"Excuse me — I seem to have misheard you. …You want a what, Gabriel?"

Even by angelic standards, Israfel was unbelievably pretty, a fact that rubbed him with all the tact, grace, and pleasantness of sandpaper. As far as his opinion mattered, everything that made him beautiful had to be some kind of a curse. He hated his high, finely carved cheekbones, and he'd been cutting his black hair short for eons, just to avoid growing the ringlets and curls that, by existing alone, tempted people to pull on them. His green eyes glinted like beetle shells, and presently, they narrowed up at the angels bothering him until they'd practically closed — and Gabriel's expression didn't change. The smug, self-entitled smirk on the archangel's offered no evidence for why this request purportedly meant any sense at all. Beside him stood Barachiel, of the Cupids, who simply smiled and wiggled his fat little fingers.

Gabriel waggled his eyebrows as if to suggest that Israfel could hurry up and get on with making his life easier now.

"…No?" Israfel hazarded, idly tapping his pen against his desk. "Honestly, I have no idea what you think you're talking about or why I ought to acquiesce to your request in the slightest."

"How about because I outrank you and I said so, Izzie, huh?"

Israfel sighed, fighting the powerful temptation to roll his eyes at that atrocious nickname. True, Gabriel outranked him on the Heavenly hierarchy. He always had, and despite his history of defection and borderline treason, he always would, but — "Blindly following your insane whims because you told me to do so is not part of my job description."

"Oh, please, can we just borrow a choir for a little bit, brother?" Cupid asked, eyes glimmering with hopes that, unbeknownst to him, would soon be dashed and bleeding on the pavement.

Israfel shook his head. "I know that many people consider my work one of the greatest jokes in the Spheres, brothers," he told them with a sigh, turning the pen over in his fingers, "but, regardless, of everyone else's opinions on it, I take my job as orchestrator of the Heavenly Chorus very seriously — and I do not simply loan out my voices for some… ridiculous plan that isn't even going to work. And is hardly any business of yours, besides that."

"Oh, come off it!" Gabriel huffed. "Everybody's getting tired of Castiel's 'Mister Tough Angel' act, Izzie—"

"I, personally, have had no trouble with how our leader has taken to running things."

"You are the biggest kiss-ass I've ever met. And that's including the entire Spartan army."

"Well, perhaps you should have considered that not everyone will always agree with you and your notions of what to do about anything."

"We're not talking about absconding with your choir boys and keeping them forever and ever," Gabriel insisted. "We just want to borrow them for a little bit, so we can have some nice background music while we get Dean and Castiel to do the horizontal rumba."

"Are you serious?" In a moment of silence, Israfel stared up at Gabriel, peering into his hazel eyes with the unmoved placidity of a cow on a train track. He didn't even bother looking into his brother's mind, because the shock of being told 'no' answered every question of motivation and intent that Israfel could have come up with. "…You, gentle brothers, will need to find your soundtrack somewhere else." Rising to his feet, he concluded, "Now, if neither of you opposes it, I have a rehearsal to oversee."

"Pleeease, Israfel?" Cupid begged, his brow knotting up, his eyes distraught. "It's for the pursuit of true love! Nothing could be grander, or more important, or—"

"Brother," Israfel interrupted flatly. "Take Gabriel with you and get out of my office."

Gabriel and Cupid slumped out of the office with their heads down and their shoulders slouched; neither of them paid any ostensible mind to Israfel as he made his way past toward the rehearsal space. Had anyone been around and of the mind to notice it, they would have seen Gabriel glaring after the angel of music's back and muttering a string of curses in various languages (intelligibly: English, Spanish, German, Russian, Babylonian, Latin, Enochian, and Swedish) — but the only other being who could have seen was Cupid, and his attentions belonged more to staving off the desire to sob uncontrollably. With a sigh, Gabriel patted his brother on the shoulder, and got one of Cupid's odd little noises in response.

"Gabey," he whimpered, "what're we gonna do?"

"Well, first," Gabriel mused aloud, "I'm going to go punch out Israfellatio. Then I suggest we regroup and try to work around the plan's reliance on background music."

"Can't we just skip right to the second part?" Cupid's frown deepened, and grew more pathetic, at the mention of possible violence erupting amongst his brothers. One of the best things that Castiel had done, in his opinion, was bringing peace to Heaven (even if he'd done so by waging war against their brothers and sisters who'd chosen to side with Michael or Raphael); they couldn't go and ruin that just because of Cupid's plan. Gabriel considered this for a moment, then shook his head. "…Oh. So what do we do now, then?"

"You, little brother, are staying right here," Gabriel announced. "Wait for Izzie to come back, and then work on charming the holy chorus out of him. I don't care how you do it, just make sure that it gets done. Even if we only get it for the very end, we need background music for this plot and his folks are better than anything I could come up with." Gabriel knew. He'd tried to trump Israfel's choir before.

"Well, you know why that is, right?" Cupid explained, voice brightening as he delved headlong into his tangent. "I mean — not that I'm doubting your reality-warping powers or anything, brother, because I'm not. I really loved that one trick you did, the one with the slow-dancing alien? Oh, and then there was the Mystery Spot — but anyway. …So, the reason why Israfel's choruses are better than yours are because, you know, you can make anything you want, but it's just not going to replace the time, and the energy, and the pure love that he puts into training his singers, and you—"

Gabriel held up his hand. "Stop talking," he huffed. "Just… think about how you're going to get him to go along with the plan, okay?"

Cupid agreed, and then had a thought. "So, while I'm doing that… what are you going to do?"

"Me?" Gabriel asked. Cupid nodded. "I, brother, am going to go and improvise."

Down on Earth, on lonely a state highway in Indiana, winter had settled in quite nicely back not too long after Halloween and, by the first few days of December, no one could have told that there'd ever been a patch of green anywhere. As the Impala sailed down the well-salted roads, blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Tombstone Shadow" at all the unsuspecting suburbanites for the fifth time that day, Dean was, for once, sitting in the passenger's seat, slumped against the car's door, resting his head on her window. Despite being the driver for the past two hundred miles, Sam hadn't humoured the thought of making his brother change the music; he just had a private smile over the fact that Dean hadn't reached to change this tape halfway into the song.

So far, they'd cycled through Metallica ("Nothing Else Matters" — because Dean needed more of a reason to mope self-indulgently), Janis Joplin ("Piece Of My Heart" — because, again, Dean really needed another excuse to sulk like some jilted fourteen-year-old), Johnny Cash (the better part of his Greatest Hits, before Dean had decided that he only wanted to listen to "Cry, Cry, Cry" on a frustrated loop; by the tenth time, Sam had invoked the right to "driver picks the music; shotgun shuts his cake-hole" and made Dean put on something else), and Led Zeppelin ("When The Levee Breaks," "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," and part of "Travelling Riverside Blues"). Nothing that went on stayed for very long, and Sam frowned when Dean took out the Zeppelin tape. As though nothing else about his brother's behaviour made it obvious, the fact that they hadn't finished one of his favourite songs was a neon sign in a dark night, screaming, PAY ATTENTION, SAM. SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG HERE.

But what was Sam supposed to do? Dean hadn't said anything yet, and he wouldn't say anything until he wanted to; the last adventure in prodding him had only wound up with him snapping at Sam to mind his own business and subsequently downing the better part of a bottle of Jack. Even asking after the rapidly shifting music, when Dean made the abrupt shift from "Travelling Riverside Blues" to King Crimson's "I Talk To The Wind," wound up inadvertently causing capital-T-Trouble: "What the Hell do you mean, 'Why're you changing songs like that,' Sammy?" Dean had balked. "What, I mean… a man can't choose the music in his own damn car?"

With a begrudging sigh, Sam had agreed that, yes, Dean could choose the music in his own car. "But it's not the music I'm asking about," he'd explained. "It's the fact that you're cycling through it like some ADD Chihuahua."

"Yeah, and you know why? Because I feel like it."

Sam sighed to himself and put the argument out of his mind, choosing to focus on the road and getting to Lisa's place in one piece instead. Through the next few cycles, Sam bit his tongue and kept his thoughts to himself — and Dean seemed to be rewarding him by not tearing out the mixtape of CCR as soon as he got bored. They made it through "Bad Moon Rising," "Cottonfields," and "Run Through the Jungle" without incident, and even though Dean repeated "Tombstone Shadow" a grand total of seven times, it seemed that they had finally found some music that wouldn't unreasonably irritate him — until the opening chords of "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" started up.

For a moment, it all went as though nothing would happen. A smile crossed Sam's face for the first time in what felt like too long, and he tapped his palm on the steering wheel in time with the music. Dean, on the other hand, glowered at the radio, silently questioning how it had fucking dared to play this song in his presence. Nothing continued to happen: the wet road slid by under the tires, Sam started bobbing his head along with the music, and then… the chorus came and Sam just couldn't help himself.

"Iiiiiii wanna know," he sang along, "have you ever seen the rain? Comin' down on a sunny — Hey!" The tape shot out of the deck and, grimacing, Dean flung it into the trunk. They went two miles down the road without any sounds besides the gravel and the rubber. "…Okay, you know what," Sam sighed, "I gotta ask: what the Hell is your problem today?"

"Nothing," Dean snapped. "I'm fucking awesome."

Sam rolled his eyes. "What, is it because Lisa and Becky asked you to come to their pre-Christmas? The one that they're having at all because you told them that you didn't want to be alone for the holidays, and because you wanted to spend time with Ben, but didn't know if we'd be hunting or not when the big day rolls around?"

Dean's frown mutated into a deep scowl, but he said everything with the darkness that took over his green eyes, giving the appearance of an oncoming tornado. To be fair, Sam knew that bringing up Lisa was a touchy subject. One minute, it had been, Come on in, Dean, let's have a beer and talk about how you really are Ben's biological father; the next, it had been, Dean, I love you, but I don't know how well we're working out as a couple; and finally, it had been, Your friend is really nice, she's great with Ben, and she can't go through being pregnant alone. …Is she single? Getting dumped at all sucked — especially when Dean (and, more importantly, his pride) was the one being dumped, and especially when he'd actually liked Lisa as much as he had — but getting dumped for Becky… Well, Sam imagined that it had to sting.

It still didn't explain the posture and its hunched shoulders, or the storm cloud expression he wore, or the fact that all of the music they'd endured on this trip had, somehow or other, been selected so Dean could stick it on and mope.

"You know, just a thought, Dean?" Sam shrugged, glancing away from a long stretch of straight road to look his brother in the eyes. "Maybe, if you talked about what's been going on for you? …I don't know, maybe someone could help. Or you could at least get it off your chest and stop taking it out on everybody?"

Dean sighed and thumped his head against the seat. "I told you it's fucking nothing, okay? It's just… That's like the only song that Cas and I ever agreed on. It still…" Reminds me of the way he tilted his head when he didn't understand something. Gets me itching to fuck the stupid bastard into the mattress like we did before we took on Raphael. Makes me miss him so bad that I just want to claw my eyes out. "I don't know. I just don't want to listen to it."

Although he still wanted to smack Dean upside the head for being such a difficult little shit, Sam allowed his expression to melt into a kind of sympathy. "It's okay to miss him, you know," he said, his tone soft, the gentle sort of voice that he usually used to mollify Dean when his temper got the best of him.

Dean glared daggers at his brother, letting the sound of their forward motion take up the space in which he could've been speaking. "What is wrong with you?" he finally huffed. "I don't miss that junk-less son of a bitch. He got his angel powers back and wanted to get gone back to Heaven, then fine. He can leave. For all I care, he can fucking stay gone. I'll be fine. I always am."

"Yeah," Sam murmured in agreement, biting back the exasperated sigh that he so desperately wanted to let slip. "Yeah, you always are."

And so they drove on in silence, until Dean gave up on the lack of talking and shoved an Alice Cooper cassette into the deck. As they pulled into Lisa's neighborhood, Dean hummed along to "Poison," muttering along with the chorus and particularly spitting the parts about how he wanted to kiss the addressee too much. Outside, a woman in a parka and boots paused her walk and stared at the Impala; Sam just pressed on to Lisa's home and pulled up in the driveway, leaving a fresh set of tread-marks in the small accumulation of snow. He got out of the car immediately, and started picking bags to carry in out of the trunk. Dean sat in his seat, sliding further down into it and staring at his baby's ceiling. Christmas was just a fucking crock-pot full of suck this year, and Dean didn't see any way that it could get better.

On the plus, he guessed, it pretty much couldn't get any worse either, considering he'd already had Cas leave him, Lisa dump him (and for a virgin. A virgin who wrote gay porn about Sam and Dean having sex), and his years spent trying to save the world not really be worth a sharp stick up the persqueeter because, sure, they'd avoided the Apocalypse, but now every other dark and evil thing had kicked its monster act into overdrive and not enough hunters had made it out of Armageddon alive. Dean smacked the back of his head into the seat again, and then another time for good measure. Maybe he wasn't dreaming, and maybe this wouldn't wake him up from anything — but a little bit of pain just reminded him that he was still alive and kicking, and that, regardless of his own feelings, people needed him to maintain some façade of having it together. And to do it better than he'd been pulling off around Sam.

Dean startled when a series of short raps came on the window, and stared up into his brother's bemused expression. Pointedly, Sam held up his bags of presents, booze, food, and miscellaneous Christmas treats; Dean sighed, and slunk out of the car. The snow crunched underneath his boots, and Dean didn't even call Sam a bitch when he shunted some of the bags into his hands or when he patronisingly told Dean to come on. Upon Sam's pressing it, the doorbell played an unnervingly happy series of notes that set Dean's stomach on edge. When Lisa came to the door to let them in, she wore a hand-knit sweater with a pattern of a reindeer on it; Sam complimented it with a broad grin, leaning down when Lisa held up her cheek for a kiss. Dean only shrugged, and guessed that it was okay.

"Becky made it," Lisa explained, glowing a warm pink at the mention of her girlfriend. "She's just been knitting up a storm lately — I guess her office has mostly been having meetings for the holidays. Ben's got Santa Claus, Becky and Samantha Dee are wearing a Christmas tree, and she made some for you two, too."

"That's great," Sam agreed, continuing to be a smiley goddamn Sasquatch. "I hope she's not making you go dry for her, because… I mean, we knew that she couldn't drink, but—"

"Who's Samantha Dee?" Dean said, cutting Sam off and not even looking up at him by way of apologizing.

Lisa rubbed her lips together and looked around them as though some vampire might have been laying in wait to bite her neck. "It's… Well, it's what we've been calling the baby. …It's not official yet, we haven't decided anything, but… Becky likes Samantha Deanna as a name, so we've started saying Samantha Dee."

Dean and Sam traded arched eyebrows, but once Sam went and agreed that it sounded like a lovely name, Lisa, Dean returned to glowering at Lisa's and his brother's backs. It figured that Becky would name Jesus Mark Two after the Almost Antichrist.

Without a word, Dean followed Sam and Lisa to the den, where they found Ben on the sofa, thumbing through the latest issue of Batman comics, and Becky sitting in an armchair, grinning like a crazy person at the bubblegum pink sock she had her knitting needles in. Both were, as Lisa had said, wearing their home-made holiday sweaters. Becky's Christmas tree had sequins sewn into the yarn to decorate the ornaments and the star on top, and to serve as Christmas lights; Ben's reindeer had sunglasses.

"Hi, guys!" Becky beamed at them — as always, more at Sam than at Dean — and Ben abandoned the ornaments he was hanging up to come and hug Dean around the middle. For all her face hadn't changed much since the last time he'd seen her, Dean couldn't look away from Becky's (much larger) tits or her very pregnant belly, the one that would, in a few months, pop out the second Jesus, whose life he'd also be spectacularly uninvolved with, just like his son's. Patting the top of Ben's head, Dean forced a smile so hard that his face ached. But it was, he figured, better than nothing — and hey, he had to at least try to enjoy this.

After half an hour of trying to enjoy this, Dean stormed out into the backyard, boots smashing the snow like a first-time drunk in a china shop. He stomped right past the playscape that Ben had started to outgrow, up to the fence, and stared up at the clouds. When nothing showed itself to be in evidence, he slunk back toward the playset and the attached swing set, and despite his legs being far too long for it, tried to make himself comfortable on one of the swings. This idea quickly proved to be one of Dean's worse ones, and he relegated himself to leaning on the ladder to the slide instead. With a sigh, he looked back up at the sky, at the barren sunlight that danced across the snow and at the mix of different fluffy cloud formations — here, he thought he saw a set of wings, but, in the end, it was just a patch that couldn't decide between life as cirrus or cumulus.

Shaking his head, Dean pulled out his phone and flipped through the contacts list. He knew that this was a stupid idea. Even if Heaven got cell reception, it wasn't like Cas would pick up, and even if he would have, his phone had probably run out of minutes ages ago. As he pressed the button to dial out, Dean stared up at the leaf-less trees instead of at his screen. He held the phone to his ear as the ringing started up. Once, twice, three times — a pause — Dean's breath hitched in his throat as he waited to hear something, anything, but hopefully that gravelly voice that irritated and soothed and did twenty different things to Dean at once — a click, and then…

"You have reached the voicemail of," said the tinny, probably automated voice of the woman responsible for informing Dean that Cas was going to be a bastard today, just like he had been every day before, for longer than Dean cared to think.

"I don't understand," Castiel's voice responded. It sounded just like Dean remembered it, the same way it had sounded every other time he'd tried to call and gotten cock-blocked. His lips contorted into a thin, white line, and then a deep frown. "Why do you want me to say my name?"

The beep rang out like a gunshot; Dean sighed. He could just say whatever he wanted, he supposed. It wasn't like Cas was ever coming back to wherever he could check it — not like he'd check it, even if he wanted to come back down to the rabble. "What the Hell," he muttered, voice barely above a whisper and only growing louder as he spoke. "Seriously, Cas? Thanks for sticking me with your freaking voicemail — again. Don't know how it's not full yet. I keep calling you — don't know why, since it keeps getting me jack-crap nothing. But, just… What the fuck, Cas. You were supposed to be here. I thought—"

"I'm sorry," said the woman's voice again, "but the message box you called has reached its full capacity. Please try your call again later."

Dean hung up with a grunt and threw his phone across the backyard; it sailed right past Sam, nearly missing him as he emerged from the house. Concern knotted his brow and put an odd glint in his eyes, one that Dean didn't like acknowledging, much less looking at. Frowning, he contemplated the snow between his feet and his bootprints in it. Sam's steps went away from him first, and Dean only looked up when they doubled back around, coming toward him. Sam had the cellphone in his hand. Giving it back to Dean happened politely enough (although Dean grabbed at the phone instead of just accepting it), but came with an attached awkward silence, the one that always came when Sam had to find the right words to express what he wanted at Dean. Nothing sounded right in his head, and even more importantly, nothing sounded like it could actually get Dean to talk to him — quite the opposite, most of it had the ring of things that would just make Dean shut down completely.

Ultimately, Dean made the decision for him: "No," he huffed preemptively, pocketing his phone, shoving himself off the ladder, and stalking back toward the house. "We are not going to fucking talk about it."

Sam sighed and leaned on the ladder where Dean had been. Hands in his pockets, he looked up at the sky, then over the fence and into one of the other yards, and finally down at the snow. Moving on had always been a huge part of their lives. Dean had taught Sam that when they were kids — being a hunter meant that you picked yourself up and, even if you didn't deal with the crap that fell on you, you at least put it out of your mind because there were other people — good people, innocent people — who depended on you to keep them safe without knowing that they did so. And you had to preserve that, because their happiness and their ability to keep it was why the world, for all of its grime, was worth saving at all.

And here Dean was, doing the exact opposite with The Castiel Situation. Sam sighed and pulled out his own phone; he flipped down to Cas's number, but didn't dial it. The sheer number of times Dean had called the angel in the past six months hadn't escaped Sam, but he didn't understand, either of them. Why Dean kept dialling when he didn't get anything, what was so important in Heaven that Cas couldn't come back for Dean (and that had no apparent signs on Earth, besides) —

"Well, he's a tetchy little thing, isn't he?" a familiar voice asked, shattering the heavy silence.

Sam's eyes jumped up from his phone's screen. At first, he didn't see anybody. Darting away from the playscape, he turned around — and then they made themselves obvious, not dressed for the weather at all and wearing, instead, expressions that were far too friendly. Crowley had picked up his vessel of choice, the literary agent with the short, dark hair; Bela, since she couldn't wear her old meat, had selected a pretty redhead with green eyes and a constellation of freckles scattered across her pale skin.

"Don't worry," she said with a smile. "She was in a permanent vegetative state and no one had claimed her body — I have the papers to prove it, if you like."

Sam sighed and let his shoulders slump a little closer to the grounds. "Respecting my thoughts on possessing people isn't going to make me come with you guys," he informed them flatly. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm sort of up to my eyes in other things to be busy with and I told you before: I don't care how you two want to run things Downstairs, just… don't involve me."

"Yes, we know," Crowley agreed. "And I think it is just so admirable of you to be dedicating your time to caring for an emotionally unstable brother after his lovely, angelic boyfriend dumped his sorry arse."

"He's not emotionally — well, he is kind of unstable, but — …it's not that simple, alright?"

"I don't see any other complications. Do you, Bela?"

Smiling, she shook her head. The loose curls ran across her shoulders and the back of her neck — Sam caught himself staring and immediately looked up at the sky instead, trying to put any untoward thoughts of her out of his mind. Bela chuckled, bunching up her hair and tying it back with the ponytail holder on her wrist. "Better, Sam?" she asked. He nodded, and she continued: "Also, no, I don't see any other complications. What I do see is a king who ran away from his throne—"

"Gabriel took me away," Sam snapped, the exasperation with this entire day bubbling up and losing any control that Sam might have exercised on it. "Look, I didn't want this position then, and I don't want it now, but at least… be fair and stop acting like my leaving was some grand escape plan that I orchestrated."

Crowley shrugged and leaned his head against the ladder. "That would almost be a thought in my mind," he said, "except for the part where I can't even begin to fathom how on Earth you would have the ability to take a dead archangel and get him to raise you from Hell."

"And while we still don't understand why they raised you," Bela picked up, exactly where Crowley had left off, a note of urgency slipping into her voice, "that fact is not nearly as important as what we need to do now that they have. Running Hell is not an easy business, Sam—"

"And you two didn't know that when you first got into this?" Sam pointed out.

"Of course we did." Crowley held up a hand, with the intent that it would keep Sam quiet for a minute. "It isn't as though we just woke up one morning and thought to ourselves, 'Oh, I feel like commanding all the demons in the world today, that sounds like it would be a trip to Disneyland' — but unforeseen difficulties have arisen, and we need you to put aside your charming domestic drama and come assist us in clearing them up."

Sam paused, and looked from Crowley to Bela, then back again. He saw the worry etching itself in every line on their faces, and with a sigh, he asked, "…What kind of unforeseen difficulties?"

"The sort that involve a demoness called Belial," Crowley said, as though this explained everything. From the bemused expression that crossed his face, he expected some kind of a reaction out of Sam — shock, or horror, or anything but standing there and failing to understand what Crowley meant.

"You've met her before," Bela amended, rolling her eyes. (She enjoyed men, and male demons, of course she did. But, really, attempting to talk to them just got so tedious after a while.) "She's the demon otherwise known as Meg Masters."

As though it hadn't been cold enough outside, that name sent a small shiver up Sam's spine. "…But Meg is dead," he tried to argue. "She — Castiel dropped her into holy fire."

"Which would have been terribly effective," Crowley told him, voice quiet and eyes grave, "had she been anyone's child but Azazel's."

The mention of Yellow Eyes also sent a freezing sensation throughout Sam's body, as though a glacier had been dropped into his stomach. He listened, at full attention, while Crowley and Bela explained the whole story: back, back, back, several eons ago, after Lucifer's rebellion but before his entrapment in Hell, Azazel had been a member of the angelic guard, one of the Grigori. ("Watchers," Crowley explained, catching Sam's confusion on the matter. "Look in the Book of Enoch sometime. Your friend Bobby Singer has at least three copies of it, and it'd be a good learning experience for you.") Led astray by Lucifer's tempting, his response was to lead a group under his command to sleep with mortal women, for which he fell into Hell and became a demon.

"So, Meg — I mean. Belial," Sam said. "She really was his daughter?"

"Oh yes." Crowley nodded, with a dry smirk. "Did it never occur to you that she was far more powerful than the average demon?"

"Of course it did, but… We never really wondered after why."

"And now you know," Bela pointed out. Behind her little smile, Sam could see the tug of her growing impatience, and he didn't entirely begrudge her that. In this situation, he probably wouldn't have enjoyed dealing with himself that much either. "The why isn't important, Sam," she continued. "What matters is what she plans to do."

"And that is…?"

Crowley sighed, and shoved his hands into his pockets. Straightening up, he assumed the posture of a boss on the verge of delivering some terrible news about the status of someone's position. "Since the Battle of Armageddon, most of our kin have gathered that Lucifer is not the saviour of demon-kind as he liked to make us believe he was. However, there remain a few… shall we say, dissidents, who refuse to give up the belief in a dark messiah that is going to come up from Hell and give us all a permanent vacation in bloody Candy Land — all the human souls we can eat, and nothing standing in our way."

"Belial has made herself the leader of a small, but vocal, and moreover powerful, minority of demons," Bela explained. "They call themselves the Luciferians. And they're plotting to raise You-Know-Who out of his cage by way of bringing about his purported demonic Paradise on Earth."

"What about the Seals?" Sam asked. "I mean, there were some that Lilith didn't break — but she's dead and Dean's not in Hell to break the first one again, so… how are they going to spring Lucifer from the Hot Box?"

"And you expect us to know?" Crowley balked. "We haven't the foggiest, Sam, and no self-respecting Luciferian would tell us the time of day, much less their master plan for getting the Devil back out of Hell. All we know is that Belial is leading them — and, if you need any added incentive, they're planning on coming for your Virgin Becky."

For a long moment, Sam just stared ahead at the two demons talking at him, looking from Crowley to Bela and back again, trying to find some way that he could argue with what they were trying to sell him. He couldn't find one. Running a hand back through his hair, he asked, "So, you need me and Dean to go and hunt her down and… put her out of our misery?"

"That would be the notion, yes," Crowley told him with an expectant, impatient smile. "If it doesn't overlap too terribly much with your brother's pre-scheduled temper tantrum."

Sam sighed. "I'll talk to him, okay? And we'll get on it, just… Let him have today. He's not managing well as it is."

Crowley and Bela didn't even answer Sam with a nod; they simply vanished into thin air with simultaneous snaps of their fingers.

As he slouched back into the house, Sam had every intention of just going back to the living room and passing around presents like he'd done before he'd left to go bring Dean back. Life, however, had other plans.

Sam didn't notice anything off at first — mostly because there was nothing all that off to notice. Pausing, he went to the cupboard with the glasses and picked one out. He filled it with a bit of ice from Lisa's fridge, and then added water onto it; leaning against the counter, he started drinking, only to hear a boisterous, "Heeey-o, Sammy!"

The glass fell from his fingers and, effectively startled, Sam darted around the kitchen, looking for whoever had addressed him. He paused again when the glass — and the water — reappeared in his hand. When he felt a tap on his shoulder, he felt his drink slipping and gripped onto it tighter; instead of dropping it again, he spun around and found himself met with the presence of a familiar figure who, by all rights, really should have been anywhere but Lisa's kitchen. Much shorter than Sam, hazel eyes beaming with a mischievous urge that probably never left them, Gabriel stood there, looking perfectly at home. Wide-eyed, pressing his lips together until they both turned white, Sam just stared at him.

"Hey there, big guy!" the archangel said brightly, smirking the smirk that unequivocally said that he knew something Sam didn't. "Careful with those glasses. Lisa paid good money for them and I can't come cleaning up your messes all the time."

Sam stopped and tried to catch his breath, looking Gabriel up and down several times, and trying to find on his own any kind of answer for the question he spluttered out: "What are you doing here, Gabriel?"

"Just making a courtesy visit," Gabriel explained, by way of not explaining anything at all. With a self-satisfied bounce in his step, he scooted past Sam and started pacing around the kitchen. Idly, he picked up an apple out of Lisa's basket of them and tossed it from one hand to the other. "Or, anyway, I thought it'd be polite to tell you before I started in on my master plan."

Sam sighed — he didn't like this reaction, but he also couldn't help it. Learning about Belial's master plan had been more than enough for him for one day. "Look, unless it involves keeping Becky safe from the demons who want to take her baby… I really just don't have the time or the energy to care, okay?"

Gabriel paused, and considered this for a moment. He hadn't heard about any plans to go after Dad's latest Virgin or her baby — but, ultimately, he supposed that it wasn't really his problem. "Oh, you'll care when I tell you what it is," he said with a shrug. Without waiting for Sam to give him permission to start, Gabriel went on, "I'm sure you've noticed that your brother's been an even bigger pain in the ass than usual since the Apocalypse. And my brother has just — you don't even want to know the things that Castiel's been pulling Upstairs—"

"Gabriel," Sam interrupted, snapping more than he'd originally meant to. "I don't care. Bela and Crowley just told me about this plan going around to raise Lucifer again, and as long as we stop it, Dean can be as much of a bitch to me as he wants—"

"Well, he won't be a bitch for long." Turning back to face Sam, Gabriel leaned down, resting his elbows on the counter top and smiling like a cat next to an open fish-tank. "I'm getting him and Castiel back together." That had not been what Sam expected to hear out of the archangel. He'd planned several retorts for anything Gabriel had wanted to say about him being difficult, or not having a sense of humour, or anything else… But, instead, this assertion gave him pause and he just stared, slack-jawed and at an utter loss for words. "Your jaw's flexible," Gabriel said after a full minute-and-a-half had passed. "Good to know. I might need to use that information later."

The archangel stood, and started heading for the door. "Wait!" Sam huffed. When Gabriel turned back, he asked, "What are you planning to do to them, Gabriel?"

"Oh, Sammy," Gabriel chided gently. "I can't go telling you that. You might run off and tell your brother, and then there'd be nothing fun to make them work for anymore."

"Just… please be careful with them?" Sam requested, his voice almost trembling. Gabriel pretended to consider this, and then gave the taller Winchester a noncommittal shrug. "Please, Gabriel? …It's important. …Dean's been in a bad place since Cas left. And I can't stop these demons without him."

"Fiiiiine," Gabriel sighed, rolling his eyes. "One happy couple's reunion, hold the dangerous stunts and with an extra side of unnecessary caution. Got it."

And, in a flurry of feathers and the sound of beating wings, he disappeared.

Sam leaned down, putting his glass on the counter, and then his elbows afterward. Groaning, he put his forehead in his hands and tried to think of a solution to the insane problems that had just been dumped in his lap, a process that quickly consumed him and all of his thoughts. He barely even noticed when Becky came in and, with a warm hand on his shoulders, led him back to the living room to open up his sweater.