Chuck was upstairs, getting used to the bed Bobby had temporarily put in place for him, and the Winchesters were sitting in the living room talking shop.
"Okay, we've got the prophet in our pocket, what's next in the fight against Raphael?" Dean asked.
"Balthazaar and holy weaponry," Sam sounded less than happy, "Oh, and an actual plan."
"What are we supposed to do, kill Raphael?" Bobby said. "He isn't ever going to forgive us for imprisoning Michael, even if he does give up on the apocalypse."
Dean sighed. "Yeah, I think that's what we're supposed to do. Or imprison him too, I guess, because if we couldn't kill Lucifer we probably can't kill Raphael."
"We can't open the cage again, or Michael and Lucifer will come rushing out, and we can't kill an archangel," Sam said.
Everyone sat in the room, silently.
"Not that I'm giving up," Dean began, "But we are really SOL."
"Maybe we don't have to deal with Raphael directly," Sam said. "All the seals are broken, so the only way to restart the apocalypse is to open the cage with our key."
"Are we sure about that?" Bobby asked. "Because if Raphael can re-break the seals, that would be a problem."
They looked at Dean, and Dean looked to the sky.
"Oh Castiel, we pray to you to ask if the seals are permanently broken, or if they can be rebroken by Raphael," Dean said.
Castiel was there in an instant. "The seals are reforming, even as we speak. The last seal has re-formed on a powerful demon named Abbadon. As soon as the first seal reforms, it can be broken again."
Dean looked around. "Does it matter who the righteous man is?"
Castiel tilted his head. "It was supposed to be you, just as it was supposed to be Sam for the last, and then you two were supposed to be the vessels. But your brother Adam became a vessel, and the last seal re-formed, so I am no longer sure."
"We can't stop a contingent of angels from re-breaking the seals," Sam said despairingly.
Dean looked down. "Especially not with angels helping them."
Sam shook his head. "Lets cover all our bases here, make sure there's no way to stuff him in the cage too."
"We don't even know if that cage can hold two archangels, let alone three," Bobby said.
"There are weapons that can kill an archangel, and Balthazaar searches for them even now," Castiel said. "Not all hope is lost."
"You know who would know about the cage?" Sam asked.
Dean raised an eyebrow at Sam.
"Crowley."
One short summoning ritual later, Crowley, King of Hell was standing in the Singer household basement.
"What can I do ya for, fellas?" He said, all jovial tone and expensive whiskey. A smile was on his face, and he didn't even whine about the musty quality to Bobby's basement.
"What's got you so cheerful?" Dean asked bitingly.
"You two! Moose and squirrel!" Crowley laughed, smiling widely. "Now that Lucifer is out of the picture, I'm leading the demon armies. Me! King of Hell! Can you believe it?" He laughed. "I'm feeling very generous when it comes to the people who put me there. And," he looked at the floor. "You didn't even put me in a demon trap," he grinned even wider. "It's a good day."
"Good, because we need your help," Sam said, tone low. "Specifically, we need Raphael out of the picture."
"Castiel has told me he wants to do the end of the world, all over again," he concurred, setting the whiskey down. "You don't need to convince me he's wrong. But," Crowley dipped his head in fake lament, "I don't know how to get Raphael out of the picture."
"Do you know of a way we could stuff someone else into the cage, without opening it up to let Lucifer and Michael out?" Sam pressed.
The new King of Hell frowned. "Not off the top of my head. Folks are always so obsessed with the formal way of opening it, the seals, the prophecies, you know. Let me look around, I'll let you know. Anything else?"
Dean's tone was flippant. "Yeah, what's the catch?"
Crowley smiled again. "No catch this time, boys. I want Raphael gone just as much as you."
In a blink, he was gone.
"He's right," Sam followed up. "He wants Raphael gone too. Our 'interests are aligned,' as it were."
"But what about when they're not aligned?" Dean growled.
"We'll go back to being enemies then," Sam said, sighing. "When did working with demons become something we did?"
"When there were things worse than demons," Dean sighed. "Just… I hate this."
Sam frowned. Yeah, I know.
Dean looked up at the basement ceiling, and said "Cas, angel of The Lord that Left, I just want to let you know that we called Crowley and asked him if there's a way to stuff Raphael in that cage with Michael and Lucifer. He said he'd look around."
Sam led the way, and they climbed up the basement stairs.
"Has it occurred to you that shoving all three archangels in one cage might be a bad idea?" Sam asked. "We don't even know if it can hold more than one archangel safely, and then they're going to spend millennia down there, angry and plotting."
Dean smirked, and said "You know what? Like Bobby always says, we'll leave that one for hunters in spacesuits."
The next few weeks passed by slowly. All the new hunters were handling the normal cases, which left Sam and Dean a lot of time to bounce around the Singer property fixing up cars and researching archangels.
Chuck spent his time trying to stay out of the way. Castiel had carved angelic sigils into his ribs, but the Winchesters decided not to relocate him to a safehouse as they usually would. For all they knew, Chuck was another antichrist, and they didn't want a loose nuke like that slipping through their fingers again.
Chuck didn't realize any of this, and just thought they were ignoring him like a piece of furniture. He curled up further into the chair he'd made his own.
Dean walked into the house to see the screen open to a text editor, and resisted the urge to slam the laptop shut. "That isn't Supernatural, is it?"
Chuck looked up, red rimmed eyes from alcohol. "No more visions, remember?" he sighed. "No, some other crap novel of mine."
Dean eyed the hunched man. "Do you ever do anything other than wallow?" His tone was a little more condescending than he'd meant, but it happened and he wasn't gonna apologize.
Chuck gave Dean a surly glance, but said nothing. It reminded Dean of a fourteen year old. You don't know my pain! "What's there to do otherwise?" he asked instead. "Really? You boys work so hard to save the world, and yet people still suffer and die."
"Less!" Dean insisted. "Way, way less."
Chuck looked like he was going to argue, but decided not to. "Yeah, I suppose you're right," he said quietly. Then he looked at his laptop, and continued to furiously type.
Dean rolled his eyes, and said nothing.
The next few weeks moved slowly.
They fell into a comfortable routine at Bobby's, passing smaller hunts off to other hunters not currently fighting Raphael. Castiel had a tendency to arrive unannounced, and they didn't want to be in the middle of a hunt when he did.
Every time Castiel showed, he had the same report. No progress has been made on finding Balthazaar.
Sam and Bobby were researching ways to find an archangel, ways to trap an angel permanently, ways to kill an archangel, ways to depower an archangel, anything that would make Raphael unable to start the apocalypse up again.
Every so often, Chuck would wander over to help, curious about what they were reading or doing, and Sam was always patient in explaining to him what was going on. Occasionally he stepped up to help with research, contribute thoughts, or do things that needed doing.
Team free will was floored with how well Chuck integrated into their group.
Bobby had set Chuck some menial task involving moving tires from one end of the lot to the other, both to get Chuck out of his laptop and building some sort of strength that didn't involve prenatural fighting skills.
Dean tilted his head as he watched Chuck struggle to wrap his arms around the gigantic truck tire he was lifting.
"You know, he's not so bad anymore. Remember when we met him and he just kind of hid from everything?" he said to Sam, standing next to him.
Sam snorted. "Yeah, it annoyed the shit out of me."
Dean nodded toward the shorter man. "Well, look at him. He's manned up, he's handling this craptastic situation pretty okay. Most people would have lost it by now."
Sam laughed reservedly. "I'll admit it, Dean, I actually kind of like the guy. Who knew he had such a good sense of humor?"
Dean frowned. "He is almost changing my opinion on shitty people. Like, if Chuck has a reason for being this way, maybe they all do."
Sam snorted, this time louder. "No. I met a lot of shitty writers who thought they were deep at Stanford, and ninety percent of them thought their halfhearted attempt at suicide when their girlfriend dumped them constituted knowing the darkness of the world."
"Oh, good, I thought I was going to have to adjust my world view." Dean looked back out the window. "Nope, everyone still sucks. Good."
"Remember, Chuck's not a human, anyways, probably," Sam continued. "So your view of him doesn't even have to change your view of humanity."
"Thank you Sammy, defending my critical worldview until the end."
"I'm supposed to be the hopeful one, not you," he quipped.
Dean turned to him. "But you haven't been lately," he said quietly.
They were still watching Chuck struggle to haul tires across the lot.
"Roll them!" Dean yelled across the lot.
Chuck looked up, spotted them watching him struggle. He made a snarky expression, but rolled the tire to it's destination.
Sam shrugged. "We have no leads on Raphael. Cas says… you know what he says." That he gains angels every day. "We don't even have a half-assed plan."
"We didn't have a plan for Lucifer, and we figured that out," Dean said. "I don't mean to minimize your sacrifice, Sam, but it turned out all right."
Sam nodded. "I know, I know. I'm glad it did. Just… hard to see when it will end. Maybe we kill Raphael, but then he's got followers, and what then?"
"We figure it out, like we always do," Dean said.
Dusk found everyone, sans Castiel, gathered around the kitchen table and a bottle or two of alcohol. They'd all had more than their fair share, and it was late in the night as they gathered around the table.
"You haven't officially been on a hunt yet," Dean hummed around his drink, "But you've had Castiel's molar in your hair and lived to see him resurrected, so in my book, you're one of us."
"But I'm a huge coward!" Chuck laughed. "Every time you guys showed up, all I wanted to do was run away."
"That tapered off," Sam tipped his drink toward him. "Near the end you took on that ghost, that was pretty cool."
Chuck shrugged. "What was I going to do, let it kill everyone?"
"You'd be surprised what people do," Dean said sagely. "They panic, put themselves first, then it all goes to shit."
Chuck heaved a sigh. "I'm just tired of being useless."
"You won't be useless much longer at this pace," Bobby quipped.
"The moment Castiel says he needs us, I'm ready," he affirmed. "As ready as I'll get." There was something in the set of his shoulders, so determined.
"Why are you always trying to prove yourself, Chuck?" Sam slurred, having had one too many for even his big frame. "I mean, you know Dean and I's life story, hell, you wrote it, but we don't know yours."
Chuck's face fell. "I'm happy to blather on about the morbid past, self hating writer and all, but I doubt you want to hear it."
Dean perked up, and filled his glass. He was going to need to be more drunk for morbid childhood conversations. "No, we do," he assured. "Sammy's a sucker for morbid conversations while drunk."
Bobby nodded, also downing more of the strong alcohol. "It's true."
Chuck followed suit as well, shuddering as it went down his throat. "You guys know I was on foster and all, Bobby practically audited my records. But what they don't say is how horrid the foster families were. Most of them were just neglectful, taking in children for the tax break, no big deal. But some of them were worse than that."
He looked down. "Linda and Ron. They were influenced by demons or something, I don't know. They made it their mission to beat every child that they received. They were busted two years into my living with them, but that wasn't nearly fast enough."
Chuck cleared his throat. "But honestly, I was never worried about me all that much, you know?" He looked away, as the large pulls of whiskey began to affect everyone. They were leaning forward, swaying slightly, listening rapturously.
"I couldn't save the others, you know? They wouldn't run away, they were too afraid to call the cops. I just felt so hopeless. Why was this happening? Why wouldn't they stick up for themselves?" He shook his head.
Chuck's eyes changed, and he didn't notice, but everyone else did.
His whole gaze became heavy, and in an instant it was as if he was someone else.
"They just wouldn't save themselves. They had everything they needed, but they wouldn't do it. Did they want to live in misery?" His voice was empty. "I've never understood what possessed humanity to throw themselves into these things. It's not even the evil they throw themselves to…"
None of them missed the way he said "they."
"…it's the death. The wages of sin is death. That isn't some punishment, it's a statement of fact. When they throw yourself emptily and wholeheartedly into that nothingness, they die. They don't go to hell because anyone is punishing them; they go because they just don't want to go to heaven. There isn't enough of them left to want anything anymore."
"I know," came Dean's heavy agreement. "There were so many people in hell that were already broken when they got there." Sam knew it was a maudlin night, then, because Dean had to be really drunk to talk about hell in more than vague allusions. "Most everyone was, actually; you could always tell when someone made a deal, because they were the only ones not broken upon arrival."
"No matter how hard I try, they just keep doing it," came Chuck's heavy voice. "Throwing themselves to darkness."
"That's why we fight, isn't it?" Sam's quiet voice came. "We gotta do what we can, even if we can't save everyone."
The otherworldly quality seeped into Chuck's tone. "But what good does it do in the end?"
"People are alive!" Dean insisted. "Families are together for that much longer before they die! Heaven sucks, yeah, but it's better than hell!"
"I would still have my wife if someone told me," Bobby said somberly. "That's why I keep this all up," his voice was heavier than even Dean's. "It's why I'm still here."
Chuck dragged his heavy body up, and back to bed, looking like a different person.
The three men at the table looked at each other in his wake.
"Something about the way he says things makes me want to listen," Bobby murmured. The words were the words of a literary drama queen, but something about the way he said them made it seem like he knew what it meant.
"I know," Sam agreed. "Lots of people talk about loss, and say emo shit like that, but… something happened to him."
"Yeah, and he doesn't even know what is the worst part," Dean shook his head, and then put it in his arms. "Or maybe that's the good part." He put his hands on his stomach. "Ugh, I haven't drank this much since…"
"Since like last month, give it up," Sam said.
"Did you guys see the way his face changed?" he continued. "Like one minute he was just blabbering about a bad childhood, and the next -"
"- he was talking about something else entirely. He used 'they' when referring to humanity again," Bobby finished. "My bet is on pagan god."
"I'll take you up on that," Sam slurred. "I'll go for higher order angel"
"How likely is that?" Bobby bickered back. The rest of the night they took bets on whether Chuck was an angel, a demon, a pagan god, a confused psychic, or any of the above.
Chuck was asleep on his cot in the last bedroom, blissfully unaware.
"Oh my God, don't ever let me drink with you guys again," Chuck groaned the next morning, bent over a glass of juice. "I haven't drank that much since college. You are horrible influences."
Sam and Dean must have been made of stronger stuff, because they were not nearly as hung over as Chuck.
"Do you even remember last night?" His tone was joking, but they were both paying attention to the reply.
"You guys asked me about my shitty foster family, and then…" something crossed his face for a moment, then vanished. "Nothing. Usually when I black out, someone informs me that I said a bunch of maudlin things about fate or destiny." He groaned.
Sam tilted his head, shrugging. "Yeah, pretty much."
Chuck shook his head, spooning cereal into his mouth and missing every so often. "Don't ever let me do that again."
"No can do, Charles," Dean said, happily eating the bacon he found. "This is an alcoholic household."
Sam bent over, and plucked a piece of bacon from Dean's plate.
"Hey, get your own!" Dean slapped Sam's hand, but he appeared unconcerned. "Fucking little brothers."
Bobby trudged down the stairs, tired, but still less hung over than Chuck.
"How is Bobby less hung over than I am?" Chuck squinted up at the older man. "I didn't even have that much and I blacked out! I don't even remember being that drunk!"
"He blacked out?" Bobby asked, pointing at Chuck who was now making a feeble attempt to cover his ears.
Sam looked at him significantly. "Just for the tail end of the conversation."
Bobby nodded. "Well, living here you'll grow a tolerance."
"You say that like I'll be around much longer," he said dryly.
Bobby shrugged. "The boys crash here whenever they're not hunting, so until y'all hit the road you will be."
"He's hitting the road with us?" Dean stuck his thumb out at Chuck.
"Someone's gotta train him, and it ain't me," Bobby said, pulling leftover burgers from the fridge. "You two are the best hunters in town, and apparently he has some sort of magic secret past. We aren't passing him off to a stranger."
Dean groaned, but shut up when he saw Chuck's hurt face. "Sorry Chuck," he grumbled, "I just don't like training new people."
"I don't really wanna be trained, but it doesn't seem optional at this point," he grumbled back.
"Not with all the weird coincidences lining up around you, it's not."
Dean was drinking a beer and watching daytime tv when there was a knock at the door.
"I'll get it," Chuck said, prying himself from his customary position under his laptop.
He opened the door to find a well-dressed man standing there, complete with a pocket square.
"Hello?" he asked, feeling like something was off.
"Crowley," the man offered. "And you are?"
"Irrelevant," Dean growled, suddenly behind Chuck.
"This is that missing prophet, isn't it?" Crowley asked, eyes narrowing at the man. "Chuck, right?"
Dean rolled his eyes and yanked the door open.
"Oh, no," Crowley scoffed, eyeing the hallway. "I know better than to walk over a rug."
Dean looked down, and made an annoyed noise. "Sam! Bobby! Crowley's at the door!" he yelled before stepping outside.
Chuck stepped outside too, wondering what the hell was going on.
"Crowley," Dean grumbled, sensing Chuck's plight, "is the King of Hell."
Chuck jumped. "Pardon?"
he was less than pleased with how high his voice came out.
Castiel appeared on the porch aside Dean.
Crowley merely raised an eyebrow at the man. "You're the first prophet I've ever met, you know?" he said. "Less than impressive."
"What do you want, Crowley," Bobby said, stepping out on the porch with Sam.
"Christ, you guys act like I'm here to hurt you," he said, mock hurt. "No, just bringing an update. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to stuff Raphael in that cage, too. Transferring individuals out? Possible. Transferring individuals in? Not possible."
"Why would there be a way to take someone out but not put them in?" Sam asked. "You know what, nevermind. So that's that, then?"
"It would seem so," Crowley said, hands in his pockets.
"You got a way for us to kill him? Any ideas?" Dean asked instead.
Chuck was uncomfortable with how comfortable he was becoming with this situation; having a chat with the King of Hell on the porch, like it wasn't a problem.
Crowley shrugged. "None that Castiel hasn't thought of."
"It would appear our only option is to find Balthazaar," Castiel intoned. "As I have been trying to do. Would you know of a way to find a specific angel?"
Crowley shook his head. "That's one I've actually been working on for some time, which should come as no surprise to you," he drawled. "No such thing exists. I've got some witches on the payroll, but they haven't made any breakthroughs."
Dean shrugged. "Do let us know when you find it, will you?"
"I suspect we will be made aware," Castiel said, turning a threatening eye to Crowley.
Crowley smiled. "This dumb angel is the smartest of you lot," and vanished.
"Charming," Chuck said dryly.
"He only gets better," Dean griped as he went back inside.