Chapter 5

"Uh…hormones?" I asked weakly.

"Well," Sam said, waving a hand around. "The doc did say that it might, you know, affect some things."

"Pull over."

"What? Why?" Dean said, clearly unwilling to stop now that he was moving.

"I'm gunna throw up!" I snapped at him.

The Mustang swerved to the side of the road and Sam clambered out, tipping the seat forward to let me out. I heard Dean's voice rising as I stumbled away from the car.

"I thought you said this part was over!"

I hadn't had anything to eat so virtually nothing came out and after a minute the shuddering went away. I spat into the grass, feeling about as idiotic as it was possible to feel. Just shock, I told myself. Nothing to feel bad about. It wasn't just shock, of course, but hey, you tell yourself what you have to.

"You okay?" Sam called out worriedly and I pulled in a breath, waving my hand in the air behind me to indicate that I was fine, and looking at the line of traffic coming out of the city.

Turning around, I walked slowly back to the car. Knocked up, I thought, really and truly, in this timeline anyway, knocked up. I have to say, and you may think badly of me for even thinking it, that it seemed incredibly unfair to not have even had the experience of having sex with the tall man hovering anxiously beside the car to make up for the consequences.

"You done hurling chunks?" Dean asked as I climbed back into the car.

"I didn't hurl anything," I said, leaning back against the seat. "That was the problem."

"What?"

"No breakfast."

"We'll stop and get you something to eat?" Sam said soothingly as he got back in and pulled the door closed.

"What?!" Dean looked at him, then twisted around in the seat to glare at me. "It's an hour and a half's drive, you can wait, can't you?"

"It'll be the slowest trip you ever had if I can't get something in my stomach before we get going," I told him. That was the real me, the old me, getting car-sick if my stomach was achingly empty. Apparently being knocked up only made it worse.

"There's that place before Cedonia," Sam said quickly, glancing back at me. "They do an all-day breakfast and we can fill up there."

"This is not turning into some kind of – of –"

"It's not," Sam told Dean and I leaned back against the seat, wondering what I could possibly do to get us back to where we were supposed to be – where they were supposed to be – I didn't even know where I was supposed to be.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Chester, Pennsylvania is an old town by the Delaware River, more renowned for being the original stomping ground of Bill Haley and the Comets, than anything else, although I guess, that depends on who you talk to.

"What's the story?" Sam asked as Dean negotiated the freeway.

"Three people got kicked off in the last week, all freaky. Last guy got karate-chopped by his garage door. And these are all blood relatives," Dean told him, turning onto a street of narrow, sidewall houses.

"And you're thinking…family curse?"

"Could be."

"It's not a family curse," I said, leaning forward between them. "At least, not just one family," I added, thinking of how to short-circuit the investigative process and at least get them to a point where they might be ready to think about angels and…Fates.

"What?" Dean looked over his shoulder at me then hit the brakes when a woman dragging a small dog stepped into the road in front of him. The Mustang's nose dipped sharply and the woman glared at him, the dog yapping furiously as she crossed in front of us. Judging from the paling of Sam's face, I wasn't the only one who'd had a minor attack at that moment, life intruding annoyingly into our mystical quest. Some people, apparently, were just getting on with their lives, oblivious to the fact that they weren't supposed to be living those lives either.

"The Russos aren't the only family affected," I told Dean, hearing the weariness in my voice with an inward wince. "I told you, Balthazar saved the Titanic and these are the people descended from the families who came out here on that ship."

"What's a friggin' ship got to do with someone dying in their garage?"

"So, who's killing them?" Sam ignored his brother's comment and looked back at me.

I thought about Balthazar's warning. There wasn't any way to avoid the Fate, and from what I remembered of the draft, she was pissed at the boys anyway.

"Atropos," I said, hoping that I wasn't – once again – going to make things worse by having the advance information.

"Atro-who?" Dean blurted out, making a left toward the downtown area.

"The Fate?" Sam asked at the same time. "The three sisters?"

"Yeah," I answered, happy I didn't need to go into that, anyway.

Dean slowed down for the lights and looked at Sam. "Why's this chick ganking these families?"

Sam shook his head. "How far are we from the vic's house?"

"Five minutes."

We got there in three, with only a little tire-squealing around the corners. Dean pulled up at the house where the yellow crime tape was still fluttering from the sides of the garage and we got out, walking warily under the half-open garage door.

Dean looked at the EMF meter in his hand. "Not a bleep."

"Well, not a vengeful spirit, then," Sam said, his flashlight beam swinging around the walls and floor. "Huh."

He bent down and picked up a golden thread, looking at me.

"What is that, Christmas tinsel?" Dean asked before I could say anything, looking at the flash of gold in his brother's hand.

"I don't know," Sam said slowly, looking around then walking to a bench with a terracotta pot on it. Rubbing the thread over the side, it left a shimmering golden smear. "It's gold."

"You mean, like, gold gold?"

"Why would a handyman have gold just lying around in his garage?"

"He didn't," I snapped, walking between them. "He was minding his own business, trying to fix that thing," I waved a hand at a bent metal rod lying on the bench. "And Atropos moved his beer."

"What?" Dean looked me as if I was finally losing my marbles. I ignored him and turned around.

"He had a bottle of beer sitting here." I looked at the ring left by the bottle, still visible on the bench's surface. "She moved it, and when he picked it up, he knocked over a jar of nails that was here."

Sam looked at the floor, his flashlight picking up the tiny gleams from the glass specks, a nail half-hidden in the shadow of the bench.

"He took a broom to sweep up the mess, and knocked over the skateboard," I kept going doggedly, feeling my face scrunch up as I tried to remember the exact wording in the script. It was a total knock-on scene, where every single action had caused something else to happen, in a particular chain. "He stepped back onto the skateboard and almost fell onto the shears," I said, pointing to the sharp points of the pruning shears protruding from a pot on another shelf. "When he stopped himself, he knocked over that bucket and sent the golf balls all over the floor. He slipped on them and landed on his back, there." I pointed to the chalked outline on the floor. "Then one of the golf balls rolled onto a mouse-trap."

The mouse-trap was still there, sprung. I couldn't see the offending golf ball but it was somewhere still in there.

"What are you, Sherlock Holmes all of a sudden?" Dean stare shifted from the mouse-trap to me.

"No." I waved at the garage door. "The door was propped up with a plank," I said, and the plank was still lying there, just outside. "And the golf ball hit the plank, knocking it from under the door."

"And the door dropped and decapitated him," Sam finished, looking around the garage. "Because Atropos wanted to kill him."

"Right." I said, looking at him with a little flutter of hope.

"Because Balthazar stopped a ship from sinking," he continued, looking from me to Dean.

"Right!" The hope was more than a flutter now.

"You got all that…from this?" Dean looked around the garage disbelievingly.

"No," I told him, my patience just about gone. It always looks so easy on a show or movie to convince the heroes that someone's from the future or the past, or a different world and that the information they have has to be acted on immediately. Even in the scripts from the show, Dean and Sam would 'get' what Cas was trying to tell them or show them straight away, no matter how preposterous it was. It wasn't like that in real life.

Maybe I didn't have a convincing-enough expression, maybe it was just because it was real freakin' life, but I was getting tired of being pregnant and tired of not being believed.

"I got it from the script of a TV show in another world, a world that I used to live in and which you and Sam were thrown into for a while, before Raphael pulled me back here along with you."

Their faces held identical expressions of confusion.

"Look, call Ellen," I said, remembering that Jo had been tracking similar deaths. "Tell her you found a gold thread."

Dean cocked a brow at me, sliding another look at his brother. "Yeah, well, calling Ellen's an idea, anyway."

He pulled out his phone and ducked under the garage door, giving it a leery look as he went.

"You okay?" Sam asked me and I sighed…deeply.

"Sam, you've got to believe me about this," I said, looking into his worried and concerned eyes. "It's Balthazar. I don't know how to prove it to you, but we've got to summon him, make him undo what he's done. This," I waved a hand around the garage. "This isn't where we're supposed to be."

And the angel had thought that the Fate just might kill them, I suddenly realised. I didn't think he'd had that much ill-feeling toward them, but maybe I'd been wrong.

"Come on, we'll get a room, figure this out," Sam said, looking at the garage door, the rumble of his brother's voice outside. "I never even heard of a ship called the Titanic."

Following him out, I nodded. "No one has."

Dean finished the call as we ducked under the door and came into the sunshine.

"Ellen said Jo's tracking deaths across the West Coast, same deal," he said shortly, looking at me, his expression perplexed. "She's got Bobby working on it."

I realised uncomfortably that it really said a lot for the supposed-relationship I was in with Sam that he wasn't looking at me with suspicion.

"So…" he said, turning to look at Sam. "What now?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The motel room was weird-looking. Weirder-looking than the dinky sets from the show, I mean. It was all black and white. I felt like I should be wearing a slinky evening gown and smoking a cigarette in a long holder while leaning on a piano. Maybe it was just the pregnancy thing. I'd been having a lot of weird thoughts lately.

"Alright, the RMS Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world when it made its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic in 1912," Sam said, reading the details from the web site he'd found.

"So what's the big friggin' deal? It's a ship. It sailed," Dean said, opening a beer and dropping onto the sofa.

"It wasn't supposed to sail," I said, walking behind Sam. "It was supposed to hit an iceberg and sink, with most of the passengers and crew lost."

"Um...oh, looks like there was a close call. Ship almost hit an iceberg," Sam said, frowning as he looked at Dean, then twisted around to look at me. "How'd you know that?"

I repressed the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes. "What happened?"

Sam looked back at the page and read on. "Uh, looks like the first mate spotted it just in time."

"Good for him," Dean remarked, leaning back.

"Not good for him," I said in exasperation. "Sam, what was the first mate's name?"

"Mr I. P. Freeley," Sam said, his mouth twisting up as he looked at Dean.

Dean straightened up, paying attention for the first time since we'd gotten into the room. "Well, that's not suspicious. You got a picture of old Freeley?"

"Oh, you got to be kidding me," Sam said, zooming in on the picture on the screen.

"What?"

Dean got up and walked around behind him, looking over his shoulder. I stepped back and closed my eyes in relief. The picture was unmistakably Balthazar.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The table was small and round, and it made drawing the circle easy. Sam closed the curtains as Dean pulled several small pouches of powder from his bag and tipped them into a bowl on the table. He lit four candles and dropped the match into the bowl.

The lights flickered.

"Boys, boys, boys…and girl. Whatever can I do for you?" Balthazar said cheerily, leaning against the divider that separated the room from the kitchen facilities.

"We need to talk," Dean growled at him. Sam moved around to the other side of the table.

Balthazar's gaze settled on me for a moment, and I stared back at him. He gave an almost unnoticeable shrug and looked back at Dean.

"Oh, you seem upset, Dean."

"The hell with the boat, Balthazar?"

"What boat?" the angel said with an attempt at innocence that wouldn't have flown even if he had been innocent. He just had one of those faces.

"The Titanic," I reminded him pointedly.

"Oh. Yeah. The Titanic. Yes, well, uh, it was meant to sink, and I saved it," he said, smiling at Dean.

"What?" Sam looked at me, his forehead all wrinkled up.

"Well it was meant to bash into this iceberg thing and plunge into the briny deep with all this hoopla, and I saved it," Balthazar said, his tone matter-of-fact. "Anything else I can answer for you?"

"Why?"

"Why what?" The angel raised his brows.

"Why did you un-sink the ship?" Dean asked, his voice deeper, a sure sign that he was losing his patience.

"Oh, because I hated the movie," Balthazar said breezily.

"What movie?"

"Exactly!" he exclaimed with a delighted giggle.

"Tell them the truth," I said. "Tell them about Cas."

"What about Cas?" Dean looked from me to Balthazar as the angel's expression changed to a scowl.

"Cas had nothing to with it," Balthazar said, staring at me. "He's busy with the civil war in Heaven."

"The civil war that needs more souls," I said, feeling a bit more confident now that we were back somewhere near the scripts.

"I didn't think that was possible. I thought you couldn't change history," Sam said, inadvertently derailing my masterful interrogation. Balthazar smiled at me, then looked at Sam.

"Oh, haven't you noticed? There's no more rules, boys."

"Wow. The nerve on you. So you just, what, un-sunk a giant boat?" Dean asked, folding his arms over his chest as he stared at the angel. I wanted to interrupt, to keep on at Balthazar about Cas and the souls and the fact that his friend was edging closer and closer to the dark side, but I couldn't get a word in.

"Oh come on. I saved people. I thought you loved that kind of thing," Balthazar said, waving a hand in a broad gesture around the room. "You still averted the Apocalypse, and there are still Archangels. It's just the small details that are different…like you don't drive an Impala," he continued, watching them.

Sam looked at Dean. Dean was frowning at Balthazar.

"Yes, yes. 'What's an Impala?' Trust me, it's not important. And, of course, Ellen and Jo are alive," he added, turning around and picking up Dean's bottle of whiskey and pouring himself a drink.

He'd dropped that bombshell perfectly, I had to admit it. I couldn't think of a way out of what was going to follow.

"Ellen and Jo?" Dean asked, looking around at Sam. "What?"

"Yes, they're supposed to be dead," Balthazar said, pausing just long enough to let it sink in. "You see, I save a boat, one thing leads to another, which leads to another thousand things, and yada, yada, yada. To cut a long story short, they don't die in a massive explosion." He tipped the glass up. "Mmm. Anyway, let's agree I did a good thing. One less Billy Zane movie and I saved two of your closest friends."

"But now somebody is killing the descendants of the survivors," Sam said. I could see that he was trying to put all these pieces together – what I'd said, what the angel had said, what was actually going on – but it really wasn't all that helpful. He was such one-track guy about this stuff.

"And?"

"And what the hell do you mean Ellen and Jo don't die in a massive explosion?" Dean asked him belligerently.

"They didn't die in the explosion," I butted in. "At least, Jo…didn't…"

I really need some kind of leash for my mouth. Or brain. Or both. I don't know what possessed me at that moment to keep that topic going but from the look on Dean's face, I realised instantly that it was the worst idea I'd had for…probably forever.

"What do you know about it?" he snapped, turning the slowly-growing anger he'd been directing at the angel onto me.

"I told you," I said, wishing that a hole would appear in the floor under my feet and just let me drop into it. "This isn't our timeline. This isn't the right life. Ellen and Jo died in Carthage, when you and Sam tried to kill Lucifer."

Balthazar laughed. "Tell them about the hellhounds, why don't you?"

I looked at him furiously. "Tell them about Cas and why he asked you to un-sink the Titanic!"

"I haven't the foggiest idea of what you're talking about," he said cheerfully, his wide, shit-eating grin not making it to his eyes.

"Tell them why Atropos is killing all these people and looking for them too – or is that part of your mop-up plan?"

"Atro-who?" Balthazar said, looking at his wrist as if he was wearing a watch. "It's been fun, really, it has…but I've a terribly schedule today, so au revoir!"

I reached out for him, and felt Sam's hand close around my arm just as the angel vanished, a popping sound louder than the soft rustle of flapping wings leaving an echo in my ears.

"Whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait. Son of a bitch!" Dean barked at the empty space in front of him.

"Damn it!"

Dean and Sam both turned to look at me.

"Okay," Sam said slowly. "From the top."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"So, in the timeline we're supposed to be in…where the Titanic sinks," Sam said, looking at his hands, clasped together in his lap. "Ellen and Jo die, and…uh…Bobby's alone…and…um…we don't…uh…we're not…there's no…"

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I couldn't have sugar-coated that bit for him, and it couldn't help to tell him that when he got back to the right timeline he wouldn't be feeling what he was feeling. I sure didn't want to make the situation worse by trying to comfort him, although I had a feeling that at least one of the brothers was expecting to me to do just that.

Dean was looking at his brother, his expression drawn. I wasn't surprised, exactly, along with millions of viewers, I'd seen Dean look like that before, hurting on behalf of his brother. It just seemed too familiar for the unfamiliar men who weren't really like the characters. Except, I thought, maybe in the important things, they were.

"Doesn't sound like we got any good reasons to convince Balthazar not to sink the boat," Dean said, his voice holding a bitter edge as he looked back at me.

I bit my lip at the intentional rebuke in his eyes. "Atropos is setting the scales right," I said. "She'll kill all the descendants of the people who lived instead of dying, and then she'll come after you two."

Sam pulled in a deep breath, his lost expression smoothing out as he lifted his head and looked at Dean. "This isn't meant to be, and we know how that goes down, we've done this before, trying to change things, to make them work out."

"Sam…"

Shaking his head, Sam looked at me. "How do we get Cas to undo it?"

"I think, if you…put yourselves out as bait, Atropos will come after you," I said. The draft had been sketchy at that point, but it felt right. "Cas will save you, but you can't tell him that you know it was him behind it."

Dean looked affronted. "Why not?"

"Because this is a glitch, there's a lot more to do," I said, thinking of phoenix ash and killing the Mother of All and keeping Purgatory closed. "And for the moment, at least, Cas has to believe that you think he's the same friend he's been."

He looked away, and his jaw tightened. "But he's not, is he?"

"He's doing what he thinks is the right thing, Dean," I said, trying to explain the angel's actions. I only had the outline of the season to go with, Cas trying to fight Raphael on his own, mostly. "He's just as trapped as we are. If he does nothing, and Raphael wins, the Apocalypse is back on track."

"Alright," Dean said, his tone indicating his unwillingness to pretend that nothing was wrong when he plainly wanted to demand an explanation from Castiel. He seemed to be prepared to keep that need under control. "Tethered goats, tempting Fate."

"You're staying here," Sam said to me tersely.

I thought about that for a long moment. If I went with them, how much more would get screwed up? If I didn't, and something happened, something that I could've prevented, it would screw up everything anyway.

"No," I said, a series of thoughts formulating somewhere in the back of my mind. "No, I won't get in the way, but I've got an idea."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The Mustang smelled of gun oil, a scent I could recognise easily now, and solvent, and a little bit of whiskey – spilled at some time, I thought. I was parked at the end of the busy street, the video camera's zoom lens giving me all the detail I needed. The mike was something else. Sam had pulled it out of his bag, saying it was military. It was directional and I had it perched on the side-mirror, pointing at the Winchesters as they walked up the street slowly toward the car. It was picking up everything, I could hear them and the background noises clearly through the headphones I had on, and hopefully the same quality soundtrack was being recorded to the hard drive.

I was banking on the fact that none of this timeline seemed to be affecting me, as if I was standing on the outside of this world's lines of fate completely. I had an idea of what might happen, not a certainty, just a hope really, and I wanted to get it down, so that if the angel didn't allow them to retain the memory of what'd happened here, I would be able to show them.

Dean and Sam walked along the left-hand side of the street, giving the outside appearance of a casual stroll. I could see that their shoulders were rigidly tense under their jackets, but from a distance they didn't look too bad.

"Okay, so, we're just gonna meet our fate at any time, right?" Dean said, a faint crackle from the mike in my ears, but I could hear the nervousness in his voice anyway.

"Yeah," Sam said, looking around. "Just walk. Act natural."

They stopped abruptly at the foot of a set of steps as a kid shot past their noses on a skateboard.

"Okay," Dean said, jamming his hands into his pockets.

"That's fine," Sam agreed, dodging out of the way of a cyclist as Dean stared at a man coming down the steps toward them, struggling with two German Shepherds, both barking furiously at the brothers as they passed. In the viewfinder of the camera I watched Dean suck in a breath and freeze as he saw what was ahead of them.

"Oh…you gotta be kidding me."

"All right, just…just keep walking," Sam said, his face becoming determined.

"Sam, they're juggling knives," Dean hissed as he followed his brother. "And hatchets."

"Yeah, I know." Sam ducked and hurried across the paving as the jugglers switched to flaming torches. "Can't avoid fate."

I watched them walk through the display, saw the sudden stain of sweat on both of their shirts as they made it through unharmed. Ahead of them, a building front was under renovation and Dean flinched violently as the carpenter swung his nail-gun around, trying to clear a jam, the barrel following the boys as if drawn by a magnet.

"Ah," Dean said, and I'm not sure, but I think he might have been hyperventilating by the time they made it past without getting nailed.

"All right," Sam said, looking behind them. "I don't get it."

"I don't either. Who do you got to kill to get killed around here?" Dean's gaze scanned the street.

"Look out!"

The shout was from above them, and I froze as the camera caught the monstrous air-conditioning unit, falling from the side of the building, the brothers right underneath.

It was, as they say in Hollywood, the money shot. I can't tell you how relieved I was to be right about the angel, about being right that I was on the outside of the timeline in this world thingy, and about right to have the camera in my hand.

For the rest of the world, time had stopped. Completely. Every person standing on the street, sitting in offices above it, the dogs, the skateboarder, the jugglers, all frozen in the split-second that Castiel appeared and a slender, rather bookish-looking blonde woman walked out from the building that the air-conditioner belonged to. Dean and Sam were frozen, both looking up at the air, the shadow of the air-conditioner falling over them.

"Castiel," the blonde woman said curtly, stopping in front of him.

I turned the mike a little more toward them, and held the camera steady. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating so much that I was holding the camera with a death-grip, the only thought running through my head was an agonising loop of how important it was that Sam and Dean hear what the angel said, and how much danger I was in if either Cas or Atropos noticed that the stop-time effect wasn't a hundred percent effective.

"Atropos." Cas looked warily at the Fate. "You look well."

Her nose wrinkled up. "I look like stomped-over crap, because of you."

"All right, let's talk about this," he said resignedly.

"Talk? About what?" she exclaimed, her voice rising. "Maybe about how you and those two circus clowns destroyed my work. You ruined my life!"

"Let's not get emotional."

"Not get emotional?! I had a job," she hissed at him, taking a half-step closer. "God gave me a job. We all had a script. I worked hard. I was really, really good at what I did...until the day of the big prize fight. And then what happens? You throw out the book!"

"Well, I'm sorry. But freedom is more preferable," the angel said, almost prissily, I thought.

"Freedom? This is chaos! How is it better?" Atropos demanded shrilly. "You know, I even went to heaven just to ask what to do next, and you know what? No one would even talk to me!"

"There are more pressing matters at hand," Cas said, his gaze moving shiftily to one side. Even I could see he was trying to evade the conversation and Atropos huffed angrily at him.

"But I don't know what happens next. I need to know. It's what I do."

"I'm sorry. But your services are no longer required."

For a long, drawn-out moment, Atropos looked at him, her lips thinned out and her eyes narrowed.

"You know what? I've kept my mouth shut. I could have complained, I could have raised a fuss, but I didn't. But you know what the last straw is? Un-sinking the Titanic. You changed the future. You cannot change the past. That is going too far!"

"It's Balthazar. He's erratic –"

"Bull crap. This isn't about some stupid movie. He's under your orders. You sent him back to save that ship," she said, and I let out a long, slow exhale. Way to go, girl, I thought, watching Cas shift his weight from one foot to the other.

"No, I didn't. Why would I?"

"Oh, maybe because you're in the middle of a war and you're desperate?" she suggested brightly. "Come on. This is about the souls."

"You don't know what you're talking about," Cas countered, but he looked clearly discomforted by her comment, that telling expression caught on camera, and I couldn't wait to hear what she was going to say next.

"That angel went and created fifty thousand new souls for your war machine."

"You're confused," Cas said.

Behind Atropos, Balthazar appeared and I startled at the sight of him, shaking the camera. He was holding a gleaming sword in his hand.

"No. You can't just mint money, Castiel. It's wrong...it's dangerous...and I won't let you," the diminutive Fate said sharply.

"You don't have a choice."

"Maybe I don't. So here's a choice for you," she said, her voice dropping. I could hardly hear the next words. "If you don't go back and sink that boat, I'm going to kill your two favourite pets."

"I won't let you," Cas said, but the worry was clear in his voice.

"Oh, yeah? What are you going to do?" she asked mockingly.

"Do you really want to test me?"

"Okay. Fine," she said, shrugging and looking around the frozen tableau surrounding them. "But think about this, my fine, feathered friend, I've got two sisters out there. And they're bigger…in every sense of the word." She paused slightly for emphasis and I could see that Castiel knew about her sisters, who they were…and what they could do.

"Kill me – Sam and Dean are target one," Atropos told him, her voice dropping low again. "For simple vengeance. You're not fighting a war or anything, right? You can watch them every millisecond of every day?" she asked, sarcastic now. "Because maybe you've heard…Fate strikes when you least expect it."

Behind her, Balthazar was watching Cas' face, the sword raised high over the Fate's back.

"Balthazar, stop," Cas said.

Atropos looked around and saw the angel, who dropped his arm and smiled uncomfortably.

"Aah. Awkward."

I actually saw her eyes roll as she turned back to Castiel. "Set things right before I flick your precious boys off a cliff just on principle," she said.

"Uh, sweetie, before we go, um, I could remove that stick from your –" Balthazar said, with what I thought was an incredible lack of tact.

Apparently the Fate thought so too. "Don't try me," she warned him.

"Oh. We'll leave it inserted, then. All right, then. Let's sink the Titanic," the lanky angel said.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby leaned back in his chair as the screen went to black. "Well, that tells us somethin'."

On either end of the sofa, Dean and Sam exchanged a look. "Tells us that we're not only fighting Crowley and Hell, but now Heaven," Dean said, an acid edge to his voice.

Sam's gaze slid past me and I saw colour rising up his neck, feeling an answering heat in mine. When the angel had re-sunk the ship, we'd all ended up back in Bobby's shed, standing around the circle they'd used to summon the angel. Bobby hadn't noticed anything amiss, not even noticing the video camera I was still clutching in one hand. Sam and Dean had stood looking at each other open-mouthed, remembering it all. And Sam hadn't been able to meet my eyes since.

I'd taken three pregnancy tests while they'd downloaded the footage to Sam's laptop and made a disc and I was at least reassured that that was no longer an issue I had to deal with. Sooner or later, I thought I would have to say something to Sam, but I was dreading that conversation and I couldn't even think of how to open it.

"You still think Balthazar's gonna help us get the phoenix ashes, Dorothy?" Dean asked me, the sardonic tone back in his voice and a coolly appraising smirk on his face.

"We don't need him to," Sam said, clearing his throat when the words came out thickly. "Cas doesn't suspect that we know anything," he continued, sounding more normal. "We'll ask him."

"Where's this phoenix supposed to be?" Bobby looked from Sam to me.

"Sunrise, Wyoming," I said, mostly automatically. The folder had been restored to the one I'd brought with me, with all the notes, outlines and drafts familiar again. The draft of the western episode was quite detailed.

"And what do we kill it with?" Dean asked, one brow lifting.

"The gun that'll kill anything, of course," I said, looking down at the floor. I know I'd wished for Dean's snarky attitude back in the other timeline, but now, having it directed at me for the last thirty hours, I was over it. "Samuel Colt's gun."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~