Chapter 9

I nodded, uneasy about where he wanted to go with that. "I saw why you did it, too," I said quickly, looking at him. "Saw Dean killed, his soul taken to Hell, and saw how you tried so hard to stop it from happening."

He smiled, but there wasn't a speck of humour in it. "Failed, you mean. Failed him, not just once, but over and over."

"No, Sam," I said, leaning forward to look at him carefully. If I could stop this endless cycle of guilt now, even if just for Sam, maybe that was the reason I was here, not some hidden angel plot to confuse and stir things up even more. "You know that Heaven and Hell made sure that Dean made the deal, because they needed the first seal broken. There wasn't anything you could've done about that."

He laughed then. "Oh, Terry, that's – that's a nice thing to say, but we both know that's not true. I could've done any number of things differently, could've been what he wanted me to be and not kidded myself that what I was doing, with Ruby, was anything but…arrogance."

I didn't know what to say to him in the face of the aching self-loathing I could hear in his voice.

"You thought you were doing the right thing," I offered.

"Yeah," Sam huffed. "But good intentions don't pave the road to Heaven."

He had his answers down pat, almost as if the conversation was one that he'd practising for. Maybe he had been, I thought uncomfortably. Practising for telling this to his brother. He'd apologised to Dean, a lot of times since they'd been saved from the convent, but Dean couldn't hear it, couldn't see past what Sam had done, specifically, I thought, to their family.

"Did you see what I did when Cas pulled me out, without my soul?" he asked, his voice so quiet that I could hardly hear him.

"Some of it," I told him. "The, uh, hunt in Rhode Island, with Samuel."

He nodded, looking away and his mouth curled down. "You'd have to know me really well to be able to sit in the same room as me, knowing that."

"Sam." I got up, walked over to the desk, forcing him to look at me. "I do know you, probably better than I should. You can't look at those things in isolation. They weren't decisions made in isolation. There wasn't any time to–"

"Don't –" He shook his head. "Don't do that, okay? Dean does that, overlooks what I've done, pretends it didn't – pretends it's in the past, over and done."

"Isn't it?"

"It doesn't feel like that," he said, his eyes cutting away from me again. "I thought…I thought that I'd paid for it all, going down there, taking the devil back to the cage. But I haven't. I don't remember it, so how can I have paid?"

There wasn't a great deal I could really say to that either. I didn't know either of them well enough to give them insights into each other. "Maybe paying isn't what you do, maybe you're looking for some kind of…" What, I wondered? Way to make amends? Make it better? "…some kind of way to make things better, the way you're feeling?"

His head snapped around to look at me and his eyes were narrowed in thought. "You might be right," he said in a tone I didn't like at all. "Maybe that's it. The way past…everything."

He leaned across the desk and gripped both of my hands, smiling at me. "Thanks."

"For what?" I asked, feeling very uncomfortable. I hadn't said anything really useful.

"For listening, to start with," Sam said, shrugging. "And for not looking at me as if I'm a monster."

"You're not a monster," I said, able to be honest about that. "Any more than your brother is. You both think that you have the capacity to become that, but," I added, shaking my head. "it's not really possible. Not for either of you."

"What makes you so sure about that?"

"You care too much," I told him, and the clarity of that thought hit me for the first time. I'd watched the episodes, over and over and over again, for years now. I knew the lines, knew the expressions, knew the details of every hunt, every monster, every argument and the brief moments of peace between the two of them. I didn't know how accurate those times had been, from the show, but I knew them inside and out. It was still the first time I'd thought about what really drove them, to do what they did, to feel the way they did, about each other, about themselves as well.

"Both of you care too much – about other people, and about each other." I hoped I was right about this, but it felt right, you know? It felt like it was the key to both of them. "Monsters don't. Demons don't. Angels don't."

Sam sucked the edge of his lip in between his teeth, chewing on it absently as he looked at me. "Dean's disappointed, in me. In what I've done."

"I don't think he is, Sam," I said, glancing involuntarily to the doorway, as if his name was somehow going to conjure him up. I could just imagine his reaction to this kind of conversation. "I think he thinks that he raised you, and he didn't do it properly."

Sam let go of my hands, his forehead creasing up as he looked at me. "He was a kid."

"You don't have to tell me that," I told him. "And I don't know for sure, alright? But I get the feeling that he blames himself for what happened to you, maybe not the demon blood, but everything afterward."

"It wasn't his fault, it was Dad's," Sam sputtered. "Pushing us, keeping us on the move all the time, putting all the responsibility onto Dean –"

"You should be talking with him about it, you know."

"I can't," he said. "He won't."

I thought about what we were coming up to, Cas admitting his betrayal. "He put a lot of faith in Cas, you know. He's going to need someone to lean on when Cas admits what he's been doing."

"I know."

"It might be a start, to get back to trusting each other again," I suggested.

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

Bobby looked up at the lightbox he'd screwed into the wall. Dean's x-rays were clear on it, the marks a lighter grey against the ribs.

"The whole house?" he asked, turning around to look at Dean.

Dean shook his head. "That'll make him wonder. Just the panic room to start with, someplace we can talk without being overhead, or watched."

"Not the car?" Sam asked him.

"No, he'll definitely be suspicious if he can't jump in and out of that," Dean said with a grimace. "He popped in on me on the way back from Laramie."

Sam and Bobby looked at him.

"What did you tell him?" Bobby asked. Dean shook his head.

"Nothing, alright? Told him I was meeting up with Sam, in Omaha."

"He didn't suspect anything?" Sam asked and I got a shiver up my spine.

"Not yet," I cut Dean's answer off. "But we have to do this fast, because I think we're out of time."

"Gotta lead from Kenny an hour ago. He found what we're lookin' for and he's got him on ice at his place," Bobby said, scratching his beard. "We should get going." He looked at me. "You can handle these sigils?"

I nodded. "Do they have to be in blood or will paint do?"

Dean snorted into his coffee then tipped the rest of the contents of the cup down his throat. "Paint'll do, Dorothy."

They picked up the big canvas duffles and got into the cars, engines rumbling as they pulled out of the yard and a minute later the place was silent again.

I wondered if Cas had been here, watching and listening. The script was too vague on the matter to work out where and when the angel had access, just a series of notes and ideas for dialogue and a few rough descriptions filling the in-between times. Picking up the notepad and a pen, I looked down at the lightbox and started copying out the symbols that had been engraved on Dean's ribs, checking for repetitions.

The conversation with Sam kept coming back to me. I don't think it'd escaped too many fans of the show that the much-loved bond between the brothers had deteriorated into a series of lies and secrets, neither able to trust the other, or themselves, it seemed, half the time. They'd spent as much time fighting each other as they had fighting the powers of evil, or being miserable because they felt so isolated from everyone and everything.

Frowning, I thought back to the first season – 2005 in this world, and in my own – and realised that the deterioration had begun back then, and for Dean and Sam, before that as well, when Sam had left for college. Dean might've had a good reason for trying to keep the fears he'd had about Sam buried, and Sam hadn't been able to face looking weak about Jess' loss to his brother, but they'd been hiding things even back then, and it'd only gotten worse over the years.

I looked at the leather folder, with its bundles of secrets from the past episodes and its rough blueprint for the disasters of the future ones. Everything I changed here, was going to change their lives exponentially into the future. The trouble was, for all the glimpses these outlines gave, none of them could tell me how that was going to look.

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

I was making notes from the vague outline of the next script when I heard a rustle of wings in the room. If that wasn't a giant pigeon, I thought worriedly, I was in trouble.

"Why are you doing this?" a roughened voice said behind me, and I turned around to see the angel, looking tired and strained and grubby.

"Doing what?"

"You told them I was – in league – with Crowley," he accused, walking toward me.

You might've already noticed that bravery is not one of my strengths. I hastily got up and skittered around the table, keeping it in between us. No idea what I thought that would do, since he could've annihilated me from New Jersey just as easily as across the table. But you know, not always thinking logically at times like these.

"Opening Purgatory is a huge mistake, Castiel," I said, looking at him. He was distraught, I could see that. I wondered exactly what he'd overhead when he'd been spying on them.

"I don't have a choice!"

"There's always a choice," I snapped back, doing a small double-take in my head when I realised how much that'd sounded like Dean. "Why didn't you tell Dean that Sam wasn't in Hell? Why didn't you ask him for help?"

"He'd done enough, he deserved to get what he wanted," Cas ground out, looking at the table top between us.

"He didn't want a life of misery and grief thinking Sam was being tortured every day," I told him. "He didn't want to be betrayed by his best friend."

At that, Cas looked up, an almost wistful look on his face. It disappeared and he frowned at me. "If I am not strong enough to defeat Raphael, he will free Lucifer and the whole apocalypse will begin again – or he will take Lucifer's place and start the Second War and bring that down to earth."

I shook my head. "You're going to do worse."

"How do you know that?" He looked at me, and this time I could see the confusion in his eyes. "Where are you getting this information?"

I'm normally a pretty honest person, but there was something, some little voice at the back of my mind that told me I needed to keep the whole Winchester-tv-show-scripts-about-the-future thing under my hat.

"I sometimes have dreams," I told him, hoping that would be vague enough to pass and that he wasn't going to question it. He'd been right, before. I wasn't a seer and I sure as heck wasn't a prophet.

"What kind of dreams?" he asked.

"Weird ones," I said. "Sometimes, some parts of them come true."

"You had dreams about Crowley and I?"

I nodded. The fine art of lying well involves telling someone no more than a basic unverifiable fact. Trying to dress it up invariably ended up in a mess. In fact, the less you actually say, the more likely you are to be believed.

"Why would they believe you?"

"I don't think they really did, until Eve confirmed that you didn't kill Crowley," I said, weaving in a little bit of truth. "You must have known I could see a bit of what's happening," I added, thinking of his behaviour in Grants Pass. "You knew I would argue against Dean taking those boys to their family."

"I can't see you clearly," he said, plainly bewildered by that. "Perhaps because you're from an alternative existence, or perhaps because of something else."

What else was there, I wondered worriedly, but didn't get a chance to ask. His head snapped up, his eyes going wide.

"Crowley!"

He disappeared and the papers on the table fluttered.

For a moment, I couldn't remember what Crowley had done, then I did. Demon attack on Bobby and the Winchesters – and Cas saves them.

I looked down at the script and realised that Crowley would make his move on Lisa and Ben very soon now. Maybe as soon as he freed Cas. Picking up the phone, I dialled Dean's number, which of course went straight to voicemail.

"Dean, I think Crowley's getting close to kidnapping Lisa and Ben to stop you from trying to find him. You need to – dammit!" I looked down at the phone in annoyance as the message time ran out. Well, he'd know what to do about it, I thought.

If Crowley had no leverage against them, would Balthazar still help them find the disused warehouse that the demon was using to torture the information out the monsters?

I sat down again and went through all the notes I had on the end of the season. There were dozens of locations but none of them were any use, being for physical locations in and around Vancouver that would be substituting for American towns and buildings. I was skimming through the notes for the next episode, the one where Crowley does kidnap Lisa and Ben when the name leapt out at me.

Lovecraft.

If you've dabbled at all in reading fiction in the genres of horror, gothic and the supernatural, chances are, you've read at least one of his stories. He didn't really give a damn about humanity, and that's what made his stories so creepy. There were a million rumours about him and the circle of friends he made and he wrote a book that was supposed to be a fictional magical text on spells and lore, particularly, spells for opening doorways into other dimensions, the notes on the script said. In my world, maybe it had been fictional. In this world, I wasn't nearly as sure of that.

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

Bobby came in, followed by Sam, both of them looking tired. They perked up a bit at the smells from the kitchen, and ate fast and hungrily when the dinner I'd made a couple of hours earlier was served out. I was making a lot of casseroles.

"Dean's gone to Michigan," Sam said, between mouthfuls. "He thinks they'll be here by morning."

"Cas was here," I told them, getting both of their attention immediately. "He wanted to know how I was helping you."

"What'd you tell him?" Bobby asked, putting his fork down.

"Not much. I said I was having dreams, and then he disappeared," I said, pushing my food around the plate. I'd been hungry when I'd started to make it. In the last fifteen minutes, my appetite had disappeared completely. "To rescue you guys, I guess."

Sam nodded. "He showed up and we trapped him in the holy oil circle," he said, mopping his plate with a slice of bread. "Then the demons came and we were just leaving when Dean got your message."

"Will they be safe here?" I asked Bobby. "When he left, I did the rest of the house using the sigils."

Bobby shrugged. "We got demon traps and angel wardings, hex bags and salt and iron. Can't make it any safer."

"What'd you find out on Lovecraft?" he added, picking up his plate and taking it to the sink.

"Not much more than what I knew," I said. "Someone who really knows the lore here needs to go through your library, Bobby."

"I gotta journal, one of the Campbells, I think," he said, turning back to the dining room. "I'm sure there was something in that about ol' Howard Phil, but I'll have to dig it out." He pulled out his mobile. "In the meantime, there's someone else who might have a clue."

"Dr Visyak?"

He looked up in surprise and under the shadow of his cap, he frowned at me. "Whaddya know about her?"

"Just what I saw in the dragon episode," I said, fiercely repressing the urge to smile when I caught Sam's eye. Obviously, Dean'd told him about the previous relationship as well. "But there's a notation at the end of the next script that Castiel finds her and takes her, so I'm thinking she's a bit more than a medieval studies professor?"

"You two hold down the fort," Bobby said instantly, shoving his phone into his pocket and swinging back to the hallway. Sam got to his feet and followed him out.

"What the – Bobby, where are you going?" he called out as I scrambled out of the chair and followed him.

"Dean ain't the only one with connections," Bobby said, dragging his jacket on and checking the pocket for the car keys. "I'll be back when I get her."

He opened the front door and slammed it shut behind him and after a moment, we heard the sound of the Nova coughing into life, throwing gravel as it sped out of the yard.

"Great!" Sam turned back to me, running a hand through his hair and pushing it back from his face. "Did you see that coming?"

I looked away. I hadn't. Bobby did go to see her but it was a just scene marked up for a location – a small cabin in the woods – and nothing else.

"Bobby's collection of hunters' journals is in the living room," I said, jerking my head toward the room's double-sliding doors. "We may as well see if we can find the references."

He followed me into the room, and over to the shelves, and I passed him an armful of thick card or leather-bound, hand-stitched books from the section. Sitting on the sofa and armchair respectively, we started to read. After a moment, I realised that Sam was looking uncomfortable, restlessly flicking through the pages instead of concentrating.

"What?" I asked him. "Is something wrong?"

He looked up and to my surprise a hint of colour started rising in his face. "Nothing, it's – sorry, it just feels like, uh, it feels a bit like, um, well," he sighed deeply and put the journal down on the sofa beside him. "This is, it's reminding me a bit of the, the, uh, you know, the other, um, timeline."

Uh huh, I thought. "I don't want to make it worse, but really, Sam, what was it about me in that life that you liked so much?"

He looked away, smiling slightly. "You were together, I guess. You handled stuff, you were brave and, I, uh, I could talk to you, about anything," he said, shrugging. "You stood up to Dean. You made – um, you made us a home."

I frowned at him, totally unable to imagine myself being or doing any of those things. "You mean, everything I'm not, in this life? How on earth did we meet?"

His forehead wrinkled up as he looked back. "You were researching supernatural mythology at UCLA. We had a case and we couldn't figure out the parameters of the attacks. You didn't know it was for real, but you got all the information you could find and it worked out," he told me. "You saved our asses on that one."

"Sam…," I said, shaking my head at that unlikely view of me. "That's all really flattering, and don't get me wrong, I'm quite enjoying hearing it, but come on, that doesn't sound like me, does it? A college researcher? I almost flunked out of high school. And have you seen me standing up to your brother? Even once?"

"Well, maybe, you know, you'll get more used to it here and relax into it," he said, and I wondered if he really thought that.

"Maybe," I hesitated, looking at him doubtfully. "But I'm not – I'm not like that. I mean, on the most fundamental of levels, I don't think anyone would consider me brave – or able to hold it together enough to save anyone."

He leaned back, his expression thoughtful as he looked at me. "You never know until it happens."

"You gonna wish that on me? In the middle of all this?" I said, hoping to lighten the conversation and get a smile. I did. He smiled, I mean. I got the feeling that it wasn't the last conversation I'd have with him about this, though.

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

We were still up, reading through the journals, when the unmistakable rumble of Impala pulling into the yard and stopping outside the house made Sam glance up.

"Think they'll want something to eat? Or just crash out?" I asked him. He shook his head.

"Wait and see."

The front door opened.

"Uh, there's a bedroom free upstairs," Dean's voice came from the hall as the door shut. "Come on."

We heard the sounds of them going up the stairs and I got up, walking back to the kitchen and turning on the oven. Sam and I'd made a deep-dish lasagne for dinner and there was more than half left over.

"You guys still up?" Dean said, leaning into the dining room doorway.

"Sam's in the living room," I told him, waving a hand at the stove. "There's lasagne if you guys are hungry?"

"Yeah," he said, tossing the confirmation out as he was already turning to see his brother. "Uh, Lise, that's Terry," he added, as Lisa took a couple of steps into the dining room. "Terry, Lisa and Ben."

"Hi," I said. They both looked tired and a bit scared, which I thought was fair enough considering Dean had just snatched them from their home and life, probably without much of an explanation. "This should be hot in a few minutes."

"Um, hi, thanks," Lisa said, walking into the room a bit further, her head turning to watch Dean as he crossed the hall to the other room. "Sorry for the invasion."

"No need to apologise to me, it's not my house," I said cheerfully. "Have a seat; do you want a coffee or anything? Hot chocolate?" I looked at Ben who nodded, his gaze on the floor.

"Do you know how long we're supposed to be staying here?" Lisa sat down at the table, and Ben sat beside her.

"Until Crowley's contained, I guess," I told her. It was all a bit vague. I wasn't even sure that they could contain Crowley, but Dean would want them to be safe until the Purgatory issue was resolved, one way or the other.

"Who's Crowley?"

Oh. Awkward. I kicked myself mentally for the slip. "Um, one of the bad guys. What'd Dean say?"

"He said we were in danger and we had to leave," she said, glancing back at the dining room doorway. "And that was it, we had five minutes to pack a bag and we were on our way."

"It's a complicated situation," I hedged, hoping that the brothers would make an appearance soon, before I put my foot in it any deeper. "I'm sure Dean'll explain it as soon as he can."

The coffee was hot and fresh and I finished heating some milk for Ben's hot chocolate, pouring it into a cup and adding a marshmallow from the pack I'd bought just for that purpose. I love it that way and if you can't indulge in the little things, there's not much point to living at all.

"Here," I said, setting down the cups in front of them. "Food's coming up."

"Uh, are you a friend of Bobby's?" Lisa asked as I turned away.

"Sort of," I said, having no real clue of what else to say on the matter of my living there. It occurred to me that I wasn't really a friend of any of them.

Dean and Sam choose that moment to walk in and I scurried thankfully back to the stove. I hadn't really thought through how much they knew or what Dean would tell them about the situations, both theirs and the one here. The impression I'd gotten from the very small amount we'd seen of Dean's life in Cicero had been that he hadn't told them much about his life, trying to start fresh. I didn't know if that was right, for this world.

"Where's Bobby?" Dean asked, looking around the room.

"He went to get Dr Visyak," Sam told him, smiling at Lisa and Ben as he sat down on the opposite side of the table. "You two must be exhausted."

"Getting there," Lisa acknowledged, putting her arm around her son. "Dean, you said you'd explain when we got here."

He gave Sam a hunted look and sat down at the table. "We got word that you two were in danger. You can stay here until we sort it out," he said, and it was obvious even that paltry offering was delivered reluctantly.

Lisa plainly thought so. "What kind of danger? From who?" She glanced at me. "This Crowley person?"

I had my back to him, but I felt the glare from the dining room anyway, hunching up a little bit as I checked the temperature of the slowly heating lasagne.

"Don't worry about Crowley, we've got him covered," he said to Lisa. "It's just gonna be safer if you stay here, okay? This is what I do," he added, glancing at Sam. "What we do. You know that."

"For how long?" she asked, looking down at Ben. "We can't stay here indefinitely."

"It won't be long," Sam said reassuringly, lying through his teeth. "A couple of weeks, maybe."

"Weeks?"

"Yeah," Dean admitted, not looking at her. "No more than two."

The food was heated all the way through and I was glad that I had something to do with myself, because the silence at the table was so thick you could've cut it with a knife. I cut slices from the dish and served them onto plates, carrying the plates to Lisa and Ben first, then putting one in front of Dean, not looking at anyone on my back-and-forth trips.

The fact that neither brother talked about the research we'd done on the journals, or about Bobby racing off to get his doctor friend, or about Cas or Crowley, told me enough about what Dean had and had not shared with Lisa over the time he'd lived with them. Had he been successful, I wondered? Pretending to be normal? I didn't think I'd get the chance to ask that – ever.

When they'd finished the food, Dean looked at her, and then at Ben. She took the hint and they got up, excusing themselves to go upstairs. I watched the brothers listening to their progress up the stairs and along the hall, both relaxing unconsciously with the sound of the closing bedroom door.

"So what'd you find out?" Dean looked at Sam, one eyebrow raised.

"One of the Campbells got involved with a murder spree in 1937," Sam said, leaning back in his chair. "Started with H.P. Lovecraft and something went right through his circle of friends."

"Lovecraft had written a book," I added, carrying another cup of coffee to the table. "It was called Necronomicon and it was supposed to be a book of spells, some of which detailed how to open doors to other dimensions."

"You're joking," he said, looking from Sam to me incredulously. "It was published?"

"Limited run, but yeah," I said.

"He had some kind of dinner party and they used one of the spells, and it looks like something might've come through," Sam added, waving a hand toward the living room. "What's not specified is what dimension they opened, but we need a copy of that book."

"Why do I get the feeling that's going to be near impossible?" Dean asked sardonically.

"Probably because it is," Sam said with a shrug. "We can only find one copy still in existence. It's listed on eBay for two hundred thousand dollars."

"Only two? Hang on, lemme get my checkbook." He rubbed a hand along his jaw. "Where's the location?"

"Manhattan," Sam said, his mouth turning down.

"Why's Bobby gone after Dr Visyak again?"

"Dr Visyak has no past history," I said. "She appeared in 1937, age indeterminate and began teaching medieval studies at Columbia in 1939."

"Kind of old for Bobby, ain't she?" Dean frowned, remembering the woman who'd given him the dragon-slaying sword. "She didn't look that old."

"She's probably a lot older than that," Sam told him.

"You think she's what came out of this doorway the writer opened?"

"Pretty sure," Sam said.

"And Bobby's gone after her alone?" Dean straightened up suddenly, his chair scraping back on the floor.

"They have a history," I said. "A close history."

"How'd you know that?"

"It's in Bobby's journal," Sam told him. "We checked, after he left without so much as a word of explanation."

"So we're spying on Bobby now?"

"Can you focus?" I asked him. "If we can't get that book, Dr Visyak can probably tell us if she came from Purgatory and maybe how to keep it closed."

"Or she can kill and eat Bobby," Dean said with another glare at me. "And what the hell are you telling Lisa about Crowley for?"

I stood up. "For some strange reason, I thought you'd have filled her in, since you actually lived with her for a year."

In the corner of my eye, I saw Sam's eyebrows shoot up and I walked out of the room. Maybe I was relaxing into this life, I thought, a nervous flutter in my stomach.

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

It wasn't far off dawn when I woke suddenly, my mouth dry and my heart still pounding from a dream I couldn't remember. I looked at the moonlit bedroom and decided that two hours sleep wasn't going to be enough to get through the next twenty-four hours and a cup of hot milk might help to get some more. Pulling on my robe and some socks, I headed for the stairs and the kitchen. When I reached the bottom step, I heard voices in the living room and froze.

"Well, it's too bad we got to angel-proof in the first place, isn't it? Why are you here?" Dean said, his voice low but belligerent.

"I want you to understand."

That was Castiel and I wondered how he'd gotten past the wardings.

"Oh, believe me, I get it. Blah, blah, Raphael, right?"

"I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you," Cas said, his voice filled with an earnestness I didn't think I'd heard before. He sounded as if…well, as if he was pleading with Dean.

"Because of me. Yeah," Dean said sarcastically. "You got to be kidding me."

"You're the one who taught me that freedom and free will –"

"You're a freakin' child, you know that? Just because you can do what you want doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want!"

"I know what I'm doing, Dean," Cas said, the plea gone from his tone suddenly.

"I'm not gonna logic you, okay? I'm saying don't...just 'cause. I'm asking you not to. That's it."

"I don't understand."

"Look, next to Sam, you and Bobby are the closest things I have to family–you are like a brother to me. So, if I'm asking you not to do something...you got to trust me, man," Dean told him, and I leaned against the wall of the staircase, sinking down to sit on the step at the tacit request in his voice. He sounded…I didn't know what exactly he sounded like. As if he were asking for something he didn't think he'd get?

"Or what?" Cas seemed to have missed the monumental occasion of Dean asking for something, taking his plea defensively.

And Dean reacted to that. "Or I'll have to do what I have to do to stop you."

"You can't, Dean," Cas said. "You're just a man. I'm an angel."

For the first time, I heard a pity in the angel's voice. It was deeper than Misha's voice, the timbre rounded. Not an actor forcing that depth, I thought. An angel.

"I don't know. I've taken some pretty big fish," Dean countered, and I wondered if the cockiness was deliberate or involuntary.

The stair under me creaked as I changed my position and the silence from the room told me that both man and angel had heard it. I sighed, getting to my feet and walking down the rest of the stairs to the living room doorway.

Dean looked at me, no doubt wondering how much I'd heard of the conversation. Cas' eyes narrowed as he looked at me, and he took a step closer.

"You didn't quite get one of the sigils correct," he said. "I've come to take you back."

I looked at him for a moment, then looked at Dean, catching a quickly-hidden flash of shock on his face.

"You want to go home?" he asked me brusquely.

"I –"

"She has to go, she doesn't belong here," Cas said, and that was probably the worst thing he could've said at that moment, Dean already pissed at him.

"That's her choice," he said, turning to look at the angel. "Or doesn't free will apply to everyone?"

"She wants to go," Cas said, looking at him.

"Yeah, well, she doesn't," Dean contradicted him without even glancing at me. "She wants to stay here and fight, with us."

The angel turned to look at me and I looked back, unwilling to say anything. I had no idea why Dean had suddenly decided I was needed, if it was just to thwart the angel or if he thought I was going to be useful somewhere down the track, but it made the decision for me, hearing it from him. I was clear enough in what I wanted.

"I want to stay," I told Castiel, trying to suppress the waver in my voice.

Cas looked back at Dean. "I'm sorry, Dean."

"Well, I'm sorry, too, then."

They didn't seem to be talking about anything to do with me. There was a fluttering noise in the room and then it was just us, standing there, looking at the spot where the angel had stood.

"You want to stay?" Dean asked me.

I nodded. "If you don't mind."

He gave me a look I couldn't decipher and looked at the sofa. "What the hell are you doing up anyway?"

"Had a bad dream," I said. "Dean…I'm sorry about Cas."

"I hope you got some idea of how to defeat an angel and the King of Hell," he said tiredly. "'Cos, I'm fresh out."

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