A smidge shorter than the last, and I'm sorry it took so long to finish up... New Year shenanigans will do that to your writing. XD

It happened out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever one day in the middle of a hunt, when Dean had suddenly gotten curious and poked his nose in where it didn't technically belong. He'd been on the laptop, looking for some bit of information that Sam swore was on there, and that's when he found it.

It looked innocent enough, a file simply entitled A.M., and Dean clicked on it to see if this was the file Sam had been talking about. And then he saw the driver's license and the birth certificate and spit his mouthful of coffee back into his mug right as his little brother opened the door.

"Dean?" The younger man asked, an eyebrow arching and Bitchface #10 (one that promised Dean months of torment if he was using Sammy's laptop to look up porn), surfaced.

"Ariel!" It certainly wasn't the most graceful summons on the face of the earth, but it worked just fine, because barely a full two seconds after the name left his lips, the Seraphim was standing by his shoulder, looking at the laptop's screen and blinking in surprise.

"Where'd you unearth that?" She asked, directing the question to the room at large, but sending Dean a rather curious look.

"Is that your Annie?" He asked, pointing at the screen, and the gears began to click in Sam's head as he realized what his brother must have found.

"Yeah, it is." Ariel admitted with a shrug. "Why?"

"Why?" Dean repeated, his voice spiking up an octave in accusation. "Because I know that last name, and I will admit to not being very comfortable knowing that your vessel is the granddaughter of our big daddy demon!"

Sam licked his lips nervously, and Dean noticed from the corner of his eye the way his brother suddenly looked far too guilty for his own good. "Dean, look…"

"You knew, didn't you?" He rounded on the younger Hunter. "Why didn't you say so, Sammy?"

"Because it wasn't important, Dean!" He snapped back, suddenly on the defensive. "She had no idea who her granddad was, she grew up here, and she probably doesn't even know what Demons are! When I told you she checked out, I meant it!"

Dean had opened his mouth, ready to snap back at his brother, but Ariel slammed the top of the laptop shut and leaned in close enough to hiss into his ear, a sensation that had Dean instantly even more on edge than he had been before. "Look, Winchester," and the name sounded like an insult as it rolled from her tongue, "I didn't just hi-jack Annie and decide to take her for a joy ride. I asked her. I spent months telling her what would happen and how her life would change, I gave her so many chances to back out I'm actually a little surprised she didn't." Her tone softened slightly, and she gave Dean back a few inches of personal space. "So please, for the love of Dad, stop pointing the finger my way whenever something goes wrong."

Dean took a steadying breath, ready to say God only knew what, but when he turned to look at the spot she'd been occupying, she was gone. And then he felt a sinking in his stomach, because he'd just pissed off a Seraphim, and yeah, the floor was probably going to swallow him at any second.

Sam looked similarly discomfited for another three seconds before he took in a half breath and closed his eyes. "Gabriel, we need you."

"The hell are you doing?!" Dean hissed, even less thrilled about the prospect of the Archangel getting mad at them because they'd upset his big sister.

"Oh, right, because you have a better idea." Sam snapped, plopping down into the seat opposite his brother. "And before you start tearing into me; this is precisely why I didn't tell you about her." He glared across the table, warning Dean not to interrupt, and then continued. "I asked Ariel about it while you were unconscious last week. She told me about Annie, everything she had to do and everything she could have done but didn't. She's not the villain you make her out to be, Dean, and I don't see why you can't just accept that."

Dean let out a sigh, shaking his head, but was stopped from replying properly by the sound of fluttering wings filling the room. Both boys turned to look at a slightly confused looking Castiel standing not two feet from, his head tilted off to one side in consideration, as though he were listening to something they couldn't hear, and then he straightened and nodded to them. "Hello."

"Cas?" Dean looked him over; curious as to why he'd popped up this time, since neither of them had prayed for him.

"Gabriel asked that I come by and see what you needed," he said by way of explanation, "he is under the impression you request his presence even when you do not need the full power an Archangel possesses. He believes it is due to his glittering personality, but I'm not sure he quite has that right." He seemed to consider it seriously for a moment before his face cleared and he glanced between the two of them. "So why did you ask for him?"

"We wanted to ask him about Ariel." Dean decided to ignore the comment about Gabe's glittering personality, and instead decide to glare the shorter man into submission the next time he saw him.

"What exactly would you like to know?" Cas asked, pulling out the third chair at the table and sitting on the edge of it, elbows on his knees. He looked more serious than Dean had seen him in a while, and for some reason that unnerved him just a little.

"We wanted to know about her and her vessel." The elder Hunter replied before Sam managed to get a word in edgewise. "More specifically, why she picked who she did."

Cas' mouth pressed into a thin line, his mind evidently whirring away behind his blue eyes, and for a few awkward moments, silence filled the room. "Unfortunately," the Angel replied at last, "I can't answer that question. You'd have to ask Ariel herself that."

"We might have… Made her a little mad." Sam said tentatively, looking like Cas might threaten to kill a basket of puppies at the news.

"Oh." Was the simple reply, and Cas looked a touch uncomfortable as he sat back in his seat and folded his hands into his lap. "I see."

"You do?" Dean asked, not even trying to keep the incredulity out of his tone. "Really?"

"Ariel is very protective of her vessel, Dean. And for very good reason." He looked like a schoolboy who was about to rat out another student, and Dean decided that he should probably just let Cas divulge while he was in the mood and not interrupt. "Angels, like me, can take on any vessel that is willing. We may shift bodies without too much difficulty, and often use more than one vessel in order to act as the messengers of God." He paused, letting that sink in for a moment before he continued. "Seraphim do not act that way. Once they choose a vessel, it is often for life. If the Seraphim leaves the vessel, it will be to return to heaven, not to take on another body, and if they wish to return, they will take on their former vessel once again." He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Dean realized that Cas was actually telling them something he shouldn't be. "That is why Ariel is so protective of Annie. If anything were to happen to her, it is unlikely that Ariel would be able to find another vessel."

Well that would explain it. "Oh." The elder Hunter managed faintly, gears suddenly clicking in his head. "But, when she brought Gabriel back…?"

"That was a simple transference of Grace from one body to another." Cas said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. "Ariel gave over Annie's body to Gabriel for safe-keeping while she reconstructed his former vessel and then return to Annie again once she was finished." He glanced up and caught the confused looks on their faces, and managed a very faint smile. "It's less complicated for us than it sounds, I assure you."

"I'll take your word for it." Dean muttered, shaking his head and sitting back in his seat.

"Speaking of Archangels," Sam began after a moment's pause, "why did Gabe send you instead of coming himself?"

Cas blinked twice in quick succession and then replied in the simplest terms he could conjure up. "He had to see a man about a dog."

There were times, in his long, sordid existence that Gabriel sometimes forgot who he'd been before he'd (as Dean so tactfully put it), "run off and joined the pagans". He'd been the Archangel Gabriel. The one, the only, the powerful and absolute. But then he'd flown the coop, as it were, and turned into the devious, delightfully entertaining Trickster Extraordinaire, and he'd stopped worrying about the rest of the world.

But then he'd taken the advice of those muttonheads and stood up to his brother, and it had gotten him toasted like a marshmallow over an open fire, and he'd ended up good and truly dead. But there had been light at the end of the tunnel, and this time it wasn't hellfire, it was his big sister come to piece him back together again shard by shard.

And now he was here, doing his duty as both Archangel Gabriel and little brother to one of the best sisters on the face of the planet, and he was doing as he'd promised, and ending the sorry son of a bitch that had ruffled his sister's feathers.

Admittedly, there was really only so much someone like him could do to a sniveling little wretch like the Demon now panting on its knees before him before it went too far, but he did thoroughly enjoy knowing that the thing was suffering as much as his sister had.

"I didn't know who she was!" It spat out a mouthful of blood, coughing from what was likely even more crimson liquid filling its lungs slowly. There was a broken end of a rib jabbing its way viciously into his left lung, and Gabriel presumed that was what was making it hard to breathe. Well, that and the Holy Water I.V. he'd slid into the Demon's arm.

So nice to have one's mojo work no matter where one was.

"Who did you think she was?" He asked, in a tone that would have made even Dean shudder. "Who did you think you were sending your Hounds after? Some measly little messenger?"

"I didn't know," it mumbled around another mouthful of blood, "Crowley asked to borrow my Hounds, and…" It stopped, coughing up another generous amount of blood.

Gabriel glared at the creature, disgusted by the entire ordeal. He didn't like getting his hands dirty, preferring to let his little mojo-made monsters do it instead, and stooping as low as this, well… "Why?"

"Said something about asserting himself. Something about needing to assure the rest of us she wasn't a threat."

Gabriel didn't need any more than that, he put the thing out of its misery and let out a huff of annoyance as he walked away from the corpse. "Not a threat." He muttered, moving through the warehouse before he zapped off anywhere. "Damn right she's a threat…!" He felt his spine go stiff at the thought that anyone might doubt that. Be it the king of hell, or one of his sniveling little minions.

Dean wasn't really paying attention as he cleaned his gun, but the motions were so familiar they came as second nature to him now, and he hardly even had to think about what he was doing as he carefully disassembled the firearm and then went over each component with an oiled rag.

Sam had vanished out the door about ten minutes earlier, leaving Dean alone with his thoughts and the firm command to "suck it up and just say you're sorry". And the elder Hunter had intended to do just that. To tell his stubborn pride to go screw itself and just get the chick-flick moment over with, but then his body had decided that no, it wasn't going to listen to a single command he gave it, and instead of closing his eyes and bowing his head, he'd grabbed his gun and started to clean it the way he did every time he needed to clear his head.

And normally, that would have worked. He would have calmed down as the cool metal slid through his fingers and fitted back together under his guidance. He would have found comfort in the weight of the bullets as he put them back into the clip, but today it was different. Today he had a tiny Sam in the back of his head screaming at him to just pray and ask for forgiveness (which Dean refused to find funny, even though it was), and the array of metal parts held no comfort for him.

So, once the gun had been split into all its separate pieces, well cleaned, and then reassembled, Dean found himself feeling just as uncomfortable as he had been before he'd started. But somewhere amid his uneasiness, he decided that enough was enough, and the words slipped past his lips before he gave them a second thought.

"Look, Ariel, I'm sorry about earlier," and yeah, he really was, "but do you think you could come down here and talk to me? Preferably without the lightning and thunder and smiting, because I don't know about you, but I like my hide the way it currently is." He paused for a few heartbeats and waited, eyes still closed, and when he heard a faint rustling fill the room he tentatively opened his eyes and looked across the table to the girl sitting there.

"Thunder and lightning is more Raphael's thing, remember?" She said softly, not quite looking him in the eye. "Apology accepted, by the way," she added when she realized he still looked worried, "and I wouldn't smite you over something as stupid as calling me out on my vessel. I'm not that petty."

"Well with your family history, I wouldn't be too sure of that…" The comment earned him a glare, but it was mild in comparison to the one he'd been expecting, so he didn't let it bother him. "So are we good now?" He asked tentatively after a pause.

"Dean," Ariel shook her head, "I might get exasperated with you from time to time, but I will never hate you. It's not in my nature." He arched an eyebrow at her, ready to call bullshit, but she continued before he had the chance. "I'm a guardian, Dean, I look after people and places and things. It used to be my Father's throne, then it was my little brothers who needed my help," she smiled softly, "and now it's you."

There was no lump in Dean's throat, it was simply his imagination, and he did not have to take a moment before he replied to be sure that his voice came out at the right octave. "What makes us so damn special?"

She grinned. "Ever notice how you attract trouble like a freakin' magnet, Dean?" She waited for him to give her a look, complete with tight lips and lowered brows, before she continued. "But you attract good things too. And the funniest thing is; you never notice until someone points it out to you."

He sat back in his chair, trying to find a position that was comfortable as her gaze dissected him slowly. "I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at, so you might want to be a bit clearer." And he was expecting an eye roll, or an exasperated sigh, but none came.

"Cas is still around, Dean, even after all the crap he put you and your brother through, he came back. Gabriel could have gone anywhere, could have decided to screw this marble and go check out another, but no. He came to see you. He stuck around." She leaned in a little closer. "Getting my point now?"

And the Hunter did get it. Because no matter how wrong things went, they always turned out alright in the end. And sure, no plan they'd ever hatched had been perfect, and most had been crafted from whatever the hell they happened to have in their pockets at the time, but they made it work. They took hopeless situations and made them not quite so hopeless, and that was a pretty okay plan in Dean's mind. He could live with slap-dash plans and pieced together information because that was what they did, and they were damn good at it.

"So stop looking like I have any right to be mad at you, because I honestly don't. And I'm not looking for an excuse to turn you into a pile of ash, so stop trying to find one for me."

"I'm not…" Dean began to protest, but stopped when she raised an eyebrow at him.

"What, precisely, is it you think you deserve to be killed for, Dean? Do you honestly think I would have jumped through all the hoops I have if I didn't think your soul was worth saving. And save me the speech about not being worthy, because I heard it verbatim from Cas, and I wanted to deck you for breaking my little brother's heart with that." She realized she'd been leaning in closer across the table as she spoke and checked herself, leaning back in her seat once more. "You're smart, Dean, clever too, you wouldn't have survived in Purgatory if you weren't."

"That was different." He snapped without thinking, gaze meeting hers as he felt his heart begin to race. "That was instinct and survival, and I'm good at that. Hell, that's probably the only thing I am good at, making things bleed. Because that's the family business." His sardonic smile belied his light words, and he saw the way Ariel's eyes softened just slightly at the edges. "So don't give me the speech about being a man worth saving, because I got that more than enough from Cas, and I don't need it from you too."

"Then what do you need?" The question caught him off guard, and he stared at her for several seconds before she repeated herself, a little softer this time. "What do you need from me, Dean?"

He took his time answering that question, because he doubted he'd ever get the chance to say this again. So he thought long and hard before he opened his mouth, and when he finally did, his voice came out softer than he'd intended but he tried not to think about it. "I want you to stay." And he would deny to his dying day that he ever choked up on that sentence, because there was no way he was having a chick-flick moment with an actual chick and getting emotional about it.

"Then I'll stay." Ariel replied with a smile so soft Dean was sure he would melt right out of his seat at the sight of it. "For as long as you want me."

"Who said I wanted you?" He teased gently, still unsure of how solid the ground he was treading here was. That was one thing about Ariel he still hadn't gotten used to, the way her emotions changed so rapidly. Some days his jokes would be well-received, and even returned, and others she'd merely send him a glare that could slay and act like he'd never even opened his mouth.

She grinned, always a good sign, and Dean realized that today was one of her tease-back days. "Oh, kiddo, the signs are everywhere!" She stood and rounded the table towards him, and he felt his pulse pick up a pace. "But mostly, it's because you just asked me to stick around, when you could have gotten rid of me permanently." She leaned in a pressed a light kiss to his forehead, a motion that was both familiar to the Hunter, and yet so foreign as well. "I won't let you down."

Dean let out a huff of laughter, not looking at her, even after she pulled away again. "I wouldn't hold it against you if you did… Most other people have."

She gave him a look that he recognized from Cas, one that was full of determination and maybe just a dash of annoyance over being doubted. "I," she stated simply, "am not most other people."

"Oh you got that right, sweetheart." And no, he did not just call her that, it was his imagination playing tricks on him. "And while we're on the subject of you and how you're different," he continued quickly to cover up his slip of the tongue, "how come you picked Annie, if you don't mind my asking."

She shrugged, sitting back down and folding her arms. "She was the one. Like how Michael wanted to jump your bones because you were special, or how Luci hounded Sam because he was supposed to be the vessel for him." She grinned at his pained expression. "It was sort of the same for me. I knew Annie was the one I was meant to pick, so I picked her. I mean, I had to talk to her and let her know who I was and that I meant her no harm and all that jazz, but… Yeah." She shrugged again, looking almost a little uncomfortable now. "She's still in here, dreaming sweet dreams… I plan to leave her whole, if I ever do leave, and I want to make sure she's happy after I'm gone."

"You really look after your vessel, don't you?" Dean asked, remembering in vivid detail the state Raphael's vessel had been in before they'd pissed him off enough to react. Dean had thought that maybe they were all that way, but Ariel seemed to take a different approach. "What's it like for her, in there with you?"

"Like being hog-tied to a galaxy, I'm told." She managed a faint smirk. "I'm worse than even the Archangels, when it comes to occupying space."

"I would have thought it would be different." He admitted softly. "I mean, you might be higher up the food chain, but you don't do much up there in the clouds, do you?"

She laughed. "No, not really. But, if anything got that far, through all my younger siblings and threatened my Father's throne, I would need the power to do something about it."

The nonchalance with which she spoke bothered Dean for a reason he couldn't quite pinpoint, and he felt his mouth tug downwards into a frown, unbidden. "So, what, you just decide to use your powers to bring back the dead and not take care of the living?"

Her eyes narrowed, and her lips mimicked his in a frown. "Dean, I can't just run around smiting whoever I see fit. It doesn't work like that."

"Then please explain to me why you can't just snap your fingers and turn Crowley, or any number of his Demons, into Demon stew."

"Crowley's off limits for another reason entirely," she replied faintly, "and even if he weren't, I can't just go around screwing with the balance of the world, Dean."

"World seems to be pretty out of balance from where I'm sitting." He snapped back. "You could probably do something about that, couldn't you? And what the hell makes Crowley so special?"

"He and I made a deal." The reply was barely even a whisper into the quiet air of the motel room, but Dean still managed to hear her.

The Hunter felt the wind leave his lungs in a rush, the simple sentence coming like a physical blow and knocking the breath right out of him. His jaw went a little slack, and his eyes widened, and then his teeth clenched and he glared at her, eyes narrowing. "Wanna run that one by me again?" It was less of a question, and more of a demand.

"Not a kiss-to-the-lips, sold-my-soul deal, Dean." She wanted to make that perfectly clear. "More of an… Arrangement. I keep my hands to myself where he's concerned, and he'll do the same for me and mine. Nothing more than an agreement. No writing, no smooching, nothing official."

"Then how the hell do you know whether he's keeping up his end?" He demanded. "He's a slippery little bastard, you know that, right?"

"Yes, I know, but I also know he likes being where he is, and he won't do anything to jeopardize his position, and that includes pissing me off." She gave Dean an annoyed look. "I trust him to know what'll happen if he doesn't keep up his end of the deal."

"And what would happen, exactly?" Dean asked; curiosity more than anything burning inside him at this point. He wanted to ask about the details of the bargain, who it was that counted as Ariel's "mine", and why the hell she'd agree to such a deal in the first place, but he decided that one question at a time was a better way to go.

Her grin bordered on being downright creepy, and Dean decided then and there he never wanted to be on the receiving end of it again. "I'd turn him and all his little Demons into Demon stew."

Castiel was perched at the end of the motel, elbows on his knees as he occupied one side of the rusty metal bench that sat there next to the ice machine, and watched the world drift by in a blur of light and sound. The highway was a mile or two from his seat, but he could see and hear it perfectly well despite that, and enjoyed watching the people pass by without a thought for who might be watching them, or what else might be going on around them.

He had taken up sitting here over night as Dean had given him several lengthy (and a few very short, very pointed) lectures on how much he disliked having the Angel sit in the room awake all night while he and his brother attempted to sleep. Admittedly, Castiel could understand their hesitance over it, humans were rather odd in that respect, but at the same time it made him feel a little sad. He only wanted to help the brothers, and so had resigned himself to the bench to give them their privacy and yet ensure he could reach them easily if something important came up.

He had just begun listening to a preacher on the radio (who's theology wasn't quite so flawed as some of them and had very moving sermons), when a presence beside him made him turn his head that way, and he was greeted with the sight of Ariel lounging against the hard metal beside him, her eyes directed towards the highway as well.

"Sister…?" It was part greeting, part question, and it earned him one of the smiles he'd seen so long ago when he'd first met his elder sister near the steps of their Father's throne.

"Don't panic, Cas, I just came to see how you were doing."

The nickname sounded unfamiliar from her lips, but at the same time the younger Angel liked hearing her say it. "I'm fine." It was a term he'd heard Dean use more times than he could count, and he knew it was normally used in a sarcastic manner, but he meant it.

"Good to hear." She still wasn't looking at him, her eyes trained on the distant skyline as though it would be rude of her to look away from it. "Cas, will it bother you if I stick around for a while?"

The question wasn't one he had been expecting, and it took him a moment to fully process what she'd just said, and then reply. "Why would your company bother me? It's quite… nice to see you again, to be able to talk to you." In Heaven, before… well, before, she had been off-limits to him in a way. Seraphim weren't meant to mingle with the younger Angels unless instructed to do so, and Castiel was a mere messenger, not a guardian of their Father's throne. He was an insignificant little speck, compared to her, and he would be lying if he said it wasn't nice to feel needed by his big sister now that she was on earth.

"I just wanted to be sure I wasn't crashing your party."

Castiel could hear the sadness in her voice, and did her the favor of returning his own gaze to the skyline as well, giving her as much privacy as their close proximity would allow. "If you were the one doing the crashing, I don't think I would mind very much." He heard her chuckle, and felt better for it. "I know you and the Winchesters do not always see perfectly eye-to-eye, but I believe they will be grateful for your assistance once they understand your motives behind it."

"And what motives might those be, Cas?" She asked, almost more of herself then him.

"You are a guardian." He replied instantly. "It is your purpose and duty to guard those who need protection, even if they do not believe themselves to be in danger."

Her next words were barely more than a whisper, and he could smell the salt on the air as her vessel cried. "If I'm a guardian, Castiel, then who's going to guard me?"

He looked at her then, and found her green eyes already directed onto him. Unconsciously, he reached out one hand and wiped gently at the tear track on her cheek with the pad of his thumb, the faintest of smiles tugging at his lips. "If there is one thing I have learned from Sam and Dean, it is that family looks out for one another."

She laughed, although there was sorrow in the sound, and he suddenly found himself being embraced by arms that felt far too strong to belong to the girl beside him. "Good thing I have such great brothers then, huh?"

He tentatively put a hand on her back, hugging her back gently and letting his eyes dip closed as he felt the hum of her Grace begin to resonate against his own, a strange sort of music coming from the combination. "You might say that, yes."

She pulled away far enough to press a kiss to his forehead, and he was instantly reminded of the first time they had met, when he had been nothing more than a tiny little fledgling, and she had leant down to kiss his forehead and tell him that there were great things in store for him. And even after all this time, and all the trials he had faced, he'd never forgotten those whispered words.

Nor had he ever doubted them.

Couldn't resist letting Gabriel get in there and rough up the Demon a little. XD

And Cas is so fun to write for, I might try to do it more. Especially with him and Ariel.

The song "Where the Lines Overlap" belongs to: Paramore