"A mental hospital?" Sam asked as the Impala pulled into a parking lot of a mental facility in Oklahoma.
"One of dad's friends needed a favor." Dean said from where he was steering the car through the lot while reading something that was written in Russian.
"What's that you're reading?" Sam asked.
"Some story by Tolstoy. I started off on War and Peace at the beginning of the drive and decided to read the rest of his stuff. This story isn't half bad. Pity it never happened. Chances are that there would be a lot less douchebags in heaven if something like that happened to some of the little bastards. Of course, there'd be a lot less douchebags in Heaven if they were even a little bit like the Michael in this story." Dean replied from where his nose was in a book that he was very slowly paging through while the Impala wended its way through the semi-crowded lot.
Sam snatched the book out of Dean's hands and flipped it to the story his brother had been reading, which was called What Men Live By. Sam rapidly flipped through the story.
"Sonuva-!" Sam exclaimed when he finished the story.
"Something wrong Sammy?" Dean asked.
"Nothing." Sam bit out angrily as he crumpled the hardbound book in one hand, resolving that if he ever found out where Father was hiding out, he would strangle him.
An hour later, a Wraith was dead, and a shell-shocked Dr. Fuller began to question his own sanity after he watched his two newest patients vanish into thin air. Off in the distance, he could hear a squealing of tires as a car screeched out of the facility's parking lot.
"Well, that went well." Dean said as the Impala sped down the highway at slightly subsonic speeds, causing a Highway Patrol officer to spill his coffee as his car tumbled in its wake when it blew past.
With that hunt over, Sam and Dean were hard pressed to find something to do as there was a slight dearth of signs of the Apocalypse to thwart, and Death had pulled a vanishing act after Carthage. Fortunately, Christmas and all of the distractions that came with it was coming up. Sam and Dean simultaneously and independently decided on the same present for Gabriel.
On Christmas morning, Gabriel awoke to find a pair of stockings at the end of his bed. He emptied one of them. Coal. He emptied the second. Coal as well. Flaming hot coal which promptly set his bed on fire.
Like all things, Christmas too passed, as did New Year's. During an absolutely pointless poltergeist hunt in Massachusetts that was done at the behest of yet another friend of the family in early January, Sam blinked as he felt something try to take over his body. Shrugging, he followed the spell to its source and found a trio of teenagers.
"Kids." he muttered as he torched their spellbooks and other occult items after putting the fear of Lucifer into them.
Based on the way the little brats had shit themselves, he had a feeling that they wouldn't be trying magic again anytime soon, like say, within the next eternity or so.
He'd nearly slaughtered the brats for their presumption, but some form of Human mercy that he'd picked up during his years as Sam had stayed his hand. After reading that short story a while back, he found himself wondering if that hadn't been Father's plan after all, found himself wondering if he hadn't been deliberately let out of the Pit in the manner that he had been in order to be taught a lesson. The Michael in that story however had disobeyed out of a sense of mercy and kindness, and had been left on Earth to learn the lesson of "Dad was right all along". His Michael never had such a flaw, and would have never disobeyed, even if it would have actually cost those two little girls their lives.
The lesson on what it is to be human however...The lesson on what it is to be human is a painful one which he wished he'd never learned. He'd learned it though, and had changed because of it. He could feel that he was different in those moments when he wasn't being Sam for Dean's benefit. Dean who was his Dean and so much more, and could never be Michael in his eyes, because then they would be forced to fight, because the minute he acknowledged Dean to be Michael, Michael would be forced to stop pretending that he was "Just Sammy".
In many ways however, his Dean wasn't his Michael. The brother he had known before Michael had fallen and become human had been merciless, and obeyed Father in all things. This one was still Daddy's little soldier, but he didn't always obey, and he had shown mercy where Michael would have shown none. Dean had sold his soul for him, died for him, and gone to Hell for him. Michael, who believed it was his job to destroy him, would have done none of those.
Michael wouldn't have gotten him beer and a back scratcher for Christmas either.
Pulling himself out of his musings, Sam folded back in on himself, left the traumatized teenagers sitting there in their waste, and went to where his brother was hanging out in their old babysitter's basement. They had a witch to salt 'n burn.
Soon, the witch was dispatched, and the Winchester brothers were back on the road again. Behind them, a small dorky teen named Gary was informing his shocked family that he would be entering the Seminary as soon as he graduated and becoming a priest.
Their cries of "But, you're not even Catholic!" went unheard.
In two other households, a girl named Nora and a boy named Trevor informed their stunned families of similar callings to the cloth.
"You see Ralph, I told you that whole Satanism thing was a phase he would grow out of." Trevor's mom said when Trevor had told his parents that he planned on becoming a minister over dinner.
"Yeah, the Devil's a total prick." Trevor said. "He told me that if I tried stealing his body again, he'd send me straight to the anal rape section of Hell "Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars" whatever that means. I wasn't the one trying to steal his body, it was Gary."
Trevor's parents simultaneously dropped their forks, turned to stare at each-other, and gave each other the other kind of seafood, the kind with two Es.