A/Ns: I was like, sure, I can totally post this while I watch "The Boys'. It's not like I need to concentrate or anything. Just upload, quick scan through, write some Author Notes, and then done-o.

Whelp. That was about three hours ago now. *facepalm*

Also, holy crap. I had no idea that show was written by Eric Kripke. Sweet Beans. I just started watching it because A. supers and B. Karl Friggin' Urban. I want that man as my spirit animal.

Review Replies: Sorry I haven't had a chance to get back to anyone yet. Your reviews have all been amazing and awesome and you are wonderful human beings. I will be trying to get around to responses in the next week. I haven't been in a good place for about a week now, which means I'm pretty much useless, and when I'm not useless, I'm trying to force myself to write. Sigh. It'll clear up eventually.

Chapter Warnings: Dean celebrates his birthday in fake Aruba with Eliot Ness, then has a chat with Cas before shit gets real weird.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

The Road So Far (This Time Around)

Season 2: Chapter 58

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Sam was laughing.

Dean turned his head at the boisterous noise. Something stupidly warm curled up in his chest at the sight of his beanstalk brother coming into the room, a big smile on his face and Castiel trailing behind. Sam was holding a beer in one hand, the brown glass still frosted with cold from the fridge. Cas was in his usual getup, tie still missing but dress shirt and tan trench coat properly rumpled. The angel was holding a bucket in his hands – an honest-to-god, tin bucket – filled with ice and a dozen popped beers. There was a smile on the angel's face, too, a rare thing for how wide and unhesitant it was.

Dean sat up, leveraging himself off the back of the plush and ridiculously comfy brown couch. They'd found it at a garage sale. Imagine that. Winchesters. Garage sale shopping. Sometimes, Dean still couldn't believe the domesticity of it all. The couch hadn't been the first piece of furniture they'd ever bought – that would be their amazing, spectacular, beautiful, world-altering, life-changing memory foam mattresses – but it was the first thing they'd ever bought for their new home that they hadn't technically 'needed.' That night the boys picked a spare room in the bunker, set up a flat screen, a DVD player with Netflix access, and built themselves a straight up Mancave. Dean had been in pure heaven. Sickeningly domestic heaven, maybe, but hell, there hadn't been a thing in the world capable of putting a dent in his ear-to-ear grin that night.

"Are you guys kidding me right now?" he asked now, smile a damn near duplicate.

"It's not Aruba," Cas started, sounding almost apologetic as the two of them stood practically shoulder to shoulder beside the couch. "But, we figured…"

"It's close enough," Sam finished with a smile, then pulled something out of his pocket. It was one of those mini umbrellas tiki bars put in frou-frou drinks. The Samsquatch popped it open, rolling the rubber-band up to the top of the toothpick to lock the parasol in place. He slid it into the opening of one of the bottles in Cas's bucket, pulling the now-frou-frou'd beer free from the ice.

Sam held it out to Dean by the neck, little umbrella sinking down to the canopy like an awkward hat. A festive beer hat.

"Happy Birthday, Dean."

The older Winchester laughed, swiping the drink from his brother. He plucked the little umbrella out of the top and took a damned happy swig. Dean remembered the offhand comment, something he had groused about to Sam just the week before (about how they needed a real vacation, maybe Aruba. Sunshine. An ocean that wasn't sporting the week's newest sea beast in need of battling. Drinks with little umbrellas in them. A cabana boy to bring them a bucket of beers on demand. (Sam had raised one hell of an eyebrow at that, and Dean rolled his eyes. 'They don't have cabana girls, Sammy, or you know that's what I'd have said.' 'Uh-huh. Sure, Dean,'had been his jerk of a brother's reply.)) For lack of a better place to put the decorative thing now, Dean tucked the umbrella behind his ear, still open. It sort of stayed there, tucked against his short-cropped hair, and Dean's grin could not be beat, though he welcomed any to try.

Sam rolled his eyes, but there was nothing but mirth and fondness in the expression. He stepped over Dean's outstretched legs to plop down on the far side of the couch beside his brother, holding out his beer in cheers. Dean clinked the neck of his bottle to Sam's, and the two shared a drink.

"Happy Birthday, Dean," Castiel said as well, settling a little more awkwardly on Dean's other side. The bucket still in his lap and Dean reached out with his own to tap the neck of one of the beers within.

"Grab one of those, Cas. This calls for a toast." Dean smiled at his angel, who obliged by selecting the bottle Dean had clinked. The nerdy little angel leaned forward to set the rest of the beers on the ground, between his leg and the hunter's.

"To…. Shit," Dean paused, beer held out in front of him, as he realized he had no idea what to toast to. Birthdays were total crap in his opinion. Never thought he'd live to see enough of 'em, anyways. He looked at his kid brother, then his angel. "To family?"

Sam held out his drink as well, the sound of glass meeting glass a pleasant ring in the small room. "To family."

Cas hesitated for only a second, before he met their bottles as well. There was something somber on his face, but a light in his eyes that kept Dean's grin from faltering. "Family."

As the three enjoyed their respective drinks, Dean leaned back into the couch, spreading his free arm out along the back. Yeah, this was the good life. A bunker, his brother, their angel, and a bucket of beers. Who needed Aruba?

"So what are we watching?" Sam asked, picking up the remote and offering it to Dean. A true birthday miracle right there.

Dean swiped it with a grin. "I think today's the day. It's time to introduce Cas to Eliot Ness."

His brother let out a groan – at this point, he could quote The Untouchables line for line, and that was not out of love like his brother – but the noise was mostly for show. Sam might draw the line of birthday suck-upage at handing over the remote, but it wasn't like Dean had elected to make them watch another Dr. Sexy marathon. So Sam didn't say anything as his brother turned on the TV and started scrolling through Netflix.

The three Winchesters sat in their Bunker Mancave, finishing the bucket of ice-cold beers and watching one of Dean's favorite movies. The older Winchester snuck a glance at his family, Sam quietly engaged in the movie despite his groaning and moaning, and Cas tracking the moving images with his usual intensity, occasionally asking questions for what he didn't understand.

Yeah, Dean thought, leaning hard into his domestic little life with all its warm and fuzzies. Happy birthday to him.

-o-o-o-

Cas was at the sink in the kitchen, rinsing out the last of the bottles to put in the recycling the next morning. Talk about domestic; Dean thought buying a couch was the height of it. Nope, that honor belonged to an Angel of the Lord taking out the recycling. (He had told Cas to leave it, but the angel insisted on cleaning up, always). Dean was watching him, leaning against the island behind his friend, legs crossed at the ankles and sipping slowly at the last beer. Cas, the dude who had pulled him out of hell and saved his ass more than a million times, was doing the dishes in his kitchen. The thought made Dean chuckle, the warmth of alcohol mixing pleasantly with the warmth of an evening spent with family.

"You know, I missed you like this," Dean offered up casually. He gestured with the nearly empty bottle at Cas's getup when the angel turned to him with a questioning look. "Don't get me wrong, Angela was a nice change up. Dragon Lady aside, I mean. But I guess…I still think of you like this, man."

"I'm fine, Dean."

The hunter frowned, going still at the odd response. Castiel glanced over his shoulder at him, eyes wide and blue as ever, but there was a level of sadness in them that Dean didn't quite like. It crashed that inebriated warmth almost immediately.

"What?" Dean stared at the angel, who smiled, nodded, and turned back to the sink. Cas said something again, but Dean wasn't listening anymore. Something here…it wasn't right.

"I know. I'm…sorry, for what happened."

It was like…like there was a disconnect. Castiel was having a different conversation than him. But that wasn't right, either. Dean frowned, the edges of the thought as fuzzy as his buzzing body. No, he remembered this conversation. He'd had this conversation. Cas was on script.

Wait, script?

"It wasn't your fault. It was mine." The angel sighed. "Claire is…difficult, yes, but she has the right to be angry and hurting. I am not her father."

Cas set the brown beer bottle upside down on the counter, a dishtowel spread out beneath all the draining drinks. Dean stared at the red-striped fabric of the towel, brilliant against the metal counter top. Sam had picked up a set of kitchen towels earlier that month, all of them red and green and apparently on sale from the holidays. had snorted at the sight of them and their now Christmas themed discount shopping. God, they really had changed, hadn't they?

Changed?

Dean uncrossed his ankles as his brain slowly started to catch on, bit by bit. He set the beer down on the counter. Cas was still talking, pauses in his words like he was listening to someone else speak in the in-betweens. Dean finally pinned down just what the hell all this was as Cas answered a question no one had said aloud, but Dean remembered asking years ago. He remembered Cas's answer, too, which the angel delivered word for word.

"What can I do?" Cas was saying, and Dean remembered the way the angel's fingernails had dug into the white rim of the kitchen sink, the way his shoulders hunched around his ears, the exhaustion in every line of his body and words. "I took her father form her, Dean. And now, this body…it's mine. Jimmy's soul is in Heaven and Claire…"

This was a memory. Holy shit, this was a memory. What the hell?

Dean turned to his left and right, but he was in the bunker kitchen. A complete rendition, down to the smallest details. Like the damn Christmas towels, even though it was near the end of January and the Winchesters didn't do Christmas.

A djinn?

No, that didn't make sense. His surroundings lacked the distinct aftertaste of a djinn; that subtle but persistent feeling of wrongness Dean had always been able to identify among even the most perfect layers of happiness in every djinn dream. The cynical hunter had always just assumed it was because true happiness wasn't a thing Dean was comfortable with in any form. But this…this didn't have that wrongness. No, this had the right level of happy-but-still-just-a-touch-miserable-because-I'm-a-Winchester-and-that's-as-good-as-it-gets. This was…it was January, because it was his birthday. His thirty-sixth birthday, he remembered that. Which made it…Dean did the math in his head: 2015.

Oh shit.

It was supposed to be 2006. He knew that. Worse yet, 2015 had not been a good year. And this conversation, it had all started because of….

Dean swallowed with difficulty. There was a lump in his throat made of fear and self-loathing. His mouth dried up like the damn Sahara as he slowly reached across his body with his left arm hand curling close-to-trembling fingers around his right forearm. He couldn't feel the raised skin of the Mark beneath his over-shirt, rolled up above his wrists but never enough to reveal the red, branded skin. Dean knew it was there, though. He could feel it, now that he was thinking about it.

No, no, no, no. Dean's breath picked up and he slammed his eyes shut. This was a memory. It wasn't real, it was a memory. A happy one, actually, when he thought about it and not the thing branded onto his arm. His birthday, the little celebration Sam and Cas had given him, the beers and The Untouchables. Sam's stupid grin and teasing about the drink umbrella that stayed tucked behind Dean's ear for the duration of the movie. All of Cas's questions and adorably serious concerns over the validity of the plot. Even this conversation. All of it had been a good night.

Dean dropped his hand from the Mark and tried to let go of the feel of it beneath his fingertips, running through his veins. Yeah, this might have been a happy memory, alright, but it definitely still had the distinct Winchester-shitty-life quality to it, didn't it? Definitely not a Djinn.

"Thank you, Dean. I will take all the advice I can get." Cas was turned around now, leaning against the sink and drying his hands on a green dishtowel (and god, it was sparkly. Dean had forgotten about that (possibly because by mid-March he'd hidden every Christmas colored discount item around the bunker he could find, later to burn them all out back)). The angel was smiling gently at him now. It was sad, but it was warm, and Dean muddled through his memories for a minute, trying to recall what it was Cas was thanking him for.

Offering to help out with Claire. Because the two had come to an almost, sort-of understanding after she'd asked two of her friends to kill him, and he'd managed not to kill the two in return when they'd tried it. Yeah. Sort-of, almost understanding.

(An understanding necessary because he'd murdered her son of a bitch surrogate father figure and all his buddies who'd been doing nothing but using her, but that's not how she saw it.)

(Yeah, definitely the shitty quality of what constituted Dean's real life, right here.)

"I'm dead, aren't I?"

Dean blinked owlishly, even as he said it aloud. The realization had hit his brain about the same time the words left his tongue. Cas didn't even hear him, just kept on discussing parenting techniques with a future-and-also-past version of Dean that wasn't actually there.

This was a good memory. That's how Dean knew he was dead. Not a wish-fulfillment, but a memory, and a happy one at that. Despite the horror of having murdered a room full of people – dirtbags though they might have been – and realizing he'd enjoyed it only a month before all this, this had still been a good night. One of his few from that year, really. He and Cas had stayed in the kitchen until the ridiculously early hours of the morning, talking parenting tips. Which led to Dean recalling almost all of his favorite stories of Ben, both from the year he'd spent with the Braedons and the few times he'd gotten to see them after.

He missed that kid.

And Cas had been so eager to learn how to be a good father to Claire. Maybe not a father, but whatever she needed him to be. He was so earnest to help, to make it right, like everything the angel put his heart and soul into.

"Shit, I'm dead," Dean repeated. Because this was a memory from…more than three years ago, and also a decade from now. It wasn't 2015. It wasn't even 2016, which Dean still thought of as right when it came to the year. No, it was 2006 and Dean had been…he'd been trying to find Cas.

Cas who should be possessing a female vessel named Angela Garrett (Dragon Lady), and not Jimmy Novak in his trench coat and suit. Angela, a woman currently lying comatose in Bobby Singer's spare bedroom. And Cas, who had been severely injured by Azazel's trap in Rivergrove and gone back to Heaven for healing. After, of course, he dropped mother friggin' Uriel's name. Of all the brother's he could have decided to trust and then not tell Dean about.

(That wasn't entirely fair. Dean hadn't asked, either.)

The hunter had been trying to summon another angel to help locate Cas, because the damn guy wasn't answering his prayers. If Dean was lucky, that was because Cas was healing and not because he was fucking dead. But that didn't matter right now, because he'd succeeded. Dean remembered succeeding. Rachel had answered him, had agreed to search Heaven for Cas.

She'd also absolutely refused to bring him with her. So what the hell was he doing here?

"Shit, I'm dead," Dean said for the third time, suddenly spinning in the kitchen. "How the hell did I end up dead?!"

Maybe it was a ridiculously illogical leap for anyone else, but Dean had been to Heaven, more than once. He knew what the cycle of memories that represented eternal Christian Paradise felt like, and it felt like this.

Shit, shit shit. Who the hell had iced him? And when?

The older Winchester scanned his memories, trying desperately to recall what had happened after Rachel left. Had she come back? He had no memory of that and, despite the fact that he trusted Rachel only slightly further than he could throw her (which wasn't far to begin with), Dean didn't think she'd have killed him. If the angel wanted him dead, she'd have just done it. No need for a vanishing act or false pretenses.

No, there'd been something else.

Sam had called…. No, Sam had left a voicemail! Because Dean hadn't wanted to answer his phone with Rachel around. But the angel left and Dean got his phone out and listened to Sam's voicemail, and…

And that was it. That was the last memory he had.

What. The. Hell.

"Okay, Dean, think," he muttered, running a hand down his face. "What did Sammy's voicemail say?"

His brain short-circuited before it could come up with an answer as something entirely else shoved its way into his conscience. Something that took up all the room his befuddled mind could spare.

He was in Heaven.

He was in Heaven and Cas was also in Heaven.

Dean dropped his arm. Son of a bitch!

The hunter looked around the kitchen again before moving quickly for the open door. He left behind a memory of the angel, laughing with a warm smile and crinkled eyes at a story Dean should be telling him about Ben. But he didn't have time to relive a memory right now. Dean skidded to a halt in the hallway, looking left and right. The last time they'd been in Heaven and tried to go Paradise hopping, Cas had said to look for a road.

Alright, well that was easy in this particular memory. He just needed the garage and his Baby. Dean took a right and headed down the hall.

This might not have been the plan (it really, really hadn't been the plan. If it had been the plan, Sammy definitely would have murdered him first for even thinking it), but it was what had gone down. So why waste it? Dean was in Heaven, the one place he didn't think he could get to, the place Cas was (possibly in danger or at the very least still injured), and Dean didn't plan to waste that opportunity.

He was going to find his angel and drag that feathery ass of his back down to earth himself.

-o-o-o-

Gordon pulled away from the scope, using the unaided, sharp eyes of a hunter to stare at his downed target, only fifty feet away. Dean Winchester wasn't moving. Gordon climbed to his feet, rifle by his side, and waited another moment. The downed hunter still didn't move and that combined with the puddle of blood beneath his head was confirmation enough for Gordon.

He climbed down from the gas station roof the same way he'd gotten up; a disused ladder attached to the backside of the building and a dumpster he'd had to shimmy into place just to get to the bottom of said ladder, which was suspended a good ten feet off the ground. Gordon honestly hadn't been sure he could pull this hunt off tonight. After showing up in town a couple days ago to find his original target already gone – missing for more than a week, with a clueless and worried father sure his troubled son had finally ditched town – Gordon figured Lafayette was as good a town as any to set a trap for the Winchesters.

He'd been planning on something of that nature for a couple weeks now, and the lack of intended prey meant a perfect opportunity to not waste an opportunity. The right guy stabbed in a parking lot here, the proper phone call there, and the Winchesters were sure to get word of a case in Indiana. Those boys had their Roadhouse connections and Gordon had his. It wasn't hard to get someone to call Bobby Singer with a hunt that needed hunting, and everyone knew who his go-to boys were.

Gordon hit the ground, shouldering his rifle strap. He started around the building, forgoing his car which he'd parked about a hundred feet away after pulling into the lot with no headlights, hoping Dean didn't hear the near-silent engine. To be honest, Gordon had lost the older Winchester earlier on that night. He'd found the brothers' motel with pathetically little searching; that gorgeous car of theirs had been parked right out front of the third place Gordon drove by. He'd been scoping out the best vantage point for a sniper nest when Dean Winchester came out of the room near midnight and took off in that beauty.

So Gordon weighed his options. Dean or Sam. He wasn't one for murdering men in their sleep, even monsters, so he'd taken off after the older Winchester.

Of course, the trained hunter spotted a tail within minutes. Dean did the absolute bare minimum needed to ditch his follower, which told Gordon he wasn't taking it all that seriously. Probably thought he was Sam. Still, Gordon chose to turn off before his prey upped the ante with anything more confrontational. The hunter preferred the risk of losing his target and heading back to their motel than losing the element of surprise.

He gave himself thirty minutes to find Dean Winchester again. Gordon could search the direction the older Winchester had been headed for thirty minutes, looking for that slender lady of a car, before he'd call it and head back to catch him at the motel. Imagine his surprise when he'd actually found the hunter, twenty-two minutes in, at a gas station on the edge of town. Pretty much the last thing in town.

By the time Gordon had pulled up behind the building, gotten his rifle out, and made it up to the roof, Dean was talking with whoever he'd come all the way out here to meet. It was a woman, average looking with shoulder-length brown hair, dressed in a sharp suit. If Dean Winchester were anyone else, Gordon might have assumed a shady business deal was going down. But Dean wasn't anyone else; he was a hunter.

So it wasn't with complete surprise that the woman disappeared. In the blink of an eye, she was gone. Gordon's jaw tightened as he pulled away from the scope, staring at the lot below, now empty of all but his target.

Dean Winchester, consorting with demons. He could hardly say he was surprised, given what that bastard he'd exorcised down in Louisiana told him about the brothers. There were lines you didn't cross in this business. Betraying your own species was sure one of 'em. Associating with demons instead of killing them on the spot was another. Gordon lined his shot back up and didn't hesitate to take out the hunter that had become no better than the things he hunted.

Now Gordon stood over the downed Winchester, staring dispassionately at Dean's frozen face, eyes lifeless and entire right side splattered in blood. The vamp hunter bent down, picking the discarded phone off the pavement next to the man's lifeless hand. It was still working; the screen lit up when Gordon tapped a key. A shame, really. Everything he'd heard of Dean Winchester up until he'd met the man had been about what a good hunter he was. Gordon took no delight in depriving the world of one of their own. But when one of their own went rogue, it had to be done.

He tucked the blood-splattered phone into his pocket. Gordon would need it to lure Sam Winchester out next. Speaking of. The hunter pulled out his own phone, flipping it open and extending the device out over Dean's corpse. The flash of the camera was bright in the darkness.

Gordon checked the image, flipped his phone shut, and headed back for his car. He had preparations to see to.

-o-o-o-

Rachel stood in Arthur Staten's personal Paradise and tried to remain calm. She pulled from her millennia of training as a Warrior of God and forced down all distractions. Rachel found comfort in the familiar balm of old training.

The autistic man's memories were empty of Castiel. Each of Castiel's favored human retreats had been absent of the wayward angel. It was actually the second time she had checked this particular Paradise, because it just didn't make sense.

There was nowhere in Heaven Proper to hide one of the Host. Even if Uriel was the one dampening Castiel's signature, Heaven itself was built of the very same energy the angels were. She should have been able to commune with the walls, the archways, the plants and trees and stones. They would have told her where her commander was. Which meant his grace was not physically in contact with the walls, the plants, the stones, or the very ground they walked on. He was not in Heaven Proper.

Which left the Paradises. Unfortunately, there were, quite literally, millions of them. If Uriel was the one hiding Castiel, he could have picked one at random. Rachel was never going to find her missing commander, especially not before her ambiguous promise of 'I will return shortly' ran out and Dean Winchester took matters into his own hands.

Not that she knew what a human could possibly do in this situation, but the volatile manner in which Dean had insisted he accompany her back to Heaven had left Rachel…wary. Which meant she had to find where Uriel was hiding Castiel before that undetermined amount of time had passed on Earth.

The only variable that remained was how?

She could enlist the help of the rest of her Flight. With all of them divided and searching the Paradises, they just might find Castiel in time. She'd need a cover story for why the angel had somehow…misplaced himself in a human Paradise. And how Rachel somehow knew about it. And how no one was to discuss it with Uriel…

Standing in the middle of Arthur Staten's fourth birthday party – the balloons bright blobs of colors and the other kids moving wavelengths of energy and noise – Rachel let out an irritated noise. Her wings flapping restlessly and the balloons bobbed back and forth in the wind created by her agitation.

Wait. Of course! Uriel.

Her performance in this matter so far had been grossly inept, Rachel chided herself. How many centuries had she and Castiel studied together, testing themselves on strategy and tactic, all for her knowledge to fail them both so blatantly now? Uriel may have found a way to cleverly disguise Castiel's grace, but he would not have disguised his own. All she had to do was search for Uriel, who would eventually lead her back to wherever he was keeping Castiel.

Rachel exited the human Paradise, closing the door to Arthur Staten's memories behind her. The hall was silent, it's ethereal floor and walls a welcome calm from the chaos of the human's domain. Rachel was in the A's, still quite close to Heaven Proper, and could feel the hum of grace buzzing through the walls. She leaned her back against one, wings pressed flat to the white expanse beside Arthur's door. In the distance, the sound of her brothers' voices raised in song was a reassuring comfort, and Rachel pulled on her training once more.

She closed her eyes, extended her senses and-

"I can't believe the Righteous Man ended up dead two years early!"

Rachel slid her eyes – all sixteen pairs of them – back open in a single, coordinated snap. What?

"He's not supposed to be up here at all," another voice added, far more hushed than the first but still quite clear in the long, resonating halls. This angel's words were distressed, ringing out with an air of wrong in the peace and calm of Heaven. "Zachariah is furious. I've never seen him turn that color red."

"Let's just…find him before the boss takes it out on us instead. Which way are the D's? I've never been down here before…" The voices carried away until Rachel could no longer discern them.

The Righteous Man…. If Dean Winchester had been telling the truth (and Rachel had been inclined during their initial meeting to believe him) then… He hadn't even waited an hour for Rachel to fulfill her promise? He had killed himself just to come find Castiel on his own?

Of all the imbecilic, self-righteous…!

The angel made another low noise deep in her core, feathers bristling in indignation and irritation. Seriously? Of course Castiel, an angel with the patience of a river carving its way through solid rock, would find the one human physically incapable of restraint! Not to mention boorishly insistent on doing things himself. Rachel pushed off the walls, immediately turning away from Heaven Proper and hurrying down the long corridor of A's.

She had been in and among the Paradises before – several times, in fact – and did know her way around. Mostly thanks to time spent hunting down an errant commander who enjoyed an autistic man's heaven and was often late to sparring sessions and Flight drills because of it. Rachel would get to Dean Winchester's soul before those other angels, give the human a firm lashing for not even giving her the allotted time to search for her brother safely, and then…deal with getting him back to Earth.

Somehow.

(For the moment, Rachel had neither the time nor the patience to question what business Zachariah could possibly have with the human soul. It was a relevant question, she knew, and one to revisit later. The only reason she could fathom off the top of her grace was that the Dominion wanted to send the soul back to Earth. If Dean was, indeed, the Righteous Man than his death had clearly been a mistake.

However, that was not Zachariah's department…)

-o-o-o-

Dean opened the door to the bunker's attached garage expecting his beautiful ladies and a road, and instead stumbled into a hallway that was obnoxiously white. Like…Martha Stewart running a mental hospital on steroids levels of white. Dear God, sterile much? Dean blinked in the brightness, the truly blinding existence of light which felt like it was coming from everywhere. Actually…it kind of was. The hunter squinted, sticking his neck out like a turtle as he stared at one of the walls around him. The smooth, white expanse of it really was glowing. And not like an opaque glass or plastic with a light source behind it. No, the surface itself, the material itself (whatever that was), was emitting light.

The hunter pressed his hand to the surprisingly cool surface. The edges of his fingers curved the light in a soft, golden-white glow. It was…kinda pretty. Calming almost.

Dean pulled his hand off the wall with a frown, glaring at the thing for daring to be…what? Peaceful? Yeah. That. The older Winchester spun around, taking in the weird hallway he was in. Aside from glowing, it was also lined with white lights, white frames, white arches, and white doors. They, too, were obnoxiously shiny: some kind of freshly polished silver, metallic material that gleamed in the diffused light. Each door had an equally polished plaque, names cut into the material and backlit by, you guessed it, more white light.

The one directly in front of him – the one he'd just stumbled out of – had his name on it. Along with the years, 1979-2006.

Well, that probably wasn't good.

Dean glanced down the hall to his left, which seemed to stretch forever, and then to his right. Same result either direction. Just white, light-lined archways, walls, and doors, endlessly repeating like something out of The Shining, only if The Shining had taken place in a dystopian author's wet dream of a sterile Sperm Lab in some underground, secret, billionaire's bunker.

It was like staring at one of those pictures on the internet where, if you looked long enough and hard enough and forgot to blink, the lines started to vibrate. That was usually right before the website told you there was a high percentage chance you were a psychopath. Dean remembered being damn proud of how fast his little lines vibrated, at least until Sam read the second part of the 'test' aloud. Then he'd just been uncomfortable and defensive, calling Sam a liar when the younger Winchester insisted the lines had only moved a little bit for him. Nuh-uh. If Dean was going down as a psychopath, he was sure as hell taking Sammy with him. Winchesters stuck together, after all.

"Hulloo?" Dean called out, wincing when his voice, even just that exaggerated whisper, echoed all around him and seemed to travel down both ends of the hallway for a ridiculously long amount of time.

What the hell.

The last time they'd 'hacked' Heaven, Dean had never left…well, his own memories. His and Sam's. They'd just traveled through different versions of them, always along a road of some sort. At least until they'd bumped into Ash, who had helped him and Sam actually hack Heaven the right way. But this…this place definitely wasn't in his memories. There was no road, for starters. As for Ash, that mulleted, loveable little freak should be passed out drunk (but very much alive) on a pool table in the back of the Roadhouse about this time.

So…where was Dean? Was this still heaven? Or had he gotten the whole memory-déjà-vu thing wrong from the get-go?

This still didn't feel like a Djinn dream. Maybe…a pocket dimension? Dean knew they were due to run into Gabriel sometime soon, though he couldn't remember down to the month or day. This could be the archangel and Dean just didn't remember bumping into him or getting tossed in here. Which meant Sam was probably in here somewhere too…. Though what the lesson was this time, Dean didn't have a clue.

The hunter squinted at the glowing walls again, reaching out a hand to poke one. He shook his finger when it remained very solid. Something about this place…the white, the gleam, the glowing plaque with his name… Sure, he would give Gabriel points if this turned out to be him. This over-the-top sterile, fake, light-obsessed environment was absolutely what Dean would expect Heaven to look like. Cartoonishly so, which was right up Gabe's alley.

But…it also stank so much of high heaven – with its hoity-toity, holier-than-thou odor, clinging heavier than a middle-aged French heiress' perfume – that Dean was actually pretty sure it was Heaven and not a cheap knock-off intended to make him just think it was.

He was just…seeing it differently this time.

Which was a mystery for another day. A day when he wasn't mysteriously dead or trying to find his angelic best friend in a hallway maze where he half-expected to find a pair of twins standing, holding hands, asking him to come play with them.

Alright, whatever. Visuals might have changed, but the plan hadn't. Dean still needed to find Cas.

Which…okay, he had no idea how to do.

Time to break it down into steps. Step one, pick a direction and go with it. At least his first decision was easy. Left or right, because the hallway looked like it just kept going in either direction and those were the only two options.

Dean glanced down both, shrugged his shoulders in utter indifference because he honestly had no friggin' clue, and went with right.

-o-o-o-

Rachel stood in the open doorway of Dean Winchester's Paradise and stared, something between stupidly and apoplectically, into the empty room. Just four walls and nothing more. No furniture, no décor, no memories to fill the space with warmth and personality and life. Because there was no soul in this Paradise.

"Are you kidding me?!"

-o-o-o-

He made it about sixty doors down (Dean had lost track somewhere in the thirties and kinda just figured he'd walked about twice that, so far), when he crossed another hall. It branched off to the left in a standard T-intersection from the one he was currently in. Dean stared down it, which turned out to be fairly pointless because it looked exactly like the one he was currently in.

Seriously. Glancing between the two identical paths made him dizzy and sort of short-circuited the logic portion of his brain.

Did he even still have a brain if he was dead?

Well, might as well turn left down the new aisle of doors, Dean figured. It was true that he was less likely to get lost if he stayed on his current trajectory of endlessly straight-to-the-end-of-all-eternity-including-his-sanity-and-good-god-only-sixty-doors-and-he-already-wanted-to-scratch-his-eyes-out-of-his-skull-seriously-what-was-with-angels-and-their-white-and-their-light-and-their-sterile-stoic-no-change-bore-bore-bore. However, anyone who might come looking for him (and they would, because 1. he was the Righteous Man and definitely wasn't supposed to be dead yet and B. last time he'd ditched his personal heaven, angels had been on him and Sam pretty quickly in the form of a weird, origin-less searchlight in the sky) would absolutely find him in less than a hot second, since all they'd have to do to spot him was look down a hallway.

So far, it had been nothing but a straight shot six hundred doors down with nothing to look at but him and the endless eternity that was the other end of this god-forsaken hallway. Anyone came looking for him, he was a dead man.

Er…Deader.

In short, Dean turned left.

-o-o-o-

Rachel was going to kill this particular human. Which, logically, she was currently incapable of doing. Dean Winchester was already dead. But if ever there was a human to test Rachel's ability to defy logic, it was this human.

He wasn't in the D's.

The angel had flown down the entire length of the corridor until it dead-ended at a T-intersection with the V's. She had not spotted a wandering soul for the entire length of the hallway, though she had passed two other branches that went into the H's and the R's. Now Rachel had to make a choice she had hoped not to make. What she had hoped for was to stumble over the human soul in his correct hallway. Even better would have been his correct Paradise, where he belonged. But neither of those had happened, had they?

Rachel debated between the four options available to her: the H's, the R's, and the two directions of the V's, one which led to the M's, the other to the F's. After consulting every bit of strategic data she had ever consumed, adding to it the (admittedly limited) human knowledge she possessed, Rachel decided to backtrack to the H's. It was the first turn Dean would have come upon and, if he knew he was on the run in a place he shouldn't be and possibly being pursued, it was the logical choice.

At least, it was the choice she would have made. Not that that was saying much, because Rachel wouldn't have chosen to leave her Paradise in the first place.

There was another option, of course. The human could have entered any of the Paradises along the D corridor. However, Rachel dismissed it as a possibility. For one, because no human soul should be able to enter another's Paradise (then again, Dean Winchester should not have been able to leave his), and two, because if he had, then she was never going to find him.

Like she was never going to find Castiel, at this point.

Rachel turned into the H's, taking off down the hallway at as fast a flight speed as she deemed safe in the fairly narrow corridor.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

A/N: See, That was almost entirely not really even a cliffhanger at all! (Actually, about half of this arc will be less cliffy, more stopping-kinda-in-the-middle-of-things-cuz-where-else-are-we-gonna-stop!?)

Review Responses: The previous two chapters and the holidays were such a whirlwind that I forgot to address some of the big questions/points/guesses that came up in reviews. I'm going to take a minute to do that now, so feel free to skip these notes if you're not interested in chatter.

Balthazar: Yes, Balthy is alive! Most of you guessed that he was ;) I really appreciate many of you mentioning that while you disliked his decision not to interfere, it was also in-character of him. It wasn't an easy decision for me to write him that way so I appreciate hearing it. I like Balthazar and I loved his friendship with Cas. What I want in this story is more of that, so it was hard keeping him as his early-asshole-self. (We'll get there eventually :D)

(P.S. Shameless plug: If you like Balthazar and my writing combined, you should check out my other story, Cadence. It's not complete yet (because I apparently *can not* work on two stories at once) but it is a fun twist on what life might have been like for Dean if it was Balthazar that had pulled his ass out of Hell instead of Cas XD In other words, *another* timeline AU, just waaaaaay shorter than this one)

(Shit…I don't think I ever posted it on A03 because I thought I'd wait till I finished it. *Sigh* Guess I'll just post it unfinished *grumble grumble grumble* It'll be up tomorrow.)

Gabriel: A lot of people guessed that Dean would summon Gabriel, and as this is the second time that's happened, I'd like to address why Dean hasn't gone after our favorite Archangel. First, I love Gabe and I promise, he will have a big part in this story. However, I think there's a major difference between how we the audience see Gabe and how the boys see Gabe. We friggin' love him because, among many reasons, he's funny. The things he does are downright hilarious. However, if you were Dean or Sam, you probably wouldn't feel that way. What Gabe does is horrible if you have to live through it, and if not horrible, than incredibly frustrating and exhausting. There are Sam and Dean, with the entire fate of the planet literally resting on their ability to stop the apocalypse, and the one guy with enough power to actually help, who might just ally with them, won't stop playing games. That would be so damn infuriating. And when the angel finally agreed to help it was only because all of his pagan friends were going to die (we the audience can see more into his character, but I don't think Dean necessarily did) In 2006, all Dean knows is that Gabe wants the apocalypse to get started so it can finally be over. He doesn't have any leverage to change the angel's mind, so he's not going to actively seek Gabe out until he's got something tha'll get him to help.

Of course, Gabe's gonna interfere all on his own loooong before that XD Cuz, ya know, Time wants to stay the same and, also, Gabe's an ass ;)

Chapter Reference – Gabriel: I very quickly mentioned where Dean's head was at concerning Gabriel when he was brainstorming options to save Sam way back when the kid pushed too hard and almost died. See Chapter 16: Season 1 Chapter 15 if you would like that refresher, but it is just a paragraph (and that was two years ago so I will not be surprised if people do not remember it :P)

Up Next: We catch up with Sam and Ava, Gordon gets busy texting and rigging explosives (not at the same time), Rachel has a few choice words for Dean, Dean has a few choice words for whatever idiot designed Heaven (that would be God, Dean), and Castiel is surprised to find himself still alive.