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Title: Gumshoe
Author: Jewels (fanfic [at] bjewelled.co.uk)
Fandom: Supernatural
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to people other than me. Hopefully very nice people who won't sue.
Summary: The tale of murder, betrayal, and the stealing of Dean's porn stash. So, what has Castiel been getting up to while the Winchesters have been running around dealing with the apocalypse?
Word Count: 21,885
Art: [http://geaugaart.livejournal.com/]
Also Available In: RTF, ePUB

Written for the Supernatural Big Bang 2010

**

Gabriel didn't look happy. The downpouring of water made him look wilted, and the sour expression on his face bespoke pique. Castiel paused after Sam and Dean Winchester as they walked out of the warehouse, staring back at his brother. It was well-clothed, the habit of so many years serving him well, but he could easily perceive the Archangel's true nature. Yet, the expression and the water combined to make him seem momentarily small to Castiel's eyes, and Dean's scathing words seemed to have hit harder than Gabriel liked.

As Castiel stared, wondering at the sort of creature the brother he barely knew had become, Gabriel abruptly seemed to become aware of him. He gave Castiel a thin, hard smile.

"Don't know what you see in him," he said, jerking his head after Dean.

Castiel considered the appropriate response to his statement and found that, after having existed amongst Humans for some time now, there were several he could immediately summon as being useful.

Castiel flattened his mouth into a line, extended his arm, and gave Gabriel the finger.

Then he turned and walked out.

Dean and Sam were leaning over the Impala, talking.

"Right about now," Dean was saying, "I wish I was back in a TV show."

Sam nodded. "Yeah, me too," he said, and started to get into the car.

"I don't believe you two!" Castiel said, loudly, in exasperation. Both boys froze, halfway into their seats, and looked up at him with surprise plain on their features.

"You 'wish you were in a TV show'?" Castiel wanted to smack their heads together. Irritation was becoming all the more common an experience these days, and he had no particular urge to ignore the feeling at that moment. "What kind of thing is that to say? Perhaps next time I'll just leave you to the mercies of an Archangel with a grudge. It's not like I'm prepared to die to protect you. Oh wait. I already did that."

Dean and Sam looked at each other, unnerved. "Uh, Cas..." Dean started, cautiously.

"Don't 'Cas' me," Castiel said. He was tired, sore and had spent the better part of the last day in some sort of arena-based obstacle course where spandex-clad musclemen had tried to beat him to a pulp while a crowd cheered them on. On top of that, his brother, previously thought lost, had turned up, apparently having spent a few centuries being juvenile and, worse, having taken up paganism. "Of all the ungrateful..."

He turned on his heel and stalked away, after half a dozen steps, he took to wing and threw himself across space, and if he happened to send a mud and dirt flying in his wake, that was entirely unrelated.

He found that anywhere he went on Earth wasn't far enough to give him sufficient distance to properly be alone. There was always the low hum of Humanity, and the even more distant sound of Angelic chatter. He was no longer part of the chorus, whatever had happened when he died had seemed to remove him from the song, but he was still aware of it, still heard things whispered between his brothers and sisters. It let him stay ahead of them, made sure that no one caught sight of him, allowed him to avoid capture. It also meant he could hear the poisonous lies that Zachariah and his superiors spread about him.

So he went further than Earth, fled all the way to the planet Humans called Mars, and sat down on a rocky outcropping on what had, once upon time, been called the Crest of the Eastern Flame, and that Humans these days called Cydonia. Angels had no care for Mars these days, not since it was purged in what Zachariah had once callously referred to as a 'little housecleaning'.

Castiel liked it. It was a place where he could be far enough away from Earth and the bulk of the Host that he could have some peace and quiet. The moon might have sufficed, but the frequent duststorms means that he didn't have to worry about tidying up his footsteps after him. He'd always liked the quietness, although these days, Mars tended to serve as a reminder to him of what might one day happen to Earth if he failed.

One Angel might have known to look for Castiel here, but he had long since met his end at the end of Castiel's blade, wielded by Anna. And so Castiel was left alone.

He sat, watching the deep purple of the sky creep darker as the planet turned, and listened to the sounds of radio waves coming from the other planets, the metallic serenade of Jupiter mixing with the stray signals to come from Earth over the decades. He listened to half a verse of Buddy Holly mixed with the pops of Saturn's rings before he sighed and tuned it out.

As much as it would have been preferable to remain in a moment of peace (Dean would have called it 'sulking', but Castiel would vehemently deny anything of the sort), Castiel knew he couldn't stay there forever.

For lack of anywhere better to go, he returned to the last place he'd been on Earth, the warehouse where Gabriel had been briefly imprisoned. There was no sense of the Archangel now, nor was he anywhere within a couple of hundred miles. Archangels were like a lit strip of magnesium in a dark room. They were impossible to ignore. Gabriel had successfully masked himself for millennia, but Castiel was sure that, now he'd seen the guise that the former servant of God was using, he would recognise Gabriel again.

Gabriel was gone, the warehouse empty except for...

No, the warehouse wasn't empty at all. There, lying in the middle of the empty space, surrounded by puddles of water and smears of oil, was a Human figure. It was face down and wasn't moving. Castiel experienced a brief moment of awful curiosity, wondering if Gabriel had abandoned his vessel, now that it was recognised, and that the man, having been subject to centuries of Archangel possession, was completely burned out. He walked over to the figure, and rolled it over onto its back.

It wasn't Gabriel's vessel. It was a Human male, with pale skin not too dissimilar a shade than his own vessel's. Castiel couldn't see any easily apparent injuries or damage that would explain why the man was dead, nor was there any sign that Castiel could identify to show how long the body had been there. He briefly calculated time in his head. Martian and Earth days were more or less the same duration, and he had seen the sun set over Cydonia. He had only been gone for less than a day. In that time, someone had left a dead body here.

Castiel stared at the body for a long time, then reached out, patting at the pockets of the man's clothes. It was a suit, ill-fitting, and lacking a tie such as the one that Castiel wore. The shirt was pulled loose of the trousers, and the jacket was stained. He eventually found a wallet, and flipped it open to reveal a driver's license. Richard Berrington.

He put the wallet back in place, erasing the fingerprints he'd left with an idle thought. He had no desire for anyone to wonder why Jimmy Novak's fingerprints were on a dead man's possessions. It was unnecessarily complicate matters for him to have to distract law enforcement. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out his phone, dialling one-handedly. He was getting better at using the tiny device. Once he'd gotten over his amusement at the fact that Humans had found a technological method of communicating over long distances, something that had previously only been the purview of the Angels, he'd spent a long time cursing at the tiny size of the keys, which had apparently been designed with rodent paws in mind.

"911 Emergency."

"There is a dead body in a warehouse," Castiel said, and gave the address. "I suggest you come quickly."

"Sir, what's your nam-"

Castiel hung up the phone, slipping it back into his pocket and walking outside of the warehouse. There were tyre tracks there from the Impala. Castiel waved a hand, erasing any evidence that they'd ever been there. He spent another few minutes walking around, making sure that there were no fingerprints or incriminating DNA left behind. It was in his wanderings that he found a set of tracks that he was sure hadn't been there last time he had been there with the Winchester brothers.

He frowned at them for a long minute, crouching down, touching a fingertip to the edge of the tracks. In the distance, he could hear the sound of sirens. Law enforcement, arriving in response to his report. He couldn't stay, and, more to the point, he shouldn't stay. There was nothing he could do, and it wasn't his problem to deal with. He didn't know Richard Berrington, and he had vastly more important issues to attend to.

Castiel left the warehouse to the Humans, picking a direction at a whim and flying until he reached a town.

After he arrived, his phone beeped, signalling the receipt of a text message.

sorry :(

The timestamp was from several hours ago. Castiel looked at it for a long time before awkwardly typing a response.

You are still ungrateful.

It was half an hour before he received an answer to that.

its what makes me so lovable

Castiel smirked to himself.

**

The problem with searching for God was the question of where to start looking. Castiel had a distinct lack of resources to draw upon when it came to investigating divine disappearances, and his first instinct, to seek out religious institutions who might have some inkling of a solution had not panned out. After the third priest had told him that "God is everywhere, my son," Castiel had decided that the clergy in general were a waste of his time, and sworn off organised religion as a useful resource.

There had also been a homeless man who had claimed that God was talking to him through the fillings in his teeth, a line of inquiry that Castiel wasted a whole week on before he realised two things: the man in question was undeniably crazy, and that he was never again taking the word of a man in a tinfoil hat seriously.

It was all well and good this rebelling thing, which had seemed like such a great idea at the time. Rebel, save the world, everyone rejoices. Castiel realised that he should have known better. Grand plans had never gone smoothly, not once in the history of creation. He should have remembered that after the rather disastrous attempts by Nimeth and Brachel to organise an around-the-world angelic relay race (Meloch's failure to correctly pass the baton at the third leg was referred to by Humans in more modern times as "The Tunguska Event").

He let the rain wash over him, running down over his face, soaking his clothes and dripping onto the ground, where it mixed in with the water that flowed across paving stones, gleaming in the artificial light. Inevitably, he found his mind returning to the man in the warehouse, the dead body, Richard Berrington. Since Lucifer appeared to be in no particular rush to destroy the world, and Castiel's own search was proceeding at a glacial pace, there was nothing much to distract him from his musings.

He reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulling out the slim leather wallet that Dean had insisted he keep a hold of 'just in case'. He'd even taken the time to customise the fake ID to Castiel, inserting a picture and giving him the name of 'Castiel Lord', which he'd no doubt thought was hilarious.

It was a bad idea to pursue this, Castiel knew. It was unrelated to his investigations into where exactly God could be found, and was no doubt the result of very earthly crimes that should not concern him. It would all be irrelevant shortly, anyway, given that the apocalypse was upon them, the forces of Heaven and Hell both poised to turn Earth into a battleground which no one would survive.

He was telling himself that right up to the point where he walked into the police station of Wellington, Ohio, held up his ID card, and said, "I'm here about the death of Richard Berrington."

**

Humans, in this particular geographical region, had peculiar taboos relating to dead bodies. Castiel had never understood them, and was somewhat concerned about not fitting into the correct social mode used for dealing with dead bodies. He was somewhat relieved when the white-garbed Human that he was taken to turned out to be particularly no-nonsense about the whole issue.

"Richard Berrington," he said, when Castiel repeated his need for information, "Hmm." He sorted through a filing cabinet before finding a brown folder which he handed to Castiel before leading him over to a wall of metal doors, one of which he opened to reveal the man that Castiel had found on the floor of the warehouse.

He seemed smaller than Castiel remembered. He had been stripped naked, and was clean, but now there was a cleanly stitched incision on his chest.

"How did he die?" Castiel asked.

"It's all in the report," the man, who had been named to Castiel as 'Doctor Wilkinson', nodding to the paper in Castiel's hand.

Castiel looked down at the brown folder. He had wondered why he'd been given it. "I'd prefer you told me yourself," he said, honestly. "How did he die?"

"Cardiac arrest," Doctor Wilkinson said, sticking his hands in his pockets and scowling deeply. It added to the lines already present in his face.

"Cardiac arrest," Castiel repeated. "What does that mean?"

Doctor Wilkinson's mouth twitched. "Can't put one over on you, huh? Been around a while, I'm guessing."

"Millennia," Castiel replied gravely. "But what does 'cardiac arrest' mean?"

Doctor Wilkinson harrumphed a sort of harsh laugh, "Of course, it doesn't mean anything. Everyone dies when their heart stops."

"Unless you're not Human," Castiel supplied. It was always a possibility, after all.

Doctor Wilkinson laughed much louder at that. "Well, quite. As to what caused this guy's heart to stop, I've got no clue. Best guess: pre-existing medical condition. Sometimes happens, even to men his age. Sometimes they just drop dead."

"Was there evidence of that?" Castiel pressed.

Doctor Wilkinson shrugged. "There was nothing in his tox-screen. No injuries, wounds or trauma."

"And nothing unusual was found?" Castiel remembered Dean telling him that it was often useful to let local law enforcement do the hard work of investigation, then come in and usurp their hard work at a later time.

"Some oil with an unfamiliar composition was found on the skin, but that didn't seem to be at all responsible. It's just oil, with a few spices mixed in. The PD had closed the case. Guy probably went collapsed in the warehouse, died before he could get any medical attention."

"You're sure about that?"

"Sure as we can be." Doctor Wilkinson frowned at him. "What does the FBI care about this guy's death anyway?"

"They don't," Castiel told him, "I am not investigating this with their sanction."

Doctor Wilkinson frowned. "So you know this guy? We couldn't find any friends or family to notify. So this is personal?"

"No," Castiel said, "I never met him while he was alive."

Doctor Wilkinson snorted. "I meet most people like that. It's okay. I like dead people. They don't say much."

Castiel frowned. "As long as they don't come back as ghosts."

Doctor Wilkinson laughed. "I like you," he said, as he closed the morgue drawer. "You've got a sense of humour for a fed."

"I have no sense of humour I'm aware of," Castiel said, primly, "Thank you for your time, Doctor."

Most Humans would have been surprised to learn exactly how much of the organisational structure of the Universe was based on the mortal plane. The Garrison that Castiel had been stationed at since time immemorial was quite firmly located in a physical existence. Of course, even if a mortal had known where it was, and gone looking for it, hoping to gaze upon its imposing edifice and see the Angels dwelling inside, they would have been frustrated at the fact that no matter where they tried to look, it was always to be found 'just to the left' of that point.

The place that Castiel sought was similarly hard to find, although it relied on its anonymity in a crowded city, a single building of multiple floors, steel and glass, amongst dozens of other similar facilities. Castiel wasn't overly concerned about setting foot over its threshold. While the Angels and Archangels were the instruments of God and Fate, the beings in this particular building were more like the oil that greased the great machine of the Universe, uncaring of the politics and wars that occupied other minds, and Castiel doubted they would immediately report him. They held no particular allegiance to Heaven, like the Reapers, and were more in the business of the smooth running of the mortal plane.

As an Angel, Castiel had avoided them. Now he had no choice but to deal with them.

Castiel made his way to the thirteenth floor, and walked through the office filled with desks roughly divided with crude partitions until he found the desk he'd been directed to.

An exasperated looking woman, who was in truth nothing approaching the Human she currently chose to look like, flicked her eyes up to him, exuding intense boredom, and said, "Can I help you?" in the sort of voice that said she really hoped she couldn't.

"I need a copy of Richard Berrington's final balance sheet," Castiel said.

The woman heaved a sigh. "Take a seat," she sat, flicking a hand at the chair on the opposite side of the desk to her.

Castiel sat. It was an old swivel chair that wobbled precariously the moment he put his weight down, and squeaked loudly with any movement. The name on her desk plate said 'Chi' and she was firmly fixing her attention on the computer which she was suddenly typing on with great rapidity.

She typed. And she kept typing.

Castiel found his attention wandering as he waited for her to complete her task. There was a calendar that gave the date in the Mayan system, and a half-wilted fern poised atop a pile of books on the filing cabinet.

Finally Chi looked up from her screen. "Do you have a signed J96-V??9 form?"

Castiel blinked slowly. "I do not."

Chi sighed again, in a manner that conveyed how little she thought of his intelligence. "Do you have a signed and notarised letter from your immediate superior or governing pantheon? As a rule, all non- J96-V??9 form submissions must be accompanied by identification in the form of blood, evidence of public worship or a recent bill to home address with photocard ID."

"I have none of those things," Castiel admitted.

Chi stared at him, as if seeing him for the first time. "You don't have a signed J96-V??9 form?"

"No."

"And you don't have an authorised substitute or photocard ID?"

"No." He had 'Castiel Lord's' fake FBI identity card, but he doubted it would be well received if he attempted to use it.

Chi sighed. Castiel wondered if she was having difficulty breathing. "Then I can't provide you with a copy of a final balance sheet."

Castiel scowled at her. "I am an Angel of the Lord."

Chi folded her arms. "But you don't have a signed J96-V??9 form."

Castiel wondered if delivering a smiting would have any effect. "I have the might of Heaven at my fingertips." He didn't, but she wasn't to know that. "I need to see that sheet."

Chi leaned back and smirked at him. "If you don't have the form, I can't give you the sheet. Those are the rules."

Castiel frowned. "I will return," he vowed, standing. He turned to leave, then halted, turning around and peering at her. "Do I know you? You seem familiar."

"Don't interact with Angels much," Chi said, breezily. "If you don't mind, I have work to do."

Castiel stalked off, re-evaluating his course of action.

When his only plan was to wonder 'What would Dean Winchester do?' Castiel realised that there wasn't much hope for him, as that course of action would only leave him with the option to try to seduce the bureaucrat, and Castiel was extremely sceptical of the success of any such attempt.

He needed a new idea.

**

Much later, Castiel had to admit that 'new' ideas were not his forte. Creativity had never been his strong point, nor was it the strong point of most Angels in the hierarchy. Creativity was an aspect of free will, and thus highly discouraged. It was a gift of God, Castiel had been taught, granted only to Humans. Of course, since Castiel had worked out exactly how much he and his brethren had been lied to by their superiors, he had reason to doubt those particular teachings. Lies or not, though, the fact was that he had no idea what to do next. Castiel had seriously considered calling Dean, if only to ask him for his advice, but he talked himself out of it, reminding himself that Dean and Sam doubtlessly had their own important work to be getting on with. So he slipped his phone into his pocket, number not dialled, and tried to plan out what he was supposed to do next.

Under other circumstances, he might have retreated to somewhere such as Mars, to contemplate what to do next with the privacy of his own thoughts, but this was an Earthly puzzle he was presented with, a Human problem, that of murder. So Castiel submerged himself in the busiest convergence of Humanity he could find: a shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon.

He sat on the edge of a bubbling fountain, just next to where a couple of children were babbling to each other in nearly incomprehensible words as they tossed pennies into the water, and watched people as they walked by. Some walked by alone, others in pairs or groups, or trailing children or elderly relatives. Two teenage girls laughed in high-pitched screeching tones, while a married couple walked arm in arm, the man's free hand burdened with shopping bags. Castiel watched him, and could see that he thought it a nuisance to have to carry everything, but he had no intention of making his wife carry it. Castiel could see the love he felt when he looked at her, asked her where she wanted to get something to eat, and as she laughed, saying she didn't mind where they ate, as long as they had steak on the menu.

Castiel wasn't used to the necessity to make decisions without consultation with another. He was certainly getting better at it than he had been. Once upon a time, when he had still been a loyal servant of Heaven, he had been possessed of sufficient rank to direct other Angels in their duties, but he had always been subordinate to others, to Angels of other ranks and, of course, to the Archangels. He had been fulfilling the will of Heaven, and now he had no will other than his own.

It was unnatural, or so habit told him. From the very moment of his creation, his entire purpose had been devoted towards servitude. The first thing that had been said to him, as he awoke in the Fields, was from an Angel superior to him, who had bent over him and said, "Take up your sword, Castiel, for there is much work to be done."

Inevitably, the second thing that was said to him was, "That's a flaming sword, you clumsy bugger! Watch what you're doing!"

Every moment of his life since that day had been devoted to doing what others told him to do. When he had finally thrown his lot in with the Winchester brothers, he had not expected his rebellion to be anything other than short-lived. And he had nearly been right. After all, it had probably been less than five minutes between pulling Dean out of the reach of the Angels before Raphael had descended to tear him to shreds.

Of course, there was no way he could have anticipated what happened next. Revival from death wasn't the norm for most beings in creation. Only the exceptional ones were granted that privilege, ones like Dean. Castiel sometimes wondered how a rebellious Angel could ever have deserved to come back from... whatever that had been.

He had always wondered what had happened to Angels who were killed. They certainly didn't appear with the Human dead in Heaven. Castiel had thought that perhaps their Father gathered them to his embrace, but he had no such recollection himself.

Next to a potted palm tree, a young woman was leaning against a pillar, engaged in conversation with her husband. They were trying to have a baby, but unable to conceive because of his low fertility. The woman toyed with her hair, not really listening to him, thinking about leaving him because she wanted children and as much as she loved him, if she couldn't have children with him, then she couldn't stay with him. She was praying silently, asking for help from God in making her decision. Castiel felt like going over to her and advising her that asking God for help was less useful than she might think.

Castiel gazed upwards. Heaven wasn't physically above his head, but it was a pleasant affectation. He liked to be able to stand atop a mountain or in the middle of a plain and look upwards, staring amongst the stars and believing that his home was there. If he hadn't risked a second death by setting foot there, he might have been able to visit Richard Berrington there and ask what had happened to cause his death. He could have easily found out who had killed him and why. Of course, Richard Berrington might have gone to Hell, in which case he still would not attempt to talk to the man. Castiel had little desire to go back there for any reason.

Castiel, for now, had no way of knowing what his last thoughts had been.

But, he recalled, he did have one possible avenue of investigation open to him. He had seen Richard Berrington's driver's license. He knew his address. Castiel had no idea what he hoped to find there, but he could think of no other place to go to in order to acquire information.

Before he departed, he stood, and crossed over to a girl in her late teens, who was blushing furiously and touching up her makeup using a small compact mirror from her purse. She was sitting at a table outside a cafe, and had spent the last hour chatting to a charming man, only a few years older than her, who had made her feel feminine, grown up and special. Castiel got her attention through the simple expedient of dropping his hand on her shoulder.

"Don't go home with him," he told her.

She gaped at him, hands frozen in the act of smudging blusher on her cheeks. "Who the-"

"If you go home with him, he'll hurt you. He might kill you." Castiel dropped his hand. "It is, of course, entirely your choice." He turned and walked away, before the girl had managed to regain her wits enough to call after him.

He could have stopped her going with the man who had such disturbing things on her mind. He could have touched her, blurred her memory, and moved her somewhere where he could not easily find her. He wasn't going to do any of that. Free will, after all, was the gift of Humanity.

Richard Berrington's address, as it had been listed on his driver's license, turned out to be a low-rise building in Columbus, Ohio, which seemed to contain only offices. Berrington himself turned out to be one of several tenants, along with a small internet-order office supply company and a freelance accountancy firm. Berrington's office occupied a small corner of the second floor, the entrance to which was a glass-panelled door that had any view of the inside obscured by a pulled-down blind. The door was locked, but small metal tumblers were hardly a challenge to a being that could bend space and time to his will on a good day.

Castiel was vaguely aware that Humans had delineated areas of space for different functions in life. The Winchesters were an oddity in that they did not have any fixed location to call home, unless, of course, one counted the Impala. But he was aware the majority of people in this particular nation state had a place they used as a domicile, and a separate place which employed them. This place seemed to combine the two.

The only light in the room spilled in through slatted blinds, letting orange light in from the street outside, broken up into fractured slivered by the rain that poured down the window pane. It was enough to reveal a room made of a dark panelled wood with no carpets or rugs to soften surfaces. Every step Castiel made seemed to echo unnaturally loudly. It seemed, at first glance, to be an office. There were shelves with books and files stuffed into every available inch, two filing cabinets side by side with a sadly drooping spider planet sitting on top, and a heavy desk covered in bits of paper and a single framed photograph, depicting Richard Berrington and a young female that Castiel had no way of recognising.

But, looking closer, there was more than that. A fridge hummed in the corner next to a sink, a hot plate standing on top of it. Behind the desk there was a camp bed, reasonably neatly made up with a thin quilt and half-made sheets folded over the top. It wasn't just an office it was the man's home.

Castiel felt briefly uneasy that he was trespassing on the home of a dead man, but reasoned to himself that the man himself was unlikely to object. He offered a quick prayer for the man's forgiveness, and started going through the paperwork on Richard Berrington's desk. There was a lot of torn of bits of paper with notes scrawled on that were mostly illegible, or virtually impossible to understand. There were phone numbers with no names attached, a couple of addresses crossed out and shoved aside. There were bills marked 'payment due', and folders with photographs shoved hastily inside.

With no indication what they were, he left the folders for the moment, and started opening drawers. Mostly they contained bits of pieces of office detritus, half dead pens, broken erasers and pencils, a couple of blank or half used notebooks. One drawer held a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving equipment. One drawer was locked.

The key might have been somewhere in the office, but Castiel had no inclination to engage in a potentially fruitless search. A flick of the fingers, and an extension of himself past the limits of the fleshly form he wrapped himself in, and the tumblers fell into the correct order, and, with an audible click, the drawer unlocked. Castiel pulled the drawer open, and realised that he was looking at the physical representation of the man's soul.

Every Human being attached themselves to things, to objects. It was something Castiel didn't pretend to understand at all. Things were just things. Humans gave things value based on their scarcity, or their social cachet, but Castiel couldn't help but just see them as unimportant objects, no more understandable than a Human looking at a magpie and wondering why it was so entranced by shiny foil.

Then he thought about Dean Winchester, his peculiar attachment to his vehicle, and thought that maybe he could learn to understand it.

The items in the locked drawer had clearly meant a great deal to Richard Berrington, given the effort he had gone to in order to hide them from casual intruders. There was a locket on a broken chain, with nothing inside it, the silver tarnished and dull. There were several pebbles and shells, the significance of which were not readily apparent. There was a bundled of opened letters, with a rubber band holding them together. They looked to be handwritten, and Castiel passed them over for the time being.

There was a much-creased photograph lying inside. It was Richard Berrington again, also depicted with a female, but this time an adolescent. When Castiel looked closely, he thought he saw a familial resemblance in the cheeks and around the eyes. On the back was written, in faded ink, "Cassie's 14th", along with the words Belmont, Ohio and a date roughly two years earlier.

A daughter? Castiel wondered.

The door to the office-cum-apartment opened with a bang and shook the glass in the door-pane. Castiel was about to reflexively flee, briefly startled, but the light flicked on and he was confronted by neither demonic attacker, nor irate angelic warrior.

Instead, a Human woman, heavily made up and wearing a red dress that was cut low on the neck and high on the leg, a fur coat thrown over the top, stood framed in the doorway, balancing uncertainly on stiletto heels. She seemed quite out of breath, her bosom heaving.

"Dick? Oh, thank God you're here. I was starting to panic."

Castiel, momentarily and completely disconcerted, could only respond with, "I beg your pardon?"

The woman shut the door behind her, leaning on it as if there were Hellhounds pursuing her. Castiel briefly extended his senses outwards, but he could feeling nothing in the hallway or, indeed, the entire building, that might make her act thusly.

"Sorry," she said, regaining some sort of equilibrium, and stepping forward. "We only spoke on the phone. I forgot you might not recognise me." Her New York accent was thick as she spoke. "Jill Tedd," she said, extending her hand.

Castiel stared at her hand for a long moment. Too long, apparently, she faltered and dropped her arm, fidgeting with the clutch purse she carried with her. She seemed most agitated, and Castiel, while his initial inclination had been to dismiss her and get her to leave as soon as possible, found that he could not leave a soul in such a condition.

"Please sit down, Miss Tedd," he said, gesturing to the battered office chair that was clearly intended for visitors.

In spite of her apparently perturbed state, she didn't collapse into the offered seat, instead lowering herself delicately, crossing her legs and causing her skirt to hitch up, displaying even more of her legs than it did already. She opened her clutch purse, fishing around inside until she came up with a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. Her hands shook as she lit it up.

Castiel could see the damage it was doing to her lungs, and what would happen if she continued to smoke them. "Those will kill you," he told her, with the certainty of one who could see right down to the mitochondria in her cells.

Jill gave a little laugh, and blew out a puff of smoke. "If I live that long," she said, ruefully.

In spite of himself, Castiel was intrigued. He leaned against the desk and looked down at her. "You have reason to believe your life is in danger?"

"I didn't make that clear enough during my panicked phone call?" Jill smiled ruefully, starting to relax now. She slouched a little further in her chair, and her skirt hitched up a little higher. Castiel, pointedly, did not look.

Castiel, for a moment, found himself mired in what the poetic might call a 'philosophical quandary', and what Dean Winchester might call a 'whole heap of potential shit'. This woman was clearly under the mistaken impression that he was the rightful occupant of the office, Richard Berrington, and while the sensible course of action would be to disabuse her of the notion and get back to the rather important business of the end of the world, the truth of the matter was that he felt a strange sense of compulsion to uncover the matter of Richard Berrington's death.

Because, if this woman's attitude was any indication, no one had realised that he had died. That seemed, to Castiel, to be suspicious.

And so, already composing the appropriately penitent phrases in his head, Castiel said, "Refresh my memory."

If Jill thought this was a suspicious thing to say, she gave no sign of it. She took a long drag on her cigarette, composing her thoughts.

"It's my husband, Keith," she said, "He's disappeared, vanished into thin air."

As Castiel was reasonably certain that Humans hadn't mastered personal dimensional transfer, he didn't bother asking if that could have been the reality behind her husband's disappearance. He kept silent, and let her speak.

"At first, I thought he'd run off with some floosy, maybe someone he met down at that dive he called a bar," she said, breaking up her sentences with a pull on the cigarette, "But if he was gonna run off, he probably wouldn't have left his car, or most of his clothes."

"Perhaps," Castiel ventured, "He left anyway. I'm aware of at least one case where a man, dissatisfied with his job, abandoned his entire family, including his daughter."

Jill blew a stream of smoke into the air. "Why'd he do that?"

Castiel shrugged slightly. "He didn't like the work he was doing at the Post Office."

"My husband wasn't a postal worker," she said, with a wry twist to her mouth, "He's a business man. I'm afraid that his... business... may have brought him into contact with some rather unsavoury individuals."

"Criminals?" he must have frowned, because consternation crossed Jill's face.

"My husband wasn't a criminal," she said, hastily, "He just had poor judgement and associated with, as I said, unsavoury sorts."

There wasn't much mystery in his disappearance, to Castiel's mind. A man had associated with known criminals, and had now disappeared. Criminals weren't renowned for kindness to those who trespassed against them. But that didn't solve the mystery of why Jill Tedd thought her life was in danger, and why she had come to Richard Berrington to solve the problem, a man who was now quite thoroughly dead.

"Do you think that he's dead?" he asked her, staring at her closely.

She looked away, unwilling or unable to meet his eyes. "No," she said, smoke escaping from her lips with the word. It disconcertingly resembled the first curls of demonic possession leaving a victim. "And I don't think he just vanished into thin air like some sort of ghost either. That's why I'm here, Dick. I hear you're good at finding people."

"I've passed through hell to find someone special," Castiel admitted, with a vague hint of pride. He was aware it was a sin, but it was one he didn't feel too much inclination towards suppressing.

Jill's red-painted lips curved into a sensuous smile. "And that's why I hear you're the best," she said. She leant forward and stubbed the cigarette out in a discarded saucer, one decorated with an unattractive tea stain.

This was, if Castiel was perfectly honest with himself, a rather futile charade. Miss Tedd had not revealed anything that might explain why Richard Berrington was dead. All he was doing was involving himself in business that was none of his concern and would, ultimately, only serve as a distraction he did not need.

Angels, of course, being as good at self-deception as any Earthly sentient, were perfectly capable of ignoring the fact that they were already thoroughly distracted by suspicious corpses in places they should not be. Angels didn't talk about that sort of thing.

He chose the path of least resistance as the most expedient method of getting her to leave. "Well, Miss Tedd-"

"Oh please. Jill."

"Jill." He stood, made his way to the door and opened it for her. "I will look into your problem for you. I'll contact you if I have any further information."

Jill unfolded her legs in a languid, sensuous movement, and walked with an exaggerated swaying of the hips that Castiel was convinced was highly unnatural for Humans. She stood in front of him, so closely that he could feel the warmth from her skin, and smell the faint traces of perfume that lingered about her. He found this action rather peculiar, given what Dean had repeatedly said to him on the matters of so-called 'personal space'. "You promise?" she asked, looking at him from under hooded eyes.

He had been cast out of Heaven, murdered his brethren and thrown his lot in with the Winchesters, the latter of these three sins probably being the biggest reason why all of creation seemed to want him dead. He should feel absolutely no compunction about lying to this woman, and so he said, "Of course," and immediately set to composing a lengthy penance to be uttered later*.

Jill smiled, slowly, and smoothed out the label of his coat in an unnecessary gesture. She slipped a small square card, on which he would later discover was written her phone number, into his pocket as she drew back. "I'll be in touch," she said, and sashayed out of the door. She was long out of sight by the time Castiel remembered he was still holding the door and let it swing closed.

(* The penance went something like this:

Our Father, who art not in Heaven (but hopefully will be again someday), hallowed be thy name. Forgive thy humble servant for his lies uttered towards your child Jill Tedd, in the assurance that it's all for a good cause in the end, and, really, it's no worse than the Winchester brothers have been doing for years, so it's a bit inconsistent to start worrying about it now. Amen.

A lot of Castiel's penitent recitations featured the Winchesters these days.)

**

"I need to find a woman," Castiel told Dean Winchester as he stood on the threshold of the brothers' latest hotel room somewhere in Wisconsin.

Dean stared at him for a moment with an utterly blank expression on his face, as if he didn't even recognise Castiel. Then he broke into one of the biggest grins Castiel had ever since. "Boy," he said, "Did you come to the right place."

Castiel rolled his eyes and stepped past Dean into the room proper. He'd decided to try manifesting outside the door and knocking when arriving to speak to Dean and Sam, as both of them had begun to express irritation at his appearing within the immediate vicinity. It seemed a pointless waste of effort to Castiel's mind, but since it had managed to avoid the usual chastisement for lacking personal space issues maybe it was something he should stick to in the future. Sam was sitting at a small rickety table inside the room, which looked to be swaying precariously under the weight of a great deal of open books. "Research?" he asked, momentarily curious.

Sam nodded slowly, rolling a pen between thumb and forefinger. "We're not sure, but we're looking for something female that likes woodlands and snakes."

Castiel frowned, thinking for a moment. "Ajatar," he said, finally and then looked to Dean, "Try not to look so gleeful. I don't need a woman in that fashion."

Dean looked an awful lot like there was a joke he felt Castiel just wasn't getting.

Castiel sighed and pulled the photograph he'd taken from Richard Berrington's office from his pocket, holding it out to Dean. "I need to find her."

Dean frowned as he took the photo, flipping it over and reading the back, lips moving slightly as he did so. Finally he looked at Castiel, brow furrowed, "Why do you need to talk to this girl?"

"To find out if she knows anything relevant," Castiel said, "Can you help me?"

Sam held out his hand, making a grasping motion with his fingers. "Might be able to," he said, as Dean passed him the photo, "Got a name?"

"Cassie," Castiel hesitated, "Possibly."

Sam and Dean glanced at each other. "Don't suppose you have a surname to go with that?"

"Berrington, but I'm not sure if that's correct," Castiel said. "I have limited information. I'm being forced to make... assumptions, one of which is that her father is a man named Richard Berrington."

"That's the guy in this photo?" Sam asked.

"Yes."

"Where is he?"

Castiel frowned slightly. "A morgue in Ohio."

Sam shook his head faintly and pulled his laptop closer. "Sorry I asked."

"What's this about?" Dean asked, as Sam started clicking and typing rapidly. "A lead on the Big Guy?"

"If by 'Big Guy' you mean God, no." There was a twist in his chest when Dean spoke so callously of his Father that Castiel was becoming unhappily used to. He hadn't been able to decipher it yet. Sometimes it felt like disappointment, other times irritation, other times acknowledgement. Castiel didn't like it. "This is an apparently unrelated matter."

"Apparently?" Dean raised an eyebrow.

Castiel spread his hands slightly. "As God is the creator of all things, everything is related to him in some way, is it not?"

Dean rolled his eyes and muttered something unintelligible. Castiel felt that familiar twist again.

"Here," Sam was scrawling on a piece of paper, and when he'd finished, he handed it to Castiel. "I think this is who you're looking for."

It was a name, Melinda Berrington, and an address. Castiel looked at Sam in askance.

"I think Melinda's her mother. Best I can do with such ah... limited... information."

"I'm very grateful for your help," Castiel said, folding the piece of paper carefully and tucking it into his pocket.

"Let us know how it goes."

Castiel inclined his head, and left as quickly as he had arrived.

**

The home of Melinda Berrington was a charming little house in a charming little neighbourhood. It had neatly manicured lawns (just like all the neighbours did) and even possessed a white picket fence. A few people wandered through the neighbourhood chatting or walking dogs, and it seemed an entirely pleasant place to live. Mindful of how simply walking into the house might be disturbing to the occupants, Castiel walked up to the door and politely knocked.

There was no answer. After a few moments, Castiel knocked again, louder this time.

The door flew open, revealing a woman in her dressing gown, hair mussed and tangled, a cigarette hanging from her lips, and a small child jumping up and down and pulling on her clothes. "What?!" she screeched.

Castiel took half a step backwards before he reminded himself that he was an Angel, she was a mere Human and that he should not be intimidated by one such as her. "Melinda Berrington?" he asked.

The woman took the cigarette out of her mouth and flicked away the ash. "Who's askin'?"

The child, given that its mother wasn't paying any attention to it, had decided to transfer its attentions to Castiel. It yanked on his coat, chattering in some high pitched an unintelligent voice. "Do you know a man named Richard Berrington?"

"Fuck." The woman was definitely Melinda. He could see as much from what he'd glimpsed of her mind at his initial greeting. He couldn't read thoughts directly, but he could get the general flavour of a person's mind. Hers was tinged with wariness and impatience. "What lies is that bastard spreading this time? He's the one behind on his payments, y'know."

"Do you have a daughter named Cassie?"

Melinda scowled. "You're asking a lot of questions."

The child had something sticky on its hands, and it was leaving mucky handprints all over Castiel's coat. The constant yanking might have threatened to pull someone who was only Human off their feet. Castiel simply stood, unmoving as granite. "I am," he told her, "But you are not giving me any answers."

Melinda scowled, flicking the cigarette ash away with an impatient gesture. "Cassandra! Get your ass down here!"

"What now?!" A young voice came from the upstairs rooms, a shriek to match Melinda's.

"There's someone here to see you!"

There was the sound of a door slamming open, which Castiel regarded curiously. His only real knowledge of Human teenagers came from Claire Novak, and she had been a good, pious child. She was the polar opposite of the girl who stomped down the stairs, her hair dyed an unpleasant shade of purple, her clothes dark, torn, and held together with a variety of safety pins. Melinda turned and headed out of sight without another word, leaving the girl that Castiel recognised as 'Cassie' standing in front of him, her arms folded. The photo that Castiel had seen was clearly a few years old. The girl was older, Castiel wasn't sure by how much, but her body had changed shape, her face having taken on the cast of burgeoning maturity.

"Yeah?" she prompted.

The small child, having realised that Castiel wasn't going to move however much it pulled on the coat, was jumping up, swinging his feet off the ground. "Do you know a man named Richard Berrington?"

Cassie shifted her weight from foot to foot, and folded her arms. "Yeah, he's my dad. Why?"

Castiel looked at her closely. He could tell that there was nothing behind her eyes but impatience and suspicion at a stranger. She didn't know her father was dead. Castiel hesitated. He didn't want to upset the girl, but it would be cruel to leave her ignorant. Presumably, however, the proper authorities would eventually inform her. If Castiel told her now, she would become stricken with grief and perhaps less communicative. Castiel decided that, for the moment, he would say nothing. Instead he flashed his falsified identification, too fast for her to get a good look at it, and said, "I'm investigating an incident relating to your father," he told her.

"What, he got arrested for lurking taking photos again?" Cassie ran a hand through her hair, sighing. "For a PI, he's really unsubtle."

There was a fondness there, in spite of her outwards exasperation.

"Do you know what your father was investigating in Wellington, Ohio?"

"Wellington? I-" Cassie's expression abruptly shuttered. "No. No idea."

Castiel didn't need angelic insight to know she was lying. "Cassandra," he said, stepping forward and looking her in the eye, "It is very important that I find out what your father was doing in the last few days. I have to find out what he was involved with."

Few Humans were capable of looking an Angel in the eye and being unaffected by the sheer force of the soul lying hidden inside. People like the Winchesters, special in their own way, would barely notice it. Normal people were not so unaffected. Cassie trembled slightly, and wrenched her gaze away. "Dad's dead, isn't he?" Her bravado had fallen, leaving being the tremulous sound of hidden sadness.

Castiel nodded slowly. "I'm very sorry."

Cassie roughly scrubbed at her cheeks. "Son of a bitch," she muttered, without heat. "I knew he was getting into stupid shit. I just knew it."

She turned away from Castiel, and crossed the hallway, crouching down next to a pile of fabric that turned out to be a tie-dyed fabric bag tossed carelessly on the floor. She rummaged through it for a minute before she pulled out a crinkled piece of paper. "Dad never told me what he was up to half the time. Stupid idiot thought he was protecting me. Why bother to protect me from a bunch of wives and husbands who chase up their partners just to find them screwing the meter maid? So I got bored, and looked at his files last time I was at his place." She handed the paper to Castiel. "I copied this down."

To someone who didn't know what they were looking at, the scrawl was virtually incomprehensible. The squiggles didn't correspond to any language officially spoken on Earth, nonsense to the uneducated, but Castiel recognised them by virtue of being familiar with every known method of communication known to sentient life. It wasn't angelic or demonic script, but was as precise and representative as plain mathematical symbols. The symbols, arranged in a circle with arcs and lines connecting them, was, more or less, an equation. There was only one person who could have drawn it. And either Richard Berrington was the author, or he had found it somehow. Either possibilities opened up a raft of possibilities for why Richard Berrington had died.

"Do you know what this means?" He asked Cassie, carefully.

Cassie bent down, picking up the small child, pulling him off Castiel's coat and telling him to 'go get a cookie off mom'. She seemed to be delaying answering. "I can't read it," she contemporised.

Castiel wondered if she was being coy. Non-conventional religious inclinations were not always appreciated in this part of America. "I know there is significance to these symbols," he said, "Did your father?"

Cassie fidgeted. "I... dabble," she said, pulling on her sleeve and refusing to look at him. "I know that it's no art project. When I was a kid..." She drew a deep, shaky breath. "Some stuff like that, he kept it around the house. Wasn't hidden away good enough for a kid with too much curiosity and not enough sense. He got good at hiding it, later. I researched it when I got older."

Then Richard Berrington was the author. "Was it related to his current investigation?"

"Maybe," Cassie shrugged. "I couldn't tell you."

Castiel looked down at the paper. "May I keep this?"

"Sure."

Castiel folded it neatly. "Thank you for your help."

"Yeah, whatever," Cassie said, trying to resurrect her previous sullen exterior, but it was flawed, and she looked like she just wanted to go away and cry for a while. "For all the good it'll do."

"I will find who killed your father," he promised her, aware that it was perhaps a rash promise but that if Richard Berrington was who Castiel thought he was, then he owed him that much.

"Do that," Cassie said, and shut the door in his face.

**

Castiel returned to Richard Berrington's office-cum-apartment and spent some time looking for any other evidence of the man's activities. Everything there was very mundane and exactly as was to be expected in an average Human home. When he failed to find anything, he sat down in Richard Berrington's chair and looked at the paper more closely.

Castiel, until relatively recently, had lived on the side of one of the more powerful forces in the world, that of Heaven. On the opposite side were the forces of Hell. Each side had their allies, Human, supernatural or otherwise. Earth, being the neutral ground that both sides were forced to meet on had no true advocates, save the Winchesters and now perhaps Castiel himself. But there were those, like those in the office building Castiel had visited not too long ago, who held no allegiance and who just tried to keep the world running. There were freelance agents as well, Humans who had, by some mechanism that even Castiel didn't understand, came to wield tremendous power and whose lives were devoted to maintaining the state of the Earth as neutral ground. They would repair tears in reality where they developed, rebalance energy where it had become overwhelming or too thin. They were agents of the Balance and apparently Richard Berrington had been amongst their number.

When Castiel realised that, the reason why he hadn't found any useful information became abruptly apparent.

He stood, closed his eyes, an extended his senses beyond the mere five senses his vessel could use, reaching out with what little of his true form he was willing to extend outside of the vessel. He had to be careful not to attract too much attention to himself. Insinuating himself across dimensions was like stepping into a still pond; he was bound to cause ripples. Fortunately, what he was looking for wasn't too far away, in dimensional terms. He reached out a hand, and pulled gently at the fabric of reality. It unravelled beneath his touch, allowing him to reach through the gap and grasp what lay beyond. He pulled his hand back and allowed the dimensions to snap closed with a metaphysical pop.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his hand. He held a cheap generic notebook, but when he opened it and started to read, he found it was filled with Balance equations, notes on various instabilities caused by supernatural activities and the steps he'd taken to prevent it. One entry, halfway through the book, noted that he had rebalanced a load on a fault line that stopped most of Manhattan from falling into the sea. There was then a note about a fix placed upon it, stating that, 'As far as anyone knows, there is no fault line under New York. Best not to scare the mundanes, after all.'

Castiel turned to the very end of the book. Keith Tedd, it read, Came by today with a new time-slider equation. His spelling's sloppy, as usual, but offered to help him test. There was nothing written beyond that.

Castiel realised that he'd made a mistake by ignoring Jill Tedd and her words about her missing husband. But while she was under the impression that Castiel was Richard Berrington, she did not seem to expect him to know who her husband was. Therefore, she must have been unaware of the connection between Richard Berrington and Keith Tedd. While Richard was dead and unable to answer his questions, the matter of Keith Tedd and his whereabouts was still unresolved. Without pausing to consider that it would be a bad idea to get involved, Castiel took out his phone and Jill Tedd's phone number, and dialled.

**

When Jill Tedd opened her door, she was, like Melinda Berrington, wearing a dressing gown. Unlike Melinda Berrington, that gown was silk, open far enough to show a perilous amount of cleavage, and she was still in full make up, which seemed terribly impractical.

"Won't you come in?" she purred.

"Thank you," Castiel said, inclining his head politely, and followed Jill past the entrance hall and into a well-appointed living room full of darkly-coloured furnishings and a fire quietly crackling in the heart. Night had fallen, and Castiel could certainly see the logic in building a fire.

"Do you have any news?" she asked, as she sat down, crossing her legs demurely and leaning back against the cushions of her leather couch, which creaked with her movement. "News about my husband, that is?"

"I am afraid not," Castiel said honestly, standing before her, hands by his sides.

"Oh dear," Jill said, and glanced at his coat, "Do you realise you have ice cream smeared on your coat."

"I am," he told her. "I've come to ask you for any additional information you might have about your husband." He paused, and thought for a second. "Anything that might help me locate him," he added.

Jill patted the couch beside her. "Won't you sit down?"

"I prefer to stand," he said.

Jill sighed, heaving her whole body with the motion, and pouted slightly. "As I said to you before, he was a business man with unsavoury contacts."

"Could you be more specific?" he asked.

Jill pursed her lips. "He was in shipping, moving heavy goods around the country. Some of his customers paid him extra to ship things that folks in authority didn't want to see moving."

"Smuggling," Castiel said, bluntly.

Jill inclined her head in careful acknowledgement. "If one wants to call it that."

"And that was all he was involved in?" Castiel stared at her intently, trying to read what he could from the glimmers of the soul visible behind the mortal flesh that surrounded it.

Jill was the very picture of wide-eyed innocence. "Why would he be involved in anything else?"

It wasn't unusual for those involved in Balance maintenance to keep their activities secret from loved ones. It was a subtle art, but a dangerous one, and the Humans who were involved in it put their lives at risk. Both Heaven and Hell had a vested interest in tilting the conflict in their favour and, while Castiel had no knowledge himself of any orders to stop their work, his superiors had been disgruntled on more than one occasion when sacred relics were dispersed or hidden, preventing the build up of divine energy that could serve as energy-rich resources for angels on Earth. No one would want to put their loved ones in harm's way if they were caught doing such a thing. It was entirely possible that Keith Tedd had never told his wife of his non-work activities. Or she could have been lying about her knowledge of his affairs. Castiel sensed no deceit, however, and he pressed on.

"When was the last time you spoke to Keith?"

"Nearly a week ago." Jill dabbed under her eyes with her fingertips and blinked rapidly. "He said he was going to have a meeting with some people from Michigan. He called to say he'd be late back, but I haven't seen him since. I'm terribly worried about him, Dick."

Castiel reminded himself that it was a diminutive form of Richard, and not the preferred insult of Dean Winchester towards the angelically inclined. It allowed him to reign in his irritation before he retaliated with more than a sharp word. "I will do my best to locate him," he said, gravely, "Do you have an image of him? I don't know what he looks like."

"Oh! Of course." Jill drew herself up smoothly from the couch. "Please, I'll be just a minute."

She glided from the room, leaving faintly perfumed air in her wake. Castiel stood in the centre of the room and glanced around briefly. Most of the ornaments were gold or delicate porcelain, and Castiel was unused enough to seeing them that he could guess they were expensive and not the sort of thing owned by the average American. There were statues of sinuous stylised women in antiquated styles of dress, in languid poses, small crystal bowls, a tiny palm-sized set of brass scales, weighted to the left, and an assortment of animals carved out of wood. There was nothing to catch his interest, and so he settled into staring at the wall directly in front of him, waiting for Jill to return.

Eventually, she padded back into the room, a small leather bound photo album in her hands. She turned the pages carefully, wary of her precisely manicured nails, and sighed over the pictures. "Oh, my dear Keith," she murmured, and pulled out one in particular, handing it to him. "Here. I hope it helps."

Castiel nodded. "You said that your husband frequented a bar of some sort?"

Jill looked briefly startled. "You have a good memory." She closed the album and ran her fingers over the front. "He frequented the theme pub," her lips curled on the words, "called the Dog and Duck. Said you couldn't get a proper drinking experience unless it was in a pub. I never went there, of course. Filthy habit, drinking." She shuddered, artfully.

"I wouldn't know," Castiel said.

**

The bar was of the type that Castiel was familiar with. Dean Winchester would have felt right at home in the dingy, poorly ventilated space. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the floor covered with sticky patches of unidentifiable liquids, and the clientele looked like they would consider a fist fight entertainment only if involved at least two hospitalisations and an appointment for emergency dental surgery. Castiel, however, knew he had nothing to fear from these people, and so made his way over to the bar with a confidence born of invincibility. He crossed to the bar, leaning on it with both arms in a mimicry of the sort of posture Dean used.

"What'll you have?" the barman asked, not looking up from the glass he was cleaning with a dirty rag.

Castiel at least knew how to answer this particular question. "I'll have a beer."

The barman gave the glass a quick final polish and set it down. "Bottle or draft?"

Castiel blinked, nonplussed. "Draft," he said, after a moment.

"Bad Frog, Ice House or Bud?"

Castiel stared at the barman, wondering if this was some sort of elaborate joke. The barman stared back, unblinkingly.

"Bad Frog," Castiel said, slowly.

"Cold or with the chill off?"

Castiel gripped the edge of the bar and, for just a moment, had the nearly overwhelming urge to lean across the bar, grab the barman by the front of his grubby, beer-stained shirt and tell him, "I am an Angel of the Lord, fallen to try to save mankind from the coming apocalypse. I have entered Hell and left victorious. I have faced the unrighteous and triumphed. I have sung of The Word, danced on the dark side of an electron, and woven life anew from skeins of stellar filament. And now I ask this of you: give me a beer before I rip your soul from your body and use it to mop the floor of your disgusting establishment."

Instead, he just said, "Cold, please."

The barman grunted, and turned away to fill Castiel's order. Castiel let go of the bar and took a photograph of Richard Berrington out of his pocket. When the man returned with his beer, he showed it to the barman. "Do you recognise this man?"

The barman looked at it closely as he pushed the glass over the bar. "Looks familiar. I think he came here a few times. He owe you money or something?"

"No," Castiel said, "When you saw him, was he with anyone else?"

"Like a girl or something?" The barman shrugged. "I dunno. Wasn't looking that hard. I get a lot of people in here."

Castiel took out a second photo, one he'd been given by Jill Tedd. It depicted her and her husband, arm in arm, outside somewhere with a lot of people milling in the background. "What about this man?"

The barman peered closely at the photograph. "Him I don't remember," he said, "Her. Wow. That's a woman with a rack you don't forget."

Castiel briefly wondered why anyone would carry a rack around with them, but refrained from asking. Instead he said, "Has she been here before?"

"Dunno if I'd say that," the barman said. "But I saw her lurking around outside once after my shift was done. She was wearing this real low top. Real low." The man abruptly coughed, shaking his head to dispel the sudden attack of mistiness that had come over his eyes. "So are you gonna pay or not, man?"

Castiel dug into a pocket, taking out a crinkled bit of green paper, which he held out to the barman. Castiel wasn't sure of its worth, but it seemed to satisfy the barman, who snatched it out of Castiel's hand with a satisfied grunt. Castiel wrinkled his nose slightly at the beer before him and took an experimental sip. Taste had been alien to him before his extended stay on the mortal plane that was Earth, so he didn't have much in the way of a frame of reference to judge the beer's worth. It wasn't unpleasant, though, so perhaps that counted for something. He doubted, though, that Richard Berrington came here for the beer, and though the barman hadn't recognised him, Jill Tedd had claimed her husband was a patron. Castiel already had evidence that the two of them knew each other, but there was the curious matter of Jill being present outside of the bar, wearing such a memorably low-cut outfit that the barman had no trouble remembering her.

And then, in a flash, Castiel remembered exactly where he had seen the bureaucrat, Chi, before.

**

The Winchesters had moved onto a new motel, and it took a phone call to locate them. Castiel wasted no time getting there, and Dean hadn't hung up the phone when he set foot on the threadbare carpet and said, "Where do you keep your porn?"

Dean stared at him, and, for the first time that Castiel had ever witnessed, seemed to be lost for words. Castiel would have been lying if he didn't derive satisfaction from that fact.

"I need your porn," he said, wondering if restating his question would help Dean in finding his tongue.

That, if anything, made the situation worse. Dean just took half a step back, stared some more, and yelled, "Saaam!"

Sam, who seemed to be half way through brushing his teeth, stuck his head out of the door. "Hey Cas. What, Dean?"

"I think Cas is possessed. Get the holy water."

Castiel glowered at Dean. "I am not possessed. I am in need of your porn. Immediately."

Sam stared at Castiel, then at Dean. "You're on your own," he said, and ducked back into the bathroom.

Castiel sighed impatiently. "Porn, Dean. Now."

"I don't see how this helps you find God," Dean said, folding his arms. Then he grinned, tilted his head. "Unless you're trying to 'find God' in the euphemistic sort of way?"

"What are you talking about?" Castiel asked, genuinely confused. "What other way is there?"

"You know, Cas, when you're finished doing whatever the hell you're doing, you and I are going to have to sit down and have a chat about the birds and the bees."

"I am interested in neither the habits of avians, nor the activities of insects." Castiel folded his arms. "Are you going to help me or not?"

Dean held up his hands in wordless surrender and crossed to his bag, digging around the bottom under various crumpled shirts and trousers, which he tossed aside as he searched. "Got any particular preferences? Redheads, brunettes?"

"Asians," Castiel said, stepping closer.

Dean stopped, and stood up straight. He gave Castiel a watery-eyed look and pressed his lips together. "My little angel is all grown up."

"Dean," Castiel said, warningly, not feeling like being mocked.

Dean pulled out three magazines and handed them over. "Don't enjoy them all at once. A man has to pace himself."

Castiel accepted the magazines, then crossed to the small side table and set them down in a neat pile. He picked up the topmost magazine and started to flick through it.

"Woah! I didn't mean right now!"

Castiel ignored Dean's spluttering and kept flipping through the magazine. He didn't see the appeal, personally, but Dean seemed to enjoy the representations of women depicted inside. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, Castiel supposed that the woman were creatively posed. Angelic aesthetics were different than Human standards, being, as they were, much more metaphysical. Vaana, for instance, had long been renowned in the Heavenly realm for her ontological delineations.

The first magazine didn't hold what he was looking for, so he set it aside and picked up the next one.

Sam came out of the bathroom while he was skimming the content. Sam looked at what he was holding, and smirked. "I hope none of those pages stick together," he said, looking at Dean even as he addressed Castiel, "You might wanna wash your hands after you're done."

"Sam!"

Magazine number two was as unhelpful as the first. Castiel opened the final magazine and it was on page thirteen that he found what he was looking for. "That's her," he murmured to himself.

"Friend of yours?" Sam asked, dryly.

Dean peered over Castiel's shoulder to see what he was looking at. "Ah yes," he said, with an air of nostalgia about his voice, "Miss Cherry Blossom, one of my favourites." He stared off into the distance, apparently reliving some memory.

Sam tilted his head. "Why do you need that anyway?"

"Blackmail," Castiel answered succinctly. "Dean, I'm taking this."

Dean stirred himself to say, "Hey, Cas, wait a minute-"

But by then, Castiel was already gone.

**

Chi was a midlevel bureaucrat, and had been for most of her existence. She had worked her way up to her current level from her days starting out polishing the abacus beads for the more senior bureaucrats. It had taken a lot of hard work over the millennia, but she had earned her little corner cubicle, her fern and her filing cabinet filled with a stash of fortune cookies that had been confiscated from a restaurant in London after investigators had discovered that a mischievous ethersprite was the reason why all the fortunes were more accurate than any fortune cookie in the history of creation.

Just the thought made her feel somewhat peckish, and, as she slid a freshly completed B-1857? form into her out tray (requisition for transcendental pig feed) and opened the drawer. Inside were dozens of shiny red-foil packets, nestled together looking like edible rubies. Chi ummed and ahhed for a moment before she picked a cookie at random. She tore the wrapper and broke the cookie apart, chewing meditatively on one half as she pulled the slip of paper from the other and read it.

If you start moving now, it read, and take the back stairs next to the vending machine, you might just get away in time.

Chi scowled at it. "What the fuck?" she muttered, and popped the second half of the cookie in her mouth. There was something written on the other side of the paper, she realised, and so turned it over.

Now it said, Too late. I did try to warn you.

"Miss Cherry Blossom. Age twenty two. Hmm. Missing a couple of digits there, I believe. Cup size double E."

Chi froze, horror creeping over her. She recognised that voice. It was the angel from before, the one in the ugly trench coat and the attractively scruffy vessel. And there was only one thing he could be reading from.

The angel, Castiel, was leaning on the edge of the partition wall that separated her from the rest of the office. In his hands was the May edition of Busty Asian Babes, and he was reading from the article on what she knew had to be page thirteen. He sat down opposite her and continued, "Miss Cherry Blossom's turn-ons include coffee liqueur, dirty talk and threesomes with girls. Her turn-offs are commitment, the unadventurous, and moustaches."

Chi lunged across the desk and tried to snatch the magazine out of his hands. He whipped it out of reach before she got close, leaving her sprawled over her desk. "Where did you get that?" she hissed.

Castiel looked at her reproachfully. "I'm surprised senior management allows their employees to take part in outside work. Though I admit, from what I've seen, you have a natural talent that's going to waste behind a desk." He turned the page and tilted the magazine. "I admit that I had never thought that a pair of chopsticks and a passionfruit could be put to such innovative use."

Chi made another unsuccessful grab for the magazine, only succeeding in sending her potted fern flying. She drew back, straightening her rumpled top and tried to gather the shreds of her tattered dignity. "What do you want?" she demanded.

Castiel smiled, ever so slightly, and closed the magazine. "A copy of Richard Berrington's final balance sheet, please."

"Do you have a J96-V??9 form?"

Castiel opened the magazine again. "Just the sight of a man's cock is enough to get me wet, says Cherry. One glance and all I can think of is that hard length pounding into me over and-"

"Alright!" Chi shrieked, before hastily dropping her voice to a harsh whisper, "Keep your damned voice down!"

Castiel looked far too pleased with himself. Chi briefly regretted that she didn't know of any way of killing or banishing angels, and wondered if it should have been on the day one orientation lecture. "The balance sheet, if you please?"

Moving slowly and glaring so that he'd know exactly how much she resented it, she flicked her computer's screen over to the search page. It was only a moment's work to bring up a list of recently deceased Richard Berringtons, of which there were three. Castiel supplied an address that apparently been his mortal residence, and it brought the list down to a single name. Chi hit print and glared at Castiel as the printer shuddered into life. It took far too long to print and when it was done, she tore off the sheets and tossed them over the desk. "I want that magazine," she informed him, "If management find out I was moonlighting, I'll be praying for the days when I polished abacus beads."

"Why would an incorporeal bureaucrat do that anyway?" Castiel asked, as he picked up the sheet, smoothing it out and reading it, eyes skimming rapidly through columns of figures.

Chi shrugged slightly. "The photographer was hot. Really hot."

Castiel looked up at her and blinked. She shrugged. "It'd been about three and a half thousand years since my last break. Figured I should enjoy myself before I had to get back to work."

"Your... last break?"

Chi nodded. "It's not too bad. Lunch time's coming up next century."

Castiel shook his head slightly and returned his attention to the sheet. "What does this final line mean? I don't recognise it."

"Accounting not your thing?" she asked, tartly.

"No."

She scoffed and held out a hand imperiously. He handed back the sheet and she skimmed to the appropriate line.

She shrugged. "All debts paid in full."

Castiel frowned. "What does that mean?"

She sighed and set the paper down on the desk, pointing out the appropriate lines. "See, this notation says he followed the path of balance. The final line says that the final balance was zero, and that he paid in full." Seeing that the angel was still giving her a blank look, she shook her head. "You don't know a lot about balance-working do you? Ok, well it's not like magic, or your Grace or demonic energy. That's all drawing from an external source, moderated by your own will. Balance-working is about making the scales even, about giving and taking in equal measure. When a worker balances both sides of the equation, he has to give something back in return for the energy he needs to make changes to the world. Sometimes it's a memory, or a few years off your life. I've heard of debts demanding the supplicant give up their voice or their femininity. This," she tapped the paper, "Indicates that he gave a life price, willingly. He sacrificed himself for something or someone else. You can't give a bigger payment than that."

Angels could really be idiots some times.

"One more thing, if you please."

She opened her mouth to object, but Castiel raised the magazine, rustling the pages threateningly. She subsided. "And what might that be?"

"I need the sheet for a man named Keith Tedd."

She turned back to her computer, and it took her far longer to find the sheet for this new name. "Hmm," she said, "He doesn't have a final balance sheet. He must not be dead yet." But there was a strange symbol at the bottom she didn't recognise. Out of curiosity, she pulled the user guide for the system off her shelf and started flipping through looking for the glossary. "Huh. Looks like he's out of earthly ambit."

Castiel quirked an eyebrow at her in a remarkably Human affectation. "Meaning?"

"He's probably dimension hopping somewhere. Gone to see the sights on Rigel XII maybe. I hear they have a kick-ass buffet after six. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

"No. Thank you for your generous assistance." Castiel stood up to leave, but paused before moving. "I have a friend who's a big fan of yours," he told her, holding up the magazine.

Chi blinked, and suddenly felt unaccountably pleased. "Really?"

"Yes," Castiel said, "It was hard to persuade him to part with this copy. It is very... well thumbed."

"Well," Chi fought down her inclination to grin, trying to present a stoic outward appearance. She refused to be flattered by this shameless blackmailer. "Would you like me to sign the magazine?"

Castiel thought for a moment and then nodded. "I believe he'd appreciate that."

It took a moment to find a marker pen, and Chi flipped to page thirteen and smiled at the photos. The mortal body she'd chosen to don for that particular occasion did photograph very well, and had excellent flexibility. Yes, she was definitely pleased with the shoot. She wrote, Thinking of you and your hard length pounding into me, kisses, Cherry.

She handed it back and, in a sudden surge of magnanimousness, reached into her drawer to toss him a fortune cookie. "In case you get hungry," she said.

Castiel looked baffled by the gift, but obligingly stuck it into his pocket. Chi shrugged to herself. Either he'd get it, or he wouldn't, and she was betting on 'wouldn't'.

There was a stretch of untouched mountainside in central France that didn't get a lot of visitors. It was too far off the beaten track, too inaccessible to modern vehicles, and most Humans lacked the patience to walk such long distances for little reason other than to experience the wonder of God's creation. So when Castiel appeared amongst a cluster of deciduous trees, there was no one there to see him settle on an exposed bit of rock, taking a moment to move an insect away before he accidentally sat on it. He'd wanted somewhere private to sit and think, and while he could have returned to Mars and basked in the silence of a dead world, he had no desire to be surrounded by a reminder of what had once been. Here, on Earth, surrounded by plants and animals, he could remind himself that life was broader than just Humans and Angels.

It was early morning in this part of the world, and the air was fresh and damp, the sun just starting to peek over the mountains. If Castiel listened closely enough, he could hear the grass singing to itself as it reached upwards for the sunshine, and the low murmur of the trees providing a solid baseline to the high pitching fluting sounds of the birds amongst their branches. Of course, they weren't making sound as any Human would understand it, but it was perhaps the closest way that he could have described it. He simply sat there for a long moment, face turned upwards towards the sun, staring into the heart of the great fusion engine that powered the whole system. It restored him a little, revived him, reminded him that God's Universe was bigger than this single planet, and that everything had its place in the Design.

He could understand what had happened, because there was a reason for everything. All he had to do was work it out.

Castiel took Richard Berrington's journal out of his pocket and flipped to the end. The last entry was unchanged, but he moved backwards through the pages, to roughly a week or so before the final entry.

JD 2455131.22725
I met Miriam's replacement today. Sweet kid called Kira. The poor thing looked utterly overwhelmed by everything, but that's what happens when you wake up one morning to find the Knowledge knocking on your brain and refusing to take no for an answer. I still can't believe that Miriam died just like that. You always think that sort of thing happens to other people, not your friends. But I suppose that, considering these dark days, a car crash isn't the worst way for a person to go. I wonder who my replacement would be. I'll never know, I guess. That's how it's supposed to be. GIGO.
I've been logging some higher than usual spikes in the local lines. When I say high, I mean really high. 48.2 high. That sort of stuff is major league stuff, and I'm not sure I want to tangle with it, at least, not on my own. I might give Keith a call and get his opinion on things.

JD 2455133.04387
Yesterday, Keith and I got in the car and drove over to this warehouse in Wellington, where we figured the centre of these spikes was coming from. Twice we got turned around and put on the highway back the way we'd came. The first time Keith just said it was my piss poor navigation. The second time, we got the message. Something is working something major in that area, and we're just not equipped to handle it. We gave Miranda a call, but she claims to foresee no death, horror and destruction in our immediate future. Well, nothing worse than usual. She did tell me to "look before I leap", but that could mean anything. Keith & I figure that we'll head that way when the spikes start to die down, and do some cleanup. For now, I feel that all this driving deserves a drink, so we will decamp to the nearest bar.

Castiel ran his fingertip over the words. He could feel the slight different in texture where the ink formed loops and arches, could detect the faint indents that the pen's pressure had left in the paper. Presumably, Richard Berrington and Keith Tedd had become aware of Gabriel's meddling in the fabric of reality. It was rather fortunate that they had taken the hint and avoided the situation. Castiel was sure that his Brother would have had no particular compunction about getting rid of two irritating Humans who were incapable of understanding that they were supposed to stay away.

For a moment, Castiel contemplated the possibility that Gabriel might know what was going on, and tracking him down to ask him about it. It wasn't something he contemplated for very long. Gabriel clearly hadn't retained any loyalty to Castiel as a brother, and while he didn't seem to want Castiel dead (as the other Archangels did), he certainly didn't seem to have any interest in treating him like anything more than a nuisance that stood in his way. Castiel had no desire to be considered annoying enough to permanently erase from existence. One death was more than sufficient.

Besides which, Castiel doubted that Gabriel had been the cause of trouble with the fabric of reality. As an Archangel, he was powerful enough to bend and shape the world to fit his designs, but that same power meant that he could smooth out any wrinkles with a mere thought. Gabriel had always been a neat worker.

He turned over the page, skipping past several graphs and a scribbled diagram that seemed to be mostly doodles that had no intrinsic meaning.

JD 2455133.48970
I keep wondering if writing this down will make it more real. I certainly can't seem to believe it right now. My head keeps spinning, and everything has the air of surrealism to it. I feel like I've accidentally sidestepped into another dimension and forgot to get back out again.
Keith kissed me.
Even writing that seems stupid. I feel like I'm some stupid schoolgirl with her first crush. And that's even more stupid. Keith wouldn't be my first crush; not even the second or third. I think the third was why my marriage broke up. More to the point, I thought he was still married. When I pointed that out to him, the pair of us standing like idiots in the drizzling rain outside the bar and grinning like idiots, he glanced at the ring on his hand and shrugged. He reminded me that it was over between them, and had been since the moment he'd walked in on Jill and the pool cleaner in flagrante delicto. It had been doubly ironic, since Keith had found the pool cleaner rather attractive himself until he came home from the library early to find said pool cleaner's backside bouncing up and down in the air.
Jill always had such poor taste, like that brass crap she always keeps around the house.
Keith Tedd and I have been balancing the scales for years, ever since we met way back when I first started spelling. You always get pretty familiar with people you work that closely with, but I never thought...
Ok. Now I really am sounding like a teenage girl.

JD 2455134.49942
Something's off. I'm not sure what. The regional coordinators don't report anything, so it's nothing to do with the Heaven v. Hell catfight that's going on. It's localised, whatever it is. I have a very bad feeling in my gut, but that could be the fault of Cassie's gingerbread.

JD 2455134.90637
Keith Tedd came by today with a new time-slider equation. His spelling's sloppy, as usual, but offered to help him test.

Castiel folded the notebook carefully and returned it to his pocket. Suddenly, an awful lot of things had become clear.

**

Castiel appeared next to Cassie Berrington as she walked home from school through inclement weather, having no time to be subtle about his approach. She had the hood of her sweater pulled up, and perhaps thought she hadn't seen him coming, since she only jumped in mild surprise, rather than shrieked and ran as he might expect of someone who just witnessed a man appearing out of thin air.

Or, if Castiel was right, she wouldn't have been surprised at all.

"You lied to me," he said, without preamble.

Cassie turned her head awkwardly to stare at him. She poked strands of her hair that fluttered free in the wind back under her hood to better see him. "Are you a ninja or something? You're a stealthy bastard, aren't you?"

"No," he said, "But you lied to me."

Cassie bit her lip and walked away, apparently concentrating intently on walking down the street. Castiel kept pace with her without difficulty. "You don't dabble. No one dabbles in balancing. The next one is only made when a balancer dies. It maintains the numbers, keeps things stable. It likes stability, whatever 'It' is." It was borderline blasphemy to insinuate that there was a power equivalent to God, but Castiel had done far worse things in the eyes of Heaven than insinuate that there were powers that kept the Universe spinning that Angels didn't understand.

Cassie tried to quicken her pace, to no avail; Castiel had no problem keeping up with her Eventually, she slowed back down to a regular walking pace. She kept a rebellious expression on her face. "I told you. I just copied stuff down that I found in my dad's office. I don't know what you think I am but-"

"Your father didn't keep anything related to his work, his real work, lying around in his office. He took create pains to keep it hidden, even folding over a corner of space to hide it." Castiel took the notebook out of his pocket and held it out to her. "This is the only thing he had related to his work. It's not a handbook, doesn't contain the symbols you would need to know to create that design you gave me. There is no handbook, just the Knowledge, am I right?"

Cassie sighed, miserably, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. She turned to face him properly, folding her arms as she spoke. "You're very astute, but then you're an Angel. I shouldn't be surprised that you received Revelation on the subject."

"I'm no longer affiliated with Heaven," Castiel said, turning the notebook over in his heads. "Revelation is no longer a resource I have access to."

"You fell?"

"None of your business."

Cassie shrugged slightly, and held out a hand. "Please, may I have that? I don't have much of my dad's, you see..."

Castiel didn't need it any more. He handed it over and watched as she lovingly caressed the torn and stained cover before tucking it into her book bag. "You're your father's replacement, aren't you?"

Cassie nodded slowly. "Found out he was dead when I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and suddenly aware that I have this obligation that'll probably kill me by the time I'm thirty five, and that, by the way, my dad just died."

"Are you aware your father worked with a man named 'Keith Tedd' on occasion?"

"Uncle Keith?" Cassie's eyes widened. "Yeah, he and my dad have been friends for years. But he's... he's gone too... I don't know how I know, but it doesn't feel like he's dead..."

"My information indicates that he's no longer in this dimensional plane," Castiel said, "His whereabouts aren't known to me. Since he isn't dead, I'm assuming that he hasn't been replaced?"

"No. Things are off-kilter, out of balance. I got a text this morning from the regional coordinator. She says that all the ducks in her pond started swimming backwards. It's a sign, she says. They're very sensitive ducks."

"Can you not find him?"

Cassie shook her head. "The balance doesn't really allow for transdimensional travel. It's not natural. Neither's flying by aircraft, of course, but It didn't seem to argue with that one."

"But can you find him?"

Cassie frowned slightly. "Maybe. Why? What are you thinking?"

"Keith Tedd might be the only one who knows the exactly circumstances of your father's death. Except, of course, for the perpetrator. They will not be forthcoming."

Cassie's hand went to her throat. "Do... do you know who killed my father?"

Castiel hated to disappoint her. "I have a suspect," he clarified, "For now the more urgent matter is to retrieve Keith Tedd from wherever he has gone. There are dimensions that can tear Human minds apart. Let us sincerely hope that he has not been sent to one of those."

Cassie took a deep breath. "Right," she said. "I can help with that, but it would be handy to be close to the place he first went missing. The wall'll be thinner there."

"I know where that is. Let's go." Before she could object, he whisked them both away with a finger to her forehead. When she opened her eyes again after blinking in surprise, they were standing in a disused warehouse in Wellington, Ohio.

**

Cassie wrapped her arms around her body and shivered in the uninsulated warehouse. "Nice place," she muttered, rubbing her arms vigorously. "Feels weird though. Like..." She trailed off, unwilling or unable to finish her sentence.

"I have reason to believe that this is the location that Keith Tedd disappeared from," Castiel said, looking around. There was still a burnt smudge on the ground from where Dean had lit the Holy Oil, but now there were muddy footprints all over the floor that hadn't been there previously, black powder dusting various surfaces, and tattered bits of yellow tape were drifting in the breeze. Cassie noticed, and she looked at Castiel with wide eyes.

"This was a crime scene," she said in a small voice. "Was this... was this where my Dad died?"

"Yes," Castiel said. "I'm sorry to have to bring you here."

Cassie shook her head violently, and pulled her hood down. "Don't be. If this helps get the bastard who did this to my dad, I don't care." She was trying to sound like she was unconcerned, but Castiel could see the anguish lingering about her like a sickly yellow haze. "Help me clear some floor space."

Castiel moved away a few bits of scrap metal from the patch of bare concrete that she indicated. Somehow, Cassie found a stiff-bristled broom in what might have once been a janitorial closet, and she swept the floor clean with sharp, angry motions.

"So, you ever going to tell me your name?" she asked, as she worked.

"Castiel," he answered.

"Nice name," she said, without a hint of sarcasm.

Castiel watched her work silently for a moment. "Sometimes people call me Cas," he offered.

"Me too," Cassie said. She set the broom aside, and picked up her bag. It turned out that she had a pack of pavement chalk with her for an art class.

"Do you always carry chalk around with you?" Castiel asked, as she knelt on the floor and set the chalk to the ground to draw arcs and coils and curves, following some unseen design.

Cassie smiled. "Not usually. But I've started to realise in the last few days that there's no such thing as coincidences."

She worked with a look of intense concentration on her face, tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth as she edged around her drawing, careful not to smudge the lines she had just lain down. Slowly, what had been an interesting but peculiar geometric design started to take on a new solidity, as the lines started to connect, and Cassie filled in the gaps with a spidery language that Castiel recognised as a balancer's shorthand. He could read it, but to his eyes, it seemed as if it shouldn't have been able to do anything. It was essentially all descriptive text, denoting date, time, who she was, where she was, the weather outside.

Balancing wasn't magic, or an exercise of divine grace. To Castiel's eye, it looked more akin to Human science. Perhaps that was why only Humans could practice it.

Cassie was touching up a joining of three lines when her stomach rumbled audibly. "Sorry," she said, sounding embarrassed, "Haven't eaten since lunch time."

Castiel remembered the small foil packet that Chi had given him before he'd left the bureaucracy. He pulled it out of his pocket and offered it. "Here," he said.

"Thanks." Cassie tore open the packet, extracting something small and hard and twisted into an odd shape. It didn't look particularly edible to Castiel's eyes. "Do you want half?" she offered.

"No, thank you."

Cassie nodded, broke it apart with her fingers to eat it, crunching noisily on the cookie as she read the small piece of paper that had been tucked inside. She made a thoughtful sound and held it out to Castiel. "I think this is for you," she said, with her mouth full.

Castiel took it. Take a deep breath, it said, and don't look down.

Castiel frowned.

Cassie sat cross-legged on the floor as she broke up the cookie into bits with her fingers, eaten one piece at a time. "Why are you doing this?" she asked, in a rush, like she hadn't really intended to ask the question. "Why would an angel - a fallen angel - care about what happened to my dad?"

Castiel tilted his head, staring at her intently. When she didn't back down from a look that Castiel knew perfectly well was intimidating, he felt she deserved an answer. "I was the one who found your father," he said, "I wanted to know what had happened to him, and why."

"Was it worth it?"

Castiel looked at the chalk lines on the floor, watched the bits of loose chalk that had broken free while Cassie had been drawing dance sideways in the breeze that came through the gaps in the wall. "Ask me again later," he said. "How's it coming along?"

Cassie brushed off her palms, sending crumbs flying. "I'm nearly done," she murmured, and got back to her drawing. "I think. I mean... I've never done this before. For all I know, this could be a summoning spell for Cthulhu or something."

That wasn't a very reassuring thing to hear. Castiel shifted uncertainly, but there weren't many other options available for him to explore at this point.

Eventually, she sat back on her heels and looked at the diagram with satisfaction. "There," she said, "That should do it. Probably. It's just missing one thing."

"What might that be?"

"The price," Cassie said, shushing him and listening intently, scowling as she cocked her head. Castiel extended his senses, but could hear nothing. After a moment, her brow smoothed out and she gave him an apologetic smile. "The price is your greatest fear."

Castiel started, unpleasantly surprised. "Why do I have to pay the price?"

Cassie tapped the chalk against her fingers. "Because you're the supplicant here. I'm just the middle man. It wants to know your greatest fear."

"But why that?"

"Because your greatest fear is a secret, and secrets have great power." Cassie stood up and held out the chalk. She pointed to a blank section of the drawing. "Write in whatever language you want, except for English and Balance equations. I can't read anything else."

Warily, Castiel took the chalk and crouched down in front of the section of the diagram she had indicated. Angelic script had a power of its own, he reminded himself. It wouldn't do to write in that language. Enochian was the safest bet, the closest earthly equivalent that could be used to express his thoughts without attracting unwanted attention. He reached out, chalk touching the asphalt, but found that it was almost impossible to actually start moving, to write down the greatest fear he held, trapped deep inside his soul where absolutely no one but him would know about it. He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. He reminded himself that he was doing it for a greater purpose than himself, as he had ever done. But it was still nearly physically painful to start writing. Then, once he'd started, he found he couldn't stop. When his hand finally stilled, his vision was blurred and his breath was short. He stood up, feeling slightly dizzy, and held out the chalk to Cassie.

"Look," she urged as she took the chalk, directing his attention to her diagram.

Lines moved of their own accord. At first Castiel thought it was some left over disorientation, but he blinked and his vision cleared, and yet the lines were still moving. They stretched and twisted, and Castiel had the uncertain feeling that there was something at work, something that he didn't quite understand, and as one who had stood amongst the chosen of all creation, that was a frightening feeling indeed. He stood his ground, fingers clenched, and watched intently. The lines were forming a familiar pattern, one that was becoming more and more apparent by the second. A map.

"Cool," Cassie said, awed.

When the lines stopped moving, having finished rearranging themselves, Castiel stepped close and crouched down. The diagram was explicit and while it wouldn't mean anything to any Human, not even one who'd spent his life devoted to the mathematics of other spatial dimensions, it was plain and uncomplicated to an angel. It was a description of the dimension in which Keith Tedd was trapped, and depiction of the path needed to get there.

He straightened, and glanced at Cassie. "Excuse me a moment," he said, "I may be some time."

As she opened her mouth to speak, he stepped sideways.

'Alternate Dimensions' were words that had been used to describe Heaven and Hell. While it was true that they each were very different from Earth, and they had their own set of rules and refused to conform to anything a Human might find familiar, they were more alike to Earth than not. The three worlds sat alongside each other, and there were places where the gaps were very thin, or the Veil touched more than one world at a time. At their core, Heaven, Hell and Earth were more similar than they were not, which was partly why Humans, Angels and Demons could move between the three (although only Angels truly had the power to do so at will). Dimensions, such as the ones that Castiel was crossing at that moment, were more akin to mathematical ideals, and were more alien to him than even Hell had been.

There weren't truly words to describe what he experienced, as he passed through worlds that were not worlds, stepping between them like he was awkwardly crossing a pond on stepping stones that rocked with the slightest movement. He paused, precariously balanced between existence and oblivion with every step he took. Every time he did so, he contemplated turning back. The Balance was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. He was needed to stop the apocalypse. If he wasn't able to help Dean and Sam, lost between dimensions because of his sudden urge to help a Human he had never before met, then the world would be in a much worse situation. He still had to find God! What was he doing, engaged in such foolishness?

Then, he reminded himself that if he wasn't willing to at least try, then he would regret his inaction for the rest of whatever remained of his life. He took another step.

It was becoming harder to move, and it took Castiel a while to realise that it was partly the fault of his vessel. The Human form found this sort of travel much more difficult than his angelic body, but Castiel had become so accustomed to sitting inside Human flesh that he had, in truth, forgotten about it. It was too late to do anything about it now. He couldn't abandon his vessel; it would be lost between dimensions, and he didn't want to leave it behind. If he'd been able to, that part of him that still experienced the wonder of God's creation would have pointed out to his vessel all the marvels that they swam through, but that was no longer an option for either of them.

Castiel continued.

The path he had been given to travel was not an easy one, but he was aware that it was the safest. Zero sum equations left voids to either side of him, and sometimes he treaded a line only a quarter the size of a quark to pass through the dangerous patches. Eventually, though, he became aware that he was not alone. An Angel is these places was an alien, a Human equally so, and Castiel could feel the other presence long before he came within reach of it. He couldn't help but do so; prayers called to him.

Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

It gave him something to follow, a beacon, and suddenly the path didn't seem so perilous, now that what he sought was so close by. He tried to hurry as much as he was able, passing through a dimension curled up on the planck scale in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

He dodged a tangle of fractals, slipped between branes, and narrowly avoided tripping over a hyperstring.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses.
Bread and trespasses. Bread and trespasses.
Did someone steal Christ's sandwiches or something?
Maybe they were his favourite? Peanut butter? Maybe jello?
Peanut butter and jello sandwiches, favoured of the Lord.
Must have missed that page in Sunday school.

There was a sensation that sounded a bit like demented giggling for a while, and then the prayer began again.

Our Father who art in Heaven...

Castiel came close, close enough to read out. He struggled to force his surroundings into something he could interpret, something he could affect. He was left with something that the brain might have interpret as vaguely humanoid shape, with extrusions that could have been seen as wings if a witness narrowed their eyes and squinted. Keith Tedd, or the analogue of him, was coiled up tightly on itself, rocking back and forth and praying to a God that either couldn't or wouldn't hear.

Keith Tedd? It took more than a moment to frame the thoughts into words, and then to translate those words into equations and convey those to Keith Tedd. Castiel had to make three attempts before the man showed some sort of recognition, pausing in his constant litany.

Am I dead yet? Please tell me I'm dead. I'd quite like to be dead. I wonder if I could get a peanut butter and jello sandwich in Heaven. Or Hell. Maybe in hell they're just constantly out of peanut butter? Keith didn't even seem to realise that another person had intruded on his torment.

There's no peanut butter or jello in Hell, Castiel said, with the authority of firsthand knowledge. My name is Castiel. I'm here to rescue you.

Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper? Demented giggling swamped the surroundings again, peaks and troughs of amusement.

Long experience with Dean had taught Castiel that the best way to deal with unfamiliar pop-culture references was to ignore them. You have been caught in this place against your will. I have come to take you home.

A tremulous uncoiling. You promise?

I am an Angel of the Lord, Castiel said. I would never lie to one in need.

Huh. Keith Tedd seemed to think about that for a while. I suppose an Angel wouldn't lie.

He apparently didn't have enough wits about him to consider that Castiel might be lying about being an Angel, but Castiel wasn't about to point that out to him. Then take my hand, he said. And I will take you away from this place.

Keith hesitated for a long moment, then extended part of himself towards Castiel, just enough for Castiel to latch onto, to grip securely. Castiel knew the way back now, and the moment he was sure that he wouldn't lose Keith along the way, he raced back towards the more familiar levels of reality, diving through dimensions, uncaring if he left ripples than other Angels might feel and trace back to him. All he could think about was returning to normalcy, and when he landed, he gasped like he was breaking through the surface of a cold, dark lake.

And then he hit the floor.

**

It wasn't Castiel's fault that he slightly misjudged his landing. In all honesty, he was probably lucky that he'd managed to convert himself back into real matter without reversing every molecule in his body. He would have preferred, however, not to have reappeared seven feet above the ground gripping a fully grown adult male by the shoulders. The best that Castiel could do was to make sure that he served as a buffer between Keith Tedd and the floor. It was far easier for him to repair bones than it was for a Human.

Cassie screamed with shock, scuttling out of the way as they landed. Castiel's head cracked on the concrete floor, leaving him dazed for a moment. When he regained his equilibrium, Cassie was chanting, "Oh my god, oh my god," and kneeling over the pair of them, apparently unable to decide who she should help first.

"Help him," he told her, taking the decision out of her hands.

Cassie nodded frantically. She carefully reached out to touch Keith Tedd's shoulders, rolling him off Castiel to lie on his back. Keith groaned as he moved. He was alive, at least. Castiel's efforts hadn't been in vain.

"Uncle Keith?" Cassie's hands fluttered over his chest vaguely. "Oh god, are you alright?"

Keith coughed, cracking open his eyes just a slit. "Cas?"

Cassie sobbed awkwardly, and wrapped her arms around his chest, hugging him tightly.

"Ow," he muttered, "Cas. Ow. Not so tight."

Castiel took a deep breath, reminded himself which nerves had to be used to fire which muscles in the Human body and, after a brief false start where all he managed to do was make his arm flop back and forth for a moment, managed to push himself into a sitting position. The world pitched alarmingly to the left, but he told it to stop such nonsense and fought to hold back the immediate risk of slumping back to the ground.

"Cassie," he said, "You and he must leave as soon as possible. I am certain that the perpetrator behind the murder of your father will be here soon."

Cassie straightened, but didn't stand up, staying on her knees by her uncle. "What are you talking about?" she asked, in a quavering voice. "We got Uncle Keith back."

"That isn't the end of it." Castiel found that he was having difficulty getting enough air into his lungs. He paused, breathing in and out rapidly a few times. "I did not originally know that your Uncle was related to the matter of Richard Berrington's death. I would not have realised it, except that it was brought up by someone who was well aware of what had happened to him. She pretended not to know your father, which was impossible given his involvement with Keith Tedd. She believes she has manipulated events. Now, I have to get you both to safety." He just needed a moment to stop thinking in fractals, and he could send them on their way to relative safety.

The sound of clicking heels resounded through the empty space.

"I must say, you haven't disappointed me."

Cassie's head jerked upwards, and she gasped. She looked terrified, every inch the scared teenager that she was. Castiel forced himself on his feet in a moment, putting himself squarely in between Cassie and Keith and the newcomer. He'd suspected that she would turn up eventually, but he'd hoped for at least a few more minutes to regain his energy before she'd arrived. Jill Tedd stood in the same red dress she'd been wearing when he first met her, lacking only the fur coat. A small red leather clutch purse was held in one manicured hand. She looked like she was on the way to an evening out, instead of prowling around a disused warehouse in the middle of the afternoon.

"You're a very hard man to keep track of," Jill said, one hand on her hip, as if delivering a stern lecture to a recalcitrant child. "America, France, vanishing entirely off the face of the planet at times. I figured you'd eventually make your way here though. Didn't take a genius to work out that all I to do was wait."

"You mean the tracking spell you put on this?" Castiel took her business card out of his pocket. "Your spell was well hidden, but once I knew what to look for, it wasn't that hard to find. You need more practice." He tossed the card to the floor.

Jill shrugged, unconcerned. "I'll bear that in mind for next time," she said. She looked around the warehouse with distaste plain on her face. "God knows why the two of them picked this place for their little assignation, but I suppose I shouldn't really have been surprised."

She hadn't known, Castiel realised, with surprise. She'd never worked out exactly what he husband did in the name of planetary maintenance. While Jill Tedd had almost certainly seen her husband and Richard Berrington in a compromising position outside the bar that Wednesday night, she'd taken it for simple sexual betrayal rather than magical interference in her business. There hadn't been some overarching plan to destabilise the balance of energy running through the world. Jill Tedd had just been angry enough to kill. She'd known from the moment she'd walked into Richard Berrington's office that Castiel was not that man. She'd faked her own ignorance in the hope of finding out how much he knew, in the hope of manoeuvring him into a situation where she could take care of him quietly, where no one else could see. Perhaps she'd come to the office that night to find out more about the man who, in her eyes, had stolen her husband. When she'd found Castiel, she'd thought fast, and Castiel had believed her. She had so skilfully masked her true intentions that even staring into the very heart of her hadn't revealed the details.

Castiel wasn't the only one to work out exactly what Jill was doing there.

"You killed my father, didn't you?" Cassie was pale, almost grey as she stared at Jill. Her hands were curled in Keith Tedd's shirt. Keith himself was still insensate, uncaring about what was going on.

"Unintentionally, though it was actually more satisfying that I thought. I was aiming for my feckless halfwit of a husband here," she said, jerking her head to where Keith lay gasping on the ground. "I had the perfect spell for him too. Steal the rest of his life, consume it, add his years to my own, and I'd be enjoying all the fun he would have taken away from me, cavorting around with some other man."

"Richard Berrington got in the way," Castiel said, working out the final pieces of the puzzle. "He was here, with Keith Tedd. You attacked your husband, and he got in the way. He sacrificed himself to save the man he loved."

"For all the good it did him," Jill said, with a toss of her head. Her hair didn't move. While it was long, and strategically curled, it had apparently been hairsprayed to within an inch of his life. Jill Tedd had cultivated the perfect look, and seemed intent on maintaining it, perhaps for decades beyond what she might otherwise had received. "After drinking him up, and really, he had such a lot of life in him that I was almost fit to bursting, if he'd had a calorific content I'm pretty sure that Weight Watchers would have banned him, it really wasn't much of a trial to knock my darling hubby into the middle of next week."

"Not quite," Castiel said. He summoned every ounce of determination he had, forging it into a hard knot into his stomach.

"Well, don't you worry." Jill raised her hand, wagging her finger at him. "This is one witch who's learnt her lesson. This time, I'm going to make sure I take care of all my loose ends." She reached into her clutch purse, and pulled out a small, neat gun. In a quick motion, before anyone could react, she had aimed it and fired. Cassie screamed, her voice falling silent before the echo of the shot did.

It was poor choice on Jill's part that the first target she chose was Castiel. He merely looked at the hole that had been punched in his shirt with irritation.

"I would prefer you didn't do that," he said, frowning in disapproval. He waved his hand in a short sharp motion.

Jill was already agape in shock. She had no chance of holding onto the gun as it was flicked away from her hand and thrown into some darkened corner of the warehouse.

"How did-?" She set her jaw, and breathed heavily for a minute.

Cassie was staring, as was Keith, both of them looking at Castiel with utterly blank expressions, apparently having no idea what to think.

"Fine," Jill Tedd seethed, teeth bared, her previously attractive visage suddenly twisted and unpleasant. "I don't know what the hell you are, but I don't need some gun to take care of you."

She raised her hands skywards. The air thickened, becoming heavier somehow, and charged. Thunder rolled overhead, rattling the metal sheeting that made up the roof. Cassie shrank back, clutching at Keith's arm as she knelt on the floor next to him. Neither of them had any defence against this sort of rampant expression of power. Jill Tedd had forged herself into a powerful witch and, if what she had said was true, and she had stolen Richard Berrington's life from him, absorbing it into herself, then there was a deep well of essentially limitless power for her to draw on. Castiel could have wondered what had driven her that far into madness and anger, but he didn't have the time. He could feel the power building, felt her reaching for something older and beyond her. He couldn't tell if she was summoning some monster, or if she intended to crudely tear a doorway straight to hell and let demons free, but he could tell he didn't have much time.

He was tired, sick and near collapse. He didn't have the strength to resist whatever she intended to unleash upon them, a witch in her prime and the stolen years of another's existence powering her actions. But then, he didn't need to.

Take a deep breath, and don't look down.

Castiel ran towards her, as fast as he was able. He used his mass and slammed into the much smaller woman, sending them both tumbling towards the concrete floor. Before they hit the ground, they vanished.

**

Outer space, as understood by most of science, is not that far away from the Earth's surface. The troposphere, that breathable atmosphere of which is so beloved of life on Earth, ends at around the twenty kilometre mark. Travel to around fifty kilometres above the surface of the planet, and NASA will tell you that you're officially an astronaut. If you intend to maintain a stable orbit around the planet, you need to reach the dizzying heights of three hundred and fifty kilometers. If you don't intend to remain stable, you need not travel so high. For obvious reasons, travel in space without some sort of protective gear isn't recommended for Humans. In a vacuum, a Human will lose consciousness ten to fifteen seconds. After roughly ninety seconds, they'll die.

If anyone at that particular moment in time had been looking at a point in space, roughly two hundred or so kilometres above the surface of the Earth directly over Ohio, at that moment, they might have seen two Human-shaped objects pop into existence. They would have seen one of them suddenly start thrashing around, unable to cope with the sudden loss of air to the lungs. They would have seen the clawing, and the flailing, and they might have taken note of the way the other figure floated placidly, watching. Ten or fifteen seconds later, they would have seen the flailing shape fall still. But, of course, there wasn't anyone to see.

Two minutes later, the now-still shape was the only one left to float in a slowly decaying orbit over the Earth.

"Space," Cassie repeated, dully, "As in outer space?"

Castiel leant heavily against the wall, grateful for a solid surface to keep him upright. "It wasn't that far," he said, "It just so happened to be straight upwards."

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer bitch," Keith Tedd said, hoarsely. He was shivering in the cold air, and Castiel would have attempted to impart some sort of warmth to him, if he'd had the strength.

Cassie shook her head slowly. "I always wanted to see space," she mused. She picked up the broom that she had used to clear the floor with before she had begun her drawing on the floor, and started scrubbing at the chalk lines. They faded under her assault, becoming smudged and then nearly completely indistinct.

"You should see Mars this time of year," Castiel said. "And I hear there's a buffet on Rigel XII you should try."

"Maybe I'll do that."

Provided the planet survived the next few months, of course.

Castiel looked towards Keith Tedd, who was looking at the girl who called him uncle but who was not related to him by blood (but perhaps by spirit, and which was stronger?). "I'm sorry for your loss."

Keith looked surprised at being addressed, and shook his head. It wasn't a rejection of what Castiel had said, but an expression of sadness. "Jill wasn't so bad when I first met her," he said. His voice was rough, the intonation of his words uneven. He'd grown unused to speaking with his normal voice. Time didn't run the same in that place of mathematics and ideas. Castiel had no idea how much subjective time that the man had spent there. "She was always a little moody, but I loved her."

"I never liked her," Cassie muttered at the floor.

"She got weird, after a few years. I don't know whether it was something I did, or whether it was the moment when she let her dabbling in witchcraft start to change her. Oh, I knew." He gave Castiel a wry smile. "Everyone has the right to their own hobbies, I told myself. She was a good person. She wouldn't let the magic corrupt her, like so many had. I forgot that when you give so much power to someone, it unbalances them, twists them. Greed begets greed. The imbalance grew worse."

Castiel thought that, when you involved balancers in a situation, everything became about balance. It was a faintly simplistic view of the world, to Castiel's mind, but he was loathed to argue with a man who hadn't been made of matter for at least two weeks.

"I pretended I didn't know she was having affairs. Told myself it didn't matter. I still loved her. Then I caught her with that damned pool cleaner." He laughed without mirth. "I should have known. He always did a crappy job. We mostly separated; I started living over at my mom's old place. I'd never sold it after she died. It was a good place to crash. Rich came over with a bottle of whiskey and commiserations. I think that was when I figured out that I loved the man who'd been my friend for years more than I loved my wife." He shrugged. "Just took me a while to bring him around to the idea."

"Ew," Cassie muttered, dancing away a step or two. "TMI."

"I'm glad you had the moments you did." Castiel passed a hand over his forehead, feeling the dampness of sweat there. "Many don't."

"Yeah," Keith said, softly, and turned away.

Castiel felt tired, and almost physically weighed down. If he found this a strain, how was he ever supposed to help Dean and Sam fight the apocalypse, even providing he could find God? For a moment, Castiel despaired.

"Castiel... Cas."

He turned to look over at Cassie.

"You gave up your secret, and you got the information to retrieve Uncle Keith. That was a fair exchange." Cassie paused in her sweeping, and frowned at something in the middle distance. "Killing Jill... that was unasked for. It doesn't like unpaid debts. You..." She hesitated, listening carefully. "Your greatest fear might yet come to pass, but it might not. To prevent it, a great sacrifice must be made. This is the payment offered: hope."

She shook her head, as if coming out of a daydream. "If that helps any," she finished, in a more normal tone.

"It..." He felt somewhat shaken by her words, though a small kernel of warmth had kindled in his chest, banishing the moment of despair into memory. "Thank you."

Cassie shrugged, and with a firm movement of the broom, wiped the last of Castiel's greatest fear from the floor. "C'mon," she said to Keith, "Let's get the hell outta here."

Keith looked at Castiel with haunted eyes, but managed a thin smile anyway. Castiel heard the thanks that could not be said, and bowed his head. He reached out, and touched their shoulders, sending them away, to Keith Tedd's home. Then Castiel was left alone, with nothing but the wind and chalk dust for company.

**

"Remind me that it's all worthwhile."

Sam had gone out for pizza, leaving Dean alone in the motel room to sit on the bed and flip through a car magazine only a couple of months out of date. He hated to admit it, but he'd gotten so used to Castiel appearing out of nowhere that it didn't even prompt a flinch even more. He just flipped the corner of the magazine down to see Castiel standing by the window, looking out over the dingy grey parking lot.

"Excuse me?" His first instinct had been to make some wise ass response, but Castiel looked serious enough that it probably wouldn't have been appreciated.

"Remind me," Castiel repeated, not looking at him, "That it's worth going to all this effort to save Humanity when there's murder, jealousy, rage, selfishness, greed and despair. Remind me that it's worth it."

Dean set the magazine down on the bed slowly. "It's worth it," he said. "What's the alternative? Eternity in Stepford? You lose the despair, the rage and jealousy, and you lose the passion, the love, the joy, things that make life really worthwhile."

"And then there's the porn," Castiel said dryly. "You'd probably miss that."

"Man's gotta have his vices." If Castiel was up to his usual strained attempts at humour, he probably wasn't too upset. "Where've you been Cas?"

"That's a more loaded question than you'd imagine." Castiel turned away from the window and reached into his pocket. "I brought you a present." He tossed the magazine that he'd taken from Dean, open to page thirteen, onto the bed.

"Sweet." Dean read the inscription and grinned, then looked curious at Castiel. "What the hell have you been doing that has you hanging around models?"

"Blackmail," Castiel said, shortly, and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked tired. "And then I had to spend a small amount of indefinite time travelling through mathematical constructs. It was a very draining experience."

Dean glanced over to the battered plastic kettle in the corner of the room. "You want a coffee?"

Castiel furrowed his brow, curious. "Would that help?"

"For you? Probably not unless it was a triple espresso," Dean shrugged. "I can probably get Sam to bring some back."

"Thank you for the offer, but I'll be... fine. Eventually. I just need to rest and regain my strength. Being turned inside out and back to front is an interesting sensation, but not one I'd want to repeat." Castiel sighed heavily. "And all for such petty reasons, in the end. Anger, jealousy, greed."

Dean closed the magazine, laid it reverently aside. "So tell me. What happened?"

Castiel hesitated and then, haltingly, related everything.

~ The End ~

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