Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sam always kept their journal. Not right from the get go; he started it after they took down the Hook Man in Toldeo and backdated the rest. And not like Dad's, with long handwritten paragraphs about the hunt and bits about their lives all mixed together: His was an excel spreadsheet, neatly listing places, dates, names (victims and monsters), bullet points for what happened and how they'd stopped it, and here and there notes as they learned new stuff from the lore. But mostly, names: Names of people involved, the ones that had information, the ones that were targeted, the ones they saved, and the ones they didn't.

Printed out, it covered two walls.

Dean kept two lists, both in his head; shorter, just names. One was everyone he'd ever failed to save: Charlie. Kevin. Bobby. Jo and Ellen. Ash. Dad. Adam. Jessica. So many others. And every time he thought of any of them, he saw their deaths: Eyes burned out. Explosion and hellhounds. Bleating hospital monitors. Fire and smouldering ashes. Blood spattered bathtub.

Every time he thought of any of them, his heart was shredded again.

Your fault.

The other list named every son of a bitch he'd have to kill to save them.

"What you're proposing... Dean," said Cas, shaking his head. "Dean, this could go very badly."

Dean leaned back in his chair slowly, feeling the ache in his eyes from too many hours dry sobbing in the shower and too bone-tired from fighting to care. "Compared to what, exactly?" he said. "They're already dead. They're all dead, and it's on me."

Shaking his head, Cas pulled out the other seat with sharp and jerky movements and sat down. "If I take you back in time, the moment we change anything, this future will cease to exist. Everything that has happened since that moment will be erased."

"Sounds good to me. Let's McFly this fucked up timeline."

"You don't understand," he said intensely. "If we mess up anything, anything at all, all the good we've accomplished will be gone as well. The people we've saved could die, or worse: The Apocalypse could come about after all. The world could end."

"Far as I'm concerned, it already did."

Cas sighed.

Dean hesitated, looked down. Cas was on his list too, in the 'screwed over too many times' column. "Look, man... I know I've got no right to ask you any favours. What I did to you– what I almost did. That can't be forgiven."

"That was the Mark."

"It was me."

"I blame the Mark, and it's gone now," Cas said. "We all paid the price for that, Dean, and it was too high. The question is, what will you do next time Abaddon threatens your family? Or Lucifer, or Eve, or any of the others? I can't watch this happen again, not ever."

The price. Cold terror slid up Dean's gut, squeezing his heart until he almost puked. "The Colt will kill her," he replied, fighting it down, "as long as we don't lose it this time. It'll work on all of them, except Lucifer, and we can keep him trapped in the cage. If we kill Lilith before the other seals break, he'll never get out. No Apocalypse. Michael will be furious but hey, douchebag." He tried to smile. It didn't really work.

Cas rubbed his eyes and let his shoulders slump the way he always did when he was giving up, giving in. "You're playing a very dangerous game, Dean," he sighed.

"It's all I've got left."

All either of them had left, now. Cas nodded. "All right," he said slowly. "I'll do it. For you."

Something that might have been hope sparked in Dean's chest, jittery and sloshing like his stomach after drinking too much booze. His throat got tight and he clenched the armrests until he could talk without shaking. "Right, okay," he said, climbing to his feet. "Come here."

He stepped over to where Sam's records were taped to the walls. "These," he said, "are all the people we're going to save."

There were hundreds of names there, and thousands more that weren't; people lost to monsters before he and Sam caught the case, or to the Croatoan virus or demon deals or Leviathans or whatever. So many people.

Cas just shrugged. "We're going to need a plan," he said, reading over the lines, "some sort of strategy. Every change we make in the past is going to have a ripple effect. We'll have to be careful."

"Then grab a beer, buddy. We've got work to do."

Chapter Text

They were making good time back from Jericho. Sam knew he wouldn't be getting much sleep before the interview, but he'd make it, and for now Dean had picked a song they both liked, and there were worse places to be than driving through Palo Alto in their faithful old car, singing along loud enough to get glares at every traffic light.

His phone rang: Caller ID said Jess. He reached over to turn the music down as he put it to his ear; Dean tried to scowl at him, but a grin kept poking through. "That your hot girlfriend?" He waggled his eyebrows.

"Hey Jess," said Sam, cheerfully giving his brother the finger. "We're about ten, twenty minutes out–"

"Get your ass back here NOW."

He lurched forward in his seat. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"Brady went crazy. He did stuff – I don't know how, he just came at me–" Her breath rattled as she sucked it in, and he could hear the tears she was forcing down. She was terrified.

Jess did not scare easy.

"Are you okay? What happened?" demanded Sam. Beside him, Dean tensed, flipped off the music and stomped on the gas.

She sniffed loudly, amplified by the phone. "He tried to kill me. He just flicked his wrist and I got thrown into the wall. He didn't even touch me!" she shrieked.

"It's okay, it's okay, we're coming," said Sam. "Just keep talking. Where is he now?"

"Here. Knocked out." Her voice was shaky, but she was holding together. "Sam, is Dean with you?"

Confused, he turned to his brother. "Yeah, he's right here."

"He's here too."

Sam's guts went cold. "Jess, listen to me," he said, fighting to stay calm. "Whatever's there with you, it's dangerous. Get out right now."

Dean ran a red light.

"They said Brady's a demon," Jess went on. She was rambling. Hysteria. Shit. "Said they came to save me, they said they're from the fucking future!"

"We're coming," he swore. "We're coming. Just– stay on the line, okay? Can you do that?"

Jess was quiet for a second; she forgot people couldn't see her nod through the phone. "Just hurry."

Sam felt his eyes burn as fear clawed its way through his chest. Should've stayed, should've stayed, stupid stupid STUPID– He peeled the phone from his ear long enough to put it on loudspeaker and force himself to think.

"Okay, Jess, I've got to know what we're walking into. The thing that looks like Dean, what does it want?"

"What the fuck?" said Dean. "What the fuck looks like–?"

"Dean? You are there." She sounded numb, like hearing him was both reassuring and scaring her more.

"Yeah, I'm here, sweetheart. We're coming. Five minutes, tops. We'll get these sons of bitches for you, you'll be all right."

"He said you'd say that. He said he's 'sort of' you and he says– He says bring a silver knife and he'll prove it?"

Sam braced his arm against the roof as Dean took them around a corner fast enough to skid. Their eyes met: A shapeshifter? Stupid enough to dare them to bring silver?

It wasn't like they had a choice.

"What's happening now? What's it doing?"

"They're sitting. Waiting. For you."

"Oh, this is going to end well," Dean muttered.

Dean braked as hard as he could without screeching and they tried not to slam doors as they climbed out of the Impala. Sam was keeping up a steady stream of comforting words for Jess as they went, barely even hearing himself anymore. He thumbed the phone back to handset while Dean opened the trunk and started digging around for a silver knife. Maybe he had silver bullets somewhere in there, Sam didn't know; he just grabbed the first pistol he saw, vaguely planning to bluff or at least hurt it with normal rounds, and ran. He heard Dean swearing as he followed.

"Okay, Jess, we're here," he said. "Now I need to know some stuff without them knowing you're telling me, so we can surprise them. We've gotta keep control of the situation, so try for yes or no. Is the front door open?"

"No."

He pointed Dean to the stairs and nodded; they cat-footed it up the to the hallway. "Is it locked?"

"Yes."

"Chained?"

"No."

Sam clamped the phone between his chin and shoulder and fished out his keys. "When we come in, will they be facing us?" he whispered.

She paused, then said, "Can't see. Wall."

Sam grimaced. The front door opened to a little foyer and the kitchen, with the living room and bedroom off to the side. If the intruders couldn't see him and Dean coming in it'd be be because they were in one of those rooms and a wall was blocking the view, and they'd hear him and Dean coming before they could get a sightline, let alone get close enough with Dean's knife. He quietly slid the key into the lock, stopping it just before it would have clicked. "Jess, listen, we're coming in. When I count to three, I want you to duck and roll out of their line of fire and stay down until we can get their guns off them. Oka–?"

"They don't."

He held up his gun hand in front of Dean. "What do you mean?"

"I've got it."

Dean mouthed "what?" impatiently and Sam shook his head, puzzled. "Are they armed? Can they hurt or grab you from where they are now?"

"No. And no."

Dumbfounded, Sam shrugged. "Okay," he said, and turned the key.

They burst in.

Jess was okay: She was standing at the door to the living room, cell phone in one hand and a gun in the other. The belt of her bathrobe was trailing on the floor. Sam flew to her, his Taurus at the ready, throwing himself between her and whatever had invaded their house. Dean was right beside him.

He was also on the living room couch.

Calmly, the fake Dean raised both empty hands and said, "About time, Sammy."

Dean, the real Dean, took point and stepped into the living room, never taking his eyes off his doppelganger and keeping far enough back to shoot first if anyone moved. He nodded once, tightly, and Sam's panic turned down a few notches. His brother had it covered.

Stepping back from the doorway and out of sight, Sam clamped his arms around Jess, grateful beyond words to feel her breathing under him. "You okay? Are you okay?" he asked into her hair, and when she shook her head he stepped back to hold her shoulder and cup her cheek and really look at her. "Jess? Jess, God, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."

Her eyes were red and her shoulders were trembling and she was breathing the deep slow breaths of someone forcing panic down, but she nodded. "I'm okay," she lied, nodding tightly. Then, quieter, she said, "I'll be okay," but she didn't let go of the gun.

(Jess didn't own a gun. Never had. And this one – this was a .45 Colt MK IV with ivory grips, exactly like the one Dean was holding. Exactly.)

Sam frowned and moved back to the living room, gun at the ready, and studied the scene.

Their coffee table had been shoved against a wall and a kitchen chair was in the middle of the room; Brady was on it, tied to it, wearing handcuffs with his chin on his chest, out cold. A chalk circle surrounded him, mirrored on the roof like a burger bun, and at a glance Sam recognised one or two of of the symbols in the pentagram. Whoever these guys were, they knew lore.

And yeah, they. Sam didn't recognise the other one (black hair and tan coat, sitting straight up with his hands on his knees, totally calm), but they were both sitting there like it was a dentist's waiting room, unarmed, just watching patiently.

Almost. The one imitating Dean was looking at him weird, like... something sad and distant and soft, and as soon as he noticed Sam watching it vanished. He smirked at them, looking bored, and said, "So we gonna do the knife trick or what?"

Dean scowled and nudged his weapon at the shapeshifter, finger tight on the trigger. He probably had silver bullets. Probably. "What are you? What do you want?"

The Dean on the couch raised his eyebrows in the patented Winchester look of You're an idiot. "I heard her tell you," he said, and his voice was way different from Dean's, lower and rougher. Tired. "I'm you. Twelve years older. We came back to now because the way I remember this night," he said, looking straight at Jess, sincere and sorry, "you died. If we hadn't done what we did just now, you'd have died again, and for all the crap Sam's going to give me about not dragging you into this crazy, there wasn't any other way to save you."

Into the silence he added, dryly, "You're welcome."

Jess didn't reply. Her free hand strayed to the front of her nightgown and, glancing down, Sam suddenly saw the bright red slash across her front. "Jesus," he breathed, crouching down to stem the bloodflow– but there was nothing to stop. Her skin was intact, it was just a... a stain, new and wet and leaving smears on her ribs under the torn fabric. He looked up to see Jess shaking her head.

"I don't know what happened," she said tightly, anger at her confusion seeping out between her fear. "I don't get it. Brady stabbed me – he fucking stabbed me – but he didn't use a knife and I still felt it inside me. It scraped my ribs," she said, and her voice was locking up again, tight with frustration and confusion and buried panic that tore his heart out. "I heard it, Sam, I don't understand, I thought I was dying."

"You were," said the other guy, the one in the tan coat, watching them quietly. He paused, then added, so deadpan it was sincere: "You're welcome."

Jess whirled on him, eyes narrowed in that dangerous way she had when a professor gave her a vague or useless answer, a familiar flare up that was almost comforting to see right now. "And how exactly did you do that?" she demanded. "All you did was touch my head," she gestured, tapping her forehead, forgetting for a second that she was holding a gun that was cocked and probably loaded; Sam scrambled to slide it out of her hand. She let him, rounding back on the coat guy with a stabbing finger that was just as threatening. "I was stuck, not blind: I saw what happened. You didn't even blink when you saw me up there." She flicked her hand vaguely up. "You weren't surprised. You had to know how he did it, you knew how to get me down!"

"Whoa, what?" said Dean, jerking his head round to look at her. "You were on the ceiling?" He looked at the gash on her nightgown. "Like that?"

"Brady stuck me up there like glue. He didn't even touch me. How the fuck is that possible?"

On the ceiling, cut open– Sam felt winded. "Jess..."

"You know something, Sam, and you're going to tell me right now."

"Give them a break, sweetheart," the Dean on the couch said. "This is blowing their minds too."

"And YOU." She turned on him like a viper. "Who the hell do you think you are, saying you're from the future? Who the fuck does that? What do you want?"

She was in his face, punctuating every question with a finger jabbed in his chest– too close. Ice dropped into Sam's stomach and he pulled her back by the shoulders. "Don't get near it."

"It? Answers, Sam, now."

"They think I'm a monster," said the Dean on the couch, rolling up his sleeve. "Shapeshifter." He looked at Dean and said, "Can we get this over with?"

Sam shared a glance with his brother. There were still two of these guys and no way to get close enough without the risk of being jumped. Not to mention they'd have to put a weapon in the thing's reach to test it. Dean flicked his eyes to Jess and down, to her hands, and Sam nodded grimly. There wasn't much choice.

"Jess, can you cover him?" he said, offering her the gun back. (Definitely the same make as Dean's pistol, and he could feel a familiar scratch that messed up the left etching. Couldn't think about that now.) "I got this side."

She hesitated, then took it. She recocked the pistol carefully, nodding to herself as she checked to make sure she was doing it right. Sam left her at the doorway and took two steps sideways to cover Dean's right. Dean slowly tucked his gun in the back of his waistband, never taking his eyes off the shifter as he stepped up, knife in hand.

It drew blood. No sizzle, no smoke, no screaming. Not even a wince. "You satisfied?"

"No," said Dean, taking his gun out again, but Sam could hear he was shaken. Sam wasn't feeling all that sure himself.

"That was definitely silver, right?" he asked under his breath.

"I'm not an idiot, Sam! Of course it was silver."

"What's the significance of silver?" asked Jess.

Sam winced. No, no, please no. She wasn't supposed to get mixed up in this, she was supposed to be normal, happy, safe– "Jess... just let us figure this out, please."

She frowned, opened her mouth to argue–

"Silver is toxic to all shape-shifting monsters and reanimated corpses," the guy in the coat said evenly. "If Dean were a shapeshifter, the blade would have burned him."

Jess scowled. "Yeah, thanks, that clears everything up."

Dean had stepped back, examining the silver blade and the blood on it. The Dean on the couch was pressing down on his cut with a cloth. "Smells human," he said, looking at Sam, shrugging tightly.

"You want more proof? Okay," said the other Dean, irritated. "Rhonda Hurley, '98, pink satin, kinda liked it."

Dean choked, flushing red from neck up.

"And Sammy?" said the other Dean, looking at him. "You've been dreaming about Jess dying for days now."

Guilt hit Sam like a gut punch. He tried to keep it off his face, but the other Dean, watching him intently, suddenly softened. "It's not your fault either," he said quietly. "They'd have done it anyway. You couldn't have stopped them."

Sam said nothing.

The fake (fake?) Dean stood up slowly. He wasn't any taller than the real Dean, and Sam looked just slightly down at him, just like he did to his brother, but this other Dean, he felt bigger somehow. And he was definitely older – he looked older. Could a shapeshifter change those sorts of details? They'd never run into one with Dad but from what he'd read Sam thought they always took on the exact look of their victims.

If there were victims here. They hadn't hurt Jess.

"So, we good?" the other Dean asked. "You done being sceptics or do I need to pull out some more deep dark secrets?"

Still keeping his pistol up, Sam shared a glance with Dean, who shrugged slightly, jaw tense: Whatever this Rhonda thing was, he hadn't shared it. This guy– thing– shouldn't know.

But time travel? Really?

The other Dean sighed. "It's like you grew up with soccer moms," he muttered, throwing his hands up. "What's it going to take for you to believe me?"

"Oh, I don't know," Dean mocked him. "How 'bout you show us your DeLorean?"

He shrugged. "Okay. Cas?"

The other guy – Cas – chuckled. Jess's eyebrows went up and both Deans looked at him funny, and when he noticed he said, "I understood that reference." The other Dean rolled his eyes.

Sam tensed as 'Cas' stood up, hesitating a second before turning to aim his Taurus at him; Dean and Jess had the other Dean covered. 'Cas' glanced at the gun for a second before his eyes flicked back to Sam's face, dismissing the threat. It was an intense stare. Had he been looking at them like that the whole time?

Whatever he was looking for, he didn't find it. He shifted his eyes to the other Dean, who lifted the cloth off his bleeding arm. "Help me out here, would you?"

'Cas' sighed, reached up and touched his Dean on the forehead. He stepped back again and Sam was about to call his bluff when Jess swore, "Mother Mary..."

The other Dean lifted his arm, completely healed, and showed it around like it was a fake ID he was sick of having to hand out to prove his age. "Happy now?"

Blood was still smeared on his skin, but the cut was definitely gone.

Dean swung his gun on the other guy. "What are you?"

He tilted his head, a small fond smile on his mouth. "My name is Castiel. I'm an angel."

"Bullshit," said Dean. Sam's eyes widened.

Jess was the one who laughed – tight and nervously, but laughed. "You're not an angel," she said, wary. "You... can't be."

Castiel gestured left, to the painting Jess had finished a few weeks ago, a crucifix in swirling abstracts. She'd based it on the necklace her mother gave her for her birthday, the one she never wore but left hanging on her bedside lamp. "You believe," Castiel said. "You've read the Bible; you know angels are soldiers for God."

Dean snorted. "Yeah, quit the sermon there, Father. God isn't real."

"Oh, he is," the other Dean said darkly. "He just doesn't give a shit. Cas, we don't have time for this. You want to just show them?"

"No." Castiel frowned and looked at his Dean. "And I still don't see why you asked me to. It took far more than that for you to believe me when we first met."

"It's a start, man. We don't exactly have the same circumstances here."

"That's my point," said Castiel. They locked eyes for another few seconds, then Castiel sighed.

He started glowing. His eyes went bright blue, then white, almost too bright to look at– but he dialled it down, enough not to blind them. Somehow he still cast a shadow on the wall and–

Wings.

Jess sucked in a breath and dropped her gun arm. "Oh Lord."

Broken wings. Thin, skeletal, with outlines of feathers in uneven clumps, one of them twisted at an awkward angle. What the hell?

Power sizzled in the air, raw and sharp and static, making their skin rise in goosebumps and hair stand on end. Knickknacks rattled on the shelves. The table lamp sparked. Left empty on the coffee table, a glass shattered.

Suddenly the light faded, sucked back in and wrapped up under skin. Castiel shifted uncomfortably under their stares. "I will replace your glass," he promised.

Dean shoved his gun in Castiel's face. "What the hell?"

"Heaven, more accurately."

"Can we be done with this little show and tell now?" the other Dean said irritably. "Cas is an angel, angels can jump through time, that's how we're here. Yeah, I know," he said, pointing at Dean: "No such thing, why hasn't any hunter ever seen one? That's what I said last time. Then Sam went on about how maybe for once all this supernatural crap turned out a good guy, and you know? That one's true. Cas is a good guy. But the rest of the angels, they're dicks."

"Hey!" snapped Jess.

"Unfortunately he's right, my brothers can't be trusted," said Castiel, and Dean (the real Dean) snorted.

"Yeah, 'course they can't. They're off conspiring with leprechauns and vampires," he sneered, but when he glanced at Sam, he looked worried.

Sam wanted, really wanted, to believe it, but he couldn't quite lower his gun either. His throat felt dry. "You said Jess died."

"A lot of people died," the other Dean said. "Most of them horribly. You were the first," he told Jess softly. "We didn't get back here in time. And it... it wrecked Sammy. He was never the same again."

Sam felt sick. His hands shook. Jess glanced at him, heart cracking a little in her eyes, and squeezed his arm. Then she turned back and nodded once, sharply. "Well, in that case, thanks," she said. She turned to the angel (angel), dipped her head respectfully, kind of awkwardly (angel, wow, of course she was awkward. She'd prayed to angels every day of her life), and said, "Castiel, right? Thank you. For saving me. I... kind of like being alive."

Beside them, Dean chuckled, and Dean – his Dean, younger Dean – slowly lowered his gun. Belatedly, Sam did the same, blinking.

Castiel smiled at her. "Sam told me about you once. He said I would have liked you. I think he was right."

Dean was still frowning, and gestured at them with his pistol. "So why didn't Sammy come back with you? Only room for one on Angel Air?"

The other Dean sobered. It was like a lightswitch. His face fell and every line deepened. For several long seconds, he didn't say anything.

"Well? Why didn't I?"

The other Dean looked at him, that same sad and soft and distant look, and Sam finally pinned it down: Nostalgia. Grief. Longing. What the hell had happened?

"Think about it, Sammy," he said quietly. "Twelve years. Jess died here, exactly like Mom did, and you blamed yourself. We found out what did it, spent years hunting them down, but you never got her back. You barely talked about her. Every time her name came up, you got all quiet again. I saw you crying sometimes. For twelve years. You really think you could've come back here, saved the day, then watched her and You Junior keep going through life all happy without you?"

Sam dropped his eyes. His stomach churned.

Jess's warm hand slid into his. She squeezed it, all sorts of promises in her face, and Sam finally stowed his gun. He looked at Dean, nodding slowly. These guys – their story was straight. Okay, the angel thing, that was huge, but with all the bad in the world there had to be some...

Huh. That's what this Dean had said his future self had said, wasn't it? That there had to be some good to balance out all the crap. For once, a good guy, making good things happen. Saving Jess. Sam hadn't known he would think that; the thought jumped into his head on its own. No way a monster could've known he'd think that before he did.

Dean still looked sceptical, but he tucked his gun away too. Jess, seeing that, picked up the mystery gun and studied it, eyes flicking up to the other Dean. Slowly, she offered it to him barrel first, frowning suspiciously. "You did it on purpose, didn't you?" she said.

"Did what?" asked Dean (his Dean, that is. Man, this was going to be annoying). The other Dean's lips twitched.

"He left this on the table after he finished tying up Brady," replied Jess, keeping her eyes on the other Dean. "Right where I could grab it. Then they both turned their backs for no reason. Really convenient."

The other Dean shrugged as he took his gun back. "Figured you'd feel safer that way."

"Is it even loaded?"

"Yep."

She blinked. "Okay. That's a pretty big risk you took there. ...But, he can heal you," she reasoned, pointing to Castiel. "So you– You wanted me to call Sam, didn't you?"

A proud little smile spread across Dean's face. "Yep."

"You wanted us to know," Sam reasoned, looking around. "You didn't get caught, you set this up so you could tell us your story."

That smile turned into a full-blown smirk. "Yep."

"Why?" asked Jess.

The smirk faded and he looked at her, dead serious. "Because saving your life isn't as simple as stopping this one thing. They're going to try again, and you need to know what you're up against or they are going to get you; we can't be there every second to stop 'em."

He took a step away from the couch, towards the kitchen chair and the chalk circles and the unconscious body Sam had been trying really hard not to think about. "And maybe, if we're lucky," Dean said, "we can save your friend, too."

Chapter Text

So this thing was called a Devil's Trap, and it locked up demons. Turned off their powers. Pretty neat, Dean admitted grudgingly, and tried to memorise some of the symbols his creepy old double was chalking into the pentagrams. The demon (or, the body of the poor guy it was in; 'meatsuit' they'd called him, who came up with that crap?) was still out cold, and now that he knew what to look for Dean could see devil's traps engraved on the handcuffs holding his arms behind the chair.

Behind him the front door opened, closed, locks clicked, and the angel came back in. "It's done," he said. "No one in the area will wake for anything less than an earthquake until morning."

"Thanks, man. Almost done here," said the old guy, taking the lockpicks Castiel offered and tossing them in his duffle bag.

Sam, sitting on the couch with Jess, cut off his breadbox edition of Hunting 101 to turn to them, frowning. "Done with what?"

Castiel glanced at his Dean. "Dean is going to exorcise the demon and make sure it believes that you and your brother were the ones to capture it – without any help."

Dean bristled. "Who cares what it thinks?"

All annoying and patient, Castiel said, "At the moment we know what the demons are planning, and where and when they're going to act. It's a significant tactical advantage. If we raise their suspicions they could alter their plans before we can use it against them."

Sam turned to him. "You make it sound like a war."

"It is."

Dean snorted. Angels must be some major drama queens.

But Dean's creepy older double didn't even react, let alone make fun of him, just climbed down from the chair, clapping the chalk off his hands and careful not to smudge the floor symbols as he took the spare chair away. "And this time," he said instead, grinning and still somehow grim, "we're going to win. Those sons of bitches are going to regret coming after our family."

Family? Dean jerked round and caught Sam's eye. "This is the thing that killed Mom?" he demanded. "Why didn't you tell us?"

Other Dean blinked. "Forgot you didn't know." He shook his head. "No, this guy's just a lackey," he jabbed the demon in Sam's friend with a toe. "His boss is the one that killed Mom."

Dean straightened up. "Okay, so he's the bait. What do we do?"

Future him ignored the question. He said, to Sam and Jess, "Pack."

Jess blinked. "Excuse me?"

Sam said, "No–"

"We've got to get you out of town before they–" Dean jabbed a thumb at the demon "–come back to finish the job. You got a few days, tops, so figure out a cover story."

"Are you kidding?" demanded Jess, storming up and barely remembering to not step on the chalk. "We can't just drop everything and leave! I am not risking my career–"

"They'll kill you, you get that?" other Dean said.

"I'm not going to be scared off by some horror story," she snapped, folding her arms at him. "Sam?"

Sam hesitated, but stood behind her. Dean caught his eyes, and Sam didn't quite meet his. "If they come again, we'll stop them," he said instead to future Dean. "You obviously know how; you'll teach us. We'll be fine."

"Did you miss the part where we're at war?" Castiel asked flatly. "They will come for you. Not just one demon infiltrating your life as a spy, but hundreds. This is bigger than you know."

Future Dean didn't quite roll his eyes as he put the chalk away, but it was close (so angels were drama queens, huh? Great). "You got family, Jess?" he said instead. "They'll kill them too. They'll peel their eyeballs and put their heads on stakes just to get to you. And they'll laugh the whole time."

Dean's guts twisted. Jess went pale, but she held herself steady, watching him with narrow eyes, and if she was anything like Sam it meant she was analysing every bit of intel she had. Which? Wasn't much. She looked at Sam, and then at Dean, searching for data. "Is that true?"

Shit, how should he know? Dean shrugged stiffly, looking at Sam so he could take it, but his brother just looked lost. And dude, fair enough. Dean didn't know how to handle this. "With what we know about demons..." he said "...yeah, pretty much."

Jess looked from him to future Dean. "And if we go with you?"

"They probably won't even check to see if you're really dead," he said.

Her eyes flashed furiously, but the insult faded fast and shit, Dean knew that look: It was the same look people got when he and Dad told them yeah, the ghost of your dead kid is trying to kill you because you're the last thing it remembers seeing when it drowned. Your life's never going to be the same again. Great news, makes everyone's day.

Sam looked gutted. "God, Jess, I'm sorry, I never wanted this to touch you."

She closed her eyes, shook her head, stepped away from him. "You wanted out," she said. "You wanted normal. That's why you were always– God, always going on about 'normal'."

Sam hung his head. "I'm sorry. It's all my fault."

Dean opened his mouth, to make a crack, to say something–

"Hey, if it makes you feel any better," his double said, lifting a plastic milk jug full of water out of his bag, "blame him." He pointed at the demon. "The only reason it introduced you two was so it could use Jess to hurt you later. It picked her, not you. It's not your fault."

Hell, that guy sucked at comforting. Sam jerked. "He's been possessed that long?"

"Poor bastard," Dean murmured.

"Yeah, this isn't going to be pretty," said other Dean. "But it's going to wake up soon, so if you don't mind...?" He waved at them impatiently, gesturing to the door.

Jess planted her feet instead. "I want to do the exorcism."

"Sorry, sweetheart," other Dean said. "That demon thinks he killed you, or close enough. If it sees you standing before we send its ass back to Hell, it's going to start asking questions we really don't want it asking."

Her jaw clenched, but after a second more, partly glaring and partly glancing worriedly at her friend, she stalked off to the kitchen. Sammy hesitated.

"He's my friend, I can't–" He shook his head. "They did this because of me. I should be here; I need to help him."

"Yeah, but cover story, Sam," said other Dean, irritated. "If it really was you and me who got here in time you'd be halfway to the hospital with Jess by now. You guys have got to stay out of sight, get ready to go, and stay quiet. I'll take care of this. Okay?"

Castiel touched Sam's shoulder and, half a staring contest later, herded him out. Dean rocked forward on his toes. "What am I supposed to do?" he asked.

Other Dean shrugged. "I dunno."

He turned his back and opened a bag of salt next to the water jug. Through the plastic, Dean could see beads in the water. He looked at Brady, then at the water. Was he seriously...?

"Dean," the angel said, from behind him, and Dean turned, realised the guy probably meant– No, he meant him. Okay.

"What?"

Castiel gestured to the kitchen. "I need your help. We need to make sure none of you can be tracked by supernatural means."

Tracked? Dean frowned and followed him. Sam and Jess were only just through the door, all full of apologies and comforting hugs, but they must've heard; they were looking up as he and Castiel came in. "How could they track us?" asked Dean.

Castiel reached out to Sam and Jess and pushed the tips of all his fingers into each of their chests; they groaned and crumpled, and Dean flew forward (fucking TRAP–tricked us–what the HELL)– and the freakin' angel swung round and got him too before he could land one punch.

It felt like huge fingernails scraping through a chalkboard in his chest. It hurt, knocked the wind right out of him; he grabbed the back of a chair and doubled over it.

Weakly, Sam demanded, "What did you do?"

"I carved Enochian sigils into your ribs," Castiel said gently. "At the moment the forces of Hell think they know where you're going and Heaven has lost track of you and your brother..." he paused. "Or, most of them have been told they have. It doesn't matter. No one can track you now; not demons, or angels."

The pain was fading, but not fast. Dean put on some extra winces for effect as he lowered himself into the chair. "Ribs, man, really? Couldn't you have drawn it in crayon or something?"

"That would wash off."

Footsteps thumped in the other room and other Dean appeared in the door, glared at them, and pressed a finger to his lips. He closed the door behind him and they could hear him walking back to the devil's trap. "Rise and shine, Sleeping Ugly!" he called.

Jess shuffled in her chair, groaning but keeping it quiet, and opened one of the kitchen drawers, feeling around until she yanked out a pack of tylenol. Castiel at least had some kind of sympathy for human pain, because he went to the sink to get them a glass of water (and did it totally freakin' silently, who the fuck could do that?). They split the pills.

"You'll also need tattoos," Castiel said, whisper quiet. He took a pen and a sheet of paper from what was obviously the scrap pile, a messy stack of printer paper with ink streaks on the down side, and drew a pentagon in a weird flame circle – Sam's eyes lit right up, something must be significant there – and Castiel pulled his collar sideways to show one inked under his neck. "They will prevent your bodies from being possessed by demons." He paused, then added helpfully, "Angels can't take a vessel without consent. If you never say yes, you'll be fine. Don't believe any arguments they make to convince you."

Dean had already whirled around and barely remembered to whisper, "You're possessing some poor bastard?"

Castiel made the guy – the 'meatsuit' – he was wearing shake its head. "I am the only one in this body now. But," he added reluctantly, "sooner or later my past self will undoubtedly try to find our vessel again. I will need to stop him."

Jess drained the last of the water and frowned, fiddling with her cross again. "He won't be on our side too?"

Castiel looked embarrassed. "I was... less wilful, in this time. Angels are, with few exceptions, unquestioningly obedient." He nodded at Dean and Sam. "You taught me otherwise."

Through the wall, the guy he really meant said, "Why don't we start start with what the hell you did to Jess, you bastard!"

The voice that replied was smarmy and cold – "What, you didn't like my little party trick? It didn't bring back any memories?" – and both Sam and Jess shuddered. He took her hand.

"I don't get it," said Sam, eyes flicking to the door. "How can angels be bad?"

Carefully, Castiel sat down. He looked at the table. "Some, a rare few, believe that Lucifer was right about humanity. Others have lost sight of our primary mission." He shrugged, the same kind of tired as the other Dean. "I hope to remind them."

Something slammed down hard. "What'd you do to our Mom? Why her? Why us?"

The demon laughed. "Why not?"

Sam tensed up and Jess started to stand– Dean took her arm to hold her back, and when she turned on him he made himself shrug casually. How else were you going to get information out of a demon, right? Couldn't take them out for coffee or anything. His older self seemed like a pro at this, and Dean felt kind of proud that he was such a badass.

(The real Brady was sleeping through it. Other Dean wasn't hurting him. Right?)

There was a splat and the demon hissed in pain. "What, you don't like holy water?"

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. "You can heal him?" he pleaded.

"Any injury, as long as he's alive," said Castiel. "It will be okay, Sam."

Sam grimaced and tore his eyes away from the door, leaned his elbows on the table, focused on it. "We do need a cover story."

Jess folded her arms tightly, jaw tense and refusing to look at Castiel. "Family emergency seems pretty accurate right now," she muttered.

"For me, yeah, but they can check with your family," said Sam. "What will we say about you?"

Bitterly, she replied, "I'm a supportive girlfriend."

Sam reached for her, probably to hug, went still, then aborted, easing away from her. "Okay. But that's only going to buy us a few weeks, maybe. How long's this going to go on?"

"Possibly the rest of your lives," said Castiel. "But we hope to manoeuvre the demons into a vulnerable position within the next year. The... 'main event' is not scheduled for another five years, but our interference could change that."

Jess looked up, despair starting to creep into her rage. "Years?"

"We can take one year off, maybe two–"

Dean said, "Tell them Dad's sick."

Sam and Jess looked at him, and he shrugged. Made sense, didn't it? "Tell them Dad's got some awful incurable disease and take off like you think he's about to kick it, then call next week and say he's stable, don't know how long that'll last, that sort of thing. Could keep it bouncing back and forth for months. Nothing suspicious about a devoted son taking care of his father."

Sam scoffed. "Yeah, no one here's going to believe that."

Dean grimaced and tried not to look betrayed. He had a feeling the angel saw it anyway. But not Sam, no – of course not.

"We'll find a way to kill you, you son of a bitch," other him was saying. "You killed our mom, you might've killed Jess; you really think we're gonna take that lying down?"

You could practically hear the grin in the demon's voice when it said, "I think you can't do jack shit."

Splash. Sizzle. Groan.

"I can send your ass back to Hell. And when you get there, tell them the Winchesters are coming. And you're all gonna die."

"Oh, the Winchesters!" it mocked. "All you've got is holy water and salt. You really think you can hurt us?"

"I dunno," said Dean lightly. "What if I shove it down your throat?"

There was a weird sound and then, unmistakably, choking and a muffled coughing scream. Sam jumped in his seat and the wooden chair scraped on the floor – loudly. Dean froze, eyes flicking around, but they all had the same look on their faces: That was too loud. Shit.

The other room was silent for a second. Then, through the choking: laughter, and sputtering, spitting sounds. "Why don't you invite your friends in, Dean?"

"What friends?"

The demon's voice was rough now but it still managed to put don't take this shit with me in its tone. "You think I wasn't tracking Sam all this time, dumbass? He wasn't here when you got the drop on me. So why would you say he was? Loudly? Twice?"

Castiel was standing now, standing facing the door like he could see right through it. Maybe Superman had x-ray vision. Dean quietly stood up too, tense and ready for a fight.

In the living room, his other self tried to sound annoyed and not worried. "What the hell are you on about?"

"Oh, Dean. You really thought you could pass for twenty-five?"

Castiel called it, shook his head, opened the door. The rest of them were still out of sight around the corner, so Dean could only see him meet the other guy's eyes, wait, then nod. He stepped back and gestured for the three of them to go out.

The demon's back was to them, with other Dean on the far side of the room, and they edged around the circle one at a time, Sam and Jess in the lead, avoiding the spots where holy water was puddling and smearing the chalk. So that's why it was mirrored on the ceiling. Okay.

Dean studied the ceiling professionally, ignoring the demon. He knew what it would look like–

He heard Sam suck in a breath, and turned.

Brady looked awful. There were burns all over his head and chest and hands, puckered pink boils and raw red in some places, but way worse was his mouth, minced and bleeding from where the salt tore up his lips and throat. He was grinning with red teeth.

"Hiya, Sammy."

Sam looked ready to puke. Jess was covering her mouth, tears spilling out onto her hands.

Then the demon caught sight of Dean, and looked at his future self, and Dean could see him starting to put the pieces together. "Huh. Aren't you interes–"

"Cas?"

Castiel stepped up from behind the trap, into its view, and the demon panicked. It threw itself back into its chair, terror on its face, kicking at the ropes around its legs like maybe it could break a Winchester knot. "Fuck you, fucking angels, fu–"

"Not interested," said Castiel, and tapped the demon's forehead. It kept yelling, mouth moving, but no sound came out.

Future Dean sighed and closed the bottle of holy water. "Well, crap."

And Dean suddenly got angry, because fuck, look at Sammy's face: This was his friend, okay? "Yeah, great job with the master plan there, Xanatos," he sneered. "Now what're you going to do?"

He shrugged. "Kill it. You guys get your story sorted?"

Sammy couldn't take his eyes off Brady. Puzzled, hollow, he said, "Yeah. Why?"

"Those few days I talked about? Forget it. Soon as this guy doesn't check in his boss'll come looking, and we aren't prepped for that. We leave tomorrow."

Jess jerked, a whole body sort of thing like she'd been zapped by too much power, too much everything, and Dean looked away but his chest ached a bit. Sam shouldn't have come to Stanford in the first place, that was on him, but Jess – she never did anything.

But Sam looked pretty rotten too. He couldn't look at Jess or Brady without looking ready to hurl.

Brady– the demon in Brady was talking at them, mouthing words intently and staring right into their eyes, trying desperately to say something. Sam shook his head. "I don't understand."

Castiel looked at future Dean, who shrugged. "No one can hear," he said, and Castiel (why would an angel wait for permission, anyway?) stepped in to give Brady back his voice.

"Jess, please, you've got to help me! Please, it's me, the demon's gone, they're going to kill m–!"

Castiel muted him, but too late: Jess was crying again, fat wet tears on both cheeks, breathing too fast and hard and losing her grip. Sam had turned away, eyes squeezed shut and covering his ears. Dean felt lost, flailing. That... that sounded so human. What if this trap had exorcising properties or something? That was possible, right? Sigils for no-tracking and tats for no possession, there had to be something for automatic exorcism.

But his older self was totally unmoved. Castiel too. Cold bastards.

Future him turned his back and fished out some kind of jagged dagger with a wooden grip and engravings on the blade. He showed it to the angel, keeping it out of Brady's sight, and said quietly, "Bobby survived this. Think it'll work here?"

"If we're very careful," said Castiel. "All the symbols need to be in contact with possessed flesh to work. There are only so many parts of the body deep enough to take it without causing instant death."

"What about your sword? It's thinner."

Castiel shook his head. "It's the equivalent of smiting, it will destroy everything."

Dean considered, then offered him the knife. "You've, uh, you've got better aim than me."

"Hey!"

Wiping off her tears, Jess stormed around behind them and right in other Dean's face. "You said you'd save him," she growled, and grabbed the wrist with the knife in, trying to wrestle it away: She didn't have a chance, he wasn't taller but he was way stronger, but she tried anyway, clawing at his hand with her nails and kicking at his crotch so he had to twist and dodge.

"Jess–"

"You're not killing Brady! I won't let you, I don't care if it gets away!"

And suddenly he got it, and softened. He didn't let go of the knife, but he brought it between them and held still, looked her straight in the eye.

"We will save him," he said. "I promise. If we have to drag that black-eyed son of a bitch with us until we can figure out a way to kill it without killing your friend, we will. But that thing talking just now? That wasn't him."

Jess kept her eyes on him, barely blinking and nose-to-nose. "I don't know if I believe you," she said. "How can I?"

"I do."

Dean turned. Sam was watching them, a weird, thoughtful look on his face, and he looked between Dean and his double, and smiled a little bit, his I just figured it one. He turned to Jess. "I believe him."

She searched his face. "How can you be sure?"

Sam smiled again and shrugged. "He's my brother."

"Hey!" Dean scowled at him. Sam turned and grinned.

"Him too."

"Yeah, we'll see who's... 'too'," Dean grumbled, hating that the perfect snappy words never came. Sam snorted (jackass) and Jess looked at him, at his older double, then back at him.

Very slowly, she let go off the dagger. "Okay," she said, and took a step back, eyes on other Dean. "Prove them right."

He nodded and handed the dagger to Castiel. He took it, held it upright like this was a duel, and stepped back into the trap.

The demon was fighting again, trying to rip his way out of the handcuffs, bleeding on them, eyes full of hate, but he didn't have a chance: Castiel plunged the dagger into his lower belly, up to the top of the last symbol and no further, surgical precision.

It screamed, totally silent, and lit up from the inside out, red light that showed his skeleton, flickering, shaking as it died–

–and Brady collapsed in the chair.

Sam and Jess threw themselves over the chalk line, kneeling by their friend. Sam held him up and Jess steadied his head, both trying to make eye contact, but Brady was wild-eyed, looking frantically everywhere and probably seeing nothing.

Castiel held on a second longer, then pulled the knife out of Brady's gut and held his fingers to the guy's forehead until all the wounds and burns and the bloody mess of his mouth vanished. Brady was shaking violently, spasming against the ropes and cuffs and breathing so hard–

"He's hyperventilating," Dean said, and pushed Sam aside to crouch and start untying ropes. Other Dean picked up the weird ass dagger and started cutting instead. Freaky thing still had blood on it.

Sam and Jess eased Brady out of the chair and Dean shoved it aside so they could get him on the floor. Other Dean unlocked the cuffs, shook his head and turned around. "Cas, get a blanket. And a pillow!"

Brady finally locked eyes with Jess– and screamed. "NO! Don't hurt her please please don't hurt her– NO! No no no no no no no–"

"Brady, it's okay, it's me, I'm okay!" she said, grabbing his wrists and trying to hold him still. "It's gone, we've got you."

"We can hear you," said Sam, and he shuffled a bit so he could sit in his friend's sight. "Brady, we can hear you. It's gone."

"Oh God– oh God– oh God I'm sorry, Sam, Jess, I'm– oh God–"

He threw up, mostly over Jess, and burst into tears, gasping and shaking. Sam leaned over and kept saying things and Jess hugged him, but he couldn't stop long enough to string two words together. Huge globby streams of snot leaked out of his nose, and Dean looked around for something they could use as a tissue, wiping his hands on his jeans. One of Sam's overshirts was on the edge of the couch; that would do.

Castiel came back with the blanket, took one look at them all, and reached for Brady's head again. One tap and the guy slumped over, breathing slowed down to normal, then slower. "He's asleep now."

Sam looked up at him like he had two heads, then glanced at his brother – both of them. Dean shrugged. Angels, man.

Castiel crouched down on one knee with the blanket and rested his hand on Brady's head. And frowned. "He may not recover from this ordeal quickly."

"No shit," snapped Jess, then froze and looked up guiltily at the angel. "I mean, if that thing possessed him for almost two years–"

"Cas means we can't stick around for months to help him," said other Dean. "We need a quick fix."

"There are no quick fixes for trauma."

Sam took in and let out a deep breath, slow as he could, but his jaw was tight. "You guys have this great big plan. What do you suggest?"

Other Dean looked at Castiel. They locked eyes for a second, then Castiel sighed. "I don't like doing this, Dean."

"You think I like asking?"

He frowned and looked to Sam and Jess. Dean was starting to feel really left out. "I can erase his memories of being possessed," he said slowly. "And if the two of you consent, I can use your recollections of that time to construct replacements so he can believe nothing happened."

(Other Dean looked kinda pale. Sick, even. He turned and started shoving things into his duffle. The salt spilled as he threw it in, and he didn't seem to notice.)

Sam and Jess looked at each other, somewhere between surprised and suspicious, and Dean finally processed what was just said. These dickbags could read minds, too?

Fuck.

Sam grimaced. "Are there any better options?" he asked.

"No."

He looked at Jess. She shook her head miserably. "It's better than amnesia. Or getting committed."

Sam punched the floor, hard. Twice. His knuckles split and he winced. "God... Fine! Fine, yeah, do it."

Castiel crouched beside them and started touching heads. Other Dean got up abruptly and walked away, gesturing to Dean to come with him. "I need your phone," he said as they passed the kitchen door.

Dean held onto it in his pocket. "What the hell, dude?"

The other guy looked confused. "What?"

"You kidding me?" he said, shaking his head. "You couldn't have warned them? Warned me?"

Other Dean, old Dean, future Dean, creepy old guy, whatever; he sighed and rubbed his head. "It wasn't supposed to go this way."

"Yeah, well, it did," said Dean. "Big surprise, plans don't always go as planned. Thought we'd figured that out when Sam left," he spat. "So what about next time?"

Other Dean looked at him, blank and tired. "Next time nobody will be watching," he said. "We'll have more options."

Dean scowled: That wasn't an answer. He held the stare until the other guy relented.

"Look, when they've got that sorted in there, you need to help them pack whatever they'll need and head down to Lawrence–" Dean jerked, hard, and future him held up a hand. "I know, I know, we 'swore we'd never go back'." He shrugged. "Had to. But we've got a safe house in Lebanon; safest place on the planet, nothing evil can get in unless we take 'em. It's the best place to keep everyone safe."

Lebanon, huh? So not Bobby's, but not their old house either. "Then why go to Lawrence at all?"

Other Dean held his hand out for the phone. Grudgingly, Dean handed it over. Future him fumbled as he unlocked it and flicked a thumb over the screen for a second before hitting the scroll button and clicking through the menus. Dean saw him find the contacts list before he punched one last button and held it to his ear.

Dad didn't suddenly answer for him, which was good, or Dean wouldn't have been able to take it. The phone rang out all the way before voicemail came up.

"Dad, it's me," said future Dean. "A demon just tried to burn Sam's girlfriend on the ceiling; cut her open and everything, just like Mom. Meet us in Lawrence in two days. Mom's ghost is still in the house."

Chapter Text

Haley opened the front door and blinked. "Tommy? What are you doing home?"

Tommy scowled and pushed past her into the house, throwing down his camping pack as he stalked to the kitchen. Further down the corridor, Ben popped his head out of his room and caught her eyes, confused. Haley threw up her hands and followed her brother, and found him kicking the fridge door shut and opening a beer.

"What happened to the trip?"

"What do think?" he grumbled, throwing away the cap. "Had to call it off."

"The why is kind of what I'm after. Did Brad get sick again?"

Tommy shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. "No," he sighed. "Rangers cancelled our backcountry permit. Someone started a fire in the old mines and they're not letting anyone go off-trail till it's out. Trip's off 'until further notice'."

Which meant months, probably, until all three of them could sync up time off again, and by then it'd be too cold. Haley rubbed his shoulder. "I'm sorry. But, it's better than burning alive."

Tommy sighed again. "Yeah, I know."

Sheriff Jake Devins had barely opened the door of his squad car before the smell hit. Smoke and burned meat, both to be expected when a human body is found burned in the woods overnight, but there was an undercurrent of something else, something rotted, sick, wet, and he couldn't place it.

"Over here, sir," said one of his deputies, standing a few feet away on a rise, the last one before the earth sloped down to the lake. "Watch your step."

Jake waved her on and followed, covering his mouth to breathe through his sleeve. Through the leaves he could see the roof of Andrea's house, and he shuddered at the thought of some nutjob getting so close to his family.

"Here, sir," said his deputy, edging down to the water and standing well clear of the yellow tape blocking it off. "There are no signs of anyone going into the water for fifty feet either way."

But clear signs of someone coming out: Footprints – a man's dress shoes – strode out of the lake next to a skid mark too small to be a body... an adult body, that is. The prints walked up the slope to the smoking remains of a pyre. Jake followed them, holding his breath.

A few shards of charred bone were left among the ashes; three ribs, part of a skull – child size, all of them. But underneath were the twisted, melted remains of something metal, destroyed more thoroughly than an open wood fire could ever manage in a place this wet. Next to it was a mess of upturned soil, soil that Jake Devins knew for a fact hadn't been moved in thirty-five years.

Peter's red bike was gone.

"Mr Worthington? I'm Lieutenant West. I understand you had a break-in?"

Gerald Worthington opened his door to let the officer inside. "Yes. It was probably yesterday, I was out all day, but possibly today before lunchtime; I don't always go into this room," he said, and took out an old-fashioned key to unlock the matching old door just off the foyer.

Lieutenant West took one step in and raised his brows. "It was like this when you found it?"

Mr Worthington nodded.

A large, antique mirror frame was sitting awkwardly against one wall, shattered glass sprayed in front of it, over the carpet and the other things stored in the room. And all over that, blood. Lots of blood.

"No one was home," said Mr Worthington. "It must have been the thieves. They must have fought each other over the mirror."

West nodded slowly, studying the scene. "Was there anything special about the mirror?" he asked, crouching down and careful not to touch any of the glass shards. "Any reason someone might fight over it?"

Mr Worthington stiffened. "I was going to sell it."

Reverend Sorenson stepped up to the pulpit with dignity befitting a churchman. He held his head high, thought only of God, and rehearsed his sermon one more time to make sure it was as gentle yet firm as his parishioners deserved.

What came out instead was: "Theft is a terrible sin! And, worse, to desecrate the house of God – and the house of a neighbour! – these are things which God frowns on most severely."

In the pews, Lori groaned and sank down into her seat.

"Objects which have been placed in the care of the church and its caretakers are cherished, valued symbols of church history. Pranks are dangerous, childish displays of disrespect and cannot be tolerated..."

It had to be a prank of some sort. He was certain of it. Those college children, no doubt. Why else would the thieves light the furnace, then leave? Why take all their silver, and nothing else?

Sam kept sneaking looks at Jess in the rearview mirror. Not sexy looks, either; worried ones. She was crammed up between their baggage and the window, staring out like she had been since they left Palo Alto, arms folded and jaw tight, but once or twice Dean was sure he'd seen a few tears slip out before she scrubbed them off.

Didn't blame her, really. He got the whole shock thing, getting your whole life ruined in one night, and yeah, it'd been pretty damn creepy seeing Brady wake up from that weird angel coma thing and act like nothing had happened. Dean even got chatting with him for a while about baseball and they were laughing before he remembered he was supposed to be worried sick about Dad being in hospital. Jess had stared every time she passed the living room door with another packed bag, and before they left Brady had pulled her into a hug and tried to make her laugh by jabbing her ribs and tickling her: Jess had gone white, jumped back, and hadn't talked since, and as long as Jess was upset, Sam was upset. Between them the car was like a cemetery.

But Sam was back, back in the car, back in the game, ready to hunt and not even bitching about Dad for once, and Dean was happy.

And man, enough was enough.

Black Sabbath and Metallica had been this drive's soundtrack so far, and no one was singing along. Fine, fine, everyone's taste sucked, but he had some things Sam didn't hate... He reached out and fumbled through the cassette box, feeling down to the ones close to the bottom but not quite as damned to hell as Pearl Jam's Ten. Sam ignored the plastic clacking; he was back to scowling out his own window, and hadn't complained about Dean's 'mullet rock' (it was totally not) for hours.

Dean snatched up Lynyrd Skynyrd and slid the tape.

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?

"For I must be travelling on now," Dean sang, and grinned over his shoulder at his brother. "C'mon, Sammy, this's close to that angsty emo crap you listen to. Sing along."

Sam rolled his eyes. "You know, Dean, you're really insensitive. Do you have any idea what these last twenty-four hours have been like for us?"

"Offhand, Sammy, probably as weird as having your pushing-forty future self pop up and waste a demon like a plate of waffles." He shrugged lightly. "But that's just guessing."

Sam was going to retort, Dean could see it, and he kicked himself. Sam would get mad and flush this whole cheer-up thing down the toilet, dammit, he had his mouth open and everything – but then he glanced at the rearview mirror and froze, and twisted round in his seat to see Jess, silently mouthing along with the lyrics.

"You like this?"

Jess rolled her eyes. "'Cause I'm as free as a bird now," she sang at him dryly, annoyed but kind of... Huh, there was a tiny smile pulling on the corner of her mouth, getting bigger the longer she tried to glare at him. "And this bird you cannot change."

The look on Sam's face was priceless. Dean grinned and joined in: "Oh, oh, oh, OH! And this bird you cannot change!"

Sam stared between them. "Oh God. Now there's two of you."

A bright laugh burst out of Jess and she finally unfolded her arms, reaching forward between their heads to stretch them out. "Like it? Sort of. I don't hate it."

"I didn't know you even knew it."

Jess shrugged, leaning her elbows on the back of the front seat. "It's pretty mainstream on the right stations, but you always started moping when they were on. Besides, I like my stuff better."

Sam looked at her sceptically. "You listen to the Backstreet Boys."

"Hang on, what?" demanded Dean, whipping his head round to stare at her in exaggerated horror. "Right, get out. I'm done. I cannot have you in my car."

She grinned. "Your car with its ancient music system. I've got a CD player in here somewhere..."

He shuddered. "Lady you are not contaminating my baby with boy bands. House rules: Driver picks the music."

"Then I think it's my turn to drive."

Sam took one look at the totally sincere horror on Dean's face and laughed his ass off.

Chapter Text

John had seen a lot over the years. From a fire that couldn't possibly be explained by natural means, to ghosts, to werewolves, even demons once or twice, he'd seen more than most people – hell, more than most hunters probably had, and worse, he knew (didn't have proof yet, but he knew) that some of that evil was coming after his family. So when he got a cryptic message from Dean about a demon turning up at Stanford and going after Sam, cutting and burning Sam's girlfriend just like Mary, it was all his worst fears come true, and in a heartbeat he dropped his own thin lead on the demon to gun it for Kansas.

As for the part about Mary's ghost – well, he'd seen enough in his life to keep an open mind. In this case, that meant stocking holy water and exorcisms along with the salt rounds.

He pulled into Lawrence late on the day before Dean had said they'd arrive and, after checking his phone three more times just in case, forced himself to take a slow drive by his old haunts – the shop, the diner, the high school, everywhere but the house – and eventually found himself pulling over in front of Missouri Moseley's.

He hesitated for a minute, engine running, before killing it and climbing out; no doubt she already knew he was there, and he'd get an earful next time if he left without saying hello. Besides, it'd be good to see a friend, get another adult's perspective on this mess, maybe help him figure out what to say to his boys tomorrow. By going after them like this the demon had broken what little shaky pattern John had been able to piece together, and they had to be ready for whatever came next, but they didn't need to hear John's terrifying theory – not yet. That wasn't a burden his boys needed, especially if he was wrong. The evidence was just too circumstantial, too much conjecture based on too much misinterpretable lore, and if it was after–

Sam answered the door.

John stopped short, blinking.

He hadn't even begun to figure out how to have this conversation. It was bad enough before, imagining some distant time when Sam might speak to him again, wondering if he'd be able to keep his shit together enough not to yell at him until he left for good, but now...

John wasn't often out of words. Sam looked just as surprised.

Sam was alive, uninjured, and not running full speed from a demon. Good start. But he looked like he hadn't slept well for days, and he'd cocked a pistol behind the door before opening it; the line of his arm was too stiff to be empty. "You okay, son?"

Slowly, Sam nodded and relaxed. He didn't open the door further. "All things considered."

John winced. "I'm sorry about your girlfriend."

Sam's jaw tightened; he let out a sharp breath. "Yeah, well, she's pretty shaken up, but..." He shrugged and John blinked again.

"She's alive? Dean said–"

"Yeah, I know. It was close, it's... a long story." His shoulder brushed the door as he spoke and he started, blinking at it. He shook his head and opened the door. John stepped in and let Sam push it shut behind him, hesitating. If this were Dean he'd give him a hug or a clap on the back, say good to see you and all that, but Sam–

"Are you boys just about done being idiots or do I need to come over there and slap you?" Missouri stood at the threshold of the living room, frowning and drumming her fingers as if it hadn't been years. "John Winchester, you give your boy the hug he needs."

Sam backed away instantly, shaking his head and stowing the pistol in his waistband. "It's fine, really."

"You keep telling yourself that, honey, still won't make it true. John, you get in here. Tea's gettin' cold." Once Sam's back was turned, she winked, and John felt himself smile. Some of the weight fell off his shoulders.

As he stepped towards the living room she leaned in and whispered, "Go easy on them, John, and keep an open mind. They believe what they're sayin' and there's absolutely no reason it can't be true."

She disappeared into the kitchen before he could ask what.

Sam was settling on the couch next to a girl in a white shirt, and for a second she looked so like Mary that he couldn't breathe. But no; she was taller, even sitting, and frowned at the pistol at Sam's back as he sat down. Mary never had a problem with guns, as long as the kids couldn't reach them. But the resemblance could mean something: Maybe the demon, like some ghosts, was going after particular types of women. Or maybe Sam had a Freudian thing that John instantly decided he didn't need to know about.

She looked up as John walked in, a bland polite smile as she stood up to say hello, but behind him footsteps thumped on the stairs as Dean hurried down from the upstairs bathroom. "Dad? Dad!"

He grinned when John turned to him, relief plain on his face, and clapped him in a hug just a bit tighter than normal. And he held on too long. John let himself feel guilty for half a second as he hugged Dean back, then stomped it out. He had his reasons. "You good, son?"

Dean nodded. "Been a weird couple of days."

"And it's gonna get weirder," said Missouri, coming in with a plate of cookies and waving him towards an armchair. "John, you can stop lookin' for burns on these kids right now; that fire never got started. Someone got there in time to stop it."

John looked to Dean, who suddenly shifted, uncomfortable, and Sam kept his eyes on the plate. The girl (what was her name?) curled her shoulders in and said nothing. Missouri sighed. "You're all so convinced no one's gonna believe you that you ain't even gonna try?"

"It's a crazy story," said Sam, and the look in his eyes as he glanced at John said, You'll never even give it a chance. John bristled.

"You'd be surprised by what I'd believe. I've been in this a lot longer than you have."

Sam scowled. "You mean my entire life? The years you've spent dragging us around? Yeah, thanks for that."

"Okay, guys–" said Dean.

"Yeah, that's right. How do you think you've lived this long?"

Sam had already opened his mouth to retort, but at the same time Missouri's wooden spoon came down on John's hand, Sam's girlfriend wrenched him back by the arm. "If you really don't want to fight with your dad, then don't fight," she hissed.

Sam grimaced. "Jess–"

"If I have to leave school for God knows how long and trust you guys to keep those things away from me, either you stow your crap or get it out and deal with it, 'cause I'm not listening to this again. It was bad enough one-sided."

Missouri, John noticed, looked smug. John decided not to notice that this girl – Jess, Jessica, that was it – was more or less telling him off too. He was the adult here. "You said it's a crazy story?" he asked, looking at Dean.

Dean shuffled forward to sit on the edge of the couch, putting himself between John and Sam, and nodded. "Me and Sam wouldn't've gotten back in time to save Jess. We had no idea what was happening. It was... someone else."

He was being cagey. John frowned. "Who?"

John had seen a lot over the years, so he only chewed out his boys for ten minutes or so over how big a risk they were taking trusting a so-called angel and a guy 'from the future', and only grilled them on every test they'd done on the two for about an hour. Either Missouri agreed with him or was just letting him get it out of his system, because aside from waving that spoon ominously each of the (few) times he and Sam almost went at it again, she stayed quiet, probably listening to the boys' and Jess' minds as much as their words. He'd never asked if she could see what people were picturing or only hear the words, but whatever was playing through their heads, it was unsettling her.

John really didn't like it when something unsettled Missouri. It usually meant his life was going to change.

Finally he sighed and rubbed his eyes. "If they're what they say they are, can they find the demon that killed your mother?"

"They said so," said Dean uncomfortably. "But they said it's bigger than Mom. Like a war; demons are planning something. They didn't say much."

"Castiel said we all need to get this tattoo to keep from being possessed," said Jessica, unfolding a piece of paper from her back pocket. She smoothed it out and handed it over, and Missouri leaned in to see it.

"Oh, that's some powerful magic there," she said. "You kids get on that right away. There's a place on Eighth Street that'll do you just fine."

John studied the symbol – the pentagram was familiar, he hadn't seen the flames/sun thing before – but this sort of airy fairy spellwork stuff wasn't his area of expertise; vengeful spirits needing a salt-and-burn or silver bullets for a monster, some basic summonings, that he could do, that was all hands-on and grounded and made sense. Interpreting lore was Sam's strength.

Or Bobby's, but that was a conversation that would never go well.

John handed the paper to his son. "You think you can figure out what this means before you all ink yourselves with it?"

"Well, the pentagram's protection," Sam said as if it was obvious. "The sun can have a lot of meanings, but it's always light and demons are creatures of darkness so it's probably for strengthening the protection, right?"

...He thought it was a test. At least he wasn't throwing a fit about it. John just nodded.

"You'll need it too, Dad," Dean said quietly. "What if it's you they're after?"

It's not, he almost said, and bit his tongue.

The so-called angel and the guy claiming to be Dean arrived the next morning; Missouri had them making pancakes when John stumbled in for coffee, and it took John four full seconds to realise this wasn't his Dean. The man's back was turned, and that was the only excuse John allowed himself; those shoulders got tense the second John mumbled "Morning", and he didn't turn around. John was halfway to reaching for the coffee pot before he saw his boy's face was lined and worn and he froze, and slowly backed away.

The guy setting the table in a tie and trenchcoat barely registered.

The 'Dean' in front of him loosened a pancake from his frying pan and turned it over without any flourish, didn't flip it halfway to the ceiling the way Dean had since he was eight and finally learned how. He looked at John for a few seconds, flipped it again, and said, "Hi, Dad."

What was that, half an octave lower? John shook his head. Not important. "Who are you?" he demanded.

'Dean' gave him a sideways look and muttered, "Guess that answers that."

John narrowed his eyes. "According to my sons, now's the part where you tell me something only I could know. I don't think you can."

"Probably not. I still don't know how much you knew about why the demons wanted Sammy before he–" he broke off, looking at John. "Huh. You didn't know that."

John stomped down on the icy lump in his gut. "I suspected."

"Well, by mid-May you would've been sure, at least about part of it. 'Course, you didn't see any point in telling us."

There was a reason for tha– John bit off the thought. Not important. "So you haven't got any proof. At all."

'Dean' hesitated, looking up from the batter he was pouring, and opened his mouth slightly– then changed his mind and hurried to contain the batter puddle for what would be a very oversized pancake. "Nothing that would convince you."

John considered him. Hot air aside, there were plenty of things a demon or a monster could have found out about him and used as 'proof' if it wanted to. So why didn't they? Was it a tactic to make him ask just that question, and then think it must be evidence he was telling the truth? John wouldn't put it past the yellow-eyed bastards, but on the other hand...

It was possible they were for real. Unlikely. Next to impossible. But possible. Look, Missouri; keeping an open mind.

She raised her eyebrows wryly at him as she mixed more pancake batter.

The Dean at the stove glanced between them, figured it out, and a faint grin pulled up the corner of his mouth. "You got a verdict already?" he said lightly. "That's new."

"How old are you?" asked John.

He looked surprised; shrugged. "Thirty-eight."

John was fifty-one. A year more and this man would be closer to his age than Dean's– his Dean's. It was unnerving. Everything about him was unnerving; he used the same sharp twist of the wrist to loosen the pancakes as they cooked, but he stood almost completely still, no constant restless movement, no big grins and bad jokes. If he was Dean, he'd changed a lot.

John stepped back and studied him, folding his arms, trying to assess this guy without comparing him to anyone. He looked...

Like an adult. That was all. Older, sure of himself in a way that Dean's cheerful bravado didn't manage. But that was all. Was this what Dean would grow up to be like? Or was it a very good trick?

He turned to Missouri–

"He's your son, John. Just older."

John frowned. That was too easy. Something was wrong here. "And that one?" He jerked his chin at the man waiting patiently in a chair.

The 'angel' frowned from behind the book he was leafing through. "You're very rude," he said mildly, and the Dean behind him chuckled.

"Yeah, I've got more important things to do when someone's trying to hurt my family," John snapped. "How 'bout this: If you're really my son, and you can really 'travel through time', why didn't you go back to '83 and save your mother?"

The mood dropped like a stone. 'Dean' went still, and the frying pan jerked in his hand as he gripped it. His eyes closed. "We tried," he said at last, not looking up. "Twice."

"Heaven had a vested interest in ensuring that past events happened exactly as you remember them," said the 'angel' – Castiel – and John frowned.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Me and Sam told you and Mom everything in '78," said 'Dean', "but the archangels stepped in and wiped your memories. If they know we're here, they'll do it again. That's why we've got to be careful. They can't know what we're doing 'till it's done."

John barely heard that last part. They messed with my head? And Mary–

That hurt too much to think about. "If you're telling the truth," he said.

'Dean' grunted and went back to trying to flip the oversize pancake. It kept wobbling off his spatula. "Yeah, you'd think we'd have come up with a better story, right?" he grumbled.

Missouri, meanwhile, had been frowning at John from across the tiny kitchen, and before he could open his mouth to spit out exactly what he thought of their story, she hustled him out through the living room and into the front hall. John wasn't sure why he let her.

"You are rude, you know," she said, folding her arms. "Gettin' worse every year. Were you even gonna try to listen to them?"

John grimaced. He'd meant to. "Just tell me what you know."

She softened a little and patted his hand. "He is your son. I know it's hard, and he knows it's hard, but it's true. He's got all the same memories as Dean right up 'till a few days ago, and everything since then matches up exactly with what the others showed me yesterday. There's not a whiff of a lie in any of it." She took a deep breath, squeezing his hand more for her sake, it seemed, than his. "And I saw... what happened last time," she said softly. "Dean saw Jessica die; on the ceiling, burning, just like Mary. I felt his horror. I heard Sammy scream, and cry. He cried for days, and Dean felt so helpless. You weren't there, John. You didn't come, and he didn't know why. Still doesn't."

John's guts knotted up. He swallowed as Missouri shook her head, trying to shake off the feelings that were getting the better of her. He'd only ever seen her have this much trouble on the day he took her to the smouldering wreck of the old house; the echoes had been so overwhelming she'd left with a migraine. Distractions, he's learned, helped. "What about the other guy, trenchcoat?"

Missouri shrugged, taking a steadying breath. "Can't read him," she said. "Not thoughts, anyway. I get colours, light. Some feelings. He's very old, very sad. But he means well."

"You mean Castiel?"

They looked up. Jessica was halfway down the stairs, looking like she hadn't slept at all save for a bright, awed look dawning on her face. Belatedly, John noticed a small cross around her neck. "You can hear his thoughts?" she asked.

"Not really, honey," said Missouri, putting on a smile. She paused. "You're just gonna have to ask him yourself."

Jessica nodded, pressing her lips together. She looked to John. "Morning."

"Morning. You all right?"

She shrugged awkwardly, stepping down the last of the stairs. She zipped up her sweatshirt and shoved her hands in her pockets. "Yeah. Considering."

"...Good," said John.

She waited for something, but John had no idea for what. A few uncomfortable seconds passed, then she gave up and walked to the kitchen. John sighed. "What happened there?"

Missouri had recovered enough to chuckle. "I'm not here to fix all your family problems, John; you gotta figure it out yourself."

She patted his arm again and went back to the kitchen. John eyed this other Dean through the doorway; he was serving the first pancakes and greeting Jessica, smiling a little.

It was possible he was for real. Possible. And if so, if he'd told the truth about everything–

John slapped his pocket – keys, check – and hurried out the front door.

It didn't take long to break into the old house; John waited in his truck while the new owners rolled down the driveway on their way to work in their shiny cars, past the For Sale sign then made his way to the backyard and picked the lock there.

A lot had changed; the shutters on Sam's nursery had been replaced, of course, and everything had been repainted; half the roof tiles were a few shades darker than the rest. But the old tree was still there, and the mailbox he'd made. The swing they'd bought for Dean's birthday was gone.

The door creaked as it opened. Got to oil the hinges, John thought– but it wasn't his house anymore. Everything inside was wrong. Framed diplomas and photos of strangers had invaded the hall. Messy wires and computers and printers had taken over half the living room. The kitchen had been rearranged all wrong, and–

Something yanked him back. John whirled, raising his pistol–

–and Castiel locked his wrist in an iron grip. "You shouldn't have come here alone," he said.

John yanked his arm but the guy could have been made of stone for all the effect it had; Castiel decided to let go a moment later. "This is my house," said John. "Get out."

"There's a poltergeist," replied Castiel. "It almost killed Dean and Sam last time. You weren't supposed to come here until I took care of it."

"Then by all means," John sneered; "take care of it."

Castiel frowned and walked into the living room. John followed, rubbing his wrist, waiting to see what kind of proof this one was going to try to pull. The kids's descriptions had been vague, something about light and feelings, but the 'angel' just stood there, head tilted like he was listening.

"So?" he said after a minute. "Where is it?"

"It is incorporeal," Castiel replied, irritated. "And it's afraid of me. It's hiding. You should close your eyes."

Outside, the Impala pulled up across the street, followed by Missouri's Toyota. The kids piled out and the other Dean waved them back, searching the windows until he saw John watching them. He gestured sharply for him to come out. John turned his back.

Half a second later, Castiel's head snapped up, his eyes turned bright blue, then white – "Close your eyes!" he shouted – and he flung up his arms and light exploded; John ducked to shield his face. A feeling like a thousand tiny bolts of lightning shot across him, and something wailed, then screamed–

Then silence.

John's heart thumped in his ears. He wobbled, weak, and stumbled, landing on his ass just as the front door opened. "Dad!"

Dean, his Dean, scrambled to his side to help him up. John got most of the way himself. The other Dean went straight to the angel. "You good?"

Castiel nodded.

Missouri came in tentatively, looking around, then closed her eyes and took a breath like it was the cleanest air she'd ever smelled. She stepped in easily, and Jessica followed, but Sam hovered in the doorway.

"You're sure our mom's here?" he asked Missouri, sceptical. She nodded slowly, looking around.

"There's just one spirit here now. She's upstairs."

For half a second, Dean met John's gaze, eyes full of something unreadable – then he turned and ran up the stairs. "Mom?" he shouted. "Mom?"

John didn't move. In the doorway, Sam's face collapsed into a mix of hope and fear, and a moment later Jessica took his hand and pulled him up the staircase.

Still in the living room, the other Dean watched them go with an unreadable look on his face. Through the corner of his eye, John saw the angel touch the back of his elbow, but the other Dean shook his head.

Footsteps thumped above their heads; Dean was searching ever room. "Mom? Mom?" came muffled through the ceiling.

However this turned out, John thought, his boys needed him, so he hauled himself towards the stairs. His feet felt heavy and his chest was tight. Because of that angel light thing, he decided. He left the others behind.

Upstairs was too familiar; there was less clutter here, fewer things belonging to strangers, and the paint was almost the same colour it used to be. Down the hall was the nursery door; he turned away into the master bedroom.

Sam and Dean and Jessica were in the next room, Dean's old bedroom, talking too softly to make out. John looked around, seeing where the old bed had been, the dresser where Mary kept her parents' pictures, the chair he'd always tossed his clothes on. In twenty-two years John had never seen a ghost that wasn't out for revenge and it was stupid to think so, but he still found himself quietly calling, "Mary? Mary... it's me."

Silence.

John cursed himself, the imposters downstairs, and himself again for good measure. Stupid to hope.

Then Sam yelped, and John ran out.

Sam was just inside the nursery; Dean and Jessica were behind him, looking in, and John's guts twisted as he approached, pushing shoulders out of his way. He could still feel the heat in that place, smell the smoke–

There was smoke, and flame, a column of it in the middle of the room, but Sam was reaching for it, and in a gust it blew away, and– Mary was there.

She smiled.

At the top of the stairs, Dean watched his younger self follow Dad in. Cas, halfway there, turned back expectantly, but Dean shook his head. "I had my chance."

Cas frowned, puzzled, but nodded and came back to him. A step behind him on the stair, Missouri poked Dean in the back until he climbed up to the landing. She stepped up and looked him in the eye. "Honey, she's your family too."

Dean shook his head again. The voices coming from the nursery were happy; Sam was choked up, Dad sounded better than he'd ever been, and there was a loud sniffle – Jess. She said something self-depreciating and the others chuckled. Mom too; her voice carried. It was enough.

...It wasn't enough. He listened and listened as they talked, but it wasn't enough. Dean shook his head hard. "Does he believe us now? Dad?" he asked.

Missouri tilted her head, listening. "He's not thinking about it just now," she shrugged, "but I don't feel any suspicion comin' from him anymore. I think he'll listen when you tell him again." Her head jerked around to him. "You got a bunker? That's where you're going?"

"Safest place we know," Dean replied, then thought of something and started rummaging in his pockets until he found a pen. "Look, if you ever need–"

She closed a hand over his. "Don't you worry about me, Dean Winchester. No one's after me. I'm not gonna need a warded hidey-hole. You just keep everyone else safe there, all right?"

Dean felt his face fall. "You're not the first person to say that. They've all been wrong."

Sadness filled her face. "You're going to do it, Dean. Trust yourself."

"Dean?"

His head snapped up. Mom.

Mary stood in the doorway, peering at him. Jess and Dad had backed out to give her room and she was trailing a hand back towards Dean's younger self, as close as she could come to touching them. Sam had tears down his face.

And as Mom looked at him, her face fell. She walked up and reached for him, hands hovering over his cheeks; he could feel the cold buzz of her energy. "Oh, Dean. What happened to you?"

Behind her, Dean dimly noticed Dad look up. "I'm okay, Mom," he said, shaking his head.

"No. You're not. And you have to let someone help you," she said firmly. "Promise me."

This was more, way more, than last time, and not enough; it would never be enough. Dean trembled. "I promise."

Mom nodded slowly, never taking her eyes off him. "Good." She stepped back and looked at Cas. "You take care of him."

Cas nodded solemnly.

Mom gave Dean one last, long look, worry falling away into a sad smile. "I love you, Dean."

His throat closed; he choked, and tears burned in his eyes. "Love you too, Mom."

She smiled and stepped back to the others. She hovered a hand next to Dad's face too, then other Dean's, then Sam's. "I can't stay," she told them. "A reaper will be here soon."

"Mom–" began younger Dean, but he couldn't get more out. He glanced at Dean and for a second, they were mirrors. Mom understood anyway, and reached up to him.

"I'm so proud of you, Dean. My little angel," she smiled, and he softened. (Cas ducked out of sight to hide a chuckle.) "Take care of your brother, and take care of yourself."

She moved on to say goodbye to Sam, then Dad, even Jess for a second, but Dean couldn't watch. Not again. He gripped the banister and looked down.

"The reaper is coming," Cas said quietly. "We can't let it see us."

Dean nodded. Cas frowned at him, very confused, but let it go. He turned to the others.

"Mary," he said, and waited until she turned. "When you reach Heaven, don't let them know what we're doing," he warned. "Most angels cannot be trusted. Nor most reapers. Take no chances."

Mom looked worried, but nodded. "Don't join me anytime soon," she said, looking straight at Dean, then to Dad and Sam and younger Dean. "Any of you."

"We miss you," Dad said softly, and Mom said, "I know."

Something in Dean broke, and he was halfway down the stairs before her voice faded.

Chapter Text

The Men of Letters, Jess decided, had never so much as mopped up their own coffee spills in their entire paranoid, sun-deprived, OCD lives. If anyone had bothered organising the bunker's cleaning equipment as accurately as the file room, she'd be done by now.

It should have been they'd be done by now, but she hadn't heard a peep from Sam's end of the library in a while, so he was probably buried in a book again. Third time today.

Scowling, Jess shoved aside some more mop handles and dug through the shelves. All the bottles of cleaner were new, but Dean (the future one, that is) hadn't mentioned that the mess in here was decades old, so all they'd bought in the way of cleaners was soft sponges and cloths, and that was just not going to cut it.

"Dean, you've got to check this out. These guys hunted vampires."

"No way! They're real?"

"And get this: The only way to kill them is decapitation. All the other folklore is crap."

"Awesome."

Jess grit her teeth. Finally one of the back shelves yielded a small basket of scrubbing tools – all bent bristles on wooden handles, but they'd do. She shoved the ancient boxes back into place and stalked out into the library.

Sam had a stack of half-dusted books on the table and a damp cloth for wiping the shelves over his arm, slowly soaking his shirt up from the elbow as he leafed through the pages. Dean was sitting on the table and leaning over to read Sam's book it upside-down, swinging his legs, duster dangling uselessly in one hand. Jess stomped in loudly, pointedly ignoring them, and set to attacking her nemesis: a congealed puddle of what might, fifty years ago, have been tomato soup. The tipped bowl it had come from had gone straight in the trash, along with any cutlery in a four-foot radius; the only vaguely sanitary crockery left in the bunker had been stacked in the kitchen cupboards, and she'd made Dean – both of them – help her wash the whole lot in scalding water with half a bottle of detergent before anyone could get ideas about making dinner with them.

She was starting to get why Sam's first dorm had always felt gross even though everything was so neat. If there wasn't blood or guts on something, they actually thought it was clean. She shuddered.

Dean hauled himself off the table and started taking books out so Sam could clean the shelves, and he grinned at whatever title was stamped on the top one. "Dude, we've so got to check this out."

Sam paused and craned his neck at it. "Sirens? Really?" And he put down his cloth (he'd wiped like ten inches of shelf space) to take a look. Jess grimaced and scrubbed hard on the soup stain.

Maybe she should have let the old brush soak in the bucket a bit longer. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference: One hard push from her shoulder and half the bristles broke, spraying across the floor she'd just swept as the wooden handle slammed into the table, jamming her knuckles under it hard enough to tear the skin.

She yelped and threw the useless handle to the floor, hard, and it was viciously satisfying to see both of them jump at the noise. She glared at them. "I did not leave college to be a fucking CLEANING LADY!" she yelled. "I am not doing all this myself! Get your ass in gear, Winchester. Now!"

Sam looked horrified and guilty, which made her feel bad for a second, and Dean looked almost terrified. "Uh... yeah..." He looked to Sam and back, hands pointing stiffly between them, then at the floor. "Um, you want that back?"

"What fucking use is it? When you become future you, and come back in time to bring us here, buy us scrubbies that were made this century. That would be useful."

Dean's brow furrowed. "I don't think it works like thaaaaaaa... Um, Sam? She's got laser eyes."

Sam had put down his book and was rounding the table, shaking his head sorrowfully. "Jess, I'm sorry. That wasn't fair of us."

Fuck, he was turning on the puppy eyes. And reaching for her hands. Jess folded her arms and scowled. "Damn right."

He backpedalled. Looked around. "The cleaners aren't good enough? Um, you want new ones?"

"I can get new ones!" said Dean. "Baby doesn't need to stay in her new parking spot– Right, Sam, that's what I came here to say, you wouldn't believe the garag– Right, going!" He backed towards the door. "New stuff coming up. I'll get you the whole aisle."

He fled.

"Jess," Sam said gently, "I–"

"Don't give me that crap about how you wish none of this had happened, Sam," she snapped. "You were never this excited about law."

His eyes went wide and she didn't give him time to reply; she hooked her foot behind her bucket and kicked it at him – the soapy water sloshed and slopped out – and stalked off.

He didn't follow.

Her eyes prickled as she went, hot stabs that she refused to turn into tears. It wasn't worth that. She was just tired and filthy and sore from the new tattoo and pissed off about everything, and it wasn't really Sam's fault, but right now it didn't matter, and she couldn't handle any more earnest promises or sincere apologies.

She swung round the door frame into the kitchen – the only room checked off as completely clean – dropped into a seat, drew her knees up, and cried.

It wasn't worth crying over. It wasn't. She got that this was the best of a bad situation and yeah, she felt way safer in this bunker than the shoddy motels they'd stayed in on the way, but it'd been three weeks and she missed sunlight and school and ice cream for lunch and learning and lectures and being picked on to answer questions when she'd forgotten to study and fuck, wasn't that pathetic? But she missed their apartment and their friends and calling her mom and relaxing and not being angst bait for a demonic war.

And it wasn't their fault. Not Sam's or Dean's or future Dean's or anyone's, and that was just worse, because she couldn't even yell at them.

Quietly, somewhere ahead of her, a plate clacked quietly against ceramic. Jess' head jerked up.

Castiel was standing awkwardly on the far side of the kitchen, a dish towel in one hand and a stack of newly washed plates on the table. He shuffled a little, twisting the towel in his fingers. "Are you all right?"

He was an angel and he was drying dishes. Jess blinked and shook herself, automatically uncurling to stand up and be... what, presentable? Something. She backed away. "I'm sorry. It's fine." She turned for the door, but her foot caught on a bar under the table and she stumbled.

"Jessica, wait."

She stilled, hand braced on the doorframe. Her heart was thudding. Slowly, she turned around.

If anything, Castiel looked even more awkward, wringing his hands in the towel. "You don't have to leave. I probably can't help you, but I can listen. If you want to talk."

Part of her, the part shaped by years of listening to sermons, recoiled and yelled that she should be kneeling or something because no, wrong, she couldn't – but the other part, the part that had rolled her eyes and learned to say "fuck" – that part nudged her forward, and back to the seat she'd left. She lowered herself down slowly, sitting very straight. Castiel sat beside her.

He watched her, saying nothing, and Jess's hands started to tremble. She clenched them, trying to pull herself together, and took a deep breath. She had no idea what to say. What do you say to an angel? One who had seen God, been touched by God, blessed by God? How could her problems be anything but petty and stupid to him? And they were, and she knew it, she was just... She was tired. That was all.

She took in another deep breath; let it out. Another. The hot prickles in her eyes cooled a little. Her hands were still trembling.

Castiel was absently folding and unfolding the dishtowel, running it between the pads of his fingers. "I'm not good at this. Dean and Sam never want to talk."

"They're idiots–" She bit it off and clenched her jaw. This was her problem. She shouldn't bother him with it.

But he snorted. "Sometimes I think that too. But then they risk their lives for me and I remember I shouldn't judge."

Jess blinked. "How could they save you?" she blurted out.

"I was human for a while," he replied. "But they've saved me more times than I can remember. Being an angel doesn't make me invulnerable. You saw my wings."

Understatement. The image was burned into her mind. Her sketchpad was back in Palo Alto, but the cheap notebook Sam had bought her when they were crossing the Rockies was full of roughs, pen outlines or negatives edging the lined sheets, a faint figure in the middle of the glow. Her fingers itched for brushes and canvas.

"What can hurt you?"

He sighed. "Other angels. The more powerful demons were a match for me even before I fell, and now–" He grimaced. "There are ways. Dean and Sam have often thrown themselves in harm's way to save me. They'll do anything – even stupid things – to protect people they consider family."

"I know I should be grateful. I am," she promised. "I just... I don't want this to be my life now. Is this all God meant for me? Is this His plan?"

Castiel's face darkened into something ugly. "It better not be."

And before she could process that, his phone rang. He fumbled as it caught in his pocket and hurried to answer. "Dean–?"

"Emergency, Cas!" came the voice from the speaker. "It's going way faster than we thought, I need you here NOW."

Castiel surged up and ran for the door. "Jessica, get the others. Room thirty-four. Hurry!"

Jess didn't stop to think: She sprang up as he took off running and pelted down the corridor to the library. "SAM! SAM, EMERGENCY!"

He skidded into the hallway before she reached the main door, huge soapy spots on his shirt. "Je–"

"Room thirty-four, I don't know what–" she grabbed his hand and yanked in the direction Castiel went. "Come on!"

He overtook her in seconds. Room thirty-four wasn't far – there was thirty, thirty-two – they flew in, skidding to a stop. The moment future Dean saw Sam he tossed him something red.

Jess slid to a stop against a wall. She felt something plasticy under her hand – it was duct tape, thick strips of it sealing what, by rough shape, was probably an air vent. This was a tiny room, she realised, and they'd emptied it out completely except for a big glass jar lying on the floor by a thick grey web that stretched from floor to ceiling.

Which was moving.

Behind her, Dean was ripping strips of duct tape off a roll and scrambling to seal every crack around the door. "Dean, no time!" said Castiel.

"She can't escape this time. You got the poppy bullets?"

"What the hell is is this?" Sam demanded, waving the– she blinked. A red, glittery, shoe.

Dean threw down the tape roll and pulled a gun from his belt, grabbing a magazine from Castiel– and stopped at the sight of them. "Where's Dad? Where's me?"

"They went out–"

Dean growled and shoved his gun at Jess; she fumbled to catch it. Her hands were still soapy and it slipped a little. She hurried to rub one and then the other off on her jeans and aim it at... the webbing. Yeah, probably the webbing. It was pulsing now, angry dents like something huge was being born inside. Probably not something good. Probably.

Her hands shook around the gun.

Dean dug into a bag on the floor and pulled out another shoe.

"Dean," said Sam, "what the fuck?"

"Wicked witch of the west," he said, totally straight-faced. "Not even kidding. Poppy bullets will slow her down, these heels will kill her. Don't let her touch you."

"...Fuck you," said Sam, and he tossed the shoe aside; Dean lunged for it. "You think just 'cause you're older you can pull this crap–"

"Sammy, this isn't the time!"

Something stabbed through the webbing at the top of the biggest bulge. Jess tightened her grip and raised the gun. "Sam, take the damn shoe."

"Jess, he pulls these stupid pranks all the time–"

The webbing tore and a bunch of grey hair tumbled out. Jess aimed, but from either side Castiel and Dean surged forward, Dean with the red shoes and Castiel with his short sword. Sam was saying something behind her, worried, way too late – the hairy mass straightened up into an old woman and everything about her screamed evil.

Dean bashed her in the side of the head with the heel of one shoe. She turned on him, hand raised – he ducked to avoid it, dropped the shoe – and Jess had seen way too many action movies not to know she should shoot now.

It slipped; she dropped it. The gun went off.

For two painful thudding heartbeats, she didn't know if it hit anyone. Then she realised she could have hit anyone, and she stopped breathing.

God, no, please, I didn't mean–

She backed away, grabbing blindly back for Sam, but he was moving too: He swept up the gun and fired in the same movement, and while the red puff distracted the– the hag, he threw the shoe to Dean. The hag turned on them – Sam fired again – and in sync Dean and Castiel stabbed her with the sword and the shoe.

She vanished.

Suddenly Sam's arms were tight around her and it took a few seconds to realise she was on her ass on the floor, hands clawed into her cheeks and hyperventilating.

"Jess, you okay?"

"Jess!"

Her lungs were burning and stone all at once. Faintly, she could feel Sam at her back, dimly knew someone was saying something, but it didn't get through.

A warm hand settled on her shoulder and fingers pressed lightly on her forehead. The spasms stopped. Her lungs relaxed. Sound came back. Castiel was kneeling in front of her and, for just a second, she saw wings.

"Jess? Jess, God, I'm sorry, please say something."

She blinked and shook her head. "I'm-m-m I'm okay. I'm sorry, I– I didn't mean to drop it, I–" She clenched her hands before they could shake again. "I don't think I can do this."

Sam's arms got tighter and Castiel's face fell, sad. Behind him, Dean said, "You don't have to, sweetheart."

She squeezed her eyes shut, nodded into Sam's shirt, and let out a breath. "I'm okay," she said, pulling away and shaking herself out. "I'm fine."

Sam didn't believe her, she could see it, but he let it go. Castiel gave her a little nod and then moved to study the cloak puddled on the floor. He brushed two fingers over it, sniffed and said, "This is very unusual magic, Dean. It tastes like a fairy dimension. Are you sure we shouldn't investigate?"

Dean shook his head, a bit of a smile tugging on his mouth. "It's called Oz, Cas, and I really don't want to go there. But," he said, stepping back to the webbed wall and pulling out a switchblade, "I know someone who does."

Carefully, but without a care in the world, Dean stepped around to another bulge in the webbing, one that was completely still, pressed at it in a few places and then slit the thing from top to toe.

Another woman fell out, but Dean caught this one carefully, pillowing her head on his shoulder and lifting her up. "Sammy, get the tape off the door, would you?"

Sam hesitated. "Who–?"

"Dorothy, hunter, her dad was a man of letters, she's been out seventy-five years and probably needs a stiff drink. So not here, okay?"

Dorothy stayed in the bunker exactly as long as it took to memorise everything Dean knew about the Wizard's double and the upcoming war in Oz (minus anything to do with Charlie because that was not happening again), then left without saying goodbye – at least, not as far as Dean knew. The only person she'd warmed to even a little was Jess; Dean was pretty sure she just found him creepy.

It didn't surprise him, exactly – it's not like they had a whole slumber party bonding experience this time round, or that they ever got thanked much anyway. The whole point of this crazy time travel job was to make it so most people never knew they had to be saved from anything at all.

Job sucked sometimes.

Other times, it really sucked.

"Hey Cas, you know how to fly a plane?"

Cas frowned at him over the kitchen table, a mess of crumbs, plates and coffee mugs; the usual 1am mess. "No."

Dean pushed over a printout from Sam's excel journal and tapped a line that read:

1–5 Dec 2005
Pittsburgh airport; Indianapolis airport
United Britannia Airlines flight 2485 (Pittsburgh to Denver); private plane; Flight 424 (Indianapolis to Pittsburgh) – Demon possessing George Phelps (passenger); 424 co-pilot (?name)
Victims: 100+ passengers on 2485; Phelps & co-pilot on private – Survivors: Max Jaffey, Amanda Walker (2485); all passengers (424);
Details: Demon crashed planes for kicks after 40m flying time; targeted survivors on other flights.
It knew Jess.

"First flight we know this thing was on was Flight 2485 out of Pittsburgh this Friday," Dean explained, rubbing his eyes and trying really hard not to think about how bad this could go. "I'm pretty sure it possessed Phelps before takeoff, but if not you and me might get stuck trying to figure out who it's hiding in, and if it's got a thing for taking out the pilots I don't want to get stuck in the air with no one to fly the thing."

"It can't possess both at once," Cas said, putting down the sheet. "We can mark them with pentagrams before takeoff."

"How? Stamps?"

Cas gave him the bitch, please look. "Rib carvings."

Dean shook his head and threw back the last of his coffee. "Man, you got thing for those. What was it, art class in angel preschool or something?"

"Something like that," said Cas, standing and gathering the plates. "Can you remember anything else we need?"

"Bucket of dramamine," Dean muttered. He shook his head: "Nah, we're good." He swept up the journal printouts and folded them tightly, counting to make sure none got left behind for the others to find and blinking when he found one extra. "Huh."

Cas glanced back from the sink. "What is it?"

"Nothing, just the list of salt-and-burns." He frowned at it. "You know there's only, like, twenty cases in here that Sam and mini-me can go take care of right now? Everything else is either a monster who could be anywhere right now or something that happened because of us. In twelve years, man. Says something."

"It says we have a lot of work to do," replied Cas, drying his hands. He eyed the paper in Dean's hand. "Are you going to give it to them this time?"

Dean grimaced. "'Course I am. They can handle it fine. I did." He glared at the look on Cas' face. "I can't right now; they're all in bed."

"Your father arrived half an hour ago. They're all talking in the library." Cas tilted his head, listening. "There's a voice I don't recognise."

Dean tensed, stood up and hurried out, wishing he hadn't left his guns in his room. Cas wasn't worried so it was probably fine, but he'd had that soft spot for Meg and had no idea how nasty she'd been back then– well, now.

But the voices drifting through to where his ears could catch them sounded relaxed, and Meg wouldn't have waited a half hour to start threatening them. Dean still peered round the last doorway warily– them stumbled and almost jogged inside. "Jim? Pastor Jim?"

Jim looked up from the library pyjama party and smiled, and quickly glanced between him and the younger him sitting at the table. He shook his head. "You weren't kidding, were you?" he said to Dad. Dad shrugged, his lip twitching.

"Had to see it to believe it myself."

Jim chuckled and stood up as Dean approached, eyes a little too steady to not be called staring.

He didn't hug him. Came close, but held off; he'd done enough touchy feely teary stuff for a lifetime this last month, and Jim wasn't Dad, or Bobby. Time hadn't stopped when he'd died. "Good to see you, man."

Jim had been reaching out to clap Dean on the shoulder the way he always did, but at that he slowed, stopped. "Ah," he said. "I take it I died too, then?"

At the table, Sam and other Dean lost their happy faces. Dad looked a bit rattled too. "What?"

"How?"

Dean didn't want to have this conversation – not again. Dad had figured out last week that he hadn't made it, and in the end Dean'd made up some half-assed lie about how because reliving that day in the hospital, and all the guessing afterwards... he couldn't. To Jim he said, "I, uh, I'll put together a list. Sigils and warding like on this place that you can use to protect yourself. Things should happen differently this time, but," he shrugged, "can't hurt."

Jim shook his head and walked Dean into the circle of chairs; Sam dragged an empty one over for him. "I'll be glad of any help, son, but don't worry; I won't let my guard down at all anymore unless I'm somewhere safe, and I always have holy water on me."

"Hallowed ground's not enough, not by a long shot," said Dean, holding the back of the chair and too tense to sit. "I've seen demons walk right through them and pull down crucifixes with their bare hands. Stings 'em a little and that's it." He watched Jim get a bit paler. Good. "You've got to put devil's traps all over the place. Those will net Lilith herself if she comes round again. And she will."

Slowly and way more seriously, Jim nodded. "Thank you. Do you have anything that could help protect my parishioners?"

Dean breathed out and took the chair. "Maybe. Pentagram jewellery, get them to carry talismans. Holy water in the mains always works well."

Dad shook his head. "Not a good idea. If a demon gets burned and there's only civilians around it might take it out on them. At the very least it'll tip them off that there's a hunter around."

It was a good point, and Dean "mmm"d almost in sync with Sam and younger Dean. Jess sighed loudly.

"Do you guys ever have a conversation that doesn't end up being hunting stories or a strategy session?" she asked, annoyed. "Just once, how about a happy conversation?"

Sam looked abashed and Dad smiled faintly. "Sorry, Jess; we've never had much of a life outside hunting," said Sam, all light and innocent. "I guess it's all we know."

Dean glared at his much-much-younger brother. Had it been like this last time? Dad just scowled and didn't take the bait though, and Jim leaned in. "I'm sure we can," he said to Jess. "What would you like?"

She shrugged. "You knew them when they were little," she said, nodding at Sam and Dean. "You've got to have some funny stories."

"Uh oh," said younger Dean, grinning and sharing a glance with Sam. They both eyed Dad, who looked like he was remembering some of the more embarrassing ones, then pleadingly at Jim, who shared a conspiring look with Dad. Dean watched them all like a tennis match.

"Well," said Jim lightly, "there was the night I ordained them as priests..."

Dean felt himself grin and smothered a chuckle in his hand. Dad didn't bother. Sam started to turn red and other Dean smirked. Which, fair: Sam had come off worse in this particular story. Hadn't ever heard anyone tell it as a story, though; everyone they could tell had already known.

Jess ignored them. "So they can make holy water?" she asked Jim.

He nodded. "Exactly. Now keep in mind: Dean was eight and Sam was four. Usually I wouldn't have, but they were worried about John."

"You were hunting a rawhead, right?" asked younger Dean. Dad nodded. "I just remember you were in a big hurry and hauled us out of the hotel in the middle of the night."

"I'd lost it once already," Dad explained, "and it killed two more people before I caught a report on the police scanner. Figured it could be my last chance."

"Guys..." Jess warned. "No more hunting stories." She turned to Jim. "You were saying?"

"Well, they were eight and four, worried about their father and up way past their bedtimes. I should have known better than to think it would all go to plan, but, I didn't have much experience with children then."

Jess started to smile, and Dean realised he was too. He remembered that night; the punchline was that they'd spilled oil just about everywhere and had to scramble to clean it up before morning service. Getting Sammy in the bath had taken even longer. Jim remembered the details, though, and Dean leaned back, settling in to enjoy the story. A few times, he even laughed.

What should've been the next morning but was really only about five hours later, Dean gave up on sleeping and shuffled through the kitchen, grabbing dry cereal and a beer as he hauled his duffle bag towards the garage. It was the first time he could remember going to bed early for a hunt and leaving people talking behind him, but then, this wasn't a job the rest of them were ready for – and yes, Cas, he did leave them the list of salt-and-burns. Dad and his other self, maybe with Jim, would probably head out to start on those later in the morning. Like, sometime after dawn.

At the door to the library, he stopped short: Jim was still sitting there, still in the coat he'd arrived in, talking to Jess, still in her pyjamas. They were very quiet, but Dean had the feeling that if he came in, he'd be interrupting anyway. He shrugged: There was another route to the garage.

"Maybe," said Jess as he turned to go, and he stopped again: Her voice was thick and tired, like she'd been crying. "I just... How do you do it?" she asked Jim. "How do you still have a life, with all this?"

"Hunting and tending the flock are a lot alike," he said gently. "Both serve God and protect the vulnerable. But I know God would never ask me to give up living my life for the hunt; taking the time to bless someone or perform a wedding or a christening – these, too, fight the devil. Your fight is much harder, Jessica, but you will be rewarded too. You will see your parents again, I have no doubt."

She was quiet for a long time, and when she did speak, she sounded... fragile. "Has God ever spoken to you about this? All these demons, these murders? His plan?"

Jim shook his head. "But I have faith that He will see us through. He loves us, and He will protect us."

Dean grit his teeth, cursed under his breath, and stalked off.

In the empty space Dean left behind, Pastor Jim's voice floated in from the library. "Why else would he have sent Dean back to us?"

Chapter Text

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Hi Mom,

I'm doing well! London is a lot like I expected – it rains a lot – but Sam and I are having a great time. Taking the offer to study here was the right choice, I'm just really sorry it means I can't come home for Christmas. I want to, so badly. I miss you. Tell Dad and Grandma I love them.

I'm mailing some presents to friends at Stanford anyway so I'm saving postage by sending yours to them too and they'll forward them to you. No London souvenirs, but I think you'll like them.

Love you lots. I miss you so much.

Merry Christmas.

Love,
Jess

Nestled in a blanket on her side of the bed, Jess looked around the walls of the bunker, breathed in deep, shoved everything down, and hit Send.

Three days later, pulled over on the side of the I-29 just outside Sioux Falls, John slapped a hand on the wheel of his truck and decided, "Caleb."

Caleb's place was three hours away. Jim was closer, but Christmas at Jim's was always too full of God for John's liking. Caleb took it easy; a few beers, some store-bought eggnog and whatever game was being rerun on the only channels not playing It's a Wonderful Life. Caleb would be glad of the company and wouldn't ask questions. He was a good guy like that.

Right, John nodded. He was going to Caleb's. All he had to do was wait for Dean to call to say they were safe at Bobby's and that, as expected, he wasn't invited.

The kids thought he would be, of course; even Sam wouldn't have gone off to have Christmas without him, but then, Sam had been clingy ever since future Dean had let slip that he'd kicked it less than a year from now.

Jessica had blatantly rolled her eyes when John insisted he'd wait for an okay from Bobby before setting foot in his town. He really didn't feel like being shot today. Why future Dean thought it'd be fine, he didn't know, but both Deans were being stupidly bullheaded about trying to make everyone get along. As if they didn't have more important things to do.

Like finding the yellow-eyed demon. Future Dean kept saying he didn't know where the thing was right now, only where it would be later this year, and that they didn't have the means to kill it yet. John mostly believed him, but he sure as hell didn't believe in not trying to track the thing anyway.

(Castiel had taken one look at John's room, at the maps and newspaper cuttings taped up and strung together, and told him he would never find the demon by following its side effects. John had shut the door in his face.)

He sighed and tapped the steering wheel. The kids should've been there by now. Maybe Bobby was being more surly than usual.

His phone rang: Dean's number. He picked it up. "What'd he say?"

Bobby replied, "That you're an ass."

John grimaced. "Then why are you talking to me?"

"To figure you how the hell the lot of you are talking again," said Bobby. The background noise behind him faded and there was a clunk of wood on wood; he'd gone outside. "Sam had plenty good reason to hate your guts and yet here he is, bringing home his girlfriend and asking me to give you another chance."

"They tell you the story?"

"Yeah. I'll believe it when I see it."

John sighed, tired of this. "Tell the kids I'll be at Caleb's," he said, restarting the engine. "I'll call when–"

"You're comin' here, idjit. Bring a ham. I ain't got enough for four, let alone seven."

John paused. The indicator ticked, waiting for him to pull out. "Why?"

On the other end, Bobby's voice got quiet. "Like I said, you lot are finally talking again," he said. "Those boys are happy. If you screw this up, I'll kill you."

"I'm Dr Palmer, this is Dr Piccolo," said Dean, walking up to the reception desk with Cas and flashing their latest fake IDs. "We were called in for a private consult. Can you direct us to the oncology ward?"

The receptionist checked their cards a little more thoroughly than most people tended to, but smiled when he was done and pointed them the right direction. Cas was still fiddling with his white coat. "I don't like this, Dean. If anyone sees me there could be talk of a miracle. It would draw too much attention."

"We'll be careful, Cas. Just act natural and keep walking," said Dean, picking up the pace until they were at a brisk walk that got most people stepping out of their way.

"What if they ask about my 'technique'?"

Dean snorted and tried to hide his laugh as a cough. "Cas..." he fought down a grin. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you've got to stop watching Dr Sexy."

Cas frowned. "Season one is dull," he replied sulkily, "and season two isn't airing yet."

"I should've brought DVDs back with us," Dean grumbled. "And the season twelve cliffie? Man, it's going to be a long wait."

The hospital staff around them were nothing like those at Seattle Mercy Hospital, which was bad, because their IDs got checked at every ward, but on the other hand, they weren't celebrating Christmas with mistletoe in every (every) doorway, and didn't spare a second glance for the two 'doctors' walking through.

The paediatric oncology ward had more decorations than the rest of the place: tinsel on the doors, plastic trees and lights in every room, and the nurses all wore Santa hats. A box on the reception desk was labelled "for gifts" and was nearly full; Dean stuffed a few bills in when no one was looking. There was a big playroom to their left where kids with IVs and nasal tubes and shaved heads were watching The Muppet Christmas Carol with their parents; Dean scanned the faces once and moved on to the private rooms.

Cas took the right side of the corridor, Dean the left, and they checked the clipboards beside the doors one by one until Dean said, "Here."

Cas listened for a second, then nodded and said, "They're both asleep."

They slipped in.

The room was dark except for the glow from under the door and a nightlight, just enough to see by. Two chairs were crammed up next to the bed, and a man was awkwardly curled up on them, snoring, holding the kid's hand. Dean couldn't understand much from the monitors, but the way Cas stiffened when he got near the kid – that he got. "You can cure him, right?" he whispered.

Cas stepped up to the bed and laid a palm on the kid's head; his hand was huge in comparison. "Yes," he said, "but not in a way they'll be able to explain."

And it'd draw attention, he didn't say. Maybe a lot. Maybe even from Hell.

"Do it."

Cas closed his eyes, one hand on the boy's head and one on his chest. The air changed, just a little; it felt charged, and the hairs on Dean's arms stood up. White light glowed under Cas's hand, but it was thin and hazy, like a cloud. Nothing broke. The monitors flickered. "Cas, you okay?"

A few long seconds later, Cas stepped away and the glow faded. He let out a heavy breath and nodded wearily. "We should leave. He'll wake very soon."

Dean cracked the door open and scanned the hall; a nurse was approaching, reading a chart, so he waited. She stepped into the room opposite and Dean checked again. "Coast's clear," he whispered, and they stepped out.

They were a few feet down the hall when Cas slowed, ears cocked and listening, and he slowly smiled. "The boy is talking," he said. "He's waking his father." Suddenly he smiled. "He wants a Happy Meal."

Dean chuckled. "Not bad for a terminal case."

The door behind them flew open and the father stuck his head out the door, eyes bright and wet. "He's awake! Nurse? Nurse, he's awake! He's hungry! Can someone find my wife?"

Then he scrambled back in, and even Dean could hear him crying as he hugged his kid. The nurse he'd been talking to was alerting a doctor, and Dean and Cas had to pretend very hard to be concerned about something in their prop clipboard as the man hurried past.

"Owen! We're so glad to see you're awake. When... when did this happen?"

Then, at the end of the hall, the nurse stepped out of the ladies' room, looking back in and holding the door open, and Jody Mills ran out.

"Owen? Owen?"

She almost bowled them over as she rounded the corner to her son's room, long hair whipping into her face. Slowly walking past the doorway, they could only see the foot of Owen's bed, and that's where Jody stopped short, hands on her mouth, tears in her eyes, staring as her son said, loud and clear, "Mommy!"

Dean got something in his eye. Dust. Definitely dust.

If he'd had anyone to tell it to, Dean probably would've said he was looking forward to seeing Bobby's eyes bug out when he met his future self, and that he was hoping Dad would stay away because it was better than watching him and Bobby punch it out. He'd been ready to leave, honestly, and spend the next week wherever Dad was going; Sam and Jess had been the ones who'd been moping about not having much of a Christmas, and Bobby was getting on fine with them.

But somehow, it didn't happen. Dad turned up with enough ham to feed ten people and he and Bobby only glared across the threshold for about a minute before Dad was allowed in. They didn't talk much to each other, but when Bobby snapped that someone better let Rumsfeld in before the damn dog froze out there Dad was the one who stepped outside, and when Dad said he'd noticed a part of Bobby's west fence had been cut, probably by some kids, Bobby grunted and said he'd have to fix that tomorrow. Dean spent half the evening keeping an ear out in case they pushed each others' buttons (on purpose or not), but all he managed was to chop his finger instead of the green stuff Jess insisted on having with the potatoes. Both Dad and Bobby had lunged for the nearest towel.

When future Dean arrived with Castiel and all Bobby said was, "Huh. You boys bring cranberry sauce?", Dean was just plain disappointed.

"So you're an angel," Bobby said to Castiel, frowning. "You don't look like much."

Castiel smiled gently. "It's good to see you," he said.

That was... weird. Dean frowned, watching the over his shoulder as he diced the apples that would be pie for dessert. Bobby was mostly ignoring it, studying Castiel for tells, and beside them future Dean was watching Bobby with a soft, mushy look on his face. Shit, not Bobby too?

Well, that wasn't happening again. No way, not Bobby. He'd try talking the how of it out of future Dean later. For now he waved a kitchen knife at the guy. "You going to show off your mad cooking skills, old man?"

Future Dean snapped out of his mush and looked around. With a smirk, he stepped over to the counter and stole the knife. "Watch and learn, junior."

Asshole. But the pie turned out great.

Around eleven, while Dean was polishing off the last piece of pie (there had been a fight for it, let me tell you) and Bobby was gruffly directing everyone around with their dishes ("What do I look like, housekeeping?"), future Dean tapped him on the shoulder and gestured to the back door. "Got something for you."

Dean frowned around the crusty, flaky perfection that is pie, but his mouth was too full to ask what. Future him was being quiet about it too, glancing round and nodding to Castiel, and smoothly swiping a few folded sheets of paper from his buddy's hand.

The porch was freezing, but the light from inside was warm and all the windows were shut tight, keeping in the noise. For a second, Dean thought, but now Dad and Bobby are alone, but he shook it off. If it came down to it, Castiel could literally hold them apart.

Future Dean unfolded the paper and handed it over. It was a photocopy of a newspaper article on some medical conference in Wisconsin. Dean scanned the details, but nothing popped. He shrugged. "What is it?"

"The shtriga."

Dean's guts went cold. Future Dean looked sympathetic. "Yeah, same one," he nodded. "It's going by the name of Dr Hydecker, works at Dane County Memorial in Fitchburg. Sammy and I found it last time after it started feeding on kids again. We killed it, and the kids lived, but I, uh..." He glanced down. "I didn't want Sammy to know then, so I figured if I give it to you now, you can go kill it, and he'll never have to." He paused. "You'll need Dad, or me or Cas; can't do it alone," he said, quicker. "It wasn't easy last time. I don't know what Dad'll say – never had a chance to talk to him about it – but if you want, I've got the time." He shrugged.

And Dean – Dean just stared at the smiling face in the picture, "Hydecker" printed neatly on his nametag. Suddenly a fold appeared right through the face; the paper was wrinkling under this thumb. He looked up, trying to decide if he should ask (How'd you kill it without letting it feed? It definitely dies, right? What will it feel like? Does it feel good? Did it make the guilt stop? Does Dad ever forgive us?), but all the words died on his tongue. "This is your idea of a present?"

Other Dean snorted. "Yeah, it is," he said, grinning. "Pretty crap, huh?"

Dean shrugged, looking at the picture again. Hydecker. His throat went dry. "Thanks."

"Merry Christmas."

Maybe it was the eggnog half made of rum, but watching his younger self walk back inside, shoulders set and shoving the shtriga's picture in his pocket, Dean felt a fuzzy sort of warmth that... well, he couldn't remember the last time. But it felt good

"Man, you're soppy."

He turned. Bobby was standing further down the porch, at the corner that went round to the front door. He had a beer in each hand. Dean made himself shrug casually. "You heard all that?"

"Some," said Bobby, walking over and offering a bottle. "Your daddy never mentioned going after a shtriga."

"It was years ago. We lost it." He hesitated. "It was my fault."

"Ah."

Bobby leaned back on the rail and took a sip, and Dean did the same, shrugging his coat higher against the cold and trying very hard not to think about how much he'd missed this. Missed him.

"Your buddy Castiel said you just paid a visit to Sheriff Mills's son," Bobby said after a minute. "Saved him from lung cancer."

Dean nodded. "He would've died inside a week."

Bobby eyed him. "So you're literally going around saving everyone you can? You do know everyone has to die sometime, right?"

"Not everyone. I mean, I know, yeah–" He bit it off. Sighed. "There was a zombie thing, a few years from now. Her son got brought back and she had to kill him. She ended up becoming a hunter because of it. And a friend. I didn't want her to go through that again."

"Ah," said Bobby, tipping back his head for another sip. "Guess that explains all this."

"All what?"

Bobby swallowed and gestured to the windows and the movement inside. "This. You crashing my house for a goddamn Christmas party, getting all your ducks in line to play happy families for Sam. You're trying to make everything go your way this time 'round."

Dean frowned, puzzled. "Wouldn't you?"

"Course I'd try," said Bobby, shrugging. "But have you ever heard the phrase 'you can't fight fate'?"

"Fate's a bitch," Dean replied. "An actual bitch. And she's not all-powerful. Angels are supposed to be agents of fate too, but they just get orders from other angels, and even archangels don't know everything. God's AWOL, by the way," he added, and looked to see if that would surprise him, but Bobby just shrugged.

"Figured."

Dean nodded to himself. "If he cared enough to stop us he'd have stepped in by now. We're up against some heavy hitters, but not fate. Not destiny. Just guys with bigger sticks."

He was half talking to himself at that point, fuzzy rum and the comfortable presence of family all around him dropping his guard, so it took him a second to click when Bobby said, "There's way more going on than demons getting ambitious, isn't there?"

Dean blinked at him, squinting and thinking back to figure out where he'd said too much. Bobby snorted.

"Come on, Dean. Not one angel's set foot on Earth in millennia, but a dozen years from now you've got one glued to your side? I'm not stupid. Demons don't go to war; they've got nothing to fight for, and they're too selfish to die for a cause. So what's really happening?"

Dean looked away. There was... really nothing he could say that wouldn't mean saying everything. "We're taking care of it. Me and Cas."

"Uh huh. I know that look," said Bobby. "You're in deep shit."

"I've got a plan," Dean said sharply. "It's a good plan, it'll work. It just takes time."

"Right," Bobby said sceptically, pushing himself off the rail. "Well, when that all goes to hell, call."

He finished off his beer. Dean paused. "What?"

"You heard me. Whatever it is, I'm in. But," he jabbed a finger, "when you do call, it's all or nothing. I don't work in the dark, Dean, but I'm sure as hell not sitting this out. Not if whatever happened in your time went so bad that you had to come back here to fix it."

Something tightened in Dean's chest. "Bobby... you died last time."

He shrugged. "There are worse ways to go. I don't want to be protected if it means your neck on the line, you got that?"

The tightness crept up through Dean's throat, thick and warm, and burned in his eyes. He nodded sharply. "Yes, sir."

Chapter Text

"Car's up ahead."

Dad "hmmm"d and kept his eyes fixed on the road. Dean squinted at the taillights, trying to make out the model of the car in the dark, but Sam's journal was pretty clear about the victim's car being the only one on this road at the time.

Except the ghost truck, that is.

Truth be told, Dean was kind of excited about this one. A lot of the hunts his older self had sent them on these last few months were pretty dull; all the investigating had been done already and it was all just 'dig up this corpse' or 'burn this random thing'. They'd got to face one ghost (well, two), but only because she was stuck in a repeating loop every year and had to be talked into moving on, which was pretty cool really, even if he wouldn't admit it to Dad. But the rest of the time they were just breaking into crypts or (actual) haunted houses – and an asylum, wasn't that fun, even in broad daylight – or sneaking into places to burn things like gloves or a desiccated hand or a painting and dolls with real hair. There'd been a tree out in Indiana with a fugly scarecrow too, and some Confederate soldier's crypt with a super unlucky penny.

And the shtriga. He still couldn't talk about that one. Dad had clapped him on the shoulder when it was over, said something about being done now, but...

No.

Today they were saving Cassie's dad, and Dean had spend the whole drive down grinning to himself. According to other Dean, last time she'd called him for help after this psycho's ghost truck had turned up, so, okay, she wasn't going to have as much reason to trust him this time, but riding in on a white horse after saving her dad had to count for something, right?

"It's nine-thirty," said Dad. "Truck should've shown up by now."

Dean checked the case notes again (actual notes, scribbled while his other self had described the case to them, not the actual journal the other Sam had kept; Dean had asked twice to see it, but the old guy wouldn't budge). "Doesn't look like the cops knew the exact time. Give it a minute." Dad scowled and Dean backpedalled. "Or could be the ghost waits 'till the victim's alone. We could back off a bit."

"If I back off any more we're going to lose him."

Dean shut up. They backed off anyway.

When something finally happened, Mr Robinson's car was a speck of red light way down the road that barely showed up even in the headlights of the ghost truck. If the dashboard hadn't flickered, they would've missed it.

"Dad–"

He'd already gunned it. Dean held on and shoved the papers in the glove compartment, unbuckling his seatbelt and shuffling hard up against his door. Ahead, the ghost truck was bumping the little car, smashing taillights and getting rougher every time, toying with him. Mr Robinson was trying to outrun it, but didn't have the horsepower. That truck was just too fast.

Dad's truck was faster.

With its prey in sight, the ghost wasn't paying any attention to them, so Dad got past it pretty easy. Dean wrapped his seatbelt round his arm a few times and, taking a breath, opened his door.

Mr Robinson was barely visible through his windows, trying like hell to keep control and evade, and from the look on his face when he saw them, he probably hadn't heard them drive up at all. For a second he blinked, wide-eyed like a cartoon.

They couldn't spare that second.

"Open up!" Dean yelled over the noise of three engines. He braced one foot on the step, shoved the other knee into his door to keep it open, and swung out on the locked seatbelt to hammer his fist on Mr Robinson's door. "We'll get you out of here, come on!"

The ghost, turns out, wasn't stupid. It changed targets.

Crunch.

Dean got slammed into the chassis as the ghost took out Dad's right taillight. From inside Dad shouted, "Dean!" but the blow had knocked the wind out of him; it took him a second to move. "Dean, now!"

Mr Robinson had cottoned on and was pushing his own door open, wriggling out of his seatbelt as he drove one-handed. Dean hoped like hell he was setting the cruise control because there was no way he could haul the guy in if that car wasn't matching their speed – if he could manage it at all.

Over his shoulder he called, "You gotta get me closer!" and Dad did his best. They swerved in and Dean reached out far as he could, but his fingertips were still half a foot from Mr Robinson's. He waved at the guy to move in. "Closer!"

Dad tried. The ghost jolted them again, trying for a side-swipe, and Dad used the opening to angle in, but there was less than a second to make the grab before Dad had to swing out to avoid a crash, and Dean missed.

The ghost truck nosed its way between their two bumpers, making it impossible to swing in again, but it couldn't rear-end either of them anymore either. The road was wide enough for three cars, but Dean would've bet his cosy new room at the bunker that the ghost would try running them off next. He couldn't swing out, and while Dad could gun it and get ahead, Mr Robinson couldn't.

Dean glanced at the road ahead – straight line, for now – yanked his door in, waved Mr Robinson back in and yelled "Brake!"

Dad reacted first, peeling left just enough so the passenger door wouldn't catch and rip Dean's arm off, and screeched to a stop, letting the ghost truck race by. A few dozen feet ahead, Mr Robinson halted and lost his door as the ghost barrelled past.

It braked a moment later.

They had barely a few seconds and they all knew it, so Dad hit the gas again and Dean got a car-door bruise across his shins as they raced up to the crunched mess Mr Robinson was climbing out of.

He ran for them. Dean pushed the door open and threw himself backwards into the gear stick as the ghost truck revved and reversed at them; Mr Robinson scrambled into Dean's seat and Dean grabbed his arm to hold him in as Dad evaded.

They took off.

"Wha– what the hell?" Mr Robinson panted. Dean reached over to slam the door shut.

"It's a ghost manifesting a truck and it's trying to kill you," said Dad, eyes flicking quickly between the road and the truck in the rear-view. "We're going to get you out of here."

"A gho–?"

"Long story."

"How did you kno–?"

"Longer story."

Dean yanked his notes and the local map back out of the glove compartment and fished around for his flashlight. Damn, they really should've gotten here early enough to drive this a few times in the daylight. "Okay Decatur Road, should be half a mile ahead."

"Watch my back, Dean!"

Dean swung round in his seat and squinted into the headlights. "Fuck. Dad–!"

Too late; the ghost truck rear-ended them, making what sounded like an ugly dent in the weapons trunk and throwing all of them into the dashboard – except Dad (Seatbelts? Great things). Dean bit back a shout as his shoulder was slammed into hard plastic. Instead, blood on tongue, he muttered, "Looks like it's chasing us."

"Yes, Dean, I got that," Dad growled. "Are you all right? Dean!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm good." He winced and twisted back round to look again – still close, not ramming just yet – and back to the map. With no flashlight. Its beam rolled somewhere around their feet. He reached down for it and– yep, definitely bruised something bad. "Decatur Road, up ahead," he said from memory. "Then six... no, seven-tenths of a mile to where an old church burned down."

"And then?" said Dad.

Dean eased himself back into the tiny middle seat and glued his eyes to the mirrors. "Then it's supposed to chase us onto holy ground and off itself."

Dad growled and took a tight turn into Decatur Road. "This had better work."

"Must've last time."

Beside him, Mr Robinson was trying hard to get his breathing under control. But from the way he was clutching his seat he was... possibly having a panic attack.

"Hey, hey!" said Dean, shaking him. "You're all right. Okay? That ghost'll be toast in a few minutes, you're gonna be fine."

Mr Robinson shook his head frantically, still sucking in air. "Why – why's this ha–happening?"

"Dunno. Ghosts usually turn up as themselves, not some damn truck. We don't know much. Its name is Cyrus Dorian. Heard of him?"

His breathing stopped completely – for a second – and all the blood drained out of his face. Up side, it stopped the panic attack cold. Dully, totally disconnected from everything going on, Mr Robinson said, "He's after us."

The cabin brightened. Dean whipped his head back to the mirror, flung an arm in front of Mr Robinson and braced himself on the dash as the truck rammed them again. "Yeah, I'd say so."

"Church," Dad said, zeroing in on their target. There was barely anything left, and Dad pulled in as close as he could to the burnt sticks that were once a wall.

As one, the three of them turned to look out the back. The headlights were blinding, and its engine just kept getting louder and louder. Dad was swearing under his breath, gripping the wheel and ready to go. Mr Robinson started to pray.

It screamed at them, tearing down the road, getting closer so damn fast, and for half a second Dean thought calmly, I'm gonna die. Bastard future me set us up.

Then the ghost truck hit a ghost gate and shattered into little ghostie pieces.

...Huh.

The electrics stopped flickering; the rumble of Dad's engine didn't seem ominous anymore. It even felt a bit warmer. As one, Dean and Dad relaxed, and Mr Robinson slowly turned around. "Is it over?"

Dad smiled and clapped Dean on the shoulder (not the bruised one, though Dean still had to work to hide the wince). "It is. Hallowed ground destroys evil spirits. Give us directions, we'll take you home."

"Oh, thank God," said Mr Robinson as they pulled out, slumping in his seat. "Thank God for you two. How did you know?"

"All part of the job," said Dean, grinning and settling carefully in his seat. He offered a hand. "Dean Winchester," he said and, jerking his head, offered, "My dad, John."

Dad gave a short salute.

"Take a left when you reach the highway," said Mr Robinson. He shook his head. "I just don't know... these last few weeks have been hard." He looked up sharply. "Is there any way... I mean, do you know if this is what happened to Clayton?"

Dean paused; looked at Dad. Dad frowned. "Who's Clayton?"

"Clayton Soames, a friend of mine. He died a few weeks ago. It looked like he'd been run off the road but there were no other tyre tracks." Exactly like this would've been, if they hadn't turned up. Dean's guts went cold. "I just thought," said Mr Robinson, "if it was Dorian..."

"If it was," said Dad darkly, "we should've known."

By the time they got back to the bunker, Dad was wound up to a rage. Hell, he'd been steaming before they left Cassie's place, soon as Mr and Mrs Robinson finished telling their story, but Dean's asshole older self and Castiel weren't answering their phones, and all Sam knew was that they said they'd be back soon.

So here they were, storming in from the garage with Missouri mud on their boots and startling Sam and Jess out of their law books. Dad didn't waste time: "They here?"

"Yeah, but they're not talking." Sam jerked a thumb towards the dorms. "Came back an hour ago. 'Got things to discuss', he said."

Which meant they'd be shut in Dean's room going over whatever bullshit they got up to when they were gone from the bunker, which was most of the time. Other Dean had said they were doing the same as him and Dad, taking care of hunts that would've happened later on so even the first vics wouldn't die, but if that were so, why'd they never share details? Huh? And that journal future Sam had written – they kept it locked away for no reason. Dean was sick of this kids' table crap, and he was nothing compared to Dad.

Sam knew them too well; he hurried after them. Dean didn't bother filling him in. Down the hall, a few turns later, and Dad was hammering on other Dean's door. Through it, other Dean said, "Not now!"

Dad stepped back and slammed his boot into the wood. The old knob gave way and he stormed in – and froze.

Dean, behind him, blinked. "Wha–?"

Castiel stood with his back to them, his long coat blocking most of their view of other Dean, who was sitting on the bed, feet planted on the floor and knees spread wide. He was doubled over, moaning, one hand gripping Castiel's coat, and Castiel was leaning forward, one hand on other Dean's shoulder and the other...

"Finish, Cas!"

The other arm was plunging straight towards other Dean's body. They couldn't see exactly where, but from the angle, and the way Castiel was bracing his weight on other Dean's shoulder–

A puff of warm air hit Dean's ear as Sam said, "Is he jerking him off?"

Dean jumped, mouth full of wordless denials that fell out silently as his jaw hung slack. Ahead, Dad was just as speechless.

But then Castiel took a step to the side, and no: They were both dressed. But Castiel's arm was sunk into other Dean's sternum, right through his shirt; there was a thin glow around his wrist as he– What? Felt around inside the guy's ribcage? Whatever it was, it hurt; other Dean was gripping Castiel's sleeve with one hand and the mattress with another, sweating and grinding his teeth.

"Get away from him!" yelled Dad, and he lunged for them– but Castiel flicked one wrist and he bounced back, crashing into Dean and sending both of them into the wall. Son of a bitch didn't even look up; his eyes were screwed closed in concentration.

Sam helped them up (which was good, Dean wouldn't say, because his shoulder felt completely screwed now), and it was probably only his hand on Dad's arm that kept Dad from going again. What the fuck were they–?

Castiel slid his arm out, slowly, carefully, and as soon as his fingers were free the glow vanished; other Dean slumped right over, pale and shaky, and Castiel caught him. "You need to sleep."

"'m fine, Cas," he mumbled, weakly shoving him off. He tried to stand and stumbled right over. Castiel put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down.

"Get off him!" snapped Dad. He grabbed the angel's arm and tried to haul him off. Tried; Castiel was like a statue, a solid granite one bolted into the ground and welded down. Dad could've been a breeze for all the effect he had. Castiel ignored it, focused on keeping other Dean sitting. Other Dean was waving him off weakly.

"'salright, Dad."

"Bullshit. What the hell are you doing?"

Other Dean took a deep breath, looking up at them with that face that said he was deciding whether or not they got to know. He turned at Castiel, but the angel just frowned at him. "It was your idea," he said darkly.

Other Dean frowned and shook his head. "Fine," he grumbled, and glanced at them. "Angel power comes from Heaven, but Cas can't connect to that because other angels would notice him do it. So he's got to use his own grace all the time, and that can drain out. Human souls are kind of like a generator for that stuff, so if he touches mine, he can juice up for a while." He shrugged. "That's all."

Dean blinked, rubbed his eyes, brain sorting that into some kind of logic. "You're using your – sorry, our soul – as a battery charger. For angel juice."

Which must've sounded just as stupid to his older self because other Dean chuckled, and he must've been exhausted because it turned into kind of a weird giggle.

"It's a dangerous process," Castiel said, eyes fixed on other Dean, disapproval radiating from him. "Especially this often."

"We've got work to do, Cas."

It sounded like an old married couple argument, which Dean might have mocked them for if his brain wasn't still spinning from the traumatising sight they'd walked in on.

"What happens to his soul?" Sam asked Castiel, eyeing other Dean as he slumped forward on his elbows. "When you... touch it?"

"It drains his energy. He needs time to recover. Sleep."

Other Dean scowled. "You're not my mother."

"She told me to take care of you."

Dean froze, Dad jerked, and other Dean flinched, stung. Mom... Mom was a pretty harsh card to play, but Castiel had the same look as Dad did when he was at the end of his tether. It worked, anyway.

"...Fine," grumbled other Dean, and shooed them out. "Fine, I'll sleep. Ten hours, Cas, that's it– No, do not knock me out. I can sleep on my own."

Castiel held two fingers out ominously until Dean deflated a little. "I promise, Cas," he said, softer. Castiel nodded and turned to walk out, but Dad didn't move out of his way, though behind him Dean could hear Sam step aside. Castiel slid past. From the bed, other Dean squinted up at them. "What? Everything went fine with Cassie's dad, right?"

Dad shook the paper notes they'd had for the Robinson case. "Clayton Soames died last month. Same ghost. They told us before we asked; no way you didn't know."

Older Dean – and he really did look old to Dean's eyes right now, old and sad – slumped. "Yeah, well. That wasn't supposed to happen."

"What did happen?" demanded Dad. "You let a man die, Dean."

"It happened, all right?" other Dean snapped, and would have gotten up if he hadn't swayed with dizziness just from moving too fast. He steadied himself and ignored it. "There's a lot of cases here," he said steadily, looking just south of Dad's eyes. "Hundreds. I didn't remember that the first killing was so much earlier 'till I re-read the journal, and by then it was too late. Cas can't just time-hop us back every time we mess up, it'll kill him."

"So why didn't you tell us?" said Dean. "Better yet, why didn't you share that gold mine journal of yours so one of us might've caught it?"

His older self ignored that. "It's my fault, okay? They can blame me."

"Yeah, convenient how we can't tell them about you, isn't it?" Dad scowled and stalked out. Sam followed. Dean would've gone too, nothing left to say, but behind him the other guy said, "Hey, me– you – Dean," and he turned around.

His older self was watching him, hitching a knee to slowly pull off one boot, and jerked his chin to invite him back in. Dean took a few steps and didn't sit. This room always felt weird to him; too many things the same and different, like the picture of Mom by the lamp, way more worn out than the one in his wallet. Other Dean avoided his room too. "What is it?" asked Dean.

Other Dean hauled off the first boot and stretched out his leg before starting on the other. "Wanted to ask you about Cassie," he said, eyes on the boot. "Did you talk to her?"

He had, and back then he'd been ready to sing; now he just didn't feel like it. "Yeah."

"And?"

Dean folded his arms. "And what? You know me, you know everything." No, that didn't come out bitter. Probably.

Other Dean shucked the boot and started peeling off his jacket and belt, shaking off a yawn. "Not everything. But I know what we wanted before seeing her again, and I know what's going to happen if you go down that road. So don't."

"Why, why not?"

"Because." Other Dean threw his jacket across the room, didn't look at him. "The last time I saw her she said she's a realist, and didn't see any hope for us. That was a few days from now."

"And you didn't even try?" demanded Dean, because no, she hadn't said that; she'd hugged him and thanked him for saving her dad and invited him back sometime. She'd still been sceptical about it all and Dean might have promised to take her on a (very safe and easy) ghost hunt sometime to prove it, but they had a shot. "Twelve years and you didn't even get in touch again?"

Other Dean shrugged. "Shit happened."

Dean scowled. "Don't lie to me."

"Why not? We do it all the time," he retorted, and slowly stood up from the bed. He looked Dean straight in the eye. "Cassie's not going to stick around. She doesn't want this life; she didn't want us. Not enough. So whatever she said while she was over the moon that you brought her dad back, she'll change her mind."

Dean swung at him, but even worn out from angel juicing, the other Dean was still faster; fucker had twelve years of practice on his side, and he grabbed the swing and twisted, digging his thumb against Dean's ring and little fingers, two of his worst old breaks – even Dad didn't know they still twinged sometimes. Dean winced and grabbed back, but his older self had the better angle. They went still, locked in a knot of fists and forearms, and Dean suddenly had a up-close view of other Dean's hands: None of his fingers were off angle. Not even a little. He stared.

"Cas healed them," explained other Dean, and, after another second, let go. Dean stepped back, shaking out his arms. "He'll probably do the same for you if you ask. He's got the juice, for now."

"Yeah, thanks," Dean sneered, and turned and stalked out, not closing the door just so the bastard would have to do it himself. The broken knob made him grin.

Then it occurred to him, what he should have said: "I don't believe in fate." Over his shoulder he yelled, "I don't believe in fate! Thought you didn't either!"

He was probably too far down the corridor for the other Dean to hear him, but it made him feel better. He felt around inside his pocket as he walked and pulled out a scrap of paper; stared at it for a second. Cassie's email address looked back at him.

"What the hell," he said.

Castiel was nearing the kitchen when John caught up with him. "Hey!" he barked. "I want a word."

The angel paused and turned, watching him levelly. John walked up, ignoring the way his back ached from hitting the wall; it'd pass, and he was too angry to care. He got right up into the angel's face and said, "You need a boost, you use me. Not my boys. You got that?"

The feathered bastard looked surprised. He tilted his head, studying him for a second. "You're volunteering?" he asked.

John's jaw tightened. "I don't know what you two are up to and right now, I don't care. I won't let you drain him dry."

"I'd never do that," Castiel said, suddenly intense and– John did not step back. The wall was just closer than he'd thought. "Never."

John didn't break the stare. "Prove it."

Castiel leaned back, studying him for a long moment. Finally he said, "Dean will notice if I come to you too often. Every second time."

John frowned, considered, nodded. "Fine."

Chapter Text

The bunker was a warren of hidden rooms in plain sight. Besides the dorm rooms and the bathrooms and file rooms and the labs and the dungeon hidden in the back of 7B, there were a couple of other rooms Dean and Sam and Cas had found back in the future that were out of the way and boring-looking, easy to overlook, but which had really heavy duty warding protecting them. Most of what they'd found inside was in curse boxes, except for the books on how to make even nastier things. With a bit of care not to disturb the dust outside and with Cas using his mojo to jam the door every time they left, one was working really well as a vault.

Dean had finally woken up twelve hours after the ten-hour deadline he'd set and was grumbling his way through his second cup of coffee as he made his way down the corridors, stepping up to the door as carefully as he could. "Cas, it's me," he said, not raising his voice. "Lemme in."

The door in front of him squeaked a little as Cas undid whatever he did to jam it. Dean stepped in and shut it behind him. "You turned my alarm off."

"You shouldn't have set it," Cas replied blandly, reading from the laptop.

"Yeah, well, I was pretty sure junior me was going to go do something stupid," Dean said, pulling out his chair and falling into it.

"That does seem likely."

Dean took a swallow of his too-hot coffee and slumped back in his chair. All his bones still felt like lead, and if he were honest about it he'd admit another twelve hours sleep would be a good place to start, but he was never honest like that. It'd been a long week; a long week after another long week after a long few months, but it'd been worth it.

He looked up: The shelves around them were lined with curse boxes and one, sitting quietly between the one with the cursed ballet shoes and the one with the rabbit's foot, was a plain, dull, lead-lined box holding the Book of the Damned.

Sometime between crap going bad and crap going worse Sam must've sat down with Charlie and gotten all the details of the Spanish monastery where she'd dug up the thing; his journal had it described right down to the corner of the room to dig in, and the whole thing took less than an hour. Dean had white-knuckled the flight both ways and sworn he'd do whatever it took to get Cas's wings back (at least that was over quickly), but they'd got the book, and Charlie wouldn't. She'd never come near it, and the Stynes would never come near her. Ever. She'd be safe.

(The Stynes were dead. Cas had argued and pleaded, but Dean had kept that plan to himself till the day after they'd come back from breaking the curse on Oasis Plains, and Cas, fresh out of grace, hadn't been in any shape to stop him. It'd made national news but he'd got away clean, and he'd left the kids alive – eleven-year-old Cyrus Styne, a six-year old girl and a baby cousin. Cas had grudgingly erased the details of their family's practices from their minds, and then bitch/preached the whole drive home.)

The First Blade had been easier to get. That had mostly been detective work, tracking the Blade from the sub that had scooped it up through to the Moroccan pirates who sucked at poker; thank god for Crowley's big mouth. Dean'd only had to put himself in the right place to join the game and now Cuthbert Sinclair would never get hold of the thing. As soon as he'd left the game he'd shoved it in Cas's box and torn himself away to be sick in the grass. It still called to him, even without the Mark.

That'd never happen again either. Not sure how yet, but it wouldn't.

Nadya's codex hadn't been too hard to get hold of; crack the Werther Box and juice Cas up enough to break the curse himself, no blood needed, though Dean had been out of commission for a week. Getting the angel tablet out of Lucifer's crypt was tougher, but once they'd got inside there was enough other stuff that made Cas light up to be worth the effort; Dean wasn't sure what half of them did, but Cas had locked himself in their 'vault' for three days building curse boxes to hold them, and came out looking, for the first time, like he actually believed they might beat the Apocalypse.

The boxes for the tablets sat stacked on top of each other in a corner. The leviathan tablet, in the middle box, was fresh from Iran and still caked in red clay, and the last one was empty. Wherever Crowley had gotten the demon tablet from, probably Hell, it was out of reach for now, and the demons would fight hard to keep it that way, but it didn't matter; they had all of Kevin's notes and translations, and Kevin was home with his mom finishing fourth grade. No one was going to need him to read them. They were done getting kids killed.

(He'd killed Gordon Walker too. Made it look like a vamp got the best of him. The bunker would keep Sam was safe, but there were too many of the other special kids out there that Gordon would call evil, and Andy and Ava and all of them could still be saved. The guy was a psychopath. Dean wasn't sorry.)

"I've found the Two Rivers Motel."

Dean looked up. Cas was frowning at the screen. "And?"

Cas eyed him. "I still think I should go with you. If Metatron overpowers you–"

"Cas, we've talked about this. I'll be fine – douchebag won't even know who I am – but if he gets his hands on you he can work that spell to knock all the angels out of Heaven again, and I'm pretty sure that'd make those feathery assholes suspicious."

Cas grimaced. "And if something goes wrong?"

Dean shrugged. "Like what? I talk my way in, cut his throat, bottle his grace and put a bullet in him. Boom."

"Things can always go wrong, Dean. Things usually go wrong."

He hesitated. "Not every time." But Cas had that stubborn, pouty look on his face and Dean sighed into his coffee. "Okay, okay, fine. You tag along, and watch my back till I get to the hotel. Hang around in the lobby; I'll keep a phone line open so you'll hear everything."

Cas nodded slowly. "Thank you, Dean."

"Hey, whatever man, it's a quiet week. Nothing's going to happen until – what, next Tuesday?" Something like that; he'd checked the journal before passing out. Or the day before. Something like that.

"Thursday." Cas closed the laptop. "Your father and younger self left this morning for a haunting at Bodega Bay."

"The Van Ness house?" Dean paused, thinking back on that case, then shook his head. "Eh, they'll be fine. You gave them the case notes, right?"

"Everything that could possibly be relevant. They insisted. Including how the spirit planted an anchor item on Sam and that Bobby's ghost helped you solve the case."

"Yeah, I bet that motivated them," muttered Dean. He chugged down the rest of his coffee and smacked the cup down. "Right. I'll load up the car." He stood– and wobbled slightly. Cas's eyes narrowed.

"Are you sure–?"

"I'm fine, Cas, let's go! You know how long I've been waiting to kill Metatron?" He grinned. "This is gonna be fun."

Sam's head smacked into his pillow, and a second later Jess's hair hit his eyes as she flopped into her own, sweaty and still breathing hard. He grinned stupidly. "See?" he said. "Definitely perks to being left behind."

Jess shook her head, smushing her nose into the pillow, and sighed and pushed herself up on her elbows. "You mean being locked in. Metaphorically," she added before Sam could say anything. He probably looked sceptical because she added, "Or didn't you notice how Dean's always offering to pick up the groceries and the newspapers and my tampons so that we don't have any reason to leave?"

He shrugged and shuffled back to sit up against the headboard. "Yeah, of course, but the demons are still out there. We're safe here."

"I'm bored here," she groaned. "This isn't my life, Sam, this is... waiting for life to start up again. How much longer is it going to take?"

Sam sighed and shook his head. "Dean said they're getting somewhere. He and Castiel were going to take out some kind of key player today."

Frowning, she rolled over and stood up, gloriously naked, and Sam sat back to watch her walk across the room for a minute, leaning over every so often to pick up clothes. She turned back to him, hand on hip. "Well?"

"...Huh?"

She rolled her eyed and stepped into her panties. "I said, do you think they're ever going to tell us everything?"

"Probably not," said Sam. "But I have an idea."

It was really only half an idea, one he hadn't put much serious thought into, but Jess had been pretty down these last few weeks, and he could make this work if it'd cheer her up. Something twinged in his forehead and he flinched, but ignored it. "You know the laptop where they keep that journal of theirs?"

"Yeah..." She zipped up her jeans and pulled on a shirt. "You want to break in?"

"Dean's passwords are really easy to crack," Sam said, grinning at her. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second and shook his head. "At least for me. Future Dean's can't be that much harder."

Jess was nodding slowly, smiling for the first time in a while, and she started to say something, but suddenly Sam couldn't hear it. A migraine started shooting up both sides of his head and he winced, rubbed his fingers hard into his forehead, trying to soothe it, then–

PAIN

–doubled over on the bed.

Images flashed across his eyes: People he didn't know, shouting, blood– And then the pain ripped through his head like an axe, blinding him.

Then, faintly, he heard Jess's voice.

He blinked, weak and shaky, and above him Jess sagged with relief. "You okay?"

"I... uh..." He shook his head – bad idea. It sent him spinning and he slumped back into the pillow. He was lying down again, tucked in under blankets, and dressed. Jess had her sweater and shoes back on. He squinted at the clock but couldn't remember when he'd last looked at it. "I think so. What happened?"

"You tell me, Sam. Has that ever happened before?"

With a sinking feeling, Sam realised: Yeah, it had.

Dean was whistling as he sauntered into the bunker, re-living the look of pant-pissing terror on Metatron's face for the hundredth time since leaving Colorado. Asshole hadn't realised he could be made mortal any more than his future self had, and seeing him flinch at the cock of a pistol almost made up for all the times he'd screwed them over.

Almost. Nothing made up for what had happened to Kevin. God, Kevin.

Plus, Cas was now juiced up as high as he could go without getting his own grace back, and had taken off to use it up before it started to bleed away. He'd insisted on going alone, grumpy and sarcastic the way he got when he was worried, so Dean kept on whistling as jauntily as he could, ready to brush it off as nothing if the others asked. They'd ask. They knew how important Cas was, right?

No one was in the library when he walked through, or the kitchen, or any of the other common areas. Dad and his younger self would still be in California, but Sam and Jess usually spent this part of the day with their law books spread all over the tables, quizzing each other. (Or screwing. They weren't subtle.)

His phone beeped in his pocket, and when he pulled it out he found three texts from Jess, the first two sent while he was singing at the top of his lungs on the drive home.

The first read: Sam fainted. Looked like he was having a migraine. John and Dean aren't picking up.

The second read: He's awake and he had some kind of vision. He's sure it's real. Did anything like this happen to the other Sam?

And the last, sent just now, read: Where are you? Call me.

Dean sprinted down the hall.

The door to Sam's room was open. He was lying in bed, sleeping, and Jess was in a chair gnawing her thumbnail. "What happened?" Dean demanded, rushing to the bed. "Sammy?"

"He's okay–" Jess started.

"Mrrf. Dean?" Sam blinked up at him. After a second, his face closed over, and Dean tried not to think about how that only happened after he realised which of his brothers he was seeing. "What are you doing here?"

"Finished the job. What the hell happened? You had a 'vision'?" He tried to sound sceptical, but in his head thoughts were tripping over each other. Not now, not now, it's too soon, and You weren't supposed to know, fuck it, and, worst: Why's it happening NOW?

He took a breath and looked at Jess. She shook her head.

But Sam was nodding, slowly sitting up. "It wasn't a dream or hallucination or anything," he insisted. "It felt like a premonition. Like... when I dreamed about Jess dying in a fire."

Fuck, he had to go and make that connection. Dean sighed and pulled up the other chair, trying to avoid Jess's eyes. "Okay, what did you see?"

"Did this happen to the other me?"

"I don't know, what'd you see?"

Sam frowned. "It was a living room," he said, glancing at Jess. "A family, with son about my age, kinda short. Pale. The father was yelling. There was a letter opener hovering and spinning above a table. It shot across the room and into the dad's mouth. Stabbed him through the throat, right into a wall." He braced himself and looked at Dean. "I know it was real."

"Yeah, yeah," Dean said absently. Okay, fuck, that did sound like the Millers, and that was definitely a dead-on description of Max, only it hadn't happened that way. And last time the first vision hadn't come for another week; he'd triple checked the journal. He had planned to take a day at home, get some shut-eye, and head for Michigan in the morning so it'd all be over before Sam ever saw a thing, but now...

"Sounds kind of like a haunting we stumbled over last time," he said. "Some crazy old bat died in the house, tried to kick out the new owners and all that. I was gonna go salt and burn her ass soon anyway, so if it'll make you feel better, I'll hit the road tonight instead. This time tomorrow, she'll be toast. No one gets hurt. Okay?"

Sam looked hesitant. "Yeah, but what about–"

"Sammy, come on, it's a milk run. I'll be fine."

"Why did I see it in the first place?"

Dean closed his mouth.

"It makes sense that he'd see something about me," Jess spoke up from across the bed. Her face twisted. "As much as any of this makes sense," she added. "But why some random haunting?"

Dean shrugged nonchalantly. "We never figured it out," he lied. "Every so often he'd see something before it happened, but a lot of the time it was people or places we didn't know – never found half of them, and the ones we did find, sometimes what he saw didn't happen for years." There, that should be enough to throw him off. "Only thing they all had in common was something supernatural."

Sam was eyeing him. "You're sure?"

"Hey, weirder things have happened." He stood up, slapping Sam on the shoulder. "Get some sleep, okay? I'll text you when I've taken care of it. Won't take long."

Three hours later Jess woke with a start, almost knocked out of bed as Sam jerked upright, face contorted in pain and said, "Dean– it's going to kill Dean", and half an hour after that they were in a car, tearing up rubber trying to catch up with Dean before he reached Michigan.

Jess was driving. She figured it was safest.

"We've got to go faster," said Sam, jittering in the passenger seat. "Jess, please."

She pointed to another sign as it shot past. "Speed limit."

"Jess–"

"No, Sam, it's too fast. I'm not going to get us killed. Call him."

"I have called him."

"Call him again. Call John and your Dean; get them to call him."

"Why would he pick up for them and not me?"

If she hadn't had to keep her eyes glued to the road, she would have rolled them. "Don't sound so butthurt. Maybe he thinks you're panicking over nothing."

He scowled. "You didn't see what I saw."

No, he'd just described it a billion times. The same scene as before, only Dean was there, facing the son with his hands up and saying, "Max, you don't want to do this" right before the letter opener stabbed him in the teeth. It was horrifying and she couldn't imagine what it was like to actually see it happen, real as life, but after the fourth emphatic retelling, complete with "no way that's a haunting, that guy has some sort of telekinesis; Dean lied", she'd kind of lost her sympathy.

Most, not all. Every time Sam had another flash, or hunched his shoulders trying to hide how much the last one still hurt, her irritation blew away. Like now; he was wincing and grinding his fingers into his eyes. "Sam, you okay?"

She couldn't keep looking at him; just a glance as she checked the wing mirror. "Sam!"

"Yeah. Yeah, sorry." He unwound slightly and braced himself, staring down the road. "Can we go any faster?"

She grit her teeth.

Dean's car was parked outside a nondescript house in Saginaw, and Jess pulled up right by a mailbox labelled Miller. Sam had been on the phone on and off since they left Lebanon, lying to the police and using bits of details from his visions to stalk the family and track Dean down in time.

If they were in time. As they hurried out of the car, Jess saw that the front door was ajar, and her insides went cold. Please, Lord, don't let him be dead, please, I swear I'll speed next time, I'll break every road rule–

Sam rammed the door with his shoulder and Jess sprinted in after him. Her eyes took a second to adjust to the light.

Dean was standing by the window, hands held up loosely with one elbow in front of Mr Miller, trying to shield him and facing off with the younger guy Sam had described, Max. Mrs Miller was nearer to them, on Dean's other side and out of the line of fire – for now. Hovering between them all was the letter opener, and as they burst in it swung around. Heads turned. Dean suddenly went as tense as a coiled spring. "Sam, leave."

"Max," Sam said breathlessly. "Don't do this."

All the Millers were glancing between them, confused between their fear or fury, but only Max moved. "What do you care?"

"I care," Sam promised. "I know it– it probably makes no sense but I care, Max. You don't want to do this."

Max had tears spilling from his eyes, all anger and terrified rage in fists so tight his arms trembled. Behind him his father staggered, drunk and snorting like a mad bull, just barely more afraid than he was furious, and behind them Mrs Miller trembled, looking between son and her husband. Jess took hold of Sam's wrist, keeping him from going any closer. This wasn't right.

"They deserve it," Max seethed, biting off his words, so quiet and scarier for it. "Do you have any idea what they did to me?"

"I'm sure it was terrible," said Sam, "but you're better than that."

"Sammy, leave," said Dean. He was edging closer, away from Mr Miller, and Sam glanced at him, still angry.

"Max," he said instead, "let us help you."

Max was looking at them like they were a puppet show, something inane and stupid that he was so done with. "Go away. This isn't about you." He turned back at his father with eyes that were narrow slits of hate. "They hurt me, they beat me. For years. I can't let that go."

The letter opener spun menacingly in front of him. Backed against the wall, Mrs Miller cringed, silent tears dripping down her face. Jess met her eyes – pleading, despairing – and she said, "They? Or him?"

Max's glare turned to his mother. "Both," he spat. "They both–"

"Really? 'Cause I don't think she has it in her to hit anyone."

Now Max did look at her, madness spinning behind those eyes, and for a second Jess froze in fear, but she swallowed it. "She's as terrified as you are."

Dean was hovering just on the other side of Mrs Miller, hands still up and eyes flicking between Max and Sam, but when he tried to step in front of her, the letter opener flew up to his nose. "Don't."

He took a step back. "Max, we're not here to hurt you," he said, "just think about this for a–"

Mr Miller made a break for the kitchen door. Everything went very fast.

Max's head whipped around.

The letter opener flew across the room and straight through the back of his head.

Dean's arms dropped.

Jess yanked on Sam's wrist and reached for Mrs Miller, who was staring in shock.

"Max, no!" yelled Sam. "You don't have to do this!"

The letter opener jerked back into the air, dripping blood on the carpet, and pointed squarely at Mrs Miller. "I want to."

Jess lunged, vaguely thinking she could protect the woman if she could just stand in the way, that Max would stop, there'd be time to talk–

Sam 's weight hit her like a freight train, slamming them both into the floor.

Above them there was a squelch and a thud–

BANG.

–and everything went still.

Softly, beyond the protective cage of Sam's torso, something large hit the couch.

"Jesus," murmured Sam, and Jess faintly registered that her jaw and cheekbone were aching, smacked hard against the floor. Sam shifted above her, straightening up, and as he moved away she saw the couch behind him, and Max, messily sprawled on the cushions with a neat red hole in his forehead. "Jesus, Dean! What the hell were you thinking?"

Dean was tucking a gun into his waistband. "We've got to go." He pulled out a cloth and shoved it at Sam. "Prints."

"Dean–"

"Later, Sam!" He pulled his sleeves over his hands and started rubbing down a tabletop and the back of a chair. Sam attacked the doorknob. Right, Jess thought faintly. Fingerprints.

Her hands were on carpet, and she didn't remember touching anything except Sam's arm, and maybe some of Mrs Miller's sleeve... wait...

She looked up. Mrs Miller was still up against the wall, pinned against it by the metal that had rammed through her eye socket. Jess gagged.

Large hands hauled her up. "Hurl outside!" said Dean, stepping them around the mess to the front door. "Walk normally, keep your head down, get straight to the car," he instructed. "If someone heard that shot we can't let them I.D. us; if they didn't, we can't tip them off."

She felt dizzy. "Sam–"

"I've got you." He appeared behind her, a comforting mass by her shoulder. He put an arm around her and tucked her close, hesitating at the threshold. "Are you okay?"

With... what? The three dead bodies bleeding out behind them? The plan to scurry away like criminals? How the first thing they thought of was fingerprints and exit strategies? Hot tears burned in her eyes, anger as much as shock, and she shook her head. Sam hugged her and muttered something comforting, but there were no words for how much she did not want hugs right now. For the first time ever, it felt disgusting.

Then they were shuffling her outside, strolling casually towards the cars, heads bent towards each other in such a way that they blocked each others' faces from view. The garden path seemed to go on forever and then her hip bumped the car; Sam was opening the passenger door for her and ducking across to the driver's seat. Ahead, Dean's brake lights came on.

And then they were moving, gliding away, keeping to the speed limit for three blocks and gunning it from there. Before she knew it they were on the highway sailing out of Saginaw and Sam was yelling down the phone. She didn't listen, barely noticed, watching the lamp posts swish by and wondering how they could be so normal when somewhere back there, in a normal house on a normal street, three bodies were going cold.

She wasn't a lawyer yet, but she'd picked her field for a reason. The law was about proof, evidence and reasoning, not arbitrary sentencing, and in the back of her mind, disconnecting itself from the emotional train wreck, Jess was putting together fragments of the day – of how Dean's gun was in his belt, already loaded, how he'd been facing Max from the start, shielding the parents, how he'd told Sam he'd "take care of it". The more she turned it over, the more she wondered if Dean had always meant to shoot him. How was that 'saving everyone'?

That evening, back in Lebanon, Dean brought them all pizzas. Jess blinked, got up, walked to the bathroom, and hurled.

Chapter Text

The phone started ringing before his tyres hit Route 281. He blindly jabbed the call button, left hand fisted on the steering wheel and squinting into headlights through the rain. "What?"

"Sammy, come on, this isn't going to fix anything," Dean's tinny voice said. Sam grit his teeth and stomped on the gas.

"I deserved to know– we deserved to know," he bit out. "You should've told us!"

A disgusted grunt came through the speaker. "I'm not future me, dumbass!"

Sam glanced down at the screen – it just said 'Dean' – and scowled harder. Usually he could tell them apart. "Sorry," he said. Dean sighed.

"Just come back, okay? Jesus. Dad says–"

"Fuck Dad. He lied to us."

"It's not like there was any good way to tell us," Dean replied, and Sam almost took out a Honda as he changed lanes.

"Why are you defending him?" he demanded.

"Someone's got to!" said Dean. "Look, calm down, it's not that big a deal."

"We have a brother and he never told us," Sam snapped. "It's a huge deal."

He hung up.

It'd just been a bad, bad day.

Dean had gone with Dad and his future self on a hunt to Carthage to take out a rugaru and it... it hadn't gone wrong, exactly, they got the– thing. Guy. Jack Montgomery, his name was. They got him, burned him alive, and he'd had no idea why. He hadn't started turning yet.

That was tough. Dad had hunted one before back in '95, but that one was already eating people. Jack Montgomery had been buying roses for his fiancé when they met him, grinning all goofy and blushing. Dean had been edgy and Dad had been tenser than a spring. How the hell were they supposed to set this guy on fire?

When future Dean stabbed him through the heart and he didn't die, it got a bit easier. But Dean could still hear the screams, and see the fiancé's face when she ran in to find her guy char-broiling on the kitchen floor.

Yeah. Bad day.

He and Dad had driven back in silence, future Dean's taillights disappearing now and then ahead of them. He wanted to ask Dad... something. Couldn't put it in words even in his head. So he didn't. Dad didn't take his eyes off the road the whole time.

Sam and Jess were fighting when they got to the bunker. A whole lot of "that's not fair!" and "could at least try!" and "what do you want me to do about it?" Dean edged his way past, too wiped to listen to another round (Jess wanted to visit her family, said she had the right and they'd wonder why she didn't come home over summer; Sam thought it was too dangerous with the demons still out there, for her and for them. Had a point. Two days of two would-be lawyers making cases at each other was enough to make him wish for a good old fashioned beat-down), so of course today they dragged him into it. And Dad, because that was a brilliant idea.

Dad had looked at her, at Sam, and over his shoulder at future Dean, coming down the stairs behind them. "You want to go, go," he said to Jess, eyes on future Dean. "Not like we know any reason you shouldn't."

Dean closed his eyes.

Future Dean walked up, stiff and dull-eyed, and said, "Too dangerous" without breaking stride.

"Not fucking good enough," said Jess, blocking his way to the kitchen. "Why?"

"I told you, I can't tell you," future Dean said wearily, "but trust me–"

"No," said Dad, and moved to box him in from the other side. "You've been keeping us in the dark for months and we're not one step closer to finding the yellow-eyed demon."

Future Dean turned slowly over his shoulder, eyes narrowed and that same dull blank look on his face he'd had when he stabbed Jack Montgomery just to prove it wouldn't kill him. That face gave Dean chills.

Dad ignored the look. "So tell me, Dean," he said, "why the hell should we keep trusting you if you don't tell us the truth?"

"Oh, you wanna talk about truth?" said future Dean, low and mild, and alarms went off in Dean's head. From the corner of his eye he saw Sam tense. "I'm not the one who lied to his sons, gave the shittiest warning ever and then died without explaining a damn thing."

"That wasn't me." Dad's eyes were flicking back and forth over future Dean's face. "And you obviously made it out just fine. Didn't you. Both of you."

Jess looked between them, then met Dean's eyes, then looked at Sam. Future Dean was totally still. "It was you. It is you. You never trusted us; you didn't even tell us about Adam."

Dad jerked, horror creeping into his eyes. "What happened to him?"

"Who's Adam?" asked Sam.

"What happened?"

A sinking feeling settled in Dean's gut. Future him lifted his chin, looking like he had an 'I told you so' and was hating it. "Same thing that happened to the rest of his family."

"Who's Adam?" demanded Sam, getting between them. "Dad? What's going on?"

Future Dean stepped back, shouldering his duffle. "You tell them," he said to Dad. "Or I will."

Yeah. A bad, bad, fucked up day.

"We have a brother and he never told us," Sam snapped. "It's a huge deal."

He hung up. Dean threw the phone at the wall– and jumped. "Jess."

She was standing in his doorway, flinching and wide eyes stuck on the spot three inches from her face where the phone had hit. She pointed. "Aim better."

"Sorry." He sighed and bent down to pick it up. "You okay?"

"You guys usurped my argument," she said, folding her arms. "I'm not letting it go, you know. I'm going to go see them. But yeah. How's Sam?"

Dean shrugged. "Pissed. Haven't heard him yell like that since the day he left for college."

"And you?" she asked.

His mouth opened and spilled, "I don't know if he'll come back." He clamped it shut and busied himself checking if the phone still worked.

"Where is he?"

"Didn't say."

She frowned tightly and nodded, and made for the door. "Give him two or three hours, then call again. Let me know soon as he tells you."

"Go ask 'future me'," Dean muttered, studying the fractures in the plastic shell. "He knows eeeeeeeverything."

Jess groaned and turned back. "I'm not going to be your fucking counsellor just cause I'm the only woman here, okay? Your dad's the one you're mad at. Talk to him."

The phone cracked in his hand. "This isn't on Dad."

"Uh, yeah, it is. And if I've gotten to know you guys at all, you're going to keep being stupid about this till you sort it out. I don't know why he didn't tell you. It's not my problem. Deal with it. Talk to your dad."

"Can't." Dean opened his hand and dropped the bits of phone into the trash. "He took off too."

His brother was blond. For some reason that struck Sam the hardest. He looked a lot like his mom, who looked a lot like Mom, and he'd gotten way less of John Winchester in him than Sam had, or Dean. Sam wouldn't have looked twice at the kid if they'd passed on the street, and honestly, he still wasn't sure. Adam Milligan was just a normal kid, hanging out with his friends after school and laughing about something Sam couldn't make out. He sank lower on the park bench and tugged his baseball cap down so he could tilt his ear towards them. Adam's friend was saying something about going to the mall, and Adam was shaking his head. "I've got homework."

His friend groaned. "You're no fun anymore," he teased, and Adam mimed shoving him. His friend ducked and they tussled (badly, Sam noticed; neither of them would last a second in a real fight), and stumbled into the grass, laughing. It was like a movie montage. Sam couldn't look away.

"You barely knew him–" Sam jumped and whirled, hand flying to his pistol – but it was Castiel, sitting on the bench beside him. He smiled slightly, in the corner of his mouth. "Sorry."

Sam breathed hard, forcing it to slow to normal. "What are you doing here?"

Castiel looked out at the playground. "Dean said you'd need help hunting the ghouls that were going to kill Adam and his mother, and he was sure you wouldn't want to see him."

"I never said I was going after them," said Sam. Down the path, Adam waved goodbye to his friends and started walked their way. Sam ducked deeper into his baseball cap.

Beside him, Castiel gave him a dry I'm not an idiot look. "The ghouls live in a series of tunnels accessible from the Millsap family tomb; Dean described them to me before I left. If we leave now we can be finished before sunset."

"Oh." Sam glanced down the path at his little brother, who was almost on them. "All right."

"Good." Castiel stood up suddenly, onto the path, and slammed straight into Adam. They both went sprawling. Sam stared.

"Watch it, man!" cried Adam, cradling his ribs. He winced as he tried to sit up. "Geez."

"I'm so sorry; let me help you," said Castiel, already rolling to his feet. He wrapped a hand around Adam's shoulder and the other on his elbow, and pulled. Adam yelped and swayed a little on his feet, and Castiel immediately started checking him over, turning his head side to side and studying him intently. "Are you hurt?"

His prodding was embarrassing to look at, and Sam was about to step in when the angel swiped his fingers across Adam's face, right across the eyes, and Adam ripped himself free.

"What the hell's wrong with you? That's not how you check for a concussion!" he shouldered his bag and skittered around them, hurrying away a few feet before turning his back and speed walking away.

"Great, now he's never going to want to talk to me," muttered Sam, kicking the grass. "Typical." Castiel watched him sadly.

"You should know," he said softly, "Dean is sorry about all this."

Sam snorted and started walking, in the other direction, toward his car and the cemetery. "Sure he is."

"Sam." Castiel stepped in front of him, got right in his face. "This is the reason we decided not to tell you and the others anything that wasn't necessary. A lot of terrible things happened in the future we came from, and we were responsible for many of them. Dean had to leave Adam's soul to suffer in Hell, for eternity, in order to save yours."

"He..." Sam shook his head and kept going. "You know, I'm not surprised by anything anymore."

"Good. You'll need to be resilient," said Castiel. He looked around the park slowly as they walked, then up at the sky and asked, "Have you talked to Jessica?"

"Yeah," he sighed, "she called a few hours ago. She's invited me to go with her to Santa Cruz to see her family, so I can make sure they're safe from the demons. Ward their house, that sort of thing."

"Are you going?"

Kicking a pebble, he said, "Haven't got a choice. She'll take off alone if I don't, and she can't fight off a demon if they turn up."

Castiel nodded. "If you like, I'd be happy to follow you. I can keep watch for demons from a distance far better than you'll be able to from inside the house."

Sam looked up. "You'd do that?"

"Of course. You're my friend."

Me, or future me? Uncomfortable, Sam glanced away. "If it's not too much trouble, yeah, thanks. That'll help a lot."

"You're welcome."

They reached the road. Castiel's car was the 50s Ford that had been parked closest to the door. Sam had taken Dad's truck, and he smirked a little as he unlocked the trunk to check the weapons bag. "Dean said there's two of them?"

From behind the trunk of his own car, Castiel said, "Yes. A brother and sister." He hesitated, probably realising the weight of that, and a moment later the trunk shut and he walked to Sam's side. He stood awkwardly, as if he'd be shuffling his feet if he weren't totally still. "I know something about what you're going through," he said. "Many of my brothers and sisters were killed in the future we came back to prevent. Some of them by my own hand," he added shamefully, and Sam blinked. "Right now they're in Heaven, and I can't risk telling them anything about that future because I don't know what they'll do with that information. Some of them made terrible choices last time. Some of them killed a lot of people. Some of them tried to kill you."

"Wha–? But– they're angels. Why–?"

"It's a long story. The point is, some of them are far more powerful than I am, and the only way I can protect you from them is to make sure they don't have the knowledge that led them to make those choices last time."

Sam's fingers tightened on the duffle bag he was zipping up. "I had a right to know. He's my brother."

"Maybe someday your father will introduce you. That's up to him. For what it's worth, I'm sorry you found out this way."

Sam reached up and slammed the trunk shut. "Yeah. Me too." He sighed and looked back over the park, down the path. Adam was long gone. "Do you think he'll be safe?"

"The demons aren't after him," Castiel promised. "He and his mother should be left in peace once we eliminate the ghouls."

"At least one of us gets to be." Sam sighed and flipped the car keys in his hand. "Okay. Let's get to work."

Hours later, when their tools were clean of blood and Sam was sleeping through the accelerated healing of his tibia, Cas finished a circuit of the motel grounds and, satisfied, took out his phone. Dean answered on the first ring. "You okay?"

"Yes, we both are. The ghouls are dead and Sam and I will be heading home in the morning."

Through the weak speaker, Dean sighed heavily. "Thanks, man. I owe you. How's Adam?"

Castiel tilted his head to better see the few faint stars visible above the city. "The ache in his ribs will have faded by now. He should be sleeping."

Dean chuckled. "Poor kid. Some days I still swear I can feel those sigils scraping around inside me. He doesn't suspect anything, right?"

"No, I 'bumped' into him. His mother too; she was on a lunch break outside the hospital."

"Better hope they don't swap stories," Dean said, but he didn't sound worried. "Where'd you put the devil's trap? Their skulls?"

"No, it has to be on the body's outer surface. I drew it on the inside of their eyelids."

Dean laughed. "Awesome."

Cas frowned – that wasn't the adjective he would have chosen – and let it go. "I doubt Michael will think to track him down by mundane means. They'll assume your father has hidden him, if they feel the need to look for him at all."

"It's not going to come to that," Dean said firmly. There was a sound of movement; Cas couldn't make out the fine details through the phone line but he was fairly sure Dean had shaken his head. "All right, I've got to get some shut-eye. See you tomorrow?"

"We'll be there, Dean."

"Right, yeah. Goodnight, Cas."

"Goodnight, Dean."

Somewhere behind him a clock must have ticked over midnight: the bartender called, "Last round!" and John winced as the sound hammered through his head. He waited while everyone else shouted orders and grumbled as they paid up tabs, then raised a hand. "Can I get another one?"

The bartender frowned at him but refilled the glass – just a finger, but John was still sober enough to realise that anything more was a bad idea. He watched the liquid splash around. "I should've told 'em," he mumbled.

"Yup."

"I wanted them to be safe. Adam still had his mother. He daydreamed about us being a normal family. I couldn'– I couldn' wreck his world too."

"Considerate of you."

"Dean's never goin' to forgive me," he said, nose almost on the bar. "He'll say he does, but he won't. Not ever."

A heavy sigh and the slam of a bottle by his ear jerked John out of his slump. Behind the bar, Ellen glared. "You listen here, John Winchester," she said, barely keeping her voice low enough not to carry. "Just 'cause your time-travelling forty-odd-year-old future son ain't forgiven you for not telling him that time 'round doesn't mean it's gotta be the same now."

John shook his head slowly. "I know my son."

"And I know my daughter, but that doesn't mean our kids can't surprise us sometimes. You never would've come here if your future boy hadn't told you I'd forgiven you, 'cause you never would've imagined I could. And believe me, part of me wishes I hadn't or I wouldn't be stuck playing agony aunt to a stubborn old drunk who can't get his head out of his ass long enough to be honest with his kids."

"Ellen–"

"Shut up. I forgave you 'cause I decided to. You've gotta give Sam and Dean the same choice." She took the glass away, tequila still swirling inside, and knocked it back. "Get your ass to a motel, sleep it off, and get the hell home."

John was halfway into bed before he realised he hadn't thought twice about what 'home' meant.

Chapter Text

"Merry Christmas, bitch."

Madge Carrigan howled G-rated curses as she barrelled through to the living room– and choked as an evergreen stake slammed through her lungs.

"MADGE!"

Dean turned in time to see his younger self clothesline Ed Carrigan and swing round to stab him in the stomach. "And a Happy New Year," younger Dean said, grinning. "Or how 'bout 'Happy Dead Year'? Huh? What, you got nothing?" Shrugging, he pulled out the stake and stepped over the body. "Loser."

Dean smiled. "You know if Sammy were here he'd say–"

"'You know it's August, right'?" they finished together, and chuckled.

Younger Dean drove Baby back to the bunker, but older Dean picked the music; it was the only way they'd settled on that didn't mean taking two cars on every job they did together, and it didn't technically break the rule. Twice he put on the REO Speedwagon tape Jo had left behind ("totally by accident, Dean-o") after she and Ellen had come to see the bunker and get all the anti-angel, anti-demon, anti-everything tattoos Cas had been perfecting. Other him had complained, but it wasn't half as fun as his face when Dean had put on Taylor Swift and said, deadpan, "Oh, it's my favourite now."

Dad was in the library when they got back, typing away on the laptop he'd grudgingly accepted after Dean and Sam got it as a birthday present and refused to share theirs anymore. They'd gotten one for younger Dean too, but he didn't use it much (yet. Busty Asian Beauties was going to come online in a few months).

"Hey Dad, you're back early. Is Elkins all right?"

He nodded absently, reading a minute longer before looking up. "He didn't have the Colt."

"What?" Dean stopped in his tracks. "He's got to. He lied."

Dad shrugged. "He said he didn't. And even if he does, you can't force a man to give up something like that."

Dean sighed and dumped his duffle on the table. "Yeah, I can. Where's Cas?"

"Your room."

Dean twitched. Walking casually out, he said, "Really got to get that guy his own space, even if he doesn't sleep. I'm not a fricking movie theatre."

Dad didn't say anything, and Dean breathed out as he headed down the corridor. Music was thumping from a branch off towards Sam and Jess's room, and he snickered as he made out Taylor Swift. Suffer, Sammy.

Cas was slumped against the headboard watching TV. Dean leaned on the doorframe and knocked a few times. "Hello, Dean. When did you get back?"

"Just now, and I gotta go again; Dad didn't get the Colt."

Cas's brow furrowed and he hit mute. "Why not?"

"Didn't say. You want to come?"

His eyes swung back to the screen for a few seconds. "Do you need me?"

"I want you." He stopped. "To come. Along, I mean."

Cas looked at him, head tilted, for a few seconds. Dean refused to squirm.

He clicked off the screen. "All right," he said, getting up. "I assume we'll start with Elkins. The Colt is a powerful and unique tool. Everyone would want it."

"Yeah, question is, who knew where to find it when they didn't last time?" said Dean, leading the way back. "We must've changed something."

"We've changed a great deal. It's hard to determine which are relevant." Cas thought for a second. "I doubt it's Heaven. Angel radio has been silent, and our swords are nearly as versatile as the Colt."

"Yeah, but you gotta be at close range," said Dean, stepping into the library to grab his duffle. "And right now it still only works with the original bullets. I'd say look into the vamps Elkins was chasing, but they killed him for it last time, so that leaves–"

"Hell," Cas finished. "Azazel?"

"Probably. The others are still down deep there plotting." Sparks of black fire and blood shot behind his eyes and he shook his head hard. That was over. That was way over, and would never happen. Cas was watching him. Dean turned away. "Which puts us back at the start: How'd he know?" He ran through all the names on his kill list. "Maybe Meg or Tom, but it doesn't fly; they're not that subtle."

"I wouldn't know," Cas said, and it was sharp enough to make Dean glance at him– Oh. Right. Meg. Cas was still clinging to the hope of saving her, but the her she'd been when she died, not–

Fuck it, I'm too tired for this. He sighed and took the turn to the garage.

Manning was a six hour drive away, and Dean grudgingly agreed to sleep for half of it – the second half, he insisted, but Cas got behind the wheel anyway. "This is my car," he said.

Dean scowled magnificently, eyeing Baby where she stood gleaming over the puddles where his younger self had been washing her. "You just drove it, Dean."

"She's my car," he muttered, and climbed into the Ford's passenger seat in a sulk. Cas rolled his eyes as he drove them up the ramp and out of the bunker.

It was coming up on one in the morning, and Dean's eyelids started betraying him inside of twenty minutes. The window glass got warm under his forehead before he realised he was leaning on it, and he shook himself twice before Cas sighed and asked, "How was your hunt?"

Dean grinned in spite of himself. "Festive," he said. "Junior me's working his ass off trying to be me. I don't know whether to teach him how or lie and say he's just as good."

"You hate being lied to."

"Yeah, but it's not me." He paused. "Well. Sorta. He could be me, but I don't want him to, you know, go through Purgatory to get this good."

"That won't happen this time," Cas said sharply, and Dean backpedalled.

"I know, I know. Geez, Cas, wasn't accusing you of anything."

Cas' hands flexed on the wheel. "Has he admitted he's seeing Cassandra?"

Safe territory. Dean relaxed. "Nah, he's still mad at me about that. Or scared I'm going to tell him something else about Cassie that'll ruin it for them."

"Will you?"

"Got nothing left," Dean shrugged. "He knows more than me now."

Cas "hmmmm"d as he changed lanes. "Do you think their relationship will last?"

What he wasn't asking was, Are you going to interfere again? and Dean honestly didn't know. Back then he'd fantasised a couple of times about getting back together with Cassie, mostly before that year with Lisa, and the few times it occurred to him since he'd figured she'd probably moved on already. Probably had three kids and as picket fence and a high flying career too (that last one wasn't a guess. He'd googled), and the thought left a bitter taste in his mouth. But now, for younger him–

"What is this, Teen Vogue?" he snapped. "I don't know, Cas, it's not my problem."

Cas let out one of his big heavy you're an idiot sighs. "Dean," he said, "if you keep–"

The world exploded.

It felt like an explosion. The cloud of demon smoke tore through the sky like a bomb so he wasn't wrong for thinking it, okay? It was loud and fast and rattled everything – Cas fought hard with the wheel to keep them in the lane – but it passed. Horns and car alarms blared around them as the rest of the highway tried to decide if it was safer to stop or keep speeding, and Dean braced himself as Cas drove and hated every second of not being able to do anything.

But for all the shit Dean gave him, Cas was a good driver, and he wove them to an off-ramp inside of a minute. "What the fuck?" Dean kept saying. "What's going on?"

Cas winced as he stopped them sloppily in front of someone's driveway. He leaned over and held his head. "Angel radio," he explained, wincing. "They're not sure what's happened."

"But this didn't happen in our time, did it?"

"Definitely not."

"Shit." Dean dropped into his seat and started dialling Sammy. "Those were demons."

"Yes." Cas winced again as he listened. "Several hell gates have opened and they're possessing large numbers of humans in the area, but none of the angels know why."

"Something pissed them off," said Dean, listening as Sam's phone rang. "Or scared them."

"Hi, this is Sam. Leave a mes–"

He ripped the phone from his ear and started dialling again. "Something's changed," he said, thinking frantically through everything they'd done lately. "Something tipped them off, something they realised isn't just us trying to find–" He froze. In his ear, Jess' voice started reciting her leave-a-message thing.

"Trying to find what?" Cas grumbled. He straightened up as the radio chatter died off. "Dean?"

"'The yellow-eyed demon'," Dean said, staring out the windshield. "We always called him that. It was ages before we knew his name."

"Azazel?"

Dean nodded. "That's why we couldn't just summon him all those years Dad was hunting him. We didn't find out until..." He swung around. "Cas, when we were leaving, you–"

"I said his name," Cas realised. "As we were passing the library. Your father would have heard it."

"But what good would it do– Fuck." Dean slammed his hand into the dash. "He's got the Colt. He got it from Elkins yesterday."

"And lied," said Cas.

Dean yanked on the door release. "We gotta get back," he said, leaping out and hurrying round. "I'm driving."

If the well-dressed corpse hadn't said enough, the shouting echoing down the corridors would have done it. Jess was livid.

"That's a person!" she screeched in Dad's face, pointing a sharp finger and barely stepping around the devil's trap on the floor. "I don't give a FUCK about your fucking revenge, he had a right to LIVE!"

Sam tried, "Jess–"

"SHUT UP. This possession crap is out of control! There are people in there!"

Dad wasn't saying anything, but he had the Colt cradled in both hands and the body was leaking at his feet. Younger Dean was glaring at it, cold and hard, and Sam's face was grim.

Dean stopped in the doorway. "Fuck. Fuck."

The others glanced his way, but only his other self reacted: He grinned, angry and feral, and Dean felt sorta sick. "We got the son of a bitch!" younger Dean crowed.

"You've got no fucking idea what you've done," said Dean. He gripped the back of a chair and leaned over, thoughts racing. "Fuck."

Beside him he felt Cas sigh and pull out a chair, heard him drop heavily into it. "This is bad," he said dully.

"Thank you," said Jess.

"Not 'cause of that," said Dean, and he looked up for a sec. "Sorry. Someone was always gonna have to die to kill him with them."

"And you feel justified in that?"

Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I really can't deal with lawyer talk right now, okay? You've got no idea–"

"Then why don't you tell us, Dean," snapped Sam. "For once."

Dean looked up at his little – so little – brother, and his throat went dry. All the awful things he'd spent months promising would never happen this time rushed back and he choked on them.

No.

"Dean," Cas said quietly, "this changes things. They have to know."

"No."

"If you don't tell them, I will."

"No."

"You can't stop me."

He snapped his head around then, braced to go, but Cas just looked sad, and the fight drained out of him.

Jess marched over and planted herself in in front of them, arms folded, beating Sam by half a second. "Start talking."

Younger Dean was hovering halfway between them and Dad, who was still looking over the corpse numbly. Dean kept gaze on him. "Azazel had kids, Meg and Tom, they were working this thing with him. Now they've got half of Hell dragged up, probably to find out what happened, we don't know what they're going to do, and that's on you," he said, louder. "Why'd you go behind my back?"

Finally Dad met his eyes. "You knew how to summon him all along."

"And if I'd let you kill him then, all the people we've saved this year would've died. You know how many more are gonna die now?" he seethed. "Do you have any fucking clue?"

"Hey, hey guys–" younger Dean tried, but too late. Dad stalked across the room, Colt in hand.

"This son of a bitch is the worst thing we've ever seen and you let him live–"

Dean barked a laugh, short and rough and hollow.

"Older and more powerful players than Azazel have now been awakened," Cas said, "and we don't know what they're going to do next. It was the only advantage we had. Now they may very well bring about the Apocalypse."

Into the silence, Dean muttered, "Again."

Younger Dean laughed, for a second. A few giggles in, he trailed off. "You're kidding."

"Nope."

Jess's hand closed around the cross on her necklace. "Oh God..."

"God's AWOL, Heaven's full of righteous smiters that don't think for themselves and the archangels want this world to end." Dean rubbed his face, hard, and sighed. Over his fingers, Jess looked stricken. "Sorry. I'm sorry, this– wasn't supposed to happen."

Feeling the weight of every long year in his bones, Dean dropped into a chair with a long sigh. "We barely stopped it last time, and a lot of people died. Jo and Ellen, and–" It caught in his throat, and he looked down. Ash, Adam, Pam... "So, you know, it was kind of worth letting Yellow Eyes walk around a bit longer," he added pointedly.

Dad held his eyes. "You should have told us."

Dean snorted. "If you'd've just done what we told you–"

This time Dad laughed, a short rough bark. "You actually expected that?"

Dean clenched his jaw. "I know what I'm talking about. You don't."

"You should have told us."

"All right, all right," said Sam, getting between them, sheer height blocking their view. "You both screwed up. You both treat the rest of us like kids–" Dean flinched "–and we don't have time for that anymore. No more secrets," he said to Dean. "No more micromanaging; you don't have the intel anymore. We've all got to work together to figure this out. So," he said, taking a seat like a lawyer, "you're gonna tell us everything."

Sam, limp and bleeding out, Jake Talley's knife in his back. Sam, icy in a neat white suit. Sam, black eyed. Drinking blood. Soulless. Hallucinating. Desperately pressing the scar on his palm. Fevered, gritting his way through the trials.

Sam, baby-faced under short hair, watching him intently. "Yeah, fine," Dean muttered. Everything about the Apocalypse; they could handle that. They'd need to know about the seals, Lilith, the righteous man crap, Ruby (oh, definitely Ruby, one word there: No), the angels and Michael, the Seven Sins demons and the Horsemen, Croatoan, the special kids–

Sam, standing on the lip of the Pit. "It's okay, Dean. It's gonna be okay. I've got him."

Almost everything.

Dean rubbed his face. "I don't know where to start. It's... a lot."

"Summarise," Sam bit out.

"Azazel and his followers intend to free Lucifer from his cage in Hell," said Cas. "The archangel Michael will let them so he and Lucifer can battle to the death, and end the world."

Jess stiffened. "Why? They're angels."

"Michael and Raphael believe it will create paradise," Cas replied. "They don't particularly care if humans live to experience it."

Her hand tightened on her cross.

"Most angels don't know about that," Dean put in, wishing it could actually help. "Cas didn't."

Sam's face brightened. "We can use that," he said, puppyish with sudden optimism. "If Cas can contact them quietly, tell them the truth–"

"That's the plan, Sammy, but it won't be enough," said Dean irritably. "Not even close."

A step back from their rough circle, younger Dean broke his silence. "Then what is 'the plan'?" he sneered. "Save the world all by yourself?"

Dean glared at him. "There are six hundred seals locking Lucifer in his cage. The demons only need to break sixty-six to get him out."

"Shit," muttered Dad.

"We can't hope to stop them all," said Cas, "but the first and the last are very specific. The first requires a man–" he paused for a microsecond, glancing away from Dean and adding "–any man that fulfils certain criteria, to shed blood in Hell. They want a particular man but will settle for anyone; it's unlikely we can do more than postpone them."

"But the last seal involves killing Lilith," said Dean, "the oldest demon there is. So me and Cas think if we kill her before the other seals are broken, that ought to shut things down pretty good."

"You think," said Dad flatly. "And if you're wrong, then what?"

"Michael and Raphael will probably find a way to force it anyway," Cas noted desolately.

Dean ignored him and nodded to the Colt Dad was still holding. "Archangels are one of the few things it won't kill, but it'll knock them out for a minute or two. Last time round we found out how to open the cage in Hell. If we can get them together – Lucifer and Michael, and Raphael, if we can – we can gun 'em down, throw 'em in and lock the door behind them."

Sam rubbed his face. "This is... huge."

"Yep. Still glad you know?"

Sam bitchfaced at him. "Yes. Now what do we do?"

Dean sighed. Looked at Cas. Cas met his gaze, regret filling his eyes. "We act," said Dean. "Fast. Now. Before the demons or the angels or anyone else can figure out what we know. We've got to try to get to Lilith and Alastair and every other big player in Hell and kill them. And we're gonna need every ally we can get."

Younger Dean leaned back, getting it first. "Bobby. And Ellen and Jo, and Jim, and Caleb. That's why you keep bringing them here. Every hunter we know. You want them all on this," he accused.

"I didn't want any of you on this, I want everyone to live," snapped Dean. "This bunker is the safest place on Earth. If shit goes down, and it will, this is the place to be."

"Well, we're not staying here," said Sam, getting up. "We're going to be out there helping to stop this. So tell us how."

Dean locked eyes with his brother, too many dangers and risks and what if?s spinning through his mind. He looked at Cas, tired and sad, and at Dad, hands tight around the Colt.

At himself, young and angry and determined to save the world.

Slowly, he let out his breath and took a seat. "Like this."

Chapter Text

Jimmy.

Jimmy. Wake up.

"'m'lia?"

She's taken Claire to visit her mother.

Right, right. Jimmy rubbed his face. No wonder he couldn't sleep–

Come outside.

He sat up, frowning. Okay, that was definitely a real voice. Not a dream. But it was weird, it was like... like the voice was in his head, and–

Hurry up and come outside, Jimmy. It's cold.

And it was grumpy, apparently. Jimmy shuffled out of the covers and wriggled into his slippers. The bedroom window was fogged up, pre-dawn glow just starting to tint the sky, and through it he could see something outside in the back garden, a black smudge against the grass.

Dear Lord, it was a person. A burglar? A murderer? Thank God Amelia and Claire were away. Jimmy's heart raced. He should call the police. He should–

No. Come outside. Now. Then, gentler: I won't hurt you. I need your help.

The voice was definitely in his head, and only in his head. He picked up his baseball bat.

The air outside had a bite to it, and Jimmy could feel the dew seeping into his slippers. By the time he'd made his way to the stranger, bat at the ready and staying a cautious arm's length away, his toes were damp and uncomfortably cold.

The man was standing with his back to Jimmy, arms loose by his sides and hands empty. As Jimmy edged closer, he made a point of holding them up and open. "I'm not here to hurt you," he said, and there was something about his voice – it was deep, gravelly... "I need you to help me find someone."

Jimmy frowned. "Who?"

"Me."

He turned quickly and stepped up, and before Jimmy's brain processed exactly whose face he was seeing, before he could cross himself and pray for rescue, the man (Me?) had pressed two fingers into his forehead and all of Jimmy's muscles froze.

"I'm sorry but I don't have time to awe you with miracles. I am an angel, my name is– Cas." He grimaced (Do I really look like that?) and took the bat out of Jimmy's hands. Which stayed curled, frozen. So did his arms. It was awkward, and starting to ache.

Cas walked around to his side, on the edge of Jimmy's vision. "Don't be afraid," he said. "I'm going to use you to call to another angel, who will come and see you and think it was you who called. It will ask for your consent. Say nothing. Don't under any circumstances say Yes."

Yes to what? he wanted to ask, but he couldn't, and Cas wasn't waiting anyway. He leaned in close, right up to Jimmy's ear (his breath was warm and he hadn't brushed his teeth) and said, "Castiel, it's me, Anna. I need your help. Come now and tell no one."

Buddy, you don't sound like any 'Anna' I've ever known, Jimmy thought at him. Cas twitched like he'd heard it, but if he had, he ignored it. He took several steps back into a circle of symbols scratched into the grass of Jimmy's once perfect lawn. It was weird, but soon as he was in that circle he kind of blurred; Jimmy had trouble seeing him, like he was camouflaged. He fell silent, waiting.

It was really cold. Jimmy's toes were numb in his squishy slippers.

When the presence came (he wouldn't call it an angel. Would. Not.), it was a soft and wispy white light. It felt huge and insubstantial, calm and thunderous, and it was coming down, down, down, and it was puzzled.

"You are a vessel. My vessel."

The paralysis holding him quietly fell away, and Jimmy stared up, open-mouthed. "Uh..."

Cas had said to say nothing, but who was on the side of God here? "Are you Castiel?"

"Yes. I am here to find a comrade. Will you aid me?"

Jimmy's eyes flicked to the blurry circle by the bushes. "Uh–"

"Yes," said Cas, bursting out with some sort of glowing symbols on his arm, carved in blood, okay– Jimmy wobbled, faint, and then Cas slapped a bloodied hand onto the glowing symbols and everything went white.

The Summoning dragged her to a dirt crossroad in the dead of night somewhere about a thousand miles from where she wanted to be, right into the middle of a fucking devil's trap. It was a good one, too, she realised, grimacing: heavy duty spellwork, layers of it, with rings of salt and iron and pellets of of both poured into the sigils dug into the ground. No way she was fighting out of this, so it'd have to be charm. She put a smile on the face of her meatsuit and turned toward the human who'd summoned her–

"Ruby?"

She blinked. "Yeah?"

Dean Winchester grinned. "Just checking."

He raised a gun (fuck that's the fucking Colt–) and fired.

Bang.

Jimmy woke with a start, shooting upright on his own bed, his own bedroom, still wearing the wet slippers, ugh–

"I'm sorry for not explaining."

Jimmy threw himself away from Cas so hard he almost fell off the bed. His heart was racing, the air was charged, and he gripped the blankets hard. "What in God's name happened? Where's the other guy?"

"I absorbed him," said Cas. "Every angel's grace has a unique resonance and only our own grace can sustain us indefinitely. Once I drew him into my vessel, our graces merged and I was healed. I overpowered his will and because he was our younger self my consciousness survived while his became part of my memories." He tilted his head. "This isn't making any sense to you."

Duh. "No."

Cas frowned. "It doesn't matter. All you have to remember is to never consent to being a vessel for any angel, no matter what they promise you. Tell Claire the same."

Jimmy shook his head. "Why?"

"Don't trust any angels. Your lives will be ruined." Cas stood up and the air crackled; a white glow seeped out of him, brightening the room, leaving only one shadow, huge, winged– "A war is coming and you cannot trust anyone. From now on pray only directly to God, and don't expect an answer."

A light bulb exploded. Cas blinked. "Sorry."

Then he was gone, leaving the sound of flapping feathers in his wake.

In the morning, Jimmy realised his favourite tan trenchcoat was missing.

It took an awful lot to drag a demon as old as Alastair out of Hell, but someone up there knew just the right words, called him by his old name, even, and when he found himself standing in the devil's trap at the crossroads, Alastair was more curious than anything else.

The bang of the gunshot rang out before he even opened his mouth.

Balthazar, I need your help. Come now, and tell no one. Anna's alive.

"Well, it was a curious enough message, certainly," said Balthazar, examining the vessel he'd hurriedly seduced before winging his way over. "But really, Cassie, we were just chatting oh, what, two years ago? What could have changed?"

He turned around, looked, really looked at Castiel. He was perfectly fine, of course, even crammed into this tiny vessel, but... "You're different," he said, puzzled.

"I am," said Cassie, and his face was drawn with more than his usual dull seriousness; he was horribly, horribly sad. "I'm sorry, Balthazar. I'm so sorry."

"For what?"

Cassie stepped in and hugged him, and– What? Wha–? Castiel, using a vessel for more than plodding around Earth, using it to show emotion? Balthazar blinked and patted his back a few times. "Ah... there there?"

"I betrayed you in the worst way, and even though you don't remember, it happened. I'm sorry."

Balthazar pinched his nose. Oh, how good it was to have a vessel again; now he could get headaches. "Cassie, start from beginning."

"I need you to promise to hear me out. You'll probably hate me long before I reach the end."

"Oh, there's the dour and dull Cassie I remember. Get on with it, then. And start with explaining that bit about Anna; you don't get to toss around the name of one of our oldest friends lightly."

Dean Winchester was grinning at him. And the ground – it was a devil's trap but more. A ring of holy oil burned around it, flickering across sigils designed for angels. "You've trapped me. Why?"

"Because, Zachariah," Dean said, lifting a gun, "I hate your guts."

Bang.

"I have it, Cassie," Balthazar announced as he landed in Ohio. "And don't think it was easy, slipping out of Heaven like that again. I had to run circles around Neptune to keep Uriel from following me."

Cassie's eyes widened. "He knows you took it?"

"Well of course, it's not like I could disentangle Anna's grace from inside him without drawing some attention, and anyway, I wanted to know why he'd do such a thing since you're keeping so mum about what happened in this 'possible future' of yours– What are you doing?"

Cassie was tapping furiously on some little device he'd whipped out of a pocket. "Fixing this before it becomes a problem." He drew his sword from his other sleeve. "Be on your guard."

Balthazar sighed heavily and gestured at the park across the road, and the woman quietly reading college textbooks on the grass. "Look, if that really is Anna, maybe I should talk to her."

"We're not going to talk to her," said Cassie, holding him back. "Too risky. We're going to take her by surprise, fly her far enough out of town not to risk any human lives and return her grace there. Her memory should return with it."

"Kidnap her, Cassie? That's rude."

"Do you have a better idea?"

Balthazar grinned. "Watch me."

Dean frowned at the empty devil's trap. He'd cast the summoning perfectly both times, he was sure, but no sign of Abaddon. Guess pulling her crazy ass through time was too much for even this spell.

He sighed, annoyed but in too good a mood to get really pissed off. They'd just have to wait until she popped through the nearest door in eight years – right after Henry. Man, he'd have to make sure to have a camera on Dad's face when that happened. Sammy's journal probably had it recorded right down to the minute. He could make sure to be around at that time. Assuming the world was still around.

His phone beeped: Text from Cas. Uriel knows. Summon him next.

Dean grinned.

Anna insisted on saying goodbye to her parents. "I love them and I have to protect them," she said. "I'll come and find your bunker in a few days."

Cas nodded. "Stay safe, Anna. We can't lose you again."

She smiled at him, warm and proud, and cupped his face with both hands. "It's so good to see you free. I didn't think it was possible. Balthazar, maybe, but not you."

Slowly, almost carefully, he stepped in to give her a light hug. "I owe a lot of it to you, old friend."

Anna pulled back and kissed his cheek. "I guess this means you won't be following my orders anymore."

He hesitated. "I know much more than you do now. The Winchesters trust me and–"

"Castiel," she said, smiling, "it's fine."

She stretched out her wings, invisible only to human eyes, and in a millionth of a second launched herself into the air, twirling through the clouds and leaving a only a breath of air behind. Cas's freshly healed wings twitched on his back, restless and eager to soar again; it had been so long.

"So," Balthazar drawled, lounging on the park bench and pretending to be bored, "who's next?"

"There aren't many angels I still trust. Hannah, Inias, maybe Rachel. Not Hester, she's too unpredictable."

"Joke's on you, Cassie, if you think you're getting Inias without Hester. And where do you get off saying you don't trust the others? All those terrible things you say you've lived through haven't happened yet."

Cas sighed. "No. But that's just it. I've seen our sisters and brothers after they lived through horrors that truly tested their character. Not many were as strong as they think they are, and I don't know how many already follow Uriel."

"Hm, yes, I do plan on asking him about that," said Balthazar. Cas pushed his phone a little deeper in his pocket.

"There's one other angel whose heart I trust completely. Samandriel. But I don't know what unit he's in now."

"Ah, couldn't tell you, never spoke with him." Balthazar slouched back on the bench. "Now see, Cassie, if you've thought this out so well answer me this: What exactly is Heaven going to do when a handful of angels, mostly from our garrison, disappear all in the same day? Even if the warding is as good as you say in this human hidey-hole of yours, they're going to look for us."

Cas forced himself to keep eye contact. "There are... more disappearances today. Heaven will be busy for a while trying to work out where all of them have gone. They'll assume agents from Hell are responsible, and that we suffered the same fate."

"Hell?" Suddenly Balthazar was on his feet, in his face and intense. "Cassie, what in Father's name do demons have to do with anything? What are you not telling me about this godawful future of yours?"

Cas raised his head, grim. "The demons are trying to start the Apocalypse," he said, "and the archangels want it to happen. Michael and Raphael have been arranging it for decades, maybe centuries. Ever since God left; no one has seen him in eons. We're on our own."

Not many things could shut Balthazar up, even for a moment. It took a full eight seconds before he said, "Well. Fuck."

Dean twirled the Colt round on his finger and blew imaginary smoke off the muzzle. Naomi lay face-down in the dirt, the lightning burst of her grace fading from the back of his eyes, and one more jagged wound in his heart started to heal over. She was never going to hurt Cas again. Not ever. No one would.

There was getting to be an awful lot of bodies in the truck, though; he'd have to buy more kerosene for the pyre. And they'd need to restock on candles and acacia and about a dozen other herbs; the Men of Letters hadn't kept enough to use up this much in one night. Should probably get some more myrrh and holy oil too; they had plenty of special bullets for the Colt right now but no way it was going to last. Taking both Heaven and Hell by surprise in one night would buy them some time, but not much. From here on out, they'd have to play everything smart.

Dean laced his fingers together and stretched, shaking out his limbs. Just one more summoning for the night and then he could get going.

He didn't need to check the words for this summoning; the words rolled off his tongue easily, well practiced, and when the demon appeared in his awesome masterpiece of a trap, he was even in the same meatsuit Dean remembered.

He holstered the Colt. "Hey Crowley," he said to the suspicious face eyeing him. "Want to be king of Hell?"

Chapter Text

Ava looked at her ceiling despairingly. "God. This can't be real."

"'Fraid it is," said Ellen, leaning forward on the edge of Ava's boyfriend's too-clean couch; John waited semi-patiently beside her. "You got any better explanation for–"

Ava's head snapped round. "–why you see things in dreams," they finished together. Ava's breathing quickened. "That– that was in my dream, you saying that. Exactly. Oh, God–"

"Ava," John rumbled, "calm down."

She glared. "How? This is crazy. A couple of months ago I start getting some weird dreams and now I'm supposed to believe in ghosts and monsters and demon blood?"

She had a point. Damn Balthazar anyway for not meeting them as promised; without angel wings or a convenient ghost, civilians were tough to convince. "Well, maybe we're crazy. And so are you."

Ava scowled.

"But if we're not, there is a way to get rid of it. It's gonna take a while, and we need some time to prepare, but it can be done."

She shook her head. "Okay, say I believe you. How?"

Ellen hesitated; future Dean hadn't exactly gone into detail. "Three spells, actually. Gets messy. Got to get some stuff together first." She shot a look at John, but he was about as helpful as usual. "One thing at a time," she said instead. "You take a your time to process this and we'll be in touch when we're ready, all right?"

"Until then," said John, "try not to use your powers. In your case that'll be hard," he acknowledged. "Ignore them. And don't tell anyone, including your boyfriend."

Ava looked pained. Ellen shook her head. "Here." She grabbed some paper and started jotting down numbers, blindly pulling out her cell. "If you need to talk, that's my number. This one here is John's, and this one–" she scrolled through her contacts to write out the last one and made a thick square around it "–this is for a guy called Cas; that's for emergencies. If something really bad happens, he can get to you fastest. All right?"

Ava took the paper dubiously. "That's it? Go back to planet Earth, pretend everything's normal?"

"No." John took out a folded sheet of paper from his bag and handed it over; their second-last photocopy of the protective sigils. "These will protect you. Pendants are good, tattoos are best. Have those on your person at all times. If we're lying, it doesn't hurt. If not, they'll keep you safer."

"Safer," she repeated warily, looking at the symbols. "Not safe. From who?"

"The demons who changed you," said John. "They'll be back. No one's ever safe."

As if to illustrate the point – and, later, Ellen would decide he'd done it on purpose – there was a rush of air and Balthazar landed neatly on the coffee table. "Am I late?"

Ava yelped and scrambled back into her chair. "What the fuck?"

"Well, if you insist, darling," he said, offering a charming smile. "I'm sure I can make the time." He swept up her hand to kiss it and Ava's stunned face gave way to a tiny smile. "Of course there's a little business to take care of first, won't be a moment. I'm here to show off my rather spectacular assets, make sure you believe all this unhappy business about your blood contamination and delightfully, this requires me to take off my clothes."

It didn't, of course, but seeing wings actually sprouting from a human back was quicker than letting the kid pat him down down for a concealed wing-pack under his shirt like Scott Carey had.

John quietly took the chance to escape through the kitchen. Ellen shrugged and settled in to enjoy the show.

In the bunker, Jess took a second to close her eyes and grit her teeth, and let out a long breath. Angels could be such babies.

They'd been wandering the place for a week now, complaining about everything from flaws in the warding spells to how limiting their human vessels were. They didn't sleep, and totally didn't get – or care about – the need to be be quiet at night, so every morning at least one or two hunters were extra grumpy even after their usual death breakfasts of sausage and beer. (Jess had tried, exactly once, to make herself useful by cooking everyone a healthy dinner. The Deans had been polite enough to mysteriously disappear; the other hunters, not so much. Sam, Jo and Ellen had done their best to eat for twenty. There were still leftovers in the fridge.)

The hunters living in were mostly John's old hunter friends, or Bobby's old hunter friends, or future Dean's old hunter friends, all of them gruff and grim and sceptical of everything about the Apocalypse – but they listened. Future Dean drilled them on how to trap and kill demons, on stopping seals and early signs of something called "croatoan", and they listened, and grudgingly took on whatever hunting assignments he handed out. The angels believed just fine (at least about the Apocalypse; they were in constant stony argument about whether archangels could possibly be complicit) and they did their part, flapping off the moment intel came in about demonic activity anywhere around the planet, but they wouldn't so much as exorcise nun unless Castiel said to.

And, for the love of God, they could. not. sit. still.

"This is very uncomfortable," Rachel said for the sixt– seventh time, shifting his weight on the table. Jess rolled her eyes and continued carefully tracing out Enochian symbols on his ribs with her tattoo machine. She finished a serif and put it down to shake out her hand, and Rachel perked up. "Is it finished?"

"Not even close."

He frowned and peered at his ribs. "You work slowly."

Jess closed her eyes and breathed out, letting the noise of the bunker wash over her: the screech of hinges as Jo came in with shopping, the faint bangs coming from the gun range, mutters from Bobby and Rufus sharing beers over a pile of books at the next table. The new normal. "Yes. Well. Good things take time, and I want to make sure this is done right."

Rachel lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders. Jess checked the next symbol and leaned in to continue.

Across the room, Sam emerged from a corridor with the guy he'd driven out to Oklahoma to pick up a few days ago, Andy. They were talking excitedly about something, Andy imitating some kind of movie sound effect, complete with a weird face and and a big hand gestures, and Sam laughing and mimicking him. Jess glanced up. "Finished the tour?"

Andy grinned at her. "This place is awesome!" he crowed, twirling a little on his toes and pointing up at the display swords in the bookcases. "Have you seen all this?"

She turned back to Rachel's ribs. "Yep. All of it."

"You've gotta be Jess, right?" he grinned and skipped over, hand outstretched. "Hey, hi, Sam's told me so much about you." He seized her hand soon as she raised it a little and grinned as he shook it. "You're awesome."

Jess had to smile, and she raised her eyebrows at Sam, who blushed and looked down. "And this is, uh..."

"Rachel," Jess supplied. The tattoo machine was still whirring so Jess bent back over her work.

Sam nodded quickly. "Rachel's an angel."

"Oh wow, pleased to meet you!" Andy beamed and stuck out his hand.

Rachel looked up, down, and down his nose. "You are also contaminated with demon blood."

Andy's face fell. "Hey, he didn't ask for that," Sam snapped. "None of us did. We're not using those powers and we never will. So... you know. Butt out."

(He'd been rehearsing that; she'd heard him muttering while studying in their room. Usually it ended more grandly.)

Rachel's disdainful frown stayed fixed. Andy shuffled awkwardly and jammed his hands in his pockets, hurt on his face. Jess may or may not have jabbed the tattoo machine a little harder, your honour; no evidence, can't prove a thing. Rachel flinched.

Sam clapped a protective hand round Andy's shoulder and led him off, looking apologetically at Jess over his shoulder. She shrugged; Rachel was easier than Balthazar. Two hours of being hit on by a celestial being who'd just discovered dick jokes and she'd been fantasising about a peaceful life in a convent.

"Are you finished yet?"

"No."

Down in the bunker's lower levels, pausing in a dusty corridor, Dean unfolded a limp square of paper from his wallet and scratched Ansem Weems off from near the bottom.

The out-of-the-way storage room he and Cas had turned into a vault had gotten so many extra layers of warding on it lately – wards against Azazel-level demons, wards against any angels without Jess' special tattoos on them, wards to keep nosy angels out unless Cas was with them, spells to keep humans from noticing the door, spells to keep angels from noticing the spells that kept humans from noticing the door – that now it took both Dean and Cas to unlock the damn thing: Dean had to give his blood to make a sigil (even Sam's or Dad's wouldn't work), and only Cas' specific flavour of grace could activate it. It was getting ridiculous, but with some of the stuff in there... Ridiculous was worth it.

Dean glanced over his shoulder out of habit as Cas opened the last wards. "How many are you gonna take?"

Cas stepped in and made a beeline for the weapons taken from Lucifer's crypts. "All of them."

"Uh, Cas, that's..." Five spears, a dozen swords, and a handful of bulky medieval-looking things he couldn't name. "There's only eight of you."

Cas levelled a look at him. "We're flying into Hell, Dean. Last time I did this it was to rescue you, and several of my sisters and brothers died. Lilith will be trapped much, much deeper."

Dean raised his hands. "Okay, okay. It's just, uh... you think everyone in the angel squad can use two or three of those at once?"

Pausing, the pile of spears jammed up against his shoulder and two swords slipping from under his arm, Cas considered. "Possibly not. But I have to protect them."

"I know, buddy." Dean clapped his shoulder and hefted the spears. "We'll let them figure out what they want to take, all right?"

"All right." Cas laid the swords on a table and started bundling them together. "Have you heard anything from Crowley?"

There was a dark tinge to his voice that Dean was getting way too used to. He sighed. "No, but he'll pull through. He doesn't know us very well yet. Once Lilith is dead and he's convinced we can hold up our end, he'll give us all the intel on what's going on in Hell."

"I don't trust him."

"I know."

Out in the corridor, Dean balanced the spears on a wall and reopened the slice on the back of his arm to re-seal the vault. "Look, Cas... if anything goes wrong down there, you get the hell out, okay?"

"That's a terrible pun." Cas finished the last of the wards and habitually swept a hand over Dean's arm to heal the wound. "We'll be all right, Dean. We've fought together before."

"I didn't mean them. The way you've been running around doing everything yourself, you're gonna get yourself killed trying to atone for things you didn't do to them this time round."

Cas stopped dead in the narrow corridor and turned around, stone-faced. "These are my brothers, Dean. I won't abandon them to their deaths."

Yeah, that look stopped being scary the day Cas started collecting honey. "I need you, Cas. End of the day, you're the only one I can depend on to get this done. You can't die for them."

"I deserve to."

"Yeah, we've been through this, no."

A gust blew across Dean's face and then he was alone in the corridor. He threw up his hand. "Great! Real mature, Cas!"

Another gust and Cas was back – long enough to take the spears out of Dean's hands, bitchface perfectly intact. "We'll leave our vessels here. If none of us make it back, mine and Anna's are the only ones you'll have to burn. The other souls will wake up within a day."

"Cas!" Dean lunged, pissed and ready to shove him up against the wall– but too late, he'd vanished. "Don't you fucking dare, Cas!"

He sprinted down the corridor for the stairs and the four fucking flights up to where the angel squad was waiting. His lungs started burning after two. He grit his teeth and ignored it, swung round a corner, ran down past the kitchen, to the library–

Bobby and Rufus were looking around the floor full of unconscious vessels, baffled. Dean's heart sank. "What these bastards doing now, sleeping on the job?" demanded Rufus.

Dean's eyes dropped to Cas's body, lying on its back, hands folded neatly on its chest. Mute, he shook his head.

Dean leaned back to glance down the corridor, caught Jo's nod, and grinned: Home free.

With one last glance down the corridor, he pocketed his lock picks, slipped through the open doorway, spun and closed it behind him, and punched the air with both hands. Score!

His older self kept the door to his room locked all the time so there had to be something good inside, and Dean figured, what with Old Grouchbag sitting a stubborn vigil over the angel vessels for six hours now, this was the perfect time to find out.

At first glance it was kind of disappointing. Future Dean was a neat freak, and he didn't have much to be neat-freaky about. Not that Dean hadn't always travelled light too, but this place...

There were a few books, all from the library upstairs, and a picture of Mom propped up against the desk lamp. Same picture Dean had in his wallet. Huh. He hadn't thought to frame it. Wouldn't put it on the desk though; he only ever used his desk to throw clothes on when he couldn't be bothered folding them (so, always).

Future Dean kept all his clothes in the dresser, Dean discovered. He rifled through the piles just long enough to be sure there was nothing hidden in or under anything, and found his Bon Jovi concert shirt that had somehow survived another twelve freaking years. It was thin and faded and had a weird-ass stain on the hem, but it made it!

Next closest thing was the cupboard under the sink, so Dean knelt and dug round in it. There were two spare toothbrushes, travel-size haircut kit, box of condoms, can of shaving cream, razor, half-full bottles of shampoo and conditioner (the same brand Dean used now, huh), a jar of vaseline and nail clippers, but no porn. That stumped him. Dean kept his skin mags in his dresser, and if not there or the sink cupboard, then where?

The desk drawers. Dean shut the cupboard doors (careful to put the shaving cream back in place so Old Dean would never notice) and crouched down by the desk. Truth be told, he hadn't come looking for his other self's porn stash, but now that the thought had struck him he was too curious not to try. Man should at least share his porn with himself, right? Maybe future porn was better somehow. Like 3D, maybe. Maybe not quite holograms like out of Star Trek but–

Oh. Oh, no, this was better. He grinned. In the top desk drawer was a laptop; sleek and light and really really thin. Real life future tech. Everything else seemed the same though; same keyboard, power button, but it booted up really fast. On sleep or something maybe?

Not important. The gorgeous high-res screen with nothing but a blinking password box was more important. Dean bit his lip. Couldn't hurt to start with some of the old faves; wasn't like he hadn't reused passwords before. He typed:

MetallicaROCKS

The username or password is incorrect.

Hm. Okay.

ACDCROCKS

The username or password is incorrect.

BlackSabROCKS

The username or password is incorrect.

Huh. Sam must've figured them out at some point. Oh well. He'd just have to think like his future self. Couldn't be that hard.

He typed:

ApocalypseNow

The username or password is incorrect.

GottaSaveTheWORLD

The username or password is incorrect.

Good thing it didn't look like there was a limit on attempts; this might actually take a while.

TimeTravelTime

Nope.

I'mMartyMcfly

Nope.

HeyMcfly!

Nope. Okay, new angle.

RhondasPanties

Nope. Okay, different angle.

...

Dean frowned. He couldn't be blanking already. He'd made up this password, he had to be able to guess it.

I'mASuperHunter

Nope.

SuperHunterDean

Nope.

HuntingThings

Nope.

TheFamilyBusiness

Nope. Dean scowled and typed: I'mAGiantDickWithNoSenseOfFun

Nope. Of course not. He sighed and checked his watch; Jo could only hang around in the corridor for so long before it got suspicious, and if he lost his lookout, well...

He powered down the laptop and carefully slid it back into place. Next time. He'd think up as many passwords as he could first. Meantime, he'd said five minutes and this was only four and a half. Maybe there'd be something taped under the desk drawers...

Bobby popped another beer and clinked it against Rufus's. "Cheers," he muttered, leaning back over his book.

"Suck dirt, you old bastard." Rufus groused. He pulled his beer out of reach and propped his muddy boots on the table so dirt showered down, though not quite on the pages. Adding a loud, theatrical huff, he started cleaning his guns.

'Course, he could have gone to bed; it was almost midnight and they'd spent well over an hour helping Dean carry the angels' vessels to an empty rooms to wait until (if) they came back. (Bobby had decided not to say anything when Dean had carefully put Castiel on the only bed, pulled up a chair, and settled in). Then again, Rufus had been threatening to go hole up in his Whitefish cabin since setting foot in the bunker, and hadn't once made a move to get going. Bobby pretended he didn't appreciate the company.

He closed the cover of his book and reached for the next one. Still too much to do before he'd even think about hitting the sack. Future Dean was being way too cagey about whatever spells he had up his sleeve to get the demon blood out of these kids; everything he had back home and everything he'd gotten through from the bunker's library didn't say squat about the effects of demon blood infections, let alone how to wash the damn crap out twenty-something years later, and none of them mentioned the only thing Dean said they needed: a jar of holy oil. And half a dozen pairs of glasses, for some reason.

"Whatever's in that book, it ain't gonna tell you what you need to know," said Rufus. He blew into the barrel of a revolver and peered down the inside.

Bobby scowled. "You got anything useful to say?"

"Yeah. You know who's got answers: Go talk to the man. Shake them out of him if you have to, but I'm not doing squat to help these weird-ass kids till I know what the hell's involved." He picked up a shotgun – empty, hopefully – and waved it toward the hall. "You're no fun when you're sulking."

"I ain't sulking." But then, if that was the best retort he could come up with, maybe he had been at this too long. "Fine, asshole, I'll talk to him. Remind him again that I don't work in the dark. We'll see what happens."

Rufus leaned back further in his chair, balancing on two legs. "Good riddance."

Bobby shook his head and stalked down the corridor. By the time he reached the rooms a level down, he was treading quietly. No need though, turns out; Dean had nodded off in his chair.

For a moment, Bobby considered the man in front of him, sitting a useless vigil over a dozen borrowed bodies waiting for one angel to wake up, how he was and and the same time wasn't the same boy Bobby thought of as a son – but he wasn't that sentimental. Mostly he was pissed. "Hey," he barked, jabbing Dean's shoulder. "Wake up, idjit."

Dean's eyes opened and he looked sharply around, once, then jerked up. "Bobby? What's happened?" His eyes landed on Castiel, lifeless on the blanket, and stuck there. His whole body slumped, miserable and pathetic.

Damnit.

Bobby sighed and said, "We can't get the holy oil. Only genuine source any of us knows is a collector in Jerusalem and he wants millions for it. Starting price."

"Cas can–" He bit off the rest. "He'll grab it for us when they get back."

"Great," said Bobby, and he looked around for another chair. Nothing. "But it could be a while, down in Hell, especially that deep."

"They'll be back."

"Yeah, but it could be a while," Bobby repeated in his 'duh' voice. He settled on the edge of the bed, facing Dean directly. "Till then, we've got a crapload of work to do, and all of it takes money. You know how far our credit cards are already stretched just on ammo? We fake any more, we're going to draw the other kind of bad attention."

Dean sighed, leaning forward on his knees and nodding. "Yeah, you're right."

"Good. Now I don't suppose you know of any buried treasure that gets dug up in the future? Some rich old lady who'd pay a buttload for one of those harmless relics we've got stashed away?"

Dean had been shaking his head, tired, when suddenly he froze. "Crap."

"What?"

Dean groaned and sat back in his chair. "Bela."

"You want to explain–"

A white light burst in through the door and shot across the room, blinding them for a second. Across the room, someone gasped for air. Dean was on his feet before their eyes adjusted and–

Hannah, it was Hannah, sitting straight up on the floor. Dean was by her side in a second. "What happened?"

She looked sick. "It was terrible."

More streaks of light flew in behind them, whirling over the bodies until the angels found their vessels: Hester sat up, then Balthazar, then Anna. Then nothing. Dean looked around frantically while Bobby helped Hester to her feet. The angels looked shaken and exhaustion radiated right through their vessels. "What happened?" Dean demanded.

"Had a, uh, spot of trouble with the locals," said Balthazar, brushing down his sleeves.

"Is Lilith dead?" asked Bobby. Anna nodded, chin tilted up proudly.

"She was well hidden, but we found her. Her death can no longer be the final seal to begin the Apocalypse."

She smiled but it faded fast as Dean rounded on her. "Where's the rest of you?"

Anna looked down. Beside her, Hester actually touched her shoulder in comfort. "We lost Rachel."

"And? Where's Cas?"

Anna stepped forward carefully. "Dean," she said gently, "a hoard of demons caught Samandriel as we made our escape. Cas and Inias went back for him."

Bobby felt something cold settle into his stomach. Dean stiffened.

"And?"

"I don't know. Castiel ordered us to continue. We had to bring you word that we succeeded."

"If Cas doesn't come back, you failed!"

"Dean!" Bobby snapped, but it did nothing. Dean whirled back to the three bodies still lying silent, fists clenched and wound like a spring, breathing hard.

Bobby discreetly gestured the angels to the door. Anna nodded and herded her team out, but Balthazar shook his head. "I'll wait for Cassie."

Dean jerked round to look at him, and something in Balthazar's face got through; he softened and nodded, and went back toward his chair, but then another shot of white light came in and he tensed up again.

It was Samandriel. His vessel was just a kid, younger than Jo, and maybe that was why his eyes filled with tears soon as they opened. Balthazar hurried to his side. "Are you all right?"

Samandriel nodded, wiping his eyes. He accepted a hand to stand up but was unsteady on his feet; he leaned against the wall. "What happened?" asked Balthazar.

"To Cas," Dean added. Then: "And Inias."

"They saved me," said Samandriel, shaky. "They distracted the demons who caught me and separated the hoard to lessen their advantage of numbers. Inias was the bait. Castiel freed me but they overwhelmed Inias."

"And?"

"Castiel sent me ahead. He said he'd be right behind me."

Dean looked stricken. He sat down heavily and laced his fingers tight, but it couldn't hide the trembling. Bobby cursed. Damn self-sacrificing angel. Knew he had a guilt complex. You break my boy I'll hunt you down in the afterlife.

When one more streak of white light flew in, sluggish and wobbly, Dean watched it with dead eyes. Inias's body was on the floor at the foot of the bed, and the white light stuttered, drooped down over it–

And passed him by to sink into Cas. Dean froze, not even breathing.

Then Cas opened his eyes and Dean yanked him up into a hug. "Fuck, man, what the fuck were you think–"

He choked on what sounded suspiciously like a sob and went quiet. Cas's arms slowly lifted to curl lightly around Dean's back. He looked over Dean's shoulder at Samandriel and Balthazar.

"I tried to save Inias," he said, eyes pleading. "I tried."

"We know, Cassie," Balthazar said quietly. "I'll tell the others."

Cas nodded, nose bumping into Dean's neck as he hugged back. "Thank you."

Bobby tilted his head discreetly at Rachel and Inias's vessels, still out cold on the floor. Balthazar nodded and they quietly crouched beside each body to carry them out, Bobby stifling grunts as best he could under Rachel's weight.

All the while, Dean held on to Cas, mumbling angrily. "You're all I've got, man," he said, muffled by the trenchcoat. "I need you."

"I know."

Chapter Text

Everything posted so far is what I called Act 1, and a bit of Act 2, out of three acts plus an epilogue.

Quick recap:

Act 1 was chapters 1–11. Character-wise it was all about Sam and season 1 Dean (hereafter "s1!Dean") and Jess and John, about family and the clashes of personality and goals within that core group. Future!Dean and Cas are accepted but definitely outsiders; they formed some tentative bonds but there are a lot of trust issues, not helped by future!Dean being super cagey about what exactly happened in the future and why Sam didn't come back with them. I didn't nail down exactly when in season 10 this breaks away from canon, but losing Charlie was one of the straws that broke Dean's back.

Future!Dean has been making side trips between hunts to check in on people like Charlie and Kevin and protect them from a distance; there were going to be a lot more interludes and connected one-shots posted in the series for characters like Madison, Lisa and Ben, and the Ghostfacers.

Dean is still suffering fallout from the Mark of Cain and has to keep far away from the temptation of the First Blade. Dean and Cas are tearing themselves up trying to save people while staying under the radar of both Hell and Heaven because, as Cas says, their best advantage is that they know exactly what's going to happen and what all their enemies are going to do – as long as they don't change too much or get noticed.

Their plan for stopping the Apocalypse begins with killing Lilith to invalidate the whole first-and-last-seals thing, but it's more than likely that the archangels will step in and force things. They have a big stash of divine weapons, but Cas isn't betting on it being enough, and their backup plan if Lucifer does get out is to use the Colt to knock out and then trap him (and Michael, and maybe Raphael if they can swing it) in the Cage. Dean is, of course, dead set on anyone but Sam and Adam being their vessels.

And things mostly go to plan... until they don't.

Act 2 started with chapter 12 after John killed Azazel and future!Dean grudgingly gave in and told the s1 crowd a limited version of the Apocalypse and how to prevent it. Hell (probably Meg and Tom in particular) reacted as soon as Azazel died, and Dean took the opportunity to quickly kill Ruby, Alastair, Zachariah, Uriel, and Naomi, and then summoned Crowley to offer him the throne in Hell exchange for information, though Cas doesn't trust him. Cas meantime sort of cannibalised his younger self, restoring his wings and his grace, and he and and his Angel Squad^TM kill Lilith, but lose Rachael and Inias in the process.

The s1 crowd, now including Bobby, Rufus, Ellen and Jo (and Ash, though he's been off-screen so far) have been finding as many of the Special Children as possible, warning them and offering whatever protection they'll accept; future!Dean has promised there's a way to purge them of the demon blood (i.e. the trials), but hasn't given details yet. The only one currently in the bunker with them is Andy, who Sam has become fast friends with.

And that's the end of chapter 13, and where I lost my steam.

Here's everything that was going to happen:

For now, things seem under control. The human hunters, mostly organised by John and Bobby, are hunting down demons and protecting as many seals as possible, though there's only so many they can save; Samhain, for one, is a failure. Despite that, the hunter-angel team is strong and everyone feels like this is winnable, but there is tension and distrust between humans and angels.

On the Hell side, the demons are more organised than expected given that future!Dean is assuming it's mostly Meg and Tom trying to get revenge for their father and continuing Azazel's work re: the Special Children. Since no one knows how many kids were infected with demon blood in total, only the ones future!Dean knew about can be protected; Ash is working on finding more. As far as they know, Hell is still trying to (or may have succeeded at) finding someone else to fill the shoes of the Righteous Man.

Off-screen (so, my writing notes only, wouldn't have been stated directly in the narrative), what Dean doesn't know is that Azazel was the one holding Hell in check, so many demons are going off on their own agendas, which creates a fair bit of chaos and extra work for the various hunters, angels, etc in the Winchester team, and makes it harder to figure out what demon activity is Apocalypse agenda and what's just noise.

Heaven, on the other hand, is aware of some angels disappearing, but Michael and Raphael aren't alarmed, so for now there are relatively few instances of angels making a mess on Earth. Balthazar and Hester are the team's spies, so as far as Heaven knows they aren't missing, and they are in and out of the bunker half the time keeping up appearances.

The Winchester team is headquartered at the bunker, but they also have bases and safe houses at Bobby's, the Roadhouse, and Rufus' cabin, plus other hunters' homes as far out as they can reach (not just in America. I'm very tired of this whole "America is the entire relevant world" thing. No British Men of Letters, as future!Dean is from season 10 and doesn't know them yet, but at least some of their team has to have hunter friends overseas, right?).

The team needs a lot of resources, and as money issues get worse, future!Dean makes a deal with Bela; all the money they need in exchange for getting her contract torn up. Crowley does so, and brings some intel on Hell at the same time, which future!Dean passes on, and it pans out, giving the team a minor but substantial victory.

Dean's other priority right now is to get Sam clean of demon blood, to get rid of his visions and to get him off the list of potential Lucifer vessels just in case enough seals get broken. Dean's rightfully paranoid about that. With the tablets and information about the trials, and the ingredients the angels fly round to get, they've got all they need to put the Special Children through the trials, and then stop at the last second the way s10 Sam did; they've got enough angels to inhabit and heal about four of the kids at a time (while still having enough active squad to protect them and hunt stuff), and future!Dean insists that Sam be in the first group, along with Andy, Ava and Lily. It works well. (I'm not sure which souls they'd each bring back from Hell. Hmm, that would have been a great chapter to write.)

Crowley is less than happy with this trials business as the Hellhounds are his pups, and when the first four suddenly die he drops in on Dean (on a hunt outside the bunker) and rages a bit. He's harder and cruller than future!Dean last knew him, and the next bit of intel he gives Dean, while still technically accurate, leads to a painful defeat. Dean and Cas scrutinise all future intel more carefully, but it seems to be a one-off. Crowley lets the kids rescue whatever souls they want from Hell, and really doesn't care if a few demons get cured/nearly cured since he makes sure none have sensitive information and the Winchesters kill them anyway.

Meantime, future!Dean is breaking his promises about telling the truth left and right, and is feeling super lonely; everyone around him, save Cas, is different than he remembers, and he misses his friends as he knew them. He's putting himself under a lot of pressure, and he loses it sometimes. When he and Cas are alone he can let it out a bit, and one day, after something happens, he rants, "This isn't my Sam! This Sam plays Asia. On Tuesdays. My Sam is GONE, we ERASED him!" Going back in time is a heavier weight to bear than he expected, saving people or no.

Cas is having an easier time of it; his angel friends are mostly as he remembers them, and since getting his wings back he's taken to flying as much as he can. He sort of quietly loves popping up behind people startling them, and does it a lot, to Dean in particular.

Cas encounters Meg a few times and despite all he said to Dean about Crowley, he can't not see Meg as the person who helped him, so that doesn't go too well. When some the other angels find out they just plain don't understand his attachment; they don't get his attachment to Dean, either, but in Meg's case it gets Cas hurt, maybe ruins a hunt or two.

Inevitably, the things they do make ripples, and changes become more obvious. Future!Dean and Cas's foreknowledge fails here and there, on little and sometimes bigger things. Dean also screws up something at some point, going off half-cocked without backup because he was sure he could handle it, and the s1 crowd have to rescue him. Cue some embarrassed shouting, because wow is Dean not good at being wrong.

As Heaven in particular clues into the fact that someone with more knowledge than they shoud have is meddling with their Apocalypse, the archangels start bending the rules and forcing Apocalypse events to happen, without caring about specificity, often out of order, and on a sped-up timeframe. Hell starts getting more unpredictable, and Dean and Cas can't figure out why. On the up side, more angels believe Balthazar when he carefully sounds them out, and they get more angels on their side.

Croatoan turns up; future!Dean responds by instantly killing everyone infected, probably by getting the angels to wipe out the town (this is just another plague to them), or else by quietly sending some of the less moral hunters to put them down. He makes sure the s1 crowd don't find out.

Then something (I hadn't decided what) happens exactly as it did in the canon timeline, for no reason Dean and Cas can figure out; it could be a coincidence, but the odds against it are very very high. Cas suggests the possibility that the timeline could be correcting itself – Dean fiercely refuses to consider the possibility. They went back, they changed the past, it's a new timeline. Done.

The vault Dean and Cas built is locked in such a way that it can only be opened with Cas' grace and Dean's blood. So, narratively, either something has to happen at some point where the others badly need something inside and Cas isn't around to open it (s1!Dean's blood will work, which future!Dean didn't think about), or else at some point the vault gets broken into. This would have tied into something else in this act, but I never decided what.

The team has a few bad defeats as Heaven and Hell keep pushing their agenda. There's a fair bit of disillusionment among the team, particularly the few devout hunters, the angel squad, and Jess, who wonders why God, who is supposed to be all-loving, would let all this happen.

Jess in particular has been having a crisis of faith and is keeping in touch with Pastor Jim via email, trying to make sense of the world she's found herself in. She's also in touch with Brady, whose memory wipe has left him unsettlingly bland and cheerful, and she has reoccurring dreams of possessed!Brady laughing at them. The threat to her personally has faded a bit now that Hell has realised Sam has been purged of the demon blood, and from the bunker she's doing what she can to help for Sam's sake. She sticks to research, since she's not suited to hunt work even if she were willing. Her rigid law-oriented morals has always made her uncomfortable with the fake credit cards and impersonations and other thefts/scams/break-ins, etc.

All of this makes for a very strained relationship with Sam; she's perpetually unhappy while Sam, for all that he doesn't want this life, has formed great friendships with Andy and Jo and others, and – as Jess notices and points out more than once – he gets way more excited over lore and spells than he ever did about law. Sam doesn't know what he wants (though whenever John is around he still pretends too; they've gotten over the worst of their clashes, largely because they spend a lot of time apart), but he does feel the importance of what they're doing, and has to stay to help save the world. Jess totally gets that, and Sam totally gets why she's unhappy. It's a difficult situation.

Younger/season 1!Dean is having a harder time; he feels sidelined and unimportant. Even though he's doing heaps, and doing it really well, everything is overshadowed by his future self, and he gets resentful, especially when he gets put on less dangerous or important hunts because he knows it's future!Dean and John keeping him out of harm's way; he does a few reckless things in response. Overall he is happier than in canon because he's got his family together, and he goes out of his way to keep everyone happy and getting along – jokes, surprise breakfasts, whatever it takes. When he can (not often), he visits Cassie, and they're keeping in touch, but he's not sure where or if it's going anywhere, or if he wants/should want it to. He and future!Dean don't talk much, but when they do it's either tense or a surprise moment of bonding over something, usually something geeky. Neither of them really knows how to deal with the other.

Sam and both Deans are close to Bobby, especially in contrast to their relationships with John, thought s1!Dean spends more time with John trying to prove that he's just as good. Future!Dean in particular always goes to Bobby when he needs to talk, and this doesn't go unnoticed. John and Bobby have more than a few loud arguments, few of them directly about the boys but all with that tension(/jealousy/anger) underlying it. Future!Dean doesn't form much of a bond with Ellen this time as they're much closer in age, but she does mother Sam and s1!Dean. Jo and Ellen's relationship with each other and the Winchesters is much as it is in canon, and Jess and Jo form a friendship through the sheer amount of time they spend in the bunker, though they're not much alike.

Pamela joins at some point and it's good to see her, but this is at about the time when Balthazar and the other angel spies have to stop snooping around Heaven because Michael and Raphael's loyalists are closing in on them. Pam tries to see what the angels around Earth are up to, and gets blinded – exactly the same as in canon. This time the angel squad can restore her burned-out eyeballs, but it's unsettling (especially for future!Dean), and Pam understandably doesn't stick around.

The only other accessible person who could give them intel now is a prophet, but future!Dean refuses to bring Chuck into this because if he's killed, a) that's bad, he likes Chuck, but b) then Kevin will be called next, and Dean can't stomach that. (Remember that this Dean is from season 10 and at the time I plotted all this out the Chuck-is-God thing was only a theory.) He does get worried about what might be getting published in the Supernatural books and quietly buys copies of the entire series; turns out, only three books were printed, and nothing in there talks about anyone coming back in time. Dean feels assured that, on the off-chance anyone in the know actually read those books they wouldn't find anything useful, but wonders why Chuck didn't publish more, and why he didn't see them come back in time, and the thought worries him.

More bad news: Although Sam, Andy, and several of the other Special Children have been purged and healed, something goes wrong with one of the groups that goes through the trials later; someone (not Jake) goes off the rails and has to be stopped. Future!Dean kills them. Not everyone finds out about it; Sam might (and he would be horrified), but John definitely does.

John and future!Dean have been doing really well on the work front up to this point, at least when they're not clashing over who's in charge; both are determined to protect everyone else whether they want to be protected or not. Future!Dean spends part of this act coming to term with how, after years of first worshipping and then hating his father, John is also just a guy who's in over his head, doing his best, and failing as often as not. The two of them are really a lot alike, and it's not a comfortable realisation. However, this kid was a civilian, and it's a line John wouldn't have crossed. Future!Dean has been oblivious to there being a line at all for a while now, until John tries to haul him back over it. Future!Dean needs has lost sight of the value of life.

Dean's methods in general have been pushing others away slowly for a while now, and it gets worse as time goes on. Cas's ease with killing enemy angels has a similar affect on the angel squad. Their team starts losing its inner strength.

In the midst of this is a ray of sunshine in the form of Charlie dropping in; in her one-shot (Little Sister), Dean gave her the bunker's address in case she ever needed a place to stay safe. She's gotten herself in trouble, either from hacking or from spilling some detail about the Hobbit films that's currently super confidential (if there even was anything at... whatever point in time this is. They've probably been going well over a year now, so let's say we're somewhere in 2007/2008. Probably go with hacking, then.).

Future!Dean is delighted to see her, and it's pretty obvious to everyone else in the bunker that future!Dean is way soft and emotional around her, so many of them assume they were a couple, to both their annoyance. Dean is in bad need of someone to confide in (he has Cas, but they argue plenty), but he makes the mistake of treating her like the much-older woman he knew, and this Charlie can't really deal with his problems. They do watch plenty of Star Wars, though, and she spends a lot of time with Jo. At some point she and Jo get together, and it's all very fluffy.

Charlie also gives Sam and s1!Dean an opportunity they've been waiting a long time for; they've repeatedly tried to break into future!Dean's laptop to see what else is in his/future!Sam's journal; no one trusts that future!Dean is telling them everything anymore. She works at it while future!Dean is off on a hunt for a week, and cracks the laptop password. They find heaps of photos of future!Dean and his Sam and his Charlie, and lots of other people and places they don't recognise. It's eerie for everyone except Dean to see their older doppelgangers doing things they don't remember. Charlie digs around and finds future!Sam's journal, which isn't a narrative like John's but is a list of dates and monsters and deaths, with notes on what and how. A lot of it isn't immediately clear, but they (Charlie, s1!Dean, Sam, Jo, Jess and Andy) print off and read through the entire thing. Charlie finds the entry on her own death and has a bit of a freakout; so does Andy, who also finds out about his twin.

Future!Dean gets back to a punch in the face, and the threat of more. Sam and the others didn't hesitate to tell Bobby, John, Ellen, Rufus, Anna and Balthazar so Cas and future!Dean end up (angrily, in Dean's case) defending himself/themselves to all of them. Charlie has obviously been crying, but has pulled herself together and rolls her eyes when she says, "Dude, your password was 'NotCharlieNotAnyoneNotAgain'. With three exclamation marks."

The most important details they've learned are about the confrontation at Stull Cemetery and how Winchesters were always meant to be the True vessels. Also Sam's multiple painful deaths and the blood addiction, but given he's been purged that's not nearly so bad a betrayal to him now. Andy's angry that he never got to meet his brother, no matter how twisted the guy was. There are lots of similar outrages from different people, particulary the angels who are stunnned by all the things Cas did, particularly post-Apocalypse/seasons 6–10. It's a very big fight, and the trust between future!Dean and Cas and the past/present crowd is badly broken.

Atropos turns up soon after to kill future!Dean and Cas, and is killed by them so fast that no one finds out what she was going to say.

Then Jess tells Sam that she's leaving; she's going back to her old life at Stanford. She's going to use everything she now knows to protect herself and her family but she's done hiding in a sunless bunker waiting to be saved. This is not her life. Sam never did propose, and whatever Jess's feelings might have been back then, they can't work as a couple this way. She says, "Come and find me when you've saved the world," and Sam is left wondering if that will ever happen.

And thus ends Act 2.

Chapter Text

Act 3 is basically seasons 4 and 5 crammed into a a few months. As it begins, the theory of the self-correcting timeline starts rearing its head in a bad way: With increasing frequency, people are being injured or killed in the same ways as in canon. The Roadhouse gets blown up; Jo was in the bunker and Ellen was out buying ammo, but Ash (and a number of other hunters) were inside and are killed. There's no indication whether Heaven or Hell did it. Future!Dean is starting to freak out that maybe things are inevitable, though Cas and the angel squad, their experts on angel air time travel, assure him he's just being paranoid – possibly because the First Blade is still in the general vicinity?

The team is gathering every ally they can get in touch with: Hunters like Tamara and Isaac, Annie Hawkins, and the Campbell cousins (and isn't that a fun family 're'union; John has never met them, but they know about each other).

Meantime, Sam uses what's in the journal to find Amy Pond; he urges and then helps her to leave the country (/continent/hemisphere) to protect her from future!Dean, whom he doesn't trust right now.

Out of the blue, Meg and Tom, who disappeared a while ago after the Special Kids were purified en mass, turn up with Dagon and other hell knights, whom season 10 Dean doesn't know about and doesn't know how to deal with. Suddenly it's back to digging through the lore for new information; future!Dean has been relying far too long on already knowing everything.

Shortly after, Crowley switches sides. Well, actually, he was never really on future!Dean's side; he was playing both and waiting to see who'd come out stronger. To Dean he says the king thing was a nice idea, was tempting, but he'd rather live.

Future!Dean is furious (and hurt, but won't admit it). Cas reminds him that this isn't the Crowley he knows any more than Meg was; this is the Crowley who was responsible for Lisa and Ben's suffering. Dean is silent for a minute, then says, grimly: "Cas, that's exactly what I needed to hear." He kills Crowley particularly violently. (Got to say: I love Crowley! But back in season 5/6 he was not good.)

And then the Cage is opened, and Lucifer gets out.

The cage is opened by either Rowena, because guess who future!Dean disregarded since she didn't get involved last time? (I love Rowena too, but with no time to form relationships as in canon, of course she'll side with Hell, whoever can give her the most power.), or it's opened by direct interference from Michael; I never decided.

All the big ugly omens start hitting Earth; forest fires, biblical storms, quake, disease, etc. Fun times. Future!Dean has a bit of a crisis: "We shouldn't have come back! It's all happening all over again!" But it's way too late now. He grills Cas about what would happen if they go back to just before they arrived in the past and stop their past-future selves from saving Jess, but for Reasons to do with cosmic stuff and timeline integrity and everything it just won't work, they'd erase themselves or end up in a paradox loop or something.

Cas and future!Dean focus on getting the Rings from the Horsemen, and over a painfully long few chapters they get hold of three of the rings. They have to wait for Lucifer to raise Death to try for that one, but on the up side, they don't target a town with connections to the Winchesters just to send a message, so Bobby never has to face Karen dying a second time.

Then Dean summons Death, and is super shaken when Death calmly talks about the timeline he left.

"I exist outside of time, Dean," said Death. "How is it, do you think, that people kept dying while I was imprisoned? I am everywhere and everywhen. You can't kill me."

Death also talks about inevitability, so Dean argues that since Death gave his ring last time, he should do it again. He leaves that meeting with the ring and a lot of anxiety.

Heaven goes after Adam; the Winchesters keep him safe, have to tell him and his mom the truth, and they have a bit of actual family time together. John tells him and his mother what's going on (bit of a turnabout, with John having to be the one telling a story that's ridiculous even by hunter standards). Adam and Kate are sent to a safe house, Rufus' cabin, and Rufus closes it as a hunter base to stick around and protect them.

John's nerves are frayed with worry about his sons – he's now got four who are or were potential vessels – and when he and future!Dean have another of their frequent arguments, John shouts at him that he has no idea what it's like to lose a child. Dean, who has recently been thinking about Ben, and who ran into a bunch of Amazons not too much earlier and was painfully reminded of Emma, and who is constantly worried sick about Sam and Adam too... well, that is a really, really bad fight. (Not necessary for the plot maybe, but I hate that Emma got forgotten. So many potential feels for Dean!)

So with everything going to shit like this, future!Dean goes for his aces: Jesse Turner and Gabriel. Both are a big risk and a long shot, but also their most powerful potential allies.

Jesse is barely ten years old, and things go about the same as they did in season 5; he's scared and disappears (with his parents this time) to a safe place somewhere; there's no way to track him.

Gabriel is another story. It takes a bit of work and a bit of (fun) trickery, but Cas and Dean get him to stick around long enough to hear their story. Of course, like before, he doesn't want to get involved. He scoffs at the idea that Lucifer would kill him, and says that he wouldn't manage if he tried.

Dean said, "Yeah, 'cause you'd use a double? Good plan. Better off pulling a Loki instead."

Gabriel frowned, puzzled, and Dean added. "Movie. Not out yet."
(Meaning Thor 1, which came out in 2011, where Loki created dozens of doubles to escape danger.)

"Good?" asked Gabriel.

"Not bad," said Dean.

"Huh." Gabriel snapped his fingers and Dean felt a weirdness in his head, then Gabriel was holding a DVD of the movie. It dissolved, and Gabriel tilted his head, absorbing the story. "Yeah, not bad." Loki's horned gold helmet appeared on his head and he grinned. "What do you think?"

Thing is, though Gabriel believes them, he doesn't believe that Dean and Cas's plan will work, and he knows more about the Apocalypse and God's original creation of the universe than any of them.

"Destiny isn't just some prediction you get steered towards, all right? It has power. It has weight. The Apocalypse is happening. It's started. You can't stop it."

"We stopped it last time," said Dean.

"You changed it," Gabriel replied. "It's not the same thing. Give it a few hundred years, Michael and Lucifer will get out again, probably get let out, and another pair of human schmucks will be their vessels for the rematch. Probably someone from your line too. You absolutely sure none of your swimmers got past the goalie? Maybe their kids, or their grandkids, someone with no clue about hunting, would have been you and Sam version 2.0."

...

"Dad's stubborn about his plans. Once he says something's going to happen, it does. One way or another."

Dean replied, "Your dad's a douche."

Which is true, but not helpful. Dean isn't asking Gabriel to deal with his father, he's asking him to go against his brothers. My read on Gabriel is that he doesn't want to have to choose between them, and that back when they had 'family dinners', he was the one who'd try to defuse arguments and get yelled over.

It takes a while, but eventually Gabriel decides to help – to a point. He doesn't want to have to help or watch one brother destroy the other, and Dean's side is pretty much the only side offering that possibility, by locking them all in the Cage instead of killing anyone. So Gabriel agrees to help trap them.

For a while, things are tentatively looking up again; Gabriel won't help with any day-to-day stuff (he's right when he says his brothers would notice archangel powers sooner or later) and hangs around the bunker watching movies with Jo and Charlie, and whatever hunters are resting between hunts. The angel squad annoy him – far too worshippy. Balthazar is the only one who gets over the whole "wow, archangel" thing enough to throw popcorn at the telly with him.

(I should add that this part of the plotting is very sketchy so all I've really got are the major events, most of them grim and fatalistic. There is still a lot of character time going on, day to day life between attacks and angels and demons and all that, and there's optimism, just less of it. The ones stuck 'safe' in the bunker get the most light-hearted scenes. Also, I can't resist the thought of Gabriel and Charlie egging each other on until there's a full-on LARPing game, complete with an enchanted Moondoor forest courtesy of archangel illusion magic, taking up a lower level of the bunker. And then future!Dean, on a rare evening where there's nothing to do but wait, finds out and joins in and he's just happy for a little while.)

Then, in a fight with one of the Hell knights, the Colt is destroyed, and that fucks things waaaaay up; they were relying on it to daze the archangels in whatever vessels they end up with and kick them into the Cage. Without it, the plan goes up in flames, and the team – the Winchesters, Bobby, Harvelles, and angel squad – now have no idea how to stop the Apocalypse.

They turn to Gabriel, but Gabriel was there to lock up his brothers, not fight them. He takes off. Sam and Cas track him down, ask him to at least try – he could fight to not kill, right? Hide until the Cage is open and then push his brothers in? He's got the most juice. And maybe Gabriel would have agreed, but at that point Raphael decides his brother is going to do his duty (by which he means whatever he and Michael say), drops in, and – after a fight, both verbal and physical – drags Gabriel back to Heaven.

It feels like game over. They're out of options; all that's left is to try to do what Sam did last time, say Yes and hope to out-willpower Michael and Lucifer at the Pit. The chances of that working are so small, no one's willing to let anyone volunteer for that. They hit the books looking for any other way.

Privately, Future!Dean decides to say Yes. Over the course of this story he's gone from determined hope to total despair, his faith in free will crumbling under the weight of inevitability. He hasn't bonded with his past family, he's failed over and over again, his Sam is long gone, erased, and he's got nothing, except Cas. He doesn't tell Cas – Cas has his own suicidal tendencies, and damned if he's going to fail the only person he has left from his own timeline.

In a POV scene of his own, s1!Dean makes the same decision; he's read future!Sam's journal back to front, and he's spent the last year or so feeling sidelined and replaced and unneeded. This is one thing he can do that matters; it'll save Sammy, and save the world... and he won't have to spend every day wondering if John wishes he was more like future!Dean better, or if he loves Sam more, or Adam.

And now we get to the last few chapters, which have names again!

In almost identical circumstances to last time, Ellen dies. Future!Dean freaks out; it was all the same, right down to the place of the wound on Jo's leg, and the only reason Jo didn't die too is that Dean carried her out of the the hardware shop crying and screaming while Ellen held off the hellhounds. To call it coincidence would be absurd.

Once they get back to safety Bobby shouts some sense into Dean, who's beating himself up over losing Ellen on top of grieving for her. Bobby says, "Saving people doesn't always mean saving their lives. You can't save everyone, Dean. Sometimes you just gotta help them die the best way they can."

And Dean doesn't want to think about it, but dying so Jo could live, giving Jo a chance at a safe life, is precisely what Ellen has wanted all this time. Jo clings to Charlie and sobs and screams, and Dean looks at her and thinks, How is this 'saving' her?

Then just to make the day better, Andy calls, frantic: Sam has said Yes to Lucifer. And John is missing.

Either Sam left a note or said something, or they just know him well enough to figure out: He did it to spare the other special kids; the who-knows-how-many others out there infected with demon blood that they haven't found. Having read the journal and the lore over and over, Sam bets correctly that Lucifer will take a 'true vessel' with the right bloodline over someone else strengthened by demon blood, and a vessel can be made to drink the blood later; his body won't decay right away. Sam may also be doing this because it gives him purpose, and/or because he's believing in destiny or inevitability following future!Dean's breakdown over the apparently self-correcting timeline. Either way, the Deans go into full-on crisis mode.

For the first time ever, the Deans work in perfect tandem. They use all the brains they usually pretend not to have to try to invent a spell/potion/something to help incapacitate or expel archangels, and s1!Dean gets to work on brewing their experiment while future!Dean and Cas fly out for their last hail Mary: Chuck. At this point, it's worth risking Kevin in the long term to get some foresight now.

Dean hammers on the door. Chuck answers looking weary, but not the sleepless drunk from last time. He just looks sad. Dean doesn't notice anything different, but Cas does; Chuck isn't hiding who he is. Cas stares. "Father?"

And Dean Winchester punched God in the face.

Stepping out of the narrative for a second: When I plotted this out, it was long before the Chuck-is-God reveal and I was... let's say slightly peeved when the show unveiled him to be almost exactly like I had scribbled out in my notes a year earlier. They stole my fire :P The backstory I sketched out for the Heaven family and how the Apocalypse came to be in the first place was a bit different, but it still mostly holds with canon. My Chuck/God, this creator who loves literally everyone and everything, doesn't know how to hate or resent or fear anyone, and all the problems with the world stem from his inability to understand those feelings.

The main things SPN has always been about are family and free will, and that's what I wanted to parallel with the Heaven family (lousy name, I know, can't think of a better shorthand). So in this world, when God made the angels/archangels, they were the best thing he'd ever created, but then he made humans and realised how amazing this free will thing was. He wanted to share it with his other kids, but they weren't built for it. Angels were all "Free will? What does God want us to do with it?" Archangels were a little better, they had more developed individuality, but God wasn't prepared for their free will to challenge or argue with him. Lucifer kept trying things, some of them strange or destructive or twisted (the early steps towards creating Lilith), and whenever God would say, "No, don't do that", he'd ask "Why? Why? Why not?"

And God didn't have good answer, so he responded by making The Word: what he thought would be nice, clean-cut rules that everyone would follow and it would curb this pesky misbehaviour and all would be well. Most angels followed what was Written and for a while God thought it was going great, but then he realised that their apparent free will was only following the instructions, e.g. "Help humans" was read as "do things for them", so some angels saw a human struggling to light a fire and did it for them, inspiring the first hints of religion, or saw a human crying or hurt and decided to help by ending that pain by killing them or killing the person who upset them, etc.

At the same time, the arguments with Lucifer were getting more heated. God didn't realise how jealous Lucifer was and how constantly saying "look to the humans, don't you see how great humans are?" only fanned the flames. Lucifer regularly stormed off in a huff (to this ugly dark place called Hell that he'd created as a polar opposite to Heaven, just to spite his dad), and God, being immortal, left him alone to get over it. But sometimes when they argued God would say something like "If you do that thing, all these bad things will happen!" (meaning it as a warning, not a threat) and then Lucifer would thumb his nose by going and doing exactly that, without thinking of taking a third path – still following the script God 'wrote' whenever he made declarations like that.

So God decided that the angels, archangels in particular, needed an object lesson in free will, and toyed with the idea of absenting himself for a while so they'd have to think for themselves. But then Lucifer went way way off the rails and twisted Lilith into this horrible new thing, because he has free will, right? He wanted to, so he did. And God saw this abominable tortured wreck of a beautiful human soul and Lucifer just standing there smugly, and God lost his temper.

He shouted that Lucifer was DAMNED and he'd be LOCKED UP FOREVER and if he ever got out Michael would fight him TO THE DEATH and they'd destroy the WHOLE EARTH! (He was a bit of a drama queen back then.) What he wanted was to force them to choose between their love for each other and doing What Must Happen Because God Said So, and hoped they'd use their free will to make different choices. Then he skipped off to Earth in disguise so they couldn't ask why or beg him to fix it.

Only, being a God who loves everyone, he underestimated how much they could hate, and following their father's will was, even in Lucifer's case, easier than truly thinking outside the box. By the time the preordained century started rolling around, Chuck (having lived among humans all this time and gained new perspective himself) has realised it's not working and is pretty depressed and feeling helpless because, even though he still has all his powers, interfering and telling them what to do would ruin the whole point.

Chuck tells them all of that. Then he looks at Dean and starts talking about the other timeline, because of course he knows all about it. He knows everything, except what anyone's going to do with their free will.

Last time, when Dean and Sam violently rejected the Apocalypse plan, Chuck felt hope. He was satisfied with the resolution of Swan Song because it forced Michael and Lucifer into a position where a) they had to acknowledge that what was written didn't come to pass, thus forcing them to think, and b) to talk to each other, eventually, as there's nothing in the cage that can be done but either sit in silence or talk. (Though in a few millennia he might have found that they sulked in silence the whole time...)

Then future!Dean did one better and changed the past, because he has never followed any plan but his own and thinks outside the box, which is great... except now they're on track to end up with the archangels in the Cage again, and this time Lucifer, with Sam's body, has all his knowledge of future!Dean coming back to change the past and – apparently – failing. If they end up in the Cage again, it will appear to prove to the archangels that things are inevitable.

And no, Chuck says, they absolutely are not, but Gabriel was right about 'destiny' having weight; back when Chuck first declared the Apocalypse, that put weight behind it, because it was a very specific path for the future he was laying out. Can they get off it? Yes, of course, that's what free will means. But it's why 'coincidences' are happening, why events have been happening so much like before; it's like a river taking a well-worn path rather than forging a new one. Path of least resistance.

So Chuck feels stuck in a corner; destiny weight is pushing things to be almost the same as before, if the archangels (and Sam!) end up in the Cage they'll never learn their lesson, and if they don't all humans will suffer. He doesn't know what to do.

Dean does. He absolutely loses it, rages, lots of capslock, tearing Chuck a new one about taking responsibility, demanding he "put a leash on them!" (archangels), yells that hands-off parenting has done jack-all and he's got to "control your fucking kids before they kill everyone!"

Chuck shakes his head, says he doesn't think it will help, Michael and Lucifer are so intractable, sometimes he wonders if maybe it is impossible for angels to truly learn free will... but then there's Cas, sitting right there on his coffee table, an angel who wields his free will as easily as his sword. He doesn't know how to replicate what makes Cas unique.

"You have to try!"

Cas, for his part, is bitterly disappointed in his father. Chuck is really happy to see Cas, is proud of him, offers a few olive branches, but Cas is in sarcastic little bitch mode.

"Is this the part where you tell me you've always been with me?"

Chuck looked down. "No. I wasn't. I'm sorry, son."

Cas doesn't accept his apology; this is the first time they've spoken directly in Cas's life, and Cas has realised that's just not good enough. Spending all this time around the Winchesters, it took him a while to see John without angry-Dean-coloured lenses, but he has: He's seen John breaking his metaphorical back trying to protect his boys from literally everything. Oh, John's been really stupid about it, made so many wrong decisions, been gruff and awkward and angry, made so many fails, but he tried. No one ever did that for Cas, or any other angel, and in retrospect, they needed that something in their cold heavenly childhood; they needed a parent.

"You may be my creator," said Cas, "but you were never my father."

Chuck apologises. And then he apologises to Dean, sincerely, but says he's decided not to interfere with the Apocalypse.

But, he adds, that's not what they came for; they came for a prophet's insight, and that he can give. He hands Dean some printed pages – proofs for another Supernatural novel from a shelf full of printouts that never got sent to a publisher. Dean reads them, goes pale, punches Chuck again, and runs out the door. (Then, because I need levity, he realises they didn't drive and bursts back in. Beat. "Cas, you gotta fly us to the bunker like now.")

This fades into a scene written by Chuck, showing us what happened off-screen while Sam was saying Yes, the pages that Dean read:

At Rufus' safe house cabin, Heaven got to Adam; Raphael killed Rufus and tortured Kate in front of Adam to force him to say Yes, and John – who has spent years afraid Sam will have to die, who always expected to die fighting Azazel or some other monster, who knew full well that the only 'true vessels' are his four sons – got there in time and offered himself instead. Michael accepted.

Out of time and with no last-minute ass-saving discoveries coming out of the lore, their experimental spells all failures, they are at the rock bottom of hope. Team Free Will 3.0 grimly prepares to fight to the end and future!Dean totally fails to come to terms with that being their decision to make. He begs them – s1!Dean, Bobby, Jo, Charlie, Anna, Andy, Pastor Jim, and all the others they've gathered that survived (this cast is too huge to name them all every time) – to just go, go anywhere, go somewhere safe. Anna and Balthazar and the remaining angel squad can take them away from Earth, somewhere they'd survive... but they choose to go down fighting. Future!Dean despairs.

(In Charlie's case, 'go down fighting' doesn't mean picking up a weapon. She kisses Jo before they all head out and says, "You're coming home, for that. Got it? I am not ruling Moondoor alone." And she says similar things to the Deans, sans kisses; she's become their little sister again, and she knows them, and knows hero stories, well enough to know that they need something to fight for. Once they're gone, she puts on Return of the King and waits.) (Some of the others who are injured or are non-fighters wait in the bunker too.)

The rest of them head for Stull Cemetery. In the Impala, future!Dean drives and s1!Dean, after a minute, puts on Def Leppard. Cas and Bobby are grimly silent in the back seat.

Everything is building to be Swan Song all over again. They're hoping desperately to pull something off but they have no plan. They're just determined to do something even if they all die.

When they get there, future!Dean is practically re-walking the same steps. He sees the same sight ahead of him – almost, John's body instead of Adam's, but everything else, everything... They have the four Horsemen's rings and future!Dean makes a big show of starting the incantation, but Michael and Lucifer have access to all that Sam and John know, and they actually work together for a second to take and disassemble the rings before s1!Dean, who supposed to sneak close and do the real incantation while future!Dean bought him time, can even get close.

The Deans offer, nearly beg, to be the vessels instead, but the archangels won't bite. Future!Dean yells for Sam to fight – he did it last time, he can do it again, but the archangels have had enough. They blast the Deans away.

Bobby, Jim, Jo, Andy and the other hunters are circling with bespelled guns, but none are the Colt. Anna, Balthazar and Samandriel have their blades, but none are archangel swords. They charge anyway, trying to give the Deans a chance to get the rings back by shooting and maybe possibly surprising the archangels long enough to make a difference (in Bobby's case, with suspiciously wet eyes, and he aims for John instead of Sam), but it's about as effective as shooting bullets into a tornado. It's not clear whether Lucifer or Michael snapped their fingers first, but everyone besides the Deans explodes in a spatter of red. (And ow, does future!Dean's heart shatter when he sees Cas turned to meat chunks again. I kept it ambiguous because I wanted this to be a gen fic, but future!Dean is 100% in love with his Cas (and vice-versa), and without him Dean feels more alone than ever.)

Why not explode Dean and Dean too? Because Sam and John made them promise before saying Yes. And Lucifer-as-Sam, smiling that horrible sickly condescending smile, says, "Besides, don't you think that would be a little... redundant?"

The Deans lock eyes. Sam and John are fighting, they're sure of it, and they know it's possible to win the battle of wills with emotion – but Michael and Lucifer now know that too; all they have to do is not repeat Lucifer's fail of letting future!Sam see him beating the crap out of Dean. There's some dialogue to that effect – they're keeping Sam and John in the dark, not letting them see where they are or what's happening, keeping them asleep maybe, unable to fight for control.

Ringing through Dean's head are Bobby's words: "Saving people doesn't always mean saving their lives" as he watches Lucifer toy with two of the rings, and Michael with the other two. Saving people doesn't always mean saving their lives.

And Dean goes, "Fuck it", and sprints towards them, no weapons left, his younger self a split-second behind him, both of them running to tackle the goddamn archangels in a reckless suicidal bid to grab the rings because they have to save Sam they always have to save Sam–

Time stops.

Chuck stands quietly beside them, looking between Dean and Dean and Lucifer and Michael. "I can't do it," he says. "I can't watch this again."

My notes at this point, in italicised bold 20pt font, read:

DO NOT DEUS EX MACHINA THIS!!!! maybe lampshade it?

Let's step out of the narrative again for a second:

Once I had the basic premise of this story laid out, pitting destiny against free will with foreknowledge as the wild card, I realised two things:

One, foreknowledge is as much a problem as a solution. If Team Free Will were the only ones to benefit from it it, that would be too easy. Future!Dean's plan would have been the right choice all along and Cas's very reasonable concerns about changing too much would have been a worry that went nowhere; it would have invalidated a lot of both their character arcs and the conflict narrative as a whole. Things had to go sideways.

Two, as awesome as it would be for human love to always be stronger than archangel hate, to have them pull off the same trick twice would be falling right back into the Destiny! trap, both in and out of the narrative. By that I mean, when we write fic we know everyone reading it already knows canon; I didn't have to explain why future!Dean got so upset about this Sam listening to Asia on Tuesdays. The other side of that coin is that what narrative storytelling demands and what fandom expects is itself a sort of destiny; we expect the Winchesters to have some sort of half-luck half-love victory because that's what they always do. To really prove free will is a thing, the Winchesters had to break away from everything that canon and fandom consider to be the only What Is Written possibilities. So I couldn't let it copy canon.

Which left me the big question of how to fix this fucking mess? Personally, I see Swan Song as a beautiful tearjerker ending that worked 10% because of love/faith/doing the right thing and 90% because of luck and the element of surprise; I know a lot of fandom will disagree with that, but it's my story, so. To me, these are some very determined, very emotional and moral humans with some spells and a few strong allies, against enemies who, at full strength, are hilariously out of their weight class. Bullets at a tornado.

But they're still the heroes of the story, and I'm never one for downer endings. So I had to find some other way.

SPN is about family, and the parallels between the Winchesters and the Heaven family are explicitly spelled out in canon; the Winchesters are what Chuck and his kids ought to be, and are the representation of free will vs the archangels representing destiny. So for free will to win the day, it can't be just the Winchesters who use it. And free will? Also means being able to change your mind. Say, when the your hot-headed kids are about to destroy everything you love to follow a stupid destiny you made up during a temper tantrum.

The single trickiest thing to pull off in this entire fic was going to be this moment: Using all the emotional build-up and talk of destiny and decisions to make it feel natural that Chuck, who saw everything that happened since future!Dean came back, who actually listened to everything Dean and Cas yelled at him about taking responsibility for his family, has realised that it's okay to go "Guys? I fucked up. Let me fix this."

(And yeah, I'm 100% aware of the Chuck=God=Author parallel here.)

It's not the same as the Winchesters (and Cas) fixing everything themselves, but they effected it; they were the inspiration and the kick up the ass Chuck needed. Having God listen to you and change things because of you is no small potatoes. I was never sure if I'd be able to pull that off in a way that's satisfying to all you lovely readers. I guess you'll let me know?

ANYWAY.

Chuck keeps the four of them from fighting and resurrects everyone else in the cemetery. A blink later and Gabriel and Raphael are summoned from wherever they were in Heaven, and Gabriel isn't looking so good from whatever prison his brothers had him in. The archangels are startled to see their father, and future!Dean lets the others know who this is pretty efficiently when he says, "Chuck, what the fuck?"

Chuck apologises – to all of them. He says he made a mistake, thinking that he could teach his angel kids free will by putting their backs to the wall like this, that it got way out of hand and he should have stepped in sooner. He's particularly warm/grateful to Cas, who really got to him when he said "You may be my creator but you were never my father"; he needed that kick. He says it's time for him to step up as a father, and references John, who for all his crappy parenting has still done better than Chuck has (Sam and John are awake and can see/hear now, though are still sharing bodies).

Being told the Apocalypse was all a setup makes Michael and Lucifer furious. Being told their dad still wants them to emulate humans is worse. They rage that humans are flawed and "nothing like us!" Chuck shakes his head and compares the bad reactions they had to "the new baby" (humans) to when Sam and the Deans first learned about Adam; they didn't take it well, but they got over it, and took this new brother into their protection because family. "Why do you think your true vessels are brothers?" Chuck asks: Because they're all mirrors of each other, mortal and angel, Earth and Heaven. They were supposed to learn from that.

Of course, that doesn't exactly make Michael, Raphael and Lucifer suddenly all understanding and warm fluffy bunny types. They're still angry and dangerous, and Chuck says he can't let them continue hurting people. Something Dean said when he was raging – "put a leash on them!" – stuck with Chuck, and while angsting over his decision after they stormed out, he got an idea, one that gives him a third option to break out of his "destiny & destruction vs interfere & no lesson" dilemma. And he says he's not sure, maybe this won't work, but as Dean said, he has to try. That's been the theme of this entire venture, maybe the whole SPN canon: Maybe it won't work, but you have to try anyway, and Chuck's finally gotten that.

A blink and there are two more figures standing in the cemetery: New faces, not anyone either future!Dean or we the readers recognise, standing next to Sam and John, who are in control of their bodies again. (I thought about describing Nick's face but figured that would be unfair to the 'real'/in-universe Nick. I still picture Mark Pellegrino though.) John hauls Sam back out of the ring of archangels and grabs s1!Dean as he goes, standing protectively in front of them. s1!Dean hugs Sam and doesn't give a damn who's watching.

Chuck conjured vessels for Raphael and Gabriel when he took them out of Heaven, so now all four archangels have bodies of their own, and three of them quickly realise that their grace and power is missing. Chuck has made them mortal and says this is the object lesson he should have given them in the first place: They're going to live on Earth now, and he hopes they'll learn to appreciate a) humans, b) free will, and c) each other. And if they don't learn it in this lifetime, well, he'll just put them into new bodies to be born again and again until they do. Chuck says he'll watch out for them, and whenever they want to talk, he'll be there. He's not going to be an absent father again.

Right now, it doesn't look like they'll ever want to talk again. They rage and threaten, but the most they can do is throw punches, and Team Free Will gets a lot of satisfaction watching Lucifer go down after s1!Dean punches him in the face.

Gabriel gets to keep his powers – he didn't do all this damage, he's already lived on Earth and likes humans, and it wouldn't be much of a lesson. His problem was that he never took responsibility for anything, so Chuck asks (asks!) him to go back to Heaven and take care of things there; Gabriel laughs it off, fully expecting Chuck to force him to go, but free will, so no; he can do as he likes. I think he eventually does go, because he loves his angel little siblings, but feels confused by it all.

Then Chuck sends his three mortal sons off to different corners of the planet, and... it's over.

Again, I'm sorry if this doesn't feel like an ending that's really about the Winchesters. I didn't like that Team Free Will just ended up as bystanders watching the Heaven family sort their shit out. I had hoped that when I wrote this scene there would have been much more interaction, with the emotional journeys of every character, including ones like Pastor Jim, having a moment of relevance in the dialogue. Maybe a completely new and better idea would have come to me. Maybe this would have turned out awesome anyway – guess we'll never know.

Also, I considered having Chuck turn the archangels into babies so they'd have to live an entire lifetime from the beginning, mostly because it cracks me up to imagine baby!Luci and baby!Mike and baby!Raph, with enough angel awareness to be glaring hate out of those pudgy faces, trying stubbornly to crawl over and smack each other impotently with fat little baby hands. It would have meant Chuck would have to literally raise them, which was tempting, he deserves no sleep and soiled nappies, but they need the faculties of adults and to be treated as adults on Earth to truly get their egos crushed first. Maybe after the first time they die bitter old men (or young and violently, who knows), they get reborn as babies and Chuck lets them grow up without their angel memories for a few decades, like Anna did (and he has to change their nappies).

Thing is, the resolution of the Apocalypse was never the emotional resolution of this story. Everyone (mostly) is saved – that's probably what you expected when you clicked on a story called "Saving People". What this story has been about is future!Dean and Cas's journey into the past and all their messy, complicated interactions with the people in their past, and this is the part of the ending I am really happy with.

So in the deep breath following Chuck's third way out for handling his emotionally immature sons, Team Free Will blinks and goes, "Wait... we did it?"

There's numbness and relief and celebration, and a lot of anger at Chuck for taking this long to sort things out. Jo expected God to bring Ellen back, and he didn't. John is quietly thinking the same about Mary. If Chuck wanted to fix everything, why didn't he fix everything? Cas and future!Dean suspect it's probably the same reason why God brought Cas back in Swan Song, but didn't restore everyone else who died for Apocalypse-related reasons before that. Of course, Chuck's not around to ask.

The survivors head back to the bunker (Charlie, meanwhile, has mainlined all of LotR in her nervous sleepless wait), and over the next few days they disperse back to their old lives, which is what future!Dean wanted, but he also somehow vaguely imagined that they'd all be in the bunker together forever, and is sad.

Sam gets in touch with Jess and re-applies to Stanford; he may not be able to stay out of the hunting life, but he still has the opportunity for a normal one, and Jess is open to maybe getting back together. This is left ambiguous but hopeful.

For s1!Dean, he's always felt second-place – first to Sam, then his future self and Adam. There would have been a scene here with him and John talking that gets s1!Dean some closure/catharsis. John (having learned a lesson from Chuck, maybe?) forces himself to talk honestly long enough to be clear that he doesn't want Dean to turn out like him; future!Dean is way too much like him, too cold, too ruthless; he wants his Dean to have a life. So yeah, hunt if he wants, but he can settle too, and marry that girl Cassie if he wants. They're safer now – never safe (oh, John, you paranoid bastard), but safer.

(I never decided if things with Cassie and s1!Dean were going to fall apart somewhere along the way. Maybe they broke up back in Act 2, or maybe not. But I don't want this fic to end with Happily Ever After, Straight Couples! >.< That said, Charlie/Jo are totally endgame in this fic. Someone needs a completely Happily ever after.)

For future!Dean, he's suddenly purposeless. What's he going to do, hunt ghosts with his younger self forever? This Dean is tired, and worse, now he's the one who feels superfluous; it wasn't him that Sam and John hugged first when everything was over, and he'll never really stop being an outsider.

One night a little while later, as future!Dean and Cas have a beer under the stars in Bobby's junkyard, Chuck joins them. He's proud of them, and so sorry for putting them through this, and asks if they would still have come back, knowing how it would go. Of course they would, Cas says, and Dean says:

"Anything's better than where we came from."

Chuck winced. "Guys... I'm really sorry."

Cas narrowed his eyes. "Why?"

A soft crunch came from behind them and they turned to see Death, eating a bag of Cheetos. "Because you can't stay here."

Chuck and Death, it seems, have been debating this ever since Dean and Cas landed in the past, and to Chuck's regret, he tells them that they can't stay because they don't belong in this universe; it's like they're the two extra grains of sand that make this timeline too heavy, and the one they left behind too light, and eventually (in a few millennia) both will self-destruct. They have to go back.

Dean is devastated, reacting way way worse than we would have expected. Being Dean, it comes out as anger, and he rails about all the people they've saved having to die again– but they won't, they won't, Chuck promises. This timeline will continue, the two of them just can't be a part of it. None of the souls they saved here will be erased; souls are hardy like that. They'll all get in to Heaven and remember both timelines.

And Dean screams, "WHAT ABOUT SAM?"

And this is the kicker that I hoped would take you all by surprise: In the chapters that got written I'd started sprinkling hints that future!Sam had died trying to save Dean from the Mark, and that Dean had come back in time to, above and beyond all else, save his brother; hints in Acts 2 & 3 would hopefully have left you sure of that. The references to the high cost of removing the Mark were meant to suggest the cost was Sam's life (i.e. Dean scything him while Death watched in 10x23). Dean absolutely lied when he said Sam chose not to come back.

But future!Sam didn't die: When he and Dean and Death met in 10x23 (the last episode that aired before I started writing this), Sam took the Mark from Dean and took up Death's offer to relocate him away from Earth, where he'd be alive but unable to hurt anyone. Dean was the one who would never rest until Sam could be free; one way or another he convinced Death he would be fine, probably said something like "Long as Sammy's alive, that's all I care about". To Dean, going back to a time when Cain was stuck with (but able to deal with) the Mark and Sam was alive was a loophole he could exploit.

And Death grants that it was clever, but entirely against the The Rules of the universe. "Did you really think, Dean, that a little thing like time could fix everything?"

But Dean can't bear to go back to a world without Sam, and Chuck and Death know it. Chuck says he'll send them back to shortly before Sam took the Mark, and things can go differently. Exactly how is up to them, free will is a thing after all... though their memories will be wiped as soon as they travel back (for Reasons; bear with me).

After a little while of them throwing ideas around, they conclude that either Dean or Sam would always take the outer space exile if it were an option, so it has to not be an option. Death can either refuse to say anything after he's summoned, or, Chuck suggests, he can let Dean and Sam think he's out of the picture.

Death comes as close as he ever has to looking incredulous and says, "You're suggesting that I give this mortal my scythe and let him think he killed me?"

(I always thought it was beyond stupid that Death could be killed by his own scythe, and stupider still to think that, if it could kill him, he'd ever put it in arm's reach of the Winchesters.)

But it would work long enough for the Mark to be removed without either brother dying. Depending on how the scene wrote itself, either Chuck and Death would refuse to say anything about what would happen after that, or there'd be a fade-out implying that Dean and Cas did get to know some of it, but because their memories would be erased, it would never be 'shown' on 'screen'.

So Dean and Cas agree to go back to their reality and save their Sam, knowing that no matter what goes down there, no matter what gets fucked up, this timeline where everyone's okay and everything's all right will still be there – they won't remember, but it is.

And that means that the unknown future Dean and Cas go back to becomes the canon timeline this fic initially broke away from, and which we've been watching ever since. That makes this fic, in a way, canon compliant, which tickles me so much. Between you and me, for the last two seasons every time something horrible has happened I've yelled at the screen that there's a timeline where none of that happened, and you can't hurt them anymore, bitch! It's my coping mechanism. Feel free to use it yourself ;)

There's one last emotional scene where Dean and Cas go back inside before they leave; Bobby's there, and John, having the same grumpy old men bickering Bobby and Rufus used to. S1!Dean is talking to Sam on the phone; Dean's own phone beeps with a text and photo from Charlie. Dean can't bring himself to actually say goodbye; he chokes on it. Instead he shrugs and says they're going back to their own time, acting like it was the plan all along.

The others are surprised; s1!Dean says they're gonna miss them, John demands to know why they can't stay, and Bobby, after a minute, hugs them both. S1!Dean offers to call Sam back, but future!Dean can't take that. He looks around one more time, thinking about everyone they've saved, and knows that it was worth it.

Outside again, Death has left, and Chuck is waiting. He asks if they're ready. Dean and Cas look at each other, and what passes between them has no words. Shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, they follow Chuck into the night.

Death is the end of all things, so it seemed fitting to end the story on a conversation between Death and God, symbolic of the end of one story and the start of another.

As Dean and Cas are returned to the beginning of 10x23, memories gone but a subconscious hint remaining, Death and Chuck watch quietly together.

Death sighed. "You know what will happen once they think I'm dead."

Chuck nodded. The Darkness. Amara. Maybe even his own death. "Yeah. But I owe her better than eternity in prison. I need to fix things with her."

"That isn't always possible, old friend," said Death. "You could make things much worse."

Chuck shrugged. "I know. But I have to try."