Standing Outside the Fire

62

[Devil May Care]

Dean was lying on a picnic table. Sam sat next to him.

"So, what, Cas is human?" Sam asked.

Dean sat up. "Ish. I mean, he's got no grace, no wings, no... harp, whatever the hell else he had."

"Okay. Where'd he crash-land?""

"Called me from a payphone from Longmont, Colorado. I told him just to make for the bunker."

"Well, you think he can handle a road trip like that?"

"Cas is a big boy. Things go Breaking Bad, he knows our number. Right now, we got bigger issues."

"The fallen angels?"

Dean nodded. "Yeah. I mean, thanks to Metatron, we now have a couple of thousand confused loose nukes walking around down here."

"What do you think they're gonna do?"

Dean shook his head. "I got no damn clue."

"What about Crowley? You, uh..." Sam mimed slicing his throat.

"I would've loved nothing better than to ice that limey bitch. But then I thought to myself, what would Sam Winchester do?"

"I'd have stabbed him in the brain."

"Oh. Well, I figured the King of Hell might know a few things, so why not Zero Dark Thirty his ass?"

They got off the table and went to the car.

Sam frowned. "Wait, so Crowley is... alive?"

Dean opened the trunk to reveal Crowley as he said, "Oh yeah. He's the junk in my trunk."

A Devil's Trap had been painted to keep Crowley there.

"Huh," Sam noted.

Dean entered the bunker. An arrow came flying towards him, and got stuck in the handrail a few feet in front.

"The hell?" Dean said.

Kevin stood from behind his barricade of books and a flipped-over table, holding a crossbow. "Dean? You're alive!"

"Yeah, 'cause you're a crappy shot, Katniss."

"Sorry. It's been a bad couple of days. I-I haven't slept, or eaten, I'm pretty backed up. Frankie's worried, the twins are scared."

"Okay, overshare."

"After we talked, this place went nuts, all right? Th-there was some alarm, and all the machines were freaking out, and the bunker just locked down. I couldn't open the door, my cell phone stopped working, I thought the world was ending."

"Close. The angels fell."

"The... what does that mean?"

"Nothing good." He took the crossbow from Kevin. "Listen. Next time the world's ending, grab a gun. Works a hell of a lot better."

He put the crossbow on the table and started walking away. He pulled out his phone. "I got service."

Kevin flipped a switch on the bunker's control panel. Lights turned on and there was the sound of mechanics whirring into action. "It's back online. Maybe when you guys opened the door from the outside door, it reset the system."

"Yeah, okay, let's go with that," Dean said, grabbing Francesca's wrist just as she ran up to him. "Hey, honey."

"Dean? You're alive! Last I heard..." she trailed.