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Singer's Salvage Yard

August

Bobby cruised into his yard, pulling his battered and leprous 1977 Chevelle SS behind his ramshackle home. He was shaking his head as the sounds of the high-pitched shrieking, a woman's shrill scream, from a few moments ago still echoed in his mind.

Things were loud down the road that hot, humid morning. A cranky neighbor, and yeah that fit Bobby's description on a lot of ways, might have minded having a few rambunctious kids wreaking havoc and raising hell next door. He might have dreaded the occasions when he had to drop by to talk to the adjacent property owners, but these were the Winchesters and those kind of rules and expectations didn't fit.

The screams had greeted him as he pulled into their driveway and spied a thin and pale woman with close cropped blond hair running for all she was worth away from a stream of water being wielded a 12-year-old with a determine expression only to find herself ensnared the firm yet gentle hold of a 16-year-old laughing manically while ignoring her commands to release her.

Mary Winchester really should have known better, Bobby thought as he smiled recalling the sight to the woman, dripping and mildly furious, attempting to scold her children. School vacation was nearly over and the boys were getting their last licks of fun out. That a few of those included turning their chore of washing the car into soaking their mother and the laundry she was attempting to hang on the line was a fairly obvious oversight on her part, Bobby figured.

He sat in his car pondering the twists and turns of good fortune that had visited his extended family that summer. His boys were smiling again, being rotten little brats also, but being young boys just blowing off steam, aggravating their mother and behaving like kids whose only concern was the swiftly approaching first day of school.

And Mary, there was another sight that brought a smile to Bobby's scraggly face—the fact she was around at all was a reason to rejoice; that she was still getting better and looking healthier each week was cause for being ecstatic. Just two months prior, the woman was at death's door and about to breathe her last when she opened her eyes and awoke from her coma. It took another couple weeks of treatments and hospital care, but she was eventually released when tests revealed that the tumors that had riddled her body were shrinking and (in some instances) had disappeared altogether. Doctors were calling it a spontaneous remissions and declaring it was as scientifically explainable as it was surprising. Bobby had read up on this sort of thing and found there was enough scientifically documented cases of this happening to others to let him sleep at night.

But only just.

What bothered him was the timing of it. The very night he expected John to call with news that the woman was gone she had instead awakened and asked to see her children. John held off until the next morning, shuttling the boys to her room briefly to see her. Both seemed unsurprised in Bobby's estimation to see their mother awake and lucid. He attributed Dean's reaction to his stubborn refusal to accept that his mother was at her end. It was a raging case of denial, but so far it didn't need to be corrected.

It was Sam's reaction that struck Bobby most. The kid had smiled… knowingly. He had walked into that room with a wide grin and an air of such confidence that Bobby couldn't help but wonder if maybe the brat's whispered words to the Almighty had been heard.

And that's what was bothering the old hunter.

Science explanations aside, Mary's recovery still had a bit of a miraculous aura around it in his estimation. It had Bobby wondering, pondering and questioning. He knew there was only one place he might find some answers.

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The flare from the flashpot was blinding, but Bobby instantly felt the presence in the room. There was a tingling sensation (not all together unpleasant) in his spine and (disturbingly) in his nether regions. He subtly shook off the feeling as his eyes rapidly began to adjust to the light. A short figure appeared in his vision sporting a grin that was both arrogant and inviting.

"Hidey Ho, Neighboroo," said 'James Smith,' the human vessel for the Archangel Gabriel beamed at him. "What's with flashing the Bat Signal? I thought we talked about this being a 'don't call me, I'll call you' kind of relationship? You're not getting clingy on me, are you? I guess letting you down easy before didn't make my point. Now, I'll have to be blunt: I'm just not that into you."

Bobby scowled at the self-important winged conman. The hunter still didn't quite have a handle on his supernatural adjacent property owner. On one hand, he stole the Winchester boys from their beds and essentially hid them from their family for a decade. On the other, he had dropped the occasional bread crumb of a detail that had kept them safe since their return (and Bobby suspected his invisible hand in that little caper as well).

"Mary Winchester," Bobby said without preamble.

"Uh, no," the angel grinned as he tapped his temple. "I see that senility and cirrhosis setting in early into your old casaba, eh Bob? I'm not Mary anyone. I'm Jimbo, your old pal, Mr. Smith Goes to South Dakota, one of the original G-men."

Bobby scoffed at the blather but kept his tempter in check as he reminded himself that, despite his diminutive size, this guy could smite with a sneeze.

"I mean do I need to thank you for them, the Winchesters," Bobby replied. "I'm talking about Mary's cancer. It's took an about face and marched its malignant ass out the door. Did you do that?"

Gabriel eyed the hunter carefully and tried not to let his lack of information (and how much that worried him) show. Bobby was a smart man despite his outward appearance. Hunters were not known for being Rhodes Scholars by nature—or so Gabriel learned when he rubbed elbows with the snotty Men of Letters crowd half a century earlier. Bobby Singer was different; he was scholarly in a back-woodsy kind of way. Despite looking like an extra in Deliverance, Bobby certainly was quicker on the uptake than any other hunter the angel ever encountered. For example, he was the first human ever to figure out what the angel was. After a couple millennia in virtually impenetrable celestial witness protection, that was pretty substantial streak to break, and it made the angel respect the man… a bit.

"No," Gabriel admitted. "Wasn't me."

"One of your frat brothers?" Bobby wondered, not sure if a positive answer was a good thing in this context or not.

"Not as far as I know," the angel shook his head. "Mr. Personality himself, John Winchester, mentioned it when he let me know my rent check was going to be late… again. He told me all about the astounding recovery underway. Since then, I've been tuned into angel radio a bit. Haven't heard a word about any sanctioned miracles."

Bobby nodded and huffed loudly as the next option came to mind.

"What about the unsanctioned kind?" he wondered.

"We don't do those," Gabriel shook his head. "That's the opposition's gig."

"The opposition?" Bobby repeated as he narrowed his eyes. "Demons? They ain't known for helping people and saving lives generally. I'm more apt to believe they gave her the disease than I am that they took it away."

"Yeah, not really a good deed crowd," Gabriel agreed. "Of course, there's a couple reasons they might step in. Maybe keeping her around helps them out somehow or maybe it screws someone else over—which is kind of the same thing with my brother Lucifer's ill-trained pets. Then again, maybe we're overthinking this. Maybe her cure wasn't supernatural at all—just a fluke, a real science thing. You humans, you're a mess inside: a lot of cells and coding, bugs in all the mechanics; you never know when something's going to turn on or off. I swear sometimes it seems like dear old Dad made you all the original version of Windows."

Bobby's face scrunched tightly. It was a constipated expression that said one of the conversationalists was full of shit only he wasn't sure which. The angel smiled superiorly as he diagnosed the problem and the source of the confusion.

"I'm saying you're like that new computer operating system that's eventually going to pretty much own your asses," the angel explained. "Sometimes, you have to suddenly turn it off then back on again for no apparent reason in order for it to work. Seriously, any of this ringing what's left for bells in that crusty head of yours? Bill Gates exists in this reality, right? You've at least heard of Windows 95, haven't you?"

Bobby's expression grew flat and unyielding again. It was his impatient look, one that would make most grown adult men seek cover or simple walk away quickly. However, it wasn't going to get a rise out of an archangel. In fact, he grinned at it. Yet again he had dropped a little nugget of future information on the guy (something that could be used and exploited for personal gain if he was that kind of creature) but Bobby refused the bait. It was a little childish, Gabriel knew, but one of his alter egos was that of the Trickster. If he didn't give folks enough rope to hang themselves, he might get a reputation as a softee. Bobby Singer was just good at not falling for those traps making the angel suspect that had the hunter lived five hundred years earlier, he'd have been a grizzly bearded saint (likely burned at the stake of his successful alchemy).

Rather than drop that compliment on him, Gabriel scoffed and looked around the humble and dilapidated abode as he turned up his nose.

"Right, Win 95, who am I kidding?" Gabriel remarked. "You've never even heard of window cleaner by the looks of this place. Cleanliness, godliness, ring any bells? My brothers and I have done miracles in a stable, but this place might make us change our minds."

Bobby ignored the first part of the jab and went straight at the bit of imparted information that meant something to him.

"Hold on," he objected. "You told me once that angels are the ushers of destiny, that there is no random in this world. If that's true, why can't you explain this?"

The angel sighed, seeing the little flaw in his plan of dropping in (on command), saying little to nothing and flitting out before he ended up on heaven's radar for surely someone upstairs had taken notice that Mary Winchester wasn't knocking on heaven's door.

However, the answer to Bobby's question was elusive, event to the archangel. He had theories—none of which were good, but that didn't make them facts. Frankly, he wasn't even sure he should be tuning into this little North American soap opera anymore. It was supposed to be total Snoozeville now that the big prize fight was off and there wasn't going to be a Seraph casting call for Look Whose Coming to the Apocalypse.

But there was just something about the Winchester family that Gabriel couldn't leave alone.

Alone.

That, he knew, was the real key. He was alone, cut off from his own family, faking it with the many difference guises and false identities he took on to stay hidden. Then he met those two boys, brothers, with a bond as strong (hell, probably stronger from what he had seen thus far) than that which he himself had with his own brothers. And, despite their in-fighting, power struggles, unfortunate incarcerations and bitching, Gabriel still missed Michael and Lucifer greatly. Each time the archangel took a peek at the Winchesters, he felt a little closer to home, to his own family. These boys were supposed to be his brothers' vessels, the ones who were going to end the family feud once and for all.

That is until Gabriel stepped in. It was selfish to do so really. Being cut off from his brothers and lonely was one thing. Letting Michael and Lucifer fight each other to the death was not something Gabriel (essentially the middle child and peacemaker) could do. So he did the next best thing. He removed their ability to face each other by not letting the prophesy come to fruition. No demon blood to taint the vessel for Lucifer; without that, there was no need for the Righteous Man.

"Well, that whole fate and destine gig seems to be on the cutting room floor," he shrugged as he looked at Bobby with an earnest expression. "Things have changed a bit since I left. You know how wars can shake up things. Dad's been vacationing and getting in a little Me time for bit so who knows what's going on at home."

"So this remission is a coincidence?" Bobby demanded as he gestured to the instruments on the table beside him. "Keep in mind that I don't believe in 'em as a rule. Oh, and I've got a squirt gun of holy oil and a blowtorch aimed at your dangling bits."

"Flirt," Gabriel grinned then winked his lack of fear. "Okay, remember last year when I told you I'd done a little Where's Waldodeal by putting the Winchester brats on an extended vacation from their family all those years ago? Well, that destiny thing I was detouring was kind of a big deal—like the main feature in our big script. So, if you knock over one domino out of order thus changing the way the whole thing operates, sometimes a few other dominos topple in a direction you weren't expecting."

Bobby considered the information as he began to nod slowly and reluctantly.

"So you're saying that this could actually be a good thing—just like it appears?" he asked. "It's possible this is an unintentional outcome that for once doesn't screw good people?"

Gabriel shrugged as his expression let it be known his guess was as good as anyone's.

"It's possible," he replied. "It's not usually likely, but unlikely and impossible ain't the same thing, Roberto. From my read of the landscape, the Winchester family is so irrelevant to the big picture now that it's probably not worth killing any of them right now. It could be that heaven canceled their early check-in reservations and figured they would be less trouble just leaving them down here. I mean, have you seen the way those two kids behave? Heaven's a nice place, generally. Boys like Frick and Frack are why we have to hide our nice things. I'm probably not the only one who was worried they'd turn our lovely knoll in The Garden into a Slip-N-Slide."

Bobby snorted, not so much at the sentiment as at the visual the statement gave him. He wouldn't put it past the Winchester boys to do something like that. It would start innocently enough, as most of their antics did, usually when Sam wanting to do something. That would lead to Dean coming up with some outlandish way to get Sam want he wanted. Turning some tranquil heavenly garden into a first warm day of spring free-for-all was not outside the boys' repertoire.

Still, that didn't seem quite like enough reason to keep Mary around when she was literally hours away from her plot in the ground.

"You believe that's the reason for all this?" he asked sternly but with a heartfelt expression.

Gabriel shrugged as he sighed.

"I'm an angel," he replied. "Faith is my kind of my gig. Dad sort of required it when he built us—part of the original operating system, if you catch my drift."

"That's not an answer," Bobby persisted.

"I'm telling you I don't know and if I don't know it, then we are off script and anything can happen," Gabriel said.

He suspected that the anything possibility was not a good one. There was something about Mary's recovery that bothered him—like the fact it happened at all. That was why he was keeping an ear out for any chatter on what the God Squad was going to do. If they felt taking Mary Winchester was a moral imperative, they would do it. If they did that, then they would find the boys—Enochian invisibility cloaks etched into the ribs or not. Then again, if they were expecting her to die in 1983, they had done nothing to see that to fruition in the 12 years since. In truth, none of it made sense to him, which could only mean one thing: chaos.

Angels and heaven liked order. It was the downstairs neighbors who liked the opposite. And that, he realized, was the answer he didn't want to contemplate. There was a chance that someone had saved Mary and used the powers of Hell to do it. Maybe. Ignorance, Gabriel felt in this instance, was bliss. So who might have done something naughty was remained a mystery to him and he wasn't willing to find out.

If pushed, he would have said he suspected John. The guy had the knowledge from his forays into hunting and was just gruff enough to think he could fight his way out of deal. For the family's sake, he hoped that was the case because, despite all of John's virtue, he wasn't The Righteous Man. No, that title would always be his son's and his son's only. So, as long as Dean remained ignorance of the evil and creepy crowd, his very valuable and much coveted soul would be kept save from taking up residence Hell, and everything would be fine.

"I know you want a better answer than 'I don't know,' but that's all I've got for you," Gabriel continued. "When anything can happen, well, anything can happen. When this whole blue ball started rolling around the universe and getting populated by all that begetting you all do so well, there was a plan. I sort of stole the sides rewrote Act Three—for the good of everyone. What does that mean for all of you now? I don't know. Maybe it leads us back to Act One so we can start over without any of the crap that was coming down the pike. Maybe this is a sign. Check your notes, Bob. When's the only time the Bible states that things here were good?"

The hunter/junkman paused as he stared flatly at the nodding angel in front of him. When Bobby answered, his tone was firm yet skeptical. He quoted the first line of that holy book with a hint of dread and bucket full of uncertainty: "In the beginning."

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A/N: The sequel ("IN THE DARK") is now available.