Not Like He Imagined

This contains SPOILERS for the season four finale!

(Semi-inspired by a comment by nev_longbottom)

Zachariah was sure that somewhere out there, wherever it was that angels go when they die, Uriel was laughing at him.

He'd been under the impression that the Apocalypse would be a bit more, well, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am-ish. Lucifer would rise, humanity would be destroyed (or enslaved, or turned into Shetland ponies, or whatever it was exactly that Lucifer wanted to do to the mudmonkeys), and then when all the demons were distracted by their blood orgies and evil quilting clubs, the angels would step in and smite them. Then everything would be good. Literally. Everything.

But Zachariah (and his stupid, stupid superiors) had been so busy looking forward, they'd forgotten to consider the past. And by past he meant episodes like that time Lucifer had wiped out the dinosaurs because one of them sneezed on Castiel. Or that time he threw an un-birthday party for Castiel and somehow managed to get all of the demons to make a giant, heart shaped cake (devil's food, of course). Or the time he'd tried to get a be-vesseled Castiel drunk so that he would agree to elope.

Mainly, they'd forgotten that Lucifer was kinda an idiot. A love-sick fool that couldn't get over the fact that, no, Castiel didn't fall because he'd been distracted by a new breed of flower and totally missed the whole battle, he didn't fall because he didn't want to spend the rest of eternity as Lucifer's Dark Consort. Or Beloved. Or whatever asinine title Lucifer was plying him with that week.

So the fact that every single Apocalypse-y thing that started came to an absolute stand still when Castiel and the prophet, Chuck, stumbled into the room, looking a little worse for wear, was frustrating in its predictability. They really should have known.

Uriel, if Uriel wasn't dead (that lucky bastard), would be cracking more than a few jokes at how Lucifer was trying to comfort Castiel. He offered to heal him, offered to bathe him, offered to take him away to some private island where no bad archangel could ever find him. More than that, he'd probably be joking about how Castiel's favorite mudmonkey, Dean Winchester, looked like he was about to bite out Lucifer's not-actually-real jugular.

Maybe they could convince Dean to do their bidding out of jealousy.

And wherein the past Castiel would have been rude, would have dismissed Lucifer's attention or told him where to shove it, today he was being...almost nice. He politely asked how Lucifer was doing, if he felt well rested after such a long nap, how the kids were. It took Zachariah and the other angels entire minutes to figure out why this was a ivery bad thing/i.

"It's just like when he tricked the archangel into scaring off that Lilith bitch," Gabriel murmured while the others around him nodded.

Zachariah glared. It totally was. Castiel was a devious bitch.

Castiel was also telling Lucifer about how much he liked humans...and possibly just referred to Dean as his pet (to excuse the possessiveness). Zachariah groaned.

This Apocalypse thing was inot/i working out the way he imagined.