Work Text:
Dean was having a very weird day. “Okay. I’m gonna need you to run this by me one more time. Why does Heaven need an interior designer?”
Naomi’s smile became just a touch faker as she held back the sigh. “We’re creating homes for the angels similar to how human souls work. Since we don’t have souls to generate them, we need help figuring out what they’re supposed to look like. You have… ties… to Heaven that make you the best designer for the job.”
“Just how many homes are we talking, here?” There was no way Dean could handle designing a space for every angel in Heaven. He wasn’t sure how many there were, but it was probably more than he could handle.
“Three or four, probably. After that, we can probably handle it ourselves, using your work as examples.” Naomi rose from her desk and walked around to where Dean was sitting. “Do we have a deal?”
“Yeah, sure.” Wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for what they were offering. Sam would be looked after, kept safe, the angels would use their contacts among pious individuals to smooth his path after he finished law school – and they had a contact who would make sure Sam could afford law school. Figuring out what an angel’s home should look like? Not that hard, really.
They wanted it to feel human. The reason they’d brought Dean up was the thought that if angels had their own spaces to rest, they wouldn’t go into the humans’ heavens as often. It was kind of nice, too – he could work without a budget, he could experiment, the space would respond to his imagination until he was satisfied with it. He shook the hand Naomi held out. “Who’s first?”
“Mine. Michael would only agree to this if I volunteered to go first.” Naomi gave him a somewhat lopsided smile. “Naturally, mine is a bad choice.”
“Why’s that?” Dean already had ideas based on the impression he’d gotten of Naomi. If she was going to be a micromanager, he’d forget those ideas.
“It’s not just my space. Most angels have a mate they’ll want to share space with.”
Dean blinked a couple times. The idea of angels having mates had never occurred to him. He didn’t want to think too hard about it, either, given some of the things he’d always been told about angels. What exactly was the point of having a mate if you weren’t gonna be… and he shut that thought down to focus. “Okay, so if that’s typical, why’s yours a bad choice? Is your mate a pain in the ass or something?” It couldn’t be that she was the rare one without a mate, not if she was planning on sharing her space, so he couldn’t think what else the problem could be.
“Most of us have a mate. Singular. I have two, and they don’t get along very well.”
Deaan snorted. There was a nice obvious solution to that. If the angels couldn't figure that one out, no wonder they had no idea how to design a room. “So split ‘em up. You said space is pretty much unlimited here, so they each claim their space and you divide your time between the two.”
“That’s what I thought we should do, but neither Zachariah nor Virgil like the idea. They insist that we all share. After all, they’re supposed to be mates, too, and one of these days they might even start acting like it again. Their problems with each other have nothing to do with me… Virgil refused a request from Zachariah for help in arming the garrisons under his command for an assault on Hell to rescue a righteous man who had been taken there, and Zachariah hasn’t forgiven him in two thousand years. They don't want me to have to suffer because of their stubbornness.”
“Splitting up is the best way to not make you suffer. It's gonna be annoying if you can’t separate them,” Dean said. Thankfully, it was an easy enough problem to solve. “Don’t worry. I got this.” Room dividers and privacy screens were a thing.
While he was working, though, his head started feeling a little fuzzy. As he hung wallpaper – so much easier than in the real world when you could just imagine it and put it in place – he thought he could hear voices. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they sounded very concerned about something.
From Naomi’s description, Zachariah and Virgil sounded like little kids, so Dean made sure that their time-out spaces were identical in every possible way. Naomi didn’t need to deal with fights over whose space was better. While he was measuring to be sure, a voice broke through. “Dean. Dean, wake up.”
The voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He shook it off and went back to work. He was just putting the finishing touches on the room, hanging some artwork, when he heard another voice. “Dean. This isn’t funny, you need to wake up so we can get you the fuck out of here.”
Sammy. That was his Sammy. He closed his eyes, focusing on his brother. When he opened his eyes again, the room he’d just designed was gone. He was in a dark room, in… “Is this Hell? Why am I in Hell again?”
“Abbadon brought you here. She’s not worried about her chances against Crowley, but she’s figured out that her chances go way up with the two of us out of commission,” Sam explained as he hauled Dean to his feet. “She brought you here so she wouldn’t have to worry about keeping you fed or anything, gave you drugs that would put you in a dream, and Cas and I are here to rescue you.”
“Huh. Thanks.” Dean got to his feet. That had been the other voice he’d heard, Castiel. Reality was starting to slip back in, and Dean swore to himself that he was figuring out how to block HGTV. That had been the weirdest fucking dream of his life.