Lexington sun was nothing to sniff at, even in mid-March, when the clouds banked in and settled like they weren't going to move 'til tornadoes came and stirred them up.

Heaven's Army (2394905905th Battallion, Reserves, not that anyone was counting) was eight steps out the front door (and three steps out the back, on Metatron's part. He wasn't going to sully his morning with Lucifer's ilk unless it was absolutely, absolutely required) when it hit them.

The eight words out of Lucifer's mouth were clearly quicker on the draw, because behind him the horizon flatlined and the world went white.

I AM LUCIFER, AND I AM THE MORNINGSTAR

etched itself into what felt like everything, laser-precise.



Crowley, for one, was glad he had shades.

There was a debate going on, and a difficult one--mostly because in order to debate, one must first pick a side, and said picking appeared to be a primarily arbitrary conceit. Demons tended to side with one another, and humans on the other. The angels, lacking a leader and a definite Statement of Purpose (not that there hadn't been attempts. But the angels hadn't written anything since Moses, had quite forgotten who had done the writing, and were unsure of how best to go about crafting the sequel. One can only imagine what sorts of Important, High Priority debates were being conducted, as regards copyright, public domain, ghostwriting, and punctuation rules), were somewhere in between.

In any case, the debate far outranked any Apocalypse. They'd overseen a variety of those, but really. There were only then Ten Commandments. If someone was going to write Ten Commandments: Part Two (or Ten Commandments: The Movie, as one particularly forward-thinking angel suggested), it would be a truly monumental occasion.

The humans (and other vaguely humanoid inhabitants) of this year's Potentially Apocalyptic Splash Zone had, in the eyes of the angels, priorities that were slightly eschewed. They seemed to be under the impression--the ones in the Know, of course--that mass death and the entire obliteration of a civilization, planet, and history would be a bad thing.

You know God, truly, has left the building when people start talking as though the Apocalypse were more important than the possibility of a Twelfth Commandment: Thou shalt drink tea*.

*And this Aziraphale felt was particularly detrimental to his picking a side, because as much as he loved Earth, at his core-est of cores, he knew that any tea legislation was in desperate need of his wordsmithing expertise.

What this all boiled down to--in the sense that soon, Earth will be boiled down to a particularly stringy, wet, and acidic puddle of nothing--was a small diner in Lexington, Kentucky. It did indeed have greasy spoons.

On account of its menu choices, it also boasted a good deal of salt and a temperature-moderated storeroom for oil (guess what kind). The diner was called Heaven's Kitchen, and the Winchesters had never seen Castiel so insistent on stopping to eat.


And, well. They did have pie.