Ohio, 15 December 1990 C.E.

[hear_the_voices]

The mall is crowded, on a Saturday with only a week and a half until Christmas. Anna has been given very specific instructions from her parents: Stay with us.

And she means to. It's just one of those things that happens, in the crowds and the chaos. Anna gets distracted by a display of nutcrackers when her parents decide split up for five minutes, and when she looks up again, she is alone.

(Her mother and father -- not that Anna knows this -- are meeting each other at the other end of the department store, with horrified statements of I thought she was with you.)

Anna looks around, puzzled and a bit worried.

And then decides that if her parents are lost, well, she's just going to have to go find them.

Comments

[hear_the_voices]

Oh, she has an idea. She just doesn't have a terribly good grasp on it. And she certainly couldn't articulate it.

Coming?

Anna opens her eyes, spots the train and goes left.

[thursdays_angel]

After that is a trio of chickadees in red and white striped stocking caps. And then an elf. And then a sugarplum fairy.

...Gloria, in excelsis Deo...

A rope of music that leads the way through the displays and shelves and busy shoppers.

[hear_the_voices]

Anna has just reached the sugarplum fairy, and the chorus again, when --

"Anna!"

There they are.

"I found you!" Anna says happily, as she's swept up into her father's arms and her mother is saying something about being scared half to death and how Anna was not supposed to wander off.

Which Anna didn't. At least, not until after her parents got lost. Which is where they would still be if she hadn't found them.

Still, being lost is scary, so she maybe that is why her mother is upset.

"But I found you," she says, to her mother. "There was music."

[thursdays_angel]

Castiel half wonders if she remembers being responsible for others, or if it is just the nature of this human incarnation of Anna.

Little that it matters.

Castiel, his self-imposed task completed, draws back from the family. But not far enough that he can't still watch.

Just for a little while longer. And then not again.

The last time, he warns.

It bears greater conviction when put into words.