Anna likes going to confession.

Well, no, that's not quite accurate. What Anna likes, really, is having been to confession. It's sort of like going to the dentist; not all that pleasant during, but afterward everything is clean feeling.

And she knows it shouldn't matter, but she's hoping that this is Father Sullivan's Saturday. (Father Sullivan has only been at St. Michael's for a few months, and Anna's favorite babysitter calls him Father What-A-Waste, which Anna thinks is very strange, because he's not wasted at all, he's a very good priest.) And it's not that Father Sullivan nicer, Father Barton is very nice, too . . . but Father Sullivan is better at explaining things. And Anna, today, it bothered by something.

Anna lets herself into her side of the confessional and slides open the screen. She sees Father Sullivan's dark hair instead of Father Barton's bald head, and so it's with some degree of relief that she says, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been three weeks since my last confession."

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.

Anna Milton is supposed to be napping.

But her parents have discovered, in the two and half years of her life, that Anna is not much of a sleeper. There's always something more interesting to be doing.

And it's not like people can be made to sleep.

But they can be made to stay in their beds, and stay quiet, for an hour.

Anna is sitting up in her bed, whispering a story to her teddy bear, and waiting until she can get up.

It’s been almost a century (35,482 days) since Anna watched a blizzard blow across the Plains on a January day. There’ve been other tragedies and horrors and “acts of God” since then, conflict and atrocities, sweeping epidemics and war on a grander and farther-reaching scale than some had thought humanity capable of.

And there have been, as well, countless acts of compassion, of bravery, of love. Expressions of joy and gladness and wonder. Small kindnesses and great charities.

And through all of them, those things done carefully or capriciously, willfully or inadvertently, or left undone for all the same reasons, Anna has watched.

And every day, Anna has thought about the decision she almost made while the snow fell on the schoolhouses. But it’s remained an almost, the tether Castiel put around her has held.

For thirty-five thousand four hundred and eighty-two days.

But not, she knows now, for thirty-five thousand four hundred and eighty-three.

Just as she knows she will find him here.

Anna is watching the snow fall.

Humans talk about storms blowing up out of no where, arriving suddenly on previously fair days, but Anna has watched this one come together -- cold air moving south to meet warmer, wetter air coming north. The seemingly fair day gave way quickly and savagely to a blizzard, catching people unawares and unprepared.

Not all the schoolhouses have enough fuel to outlast it.

Disasters bring out the best and the worst in humans -- courage and cowardice, greed and sacrifice, pettiness and selflessness, prayer and despair.

And through it all, the snow keeps falling, to drift and blow across the plains.

There's something remarkable about humanity's inability to be content with staying put, to go on finding ways to traverse the Earth.

Even more remarkable, they keep insisting on traversing the seas, entrusting body and soul to a small wooden structure, dwarfed by the expanses around it, with very little chance of finding help should it be needed.

It takes, Anna thinks, a certain degree of something to decide to do such a thing -- faith, curiosity, hope, desperation, a longing for something better at the end of the journey. Some combination of all those things.

The ship below her has made it almost halfway across the ocean without major incident.

Thus far.

Anna is watching the activity below her on Earth.

It's what she does, these days. Watches.

All she has done for more than a thousand years. Watch. Unable to interact, or to go home.

At present, her attention is mostly (though not entirely, never entirely) focused on the watching the construction of yet another soaring church built to celebrate the fact that the world had not ended when the first millenium did. She finds this outburst of church-building fascinating; by now there are none alive who could have worried that the world would end in Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi 1000, and yet the building continues.

The sunlight comes through the window and falls across the parchment on the man's table, illuminating his calligraphy.

The Qu'ran is the Word of God, to be copied with devotion and great care, the words made beautiful as an act of worship and praise and thanksgiving.

The man, bent over his work, is entertaining an angel unawares, as Anna, unseen and unknown, watches each word appear on the page.

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful . . .

There's nothing much to mark out this spot in the landscape, too close to the city to be called desolate, far enough away to be deserted.

Except that then, suddenly, it's not deserted. There's a woman there, who neither walked nor rode to this destination, she simply arrived.

The wind is hot and dry, and she faces into it, eyes closed, pulls her hair free of the cloth that holds it back. She stands like that for a long moment, wind whipping through her hair -- or, more accurately, through her vessel's hair.

And then she reaches out, thought traveling farther and faster than anything the wind could carry, soft as rainfall and loud as thunder.

Castiel.