The shadows lengthened, deepened: matched the silence in its completeness. Each movement the patients made magnified in the thick air, the rustle of Lust's recoil and the matching fabric-swish of Castiel's urgency. In the cocoon of quiet around them there was nothing but the boy -- and then in the blink of an eye, not the boy, either. Nothing more than their own footfall and the faintest smell of what might have been autumn around them, hot long afternoons warming through rotting fallen leaves.

And then in another blink the boy was in front of them, standing as if he had always been there. The cat purred in his arms, gaze locked upon them.

He opened his mouth, and the sound was almost as if his voice and the cat's had melded, a solemn brash yowl of a word: "Toshio."