Archive of Our Own

He’s sprawled all along the seat, lightly, as if he’d fly away at any moment. His laughter—almost hysterical in its relief, its enthusiasm—has faded as his tears dry invisible on his sharp, hungry cheeks; now he’s quiet, barely breathing loud enough to hear.

Sam can see the bones standing out in his hands, thin and fragile like Sam’s vague memories of the large-eyed lorises sold as exotic pets (vague memories of Jess, waving pictures in front of him—join Students for Animal Rights!). His arms, encircled at the wrist by cold, narrow metal, disappear into the red patterned shirt that drapes (much too large) over him, a sloppy plaid toga, still open to the third button. They’d forgotten his jacket back in that…place, along with his shoes—though Sam hadn’t seen them when they’d stepped into that little slice of hell to find Gabriel, back to the wall, vulnerable, broken. Eyes bright and a little mad, tongue darting out to taste lips pink and cracked with dehydration, standing hopelessly against a circle of gleeful men.

Ever since they’d first met, Gabriel had been short. Sam’s never before seen him so small.

He had refused to let go of Sam, and so they're both sitting in the back. Gabriel's dozed off against Sam's chest, his dancing hands finally still— he'd been opening and closing them up and down Sam's clothing for a while. Sam has one arm slung around his back, and rubs little circles along it almost automatically as he stares out the window.

He’d kicked up a fuss when Dean indicated they'd take him to a hospital—probably the most life they'd seen out of him yet—and so they're heading up to the cabin in Whitefish. They've been driving straight through the night, stopping from time to time to acquire coffee and sugar. The sun is starting to rise behind them as the dull grey early morning landscape of Minnesota flashes by.

“Want me to drive?” Sam asks, and Dean blinks before adjusting his grip on the wheel.

“Nah. I'm good. Just call Bobby, would you?”

“Yeah.” Sam extracts his phone from his pocket carefully, trying not to jostle Gabriel, who wakes up anyway. He looks up at Sam, frowns a little, then seems to realize where he is and why and settles back down. Sam switches his phone to the other hand, resumes his petting.

“…Bobby? Yeah, it's Sam.”

“Sam? You boys alright?” The ‘and if so, why are you calling me at all hours of the morning?’ is implied rather heavily in his concerned-verging-on-irritated tone.

“Um, yeah, Bobby. We've, uh. It sounds kinda crazy.”

“Where've you been the past five years? Spit it out.”

“We ran into Meg,” Gabriel makes a little questioning noise at that, “and she, uh, told us that Gabriel was alive.”

Bobby huffs a long breath down the line. “The archangel. Didn't Kali say Lucifer’d killed him?”

“Yeah, we thought so. We tracked him down. Turns out he's been in Chicago the whole time.”

“So, what, he's just been—”

“It's, um,” Sam interrupts quickly. “Bobby, it's not like that. He's in really bad shape. There were some pretty awful things going down there. So—we're heading up to the cabin, be there by tonight if Dean doesn't collapse before then—”

“I've driven a lot longer than this before, Sammy, I'll be fine.”

“—and just have, I don't know, an extra place to sleep or something. He refuses to go to a hospital.”

“How bad is it?”

Sam hesitates. “He says he got healed every day. This guy hit him pretty hard with a crowbar, though, and I don't know how long it's been since he ate—”

“Ate yesterday,” Gabriel tells him, staring up at the roof, barely blinking, “I eat—ate every three days.”

“—Since yesterday, then, but he's really skinny and he says they only fed him twice a week.”

“They didn't feed me at all,” Gabriel mutters, “he did. There was food in the little room every three days. But I couldn't save it because it just disappeared. And last Thursday it was only oatmeal. Usually I'd get beans, too. And an apple.”

Sam looks disturbed. “That's, like, less than a thousand calories a—um. Sorry, Bobby. We're gonna get there as soon as possible, okay? And, I don't know, you know people who can at least tell us what to do, right?”

“Yeah, I'll look into it.”

“Um, Bobby? There's these cuffs on his wrists, we can't get them off, he says they're keeping his grace suppressed. Carved all over in Enochian and, I don’t know, other stuff. So if you could look that up, too, that would be great.”

“Yeah. Alright. Send me a picture and I'll see what I can do. Tell that idjit brother of yours to let you have the wheel before he crashes his precious car.”

“Okay.” Sam hangs up. “Gabriel, here, I’m gonna take a picture of the cuffs, okay?” He catches his wrist gently, and Gabriel doesn’t protest, doesn’t even move—lets Sam manhandle him around with neither hindrance nor help. Poor lighting, but the picture’s sent, and when Sam lets go Gabriel settles down into his lap, eyes still on the roof.

Dean frowns back at him. “Dude, how do you know that about the calories? Actually, never mind, I don’t want to know. Shouldn't he be—”

“Dead,” Gabriel says, “yes. Maybe. I've never tried starving myself before. But I couldn't die. I cut my throat once. It didn't work.” He taps his fingers absently along the edge of the seat. “Maybe I can die out here.”

Sam shakes his head. “…I don't know, but we're going to try to keep you alive, alright?”

“Why?” He quits tapping, and gives Sam an odd look.

“I—you don't—you didn't deserve this, Gabriel. And you don't deserve to die like this, either.” He says it with a quizzical look, as if it's self-explanatory.

Gabriel smiles, a weird little smile that twists his face into something old and alien. “Why? Because I helped you? You know, I raped a man seven or eight years ago. He was a girl at the time. Still is, probably. He screamed for twelve minutes before I even touched him, and begged me to stop the whole time even as I made his body like it. Who are you to say I didn't deserve it?”

There’s a sudden hum as Dean’s shoulders tense and the car speeds up. Sam's hand on Gabriel stills, and he looks back out the window. The head and shoulders resting on his legs suddenly seem much heavier than before.

“…I. I don't—I’m not. I guess.”

He can feel Gabriel’s eyes burning a hole up through his chin, but he doesn’t glance back down to meet them.

They stop at a fast-food place for breakfast. Gabriel refuses to go in, so they eat it a few miles out of town on a little turnout. Sam gets Gabriel chicken soup, because he figures it's got to be the best thing on the menu, and anyway it has electrolytes or something. He thinks, not for the first time, that it would be infinitely more helpful to have been pre-med.

Of course, he was trying to get as far away from his childhood as possible, and law had seemed like the one of the least useful things for a hunter to know.

It’s warm, for November, but Gabriel starts shivering just about as soon as he leaves the car. Sam drapes his own jacket around the angel's shoulders. Gabriel seems surprised, but clutches it tightly and huddles into himself as his sock-covered toes curl into the half-dead grass.

Sam and Dean finish their food quickly, and watch Gabriel eat. He scoops up tiny amounts of soup in each spoonful, sniffing it before he brings it to his mouth, and he stares off past the trees to someplace Sam can't see.

They sit there for at least an hour. More. Dean clears his throat, looks down. “Um. Gabriel.”

Gabriel looks at him, tilts his head. It reminds Sam of Cas, almost, and he can see Dean flinch and swallow. “Did he—the man. The guy you, uh. Did he deserve it?”

Gabriel shrugs. “Does it matter?”

“Yes! Yeah, just, I mean—if you don't wanna…”

Gabriel speaks slowly, almost hesitantly, eyes fixed on Dean's. “He would pick up hitchhikers, or other girls just down on their luck, take them back to his place, feed them and make them feel safe. Then he'd tie them to the bed, rape them, and murder them. The youngest one was thirteen.

“One of the people he killed ignored her little brother when she was supposed to take care of him, and he was mauled by the family dog. She claimed she hadn't heard the screams. Later, she'd have gotten mad at her own kid for interrupting her nap and shaken him into a coma. Another one helped her friends drug up a couple of guys once, just a prank, set them up together naked in the student center. One of them was deep in the closet—he killed himself a few days later.

“Most of them, of course, were perfectly normal, decent people. You tell me if he deserved it.” Gabriel scrapes the bottom of the cardboard container with his spoon, then tilts it back and licks it out.

Dean looks sick. “He, uh. Didn't know that, though. About those women.”

“Course not. He wasn't psychic. Just psycho.” He doesn't even bother to laugh at his own joke.

Sam can see Dean thinking, and deciding that whatever Gabriel had done to the guy was pretty much deserved. Sam doesn't know what to think, really, except that even if Gabriel's victim had renounced his ways and reformed Gabriel had probably paid for the act hundreds of times over.

“Do you regret it?” he blurts out.

Gabriel sets down his container—good, because Sam could swear that he'd been looking at it like it was edible—and twirls his spoon around. Or tries to, anyway—he drops it, hands still clumsy. Sam wonders if that's because he's stuck as a human, or whether it's because his body is breaking down more than he's letting on.

“No, Sammy,” Gabriel says, “I don't regret it.”

Sam considers telling Gabriel not to call him Sammy, but the moment has passed, and they're all getting back in the car. Gabriel doesn't lean against him this time—just hunches over on the far side of the car with his cheek pressed to the glass.

*

He’d almost made it.

Sixteen days, five meals, one hundred ninety-one discrete men (three hundred seventy-seven, if you count the total), sixteen mornings of his brother’s cold hands carefully scouring his skin, eighty-five lashes (because some of them like to make him count), thirty-six orgasms (nearly all of them on Thursdays), two silver bracelets (many more handcuffs), one perpetual headache that only fades in and out, never disappears, uncountable hours (probably three-hundred eighty four, maybe more, maybe less) of unyielding fluorescent light. A gradual weakening—strength, reflexes, thought; but he’d almost made it tonight. One hand on the door, already half-naked, already bleeding from his mouth. An arm around his waist.

His brother watches, as always, from one unadorned corner, ruined face expressionless except when it is pitying—when he lifts his head from the pristine grey floor and chokes on his own screams, when his fingers go limp and yielding, when he stops begging altogether.

*

Dean does eventually let Sam drive, and they make it to Whitefish by ten-thirty with Dean snoring in shotgun and Gabriel still silently staring at the edge of the window. Sam reaches over to shake Dean awake, then gets out and opens Gabriel's door. He holds out a hand in a silent offer to help.

Gabriel watches him, then quirks up one side of his mouth. “I think I can get out of a car, Sammy.” He grasps the door handle on one side and the driver's seat on the other, levering himself up and out. It's almost completely dark out, except for the lights coming from the cabin, and he doesn't take three steps before tripping and landing hard on his side. He hisses a breath in and doesn't move.

Sam's by his side in an instant. He kneels down next to him. “Gabriel? You okay? Can you get up?”

“Give me a minute.” He's breathing shallowly, and he grimaces at the ground. A minute passes, and then another. Dean's gone up to the front door and knocked, and the light gets brighter as the door opens and Bobby's silhouette appears.

Sam frowns. The fall hadn't been that bad. “Gabriel, give me your left arm, okay?” Gabriel obliges, and Sam lifts it up around his shoulders. He puts his own right hand on Gabriel's back between his wing bones, and starts pressing against his chest with the other hand. He gets about halfway down on the right side before Gabriel hisses and pulls back.

“Man, you've got a broken rib. Probably multiple. Why didn't you say something?”

Gabriel doesn't reply.

“Alright—look, how long have you had trouble breathing?” Silence. “Gabriel! Say something!”

“It's not trouble. Exactly. Just hurts a little.”

Sam sighs. “You stubborn little—Gabriel, I'm going to pick you up now.” He doesn't leave room for argument, just shifts his right arm to cup Gabriel's back a little more firmly and grasps his thighs with the other. He stands effortlessly, and Gabriel slumps forward against his chest.

Bobby's come down to meet them, and stares openly at Gabriel before turning his gaze up to meet Sam's. “Better bring him in.”

Sam lays him out on the couch while Bobby fetches pills. He brings them over with a quarter-full mug of water, and proffers them with one hand. Gabriel just stares.

“Painkillers. Take 'em.”

Gabriel holds out a hand, places them both on his tongue. He gulps down the water in one greedy swallow. “Thanks.” He forms the word as if it's foreign to him, mouth shaping around it slowly.

“Sure. Hear you don't want a hospital.”

Gabriel shakes his head.

Bobby stares at him for a while, clearly expecting more, then shrugs. “We've all got our hang ups. But you start getting worse and we're taking you in.” Bobby looks up at Sam. “You know where they're broken?”

“Right side,” Sam replies, “bottom three, I think.” Bobby nods.

“We'll keep an eye on those, then. Try not to bang them up. And I talked to a friend of mine, said we should start you on a low-calorie diet at first. Got a list of foods. You can get real sick if you start it up too fast, so if you feel too nauseous, have trouble breathing, anything, you let us know. Got it?”

He nods. The painkillers are starting to make him drowsy, and his head lolls to the side. “Thanks,” he says again, because he knows he should, and then he slips into a state of half-awareness, falling in and out of sleep.

He catches bits and pieces of their conversation as they crowd around the table “—no, we don't know exactly—” “—yeah, try to get them off, see if he knows anything about—” “—reports keep coming in, nothing good—” “—night.” “Night.”

Gabriel pretends to be asleep as Sam comes over and lifts him lightly up. He pads past the fireplace, through the door, and up the narrow staircase, ducking under the low ceiling, and settles Gabriel down on a bed. He just watches for a while, then reaches out a hand to cup Gabriel's face and tugs several warm blankets over him. He turns to leave, then stops suddenly.

“Go away,” he whispers. “Don't touch him.” He takes a hasty step back, arms out as if protecting Gabriel. “You're not real.”

Sam stands there breathing loudly for a few more minutes, then lowers his arms and leaves the room.

*

Just another day, or night, or something—it’s not as if the time matters down here. Just a constant bright light, artificial light, though the kind of light shouldn’t matter. He should just be glad he has any at all.

Except it is only in the small dark room he has any peace, and not even there; even there, there is nothing to sustain him.

Cold food is not enough, cold water is not enough, cold air is nonexistent—there’s only a lukewarm atmosphere, nothing too hot or too cold, something just perfect enough to keep him alive, alive, alive.

He wakes up in the middle of the day or night, he never knows when it is, because every minute is just the same as every other minute except when they’re here, and those minutes all blend together like the chalk on a blackboard, smudging white dust all over the meanings of things.

*

Gabriel wakes up in the middle of the night desperately thirsty. His ribs hurt again, and he blinks back sleep. The room's illuminated by moonlight. He stares up at the ceiling (four rafters, five slats of wood between each…), listening to his breath puff in and out through his open mouth. He feels antsy and grimy, cold even under the layers of blankets.

It feels strange to have clothes on. They hang loosely around him—they're exactly like the ones he'd had on in the motel, and are now several sizes too big. He shifts, trying to coax his jeans into reaching some level of comfort. The denim rubs roughly against his calves, the edge of the waistband digs into the side he'd been lying on, his shirt (still half unbuttoned) leaves his upper chest open to the air. He can't quite bring himself to button it.

On a whim, he eases the blankets off and slips off the bed. The floor is smooth and chilly under his bare feet, and he pulls one blanket off to wrap around himself before shuffling out the door and slowly downstairs. His ribs still hurt, worse and worse now that he's moving. But his head is clear, the perpetual headache fading, a little, and he's awake and alert. Good enough.

The TV's on. The sound's off, but he can hear its high whine even before he steps into the dull drift of light that crosses the doorway.

There's a silhouette hunched up on the couch, and at first Gabriel thinks whoever-it-is is asleep. It turns to face him, though, so that he can't see its face but only the shadows that it casts. “Hey.”

“…Hey,” Gabriel replies, and he's not particularly surprised that it comes out in a stutter and a croak. It's been a long time since he's talked as much as he did today.

The person shifts, and the hollow light from the TV dances across his face, the glint of green eyes and sharp edge of slightly flared nostrils. “You, uh—you need something?” It's clearly Dean at this point. He's not even really sure why he'd wondered.

He shakes his head, shrugs over at the sink. “Just getting water.” Dean nods, then swings halfway off the couch before a sudden itch of resentment grows and sharpens. “I can get it.” 

Dean looks surprised, a bit, and raises his hands in surrender. “Sure.”

He can feel Dean's eyes on him as he shuffles over to the sink; the light barely reaches over, and makes the empty bottles scattered around seem huge. He takes a mug that seems clean, fills it up about halfway with a burst of water from the tap, and cradles it in both hands as he turns back to Dean.

There's a noise from his right, and he jumps. Water sloshes up the edge of the mug and drips onto the fold of skin by his thumb—he twitches it off and grips the handle more tightly. Dean looks over, gestures past the fireplace and Gabriel's field of vision, “Sam's asleep. He gets nightmares.”

Gabriel nods, and looks down into the black water, swishing it back and forth. “You did it.”

“Yeah.”

They're silent for a while, and then Gabriel looks up again. “…Is Michael…?”

“In the Cage, too.”

The mug is growing slippery with sweat, and squeaks a little as he rubs his thumb along it. “Raphael?”

“Dead.”

“Your—Castiel?”

Something flickers in Dean's eyes, and he looks back at the TV. “Dead.” He interrupts before Gabriel can say anything further, “It's a long story.” He takes in a deep breath, and swings his head up to look at the ceiling. “Hell, I don't think I know any angels who are still kicking. Except for you. I'm sorry.”

He's not thirsty anymore, but he drains the mug anyway, in lieu of responding. The edge of it scrapes along his teeth, drags his lip down, and he puts it on the little round table slowly. There's pressure growing along his temples, along the bone beside his nose, behind the roof of his mouth, and he grits his teeth to keep it from spreading into sparks of pain in his eyes. Water collects on his lower eyelid, and he turns to the sink to wipe it away.

“Dude, are you—I mean, Go- shit, I'm sorry. Gabriel?”

He's silent. Dean's footsteps echo across the floor and stop anxiously a couple feet away. “Gabriel—”

“Kali?” he asks, hunched over, watching the ragged, off-white curtains shiver with his breath.

“…I don't know. We haven't seen her, but that doesn't mean anything; she told us she never wanted to see us again, and she'd, I dunno, rip our hearts out if she did.”

Gabriel huffs out a wry murmur of not-quite-laughter. “Sounds like her.” He shakes his head slowly, then turns around again, and gestures at the TV. “What's on?”

Dean pauses for a second, somewhat taken aback. “…Uh. Mostly Spanish soaps. Reruns, I think.”

“Ever play Fuego en la sangre?”

“Uh. Dunno, but there was a guy named Ricardo. Died, though.”

“Mind if I watch?”

Dean shrugs. “I—no. Go ahead.”

The silence isn't exactly companionable, but Dean pretends that he's not staring at Gabriel, and Gabriel pretends he doesn't notice Dean, and when Sam stumbles out of bed the next morning he finds the television still going and both men asleep on the couch.

*

It’s himself and not himself. Everywhere he looks, too, big and small, bloodlines of his he never knew, bloodlines of his murdered for their ancestry. Everyone he could have been—the dark girl with a slender ibis-neck and black-brown eyes, the tall man, heavy-set, always laughing.

The man sitting in the corner of his vision, always in the corner of his vision, eating pancakes. The man always behind him, flickering in and out of existence—or visibility, anyway, because no matter how he turns all he sees is a hateful stare out of the corner of one eye. He tries to ask them their names, but his mouth is scarred over, sewn shut with golden thread.

His brother, not Nick-the-dying-vessel but his brother, real and true, except then his perception snaps back into humanity when he realizes he cannot see an angel’s form, not anymore, and he sobs, long and low.

It’s not a nightmare. The nightmares have the men, taunting, playing, dull edges all blending together. The nightmares have things, cold metal, cold concrete, cold knives, warm fur rubbing against his cringing skin. It’s not a nightmare. He doesn’t know what to call it. Angels don’t dream.

The pieces of him collide here and there, sparking jumps across time and through heavy pockets of darkness. With each contact there is a brief flash of thought, too quick to understand—

—you could not help but lose, for it was wildfire itself you sought to outrace—

—or a glimpse of something too large to see.

*

“Seriously?” Dean stares at the bowl with a grimace. “What the hell is this, anyway?”

Bobby glares at him from across the room. “Potato porridge. It's good for you. Eat up.”

“Dude, I'm not the one on a special diet here!”

Sam gives him his best exasperated face. “Dean, just eat it. It's not that bad. There's banana and nuts and stuff.”

“Yeah, that just makes it weirder. What did you do, throw everything on that list in a bowl and mash it up?”

“Dean.” Sam catches his eyes and glances meaningfully over at Gabriel, who's eating slowly and quietly at the table. “Deal with it.”

He rolls his eyes, but eats, and they're right—it's not that bad, not that he'd ever admit it. If Sam's determined to be a mother hen, he figures it at least means he has something to focus on. Which is more than Dean does.

He finishes up in about five minutes, and goes to drop the bowl by the sink. “So, what's the crisis of the day?”

“Couple of disappearances down in Horseshoe Bend, Idaho, and a guy in Santa Fe doctors swore was DOA who woke up two minutes before the autopsy. Feel like checking them out?” Bobby drops the circled articles on the counter next to him, and Dean shrugs.

“Sure. Be in Idaho by tonight. Any leads?”

“Eh, not really. Small town, so it caused a stir. Could just be mundane.”

“Yeah, well, it’s close.” And he’s grateful for something to do, rather than just sit around the cabin and wait for information that never comes. “I’ll be off in a few. Sammy, you coming?”

Sam shifts in his seat and shakes his head. “Figure you can take care of it. I’m going to get Gabriel clothes and stuff, maybe set him up with a driver’s license or something. And Bobby’s setting up some phone lines, Ricky Collins wants an FBI cover for a couple days.”

“…Oh. Okay, then. All goes well I’ll be back in two. Saturday.”

“Great. Call us.”

“Four,” Gabriel mutters, and Dean squints.

“What?”

Gabriel looks uncomfortable when they all turn to look at him, glancing quickly down to his spoon before squaring his shoulders and looking back up. “Saturday’s four days from now.”

The silence lingers for a few seconds, before Sam gives him an awkward smile. “Uh, two weeks, he meant. And today’s Saturday.”

Gabriel deflates very suddenly. “…How long was I asleep?”

Sam shrugs. “You slept a lot of yesterday. And then we got here and you were pretty much out, so—I dunno, twenty-plus hours total?”

“…Right, but—” he looks out at the curtains, at the light filtering through “—it's not Tuesday? May 15? Twenty-twelve?”

“It's November twenty-twelve. Um. The—what, seventeenth? We found you Thursday night.”

His forehead furrows, and he nods quickly. “So it took you a while.”

“What?”

“To—after—after the massacre. To stop it.”

“After—Elysian, you mean? Stopping the Apocalypse? Couple months, I guess. Are you all right?” Sam's concerned-that-Dean-might-be-whammied look is on in full force. Only this time it's not directed at Dean.

Who really wants to just—sidle away. Only even him at his quietest would seem unbearably loud right now. Gabriel's scrunched his nose up, digging lines into the table with his fingernail, and is breathing very slowly and steadily and calmly.

“A couple months. Like seven or eight.”

“Like two. Gabriel—”

“So since April 4th. Twenty-ten. You're saying it's been nine hundred fifty-nine days.” The speed of his words seems to be increasing even as his breathing slows.

“I have no idea. Um. Two years, plus—uh, yeah, something like that.”

Dean shifts his gaze from Gabriel to Bobby, who doesn't look nearly as confused as the rest of them, and in fact has this pinched mouth that he gets when he doesn't really want to say something but has decided everyone else in the room is too stupid to do so. “How long did you think it was?”

“…Not that long. It's not important. I just—I lost track, that's all.” Gabriel picks up his spoon and carefully scrapes the slowly congealing porridge from the sides of his bowl.

Well, Dean realizes would be utterly tactless to say, thinking the time was shorter than it really was is actually a lot better than the alternative. He's been the victim of hell-fairy-time-screwing enough to know, right?

Instead of making the awkward moment worse, however, he gracelessly escapes it by giving Bobby a quick and insincere grin before fleeing to the bathroom.

*

Once he starts to lose track, he makes the marks permanent.

The scratches on the wall swim in front of his eyes even when he closes them, even when he curls up on the narrow white cot—no blankets, no sheets—and tries to sleep the time away. They’re doing it now, too, but he’s not looking at them, and his eyes aren’t closed; it doesn’t matter, because they’re scratched into his skin now, each one, counting down the endless days until the end of the world.

Except that already happened, didn’t it?

*

“Idaho’s a bust,” Dean’s voice comes tinny through the phone, “I’ve been looking into the Santa Fe thing. Dude was full-on brain dead, had a heart attack—the family insisted on the autopsy, though, ‘cause the guy ran marathons for fun. Anyway, he’s back up, walking and talking like nothing’s wrong. I’ll be down there soon. Everything going okay?”

“Yeah,” Sam replies, absently stirring a pot of off-white, bubbling soup (no cream, fat’s bad, solid foods still difficult…), “Collins is an idiot but we knew that already. Switched up the phone numbers to reach the CDC one instead of FBI, almost got busted. Bobby threw a fit.”

“Heh. Dumbass. Any leads on our favorite blobs of black goo?”

“Nope. Same old. Oh, except apparently someone positively IDed Arianne Zucker. Big teeth and everything.”

“Oh, hell no.” Sam grins through the mouthpiece at Dean’s whine.

“Nah, I’m just screwing with you.”

“Bitch.”

“Yeah, yeah. So we finally found clothes that fit Gabriel, and he’s almost got the hang of shaving. Bathing was awkward the first couple times, but he’s a little more steady on his feet—I swear, he was tripping over everything, Bobby thought it was vitamin deficiency so we’ve got him on a multi—”

“—So he’s alright, then?”

“Well, I don’t think he sleeps through the night. And he spends most of his time on the porch, even though he gets really cold, always has these blankets on him. ‘Cause it’s outside, I think. Doesn’t talk much, it’s—weird, for him, y’know? I mean, he talked more when we first found him. And when he does, half the time he’s got this weird look on his face. Won’t touch Bobby, but for some reason I’m okay. And he gets these things, Bobby says it’s like, uh, like me, where he just freezes up for no reason, except I’ve been looking into it and there’s always a reason—”

“Sam?”

“Huh?”

“I’m glad you’re, uh, bonding, but I really have to—go. Y’know. Turn in early. Okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. See you.”

“…Bye.”

*

He can’t remember what the stairway cost, but it’s there and he did pay for it somehow, so he climbs. Every step is a little harder, a little higher, and he can’t catch up with the breath he knows he has to have, now. Somewhere at the top of the stairs is heaven. No. Earth.

Somewhere at the top of the stairs is earth, pressing down all around him and leaving him to choke, powdered dust layering bit by bit along him as he climbs until he can no longer move. His hand reaches out, up, frozen in place, and before the powder cakes over his eyes he sees that it, too, is crumbling into dust, the same dust that falls into his ears and nose and mouth and crushes his lungs flat and empty.

He had been so close.

*

It’s raining, so Sam’s finally convinced Gabriel to come in out of the growing cold—he’d even gotten a few sentences out of him during the exchange (“it’s a closed-in porch, the leak’s all the way over there, shivering just means I’m keeping warm”). The angel—the man’s dripping all over the couch now, instead, eyes fixed on a fuzzy nature documentary, something about lions and hyenas.

Sam’s really trying not to stare, even as he pages through the thick stack of photocopies—at least there are English translations written all along the margins, in a ridiculously tiny, neat hand. He wonders whose—Bobby’s writing is nothing like that. Nor is any hunter’s he knows of. He pauses with his finger near a diagram, rereads the notes a few times as excitement builds. “Hey. Gabriel?”

Gabriel turns his head, meets Sam’s eyes, and quirks up one eyebrow in response.

“I think I found something. Um, there’s this ritual, easy ingredients, anyway—borage, acacia—”

“Won’t work.”

“…Okay…”

He glances back to his documentary, briefly, “Look, I appreciate that you’re trying to help, Sam. But there’s only one way to get rid of them, and all the archangels are dead. Or as good as. So—”

“There has to be another way.” The happy feeling in Sam’s chest has rapidly deflated, and Gabriel won’t look at him.

“They’re made of an archangel’s—my—blade. Nothing can break an archangel’s blade.”

“Everything can be broken.”

“No.”

“You said we’d never stop the apocalypse—”

“It’s different!” He gathers his knees up to his chest and wraps the ubiquitous blanket more tightly to him.

“How?”

“Sam.” He leans his head back against the couch—the sharp definition of his chin is as clear as ever, hardly a pound gained in the last week and a half—stares up at the ceiling, as if it held answers. “You don’t think I’d have thought this through? You don’t think I’d grab any chance I got? Imagine someone tearing off your arms. Imagine someone cutting into your brain and slicing pieces away. I know what will work and what won’t, and no ritual or spell or fancy sword is gonna cut it. You need another archangel’s blade—”

“We’ve got that.” (This, Gabriel knows. Bobby’d left Raphael’s sword on the counter a week ago, and Gabriel had taken one look and clammed up entirely for two days—all the progress Sam had thought they’d made gone.)

“—and you need another archangel. My br- Lucifer knew what he was doing, okay?”

Lucifer’s sitting across the table from Sam, frowning at him. “I’m sure I would have, if I’d done this. Which—Sam, do you really think I’d do this to my own brother? It amazes me what your mind comes up with, really.”

Sam bites back the retort and ignores him. “Gabriel, we could find a way, if you’d just help a little! I’m flying blind, but—look, there has to be something.”

“Why are you so invested in this?” The muscles in Gabriel’s neck grow tighter. “—Look, I can leave. Now, if you want. Just give me a couple bucks, I’ll catch a bus and be out of your hair.”

Sam scowls, though it’s not as if Gabriel’s looking. And it figures that the first time they’ve had a real conversation in the last ten days, it’s an argument. “I don’t want you to leave.”

“—I mean, you’ve done enough for me already. Really. You can just go back to—researching whatever it was you were researching before I came along, alright? Sounds good. If you don’t want to spare the cash, I’ll hitchhike. Done it before—” he snorts. “Well, sort of. I can do it again.”

“Don’t—Gabriel.”

“I’m not Castiel, Sam. Not some fresh-off-the-boat mick. I don’t need you taking care of me.”

“Obviously you do—”

“The fuck I do!”

“I won’t let you leave!”

Gabriel’s eyes shift over to stare at him, mouth half open, breathing slowed. “What?” he says quietly, whispered, with all the tentative strength of a paper crane.

Sam swallows. “I—I mean. Shit. If you—no. Gabriel, yesterday you tripped on the stairs, landed on your broken ribs, and couldn’t sit up straight for an hour. You’re not going anywhere.”

Gabriel’s silent for a long, angry moment, and when he does speak his voice is hoarse and shaky. “I will go—I will do,” he says, deliberately, “whatever the fuck I want.”

Something roils deep in the pit of Sam’s stomach, and even Lucifer is glaring at him, now. “I didn’t mean it like that, Gabe. I just want—look, is it so hard for you to believe I care what happens to you? Is there always some—some ulterior motive? We’ve lost enough allies, okay?”

“That’s it then. Fine.”

“That’s what?” 

“Your ulterior—points for the SAT word there, Sammy—motive. You miss your pet angel, thought you’d get yourself a replacement. Complete with a pet name. Don’t pretend you care about me.”

“I’m not pretending any-” The shrill sound of a phone ringing cuts through his sentence, and he grabs at it, suddenly glad for the excuse. It’s Dean. He picks up.

“Yeah?”

“—Uh, hey. It’s Dean—”

“Yeah.”

“Dude, you okay?”

“I’m fine. What do you want?”

“—just checking in. Dug up some more stuff, thinking it’s a revenant. Apparently he was all quiet—seriously, didn’t say a word—but they let his wife take him home, and now he’s up and disappeared. So I figure he’s after someone, looking around for enemies. Weird thing, though, don’t they usually talk?”

“Yeah. I’ll see if there’s anything else it could be. What’s the timeline?”

“Died two weeks ago of a heart attack, woke up same day, they released him last Friday and he spent three days not doing anything. Or eating anything, apparently, except when they held it in front of his mouth.”

“Huh. Okay, died, woke up, doesn’t talk, ignores his wife, disappeared. I’ll see what—”

“Zombie.”

“—Just a second. What?”

Gabriel’s got a flat look on his face, attention back on his documentary. “It’s a zombie.”

“Uh. Dean, Gabriel says it’s a zombie.”

“Don’t they usually eat people? And rot?”

“I thought so. Gabe? Wouldn’t that be noticeable?”

He snorts. “Wrong kind of zombie.”

“…Care to elaborate?” Sam taps his pen on the table, still halfway to furious.

Gabriel shrugs. “It’s a corpse powered by a half-dead, tethered human soul. Guy gets cursed, gets killed, and then his soul isn’t quite in place but it can’t escape either. The bokor usually has him wake up after burial—”

“Bokor?”

“You do this for a living? Sorcerer.” There’s a trace of the old Gabriel back in the scorn weighing down his tone. “Voodoo tradition. Priest that specializes in black magic, specifically the use of souls. They can’t go around fooling with the pure thing, it’s incredibly powerful, but zombifying’s one of the things they can do. It’s like a slave that never ages or gets sick or dies. I’m told it’s incredibly painful.”

“Oh. Uh, Dean, the voodoo version.”

“In Santa Fe?”

“I guess? Gabe, they show up in Santa Fe?”

“I can hear him talking through the phone, you know. You don’t have to relay the message. And they’re human. Humans can move wherever the hell they want.”

“Apparently yes, they do.”

“So how do I kill it?”

“How does he kill it?”

“You don’t kill it. You can’t, that’s the point. You kill the sorcerer.”

“He says you kill the sorcerer.”

“—Great, how do I kill the sorcerer?”

“Like you’d kill any human. Shoot him. Or, y’know, decapitate. Stab. Punch too hard. Feed fattening foods and wait. Most things, really.”

“Nothing special, Dean, you just kill him.”

“How do I find him?”

“Spin around in a circle three times and chant dirty limericks over a dead chicken.”

“…I think you just have to find him the old fashioned way, Dean. You need help?”

“Wouldn’t want to drag you away from your new boyfriend. It’s cool, I got it.”

“He needs help,” Gabriel calls over.

“You sure, Dean?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“If he’s powerful enough to make one zombie, he’s powerful enough to make two. So he could have a whole legion of immortal quarterbacks at his beck and call. You need at least two people, and get some other houngan—sorry, priest—down there to whammy you up protection charms. Or, actually.” He grabs an old Reader’s Digest from the crowded table in front of him, and scribbles something on it, waves it in the air. “Carry this around and the zombies will avoid you for a while.”

Sam frowns at him, and Gabriel just shrugs and raises his eyebrows. “…Okay, I’m coming down. Be there in a couple days, don’t do anything stupid.”

“You want me to just sit here?”

“Track him down. Don’t attack him.”

“—you’re sure about this? I mean—”

“Yeah. I trust Gabriel, okay?” He says it a little too loudly, maybe.

“—alright, Sam. If you insist. Thursday?”

“Thursday. See you.”

“Bye.”

Sam shuts off the phone, turns to Gabriel. “Why are you suddenly being helpful?”

He shrugs. “Watching you two fumble around like stoned puppies isn’t as fun as it used to be.”

Stoned puppies? Sam wrinkles his nose. “And you’re sure?”

“That it’s a zombie? Pretty sure.”

Sam nods, and fiddles with the edge of a piece of paper. The silence stretches on—Gabriel’s not looking at him, but he’s not watching the TV anymore either, staring instead somewhere between the window and the ugly black armchair. “…So, Gabriel.”

“Yup.” He pops the  ‘p’ sound obnoxiously. It’s almost a relief, perversely enough—he’s actually got enough life in him to be annoying.

“If I leave. Are you going to?”

Gabriel shifts, lies out along the couch, tugging the blanket here and there and staring at what must, to him, be a fascinating ceiling judging by the way his attention always seems to turn to it. “…No. Probably not. Singer’ll keep me here, I’m sure. ‘Sides, it’s comfortable here.”

Sam looks around at the grimy floors, the cobwebs stretching across the rafters, the mismatched, rickety chairs. “Promise?”

A pause. “Sure. Not until you get back.”

“Shake on it?”

Gabriel flicks off the TV, shifts his feet back down to the floor. “You’re pushing it.”

Sam just looks at him. Gabriel sighs.

“You’re way too touchy-feely, kid. Fine.” He levers himself up off the couch, shuffles over with an eye to his footsteps, and holds out one of his raccoon-slender hands. Sam takes it carefully. They shake, and don’t linger.

*

They’re there again, one two three four many, all crowded around, moths to a bright flame, demons to a spark of life, and he cannot conceive how he should be so fascinating, so brilliant—not now, now that he is dead and wilted, numb within a body not his own, not his own; he was never meant for earth.

Well, he is below the earth, now, in a sense—in many senses.

There is nothing beautiful about a butterfly pinned under glass, a frog being slowly vivisected, but they seem to find it glorious.

He writhes, opens his toothless, bloody mouth, shrieks.

*

His headache is worse when he first wakes up, so much so that he thinks it’s that which wakes him—steady pain increasing to the breaking point. His ribs don’t want to be left out, either, sending ragged claws across his side to remind him. He’s too warm below and too cold above, hands clammy as they clutch at the blankets, lips as dry as ever. When he closes his eyes, bright flashes of dream tear across them, and his heart quickens.

He never saw things, before. It figures, though, that he’d only go mad just as soon as the torture ended. Like the humans who never quit their hated, mind-numbing jobs because they can’t take the pain of retirement.

He shuffles out of the room, and with one hand braced against the wall heads downstairs. The fire is banked, and moonlight streams in through the windows above the little table too. Bobby's asleep on the couch, Sam probably still doubled over in the lower bunk by the fireplace, so Gabriel moves as quietly as he can.

He fills a mug with water, then sits by the table and sips it slowly. There's a pad of paper on the table, and a pencil rests on top of it. The paper is yellow, lined with blue, but otherwise blank and crisp, and he tugs it over.

Almost automatically, he picks up the pencil and starts to sketch, drawing the sigils he'd once carved painstakingly into the walls of his prison. He finishes one after another, tearing off the papers and letting them pile haphazardly around him. It's soothing, and eventually the pains in his ribs and head ebb. He falls asleep with his head on the table and hand still clutching the pencil.

*

A pile of dead feathers, a hundred and twelve years old to the day.

A forsythia bloom curling golden against the wide grey sky.

Human tibias, to be made into flutes that will sing out the notes of reincarnation.

Twenty-one tons of human hair, twisted and ground into itself.

A woman wasting away into a pile of rock—rock salt, to keep away the evils of her city.

The vast and beautiful city, dead by divine providence, or simply dehydration—collapsed into the empty reservoir beneath.

An island full of snakes, snakes in the trees, on the ground, where you cannot step without being caught and bitten.

Thirty-four rats, six of them already dead, scratching and clawing at each other, pulling in all different directions—unable to escape the clotted mass that keeps them tied to their brothers.

Mass graves marked by slight depressions in the earth, scattered, torn pieces of clothing.

A man who drives and drives and drives until he reaches the sea, and then keeps going, car rusting as he goes, driving until the gas runs out.

Cockroaches being kept for their legs, living, legs growing back, being cut off; doused in ice water to keep them insensate, docile, because even the most harmless insect may carry something evil within it.

Two boys who left the only place they knew, the only safe place there was, to follow something dark and angry that lies within their all-too human hearts; trying to reach some, any other place.

(There is no other place.)

Himself, in a wide dusty field stretching out to the edges of oblivion, surrounded by holy oil tracing out endless patterns in the dust.

The fire catches.

*

When Bobby wakes up, he notices Gabriel almost immediately. The angel's surrounded by drifts of yellow paper, and Bobby picks up a sheet. The drawing on it looks almost like a devil's trap, but it's much more complicated, with little dots here and there that could be mistakes or bits of dust but might also be integral to the piece. He drops the paper, and picks up another. It's got bits of Spanish written on it, and something that looks like Chinese, all encased in a perfect seven-sided shape.

He drops that one, too, and looks at the sleeping man before him. He doesn't much look like the guy that tried to kill him with a chainsaw murderer. Looks cold and vulnerable, really. His blanket is slipping off, and Bobby replaces it gently.

He sits across the table. Gabriel's sleeve has slipped down, giving Bobby a clear view—much better than Sam’s blurry picture—of the cuffs holding his power in. They look like silver bracelets, if bigger, maybe an inch wide and an eighth inch thick. He still doesn't recognize anything beyond the Enochian written on them, and he’s looked—put his research on Leviathans aside, all in the name of giving the angel his wings back.

He wonders if he does it for Gabriel, or for another angel gone too long to hate.

There's a creaking noise, and Sam comes around the bend, stopping when he sees them. He, too, goes and picks up a paper, giving Bobby a quizzical look. Bobby shrugs. Sam turns it around to show him—it's all in English, modern English, arranged in rows and columns. Parts of it are scratched out.

Gabriel stirs, slowly easing his eyes open and frowning at the pencil. He lifts his head and comes face to face with Bobby. “Morning,” Bobby says.

“…good morning,” Gabriel replies scratchily. He glances around at the mess, looking vaguely puzzled. “Um. Did I—” he trails off.

Bobby shrugs. “Woke up and you were sitting right there. You hungry?”

Gabriel nods.

“Alright. I’ll whip something up.” Bobby gets up and starts puttering around the sink area, and Sam takes the opportunity to steal his seat.

“We saw these sigils on the walls where they were keeping you,” he says. “Huge one on the floor, too. Did, uh, Lucifer—”

“No,” Gabriel shakes his head, “I did them.” He doesn't elaborate for a while, and Sam doesn't press, but when Bobby sets down a bowl of some unidentifiable mush Gabriel continues. “I was trying to find a way to keep humans out.”

“Oh.” Sam pauses. “The crossword, too?”

Gabriel frowns at him. “What?”

“Uh. This.” Sam shows it to him.

Gabriel pauses with his spoon halfway to his lips, head tilted to one side. “Yes.”

“What for?”

“…originally skinwalkers, I think. Or rougarou, I don't remember. Although.” He gestures at the left corner. “That may have something to do with giraffes.”

Sam's not sure if he's joking, and turns it around to look more closely. “Quotidian? Camels? Blue?”

“Definitely giraffes.” He returns his attention to eating. Really, really slowly. Sam stares at the sheet of paper, wrinkling his nose up. It takes him a minute to notice that Gabriel's smiling very slightly.

Sam sputters. “You—you—”

Gabriel gives a small, tired laugh. “Samuel Winchester. You're incredibly gullible, you know that?”

“So it's not a protection sigil.”

“Sure it is.” They stare at each other before Gabriel shrugs. “It doesn't actually matter what language you do it in, you know. Some of them are better for different things, I guess. And some are easier to squeeze something out of, which is why all the ones you hunters use are…funky. I thought using a language still being spoken might work better.”

“Like how Enochian works against angels?” Bobby plunks a bowl down in front of Sam and sits down with his own.

“Sure, like how Enochian works against angels. Theoretically anything works against anything, if you do it right. Humans are obsessed with tradition, though. So all your exorcisms, for example, are still in Latin, even though it would be easier for you to remember one in English.”

“Hmm. So you could—make these up, then.”

Gabriel gestures to the piles of paper around him with one quirked eyebrow. “Yes.”

“And see if one would work?”

“Yes. Probably. Though it’s not really a science. Takes trial and error.”

“Rituals, too? Other stuff?”

“I suppose.”

“Mind taking a look?”

Gabriel looks puzzled. “Sure.”

Bobby nods. “Great.” He leans over and picks up a massive stack of yellow envelopes from the counter, tossing them onto the table before Gabriel. “Get annotating.”

Sam almost laughs at the expression on Gabriel’s face, then composes himself, slurps up his mush in the space of a minute. “Right. Well, I’d better get going. We’ll check in.”

“See that you do.”

*

It’s not even that he can’t escape the vessel. It’s that it doesn’t feel like one—he can’t even mark the boundary where he ends and the body begins, no matter how he scratches and peels away at the places where the line should be.

If he could fight, if he could struggle against it, maybe he could get out. But here, there is nothing to fight.

Too comfortable in your vessels, they’d said, it’s strange how you can fall into these humans so easily, and how foolish, that at the time he’d taken it as a compliment.

*

“Ow, Dean!” Sam flinches away from the needle as Dean jabs it into his shoulder.

“Big baby. Quit moving. Have a drink. Come on, we've done this a million times.” Dean picks up the bottle of Jack and waves it back and forth in front of Sam’s face until Sam grabs at it irritably with his good hand and swings it back to drink.

“So you should be a little better at it by now, don't you think?”

“And you should be better at dodging small angry women. Seriously, how many times have you been beat up by some chick half your size?” Dean’s grinning behind him. Smug bastard.

“Because you were so much help. Way to lose Gabriel's sigil-thing, by the way. Made that so much more fun.”

“Yeah, I'll take Romero zombies over those things any day. There you go.” He ties off the thread and pats Sam's uninjured shoulder. “Good as new.”

“Thanks.” Sam fiddles with the label on the whiskey for a moment, then hands it over a bit reluctantly when Dean makes grabby hands. “Dean…”

“It is perfectly normal to have a drink in celebration of our victory, Sam, I'm not —”

Sam rolls his eyes at him. Though they should probably have a talk about that, too. “Dean.”

“What?”

“Just, don't tell Gabriel about the Leviathans, okay?”

Dean blinks. “Okay, um…I haven't. Though, why not? He's kind of our best shot at them. Wait, you've neither of you mentioned them?”

“No, it just—nothing new came in, and then we were looking for stuff on breaking those cuffs—”

“How's that going?”

“About as well as you'd expect considering Gabriel's no help. He translated the Enochian for us, but most of it's standard binding stuff where you usually just break the circle, and there’s these bits that he’s not sure about so he insists we can't just cut through them. Thinks you need an angel, which obviously isn't in the cards. Anyway. They didn't come up, and then—he's got this whole thing where he thinks we're just taking care of him because of Cas, or something, and I just don't want to…” He trails off, scowling at the wall, and takes the bottle back from Dean.

“…tell him we're just taking care of him 'cause we think he can gank some monsters for us?”

“Yeah. That.”

“'Cause we kinda are.”

Sam frowns at him. “What? No we're not.”

Dean shrugs. “Well, I mean—we'd never have found him without Meg, right? And she mentioned him because of them. So…”

“Yeah, so that's on her. It's not the reason we got him out of there. That's just—common human decency, right? Are you saying you'd have just left him there?”

“No! No, but, Sam, we're going to have to tell him sometime. And he'll probably just be more pissed the longer we keep it from him.”

Sam swishes the whiskey back and forth, staring down through it at the motel floor. “Yeah. I know.”

*

Lucifer returns on a Tuesday, but won’t talk, just hides behind first one man and then another. He reaches out, but can’t quite touch him, breaks free and squirms his way through the circle to find that he’s gone, blinked out of existence.

Then he starts seeing Michael, and tries to reach him, too, but he’s playing the same game. Soon, they start to blink in and out one by one, and he no longer knows which way to turn until the men take hold of him and turn him to them instead, until he forgets and sees only solid flesh in the bright lights.

When they leave, he looks, but none of his brothers have come back for him.

*

It's oddly relaxing.

Singer’s got him going over what appears to be an entire library of photocopied books—the stairwell currently contains stacks upon stacks of manila envelopes that just get higher every time Singer leaves and returns. Neon green's the most ostentatious color of pen the man has, so that's what Gabriel's using—it annoys him just enough that he doesn't quite say anything about it. The thick black marker annoys him more, though, because when Gabriel takes that out he's blacking out paragraphs and paragraphs of bad information. It makes the old hunter cringe, as if losing even the chaff was personally painful to him.

He's going to need a new one, though, because that last manuscript on imported Danish fairy beliefs in Iowa was pure drivel (humans, seriously, who writes hundred-page academic papers on this stuff?), and by the time he'd got through it he'd left less than a quarter still intact, and that all covered over in green. It had taken him the better part of a day.

He's gone from crouching over the wobbly table to stretching out on the couch to where he is now, settled comfortably in front of the fireplace among a nest of blankets and pillows that he'd salvaged from the upstairs bedroom and various chests smelling heavily of mothballs and cedar. Even if it hadn't turned out to be as nice as it is, the work would have been worth the look on Singer’s face when he walked through the front door to find the majority of the textiles in the place draped all around Gabriel.

Whoever wrote this particular journal seems to believe it's a combination of turning his jacket inside out and throwing warm ashes around that cowed the spriggan he'd gone and pissed off, which is common enough but utterly stupid. The man seems to have survived on a string of good luck in general. Not unlike most hunters, Gabriel supposes; as a breed they seem to have a tendency to blunder awkwardly straight into things and flail at them until they're dead. Only fair to help the poor things out, right?

Who knows what he'd do if he had to write anything about gods, but he's got no sympathy for ugly, mindless little parasites hopping around and making trouble for themselves. If they're incapable of keeping their heads down, no power to them. This for kelpies, that for trolls, and it's nice to know that his memory's not entirely gone, that he can in fact be useful.

He's organized his sigils, too, and he's oddly tempted to just start drawing them around the walls of the cabin. Some of them would probably be useful, really, since apparently this isn't Singer’s actual house and the nicely warded one burned down a few weeks ago. Suspicious, since Singer hasn't actually told him how it burned down, and if he's on something's hit list, which isn't implausible, Gabriel would really like to know. Being in the line of fire is just another indignity he doesn’t really need—he still cuts himself shaving, apparently can't do so much as drive a car (and no need to tell Singer that he'd tried), has to watch his feet as he walks for fear he'll forget where they are. He doesn't understand how they all live like this, he really doesn't.

The front door creaks, and through it comes Singer, shaking the rain off his coat and carting another box along with him. He sets it down with a thump by the table. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Gabriel replies, setting down the pen and flexing his fingers.

Singer gestures over his shoulder back at the door. “Heading back out to get groceries. Want to come?”

Gabriel’s eyebrows scrunch down, and he tilts his head one way. “Why?”

Singer shrugs. “Might do you some good to get out of here. Gets stifling, hanging out in a house all day with nothing to do but correct other people’s mistakes. Come on. Won’t be many people there this time of day, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Gabriel blinks and looks away, frowning, and Singer huffs. “You don’t have to. Just thought you might like some change.”

Change is for humans who can’t make up their minds, he wants to say, but it sounds uncomfortably like something that one of his brothers might have said. Instead, he just gives a little half-shrug. “If you want.”

“I want. Get something on your feet.”

Gabriel untangles himself from the blankets and sets the manuscript aside. Maybe he can find a calendar at the grocery, anyway. He’s wanted something to mark the days with.

The car ride is quiet, because Gabriel doesn’t have much to say and Singer—unlike Sam—seems perfectly content with that. When they pull up to the place, true to his word there’s very few cars parked outside, and they park right up close to the door. “Just getting the essentials,” Singer tells him, “and if there’s anything you want—”

“Chocolate.”

“—you probably can’t have it.” Gabriel snorts at him and scowls, and Singer just shrugs. “Sorry. Give it a few more weeks.”

They reach the automatic glass doors, though, and the brilliant fluorescent light is flooding out and bouncing off the raindrops, and Gabriel—who wasn’t going to, who isn’t scared of such a stupid, inconsequential thing—freezes halfway under the eaves by a line of shopping carts. He clenches his fists and chokes on the air, staring at the linoleum flooring just beyond the line of glass, and doesn’t even see Singer until he’s right next to him with one hand held up between them. “Hey,” he says, and it seems oddly gentle, “You want to go back to the car?”

He shouldn’t want to, but he just swallows and says, “I’m sorry,” and Singer nods and leads him back. “I’m fine,” he says, “Go in and get the food.”

Singer pauses, frowning, and Gabriel just leans his forehead against the cold glass of the window until he leaves.

He didn’t even remember to ask Singer to get him a calendar.

*

He’s filthy.

He washes and washes, and the water evaporates off him, and he washes again. Again. Again.

There are tiny things crawling all around him, and they will not wash away.

*

Sam and Dean come crashing through the door with all the grace of two lightning-struck trolls. They’re about as wet as the trolls would be, too, and drip water all over the entryway. At least Singer tries to keep things dry.

Gabriel’s nose is itching again. He sighs, and picks up a tissue from the box beside him moments before he sneezes. Stupid humans and their stupid diseases. Stupid Singer, who probably gave him this one in particular.

“Wait. You’re sick?” Sam stops where he is and stares at Gabriel with a frown.

“…Haven’t we established?” He shakes another tissue loose and blows into it messily, glaring at Sam all the while. “I’m human. I piss and shit and breathe, I have a headache, and I spew random fluids everywhere with the best of them. How is that hard for you to understand?”

“No, it’s not—crap.” Sam’s got this half-confused, half-stricken look on his face, and he digs his fingernails into his palm as he glances away from Gabriel’s little nest.

“What? Sam?” Gabriel makes to stand up, scattering papers across the floor, but Sam looks up abruptly and motions him down.

“I’m sorry, but we have to take you in. There’s probably a clinic in Kalispell—”

“No. Sammy, a cold’s not gonna kill me. I might be more prone to getting sick than you lot, but my immune system works just fine.”

Sam’s already dragging out the brittle yellow phonebook from behind the couch. “It’s not that.”

“So what is it?”

Dean peers down over the couch at Sam. “Yeah, Sam, I’m not following either.”

“Look, it’ll just be a quick test. I’ll get an appointment in a week or so, it’ll only take a couple hours—”

Gabriel meets Dean’s eyes with their expressions mirroring each other’s, and they say almost simultaneously, “Sam—”

“Gabriel,” he swings around, clutching the phonebook, “when—the last couple of years. They didn’t—did they, um, use condoms?”

Dean’s eyebrows rise and he scoots down into the couch, fixing his gaze firmly on the television. Gabriel’s face twitches, going from shock to anger to a tense smile. “Sam, I realize you didn’t get a great education when you were young, but you’d think by the time you made it to Stanford you’d have learned that only women can get pregnant.” He speaks in a very deliberately level tone, flicking his tongue over his lips, before screwing up his nose and abruptly sneezing into a tissue he barely manages to reach in time.

Sam looks away. “You know what I mean.”

“No, Sam. Enlighten me. Because if you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, you’d realize that if I—well, I would already know, don’t you think? I never got sick, Sammy. Not once. Didn’t catch down there. So you can take your clinic—”

“They can be asymptomatic,” Sam butts in miserably.

“No.”

“Gabriel, please just—”

“No! No means fucking no, Winchester!” He drags the palms of his hands hard along his ears, not to block out Sam but to alleviate the shrill, angry, whining buzz that’s digging into his brain and happily dancing along the inside of his skull. The room is a grey blur, and he scrambles to his feet, rushing past Sam-trying-to-look-five-feet-tall and running smack dab into an extremely confused Bobby.

“…Gabriel?”

He backs away, inch by inch, and veers away from Sam and up the step towards the fireplace. There’s a blank look in his eyes as they dart back and forth between the three men—Dean has finally sat up fully—and he reaches awkwardly behind to pat out the shape of the wall.

“What the hell did you idjits do?” Bobby snaps, “How long have you been back? Five minutes? And you’ve already got him going?”

“Yeah, good going, Sam,” Dean mutters, “seriously, a little tact?”

 “I—Gabriel—” he takes a tentative step forward, mirrored by Gabriel’s steps back—his hand catches on the handle of the porch door, and he squeezes it tightly before opening it. “Gabriel, come on, it’s still raining out there—”

“He ain’t seeing you, Sam,” Bobby levels a glare his way, “let him go calm down.”

Sam’s face squinches up, and he retreats, sitting heavily on the short chair that makes his knees lift up above his hips. Gabriel, likewise, slips out the door, facing inside until the moment he closes it behind him. It's cold, dark, raining, but there's nothing wrong with the cold. It releases some of the pressure on his eyes, and the air is sweet and fresh as he drags it in through his mouth with long, slow gasps. 

Outside. Outside is good. Outside is free.

*

He runs out of places to write, and carves the symbols smaller and smaller, each curling around into another until the floor is no longer smooth but rough with the careful furrows, and then he starts to carve into himself.

But his skin just heals over, so he has to cut deeper, deeper, deliberately peeling away first the skin, then the bloody strips of flesh, fat and muscle and everything in between, until he reaches the bones.

He tries to wash the blood off of them until they’re clean, pale and yellow, but as soon as he’s done it another narrow artery burrowing through them breaks, and he has to start all over again. Blood ruins it, he’s sure. Or perhaps it makes it more potent.

He’ll have to experiment.

He cuts away at himself until there’s nothing left except bone, and then they come, and still they touch him, and suck all the marrow away.

*

Sam pokes his nose out a few hours later, gingerly opening the door and peering around to find Gabriel hunched in the corner away from the leaky bit of roof, humming something low and eerie. “Um,” he whispers, trying not to startle the man and utterly failing—Gabriel’s head swings around with an abrupt cessation of song and a drawn-in hiss of breath. He looks up at Sam for a while, expressionless, and then turns back to looking out at the trees beyond the screen.

“Yes?” His bare foot is toeing the line of water creeping onto the deck—thankfully the rain is driving away from this side of the cabin, but it still manages to trickle through in places. A line of mucus drips down to his lip, and he wipes it away with a quick, angry jerk.

“I was just seeing if you wanted dinner.”

“Gruel?”

“Soup.”

“Chicken?”

“…The broth, anyway. There’s dumplings,” Sam offers, although they’re really just three frozen biscuits, chopped up, dumped in the soup and swollen with broth to the point of disintegration.

“Yeah. Sure.” He doesn’t actually move, though, except to crinkle up his nose and sneeze abortively.

Sam lingers in the doorway, watching him. “Uh—well, you can just come in when you want, then.”

“Fine.”

“Yeah.” A gust of wind pushes the rain harder, for a moment; Gabriel tenses slightly, and then sighs soundlessly.

“They did.”

“What?”

“The question you asked earlier. Yes. Sometimes. When it would have hurt them not to.”

“…Oh.”

Gabriel rocks forward to sit on his knees, then braces himself against the railing and stands. “I’ll do it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yes,” he interrupts, as he makes his way to the door, “I do,” and underneath the determination in his voice is a thin layer of fear.

*

He observes closely.

The man’s tied down, but he’s limp anyway, so the threads sewn through his wrists and ankles are hardly necessary. The little, curious insects poke at him, tickle him, but he doesn’t even squirm at their touch. He could be dead, except that his eyes are open, open and far too clear, nothing like the jelly-blank stare of a dead man. He doesn’t breathe, though. He doesn’t resist.

It seems like a good lesson, as lessons go.

A woman, a little bigger than the insects, walks along his leg, continues up his smooth stomach, his chest, climbs up the jut of his chin. When she steps on his mouth, it opens slightly, and she pauses, stomps down. A tooth cracks, and she smiles.

She ends up sitting above his eyes, staring down, but how does she tell if he’s looking at her?

Easily, it turns out. She simply stabs her pointed toe into the soft meat of his eye, and then he is no longer looking.

*

It’s a nondescript brown building. The door handle is slippery and hard to turn, and there’s a discordant jangle of bells when he does manage to get it open. It only takes a few extra seconds, but by that time Sam—standing behind—has already made several abortive movements forward as if to help. He doesn’t seem to want to get too close, though—even during the long and awkward car ride he’d avoided saying much, and he’s always trying to get Gabriel to talk. As if there were anything to say.

The carpet in the waiting room is a dull blue flecked with the occasional loop of purple. There are about forty purple bits for every square foot, except on one patch near the single long couch where the factory-perfect randomness seems to have failed and instead coughed up twice as much purple as everywhere else. The fake plant’s got purple in it, too, and suddenly everywhere he looks he sees it—the lettering on the pens attached to each colorful clipboard, every other narrow vertical stripe on Sam’s shirt, the shoelaces of the scrawny teenager who’s slumped with one hand on his girlfriend’s and the other furiously tapping away on his phone.

They wait. He counts nine jangles, except three of them are from the same person who had to go out and come back in again. The room had been about half full when they’d come in, but it’s filling up, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise when the man plops down in the chair next to him and opens a magazine with a rattle of paper. Gabriel twitches, though, and scoots away slightly before he realizes what he’s done. Sam looks over with his big sad eyes and furrowed brow, and Gabriel scowls, consciously relaxes. Taps his foot impatiently.

He’s thirsty, but the stupid teenager’s legs are five feet long and stretch diagonally across exactly where he’d have to step to reach the water cooler.

“Sullivan? Uh, Gabriel Sullivan?” The nurse is young and tired-looking, her makeup a little overdone—her lips are red and garish, eyeliner starkly black.

Gabriel’s foot stops tapping, and he swallows. “Uh, yeah. ‘S me.”

The nurse waits. “Well, if you’d like to follow me. For your exam.”

“Right. Yeah. Coming.” He stands, and Sam moves with him. The nurse—Kelly, her nametag says in cheerful lettering—steps between them, holds out a questioning hand.

“Him, too?” she asks, and Gabriel pauses.

“Oh, uh, yes. Yes.”

“Alright, come this way.” She leads them to a small examining room, where Gabriel cringes at the sight of the table and stirrups; she looks sympathetic.

“You can wait here,” she tells Sam, “Mr. Sullivan, we’ll need a urine sample, first. Bathroom’s this way, just pee into this cup and bring it back, okay?”

“Yeah. I can do that.” This won’t be so hard. Maybe.

Except that he momentarily can’t find the bathroom, can’t get the urine flowing, almost misses the damn cup, and by the time he’s heading back to the room he’s already trembling a little. Fuck. Stupid. The whole thing’s stupid, really, but Sam’s so—so earnest, like a horse that’s grown up to think you’re bigger than him and who just wants to please.

Kelly smiles at him, which is supposed to be reassuring, and all he can think is that she looks a bit like that woman they’d brought in. Day—seven hundred two? No. No, because the days are all wrong, anyway.

“We can get blood samples processed, too, but you’ll need to go across the street to get it taken. We’ll fill out a form for you, and the results will come in with the rest of the test. Wait here for the doctor; you’ll need to take your clothes off.”

The door closes sharply behind her, and Gabriel starts to pace the room. Not that there’s a lot of room to move, and Sam’s intent on standing in one corner, taking up too much room, still imitating a horse. The wait seems to take forever. He’s lost his sense of patience developed over the last two years, already, in just a few weeks. It’s like he changes all the time now, like some human, always shifting, always contrary.

When the door finally opens again, he jumps, doesn’t pay attention to where he’s going, and nearly crashes into the table. The doctor’s maybe fifty, average height, male, and it’s only then that Gabriel realizes he’s been hoping for a woman.

Another stupid human trait he’s picked up. Gender never mattered to him before.

“Mr. Sullivan?” he says, warmly, and it takes all Gabriel has just to nod and stand there. “My name’s Dr. Morgenstern. And—” he turns to regard Sam. “—you are?”

Sam blinks. “Uh. Sam. We just, uh, live together.”

“Ah. Alright—are you planning on staying in the room? Because I don’t—”

“Can he?” Gabriel asks, and he’s not really sure why. It’s not like the horse is—well, he’s calming, a bit, but he’s also not at all.

Morgenstern blinks, then nods. “If that would make you more comfortable.”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. So—says here you have broken ribs? Not taking anything for those?”

“Um. No. Yes. I have broken ribs, they’re healing up, I just—over-the-counter. Ibuprofen.”

“—Alright. Have you had an exam like this before?”

“No.”

He nods. “Alright.” Is that his catch phrase? He’s almost too friendly, nice fake smiles and big warm hands. He goes to wash them—the hands—dries them, applies gloves. “So, if you’d just like to start by removing your shirt, that’s alright—” hell “—I’ll be doing a general exam, checking over your skin for any discoloration or odd marks. I’ll take a look at your mouth, collect a swab, and then I’ll need you to remove your pants. Will that be alright?”

The edge of the table is digging into Gabriel’s palm where he’s gripping it. “Yes,” he says, automatically.

Morgenstern’s a little more patient than the nurse, but when Gabriel’s shown no sign of moving he gives another of his little twitchy smiles. “Your shirt? Sir, if there’s—”

“No, it’s fine!” He scrabbles at the buttons, uncoordinated, then snaps at Sam when he steps forward. “I can do it.” He does, eventually, shrugs the shirt off completely and stands there half-naked and shivering.

Morgenstern raises his gloved hands. “If you feel uncomfortable with anything—”

“It’s fine, just do it.”

“Alright.” He hates that word. Oh, how he hates that word. It’s not alright.

The doctor has to move around to the side of the table, because Gabriel’s not going anywhere, and though he barely skims his hands over Gabriel’s skin a sweat breaks out all over it.

“Hold out your hands?”

He does, unclamping from the table. There’s an angry red mark on his right palm from clutching at it, and he stares at it as Morgenstern lets him lower them and steps around to his back.

He jumps out of his skin when the doctor brushes his hair aside, and Sam’s there before he can blink, before the doctor can step away.

“Mr. Sullivan—”

“Sorry,” he says, now examining the plaid pattern of Sam’s shirt, “I just—didn’t expect that. It’s fine. Keep going.”

The fingers are an even lighter touch, and the doctor comes back around to the front, pronounces his skin to be healthy. “That’s part one done! Not too bad, alright, now I just need to take a look at your mouth, check inside for anything. Alright?”

“Yes.”

Sam’s hands are moving around awkwardly, as if he’s not sure whether to touch Gabriel or not. Morgenstern clears his throat.

“Mr.—Sam. Would you care to move aside?”

“Oh! Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’ll just—get out of your way.”

“Thank you.” He has a light, one of those tongue depressors—just a strip of wood, and Gabriel doesn’t know why it seems so sinister. “Say ah.”

He says ah. The light flicks around inside his mouth, the depressor enters and he tenses up his neck muscles, breathes out through his nose. Sam’s at his side, now, still awkward—Gabriel can feel his body heat, Morgenstern’s body heat, the heat from the fluorescent lights, from the reflection of it on the table, from the light still clawing its way through his mouth, from—

“Gabriel. Gabriel, hey.” Sam’s face swims in front of him, and he blinks.

“You can close your mouth now,” the doctor tells him, brow furrowed. “Mr. Sullivan, the next part is difficult for a lot of people, alright? And if you need time to—”

“Just get it over with,” Gabriel snaps. “Please.”

“I’m not sure that—”

“Can you or can you not do it quickly and get it done?” His voice rises in pitch and volume, and Morgenstern flinches back a little.

“—Yes. I’ll—alright. I have to ask you to remove the rest of your clothing, then.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

He strips as quickly as he can, this time, leaving himself even colder than before now that the sudden burst of heat has gone. His feet are sweating, though. He rolls his toes, wipes the sole of his left foot on his right calf and almost misses.

“If at any point you decide you need to stop—”

“Yes, yes, okay,” and he’s of course aware that his voice is still high-pitched, “thank you, do it, don’t tell me about it, just do it.”

The doctor bites his tongue, kneels, coaxes Gabriel’s feet apart and lifts his hands up into Gabriel’s groin. Gabriel freezes. Just a doctor. Just an exam. Stupid exam, but Sam’s still there watching with those big eyes, still looking uncomfortable. He stares straight ahead, instead, past Sam, at the shade over the small glass window in the door. There are twenty-one sections, eighty little holes punched into the plastic with the thread running through, two crooked ends where someone bent it and it never bent back.

Sam’s eyes keep flicking up and down, between Gabriel’s face and Gabriel’s crotch, until they drift away to the table as he worries his lip between his teeth.

“Sir? Sir?” Gabriel looks down. “Can I ask you if you would prefer to retract the foreskin yourself—”

His mouth refuses to cooperate for a few seconds, but something in his face obviously makes the doctor stop talking. “Just do it,” he finally spits out.

“Alright,” and so help him if he hears that word again he might just shatter.

At the hand on his penis he panics, shoves away, completely irrational and more than a little insane.

“I can’t do this,” Morgenstern says, standing, “maybe it would be better if you left, uh, Sam, but—”

“No,” Gabriel whines, “I’m sorry. Keep him here. I need to keep—I’m sorry.”

The doctor grimaces. “Don’t apologize, it happens. Are you sure—?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t quite know how he makes it through that part. Pressed to remember it later, actually, he can’t, really, as if the experience were something that happened a long time ago and maybe to someone else. But the doctor’s stripping off his gloves and replacing them, urging him to sit up on the table, put his feet in the stirrups, and that’s the point at which he really blacks out.

Sam’s there when it’s over, wincing and rubbing his hand like a new father. Gabriel scrambles off the table with the doctor still giving him strange looks and collects his clothes. When Morgenstern beckons Sam outside, he’s given the chance to be alone.

The clothes he’s holding are similar to the ones he’d worn before. On and off, on and off, constantly being replaced, nothing ever really changing. He should put them on again. But then he’ll just have to take them off, on and off…

Sam knocks, walks into the room, blinks. His right hand is full of pamphlets in tastefully muted colors. “Um. Do you—need help?”

That snaps Gabriel out of it. He shakes his head, dresses. Goes across the street to the lab. Blood work isn’t so bad. Nothing wrong with a little blood—it’s healthy, really.

*

He’s blind and mute and deaf, but he can still feel them running their hands up and down his body (his body, not him), clammy and curious and cold. They scratch him gently with their nails, tug at his hair until strands come away with little pricks of pain. They open his unseeing eyes and press across the tissue there, curl fingers into his mouth and stretch his cheeks into a grotesque smile, pull his limbs apart so that he sprawls open and empty across the floor.

They whisper things to him, though he can’t understand, only feel the soft brush of air against his ears, or in the cavern of his mouth when they kiss him wide and sloppy.

*

“I told you so,” Gabriel crows as he slams the phone down, “nothing.”

Sam winces, then smiles awkwardly. “Uh, good. That's great, then.”

He crosses his arms and glares. “What, that's all? No sorry I made you go get poked and prodded and probed, here's some chocolate?”

“Look, Gabriel, we couldn't have known without the tests.”

“I knew!”

“Not rea- okay, okay, fine,” because he shouldn't pick fights with the man, not again, “I'm sorry.”

Gabriel nods. “Thank you. And?”

“…Uh.” Gabriel's eyebrows rise expectantly, and what else does Sam have to be sorry for? He'd thought they'd gotten over the pamphlets after the thing yesterday (“Oh, no, Sammy, no problem, just reading about how my experience doesn't make me less of a man. Or gay. Bet you're a real expert on this stuff by now, eh?” and Lucifer had laughed at that and patted Gabriel on the head and made obscene gestures at Sam behind his back, and then Gabriel had crumpled up the papers and thrown them away and bitched about Sam and his mothering tendencies for three hours.) Sam's pretty sure they haven't left anything else out that might have set him off—on the one hand, now Gabriel's actually talking, and on the other he hasn't said anything nice since telling the nurse he wanted Sam in there with him.

“I'm really sorry?” Sam tries, and Gabriel rolls his eyes.

“Can't even follow the script. Second clause.”

Oh. “…I'm not giving you chocolate.”

Gabriel pouts and slouches against the counter. “I know you've got it somewhere. Singer bought some last week. Probably just to taunt me,” he says accusingly.

“It hasn't even been a month yet. No sugars. You could get really sick.”

Gabriel shrugs. “I am really sick.”

“You could die.”

Another shrug. “Medical inaccuracies aside—I can't die.”

“You don't know that.”

“Well, then, let's test it out.”

“No.”

“Sam…”

“I don't care how much of a death wish you have, you're sticking to the diet. Gabriel, you can't even stomach undiluted orange juice.”

“Because it's nasty. And acidic. And I had a death wish nine-hundred and eighty-four days ago. If I wanted to kill myself now, I'd just use Raphael's sword, which you haven't hidden from me and is fact currently on the third bookshelf.”

Sam glances over involuntarily at the chest by the door, because he could have sworn he had hidden it and it was in there. When he looks back over at Gabriel, of course, the man’s smirking. “Or there,” he says, and pushes off the counter to strut to the chest and rifle through its contents. “Never play poker, Sammy.” He comes up with the blade, holding it horizontally in front of his face.

“Gabriel—”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist.” He runs one finger down its length, and his expression pinches off with a frown. “How’d you get it, anyway?”

“…Cas killed him. Uh. Her.”

“And you shopped around for the leftover pieces like teenagers the day after Halloween. Don’t.” He holds the sword up between them after Sam flinches and before he can open his mouth, and twists his mouth bitterly. “It’s just a piece of metal,” and it sounds like he’s reminding himself, “It’s got no loyalty to anything.” He sets it down abruptly on the lid of the chest, and stalks past Sam to his pile of blankets, holding his arms out wide. “See? No death wish.”

Sam’s not quite sure that he believes him.

*

They had come before.

This was unimportant, though, because they were not favored, and therefore they would lose, ancient though they might be. One by one, gone, locked away, diminished. Beating useless hands against the walls of their cages.

But he is free, so why sympathize?

*

The knock comes when they’re all gathered in the living room—Bobby and Sam at the table, Dean sprawled out on the couch, Gabriel in his little nest of blankets and papers by the nice warm fire—and they all look up as if directed in unison. “Who’s that?” Dean asks, still flipping through channels, but sitting up and reaching for the pistol conveniently located on the table beside him.

“Dunno,” Bobby says, “let’s see,” gun of his own stashed not-so-subtly by his waist.

He opens the door, blinks at the guy standing there. “Yes?”

“Hi,” he says, sharp little grin under green eyes. “Good to see you.”

“Do I know you?”

“Nah,” he says, “but I know you. And—” he looks around and spreads his arms theatrically “—it looks like I got all three here. Plus an extra! It’s like a bad deal at the drugstore. Buy three get one free, am I right?”

Bobby’s ready when the punch comes, but he’s entirely unprepared for the strength behind it, and is sent sprawling on the floor. The guy’s grin widens as Sam comes rushing forward, knocking him aside easily and slamming the door.

“Name’s Chet, by the way. Sort of. Not really? This guy’s named Chet, anyway.”

“Christo,” Sam spits out, scrambling up, and Chet laughs.

“Heh, not so much. Damn, those things are nasty, though. Taste like puke and sulfur. Little maggots.” The gunshot echoes through the cabin, and the guy barely moves, but a line of black oozes down from his shoulder. “Nice try, Dean. Not a very good shot, though, are you? I mean, I’d aim for the head.”

Gabriel’s frozen where he sits as the scene plays out, clutching his pen as if it would help him somehow. He’s acutely aware of his headache, of the cuffs around his wrists, of his utter helplessness as Chet slams Dean back into the table by the couch, kicks Bobby into the sink, lifts Sam up by the throat and—opens his mouth, long sharp teeth ringing a gullet that seems to stretch on forever.

Fear opens a pit in Gabriel’s stomach even as he realizes what Chet is, and he’s suddenly, intensely cold. Electricity sparks through his nerves, and yet when he speaks it’s almost entirely calm. “Hey,” he says, stupidly, reaching back across time to awkwardly shape the words of a language already old when he was created. “Big mouth. You Thing One or Thing Two? Nah, the younger one. Too ugly to be one of your brothers. Though I never could tell you nasty primitive excuses for parasites apart.”

Chet drops Sam, leaves him gasping on the floor, and snaps his gaping mouth closed.

“Who the fuck are you?” he smirks, in the same dead language that has the three humans utterly confused, “some cute little scholar? Little scrawny for my taste, but you take what you can get, right? I bet you’ll go down well with a bit of steak sauce. Or cheese—everything goes well with cheese.”

He stalks towards Gabriel, licking his lips. “Did you want to get eaten first, is that it? ‘Cause I can do that. Easy-peasy.”

“Sure you can,” Gabriel replies, clutching his black marker and an empty, worn manila envelope as he stands. Edging around so that his back’s not to the fire, he continues, “If you really feel like it. I mean, we’ll probably be your last meal, yeah? Dumb guy like you, I bet you’re next on big brother’s menu.” Not that he knows that the thing’s not alone. Or that it hasn’t eaten its siblings already.

“Glad you’re up for it,” Chet shrugs, “you think some human throwing insults is gonna faze me, little guy?”

“Didn’t really hope it would,” Gabriel says, “but it did get your attention.”

Raphael’s sword doesn’t kill him—or inconvenience him for very long, really, considering it’s being wielded by Sam—but it does hurt him, just a little, and he howls and curses and knocks Sam back into the wall. He’s managed to keep a hold on the blade, though, which is definitely a good thing considering the intensely pissed-off Leviathan—and Leviathans? What the hell, Winchesters?—coming for him now.

Gabriel spins around to push the envelope against the wall, hesitates for only a moment before he draws long-unneeded lines across the yellow in thick black ink. And hell, he hopes he got it right, because once he closes the circle he’s already sprinting for Chet’s back. This time, he doesn’t trip—not that he’d necessarily been expecting to, but his track record still isn’t quite ninety-nine percent—and he slams with all the basically irrelevant force of his body weight into the monster. Sam’s slashing at the thing, and Dean and Bobby hang on it like insignificant barnacles on a whale—it’s got its hands around Sam’s throat, rapidly choking the life away.

Gabriel cups the paper in one hand and presses it against the bare skin on the back of Chet’s neck.

The Leviathan screams, a true shriek of pain, dropping Sam and allowing him to drive the blade up into his chest. His mouth opens and closes, going from tight-closed lips to human mouth to immense thing in seconds, and he bucks at Gabriel’s contact, kicks Sam away again, shakes Dean and Bobby off. And Gabriel’s nowhere near strong enough to keep hanging on, so he’s thrown too, landing on the floor at Chet’s feet.

Chet’s grimacing and panting out slurred curses. He pulls out the blade, flings it to the side, and whirls sharply around to regard Gabriel’s prone form. “Not just a little scholar, are we?” he snarls, “I’m gonna kill you slowly,” and he advances as Gabriel scuttles away slantwise, crouching behind the couch and still grasping the marker. His palms are sweaty, and he feels almost sick with adrenaline as he pushes himself up to stand.

Fuck this; he’s facing a monster he thought they’d locked away eons ago with no grace, a headache, three broken ribs, and a fucking Sharpie. The toxic smell of burnt Leviathan sits heavily upon his tongue, ratchets up the headache until all he wants to do is sit back down and surrender. Close his eyes and let them do whatever they want to his body (it’s not like it’s his, really, it’s not like they can actually touch him); if he survives, good—if he dies, better. At least it will be done with. He counts the days, but what good does it do, really?

And then the shrill sound in his ears snaps, and everything blinks back into sharp, hyper-focused reality. Because Dean’s lying bruised and sluggish on the floor by the television where Maribel just found out she was pregnant right before the weekend break (Manuel or Gustavo’s child? find out Monday), crotchety old Bobby Singer’s bleeding from the gash on his head where he banged against the counter (hours chopping up potatoes, bananas, carrots), earnest little Sammy’s struggling to take in enough air to stand, fingers reaching desperately for Gabriel’s dead brother’s sword. The analogy doesn’t work. Gabriel’s not the only one about to become a chew toy; Gabriel has no right to sit down and give up.

Which is what he figures later (privately) is what he was thinking, but at the time he didn’t really have much time to think it. The important thing, though, is that he doesn’t collapse into boneless submission, and his desperate lunge over the couch isn’t out of some half-assed impulse to flee out the door of the cabin. He almost faceplants, scrambles awkwardly to grab the discarded paper as Chet catches up with him and grabs triumphantly at his throat. He kicks out uselessly, left hand trying to shove the sigils in Chet’s face, right hand flopping around searching blindly for Raphael’s sword, eyes bulging wide as his trachea starts to compress and shut out his air.

Someone pushes the blade into his hand just as the envelope reaches its mark and Chet flinches back momentarily, and he plunges it through the paper into the Leviathan’s neck.

The monster shudders, sparks, and collapses, lying nearly motionless amid a cloud of noxious smell sizzling up from the place where the black sigils touch its skin. It’s still breathing, still functioning—still twitching a little—but its consciousness is caught somewhere between the holy blade and the crumpled envelope that’s pinned onto it like some sort of bizarre collar.

He’s actually a little surprised that that worked, but he’s not complaining. About that, anyway.

As soon as he gets his voice back and black spots quit blooming in his vision, he sits up, wincing at the pain in his ribs that he suddenly notices rather sharply again. He takes a couple good, deep breaths, looks around at the three humans slowly coming to their feet, and proceeds to curse at them nonstop for several minutes.

He’s pretty sure Sam and Bobby caught some of the Latin and Greek, but judging from the blank looks on their faces the rest of it flew happily over their heads. (Dean’s blank look is basically par for the course. Which may be somewhat unfair, but there’s something else here that’s much less fair.)

He finishes his tirade, pauses, looks back down at the prone monster, and then (with so much restraint) says, “Leviathan.”

He nods to himself, taking in the absolute mess that they’ve made of the room, the ever-increasing pains and aches he’s slowly beginning to feel.

Then he uses English. “You stupid sons-of-bitches. You slimy, pink excuses for two-footed donkeys, you miserable masses of inbred, poorly mutated bacteria, you—” and while they may understand him, it’s not actually as satisfying, so he stops. His gaze settles on Sam. “—how the ever-loving fuck did you manage to piss off a Leviathan?”

“It wasn’t me this time—”

Gabriel’s eyes narrow. “Somebody going around opening Purgatory—I assume that’s how it got out? Something that profoundly idiotic has to be connected with you two morons…oh, shit. I think I know this story. Castiel or Raphael?”

They all flinch, slightly. “…Cas,” Dean says.

“So that’s how he kicked it?”

“Yeah,” he mutters, looking suddenly very tired. “Yeah, they just—possessed him.”

Gabriel frowns. “If he was just possessed…?”

Dean’s eyes shift from staring at Chet to meet Gabriel’s. “They said he was dead.”

He doesn’t contest it. “…Poor fucker. And I get to clean up the mess. Y’know, I thought the Talmud would be just as much bull as Revelations by the time you lot were done screwing around with all the shit you could lay your hands on. I mean, it’s not even prophecy. I want—hell.” He levers himself to his feet. “I want chocolate. A lot of chocolate. And then we’re going to tie this fucker up, and see how much he knows, and see how much they know, and then we’re going to shove their asses all the way to Purgatory where they belong. Got it? Ow.” He makes a face. “Fucking ribs.”

He’s allowed one square, per Bobby’s constantly over-cautious orders, and so he doesn’t actually bite it—just holds it in one hand, lets it melt onto his fingers, then transfers it to the other and licks the melted bit off his skin. It’s rich and dark and lovely, a taste so much more intense in his semi-human state—just as every sensation is so much more intense when he doesn’t have the option to change it. Doesn’t quite make up for the fact that he’s probably set himself back a couple weeks on his ribs, though, and honestly he feels a bit like a dog. Says as much; “So I fetch the duck and get a treat?”

Bobby just snorts. “Don’t be stupid. Got sick of your whining. And I figure if you’re well enough to beat up Mr. Tall-Black-and-Slimy, you’re well enough to eat a little more.”

Gabriel’s perfectly content not to comment on the man’s faulty logic, if it gets him chocolate.

“So,” he says a few minutes later, gazing forlornly at his licked-clean fingers, “no chance of another?”

“Nope.”

Gabriel puffs out his cheeks in a wide pout, then sighs, right before Sam comes trailing Dean through the door to the basement. “He’s all inked up,” Dean says, “chained, too, and we took the sword out and he didn’t wake up, so—I figure we wait, right?”

“Sounds about right,” Bobby nods. “And lay low for a bit, until we find out if the rest of them know we’re here.”

“Great,” Dean says, “who’s up for dinner?”

*

There’s something different.

It’s not that he’d fallen asleep in front of the fire, or that he’s woken up there, with the pale sunlight filtering through the windows and Dean snoring intermittently on the couch. It’s not that it’s past dawn and they’re all still not out of bed—it happens occasionally, despite the odd hours they (Bobby especially) tend to keep. It’s definitely not the piles of dirty dishes stacked by the sink waiting for someone to get tired of them sitting there and clean up.

He lies there for several long minutes, considering. He wiggles his toes—no change there—stretches out his calves and thighs, which ache slightly from the beating he’d taken the evening before. When he twists his torso, his ribs twinge; he still hears his heart beating a little too loudly. His lips are as dry as they always are when he wakes up, and he has to curl his neck down and around to relieve a slight crick.

Something shifts over to his right, and he looks over. Sam’s curled up awkwardly on the lower bunk bed, hair mussed and eyes just opening, and he stops moving when he meets Gabriel’s eyes. They blink at each other for a long moment, and that’s when Gabriel realizes.

His head doesn’t hurt.

Not even the echo of a pang somewhere deep behind his forehead, not even the light constant pressure that persists even on his best days, not even the buzzing whine that isn’t exactly pain but still somehow digs in and muddles his thoughts. He feels downright divine, and at the epiphany he smiles.

Sam probably thinks he’s smiling at him, and curls the edge of his mouth up too—and, Gabriel figures, why shouldn’t the smile be for them both? “Morning,” he murmurs, and Sam smiles a little wider, swings his over-long legs off the bed so that he’s sitting up and looking down.

“Morning,” he replies, then stands, takes the few steps over until he’s crouching by Gabriel’s head. He holds out a hand.

Gabriel takes it, and sets his knees under him before he lets Sam heft him up to standing. The blankets fall away and twist around his feet, and he steps delicately out of them, shivering as his sole lands on the chilly cement floor. Sam grips his hand a little tighter, and he tenses only slightly before relaxing into the hold.

“You alright?” Sam asks, sincere and sweet as ever, and Gabriel looks over the dusty cabin, the broken chairs still not cleared away, over Dean’s rumpled head just stirring on the couch; he looks over his scattered piles of paper, his nest of old, flat pillows and scratchy wool blankets; he looks over his cold feet, his aching legs, his wrists still trapped in unforgiving metal; he overlooks them all.

“You know,” he says, as the dim winter sunlight moves to slant across his vision, “I think I will be.”