It's a Long Walk Back to Eden: Part II
Rec'd listening: Radiohead - Electioneering.
Sam doesn’t burn the body.
Could be he’s listening to Gabriel. Could be he just doesn’t have the energy to build a pyre, today. He’s always looked at pyres as more of a two-man job.
♤ ♤ ♤
The diner isn’t much, rotting rafters and a healthy dose of mildew, but the back-up generator out back and the piddling little meat locker on the inside are enough for his needs. The generator spews smoke and gunk as it purges six months of disuse, but it looks like it’ll survive on the second-hand gas he’s siphoned from the Impala’s tank. It’s enough.
Every breaker in the circuit box goes off but the main and the meat locker. That’s where he puts Cas, neatly arranged between the empty metal racks, and with only a passing thought on the serious morbidity of the whole thing he’s turning to leave.
It’s the door that snags him. He’s got his fingers on the handle when he thinks, abruptly, I could’ve caught him. He lingers in the stifling, clammy humidity of the room. Yeah. Could’ve. Could’ve followed Cas right out the door he’d chased him through. Could’ve tackled him before he even got there - thrown him down and held him until he heard the stupid goddamn words coming out of his mouth, misanthropic son of a bitch--
Castiel. Cas. His stupid brother’s stupid little stoic angel. Cas, the off-and-on alcoholic, trying on human addictions and affectations and emotions like clothes and shrugging them off just as easily. Cas who he couldn’t trust to drive anywhere, ‘cause he’d just-- stop, Sam stirring awake in the passenger seat to the Impala idling on gravel and Cas standing out on some rise, staring blankly at the sky or an empty field. Looking small. Small, small, small. Little grounded human Cas.
And now Cas just-sits there, small, and Sam stands, just as still and motionless under the cold rush of air from the shuddering vent, stands until the claustrophobia’s worked under his skin and through, until he’s fumbling for the handle, shoving out the door, stumbling through the kitchen and escaping into muggy miserable empty fucking night.
“Gabriel! Come on, you son of a bitch!” He slams his fist against the side of the restaurant, drawing a rattle out of the loose porch light overhead. “GABRIEL!”
He shouts it until he’s hoarse. The bastard doesn’t show.
♤ ♤ ♤
Sam wakes to dark and Gabriel saying, “You’ve got this moping thing down.” He’s framed by the interior light of the kitchen’s conventional refrigerator, which had, when Sam had fallen asleep in the corner, been unplugged. There are two bottles in his hand when he turns back. It’s too dark to read the label, but it’s pretty clearly beer.
What the hell. Sam takes it by the neck and pries off the cap with sleep-numbed fingers. The cold’s just enough to loosen up his tongue for a curt, “Leave me alone.”
“Hey, you called me, remember?”
“You didn’t come,” Sam accuses.
“I’m not Lassie,” Gabriel sneers back. “’sides, I was getting some things together.”
“And I was thinking, you don’t give a shit what happened to Cas. You’re just-whatever you are. Bored. Gloating. I don’t care. Do it somewhere else.”
“Sure. What with the Michael-Lucifer throwdown, world’s boring these days.” He gives a staged sigh, kicks his volume up. “Humans these days. They’re so close-minded about this whole ‘death’ thing.”
“I get it.” That’s as far as he’ll let the bait take him. “Why are you here?”
“I owe you half a favor,” Gabriel finally admits. And of course he spins it to sound condescending: “Your brother’s done his part, getting this familial bullshit over with. I reward good behavior. Indirectly, in this case.”
Sam bumps his shoulder against the nearest wall. “He’s fighting your war for you.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s fighting it,” he leers.
Sam spins his anger out in silence - twists the bottle once, twice in its ring of condensation on the floor. Gabriel keeps talking, of course, can’t fucking shut up: “And you were something yourself, back in the day. I heard you and the Boy Scout in there had a sizeable role in keeping those Croatoan nasties from running amok in the world. With a little help from the big boys, of course.”
“We stopped some outliers,” Sam answers flatly. “Michael razed a fucking city.”
“They’re big believers in collateral damage,” Gabriel says around his best shit-eating grin. He looks Sam over more carefully. “Can’t say I’m impressed with how you’ve turned out. Poor time for retirement, don’t you think?”
At that, Sam goes still. He looks up, watching the archangel with flat resentment.
Gabriel drops to his mirthless smirk. “You made a mistake. Or, you think you did, and that’s all that matters with you guilty types. I’m willing to give you the opportunity to fix it, because I am just that good. My only question for you is, would you take it?”
“Take what?”
“The chance to revive your meat popsicle, in there. Answer right. Once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Sam takes a slow glance at the freezer door. There’s a little too much locked up in there - in him - for a right answer. It’s just-fuck. He doesn’t know. Except he does, or some part of him does, because his mouth speaks for him: “Yeah-“ He pauses, but doesn’t contradict, just affirms, “Yes. But why the hell do you--”
Gabriel cuts him off. “See, this is why no one can have a rational conversation with you mortals. It’s always why, why, why. Just accept, okay? Now.” He cups a hand around his ear and leans forward in an exaggeration of intent listening.
Sam glares at him before finally announcing, “So Cas isn’t dead.”
Gabriel rolls back, bumping his back against the metal of the fridge. “Oh, he’s dead. Dead as a doorpost. Far as you’re concerned, anyway.”
“Then he’s in Heaven.”
Gabriel laces his fingers around the neck of his bottle. “And just guess who put him there.”
“Michael? Hell if I know. Like you said, the whole Host wants him-“ Sam stops, squints. “Oh.”
“By god, I think he’s got it. Yessir - it was Zach’s boys that done dragged him up there.”
“Petty,” Sam mutters, and draws out the next mouthful of beer. He hits dregs. Gabriel obliges him with another. He flicks the cap at the far wall and says, “So, what - he’s back in angelic Alcatraz?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Zach’s benched and bored, these days - Michael’s orders, or so I heard. He’ll have his own little Disneyland planned out.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
Gabriel shrugs in the dark, answering with an aloof, “Where’s that moronic ‘Go-to’ attitude I know and love?”
“Humans don’t just go waltzing into Heaven, alright? There’s this little thing about dying--”
“Ways around it,” he interjects.
“-and even if I do get there, I’m not an angel. I’ve got no clue where to start looking. I don’t even know how to look-“
“Oh, you don’t have to twist my arm, I’ll go with you.” He throws out his arms, sloshing beer across the floor when he does. “I’ll be your Sancho Panza, your Sacaga-fuckin’-wea.”
Sam watches him narrowly. “Thought you were in self-imposed exile.”
“Don’t know if you noticed, kiddo, but Heaven’s empty. They’re all down here, fighting Daddy’s war.” He considers. “Well, mostly empty. Few guards we’ll have to slip past. No big deal.”
“You know that saying about something being ‘too good to be true’?”
“Heard another one about not lookin’ a gift horse in the mouth,” he answers around a swallow of beer.
Sam finally bothers to sit forward and look him in the eye. “I think you’re going to waste my time, same as you always do. Throw me into some stupid playworld-“
Gabriel’s voice has dropped to something darker when he leans forward to match. “World’s hit the expiration date, Sammy. I don’t have time for that anymore.”
“Yeah, expiring as we speak.” He slumps back. “So we’re back at why you care if Castiel’s alive or not.”
“I’ve got other business up there, if you must insist. But don’t worry. I’ll get you to ‘Cas’.”
“And what then? How exactly am I supposed to deal with Zachariah of the Six Wings and the Four Faces-“
Gabriel scoffs. “He tell you that? Lying bastard. He’s got four wings on a good day.”
Sam scowls at him, adding, “And how am I supposed to get back?”
“Return trip, I can guarantee. As for the rest - well, I say worry about that when you get to it. Oh, by the way, Columbo left this-“ he drops a surprisingly heavy sword in Sam’s lap “-back at the slaughterhouse.”
Sam picks it up and turns it over, studying the simple, perfectly-crafted lines of Castiel’s sword. Then he turns the hilt back to Gabriel and asks, “Can you keep it with you, for now?”
And there’s that grin again; this one spells out ‘atta-boy.’ “Why not?”
With a spring, the archangel’s on his feet and the sword’s gone from Sam’s hands. It disappears into the inside of Gabriel’s jacket; Gabriel himself disappears through the double doors that lead into the dining room.
Sam takes the rest of his beer in three slow swigs and stands to follow.
Gabriel’s bellowing through the doors, “A few ground rules first. Just in case we get separated.” The snap of fingers and blinding light greets him; that and the molded green of the linoleum, garish under fluorescent bulbs. “Here,” Gabriel announces cheerfully, and lobs a bright red bottle at his chest. “Art time.”
Sam catches it on reflex. It’s ketchup, good old traditional Heinz.
Gabriel kicks a chair out of the way to clear up a patch of floor before he bends over with his own condiment - in his case, mustard - in hand. He sketches a sigil across the floor: Enochian-based sigils worked into a framework of concentric circles, a few Sam recognizes, others that not even Sam ever figured out the meaning for. His motions are quick and efficient, like a guy scrawling his signature.
When he’s finished, he gestures to each symbol in turn. “Air, fire, sight, strength. Sight’s what you need.”
Sam motions towards one particularly suspicious sigil. “I thought that meant ‘goose’.”
“Yeah, well, Dad didn’t make your lot smart. Here.” He makes a gesture at Sam’s arm; it’s mostly on reflex that he puts it forward a little and says, “What?” Just as quickly, he’s hissing, “Ow,” as Gabriel slices his wrist open with a knife that he wasn’t holding three seconds ago, leaving a bloom of blood in its wake. The archangel swipes a fingerful of it before going back to his art. “You couldn’t just summon some?” Sam asks, wrapping the offended limb up in his shirt.
“Gotta figure out what kind of game Zach’s playing,” Gabriel says, dutifully ignoring him while he superimposes two more symbols over the original sketch. “I got my hunches, but omniscient I’m not.” He pauses mid-sketch. “You want the Vulcan mindmeld, or should I?” Appraising Sam’s dubious scowl, he grins. “Aw, you look like you wanna. Here ya go.” He draws one more symbol, this one connecting the two via its jagged outer ring.
“Castiel,” he says, pointing to the top. “Mind,” he says, pointing to the bottom. For the middle, he says, “Mud-monkey. Get your right hand nice and bloody; heel over mud-monkey, fingers over Cas. Probably wanna close your eyes.”
Sam stares at the mess of mustard and blood, eyes narrowed. “What is this supposed to do, exactly?”
“You’ll see. C’mon, don’t got all night.”
He gives Gabriel one long, gauging look while he uses his left hand to drag some of the still-leaking blood up over his palm and fingers. Gabriel stares obligingly back, ambivalent as ever.
With a staying breath, Sam presses his palm to the sigil.
Nothing happens.
He glances at Gabriel, hesitant. “I think you-“ He doesn’t finish. In a span of milliseconds, that bland face gets washed out in blinding white; Sam throws a hand up over his eyes, making a startled, pained noise. He’s distantly aware of Gabriel smugly announcing, “Told you to close your eyes.”
There’s something under his knees, but it’s not tiled floor (grass? No; something--) shifting. Jarring. The light doesn’t dim, only grows brighter, painfully so, and something speaks. A dozen voices thrown together - he knows outside of this it’d be noise to his ears, Angel-speak, but here it’s words: In the beginning, there was Light.
The voice laughs in the too-bright emptiness.
Oh. You weren’t around for that part, were you?
Stop-- A closer, smaller voice. He recognizes it even when he doesn’t. He says Cas, but there’s no sound. He’s an observer, locked in neutral.
Fingers card through his hair and dig in, deep enough to draw blood. Let’s start somewhere relevant, the voice says, too close, and the fingers tear through and-
Warm, strong fingers grab his wrist and jerk it aside. He blinks away the bright, staring down at the smeared sigils on the floor. They’re no longer readable.
Gabriel lets go of his hand. “So, what’s the tricky bastard up to?”
“Don’t know,” he mutters, dragging his hand up with suddenly shaking muscles. “Something was talking. I guess it was Zachariah. He grabbed my head - uh, Cas’s? Felt like he was digging through my skull.”
Three taps of his finger against the tile. “Alright.” He picks up the mustard bottle and swipes a hand through the air above the ruined sigil; the floor’s scrubbed clean again.
“No, not alright,” Sam says, rubbing his still-bloody hand across his jeans. “What’s he doing?”
“Mock-trial.” He waves a hand. “Court-martial, tribunal, whatever you want to call it - when you pull an offense in the almighty eyes of Heaven’s precocious bastards, you have a right to fair trial before your peers. Except your only character witnesses are your own memories, yanked out for all to see in high definition. It’s a bit of a mind-fuck. Zachariah knows the procedure front and back, I’m sure.”
Sam presses his hand to the back of his skull, an unconscious sympathetic gesture. “So he’s gonna drag him through his own memories.”
“Probably. All the real nasty ones. The nice thing is, he’ll leave a trail. He’s got to create some dioramas out of your boy’s head. You’ll be able to follow them, leapfrog-style.”
“Like the axis mundi.”
Gabriel looks him over, reassessing him, then shrugs. “Yeah, pretty much, minus all the fluffy little fond memories. There are a couple of ways to follow it. ‘Course, I’m fastest. I’ll try to keep a hold on you, but things happen, slow mud-monkeys fall behind-best you know the back-up ways. Alright, here’s the base-“ Gabriel draws two circles, and a pentagram to encircle them. He points towards Sam. “Draw me the sigil for Castiel. That one’s important; specific to him alone. Zach’s, too.”
He obliges with the ketchup, and mostly succeeds; there’s one line in the Zachariah sigil that Gabriel smudges and corrects before making him draw it three more times.
“What’s yours?” Sam asks while he works.
“Classified,” Gabriel answers. “Alright, that’s good enough for government work. You wanna follow Cas, put his name here--” he points to the top of the construct, then drops his fingers to the bottom “-and mud-monkey here. You remember that one? Yeah, right, draw it anyway.”
He bites his tongue and draws. On a safer topic, “And how are we getting there, again?”
“Let me worry about that. Ok, draw the whole thing. Zachariah, this time. Not that you’ll want to. He’ll probably charcoal your ass if you pop up at his- oh, c’mon, faster! Christ, you’re slow.”
He keeps up the commentary about Sam’s arthritic palsy through two more repetitions, then he drops back with what could pass for a look of satisfaction under about sixteen layers of consternation. “Alrighty then. Here.”
Sam catches the flask that the angel chucks at him reflexively. It’s silver, tarnished at that, but there’s a lot of painstaking detail worked into the filigree wrapped over its surface. On the edges, there’s Enochian worked into the leaves and vines. “What’s this?”
“Honey, rosemary, manna of the gods-- Don’t worry about it. Thing you need to know is, it’s your key to the kingdom. That’s what you’re going to be drawing your sigils with.” When he sees Sam unscrewing the cap, he warns, “Once it’s gone, it’s gone. So don’t waste it.”
He only takes a testing sniff - it’s sickly sweet - before replacing the cap. “How do I finish the sigil?”
“Ring finger here, index finger here.” He points to two points of the center star. “Thumb here.” The bottom. “Lucky you, no blood.” He squints at Sam, looking doubtful. “You got all this? ‘Cause I’m not coming back for your ass when you-“
“I got it.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of Dodge. Sit back, eyes closed. No-“ Sam’s moving to pocket the flask. “Keep it in your hand.”
Sam falls back on his heels, the silver flask heavy in his hand. He stares at Gabriel’s smug face long and hard, and then he takes one shifting glance towards the meat locker door. It’s nothing but a bit of chrome shine beyond the sagging double doors.
He breathes slow and closes his eyes.
Nothing happens - not immediately. Instead his pain-in-the-ass guide’s saying, “You ready? ‘Cause once this baby hits 88 miles an hour-“
“Oh, for the love of-“
Gabriel scowls and pokes two fingers to his forehead. “Shut up and hold still.” He says three words in Enochian. Then he says, “Bang.”
Part I | Part II | Part III
Sam doesn’t burn the body.
Could be he’s listening to Gabriel. Could be he just doesn’t have the energy to build a pyre, today. He’s always looked at pyres as more of a two-man job.
♤ ♤ ♤
The diner isn’t much, rotting rafters and a healthy dose of mildew, but the back-up generator out back and the piddling little meat locker on the inside are enough for his needs. The generator spews smoke and gunk as it purges six months of disuse, but it looks like it’ll survive on the second-hand gas he’s siphoned from the Impala’s tank. It’s enough.
Every breaker in the circuit box goes off but the main and the meat locker. That’s where he puts Cas, neatly arranged between the empty metal racks, and with only a passing thought on the serious morbidity of the whole thing he’s turning to leave.
It’s the door that snags him. He’s got his fingers on the handle when he thinks, abruptly, I could’ve caught him. He lingers in the stifling, clammy humidity of the room. Yeah. Could’ve. Could’ve followed Cas right out the door he’d chased him through. Could’ve tackled him before he even got there - thrown him down and held him until he heard the stupid goddamn words coming out of his mouth, misanthropic son of a bitch--
Castiel. Cas. His stupid brother’s stupid little stoic angel. Cas, the off-and-on alcoholic, trying on human addictions and affectations and emotions like clothes and shrugging them off just as easily. Cas who he couldn’t trust to drive anywhere, ‘cause he’d just-- stop, Sam stirring awake in the passenger seat to the Impala idling on gravel and Cas standing out on some rise, staring blankly at the sky or an empty field. Looking small. Small, small, small. Little grounded human Cas.
And now Cas just-sits there, small, and Sam stands, just as still and motionless under the cold rush of air from the shuddering vent, stands until the claustrophobia’s worked under his skin and through, until he’s fumbling for the handle, shoving out the door, stumbling through the kitchen and escaping into muggy miserable empty fucking night.
“Gabriel! Come on, you son of a bitch!” He slams his fist against the side of the restaurant, drawing a rattle out of the loose porch light overhead. “GABRIEL!”
He shouts it until he’s hoarse. The bastard doesn’t show.
♤ ♤ ♤
Sam wakes to dark and Gabriel saying, “You’ve got this moping thing down.” He’s framed by the interior light of the kitchen’s conventional refrigerator, which had, when Sam had fallen asleep in the corner, been unplugged. There are two bottles in his hand when he turns back. It’s too dark to read the label, but it’s pretty clearly beer.
What the hell. Sam takes it by the neck and pries off the cap with sleep-numbed fingers. The cold’s just enough to loosen up his tongue for a curt, “Leave me alone.”
“Hey, you called me, remember?”
“You didn’t come,” Sam accuses.
“I’m not Lassie,” Gabriel sneers back. “’sides, I was getting some things together.”
“And I was thinking, you don’t give a shit what happened to Cas. You’re just-whatever you are. Bored. Gloating. I don’t care. Do it somewhere else.”
“Sure. What with the Michael-Lucifer throwdown, world’s boring these days.” He gives a staged sigh, kicks his volume up. “Humans these days. They’re so close-minded about this whole ‘death’ thing.”
“I get it.” That’s as far as he’ll let the bait take him. “Why are you here?”
“I owe you half a favor,” Gabriel finally admits. And of course he spins it to sound condescending: “Your brother’s done his part, getting this familial bullshit over with. I reward good behavior. Indirectly, in this case.”
Sam bumps his shoulder against the nearest wall. “He’s fighting your war for you.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s fighting it,” he leers.
Sam spins his anger out in silence - twists the bottle once, twice in its ring of condensation on the floor. Gabriel keeps talking, of course, can’t fucking shut up: “And you were something yourself, back in the day. I heard you and the Boy Scout in there had a sizeable role in keeping those Croatoan nasties from running amok in the world. With a little help from the big boys, of course.”
“We stopped some outliers,” Sam answers flatly. “Michael razed a fucking city.”
“They’re big believers in collateral damage,” Gabriel says around his best shit-eating grin. He looks Sam over more carefully. “Can’t say I’m impressed with how you’ve turned out. Poor time for retirement, don’t you think?”
At that, Sam goes still. He looks up, watching the archangel with flat resentment.
Gabriel drops to his mirthless smirk. “You made a mistake. Or, you think you did, and that’s all that matters with you guilty types. I’m willing to give you the opportunity to fix it, because I am just that good. My only question for you is, would you take it?”
“Take what?”
“The chance to revive your meat popsicle, in there. Answer right. Once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Sam takes a slow glance at the freezer door. There’s a little too much locked up in there - in him - for a right answer. It’s just-fuck. He doesn’t know. Except he does, or some part of him does, because his mouth speaks for him: “Yeah-“ He pauses, but doesn’t contradict, just affirms, “Yes. But why the hell do you--”
Gabriel cuts him off. “See, this is why no one can have a rational conversation with you mortals. It’s always why, why, why. Just accept, okay? Now.” He cups a hand around his ear and leans forward in an exaggeration of intent listening.
Sam glares at him before finally announcing, “So Cas isn’t dead.”
Gabriel rolls back, bumping his back against the metal of the fridge. “Oh, he’s dead. Dead as a doorpost. Far as you’re concerned, anyway.”
“Then he’s in Heaven.”
Gabriel laces his fingers around the neck of his bottle. “And just guess who put him there.”
“Michael? Hell if I know. Like you said, the whole Host wants him-“ Sam stops, squints. “Oh.”
“By god, I think he’s got it. Yessir - it was Zach’s boys that done dragged him up there.”
“Petty,” Sam mutters, and draws out the next mouthful of beer. He hits dregs. Gabriel obliges him with another. He flicks the cap at the far wall and says, “So, what - he’s back in angelic Alcatraz?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Zach’s benched and bored, these days - Michael’s orders, or so I heard. He’ll have his own little Disneyland planned out.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
Gabriel shrugs in the dark, answering with an aloof, “Where’s that moronic ‘Go-to’ attitude I know and love?”
“Humans don’t just go waltzing into Heaven, alright? There’s this little thing about dying--”
“Ways around it,” he interjects.
“-and even if I do get there, I’m not an angel. I’ve got no clue where to start looking. I don’t even know how to look-“
“Oh, you don’t have to twist my arm, I’ll go with you.” He throws out his arms, sloshing beer across the floor when he does. “I’ll be your Sancho Panza, your Sacaga-fuckin’-wea.”
Sam watches him narrowly. “Thought you were in self-imposed exile.”
“Don’t know if you noticed, kiddo, but Heaven’s empty. They’re all down here, fighting Daddy’s war.” He considers. “Well, mostly empty. Few guards we’ll have to slip past. No big deal.”
“You know that saying about something being ‘too good to be true’?”
“Heard another one about not lookin’ a gift horse in the mouth,” he answers around a swallow of beer.
Sam finally bothers to sit forward and look him in the eye. “I think you’re going to waste my time, same as you always do. Throw me into some stupid playworld-“
Gabriel’s voice has dropped to something darker when he leans forward to match. “World’s hit the expiration date, Sammy. I don’t have time for that anymore.”
“Yeah, expiring as we speak.” He slumps back. “So we’re back at why you care if Castiel’s alive or not.”
“I’ve got other business up there, if you must insist. But don’t worry. I’ll get you to ‘Cas’.”
“And what then? How exactly am I supposed to deal with Zachariah of the Six Wings and the Four Faces-“
Gabriel scoffs. “He tell you that? Lying bastard. He’s got four wings on a good day.”
Sam scowls at him, adding, “And how am I supposed to get back?”
“Return trip, I can guarantee. As for the rest - well, I say worry about that when you get to it. Oh, by the way, Columbo left this-“ he drops a surprisingly heavy sword in Sam’s lap “-back at the slaughterhouse.”
Sam picks it up and turns it over, studying the simple, perfectly-crafted lines of Castiel’s sword. Then he turns the hilt back to Gabriel and asks, “Can you keep it with you, for now?”
And there’s that grin again; this one spells out ‘atta-boy.’ “Why not?”
With a spring, the archangel’s on his feet and the sword’s gone from Sam’s hands. It disappears into the inside of Gabriel’s jacket; Gabriel himself disappears through the double doors that lead into the dining room.
Sam takes the rest of his beer in three slow swigs and stands to follow.
Gabriel’s bellowing through the doors, “A few ground rules first. Just in case we get separated.” The snap of fingers and blinding light greets him; that and the molded green of the linoleum, garish under fluorescent bulbs. “Here,” Gabriel announces cheerfully, and lobs a bright red bottle at his chest. “Art time.”
Sam catches it on reflex. It’s ketchup, good old traditional Heinz.
Gabriel kicks a chair out of the way to clear up a patch of floor before he bends over with his own condiment - in his case, mustard - in hand. He sketches a sigil across the floor: Enochian-based sigils worked into a framework of concentric circles, a few Sam recognizes, others that not even Sam ever figured out the meaning for. His motions are quick and efficient, like a guy scrawling his signature.
When he’s finished, he gestures to each symbol in turn. “Air, fire, sight, strength. Sight’s what you need.”
Sam motions towards one particularly suspicious sigil. “I thought that meant ‘goose’.”
“Yeah, well, Dad didn’t make your lot smart. Here.” He makes a gesture at Sam’s arm; it’s mostly on reflex that he puts it forward a little and says, “What?” Just as quickly, he’s hissing, “Ow,” as Gabriel slices his wrist open with a knife that he wasn’t holding three seconds ago, leaving a bloom of blood in its wake. The archangel swipes a fingerful of it before going back to his art. “You couldn’t just summon some?” Sam asks, wrapping the offended limb up in his shirt.
“Gotta figure out what kind of game Zach’s playing,” Gabriel says, dutifully ignoring him while he superimposes two more symbols over the original sketch. “I got my hunches, but omniscient I’m not.” He pauses mid-sketch. “You want the Vulcan mindmeld, or should I?” Appraising Sam’s dubious scowl, he grins. “Aw, you look like you wanna. Here ya go.” He draws one more symbol, this one connecting the two via its jagged outer ring.
“Castiel,” he says, pointing to the top. “Mind,” he says, pointing to the bottom. For the middle, he says, “Mud-monkey. Get your right hand nice and bloody; heel over mud-monkey, fingers over Cas. Probably wanna close your eyes.”
Sam stares at the mess of mustard and blood, eyes narrowed. “What is this supposed to do, exactly?”
“You’ll see. C’mon, don’t got all night.”
He gives Gabriel one long, gauging look while he uses his left hand to drag some of the still-leaking blood up over his palm and fingers. Gabriel stares obligingly back, ambivalent as ever.
With a staying breath, Sam presses his palm to the sigil.
Nothing happens.
He glances at Gabriel, hesitant. “I think you-“ He doesn’t finish. In a span of milliseconds, that bland face gets washed out in blinding white; Sam throws a hand up over his eyes, making a startled, pained noise. He’s distantly aware of Gabriel smugly announcing, “Told you to close your eyes.”
There’s something under his knees, but it’s not tiled floor (grass? No; something--) shifting. Jarring. The light doesn’t dim, only grows brighter, painfully so, and something speaks. A dozen voices thrown together - he knows outside of this it’d be noise to his ears, Angel-speak, but here it’s words: In the beginning, there was Light.
The voice laughs in the too-bright emptiness.
Oh. You weren’t around for that part, were you?
Stop-- A closer, smaller voice. He recognizes it even when he doesn’t. He says Cas, but there’s no sound. He’s an observer, locked in neutral.
Fingers card through his hair and dig in, deep enough to draw blood. Let’s start somewhere relevant, the voice says, too close, and the fingers tear through and-
Warm, strong fingers grab his wrist and jerk it aside. He blinks away the bright, staring down at the smeared sigils on the floor. They’re no longer readable.
Gabriel lets go of his hand. “So, what’s the tricky bastard up to?”
“Don’t know,” he mutters, dragging his hand up with suddenly shaking muscles. “Something was talking. I guess it was Zachariah. He grabbed my head - uh, Cas’s? Felt like he was digging through my skull.”
Three taps of his finger against the tile. “Alright.” He picks up the mustard bottle and swipes a hand through the air above the ruined sigil; the floor’s scrubbed clean again.
“No, not alright,” Sam says, rubbing his still-bloody hand across his jeans. “What’s he doing?”
“Mock-trial.” He waves a hand. “Court-martial, tribunal, whatever you want to call it - when you pull an offense in the almighty eyes of Heaven’s precocious bastards, you have a right to fair trial before your peers. Except your only character witnesses are your own memories, yanked out for all to see in high definition. It’s a bit of a mind-fuck. Zachariah knows the procedure front and back, I’m sure.”
Sam presses his hand to the back of his skull, an unconscious sympathetic gesture. “So he’s gonna drag him through his own memories.”
“Probably. All the real nasty ones. The nice thing is, he’ll leave a trail. He’s got to create some dioramas out of your boy’s head. You’ll be able to follow them, leapfrog-style.”
“Like the axis mundi.”
Gabriel looks him over, reassessing him, then shrugs. “Yeah, pretty much, minus all the fluffy little fond memories. There are a couple of ways to follow it. ‘Course, I’m fastest. I’ll try to keep a hold on you, but things happen, slow mud-monkeys fall behind-best you know the back-up ways. Alright, here’s the base-“ Gabriel draws two circles, and a pentagram to encircle them. He points towards Sam. “Draw me the sigil for Castiel. That one’s important; specific to him alone. Zach’s, too.”
He obliges with the ketchup, and mostly succeeds; there’s one line in the Zachariah sigil that Gabriel smudges and corrects before making him draw it three more times.
“What’s yours?” Sam asks while he works.
“Classified,” Gabriel answers. “Alright, that’s good enough for government work. You wanna follow Cas, put his name here--” he points to the top of the construct, then drops his fingers to the bottom “-and mud-monkey here. You remember that one? Yeah, right, draw it anyway.”
He bites his tongue and draws. On a safer topic, “And how are we getting there, again?”
“Let me worry about that. Ok, draw the whole thing. Zachariah, this time. Not that you’ll want to. He’ll probably charcoal your ass if you pop up at his- oh, c’mon, faster! Christ, you’re slow.”
He keeps up the commentary about Sam’s arthritic palsy through two more repetitions, then he drops back with what could pass for a look of satisfaction under about sixteen layers of consternation. “Alrighty then. Here.”
Sam catches the flask that the angel chucks at him reflexively. It’s silver, tarnished at that, but there’s a lot of painstaking detail worked into the filigree wrapped over its surface. On the edges, there’s Enochian worked into the leaves and vines. “What’s this?”
“Honey, rosemary, manna of the gods-- Don’t worry about it. Thing you need to know is, it’s your key to the kingdom. That’s what you’re going to be drawing your sigils with.” When he sees Sam unscrewing the cap, he warns, “Once it’s gone, it’s gone. So don’t waste it.”
He only takes a testing sniff - it’s sickly sweet - before replacing the cap. “How do I finish the sigil?”
“Ring finger here, index finger here.” He points to two points of the center star. “Thumb here.” The bottom. “Lucky you, no blood.” He squints at Sam, looking doubtful. “You got all this? ‘Cause I’m not coming back for your ass when you-“
“I got it.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of Dodge. Sit back, eyes closed. No-“ Sam’s moving to pocket the flask. “Keep it in your hand.”
Sam falls back on his heels, the silver flask heavy in his hand. He stares at Gabriel’s smug face long and hard, and then he takes one shifting glance towards the meat locker door. It’s nothing but a bit of chrome shine beyond the sagging double doors.
He breathes slow and closes his eyes.
Nothing happens - not immediately. Instead his pain-in-the-ass guide’s saying, “You ready? ‘Cause once this baby hits 88 miles an hour-“
“Oh, for the love of-“
Gabriel scowls and pokes two fingers to his forehead. “Shut up and hold still.” He says three words in Enochian. Then he says, “Bang.”
Part I | Part II | Part III