The Blind Side 13/?
Chapters 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
Tillie picked up her cane and walked away from Gabriel, tension in her shoulders as she sensed the fact the he was going to leave shortly to go meet with Raphael. Reaching the kitchen counter, she leaned against it, letting out a small sigh as she rubbed the back of her neck. It’s not that she didn’t want him to meet with his brother. She just didn’t want to be left alone. She knew from her visions that at some point, Cas or Eve was going to manage to take her away and she doubted it would be when Gabriel was here with her.
As she felt arms snake around her waist from behind and a chin rest on her shoulder, she heard Gabriel whisper in her in ear. “What’s bothering you sweet cheeks?”
“I think you already know,” she answered as she tilted her head towards him. “Besides, you need to leave now, don’t you? It’s about time for you to meet Raphael.”
“True,” he replied. “But he can wait five minutes and you will feel better if you get it off your chest.”
“No,” Tillie said shaking her head. “You should go. Don't keep him waiting. It’s not like I need another one of your brothers on my bad side. And the sooner you leave the sooner you get back. The less time I spend alone here the better."
“If you are really worried about being alone, I can have Jodie come back before you leave,” Gabriel offered as he pulled her closer.
“You can’t be serious,” Tillie countered. “What could Jodie do to stop Cas or Eve? The wards you added are going to have to be enough.”
Gabriel chuckled slightly. “The wards I added will pretty much fry anything that would want to get in here, and I'll be back before you know it, " Gabriel snapped his fingers and Death’s Scythe appeared on the kitchen counter before them. Gently taking her hands he helped guide them along the weapon so she could understand what he had done. "And besides, it's not like I'm leaving you completely defenseless here. Think you can hold on to this for me while I have a chat with my brother?"
“I…you…you trust me with this?” she stuttered. “You really think I can use this against Eve, or even Cas?”
“Well, I don’t expect that you will actually have to make contact with them,” he admitted. “But it should make them think for a second or two before they do anything stupid, which should give me enough time to get back here if they are actually stupid enough to show up while I am gone.”
“Oh, good,” Tillie answered, relieved. "So, what are you going to tell him? Raphael, that is."
Gabriel shrugged as a flash of irritation crossed his face at the thought. "The truth is, I don't want to get involved in another pissing match and have to kill my own brothers, or have to try anyway. I already had to deal with it once this century, and I don't really feel inclined to go through it again."
"Then what about Cas?” Tillie asked quietly. “How are you going to handle him?"
"Hopefully, I won't have to,” Gabriel sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “But if he tries to pull anything, he'll find out just what it means to get on an archangel's bad side."
"He already is on an archangel's bad side," Tillie reminded him gently. "No matter who or how this war got started, Cas is already going up against Raphael. It hasn't seemed to slow him down much."
Gabriel gave a snort of wry laughter. "Of course. What was I thinking? Those muttonheads have rubbed off on my little bro more than I’d care to admit."
Knowing she couldn’t delay his departure too much longer, she sighed nervously. "Don't take too long, alright?"
"Wouldn't dream of it,” he said with a smirk. “Not when there is leftover cake still here in the kitchen.”
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Dean stared a Cas for a few minutes before he began to chuckle. “You played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a demon? You've been taking lessons from Sammy or something?”
Cas tilted his head as he looked at the hunter. “I do not understand that reference.”
Dean just shook his head as he slapped Cas on the back. ”Of course you don’t buddy. Just promise me that next time you want to practice something you learned from the pizza man, don’t try it on a demon. Now let’s see about warning Tillie and Gabriel, okay?”
“I cannot locate either of them,” the angel admitted with a sigh. “I think he has hidden both himself and Tillie from me.”
About this time Sam came down the stairs and saw his brother and Cas talking in the living room. “So Dean, you woke from your alcohol-induced stupor and decided to finally talk to Cas, huh? Did you learn the secrets of the universe?”
Dean rolled his eyes at his brother. “You were right bitch, okay? I did need to talk to Cas. But he is not working with any demon. In fact, he thinks it’s Raphael that is screwing with Tillie’s visions. Except he can’t locate Gabriel using his Spidey senses in order to warn them.”
“I told you that you should have just talked to Cas a long time ago, jerk,” Sam pointed out, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “And lucky for all of us, I know where Tillie and Gabriel are.”
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Tillie carefully walked back into the living room with the scythe in her hands. It wasn’t something she felt very comfortable holding, let alone using. But it was better than being alone and unarmed. She just hoped Gabriel’s meeting with Raphael didn’t last long and he would return soon.
Since she wasn’t at ease handling a weapon she was unfamiliar with, she decided to tuck it under the couch at her feet. She figured she still could get to it quickly if she needed to, but wouldn’t have to sit around with it in her hands looking foolish. Of course, now she had nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs. She realized this was the first time she had been alone since she had ended up in this reality and being scared half out her wits of supernatural creatures coming after her was only half of the problem.
In her own world she had relished her time alone, using it to relax through reading and writing, or listening to music. There was no way she would put on head phones to listen to music now and tune out one more sense. And until her new computer equipment came, the written world was closed off to her when she was alone as well.
In general, the house was quiet, though it was the symphony of everyday background noise that kept Tillie entertained briefly. The hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock on the wall, capped off by the blower of the furnace. But when a new sound was added to the mix, a scraping and pushing, followed by what she would have sworn was the rushing of wings, she became curious and slightly worried. She knew it wasn’t Gabriel, because she couldn’t sense him.
“Jodie,” she called out hesitantly. “Is that you? Are you back from the station?” Not receiving an answer, she began to reach down underneath the couch to try and grab the scythe. But before her hands could find it, she felt something brush across her forehead and her world fell silent.
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Gabriel paced back and forth on the roof of Cedar-Sinai Hospital waiting for his brother to show up. He couldn’t believe that Raphael had the audacity to suggest meeting here of all places. The angel of healing had been ignoring the prayers of those seeking his help for far too long. Even Gabriel could hear the pleas and prayers of the souls in the building below him and if his brother didn’t show up soon, he was sorely tempted to help out a few of them while waiting.
While he was marking time, he wondered what he truly was going to do about Cas. He really didn’t want to have to try and kill another one of his brothers. Heck, he really didn’t want to have to try and kill Luci; that had all been an elaborate trick that had failed. If Dad hadn’t pulled his ass into another dimension, he would have been toast. And that whole idea of throwing big brother back into the Cage was as much a way of helping the Winchesters avoiding the Apocalypse as it was saving his brother’s life. The fact that Michael got swept up into it was only a side effect of his eldest brother’s stubbornness.
So to end this mess and still save Cas’ life, he would have to keep thinking outside of the box. He just needed to come up with the right plan and throw in a bit of swagger like he always did. A shift in the wind startled him out of his thoughts and helped him realize it was long past time for his usually punctual brother to show up for their appointed meeting. While that in and of itself was concerning, a quick check of Jody’s house confirmed that Tillie was no longer there and he was unable to sense her at all, which shouldn’t be possible. It only took seconds for him to grasp that this could only mean trouble and he took off for the sheriff’s home immediately.
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Kali appeared in Sheriff Jodi Mills’s living room in time to see Raphael render the prophet unconscious. “You did not intend to make my task easy, did you?”
“What are you doing here?” the angel sneered as he whirled around to confront the goddess.
“Doing exactly what you demanded of me,” she replied flatly, a bored expression painted on her face. “You want me to convince Gabriel to join your cause. This is where he has been staying. I expect he should be returning soon. Though I doubt he will want to help you once he has seen what you have done to his prophet.”
“Oh, he will help,” Raphael purred as he picked up Tillie. “Once you tell him that it was Castiel that broke the wards on the home and took the woman away. That should go along nicely with the visions she has been having.”
As the angel disappeared with Tillie, Kali once again was regretting her involvement with any Westerner, but especially angels. Loki was barely tolerable these days but if nothing else, he would at least provide a modicum of entertainment by teaching his older fool of a brother a lesson. That is, if he ever decided to get back to find out what was really going on here.
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Gabriel arrived back at Jodie’s house and despite continuing not to sense Tillie, he gave at last ditch effort and called out to in case the improbable had occurred and someone had interfered with the bond. "Tillie? I think I just got told by big brother that my opinion means squat to him."
"You are just now figuring this out?” Kali asked as she reclined on the couch. “Especially when he was the one who came and took your precious little prophet away while you were gone?"
"What are you doing here?" the angel growled, eyes narrowing in on the goddess as he stiffened.
"I came to warn you that Raphael is working with Eve,” Kali huffed in bored annoyance. “But he thinks I am here to convince you to work with him and that monster so they won't kill any more of my followers."
"Why?" he snarled his face briefly contorting in anger before his expression became coldly shut off. "You just said that Raphael has Tillie. Are you telling me that all of this was a set up?"
The elegant goddess briefly smirked as she prepared to offer an to answer, but before she could do so they both heard the brief flutter of wings and turned to see Castiel appear in the middle of the room with Sam and Dean on either side of him.
Gabriel glared at the three new arrivals. "Okay, would somebody care to tell me just how in Dad's name is everyone getting around my wards? Because last time I checked, I didn't do crap work. If they had been working, the first unwelcome guest to try and cross them should have gotten more deep-fried than an Oreo at the State Fair."
"And when was the last time you checked the kind of work you did?" Dean snorted.
"Dean, now is not the time for this,” Cas pleaded. “We have more urgent matters to attend to.”
"You keep mouthing off to me like that, Dean-o, and I might just consider smiting to be an option,” the archangel growled as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Now does someone want to explain to me what is going on, and why we decided to have a party all of a sudden, without including Tillie?”
"It is Raphael," Kali and Castiel answered simultaneously.
Gabriel’s eyes darted back and forth between his brother and his ex-girlfriend before finally falling on Kali. "You were here first, so you talk first."
“Raphael is the one who got passed the wards,” she stated simply. “He has been working on it since he...enlisted me. And yes, it was a set up."
Gabriel began pacing back and forth while still watching the goddess like a hawk. "You mentioned something earlier about Raphael snatching Tillie. Why?"
"He hasn't told me everything. He only wants me to convince you to work with him, against this one,” she said while motioning to Cas. “But she is a prophet, so she must have value to him, to all of you?"
"Gabriel, we believe that Raphael may have tampered with Tillie's visions so that he could divide us and take her before we could discover what he was up to," Castiel interrupted, growing inpatient with the pace of the conversation.
"He wouldn't be the first angel to mess with us,” Sam suggested, seeing the wary look on the archangel’s face. “Zachariah tampered with Chuck's visions and gave him false information, too."
“Dammit,” Gabriel hissed, followed by several other words in a language that was older than some of the occupants in the room. It did manage to illicit a chuckle from Kali that was promptly ignored by the angel. “So my older brother has been making a fool of me all this time, working with Eve, messing with Tillie’s visions and leading me to believe that Cas can’t be trusted. Shit.”
"The fact that she is here seems to confirm all of this,” Dean said as he pointed to Kali. “I think someone owes his little brother an apology."
Sam smacked Dean on the back of the head after Gabriel glared at the older Winchester. "Raphael has Tillie, jerk. We need to focus on what we are going to do to help her while we try to stop Eve and him from doing more damage."
"Cut it out, bitch,” Dean moaned while rubbing the back of his head. “I just thought it would be better if we were all on the same page and no one's feelings were hurt."
"Nice to see that at least one of you muttonheads can sort out their priorities,” Gabriel snorted as he walked around the room again. “Now, I think that I need to drop by and have a little 'chat' with my brother on not keeping his appointments."
Cas stared at Gabriel, wide eyed. "Brother, you can't go alone. Eve is there, and likely some of her children. You might be a match for one of them, but certainly not all of them."
"Who said that I was going in alone?" Gabriel said offering his brother a wry smirk.
"Of course you’re not going in alone, you’re no match for even Raphael,” Dean quipped. “Anyone remember what happened the last time he went up against a big brother?"
"And you muttonheads are?" he asked incredulously. “Seriously, you wouldn’t have even had the idea to toss my brother back into the Cage if it hadn’t been for little old moi.”
“Look, that’s all great,” Sam pointed out trying to keep the two of them from starting another argument. “But that is all in the past. How do you plan to stop Raphael now?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure kiddo,” Gabriel admitted with a sigh, running his hand through his hair. “I’m still not big on the idea of fighting my brothers, but he has really stepped in it nearly as bad a Luci this time.”
“Death is always an appropriate response to betrayal,” Kali suggested with a smug smile on her face.
“I am so glad I dodged the bullet on that one,” Dean whispered to his brother, nudging him with his elbow.
“Dude, she turned you down,” Sam shot back. “In fact, she didn’t even let you ask the question.”
Gabriel ignored whatever private argument the Winchester brothers seemed to be having. “I don’t want to have to kill my brother. There has to be another way.”
“Can’t we just shove him in the Cage with the other two?” Dean asked hopefully.
Gabriel emitted a low growl while Cas just shook his head. “It is too big of a risk that Lucifer would get out when opening the Cage to try to put Raphael in it.”
“Lucifer? Hell, I bet Michael would be just as pissed at all of us about now if he got too,” Gabriel said looking knowingly at the others in the room. “No, that ship has sailed and we need to find another way to deal with the latest angel to go on a power trip.”
The group fell into silence for a few moments before Dean finally spoke up. “Too bad you guys have to choose to fall in order to become human; otherwise you could just push him out of the family tree and be done with it."
"Well I’ll be,” Gabriel said in near disbelief as he looked at Dean thoughtfully. “I do believe the muttonhead might be on to something there.”
Tillie picked up her cane and walked away from Gabriel, tension in her shoulders as she sensed the fact the he was going to leave shortly to go meet with Raphael. Reaching the kitchen counter, she leaned against it, letting out a small sigh as she rubbed the back of her neck. It’s not that she didn’t want him to meet with his brother. She just didn’t want to be left alone. She knew from her visions that at some point, Cas or Eve was going to manage to take her away and she doubted it would be when Gabriel was here with her.
As she felt arms snake around her waist from behind and a chin rest on her shoulder, she heard Gabriel whisper in her in ear. “What’s bothering you sweet cheeks?”
“I think you already know,” she answered as she tilted her head towards him. “Besides, you need to leave now, don’t you? It’s about time for you to meet Raphael.”
“True,” he replied. “But he can wait five minutes and you will feel better if you get it off your chest.”
“No,” Tillie said shaking her head. “You should go. Don't keep him waiting. It’s not like I need another one of your brothers on my bad side. And the sooner you leave the sooner you get back. The less time I spend alone here the better."
“If you are really worried about being alone, I can have Jodie come back before you leave,” Gabriel offered as he pulled her closer.
“You can’t be serious,” Tillie countered. “What could Jodie do to stop Cas or Eve? The wards you added are going to have to be enough.”
Gabriel chuckled slightly. “The wards I added will pretty much fry anything that would want to get in here, and I'll be back before you know it, " Gabriel snapped his fingers and Death’s Scythe appeared on the kitchen counter before them. Gently taking her hands he helped guide them along the weapon so she could understand what he had done. "And besides, it's not like I'm leaving you completely defenseless here. Think you can hold on to this for me while I have a chat with my brother?"
“I…you…you trust me with this?” she stuttered. “You really think I can use this against Eve, or even Cas?”
“Well, I don’t expect that you will actually have to make contact with them,” he admitted. “But it should make them think for a second or two before they do anything stupid, which should give me enough time to get back here if they are actually stupid enough to show up while I am gone.”
“Oh, good,” Tillie answered, relieved. "So, what are you going to tell him? Raphael, that is."
Gabriel shrugged as a flash of irritation crossed his face at the thought. "The truth is, I don't want to get involved in another pissing match and have to kill my own brothers, or have to try anyway. I already had to deal with it once this century, and I don't really feel inclined to go through it again."
"Then what about Cas?” Tillie asked quietly. “How are you going to handle him?"
"Hopefully, I won't have to,” Gabriel sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “But if he tries to pull anything, he'll find out just what it means to get on an archangel's bad side."
"He already is on an archangel's bad side," Tillie reminded him gently. "No matter who or how this war got started, Cas is already going up against Raphael. It hasn't seemed to slow him down much."
Gabriel gave a snort of wry laughter. "Of course. What was I thinking? Those muttonheads have rubbed off on my little bro more than I’d care to admit."
Knowing she couldn’t delay his departure too much longer, she sighed nervously. "Don't take too long, alright?"
"Wouldn't dream of it,” he said with a smirk. “Not when there is leftover cake still here in the kitchen.”
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Dean stared a Cas for a few minutes before he began to chuckle. “You played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a demon? You've been taking lessons from Sammy or something?”
Cas tilted his head as he looked at the hunter. “I do not understand that reference.”
Dean just shook his head as he slapped Cas on the back. ”Of course you don’t buddy. Just promise me that next time you want to practice something you learned from the pizza man, don’t try it on a demon. Now let’s see about warning Tillie and Gabriel, okay?”
“I cannot locate either of them,” the angel admitted with a sigh. “I think he has hidden both himself and Tillie from me.”
About this time Sam came down the stairs and saw his brother and Cas talking in the living room. “So Dean, you woke from your alcohol-induced stupor and decided to finally talk to Cas, huh? Did you learn the secrets of the universe?”
Dean rolled his eyes at his brother. “You were right bitch, okay? I did need to talk to Cas. But he is not working with any demon. In fact, he thinks it’s Raphael that is screwing with Tillie’s visions. Except he can’t locate Gabriel using his Spidey senses in order to warn them.”
“I told you that you should have just talked to Cas a long time ago, jerk,” Sam pointed out, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “And lucky for all of us, I know where Tillie and Gabriel are.”
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Tillie carefully walked back into the living room with the scythe in her hands. It wasn’t something she felt very comfortable holding, let alone using. But it was better than being alone and unarmed. She just hoped Gabriel’s meeting with Raphael didn’t last long and he would return soon.
Since she wasn’t at ease handling a weapon she was unfamiliar with, she decided to tuck it under the couch at her feet. She figured she still could get to it quickly if she needed to, but wouldn’t have to sit around with it in her hands looking foolish. Of course, now she had nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs. She realized this was the first time she had been alone since she had ended up in this reality and being scared half out her wits of supernatural creatures coming after her was only half of the problem.
In her own world she had relished her time alone, using it to relax through reading and writing, or listening to music. There was no way she would put on head phones to listen to music now and tune out one more sense. And until her new computer equipment came, the written world was closed off to her when she was alone as well.
In general, the house was quiet, though it was the symphony of everyday background noise that kept Tillie entertained briefly. The hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock on the wall, capped off by the blower of the furnace. But when a new sound was added to the mix, a scraping and pushing, followed by what she would have sworn was the rushing of wings, she became curious and slightly worried. She knew it wasn’t Gabriel, because she couldn’t sense him.
“Jodie,” she called out hesitantly. “Is that you? Are you back from the station?” Not receiving an answer, she began to reach down underneath the couch to try and grab the scythe. But before her hands could find it, she felt something brush across her forehead and her world fell silent.
tbs*tbs*tbs*tbs*tbs
Gabriel paced back and forth on the roof of Cedar-Sinai Hospital waiting for his brother to show up. He couldn’t believe that Raphael had the audacity to suggest meeting here of all places. The angel of healing had been ignoring the prayers of those seeking his help for far too long. Even Gabriel could hear the pleas and prayers of the souls in the building below him and if his brother didn’t show up soon, he was sorely tempted to help out a few of them while waiting.
While he was marking time, he wondered what he truly was going to do about Cas. He really didn’t want to have to try and kill another one of his brothers. Heck, he really didn’t want to have to try and kill Luci; that had all been an elaborate trick that had failed. If Dad hadn’t pulled his ass into another dimension, he would have been toast. And that whole idea of throwing big brother back into the Cage was as much a way of helping the Winchesters avoiding the Apocalypse as it was saving his brother’s life. The fact that Michael got swept up into it was only a side effect of his eldest brother’s stubbornness.
So to end this mess and still save Cas’ life, he would have to keep thinking outside of the box. He just needed to come up with the right plan and throw in a bit of swagger like he always did. A shift in the wind startled him out of his thoughts and helped him realize it was long past time for his usually punctual brother to show up for their appointed meeting. While that in and of itself was concerning, a quick check of Jody’s house confirmed that Tillie was no longer there and he was unable to sense her at all, which shouldn’t be possible. It only took seconds for him to grasp that this could only mean trouble and he took off for the sheriff’s home immediately.
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Kali appeared in Sheriff Jodi Mills’s living room in time to see Raphael render the prophet unconscious. “You did not intend to make my task easy, did you?”
“What are you doing here?” the angel sneered as he whirled around to confront the goddess.
“Doing exactly what you demanded of me,” she replied flatly, a bored expression painted on her face. “You want me to convince Gabriel to join your cause. This is where he has been staying. I expect he should be returning soon. Though I doubt he will want to help you once he has seen what you have done to his prophet.”
“Oh, he will help,” Raphael purred as he picked up Tillie. “Once you tell him that it was Castiel that broke the wards on the home and took the woman away. That should go along nicely with the visions she has been having.”
As the angel disappeared with Tillie, Kali once again was regretting her involvement with any Westerner, but especially angels. Loki was barely tolerable these days but if nothing else, he would at least provide a modicum of entertainment by teaching his older fool of a brother a lesson. That is, if he ever decided to get back to find out what was really going on here.
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Gabriel arrived back at Jodie’s house and despite continuing not to sense Tillie, he gave at last ditch effort and called out to in case the improbable had occurred and someone had interfered with the bond. "Tillie? I think I just got told by big brother that my opinion means squat to him."
"You are just now figuring this out?” Kali asked as she reclined on the couch. “Especially when he was the one who came and took your precious little prophet away while you were gone?"
"What are you doing here?" the angel growled, eyes narrowing in on the goddess as he stiffened.
"I came to warn you that Raphael is working with Eve,” Kali huffed in bored annoyance. “But he thinks I am here to convince you to work with him and that monster so they won't kill any more of my followers."
"Why?" he snarled his face briefly contorting in anger before his expression became coldly shut off. "You just said that Raphael has Tillie. Are you telling me that all of this was a set up?"
The elegant goddess briefly smirked as she prepared to offer an to answer, but before she could do so they both heard the brief flutter of wings and turned to see Castiel appear in the middle of the room with Sam and Dean on either side of him.
Gabriel glared at the three new arrivals. "Okay, would somebody care to tell me just how in Dad's name is everyone getting around my wards? Because last time I checked, I didn't do crap work. If they had been working, the first unwelcome guest to try and cross them should have gotten more deep-fried than an Oreo at the State Fair."
"And when was the last time you checked the kind of work you did?" Dean snorted.
"Dean, now is not the time for this,” Cas pleaded. “We have more urgent matters to attend to.”
"You keep mouthing off to me like that, Dean-o, and I might just consider smiting to be an option,” the archangel growled as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Now does someone want to explain to me what is going on, and why we decided to have a party all of a sudden, without including Tillie?”
"It is Raphael," Kali and Castiel answered simultaneously.
Gabriel’s eyes darted back and forth between his brother and his ex-girlfriend before finally falling on Kali. "You were here first, so you talk first."
“Raphael is the one who got passed the wards,” she stated simply. “He has been working on it since he...enlisted me. And yes, it was a set up."
Gabriel began pacing back and forth while still watching the goddess like a hawk. "You mentioned something earlier about Raphael snatching Tillie. Why?"
"He hasn't told me everything. He only wants me to convince you to work with him, against this one,” she said while motioning to Cas. “But she is a prophet, so she must have value to him, to all of you?"
"Gabriel, we believe that Raphael may have tampered with Tillie's visions so that he could divide us and take her before we could discover what he was up to," Castiel interrupted, growing inpatient with the pace of the conversation.
"He wouldn't be the first angel to mess with us,” Sam suggested, seeing the wary look on the archangel’s face. “Zachariah tampered with Chuck's visions and gave him false information, too."
“Dammit,” Gabriel hissed, followed by several other words in a language that was older than some of the occupants in the room. It did manage to illicit a chuckle from Kali that was promptly ignored by the angel. “So my older brother has been making a fool of me all this time, working with Eve, messing with Tillie’s visions and leading me to believe that Cas can’t be trusted. Shit.”
"The fact that she is here seems to confirm all of this,” Dean said as he pointed to Kali. “I think someone owes his little brother an apology."
Sam smacked Dean on the back of the head after Gabriel glared at the older Winchester. "Raphael has Tillie, jerk. We need to focus on what we are going to do to help her while we try to stop Eve and him from doing more damage."
"Cut it out, bitch,” Dean moaned while rubbing the back of his head. “I just thought it would be better if we were all on the same page and no one's feelings were hurt."
"Nice to see that at least one of you muttonheads can sort out their priorities,” Gabriel snorted as he walked around the room again. “Now, I think that I need to drop by and have a little 'chat' with my brother on not keeping his appointments."
Cas stared at Gabriel, wide eyed. "Brother, you can't go alone. Eve is there, and likely some of her children. You might be a match for one of them, but certainly not all of them."
"Who said that I was going in alone?" Gabriel said offering his brother a wry smirk.
"Of course you’re not going in alone, you’re no match for even Raphael,” Dean quipped. “Anyone remember what happened the last time he went up against a big brother?"
"And you muttonheads are?" he asked incredulously. “Seriously, you wouldn’t have even had the idea to toss my brother back into the Cage if it hadn’t been for little old moi.”
“Look, that’s all great,” Sam pointed out trying to keep the two of them from starting another argument. “But that is all in the past. How do you plan to stop Raphael now?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure kiddo,” Gabriel admitted with a sigh, running his hand through his hair. “I’m still not big on the idea of fighting my brothers, but he has really stepped in it nearly as bad a Luci this time.”
“Death is always an appropriate response to betrayal,” Kali suggested with a smug smile on her face.
“I am so glad I dodged the bullet on that one,” Dean whispered to his brother, nudging him with his elbow.
“Dude, she turned you down,” Sam shot back. “In fact, she didn’t even let you ask the question.”
Gabriel ignored whatever private argument the Winchester brothers seemed to be having. “I don’t want to have to kill my brother. There has to be another way.”
“Can’t we just shove him in the Cage with the other two?” Dean asked hopefully.
Gabriel emitted a low growl while Cas just shook his head. “It is too big of a risk that Lucifer would get out when opening the Cage to try to put Raphael in it.”
“Lucifer? Hell, I bet Michael would be just as pissed at all of us about now if he got too,” Gabriel said looking knowingly at the others in the room. “No, that ship has sailed and we need to find another way to deal with the latest angel to go on a power trip.”
The group fell into silence for a few moments before Dean finally spoke up. “Too bad you guys have to choose to fall in order to become human; otherwise you could just push him out of the family tree and be done with it."
"Well I’ll be,” Gabriel said in near disbelief as he looked at Dean thoughtfully. “I do believe the muttonhead might be on to something there.”