Gabriel, Interrupted 7/?
Chapters 01 │ 02 │ 03 │ 04 │ 05 │ 06
“We can’t watch TV now,” Gabriel hesitated, trying to put off the inevitable. “It’s still Sing-Along with Mitch time downstairs.”
“Nice try bucko,” Tillie said. “But one of the perks of having a television in my office is that I can actually use it to watch TV shows.” Tillie picked up the remote, turned on the TV and switched the channel over to TNT. Oh, good, Tillie thought to herself. Season three. And it was “The Kids Are Alright”, where Dean got to meet Ben for the first time. Gabriel wasn’t even in this one. Even if he came up with something, what proof would he have in this “universe”, right? Plus, there was only about fifteen-twenty minutes left in the episode so it wasn’t much time for him to fabricate a lie.
Oh good, Gabriel thought to himself. That Ben Braden kid that Dean got involved with. He had to step in and intervene with the muttonheads before someone really got hurt. Surely there was an opportunity for him to prove to Tillie that he was telling the truth.
Tillie and Gabriel were both silently engrossed in watching Dean breaking the window of the basement and getting the kids out of the house when Sam came running. “Hey! Dean! There's a mother.”
“A mother changeling?” Dean asked, shocked.
“We got to get these kids out quick.” Sam yelled.
“Right there.” Dean indicated. “There's one more. You got to break the lock!”
“I guess that's why the changelings are keeping the kids alive --so the mom can snack on them,” Sam said.
The scene then shifted to Lisa’s house, where changeling Ben had taken the real Ben’s place. “This is when it gets good,” Gabriel inserted.
“What's wrong, mommy?” !Not Ben asked.
“You're not my son.” Lisa said.
“Yes, I am,”!Not Ben insisted.
They continued to watch as Lisa attempted to find out about her real son, and then ran out the front door, only to be confronted by several changeling kids in her front lawn, blocking her exit. She ran back inside to be confronted by! Not Ben. Gabriel couldn’t wait to see which version this was, but it cut back to the muttonheads rescuing the real kids and killing the mother changeling. After the mother changeling had been burnt to a crisp with the flamethrower, the scene again changed to Dean and Sam taking the kid back home. This time, the kid hopped out of the car, ran to his mom and gave her a hug, while she asked him if he was okay.
“Okay,” Gabriel spoke up with a triumphant smirk on his face. “It did not happen this way the first time.”
“What?” Tillie asked, snapping out her trance that the show always seemed to put her in. “What are you talking about?”
“I said,” Gabriel started over slowly, as if he were speaking to a child. “It did not happen this way the first time. Momma Braden did not live the first time. The changeling brat killed her before the dunderheads ganked the mother changeling. Dean of course, felt guilty. So he stepped in and tried to be a father figure and spend time with the kid. Worst possible time since he had that impending date with Hell and all. So I had to take charge and remind him of the damage he was doing to the kid, despite his good intentions. Road to hell is paved with them, ya’ know. Took the opportunity to show Sammy the damage his relationship with his brother was doing to him, too. After he learned his lesson, I went back and set things right. So, surely there has to be proof of this somewhere, right?”
Tillie gaped at him. She couldn’t move from her seat. If she did, she was sure her head would explode or she would have to hurl the contents of her stomach into the trash can. How…how the fuck did he know? No one had ever read that fic. It was on her laptop at home. She hadn’t published yet it on any fan site even though she wrote it almost two months ago. She had never shared it with anyone. Hell, she had never sent it to her beta to have it proof read. No one could possibly know details like that. No one.
She reached for her purse and began immediately fishing for the bottles. She pulled both of them out and opened them, taking out one pill each and opened the water bottle on her desk.
“What are those?” Gabriel demanded. “What are you taking? Are you alright?”
“It’s Imitrex and Comapzine,” Tillie answered, knocking back the pills. “I can feel the blood vessels in my head exploding and I am about to lose my breakfast, so I am trying to stop all of that from happening, if you don’t mind!”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed as he watched her. “It was something I said, wasn’t it? There is some sort of proof here that I am who I say I am. I knew it! I couldn’t have just randomly ended up here. There was a reason for it!” In his excitement, he picked her up and spun her around in the air, which was a huge mistake. Tillie immediately leaned over the trash and vomited.
When she was done, she looked up at him in frustration. “I…I can’t do this right now. I can’t explain what you just did. I don’t even know what you just did. I need you to leave my office. I…need to leave. I need to get out of here for awhile.”
With that, Tillie gathered her things and left a dumbstruck Gabriel in her wake.
*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*
Tillie got her in car and drove. She just drove around the city. She needed time to think. She still wasn’t sure what happened back there. Her brain wasn’t processing how Gabriel could possibly know what she had written in her fic. Could he have actually experienced those things as she had written them? Could he really be the Gabriel? The one from the Supernatural universe? How was that even possible? Did she write them because she saw them as they happened? Or did they happen because she wrote them? How could he end up here? In her world? At her group home? She had always believed in God, but had He orchestrated something this unlikely? And why use her?
She had been so distracted she hadn’t been paying attention to traffic. So she didn’t see it. It was just a golden blur. She had to swerve to avoid hitting it. She didn’t even know what brought her out of her reverie to do that much. But she pulled over, turned her car off and jumped out to make sure it was okay. The golden retriever was sitting in the grass of the park, panting. He seemed okay. But she was already so shaken that she decided to just sit here next to the dog for awhile to see if it would help calm her down.
“Sorry there, fella,” she soothed as she petted his golden fur. “It seems you and I have both had a rough day.”
“Yours has been much worse than mine,” he answered, as the dog’s form changed to that of a man.
Tillie shrieked in surprised as she tried to scramble backwards on her hands and feet. But the man was too quick and grabbed her by the wrist. Tillie looked up at him in the face. “You?! How did you get here? I just left you back at the group home!”
“I’m not him,” the man claimed. “I’m not that Gabriel. I just chose this form because I thought it would be less confusing to you.”
“Well, news flash,” she retorted. “It’s not working. If you hadn’t noticed, you changed from a dog to someone who looks like Gabriel. So you left confusing in the rearview mirror awhile ago and are passing mindfuck right about now. So why don’t you tell me just who in the hell are you?”
He plastered on that damn trademark smirk of Gabriel’s “Actually, that’s the wrong place of residence. I’m from Heaven. The name’s Gabriel. And I’m the Gabriel from this dimension.”
Oh, God, oh God, oh God! Beyond any doubt she was in major mindfuck territory right now. “Oh crap,” she groaned. “Now I know for sure my head is really going to explode.” He immediately dropped his smirk and his look darkened for a moment. She pushed that to the back of her mind for now and continued. “So do you use the same vessels in all of the different realities?” she asked, trying to wrap her brain around how all this worked.
“This?” he said. “This isn’t a vessel. The rules are much different here. We don’t need vessels. When we need to interact with humans, we can appear as anyone, or anything we need to.”
“I should have guessed, given the dog,” Tillie scoffed. “I doubt many of them can say ‘yes’ to being a vessel anyway. Must be much more convenient. So why the dog?”
“The way you were driving back there, you were bound to hit something. So I needed to create a distraction to get you to pull over,” he explained. “But I think if I would have appeared as Optimus Prime or even Bumblebee I would have created much more of a panic for the rest of the people around here than just showing myself as a dog, don’t ya’ think?”
Well, he wasn’t a carbon copy, but he definitely was similar to the Gabriel she had watched on television, to one she had read about in fanfics, heck, to the one she had been helping, similar enough to pass muster. And she didn’t have it in her to argue right now. “So it’s him,” she whispered. “He wasn’t delusional, or lying or anything else. He was always just being him. So why are you here? I can’t imagine that you make routine visits to earth to have chats like these.”
“Well, you’re right,” he confirmed. “I usually only have chats like these for important things. The last time was for a certain birth announcement a couple of thousand years ago.”
“So, confirming my suspicions about…about the other Gabriel warranted a personal visit from you?” Tillie asked incredulously.
“No,” he sighed, and he grew still. No, that was wrong, Tillie thought. The whole world around them grew still. The breeze that had been in air died. The sounds of the birds singing and dogs barking stopped. She no longer heard the symphony of laughter and children playing in the background. But her mind was filled. Filled with things yet to come. He laid open as much of the future to her as His Father had allowed him to show her. It seemed like several minutes, but in reality it only lasted seconds.
“That...that was much more than a birth announcement,” she uttered, suddenly on the brink of exhaustion with the weight of it all. “It certainly doesn’t seem like an easy road ahead.”
“Do you think my ‘birth announcement’ to Mary was an easy road? Hello, you’re going to be an unwed mother, give birth in a stable, have to be on the run from a maniacal king in a foreign country for a couple of years before coming home. And that was before the kid grew up and started a religion.”
“Well, seeing how difficult things will be, I guess my AFLAC wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” she laughed trying to lighten her own mood with humor.
“You’ll need more than AFLAC,” he said somberly. “But there will be additional support around, for both of you.”
“I need to go back,” she decided. “I need to tell the other…my Gabriel. Let him know he can...”
“Absolutely not,” he cut her off. “He can’t know any of this yet. It’s not time.”
“But he needs to know that I believe him,” she pleaded. “That I don’t think he is crazy.”
“Then show him your writing,” Gabriel instructed her. “He has prophets in his world, just like we do here. It might seem far fetched, but not entirely strange to him that someone from another dimension was able to write something down that happened in his world. Besides, he already ended up here and believes there is a reason for it. But he can be very impatient when it comes to his own interests. So telling him about me, or anything else I’ve shown you will only do more harm than good.”
*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*
Sarah Mercer had been working at the Department of Mental Health for over fifteen years. For most of that time, she simply processed applications for funding. Today was no different. She had about nineteen new applications on her desk. Right now, she was working on one for Gabriel Milton, who was currently living in a group home in St. Louis, MO and appeared to be suffering from delusional disorder. Everything appeared to be in order. She approved temporary funding. But with the Patriot Act in place, she simply needed to start the process to verify his identification before permanent funding could be granted.
A/N 2: I promised a bonus with this chapter, so here it is: The unpublished fic that Tillie mentions, and Gabriel “summarizes” as part of his experience with the Winchesters, is an actual fic that I did write a couple months ago and haven’t published. It is based a lyric prompt given to me by princess_aleera , and it is titled Help Me Forget. We were both supposed to write a fic based on the same lyric and publish them at the same time. But she has been swamped with a variety of things, including a trip to China, and now to the Amazon. So she has graciously allowed me to publish mine to coincide with this chapter, as a bonus to all of you. Click on the title to go to the fic. You don’t have to read the fic to understand this chapter, but if you want a bonus, it is there.
Chapter 8
“We can’t watch TV now,” Gabriel hesitated, trying to put off the inevitable. “It’s still Sing-Along with Mitch time downstairs.”
“Nice try bucko,” Tillie said. “But one of the perks of having a television in my office is that I can actually use it to watch TV shows.” Tillie picked up the remote, turned on the TV and switched the channel over to TNT. Oh, good, Tillie thought to herself. Season three. And it was “The Kids Are Alright”, where Dean got to meet Ben for the first time. Gabriel wasn’t even in this one. Even if he came up with something, what proof would he have in this “universe”, right? Plus, there was only about fifteen-twenty minutes left in the episode so it wasn’t much time for him to fabricate a lie.
Oh good, Gabriel thought to himself. That Ben Braden kid that Dean got involved with. He had to step in and intervene with the muttonheads before someone really got hurt. Surely there was an opportunity for him to prove to Tillie that he was telling the truth.
Tillie and Gabriel were both silently engrossed in watching Dean breaking the window of the basement and getting the kids out of the house when Sam came running. “Hey! Dean! There's a mother.”
“A mother changeling?” Dean asked, shocked.
“We got to get these kids out quick.” Sam yelled.
“Right there.” Dean indicated. “There's one more. You got to break the lock!”
“I guess that's why the changelings are keeping the kids alive --so the mom can snack on them,” Sam said.
The scene then shifted to Lisa’s house, where changeling Ben had taken the real Ben’s place. “This is when it gets good,” Gabriel inserted.
“What's wrong, mommy?” !Not Ben asked.
“You're not my son.” Lisa said.
“Yes, I am,”!Not Ben insisted.
They continued to watch as Lisa attempted to find out about her real son, and then ran out the front door, only to be confronted by several changeling kids in her front lawn, blocking her exit. She ran back inside to be confronted by! Not Ben. Gabriel couldn’t wait to see which version this was, but it cut back to the muttonheads rescuing the real kids and killing the mother changeling. After the mother changeling had been burnt to a crisp with the flamethrower, the scene again changed to Dean and Sam taking the kid back home. This time, the kid hopped out of the car, ran to his mom and gave her a hug, while she asked him if he was okay.
“Okay,” Gabriel spoke up with a triumphant smirk on his face. “It did not happen this way the first time.”
“What?” Tillie asked, snapping out her trance that the show always seemed to put her in. “What are you talking about?”
“I said,” Gabriel started over slowly, as if he were speaking to a child. “It did not happen this way the first time. Momma Braden did not live the first time. The changeling brat killed her before the dunderheads ganked the mother changeling. Dean of course, felt guilty. So he stepped in and tried to be a father figure and spend time with the kid. Worst possible time since he had that impending date with Hell and all. So I had to take charge and remind him of the damage he was doing to the kid, despite his good intentions. Road to hell is paved with them, ya’ know. Took the opportunity to show Sammy the damage his relationship with his brother was doing to him, too. After he learned his lesson, I went back and set things right. So, surely there has to be proof of this somewhere, right?”
Tillie gaped at him. She couldn’t move from her seat. If she did, she was sure her head would explode or she would have to hurl the contents of her stomach into the trash can. How…how the fuck did he know? No one had ever read that fic. It was on her laptop at home. She hadn’t published yet it on any fan site even though she wrote it almost two months ago. She had never shared it with anyone. Hell, she had never sent it to her beta to have it proof read. No one could possibly know details like that. No one.
She reached for her purse and began immediately fishing for the bottles. She pulled both of them out and opened them, taking out one pill each and opened the water bottle on her desk.
“What are those?” Gabriel demanded. “What are you taking? Are you alright?”
“It’s Imitrex and Comapzine,” Tillie answered, knocking back the pills. “I can feel the blood vessels in my head exploding and I am about to lose my breakfast, so I am trying to stop all of that from happening, if you don’t mind!”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed as he watched her. “It was something I said, wasn’t it? There is some sort of proof here that I am who I say I am. I knew it! I couldn’t have just randomly ended up here. There was a reason for it!” In his excitement, he picked her up and spun her around in the air, which was a huge mistake. Tillie immediately leaned over the trash and vomited.
When she was done, she looked up at him in frustration. “I…I can’t do this right now. I can’t explain what you just did. I don’t even know what you just did. I need you to leave my office. I…need to leave. I need to get out of here for awhile.”
With that, Tillie gathered her things and left a dumbstruck Gabriel in her wake.
*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*
Tillie got her in car and drove. She just drove around the city. She needed time to think. She still wasn’t sure what happened back there. Her brain wasn’t processing how Gabriel could possibly know what she had written in her fic. Could he have actually experienced those things as she had written them? Could he really be the Gabriel? The one from the Supernatural universe? How was that even possible? Did she write them because she saw them as they happened? Or did they happen because she wrote them? How could he end up here? In her world? At her group home? She had always believed in God, but had He orchestrated something this unlikely? And why use her?
She had been so distracted she hadn’t been paying attention to traffic. So she didn’t see it. It was just a golden blur. She had to swerve to avoid hitting it. She didn’t even know what brought her out of her reverie to do that much. But she pulled over, turned her car off and jumped out to make sure it was okay. The golden retriever was sitting in the grass of the park, panting. He seemed okay. But she was already so shaken that she decided to just sit here next to the dog for awhile to see if it would help calm her down.
“Sorry there, fella,” she soothed as she petted his golden fur. “It seems you and I have both had a rough day.”
“Yours has been much worse than mine,” he answered, as the dog’s form changed to that of a man.
Tillie shrieked in surprised as she tried to scramble backwards on her hands and feet. But the man was too quick and grabbed her by the wrist. Tillie looked up at him in the face. “You?! How did you get here? I just left you back at the group home!”
“I’m not him,” the man claimed. “I’m not that Gabriel. I just chose this form because I thought it would be less confusing to you.”
“Well, news flash,” she retorted. “It’s not working. If you hadn’t noticed, you changed from a dog to someone who looks like Gabriel. So you left confusing in the rearview mirror awhile ago and are passing mindfuck right about now. So why don’t you tell me just who in the hell are you?”
He plastered on that damn trademark smirk of Gabriel’s “Actually, that’s the wrong place of residence. I’m from Heaven. The name’s Gabriel. And I’m the Gabriel from this dimension.”
Oh, God, oh God, oh God! Beyond any doubt she was in major mindfuck territory right now. “Oh crap,” she groaned. “Now I know for sure my head is really going to explode.” He immediately dropped his smirk and his look darkened for a moment. She pushed that to the back of her mind for now and continued. “So do you use the same vessels in all of the different realities?” she asked, trying to wrap her brain around how all this worked.
“This?” he said. “This isn’t a vessel. The rules are much different here. We don’t need vessels. When we need to interact with humans, we can appear as anyone, or anything we need to.”
“I should have guessed, given the dog,” Tillie scoffed. “I doubt many of them can say ‘yes’ to being a vessel anyway. Must be much more convenient. So why the dog?”
“The way you were driving back there, you were bound to hit something. So I needed to create a distraction to get you to pull over,” he explained. “But I think if I would have appeared as Optimus Prime or even Bumblebee I would have created much more of a panic for the rest of the people around here than just showing myself as a dog, don’t ya’ think?”
Well, he wasn’t a carbon copy, but he definitely was similar to the Gabriel she had watched on television, to one she had read about in fanfics, heck, to the one she had been helping, similar enough to pass muster. And she didn’t have it in her to argue right now. “So it’s him,” she whispered. “He wasn’t delusional, or lying or anything else. He was always just being him. So why are you here? I can’t imagine that you make routine visits to earth to have chats like these.”
“Well, you’re right,” he confirmed. “I usually only have chats like these for important things. The last time was for a certain birth announcement a couple of thousand years ago.”
“So, confirming my suspicions about…about the other Gabriel warranted a personal visit from you?” Tillie asked incredulously.
“No,” he sighed, and he grew still. No, that was wrong, Tillie thought. The whole world around them grew still. The breeze that had been in air died. The sounds of the birds singing and dogs barking stopped. She no longer heard the symphony of laughter and children playing in the background. But her mind was filled. Filled with things yet to come. He laid open as much of the future to her as His Father had allowed him to show her. It seemed like several minutes, but in reality it only lasted seconds.
“That...that was much more than a birth announcement,” she uttered, suddenly on the brink of exhaustion with the weight of it all. “It certainly doesn’t seem like an easy road ahead.”
“Do you think my ‘birth announcement’ to Mary was an easy road? Hello, you’re going to be an unwed mother, give birth in a stable, have to be on the run from a maniacal king in a foreign country for a couple of years before coming home. And that was before the kid grew up and started a religion.”
“Well, seeing how difficult things will be, I guess my AFLAC wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” she laughed trying to lighten her own mood with humor.
“You’ll need more than AFLAC,” he said somberly. “But there will be additional support around, for both of you.”
“I need to go back,” she decided. “I need to tell the other…my Gabriel. Let him know he can...”
“Absolutely not,” he cut her off. “He can’t know any of this yet. It’s not time.”
“But he needs to know that I believe him,” she pleaded. “That I don’t think he is crazy.”
“Then show him your writing,” Gabriel instructed her. “He has prophets in his world, just like we do here. It might seem far fetched, but not entirely strange to him that someone from another dimension was able to write something down that happened in his world. Besides, he already ended up here and believes there is a reason for it. But he can be very impatient when it comes to his own interests. So telling him about me, or anything else I’ve shown you will only do more harm than good.”
*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*gi*
Sarah Mercer had been working at the Department of Mental Health for over fifteen years. For most of that time, she simply processed applications for funding. Today was no different. She had about nineteen new applications on her desk. Right now, she was working on one for Gabriel Milton, who was currently living in a group home in St. Louis, MO and appeared to be suffering from delusional disorder. Everything appeared to be in order. She approved temporary funding. But with the Patriot Act in place, she simply needed to start the process to verify his identification before permanent funding could be granted.
A/N 2: I promised a bonus with this chapter, so here it is: The unpublished fic that Tillie mentions, and Gabriel “summarizes” as part of his experience with the Winchesters, is an actual fic that I did write a couple months ago and haven’t published. It is based a lyric prompt given to me by princess_aleera , and it is titled Help Me Forget. We were both supposed to write a fic based on the same lyric and publish them at the same time. But she has been swamped with a variety of things, including a trip to China, and now to the Amazon. So she has graciously allowed me to publish mine to coincide with this chapter, as a bonus to all of you. Click on the title to go to the fic. You don’t have to read the fic to understand this chapter, but if you want a bonus, it is there.
Chapter 8