(So Don't Come Around Here) And Tell Me I Told You So
Title: (So Don’t Come Round Here) And Tell Me I Told You So
Author: OpheliacAngel
Pairing: Dean/Gabriel
Genres: Romance/Hurt/Comfort
Rating: Teen
Summary: Dean and airplanes don’t mix. Dean and Gabriel, however, mix better than Dean thinks.
A/N: Written for SPN Rare OTP Fic-a-Month Challenge for June’s prompt of ‘travel.’ Also a fill on my h/c_bingo card for ‘abandonment issues.’
Soundtrack: Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Fallen’
...
~Though I’ve tried, I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I’ve messed up better, I should know~
Dean’s subconscious was pulling him into that dream again. The one with the plane. The one with Dean in the plane, brutally chewed down fingernails clutching the armrests as if they alone could save him if the plane were to simply fall right out of the sky; eyes wide and gaze trained on the seat in front of him; thoughts curling and roiling in his mind: prayers and desperate mutterings and even some screaming. All of those sensations so real, so vivid and ingrained in his memory that he almost thought it was real.
Yet Dean would never willingly step foot on a plane, and the fact that he couldn’t figure out why he was on it led him to believe, no, convinced him that this was nothing but a dream, a nightmare and a pretty flimsy one at that.
His stomach was bottoming out though, after countless hours, or minutes, of it swaying back and forth violently in his chest, sending him lurching forward at one moment and pressing back against his seat the next. His legs were falling asleep and cramps were ripping through him and his arms were already sore, and the fact that he knew he was dreaming didn’t make him feel any less.
But he had to be dreaming because Gabriel the freaking archangel was sitting in the seat next to his, not the one across the row but the one right next to his, one hand on Dean’s shaking arm and the other holding a cup of something golden and most definitely alcoholic, and Gabriel was dead.
“You’re dreaming again.” Gabriel didn’t look over at him and after one look himself, Dean turned away. Not that Gabriel was making him sicker or anything, but he couldn’t handle a dead archangel right now. So he ignored him, despite the fact that Gabriel could make him talk if he wanted to, despite the fact that Dean was about a half-second away from begging for that drink, from begging for mercy which equated to off this goddamn plane, but Gabriel was nothing if not persistent. “Of course, you wouldn’t call it a dream.”
The plane dipped suddenly and Dean’s crumbling stomach along with it. He gasped and put his head down between his knees, having read somewhere that that simple action was supposed to relive tension and the onset of nausea, but it didn’t seem to help. His head was spinning and his insides doing somersaults, and now he could feel actual bile rising in his throat. To make matters worse, one of the flight attendants chose that exact moment to walk by their row. “Everything alright here?”
“Just fine and dandy,” Gabriel replied instantly, his voice chipper as if everything in the world was going his way. Usually, Dean suspected, it was. Except for the getting killed by one’s own brother part. He groaned loudly when the plane dipped again, though it had almost as much to do with Gabriel being right there and given that he was dead that he shouldn’t be allowed to appear in Dean’s dreams, and also that he was present to perpetuate Dean’s total misery.
If there was a way to wake himself back up, then he would.
“You’re doing this,” he mumbled after the attendant walked on and was definitely out of earshot. It wasn’t like his subconscious to taunt him with fears he knew were trivial, it would rather bleed him by dredging up memories of decades on the rack, so this had to be Gabriel’s doing. Yet where the hell Gabriel was he didn’t know, he just hoped that he wasn’t hovering over him and Lisa in their room. Dean wanted Gabriel to have no involvement in that part of his life, not with Lisa in the bed next to him and Ben just two doors down.
When Dean sat up again he noticed that Gabriel was looking at him, hard amber eyes now soft yet just as piercing and almost beautiful in a way. He wondered if the archangel’s wings matched his eyes, or whether they were stereotypical fluffy and white. He kicked himself mentally for even thinking it. Gabriel’s hand also pulled back, though slowly, and Dean realized his hand had been hovering a mere two inches from his back.
Gabriel caught Dean staring at him with a suspicion that Dean knew betrayed his nearly overwhelming curiosity, and Gabriel’s eyebrows raised as if on cue. “What?”
Those damn eyes penetrated him until Dean felt his soul was bleeding, and betraying his pride he looked away quickly, focusing intently instead on the in flight magazine stuffed into the pocket of the seat before him. He made no move to remove it, but he wanted to so badly because Gabriel’s eyes on him felt like a curse, a surefire way to end what he had so carefully and painstakingly built for himself these past few months.
But this was just a dream, a nightmare, and he was taking it too far.
There were screams in the distance and Dean then knew exactly where the plane was heading. He could feel hell close by and Alistair waiting, even though he was long dead and Dean no longer had to feel that perpetual fire. Only in his nightmares, only when he was caught off guard, only when it wasn’t real and that was worse, in some ways, because being just memory meant he could never escape it. Dean shrunk back against his seat in fear, refusing to look over at Gabriel again.
The words that slipped out of his mouth like a long-forgotten prayer should never have been directed toward Gabriel. “Take me out of it then. If you’re so sure this is a dream.” Gabriel’s look giving away nothing led Dean to believe for just a moment that this was no dream. He had fucked Gabriel over, gotten him killed. This was his punishment. “Please,” he added as an afterthought. He didn’t know what he was begging for anymore, begging for Gabriel not to be dead, for Dean to not be going back to hell, for Sam to still be alive and waiting for him when Dean woke up again.
For what had happened never to have happened in the first place.
One snap of Gabriel’s fingers and there was no more light. The sky outside the windows was pitch black and there were no lights on the plane, not even overhead, and the passengers were no longer shifting and talking around him, there were silent and frozen. Another snap and an overhead light came on in the row before them, barely illuminating Gabriel’s face though still reflecting off his amber eyes, molten and warm and giving.
“I can’t do that.” Dean bit back his whimper but Gabriel shoved the drink into his shaking hand and it came out, choked and pitiful and Dean could taste blood in his mouth from where he had bit his tongue. Gabriel leaned closer, grin wider and greater than the sun itself, one hand on Dean’s cheek and the other unbuckling Dean’s seatbelt. “But I can take you somewhere you would never go on your own. It’s not exactly easy to have my way with you, little destroyer.” He patted Dean’s cheek and Dean jumped as the seatbelt clicked open loudly in the unnatural silence of the plane. The world swirled around them and the screaming faded away, yet Dean still felt as if his head was imploding, as if he himself were the only one screaming as if he were already lost.
Gabriel’s hands were always on him though, on his cheek, around his waist and shielding his eyes from what he didn’t want Dean to see, hands fluttering around his neck, his shoulder, his chest and quick swipes across his forehead, against his knee, fingers graceful grazing his knuckles and where his teeth bit his lips bloody.
The spinning seemed to go on for ages even when Dean knew it had stopped and he was sitting on something, maybe a bed but probably Gabriel’s lap judging by the continual shifting beneath him. Gabriel’s hands left him then, thankfully, but they weren’t abandoning him. They were simply granting him space and Dean hummed in agreement.
He opened his eyes as if someone had just pulled off a blindfold and the sky hung open before him, wide and black and seeming to welcome him into its embrace. Dean was sitting on a hammock, still on Gabriel’s lap. The dizziness was still there too, his body rebelling and threatening to spill all its contents out onto the wood beneath them. He swallowed, hating that Gabriel was manipulating him like this but also secretly loving it too. It wasn’t like he didn’t love Lisa, he did and he always would, but she couldn’t take away his pain and his guilt, she could only push it back further in his mind, mask it for him until he fell asleep, and his responsibility toward Ben was more of the same.
Gabriel had that power within him to take it away for good: all that pain. Memories of his brother too, and that scared him, but not as much as Gabriel leaving him was.
“Your pain’s too much, Dean-o. Let it go.”
Pain too much for an archangel, and a human’s one at that. Was that even possible?
Another thing that wasn’t possible was the famed Eiffel Tower to his left and the biggest baseball stadium he had ever seen before him and stretching off to his right. Beyond that there were cornfields and Dean’s baby parked on steaming asphalt, doors wide open, dark frame shimmering in the sun. There were so many stars above him that they couldn’t be real either.
Gabriel had snuck into his dreams, creep that he was, and now Dean had to see just what the hell he wanted.
Dean made to move off his lap, because even in a dream it was making him blush and feel overheated, but one of Gabriel’s hands held him by his neck, a tight hold but one that didn’t hurt, and his other gripped the side of the hammock, as if Dean were putting him off balance. What the hell?
“You’ve been haunting my own dreams for months now, kiddo.”
“So?”
Gabriel tightened the grip he had on Dean’s neck and now it was hurting. “So, I am drowning in your guilt, and none too willingly. Seriously, kid, you’ve got to learn to reign in it. I know it’s hard.”
Dean tensed until all his limbs were cramping up. “Bullshit you know. Sam, my own brother, jumped into the Cage to save my ass. Do you know what that feels like? Can you even imagine?”
Gabriel nodded patiently and none of this seemed right to Dean. “I can. My brothers are down there too, Dean. Even though they were both self-righteous dicks they were still my brothers. I thought I was hurting, hell, I’m dead! But clearly Dean Winchester has to top every-freaking-one.”
Dean swallowed and Gabriel’s grip lessened until Dean could breathe again. No doubt as a result of the archangel’s anger, storm clouds were forming in the sky, thunder resounding and lighting crashing down dangerously close to the hammock soon after. Gabriel sighed, clearly annoyed but it sounded sorta resigned too, and the storm fell apart. Dean just wanted to be back in bed at this point. He didn’t know what the hell Gabriel wanted with him, but he was acting off for one thing. Off in a way that made Dean almost speechless, and that was never a good thing.
Gabriel shifted then and released his grip on Dean completely. Dean scooted to the other side of the hammock and turned away from the archangel, trying to think of some way to wake himself up without Gabriel realizing, but there was fat chance of that.
“You didn’t kill your brother, Dean. You didn’t kill me either.”
Dean looked over at him, startled when he realized that Gabriel was now standing several feet away, glancing up at the sky. He had never even heard the guy get up, but he supposed that was the point. Dean cleared his throat, trying to rid his - or realistically - Gabriel’s dream of the awkwardness it had fallen into. “Where are we anyway?”
That seemed to lighten the mood considerably, judging by the way Gabriel’s face lit up like he had just found a candy store. “Well, I figured it would be boring to take you somewhere that you can just go off to on your own. So I picked a few places, took what I liked from each, mashed them together and whoila!”
“So you made this place?” Not like he didn’t know it, but the guy was supposed to be dead, which meant he shouldn’t be making anything, cupcakes or dreams.
Gabriel sat down next to Dean again. “Underestimate me much, kiddo?”
“You’re unbelievable,” Dean breathed. He was tempted to add, ‘And full of yourself,’ but bit his tongue. He was just as - if not more - tempted to tell Gabriel to bring back the plane scene again, or even to let him succumb to his other numerous nightmares, suspicious of the archangel playing him in some way, but as he leaned back into the pillows behind him, he let out a breath and realized just how easy it was to relax here, away from the world.
Gabriel, though, clearly wasn’t ready to shut up. “You're an all-american guy, in some ways. Used to think that it was annoying, but there is a lot to like. Baseball games, apple pie, excess and lots of it.”
Dean raised an eyebrow but didn’t move; if he was stuck here then he may as well enjoy it, even if it was weird. “Nothing wrong with pie.”
One side of Gabriel’s mouth pulled upward in a smirk. “Definitely nothing wrong with pie.”
The archangel seemed non-threatening and even content, in a way, so Dean let him be to enjoy the view of the nighttime sky and closed his eyes. Whether he trusted Gabriel or not, it didn’t much matter. Nothing did now. Because as many times as Gabriel told him, regardless of why the hell the archangel cared about his well-being in the first place, he had killed the archangel and he had killed Sam too. By not being strong enough or fast enough. By not being good enough.
Facts were facts, and Dean wasn’t blind to them.
Gabriel, however, tensed beside him and Dean opened his eyes again. The all-powerful archangel was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, back facing Dean. The starlight illuminated his honey brown hair and Dean was taken aback by how angelic he looked right then and there, but also small and delicate and even lost.
Dean had done that to him too.
Thing was, Dean was so tired of being alone. Of sharing a bed with someone else but feeling abandoned regardless. Of living in a house that might as well have been empty with how little it healed him. Of being left behind time and time again because he wasn’t what he should have been. He had failed Sam over and over, failed Cas and his friends and here he was. Hell, he failed Gabriel too and Gabriel still wasn’t giving up on him. It made no sense.
It made no sense ‘cause he was dead.
He looked real though, felt real as Dean placed a hand on his back, needing to touch something other than the too soft pillows behind him or the rough wood under his hands. With that one touch he could feel the same fear, the same desires. Gabriel had been left behind too, but he had come back for Dean, against all the reason that Dean could come up with. His hand didn’t pull away even with that shock, even while getting smacked in the face with those startling similarities. If anything he pressed his hand more firmly against Gabriel’s back, as if subconsciously searching for something.
Gabriel shifted but didn’t turn around, though he was still there, still there as in not fading, not disappearing, not dying all over again. “You can stay here forever if you want to. Got enough juice left in me to grant you this. You’ve given enough, Dean.”
No, I haven’t. Not by a long shot. “Can’t,” Dean’s voice broke on that one simple word. Lisa and Ben were his responsibility now, it was his job to not only look after them but take care of them. He couldn’t handle being alone now anyway, Sam had been right about that. “Have to go back.” As long as it’s not back on that freaking plane.
Gabriel chuckled and snapped his fingers. The world around them shifted, but when the haze cleared Dean could tell they were still in the same world; they were just farther out than they had been before. Now the sun was beating down on them and the Impala was parked before him, glorious and free, doors open and awaiting him to just hop right on in and take a spin. Dean smoothed a hand over her hood and then eagerly climbed inside. Gabriel followed suit, as if he belonged in that passenger seat and nowhere else, and for once Dean didn’t snarl at him to leave.
“So you dead or what?”
Gabriel shrugged, but Dean could easily tell he was hiding. “Kinda, pieces of my grace are still hanging around, preventing me from stepping off into the other void. If I find them then I’ll be whole again. Still damaged beyond repair, but physically whole again. Unless someone else finds them first, then I’ll just be... gone.” A cold shock of dread washed through Dean’s system, but it did anything but numb him. The archangel leaned across the bench seat until their faces were almost touching. “Give me this, Dean? Dead guys have wishes too.”
Dean turned away, biting his lip, eyes squinting against the sunlight pouring through the dash. If he looked at Gabriel he would be lost, dragged under by his spell.
He turned back to him, put a hand on the back of his head and pulled him closer, mashing his mouth against the archangel’s. Gabriel tasted like Dean had thought he would: butterscotch but with a hint of something sour underneath that too, and that Dean hadn’t expected. Like sour gummy bears or something, something that only pulled Dean in further. When he pushed himself away they were both panting, but Gabriel looked even more exhausted than Dean felt. Dean felt a pang somewhere in him at the sight of Gabriel, golden and grace-given, powerful but vulnerable at the same time.
And if he was like this in Dean’s dream then how would he be if he were alive again?
“I’ll help you find what’s left of your grace. I’ll help you find peace.”
Gabriel grasped Dean’s hand. “No, Dean. I am at peace.” As if to make Dean believe him more, knowing now that Gabriel needed this dreamworld just as much as Dean did, the world pulled and pushed at Dean until when he glanced up, all he could see was the forgiveness in Gabriel’s eyes. “I’ll be waiting here if you change your mind about me,” his voice echoed, like honey flowing against Dean’s own thoughts.
Dean pulled Gabriel to him again before he could slip away for good. “Already have.”
FIN
Author: OpheliacAngel
Pairing: Dean/Gabriel
Genres: Romance/Hurt/Comfort
Rating: Teen
Summary: Dean and airplanes don’t mix. Dean and Gabriel, however, mix better than Dean thinks.
A/N: Written for SPN Rare OTP Fic-a-Month Challenge for June’s prompt of ‘travel.’ Also a fill on my h/c_bingo card for ‘abandonment issues.’
Soundtrack: Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Fallen’
...
~Though I’ve tried, I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I’ve messed up better, I should know~
Dean’s subconscious was pulling him into that dream again. The one with the plane. The one with Dean in the plane, brutally chewed down fingernails clutching the armrests as if they alone could save him if the plane were to simply fall right out of the sky; eyes wide and gaze trained on the seat in front of him; thoughts curling and roiling in his mind: prayers and desperate mutterings and even some screaming. All of those sensations so real, so vivid and ingrained in his memory that he almost thought it was real.
Yet Dean would never willingly step foot on a plane, and the fact that he couldn’t figure out why he was on it led him to believe, no, convinced him that this was nothing but a dream, a nightmare and a pretty flimsy one at that.
His stomach was bottoming out though, after countless hours, or minutes, of it swaying back and forth violently in his chest, sending him lurching forward at one moment and pressing back against his seat the next. His legs were falling asleep and cramps were ripping through him and his arms were already sore, and the fact that he knew he was dreaming didn’t make him feel any less.
But he had to be dreaming because Gabriel the freaking archangel was sitting in the seat next to his, not the one across the row but the one right next to his, one hand on Dean’s shaking arm and the other holding a cup of something golden and most definitely alcoholic, and Gabriel was dead.
“You’re dreaming again.” Gabriel didn’t look over at him and after one look himself, Dean turned away. Not that Gabriel was making him sicker or anything, but he couldn’t handle a dead archangel right now. So he ignored him, despite the fact that Gabriel could make him talk if he wanted to, despite the fact that Dean was about a half-second away from begging for that drink, from begging for mercy which equated to off this goddamn plane, but Gabriel was nothing if not persistent. “Of course, you wouldn’t call it a dream.”
The plane dipped suddenly and Dean’s crumbling stomach along with it. He gasped and put his head down between his knees, having read somewhere that that simple action was supposed to relive tension and the onset of nausea, but it didn’t seem to help. His head was spinning and his insides doing somersaults, and now he could feel actual bile rising in his throat. To make matters worse, one of the flight attendants chose that exact moment to walk by their row. “Everything alright here?”
“Just fine and dandy,” Gabriel replied instantly, his voice chipper as if everything in the world was going his way. Usually, Dean suspected, it was. Except for the getting killed by one’s own brother part. He groaned loudly when the plane dipped again, though it had almost as much to do with Gabriel being right there and given that he was dead that he shouldn’t be allowed to appear in Dean’s dreams, and also that he was present to perpetuate Dean’s total misery.
If there was a way to wake himself back up, then he would.
“You’re doing this,” he mumbled after the attendant walked on and was definitely out of earshot. It wasn’t like his subconscious to taunt him with fears he knew were trivial, it would rather bleed him by dredging up memories of decades on the rack, so this had to be Gabriel’s doing. Yet where the hell Gabriel was he didn’t know, he just hoped that he wasn’t hovering over him and Lisa in their room. Dean wanted Gabriel to have no involvement in that part of his life, not with Lisa in the bed next to him and Ben just two doors down.
When Dean sat up again he noticed that Gabriel was looking at him, hard amber eyes now soft yet just as piercing and almost beautiful in a way. He wondered if the archangel’s wings matched his eyes, or whether they were stereotypical fluffy and white. He kicked himself mentally for even thinking it. Gabriel’s hand also pulled back, though slowly, and Dean realized his hand had been hovering a mere two inches from his back.
Gabriel caught Dean staring at him with a suspicion that Dean knew betrayed his nearly overwhelming curiosity, and Gabriel’s eyebrows raised as if on cue. “What?”
Those damn eyes penetrated him until Dean felt his soul was bleeding, and betraying his pride he looked away quickly, focusing intently instead on the in flight magazine stuffed into the pocket of the seat before him. He made no move to remove it, but he wanted to so badly because Gabriel’s eyes on him felt like a curse, a surefire way to end what he had so carefully and painstakingly built for himself these past few months.
But this was just a dream, a nightmare, and he was taking it too far.
There were screams in the distance and Dean then knew exactly where the plane was heading. He could feel hell close by and Alistair waiting, even though he was long dead and Dean no longer had to feel that perpetual fire. Only in his nightmares, only when he was caught off guard, only when it wasn’t real and that was worse, in some ways, because being just memory meant he could never escape it. Dean shrunk back against his seat in fear, refusing to look over at Gabriel again.
The words that slipped out of his mouth like a long-forgotten prayer should never have been directed toward Gabriel. “Take me out of it then. If you’re so sure this is a dream.” Gabriel’s look giving away nothing led Dean to believe for just a moment that this was no dream. He had fucked Gabriel over, gotten him killed. This was his punishment. “Please,” he added as an afterthought. He didn’t know what he was begging for anymore, begging for Gabriel not to be dead, for Dean to not be going back to hell, for Sam to still be alive and waiting for him when Dean woke up again.
For what had happened never to have happened in the first place.
One snap of Gabriel’s fingers and there was no more light. The sky outside the windows was pitch black and there were no lights on the plane, not even overhead, and the passengers were no longer shifting and talking around him, there were silent and frozen. Another snap and an overhead light came on in the row before them, barely illuminating Gabriel’s face though still reflecting off his amber eyes, molten and warm and giving.
“I can’t do that.” Dean bit back his whimper but Gabriel shoved the drink into his shaking hand and it came out, choked and pitiful and Dean could taste blood in his mouth from where he had bit his tongue. Gabriel leaned closer, grin wider and greater than the sun itself, one hand on Dean’s cheek and the other unbuckling Dean’s seatbelt. “But I can take you somewhere you would never go on your own. It’s not exactly easy to have my way with you, little destroyer.” He patted Dean’s cheek and Dean jumped as the seatbelt clicked open loudly in the unnatural silence of the plane. The world swirled around them and the screaming faded away, yet Dean still felt as if his head was imploding, as if he himself were the only one screaming as if he were already lost.
Gabriel’s hands were always on him though, on his cheek, around his waist and shielding his eyes from what he didn’t want Dean to see, hands fluttering around his neck, his shoulder, his chest and quick swipes across his forehead, against his knee, fingers graceful grazing his knuckles and where his teeth bit his lips bloody.
The spinning seemed to go on for ages even when Dean knew it had stopped and he was sitting on something, maybe a bed but probably Gabriel’s lap judging by the continual shifting beneath him. Gabriel’s hands left him then, thankfully, but they weren’t abandoning him. They were simply granting him space and Dean hummed in agreement.
He opened his eyes as if someone had just pulled off a blindfold and the sky hung open before him, wide and black and seeming to welcome him into its embrace. Dean was sitting on a hammock, still on Gabriel’s lap. The dizziness was still there too, his body rebelling and threatening to spill all its contents out onto the wood beneath them. He swallowed, hating that Gabriel was manipulating him like this but also secretly loving it too. It wasn’t like he didn’t love Lisa, he did and he always would, but she couldn’t take away his pain and his guilt, she could only push it back further in his mind, mask it for him until he fell asleep, and his responsibility toward Ben was more of the same.
Gabriel had that power within him to take it away for good: all that pain. Memories of his brother too, and that scared him, but not as much as Gabriel leaving him was.
“Your pain’s too much, Dean-o. Let it go.”
Pain too much for an archangel, and a human’s one at that. Was that even possible?
Another thing that wasn’t possible was the famed Eiffel Tower to his left and the biggest baseball stadium he had ever seen before him and stretching off to his right. Beyond that there were cornfields and Dean’s baby parked on steaming asphalt, doors wide open, dark frame shimmering in the sun. There were so many stars above him that they couldn’t be real either.
Gabriel had snuck into his dreams, creep that he was, and now Dean had to see just what the hell he wanted.
Dean made to move off his lap, because even in a dream it was making him blush and feel overheated, but one of Gabriel’s hands held him by his neck, a tight hold but one that didn’t hurt, and his other gripped the side of the hammock, as if Dean were putting him off balance. What the hell?
“You’ve been haunting my own dreams for months now, kiddo.”
“So?”
Gabriel tightened the grip he had on Dean’s neck and now it was hurting. “So, I am drowning in your guilt, and none too willingly. Seriously, kid, you’ve got to learn to reign in it. I know it’s hard.”
Dean tensed until all his limbs were cramping up. “Bullshit you know. Sam, my own brother, jumped into the Cage to save my ass. Do you know what that feels like? Can you even imagine?”
Gabriel nodded patiently and none of this seemed right to Dean. “I can. My brothers are down there too, Dean. Even though they were both self-righteous dicks they were still my brothers. I thought I was hurting, hell, I’m dead! But clearly Dean Winchester has to top every-freaking-one.”
Dean swallowed and Gabriel’s grip lessened until Dean could breathe again. No doubt as a result of the archangel’s anger, storm clouds were forming in the sky, thunder resounding and lighting crashing down dangerously close to the hammock soon after. Gabriel sighed, clearly annoyed but it sounded sorta resigned too, and the storm fell apart. Dean just wanted to be back in bed at this point. He didn’t know what the hell Gabriel wanted with him, but he was acting off for one thing. Off in a way that made Dean almost speechless, and that was never a good thing.
Gabriel shifted then and released his grip on Dean completely. Dean scooted to the other side of the hammock and turned away from the archangel, trying to think of some way to wake himself up without Gabriel realizing, but there was fat chance of that.
“You didn’t kill your brother, Dean. You didn’t kill me either.”
Dean looked over at him, startled when he realized that Gabriel was now standing several feet away, glancing up at the sky. He had never even heard the guy get up, but he supposed that was the point. Dean cleared his throat, trying to rid his - or realistically - Gabriel’s dream of the awkwardness it had fallen into. “Where are we anyway?”
That seemed to lighten the mood considerably, judging by the way Gabriel’s face lit up like he had just found a candy store. “Well, I figured it would be boring to take you somewhere that you can just go off to on your own. So I picked a few places, took what I liked from each, mashed them together and whoila!”
“So you made this place?” Not like he didn’t know it, but the guy was supposed to be dead, which meant he shouldn’t be making anything, cupcakes or dreams.
Gabriel sat down next to Dean again. “Underestimate me much, kiddo?”
“You’re unbelievable,” Dean breathed. He was tempted to add, ‘And full of yourself,’ but bit his tongue. He was just as - if not more - tempted to tell Gabriel to bring back the plane scene again, or even to let him succumb to his other numerous nightmares, suspicious of the archangel playing him in some way, but as he leaned back into the pillows behind him, he let out a breath and realized just how easy it was to relax here, away from the world.
Gabriel, though, clearly wasn’t ready to shut up. “You're an all-american guy, in some ways. Used to think that it was annoying, but there is a lot to like. Baseball games, apple pie, excess and lots of it.”
Dean raised an eyebrow but didn’t move; if he was stuck here then he may as well enjoy it, even if it was weird. “Nothing wrong with pie.”
One side of Gabriel’s mouth pulled upward in a smirk. “Definitely nothing wrong with pie.”
The archangel seemed non-threatening and even content, in a way, so Dean let him be to enjoy the view of the nighttime sky and closed his eyes. Whether he trusted Gabriel or not, it didn’t much matter. Nothing did now. Because as many times as Gabriel told him, regardless of why the hell the archangel cared about his well-being in the first place, he had killed the archangel and he had killed Sam too. By not being strong enough or fast enough. By not being good enough.
Facts were facts, and Dean wasn’t blind to them.
Gabriel, however, tensed beside him and Dean opened his eyes again. The all-powerful archangel was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, back facing Dean. The starlight illuminated his honey brown hair and Dean was taken aback by how angelic he looked right then and there, but also small and delicate and even lost.
Dean had done that to him too.
Thing was, Dean was so tired of being alone. Of sharing a bed with someone else but feeling abandoned regardless. Of living in a house that might as well have been empty with how little it healed him. Of being left behind time and time again because he wasn’t what he should have been. He had failed Sam over and over, failed Cas and his friends and here he was. Hell, he failed Gabriel too and Gabriel still wasn’t giving up on him. It made no sense.
It made no sense ‘cause he was dead.
He looked real though, felt real as Dean placed a hand on his back, needing to touch something other than the too soft pillows behind him or the rough wood under his hands. With that one touch he could feel the same fear, the same desires. Gabriel had been left behind too, but he had come back for Dean, against all the reason that Dean could come up with. His hand didn’t pull away even with that shock, even while getting smacked in the face with those startling similarities. If anything he pressed his hand more firmly against Gabriel’s back, as if subconsciously searching for something.
Gabriel shifted but didn’t turn around, though he was still there, still there as in not fading, not disappearing, not dying all over again. “You can stay here forever if you want to. Got enough juice left in me to grant you this. You’ve given enough, Dean.”
No, I haven’t. Not by a long shot. “Can’t,” Dean’s voice broke on that one simple word. Lisa and Ben were his responsibility now, it was his job to not only look after them but take care of them. He couldn’t handle being alone now anyway, Sam had been right about that. “Have to go back.” As long as it’s not back on that freaking plane.
Gabriel chuckled and snapped his fingers. The world around them shifted, but when the haze cleared Dean could tell they were still in the same world; they were just farther out than they had been before. Now the sun was beating down on them and the Impala was parked before him, glorious and free, doors open and awaiting him to just hop right on in and take a spin. Dean smoothed a hand over her hood and then eagerly climbed inside. Gabriel followed suit, as if he belonged in that passenger seat and nowhere else, and for once Dean didn’t snarl at him to leave.
“So you dead or what?”
Gabriel shrugged, but Dean could easily tell he was hiding. “Kinda, pieces of my grace are still hanging around, preventing me from stepping off into the other void. If I find them then I’ll be whole again. Still damaged beyond repair, but physically whole again. Unless someone else finds them first, then I’ll just be... gone.” A cold shock of dread washed through Dean’s system, but it did anything but numb him. The archangel leaned across the bench seat until their faces were almost touching. “Give me this, Dean? Dead guys have wishes too.”
Dean turned away, biting his lip, eyes squinting against the sunlight pouring through the dash. If he looked at Gabriel he would be lost, dragged under by his spell.
He turned back to him, put a hand on the back of his head and pulled him closer, mashing his mouth against the archangel’s. Gabriel tasted like Dean had thought he would: butterscotch but with a hint of something sour underneath that too, and that Dean hadn’t expected. Like sour gummy bears or something, something that only pulled Dean in further. When he pushed himself away they were both panting, but Gabriel looked even more exhausted than Dean felt. Dean felt a pang somewhere in him at the sight of Gabriel, golden and grace-given, powerful but vulnerable at the same time.
And if he was like this in Dean’s dream then how would he be if he were alive again?
“I’ll help you find what’s left of your grace. I’ll help you find peace.”
Gabriel grasped Dean’s hand. “No, Dean. I am at peace.” As if to make Dean believe him more, knowing now that Gabriel needed this dreamworld just as much as Dean did, the world pulled and pushed at Dean until when he glanced up, all he could see was the forgiveness in Gabriel’s eyes. “I’ll be waiting here if you change your mind about me,” his voice echoed, like honey flowing against Dean’s own thoughts.
Dean pulled Gabriel to him again before he could slip away for good. “Already have.”
FIN