My North, My South, My East, My West
Title: My North, My South, My East, My West
Author: secondplatypus
Pairing: Sam/Gabriel
Rating: R for a combination of violence, language and some disturbing imagery (the sexual content is at a PG-13 level)
Warnings: see above, and throw in a touch of schmoop. There's no outright gore, but there's blood and some pretty unpleasant things going on. When Sam is under the control of -- let's call them outside forces in the name of not wandering into spoiler territory, shall we -- the contact between him and Gabriel technically qualifies as non-con, but since the contact in question is rated PG, I don't feel a non-con warning is necessary.
Spoilers: major 5.14, minor/moderate 5.04
Word Count: 1919
Disclaimer: Supernatural and all characters therein are the property of Eric Kripke and the WB/CW, I'm just borrowing them for my own nefarious purposes.
Summary: In the wake of the events of 5.14, Sam is dying in Bobby's panic room. In a desperate, last-ditch effort to save the younger Winchester, Castiel asks Gabriel for help. The trickster-archangel agrees. What follows is a tale of a brutal struggle, salvation, and redemption.
Author's Notes: This was inspired by "Supernaturally" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which is where the title and the cut text came from. I would have entitled it "Supernaturally", but given the title of the show, I had to pass that one by.
- this is the seventeenth Supernatural fic I've written, which I'm only taking note of because seventeen is my favorite number. and it's late and I'm bored.
- the cultural context for the access points to the soul come from two sources; the first is the commonly held adage that "the eyes are the window to the soul", the second is a quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom I love dearly, "Soul meets soul on lovers' lips."
- The idea for this hit me in a diner after I'd just finished watching a beautiful fireworks show; I scrawled my notes down on a napkin and started writing when I got home. A few hours later, voila!
Gabriel.
The cry slammed into the archangel's grace, filled with enough desperation and pain to make Gabriel sick to his soul.
It came from Castiel, the little Thursday-angel he hadn't seen in months, since he and the Winchesters had walked out of the warehouse where they could have left him to die. He owed them a favor, that ragged band of brave, doomed fools; unscrupulous Trickster though he had been, and still was, Gabriel took his debts too seriously to ignore a plea torn from that deep within one of his brothers.
He found Castiel in a scrap-yard full of cars, in the process of screaming his grace raw calling for help. The angel's eyes were wild with panic, and it took Gabriel nearly five minutes to make sense of what he was saying. Sam had done the next-to-impossible and destroyed Famine using the addiction the horseman had rekindled, but it had taken a hideous toll. Now, Sam was locked inside a panic room in the house, dying an agonizing death as the cravings ate him from the inside out. If they weren't stopped, the intensity of the heat would fry Sam to a crisp, and his heart would literally burst in his chest.
If he owed Dean for letting him out of that warehouse, Gabriel owed Sam double for not stopping his brother from switching on the sprinkler system. The Father knew Gabriel deserved it after torturing Sam the way he had, but the younger Winchester was forged of stronger stuff than Gabriel had ever imagined, and now that magnificent soul was being torn to pieces. Castiel didn't have enough power left to stop the addiction from destroying Sam; if he'd still been connected to Heaven, he likely wouldn't have been able to do much to help.
Castiel looked at him, imploring mercy with enormous blue eyes,
"Gabriel, will you help him?"
Gabriel answered with a single nod.
"Take me to Sam."
--------------------------------------------
Gabriel looked through the small window at the black-eyed body howling and bashing itself against the iron walls.
When his eyes returned to Castiel's, not a trace of his usual joviality and mischief was evident anywhere in him, and when he spoke, it was with the commanding authority befitting the Arch-Herald of God himself.
"No matter what you hear, do NOT open this door. In fact, don't come within twenty feet of it."
and keep him, Gabriel said, motioning to Dean as he projected his thoughts into Castiel's mind, away.
Gabriel blinked into the room, where Sam was throwing himself against the door and clawing at it, pummeling his body and tearing the flesh from his fingertips. Sam was so hungry for blood that he was ripping his own skin off; Gabriel could see the marks where Sam had sunk his teeth into his own flesh in search of the diluted demon-blood that flowed through his veins.
When the maddened creature sensed Gabriel's presence, he turned to face the intruder. Sam's beautiful, sensitive, expressive face was contorted into a mask of hunger and fury, and with a roar that echoed and rumbled with the darkness of Hell, he was in motion, tackling Gabriel to the ground. At nine inches taller and eighty pounds heavier, Sam's physical body had the advantage, but he was no match for an archangel. Within a second of his head cracking against the concrete floor, Gabriel had reversed their positions, pinning Sam beneath his body. Sam's heart was beating so fast Gabriel couldn't count the beats, the temperature of his skin so high Gabriel could barely stand to touch him.
Before Gabriel did anything else, he needed to heal Sam's wounds. He pressed a finger to the too-hot, broken skin of Sam's left wrist, extending his grace to flow through the man's body. At the touch of Gabriel's power, Sam's heart rate climbed higher still; had Gabriel arrived mere minutes later, the simple act of sealing up torn flesh and a few broken bones could have killed him. For a sickening moment, Gabriel was afraid Sam might not recover from the shock, but within a few seconds, he felt the hum of Sam's heart slow. If that tiny exposure to his grace had that effect, pouring it into his body to annihilate the addiction would be the death of him; instead of the straightforward approach of burning the darkness out, Gabriel was now faced with the subtle, complicated task of drawing the poison out of Sam and into himself, then incinerating it.
The Father's knucklehead creations had managed to get a few things right over the span of their history, in spite of themselves; the legends of souls meeting souls on lover's lips had an element of truth to them. The best way to access a human's soul was through their eyes or their mouth, and if Gabriel tried to draw it out through Sam's eyes, Sam would be permanently blinded, which left him with an option that would most likely make him an enemy of the Winchesters.
As Sam squirmed and snarled, biting down hard on the soft flesh between Gabriel's thumb and forefinger, Gabriel sighed. Better to have Sam hate him even more than let him die, and in the grand scheme of things he knew he shouldn't care what Sam thought of him in the first place.
Sam quickly tired of Gabriel's hand and lunged for his neck, intent on tearing the smaller form's throat out. It was exactly the opening Gabriel needed. As Sam bared his teeth, Gabriel turned his head, capturing Sam's mouth with his own and fisting his fingers in Sam's hair so he couldn't pull away.
With the body beneath him struggling, trying to break free of the pure brilliance of his power, Gabriel did something he hadn't done in longer than he could remember - Gabriel breathed, pulling Sam's addiction into him through his mouth, replacing the bitter, demon-tainted air that spilled from Sam's lungs with the cleansing fire of an archangel. The poisonous tendrils of the addiction that bound Sam were no match for Gabriel's grace, incinerating the instant they came into contact with it, but they were putting up a terrifying fight, retreating deeper into Sam and whipping him into a frenzy.
The growling, writhing body beneath him was tremendously strong and thrumming with power, fueled by a lethal mixture of rage and hate and dark, blood-thirsty passion that boiled beneath Sam's skin. The inferno raging within Sam's skull had crossed, if not destroyed, the pathways in the poor human's brain; Sam was hard as a fucking rock, a fact that Gabriel was reminded of every time Sam's hips clashed against him. Gabriel wasn't about to let something as trivial as the lust that surged through him each time he felt that impossibly hard length distract him from saving Sam's life, but with each bruising collision, Gabriel became more painfully aware of the heat coiling deep in his belly.
Sam bit down viciously on Gabriel's lip, savage growls ripping from somewhere deep and hungry within him as he lapped hungrily at the blood that welled from the little gash. Gabriel fought the impulse to bite back and healed himself with a thought, tightening his grip on Sam's hair as he locked his legs around the man.
It was a brutal battle, made all the more difficult by the delicate balance Gabriel had to maintain, ensuring Sam had enough air to keep him from suffocating without exhaling grace into his lungs and using enough force to control him without hurting him. After a seemingly endless onslaught of teeth and nails and violent thrashing that left Gabriel's shirt shredded and his body battered, Sam began to quiet. As Gabriel continued pouring his breath and grace into healing Sam, he could feel the cloud over Sam's soul begin to break and fade, the body in his arms going still. Gabriel didn't need to see Sam's face to know that the glittering black of his eyes was beginning to recede, giving way to turbulent blue-hazel.
For a moment, Sam went so still that Gabriel was afraid he might have slipped into a coma, but then Sam started to move as though he was trying to break free of Gabriel's lips again. Gabriel untangled his hands from Sam's hair, allowing him to move his head to the side and sever the connection between them; now that the man was himself, Gabriel wouldn't take such an intimate touch from him without his permission. Gabriel pulled back, lamenting the departure of Sam's warmth as harsh, sharp longing ripped through him.
When Sam spoke, his voice was soft and broken where air couldn't quite make it through his shredded vocal cords.
"Gabriel?"
"Yeah, kiddo, it's me."
Confused eyes searched Gabriel's face; the Father only knew the horrors and hallucinations Sam's mind had inflicted on him.
"Are you, is it--"
"Hush, Sammy. I'm really here."
Sam's face crumpled as a sob wrenched itself from his lips, laden with an emotion Gabriel couldn't place. Gabriel had no idea what to do, didn't know if Sam's reaction was one of relief or pain; given everything he'd put the poor kid through, Gabriel was betting on the latter. He shifted his body and started to move away, not wanting to cause Sam any more distress, and was surprised to feel a pair of arms wrapping around him. The withdrawal that had ravaged him should have sapped every bit of Sam's strength, leaving him weak and boneless, but somehow a large, warm hand was flattening between Gabriel's shoulderblades while the other found its way to his lower back, guiding his body back against Sam's with firm, gentle pressure.
"Don't go," Sam whispered, brushing his lips along the lines of the archangel's jaw, "please."
The contact drew a groan from Gabriel as sweet sparks of desire danced along his nerves.
He indulged the feeling, allowing it to wash over him for an all-too-short moment before he felt Sam begin to shake from the effort of lifting his head.
Gabriel relaxed his weight into the body under him, brushing tangled locks of hair back from Sam's face before sliding his hand to the back of Sam's head. With a soft nudge of Gabriel's cheek against his, Sam relaxed, resting his head back against the hand that cradled him, cushioning him against the hard floor. Gabriel raised his other hand and, with a snap, he and Sam were lying on the bed, which had acquired a very soft pillow and mattress top over the course of the last millisecond.
The hand on his shoulders moved up along his neck, then higher still, combing though his hair before pulling Gabriel down to meet lips that willingly parted for him and a tongue that eagerly twined with his.
---------------------------------
When the groans and screams coming from the panic room started up again, Dean wanted to check on Sam, but Castiel reminded him of Gabriel's words, telling him with a lot of stammering and fumbling that Gabriel was performing a very complex exorcism ritual that couldn't be disturbed under any circumstances. Castiel knew full well what Sam and his brother were up to in there -- he still had enough grace to read Gabriel's thoughts (when they weren't being projected at him), which were well on their way to scarring him for the remainder of his existence -- and he figured there was no need for Dean to spend the rest of his life in a similar state of trauma.
Author: secondplatypus
Pairing: Sam/Gabriel
Rating: R for a combination of violence, language and some disturbing imagery (the sexual content is at a PG-13 level)
Warnings: see above, and throw in a touch of schmoop. There's no outright gore, but there's blood and some pretty unpleasant things going on. When Sam is under the control of -- let's call them outside forces in the name of not wandering into spoiler territory, shall we -- the contact between him and Gabriel technically qualifies as non-con, but since the contact in question is rated PG, I don't feel a non-con warning is necessary.
Spoilers: major 5.14, minor/moderate 5.04
Word Count: 1919
Disclaimer: Supernatural and all characters therein are the property of Eric Kripke and the WB/CW, I'm just borrowing them for my own nefarious purposes.
Summary: In the wake of the events of 5.14, Sam is dying in Bobby's panic room. In a desperate, last-ditch effort to save the younger Winchester, Castiel asks Gabriel for help. The trickster-archangel agrees. What follows is a tale of a brutal struggle, salvation, and redemption.
Author's Notes: This was inspired by "Supernaturally" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which is where the title and the cut text came from. I would have entitled it "Supernaturally", but given the title of the show, I had to pass that one by.
- this is the seventeenth Supernatural fic I've written, which I'm only taking note of because seventeen is my favorite number. and it's late and I'm bored.
- the cultural context for the access points to the soul come from two sources; the first is the commonly held adage that "the eyes are the window to the soul", the second is a quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom I love dearly, "Soul meets soul on lovers' lips."
- The idea for this hit me in a diner after I'd just finished watching a beautiful fireworks show; I scrawled my notes down on a napkin and started writing when I got home. A few hours later, voila!
Gabriel.
The cry slammed into the archangel's grace, filled with enough desperation and pain to make Gabriel sick to his soul.
It came from Castiel, the little Thursday-angel he hadn't seen in months, since he and the Winchesters had walked out of the warehouse where they could have left him to die. He owed them a favor, that ragged band of brave, doomed fools; unscrupulous Trickster though he had been, and still was, Gabriel took his debts too seriously to ignore a plea torn from that deep within one of his brothers.
He found Castiel in a scrap-yard full of cars, in the process of screaming his grace raw calling for help. The angel's eyes were wild with panic, and it took Gabriel nearly five minutes to make sense of what he was saying. Sam had done the next-to-impossible and destroyed Famine using the addiction the horseman had rekindled, but it had taken a hideous toll. Now, Sam was locked inside a panic room in the house, dying an agonizing death as the cravings ate him from the inside out. If they weren't stopped, the intensity of the heat would fry Sam to a crisp, and his heart would literally burst in his chest.
If he owed Dean for letting him out of that warehouse, Gabriel owed Sam double for not stopping his brother from switching on the sprinkler system. The Father knew Gabriel deserved it after torturing Sam the way he had, but the younger Winchester was forged of stronger stuff than Gabriel had ever imagined, and now that magnificent soul was being torn to pieces. Castiel didn't have enough power left to stop the addiction from destroying Sam; if he'd still been connected to Heaven, he likely wouldn't have been able to do much to help.
Castiel looked at him, imploring mercy with enormous blue eyes,
"Gabriel, will you help him?"
Gabriel answered with a single nod.
"Take me to Sam."
--------------------------------------------
Gabriel looked through the small window at the black-eyed body howling and bashing itself against the iron walls.
When his eyes returned to Castiel's, not a trace of his usual joviality and mischief was evident anywhere in him, and when he spoke, it was with the commanding authority befitting the Arch-Herald of God himself.
"No matter what you hear, do NOT open this door. In fact, don't come within twenty feet of it."
and keep him, Gabriel said, motioning to Dean as he projected his thoughts into Castiel's mind, away.
Gabriel blinked into the room, where Sam was throwing himself against the door and clawing at it, pummeling his body and tearing the flesh from his fingertips. Sam was so hungry for blood that he was ripping his own skin off; Gabriel could see the marks where Sam had sunk his teeth into his own flesh in search of the diluted demon-blood that flowed through his veins.
When the maddened creature sensed Gabriel's presence, he turned to face the intruder. Sam's beautiful, sensitive, expressive face was contorted into a mask of hunger and fury, and with a roar that echoed and rumbled with the darkness of Hell, he was in motion, tackling Gabriel to the ground. At nine inches taller and eighty pounds heavier, Sam's physical body had the advantage, but he was no match for an archangel. Within a second of his head cracking against the concrete floor, Gabriel had reversed their positions, pinning Sam beneath his body. Sam's heart was beating so fast Gabriel couldn't count the beats, the temperature of his skin so high Gabriel could barely stand to touch him.
Before Gabriel did anything else, he needed to heal Sam's wounds. He pressed a finger to the too-hot, broken skin of Sam's left wrist, extending his grace to flow through the man's body. At the touch of Gabriel's power, Sam's heart rate climbed higher still; had Gabriel arrived mere minutes later, the simple act of sealing up torn flesh and a few broken bones could have killed him. For a sickening moment, Gabriel was afraid Sam might not recover from the shock, but within a few seconds, he felt the hum of Sam's heart slow. If that tiny exposure to his grace had that effect, pouring it into his body to annihilate the addiction would be the death of him; instead of the straightforward approach of burning the darkness out, Gabriel was now faced with the subtle, complicated task of drawing the poison out of Sam and into himself, then incinerating it.
The Father's knucklehead creations had managed to get a few things right over the span of their history, in spite of themselves; the legends of souls meeting souls on lover's lips had an element of truth to them. The best way to access a human's soul was through their eyes or their mouth, and if Gabriel tried to draw it out through Sam's eyes, Sam would be permanently blinded, which left him with an option that would most likely make him an enemy of the Winchesters.
As Sam squirmed and snarled, biting down hard on the soft flesh between Gabriel's thumb and forefinger, Gabriel sighed. Better to have Sam hate him even more than let him die, and in the grand scheme of things he knew he shouldn't care what Sam thought of him in the first place.
Sam quickly tired of Gabriel's hand and lunged for his neck, intent on tearing the smaller form's throat out. It was exactly the opening Gabriel needed. As Sam bared his teeth, Gabriel turned his head, capturing Sam's mouth with his own and fisting his fingers in Sam's hair so he couldn't pull away.
With the body beneath him struggling, trying to break free of the pure brilliance of his power, Gabriel did something he hadn't done in longer than he could remember - Gabriel breathed, pulling Sam's addiction into him through his mouth, replacing the bitter, demon-tainted air that spilled from Sam's lungs with the cleansing fire of an archangel. The poisonous tendrils of the addiction that bound Sam were no match for Gabriel's grace, incinerating the instant they came into contact with it, but they were putting up a terrifying fight, retreating deeper into Sam and whipping him into a frenzy.
The growling, writhing body beneath him was tremendously strong and thrumming with power, fueled by a lethal mixture of rage and hate and dark, blood-thirsty passion that boiled beneath Sam's skin. The inferno raging within Sam's skull had crossed, if not destroyed, the pathways in the poor human's brain; Sam was hard as a fucking rock, a fact that Gabriel was reminded of every time Sam's hips clashed against him. Gabriel wasn't about to let something as trivial as the lust that surged through him each time he felt that impossibly hard length distract him from saving Sam's life, but with each bruising collision, Gabriel became more painfully aware of the heat coiling deep in his belly.
Sam bit down viciously on Gabriel's lip, savage growls ripping from somewhere deep and hungry within him as he lapped hungrily at the blood that welled from the little gash. Gabriel fought the impulse to bite back and healed himself with a thought, tightening his grip on Sam's hair as he locked his legs around the man.
It was a brutal battle, made all the more difficult by the delicate balance Gabriel had to maintain, ensuring Sam had enough air to keep him from suffocating without exhaling grace into his lungs and using enough force to control him without hurting him. After a seemingly endless onslaught of teeth and nails and violent thrashing that left Gabriel's shirt shredded and his body battered, Sam began to quiet. As Gabriel continued pouring his breath and grace into healing Sam, he could feel the cloud over Sam's soul begin to break and fade, the body in his arms going still. Gabriel didn't need to see Sam's face to know that the glittering black of his eyes was beginning to recede, giving way to turbulent blue-hazel.
For a moment, Sam went so still that Gabriel was afraid he might have slipped into a coma, but then Sam started to move as though he was trying to break free of Gabriel's lips again. Gabriel untangled his hands from Sam's hair, allowing him to move his head to the side and sever the connection between them; now that the man was himself, Gabriel wouldn't take such an intimate touch from him without his permission. Gabriel pulled back, lamenting the departure of Sam's warmth as harsh, sharp longing ripped through him.
When Sam spoke, his voice was soft and broken where air couldn't quite make it through his shredded vocal cords.
"Gabriel?"
"Yeah, kiddo, it's me."
Confused eyes searched Gabriel's face; the Father only knew the horrors and hallucinations Sam's mind had inflicted on him.
"Are you, is it--"
"Hush, Sammy. I'm really here."
Sam's face crumpled as a sob wrenched itself from his lips, laden with an emotion Gabriel couldn't place. Gabriel had no idea what to do, didn't know if Sam's reaction was one of relief or pain; given everything he'd put the poor kid through, Gabriel was betting on the latter. He shifted his body and started to move away, not wanting to cause Sam any more distress, and was surprised to feel a pair of arms wrapping around him. The withdrawal that had ravaged him should have sapped every bit of Sam's strength, leaving him weak and boneless, but somehow a large, warm hand was flattening between Gabriel's shoulderblades while the other found its way to his lower back, guiding his body back against Sam's with firm, gentle pressure.
"Don't go," Sam whispered, brushing his lips along the lines of the archangel's jaw, "please."
The contact drew a groan from Gabriel as sweet sparks of desire danced along his nerves.
He indulged the feeling, allowing it to wash over him for an all-too-short moment before he felt Sam begin to shake from the effort of lifting his head.
Gabriel relaxed his weight into the body under him, brushing tangled locks of hair back from Sam's face before sliding his hand to the back of Sam's head. With a soft nudge of Gabriel's cheek against his, Sam relaxed, resting his head back against the hand that cradled him, cushioning him against the hard floor. Gabriel raised his other hand and, with a snap, he and Sam were lying on the bed, which had acquired a very soft pillow and mattress top over the course of the last millisecond.
The hand on his shoulders moved up along his neck, then higher still, combing though his hair before pulling Gabriel down to meet lips that willingly parted for him and a tongue that eagerly twined with his.
---------------------------------
When the groans and screams coming from the panic room started up again, Dean wanted to check on Sam, but Castiel reminded him of Gabriel's words, telling him with a lot of stammering and fumbling that Gabriel was performing a very complex exorcism ritual that couldn't be disturbed under any circumstances. Castiel knew full well what Sam and his brother were up to in there -- he still had enough grace to read Gabriel's thoughts (when they weren't being projected at him), which were well on their way to scarring him for the remainder of his existence -- and he figured there was no need for Dean to spend the rest of his life in a similar state of trauma.