Supernatural -- "A Mother's Love" Gabriel/girl!Sam

[wonderfoal]

Title: A Mother's Love
Author: wonderfoal
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Gabriel/Sam (girl!Sam)
Wordcount: ~10,300
Warnings: AU (Sam was always a girl, and it deviates from canon after season five, although some material from season six is used), pregnancy, angst
Summary: post season 5 au -- Sam's out of Hell, without her soul and with a baby.
Notes: Mostly written in December 2010, but I struggled hard with the ending. Also, the 4 months = 40 years in hell had to be scrapped. With a pregnancy there, it could only go one of two ways: Sam had the baby and the kid was over a hundred when they got out, or Sam was pregnant for eighty years (ha) and the baby was a crying infant for forty years... just no. So, in this fic helltime is realtime.
Date: Sunday, February 27, 2011



Chapter One

The baby crying startles Sam awake. She sits up with a groan and finds the source of the sound cradled against her side. She has one arm around the infant who is still wailing like a little siren. “Shut up,” she groans and lets the baby fall against the ground so she can massage the pain from her forehead.

The baby cries harder and she squeezes her eyes shut and thinks about just leaving it there. She knows it’s hers - she remembers giving birth to him, remembers nursing him, remembers loving him. Right now, she doesn’t feel anything but a headache and disinterest in the naked child squirming on the ground. This is what I traded my soul for, she thinks numbly.

Overhead, the sky is blue and the clouds fluffy white. It occurs to her that it’s the first time her son has ever seen daylight. He was born in the Cage, deep in hell. He spent the first four months of his life there - this is his first breath of real air.

“Be quiet,” she says sharply. The baby stills at the sound of her voice, but he knows something’s different about his mother and starts crying again.

Sam wishes she could feel affection for the baby, but inside she is only empty.

The grass is green and soft under her skin and she lies against it for a moment. She closes her eyes and the headache bleeds away. All she can hear is the wind and the tiny cries of the finally quiet baby.

All too soon, he starts crying again, doubtlessly hungry. She sits up and looks over the array of tombstones in the cemetery before picking up the baby and unbuttoning her blouse. Once, feeding her child brought her comfort. It gave her respite against the presence of Lucifer and Michael. Now, it’s nothing to her. It’s not even an annoyance. She doesn’t feel anything and this is what it means to lose a soul, she realizes. There are no highs or lows, fears or joys....

Your soul or your son, Crowley had said before freeing her. Your coupon’s not good for both.

I’m not leaving my son here.

“Idiot,” she snorts now. Human souls are valuable things, even ones as tainted as hers. And she had traded it for a baby... a half-human freak of nature that even now might not live.

The baby’s eyes are drifting shut, and she touches his pudgy cheek with her finger, unable to feel any affection for him. “Are you worth it?” she wonders aloud. She’d thought so before. Trapped in hell with two archangels out to make her sorry for foiling their plans --

They’d tortured her for what felt like years, flaying and maiming... just to build her back up and do it again. She’d fallen into hell in her own body, and it continued to age as it would topside - she was still alive, for all that she didn’t eat or sleep. Months ticked by and she hadn’t noticed her pregnancy at first, but suddenly her tormentors had stopped hurting her.

Sam had spent months curled into her own little dark corner of the cage, living off of the archangels’ power. Her son had grown within her, and with him had been her saving grace. The baby was Gabriel’s, conceived just hours before his death. Against all her expectations, Michael and Lucifer had been unwilling to harm their nephew.

Once, Sam had loved him more than life itself. Now, she feels nothing for him. But she remembers loving him, remembers cradling him to her chest and feeling overwhelming joy. She hadn’t hesitated at all to choose him over her own soul, and she won’t throw that away now.

Dean wipes his greased hands on a rag when he hears the knock on the door. It had been a long six hours, but the car is finally repaired and he can get it back to the owners and get paid. Credit card scams are easier, but there’s something satisfying about doing something with his own hands.

He’s going to miss it when he gets back on the road and back to the hunt, but after things fell apart with Lisa, he needs the familiar comfort of the open road for a while.

“Coming!” he shouts before tossing the rag aside and hurrying toward the entrance. He stops dead at the sight of his baby sister standing by the door. “Sammy,” he breathes, looks her over, and feels his throat tighten up.

“Hey Dean,” she greets without smiling.

Don’t be an idiot, he tells himself even as his body moves forward to hug her. She returns the embrace, but the reaction is lackluster. “How are you here?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Crowley sprung me so I’d do his dirty work.”

Dean shakes his head. “Where does that two-bit Crowley get the power for that?”

“He’s the new King of Hell, or so I hear.” Lucifer certainly hadn’t been happy about it.

“And he just expects you to go along with it? No strings?” he asks incredulously. Things are never that easy for them.

Sam shrugs indifferently and Dean knows something’s wrong. “He kept my soul back,” she explains. “To hold over my head.”

“You don’t have a soul?” Dean looks her over again and can see it. Her face is too flat, her eyes too empty. He closes his eyes and draws in a shuddering breath. “We’ll get it back,” he promises.

Sam gives him that damnable shrug again. “I don’t want it back,” she says. “Life’s a whole lot easier this way.”

Dean’s jaw tightens and he rubs a hand over his hair. It’s shock, he tells himself. Give her time. “How long have you been back?”

“A few days.” She looks over the garage and then meets Dean’s eyes with that apathetic stare that sends chills down his spine. “We had to drive here from Kansas.”

“We?” he asks, already imagining the worst.

As though cued, a baby cries. Dean blinks and looks around, but Sam’s eyes immediately go to the car parked outside. Dean follows her gaze and sees a baby sleeping in the front seat. It’s not in a car seat and just barely buckled in. “What the hell?”

Sam snorts. “Exactly,” she says and retrieves the baby.

“Is that yours?”

“I stole it,” she explains, carrying the baby back into the garage. Dean starts to ask if she meant the car or the baby, but one look at the kid answers that.

“He looks like a Winchester,” he says. He looks like Sam.

“Meet Johnny,” she says and without warning dumps the baby into his arms.

The baby wakes and cries, and Dean rocks him in his arms as Sam crosses her arms in front of her chest and watches. “Sam, what’s going on?”

“If he ever shuts up,” she says acidly, “I’ll tell you.”

“Sam,” Dean snaps, “he’s a baby.”

“Who’s been crying for the past two days.”

Dean soothes the baby to silence, old memories of rocking Sam coming back strong. “Sam, where did you get a baby?” he asks quietly.

Sam raises her eyebrows speculatively. “Where do you think? In a cabbage patch?”

Dean doesn’t want to think about the obvious answer, but it keeps smacking him in the face. “You were in Hell.”

Sam nods easily. “In my own body,” she adds.

Locked in a cell with Michael and Lucifer... Dean swallows hard at the thought of what those bastards had done to his sister. “So he’s half angel?” he asks. The baby looks like a normal human. He has pudgy pink cheeks and dark blond hair swirled into a cowlick on the back of his head. His eyes are the exact same shade as Sam’s and for a moment it’s like having baby Sam in his arms again the night of the fire. It feels similar - like the rug has just been pulled out from underneath him.

“Yes,” she says nonchalantly. It’s like it doesn’t mean anything to her... not the baby and not what happened in Hell.

“Is that even allowed?” he asks, looking back at the baby. The baby coos up at him and Dean bounces him in his arms again. Dean can’t recall anything good happening to human-angel hybrids.

“He’s here,” Sam says. “If Heaven has an issue with it, that’s not my problem.” Some dick from Heaven might show up to smite the kid to pieces, and Sam looks like she couldn’t care less.

“I’m calling Cas,” Dean says. They can’t take chances, not with a baby involved.

“Go for it,” Sam says. “I’m going out for a beer.”

“You just got back.”

Sam pauses at the door. She shrugs one shoulder and stares at him, waiting for him to make his point. “So?”

“Sam’s out of Hell,” Dean tells Cas the moment he appears. The baby is sleeping in his arms, which are tired by now from holding his not inconsiderable weight for so long. He doesn’t have a crib or even a bed, and there’s nowhere else safe and clean enough to leave him.

Cas’s eyes flicker down to the baby before returning to Dean’s face. “Hello,” he greets stiffly.

“Sam’s out of Hell,” he says again. “And she’s a freaking robot.”

Cas frowns and searches his words for hidden meaning, wondering how Sam could be turned into an artificially intelligent machine. Dean rolls his eyes and groans. “I mean she’s acting like a pod person, she doesn’t act like she cares about anything, doesn’t smile or cry, or react at all-“

“As though she has lost her soul?” Cas guesses.

Dean blinks. “That’s what she said,” he agrees. “But when I sold my soul, I didn’t lose touch like this.”

Cas is silent for a long moment. “You retained your soul until the point of your death, even though it belonged to Hell. If what I am assuming is correct, Sam’s soul has been removed from her body. She is incapable of feeling or caring for anything or anyone without her soul.”

“Where is it?”

“Presumably, it is still in Hell.”

Dean chokes and looks away. Sam is back, but not really. Her body is here, but her soul is still facing the wrath of two pissed off archangels. “Help me get her out.”

Cas shakes his head. “I can’t. Not without risking freeing Lucifer and Michael.”

“Then risk it.”

Cas stares him down, unwilling to budge. “That would throw away everything that our friends and allies have given up so that we could win.”

Dean knows he’s right, but it is a hard thing to accept. “I can’t just leave her down there.”

“You promised you would,” Cas reminds him. His eyes go back to the baby and linger there. “You have other things to worry about now,” he tells him. “This child is half-angel.”

“He’s Sam’s,” Dean says hoarsely. He can feel hot tears in his eyes but doesn’t want to cry in front of Cas. Cas is looking at the baby, and doesn’t look like he wants to smite him to bits. “Cas, is this okay?”

“Dean?”

“The kid... are Heaven’s goons gonna come for him?”

Cas meets his eyes heatedly and puts one hand against Dean’s marked shoulder. “No one will harm this child,” he vows.

Sam comes in at two in the morning, reeking of beer and cheap perfume. She’d ditched the car somewhere and came back by taxi to Dean’s motel room. He’d booked the place for a month after moving out of Lisa’s and his time there is almost up. The baby is asleep on his bed and Dean is sitting in the nearby chair, watching him breathe and wondering how they were going to handle this.

“Where have you been?” he asks, wondering how - soul or not - Sam could treat her kid this way. Sam had wanted kids of her own since she was a teenager and decided the only way she could have a normal life was with a new family of her own.

“I told you, out for a beer.” She collapses onto the bed next to the baby, jostling the mattress but not waking him. Dean had spent hours soothing him to sleep, first changing the dirty diaper Sam had left him in, then running to two different grocery stores in search of formula.

“That was ten hours ago,” he snaps.

Sam opens her eyes and looks at him coldly. “Stop bossing me around, Dean.”

“I’m not,” he protests. But she’d been gone ten hours and Dean was left alone with the baby and no idea if she was even coming back.

Sam kicks off her shoes and stretches out on the bed, but she doesn’t fall asleep. She stares up at the ceiling and completely ignores the baby. “I found a hunt,” she says idly.

Dean blinks. “You want to go hunting? Now? Sam - we need to worry about getting your soul back.”

Sam turns her head to look at him, her lips pursed in a frown. It’s the first emotion he’s seen out of her since she’d come back, but he knows it can’t be real. “I told you Dean, I don’t want it back.”

“Sam-“

“My soul, my choice,” she snaps. She looks back at the ceiling. “Sounds like a poltergeist in Monterey. We should check it out.”

Dean exhales slowly, making sure to keep his words in check. “Sam, we can’t take off for California with a baby in the backseat.”

“We’ll ditch the kid,” she says.

Dean sits upright, startled beyond belief. “What?”

“I don’t want him,” she says simply.

Dean looks at the sleeping baby and feels his heart break all over again. “Well I do.”

“Then take him,” she says. “I’ll go by myself.”

“Sam-“

“Dad dragged us all over the country,” Sam sits upright, meeting Dean’s eyes in the dark. “So the real issue is that you don’t want to go with me.”

“You weren’t a few months old,” he says gruffly. “And since when do you want to hunt? All your life, you talk about getting out of it and settling down. Now you have that chance, and you throw it away to do this?”

Sam looks at him, face annoyed but eyes devastatingly blank. “I don’t have a whole lot of career options, Dean. You can fix cars, but what am I supposed to do - be a waitress, a stripper... turn tricks? My options are more limited.”

“Don’t you dare-“

“I can hunt, and I’m good at it. You want a family? A normal life? Take the kid and have one. It’s not something I want. He’s not something I want.” She sits up all the way and perches on the side of the bed. “I have a poltergeist to hunt. You can either come with me, or stay with him.”

Chapter Two

The guy had told her his name, but she can’t remember it. It isn’t important - another few minutes and she’ll never see him again. What is important is the brush of brick against her back through her shirt, the chill on her bare hips and stomach, and the delicious heat within as he thrusts inside of her.

“Baby, baby,” he croons as rubs her with his fingers. Sam bucks in the embrace, desperate for any sensation she can get. She has no feelings - all she can hold on to is physical sensation. She relishes in every fuck, every physical blow, every blood spatter against her skin as she kills a monster.

She remembers when it wasn’t always like this. Before the apocalypse, before Hell... this physical act meant something to her then, it was something special. Now, it’s a stranger’s bed, or a ratty motel room, or dark alley behind a bar with some nameless, faceless man who’s promised her a good time.

This one is better than most. He’s managed to bring her to orgasm twice before coming himself. He pulls away and tosses the condom behind a dumpster. Sam catches her breath and buttons up her jeans, tugs her thin shirt down over her sweat-dampened stomach.

“Thanks, babe,” the man grins. “Do you want a ride home?”

Sam shakes her head. The night is young and she still has a haunting to take care of before dawn. If she could feel anything, she thinks she might be proud of how well she hunts now. Nothing intimidates her, nothing makes her hesitate. She’s a better hunter than she’s ever been in her life - much better than Dean and her dad ever were.

Dean has a car seat in the backseat of the Impala, something he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to despite how many months have passed since he started raising his nephew. Johnny is heavy in his arms, but happy and babbling contentedly. “Dahdee,” he croons into Dean’s ear.

Dean smiles at him. “Uncle Dean,” he corrects, because this is Sam’s kid, and she’ll want him back as soon as she comes to her senses. He’s been looking at every opportunity for ways to retrieve souls from Hell. He won’t just leave her there.

“Easy tiger,” he says as the boy starts chewing on his jacket collar. He’s almost a year old now, Dean guesses. Sam had never given him much information about him, and he doubts she even knows. It’s not like Hell had daily calendars. She’d told him he was four months old before she left, so that puts his birthday in late January, just like Dean’s. Hell, they could both be born on the same day.

Johnny has a rash that Dean’s hoping is just poison oak from playing at the park, but he doesn’t want to take any chances. The kid had a rough start, and Dean wants to give him everything he needs now. He has an appointment with the pediatrician in an hour and is already cringing at the thought of using his fake insurance card. Assuming the little guy is okay, they’ll have to hightail it out of the county afterwards.

Dean snaps the last of the buckles around the baby when the phone rings. He glances at the unfamiliar number but answers it anyway. “Dean,” a male voice greets gruffly.

It takes him a moment to place him. It’s dad’s old friend, but he hasn’t heard from him in years, not since Sam contacted him about the faith healer to help Dean. “Joshua, hey,” he says as he slides into the driver’s seat. “What’s up?”

“You can tell me why I just saw your sister dancing topless at a hole-in-the-wall.” He huffs. “I barely recognized her, it’s been so long, but I know she was raised better than that. Where the hell are you?”

Dean closes his eyes and breathes out slowly. He hasn’t heard from Sam since she left Johnny with him and took off for California. He never wanted to leave her, but she is a grown woman and can at least theoretically take care of herself. Johnny is a baby, and he needs a parent who’ll love him and take care of him. “I’m in North Carolina, Charlotte,” he says.

“That’s half a state away,” Joshua grumbles. “What are you doing there?”

Half a state? “Joshua, where are you? Where’s Sam?”

“The question is: why aren’t you with her? Last I heard you were road tripping across the country together.”

Dean winces. It had been years since he’d spoken to the other hunter. He’d never meant to fall out of contact, but with all the shit that had happened... “We’re not hunting together,” he half-explains. “She left to go it on her own.”

“And you let her?” he asks with a scoff.

“Listen, man, we’re not kids anymore.” The last time they’d seen him in person, Sam had been in high school. “I can’t stop Sam from doing what she wants.”

Dean hears him curse on the other end of the phone. “Well you should try,” he says. “I tried and she told me off, so I thought I’d call you. I know people change, Dean, but I can’t believe this is really Sam. I checked her for possession, and let me tell you - she did not appreciate that.”

It’s not Sam, he knows. It’s this shell with Sam’s face that breaks his heart every time he thinks about her. His eyes dart to the baby in the backseat and he just can’t let it continue anymore. “Tell me where you saw her and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

It’s not hard to find Sam once he hits the city. The town isn’t all that big and there are a limited number of bars he can check. He finds Sam in the second one, on a table with a crowd of men around her. Her bra is thankfully still on this time, but she has a shot glass wedged between her boobs and Dean doesn’t like the implications of that at all.

Sam’s pants are unbuttoned and she looks like she’s about to shimmy out of them at a moment’s notice. Dean grabs her by the arm and yanks her off the table without a word. Sam yells and claws at his hand before recognizing him and snarling. “Dean! What the hell?!”

“What are you doing?” he asks once they’re away from the crowd.

“Dancing,” she snaps and jerks out of his grip.

“Sam, you can’t realize this now, but this is not you.”

She crosses her arms in front of her chest and Dean is reminded that she has no shirt. He sheds his jacket and pushes it into her arms. She wears it, but it’s obvious that she’s just humoring him. “Dean, you don’t know me. I’m not your kid sister anymore.”

“It’s because you don’t have a soul, but we can get it back.”

She scoffs. “Dean, I’ve been out of hell for nearly eight months, and I was under a year before that. What do you think is happening to my soul right now? You know, so don’t act so naïve. How could I ever get it back and be that person again?”

“We’ll find a way to fix the damage.”

She shakes her head. “Dean, you’re not stupid. Stop acting like it. I don’t want my soul back - this is better than nothing.”

“Sam, I am not giving up on you.”

She shrugs apathetically. “You don’t have a choice.” She peels off his jacket and hands it back to him. “You need to stop pretending you care about me. I know you’re just here because you want old Sam back. She’s not coming back, and you made it clear you don’t want me.”

“Made it clear - what are you talking about?”

“You chose a kid you don’t even know over me.”

Dean’s jaw drops and he stares at her. “He’s your son - my nephew - and you expect me to just abandon him? He needs me.” You just said I don’t even know you. If you really believe it, how are the two any different?

“Exactly. He needs you, but I don’t. So stop bothering me.”

Dean grabs her arm, wants to shake her and say that she disappeared for months without a word to him, that this is the first time they’d seen each other since she showed up with Johnny.

A heavy had clasps down on Dean’s forearm and jerks him away. “The lady said to stop bothering her,” the guy says. He’s a foot taller than Dean and his muscles look like they’re about to burst out of his shirt.

“It’s not like that,” Dean protests.

“All I know is I see an unhappy lady and a dick who won’t keep his hands to himself.” He situates himself between Dean and Sam and she smirks at Dean.

“Get lost, Dean,” she tells him. She puts her hands on the guy’s muscled arms and leans up against him. “Thanks,” she purrs and Dean wants to vomit. It takes everything he has to turn and walk away because if he puts up a fight, it’s going to end ugly.

He goes back to the motel and sees Johnny still asleep on the bed where he left him. He breathes a sigh of relief that he’s safe and wishes he had somewhere better to keep him. He deserves a real home, in a nice neighborhood where Dean can call a babysitter when he needs to go out. He thinks about how lucky Dad was that he had him to watch Sammy when they were kids.

Johnny shifts in his sleep and Dean puts his hand against his tiny face. He has a cute smudge of lotion on one cheek where he’d wiggled earlier when Dean was treating his rash. He wipes it away with his thumb and promises him, “We’ll get your mom back.”

Dean meets up with Sam a few months later on a hunt. Dean’s been easing back into the old life, but it’s hard juggling the job and the baby by himself. He thought about leaving him with Bobby for a few weeks, but the kid already had one parent walk out on him, and he’s not willing to be the second.

Dean lucked out and found an old hunting buddy of his dad’s - one of the few still alive and who hadn’t turned into total dicks when the shit hit the fan - working the case, too. He has a teenage daughter who’s babysitting Johnny while Dean and her dad track down the werewolf who’s been preying on the town.

They track the beast down to a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town and Dean feels his skin crawl just looking at the place. The ‘wolf has been hiding out there during the day, and Dean knows they have to get it before it changes. Most of the werewolves he’s hunted have been shot down in their other form, and the ones he’s found as humans didn’t know about their other nature. This one, though... he knows what he is and he doesn’t have any hesitation about killing his enemies.

They creep into the house and split up. Dean heads to the right and soon loses sight of Jeffrey. He stays as quiet as possible, but the wolf has to have scented them by now. His gun is loaded with silver bullets, and he’s alert to any sound. There’s creaking on the floor above him, and Dean knows that’s where he’ll find his target. He slinks toward the stairs and hopes they don’t groan under his weight.

His luck holds and he eases around the side of the first room, peering through the door for any sign of the werewolf. He spots Jeffrey down below, catches his eye, and motions for him to wait. If it runs, he needs someone for backup already below.

Dean peers into the next room and sees the werewolf perched by the window. The curtains are tatty and dusty, but they cover his form and Dean can just barely see his features through them. He’s a slender guy, lean but muscled, and Dean can see the outline of a scarred bite mark on shoulder. He’s definitely their guy. Dean raises the gun and prepares to shoot.

Before he can squeeze the trigger, there’s a loud creak and the wolf spins on his heel to look behind him. He sees Dean and lunges, knocking the hunter to floor and clawing his arm and shoulder. Dean stabs him with a silver knife and he recoils, runs down the hallway and Dean can hear him on the stairs.

There’s the sound of gunfire as Dean struggles to his feet and chases after him. He bounds down the stairs and sees Jeffrey wrestling with the wolf. He can’t get a clear shot, can’t hit the monster without hitting the hunter, too.

He readies his knife and prepares to leap into the fray when a loud shot rings out and the werewolf crumples to the ground. Jeffrey looks up in shock, but his gaze is focused behind Dean.

Dean turns to see Sam standing there, arm still extended from where she fired the gun. She slowly lowers it and looks at them blankly. “Check to see if he’s dead,” she demands. Dean looks at the corpse, little doubt of its deceased state. The bullet hole goes right into his heart.

Jeffrey thanks her for her help, but his expression is closed off. “I’ll meet you back at the hotel,” he tells Dean. “Sally and I are heading out in the morning, so stop by soon.” Dean has to pick the baby up, but right now he has to talk to Sam.

“What were you thinking?” he asks coldly as soon as Jeffrey’s out of earshot. “You could have killed him.”

“I was eliminating the threat.”

“The shot wasn’t clear!”

Sam shrugs. “A clear shot’s a boon, not a necessity.”

Dean can barely believe what he’s hearing. “Unreal. I knew you’d gone off the deep end, but this...? How many people have you killed doing the job?”

She snorts. “A few. I don’t like to do it, Dean. I’m not some psycho killing for kicks.”

“But you still kill them.”

“If they’re in the way, yeah. It’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal?” he repeats. “Sam, can you even hear yourself?”

She looks annoyed and Dean just stares at her. “What’s your problem? I just saved your ass.”

“You think you’re such a great hunter now, but Sam, try to remember why we do this.”

Sam looks genuinely confused and Dean wants to hit something. “We do this to hunt monsters.”

“No. We do this to save lives.”

Sam snorts. “And how many people have you saved lately?”

Sam’s been out of hell for a year, and Dean thinks he finally has an answer. Angels won’t help him and demons can’t help him. Monsters try to strike deals, but Dean’s smarter than that. Short of God, he can think of only one being with the power - and maybe, oh please - the willingness to do what he wants.

He summons Death.

Dean’s terrified to see him, but that’s nothing new. Baby Johnny is asleep in the bed behind him. He wanted to leave him with the babysitter for another few hours, but Jeffrey was in no mood to stick around. There was no secret there how close he’d come to Sam killing him. Dean wanted to explain, but him knowing Sam’s behavior was a result of soullessness wasn’t going to do much good to mend those bridges.

“Really, Dean, what kept you? I was expecting you to call much sooner.”

“Then you know what I want.” Well, that makes things easier. Maybe. “Can you do it?”

Death looks at him condescendingly. “Of course I can.”

Dean is relieved to hear it but tries to keep his poker face up. He’s got no bargaining chips and he knows it. “Will you?”

Death doesn’t say anything for a long time, merely studies Dean. Dean can feel him judging him, but whatever verdict he decides, he keeps it to himself. “Do you really think that is a good idea?”

“Sam’s not Sam anymore. She’s hurting really bad, she just doesn’t know it. I’ve looked out for her her whole life... I can’t leave her like this.”

“I should warn you that Sam’s soul has been in Hell for a long time. You won’t like how she’s changed.”

Dean nods. He suspects as much, but anything has to be better than this self-destructive shell that’s taken the place of his sister. “I know.” He swallows his pride and begs. “Please, please bring her back.”

Death sighs like he’s disappointed, but he nods. “Very well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he says and disappears.

Dean waits, but he doesn’t show up. He realizes he has no idea where Sam is staying and starts looking for her. It’s too much to hope for that she still uses their old system of finding each other. This Sam doesn’t want to find him, doesn’t care that they’re separated. He starts checking motels for her aliases, but it’s useless.

He’s sweeping up the stairs of his fourth motel when he hears moaning behind the door, and not the good kind. He recognizes Sam’s voice - would know it anywhere. He picks the lock at record speed and hurries inside.

Sam is lying on the floor, eyes open but blank, and her body twitching. “Sammy!” he calls and drops to her side. She doesn’t respond. He shakes her, takes her pulse, talking to her all the while. This is unlike anything he’s ever seen before and he’s terrified. “Sammy!” he calls again and looks into her eyes. They’re wide and glassy, and he almost thinks she’s dead. This isn’t the coldness she carried before, the empty spot where she had no soul. This is something else entirely. Dean dials 911.

Chapter Three

Five years later....

Gabriel’s fingers twitch. He knows he’s lying on the floor, but he has no idea how he got there. His memories of the immediate past are fuzzy, but they’re slowly rebuilding in his mind. Lucifer had killed him.

He opens his eyes looks around. He’s in the same hotel he’d been in the night he died, but it’s dusty now and dark. Some time has passed, but he can’t get his bearings, can’t pinpoint when it is.

He sits up, then stands and looks back to the ground to see the ash outlines of his wings still on the floor. He died... and the only one who could revive an archangel is his Father. He bows his head in gratitude and leaves that dreary place.

His memory is spotty, has tiny holes that are slowly mending themselves. One of them is Sammy Winchester, and he’s startled to realize he ever forgot her. The world is still bright and sunny and covered with people, so he guesses the Apocalypse had the rug swept out from underneath it. He’d told the Winchesters how to stuff Lucifer back in his cage, but he’d had his doubts they could pull it off.

He looks and doesn’t see any large force of angels. There are one or two, and the cherubs, but nothing to indicate Heaven is still meddling on a large scale. He doesn’t see Michael or Lucifer anywhere, and that can only point in one direction. He goes looking for the Winchesters, but it’s a hard thing to do with the Enochian carved into their ribs.

It’s easier to look for Castiel. He may have returned to Heaven or he may be dead, Gabriel can’t tell, but he’s not walking the Earth at the moment. There is the trace of his power still lingering, the mark he’d left on Dean Winchester. He follows it back to the source and appears in a rather nice, clean motel room. At least their standards have improved, he muses.

“What the Hell?” Dean shouts and there’s a clatter as he rises from a chair and drops the books he was reading. “Gabriel?” he asks incredulously.

Dean is older, but it’s not by much. Gabriel guesses a few years have passed. “Hey, Dean-o,” he grins. “Miss me?”

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands to know.

“Thought I’d drop in on my favorite hunters,” he says. For the first time he looks around the room more closely and notices someone’s missing. “Where’s Sam?”

Dean’s face is blank. “Not here,” he says roughly. “She’s not been here for a while.”

Gabriel knows something’s wrong. He casts his mind out to look for her but there’s no trace. That’s no surprise -- Castiel had hidden both Winchesters from angels. He regrets not putting his mark on her. “Is she alive?” he asks, because only death could drive them apart like this.

Dean shrugs. “You could say that,” he says ominously.

Gabriel doesn’t like the sound of that at all. “Where is she?”

“Why do you care? Are you going to screw with her head some more?” It looks like Dean is still pissed about the time loop he’d inflicted on them in Florida, but that’s not surprising either.

He’s guessing Sam didn’t tell her brother that they were sleeping together prior to his death. She’d said she wanted to but thought Dean would overreact. Given their prior history, it was a safe bet.

“Just tell me where she is,” he hisses.

Dean looks away. “It won’t do you any good. Cas tried to fix her and he couldn’t.”

Gabriel feels cold fear coiling in his gut and locks eyes with the broken expression on Dean’s face. “What happened?”

“We did what you said, with the keys to the cage. But that left the problem of getting Lucifer back in.”

The pieces fall into place and Gabriel closes his eyes for a brief eternity. “She didn’t,” he pleads. The thought of Sam in Hell is revolting and it makes his grace shivers in despair.

“Yeah. She said yes and jumped in. Dragged Michael down with her, too,” he adds with a snort.

Sam locked in Hell with pissed off Lucifer and Michael... There was no way that could have a good ending. “How long?” he asks, because Dean implied Sam was topside again and he has to see her, needs to inspect the damage.

“Why do you care?” Dean asks again.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he snaps. In his mind he can see the last sad smile Sam gave him before he went to confront Lucifer.

“Neither do I,” Dean snarls. He picks up the fallen book and paces around the room in quick circles.

Gabriel sighs and looks away. He could get the information out of Dean by force, but that wouldn’t make anyone happy. He has to compromise. “Sam and I had something going on,” he admits after years of keeping it a secret.

Dean stares at him, jaw set but silent. He breathes out loudly and clenches his hand into a fist. “For how long?”

“A few months. Now answer my question.”

“She was under a year before she showed up.” He kicks at the wall. “Crowley brought her up, but that son of a bitch left her soul behind.”

Which is probably the worst thing that could have happened, he thinks. If she’d fallen into Hell in her body, then it would have provided at least a little protection for her soul. Stripped bare, with his brothers tormenting her...

“Where is she now?” Dean looks away, and Gabriel can see guilt in his green eyes. “What did you do?”

Dean sighs. “You don’t know what it was like, what she was like. The person who came up wasn’t Sam, she wouldn’t have wanted to live like that.” He runs his hand over his hair. “I got her soul back.”

Air freezes in Gabriel’s lungs and the world dims as he focuses on those words. A soul, after a year in Hell, shoved back into a body - “Where is she?” he asks for the last time.

Dean tells him.

White Oak Long-term Care Facility isn’t the best place money can afford, but it’s clean, and the staff is knowledgeable and dedicated. Sam’s room on the second floor is painted a soothing sky blue color and the nurses had brought fresh tulips in that morning.

Gabriel stands at the foot of the bed and looks down at the still figure lying beneath the sheets. Sam’s face is relatively unchanged, although her hair is a little longer now. She looks thinner, her muscles wasted away from disuse. Her skin is pale and thin and casts an overall look of frailty to her.

It physically hurts to be in the same room with her. The psychic pain she’s projecting clouds the room until he chokes on it and needs to step away. He won’t let himself, knows that her condition is ultimately his fault. He’d been the one to tell her to open the cage back up; his plan had landed her here.

A rustle of feathers and then Castiel is standing beside him. Dean staggers for his footing and leans against the end of the bed. His gaze latches onto Sam’s unmoving body, watches her breathe to make sure she’s still alive. “She’s been like this for five years now,” he says.

Gabriel forces himself closer and tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Why didn’t you help her?” he asks Castiel.

Castiel looks sorrowfully back at him, blue eyes betraying his failure. “I didn’t even know where to begin,” he explains. Castiel is stronger now, but he lacks the experience to use all of that strength. Gabriel understands and turns back to Sam.

“I’m not giving up on her,” Dean says with conviction. “I know it’s my fault that she’s like this, that I’m the one who broke the pieces, but I’ll keep looking for a way to fix her until I die.”

Gabriel looks at him stonily and then cups Sam’s chin in his hand. “Don’t be so melodramatic,” he says. He drags his other hand down to her midsection and feels the damaged soul beneath his palm. It’s an injured, twisted thing that’s been carved and shredded and -- He pushes his grace through his fingertips and sets himself to heal the damage to Sam’s soul. What can’t be healed he pushes to the far reaches of her mind and hopes it will stay buried there.

“What are you doing?”

“Dean, he is helping her.”

“You’re telling me that all this time-“

Everything falls silent as with a whimper Sam opens her eyes for the first time in five years. She looks around, eyes darting between her boyfriend, her brother, and their friend before warm tears roll down her cheeks.

It only takes a second for Dean to hug his sister. “Sam!” he sobs into her shoulder. She returns the embrace as hard as she can, her atrophied muscles healed by the archangel.

“Dean! God, I - I- Where’s Johnny?“ she asks suddenly. She looks around as though he should be in sight.

“Calm down,” Dean soothes. “Johnny’s at school.”

“School?” she repeats questioningly. “He can’t be in school, he’s just a -“

“Sam,” Dean says with forced calm, “It’s been five years. Johnny’s almost seven now.”

Sam’s whole face freezes and tears well in her eyes. She holds the expression for a moment and then breaks down into loud sobs, her hands shaking and her face blotched red. After so long unable to feel emotion, and then even longer in a coma, it’s no wonder she’s overwhelmed.

“What do you remember?” he asks gently when her tears ease. His eyes dart back to Gabriel and Castiel watching silently from the other side of the bed. Sam’s forgotten all about them, but Dean remembers that they’re there. If Gabriel took all of her bad memories away it would be a godsend, but he doubts they’ll be that lucky.

“Everything,” she gasps and is horrified.

Later, Sam sits on her bed brushing her hair and wishing she could rewind the last decade of her life. Dean had left only to pick up Johnny from school, otherwise he would still be glued to her side. Castiel had disappeared to parts unknown, but had promised Sam she would see him again soon.

That just leaves Gabriel, who is now leaning against the wall and watching her. Gabriel is quieter since he came back, or maybe since she came back. The jovial trickster she once knew seems to be gone, or at least buried under layers of this solemn angel before her.

“Thank you,” she tells him finally. She doesn’t remember anything from the time the man in the suit - Death, Dean had told her-appeared with her soul until now. She thinks she’d probably have stayed in that coma until she died had it not been for the archangel.

She doesn’t know what else to say to him, doesn’t know how much he knows.

Sam has perfect clarity of her year on Earth without a soul, the things she had done, the innocent people she had killed. There aren’t any words to make it better, only a crushing sense of remorse weighing down on her.

She doesn’t know where she stands with Gabriel, either. Before he’d died, they’d been casually dating. She’d slept with him three times, hadn’t been seeing anyone else during that time. After... She thinks about the people -- strangers - she’d fucked without even knowing their names, without protection, and feels like a little whore.

“It wasn’t you,” Gabriel tells her. “Whatever you’re thinking about, what you did, it wasn’t you.”

“You don’t know,” she says. She thinks of the worst thing she’s done, but can’t talk about it. She settles for a lesser transgression, forces the admission from her lips for the first time. “I had sex for money,” she tells him. It wasn’t even for food, or shelter, or because she was broke. Her purse had been full, she’d just wanted to do it.

Gabriel doesn’t look away, doesn’t recoil in disgust. “It wasn’t you,” he says again.

“My hunting strategy for monsters that looked like humans was to gank the suspect and then confirm he was a monster. If I was wrong, I just kept trying until I found the right one.” She snorts a mirthless laugh. “One time, I was trying to shoot a shapeshifter. He had a little girl as a hostage, told me to drop the gun... I put the bullet straight through that girl’s head in order to hit him.”

“Sam,” Gabriel warns. “You weren’t there, not really.”

“Holy Full Metal Jacket,” she reminds him of his own words. “My body, my brain, my decisions.”

“Let’s get out of here,” he says and brings his hand to her forehead.

An instant later they are in Dean’s motel room. Sam looks around, surprised to find a room with no mold, or dingy carpets, or stained beds. They room shows clear signs of being lived in. There are photographs on the mirror and clothes spilling out of open bags.

Sam looks at the photos and sees they’re mostly of a blond-haired boy. “Johnny,” she breathes and traces his face with the tip of her finger. Tears fall from her eyes as she looks at her son’s face for the first time since he was an infant.

Gabriel joins her and looks at the pictures. “Dean has a kid?” he asks.

Sam wipes tears away with the back of her hand. “He’s mine,” she whispers. She looks at Gabriel and swallows hard. “Ours.”

Chapter Four

Johnny is happily chattering to Dean about his day at school when he unlocks the door and steps inside. The boy falls silent at the tense atmosphere they enter and Dean’s eyes flicker between Sam and Gabriel. Sam is on the verge of tears again and the archangel’s eyes are focused solely on the six-year-old.

Johnny’s hand reaches up to take Dean’s hand and his tiny fingers squeeze for comfort. “Daddy?” he asks quietly.

“It’s okay,” he tells him with a squeeze of his hand. “This is my sister, Sammy. You knew her when you were a baby.”

It’s the truth, but it stings Sam more than she thought possible. Her own son doesn’t know her, doesn’t know she’s his mother. “Johnny,” she starts, standing to go to him.

Johnny looks up to Dean for reassurance and Dean is frozen with the sudden realization that he’s about to lose his son. He’s spent six years raising this kid, on his own, and now Sam’s back in the picture, ready to be his mother again. Gabriel’s there, too, and Dean wonders if his suspicion’s right that he’s Johnny’s father. If he is, then there’s another threat coming to take his son from him.

Dean can’t give his son reassurance, but neither does he project his fear. Johnny slowly lets go of his hand as Sam steps closer and wraps the boy in a hug. She holds him as tightly as she can, wet tears falling from her eyes and landing on his little shoulders. “Hey, hey Johnny,” she says, more to herself than the boy. She doesn’t tell him that she’s his mother, that his Dad isn’t really his Dad.

It doesn’t escape Johnny’s notice that the short guy in the back hasn’t been introduced. He stares up at him curiously as the crying woman hugs him. The stranger meets his gaze, stares at him with bright eyes.

Sam finally lets go and rocks back on her heels to look at him at his level. She runs her hand over his hair, which is getting too long. Dean had told him it was time for a haircut, but Johnny hated haircuts, threw fits when anyone got near his head with scissors. Dean remembers when Sam had been the same way and feels his chest tighten up with emotion.

“Daddy, don’t forget about Maria’s party,” Johnny says once Sam is done touching him.

“You’re leaving?” Sam squeaks, throws a wild glance toward her brother.

“It’s his best friend’s birthday party, Sam. We’ll be back.”

She doesn’t look very happy, but Johnny’s excited face curtails any argument she might make. “How old is Maria?” she asks him in a cooing voice like she’d used when he was a newborn.

“Six, like me,” Johnny smiles. He holds up his fingers and proudly shows four on one hand and two on the other. “We learned counting in class,” he adds shyly.

Sam smiles shakily and touches his hair one more time before turning away. She’s crying again. Even if Dean can’t see her face, he can see her shoulders shaking.

Johnny is looking more and more unhappy at being in this tense environment. “Daddy,” he starts, little face about to scrunch into a wail.

“Hey, Champ,” Dean cuts it off. He picks Johnny up and hoists him into his arms. “What do you say we pick up Maria’s present and go have some cake?”

“Yeah!” he beams.

Sam is still turned away, but Gabriel is watching with an unmoving expression. The look he gives Dean is unreadable as he watches him hold the boy in his arms. “We’ll be back by six,” he says to the room at large. Sam raises a hand to wave them off but otherwise doesn’t answer.

Sam can’t breathe again until after Dean is gone. She’d seen her son, had held him in her arms, and it was more painful than she could possibly have imagined.

“Say something,” she says when the silence starts gnawing away at her. Gabriel hasn’t moved a muscle since the door opened and Dean and her son stepped inside. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he’d been replaced with a wax statue. There hadn’t been any time to react to her news before Dean and Johnny were there, she’s just thankful they didn’t devolve into a nasty argument with him in the room.

“You’re giving him up,” Gabriel says, looking at her solemnly.

Sam feels more tears burn at her eyes. Since she’d woken up, she can’t seem to stop crying. All that time without a soul, without caring, finally caught up to her and left her a wreck. “I gave him up,” she says bitterly. She can still see the scene in her mind, can relive every second that she stood in that room and told Dean she didn’t want her own child.

“He’s your son,” Gabriel says.

“And I love him more than anything. But I don’t deserve him.”

Gabriel crosses his arms over his chest, a sign she’s noticed that he does when he hears something he doesn’t like. “You weren’t yourself.”

“He was my son, and I threw him away.”

Gabriel breathes out hard. “He’s my son, too.”

Sam startles. “Are you… going to take him?” She doesn’t know why, but it hadn’t occurred to her before. She’d seen it as Sam vs. Dean for the right to parent the baby, with her losing badly. But to throw Gabriel into the mix… Dean would never forgive her if he lost Johnny.

Gabriel doesn’t answer. He watches her, face unreadable even considering how much she knows about him. “You had him in Hell, didn’t you?”

Sam flinches, those dark memories immediately rising to the surface. She nods. “Yes. I didn’t know I was pregnant when I jumped.”

She hopes that he doesn’t ask what she would have done if she had known she was pregnant. It’s not a question that she ever wants to be asked. It’s not even something she wants to ask herself. There’s no answer she can give that would be okay. Billions of lives against her own was one thing. Billions of lives against her baby would have been something else entirely.

Luckily for her, Gabriel doesn’t press that issue. He instead asks, “And Michael and Lucifer…?”

“Never touched him,” she answers in relief. She chokes on a laugh, but it’s not funny in the least. “I didn’t know what to expect out of Michael, but I was so sure, if Lucifer was willing to kill you, that he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt Johnny, but-No. After they noticed I was having your kid, they backed off. It was a lot better, they left me alone, let me have him in peace.” And then Crowley had come for her body and the baby, and things were so, so much worse.

“Sammy, I never meant for you to be in the Cage, too. When I told you about the rings-“

“It was my choice,” Sam interrupts. Everyone felt so bad for her - even people that didn’t like her - and she was quick to remind them that letting Lucifer in and then jumping into Hell had been her plan.

Gabriel doesn’t say anything. She’s not sure how she should react to him, barely knows him like this. She’s used to the fun-loving Trickster, even after he was revealed to be an angel, and now it’s like someone’s drained all the life out of him. Some of it is dying and coming back, some of it is her, and some of it is this situation with Johnny.

“What are you going to do?” she asks quietly. Her fingers are almost trembling with nervous anticipation. First figure out what Gabriel’s going to do about the baby - child, she corrects herself harshly - and then she and Dean can figure out what they’re going to do. If they still have him. The thought of Gabriel taking him and leaving is an all-too-real possibility, and she knows they don’t stand a chance of stopping him if he really wants to leave with Johnny, not that that would stop Dean from trying. Superimposed over all of that, her little boy’s face as he looks up at Dean and calls him “Daddy” wrenches her heart painfully.

“He’s my son,” he shrugs. “But he won’t be the first kid I didn’t raise.”

Sam’s first feeling is relief that he’s not going to take Johnny away. Then anger bubbles up. How can he not want him? Johnny is a beautiful, sweet little boy, and Gabriel just doesn’t want him? She turns to him with an accusing face, but Gabriel’s gone.

The door unlocks at five-oh-five, and Sam’s hand goes for a knife out of habit. The guns are all tucked away out of the sight and reach of a young boy, and it had taken her half-an-hour to find the silver knife in the coffee can. She’d been unarmed when she came back from her coma, and hadn’t felt right until she slipped that knife into her jacket pocket.

She tenses as the door opens, even though she knows in her head it’s going to be Dean. A second later her brother enters the room. He’s holding Johnny in one arm and the little boy is fast asleep against his shoulder. Sam’s breath catches at the sight. If she hadn’t actually met them, she would have said he looked like a little angel. His eyes are closed and his hair is mussed against Dean’s leather jacket - Dad’s leather jacket, and it’s almost like three generations of Winchester men together.

Dean looks like he’s walking to the gallows when he sees her. “Hey,” he calls quietly.

Sam’s eyes won’t leave Johnny, and she gets up to go to him. She pushes his hair back and smiles sadly at his peaceful expression. This is her little son, but she hasn’t been a part of his life in so long.

“He’s wiped out,” Dean says. “Try not to wake him up.” He looks around the room and then turns back to her. “Where’s Gabriel?”

“Um, gone.”

“Gone?” Dean asks tightly.

Sam knows her brother, can read between the lines for what he’s really wanting to know. “He’s not going to take Johnny.” Tension drains out of Dean. His shoulders sag in relief at not having to fight an archangel for the child.

The motion wakes Johnny and he stirs in his father’s arms. “Daddy?” he murmurs sleepily.

“Easy, Tiger,” he soothes him. But Johnny is awake now, looking around the room, and his eyes stray to Sam.

“Let me take him,” she coaxes Dean and the worry is immediately back in his eyes. Just because Gabriel’s not going to take the kid doesn’t mean Sam won’t. Reluctantly, he hands him over and Sam’s eyes sting with tears. “Hey, Johnny,” she croons and bounces him in her arms like she did when he was a baby. “Did you have a good time at the party?”

He nods happily. “Maria’s daddy brought ponies,” he says with a smile. “I got to ride one.”

Sam smiles at the delight she sees in his eyes. “Yeah?” she asks. “Why don’t you tell your Aunt Sammy all about it?”

Johnny starts recounting the tale, all happy eyes and careful pronunciation when he says the word “stirrup.” Over that, she hears Dean gasp at her, but she can’t acknowledge it. This is hard enough without looking at him. After Gabriel left, she had to sit down and think about what she was going to do. Dean loves Johnny, that much is clear. Sam had been no parent to him, and Dean had filled the role in her absence.

Johnny is her son, and she loves him, so she has to do what is right for him. Giving him up isn’t what she wants to do; it isn’t easy. It is the hardest thing she has ever done, including jumping into the Cage for what she thought was eternity in Hell. Johnny’s six - almost seven - and Dean’s the only parent he knows. If she took him back, it wouldn’t be like reclaiming him as a baby, when he could adjust to a new parent with little difficulty - like he had to with Dean when she left him with him. There would be tears, and her little boy would be broken-hearted.

Dean is a good dad to him, and Sam doesn’t have it in her to rip them apart. And deep down, she can’t ever forgive herself for abandoning him, no matter what anyone tells her about it not being her fault. He was her son, and she was supposed to love him unconditionally - soul or no soul.

So if being his loving aunt is the best she can do, so be it. She can still be around him this way, still be a part of his life as he grows up. It hurts, but for all the bad things she’s done, she can’t pretend she doesn’t deserve it.

A week later, Gabriel shows up. One second she’s alone in the bathroom, taking off her bra, and the next she’s on the slippery satin sheets of a huge bed in a decked out bedroom. Gabriel’s beside her, looking up at his reflection on the ceiling mirror. “How’s the kid?” he asks, looks at her in the mirror but not directly.

Sam smiles shakily. “He’s okay.”

“You gave him to Dean?” he asks, but he says it strangely and she knows that he already knows.

“I gave him to Dean a long time ago,” she says. “I’m just not stealing him back.”

Gabriel huffs but doesn’t otherwise comment. He rolls onto his side and pulls Sam up so that her bare back is against his chest. His arm loops around her and his hand starts rubbing little circles on her belly. “I’ve been thinking…” That’s been the lead-in to a lot of bad ideas in the past, so she can’t help but be worried.

Sam turns her head a little to look at him. Instead of that mischievous gleam she’s expecting, his eyes are earnest. “Yeah?”

“There’s no reason Johnny has to be an only child.”

She goes still. “I can’t just replace one child with another.”

Gabriel shushes her. “No one said anything about replacing. Lots of families have siblings.” She half-expects him to jokingly say “Just look at mine,” but he thankfully doesn’t.

She watches him, and determines for herself that he’d being serious. Sam closes her eyes and imagines herself pregnant again. It would be better this time - no Hell, no torture, no callous disregard for her own child. She can see a little girl with Gabriel’s eyes and her own dimpled smile. Johnny could still be her big brother, even if they thought they were cousins. Dean had been the best big brother to her, he could show Johnny how it’s done.

Her lips pull up into a tender smile at the thought. Her hand goes down to Gabriel’s, still gently touching her belly, and she links her fingers through his.