Zir Noco Iod Gadreel
So I love Gadreel to bits, and I have been working/procrastinating on this piece from his pov for months. Aaaand it’s finally done, woo!
Words: ~2,350
Summary: You are alone, angry, in agony, free, Ezekiel, human, Sam, a hero. You are Gadreel.
Warnings: SPOILERS until 9.10: Road Trip (vaaaague one for 9.11 as well). Super-pretentious second-person pov, some depictions of torture, utter weirdness. IDEK, either.
As for the title… I am indebted to the wonderful monicawoe and her amazing post compiling all of the Enochian spoken on the show and their translations.
Zir Noco Iod Gadreel
you are alone.
-
You are in a cage made of light, where the walls pulse as if alive, and ribbons of radiance pierce through you and tether you to raised knobs of amorphous flesh that you know are watching you, always watching you. It is at once large enough to hold entire universes, and so small that your wings are withering under the constant pressure.
You haven’t spoken in millennia.
Sometimes, you catch glimpses of Heaven outside of your cocoon-a vast, uneven landscape, pockmarked and misshapen by hundreds of billions of human souls and their hundreds of billions of little universes, playing on an endless loop.
You made this happen.
You are a cancer upon God’s creations, the weak link in His Grand Plan, the disappointment that weighed His shoulders, the traitor to be thrown away to rot for all eternity.
You are even more of a disappointment than He’d thought-you cannot even accept your own solitude like the gift it is. Heaven watches you, always.
There is no pain. There is no respite.
There is only you.
-
you are angry.
-
You screamed, at first.
It did not even rattle the walls of your cage; did not even create a ripple in the bond that you share with your brothers and sisters. Century upon century of cold indifference and cloying despair-it warps something inside you, twists and bends it until it is crumpled and full of jagged edges and every movement spears indescribable pain through you.
At least Lucifer-great, bright Lucifer, who shines even when Fallen-has a dominion of his own, a kingdom to shape, a species to create. Lucifer defied Him and gets the gift of Creation, even if it is only scum; you… let yourself slip for no less than an instant, and you are rewarded with an eternity of isolation, stripped of everything that ever mattered to you.
there are others! you’d screamed, in anger.
there are others! you’d screamed, in desperation.
There was only silence; a great, yawning sense of lack, that engulfed your screams, your anger, your desperation, your petulance, your grief, your regret.
When Thaddeus arrives, it’s almost a relief.
-
you are in agony.
-
Pain has always been an abstraction to you, something that you and your siblings discussed at great lengths with the assurance and comfort (and insensitivity) of those that know they will never suffer such things. Pain, love, grief, betrayal, joy-they are so intertwined that they might as well be the same thing, you’d argued; a labile, flexible thing that shaped weaker minds instead of being moulded by them.
Thaddeus gives you a lesson in true pain.
He peels you apart like an over-ripe fruit; each layer tears and leaves you bleeding grace and sanity. He reaches into every part of you that you’ve ever sanctified and squeezes; he defiles and he rips and throws the pieces to the air and he does all of this in complete silence, like you are a strange creature that He created solely for Thaddeus’ entertainment. It is distressing, humiliating, agonising; but the fact that it is your brother that’s relishing taking you apart is what breaks you.
The day you finally scream, Abner is brought into your cage.
Abner is a pathetic thing, resigned to his fate long before Thaddeus lays a finger on him, but you are equally pathetic, a broken toy quivering in your bonds. Neither of you ask the other why they’re imprisoned; neither of you say a word. But Abner’s grace slowly coils with yours, healing what it can, papering over everything else. It’s an unexpected gesture of solidarity after millennia of nothingness-and that jagged thing in you softens, just a little.
Thaddeus smiles when he finds you and Abner together.
It’s the first emotion you’ve seen from him since your imprisonment; when he takes Abner and begins to tear him apart, Thaddeus glows like he’s eaten the sun. He is far more ruthless with Abner than he’s ever been with you; the more you scream, the more Abner is ripped into, until Thaddeus is holding the very essence of Abner’s being in his hands, teasing you, reminding you that with one stroke, he can end Abner forever.
He never does, however.
It is left to you to put Abner together every time. You use your own grace to heal him; filling holes where Abner’s has been obliterated, putting together the pieces like you’re re-creating Abner all over again. You’d envied Lucifer his power of creation; now you understand the pain of pouring yourself into something, only to watch it get torn apart, and do it over and over and over again. You’ve never felt closer to both God and the devil.
Ultimately you and Abner both survive-all of you, all that you’d ever hoped you’d be, has been pared down to this simple fact, and you are grateful for it.
-
you are free.
-
Uncountable centuries later (you decide you will ask Abner, for he comes from an age when the passage of time has meaning), the cage of light disappears, and you are falling. You do not know why, or how, but you have been beyond caring for a long, long time now.
You are hurtling-through cold, dark skies, pinpoints of light whirling around you in crazy patterns. You try opening your wings, but you have spent much too long in captivity, and they stay tucked in.
The darkness and the pinpricks of light end, and you don’t quite crash as much as you…. spread. It appears that you cannot use your true form in this realm, and only your grace remains. A whole new world lays unravelled before you-much of what you know about it comes from what you’ve glimpsed of Heaven, but nothing has prepared you for the sheer… fullness of everything, the riot of sound and colour, the dark and shadow, the exquisite intricacy with which these things are assembled.
You wander for some time, drunk with wonder. Humans are vastly different from the very first that you’d seen-that you’d been assigned to guard. They are much, much shorter, much more fragile, possessing hard edges and a terrible… coldness. The first humans burned like they had fire running underneath their skin; they could behold an angel in his true form without flinching.
Now, they are… sallow. Shrunken, cold, embittered imitations living in a world that they delusionally think they are shaping.
Then you possess Earl, and everything changes.
-
you are ezekiel.
-
You are instinctively drawn to Earl, for reasons beyond your understanding. He is a sturdy man, taller than most, healthy but for an impending failure of his body’s resources to cope with his blood sugar. You tentatively knock at his mind, and to your surprise, it lets you in almost immediately.
And his mind-
It is spectacularly, mind-numbingly beautiful-a verdant garden to rival Heaven’s, where memories bloom and wilt like flowers, and the sky ripples through an impossible rainbow, bathing everything in vibrant colour. There is darkness, too, towards the horizon; a wasteland, grey and featureless, and Earl is standing in the middle, staring, slack-jawed.
“Sandra?” he says.
You look down at yourself and realise that you have assumed the form of a woman; a woman, no doubt, constructed by this man’s mind. “I am an angel of the Lord,” you say, although you cringe, although you dare not reveal your true identity. You cast about for the name of a brother. “I am Ezekiel,” you say, and the words ring in your mouth and the plants of this memory-garden twine around your arms and crawl under your skin and lift your hands towards him, and suddenly you know.
“Earl,” you say, as Gadreel, as Ezekiel, as Sandra who died a slow death from cancer two months ago, “Earl, it’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Earl hesitates, perplexed.
“Just let me help you,” you say, and in your every word, Sandra’s asking about his alcoholism, about the late nights and the dark circles and the tears, the endless tears. “Please just let me in. Just say yes.”
“Yes,” Earl says, with the unthinking conviction of the dreaming, and you (Gadreel-Ezekiel-Sandra) smile.
Yes.
-
you are human.
-
You learn a lot from Earl.
You learn of the wonders that these frail, cold hands can create; the monuments they build to their existence, the stories they tell, the songs they sing. Every minute of every day holds meaning in a relentless march to death; in all your centuries of imprisonment, you had never had that to look forward to.
You have missed so much.
Earl has two cups of coffee in the morning-one scalding hot at sunrise and another, sweetened and milky, just before work. He drives a car that he’s afraid is going to fall apart beyond the point of repair when he can’t afford another one; has no real friends to speak of but looks forwards to Wednesday afternoons because that’s when old Simon pops in for a drink, and he spins some great yarns. He wanted children with Sandra, and there’s nobody he loves more than his sister’s little boy.
He prays to you.
You meet him sometimes in that garden, when he dreams. You learn of hope and evil, of prayer and faith, of endless suffering (because of you), of crippling doubt and worry. You can only hope to be worthy of being the creature that listens to his deepest thoughts, let alone assuage them. You can only hope to try.
(You and Earl, feeding off each other’s hope. It amuses you, sometimes.)
The days go on, and Earl begins to feel unwell. His sight is blurring, his skin is papery-dry, and his hair is falling out. He is losing weight, and his blood runs thin, leaking under his skin in big, ugly purple bruises. He sees several doctors (his panic is more than you can bear), but nobody can see you inside of him, unravelled through every open pathway like a parasite, causing his body to fail.
Time is running out-you need to find a new vessel, save Earl, and stay away from the other angels, whose voices you can still hear distantly. You’re not quite sure where Earl’s panic and sense of impending doom ends and yours begins-when Earl runs, you run with him.
That’s when you hear Dean Winchester’s prayer.
-
you are sam.
-
Sam Winchester… is indescribable.
You don’t have much experience to work with, but standing there in that hospital room with his brother leaking blood and desperation, your hand over his heart-you know. This man has held Lucifer. His residual grace reaches towards you like a plant reaching for the sun, and you should recoil, you want to recoil, but-
This man held Lucifer and survived.
His insides are half-burnt and he is one mistake away from death; yet, you know these are all fixable. More than that-his mind is a strongbox, removed from his broken, bent, failing body; a strongbox made of scar tissue and unimaginable pain. You do not dare enter, but the door is well-oiled, and you walk in.
There is-
no garden. No-
-thing can truly encompass the utter desolation that you see: a world wiped clean by devastation, a-
toxic non-space where the soil glows with radiation and the sky is covered in grey stormclouds and Sam-
stands in the middle of it all like the impossible man that he is, and he-
-almost sees you.
(Post-apocalyptic, you think, is a great way to describe Sam’s soul.)
You retreat quickly; you have no intention of confronting that damaged a psyche until you have some strength of your own. You focus, instead, on Sam’s physical injuries, that are rather considerable. In this you find the reassurance of practice-you have put together entire beings before.
You are God, and you are the devil, and you begin to re-create Sam Winchester.
Shame runs through Sam like fissures deepening into ravines; he regrets (deeply, forever), and the weight of his guilt is staggering. Sam is over two hundred years old and has seen places and endured things that nobody else has in the history of his species, and the words atonement and penance have come to mean large, jagged, ugly, impossible things, that only serve to break Sam further.
They have come to mean being accepted by his brother.
Sam loves his brother fiercely, and so it means you love Dean fiercely without knowing or understanding why. Dean demands, Dean often seems to care little of your safety, Dean forgets, Dean needles, Dean hates, and Dean loves-at least he seems willing to lie for you.
You want to love Sam like you love Dean, like you once loved Earl, loved Abner; but you can’t love yourself-you know too well the weight of unending guilt and being pared down to nothing but a basic instinct to survive by centuries of torture. What you have not known so far is working towards atonement, as cruel and desolate as the journey is.
So when Dean asks, you listen, no matter how it drains both you and Sam.
After all, atonement has to start somewhere.
-
you are a hero.
-
Metatron hands you a little yellow card with a name on it.
Purpose is intoxicating; a chance to reclaim what you used to be even more so.
You were a hero, once. At least, you think you were. It’s difficult to remember anything before your imprisonment; at least now you need not live trapped in a series of cages.
You hold the card against your heart and subsume yourself in Sam once again.
You head towards the bunker.
-
you are-
you-
are-
Finis