I have carried you upon the wings of eagles, and have taken you to myself
Written: 26-28 Nov 2011.
Pairing: Dean/Gabriel, background Castiel/Dean, Sam/Gabriel and OT4 (no cheating).
Rating: NC-17.
Length: c. 7200.
Warnings: Not unless you disapprove of wings, or are likely to be startled by the appearance of someone called Gabriel
Notes: Futurefic for In His Image. Written for the kinkmeme at spn-gabriel, because the prompt fit so perfectly into the universe of In His Image. If you haven't read the big one, all you need to know is that it goes AU after “Hammer of the Gods” (so no seasons 6 or 7); that Castiel and Gabriel now have souls as well as grace, and that Gabriel’s original wings were lost when Lucifer killed him and these ones are courtesy of “the tears of some holy chick back in the Dark Ages”, as Dean puts it here, with his usual complete lack of historical precision.
Hence, Dean and Gabriel being more fluffy.
And by the way, when it comes to awesome powerful wings that are absolutely amazing - this video. Someone with skills should definitely shop those onto a gif of Richard Speight Jr.
Summary: Original prompt was: “Showing your wings to a human without burning them up takes skill and care. Castiel can't manage it yet, but Dean is curious. Then Sam lets it slip that Gabriel's been bringing out his wings in bed... Bonus points if Gabriel tries to persuade Dean that flying is not so scary as he thought.” Honestly, most of the prompt ended up being implied background, but let’s face it, the wings are the main thing!
AO3 link.
It started with this:
“Little bro still holding out on you, is he?”
“Get off the roof of my car, Gabriel.”
“Sammy says you’re jealous. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Yeah, almost like Cas’s got something against burning my eyes out. Why - you think you can do better?”
“Sure I can. You hang around on earth for a millenium and change, you learn some self-restraint.”
“Dude, you’re the poster child for locking self-restraint in the closet and swearing it was never there in the first place.”
“But my wings are awesome.”
---
Later, it went something like this:
“Hey Dean! I want to show you something!”
“Okay, department store window displays, that’s a new one.”
“You like? I think the burberry and scarf combo suits me.”
“It makes you look like a metrosexual librarian with the attention span of a dragonfly. Should I bother asking why I can hear you from behind the glass?”
“Nope. Dean. Deeean. Dean. I need to abduct you.”
“A whiny eight-year-old metrosexual librarian.” Dean rocked back on his heels, hands shoved into his pockets, and tried not to let his grin slip into indulgence. “What for?”
“Practical demonstration, of the feathery kind.” A ridiculous cheesy waggle of the eyebrows. “Promise I’ll make it good for you, baby.”
Like Dean was ever going to back down when Gabriel threw him a glove. “Okay then. Show me.”
“Sure about this, tiger?
“Bring it on, big man.”
Gabriel leaned through the glass like it wasn’t there and touched two fingers to Dean’s forehead.
---
They were perched on top of the world. The air was strange and crisp in Dean’s throat, and the shapes of the trees and the sounds of the birds were unfamiliar.
He turned slowly on one heel, sizing it up. Not that he didn’t trust Gabriel by now, and having two angels on their shoulders all the time sure made things a hell of a lot less dangerous, but that didn’t mean Dean was going to drop a lifetime’s habit of making sure he knew where any unexpected attack was going to come from. They were in the middle of a wide lookout in a foreign forest, almost at the top of a mountain. The grass was long and delicate, almost up to his thighs, but soft and not thickly grown (would cushion any falls without scratching, could provide a little cover from low angles). The ground was a little damp (not muddy enough to catch at feet), and there was some kind of blue and purple wildflower growing all over the place. Must be a road nearby, because there was a cement picnic table over to his right, one of those ones that was made all of a piece with the benches and assumed a family meant four people, two big and two small.
“Where are we?”
“You know it by the name of a Dutch province that some unimaginative cartographers slapped on it about three centuries back.”
Dean took a moment to disentangle that from Gabriel’s smug I-disdain-your-petty-little-twenty-first-century-priorities perspective. “New Zealand?”
“Ding ding!”
Gabriel strutted forward and jumped up onto the picnic table like it was a stage, appropriating the age-old mountains falling away into purple and blue and white in the distance as his own personal backdrop.
Dean snorted. “Drama queen.”
Gabriel grinned like a lion and spread his arms wide. “Hey, the theatrics are half of any fight. Embrace it.”
Dean gave him his best not-impressed-yet look. It was one that got a lot of use around Gabriel.
Gabriel smirked at him, all sharp edges against the soft horizon behind him. “Now, this one’s tricky. Most proper angels could never work out how, because they can’t think about things from a human perspective, so they can’t work out which bits to hold in or how to make the rest work without them.” His familiar explaining-my-own-genius airiness was laced with a weird tension. Like he was stalling. “Took me a couple of centuries on earth to work it out. Your boy’s got a head start there, with his whole dalliance in mortality thing behind him, but he’s still got a way to go before we can tease this out of him.”
There was something half-formed hovering in the air behind Gabriel’s shoulders, a hint of a shape of a redirection of the sunlight. If Dean got fanciful (which, to be honest, usually paid off around angels), it could be shaped like folded wings, hunched and drawn up, twin peaks three feet above Gabriel’s head and curving down into a shroud, too big to be contained behind any human size, giving a faintly golden aura to that insignificant little vessel posturing all over the picnic table.
Dean let out his breath in shaking little increments and stalked closer, rolling his hips and keeping his eyes dark and solid on Gabriel’s. Just like he would if they were playing a game back at home, in Gabriel’s house, and he wanted to keep everyone’s focus on him.
Gabriel waggled his eyebrows at him and began unbuttoning his shirt, making a deliberately silly tease of each few inches of exposed skin. And it would have been just as relaxed and playful and sexy as normal, except that, as he circled around behind the table, Gabriel’s eyes were tracking him with something that looked like anxiety, not anticipation.
“Come on, angel.” Dean grinned up at him, that familiar shit-eating grin that he knew kicked into Gabriel’s brain (or whatever) as a dare, and spread his hands. “You didn’t bring me here for a botany lesson. Show me what you’ve got.”
Gabriel’s mouth curled into mocking response, like he knew he was being humoured but he couldn’t quite argue with it. A challenge, tossed and caught. They were good together, he and Gabriel, sharp and fierce and startlingly easy, calling each other’s bullshit without a second thought. Not like with Castiel, where every look and word was weighted down to his soul and so, so dear. Still important, though. Still family. And also fun, sexy, and a hell of a long way from meaningless.
Gabriel flung his shirt aside with a flourish and made a show of it, poised there in just his jeans in the cool air, rolling his shoulders luxuriously. Linking his hands over his head, he stretched like a relief, all slim muscle and sensuality and smirk in the cool air. Then he opened his wings.
“Holy shit,” Dean breathed.
Gabriel let out a quick, startled snort of laughter, then shook his head. “Too easy, Deano.”
Sam had said clear, and Dean had thought, glassy, invisible, colourless.
Sam had said tears and Dean had thought, watery, insubstantial. And, well, okay, girly.
Apparently, Dean was an idiot. Not that that was news.
They were clear, and they were like water, but very far from insubstantial. Just like the light would catch every ripple and splash and raindrop on the surface of a brook and edge each detail with silver, making it something inviting and soft and sensual, so every feather, shaft, and barb caught the light and turned it weighty and gold at the edges, deeper and richer where they were clustered more closely. Like the way you only saw the green in glass where it was thickest, or looking at it where it curved. Like the colour was hidden until you caught it looking sideways.
Yes, alright. So, looking at them, Dean could believe that whole thing Sam had gushed about Gabriel’s wings being a manifestation of both angelic power and human love.
Which didn’t mean he’d take back what he’d said to Sam in return. That had been brilliant and witty.
Dean drifted closer to the table, fascinated by the pattern of the long, overlapping feathers on the trailing edge of the wings, the way the sun shining through them from behind came out stronger and more meaningful than it was on its own, like through a stained glass window. The grass whispered softly out of the way of his boots.
He’d never really seen Castiel’s wings. Seen the shadow of them once, something in a warded barn that could just as easily have been an illusion created by any number of supernatural things. Felt them once, physical and weak under his hands, useless in the dark of an abandoned car yard at the end of the world, but warm and beautiful and quivering with determination and Castiel. But these? These looked like he should have imagined an angel’s wings to be.
Except they weren’t, of course. When Gabriel had been pure angel, his wings would have been something very different. These were archangel tempered by humanity. These were Gabriel’s soul, made physical.
… No wonder Gabriel was looking kind of tense around the mouth, showing him this.
Dean cleared his throat, then cleared it again to make sure, and gestured to the wings, to the way they gathered the sunlight and made it into something rare and divine. “So… this right now is just the physical stuff? No grace at all?”
Gabriel jerked his chin up a little, a jaunty smirk that was almost convincing. “One hundred percent non-burning, guaranteed.”
“Cos when Sam said you got these from the tears of some holy chick back in the Dark Ages, I sort of pictured them more…”
“… More?”
There was a little edge of vulnerability under there, almost exposed, like the first time Gabriel had had to turn to Dean to ask just what it was that he’d said that had made Sam so toweringly furious, or the first time he’d heard Castiel’s voice after he’d been brought back to life.
“Droopy.”
Gabriel’s mouth did a funny little twist, like it wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or snark.
Dean grinned at him, bright and open and letting him see all the delight and wonder. Because they were getting better at this, at setting the smart-arse aside just for a moment, now and then, and if Gabriel could show him this, Dean could give him that much back. “Dude. You have got to teach Cas to do this.”
Gabriel’s smile was bright as the sun. “I dunno, Deano. Castiel’s got the whole broody nerd look going for him but he’s just nothing like as brilliant as yours truly.”
“Tell you what. Pass a legal driving exam in any state at all, without cheating, and I’ll consider letting you into the running for transport genius.”
“Hey, why bother with a rickety old pushbike when you’ve got high-speed rail?”
“Do they work for actually flying, or just for, you know…” Dean wriggled his fingers. “Zapping from place to place?”
The smile slid into something dirty with promise, and that was all the warning he got. Gabriel took two steps forward, the second one with a bent knee and the sole of his bare foot curling around the edge of the table top, and he leapt. Twenty feet of angel wing slammed down against the air with a crack, Dean hit the ground and rolled, and something far too big to be probable shot past overhead.
“… Little warning?” Dean yelled, through mud.
Unhelpful cackling drifted down from above.
“Dick.” He rolled over, splayed on the ground with his view framed by slightly squashed grass.
The sky was filled with light.
Gabriel crooked his left wing sideways and slid away through the air. The scattered sparks of gold, dancing like a kaleidoscope over the grass, rushed away after him.
“… Awesome.”
Dean sat up, and goggled shamelessly. Gabriel was circling the clearing with slow, lazy wingbeats, like he was doing the air a favour by stroking it. As Dean watched, he crested the trees at the lower end of the clearing, opened his wings wide and full for one breathtaking moment, then shot upward like a leaf that had drifted over an air vent. Something caught in Dean’s throat - the sheer delight, the beauty, the joy of it, Gabriel in his element, that old old joy that they all knew had been Gabriel’s birthright and that had been lost for so long, that they were only just beginning to see again, here and there. Higher and higher, circling on the wind, one wing cocked insouciantly downwards like it knew it didn’t really need to bother, until he was balancing almost level with the peak of the mountain. Then he rolled over sideways, tumbled in a victory roll (of course he did), and closed his wings.
He fell. He just freaking fell. And, sure, angel, wings, he was fine, and it wasn’t like you could kill an angel by hitting him with the ground, okay, Dean knew that, but Dean did not approve of his family falling out of the sky and it took him a moment (just a moment, he was not hyperventilating) to amend falling to diving.
Barely ten feet off the ground the wings snapped open again, and Gabriel swung around smooth as anything from a sheer nosedive to a sedate smug glide. Which defied all physics, and at that velocity would have had to sprain his wings at least and probably tear them right off if he had been anything bound to regular flesh and blood, and come to think of it should have made the air ring with the impact if not knocked Dean flat on his back again.
Dean rolled his eyes at Gabriel’s wink (show-off), and watched the pull of feathers over air more closely as he made one final lap of the clearing. Something didn’t add up, now he was looking for it. Because, okay, he wasn’t a genius like Sam and he’d never actually read any physics textbooks in high school, but he knew how things were meant to work, and he was very good at spotting things that moved like they weren’t quite natural. No tail feathers to balance out against the strokes of the wings, just trailing feet. Turns too tightly angled, like momentum was an afterthought that didn’t really matter. And the whole construction, body and wings alike, just looked far too heavy to be kept in the air by the lazy amount of downward pressure those wingbeats could possibly be giving him.
As Gabriel pivoted to vertical and landed on the table, far too prim and neat, Dean pointed an investigative finger at him, not taking his eyes off the flex and relax of pinions.
“That shouldn’t work.”
Gabriel cocked his head and make a little noise like a curious seagull.
“You look like you shouldn’t be able to get off the ground.” Dean helpfully provided the calm and rational voice of basic physics. Although maybe he shouldn’t point it out, in case it stopped working. And apparently his feet had some kind of fatal attraction to wings, because they were creeping him closer again. “Okay, so they’re big, but they’ve got to be a pretty solid weight themselves, yeah? And dude, you’re heavy for your size.” Dean had woken being squashed by a sprawling archangelic octopus often enough to know.
Gabriel’s mouth was a slow curl of amusement. “Sam wanted the metaphysics. You want the mechanics.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “He would. Can I…?” He gave in and asked, since his hands were agreeing with his feet and lifting themselves towards Gabriel. They just looked really… touchable. Velvety. Or something.
Gabriel went blank and unfathomable for a moment, like he wasn’t sure what was coming or if there was a punchline. Then, just as Dean was about to back off and make a joke out of it, he stepped down and plopped himself onto the bench of the table, looking rather small in his massive feathery setting. “Have at ’em.”
Dean set one knee on the bench and leaned in. Gabriel glanced sideways at his face and away again. Dean’s throat apparently felt it was getting left out of this whole democracy business, and started doing a weird little catchy thing when he tried to swallow, so he told his body to sod off and trailed the back of his knuckles down over the middle of Gabriel’s right wing.
Yep. Velvet. Only warm, and it felt like it was breathing. Or maybe that was a little quiver. Felt alive, anyway, in a way that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Dean smoothed the tip of one forefinger delicately down the shaft at the centre of one of the larger feathers, then slid that finger under it, just enough to pinch it experimentally against his thumb. He could see his finger through it, a bit muzzy with the way the tiny barbs broke the light into little shivers of gold. It was yielding, delicate and so luxurious, like the ridiculous sheets Gabriel always insisted on for even motel beds, but there was a kind of a strength under there that he could almost feel throbbing against his fingers. He let it go, settled it back into place with a light touch, then rested his whole hand over the spot, spread it warm and solid into the crook of the wing.
He snuck a look sideways at Gabriel’s careful profile. “This okay?”
Gabriel nodded, once. Dean took him up on it, because that wasn’t his “no” face but the “persuade me” one, and slipped the tips of his fingers in between the rows.
That one was definitely a whole-wing quiver.
Gabriel went with his usual relaxation technique for when he was feeling less than cocksure, which was the dulcet melody of his own voice.
“So first, with birds you can’t just scale up, right? The heavier the bird the bigger its wings need to be relative to its body and the more power it needs to move them, so the bigger the muscles, which makes it heavier again, less manoeuvrable, harder to get off the ground without a falling start…”
Dean knew every inch of Gabriel’s human-shaped skin and the way he inhabited it, the way it moved when he was unhappy or impatient or furious, and how to coax it back to thrumming contentment under his hands. He knew that the angel’s voice right now was a little too bright, with just an edge of that wary sharpness that the Trickster had worn all over, like an iron glove. What he didn’t know was what Gabriel’s wings felt like when they were relaxed and happy. This was obviously very important knowledge, and research was called for.
He explored.
“… plus the wings have to take their own weight anyway, until you get something like a condor which makes flight look like the Michelin man trying to figure skate. So you might get a bird with a four inch body and a seven inch wingspan, but at four feet it’ll need a wingspan more like eleven feet, and after that it just gets impossible and it’s far more practical just to get sodding big legs and kick anything that comes too close…”
Dean’s fingers meandered, taking their time, seeking out the bits that felt sensitive, like they wanted to be touched and teased, or smoothed down with delicate strokes, or nudged just out of place to tickle the nerve. He’d always been good at that, with people’s bodies, even with women when theirs were new and strange under his hands. It was kind of weird to be able to do it to something like this, that should be so very foreign. Except it really just felt like, well. Gabriel.
He made a little interested-completely-innocent-student-here noise. “And what about a five foot body?”
“Sod off, Winchester, I’m five foot eight. Only my strength has nothing to do with muscles, and I can…” Gabriel’s eyes shivered closed for a moment, and the knee nearest Dean nudged ever so slightly against his thigh. Mental note: thumb right there, small circles into the muscle close to his back just above the fourth rib, rubbing slowly back against the lie of the supple little feathers that curled there. Better check it was the same on the other side. Purely in the interests of science, of course. “… and I can weigh whatever I like. Second, forget all that air pressure and lift direction and relative speed and thermal - oh - thermal currents crap that birds need to think about - I tell the air around my wings what I want it to do keep me in the air and heading where I want to go. Third…” Gabriel’s head sank slowly down towards one shoulder, eyes gleaming dark under heavy, ironic lashes. “Physics can go screw itself.”
The long primaries and secondaries, the ones that stood out so proudly at the tip and trailing edge of the wing and accounted together for well over half its size, weren’t so sensitive - couldn’t be, they were too structural - and, while tugging them out of order would pass sensation down to the bases, it felt like it would be the kind of sensation that would irritate, not please. Besides, the shafts were stiff and hard enough that they weren’t much fun for Dean’s fingers either.
“So are you actually flying, or using your grace to cheat?” He tapped Gabriel lightly on the chest, then tugged at his hip. “Turn around, I want to see the back.”
Gabriel went obediently, waving his hands in a gesture of Important Explanations for the Poor Ignorant Mortals. “Both, of course. Like priming an engine with a bit more gas to get the party started.”
Dean was a bit distracted. “Dude. Did your wing just go right through the table?” He curled his hands over them just where they sprung out strong and impossible from the back of Gabriel’s shoulders, and squeezed down gently.
Gabriel answered the question he hadn’t asked. “You’ve got the whole consciousness thing working for you. The table’s just physical, so they can ignore it. Unless I tell them otherwise. Otherwise they’d be a bitch in bed.” He leaned forward, hands braced wide on the table and wings quivering at half-open, and if that wasn’t an invitation to a whole freaking buffet of things, Dean didn’t know what was.
He could see Sammy there, his little brother rubbing off on Gabriel (and not only in the obvious sense, though he saw that often enough too these days). His easy loose-limbed sprawl, the way he let his head tip forward and just went with it, his pout. Little bits of all four of them reflected in each other. Which made sense. Gabriel had sure given Sam a hell of a lot - pulling him literally out of Hell, for starters, and teaching him to laugh again - but Sam hadn’t exactly been miserly in returning the favour. Teaching Gabriel to trust hadn’t been the least of it.
He pressed a kiss between Gabriel’s shoulderblades, nuzzling into the faint thrum of tension still lingering under his mouth. There was a final downy feather tickling each of his cheeks, nestled into the skin where wing became torso.
Gabriel rolled his shouders back just a little, shifting under Dean’s hands, the way he always did when he wanted to be touched but wasn’t quite prepared to ask. Only it wasn’t his actual shoulders this time, but the base of his wings. Huh. Dean rubbed his cheek against the spot, a silent “I’ve got you,” and eased his own hips back a touch, keeping the promise of tightness in his own jeans from pressing just where it was tempted to. Because, no. Not just yet.
He drew his hand down from where the wing emerged from Gabriel’s shoulder to the first joint, from which the wing began to curve back up towards the peak. Gabriel flexed slightly under his hand, bone shifting through bone and muscles tugging it in a way that suddenly made sense of the whole foreign appendage.
“Huh. That’s an elbow.”
“Nothing gets by you, does it?”
“Bite me, Peter Pan.”
He kept one hand there, spread out over the joint with splayed fingers pressing in just enough to feel the soft thud of blood in the skin underneath, and drew the other further along the wing, making sure to ruffle Gabriel’s feathers as he went. Slower, this time: this was the most powerful part of the wing, the leading edge, and it was a little difficult to make out the path of the bone under hard muscles muffled over with feathers. And yes, this was built like a human forearm. Two parts to the bone, though each of them was as thick as Dean’s shin and a good four feet long. And there, right at the arch of the wing, the powerful wrist that drove more than half that bulk, and the long, slender backward-curving fingers that guided the muscle. All folded and bunched up, too thick underneath with overlapping feathers for him to get through to the skin.
Holding the elbow in his right hand, Dean tugged gently downwards until it lay snug against Gabriel’s hip and the tips of the secondaries brushed the seat of the picnic table. Gabriel made a faintly bemused noise and went with it, pliant under his hands. Dean ran a thumb over the back of the finger bones, then again more firmly, urging them out.
“Open up, Gabriel,” he murmured, hot and quiet and demanding into soft feathers.
Gabriel made a little sound, deep as if it had been tugged out of his chest, and opened under Dean’s hand. Giving him as much as he could want.
The light rippled over Dean’s fingers as if he was looking at them through the water, streaks and specks of amber dancing and wheeling over his skin and his clothes and the ground, as the longer feathers slid out from each other like a fan. Dean’s breath tripped and staggered in his throat for a moment, and without quite meaning to he shoved his hand forward and up, sinking to the wrist in warm living gold.
He imagined doing this to Castiel, feeling his angel come apart, growling and just taking until he shuddered into loose, shaky moans, silky dark feathers sliding between Dean’s fingers.
He heard his own voice come out rough and deep, not nearly so teasing as he’d meant. “Best action figure ever.”
No quip resulted. Apparently Dean had Gabriel distracted. That sure counted as a win in his book.
Skin and flesh and tender nerves underneath, muscles stretched into different shapes for different purposes, but they weren’t that foreign after all. He could read them.
Dean crooked his fingers and pressed them in deep, brushing his tips against the flesh underneath between the feather tracks, thick and plush with down. Huh. Wasn’t down suppoed to be for warmth? Bit of a waste on an angel, you’d think. He pressed his fingertips into it a little deeper, just a hint of pressure, so that the down dragged cosy and insubstantial up to his first knuckle.
Gabriel murmured something that didn’t seem to have any words in it, low and throaty, and his hands slipped forward a few inches before he tightened his grip on the edges of the table.
Dean stilled, and slid his other hand up the shoulder of the wing to curl large and warm around the back of his neck. “Bad?”
Gabriel growled softly. There was a dry rustle, and the long overlapping feathers at the wingtip began to refold as his wing bent and tilted, sinews pulling and contracting under Dean’s hand in a way that absolutely should not be so hot as it was. The stronger feathers on top crowded up velvet-firm around his wrist so that he’d have to wriggle a bit to get it out, which his dick was suddenly telling him was all kinds of interesting, and the whole wing pushed ever so slightly back into his touch.
… Okay. Not bad, then.
“Neat,” Dean breathed, and felt breathy amusement rumble all the way up through bone and muscle and quiver its way through the feathers. He let his thumb stray downwards a little, nudging aside the down, until he found the next line of feathers sprouting from the skin. These ones were only about as long as his hand, and even at their bases the shafts were only stiff, not hard. There to make the air curve back over the leading edge into a nice smooth jetstream, not intended to take the weight of an angel against the wing, or to do the dextrous work of steering. Coverts, some random trivia part of his brain provided. The pad of his thumb rubbed back and forth across the little row of bumps from which they sprouted, all neat and regimental, his callouses catching a little on the fluff at their base.
Gabriel sighed, soft and breathy, and the tiny shell-shaped feathers quivered under Dean’s touch. “Mother of hell, Dean, your hands.”
“Hmm?” Dean left that hand where it was, leaned sideways and smirked against Gabriel’s shoulder, where just one last feather curled over hot skin. The movement of his mouth puffed it out of place. “Sammy not making it good for you, babe?”
“Sammy’s awesome, you smug little dick.” It was a rumbling growl under his mouth, Gabriel’s bed-voice. His hips nudged backwards towards Dean’s thigh. “You’ve got - oh - you’ve got mechanic’s hands.”
“Hard and oily?”
“Know how everything works. You…” Gabriel’s head dropped forward between his shoulders, which were loose and yielding under Dean’s cheek. “I get why the Impala purrs for you.”
“You are so very weird.” Dean opened his mouth around a feather experimentally. That actually did feel kind of strange, having something dry and fluffy in his mouth, tickling at his tongue and the inside of his cheek. He mouthed at it until it went slick and compliant, then teased with his tongue at the base, drawing provocative little circles on hot skin.
“Dean?” Gabriel’s voice was a harsh, sweet vibration that shivered right through Dean’s belly. He sounded as if his patience was dangling by a very frayed thread over something delicate and packed with explosives. “You are so very… overdressed.”
Dean considered, for a sadistic little moment, drawing it out for longer. Like Sam would, if he were doing this. Keeping him here all day, stretched out and pliant and quivering. Getting to know just how to work every new inch of flesh on twenty feet of wing, front and back. But then again, from Gabriel’s point of view, he’d been doing that for a while already. And the low thrum of warning in Gabriel’s voice said he really wasn’t in the mood right now to rein himself in.
Dean leaned forward to breathe hot into Gabriel’s ear, to feel the shiver of skin and feathers almost touching his chest all the way up. “Yeah?” He slid his hand over the denim-coarse jut of Gabriel’s hip, then down and back to curl around the back of his thigh, his little finger pressing in just high enough to promise. “I’m not the only one.”
So it really wasn’t a surprise to find his hand was suddenly pressed into bare skin instead, to feel the sharp mountain breeze whispering over his back and arse and the sensitive skin inside his thighs, or the grass tickling the hair on his calves. Dean nestled forward without thinking into the warmth under him, blanketing Gabriel’s body with his own. He grinned against Gabriel’s ear, then kissed it, soft.
“What do you need?”
Gabriel’s thighs shifted restlessly, edging further open, pressing back into Dean’s heat, his breath coming short and shallow as Dean’s little finger brushed one gentle stroke up over the fragile skin of his balls. “Nothing. Good to go. Stop being such a. Bloody gentleman.”
Dean hummed deep and rough and obliged, curling his hands large and hard around Gabriel’s hips and pushing in against where he was ready and slick and welcoming.
“Handy, that.”
Gabriel shivered loose under his cheek, all heat and dry silk. Dean held still for a moment, teetering on the edge, dragging forest-rich air into sluggish lungs.
Then he was inside, one long demanding shove, dragging over his nerves like crushed velvet. Gabriel shuddered around him, under him, his knuckles clenched white around the edges of the table top. Little crumbs of concrete broke and scattered away into dust under his fingers. Dean’s hips jolted forward without his say-so, once then again, before he could still them to wait. Not that he really needed time to adjust, not Gabriel. Not like this.
Dean looked down at his back, one long taut curve of trust and demand. He let his fingernails drag slowly up over Gabriel’s ribs, teasing through the pearlescent fluff that nestled between his shoulder blades, slipping up the nape of his bowed neck to shove into his hair and make a slow mess of that.
Gabriel jerked back against him, hot and greedy, and Dean gave up on self-restraint.
It was harsh and fast and deliciously unforgiving, almost overwhelming in the press and pull and tug and shove of it all. Gabriel’s back was rocking smooth and firm under his hand, so responsive, so hungry, as if he ached for every touch, throbbed with it, twitching and shivering with every thrust and every breath on his spine. Demanding every bit of him, all his motion and weight and strength and more. Every stroke was pounding Gabriel forward into the table, and if it had been anyone else Dean would have been worried about seriously bruising their thighs on the edge of it. But this was Gabriel, and no matter how much they threw at them, Gabriel and Castiel took it, demanded it, no matter how far they went beyond human, how dark things got, they never flinched, never looked away. Always shoved right back, pulled them back out, were pulled out in their turn, and never broke.
Dean gave himself over to the furious thump-thump-thump of arousal almost painful in his own gut, demanding, moving with him, a heavy shove-slide of lust and glory and overheated flesh. He heard Gabriel’s breath catch, a moment of frustration, felt him shift under and against him, squirming for something. Dean slipped one knee forward between his thighs and manhandled the left one up and out, opening him up more and turning his own thrusts deeper and sharper. Gabriel’s writhings slid away into shocked noise, pushed out of him in little shivers of pleasure and surprise.
Dean grinned wet and open into the base of Gabriel’s wing. He bit it, setting his teeth there messy and harsh where the muscle rose strong and straining out of the line of Gabriel’s back. Feathers scattered under the hot puff of his breath.
Then Gabriel was moving, shoving him back and off and around, a flurry of feathers and a flash of grinning teeth and all greedy determined hands. Dean hit the ground for the second time that afternoon, only this time with cool moss under his skin and grass tickling a little too intimately in certain places thanks very much and the hot weight of an archangel pressing him down into the earth, pressing down on top of him and taking him back inside with a deep, juddering sigh of satisfaction.
Dean rubbed his hand over his face, leaving a smear of damp earth behind, and groaned with him, ragged and long, until he was seated snug. “Dude. You could have just said.”
Gabriel grinned down at him, sharp and breathless, then leaned down just long enough to swipe his tongue over the trail left by Dean’s hand. “Hey look, a mud monkey.”
Dean rocked up sharply into Gabriel’s body, and his cheeky smirk dissolved into glazed eyes and sharp little breaths. He pushed back, digging his hands into Dean’s shoulders and clamping Dean’s hips between his thighs and shoving down. Once, twice, then into his own rhythm. It was slower this time, deep and shudderingly hard and so very, very strong. Dean just let him, let him be greedy and beautiful, and arched up into it as much as he could, digging his fingers into the earth by Gabriel’s feet and holding on.
He could feel the sharp catch of Gabriel’s breathing as he sucked in air with his head dropped forward and his eyes squeezed tight, feel the deep pounding of his blood and see the little flutter of it in his throat, could see them at the same time in the stretch and quiver and flex of the feathers that drew a gauzy, powerful curtain between Dean and the sky.
Sunlight curled like pale fire around the solid living arch of the right wing’s peak and Dean lifted one hand and reached out to touch, to trail just his fingertips along the tiny overlapping feathers there and see how far they’d stir.
His wrist was grabbed and slammed hard into the ground behind his own head, a sharp little stutter of pain that had him bucking up into Gabriel even as the angel plastered himself over Dean’s chest and pinned him down. He rested his forehead against Dean’s, chest heaving, and breathed raggedly into Dean’s mouth, “Do that and I’m gone.”
Dean gulped down his own breath and Gabriel’s and nodded, just slightly, slid his other arm around Gabriel’s waist and held him close. It always seemed like it should be strange to feel an angel’s heart beating so frantically inside their borrowed bodies, thudding through flesh and blood and dick and throat; but Gabriel, Gabriel inhabited humanity with such vibrant entirety that even like this, with feathers quivering against Dean’s upper arm, it was impossible to think of him as something separate from it.
Which wasn’t to say that Dean didn’t fucking love driving him to this point. Making him forget he was alien.
He rolled his hips just once, slow and gentle, and spread his free hand warm and possessive over Gabriel’s lower back. The angel murmured appreciatively against the corner of his mouth, deep and wordless like a purr. Dean nudged his head sideways just a fraction, enough to slide his mouth graceless and open under the damp hot press of Gabriel’s, and pushed into his tongue. The muscles of Gabriel’s abdomen tensed against him, deepening the warning thump of heat in Dean’s own stomach.
They could keep doing this for hours. Or they could both be over the edge and shuddering into nothingness within the next minute.
Dean crooked his fingers, ever so slightly, pressing just the faintest promise of nails into the base of Gabriel’s spine and the top of his arse. They both went very still for a moment.
And then Gabriel was wriggling free, flicking aside Dean’s hands when he made a protesting sort of a gasp and tried to pull him back, leaving his lap cold and empty as the archangel flopped over backward onto his elbows and slithered out of reach. He grinned at Dean, bright and breathless and blatant, down over his own chest with his legs still sprawled wide and open and his hair a freaking mess, his whole body spread out in easy curves of desire and sweat and framed by impossible, delicious wings arching behind and beneath him. They weren’t stretched wide, but half folded and curled loosely forward toward Dean at the edges, so that Gabriel looked like he was reclining in some huge soft clam shell or something, just waiting for Dean to join him. To burrow back into that warm, familiar body, to cover it with his mouth and hands and pin it down with his weight, to be wrapped and engulfed in slick heat and the luxurious, otherworldly strength of wings.
Dean realised he was gawking lustfully when Gabriel’s grin turned smug and he arched his back, tilting his hips shamelessly to make a teasing display of exactly where Dean had just been buried, all open and glistening. One wing stretched a little, feathers unfolding lazily towards him, not quite close enough to touch.
Dean growled and lunged. He grabbed the nearest wing, fingers pressing in hard near the tip, using it to pull himself forward and Gabriel into him or off-balance as the angel swore sudden and startled through laughter and tried to tug away. Dean over-balanced instead, then it was a mess of flailing limbs and possessive hands and snorted laughter and buffets from wings and no one staying pinned for long. Gabriel’s body with a pair of powerful wings behind it moved differently from anything Dean was used to wrestling and it kept throwing him, literally and figuratively, and as soon as he started to compensate for them Gabriel would ignore physics and let them sink right through the ground like water, but he could make Gabriel gasp and shiver and go limp with just one little touch in the right feathers, so hey, not complaining. He got his knee between Gabriel’s thighs and one leg pinned, dragging his knuckles down Gabriel’s back, while Gabriel nuzzled fond and amused into his throat. Then Gabriel opened his mouth there hot and dirty, bright with the hint of teeth, while he tensed one wing against the ground and shoved, and over they went again, with Dean not even bothering about whether his squeak of protest was manly or not. Gabriel was a solid, familiar weight on his hips, his grin manic and mud-splattered above Dean and the sun breaking into fractured curves through the feathers and hot damn, he was gorgeous.
Also, he was a freaking tease. Dean grabbed at him as he stood up and backed away, but all he got was a bare foot on his chest pushing him back down. Dean glowered at him. Gabriel wriggled his toes against Dean’s chest and smirked, so Dean grabbed the foot and bit into the arch. Gabriel yelped and dug it into his ribs, and Dean tried to pull him off balance. Gabriel hopped and spluttered, and whoever said angels had dignity?
“Stop that, you greedy boar. I want to show you something.”
Dean eyed the extended hand and the wicked sweet curve of Gabriel’s mouth with deep, deep suspicion.
The angel’s eyes opened wider, dancing with lust and amusement and really completely failing to look innocent. “No, trust me.”
---
It ended (at least for that day) like this:
“The Mile High club? With Gabriel?”
“Now who’s jealous, Sammy?”
“Dean, you’re scared of flying.”
“… I was distracted?”
“Hey guys! Dean, Dean, did we get the pout of epic disapproval this time?”
“… Gabriel, get out of there. You are not one of Santa’s elves.”
“Yup. His forehead did the crinkly thing.”
“Aw, precious.”
“I hate you guys.”
“Hey. Hey, Sammy. Want to come for a fly? Pinkie-swear it’ll be worth your while.”
“Gabriel! We’re in the middle of a case! Possessed reindeer, remember?”
“Awesome, you got him to do the face again.”
“… Okay, that’s it. Cas and I are taking you two down.”
“Bring it, honeybuns.”
“Look out! Evil Santa!”
Pairing: Dean/Gabriel, background Castiel/Dean, Sam/Gabriel and OT4 (no cheating).
Rating: NC-17.
Length: c. 7200.
Warnings: Not unless you disapprove of wings, or are likely to be startled by the appearance of someone called Gabriel
Notes: Futurefic for In His Image. Written for the kinkmeme at spn-gabriel, because the prompt fit so perfectly into the universe of In His Image. If you haven't read the big one, all you need to know is that it goes AU after “Hammer of the Gods” (so no seasons 6 or 7); that Castiel and Gabriel now have souls as well as grace, and that Gabriel’s original wings were lost when Lucifer killed him and these ones are courtesy of “the tears of some holy chick back in the Dark Ages”, as Dean puts it here, with his usual complete lack of historical precision.
Hence, Dean and Gabriel being more fluffy.
And by the way, when it comes to awesome powerful wings that are absolutely amazing - this video. Someone with skills should definitely shop those onto a gif of Richard Speight Jr.
Summary: Original prompt was: “Showing your wings to a human without burning them up takes skill and care. Castiel can't manage it yet, but Dean is curious. Then Sam lets it slip that Gabriel's been bringing out his wings in bed... Bonus points if Gabriel tries to persuade Dean that flying is not so scary as he thought.” Honestly, most of the prompt ended up being implied background, but let’s face it, the wings are the main thing!
AO3 link.
It started with this:
“Little bro still holding out on you, is he?”
“Get off the roof of my car, Gabriel.”
“Sammy says you’re jealous. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Yeah, almost like Cas’s got something against burning my eyes out. Why - you think you can do better?”
“Sure I can. You hang around on earth for a millenium and change, you learn some self-restraint.”
“Dude, you’re the poster child for locking self-restraint in the closet and swearing it was never there in the first place.”
“But my wings are awesome.”
---
Later, it went something like this:
“Hey Dean! I want to show you something!”
“Okay, department store window displays, that’s a new one.”
“You like? I think the burberry and scarf combo suits me.”
“It makes you look like a metrosexual librarian with the attention span of a dragonfly. Should I bother asking why I can hear you from behind the glass?”
“Nope. Dean. Deeean. Dean. I need to abduct you.”
“A whiny eight-year-old metrosexual librarian.” Dean rocked back on his heels, hands shoved into his pockets, and tried not to let his grin slip into indulgence. “What for?”
“Practical demonstration, of the feathery kind.” A ridiculous cheesy waggle of the eyebrows. “Promise I’ll make it good for you, baby.”
Like Dean was ever going to back down when Gabriel threw him a glove. “Okay then. Show me.”
“Sure about this, tiger?
“Bring it on, big man.”
Gabriel leaned through the glass like it wasn’t there and touched two fingers to Dean’s forehead.
---
They were perched on top of the world. The air was strange and crisp in Dean’s throat, and the shapes of the trees and the sounds of the birds were unfamiliar.
He turned slowly on one heel, sizing it up. Not that he didn’t trust Gabriel by now, and having two angels on their shoulders all the time sure made things a hell of a lot less dangerous, but that didn’t mean Dean was going to drop a lifetime’s habit of making sure he knew where any unexpected attack was going to come from. They were in the middle of a wide lookout in a foreign forest, almost at the top of a mountain. The grass was long and delicate, almost up to his thighs, but soft and not thickly grown (would cushion any falls without scratching, could provide a little cover from low angles). The ground was a little damp (not muddy enough to catch at feet), and there was some kind of blue and purple wildflower growing all over the place. Must be a road nearby, because there was a cement picnic table over to his right, one of those ones that was made all of a piece with the benches and assumed a family meant four people, two big and two small.
“Where are we?”
“You know it by the name of a Dutch province that some unimaginative cartographers slapped on it about three centuries back.”
Dean took a moment to disentangle that from Gabriel’s smug I-disdain-your-petty-little-twenty-first-century-priorities perspective. “New Zealand?”
“Ding ding!”
Gabriel strutted forward and jumped up onto the picnic table like it was a stage, appropriating the age-old mountains falling away into purple and blue and white in the distance as his own personal backdrop.
Dean snorted. “Drama queen.”
Gabriel grinned like a lion and spread his arms wide. “Hey, the theatrics are half of any fight. Embrace it.”
Dean gave him his best not-impressed-yet look. It was one that got a lot of use around Gabriel.
Gabriel smirked at him, all sharp edges against the soft horizon behind him. “Now, this one’s tricky. Most proper angels could never work out how, because they can’t think about things from a human perspective, so they can’t work out which bits to hold in or how to make the rest work without them.” His familiar explaining-my-own-genius airiness was laced with a weird tension. Like he was stalling. “Took me a couple of centuries on earth to work it out. Your boy’s got a head start there, with his whole dalliance in mortality thing behind him, but he’s still got a way to go before we can tease this out of him.”
There was something half-formed hovering in the air behind Gabriel’s shoulders, a hint of a shape of a redirection of the sunlight. If Dean got fanciful (which, to be honest, usually paid off around angels), it could be shaped like folded wings, hunched and drawn up, twin peaks three feet above Gabriel’s head and curving down into a shroud, too big to be contained behind any human size, giving a faintly golden aura to that insignificant little vessel posturing all over the picnic table.
Dean let out his breath in shaking little increments and stalked closer, rolling his hips and keeping his eyes dark and solid on Gabriel’s. Just like he would if they were playing a game back at home, in Gabriel’s house, and he wanted to keep everyone’s focus on him.
Gabriel waggled his eyebrows at him and began unbuttoning his shirt, making a deliberately silly tease of each few inches of exposed skin. And it would have been just as relaxed and playful and sexy as normal, except that, as he circled around behind the table, Gabriel’s eyes were tracking him with something that looked like anxiety, not anticipation.
“Come on, angel.” Dean grinned up at him, that familiar shit-eating grin that he knew kicked into Gabriel’s brain (or whatever) as a dare, and spread his hands. “You didn’t bring me here for a botany lesson. Show me what you’ve got.”
Gabriel’s mouth curled into mocking response, like he knew he was being humoured but he couldn’t quite argue with it. A challenge, tossed and caught. They were good together, he and Gabriel, sharp and fierce and startlingly easy, calling each other’s bullshit without a second thought. Not like with Castiel, where every look and word was weighted down to his soul and so, so dear. Still important, though. Still family. And also fun, sexy, and a hell of a long way from meaningless.
Gabriel flung his shirt aside with a flourish and made a show of it, poised there in just his jeans in the cool air, rolling his shoulders luxuriously. Linking his hands over his head, he stretched like a relief, all slim muscle and sensuality and smirk in the cool air. Then he opened his wings.
“Holy shit,” Dean breathed.
Gabriel let out a quick, startled snort of laughter, then shook his head. “Too easy, Deano.”
Sam had said clear, and Dean had thought, glassy, invisible, colourless.
Sam had said tears and Dean had thought, watery, insubstantial. And, well, okay, girly.
Apparently, Dean was an idiot. Not that that was news.
They were clear, and they were like water, but very far from insubstantial. Just like the light would catch every ripple and splash and raindrop on the surface of a brook and edge each detail with silver, making it something inviting and soft and sensual, so every feather, shaft, and barb caught the light and turned it weighty and gold at the edges, deeper and richer where they were clustered more closely. Like the way you only saw the green in glass where it was thickest, or looking at it where it curved. Like the colour was hidden until you caught it looking sideways.
Yes, alright. So, looking at them, Dean could believe that whole thing Sam had gushed about Gabriel’s wings being a manifestation of both angelic power and human love.
Which didn’t mean he’d take back what he’d said to Sam in return. That had been brilliant and witty.
Dean drifted closer to the table, fascinated by the pattern of the long, overlapping feathers on the trailing edge of the wings, the way the sun shining through them from behind came out stronger and more meaningful than it was on its own, like through a stained glass window. The grass whispered softly out of the way of his boots.
He’d never really seen Castiel’s wings. Seen the shadow of them once, something in a warded barn that could just as easily have been an illusion created by any number of supernatural things. Felt them once, physical and weak under his hands, useless in the dark of an abandoned car yard at the end of the world, but warm and beautiful and quivering with determination and Castiel. But these? These looked like he should have imagined an angel’s wings to be.
Except they weren’t, of course. When Gabriel had been pure angel, his wings would have been something very different. These were archangel tempered by humanity. These were Gabriel’s soul, made physical.
… No wonder Gabriel was looking kind of tense around the mouth, showing him this.
Dean cleared his throat, then cleared it again to make sure, and gestured to the wings, to the way they gathered the sunlight and made it into something rare and divine. “So… this right now is just the physical stuff? No grace at all?”
Gabriel jerked his chin up a little, a jaunty smirk that was almost convincing. “One hundred percent non-burning, guaranteed.”
“Cos when Sam said you got these from the tears of some holy chick back in the Dark Ages, I sort of pictured them more…”
“… More?”
There was a little edge of vulnerability under there, almost exposed, like the first time Gabriel had had to turn to Dean to ask just what it was that he’d said that had made Sam so toweringly furious, or the first time he’d heard Castiel’s voice after he’d been brought back to life.
“Droopy.”
Gabriel’s mouth did a funny little twist, like it wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or snark.
Dean grinned at him, bright and open and letting him see all the delight and wonder. Because they were getting better at this, at setting the smart-arse aside just for a moment, now and then, and if Gabriel could show him this, Dean could give him that much back. “Dude. You have got to teach Cas to do this.”
Gabriel’s smile was bright as the sun. “I dunno, Deano. Castiel’s got the whole broody nerd look going for him but he’s just nothing like as brilliant as yours truly.”
“Tell you what. Pass a legal driving exam in any state at all, without cheating, and I’ll consider letting you into the running for transport genius.”
“Hey, why bother with a rickety old pushbike when you’ve got high-speed rail?”
“Do they work for actually flying, or just for, you know…” Dean wriggled his fingers. “Zapping from place to place?”
The smile slid into something dirty with promise, and that was all the warning he got. Gabriel took two steps forward, the second one with a bent knee and the sole of his bare foot curling around the edge of the table top, and he leapt. Twenty feet of angel wing slammed down against the air with a crack, Dean hit the ground and rolled, and something far too big to be probable shot past overhead.
“… Little warning?” Dean yelled, through mud.
Unhelpful cackling drifted down from above.
“Dick.” He rolled over, splayed on the ground with his view framed by slightly squashed grass.
The sky was filled with light.
Gabriel crooked his left wing sideways and slid away through the air. The scattered sparks of gold, dancing like a kaleidoscope over the grass, rushed away after him.
“… Awesome.”
Dean sat up, and goggled shamelessly. Gabriel was circling the clearing with slow, lazy wingbeats, like he was doing the air a favour by stroking it. As Dean watched, he crested the trees at the lower end of the clearing, opened his wings wide and full for one breathtaking moment, then shot upward like a leaf that had drifted over an air vent. Something caught in Dean’s throat - the sheer delight, the beauty, the joy of it, Gabriel in his element, that old old joy that they all knew had been Gabriel’s birthright and that had been lost for so long, that they were only just beginning to see again, here and there. Higher and higher, circling on the wind, one wing cocked insouciantly downwards like it knew it didn’t really need to bother, until he was balancing almost level with the peak of the mountain. Then he rolled over sideways, tumbled in a victory roll (of course he did), and closed his wings.
He fell. He just freaking fell. And, sure, angel, wings, he was fine, and it wasn’t like you could kill an angel by hitting him with the ground, okay, Dean knew that, but Dean did not approve of his family falling out of the sky and it took him a moment (just a moment, he was not hyperventilating) to amend falling to diving.
Barely ten feet off the ground the wings snapped open again, and Gabriel swung around smooth as anything from a sheer nosedive to a sedate smug glide. Which defied all physics, and at that velocity would have had to sprain his wings at least and probably tear them right off if he had been anything bound to regular flesh and blood, and come to think of it should have made the air ring with the impact if not knocked Dean flat on his back again.
Dean rolled his eyes at Gabriel’s wink (show-off), and watched the pull of feathers over air more closely as he made one final lap of the clearing. Something didn’t add up, now he was looking for it. Because, okay, he wasn’t a genius like Sam and he’d never actually read any physics textbooks in high school, but he knew how things were meant to work, and he was very good at spotting things that moved like they weren’t quite natural. No tail feathers to balance out against the strokes of the wings, just trailing feet. Turns too tightly angled, like momentum was an afterthought that didn’t really matter. And the whole construction, body and wings alike, just looked far too heavy to be kept in the air by the lazy amount of downward pressure those wingbeats could possibly be giving him.
As Gabriel pivoted to vertical and landed on the table, far too prim and neat, Dean pointed an investigative finger at him, not taking his eyes off the flex and relax of pinions.
“That shouldn’t work.”
Gabriel cocked his head and make a little noise like a curious seagull.
“You look like you shouldn’t be able to get off the ground.” Dean helpfully provided the calm and rational voice of basic physics. Although maybe he shouldn’t point it out, in case it stopped working. And apparently his feet had some kind of fatal attraction to wings, because they were creeping him closer again. “Okay, so they’re big, but they’ve got to be a pretty solid weight themselves, yeah? And dude, you’re heavy for your size.” Dean had woken being squashed by a sprawling archangelic octopus often enough to know.
Gabriel’s mouth was a slow curl of amusement. “Sam wanted the metaphysics. You want the mechanics.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “He would. Can I…?” He gave in and asked, since his hands were agreeing with his feet and lifting themselves towards Gabriel. They just looked really… touchable. Velvety. Or something.
Gabriel went blank and unfathomable for a moment, like he wasn’t sure what was coming or if there was a punchline. Then, just as Dean was about to back off and make a joke out of it, he stepped down and plopped himself onto the bench of the table, looking rather small in his massive feathery setting. “Have at ’em.”
Dean set one knee on the bench and leaned in. Gabriel glanced sideways at his face and away again. Dean’s throat apparently felt it was getting left out of this whole democracy business, and started doing a weird little catchy thing when he tried to swallow, so he told his body to sod off and trailed the back of his knuckles down over the middle of Gabriel’s right wing.
Yep. Velvet. Only warm, and it felt like it was breathing. Or maybe that was a little quiver. Felt alive, anyway, in a way that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Dean smoothed the tip of one forefinger delicately down the shaft at the centre of one of the larger feathers, then slid that finger under it, just enough to pinch it experimentally against his thumb. He could see his finger through it, a bit muzzy with the way the tiny barbs broke the light into little shivers of gold. It was yielding, delicate and so luxurious, like the ridiculous sheets Gabriel always insisted on for even motel beds, but there was a kind of a strength under there that he could almost feel throbbing against his fingers. He let it go, settled it back into place with a light touch, then rested his whole hand over the spot, spread it warm and solid into the crook of the wing.
He snuck a look sideways at Gabriel’s careful profile. “This okay?”
Gabriel nodded, once. Dean took him up on it, because that wasn’t his “no” face but the “persuade me” one, and slipped the tips of his fingers in between the rows.
That one was definitely a whole-wing quiver.
Gabriel went with his usual relaxation technique for when he was feeling less than cocksure, which was the dulcet melody of his own voice.
“So first, with birds you can’t just scale up, right? The heavier the bird the bigger its wings need to be relative to its body and the more power it needs to move them, so the bigger the muscles, which makes it heavier again, less manoeuvrable, harder to get off the ground without a falling start…”
Dean knew every inch of Gabriel’s human-shaped skin and the way he inhabited it, the way it moved when he was unhappy or impatient or furious, and how to coax it back to thrumming contentment under his hands. He knew that the angel’s voice right now was a little too bright, with just an edge of that wary sharpness that the Trickster had worn all over, like an iron glove. What he didn’t know was what Gabriel’s wings felt like when they were relaxed and happy. This was obviously very important knowledge, and research was called for.
He explored.
“… plus the wings have to take their own weight anyway, until you get something like a condor which makes flight look like the Michelin man trying to figure skate. So you might get a bird with a four inch body and a seven inch wingspan, but at four feet it’ll need a wingspan more like eleven feet, and after that it just gets impossible and it’s far more practical just to get sodding big legs and kick anything that comes too close…”
Dean’s fingers meandered, taking their time, seeking out the bits that felt sensitive, like they wanted to be touched and teased, or smoothed down with delicate strokes, or nudged just out of place to tickle the nerve. He’d always been good at that, with people’s bodies, even with women when theirs were new and strange under his hands. It was kind of weird to be able to do it to something like this, that should be so very foreign. Except it really just felt like, well. Gabriel.
He made a little interested-completely-innocent-student-here noise. “And what about a five foot body?”
“Sod off, Winchester, I’m five foot eight. Only my strength has nothing to do with muscles, and I can…” Gabriel’s eyes shivered closed for a moment, and the knee nearest Dean nudged ever so slightly against his thigh. Mental note: thumb right there, small circles into the muscle close to his back just above the fourth rib, rubbing slowly back against the lie of the supple little feathers that curled there. Better check it was the same on the other side. Purely in the interests of science, of course. “… and I can weigh whatever I like. Second, forget all that air pressure and lift direction and relative speed and thermal - oh - thermal currents crap that birds need to think about - I tell the air around my wings what I want it to do keep me in the air and heading where I want to go. Third…” Gabriel’s head sank slowly down towards one shoulder, eyes gleaming dark under heavy, ironic lashes. “Physics can go screw itself.”
The long primaries and secondaries, the ones that stood out so proudly at the tip and trailing edge of the wing and accounted together for well over half its size, weren’t so sensitive - couldn’t be, they were too structural - and, while tugging them out of order would pass sensation down to the bases, it felt like it would be the kind of sensation that would irritate, not please. Besides, the shafts were stiff and hard enough that they weren’t much fun for Dean’s fingers either.
“So are you actually flying, or using your grace to cheat?” He tapped Gabriel lightly on the chest, then tugged at his hip. “Turn around, I want to see the back.”
Gabriel went obediently, waving his hands in a gesture of Important Explanations for the Poor Ignorant Mortals. “Both, of course. Like priming an engine with a bit more gas to get the party started.”
Dean was a bit distracted. “Dude. Did your wing just go right through the table?” He curled his hands over them just where they sprung out strong and impossible from the back of Gabriel’s shoulders, and squeezed down gently.
Gabriel answered the question he hadn’t asked. “You’ve got the whole consciousness thing working for you. The table’s just physical, so they can ignore it. Unless I tell them otherwise. Otherwise they’d be a bitch in bed.” He leaned forward, hands braced wide on the table and wings quivering at half-open, and if that wasn’t an invitation to a whole freaking buffet of things, Dean didn’t know what was.
He could see Sammy there, his little brother rubbing off on Gabriel (and not only in the obvious sense, though he saw that often enough too these days). His easy loose-limbed sprawl, the way he let his head tip forward and just went with it, his pout. Little bits of all four of them reflected in each other. Which made sense. Gabriel had sure given Sam a hell of a lot - pulling him literally out of Hell, for starters, and teaching him to laugh again - but Sam hadn’t exactly been miserly in returning the favour. Teaching Gabriel to trust hadn’t been the least of it.
He pressed a kiss between Gabriel’s shoulderblades, nuzzling into the faint thrum of tension still lingering under his mouth. There was a final downy feather tickling each of his cheeks, nestled into the skin where wing became torso.
Gabriel rolled his shouders back just a little, shifting under Dean’s hands, the way he always did when he wanted to be touched but wasn’t quite prepared to ask. Only it wasn’t his actual shoulders this time, but the base of his wings. Huh. Dean rubbed his cheek against the spot, a silent “I’ve got you,” and eased his own hips back a touch, keeping the promise of tightness in his own jeans from pressing just where it was tempted to. Because, no. Not just yet.
He drew his hand down from where the wing emerged from Gabriel’s shoulder to the first joint, from which the wing began to curve back up towards the peak. Gabriel flexed slightly under his hand, bone shifting through bone and muscles tugging it in a way that suddenly made sense of the whole foreign appendage.
“Huh. That’s an elbow.”
“Nothing gets by you, does it?”
“Bite me, Peter Pan.”
He kept one hand there, spread out over the joint with splayed fingers pressing in just enough to feel the soft thud of blood in the skin underneath, and drew the other further along the wing, making sure to ruffle Gabriel’s feathers as he went. Slower, this time: this was the most powerful part of the wing, the leading edge, and it was a little difficult to make out the path of the bone under hard muscles muffled over with feathers. And yes, this was built like a human forearm. Two parts to the bone, though each of them was as thick as Dean’s shin and a good four feet long. And there, right at the arch of the wing, the powerful wrist that drove more than half that bulk, and the long, slender backward-curving fingers that guided the muscle. All folded and bunched up, too thick underneath with overlapping feathers for him to get through to the skin.
Holding the elbow in his right hand, Dean tugged gently downwards until it lay snug against Gabriel’s hip and the tips of the secondaries brushed the seat of the picnic table. Gabriel made a faintly bemused noise and went with it, pliant under his hands. Dean ran a thumb over the back of the finger bones, then again more firmly, urging them out.
“Open up, Gabriel,” he murmured, hot and quiet and demanding into soft feathers.
Gabriel made a little sound, deep as if it had been tugged out of his chest, and opened under Dean’s hand. Giving him as much as he could want.
The light rippled over Dean’s fingers as if he was looking at them through the water, streaks and specks of amber dancing and wheeling over his skin and his clothes and the ground, as the longer feathers slid out from each other like a fan. Dean’s breath tripped and staggered in his throat for a moment, and without quite meaning to he shoved his hand forward and up, sinking to the wrist in warm living gold.
He imagined doing this to Castiel, feeling his angel come apart, growling and just taking until he shuddered into loose, shaky moans, silky dark feathers sliding between Dean’s fingers.
He heard his own voice come out rough and deep, not nearly so teasing as he’d meant. “Best action figure ever.”
No quip resulted. Apparently Dean had Gabriel distracted. That sure counted as a win in his book.
Skin and flesh and tender nerves underneath, muscles stretched into different shapes for different purposes, but they weren’t that foreign after all. He could read them.
Dean crooked his fingers and pressed them in deep, brushing his tips against the flesh underneath between the feather tracks, thick and plush with down. Huh. Wasn’t down suppoed to be for warmth? Bit of a waste on an angel, you’d think. He pressed his fingertips into it a little deeper, just a hint of pressure, so that the down dragged cosy and insubstantial up to his first knuckle.
Gabriel murmured something that didn’t seem to have any words in it, low and throaty, and his hands slipped forward a few inches before he tightened his grip on the edges of the table.
Dean stilled, and slid his other hand up the shoulder of the wing to curl large and warm around the back of his neck. “Bad?”
Gabriel growled softly. There was a dry rustle, and the long overlapping feathers at the wingtip began to refold as his wing bent and tilted, sinews pulling and contracting under Dean’s hand in a way that absolutely should not be so hot as it was. The stronger feathers on top crowded up velvet-firm around his wrist so that he’d have to wriggle a bit to get it out, which his dick was suddenly telling him was all kinds of interesting, and the whole wing pushed ever so slightly back into his touch.
… Okay. Not bad, then.
“Neat,” Dean breathed, and felt breathy amusement rumble all the way up through bone and muscle and quiver its way through the feathers. He let his thumb stray downwards a little, nudging aside the down, until he found the next line of feathers sprouting from the skin. These ones were only about as long as his hand, and even at their bases the shafts were only stiff, not hard. There to make the air curve back over the leading edge into a nice smooth jetstream, not intended to take the weight of an angel against the wing, or to do the dextrous work of steering. Coverts, some random trivia part of his brain provided. The pad of his thumb rubbed back and forth across the little row of bumps from which they sprouted, all neat and regimental, his callouses catching a little on the fluff at their base.
Gabriel sighed, soft and breathy, and the tiny shell-shaped feathers quivered under Dean’s touch. “Mother of hell, Dean, your hands.”
“Hmm?” Dean left that hand where it was, leaned sideways and smirked against Gabriel’s shoulder, where just one last feather curled over hot skin. The movement of his mouth puffed it out of place. “Sammy not making it good for you, babe?”
“Sammy’s awesome, you smug little dick.” It was a rumbling growl under his mouth, Gabriel’s bed-voice. His hips nudged backwards towards Dean’s thigh. “You’ve got - oh - you’ve got mechanic’s hands.”
“Hard and oily?”
“Know how everything works. You…” Gabriel’s head dropped forward between his shoulders, which were loose and yielding under Dean’s cheek. “I get why the Impala purrs for you.”
“You are so very weird.” Dean opened his mouth around a feather experimentally. That actually did feel kind of strange, having something dry and fluffy in his mouth, tickling at his tongue and the inside of his cheek. He mouthed at it until it went slick and compliant, then teased with his tongue at the base, drawing provocative little circles on hot skin.
“Dean?” Gabriel’s voice was a harsh, sweet vibration that shivered right through Dean’s belly. He sounded as if his patience was dangling by a very frayed thread over something delicate and packed with explosives. “You are so very… overdressed.”
Dean considered, for a sadistic little moment, drawing it out for longer. Like Sam would, if he were doing this. Keeping him here all day, stretched out and pliant and quivering. Getting to know just how to work every new inch of flesh on twenty feet of wing, front and back. But then again, from Gabriel’s point of view, he’d been doing that for a while already. And the low thrum of warning in Gabriel’s voice said he really wasn’t in the mood right now to rein himself in.
Dean leaned forward to breathe hot into Gabriel’s ear, to feel the shiver of skin and feathers almost touching his chest all the way up. “Yeah?” He slid his hand over the denim-coarse jut of Gabriel’s hip, then down and back to curl around the back of his thigh, his little finger pressing in just high enough to promise. “I’m not the only one.”
So it really wasn’t a surprise to find his hand was suddenly pressed into bare skin instead, to feel the sharp mountain breeze whispering over his back and arse and the sensitive skin inside his thighs, or the grass tickling the hair on his calves. Dean nestled forward without thinking into the warmth under him, blanketing Gabriel’s body with his own. He grinned against Gabriel’s ear, then kissed it, soft.
“What do you need?”
Gabriel’s thighs shifted restlessly, edging further open, pressing back into Dean’s heat, his breath coming short and shallow as Dean’s little finger brushed one gentle stroke up over the fragile skin of his balls. “Nothing. Good to go. Stop being such a. Bloody gentleman.”
Dean hummed deep and rough and obliged, curling his hands large and hard around Gabriel’s hips and pushing in against where he was ready and slick and welcoming.
“Handy, that.”
Gabriel shivered loose under his cheek, all heat and dry silk. Dean held still for a moment, teetering on the edge, dragging forest-rich air into sluggish lungs.
Then he was inside, one long demanding shove, dragging over his nerves like crushed velvet. Gabriel shuddered around him, under him, his knuckles clenched white around the edges of the table top. Little crumbs of concrete broke and scattered away into dust under his fingers. Dean’s hips jolted forward without his say-so, once then again, before he could still them to wait. Not that he really needed time to adjust, not Gabriel. Not like this.
Dean looked down at his back, one long taut curve of trust and demand. He let his fingernails drag slowly up over Gabriel’s ribs, teasing through the pearlescent fluff that nestled between his shoulder blades, slipping up the nape of his bowed neck to shove into his hair and make a slow mess of that.
Gabriel jerked back against him, hot and greedy, and Dean gave up on self-restraint.
It was harsh and fast and deliciously unforgiving, almost overwhelming in the press and pull and tug and shove of it all. Gabriel’s back was rocking smooth and firm under his hand, so responsive, so hungry, as if he ached for every touch, throbbed with it, twitching and shivering with every thrust and every breath on his spine. Demanding every bit of him, all his motion and weight and strength and more. Every stroke was pounding Gabriel forward into the table, and if it had been anyone else Dean would have been worried about seriously bruising their thighs on the edge of it. But this was Gabriel, and no matter how much they threw at them, Gabriel and Castiel took it, demanded it, no matter how far they went beyond human, how dark things got, they never flinched, never looked away. Always shoved right back, pulled them back out, were pulled out in their turn, and never broke.
Dean gave himself over to the furious thump-thump-thump of arousal almost painful in his own gut, demanding, moving with him, a heavy shove-slide of lust and glory and overheated flesh. He heard Gabriel’s breath catch, a moment of frustration, felt him shift under and against him, squirming for something. Dean slipped one knee forward between his thighs and manhandled the left one up and out, opening him up more and turning his own thrusts deeper and sharper. Gabriel’s writhings slid away into shocked noise, pushed out of him in little shivers of pleasure and surprise.
Dean grinned wet and open into the base of Gabriel’s wing. He bit it, setting his teeth there messy and harsh where the muscle rose strong and straining out of the line of Gabriel’s back. Feathers scattered under the hot puff of his breath.
Then Gabriel was moving, shoving him back and off and around, a flurry of feathers and a flash of grinning teeth and all greedy determined hands. Dean hit the ground for the second time that afternoon, only this time with cool moss under his skin and grass tickling a little too intimately in certain places thanks very much and the hot weight of an archangel pressing him down into the earth, pressing down on top of him and taking him back inside with a deep, juddering sigh of satisfaction.
Dean rubbed his hand over his face, leaving a smear of damp earth behind, and groaned with him, ragged and long, until he was seated snug. “Dude. You could have just said.”
Gabriel grinned down at him, sharp and breathless, then leaned down just long enough to swipe his tongue over the trail left by Dean’s hand. “Hey look, a mud monkey.”
Dean rocked up sharply into Gabriel’s body, and his cheeky smirk dissolved into glazed eyes and sharp little breaths. He pushed back, digging his hands into Dean’s shoulders and clamping Dean’s hips between his thighs and shoving down. Once, twice, then into his own rhythm. It was slower this time, deep and shudderingly hard and so very, very strong. Dean just let him, let him be greedy and beautiful, and arched up into it as much as he could, digging his fingers into the earth by Gabriel’s feet and holding on.
He could feel the sharp catch of Gabriel’s breathing as he sucked in air with his head dropped forward and his eyes squeezed tight, feel the deep pounding of his blood and see the little flutter of it in his throat, could see them at the same time in the stretch and quiver and flex of the feathers that drew a gauzy, powerful curtain between Dean and the sky.
Sunlight curled like pale fire around the solid living arch of the right wing’s peak and Dean lifted one hand and reached out to touch, to trail just his fingertips along the tiny overlapping feathers there and see how far they’d stir.
His wrist was grabbed and slammed hard into the ground behind his own head, a sharp little stutter of pain that had him bucking up into Gabriel even as the angel plastered himself over Dean’s chest and pinned him down. He rested his forehead against Dean’s, chest heaving, and breathed raggedly into Dean’s mouth, “Do that and I’m gone.”
Dean gulped down his own breath and Gabriel’s and nodded, just slightly, slid his other arm around Gabriel’s waist and held him close. It always seemed like it should be strange to feel an angel’s heart beating so frantically inside their borrowed bodies, thudding through flesh and blood and dick and throat; but Gabriel, Gabriel inhabited humanity with such vibrant entirety that even like this, with feathers quivering against Dean’s upper arm, it was impossible to think of him as something separate from it.
Which wasn’t to say that Dean didn’t fucking love driving him to this point. Making him forget he was alien.
He rolled his hips just once, slow and gentle, and spread his free hand warm and possessive over Gabriel’s lower back. The angel murmured appreciatively against the corner of his mouth, deep and wordless like a purr. Dean nudged his head sideways just a fraction, enough to slide his mouth graceless and open under the damp hot press of Gabriel’s, and pushed into his tongue. The muscles of Gabriel’s abdomen tensed against him, deepening the warning thump of heat in Dean’s own stomach.
They could keep doing this for hours. Or they could both be over the edge and shuddering into nothingness within the next minute.
Dean crooked his fingers, ever so slightly, pressing just the faintest promise of nails into the base of Gabriel’s spine and the top of his arse. They both went very still for a moment.
And then Gabriel was wriggling free, flicking aside Dean’s hands when he made a protesting sort of a gasp and tried to pull him back, leaving his lap cold and empty as the archangel flopped over backward onto his elbows and slithered out of reach. He grinned at Dean, bright and breathless and blatant, down over his own chest with his legs still sprawled wide and open and his hair a freaking mess, his whole body spread out in easy curves of desire and sweat and framed by impossible, delicious wings arching behind and beneath him. They weren’t stretched wide, but half folded and curled loosely forward toward Dean at the edges, so that Gabriel looked like he was reclining in some huge soft clam shell or something, just waiting for Dean to join him. To burrow back into that warm, familiar body, to cover it with his mouth and hands and pin it down with his weight, to be wrapped and engulfed in slick heat and the luxurious, otherworldly strength of wings.
Dean realised he was gawking lustfully when Gabriel’s grin turned smug and he arched his back, tilting his hips shamelessly to make a teasing display of exactly where Dean had just been buried, all open and glistening. One wing stretched a little, feathers unfolding lazily towards him, not quite close enough to touch.
Dean growled and lunged. He grabbed the nearest wing, fingers pressing in hard near the tip, using it to pull himself forward and Gabriel into him or off-balance as the angel swore sudden and startled through laughter and tried to tug away. Dean over-balanced instead, then it was a mess of flailing limbs and possessive hands and snorted laughter and buffets from wings and no one staying pinned for long. Gabriel’s body with a pair of powerful wings behind it moved differently from anything Dean was used to wrestling and it kept throwing him, literally and figuratively, and as soon as he started to compensate for them Gabriel would ignore physics and let them sink right through the ground like water, but he could make Gabriel gasp and shiver and go limp with just one little touch in the right feathers, so hey, not complaining. He got his knee between Gabriel’s thighs and one leg pinned, dragging his knuckles down Gabriel’s back, while Gabriel nuzzled fond and amused into his throat. Then Gabriel opened his mouth there hot and dirty, bright with the hint of teeth, while he tensed one wing against the ground and shoved, and over they went again, with Dean not even bothering about whether his squeak of protest was manly or not. Gabriel was a solid, familiar weight on his hips, his grin manic and mud-splattered above Dean and the sun breaking into fractured curves through the feathers and hot damn, he was gorgeous.
Also, he was a freaking tease. Dean grabbed at him as he stood up and backed away, but all he got was a bare foot on his chest pushing him back down. Dean glowered at him. Gabriel wriggled his toes against Dean’s chest and smirked, so Dean grabbed the foot and bit into the arch. Gabriel yelped and dug it into his ribs, and Dean tried to pull him off balance. Gabriel hopped and spluttered, and whoever said angels had dignity?
“Stop that, you greedy boar. I want to show you something.”
Dean eyed the extended hand and the wicked sweet curve of Gabriel’s mouth with deep, deep suspicion.
The angel’s eyes opened wider, dancing with lust and amusement and really completely failing to look innocent. “No, trust me.”
---
It ended (at least for that day) like this:
“The Mile High club? With Gabriel?”
“Now who’s jealous, Sammy?”
“Dean, you’re scared of flying.”
“… I was distracted?”
“Hey guys! Dean, Dean, did we get the pout of epic disapproval this time?”
“… Gabriel, get out of there. You are not one of Santa’s elves.”
“Yup. His forehead did the crinkly thing.”
“Aw, precious.”
“I hate you guys.”
“Hey. Hey, Sammy. Want to come for a fly? Pinkie-swear it’ll be worth your while.”
“Gabriel! We’re in the middle of a case! Possessed reindeer, remember?”
“Awesome, you got him to do the face again.”
“… Okay, that’s it. Cas and I are taking you two down.”
“Bring it, honeybuns.”
“Look out! Evil Santa!”