In His Image: Quickening
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In which Dean foists himself on Gabriel, while Sam, Castiel, and Bobby hit the books.
Dean, Sam, Castiel, Gabriel, Bobby.
Warning: This chapter contains some large images (SFW).
quicken [v]: to speed up; to come to life; to animate or give life to; to recover or revive; to stimulate or inspire; to grow bright; to make more potent.
Gabriel looked weak. Which just seemed wrong on some really basic level. He was skinny, with a patchy shaving job and a few small nicks under his right ear. And he wasn’t even smiling. In fact, he was staring at Dean like… well, like anyone who wasn’t one of them would look if they’d seen a ghost.
He also looked like he wasn’t sleeping well, but hey, who was these days.
Dean greeted him with, “You look like shit,” and limped past him into the motel room.
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed from startled to combative, and there, that was more familiar.
“Says the guy with his head punched in.”
Dean shrugged, and tossed the brightly coloured little bag to Gabriel. “These were in the glove box,” he offered, with absolute technical truth.
Gabriel unfroze, made a rabid sort of a noise, and dove for the Skittles with both hands. “You are so my favourite.”
Entrance successfully negotiated, Dean grunted and appropriated the couch, because this weird little yellow Beetle Bobby had leant him released the clutch far too low and was heavy on his sore ankle. “Sammy’ll get a complex.”
Gabriel’s eyes stayed hidden behind his eyelashes as he ripped into the bag that Dean had definitely not bought on purpose when he’d stopped to fill up the tank, but his voice was all breezy. “Yeah, well, he doesn’t bring me candy.”
Dean dragged the other two bags out of his duffle and dropped his burden on the little bar fridge beside the couch. Takeout, and beer. Well, it was only fair. There was no reason for Gabriel to look at him with that funny little half-curve at the corner of his mouth like it was some kind of trick.
“Those were in the glove box too?”
Dean shrugged, a bit uncomfortable, and started on his own burger. “Yeah, well, you’re paying for the couch I’m going to crash on tonight, so.”
Something eased up in Gabriel’s eyes, into an almost-smirk. “Oh, so you’re not here to go all disgraced prodigal on my ass and drag me back to Singer?”
“Screw that, we’re all in this together. And broken angels are really shitty at looking after themselves. Besides.” Dean pointed at him and spoke with his mouth full. “You, my friend, need to learn to drive.”
There. He might have known the son of a bitch wouldn’t back down from a challenge.
---
Gabriel really had brought back a hell of a lot of books. Which begged the question of just how this whole time-travel luggage business worked. How much carry-on were you allowed to take?
Not all of them were, well, useful. Some were just interesting. One seemed to be one man’s (or woman’s) collection of poetry that he liked, romances and epics and Arthurian stories and political satires, all written out in the same hand over what looked like years without theme or organisation. There were even some personal letters copied into it. Another one was a very long Arthurian romance that Sam was pretty sure didn’t exist anywhere anymore. A third was a long, beautifully written meditation on the growth of the soul, which Sam was tempted by but reluctantly set aside for later when he realised it had nothing to do with actual souls, just people learning to be people. One book was only a series of dry annals, but the parchment that had been cannibalised for the pastedowns on the insides of the covers was a pair of love letters between a monk and a nun (or maybe two monks?) who seemed to like to woo in Latin hexameters and elliptical allusions to Boethius.
Even setting those ones aside, though, there were still about fifty books of philosophy, theology, history, rumour, demonology, local folklore, personal record, letters, and who knew what else, often all in one volume, which could potentially contain something relevant to the current problem (but probably didn’t, in most cases). Gabriel seemed to have done a pretty good job in a short time of only choosing the books that were most likely to be useful, but that didn’t mean that all of them were. Or that all of them were reliable.
Sam was going to need glasses in a few years, he just knew it.
He almost wished Dean were here. Dean would bitch and ask Sam what he thought this smudged or faded word was every five minutes, and his Latin wasn’t as good as Sam’s, but he had this weird instinct for sorting out reliable sources from what he called the olden-days equivalent of the Weekly World News. Sam had a habit of getting bogged down in allegory and metaphor.
He also wished, sort of uncharitably, that Bobby would stop taking every possible excuse to go up and down the stairs. That one squeaky board was kind of getting on his nerves. It didn’t help that Castiel was just sitting there looking kind of mute and frustrated, even without lifting his eyes from his dogged perusal of two books at once.
Sam knew that, given a few hours, or maybe a day, he’d be right into this. He was good at it, and he did enjoy it, and hell, it was a whole lot better than just about anything else useful he could be doing at the end of the world. But his body was still fizzling with adrenalin and the expectation of attack; his eyes kept flicking over Castiel’s and Bobby’s faces looking for the tics and crazed spark of aggression that would signal the virus about to take over; his feelings were keyed up for rage and guilt.
And he had hoped - selfishly, stupidly - that Gabriel would be here.
But hey, if there was one thing Gabriel was good at it was running away. Why should Sam have expected anything different, just because he’d thought - anything at all?
Around eleven, Bobby plonked his laptop down in front of them and pointed to the screen without saying a word. It was a map covered with flags, each one marking one of the towns that fit the patterns of the demonic sieges they’d seen in Blue Earth and Repton and other places like it.
There were five new ones. The nearest was northern Nebraska.
Sam texted Dean to put him on the job. Castiel lifted an eyebrow at him. Sam huffed, and sent another text to tell Dean to try to drag Gabriel along.
He got back:
dean: on it
dean: g says he liks me best bcos gve him chocolate
SW: you know you can rot his teeth with that now?
dean: good plan
dean: also it hink hes cheating at poker
G: whatever d just said is a filthy lie
Sam thought of replying, but couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound snappish. And that was his problem, not Dean’s, not Gabriel’s.
---
“Bobby’s legs.”
Dean dealt.
Gabriel, following the flicker of Dean’s fingers from card to card with deceptively lazy eyes, made a vague humming noise.
When it became obvious he wasn’t about to volunteer anything, Dean prodded some more. “He says you didn’t really know how you’d done it.”
Gabriel smiled, too bright and evasive. His eyes still caught just a bit too much of the light to be human, caught it and held it and turned it into something deep and hidden and almost gold. “Cagey aren’t they, men of that generation? Disgraceful, I call it. Somebody should write a letter.”
“Fine, if that’s how you want it -” Dean stole half of Gabriel’s cards back before he could look at them.
“Hey! There were three aces in there!”
Dean smirked and pointed at him. “Cheat.”
Gabriel made a disgusted noise. “Oh, just because your memory’s defective.”
“I shuffled those.”
“And I watched.” Dean gave him an I Call Bullshit look, and Gabriel spread his hands and grinned, all bright wounded innocence. “What? Quick eye.”
“So I’m not an archangel. Suck it.”
“Oh, fine. Here.” Gabriel dropped his hand in the middle of the table, palm up, and waggled his eyebrows invitingly. Which was obviously some kind of trick, and no way was Dean putting his hand in Gabriel’s because that wasn’t going to end well.
… Okay, so maybe Dean was a sucker for a challenge too.
Gabriel’s fingers were soft and sort of cool, like he had a desk job and really poor circulation, and they looped just shy of firm around Dean’s wrist. Dean was just gearing up for a witty and epic quip about hand-holding when something sort of… quivered in his ankle. And in the back of his head. And then all down the bruises that spread dramatically along his thighs and knees, where he’d taken some of the car’s weight. It vibrated under his skin, then there was a hot thump of pain, like something was trying to wrench things back into shape.
Dean flinched, but didn’t let go, because that would be admitting defeat. He held on, as things sort of ground around weirdly inside him and Gabriel’s face went a bit pale and sweaty. Then his hand was free, and Gabriel slumped back panting into his chair and quirked an eyebrow at him. Dean moved cautiously, flexed his ankle, prodded at his thigh, rubbed at his head. The weird clouded feeling of mild concussion had vanished like the weakness in his ankle, and the angry tenderness of the bruising was gone, but there was a fading shakiness under his skin like his body was startled by the sudden changes.
“So, you tell me,” Gabriel drawled.
Dean shook out his leg gingerly. “That… didn’t feel like an angel healing.”
“Y’think, hot shot?”
Dean shrugged and re-shuffled, under the table this time. Gabriel tapped his fingers on the table, irregular and peevish, all restless energy and hair that wouldn’t stop falling forward into his face.
Four hands later, Gabriel said, without looking up, “Look, all I know is… things are coming back. Not all of them. And not exactly coming back, because they don’t feel like they did before. Exhausting as all hell, for one thing. Like they’re actually using me for power, and not… well… my grace.”
“I thought your grace was a part of you.”
Gabriel shrugged, and grimaced at his cards. “Yeah, well, go figure.”
---
Sam wandered into the kitchen at half past seven, smearing the few hours’ sleep out of his eyes with one hand. Bobby was sitting at the table, spearing something unidentifiable with a fork and flicking through his various feeds and bulletins on Sam’s laptop. Something on the stove smelt vaguely like frying, and Castiel was standing over it with rumpled hair, a spoon, and a thoughtful frown.
“Hey, guys.”
“Good morning, Sam.”
Bobby grunted.
Domestic. Kind of surreal, kind of soothing. Sam played along, though he felt like he was the unreal thing in this room, hitched his hip up on the counter next to the stove and peered into Castiel’s pan. “What happened to those eggs?”
Castiel eyed them dolefully. “I think the potatoes disagree with them.”
“Huh. Maybe the potatoes should be in another pan?”
Castiel shot a dark glance at the sink. It was sort of… full. Which was apparently what happened when everyone in the house was too busy reading to wash up the night before. Or after Bobby got up to get some bacon at half eleven. Or after Sam’s craving for re-heated casserole at two. Or the soup he’d put on for Castiel half an hour later. So much for Bobby’s tiny cache of cookware.
“… Yeah, point.”
He leaned dangerously over Castiel to grab the coffee pot. “So is this what happens in this kitchen now? You sit around and let angels cook for you?”
Bobby shoved another forkful of weird potato and egg and tomato and leeks into his mouth without looking up. “Hey, my time of life, I’ve earned it.”
Which, of course, didn’t answer the most important question. “Cas.” Sam gestured vaguely at the angel’s chest with his coffee mug. “Why are you wearing an apron?”
Castiel looked down at himself, as if he’d forgotten it was there, and patted it. “I believe it’s customary, to protect one’s clothes from spitting oil.”
“Uh-huh.” Sam smirked around the rim of his mug. “And why does Bobby have an orange frilly apron with ‘Kiss the c-’”
“You’re not too old for a walloping, boy.”
“I didn’t ask,” Castiel murmured, far too blandly. Sam snorted, and Castiel shot him one of his sly little half-smiles that pretended to be anything but.
Sam hitched down the last two clean plates from Bobby’s secret clean plate stash in the top shelf. The servings were a bit small, but Sam didn’t mention it. It wasn’t that long since they’d eaten; and besides, quantities took a while for any cook to learn to judge, even those who did know at a glance how much of every food their stomach could take at a sitting. And it wasn’t actually that bad.
“So.” Sam shoved his last half-page of notes, the one he’d dozed off in the middle of, into the middle of the table. “What d’you guys think about this? ‘Et pestilentiam aggredit et superauit, quiescens in manum benedictum arcangeli’ - some guy walked up to Pestilence and survived?”
Castiel reached out one long finger to slide the paper towards himself, and Bobby grumbled dubiously without looking up from Sam’s computer. “Sounds like a metaphor to me.”
“Yeah, but they write customs accounts like metaphors. And there was a figure of Pestilence in the margin, so I think they mean actual Pestilence, not just the plague in general.”
Castiel made a thoughtful little noise in his throat, and swallowed his mouthful. “Was there an illustration of the archangel? Or any other reference to it?”
“Nothing. But that’s the third reference we’ve found to the hand of an archangel being linked to Pestilence.”
“Could just be ‘and he fought the plague and triumphed and now rests in the hand of the archangel’. Triumph over death by heading upstairs.” Bobby shrugged. “Ya whole family dies, you gotta get your comfort where you can.”
Sam’s shoulders slumped a little. “But ‘aggredit’ means ‘approached’, not ‘fought’.”
A piece of egg on Castiel’s plate wobbled, and the angel gave it a doubtful look. “It is usually used of armies. For an army, to approach is to oppose. But Sam is right - it is an odd word to use here if the writer did not intend overtones of movement and confrontation.”
“Okay. Chalk it up in the ‘maybe’ column?”
“Might be more use if it had more details. Or if we had an actual archangel about,” Bobby pointed out dryly.
“Yeah, I’ve got some ideas about that.” Sam shoved his chair back and dumped his plate by the sink. “I’m going for a run before I turn into a pile of mush.”
---
Dean was big enough to admit that Gabriel could actually be kind of handy. In a really annoying way.
“What’s with the body art?”
Gabriel kept on drawing weird Enochian things all over his own stomach in purple marker. “Not really in the mood for being a demon’s shuttlecock today.”
“Wait, wait.” Dean glanced at the road to make sure it was still doing its thing, which it was, then stared at the design that was taking shape under Gabriel’s quick strokes. “You know a mark that stops them from doing all that pick-me-up-and-fling-me-around shit?”
“You don’t?” Incredulity flickered all over Gabriel’s face, and his shirt slipped down from where his chin had pinned it as he lifted his head and pointed at Dean accusingly with the purple nib. “You mean you guys just waltz right in there and get beaten up and asphyxiated and shoved through walls voluntarily? Until Lady Luck herself just chooses to grimace at you for being wacky little heroes and sticks her finger in the pie?”
Well, when you put it like that… “Yeah, pretty much.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes dramatically heavenward for patience, which was probably ironic, and made some kind of elaborate see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with gesture with both hands that almost knocked Dean’s right arm away from the steering wheel. “The world’s saviours, ladies and gentlemen. Pull over.”
“What? Now? Why?”
“Well, unless you want to wait for the next gas station for me to rip your shirt off and doodle all over you with purple marker. Truckies might raise eyebrows, is all I’m saying.”
---
“Hey, moose.”
Gabriel’s voice was just light and airy enough not to be really light and airy. Sam went for professional.
“Gabriel, hey. Speakerphone me?”
There was a beep, then the background hum of the engine, and the sound of Dean’s music being turned down.
“Live from the tiny yellow rustbucket, baby. What’s up?”
Sam shuffled his notes on the table in front of him. “Okay, so. We’ve got four references in here to the hand of an archangel as the key to protect someone from Pestilence, three to nettle and may warding him off (though I think two of them were copying from the same source), and eight to some kind of posset held in front of the nose to keep his influence from entering the body. Ring any bells to you two?”
Gabriel made a noncommittal noise, almost lost under the background noise. “Everyone used to hold smelly herb bags in front of their nose to keep off infection. Figured it was the smell that did it, and if you couldn’t smell it it couldn’t get you.”
“Doesn’t mean someone couldn’t have stumbled on the right combination.”
“Don’t mean it ain’t wishful thinking, kid,” Gabriel countered.
“Hang on,” Dean put in. “Doesn’t nettle keep out shtrigas?”
Sam jotted it down - he’d forgotten that, but Dean had a special grudge on for shtrigas. “So you think someone’s just confusing it for the other, or that it works on both of them, like silver works on anything in the shifter family?”
“Nah, too simple for Pestilence. It’d have to be blessed or stirred in some weird wooden bowl from a Buddhist nunnery or something.”
“Never heard of it,” Gabriel drawled like this was all far too boring for him and he’d rather be discussing monocycles or something, “but I always steered clear of him when he was about before. Plus, all I had to do was waltz in somewhere and put the whammy on the town water supply to tidy up his mess, so, you know, not a lot of reason to go scrounging about for a hard way to do things.”
“Hand of an archangel?” Sam met Castiel’s eyes across the table. “You mean that could work?”
“Curing a few families of something that’s already in their bodies ain’t the same as shielding them from his direct presence. Not to say that I couldn’t’ve if I’d tried, but if there’s anything in those books that actually happened I’m gonna lay money that it don’t involve any of the God squad coming down to personally escort intrepid little conquerors in and out of Pestilence’s front door.”
Or you, Sam didn’t say. Because he’d already known that Gabriel hadn’t exactly been humanity’s champion all his life, and he already knew there were things he wasn’t proud of. No point raking it over.
“Except maybe Sariel,” he pointed out instead.
Gabriel hummed vaguely, and there was a rustle of plastic. “Could be.”
“Who’s Sariel?” Dean interjected.
“Azrael.”
“Okay, why the two names?”
“Because she’s got two aspects,” Sam replied, with the promptness of one who has done his research. “She’s the one responsible for death, for bringing it and for keeping it under control, and she’s meant to make sure every soul goes to the right place after they die. So, positive and negative aspects. Sariel’s meant to be the name for the benevolent one. That right, Gabriel?”
“It’ll do.”
Dean made a rude noise. “Because the angels without split personalities aren’t insane enough.”
“Screw you, Winchester, that’s my sister,” Gabriel snapped immediately, though with less heat than Sam would have expected.
“No paying out sisters, check.”
“Can it, guys. Gabriel, tell me about Sariel?”
Gabriel was quiet for a minute, although that could have had more to do with the candy noises crunching in the background than thoughtfulness or anything like that. “Slow temper, but pretty damn scary once she got there. Always a few steps ahead of everyone. Cute laugh, kind of private, got a real hard-on for keeping to the natural order of things. And, yeah, disappeared September 1666, in London. So did Pestilence. Outbreaks of plague after that were all just scattered pockets of infection, nothing pushing them.”
“So you think she just - what, had enough?” Dean sounded deeply sceptical. “Decided Pestilence had had his fun and it was time to pack him off home?”
Gabriel scoffed. “Have you seen the mortality stats for the fourteenth century? First two waves of plague killed off half the population - more than, in some places. Don’t know what raised Pestilence in the first place back then, but he sure weren’t meant to be there. Been hearing murmurs lately - well, lately for me, five or six hundred years ago for you - that she was keeping tabs on him from the start. Took four centuries for Europe to get her figures back up to what they were in 1300, so yeah, that’s probably enough to piss Sariel off.”
Waiting for God to step in and fix it, Sam thought. Even for someone immortal and removed, if they cared at all, that had to be a pretty long wait.
“And you think they went down together?”
“Wasn’t there.” Gabriel’s voice dropped, went a little reluctant. “But taking down a Horseman isn’t easy, even for an archangel, ’specially not when he’s all hopped up on choking souls and got his little army of monster followers trailing around after him. And there were rumours that some of that little London bonfire was more than just ordinary flame.”
Sam met Castiel’s eyes across the table. They were wide and dark with shock.
“Holy fire.”
“That’d do it,” Gabriel confirmed grimly.
“Hard luck,” Sam offered uselessly, to both of them. Even if you’d already known you’d lost someone, that had to be a shitty way to hear they’d gone down. Castiel blinked and nodded, then dropped his gaze.
“You didn’t go looking for her?” Dean demanded. “She was your sister, dude.”
Gabriel’s voice was a low growl. “I looked. And I know a thing or two about hiding, Winchester. Pretty damn sure she ain’t on earth anymore.”
Which… didn’t leave many options, really. Sariel was probably a scratch-at-the-post, then.
“Okay. So, Chamael and Yrihel then. What happened to them?”
Gabriel bit down on something with an obnoxiously loud pop. “Not a clue. Heard they left early last century, that’s it.”
“1917.” Castiel spoke up for the first time, his voice a low growl. “They left Heaven for the world in 1917, because they couldn’t bear to watch any longer and do nothing.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. It hadn’t even occurred to Sam to ask Castiel - but of course, he had been there at the time, and Gabriel had been kind of out of the celestial loop.
Dean cleared his throat. “Huh. Whaddaya know. Angels with a conscience.”
“Shut up Dean,” Sam responded automatically.
“We were forbidden to intervene,” Castiel said, without inflection. “We had been forbidden for centuries. Humanity was not righting itself. It seemed, if anything, to be getting worse.”
“Hey.” Dean’s voice took on that strange little gentle edge it had just for Castiel lately. “Not your fault, dude. We’re pretty good at screwing the pooch all by ourselves even without some heavenly grudge match going on down here. Not like you could have turned it all around even if you had been allowed to leave the ivory tower.”
“Okay, so. Out of the seven, sounds like these are our go-to guys? I mean, if they actually already stepped up against Michael for humanity once?”
“Not gonna do much good if they’re Fallen, is it?” Dean pointed out unhelpfully.
“It’s a start, Dean. If we could luck out on finding their grace… did they actually Fall, Cas, or just leave?”
“Chamael Fell, but if Yrihel did so she did it with some delicacy - enough that we didn’t see it. Which means that one or both of them may have kept their own memories, or some of their powers.”
“Okay. That’s something.” Sam chewed on his lip and scribbled down their names, the year, and a big FALLEN?.
“Don’t suppose either of you two featherheads heard anything about them after? No idea where they touched down, or where they’ve been since?” There was an odd emphasis in Dean’s voice, like he was trying to prod Castiel or Gabriel into something.
“Belgium, initially, or thereabouts. After that… I’m afraid not.” Castiel sounded genuinely regretful, like it was his personal responsibility to keep tabs on runaway archangels who had hidden themselves from Heaven.
“Belgium makes sense, for 1917.” Sam jotted that down too.
“Gabriel?” Yes, that was definitely Dean’s pointed tone.
There was a pause, then, “Didn’t hear anything.” Gabriel’s voice was a little more stilted than it had been before, less casually rude. “Didn’t even know they were gone until the fifties.”
Sam got the impression that there was a whole other conversation flying over his head.
What?, he mouthed at Castiel. Castiel shook his head, his mouth a thin uncomfortable line.
Sam cocked an eyebrow at him. “Okay then. I’ll try that ritual I used to find Cas, see if I can feel either of them out at all. And I’ll try Sariel. Worth a shot, at least.”
“If you give me some time, I will try to adapt the ritual so that it doesn’t depend on the existence of an angel’s grace.”
Sam blinked at Castiel. “You can do that?”
“Probably.” There was no boast or hopefulness in it, just a calm statement of fact.
“Huh.” Sam took a breath, then ventured, “Gabriel - if it comes to talking them into it, can I use your name? If I can say you’re onside with this, it’s gotta help, right?”
There was a pause, then Gabriel admitted quietly, “Don’t know if it’ll do you any good, Sam. But sure - spin it how you like.”
Sam swallowed, and nodded. “Thanks.”
“Hey. Castiel?”
Castiel’s head came up like it was attached to a string, and he eyed the cell as if he wasn’t sure whether the rumours about them giving you cancer were true. “Gabriel.”
“Wattle root.” Gabriel’s voice stumbled for a moment, then went on, all light and chirpy, “Used it for locating spells to check if there were any angels about a few times. Doesn’t go for their grace - it latches onto the size and age of a thing’s memories, and an angel’s gonna be a bigger fish than almost anything else there.”
Castiel’s head tipped very slowly to one side, and he looked a little lost. “Thank you. I will… bear that in mind.”
---
Dean pressed the red button to end the call, and stole Gabriel’s phone. Because they were going to have this out now, before anything went wrong.
“What’s up with you and Cas?”
Gabriel’s eyes slid away into something unfathomable. “We’re planning to host a talk show together. With robots. And a hippopotamus in pink.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” Dean growled. “You run away when Sam tells you he’s with us, you send him weird messages by proxy, you freeze over like some kind of startled popsicle when he pipes up on the line? You got something against rebel angels?”
Gabriel folded up the empty candy bag, threw it into the glove box with a petulant flick, and growled right back. “Don’t be more of an idiot than you can help, Winchester.”
“Okay then.” Dean eased off, just a little. “Just let me know whether I’m going to have to do some kind of intervention here, or what.”
Gabriel looked irritated, then impatient, then kind of embarrassed. “He - stood up to Heaven, okay? He turned around and told them they were wrong. And he didn’t stick around to bitch about it, he just… went and did what he had to, no matter what sucky crap came along with it. Plus, have you seen how sneaky that kid is?” Gabriel’s hands made some massive complicated gesture that might have been meant to indicate intense sneakiness, possibly by demonstrating its opposite. “I mean, forget losing his grace, even if I still had mine I wouldn’t want to cross him. How many people do you think could just screw around with a ritual like that and make it do what they want? He gets creative.”
… If Dean didn’t know better, he’d have said Gabriel had a crush.
Gabriel took advantage of Dean going all soft on him to steal his phone back off Dean’s thigh and go back to his game of sudoku or porn or whatever he’d been doing on there before Sam rang. Once his eyes were safely glued to the screen, he muttered, “Just not used to having… brothers who are worth the effort.”
Dean let out a breath, and turned the music back on. “Yeah, I hear you.”
He let it sit there until they pulled up in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping strip, on the outskirts of their target town.
“Gabriel?”
The angel made a noise, vaguely interrogative, and didn’t look up.
“You’re the only brother Cas has left who isn’t actively trying to kill him. Don’t screw him over.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows climbed his forehead like caterpillars on a ladder, in a way that strongly suggested he thought that was a bit rich coming from Dean. Dean gave him a dirty look and got out of the car.
---
It was on the second night that Dean was woken by little broken-off whimpers and jerky movements. And not the fun kind, either. He was sort of programmed to respond to those noises by now, after decades of being a big brother in a nasty world, and he had stumbled off the couch and slouched down on the side of the bed before he remembered that it really, really wasn’t Sammy in the room with him: that those distressingly mortal sounds came from a throat that shouldn’t really know how to make them. And by that time, well, he wasn’t enough of a dick to just go back to sleep.
Just like Castiel, Gabriel lashed out when Dean touched his shoulder. Unlike Castiel, he checked the swing himself, mumbling frantic apologies that Dean suspected weren’t meant for him, and there was wetness where his face pressed into Dean’s wrist.
Dean was so underqualified for this.
“Hey. Hey, easy, dude.”
There was a moment of stillness, and a faint gleam from under barely cracked eyelids. Then Gabriel mumbled an eloquent little “Fuck,” and pressed a shaking hand over his eyes.
Dean just sort of squeezed his shoulder and looked away, blinking through the sleep heavy in his eyes.
“Sorry,” Gabriel muttered eventually, and it sounded so small and so wrong coming from someone who should be all wicked and arrogant and amused that Dean abruptly decided to go with the whole not-really-awake thing.
He yawned, jaw-crackingly, and slurred out, “Hey, no problem Sammy. You know how often I sleep through the night.”
He felt the pause, then the little huff of breath, but he was already pushing back the blankets and climbing into the bed to spoon up behind Gabriel, like he hadn’t done with Sam for over a year. Gabriel went very carefully still, but Dean really was sleepy, sleepy enough to just burrow his face into the nearest warm shoulder.
And hey, better than the couch.
Gabriel was the wrong shape and the wrong size in the bed, too worried, and his heart was still skipping from whatever he’d conjured up for himself in his dreams, but it was only a minute or two before he started to relax. Then he turned his head away and grumbled quietly into the soft whush-whush of the aircon, “Oh, this isn’t at all patronising, is it.”
“Suck it up, princess,” Dean muttered comfortably into his hair. Which was almost as soft and ridiculous as Sam’s.
In the morning, Dean woke up to a fully-dressed Gabriel with his feet on the table and his chair tipped back outrageously. As soon as Dean opened his eyes and focussed squintily on him, he smirked, and pointed.
“You’re a cuddler.”
Dean grumbled and buried his face back into the pillow, because it was too early in the morning to defend his masculinity against a smart-ass not-archangel. “Seriously, dude? We’re going to go there? Golden rule of that crap is you never talk about it the next day.”
Gabriel’s smirk turned up a few more notches, like the cat who’d got the canary and the archangel mojo all at once. “You cuddle. I have photos.”
“… Why do I even care?”
The cat purred. “Hah. You care.”
Dean rolled out of bed and flipped him off. “Whatever. Your girlish sniffling was keeping me awake.”
Which maybe wasn’t the the most sensitive thing to say, but Gabriel just grinned and tossed a Skittle into his mouth - “Aw, diddums, love you too” - so Dean figured his feelings couldn’t be too hurt.
---
Mojo aside, Sam thought, there were definitely advantages to having an angel brain on the case. They were working with a bewildering array of scripts and scribal habits from across eight centuries, leaping back and forth between the eclectic code-like hands of individual pre-Carolingian monasteries and the grand magisterial Gothic bookhands which, while at least consistent, seemed to take pride in making every single stroke look like every single other stroke so you had to count every line and calculate the word from that.
Sam usually had more time to adjust himself to a given script that he was working with. Jumping across centuries and localities like this, it was too easy to glance at a word and misread it: he didn’t have time to internalise the fact that this strange squiggle in this hand was an e, that the teardrop shape in that one was an o and the thing that looked like o was actually a, that this scribe always did a little loop on top of his d so that right there couldn’t be a d but had to be ol (unless the bowl belonged to the letter before it, of course - it was very blurred and hard to say). The weird symbol here was meant to be a quick form of tia, and the little loop below the o indicated a following e, but over here this scribe always wrote t short and without a stem above the cap so that it looked like a stiff c and that the letter that looked like a t was actually l with a horizontal stroke through it, to indicate a preceding u or e, so that sometimes he almost wrote down ut where it should have been uel.
Castiel could just look at a page and compute all of that without a blink, like all those irregularities were nothing, and never get confused over the bits where a human eye would jump ahead of itself and put things together wrong. For some of the rarer scripts Sam still had to start from first principles and compile an alphabet list, with notes of all the variant punctuations and letter forms, especially for the scribes who didn’t bother putting spaces between words or ending a line at a word break.
And that was before the rise of the universities, and the freaking plague of abbreviations that scholasticism brought with it. It was all very well to deduce that the unclear letter in mi-ime must be n because there was no other word it could be, but what if three other letters in the word had been sacrificed to constrictions of space? Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to write a hundred-word note in tiny tiny letters in a four by five centimetre block in their margin, in which every single word was abbreviated beyond recognition? After hand-copying all their university texts? Sam, massaging his aching hand, had never been more glad of the modern ability to buy law texts and notebooks from the university bookshop in his life.
This was where Castiel really came in handy. He stumbled the first few times he came across an abbreviation, because apparently knowing every human language ever didn’t mean you automatically knew all the idiosyncrasies of the ways people wrote them down. But then Sam explained that a straight line over a word usually meant a missing m or n, that a hooked shape above any consonant but p meant -er or -ar while the same squiggle over p meant pr(a)e and per and par were indicated by a p with a stroke through the stem but a stroke through the stem of a final d meant either de or dum, depending on context. Castiel had gone all thoughtful and quietly curious and asked if there was a catalogue of these somewhere, Bobby had stomped up the stairs (just because he could, Sam suspected) to fetch down an old copy of Cappelli’s dictionary of Latin abbreviations for him, and Castiel had... memorised it in half an hour.
So now it was just quicker to say something like, “Hey, Cas? I’ve got these three letters, then four minims, then something that’s either this letter or that one, a suspension stroke over the second, and something that’s either an i or a hook over this letter - what are my options?”
“Hand?”
“Late thirteenth century anglicana, not very formal, scribe tends to pull to the left.”
“Can the fourth minim be the primary stroke of a c instead?”
“Could be, I guess.”
“Then this word, or that one.”
“Got it; has to be that one because we’re missing the direct object - thanks!”
The thing was, Dean’s Latin wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought it was, but this work? For this, you needed to be able to obsess over it, and Dean’s obsessions weren’t here.
(Although he probably would have enjoyed the manuscript that showed ‘Angelus Gabrihel’ making jazz-hands across the page at the Virgin Mary.)
---
And then there was the question of weapons. Gabriel wasn’t actually bad at handling a gun, better than Castiel: he’d said something about the Old West needing a hell of a lot of Trickstering and guns being just a part of the outfit, which made Dean really tempted to suggest a day off and a little field trip through time. The trouble was, he refused point blank to risk killing any human, which… Dean hadn’t expected.
“Oh, now you’re squeamish?”
“Don’t play stupider than you look, Winchester. Go ahead, tell me there’s no difference between trapping an asshole in poetic justice so he can take himself down, and treating a person like… collateral damage.”
“Hey, you think I don’t care? Every time I have to put down some poor bastard who’s being ridden?”
Gabriel’s eyes went all narrow and sharp. “Seems to me you’re getting pretty casual about it.”
Dean glared right back. Because, no way was he letting the Trickster-slash-coward-archangel go all moral high ground on him. “It’s the Apocalypse, genius. If it’s that or the second demon tears Sam or Cas’ throat out, or an exorcism takes too long and we all die, or it gets out and goes off to take down another fifty people, or hell, we do exorcise it and it goes off for a weekend break downstairs which, by the way, is standing wide open right now so it can pop right back up whenever it likes - yeah, I’d say a bullet in the head is better than then end of the world.”
Gabriel just arched one eyebrow at him and settled back, arms crossed over his chest and feet propped all immovable on the table in front of him. “I don’t kill. Not unless I mean it.”
Which Dean could almost understand, because the kind of things they all saw and did when you lived this kind of life meant you had to have some lines for yourself, even if they got sort of bendy sometimes, but… “Really. Because your brothers don’t seem that worried about collateral.”
Even Castiel. Not that he didn’t care, he just… thought like a warrior. If he had to, he would kill, and not look back.
“Yeah, well, I’m not them.” Gabriel’s shoulders did this complicated little rolling hitch against the chair back. “They just figure, oh, sooner dead, sooner into Heaven. Death don’t mean anything to them - they don’t see anything worth sticking around for down here, and they don’t see what happens to the people left behind.”
“Huh.” That was actually… a bit more honest than Dean had been expecting. He’d sort of forgotten how, if you pushed him, Gabriel would sort of fling these big emotional truths like bludgeons. And, well, he had asked for someone who was on Earth’s side, not Heaven’s or Hell’s.
He backed down, scooped up the Colt and tucked it into his belt like a challenge. “Okay. Got a better plan?”
Gabriel just stared at him narrowly for another moment, eyes still doing that weird gold half-glowy thing they did when he got riled up. Then it broke and scattered like nothing into his deliberately maddening grin.
“Give me a minute.”
He vanished.
Two minutes later, he reappeared, right behind Dean’s shoulder. “So, fun fact, there were a lot of demons flitting about in late-eighteenth-century France.” And he dropped an honest-to-God sword and dagger combo on the table, scabbards and all. “Friend and I, thought we’d do something about it, back in the day.”
Dean whistled softly and drew the sword. Straight steel blade (or something that looked like steel), brass hilt wrapped with black leather - ordinary enough for its time, probably, but really pretty awesome right now. Well, ordinary except for the little symbols and whorls of writing running up and down the blade, Latin and Enochian and something he thought might be Arabic or Hebrew or one of those things.
“This kills demons?”
Gabriel nodded and tossed him the long dagger. “I get the epée.”
“Size queen,” Dean shot back automatically, and pulled out the smaller blade. Same thing in miniature, but this was a size and style he was more used to, and he could feel the quality in the balance and the weight, the way it’d just handle like a dream, slice through the air like part of his arm and -
“Okay.” Yes, so, they were pretty damn neat, but it had to be said: “And how is stabbing people any better than shooting them?”
Gabriel took the sword back, tossed it into the air, caught it and held it up to the light, grinning at it like an old friend. “Demons don’t have bodies, right, genius? It’s all kind of… wafty. So why does it matter where you hit them? That clever little water pistol of yours just binds them to the mortality of the body then kills that body, which is why you have to hit them where it hurts the vessel.”
“Okay. And with these…?”
“These kill the demon. All you have to do is break the skin. That’s the barrier between the demon and the world. Break that, touch them with this, and that’s them dead.”
Which just… wow. Kill a demon, and leave its host with a freaking bandaid? Maybe a couple of stitches? Dean ran his thumb along the edge of the eighteenth-century blade that was as sharp as it had been two hundred and fifty years or ten minutes before, and felt a weight he hadn’t even noticed slip away from his shoulders.
“You designed these?”
Gabriel shrugged, all breezy and casual and bouncing just a little on the balls of his feet, like a kid showing off his science project. “Joint effort. He was a creative little son of a bitch.”
Dean felt his face break into a grin, and he reached over to mess up Gabriel’s stupid shiny hair. “Awesome.”
Gabriel yelped and beat him off and called him a tentacle fetishist or something, but he looked kind of smug and eager at the same time.
---
It turned out that Gabriel was awesome with a sword. Or epée de cour, or whatever he called it.
Dean wasn’t really surprised.
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