Fic: They were thy brothers (March-Stalkers Mighty timestamp)
They were thy brothers.
a March-Stalkers Mighty extra
She wished to give her brothers pleasure, and plucked the twelve flowers, and thought she would present each brother with one while at dinner. But at the self-same moment that she touched the flowers the twelve brothers were changed into twelve ravens, and flew away over the forest, and the house and garden vanished likewise. And now the poor maiden was alone in the wild forest, and when she looked around, an old woman was standing near her who said, “My child, what hast thou done? Why didst thou not leave the twelve white flowers growing? They were thy brothers, who are now for evermore changed into ravens.”
Grimm’s Household Tales, The Twelve Brothers.
Word Count: 6800.
Pairings: None, though it might be read as pre-Gabriel/Sam in the context of the whole series. Mention of past Gabriel/OFC, past Gabriel/Lucifer/Michael.
Rating: Mature, mostly for Gabriel’s state of mind.
Warnings: (Mouse-over individual warnings for mildly spoilery details, if desired.) Hermaphrodite character. Mention of trans/gender confusion. Angst, and grief. Violent thoughts, mental and emotional instability. Memories of kids being bullied, handling weapons, being attacked by monsters, and facing the start of a civil war. Mention of unprotected sex - I’m pretty sure Terry Pratchett’s is still the only fantasy universe with condoms. (Withdrawal is not an effective contraception, kids.)
Spoilers: None (AU).
Summary: This summary assumes you’ve read the main story. Gabriel’s mind is jumping wildly all over the place here and his disjointed thought process will make even less sense if you don’t know what's going on; and besides, there are a lot of details about his family and the situation of angels in general that are assumed knowledge here which are only discovered by the humans later on.
Told from Gabriel’s point of view. Takes place after the events of Passus II, pes dexter (i. e., after Dean meets Castiel, drags Sam out of bed, and confronts Gabriel in his cage in the barn to demand answers about how angels can possibly be people). Dean having left, Sam re-enters the barn to get answers to his own questions. Gabriel, raw with the shock of hearing about his brother’s death and with his imprisonment, struggles to retain his grip on reality and on sarcasm.
AO3 link.
There had been a woman once, with a sense of humour as dry as brushwood after a fire. It savoured of disappointment, and of old grief.
So too did the three locked doors in her farmhouse - always locked, so that the spiders clung to the corners and the keyhole though the rest of the house was immaculate. She was worn, like her house, but sturdy still; and she never pretended that all her doors were open.
It suited Gabriel, though: the honesty of it, four days in either direction from any town or village sizeable enough for hypocrisy. Marie la Raconteuse, they had called her, although he had never heard her put more than three sentences together.
One year, passing through, he added a warmed bed to his lodging fee. It had been weeks since he had felt the touch of another creature with a mind to remember and a voice to speak - months since anything more than a clap on on the shoulder - and there was meaning to it, gallant and poignant in the dark.
He hadn’t removed his shirt, though. Best, after all, to keep something between them. He had spent all his time exploring her body so that she wouldn’t explore his, and discover his hidden strangeness.
---
Gabriel was late here, this year. He’d spent two weeks alone in the forests sweating out the forerunner of a heat. Two weeks shaking and moping, starving for a familiar laugh or (shit) a touch, a brother’s arm slung around his shoulder, a friend’s lips brushed carelessly against his cheek. Proof of being secure, of being home and loved, everything in his stupid fucking body crying out for it, until he was pathetically grateful just for the wet snuffle of his horse’s lips across his forehead.
Of course the heat didn’t happen, after that. The demands of the pre-heat weren’t satisfied: he wasn’t safe, after all, wasn’t home, so it had proceeded no further. Just like it hadn’t the year before he’d run away from home (everyone tight-lipped and tight-shouldered, blades barely hidden, deaths every week that no one would confess to or deny). Just like it hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have, every year since.
Not like there was any way around it, now he was alone. Not like it would do him any good if it didn’t fail - couldn’t exactly drive into a town horny as hell and stinking of sex, with his voice too light for a man’s.
He’d spent another week sulking, all the same, before he’d broken camp and moved on. Because, yeah, he was awesome like that.
So Gabriel had been late this year, when he’d driven in through the gates of this quiet, fateful town. In the privacy of his head, he called it Righteousness - almost entirely sarcastically - because it was so distant, and so beleaguered, and so self-important, that it had no name for itself, as if it were the only real place in the world.
He’d been late; and, within forty-eight hours, he’d been discovered.
By Dean, or by Bobby, or by all of them. He didn’t know where he’d slipped up, what tiny clue he’d given away to these hardened, wary people whose world was crumbling away around them. Perhaps it had been inevitable.
Perhaps he’d even meant to. Gabriel wouldn’t put it past himself. Hell, he was probably screwed up enough to do that.
Gabriel curled his fingers in the straw. The dry, gritty dust of it was creeping into his skin, under his fingernails, into his mouth, into his ears. The longer he stayed here, the dryer and dustier he became. And the stink of sheep, always of sheep. He smelled like that too.
Cold cut of the breeze. Sam had left the barn door open behind him. Forgetful, or intending to come back once Dean got over his little crisis about beards or what the hell ever.
Gabriel’s skin shuddered, a visceral full-body twitch, and he whipped around to slam his hand into the wall to stop it. Beast of a body, as if the bitch of a thing wasn’t his to control. The vicious throb of the knife wound healing far too slowly in his shoulder, the wings heavy at his back that had burst out of their own accord when his friends had stuck a blade in him hard and quick. The creeping horror in his skin or gut every time one of them got close to the bars, in case they reached out to touch him.
Like he was strapped to a wild animal. Or infected by it.
The stone of the wall was rough under his palms, and his mind was not rational, he knew it. His thoughts were flying everywhere all at once, and he wanted to press his hands (his tingling right hand) into the wall until the stone deadened them, grate away the feel of Sam’s skin warm against his, Sam’s blood pounding in his throat, Sam’s windpipe struggling to draw breath against him.
Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve. Could’ve killed Sam Winchester, pushed his thumb in deeper and harder until the breath stuttered to a stop, snapped the frail column of his spine like straw, straw, always straw, but Sam’s eyes…
Dean would’ve killed him for that. Dean should’ve killed him like Balthazar. Balthazar, Balthazar couldn’t be dead. That couldn’t be real. Made no sense. Gabriel had been dead for years, to him. Balthazar could have been dead so many times while Gabriel was useless out here.
Spirals. Useless spirals of the mind without sense to them. Vicious. Dangerous. Don’t go there. Don’t think about it.
Gabriel dragged his thoughts away savagely, back to the cold metal of the bars and the chill of the night air. Smell of sheep. Lanolin. Wool. Hell, what he wouldn’t do for some decent wool.
(Chill morning air, his mind whispered. Balthazar at thirteen, gangly and careless, with skinny arms that seemed longer than they were because he gesticulated like a windmill. Castiel’s little body curled up warm against Gabriel’s side in the cold, and Balthazar ranting, lip curling in fascinated disgust at the slugs that had crawled into his blankets overnight. Gabriel, tossing a word or a rescued slug at him here and there and teasing him about all his slug boyfriends, while Castiel stared at Balthazar’s blanket with that little frown he made so often that Gabriel had never understood. Balthazar’s blanket, the next day, laced and double-laced neatly all along the side and foot by tiny fingers, to form a sort of bag with the seam running down the length of it on the upper side, where no slug would go to nestle. Balthazar, slinging his arm around Castiel’s shoulders, and boasting to everyone who would listen about his genius squirt of a little brother -)
Gabriel split his knuckles on the stone.
The door creaked sneakily shut behind him.
Gabriel went still. Someone was moving in the barn - scuff of loose shoes on stone and straw, the uneasy prickle of air crawling across Gabriel’s spine and the backs of his wings. Too close. As if hands were hovering over his back, too hot, just about to touch and grab and. Hold. Trap.
Sam.
Not that close. No matter what his skin and its useless panic said. And he knew it, that was the crazy part, he knew it and he still couldn’t stop the crawling of his skin, couldn’t stop flinching away from the touch that wasn’t going to come.
Balthazar wasn’t dead. Gabriel couldn’t know it. The knowing of it, the feeling of it, they were locked outside the cage, beyond the bars, somewhere out there with Sam and the brother who loved him. All those emotions balled up inside them, ranting at Gabriel like they were the only ones who knew how to feel. Or what to feel. Or what was real and what was a mess of nothings inside the imagination…
Gabriel curled his mouth into a snarl of a grin, hidden against the wall.
“Go diddle your mother.”
The careful movements paused.
“My mother’s dead,” Sam pointed out. He sounded pissy. Good for him.
“Really?” Gabriel purred. “Mine too! Let’s be bestest friends.”
Somewhere behind him, Sam huffed out a noise like this was all some minor nuisance that could be forgotten in five minutes. “See, here’s the thing. You live with Dean all your life, you get used to a few things. You can’t get rid of me by being a dick.”
Gabriel licked dust from his lips. “Hey, I love a challenge.”
Sam was quiet for a bit. Gabriel could feel the weight of his gaze on the back of his neck, dragging him down, making his wings too heavy.
“No, I don’t think you do,” Sam said at last, and he wasn’t sounding provoked at all. Gabriel was losing his touch. “You’re looking kinda tired over there, man.”
Oh hell. He wasn’t going to be all concerned, was he? Warm, reproachful, like he was just waiting for the right moment to bestow gracious forgiveness and pull Gabriel in for a hug (solid living arms around him and the strong slow beat of another heart against his chest, warm and sweet and - iron bands, wrapped around his belly and his ribs, squeezing his lungs tight).
I know you’re not just some mindless beast, okay?, Sam had said, frustrated and magnanimous while Dean had been frothing at the mouth like Gabriel cared about his goddamned epiphany.
Gabriel’s wings mantled without his say-so. Beast. Hunched. A threat. A raven ready to shove its heavy beak into the eye socket of a dying sheep, talons digging in, careless of the feeble life still there.
But the raven didn’t know what pain meant. It was the beasts that weren’t mindless that you had to look out for. They knew what pain was, and how to use it. What they did, they did viciously. They meant it.
Hells. His mind was breaking up anyway. Why wouldn’t the stupid kid just take him for a monster and leave him the hell alone?
Gabriel turned his cheek to the stone and glared back over his shoulder. “Why are you still here?”
Sam made a face like a put-upon giraffe. “Because I don’t get it, okay? I don’t… why did you even come here in the first place?”
“I’m a pedlar,” Gabriel explained sweetly, drawing out the syllables like he was talking to a dunce. “I travel. I sell things.”
“No, you’re an angel.”
Well, that was worth turning around for, just for the sake of leaning back against the wall with his wings nice and large around him, crossing his arms over his chest and giving the giant his best “wow, do you really not know the difference between a species and a job description?” eyebrow.
Sam made an annoyed noise, looked away, looked back, and shoved his hair out of his face. “Don’t look at me like I’m an idiot. It’s not a stupid que- okay, it’s not really a question, but - angels don’t just take up human trades. Angels kill humans.”
Aw, bless. The eloquence of youth.
“I’ve been living human for longer than you lot have been flinching at the sound of wings.”
Wings. Wings against the sky. How many years since Gabriel had seen that shape?
(Should be able to hate Dean. Should be wanting to tear his throat out, hold him down and dig a fencing nail slowly, slowly into his eye socket, while he screamed. Screamed and yelled for his little brother. He could take away Sam first, take away Dean’s little brother like Dean had taken -)
Gabriel wished, viciously, that he could feel the fire of hating Dean, hating someone, but the feeling wouldn’t come. (No feelings. Nothing plain. Just this terrible empty yawning mess.)
“But we’re not the only people who’re fighting angels.” Sam was babbling, all indignation and bewildered self-righteousness. “You’ve said so yourself, and other travellers. You can’t pretend there’s some magical friendly place where that makes no difference, where an angel could just stroll in and say ‘hi, I want to be a pedlar, anyone got a cart I can buy?’ without lying his ass off.”
“Nope,” Gabriel said brightly, because if he could poke Sam just right surely he must be able to make him angry, make him rage. Anger was easy. “And whose fault is that? Who do you think starts it, Sam? Every fucking time?”
(Should hate Dean. But Dean killing Ba- no, no, killing angels, humans killing angels, that was old news. People killing people. Not a surprise. The same old thing Gabriel had run from in the first place, following him here. Death, plodding along in the dusty tracks of his wagon wheels.)
Sam’s brow furrowed, but his eyes lit up, like a dog who’d caught the scent, launching himself happily onto the trail of reasonable argument. “Well, we fight back, but they do kill us, Gabriel.”
“First time one of you lot saw an angel, what did you do?” Gabriel drawled, mockery or bitterness or something.
Sam opened his mouth to retort something innocent and wronged and naïve, but he didn’t get any words out before his face crumpled up. Memory. Going over your memories and realising, no, that actually happened this way.
Gabriel was right, then. An angel hadn’t been the aggressor. An angel had simply been there, been seen, and someone had decided that was a monster, that meant aggression.
Hardly a surprise.
“And you think they should just forgive that and hope you little rascals don’t do it again?” Gabriel murmured, dragged his tongue along the inside of his forearm (tasted like straw dust, like everything else, but hey, the gesture looked animalistic, and it made Sam recoil). Then he grinned, sharp and white. “You’re not the only ones who grew up surrounded by monsters, kiddo. Angels are hunters too, and guess what? They talk to each other. I’m guessing they learned pretty damn quick that humans are the harshest monsters of all.”
Sam flinched, like Gabriel had punched him in the throat, and looked away. That should have felt satisfying.
His mouth was open, a bit. He was very young, and bemused, and there was still sleep in the corners of his eyes. Facing down a monster in the barn, and determined to make sense of it.
Gabriel would not think of him warmly.
He thought savagely instead, of pushing him down onto the barn floor and mouthing at his neck. Showing him, hard and fast, that his body could be a sexual thing. Pinning those lanky muscled forearms over his head, licking into that puzzled mouth, locking his fingers hard into the mess of hair. Pushing open his legs. The kid might even let him, if he went about it right.
His body shied away from the thought. Stupid fucking body.
(Men, abstract faceless men. Men were easier than women in some ways, more complicated in others. Women were more likely to let Gabriel set the terms, take charge, be the romantic secret dashing lover who’d ravish them attentively and be gone next week. Men, though - with a man someone fucked someone, or there was an exchange of the services of hand and mouth. If Gabriel was doing the fucking, all well and good; or if the other guy was spread out under him in the dark, so Gabriel could position him, and Gabriel could ride him. But if his hands began to wander - if a lover got thoughtful and creative - it was only a matter of time before a finger slipped further back into wetness, found a yielding and a hot welcome where it shouldn’t. So Gabriel controlled every touch, made it safe, even if sometimes he longed to be filled up and screwed properly, where he ached for it, not just the way a pure man would take it.)
(Sam wouldn’t be hard and brutal. Sam would be careful, and earnest, and -)
Hell. That was a worm of thought to stamp on viciously, grind under the heel of your boot. If Gabriel had had boots.
Sam would look at Gabriel like he was a freak, the way he kept not doing now. Provincial innocents, the lot of them. Probably hadn’t even heard of the prostate. Or the clitoris.
“Yeah?” Sam was looking at him again, big wide serious reproachful eyes like he knew everything and got to judge. “And where were you in all this?”
Gabriel bared his teeth and laughed, raw. “Running.”
“Why?”
Death. Red on silver blades, angels dying, demons rising from the wet earth. Beloved faces turning cold and brittle. Brothers and cousins becoming tools. Or targets. Becoming, becoming. Changing into things. All of them, rising up to snap at him, set loose in his mind now where he’d stamped down on them for years, kept them back, set loose by a knife in his shoulder and friends’ faces turned cold and straw that stank of animals and Dean’s voice saying, saying…
“… Fuck off.”
He could lay his hands on Sam and kill him. He could see the spot on Sam’s neck where just a bit of pressure, just a shove and a twist… that shadow right there, that skin, just above that mole. It would be easy. It must be easy - he’d never killed anything with a soul before, but everyone else seemed to find it easy. Maybe Gabriel was the freak.
He could kill Sam, and see him look horrified and surprised and sad with the last flash of light in his eyes, and then Gabriel would be a monster. Become a monster. Change.
Maybe that would be simpler. Easier.
(Running away had looked easier. It hadn’t been. And he had only ended up in an animal pen, and the clamour of dogs with Gabriel’s magic in their veins, and Dean’s knife, and Dean’s laugh, casual and easy and happy in the Roadhouse, slinging his arm around Sam’s shoulders and loving him. Not broken, that boy. A monster. A person. Simple, for him. And Balthazar’s throat gaping, a wide red mouth)
Hells. He was shaking all over, rustling in the dark, and -
“Gabriel.” Sam was pushing in, stern, earnest. Closer, hands on the bars like he was a simpleton who’d forgotten what had happened last time he got that close, touching Gabriel’s cage, the thing that kept him from getting out, laying his own hands on Sam’s body or anyone’s or hell, flying home, hah, as if there was a home anymore. “You swore, every time you came through our gates, to ‘deal with truth and integrity’. And not to ‘admit or compass the entry of any creature supernatural or preternatural past the walls’.”
Guest code.
Gabriel’s flailing mind seized on that like a terrier on a rat. Relief at its solidity. Then incredulity. The fucking guest code? Now? As if he was a person to stand and fall not by his body and blood but by his actions? By people’s rules, by the petty little laws they made for themselves? The petty little laws he swore to every time… swore every time he came through the gates, yes.
Because every place, every people, they were all different. You had to be a chameleon. You had to be a person by their standards, everywhere, everywhere different.
Like everyone who came through those gates wasn’t an alien. All chameleons. Honesty? You could tell the truth, so far as it went, but you could never be honest.
He sneered.
Sam, for some reason, looked hurt, genuinely hurt, for the first time. His shoulders pulled in, like he was trying to make himself almost normal human size.
“Was any of it real, Gabriel? Anything you said to us?”
Fuck.
Where the hell did that kid get off, looking at Gabriel like he’d expected something better? What was he even talking about?
“All pedlars are frauds and scoundrels, aren’t they?” he drawled, and tried not to look at Sam’s hands, tried not to think about the warmth and the weight of them on his body, keeping him steady, telling him he was there. About the touch of a friend. Of a brother.
“I don’t know. I mean, sure, some of them will talk up some dodgy gadget like nobody’s business, but you always… I don’t know.” Sam’s fingers tightened on the bars then let go, uncertain. “You seemed like we could trust you,” he finished, and trailed off, voice low and halting, like that wasn’t really what he meant but he didn’t know what he wanted to say anyway, and…
Gabriel’s throat went stupidly tight, furiously tight.
(He’d slept with Marie again the next year too, and it had been good: friendly, easy. Wry, and kind of sweet. She had left the bed halfway through to punch down the dough and come back with floury hands, and Gabriel had sprawled lewdly all over her clean sheets and made all the stupid puns he could think of about rising bread and sex, and she had laughed and pounced on him and he had caught her hands in his and kissed them as she’d settled easily on top of him and taken him inside her.)
“Was it really…” Sam started, and stopped, and chewed on his lip, and hid behind his stupid floppy hair. “Were you really just… being a pedlar?”
Hell. Gabriel had no idea what was going on in that useless fluff-covered head of his, but why couldn’t he stop poking Gabriel with it? And the world was rocking, sickly and slow and disorienting.
He threw Sam what he hoped was a scathing look and began to pace, just daring the floor to pitch and send him sprawling. Whatever Sam saw, it made him perk up, lean in, and drape himself over the bars, all long limbs and hopeful beam.
“So are you actually half human,” he asked, with that shy eagerness creeping back in like it was any other day in the Roadhouse and he was asking after exotic stories, “or was that just…?”
A lie?
Gabriel flicked his wings, a sarcastic little flutter in the confined space.
“Nope. All angel, baby.”
“But would that even be possible?” the kid chattered. “Cross-breeding - um, interbreeding, or whatever you’d call it?”
Seriously? This, now?
“I’ve heard stories,” he allowed, grudging, and was hit with a sudden flash of sensation, pulling out on the verge of completion and spilling himself over some woman’s (any woman’s) thigh or belly as she lay, gasping and sated below him. Caution. “Could be true.”
“Wow.” Sam. Yes. Sam was there. He was in the barn on a lurching floor and Sam was there, still there, with this silly little grin like he knew how ridiculous he looked with all that hair, shaking his head. “I’m actually talking to an angel.”
Was this the kid who’d locked an arm around Gabriel’s neck five days ago and snarled in his ear and held him trapped for the knife?
Straw scattered away from Gabriel’s feet. A stone rose out of the ground to stub his toe, but if he winced he’d fall so he snarled at it and stumbled on. The end of a lap: he pivoted on his heel, wings squashing up against the bars and wall as he turned.
“Try not to explode with joy,” he suggested helpfully.
“Can I,” Sam said, warm and eager, “could I actually touch...?”
Gabriel’s body went tight and took over, panicfuryflighttrapped. It flinched back, caught his foot and lurched queasily sideways, got his back solidly against the wall somehow and glared at Sam’s outstretched fingers.
The fingers curled up, and pulled back.
“Right,” Sam said, and now he just sounded sad. “Sorry.”
The wings pressed in hard on either side of him, air clawing thinly in his chest, and his face furrowed up into a snarl, at himself, at the air, at the bars that kept him safe from grasping hands.
(Raphael, he remembered, Raphael and his - or her - bitter longing to be noticed by Michael and Lucifer, and his-or-her perpetual indecision, from one year to the next, over which gender to wear. Raphael, worried and fretful because Gabriel had spent the morning with Castiel, showing him how to catch frogs, instead of with Raphael. Or another time, perhaps, because Gabriel had given to Castiel instead of to Raphael the little cakes that Gabriel had conned out of a grown-up, with his big innocent eyes and his hand trustingly squeezing theirs - women always fell for that one, for the tiny warm hand nestled inside theirs - playing the sweet little baby archangel card to the full. Raphael, for whatever reason, picking on Castiel when he seemed to be alone. Balthazar, slinking out from nowhere to befuddle the teenager with too many words and too many meanings.
And the pair of them later, against any other kids who might want to pick on them for being the brothers of an archangel, of a child whom all the adults fawned over and whom they couldn’t touch. Balthazar and Castiel, each always knowing where the other was, gradually making themselves untouchable with all their strange array of tricks and traps and little magics they made up, just enough to make other kids wary of revenge. Gabriel, too different, making his little brothers different. Changing them. Making them into targets.
Dogs. Hounds’ voices, loud, too loud, ringing through his head, through Bal-)
Sam’s voice. Sam talking.
“So you knew Cas, huh.” Not scared. Just… embarrassed. Trying to go for idle chit-chat. “Did you know the other one? His brother?”
… Idle. Right.
Sam, with his home and his brother, and the way they bickered all the time but never had to actually say anything for the other one to understand.
Sam grimaced a bit, under Gabriel’s stare. “Um. Okay. Yeah, Dean’s kind of a dick. Sorry. I’m sorry you had to hear like that. But really,” justifying, reasonable, like it had just been some distant acquaintance, like reason could ever cut it, “he would’ve killed me. And if it’d been your little brother whose life was on the line, you’d know -”
“Don’t,” Gabriel got out, strangled and harsh because there was no air in his chest. “Don’t you dare talk to me about brothers, Winchester.”
Gabriel could tear out Dean’s throat. He could hold him still and press his fingers in, one nail at a time, feel the skin give a little, nudge and scrape at it until it let him through, sink into the hot flesh under it, take Dean’s windpipe in his hand from the inside and tug it gently out. Smile at him while he did it.
The idea left him hollow. Not pleasant, not unpleasant. It just didn’t do anything.
“I just don’t get it, man,” Sam was saying, angry, almost gentle, persistent as a dog worrying at an itch. “I don’t get how you can just… leave your home behind you.”
That, though. That did something. That hit Gabriel hard and devastating, like the bars weren’t even there to keep him locked away from himself.
“I am not a man, Sam,” he muttered, half a sneer, and saw Sam’s little moue of frustration, like Gabriel was just being difficult.
Served him right.
Gabriel could twist his own words around, force their other meaning into Sam’s face, force him to respond. The kid’s eyes kept skipping to the wings, fascinated, not scared - why, why would he not look scared? - but hah, Gabriel could almost taste his revulsion if he knew about the womb and the cunt. Gabriel possessed monstrous appendages, and they made him intriguing; but the fact that he had between his legs what every woman Sam knew had too, that would make him a monster.
He could be a monster. Bare his teeth. Force Sam to let him be a monster. To let him fucking go already, to break into pieces -
(The dense cloying scent of his own heat. Lucifer and Michael, filling him up, one after another after another, sweet and inexorable and adoring, strong and supple inside him, calling him brother. Not leaving him for days, covering him hot and thick with that affection that he was almost sure they felt, other times: it was always promised, always implied, always deferred because their eyes had slid to one another’s again and the rest of the world had vanished. And Gabriel with it, always just the sweet little baby archangel.)
“Hey. Um.”
Sam was there, closer. Smelling human, and sleepy, and warm, and a bit like sweat, and a bit like Missouri’s honey cakes. Not letting him go. Stubborn. He was leaning into the bars, one arm right through, holding it out to Gabriel. Offering, like Gabriel couldn’t just grab it and rip it out of its socket, turn Sam into Grendel, the intruder in the night.
This one unimportant kid in this one unimportant town who actually cared what became of him (what he became). Why? Why?
Numbskull.
Gabriel wetted his lips. “Wow. An arm,” he noticed, because apparently his sarcasm was broken right now.
Sam huffed. “It’s a hug, actually,” he said, a bit of teenage diffidence clinging to the shrug of his shoulders, and Gabriel’s eyes skittered over the little scar on the top of his forefinger, the plaited leather of the bracelet looped around his wrist, the scattering of dark hair over the long muscles of his forearm. “Well. Half a hug. Unless, y’know. Unless you feel like coming over here, and. Um.”
Gabriel could see what it would look like, the savaged sinews and the gleaming wet bone at the end, the fingers jerking to a stop. He could hear the sounds it would make, smell it, the heavy tang of it. Feel it on his fingers. If he touched Sam. His hands, his own hands, bloodied with the death that followed him, always everywhere killing, people turning on people on friends on family and shit, how could he possibly touch Sam?
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
It twisted in his throat, like the words wanted to choke him
Sam blinked, but his hand didn’t waver. “Because you’re not a monster,” he said easily, clear and steady and stubborn, and hell, yes, yes, Gabriel was, they all were, but arguing against Sam was pointless, hopeless. Not a monster? It was either very profound or very stupid, and Gabriel couldn’t decide which, and Sam was looking at him with those soft determined eyes, and the world was pitching drunkenly around him, so he gave up and put his hand in Sam’s.
… Skin. Warm skin on skin. Blood beating strong and live under the surface, against him.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fucking fuck. Fuck all Winchesters and their stupid hair and their stupid fucking eyes and their self-righteousness and their earnest fucking certainty. Because there, there were all the fucking emotions in the warmth of Sam’s hand and the way his fingers curled around the bones of Gabriel’s, and Gabriel hadn’t wanted them after all, because they were too fucking much and fuck Sam Winchester for taking away his ability to fucking swear properly.
(The third year, the third year. Marie had welcomed Gabriel to her bed again, and put nightshade in his cup. It hadn’t hurt him, of course - weird taste, but he hadn’t known what it was. Not until she looked at him strangely, paler and paler over the hours as he didn’t die, didn’t convulse, didn’t vomit or sweat, then made some excuse and returned with three men - well, two men and a boy - to kill him.
They hadn’t been murderers, none of them - the boy was white, lip red with blood where he was biting it - but they’d been desperate. Gabriel had had to fight, fight properly, and prove himself far from human.
He had asked her why, later, as the boy stood slumped against the wall with his hand over his eyes, and his father lay unconscious, and his uncle sat against the well with his hands loose on the dirt beside him and stared at the sky like a man who had cried all his tears. She, she hadn’t kept out of the fight: she had blood running down the side of her face and was cradling a broken wrist that he didn’t offer to mend.
We needed it, she had said, as simply as that. My sister’s children are hungry, and you carry in your wagon more than enough to keep them. We needed it.
He hadn’t understood it, then or later. He’d thought there must have been something more, something he had done to her to earn it, to earn hatred. Was the latest baby, perhaps, not really her sister’s after all? Was it only three months old? Had he not been so careful as he’d thought, and did she think he owed her? Did he have a son or a daughter starving back there, with a killer for a mother?
But her eyes had been tired, clear of anger and clear of shame. Only “we needed it.”
Only humans - only people - being monsters again, for reasons of their own. Because, sooner or later, they always did.)
“Gabriel? Gabriel!”
Sam.
Sam, tugging gently on his hand. Sam, wide-eyed and worried like he thought he’d done something wrong. Sam, here and now, warm behind cold bars, and Gabriel swore unimaginatively and stepped forward to grab handfuls of his shirt and bury his face in it and shake into pieces. The weight of Sam’s arms crept carefully around his shoulders, nudging in awkwardly under and over the wings, and just for now it didn’t feel like a trap. It felt like the one steady sure place in a wave-tossed ship. It felt like a fucking hug.
(Balthazar, at Castiel’s seventh birthday, vicious gleam of teeth and snide curl of his voice telling Gabriel that this year he wasn’t invited to the secret party they always had for birthdays, just the three of them. Brothers only, he’d said, and that Gabriel was Michael’s and Lucifer’s and Raphael’s brother now, so he should go and play with them instead since he liked them better anyway.
Gabriel had looked down at Balthazar’s fingers clinging tight and white to his wrist, then up again into his face. For the first time, then, he’d used his superior strength on one of his brothers, and it was to break away from his touch.
Later that year, when Balthazar had turned nine, Gabriel hadn’t come to that either, even though Castiel had set a place for him. He’d been busy, he really had; but maybe he hadn’t needed to be.
Balthazar hadn’t spoken to him for weeks.
The next year, Gabriel hadn’t been able to see Castiel turn eight. Castiel’s birthday was in July, and for the first time that year Gabriel didn’t go with his family on the summer roamings. He was twelve, and he had to stop being a child and start learning to be an archangel.)
Hell. Balthazar. Laconic, snide, brilliant, dead. How had that happened? It still made no sense, he couldn’t work it out, and Gabriel was stuck in here with iron bars pressing into his face and chest, shaking so badly that the world was spinning, bawling like some kid into a kid’s shirt.
Gabriel had never been close to Balthazar, had he? Had he even tried, or had he always just assumed - assumed he’d be there until -
Sam’s enormous hand spread out hesitantly between Gabriel’s shoulder blades, callouses dragging over the scattered little down feathers. Sincere. Solid and there, and incomprehensible. Soaking warmth through his skin, deep into Gabriel’s bones, warmth and the kind of weariness that might let him sleep, eventually.
The same hands that had pinned him for the blade and the butt of the gun five days ago, hunter’s hands, brutal and strong. The hands that had taken his horse’s reins from him when he’d arrived and tossed him a wet rag for his face and hands, as Sam had laughed something about the road-dust all over him and looking like a golem. The hands that had clapped him on the shoulder, clapped Dean on the shoulder, taken mugs of beer from Ellen and slid them across the table to Gabriel and everyone else there, as Sam had joined the party, biting his lip, eyes shining, eager to hear Gabriel’s stories. Faces of friends - not his friends, not really, but each other’s friends, each other’s family, warm and sure and happy, letting him join in for a day. Letting him have that illusion, until they’d turned on him.
Dogs. Dogs, wide-mouthed happy deadly dogs bearing Gabriel’s magic, Gabriel’s blood, in the very script of their being. A foundation that Singer had built on somehow to make them so much worse. To kill. Gabriel’s blood, and Gabriel’s magic, on the blades of their knives and the heads of their arrows and the shot of their guns, shoved into his cousins’ hearts. Slashed across Balthazar’s throat.
Targets. Making his own brothers into targets. Dragging war along with him.
Balthazar, Balthazar, Balthazar again. The first time he’d summoned his sword, eight years old and laughing, and their father dismayed that he’d managed it so early, and Gabriel charged with teaching him how to handle it without hurting himself.
Balthazar again, at twelve, terrified and staunch, standing over an injured Castiel with his sword in hand and a hungry skinwalker circling them in the shape of a lion - a scene glimpsed in a moment as Gabriel had pulled in his wings and arrowed down out of the sky, fast and furious. The rapid beat of Balthazar’s heart against his collarbone once it lay dead, Castiel’s breath hot and wet on his cheek, wild hysterical giggles all around at some stupid joke to make it feel normal, and all thirty of their fingers leaving bruises in each other’s flesh.
Balthazar, fifteen, drawing his sword for the first time against another angel. Laughing still, but the laughter had become a shield, face pinched and grim.
Gabriel sobbed, great wet tight-chested gasps, no control, no dignity, heart seizing and racing inside him. Because it hurt, it fucking hurt, all of it, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t, there was nothing he could do with that. Nothing but let it all go and run mad, run savage.
“Hey. Hey, now.”
Awkward. Warm, and worried, and a bit scared.
Sam’s hand tightened on the back of Gabriel’s neck, let go, and slipped up into his hair to cradle his skull, like he was something delicate, something that Sam might break, might have already broken. The other hand slid down a bit, down Gabriel’s back and up again. Petting. Soothing. Not too far down, pausing at the top, apologising for touching.
So much for dignity.
Gabriel dragged in a breath, and another, but they were ragged and wet.
“Fuck,” he gulped out fervently.
Sam laughed a bit, breathless. Gabriel decided, uncharitably, that it was totally a nervous giggle.
Not thinking about anything. Batten down the thoughts. Weather the storm. Another minute, two, five, and the sobbing was even enough that he could fight it down and pretend it wasn’t there.
He stepped back, and Sam let his arms fall.
“Hey,” the kid said, yet again. He sounded kind of pleased. Warm, like they were best friends. Like they could just stitch each other up and keep each other human. “You with me?”
Too close. Too dangerous.
“No,” Gabriel pointed out sharply, not meeting his eyes, and put out one hand to lean against the wall. “I’m locked in a cage.” He scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, then the back of his forearm, for good measure. Mostly it meant he smeared dust-mud across his face and arm.
Sam made a sound that probably meant he’d rolled his eyes or something. Gabriel saw, from the corner of his eye, his hands lift like they might push between the bars again, reach in to touch. But they didn’t: they stopped, to curl carefully around the metal.
Good.
Gabriel’s walls were broken. No skin left to him, just raw flesh, exposed to the air, humiliated. And Sam had looked right in and seen him, and now he wasn’t looking away.
Cage bars would have to do instead.
“Really, though. Would water help? Washing water and a bowl and all, I mean. And something to help your shoulder. And, um. Books?”
Gabriel looked away, down the shadowy, dusty length of his little prison. Wall, floor, high roof, bars, straw. Nothing to do but sit and stew, and ignore Bobby Singer’s attempts to trick him into talking, and wait for them to do whatever they decided to do.
He turned away, wings shadowing his face because Sam’s eyes were still on him, and he didn’t reply.
a March-Stalkers Mighty extra
She wished to give her brothers pleasure, and plucked the twelve flowers, and thought she would present each brother with one while at dinner. But at the self-same moment that she touched the flowers the twelve brothers were changed into twelve ravens, and flew away over the forest, and the house and garden vanished likewise. And now the poor maiden was alone in the wild forest, and when she looked around, an old woman was standing near her who said, “My child, what hast thou done? Why didst thou not leave the twelve white flowers growing? They were thy brothers, who are now for evermore changed into ravens.”
Grimm’s Household Tales, The Twelve Brothers.
Word Count: 6800.
Pairings: None, though it might be read as pre-Gabriel/Sam in the context of the whole series. Mention of past Gabriel/OFC, past Gabriel/Lucifer/Michael.
Rating: Mature, mostly for Gabriel’s state of mind.
Warnings: (Mouse-over individual warnings for mildly spoilery details, if desired.) Hermaphrodite character. Mention of trans/gender confusion. Angst, and grief. Violent thoughts, mental and emotional instability. Memories of kids being bullied, handling weapons, being attacked by monsters, and facing the start of a civil war. Mention of unprotected sex - I’m pretty sure Terry Pratchett’s is still the only fantasy universe with condoms. (Withdrawal is not an effective contraception, kids.)
Spoilers: None (AU).
Summary: This summary assumes you’ve read the main story. Gabriel’s mind is jumping wildly all over the place here and his disjointed thought process will make even less sense if you don’t know what's going on; and besides, there are a lot of details about his family and the situation of angels in general that are assumed knowledge here which are only discovered by the humans later on.
Told from Gabriel’s point of view. Takes place after the events of Passus II, pes dexter (i. e., after Dean meets Castiel, drags Sam out of bed, and confronts Gabriel in his cage in the barn to demand answers about how angels can possibly be people). Dean having left, Sam re-enters the barn to get answers to his own questions. Gabriel, raw with the shock of hearing about his brother’s death and with his imprisonment, struggles to retain his grip on reality and on sarcasm.
AO3 link.
There had been a woman once, with a sense of humour as dry as brushwood after a fire. It savoured of disappointment, and of old grief.
So too did the three locked doors in her farmhouse - always locked, so that the spiders clung to the corners and the keyhole though the rest of the house was immaculate. She was worn, like her house, but sturdy still; and she never pretended that all her doors were open.
It suited Gabriel, though: the honesty of it, four days in either direction from any town or village sizeable enough for hypocrisy. Marie la Raconteuse, they had called her, although he had never heard her put more than three sentences together.
One year, passing through, he added a warmed bed to his lodging fee. It had been weeks since he had felt the touch of another creature with a mind to remember and a voice to speak - months since anything more than a clap on on the shoulder - and there was meaning to it, gallant and poignant in the dark.
He hadn’t removed his shirt, though. Best, after all, to keep something between them. He had spent all his time exploring her body so that she wouldn’t explore his, and discover his hidden strangeness.
---
Gabriel was late here, this year. He’d spent two weeks alone in the forests sweating out the forerunner of a heat. Two weeks shaking and moping, starving for a familiar laugh or (shit) a touch, a brother’s arm slung around his shoulder, a friend’s lips brushed carelessly against his cheek. Proof of being secure, of being home and loved, everything in his stupid fucking body crying out for it, until he was pathetically grateful just for the wet snuffle of his horse’s lips across his forehead.
Of course the heat didn’t happen, after that. The demands of the pre-heat weren’t satisfied: he wasn’t safe, after all, wasn’t home, so it had proceeded no further. Just like it hadn’t the year before he’d run away from home (everyone tight-lipped and tight-shouldered, blades barely hidden, deaths every week that no one would confess to or deny). Just like it hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have, every year since.
Not like there was any way around it, now he was alone. Not like it would do him any good if it didn’t fail - couldn’t exactly drive into a town horny as hell and stinking of sex, with his voice too light for a man’s.
He’d spent another week sulking, all the same, before he’d broken camp and moved on. Because, yeah, he was awesome like that.
So Gabriel had been late this year, when he’d driven in through the gates of this quiet, fateful town. In the privacy of his head, he called it Righteousness - almost entirely sarcastically - because it was so distant, and so beleaguered, and so self-important, that it had no name for itself, as if it were the only real place in the world.
He’d been late; and, within forty-eight hours, he’d been discovered.
By Dean, or by Bobby, or by all of them. He didn’t know where he’d slipped up, what tiny clue he’d given away to these hardened, wary people whose world was crumbling away around them. Perhaps it had been inevitable.
Perhaps he’d even meant to. Gabriel wouldn’t put it past himself. Hell, he was probably screwed up enough to do that.
Gabriel curled his fingers in the straw. The dry, gritty dust of it was creeping into his skin, under his fingernails, into his mouth, into his ears. The longer he stayed here, the dryer and dustier he became. And the stink of sheep, always of sheep. He smelled like that too.
Cold cut of the breeze. Sam had left the barn door open behind him. Forgetful, or intending to come back once Dean got over his little crisis about beards or what the hell ever.
Gabriel’s skin shuddered, a visceral full-body twitch, and he whipped around to slam his hand into the wall to stop it. Beast of a body, as if the bitch of a thing wasn’t his to control. The vicious throb of the knife wound healing far too slowly in his shoulder, the wings heavy at his back that had burst out of their own accord when his friends had stuck a blade in him hard and quick. The creeping horror in his skin or gut every time one of them got close to the bars, in case they reached out to touch him.
Like he was strapped to a wild animal. Or infected by it.
The stone of the wall was rough under his palms, and his mind was not rational, he knew it. His thoughts were flying everywhere all at once, and he wanted to press his hands (his tingling right hand) into the wall until the stone deadened them, grate away the feel of Sam’s skin warm against his, Sam’s blood pounding in his throat, Sam’s windpipe struggling to draw breath against him.
Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve. Could’ve killed Sam Winchester, pushed his thumb in deeper and harder until the breath stuttered to a stop, snapped the frail column of his spine like straw, straw, always straw, but Sam’s eyes…
Dean would’ve killed him for that. Dean should’ve killed him like Balthazar. Balthazar, Balthazar couldn’t be dead. That couldn’t be real. Made no sense. Gabriel had been dead for years, to him. Balthazar could have been dead so many times while Gabriel was useless out here.
Spirals. Useless spirals of the mind without sense to them. Vicious. Dangerous. Don’t go there. Don’t think about it.
Gabriel dragged his thoughts away savagely, back to the cold metal of the bars and the chill of the night air. Smell of sheep. Lanolin. Wool. Hell, what he wouldn’t do for some decent wool.
(Chill morning air, his mind whispered. Balthazar at thirteen, gangly and careless, with skinny arms that seemed longer than they were because he gesticulated like a windmill. Castiel’s little body curled up warm against Gabriel’s side in the cold, and Balthazar ranting, lip curling in fascinated disgust at the slugs that had crawled into his blankets overnight. Gabriel, tossing a word or a rescued slug at him here and there and teasing him about all his slug boyfriends, while Castiel stared at Balthazar’s blanket with that little frown he made so often that Gabriel had never understood. Balthazar’s blanket, the next day, laced and double-laced neatly all along the side and foot by tiny fingers, to form a sort of bag with the seam running down the length of it on the upper side, where no slug would go to nestle. Balthazar, slinging his arm around Castiel’s shoulders, and boasting to everyone who would listen about his genius squirt of a little brother -)
Gabriel split his knuckles on the stone.
The door creaked sneakily shut behind him.
Gabriel went still. Someone was moving in the barn - scuff of loose shoes on stone and straw, the uneasy prickle of air crawling across Gabriel’s spine and the backs of his wings. Too close. As if hands were hovering over his back, too hot, just about to touch and grab and. Hold. Trap.
Sam.
Not that close. No matter what his skin and its useless panic said. And he knew it, that was the crazy part, he knew it and he still couldn’t stop the crawling of his skin, couldn’t stop flinching away from the touch that wasn’t going to come.
Balthazar wasn’t dead. Gabriel couldn’t know it. The knowing of it, the feeling of it, they were locked outside the cage, beyond the bars, somewhere out there with Sam and the brother who loved him. All those emotions balled up inside them, ranting at Gabriel like they were the only ones who knew how to feel. Or what to feel. Or what was real and what was a mess of nothings inside the imagination…
Gabriel curled his mouth into a snarl of a grin, hidden against the wall.
“Go diddle your mother.”
The careful movements paused.
“My mother’s dead,” Sam pointed out. He sounded pissy. Good for him.
“Really?” Gabriel purred. “Mine too! Let’s be bestest friends.”
Somewhere behind him, Sam huffed out a noise like this was all some minor nuisance that could be forgotten in five minutes. “See, here’s the thing. You live with Dean all your life, you get used to a few things. You can’t get rid of me by being a dick.”
Gabriel licked dust from his lips. “Hey, I love a challenge.”
Sam was quiet for a bit. Gabriel could feel the weight of his gaze on the back of his neck, dragging him down, making his wings too heavy.
“No, I don’t think you do,” Sam said at last, and he wasn’t sounding provoked at all. Gabriel was losing his touch. “You’re looking kinda tired over there, man.”
Oh hell. He wasn’t going to be all concerned, was he? Warm, reproachful, like he was just waiting for the right moment to bestow gracious forgiveness and pull Gabriel in for a hug (solid living arms around him and the strong slow beat of another heart against his chest, warm and sweet and - iron bands, wrapped around his belly and his ribs, squeezing his lungs tight).
I know you’re not just some mindless beast, okay?, Sam had said, frustrated and magnanimous while Dean had been frothing at the mouth like Gabriel cared about his goddamned epiphany.
Gabriel’s wings mantled without his say-so. Beast. Hunched. A threat. A raven ready to shove its heavy beak into the eye socket of a dying sheep, talons digging in, careless of the feeble life still there.
But the raven didn’t know what pain meant. It was the beasts that weren’t mindless that you had to look out for. They knew what pain was, and how to use it. What they did, they did viciously. They meant it.
Hells. His mind was breaking up anyway. Why wouldn’t the stupid kid just take him for a monster and leave him the hell alone?
Gabriel turned his cheek to the stone and glared back over his shoulder. “Why are you still here?”
Sam made a face like a put-upon giraffe. “Because I don’t get it, okay? I don’t… why did you even come here in the first place?”
“I’m a pedlar,” Gabriel explained sweetly, drawing out the syllables like he was talking to a dunce. “I travel. I sell things.”
“No, you’re an angel.”
Well, that was worth turning around for, just for the sake of leaning back against the wall with his wings nice and large around him, crossing his arms over his chest and giving the giant his best “wow, do you really not know the difference between a species and a job description?” eyebrow.
Sam made an annoyed noise, looked away, looked back, and shoved his hair out of his face. “Don’t look at me like I’m an idiot. It’s not a stupid que- okay, it’s not really a question, but - angels don’t just take up human trades. Angels kill humans.”
Aw, bless. The eloquence of youth.
“I’ve been living human for longer than you lot have been flinching at the sound of wings.”
Wings. Wings against the sky. How many years since Gabriel had seen that shape?
(Should be able to hate Dean. Should be wanting to tear his throat out, hold him down and dig a fencing nail slowly, slowly into his eye socket, while he screamed. Screamed and yelled for his little brother. He could take away Sam first, take away Dean’s little brother like Dean had taken -)
Gabriel wished, viciously, that he could feel the fire of hating Dean, hating someone, but the feeling wouldn’t come. (No feelings. Nothing plain. Just this terrible empty yawning mess.)
“But we’re not the only people who’re fighting angels.” Sam was babbling, all indignation and bewildered self-righteousness. “You’ve said so yourself, and other travellers. You can’t pretend there’s some magical friendly place where that makes no difference, where an angel could just stroll in and say ‘hi, I want to be a pedlar, anyone got a cart I can buy?’ without lying his ass off.”
“Nope,” Gabriel said brightly, because if he could poke Sam just right surely he must be able to make him angry, make him rage. Anger was easy. “And whose fault is that? Who do you think starts it, Sam? Every fucking time?”
(Should hate Dean. But Dean killing Ba- no, no, killing angels, humans killing angels, that was old news. People killing people. Not a surprise. The same old thing Gabriel had run from in the first place, following him here. Death, plodding along in the dusty tracks of his wagon wheels.)
Sam’s brow furrowed, but his eyes lit up, like a dog who’d caught the scent, launching himself happily onto the trail of reasonable argument. “Well, we fight back, but they do kill us, Gabriel.”
“First time one of you lot saw an angel, what did you do?” Gabriel drawled, mockery or bitterness or something.
Sam opened his mouth to retort something innocent and wronged and naïve, but he didn’t get any words out before his face crumpled up. Memory. Going over your memories and realising, no, that actually happened this way.
Gabriel was right, then. An angel hadn’t been the aggressor. An angel had simply been there, been seen, and someone had decided that was a monster, that meant aggression.
Hardly a surprise.
“And you think they should just forgive that and hope you little rascals don’t do it again?” Gabriel murmured, dragged his tongue along the inside of his forearm (tasted like straw dust, like everything else, but hey, the gesture looked animalistic, and it made Sam recoil). Then he grinned, sharp and white. “You’re not the only ones who grew up surrounded by monsters, kiddo. Angels are hunters too, and guess what? They talk to each other. I’m guessing they learned pretty damn quick that humans are the harshest monsters of all.”
Sam flinched, like Gabriel had punched him in the throat, and looked away. That should have felt satisfying.
His mouth was open, a bit. He was very young, and bemused, and there was still sleep in the corners of his eyes. Facing down a monster in the barn, and determined to make sense of it.
Gabriel would not think of him warmly.
He thought savagely instead, of pushing him down onto the barn floor and mouthing at his neck. Showing him, hard and fast, that his body could be a sexual thing. Pinning those lanky muscled forearms over his head, licking into that puzzled mouth, locking his fingers hard into the mess of hair. Pushing open his legs. The kid might even let him, if he went about it right.
His body shied away from the thought. Stupid fucking body.
(Men, abstract faceless men. Men were easier than women in some ways, more complicated in others. Women were more likely to let Gabriel set the terms, take charge, be the romantic secret dashing lover who’d ravish them attentively and be gone next week. Men, though - with a man someone fucked someone, or there was an exchange of the services of hand and mouth. If Gabriel was doing the fucking, all well and good; or if the other guy was spread out under him in the dark, so Gabriel could position him, and Gabriel could ride him. But if his hands began to wander - if a lover got thoughtful and creative - it was only a matter of time before a finger slipped further back into wetness, found a yielding and a hot welcome where it shouldn’t. So Gabriel controlled every touch, made it safe, even if sometimes he longed to be filled up and screwed properly, where he ached for it, not just the way a pure man would take it.)
(Sam wouldn’t be hard and brutal. Sam would be careful, and earnest, and -)
Hell. That was a worm of thought to stamp on viciously, grind under the heel of your boot. If Gabriel had had boots.
Sam would look at Gabriel like he was a freak, the way he kept not doing now. Provincial innocents, the lot of them. Probably hadn’t even heard of the prostate. Or the clitoris.
“Yeah?” Sam was looking at him again, big wide serious reproachful eyes like he knew everything and got to judge. “And where were you in all this?”
Gabriel bared his teeth and laughed, raw. “Running.”
“Why?”
Death. Red on silver blades, angels dying, demons rising from the wet earth. Beloved faces turning cold and brittle. Brothers and cousins becoming tools. Or targets. Becoming, becoming. Changing into things. All of them, rising up to snap at him, set loose in his mind now where he’d stamped down on them for years, kept them back, set loose by a knife in his shoulder and friends’ faces turned cold and straw that stank of animals and Dean’s voice saying, saying…
“… Fuck off.”
He could lay his hands on Sam and kill him. He could see the spot on Sam’s neck where just a bit of pressure, just a shove and a twist… that shadow right there, that skin, just above that mole. It would be easy. It must be easy - he’d never killed anything with a soul before, but everyone else seemed to find it easy. Maybe Gabriel was the freak.
He could kill Sam, and see him look horrified and surprised and sad with the last flash of light in his eyes, and then Gabriel would be a monster. Become a monster. Change.
Maybe that would be simpler. Easier.
(Running away had looked easier. It hadn’t been. And he had only ended up in an animal pen, and the clamour of dogs with Gabriel’s magic in their veins, and Dean’s knife, and Dean’s laugh, casual and easy and happy in the Roadhouse, slinging his arm around Sam’s shoulders and loving him. Not broken, that boy. A monster. A person. Simple, for him. And Balthazar’s throat gaping, a wide red mouth)
Hells. He was shaking all over, rustling in the dark, and -
“Gabriel.” Sam was pushing in, stern, earnest. Closer, hands on the bars like he was a simpleton who’d forgotten what had happened last time he got that close, touching Gabriel’s cage, the thing that kept him from getting out, laying his own hands on Sam’s body or anyone’s or hell, flying home, hah, as if there was a home anymore. “You swore, every time you came through our gates, to ‘deal with truth and integrity’. And not to ‘admit or compass the entry of any creature supernatural or preternatural past the walls’.”
Guest code.
Gabriel’s flailing mind seized on that like a terrier on a rat. Relief at its solidity. Then incredulity. The fucking guest code? Now? As if he was a person to stand and fall not by his body and blood but by his actions? By people’s rules, by the petty little laws they made for themselves? The petty little laws he swore to every time… swore every time he came through the gates, yes.
Because every place, every people, they were all different. You had to be a chameleon. You had to be a person by their standards, everywhere, everywhere different.
Like everyone who came through those gates wasn’t an alien. All chameleons. Honesty? You could tell the truth, so far as it went, but you could never be honest.
He sneered.
Sam, for some reason, looked hurt, genuinely hurt, for the first time. His shoulders pulled in, like he was trying to make himself almost normal human size.
“Was any of it real, Gabriel? Anything you said to us?”
Fuck.
Where the hell did that kid get off, looking at Gabriel like he’d expected something better? What was he even talking about?
“All pedlars are frauds and scoundrels, aren’t they?” he drawled, and tried not to look at Sam’s hands, tried not to think about the warmth and the weight of them on his body, keeping him steady, telling him he was there. About the touch of a friend. Of a brother.
“I don’t know. I mean, sure, some of them will talk up some dodgy gadget like nobody’s business, but you always… I don’t know.” Sam’s fingers tightened on the bars then let go, uncertain. “You seemed like we could trust you,” he finished, and trailed off, voice low and halting, like that wasn’t really what he meant but he didn’t know what he wanted to say anyway, and…
Gabriel’s throat went stupidly tight, furiously tight.
(He’d slept with Marie again the next year too, and it had been good: friendly, easy. Wry, and kind of sweet. She had left the bed halfway through to punch down the dough and come back with floury hands, and Gabriel had sprawled lewdly all over her clean sheets and made all the stupid puns he could think of about rising bread and sex, and she had laughed and pounced on him and he had caught her hands in his and kissed them as she’d settled easily on top of him and taken him inside her.)
“Was it really…” Sam started, and stopped, and chewed on his lip, and hid behind his stupid floppy hair. “Were you really just… being a pedlar?”
Hell. Gabriel had no idea what was going on in that useless fluff-covered head of his, but why couldn’t he stop poking Gabriel with it? And the world was rocking, sickly and slow and disorienting.
He threw Sam what he hoped was a scathing look and began to pace, just daring the floor to pitch and send him sprawling. Whatever Sam saw, it made him perk up, lean in, and drape himself over the bars, all long limbs and hopeful beam.
“So are you actually half human,” he asked, with that shy eagerness creeping back in like it was any other day in the Roadhouse and he was asking after exotic stories, “or was that just…?”
A lie?
Gabriel flicked his wings, a sarcastic little flutter in the confined space.
“Nope. All angel, baby.”
“But would that even be possible?” the kid chattered. “Cross-breeding - um, interbreeding, or whatever you’d call it?”
Seriously? This, now?
“I’ve heard stories,” he allowed, grudging, and was hit with a sudden flash of sensation, pulling out on the verge of completion and spilling himself over some woman’s (any woman’s) thigh or belly as she lay, gasping and sated below him. Caution. “Could be true.”
“Wow.” Sam. Yes. Sam was there. He was in the barn on a lurching floor and Sam was there, still there, with this silly little grin like he knew how ridiculous he looked with all that hair, shaking his head. “I’m actually talking to an angel.”
Was this the kid who’d locked an arm around Gabriel’s neck five days ago and snarled in his ear and held him trapped for the knife?
Straw scattered away from Gabriel’s feet. A stone rose out of the ground to stub his toe, but if he winced he’d fall so he snarled at it and stumbled on. The end of a lap: he pivoted on his heel, wings squashing up against the bars and wall as he turned.
“Try not to explode with joy,” he suggested helpfully.
“Can I,” Sam said, warm and eager, “could I actually touch...?”
Gabriel’s body went tight and took over, panicfuryflighttrapped. It flinched back, caught his foot and lurched queasily sideways, got his back solidly against the wall somehow and glared at Sam’s outstretched fingers.
The fingers curled up, and pulled back.
“Right,” Sam said, and now he just sounded sad. “Sorry.”
The wings pressed in hard on either side of him, air clawing thinly in his chest, and his face furrowed up into a snarl, at himself, at the air, at the bars that kept him safe from grasping hands.
(Raphael, he remembered, Raphael and his - or her - bitter longing to be noticed by Michael and Lucifer, and his-or-her perpetual indecision, from one year to the next, over which gender to wear. Raphael, worried and fretful because Gabriel had spent the morning with Castiel, showing him how to catch frogs, instead of with Raphael. Or another time, perhaps, because Gabriel had given to Castiel instead of to Raphael the little cakes that Gabriel had conned out of a grown-up, with his big innocent eyes and his hand trustingly squeezing theirs - women always fell for that one, for the tiny warm hand nestled inside theirs - playing the sweet little baby archangel card to the full. Raphael, for whatever reason, picking on Castiel when he seemed to be alone. Balthazar, slinking out from nowhere to befuddle the teenager with too many words and too many meanings.
And the pair of them later, against any other kids who might want to pick on them for being the brothers of an archangel, of a child whom all the adults fawned over and whom they couldn’t touch. Balthazar and Castiel, each always knowing where the other was, gradually making themselves untouchable with all their strange array of tricks and traps and little magics they made up, just enough to make other kids wary of revenge. Gabriel, too different, making his little brothers different. Changing them. Making them into targets.
Dogs. Hounds’ voices, loud, too loud, ringing through his head, through Bal-)
Sam’s voice. Sam talking.
“So you knew Cas, huh.” Not scared. Just… embarrassed. Trying to go for idle chit-chat. “Did you know the other one? His brother?”
… Idle. Right.
Sam, with his home and his brother, and the way they bickered all the time but never had to actually say anything for the other one to understand.
Sam grimaced a bit, under Gabriel’s stare. “Um. Okay. Yeah, Dean’s kind of a dick. Sorry. I’m sorry you had to hear like that. But really,” justifying, reasonable, like it had just been some distant acquaintance, like reason could ever cut it, “he would’ve killed me. And if it’d been your little brother whose life was on the line, you’d know -”
“Don’t,” Gabriel got out, strangled and harsh because there was no air in his chest. “Don’t you dare talk to me about brothers, Winchester.”
Gabriel could tear out Dean’s throat. He could hold him still and press his fingers in, one nail at a time, feel the skin give a little, nudge and scrape at it until it let him through, sink into the hot flesh under it, take Dean’s windpipe in his hand from the inside and tug it gently out. Smile at him while he did it.
The idea left him hollow. Not pleasant, not unpleasant. It just didn’t do anything.
“I just don’t get it, man,” Sam was saying, angry, almost gentle, persistent as a dog worrying at an itch. “I don’t get how you can just… leave your home behind you.”
That, though. That did something. That hit Gabriel hard and devastating, like the bars weren’t even there to keep him locked away from himself.
“I am not a man, Sam,” he muttered, half a sneer, and saw Sam’s little moue of frustration, like Gabriel was just being difficult.
Served him right.
Gabriel could twist his own words around, force their other meaning into Sam’s face, force him to respond. The kid’s eyes kept skipping to the wings, fascinated, not scared - why, why would he not look scared? - but hah, Gabriel could almost taste his revulsion if he knew about the womb and the cunt. Gabriel possessed monstrous appendages, and they made him intriguing; but the fact that he had between his legs what every woman Sam knew had too, that would make him a monster.
He could be a monster. Bare his teeth. Force Sam to let him be a monster. To let him fucking go already, to break into pieces -
(The dense cloying scent of his own heat. Lucifer and Michael, filling him up, one after another after another, sweet and inexorable and adoring, strong and supple inside him, calling him brother. Not leaving him for days, covering him hot and thick with that affection that he was almost sure they felt, other times: it was always promised, always implied, always deferred because their eyes had slid to one another’s again and the rest of the world had vanished. And Gabriel with it, always just the sweet little baby archangel.)
“Hey. Um.”
Sam was there, closer. Smelling human, and sleepy, and warm, and a bit like sweat, and a bit like Missouri’s honey cakes. Not letting him go. Stubborn. He was leaning into the bars, one arm right through, holding it out to Gabriel. Offering, like Gabriel couldn’t just grab it and rip it out of its socket, turn Sam into Grendel, the intruder in the night.
This one unimportant kid in this one unimportant town who actually cared what became of him (what he became). Why? Why?
Numbskull.
Gabriel wetted his lips. “Wow. An arm,” he noticed, because apparently his sarcasm was broken right now.
Sam huffed. “It’s a hug, actually,” he said, a bit of teenage diffidence clinging to the shrug of his shoulders, and Gabriel’s eyes skittered over the little scar on the top of his forefinger, the plaited leather of the bracelet looped around his wrist, the scattering of dark hair over the long muscles of his forearm. “Well. Half a hug. Unless, y’know. Unless you feel like coming over here, and. Um.”
Gabriel could see what it would look like, the savaged sinews and the gleaming wet bone at the end, the fingers jerking to a stop. He could hear the sounds it would make, smell it, the heavy tang of it. Feel it on his fingers. If he touched Sam. His hands, his own hands, bloodied with the death that followed him, always everywhere killing, people turning on people on friends on family and shit, how could he possibly touch Sam?
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
It twisted in his throat, like the words wanted to choke him
Sam blinked, but his hand didn’t waver. “Because you’re not a monster,” he said easily, clear and steady and stubborn, and hell, yes, yes, Gabriel was, they all were, but arguing against Sam was pointless, hopeless. Not a monster? It was either very profound or very stupid, and Gabriel couldn’t decide which, and Sam was looking at him with those soft determined eyes, and the world was pitching drunkenly around him, so he gave up and put his hand in Sam’s.
… Skin. Warm skin on skin. Blood beating strong and live under the surface, against him.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fucking fuck. Fuck all Winchesters and their stupid hair and their stupid fucking eyes and their self-righteousness and their earnest fucking certainty. Because there, there were all the fucking emotions in the warmth of Sam’s hand and the way his fingers curled around the bones of Gabriel’s, and Gabriel hadn’t wanted them after all, because they were too fucking much and fuck Sam Winchester for taking away his ability to fucking swear properly.
(The third year, the third year. Marie had welcomed Gabriel to her bed again, and put nightshade in his cup. It hadn’t hurt him, of course - weird taste, but he hadn’t known what it was. Not until she looked at him strangely, paler and paler over the hours as he didn’t die, didn’t convulse, didn’t vomit or sweat, then made some excuse and returned with three men - well, two men and a boy - to kill him.
They hadn’t been murderers, none of them - the boy was white, lip red with blood where he was biting it - but they’d been desperate. Gabriel had had to fight, fight properly, and prove himself far from human.
He had asked her why, later, as the boy stood slumped against the wall with his hand over his eyes, and his father lay unconscious, and his uncle sat against the well with his hands loose on the dirt beside him and stared at the sky like a man who had cried all his tears. She, she hadn’t kept out of the fight: she had blood running down the side of her face and was cradling a broken wrist that he didn’t offer to mend.
We needed it, she had said, as simply as that. My sister’s children are hungry, and you carry in your wagon more than enough to keep them. We needed it.
He hadn’t understood it, then or later. He’d thought there must have been something more, something he had done to her to earn it, to earn hatred. Was the latest baby, perhaps, not really her sister’s after all? Was it only three months old? Had he not been so careful as he’d thought, and did she think he owed her? Did he have a son or a daughter starving back there, with a killer for a mother?
But her eyes had been tired, clear of anger and clear of shame. Only “we needed it.”
Only humans - only people - being monsters again, for reasons of their own. Because, sooner or later, they always did.)
“Gabriel? Gabriel!”
Sam.
Sam, tugging gently on his hand. Sam, wide-eyed and worried like he thought he’d done something wrong. Sam, here and now, warm behind cold bars, and Gabriel swore unimaginatively and stepped forward to grab handfuls of his shirt and bury his face in it and shake into pieces. The weight of Sam’s arms crept carefully around his shoulders, nudging in awkwardly under and over the wings, and just for now it didn’t feel like a trap. It felt like the one steady sure place in a wave-tossed ship. It felt like a fucking hug.
(Balthazar, at Castiel’s seventh birthday, vicious gleam of teeth and snide curl of his voice telling Gabriel that this year he wasn’t invited to the secret party they always had for birthdays, just the three of them. Brothers only, he’d said, and that Gabriel was Michael’s and Lucifer’s and Raphael’s brother now, so he should go and play with them instead since he liked them better anyway.
Gabriel had looked down at Balthazar’s fingers clinging tight and white to his wrist, then up again into his face. For the first time, then, he’d used his superior strength on one of his brothers, and it was to break away from his touch.
Later that year, when Balthazar had turned nine, Gabriel hadn’t come to that either, even though Castiel had set a place for him. He’d been busy, he really had; but maybe he hadn’t needed to be.
Balthazar hadn’t spoken to him for weeks.
The next year, Gabriel hadn’t been able to see Castiel turn eight. Castiel’s birthday was in July, and for the first time that year Gabriel didn’t go with his family on the summer roamings. He was twelve, and he had to stop being a child and start learning to be an archangel.)
Hell. Balthazar. Laconic, snide, brilliant, dead. How had that happened? It still made no sense, he couldn’t work it out, and Gabriel was stuck in here with iron bars pressing into his face and chest, shaking so badly that the world was spinning, bawling like some kid into a kid’s shirt.
Gabriel had never been close to Balthazar, had he? Had he even tried, or had he always just assumed - assumed he’d be there until -
Sam’s enormous hand spread out hesitantly between Gabriel’s shoulder blades, callouses dragging over the scattered little down feathers. Sincere. Solid and there, and incomprehensible. Soaking warmth through his skin, deep into Gabriel’s bones, warmth and the kind of weariness that might let him sleep, eventually.
The same hands that had pinned him for the blade and the butt of the gun five days ago, hunter’s hands, brutal and strong. The hands that had taken his horse’s reins from him when he’d arrived and tossed him a wet rag for his face and hands, as Sam had laughed something about the road-dust all over him and looking like a golem. The hands that had clapped him on the shoulder, clapped Dean on the shoulder, taken mugs of beer from Ellen and slid them across the table to Gabriel and everyone else there, as Sam had joined the party, biting his lip, eyes shining, eager to hear Gabriel’s stories. Faces of friends - not his friends, not really, but each other’s friends, each other’s family, warm and sure and happy, letting him join in for a day. Letting him have that illusion, until they’d turned on him.
Dogs. Dogs, wide-mouthed happy deadly dogs bearing Gabriel’s magic, Gabriel’s blood, in the very script of their being. A foundation that Singer had built on somehow to make them so much worse. To kill. Gabriel’s blood, and Gabriel’s magic, on the blades of their knives and the heads of their arrows and the shot of their guns, shoved into his cousins’ hearts. Slashed across Balthazar’s throat.
Targets. Making his own brothers into targets. Dragging war along with him.
Balthazar, Balthazar, Balthazar again. The first time he’d summoned his sword, eight years old and laughing, and their father dismayed that he’d managed it so early, and Gabriel charged with teaching him how to handle it without hurting himself.
Balthazar again, at twelve, terrified and staunch, standing over an injured Castiel with his sword in hand and a hungry skinwalker circling them in the shape of a lion - a scene glimpsed in a moment as Gabriel had pulled in his wings and arrowed down out of the sky, fast and furious. The rapid beat of Balthazar’s heart against his collarbone once it lay dead, Castiel’s breath hot and wet on his cheek, wild hysterical giggles all around at some stupid joke to make it feel normal, and all thirty of their fingers leaving bruises in each other’s flesh.
Balthazar, fifteen, drawing his sword for the first time against another angel. Laughing still, but the laughter had become a shield, face pinched and grim.
Gabriel sobbed, great wet tight-chested gasps, no control, no dignity, heart seizing and racing inside him. Because it hurt, it fucking hurt, all of it, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t, there was nothing he could do with that. Nothing but let it all go and run mad, run savage.
“Hey. Hey, now.”
Awkward. Warm, and worried, and a bit scared.
Sam’s hand tightened on the back of Gabriel’s neck, let go, and slipped up into his hair to cradle his skull, like he was something delicate, something that Sam might break, might have already broken. The other hand slid down a bit, down Gabriel’s back and up again. Petting. Soothing. Not too far down, pausing at the top, apologising for touching.
So much for dignity.
Gabriel dragged in a breath, and another, but they were ragged and wet.
“Fuck,” he gulped out fervently.
Sam laughed a bit, breathless. Gabriel decided, uncharitably, that it was totally a nervous giggle.
Not thinking about anything. Batten down the thoughts. Weather the storm. Another minute, two, five, and the sobbing was even enough that he could fight it down and pretend it wasn’t there.
He stepped back, and Sam let his arms fall.
“Hey,” the kid said, yet again. He sounded kind of pleased. Warm, like they were best friends. Like they could just stitch each other up and keep each other human. “You with me?”
Too close. Too dangerous.
“No,” Gabriel pointed out sharply, not meeting his eyes, and put out one hand to lean against the wall. “I’m locked in a cage.” He scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, then the back of his forearm, for good measure. Mostly it meant he smeared dust-mud across his face and arm.
Sam made a sound that probably meant he’d rolled his eyes or something. Gabriel saw, from the corner of his eye, his hands lift like they might push between the bars again, reach in to touch. But they didn’t: they stopped, to curl carefully around the metal.
Good.
Gabriel’s walls were broken. No skin left to him, just raw flesh, exposed to the air, humiliated. And Sam had looked right in and seen him, and now he wasn’t looking away.
Cage bars would have to do instead.
“Really, though. Would water help? Washing water and a bowl and all, I mean. And something to help your shoulder. And, um. Books?”
Gabriel looked away, down the shadowy, dusty length of his little prison. Wall, floor, high roof, bars, straw. Nothing to do but sit and stew, and ignore Bobby Singer’s attempts to trick him into talking, and wait for them to do whatever they decided to do.
He turned away, wings shadowing his face because Sam’s eyes were still on him, and he didn’t reply.