They call me Gabriel.
And I don't think you really understand, small and broken and fragile as you are, everything that Gabriel stands for. Everything that Gabriel means. All the hurt, all the lies, all the joy and the pain and the bittersweet nostalgia and guilt that is Gabriel. Every last faked laugh and strained grin and the one blinding tapestry of hope slowly eaten away until there was only one tiny thread left and it snapped.
How could you, though? You're only human, after all. How could you even come close to grasping everything I am, everything I was, everything I ever will be?
You don't see it.
But then again, you have a tendency to not see things, even when they're laid out in front of you, bare and vulnerable and completely and utterly obvious. Thick-headed, stubborn, moronic, broken, flawed, and yet so pitifully hopeful- don't you know that it's going to tear you apart from the inside, little boy, like it did to me? Do you think that I've never been the host of hope? Of course I have. Faith and hope and trust and love and that's all gone now and in their places is a giant gaping black hole.
I'm trying to do you a favour, you know, but you never listen. It'll be your damnation, that will of yours. Be careful; that's a double-edged sword you're wielding.
I try to make you smarten up. I really do. I try in the form of words and pictures and pain and anger but no matter what I do you don't listen.
I wish you'd listen.
Maybe things might have turned out differently if you had.
I wish they had.
I wish it hadn't come to this. (You don't know this, but in his self-centred hypocrisy Gabriel also despises fighting. Or at least fighting within his family. Anyone but his family.)
And now I am alone.