Disclaimer: Supernatural was created by Eric Kripke and is, as far as I can tell, owned by him, Kripke Enterprises, and Warner Brothers Television. In any event, it isn't owned by me, and this story is for fun and not for profit.
Author's Notes: This is an AU that explores possible meanings behind Lucifer saying "I know where your heart truly lies" to Gabriel in "Hammer of the Gods," each one probably crazier than the last. It will contain some not-so-pleasant things (which should be obvious from the pairings), including non-con.
I use some dialogue from "Hammer of the Gods" in this chapter. I didn't copy and paste all of it, as that would be boring, but just used enough to create a solid foundation for Gabriel's introspection and my jumping off point from canon. Future chapters generally won't have so much show dialogue.
"Maybe those freaks in there aren't your blood," Dean told him with all the self-righteousness of Michael and none of the understanding, "but they are your family." Gabriel really did not want to have this conversation, but Dean just would not shut up. "Now they're gonna die in there, without you."
And really, for Gabriel, it all came down to one thing. A simple, unwavering truth that Dean, of all people, really should have understood.
"I can't kill my brother."
Dean looked at him with such moral indignation that Gabriel really should have smote him where he stood. "Can't or won't?"
Both! he wanted to shout. Honestly, Dean had made a deal to save his brother, had willingly gone to hell just so his brother could live. And Sam! Sam had tried everything he knew how to try and then some when Gabriel had killed Dean for good on that Wednesday, and he had single-mindedly tracked Gabriel down and stopped at nothing to get his brother for even a few short months before Dean boarded the crazy train straight to the pit.
How could either of them honestly ask Gabriel to actually kill his own brother with his own hands, when neither of the Winchesters could even let the other stay dead when someone else did the killing for them?
And yeah, sure, Gabriel really did care about the other pagan gods. Well, some of them anyway, and some a lot more than others. (Fuck Baldur. Kali certainly had.) But he had only been one of them for like a few thousand years, tops. Lucifer had been his brother for countless—literally countless!—eons before Earth or humans or pagan gods or anything else had even existed.
So what if Lucifer had turned the last fifty thousand years or so into an enormous black hole of despair and fratricide and general suck assery? He was still Gabriel's brother, and fifty thousand years to an archangel was like fifteen thousandths of a second of Dean Winchester's puny human existence.
Gabriel couldn't kill Lucifer. It had nothing to do with physical prowess or magical mojo (although those were questionable) and everything to do with the fact that Gabriel could not kill his brother without completely wrecking his own psyche while he was at it. Then the world would just be trading their evil overlord Satan for their new evil overlord Gabriel, because any archangel who'd gone Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs was a major danger to anyone and everyone and everything around him.
And Gabriel wouldn't kill Lucifer because he just didn't want to. Period. End of story. Put a lid on it and zip it into one of those vacuum sealed bags and punt it into Purgatory and give it to one of the Leviathans to swallow, because the Winchesters would have an easier time finding their answer there than getting Gabriel to kill his brother.
Except, of course, that Gabriel had inherited Lucifer's damnable curiosity and penchant for getting into world-destroying kinds of trouble. It might (probably would) be the death of him, but now that he was so close he couldn't resist seeing Lucifer. It had been tens of thousands of years since he'd seen any of his brothers. (He just meant Luci and Mikey and Raphe, of course. The seraphim and angels and all the other Winged Ass Monkeys might as well be separate species, so different were they from archangels.)
Gabriel had never gone back to Heaven after leaving the first time, because he'd known that he'd never have been able to leave again if either Michael or Raphael had caught him. Leaving the first time had been the hardest thing he'd ever done in his billions of years of existence; he couldn't have done it again, especially not if his older brothers had a chance to try to talk him out of it.
So long story short, if he'd just taken his own damned advice and blown Jonestown before Lucifer had shown up, then he'd have been able to ignore the whole situation and keep his head down for a little while later until one of his dickbag brothers won. But he hadn't. He'd waited. And as soon as the fox had landed in the henhouse, Gabriel's Grace had gone haywire with the want and the feels and the longing and the pure, unadulterated need.
And then there was his brother. His brother! Right in front of him.
Okay, so his vessel looked like it'd been run over by a Zamboni, but Gabriel could see past that to his brother's true form underneath. Okay, so Lucifer's true form was dark where it had once been the brightest in Heaven, and okay, so it kind of hurt Gabriel in some visceral way somewhere deep down inside to see Lucifer's pitch black feathers where once they had been even more colorful and beautiful than all the dawns put together.
But it was still every bit his brother. If Dean hadn't been okay with killing his brother just because he'd drunk demon blood out of some lady's brain stem and let the devil out of his cage, and Sam hadn't been okay with killing his brother just because he'd broken the first seal that started this whole clusterfuck in the first place, then how could they expect Gabriel to be okay with killing his brother just because he was…
Okay, so Gabriel's brother was Satan.
That didn't stop every ounce of Gabriel's Grace and every follicle of his vessel's skin and every plumule and barbule of every feather on every one of his six golden wings from quivering with longing just to be in Lucifer's presence.
He'd resisted the pull, of course. Called Lucifer on his bullshit and called him a great big bag of dicks. It wasn't like it wasn't one million percent true. But then Lucifer had used that tone.
"Gabriel… if you're doing this for Michael…"
It was the same tone he'd used when Gabriel had been little more than a newborn, when he'd clung to Lucifer's wingtips with all the ferocity a miniature archangel could muster and refused to go with Raphael as he'd been meant to. That's how it worked: Michael raised Lucifer, and Lucifer raised Raphael, and Raphael should have raised Gabriel. But Gabriel hadn't existed for a full millisecond before he'd realized that Raphael was a sack full of boring. Lucifer had taken Gabriel's affections in stride. He'd probably just wanted another chance to rear someone with some kind of personality, since he'd failed so miserably with Raphe. (Gabriel was probably being a little unfair to Raphael, but only a little.)
Lucifer's tone infuriated Gabriel.
"Screw him!" he snapped, cutting his older brother off mid-sentence. "If he were standing here, I'd shiv his ass too!"
And Lucifer had the—the—the unmitigated gall to be angry on Michael's behalf?! As if Gabriel were the disloyal one?!
Gabriel hadn't wanted to argue. He'd known, of course, that seeing Lucifer could only have ended in an argument and probably in his own untimely end. But he hadn't wanted it. He'd hoped for more.
Argue they did, though, until Lucifer had addressed him with such sincere sorrow, almost whispering, "Brother, don't make me do this."
The corner of Gabriel's mouth turned up just the smallest bit. "No one makes us do anything."
Not even their God, apparently. Just ask Lucifer.
Gabriel was all ready to admit defeat and give up and retreat back to witness protection, or at least whatever new version of it he could scrape together on such short notice. It was all set. Lucifer would be arrogant enough to think that Gabriel was still using the old tricks his older brother had taught him, of course, and he'd go for the decoy while Gabriel made his escape.
But then he had to say it, damn him. All "Oh, Gabriel, I know where your heart truly lies," and Gabriel read so much between those lines that he could hardly stay upright.
He should have let Lucifer turn for the decoy behind him. He should have hoped that his replica kept his brother distracted for long enough that Gabriel could make a clean getaway, then ditch his longtime vessel (as much as he loved it) and fly as fast and as far away as three pairs of wings could take him.
Instead he used his wings to cross the few feet between them and grab Lucifer's arm just as his brother was turning to face the decoy behind him. Lucifer was obviously startled, but before he could react Gabriel had planted his other hand firmly on his brother's chest over his heart.
"My heart lies here, where it always has," he said in a much stronger voice than he'd imagined. "With Samael."
He thought he might have actually broken Satan. His brother's cold Grace flared darker in anger for a moment and then abruptly deflated into something small and almost contrite. Well, small in relative terms, of course, meaning that it had gone from the size of four Yankee Stadiums to the size of maybe three Yankee Stadiums. Archangels couldn't contract much more than that even in the purely ethereal dimension their Graces usually inhabited.
The point was that Lucifer clearly hadn't heard his true name in almost as long as Gabriel, which was unsurprising. Only other archangels would have had he balls to go against Father's orders and call him Samael instead of Lucifer, which was the title his brother had been forced to embrace after he'd been tossed out of Heaven and his name no longer spoken. Mikey and Raphe wouldn't have gone against their Father's wishes, of course, but Gabriel didn't have that problem. He hadn't been struck with any lightning bolts yet, so he assumed that Father really didn't give a shit after all.
The two archangels had gone from one brother intent on murdering the other to peering uncomfortably into each others eyes in calm too still to be natural. And Gabriel knew that Dean had been right that he had been too afraid to face his family, but he had to accept finally that it wasn't just because he didn't want to watch his brothers kill each other.
It was because he wouldn't have survived intact had Michael killed Lucifer, and he wouldn't have been able to say no had Lucifer asked him to stand against Michael, no matter how much it would have killed him to stand with one brother against another.
It was a truth he'd always run from. He'd run because he hadn't wanted to stand against any of his brothers, but he would have done it for Lucifer even if it had wounded him in ways that would only scar mentally. Gabriel loved Lucifer more than Father. More than Mikey or Raphe. More than the humans and more than the pagan gods. And, Father help him, he loved Lucifer more than he loved himself.
The ass-hat had that effect on people, apparently.
Lucifer broke the silence. "I haven't heard that name in…" he began, then trailed of as if he didn't know how to complete the thought.
"Your name," emphasized Gabriel. "It's not 'that name' like it's what the kids at school used to call you before you lost weight and outgrew your ginger phase. It's your name."
In another dimension, Lucifer's obsidian wings flexed in indecision and mild discomfort.
"I am not Samael anymore, brother. But I am Lucifer still," he said in that same pleading voice he'd used to beg Gabriel not to try to fight him. "Gabriel, join me."
Gabriel's wings flared and he reflexively tightened his grasp on his brother's body so much that he would have torn apart a mortal man.
"Will you kill me if I say no?"
Lucifer glared at him as if it were a ridiculous question. "No!"
"You were going to kill me like thirty seconds ago!" Gabriel pointed out quite reasonably.
His brother reached out decisively and wrapped his vessel's hand in the razor-sharp feathers of Gabriel's uppermost wing. The gesture was absurdly intimate and nearly made Gabriel accidentally cause a cataclysmic shift in the Wabash Valley Fault System that ran under the state.
"I thought that you had chosen humans over me, and still I would have let you go if you had tried to walk away. I haven't wept in fifty thousand years, but I would have wept if you had forced me to kill you." Lucifer tugged his wing again and offered a smirk. "Besides, it was totally more like ninety seconds ago. Stop being so dramatic."
Of course there was a lot more to hammer out between them, so much more that it almost boggled even Gabriel's mind to think about it, but he had always been in danger of saying yes if only his brother had ever asked. And that was before he had ever experienced things like jealousy and lust firsthand. It didn't seem like such a horrible idea to fall when he hadn't been home in thousands of years anyway.
"Okay, whatever," he agreed flippantly, "but only if you promise to keep me elbow deep in Butterfingers and Tootsie Pops. Oh, and only if you promise not to get all smitey when I tell you about the Winchesters."
Citations: The dialogue from "Hammer of the Gods" belongs to Eric Kripke, Andrew abb, Daniel Loflin, and David Reed.
Author's Notes: Yeah, I am a firm wishful thinker in the school of Gabriel Lives. I just can't believe that after thousands of years living as Loki, away from Lucifer, that he would have been dumb enough to use a trick that Lucifer had taught him. But a trick based on tricking Lucifer into thinking he would? That I can see.
I sometimes play kind of fast and loose with various theological canons with respect to the identifies of angels and other things, but that really shouldn't bother anyone who watches Supernatural. Samael doesn't really exist as such in Christian lore, only in Talmudic lore and the like (i.e. primarily Rabbinic Judaism). Samael was a satan and did a lot of the things, such as tempting Eve and seducing Lilith, that Christians later attributed to their idea of the Satan, which of course later became associated with the devil and the name Lucifer.
I just thought, hey, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Lucifer—one of these things is not like the others. So I decided that Samael is his name and Lucifer (meaning light-bringer or morning dawn) is just a title, which substituted for his real name after he fell.