Disclaimer: I own nothing, etc etc.

The Greatest of These

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

In the days when man first walked upon the Earth, unclothed and free from sin, God turned to His four archangels, the first of His creations, and said onto them:

"These sons and daughters of Man are to be my children, and they shall be the most beloved of all my creations, onto the ending of time. Love them, my faithful servants, as you love me."

Lucifer, the first and most glorious of the archangels, bent his knee before God and replied, "I obey you, Father. I shall guide them with the light of Truth, that they may never stray from the path of righteousness."

Then Michael, the mightiest of the archangels, also bent his knee before God and replied, "I obey you, Father. I shall protect them with the sword of Faith, that they never need fear the darkness of the void."

After Michael, Raphael, the loveliest and purist of the archangels, also bent his knee before God and replied, "I obey you, Father. I shall sing to them the song of Hope, that their spirits may never wither and fade."

But the last of all the archangels did not approach and kneel before God. Gabriel, who was neither as glorious, nor as mighty, nor as or pure as his brothers, only stretched out his hands in supplication.

"Father, I cannot love these new creations as I love You," the shining being pleaded to the Creator of all. "For my love for You is too great, and I have not the guidance of Truth, nor the strength of Faith, nor the serenity of Hope to give that same love onto another."

But God merely smiled at His creation, and said, "Gabriel, the youngest of my four—you do not have the Truth of Lucifer, or the Faith of Michael, or the Hope of Raphael. This I know. But you will find that the Love with which you have been gifted is greater than all these things, and from Love will spring Truth, Faith, and Hope. Now go forth, and obey my will."

And so Gabriel bent his knee before God and replied, "I obey you, Father."

And if any of the multitudes surrounding the Throne saw the tear of golden light on the face of the youngest and least glorious of the archangels, they assumed that it was a tear of Love.

None, save the Lord Himself, knew it was a tear of loss.

And not long after that, Ladies, is when the shit hit the fan.

You see, Dad's new little golden boy, Adam, really couldn't keep it in his pants. Metaphorically speaking, since he didn't have pants yet. But wowie, that man had fetishes like you wouldn't believe. If it moved, he boinked it.

And good old Lucifer was something of a prude in those days. He just couldn't stand seeing Dad's new little darlings acting up and getting away with it. But every time he went to tattle on this human or that human for getting down and dirty with a goat, Dad turned him away and reminded him of his oath to love the hairless monkeys the way he loved Dad.

Lucy…well, if he had teeth back in those days he would have ground them into powder from all that jaw clenching he was doing, but he played along like the good son, bringing the light of Truth to the squabbling mass of humans. Or trying to, anyway. Reading wasn't really in vogue back then.

But one day, Lucifer found out that some of the hairless apes had decided to do the horizontal tango with some angels, and he completely flipped his shit. Never mind that the angels were just as into it as the humans. The mere thought of getting down and dirty had always made that stuck-up brother of mine cross his legs like an elderly librarian, and to find out that the other angels were sullying themselves (quite enthusiastically) with the fleshy, sweaty, grabby humans…Lucy went ballistic. Literally. He marched right up to dear old Dad and said that it was either him or the humans.

And surprise, surprise, Dad chose the humans.

So Lucy threw a giant temper tantrum, yadda yadda, lots of angels were massacred, a third of the heavenly host was cast into the Pit to languish for all eternity, blah blah blah. Ancient history.

Point being, Lucifer broke his vow to God. And Michael, after being forced to fight his brother over the very humans who were mucking up the beauty of Dad's creation with all their sinning…well, Michael would never outright disobey God, but let's just say that love was not in the air when it came to the hairless apes.

So why am I airing out all the dirty family laundry, you ask? Because I'm dead now, and I think it's about time I got some recognition.

Not for being dead, you nincompoop.

For being the lone ranger, the kamikaze pilot, the lucky number, the 25%.

For being the only archangel to keep the last vow we ever made to God.

From time to time, some of the lesser angels liked to pop in to gawk at Gabriel. They always prostrated themselves and claimed that they were there to bask in his glory, but Gabriel knew what they were really after.

They wanted to see just how far the archangel had fallen.

The latest boob popped out of the ether in front of Gabriel's table, and immediately frowned. Gabriel couldn't tell if it was because of the pulsing, screeching music pounding through the darkened club, or because of the half-naked bombshell in the archangel's lap with her tongue down his throat. But Gabriel was very much enjoying that tongue, and couldn't be bothered to peak into the lesser angel's mind to find out what had crawled up his ass and died.

"Sir?"

Gabriel had to give the poor slob points for trying—that had sounded almost sincerely baffled. As if the angel hadn't already gotten an earful of Gabriel's reputation.

Rebel, traitor, lustful satyr….or something catchy like that.

Gabriel reluctantly pulled away from the smoking hot babe in his lap (younger than she pretends to be, hates wine but drinks it anyway, still scared of the dark, wants to forget about the boyfriend at home who hits her) and rolled his eyes at the heavenly dodo bird.

Said dodo bird took that as his cue to approach, glancing hesitantly between the archangel and the human girl curled up against him. She pouted prettily at the interruption. Gabriel gave her a forget-me-not ass pinch, to her delight, and shooed her off to go get drinks.

And if the memory of a handsome stranger with golden eyes happened to fade from her mind as she crossed the dance floor, then that was probably for the best. With the angelic pencil pusher looking at him like that, Gabriel likely wouldn't have time to get lucky that night anyway.

"You look thirsty, amigo. How about a dry martini on the rocks?" Gabriel suggested.

Unlike a human, the angel did not react when a dry martini on the rocks—shaken, not stirred—popped into his hand. He just stood there holding it dumbly, still staring at Gabriel, and damn if it wasn't just about the funniest thing the archangel had seen all night when the angel finally turned his head to look stupidly at the martini glass in his hand.

It only got even better when the angel remained completely unaware of the pointed dunce cap that appeared on top of his neatly coifed hair a moment later.

"Sir, I have a message for you from the Heavenly Host." The holy telemarketer announced gravely.

Gabriel leaned back in the red leather booth and grinned crookedly. This was going to be good.

"Let me guess. My brothers want me to hurry up and get over my rebellious teenage phase, come home, and pick up playing the harp. Am I right?" Gabriel picked up his flute glass of pink champagne and gave it an appreciative sip. A delicate vintage, made even more perfect by the candy syrup mixed in.

"No, sir. Michael has instructed me to tell you that the wheels of the End Times have been set in motion, and that you are not to interfere."

Gabriel froze. Every light in the room flickered, and for a split second the pounding music distorted into an unearthly scream. But then the world righted itself, the lights came back up to full brightness, and Gabriel slowly set down his champagne flute.

"So Dad's come back, has he?" Gabriel asked lightly.

"No sir." The angel replied, as tonelessly as ever, and suddenly the martini in his hand and the dunce cap on his head weren't the least bit funny. Gabriel vanished them without a thought.

"Fine. Message delivered. Get out."

The angel didn't bow, didn't even blink in acknowledgement. At Gabriel's command, he simply flittered out with the soft sound of beating wings.

Gabriel sat motionlessly in the spacious booth long into the night, as still as a granite statue while the club and its human bodies throbbed and writhed around him, heedless of his stillness. Hours after the last partygoer had left, hours after the cleaning man had walked right through the archangel while vacuuming, humming without a care, Gabriel finally stood up and winged out of the club.

The sun was just beginning to rise over the empty city streets, but Gabriel blocked out the opening notes of the dawn symphony. It was always the same day after fucking day, the same otherworldly halleluiah played on a loop like elevator music, and nobody cared because the head honcho who set it up to pipe into his office had quit the company millennia ago.

It wasn't hard to find a human circled by the tiny crows of sin. Every hairy ape had their own polluted cloud cawing and flapping around their head—the only difference was the size of the cloud. Gabriel settled for an investment banker riding his bike to work. A wife and two kids, went to church every Sunday, donated to charity, and dealt heroin on the side.

Gabriel skipped the usually pageantry and deposited the man into a deep, dark pit far from civilization. The archangel whistled and walked away as the man screamed and sobbed for someone, anyone, to save him, to not abandon him alone in the dark.

"Love them, my faithful servants, as you love me."

"Go fuck Yourself," Gabriel whispered.

He tried to grin, tried to turn it into his own cruel little joke that no one would ever notice or appreciate. But the expression felt like wearing a rubber mask; the terrified cries echoing across the desert were too familiar, too raw.

So with a flicker of grace Gabriel winged himself to Bora Bora, before he could hear his own voice calling out from that deep, dark hole.

…

…

…Okay, okay, so maybe it took a while for me to get over myself. Just keep watching.

Gabriel lived high on life for a while after that. Higher, that is. If the world was going to come to an end in just a few short years, the rebel archangel was determined to party like it was going out of style. He treated himself to every decadent dessert and sexy babe he took a fancy to. He threw elaborate parties—or crashed them—bringing performing elephants, pink champagne fountains, conga-line drag queens, world-class marching bands, pool noodles, and (on one particularly memorable occasion) a private jet plane full of sky-diving Elvises. His after-parties were even better; chanting, candles, a sacrificial cow or two, and drunken orgies with a required minimum of 20 people.

He even snapped himself up a pair of Aviators and a rainbow scarf to compliment his color-changing leisure suit. They provided just the right touch when watching serial rapists being chased through a fun house mirror maze by a horde of gigantic purple dildos with teeth.

Because naturally, living high on the hog did not solely involve partying for Gabriel. The partying and the babes were great, no doubt about it. But there was just something about tormenting assholes with angel-delivered karmic retribution that really made his day. Before, the archangel might have bothered with delivering some sort of inspiring message after dealing out just desserts to the scum of the world, but now…screw it, they were all going to wind up being slaughtered when the apocalypse reared its ugly head in a few years anyway, so why not just get the job done early.

And Gabriel probably would have continued on like that right up until the end of the world, if he hadn't encountered the Winchesters.

Scratch that. If he hadn't survived the Winchesters. There was no such thing as simply encountering those two, the same way there was no such thing as merely 'encountering' the ground at 70 mph. Oh, there was no chance of them actually being able to whack him, but the archangel found his sanity a little worse for wear after the whole ordeal was over with.

And after being trapped in a ring of holy fire like a total noob, Gabriel was left feeling more than a little bit raw on the inside. Normally he couldn't give two shits what some hairless ape thought of him. But the way Sam had looked at him, the way the human's soul had ached with disappointment and disillusionment as he glanced back at the archangel standing under the gushing sprinklers….

The drunken revelers never cared who he was or what he did, so long as he brought booze and sparkling lights and lots of entertainment. They didn't expect anything from him, and so it was impossible to disappoint them when he had a threesome on the front lawn or left a drunk teenager to drown in his own vomit. He was as bright and happy and buoyant as a balloon, and most days that was enough to keep the darkness of utter despair at bay.

But when Sam Winchester's soul turned away from him- losing hope, losing faith, disappointed- the balloon popped, and Gabriel was left painfully aware of just how hollow it had been all along.

For weeks he was tempted to just…fade away. He no longer had the heart to conjure up a smile or a laugh, even if he could create fountains of booze or pleasurable company with just a snap of his fingers. It all amounted to less than dust, in the end. So he went up into the mountains and spent weeks looking down at the world, drinking in the solitude and beauty, contemplating scorching everything in sight just to get it over with.

Then he realized he was sulking, and damn if that wasn't even more depressing. Being mopey and whiny was Michael's gig, and he was welcome to it. So Gabriel pulled on his big angel pants and manifested his vessel back down among the masses.

He had a Winchester to pick a bone with.

Sam wasn't all that hard to find, even with Cassy's calligraphy decorating his ribs. That car of Dean's was very distinctive, and very easy to track. Too bad Zachariah hadn't spent more time among the humans he was trying to wipe out; the whole apocalypse thing would have gone a lot faster if the smarmy pencil-pusher knew a thing or two about classic cars.

Gabriel winged his way into the wonder twins' latest motel room, and found Sam passed out on the bed, fully clothed. Dean was nowhere to be seen, but Gabriel could sense the annoying older sibling at the diner next door, eagerly flirting with the waitress. It would be a while before he came back to check on this big baby boo. Plenty of time.

Gabriel jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and stood looking down at the sleeping human. He briefly considered a myriad of ways to jar him awake, including upending a bowl of strawberry jelly over his head or setting a live alligator loose in the sheets. But while doing so would have been momentarily satisfying for the archangel, after the screaming had stopped Sam would go back to being annoying and perhaps even attempt something idiotic, like grabbing Ruby's knife. Or calling for his brother.

So Gabriel settled for the oldest trick in the book. With a whisper of grace he sent the human into a deep sleep. Then he plopped down on the bed beside the snoring human, pulled a black sharpie out of his pocket, and began to doodle all over that adorable, slightly homicidal face.

It was the perfect solution. Gabriel would have his revenge through not-so-easy (read: impossible) to scrub off doodles of various embarrassing designs, the Winchester duo would get the message that he could and WOULD find them if they pissed him off enough, and Sam would remain more or less intact and unharmed.

Gabriel looped a thick, dark line around one closed eye, then scribbled down onto the cheek, grinning just a bit. He was older than the dawn of time, yet still somehow stuck in middle school. Gabriel thought he should get some sort of award for that.

The nose was next, and the archangel couldn't resist giving Sam a cat nose and whiskers. It went well with the veiny penis drawn on his left cheek. The beanpole human slept on, blissfully unaware of the archangel perched on his bed beside him, drawing all over his face.

While it would have been more cathartic to smack the taller Winchester around a little bit, Sam would probably end up giving him that sad puppy face again if he did. And for some inexplicable reason, Gabriel always felt like a popped balloon whenever another piece of Sam Winchester's faith withered and died.

Running out of room on Sam's cheeks, Gabriel moved on to the forehead. Grin fading into a more somber expression, he settled for scrawling out random designs rather than trying to compose a dirty limerick.

The archangel knew that Sam losing faith was the point, after all. Sam had to lose faith so that he would give in to Lucifer. That was the Plan; that was the ultimate end-game. Sam gives into Lucifer, Dean gives in to Michael to stop him, and the ultimate showdown begins. The fighting would finally stop, the world would be cleansed, and…

And there would be no more parties. No more leisure suits. No more rainbow scarves. No more overgrown humans with hearts of gold. And Dad would still be gone.

The sharpie stilled in his hand. The room was full of the sound of Sam's deep, peaceful breathing; a car drove by outside, and somewhere a bird was chirping. The motel room around them was tacky and outdated and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. A half-eaten pizza sat growing mold on the table. Gabriel could feel the psychic echoes of all who had passed through the room, the snippets of countless lives fluttering against his grace with snatches of hate and sorrow, love and longing, toil and triumph. Sam was but one of many. So very many. Countless humans, all living their meaningless little lives, breeding and dying, breeding and dying. Seven billion humans; seven billion little universes that carried on in isolation, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. What was the point of it all, if it was just going to be wiped away?

The sharpie snapped in his hand. Gabriel fixed it with a whisper of grace, then determinedly bent over the sleeping human once more and turned his attention to his freakishly long arms. They were just begging to be covered in why-won't-it-come-off doodles.

It was too late in the game for Gabriel to do anything about the end of the world, even if he could. Even if he wanted to. If dear old Dad didn't care that his kids were planning on trashing His greatest Creation, why should he?

'The Love with which you have been gifted is greater than all these things.'

Yeah right. Love hadn't done jack shit to stop his brother from being thrown screaming into endless night; love hadn't brought his Father back after he had packed up his celestial suitcase and driven off. And it wasn't going to make any difference now to stop the Earth from being consumed in fire.

Though immeasurably powerful compared to a human, Gabriel knew he was the weakest of his archangel brothers. The weakest, and most useless. He hadn't been able to stop the fighting between his brothers at the beginning of time, and he wasn't going to be able to stop them now.

As always, he was nothing more than a balloon. Childish, hollow, and easily batted aside.

"Love them, my faithful servants, as you love me."

Gabriel stood abruptly, vanishing the sharpie in his hand. Nothing had changed within the motel room, yet the thought of remaining there an instant more was about as tempting as the thought of hot knives peeling away the skin of his vessel. If he continued to sit there, so close to that weak, fluttering soul under siege from the encroaching darkness, so utterly alone, he might be tempted to do something very stupid.

If he enfolded Sam Winchester's soul in his grace and held it close and safe to the core of his being… he didn't know if he would ever be able to let it go.

Gabriel stepped back from the bed, and did a double take when he saw what he had unconsciously drawn over Sam's face, neck and arms while mired in his own thoughts—sigils, chains upon chains of interlocking Enochian sigils, mixed in amongst the stick figures, boobs, and dicks. They feathered across the human's brow; ancient blessings for wisdom, temperance, and foresight. Even more twined gently around his neck and down his arms; powerful charms for protection, strength, and healing.

Catching sight of black ink disappearing beneath Sam's shirt, Gabriel hooked a finger through the human's collar and pulled the fabric down, revealing Enochian words scrawled across his collar bone that the archangel had no memory of writing.

You are not alone

Gabriel's vessel trembled softly with the force of his churning grace.

'I have not the strength to love them as I love you, Father.'

…This love is too strong, and if it were multiplied, I would surely perish in its blaze…

Gabriel spread his wings and fled.

Gabriel had always been a sucker for the underdog, especially underdogs as outmatched as the Winchesters. So really, it wasn't much of a surprise when he found himself drawn to the gaudy hotel despite his pledge not to get involved. But even still, he was determined to only help them from the sidelines, nothing more. Just enough so that he wouldn't be made a liar by the words that had washed off of Sam's collar bone weeks ago.

And then his older brother decided to make a dramatic entrance. It was the first time that Gabriel had stood before the first and most glorious of all the archangels in countless millennia. He expected to find his bother's grace deteriorated, rotting and fetid. He expected to look upon his brother's Face and see a hideous, grotesque monster where once he had seen his most beloved guide and companion.

But when Gabriel saw that Lucifer was just as glorious and beautiful as ever beneath the thin human veneer, he felt cold, and somehow not at all surprised.

His angel blade dropped into his hand.

"Lucy, I'm home." He said lowly.

Lucifer stared back at him through glassy human eyes, stirrings of surprise flickering through his ocean of grace. But then he was climbing to his feet, surprise disappearing beneath oily confidence, and Gabriel felt his resolve harden. His hand clenched around the shining length of his blade. When Lucifer moved as if to brush past him, Gabriel found himself barring the way. He raised his blade between them. A barrier…and a threat.

The words clawed their way up from the very bottom of his being. "Not this time."

No more would he allow himself to be brushed aside. He may not have been as strong as Michael, or as wise as Raphael, or as glorious as Lucifer, but behind him stood the world and all its teeming masses of flawed, wonderful people. Behind him, crouched and hiding, was Sam.

And it didn't matter that he was not strong enough, or wise enough, or glorious enough to stop his brother.

Love was worth dying for, and he would not be moved.

"Love them, my faithful servants, as you love me."

And Gabriel obeyed.

Author's Note:

Beginning quote is from the Bible, Corinthians 13:13.

Nothing else is taken from the bible- the conversation between God and his archangels is entirely my own headcannon, although I hope they won't mind me borrowing their likenesses for my story.