Title: To Weather Any Storm (1/5?)
Pairings/Characters: Gabriel, Sam, God, assorted angels. Pre-Sabriel
Word Count: 658
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Spoilers: "Changing Channels" (5-08)
Summary: The first and only time Gabriel had a hand in creating a human soul, he was young and naive.
A/N: Intended as a lead-in to an AU that swerves off during "Hammer of the Gods" (5-19) and heads on through the Apocalypse. Rating likely to change as content is added.

The first and only time Gabriel had a hand in creating a human soul, he was young and naive. Adam and Eve had barely left the Garden for a life of hardship and toil when the Father took him aside, saying "This is the most important thing you will ever do, my son."

Gabriel didn't understand, but he trusted the Father, and trusted in Him. He took the raw, unfinished soul God gave him, and sat to work. Gabriel knew loyalty, and wove that into the soul. He knew compassion and love and humor, and wove these things too into the soul. And because he loved his brothers so, he added qualities they would find most pleasing. For Michael, dedication and strength. For Raphael, the capacity for healing with thought, deed and word. For Uriel, fondness of verse and song. For Selaphiel, humility and grace. For Jegudiel, hardiness of spirit and responsibility. For Barachiel, a willingness to protect others.

Even lost Heylel, Lucifer the Morningstar, was not forgotten, as Gabriel remembered his glory and his pride and his beauty and wove these things into the soul.

Gabriel poured himself, and his brothers, and his Father, into the soul, imbuing it with God's love and his own angelic Grace. When he had finished, he stood back and marveled at the thing he had shaped, the radiance of it, the sheer simple beauty.

God came to him then, and saw what he had done, and God smiled.

"This is a man," God said, "to weather any storm."

"When will he be born?" Gabriel asked, for in truth, he was eager to see the shape of the soul made flesh. Eager to meet the being into whom he had devoted so much of his time and essence.

God gathered the soul to him, cradling it gently in one mighty hand. "Not for many years to come," he said gently. "But when the time is right, you shall wield the hammer and make him unbreakable, and herald him into a new age for all humanity."

And God took the soul away, and Gabriel grew older and wiser and more experienced, and in time forgot about the soul, except in distant dreams.

He remembered it abruptly the night he was sent to tell a woman that she was pregnant with a boy she would name John. And again, five months later, when the task of informing Mary of her impending motherhood fell to him. He waited impatiently for the women to give birth, but despite his hopes, neither child felt the same. Bright and precious and radiant with love, but not at all the one he had shaped.

And he forgot again, as the age turned and he grew older and more jaded and miserable. The Father left Heaven and, without His presence to filter everything, Gabriel's tolerance for his brothers waned. Eventually he, too, left Heaven.

By the time the age passed into technology and apathy, he had buried himself in the Trickster persona so deeply, he no longer felt like an archangel, even to himself.

But he remembered suddenly, abruptly, one morning in Podunk Bumfuck, USA, right after delivering an alien abduction straight to some asshole who richly deserved it. When he felt the soul.

It was muted, not bright. Tainted by darkness, scarred with pain. All those things Gabriel had imbued into it had been touched with strife and toil. But underneath it all, the love, the radiance, the sheer simplicity of it. And brightest of all, the mark of God's hand, with an underlying resonance of angelic Grace. The signature of an artist to a masterpiece. A ephemeral tag scrawled on its wall like graffiti. Gabriel was here.

Later that afternoon, he came face to face with Sam Winchester, and saw that soul shining out of dark brown eyes.