AN: Apparently all I can write at the moment is depressing prose, so, here it is I guess.

Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any of the characters involved; if I did then this would never have been written 'cause Gabriel wouldn't have bloody died. Anyway, onwards and upwards.


When Sam first hears the word come out of the tinny laptop speakers, it does not occur to him to feel anything.

"If you're watching this, I'm dead." Dead. The word exists only as sounds, letters that dance their way around his skull but ultimately do not form anything meaningful. Dead. The bluntness of it falls so easily from Gabriel's lips, he thinks, the bow and dip of his jawline fitting comfortably around the single syllable that encompasses the ending of a lifetime. Dead, and Sam closes the laptop and tucks it in the backseat, tucks Gabriel away in the pocket linings of his mind to become another faded memory, the bitter haze of time doing little to remove the stain of that word. Dead, like every other person Sam has allowed himself to love, in quiet stolen moments in the back alleyways of his heart, and the tentative belief that there is a place for him in this world after all.

Dead. Sam pictures the word scrawled in permanent marker, the acrid blackness of the ink staining his fingertips, staining his bones as he runs his fingers through his hair and tries not to hear it. Dead, and all he can see is the burned out silhouette of wings, feathers charred and sketched into the floorboards of another empty hotel room. He bunches his hands into fists and tries not to think about how warm Gabriel's had always been as they pressed themselves into the hollow spaces of Sam's existence. Dead. Sam leans his head back into the worn, familiar leather of the passenger seat and breathes out gently. Dead, as Gabriel's breath stills and crystallizes and stutters to a stop. Dead, and Sam finally thinks he knows it as his mind explores the concept of hope and comes up with that word, comes up with another montage of immobile fingers and eyes glassed over, reflecting the bare fluorescent light as it dims and flickers and goes out.

Dead, and Sam boxes up Gabriel like an outgrown toy, stows him gently away somewhere deep inside, seals him up with masking tape and an oily, hard determination not to lose him. He sets his jaw and fumbles his seatbelt closed, the metal clasp replaced in his mind by the cruel iridescence of an archangel's blade now abandoned and rusting next to a crooked leg and a frozen heart.

Dead, and Sam closes his eyes, feeling the Impala's engine reverberate in his spine, more familiar to him now than silence. Dead, as Gabriel falls far behind him and deep inside; as he melts away into a thought to slumber within Sam, to curl in upon himself and quietly pretend, just for one more day, that the word is not a word at all.

Dead.