Title: To Weather Any Storm (5/7)
Author: ficlicious
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Gabriel
Warnings: Explicit Language, Pre-Slash (Pairing Sam/Gabriel). Violence. Angst. Wings.
Spoilers: General S3, notably "Mystery Spot". General Season 4. Season 5, up to "Hammer of the Gods"
Disclaimer: I'm not making any money from this. Kripke just makes awesome toys.
Note: Intended as a lead-in to an AU that swerves off during Hammer of the Gods (5x19) and carries through the Apocalypse.
Characters: Sam, Gabriel, God, Dean, Castiel, Ruby, Raphael, Assorted Angels, Others
Genres: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Drama, Spiritual
Summary: He wasn't always a trickster. Once upon a time, he'd been an archangel and, once upon a time, he had a hand in creating a very special soul. The days harbinging Lucifer's return are making it harder for him to stay away from that soul and, to tell the truth, he really doesn't want to anyway.
Word Count: ~1,300
=0=
Gabriel returned to consciousness abruptly. He sat up and regretted it almost immediately, as his the killer headache lurking in his brain exploded. He hunched over with his arms on his knees, waiting for the pain to subside, hissing labored breaths through his nose. His body didn't feel all that stellar either, once he could properly take stock of it. Ribs, hands, face, legs, knees, toes… Everything hurt, right down to the follicles on his head. Felt like he'd been in a mosh pit with Thor, Hercules and Lord Ganesh. Those three muttonheads had used him as a trampoline the last time he partied at Dionysus' pad with the whole gang.
Even though he'd sworn he'd never go back after that drag-down bitchfight with Kali at the last get-together, he must have. He was missing several rather large chunks of the last few weeks in his memory, and very few things could do that to him. Dionysus' homebrew ambrosia was one of them.
He stood up, turning around and around in place to take in his surroundings. A flat, dusty plain, two-lane road, and some weathered poles stringing black cables into eternity. Probably still in the good old US of A, the air just kind of had that feel to it. He squinted against the brightness of the sun, which wasn't making his headache any better, and raised a hand to shield his eyes. e hadn't the slightest clue where he was or how he'd gotten there.
He staggered up to the road, peering down both directions. There wasn't a car in sight and, with the amount of dust and lack of tire treads on the road, there wasn't one expected to pass any time soon.
He snapped his fingers to be elsewhere, but he didn't budge an inch. Gabriel blinked and snapped again, but the result was the same. His reserve of Grace was responding sluggishly, like it too was hungover. Too low on the mojo. Batteries drained like he'd taken on the armies of Heaven single-handed. Or been in a mosh pit with burly gods of strength and violence. It'd recharge, it always did, but in the meantime, it looked like he was walking.
Must have been one hell of a kegger.
=0=
Sam woke up disoriented, bolting awake in the darkness of early morning. His heart raced as if he had just run a marathon, chest heaving with ragged breaths. It took several long minutes before he could pry his hands off the bedsheets and swipe the sweat off his face.
He had never had a peaceful dream. As he understood them from his college psych classes, dreams were the body's way of processing experiences and that it wasn't a very understood field, despite what the Dream Analysis section of Barnes & Noble might claim. Sam didn't know about any of that, but what he did understand was that he lived a life full of demons and monsters, so other people didn't have to dream about disembowellings and burning fiancées pinned to ceilings and various brands of ick washing away in a shower drain.
He leaned forward, finally managing to wrangle his breathing back to some semblance of control. Tonight's dream had been a new take on an old theme, with its own bizarre twists just to make it that extra bit special. Falling out of the sky only to land at a frat house filled with six-armed women and goat-legged men drinking out of a keg made of fused human bones was definitely a new one for him, but the real kicker was the Trickster, the one that had made his life absolute misery for three hundred Tuesdays in a row, tipping back a long, bone-white etched horn while seated on a wolf the size of an elephant.
For some reason, the Trickster had massive golden wings.
The bedclothes stirred beside him, and Ruby peered bleary-eyed at him from under the sheets. "Sam?" she said, voice sleep-heavy. "You okay?"
"Yeah," he said. "I just had a really weird dream."
Ruby snuggled back into her pillow. "You should get some rest," she purred, eyes half-slitted like a cat's. "We have work to do. You need your sleep."
"Yeah. Sorry I woke you." Sam lay back down on the bed, staring unseeingly at the ceiling for a long time. He was still awake when the sun came up, hours later, with a vaguely disconcerted churning in the pit of his stomach. Something was seriously wrong, but for the life of him, he couldn't figure out what it was.
=0=
Three weeks later, Gabriel finally admitted to himself that maybe it wasn't just a hangover.
His Grace had replenished somewhat slower than he was used to, but he topped right up to previous levels without much of an issue. Physical injury healed decently, at just above human average until his batteries were charged enough to speed things along. Normally, the memories would likewise sort themselves out, but when his strength was brimming and his vessel tiptop once again, there was still a gaping hole in the middle of his mind.
He poked and prodded at it, but the spot stayed annoyingly, glaringly blank.
It bothered him more than he cared to admit. Gabriel didn't have holes in his memory. He had perfect clarity all the way back to the moment of his creation. He remembered the lights flipping on, the first protein forming in the primordial soup, the first hairy ape that stood on two feet, the first glorious city crafted by entirely mortal hand. He'd seen empires rise and fall, nations come together and crumble away, villages expand into sprawling metropolis before vanishing into the mists of time.
He didn't do memory loss. He might sometimes misplace a memory, let it slip back into the back of his head, but when he went searching for it, it always returned.
Yet here he was. With memory loss.
He was tired of examining his own mind, gingerly feeling around the sharp and shiny edges. He pulled a tootsie pop from the ether and stuck it in his mouth, feeling somewhat better with the quick rush of sugar. Dogs barked in the distance, the excited baying of hounds on the trail, and he turned to look out over the misty hills, the sun-dappled wood.
He snapped his fingers, and four cages containing foxes popped into place at his feet. He crouched by the cages, lollipop stick hanging out of the corner of his mouth. "Now, boys," he said, laying his hands on opposite cages, and relishing the way the foxes cowered away from him, "I know you all came out here on a hunting trip, expecting to bag yourselves some foxes. Well, try to see it from the fox's point of view."
He snapped his fingers again, and the cages vanished. The four foxes, who up until that morning had been rich, arrogant assholes who got their jollies terrorizing small furry critters, milled about in confusion and fear.
The dogs bayed again. The foxes bolted, vanishing over the grass and into the trees. Gabriel stood up, the Trickster's smile firmly in place. "Enjoy the hunt!" he called with a mocking little finger-wave as the last white-tipped tail vanished into the brush. "I know I will!"
=0=
Somewhere in Illinois, Dean Winchester crawled out of his own grave.
Several hours later, he and Bobby Singer banged on the door of a cheap motel room, looking for Sam.
Moments after that, in a seedy bar in Reykjavik, Gabriel's attention was abruptly yanked away from his poker game as fearhaterageangerhopejoydisb elief spun through the hole in the middle of his mind.
