Chapter 16

Be with Me

He'd never been here before. He knew about it, remembered it from a past (human) life. It was a memory, and he hid himself away in it.

White snow fell from a gray and heavy sky. It settled over the cold and hard ground like a useless blanket. The evergreen trees – not green, just brown and black and dark – were silent with not a breeze to whisper through their branches. Nor were their small animals to chitter and tweet and bring life to the place. It was a dead and desolate warfront.

He ignored the loud explosion that broke the silence. He ignored the shouting and cries of men, soldiers who had volunteered to come out here – so, so far away from home. He ignored the way the ground shook every time another mortar shell hit its mark. He ignored the dud that rolled past his feet, ignored the scared look on some man's face. He ignored the resolve that came over the man's face as he watched another of his friends – brothers-in-arms – die.

He ignored how the world shifted into a different era – different memory – when the other one eventually ended. It was all the same old story, just different setting, different people.

"You shouldn't lock yourself away like this," came an annoyingly unignorable voice. He didn't need to look up to know that Bennett wasn't actually in front of him or wherever direction his voice was coming from. Bennett wasn't in this memory, or any of the ones like this. Then again, he wasn't supposed to be in them either. "It's not good for the psyche."

He let out a soft scoff and rolled his eyes but didn't resist letting the boy purposefully change his surroundings.

Bennett was there this time. He stood out like a sore thumb in the waves of never-ending golden grass. Mountaintops could be seen a great ways away in the far, far distance. The dark blue speckled with white of night stretched over their heads, a light in the east signaling the coming of dawn.

He looked down and saw that he himself was made up of light in this memory – for once, something that was theirs, something they both shared.

"Interesting choice," he murmured. And he had to stop for a moment because, well, it had been literal ages since he'd heard himself in this voice, his voice unfiltered by a vessel.

The boy smiled at him. "It's relatively neutral common ground for us."

"Here to negotiate the terms of my control?" he asked, half-teasing half-serious.

Bennett shrugged, feeling the emotions clearly, nothing lost in metaphorical translation. They were technically the same person, he had to remind himself. Bennett had an in-linking to what he felt and vice versa. He still doubted how much of that went both ways since he hardly could ever distinguish the boy's feelings from his own, though Bennett obviously knew which was which.

"He doesn't need you to take care of him. You can be yourself. You're what matters to him."

"I know."

The boy looked away, eyes scanning the horizon. "Is that why you haven't told him yet?"

"What? That I didn't kill Crowley and Rowena? It's not like he doesn't already know, or at least suspect that, especially with that slip up the other day."

"No." Bennett turned his gaze back to stare at him. "Why haven't you told any of them that you made a deal with Crowley?"

He actually laughed at that. "You make it sound like it was a bad thing."

"It is if you keep it a secret," Bennett warned him.

He sobered a little, but that didn't stop him from responding. "There's no need to tell them what doesn't affect them," he said.

"It'll come back to bite you in the ass if you don't tell them," the boy said with a surprising use of profanity, as slight as it was.

"Doesn't it always?"

"Gabriel."

A crack of thunder. The sound of rain. But it wasn't raining. Gabriel blinked, looking up. The sky was still clear, and dawn still hours away. So why did it sound like they should have been in the middle of a thunderstorm? Rain, he could understand – rain was contentedness and quiet days at home. Thunder was… thunder meant disconnect.

Wind rushed by. A stiff breeze that pushed against the fields of gold, sending the stalks waving back and forth, creating a collage of dizzying motion. It was natural beauty. He never could have forgotten this imagery, and yet he'd tried for millennia after he left here.

Bennett sighed, and in the blink of an eye, he stood beside him, taking his hand. Small, boyish fingers wrapped around his own. Gabriel looked down, staring at their hands.

"It was supposed to be a seamless merge, nothing to tell the difference between us," the boy mused. "In a way, it worked, but there's still the two of us. We're just connected together, not… blending."

"That's 'cause it's your body. You're the one who was still alive when I wasn't. Even if I'm the dominant personality… I'm just an echo," Gabriel said, feeling the boy's comforting squeeze and returning the hand gesture.

"Gabriel," the boy started after a long but mutual silence, "if Michael and Raphael really are coming back, or if they already are—"

He cut Bennett off before the boy could worry too much (not that Bennett hadn't been worrying from the moment they found out Michael and Raphael). "We'll deal with them when they get here. There's no point to making preemptive countermeasures. They can't force another Apocalypse, not only because Lucifer wouldn't want any part in it but also because of how he is now. If Mikey and Raph still want to go at it, they can have it between themselves somewhere not on Earth. Luci and I aren't playing ball with them."

"And if…"

Gabriel frowned when Bennett didn't finish his thought, but he could guess what it was about. He sighed. It was a rather optimistic thought, not necessarily naïve but still innocent in origin. It was a thought he wished would come true. (That was the naïve part.)

~o-O-o~

To be completely honest, Dean wasn't all that surprised when he came home to the Bunker only to be more or less ambushed by an up-jumped archangel (okay, maybe he had been a little surprised when he'd been suddenly assaulted by a bunch of confetti). Even with the complete shocker of seeing Gabriel (like, full on adult trickster), Dean was too pleased by his sweet, sweet vacation on a beach in Florida to be all that perturbed by any of the change's implications.

That didn't keep Dean from noticing the way Gabriel seemed to have a perpetual frown drawn on his forehead, and then there was how Lucifer kept tensing up whenever Gabriel was in the room. Gabriel's frown was clearly because of the way Lucifer was unconsciously skittish around him. On the other hand, Lucifer was obviously better about being in the same room as this adult form of Gabriel's: the brothers were interacting just fine… but Lucifer wasn't being very subtle about how not-quite-ready he was about the change.

It was when Sam got back with a somewhat goofy grin on his face that Dean cornered Cas about why Gabriel wasn't a kid anymore.

The angel looked off to the side with a tired sigh. "If you really want to know, ask Gabriel."

Dean asked his mom an hour later just to be sure. Her answer wasn't all that different, though Castiel seemed to know more about what was going on than she did. So, Dean went to go find their resident archangel/trickster, got him alone and asked him. Gabriel actually clammed up and avoided the question for several minutes before Dean got fed up and demanded an answer.

"Look! It's complicated, okay?" Gabriel exclaimed. "Something came up, and it was enough for Lucifer and I to get our shit together for a while."

Dean repeated part of that answer in his head. Something came up. Yeah, that didn't sound good at all. "And the kid's okay with all of this? You're okay with this?"

It was a legitimately important question: if the two didn't agree on whatever the issue was, different kinds of bad stuff would happen (if he understood the concept correctly, which he did since both Cas and Sam had pulled him aside to explain it in depth).

"Yes, Deano, we're all okay with all of this," Gabriel said in a slow drawl, bemused but understanding.

"So you got your stuff sorted out?" Because that was why that fairy queen chic turned Gabriel back into Gabriel Bennett for a while, wasn't it? Gabriel the archangel had issues, so he got put in the passenger seat until he got his act together. "I was gone for a week, and all kinds of shit happened."

"That's not completely inaccurate," Gabriel muttered under his breath.

Dean narrowed his eyes at the archangel but otherwise pretended not to hear the comment.

~o-O-o~

Sam, of course, already knew about most of what was going on before he'd left for his own vacation with Eileen. Well, if he didn't know, he'd suspected, at the very least. But he tried not to think too much about that while they were on the cruise and then staying at a small private beach somewhere along the Gulf coast. (How Gabriel managed to organize all of that was a question Sam wasn't going to ask.)

What had shocked Sam the most during his romantic vacation was the fact that the captain of the cruise ship had not been human. In fact, he had been a selkie – though why he was the captain of a cruise ship that toured the Caribbean, Sam was a little lost on that. He would have thought that selkies stayed closer to the North Atlantic or even Arctic Ocean waters.

Sam subtly confronted the selkie about it. The creature had panicked when he realized he was talking to a hunter but then calmed down as Sam explained that he just wanted to know… well, why he was this far south. The selkie had explained that this was a cruise for supernatural beings – the entire crew were creatures of some sort and most of the passengers were either also creatures or their human family members.

This did not – at all (note, sarcasm) – blow Sam's mind. Though, to be fair, Sam should have expected there to be a civilized society of supernatural creatures. He reasoned that not all of the monsters he and Dean had hunted were actual monsters and that some could be convinced to live conventional human lives, to blend in. Of course there would be vacation spots like this where they could act a bit more like themselves and indulge in natural instincts.

(And Gabriel would send them on a cruise like this. Sam supposed the archangel made up for it with the private beach that had been rented out to them for a week after the cruise.)

Eileen hadn't been oblivious to the not-human aspects of the cruise, but after Sam had given her the captain's assurances and then some of his own as well as an apology text from Gabriel Bennett (apparently he'd thought Sam and Eileen wouldn't have minded, and Lucifer had said that malcontent supernatural creatures would be unlikely, not relatively peaceful ones), she had rolled her eyes and told Sam to relax – "We're on vacation just as much as they are," she'd said. So Sam did. Because that was what you were supposed to do on a vacation: relax.

Sam slept much better when they were on dry land.

Eventually, he did have to part ways with Eileen and return to the Bunker, coming home with a glorious tan to rival the one Dean had acquired. Gabriel's change back into his usual archangelic self had been a bit of a surprise to Sam – mainly because he'd thought Gabriel Bennett would stay a little longer, but then again, if Gabriel knew about the other archangels… well, Sam would have been more worried about Gabriel not going back to his adult-ish self. ('-ish' because Gabriel was a child and Sam had the means to prove it.)

"Gabriel?"

The archangel let out a groan, shoulders slumping as he looked upwards in what could only have been exasperation. "You're not going to ask if I'm okay, too, are you?"

"Uh," Sam paused. He decided to go with a half-truth. "No."

Gabriel turned slightly and sent a glare at Sam over his shoulder. "I'd say try again, but you might as well just go on to whatever your other reason for hunting me down is all about," he said with a flippant hand gesture."

Sam, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, took the offered conversation save. "I was going to thank you for the extended vacation and then ask you if Dean and Mom know about that one issue." Sam knew that he'd gotten his point across when Gabriel tensed at the last word.

"Lucifer told me about it, but I'm not sure if Mary knows, and Dean definitely suspects something," Gabriel answered after a moment's pause.

"Something on your mind?" Sam prompted, knowing there was something else bothering Gabriel.

Gabriel's lips pursed together. "Just thinking that we all need to have a sit down to catch everyone up and make sure we're all on the same page… And there's something I need to tell you guys."

Okay, that sounded a bit ominous, but Sam forced himself not to worry to much about it until Gabriel came out with it.

~o-O-o~

Ketch wouldn't be back for at least another week, and there wasn't any more to be done in the field base, not for a while anyway. At least, that was what Mick kept telling himself when he finally finished the paperwork for the day and realized it was barely half past two in the afternoon. It was these thoughts that helped convince him to go to the café on the other side of the town.

It wasn't at all because he needed a break.

Mick wasn't quite sure how long he spent sitting at a table in a fenced off outer section of the café. For late March, it was a reasonably warm day with the sun peaking out from behind some scattered clouds in addition to the coat Mick had made sure he put on before leaving the base, and the hot tea he ordered kept away the chill in his fingers.

(Though really, he had never been one to get cold easily. He could feel cold – just like anyone else – but it was rare to find him shivering even when it was freezing outside. When someone had asked at one point, Mick had pointedly not answered that it was because there was what felt like a fire burning in his chest, eternally warming him.)

The town – for all of the warehouses that were littered about the surrounding area – was small. And while it wasn't a place where everyone knew everyone, Mick really shouldn't have felt surprised when the barista had picked him out for being "new" before he'd even said a word, but she had also been nice about it, even pointing him to the table he was at now.

As soon as he'd sat down with his drink, he'd realized the table's… strategical position. He was essentially in a corner with his back to a wall and a bush at his right, but he could still see both the street and the inside of the café as well as all of the other customers: a young adult couple, a man on his laptop, a woman reading a novel, and another older couple in the opposite corner outside with him.

It still took Mick almost half an hour to relax into the padded outdoor chair. And by the end of an hour, his tea had long gone cold, but he was too lost in thought to care, which was why he startled so easily when he received a text from Ketch.

Possible answers acquired. However, several more questions were brought up. Will report again when I have answers for those as well as conformation on the original ones.

Mick grimaced slightly at the text's implication but managed to hold back a frown, keeping his relatively calm demeanor at the forefront of his 'normal customer' act. Well, that meant Ketch would probably be out for yet another week. This was the third time Ketch had extended how long he would be 'out'. While Mick didn't particularly mind the other man being away for weeks on end, it also left Mick very, very alone in the base.

It wasn't even that he wanted the company (yes, yes he did; he was never meant to be a solitary being). It was just too quiet despite the constant hum of the tech around him (it would never compare to the silence when he had been in the—). And not to mention that for some reason the bloody headaches had gotten even worse (though at this point Mick was dead set on simply ignoring the dull throbbing in his head).

In essence, Mick was getting restless. He needed something to do, something that wasn't paperwork and sucking up to the Old Men and specifically Hess, who still refused to say anything about whether or not reinforcements would be provided. Though, Mick was beginning to think that the Old Men had sent Ketch and him to America just be rid of them, and if the two somehow managed to achieve what they'd been told to do, well, then that was a bonus to be celebrated before Ketch and Mick were sent off on another suicide mission.

As Mick left the café, a new and steaming cup of tea in a styrofoam cup in hand, he didn't notice the way the older couple watched his departure with knowing eyes. Nor would he have heard the short words that passed unspoken between the unassuming man and woman.

"Are you sure? So soon?"

"They need each other."

A/N: You know, I was writing that first scene with the Gabriels, and I realized that because it's inside Gabriel's head and mostly about his memories, it's kinda like a mind palace (yes, I'll admit to watching Sherlock recently). I don't know. Ignore me :P

Also, Mick wasn't supposed to be having this many scenes, but he's been demanding more screen time. I mean, he's fun to write in this context, so I hope you guys don't mind.

Last edited: [August 12, 2018]

The Gryfter: Thanks!

teabrows: No Raphael in this chapter, but we will be getting back to him/her in a bit. Hopefully I won't be gone for a whole month. Then again, I'll be out for like two and a half weeks, but I should have finished the next chapter on the plane or something by then. ;-)