(A/N): Hey Guys. Now I know these chapters have been pretty back-story heavy, but I'm trying out a new sort of structure. Basically, when their shared history comes into play later in the story, you'll have all the pieces rather than me giving you a whole big passage of it closer to the time. Let me know what you think. Too much? I'm also thinking of starting a little Companion of sorts, something I've never even thought of doing before, that would maybe be set during times of their childhood and follow ideas I've mentioned. Some of this story might move over there if it's clogging up the flow of the story. I know sometimes less is more, so. Maybe I'll do that.
Anyways, hope you're enjoying it so far! Your comments make my day, and you're all awesome!
Happy Reading!

Chapter Six

It was eating at him like acid. They both knew he had to ask. They were only dodging the question, with never a chance that they could just leave it alone. Sam followed Gabriel through to his room, unable to feel the nice sort of warmth he usually felt when Gabriel headed straight for the bed they both subconsciously thought of as his. Loki was unusually quiet when they came back through, lying patiently on Gabriel's bed and wagging his tail when he saw them.

The dog was perceptive, there was no doubt about it. Loki never slept on that spare bed unless Gabriel was in it, and he shifted when Gabriel reached for the duvet now. Sam sat down on his own bed as he watched Gabriel climb under the covers and prop his pillows against the wall to sit and reach for Loki. The dog wagged his tail again, crawling up the bed on his belly to lick at Gabriel's fingers. It was such a small thing, but Sam watched as Gabriel's mouth twitched into a small smile.

"Hey, buddy. Taste like soap, don't I?"

Loki gazed up at Gabriel with adoring brown eyes and Sam couldn't help the half-snort that made its way out of him. It might say on paper that Loki was a Winchester dog, but that didn't mean the dog knew it. He was friendly and playful, and like all good Labradors he often forgot he was no longer a puppy. Though trained, he was subject to whim and would chose to ignore whoever was calling for him to do something if he thought something else was more interesting. And he was crazy about Gabriel.

They often joked that Loki liked Gabriel better than the Winchesters, and sometimes when Sam was feeling particularly glum it made him a little sad. But in that moment he was ever grateful for the canine's devotion, because if it made Gabriel smile when he felt like crap, then it could only be a good thing. Maybe asking could wait till the morning. He supposed really it already was morning, but the perks of a Saturday meant they would at least have the chance for more than a couple hours.

Maybe if Gabriel was feeling a little more like himself they could make pancakes. Maybe if he was still not so much himself Sam could try anyway, see if it brightened him up. If he could convince Gabriel to help, which under normal circumstances was a cinch. Making them on his own wasn't as much fun. Somehow it was a totally different experience with Gabriel.

With the added bonus of maybe roping Dean in to help too. He often did, even if he passed it off as an opportunity to prevent them wrecking his kitchen. Sam swallowed back the unexpected flare of anger once again, at the thought that the bastards could have hurt Gabriel to the point where he might not want to help make one of his favourite foods.

Maybe Sam needed to quit worrying so damn much and wait and see.

Gabriel murmured smalltalk at the dog while Sam turned the lamp low and lay in his bed, and though he had to feel Sam's eyes on him he didn't bring it up. Eventually his voice fell quiet and Sam could hear them rearranging as Gabriel lay down properly. Sam had long since closed his eyes, but he didn't sleep for a while longer, listening instead to Gabriel's breathing and wondering what he could do to make the rotting feeling in his stomach let up enough for him to relax. From somewhere atop Gabriel's bed, Loki gave a long yawn and shook his ears out, the tag on his collar giving a faint clinking sound.

The extra bed had come about when Sam was really little and had moved with them to their new house all those years ago only because there had been space in the moving van. John had wanted to get rid of it.

Sam was nearly three when their mother died. It wasn't long after Dean's seventh birthday, and it had almost shattered their family into fractions. John had been respectable and thoroughly invested while Mary was alive, but once she'd died something in him had broken. Sam was too little to remember, only knew things like that from Dean and from their Uncle Bobby, who was really just a friend of the family that saw them as surrogate sons and checked in on them every now and then because he knew John was never around.

Sam had been plagued by night terrors and insecurity when Mary died and John had found more mornings than not that Sam had crawled in with his brother during the night, clinging to Dean like a lifeline. As brothers went they were really close, probably due to John's terrible parenting and Dean basically being Sam's only real parent. Dean was Sam's whole world for a long, long time. Try as he might have, John couldn't drum Sam's dependency out of him. So instead he'd bought another bed for Sam's room, a spare bed for Dean to sleep in if Sam was having a bad night, with the bonus that Dean could sleep in Sam's room if any of John's hunting buddies ever stayed over.

The need for Dean to give up his bed to anyone was rare, but Dean slept half his nights in Sam's room and the other half in his own, and only half of those were by himself. At least till Sam was around five or six. There were a few occasions when he was a little older, but for the most part it ended not long after Sam started school.

Possibly because he and Gabriel were sewn together practically all the time, even if Gabriel annoyed Dean and John didn't like him. He was good for Sam, and he slept in the spare bed in Sam's room so often when they were kids that it had become permanently labelled in Sam's mind as Gabriel's bed.

Since Michael had moved out of their family home, Gabriel had stayed at home more often, and when Luke moved to his new flat - without telling Michael - Gabriel stayed with Sam less and less. Despite the strangeness of it, having had Gabriel in his room every other night for so long, Sam could see how much happier Gabriel was at home. Michael had kept them all together when their dad ran off. Since the boys had lost their mother young, just like Sam and Dean, Michael had already played as big a role in Gabriel and Castiel's childhood as Dean had for Sam. When Charles finally stopped coming home from his 'business trips', Michael had simply stepped up and become both parents.

He was twenty-two when it happened, so when some neighbour or other phoned Social Services on the house after one particularly rowdy argument between Gabriel, Luke and Michael, he had been old enough and silver-tongued enough to keep them together under one roof.

Gabriel hadn't slept in his own house once the whole month following Chuck's departure. Considering John had been ditching Dean and Sam since they were old enough to lock the door behind him, Sam had understood and Dean had pretended not to notice Gabriel's increased presence at their breakfast table. Fourteen had been a tough year for them both, but they'd gotten through it with the help of each other and older brothers.

It sucked, but they had each other, Michael and Dean were working and John had at least had the decency not to cancel any direct debits keeping the house their home while Dean was still at the local college. Dean was a few months shy of eighteen when John left for good and so he and Sam had kept their mouths tightly shut about it. Charles had abandoned his own family not six months earlier and to a group of unprepared teenagers it had felt like they were damned, the whole world against them.

Rumours started up at school. If you were friends with a Novak you'd better watch out your dad didn't fuck off and leave you. Nobody knew for sure that John was gone, but it had never been much of a secret that he was out of town a lot. Eventually, as all the most vicious rumours do, word reached the teachers once too many times and suddenly everything was looking potentially bleak.

Sam was sitting in the dining hall with Gabriel when he saw Dean standing by the doors with a grim look on his face. They exchanged tense, fast whispers in the corridor, trying to ignore the curious eyes of students passing them by.

Sam's heart was in his throat.

They'd called Dean in for a meeting about John. They couldn't get hold of John at work. The number they had was for the mechanics he hadn't worked at in over a year. Dean was sure they were going to want to involve Social Services.

Sam spent the rest of lunchtime throwing up in the toilets, Gabriel leaning against the stall door and snarking at the first years who came in, sending them running.

They walked to their next class in fearful quiet, and Sam had barely gotten through the door but their teacher told him he was wanted in the Office. When the receptionist told him the Headmaster would be a couple minutes longer, Sam was once agains holed up in the bathroom, trying to make himself look presentable, trying to think of a lie, any lie vague enough to convince them not to tear him from his brother's keep.

He'[d splashed his face with water and patted it dry with tissue and stood there, gripping the sink with blanching fingers for a lot longer than a few minutes. He expected to be scolded when he got back, but he was told there was someone else in the office now. Sam's empty stomach had threatened to supply more bile.

When the door had finally opened, it was not his brother or the Social Worker Sam was expecting who strolled out.

"Gabe?" Sam hissed, looking utterly wretched sitting on that stupid velour-covered seat.

Gabriel's cocky grin had taken a lot of effort right then, a pretence that he couldn't sense the Headmaster following him from the office.

"I was just telling the Head about the crap pancakes your dad made on Saturday." he said, smoothly, despite how his heart was hammering at what could happen if his lie was seen through.

For a moment Gabriel had watched fearfully as a puzzled light crept into Sam's eyes, before his while expression had washed with a sweet relief.

"Oh." Sam answered softly, before giving the teacher behind Gabriel a sheepish smile, "Yeah, he's never been good at pancakes."

Sam had managed to keep the charade strong when the Headmaster spoke to him. The man suspected, that much was obvious. He tried to level with Sam. Told him how it didn't have to be something he shouldered all on his own, that there were teachers who would listened, people who could help. Told him it wasn't anything to be ashamed of if they were on their own, that he could phone someone to take away the pressure. Sam thought of Dean, reliable Dean who was only four years older than him and yet had so much on his shoulders. Sam had felt himself weakening. But he wasn't on his own. He had Dean, and he had Gabriel and even Michael and Luke looking out for him.

It was a rocky few months of looking over their shoulders all the time until Dean hit eighteen and immediately filed for custody of Sam. They caught John on one of his many infrequently-answered phones. He was furious. He screamed down the phone. He ranted and raged and roared.

Three weeks later the papers came through and they were safe. Dean started working as soon as his apprenticeship at the college was complete, and by his next birthday he'd spent a week on the phone talking to people about official things and sounding far more grown-up than he should have had to. Bobby dropped by that week, spent a month in the house teaching Dean everything he could think of that the kid didn't already know.

By the time he left they were feeling pretty confident about being on their own.

Gabriel had been working through his own family crap the whole time and Sam had been trying his best to help, but in the end it was most often Gabriel helping him. He called out people whispering in the corridors. He put an end to the rumour that Dean and Sam had killed their dad and their weird Uncle had come along to help them hide the body. He turned up the first day of a long weekend with Castiel in tow and a dozen tins of paint in a wheelbarrow.

Somehow he'd convinced them. They'd stripped out all the old wallpaper in John's room. They threw out old papers, magazines, junk. They stripped the bed and threw a tarp over the top. They painted the room, each wall a different shade of blue and seamed in two with a border in different colours, the work of Castiel's free time and his love for nature. bees swooped lazily over painted fields of horses, sheep, cows. A forever-running reel, a banner through the middle of each wall. It was detailed, almost madly so.

It was almost a little too floral, and yet somehow it had the feel of cowboys to it too.

Castiel fell into Gabriel's bed each night almost dead on his feet, leaving Gabriel and Sam to crush into Sam's bed and squabble over the duvet. On the last afternoon Castiel was done, standing proudly in the centre of the room with yellow in his hair and green on his cheek and a kaleidoscope of colours on his hands and the proudest grin Sam had ever seen him wear.

He was fourteen then, still pretty small for his age and already an expert in solemn and stoic. Sam and Gabriel watched over him like anxious parents but truth be told Castiel seemed to veer around trouble like he knew it was coming. He wasn't popular, and he didn't care.

Sam hugged him hard as he marvelled over the bluebirds singing in the branches of a corpse of trees. Gabriel whooped and followed the band around the room in a double-circuit and hollered for Dean.

That was the day Sam and Gabriel agreed Castiel was utterly smitten with Sam's older brother. Personally Sam didn't see the appeal, and when he asked Gabriel his friend merely shrugged and said a guy could do much worse than a Winchester. Dean, nineteen and in his new role of House-Adult, seemed not to notice how red Castiel got when he praised the beauty of his work. He also seemed not to notice how the boy's blue eyes never left his the whole evening at dinner and watching a movie later, nor how gruff his voice whenever he spoke.

Dean blamed Cas's painting when Sam suddenly began begging for a dog. But he gave in anyway.

Gabriel went with Sam to choose one. Dean had brushed off Sam's initial request, but once Sam was in bed he'd spent the night on his laptop trying to work out the best breed for his little brother. He'd winced at the prices. He'd grafted payment plans. He'd decided to find a way and told Sam yes. When Sam announced he and Gabriel were going to take the bus to the next town to look in the pound, Dean had laughed at himself for thinking Sam would want a pedigree when he could take in a stray who'd been abandoned.

Loki wasn't the well-behaved and placid creature Dean had expected, but somehow he fit.