The Winchesters were clearly insane. Dean had gone to sleep well after midnight, and Sam well after that, but they were both bright-eyed and bushy tailed at six o'clock that morning, praying to Gabriel to get his feathery ass in gear. Of course he had only left in the first place to lock down Pestilence's location, and he didn't need to sleep or rest, but that didn't make the hunters any less crazy for being up at the crack of dawn.
"My ass is totally featherless," he said by way of greeting. "It's hairless, too. Wanna see?"
Dean looked vaguely grossed out, but the corners of Sam's mouth turned up.
Before his older brother could respond, Sam replied, "Maybe after you help us get the ring."
Gabriel held up his hand and pretended not to notice the way Sam flinched as if he were about to do something with it.
"Woah, woah, woah! Hold up, hotshot. I said I would tell you where Pesty is. I never said I would help you get his ring."
"Come on!" complained Dean. "You coulda already got the ring if you'd wanted, couldn't you? The least you can do is give us more than a pin on a map!"
If Gabriel hadn't already been well versed in the stubborn impudence of Winchesters, he would have been tempted to send Dean into a pocket reality where Impalas didn't exist and no women found him attractive. As it was, he merely rolled his eyes.
"What part of 'I don't want my brother to know I'm alive' don't you idiots get? Lucifer would notice me zeroing in on Pestilence before I could get within a hundred-mile radius. Even if I were able to get away with the ring before Luci rained Hell fire down on my perfectly smooth ass, my element of surprise would be gone and the plan blown."
Dean's already stern expression deepened into one of consternation, which only made his well sculpted face look even prettier, damn him.
"What plan?" he demanded.
Sam looked at Gabriel with a distinctly pleading expression, then at anything besides his brother after Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest and pursed his lips in silent disagreement. Dean's green eyes flitted between them, growing harder with each pass.
"Sam," he all-but growled. "What. Plan?"
Sam seemed to bite his nails pretty much subconsciously when he was under extreme stress, and Gabriel didn't know whether he wanted to smack the overgrown man's hand away from his mouth or wrap him up in his wings and promise to make it all go away. Which really confused him. It hadn't been that long ago that he'd felt little more than annoyance for Sam Winchester. The kid could be stubborn to the point of being thickheaded, and he was operating under an incredibly frustrating combination of self-righteousness and self-loathing, and he was an enormous pain in Gabriel's ass. But Gabriel kind of respected his unwavering tenacity, and he'd rarely met anyone who held onto so much faith despite all the crap that had been piled onto him. Plus he had to admit that Sam loved his brother as much as Gabriel loved his.
Gabriel had hurt a lot of people under his Father's orders, but he had always believed that they deserved it, even if he hadn't always understood why. He had always believed that Father wouldn't have ordered him to destroy anything or anybody that wasn't truly wicked, and he still believed that. He had to. And when he'd taken up his Loki persona, he had always chosen people who really deserved what they got—maybe Dad wouldn't agree, but He wasn't around to say what He thought, so screw Him anyway.
But Sam hadn't deserved what Gabriel had done to him at the Mystery Spot. Sure, he'd justified it to himself as being in both Sam's and the world's best interests that Sam not go out of his mind with grief and allow himself to be manipulated into freeing Lucifer, and that was kind of true.
It was even more true that Gabriel had thought it was in his own best interest not to have to watch his brothers destroy each other, and that had been his motivation more than anything.
He'd felt bad about it when Sam had pleaded with him to give him back the last months he'd thought he would ever have with his brother. Gabriel had never tortured anyone who hadn't deserved it before. Now that he had Lucifer back, Gabriel had allowed himself to feel everything he'd been repressing for millennia, and he felt even more terrible for putting Sam through the same kind of torture he'd experienced during Lucifer's fall.
And Sam had been stronger than Gabriel had ever been. Sure, he'd done the wrong thing, but he'd done it thinking that he was fighting for his brother. Gabriel had run away without fighting for his, and that was an awful thing to admit.
He was angry at both Winchesters all of a sudden—at Sam for doing what Gabriel never had back then, and at Dean for not properly appreciating it as much as Gabriel thought he should.
"You can't do this!" Dean was shouting when Gabriel finally snapped, both literally and figuratively.
The brothers both stopped and swung to look at him, then at each other, as if to determine what the Archangel-turned-Trickster had done to them with that bit of magic.
"Listen up, assholes," he said, his voice more strident than usual as he tried to cover his emotions. He pointed at them in turn. "You, Gigantor, shouldn't have tried to do this behind your brother's back, or at least you shouldn't have dragged me into it until you were ready to tell him. And you, Dean-o, should respect his choice to save the world instead of his own hide. Don't bother praying to me again until you're both completely committed to the plan."
Lucifer was holed up in a ratty hotel in what used to be a good area of Columbus, Ohio. Gabriel normally would have been overflowing with negative comments on the location and décor, but today his eyes were all for his brother, who was hunched over a manuscript written in some dead language Gabriel didn't currently care enough to identify. Lucifer looked up when Gabriel touched down on the grimy carpet, even though Gabriel's grace was pouring out of him and Lucifer couldn't have possibly needed to look to see who had disturbed him.
The fact that his brother took comfort in seeing him made Gabriel's eyes burn with unshed tears.
Lucifer looked nonplussed for a moment before his eyes narrowed in growing anger. Gabriel could see where that was going—Lucifer was gearing up to obliterate whoever had made baby bro cry.
He choked out, "Your vessel chews on his fingernails."
That hadn't been at all what Gabriel had planned to say. Lucifer looked just as confused as Gabriel felt. He blinked once at his brother, leaning back in his uncomfortable hotel chair as if to get a better look at him.
"I'll, uh… make him stop?"
Gabriel let out a pitiful little chuckle that was halfway obscured by a sniffle. "He fought for his brother."
"Gabriel, you're not making any sense," his older brother told him almost gently. Well, it would have been almost gently if his tone hadn't been tinged with frustration at Gabriel and with a lingering, as-yet-undirected anger, just in case it turned out that he needed to smite someone after all, but Gabriel knew what he meant.
"Sam fought for Dean!" Gabriel threw up his hands haphazardly and sucked his snot back up into nostrils. "He didn't care about himself or the other people he loved or the innocent strangers he hurt along the way or that even if I resurrected Dean it would only last for a few months before Hell came calling—he just cared about getting his brother back!"
Lucifer still looked as confused as ever. His vessel's blue eyes were wide now, and he had brought his thumbnail up to his mouth in such a familiar way that Gabriel couldn't help but laugh.
Lucifer looked on with genuine concern.
"Is this some sort of fit of hysteria?" he asked.
"I didn't do that for you!" the youngest archangel finally managed to blurt out. "That's why you don't completely trust me!"
Lucifer went completely still, not even allowing his vessel to breathe or blink for several seconds.
Finally, he bit out, "What?"
"You didn't share your thoughts with me or ask me to support you before you fell, and you didn't try to find me or ask me to join you after you fell, and now you won't share your thoughts or plans with me unless I beg, and—"
"No!" shouted Lucifer, shooting up from his chair with so much force that it flew into the wall several feet behind him.
Gabriel stopped talking abruptly and only barely remembered to snap his mouth closed. His older brother's eyes were glowing a vibrant red-orange, and Gabriel took an involuntary step backwards. He wasn't afraid of Lucifer; he was just afraid of Lucifer's reaction and of hearing his brother confirm everything he'd said. It had always hurt badly enough when Michael had chastised him for not showing a proper amount of decorum for an archangel or when Raphael had lobbed harsh words at him when they had disagreed about how Father wanted them to complete a task. Hearing the truth from Lucifer would be the most painful thing to endure, though.
"I do trust you," Lucifer insisted. "I trust you too much. That's why I was so angry when I thought that I'd been wrong, that you were choosing Michael or even humans over me."
Gabriel trembled. "That doesn't even make sense! You shared your thoughts and misgivings with Michael, Archangel of the Enormous Flaming Sword and Even More Enormous Stick Up His Ass, but you didn't tell me!"
That Lucifer neither smiled nor chastised his brother for that description of Michael was testament to how focused he was on the issue at hand.
"I didn't want you with me!" he declared fiercely.
He seemed to realize a moment later that he had revealed too much with too little care. Gabriel's grace had deflated to such an extent that it was painful. Lucifer crossed the room between blinks and invaded his brother's personal space.
"Stop," he ordered, his voice harsh with fear. Gabriel looked down, and Lucifer softened his tone and gently cupped his hands around Gabriel's face to tilt his head up until their eyes met. "Brother, of course I wanted you with me for my own sake. But for your sake, I didn't want to expose you to what I was doing or to Father's wrath."
"But Michael—"
"Could take care of himself," Lucifer interrupted gently.
Gabriel squawked in indignation, and Lucifer laughed with his true voice, the sound like a beautiful melody plucked out on several heavenly harps—ones that were just a bit out of tune, as testament to Lucifer's warped Grace, but still beautiful.
"I know that you can take care of yourself too, Gabriel. I have seen the destruction you can cause without even trying. But even though you are literally older than dirt—older even than the atoms that formed the stardust that eventually formed the dirt—you will always be my younger brother, and I will always try to shield you. Even if you don't really need me to."
Gabriel was so touched that he couldn't even think of anything appropriately inappropriate to say, so instead he leaned up and buried his face into the neck of his brother's much taller vessel. And Father help him that his brother would be a good three or four inches taller when he got sweet Sammy's hot bod….
Lucifer tolerated the embrace for a few seconds before he began struggling to get away.
"Gabriel! Gross!" he complained loudly. "Your vessel is leaking!"
Gabriel deliberately wiped his runny nose on his brother's collar. "Yeah, they tend to do that."
It was really quite amusing that the Devil didn't mind being covered in blood and guts and Leviathan slime and other tissues from all manner of beings that the archangels had been tasked with exterminating over the years, but he was freaking out about a bit of snot. Gabriel would have taken that as license to mock his brother incessantly for the rest of eternity, except that Lucifer sighed his defeat and wrapped his arms around Gabriel with such deliberate gentleness that Gabriel didn't want to do anything to stain the memory for either of them. Lucifer had always been kind and gentle with his younger brothers, at least until the Mark had begun its work and corrupted him. Gabriel had missed it more than he'd known until that moment.
After a while, Lucifer extricated himself from the embrace just enough to see Gabriel's face and said, "Now, brother, you have to tell me what brought on all of this."
"Oh," Gabriel replied rather dully, "it's just the usual Winchester crap. Dean is trying to deny the hopelessness of the situation and that he can't keep his brother safe this time, while Sam has accepted it but is keeping that a secret from Dean because he knows that Dean won't want to face it. But it just made me so angry to see it…"
Lucifer released a chilling laugh. "That sounds familiar."
Gabriel didn't have to point out that the Winchester brothers were literally meant for Michael and Lucifer. They could both see the parallels well enough without anybody having to say it aloud.
Gabriel… Gabriel, come on.
The archangel sighed and buried his entire head under his brother's wing to try to block out Sam's voice. The feathers there were as long and broad as a broadsword and as hard as diamonds, but they didn't cut Gabriel's skin like they would have cut anyone else's, even the other angels'. One of the reasons they had never been closer to their younger brothers—besides that whole thing where archangels were created from primordial energies through the first and best efforts of their Father way before God had created the angels—was that their younger brothers were so fragile compared to them. Actually maybe that did have something to do with the whole primordial energies thing.
Anyway, it was a really heady experience to be in such close proximity to wings that could cause tsunamis and tornados, even for another archangel whose wings could do the same.
Unfortunately, one thing his brother's wings couldn't do was block prayers.
Please, Gabriel!
Gabriel's next annoyed exhalation rustled Lucifer's feathers, and his brother finally lifted his wing out of Gabriel's reach and peered down at him with a lifted eyebrow.
"What?" demanded Gabriel. "You try having a direct line in your mind to Sam Winchester's whining."
Lucifer gave him a sardonic smile and laid his copy of the Divine Comedy across his chest so that he could give his brother his full attention.
"I plan to have Sam in my mind all the time," he said.
Gabriel sat up so that he could look Lucifer more fully in the eye, mostly to see if he was kidding. Angels didn't allow their vessels to maintain a connection to their minds; they just didn't. Although most humans were honored to host an angel at first, they quickly changed their minds. And then it was all mental screaming and crying and pleading and scratching and throwing themselves against the walls of your mind. No fun at all.
But Lucifer had such an earnest gleam in his eyes that he was clearly being perfectly serious about letting Sam live inside his head.
Gabriel swallowed once and ventured to ask, "You… you really, uh… care about him, don't you?"
Lucifer stared at him in clear surprise. "He was created for me; of course I love him." He gave Gabriel a searching look. "Don't you love your vessel?"
Gabriel blinked once. Twice. "I haven't even thought of him in thousands of years. He was my vessel, nothing more."
"'Was'? Is he dead?"
Lucifer looked like he actually might be upset at the idea. Gabriel could only lean back and study his brother's face, as if it might contain all of the answers. Which was distantly amusing, since that's the exact same way Daniel had looked at Gabriel when he'd interpreted his visions for him, and how Zacharias and Mary had looked at him when he had announced the impending arrival of their respective sons—granted, Mary had not been as deferential and grateful as she should have been to an Archangel of the Lord, but he'd forgiven her since he had just thrust the idea of immaculate conception into her face.
But he couldn't distract himself from Lucifer's question forever, so he took an unneeded breath and rearranged his wings more comfortably behind him.
"Yes, he's dead. I kept him alive for a while—several hundred years at least, maybe a millennium, I wasn't really keeping track of time back then—but then I decided that I would keep the vessel permanently so I let him go."
"You let him go?" echoed Lucifer, his incredulous tone sharpened by an edge of steel. "I will never let Sam go."
Gabriel could have pointed out that it would be cruel to keep their vessels' souls with them forever. Serving as a vessel was never meant to be a permanent state; after all, neither archangels nor angels were meant to stay on earth forever.
Instead, he said, "Well, Hávarđr wasn't exactly my prophesied vessel of the apocalypse. He was just some guy from my bloodline. And anyway I made use of different vessels several times when Father sent me to Earth, so I never saw them as the companions of my soul or whatever."
His older brother looked at least slightly appeased.
GABRIEL!
Gabriel huffed in annoyance at the intrusion, but he immediately felt bad about being so annoyed when he saw the way Lucifer stared at him, clearly wishing that he were the one Sam were praying to.
"'I am ready to die'? Really, Gabriel?"
Sam was clearly engaged in an internal war between annoyance and amusement, if the wavering expression on his face was anything to go by. Dean, on the other hand, was obviously unamused.
Gabriel shrugged and carefully peeled down the wrapper of his Snickers Bar. "I like Harry Potter."
"That's not even—it's not—You're mixing up Harry Potter references!" Sam pointed an accusing finger toward the map of the United States that sat neatly folded into a couple of square inches, unless Sam said the magic words. After several seconds of Gabriel staring back at him with complete unconcern, he sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose instead. "Pestilence said that we were too late. Do you know what he meant?"
"Uuhhh… I don't know," replied Gabriel. "Did they really land on the moon? How do you make your hair look like that? Why does anyone pretend that Splenda tastes like the real thing? I said that I'd tell you where Pesty was, not that I'd answer all the burning questions of the universe for you."
"Yeah, okay, you're hilarious," Dean cut in sharply, "but a Horseman of the Freakin' Apocalypse just told us that we're too late for something, so we don't really have time for your crap."
Gabriel made a show of spreading his arms wide in surrender, although the effect was no doubt ruined by the half eaten candy bar clutched between his fingers.
"Okay, okay! I could help."
The look of sheer relief that passed over Sam's face told Gabriel all that he needed to know. The kid was drowning and thought that Gabriel could hold his head above water for him.
He sat down heavily in one of the rickety chairs. "That's good. Really good."
"I said I could help, not that I would," Gabriel pointed out.
Sam's face fell immediately, but Dean's face only hardened even more than before, until he resembled Michael on Gabriel's worst days. He pinned Gabriel with a knowing glare and, "What do you want?"
Gabriel didn't bother to deny it.
"I want to join the team," he said immediately. "Full-fledged member, no keeping me out of the loop. You tell me what you know and I will tell you what I know."
Dean looked even unhappier than before, and Gabriel was momentarily insulted at the train of the man's thoughts. Making a deal with him was not like making a deal with Ruby, thank you very much. Well, except for the whole thing where he actually was cozying up to Sam in order to manipulate him into helping Lucifer. Like Ruby had done. But it was totally different. Obviously.
On the other hand, Sam seemed to have a pleasing amount of cautious optimism behind his hesitancy. "You've been refusing to come off the sidelines from the start. Why change your mind now?"
Gabriel flexed his uppermost wings. Although the Winchesters couldn't see what he had done, they both felt the disturbance in the atmosphere and eyed him warily. He ignored their reactions and carelessly flung his empty wrapper onto Dean's bed, conjuring another candy bar in its place.
"What can I say? I really dig the uniforms. Do I have to supply my own lumberjack shirts or do you have spares?"
