"I'll never understand you humans," Gabriel announced as he settled himself onto the arm of the sofa next to Sam. "What with all the selling your souls for the slightest reasons."
Sam jumped in surprise and brought his arm up instinctively before his brain caught up and recognized who had just appeared next to him. He was a huge guy, and his blow was powerful enough that it would have knocked Gabriel right off the couch and onto the floor, if hitting Gabriel hadn't been something like hitting a thirty-five-hundred-year-old sequoia.
Then there was a sawed off pointed at his face.
"What the hell is going on?"
Sam pushed the gun away from Gabriel's nose even as the archangel crossed his eyes to get a better look, which Gabriel appreciated even though it really wouldn't have done anything to him. The kid did care! He leaned back against Sam's broad, manly shoulder and grinned at the old hunter with an expression that would have tried the patience of Father himself.
"He's here to help, Bobby," insisted Sam in that pleading, earnest Sam Winchester voice that made Gabriel's feathers go all fluffy.
Bobby kept his glare firmly trained on Gabriel for a few oppressive seconds, then shifted his eyes to Dean, bypassing Sam entirely.
"That true?"
"Oh, come on! You guys didn't tell him about me?" Gabriel crossed his arms petulantly over the hideous plaid shirt he had conjured up just for the occasion. "I thought I was part of the team now!"
If Gabriel wasn't quite mistaken—and who was he kidding, he was hardly ever mistaken—then the stern, annoyed look on Dean's face was totally a front to hide his amusement at Gabriel's outfit. The older Winchester crossed his arms across his chest in much the same way Gabriel had his own.
"Yeah, it's true. But what I don't get is why he's suddenly all gung ho to have you and Crowley know he's alive."
As an archangel, Gabriel didn't have to keep an eye on Crowley to know that he was trying to pop out of the house. It was a good thing he didn't have to look, too, because the last thing Gabriel wanted to do was stare at the hideous, mangled soul underneath the surface of the meat suit. He had long since learned to focus on humans' vessels instead of their souls, although it had him taken centuries and he was still occasionally blindsided by particularly spectacular souls if he wasn't expecting it, like when he'd first seen Dean's and Sam's. But he hadn't spent any time around demons to be able to train himself otherwise, so with his archangel sight he couldn't help but see their true forms. He looked as little as possible.
Gabriel snapped once and wagged his finger in Dean's direction. "Good question, Dean-o! I'll tell you why: The old man isn't—Sam, stop wriggling like a sack full of kittens! I'm trying to get comfortable here!—isn't quite as big an idiot as the rest of you, and what the demon knows doesn't signify now that you don't need him."
Everyone in the room turned to look at Crowley, who had gone tense with surprise and fear when he realized that he couldn't leave. Sam shifted uncomfortably underneath Gabriel's surprisingly heavy weight and craned his head to see around the archangel's body.
Crowley turned slowly on his heel to face the room with a confident smirk, as though he hadn't been trying to flee. "Now, now, we're all friends here. I've helped our dear boys locate Death. I want Lucifer dead as much as anyone."
Gabriel barely managed to contain himself from smiting the little piss-ant. He could have explained it away to the hunters and his baby brother, or else he could have taken their memories of the event if he couldn't explain it away. So that wasn't stopping him. No, the only thing that was stopping him from burning away the remains of the King of the Crossroads' tattered soul from the inside out was that Crowley was actively working to betray Lucifer, his master and Gabriel's most beloved brother, and Gabriel thought that prolonged torture would be a more fitting punishment.
Oh, yeah, and also probably Lucifer would like to be the one to ultimately kill the guy. After Gabriel was through with him. Maybe.
"You don't need to worry about Lucifer," he informed the demon seriously, letting his eyes glow a flat gold. "Lucifer's not here… and I'm a lot less friendly to demons than my brother is."
Then Crowley vanished from thin air, and there was perfect, complete silence. Gabriel could feel Sam's muscles tense beneath him, but he didn't say anything. Dean made a few indistinct noises, and Bobby seemed to be in shock.
Somewhat to Gabriel's surprise, it was Castiel who spoke up first. "Brother, perhaps you can convince the demon to return Bobby's soul before you kill him."
It hurt to look at Castiel's diminished Grace, but Gabriel finally turned to face him fully, offering a smile. "Don't worry, Castiel, I'm sure that a few years reliving his life from infancy with his human mother will do a world of good for his attitude."
Dean snorted with laughter and reached out to give Sam a friendly punch on the arm, presumably because he couldn't reach Gabriel. "Dude, that's awesome!"
"Yes, well," Gabriel said, turning his glowing eyes on the hunters, mostly on Dean and Bobby, "if someone had mentioned me, then someone else wouldn't have felt the need to sell his soul to a demon just to find out where Death is."
They were obviously a bit disconcerted at seeing him like this. Distantly Gabriel realized that the hunters had never seen him for what he really was. Oh, they knew what he was, of course, but he had never acted like it around them before.
"Balls!" the old one exclaimed.
Gabriel could concur. He finally let the light dim from his eyes and a half pitying, half amused smile curl the edges of his vessel's mouth.
"Why're you in that chair anyway?" he asked Bobby.
Everyone turned nearly as one to glare at him, and Sam tried again to wriggle away. He was unsuccessful, of course. Obviously.
Gabriel shrugged. "What? Do you have some sort of fetish I'm not supposed to talk about?"
Bobby's face hardened in fury and poorly concealed grief. "No, jackass, I'm paralyzed!"
Gabriel blinked and then squinted at the man, tilting his head to get an optimal view of the vessel. He could see the electrical impulses throbbing throughout the hunter's body, and there weren't any blockages or other problems that Gabriel could see.
"Um, sorry to angelsplain your own body to you, but no you aren't."
There were a few moments of shocked disbelief, then a furor as Bobby rose shakily from his wheelchair and Dean rushed forward to flap ineffectively around him offering help the man didn't want. Gabriel finally allowed Sam to displace him so that the younger Winchester could awkwardly embrace the man he considered a surrogate father. For his part, Castiel was staring hard at Bobby's spine, as if he could see the underlying anatomy through his nearly human eyes if he just tried hard enough.
When Sam stopped next to Gabriel and loomed over him where he was perched precariously on the narrow arm of the couch, it became clear to the archangel that they all thought he had been the one to heal Bobby. Now, he knew very well that he ought to disabuse them of that notion immediately if he were a good little archangel. But he wasn't. Hell, neither were any of his brothers, not really. So he smiled magnanimously and allowed himself to preen under the attention of Sam's rather awkward hand on his shoulder.
Then, before Sam or Castiel or anyone else had time to react, he had roused himself from his seat, such as it was, and was standing directly in front of his brother with his hand plopped unceremoniously on the vessel's forehead and halfway covering its eyes. Castiel went rigid, which Gabriel had anticipated on account of his having been smited by an archangel before—not that an archangel had to touch someone to smite them—but Castiel had no chance of escaping Gabriel's grasp before he let his own Grace pour into the angel.
The entire ground floor of Bobby's not insubstantial house was filled with rich golden light that crackled and burned through the air, daring anyone to be tempted by its beauty. Cas gasped and staggered to his knees before his older brother, and it was a good thing that the humans were temporarily blinded by his Grace or else Gabriel was sure that Dean would have moved to defend his pet angel.
Once the light show ended, Cas stayed kneeling on the scratched hardwood floor, gazing up at his older brother with heartbreaking awe.
"Brother…" he began, his deep voice cracking as if he desperately needed a drink. "Brother, thank you."
Gabriel shrugged as if it weren't a big deal. And for him it kind of wasn't, given that he had barely used any of his own power to restore Castiel's, and his Grace was already replenishing itself. Archangels had been formed from primordial energies long before God had ever created Heaven, so they and their powers functioned perfectly independently of Heaven. Unlike seraphs and foot soldiers and other lesser angels, the source of whose power was Heaven itself, archangels were their own power sources. Which is why Gabriel was completely undiminished by his time on earth, and why Lucifer had to be locked in a cage to protect the world and was still just as powerful as ever before despite the isolation.
"It should last you a while, but it will fade the same way it did when you were cut off from the Host," Gabriel informed the young angel. "We'll have to charge you up every few months. Assuming we live another few months."
Assuming Castiel lived another few months, that is. Gabriel wasn't entirely sure that Lucifer would let him live after he figured out how he'd been resurrected.
The humans seemed entirely overwhelmed by how awesome Gabriel was, as they should be. He could only hope that Sam remembered his awesomeness after he realized that Gabriel had been helping Lucifer all along. Oh well, it would work out somehow. Gabriel was sure of it.
He conjured up an oatmeal cream pie and offered a grin to belie the seriousness of the room.
"So, how about Death then?"
Lucifer had relocated to Detroit, to a room just as dismal and disgusting as the last one they'd been in. Gabriel couldn't help the scowl that spread across his face at the sight that greeted him when he landed.
"Luci, baby, will you please let me do something about this… this… hazmat zone?"
Lucifer appeared shocked for a moment at that form of address, but he had been nothing if not adaptable since getting out of his prison and reuniting with his pagan- and human-corrupted little brother, so he let an indulgent little smirk barely curve the corners of his mouth.
"You can do whatever you want with it," he said darkly. "I hardly see how it matters, but then I am used to the conditions of a cramped cage within the darkest, furthest reaches of Hell that Father could dream up to punish me."
That made Gabriel, who had been critically examining the sheets he held between the very tips of two of his fingers, stop abruptly and turn to look at his brother with wide, swimming eyes.
Lucifer immediately regretted his bitter words and held up his hands preemptively, as if he expected Gabriel to launch himself at him bodily. "No, no. Come on, Gabriel, we've already filled our quota for this sort of thing."
He really wanted to ask what time period Lucifer was using as a measurement, because surely they hadn't had enough emotional moments to make up for all of the tens of thousands of years that his brother had been folded up and stuffed into that teensy little cage. In Hell. Which their father had created for the express purpose of punishing Lucifer. But he could tell that Lucifer was in no mood for it, and to be honest Gabriel wasn't either. He hadn't experienced so many emotions since the first few years after leaving Heaven.
Instead, he decided to pile on the bad news while their moods already sucked anyway and announced, "Me and Dean are gonna go see Death tomorrow."
Lucifer turned serious blue eyes on him. "If Death sees you—"
"So what if he does? He can't, you know, kill me," interrupted Gabriel. His brother glared at him for his daring, but Gabriel had stopped being afraid of him ages ago. Or, you know, at least a few days ago. "But I wasn't gonna let him see me anyway. I want to see for myself how he reacts to Dean and how far he is willing to go to be rid of you."
Lucifer could have said any number of things, but he seemed to settle for pointing out, "If he does see you, then there is nothing binding him from making it widely known that you are alive and helping the humans, unless I reveal to him that I know about you."
"I won't be seen," insisted Gabriel, with a general flap of his hand in Lucifer's direction to indicate that he should stop interrupting. "Also Sam and Castiel and Robert Singer are going to take out your little vaccine factory before it can ship the virus."
Lucifer managed to form the first syllable of whatever he was going to say before Gabriel said, "That's not all."
Satan definitely blinked at him in stymied confusion for at least a second and a half before he exclaimed, "What else can there be?"
"Castiel almost definitely wasn't raised by Michael or Raphael. I restored his Grace so that I could do some super invasive checking, and there wasn't a trace of either of our brothers in him. They could have just hidden it or maybe it doesn't work that way in the first place, but…"
"Hmm, yes, either of those is unlikely," supplied Lucifer.
He appeared way calmer than Gabriel would have given him credit for after hearing that their Father had almost certainly personally resurrected a low-level angel. He clenched his vessel's jaw so hard that Gabriel could hear the teeth grinding, and his wings twitched as if he was barely restraining himself from taking flight, but overall he managed not to react overmuch.
Gabriel replaced the awful hotel bed with the monstrosity of down and fluff that he preferred whenever he had a reason to use a bed, then let himself fall back onto it with a contented sigh.
"I just don't see why Father would take the time to bring the little angel back from non-existence but allow him to be completely cut off from Heaven," he grumped.
What he really wanted to know was why God would take the time to resurrect Castiel but wouldn't take the time to intervene any further in the conflict, and hadn't taken the time to check in on any of his children for millennia untold but had decided that Castiel was worthy of his time. But he didn't want to ask either of those thoughts out loud. He was uncomfortable enough just allowing them to flit through the utter privacy of his mind.
Lucifer seemed perfectly happy to take up the distraction Gabriel had offered, although the bitterness had returned to his voice. "It is useless to try to figure out why Father does anything. Nothing He does is sensible or consistent. He created us with free will, yet He cast me out of His sight and out of Heaven altogether when I dared to use that which He had given me. He did not create the humans with knowledge of anything beyond paradise and perfection, yet He punished all of humanity because Eve was incapable of recognizing the deceit and ill intent that He had made sure she was ignorant of."
He sighed and sat on the edge of Gabriel's bed, bowing his head as if in prayer.
"Either He really has little more idea than we do about how things will pan out and is lying about His omniscience, or He knew what would happen and willingly allowed it. Tell me, brother, which is the better way to think of our Father?"
They were both horrible.
Gabriel swallowed thickly and sat up so that he could wrap his arms around his brother. When Lucifer didn't protest at his first tentative gesture, Gabriel squeezed more securely and leaned his forehead against the broad expanse of his brother's back.
When he could no longer avoid the urge to give voice to his thoughts, he whispered, "He knew."
Lucifer reached up to twine his fingers with the ones Gabriel had sprawled across his abdomen.
"Yes," he agreed. His voice was cold and matter-of-fact, without a hint of the despair Gabriel was feeling. "He wanted his little pets to experience it all, and he wanted me to be the one to give it to them. The humans wouldn't care about God if there weren't Satan."
The only thing Gabriel could do was tighten his fingers around Lucifer's and make a sound of distress.
Lucifer pulled the smaller vessel's arms from around himself and turned so that they were face-to-face.
"You should not be so surprised, Gabriel. After all, Father only created us to serve His purpose—at first to help Him defeat Amara, which He couldn't do by Himself, and He must have known what would come next, and then as soon as we weren't useful anymore daddy went out for beer and never came home. But I don't blame you, because I was surprised too when I realized it."
"But He loves us," Gabriel protested, with significantly less conviction than he'd thought he would be able to muster up. He looked up into Lucifer's face and knew that he was pleading with his brother to agree with him. "I know He does."
Lucifer smiled affectionately and pulled Gabriel against his chest, but he didn't offer a reply.
It turned out that Gabriel was right about the Winchesters being insane.
"We're not going to chop off Death's finger!"
Dean spun away from his conversation with Sam, holding the cursed knife his brother had handed him in one hand and clenching his other fist tightly in annoyance at being snuck up on by the archangel.
"Well, why not? We can't kill him." He paused for a second and shared a significant look with Sam. "Can we?"
The taller hunter bit his lip in indecision. "If the Colt won't work against Lucifer, then why would it work against Death itself?"
"No!" screeched Gabriel. "Just no. We're not going to kill Death! And I don't suppose you mean the herbivorous odd-toed quadruped?"
Dean glared at him for several seconds while he processed the meaning behind what Gabriel had asked, but Sam got it immediately.
"No, the repeating single-barrel revolver," he supplied, just a hint of smug know-it-all creeping into his voice. "It was made by Samuel Colt and can kill anything we've ever come across, except Lucifer."
"He said that he's one of five things in all of creation that the Colt can't kill," added Dean. "I shot him in the head from one damn inch away and the fucker got up and shook it off like it was nothing."
The gun was quickly produced for Gabriel's inspection. Dean, Sam, Bobby, and Castiel wanted to know what the other four things in all of creation were, and Gabriel just wanted to examine the thing for himself. He could definitely feel the magic emanating from it as soon as it was pressed into his hand, but he couldn't get a good handle on exactly what it was just by holding the thing.
"Hm," he mused, and then grinned outrageously at the horrified expressions on all their faces as he raised it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Pain. Pain. Painpainpainpainpainpainpainpainpainpain.
"Ooooooowwww!" he whined as soon as he had control of his vessel again. "Ow! No, seriously, ow! That is some bad juju!"
Castiel was crouched down next to him in the dirt and sparse, half-dead grass of Singer Salvage Yard, one of his hands halfway extended towards Gabriel's head as if he had been about to try healing him. For all the good that would have done, which would have been zero. The humans had crowded around and were peering curiously down at him from over Castiel's head. Dean looked undecided between anger and laughter, Bobby looked bearded and curious, and Sam… Sammy looked absolutely furious.
He glared at the archangel and let his lips curl into a snarl. "What were you thinking?"
Gabriel grabbed Castiel's shoulders and levered himself up into a sitting position. Not because he needed the help so much as because the discomfort on the angel's face was worth it. Then he contorted his vessel's neck until all the fluid in his vertebrae rushed out of the joints with a pop that sounded almost as satisfying as it felt. Finally, he turned to offer a half-mocking, half-placating smile to his favorite hunter.
"Well, if it couldn't kill my brother then it couldn't kill me."
"Are those the five things then?" asked Bobby before Sam could respond. "God and the four archangels?"
Gabriel ran his finger across his temple and brought his hand to eye level to curiously stare at the blood, just to give himself time to consider his answer.
"No. There are five things, not five beings. There's a difference. There's God and archangels and Death, and then two other things that don't really matter because my brothers and I already got rid of them before this puny little solar system was even created. Maybe I'll tell you about them when we have more time, if we survive the apocalypse."
They didn't need to know about Amara or the Leviathans, although he knew from the looks on their faces that they weren't going to leave him alone until they found out. They would just have to wait until later, because now wasn't really the time to tell earth-shattering stories.
It took a while, but Gabriel finally managed to herd Sam and his two tag-alongs into the van they'd probably stolen for the occasion, and then it was merely a matter of distorting reality for a second or two until he and Dean appeared on the nearly deserted sidewalk in Chicago.
"Aw, man," Dean groaned as soon as he had regained his footing. He was clutching Gabriel's shoulder like a lifeline, but as soon as he realized he was doing it he let go. "I hate that Harry Potter-y thing you guys do."
Gabriel would have taken the opportunity to mock Dean for admitting that he'd read Harry Potter, but the situation at the moment was too serious for even Gabriel to take it lightly. He silently filed away the information for latter ribbing purposes and hooked a hand behind the hunter's elbow.
"C'mon, Dean-o, you've got a date with Death."
Death was sitting alone in a pizza parlor, eating a slice in the girliest way ever with a knife and fork. Gabriel strode across the street, dragging Dean behind him (He had a feeling that if Dean wasn't so invested in his brave, self-sacrificing, manly image, he would have locked up his legs and made Gabriel drag him across the pavement on his stomach like a lazy labradoodle.), and all but shoved the man through the front door with instructions not to mention him.
It was agony to listen to Death's little speech without bursting through the door himself, but he managed it somehow despite his growing anger on behalf of Lucifer and even on behalf of their deadbeat asshole of a father, even though God didn't deserve to have any of his sons defend him. It was especially difficult not to jump into the ring when Death tried to make Dean swear to make Sam jump into the Pit, but Gabriel held his ground.
Dean looked more than a little relieved to see Gabriel once it was over. He had actually been frightened of Death, and Gabriel couldn't remember ever having known him to be afraid of anything before. This pale and shaky Dean Winchester was definitely a new experience, and as they were waiting for Sam and his gang to wipe out all of the demons and Croats (and potential witnesses) and pray for Gabriel to pick them up, Gabriel decided to put him out of his misery.
Gabriel smiled kindly. "Death has always had a jumped up idea of his own importance, but mostly he was just messing with you."
Dean looked stunned beyond anything he had ever been able to imagine, which Gabriel imagined was really saying something for one of the Winchester brothers.
"Just… Wait… Hold on," he spluttered, his voice deepening with each syllable. "He lied to me?"
Gabriel snorted.
"Uh, yeah. 'Oh, I don't remember whether I'm older or God's older, life or death, chicken or egg' as if he's the yin to my Father's yang. Well, he isn't the other side of God's coin. God is Light, and the other side of that coin is Darkness. Death is just death, and the other side of his coin is just life. He only came into existence at the moment God created mortal souls."
"And all the 'Oh, I'm going to reap God,' when he and I both know that he can't do jack to my Father until God wills himself to die, and he can't do jack to Lucifer because angels don't have mortal souls for Death to reap and aren't capable of willing themselves to die like Father is. We either exist or we don't exist, but we don't die. If Death could have killed my brothers and me before we locked him in that tomb, he would have."
"You locked him in that tomb?" interrupted Dean.
Gabriel laughed outright this time. "Yeah, who did you think did it? Certainly not Deadbeat Dad, although he did bestir himself enough to request that we do it for him. And if Death could have killed Lucifer before he bound the guy to him, he would have. But he couldn't, just like he couldn't stop me from resurrecting every soul he's ever reaped, if I wanted to, and without turning them into brain-eating zombies like he did."
Dean swallowed once. Twice. Three times.
"Well. Hot damn."
