On the Flip Side
Chapter 3
What the hell did he do?
He paced the length of his current apartment, agitated and frustrated with the world. With himself. It didn't help that he was having a hard time putting his grace back in it's box now that it had come out to play, making him feel claustrophobic in his own borrowed skin. It hummed and vibrated and was taking forever to settle enough to be contained.
Last but not least, he was officially done with giant alien robots. Cybertronians. Whatever.
Especially ones that decided to put themselves at the end of a gun after freshly bonding their soul to another living being. Gabriel just about lost it at that point, furious, it wasn't like the kid's life was on the line or anything. Gabriel was risking his very safety and security by helping them, after all, and it was all but thrown right back in his face before the dust even settled.
Then again, it's not like they were aware he was assisting them in the first place.
Luckily for all parties involved, Prowl wasn't the kind to shoot his brother in cold blood.
Brother! Robots could apparently have brothers, twins even. Now wasn't that a kick in the head?
Like an itch in the back or his mind, something shifted ever so slightly, twitched, and then settled into a dormant silence, two energies syncing back together, held in rhythm by a third.
Gabriel, Loki, summoned one of his stashed containers of deity-quality hard liquor, uncapped it and took a long pull straight from the bottle. Trying to drown out the awareness.
What the hell had he been thinking?
He hadn't, that's what.
Gabriel had tried to stay with Jodi during the chaos that followed that first three-way-connection. But with the awkward handoff and then Barricade collapsing right there on the beach, he had been forced to scramble out of the way, breaking the steady support his grace had been supplying to Jodi. The kid had seized before falling still in Prowl's massive metal hands.
Her heart had stopped.
There had been a flurry of people barking orders, and a shuffle of equipment that was arranged in a semi-circle around the kid. He slunk back to her side when the medics swooped in, restarting her heart in time with their resuscitating efforts.
Jodi and her metal man both had to be airlifted off the beach, and flown to the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada. Because apparently they couldn't take the kid and her beat-up bodyguard anywhere closer.
Of course Gabriel hitched a ride with them, because why the hell not.
Well, he hitched a ride with Jodi anyway. She was his primary concern and was the first one to be shipped off to boot. Not to mention the whole heart-stopping thing. That might have been a factor as well, though why, why, why he didn't quit while he was ahead was beyond him.
Gabriel had sat in the back corner of the chopper, wedged between Jodi's diety feet and the wall to keep the two attending medics from bumping into him, all the while keeping one hand on her ankle to monitor her condition.
Once they had Jodi on an emergency blood transfusion he eased up on that front, especially when one of the men started muttering that he didn't know how she was still alive. He dialed it down and turned his focus elsewhere.
Or well, he tried to, but of course there had to be more complications.
Of course there was.
The fractured piece of Barricade's soul was rattling around Jodi's body and causing problems, fighting anything and everything that was messing with the kid, including Gabriel himself. Thankfully a single piece didn't pack the same punch as the whole, or there would have been potential for some serious collateral damage. It was still damn annoying though.
When Jodi flat-lined for the third time Gabriel finally realized the problem.
The shard was sentient enough to consider him a threat, and was trying damn hard to fight him off even as it became more erratic. The sudden distance from it source seemed to throw it into some sort of shock, making it swirl though the kid and interrupting her body's own responses, all the while trying to bury itself within the girl's soul, trying to fill the hole that had been torn out and integrate itself instead.
Gabriel remembered how Barricade had taken in the tiny bit of Jodi's soul, assimilating it into himself as easily as two water drops merging, clearly designed to do such a thing. Human souls didn't work that way. They didn't have that kind of fluidity and were incapable of mingling like that, of accepting that kind of bond at such a level. The end result was like watching water trying desperately to blend itself with a whole barrel of oil.
It was never going to happen.
To top that off, the exchange had been horribly uneven, Barricade leaving far more of himself than he had actually taken. The sheer excess had nowhere to go and would burn the kid out before much longer.
For such a tiny scrap of a human, she sure was making Gabriel jump through some pretty big hoops to keep her alive.
Luckily for her, his time as Loki made him exceptionally capable of thinking outside of the box, or through the box as the case might be.
Though he wondered if this bordered on blasphemy.
Ignoring the shard's protest, Gabriel had extended his grace a little deeper, digging, searching, until he found what he hoped he would. It was barely there, and so thinly structured it would probably explode under the strain of it's intended use, the bloodline too watered down to sustain any but the weakest of his siblings. But maybe, just maybe, it was strong enough for this.
He hoped no one noticed one little potential vessel being removed from the board.
Now for the hard part.
That not-so-tiny shard of Barricade's soul took to being corralled about as well as a wolverine took to being caged.
That is, not at all.
Writhing and thrashing with all its might, it saw his manipulation as an attack and coiled itself more tightly around Jodi even as it tried to evade his grip.
The close proximity of foreign energy was much easier to deal with in this fractured format. It was still abrasive, but at such a low dose it was much easier to work with without risking unwanted side effects. Like blowing up the state, for example.
Gabriel had pushed and prodded, using his grace to funnel the shard where he wanted it to go. It protested violently until it seemed to realize that he wasn't actually trying to pry it from the girl's soul, but assisting, and just like a switch was flipped it stopped, and allowed itself to be directed.
There had been a massive sigh of relief at that.
With long buried pathways lying wide open before it, the shard surged forward, spilling itself inside the lines and spreading out. It circulated throughout the kid's body, now in constant interaction with Jodi's soul without actually merging. The shard finally calmed then, and with any luck, it would no longer interfere with any further attempts of fixing the kid.
The lines had trembled once, the tiniest vibration under the sudden strain of foreign energy. Gabriel quickly used a touch of his own grace, reinforcing the pathways and tricking them into thinking that it was supposed to be there. There was always the possibility of the whole thing crumbling like a brittle sand castle, so once more Gabriel acted without thinking about the damn consequences.
He left a small touch of his own grace, letting it be the super glue that kept the kid held together.
He was a damned moron.
Now here he was, sitting in his temporary apartment, trying his very best to drown out his own stupidity with alcohol.
He plopped like a sulking child down into an overstuffed armchair, legs tossed carelessly over one arm and the bottle propped up on his lap. Staring at the far wall, he took another swig when he felt the connection shift and then finally settle, like a house coming to rest on its foundations. With any luck, the awareness would ease with time. Maybe disappear all together.
That was a big maybe.
There was no precedent for this after all. It wasn't everyday that an archangel-turned-Pagan-God linked themselves, however faintly, to a soul bonded pair. A pair that would have been impossible if he hadn't been there.
Dad was probably sitting in the far corner of the galaxy and laughing he ass off right about now.
He scowled at the bottle and took another long drink.
A faint whine and a paw scratching on his hip, brought his attention to the little Jack Russell now standing by his chair, reminding him that he wasn't the only one he had put at risk tonight.
The guilt of that alone was crushing enough that he was finally able to completely reel in his grace, tucking it all away.
Gabriel, Loki, scooped the little dog up and brought him into his lap, rubbing an ear affectionately. "Don't worry about it, little buddy, it's nothing to worry about."
As the booze did its work, Loki forcibly put Gabriel back in his box and made a mental list of the things he needed to do to prevent this whole ordeal from biting him in his ass, or al least lessen the blow if it did.
Because there was no doubt in his mind that it would bit him in the ass.
End.
Author's Note: And thus concludes On the Flip Side! Never fear, there are lots more to come in the Wayward Ones universe! There are a few short oneshots coming your way, mostly to bridge the gap between Disregarded/Flipside and Fulminata Coil's Stranger than Frisson (it's in my Favorites, please go read it!), and a multi-chapter story involving the Winchesters. Rest assured, Gabriel shall return, I promise. Thanks for reading, and please remember to review! -Shadow