Wildflowers brightened the sepia tones of the desert landscape with a smear of candy-slick blues and reds. Wasps swarmed among the blossoms and crawled sluggish across the parched earth between them, bodies bloated with a surfeit of sugar.
Gabriel followed the curving tract of color to the lump of cooling meat that was his brother's vessels. The collision with the ground had reshaped mortal flesh into something tendriled and abstract, form swallowed by the forces of gravity and friction.
Gabriel landed hard and felt fat wasps burst beneath his heels. The vessel's seams had burst wide, spilling loops of bowel into the dust. He ignored the wreckage for the moment and focused deeper, searching for the blue flame of Castiel's Grace. What he found was a sullen ember, its edges frayed and wisping to smoke. His brother's true self was as battered as his borrowed body. The light dimmed further as Gabriel watched, flickering on the bare verge of extinction.
Ah, Castiel, you idiot, your wings…
The right was broken near its base. A bad injury, but one that would heal with time and rest. The left was flayed to muscle and bone, its delicate architecture laid open to the eyes of the vultures that circled above. There was something terribly intimate about the sight; something that made Gabriel spread his own wings wide as if to shield his brother. The drift of shadows only threw the ruin into bas relief, highlighting where tendons had torn free of their moorings.
Healing the vessel was an easy miracle, one Gabriel performed now with careless disregard. A brush of his fingers across the pale forehead and loops of intestines slotted back into place, the belly bulging briefly before skin rippled and sealed. Only the infected sigil in the middle of the chest remained, its lines crusted over with dried pus.
Had only his brother been a bird brought low Gabriel could have done the same for him, erasing even the grievous damage to his wings with a touch. The same God who felt the fall of every sparrow had not given his angelic children the power to heal their own.
Gabriel had no memories of Castiel that were not also those of flight. When he thought of his brother he thought of dark clouds and the Grace that danced within them. A Castiel tied to the earth was a pervasion, an insult to all things feathered and brave in the face of the storm.
Gabriel cradled his brother in his hands, a tender dying glow, and thought of how easy it would be to snuff it out. To close tight his fist, a motion as easy and simple as the brittle breaking of an insect's carapace. A simple thing and all too familiar, the burden of a messenger of both God's wrath and his mercy.
Garbiel saw their faces reflected in Castiel's Grace, the bright and shining warriors he had been forced to sacrifice on the altar of war. Michael and Lucifer were stronger, but it was Gabriel who was given authority over the armies of Heaven. It was by his word that soldiers marched to battle to never return. Onto him was given both dominion over all things powerful and a weight heavy and crushing to keep him from abusing his responsibilities.
Onto Gabriel was given love.
Not the reckless passion of humanity this but love simple, love pure. Michael and the rest viewed the lesser angels as expendable, their lives well-spent if given in service to the greater glory, but in Gabriel their names were known. He grieved for them, his soldiers, and fought at their side so that they might not die alone. What bled in Heaven bled dry, but at least Gabriel could send his brothers on without prolonging their suffering.
Love made him ruthless. In the war against the Fallen Gabriel lead the charge, whispering apologies even as he cast the traitors down to perdition. Love made him cunning. Tasked with cleansing the world of the half-bred Nelphilim, he used rumor and spite to turn the tribes against each other so that his own people might be spared battle.
And love made Gabriel strong. It gave him the courage to leave Heaven behind, an act that the ignorant Winchester boy had labeled cowardice. To stay would have meant being forced to choose a side, and where Gabriel stood so did the rank and file of the Host. Michael, Zachariah, and the rest could press garrisons into service as needed, but they could not sound the call to war.
But now, waiting beside yet another wounded warrior, Gabriel's bravery deserted him. He'd been here before. In a way he'd always been here, had spent his long life in mourning on bended knee. But as familiar as it was, everything was different this time around. It was different because Castiel was different.
From the moment of his creation, Castiel had been a surprise. Gabriel had simply been in the right place at the right time to witness the lesser angel's birth. Castiel's first words had not been a prayer of thanksgiving or a plea for orders. Instead he had turned to Gabriel with a frown and asked the one question that no other angel dared voice.
"Where do we go when we die?"
Gabriel had no answer. Heaven and Hell were promised to mankind, but if anything awaited angels their Father had not deigned to share the knowledge. Gabriel had existed for millennia, but his life was as a mayfly's when compared to the eternity of a mortal soul.
It was just as well then that Castiel did not wait for a response. He lurched into flight, feathers still tacky from the weave of the star that had been his womb, and was gone. It was the first of countless times he would leave Gabriel floundering in his wake.
In his first battle Castiel had again proven himself something altogether new. The rookie garrison had been overwhelmed by a pack of rutterkin, savage little demons with a taste for Grace. Cut off from retreat and outnumbered, things would have ended badly if Castiel hadn't disobeyed the order to fall back. Instead he'd flown high and twisted the ley lines under the battlefield into a simple devil's trap, giving his fellow soldiers the advantage.
He'd been punished, of course, but the ingenious little trick also earned Castiel a place in Anael's garrison, where he'd quickly risen up through the ranks. Uriel had chafed at following a fledgling's orders, but even he found a grudging respect for Castiel's ability to defy the odds.
Eventually Anael brought her lucky find to Gabriel's attention. By then Castiel had had the questions beaten out of him, but there'd been enough of a spark left for Gabriel to bother taking him under his wing to mentor him in the old wards.
He'd regretted those days when news came that Castiel had rebelled against the Host. It was one thing for Castiel to revolt against the archangels' designs, quite another for him to match swords with his own kin. The betrayal made Gabriel harsh when he caught the little angel nosing around the dimension he'd hand-crafted for the Winchester brothers' edification. Only now did he see how much those deaths had cost Castiel, the names of the slain carved bloody and deep in his Grace.
Gabriel loved his brothers, blindly, helplessly. But what he loved he also hated, for that love had been thrust upon him. It was the collar at his throat that strangled him with grief and there was no escape from the ties that bound him. He loved because he could do no less, for Gabriel too was as his Father made him.
But for Castiel, Gabriel had found he could do more. He had felt pride in his protégée's accomplishments with charms and sigils, but there had always been something else, something deeper. It had been born not in battle but in those first moments of Castiel's life, in the quiet question that echoed all of Gabriel's doubts and fears.
The love given to Gabriel had made him ruthless and strong. But the one love he had chosen for himself made him weak, too weak to relieve Castiel's pain. He wrapped the frail Grace in his own, holding his broken brother close in wing and prayer. 'My Castiel, my own, you'll live, and I hope you can forgive me for it.'
But the same self-chosen love also firmed Gabriel's resolve into something still and cold. In the seconds before Castiel had torn him away, he had looked into Lucifer's eyes and wavered. He had remembered his Morningstar and the sadness they'd all felt when he Fell. But no longer. It had to end.
Not for Sam and Dean. Not for the soldiers left alone. Not even for Castiel.
For Gabriel, so that his days of standing vigil might finally be over.