In the end, it came down to Sam.
Gabriel had known that it would, from the first time he set eyes on the boy and recognized him for what he was, a fellow trickster. It had always been on their kind to steal for humanity those things denied, be it water, fire, or a chance at survival.
What Gabriel had stolen had been no less than Heaven, that promised place to which no angel could aspire. They were not given to interfere with the passage of a mortal soul without orders, but one by one he had tormented and beguiled, leading his chosen victims by the hand to redemption. In those seconds before justice crashed down on their heads most prayed, and that was all God required of his favored creations.
For those few who died without the Creator's name on their lips, Gabriel felt no remorse. His Father had given them free will even as he shackled Gabriel with bonds of love. Their choices were their own, their refusal to take the gift of paradise in the face of ironic death too pathetic not to be humorous. In Gabriel's darker moments, as he watched yet another soul ascending screaming toward paradise, he understood Lucifer's rage at being cast aside for mankind.
But where Lucifer viewed all of humanity as lesser than the angels, Gabriel saw little difference between the two. Mankind's flaws and foibles were not unique, the extremes of greed and rage as prevalent above as below. Nor could he could accept that their capacity for kindness was any greater than his own. The tears he wept over a stricken soldier burned every bit as much as those shed by Abraham as he stood above his son.
Gabriel loved his Father. In this too he had been given little choice, but it did not prevent him from understanding the game for what it was. They were all pawns, humans and angels both, toys to be played with and discarded at whim.
For God loved them but his love was perfect and cold. When you love all equally, when love is flawless and guaranteed, it ceases to have meaning. Gabriel had not understood that until he found one among them all to love more than the rest.
The love he felt for the others, even God, was soft and shapeless. His love for Castiel was hard, a thing of hooks and thorns. It scraped raw against his Grace and wore it thin, raised raw welts across the surface of his heart, precious little wounds that he carried with pride.
In accepting his love for Castiel, Gabriel found he could look upon humanity with a certain tender pity. Because of Sam. Because there were tricksters and brothers among them, so like himself, full of cunning and just as desperate in the face of loss.
And it was a shame that Sam had never embraced that part of his soul. He had denied his darkness, fought it at every turn, used it only when it was sure to hurt. But the color of purity was white; white the absence of shade and hue. Far better to be gray, to straddle the line and leave open options on either side.
In Gabriel was coyote, the little laughing god who sowed destruction in his wake so that new crops might grow. In Sam was raven, the wise one who always returned to watch over the people whose lives he touched. They shared the same charisma, that ability to get under the skin and settle in, but it was Sam who took note of the bigger picture, who could step back and trace the web that bound them all.
For their plan to succeed Sam would need to embrace the trickster within and fool the greatest of deceivers. He would have to make peace with the ruthless strength buried deep in his soul, long enough to leap headlong into the cage while Gabriel took up his blade…
Finish it, damn you. Finish the thought. If you cannot think it, how will you do it?
…and killed his brother.
His own, his Castiel. Gabriel's to keep and Gabriel's to set free, whatever it might cost him. Gladly he would stand in his brother's stead, but this sacrifice was not his to make. It was time for Gabriel to return home and time for Castiel to journey on, to answer the riddle he had posed in his first moments of life.
Where do we go when we die?
The memory ached, a deep throb at the center of his Grace. There had been no anxiety in the question. Just curiosity, burning bright, before orders and discipline had taught Castiel to hide the better parts of himself.
Maybe it had never been a choice after all. For when faced with such a strange and beautiful thing, that question and that Grace, blue and wondering, how could Gabriel have done any less than love?
And so he would use his blade against his brother. Not because it was the most logical course as Castiel claimed, but for love's sake. He would do this terrible thing because Castiel had asked it of him, because his brother had spoken a bitter truth. Dean's friendship, Gabriel's brotherhood…they weren't enough. Couldn't fill the hole left by wild winds and distant earth.
He could not save his brother. But perhaps, if he had courage, he might yet save Sam.
He found the boy inside, watching Dean's methodical destruction of a clunker of a van from the safety of the backdoor. Sam jumped slightly when Gabriel touched down behind him, tipping his head back in acknowledgement.
"All things considered, I think he's taking it pretty well," he said, "So, when does everything go down?"
"Two days. The equinox." There was no real significance to the date and possible danger in the delay, but Gabriel had played at being pagan too long not to need the comfort of it.
They watched Dean's rampage for a time. Gabriel whistled low at the boy's skill with a crowbar, impressed despite himself.
"I made him promise," Sam said unbidden, "That he wouldn't give up. That he'd go on and live the apple pie life he always dreamed about."
He flushed before he finished speaking, as if the words had escaped without permission. "Sam," Gabriel said, "That's your dream, not Dean's."
His tone was gentle, but only because it was all so familiar. Gabriel had spent his life in mourning, but until Castiel had forced it he had never wasted tears upon himself. Just as Sam stood only days from death and thought of his brother's future, extracting promises they both had to know would not be kept.
"Anyway, you're getting ahead of yourself," he said, "Who says you can't come back out of the hole?"
Sam started to speak, blinked, then tried again. "You did," he said, "When we went over the plan this morning. "
Gabriel brushed that aside with a flap of his hand. "I say a lot of things. What if you could carry old Lucy over and leave him there?"
"How? If it means becoming a demon, I'm so not game."
"You ditch your meatsuit. Let Lucifer keep it if he wants it so bad, but without it you won't be tied to him anymore. I should be able to slip you out through the bars."
Sam was shaking his head but the movement was slow and methodical, reflecting not so much denial as disbelief. "So I'd be a ghost, then?"
"That's an option but probably not a very convenient one," Gabriel said, "Or you could stuff yourself into Castiel's vessel. He won't be needing it anymore and Novak flew the coop the first go round with death. No reason to let it go to waste."
"Gabriel…" Sam spat the name like it was choking him, but after that first guttural growl his voice dropped to a whisper. "How can you laugh about this?"
"Because if I don't, I'm going to scream, and if I scream your head will explode?"
He expected Sam to argue, but the boy just looked at him, steady and doleful. There was pity in his eyes, compassion and empathy in equal measure, and oh, how Gabriel hated him for it.
"Look, do you want an out or not?" he snapped, "I'm not going to beg you to let me save your ass."
For once in your life, you stupid ignorant child, take what's being offered and don't ask questions.
"I don't…I don't know. That's really going to mess with Dean. The way he feels about Cas…"
"In or out." Gabriel shoved Sam back against the door in his haste to interrupt. How Dean did or did not feel about his brother was something he had been careful not to consider too deeply.
"Out?"
It sounded more like a question than a statement, but it was close enough to a yes for Gabriel. He touched his fingers to the furrowed forehead, slamming Sam down into sleep with unnecessary force. He made no attempt to catch the limp body as it crumbled, smirking a little at the hollow sound of Sam's skull bouncing off the cheap linoleum.
Gabriel spread his wings and followed after.
Sam was dreaming of blood and sex. Gabriel caught the boy up on the way past and dragged him deeper into his own mind, sliding down through suffocating layers of rationalizations and excuses. Down to the very core of it, that hidden place where truth walked.
And there they found the road.
Not the same dark straight stretch that Dean worshipped but gray and gently curving, rolling out from their feet and vanishing into dust behind.
"Where?" Sam asked and the question echoed back, became all the questions the boy wanted answered.
Did Dad love us? Why wasn't it enough? Is it wrong to need something for myself? What about Dean?
"To pull you out, I need to get a line around you, Sam. To do that, I need to know who you are."
Fields of salt bordered the road, glittering under the red glow of the sun. Monoliths jutted from the silt, rusted bicycle skeletons and moldering tree forts. A naked oak reached toward the sky, its trunk engraved with rough-hewn initials connected by the shared bird shape of the "W".
They walked on, past the ruins of a childhood that never was. Stocks and blades rose up from the crystals, an armory buried in shards of glass. Night fell quickly and in the darkness something growled. When the sun rose again nothing changed, the unseen still slavering at their heels.
The yellow line beneath their feet changed between double and single, but stayed always broken. Further down the path there were books and fire, churches and graveyards, but Gabriel did not let Sam tally. These were the things that had gone into the making of Sam Winchester, but they were not him, did not tell Gabriel what he needed to know.
He needed a name. A true name, one he could use to summon Sam's soul back from Lucifer's cell. A name that encompassed everything Sam was and could become, so that no part of him would be left behind.
He already knew some of the things Sam answered to. Sammy. Brother. Son. Boy. Man. Lover. Friend. Hunter. Scholar. Hero. Monster. All of them only aspects of the whole, broken reflections in a cloudy mirror.
Just as Gabriel was only one part, archangel another, trickster a third. What lay beneath was something else entirely, something green and impossibly weary.
The road was long. They walked in silence to its end, to where all was mist and shadow. And there they waited for Sam to know himself.
When he spoke the name at last it was with wonder and deep joy. It rang loud through the hollow space, a cry of claiming, of knowing, without doubt or fear.
"I am! "
And Gabriel gave his own self in return, the lessons taught and learned, the ways in which he loved and hated, the coyote with sparrow wings that lived within his Grace. All of it.
Everything.
When they rose back up to waking only minutes had passed. Dean was still venting his rage with the crowbar, shouting curses now with every blow. Castiel was still sleeping, held within the circle of his brother's Grace despite being rooms apart. Singer was still pretending to research in the living room, avoiding all of them because to speak with his boys now would be too painful.
Nothing had changed.
But he knew Sam now, and Sam knew Gabriel. And that made the world altogether different for them both.
"Why?" Sam asked.
'Because if I told you what it meant, you might have said no,' Gabriel thought and knew that it was heard, 'Because without this connection, I fear what I will do. In two days I strike my brother down. I go home, to fight against Michael, to face the ones I left behind.
'No one has the right to ask this of another, which is why I did not ask. Forever I will know you and be known by you. You must become the thing I cannot run from, for else I may lay waste to the earth, call down Heaven's wrath upon you all for the crime of living while Castiel does not.
'But now I will know that you are there, you alone among them all, and it will give me cause to fight. Cause to live. Even if you hate me for forcing this on you, that hatred will be more important than God's love to me, for it will be my own.'
Sam's lips were rough and dry against his own. Gabriel opened for the kiss, hungry for it. He would have taken hate, but this, this was so much better, not quite love but fondness mingled with exasperation.
"Gabriel," Sam whispered when they parted, hand still cupping the archangel's cheek.
But what he thought was 'I would have said yes.'