The Impala was almost exactly as Dean and Cas remembered it, although somehow that didn't help their conviction that they hadn't finally flipped and gone utterly mad. Gabriel led them through the bay, chatting happily as if his presence there wasn't entirely impossible. And, in his defence, it wasn't. It was just highly, highly improbable.
"Man alive, am I glad to see the pair of you." Gabriel grinned, darkly. "And I don't say that often."
Now Castiel was over his initial shock, he noticed the dark bags under Gabriel's eyes, his pallid complexion, and the tentative limp with which he walked.
"Gabriel, what happened? You look like death!"
"Hmm?" Gabriel looked around, caught himself off guard with a deep, rattling cough, looked like his head was about to fall off and then crumpled into one of the chairs on the bay. "Oh… that… Yeah, I'm… not well."
"I can see that, what happened?"
"The Daemons got me. And Balthazar."
"Hey, where is he?"
"No idea. See, they took the whole building we were in… took it to the Hellsphere."
"The Hellsphere?" Cas repeated, a kind of terrified awe in his voice.
"What's the Hellsphere?"
"Shh."
"They… they put me in the Torturemat. And… The Deific Visuo-Generator."
"Oh, no…" Castiel patted Gabriel's hand. Dean tried again.
"What's the…"
"Shh."
"Please, Castiel, I'm… I'm very ill."
"Well after going through that, I'm not surprised."
"Very ill… Excuse me." With monumental effort, Gabriel pulled himself to his feet, staggered to a nearby waste chute and vomited. Dean tried again.
"What's the Deific… Video whatever?"
"The Deific Visuo-Generator," Castiel said it slowly, tearing his eyes away from his sickly semi-cousin, "is the worst thing in the Universe. It is the ultimate torture."
"Oh, no." Gabriel leant back, looking a little better, although still pale and sickly. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and staggered back to the chair. "No, the Generator was fine. It was the party afterwards that really killed me."
"Afterwards?" Cas repeated, incredulously. "There isn't supposed to be an 'afterwards'. No one has ever come out of that thing alive."
"Which is exactly why I had to celebrate." Gabriel shrugged. "I've been drunk for a month."
"About to initiate take-off." A familiar mechanised gruffness rattled through the ship's speakers. "Well hey there, boys. Long time no see, Cas. Monkey-man."
"Hey!" Dean scowled. "I come from a long line of…"
"Internet trolls and hack artists?" Cas finished, smiling at him demurely. Dean rolled his eyes and sat down, knowing he couldn't win.
"Anyway." Bobby chuckled. "About to initiate take-off, all drives primed and operational. Waiting on your word."
"No, hang on." Cas turned to Gabriel, still trying to nail down the facts. "How did you escape the Daemons?"
"Luck."
"How did you get the ship back?"
"Chance."
"And how did you find us?"
"Shirt."
Cas blinked. Dean blinked.
"Say again?"
"I got your shirt. I have to say, guys, way to think outside the box. It was a huge Leap of Faith to presume that, when your shirt got fossilised in that volcanic rock, six million years later when the planet got blown up, that particular chunk would become a meteorite. And to presume it would be someone with a sufficient urge and ability to time travel back to where you were… that was a big enough Leap to give me a lock on your co-ordinates! You must have been working on that day and night!"
"Uh…" Dean and Cas exchanged sideways looks. "Yeah. Yeah, that was… what you said."
"But, hey." Gabriel grinned, becoming more like his old self with every passing moment. "Don't you want to hear about what happened on the Hellsphere?"
"What's a Hellsphere?" Dean asked, feeling a little out of his depth with this conversation. For nearly two years, he'd only ever spoken to Cas. Or himself. And those conversations were usually much easier to understand.
"I thought you'd never ask." Gabriel smiled.
(-*-)
Many stories are told of Gabriel Angeles' journey to the Hellsphere. Approximately ten percent are mostly true, fifty percent are half true, and forty percent are flagrant lies. Interestingly enough, forty percent of them are also told by Gabriel Angeles, although legally, the Book is not allowed to draw any more comparison than that.
Only one completely and unerringly accurate account exists, but that has been typed and saved on an external memory bank, which was then broken, burned, blown up and finally ground to a fine powder, which Gabriel used to mix in with Sam's chassis polish to give him an extra shine.
What follows is one of the "mostly true" ten percent, otherwise referred to as "Rufus' version".
(-*-)
The building swayed and crumbled around them as Rufus, Gabriel and Balthazar stumbled towards the office of the mysterious Zarniwoop.
"Is this really any time to keep an appointment?" Balthazar muttered, skirting around blocks of fallen debris.
"It's the only safe room in the building." Rufus replied, hurrying as much as he could, given that the ground didn't seem to be entirely sure what to do with itself. "Here we are. Now go in, and… this is important, you hear? Once we land, which… is probably going to be soon… you don't leave through the door, ok? You leave through the window."
"What? Why?" Balthazar asked, and for his troubles, he got shoved into Zarniwoop's office and the door slammed in his face. Rufus staggered off to the nearest vending machines, wondering if he couldn't liberate a few snacks for the rest of his journey.
"Sweet guy." Gabriel muttered, as he examined the office. "Shame he's gone."
"Yes, I was just starting to dislike him."
The office looked pretty much like every other executive office Gabriel had ever seen. Balthazar felt a slight pang of loss as he realised it looked just like the offices he and Dean used to work in. Gabriel looked out of the window, and then quickly scrambled away from it. The reason for this was simple; ground was coming up on the other side, and it seemed very eager to meet them.
The building gave one last, juddering crash as it collided with the arid desert surface of the planet Hellsphere. Then, somehow more worryingly than all the juddering and jerking, everything was very, very still. This was worrying, because the arid desert surface of the planet Hellsphere was not the sort of place you really wanted the chance to look around at, least of all if you were actually there.
"Ugh." Gabriel surmised, looking at the dead and blighted planet.
"Yuck." Balthazar agreed. Edging through the broken window, they made the short drop to the ground and, for want of anything better to do, started walking.
(-*-)
It is important to remember, at this point, that "sadness", "bitterness", "lethargy" and "woe" have long since been established as wholly acceptable emotions for a person to have. Every race throughout the galaxy has some view or another on how innately pessimistic we all are, but it is sometimes good to have a little perspective on the matter. For example, while stranded on prehistoric Earth, Castiel may have missed civilisation and, by extension, his family, but he had a wealth of natural highs and, of course, Dean, to take his mind off of things, so on the whole things weren't that bad. Gabriel and Balthazar, however, are currently walking through a desert in such a manner that will probably lead to their deaths, if only to avoid being captured by the Daemons and put through horrible torture.
The only way a person could be worse off than them would be if, say, they were a mortal (and therefore, graced with a finite lifespan) consciousness that has been placed in an immortal (whilst in accordance with the manufacturer's warrantee) robotic body, which has then been catapulted through time and space with an almost reckless abandon, and then taken a huge leap of faith that it might survive something almost utterly insurvivable (say, the total immolation of the ship you happen to be on), in order to save the lives of everyone else in the immediate surrounding area. What would be worse still would be if, through that leap of faith, you and the wreckage of your ship were somehow teleported to a middle-of-nowhere desert planet, and left with nothing to do but rebuild the ship and whatever parts of yourself needed rebuilding, waiting for one of your crew to come find you.
This is, of course, merely a hypothetical.
(-*-)
Meanwhile, Gabriel and Balthazar trudged. They trudged in the manner of all prisoners who are making their break in a rather poorly planned escape bid; silently, and with many hostile glares at the ground, the sky, the horizon and each other.
"You know, normally they wait for me to come and get them."
"What?" Gabriel looked around, wilting under the heat.
"What?" Balthazar replied, his eyes heavy.
"Did you say something?"
"No."
Gabriel stared at him for a moment, before turning around and resuming the tired trudge.
"I mean, I appreciate the exercise, but I think we would all be slightly less pissed if you'd waited for me to turn up."
"What?" Gabriel said again, stopping and turning to Balthazar. Balthazar blinked.
"I didn't say anything!"
"Well then who did?"
"Me." Gabriel whipped around at the sound of the voice, to see a pair of almost reptilian yellow eyes hanging unaided in the air. Gabriel looked like he wasn't sure whether to faint, vomit or sneeze. The voice that accompanied the eyes chuckled.
"Yeah, that's the same face they all make. Come on, we really want to be heading over there."
So saying, the eyes bobbed off ahead. Balthazar and Gabriel exchanged looks of terror and confusion. The voice that accompanied the eyes sighed.
"If you don't follow of your own volition, I could always buzz Crowley and get him to send some gun-toting heavies to accompany you…"
Resigned to fate, they followed.
"So, I am looking at… Which one of you is Gabriel Angeles?"
"That's me."
"Ah." The yellow eyes turned on Balthazar. "Goodbye."
Balthazar disappeared. Gabriel gawped and protested, but his protest did nothing. The eyes glanced at him as they led the way.
"Now, Angeles, I am your Deific Visuo-Generator Associate, I am here to facilitate your induction into the torture program. You can call me Yellow Eyes, if it helps… everyone else does… Well, come on, the Generator doesn't doom itself to an endless agony of writhing, brain-boiling torment."
"Ok…" Gabriel started, nerves creeping in as he realised he was being walked to his near certain doom. "Why can't I… why can I only see your eyes?"
"Ah. Well, my body wanted to come, but it's… It's busy."
"Busy?"
"Yeah, you know. Got things to do… Pleasures of the flesh, I'm sure." They trudged towards a squat, domed building on the horizon. It had the look about it of an abandoned warehouse, or a secret research facility gone wrong. Gabriel started to pedal furiously through a list of possible excuses and delays, but the gnawing, cold knot of impending doom that had tied itself around his intestines was slowly making its way up the spinal column and into the brainstem.
"But… hey, don't you miss your body a little?"
"It was a fairly mutual agreement. Just a trial separation, you know, and we agreed that we really didn't need each other. At least I got custody over the eyes."
"Yeah, that's… great." Gabriel guessed. "Still, why don't we hang out? I mean, I'd love to meet the both of you…"
"Actually, we don't talk." Yellow Eyes turned on Gabriel, his tone sharp. "And if you don't shut up about it, you won't either."
"Won't? Won't what?"
"Won't talk. Just because I'm a disembodied mind, doesn't mean I can't rip out your vocal chords, sonny."
Gabriel nodded, mutely. They entered the squat warehouse, which was far bigger from inside.
The roof was a mile or so above them, and the dingy, grey painted walls stretched out into shadow. The floor was hard grey concrete, splattered occasionally with the dull brown stains of blood and bile. In the centre, under one harsh spotlight, sat the Deific Visuo-Generator.
"So… that's the generator?"
"Yes."
"Looks kind of like a broom cupboard."
"Yes."
"And why are all those wires plugged into a slice of apple pie?"
"Look, kid, I don't have the time or the patience to explain the science to you. The Generator isn't quite ready yet, so if you could just take a seat over there and put those headphones on…"
"What's on the headphones?"
"The sound of the last guy who went in there."
Gabriel put on the headphones.
The scream was the horrific noise of a man being robbed of his mind, his soul, and his humanity; a man having his self, his identity, his understanding of the universe savagely torn from him.
Gabriel took the headphones off again.
"I'm ok, thanks."
(-*-)
The universe, as has been previously stated, is pretty goddamn big.
The effect of the universe's largeness can be quite unsettling to the majority of the people who live in it, and so it is pretty much unanimously ignored, if only for a quiet life. There is no life form in the entirety of the known galaxy which can adequately comprehend, come to terms with and express the vastness of the universe, which is why the Deific Visuo-Generator is as horrific as it undoubtedly is. When you are put in the generator, you are given one momentary glimpse of the entirety of the universe, as if seen by some external God figure, along with one tiny, near invisible dot that reads "you are here".
(-*-)
Gabriel stared up from his seat, his legs shaking slightly.
"Do we really have to do this? Couldn't we… go to a party or something?"
"I may already be at one." Yellow Eyes dismissed. "My body, I mean. It does like to have fun… Not that I don't, but we have… differences of opinion. You know bodies."
"I used to think I did…"
"Well, come on. Time to light the fuse."
"But… wait, I'm not ready. I can't…"
"No one is ever 'ready' for the Deific Visuo-Generator, Angeles. That's kind of the point. All those planets… The infinite, unbounded distances of space, the infinite people and planets in it, and the distances between them… and then you. Just another meaningless, near invisible dot, amid an infinite number of other meaningless, near invisible dots. Nothing. No one."
"Hey." Gabriel pulled himself (shakily) to his full height. "I'm Gabriel Angeles. I…"
"Am, in the grand scale of things, just as unimportant as everyone else." Yellow Eyes finished, a sadistic smugness to his voice. "It's ready for you, Angeles. Hop on in, the mind fuck's lovely."
Gabriel, every part of him shaking and yet doomed to its fate, entered the Generator.