The first step, Gabriel decided, was to get Dean and Castiel in the same room together, and the best way to do that, Cupid argued, considering the desired end of getting them back in love and out of everyone else's collective hair, was to set them up on a nice, romantic dinner date. Rather than making a restaurant of his own out of thin air, he reserved them a table at a nice, Italian place (Cupid had said something inane about dogs and spaghetti being terribly romantic), and conveniently disguised himself as a waiter. He'd sent missives to both Dean and Castiel, naming this place, the time, and the name under which the reservation had been made, and hopefully, they'd both show up. Castiel, he knew, wouldn't turn down the promised opportunity to get inside information on demonic plans from Crowley; whether or not Dean would show up to meet a purportedly apologetic-and-missing-him Cas, though, was a different story.

Dean arrived first — dressed in the same t-shirt, jeans, and jacket that he'd worn out hunting — and glanced around the restaurant as though something, lurking somewhere inside it, needed to be killed before it ate him. The charming hostess led him to a nice, relatively out-of-the-way table, which, courtesy of Gabriel's good nature and creative whims, already housed two shot glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniels. To the archangel's mild surprise, Dean didn't hit the booze straight off. Instead, he looked around, sighed, and idly fussed with the napkin tied around his silverware. The elder Winchester had looked younger than his real age for as long as Gabriel had known him, but the anxiety behind the darting of his eyes gave him an especially youthful edge tonight, like the shit-head kid who'd eaten the last cookie in the jar.

As he waited, Dean pulled out his phone. He perused the contacts, lingering on no name, except for Castiel's — but, by what had to be, in Gabriel's estimation, some kind ofmiracle of pig-headed stupidity, looking at it over and over didn't result in Dean dialing it. He only continued surveying the place, routinely looking at the space between his knees every time Castiel didn't show. A pretty blonde waitress brought Dean a glass of water when he asked for it, and the bread basket showed up at the table before the missing angel did. So much for this, Gabriel thought to himself as he took a tray of pasta dishes to a table that seemed to be hosting a family reunion. There had only been a handful of times when being wrong had upset the archangel quite so much as this. One had involved Lucifer stabbing him, and the worst had happened when he'd lost a bet with Baldur on the Trojan War.

Gabriel left his latest run and headed for Dean's table, preparing to play everything off as a bad joke gone wrong, thereby cutting the kid loose so he could go home and sulk somewhere it wasn't costing him money — but he didn't get there. At the sound of flapping wings, Gabriel stopped dead in his tracks, and in a flurry of tablecloths and toppled glasses, Castiel appeared, wearing the same trenchcoat and pensive, surly expression — looking, for all intents and purposes, as though the past six months hadn't happened. Dean rose to his feet slowly, mouth gaping. Before his boss could spot him, Gabriel ducked behind a convenient corner and pressed his back against the wall. He stayed very careful, kept his movements slow, as he peered out at the two of them. Maybe this waiter visage would fool Dean, but Castiel had more brains about him and Gabriel wanted to watch this magic happen.

…If the magic happened at all.

Oh, it would. He trusted that it would, but, to be fair, he was dealing with two stubborn, emotionally stunted blockheads, and keeping his mouth shut, he cursed his unreasonable expectations (but mostly Dean and Castiel) for the lack of a magical start. For a moment, all they did was stand there and stare at each other. The grimace that crossed Dean's face seemed so inappropriate that Gabriel had to do a double-take. He'd seen Dean looking scared, angry, enamoured, and on the verge of tears — but never all four at the same time, and certainly not without an attempt at hiding them behind a cocksure smirk. Castiel tilted his head and furrowed his brow.

"Cas…" Dean started, stepping around the table to move toward him. Had it not been for his angelic ears, Gabriel wouldn't have been able to hear. "It's good to—"

Castiel cut him off: "What are you doing here, Dean?"

Dean's eyes widened momentarily, and he paused in his advance. "What do you mean 'what am I doing here'?" he demanded, brow furrowing and a more tangible, clearly upset frown beginning to form on his lips. "You're late, Cas. I've been here for half an hour."

"My business here is not with you," Castiel told the hunter flatly. He broke eye contact with Dean to look around the restaurant for any black eyes, and inhaled deep, searching for any faint whiffs of sulfur. Nothing came up, and he frowned impatiently. "I came to meet with Crowley. He has information for me regarding certain demonic plans being made to move against Heaven."

From his perch behind the wall, Gabriel could practically hear the shot hitting Dean square in the heart. He only flinched but a moment, and when he recovered, the smirk wavered as though attempting to ice dance while spinning china plates on the end of sticks. "Yeah, well… haven't seen him," Dean said with a shrug. "But… since he's not here yet and I am, you want to come sit? …We've got Black Jack at my table."

With a heated sigh, Castiel looked over at the table and considered the offer. The gears in his head turned so loudly that Gabriel harboured earnest surprise that they didn't go raising a damn zombie army — but, finally, he quipped, "Fine," and he and Dean sat down. A silence settled in while Dean poured Castiel a shot, which promptly disappeared down the angel's throat; Dean poured Castiel another one, and so on for six more before he just turned the glass upside down for the time being.

"Guess there's no law against drunk flying in Heaven," Dean said drily, giving Castiel a once-over and another smirk. This one seemed more stable than its predecessor, but something that looked off in Dean's eyes, something that Gabriel couldn't quite put his finger on. Castiel tilted his head again, and Dean attempted to clarify: "Just… you hit the whiskey pretty quick there, Cas."

"That whole bottle would not even intoxicate me," Castiel said, voice devoid of emotion and face even more stoic. Muttering various curses to himself Gabriel looked his brother up and down, for any sign that this was affecting him in some way, besides making him shut down and be difficult. All Castiel offered him was a thoughtless tapping of his finger against the shot glass's bottom. More silence followed, as though they were afraid of interrupting someone else's conversation by having their own. Too wrapped up in their own thoughts, they didn't even look at each other — which was decidedly not what Cupid had promised would happen when he'd talked Gabriel out of using love potions on the two of them.

Yeah, 'You won't be able to keep the spark from igniting, just put them together and true love will take its proper course — but make sure they kiss so the magic can take properly,' my ass, Gabriel mused, plotting all the things he would do to Barachiel if this work amounted to a big, fat lot of nothing. He hadn't had a good Wes Craven marathon in too long, and Cupid needed to meet Freddy Krueger sooner or later.

Finally, they locked gazes again — storm green on Arctic blue, and the air between them smouldered like the white ashes of a fire. Both of them had pointedly neutral expressions, but their eyes gave them away: pain, confusion, and self-loathing sat under Dean's (Because that's so different from normal; Gabriel sighed), and Castiel's revealed, in addition to the blatant confusion, a wounded sense of security and an impatience with the way his vessel and his fall had made him start to feel things (which Gabriel guessed that he couldn't begrudge his brother; emotions were tricky, even if you'd had time to get used to them). Neither spoke. They looked away from their staring contest, Dean glancing at a waitress carrying a tray of desserts and Castiel once again doing a sweep of the place to look for Crowley. He turned his eyes back to Dean before the hunter had taken his off the triple-layer fudge cake.

"You look good, Dean," he whispered, so that none of the other patrons could hear him say it (and even Gabriel had to strain to hear it). Looking into his brother's mind, Gabriel saw that Castiel took his lowered voice as a kindness, a way to protect Dean from attracting unwanted attention. Based on the way Dean's brow knotted, saying that he disagreed would have been an understatement. "I've been watching you, and Sam," Castiel explained, a bit louder this time (though obviously keeping his voice down again so as not to make people ask questions about the angel sitting at the table). "You've done good work — especially with keeping Rebecca safe."

Dean wrinkled his nose. "Who the Hell is Rebecca? …Oh, wait, you — you mean Becky?" Castiel nodded. "Well, what were we supposed to do, Cas? Ditch some pregnant chick — some single pregnant chick, who barely knows how to do anything without turning it into, 'And then Sam and Dean had gay sex in the ass all night long' — and leave her by herself when there's all kinds of monsters that could get at Chuck's baby?"

"My Father's new daughter is of great import," Castiel agreed, a hint of vitriol slipping into his voice. The subtleties of his vocalizations weren't lost on Gabriel — but Dean seemed to miss something essential:

"Oh, yeah, she's friggin' fascinating." He poured himself another whisky, but this one wound up in his (heretofore empty) water glass instead of the shot glass. Dean didn't even wince at the long sip he took. Taking a cue from this, Castiel snatched up the bottle and poured himself a large glass as well. "I tell you, there's nothing that gets my panties in a twist more than the twenty-first century Jesus." Castiel only shrugged in response to this, and Gabriel couldn't blame him for that. What was one meant to say when one's ex-lover was flaunting the pink lace he had on under his jeans? Dean's eyes darkened, and he emptied his glass of its contents in a series of rapid-fire gulps. Slamming it back onto the table, he announced, "Alright, you evasive bastard. You asked me to meet you here so we could talk and patch things up, not so we could drink and play 'who can go the longest without blinking'—"

"I did no such thing, and I could go without blinking longer than you could," Castiel commented off-handedly. "My eyes have a greater tolerance for dryness—"

Dean thumped his hand on the table next to the glass. "Not the point, Cas!"

Narrowing his eyes, and speaking in a low, dangerously unruffled voice, Castiel asked, "What is the point you wish to make, Dean?" The implication was clear to Gabriel — and, judging from the little flare of his nostrils, Dean picked up on it too: Do you even know what your point is?, Castiel had inquired without verbalizing it. And, moreover, why should I care?

"My point is…" Dean cut himself off, slipping into a pause with a heated sigh as he realized that his voice had raised without his consent, and that they'd gotten more than a few heads to turn and start staring at him. "…Dammit, Cas, you don't have to lie and tell me that I look good. I don't look good right now; I look ragged, and worn down, andfucked. up. And you know what? I feel ragged, and worn down, and fucked up. Work's been going absolutely insane since we iced Lucy, I don't even know where to begin to tell you about it — not to mention that Crowley and Bela keep hounding on Sam and I can't make them stop.

"I can't do crap for my son, either, not since his mom's had her Jesus-pregnant girlfriend move in with them — and I really could have used some fucking support, but… who am I supposed to get it from? Jo and Ellen are dead. Bobby's busy trying to get his soul back. Half the other hunters won't talk to me, the other half still want to send Sam packing back to Hell, and I can't hustle enough pool to buy Rufus a friggin' bottler of Johnnie Walker Blue every time I want to fucking talk to someone. And where've you been?"

"In Heaven," Castiel said flatly, tapping his fingers on the table and glaring so hard he could have bored holes through Dean's impossibly thick skull. "The same place I told you I would be."

"Yeah, and what were you doing there, exactly? Sweeping up the other angels' messes? Cleaning up after them when they cast you out? When they hunted you and tried,several times, to kill you bloody? I mean, no offense meant, but… what the Hell, Cas—"

"My family needed me," Castiel snapped. His eyes flashed, and then, for the first time, they darkened to match Dean's. More often than not, Castiel looked anything but dangerous to Gabriel — but he couldn't have said now that he'd have been pleased to meet his little brother in a dark alley. "Chaos had taken over in Michael's absence. My Father needed one of His most faithful to bring everyone back together. Of all people, you ought to be able to understand that."

Dean paused, knowing that Castiel had hit him right where it hurt the most — and where it was impossible for him to deny the angel's claim. He'd given everything for his father, for his brother; he'd cleaned up both of their messes, and dealt with John Winchester's worst on Sam's behalf; he'd died, been to Hell, endured Alastair's razor, and had to confront parts of himself he wanted to lock away and forget about — all for his brother, to keep him as safe as possible from the oncoming Apocalypse. "Cas, I…" He started, stopping himself again as he tried to find the right words (and probably, Gabriel thinks, ones that won't make him sound like some simpering teenager on prom night). "…Cas, Ineeded you," came up as though the words had been dragged there, kicking and screaming.

Castiel downed the rest of his whisky and narrowed his eyes. "What," he said. "Lisa wasn't enough for you?"

All the other noise of the restaurant seemed to die out, for a moment, and the silence that followed crackled with an electric burn; even Gabriel's eyes widened and spine stiffened at the impact of that jab. He held his breath, waiting for the screaming tantrum that Dean was sure to have, that had to be coming, that would come, by hook or by crook, because that was how Dean Winchester dealt with the problems he couldn't shoot, behead, salt and burn, or shove a stake through: he yelled at them until he went blue in the face.

The screaming never came.

First, Dean tightened his hold on the glass until it broke, several shards embedding themselves in his hand. Castiel tried to point out that he was bleeding, only for Dean to snap, "Leave it." They locked eyes. How the two of them had yet to hurt anyone else escaped Gabriel entirely, and had he not needed to see how this played out — Angry sex is still an option, he attempted, against his own better judgement, to convince himself. They could still go fuck each other stupid in the bathroom… — he would have fled just to protect himself. The silence had within it so many unasked questions and missing smart-ass responses to them: had Dean really just done that. Yes, he had, and what the fuck was Cas going to do about it. Did Dean honestly want to know what Castiel could do about it. Why was Castiel still talking instead of doing something…

Instead of saying anything at all, Castiel stood up. Dean scrambled to his feet soon thereafter — and, for this move, Castiel punched him in the face, knocking him back into an empty table. Coming around from it, Dean pawed at his nose, looked down at his hand and saw the blood thereon. And he stared at Castiel, silently demanding to know what the angel thought that he was doing. Castiel clenched his hands in white-knuckled fists and rubbed his lips together.

"I should have known that you'd be juvenile about this," he told Dean, anger lurking just below the surface of his words, threatening to bubble up and only being curbed because, for all Gabriel's little brother was a difficult shit, he knew better than to use the full extent of his powers around civilians. "If Crowley ever does show up, let him know that I'll reschedule."

Without another word, Castiel disappeared from the restaurant, leaving Dean where he'd fallen on the floor. Gabriel didn't stick around to watch Dean fending off the waitstaff's offers of assistance. Getting caught now would have meant very, very bad things for his ability to continue doing as he pleased.

Maybe getting these two back in bed wouldn't be suck a cake-walk — but still… it needed to be done.