Hey uh... So guess who is a freaking iDIOT
THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN DONE FOR LIKE A FREAKING WEEK AND I NEVER GOT AROUND TO POSTING IT
I'm so sorry.
Take this little filler as apology.
Next chapter should come tomorrow. I'm so fucking sorry.
AKA, Waiting for the Wolves.
{June, 1909}
Driving home had started fine. Alpha and Sol were laughing along with Gabriel as they fled the scene of chaos.
They had gone a good hour, maybe two, before Gabriel caught the wave of black coming over the hillsides, demons shaking over the fields like writhing snakes, coming for the car, coming for him, coming, coming-
Gabriel reached over and yanked on the steering wheel, almost rolling them over right then while Alpha and Sol swore incoherently at him, right as the demons hit the car.
And flipped it.
Gabriel was just starting to reach for his grace, trying to make it respond, trying to be ready to throw up his true form and protect them, when he slid upward in his seat, smashing his head into the roof, and he knew no more.
-{[|]}-
Gabriel. ...
Gabriel, wake up. ...mmh...
GABRIEL!
The soft groaning of metal filled his ears, oddly loud in his limited perception.
He knew his human form was bleeding from the head. His leg was broken. He had a concussion. His shoulder felt weird.
A list of problems, none of which he could fix without someone helping him first. Because he had to pretend to be human. And his head was ringing, swollen like it was three times it's normal size and crushed in a vice.
"Help," He gritted out, low and hoarse. "Help!" His voice sounded like someone had put rocks through it, breaking and crackling like glass midway through the syllable. His grace, compacted and compressed down to nearly nothing, stubbornly refused his calling. He felt...
Weak. Soft. Broken.
Human.
He did his best to rotate, to free his body from the crushed footwell and escape the crumpled roof. Vaguely, everything felt a little floaty, like he was walking on clouds. The ringing, though, had disappeared.
Gabriel had never exactly bothered to be 'normal' during anything but the past few years as Gabriel Moran. As a result, he was very bad at human injuries.
The concussion was new.
He fell from his seat, landing on his already damaged shoulders with a heavy thump. The potentially dislocated joint made its presence known, screaming obscenities at the rest of him that rolled over on it, Gabriel flipping around slowly.
"Alpha?" Gabe questioned slowly, voice still slurred and gritty. "Alpha?" He asked again, a little more frantic. The silhouette of the girl, crumpled like a puppet with her strings cut, was cast in sharp reality by the moonlight. Blood turned a reflective black in the odd lighting. "S-Sol?" Gabriel called, head whipping to locate the boy. He couldn't see Sol.
The demons outside, meanwhile, were lazily sweeping over the car, swirling in seemingly random directions. Gabriel was suddenly thankful for the anti-possession tattoo he had gotten. It helped keep up his human appearance. The Enochian sigilwork on his ribs, however, was a method to keep angels from tracking him.
One of the demons, still in their gaseous form, poked its red smoke-self through the cracked side door, nudging around Alpha, poking at her hair and her skin.
"Hey. Hey!" Gabriel barked hoarsely, swatting at it. Quickly, the inquisitive demon fled, though their ghostly circle tightened around the car. "Fuck off." Gabriel snarled, glaring at the red line that marked that specific demon.
The ringing in his head returned with a vengeance, ferocious and loud, brutally harsh, screaming like something was trying to rip his vessel in half, and-
Crossroads demon. Watch out for any blue smoke.
The ringing stopped.
Suddenly, it clicked in Gabriel's head, right before the demons smashed through the car and started their violent attacking.
...Was that Michael?
Then they went off the cliff.
Gabriel woke up to the horrific ringing a second time, but this time, he forced it away, buried it under his grace as he struggled to roll over.
'Up' was a confusing concept, all turned over on it's ass. His stomach felt like it was doing somersaults just leaning on the overturned seat. (Ok, down. Alright. So I'm sitting on the roof.)
"Alpha?" He questioned again. Time, had also become a very fluid concept. When had they first been hit by the demons? When had they crashed? How long had he been out?
This time, he got an answer.
"Gabe?"
The voice was at least seven or eight feet away, and decidedly not in the car.
Unsafe.
There it was again. The creepy voice he was almost positive had to be Michael. He wasn't quite sure what it was talking about though. Was Alpha not safe? Or was he?
"Gabriel, don't move." Alpha ordered. "I just got Sol out, I'm going to come for you next." She informed, and the slick noise of leaf litter shifting under her feet as she moved forward sounded. "Please, stay real still, ok? The demons are still somewhere around here."
He didn't make a noise, didn't move, didn't breathe. He just waited for the broken, destroyed side door to open and for Alpha's hand to reach for him. Taking her fingers in a light grip, because he didn't know when the ugly little bastards were about to show their faces agai-
The red demon, the one from earlier, pounced, slamming the door closed behind it and ripping at Gabriel with a non-physical form.
"SON OF A B-" He shouted, kicking back at it with his True form spread out a bit to make contact. Struggling away from it, Gabriel took another swipe, clawing through the broken seat to the back...
When the car creaked.
"How many bloody cliffs are there on this h-"
His next words were lost to a fall.
{October, 2013}
Gabriel woke up uneasily the next day, after napping in his own (heavily warded) room. Neither of the Winchesters trusted him, Not even the taller, cuter one, and both seemed determined to make his life Hell.
That included making him hang out where he was either in view, or wearing an Enochian sigil.
What neither Winchester seemed to understand was that Gabriel could care less about the bloody Enochian. Loki's powers were starting to return, the icy flow of energy a gradual refilling of his being, and the power that came with it a good reminder of something he didn't want to face yet.
He was the last angel on Earth with intact wings.
Maybe Cas had the sense to take out his grace, to protect it before the spell hit, but if Cas couldn't, well... He was stuck somewhere else in the country, exactly as clueless as eighty-nine percent of their siblings, and potentially without any way to communicate with his Hell-dragged soulmate or the lumbering, adorable younger brother.
He had considered asking Sam or Dean about it, but he decided not to yet. Instead, he checked the wrapping on his wing, which had promptly vanished from human view after he put it on the broken section, and decided a mild test was in order.
Focusing on the living room, the west side with the telescope, at the empty space in the floor right before the war room, Gabriel spread his second and third pair of wings and took flight.
The fact that he flew, rather smoothly at first, then tripped over his own feathers and narrowly avoided crashing into a table, instead splattering on the floor, was telling.
"Jesus Christ!" Dean shouted when Gabriel appeared in a whoosh and startled squawk, knocking one of the chairs on top of himself.
"Close, but not-" Gabriel rolled onto his back, trying to put the chair up straight without breaking it. "Not quite, Deano." The Archangel chuckled, waving one hand. "Hey, Sammy, Samster, can ya' help me up?"
"Cut it with the nicknames. Only he gets to call me Sammy." Sam informed, but reached out his hand anyway.
"Sure thing, Sammoose." Gabriel shrugged as he got pulled upright. "Ow." He muttered, rubbing at his back where he had crashed.
"Wait a second..." Gabriel could hear the gears turning in Sam's head as he spoke, looking the Trickster up and down with careful scrutiny. "Did you just... Fly?" Sam's voice was low, disbelieving.
He didn't want to stare. He really didn't. But that weird light in Sam was bugging the holy Hell out of him. He could barely focus on anything but that. "Yeah, I did." He mumbled in return, staring at the centre of Sam's chest like it held all the answers.
"What?!" Both of the Winchesters demanded. "Let's go back to the earlier thing, how do you still have wings?" Sam continued. "No avoidance this time.
Jolted out of his reverie by the shout, Gabriel's head snapped up to look Sam in the eyes, caught. "Sorry, yeah, I managed to protect them until the spell burnt itself out. Sizzled 'em a bit, but I'll be fine." He skimmed, not mentioning the break. Crowley had already ratted out his wings being damaged. He had to keep up the burns as his reason for flying like shit, and he desperately needed to reset that wing better.
Unfortunately, the bone was close to the shoulder, and that meant he had a hell of a time setting it. Which of these two do I trust more with my True being... Gabriel questioned, but there would be time for that later.
"So, you're..."
"Fully winged, didn't even lose my smallest set." Gabriel nodded. "I'm all set, Sammoose, to cruise in the skyline!"
"And you aren't because..?" Sam drifted off.
An eye roll, followed by a small snort, made Dean give him an odd glance. "Hello, I live here. Hell, I've lived here longer than your lifespans a few times over." He made a short gesture. "And at the moment, I know more about this place than either of you. And yes, that includes the computer."
"But Gabriel Moran disappeared in 1924, how did you get back in here?" Sam questioned, sitting at the table and watching Gabriel.
Gabriel knew he had always intrigued the taller hunter, even after he had killed his brother a few dozen times. Even after he had trapped them in TV hell. Even after he had saved both of their lives and completely distracted Lucifer long enough to take out some 200 demons in the vicinity of Bobby Singer's locale before blasting off to Europe and hiding his golden ass away from the fire.
"Well, that's easy, Sammoose. Follow me." Gabriel grinned, standing from the table and starting for the hallway. After a few seconds, there was a shuffling and the rapid tapping of feet on the approach.
Gabriel trotted down the fourth hall, a barely lit, dark place where the walls were unpainted and unprotected.
And there, sunk into the concrete, wood and countless other materials that lined the walls from over the years, names. Enochian names of humans.
"Welcome to the Hall of Letters, Sammy." Gabriel looked around. He was always lost with a sense of wonder at the names. Humans truly never ceased to impress him.
Sam, though, seemed confused. "Gabriel, I don't... Get it."
"You don't- oh, that's right, you don't read Enochian." Gabriel remembered, mentally facepalming.
"Gabriel, nobody but... people taught by angels, know Enochian."
"That's a lie." Gabriel held up a finger to emphasize. "Most of the Men of Letters could at least read it."
"Huh." The noise echoed through the hall. "What are these?" He lightly ghosted fingers over a set of symbols on a wood wall.
"These, are blood sigils. They are the names of every person who has ever permanently lived in this house." Kneeling, Gabriel searched around a concrete wall for his. "These sigils directly connect to the blanket wards in the house, and protect the names written here." He pointed to a slightly shorter line of symbols, written in a calligraphy style. "See? These are mine."
Kneeling down, Sam peered at the words curiously. "Are they just... blood?"
"You have to say an incantation and then sign your name. If the sigils detect any malice toward the current inhabitants within you, it explodes. Sometimes, it's killed people." Gabriel tapped his knuckles against a black spot, an explosion radius, around a charred word. "I'm guessing 'Malone Marcus' had other intentions for this place." He chuckled.
"What do you mean, 'blanket wards?'" Sam asked.
That's one thing I like about you, Sammy. Totally willing to listen to everything in your own way. Gabriel smiled at the thought. "Well, there are certain wards that protect against generalizations. For example, the main blanket ward in this place basically is a big 'fuck you' to anything that wants to hurt the people in the house. It keeps out anything with bad intentions for any of the inhabitants."
"So anyone with their name on this wall..."
"Gets protected, yeah." Gabriel nodded. "It's an extremely powerful, extremely old ward. If you mess it up when making it, it kills you. But it lasts forever, even if the house is burned down." He stood slowly. "See, this name? 'De'van Fletch Ellis.'" Gabriel underline the Enochian with a finger. "He was a witch. I worked with him often."
"You worked with a witch?"
"More like your great-grandfather did. Vance is the one that hired him." Gabriel explained, waving a hand before continuing. "But De'van just kinda became a part of the group."
"'Great-grandfather'? You knew our great-grandfather?" Sam stood too, looking over the wall.
"Yeah." Humming faintly, Gabriel trotted a few feet down. "Here." He located the name, holding a hand under it. "'Vance Thomas Winchester'." A good man. Gabriel thought, not that he was ever planning on directly telling the current-time Winchesters.
"Vance..." Sam murmured in mild awe, placing his hand on the wall beside. "So we really have been here since forever?"
"Oh yeah. Literally. Not in this Bunker, but in other areas. You're all over the place." Gabriel explained, eyes flitting between names easily.
"What does that say?" Sam made a movement to a series of Enochian words that formed a sequence over the other sigils in black ink.
"That? 'Hallway of...' doesn't have a real translation, but 'Legends' works." Gabriel shrugged, momentarily turning around to check on the state of the other sigils.
When he went back to look at Sam though, the taller man was a few inches from him. "Can you uh... teach me Enochian?"
The words made Gabriel physically pause. "...you want me... to teach you Enochian?"
"Yes."
They waited for a few seconds.
Then Gabriel split into a grin. "Sweet. That's awesome! Yeah, I can teach you Enochian! Let's go see if my translation book is still somewhere around here! C'mon!" Gabriel encouraged, running off down the hall with Sam on his heels.