A/N: It's pretty long, but I nonetheless think of this as the Epilogue. So it is. I hope you've liked this so far!

Epilogue

Someone was pounding on the front door. Jeremy rolled out of bed, stumbled over to the door, and yanked it open. "What."

Despite the vindictive hope in the back corner of his brain, Gabe did not fall forward onto the placemat. "Hey, Jer," he said, stepping in, looking way too awake for how dark it still was outside. "Get on a computer. I need you to wipe me out of the system."

"What," Jeremy repeated. This was not, actually, the first time Gabe had turned up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, but it was definitely one of the worse times he'd chosen to do it.

Gabe waved his hand at the door and it slipped from Jeremy's hand and shut with a click. Jeremy could've sworn his friend didn't actually touch it. "I said," Gabe restated with exaggerated patience, "I need you to get online and use your little hacking skills to wipe me from the system. Gabriel Greene, son of Elaine Greene, attendee of New York public schools and various other institutions, needs to disappear. Tonight, ideally."

Jeremy looked at his friend curiously, suddenly more awake. "Now what'd you do, steal a car?" He noticed for the first time, in the dim, pre-dawn light seeping through the window-shades, that Gabe's usually-curly hair was matted down with something dark, and the glint in his eyes was...was the usual Gabe "I'm getting in trouble" gleam, but with a sharper edge that Jeremy wasn't used to seeing. "Gabe, what happened?"

"Nothing you need to know about," Gabe replied with unusual seriousness. "Just do your techie thing and I'll be gone."

Jeremy stared at him for a moment more. "Fine," he decided, and turned toward the kitchen. "I went to sleep three hours ago, so I making coffee. Then I'm not getting on a computer until you tell me the whole story."

Twenty minutes later, Jeremy was sitting at his desk, logging into the New York City School District's administration server, armed with a full mug of coffee and just enough of the story that he suspected this was all a particularly vivid, graduation-induced anxiety dream to end all anxiety dreams. That was certainly a more logical explanation than the one Gabe––Gabriel?––was offering.

Even if he had snapped his fingers and made the coffee pot spin around the room three times and do a backflip before depositing most of its contents in Jeremy's mug. Without spilling a drop.

("Fascinating," Jeremy had said. "You don't actually need to snap, do you? It's just a habit. A focussing mechanism. Telekinesis can't possibly result from the movement itself." Gabe had glared at him and muttered something Jeremy had pretended not to hear that sounded a lot like, "barely better than human.")

After elementary and middle school was GHA, whose preppy, Upper East Side firewalls were really only slightly more complicated than those of NYCSD. The University was the most difficult to crack––their protections were updated every spring by grad students––but in twelve hours, Jeremy was going to formally receive a degree in computer cryptography and programming. He could handle it.

He leaned back and took a draught of coffee as the computer whirred through a combination of possible passwords. The silence stretched out. It wasn't a comfortable silence, like the ones they'd enjoyed on so many lazy afternoons before, but an awkward competition of who could refuse to talk longest.

Jeremy gave up. "So," he said slowly, spinning his chair towards his bed, on which Gabe was lying and staring at the ceiling.

"Yeah?" Gabe asked distractedly. He looked like his brain was a million miles away.

"So," Jeremy repeated, "you're like the metacrisis Doctor. Tenth Doctor. Human body, no regenerating––um, reality-warping––but all the knowledge and experience." He'd been mulling over the analogy for the past ten minutes or so.

Gabe sat up, mind back in the present. "You're telling me you're still catching up on that? It's been three years!"

"Dude, it's like fifty seasons," said Jeremy defensively. "I'm barely at thirty-five."

Gabe rolled his eyes, and for a moment, Jeremy could believe they were back before thirty minutes ago, joking around like usual. "He's not even like––"

Jeremy raised his hands protectively. "I am going to stop you right now," he said firmly, "before you ask me to accept that yet another fictional universe is actually real."

"So you believe me," said Gabe, leaning forward, hands on his knees.

The computer binged and Jeremy turned back to it. Once in, the site was easy to navigate. "I'm considering it," he admitted. It did explain a couple things, like how Gabe learned languages, and a hazy memory Jeremy was beginning to recall of hiding in the principal's closet.

The hospital records were even easier to get to than the school archives. He found the ones for Gabriel Greene quickly enough, and dragged them over to the trash can. A window popped up, asking whether he was truly ready to delete these items forever. His finger hovered over the button. There was a strange sense of deja vu to the action. "Gabe?"

Gabe was standing at his shoulder. Jeremy wasn't sure how long he'd been there.

"Last chance. Are you serious about this?"

Gabe looked at him incredulously. "You still think this is a joke?"

"Well," said Jeremy, and he couldn't help giving a sort of crooked half-smile, "you did once put dye in all the cafeteria food and convince the staff that it was some made-up fungus, and they needed to fulfill their obligation to feed us by ordering pizza."

Gabe waved him off. "That's nothing," he promised with a grin. "I once got Thor to marry a troll. His face when he got into bed and––" He broke off abruptly, grin vanished behind something wooden and dark. "Never mind. Press the button, wipe me out, and I'm off."

Jeremy tapped Yes and the box, and Gabriel Greene of Brooklyn, disappeared from the screen.

Then he opened a new window and brought up the program he'd written idly, one afternoon, after pulling a twenty-hour James Bond marathon with his roommates.

"What are you doing?" Gabe asked sharply, staring at the screen.

"Wiping myself from the system," said Jeremy. He got up, leaving the program to its own devices, and began throwing things in a bag. A couple extra shirts, a spare pair of jeans...it was a good thing he'd fallen asleep in his clothes after the pre-graduation revelries, or he'd have to change now as well.

"What?" asked Gabriel, confusion and disbelief and just a touch of anger in his voice. "Why?"

Jeremy stopped considering whether or not to bring a toothbrush and spun to face the...angel. He should get used to thinking of him as an angel. "Because, idiot," he said with fond exasperation. "Either the coffee pot was a trick, somehow, and you're my friend who's completely cracked and needs looking after, or this is the most real and important thing I've ever heard of, and you're my friend with, sure, a little more oomph than we knew before, but still going out to do a job that required a partner in the video game version." He paused, then added, "Either way, you're my friend and I'm coming."

For possibly the first time that Jeremy could remember, Gabe just stood there, gaping at him like a fish. So he put the toothbrush in his bag, grabbed his computer from the desk and shouldered past him, back to the kitchen.

"Jeremy," Gabe called after him. His voice was quiet, a thin veneer of centuries-long build-up of casualness covering an equally old core of sadness and pain.

Jeremy turned back. "Yeah?"

Gabe stood in the middle of the room, affecting his usual devil-may-care grin. "I don't really do 'friends'. I left my family because I couldn't stand their company. I'm a rebel. A lone wolf." The grin slipped a little. "Everyone's who's thought I was their friend for the last three thousand years had been talking to a person I made up."

"Three thousand years, maybe," argued Jeremy, "but not the last twenty-two. It's like in the fourth Ender book, where––"

Gabe interrupted him. "Whatever nerdy literary analogy you're about to make, I won't get."

"Fine," he conceded. "My point is that, yeah, I didn't know you were the archangel Gabriel until this morning. Butneither did you. You were reborn a human, right? I got that much?"

Gabe nodded, so he kept going.

"Then this is you. Shooting rubber bands in class, dating Cami for three years, stealing my mom's cookies––and paying her later, by the way, don't think I didn't see you––and playing video games and that G–– that damn smirk you do whenever you're about to get me in trouble. So yeah, again, we're friends and I'm coming." The computer hummed in his arms as his program–– more of a virus, really––worked its way through the Net.

He continued on to the kitchen, Gabe trailing behind like a dumbstruck puppy.

Except of course it was Gabe, so he couldn't not keep arguing about something. "You don't need to do that," he said abruptly as Jeremy fashioned impromptu sheathes for the meat- and bread-knives, as well as packaging for some actual meat and bread.

"What?"

"Say 'God.' Not say 'God.' Even if he cared, my father is...well, only he knows. Not here, that's for sure."

Now it was Jeremy's turn to stare incredulously at his friend. "You're kidding me, right?"

Gabe stared back. "At this point? Jeremy, have you looked at the world? It's a crapheap! Trust me, Dad's not around."

Jeremy put down the knife he was holding, at least to diminish the urge to stick in Gabe's head and and see if it forced the common sense into the open. "Okay, this is the third obvious thing I've had to explain to you in as many minutes, so try to take it in." He took a deep breath. "Have you ever looked at your life? The last twenty-two years, at least? Gabe, you haven't told me much here, but thus far I've got..."––he began ticking things off on his fingers––"First off, no one but me is home right now. We would not be having this conversation if my housemates weren't all sleeping elsewhere tonight. Secondly, you're actually named Gabriel. As a human. Do you realize how unlikely that is? Then your babysitter's dad was possessed by a demon, when you were there to see it, and by the sounds of it, Krissy wasn't too unfamiliar with the situation herself. We played a video game based on the world you lived in, then stopped for no real reason. You, and I apparently, conveniently forgot about any psychic powers as soon as you got any control over them. Then, when it sounds like things might be heating up again, Apocalypse-wise, you just happen to stubble into a Crossroads Deal, and remember everything just in time to beat the demon."

He'd nearly filled both hands, and Gabe was staring at him with a expression reminiscent of a drowning man who sees light and isn't certain if it's the sun or the end of the tunnel.

"That's not even counting stuff you didn't mention, or never noticed," he added. "Point is, there are way too many coincidences. Someone wanted you here. To have a normal childhood, but not so much that you never found out the truth. And then to get back in the game." "With help," he considered adding, but decided to leave it.

Gabe stood for a moment more, then sank into a chair. "Oh."

They were quiet again, and it still wasn't a lazy afternoon silence, but a contemplative one. A silence for making choices. Jeremy loaded a couple bags.

It didn't break until they got outside.

"Oh my God," Jeremy gasped, not caring whether he was heard or not. "You actually did steal a car." It was dark blue. And shiny. And a Corvette.

Gabe shrugged. "I couldn't fly." He slid into the driver's seat and shoved the bags of food he'd been carrying into the back. "Come on, it's off a lot. It's nobody's baby."

Jeremy took a deep breath, shouldered his backpack more firmly, and got in the passenger side of the stolen vehicle. "Where to?"

"Krissy's," said Gabe decisively. "I don't know what's been going on for the last twenty-two years. The Apocalypse stopped, obviously, but there must be more. Stuff human media didn't pick up. Krissy might know."

"And she can stitch up your head," Jeremy pointed out.

Gabe fingered the back of his skull thoughtfully. "Yeah." He looked around at the collegiate cul-de-sac and frowned in disappointment. "You know, I always sort of assumed that if I ever made a dramatic exit, I'd be riding into the sunset."

"Go east first," suggested Jeremy, not really paying attention to his friend's dramatics. "The last thing my bug does is cancel my bank account." He checked the time on his tablet. "We have six minutes until $1300 is lost to cyberspace."

Gabe's eyes widened. "My bank account! You only took me out of school."

"Don't worry," Jeremy assured him. He tapped his computer. "We can run your name through the program next."

"And you couldn't have done that in the first place because...?"

"I had to make sure you weren't nuts," said Jeremy, punching him playfully in the shoulder. Gabe snapped his fingers in response, and Jeremy's backpack leapt up and hit him over the head. With all the knives, it was surprisingly heavy.

Then they drove into the sunrise.