Gabriel
He had thought being Loki was his dream. After the events in heaven, when he had started his witness protection scheme, the chance to be Loki had seemed like all he ever wanted.
Gabriel was an angel and on earth he soon learned that, no matter how powerful he was, the pagans tended to crack jokes about him. He could tell them that angels were soldiers as often as he wanted, they still believed him a weird feathery joke. So what, if he still refused to drink alcohol, wasn´t interested in human women and avoided fights rather than welcome them? That didn´t mean he was weak! He was an angel and even as a runaway he had to hold himself to some standards.
After all if they searched for him, he hoped that they would still want him back. In fact the fear that they didn´t search for him or if they found him wouldn´t want him back, controlled his actions more than he could ever admit to himself.
But apparently on earth not doing these things meant that you were weak. In heaven he had always been the rascal, on earth suddenly everyone mocked him for being "good". It was painful and confusing and when one night he stumbled over Odin in a tavern, where he had hidden from a snowstorm (after his semi-fall his grace was still kind of low) he decided that Gabriel couldn´t survive in this world. Gabriel was just too scared, too shy, too much angel.
So he sat with Odin and got drunk for the first time in his existence. That mixture of shame and excitement was like nothing he had ever felt before. Later that night Odin took a woman and Gabriel had decided not to be an angel anymore and also was too drunk to think about what he was doing.
He woke the next day with an incredible headache, feeling utterly lost. But Odin hadn´t left him in the mess he had gotten himself into. He got Gabriel out of bed (Loki found out years later that he had also paid the woman), patted him on the back and asked: "You need somewhere to stay, boy?" Gabriel had never nodded so fast in his life.
And so Loki was born and Gabriel loved being Loki. Loki was allowed to do everything he wanted. No one ever looked at him like he was weird or weak or both. Loki was a part of something , yet remote enough that he could never be crushed like Gabriel had been. Gabriels sense of humor had been light and childish, Lokis was dark, but so much more exciting. Everything about being Loki felt like getting drunk and Gabriel was addicted.
And with the time Michael and Lucifer and Raphael and even God faded away and were replaced by Thor and Baldur and Hodur and Odin. Did heaven even exist? Hadn´t Asgard always been his home? There were times when it seemed like he had only dreamed Gabriel. He was Loki, maybe always had been.
Loki, who could trick everyone in the blink of an eye. Loki, who went drinking with the other pagans. Loki, who could have an affair with a Hindu goddess of violence and no one thought that weird. Loki was vivid and exciting and addictive, not at all like pale, boring, little Gabriel. So often he thought that little idiot had finally died and left him pure Loki, but it turned out Gabriel was a lot tougher than Loki had ever expected him to be. No matter how hard Loki tried to leave him and his life behind, he always popped up again in the quiet moments.
The other pagans always joked about Lokis inability to sit still, his need to always be in motion. He couldn´t ever tell them, that he was just running from Gabriel.
It all came down in flames in the end and how shouldn´t it end this way? He really should have seen it coming, but his efforts to forget Gabriel (and Michael and Lucifer and Raphael and God) had left him blind to certain things. So he, a Norse god, had to learn from Kali of all people, that in Norse mythology it was foretold that Loki would start the end of the world.
It took him all his strength to get away from her before collapsing onto some quiet mountaintop. The images in his head were back, had never really been gone despite his efforts and he was drowning.
Michael and Lucifer fighting.
He had tried to intervene, but Michael had shoved him away like he was dirt, so he had lain helpless as Michael tossed Lucifer into the pit. He was the only one (expect Michael of course) who had heard Lucifer begging. "Like a maggot", Michael had said later, but Gabriel thought that Lucifer had just sounded scared out of his mind.
The images poured in one after another and he drowned, drowned in Gabriel.
When he came back to himself his wings were spread for the first time in thousands of years and he knew Loki had just been a dream.
He confronted Odin after that. Asked him if he had just taken him in to have someone to start Ragnarök. Odin tried to laugh him off. "You chose your name yourself, Loki", he said. "I had nothing to do with it, it is just destiny. Everything is turning out as it was always meant to be"
Yes, he had chosen Loki himself, because it meant air. Little courtesy to heaven and angels, even though he told himself he chose it because he wanted to dissolve into air and everyone else that it had to do with his trickster nature.
"Still you chose me", he said fuming with rage. "You chose me and kept secret from me my role in Ragnarök. You and all the others. I wanted a family and your lied to me and tried to use me for the last thing I ever wanted" "We didn´t", Odin replied. "You just can´t run from destiny, Loki" But Loki was a better liar than Odin and he had finally learned to recognize lies. The Trickster had been tricked all the time.
So Loki ran. Just like Gabriel. Because even if you couldn´t run from destiny you could damn well try.
He almost went back to heaven after that. He longed for seeing his brothers, sitting in the garden, having a home. Loki had turned from dream to nightmare.
But he couldn´t. From all he had heard over the time heaven was just an army camp now and he wasn´t Gabriel anymore. He couldn´t turn time back as far as he needed to.
So he became the Trickster.
The Trickster was pure despair from the beginning. More or less he was like Loki, but without a family, without a home, without even so much as a name. The Trickster could be cruel and enjoy it. Get people eaten by crocodiles and call it humor. Always smiling, always eating candy, like he was trying to get a bad taste out of his mouth. The Trickster could make you believe the world had been taken over by giant lizards while you slept or that you had been slowdancing with aliens. But the greatest trick the Trickster ever pulled was convincing himself he liked this lonely life.
When the Winchesters asked for his name and he replied "They call me Gabriel" no one had called him Gabriel for thousands of years. No one had even called him the same name for longer than a week for hundreds of years.
The being that was killed by Lucifer wasn´t Gabriel anymore, nor Loki, nor the Trickster. Lucifer killed something fused together of shreds and pieces, more stable then it had been since Loki, but broken still. Maybe Gabriel had died in Lucifers rebellion after all and Loki and the Trickster had just been ghosts.
Dreams turned to nightmares.
Beneath all the smiles and laughs and candy that was the story of Gabriels life.
Dreams turned nightmares.
