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“This doesn’t mean I forgive you for trapping me in endless Tuesdays,” Sam says.
A glimmer of something—something other than the hopeless, dead look, something kind of like mirth—flickers in Gabriel’s eyes before he ducks his head. Sam sighs. He means it: he’s not going to be forgetting about the six months after Tuesday anytime soon, either. But he knows perfectly well what getting your lips stitched together feels like, and he assumes being drained of your Grace is similar to being gutted.
So yeah. He’s not just going to leave the guy sitting at their table covered in blood.
“Uh—sit tight.”
Okay. Brother in another dimension. Archangel in what is basically their living room. Ketch on their side. Right. He can deal with this.
As Sam heads off to their well-stocked linen closet (“What a bunch of pansies,” Dean had remarked, surreptitiously stealing a sniff of the MoL’s detergent), he pulls out his phone and taps in Cas’s name. He’s going to be pissed when he learns Dean is off in the apocalypse world, but right now, Sam needs an extra pair of hands on deck.
“You have who in the bunker?”
Sam shoves the phone between his ear and shoulder as he grabs a handful of cloths and stuffs them under his arm.
“How fast can you be here?”
Castiel mutters something about construction on I-70, but he estimates about two and a half hours.
“Great. See you in a bit.”
On the way back to the library, he fills a bowl with water. It would be easier to get Gabriel into the kitchen or one of the bathrooms, but he knows from experience that the last thing he’s going to want to do is move.
He’s careful to make plenty of noise in the hallway, giving Gabriel time to notice him and steel himself. When he plunks himself down in a chair across from him, Gabriel doesn’t even flinch.
“This might sting a little,” he announces.
He dunks one of the cloths in the water, wrings it out, and leans forward to dab a little bit of the blood off of his face. He’s not about to let infection set in—he definitely doesn’t need a feverish archangel wandering around, thanks.
“I feel like I’m in a period piece, Samantha.”
Sam just stares at him. “You’ve been sewn up for months and that’s your opening line?”
Another hint of that twinkle. “I’m back, baby.”
Resisting the urge to throw the stupid rag in his face, Sam decides to just pass it over. He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. Despite the bravado, it’s clear Gabriel is more affected by his imprisonment than he’s letting on. When the bunker creaks and settles, he almost jumps out of his chair.
“I called Cas,” he says.
Gabriel lets out a low whistle, flinching minutely as the motion pulls at the stitches still in his lips. “He’s still kicking? No way. I thought he would have died for lover boy by now.”
Sam doesn’t bother acknowledging how close to the truth that is. Instead, he winds up fetching Dean’s laptop and pulling Netflix up. He figures Gabriel will get a kick out of The Good Place.
About three episodes in, he gets a quiet, “Thank you,” that they both pretend wasn’t said.
The truck rumbles beneath him as Cas finally manages to swerve out of the last of the construction and on to the open highway. He can’t quite get his jumbled thoughts in order. Sam’s lack of explanation isn’t helping matters much.
He can’t quash the little spark of hope, though. Gabriel is the last of his brothers and sisters who has not rejected him. Maybe he can still find a little sliver of the home he once had.
By the time he pulls up in front of the bunker, he’s actually nervous. It’s the strangest thing, but he almost has the urge to straighten his tie. Instead, he puts a hand on the hilt of his angel blade, just in case he’s been tricked.
“Sam?”
“In here!” Sam calls.
When there’s not immediately a snarky comment in response, his suspicions rise. Surely Gabriel would already be sarcastic if he were really here. After all, the last version he saw of his brother was a fake, too.
Sam certainly seems convinced. Cas rounds the corner just as the credits start rolling on a TV show he hasn’t seen. Dean has been on a Dr. Sexy rerun kick lately because the finale aired last month, so they haven’t watched much else.
“Hey, little bro.”
If the bowl of slightly red tinged water beside them both is any indication, Gabriel was in far worse shape before, but he still looks like he’s taken the beating of a lifetime. Cas flounders for a second.
“You’re dead.”
Gabriel shrugs. “So were you, from what I heard.”
Fair point.
Slowly, painfully, Gabriel eases himself into a standing position. Cas takes the invitation. It feels strange to hug one of his brothers—they aren’t exactly the huggy type, as Dean would say—but feeling another flare of Grace so close is almost like coming home.
Cas loves the Winchesters, but there’s a piece of himself he’s had to bury these last few years that he misses sometimes.
He goes for a joke. “This doesn’t mean I forgive you for TV land.”
Gabriel opens his mouth, but Cas presses two fingers to his forehead and lets some of his Grace smooth away the worst of the wounds. There’s not a lot he can do about some of them; he doesn’t know who exactly got their hands on an archangel blade or how, but they knew what they were doing.
“Where’s Dean?”
Sam grimaces. “That’s the thing, Cas. He—well, we had all the ingredients, so he went through the rift.”
Cas follows his hand to the crack, suspended, flickering, in midair. How the hell had he not noticed that before?
“You let him go alone.”
Gabriel shrugs. “The British guy went with him.”
Cas’s eyes nearly bug out of his head. “Sam—”
He feels a little like his heart is going to beat out of his chest, and isn’t that funny? It’s not supposed to beat at all, really, yet here he is. The thought of Dean in that world, the one they fought so hard to avoid, makes his chest actually hurt. If he dies—
“Oh my Dad. It got worse? Do they still do the thing where they say each other’s names in increasingly deeper voices?” Gabriel asks in a stage whisper. “Sam. How do you deal?”
Sam pretends he hasn’t heard. “Cas, I’m not happy about it either. But he’s right. If he doesn’t come back before the rift closes, we open it up and go after him. No sense all of us getting trapped there.”
“Right. Of course. I’ll just seduce another djinn queen,” Cas snaps.
He wishes they’d stop treating that particular jaunt like a grocery trip. It’s not as if fruit from the Tree of Life grows on trees.
Okay. It does. But it’s a rare tree.
“Seduce a—” Gabriel begins.
“You should rest,” Cas tells him. That is not a conversation he wants to have right now. “My room is second on the left.”
Thankfully, Gabriel follows the directions. Sam starts clearing away the medical supplies, allowing Cas the opportunity to sink into one of the nearby chairs and massage his forehead a little.
He needs time to process this. All of this.