Chapter Text
Gabriel's perched on a chair in Sam's room, reading a worn copy of The Color of Magic. "Hiya, Sammy," he says, and pops a caramel in his mouth.
Sam thinks maybe, normally, this would create one of those headaches. The kind of headaches usually only Dean can summon up, when he's being especially annoying. But he's just. Too tired.
"Gabriel," he says. Then, bitterly, "You're looking better."
"It's amazing what a little fresh air and lots of sex will do for you, after torture and captivity."
He can't even inflect the amount of anger he should be feeling when he says, "Yeah. I know a bit about torture and captivity."
That makes something not-quite-change in Gabriel's expression. He turns a page. "You gotta stop praying to me," he says.
Sam's jaw sets. "So you've been hearing me."
Finally he looks up. One eyebrow rises. "Be hard not to." Then the other eyebrow joins it, in a familiar waggle. "You're loud, Sam."
He exhales sharply, shaking his head. "So, what. That's all you're here to do? Tell me to stop praying? No, Gabriel. We need you. You're our only chance of saving the world – two worlds, even."
"Sorry, kiddo. Not gonna happen."
"Then get used to me praying. 'Cause there's not much else I can do."
"You saved the world before."
"Yeah," Sam says, "and it didn’t stick."
"I warned you about my family, Sam," says Gabriel. "You don't know 'em like I do. Every time a door closes, a window opens and three more of our mistakes pour in. If it's not one of Luci's creations, it's a secret aunt, or niece, or nephew. It's Dad's personal secretary getting uppity and trying to rewrite the universe, it's our sister mind-wiping other angels, it's alternate universe versions of our big brother. And all of them, all of them, are gonna have some stupid plot. Because that's what happens. Why do you think I wanted to get away so badly?"
"We're gonna get everything set to rights," Sam says, desperation creeping in. He's tired. He's so tired. Hearing it all laid out is just making him more bone-deep weary. "We're going to get it all worked out, once and for all, even if – no matter what it takes."
"That's the problem," says Gabriel. "That's always been your problem. You and Dean and my brothers. Whatever it takes. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that doing whatever it takes, with no limit, no point where you say, let's not, is exactly what got you into this mess? Hmm?"
It's an echo of Mystery Spot, ten years ago now, and Sam wonders if Gabriel can stick him in a time loop just so he can get some sleep. But then he immediately feels guilty. If he had extra time, he'd use it researching a way out of this mess—
Gabriel sighs, and Sam thinks maybe he's listening to his thoughts. And he vanishes.
But he leaves the book. It's Sam's, after all.
...He left sticky caramel fingerprints on the book.
Sam's gonna kill him.
Gabriel shows up again, reading another one of Sam's battered collection of Discworld novels, sucking on a lollipop. "Your prayers are getting a little pathetic, now."
"It's called desperation," Sam says curtly.
"Nice trick, the little storytime about my nephew."
"Jack is good," Sam says. "You'd like him. Actually, you probably won't. He won't appreciate your, uh, unique sense of humor."
"You're saying he's boring."
"I'm saying you're an asshole."
Gabriel pulls the lollipop out of his mouth. "You're in a mood," he says. "I like it. Much better than the sad sack shit you've been up to recently, moping around."
"The only hope of saving two universes is sitting in my bedroom, getting sugar all over my books and refusing to help. I can't even be sad at this point."
"Stop calling me that. I'm not your Obi-Wan, kid."
"You know, I used to pray for you. After you died. Or faked your death and ran away to Monte Carlo. I wasn't sure what happened to angels, when they died. But I prayed for you anyway. I thought you'd died giving the world a chance, because you believed in humanity – but you just wanted to disappear in a cloud of smoke."
"I did give humanity a chance, you numbskull," says Gabriel. "I saved you two yahoos! And I left you that video! And I sacrificed a lot to do it, too."
Sam snorts.
Gabriel's eyes flash dangerously, and then he's on his feet, stalking towards Sam. "My big brother was willing to kill me," he says. "He practically raised me. And he was willing to go through me just to keep having his little tantrum. And I get to live with that. Perfect memory recall, kiddo! Perks of the archangel gig, 'specially when you're the Messenger! He would've stabbed me with my own blade. Just for having a spine. So forgive me if I'm not too keen to come back for family dinner."
He turns away and disappears again, before Sam can even reply. Hogfather falls to the ground in a flutter of pages.
"Why are you even here? Don't you have models in Monte Carlo to get back to?"
Gabriel is hold Reaper Man upside down and drinking a cocktail that looks like it'll be horrifically sticky. "Pornstars, and no. Turns out, when you show up to capture an archangel, you aren't too concerned about collateral damage."
"Oh," says Sam.
"All of them are dead now," Gabriel says, unnecessarily. "Except the ones in psych wards. So. No."
"I'm sorry."
Gabriel keeps pretending to read the book. Or maybe he is reading it. Surely archangels can read upside down. "They were just pornstars."
"Were they your friends?"
"Yeaaaaah… Not really a friends kind of guy."
"There was Kali."
"She's not answering my calls," says Gabriel. "She's back with Shiva, I guess."
"That… sucks."
"This conversation sucks," Gabriel says. "Shouldn't you be yelling and pitching fits about me not joining your boyband?"
"I don't think forcing you to do things is gonna be very effective for me. So, no, I'm not gonna bother. You're not going to help us, you're not going to leave me alone, you're just going to hang around and screw with my stuff, and I have bigger problems than you. In part because of you. So if you could just get around to the vanishing act part of the evening, that'd be great."
"Oh, I'm going," Gabriel says, "but not because you told me to."
"Sure," says Sam.
Gabriel sneers a little, and then he's gone.
"Not in the mood," Sam greets Gabriel, and the Red Vines, and Interesting Times. They spent an entire week chasing leads, and he's tired.
"There's not an end to this, Sam. You just keep shoveling shit and eventually you reach the bottom and it's just another giant turd."
"So we divert a river," Sam says stubbornly. "We cut the knot. We do something, besides sit around drinking mojitos and waiting for the world to end!" His voice raises steadily as he speaks, until he's almost yelling, and dear – someone, it's the most he's felt besides empty despair in ages.
"Why?" Gabriel demands.
"PEOPLE!" Sam half-shouts. He takes a deep breath to calm down. "People, Gabriel."
"I think," he says, quietly, "this is the part where I disappear."
"Yeah," Sam says. "I think it is." He rubs at his head, but Gabriel's still there.
"He's still my brother," says Gabriel. "Another universe's version of him. But it's Michael. Michael. And the only thing worse than seeing Michael again. Is seeing Lucifer. Especially my—especially this universe's Lucifer."
"You think I don't feel the same way?" Sam asks. Seeing Lucifer again had been—
"Imagine if Dean had killed you. Imagine if Dean fully believed he was killing you and you watched him stab your clone, and twist the knife, and lower the body to the ground, in some mockery of grief. Imagine if you were left standing over your own body knowing your brother had done that to you."
Sam absolutely, resolutely doesn't think about flat black eyes and a hammer and the face of the man who'd raised him. Doesn't think about how the love he felt for Dean had been enough to fight back Lucifer, but Dean couldn't resist the urge to kill him as a demon.
He doesn't think about it. Because he knows it's not Dean's fault, logically, rationally, and he's not going to hold Dean responsible for something that wasn't his fault—but even if it had been. Sam knows.
"I think," he says, "I'd still go back. If it was Dean."
"You ever think maybe you shouldn't?"
Sam's too tired. He's just too tired. "Why are you here?"
"Maybe I want you to get out too. Before it's too late."
"Why should you care?"
"I shouldn't," he says.
"Then don't."
"I won't."
"Good."
"Fine."
They're just staring at each other.
"Can I have my book back?"
"I got strawberry licorice on the dedication page."
"Of course you did," sighs Sam. But he takes the book, and just as he does, the other hand holding it is gone, and so is Gabriel.
It's been two months since Asmodeus, and Sam still hasn't mentioned to Dean that their only hope of saving Mom, Charlie, and Jack – along with the world – is maybe. Visiting him. Regularly.
But things from the outside world have been… quiet.
Weirdly quiet.
"Oh, that," says Gabriel, when he mentions it. "You're in a time bubble, Sam. I thought I'd let you spin your wheels for a while, hoping you'd finally get some rest. It was your idea."
"I'm—what?"
"What did you do today, Sam?"
"I…" Sam can't remember specifics, except that Cass had snorted quietly at something he'd said at lunch, and that Dean had made lasagna for dinner again, and nothing new had cropped up anywhere—
"What did you do?" He demands.
Gabriel holds up his hands. "Like I said, you need to spin your wheels for a bit, hopefully realize this is all fruitless – and hey, it's been slightly less miserable than your daily life! That's all I could do, if I made it too comfy you would've freaked out immediately. But you've gotten more sleep the past month, which has really only been a half-hour, maybe. Unless I… the point is, you've been sleeping!"
Sam advances on him. "You shoved me in a time loop?"
"Not a loop. A bubble. Your own personal vacation." He gestures around. "So it kind of sucks, because again, you'd never accept leaving the bunker or taking some actual time off. But hey, I do what I can."
"What you can do is put me back. Now."
"Sam—"
"I can't believe you did this to me again," Sam says. "I thought maybe you and I were getting to a point where—no," he says. "Just. Send me back."
"You need to rest, Sam. Now that you've been eased into it, we could go to Aruba—"
"Send. Me. Back."
Gabriel blinks, and he's gone, and Sam's in his room, and the only difference is that The Light Fantastic is sitting in its place on the shelf. But he knows it's reality again. And that means he has to tell Dean.
There's a lot of yelling, and fretting, and more yelling, when Sam tells Dean and Cass what's going on.
Finally he goes to his room, feeling oddly like a child grounded, and sits down on the edge of his bed, his elbows on his knees. He looks down at the floor as he laces his fingers. He still feels strange, praying, now that he's met the guy, but he finds something soothingly repetitive in the Pater Noster.
He gets about halfway through before Gabriel says, "You don't like to make things easy on yourself, do you, kiddo?"
"You could make them easier, if you're so concerned."
"I tried."
"You could do something more permanent, if you helped us against Michael."
"I could," Gabriel allows, "but I won't."
"Why are you here, Gabriel?"
"Call it my apology. The Apology of Gabriel. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?"
"If you're really sorry—"
"Sam, Sam, Sam. I mean the original meaning of apology."
Sam slips his hands in his pockets. "Maybe I don't care about your explanation."
"Maybe not," says Gabriel. "But you'll listen. Who else would?"
Sam looks past Gabriel and swallows.
"Oh, you'll have plenty of people to listen to you," Dean says, and throws his lighter down.
Gabriel spins around as the holy oil flares up into flames around him. Dean folds his arms. Cass is hovering just a step behind him, his expression shadowy. "You son of a bitch—" Gabriel begins.
"Sorry, Sam, but you were taking too long."
The look Gabriel turns on Sam is filled with so much honest hurt and betrayal, a moment before it becomes disdain, that Sam feels like he's literally going to be sick.
Eventually, both Dean and Cass leave Sam's room. Sam stays hunched over a book he hasn't managed to read a word of while they argue in low voices. There's the sound of something breaking. Dean must be frustrated, panicking – the prospect of losing Charlie again, especially, is hurting him, Sam knows.
And Cass—well. Cass didn't exactly have many surviving brothers or sisters, not ones that cared.
The lighter in his pocket, still unused, seems to weigh a hundred pounds. But that's just the guilt. We need to talk to him without him being able to disappear the moment he disagrees with something we say, Castiel had said. I don't like the idea of trapping him, but if it will help him see reason—
Personally, Sam thinks Gabriel's been trapped plenty long enough.
But the world hangs in the balance.
He's the one who owes an apology, now. In both senses of the word. He almost hesitates to go back to his room – but it's his room, dammit. So he goes back, without asking Dean or Cass, and viciously argues with himself that he shouldn't feel the need to ask at all. He's a grown man. Going to his own room. It just happens to have a captive archangel in it. It's not like he's going to do anything stupid.
Like free him.
Gabriel's sitting on the floor, hugging his knees.
Oh, god.
"Gabriel—"
But he doesn't know what to say, and there's no response.
Sam stands lamely at the edge of the ring of holy fire, wondering – no, if he crosses it, Gabriel will just use him as leverage to get free, and Dean will be furious with him for taking the risk. Gabriel might well hurt him, now. He hasn't exactly been disinclined previously, although Sam had thought they were maybe approaching an accord, before he realized he was stuck in a time bubble, getting nothing done except sleep, the space of two months in his head—
"I…" There are a thousand justifications for this. A thousand ways to express how sorry he is. "Tell me about the pornstars."
Gabriel leans back a little, like he's surprised. But he doesn't look up.
"Come on, you must've spent a lot of time with them, and Cass says you went on and on about them for a while when you left us that message. I know you don't want to talk about – any of this. And I don't want you to get stuck in your head again. So. Tell me about the hot girls."
Slowly, Gabriel's eyes raise to his. He quirks the barest shadow of his old smirk. "Who says they were all girls?"
"Then tell me about them all," says Sam.
Gabriel does – and between the lewdness, and the bizarreness of the entire situation, and way too much information, Sam starts to know these people. People who were murdered by demons, people Gabriel had at least liked enough to spend so much of his time with, if not exactly cared about. But Gabriel pauses, in the middle of wild gesticulation about the breasts of a woman named Lucretia, and says, "So your brother's Bad Cop, little Cassie is Good Cop, and you're… Sex Cop? Malibu Barbie Cop?"
"I'd just carry on our usual conversation, but I'd feel bad arguing with you if you can't run away every time I start winning the argument," says Sam.
Gabriel does snort a little at that.
But when he speaks again he says, "You're not going to get what you want, Sam. You can tell our brothers that, too. And with your usual hammer-headed approach, you're just going to make another enemy. And trust me, kid. I can make your lives even worse."
"You can try," Sam says, stretching a little as he sprawls back against the wall. The holy fire is warming his feet through his boots, almost like sitting by a campfire. It's doing strange things to Gabriel's face, the haunted look that never seems far behind the usual smirking. Sam thinks it's not so different from how he was before. But before, he hadn't seen the vulnerability past the malice.
"Dean doesn't know half as much about torture as he thinks he does," Gabriel says. "He can't break me."
"He won't torture you at all," Sam tells him.
"Wow, you are an idiot," says Gabriel. "Your brother's an avid disciple of the ends justifying the means. I mean, the Mark of Cain? How many people did he kill like that?"
"Don't," says Sam.
Gabriel looks at him pityingly. Like Mystery Spot. Like the end of those other, miserable months that never were, talking about weak spots. Like he had in another ring of fire, in a warehouse, talking about Cain and Abel.
"He really is just like Michael, you know."
"And I'm like Lucifer, yes, I've heard, a thousand times."
"No," says Gabriel. "You're me. You just went back to your family, and fought the good fight. I just can't decide if that makes you or me the bigger coward, here."
Sam rubs at his face. "Why does it have to make either of us a coward?" He asks. "Why can't it just make us people who made different choices, and both wound up miserable?"
"I wouldn't be miserable if people would stop dragging me back in."
"You were miserable," says Sam, because he recognizes it better in hindsight than he did at the time. He can't get it out of his head, Gabriel trying to warn him after Mystery Spot, Sam just begging for Dean back.
"Not as miserable as I would've been if I'd stuck around. You've met my family. I would've been misterable with them. At least the pagans had fun, sometimes."
Sam's barely listening. "Why didn't you just say it outright?"
Gabriel's quiet. Long enough that Sam regrets saying anything, long enough that Sam remembers hellooooo, trickster!, long enough that he opens his mouth to try and explain his train of thought. Then,
"Would you have believed me?"
"You could've shown me. I would've at least been more cautious."
"Would you have?"
"Stop just – turning the question back on me."
"I could've screamed my throat hoarse explaining it, could've shown you how it would all unfold – which I didn't even know, by the way – and you still would've wanted Dean back."
"He sold his soul for me," Sam says. "I never wanted him to – why would he do that! I never wanted any of this! If I had died, if I had just died then, if I had never been born, this never would have happened, and I hate him for saving my life! I hate him for saving my life over and over, and I've spent my entire life trying to make up for the crime of being born and I just want to rest."
Gabriel tilts his head. "I told you so," he says.
"I hate you too," Sam says.
"At least this is better than the little cheerleader act. Let's all just put our pompoms up and save the world! We can do it if we just work together! Gimme a break, Sam. You're clinging to the optimist act because if you don't, this whole ship goes under. The ship being your sanity, of course. You have to believe there's a light at the end of the tunnel even when there is no tunnel, because otherwise you have to accept that you're buried alive."
Sam exhales, some time later. He doesn't know what to say, except, "So dig me out."
"I'm not a shovel."
I'm not a tool, he hears. Stop trying to use me. The Winchesters, turning their friends into weapons since –
Well.
Always.
"You're not even my friend," Sam mutters. "Why does this bother me."
"You're me," says Gabriel, "and I'm you. I'm you, if you'd just packed your shit and left like you wanted to a thousand times. Of course, that doesn't do much to help me, because you hate the reminder that you never had to stay, if you'd just grown a pair."
"You hate the reminder that you could've stayed, if you'd had the spine."
Gabriel sneers. "So we hate each other. Glad we've spent half the night establishing that."
Sam checks his watch, startled. It's almost dawn.
So much for sleep. Not that he'd have done much of it anyway. He got plenty in the time bubble, he could've spent the night in the library – instead of just talking in circles with Gabriel. So much talking, and they hadn't managed to do anything but make Sam actually say the things he's been carefully boxing up and ignoring because there isn't time to want to lay down and die when there's work to be done.
He drops his arm back to his side and leans his head back against the wall. He's getting too old to sit on the floor like this. His entire back hurts.
"Sooooo…" Gabriel says.
He lifts his head a little.
Gabriel's sitting on his heels, no longer hugging his knees to his chest – it's strange to see the archangel kneeling. Like his eyes should be cast upwards. But there's nothing up there worth praying to, is there? Not anymore.
"What now?"
Sam barely hears him. The gears are turning in his head. I'm you, he said. You're me. As it is in Heaven, so it must be on Earth, the repeated image, the multiplanar motif. Two brothers, two sets of two brothers, three sets, Cain and Abel, Michael and Lucifer, Lucifer and Gabriel, Sam and Dean, Gabriel and Castiel…
Hey, bro. How's the search for Dad going?
"Why are you making that face."
Dad's on a hunting trip. And he hasn't been home in a while.
"You look like you're thinking a lot over there."
My father turned his back on his creation. Guess it just runs in the family.
"I think I can see smoke. Is this an epiphany? Are you having an epiphany? Hopefully not in the original sense of the word, because that could get ugly—"
I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. Saving people, hunting things. The family business.
"Gabriel?" Sam says. "Shut up."
You don't know my family.
What you guys call the Apocalypse, I used to call Sunday dinner.
I just want it to be over.
You don't know my family…
But Sam did. Raphael. Zachariah. Metatron. Michael. Lucifer. Oh, gods, Lucifer. That was his big brother? Sam tries to overlay Lucifer with Dean. And somehow Cass fits nicely in Michael's place. He is older than Dean, after all. Dean had tortured people, had chased Sam with a claw hammer. Castiel had literally taken over Heaven. They'd all done awful things. To an outsider, Dean might be terrifying. Cass objectively was terrifying. And Sam didn't want to be between them fighting. But…
But Lucifer isn't Dean, and Dean isn't Lucifer, and he actually. Feels a little guilty even comparing Cass to Michael. Not to mention his brother to the freaking Devil.
And Dean and Cass had fought, dozens of times, times when Sam had been pretty sure their little trio would end with one killing the other, or vice versa. And yeah, he'd stayed out of Dean's way a little more during their quarrels. But –
Sam gets to his feet.
Gabriel watches him warily. And yeah, Sam recognizes that wariness. He's been to Hell, he's been tortured, he's looked at the world waiting for the next blow to fall.
He smothers a section of the holy fire. And then he drags his toe further down the circle, until it's uncomfortably warm and besides, it only needed a small gap.
"I'm not you," he says. "You're not me. I'm a Winchester, and you're an angel. Your family sucks. Your brother ditched Heaven for my family, and we're not exactly a shining beacon of functioning family dynamics, here. So it doesn't matter if we scream ourselves hoarse trying to beg you to help us save the world. You made your peace with the fact that your family was going to destroy it, and everything else you've ever cared about, long before me and Dean came around putting wrenches in the works."
Gabriel, slowly, stands up.
"If this is some sort of trick—" he begins.
"I think that's more your domain," says Sam.
"You freeing me out of the goodness of your heart isn't going to inspire an about-face turn. And I don't owe you for this."
"I betrayed you by letting them trap you, I'm freeing you, sorry about the reminder of your trauma, call it even for the reminder of mine."
"What's gotten into you?" Gabriel asks, eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"You ever get to three am and have a brief, crazy moment where you think, fuck it?"
Gabriel cocks an eyebrow. "It's always three am somewhere." And he snaps his fingers, and he's gone, and Sam realizes this is the first time he's seen Gabriel snap his fingers since the entire ordeal started.
And for a moment he's smiling, but then he remembers that Dean's going to wake up from too-little sleep and expect to find an archangel still here.
"Impulse control," Sam reminds himself, "this is why we exercise impulse control."
He can't quite bring himself to regret it.