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It's not the first time they're sharing a bed, all three of them. It probably won't be the last.
This time it's Gabriel in the middle, the kids on each side of him. It's one of the nights when the dreams are haunting, and he doesn't sleep much. Blurred figures, the feeling of dry lips against his forehead, the smell of old blood.
He wakes around dawn. Decides to give up on any further sleep, tired of battling the memories in his head.
He tries to climb out of the bed discreetly, without disturbing either side too much, even though stealth was never his strong suit. He's too used to claiming his own space, maybe, too confident that he can fix whatever he needs to later, with a puff or two of colorful smoke.
He manages to shimmy out of the bed and onto the floor, the stone tile cold on his bare feet. A week ago they were at Wolfhagen, but now they're in Spain, chasing after Nathan's father, for all the good it's likely to do them.
Gabriel grabs a robe to wrap around himself and goes to the kitchen of the small flat, where a door leads outside, to a balcony. He lights up a smoke and watches the sun rise. He tries to make his mind blank, just let the sound of the morning birds and the smell of the city before it awakens fill him up.
"Can I try?" Annalise says, and Gabriel turns, surprised to see her. She's cracked open the door, quietly enough that he didn't notice.
She's looking at his cigarette. He nods and takes one more puff before letting her have it.
She steps onto the balcony wearing a t-shirt over the bra and underwear she went to sleep in. It's routine for them now, this semi-dressed companionship.
Her legs are bare. She shivers slightly as she takes the cigarette from him, holding it awkwardly between three fingers.
He starts to take off his robe but she rolls her eyes and gestures for him to keep it.
He does. He's enough of a gentleman to offer, but enough of a selfish bastard not to insist.
She takes a deep breath, inhales the smoke, and then her contorts with disgust for a long moment, but she doesn't open her mouth, doesn't try to spit out the taste. She pushes it down, and does a half-terrible job of letting out the smoke.
She looks self-conscious, when their eyes meet, as if this more than sleeping next to her every night has revealed her true nature to him. Her youth and inexperience, some fundamental way in which she's not ready for the world.
"That's better than my first time," Gabriel says, not reaching for the cigarette. Letting her have it, for a few more tries. "I choked and started coughing."
"Yeah, well," she says, a little sullenly, pulling on the cigarette again, doing a better job of not cringing this time. "You were probably like, half my age, so it doesn't count."
He'd been twenty years old. In a club, in Berlin, the first time he'd been allowed to go on a job completely unsupervised. Allowing himself a small celebration.
"Hm," he grunts. He doesn't want to tell her he wasn't allowed any alcohol, or coffee, or smoking while he lived "at home". He'd never broken those rules, never wanted to find out how Mercury would punish him. Saved his small rebellions for the things that actually mattered.
Thinking about it makes him feel unmoored, not fully in control of his reality, and he takes the cigarette from her, somewhat abruptly.
He's cutting her some slack, because she did murder her father a little bit ago, so he's not going to deny her a bad habit. But he's not a patient man, or a kind one. There's no point in pretending.
"He sleeps better these days," she says, wrapping her arms around herself. "Like... he's more comfortable. Maybe it's... whatever you guys did."
What a cipher. Gabriel's best guess is that she feels Nathan's affections have changed, and doesn't quite know how to navigate her desires, or any jealousy she might have, with a healthy and balanced approach to relationships.
Well, he's no expert on that either.
"He kissed me," he says, taking another comforting inhale. "Just for the record. I wasn't trying to steal your boyfriend."
She shrugs, looking at the view of the city slowly coming to life.
"Hey guys," Nathan says, appearing in the doorway somehow, without either of them noticing. He looks tired, which means even more disheveled and defenseless than usual. "Is being out here better than being warm? Do we need to be up for some reason?" He yawns, and Gabriel wishes he didn't find it so adorable.
"Some of us like getting up early," Gabriel says, taking another puff of the dwindling cigarette. The other two only snort in response, Nathan giving Gabriel a small smile.
"You're freezing!" Nathan says, turning his eyes to Annalise. He's only wearing a shirt and his boxers, but he steps outside, onto the balcony, and wraps his hands around her.
That's the thing about Nathan that Gabriel can't get over. The son of Marcus Edge, raised by Fairbornes. Even from the snippets he knows Gabriel can imagine how full of hatred and fear and control that childhood must have been. Nathan's own half-sister becoming a hunter. Worse than Annalise's dad, by some accounts. And yet Nathan was so... his arms were always wide open. To the world, to his friends, to anyone he might keep warm with what little he had to share. Somehow no one had taught Nathan to be fearful, to always have a knife at the ready, to treat people primarily as entanglements. Or maybe they'd tried to teach him that all his life, like Gabriel had been taught, but the lesson had never stuck for some reason.
That's the thing that destroys Gabriel, whenever he looks at Nathan. Not Nathan's boyish good looks, or his resilience, or his daring-do, but the utter kindness he always offers the world. Before meeting him, Gabriel had never considered so much kindness could be contained within one person.
"What was it like, kissing him?" Annalise says, in a quiet voice. Nathan's got his arms wrapped around her, and she's leaning against him, her head leaning on his shoulder, hair still tousled from sleep.
"Like you've never kissed a boy before," Gabriel says, looking at Annalise, though he knows the question was for Nathan. He raises his eyebrow suggestively. He's pretty sure only one of them's had sex with Nathan, and it wasn't him.
He does hope that might change some day.
"It was... nice," Nathan says, suddenly looking ten degrees warmer, like there's a flush trying to crawl out of his pores. "I hope we're not going to play any comparison games."
The tragedy is, Gabriel knows Nathan meant those words. But Annalise... she's much more like Gabriel. In some ways they're completely the opposite, as people, and in some ways...
"What if it's not a game?" Annalise says, and raises her head a bit, one hand hesitantly on the back of Nathan's neck, as if suggesting the idea to him, just barely nudging him into trying this.
Nathan's face moves towards her, and they're kissing.
Gabriel uses that as his chance to take one last puff, before stubbing the butt out on the balcony railing.
"I'm still a little cold," Annalise says, when Gabriel looks over at them again. They're holding each other, mouths no longer joined.
Annalise is looking at Nathan, and then at Gabriel, and then at Nathan again. She's not biting her lower lip, but Gabriel can imagine her doing it so clearly.
"Could you...?" Annalise asks, looking only at Gabriel now, and all the gods and powers and witches of all old help him because he gets rid of the cigarette butt and takes the two steps required to press himself against them both.
He's taller than both of them, and the robe covers most of his body, and the two of them make sounds of relief at being much warmer now. Little shitheads.
It's a little awkward, huddling like this. Annalise has one hand around Nathan's waist, and another against Gabriel's chest, and Nathan has one arm wrapped around her and one arm wrapped against Gabriel, and Gabriel isn't sure what to do with his hands.
He settles on wrapping his arms around their shoulders, but that somehow brings his face and Nathan's closer than before. Very close. Dangerously close.
Nathan's lips are soft, and a little dry when he presses them to Gabriel's. Not even technically a kiss, but something more hesitant than that. More open to interpretation. Like he's waiting for Gabriel to decide whether he likes this. Or maybe like he's waiting to decide himself.
The seconds tick past and Gabriel leans into the kiss, because it's not even a question. Because he'll always want Nathan's mouth, and Nathan's mind, and Nathan's trust, if he'll allow it.
Though he doesn't want to think about that. Trusting Gabriel is historically the worst thing an attractive young man can do in his life, and Gabriel is determined that the same fate shouldn't befall Nathan, but his ability to guarantee it is a vortex of terrifying things inside his own chest.
Nathan's kiss is sweet, and slow, nothing like their last one. Nathan had been desperate then, Gabriel realized in retrospect. A little forceful, which Gabriel had liked.
Gabriel tastes Nathan's mouth with his tongue, keeping everything unhurried and relaxed, letting Nathan explore and take his time, if he wants to. Gabriel isn't looking at Annalise, but he also hasn't felt her move or make a sound, which is its own reaction. Nathan responds to Gabriel's mouth, and the kiss grows deeper, the warmth between all three of them rising by a few more degrees.
When they pull apart Gabriel feels a little dizzy, almost like he's out of breath. What's happening to him? How is this caused just by kissing a teenager on a balcony?
"Does that answer your question?" Gabriel says, to distract himself from those thoughts. His eyes are on Annalise. "About what it's like kissing me?"
"A little," she says, with a small, shy smile. It seems genuine. As if some of her defensiveness has melted away. As if now that she's seen it with her own eyes something about the prospect of him and Nathan together is no longer that threatening.
Nathan gives an amused huff. He looks about ten times more awake than a few minutes ago.
"Have you ever kissed a girl?" Annalise asks, looking at Gabriel, eyebrows drawn together in a curious expression.
Growing up, Mercury introduced Gabriel to many guests who visited her home. He remembers one day, when he was about fifteen, meeting a girl a little older than him who came to the house on the lake with her father. Gabriel remembers the father was someone important, and a blood witch, but not much beyond that. He remembers standing politely where he was told, in the middle of the living room, as the girl looked him over. He remembers being told to take the girl to his bedroom, and to play nicely, and do as he's told.
He remembers feeling, some time later, like parts of his body felt different. Like the skin didn't feel quite right. But there was nothing more, just a vague sense that his body had done things it wasn't used to. Mercury was always generous in that way. She never let him keep memories that might hurt him.
"No," he says, because what he doesn't remember doesn't count. That's always been his approach. It's why he felt so comfortable taking the memories of men he'd been with. He was trying to be kind, in the best way he knew how.
"This is a lot, for six in the morning," Nathan says, looking from Annalise to Gabriel and back again. "Shouldn't we... have breakfast or something?"
"Would you like to?" Annalise asks, eyes never leaving Gabriel's.
He thinks about her on the boat. Dancing and drinking with him, in the darkness, while Nathan sat by and watched. There was some mutual understanding between her and Gabriel that night. They both liked a good time, enjoyed a certain non-committal looseness that Nathan wasn't into.
She'd left the next morning. Such a headstrong girl, so focused on her own aims. Or maybe, she'd just felt safe leaving Nathan in Gabriel's hands.
"I'll try anything once," Gabriel says, and leans down until their lips meet.
The most shocking thing is that she somehow still tastes a bit of cigarettes. The next shocking thing is how soft the skin of her face is, without any hint of stubble.
The next shocking thing is that she's a better kisser than Nathan.
Though that probably makes sense. She's had other lovers before him.
The kiss doesn't last very long, just enough for both of them to taste each other, to get over the weirdness of doing this together, to establish that they're both capable of enjoying it, under the right circumstances.
"That's, uh," Nathan says, when they draw apart. "That was... um. Yeah."
Annalise looks pensive for a moment. "You both need to brush your teeth," she says. "We're not doing this again first thing in the morning."
"You both taste like an ashtray!" Nathan says, looking like he's channeling all his bewilderment into the words. "Since when do you even smoke, Annalise?" He turns his big eyes from her to Gabriel. "Did you put her up to this?"
"I'm merely an innocent bystander," Gabriel assures him. "She gave me no choice."
Annalise rolls her eyes. "I'm never doing it again. Tastes disgusting. Don't know why anyone would find it relaxing."
The three of them are still, ridiculously, huddled together on this small balcony. The sun is almost done rising. Will Gabriel have to be the responsible adult who gets them inside? He's terrible at that role.
"I'm hungry," Nathan says. "Like, I know there's... whatever this is, but I am genuinely starving."
"Yeah, let's go inside," Annalise says, and they break apart.
Gabriel, relieved, lets both of them go ahead of him back into the apartment.
He catches one last glimpse of the early daylight, and thinks about where his life has brought him, and where it might take him still, before going inside as well.