Chapter Text
For the fifth time in one week, Gabriel woke to the sound of his attractive new neighbour getting some. Loudly.
Normally Gabriel would find this really depressing, but he was channeling that into burning curiosity.
Sam lived alone.
Their building had walls that were like tissue.
And his front door and bedroom were right next to Gabriel’s room.
Gabriel was entirely certain Sam had been alone in that apartment two hours ago when he’d gone to drop off his borrowed lasagna dish (Sam was a good neighbour like that).
Which meant Sam’s mysterious partner (because there were two distinct voices every time) was sneaking in every night through a sixth floor bathroom window that was about as wide as Gabriel’s forearm and only opened halfway.
Although Gabriel had noticed the moans sounded suspiciously similar every night. In fact he’d almost say it was a soundtrack. So he supposed it was possible the guy liked his porn insanely loud and didn’t care if he woke up half the building.
Whether Sam had actual company or not, Gabriel decided, it was still a shitty thing to do. He folded his pillow over his ears and forced his eyes shut again.
After that night, thankfully, the noise stopped. Gabriel had three nights in a row of uninterrupted sleep.
Until the afternoon he arrived home to find an old black car parked outside.
Gabriel vaguely remembered that car from when Sam had moved in. Its driver had helped Sam cart his meager few possessions and pieces of furniture to his new apartment.
Gabriel had dismissed the guy as a boyfriend, and a scary one if that car was anything to go by.
You could probably fit a body in that car’s boot. Especially a body as small as Gabriel’s.
The boyfriend was leaving as Gabriel arrived home, a wide smile that Gabriel knew very well spread across his face. It was the smile of a fellow trickster after a successful prank. He nodded to the man in acknowledgement as they passed each other in the stairwell.
To Gabriel’s surprise, the guy stopped him.
‘Hey, short guy, you’re Sammy’s neighbour, right?’
Gabriel nodded warily. Now came the “back off or I’ll leave your body in an unmarked grave” speech. Or it would, if Gabriel had ever communicated even the slightest bit of his interest to Sam.
‘How did it go? Really? He won’t tell me and I wasn’t here, so…’
Gabriel really hoped the guy wasn’t asking what he thought he was.
‘Yes, whatever you gave him made him make pornstar noises. All week. It was awkward for everyone,’ Gabriel tried to leave.
‘Woah, hey, shorty, misunderstanding here.’ The guy called him back.
Gabriel stopped, containing a sigh.
‘That was a prank, dude. Sam’s in there dying from embarrassment because of what you must think of him.’
If there was one thing that caught Gabriel’s attention, it was a masterfully executed trick. He half turned around. ‘A prank, you say?’
The guy grinned. ‘Yeah. Oh, uh,’ he held out his hand. ‘Dean Winchester, by the way. Sam’s brother.’
This situation was getting better and better by the minute. Sam did not have a boyfriend who was twice Gabriel’s size and owned a car you could stash a corpse in.
He also apparently wasn’t responsible for the disturbing noises plaguing the apartment complex.
Dean was speaking again, gesturing with a disposable phone in his hand. ‘I just recorded sex noises, copied them onto here, set them as the ringtone, turned the volume up high, hid the phone somewhere in the walls of Sammy’s house, and called him at random intervals til the battery ran out.’
Gabriel’s eyes gleamed. ‘So the noises were your fault, then?’
‘Yup,’ Dean tossed the phone from one hand to the other. ‘I’m going home to recharge it so I can hide it again.’
Gabriel grinned at him. ‘Or… You could leave it with me, and I’ll drop it off for you. I have the advantage of being closer. I can move the phone if he gets too close. And I know the building better.’
Dean hesitated. ‘Alright. As long as you record some of his reactions for me.’
They shook on it, Dean subtly passing the phone into Gabriel’s hand. If Sam happened to be watching the conversation from upstairs the exchange might have passed as innocuous.
Gabriel spent three hours charging the phone up. When he heard Sam get into bed that night he lowered it slowly through the one of the holes on his side of the wall (his brothers had been terrible roommates and not considerate enough to pay for repairs when they moved out) into the thin space between his apartment and Sam’s.
Gabriel had never seen the inside of Sam’s apartment but based on the noises that came through the walls every night as Sam got ready for bed, he’d guess the phone was very close to the man’s sleeping head right now.
He called the phone from his landline, remembering to set his own mobile to record to send to Dean later.
Loud, loud moans came through the walls.
‘Goddammit, Dean!’ Sam shouted a moment later.
Gabriel let the phone ring for almost thirty seconds before ending the call.
Sam had obviously guessed whereabouts the noise was coming from, because it sounded like he was moving things around near the wall, still probably thinking the device was on his side of it. Gabriel cackled to himself and flopped down on his bed, kicking the mountain of blankets aside.
Three hours later, Gabriel woke up to get a drink. On the way back to bed, he pulled out his phone and called Sam.
He hung up almost immediately this time, but the ensuing swearing fit was explicit enough to have Gabriel giggling himself back to sleep.
In the morning, Gabriel reached into the wall and retrieved the phone.
Sam had to leave for work a full hour before him, so Gabriel took advantage of their building’s dangerously insecure locks and slipped into Sam’s apartment, hiding the phone in his kitchen ceiling light this time.
The reaction was worse the next night. Particularly when the cranky balding business man living on the other side of Sam started banging on the walls and yelling.
Although Gabriel did feel a little bad for Sam by the time he’d finally managed to apologize to Mr. Zachariah.
Planning on moving the phone again, Gabriel waited the next morning until he’d heard Sam’s door open and close, and enough time had passed that he could be sure the man hadn’t forgotten something and turned around.
When he got into Sam’s apartment, the man was sitting at the kitchen table, leveling an impressive bitchface at Gabriel.
‘Uh…’ Gabriel thought about backing out of the room. Decided against it. Standing his ground was good. Probably.
‘Hey, Gabe.’ Sam said. ‘Dean wasn’t here yesterday. So the phone being moved made me think he’d recruited help. Plus, it was clearly on your side of the wall the other night.’
Gabriel groaned internally.
‘And I’m usually rostered on all day Thursdays, and neither you nor Dean had any idea I swapped my shift with Brady this week, and I decided to keep it that way. See what happened.’ Sam looked entirely too smug about all of this.
‘So, you’re going to go and get the phone, and give it to me, and I’m going to break it in half.’
Gabriel nodded wordlessly and climbed up onto the table to retrieve the phone from inside the light.
He supposed he was lucky Sam wasn’t calling the police on him for breaking and entering.
When Gabriel jumped back down, Sam was staring at his midsection, where the shorter man realised his shirt had ridden up. He pulled it down and glared at Sam, who looked back up at Gabriel’s face, seemingly embarrassed at being caught staring, and held his hand out for the phone, which Gabriel mournfully handed to him.
He left Sam’s apartment and trudged off to get ready for work.
Gabriel worked a double shift that day and didn’t arrive home until after midnight.
When he lay his head down on the pillow only for the phone hidden inside the pillowcase to blare porn noises right into his ear a minute later, he wasn’t really surprised.
In the morning, Gabriel decided to help Sam get revenge on Dean.