Still haven't found what I'm looking for, for zubeneschamali
Title: Still haven't found what I'm looking for
Recipient:
zubeneschamali
Rating: PG13
Word Count: ~1700
Warnings: Some swearing
Author's Notes: Thank you to my beta - you know who you are, you shining star! All remaining errors, and suchlike are all mine. Lyrics and title are from I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2.
Summary: In the search for a way to defeat Metatron, Sam reluctantly decides to team up with their new ally, Gadreel - only to find himself a victim of cabin fever, trapped alone with the angel when a tornado threatens...
For the prompt: There was so much potential for Sam and Gadreel to have long conversations about being blamed for setting the world on fire when it wasn't something they did on purpose. Give me a scenario in which they had such a conversation and find out how much they really had in common. (Note: this does not necessarily mean that Sam forgives Gadreel).
I hope this is scratches that itch for you, zubeneschamali.
I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
We cannot get out. We cannot get out. The words kept running through Sam’s head on a loop that insisted on including the end comes soon, and drums, drums in the deep.
Yeah, thanks Dean, for all those Lord of the Rings movie marathons that have me thinking about ridiculous tentacle monsters when I need to concentrate on finding a way to cope with being stuck here with Mr Mind-rape himself - with NO WAY OUT.
Gadreel was doing that curious-bird head-tilt thing that the more naïve angels seemed to have patented, so Sam tried hard not to show how churned up he was inside at finding himself with the rebel angel confined in close quarters with nothing to do. But given that this particular angel had spent several months living inside Sam’s head, he wasn’t too hopeful that Gadreel would be fooled by his attempts at projecting indifference.
Sam glanced at his watch again and nearly groaned out loud. Barely a minute had passed since he last checked the time. Sam knew the two of them had been lucky to find this old root cellar in a long abandoned farmhouse, and he regretted once again his failure to check the latest weather warnings before setting out on this ill-advised venture. He tried to console himself with the thought that this tornado had sprung into existence with phenomenal speed, so maybe even Terry Swails would have missed the signs for this one. And the really galling thing was, it had been Sam’s idea to split up after they hit the Iowa border, and Sam’s decision to head off with Gadreel instead of with Dean. So there was nobody to blame but himself for the fact that his Canadian Shack companion was pretty much the last person he would have chosen to spend down time with.
“You are thinking very loudly, Sam,” Gadreel said, his tone both mild and annoyingly reasonable.
Fucking angels, Dean commented silently from deep inside Sam’s head.
Sam wondered if Gadreel could hear that too. So many voices inside his fucking head these days.
“I don’t know how you can hear anything over the noise of the wind,” Sam snapped back, immediately feeling childish and resenting the fact.
He could feel himself spiralling into a permanent state of irritation, and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. He regretted it immediately. The approaching tornado had stirred up a mess of dust outside, some of which had inevitably found its way into their precarious shelter. Sam coughed.
“When I told Dean I would heal you from the inside, I was sincere. I never intended to stay as long as I did, or to cause you any harm.”
It annoyed Sam even more that Gadreel addressed the root cause of his discomfort, and not the surface Sam was being so careful to cultivate.
“Yeah, well, you did cause harm.”
Sam didn’t turn around, even though he could feel the angel had moved and was standing very close, within touching distance of Sam’s firmly turned back. He really wasn’t in the mood for touching confessions, but it appeared he didn’t have much of a choice. The wooden flaps of the cellar entrance lifted and crashed back down as the rising winds caught them, reminding Sam of the reason they were here.
He went over to see if he could secure them any better, glad of the distraction. He was winding his belt through the cast iron handles when everything went quiet. He could feel the suck of the wind still tugging at the wooden doors where he was holding them shut above his head, so he knew it wasn’t that the storm had died down, and there was no way they were in the eye of it already.
So… It was something unnatural, then. Something Gadreel had done. Sam gave up his binding attempts, let go of the handles and turned around, reluctance in every fibre. The angel had backed off, thankfully, and was now seated on the earthen floor, back stiffly upright.
That’ll be that stick up his ass, Sammy, said the Dean in his head.
Not helping, Dean, not helping.
“I have made this place safe,” Gadreel said. Obviously Sam wanted to ask why Gadreel couldn’t just have made their truck safe then, allowing them to carry on driving through the storm, but before he could open his mouth the angel continued. “I am capable of sealing off a small space like this from the tempest, even though my grace is still weakened by Metatron’s barricading of Heaven.”
Sam looked around the basement, taking in the rusted metal shelving still stacked with glass jars and ancient tins of who knew what, the dirt-covered crates and liberal festoons of cobwebs. It smelled of earth and mould, and there was absolutely nothing there to provide any distraction from each other’s company.
Sam supressed a sigh and settled himself down with his back to a stretch of wall that looked a fraction cleaner than the rest, and had the added advantage of leaving Sam facing the same direction as Gadreel. At least he wouldn’t have to face those too earnest eyes for the duration of their imprisonment. He sat twisting his belt around his fist, conscious of nothing but the ebb and flow of blood in his fingers as the leather tightened and loosened.
After a few minutes that could have been hours, Sam started feeling restless in the strange dead air. Gadreel, of course, was outwardly unfazed by the tedium, presumably concentrating on keeping their bubble intact. Not that Sam was ungrateful for that, especially when he looked up in time to see the wind seize the edge of one of the wooden flaps he’d been trying to tie together and tear it completely off. It was surreal to watch the old wood crack and come away from the iron hinges in total silence, like watching the TV with the sound turned off. Exposed to sight but not to the rest of the outside, Sam could see the sky was a dark, angry gray - the colour of a great white shark’s back, and just as dangerous.
Storm’s comin’, and you boys and your daddy, you’re slap bang in the middle of it…
Story of our lives, Bobby, Sam thought. Then I miss you, old man.
I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes, I'm still running
“Our father always put a lot of trust in me.”
Gadreel’s voice was soft, but it still made Sam start, coming as it did out of the silence. Sam didn’t look at the angel, didn’t want to listen, but his hand stilled.
“It was a heavy burden sometimes, but a sign that I was favoured, being honoured by Him. Many resented me for it, but I was proud and did not care. Why should I care what others thought, when God loved me? So when He set me the task of guarding Paradise, and watching over His strange new creations, I was diligent. Lucifer though, he was something different. Beautiful beyond reason. Persuasive.”
Gadreel paused, and Sam shifted in place, easing the pressure on his sitting bones, wondering if the angel was going to continue. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was curious. Kind of terrified too, but the curiosity was winning at the moment.
“While I was in the cage, I had a lot of time to think.”
Sam couldn’t supress the sympathetic shiver that ran through his body at the mention of a cage, and for the first time, he found himself looking, really looking at Gadreel. The angel was unbending, yes, but now Sam could see that this was a stiffness born of fear and strain and something else. Something Sam recognised because he felt it too. Guilt. Responsibility. Self-reproach.
“I think Lucifer always knew what he was doing. He could see our Father’s attention moving away from us, see an endless future stretching out ahead of us, filled with these creatures that God made in his own image while the angels were merely shaped out of light. So he denigrated them, called them hairless apes. He duped me into corrupting them and setting them free in the hope that they would fall, would fail - and they did both.
“I was angry for a very long time. At God. At Lucifer. At myself. Then I heard Lucifer, bright Star of the Morning, had been cast out of Heaven for his sins, and I was filled with hope. Surely now my brothers would see where the true fault lay, that I’d been deceived. Surely now my Father would forgive me.”
Gadreel’s head drooped and he sighed. In that moment, he looked like nothing more than a weary, vulnerable human and Sam nearly stretched out his hand to pat his shoulder, as if this was Dean sitting next to him rather than a powerful elemental creature. But before Sam could follow through, Gadreel’s head came up in that inhumanly fluid way angels had when occupying a meat suit. Any latent companionable feelings fled as Sam glimpsed the blue-white glow in the vessel’s eyes. With a shiver Sam realised then the source of the dim light that had been illuminating their shelter was Gadreel himself, not a flashlight as he’d previously assumed.
Through the open hatch, lightning flashed in the storm-filled dark.
“But Michael never came, and God deserted his children, and Heaven was filled with the lost and fearful, faithful and faithless, until everything came crashing down and I was finally free.”
Gadreel’s gaze pierced Sam, cutting deep as an angel blade right into his core. He felt it then, how trapped they had both been, both were still, nowhere to go.
“I just wanted to make things right. Restitution. I know you understand.”
And Sam did, he really did.
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Of my shame, you know I believe it
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for
Recipient:
zubeneschamali
Rating: PG13
Word Count: ~1700
Warnings: Some swearing
Author's Notes: Thank you to my beta - you know who you are, you shining star! All remaining errors, and suchlike are all mine. Lyrics and title are from I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2.
Summary: In the search for a way to defeat Metatron, Sam reluctantly decides to team up with their new ally, Gadreel - only to find himself a victim of cabin fever, trapped alone with the angel when a tornado threatens...
For the prompt: There was so much potential for Sam and Gadreel to have long conversations about being blamed for setting the world on fire when it wasn't something they did on purpose. Give me a scenario in which they had such a conversation and find out how much they really had in common. (Note: this does not necessarily mean that Sam forgives Gadreel).
I hope this is scratches that itch for you, zubeneschamali.
I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
We cannot get out. We cannot get out. The words kept running through Sam’s head on a loop that insisted on including the end comes soon, and drums, drums in the deep.
Yeah, thanks Dean, for all those Lord of the Rings movie marathons that have me thinking about ridiculous tentacle monsters when I need to concentrate on finding a way to cope with being stuck here with Mr Mind-rape himself - with NO WAY OUT.
Gadreel was doing that curious-bird head-tilt thing that the more naïve angels seemed to have patented, so Sam tried hard not to show how churned up he was inside at finding himself with the rebel angel confined in close quarters with nothing to do. But given that this particular angel had spent several months living inside Sam’s head, he wasn’t too hopeful that Gadreel would be fooled by his attempts at projecting indifference.
Sam glanced at his watch again and nearly groaned out loud. Barely a minute had passed since he last checked the time. Sam knew the two of them had been lucky to find this old root cellar in a long abandoned farmhouse, and he regretted once again his failure to check the latest weather warnings before setting out on this ill-advised venture. He tried to console himself with the thought that this tornado had sprung into existence with phenomenal speed, so maybe even Terry Swails would have missed the signs for this one. And the really galling thing was, it had been Sam’s idea to split up after they hit the Iowa border, and Sam’s decision to head off with Gadreel instead of with Dean. So there was nobody to blame but himself for the fact that his Canadian Shack companion was pretty much the last person he would have chosen to spend down time with.
“You are thinking very loudly, Sam,” Gadreel said, his tone both mild and annoyingly reasonable.
Fucking angels, Dean commented silently from deep inside Sam’s head.
Sam wondered if Gadreel could hear that too. So many voices inside his fucking head these days.
“I don’t know how you can hear anything over the noise of the wind,” Sam snapped back, immediately feeling childish and resenting the fact.
He could feel himself spiralling into a permanent state of irritation, and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. He regretted it immediately. The approaching tornado had stirred up a mess of dust outside, some of which had inevitably found its way into their precarious shelter. Sam coughed.
“When I told Dean I would heal you from the inside, I was sincere. I never intended to stay as long as I did, or to cause you any harm.”
It annoyed Sam even more that Gadreel addressed the root cause of his discomfort, and not the surface Sam was being so careful to cultivate.
“Yeah, well, you did cause harm.”
Sam didn’t turn around, even though he could feel the angel had moved and was standing very close, within touching distance of Sam’s firmly turned back. He really wasn’t in the mood for touching confessions, but it appeared he didn’t have much of a choice. The wooden flaps of the cellar entrance lifted and crashed back down as the rising winds caught them, reminding Sam of the reason they were here.
He went over to see if he could secure them any better, glad of the distraction. He was winding his belt through the cast iron handles when everything went quiet. He could feel the suck of the wind still tugging at the wooden doors where he was holding them shut above his head, so he knew it wasn’t that the storm had died down, and there was no way they were in the eye of it already.
So… It was something unnatural, then. Something Gadreel had done. Sam gave up his binding attempts, let go of the handles and turned around, reluctance in every fibre. The angel had backed off, thankfully, and was now seated on the earthen floor, back stiffly upright.
That’ll be that stick up his ass, Sammy, said the Dean in his head.
Not helping, Dean, not helping.
“I have made this place safe,” Gadreel said. Obviously Sam wanted to ask why Gadreel couldn’t just have made their truck safe then, allowing them to carry on driving through the storm, but before he could open his mouth the angel continued. “I am capable of sealing off a small space like this from the tempest, even though my grace is still weakened by Metatron’s barricading of Heaven.”
Sam looked around the basement, taking in the rusted metal shelving still stacked with glass jars and ancient tins of who knew what, the dirt-covered crates and liberal festoons of cobwebs. It smelled of earth and mould, and there was absolutely nothing there to provide any distraction from each other’s company.
Sam supressed a sigh and settled himself down with his back to a stretch of wall that looked a fraction cleaner than the rest, and had the added advantage of leaving Sam facing the same direction as Gadreel. At least he wouldn’t have to face those too earnest eyes for the duration of their imprisonment. He sat twisting his belt around his fist, conscious of nothing but the ebb and flow of blood in his fingers as the leather tightened and loosened.
After a few minutes that could have been hours, Sam started feeling restless in the strange dead air. Gadreel, of course, was outwardly unfazed by the tedium, presumably concentrating on keeping their bubble intact. Not that Sam was ungrateful for that, especially when he looked up in time to see the wind seize the edge of one of the wooden flaps he’d been trying to tie together and tear it completely off. It was surreal to watch the old wood crack and come away from the iron hinges in total silence, like watching the TV with the sound turned off. Exposed to sight but not to the rest of the outside, Sam could see the sky was a dark, angry gray - the colour of a great white shark’s back, and just as dangerous.
Storm’s comin’, and you boys and your daddy, you’re slap bang in the middle of it…
Story of our lives, Bobby, Sam thought. Then I miss you, old man.
I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes, I'm still running
“Our father always put a lot of trust in me.”
Gadreel’s voice was soft, but it still made Sam start, coming as it did out of the silence. Sam didn’t look at the angel, didn’t want to listen, but his hand stilled.
“It was a heavy burden sometimes, but a sign that I was favoured, being honoured by Him. Many resented me for it, but I was proud and did not care. Why should I care what others thought, when God loved me? So when He set me the task of guarding Paradise, and watching over His strange new creations, I was diligent. Lucifer though, he was something different. Beautiful beyond reason. Persuasive.”
Gadreel paused, and Sam shifted in place, easing the pressure on his sitting bones, wondering if the angel was going to continue. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was curious. Kind of terrified too, but the curiosity was winning at the moment.
“While I was in the cage, I had a lot of time to think.”
Sam couldn’t supress the sympathetic shiver that ran through his body at the mention of a cage, and for the first time, he found himself looking, really looking at Gadreel. The angel was unbending, yes, but now Sam could see that this was a stiffness born of fear and strain and something else. Something Sam recognised because he felt it too. Guilt. Responsibility. Self-reproach.
“I think Lucifer always knew what he was doing. He could see our Father’s attention moving away from us, see an endless future stretching out ahead of us, filled with these creatures that God made in his own image while the angels were merely shaped out of light. So he denigrated them, called them hairless apes. He duped me into corrupting them and setting them free in the hope that they would fall, would fail - and they did both.
“I was angry for a very long time. At God. At Lucifer. At myself. Then I heard Lucifer, bright Star of the Morning, had been cast out of Heaven for his sins, and I was filled with hope. Surely now my brothers would see where the true fault lay, that I’d been deceived. Surely now my Father would forgive me.”
Gadreel’s head drooped and he sighed. In that moment, he looked like nothing more than a weary, vulnerable human and Sam nearly stretched out his hand to pat his shoulder, as if this was Dean sitting next to him rather than a powerful elemental creature. But before Sam could follow through, Gadreel’s head came up in that inhumanly fluid way angels had when occupying a meat suit. Any latent companionable feelings fled as Sam glimpsed the blue-white glow in the vessel’s eyes. With a shiver Sam realised then the source of the dim light that had been illuminating their shelter was Gadreel himself, not a flashlight as he’d previously assumed.
Through the open hatch, lightning flashed in the storm-filled dark.
“But Michael never came, and God deserted his children, and Heaven was filled with the lost and fearful, faithful and faithless, until everything came crashing down and I was finally free.”
Gadreel’s gaze pierced Sam, cutting deep as an angel blade right into his core. He felt it then, how trapped they had both been, both were still, nowhere to go.
“I just wanted to make things right. Restitution. I know you understand.”
And Sam did, he really did.
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Of my shame, you know I believe it
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for