March-Stalkers Mighty: 8/22
Passus IV: Pes sinister.
“I don’t like him,” Dean informed Cas.
“Go stick your head in a pig,” Gabriel returned pleasantly.
“Save it,” Cas growled.
If he hem stowned vpon fyrst, stiller were þanneIf he had astounded them before, yet stiller were then Alle þe hered-men in halle, þe hyȝ & þe loȝe;All the men in the hall, the high and the low. Þe renk on his rounce hym ruched in his sadel,The man on his steed swivelled in his saddle, & runischly his rede yȝen he reled aboute,and weirdly rolled his red eyes about, Bende his bresed broȝeȝ, blycande grene,bent his bristled brows, gleaming green, Wayued his berde for to wayte quo-so wolde ryse.waved his beard, waiting for whomsoever would rise. When non wolde kepe hym with carp he coȝed ful hyȝe,When no man would contradict he coughed very loudly, Ande rimed hym ful richley, & ryȝt hym to speke:And stretched himself slowly, and started to speak. “What, is þis Arþures hous,” quod þe haþel þenne,“What, is this Arthur’s house,” quoth the man then, “Þat al þe rous rennes of, þurȝ ryalmes so mony?“That all the talk tattles of through realms so many? Where is now your sourquydrye & your conquestes,Where is now your pride and your conquests, Your gryndellayk, & your greme, & your grete wordes?Your hot bragging, and your boasts, and your great words? Now is þe reuel & þe renoun of þe Rounde TableNow is the revel and the renown of the Round Table Ouer-walt wyth a worde of on wyȝes speche;Overturned with a word of one man’s tongue, For al dares for drede, withoute dynt schewed!”For all dither in dread with not a blow dealt!” Wyth þis he laȝes so loude, þat þe lorde greued;With this he laughed so loud, that the king was grieved, Þe blod schot for scham into his schyre faceThe blood shot for shame into his face, & lere; smooth-cheeked and fair; He wex as wroth as wynde, He waxed as wroth as wind, So did alle þat þer were So did all that were there. Þe kyng as kene bi kynde, The king, as became his pride, Þen stod þat stif mon nere. Then advanced on that man.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous, c. 1380s, translation mine. (The Green Knight’s challenge to the Round Table, stanza XIV.)
My devil had been long caged; he came out roaring.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, R. L. Stevenson, 1886. (Chapter X.)
The moon was at his darkest ebb tonight, but the eastern star was sinking towards the horizon for dawn by the time Dean brought the axe down on the lock of the barn door.
Two precise hits, splitting the grain of the wood around the lock, then one more to buckle the thin iron brace that strengthened the centre of the door. From there, it was the work of a minute to lever out the loose and damaged bolts, to pound the lock free of the lintel, and push the mutilated door open.
The darkness inside was warm and heavy, streaked high up near the ceiling by the faint starlight falling through the windows high under the roof beams. Dean fumbled along the wall by the door until he found the shelf with the lanterns and the tinders, and lit one by feel, making sure to pull the door shut behind him before anyone could notice the light.
The wick stuttered and yawned into life. It threw flickering yellow tongues out over the floor, stretching slowly as it rose, all of them with grotesque little counter-shadows dancing inside them from dirt and straw and scraps on the floor.
Dean held the lantern higher, making the shadows shrink back towards their parents’ feet, and peered through the dark towards the dull gleam of metal bars.
Gabriel wasn’t there.
Dean had time for a moment of very manly panic before one of the lumps of shadow down the end moved slightly, and resolved itself into the shape of a small man, huddled into the corner and swathed in a cloak. His head was turned toward Dean, but his face was only shadows.
Dean really had no freaking clue how to play this.
He turned his back on the angel and picked his way carefully around bags and barrels, over towards the corner near the stockyards. When he was halfway there, he heard a dry cough. Then a hoarse voice drawled its way across the barn toward him.
“Look at this. A visit from the Wild Man of the Forest. To what do I owe the honour?”
The snark didn’t have the bite to it that Dean was getting used to, that barely contained animal fury kept on a tight rein of sarcasm. Didn’t have the warmth and the charm under it that the Trickster had always had before either. This was just tired. Sort of resigned.
“The axe is an inspired touch. Really. I mean, a club’s more traditional, but an axe is sort of branching out. There’s precedent. More of a Green Knight look.”
Dean propped the lantern up on a shelf next to the control board for the gates mechanism, dropped the axe, and didn’t look around. “You really couldn’t shut up if your life depended on it, could you?”
“Does it?” Gabriel shot back.
Dean glanced back at him. The crouching lump hadn’t moved, except to turn its head to follow Dean. From here, its eyes caught the light, yellow and reflective like a cat’s. Good night vision, but Dean already knew that.
Dean braced himself, and hauled down on the right lever until it slotted into place.
“Not your life I’m worried about here, angel.”
Gabriel went very still as the inner gate rumbled and creaked its way up towards the roof. The gate for letting animals out of the bull press and into the barn. He didn’t even have to watch it - he could probably feel it. Without that gate, all the warding marks on the inside of the cage were incomplete. The only thing keeping him from going full angel-wrath now was the collar around his neck, and that wouldn’t stop him from walking out, picking up a weapon with all of his unnatural strength, and -
“... Good call,” Gabriel remarked, sugary-low and wary.
Dean shoved his hands into his pockets, took a few steps away from the levers (and the axe), and stared levelly at the angel. “Will you listen?”
Gabriel slid his hands out from under the cloak to rest flat on the floor in front of him, crouching like a cat. Then he rose, smooth and fluid, letting the cloak pool in shadows around his feet.
Huh. No wings.
No mistaking him for a regular person now, though, not with his eyes like that. Not with that invisible pulse of menace and power in him, stretching out like long-cramped muscles, curling lazily around Dean and raising the hair along his arms.
Gabriel’s teeth flashed white in the shadows.
“You sure you know what you’re doing, sugar?”
Dean shrugged. “Close enough.”
The angel drifted closer, soft-footed in the dark. His hand trailed along the bars beside him, a deliberate and lazy thud-thud-thud of skin on metal.
“Gonna assume you’re not a shapeshifter or a demon. Not if you just walked in here. And I’m guessing by the smell of you that you ain’t been chumming it up in the town square for a bit, with all those crazy kids out there.” A bit of a shiver there, an edge of something that didn’t fit in with the leopard’s prowl he was doing in there. “Gone native with Sammy, have we? Or maybe, just maybe...” His fingers curled suggestively around a bar for a moment. “... they worked it out? They were just too rabid, too damned human, to listen? Threw you both out?”
He paused, just a yard from the open gate, cocked his head in that gesture that looked endearing on Cas and alien on Gabriel, and grinned without humour. “How’s your brother, Dean?”
Dean kept his own gaze steady, as close to polite as he could manage, and answered as if Gabriel had meant it. “No change. Bobby’s had no luck.”
“Yeah?” Gabriel’s eyes flicked sideways towards the gate, then he leaned in conspiratorially until his cheek was resting against the nearest bar. “So what’s the trick, huh? I come out there, and you, what? Stick me one? Call in the dogs? Drag me out to the town square for your annual bonfire festival? Or is it stoning this year? Bit of mob violence to get everyone chatty and happy again?”
“Shit.” Dean swallowed around the nauseous lump in his throat. “You are one sick son of a bitch, you know that? We don’t do that sort of thing.”
Gabriel smirked like a snarl. “That why you’re hiding your brother away in the woods, then?”
“… Shut up.”
The floor was suddenly fascinating.
“You haven’t been in here to hear them in the evenings, Dean,” the angel purred. “After the sun goes down? After the booze comes out? I can hear them through the walls, you know.”
“Yeah, so.” Dean gritted out, trying not to think about huddling in here, waiting night after night for the door to break open (an axe on the wood, on the hinges, falling once, twice, three times). “You want out, or not?”
Gabriel stepped back, a soft swish and crackle of bare feet on straw. Dean kept an eye on those feet, because he didn’t want to look at his face but he wasn’t stupid enough to take his eyes off him altogether. After a long minute, the angel said, halfway between grudging and contemptuous, “What’s your game?”
Dean decided that was close enough to “I’m listening,” for now.
He squared his shoulders, and raised his head to look the angel in the eye, trying to play it cool and calming. “No game. I relieved the poor sap on gate duty, sent him and his friend off to bed. Got your cart out of storage, stocked it up, got your mare and all. The whole shebang’s stashed nice and quiet out of sight outside the Gates. Just need you now.”
Gabriel snorted inelegantly. “Yeah, course you do. Just out of the goodness of your heart. What’s the catch?”
Dean shrugged. “Got you a passenger. Need to get him away from here before the hunt catches up with us, and he’s in no fit state to ride.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabriel rocked back on his heels, hands deep in his pockets and eyes inscrutable. “So they’re on Sammy’s tail after all?”
“His name’s Sam.” Way to pick your battles, Dean. “And no. Well. Maybe. But not him.” Gabriel cocked an eyebrow, unimpressed, and Dean dug in his heels and glared at him. “Castiel. It’s Castiel, and he’s in pretty bad shape, so could you just shut up and come?”
Gabriel blinked, twice.
Then he looked hard at Dean, that look that Cas did sometimes which felt like he was staring right inside Dean and seeing things Dean had never really looked at himself. Whatever he saw, it made him whistle and shake his head.
“You crazy kids are in this thing deeper than I thought.”
Dean cocked an eyebrow right back at him. “No kidding,” he deadpanned. “You coming, or what?”
Gabriel made a thoughtful humming noise, like he was thinking it over as obnoxiously as possible. Then he stepped sideways, grinned his predator’s grin straight at Dean’s throat, and sauntered out through the gate.
“Great,” Dean breathed out, heart thudding alarm against his ribcage. “Thank you. Now can we go?”
Gabriel cricked his neck, rolled his head around from one shoulder to the other like a stretch. Then he shook his shoulders and, with one eye slyly cocked towards Dean, slowly unfolded the wings. The slashed fabric of his (Dean’s) shirt parted and slipped around them as they curled outward, until - shit.
Okay, so Dean had technically been this close to them before, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t looked this freaking enormous from the other side of angel-proof bars.
Gabriel smiled at him, sweet and promising.
Then he punched Dean in the face.
Dean swore and staggered back, not before he caught another blow to the chin. The son of a bitch wasn’t holding back either.
“My, my, Dean,” he heard the angel purr. “You kiss your mother with that mouth? Oh, wait. My bad.”
Fuck. Okay. So either Gabriel didn’t care about Cas at all and Dean had misread everything, or Gabriel was actually insane. Either way, Dean was kind of screwed.
He ducked the next punch, staggered, lost his footing, and turned it into a roll. Except, even stiff and collared, Gabriel was too fast. Dean was halfway to his feet, hadn’t even got his hand on his knife yet, when Gabriel’s fist slammed into his stomach and knocked all the breath out of him.
Dean was, unlike several of his recent acquaintance, only human. He tumbled to his knees and stayed there, retching.
Nothing happened.
When he looked up, glowering and wary, Gabriel was just standing there, a few yards away, hands in his pockets and a smirk carved all over his face. When Dean met his eyes he licked his lips, slow and provocative, and winked.
“You coming, or what?” he parroted.
Dean eyed him disbelievingly. Gabriel did that stupid thing with his eyebrows again.
“Depends,” Dean grunted, and levered himself carefully to his feet. “You gonna keep pounding into me or not?”
Gabriel actually fluttered his goddamn eyelashes. “Not just now, honey. I’ve got a headache.”
Dean blinked. “Whatever.” He dug the little device that he’d grabbed from the smithy out of his pocket, and beckoned to Gabriel with one hand. “Collar.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes, and his wings crooked up warningly when Dean stepped in closer. “What’s that?”
Dean smirked in his turn, and reached for the little metal band around Gabriel’s throat. “Well, if you want to keep wearing that thing everywhere, don’t let me stop -”
Gabriel slapped his hand away and scowled.
“Don’t touch me, Winchester,” he snapped. “I’ll do it.”
“No can do, angel.” He twirled the little three-pronged key between his fingers. “You need to be able to see what you’re doing with it.”
Gabriel glared. “Fine.” Then he tipped his chin up, exposing his pale, grubby throat. “But if you choke me I am haunting your fine ass.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll take my chances.” Dean reached up and rotated the collar until the lantern light fell full on the catch. Then he slid two fingers under the cool metal to lift it clear of the skin, ignoring Gabriel’s flinch at the touch. “This’ll probably pinch, okay? There’s three little teeth in the catch that go right through the collar, and they have to turn all the way around to release it.”
“Get on with it.”
Dean made a point of squinting at the metal as he slid the key home. “Of course, this would all be a hell of a lot easier if someone hadn’t just blacked my eye.”
Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest and glowered stubbornly at the ceiling. “Go ahead. Tell me you didn’t deserve it, Winchester.”
Dean already had his mouth open to snipe back, before he realised that he actually had nothing to say to that, not even something sly and snappy that meant nothing.
Not because Gabriel was right, of course. Just because he was worried about Cas and Sam.
He twisted the key a bit more viciously than he needed to, and slid the arms of the collar open and off.
“Holy dungarees,” Gabriel breathed, and closed his eyes tight.
Dean dropped the collar and stepped smartly back. There was light crawling under Gabriel’s skin. Heat was pouring off him in palpable waves, and as he stretched out his wings the feathers glowed and flickered like flames.
“Okay!” Dean said, a little too loudly. “Mind holding off on burning the place down until we’ve got everyone to where they should be?”
Gabriel cracked one eye open to glare red-hot light at him. Then he shook himself, and all the light and the power pulled back into his skin again until he was just some ordinary guy standing about with enormous wings.
Yeah, Dean’s life wasn’t weird at all.
There was no one outside, though they’d wasted ten minutes with Gabriel’s stupid posturing and suspicions, and they cut across the stock yards and down the hill to the river rather than take the shorter way back to the Gates. It wasn’t worth the risk, going that way. No one would be on duty - even though Barnes had seemed a lot less enthusiastic than Dean would have expected about being relieved of gate duty, and it had taken three precious minutes to persuade him and Demian that yes, Dean had been out looking for Sam, and no, he wasn’t going to be able to sleep so he might as well take watch, but they’d left eventually. And, well, if they enjoyed hanging around outside in the middle of the night, they could do it more comfortably anywhere other than at the Gate. Still, that route cut too close to too many houses, and the protective sigils around the Gate were too dense to break quickly.
It wasn’t until they were over the river and weaving their way through the orchard that Gabriel asked, keeping his back to Dean, “What happened to Castiel?”
Dean frowned at his back, but it wasn’t very communicative. His wings were tucked careful and neat down his spine, but then, that was probably the easiest way to hold them when you were pushing between branches in the dark.
“Caught a bullet with his wing during the ambush,” he replied shortly. “One of the fingers is broken. Starting to look pretty messy, too. He’s been in and out of a fever all day.”
“Fuck,” Gabriel muttered. “Stupid kid.”
It didn’t sound like he was talking to Dean.
“Tell me about it,” he grumbled anyway, for the sake of something like civility. “Never could keep himself out of trouble. Him and Sammy’re as bad as each other.”
Gabriel half-snorted, almost like he knew what it was like to be a big brother too. Huh.
“You, uh. You know Cas well?” Dean tried, after a few minutes of dodging the trailing arms of blackberries. It was kind of weird to be taking a tone like this with Gabriel now - felt too much like making conversation with a human stranger.
“Kind of lost the right to claim acquaintance with anyone feathered when I skipped home, wouldn’t you say?” Gabriel drawled, and cleared the path with a vicious snap of his wings.
Dean only just managed to catch a branch before it whipped back into his face. “Pissy much?” he asked brightly, and shoved out after Gabriel onto the path curving around the inside of the wall.
“Hark to the self-righteous man,” Gabriel cooed. “They’re so cute when they think hating anything that looks funny makes them all pure and virtuous.”
“Okay, you know what? That’s it.” Dean grabbed the wrist of the wing nearest him to spin Gabriel around. “I don’t hate you because you’re an angel, you stupid son of a bitch. I’m pissed because you screwed us over and pretended to be something you’re not.”
Then he was pinned to the wall with Gabriel’s fingers around his throat and a furious angel an inch from his nose.
“Don’t you ever presume to understand me,” Gabriel hissed. “I screwed over my brothers for you. You slaughtered them bloody. That’s on me.”
“You know, I can punch you in the head if you need it unswollen,” Dean gasped out, although it was difficult to sound badass and unconcerned when your hands were scrabbling at a wrist that felt like it was made of stone and you couldn’t quite work out how to drag air into your lungs. “’S on us and them, you moron. Get over it. If it hadn’t been the dogs we woulda found something else, I don’t know, magical line-dancing or something.”
He was busy by the end of the sentence with trying to kick out at Gabriel’s shins (not that it would hurt him, but it might piss him off, and Dean was just that mature), so he missed whatever happened on Gabriel’s face for a moment. He only looked back up when he heard the harsh bark of Gabriel’s laugh, startled, like it had been punched out of him. Then his throat was free and Gabriel was staggering backwards, laughing and trembling violently,
Great. He was insane.
Dean turned to look at the wall while Gabriel had his little fit of hysteria or whatever behind him. The angel-warding sigils were carved into the wall a few hundred yards apart, and he knew there was one near here. Breaking that one should make the ward weak enough at this point to let an angel through. By the time Gabriel’s sickly whooping had subsided into hiccoughs and groans behind him, Dean was already chipping away with the hammer and chisel he’d snagged from the smithy for the occasion.
“You done?” he asked curtly, when the angel sagged against the wall a little way off.
“Screw you, Winchester,” Gabriel said, a bit shakily. Dean caught the quick scrub of a hand over eyes and cheeks out of the corner of his vision, and didn’t look around.
“What is it with you guys and grabbing people’s throats anyway?” he grumbled. “You get off on it or something?”
Gabriel’s voice leered sourly at him. “If that makes you feel better, honeybunch.”
Dean almost hit his thumb. Then he snorted incredulously, almost a laugh, at the sheer ridiculousness of this whole stupid thing. Everything about it, and Gabriel’s stupid nicknames too. “I’m not a girl, Gabriel.”
“I’m equal-opportunities inappropriate,” the angel decided with studied laziness. “Can we go yet?”
Dean squinted at the mess he’d made of the sigil. “Maybe? Try it now.”
Gabriel splayed one hand out on the wall, pushed at it with his fingertips. “Hmm,” he said, sort of thoughtful. Then he drew back a fist and slammed it into the wall, once, twice -
Dean grabbed his forearm, stupidly, as cracks skittered out from the point of impact, spider-webbing across the faces of dog-headed men and conjoined giants. At the touch of his hand, Gabriel flinched violently and tore his arm away.
“The fuck are you doing?” Dean snapped.
Gabriel grinned at him, wide and too bright. His fist wasn’t even scraped.
“You can’t stop me,” he declared gleefully. “You need me to help you, and I could tear this whole fucking wall down if I wanted. Let the monsters in.”
Dean stared down at him, appalled. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Oh, sugar,” Gabriel mocked. His face was too close, and when he darted out his tongue to lap at his lips the starlight caught and flashed on the wet skin. “Why the hell do you need to ask?”
“Okay then,” Dean snarled. “How about, when I left Castiel I didn’t know if he was going to last the night, and that was seven freaking hours ago, Gabriel, and also we have to get good and clear before anyone notices you’re gone. That more important than some little grudge match?”
Gabriel froze, and looked very much like he was considering blacking Dean’s other eye. Then he stepped back lightly out of Dean’s space, crouched to the ground and leaped. The crack of wings against the air knocked Dean sideways, because apparently making him fall on his ass was habit-forming, and when he picked himself up again there was an insane angel smirking at him from the top of the damaged wall and holding down a hand.
Seemed like insanity was catching. Dean took it.
“You know you’re crazy, right?” he commented ten minutes later as Gabriel settled into the seat of his wagon, behind the haunches of his quietly delighted mare.
“And whose fault is that?” Gabriel returned sweetly, and clicked his tongue to get her started.
It was a longer journey in the wagon than on horseback, but Gabriel drove his mare harder than Dean had expected. Whether because she was fresh and eager, or because of some mojo of his, she didn’t seem to get tired. Dean was sort of glad he’d left the gelding that he’d ridden down wandering outside the wall - he’d find his way home in the morning, and this journey again after too much exercise over the last two days would have been pushing it for him. It would be a dead giveaway that Dean had been at least involved in busting Gabriel out; but it had been too much to hope for anyway that Barnes would just conveniently not mention that Dean had relieved him at the Gates last night.
So, yeah. They’d figure it out. Dean would deal with that later.
They didn’t speak, except for terse directions. Dean kept an eye on Gabriel, in case he flipped out again or anything, but he just sat there all hunched up with his eyes on the road and very far away.
Dean had no idea what to make of him.
“Can I ask you something?” he muttered, when they were nearly at the cabin. His voice came out too abrupt and a bit gruff, but hey, they were kind of past social niceties.
“Can’t stop you,” Gabriel returned, levelly enough.
“I just don’t understand -” Dean stopped, swallowed it, and tried again, more tactfully. “Why the dogs? Why give us the weapons to fight back?”
Gabriel slanted him an incredulous look. “I like people. Humans and angels. Call me a freak, but I don’t like it when you go around killing each other.” Dean held up both hands in an “okay, I give” kind of gesture, and Gabriel pinned him with a glare then fell silent.
For a few minutes, there was only the rattle of the wagon and the clip of hooves over the muted noises of the night.
Then, rather to Dean’s surprise, Gabriel muttered to the reins in his hand, “The dogs were meant to stop that. Shields, not weapons. Keep you away from them and them away from you.” There was a peculiar note in his voice, almost like a plea. “Everyone’s happy.”
Dean blinked, and looked at him. “Yeah, well. Bang-up job with that,” he said, then considered punching himself in the head and saving Gabriel the trouble.
Gabriel’s mouth twisted bitterly. “Look. I don’t know why the angels kept coming, alright? But would you stop trying to gank the sons of bitches who’d hurt Sam just because they had some noisy dogs in their corner?”
Dean exhaled in a rush. “Yeah, okay. I get it.”
Why did you?
Because you did.
And I will again, so that you won’t.
“Arthur’s balls,” he muttered, and scrubbed his hand over his mouth. “What a mess.”
Gabriel didn’t reply.
Gabriel had barely moved in his seat since he’d settled into it, just the occasional twitch of a shoulder or flick of the hand holding the reins. But when they got to the cabin, he was off the boards and striding up over the rocks toward the door before the mare had brought the wagon to a complete stop. Dean swore, because he seemed to do that a lot around Gabriel, grabbed the reins until she was settled, then jumped down to follow him.
By the time he got through the door, Gabriel was already crouching beside Cas’ mattress. He’d rolled Cas onto his left side, and had one hand splayed out over his chest and the other on his forehead. Gabriel’s face was hard and grim; and Dean’s heart felt like it had tripped in an unexpected pothole and gone sprawling.
Sam was hovering anxiously around, because he always did, and Dean could almost see the way he’d look if he were really himself, the big pleading eyes and the bitten lip and the hand that kept shoving away all the hair that kept trying to fall into his face.
“What else happened?” Gabriel snapped.
Dean blinked. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something on him, some sort of... haze. Spiritual, not physical. I can’t fix the rest until that’s off him.”
Sam groaned. Dean looked at him uncertainly. “Well, there was that will-o’-the-wisp last night...”
Gabriel swore, short and curt. “You couldn’t have mentioned it? Sam, get over here.”
Sam was pressing in next to him in a helpful hopeful flash, and Gabriel reached up with the hand that had been on Cas’ chest to touch two fingers to Sam’s forehead.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on,” Dean put in, and got glared at by two pairs of eyes.
“Look,” Gabriel rapped out. “Angels don’t just have faith, that’s what we are. Family bonds, trust, being together, belonging. Sort of like humans, only it’s where we get all our strength from, and if we lose it we wither away in a hell of a more literal sense than you guys do - you just go all grumpy and insane, or whatever. Guess who must have been feeling pretty low and vulnerable already? and guess what a will-o’-the-wisp attacks?”
Dean blinked, felt sick, inwardly cursed all those angels who’d ever abandoned Cas, and blinked again. “Okay, fine, but what are you doing to Sam?”
Gabriel sneered at him, crouched low over Cas’ wan body. “How much of that do you think I have to share, Winchester? Especially just now? Sam here, oh, he believes alright. He believes in you, the poor stupid kid. All fired up and bright with it.”
“Uhm.” Dean carefully avoided Sam’s eyes. “Will it hurt him?”
Sam snorted, rolled his eyes, and pressed his forehead into Gabriel’s hand.
“Hang on,” Dean blurted out, “but you spend your whole life travelling around on your own.”
Gabriel gave Sam an incredulous “how do you put up with this guy” look. “Yep, and I steer the hell away from will-o’-the-wisps. D’you mind?”
Dean looked down at Cas, at the sunken hectic cheeks and the sweaty pallour of his forehead, at the way his hair was stupidly flat and lank, at the dull sheen of his feathers. He looked at the way Gabriel’s wings were half unfolded, curled forward protectively as if he wanted to swathe Cas up in them and keep him warm.
He stepped back.
Gabriel was ignoring him already anyway, eyes closed and forehead crinkling up. Dean sort of expected some sort of glowy effect, but there was nothing like that, just a bit of extra warmth radiating out from them. Sam had his eyes closed too, frowning behind it like he was analysing everything, but he looked perfectly comfortable and was still leaning into Gabriel’s touch, so Dean wasn’t about to jump in and break them up or anything, no matter how twitchy it made him.
Cas sighed, and shuddered.
For some reason, Dean suddenly found himself on his knees on the other side of the mattress, with Cas’ hand between his.
Gabriel opened one eye and gave him a strange narrow look, but he didn’t say anything, and Dean glared daggers of “don’t you dare say a word” until he closed his eye again, which was as good as nothing weird and girly having happened at all, right?
Cas’ fingers curled tight and cool around Dean’s.
Huh.
Faith. Family. Belonging. Okay. Dean could do that.
He closed his eyes and tried to think stubborn big-brother thoughts at Cas.
Gabriel let out a breath, let go of Sam, and brushed the hair back from Cas’ forehead. Then he leaned in, pressed an awkward sort of a kiss there, and muttered something fierce and low in a language Dean didn’t recognise.
Cas’ fingers stiffened in Dean’s for a moment, then went soft and relaxed as something imperceptible around the bed seemed to loosen. Dean thought they even felt a bit warmer. He looked up at Gabriel, mouth open on a question, and Gabriel grinned ferociously back and him and pressed two fingers to Cas’ forehead.
Cas blinked his eyes open. Then he frowned.
Gabriel’s mobile, sarcastic mouth softened into something strange and almost shy. “Up and at ‘em, little night-owl.”’
Cas narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to bring the world into focus when he wasn’t even sure whether it was actually there at all.
“Gabriel?” he tried at last.
“Guilty,” Gabriel chirped incongruously.
Cas’ eyes flicked over to Dean, wide and disbelieving and unfocussed with sleep, and Dean shrugged at him in a what-can-you-do sort of a way. He suspected he might have been wearing a dopey sort of smile, though, which probably ruined the effect.
“You’re dead,” Cas rumbled carefully. “Or I’m dead.”
“Nil out of two, little bro.” Gabriel leant down to slip his arms under Cas’ shoulders and knees, and lifted the whole unwieldy bulk of him without effort. “And let’s keep it that way, okay?”
Dean exchanged a confused look with Sam and grabbed the few things that were theirs before chasing Gabriel out the door, feeling all wrong-footed, like Gabriel had just decided to shake up the rules of the game again.
“Wait,” he called, then jumped up the steps after him into the wagon’s cramped little cabin. “You’re his brother? And you went off and left him?”
Gabriel squinted at him as he settled Cas carefully into the little palette bed at the back. “Wow. You really can’t have a single thought without blurting it out, can you?”
Dean’s mind was racing. “But then that other angel back in May - the one he said was his brother -”
“Balthazar.” Gabriel’s voice went very flat and dangerous. “You want it engraved on a fucking medal?”
Balthazar. He had a name. The angel who’d killed Cassie, the angel (one of the eight) that Dean had killed. Cas’ brother. Gabriel’s brother, and Dean had a sudden sick vision of being locked up and helpless, of someone coming in and taunting him by telling him they’d killed Sam. Of that person coming in after and having the sheer balls to ask him to save their little brother.
“Shit.” Dean backed up a step, out onto the running board, and blurted, “Why the hell didn’t you kill me as soon as I opened that door back there?”
Gabriel straightened up, stalked toward him, stopped so close that his toes brushed Dean’s, and reached up to pat his collar into shape, nice and delicate. His mouth stretched out into a sweet, mad smile, and Dean’s skin did its level best to crawl the fuck away from him. “Because, unlike you, I have two little brothers,” he said, soft enough that neither of the others could have caught it. “And, unlike you, I have self-control. I needed you to get me here first, to the one you haven’t quite killed yet.”
Dean swallowed. Well. Okay. Nice to know where he stood.
Then he looked over at the bed. Cas was watching them narrowly, as if he thought he could glare them into good behaviour.
“I don’t like him,” Dean informed Cas.
“Go stick your head in a pig,” Gabriel returned pleasantly.
“Save it,” Cas growled.
Gabriel mimed zipping his mouth shut, and started getting the wagon turned around. Dean went to saddle his horse up.
Sam rolled his eyes at them both.
---
Note: So, the weird letters in the quotation! Both old Anglo-Saxon letters, derived from runes, which lost fashion gradually after the Normans wandered into England. Thorn (Þ, þ) is both the soft ‘th’ in ‘clothes’ and the hard one in ‘cloth’, so it’s easily transcribed as ‘th’. It survived well into the fourteenth century, and was even occasionally used into the fifteenth, but it confused the Normans so they often wrote it as a ‘y’, though they still pronounced it ‘th’. This is the origin of ‘ye olde’, which SHOULD be pronounced ‘the old’. Sorry. I know ‘ye’ is more fun.
Yogh (ȝ) is... erm. Well. Usually it’s ‘gh’ or ‘ch’ (a guttural sound in Middle English, like German or Scottish). Sometimes, because it took on the role of wynn after that letter vanished, it’s ‘wh’ or ‘w’. And sometimes it’s ‘z’ or ‘s’ on the end of a word. Hence, in the quotation above, ‘broȝeȝ’ = ‘browez’ (ie, ‘brows’), ‘eȝen’ is ‘eyen’ (‘eyes’, pluralised like ‘children’), ‘þe hyȝ and þe loȝe’ = ‘the high and the lowe’. This is why it can be tricky transcribing Middle English if you don't recognise the word, or if it’s a proper name, or even if you aren’t sure which spelling the scribe intends and you want to follow his spelling!
Also, to make things more fun, there was some phonetic crossover between W and G anyway, enough so that in this poem (which is alliterative, and therefore likes to be flexible with initial letters so that the poet doesn’t have to keep making lines that alliterate on ‘G’ every time he mentions his hero by name) ‘Gawain’ is sometimes ‘Wawayne’ and ‘Guenevere’ can be ‘Wenore’. Language is fun!
“I don’t like him,” Dean informed Cas.
“Go stick your head in a pig,” Gabriel returned pleasantly.
“Save it,” Cas growled.
If he hem stowned vpon fyrst, stiller were þanneIf he had astounded them before, yet stiller were then Alle þe hered-men in halle, þe hyȝ & þe loȝe;All the men in the hall, the high and the low. Þe renk on his rounce hym ruched in his sadel,The man on his steed swivelled in his saddle, & runischly his rede yȝen he reled aboute,and weirdly rolled his red eyes about, Bende his bresed broȝeȝ, blycande grene,bent his bristled brows, gleaming green, Wayued his berde for to wayte quo-so wolde ryse.waved his beard, waiting for whomsoever would rise. When non wolde kepe hym with carp he coȝed ful hyȝe,When no man would contradict he coughed very loudly, Ande rimed hym ful richley, & ryȝt hym to speke:And stretched himself slowly, and started to speak. “What, is þis Arþures hous,” quod þe haþel þenne,“What, is this Arthur’s house,” quoth the man then, “Þat al þe rous rennes of, þurȝ ryalmes so mony?“That all the talk tattles of through realms so many? Where is now your sourquydrye & your conquestes,Where is now your pride and your conquests, Your gryndellayk, & your greme, & your grete wordes?Your hot bragging, and your boasts, and your great words? Now is þe reuel & þe renoun of þe Rounde TableNow is the revel and the renown of the Round Table Ouer-walt wyth a worde of on wyȝes speche;Overturned with a word of one man’s tongue, For al dares for drede, withoute dynt schewed!”For all dither in dread with not a blow dealt!” Wyth þis he laȝes so loude, þat þe lorde greued;With this he laughed so loud, that the king was grieved, Þe blod schot for scham into his schyre faceThe blood shot for shame into his face, & lere; smooth-cheeked and fair; He wex as wroth as wynde, He waxed as wroth as wind, So did alle þat þer were So did all that were there. Þe kyng as kene bi kynde, The king, as became his pride, Þen stod þat stif mon nere. Then advanced on that man.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous, c. 1380s, translation mine. (The Green Knight’s challenge to the Round Table, stanza XIV.)
My devil had been long caged; he came out roaring.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, R. L. Stevenson, 1886. (Chapter X.)
The moon was at his darkest ebb tonight, but the eastern star was sinking towards the horizon for dawn by the time Dean brought the axe down on the lock of the barn door.
Two precise hits, splitting the grain of the wood around the lock, then one more to buckle the thin iron brace that strengthened the centre of the door. From there, it was the work of a minute to lever out the loose and damaged bolts, to pound the lock free of the lintel, and push the mutilated door open.
The darkness inside was warm and heavy, streaked high up near the ceiling by the faint starlight falling through the windows high under the roof beams. Dean fumbled along the wall by the door until he found the shelf with the lanterns and the tinders, and lit one by feel, making sure to pull the door shut behind him before anyone could notice the light.
The wick stuttered and yawned into life. It threw flickering yellow tongues out over the floor, stretching slowly as it rose, all of them with grotesque little counter-shadows dancing inside them from dirt and straw and scraps on the floor.
Dean held the lantern higher, making the shadows shrink back towards their parents’ feet, and peered through the dark towards the dull gleam of metal bars.
Gabriel wasn’t there.
Dean had time for a moment of very manly panic before one of the lumps of shadow down the end moved slightly, and resolved itself into the shape of a small man, huddled into the corner and swathed in a cloak. His head was turned toward Dean, but his face was only shadows.
Dean really had no freaking clue how to play this.
He turned his back on the angel and picked his way carefully around bags and barrels, over towards the corner near the stockyards. When he was halfway there, he heard a dry cough. Then a hoarse voice drawled its way across the barn toward him.
“Look at this. A visit from the Wild Man of the Forest. To what do I owe the honour?”
The snark didn’t have the bite to it that Dean was getting used to, that barely contained animal fury kept on a tight rein of sarcasm. Didn’t have the warmth and the charm under it that the Trickster had always had before either. This was just tired. Sort of resigned.
“The axe is an inspired touch. Really. I mean, a club’s more traditional, but an axe is sort of branching out. There’s precedent. More of a Green Knight look.”
Dean propped the lantern up on a shelf next to the control board for the gates mechanism, dropped the axe, and didn’t look around. “You really couldn’t shut up if your life depended on it, could you?”
“Does it?” Gabriel shot back.
Dean glanced back at him. The crouching lump hadn’t moved, except to turn its head to follow Dean. From here, its eyes caught the light, yellow and reflective like a cat’s. Good night vision, but Dean already knew that.
Dean braced himself, and hauled down on the right lever until it slotted into place.
“Not your life I’m worried about here, angel.”
Gabriel went very still as the inner gate rumbled and creaked its way up towards the roof. The gate for letting animals out of the bull press and into the barn. He didn’t even have to watch it - he could probably feel it. Without that gate, all the warding marks on the inside of the cage were incomplete. The only thing keeping him from going full angel-wrath now was the collar around his neck, and that wouldn’t stop him from walking out, picking up a weapon with all of his unnatural strength, and -
“... Good call,” Gabriel remarked, sugary-low and wary.
Dean shoved his hands into his pockets, took a few steps away from the levers (and the axe), and stared levelly at the angel. “Will you listen?”
Gabriel slid his hands out from under the cloak to rest flat on the floor in front of him, crouching like a cat. Then he rose, smooth and fluid, letting the cloak pool in shadows around his feet.
Huh. No wings.
No mistaking him for a regular person now, though, not with his eyes like that. Not with that invisible pulse of menace and power in him, stretching out like long-cramped muscles, curling lazily around Dean and raising the hair along his arms.
Gabriel’s teeth flashed white in the shadows.
“You sure you know what you’re doing, sugar?”
Dean shrugged. “Close enough.”
The angel drifted closer, soft-footed in the dark. His hand trailed along the bars beside him, a deliberate and lazy thud-thud-thud of skin on metal.
“Gonna assume you’re not a shapeshifter or a demon. Not if you just walked in here. And I’m guessing by the smell of you that you ain’t been chumming it up in the town square for a bit, with all those crazy kids out there.” A bit of a shiver there, an edge of something that didn’t fit in with the leopard’s prowl he was doing in there. “Gone native with Sammy, have we? Or maybe, just maybe...” His fingers curled suggestively around a bar for a moment. “... they worked it out? They were just too rabid, too damned human, to listen? Threw you both out?”
He paused, just a yard from the open gate, cocked his head in that gesture that looked endearing on Cas and alien on Gabriel, and grinned without humour. “How’s your brother, Dean?”
Dean kept his own gaze steady, as close to polite as he could manage, and answered as if Gabriel had meant it. “No change. Bobby’s had no luck.”
“Yeah?” Gabriel’s eyes flicked sideways towards the gate, then he leaned in conspiratorially until his cheek was resting against the nearest bar. “So what’s the trick, huh? I come out there, and you, what? Stick me one? Call in the dogs? Drag me out to the town square for your annual bonfire festival? Or is it stoning this year? Bit of mob violence to get everyone chatty and happy again?”
“Shit.” Dean swallowed around the nauseous lump in his throat. “You are one sick son of a bitch, you know that? We don’t do that sort of thing.”
Gabriel smirked like a snarl. “That why you’re hiding your brother away in the woods, then?”
“… Shut up.”
The floor was suddenly fascinating.
“You haven’t been in here to hear them in the evenings, Dean,” the angel purred. “After the sun goes down? After the booze comes out? I can hear them through the walls, you know.”
“Yeah, so.” Dean gritted out, trying not to think about huddling in here, waiting night after night for the door to break open (an axe on the wood, on the hinges, falling once, twice, three times). “You want out, or not?”
Gabriel stepped back, a soft swish and crackle of bare feet on straw. Dean kept an eye on those feet, because he didn’t want to look at his face but he wasn’t stupid enough to take his eyes off him altogether. After a long minute, the angel said, halfway between grudging and contemptuous, “What’s your game?”
Dean decided that was close enough to “I’m listening,” for now.
He squared his shoulders, and raised his head to look the angel in the eye, trying to play it cool and calming. “No game. I relieved the poor sap on gate duty, sent him and his friend off to bed. Got your cart out of storage, stocked it up, got your mare and all. The whole shebang’s stashed nice and quiet out of sight outside the Gates. Just need you now.”
Gabriel snorted inelegantly. “Yeah, course you do. Just out of the goodness of your heart. What’s the catch?”
Dean shrugged. “Got you a passenger. Need to get him away from here before the hunt catches up with us, and he’s in no fit state to ride.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabriel rocked back on his heels, hands deep in his pockets and eyes inscrutable. “So they’re on Sammy’s tail after all?”
“His name’s Sam.” Way to pick your battles, Dean. “And no. Well. Maybe. But not him.” Gabriel cocked an eyebrow, unimpressed, and Dean dug in his heels and glared at him. “Castiel. It’s Castiel, and he’s in pretty bad shape, so could you just shut up and come?”
Gabriel blinked, twice.
Then he looked hard at Dean, that look that Cas did sometimes which felt like he was staring right inside Dean and seeing things Dean had never really looked at himself. Whatever he saw, it made him whistle and shake his head.
“You crazy kids are in this thing deeper than I thought.”
Dean cocked an eyebrow right back at him. “No kidding,” he deadpanned. “You coming, or what?”
Gabriel made a thoughtful humming noise, like he was thinking it over as obnoxiously as possible. Then he stepped sideways, grinned his predator’s grin straight at Dean’s throat, and sauntered out through the gate.
“Great,” Dean breathed out, heart thudding alarm against his ribcage. “Thank you. Now can we go?”
Gabriel cricked his neck, rolled his head around from one shoulder to the other like a stretch. Then he shook his shoulders and, with one eye slyly cocked towards Dean, slowly unfolded the wings. The slashed fabric of his (Dean’s) shirt parted and slipped around them as they curled outward, until - shit.
Okay, so Dean had technically been this close to them before, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t looked this freaking enormous from the other side of angel-proof bars.
Gabriel smiled at him, sweet and promising.
Then he punched Dean in the face.
Dean swore and staggered back, not before he caught another blow to the chin. The son of a bitch wasn’t holding back either.
“My, my, Dean,” he heard the angel purr. “You kiss your mother with that mouth? Oh, wait. My bad.”
Fuck. Okay. So either Gabriel didn’t care about Cas at all and Dean had misread everything, or Gabriel was actually insane. Either way, Dean was kind of screwed.
He ducked the next punch, staggered, lost his footing, and turned it into a roll. Except, even stiff and collared, Gabriel was too fast. Dean was halfway to his feet, hadn’t even got his hand on his knife yet, when Gabriel’s fist slammed into his stomach and knocked all the breath out of him.
Dean was, unlike several of his recent acquaintance, only human. He tumbled to his knees and stayed there, retching.
Nothing happened.
When he looked up, glowering and wary, Gabriel was just standing there, a few yards away, hands in his pockets and a smirk carved all over his face. When Dean met his eyes he licked his lips, slow and provocative, and winked.
“You coming, or what?” he parroted.
Dean eyed him disbelievingly. Gabriel did that stupid thing with his eyebrows again.
“Depends,” Dean grunted, and levered himself carefully to his feet. “You gonna keep pounding into me or not?”
Gabriel actually fluttered his goddamn eyelashes. “Not just now, honey. I’ve got a headache.”
Dean blinked. “Whatever.” He dug the little device that he’d grabbed from the smithy out of his pocket, and beckoned to Gabriel with one hand. “Collar.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes, and his wings crooked up warningly when Dean stepped in closer. “What’s that?”
Dean smirked in his turn, and reached for the little metal band around Gabriel’s throat. “Well, if you want to keep wearing that thing everywhere, don’t let me stop -”
Gabriel slapped his hand away and scowled.
“Don’t touch me, Winchester,” he snapped. “I’ll do it.”
“No can do, angel.” He twirled the little three-pronged key between his fingers. “You need to be able to see what you’re doing with it.”
Gabriel glared. “Fine.” Then he tipped his chin up, exposing his pale, grubby throat. “But if you choke me I am haunting your fine ass.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll take my chances.” Dean reached up and rotated the collar until the lantern light fell full on the catch. Then he slid two fingers under the cool metal to lift it clear of the skin, ignoring Gabriel’s flinch at the touch. “This’ll probably pinch, okay? There’s three little teeth in the catch that go right through the collar, and they have to turn all the way around to release it.”
“Get on with it.”
Dean made a point of squinting at the metal as he slid the key home. “Of course, this would all be a hell of a lot easier if someone hadn’t just blacked my eye.”
Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest and glowered stubbornly at the ceiling. “Go ahead. Tell me you didn’t deserve it, Winchester.”
Dean already had his mouth open to snipe back, before he realised that he actually had nothing to say to that, not even something sly and snappy that meant nothing.
Not because Gabriel was right, of course. Just because he was worried about Cas and Sam.
He twisted the key a bit more viciously than he needed to, and slid the arms of the collar open and off.
“Holy dungarees,” Gabriel breathed, and closed his eyes tight.
Dean dropped the collar and stepped smartly back. There was light crawling under Gabriel’s skin. Heat was pouring off him in palpable waves, and as he stretched out his wings the feathers glowed and flickered like flames.
“Okay!” Dean said, a little too loudly. “Mind holding off on burning the place down until we’ve got everyone to where they should be?”
Gabriel cracked one eye open to glare red-hot light at him. Then he shook himself, and all the light and the power pulled back into his skin again until he was just some ordinary guy standing about with enormous wings.
Yeah, Dean’s life wasn’t weird at all.
There was no one outside, though they’d wasted ten minutes with Gabriel’s stupid posturing and suspicions, and they cut across the stock yards and down the hill to the river rather than take the shorter way back to the Gates. It wasn’t worth the risk, going that way. No one would be on duty - even though Barnes had seemed a lot less enthusiastic than Dean would have expected about being relieved of gate duty, and it had taken three precious minutes to persuade him and Demian that yes, Dean had been out looking for Sam, and no, he wasn’t going to be able to sleep so he might as well take watch, but they’d left eventually. And, well, if they enjoyed hanging around outside in the middle of the night, they could do it more comfortably anywhere other than at the Gate. Still, that route cut too close to too many houses, and the protective sigils around the Gate were too dense to break quickly.
It wasn’t until they were over the river and weaving their way through the orchard that Gabriel asked, keeping his back to Dean, “What happened to Castiel?”
Dean frowned at his back, but it wasn’t very communicative. His wings were tucked careful and neat down his spine, but then, that was probably the easiest way to hold them when you were pushing between branches in the dark.
“Caught a bullet with his wing during the ambush,” he replied shortly. “One of the fingers is broken. Starting to look pretty messy, too. He’s been in and out of a fever all day.”
“Fuck,” Gabriel muttered. “Stupid kid.”
It didn’t sound like he was talking to Dean.
“Tell me about it,” he grumbled anyway, for the sake of something like civility. “Never could keep himself out of trouble. Him and Sammy’re as bad as each other.”
Gabriel half-snorted, almost like he knew what it was like to be a big brother too. Huh.
“You, uh. You know Cas well?” Dean tried, after a few minutes of dodging the trailing arms of blackberries. It was kind of weird to be taking a tone like this with Gabriel now - felt too much like making conversation with a human stranger.
“Kind of lost the right to claim acquaintance with anyone feathered when I skipped home, wouldn’t you say?” Gabriel drawled, and cleared the path with a vicious snap of his wings.
Dean only just managed to catch a branch before it whipped back into his face. “Pissy much?” he asked brightly, and shoved out after Gabriel onto the path curving around the inside of the wall.
“Hark to the self-righteous man,” Gabriel cooed. “They’re so cute when they think hating anything that looks funny makes them all pure and virtuous.”
“Okay, you know what? That’s it.” Dean grabbed the wrist of the wing nearest him to spin Gabriel around. “I don’t hate you because you’re an angel, you stupid son of a bitch. I’m pissed because you screwed us over and pretended to be something you’re not.”
Then he was pinned to the wall with Gabriel’s fingers around his throat and a furious angel an inch from his nose.
“Don’t you ever presume to understand me,” Gabriel hissed. “I screwed over my brothers for you. You slaughtered them bloody. That’s on me.”
“You know, I can punch you in the head if you need it unswollen,” Dean gasped out, although it was difficult to sound badass and unconcerned when your hands were scrabbling at a wrist that felt like it was made of stone and you couldn’t quite work out how to drag air into your lungs. “’S on us and them, you moron. Get over it. If it hadn’t been the dogs we woulda found something else, I don’t know, magical line-dancing or something.”
He was busy by the end of the sentence with trying to kick out at Gabriel’s shins (not that it would hurt him, but it might piss him off, and Dean was just that mature), so he missed whatever happened on Gabriel’s face for a moment. He only looked back up when he heard the harsh bark of Gabriel’s laugh, startled, like it had been punched out of him. Then his throat was free and Gabriel was staggering backwards, laughing and trembling violently,
Great. He was insane.
Dean turned to look at the wall while Gabriel had his little fit of hysteria or whatever behind him. The angel-warding sigils were carved into the wall a few hundred yards apart, and he knew there was one near here. Breaking that one should make the ward weak enough at this point to let an angel through. By the time Gabriel’s sickly whooping had subsided into hiccoughs and groans behind him, Dean was already chipping away with the hammer and chisel he’d snagged from the smithy for the occasion.
“You done?” he asked curtly, when the angel sagged against the wall a little way off.
“Screw you, Winchester,” Gabriel said, a bit shakily. Dean caught the quick scrub of a hand over eyes and cheeks out of the corner of his vision, and didn’t look around.
“What is it with you guys and grabbing people’s throats anyway?” he grumbled. “You get off on it or something?”
Gabriel’s voice leered sourly at him. “If that makes you feel better, honeybunch.”
Dean almost hit his thumb. Then he snorted incredulously, almost a laugh, at the sheer ridiculousness of this whole stupid thing. Everything about it, and Gabriel’s stupid nicknames too. “I’m not a girl, Gabriel.”
“I’m equal-opportunities inappropriate,” the angel decided with studied laziness. “Can we go yet?”
Dean squinted at the mess he’d made of the sigil. “Maybe? Try it now.”
Gabriel splayed one hand out on the wall, pushed at it with his fingertips. “Hmm,” he said, sort of thoughtful. Then he drew back a fist and slammed it into the wall, once, twice -
Dean grabbed his forearm, stupidly, as cracks skittered out from the point of impact, spider-webbing across the faces of dog-headed men and conjoined giants. At the touch of his hand, Gabriel flinched violently and tore his arm away.
“The fuck are you doing?” Dean snapped.
Gabriel grinned at him, wide and too bright. His fist wasn’t even scraped.
“You can’t stop me,” he declared gleefully. “You need me to help you, and I could tear this whole fucking wall down if I wanted. Let the monsters in.”
Dean stared down at him, appalled. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Oh, sugar,” Gabriel mocked. His face was too close, and when he darted out his tongue to lap at his lips the starlight caught and flashed on the wet skin. “Why the hell do you need to ask?”
“Okay then,” Dean snarled. “How about, when I left Castiel I didn’t know if he was going to last the night, and that was seven freaking hours ago, Gabriel, and also we have to get good and clear before anyone notices you’re gone. That more important than some little grudge match?”
Gabriel froze, and looked very much like he was considering blacking Dean’s other eye. Then he stepped back lightly out of Dean’s space, crouched to the ground and leaped. The crack of wings against the air knocked Dean sideways, because apparently making him fall on his ass was habit-forming, and when he picked himself up again there was an insane angel smirking at him from the top of the damaged wall and holding down a hand.
Seemed like insanity was catching. Dean took it.
“You know you’re crazy, right?” he commented ten minutes later as Gabriel settled into the seat of his wagon, behind the haunches of his quietly delighted mare.
“And whose fault is that?” Gabriel returned sweetly, and clicked his tongue to get her started.
It was a longer journey in the wagon than on horseback, but Gabriel drove his mare harder than Dean had expected. Whether because she was fresh and eager, or because of some mojo of his, she didn’t seem to get tired. Dean was sort of glad he’d left the gelding that he’d ridden down wandering outside the wall - he’d find his way home in the morning, and this journey again after too much exercise over the last two days would have been pushing it for him. It would be a dead giveaway that Dean had been at least involved in busting Gabriel out; but it had been too much to hope for anyway that Barnes would just conveniently not mention that Dean had relieved him at the Gates last night.
So, yeah. They’d figure it out. Dean would deal with that later.
They didn’t speak, except for terse directions. Dean kept an eye on Gabriel, in case he flipped out again or anything, but he just sat there all hunched up with his eyes on the road and very far away.
Dean had no idea what to make of him.
“Can I ask you something?” he muttered, when they were nearly at the cabin. His voice came out too abrupt and a bit gruff, but hey, they were kind of past social niceties.
“Can’t stop you,” Gabriel returned, levelly enough.
“I just don’t understand -” Dean stopped, swallowed it, and tried again, more tactfully. “Why the dogs? Why give us the weapons to fight back?”
Gabriel slanted him an incredulous look. “I like people. Humans and angels. Call me a freak, but I don’t like it when you go around killing each other.” Dean held up both hands in an “okay, I give” kind of gesture, and Gabriel pinned him with a glare then fell silent.
For a few minutes, there was only the rattle of the wagon and the clip of hooves over the muted noises of the night.
Then, rather to Dean’s surprise, Gabriel muttered to the reins in his hand, “The dogs were meant to stop that. Shields, not weapons. Keep you away from them and them away from you.” There was a peculiar note in his voice, almost like a plea. “Everyone’s happy.”
Dean blinked, and looked at him. “Yeah, well. Bang-up job with that,” he said, then considered punching himself in the head and saving Gabriel the trouble.
Gabriel’s mouth twisted bitterly. “Look. I don’t know why the angels kept coming, alright? But would you stop trying to gank the sons of bitches who’d hurt Sam just because they had some noisy dogs in their corner?”
Dean exhaled in a rush. “Yeah, okay. I get it.”
Why did you?
Because you did.
And I will again, so that you won’t.
“Arthur’s balls,” he muttered, and scrubbed his hand over his mouth. “What a mess.”
Gabriel didn’t reply.
Gabriel had barely moved in his seat since he’d settled into it, just the occasional twitch of a shoulder or flick of the hand holding the reins. But when they got to the cabin, he was off the boards and striding up over the rocks toward the door before the mare had brought the wagon to a complete stop. Dean swore, because he seemed to do that a lot around Gabriel, grabbed the reins until she was settled, then jumped down to follow him.
By the time he got through the door, Gabriel was already crouching beside Cas’ mattress. He’d rolled Cas onto his left side, and had one hand splayed out over his chest and the other on his forehead. Gabriel’s face was hard and grim; and Dean’s heart felt like it had tripped in an unexpected pothole and gone sprawling.
Sam was hovering anxiously around, because he always did, and Dean could almost see the way he’d look if he were really himself, the big pleading eyes and the bitten lip and the hand that kept shoving away all the hair that kept trying to fall into his face.
“What else happened?” Gabriel snapped.
Dean blinked. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something on him, some sort of... haze. Spiritual, not physical. I can’t fix the rest until that’s off him.”
Sam groaned. Dean looked at him uncertainly. “Well, there was that will-o’-the-wisp last night...”
Gabriel swore, short and curt. “You couldn’t have mentioned it? Sam, get over here.”
Sam was pressing in next to him in a helpful hopeful flash, and Gabriel reached up with the hand that had been on Cas’ chest to touch two fingers to Sam’s forehead.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on,” Dean put in, and got glared at by two pairs of eyes.
“Look,” Gabriel rapped out. “Angels don’t just have faith, that’s what we are. Family bonds, trust, being together, belonging. Sort of like humans, only it’s where we get all our strength from, and if we lose it we wither away in a hell of a more literal sense than you guys do - you just go all grumpy and insane, or whatever. Guess who must have been feeling pretty low and vulnerable already? and guess what a will-o’-the-wisp attacks?”
Dean blinked, felt sick, inwardly cursed all those angels who’d ever abandoned Cas, and blinked again. “Okay, fine, but what are you doing to Sam?”
Gabriel sneered at him, crouched low over Cas’ wan body. “How much of that do you think I have to share, Winchester? Especially just now? Sam here, oh, he believes alright. He believes in you, the poor stupid kid. All fired up and bright with it.”
“Uhm.” Dean carefully avoided Sam’s eyes. “Will it hurt him?”
Sam snorted, rolled his eyes, and pressed his forehead into Gabriel’s hand.
“Hang on,” Dean blurted out, “but you spend your whole life travelling around on your own.”
Gabriel gave Sam an incredulous “how do you put up with this guy” look. “Yep, and I steer the hell away from will-o’-the-wisps. D’you mind?”
Dean looked down at Cas, at the sunken hectic cheeks and the sweaty pallour of his forehead, at the way his hair was stupidly flat and lank, at the dull sheen of his feathers. He looked at the way Gabriel’s wings were half unfolded, curled forward protectively as if he wanted to swathe Cas up in them and keep him warm.
He stepped back.
Gabriel was ignoring him already anyway, eyes closed and forehead crinkling up. Dean sort of expected some sort of glowy effect, but there was nothing like that, just a bit of extra warmth radiating out from them. Sam had his eyes closed too, frowning behind it like he was analysing everything, but he looked perfectly comfortable and was still leaning into Gabriel’s touch, so Dean wasn’t about to jump in and break them up or anything, no matter how twitchy it made him.
Cas sighed, and shuddered.
For some reason, Dean suddenly found himself on his knees on the other side of the mattress, with Cas’ hand between his.
Gabriel opened one eye and gave him a strange narrow look, but he didn’t say anything, and Dean glared daggers of “don’t you dare say a word” until he closed his eye again, which was as good as nothing weird and girly having happened at all, right?
Cas’ fingers curled tight and cool around Dean’s.
Huh.
Faith. Family. Belonging. Okay. Dean could do that.
He closed his eyes and tried to think stubborn big-brother thoughts at Cas.
Gabriel let out a breath, let go of Sam, and brushed the hair back from Cas’ forehead. Then he leaned in, pressed an awkward sort of a kiss there, and muttered something fierce and low in a language Dean didn’t recognise.
Cas’ fingers stiffened in Dean’s for a moment, then went soft and relaxed as something imperceptible around the bed seemed to loosen. Dean thought they even felt a bit warmer. He looked up at Gabriel, mouth open on a question, and Gabriel grinned ferociously back and him and pressed two fingers to Cas’ forehead.
Cas blinked his eyes open. Then he frowned.
Gabriel’s mobile, sarcastic mouth softened into something strange and almost shy. “Up and at ‘em, little night-owl.”’
Cas narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to bring the world into focus when he wasn’t even sure whether it was actually there at all.
“Gabriel?” he tried at last.
“Guilty,” Gabriel chirped incongruously.
Cas’ eyes flicked over to Dean, wide and disbelieving and unfocussed with sleep, and Dean shrugged at him in a what-can-you-do sort of a way. He suspected he might have been wearing a dopey sort of smile, though, which probably ruined the effect.
“You’re dead,” Cas rumbled carefully. “Or I’m dead.”
“Nil out of two, little bro.” Gabriel leant down to slip his arms under Cas’ shoulders and knees, and lifted the whole unwieldy bulk of him without effort. “And let’s keep it that way, okay?”
Dean exchanged a confused look with Sam and grabbed the few things that were theirs before chasing Gabriel out the door, feeling all wrong-footed, like Gabriel had just decided to shake up the rules of the game again.
“Wait,” he called, then jumped up the steps after him into the wagon’s cramped little cabin. “You’re his brother? And you went off and left him?”
Gabriel squinted at him as he settled Cas carefully into the little palette bed at the back. “Wow. You really can’t have a single thought without blurting it out, can you?”
Dean’s mind was racing. “But then that other angel back in May - the one he said was his brother -”
“Balthazar.” Gabriel’s voice went very flat and dangerous. “You want it engraved on a fucking medal?”
Balthazar. He had a name. The angel who’d killed Cassie, the angel (one of the eight) that Dean had killed. Cas’ brother. Gabriel’s brother, and Dean had a sudden sick vision of being locked up and helpless, of someone coming in and taunting him by telling him they’d killed Sam. Of that person coming in after and having the sheer balls to ask him to save their little brother.
“Shit.” Dean backed up a step, out onto the running board, and blurted, “Why the hell didn’t you kill me as soon as I opened that door back there?”
Gabriel straightened up, stalked toward him, stopped so close that his toes brushed Dean’s, and reached up to pat his collar into shape, nice and delicate. His mouth stretched out into a sweet, mad smile, and Dean’s skin did its level best to crawl the fuck away from him. “Because, unlike you, I have two little brothers,” he said, soft enough that neither of the others could have caught it. “And, unlike you, I have self-control. I needed you to get me here first, to the one you haven’t quite killed yet.”
Dean swallowed. Well. Okay. Nice to know where he stood.
Then he looked over at the bed. Cas was watching them narrowly, as if he thought he could glare them into good behaviour.
“I don’t like him,” Dean informed Cas.
“Go stick your head in a pig,” Gabriel returned pleasantly.
“Save it,” Cas growled.
Gabriel mimed zipping his mouth shut, and started getting the wagon turned around. Dean went to saddle his horse up.
Sam rolled his eyes at them both.
---
Note: So, the weird letters in the quotation! Both old Anglo-Saxon letters, derived from runes, which lost fashion gradually after the Normans wandered into England. Thorn (Þ, þ) is both the soft ‘th’ in ‘clothes’ and the hard one in ‘cloth’, so it’s easily transcribed as ‘th’. It survived well into the fourteenth century, and was even occasionally used into the fifteenth, but it confused the Normans so they often wrote it as a ‘y’, though they still pronounced it ‘th’. This is the origin of ‘ye olde’, which SHOULD be pronounced ‘the old’. Sorry. I know ‘ye’ is more fun.
Yogh (ȝ) is... erm. Well. Usually it’s ‘gh’ or ‘ch’ (a guttural sound in Middle English, like German or Scottish). Sometimes, because it took on the role of wynn after that letter vanished, it’s ‘wh’ or ‘w’. And sometimes it’s ‘z’ or ‘s’ on the end of a word. Hence, in the quotation above, ‘broȝeȝ’ = ‘browez’ (ie, ‘brows’), ‘eȝen’ is ‘eyen’ (‘eyes’, pluralised like ‘children’), ‘þe hyȝ and þe loȝe’ = ‘the high and the lowe’. This is why it can be tricky transcribing Middle English if you don't recognise the word, or if it’s a proper name, or even if you aren’t sure which spelling the scribe intends and you want to follow his spelling!
Also, to make things more fun, there was some phonetic crossover between W and G anyway, enough so that in this poem (which is alliterative, and therefore likes to be flexible with initial letters so that the poet doesn’t have to keep making lines that alliterate on ‘G’ every time he mentions his hero by name) ‘Gawain’ is sometimes ‘Wawayne’ and ‘Guenevere’ can be ‘Wenore’. Language is fun!