((Supernatural Once Upon A Sabriel Bang)) Your Friendly Neighborhood Guardian Angel (Part 3)
Part 2 here.
They walk down the street in silence for a long time, Gabriel striding lazily alongside him with his hands in his pockets, his wings swaying back and forth with each step. It's tentatively comfortable, Sam supposes, and he fiddles with his fingers as they walk down the long stretch of road. Their surroundings haven't changed since they left the motel and Sam finds himself wondering if they're even going the right way, even though he doubts it's possible to go the wrong way at all in this place.
A question nags at him, though, and it doesn't settle down until he finally asks it: “Gabriel?”
“Mm-hmm?” the angel hums, as if he's just been pulled out of some kind of zoned-out trance.
“Do you have any family? Any siblings?”
Gabriel pauses for a long moment before taking a breath and answering: “Sure, loads. Grew up an angel, after all. Got lots of brothers and sisters. Too many to count.”
“Are you close to them?”
Gabriel shrugs. “We spend pretty much every waking moment together upstairs. Some of them are assholes. Actually, a lot of them are. But, you know. They're family.”
“So you've been together all your life?” Sam hazards. He pauses a moment, regarding the angel, who's looking straight ahead at the road, rather than at him. “I mean, if you were separated from them...from your family...you'd want to get back to them, right?”
Gabriel doesn't answer. Instead, he stops, gesturing down the road at what looks like an apartment building.
“Looks like we've reached checkpoint number three, kiddo,” Gabriel says. It takes Sam a moment to snap back to the task at hand, and he looks up at the apartment building, taking a step forward. But once again, recognition springs to light in his brain, and he stops.
“This is...” He trails off, clenching his fists, and he turns toward Gabriel, whose expression is unreadable. “Is this...?”
Gabriel says nothing, merely gesturing for Sam to go ahead of him through the door. When Sam turns around again, they're suddenly in a hallway, facing the door to his old apartment from Stanford. With a hand that he's valiantly trying to keep from shaking, he reaches out and turns the knob, opening it.
She's just adjusting the table cloth, shifting it so that the hole near its corner is hidden by a paper plate. Once the cloth is smoothed out, she tenderly lights the two candles in the center of the table and stands back to admire her handiwork. The flickering flames are the only sources of light in the room besides the pale moonlight streaming through the blinds over the window.
“Jess...” Her name escapes his lips before he can reign it in, no more than a whisper. He remembers this night...remembers it because he wasn't there, because he had to study his ass off in the library all night.
It was the last dinner she’d made for him, and he’d had to heat it up in the microwave.
“Anniversary?” Gabriel asks, crossing his arms over his chest and lingering in the doorway, not stepping over the threshold.
“No,” Sam forces out. “Nothing like that. She just wanted to do something nice for me...”
“I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say you didn't show up.” Sam's limbs feel too heavy for his bones as he takes a few slow steps toward her; she sits down at the table, staring at the candles flickering in the moonlight, looking pensive.
“I couldn't,” he says mournfully. “I didn't get back until almost three in the morning...She'd already gone to bed...”
“She mad?”
In spite of the way his eyes are beginning to burn with tears that he's valiantly trying to hold back, Sam coughs out a laugh. “She wasn't,” he says, wonder in his voice. “She should have been, but she wasn't...”
Gabriel says nothing more to him, and Sam walks over to the table, running his fingers along the tablecloth and glancing down at the single lily nestled in a vase between the candles. It feels so real as he sits down in the chair opposite her, as if he's right there in that same moment, getting the chance to redo it, all of it. But he knows that she can't hear or see him; even so, he has to force out her name, calling to her softly: “Jess?”
She looks up, and she stares right at him. Except she's not looking at him; she's looking through him. He purses his lips and stares down at the empty plate before him.
“Would I see her again?” he asks after the silence has dragged on long enough and Jess has gone back to staring out the window, searching the parking lot for any sign of him. He looks up at Gabriel expectantly. “In...Heaven?”
Gabriel shrugs. “I don't exactly have a meet-and-greet with everyone who comes through the gates,” he says. “But it's possible. In fact, I'd probably bet on it.”
“And you mean that? You're not just saying that to try and convince me to come with you?”
“How about both?” Gabriel offers, and Sam lets out a harsh breath through his nostrils, pushing himself up out of the chair. He stares down at Jess still, longingly.
“Jess is dead,” he finally says, and he surprises himself by letting out a rueful laugh even though tears are flowing from his eyes now. “She waited up all night for me...I hate to make her wait even longer, but...”
Jess is leaning her cheek against her palm, gazing at the candlelit lily in the center of the modest table setting, and the corners of Sam's mouth turn upwards in a grateful smile. He does hate to make her wait, but somehow he knows that she will if he asks. He wishes he didn't have to.
“Dean is still alive,” Sam says determinedly, still looking at Jess as he speaks, as if he's telling her his reasons for asking her to be patient with him. “I mean...if Heaven is as eternal as everyone says, it'll still be there later, but Dean...” He shakes his head. “Dean's still alive, and on Earth.”
“But you're not,” Gabriel reminds him.
“And that's the problem.” Sam spins around, finally facing the angel as he speaks. “Dean's alive, and I'm dead. That's not how it's supposed to be. I can't...leave him alone. Not when we were just starting to be brothers again.”
Gabriel rolls his eyes. “I thought the older brother was supposed to be the overprotective one,” he groans.
“It goes both ways,” Sam says, gazing intently at the angel. “You have siblings. You should know that.”
Something flashes in Gabriel's eyes; it's hot and quick, and Sam recognizes it as the same thing he saw when Gabriel spoke of his family before, outside. What it could possibly be, Sam doesn't know, but like everything the angel has shown him so far, it's familiar, and not because Sam has seen it before, but because he's felt it before. Despite realizing this, Sam still can't name it and can't identify it properly, and it doesn't sit right in his chest, much like his stubbornly still heart.
“Gabriel...” Sam's voice sounds so broken that he doesn't even believe it's his. He glances back at Jess again, letting out a breath and taking in another before he finally manages to get out the next word: “Please...”
“Oh, are you trying to bargain with me now, are you?” Gabriel teases. “Pleasantries are nice, but it's not going to help.”
“Whatever I have to do, I'll do it. Just-”
“Would it make you feel better if I said that if there was a way, I'd tell you?” Gabriel asks, and Sam isn't quite sure how to answer, so he doesn't. “Do you know how many people I've led through this place? Every single one of them at some point asks me the same thing: Is there a way back? Some take it better than others when I tell them the truth. The ones that died alone or in pain, they usually do okay. It's the ones that died bloody, the ones that left behind family that make it harder than it needs to be. You're not a special case, kiddo. The Boy with the Demon Blood or not, you're just like the rest. Stubborn to the end and beyond.”
The words sting, and Sam's shoulders slump. Suddenly he feels so tired, like he could sleep for days, right here on this hard wood floor under his boots if he lay down. But he doesn't; he locks his knees and keeps himself on his feet. The floorboards creak so familiarly that it makes his bones ache with longing for this crappy apartment, for the dinner he never got to have at this table, for the grimy windows and scuffed up floors and the horrendously creaky bed that could wake up the neighbors whenever they made love, no matter how quiet they were.
“We should go,” says Gabriel, and Sam realizes just how long he's been standing there, motionless, staring at nothing. He turns, zombie-like, shuffling toward Jess and leaning down toward her. Her skin is soft under her touch, her flesh warm and welcoming, and it should feel so good just to touch her again, but it doesn't, because he knows that this is not Jess. Not really. This is an illusion. Maybe the real Jess is waiting for him somewhere not too far off, but for now he settles for what he's been given, pressing his lips to her cheek and pretending that it really is her. She doesn't move, doesn't react, because she doesn't know he's there at all, so he keeps his eyes closed and tries to picture her smile in his mind instead.
He turns, wiping his eyes, and they leave the apartment without another word.
Part 4 here.