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ratherastory) wrote2011-03-17 12:54 am
ratherastory) wrote2011-03-17 12:54 am
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Part 2 —Protégé
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Part 2 ―Protégé
As Sam’s soul grows stronger, it becomes increasingly difficult for Gabriel to keep them both hidden from the other denizens of Purgatory. It’s worth it, he thinks, watching it grow from a tiny, wondering spark into a little flame that burns brightly and steadily, even in the darkest of night. Unfortunately, it also makes it a glowing beacon to everything for miles around –or whatever passes for miles in Purgatory.
For a while he takes to walking everywhere with Sam, ignoring the protests about just how embarrassing it is, and how Dean never had to be walked to school and he turned out just fine. There is no school that Gabriel has ever been able to detect. As far as he knows, Sam is always with him, and there are no other people around that he can see. The few people who were there in the beginning, who always felt slightly wrong, are nowhere to be found, and although he doesn't know it for sure, Gabriel suspects that it has something to do with the energy being spent by Sam's soul on rebuilding itself. He long ago figured out that whatever surrounds them stems from Sam, that he himself is something like a conduit, or perhaps a catalyst. Inanimate objects are easy to create, but people are far too complex, too draining, and so he and Sam are alone. Or, rather, Gabriel is alone, and Sam's world is populated by living memories that Gabriel can't see.
Dean is a perplexing presence in Sam’s life, one that Gabriel is quite sure he’s never going to understand fully. It doesn’t help that he can’t see or hear him at all, even though of late he’s felt something different in the quality of the air around them. Part of him hopes, perhaps in vain, that something of his old power is being restored to him. It’s been more than ten years ―or what counts as ten years in this place, which might be ten seconds or ten millennia elsewhere for all he knows ―since he felt that first spark that allowed him to banish the creature trying to breach his first home with Sam, and for the most part he’s tried very hard not to feed the hope that, perhaps, he will recover his grace at the end of all of this.
What’s most surprising to him, even after all this time, is that he finds he actually likes Sam. Before this task was given to him, he had never bothered to have feelings for any mortal being –they were beneath his notice, really, unless he was bored and wanted to amuse himself by torturing the ones who got above themselves in life. When Sam and Dean had first crossed his path he had worried slightly, because a pair of hunters could certainly make his life more difficult, but soon the worry had turned to amusement and then delight at the potential mayhem he could wreak at their expense.
Gabriel never bothered to examine his feelings about Sam and Dean after that either ―not even when he allowed himself to be dragged, however reluctantly, back into the fray with his brethren. It was almost too difficult just to draw his sword against his brother, which didn’t leave much room for anything else, let alone wasting time wondering about two humans –even if they were special and had great destinies and blah blah blah. Now, though, he has all the time in the world and then some. And, he has to be honest with himself (he thinks that might kind of be the point, here), Sam’s a good kid. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember that there’s more to it than this –just a kid and his guardian– that there’s an end game that even he might not be aware of. It’s the most extreme form of arrogance to pretend to know the will of God, and even at his worst Gabriel has never been quite that foolhardy.
Once he manages to take Sam somewhere normal-looking –a park with a baseball diamond– and he lets him tear off at top speed. Gabriel finds himself a seat among the empty bleachers and watches him play his own complicated imaginary games, the only kind available to him here, in this wasteland where he’s alone save for a fallen archangel for company. He looks up to see Sam waving madly at him from across the field, waves back and grins in spite of himself.
At that precise moment that he realizes exactly what his Father meant when he spoke of love.
~*~
~*~
When Sam turns fourteen years old, Gabriel loses him for the first time.
He awakens from a deep sleep, expecting to find himself in the bed in which he lay down, with carefully-constructed sunlight seeping in through the carefully-constructed window of his carefully-constructed apartment. Instead, he’s surrounded by nothing but grey. For a moment he wonders if he’s gone blind, but a hand held up before his face proves to him that nothing of the sort has happened: he’s just not where he expected to be.
He gets to his feet and the mist swirls around him, thick and cloying. There's nothing under his feet, nothing over his head, nothing all around him. It's almost as though the whole world has ceased to exist.
“Sam?” he calls out, and his voice is swallowed by the grey. There's no reply. “Sam! Where are you?”
What happens to a soul when all of physical matter in the world is gone and can't contain it? Sam could be anywhere. He might have dissolved or floated away, any number of a myriad of different ways.
“Sam!”
He wades through the mist as though it was a lake, remembers countless times he's wandered through places like this. They are the interstices of reality, places which consist of nothing but thought, nothing but the simple whim of the gods. He was a god once ―or a demi-god. He's created places like this. He's sent countless souls to be lost among the winding trails of nothingness and never once gave them a second thought. He's sent heroes along journeys through the mists, never caring if they came through at all; though he was always a little pleased when they figured out the path, when turned out to be cleverer than he gave them credit for. Now he wonders if this irony isn't a little thick, even for him.
“Sam!”
He doesn't know how long he's been looking. It could be hours or years or centuries. Time has no meaning in this place and he should know that better than most. He could be turning in circles for all he knows, or walking in place on an invisible treadmill. He might never find Sam. He's beginning to tire, even though he never expected that could happen in this place. The fog is all-encompassing and cold, leeching the warmth from his body. Gradually he becomes aware of other presences in the cloying nothing, can feel something malevolent lurking just out of sight, creeping about the edges of his awareness, waiting for him to weaken more. He reaches out, fingers threading through the swirling tendrils of mist and has to fight off a sudden surge of despair that wells up in his chest.
“God, please let me find him. Please,” the whisper turns into a prayer, and it feels blessedly natural. “Please, Father... I have to keep him safe.”
There's a flicker of warmth then, as though someone struck a match in his chest and he feels a tug on his heart, pulling him definitely in one direction. He glances in the direction he thinks is up, and allows gratitude to suffuse him. “Thank you,” he breathes and starts walking again.
He finds Sam curled into a tight ball, hidden away under the mist.
“Sammy, it's me. You okay?”
The boy uncurls slowly and doesn't even correct him on his use of the diminutive, which means he must have been pretty damned terrified. “Everything's gone.”
Gabriel reaches down and takes his hand. “I know, but I think we can build it again. The place is changing, that's all. Don't be afraid.”
Sam lets Gabriel pull him to his feet, then throws himself against him, wrapping his arms around his waist. “I fell asleep, and when I woke up everything was gone. I couldn't find Dean or Dad or anyone... I thought you were all gone,” he chokes.
“Aww, kiddo,” he hugs Sam as hard as he can. “I promise, I won't leave you. None of us will, okay? Come on, let's go find a new place to build, okay?”
Sam scrubs at his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Okay.”
Gabriel leads him back into the mist.
~*~
They move into a cabin in the woods. Sam sulks the entire time, from the moment Gabriel comes up with this admittedly brilliant plan, to the day they arrive at the cabin and Sam discovers it doesn't even have a colour television.
“What are we hunting this time, anyway?”
Gabriel looks at him sharply. “We're not hunting anything.”
Sam's expression is sceptical. “Come on. We're in the middle of nowhere in the woods. We have to be hunting something. Dad hasn't said a word, but I can tell Dean's about to explode from excitement, and that means we're hunting something. What is it?”
“Nothing, I'm telling you,” Gabriel huffs. “Why is it that hard to believe?”
“We're always hunting something.”
He doesn't know what to say to that. He doesn't understand entirely how this world works for Sam. The kid knows who Gabriel is, but he retreats into his own space more and more these days. From what little he says, Gabriel thinks he might be reliving or re-experiencing his old life, or perhaps just remembering it especially vividly, in relevant bits and snatches. Like a really bizarre highlight reel. As far as Gabriel can tell Sam is always there, where he can see him, and yet Sam sometimes doesn't remember things that have happened during the day, replacing the events with ones from his past life instead, or else incorporating their current situation into his memories, twisting them until they make a certain kind of sense. Sometimes he'll go as far as to re-enact some of the memories out loud, which serves only to make Gabriel feel like even more of a spectator than ever.
It's perplexing and not a little troubling for Gabriel to feel as though he's Sam's imaginary friend. He's been feeling stronger too, first after banishing the creature that had come for Sam when he was a toddler, and especially so after they got lost in the mist. It feels almost insulting to be relegated to a secondary role in Sam's life when it's Gabriel who's kept him safe all these years.
What's more troubling is that he still can't see Dean and John the way Sam apparently can. He doesn't understand how Sam can be here and still in that other place, with them and he doesn't like it one bit. It's not that he's jealous of Dean and John. That would be ridiculous, but it is a little galling to be treated as though somehow he's less real than they are, as though he has less of a claim over Sam than they do. Because that's not what it's about, not at all. Sam is his responsibility, decreed by God no less. The fact that Sam's blood relatives still have a claim... well, Gabriel has never really been accustomed to sharing anything with anyone, let alone something like this with people he can't even see. He kind of wishes he could will them away with a snap, like he has almost every other nuisance in his life, but something tells him it's just not that simple.
Sam pulls his knees up to his chest and rests his cheek on them, fiddling with a frayed thread from where his knee has poked a hole through the denim of his jeans. He's grown tall all of a sudden ―all elbows and knees and hands and feet that are too large for him― and for the first time in fifteen years it occurs to Gabriel that Sam might be lonely, with only his father, his brother and his semi-imaginary guardian angel for company. He sits next to Sam on the sofa.
“You don't hunt with me Sam, you know that.”
Sam shakes his head. “I know,” he says quietly, and the desolation in his voice makes a lump form in Gabriel's throat. “I hate having to choose between you all the time.”
“You think I'm making you choose?”
“No, I think Dad is making me choose. Every damned day. It's not fair. I hate hunting, I hate all of it. I want us to be normal. Why is that such a bad thing?”
“It's not a bad thing,” Gabriel assures him. “But normal is kind of overrated. I've never liked normal myself. It's sort of synonymous with 'boring.'”
“You might not even be real. How am I supposed to be normal when both sides of my family think the other side doesn't exist?”
Gabriel shrugs and decides not to comment on the last declaration. Instead, he says, “I don't think you were ever meant to be normal, bucko.”
It's the wrong thing to say. With a glare Sam springs to his feet, disappears into his bedroom and slams the door behind him.
~*~
Sam is sixteen when he gets sick. It takes Gabriel entirely by surprise, which is somehow sort of ludicrous, because it's not the first time Sam has been sick ―there have been colds and flus and the chicken pox when he was five, and a broken arm when he was twelve. This time though, it's completely different. Sam's been arguing all day with someone ―Gabriel assumes it's John― about a hunt. He's protesting, surprisingly enough, that he doesn't want to get left behind. There's something different about this, Gabriel can't help but think, watching the one-sided argument take place. Sam's been on edge since he awoke, and barely acknowledged his presence, entirely engaged with the family that Gabriel can't see and has resigned himself to never seeing for as long as both he and Sam are together. Finally though, Sam turns to him.
“Can't you talk to him?” he asks, eyes bright, filled with hope and unshed tears.
Gabriel shrugs. “He can't hear me, kiddo, you know that.”
Sam punches the nearest wall, hard enough that Gabriel worries he's broken his hand. A small piece of plaster falls to the floor, shattering into powder. “Oh, sorry,” he spits at his unseen interlocutor. “I forgot that the goddamned furniture is more important than me!” He flinches at words that Gabriel can't hear. “Yes, sir.”
With that, he turns and stalks into his room, not even bothering to shut the door, and Gabriel assumes that means that John and Dean have left.
He pads quietly into the room and sees Sam is lying face down on the bed, hands curled into fists and pulled against his chest in what looks like a very uncomfortable position, and Gabriel can see his shoulders shaking ever so slightly in an attempt to hide the fact that he's crying. He's always had a tendency toward tears, this one, which is something Gabriel wouldn't have guessed about him when he first encountered the Winchesters. They're a hot-headed bunch sure, but he'd never seen Sam cry ―unless it was that one time when he'd killed Dean permanently in that parking lot in Broward County.
"Hey bucko," he perches on the end of the bed and wonders, not without a little self-deprecating irony, when he became the Clarence to Sam's George Bailey. "You want to tell me what that was about?"
"Nothing."
"Uh-huh. Apart from nothing?"
"They're leaving me," Sam's voice is muffled by the pillow.
"But they're coming back," he points out reasonably and then promptly asks himself exactly when he became the voice of reason around here. Wonders will never cease. "You know that. And I'm here."
"They always leave," Sam sits up and scrubs at his eyes. "And one day they're never going to come back and what do I do then?" He rests his head in his hands. "I don't want to bury my family, Gabe."
Gabriel surprises himself by reaching over and ruffling Sam's hair. "You won't. Not any time soon, I promise."
Sam flinches at his touch, and Gabriel feels ridiculously wounded at that. "How do you know?"
"I can see the future."
Sam squints at him. "Can you?"
"In a way. I do know none of you are going to die for many years yet." It's a safe enough lie he thinks. After all, 'many years' can mean a lot of things and Sam will be twenty-three when his father dies. Seven years is a decently long time for a human. Sam is still squinting at him, as though he's staring into a bright light and that sets off alarms in Gabriel's head. He hasn't spent this long looking out for the kid to miss that sort of warning sign. "You feeling okay?"
Sam shrugs. "I have a headache," he mutters.
"Yeah? You want to lie down?"
Sam shakes his head. "No. I just... I keep... it keeps getting worse."
"What does?"
The kid bites his lip and looks away. "I don't think any of this is real and I hate it. I want you to be real. I want it all to change and it won't and that means Dad's going to die and Dean... and all of them."
Gabriel feels something cold trickle down his back. "I don't understand, Sam. What do you mean?"
Sam just shrugs again. "You ever get the feeling that you've lived through this all before?"
"Like déjà vu?"
Sam flinches. "Yeah. Exactly like that," he says pointedly and Gabriel feels his face heat up. "I think this is... I don't know. I know some of this already. I know you, so why wouldn't Dad and Dean be able to see you, and I can? We're supposed to hunt the things people can't see. Creatures that hurt people."
"You can't hunt me, Sam," he says quietly.
"But you hurt people."
Gabriel sighs, nods. "I have, yeah. But that's why I'm here now, to make up for that. That's why we're together."
"So I'm your punishment?" Sam snorts. "Figures."
On impulse, Gabriel moves forward and gathers Sam into his arms, even though the kid is far too old for that sort of thing anymore. "No, kiddo. You're not my punishment. I think you're meant to be my salvation."
~*~
The headache turns into a fever not long afterward, a bad one at that. As far as Gabriel can tell, Dean and John are still gone on their imaginary hunt in Sam's imaginary world ―he still refuses to believe that he's the imaginary one in all of this― and Sam and he are left alone in their desolate little cabin.
"Is it weird that I remember this?" Sam asks, curled up on his bed, the lights dimmed as far as they'll go. He's sweating, face flushed, one hand shielding his eyes even from the dim light. "I remember this. They left, and everything hurt, and when I woke up I was in the hospital."
Gabriel has no idea what to do with that. "I don't know," he admits. "I'm sort of winging it here. No pun intended."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing," he says hurriedly. "There's no hospital here, Sam. You're going to have to make do with me. Can you tell me what you remember? What they said was wrong with you?"
"Meningitis," Sam mumbles into his pillow. "I remember. Dean and I looked it up afterward. Dad said it was like practice for researching hunts, so it was okay. My head hurts," he adds, and if there's a definite whine creeping into his voice, Gabriel can't really blame him.
He knows everything there is to know about how humans work, and yet he knows he doesn't understand human suffering, not really. He strokes Sam's forehead, and wonders just what he's supposed to do about this. Sam obviously survived this bout with meningitis as a teenager, but that was in the real world, with a hospital and proper equipment. How it's supposed to translate here, where none of their physical bodies are truly real, is beyond him. Like him, Sam is used to occupying a physical body and Gabriel doesn't know if that makes it better or worse. If Sam thinks his body is dying, will it destroy his soul too?
"Hang in there, Sammy," he murmurs and goes to find a basin and a cloth. When he returns Sam's eyes are closed, but the boy sighs and relaxes ever so slightly when he wipes his face with the cloth and Gabriel feels slightly less useless for it.
Sam's fever worsens after that, until he's whimpering incoherently on the bed, mumbling his brother's name. The only words Gabriel can get out of him other than 'Dean' are 'it hurts,' and damn if that doesn't make something clench unpleasantly inside his chest. So he talks to Sam, presses cold compresses to his forehead and ice packs to the rest of his body in an attempt to cool him down and reassures him that everything's going to be just fine, even though he's sure the kid is beyond hearing him right now. The physical Sam never suffered any repercussions from this that Gabriel knows of, but he's not sure whether or not that will work here and he's leery of taking that risk, but he doesn't know what else he can do. He's only one man, after all and not much of a man at that. Suddenly he stops and laughs at himself. He's been thinking of himself as a man for far too long, because that's how Sam thinks of him, but there's more to him than that and it's high time he remembered it.
Very carefully he gets up out of his chair and moves onto the bed, sitting by Sam's hip. Sam shifts a little, mutters something under his breath with a small sigh, then settles back again when Gabriel strokes his forehead.
"It's okay, Sam," he says quietly. "You just lie quietly, okay? I'm going to fix this." It takes more effort than he thought it would, but when he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can almost feel what it used to be like when he was God's favoured messenger, his herald on earth and in heaven alike. He uses the ghost, the memory of that feeling, allowing it to suffuse him and with a flexing of muscles long disused he unfurls his wings, feeling them stretch gloriously to either side until the tips brush against the walls of the room long before they've reached their natural span. Even at this limited range it feels wonderful to sense them again, their weight and heft, and he allows himself to luxuriate in the sensation for just a moment. Then he leans forward and pulls Sam into his arms, an unresisting weight, and carefully folds his wings around him.
"Just hold on for me, Sam," he says. "You're not meant to leave this world just yet. Trust me on this."
~*~
As Sam grows older, starts filling into the physical body that's been built for him in this world, the carefully-constructed universe of Purgatory begins to disintegrate faster and faster around them. Try as he might, Gabriel can't seem to keep anything he's built from crumbling away, and he's forced to expend more and more effort on keeping the prowling inhabitants of Purgatory at bay, rather than focusing on the material aspects of their surroundings. It's worse at night, when he can hear them snorting and growling and hissing, always just out of sight, no matter how quickly he turns to try to spot them. Thus far he's been successful, but they're growing bolder, stronger, and he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to hold out against them.
The more Gabriel concentrates on keeping the external threats at bay, though, the more distant Sam becomes, at least mentally. For what little it's worth, Sam seems genuinely sad about it.
"It just doesn't seem real," he tells Gabriel on a day when he's not locked somewhere inside his own head, talking to his brother or arguing with his father or reliving some long-ago hunt. "It all keeps getting fainter and fainter. What if Dad's right?"
"He's not," Gabriel tells him, but he's no longer sure about that.
"I don't want to lose you," Sam says a little desperately. "You're my only friend except for Dean and he has to be because he's my brother. You're the only person who likes me because of me."
Gabriel looks away. "I'm sorry." Sam's already gone though, his gaze locked on something Gabriel can't see. It was easier when Sam was a child, he thinks. Or at least, when his soul was still a child. There was nothing to it then: just some Lego blocks and some funny stories and a trip to the park. There was no conflict between brothers, no conflict between father and son, no one to constantly tell Sam that what he was seeing wasn't true. At seventeen, Sam is too old for imaginary friends, has been for at least ten years, and so he doesn't ever mention Gabriel out loud to his family, always waits until he's alone before talking to him again.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" he asks one day, when he's making himself a sandwich at the kitchen table. It's such a mundane activity, his tone so normal, that Gabriel is honestly surprised he's not asking him to pass the mayonnaise instead.
"Nope. But then, if I'm really a voice in your head, it would be perfectly normal for me to tell you you're not crazy. Here's a trick," Gabriel tells him. "If you think you're crazy, then you're probably not. It's the people who are convinced they're not crazy that are the ones you need to watch out for."
"I didn't mean you," Sam huffs. "I meant everything else. How can I remember all these hunts that Dad and Dean are going on, before they even happen? And it's not like I'm seeing the future, or anything. I just remember them, like they've already happened."
This isn't the first time they've had this conversation and not for the first time, Gabriel hedges. He's not sure why he's so reluctant to tell Sam that he really has lived through all this before, in a different guise, he just knows that he wants to postpone the moment of truth for as long as he possibly can. The day Sam finds out what's really happening, he thinks, is the day it's all going to go horribly wrong.
Sam puts down his sandwich to look out the window. "The world's melting."
Gabriel sighs. "Is it?"
"I don't want to move again. I hate moving. I hate always being the new kid, always being the freak. I just wish we could pick a spot and settle down, for once. Why does everything always have to change?"
Gabriel moves to the window, sees the trees and the run-down apartment complex across the street begin to blur into an indistinct mass of colour, dripping onto the ground below and forming a puddle. The ceiling begins to drip, splashing white paint onto the blue linoleum of the kitchen floor.
"I know," he says. "But it's not like we have a choice here. Is there anywhere in particular you'd like to go?"
Sam shrugs. "It's not like I have a choice either, is it? Wherever Dad says we're gonna go next, that's where I'll be."
Gabriel looks at his hand, fingers poised to snap them somewhere else. He's always been the one in charge of deciding where they're going to go, or at least that's what he thought. But now he wonders if all the places he's snapped them to in the past haven't been pre-ordained, like everything else in the Winchesters' existence.
~*~
A few months before Sam turns eighteen he breaks his leg in three places on a hunt. Gabriel doesn't even see it happen, because as far as he knows Sam has been with him the entire time, except for how he obviously hasn't been. He sits next to Sam on his bed, looking at the pure white cast that extends from the tip of his toes all the way up past his mid-thigh and wonders just how the hell he managed to blink and miss this. He's losing touch with Sam, he thinks, when the boy points out that Dean drove him to the hospital.
"Dad's concussion was too bad, or I guess he would have driven. But Dean does love driving the Impala, so I guess it worked out for him," he remarks, staring at the ceiling. "Dean killed the skinwalker, too. Nailed it in one shot, silver bullet right to the heart. Dad was real proud."
He can hear the bitterness of the unspoken word. John Winchester is never proud of Sam, not within earshot at the very least. Sam has stopped complaining about it, but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel it every minute of every day. Gabriel knows, because he's become little more than Sam's confidant by now. Sam doesn't know everything else that he does on a daily basis, because he can't see it anymore. He can't see Gabriel making the rounds of wherever it is they're staying, marking every entrance, every window, every doorstep. Doesn't hear the banishing rituals, doesn't know what threats Gabriel is keeping from them all. There may be monsters at the door, but they're nothing compared to the demons gnawing at Sam from the inside.
"I applied to go to college," he tells Gabriel, pushing himself up on his elbows. "I didn't even tell Dean, but I think maybe he suspects. Dad thinks it's a waste of time, but I got a letter back from Stanford, before the hunt..." He's waiting for Gabriel to say something.
"What did the letter say?"
Sam's face lights up. "I got in. They want to give me a scholarship. A full ride."
Gabriel's stomach clenches. "That's good."
"Aren't you happy for me?" Sam's face falls, and not for the first time Gabriel feels a little like he just kicked a puppy for being too happy. "I thought at least you would be."
"Of course," Gabriel looks away. "I just... I don't know if I can keep you safe when you're there."
"You can't protect me forever." Gabriel turns to stare at Sam, who's looking back just as intently. He still looks like a child, not fully grown into his body, hazel eyes bright and hopeful, but there's something there now, he thinks, that might not have been there before.
"Maybe not, but I have to try."
Sam just nods.
~*~
The next thing Gabriel knows, Sam is gone, and the world has turned grey all around him again.
~*~
Go to Part 3
Go to Part 1
Part 2 ―Protégé
As Sam’s soul grows stronger, it becomes increasingly difficult for Gabriel to keep them both hidden from the other denizens of Purgatory. It’s worth it, he thinks, watching it grow from a tiny, wondering spark into a little flame that burns brightly and steadily, even in the darkest of night. Unfortunately, it also makes it a glowing beacon to everything for miles around –or whatever passes for miles in Purgatory.
For a while he takes to walking everywhere with Sam, ignoring the protests about just how embarrassing it is, and how Dean never had to be walked to school and he turned out just fine. There is no school that Gabriel has ever been able to detect. As far as he knows, Sam is always with him, and there are no other people around that he can see. The few people who were there in the beginning, who always felt slightly wrong, are nowhere to be found, and although he doesn't know it for sure, Gabriel suspects that it has something to do with the energy being spent by Sam's soul on rebuilding itself. He long ago figured out that whatever surrounds them stems from Sam, that he himself is something like a conduit, or perhaps a catalyst. Inanimate objects are easy to create, but people are far too complex, too draining, and so he and Sam are alone. Or, rather, Gabriel is alone, and Sam's world is populated by living memories that Gabriel can't see.
Dean is a perplexing presence in Sam’s life, one that Gabriel is quite sure he’s never going to understand fully. It doesn’t help that he can’t see or hear him at all, even though of late he’s felt something different in the quality of the air around them. Part of him hopes, perhaps in vain, that something of his old power is being restored to him. It’s been more than ten years ―or what counts as ten years in this place, which might be ten seconds or ten millennia elsewhere for all he knows ―since he felt that first spark that allowed him to banish the creature trying to breach his first home with Sam, and for the most part he’s tried very hard not to feed the hope that, perhaps, he will recover his grace at the end of all of this.
What’s most surprising to him, even after all this time, is that he finds he actually likes Sam. Before this task was given to him, he had never bothered to have feelings for any mortal being –they were beneath his notice, really, unless he was bored and wanted to amuse himself by torturing the ones who got above themselves in life. When Sam and Dean had first crossed his path he had worried slightly, because a pair of hunters could certainly make his life more difficult, but soon the worry had turned to amusement and then delight at the potential mayhem he could wreak at their expense.
Gabriel never bothered to examine his feelings about Sam and Dean after that either ―not even when he allowed himself to be dragged, however reluctantly, back into the fray with his brethren. It was almost too difficult just to draw his sword against his brother, which didn’t leave much room for anything else, let alone wasting time wondering about two humans –even if they were special and had great destinies and blah blah blah. Now, though, he has all the time in the world and then some. And, he has to be honest with himself (he thinks that might kind of be the point, here), Sam’s a good kid. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember that there’s more to it than this –just a kid and his guardian– that there’s an end game that even he might not be aware of. It’s the most extreme form of arrogance to pretend to know the will of God, and even at his worst Gabriel has never been quite that foolhardy.
Once he manages to take Sam somewhere normal-looking –a park with a baseball diamond– and he lets him tear off at top speed. Gabriel finds himself a seat among the empty bleachers and watches him play his own complicated imaginary games, the only kind available to him here, in this wasteland where he’s alone save for a fallen archangel for company. He looks up to see Sam waving madly at him from across the field, waves back and grins in spite of himself.
At that precise moment that he realizes exactly what his Father meant when he spoke of love.
~*~
~*~
When Sam turns fourteen years old, Gabriel loses him for the first time.
He awakens from a deep sleep, expecting to find himself in the bed in which he lay down, with carefully-constructed sunlight seeping in through the carefully-constructed window of his carefully-constructed apartment. Instead, he’s surrounded by nothing but grey. For a moment he wonders if he’s gone blind, but a hand held up before his face proves to him that nothing of the sort has happened: he’s just not where he expected to be.
He gets to his feet and the mist swirls around him, thick and cloying. There's nothing under his feet, nothing over his head, nothing all around him. It's almost as though the whole world has ceased to exist.
“Sam?” he calls out, and his voice is swallowed by the grey. There's no reply. “Sam! Where are you?”
What happens to a soul when all of physical matter in the world is gone and can't contain it? Sam could be anywhere. He might have dissolved or floated away, any number of a myriad of different ways.
“Sam!”
He wades through the mist as though it was a lake, remembers countless times he's wandered through places like this. They are the interstices of reality, places which consist of nothing but thought, nothing but the simple whim of the gods. He was a god once ―or a demi-god. He's created places like this. He's sent countless souls to be lost among the winding trails of nothingness and never once gave them a second thought. He's sent heroes along journeys through the mists, never caring if they came through at all; though he was always a little pleased when they figured out the path, when turned out to be cleverer than he gave them credit for. Now he wonders if this irony isn't a little thick, even for him.
“Sam!”
He doesn't know how long he's been looking. It could be hours or years or centuries. Time has no meaning in this place and he should know that better than most. He could be turning in circles for all he knows, or walking in place on an invisible treadmill. He might never find Sam. He's beginning to tire, even though he never expected that could happen in this place. The fog is all-encompassing and cold, leeching the warmth from his body. Gradually he becomes aware of other presences in the cloying nothing, can feel something malevolent lurking just out of sight, creeping about the edges of his awareness, waiting for him to weaken more. He reaches out, fingers threading through the swirling tendrils of mist and has to fight off a sudden surge of despair that wells up in his chest.
“God, please let me find him. Please,” the whisper turns into a prayer, and it feels blessedly natural. “Please, Father... I have to keep him safe.”
There's a flicker of warmth then, as though someone struck a match in his chest and he feels a tug on his heart, pulling him definitely in one direction. He glances in the direction he thinks is up, and allows gratitude to suffuse him. “Thank you,” he breathes and starts walking again.
He finds Sam curled into a tight ball, hidden away under the mist.
“Sammy, it's me. You okay?”
The boy uncurls slowly and doesn't even correct him on his use of the diminutive, which means he must have been pretty damned terrified. “Everything's gone.”
Gabriel reaches down and takes his hand. “I know, but I think we can build it again. The place is changing, that's all. Don't be afraid.”
Sam lets Gabriel pull him to his feet, then throws himself against him, wrapping his arms around his waist. “I fell asleep, and when I woke up everything was gone. I couldn't find Dean or Dad or anyone... I thought you were all gone,” he chokes.
“Aww, kiddo,” he hugs Sam as hard as he can. “I promise, I won't leave you. None of us will, okay? Come on, let's go find a new place to build, okay?”
Sam scrubs at his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Okay.”
Gabriel leads him back into the mist.
~*~
They move into a cabin in the woods. Sam sulks the entire time, from the moment Gabriel comes up with this admittedly brilliant plan, to the day they arrive at the cabin and Sam discovers it doesn't even have a colour television.
“What are we hunting this time, anyway?”
Gabriel looks at him sharply. “We're not hunting anything.”
Sam's expression is sceptical. “Come on. We're in the middle of nowhere in the woods. We have to be hunting something. Dad hasn't said a word, but I can tell Dean's about to explode from excitement, and that means we're hunting something. What is it?”
“Nothing, I'm telling you,” Gabriel huffs. “Why is it that hard to believe?”
“We're always hunting something.”
He doesn't know what to say to that. He doesn't understand entirely how this world works for Sam. The kid knows who Gabriel is, but he retreats into his own space more and more these days. From what little he says, Gabriel thinks he might be reliving or re-experiencing his old life, or perhaps just remembering it especially vividly, in relevant bits and snatches. Like a really bizarre highlight reel. As far as Gabriel can tell Sam is always there, where he can see him, and yet Sam sometimes doesn't remember things that have happened during the day, replacing the events with ones from his past life instead, or else incorporating their current situation into his memories, twisting them until they make a certain kind of sense. Sometimes he'll go as far as to re-enact some of the memories out loud, which serves only to make Gabriel feel like even more of a spectator than ever.
It's perplexing and not a little troubling for Gabriel to feel as though he's Sam's imaginary friend. He's been feeling stronger too, first after banishing the creature that had come for Sam when he was a toddler, and especially so after they got lost in the mist. It feels almost insulting to be relegated to a secondary role in Sam's life when it's Gabriel who's kept him safe all these years.
What's more troubling is that he still can't see Dean and John the way Sam apparently can. He doesn't understand how Sam can be here and still in that other place, with them and he doesn't like it one bit. It's not that he's jealous of Dean and John. That would be ridiculous, but it is a little galling to be treated as though somehow he's less real than they are, as though he has less of a claim over Sam than they do. Because that's not what it's about, not at all. Sam is his responsibility, decreed by God no less. The fact that Sam's blood relatives still have a claim... well, Gabriel has never really been accustomed to sharing anything with anyone, let alone something like this with people he can't even see. He kind of wishes he could will them away with a snap, like he has almost every other nuisance in his life, but something tells him it's just not that simple.
Sam pulls his knees up to his chest and rests his cheek on them, fiddling with a frayed thread from where his knee has poked a hole through the denim of his jeans. He's grown tall all of a sudden ―all elbows and knees and hands and feet that are too large for him― and for the first time in fifteen years it occurs to Gabriel that Sam might be lonely, with only his father, his brother and his semi-imaginary guardian angel for company. He sits next to Sam on the sofa.
“You don't hunt with me Sam, you know that.”
Sam shakes his head. “I know,” he says quietly, and the desolation in his voice makes a lump form in Gabriel's throat. “I hate having to choose between you all the time.”
“You think I'm making you choose?”
“No, I think Dad is making me choose. Every damned day. It's not fair. I hate hunting, I hate all of it. I want us to be normal. Why is that such a bad thing?”
“It's not a bad thing,” Gabriel assures him. “But normal is kind of overrated. I've never liked normal myself. It's sort of synonymous with 'boring.'”
“You might not even be real. How am I supposed to be normal when both sides of my family think the other side doesn't exist?”
Gabriel shrugs and decides not to comment on the last declaration. Instead, he says, “I don't think you were ever meant to be normal, bucko.”
It's the wrong thing to say. With a glare Sam springs to his feet, disappears into his bedroom and slams the door behind him.
~*~
Sam is sixteen when he gets sick. It takes Gabriel entirely by surprise, which is somehow sort of ludicrous, because it's not the first time Sam has been sick ―there have been colds and flus and the chicken pox when he was five, and a broken arm when he was twelve. This time though, it's completely different. Sam's been arguing all day with someone ―Gabriel assumes it's John― about a hunt. He's protesting, surprisingly enough, that he doesn't want to get left behind. There's something different about this, Gabriel can't help but think, watching the one-sided argument take place. Sam's been on edge since he awoke, and barely acknowledged his presence, entirely engaged with the family that Gabriel can't see and has resigned himself to never seeing for as long as both he and Sam are together. Finally though, Sam turns to him.
“Can't you talk to him?” he asks, eyes bright, filled with hope and unshed tears.
Gabriel shrugs. “He can't hear me, kiddo, you know that.”
Sam punches the nearest wall, hard enough that Gabriel worries he's broken his hand. A small piece of plaster falls to the floor, shattering into powder. “Oh, sorry,” he spits at his unseen interlocutor. “I forgot that the goddamned furniture is more important than me!” He flinches at words that Gabriel can't hear. “Yes, sir.”
With that, he turns and stalks into his room, not even bothering to shut the door, and Gabriel assumes that means that John and Dean have left.
He pads quietly into the room and sees Sam is lying face down on the bed, hands curled into fists and pulled against his chest in what looks like a very uncomfortable position, and Gabriel can see his shoulders shaking ever so slightly in an attempt to hide the fact that he's crying. He's always had a tendency toward tears, this one, which is something Gabriel wouldn't have guessed about him when he first encountered the Winchesters. They're a hot-headed bunch sure, but he'd never seen Sam cry ―unless it was that one time when he'd killed Dean permanently in that parking lot in Broward County.
"Hey bucko," he perches on the end of the bed and wonders, not without a little self-deprecating irony, when he became the Clarence to Sam's George Bailey. "You want to tell me what that was about?"
"Nothing."
"Uh-huh. Apart from nothing?"
"They're leaving me," Sam's voice is muffled by the pillow.
"But they're coming back," he points out reasonably and then promptly asks himself exactly when he became the voice of reason around here. Wonders will never cease. "You know that. And I'm here."
"They always leave," Sam sits up and scrubs at his eyes. "And one day they're never going to come back and what do I do then?" He rests his head in his hands. "I don't want to bury my family, Gabe."
Gabriel surprises himself by reaching over and ruffling Sam's hair. "You won't. Not any time soon, I promise."
Sam flinches at his touch, and Gabriel feels ridiculously wounded at that. "How do you know?"
"I can see the future."
Sam squints at him. "Can you?"
"In a way. I do know none of you are going to die for many years yet." It's a safe enough lie he thinks. After all, 'many years' can mean a lot of things and Sam will be twenty-three when his father dies. Seven years is a decently long time for a human. Sam is still squinting at him, as though he's staring into a bright light and that sets off alarms in Gabriel's head. He hasn't spent this long looking out for the kid to miss that sort of warning sign. "You feeling okay?"
Sam shrugs. "I have a headache," he mutters.
"Yeah? You want to lie down?"
Sam shakes his head. "No. I just... I keep... it keeps getting worse."
"What does?"
The kid bites his lip and looks away. "I don't think any of this is real and I hate it. I want you to be real. I want it all to change and it won't and that means Dad's going to die and Dean... and all of them."
Gabriel feels something cold trickle down his back. "I don't understand, Sam. What do you mean?"
Sam just shrugs again. "You ever get the feeling that you've lived through this all before?"
"Like déjà vu?"
Sam flinches. "Yeah. Exactly like that," he says pointedly and Gabriel feels his face heat up. "I think this is... I don't know. I know some of this already. I know you, so why wouldn't Dad and Dean be able to see you, and I can? We're supposed to hunt the things people can't see. Creatures that hurt people."
"You can't hunt me, Sam," he says quietly.
"But you hurt people."
Gabriel sighs, nods. "I have, yeah. But that's why I'm here now, to make up for that. That's why we're together."
"So I'm your punishment?" Sam snorts. "Figures."
On impulse, Gabriel moves forward and gathers Sam into his arms, even though the kid is far too old for that sort of thing anymore. "No, kiddo. You're not my punishment. I think you're meant to be my salvation."
~*~
The headache turns into a fever not long afterward, a bad one at that. As far as Gabriel can tell, Dean and John are still gone on their imaginary hunt in Sam's imaginary world ―he still refuses to believe that he's the imaginary one in all of this― and Sam and he are left alone in their desolate little cabin.
"Is it weird that I remember this?" Sam asks, curled up on his bed, the lights dimmed as far as they'll go. He's sweating, face flushed, one hand shielding his eyes even from the dim light. "I remember this. They left, and everything hurt, and when I woke up I was in the hospital."
Gabriel has no idea what to do with that. "I don't know," he admits. "I'm sort of winging it here. No pun intended."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing," he says hurriedly. "There's no hospital here, Sam. You're going to have to make do with me. Can you tell me what you remember? What they said was wrong with you?"
"Meningitis," Sam mumbles into his pillow. "I remember. Dean and I looked it up afterward. Dad said it was like practice for researching hunts, so it was okay. My head hurts," he adds, and if there's a definite whine creeping into his voice, Gabriel can't really blame him.
He knows everything there is to know about how humans work, and yet he knows he doesn't understand human suffering, not really. He strokes Sam's forehead, and wonders just what he's supposed to do about this. Sam obviously survived this bout with meningitis as a teenager, but that was in the real world, with a hospital and proper equipment. How it's supposed to translate here, where none of their physical bodies are truly real, is beyond him. Like him, Sam is used to occupying a physical body and Gabriel doesn't know if that makes it better or worse. If Sam thinks his body is dying, will it destroy his soul too?
"Hang in there, Sammy," he murmurs and goes to find a basin and a cloth. When he returns Sam's eyes are closed, but the boy sighs and relaxes ever so slightly when he wipes his face with the cloth and Gabriel feels slightly less useless for it.
Sam's fever worsens after that, until he's whimpering incoherently on the bed, mumbling his brother's name. The only words Gabriel can get out of him other than 'Dean' are 'it hurts,' and damn if that doesn't make something clench unpleasantly inside his chest. So he talks to Sam, presses cold compresses to his forehead and ice packs to the rest of his body in an attempt to cool him down and reassures him that everything's going to be just fine, even though he's sure the kid is beyond hearing him right now. The physical Sam never suffered any repercussions from this that Gabriel knows of, but he's not sure whether or not that will work here and he's leery of taking that risk, but he doesn't know what else he can do. He's only one man, after all and not much of a man at that. Suddenly he stops and laughs at himself. He's been thinking of himself as a man for far too long, because that's how Sam thinks of him, but there's more to him than that and it's high time he remembered it.
Very carefully he gets up out of his chair and moves onto the bed, sitting by Sam's hip. Sam shifts a little, mutters something under his breath with a small sigh, then settles back again when Gabriel strokes his forehead.
"It's okay, Sam," he says quietly. "You just lie quietly, okay? I'm going to fix this." It takes more effort than he thought it would, but when he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can almost feel what it used to be like when he was God's favoured messenger, his herald on earth and in heaven alike. He uses the ghost, the memory of that feeling, allowing it to suffuse him and with a flexing of muscles long disused he unfurls his wings, feeling them stretch gloriously to either side until the tips brush against the walls of the room long before they've reached their natural span. Even at this limited range it feels wonderful to sense them again, their weight and heft, and he allows himself to luxuriate in the sensation for just a moment. Then he leans forward and pulls Sam into his arms, an unresisting weight, and carefully folds his wings around him.
"Just hold on for me, Sam," he says. "You're not meant to leave this world just yet. Trust me on this."
~*~
As Sam grows older, starts filling into the physical body that's been built for him in this world, the carefully-constructed universe of Purgatory begins to disintegrate faster and faster around them. Try as he might, Gabriel can't seem to keep anything he's built from crumbling away, and he's forced to expend more and more effort on keeping the prowling inhabitants of Purgatory at bay, rather than focusing on the material aspects of their surroundings. It's worse at night, when he can hear them snorting and growling and hissing, always just out of sight, no matter how quickly he turns to try to spot them. Thus far he's been successful, but they're growing bolder, stronger, and he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to hold out against them.
The more Gabriel concentrates on keeping the external threats at bay, though, the more distant Sam becomes, at least mentally. For what little it's worth, Sam seems genuinely sad about it.
"It just doesn't seem real," he tells Gabriel on a day when he's not locked somewhere inside his own head, talking to his brother or arguing with his father or reliving some long-ago hunt. "It all keeps getting fainter and fainter. What if Dad's right?"
"He's not," Gabriel tells him, but he's no longer sure about that.
"I don't want to lose you," Sam says a little desperately. "You're my only friend except for Dean and he has to be because he's my brother. You're the only person who likes me because of me."
Gabriel looks away. "I'm sorry." Sam's already gone though, his gaze locked on something Gabriel can't see. It was easier when Sam was a child, he thinks. Or at least, when his soul was still a child. There was nothing to it then: just some Lego blocks and some funny stories and a trip to the park. There was no conflict between brothers, no conflict between father and son, no one to constantly tell Sam that what he was seeing wasn't true. At seventeen, Sam is too old for imaginary friends, has been for at least ten years, and so he doesn't ever mention Gabriel out loud to his family, always waits until he's alone before talking to him again.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" he asks one day, when he's making himself a sandwich at the kitchen table. It's such a mundane activity, his tone so normal, that Gabriel is honestly surprised he's not asking him to pass the mayonnaise instead.
"Nope. But then, if I'm really a voice in your head, it would be perfectly normal for me to tell you you're not crazy. Here's a trick," Gabriel tells him. "If you think you're crazy, then you're probably not. It's the people who are convinced they're not crazy that are the ones you need to watch out for."
"I didn't mean you," Sam huffs. "I meant everything else. How can I remember all these hunts that Dad and Dean are going on, before they even happen? And it's not like I'm seeing the future, or anything. I just remember them, like they've already happened."
This isn't the first time they've had this conversation and not for the first time, Gabriel hedges. He's not sure why he's so reluctant to tell Sam that he really has lived through all this before, in a different guise, he just knows that he wants to postpone the moment of truth for as long as he possibly can. The day Sam finds out what's really happening, he thinks, is the day it's all going to go horribly wrong.
Sam puts down his sandwich to look out the window. "The world's melting."
Gabriel sighs. "Is it?"
"I don't want to move again. I hate moving. I hate always being the new kid, always being the freak. I just wish we could pick a spot and settle down, for once. Why does everything always have to change?"
Gabriel moves to the window, sees the trees and the run-down apartment complex across the street begin to blur into an indistinct mass of colour, dripping onto the ground below and forming a puddle. The ceiling begins to drip, splashing white paint onto the blue linoleum of the kitchen floor.
"I know," he says. "But it's not like we have a choice here. Is there anywhere in particular you'd like to go?"
Sam shrugs. "It's not like I have a choice either, is it? Wherever Dad says we're gonna go next, that's where I'll be."
Gabriel looks at his hand, fingers poised to snap them somewhere else. He's always been the one in charge of deciding where they're going to go, or at least that's what he thought. But now he wonders if all the places he's snapped them to in the past haven't been pre-ordained, like everything else in the Winchesters' existence.
~*~
A few months before Sam turns eighteen he breaks his leg in three places on a hunt. Gabriel doesn't even see it happen, because as far as he knows Sam has been with him the entire time, except for how he obviously hasn't been. He sits next to Sam on his bed, looking at the pure white cast that extends from the tip of his toes all the way up past his mid-thigh and wonders just how the hell he managed to blink and miss this. He's losing touch with Sam, he thinks, when the boy points out that Dean drove him to the hospital.
"Dad's concussion was too bad, or I guess he would have driven. But Dean does love driving the Impala, so I guess it worked out for him," he remarks, staring at the ceiling. "Dean killed the skinwalker, too. Nailed it in one shot, silver bullet right to the heart. Dad was real proud."
He can hear the bitterness of the unspoken word. John Winchester is never proud of Sam, not within earshot at the very least. Sam has stopped complaining about it, but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel it every minute of every day. Gabriel knows, because he's become little more than Sam's confidant by now. Sam doesn't know everything else that he does on a daily basis, because he can't see it anymore. He can't see Gabriel making the rounds of wherever it is they're staying, marking every entrance, every window, every doorstep. Doesn't hear the banishing rituals, doesn't know what threats Gabriel is keeping from them all. There may be monsters at the door, but they're nothing compared to the demons gnawing at Sam from the inside.
"I applied to go to college," he tells Gabriel, pushing himself up on his elbows. "I didn't even tell Dean, but I think maybe he suspects. Dad thinks it's a waste of time, but I got a letter back from Stanford, before the hunt..." He's waiting for Gabriel to say something.
"What did the letter say?"
Sam's face lights up. "I got in. They want to give me a scholarship. A full ride."
Gabriel's stomach clenches. "That's good."
"Aren't you happy for me?" Sam's face falls, and not for the first time Gabriel feels a little like he just kicked a puppy for being too happy. "I thought at least you would be."
"Of course," Gabriel looks away. "I just... I don't know if I can keep you safe when you're there."
"You can't protect me forever." Gabriel turns to stare at Sam, who's looking back just as intently. He still looks like a child, not fully grown into his body, hazel eyes bright and hopeful, but there's something there now, he thinks, that might not have been there before.
"Maybe not, but I have to try."
Sam just nods.
~*~
The next thing Gabriel knows, Sam is gone, and the world has turned grey all around him again.
~*~
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