Chapter Text
Months were an oddly irrelevant thing to a celestial being. Gabriel had seen centuries fly by, the rise and fall of empires without batting an eye. Most would think a month or a year would seem like seconds, or milliseconds in comparison with how a human experiences time, but in truth, a few months to a several-billion-year-old being is like a half hour of a random Tuesday afternoon in spring. It could fly past, or linger, but it wasn't always easily forgotten.
Neither was his time with Paige, if that was ever a question. She was not some face, to easily fade into oblivion, the endless march of time. The six years –or now was it seven?-- that he had spent at her side, concealing his true identity, yet never forgetting what he was, and who she was destined to be, were burned into him the way the brand was seared into her tender flesh. The brand that now endured they were forever entwined.
He had always known how it would end, how it was supposed to end. He had known her name before she was created, before she took her first breath or her first cries pierced the air of life. He had known who she would be to him since it was first inscribed in the oldest text. Who she was supposed to be. She was to be the last vessel, The Horn of Gabriel, the one to announce the coming of the end of days. And just as it was written, she was even born with auburn hair that glowed copper in the sunlight. Celestial prophecy was not to be changed, but then again, he had never been one to play by all his father's rules. Yet somehow, no matter how far he ran, he would end up playing right into the hand dealt to him, just a rat in his father's great big maze. And so it was, until one sunny September afternoon, on the heels of one obnoxiously zealous youth group meeting, playing the part he was assigned, the starched collar of the button-up shirt scratchy and restrictive, when he first laid eyes on her in the flesh.
There really wasn't anything special at first, not visibly. She dressed about as modestly as all the other little snot-nosed do-gooders there, and had a quiet but sunny demeanor; eager to please. Almost too eager. It wouldn't be hard to get close to her, he figured. She would say yes to him easily, she seemed the type to comply with anything that was supposedly part of “Daddy’s divine plan.” It was almost predatory, he thought. Disgusting. He still had wanted no part in his family’s war, their bullshit manipulation, but still he could hardly let his vessel be caught in the fray. You know, just in case this one’s warranty ran out early. She was already in a dangerous position, surrounded on all sides by the ravenous followers of his eldest brother: Michael. He really did get all the perks didn’t he? It seemed like a cruel joke, how they had filled her head with all their rules and posturing. His motives at first were entirely self-serving: Keep his vessel out of trouble, just in case he ever needed a spare. It didn’t demand much of him, just be likable, stay in her good graces, maybe occasionally test the waters of her faithfulness to the church. She was so young, wide-eyed and sweet. He had no intentions of claiming her, asking her the “million dollar question,” but still, she was his. Dad rarely ever made him anything nice these days. He'd be damned if his younger brothers got their hands on her.
Whispers about the end of days were just that at first, but then they became louder, till people were practically screaming from the rooftops. Actually, counting that one incident, a few of them actually were. He’d be out of places to hide before long, at this rate, once the big bros came a-calling.
It would be easier if they were dating, he had convinced himself. Once he saw for himself what the church, her parents, just about every vestige of safehaven his poor vessel ever had, were setting her up for, for war, he had made the decision. Sure he’d promised Loki that he’d stay out of the more volatile side of his family’s affairs, but they’d forced his hand, really. Humans were so much more easily swayed when they were in love. He had to be close to her, closer than they were now. He needed to be sure she would come to him first, that she would follow him, over them, when the inevitable came.
He’d never been a one-woman sort of celestial-being, and she was certainly not his flavor of choice when it came to, well, just about everything about her. He never really had a taste for vanilla, if that made it any more obvious. In fact, he was sure the Paige he knew at the time might just die from shock or the indecency of it all if she’d ever laid eyes on some of the things he got up to on a typical “romantic evening.”
But everything changed with the visions. Everything changed when she first laid her head in his lap and cried. Poor, miserable Paige, she hardly even knew what she was crying about, not the way he did. She didn’t know her world was ending for real, or the colossal scope of the plan laid out for the universe, and how it was collapsing in around them, ticking down the days and the broken seals. She just knew that the community that had raised her was crumbling, her parents had suddenly become callous and cruel shells of themselves, and a heavy dread had gripped her each time she closed her eyes to sleep.
Suddenly, by all standards, she was alone in the world, and helpless. He was the only one there, the only one who understood. The only one who could save her.
Perhaps he had placed himself there strategically, he was only playing the long game.
But then she told him she needed him.
Then she told him that she loved him.
And he was the one helplessly unprepared.
He had never been loved before. Sure he’d heard those three words, usually in the throws of ecstasy. But never like this. Not by someone who meant it, who desperately needed it, who needed him . What was love anyway when your dad was the all-powerful creator of the universe, and your brothers were just itching to off eachother?
And then she was no longer a pretty little potential meat suit. No, she was everything.
Her smile, her voice, the way she made this weird guttural noise in place of a laugh at the most unexpected things, and the way she made every new place a home. She was so full of life, a life he had wanted so badly to understand, so radiantly divine, and yet so utterly human. She was everything about this world and the humans he had fallen in love with. Her temper was a hurricane and her tears a monsoon, but her smile was the sun itself. Dad had, in fact, made her just for him. He realized too late, just the cruel game he had been playing, the one he had been baited into as a hazard of his father’s plan. The one he was actively losing. He could never take those things from her now, knowing. He could never, ever claim her as his vessel. It must remain a secret.
He would take a blade before he told her, he vowed. He could never tell her. If she knew what his true purpose had been, she would hate him.
And he was learning, more quickly than a billion years of envying humans and their bonds with one another, that he too, somehow, was capable of love. And now that he knew it, felt it, it was a drug he could not live without.
He needed her, the way her kind needed air and food and water and sleep. All the things that were irrelevant to angels, when their grace alone sustained them.
He had his grace. But no substance, no porno, no card game could give him what she had. Not even watching some pompous assholes bite it could get him off anymore.
There was a warmth in his bones when she kissed him, a thrill, a completeness in just holding her.
Dad-Damnit what was happening to him?
He had his grace, but why did he feel so empty?
She was made for him, destined to be his, but the thought of claiming her as his vessel made him want to cut out everything that made him divine.
No. He knew why, but the answer was always so hard to grasp.
If he asked her, she would say yes. And then she would no longer exist, not really. Her beautiful smile would be his, but it would only sneer. Her beautiful voice, her laugh would only cackle, he couldn’t make it sing like she could. Her body was a vessel, but Paige was home.
And he was learning, trying to, somehow, however impossible as it was supposed to be for an archangel,
That he loved her.
Maybe that was why he’d left her behind. He knew Lucifer would be on his tail, along with just about half a dozen pagan gods. He’d broken the terms of his agreement with Loki when he’d stepped into the fray at the Elysian Motel. Sooner or later he and his kind would be out for blood. He’d have to break her heart, but heartache was better than the alternative. It was better than throwing her into the middle of everything he had tried to keep her from. That life could only end in tragedy. That was how they were, his brothers, the pagans, all of them. This way, she’d be alive, and even if he had to die, she’d be free. She would still exist in the world, with his memory. If that was all that was left of him when this was over, it was better than the alternative. If those two meathead hunters pulled it off and the world didn’t end, one day she’d be happy again. Nothing else mattered.
A little time-hopping got him the safehouse, hardly party trick for an archangel. It didn’t take much more than his usual antics to create the perfect “spooky lore” for the house: enough doom and gloom and well-timed misfortune to drive off any interested parties, but just low-profile enough that it wouldn’t attract the attention of passing hunters. The rest was a simple matter of filling it with everything that she could possibly want or ever need. The rooms were decorated in all her favorite colors, with those quirky little old-house details she’d rave about–she used to love those home design magazines, but she’d stopped looking at them in the years since they’d left. –that in particular had hurt: watching her slowly giving up on all the things that had once given her joy. It had been a slow release of any hope for a comfortable or happy future– He’d even gone back for a handful of trinkets from her childhood bedroom, just as icing on the cake.
It was almost finished, no, it was almost perfect, when he realized he was running out of time. Night after night while she slept, he’d snap himself back to that tiny town in Massachusetts, till one morning she woke, heart racing, bleary eyes full of tears like they had been so many times before, and she tried to tell him how she saw Lucifer skewer him like a shish-kabob and instead he attempted to ease her mind with useless flowers. Say what you want about fate, but Paige’s dreams were never wrong. He only had a few nights left, a handful of nights to prepare her for the inevitable. Just a few nights to prove to her how he felt, what she made him capable of feeling. He had to at least try to leave her with that much.
He had made peace with his demise, as long as she was safe. As long as she knew. But how? How could he tell her what had taken him the entire lifetime of the universe to understand?
And then those damn meddling Winchester brothers showed up, and he had been forced to improvise.
He hadn’t meant to leave her like that, within arm’s reach of his brother in a full-fledged murder tantrum, already having suffered the trauma of seeing him die not once but twice now, and soon after a third. There was supposed to be a dramatic goodbye, an explanation, something to let her know that she was free. She could start her life over in the place he had made for her, the life she had always talked about, that he could tell she had been slowly giving up on the further the course of events drifted from it. She’d be comfortable, she’d lack nothing, she’d be safe here till the end of time, if it really came. He would die, and she would no longer be a wheel in his father’s plan. It was the only way.
And he did die, or at least appeared to.
The little trick he’d pulled in the end had squeezed him out of there with only a drop or two of his grace left to spare. It had already been nearly halved, first in creating the seal that kept Paige protected, and then in charging the wards that shielded the safehouse.
His “death” had been convincing enough it would seem, to satisfy his brother, but even a whiff of his power, were he to use it, would be more than enough to set them on him like bloodhounds on the trail. An angelic bat-signal if you will.
Worse yet, they all had seen Paige’s face. They knew now who she was. Were he to run back to her now, he’d only be bringing the fight to her door. It would undo everything he’d worked for. This world he tried to keep from her, the parts of himself he had kept from her; he had never been ashamed of what he had done, the identity he had to take on as a condition of his deal with Loki, but he’d be damned if she was the one to pay the price in the end. The safehouse was warded, but not if he had a hundred angels, demons, or demigods on his tail.
It was for the best that he carry on with the plan, at least for her sake. She could carry on with her life, thinking he was dead like all the rest of them, and the world would keep turning. There was no plan for him, not anymore, no duty to heaven or earth. There was only a vagrant’s existence; to be no one. There were no more strings to pull. He couldn’t ask favors of any of his old contacts, not with a bounty on his head, not while he was out of juice. Not if there was even a fraction of a chance it could lead back to her.
Finally he could live for himself, for only himself, and for the pleasure of all the earthly things he enjoyed. But then again, what enjoyment was there in freedom when pleasure became routine? What then when the sensation left entirely?
With so little grace left, his body ached for rest, but he could not sleep. It yearned for food but he could only stomach black coffee. The sight of cake made him slightly queasy, as though his current vessel was retroactively rejecting his old life. Queasy was a new feeling. Angels could practically eat garbage and would never be sick, not that he’d ever been tempted.
Arguably the worst of all these new sensations, was how he ached for her. It was a hunger beyond the physical aching in his belly, a restlessness that had no end in sight. The few times he closed his eyes to rest, he saw her. He saw only her. Not the stripper at that joint in Pasadena that gave him a lap dance for free, not that lot-lizard at the truck stop off I-90, not the blonde from Casa Erotica 5, and not for lack of trying.
It wasn't just about sex with Paige. It never had been. Even the one time she’d let him carry her to bed and lay her down on the motel sheets at some no-star joint in Indiana.
It had been past two in the morning, they’d been on the road all day and nearly all night, and she’d been beyond exhausted when they finally found a place to spend the night. A bedtime shower, talking through the curtain had led to kissing, which led to more. It was burned into his brain how she’d wrapped herself around him when they made love, how she touched him, welcomed him. She had whispered to him in the dark how much she loved him, and he knew she meant it with every piece of her soul. She hadn’t needed to speak it aloud, he could feel it, in every kiss, every smile, every caress, this deeply penetrating warmth that held the power to undo him. That’s what had been missing from every pleasurable encounter before, and any afterwards. Nothing had felt quite the same.
He had felt the sting of leaving his family. Heaven was a home he could not return to, not as he was, not the way things were now. After two thousand years and change, he had made his peace with that reality, but still the wound would not heal. He had attempted to smother it with gratuitous indulgence, to prove he was better served on his own, but beneath it all he had ached to belong again. To be good enough, when echoes of failure penetrated his waking thoughts.
For years he had been running, from something, to something, it didn’t matter. In the end it was just running. Over time it had all become a meaningless string of self-gratification. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake.
There had been no comfort, no home until her.
Paige had chosen him, as he was. She kept choosing him, even when the illusions had all fallen. Divine prophecy and purpose be damned, she had chosen to love him, and that meant everything to him.
The stupidest part was she didn’t even know. He never got to tell her.
And now? What did he have now? It would almost be easier if the apocalypse did come.
But it didn’t. And months passed. A summer passed, and then autumn, and the ache only grew.
Paige hadn’t had so much as a cold in almost four years. This would seem like either abnormally good luck, or a superhuman immune system if she hadn’t known at least for half of that time that she had an archangel looking over her shoulder. Of course Gabriel hadn’t let her suffer, not if he could help it. He had considered it fitting retribution for all the things he couldn’t save her from. She so much as had a sniffle or perhaps a particularly bad sunburn, one kiss to her forehead and she would be right as rain. Sure he hardly needed to even touch her to use his power, but he had preferred to kiss her as often as she would let him.
In a similar vein, Paige had known irregular periods for as long as she had been a woman. Sure her mother had painstakingly given her the talk in her bedroom at thirteen, but past that some things just weren’t discussed in their prudish Catholic household. The rules of which were unspoken but clear: sex was for childbearing only, pleasure was only between husband and wife, anything else was sinful, and menstruation was a dirty and secretive thing all women must bear but never speak of. So of course a doctor was the furthest thing from her mind when the cramps returned that made it difficult to draw in a full breath at it’s worst, or when the bleeding had begun to encroach on two weeks, then three. She simply packed a few more handfuls of pads in her purse, popped a couple of Tylenol, and soldiered on, assuming that this must be only the normal perils of womanhood. What good would it do her to complain if this simply happened to everyone with a uterus? After all, it wasn’t that bad. She could keep going.
It had been a week till the opening of Dracula at the theater, ironically, when she had collapsed backstage, halfway up the stairs between stage and dressing rooms. She’d been nearly living attached to her heating pad while pulling all-nighters to get the frilly bustles all hemmed and put the finishing touches on the finely-embroidered details on the titular character’s suit and cape in time for opening night. Halfway up the narrow black-carpeted staircase with an armload of skirts, her legs had simply buckled beneath her. When the stage manager had come up after her, not even two minutes later, she had been too light headed to stand. A member of the lighting crew had driven her home early.
It had been conveyed to her somewhere in her formative years that the only time she should acceptably have a doctor poking around down there would be if she were pregnant, or trying to be. This line of logic gave her permission to refrain from normal routine examinations through most of her adulthood. She had been a virgin –well up until rather recently– and hadn’t seen much reason for it, not to mention the layers upon layers of shame at the thought of a stranger seeing her naked.
Sure, she wasn’t so naive as to think she was the only one. Thousands of women endure it, and worse, on a daily basis. But she had always felt… different. Sometimes it was that she felt broken, sometimes it was that she was somehow less of a woman and more an overgrown child, unable to cope with the implications, other times it was purely denial that these things were happening to her at all. It was these doubts that had made her feel unworthy of Gabriel in the first place, undeserving of love or physical intimacy. Even after years of being separated from the root of her insecurity and shame, their echos still paralyzed her when it came to tending to matters regarding her own health.
The incident at the theater, however, had pushed things into the light. She could not live in denial, nor did she have a choice. It was becoming unmanageable.
With a few good recommendations, and a whole lot of prompting, mostly from Annie, she sat through multiple doctors visits being poked and prodded, two ultrasounds, one MRI and an obscene number of blood draws, all over the course of the first two weeks of October.
“If this is how it is, let it be done unto me, or something, I guess…” She had thought to herself, while counting the plexiglass ceiling tiles and trying to numb herself to the sensation of the cold tools below the belt. She had tried countless times to imagine it was him touching her instead, but it never felt right.
Better simply to accept the situation at hand then try and daydream it away.
“ If this is what it means to be a real woman… then I guess I finally made it.”
By the time most of her neighborhood all had jack-o-lanterns on their porches, she was scheduled for surgery. It was supposed to be a minor thing, no more than an hour, just to have a couple of cysts removed. Her doctor had assured her it was fairly common for women her age, She’d be in and out with no lasting side-effects, but would need someone to drive her to and from the hospital after coming out of anesthesia.
Annie had volunteered. There really wasn’t anyone else logically to ask. She had made friends since working at the theater, but none that she felt comfortable seeing her in god-only-knows-what state afterwards. She’d only been put under once, at age thirteen: on the way home from the hospital she had puked up cranberry juice and saltines all over the white leather interior of her mother’s Sebring convertible.
She had warned Annie well in advance to pack a couple garbage bags just in case.
The morning of the surgery there had been frost on the grass for the first time, and the whole world sparkled like it was covered in flakes of diamond. Paige had tried to focus on that, as Annie took yet another speed bump at 40mph, and not the incessant burning in her throat from not being allowed a drink of water past midnight the night before. The old radiator had kicked on in the middle of the night with the temperature drop, and she felt quite effectively like a raisin.
The saline drip helped a little. She’d assured the nurse who did her IV that she wasn’t squeamish when it came to needles, but none the less she had kept her well-occupied with questions about her job and the theater till the deed was done.
She’d given all the routine information; allergies, medications, Annie’s contact information in case of emergency, till there was nothing left to do but wait.
The sweatshirt and pajama pants she’d arrived in had been neatly folded atop the chair across from her, while she sat in a vinyl-covered armchair in the pre-op area dressed in two hospital gowns, one very coarse flannel blanket, and their standard-issue mustard-yellow grippy socks. The silver chain of one very small medallion was twisted between her fingers. She wasn’t allowed any jewelry in the operating room, of course, but she’d slipped it out of the pocket of her pants just to have something to hold as she counted down the tense minutes till any one of the attractive pony-tailed nurses her age called her by name.
The small silver coin was engraved on one side with the image of a long-haired angel bearing in one hand a lily and the other a trumpet, on the other side was inscribed “ Pray for us.”
It had been a gift from her mother years ago, when she had received the sacrament of Confirmation.
Saint Anne had been the saint which she had chosen for her namesake, but she had not been her first choice. It had only been with heavy coercion from her father to pick a saint of the same gender that she had made the last-minute change. His outrage at the “sacrilege” of it at the time seemed absurd back then, when a handful of other 8th-graders in her catechism class had been allowed to choose whomever they pleased, regardless of gender.
Paige remembered how her mother had pressed the small silver medal into her palm as she was doing her hair that morning. One of the last remaining minute acts of rebellion the woman ever committed. In the coming years, she would lose herself to the same church. It was ironic that he would be the one to save her.
She touched the engraved picture to her lips, the metal warmed by her hands. She was sure to any passing observer, she looked the picture of piety, but all that crossed her mind at the moment was the memory of how it had felt to kiss him in the flesh.
What good would it do now, to pray to him? Even if he could hear it, he’s not coming back, or he would have by now…
…..Fuck it.
Gabriel.. I need you here.
“Paige Breighley? They’re ready for you.”
There was pain, and then there was whatever the fuck this was.
It was the pain that had woken her up. Surrounded by sterile white sheets, and checkered blue curtains for walls, she had clearly been moved out from under the halo of the operating table lights she last remembered staring up into. The droning of some kind of monitor across the room slowly came into her awareness, as well as the milling of several of the various figures in navy scrubs in her field of vision. The first instinct to sit up was immediately met with the undeniable heavy sensation of her body still mostly under the influence of the drugs. A figure beside her alerted with the movement. Hopeful, Paige turned her head.
“Hey hon.. you awake? How are you feeling?” Annie peaked out from beneath the gray beanie she had tucked the majority of her blue hair up into with her thumb marking her place in the latest edition of The Kraken’s Bride. Paige had always been an only child, but she assumed this must be what it felt like to have an older sister.
“....owwwwwwwwwwwwwww” was all she could manage to whimper in response.
“Hold on I’ll get the nurse.”
Several hot-packs, a dose of strong painkillers, and one barely-swallowed cup of diluted apple juice later, Paige was bundled up in the passenger seat of Annie’s red ‘93 Mustang with a black garbage bag held tightly in her lap and a loose threat that if she puked on the upholstery she’d be the one cleaning it. An agonizing 20 minutes later she was stumbling up the stairs and into the shower.
The nausea finally passed and she gathered the strength to pull herself up off the floor of the bathtub, dry herself off, and dress herself in her favorite pink nightgown hanging on the back of the bathroom door, in that particular order. At the sound of the heavy oak door creaking open, Annie was off the living room couch and up the stairs. With her to supervise, Paige hobbled to the bedroom, still in a bit of a stupor, and crawled into the center of the queen-sized mattress, but not before Annie had fluffed the pillows and made sure she was properly propped. Everything felt heavy, and the softness of her own sheets and stuffed animals felt like sleeping on a cloud. She wanted nothing more to sink into it and never come up for air.
“There.. Comfy?” Annie mused as it looked like the redhead was about to swoon the moment she was settled.
“As much as I can be… Thank you nurse-Annie” She mused, flashing her a weary lopsided smile.
“Don’t get used to it.. It’s just for today. You need anything else?”
“I don’t think so… You’re… not leaving yet, right?” A note of concern crept into Paige’s question.
“Nope! I’ve got all my stuff, I’ll stay as long as you need me. You get some sleep, I’ll be right here, ok?” She replied, settling herself down in a vintage-upholstered chair at the foot of the bed that Paige typically used for laundry. It wasn’t particularly comfy, at least not as much as the couches or blue armchair downstairs, but Annie made herself at home, propping her feet up on the corner of the bed and opening her paperback in her lap.
Dinner was reheated takeout from the night before. Paige was sleeping like a baby. Later the afternoon sun began to set at a post-daylight-savings 4:30pm, making it nearly impossible to continue reading, meanwhile Paige was still dead to the world. Annie felt her eyes begin to strain in the dim light, and at some point she too must have dozed off altogether, book in hand.
When she woke next, the first thing she noticed was an almost unnatural hush that had come over the room. Immediately assuming the worst, she snapped to attention, her eyes attempting to bringing a bleary vision of the darkened bedroom into focus. In the same moment that she realized her glasses must have also slipped onto the floor with her paperback, her vision settled on the silhouette of a man bent over the bed, backlit by the orange glow of sodium-vapor street lights below, filtering in through the curtains.
Too stunned to move, or even speak for a whole minute, she watched him bend down and press a kiss to Paige’s forehead and tenderly brush a few stray strands of hair that had escaped her braid away from her face. Just as she gathered the momentum to stand, intending to confront the figure, he turned to her. Eyes glowing an unnatural electric blue, he held a finger to his lips.
That was the last she could remember. The next morning she woke only with a headache and a vague memory of the crazy dream she must have had. Meanwhile Paige was already downstairs making coffee and doing the dishes without a single complaint or mention of pain.