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Memories are deadly things. They can eat at you, devour you, destroy your thoughts and mind in a matter of moments, and leave you shaking, sobbing mess on the floor.
And yet, Gabriel thinks, he would rather sit in the cage with no one but Luci for “company” for a billion, billion years than forget one second of the time he spent with Sam.
He thinks this as he runs the tip of his archangel’s blade under his fingernails, as he casually stands outside of the building that could very well hold his death. Second death. Whatever.
Lucifer is in there. More importantly,
Sam
is in there. Sam, who he’s been tracking and searching for and hunting down for the last
three months
. Three months. Three months since the fight with Amara, three months since he demolished all of the Berlin’s Olympic Village with a thought, three months since he’d lost Sam.
He wasn’t going to say it’d been an easy three months. How could it have been? For the first two weeks, Gabriel flew around the whole globe, looking for his… Sam. It shouldn’t have taken that long, hell, it should’ve taken a second, but Gabriel had made some… pit stops… along the way.
There were worse ways of dealing with his rage than leveling factories exploiting child labor, killing murders and rapists, and torturing demons.
The next two months had been spent at the Bunker, searching through spell books and magic scrolls for some way--
any way
--to find Sam. He’d gone through the whole Men of Letters’ library five times. Castiel had been through it twice. Dean had spent
days
going through the online index and catalog Sam had created, digging through the translations and copies of tomes and volumes that had been falling apart or ruined.
For the last two weeks, they’d been planning and plotting and scheming and whatever other words Cas had used to describe how they were trying to figure out how to save Sam. Everything had to go perfectly. They couldn’t risk Sam getting hurt, or worse. They’d sat hunched over the library tables for days straight, researching and debating the best possible ways to free Sam from Lucifer’s grasp. Gabriel may have broken a chair. Many beer bottles met an untimely death at the hands of a furious Dean Winchester.
Dean. If there was one guy handling this situation worse than Gabriel, it was Dean. It took four days after Sam’s disappearance for him to actually eat or sleep, and only then because Cas threatened him with angel mojo. He’d been living on ramen and rum and coke for the last three months. He’d shaved maybe once, so he had a beard that rivaled (and beat) Bobby Singer’s. When he wasn’t digging through the whole Men of Letters’ archive, he was in the shooting range, emptying round after round into silicon dummies.
And after three months of this, of agony and anguish and despair and desperation, here they were. They’d done it. They’d found Lucifer. They’d found Sam. They were going to save Sam.
And Gabriel was probably going to die in the process. He’d accepted it. He’d died for Sam before (well, for humanity, but mostly for Sam), and he’d do it again, as many times as it took. So as Dean set up the last of the wards around the church Lucifer was hiding out in--because he was an ironic, hipster drama queen like that--Gabriel went through his memories of Sam.
The first time they’d met, when Sam was nothing more than his brother’s plaything who just so happened to have a cute ass and an awe-inspiring smile.
The second time, an endless string of Tuesdays that burned in Gabriel’s gut like acid. Watching this man, this
boy
, really, become a hardened, lifeless shell full of only anger and hatred.
The third time, the time that had started out as a joke and a desperate attempt to just get the fighting over with but had ended with Gabriel standing under an artificial rain as his closest secrets were barred and aired to the world like clean laundry.
The fourth time, when he’d began to realize what he felt for Sam and realized what he had to do for the man who’d single-handedly changed his life in every way. When he was persuaded to put his life on the line for the human race. When said life was ended at the hands of his older brother, and yet Gabriel didn’t mind because Sam was safe.
When he’d awoken on that couch in the Bunker.
Every moment since.
These memories were killers, but Gabriel cherished them all the same. All for one mortal man. All for Sam.
Gabriel looked back at the church and tightened his grip on his blade. This was it. For Sam.