#hellish angel

            “Yeah, yeah, blame the demons just because we’re warped and evil.” You complained and sat up. “Couldn’t’ve been demons. I couldn’t even get in.” Sam and Dean had gotten to investigate the crime scene without you, despite having asked for your backup, because there was a barrier keeping you from even getting inside.

            A rush of power made you shudder. Demons were attuned to angels because they were everything that you weren’t, but you’d never felt like this before. Castiel wasn’t that strong, and he certainly didn’t intimidate you with his tree-hugging, human-friendly attitudes.

            “Anti-demon warding, sugarplum. Keeps the naughty ones from having too much fun where they shouldn’t be going.”

            You stood up from the bed and turned around to look towards the hotel door. Without it opening, an angel had found its way in. You narrowed your eyes – green canvas jacket, dirty-cuffed jeans, soft-looking blond hair and amber eyes. You didn’t let the vessel trick you, though. You looked pretty good yourself, when you were just counting the humanoid body you used to get around in. The sense of grace pouring out of the angel wasn’t painful, but it was alarming. That much grace had the ability to smite you into the floor in less than a second, and your survival sense told you to get the hell out.

            “Well, there’s your extra backup, boys.” You put the popcorn down on the nightstand between the twin-sized beds. “There’s no need for me here any longer.”

            You were just about to teleport yourself away before the angel snapped his fingers. Dean put up a hand quickly, flinching on impulse. “We don’t need any of the theatrics this time, short stack,” he warned.

            “It’s no biggie. C’mon, boys!” The angel grinned at them, wide and confident, and sly enough to remind you of a serpent. “You know me.”

            “That’s why we don’t want the theatrics,” Sam muttered.

            He sauntered closer. You tried again to teleport, but found your feet still in the same place they’d been seconds ago. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the angel could identify you as a demon just by looking at you – the real you, the one living inside the vessel of a long-gone human girl.

            “And who’s this naughty little thing?” He just about purred.

            “Gabriel, stop it,” Sam objected, closing his laptop and scowling at you both. “Y/N, that’s Gabriel, the archangel.” You tensed at the title and the archangel definitely noticed – his smirk widened and he tilted his head cockily.

            Dean rebelliously glared at the angel, the entity that embodied the polar opposite of you. “Arch-douche, more like.”

            “So we have another demon pal now?” Gabriel crossed his arms, feigning amusement to cover up what you suspected was suspicion. “I say, why not? It went great the first time, didn’t it, Sambo?”

            You recoiled at the mere reference to Ruby. “Oh, please,” you spat, disgusted. “I’m not that insane mega-bitch. Letting out an archangel to play? Teaching a hunter a better way to kill us? I may be a demon, but at least I’m sane.” To bother Dean and try not to seem so intimidated, you looked at the older brother and winked. “Relatively speaking, at least.”

            Gabriel observed you critically for a second, then announced, “Anyone who Dean-o fantasizes about stabbing is a pal of mine. Until they try to take my strawberry syrup, in which case, they die.” The glint in his eyes was handsome and attractive in the way that you liked shiny jewelry, but you knew better than to take it at face value.

            So you didn’t. “I wouldn’t want to cross an archangel. Like I said.” You tapped your head. “Sane.”

            So… about your sanity? You clearly didn’t have it, because a few months later, your best friends were a hunter who used to kill demons (like you) and drink their blood and an archangel who could literally smite you into complete and utter nothingness without breaking a sweat. You reviewed your priorities a few times over the year and this was the time when you realized that you, like everyone else in the crazily messed up world of fighting the supernatural, must’ve lost your mind at some point. It just didn’t matter very much, though, because it didn’t stop you from hanging out with who you liked.

            Gabriel had become someone whom you shared popcorn with. And candy, when he snapped it up, but usually you had popcorn with extra melted butter on top. You had a little saucer cup of melted butter, like seafood restaurants served with lobster platters, and you kept dipping your popcorn into it. It was a lot of butter, and you probably would’ve stopped by now if it didn’t bother Sam so much. He looked disgusted.

            “What about a witch?” Sam suggested. Dean sent him a dirty glower for even suggesting his least favorite opponents.

            “Nah,” you answered before putting another piece of popcorn in your mouth. “I’d have sensed if there were another demon around to power witchcraft.”

            Gabriel took the bowl of popcorn away from between the two of you and put it on the other side of his lap. “But I would’ve sensed it first,” he established, taking a piece of popcorn and aiming for Dean’s head.

            “How could you sense anything when you’re so busy being smothered in your own ego?” You retorted, teleporting swiftly to his other side to steal the popcorn back. If he really wanted you not to have it, you knew you wouldn’t, but you still felt like your victory had a little bit of meaning to it.

            “Shtriga, then. Something that doesn’t rely on a demon to get its magic power?” Dean chucked a TV remote at Gabriel, who just caught it before it hit his head and handed it to you. You flipped the channel to something more interesting than that stupid, stupid hospital drama Dean liked. The hunter turned the TV off with the controls at the bottom and continued his thought. “Is there a record of this happening before in this state?”

            “Not that I’ve found in the public records or on the Internet,” Sam reported, “Except for something seventy miles away, forty years ago, that doesn’t even match the MO.” He sulked.

             “Ugh, you two are slow.” Gabriel complained, wrinkling his nose. “How long have you been in this fleabag roach trap? Three days? Four?”

            “Four,” you confirmed, sticking your tongue out at Dean.

            “Please don’t tell me you’ve been staying here, too.” Gabriel gave you a look and shifted over as if staying in the hotel had transferred its filth to you.

            “Oh, please, I’d rather spend the night in a Chicago bus station.”

            Gabriel snickered. Dean crossed his arms. “Hey, Thing One and Thing Two, can you stop being so high-and-mighty? We can’t teleport, jerkfaces.”

            You and Gabriel shared a look with each other and shook your heads. “We can’t stop,” you answered, and Gabriel elaborated with plenty of snark that your feet were glued to your figurative pedestals… kind of like his and Sam’s had been in the Japanese gameshow. Both of you snickered and exchanged a fist-bump.

            Fight scenes always look so much cooler on TV than they actually are in person. In reality, they move too quickly to follow along with what everyone’s doing. In TV, the audience sees a shot of one character throwing a punch, and the other dodging a kick, and it’s assumed that they’re happening at the same time. In the real world, things don’t move that slowly, and you can’t figure out, Sam’s over here and he needs help, but also I need to be right here and move my arm in this way to avoid being stabbed in the face.

            Being a demon definitely had some advantages, though, and in a big fight like the one you were in, you enjoyed using them. A nest of vampires had started terrorizing a small, rural town that didn’t have enough police to figure out what to do, much less actually take them on, so that was where you, the Winchesters, and Gabriel came in. The angel said he was just bored, but you weren’t sure he wasn’t trying to make sure Dean and Sam didn’t die. He’d promised Castiel they’d be fine, and although Gabriel could easily resurrect them or heal any serious injuries, he’d have to deal with his brother’s disapproving stares if anything got that far.

            You turned around on your heel, slammed the toe of your boot into a vamp’s shin, and grabbed his wrist over your head to push his arm away from you. The knife went to the side and the vampire twisted, turning and falling, and you lifted your knee up to slam him in the chest on his way down. You barely turned around before you raised a hand furiously, and another vampire went flying telekinetically into a wall, crashed through the sheetrock, and fell into the room on the other side.

            The one you’d kicked and kneed was already getting up again. You rolled your sleeves up and flipped around the big hunting knife you had gracefully confiscated.

            The fight was only a couple of more minutes, and you ended up taking out twice as many vampires as the human hunters had. It may have helped that you were able to use your powers to keep them held in one place while you picked them off. After you stopped hearing growling from the overgrown mutts, you dropped the knife and wiped your hands off on your jeans.

            “Sammy!” Dean yelled from somewhere else in the house. It was a very old property, and in some places the floor was caving, but it was also a large property and the vampires had managed to split your group up.

            Sam’s response let Dean relax. “I’m good!”

            Neither of them asked about you or Gabriel. You turned back to the archangel, who had been idly standing by the doorway and watching with boredom. The first several times he had done this, you’d been irritated. Then you’d realized that he was an archangel, and if he joined the fight, then everyone else would be a moot point. Sam and Dean felt useful when they killed the monsters, so Gabriel let them, just like a parent would let their kids do something so they’d feel accomplished, even though an adult could’ve done it much faster.

            You raised an arm to point before you said anything. “Behind-!”

            The vampire lunging for the blond’s throat was halted when Gabriel gave you a knowing smirk. He snapped his fingers and the vampire seized. Its eyes glowed golden and orange, like it was burning from the inside out, and the remains crumbled to dust on the floor.

            Not even you could do something like that. You’d known he was powerful, but… damn. This was the first time you’d seen him exercise that, and the destruction he’d caused without so much as blinking had you vanishing from the hunting party before anyone saw the shiver that went up your back. Now you fully understood what it meant when you called him an archangel.

            Knowing what Gabriel was had always been on the back of your mind, but having it shoved in your face the way Gabe had once shoved a banana cream pie in Dean’s was like getting doused in very, very cold holy water. Every time you saw the Winchesters and Gabriel after that became more stressful.

            One day, you were touching up your vessel’s lipstick (there’s no harm in enjoying looking pretty) but then Gabriel teased you about how you were already plenty noticeable already. You knew he hadn’t been trying to make a mean comment because Gabriel was many things but subtle wasn’t one of them. That didn’t stop you from suddenly, uncomfortably realizing that Gabriel didn’t just see your vessel – he saw the real you, too. The one inhabiting the vessel, the twisted, demonic “soul” inside.

            You stopped and put your lipstick away slowly. You didn’t like the idea that Gabriel saw what you really were. It was easier with humans. Sam and Dean couldn’t see how ugly and warped you had become at Hell’s hands. They just saw the body you had picked up for a ride. No matter how you manipulated that body, with clothes or bright red lipstick or heels you could literally kill with, Gabriel was always going to see the twisted blackness within you.

            It was hard to feel confident, knowing what you knew and feeling about yourself the way that you did. You couldn’t respond to his teasing. You couldn’t reply seriously, because that would give way too much information, and you couldn’t reply in jest, because it wasn’t something you could take lightly.

            You’d been flirting with the archangel regularly, but now you were speechless; not because he’d won, but because you finally realized you had no business doing it, and you threw in the towel.

            The Winchesters were aggravating, especially Dean. Where Sam could accept being wrong, Dean would scarcely admit to fault, or to blame, or to being incorrect – and he still had yet to apologize for stabbing you (twice). The last thing you ever wanted to do was play into Dean’s insufferable ego. You would never live it down. And you didn’t want to validate his poor manners – even Crowley had better manners than Dean, for Hell’s sake. You were ninety percent sure Lucifer had had better manners than Dean (when he wasn’t snapping his fingers and making people explode, at least).

            The point was that you were never going to tell Dean that he had been just a little bit right when he’d said that going in alone was a bad idea, and that maybe you should’ve sat this one out. You’d thought he was just being his normal cocky self and liked the idea of getting rid of you for a while, but he had a point, you reflected, while you were pinned to the wall by your vessel’s throat and what felt like a brick wall of angelic Grace. Angels would hesitate to kill the Winchesters, but they would love the chance to kill a demon and they wouldn’t think twice.

            It was kind of pathetic. You could survive Team Free Will for months on end, but not this stupid little cherub with a baby face and a literal child’s body. Even you thought that was skeevy. If it were a demon, fine. Demons are awful, blah, blah, blah. Angels, though, get consent first, and manipulating a kid into throwing their life away went against everything angels wanted humans to think about them, and that was a particular kind of disgusting.

            The little Hispanic girl (twelve at most) raised the hand that wasn’t trying to crush your larynx. “It’s been a long time since I got to do this,” she rasped, and maybe some of Dean’s gallows humor was actually rubbing off on you, because such a grave sentence coming from such a non-imposing little brat almost made you laugh.

            The force of Grace that had been holding you in place was suddenly lifted. You cherished the look of shock and sudden fear on the angel’s face in the split second it took you to disappear from under their hand and transport yourself halfway across the room, well out of throat-grabbing distance. The powerless angel looked up as the lights flickered and blew, sparks raining down on both of you.

            While the angel looked terrified by the much stronger power flooding the building, you were somewhat comforted. You recognized it, and you knew you were safe with it. The other angel being so horribly undermined suggested something different where she was concerned.

            The little angel’s eyes widened as she looked back at you, and then over your shoulder. You stepped aside to make a clear path between her and Gabriel, and the archangel stepped forward like a lion on the prowl. You were kind of smug.

            “What did you do?” He demanded, sounding contemptuous and furious in that calm, quiet way that could make even a god shake in their boots. “Heal her mother if she gave her consent? Feed into the protective angel bullcrap?” Gabriel sneered and flicked his hand. The angel opened her mouth and raised a hand to her chest, struggling to breathe. You watched with interest, knowing that an archangel’s rage was something very few beings would ever live to tell about.

            The angel fell to her knees and the hem of the girl’s cutesy sundress got dirty. Her eyes glowed a bright, bright, pale blue that made you flinch and move further back. You hadn’t known angels could be exorcised out of their vessels, but that was what seemed to be happening. To protect yourself from the Grace, you shielded your eyes, but despite the bright flash that followed as the angel was banished up to Heaven, you never felt an explosion of heat or holy power. Gabriel protecting you, you figured.

            “What about the kid?” You asked when the light had faded and the child laid limply on the ground. Crossing your arms, you tried not to acknowledge that you’d developed what seemed to be a moral compass since you started running with the Winchesters. “Did it kill her?”

            Gabriel stared down at the girl for a second, then shook his head. “She’ll be fine. I’ll take her home.”

            After another moment of silence, you rubbed your neck and realized you owed him some gratitude. You’d been bacon for a few minutes there. You were a strong demon, but angels were just stronger. There was a reason they were fearsome. “Thank you.”

            “Ah, well.” Gabriel held up a hand and gamely snapped his fingers. The body of the child disappeared and you guessed that when she woke up, she’d be in her bed at home, or maybe in a hospital with memory loss if he didn’t feel like tampering with the parents’ heads. “Next time someone tries to exorcise my girlfriend, they won’t get so lucky.”

            Girlfriend? You took a quick, startled look around, but you were still the only one there. An archangel had just called you his girlfriend. That had to be wrong, on so many levels. Even at Gabriel’s worst, he was still an archangel, delivering justice with the full might of heavenly wrath. You were just a demon. A sick, twisted soul, who died in the Great War and let yourself be corrupted by monsters in the hundred years since.

            You couldn’t be the girlfriend of an archangel. You were hardly a suitable girlfriend for anyone. Your feelings hurt and your head spinning, you were out of there before you even made the choice to leave. It was always primal with demons, or so Dean said – everything about fight or flight, personal gain, bloodlust. Well, for you, your best option was flight.

            You should’ve known that there wasn’t really anywhere for you to hide, not if he really wanted to find you. It seemed like he did. He gave you about an hour to yourself and then, bam, he was up in your space, invading the quiet privacy of a peaceful cabin you’d found in the Colorado mountains. It was just so… unlike Hell. Regardless of where demons came from, Hell was hell, and there’s a reason demons are always trying to escape.

            Gabriel stood behind your reclining chair while you stared at the fire burning in the hearth. The flames crackled and it reminded you of the kind of violent power that demons had. That you had. Angels were more like water. They could be incredibly destructive, but water also allowed for life in a way that fire didn’t. Just like fire and water, you were very, very aware that getting too close to the angel could hurt you, and maybe even extinguish you completely. Just because your soul was a repulsive husk of a human’s didn’t mean that you didn’t want to protect yourself. You shrank back at the idea of losing everything.

            “I take it that was a breakup,” he eventually said, his voice cool and composed. “Suppose it’s better than getting a drink thrown in my face.”

            “We weren’t together,” you mumbled, looking down at your hands. You liked your vessel’s hands. They were a good way of avoiding looking at people when you didn’t want to.

            “I thought we had something. Was I wrong?”

            You almost wanted to nod, but you had felt it. You had felt the potential. There was potential to have something, to become something good, but it was scary, and it was wrong, and things that were scary didn’t usually last very long. Especially not in the world of monsters and hunters.

            “We couldn’t,” you responsibly tried to reason. The voice that came out of your mouth was quiet and soft-spoken, barely recognizable to you as your own. “We would never last. We’re not even the same species.” You snorted. If you were baring all, then hey, go big or go home. “Nowhere near the same league.”

            Gabriel moved forward and stood beside your chair. He looked down at you. “This is because you’re a demon?” His tone was indignant and exasperated, and that was the last thing you had expected. You looked up quickly to his irritated face. “I’d kinda noticed. The fact that you’re hellspawn doesn’t matter to me, obviously, you stupid idiot.”

            Huffily, you narrowed your eyes. “Oh, thanks. I feel so much better now that I’ve been insulted.” Your sarcasm dripped from your words thickly.

            “What’s the point in judging by angel or demon, anyway?” He continued, starting to rant impatiently. “Half the angels have forgotten that we’re supposed to be the good guys and just kill whenever they feel like. There are demons now who are more trustworthy than angels. You’re a better person than hundreds of my brothers and sisters! Times change, people change, the status quo always changes, even in Heaven, and you want to act like everything is still in black and white? Haven’t you learned anything from this apocalypse?”

            Interrupting him took courage when he was this upset, but you did it anyway and trusted that if he actually cared about you, you would be safe. “I’m better than angels?” You asked skeptically, snorting. You found that extremely difficult to believe, what with how horrific you knew you must look beneath your vessel.