#tricked queue.

     The kid’s psychic presence alone actually hurts. It’s unusual and grating and the trickster turns his attention fully on him, narrowing golden eyes and reaching out with his senses..

     “--Ah, hell, kid, you're a wreck.” He squashes down his empathy ruthlessly, folding grace and mantle away, deadening his senses but protecting himself. Drugs always make people too open. Too easy to sense. Every so often you get landed with someone who starts looking back. Gabriel misses the sensation deeply and Loki resents the familiarity--but he stays anyway. Glancing from the ignorant human to the space behind him

     “I’m a little bit real,” he denies. That’s true, he thinks. A little bit real.

     “But I’m mostly in your head.” He’s tangled up in something, some part of Tony that’s dug in too hard. Or maybe he dug in.

     He doesn’t really remember. There’s not enough of him left to remember. He thinks something’s happened to him, but there’s nothing there when he reaches to see what.

     Sometimes he opens his mouth and he’s just part of Tony’s damage, part of the bits of him that lie and tell him to jump.

     Sometimes there’s more to him than that.

     Gabriel leans over the edge of the building and eyes the straight drop, not sure when he moved or how.

     “I always hated that you did this,” he informs Tony, honest but unresentful. Maybe that anger is gone too. Maybe there’s not enough left of him to feel rage and fear.

     It’s a nice thought.

     “I think I hated always loving things that wanted to fall.”

                          (brother don’t make me do this-)

Gabriel relaxes under Castiel’s wings shuffling close to the gangly vessel his brother has taken and jams his smaller body into the space, worming hands against his clothes and gripping.