Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was nothing in the world that could stop Gabriel once he abandoned himself to impulse. Rash actions gave him an addicting rush of adrenaline and purpose—the latter of which was otherwise distinctly lacking in his life.

They also provided a facade of bravery to hide the fact that beyond the showy superficial, Gabriel was a coward. If a decision had important emotional consequences, Gabriel couldn’t bring himself to make it. God forbid he be asked to take anything seriously. He’d probably break out in hives, or worse, think sensibly.

"Isn't it a little early for ski season, mon chérie?"

"Some places ski in July. November's a great time to go!" Gabriel exclaimed.

Balthazar made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. The only reason the sound wasn't completely lost to poor reception was because Gabriel patched the call through the car's Bluetooth system.

Mountains were tricky things to drive through, and Gabriel's late start (something he considered only in passing when wrestling out of his Halloween costume) might've hindered him more than he'd anticipated. Between locating his ski equipment and making a reservation, checking the forecast hadn't been high on the priority list.

"You should've at least taken a day to recover from the spirited Samhain we had.”

"I recover best in fresh air. The slopes are calling to me, Zar! New month, new adventure.”

"Will you be back for Thanksgiving? If not, you absolutely must come for Christmas. The eggnog is always best when you make it."

"Maybe," Gabriel hedged, spotting a sign for a rest stop a few miles ahead with some relief. "No guarantees."

Balthazar paused, the small silence fraught with foreboding tension. 

"Is this about Kali? Because you know I didn't invite her. I mean, I knew she was back in town, but I swear I haven't even spoken to her."

"This has nothing to do with Kali," Gabriel lied. 

Truthfully, it'd taken all he had not to bury the memories in top-notch liquor when he'd seen her in the crowd wearing red horns and a smile aimed at someone else. Somehow, Gabriel had refrained from doing anything stupider than making a sharp 180, but it'd been too late. Kali always knew how to locate him in a crowd, and she always had to have the last word.

Gabriel reminded himself he had no right to be upset. Kali had been lost to him years ago. If only he could let things go. Grudges, lovers, regrets—they all lingered, even when he did his best to pretend they didn't.

Skiing would be healthier than cirrhosis. If Gabriel was lucky, he might even break a bone and have the perfect excuse to convalesce in a chateau far, far away from the glittery holiday party circuit.

"Gabriel..."

"Sober up, Zar, and then drink again in my honor! Give everyone my love, except for my enemies—give them hell in my stead. Ciao!" 

He hung up before Balthazar could get a word in edgewise. He loved his cousin, but sometimes, he insisted on discussing things that Gabriel would rather blatantly ignore.

The rest stop, advertised as the last sign of comfortable civilization before the arduous ascent ahead, couldn’t have come at a better time. Gabriel hustled in, swearing as the bitter cold sliced right through his bomber jacket. He'd gone for fashionable over practical for the drive and was quickly regretting the decision.

I'll be in and out, so it doesn't matter anyway, he thought, perking up as a warm blast of air greeted him inside. 

A combination of long-time habits and genetics meant that most of Gabriel’s hangover was nothing but a bad memory, but he still needed coffee. He joined a line, distractedly noting the clusters of people split between peering out the large windows or up at the TVs tuned to the news. 

The ping of a notification caught his attention. Gabriel checked it, missing an exchange of worried glances between rest stop employees as one of the workers changed all the TV screens to the weather forecast.

Zar: Wanna meet someone new??

Gabriel snorted derisively. Balthazar's theory—along with just about everyone else's—was that all his problems would be solved if he fell in love again, but this time with the right person. 

The worst part was that they were partially right. Despite the haphazard way he'd handled things with Kali (he could never shake the feeling he'd missed out on real love with her, later events in their relationship aside), Gabriel wanted a second chance at the concept. Contrary to what his friends believed, a relationship wouldn't solve all his problems (he was emotionally mature enough to grasp that much), but tap-dancing on the world’s stage as a solo act was getting old.

Gabriel: Don't want an international number you picked at random from your contact list. I'll text you from the slopes!

(What did he want?)

He responded to a few other messages and updated his feed with a selfie featuring the mountain as a backdrop, looking happier than he felt (‘Off to the slopes!’). After that, Gabriel turned off his phone, intent on ignoring everybody until he reached his destination.

If he'd paid better attention to the atmosphere at the rest stop, he might've hesitated in proceeding. However, Gabriel lived to be the worst contrarian anyone would ever have the dubious pleasure of meeting. It was just as likely he would've kept going.

So, Gabriel only spared a glance at the steely gray underbelly overhead, thought to himself that there'd be a fresh layer of powder waiting for him when he reached the resort, and drove off. 

...

Gabriel's fate boiled down to two mistakes. 

The first, and most important, was that on his way up the mountain, he turned onto the wrong road. 

He'd never been to the resort (picked based on a half-remembered rave review from a friend's friend) and was completely reliant on his GPS— the same GPS that lagged intermittently due to what had evolved into a full winter storm. Snow covered the signs, and knowing the dangers of stopping his car’s momentum, Gabriel blindly trusted in his ability to fill in the blanks when the GPS faltered.

It was only when he reached the point he should've been turning left into the resort parking lot and was instead greeted with a sheer rock face and more whitewashed, winding road that he realized what had happened.

"Well, that's not good," he said to no one in particular. 

His GPS belched out a garbled chirp. Gabriel sighed and turned it off. He'd turn it back on once he backtracked.

Except he never did, because there was nowhere for him to make any sort of turn, three point or otherwise. The road simply kept going, forcing Gabriel to follow it. 

He gradually hunched further and further over the steering wheel as the wind sent thicker and thicker eddies of snow straight on against his windshield. A seed of nervousness bloomed in Gabriel's gut. He'd had enough sense to have snow chains attached to his car before he set off, but the snow wasn't letting up. If the road's conditions deteriorated any further, he'd get himself stuck in a forming snow drift.

Gabriel slowed down and started swearing a litany under his breath, keeping his eyes peeled for some point to turn. 

The second mistake came in glancing at the center console. 

Some music will calm me down, he thought, reaching for the small display screen. He had a fondness for CDs and knew that one was already loaded into the drive. All he had to do was pick a track. 

Out of the corner of his eye, the dark wall of snow-encrusted pines to the right that had remained impenetrable for the past half hour parted, letting loose something that moved into the road.

If it'd been a regular animal, like a deer or even a bear, Gabriel wouldn't have jerked the wheel like he had. He'd encountered deer on roads before and never hit one. 

The thing that burst out from the trees wasn't quite a deer though. Gabriel only caught a glimpse of it bounding into the road, but he swore he saw one too many legs and a head far too big to belong to even the largest stag.

Gabriel's hands, spurred by some deep-seated evolutionary instinct, reacted before he could control himself. He jerked the wheel with a startled yelp, his higher brain a second too late to stop himself. The car immediately kissed the road goodbye and fishtailed, its rear end swinging towards the pines and dragging him around to face the direction he'd come.

For one wild moment, Gabriel thought that would be it. He'd stop pointing the way he'd come, fortuitously aimed back down the mountain, and live to tell a mildly embellished tale to his friends after some recuperative skiing. It would become a memory softened by distance and better experiences, and one day, he might even convince himself that he'd really seen only a deer, and not some six-legged beast.

But the car kept spinning.

"No, no, no—"

Through the windshield, Gabriel saw the deer thing stop to watch him drift towards the edge, nothing more than a black blur in the white-out conditions. He had just enough time to feel outraged at the audacity of the creature before he hit the guardrail.

All hope that it would stop him from hurtling over the edge fell away in a shatter of wood because of course it was only wood. With a startled scream lost in the panicked roar of protest from the engine as he tried one last time to do something, Gabriel went over the edge.

It happened too quickly to think about dying and all the things he'd failed to accomplish in his brief, flashy life. Stomach-curling vertigo and a flash of a rocky void (where had that come from after the trees?) ready to swallow him whole through the windshield became the whole world. A slash of rock, then white-out snow—

(A memory of falling asleep after too many shots in the back of a car, and one of his more kind-hearted friends carrying him out. The same vertigo, world-swaying sensation rocking him into warm oblivion.)

…

Gabriel's car horn blasted into the night, pulling him loose from an unconsciousness he hadn't known he'd been in until he slipped out of it.

"Oh, shut up," he groaned, his head cradled by a shitty excuse of a pillow.

Not a pillow. Airbag. 

The horn didn't heed his words. Gabriel groaned again and lifted his throbbing head, wincing as pain radiated in spiky clusters from his neck down through his torso. Pain meant he was alive, which was great, but also bad because he really, really didn't like being in pain. 

"Focus on the being alive part," he wheezed, fumbling with his seatbelt as he took stock of his surroundings. 

Somehow, he'd landed right side up. An unforgiving combination of pine and rock blocked off the passenger side of the car. Gabriel couldn't make anything out through his cracked windshield. Fractured light blazed through the glass from his headlights, momentarily blinding him.

He shivered and heard glass fall from his hair. All the windows were busted, letting in forming drifts of snow and other natural debris. He’d been unconscious for a while. The storm was burying him alive.

Gabriel needed to get out.

At first, the door refused to budge, but panic made Gabriel persistent. He got it open with an awkward kick and was rewarded for his efforts by a blast of air so cold that he nearly fell back onto the glove compartment.

His responsive surge forward freed him from the car at the price of his balance. A wave of intense dizziness had Gabriel on his hands and knees not three feet from the car, puking up whatever the hell he’d eaten that day and then some.

“That can’t be good,” Gabriel said, struggling to his feet. The puking hadn’t made him feel better. If anything, it drew his attention to his inability to draw a breath that wasn’t wheezy.

Below him, the ground sloped downward into darkness. Vague thoughts about climbing back up to the road fizzled away at the sight of it far above. He could barely see the jagged gap his car had punched through the guardrail through the wind, but the steepness and height were evident enough. It was all rocks and trees, and the damn snow coming down hard enough to obscure everything in bone-aching white.

The insensible humor that threatened to make him laugh at how ludicrous the whole situation was transformed into deep solemnity. Gabriel didn't think he'd ever felt so serious in his life. 

He turned back to his car. It’d crumpled as it was supposed to in a crash, and looking at its ruined body threatened to make Gabriel puke again. There was his usual streak of good luck, and then there was that. 

Within hours, his car would be covered and lost to the woods. There was no point in trying to call someone or attempting to climb back up. His options were dwindling.

Gabriel feared for his wavering spirit. He needed to do something practical; something that would distract him from the biting wind and dark and pain—

"Coat," he mumbled. Already, he couldn’t feel his lips move to form the word.

He'd been lazy at the time (for all his travels, he’d never gotten good at packing), but now it seemed rather ingenious of him that he'd stuck his proper winter coat to languish in the backseat along with a half-zipped duffel bag. Gabriel eagerly seized both, forcing the coat over the layers he already had and rummaging through the duffel for gloves or a scarf. 

After bundling himself up, he grabbed the GPS off his dashboard, wishing it to function. There had to be something close by where he could get out of the storm before he froze to death. 

The universe decided to throw him a bone. With a garbled beep, the GPS provided a laggy image that showed an unnamed side road not even a quarter mile up. Another minute, and he would’ve made it.

Gabriel swore, hunching further over the GPS as a gust scattered snow across the cracked screen. He'd have to ascend a bit to make sure he didn't miss the turnoff, but it was feasible.

Best foot forward, he thought sardonically, taking the first step toward what would either be his salvation, or simply a different section of mountain to freeze to death on.

…

Instead of waking up in whatever existed beyond the mortal coil Gabriel was sure he'd departed, he woke in front of a crackling fire. 

It was like the crash again, with unconsciousness flipping on and off like a switch, but this time, Gabriel remembered a bit more. The trudge of the walk slowly numbing everything below his knees; his chest refusing to let him inhale properly; tripping up a set of stairs to a cabin that looked too new to be owned by anyone worryingly creepy.

Unless serial killers are living it up these days.

"Nnrgh," was the first eloquent thing he could think to say after his serial killer musings. Reality, shrouded by the haze of smell and sight, stretched dreamlike around him. A soft rug beneath his cheek and the smoky wool of a thick blanket draped over him softened his pain.

Footsteps approached. Gabriel's unfocused eyes widened minutely as the world's largest pair of steel-toe boots entered his range of vision.

The owner of the ginormous boots crouched. Gabriel wanted to move his head in some way so he could see their face, but his stiff neck refused to cooperate. With a hoarse huff, he gave it up as a lost cause.

Luckily, the person seemed to have some understanding of his dilemma. Before Gabriel knew it, hands seized his shoulders, maneuvering him up into a seated position against the back of what felt like a couch.

"Jesus?"

It was the only conclusion Gabriel's addled mind could come to. The man's long brown hair and beard fit the general stereotype, and something about his gentle eyes spoke of hard-earned, mystical wisdom. His age was indeterminable, his clothes sturdy and practical, and upon his shoulder, a crow (or raven? Gabriel couldn't tell the difference) mimicked the man in peering curiously at him.

Gabriel stared blearily, entranced. The bird clacked its beak, shiny black eyes amused by his astonishment.

"I'm dead, and now I'm being judged by Jesus. The Christians were right all along, huh?" Gabriel asked, looking around with what range of vision he had. "Is this heaven? A log cabin?"

He had to admit, it could be worse. It wasn't like the glamorous "cabins" he'd familiarized himself with, but it was no hovel. A large fire cast the room in warm shades of orange, highlighting the earthy palette and texture of the interior. His senses refused to pick out details from the darkness past the fire, but Gabriel grasped the general shapes of more furniture and drawn curtains.

Jesus, still grasping his shoulders, blinked once at him before snorting in a very un-Christ-like manner. 

"Or Purgatory? This isn't Hell, is it?" Gabriel rambled, growing more horrified by the second.  His head spun at the ramifications. "I know I've done some, er, questionable things, but really, Hell is a bit much—"

A calloused finger placed over his lips silenced him. The bird gave a single caw, tilting its head this way and that before opening its beak again.

"Quiet!"

It was a bit garbled, but Gabriel couldn't mistake it for anything other than English. He watched, wide-eyed, as the bird flapped off into the shadows above.

"Can't I say anything to make it better? Am I really going to Hell?" Gabriel asked, teary at the thought of eternal damnation.

Jesus shook his head emphatically at his second question, sending brown strands swishing across his cheeks. Relief swept over Gabriel, culminating in a tired grin.

Out of sight, the bird grumbled discontentedly. Jesus made a strange whistling sound to quiet it.

"Can you talk to all animals?"

Jesus shook his head, an air of faint amusement coloring his wisdom-weary features into something more human. He carefully grasped Gabriel's face and tilted it this way and that, searching for injuries.

Gabriel hummed, exhausted from the roller coaster of emotions. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep. 

"Bible stretched it a bit, huh? I knew it," he murmured, wincing when Jesus turned his head too far to one side, sending a flare of pain rushing down his stiff neck. “Ow, that hurt.”

Jesus let go, hands hanging momentarily in the air. Gabriel huffed, managing a smile.

“It’s ok. Life hurts,” Now that Hell had been discounted, Gabriel’s most pressing concern was how to shut his eyes without coming off as too rude. "I'm tired.”

The world dissolved into sensation. Gabriel dimly registered Jesus reaching for him. He sighed, content to go boneless as he was lifted into the air.

Dying is alright, he thought, his ear catching a human heartbeat inside the firm chest he happily tucked his face into. Sure, there’d been a few things he’d wanted to do, like fall in love again, but that wasn’t a dealbreaker. Who needed romance anyway?

Jesus set him on a bed made of color and clouds that Gabriel melted into. The last thing he recalled before he fell asleep was a glass ceiling that held back a whirlwind of snow, and the sweep of a warm hand through his hair.

Chapter Text

"Up. Up!"

Something tugged at the blanket pulled over Gabriel's head. He grunted, curling in tighter to ignore the voice. This was one of the nicer mystery beds he'd woken up in.

"Up!"

"Up my ass," he managed to croak, eyes firmly shut. If he opened them, he'd lose the last vestiges of sleep, and Gabriel wasn't ready to do that quite yet when he felt like he'd been hit by a car.

You weren't hit…you crashed the car.

"Up!"

The alarming thought succeeded in waking him. Gabriel scrambled into an upright position with a gasp, regretting it almost instantly as all his muscles screamed in protest. 

In the process, he dislodged something light and feathery from his shoulder.

"Ack!" he exclaimed, throwing his arms over his head (and wow did that make his chest hurt even more) as a makeshift shield at the sight of the bird fluttering to perch at the foot of the bed.

"Ack!" it mimicked before descending into a halting, clicking noise that Gabriel suspected passed as laughter.

"Fuck you," he said, quickly getting over his surprise at the talking bird—crow? Raven? Gabriel had woken to much stranger sights after parties and hookups.

The bird, perhaps unable to mimic his swearing (what was the limit of a bird's phonetic capabilities?), fixed a baleful eye on him and croaked sharply. Gabriel received the message loud and clear.

Gabriel's cursory examination of himself revealed tidy medical handiwork. His chest was wrapped, with bruises blossoming out around the edges. There was also a bandage taped to his forehead. He felt like a geriatric, but after testing his limited range of motion, everything seemed intact.

With that settled, his eyes drifted to take in the bed he was in. Gabriel idly ran his hands (which looked worse than that one time he'd agreed to go rock climbing with that Dutch guy) over the blanket on top of the comforter. The intricately knitted, earth-toned pattern was unlike anything he'd ever seen. Someone, probably the same person who'd bandaged him, had taken care to toss this over the comforter, for seemingly no other reason than to make sure he didn’t get cold.

Jesus?

“Oh God,” he groaned into his hands, overcome by rare mortification. The person he had a vague recollection of from the night before wasn’t Jesus. 

The bird chuckled evilly as if sensing his train of thought. Gabriel looked up to see it'd moved to perch on top of a long, low set of dressers placed across from the bed, backside against the railing that ran around the loft floor.

He made a surprised noise of pleasure. It was bigger than he'd expected a loft floor in a cabin to be. A thick, reddish rug covered the hardwood floor, running beneath the big bed tucked into the far left corner of the space. The nightstand directly to his right contained a teetering stack of books.

Gabriel eyed the titles with interest. There seemed to be a book from every continent in the stack, and Gabriel was sure not all of them were in English.

Pale sunlight poured in from multiple vantage points. A skylight set further down, closer to the stairs, illuminated the world’s biggest woven basket and an explosion of yarn. There was a window behind him as well, partially covered by the nightstand.

Gabriel fell back against the bed, gazing upward. A second skylight gazed back, partially covered with snow.

So I hadn’t imagined the glass, he thought with a shiver as bits and pieces of the night before floated back to him. 

The bird cawed to get his attention. Once it did, it fluttered to land on something at the foot of the bed.

Gabriel wrapped the knitted blanket around his shoulders and gingerly got up, grumbling the whole time. His head felt as if it were about to float off from his shoulders, but Gabriel’s insatiable curiosity took precedence. 

“What is it?” he asked, feeling a bit foolish for talking to the bird.

The bird clicked its beak. It stood on a wooden trunk, which held a small tray containing a glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen. There’d been no room on the nightstand for it.

Warmth suffused Gabriel's sore chest. Few people had thoughtfully anticipated his needs like this, much less a stranger.

“Maybe you’re not so bad,” he said to the bird, who tilted its head this way and that in inspection.

“Bad!” it echoed before gliding over the railing and down to the main body of the cabin below.

Gabriel leaned over the railing and watched the bird land on top of a large, blanket-covered armchair nearly directly below the edge. Thanks to the open layout, Gabriel could see the majority of the cabin from his vantage point. It was as surprisingly spacious as the loft floor and incredibly dark due to the drawn curtains. There was no sign of his savior anywhere below.

After taking some medicine he was reasonably sure was what the bottle said it’d be (at this point, he didn’t care as long as it took the edge off his pain), Gabriel slowly descended the stairs in a seated shimmy.

Blankets and rugs were liberally tossed about the large living room to soften the harsh edges of heavy wooden furniture and mostly flagstone flooring. The long sides of the cabin were wood paneled, but the rest of the walls were painted plaster. Behind the grate, the fire was little more than a glowing heap of embers and served as the only other source of light besides a floor lamp that the bird kept turning on and off.

Gabriel gingerly poked at the coals, managing to temporarily rekindle the fire. Ignoring the bird keeping watch over him, he made a slow circuit of the living room.

A shotgun hung over the mantle alongside renditions of classical paintings. The coffee table was dominated by a radio with mechanical guts on display and some set aside mending, along with more books. Herbs grew in little pots that sat on shelves near the windows. Bookcases were dedicated to books and hobby items in equal measure, with no apparent rhyme or reason to the organization.

Everything attested to a deeply introverted person balanced between utility and elegance. There were many personal touches to the place—the overflowing books and certain handmade items attested to that—but there was also a painfully lonely feel to the place. The walls bore no pictures, and the curtains spoke of a shut-in.

On top of that, Gabriel could spot no visible phone, computer, or internet router. The radio appeared to be the only electronic method of communication in the place.

Whoever lived here had turned this place into a retreat, but from what Gabriel couldn't be sure. It seemed too nice for a hermitage, but what did he know about being a modern hermit? His sociable life was as far from isolation as one could get.

Except I’m here now, Gabriel said, drifting into the kitchen. 

A breakfast bar connected it to the living room. It didn’t escape his groggy notice that there was only one stool, but the appliances were modern enough, all set against a scene he could’ve placed in a French summer cottage. The pristine tile floor was prettier than Gabriel anticipated.

“I must be going crazy,” he muttered to himself, wiggling his socked toes against the variegated blue. Since when did he care about floors?

In the living room, the bird suddenly screeched. Startled, Gabriel nearly bashed his shoulder into the fridge. He recovered quickly when he heard the front door opening.

Gabriel scrambled into the living room, running a hand through his hair and deeming it a lost cause in the process. He didn't want to be caught snooping, but it was too late to get back in bed—even uninjured, he would've cut it close. Standing forlornly by the armchair pretending he didn't need to gasp for air would have to do.

The front door spilled into a tiny foyer, so there was little distance separating them. Gabriel took a fortifying breath, then let it all out in a strangled wheeze as one of the biggest men he’d ever seen in his life stepped in.

Night and pain had skewed Gabriel’s perception of his savior. The man was far bigger and broader than he’d initially assumed. His sturdy winter coat only heightened the impression that he was a walking brick wall. Backlit by the intense light reflected off fresh snow, Gabriel received an intimidating impression that froze him on the spot.

"Uh, hi," Gabriel said after he managed to regain his breath, so caught off guard that he didn't immediately chastise himself for lacking his usual charm. "Wow.”

That he did kick himself for, but the man either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Calm as could be, he dropped a few bags onto the floor (Gabriel’s bags), trudged in, and unwound a scarf from around his neck to reveal his face. 

In daylight, the man was even more handsome than anticipated and far younger than Gabriel expected. Even with the facial hair, he couldn’t have been a day over thirty.

“I’m Sam. That’s Bones,” he said abruptly, voice rough with, to Gabriel’s astonishment, clear disuse. Sam licked his chapped lips, turned his gaze to the fire, and frowned at it. “I went to your car. Got what I could from it. It was snowed in.”

Gabriel might've had selfish tendencies, but he wasn't an idiot. If Sam wasn't used to visitors—and everything pointed to a strong likelihood of it—then he certainly wasn't the kind of person who would be up to getting intimately acquainted with someone half-frozen to death on his porch.

"I'm Gabriel, but you can call me Gabe. Thanks for saving me," he replied, erring on the more mannered side in an attempt to signal to Sam that the stranger he rescued did have some redeeming qualities. 

That, and Gabriel truly was grateful to Sam for rescuing him. Much to his horror, Gabriel realized his misadventure would’ve gotten him killed if it hadn’t been for him.

Sam flushed, his head momentarily jerking to the side before he shuffled his feet and looked back at him.

“It’s alright. Are you feeling better?”

“Just sore, and itchy for some reason,” Gabriel said, frowning at the prickling feeling plaguing his skin.

“Airbags do that,” Sam replied, “There’s, um, a shower behind you.”

Gabriel perked up at the thought of a hot shower. 

“That’d be nice.  Should I—?”

“It’s already ready,” Sam said hastily, wringing his scarf in his hands. “Right across the kitchen.”

Gabriel decided to have mercy on Sam. He murmured his thanks, grabbed one of his bags that he knew held clothes, and made his way into the bathroom.

There was already a towel and fresh bandages set aside. Unlike him, Sam possessed a capacity for thoughtful consideration. Gabriel found the sensibility reassuring after such a confusing morning.

His reflection in the mirror/craftily concealed medicine cabinet caught him off guard. Bruised and scabbed over with dried blood, Gabriel looked exactly as if he'd walked away from a car crash. With his shirt off, he could see the extent of the gnarly bruise from his seatbelt layered on top of the deeper chest bruising. 

He prodded curiously at the butterfly bandage keeping a cut through his eyebrow together. All that remained were edges of flaked blood in hard to reach places. Sam had gone through the trouble of wiping clean what he could without completely violating his privacy.

Who goes to those lengths for a stranger instead of just waiting for help to arrive? A doctor?

Gabriel ended up sitting in the shower with his chest bandages on. The more he moved, the more his battered body protested.

I lived. That’s the important bit.

But as the scalding water ran orange-pink, Gabriel didn’t feel up to truly cherishing the gift of continued existence quite yet. He needed food and a lot more sleep before he processed the fact that he’d crashed his car and survived.

When Gabriel emerged from the bathroom, he found Sam bent over the radio on the coffee table, staring at it like it'd personally offended him. Gabriel had never seen a bitch face so spectacular on anyone besides Balthazar and said so as he approached.

“People have said it’s strong,” Sam said after a moment of simply staring at him, sucked out of the intense zone he’d been in and attempting to recalibrate. “It’s broken.”

“That’s not good,” Gabriel remarked helpfully, plopping on the couch across from Sam and carefully leaning back. From the armchair, Bones swiveled its head to look at him.

Sam’s brow crinkled, a complex emotion darkening his face as he returned his gaze to the radio. “No, it’s not.”

A nagging suspicion bloomed in Gabriel’s mind. He’d always had a knack for sniffing out bullshit—something which ruined the airhead effect he strived to maintain for the sake of his bullshit-filled friends.

“That wouldn’t happen to be your only form of communication, would it?”

“No. Bones delivers letters,” Sam replied distractedly, picking up the tiniest screwdriver Gabriel had ever laid eyes on. His hair swept downward as he tinkered, concealing all but the side of his face and jaw.

"Bones…delivers letters," Gabriel echoed, processing this ridiculous, yet seemingly logical statement. "Like a magic owl?"

Sam made a huffing sound that Gabriel belatedly recognized as snorted laughter. "Yes. Like that." He paused, and then helpfully added, "Bones is female.”

“Good to know,” Gabriel said, grabbing a pillow and running his hand over the green, textured surface. With a delayed mental click, he realized Sam must’ve been the creator behind the blanket and other handmade items. “So, I’m assuming communicating with the authorities hasn’t happened yet because of this. How about getting down the mountain?”

“Not likely,” Sam said, gaze still studiously fixed on the radio.

“Because of the snow?” 

“Yes. I…don’t have a way to get you further than a mile from the house.”

Gabriel blinked, trying to comprehend what Sam was insinuating.

"Wait…so no car? Snowmobile? Snowshoes?" he asked, rapid-fire. "Where's the resort? What about a town or a neighbor?"

Sam shook his head. “No vehicles. I have one pair of snowshoes, but we’re very far up the mountain. My nearest neighbor is Raphael, who’s a recluse and has no phone anyway. That’s two miles. Town is ten. Resort is on the other side of the mountain. Getting down in snowshoes before beating the elements is slim. I rescued your skis but skiing down is a death wish.”

Sam's longest stretch of speaking so far delivered an incredible amount of death blows to the faint hope that Gabriel would somehow be able to get far enough down the mountain to the resort he should've been luxuriating at.

I’m stuck.

“Well, how do you get down the mountain?” Gabriel asked, voice thready with ill-concealed panic.

Hearing the tone, Sam looked up from fiddling with the radio. For the first time, Gabriel noticed how changeable his eyes could be. In the sunlight streaming through the singular open window, they were pale and steady. 

“Jody drives up when the snow melts.”

“Jody. Who’s Jody?” Gabriel asked. He sounded like a partner asking their significant other the name of the person they’d cheated on them with.

“The sheriff.”

“The—Jesus, Mother and Mary, and every other canonized saint in the damn Church," Gabriel groaned in dismay, falling back onto the couch with his hands threaded through his damp hair. "No one knows I'm up here. Where's my phone?"

“Smashed. No towers up here anyway,” Sam said, nodding at a corner of the coffee table.

Gabriel picked up his ruined phone. The screen had cracked beyond measure, and a dent in the back didn't bode well for the internal hardware. He set it down with a disgusted sigh, the severity of the situation sinking in.

“No one’s going to find out anytime soon, are they?”

“Bones will carry a letter,” Sam said, trying to reassure him.

Bones piped up from the couch. “No.”

Sam and Gabriel both looked at her. Bones made a clicking noise deep in her throat and repeated the word before flapping off up towards the loft.

"Well. The oracle has spoken," Gabriel said dryly, stifling the panic churning in his stomach by grabbing a different pillow. "She hates me and has sealed my fate."

“She doesn’t hate you. She just needs to come around to it,” Sam argued, looking up at the loft with a befuddled expression. “She’s seen very few people. Bones?”

No noise came from the loft. Sam frowned and got up to ascend the stairs, leaving Gabriel to his pity session, making cooing noises all the while. 

Gabriel would've admired Sam's strangely wholesome devotion to Bones more if he'd had a better source of comfort than a pillow. Alas, he didn't, and instead, a frustrated outrage arose at the thought that an obstinate bird was currently receiving more affection than him—a traumatized and injured human—from one of the hottest men he’d ever laid eyes on in his life.

Unfair, he thought vehemently, squeezing the pillow with a death grip, Un. Fair.

After squishing the pillow to bits, Gabriel stretched out fully, laying on the side that hurt the least to face the back of the couch. It was all well and good that he hadn’t died, but what was he meant to do now?

Gabriel typically ran from his problems. For once, there was quite literally nowhere to go in this situation. So, he defaulted to the tried-and-true method of sleep. Things tended to look better after some rest, and if they didn't, at least he'd gotten some sleep out of it.

He dreamed of nothing and woke up warm. Someone—Sam, obviously—had adjusted the blanket he’d taken down with him from the loft so he was fully covered. Gabriel could hear him moving in the kitchen, preparing what smelled like the world’s greatest cup of coffee.

Gabriel inhaled deeply (which wasn't too deep), then reburied his face back into where he'd wedged it in the cushion. He didn't feel like getting up. A tiny part of him still pouted about the situation (and possibly about Bones), but he was mostly just too stiff to move. It felt like the time he'd taken up Pilates for a few weeks to get with the instructor combined with the belly flop Balthazar had dared him to make off an Italian cliff on their backpacking trip.

Sam padded towards him on socked feet; Gabriel could hear them swish across the flagstone. The coffee smell grew stronger as two mugs were set on the table with a thud.

Gabriel waited with bated breath. Would Sam try to wake him?

A small sigh; a long stretch of hesitation. It was as if Sam was building himself up for a confrontation. Did he think Gabriel would be mad?

No. He just hasn’t woken anyone up in a long time. He’d rather trudge to my car and lug back my winter wardrobe than wake me.

Sam's hand gently curled around his shoulder, his palm warm enough to be felt through the blanket. It felt stupidly right to have his hand there.

“Gabriel. Coffee.”

Despite the brevity of those two simple words, Gabriel heard a whole story in them. Guilt, mild worry, awkward concern—but mostly guilt.

All of this made Gabriel feel a small curl of guilt himself. Of course Sam would resent Gabriel being here and react awkwardly at best to his presence. Sam had most likely been looking forward to a peaceful, uninterrupted winter with only Bones for company. Instead, he'd gotten him.

Gabriel sat up. Sam’s hand dropped away to gesture at the coffee before migrating to the back of his neck.

“I don’t have any creamer, but I put milk. You look like you use creamer,” Sam muttered, grabbing his mug and perching on the couch as far from Gabriel as he could get. His posture made Gabriel’s back hurt just looking at him.

"I do, along with a shit ton of sugar," Gabriel said, reaching for the mug. The glazed ceramic was slightly lopsided, and on the underside, his fingertips passed over scratched in initials. "Are you an artist?"

Sam spluttered into his mug. Gabriel side-eyed him with mild amusement and waited for him to recover.

“No, no. I…um, dabble. I like keeping my hands busy,” Sam said, picking at the worn knee of his jeans. “Good to make stuff during the winter.”

Made sense. Gabriel tactfully dropped that particular line of questioning. If Sam didn’t work as an artist, then he probably didn’t work traditionally at all. Something told him Sam didn’t put himself out there as some sort of seasonal worker or laborer, and of all the hobbies he’d seen on display, he’d seen no signs of a writer.

They drank their coffee in semi-awkward silence. Gabriel longed to fill the space with talk like he usually did to distract himself, but Sam already seemed to be at the end of his conversational rope. When they finished, Sam took his mug, making it clear he expected him to remain on the couch. Like before, he took his sweet time in the kitchen and returned as tense as a live wire.

"I know this is an unusual situation," Sam started after resettling in his previous seat. He resolutely looked at the fireplace and not at Gabriel. "I know that you want to go home, but I'm sorry to tell you that until Bones comes around, you're stuck here. I don't have the right parts to fix the radio. Your car is already buried in snow. Even if it wasn't, you can't see it from the road and no one will drive up at this point in the season. I'm not sure how you did. Jody already shut the road down.”

He paused, slowly rubbing his hands. Gabriel didn’t interject, entranced by the methodical nature of Sam’s words. He’d clearly been thinking this over throughout the whole day, and whatever conclusion he’d come to, Gabriel needed to hear it first before commenting.

“I may not be prepared on the communication front, but I’ve always prepared excessively for the winter,” Sam continued, “There’s enough food for the both of us and other amenities. I’m not…sociable like I used to be, but I can keep you comfortable, warm, and maybe a little entertained with what I do have lying around. So."

Sam cut himself off and glanced at Gabriel. Whatever he saw prompted him to clear his throat and look down at his hands, hiding behind a curtain of hair.

“So yeah.”

He got up, leaving Gabriel to mull things over and avoid whatever confrontation he expected.

Before the car crash, Gabriel might've reacted more explosively at the disheartening news—a part of him still wanted to. He liked things to go his way and be in his control. The risk-reward ratio had to be in good proportion if Gabriel was going to bother doing something crazy. Spending the winter snowed in with a stranger was nowhere near acceptable.

What could he do though? It frustrated Gabriel that the situation was out of his control, but that wasn’t Sam’s fault. He’d just be lashing out and using Sam as a scapegoat, and that wouldn’t do. Gabriel had to spend a whole winter with him, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was making the best of things by staying on someone’s good side.

Getting along with Sam might prove tricky—he’d always had to play his cards carefully with introverts, especially wary ones like Sam—but it wouldn’t be impossible. Gabriel had all the time in the world. If nothing else, he could at least make it so that they didn’t snap and kill each other before the year was over.

Gabriel nodded to himself; mind made up. It was just one winter. What was the worst that could happen?

Chapter Text

Sam stayed awake long after Gabriel fell asleep in his bed.

He hadn't said anything about the sleeping arrangements during their very quiet and awkward dinner. Sam was fairly sure Gabriel hadn't realized the loft contained the only bed in the cabin. He'd turned the actual bedroom at the back of the cabin into a storage room long ago, and Sam didn't feel like rummaging through the shed out back for an air mattress he may or may not have kept. He was content to stay on the couch while Gabriel convalesced.

His needles jammed, breaking his flow. Sam studied his stitches with a clearer gaze and frowned at their tautness.  He tended to knit on the tighter side, but he hadn't knitted this tightly since his first year here.

When Sam first opened his door after hearing a thud on his front porch, he thought the man was some sort of lucid hallucination. Dean had sworn up and down that the isolation would loosen a few screws, and while his brother tended to be wrong about a lot, he was hardly ever wrong when it came to predicting bad events.

He’d stared for a long minute at the bleeding, slumped form curled on his porch, idly wondering how it’d all come to this: standing in the doorway of a cabin, high up on a mountain, losing his sanity via a hallucination that wasn’t even fun.

Sam only moved into action when Bones began to flip out. If Bones could see him, then the man was no hallucination. 

He'd been methodical about it. There was next to no chance the stranger was a psychological thriller villain faking his way into the cabin; Sam wasn't that paranoid. He divested him of the single duffel slung over his shoulder and got him into the living room with a speed that drew an impressed caw from Bones.

"Quiet," he murmured to her, not wanting to wake the stranger yet. He had no idea how far the man had trekked to his cabin—the road up had been shut down a week ago by Jody for the winter—but judging by the snow soaking his jeans far past his knees, it'd been a fair distance. Hypothermia on top of injuries that looked like they'd been acquired in a car crash wasn't good.

Too close to the fire was as equally bad as being too far away. Sam settled on nudging his cluttered coffee table out of the way and placing him on the rug in front of the couch. He unlaced his shoes, removed his scarf (only one glove; where had the other gone?) and halted there. His desire to preserve the man’s privacy clashed against the practicality of getting the wet clothes off. And, above it all, Sam was uncomfortable interacting, albeit limitedly, with a person.

There was a person in his cabin.

“Man,” Bones croaked, flapping down to land on his shoulder. She rubbed his cheek with her head comfortingly, knowing his dilemma.

“Man,” he echoed, unfolding the wallet he procured from the man’s back pocket.

His license said he was Gabriel Milton. Gabriel had several hundred dollars in varying currencies, a metal credit card, two expired condoms, and a photo of a Jack Russel terrier tucked behind a receipt for snow chains. He was still a stranger, but he had a name for the bleeding, sleeping face.

Gabriel. Where did you come from?

Gabriel hadn’t stirred when Sam said his name once, testing his voice as much as the man’s consciousness. Sam’s voice cracked in the process. 

He'd decided to remain silent after that. Silence suited him better. Silence would let him pretend that Gabriel's warmth and weight hadn't derailed the winter and intruded on a task-filled solitude that he relied on to keep him from thinking about—

Sam's needle slipped. He slowed to carefully catch the loop, getting a few more stitches precisely done before kicking back into gear.

Gabriel woke and proved within seconds he was far from average. Between the Jesus talk (simultaneously hilarious and saddening) and the high-end quality of his clothes and bag, Sam struggled to categorize him. He came from money, most likely the old kind, but so far didn’t act much like it. Despite being in clear pain, he didn’t whine about it, and he hadn’t reacted too badly when Sam had laid out the situation in stark terms. If anything, Sam had expected him to dramatically storm out or do some more yelling.

Perhaps lingering shock was making him amenable. Once it wore off, would Gabriel be a nightmare to live with?

Sam hoped not. Witnessing the aftereffects of the accident had him feeling all sorts of conflict over Gabriel's situation, and Sam hadn't felt much for other people that wasn't a clear-cut, low-stake emotion in years. He'd thought Gabriel had crashed on the road, either into the guardrail or perhaps a tree—he hadn't expected the once beautiful car crumpled thirty feet down a rocky slope, wedged against a copse of evergreens.

Just recalling it made Sam queasy. He couldn't fathom how Gabriel managed to walk away from the crash with nothing more severe than cuts and bruises. There was a chance of internal bleeding—he could only scrutinize so much from the outside and patch up what was visible, but if there was, Sam couldn't do anything for Gabriel…

The thought of Gabriel dying made him queasier. Sam swallowed the feeling down and decided to do the dishes.

Bones glided down from where she'd been watching Gabriel's slumbering form to join him. She remained quiet as he filled the basin with water too hot for pleasant comfort. At the end of the day, she was a crow. Her limited speech didn't mean she could be held to any standard of human morals.

It made her unwillingness to carry a letter down to town even more baffling, but Sam couldn't force her and wouldn't hold it against her. It did pique his age-old curiosity about the depth of Bone's intelligence. Gabriel thought Bones hated him, but if she had, she would've been carrying the paper and pen to Sam before he'd even woken up. For whatever reason, she wanted Gabriel to stay.

“Do you think I need a friend?” Sam asked, pulling his stinging hands from the sudsy water.

Bones didn’t reply. Sam tried to remember if he’d taught her the word “friend” that first winter he’d found her at the base of a tree, nest empty and no parents in sight. He didn’t think he had.

Sam finished the dishes and returned to his project with Bones still on his shoulder. Out of all the things he’d rescued from Gabriel’s car (and there’d been a lot), Sam hadn’t spotted a pair of mittens.

Gabriel had smaller hands than him. Sam wasn’t sure precisely how much smaller, but there was a difference. He told himself that the subsequently mild challenge the size difference presented was the only reason he was knitting a pair of mittens. 

He did not think about how cold Gabriel’s blue-tinged hands had been, and the mingled terror and relief of finding a pulse in Gabriel’s wrist, telling him that he hadn’t been too late.

…

"Sam? Sam.”

For a disorienting moment, Sam wondered who from town he’d slept with. He allowed himself one-night stands during the summer, but he’d never brought anyone back to the cabin save for Ruby. That had been a mistake.

Except the voice wasn't Ruby, and he was in his cabin. Wasn't it winter?

Recollection flooded back in a slow, warm wave. Sam stiffened, reminding himself to behave politely. Gabriel was only dramatic and clueless, not an enemy.

And not someone to be scared of.

"What is it?" he asked, cracking his eyes open just enough to judge the time based on the degree of pale morning light. Gabriel had opened one window but left the other's curtains untouched. A compromise of sorts?

Gabriel sat on the edge of the couch warily, his thigh grazing one of Sam's knees. The blanket Sam had first thrown over him when he'd brought him up to the loft was draped around his shoulders (did he like it?).

“I heard something outside.”

For someone unused to the sounds of the wilderness, anything from clumped snow falling off tree branches to the cry of a mountain lion could be what had driven Gabriel from bed to seek reassurance from Sam.

Reassurance?

Sam looked closer at Gabriel to confirm his first impression, and with startling clarity, he realized that was exactly what Gabriel wanted.

"You'll have to be a bit more specific," he said, sitting up.

“I think it’s a bear,” Gabriel whispered dramatically, leaning in for full effect.

Sam smothered a smile for Gabriel's sake. With his wide eyes and hands clutched at the blanket, he looked every bit like the kind of person who considered a chateau stay in the Alps a camping trip.

“I’ll check it out. C’mon,” he said, gesturing for Gabriel to follow. 

Gabriel did so meekly, all but holding onto the back of Sam's shirt. Sam was glad he wasn't. So far, he'd only touched Gabriel to treat his injuries—Sam didn't want to be touched so casually yet.

Yet?

Ignoring Gabriel's squeaked protest, Sam unlocked the back door to peer through the glass storm door.

"Huh. You were right. It got close, but it's gone now," Sam remarked. A bear's meandering stride marked the snow, skirting the uncleared deck before veering off to reenter the tree line.

"Are you sure?" Gabriel asked, pressing up against his side to see for himself now that the immediate danger was gone.

“Fairly,” Sam said dryly to cover up the fact that he hadn’t let anyone get this close to him since August. Gabriel’s proximity did things to him that he didn’t want to think about too closely. “Bears this time of year won’t get aggressive unless you provoke them. They’re too close to torpid sleep.”

"Hibernation," Gabriel murmured, breath misting as warm air slipped over the threshold to make room for the cold. His eyes glowed, filled with refracted light from the snow. "So you're sure it’s gone?”

“Relax. You should be more concerned about wolves,” Sam taunted idly, shutting the door and casually walking away. Am I joking with him now? When’s the last time I did that?

“Wolves?”

Gabriel trailed behind him like an anxious duckling. Sam probably shouldn't have wound him up, but a part of him didn't mind having Gabriel in the kitchen as he set about making breakfast.

“You can hear them occasionally. The howls echo in the mountains.”

“Are we safe?”

“Of course. Nothing bad will happen to you here,” Sam said, the words escaping him in a more fervent tone than he’d wanted them to. 

He didn’t want to see Gabriel hurt anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. It just meant he had a little compassion for someone still recovering from a traumatic experience.

Mollified for the time being, Gabriel shifted his focus to exploring the cabin. Sam kept half an eye on him as he fixed up breakfast so he could answer the various questions that were peppered at him. Gabriel expressed the most interest in the yarns and books, but his most serious question came when he stopped before the fireplace. His upturned gaze could only be fixed on one thing in that area—a gift from Dean he'd rarely used.

“Do you hunt?”

Right for the jugular, Sam thought as Gabriel looked over his shoulder expectantly. He'd expected Gabriel to make a joke out of it or simply ask if he'd ever fired the shotgun before.

“No. I know how, but I don’t care for it.” Sam pulled two mugs from the cabinet and began to set the table. “Get over here before your food gets cold.”

Sam watched as Gabriel practically flew into the kitchen, all thoughts of questions abandoned for the immediate desire for food. It was good to know that Gabriel's tenacity had a foil in his short attention span. Otherwise, Sam might not have any secrets left by the end of winter.

Sam rubbed one of his shoulders absent-mindedly as he sipped his black coffee. He'd have to be careful, but he'd manage.

“You don’t have any clocks.”

“Pardon?”

Gabriel’s eyes drifted around the kitchen, landing on the stove. He gestured with his fork to it.

“That’s the only clock I’ve seen in this whole place. Are you not a fan of telling time?”

So much for being easily redirected—Gabriel's tenacity and perception came in surprising measures. In another era, Sam would've appreciated the combination—he'd always liked people who challenged him. However, he couldn't have Gabriel sniffing out so much so soon. He'd barely been here two days.

“Time is pointless up here,” Sam decided to say, playing it off as a quirk. It mostly was, but it was the source of the quirk that he wanted to keep Gabriel from knowing at all costs. “All I need to know is when the sun rises and sets, and I have windows for that.”

“Windows that you keep shut up,” Gabriel muttered around a mouthful of egg, rising magnificently to the bait.

They exchanged mildly barbed words as they cleaned up—or rather, Gabriel lingered to annoy him while Sam did all the work. It was only when they lapsed into silence and drifted into the living room that Sam noticed Bone’s absence.

"She must've left during breakfast. She left the window open," Sam said, clicking his tongue at the ajar pane in the loft he could just make out from the couch.

“She can do that?”

"All the time. Usually, she's tidier about it. Sometimes she's just spiteful," Sam explained, mounting the stairs to close it.

To Sam’s complete and utter lack of surprise, Gabriel had left the bed unmade. A part of him wanted to fix it up out of habit, but he ignored it as he reached upward to shut the window over the bed. 

As he did, he noticed something sitting on top of the stacked books he kept on the nightstand for when he couldn't sleep. Gabriel had left his wallet on top of one stack. On the other was a photo—a different one Sam hadn't yet seen. 

Sam wavered, then gave in to curiosity. It was a snapshot of a New Year's Eve party. Gabriel beamed out from the middle of a huddle of sparkly, champagne-toting friends—distinctly younger, yet still easy to pick out from the college-aged crowd. A woman with brown skin and wide dark eyes hung off his arm, her red lipstick smeared on Gabriel's cheekbone.

Sam stared at it for a moment. The man in the picture was worlds apart from the bruised, cut-up person downstairs in his living room. Bravado radiated from his figure. He was on top of the world.

And now he’s here. 

Looking at the photo suddenly felt too intimate. It was one thing to come across the dog in Gabriel’s wallet. This photo had likely been stashed in his bag; something intentionally moved from hiding spot to hiding spot with every trip he made.

Sam turned his back on it and the unmade bed, making a beeline for his knitting. He didn't want to think about Gabriel and the learning process he'd have to undergo in the coming weeks. Knowing Gabriel spelled ruin for him—Sam could feel it in his bones. A person as contradictory and mysterious as him could never be safe.

...

Gabriel managed to stay out of the way for a few hours. Sam had just cast on the starting stitches for the second mitten (if he didn’t do it immediately after finishing the first, the risk of never starting it increased exponentially) when he saw him shuffle up out of the corner of his eye.

“What is it?”

“Um…my ribs hurt and I’m not sure if it’s because something is seriously wrong with them, or only moderately.”

Sam ignored the twist in his stomach (internal bleeding, dammit he could die—) as he set his work aside. If his ribs had been more severely damaged, he would've noticed when he'd patched Gabriel up the first time. Most likely, a slightly cracked one was giving Gabriel some trouble.

“Injuries always feel worse the day after. But I’ll check to make sure.”

“Should I add medical training to the things I’m learning about you?” Gabriel asked as he removed his shirt and laid back on the couch.

“Not really. Also, you’re not learning anything about me.”

“Au contraire, chérie,” Gabriel said, his pronunciation annoyingly accurate. He probably vacationed in Europe as often as people went to grocery stores. “I’ve learned a lot just from watching you frown at your yarn loops.”

“They’re called stitches,” Sam corrected, opening the first aid kit before glaring at Gabriel. He hadn’t felt his eyes on him at all. “You were watching?”

“For a while. You’re a man of concentration. It’s impressive,” Gabriel said blasely, looking up at the ceiling. “I can barely sit still, even though it hurts to move. I’ll probably get cabin fever by the end of the week.”

Sam grunted, turning his attention to Gabriel's chest. Gabriel had kept the old bandages on; they'd have to be changed. The bruising had darkened significantly overnight, outlining a clear pattern where his seat belt crossed his chest.

The first time he’d treated Gabriel’s injuries after bringing him inside, he’d approached him much like the occasional injured animal that made its way onto his property—gently, with restraint and emotional distance so as not to spook the usually terrified and confused creatures (and to not get attached if they died). 

When Gabriel had been asleep, this strategy worked well. Sam was handling a warm body; a being he had no connection to, that just happened to be similarly shaped to him.

With Gabriel awake, Sam was acutely aware that Gabriel's gaze was averted not out of decorum, but because he was aware that Sam didn’t like the idea of being studied. 

Gabriel brought so many problems with him. Sam had every reason to resent him for it, and yet all he could focus on were the shades of intense black and blue mottling his skin. Sam knew bruises like that were no joke. It was no surprise Gabriel’s breathing was punctuated by the occasional wheeze as Sam ran his hands up and down, this way and that.

“You’re lucky I’m not ticklish,” Gabriel huffed at one point.

“I expected you to be,” Sam replied, sitting back on his haunches. His examination hadn’t revealed anything new. Internal bleeding was hard to spot without the proper equipment, but Sam’s instincts told him that Gabriel had dodged that particular bullet. 

And if he hasn’t, I’ll know in a few days when he doesn’t wake up.

“What do you mean?”

Sam set aside his morbid train of thought and reached for the first aid kit. The words came out before he considered them too deeply.

“You seem like someone that laughs and smiles a lot,” he explained as he grabbed a new roll of gauze. It’d only occurred to him after he’d spoken that he was being incredibly forward. “I don’t think anything's broken or cracked. Either way, you should take it easy for the rest of the week. Stay in bed—"

Gabriel groaned petulantly at this. Sam rolled his eyes and poked his knee—one of the safest uninjured spots Gabriel currently possessed. He was breaking his own rule about touching, but it helped to punctuate his point. Besides, Gabriel needed help up to the loft. He’d just have to get used to it.

“I’m serious. Back to bed after I rebandage you. You can read, or listen to music, or something. Just no walking around until mealtime.”

Gabriel poked and prodded at the guidelines Sam set down for his health throughout the bandaging process. Sam wasn't sure if he was serious about finding some loophole or engaging in the verbal exercise for the hell of it. Likely both. 

“Can I smoke weed?”

Sam’s eyebrows flew up. “Where the hell do you have weed?”

Gabriel made a show of examining his fingernails with a coquettish smile. “I’ve got a secret compartment in my duffel.”

“Of course you do,” Sam snorted. He closed the kit and stood, rolling the twinge in his shoulders out. “No smoking it until the end of the week. I doubt the pain relief would beat out the irritation of the smoke.”

“I figured you’d say that,” Gabriel grumbled, taking Sam’s offered arm. He didn’t lean too much on him—out of consideration for his boundaries, or pride? He looked up at him through his lashes, looking a little chagrined. “Would you…uh, like some?”

“Weed? No, you can keep it,” Sam replied, touched more than he should’ve been by the offer. Maybe Gabriel wasn’t entirely self-absorbed. “I have my own drugs.”

Sam immediately took back his most recent assessment of Gabriel’s character when a greedy light sharpened his eyes.

“No.”

“But—”

“Nope,” Sam said firmly, fully aware he’d accidentally activated some bloodhound tendency of Gabriel’s. “You don’t even know what kind of drugs I have.”

“I doubt you do stuff like meth or bath salts. Maybe cocaine at most. But it’s probably shrooms and weed.”

"To bed," Sam said, dignifying none of Gabriel's fantastical musings about drugs with a direct response. Later, he'd have to discreetly move his stash to somewhere Gabriel would never look for it (because he would look for them, close quarters be damned). They weren’t far enough into winter to bust out the recreational drugs.

…

Dinner went better tonight. Gabriel noticed the knit placemats and asked Sam all sorts of questions about knitting while he cooked. 

“You should try crochet,” Sam found himself saying.

Gabriel’s response surprised him. “I used to when I was a kid. Or rather, a cousin showed me how. I don’t think I retained any of it.”

“Really?”

"I've got a lot of cousins and they're all crazy as hell. Crochet was probably the least bloody and most useful hobby I was exposed to. Except for origami," Gabriel mused, his gaze momentarily far off before returning with a renewed gleam. "Wait, I think I remember that one better!"

And down that path Gabriel went, making Sam scrounge up paper and scissors because he was on bed rest. Sam scowled at the unforeseen consequence of his actions, but deep down, he wasn't too irritated playing errand boy for Gabriel's whims. If he was lucky, this whim would keep Gabriel's attention for anywhere from a few hours to a whole day. Sam wasn't sure he possessed anything that could keep Gabriel occupied for longer than that.

Gabriel’s wheezing sounded less strenuous as he alternated between eating and folding paper. After a few false starts and many muttered swears, Gabriel made a sound of triumph, producing a crane.

Gabriel smiled proudly as he wiggled the wings at Sam. Sam hid his smile with a mouthful of potatoes.

“You can have it,” Gabriel said, slipping him the crane after Sam got him back up the loft. 

“You sure?”

“Duh. I can make like, fifty more. It’s only proper you get the first one. Since I’m staying here and all.”

By the end of his reply, Gabriel was fidgeting at the edge of the bed with the small stack of prepped paper he'd cut at the kitchen table. It was blank printer paper, but Gabriel had talked about making his own designs if he remembered how to make more than cranes.

Sam's hand curled carefully around the crane, unadorned and white like the snow outside.

"Alright. I better not be wading through little paper animals in the morning," he said gruffly, turning to leave before he said something stupid(er).

“I’ll make you wade through a veritable zoo!”

Later that night, Sam pretended to be asleep as the sounds of folding paper filled the cabin. He waited until Gabriel turned off the light and finally settled in for the night (a night owl; possibly a light sleeper) before reaching for where he'd set the crane on the coffee table.

He fell asleep with it in his hand. Sam woke up to find it on the rug, his dangling arm outstretched towards it.

Embarrassed, he made sure that Gabriel was still sleeping before pulling aside a single curtain and relocating it to the mantle. It caught a scant ray of light, shining softly under the shadow of the shotgun.

Chapter Text

At the end of Gabriel’s first week, he’d come to three solid conclusions. The first was that he hated bed rest. The second was that he missed the Internet. The third was that there was more to Sam Winchester than met the eye.

“How are you feeling?”

Gabriel swore, startled into dropping the tangle of yarn masquerading as crochet.

“I’m putting a bell on you. You can’t keep doing that,” Gabriel said, yanking his crochet hook free (the project was toast anyway) to point it accusatory at an unrepentant Sam.

“I walk normally up here.”

“No you don’t,” Gabriel muttered, watching as Sam prepared a new tray of tools to tend to his wounds.

Gabriel had caught the roughness in his voice the first few days from disuse, but it’d taken him a few days to realize the depth Sam’s uncanny quiet went. Gabriel didn’t know how it was possible for such a large man to move so quietly. He’d already been spooked multiple times by Sam seemingly appearing in the loft to tend to him. Sam had to have practiced it though—he hardly stood at his full height and breadth, and when he chose to speak at all, he spoke in low tones.

A part of him whispered that Sam must’ve endured some past trauma to explain his demeanor—a tiny part that clashed with the irreverent asshole he’d branded himself to be to the rest of the world.

“Do…you want to try a book?” Sam asked haltingly.

Gabriel’s mind immediately recalled titles surrounding the bed like Gender Trouble and Specters of Marx. Hot Sam, also being a well-read, smart Sam, made Gabriel want to punch his younger, college-self in the face for not paying more attention in his theory classes.

“I don’t read.”

Sam’s aghast, confused face made Gabriel laugh so hard he began to cough. He waved Sam off, momentarily clutching his ribs before recovering enough to grin.

“Gotcha! Do you have any harlequin novels lying around?”

Sam paused in unwinding his bandages, genuinely appearing to think about it, before he realized Gabriel was once again joking.

Humor was one of Gabriel’s tried and true strategies to maintain a stress-free environment. Gabriel didn’t want to get kicked out into the snow (he was 99% sure Sam wouldn’t kick him out even at his worst, but it was like hand sanitizer—there’s always that 1%), and he didn’t want to think about hard topics, so he remained willfully ignorant to things like Sam’s demeanor. It wasn’t hard to do so. Sam’s never-ending collection of hobbies kept Gabriel’s mind sufficiently occupied.

One thing he couldn’t ignore, however, was Sam’s cabin. For all of Gabriel’s projected naivety towards the “real world,” as some people in the past had criticized him for, he was financially shrewd. The cabin was a new build customized to Sam’s tastes and needs—that much was obvious from hours of studying what he could see from the confines of the bed and the couch. Where had Sam gotten the money to build the cabin from?

He didn’t strike Gabriel as the old money or new money types he was familiar with. Neither did he feel like a jaded entrepreneur marinating in an early retirement. Gabriel’s imagination ran rampant with the possibilities. He considered everything from Sam robbing a bank to being rewarded for some heroic deed by a grateful member of royalty.

“All done,” Sam said, breaking his train of thought.

“What’s the prognosis, doc?”

“Nothing terrible to report,” Sam replied, helping him back into a shirt. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a car. Oh, wait!”

That got him a quick half-smile. Gabriel pretended to take a snapshot of it with framed fingers, to which Sam hurriedly turned his face away.

“One day I’ll catch it on camera!”

“Not with that busted phone.”

“I’ve got my own,” Gabriel said coyly.

Sam arched an eyebrow fractionally. It was the most openly interested expression Gabriel had seen on him to date.

“Photography has been my hobby since college. My nicer cameras are at home, but I always pack my travel one,” Gabriel explained, reaching into the nightstand drawer. “Relax, I won’t take your picture right now.”

Sam’s panicked expression eased when Gabriel pulled out his camera with the lens cap on. It was an older Sony that had accompanied Gabriel on every one of his domestic trips.

“So far, all I’ve taken are test shots to make sure it survived the trip intact. I cracked a spare lens, but the camera itself is fine,” Gabriel said, turning the viewfinder to Sam and flicking through a limited gallery of sheets, book stacks, and a slightly blurred shot of Bones that would’ve come out better if he’d anticipated the damn bird shooting down from the rafters.

Sam genuinely smiled at the photo of Bones for a flicker of a moment. The whistle of the teakettle pulled him away before he could ask Gabriel any more questions about photography—something that Gabriel was secretly relieved by. His motivations for maintaining photography had never been clear to him, and hard to articulate to those curious enough to ask.

“No taking pictures of me,” Sam said, raising a warning finger at him before descending the stairs. His tone was mostly stern, but how serious he was about the request, Gabriel couldn’t determine.

Not that it mattered. After Kali, he’d found himself more attuned to scenery shots when he did take the time to pick up a camera. Gabriel hadn’t taken a proper photograph of anyone in years, and he wouldn’t begin with someone who didn’t want to be photographed.

…

To pay Sam back for sneaking up into the loft every time he played nurse, Gabriel would sometimes start talking, out of the blue, to Sam when he was downstairs. Letting his voice float down from the loft was the only solution he had at his disposal in addressing the problem of getting to know each other; something Sam was naturally resistant to, but would have to give in out of sheer necessity at some point. At least, that’s how Gabriel viewed it. Milestones of lessening pain on Gabriel’s end were marked with little kernels of information he triumphantly pulled from Sam like a dentist yanking bad teeth.

Learning Sam’s surname came about this way. He’d noticed the W in the initials scribbled inside his books and made a game out of guessing what it could possibly be. Games like this helped break up the monotony and often needled Sam into responding just so he’d stop tossing about outlandish guesses. Gabriel’s Polish guesses were what did Sam in, who revealed the W stood for Winchester.

“Like the gun?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, fishing out a battered copy of Being and Nothingness from the stack Gabriel had shifted off the nightstand to make room for his own things. “Like the gun.”

In return, Gabriel offered up so much of himself that he was certain Sam started tuning him out as soon as he got two sentences into an anecdote. Gabriel just couldn’t help himself. When the cabin got too quiet for too long, his skin started to itch and his mind begged for the silence to be filled.  At times, he rambled on at lengths so long and meandering that he astonished himself with the level of speech he was capable of.

Very rarely did Sam interject or make it clear he was listening, but he also never asked Gabriel to be quiet. Gabriel didn’t know what to make of his neutrality—from his bed bound position in the loft, he was pretty sure Sam wasn’t listening much outside of the times Gabriel blatantly baited him—but he kept talking. He told Sam of his preferred family members and friends, and all of the shenanigans he’d gotten up to over the years.

“It wouldn’t surprise any of them that I ended up in this situation,” Gabriel remarked after reminiscing on the time he and Balthazar crashed a golf cart in the Hamptons just to annoy the retired golfers on the green. “I always manage to get myself in and out of tricky spots.” His smile slipped, and he let it in the privacy of the loft. “But they don’t know about any of this. To them, I’ve just disappeared into thin air.”

Sam’s knitting needles—so constant in their rhythm—paused down below.

“It’s rather fitting, actually,” Gabriel said, attempting levity to cheer himself up. “Meeting a mysterious end is very in character, if I do say so myself.”

He heard Sam snort and return to knitting, but Gabriel thought he detected a mild air of sympathy about the click of his needles.

In short, the more Gabriel learned, the more Sam was somehow simultaneously mystified and clarified. Gabriel pondered this conundrum from the couch one late morning about a week into his stay, staring into the crackling fire. Sam let him sit downstairs for short periods now, standing behind him with legs like trees as Gabriel stubbornly shuffled with his butt down each stair. He didn’t think he could survive Sam carrying him down.

“Man.”

The petulant mutter, accompanied by the fluttering of wings, drew Gabriel from his incessant (and overly imaginative) thoughts about Sam in general. Bones had come back, and like she’d taken to doing, she made a great show of staring at him.

Sam said it was because she was curious about him. Gabriel thought it was creepy. He didn’t think the low-toned creaks and murmurs that escaped her beak were positive musings about his handsomeness. Sam’s rose-tinted glasses were firmly affixed when it came to Bones—only he could see what a danger she posed to him.

It didn’t matter that she was probably five pounds tops. She talked. Gabriel was of the opinion that the gift of English bequeathed upon her had been a grave mistake on Sam’s part.

“I have a name.”

“Man,” she repeated, strutting about around the items left on the open-air junk drawer of a coffee table. It was a far cry from the expensive, fragile knick knacks Gabriel was accustomed to viewing as decor, and one of the few messy spots Sam maintained in the otherwise comfortably neat cabin.

Bones picked up a paper crane and swung it about. “Hello! Sam. Sammy.” Her tone took an upswing at the last syllable, disintegrating into the closest thing she could get to a chirp as she flapped off to look for the giant.

Gabriel couldn’t blame her for being enamored. If it wasn’t the stupidest idea to lust after Sam, he would’ve been flirting all through his bed rest. Sam’s hands, while purely practical in their ministrations, possessed a firm gentleness that often put Gabriel in straits of exquisite sensory torture.

As it was, he’d decided that, no matter how horny he got (and he was going to get horny cooped up all winter), Sam had to remain off limits. He was his gracious host, mysterious mountain man with an unexplained past, and more than a little too good for someone like Gabriel.

Unless he expresses interest in me. Then we can do something about it.

“Hello Bones,” Sam cooed softly to the bird from the kitchen.

Gabriel sighed in great distress at the adorable tone. Sam wouldn’t make it easy.

He dragged himself off the couch for breakfast. Or rather, breakfast for him. Sam had settled on the last half of a bagel and coffee, which Gabriel frowned at.

“Is that all you’re eating?”

Sam hummed confirmation, absorbed in scratching the underside of Bones’ face.

“We’re not low on food, are we?”

“No?” Sam said, eyes darting to Gabriel before offering a wry smile. “I just don’t eat much in the morning. Don’t worry about food.”

Gabriel tucked into the breakfast sandwich that Sam had made him with misgivings. Sam didn’t eat much at any hour—a habit he’d only noticed about a week in. For every hearty meal Sam had, he subsisted off of five measly portions that didn’t make much sense for a man his size. He sounded adamant that they didn’t have a food problem, but if that was the case, why did he eat like that?

That was a line of inquiry that led right up to the forbidden topics of musing. Gabriel shoved all thoughts of disordered eating and the causes for them to the back of his mind, latching onto the first thing he could come up with to keep from pressing Sam on it more.

“Can I use your CD player?”

Sam’s exception to his technology ban was a cobbled together sound system and projector that he apparently used to dip into an eclectic movie collection when he felt like filling the silence. Gabriel had been itching to take it over ever since he’d heard Sam testing DVDs on the player a couple of days ago.

“Sure,” Sam’s eyes immediately narrowed. “What music?”

Gabriel didn’t respond—he was already out of his seat with the last of his sandwich crammed into his mouth, coffee in hand, and a CD in mind.

Sam had rescued the portion of his collection he’d had with him from the car. Gabriel didn’t know if he had any others (something to look for later), but he had plenty on him. He found the one he was looking for in the old sleeve container, making a beeline for the entertainment center as quickly as his sore ribs would allow.

The opening strains of “Heat of the Moment” filled the living room. Sam groaned from the kitchen. Gabriel grinned, triumphantly raising his mug towards the ceiling as he began to sing along.

‘I never meant to be so bad to you...’

He only stopped singing intermittently to sip his coffee. By the time the song ended, Gabriel had finished his coffee and Sam had migrated out of the kitchen to stare at him with a strange look in his eyes.

“You’re not bad, considering the song.”

“Not bad,” Gabriel sniffed, “Certainly not the best compliment I’ve received on my singing voice, but acceptable.”

Sam snorted. “You don’t need me to stroke your ego.”

Gabriel held back all the stroking innuendos that came to mind. “Those sound like the bitter words of a man that has the vocal quality of a drowning cat.”

Sam barked out a laugh, tossing his hair in a way that made Gabriel want to either jump his bones or shake him by the shoulders and demand his hair routine. Maybe both.

“I’m going to handle outside chores. Don’t hurt yourself. I don’t think either of us would survive a second bedrest.”

“Wait. Does that mean I’m off bed rest?”

“Yes,” Sam sighed. “But also refer to my previous statement.”

He easily ducked the pillow Gabriel threw his way, shutting the bathroom door with a soft click. Gabriel blamed his shit aim on his healing injuries and decided he’d (gently; damn he was still sore) keep the album rolling in celebration. It was only fair after all he’d been through.

…

“Do you write a lot of letters to the sheriff?”

They ate dinner in the moody lighting of the kitchen. Sam liked minimal lights at night, which meant the living room fire and a few strategic warm lights inlaid in the cabinetry of the kitchen did most of the work.

Gabriel liked it as long as he didn’t look out the windows. When he did, he was reminded that wilderness surrounded them, and suddenly the flickering lighting felt paltry against the hulking trees and sweeping expanse of snow.

Sam thumbed at the edge of his plate. He’d been mostly quiet through dinner since Bones had gone back out, and Gabriel had let him be. Singing had reduced his near manic desire for conversation, but some questions needed answers.

“I don’t write a lot to anyone. Jody’s nice. But I also write to my brother and his husband,” Sam admitted. He trailed off in a mumble. “Haven’t written to them in a while.”

Gabriel reined in his knee-jerk excitement at the admission. Calm erring towards nonchalance was what worked best on Sam.

“Really? Do they live close by, or do you make Bones fly across the country?”

“I would never,” Sam said, hiding his humor by taking a bite out of his roll. “They’re a few states over. Jody gets the letters and gives them to Bones. I never reply to letters in the winter though.”

“Why not?”

Sam shrugged. “It’s my time. I sometimes go down to town during the summer.”

Gabriel caught the finality in Sam’s tone and let the topic go. He wondered at the sort of relationship Sam might have with his brother. Of the loads of siblings, half-siblings, and step siblings he had, Gabriel could only claim a semblance of a relationship with a few of them. Balthazar was easily the closest family he had, and he was a cousin.

They migrated to the couch, basking in front of the fire from the opposite ends they occupied. Sam knitted and Gabriel reorganized his CDs, reacquainting himself with the music he’d have to rely on for the winter. He could only hope he didn’t get sick of it all by the time spring came.

“Here.”

A pair of mittens appeared in Gabriel’s peripheral. Sam dropped them by his thigh, clutching a knitting needle in each hand like twin lifelines.

“I thought I saw you working on something mitten-shaped the other day,” Gabriel remarked, studying them by the firelight. He now knew enough about knitting to know that the colorwork—shades of yellow, amber, and warm brown against an ivory backdrop—took skill. The cuffs were dark brown, and the very tips were sunshine yellow. “Wow! These are great, Sam. Are they…” He placed his hand over one of the mittens, his suspicion confirmed in a rush of warmth. “Oh, are they for me?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, looking as if he wanted the ground to swallow him up. “You don’t have any. It’s impractical.”

Gabriel thought of the hours Sam had spent, unseen on the couch, knitting away as he talked on and on about nothing in particular. This whole time, he’d been working on these?

“They’re great! Fit perfectly,” he exclaimed, slipping his hand into one to test the snug interior. “You’re so talented. Thanks for these.”

Even with his beard hiding half his face, Gabriel could tell Sam was as red as a tomato.

“Um. Gotta do the dishes,” he said, standing robotically before fleeing to the kitchen. Gabriel bit his tongue when he noticed Sam taking his knitting needles with him.

I wonder how he knew yellow is my favorite color, Gabriel thought later, admiring the mittens in the privacy of the loft. It wasn’t something he’d told Sam—stories of his adventures with friends were more fun to tell than personal details—and none of the clothes he’d packed save for a couple of socks were yellow.

A lucky guess then. With a sigh, Gabriel fell back against the bed, fumbling to turn the lamplight off.

Above, the skylight revealed a clear swath of night sky so startlingly bright that Gabriel’s eyes hurt to look at it too long. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen stars (he’d done enough camping and glamping and all the types of outdoorsy activities in between growing up to see stars properly), but the view from this bed, in this cabin, was intimately different.

Gabriel felt his situation keenly at this hour, like a knife to his already tender ribs. These particular stars reminded him that he was an outsider here; an intruder on Sam’s space and confined to a cabin for long, cold months.

On bed rest, it’d been torture. Gabriel had thought the fallout post-Kali had been the lowest point of his life, but the past week or so fought for a close second. He’d taken to waking after Sam fell asleep on the couch (why Sam slept on the couch was a mystery he’d get around to solving soon), his thoughts punctuated by Sam’s wide array of sleep noises.

Not that he snored. He just seemed to dream about bad things a lot, which resulted in tossing and turning Gabriel doubted was made any better by the couch. If he didn’t think Sam would reflexively clock him for trying to wake him up or for leaving the bed, Gabriel would’ve gone down to see if Sam was having nightmares.

He gingerly rolled onto his side, settling in for the night. A few more days, and his ribs wouldn’t pain him at all. Gabriel tried to take comfort in that fact as he put the stars out of his mind.

The mittens stayed under his pillow, carefully tucked away so he could keep them close. They were a sign that, day by day, they were becoming less strangers and more…something.

How eloquent, Gabriel thought dryly to himself just before he fell asleep. He’d have to think of a better word in the morning for what he and Sam were approaching—something that Sam wouldn’t take much offense to.

Chapter Text

Chapter Five: Acclimatization Processes

November slipped by in dreary, gray days marked by the shrinking skeins of yarn in Sam’s basket and the growing number of Gabriel’s origami animals accumulating on spare surfaces.

It didn’t snow harder than a passing flurry—something that unsettled Gabriel, who recalled the freak blizzard that had brought him here and spent every night waiting for a repeat event. Before the car crash, he’d never had a problem with snow. Now, he felt less than charitable towards it.

He tried not to let it show. Sam would be irritated if he learned he’d have to spend a very snowy winter with someone who wanted to stay away from the most critical component of the season. Gabriel liked the camaraderie he’d gained so far and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it.

Today’s kitchen lesson involved baking bread. Gabriel didn’t like how taxing the kneading process was, but Sam made it look sexy (like he did with many things), so Gabriel stuck to it.

“It’s all about the preparation. Good bread requires work,” Sam explained, kneading away with his large hands. He treated the dough expertly, conjuring up images in Gabriel’s head about what he’d like Sam’s hands to do on him.

Gabriel shook his head slightly and tried to focus on his own, less developed chunk of dough. Who knew making bread was so complicated?

Sam didn’t roll his sleeves up; he never did, even when cooking. However, the cuffs of his sleeves naturally rode up as he worked, revealing his wrists. Gabriel discreetly checked them, hiding his relief to find them unscarred. It’d occurred to him one particularly sleepless night that Sam’s habit of changing in the bathroom and always wearing sleeved shirts might be correlated.

Sam’s shadow fell over him. Gabriel swallowed as Sam’s warm hands covered his own, repositioning them. He smelled like the firewood he chopped and the bread he baked and the soap in the bathroom and—

Medicinal?

“Like that,” Sam said, directing him. “See? You’ve got it. You just need more flour on the surface.”

Sharp, clinical—it was medicinal. Of all the scant products Sam possessed in the bathroom, none smelled like it’d come from a pharmaceutical shelf. Maybe Sam had a skin condition, like eczema, and he kept himself covered up out of both comfort and embarrassment.

It was the most plausible explanation Gabriel had landed on so far. He was so excited by solving the mini mystery that he only sighed a little when Sam stepped back hurriedly, returning to his section of the counter before Gabriel could soak in the unexpected proximity.

Now I have to figure out how to express to Sam that he doesn’t have to hide his skin condition from me, Gabriel thought, throwing himself with renewed vigor into kneading.  Easier said than done.

…

The car is crashing, always crashing in Gabriel's dreams when he doesn't dream of the stars falling through the skylight. Every time, he lets the car crash and wakes with his breath muffled in his pillow, hair sticking to the back of his neck with sweat. For all his loud chatter, he's always had quiet dreams, good or bad.

Tonight, the dream has gone awry.

The creature is still standing on the road, still a blur as the car fishtails. But as Gabriel careens over the edge, he swears he can hear it let out a rattling bellow that cracks the windshield and rattles his eardrums and—

Nothing. Gabriel jerked hard enough to tip him over the mattress, landing with a sheet-muffled gasp on the rug. A second later, a structurally perilous stack of books tipped over, scattering over his head and chest.

Strangely, the thud of the books grounded Gabriel. The books were real, solid things that hurt when smashed into his nose, but a sign that the creature hadn’t followed him out of the fog of his dreams.

Downstairs, Sam woke with a confused grunt. “Gabe?”

That might be the first time he’s called me that, Gabriel thought, pausing in his movements to extricate himself from the tangled bedding.

“I’m fine. Go back to sleep,” Gabriel called out, doing his best to sound like his usual self.

Sam chewed on this for a few seconds. Gabriel held his breath, waiting until Sam called out an unconvinced “Ok,” and audibly rolled over on the couch, before letting his head fall back with a gentle thud on the rug.

The rest of the morning unfolded in a gray fog. Gabriel spilled half his coffee and knocked over the flour bag when they took up baking bread again. Sam took it all in stride, cleaning up the messes with quiet patience that made Gabriel feel worse.

Tired and confused, Gabriel fled to the living room to throw on a CD—music, noise; anything to cut through the funk dragging him down.

Sam's knitting needles kept up a steady cadence to Gabriel's erratic CD switching. Classical, 80s rock, disco, indie pop, then back to classical. Gabriel didn't realize he'd made the switches to better hear Sam on the couch until his ears paired the knitting needles and the muted piano notes. 

Something loosened in Gabriel’s head, easing the frenetic tension driving his movements. He scrubbed a hand over his eyes and sighed, drifting to a window. The sun would do him some good.

He drew the curtains back fully, studying the edges of Sam's property. On this side of the cabin (east, according to Sam), there was about ten paces worth of cleared ground before the trees started abruptly on downward-sloping ground. Rocky patches of soil peeped out through the thin cover of snow, fighting futilely to remain visible.

The barren sight rekindled the longing for the company of others. All his life, he'd kept himself immersed in others, always making sure there was someone a text or call away. He couldn't say they were all friends. Many were shallow acquaintances, little more than distractions to pass the time. Some were even enemies. It hardly mattered when Gabriel wanted to avoid thinking about his life. When all was said and done, he just liked being around people. Plural.

A shadow moved within the trees. Gabriel ignored his brain's knee-jerk reaction to label it as the creature. It was just a trick of light and movement. Gabriel swallowed back his nerves and made a point to squeeze his eyes shut, focusing on the sun's scant warmth.

After a minute of this, the knitting needles stopped clicking. Gabriel kept his eyes shut as Sam walked up, socked feet nearly inaudible.

“For all your fuss about the windows being kept shut, you sure have a funny way of showing your appreciation of the opened ones.”

Gabriel couldn’t help but smile. He opened his eyes to find Sam a few paces away, elbow resting on the top of a bookcase and body turned towards him.

“I miss the sun. Beach vacations are the best,” he said, rolling his eyes at Sam’s joking shudder.

“Beaches are sandy hell pits. No thanks.”

“When’s the last time you’ve been to a beach?”

“Hmm. Probably when I was still at Stanford.”

“A Stanford grad? Impressive,” Gabriel said, pleasantly surprised by Sam’s willing admission of personal information.

"It was a long time ago," Sam said, closing the topic with a shrug. "What made you want to go skiing anyway?"

“Of all the stuff I’ve talked about, I didn’t tell you about that?”

Sam smiled wryly, shaking his head.

Gabriel scratched the nape of his neck sheepishly. “Oops. Let’s see….I’d just woken up in the aftermath of a crazy Halloween party in which I’d spotted an unfortunate ex. I’m a creature of impulse, so I told Cousin Balthazar I was going to ski at the farthest resort that would accept my winter-long reservation that same day to avoid the gossip circuit.”

“Gossip circuit?”

“A side-effect of being a trust fund baby,” Gabriel sighed, “The money comes with everyone knowing everything about each other, except for the stuff that they try to hide and ultimately comes to light in nasty ways because money also makes people bored, which leads to secrets being revealed for fun.” Gabriel took a deep breath and dramatically wiped his brow. “Phew, what a sentence! I know you probably think I’m an airhead that’s on the wrong side of thirty for these shenanigans, but you’d be surprised.”

“I don’t think you’re an airhead,” Sam said, shocking him. “Annoying and dramatic, yes—”

“Hey!”

“But not an airhead. Or even that shallow,” Sam continued with a direct gaze. “I think you’ve just spent so long making others think you’re an airhead that you have no idea what to do here, in the woods.”

Gabriel stared at Sam, taken aback. Even with the beard, he could make out a slight flush creeping up Sam’s cheeks.

“Er, sorry. That was…”

“Fine,” Gabriel said before Sam could retreat further into his hermit crab shell. “You’re right. Skiing was supposed to be time for me to be…me. Except I don’t think I even know who that is.”

Gabriel cringed and faced the window, unable to bear Sam's reaction. He had no idea what possessed him to say that carefully buried thought out loud. Stupid.

Sam took a careful step toward him. Gabriel chanced a glance at his reflection in the glass and found nothing but placid attentiveness on Sam’s face. As their eyes met in the glass, an empathetic crease furrowed Sam’s brow.

“It took me almost six months my first year up here to make peace with who I was,” Sam said, “It’s not easy, but that’s the beauty of isolation.”

The CD clicked at the end of its run, leaving them in silence. Gabriel let himself have it for two, three seconds, their reflections locked in blurred contemplation of the other. It only ended when a sudden gust of wind rattled the side of the cabin, prompting Sam to lean over Gabriel and draw the curtains shut.

“No fun,” Gabriel joked half-heartedly. Using humor to ease their way out of the moment didn’t feel right, but Gabriel was a creature of habit.

“Someone’s got to think practically,” Sam remarked. In an anxious tic, he tried to run his hand through his hair, but it got caught in a tangle halfway through.

“It’s long enough to braid,” Gabriel said, wincing sympathetically as Sam ripped his hand free with a grunt. Somehow, every other facet of his appearance managed to remain neat. “When’s the last time you brushed it?”

Sam grimaced as he extricated himself. "Apparently not soon enough. And no braiding. Last time I let someone braid it she left it all knotted."

Gabriel’s eyebrows flew up. Sam blinked, realizing what exactly he’d said.

“She?” Gabriel asked, part incredulous and part delighted by the personal admission. And also perhaps the slightest bit jealous that some mystery lady had gotten her fingers on Sam’s luscious locks recently enough to inspire such a disgusted expression at his recollection.

Wait, does this mean he’s straight? No, he could be bi. Please let him be not solely into women.

In the kitchen, the timer went off with a jarring buzz. Sam seized the sound like a lifeline, muttering about the bread.

“You can’t escape this!” Gabriel exclaimed, hot on his heels. This was much, much better than ruminating on his lost sense of identity.

“Yes I can,” Sam said firmly, and true to his word, he refused to elaborate upon the image that now tortured Gabriel with its suggestive vagueness.

…

That night, the view through the skylight made Gabriel so dizzy that not even curling on his side to avoid it mitigated the horrible effect the wide-open night sky had on him. What he'd give for a few storm clouds or some good old-fashioned light pollution.

Gabriel gave it up as a lost cause and crept downstairs, passing Sam’s prone form on the couch. He paused there long enough for his night vision to adjust, revealing the contours of Sam’s body. Why was he still sleeping there?

I’ve got to get around to asking him about that, Gabriel thought, bemused. He wasn’t on bedrest anymore, and Gabriel was growing concerned for Sam’s back.

He unlocked the back door, revealing the glass storm door. A layer of ice-hardened snow covered the deck, only a couple of inches deep. There were some snow-covered mounds by the far corner of the deck and out in the sloped yard, but Gabriel could only guess at what might be what—he'd only looked out here once when he'd heard the bear.

Gabriel sighed hard enough to cloud the door with his breath. He idly drew a smiley face, shivering as the cold radiated through his fingernail and up his arm. The view was better than confronting the stars from the loneliness of the bed, but Gabriel didn't like the look of the trees hulking at the edge of the property any more in the dark than he did in the daylight.

He heard Sam’s weight creak against the floorboards a split second before he spoke, but his presence didn’t fully register until his voice broke the quiet.

“Did you hear something?”

Gabriel jumped a little, drawing the blanket he’d brought with him tighter around himself as he half-turned to glare at Sam.

“Jesus Christ, you scared me…”

He trailed off as Sam stepped closer into the small circle of light created by the moonlit snow. With his ruffled hair and half-lidded eyes, his visage was softened in a way that made Gabriel desperately want to touch him.

“I just…thought maybe I should go outside sometime. Test out those mittens you made me,” Gabriel said, tamping down the desire to reach out. His fingers spasmed around the blanket. “But it freaks me out.”

“What freaks you out?” Sam asked, voice still hoarse with sleep and soft. It was the only reason Gabriel continued instead of bluffing and heading back to bed.

“The wilderness. Snow. I used to like it. The snow that is—not the wilderness. Now not so much.”

Sam frowned, puzzling through his jerky sentences before his face cleared.

“The crash.”

Gabriel nodded once hesitantly. Sam swallowed visibly, ducking his head. Gabriel followed his gaze downward to see Sam’s hand flexing, fingers briefly clenched in a fist before they reached out.

It wasn’t the first time Sam touched him. It wasn’t even the fifth or sixth—Sam had been a dutiful nurse. Gabriel’s stomach still flipped at the intentionality of Sam’s hand clasping his shoulder, gentle yet firm as his eyes searched his face.

“It’s alright to be scared of the snow. You’ve got plenty of logical reasons to fear it. Just don’t let that fear get so big that it overshadows your love for it.”

“I knew all those books made you knowledgeable, but since when did they give you the right to employ your brains so poetically?” Gabriel asked, amused. At this point, he could believe Sam was capable of anything he put his mind to.

Sam shrugged with a rueful smile, letting him go. “Three years up here gave me a lot of time to think.”

Three years, Gabriel thought, filing away the knowledge as he closed the door and returned to bed, rubbing his shoulder. Three years of almost complete solitude, with only a raven and the occasional summer acquaintance for some company between the sheets. Gabriel couldn't fathom how Sam had done it, or why.

He was very forthcoming today. Or yesterday. Yesterday and today, Gabriel thought sleepily before he went to sleep.

Gabriel awoke only a few hours later to the faint sounds of shoveling coming from the rear of the cabin. His curiosity overcame his desire to laze about in the warm bed. What on earth was Sam doing outside?

Shoving his feet into the far too big slippers borrowed from Sam, Gabriel descended the stairs. He noticed right away that all the curtains were open, letting in pearly morning light that painted everything in shades of pink. In the kitchen, there were signs that Sam had eaten some toast and coffee as an early breakfast; Gabriel poured himself a cup from the still-warm pot before going to the back door.

The thermometer (one of several scattered around the cabin, because of course it made sense to have a bunch of those and avoid silly things like clocks) by the back door told of some of the lowest temperatures yet. Gabriel shivered, peering out to see what all the fuss was about.

“What the hell…”

Gabriel’s confusion melted away in shock at the mostly cleared deck. Sam stood towards the far end, his back to the cabin as he methodically shoveled snow. Bones accompanied him, hopping up and down the railing that wrapped around most of the deck to play chicken with the arc of snow from Sam’s flying shovel.

Did he do this for me?  Gabriel thought, flushing as he recollected their conversation. Surely Sam hadn’t done all this just so he could safely walk around and acquaint himself with his surroundings.

He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. Bones noticed him first, hopping to Sam’s shoulder with a caw to get his attention. He stopped shoveling, and she flew off, gliding towards the door to trick Gabriel into stepping back hastily before swooping up over the roof and out of sight. Tricky prankster.

“What’s all this?” Gabriel called through the door, unable to keep from smiling at Sam’s conflicted expression. Once again, he’d caught him doing a good deed, and Sam didn’t know how to cope with being confronted by Gabriel’s appreciation.

“I’m just…clearing snow,” he replied, voice muffled by the scarf he hastily tugged up to his nose. He planted his shovel with a thunk on the pile he’d made. “Go back to bed.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes but didn’t argue the point. He could feel the cold through the door—later, when the sun was at its zenith, it’d be a much better time to brave the outdoors.

Before he left, he made sure to give Sam a kilo-watt smile. If Sam couldn’t handle verbal compliments, Gabriel would just insist on showing it through his expressions.

Sam jerked back, accidentally knocking over his shovel in the process.

“Have fun,” Gabriel called over his shoulder, leaving Sam to curse at the wayward shovel.

…

Gabriel’s reaction to his first proper venture outdoors since he’d happened upon Sam’s doorstep was crude and long-winded enough to make Bones cackle in avian delight.

“Cold,” Gabriel finished empathetically, scurrying to press against Sam’s side after he shut the door behind him.

“Fresh air is good for you,” Sam said mercilessly, bodily nudging him out towards the open. Bones took off, landing on the railing to look at them with a cocked head.

Gabriel shivered morosely. It wasn’t as if he could fight Sam. Not only did Sam physically outmatch him, but Gabriel was sure he’d just allow himself to be pinned to the ground and let the homoerotic connotations of the position take over. Even if the ground was frozen wood.

The sharp air burned Gabriel's nostrils and crept in between the layers he'd pulled on. His breath exploded outward in a mist that resembled a dragon's breath. Bones flew through it in a lazy loop that brought her back to her stance on the railing.

“How often do you come out?” Gabriel asked. He hadn’t noticed Sam come out much at all so far, but Sam was quiet. For all he knew, he came out on a self-imposed routine he hadn’t noticed.

“Once a day for trash. At minimum once a week for compost. I try to walk the property biweekly, but once the snows start coming in it can be weeks before I step outside for more than trash. And sometimes I just do it through the kitchen window.”

“Lazy.”

Sam elbowed him. Gabriel elbowed him back before sliding across the deck to put himself out of range of Sam’s freakishly long arms.

“What about when it’s not winter? Are you an outdoorsy guy?”

“I don’t go in the woods often, if that’s what you’re implying,” Sam replied, scuffing the deck’s floorboards. “I sit on the deck a lot or tend to the garden. Occasionally I light a small bonfire around the holidays.”

"A garden," Gabriel echoed, looking out to the sloped yard with new context. Sam had mentioned gardening, but there wasn't much now, save for a pile of metal and timber within spitting distance of the tree line. "Is that supposed to be a greenhouse?"

“Supposed to. But the structure I planned clearly isn’t cut out for winters here,” Sam said dryly, “I’ll have to go back to the drawing board in spring. Luckily, I didn’t have any plants in there. I only took it up this past summer, and proper gardens can take years to cultivate.”

Gabriel quite liked the idea of Sam kneeling on soft soil, tending plants with the same calm, focused air he acquired when knitting and cooking. Gabriel had only a bare-bones understanding of domesticity like this—he'd grown up either having these activities done for him out of his sight, or not at all.

“It must be beautiful here in the summer.”

“It is. But no one leaves me alone in the summer,” Sam groused.

Gabriel snorted at Sam’s petulance. “You must be pretty popular in town when you come down from your isolation. Do you shave for the occasion?”

Sam’s expression made Gabriel gasp. “Oh my God, you do! I can’t believe you’re holding out on me. Am I not deserving of a clean-shaven Sam?”

“It’s winter,” Sam muttered, crossing his arms.

"Fair enough, I guess," Gabriel sighed, trying not to sound whiny. He couldn't help it though. Rugged, bearded Sam had its appeal, but clean-shaven? Gabriel could only imagine the jawline he was hiding.

The wind suddenly picked up, startling Gabriel into stumbling back. It was as if the woods had come alive like some primordial beast, exhaling a great gust of air.

Sam caught him by the elbow, righting him with a practiced motion.

“That’s enough for today,” Sam said after studying Gabriel for a few seconds. “Back inside. Bones!”

Bones came along, landing on Sam’s shoulder and fluttering her tail feathers in Gabriel’s face. He spluttered, glaring daggers at her that she returned with a cheeky beak clack.

“I bet you’ve seen Sam clean-shaven," he hissed to her.

Bones cooed in response, blinking one eye at him that Sam had explained wasn’t a wink since she didn’t understand how winks worked for humans, but Gabriel was convinced was a wink. In instances like this, Gabriel felt his interpretation of the not-wink was gratified.

Sam ignored their little aside with a surprising amount of dignity considering he was Bone’s perch and as such, three inches away from them both. Gabriel wondered what he’d have to do to convince Sam to shave his beard off—maybe take on a couple more chores, or contrive some sort of bet?

Then the pins and needles began to set in, and all thoughts of beards were promptly forgotten as Gabriel began the dramatically loud process of acclimating to indoor temperature.

Chapter Text

Thanksgiving weekend slipped past uncelebrated. Sam had never seen the point in celebrating when it was simply a reminder of his solitude. He cultivated an excuse about not wanting to waste food resources for Gabriel, who somehow hadn’t even noticed the holiday on the calendar.

“I guess I’ve started treating time like you do: a suggestion,” Gabriel explained with alarming alacrity given his hedonistic tendencies. “If we’re not feasting on turkey, we can at least bust out some weed.”

Sam typically saved such activities for Christmas when he desperately needed some sort of drug to get him through the bleak holiday, but he saw little harm in starting early this year. After all, he had company.

Company. It alarmed Sam how used to Gabriel’s presence he’d gotten in the matter of a month. Sam found himself going beyond tolerating Gabriel’s presence out of a sense of duty, even enjoying it. He liked it when Gabriel paid rapt attention to whichever activity Sam tried to show him the ropes of, and how he liked to play music in the drawn-out hours of the afternoon. Gabriel even sometimes made him tea and had a good eye for color that let Sam deviate from the suggestions in his knitting books with confidence in the end product.

He also had a pretty smile that he flashed about far too often for Sam’s health and hair that curled at the ends on the days he didn’t style it straight out of the shower. This was occurring more and more often due to Gabriel rationing an already half-used container of hair product he’d brought along for his original ski trip, and the new, softer hairstyle pleased Sam to an absurd degree.

It also had him thinking about his own appearance. Did the beard make him look older; more like a crazy hermit? He always grew it out once August passed to mark his slow retreat back from what limited society he could bear in the summer, and every year since, it seemed to grow back a little faster. Sam found it useful. It kept his face warm and provided a small comfort against the mirror, which Sam didn't go out of his way to avoid, but preferred not to look in.

Yet here he was in front of the mirror, rubbing his chin with calloused fingers and studying himself intently.

Sam frowned at his reflection. With Gabriel here, he didn’t like the idea of keeping the beard. He couldn’t take back the first impression he’d made (gruff and awkward), nor could he pretend to be normal (normal people didn’t winter by themselves on a frigid mountain), but he could try to be more receptive. He wanted to be for Gabriel.

Once upon a time, he’d been good with people. Not perfect, but good, and he’d always been at his best around people he knew and was comfortable with.

Resolved, Sam opened the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out the electric trimmer. The things he did to make socializing easier.

When he finished, Bones made a cooing noise of approval from her perch on the top of the toilet tank. Sam had to reluctantly agree with her. Clean-shaven always felt better, even if it harkened back to pre-cabin days. His hair remained a bit long even for his tastes, but he was already worlds more approachable.

Sam opened the bathroom door, more nervous than he’d anticipated. What would Gabriel think? It was one thing to assume shaving would soften his appearance and be appreciated. Gabriel was like the weather—only predictable half the time.

Luckily, Sam hadn’t misread Gabriel. His response, like many of them, was dramatic.

“Wow! I knew you were a looker beneath that beard,” he enthused, throwing his book aside to meet Sam in the middle.

An embarrassed flush suffused Sam’s newly exposed cheeks. He’d gotten his fair share of compliments, but few delivered so enthusiastically.

“Took years off of you. Not that you looked old at all before,” Gabe huffed, crossing his arms and fixing a suspicious look on him. “How old are you anyway?”

“Younger than you,” Sam said evasively. He remembered Gabriel’s birthday from his license and could say that with certainty.

“I figured,” Gabriel grumbled before his face lit up. “Oh, we can play the birthday guessing game!”

“Nope,” Sam said, heading for the kitchen. “I won’t participate.”

“No fun,” Gabriel said, trailing after him. He clucked his tongue. “You’ve got another tangle in your hair.”

Sam reached back to feel across his scalp, sighing as he came across the knot. “Figures. I skipped a haircut this summer.”

“It’d tangle less if you took care of it,” Gabriel said with no real heat, stepping closer. He flicked his eyes up towards Sam. “Let me?”

Sam hesitated. He used to like having hands run through his hair. After he’d come to the mountain, having his hair handled felt more like something to be endured. The only reason he hadn’t shaved it all off was because a part of him clung to the familiarity of its length.

“Alright. But be gentle.”

“I wouldn’t dare be anything else.”

They situated themselves in the living room with Sam sitting on the floor, feet outstretched beneath the coffee table and Gabriel sitting on the couch behind him. Gabriel started with a comb, running it through his hair with care that bordered on professional.

Sam tipped his head forward, slowly relaxing under Gabriel’s quiet ministrations.

“You could use a trim.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, reluctantly pulled from his lull, “Are you offering? I’m not sure I trust you with scissors anywhere near me.”

Gabriel play-swiped at his ear with the flat of the comb. “I’ve done it before! Took a course back in the day.”

“Did you?” Sam asked, genuinely curious. Gabriel’s life was so jam-packed with color and sound that Sam doubted he’d ever stop learning something new about him.

“Yup. I can give mean haircuts. Never did get the hang of bleach.”

“I’d look horrible as a blond anyway.”

Sam hated that Gabriel’s responding laugh made him want to crack more jokes. He’d have to be very careful this winter around Gabriel. Getting along was fine, but there were certain lines Sam couldn’t fathom crossing without having to expose himself.

After some more of Gabriel’s sweet-talking (which Sam didn’t need at that point, but let happen anyway because Gabriel needed the practice in meeting resistance to his demands), they moved to the bathroom for a haircut. Gabriel cut quickly, bitching about his old scissors and musing about his good genetics all the while.

Gabriel’s skill came through. The end product was remarkably similar to the old hair length he’d settled on in his early career days. Sam let this fact slip before he could stop himself.

“Yeah? What did you work as?” Gabriel asked, standing behind him as Sam studied his now barely shoulder-length hair in the mirror.

Sam's stomach dropped at the question; his nervous response heightened by the proximity the bathroom forced. This was one of the lines he'd feared crossing.

Before he could freeze up or move, Gabriel continued in an exaggerated, humorous direction. He hummed pensively, screwing his eyes shut and waving a (thankfully scissors-free hand) in his general direction.

“Helicopter pilot. Michelin food critic. BDSM business owner. Museum arts director. Professional knitter.”

Sam laughed, knowing that Gabriel was doing it on purpose. Of course Gabriel was perceptive enough to figure out what Sam’s sticking points were. Gabriel’s asshole nature came from his tendency to find boundaries, dig his heels in, and push with both hands just to see if he could make anything shift.

It was why Sam wasn’t prepared for the realization that he’d been exercising consistent tact regarding his past. Sam wanted to reward that tact, despite his reservations, with one thing about himself; something easily let go.

“I was a lawyer,” Sam revealed, mirth fading as he spoke through his unease. He ran a hand through his hair, looking at Gabriel’s reflection. What he saw made him feel the tiniest bit better about opening up. “Before I came here, I was a lawyer.”

Gabriel considered this. “Can’t say I can see you in a suit, Samshine.”

And that was it. Sam wondered if Gabriel's strategy over the long term was to gain information bit by bit. If so, and if Gabriel could sustain the patience necessary for it (which remained to be determined), he had a feeling he might succeed.

…

Gabriel rolled the blunt shortly before the time they typically reserved for dinner to coincide with potential munchies. He approached the process with the deft quickness of muscle memory.

“I wish you’d let us have some of my stuff. This smells mellow,” Gabriel said a bit sadly as he let him take the first puff.

“Mellow is better for your ribs,” Sam said, inhaling with the heady anticipation that getting high with Gabriel would prove to be an experience.

Gabriel didn't disappoint. Sam was aware of passing the blunt back and forth on the couch, lungs burning and the air growing hazy with smoke, and then they were upstairs in the loft looking up at the stars.

“I hate it,” Gabriel drawled, pointing lazily up with what was left of the blunt. He sprawled flat on his back, leaving Sam to curl on the edge, elbow propping his upper body up, with a respectable amount of distance between them. “It makes me dizzy.”

“I can put up a curtain,” Sam offered, sympathetic to Gabriel’s plight. His first year here had been terrifyingly illuminating, to say the least.

"How would that even work? It's such a funny-shaped window. Or skylight. It's a skylight.”

“Forget the technicalities. I’ll just tape up a blanket.”

For some reason, Gabriel found this hilarious. Sam joined in on the laughter helplessly, buoyed by a swimming sensation that swept him up and away. He’d never had a problem with the window, but he could see why Gabriel did. The stars spun tonight, so close that they seemed a part of the cabin’s ceiling; the glow-in-the-dark star stickers of his childhood all grown up.

"We can't put one of your blankets up," Gabriel explained once he got ahold of himself. He rolled onto his side to face Sam, hand tucked under his chin. The vulnerable position made Sam lean in imperceptibly; a compass tugged north. "They're too pretty to be treated like that."

Sam snorted to cover how touched he was. “I have regular blankets, you know.”

“Lies!”

They lapsed into brief silence to watch the smoke ring Gabriel formed rise to dissipate against the skylight. Despite the size of the bed, they'd somehow migrated to sink into the center, mere inches from each other. Sam told himself it made passing the blunt easier.

“Did I ever tell you what made me crash the car?” Gabriel asked.

“I assumed it was black ice.”

Gabriel laughed wryly, shifting even closer to him. “Oh, do I have a story to tell you.”

Sam exhaled sharply as Gabriel grabbed his hip to steady himself before he face-planted into his chest.

Gabriel moved so bonelessly that he didn’t seem to notice Sam’s tension at all. He recuperated, leaning back to put the original space between them, and began to tell Sam of the deer with too many legs that had run out into the road. By the time he finished, Sam’s heart rate had eased to make room for his gut feeling to thrum.

“You know,” he started, “This mountain’s always had weird shit going on, supposedly. Most of it stems from the local Native American lore. Some of it comes from other stuff. People say they’ve seen coyotes walking on their hind legs, deer walking backward, rabbits with two heads. Wendigos. Shapeshifters.”

Gabriel shifted a bit closer to pass him the blunt, face rapt with equal amounts of horror and fascination. Sam wove his spiel as what remained burned down to a stub in his grasp.

“I’ve only seen something strange once. It was when I found Bones. I found her in a witch’s circle. You know what that is?”

Gabriel shook his head.

“It’s a circular clearing in the middle of the woods, hemmed in by fallen branches. Maybe manmade, maybe not. I certainly didn’t make the one I found,” Sam explained, “When I stepped into the middle of it, the whole forest went deathly quiet. Like it was holding its breath, waiting for my next move.”

Gabriel was holding his breath now, his socked feet pressing against Sam’s in some unconscious desire for a human anchor. Sam let him.

“I picked Bones up. There was no getting her back to her nest by that point, and a part of me didn’t want to stick around. I’m not overly superstitious, but I remember my uncle telling me about places like that,” Sam said, lowering his voice, “Some places are touched by a different kind of hand that makes different kinds of things. He said if you don’t want to be touched by that hand, you better get a move on out of there, wherever you find yourself.”

“Your uncle sounds like a sensible man,” Gabriel managed to say.

Sam shrugged a shoulder, leaning back to stub the blunt out on the headboard. “Most of the talk is just that on this mountain. I don’t doubt something made you run off the road, but I wouldn’t dwell on it. You’re here now.”

With me.

Somehow, Gabriel seemed to sense this unspoken addition because his nerves faded into a dreamy smile. He flopped back on the bed, throwing a forearm over his eyes.

“I’ve gotta be honest, Sam-a-lam. This isn’t the best weed I’ve had, but it gets the job done.”

“I’m not made of money like you.”

“But you’ve got some kind of money.”

Sam mirrored Gabriel’s position, minus the forearm. He didn’t mind looking at the stars as he contemplated how to respond.

“Hmm. Some kind. I don’t blow it on absurdly good kush.”

“Reconsider for next year. Seriously. It’ll blow your mind.”

…

Sam dreamed of the fire. Fragments flashed through his mind’s eye, the same jagged pieces of glass as always: the overturned furniture, the screams, the oppressive heat. Smoke, orange, burning, burning, burningburningburning—

Awake. Sam inhaled once, sharply, then stared up at the ceiling. It astonished him how calm he was when usually, he woke soaked in fear-sweat and shaking right off the bed. Ever since Gabriel’s arrival, it’d been like this—no sweat, no shaking, just a racing heart. By this point, Sam had to stop feeling astonished that for whatever reason, Gabriel’s presence was putting a curb on his nightmares.

Humming drifted from the kitchen. Sam blinked once, caught off guard by the activity. Gabriel was awake and…cooking?

“You better not be burning my cabin down,” Sam called out as he sat up. He winced slightly at the crick in his neck, but other than that, he was forced to admit he slept fine. He’d somehow made it back to the couch and gotten what seemed like five or so hours of sleep, judging from the early morning light spilling across the floor.

“It’s just toast,” Gabriel complained, “I’m not totally inept!”

“No comment.”

Gabriel’s shocked whine of displeasure made Sam’s mouth quirk. He got up and shuffled to the kitchen, partly to make some tea and partly to make sure that Gabriel was really making the foods he said he was. The man had arrived at his cabin with the cooking skills of a dorm-bound college student, and Sam's microwave languished somewhere in the shed with a few busted wires. He'd told Gabriel he didn't own one at all to force him to learn.

So far, Sam would give Gabriel a C+ as a budding chef. Gabriel could bake bread, along with a few other dishes that were oven-bound. However, Gabriel hesitated with the stovetop and ran screaming when the oil began to sizzle.

“Look at that. Soon you’ll be making omelets in no time,” Sam remarked, leaning over Gabriel’s shoulder to study the slices that survived the pan. Gabriel had used too small a pan for his plans of an endless train of toast, but progress was progress.

“Omelets terrify me,” Gabriel shuddered. He remained pleased with himself long enough for Sam to start the kettle and begin deliberating on the kind of tea he wanted before speaking again. “Also, I’ve been wondering. What’s up with you sleeping on the couch?”

Sam looked up from his tea collection. "What do you mean?"

“Well, don’t you have a bed?”

Oh my God. Did he really not notice?

Sam blinked. He no longer had a beard to hide his twitching mouth, and it took all his willpower to keep a perfectly neutral expression. "Yes? You're sleeping in it."

Gabriel blinked back. The moment it clicked in his mind was pure comedy.

“Oh…oh fuck. Sam!" Gabriel exclaimed, abandoning the pan to run out of the kitchen. "What the fuck? What about your bedroom?"

“It’s a storage room,” Sam replied, moving to watch the pan with patient ease as Gabriel burst into the room he’d assumed was Sam’s bedroom. The bread was just about done anyway. “I’ve been sleeping in the loft since last year.”

He heard Gabriel run down the hall and out into the living room. “Shit! This whole time I’ve been sleeping in your bed?”

Sam transferred their breakfast to plates and decided on a black tea while Gabriel ranted to himself up in the loft. It mattered little to him where he slept, but he had to admit, the situation had started to become a little baffling. He’d thought it strange Gabriel respected the sanctity of a shut door and never gone snooping to find new things to mess around with. It made far more sense Gabriel believed it to be his bedroom.

“I can’t believe you never said anything,” Gabriel hissed once he eventually circled back for breakfast. Sam already sat at the table with steeping tea. “No, wait. I can, actually. You stupid, chivalrous moron.”

“It wasn’t chivalry. It was common decency.”

The disbelieving look Gabriel pinned him with made Sam disguise a snort of laughter as a cough. “Maybe the first night, and when I was on bedrest, but for weeks?”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do!” Gabriel declared passionately. “You should have your bed back now. Your back must feel terrible.”

Sam's back had seen better days, but that was irrelevant. For some reason, the idea of Gabriel sleeping on the couch while he was up in his loft bothered him enough to argue the point.

He and Gabriel went back and forth over their simple breakfast, crumbs flying and tempers flaring enough that by the time they concluded alternating nights would be the setup going forward, Sam had to go for a walk. He left Gabriel stewing in his dubious victory on the couch, leaving with a muttered acknowledgment.

Ice crunched underfoot as Sam trekked into the woods behind the cabin, shattering the crust that had hardened over the frozen earth. Overhead, branches rustled with movement. Sam paid the noises no mind. Silence was more disturbing than noise in a forest.

Sam kicked at a tree root, trying to parcel through the confusion and shame turning his stomach. Why had he taken such offense at Gabriel wanting to return his bed to him?

Busy hands would clear his head. Sam started collecting firewood; it was never a bad idea to supplement his store with shed branches, especially when the snow was minimal. Bones joined him in the middle of his impromptu gathering, silently watching from higher vantage points.

Weighed down with a physical burden, but feeling much lighter for the exertion, Sam trekked back. About twenty feet from the tree line, he caught movement at the back door and paused.

Gabriel stood outside, layers thrown on in haste; a scarf half unwound, his beanie askew. He had his camera in hand, his body angled diagonally away from Sam to a section of the woods. Something had caught his eye; something interesting enough to merit stepping out on his own.

Sam halted, struck by how still Gabriel stood. All the chatter and flurried movements were kept in tight rein for the sake of a good shot. Sam bit back a breath as he saw Gabriel slowly tug one of his mittens off to free his fingers.

Once, when Sam showed Gabriel the innards of the radio and tried to explain the intricacies of hardware, Gabriel commented on his lack of a profession.

“I don’t have any real talents or skills like this,” he said airily, belying his confession with humor. “I just did a lot of fucking and drinking. Oh, and piss off a bunch of people.”

You liar, Sam thought fondly, and then he was rooted to the spot for a different reason as he realized all his confusion stemmed from this new well of fondness reserved for Gabriel, and Gabriel only.

Bones took flight with a startled, resounding shriek. A chill crawled down Sam’s spine. He could count the times on one hand Bones felt the need to sound the alarm, and every time, it’d been something with teeth.

Sam dropped his firewood and ran. All he knew was that between Gabriel’s description of the fucked up deer and the bear tracks, there was a high chance that Gabriel was trying to photograph an animal; maybe a stray wolf or bear. The animal was sure to have caught his scent by now,  and Gabriel, too idiot to differentiate danger from thrill when he thought he was in control, would have no clue until it was too late.

He burst into the cleared edge of his property yard in time to catch the bellow of a bear crashing through the woods, away from his cabin. Sam took only a second to make sure the entire area was clear of creatures other than Bones before bounding up the deck stairs and hooking a surprised Gabriel around the waist.

They burst through the back door in a cacophony of boots and feathers, stumbling to a halt just before the kitchen. Gabriel chattered a mile a minute, the arm holding his camera wrapped around Sam’s neck and his feet dangling from the floor.

“Did you see it? Holy cow, it was huge! I didn’t know bears came in that color. Why didn’t you tell me about the bears—?”

“Stop,” Sam ordered, covering his mouth with a hand. Gabriel kept talking for a solid fifteen seconds before going mmrph and staring at Sam with big, confused eyes. “Just. Give me a second.”

From somewhere in the living room, Bones let out a series of erratic clicks that culminated in the phrase, “Bad man.”

Sam felt taut, pulled like a rubber band by Gabriel, who dangled in his grasp with gently kicking feet against his shins. He made no move to pull away, even though Sam’s hold on him was awkward now that they weren’t in motion.

“The next time you see an animal bigger than you,” Sam said, reigning in his heavy breathing. He set Gabriel down, punctuating his point by grasping Gabriel’s shoulders. “Stay inside. Especially if I’m not around.”

Gabriel nodded mutely, eyes darting down to his camera before back up at him.

"It was a sad-looking bear," he said, tone somehow meek and defensive all at once.

Sam had only heard the bear and fully anticipated a black bear when Gabriel turned the camera to show him the gallery. They were the most common in these parts; he'd only glimpsed a grizzly once far lower down the mountain. However, the bear that came into view didn't quite fit into any category he knew of.

At first glance, it reminded him of a polar bear, except it was too small and not all the way white—more a patchy light brown. It stayed well within the tree line for all but the last few shots, which Gabriel slowed to show for longer.

In the first shot, the bear looked at Gabriel head-on, emerging from the trees with an inquisitive head tilt. In the next, it turned to look off-camera, in the direction Sam had come from. In the last distinct one, it dove for cover back in the trees, half-obscured by an arc of kicked-up snow.

“You scared it,” Gabriel muttered.

You scared me, Sam wanted to say.

“A bear is a bear,” he replied philosophically, gently steering Gabriel further into the cabin. “No more chasing after bears.”

Gabriel, predictably, began to advocate for the bear (“I didn’t chase it, it came up to me!”). Sam half-listened, all the while drawing the curtains shut and stoking the fire. He paused at the hearth, looking up at the shotgun he’d been given the day he’d left for the mountain.

“Just in case, Sammy. It’ll make me feel better, knowing you got it.”

Sam didn't tell Gabriel that animals, particularly mammals, felt emotions and that the bear had also struck him as sad. Gabriel had already lost the material comforts of his life. Sam wanted Gabriel to treat the bear as a novelty for as long as possible.

Gabriel took no notice when Sam opened the battered lockbox half-hidden by a potted plant on the corner of the mantle and took out the bullets stashed within. The shotgun shells rolled in the palm of his hand, familiar and foreign all at once.

Just in case.

Chapter Text

Chapter Seven: Ghostly Intimacies

Gabriel had no idea how Sam slept on the couch for so long without a word of complaint. It wasn’t that it was the worst couch he’d slept on (he’d passed out after nights of partying in far more uncomfortable and stranger places), but when Gabriel awoke, he swore that his vertebrae were misaligned in three separate places. Sam found him on the ground, too stiff to bother getting up at a pace faster than “young tortoise.”

“I told you to just keep the bed,” Sam sighed, helping him up. He looked no better rested than usual, which tracked with the tossing and turning Gabriel had heard.

“It’s your bed,” Gabriel groused, but not insisting as passionately as he had yesterday. “Perhaps I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“I know better than to agree with that.”

Gabriel whacked Sam on the shoulder, and with that, they kicked off their morning.

While Sam knitted methodically away at what looked like a sleeve (a new sweater?) on the couch, Gabriel sorted through the photos he’d taken yesterday of the bear, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire to keep warm.

He hadn’t told Sam, but Gabriel hadn’t gone outside because he’d seen the bear. He’d fully intended on staying inside, pacing a hole into the rug as he tried to figure out how to smooth over the tension the bed had created when Sam returned.

When Gabriel couldn't stand pacing anymore, he resolved to head out to meet Sam halfway. Maybe if Sam came back from wherever he'd wandered off to in the woods and saw him standing on the deck, morosely taking landscape shots, he'd see how contrite Gabriel was.

Instead, he’d found the bear, and the bed situation remained unresolved. Gabriel chewed the inside of his mouth, considering his options as he zoomed in on the bear’s face.

What a strange creature, Gabriel thought, frowning at the dark marks that streaked down its face from the eyes like tears. It looked tired and haggard. So far, the winter hadn’t been treating it well.

Gabriel sighed, shutting his camera off. He hoped it came back.

“That’s your third sigh in as many minutes.”

"Can a man not sigh pensively?" Gabriel asked, adding a fourth sigh to the tally as he swiveled to look back at Sam.

In response, Sam pointed a knitting needle to the neat pile of paper on the corner of the coffee table.

Gabriel rolled his eyes and took a sheet. It’d been Sam’s idea for him to write letters to his friends and family—after one too many nostalgic ramblings from bed rest, Gabriel couldn’t blame him for wanting Gabriel to channel his thoughts in a different, preferably non-verbal form.

The most irritating fact was that the letters worked. They would never be sent, and Sam never read them, which let Gabriel write everything he wanted to say down before letting the letter burn to ash in the fire.

Dear Balthazar,

You won’t believe it, but it’s not so bad up here with Sam…

It wasn’t, surprisingly. They were using powdered substitutes for cheese and eggs,  but he no longer went to sleep hoping to be awoken by the sweet, sonorous whoosh of a helicopter sweeping to the rescue.

We did get into an argument about his bed. Turns out it's his bed and not a spare. Whoops. How do I apologize for something I'm not sorry about, but want to apologize for anyway? It's the weirdest feeling. You know how many times I've apologized to people.

Maybe I don’t need to apologize? But what can I do to get things back to normal before it gets really awkward between us?

It was a real head-scratcher, and it didn’t help that Bones kept trying to distract him by playing what he’d dubbed “golden retriever.” Learning how to fetch had resulted in the damn bird bringing people anything she thought was important, unbidden.

“What did you just drop on me?” Gabriel asked as something bounced unceremoniously off the top of his head. “Is this a—oh you little shit,” He slid it onto the pen he’d been tapping against the hearthstones. It was a black cap for a blue pen, but it fit.

Bones let loose her approximation of a laugh before flying away. Out of the corner of his eye, Gabriel could see Sam hiding silent laughter behind his rapidly growing knitwork.

Gabriel shook his head and crumpled up the letter. It was as good a sign as any that he’d finished his pseudo-diary entry for today.

Bones’ wings fluttered. Gabriel braced himself for something else to be dropped on his head, too lazy to move from the fireplace. He hoped it wasn’t heavy.

To his surprise, she landed a few feet from him, grasping a rectangular bit of paper gently in her beak. After dropping it in front of him, she pecked at the ground like a person would use their pointer finger to emphasize that he had to look at the thing, before returning to Sam’s side.

“Huh,” Gabriel said, picking up what he now recognized to be a photograph. “You really give a new definition to “rosy” when you’re drunk, Sam-a-lam.”

According to the date stamp on the back, the picture had been taken on July 14^th of that year. Sam leaned against a wooden beam in a bar located somewhere on the mountain. His half-lidded eyes and clean-shaven cheeks paired with a surprisingly soft, dimpled smile. It was the most open version of Sam he’d seen yet.

A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman leaned on the other side of the pillar, half hugging it so her arm could grasp Sam’s. Not that he seemed to notice or care, since he faced away from her, but a hot flame of jealousy still lit up in Gabriel at the sight of her possessive hand. He looked to the other side of Sam, where two women in tan police uniforms stood at a tall, round table. At a service window set in the background, a brunette with smudged makeup and a man wearing an apron and cap leaned out to see what was going on. Off to the left side, a blur marked somebody hastily moving out of frame.

“Jody gave that to me. God knows why,” Sam said, groaning when he set down the knitwork to see what Gabriel was looking at.

“Jody the Sheriff. Is the brunette Jody?”

“Yeah. Here, I might as well point out everyone since I know you’ll hassle me about it for the rest of the week.”

“Would not,” Gabriel lied, feeding the letter into the fire before eagerly sitting on the couch.

"Alright," Sam sighed. The size of the picture forced them into proximity, which was only a bonus in Gabriel's books. "This was taken down at the Ten-Point Buck. It's about the only joint on the mountain not infiltrated by tourists."

“Doesn’t seem like a place I’d go to.”

“No way. As I said, not tourist friendly.”

Sam dodged the jab to his ribs with unfair dexterity before continuing. "That's Meg Masters and Benny Lafitte in the back; waitress and cook. The women in uniform are Donna Hanscum and Jody Mills. Deputy Sheriff and Sheriff respectively. Jody's the one always riding my ass to come to town more; probably because if I died up here it'd be a long inquest for her.

"And that…is Ruby," Sam finished, frowning at the woman clinging to his arm. "We had a summer fling. I only do summer flings. She knew that, but she still got mad when I broke things off with her."

Sam moved on before Gabriel could remark on any of the number of juicy (and admittedly, depressing) tidbits he’d been offered. He pointed at the blur.

"That's Raphael. He makes cryptids look friendly. He's the closest neighbor I have. If the radio worked, I could've called him, but as it stands, he might as well be a thousand miles away instead of three down the old logging road."

“Huh,” Gabriel said, trying (and failing) to gain any more detail from the Raphael-blur. “What made him come up onto the mountain?”

“Jody told me it started as a sabbatical,” Sam said, setting the picture down on the coffee table. “He was a priest; collar and all. A month in, he had some crisis of faith. He’s still stuck in that crisis five years later.”

Gabriel hummed contemplatively. He wondered if he should ask what made Sam come up the mountain. The words were on the tip of his tongue now that the segue had been set up.

Sam’s shoulders tensed as the brief conversation pause began to extend. They both knew what was coming.

“Who took the picture?” Gabriel asked instead, surprising them both.

“Um, Garth,” Sam replied after a quick shake of his head. “Garth’s a jack-of-all-trades. He filled in for the busboy that night.”

Gabriel was convinced something about the cabin (or maybe just Sam) imbued uncharacteristic amounts of tact into him. None of his friends would believe he could hold his tongue when interesting information taunted him; much less stand up and physically walk away from the conversation.

“Too bad you don’t have any alcohol. Getting high with you was fun,” Gabriel said, moving to stand in front of the fire.

“You just like to abuse substances, don’t you?”

“Hide the household cleaners,” Gabriel joked.

Sam rolled his eyes as he pocketed the photo. Gabriel doubted he’d ever see it again, and a part of him didn’t mind at all.

“Just because I don’t keep it in the kitchen or a cabinet doesn’t mean I don’t have some. I’m sure there’s a few bottles in the storage room somewhere.”

Gabriel brightened up at the thought, then gazed meaningfully at Sam. He’d never gone into what he’d assumed was Sam’s bedroom for obvious reasons, but now that he knew it wasn’t Sam’s bedroom…

Sam sighed and waved a hand towards the general direction of the hall.

“No, I don’t care if you look. Just don’t get blackout drunk, yeah?”

Gabriel hardly heard him. He was already halfway there, intent on sniffing out every trace of booze he could find.

…

“You’re a weird hoarder,” Gabriel said, emerging two hours later from the storage room with a box full of a strange assortment of liquor and a slightly shifted perspective on Sam as a person.

“Waste not, want not. It’s especially apt up here,” Sam replied, unconcerned by Gabriel or the cooking oil sizzling in the pan.

Gabriel set the box down on the kitchen table. “You’ve got some nice whiskey in here, but trash tequila. Also,” He pulled out the most offensive bottle he’d found. “Peach schnapps? Really?”

Sam winced, “That’s a leftover from Ruby. I don’t know why she liked them so much.”

Gabriel promptly walked to the kitchen sink and poured the third left out of the bottle. After he finished, he looked up to see Sam watching with an arched eyebrow.

“I don’t like peach schnapps,” Gabriel shrugged.

They washed down dinner with two fingers of whiskey apiece. Gabriel had an extra glass while Sam abstained simply from force of habit, as he claimed. Gabriel didn’t fault him. It must’ve been terribly tempting to become an alcoholic when living in solitude in a wintery cabin—that, and something in Sam’s eyes told him that there was a little more to it.

It took a third glass for the liquid courage to loosen Gabriel’s tongue back up to his normal, assholish standards. What could he say? A leopard couldn’t change its spots.

“You’re giving me looks. Talk to me, Sammy,” Gabriel said, swaying to some jazz. He only listened to jazz when he was drunk.

“Am not. And don’t call me Sammy,” Sam said stiffly, reading a book on the couch.

“Are too. Why not? You haven’t objected to any of the other nicknames I’ve so brilliantly created for you.”

A pause. “That’s what my brother calls me.”

Gabriel spun towards the fire, placing his empty glass on the mantle, before spinning back around in a slow arc to face Sam. Sam’s brother was one of the few personal details he’d let slip early on.

“Aha. Your brother’s an alcoholic?”

Sam looked up sharply from his book. “No. My father was,” He looked down at the pages with a grimace. “Dean was on his way to it. But now he’s not.”

“And you don’t drink because…why tempt fate?”

“Something like that.”

“Fair enough,” Gabriel shrugged, swaying across the rug. He wasn’t nearly as drunk as he’d gotten at the Halloween party he’d attended what felt like so long ago. It was still a good buzz. “I miss parties. People, sometimes, but mostly parties. I’m like a flower and parties are fertilizer.”

“You’re more like a weed.”

Gabriel gasped indignantly before dissolving into wheezing laughter. Sam, who looked shocked at his own snippiness, smiled a tentative apology.

“A weed. Yeah, I can see that,” Gabriel said, craning his neck back to look up at the ceiling. “Persistent. Always popping up, even after people have gotten rid of me.”

Sam looked regretful. “Gabriel…”

“For the fiftieth time, call me Gabe. One of these days it’ll stick,” Gabriel said with an exaggerated pout, reeling himself and the conversation back to safer waters. “Only my full brothers call me Gabriel.”

“Full brothers?”

Gabriel paused. He thought back through all of the stories he’d told Sam (and he’d told him a lot), and realized that subconsciously, he’d never told Sam anything that involved his brothers. Not that he had very many funny stories with them—in hindsight, it’d been for the best.

“Oh, yeah,” Gabriel said, making a face. “By now you’ve ascertained that I have a big family. But up until I was….hmm, maybe nine or ten, I only had to my knowledge two brothers.”

He trailed off, thinking of Michael and Lucifer. It’d been a couple of years since he’d spoken to either of them; even longer since they’d all been in a room together.

“Yeah. They’re the only ones that call me Gabriel,” he said, shaking himself out of his stupor. He forced a smile onto his face, collapsing on the couch with a satisfied sigh. “Sam?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m cold.”

“Considering the amount of whiskey you had and the dancing, I doubt it.”

Gabriel shimmied closer. Sober Gabriel was attempting to ring alarm bells in the back of his mind, but he’d been firmly shelved away by Party Gabriel, who emerged with a war cry as soon as he’d had his first glass. It usually took more for him to get flirty with a purpose, but Gabriel had been cooped up in a cabin for over a month with no other society save for a hot mountain man and a talking bird that hate-tolerated him.

“I’m cold,” he repeated with a dramatic shiver.

“Grab a blanket,” Sam said flatly, “You’ve made a point of saying I have such pretty ones.”

“They are. But they’re also far away.”

“There’s at least three tossed over the back of this couch.”

“Why would I disturb the decorative function they serve?”

Sam tucked himself more firmly into his book, but not before Gabriel caught the slightest glimpse of a blush. Was that the firelight playing tricks on his imagination?

“I don’t know why I’m surprised that you’re even more annoying when you’re drunk.”

“I’ve made an effort to be nicer than usual with you.”

“Are you telling me you’re usually worse than this?”

"That's not the point!" Gabriel said, starting to feel ridiculous. He was a grown man, for God's sake. He threw a pillow at Sam anyway and fumed when Sam skillfully caught it with one hand. "The point is I'm cold and you've already warmed up the blanket you've got."

“Oh, I see,” Sam started. Gabriel’s heart skipped a beat (he’d been too obvious). “You would rather just steal all the hard work my body heat has done. How clever of you.”

“I like to think I am,” Gabriel said, letting Sam’s dry tone slip by with no more remark. Internally, he was relieved that his pathetic flirtations (this was an episode he wouldn’t tell Balthazar about) had sailed clear over Sam’s luscious locks.

Sam sighed before flipping up the edge of his blanket. He might as well have offered Gabriel the map to El Dorado or revealed how ships got inside glass bottles.

“Fine. But if you disturb my reading in any way…”

“Lesson already learned,” Gabriel said hurriedly, sidling up before Sam could change his mind. Sam liked to read uninterrupted by anything, whether it be small talk or Gabriel tossing paper airplanes at his head from the loft and pretending Bones had thrown them when confronted.

Gabriel made sure to leave a purposeful inch of space between him and Sam, but they were practically cuddling. Sam was more than aware of this—the tension radiated off of him nearly as strongly as his body heat, but to Gabriel’s surprise, Sam didn’t tell him to scram.

When’s the last time I cuddled with someone?

Kali (he'd been stuck inside for so long that he'd run through every thought his brain possessed—even the bad ones—and could now think of her without wincing) hadn't been big on cuddling. All his good memories with her had a feverish quality to them, red hot nights out in crowds and wild tumbles in the sheets. They never moved slow. 

Gabriel’s eyes slid shut. It was a bit depressing he couldn’t recall his last cuddle session. Now that the buzz was settling into his blood, promising a languid drift off into sleep, Gabriel could appreciate the magnitude of the current circumstances. Sam used to shy away from him like a skittish horse. What changed?

Sam shifted in a way that made Gabriel lean toward him. He was just drunk enough that he let it happen. After weeks of watching his distance with Sam, Gabriel’s desire for a touch more lasting than combing Sam’s hair or his overlaid hands as Sam taught him how to do something surged past his better thinking.

Gabriel's first impression was that Sam's layers of clothing did little to soften the hard lines of muscle beneath his skin. Sam could've been cut from the same stone that made up the mountain, but with a warmth that made Gabriel stay. Even the sharp medicinal scent of whatever Sam used on his skin weirdly soothed him. It meant Sam was taking care of himself.

“You’re so drunk,” Sam muttered, relaxing just the slightest.

“Am not,” Gabriel murmured back, angling himself inward toward Sam.

Sam didn't move, except to turn the page of his book. Gabriel hid his smile in the curve of Sam's shoulder and drifted off into a comfortable doze. He only woke when Sam shifted significantly.

“C’mon. Your back can’t handle another night on the couch,” Sam said gently, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.

Despite Sam’s valid point, Gabriel didn’t like the idea of moving when it meant parting from Sam. Sleeping in what he now knew to be Sam’s bed (and he’d been rather obtuse with that, hadn’t he?) without him suddenly felt intolerable.

This is a bad idea, Gabriel thought as he stumbled up the stairs with Sam’s help, but the words came out anyway.

“Why don’t we just share it?”

Sam's helping arm stiffened across Gabriel's back. Gabriel couldn't even blame alcohol for the idiotic proposition—he'd sobered up on the couch. Why would Sam want to share a bed with him? He clearly kept his bedmates sequestered to the summer season; he wasn't going to break all of his habits because Gabriel asked him to.

“Maybe.”

Gabriel caught his foot on the rug in surprise. He managed to land on the edge of the bed instead of eating shit, passing it off as drunken clumsiness. After Sam clucked his tongue at him, he tilted his head consideringly.

“I’ve already gone through more firewood than usual, and the real freeze hasn’t hit yet,” Sam said slowly, scratching the back of his neck. His eyes were fixed on the nightstand. “It’d make more sense to share.”

"Exactly," Gabriel said as if he'd been thinking on practical lines all along.

“Maybe,” Sam repeated, making a thoughtful noise,  “But tonight, you sleep up here.”

Gabriel didn’t push the point. As soon as Sam’s footsteps hit the ground floor, he flopped back onto the bed and let out a sigh of mingled relief and longing.

He had it bad for Sam. Up here, in the relative privacy of the loft, with the scent of Sam’s soap and skin wafting up from the sheets, he could acknowledge that.

New sheets sat on the trunk at the foot of the bed, but Gabriel ignored them. He slipped beneath the covers, half angry at himself for doing so just for the sake of chasing whatever remnant of Sam he could, but too selfish to change the sheets. Gabriel's emotions pulled back and forth on this continuum, tying his mind up into knots that kept him half-awake until Sam banked the fire and got settled on the couch downstairs.

What have I gotten myself into?

Chapter Text

Chapter Eight: Social Creatures

It annoyed Sam how easily he leaped to the idea of sharing his bed when Gabriel suggested it. If he hadn’t been able to tell he was largely sober (and the fact that he could distinguish minute emotional states like that in Gabriel was also concerning), Sam would’ve refused him outright.

Maybe.

Gabriel didn’t retract the offer the following morning, leaving Sam caught in an exquisite hell of his own making. Internally, he spent the entire day roiling with conflicting desires. Externally, he knitted the sleeve of a sweater that shouldn’t have been made with Gabriel’s measurements in mind, puttered around in the storage room on the off chance he could find something to fix the radio (nothing), and collected firewood since Gabriel was still leery of stepping into the woods.

They ate dinner in more silence than usual. Gabriel looked up at him several times through his eyelashes. Sam waited with bated breath for him to break the thick air of tension-anticipation smothering them to death.

He wanted Gabriel to take back the offer. He didn’t want Gabriel to take back the offer. He wanted to go to sleep.

“Right or left?”

Sam’s wrist jerked, sending his fork clanging into his ceramic mug (one of the wonkier ones he’d made at a pottery class in town). A clear note rang in the air, drawing a startled croak from the living room where Bones perched on the back of the couch.

“Pardon?”

“The bed. Do you sleep on the left side, or right?” Gabriel asked steadily. All the odd, tentativeness that had clung to his body language throughout dinner had evaporated. “I don’t have a preference, but I do sleep on my stomach.”

Sam couldn’t help himself. “That’s weird.”

“Is not!”

“It is. Who sleeps on their stomach other than babies?”

“For your information, many people do, and it’s rude to insinuate otherwise.”

They bantered all the way to the loft, where the thick tension-anticipation struck once again. This time, Sam broke it with a warning he’d been debating all day (among other things) on voicing.

“I sometimes get nightmares,” he admitted, “It might be best for me to stay on the couch.”

Gabriel looked up from where he’d been fiddling with knick-knacks on the nightstand. His eyes glowed in the lamplight; bright amber still managing to catch Sam off guard. He didn’t look particularly surprised.

“I thought you did,” he said, startling Sam. “I couldn’t always tell, but a couple times…well, it doesn’t matter,” Gabriel shook his head and gestured to the bed. “I don’t mind. I’ll wake you up if it gets bad.”

Sam swallowed thickly. He’d never had anyone sound so not put out by having to deal with his nightmares. He didn't get them with his one-night stands, but if he hooked up with someone more than a couple times, the likelihood that they would witness one increased. Ruby hadn't been pleased with them.

With more decisiveness than Sam felt, he pulled the covers back and got into bed. Gabriel was only a moment behind him.

“G’night Sam.”

“Good night, Gabriel.”

Sam stared up at the stars for a long time, waiting for Gabriel’s breath to even out. He almost envied how quickly it occurred. Sam liked to sleep on his side, but he couldn’t decide whether it’d be better to face away from Gabriel or towards him.

If he slept facing away, he'd run the risk of Gabriel having accidental access to his back, which could not be touched. Sam had tended to Gabriel long enough to be sure they'd end up near each other by morning—an unconscious Gabriel made it his mission to cover every square inch of the bed.

But facing Gabriel would push hard at a boundary Sam wasn't sure should be crossed. Beyond the practical sense in avoiding starting something that could go south before winter's end, Sam's heart, shut off for so long from anything more than brushes with society, had begun to thaw towards Gabriel.

Sam couldn't pinpoint when he stopped viewing Gabriel practically and started appreciating him aesthetically. Maybe when his growing hair started to curl, or when he started stealing Sam's flannels. All Sam knew was that he'd started to keep the curtains open more, just so he could catch a glimpse of the light haloing Gabriel's face and turning him gold.

It made casual sex an even worse idea to broach, no matter how tempting Gabriel could be in these moments when they were less than a breath away from each other. Sam could have it, but only with people he didn’t have any connection to. The instant a connection was made, like with Ruby, for better or for worse, a hook lodged itself into Sam’s sensibilities.

What he and Gabriel had surpassed anything Sam had experienced with Ruby. It reminded him of the depth of feelings he’d experienced before the mountain; before everything went so awry. Already, it was becoming hard to maintain the slow equilibrium he sank into every winter. He was like that bear wandering somewhere on the mountain—robbed of hibernation.

Sam ran his hands over his face. In the dark, he could admit it to himself: he was fucked.

"Idiot," he whispered to himself. He rolled to face Gabriel before he could overthink it any further.

Mingled relief and disappointment relaxed Sam’s muscles as, after a few seconds, his eyes found the shadowy form of Gabriel’s back. Sam watched the minute rise and fall of Gabriel’s breathing, letting it lull him away from all his overthinking.

Sleep passed over him like a gray mist. Nearly as soon as Sam’s eyes closed, they were open again. He’d remained in the same position, except now Gabriel faced him, curled into him with his head tucked dangerously close to Sam’s chin and his ankles entangled between his. The space between their torsos could’ve held a cat if Sam owned one.

Instead, Sam had Bones, who sat on the headboard with a strangely knowing look in her eyes.

On a whim, Sam carefully shifted his hand enough so that he could slip his fingers against the inside of Gabriel's wrist. His pulse, sleep-slow and familiar, reminded Sam of the early days, when he'd still worried for Gabriel's life and made a habit of checking his pulse.

His fingers twitched at the thought. He’d taken care of Gabriel, and for all intents and purposes, he was still in Sam’s care. For that alone, he shouldn’t be thinking about starting anything with Gabriel.

Sam took a steadying breath, letting himself feel one-two one-two beats before pulling away, satisfied. He couldn’t afford to linger in bed with so many chores that needed to be done. Gabriel’s feet (still cold despite the way they’d sought out Sam) were reluctant, but he managed to part from him without drawing more than a sleepy murmur.

…

Sharing a bed became easier. It helped that, since Sam no longer had his customary nightmares when sleeping with Gabriel (a phenomenon he didn’t want to probe the implications of quite yet), he could afford to practice more caution. As the lighter sleeper, Sam simply awoke when either he or Gabriel made contact and adjusted accordingly.

Despite these efforts, they always woke up cuddling. Sam managed to wake first and extricate himself every time, but he doubted the longevity of his strategy.

Either way, Sam couldn’t bring himself to regret the new habit. December descended upon them in a wrathful wail of biting winds, freezing the trees into stiff lines and turning the ground precariously icy. Sam slipped one morning taking the trash out, earning a flamboyant bruise on the crest of his hip.

“You’re lucky you didn’t break a bone,” Gabriel fretted as he gently probed the edges of the bruise. He’d noticed Sam limping as soon as he walked in, and before Sam knew it, Gabriel had lifted the hem of his shirt.

Sam didn’t freeze automatically like he would’ve weeks ago. Gabriel hadn’t lifted his shirt high enough to find the secrets spread out on his back, but he had tugged the waistband of his jeans low enough to put them in an interesting position. Sam decided to find the humor in the situation and waited patiently for Gabriel to realize what he’d done.

“I know how to fall appropriately.”

“There’s a proper way to fall?” Gabriel asked, still poking and prodding. The tip of his nose nearly brushed Sam’s skin.

Sam shifted his weight to his unoccupied leg, his back against the frame of the doorway. They hadn't even made it into the kitchen. Bones looked on distractedly from the table, more engrossed in her bit of bread.

“Sure. It’s like ice skating. You want to fall back on your butt and not on your head,” he explained, leaning a little over Gabriel to toss his gloves on the kitchen table.

The resulting shift of muscle made Gabriel lean back automatically, then freeze as he realized just what exactly he was doing. Sam bit back a smile as Gabriel snapped upright to almost military posture, his cheeks flaming red.

“You’ll live,” he said, returning to the itemized list he’d been making of the pantry.

“Thank you for the prognosis, Dr. Obvious.”

Gabriel shot a glare over his shoulder, and this time, Sam let himself grin. Gabriel's hurried turn away was worth it.

It was around this time that Sam noticed Gabriel photographing the interior of the cabin, pushing the limits of angles and perspectives to overcome the limitations of subject matter. Occasionally, he opened a window to photograph the woods, but never stepped outside by himself to do so.

After witnessing him half-hanging off the loft railing in order to get an aerial shot of the living room and nearly toppling over in the process, Sam decided intervention was necessary.

“Just photograph me,” he said, half-exasperated as he hauled Gabriel to safety by the hood of his singular hoodie.

Gabriel dramatically wheezed as he came upright. “What was that? I couldn’t hear you over the blood rushing back to my head.”

Sam rolled his eyes, loosening Gabriel’s collar with a finger before repeating himself. Surprisingly, he didn’t find it within him to take the words back.

“Photograph me. It’s safer than cracking your head open on my living room floor.”

Gabriel stared at him, his only movement the rhythmic tap of his pointer finger against the side of his camera. He stared long enough that Sam started to feel self-conscious, wondering if he’d misread Gabriel. Maybe the reason Gabriel kept photographing everything but him was that he wasn't photogenic or interesting enough to merit the effort.

“It’s not that,” Gabriel blurted out, somehow reading his mind, “Stop looking like a kicked puppy. Just…oh fuck it. Might as well tell you.”

He carefully set his camera down on the nightstand and opened the drawer, rooting around until he pulled out a familiar photograph.

“This is Kali,” Gabriel said, pointing at the woman hanging onto him in the party photo. “She’s the last person I’ve ever photographed. I must’ve taken thousands of photos of her when we dated.”

“Is she…?”

“Oh, she’s alive,” he laughed humorlessly. “It just ended badly between us. But she’s the reason why I even met you.”

“How’s that?”

Gabriel carefully put the photo away, contradicting his aggressive slam shut of the drawer. "I hadn't seen her for years until that stupid Halloween party."

"Was it that unpleasant a reunion?"

Gabriel sat on the edge of the bed, slumping over until his forehead nearly touched his knees. The posture alarmed Sam enough that he tentatively sat beside him, keeping a scant few inches between their legs.

“That’s the strangest bit. I didn’t feel anything really,” Gabriel remarked, gazing at his hands with the eyes of someone staring far beyond skin and bone. “There was the shock, and a little of the old hurt, but after that? I think I surprised Kali as much as myself that night with how ordinary the rest of our brief conversation was.”

He snorted derisively. “She did say something pretty funny at the end though.”

“What did she say?”

“That I was the only person she felt sorry for. She wanted to see me happy and knew I wasn’t just from looking at me. Kali will probably always know when I’m not happy,” Gabriel said, partly wistful before looking up at Sam. His face darkened. “Can you believe it? Feeling sorry for me?”

Gabriel suddenly got up, agitated beyond tolerance by the recollection. Sam made an aborted attempt to stand with him, before deciding it might be better for him to get it out of his system.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Gabriel spat, pacing in tight circles. “I had to get out of town after that. Not that I’d been hurt by Kali that night, but because she had to go and remind me that of all the things I’ve gotten to do in my life, I haven’t….”

Gabriel trailed off, coming to a halt with his back turned to Sam. There were a thousand ways he could’ve finished his sentence, and Sam could think of a few.

For someone who'd cruised through life spoiled rotten by privilege, Gabriel had a surprisingly low tolerance for pity. That, Sam knew perfectly well, didn't stop Gabriel from wanting something tender anyway. When was the last time someone had shown him true care? Kali? Further back than that?

“I can’t say I feel sorry for you,” Sam said, somehow finding the courage to speak.“I, selfishly, am happy that you’re stuck here with me this winter.”

Even with his gaze fixed on Gabriel’s mid-back, Sam could see the moment Gabriel relaxed. His breathing quieted.

“I’m not intruding on your solitude?”

“No.”

“What about at the beginning?”

You were a hallucination. You were an anomaly emerging from the dark I couldn’t ignore.

“You were someone I had to help,” Sam replied honestly, so earnestly that he had to clear his throat. “And then at some point things got mixed up, and you started helping me.”

Gabriel made a soft sound. “You sentimental moose.”

“That...doesn’t even make any sense—” Sam started, only to be cut off by Gabriel’s hand in his hair.

All of Sam’s thoughts melted into white noise as Gabriel gently pulled him in, standing between Sam’s legs so he could get as close as he could. Gabriel was hugging him, somehow, without touching his back.

“Is this alright?” Gabriel asked after a few heavy seconds of silence, where Sam’s brain was recalibrating. “I figured, since I’ve done your hair, that you wouldn’t mind—”

“I don’t,” Sam said, voice muffled from where his cheek rested against Gabriel’s warm side. His hoodie smelled like woodsmoke and bread. Like my cabin.

“Good,” Gabriel said, “You sounded like you needed a hug, ya moose.”

“Saying it again won’t make it make more sense,” Sam mumbled, tentatively curling an arm around Gabriel’s waist. The odd hug was already happening. Might as well keep him close while he could.

It was the best approximation of a hug Sam had received in a long, long time.

…

Bones left for a day. This wasn’t at all unusual, as lately, sensing Gabriel had grown accustomed to his fate, she’d taken to disappearing for long stretches like she used to before his arrival. Tonight though, she returned carrying an envelope..

“Hypocrite!” Gabriel declared as soon as he spotted the zippered pouch Bones clutched in her talons.

“Mail!” she croaked cheerily, not even giving Gabriel the time of day.

Sam accepted it, giving Bones a treat as a reward. He had no doubt that between the broken radio and Bone's flat-out refusal to take any sort of mail from either him or Gabriel that Jody was two seconds away from sending a rescue team up the mountain.

As it stood, the only reason she hadn't was because Bones had taken down the regular blue ribbon. In his first year on the mountain, Sam had established the communication method with Jody and Donna when the radio check-ins had grown too much. If Bones brought a blue ribbon, he was alive but didn't want to talk. Green meant Sam was opening up a line of communications, and red meant Sam needed help immediately.

There were two envelopes inside. The first was police stationery—Jody and Donna. The second was heavier, as if it held multiple pieces of paper. Sam flipped it over just to be sure, but his assumption was right (who else would it have been?)—Dean and Castiel.

Sam flopped onto the couch and read Jody’s missive first.

Sam,

Hope you’re doing well. Your dumb bird showed up and stuck around long enough that I managed to write this. I’m assuming we’re still blue. Did your radio break? We tried to flag you to signal bad weather and never got a response.

All is as well as can be. A man went missing on his way to the resort and we couldn't find him in time. The case went national because nobody could find his car; not even the state’s special units. It’s as if he just vanished into thin air.

The animals are also acting up. More bear sightings than we’ve had in a while this late in the season, and Garth swears up and down he saw a skinwalker of all things while taking out the trash at the Ten-Point Buck. He probably just saw his own shadow, but the locals are getting antsy.

In case your radio is broken: a deep freeze is expected in the first week of January. Rumor has it we won't be able to get that high up the mountain till the end of March. If that's the case, we've requisitioned funds to get proper gear to conduct welfare checks in March. We're making sure all you hermits aren't popsicles, even if you hate us for it (I know Raphael will!).

I've included the letter your brother sent. It reached us in early November. You should read it.

Donna and the rest of the crew say hi—please write back if you can!

-Jody

“Well?” Gabriel asked, perching on the couch arm furthest from Sam to give the illusion of space.

“The usual,” Sam forced himself to say nonchalantly, opening the second envelope. He’d give the letter to Gabriel later. The idea that he could be rescued in March would give him something to look forward to.

A card fell out; the heavy sort that signified something important. Sam picked it up and felt his heart drop into the bottom of his stomach.

Dean Winchester + Castiel Novak invite you to celebrate their wedding on September 18th…

Sam sucked in a sharp breath and flipped it open. Inside, a separate sheet made from the heavy paper asked for an RSVP. On the inner cover of the wedding invitation, there was a note written in Castiel's scrawled handwriting.

Sam, in this, I ask you to think of your brother. It is Dean’s most fervent wish that you attend.

“Shit,” Sam muttered, chewing on his lip. “Shit.”

“What is it?”

After a split second’s hesitation, Sam handed the card to Gabriel. Keeping secrets was hard in the cabin—this one wasn’t worth trying to hide.

Gabriel studied the card with an expert eye. “Gilded design, cream colored satin finish. They’ve got good taste.”

Sam was only half-listening as he read Dean’s letter.

Sammy,

You probably saw the card first. I'll state the obvious anyway: Cas and I are getting married. It's been a couple of months since I finally got the guts to ask him. I feel like the luckiest man alive. Can you believe he said yes??

I know it’s a long shot, but it’s been three years, Sam. I have to ask. It’s not just about me (even though I miss you like hell), but Cas too. We both want to see you at the wedding. I want to make you my best man and hear you make an eloquent speech that puts all those old public speaking skills to use. You’d throw separate bachelor parties for me and Cas and somehow split your time at both, because you’re just like that, and you’d put the wedding planner to shame. And yes, there’s a wedding planner. It’s the shindig of the year. Gotta do it right.

The past can’t keep you up there. Life will pass you by, little brother. It is passing you by, starting now, and I hate writing that but it’s true.

Please come to the wedding, even if you can’t handle being the best man and just want to stand in the corner chugging champagne—whatever works. We just want you there. I want you there.

-Dean

P.S.: Cas thinks I don't know, but I'm sure he's going to slip some kind of note into the envelope. I agree with whatever he says.

Sam remembered the first time he’d met Castiel. Dean had brought him over for Thanksgiving dinner out of the blue—they’d gone to college together, and Castiel had been an out-of-state student with an unsympathetic family. None of them had heard of Castiel beforehand since Dean had dropped off the radar in typical college student fashion. It would’ve been more awkward if it hadn’t been fully apparent that Dean thought highly of Castiel.

Castiel had been more than polite, but more importantly, he’d paid attention to Sam when he’d been having a less than stellar start to high school. Castiel’s intelligence made Sam feel more confident in his own and the ambitions he wanted to fulfill using his head.

Dean and Castiel were friends for a couple of years before they got their shit together, and they’d been together ever since. Dean ran a successful car repair joint; Castiel offered consulting services for apiaries in the Midwest. Picture-perfect couples were jealous of them.

Sam hadn’t seen either of them in three years.

“Sam?”

Gabriel sat next to him now, concern written all over his face. Sam looked down at the letter in his hands. He’d creased it with an excessively tight grip.

“I can’t go,” he said shortly, taking the card from Gabriel to hastily shove everything into the lockbox on the mantle. “Don’t ask me about it.”

For the rest of the evening, Gabriel gave him a wide berth, fiddling quietly with a book or bits of crochet he was slowly getting the hang of. Sam wished he could knit, but he knew his tension would throw all of his projects off if he tried. All he could do was stew in his misery, gazing blankly into the fire and wishing he was a better man who could step foot off the mountain come spring.

A wedding. Life is passing me by.

Gabriel didn’t speak to him again until they were in bed. Sam lay on his side, facing away from him, counting the stitches in the third blanket he’d ever made.

He reached 191 when Gabriel suddenly rolled over, hard enough to jostle the mattress.

“I feel like I’m missing something here,” he said, low and intent.

With a frisson of nerves, Sam realized that he hadn’t been the only one thinking hard that night.

“It’s not that you want to be up here forever,” Gabriel continued, “It’s that you feel like you have to be. Like you don’t deserve to drink at local bars and go to your brother’s wedding.”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Sam muttered, but with less force than he’d intended. There was a strange allure to listening to Gabriel finally attempt to piece together the mystery. His tactful blind eye to it all had come to an end.

“What happened, Sam?” Gabriel asked, words now spilling urgently from him. Sam could feel his eyes burning a hole through his back and into his heart. “I know it’s not my business, and I’m not asking because I’m being nosy—I just don’t understand. Why stay up here for so long? You can’t…punish yourself for whatever it is.” Gabriel faltered, his rationale catching up to his original surge of emotion. “Sam…I just want to help.”

Sam couldn’t help the hard flinch when Gabriel touched his shoulder blade. He couldn’t have known what lay there, but it still stunned him like a bolt of lightning. He didn’t want Gabriel to ever have to see that.

Gabriel drew his hand back with a sharp intake of breath, the sheets rustling as he scooted away.

The concept of potentially receiving an apology from Gabriel was so incongruous to Sam’s idea of him that he rolled over before Gabriel could offer one. The instinctive reaction he’d developed towards particular touches to his back warred with the urge to convince Gabriel that Sam didn’t fault him for it.

“It’s alright,” Sam said, reaching his hand across the mattress. After a moment’s fumbling, he found Gabriel’s hand in the dark. He let their fingertips touch. The gentleness of it grounded him. “I’ve been like this for a while. It’s hard, being near people. It’s better for everyone that I’m up here.”

“That’s bullshit,” Gabriel said quietly, but fiercely. He didn’t try to touch more of Sam’s hand. “Now I’m certain you shouldn’t be up here at all.”

“I had the money for it.”

A fractional pause. “You were a lawyer.”

Their conversation became a two-lane highway, with Gabriel coming from one end and Sam careening down from the other.

“Yes.”

“A lawyer…at a good firm.”

The cars came closer, playing chicken with each other. Headlights dazzled Sam’s eyes. He couldn’t help but keep playing.

“A very good firm.”

Gabriel’s fingers began to slide in between his. Not laced together—nowhere near close enough to call it that, but they were linked. “Lawyers make good money. You’re no longer a lawyer. But it can’t be as simple as an early midlife crisis or change of heart.”

The cars drifted back into their proper lanes. Sam couldn’t tell Gabriel tonight, but he’d learned something important. Sam believed he could.

“Go to sleep,” Sam said instead, pulling his hand back but stopping when Gabriel followed.

There was an awkward pause, and then Sam decided to throw caution to the wind.

“You can get closer. Just don’t touch my back.”

It was a long overdue declaration. Sam felt stupid for not setting the simple boundary from the start, then felt less stupid when Gabriel shifted closer, shoving his feet in between Sam’s shins.

“Fucking finally. Thought we’d dance around that all winter. You could’ve just—”

“Said it? Yeah. Probably should have,” Sam harrumphed weakly, tossing what he hoped was a casual, purely platonic arm over Gabriel’s back. His weird stomach sleeping had some perks, at least.

“Thanks for not asking about it,” he whispered after a comfortable silence.

He got a sleepy noise of acknowledgement in response. Somewhere below, Bones cooed to herself. Everything was as right in the cabin as it could be with the letters weighing upon his mind.

Sam shut his eyes and told himself he’d handle it in the morning—preparing Gabriel for his inevitable rescue; the wedding in September. He’d gone to sleep with worse plaguing his thoughts. Even so, it took a long time for him to fall asleep.

Chapter Text

"Do you want to go home?”

Gabriel looked up from Meditations. It’d been one of the first books living on Sam’s nightstand that clued him in to Sam’s depth of knowledge. Much to his horror, some parts of it were finally making sense to him.

“I meant, really want to go home,” Sam amended, long fingers still over his laces. He’d come back from outside, slowly shedding layers in his amble through the kitchen. “I could hike down.”

“No? It’s like, a bazillion miles away,” Gabriel pointed out. Had Sam hit his head somewhere outside?

Sam’s somber insistence was a bit undercut by the cute rosiness of his cheeks and nose. “I could do it.”

Gabriel stuffed one of the paper cranes into the book to mark his page, pinning Sam with a scrutinizing expression.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“What? No!” Sam replied, so confused and earnest that Gabriel believed him. “I’m just saying that if you want to go home, I’ll make it happen.”

Gabriel pretended to consider this. In reality, he had no intention of encouraging Sam to do anything. Not only would it be extremely dangerous despite every precaution Sam could possibly take, but at some point, Gabriel had stopped thinking so fervently about home.

What would he really be returning to? An East Coast apartment he spent more time out of than in? A life of meaningless social engagements? Gabriel missed the people that he could see now had genuine intentions towards him—people like Balthazar, but there was no one location Gabriel could point to and call home.

Nowhere in the world makes me feel like I do here.

“I can get through the winter,” Gabriel said, standing to pour Sam a mug of coffee. “Don’t worry about it.”

Sam’s mulish expression lingered, but he didn’t push it.

Gabriel let out an imperceptible sigh of relief. He didn’t know how to act around Sam after last night. It threw him for a loop that Sam seemed mostly alright with it—that they’d even cuddled before Gabriel fell asleep.

He hadn’t said anything when, morning after morning, Sam woke first to extricate himself from bed with surgical precision. Gabriel wanted to let Sam have his secret, and he wanted the cuddling to last as long as possible—as soon as Sam got tired of waking first, he’d put a polite end to it.

Instead, he’d woken up to Sam spooning him with a respectful amount of space between them, his arm draped comfortably over Gabriel’s waist.

Gabriel hadn’t wanted the space. He’d never been more tempted in his life to just back it up, but for once, common sense won out. That morning, Sam had lingered for a little longer before getting up, as if he’d been reluctant to go.

I can’t let it go to my head, he thought as Sam accepted the coffee. Just because some pushed boundaries gave you good results doesn’t mean full speed ahead.

How many times had that sentiment been expressed in his life? Every single time, Gabriel had given them all a spiritual middle finger and trucked ahead, uncaring of whether it’d result in destruction (most of the time), or more reward.

But I really, really want to.

“Are you asking me because of the letter Mademoiselle Sheriff sent?”

Sam paused with his mug halfway to his lips, his eyes flashing with a mixture of surprise and guilt.

If he couldn’t (or wouldn’t; Gabriel had to confess he didn’t want to be the one to break the delicate developments unfurling between them) ask if the cuddling meant anything, Gabriel would simply prod about something far more low-stakes—what were updates from a sheriff at the bottom of the mountain worth when they were stuck here?

At least, it should’ve been. His smug satisfaction morphed into confusion as he followed a hangdog Sam into the living room, where he retrieved the letters from the lockbox on the mantle.

“I was going to tell you. I should’ve last night. I just…” Sam trailed off, eyes burning into the side of Gabriel’s face.

“Tell me what?” Gabriel asked, confusion growing. He reread the letter again for good measure. “There’s literally nothing in this letter I don’t know. Is the juicy bit written in invisible ink?”

“Aren’t you upset by the fact you’ll be here until March?”

“I may be blonde in good lighting, but I do know when the season of winter traditionally ends,” Gabriel replied dryly. “Honestly, Sam. The bit about the animals is interesting, I’ll give credit there. Do you think the thing that made me run off the road has been terrorizing the whole mountain?”

Sam chewed on his lip, fiddling with his mug in lieu of replying. Gabriel relented, setting the letter on the table before collapsing into the couch with an exaggerated groan.

“Well, if being stuck with me until March is such a hardship—”

“It’s not.”

Gabriel arched an eyebrow at Sam’s fervency. He’d said it in a joking tone, and mostly meant it. The part of him that feared making Sam so sick of him that he’d get his ass tossed out had dwindled to nothing in the past few weeks.

Sam opened his mouth to say something else, then shut it. His hands were shaking.

“Then we’re here until the end of March. Simple as that,” Gabriel said, hiding the urge to reach for Sam by stretching his arms out along the couch’s back. Sam wouldn’t want him noticing the tremor.

Sam nodded curtly. Gabriel waited until he heard the back door slam shut before he exhaled hard, his eyes drifting to the lockbox.

The lockbox that Sam had left open.

Gabriel’s goodwill, while exercised in great quantities for Sam, was not an endless font. He held a paltry, incredibly one-sided debate about the pros and cons with himself before making his move.

There wasn’t much inside: documents pertaining to the cabin, a half-empty box of bullets, and keys to important places.

Something glittered from one of the corners. Gabriel, following his magpie instinct, plucked it out carefully.

Even as his stomach dropped to his toes, Gabriel couldn’t help but admire the craftsmanship. The ring sported a modest diamond, twisted in a dainty way that suggested femininity. That, and its size—only a woman’s hand could’ve sported something like this.

Gabriel carefully dropped the ring back into the box. He’d seen enough.

“Shiny!”

“Shit,” Gabriel gasped, whirling to find Bones perched at the end of the couch, her head tilted toward the lockbox. “When the fuck did you get in here?”

Bones clacked her beak. “Shiny. Bad man.”

“I know,” Gabriel hissed, throwing a pillow at her. Sam was outside and couldn’t stop him. Bones dodged it easily, prompting him to give the whole thing up as a lost cause. His stomach hurt too much for him to hold on to the anger anyway. “I really am horrible, aren’t I?”

Bones’ caw from the rafters was too ambiguous to be read as agreement or disagreement.

…

Without the radio, they had no real way of knowing when a blizzard would hit. Sam could guesstimate from experience, but any meteorological details were out of their grasp. When Sam told Gabriel that he expected some snow over a stew dinner, Gabriel took it in stride and imagined something like the dump of fresh powder that made skiing so pleasurable.

I should know better by now, Gabriel thought as he opened his eyes to find the skylight entirely covered by an impenetrable layer of packed snow.

Even with Sam acting as a radiator (spooning him again) and two layers of blankets, Gabriel could feel the abnormal chill in the air bite at his cheeks when he stuck his face out. With a shiver, he retreated into the warm cavern of the covers, turning enough to poke Sam insistently on his unfairly firm pec. He’d determined that it was a safe area to touch and did so with impunity. This was an emergency.

“Wha’?” Sam eventually murmured, sleepily swatting at his hand.

“It’s cold. Too cold,” Gabriel stressed, for the first time since waking feeling worried about the fact.

Sam heard this and began to sit up. His reaction to the cold air was the same as Gabriel’s, which would’ve been more amusing if the problem hadn’t been so serious.

“Damn. The heater’s probably on the fritz again.”

“Again?” Gabriel asked, aghast. Sam had never mentioned the heater having problems.

Sam turned to face him, settling back into bed. The three days’ worth of scruff on his face practically begged to be touched. “It happens when there’s a big snowfall. I’ve always been able to fix it.”

Having witnessed Sam’s handyman skills, Gabriel felt more at ease with the situation. The stressful idea of at least a foot of snow pressing in overhead, especially on the skylight, remained.

“Go fix it.”

“You’re not my boss,” Sam grumbled, shutting his eyes again. “I will in a minute.”

Gabriel was fully prepared to be petulant—he didn’t like the cold infiltrating his abodes and didn’t see why they had to tolerate it for any longer—until he looked at Sam more closely. The dark circles under his eyes seemed more pronounced, and a minute shiver that Gabriel didn’t think was from the cold shook his body.

“Sam-a-lam,” Gabriel started, his worry evolving into a new beast of entirely different proportions. “Are you feeling ok?”

“I’m fine,” Sam replied automatically, “I just slept poorly.”

Gabriel wasn’t convinced. Sam cracked his eyes open enough to see that Gabriel wasn’t going to drop it and decided that he’d rather get out of bed to avoid his questioning.

That, more than anything, told Gabriel that something was wrong. Ever since he’d laid eyes on Sam, he’d always known he was safe with him. Despite the fragility his past had instilled in certain parts of his being, Gabriel’s overall image of Sam remained one of a strong, willful man who was above plebeian things like germs.

But Sam had gotten cuts and bruises over the course of the winter. Why wouldn’t he be able to get sick?

Gabriel remained in bed, confronting Sam’s mortality with an unsettling new perspective, until he heard the whoosh of the resurrected heater kicking on.

“Happier now, princess?” Sam called from the living room.

“Who’re you calling princess?” Gabriel spluttered, torn between indignation and way more interest in the term than he should’ve had. He grabbed a blanket and shuffled to the railing, aiming the best glare he could muster considering the early hour.

“Bones,” Sam said innocently, looking up at him with a shit-eating grin.

Gabriel descended the stairs with nothing more than a harrumph. Sam’s smiles sometimes prevented him from coming up with witty responses as quickly as he would’ve liked.

When Sam opened the back door, a snow drift as high as Gabriel’s waist greeted them.

“I can do without a walk,” he said faintly, stepping behind Sam. He’d never felt claustrophobic before in his life, not even at the most underground raves, but looking at all that snow was simply too much.

Sam’s knowing eyes held no reproach. “Alright. Just get the coffee started.”

Gabriel did so, relieved to be away from the snow. Since he’d started sleeping with Sam, the dreams of the crash had been replaced by hazy fragments of treks through snow; snow so abundant that it blanketed the world and him until they were all one.

Bones seemed agitated by the snow as well, only settling to perch after Sam gave her some beef jerky.

Gabriel still didn’t like the bird, but he had to admit that she was charming in her own manner. In the long run, being nicer to Bones could pay off. She might come around sometime during the winter, and even more importantly, Sam would appreciate it if they got along more. For the latter, Gabriel was willing to set aside his pride.

“Truce?” he offered to Bones after seeing Sam out the front door, where the roof overhang had prevented the snow from piling up in crazy drifts. “I hardly offer truces to anyone. It’s not my style. So, consider my offer carefully.”

Bones looked up with an inquisitive head tilt. After a long moment of scrutiny, she made the chirrup sound that Sam said indicated she was pleased and went back to eating.

It could’ve been simple satisfaction at the beef jerky, but Gabriel took it as a graceful acquiescence to his terms.

…

Gabriel kept half an eye on Sam for the rest of the day, not entirely convinced he was fine. However, with the exception of that morning, Sam didn’t deviate in any alarming way from his tendencies. He ate and drank as usual, knit as usual, and switched between doting on Bones and bullying Gabriel as usual.

Ok, Sam didn’t bully him—if they were really keeping track, Gabriel did most of the ribbing. But now that Gabriel had finally gotten Sam to open up and they’d both, by unspoken agreement, decided to give the topic of winter’s end a wide berth, he was delighted to find Sam’s conversational style combined dry wit and deprecating humor. Gabriel wanted to laugh and recommend a therapist all at once.

With the exception of Kali, Gabriel always had a certain amount of distance from his lovers. Image was often prioritized over anything else: who posted which picture when, who went where, why they would go to this restaurant or that party. Looking good together and looking like a couple mattered more than actually being a real one.

Sometimes, the transactional nature was more than just subtext. Gabriel had a few instances where he’d made deals with people before starting a romance, putting a timeline on the whole relationship. It kept everyone on the same page. The initial sexual connection would fizzle out accordingly, and both parties moved on in an amicable divorce style.

Balthazar, I’m starting to think you were on to something the last time we talked, Gabriel wrote, back pressed against the couch arm and feet resting on Sam’s thigh. I did need to meet someone new.

“Your pen isn’t moving.”

“Neither are your knitting needles.”

They looked up at each other, the arched brows in their pretend-glare down softening into a prolonged gaze.

“We’ll need a space heater for the loft,” Sam said, still gazing at him. His brow crinkled as his eyes flitted down Gabriel’s face, before he cleared his throat and looked away. “You’ll get cold otherwise. There should be one in the back room.”

“I can look for it. You stay cozy,” Gabriel offered. He wanted space to analyze the way Sam had been looking at him, and continued to look at him as he rose to toss his letter in the fire.

I’m reading into it, Gabriel tried to convince himself. We cuddle for body heat. Do not give in to the kissing impulse.

Gabriel’s mind flashed to Sam’s lockbox of glittering secrets, and then his perpetual long sleeves. Sam wasn’t someone he could kiss casually. Not one bit.

Sam’s storage room activated his magpie urge in a way that Gabriel found hard to resist. He had a sense for where the space heater was, but between one shiny object and another small box, he quickly got sidetracked.

It wasn’t until he found an envelope filled with about a dozen or so photos of what must’ve been Sam’s family and friends that Gabriel realized how much time he’d lost.

“Genetics are so unfair,” Gabriel sighed as he studied a picture of Sam and presumably Dean standing on someone’s front porch. Teenaged Sam was all floppy hair and gangly limbs, his bright smile rendering him almost unrecognizable. Dean could’ve been a Ken doll, save for his bowlegs; an endearing skew to his enviable symmetry. He flipped it over, finding “Sam and Dean on my porch” written on a label in unfamiliar, spidery handwriting. “Knew it.”

One other photograph caught Gabriel’s eye. It was of Sam, Dean, and a man leaning against a dark classic car. The man stood between the brothers, leaning into Dean and squinting at the camera. There was something familiar about his face and shock of dark hair, but Gabriel couldn’t say what.

He frowned, flipping the photo over. He wasn’t surprised to find ‘Castiel’ among the names scrawled on the back. The name had struck him as oddly familiar when he’d first seen it on the wedding invitation (and that was a can of worms he’d have to address with Sam on a better day), but he’d brushed it off. However, it was hard to brush off a familiar name and face, especially a name as uncommon as Castiel.

Gabriel decided it’d be the new mystery of the winter. He didn’t know how he’d solve it with his limited resources, but after spending so much time generating complete thoughts without the dopamine distractions of social media, he was confident he’d figure it out.

“Sam!” he called out, dragging along the space heater in one hand and the envelope in the other. “Sam, you won’t believe what I’ve found…”

He trailed off as he entered the dark living room. The curtains were still open; the fire reduced to embers in the hearth.

“Sam?” he called out hesitantly, his eyes fixed on one of the windows.

At some point, it’d started snowing again; the flakes falling in slow, dream-like billows. Drawn in, Gabriel wandered closer, his eyes taking in what was now a familiar landscape.

Everything looked the same, save for one dark splotch pulling away from the trees, moving against the wind and snow.

Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut, pinching the inside of his wrist. He’d fallen asleep somehow, if he was seeing things again.

It won’t be there, he thought, cracking his eyes open again.

Still there. It was too far off to count its legs, but its height and shape struck Gabriel as all wrong for a deer.

An ear-piercing shriek from Bones shattered the brewing standoff between Gabriel and whatever was standing outside in the woods. He startled so badly that he dropped everything in his hands; the heater clattering just shy of his toes and the envelope sliding across the floor.

Sam had never answered him. Where was Sam?

Gabriel practically flew up the stairs, dread coiling deep in his stomach. As soon as his feet hit the landing, Bones swooped toward him, forcing him to duck.

“Christ, Bones! Where are you going?” he asked, turning in time to catch her tail feathers disappearing downstairs.

Bones didn’t deign to give him with a proper response. Gabriel pulled himself up from the floor using the edge of the bed. Somehow, he found the switch for the lamp, flicking it on with a muffled curse after knocking a few books over.

Sam rested on top of the covers, flat on his back, his breath coming in faint wheezes.

“Okay. This is okay,” Gabriel muttered to himself, even though everything was far from okay, and he could no longer hear Bones or anything at all in the cabin outside of Sam’s rattling exhales.

He tentatively checked Sam’s temperature with the back of his hand. Too hot.

“Sam,” Gabriel said, grasping his forearm. He started shaking him gently. “Sam. Wake up.”

It took several tense minutes that Gabriel spent in a blank haze, but Sam eventually roused. He sighed with relief, angling himself so he blocked out much of the lamp when Sam’s glazed eyes slitted against it in pain.

“Sam, listen to me. I need you to tell me what to do.”

“Thirsty. Where’s Dean?” Sam asked, not even attempting to sit up.

Oh boy.

“Um, he’s with Castiel,” Gabriel said, thanking the heavens the man’s name came to him without so much as a pause. “It’s just me. I can… get you some water?”

“Water,” Sam echoed, “Water’s nice.”

Gabriel ran downstairs, pausing only momentarily at the windows. No deer monster in sight.

And no Bones either, he thought, entering the kitchen to find the window she favored ajar, snow gathering on the sill. She’d left in a hurry–had she been spooked by Sam’s condition and flown off with a red ribbon, or had she seen the same thing as Gabriel?

There was no way to tell now. He grimly pulled the window shut, hoping Bones would be alright.

Gabriel mentally patted himself on the back for remembering to bring the first-aid kit along with the requested water. The not-deer hadn’t made him completely lose his cool, and he gave one of the living room windows the finger on his way back up to the loft.

Take that, weird deer thing.

“Are you still awake, Sammy?”

An inarticulate grunt came from the bed, along with a string of words that might’ve been his knee-jerk denial of “It’s not Sammy.” Gabriel took that as a good sign. He perched on the edge of the bed and, with some coaxing and quick pillow readjustment, got Sam upright enough for him to drink the water.

“Pretty sure you got a fever, but we should still check,” Gabriel said, turning the thermometer on.

The display read 101.2. Gabriel kept the number to himself, feeling distinctly like he’d been thrown into the deep end.

“Tired,” Sam murmured.

“I know. You just have to take some medicine first,” Gabriel said, putting all his faith in the Tylenol he shook out of the bottle.

He helped Sam take the medicine and got him comfortable again. Within minutes, Sam was asleep, his breathing still punctuated by a wheeze. Gabriel stayed a little longer, fiddling with the covers, before remembering he still had one more thing to do.

Gabriel stoked the fire and, one by one, made sure all the curtains were drawn. By the time he’d finished, things felt a touch cozier, dampening the fright of earlier events. With a heavy sigh, he flopped back onto the couch, his hands resting listlessly in his lap.

I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Gabriel admitted to the flames. He laughed bitterly. “Fuck. Now would be a good time to have Google on my side.”

The first aid kit contained some directions, but they were mostly aimed at handling bodily injuries. Gabriel didn’t find anything useful among the books either. Sam’s nerdiness apparently didn’t extend to medical topics. All the knowledge he’d applied successfully to Gabriel after the crash must’ve lived solely in his head, where it remained perfectly out of reach of Gabriel’s increasingly desperate hands.

He knew that in TV shows and movies, they put a cold towel on people’s foreheads, but did that really help? When Balthazar got sick, he took the medicines prescribed and slept it all off. Gabriel himself hadn’t been sick since a bout of super-charged flu in college, which he recalled little of. More medicine and sleeping it off there, he supposed.

Those situations had been well within the comforting arms of society, where there was always some kind of support system to rely on. Help was a phone call away. Up here, all Gabriel had to rely on was whatever was in the bounds of the cabin. Maybe Sam could sleep this off, but if it grew more serious…

Gabriel shuffled through the coffee table until he found the ribbons Sam used. They were all present, which meant that whatever Bones had left for, it hadn’t been to get human help.

He shoved them aside, standing to pace the cabin. She probably wouldn’t go that far down the mountain anyway in this weather. One of the few qualities Gabriel had admired about Bones from the start was that her sense of self-preservation was appropriately high.

Might as well give everything a try, he thought, prepping a towel in the bathroom.

The first towel dripped a line that Gabriel couldn’t ignore. He retreated, tried again (how hard was it to do this?), and felt a little better when he made it to the loft with no drips.

“I’ve mastered so many mundane tasks under your roof, Sam-a-lam,” Gabriel whispered. “Be sure to add 'towel-prepping master' to the list when you wake up.”

Sam didn’t react to Gabriel draping the towel over his brow. Gabriel ran his hands through his hair, fighting the exhaustion weighing his head down. He’d never been good at waiting.

“I should probably sleep on the couch in case you’re contagious,” he murmured to Sam. He yawned, stifling it in his elbow. “But I just can’t bring myself to leave you.”

Gabriel lay on his side facing Sam, curling himself around the first aid kit like it was some messed-up teddy bear. He didn’t dare touch Sam—less because of the germs but more because Sam was so out of it that he didn’t think it’d come across well. Something told him the lowered boundaries of touch wouldn’t apply when Sam was like this.

Sam’s profile, already hazy from the diffused light, blurred. Gabriel couldn’t tell if his watery eyes came from tears or sleepiness—he rubbed at them angrily anyway. The panic-induced adrenaline was running out, which Gabriel thought was a bunch of bullshit considering how his heart jack-hammered every time Sam’s breathing stuttered.

His tired eyes didn’t care. If Gabriel was going to play nurse, he’d have to be as close to peak performance as possible. That meant no all-night vigils.

“You’ll be alright, Sam,” Gabriel said, “It’ll be alright. I’ll keep talking to you, so you don’t forget you have to wake up and keep an eye on my dumbass before I break something in your cabin…”

You’ll be alright, Sam. You have to be.