Chapter Text
The room is a deathly kind of quiet, the silence only broken by short, harsh breathing.
"Brother, don't make me do this." Lucifer says softly, inevitability behind his eyes.
"No one makes us do anything." Gabriel says simply. He's still carrying that futile shred of hope that Lucifer can be redeemed.
Lucifer looks at him, something shimmering in his eyes. Gabriel refuses to believe it's regret. "I know you think you're doing the right thing, Gabriel," His voice is barely a whisper, yet Gabriel hears him loud and clear. "but I know where your heart truly lies."
The real Gabriel, having snuck up behind Lucifer, raises his blade silently, preparing to strike. When it's angled correctly, Gabriel brings it down hard-
Before he knows what's happening, Gabriel's blade is buried in his own stomach, angled up towards his heart. Gabriel gasps in pain. Wide, disbelieving eyes meet cold, resigned ones.
"Here," Luci finishes with a whisper.
Lucifer looks back over his shoulder for a moment, just long enough to see the fake Gabriel fade away, its expression frozen in the same shock that has the real Gabriel locked in place. Lucifer raises a hand to support Gabriel's head, an almost affectionate move. Gabriel is choking, suffocating in his own blood, trying to form words, or maybe a scream. He can't think through the all-too-human rush of blood in his ears.
Lucifer hadn't doubted himself for a moment, calm and assured. He knew just as well as Gabriel that this was a pointless fight.
"Amateur hocus pocus. Don't forget," Lucifer mutters, "you learned all your tricks from me, little brother."
Lucifer yanks out the sword and Gabriel screams, his Grace lighting up the room as it drains out of his vessel. The world shakes for a single moment.
Then Gabriel's vessel sinks to the floor, no longer propped up by the blade. The Devil steps away from his brother's lifeless body, breathing hard in the unnatural silence of the room.
-and Gabriel gasps for air. He's greeted by stale city air and spent fuel, but Gabriel welcomes it gladly.
He doesn't need the air, but so long spent pretending made it an instinct to breathe, and for an agonizingly long moment just then, he couldn't.
He wasn't supposed to wake up. That's something he knows, clearer than anything else in his head. He's supposed to be dead. Lucifer... Lucifer really did kill him.
Even after everything, he didn't think Luci would.
Gabriel takes slower breaths, and looks around. It's nighttime and the street is nearly empty, beside the occasional car. Gabriel is lying on the sidewalk in the shadow of a building. There are some trees and a bed of water beside the urban street. Good for you, random eco-friendly country. Why did he end up outside of America? Why was he moved anywhere?
The pavement beneath him isn't red. He's not bleeding out. His vessel doesn't even feel bruised, and it's dissonant, it doesn't line up with what he knows is true.
What does Dad expect him to do here?
The only way he'd be saved from an Archangel blade to the chest is by Dad, and Dad doesn't save his children unless he needs something from them.
Gabriel feels it, the fundamental change in the world, even while still reeling from waking up. This isn't the universe he helped create. He couldn't be farther away from Lucifer if he tried, and that settles him enough to think.
The Host feels different as well. He doesn't know every angel by name, but he knows all of them by their voice. After millenia of blocking out the same voices whispering in the back of his mind, the ones that are unfamiliar to him pierce through his head like they're shouting. There are some others he recognizes still, but there aren't meant to be any new voices. There were never meant to be new angels after the first war. It's more than unsettling.
He'd traveled the multiverse before, but Gabriel never spent long away from home, despite every instinct that he developed over the years that told him to run.
It takes raw energy to be able to travel between universes. If his Grace is in this state... He should not have gotten here. He shouldn't even be alive.
His Grace is damaged and depleted, and he isn't going to be at full power anytime soon. At least it's not getting worse.
It should be, it should be leaking out of his vessel like a broken pipeline, slowly killing him and everything around him. Somehow, it's not doing that. The wound itself is gone, his Grace scarred over unnaturally.
That means the other celestial beings here shouldn't notice him. Not yet. It'll keep him alive for a little while longer.
Gabriel's thoughts drift back to Lucifer and he immediately decides he'll deal with that later. Or, you know, never.
Gabriel finally moves to sit up, carefully, and he pauses in surprise when he feels no pain. His Grace aches--it pulses in time with the beating heart of his vessel. His vessel itself is fine, though. The mismatch feels awfully weird.
Gabriel gets up and dusts himself off, decidedly not thinking about how impossible it is for him to be here. First order of business is finding out where 'here' is. Deciding on his next course of action can come after.
His surroundings look familiar. Then again, that doesn't tell him anything, since he's been just about everywhere on Earth over the past few centuries alone.
After a while of wandering around and seeing signs like 'Huissen 4' and 'Arnhem-Zuid 3', which told him absolutely nothing except that most languages look exactly the same, Gabriel decided to just fly wherever the hell he wanted to go. Screw Dad, if He wanted Gabriel to do something here he should've made it clear. Dropped him in the middle of a conflict or something. At least then he'd have something to do.
Where to go...
His first instinct is Las Vegas, his new favorite haunt this century. He's not keen on seeing it changed, though. It won't be the Vegas he knows.
He searches for a newspaper.
The newspaper's global news section is small, but one article in particular catches his eye. The Weaponizer, a fancy title for some famous actor in Los Angeles, has been murdered.
The city of angels. He's been avoiding it for centuries. While his siblings don't tend to linger on Earth, visiting the city of angels while in witness protection would just be asking for dramatic irony to bite him in the ass.
He's not in witness protection anymore, though. He might as well be dead. And he's always wanted to visit Los Angeles.
A city filled with unsolved crime and nightlife. What more could he want?
While Gabriel is stuck here with no clue what he's supposed to do, he can always default to what he's been doing for millenia. Feast.
An instant later, he's face-down on a grit-covered rooftop in Los Angeles, screaming.
"Fuck!" When he manages to cut off the scream, Gabriel breaks into a stream of multilingual curses instead. That cuts off too with a hiss when another bolt of pain shoots through his wings. He curls into himself, hunched over his arms. They barely kept him from literally eating dirt when he landed.
"Okay," he pants out loud, forming words through the haze over his mind. "Bad idea. Very bad idea."
It's his damaged Grace. The conclusion he comes is resigned. Why did he think it would be a good idea to fly? Just because his Grace isn't actively draining out of him doesn't mean he can use it the same way he always has.
He did get to LA, but that's beside the point.
He simply lies there for a few moments as aftershocks of pain make his vessel twitch, despite there being nothing wrong with it.
When the pain fades to a dull ache, Gabriel carefully lifts himself up to look at the bustling city. He brushes specks of grit off his sleeves absent-mindedly.
It's late afternoon, judging by the sweltering heat of the sun, which he can only be thankful for. The noise of the afternoon crowds had drowned out his screams.
He'd originally planned to use any rooftop as perch and find a discreet alley to fly to, but now that seems like a less good idea.
Luckily, there's an exit on the roof he'd landed on. It looks like Gabriel landed on an apartment building, away from the true commercial center of Los Angeles, but still deep enough into the city for the streets to get crowded.
Sneaking downstairs is demoted to simply walking halfway through, when Gabriel finally gets his mind wrapped around the fact that there are no surveillance cameras at all.
He's somewhat incredulous at the lack of security. This is Los Angeles, people are robbed and murdered here non-stop!
Shaking his head, Gabriel makes his way out of the building and into the chaotic herd of humans.
And if a few hours later the landlord of that particular building is surprised by a non-native grizzly bear breaking through his own top-of-the-line security, Gabriel doesn't know anything about it.