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unityghost · 1 year

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Applied Knowledge

Some more Post-Asmodeus Sabriel Feels content (part 31) for those who are still inclined to read, even if Supernatural is over. I’ll have to find a way to organize and tag this stuff on here; Archive of Our Own has it all organized chronologically. Thanks if you’ve stuck around up until this point! I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.

Logic told Gabriel that there was no reason to expect a linear recovery, and yet he found himself expecting it to work that way no matter the dictates of rational thinking.

The relationship between his near-humanity and his somewhat-angelness was a constant source of confusion to Gabriel - and everybody around him - but it seemed that Sam had recently come to the conclusion that a working knowledge of human biology might be helpful in the short term.

“When you breathe in,” he explained, “It activates the sympathetic nervous system. Gets your adrenaline going a little. So - ”

“I have no sympathy for my nervous system,” Gabriel interjected.

“ - the important part,” Sam went on, ignoring the comment he’d probably expected, “Is to focus on your exhalation, which initiates something different - other hormones - to calm you down. So it’s best to take that nice and slow. That's your parasympathetic nervous system.”

“Activate parachute, got it. Free-falling becomes smooth coasting through a cloudless summer sky.”

“If that’s what helps you remember it,” said Sam, “Then yes, Gabriel. Pull open the parachute.”

“Listen," Gabriel told him, "I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about deep breathing before, and I suck at it.”

“I thought it might help to get more specific about what happens when you do it, so that you know why it’s helpful. It helped me to learn about that. A lot happens to the human body when it gets like …” He gestured vaguely to what was in front of him: Gabriel, still trembling from the taste of a nightmare at the back of his throat as sweat coursed down his neck and both fists spontaneously clenched and unclenched against the tangled blankets. “This.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I don’t have a human body, then,” Gabriel replied. “Otherwise I might be a mess.”

Sam tried to smile. “Do you - ”

“No. No, I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m sorry for getting you out of bed. It’s just that I thought - ” Gabriel shook his head and looked down at the bedcovers clutched between his fingers. “I was so freakin’ tired when I fell asleep that I was dreaming about being tired, Sam. Kept trying to get up off the floor of that cell and find you, but Asmodeus wouldn’t let me, and I was too exhausted to pull myself to my feet.”

Sam nodded. Perhaps there was more physiology to be expounded upon with regard to the liminal space before waking waking, the crack in between that allowed for bewildered shouts for assistance, but Sam was tactful enough to withhold any further lectures.

“So I thought,” Gabriel continued, determined to complete his explanation, “That Asmodeus was in the room. I really did.”

He looked around. He couldn’t help it. He knew it was foolish, but it seemed even more foolish not to check.

Sam frowned at him.

“I was admiring the architecture,” Gabriel offered. “I’ve grown excruciatingly fond of this glamorized speakeasy you call a home.”

“Okay. I guess that's ... good. You want anything? Water, maybe?”

Gabriel turned his gaze downward again, debating whether to ask Sam to shift his weight so that Gabriel could properly pull the covers over himself. He decided against it: if he asked Sam to move, Sam might either take offense or understand the request to mean “leave and shut the door behind you.”

“Christmas crackers!” Gabriel hissed, pounding a fist against his own knee.

Sam looked horrified. “What are you doing? Gabriel, what's wrong?"

“I - ” Gabriel tried to remember what Sam had said about breathing - parachutes, right - and tried to exhale, then realized he couldn’t exhale without first exciting himself by inhaling, and came to the conclusion that the entire process was a self-defeating hoax. “I understand exactly what’s going on.”

“What? Going on with what?” When Gabriel didn’t answer, Sam pressed: “Has something been hurting, and you just figured it out, or - ”

“Geez, you really are in doctor mode tonight, aren’t you? I meant I know that I’m not in danger.”

Sam furrowed his brow. "Is that not good?"

“What isn’t good is that I’ve known that for months now!”

“I’m still not - ”

“What use is there in trying to convince myself that Asmodeus is gone when I still feel like he’s next to me or waiting for me or on top of me or - I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth the amount of effort I put into it every day!”

“I don’t think it’s that weird that you’d have a hard time finding common ground between what you know and what you feel,” said Sam.

“I didn’t say it was weird. I said it was pointless. Unless maybe I’m not trying hard enough; but man - I’ve been giving this everything I have in me.”

“It really hasn’t been that long, you know,” Sam reminded him. “You were in Hell for a lot longer than you’ve been with us.”

“So it’s going to take another truckload of centuries to bridge the gaping maw between what you’ve taught me and what he did to me?”

Sam spoke carefully. “I didn’t mean that. I was just trying to say that if you really want to focus on being rational, you’ve gotta factor in that imbalance. The time you spent in prison versus the time you’d had without Asmodeus manhandling you - that’s not a fair fight, so try not to be so rough on yourself about it.”

“Except,” Gabriel pointed out, feeling his chest tighten against Sam's audacious refusal to acknowledge Gabriel’s failure, “There was no gap when I had him breathing down my neck. I knew I was in danger and I felt that way, too. It wasn’t unreasonable to be cowering on the floor. Things are different now - I know there’s nothing to be afraid of, but my whole alarm system has short-circuited.”

“Yeah,” said Sam. “That’s usually how it works.”

Gabriel clenched his jaw and mangled the sheets in his fists again. “This isn’t funny.”

“What? Of course not. I know that.”

“Then stop talking to me like I’m a cute idiot, Sam. I don’t care how typical any of my behavior is; I want it to stop and you’re hearing something completely different. Just because you’ve got the knowledge and wisdom to smile and nod like I’m learning to walk for the first time - ‘Oh, look at this; it’s okay, we know he’ll stop falling even if he doesn’t know that yet’ - doesn’t make this any less exhausting for me.”

Sam looked bewildered. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was trying to help. To remind you that - ”

“Shut up, okay? I know. I know. And that’s what makes it so difficult.”

“I just thought it might help you to know you’re not out of the ordinary for feeling the way you do - you know? I figure it’d only make me feel worse if I thought I was the only person to get stuck in the middle of what I knew was true and what I felt was real. I feel that way all the time. I’m not trying to preach to you. Or laugh at you. Why would I do that? I’m hardly in a position to brag about healthy recovery, am I?”

“Now you’re pleading!” Gabriel snapped. “I don’t want to feel like I hurt your feelings in addition to everything else!”

“Look,” Sam pleaded, because he was guilty of exactly that, “You and I are on a level playing field.”

“It sounds like you think you’re better than me.”

“Why would you even - I don’t think that at all, Gabriel.”

Gabriel pounded his knees again, thinking about the nightmare still sitting inside of him, exactly as real as the pain that resulted from hitting himself. “Well, you are, so maybe I shouldn't bitch about it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Sam reached out and caught Gabriel’s fist before he could repeat the childish self-beating, the goal of which Gabriel felt might become clearer with each blow. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything. Maybe I said it the wrong way, but I really, really, truly, honestly meant that it’s normal to feel stuck like this. To know what’s the matter with you, to know what’s real, and to feel something totally opposite. I feel that way every day, Gabriel. And I definitely wasn’t trying to make light of it. If it came across that way then I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Oh, don’t be.” Gabriel tried to extricate his fist and Sam let him go. He thought about hitting himself again, but it seemed ungracious after Sam had made the choice to trust him with his own hands.

Sam’s voice softened. “Listen, Gabriel: you really need to sleep. I think that’s part of what’s got you so on edge.”

Gabriel almost said, Oh, is the baby getting cranky again? Let’s put him down for his nap but instead replied, “Or maybe it’s the quality of the sleep itself. I mean, if nightmares were the only issue, that’d make sense - I could figure that out. Maybe. But it’s the fact that my whole body is just flooded with the stuff.”

“That ... um ... feeling you get?” Sam asked.

Gabriel understood his hesitance, knew that Sam had never been able to comprehend what this “feeling” was - but perhaps that was simply due to Gabriel’s ineloquence. He had used adjectives like “dark” and “warped” to describe the tang that this feeling cast upon the world, had tried to articulate the deeply visceral flavor of ethereal horror that wrenched him out of the present and cradled him in the greasy jaws of memory.

Words, however, could not give shape to this feeling, even when Gabriel drew upon all his lifetimes of speech and his countless languages to try and force the feeling's essence into description. Yet it could not be coerced into the confines of vocabulary; it could only be felt, and only disgorged in the small horrible ways with which his near-mortal body was familiar: sweating; trembling; desperate, incessant vomiting when the terror would not abate.

In fact, Gabriel was convinced that this dark, otherworldly sensation probably was suggestive of neurosis unique to him. After all, Sam had never assured him of its normalcy. Maybe it was particular to angels, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to question Castiel about it. More likely, it was a symptom of the grotesque wrongness that had metastasized in Gabriel the moment Asmodeus first laid hands on him.

“Hey.” Sam touched his arm. “You all right?”

“Yes,” Gabriel answered hoarsely. “But that isn’t how I feel.”

“Nightmare still on your mind?”

“No. I … I don’t know.” Gabriel licked his lips. “Maybe I don’t really understand as much as I like to believe I do. Sam - ” He tried to meet Sam’s eyes but Sam was still clutching his arm. He didn’t mind if Sam touched him, or if Sam wanted to make eye contact, but in general Gabriel wasn’t willing to do both at the same time. “You don’t think I’m disgusting, right?”

“What? No. Of course not.”

“Okay, but I do. I think that I’m disgusting, and I also feel like I’m disgusting. Like - in the way that maggots crawling over a decomposing body is disgusting. It’s not the corpse’s fault for rotting and it’s not the bugs’ fault that they feed on it. It’s just disgusting for what it is.”

Sam recoiled, and Gabriel jerked his head up. I was right.

Sam’s features had taken on the flush of anger. “I don’t like that at all.”

“Neither do I! What, you think I was just spouting a poetic monologue? It’s what I see, Sam. It’s what I feel.”

“But that’s just … Jesus. You’re not like that. That’s a horrible thing to say about yourself.”

“Then I’m sorry I said it! Look, you’re proving my point!”

“That’s just such a - look - ” Sam closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Pull the parachute, Sam,” said Gabriel, trying to ignore how fast his heart was pounding in response to the irritation in Sam’s face.

Sam opened his eyes. “Gabriel, I know you feel like you’re tainted or - or just bad, or whatever, but I hate to hear you talk about yourself like that.”

“Well, how am I supposed to believe it isn’t true? Based on what happened to me in Hell, I’m probably not that far off.”

“You are, though.”

“I’m not, though.”

Sam stood up.

Gabriel scrambled backward, slamming into the wall and toppling the pillow from the lip of the mattress to the floor. He had a split second’s regret - I could have used that for protection - and then several moments of quiet waiting, moments in which he was not sure what he did, moments in which he heard nothing and saw only darkness.

Then he heard his name, repeated gently over and over; he remembered where he was, and realized - with a spasm of humiliation - that what had felt like minutes probably had not been more than a few seconds. Both arms were thrown over his head as a makeshift shield - a fortress that had never proven effective against his attackers.

With arthritic slowness, Gabriel unfolded himself.

“It’s okay,” Sam whispered. “It’s okay. There we go. It’s okay. It’s all right, Gabriel; it’s all right.”

Gabriel nodded. He did not look at Sam.

Sam held out a hand, uncertain. “I’m sorry. I got a little - ”

“It’s fine.” But Gabriel was suddenly overtaken by such a violent urge to cry that he lay back down, bereft of the pillow, and turned away. “I just - ”

Sam waited.

“I forgot to activate my parachute,” Gabriel finished, and crushed his teeth together against a sob that jerked out of him like a seizure.

“Ah - ” Sam sounded shocked and unsure. “Oh man. I’m sorry.”

Gabriel knew that he was. It would only serve to make Sam feel worse if Gabriel were to vocally lament that he was terrified of giving voice to his deepest despair lest Sam lash out. Even if it was due to helplessness or to fury toward Asmodeus, Gabriel couldn’t handle that level of fire in Sam.

"Here, let's just - let me, um - " Sam tucked the blankets around Gabriel's shoulders, taking caution not to actually touch him. Gabriel had come to suspect that Sam felt most at ease in conveying affection, remorse, and protectiveness through some sort of physical contact. Gabriel often made this challenging for Sam. In fact, he reflected as he felt Sam draw away, why should he feel entitled to refuse Sam the small comfort of touching him when Gabriel was the one at fault for misinterpreting a benign gesture of frustration - especially given that the gesture was in response to Gabriel’s complaining about his poor self-image?

“Listen,” Sam said quietly. “Listen, Gabe - I won’t leave, but I’m gonna give you a couple minutes to calm down. I’m here, but I’m not going to hurt you, Gabriel.”

In the aftermath of the imagined assault, Gabriel was shaking. He listened to his own ragged breathing as he would have listened to a familiar much-hated song that played only because he was too unintelligent to find the appropriate dial to turn it off, while somebody else was forced to pretend it didn’t grate on their nerves and politely wait for the closing notes.

After a few moments, the surge of fear began to soften and the bedroom grew more solid to him. He debated the benefits and disadvantages of trying to halt his tears. Ultimately, he decided, it wasn’t a question of positives and negatives: there was simply not much use in pretending that Sam would have judged him after seeing it happen so often. The impulse to stoicism was there, as it always was - a costume with no remaining elasticity.

“I know,” Gabriel muttered into the damp sheet.

“Huh?”

He turned over, looking up at Sam. “I know that you’re not gonna do anything to try and mess with me. I really - I do. I know that.”

“That’s good.”

“If I could show you as much, I would. Instead you’ve got me whining about my self-indulgent hatred of - ” But Gabriel stopped, afraid to annoy Sam with additional descriptions of (as he’d considered saying) “this cosmic garbage that’s only ever been good for playtime in Hell.”

"That's all right," said Sam, although he looked pale and haunted. "Don't worry about it, Gabriel. Really. Just take it easy."

“You can touch me,” Gabriel offered. “If you - I’m sorry.”

Sam shook his head. “You don’t gotta make anything up to me, Gabriel.”

“I don’t want to get in trouble.” Gabriel gave a tight, nervous laugh. “If you want to, you can.”

“No. No, it's okay. Wait - if I say no, are you going to take that to mean I just think you’re gross?”

“I'm not sure."

“All right. Okay. Well, what do you want?” When Gabriel tensed - he loathed the question, abhorred the word - Sam corrected himself: “What do you need right now?”

“I’m not sure," Gabriel repeated. "I just know I’m sorry for freaking out.”

“Come on, you didn’t do anything wrong. Look, you know me pretty well, I think - and - well, hearing stuff like that can be rough because I want to change it. That’s all. It’s not your fault Asmodeus was such a piece of work.”

“I need to be more careful.” Gabriel smiled, fitfully, feeling delusional and uneven. He didn’t know whether he wanted to come across as serious. “One of these days you might actually get real pissed off. And whatever happens, I’ll have to take responsibility for not being able to control myself.”

Sam’s eye twitched. “Don’t say things like that.”

“Fine. I won’t. I’ll think them, but I won’t say them.” Gabriel was beginning to wonder if he was being difficult on purpose. “I don’t want to upset you; I don’t want to make you angry at anyone; I don’t want to make you sad when I’m afraid of you.”

“Stop.” Helplessly, Sam reached out and grabbed his hand. “You can say whatever you like, Gabriel. I just wish I could help.”

“Hey, you are helping. Like I mentioned, I at least know where I am. I know I’m not actually in danger.”

Sam gave a tired smile. “That isn’t what you just said.”

“Well - then I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. There are things I do know, and things I should know. Maybe I’ve actually lost my whole-ass mind. I believe you, I think. I believe you don’t want to hurt me. I just don’t - I guess I figure that might change.”

“But why?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because it’s me, Gabriel. It's Sam. It's not Asmodeus.”

"Yes! And yet here we are!"

Sam gripped his hand more firmly. “But that’s okay.”

“It really isn’t. I need to be able to connect the dots better. For my sake, maybe, but for yours too. I need to understand things better. I need to be able to apply what I learn. Looks like I’m screwing up both parts of that process.”

“You need more time. Maybe a lot more time.”

“I’ve had time!"

“Some. Like I said, you had a whole lot more time with him than you’ve had with any of us.”

“I just - ah - I - ” Gabriel wiped his eyes. “I’d just really like it to stop. I could do without the nightmares and without being scared of you or anyone else. And without feeling like a diseased animal stinking up the place. I hate it. I want it to end. I’m confused about what to believe and what to feel and how to act. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want you to hurt me but I - but I’m this thing, this nauseating, awful thing that he - that - and I can’t keep doing this because it’s too much for me. I can’t handle it. I can’t handle knowing it’ll probably take another eon before I’m not running away from you, and by then you won’t even be here. And I can’t handle thinking about that, either. I just want it to stop. All of it. I can’t do this." He shivered and tried to remember to breathe.

"I know," Sam murmured. "It's okay. I get it. But you're gonna be okay. I'm here."

"You - " Gabriel shuddered again, feeling sick and exhausted and still plagued by the grotesque haze of nightmares. "You can touch me."

Sam squeezed his hand.

“No,” Gabriel said, “I mean - ”

Sam eased him closer, into a gentle hug that felt undeserved but not frightening.

Gabriel took a deep breath, came close to making a remark about parachutes, and decided he had better not speak.

Since escaping, Gabriel had had instances in which he'd seriously doubted his own intellect. Surely he had simply not been clever enough to break free from Asmodeus; surely only a truly dimwitted being would have gotten so lost in the post-infernal labyrinth between knowledge and experience.

Despite this uncertainty, he didn't believe that he was stupid enough to miss what seemed obvious: the safety he felt in an embrace like this was instinctual. Perhaps it was a rudimentary form of applied knowledge. At least in this moment, there was no need to berate himself into common sense - not when the privilege of a warm embrace, however unmerited, felt quite different from anything else.

#supernatural #fanfiction #sabriel #sam/gabriel #platonic #ptsd #post-traumatic stress disorder #post-asmodeus sabriel feels #pasf #fanfic #spn fanfic #hurt/comfort #angst

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