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crime_and_inkTitle: Underneath Your Skin
Rating: R
Genre: AU (college).
Pairings: Sam/Gabriel with hints of Dean/Castiel. Sort of Gabriel/Kali in this chapter (if you’re reading the fic, you’ll understand why it’s ‘sort of’.)
Warnings: Severe mental health problems, past child abuse.
Word Count: 7,331.
Summary: Gabriel’s never minded missing entire chunks of time- at least until he wakes up in hospital and discovers the reason behind them. College is hard enough without therapy and other students acting like you’re a bomb about to go off. Sam Winchester wants to help, or at least prove that not everyone’s got the wrong idea, but isn’t getting very far.
Notes: I do not have the psychiatric disorder featured in this fic, and there will probably be mistakes, so I apologise to anyone offended by them in advance.
Kindle was sitting opposite him, taking notes. There was a sheet of paper on the floor, half hidden under the couch. There was a drawing on it, one that looked to have been done by a little kid, squint lines and stick figures. A man and a boy on the side he could see. The man had his hand somewhere that, even with half the picture hidden and the crayon lines straying across the page, was below the boy's waist.
"Oh, I'm sorry. My last patient must have left that behind."
He was sitting at the kitchen table, stabbing at the buttons on the calculator, doing the same calculations again and again because the numbers just wouldn't let him break even. It was going to be another month of working as many shifts as humanely possible, and his toothache was getting worse. They couldn't afford any bills unless he managed to find another job or, better yet, got a pay rise, but Gabriel wasn't optimistic enough to think that his boss would have a sudden change of heart in regard to raises.
The pile of college brochures looked like they were mocking him, being used as paperweights to hold down the bills and letters of warning from their landlord. Bills they couldn’t pay and an apartment that they probably wouldn’t be able to afford to keep for much long.
He still had some of the money the Shurleys had given him when he’d turned twenty-one that could cover the bills for a couple of months, but that would mean that he’d have to watch what he spent the rest of the time. He wasn’t going to ask them for money, not after everything they’d done for him.
"Gabriel?" Castiel was standing in the doorway, his bag in one hand and yet another letter in the other. "Why are you still up? It's past one."
"Why are you still up?" Gabriel hid the sheet with the numbers on it under a letter. "Shouldn’t you have been home hours ago?"
"I was studying."
Yeah, right. Gabriel didn't want to think too much about what his little brother was doing. It probably involved Meg from down the street, or maybe Keith, who lived on the ground floor and went through men like people went through condoms: a different one every time. He hoped it wasn’t Keith.
"It's not that late. I'll let you off this time." When Castiel was out of sight, he pulled out his college application forms.
She found it difficult to hug him now, but it wasn’t her fault that the baby was so big. Gabriel really hoped it would come out soon. He liked Bal, but Mike and Luc were always trying to make them choose who they loved more and Gabriel hoped that they’d get bored when they new baby came.
“Just think,” she said, looking at his dad, “soon they’ll all be grown up and going off to college.”
“What’s college?” The boy next door was always yelling, telling his parents that he was never going to college. Gabriel thought it sounded like a prison, but his dad had said that he’d met his mom after college and he’d sounded happy.
“It’s a place where you learn more about the world than you ever do in high school, and you’re going to go when you’re older.”
“Sweetie, he’s four.”
“It’s never too early to plan ahead.” She kissed his forehead. “All my boys are going to be brilliant, and none of you are ever going to make my mistake and not go because it costs too much. You’re never going to have to worry about that.”
Gabriel looked across the college applications before flicking through them to make sure that only ones there were his and that Castiel’s were safely tucked away under his stack of college brochures. The only thing he needed to do was sign them and he could send them away and cross his fingers. Then there would be scholarship applications and searching for
“Sorry, Mom,” he said, leaving them unsigned and tucking them under one of the books in the top drawer. He’d shred them in the morning.
There weren't very many things Gabriel hated more than Zachariah but, after Luc's friends, the kids at school were the worst. They were in love with themselves, with their perfect little lives, where they'd never had to explain cut lips and black eyes to well-meaning teachers and idiotic parents. Dean Winchester was a particular brand of stupid, spending most of his time skipping classes and spending his time with half the girls in their year.
"What, the Novaks?" Gabriel heard him say. "I don't know about them, but I heard his brother hangs out at the old apartment complex a few blocks away."
"Shane said he saw Luc with one of the dealers a few nights ago. If their uncle ever found out, he'd go insane. "
"He's their uncle?"
"Yeah, their parents left them here before and never came back—
“He just left them?”
“Yeah. Anyway, they say that Luc drinks and gets high with them every weekend."
"Dean, did you hear that?"
"I don't care. What's one more addict?"
...
His fist was stinging and someone had their arms around him, pulling him back from Dean Winchester, whose nose was gushing blood down the front of his t-shirt, whose nose looked like it was definitely broken.
A hand on his shoulder, the sound of Castiel and Balthazar arguing downstairs while Luc and Michael yelled at each other in the front yard. They’d be gone soon, Gabriel suspected, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to scare.
“I’ve helped a lot of people get out of the system.” The social worker’s hand had ink on it from the broken pen that was on the edge of the desk. Red ink. Like blood. “You don’t get anything in this world for free, Gabriel. Do you understand that?”
A reminder of the blood in the hospital and Gabriel nodded without looking away from the pen. He wanted to kill the social worker – Henry, call me Henry and Gabriel wouldn’t – but if he did, they’d be split up. The satisfying image of blood on his knuckles and blood on the social worker’s face.
“You’re a good kid. You’ll get out in one piece.”
Gabriel stared at the ceiling above him, listening to Sam sleeping across the room. It was too quiet, too much like the foster homes in the middle of the night. He checked the clock: five in the morning. He had a class at nine and, if he didn’t make too much noise, he could get up at six.
Tucking his hands under the pillow, Gabriel rolled over to face the wall. It was going to be a long hour.
"And what can you see from the results of the study... Lennon?"
Gabriel was glad that the professor hadn't asked him. He wasn't even sure what they were talking about, let alone what the results were supposed to show. He wondered if he could get away with dropping the Psych class. It hadn't been a good idea to take it in the first place, as everyone had told him a dozen times, but he'd been angry and looking for ways to try and prove the psychologists wrong. Looking back, taking a Psych class hadn't been the best way. He could have tried to teach Loki or the Trickster to copy his behaviour or something a little less stupid.
"Are you even listening?" Andy asked out the corner of his mouth, copying down the results from the graph that was projected on the wall in front of them.
"Nope." Between the headache and constantly ending up in places with no idea how he got there, Gabriel didn't care about the class. If he dropped it, he could still manage his major and minor and maybe even move one of his therapy sessions to one of the empty slots. Friday afternoons were a nightmare because of all the people trying to get home for the weekend, but Tuesday or Thursday would work much better. "What's your major?"
"Why?"
"I just want to know." If he could keep tabs of who was doing what, it would be easier to work out who he'd possibly end up in classes with. "English. Psych is my minor."
Huh. Strange combo. The reverse was more common, as far as Gabriel knew. Hadn't one of his old roommates had that? The one who’d been copying the DVDs. It was either one of his old roommates, or someone Castiel knew. It probably wasn't Dean Winchester. From what Gabriel knew, Dean was majoring in Mechanical Engineering, but he minor could have been anything. It probably wasn't Psych. Maybe English. Castiel... Who knew what Castiel had eventually settled on. He'd originally planned on Psych, at least until the possibility of his brother ending up as a case study had cropped up. After that, it had changed every week. English, Biology, Chemistry, even Social Work had come up. Gabriel was almost certain that English was involved somewhere, since he and Dean had swapped notes a few times. Sam... Sam had wanted to be a lawyer years ago, at least according to Castiel who could remember the names of every foster parent they'd ever had and the address of every foster home. Gabriel wasn't going to question that. He did hope that he'd changed his mind, though: Gabriel hated lawyers almost as much as he hated social workers.
"Snap." At least that cut down one of the problems with notes. "I'll need to borrow your notes."
"Sure. Just make sure the Trickster doesn't get chocolate on them."
"He's not the one you'll have to worry about." As his headache increased, Gabriel checked to make sure that the professor had his back to them as he talked about... something... and dropped his head to the desk, sighing as he felt the cool wood against his forehead. He didn't want to deal with Loki, not so soon after Loki had decided that the best form of revenge was trauma.
Would Higgins mind if he left in the middle of the lecture? The guy hadn't been overjoyed about meeting a person with DID in the first place and had been one of the people who had thought that it would have been better for Gabriel to attend evening classes somewhere rather than college full time. Screw that. He hadn't gone to a new school every time they changed foster homes to end up working for twice as long and taking evening classes, even if Loki and the Trickster sometimes made things difficult.
"I'll see you later." Gabriel pushed his chair back and ignored the looks he got from most of the people in the class as he left. Higgins didn't even turn around.
Out in the corridor, he checked his watch and tried to decide if it was worth going to the other two classes he’d have to sit through and pretend to pay attention to, or if it was better to just go back to his room and try and catch up on the sleep he’d missed.
He was halfway down the corridor when he saw one of the guys he recognised from down the hall from Dean and Castiel trying to balance a pile of glasses in one hand and put away a textbook at the same time.
“Hey, you’re Castiel brother, right?”
Shit. He couldn’t deal with the idiot right now. Hell, he didn’t want to deal with himself, let alone someone who sounded like he was going to complain.
“That’s me,” Gabriel said, grimacing and continuing along the corridor.
“Do me a favour and tell him to turn his alarm down. We don’t have nine o’clock classes.” The guy – Simon? Steven? Something with an ‘s’ – cursed and Gabriel heard the glasses clinking together loudly before they smashed on the floor.
Shane put his hand on his shoulder and Loki turned around and punched him in the face. Shane fell backwards, staggering away from the broken glass. Loki frowned at the lack of blood, but ignored Shane’s cries about how he was going to call my father and get you kicked out of here!
Some broken glass, but nothing that he usually saw when things were bad. According to his watch, Gabriel should have been in class. Things were worse than he’d meant them to become. All he’d been trying to do was distract Gabriel, make him realise that Sam Winchester was a bad idea, that there were things that had to be dealt with before anything could ever happen.
"What's going on?" Sam asked as he walked in, pushing the door closed behind him. He knew immediately that it wasn’t Gabriel sitting on the floor in front of the bed. “Shane Stevens is telling anyone who’ll listen that you tried to kill him. Andy says that Gabriel was acting weird in their Psych lecture earlier and now Ash says that you stole his shredder.”
Loki, flicking through the pages far too casually to be doing anything but acting, shrugged.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"No one saw you this much before. What's changed? What happened to bring you out so much?"
"Let's just say that Gabriel poked at the wrong wound. You ever ripped a scab off a really bad cut and then seen it get infected? That’s what’s happening. Now it’s got to be drained or the whole limb’s going to have to be cut off. It turns out that it wasn't a scar like I thought it was.” Was that guilt in his voice? Did Loki of all people sound sorry for what he'd done? "Don't even try it, Winchester. Castiel tried to earlier and Gabriel's been trying to for weeks."
"What did you tell him that was so terrible?"
"You don't want to know." Loki ripped out a page and fed it into the shredder, staring at the clear box below as it quickly filled with tiny pieces of paper. As Sam watched, he ripped out another.
That night, Sam fell asleep to the sound of the shredder whirring.
“Whatever you want, it can wait,” Gabriel snapped as soon as he saw his brother. Where did I leave the notebook? Stupid mistake, stupid, stupid mistake. Kindle told me to take it everywhere and I left it for days. It probably wouldn’t have helped, but she’ll still be pissed. What the hell am I supposed to say? Oh, I lost hours on day, but I don’t know what was happened or who was doing what during that time because I didn’t take the notebook like you told me to in the first five sessions. This is just perfect. “I’ve already lost three hours, I lost most of yesterday afternoon and at least one of the lecturers wants to talk to me about my conduct. On top of that, Sam won’t answer his phone and I’ve hardly slept for a week. I don’t care if the apocalypse has come early: go away.”
“And I don’t care how bad your day has been.”
The cold edge to his brother’s voice made Gabriel tear his eyes away from the notebook and look at Castiel, who stood by his bed, staring down at it.
The bottle lay on the bed, the cap off and the pills strewn across the rumpled sheets. Gabriel shrugged when Castiel turned to him, looking as if he'd just found out that everything he'd been told was a lie. It was an overreaction if Gabriel had ever seen one. It wasn't as if he'd told Castiel that he was taking the tablets. The only time Castiel had even asked him about them had been a few weeks after they'd been prescribed. They'd been sitting on the couch, looking forward to vacating the crappy little apartment, and Cas had simply asked, Did you take the tablets? and Gabriel had said that he had. Castiel hadn't said which tablets he was asking about. It wasn't Gabriel's fault if his brother didn't elaborate.
"You lied to me," Castiel said and Gabriel felt like he was back in the foster home again, tiptoeing around the fact that the couple who had been so happy to finally find kids had only been in it for the money and had dumped them back because she'd found out that the three of them were too much trouble. Gabriel had lied to him dozens of times back then, but it was the same sort of lie: he'd told the truth, he'd just failed to include some important details that changed it all. The couple had realised that they couldn’t handle three more kids, or their own were too much trouble for them to keep the newest foster kids.
Gabriel flicked one of the tablets off the bed, smiling when he heard the satisfying ping it made as it hit the bottom of the bin. "What do you want me to say? Sorry? No offense, Castiel, but that's never been my thing."
"I don't know why you wonder why nothing's getting better when you're not even doing what you're supposed to. You're not taking the pills and you're not talking about it the way you should be."
"Have you ever thought that maybe I can't talk about it? I don't even want to admit half this stuff happened, so why would I want to show it to anybody else."
“Talking helps.”
“In a perfect world full of rainbows, butterflies and candy rain, maybe.” Gabriel tipped as many of the pills as possible in to the bin and looked up at his brother expectantly. “Don’t you have a class in twenty minutes?”
It had taken hours of arguing with himself (and probably making the idiots next door think he had more than DID), but Gabriel was standing outside Castiel and Dean’s room, knocking on the door and adamant that he wasn’t going anywhere until his brother opened the door.
“Come on, Castiel!” he called, knocking harder. “I can do this all day if I have to.”
Andy looked up and down the corridor, at the people who were beginning to look around their doors, and then at Gabriel, who just kept knocking.
“You know what? I’ll give you the notes later.” With that, he scarpered, heading for his room.
Gabriel ignored him. He’d apologise later, and maybe he’d apologise to the people who were starting to complain that they had exams in a few days, or had been pulling all nighters to prep for exams they’d recently finished and wanted to sleep. Like the history major Gabriel had heard Castiel complain about, a big guy with a better mind for dates and events than common sense. He was sporting a black eye and Gabriel realised too late that he had to be the one Loki had punched.
“For fuck sake, man, I just finished a...” He trailed off, his mouth open in a way that made him look like a very ugly fish. “Oh. It’s you.”
Without another word, he turned on his heel and went back in to his room. Gabriel watched him go, listened just long enough to hear him start telling his roommate about how that crazy guy is banging on Winchester’s door before he turned back to resume knocking on the door. And almost punched Dean Winchester in the face.
There was a flash of déjà vu, a moment when his knuckles stung with the memory of a punch he hadn’t thrown before Gabriel caught himself. Luckily, Dean stepped back.
"Thanks,” Gabriel said, walking past him and taking in the sight of his brother sitting on his bed, his headphones and iPod on the bedside cabinet, along with his phone. He was reading a book, or pretending to read it; his eyes didn’t move and, unless the chapter title was a lot more interesting that it looked, there was no reason for Castiel to be looking at it that hard. “I need to talk to you."
“I told you not to let him in.”
“I’m sorry.”
That was the one thing that Gabriel knew would get his brother to listen to him, no matter what. It wasn’t the best way to end an argument, but he’d used worse on Balthazar when they’d been kids. Castiel was getting off lightly.
Sure enough, Castiel’s eye flicked up and across Gabriel’s face before he closed the book – Gabriel caught a glimpse of the word 'psychology' on the cover and that was more than enough to put him off making small talk about it– and set it to the side. They both looked at Dean, who shrugged and picked up his bag.
"I'm off to... study, I guess."
After he was gone Gabriel sat down on Dean's unmade bed. "You've got him studying?"
"He chooses to study, but I doubt that’s what he’s planning to do." Castiel gestured to some engineering textbooks. "Those are most of his books. The bag he picked up is full of pornography he plans to throw out.”
"How do you even know-- Do I even want to know that?" No, he didn't. Suspecting that you brother had a thing for his roommate was one thing, but knowing that he knew where his roommate's porn was kept was another thing completely. There were some things Gabriel didn't need or want to know, and that was one. Castiel was just opening his mouth when he said, "Don't tell me. You can tell me why you sent away my college apps, though."
Castiel shrugged. "I knew that you'd never send them away."
Sometimes Castiel wondered where all their pens went. He'd picked a pack up at the store a few weeks ago, but most of them had already gone missing. If Chuck and Balthazar had been around, he would have blamed them as Chuck chewed the ends and threw them away, and Balthazar usually took something from anywhere he spent more than a few weeks.
He was digging through the desk, a burst pen resting on some toilet paper far away from his college applications when he saw something that definitely didn't belong in the drawer he and Gabriel filled with the rubbish they thought might be useful in the future.
College applications, but not his. They bore Gabriel's name and writing, but no signature. They date they'd agreed to send their applications was a day away. Castiel knew why they were in the drawer immediately, although he wished he didn't: Gabriel clearly had no intention of sending them.
"That's not going to happen," he said, remembering the hundreds of times Gabriel had said the same to him.
Years of warnings and being told that Gabriel and Balthazar wouldn't let anything happen to him came back in an instant. Castiel finally found a pen, tucked between two of the applications and put his years of forging the signatures of foster parents who didn't care enough to glance over letters or reports from teachers to good use. He'd never had to forge Gabriel's signature before, so he practiced on the back of an old math book until he got it right, until he was sure that the differences were small enough for someone to think that it was the natural variation of signatures.
Castiel had just finished signing the last one when he heard a key in the lock. He covered the applications with his own just before Gabriel opened the door, rubbing his eyes with one hand and holding his keys aloft like he was trying to decide if he was going to have to do something with them again.
"How was school?" Gabriel asked.
The applications safely hidden away and ready to be sent, Castiel smiled and said, "Boring but useful."
Sitting beside his little brother in a tiny room, listening to someone shouting on one side of the wall and waiting for something unknown to fall and hit the floor was familiar. They’d done it many times, hoping that nothing would be smashed, that they wouldn’t have new cuts and bruises come morning. The only things missing were Balthazar sitting beside them and talking all the places he planned to visit when they were old enough; Gabriel telling them about the latest places he’d ended up in with no memory of how he got there (it had been funny back then, although Gabriel had a new stab of horror when he thought about it) and Castiel talking about how they’d have a great home in the future. How someone would take them away from Zachariah, and then how someone would foster them and they’d never have to explain away the bruises again.
Gabriel swallowed, the memories sticking in his throat.
“Cas?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
Castiel looked up at him with an expression Gabriel swore had just jumped through time from before they’d been able to appreciate how much of a bastard Zachariah had been, and said, “You don’t need to thank me. You’re my brother,” with so much honestly that Gabriel had to look away.
The light outside their room still wasn’t working. It wouldn’t have been a problem on a good day, but Sam’s week had been a mess of Gabriel being distant and moody and Loki being threatening and, if he was honest, a bit scary. He could definitely see why one of Gabriel’s old roommates had been terrified of him. There was something wrong with Loki, and it wasn’t that he was an alter. It was something else, the underlying threat he presented whenever he was in the room. Sam’s week was already terrible, so why would today be any different?
Sam dug down to try and find his keys, scraping his hand on the edge of a folder, feeling a pen digging in until he was sure that he was going to get ink poisoning, but coming up empty handed. No keys. He’d either forgotten them or his bag had swallowed them. Suddenly, Dean’s claims that the sets of keys he’d lost after they’d first moved to Bobby’s didn’t seem so farfetched.
“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Andy called from the tops of the stairs. Sam didn’t have time to ask what he was talking about before Jake and Ava were asking Andy if he’d heard what had happened to someone on the floor below.
Sam hoped that he had good luck for once in his life and tried the door. To his surprise, it opened easily, opening in to the darkened room. For a minute he wondered what was going on before he registered what he was seeing.
The curtains were almost completely closed, but open just enough to allow a sliver of light from the streetlight outside through between the pieces of flimsy fabric. It wasn’t a lot of light, but more than enough for Sam to see the woman with her legs wrapped around Gabriel’s waist, nails scraping lines down his back with every thrust.
Sam backed out of the room faster than he’d walked in, pulling the door closed as he did so. His back hit the wall opposite the door before he stopped, his skin humming with the images that felt like they were seared on the backs of his eyelids.
It took a few seconds for the initial shock to pass, for the sound of the woman’s moan to fade from his ears. He’d only been there for a few seconds, not even long enough to get a very good look – the sheet had been sliding down, his brain helpfully reminded him – but it had felt like an age. It was only when his phone buzzed in his pocket that Sam was suddenly, painfully aware that he was hard.
Sam told himself that it was like watching porn, that it was almost an animal instinct to respond that way, but he was still trying to get rid of the image of Gabriel and the unknown woman, the way Gabriel had been kissing her neck like he really cared about her.
“I think I just got sexiled,” Sam said as soon as Dean opened the door. Dean made a face.
“Dude, I didn’t need to know that.”
“Who was it?” Castiel asked, as if he was talking about the weather rather than walking in on your roommate having sex, while Dean dug some extra pillows and blankets out from under his bed.
“I don’t know. I heard him call her something.” It hadn’t been much, but Sam’s brain had finally processed the sound to go along with the scene. “Kali, I think.”
“Loki,” Castiel said flatly. “He and Kali managed to meet up no matter where we were placed by our social workers. She turned up shortly after Gabriel was stabbed. She rivals Loki in terms of creative cruelty, but she’s not as petty as he is; I believe she once set fire to one of our old foster homes.”
“Nice to know she’s around.”
Castiel and Sam both ignored Dean’s comment.
Sam left by bag by the door and picked his way across the room. Half of his mind was still back in the room, watching Kali rake her nails across Gabriel’s back, but it wasn’t as attractive when he thought of the two of them as Kali with Loki. Kali with Gabriel ignited a strange spark of betrayal, which was stupid because it wasn’t as if he liked Gabriel that way. Gabriel was his roommate, his friend (on a good day), occasionally Loki or the Trickster, but he didn’t think of Gabriel that way... Did he?
Waking up beside him that morning after they’d watched so many horror films Sam had dreamed about being stuck in a house full of traps that led to painful deaths for everyone there, it had felt nice, almost normal, almost comfortable.
Maybe he did like Gabriel that way.
“Sam?” Dean asked. Sam realised that his brother had most likely been staring at him while Sam had been re-evaluating his relationship – or whatever it was – with Gabriel. “Do you like Gabriel?”
The smart thing to do, the thing that Sam should have done, would have been to say that of course he didn’t like Gabriel, that Gabriel was his roommate and nothing else, but because Sam was having a bad week and Dean usually saw right through him anyway, Sam nodded.
“Yeah. I like Gabriel.”
“Why can’t you like--ˮ Dean cut himself off before he used the word ‘normal’. The one time he’d accidentally implied that Gabriel wasn’t normal Castiel hadn’t spoken to him for a few days. It wouldn’t have been a problem if Dean didn’t like Castiel. He went back and forth in regard to Gabriel – sometimes the guy was just a dick, even to Cas – but he liked Cas. “—suitable people. Who was it last time? Ruby?”
“She wasn’t that bad,” Sam protested. “She had a few problems, but she wasn’t a bad person.”
“She stole his wallet and disappeared in the middle of the night,” Dean supplied at Cas’ puzzled look. “Sammy still thinks she was a good person.”
“Sammy is still here.”
Dean ignored him. If his brother was going to mope over Gabriel, he wasn’t going to encourage him or make it any easier. Castiel apparently had other ideas, as he leaned forward and studied Sam for several moments before he spoke.
“Is it only Gabriel you’re attracted to?” he asked. “Not Loki or the Trickster?”
Sam thought it over, making a bitch face Dean had never seen before, and nodded. “Just Gabriel.”
“If anything happens, please don’t use my bed at any time and don’t give me any details.”
With that, Castiel went back to the essay he’d been writing
“That’s it?” Dean asked. “What about telling him to stay away from your brother? Telling him it’s a bad idea?”
"Loki?" Gabriel asked when he opened the door. He seemed to look right through Sam. There was no sign of Kali and Sam was relieved: that would have been one of the most uncomfortable conversations he’d ever had, and he’d been stuck in the room while his dad had told Bobby that he’d be gone for a while.
"Loki," Sam confirmed.
“Did he say anything?”
You ever ripped a scab off a really bad cut and then seen it get infected? That’s what’s happening. Now it’s got to be drained or the whole limb’s going to have to be cut off.”
“Nothing that made any sense.” Adam wanted to study medicine, didn’t he? Maybe he’d get on well with Loki if they met.
Sam watched Gabriel crawl under the pile of sheets, blankets and what looked like two duvets stuffed in one duvet cover and pull them over his head. The dark circles under his eyes hadn’t been as pronounced, but he still looked tired and stressed. Sam wondered if he would be able to stay away long enough to find out if Gabriel was still talking in his sleep. There hadn’t been anything that gave him a clue to what was going on, but maybe he’d get lucky. Or get killed by Loki.
The distant stare was finally gone, but Sam knew that it came at a price. He was good enough at telling Gabriel and the Trickster apart (it had been a bit hit and miss in the beginning, but there were obvious tells that he could now spot across a crowded room if need be) to know that he wasn't looking at Gabriel.
"Nice to see you again, Sammy." The Trickster stole one of the bars of chocolate, ripped it open and bit into it. He chewed a few times and made a face. "This stuff is disgusting."
"It's cheap," Jo didn't look too worried about the Trickster suddenly being around, but she did keep an eye on him as she unpacked the other bags. "Did you--did Gabriel leave a note telling you if he asked me to get anything?"
The Trickster made no move to get the notebook. "No idea."
"Well, you're lucky I keep track of what I'm buying and who I'm buying it for." Jo handed him one of the bags, with Sam and Gabriel written on the side in permanent marker. "It came to twenty-fifty, but I'll knock the fifty off."
At least it wasn't Loki. Although, as the Trickster ripped open another bar of chocolate, Sam started to wish that it was. Anything sweet wouldn’t last long now.
Loki was around too much. The switches between Gabriel, The Trickster and Loki didn’t usually bother Sam too much, but with Gabriel being so painfully distant to everyone and everything, The Trickster showing up was a painful reminder that his friend—he thought they were still friends, anyway—wasn’t really alone in his head.
Sam had no idea why he’d agreed to go to a party – if he never heard someone say par-tay in his life again, he’d thank the universe on his deathbed – with the Trickster. He should have known something would happen. There was no other reason for Shane to run across the grass and shout about how the aliens were going to help him than that the Trickster was getting some of his favourite kind of revenge.
Sure enough, Sam found him at the other side of the house, watching people collect drinks with a smile that made Sam think of Loki before the Trickster saw Andy go for a glass and whisper something in his ear.
"Trickster!" Sam grabbed his wrist and pulled him back, away from the table still piled high with drinks. The Trickster was watching the chaos with a perverse look of satisfaction. "What's going on?"
"Oh, that? They just had a bit too much to drink."
One of the girls was starting to strip, trying and failing to be seductive. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. Sam wasn't stupid: he knew that there was no way that she'd just been drinking, and the Trickster (Sam had stopped calling him The Trickster, despite the resulting pout because The Trickster made him sound like a criminal in a bad crime show) was enjoying it far too much.
Sam felt the Trickster slip through his grasp and followed him towards the back door, stopping only to grab a girl who didn't even look like she was old enough to be at college from falling over the banister.
"Are you crazy?"
"No, just bored. Why? Are you crazy? You must be if you're still around." The Trickster dropped a bag of pills down the drain without stopping. Sam didn't bother to try and get a good look at them. If something happened and he was dragged into it, he'd feel a lot better being able to tell the truth instead of lying.
"I meant back there." Sam managed to grab the Trickster's shoulder before he could dodge him, turning him with more difficulty than he'd expected. Trickster raised an eyebrow and Sam suddenly really missed Gabriel. "What if something happens?"
"So what if something does? It's not my problem."
On the way back to their room, Sam used the hand that wasn’t making sure that the Trickster didn’t make a break for it to text Ash, Jo, Dean and Castiel to tell them that there was something wrong with the drinks and to warn people not to drink anything that had been there before one in the morning.
“You don’t think a two hundred pound bully running around and screaming about how the aliens are coming for him is funny?” The Trickster laughed, skipping the DVD back and watching it again. Sam grabbed the remote. “Oh, come on, he starts to take his clothes off in a second.”
“What if he’d jumped off the roof or attacked someone? Would it still be funny to you? What if someone finds out that you were spiking drinks that night?”
“No one’s going to find out, Sam. It’s fine. You’re not going to tell them, are you?” At Sam’s silence he smiled. “Anyway, if he’d tried to do something stupid, somebody would’ve stopped him.”
“What happens if you get found out? I think you forget that you’re not the one who’d be punished. Gabriel could get kicked out because of something you did, and you don’t even care.”
The Trickster sobered suddenly, looking at the TV with an expression which suggested that, just for a while, he’d forgotten that he was an alter.
“This isn’t what I do,” he said, watching Shane and student Sam recognised from a few classes running across the street screaming, narrowing avoiding a car. “I’m not the one who takes things seriously and protects anyone. Doesn’t my name tell you that? I’m a trickster and caring about people, protecting people, that’s not what I do. Don’t expect it from me because I’ll let you down every time.”
"You're not the cruel one."
The Trickster bounced a ball off the wall, missing Sam's head by inches. Sam grabbed it as soon as he threw it a second time, throwing it down behind his bed. "Says who?"
"Everybody. Even Gabriel doesn't hate you. Loki's the one who hurts people because he likes it. You just screw with people because it amuses you. You don’t hurt them on purpose."
Sitting there, one knee drawn up towards his chest, The Trickster suddenly looked very young, very vulnerable. The dark circles under his eyes -- under Gabriel's eyes, Sam reminded himself -- looked even more pronounced. They didn't look like they'd come with the packaging as the Trickster usually said. They looked like they belonged to The Trickster as much as they did Gabriel. Whatever it was, it had to be bad for someone who apparently did little more than have fun and, with a lot of persuasion, took notes in classes to be showing the strain.
Did the Trickster like to pretend that he wasn't... what was he, anyway? Gabriel had never explained it, and most of the things Sam had read online didn't bother to elaborate very much. Other personalities were known as alters and they often thought they were separate to or completely unaware of the existence of the first personality. From what little Gabriel had told him, Loki and the Trickster had always been aware of who and what they were.
“Can you blame me for wanting to have fun?” he asked. “Loki and Gabriel won’t stop digging up the past at least twice a week and my homework every week usually had pages of learning about the hell that they were through for years. So I have a bit or fun and hurt a few people. I don’t kill them and I don’t do what Loki thinks about doing to people. Where’s the harm in that?”
On the screen, the image was frozen as the driver narrowly avoided hitting Shane and the other student, but Sam couldn’t quite bring himself to say ‘right there’.
“You know what really sucks?” Gabriel muttered, his arm thrown over his face to shield his eyes from the sun that was just beginning to peek in to the room. “They get all the fun and I get the hangover the next morning. Loki invites Kali over and I have to kick her out. The Trickster shoplifts and I almost end up getting arrested.”
Sam stopped picking through the pile of clothing. “What?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is that I wish I could get away with something like that. It would be nice to have some fun.”
Sam rested his elbows on Gabriel’s bed, pushing the mattress down until Gabriel moved his arm and glare at him. He didn’t move, just smiled.
“Fun? I’m worried about what’s going to happen if you have fun.”
Gabriel laughed, glare disappearing immediately and his turned his head so that he was face to face with Sam, inches apart.
“You’d love to know what would happen if I go to have fun. Admit it.”
He smelled like Sam’s shampoo and shower gel again. Lemons and oranges and chocolate, which was probably left over from the Trickster finishing off the small pile of chocolate bars he thought were terrible but seemed to eat just to complain about them. It would be easy to kiss Gabriel, Sam knew, and probably very nice, but he couldn’t get Loki and Kali out of his head, the Trickster’s unexpected sadness.
“Have you been stealing my stuff again?” Sam asked, and the moment shattered like an icicle.
Gabriel pushed him away. “I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it.”
“You can’t return used shampoo and shower gel.”
“It could signify a degree of integration between the two that we were previously unaware of,” Kindle said when Gabriel finished telling her everything Sam had told him about Loki and the Trickster. “I know that it doesn’t feel like it, but this is a good sign, Gabriel. If some integration has occurred between two of your alters naturally, there’s a greater chance that further integration will be possible. This is a breakthrough that several of my other patients have never, and will never, experience.”
Gabriel ripped the napkin into smaller pieces. “Tell that to the people who were drugged.” Tell that to Sam.
“Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?”
They still had half an hour left. Half an hour was more than enough time to spill his guts. But... Gabriel had no idea what the ‘but’ led to, but it lingered there, right in the front of his mind as he opened his mouth to speak. But this makes it real, maybe.
But it was already real.
He swallowed, thought of Sam kneeling beside the bed, leaning close enough that Gabriel could smell the shampoo and shower gel he used whenever he wanted a change. Close enough to do other things if he’d moved just a little. “I have to tell you something.”
