Nabrielise, 1668 words, Polyamory, Implied/Referenced Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gabriel Boutin has PTSD, Flashbacks, Gabriel Boutin Needs A Hug, Gabriel is In Love, Kissing It Better, Post-Season/Series 01, Getting Together, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Pre-slash, References to Drugs, POV Gabriel.
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Cyan fingers play ghostly along bright, beautifully brown collarbone mountains.
Un amour entaché.
Tainted Love, indeed.
Gabriel's face remains a book of blank pages, his default setting—a trillion miles away from the bloody battles that are raging constantly between his mind and his heart.
He's always been one to play defence. Especially with himself.
Only nineteen and already a ghost.
…well, almost.
Darkwave trance music pumps softly from somebody's bluetooth speaker—much softer than the current thump of Gabriel's industrial techno heartbeat. Nathan, the reason, now pushes upwards from where long forearms support his longer body, those big plush lips halting a mere millimetre away from Gabriel's. Gabriel stills his touch, forever-bleu fingertips buried in a perfect clavicle valley. He watches the boy's pulse ticking away under that smooth brown skin for a moment longer before allowing their eyes to meet—and do so much more than just shake hands.
Stay.
"What's this song called? Do you know it?" Nathan's mouth moves against Gabriel's as he speaks, then he's nodding his head in question towards the sounds of pulsating synth beats and low-sung neo-goth French words unknown to him.
Stay with me.
Gabriel swallows his urgency if not his want and licks his—and consequently Nathan's—lips, before taking a breath and answering, "Angélique," on the exhale.
Nathan peers out from underneath feathery raven lashes.
Stay, always.
Gabriel has become a walking/talking contradiction of himself.
Nathan's eyes flicker shut for a couple of his own now-also-racing heartbeats. Gabriel usually manages to tune out the sounds of others' life-force, or at least turn down the volume—never Nathan's though.
Or Annalise's, come to think of it.
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(read under the cut OR READ IT HERE ON AO3)
That thought digs beneath Gabriel's skin and makes a nest there, staining him just like his bloodborne alchemy. Marking him up. Tattooing him.
~Nathan&Annalise~
Nathan gently brushes just the very tip of his nose alongside the length of Gabriel's. Up and down, up and down. "So, does that mean, like…" and he mirrors now, licking his and Gabriel's lips, "...Angelic, or some shit?"
Or some shit.
Gabriel pants out three, barely there Yeses. One for each of them.
Gabriel, Nathan, Annalise.
Nathan smiles. "Like you. You're my guardian angel," he insists. "Mine and Annalise's."
Fallen angel, more like.
Stupidly, Gabriel lets himself be just that entirely fucking perfect for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Blinks and believes.
My darling angel, Gabriel.
Gabriel grits his teeth at the sudden mental intrusion. She can just fuck right off and out of his head, merci beaucoup.
He then swallows thickly again. "No, Nathan." And he's so desperate to Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!
He won't be the one to instigate though. Can't ever do that. Can't ever be that.
"You mustn't—don't think of me that way, mon cher. I'm not so… good."
Nathan fusses his gaze over every single one of Gabriel's features, with no rush to the action. Searches for a lie. He doesn't find one. He doesn't relent either, though, and now gifts Gabriel with, "You won't convince me you're anything other than a decent bloke, you know."
"Decent?" Gabriel scoffs, deflecting by looking down at his state of undress, "Dans mes sous-vêtements." Nathan's face scrunches up adorably. Gabriel sighs affectionately and smiles wryly. "I am wearing only my knickers." A nod to Annalise.
Nathan smiles some more, his face splitting with the size and force of it and Gabriel thinks he'd kill for this boy. Then Nathan tuts, just as affectionate. "You know what I mean, Gabs."
Gabriel inwardly preens at the moniker. Plenty have used the nickname before, but never has it ever sounded the way it does tripping off of Nathan Byrn's lips. Makes Gabriel think he's the one tripping, every time he hears it.
You're smitten.
Gabriel tries to ignore the oh-so familiar shrill-pitched voice in his mind as Nathan tilts his gorgeous head. "I don't care what you say, anyway. You're an angel if I say you are. With your pretty eyes and your crazy white hair."
White hair.
Gabriel blinks, too much.
You must tell me…
His mask falters. It's only a split-second—too quick for most people to notice. Unfortunately in this instance though, Nathan is not most people.
"Hey, hey, what is it? What did I say?" Nathan's eyes are blown wide and his hands instantly attach themselves to Gabriel's biceps like they've found their way home; an anchor to Gabriel's wayward ship, mooring him from the coming high-tide.
"I don't—it's nothing.“
But Nathan never knows when to leave well alone. "Bollocks, it's nothing. Where did you just go off to?"
…Is it love?
"I…"
No, no, no.
Her.
"Nathan, I—"
M E R C U R Y
And Gabriel is gone, fucked up, spiralling dangerously in a way he's managed to avoid for the longest time.
Bony fingers—too big, too knowing—sliding up the warmth of his inside thighs, to get inside of him, to tug on his will, his shame, his goodness, latching onto his very sense of self.
She'd whisper, so loudly, "Let me in, my dove. Let me in and I will give you the whole world, my sweet, sweet boy. All you could ever want and need or know or be. All for you. All for me."
He never knew why she bothered to ask.
And he fought, tooth and nail, that dove. Every time. He pushed and kicked and scratched and flapped his little wings. Didn't matter though. None of it did. She could take whatever she wanted. All of it. All of him. Always. And she did. She took everything from that frightened little bird, that little boy, until he had no fight left in him. Would just lay back and let it happen. The Witch Mercury: his teacher; his pseudo-mother; his lover. She took away his blonde curls and his deserved innocence and left him as bitter and cold as the driven snow.
Forever Winter.
"Gabriel?"
You. Are. Mine.
…almost.
Gabriel notes vaguely that Nathan's hands are no longer gripping the tops of his arms but have found their way to holding his face—no longer a mask or even a face, really, but something else. His features, ruptured now, Gabriel is a great big hole ripped right open. A gaping rift with all of his pain and guilt and humiliation spilling right out, gushing, brimming, overflowing and threatening to drown him.
He can't breathe.
"Gabriel, tell me what's happening!"
Thumbs are swiping furiously at the thawing ice that's melting from the corners of Gabriel's sad eyes.
He's crying. Having a panic attack.
Nathan is panic-stricken, too.
Nathan.
Nathan!
Not an anchor, but a lifeline.
"Kiss me." Gabriel—even with no breath in his lungs—almost shouts it, fists now balling up and white-knuckled in Nathan's shirt.
Nathan finches like he wasn't actually expecting a response. "What? No! Tell me what's wrong!"
"Nathan, please. Please!" and now he is shouting.
Maybe it's the begging itself or maybe it's just the way Gabriel's voice has a hundred hairline cracks in it, like more thawing ice, but Nathan, he seems to hear it. Somehow through the haze of Gabriel's hysteria and self-hatred Nathan hears exactly what this broken boy needs.
The role-reversal. The control.
Gabriel needs to be needed. To be something good.
Angèlique.
"Kiss me."
So The Bastard Son kisses the Ruined Alchemist in a way neither have ever kissed another, and it's its own magic spell. A counterspell; one to break Mercury's wrong-doing. A conjuring to set Gabriel free and he's there, he's so there, all in, in deep, deeply in love, and the Devil himself couldn't stop this now—
But Annalise can.
They're all but devouring each other when she walks into the room and stops dead, mouth open in a quiet gasp. So, so, quiet. But Gabriel, he hears it. And it's deafening.
Gabriel is every single Evil he's been trying to run from his entire fucking life. If he's ruined this… If he… it's not even as if he and Nathan have been trying to hide this, the thing that has gripped them both, this thing that's binding them, it's just…
It's just—
"Annalise, we—" Nathan begins, but Annalise ends it in one word.
"Us." She corrects.
And that word. That one, small word is unbelievably—incredibly, amazingly—all it takes.
Then they are magnets, he and Nathan, their combined energies pulling Annalise into them. Or she is the magnet. Or they all are? It's not important, Gabriel realises, because there's only one thing that matters now.
Us.
Annalise O'Brien and Nathan Byrn—Gabriel's family—are here, bracing him and embracing him with all of themselves. With all of their selfless love.
Annalise, with her boldness and insecurities and raw beauty and stubbornness and fierce grace, climbs up onto the bed and takes residence, curling into Gabriel's other side. A mirror to Nathan.
And they're healing him.
Nathan takes one of Anna's hands and links their fingers, squeezing. So sure. Smiling. Alive.
Annalise smiles back and leans forwards to kiss him, also sure. All warmth and sugar and spice.
Jesus, they are everything.
Us.
Then they're both laying Gabriel down with their hands and eyes, loving him better. Better than he is, better than he deserves.
Nathan can surely read minds. "Stop thinking you don't deserve this," he says and smiles, le soleil du matin—the morning sun.
Us.
Annalise, la lune dans le ciel nocturne—the moon in the night sky, hums, "Silly goose," at Gabriel, then she and Nathan are kissing each other again.
Then they're kissing Gabriel, on his arms and his chest and his neck and his chin and his cheeks and his mouth and Gabriel can finally breathe.
"Us," he agrees, his tears drying up.
And laying in a bed in a hostel somewhere in Berlin with a boy and a girl who both love him, Gabriel Boutin—guardian angel, Angélique or not—is saved.
(a nabrielise WIP—pls let me know in the comments if you'd like adding to the finished work's taglist!)
