He looked up to see you standing in the doorway, already in your pajamas which just happened to be one of his old t-shirts. Sam had gone to bed hours ago.
"Aren't you coming to bed?" you asked him, your forehead creased a little.
"I'm not tired," Dean sighed. "I'll be fine. I should keep working on this."
You stepped farther into the room. The floor was cold on your bare feet and the gentle padding sound of your steps echoed softly. "But if you don't," you said, stopping behind him and looping your arms around his neck, "I'll be so lonely without you. Come lay with me so I can feel whole again and fall asleep," you murmured. Your body leaned in against his and you nuzzled into the crook of his neck.
Dean sighed and his eyes closed, but he couldn't help smiling. His hand rested lightly on your forearm. "Are you trying to seduce me into healthy sleeping patterns?" he chuckled.
"Maybe," you hummed, kissing his neck. "Is it working?"
Dean laughed again. "Yes. Yes, it is."
"Oh, good," you breathed against his skin, and Dean could hear that you were smiling.
"Question..." Dean said softly. "You wearing anything else under that Metallica t-shirt?"
Now, it was your turn to laugh. "Why don't you come to bed and find out?"
"Oh, I'm definitely finding out," he said, pushing back from the table and turning just in time to see you scampering away toward the bedroom, biting your bottom lip.
So I wrote some backstory for my Ketch based off the throwaway line about killing his classmate. Structurally and tonally it didn’t fit into the mainline fics of that series, so I made it a stand alone instead. I’m rather pleased with it on various levels, I hope you guys enjoy!
Do Angels Dream of Heavenly Sheep? Ketchbriel BroTP(5/?)
Title: Do Angels Dream of Heavenly Sheep? (5/?)
Who: Ketch, Gabriel
What: Ketch wants some rest. The night is not necessarily restful.
Word count: 802
Warnings: None
They left the door to the hallway open that night.
Ketch would have preferred the illusion of privacy, but the build of the bunker meant that once lights were turned off the room was thrown into pitch blackness. Gabriel’s near-immediate whimpers told Ketch that wasn’t the best of ideas.
Opening the door allowed the soft glow of the bunker lights to filter into the room; that seemed to be light enough to comfort the archangel.
Ketch wondered if angels could dream.
*
Angels may not dream; but waking nightmares were not off the table.
Like most in his line of work, Ketch was a light sleeper, the better to spring into action should the need arise. More than once in the night he heard Gabriel’s pitiful moans, and once thought, even some thrashing.
“Gabriel!” Ketch called out when it started up, “It’s okay. You aren’t in Hell. Asmodeus can’t get you.” He used his most level patient voice he could muster, even when he felt said patience begin to slip.
Gabriel would settle for a while before the cycle would begin anew.
After the fourth or fifth time – Ketch wasn’t keeping count – he woke up to the sound of the cot scraping the hard floor, Gabriel seemed to be pushing it level to Ketch’s bed, where before it had rested perpendicular to it.
Ketch looked at Gabriel quizzically.
Gabriel curled up on the cot, head now level near Ketch’s.
Ketch shrugged, and even if he felt Gabriel’s eyes on him as he dozed back off once more, it was impossible to miss one fact:
There were no more disturbances that night.
*
Ketch didn’t do idle small chat, except when assignment demanded it of him. He saw no point in obliging meaningless social niceties that did nothing but eat up time. He was therefore less wondering what to say the next morning as they dressed. He knew how Gabriel had spent his night – quite poorly, for the most of it – and he wasn’t sure Gabriel was ready to open up about it, or if he should even be the one that Gabriel opened up to.
He wasn’t warm, he wasn’t fuzzy, and he only knew how to leave people in a state like Gabriel’s, not take them out of it. He worried that anything that would come out of his lips would sound hollow and false and Gabriel clearly needed more than that.
And yet, there was no tension in the room.
After Ketch finished putting on his tie – an unneeded accessory, yet one that he admitted felt like a bit of his own armor – he looked over Gabriel who seemed to be taking a quiet moment to enjoy the clean jeans and button-down shirt that Castiel had left for him. Ketch could only assume that it had been a preferred outfit of Gabriel’s from before.
The archangel didn’t look good. Though the host had been well healed by Castiel, it was as if the trauma Gabriel had suffered was manifesting itself through bags under the eyes, a pallor to his skin, and that posture that still screamed of a being trying to make itself small and inconspicuous.
There was one noticeable change from last night, however.
The light in Gabriel’s eyes was ever so slightly brighter. It was no smile, and most wouldn’t see it, but Ketch could. The tiniest spark of something that Ketch himself would say he lost decades ago if he could admit it.
Hope.
Ketch smiled ever so slightly at the sight.
Gabriel’s eyes darted up and caught Ketches and offered a slight smile of his own.
“Come on then,” Ketch said. “Let’s get some breakfast. Perhaps we’ll have been lucky enough that your brother did some grocery shopping.”
The archangel seemed to perk up at the thought and allowed himself to be lead back into the kitchen.
Indeed, Castiel had gone out for supplies. While the food stores were still decidedly modest, there were unquestionably fuller than it had been before. Ketch was pleased to note that it included a fair amount of greens – the younger brother’s influence to be sure – as well as a wide array of sugary cereals some pastry, no double Castiel trying to find something that Gabriel would enjoy.
Ketch began making himself an egg white omelet as Gabriel studied the selections with the seriousness of a five year being tasked with such a big decision.
Once it was on the table – omelet and toast for Ketch, Fruit Loops and a cinnamon roll for Gabriel, coffee for both, the two ate quietly at the table, the only noise the scraping of silverwear against old china plates.
Finally, Ketch had to ask.
“Feel free to not answer if you aren’t ready but….so, Asmodeus?” he asked, throwing the archangels own question back to him.
Who: Ketch, Gabe, Castiel
What: Stories are shared and Gabriel actually speaks. A little.
Word Count: 1035
Warnings: None
“This is amazing,” Gabriel moaned around a mouthful of pie.
The archangel was talking, which was good, so Ketch tried to not raise a skeptical brow at the judgement of the pastry. He knew there was nothing special about the pie, it was just something picked up from the local grocery store, but then anything was amazing to a starving man which he supposed Gabriel was, in a way. He took a sip of his surprisingly decent coffee. If he survived the next few days and was going to be here for the long haul, however, getting tea into the Bunker was a must. It was, in fact, the first thing on his mental shopping list. He paired it with a half-passable sandwich. It beat MREs at least.
“When you’re up to traveling, I’ll give you the name of this bakeshop back home. The desserts here simply can’t compare.” Not that Ketch was much of a sweets man, but when he was, he preferred European-style desserts. They were, on the whole, less sweet.
Gabriel nodded and took a few more bites of the dessert, not really looking at Ketch, but staring a great deal at his plate.
“So…Asmodeus?” Gabriel finally asked.
Ketch despised talking about himself, and even more so about mistakes made, but he wanted to encourage the discussion.
“Not one of my better moves,” he admitted.
“Then why?”
“He paid the best,” Ketch said.
Gabriel looked at Ketch. Really looked at Ketch. It was hard not to squirm.
“And I might have been upset at the Winchesters. They’d already killed me, you think they could let bygones be bygones and try and track down Lucifer instead. You know, priorities.”
Gabriel looked at Ketch some more.
“Oh don’t give me that!” he said, missing the slight smile on Gabriel’s face as he squirmed. “I’ve only died the once. It’s not like they haven’t dozens of time over combined. And I acquired the spell in a perfectly legitimate trade.”
Gabriel huffed. Ketch wasn’t quite sure if it was amusement or something else.
“Anyway. It was fine, for a while, but it grew increasingly apparent that Asmodeus has zero regard for this planet or the beings that live on it. He seemed far more concerned about…” he tried to find a delicate way to discuss what had happened to Gabriel, but faltered. “then stopping Michael. Oh sure, he made noises about it, but it didn’t seem to be nearly the concern I reckoned it ought to be.”
“How?”
“How what?” Ketch asked. Gabriel didn’t seemed surprised by the news – he figured that the archangel had been held captive long enough to have been kept current on the news, even if indirectly – so he wasn’t sure what was being asked.
“Lucifer? Michael?”
“I am not sure that I should be the one telling this story,” Ketch said. He raised his voice. “Castiel?”
Castiel was there in all but a blink of an eye, making Ketch wonder if he was simply spying on their conversation or just flying inside the bunker.
“What?” Castiel asked, his voice tinged with irritation.
“You were an integral part of getting Lucifer out of his cage and in discovering the alternative world that is threatening this world,” Ketch said acting oblivious to the daggers being glared his way. “You should be the one to tell your brother what happened. I couldn’t possibly do it justice.”
Gabriel glared at Castiel who blanched even more than Ketch had.
Ketch smiled around his sip of coffee.
*
At the end of it all, both Ketch and Gabriel looked thoughtful.
Ketch had no idea of what Gabriel was thinking about and wouldn’t begin to presume to know, but hearing the full story – not just the bits that the Men of Letters had been able to glean through various third party sources – was endlessly fascinating, and he wondered for the five hundredth time why the Winchesters weren’t dead.
“It’s not Dad’s doing,” Gabriel said idly.
Ketch jumped. He forgot that angels could read thoughts.
“He doesn’t care about them that much.” There was a bitterness in Gabriel’s voice. “I don’t think he cares about anything that much.”
He could hear the unspoken “especially not me” in those words. There may not have been much in the way of love within the Men of Letters, but given the relationships that the archangels seemed to enjoy – or not enjoy as the case may be – with God, he didn’t think he was missing out on much.
Gabriel went back to staring at his hands, not talking for several long minutes, even as Castiel tried to engage the archangel in small talk even as he went out of his way to ignore Ketch.
Castiel looked at the crumb-filled plate. “Can I get you another piece?”
Gabriel pushed the plate away and shook his head, his eyes went distant again. The moment was clearly gone.
The tension was mounting in the kitchen.
“Right,” Castiel said. “I will go back to what I was doing. Please call me if you need me.”
Ketch nodded, and a moment after Castiel left, cleaned up the few plates he and Gabriel had dirtied.
When done, he headed towards the door. “I’m going to try and grab some rest,” Ketch said. “It has been a long couple of days.” He’d grabbed an all-too brief cat nap after the shower he’d grabbed earlier but hadn’t seen real sleep in almost 30 hours. He could go longer, of course, but it certainly wasn’t him at his peak.
Gabriel grabbed at his arm.
Ketch froze. He needed sleep, and he wanted to not upset the upset archangel. His mind raced for options. “What if we were to set up a cot in my room?” Ketch offered. “You could stay there and if you needed me, you could wake me up.”
Gabriel considered this and slowly nodded.
Right.
“Castiel?” he called out again.
It took longer this time for Castiel to appear, and when he did, it was clear that indeed, he was eavesdropping.
“I set up a cot for Gabriel. You’ll be staying in the bedroom next to mine. I’ve already moved your belongings.”
I'm glad we have some version of Bobby in this world again. Didn't realize how much I missed him.
Who authorized Jensen and Danneel in scenes together. (In other words, they're both hot and I wanna cry bc I love them both).
Not sure how long Michael!Dean is gonna be around but I'm enjoying it like Lucifer!Cas. It's nice to see Jensen play another character.
That said. I reaaaaaally miss the original au Michael actor. He had an intimidating air about him that I don't feel with Jensen (prolly bc I've watched him as Dean so long. Idk.)
I miss Gabriel.
If I was liveblogging this, I'd have spent the entire episode screaming stop hurting Cas ffs. Why did you have to start this season like this.
Seeing Sam walk through that door and nearly hitting the bell was amusing
Okay okay. I get what tumblr was saying about how cheesy the fight scene was. Wow.
Question. Why did they bring Maggie? Don't answer. No but I can't remember if she's much of a fighter but if she isn't...why bring her? Also Sam asking her to hack the cameras was funny. "Uh...no." 😂 I just want her to stay safe in the bunker please.
Sam's speech...Sam's speech. Wow. There will be no new king of hell. And if anyone wants the job, you'll have to go through me. Literally had chills.
I could ship Mary and Bobby. And by could, I mean I do, it's too late.
Cas telling Jack he's not alone, he has his family. I loved that. That's the core of the show 😊
Oh! There was also some Sam and Cas scenes and man we don't get enough of those.
Nick is alive but...why? At least they tried to answer the part about how the archangel blade isn't meant for humans. I guess this gives them the option of just outright killing Michael without killing Dean, so yay. Dues ex machina.
