caveofsapphires | A bottle of gin is the best apology

There was a good reason the caravan was stationary and silent. Namely, Gabriel was practising. At that moment, he was glaring down at a fallen soufflé and scrolling down the recipe he had on the e-reader in his hand. What had he done wrong? They couldn't be that complicated?

The rap on the door made him toss the e-reader into the hammock (because far be it for anyone to realise he was actually putting effort into learning this), and then the archangel paused, his face tight. Re-l. Did he really want to talk to Re-l? What she'd accused him of had been unconscionable.

It had also been accurate.

Finally Gabriel forced himself to relax and strode for the door, throwing it open and leaning on the jamb. "Well, well, well, the princess is returning to the tower," he said cheerfully, and then spotted the bag. "Oh, and she's bringing gifts? I do so love surprises."

He wasn't expecting whatever was in the bag to actually be for him.

Re-l's fist, hidden behind her skirt, was white, the skin drained of all blood by its tight grip on itself. She couldn't look Gabriel directly in the eye, either. Her unfocused gaze rested somewhere around his throat.

"Yes. I thought." She stopped, swung the bag off her shoulder and handed it to him. "Gin. And a bottle of tonic." Her throat moved as she swallowed. "To make up for what I said." A glare entered her eye. "Which isn't to say I wasn't right, because I was," the glare faded, "but I didn't say it to be right. I said it to be cruel. And I shouldn't have done that."

Her entire posture was completely rigid, making up for the dignity she obviously felt her words lacked.

For a moment Gabriel stared at her, stunned. She was actually apologising. Of all the things the archangel had considered she was there for, this was the last on his list. Automatically he took the bottle and looked down at it, blinking.

"Oh." He didn't know what to say--one of the few times in his life he just hadn't had the words. Re-l wasn't exactly a hunter, but she was close to it, suspicious of supernatural types. Yet she was treating him like a person.

Like Aziraphale had, last week, treated him like a brother.

There were dozens of witty, dismissive things Gabriel could have said. Even as short a time as a few weeks ago, he probably would have said them, but right now none of them wanted to come to him. Finally he just stood aside, holding the door open. "Come on in."

Re-l followed him inside without complaint, though she paused on the doorstep to say, "It's not far to my apartment. Which has some of the niceties of life. Like chairs. And a table." Her tone was carefully calculated to be taken either as an insult or an invitation, depending on how Gabriel responded. She was working very hard on her dignity tonight. It was irritating.

The inside of the caravan smelled strongly of spices and eggs.

"You were cooking." She sounded amused, and barely restrained herself from adding that it was all he seemed to do.

"What, don't you like coziness?" Gabriel asked innocently, and then snapped his fingers with a tut. "Oh wait; I forgot. You don't know the meaning of the word. It implies warmth." There. Now the wit was coming. Well, a certain degree of wit. It was better than the paralysis of just before.

"'Course I was," he said, amused, and lifted the pan then dropped it with a clatter to the stove-top. "Have to keep in shape for when I want to feed tabasco-filled pastries to the people who annoy me, don't I?"

His tone was airy, as if the cooking was just a thing to do and he wasn't really trying at it. The archangel set the bottles in a rack and waved his hand to indicate he needed to get back the same way again. "Usually I'd be perfectly willing to accept an invitation into a chick's apartment, but since I'd be worried about stepping on the caltrops under the mat, I've got a better idea."

The caravan did open up into a cafe, after all. They just needed to move to a better place. Maybe a park.

Re-l bit her tongue after the first comment, reminding herself sharply that fighting again was not part of the plan. The plan made sense, and she would stick to it. She stood in a corner of the caravan, leaned against the wall and watched him.

He kept using that tone of voice she particularly disliked, the one that was so light it made everything a lie, and eventually she was bound to crack. When the second comment about her house came, she could hold it in no longer.

"If you don't want me here, say it. The alcohol was a present, not a bribe." She folded her arms and glared at him.

To be perfectly honest, he wasn't entirely sure why he'd asked her in except that he'd needed to do something. It was kind of worrying, actually, that that had been the first reaction to actually make it to the surface. It was polite.

Gabriel hadn't been polite in centuries. It spoke of a part of him he'd thought he'd let go a long time ago.

"Actually," he said, quite calmly and with a quirk of his eyebrow, "since you want a table and chairs so much, I thought I'd move us somewhere with more space and break out the cafe."

"Oh." On second thoughts, maybe she preferred light and snarky after all. She had absolutely no idea what to say to this.

The silence dragged itself out, and Re-l got twitchy.

"What were you cooking?" She left her corner and moved up to the stove to look at the pan.

For his part, Gabriel was intensely amused and vindicated by the reaction, and added a mark to his mental scoreboard to match the one he'd been forced to give her for her unexpected apology. So he just looked at Re-l and waited, eyebrow still cocked and with the faintest of smirks, for her to figure out what she wanted to say next.

"Chocolate soufflé," he said promptly, and then added with a waggle of his eyebrows, "with a little something special added in." Unfortunately, the soufflé had fallen before he'd even got it out of the oven, and he hadn't quite figured out why.

"And here I thought I might have interrupted your dinner," she said. "Do you ever make things that don't contain ridiculous amounts of sugar.

She looked into the pan, immediately classified its contents as "food, probably edible", but couldn't resist a further jibe.

"Is it supposed to be so flat looking?" Because it really did look rather squashed.

"Sure, why not?" he told her with a shrug, scraping the fallen pastry out of the pan and into a plastic box. Just because it had fallen too early didn't mean it wouldn't still taste good, and despite his claims Gabriel hadn't actually spiked it with anything. "I'll just call it a new variation."

He flashed Re-l a smirk. "And what's out there that's better to make?" It should have been clear, by now, just where the similarities between Gabriel and Sylvester lay. Even if Gabriel didn't actually know how to bake, his love of sweets was the same.

"Well in the vast majority of cases aesthetic imperfections do nothing to affect taste, so it's probably edible."

Re-l shrugged.

"I don't object to sweets every so often, but they're not nutritionally advantageous."

Re-l could make exactly one meal, a nutritionally balanced soup which she ate whenever she cooked. On its own it was bland, so she usually dumped a lot of chilli in. She didn't see the need for other recipes, being quite satisfied with that one.

"There's a park about five minutes west of here," she said, having finally remembered the route. "Fairview Green, or something like that." It was a park. She hadn't been very interested.

"But they taste good," Gabriel pointed out as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and, frankly, the major draw of the food at all. Not that he'd forgotten that his human body needed something other than sugar-based nibbles, but even after the weeks of actually having to eat he'd never managed to get past thinking of most other foods as sad necessities.

Then again, maybe that was because the 'most other foods' he'd been eating were rations and tasted like cardboard.

"Good choice," said the archangel cheerfully with a clap of his hands, shoving the lidded box aside and dumping the pan in the sink. He swept down the aisle, saying, "One stop, Fairview Green, keep your hands and arms inside the caravan!"

Re-l watched him go. She would have offered to sit with him on the driver's box, but it was small enough, and she would only be in the way.

Besides, she could nose around while he was driving.

"Turn left at the first junction over the canal and then right onto Abbey Street, and the entrance is about a hundred hundred metres further on on your left."

Gabriel flapped a hand at her without turning. "I got it, I got it." He knew the city pretty well by now, after having driven most of it. Sylvester had kept excellent maps; it was almost like having his angelic radar. Except really, really not.

He let the door click shut behind him and clambered up onto the booth, and a moment later they were under way.

The archangel wasn't stupid. Re-l was still inside, and not utterly exhausted, and she was a curious little thing. Of course she was going to look around. But the only thing Gabriel would have preferred she not find was the e-reader with the recipe on it; other than that, there was nothing in there he was overly beholden to. Sylvester's paperwork wasn't his by choice, so Gabriel didn't care if Re-l happened to find and paw through it.

He'd left her in here. She was a little surprised, she had to admit, because he had to know she would look around. Which meant that he didn't mind. No, that was wrong. It meant he didn't think she would find what he didn't want her to find.

She did a cursory scan of the room, but the only thing out of place was an e-reader in the hammock with a recipe book logged on, and that was completely uninteresting. She put it back - no point in revealing her hand - and went over to the drawers.

She pulled them open neatly. Old paperwork, probably in the caravan before they had reached the city, judging by the texture and crackle of the paper. She flipped through it, but though it was detailed it was boring.

Re-l stepped back and looked at the drawers again. Something was off. The symmetry was imperfect. Not that anything in this little room was symmetrical, but this had caught her attention. And Re-l didn't ignore her instincts. She pulled the whole drawer out and slid her hand into the space it left. The wood was perfectly smooth. She flipped her knife out and tried that instead. This time she noticed the crack. It was very fine, but there was a secret compartment.

It took her about a minute to figure out how it opened. Inside were more sheets of paper, packed together very loosely. As she stared at them, Re-l's eyes widened, and her hands shook slightly. The handwriting was hers.

Masa, she thought, trying to calm herself down. She glanced through the pages. It was information on a dog-fighting ring that Masa had been trying to crack. The information was not particularly interesting, but there was a note attached that made her laugh.

Syl, when you read this, leave them alone. I have no interest in your sense of justice. The ring-leader has ties to a bigger organisation. I need him. M

The drawer was back in place when the caravan stopped, but Re-l was still pouring over the pages she had pulled out, trying to fathom out her other self. Masa had a habit of writing in code when things were important - some of her diaries were in code too - and it was possible that this would be easier to crack than the longer entries.

Re-l did not look up when Gabriel came in, but she waved the paper and said, "Did you know about this?"

Gabriel chose to park the caravan under a tree tall enough that the branches wouldn't hit the panels on top and thick enough to ... well, he didn't need shade, really, but he already knew it was a picturesque look and had used the area before. The archangel came back in humming, but Re-l spoke before he could.

"Know about what?" Gabriel asked, bemused and curious, and yanked the page out of her hand with a 'yoink!' Then he read it, and his eyebrows climbed. And he laughed. It was a strange laugh, full and genuinely amused, but with a thread of disbelief in it. "Oh, that sly bastard!" He shook his head. "I had no idea. Gimme."

He stole the rest of the pages with a startlingly deft hand-motion and started flipping through them. Though his mouth was still curved in amusement there was a certain edge of focus in his gaze which said all was not quite well.

Because it wasn't. Gabriel hadn't found the compartment because he, frankly, hadn't looked. Because he hadn't wanted to look. Because he didn't want to search too deeply into his life that wasn't his, and find more things to tie him to Sylvester. Didn't want to risk finding proof that they were meant to be alike.

And now he held it in his hands.

"Where did you find these?" he asked with concentrated absent-mindedness.

"In a hidden compartment above the right drawer," Re-l said. She sighed, and added, "the handwriting is mine. Or Masa's, I should say. Apparently she used to store information here."

It made a lot of sense. If her house was attacked, Masa would want the most sensitive information somewhere else. Re-l herself thought exactly the same way.

"I didn't know about this," she added. "Masa writes a lot in code, and I haven't had a chance to decipher it yet." She would, eventually. She was certain of that. But for some reason she hadn't felt the urge to do so.

"Hmmn." Gabriel stared down at the pages with a crinkle in his brow, but then with a sharp movement shuffled them back together and shoved them at Re-l, turning toward the wardrobe.

"Above the right drawer," he muttered to himself, pulling the drawer out and sliding his hand in. His fingers found the crack easily, because he knew this, knew how to find and knew secret compartments. Granted, his had usually been reality-pockets, but the principle was the same. The compartment was empty now, but the archangel didn't withdraw. From the notes Masa had left, Sylvester had indulged in a kind of vigilante justice like Gabriel had.

Gabriel didn't like that. He didn't like it at all. But he could use it, because he knew how Sylvester would have thought. He would have thought in layers, would have thought to make a secret compartment hide another, deeper secret. And at the very back of the wardrobe, he found it: a seam belonging to a panel which slid aside, and in that, something thick and leatherbound. Gabriel froze, and for a moment he stared into space, swallowing hard. He didn't know whether he wanted to pull this out--ever. And yet part of him did.

So he just stayed there as the seconds ticked past, paralysed, his arm inside the wardrobe.

When Gabriel put his hand inside the compartment Re-l felt a surge of irritation. Did he think she hadn't done a thorough job? Then she realised what he must be looking for. Sylvester, it seemed, was vastly cleverer than she had anticipated.

She waited for him to take out whatever it was with itching curiosity, but he didn't. He just stood there, and his face was complicated in ways Re-l didn't understand. Whatever was going through his mind, it was sad and frightening.

For some reason the memory that came to her mind was the moment when he'd made the blanket appear, and she'd felt a sudden, impossible rush of relief. Because that blanket meant for sure that she wasn't Masa, and that had made all the difference. She looked down at the sheet of paper in her hand and found herself speaking, though she hadn't quite intended to.

"I hate Masa," she said. "I don't think I can ever forgive her for existing. You think I'm cold, or cruel, or selfish? Masa is a thousand times worse. She doesn't have a single friend in this world, and she treats the people who help and protect her as if they were fools." Re-l bit her thumb sharply. "And we have exactly the same lives. If you saw them, you'd notice it at once. But there's one difference. Masa never met Vincent. She's me as I used to be, and for some reason I was told to play that part again." Her hands clenched tightly around each other. "But I'm not her. I don't have to be. And I know it." She looked sharply at Gabriel. "Because I apologised. And Masa never would."

It was simply one more thing she owed Vincent. One more reason she had to find him again, whatever the cost.

The archangel's eyes flickered to Re-l, his breathing just the slightest bit heavier than it should have been. He didn't interrupt, didn't speak, but he watched her almost as if her voice was the only thing keeping him steady, even temporarily.

'For some reason I was told to play that part again ... But I'm not her. I don't have to be.'

Sylvester was everything Gabriel was. The trickster, the nomad, the one without family. Was 'Sylvester' even his real name, or had he become a Nemo just like Gabriel had?

And this was exactly why Gabriel had acted out against the Caretaker, despite wisdom, despite prudence. Because the Workers were telling him who he was supposed to be, because even pretending be might believe he was meant stuffing himself back inside a box of masks. At least when he used the trickster mask it was by choice; yet even recently, it had become so much harder to pull up without leaving cracks behind. He was losing it.

Part of him was frightened by that. Another part ... Another part recognised why Sylvester had hidden this book away. The archangel already knew what it was; there was only one thing he would have hidden so well. It was too painful, cut too deeply, and yet Sylvester hadn't been able to let it go. Just like Gabriel hadn't.

And yet Sylvester had never taken it back, either. Never even showed evidence that he would. That he could.

'I don't have to be.'

"I don't think you're selfish," he said finally, and pulled his hand out of the wardrobe, clutching the book. He laid it gently on the counter, his expression carefully studied. It was beautiful. Hand-bound and stitched with leather, with the cover embossed and impressed; the border was flowing, elegant, framing the image of a bird in flight. In the corner was the imprint of a man with a flute. Sylvester had made this himself. It was a work of art.

Gabriel laid his hand on the cover, feeling out the lines of the image. Then, in one quick motion, he flipped it open. There was no introductory page. There didn't need to be. Unlike the yellowed photographs on the wall that opened up, these were white and pristine like the day they'd been taken.

The first, the very first, was of a middle-aged man with a manic grin flanked by four grown brothers. One was tall and proud, with a military stance and physique, standing behind the chair on one side. The second, slightly shorter and stockier, but with a tiny smirk (a smirk, Gabriel realised with a chill, which looked frightening like his own when he was at his most sardonic) and the casual air of someone with effortless charisma, half-leaning on the other side of the armchair. The third, serious-faced and sitting stiffly beside the oldest man, not because he didn't want to be there but because he wanted to do it right.

The fourth was a grinning brown-haired young man with laughter in his eyes, sprawled half across his father's lap, in the middle of a playful strum of a harp.

Gabriel.

He hadn't said anything about cruel or cold. Well, Re-l supposed it was only fair. But thinking about that would lead her down a very long, very dark path, and she couldn't go there. Not alone. Not without Vincent.

When had the air in here become so stifling? She had only meant to be nosy, in a teasing kind of way. But it seemed like every time she met the angel she opened up some new kind of hole in his past. Maybe she was simply doomed to do that to everyone she met. Her raison d'etre. A very unhappy smile crossed her face.

Gabriel had taken something out of the drawer at last. She looked over his shoulder at it. A picture album. It didn't mean anything to her, expect that one of the pictures was a group shot with a much younger Gabriel, playing a harp. She wondered if he could play.

He was still being serious and sad, and she really couldn't deal with that. What experience did she have with feelings? They were a realm she had never wandered into.

She walked back up the central aisle and opened random cupboards until she found glasses. She tipped a hefty amount of gin into each and topped it up with tonic. There was no lemon, but it would have to do.

"Here," she said, handing one to Gabriel. The one with more gin. "Drink up."

The archangel stared down at the picture until he heard the clink of glass on glass and liquid pouring. When Re-l gave him one of the drinks Gabriel took it, his mouth twisted with mocking, and he knew he was wearing Lucifer's smile.

'I'm the one who taught you all your tricks.'

"To memories," he said, and knocked the drink back so fast that he choked on it, leaning on the counter and coughing. Drink wasn't usually his vice, but right at this moment, he wanted that oblivion.

Re-l watched him dispassionately, sipping her own drink. She wasn't sure about her tolerance for alcohol, especially if this body had been created for her. Though on the other hand Masa seemed to have been more of a drinker than she ever was. Either way, it was only sensible to be cautious.

"Shall we set up the table outside?" she said, when he was finished coughing, and without waiting for a reply she walked down the caravan and opened the door, looking out into the twilight. The air was balmy and warm, and there was a scent of flowers on the breeze. It should serve as a reasonable balm to whatever was upsetting him.

"I'm losing my touch, if you're starting to walk out on me," Gabriel said with a smirk, his voice breathless from his coughs, the words automatic and utterly hollow. He dug through the wardrobe to find one of the folded chairs and then followed with his glass. The archangel took a deep breath of the scented air, and felt a sudden pang of gladness that this wasn't the park which had the lilies in it. He couldn't have stood that.

"Stand back a little," he said as he handed the chair to Re-l, moving around the woman and finding the complicated catch on the side of the caravan which let him open up just one of the side-sections--the one near the rear of the 'van, so they could still look out over the park and had direct access to the bottles inside. The archangel swung down the counter attached to the section and waved Re-l forward, still with that sardonic twist to his lips. "Make yourself at home."

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