There was something there. Something off. Gabriel hadn't made any secret that he liked humanity so much, so why would Aziraphale want to hide that unless it was a cover for something else? But the archangel couldn't peg what, exactly, it was a cover for. (The idea of a demon didn't occur to him, simply because ... well, it just didn't. Demons were demons. The only angels who associated with them were the truly Fallen, which Aziraphale wasn't.) So Gabriel let it go. Maybe he'd look into it later, when things were less raw.

Which wasn't now.

"You had a soft spot," the archangel said with a twisted smile that said he understood completely. Two thousand years on Earth? There had been one or two humans in Gabriel's time. He'd always said 'never again' afterward--after they died or discovered he was supernatural and inevitably tried to kill him--and never been able to stick with the vow. Somehow he just always wound up with some idiot chucklehead who triggered whatever protective instincts he had left and channelled into revenge.

Which was why he hadn't approved of Castiel getting too involved with the Winchesters. Gabriel's last had been a hunter too, had been too recent, by angelic standards, and had blown up badly. The archangel could only wonder how the Castiel-Winchester parade was going to end.