Work Text:
The dreams start about two weeks after Jack climbs out of those freaky caves he got lost in back in Croatia.
In the dream, Gabriel is missing the right side of his face, just the way Jack remembers seeing him last. He sits astride Jack’s hips, in the tossed sheets of their bed in Zurich, which burned along with everything else, and pins his hands above his head. “You still miss him so much.”
“Yeah.” God, he does. He arches up against Gabriel. “Please.”
“You can't bring people back from the dead. Souls don’t come back.” Gabe’s ruined lips hover less than an inch above his own. An invitation. A bloody promise. His voice sounds wrong, a not-quite-human buzz. But in the way of dreams, Jack recognizes it still as Gabriel’s. “Would you give yours for him?”
The windows are open. It’s pitch black outside; the night sky of a new moon, with no sign of the lights of Zurich’s skyline. The walls of their room glow a faint, barely perceptible red, in the patterns of the carvings he remembers from down in the caves.
They made him feel sick just looking at them, at the time. They’d made him feel like ideas were trying to worm into his head, the words of something that had no business being in this world. But now with Gabe on top of him, breathing and warm and living, red glowing in the dark pupils of his eyes and the shadowed caverns where his flesh is torn away… He arches up to catch Gabriel’s mouth with his. “Anything. He deserves it more than I do.”
Gabriel kisses him fiercely. Jack can taste Gabriel's blood, remembers the flavor as it'd splashed across them, the ripping, chest-gouging weight of Gabriel dying in his arms while the corrosive smoke of a burning building sank down to blanket them. “Give it to me then.”
The smoke curls in around him, cupping him in a heavy, hot embrace as Gabriel's weight lowers on top of him. Gabriel kisses him again. Jack turns into it, lets Gabriel’s lips seal over his own. Feels it as Gabriel begins to drink him.
He draws Jack out in deep gulps, reaching down into a spot somewhere between his lungs and liver to tease pieces of him out. Memories began to shake loose; memories of Gabriel that replay in his mind as they come tumbling out. Jack feels them go like fragments of himself.
They were never officially married—couldn't afford to make their relationship a matter of public record—but there's a night they always referred to as their wedding night. Glowing bronze in the last light of the setting sun, Gabe looks down at him, naked and luminous with the awe and love in his face as his eyes run over Jack’s body. Jack’s heart aches from looking at him, like it could come right out of his chest.
“How do I deserve you?” Gabe’s hand, broad and worn and elegant, spans the curve of Jack's ribs as he strokes it up his side. “You're so fucking beautiful, do you know that?”
Jack grins up at him, giddy that this man is his. He lifts one leg, stroking his inner thigh up the curve of Gabriel's hip to catch around his waist and pull him down onto him. “You've mentioned it, but you could tell me again.”
“Beautiful and vain,” Gabe mutters into his throat with a smile as he pushes into him.
And keeps going, further than Jack remembers. Further than should be possible. He writhes, impaled too deeply to get away. “I feel like I could die just from looking at you for too long,” Gabriel sighs against him.
Jack wants to warn him not to, but his throat is full of smoke, pushing down into him and plucking his heart loose from his chest. It tastes like Gabriel, like ash, like their dying day. Jack twists under him, spitted and trembling all the way through as he comes, and can’t speak around the thing in his throat to beg him not to let go. Gabriel exhales once, deeply, into him.
Jack wakes from the dream, coughing, in his blankets in the safehouse in Stuttgart. The room is dingy, sparse, washed in the sullen yellow half-light of the city night outside. Normal.
Gabriel kneels down next to him and helps him sit up. Something clutches and tugs at Jack’s heart when they touch.
“Better?” Gabriel asks in that raspy, not-quite-human voice.
Jack looks up at him, red-eyed and wreathed in smoke, and feels the crush of grief ease for the first time since it happened. That invisible grip on his heart squeezes tighter, but it’s a petty pain in comparison. “Better.”