InsaneJournal

Who: Samandriel, Abigail Lecter
What: Samandriel visits Abigail in her dreams
When: Tuesday Night 03 September
Where: Dreams
Rating: Med-High, neither of their dreams are happy places. TW for that, but nothing more.
Status: Complete



It was afternoon, late afternoon and autumn. It was the fact that it was autumn that clued Samandriel in to the fact that he wasn’t in the world. It was the wrong kind of autumn, you see, for it to be anywhere he knew right at this moment. His bare feet crunched over fallen leaves and twigs, but none of it hurt him. He was aware, of course, but absently.

This was a dream.

There was a doe, and not far behind him, Samandriel could hear a rifle. It hadn’t fired yet, but it would soon. You weren’t supposed to shoot doe. Bucks were fair game, but not the doe. There was a reason, after all, that killing Bambi’s mother had been so horrifying.

The rifle fired. The animal fell, not immediately, it took a few shots to bring her down, but she fell all the same.

The scene shifted in the way that only dreams could, dragging him along with it while he tried to figure out whose head he was in and how to exert some influence over it.

The first question answered itself. A room full of antlers and two people he knew standing there. Her hand was shaking as she held the knife. Her father was aroused by it all. Samandriel waited. He watched. He didn’t know if he could say anything, if he would be heard. Her father’s twisted fantasies were palpable on the air and he wanted nothing more than to throw up.

It blurred out again, jumping scenes. This time it was her house. Her mother, throat slit, was going for the door and her father was going for her.

Samandriel couldn’t watch any longer. He knew that someone else was supposed to save her in this place. Hannibal, perhaps. Or perhaps someone else. But this memory was a dream and if he was in this dream, he wasn’t going to let it end with her shedding a drop of blood.

The angel of imagination simply appeared before him. There were different rules in dreams. Here, he could be everything he wasn’t in waking life yet, everything he would eventually become. Her father’s hand trembled as he held the knife. He was speaking panickedly not at Samandriel, but someone behind him. A man with glasses and adrenaline just rolling off of him in anxious waves. The man would not get to fire his gun. The angel looked at her father, and before he could make a single cut, the man was dust.

Angels had that power, you see. In dreams, he was not an occasionally scared, unfailingly polite young man. He was of the Host. He felt rather more like Castiel than he anticipated. How strange.

The dream was familiar as ever - the smell of cordite on her hands from the rifle, the heat rolling off of her biological father as he helped her dress the deer, the way his hands shook as he held the knife to her throat.

But it wasn’t the same. Will’s shaking hands never had to fire his gun. He just disappeared, as did the hands holding her tight. Blinking, she turned, seeing a familiar face. “Samandriel?” How was he here? Did they come from the same dream world? Or was she just exhausted, putting her daily events into the familiar otherworld of her dreams?

Tucking her hair behind her ears, she moved to sit down at the kitchen table, biting her lower lip. How much had he seen? She’d never wanted him to see what she dreamed, had tried to keep it hidden.

“So this is how it happened?” he asked, staying standing where he was. For a brief moment outside, the dream kept trying to play itself out and Samandriel caught a glimpse of Hannibal, but it was gone again quickly enough. A player in the abandoned scene fading away and leaving nothing where he was.

She just nodded. “The end of it.” Abigail didn’t want to talk about her dream father’s hot breath on her neck in the dark, about the other things she’d done. “The end of most of it.”

“But not all of it,” Samandriel said. “Do you see the symbolism in the doe when you relive it or does it just seem cruel for no reason?”

“Can’t it be both?” It was strange not to have her scar, the twisted knotting of flesh that marred half her neck, leaving her half in this nightmare and half struggling for light. Her fingers worried over the skin where it should have been, and she looked up at him. “Are we both dreaming this?”

Samandriel frowned while he considered the second question. There was no need for him to answer the first. “You’re dreaming,” he said finally. “I may not technically be, but I’m here all the same.”

“It comes with you being what you are, then?” She felt more safe in the dream with him there, even though everything was the same as ever. Same floral vest over a pretty pastel shirt, clothes more girlish and flirty than she’d ever wear while awake. “I wouldn’t come here that often. It’s never good.”

“Maybe that’s exactly why you need me to come here.” He didn’t look to see what her dream had dressed him in. He supposed it didn’t matter. Perhaps he ought to make sure he wasn’t either completely naked or wearing some kind of robe with a tinsel halo attached to a headband.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. This you, I mean. Or that you.” He walked over to her. “Who is the man with the glasses?”

He was in jeans and a button down shirt, but curiously barefoot. She didn’t read too much into it, figuring that maybe her subconscious was too busy to properly assign him footwear. Pulling her knees to her chest, she looked toward the door. “Will Graham. He’s here too - when we’re awake. He’s one of Daddy’s patients. I keep waiting for him to dream of this too. For Daddy to dream of it. I see them every day and I don’t - I don’t know how to talk about it. They haven’t gone through it yet.”

“He…” Samandriel paused while he considered it. “He feels like one of mine, which is rather an odd thing to say since I think we’re not even from the same world, but there’s something about him...or at least your dream of him.” It resonated in an odd way. It was probably just the dream. Dreams were made up of reality and falsehoods, a delicate balance woven together that only the most expert of liars and storytellers could achieve.

Will might not truly be imagination at all, and Samandriel could just be looking to find someone in her dreams that would look after her like he did. Projection. “I won’t walk in your father’s dreams...or at least I’ll try not to. I’m not sure how I ended up here in the first place.”

“He’s really sweet. He’s ... thoughtful. Quiet. I think he sees more than people give him credit for.” Sometimes when she talked to Will in her father’s waiting room, she saw the same haunted expression in his eyes that she thought she could see in Samandriel’s.

Nodding at his pledge to not walk with her father, Abigail smiled sadly. “Daddy wouldn’t like it. He barely likes them as it is when he’s alone. He’d think he was burdening you.”

“I think it’d all be a matter of him actually noticing me,” Samandriel said, considering for a moment. “You hadn’t, not for a while and you’re not in the habit of not noticing me.” He shook his head. “No, like I said, not planning on it. If I did, he probably wouldn’t be able to continue seeing me as his patient and I’m not sure what other therapist I’d be able to go to.”

“Still. If he ever found out, he’d still feel guilty. He and I are alike that way, we feel a heavy sense of responsibility. How long have you been here?” She looked up at him, wondering exactly how much she’d dreamed that night. Sometimes it felt a bit like a movie or a television show she could start and stop, pause and play, leave and then come back to later on. Only it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t interesting, it was just cold and hurt and heat leaving her body as her heart pumped it out of the hole in her neck.

“Enough,” Samandriel said. “You don’t have to keep this from me, you know.” He leaned back against the counter near her. “Would it make you feel less guilty if I showed you mine?”

She shook her head. “You can if you like, but ... I don’t know, maybe we’re all just a little messed up because of them. At least yours have pretty parts. I wouldn’t want to ruin that by being there.” Abigail looked over at him, aware she was crying but not caring enough to wipe her cheeks. This was how this part always ended anyway. Tears and her father pressing his hands to her neck to stave off her bleeding.

She had relinquished control of her dream and so he sent it away, replacing it not with Creation or any of his good dreams. They were observers in heaven, unnoticed. War had broken out and Samandriel placed all his kin in vessels just so that she could see properly. They might not be accurate vessels save for Castiel and Lucifer, but they would do.

He walked with her through the fighting.

War in heaven wasn’t pretty, but he tried to keep her from the worst of it so that she could watch Lucifer fall with him.

Abigail looked around, tears still falling. Of all the dreams she’d have picked for her best friend, her brother, this wasn’t even close. She bit her lower lip as she reached out for his hand, wanting to comfort him somehow. “Every night? Or just sometimes?”

He took her hand, but didn’t answer her question right away. Instead, he pointed to where his dream of himself was watching in horror, screaming into an abyss of other sounds. His voice raised no higher than anyone else’s. Tears cut down his face, his hands covered his ears. Behind him stood Raguel sent by Raphael to find the rest of Lucifer’s allies. Raguel left. No one else paid any heed to the distraught Samandriel and his partially forgotten, unused blade.

“Every night,” he answered softly. “Unless I get something new, but even then at some point I’ll have this. Over and over again.”

She squeezed his hand gently, watching as he cried, screamed in vain. He was as silent in his screams as Abigail was in her own dreams. Both of them fighting against the inevitable, yet making not even a ripple against what was coming. Maybe that was the lesson of the dreams, to make the most of what they had. Abigail had a father who loved her, a biological father who had died a good man instead of a monster. Samandriel had his star, whole and unfallen, whenever he needed him. It was enough to make her stop crying.

“But we’ll wake up,” she murmured.

“Eventually, yes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take the hurt with us.” He banished the chaos and carnage around them and brought them instead to The Garden. They could sit here and talk and enjoy the sunshine. “I feel like everything goes crashing downhill for me after the Fall and I didn’t do a thing to deserve it.” He looked over at her. “They keep saying that when they think I’m not listening. Samandriel is Good. Michael and Raphael insist that I need to be a proper soldier. They get their way, but that doesn’t mean much.”

“Of course you’re Good. But that doesn’t mean Lucifer doesn’t have a lot of his good points.” She wasn’t the sort to be religious, even when faced with Samandriel’s dreams, but if she had to believe in a Lucifer, she preferred hers to be a bit Miltonesque. “Maybe the pain when we wake up is to remind us to hold on tighter. He’s there when you’re awake, so don’t let go.”

“Lucifer threw a jealous temper tantrum,” Samandriel said softly. “It shouldn’t have escalated like it did, but it did.” He sat down on a bench and then stretched out on his back on it, inviting her to look up at the clouds with him. “I think that if I were forced to choose now, I still wouldn’t be able to.”

“God did forgive people more often than he forgave Lucifer, if I remember my Bible at all. I kind of just stopped going to Sunday school.” She sat down next to him, looking down at him rather than the sky. “Nobody’s forcing you to choose now. And fuck them if they do.”

“Castiel will walk by in a moment,” Samandriel said, and sure enough his brother did just that, unseeing the anomaly in the dream while he went to go speak with Joshua. “I thought you would like the garden.”

“It’s pretty. I just worry about you more.” Abigail smiled. “Heaven isn’t really ... a thing I think about. I’ll leave that to you. Gives me more time for trying to figure out how to make you smile.” Abigail didn’t even look up; she just leaned over to kiss Samandriel on the forehead. He was the first non-family member she’d ever loved, and in doing so she’d made him family. If that wasn’t holy, then fuck God.

“In time, I’ll remember how.” Samandriel hoped that much at least. He looked away from the sky back to her. “I just don’t think anything can actually make me do anything at this point.” His gaze returned to the clouds. “I don’t want to go back to school.”

“So don’t.” She rolled to her back, holding his hand. “Get your GED and make money and be with your soul mate and be happy. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

“Lucifer wouldn’t approve,” Samandriel said, “and your father thinks that going to school might be the best way for me to maintain whatever tiny grasp on my humanity I have left.”

“He’s smarter than I am, you should probably listen to him,” Abigail smiled. “I just wish I was still there with you.” She’d go through her senior year again for him. If that wasn’t love, she didn’t know what was. “When’s your prom? We’ll have to go shopping.”

Not to mention his mother would throw an absolute shit-fit if he gave up on school or disappeared. Four more months. Four more months and he could be done. “May, Abs. Prom is always in May. Doubt I’ll stick around that long, but if Lucifer wishes me to, I suppose it really isn’t all that much longer.”

“Mine was the first day of June, so there.” She grinned, sticking out her tongue. “It’s not that much longer, really. Isn’t it just a blink for you, or something?”

“Time passes all the same,” Samandriel pointed out. “It goes no faster for me than it does for you. I just have longer to wait out if I’m lucky.” He looked over at one of Joshua’s large trees, could feel how proud the other angel was of it. “They’re going to make a warrior out of me yet and I don’t even understand why they seem to think any of need to be ready for war again.”

“God did a lot of things twice. Look at the Flood. He made man, said they sucked, then did it again.” Sometimes she worried she was too free with her words, and she modulated their anger with a lower tone. “Maybe they think there’ll be another one. There’ll be at least one more. Revelations and all that.”

“And if it’s all predetermined anyway then why should we bother?” Samandriel pointed out. “I don’t want my imagination used for cruelty.” He didn’t think he was going to get a choice in whether or not that happened though.

“But is it? I thought we got free will?” She looked at him, blinking a little. “Will I remember this when I wake up?” She wanted to, very much. She wanted to remember him saving her for a change, not a colder version of her father, a more broken version of Mr. Graham.

“Humans get free will. Angels don’t. It’s just one facet of the issues I’m having and trying to figure out how to talk to Dr. Lecter about.” He looked at her again. “Do you wish to remember it?”

“Is it wrong of me to sort of side with Lucifer on this one? I think God might have taken you guys for granted.” She sighed, moving closer. “I do, very much. It was nice to have you save me for a change. Daddy’s so haunted in the dreams.”

“We do as we were made to do,” Samandriel said, stretching out an arm so she could cuddle properly. “We obey.” He basked with her in the sun for a while. “Then I suppose you will, though how much you’ll believe when you wake up I don’t know. It might just be like any other dream and slip away through your fingers by the time you’ve had coffee.”

“I know. I just wish you had more of a say in things.” She curled up closer to him, letting her head rest on his chest. “Well, I’m pretty sure it’d be a dream that makes sense. You’d try to save me as much as I’d try to save you. That’s just what we do.” They were family.

“Yes,” Samandriel said, “But of the things you’re not meant to see? I doubt you’ll remember those.” Heaven. The Fall. The angel of Judgment standing behind Samandriel and silently proclaiming him innocent.

“You can tell me about them. You’ll make them sound more beautiful anyway.” She liked when he told her stories, she could always close her eyes and feel like she was really there. His stories were better than any movie. “I hope that ... something happens in your dreams to make them better, I really do.”

“Me too,” Samandriel whispered. He kissed the top of her head. “Rest now. I’ll watch over you.”