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tiptoe39Title: Wipe off that angel face (and go back to high school)
Volume I: Bully and the Beast (Chapter 1 of 3)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tiptoe39
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sam/Gabriel High school AU. WIP. Done through twitfic / twitlonger. It's got many more parts than this. Thanks tojabber_moose for an amazing title!!
Sam's pissed. The first day of school and he's already been targeted by a bully. A bully half his size at that. Must have pegged Sam as the kind of guy who wouldn't hurt a fly. A gentle giant, his mom calls him. This Gabriel kid has decided he's the Jolly Green Giant instead. Whenever Sam approaches in the halls, Gabriel and all his little cohorts burst into a round of "Ho-ho-ho, Green Giant!" Sam considers possibly showing him that Green Giant can also be a nickname for the Incredible Hulk.
When Sam enters class late on a Monday morning, Gabriel says, "I thought I felt the earth moving." He pounds on his desk for dramatic effect. Sam glares at him. Gabriel looks across the seats between them and his look is almost challenging. Sam tries to tamp down on his temper, but he can't resist glowering back. Gabriel's eyebrows rise, and so do the corners of his mouth. The look he's giving very clearly says, "Bring it."
Dean offers to go to bat for him, to confront Gabriel in the hall, maybe with some of his senior friends in tow, but Sam says no. It's not just that he wants to stand up for himself, but there's also something about Gabriel's eyes that just make him wonder. Why is he trying to draw Sam out so much? It's not like Gabriel can beat him up if Sam crosses him. There's something else behind it. He feels those eyes on him surely as if they were a pair of hands. And sometimes he even dreams about them.
After taking it in silence for far too long, Sam abruptly turns one day, after Gabriel had made a Godzilla joke, and says, "Do you have something you want to say to me?"
"Nah," Gabriel says, "you can't negotiate with giant lizards." The class bursts into laughter.
Momentarily robbed of his words, Sam sits back in his seat and fumes, red-faced. What is it about Gabriel that makes him unable to talk like a regular human being? He is too clever, that's what. Sam is afraid of losing before he even opens his mouth.
Sam talks to Jess and Sarah about it, and they both kind of laugh with their hands over their mouths. They get something he doesn't. And you know how girls are, once they make up their mind not to tell you something you're not getting it out of them. Sam has enough girl friends to know this very well by now. Incidentally, it's that very fact that finally brings him face-to-face and toe-to-toe with Gabriel.
Namely, Gabriel walks past him when he's chatting with Sarah about something in the hallway and says "Woo, hoo, Baby Winchester is a ladies' man."
Sam frowns and snaps, "She's just a friend."
There's a light in Gabriel's eyes and he turns. "You got something to say to me?"
It's teasing, throwing Sam's line back in his face, but Sam's ready. "As a matter of fact, I do."
"Great!" Gabriel spreads his arms wide. "Let's hear it."
Sam frowns. "Not here," he says.
Gabriel stops short. "Why not?"
"Because you're gonna be late for class." Sam darts into the classroom just as the bell rings. Hell's about to come down on his head, but at least for now he's chalked up a victory.
The word comes down in the form of a note, passed from Gabriel to Uri, who passes it to Zach who passes it to Lily and finally arrives in Sam's hands two periods later. "Men's room in the basement across from the boiler room. Alone. 3:30 P.M." Sam spends the rest of the school day trying hard not to hyperventilate. What if he's ganged up on and thrown in the toilet? This could be an awful trap.
Sam descends the stairs like he's an underdressed teen in a horror movie. He's deathly afraid of whatever's lurking behind the row of gym mats or waiting beneath the mountain of discarded, broken desks that line the hallways. He opens the door to the bathroom all at once, like he's expecting an assault, but all he finds is Gabriel, sitting on a ledge near the sinks, eyes tilted up toward the ceiling. He looks almost dreamy. Sam checks under every stall. They really are alone.
"So?" Gabriel says without turning his head. "You have something to say to me, Gigantor?"
Sam bristles. "Why do you pick on me?" he says. "Have I done something to piss you off?"
"Maybe." Gabriel's eyes dart toward him then, a flicker of sharp green. "But that's not why I pick on you. I pick on you cause you're an easy target."
"Well, stop it," Sam says. And then, because he has always been taught to be a nice guy, "Please."
"What's the matter with you?" Gabriel twists the rest of his body to match his eyes, and he's now facing Sam head-on. "Please? You say please to a guy who's making your life a living hell? Jesus, you're a bigger freak than I thought."
Sam's fist clenches. Gabriel doesn't miss it. "You gonna punch me out, big guy? Gonna show me who's the big man on campus?"
"Would you shut up about my height?" Sam finally yells, and it feels good, sharp relief to yell like that. "I can't help how tall I am. And if I were you I wouldn't talk."
Gabriel is quiet. A smile spreads over his face. "There we go. I knew you could do it."
Sam's brow furrows. "Do what?" He has no idea where this guy is coming from anymore.
"Get angry. Hit below the belt. The world thinks you're this nice guy, but I think different. I think you could really hurt people if you tried."
"So you're... trying to make me hurt people?" This is getting crazier by the second. "Why in the hell would I want to do that?"
"Because it's who you really are," Gabriel says.
"It's not." But Sam's fist is still clenched at his sides.
"It is."
"Then I don't want to be who I really am."
"Oh, spoken like a true closet case. Sam, there are three things you aren't. One is nice, one is dumb, and if you think really hard you'll figure out what the third one is."
Sam turns away. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Gabriel snickers. "Come close and I'll whisper it in your ear."
That night Sam's quiet at dinner. Mom watches him pick at his food. Dad frowns. Dean gets up, unexpectedly, and declares, "I'm going to kick the shit out of him."
"Language, Dean!"
"What the hell did he say to you? What the hell did he do?"
"Listen to your mother," Dad says, but nobody listens to him.
"He said..." Sam pushes at his broccoli. "He said I was just pretending to be a nice guy. That I should be meaner."
"What?" Dean screws up his face into an impossible tangle of lips and freckles and lines. "What the hell does that mean?"
"That boy sounds disturbed," Mom says. "You should stay away from him, Sam."
Sam nods, but something about the concept of avoiding Gabriel depresses him. He feels like there's a mystery he's just beginning to scratch the surface of, something buried there and if he just digs enough, he might make a discovery. Maybe about Gabriel. Maybe about himself.
Besides, what if Gabriel's right? What if he really isn't a nice guy on the inside? The idea should be completely horrific, but there's a piece of him that's intrigued. Fascinated. What would that other him be like?
The next week, Sam experiments with being "not nice." He steps on an ant. He doesn't say hi to his parents when he comes down the stairs in the morning. When Sarah and Jess and Maddy are all talking about a boy band, Sam gets up and says, "You know what, I'm bored. I'm going now."
Weird thing is, they don't seem to mind. Mom and Dad mind -- they yell at him -- but Sam is surprised at how much his friends don't get up his ass about it. He's sure he's treating everyone like junk. And the hammer isn't falling.
Weirder still is that Gabriel seems to have forgotten he exists. This should be a huge relief. It's not. It's disconcerting. He's doing all of this, and Gabriel doesn't even have the courtesy to notice.
Ash hangs out in the computer lab most days after school, and he's good to talk to. Sam stands near the windows and looks down -- the lab's on the second floor -- at the kids leaving school.
"So let me get my noggin wrapped around this," Ash says, typing at light speed the whole time. "Guy gives you hell, tells you you should try being mean. So you try it, and you're pissed he doesn't notice?"
Sam half-laughs. "Weird, huh?"
"Not really." Ash hits the Enter key with the dramatic finality of an artist applying his signature to a freshly painted masterpiece. "I appreciate you not trying out your evil side on me. I get enough atomic wedgies from Uri." He rolls his eyes.
"Wait." Sam's still stuck. "How is that not weird?"
"Dude," Ash has another eyeroll for that. "You ignored him when he started to pick on you, right? You just finally decided to confront him, and that's when all this happened. Right?"
There's nothing quite like feeling like the answer's right there and you can't grab it. Sam shuffles his feet. "Right..."
"And now you're being mean and he's ignoring you."
"Yeah..."
Ash turned away from the computer and slapped both hands onto his knees. "Well? Now you know how he feels."
Sam passes the note to Ruby, who passes it to Jo, who passes it to Victor, who passes it to Uri, who passes it to Gabriel. It says the same thing the last one did. "Men's bathroom in the basement, 3:30 p.m. Alone."
He hides behind the gym mats to make sure Gabriel really comes alone.
At 3:29 Gabriel comes down the stairs, and he looks nervous, skittish, like a squirrel trying to make off with a buried acorn. Sam doesn't think he's ever seen him look like that before, and he wonders what face Gabriel would put forward if he knew Sam was looking. Sam waits a minute, then comes in.
Gabriel's on the ledge, like he was before, but he's looking square at Sam and smiling, leaning forward and kicking his legs back and forth in a way that reminds Sam, kind of, of Kermit the Frog. "I hear the devil lives down here," he says as Sam saunters in. "Have you seen him?"
"So this is what it's like for you," Sam says. "You are that desperate for attention that you act like a bully, and then you're pissed when you don't get the reaction you're looking for? Is that it?"
"I think it's safe to say I have no clue what you're talking about, Winchester." Gabriel scowls, and for once Sam knows the reason for his scowl -- he's out of his depth. He's not setting the agenda here. And that must be frustrating.
"So why do it?" Sam asks. "Why try to make me into something I'm not? Here's an idea. What if it's you who needs to change?"
"Are you trying to make me a better person? That's adorable." Gabriel laughs, but there's no confidence behind his laugh. "It's One to Grow On. And Knowing Is Half the Battle." He bats his eyelashes.
"Why me?" Sam says. "Out of everyone in the school, why bully me?"
"That's the second time you've called me a bully," Gabriel says with a frown. "It's categorically impossible to bully you. You could throw me out a window without breaking a sweat. The best I can do is throw bricks at your head and hope one of them gets through your thick skull."
Sam frowns. He paces forward. "Get through to me how?"
There's a split second when Gabriel doesn't say anything. Sam suspects he can't. Then, the smile reasserts itself. "Come a little closer and I'll whisper it in your ear."
"I don't think so," Sam says.
"Then I guess I'll have to keep throwing bricks at you."
Sam rolls his eyes, and approaches.
When they're so close there's barely a breath between them, Gabriel says, "Give me your hand."
"What? I thought you were gonna whisper--"
"Just give it."
Sam complies. Gabriel takes Sam's hand lightly in both of his, examines his palm. His hands are strangely hot.
"Strong loveline," he says, and chuckles. His eyes flicker up to meet Sam's.
For an instant there is neither air nor sound in the room.
Then Gabriel drops Sam's hand and looks away. "Nah," he says. "It's not worth it."
He pops down from the ledge and walks right past Sam, heading for the door.
"Hey," says Sam.
A pause in the footsteps.
"We could, like.. actually talk. Sometime."
For a moment he thinks he's about to get a real brick thrown at his head.
Then Gabriel says, softly, "Sure."
And he's gone.
On to Chapter Two
Volume I: Bully and the Beast (Chapter 1 of 3)
Author:
tiptoe39Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sam/Gabriel High school AU. WIP. Done through twitfic / twitlonger. It's got many more parts than this. Thanks to
jabber_moose for an amazing title!!Volume I: Bully and the Beast
Sam's pissed. The first day of school and he's already been targeted by a bully. A bully half his size at that. Must have pegged Sam as the kind of guy who wouldn't hurt a fly. A gentle giant, his mom calls him. This Gabriel kid has decided he's the Jolly Green Giant instead. Whenever Sam approaches in the halls, Gabriel and all his little cohorts burst into a round of "Ho-ho-ho, Green Giant!" Sam considers possibly showing him that Green Giant can also be a nickname for the Incredible Hulk.
When Sam enters class late on a Monday morning, Gabriel says, "I thought I felt the earth moving." He pounds on his desk for dramatic effect. Sam glares at him. Gabriel looks across the seats between them and his look is almost challenging. Sam tries to tamp down on his temper, but he can't resist glowering back. Gabriel's eyebrows rise, and so do the corners of his mouth. The look he's giving very clearly says, "Bring it."
Dean offers to go to bat for him, to confront Gabriel in the hall, maybe with some of his senior friends in tow, but Sam says no. It's not just that he wants to stand up for himself, but there's also something about Gabriel's eyes that just make him wonder. Why is he trying to draw Sam out so much? It's not like Gabriel can beat him up if Sam crosses him. There's something else behind it. He feels those eyes on him surely as if they were a pair of hands. And sometimes he even dreams about them.
After taking it in silence for far too long, Sam abruptly turns one day, after Gabriel had made a Godzilla joke, and says, "Do you have something you want to say to me?"
"Nah," Gabriel says, "you can't negotiate with giant lizards." The class bursts into laughter.
Momentarily robbed of his words, Sam sits back in his seat and fumes, red-faced. What is it about Gabriel that makes him unable to talk like a regular human being? He is too clever, that's what. Sam is afraid of losing before he even opens his mouth.
Sam talks to Jess and Sarah about it, and they both kind of laugh with their hands over their mouths. They get something he doesn't. And you know how girls are, once they make up their mind not to tell you something you're not getting it out of them. Sam has enough girl friends to know this very well by now. Incidentally, it's that very fact that finally brings him face-to-face and toe-to-toe with Gabriel.
Namely, Gabriel walks past him when he's chatting with Sarah about something in the hallway and says "Woo, hoo, Baby Winchester is a ladies' man."
Sam frowns and snaps, "She's just a friend."
There's a light in Gabriel's eyes and he turns. "You got something to say to me?"
It's teasing, throwing Sam's line back in his face, but Sam's ready. "As a matter of fact, I do."
"Great!" Gabriel spreads his arms wide. "Let's hear it."
Sam frowns. "Not here," he says.
Gabriel stops short. "Why not?"
"Because you're gonna be late for class." Sam darts into the classroom just as the bell rings. Hell's about to come down on his head, but at least for now he's chalked up a victory.
The word comes down in the form of a note, passed from Gabriel to Uri, who passes it to Zach who passes it to Lily and finally arrives in Sam's hands two periods later. "Men's room in the basement across from the boiler room. Alone. 3:30 P.M." Sam spends the rest of the school day trying hard not to hyperventilate. What if he's ganged up on and thrown in the toilet? This could be an awful trap.
Sam descends the stairs like he's an underdressed teen in a horror movie. He's deathly afraid of whatever's lurking behind the row of gym mats or waiting beneath the mountain of discarded, broken desks that line the hallways. He opens the door to the bathroom all at once, like he's expecting an assault, but all he finds is Gabriel, sitting on a ledge near the sinks, eyes tilted up toward the ceiling. He looks almost dreamy. Sam checks under every stall. They really are alone.
"So?" Gabriel says without turning his head. "You have something to say to me, Gigantor?"
Sam bristles. "Why do you pick on me?" he says. "Have I done something to piss you off?"
"Maybe." Gabriel's eyes dart toward him then, a flicker of sharp green. "But that's not why I pick on you. I pick on you cause you're an easy target."
"Well, stop it," Sam says. And then, because he has always been taught to be a nice guy, "Please."
"What's the matter with you?" Gabriel twists the rest of his body to match his eyes, and he's now facing Sam head-on. "Please? You say please to a guy who's making your life a living hell? Jesus, you're a bigger freak than I thought."
Sam's fist clenches. Gabriel doesn't miss it. "You gonna punch me out, big guy? Gonna show me who's the big man on campus?"
"Would you shut up about my height?" Sam finally yells, and it feels good, sharp relief to yell like that. "I can't help how tall I am. And if I were you I wouldn't talk."
Gabriel is quiet. A smile spreads over his face. "There we go. I knew you could do it."
Sam's brow furrows. "Do what?" He has no idea where this guy is coming from anymore.
"Get angry. Hit below the belt. The world thinks you're this nice guy, but I think different. I think you could really hurt people if you tried."
"So you're... trying to make me hurt people?" This is getting crazier by the second. "Why in the hell would I want to do that?"
"Because it's who you really are," Gabriel says.
"It's not." But Sam's fist is still clenched at his sides.
"It is."
"Then I don't want to be who I really am."
"Oh, spoken like a true closet case. Sam, there are three things you aren't. One is nice, one is dumb, and if you think really hard you'll figure out what the third one is."
Sam turns away. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Gabriel snickers. "Come close and I'll whisper it in your ear."
That night Sam's quiet at dinner. Mom watches him pick at his food. Dad frowns. Dean gets up, unexpectedly, and declares, "I'm going to kick the shit out of him."
"Language, Dean!"
"What the hell did he say to you? What the hell did he do?"
"Listen to your mother," Dad says, but nobody listens to him.
"He said..." Sam pushes at his broccoli. "He said I was just pretending to be a nice guy. That I should be meaner."
"What?" Dean screws up his face into an impossible tangle of lips and freckles and lines. "What the hell does that mean?"
"That boy sounds disturbed," Mom says. "You should stay away from him, Sam."
Sam nods, but something about the concept of avoiding Gabriel depresses him. He feels like there's a mystery he's just beginning to scratch the surface of, something buried there and if he just digs enough, he might make a discovery. Maybe about Gabriel. Maybe about himself.
Besides, what if Gabriel's right? What if he really isn't a nice guy on the inside? The idea should be completely horrific, but there's a piece of him that's intrigued. Fascinated. What would that other him be like?
The next week, Sam experiments with being "not nice." He steps on an ant. He doesn't say hi to his parents when he comes down the stairs in the morning. When Sarah and Jess and Maddy are all talking about a boy band, Sam gets up and says, "You know what, I'm bored. I'm going now."
Weird thing is, they don't seem to mind. Mom and Dad mind -- they yell at him -- but Sam is surprised at how much his friends don't get up his ass about it. He's sure he's treating everyone like junk. And the hammer isn't falling.
Weirder still is that Gabriel seems to have forgotten he exists. This should be a huge relief. It's not. It's disconcerting. He's doing all of this, and Gabriel doesn't even have the courtesy to notice.
Ash hangs out in the computer lab most days after school, and he's good to talk to. Sam stands near the windows and looks down -- the lab's on the second floor -- at the kids leaving school.
"So let me get my noggin wrapped around this," Ash says, typing at light speed the whole time. "Guy gives you hell, tells you you should try being mean. So you try it, and you're pissed he doesn't notice?"
Sam half-laughs. "Weird, huh?"
"Not really." Ash hits the Enter key with the dramatic finality of an artist applying his signature to a freshly painted masterpiece. "I appreciate you not trying out your evil side on me. I get enough atomic wedgies from Uri." He rolls his eyes.
"Wait." Sam's still stuck. "How is that not weird?"
"Dude," Ash has another eyeroll for that. "You ignored him when he started to pick on you, right? You just finally decided to confront him, and that's when all this happened. Right?"
There's nothing quite like feeling like the answer's right there and you can't grab it. Sam shuffles his feet. "Right..."
"And now you're being mean and he's ignoring you."
"Yeah..."
Ash turned away from the computer and slapped both hands onto his knees. "Well? Now you know how he feels."
Sam passes the note to Ruby, who passes it to Jo, who passes it to Victor, who passes it to Uri, who passes it to Gabriel. It says the same thing the last one did. "Men's bathroom in the basement, 3:30 p.m. Alone."
He hides behind the gym mats to make sure Gabriel really comes alone.
At 3:29 Gabriel comes down the stairs, and he looks nervous, skittish, like a squirrel trying to make off with a buried acorn. Sam doesn't think he's ever seen him look like that before, and he wonders what face Gabriel would put forward if he knew Sam was looking. Sam waits a minute, then comes in.
Gabriel's on the ledge, like he was before, but he's looking square at Sam and smiling, leaning forward and kicking his legs back and forth in a way that reminds Sam, kind of, of Kermit the Frog. "I hear the devil lives down here," he says as Sam saunters in. "Have you seen him?"
"So this is what it's like for you," Sam says. "You are that desperate for attention that you act like a bully, and then you're pissed when you don't get the reaction you're looking for? Is that it?"
"I think it's safe to say I have no clue what you're talking about, Winchester." Gabriel scowls, and for once Sam knows the reason for his scowl -- he's out of his depth. He's not setting the agenda here. And that must be frustrating.
"So why do it?" Sam asks. "Why try to make me into something I'm not? Here's an idea. What if it's you who needs to change?"
"Are you trying to make me a better person? That's adorable." Gabriel laughs, but there's no confidence behind his laugh. "It's One to Grow On. And Knowing Is Half the Battle." He bats his eyelashes.
"Why me?" Sam says. "Out of everyone in the school, why bully me?"
"That's the second time you've called me a bully," Gabriel says with a frown. "It's categorically impossible to bully you. You could throw me out a window without breaking a sweat. The best I can do is throw bricks at your head and hope one of them gets through your thick skull."
Sam frowns. He paces forward. "Get through to me how?"
There's a split second when Gabriel doesn't say anything. Sam suspects he can't. Then, the smile reasserts itself. "Come a little closer and I'll whisper it in your ear."
"I don't think so," Sam says.
"Then I guess I'll have to keep throwing bricks at you."
Sam rolls his eyes, and approaches.
When they're so close there's barely a breath between them, Gabriel says, "Give me your hand."
"What? I thought you were gonna whisper--"
"Just give it."
Sam complies. Gabriel takes Sam's hand lightly in both of his, examines his palm. His hands are strangely hot.
"Strong loveline," he says, and chuckles. His eyes flicker up to meet Sam's.
For an instant there is neither air nor sound in the room.
Then Gabriel drops Sam's hand and looks away. "Nah," he says. "It's not worth it."
He pops down from the ledge and walks right past Sam, heading for the door.
"Hey," says Sam.
A pause in the footsteps.
"We could, like.. actually talk. Sometime."
For a moment he thinks he's about to get a real brick thrown at his head.
Then Gabriel says, softly, "Sure."
And he's gone.
On to Chapter Two
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-14 08:57 pm (UTC)Wipe off that angel face (and go back to high school)I may need to..hold comments hostage.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-14 09:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-14 09:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-14 09:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-14 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-27 11:31 pm (UTC)At YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TOxhzAm7fY)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-30 07:44 am (UTC)*smacks them both* Idiots!
Also I'm not sure whether the title of this series is genius or grounds for worry about your sanity. Probably both.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-30 12:56 pm (UTC)And yay for people wanting to smack the main characters. that's proof I'm doin' it rite. XD