TEMPTATIONS (SEEK AND DESTROY)

“I'll go.” Words come out of Gabriel's mouth before he even realizes he's thinking them. He doesn't even know what he's agreeing to do, but he doesn't care.

Silence falls on the war room. There are fifteen people around the big table and all of them turn to look at him. He ignores them all. His father, sitting at the head of the table, clears his throat. “Gabriel, at least wait until we have laid out the details.”

It doesn't matter. Anything would be better than staying here. Besides, whatever it is, he can dealt with. And if he can't, even better. Hasn't he spent the past few months trying to find a way to permanently stop this thing that he's becoming? “I can handle it,” he repeats, without even blinking.

The other members of the Council didn't want him here and now they take his words for presumption, as if he needed boasting about something that everybody knows for sure he can do. His father is unnerved. They're breathing down his neck for everything these days and he doesn't need any more problems. Gabriel would like to make his life less hard, but the truth is that he doesn't feel like it. He doesn't feel much, lately. It's like watching other people's lives from behind a frosted glass. The only thing that feels real is the burning energy within himself, and only when it can feed off Tommy's.

“Several Mantids have been spotted in London,” his father says. “They move through the sewers and their number grows by the day, so it's probably a nest. The London Institute requested help because they simply don't have the means to take care of the problem right now. One of the two adult Shadowhunters in charge there has been injured and they have twenty-five children in training to take care of. I have some men to spare in Alicante. I can put together a team that will go with you and Thomas.”

“No need for that. I'll go alone,” Gabriel says.

“The hell you are,” Thomas stands up, immediately.

Gabriel can feel how outraged he is at the mere idea, how in pain. It's not just a connection between them anymore, it's something deeper, something scarier. Thomas' feelings don't emanate from his body anymore, Gabriel can feel them as if they were his own. Sometimes he could swear he can hear Thomas' voice in his head as if he was talking to him. They alternate moments where they are unusually in-tune to moments where they have an hive mind. The moments where they are fully themselves, two separate beings, are fewer and fewer. This has to stop, and the only solution is for him to go as far away as possible.

“We have our own demons to think about,” Gabriel says calmly, still refusing to look at Thomas. He knows that the moment their eyes meet, he will stay. Or he will do something else equally stupid. “There are nests all over the city, we can't both leave. Thomas will stay and take care of those.”

There are still so few of them – re-population being a very slow process – that demons are proliferating and demon activity has spiked in the past few years. They don't have enough people to face a real invasion if it comes to that, so they better keep the demon population in check as long as they can. And he knows his father knows that.

“I'm not gonna stay here if you go—“

“Gabriel is right, Thomas. We can't afford to send you both,” Alec intervenes as Gabriel thought he would. “But I still think he needs a team.”

“I do not,” Gabriel stands up, making clear that he won't discuss this any further.
And even if he feels a sadness, which is not his own, and a raging fury, which he shares in part, he leaves the room without sparing a single glance to his parabatai.

*

It turns out that there are several Mantid nests throughout London and that the demons are chipping away at the city's foundations to make room for more of them. The head of the London's institute is so in over his head in bureaucracy, children's training and the general impossibility of running such an important Institute alone that he shares with any other head of institute nowadays that he doesn't dwell on the fact that Gabriel is alone, he's just happy that he came. He apologizes because he doesn't have any back-up to offer him and sends him on his way.

But Gabriel needs no back up. He can smell those things from miles away and he follows their stench down in the sewers. He hunts them down one by one, leaving a subterranean trail of ichor from Westminster to Mayfair. Mantid nests are hard to find, though. They are always hidden and well protected, made not to lure preys in, as Mantids devour their food on the spot and don't set it aside for later, but to hatch eggs and take refuge when they need to.

So Gabriel finds a group of those creatures. There are six of them in total, enough to wipe out a whole team of nephilim in such a small space. He doesn't even care to move silently to take them by surprise. He just steps into the tunnel, something making a bone-crunching sound when he crashes it with his boots. All six demons turn at the same time, cocking their triangular heads to the side, almost in confusion. They look like giant, monstrous nuns with their long arms joined as if in prayer.

It's only a moment, then they open their mouth, showing rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth and they launch on him. They click all excited, knowing that he can't outrun them in their home now that they saw him. But Gabriel doesn't want to run. He doesn't even move. He lets them fall upon him, scratch and bite because the closer they are, the easier it is to severe their limbs and heads.

His seraph blade cuts through their chitinous bodies like butter and he rejoices in the screeching sounds they make as they collapse on the ground all around him. The ichor burns his skin wherever he's not protected by the gear, but he doesn't care. He uses that pain to fuel his anger, to become more aggressive, more vicious, more merciless, until he's not happy unless they seem to cry and plead with him to stop with their pallid milky eyes. They start to retreat and he goes after them. He came here to seek and he will destroy.

For a long blissful moment he's at peace, lost in training and war and the sacred purpose the Angel gave to him and those like him. Until he realizes that there's a second heartbeat to his heart. Suddenly, he can feel another energy filling his body and making his legs swifter, his cuts more neat. Thomas is as graceful as he's massive, together they are a perfect machine that can impact on the enemy with surgical precision.

They kill all the Mantids but one, so it can run and guide them to its nest.

There are hundreds of those creatures, but they don't care. They smile and they unleash themselves upon the demons like the wrath of God they are supposed to be. Within seconds it is a bloodbath the Mantids can't escape. It's hard for those creatures to keep slashing at them if they don't feel pain and keep marching on despite the cuts and bruises, easily avoiding the worst attacks and simply welcoming the smaller ones on their skin. They feel no pain as the energy pulsates stronger within their body.

Gabriel wakes up as the last demon is still twitching on the ground. Some time along the night, he relieved it of its legs and arms and its screeching is reverberating eerily against the tunnel's walls.

Thomas is still there, Gabriel can feel him in every fiber of his body, confusing his thoughts and yet making him complete. It's not an alien presence, but something of his that was missing and now is back. It's hard to shrug it off himself – if it's even possible – when he feels that without it, he would crumble and die.
A parabatai bond is strong, but never follows you across an ocean like this.

*

Oren is there when he comes out of the sewers, drenched in ichor and blood. He reaches out for him and Gabriel grabs his hand because he needs something real to hold on to, however real a fairy can be. As he touches his fair skin, he feels Thomas receding within himself, and yet raging harder.

Silently, Oren leads him away from the blood, somehow. They were on the streets one moment and now there's a garden, and Gabriel doesn't know, nor he wants to know, how they transitioned from one place to the other. He wouldn't care if the stretch of water now wetting their feet had boiled up from the ground.

Oren's skin is pale and almost glowing under the moonlight, which is so much more favorable to fairy people. He looks unreal as he sheds his clothes, remaining only in what would pass for bathing shorts if they weren't made of leaves. “Come,” he invites him.

Gabriel takes off what's left of his own clothes and follows him in the water.

Oren wants to bathe him, Gabriel only wants to touch him, and so he does as the fairy cleans his wounds and washes away the traces of what happened in the sewers. “Make it all go away,” Gabriel whispers in his ear as he leans forward to kiss his neck.

Oren doesn't speak – he never does when they have sex, unless Gabriel asks him to – and he works his magic on him, making him anew. Gabriel's hands find their way under Oren's pants, they tear them apart, and he feels them dissolve in water. He doesn't stop to think how that works. As many other times tonight, he doesn't care.

Oren feels soft under his callous hands, and Gabriel can pretend he also feels right. Oren is comfort more than desire, lust more than affection, and he's certainly not love, but he is what Gabriel needs right now. A yielding body that doesn't fight him for every inch of skin to conquer. Lips that welcome his kisses. Legs that part for him, willingly and compliantly. Oren is something he doesn't have to fight for, with or against. Something that he took for himself some months ago and that now remains his to do what he pleases with whenever he wants.

There's no complicity between them, just Gabriel's need and Oren's natural ability to welcome it.

Oren's body feels full in his hands and yet he weighs nothing, as if his bird-like bones were hollow. He pulls him up, the water splashing softly around them. Oren dutifully latches his arms and legs around him as Gabriel thrusts hard inside of him, once, twice, three times, just to make room for himself. The smallest whimper escapes his fairy lips as he hides his face against Gabriel's neck.

“Be quiet,” he growls, thrusting harder once again. Oren's voice would destroy the shard of peace he has found between his legs. In his moans of pleasure, Thomas would scream louder. Silence scares him away, instead, as it makes it easy to feel everything.

Oren shivers as he holds onto him tighter. His knees dig into Gabriel's hips, his nails into his back as Gabriel forces his way into his body, one thrust after the other. Oren is so small that he looks like Gabriel could break him, which is what pushes him forward, makes him hungrier: the fact that he could destroy him and that he won't because fairies are tougher than they seem.

However small, however frail.

Gabriel holds the smaller fairy by his hips and pushes him upon his erection, barely coming out of his body every time. He finds his rhythm in breaking Oren's breathing. He moves at the erratic sound of his heartbeat, at his gasps and wheezes. At some point the fairy throws his head back in bliss, but Gabriel keeps on going and going. Only when Oren's body is limp in his arms, he's finally content and he releases himself. As he fills him up, he can feel the rest of the energy leave his body as well.

He's finally alone again.
*

“How did you find me?” Gabriel asks as they get out of the water. They're both naked and unashamed of it. That kind of awkwardness between them was lost the first time Gabriel assaulted him months ago, if there ever has been.

“I followed the smell of your despair,” Oren says, lying on the grass next to him. He presses his body against Gabriel's in search of warmth and he welcomes him in his arms. “You reeked of it, you know? That is your way of calling upon me.”

The greatest thing about Faerie is that you can access it from anywhere as it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. “Are we still in London?” He asks.

Oren shrugs. “Yes and no,” he answers, and Gabriel knows it's the truest answer he can give him, even if it's probably not the most exact. “Did you come all the way across the pond to escape temptations or have you already succumbed to them?”

“I came here to do a job.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

Gabriel groans and rolls over, covering him with his massive body. “Can we not talk about it?” He asks against Oren's neck. As he was so gracious to ask nicely, he expects to be obeyed, but he should know better. Oren is only obliging when Gabriel has something to give him, and merciless when it's over.

“That energy won't go away, no matter how many times you mount me,” he goes on.

“By the Angel,” Gabriel groans again and he rolls away from him.

“I'm serious, Gabe.”

“Don't call me that.”

Oren sighs and gets closer again. He drapes himself against his back and strokes his hair, gently. “Lightwood,” he corrects himself. “Is that any better? But the facts don't change. It will grow in time and it will feed on you two.” Gabriel grows very still under his fingers. “It already did, didn't it?”

“Can we not—“

“I'm just worried!”

Orien hits him on his head and Gabriel winces. “You have a very weird way to show it.”

“The same you have,” Oren sighs. “Running away from him will only break his heart as this connection between you two certainly won't break. Staying and facing it is the only way out you have.”

Gabriel remains stubbornly quiet. He opened up in the lake – in the only way he knows how – and now he's back inside himself, his body an impenetrable fortress. “Just promise me something, alright?” Oren says softly, leaving butterfly kisses along his spine. “If it gets worse than this, come to me. I can help.”

As many other times before, he can't promise him this.
So he doesn't.