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"Instead, you turned into an octopus both times. But with fewer arms," Gabriel says with a ghost of a smile before another sip of his drink.

"Shut your face," Dean mumbles, although there's no real malice there. He frowns into his beer, glancing at the drink in Gabriel's hand. "What's that you've got there?"

"Something Thor makes. You don't want it. It's meant for getting Pagans drunk, not humans." In other words, Dean would give himself alcohol poisoning in fairly short order with it.

"You know how much regular liquor it takes to get me drunk at this point?" Dean says, raising his eyebrows at him. "I'd pee most of it out before it had any kind of effect."

Gabriel gives Dean an unimpressed look. "And this would kill you a whole lot faster than your usual."

"You hear me complaining?" Dean says, looking unimpressed right back at him. "Fine. Puny human can't handle your big god liquor. I get it."

"Shut up and drink your beer," Gabriel grouses, taking another swig of his own drink.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm drinkin' it," he mutters, but he does take several drinks from the bottle, letting silence fall for a moment. "You know, I don't think many people've ever seen you so serious as much as I have recently. Got somethin' on your mind?"

"Being the only archangel left sucks," he finally settles on after several minutes of silence.

The look Dean gives him is actually sympathetic. After all, it's kind of his and Sam's fault that there are no other archangels left.

"Sorry you had to make that choice at all," he says, voice low. "It wasn't damn fair."

"Nope. It wasn't. And I've found myself back in my old role of mediator. The one I've told you about." Time for a long drink of booze.

"Funny, huh?" Dean says with a humorless huff of laughter. "You spent all that time trying to avoid it only to wind up on the front lines in the end."

He watches him drink.

"That's why you're spendin' all this time around us, isn't it? To try and deal with it as best you can. We help you forget or remember, Gabriel?"

"Yes," he answers after the bottle is empty. He gives it a slightly mournful look before snapping it away. Another two or three bottles and he'll start feeling it, he thinks.

"Sorry you don't have a better option than us out there," he says earnestly, draining his own bottle and holding it up in a questioning gesture. Maybe they both needed to get blitzed with this kind of conversation going on.

Gabriel refills Dean's, figuring that was what he wanted before stealing another from the stash and dusting it off. "There's definitely worse choices."

He gives Dean a sideways look. "I could always take us somewhere before we get tanked so Sam doesn't have to deal with us."

"Good plan," Dean immediately agrees, pleased to see his drink refreshed. He pulls out his phone to shoot his brother a text. "Somewhere with a couch or comfy chair'd be nice."

He's not going to argue with the point that there are worse choices than the Winchester brothers. Even though he secretly thinks there aren't.

"Know what the nice thing about New York City is? It's so full of people and things that go bump in the night that hunters don't know where to even start," he says with a grin as a way of telling Dean where they're going before reaching out and lightly laying a hand on him arm as he takes them to the couch of the same apartment as on New Year's.

Dean blinks as he registers that they've moved, then takes in where they are. He shakes his head with a little snort.

"Feelin' nostalgic, are we?" he asks.

"Hey, I haven't done anything in town, so I haven't had to move," Gabriel protests as he opens bottle number two and takes a swig.

"And here I would've thought that the Big Apple would have tons of people just waitin' to be 'taught a lesson,'" Dean chuckles, going over to the window to look out. Seriously, he and Sam didn't spend enough time in the big cities of America. He added that to 'vacation at the beach' for when they were finished with the next big thing. "Not that I blame you for wantin' to hang around."

"I tend to behave myself in the places I actually want to stay in for awhile," Gabriel comments drily. "I'll probably get up to my tricks at whatever point I feel like I could skip being here for a century or so."

"And why would anyone wanna do that?" Dean says, looking at the lights of the city. "This place is kinda awesome. Always somethin' going on...in a good way."

"If I went by that logic, I'd probably still be in London. Well, I might have finally bugged out when the Blitz hit, but." He shrugs. "For the record, this is the borough that's laid out in a grid pattern. Some of the others have so many hills and turns keeping you from being able to see where you're going very well, you'll get the chance to become hopelessly lost if you're not familiar with the area. And probably slowly hating the area the longer you're there. So if you feel like hitting up, say, Brooklyn, use public transportation. Oh yeah, and you'll have a hell of a time finding somewhere to park the Impala."

Dean snorts at the load of information.

"That's one of the perks of havin' an archangel on our side, isn't it?" he says, glancing at him over his shoulder. "Free digs and parking in New York City. I can deal with that."

He's not going to ask why Gabriel simply left London during a time when it could have probably used his help. Some things are better left unexplored.

"Got any clubs you'd recommend here?"

He said he would have if he was still there. He actually left sometime earlier than that. By at least two centuries. Not to mention that people might take a little too much notice of anything he did.

"I was referring more to the fact that cars are generally smaller than your car these days. So smaller parking spaces." Good luck finding anywhere to parallel park.

Now an eyebrow goes up. "Planning to abandon me to pick up chicks?"

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