Oh geez, guys, I almost don't want to say it. But...

This is the last chapter.

And holy shit, guys. 316,175 words. That's longer than every single Harry Potter book [individually] and almost a thousand more than the first three [combined]. I might be cheating a little since I shoved six of them together into this story, but still.

Almost fourteen months and 8800 of you guys later, here we are.

I can't believe I actually wrote this entire thing. Much less that it became one of my most popular stories. I absolutely never expected this when I started writing it. To be honest, my main motivation behind this story at first was the fact that I'd just finished Twists of Fate and wasn't ready to stop writing Gabriel. But this has evolved into a huge story with such an enthusiastic following and I'm amazed at myself for writing something that so many people love so much.

This has been a fucking adventure, and I'm really sad that it's over [OF COURSE THERE'S ALWAYS THE EXTRA STUFF THAT TAKES PLACE LATER IN THIS 'VERSE THAT'S PROBABLY GOING TO END UP AS A SERIES OF FICLETS BUT YOU DIDN'T HEAR IT FROM ME].

I'm not really sure what to say, except that I've loved writing this and you guys have made it even better.

Gabriel had been perfectly fine with staying in the bed.

In theory. But doing nothing but lying there was so. Boring. He'd barely lasted through the night before the urge to get up had swamped him. Michael, though, had given him a narrow-eyed stare like ne knew exactly what Gabriel was thinking.

That, and his chest was still so sore that just sitting up was an adventure in pain tolerance levels and how much he could push them.

It wasn't as though he'd been left alone - Castiel and Muriel had returned near midnight, having finished with the demons Paimon and Belial had mustered. Most of the other angels who had been recruited [very few of whom Gabriel had actually seen] had returned to Heaven.

Aziraphale popped in from somewhere - most likely the Hogwarts library - and when Balthazar made his way in the sun was casting yellow squares through the windows and Gabriel had demanded that someone get some more pillows to prop him up because it was really awkward lying down and trying to talk to people.

"You look like crap," Balthazar said, settling onto the end of his bed.

"Thanks," Gabriel said dryly.

"You took a while to come back," Michael noted.

"I went by Gabriel's place," Balthazar said. "Thought I'd make sure the wards held. There was some nastiness around there the other night."

Gabriel's attention locked onto him. "No one's-"

"They're all fine," Balthazar said. "None of them went outside, as far as I can tell. I told them you might take a while to come back, and then they demanded an explanation as to why."

"Oh." Thoughts of going back and having to explain what had happened hadn't even crossed Gabriel's mind.

"They're worried," Balthazar said eventually when Gabriel stayed silent. "I had to talk them out of trying to come here to visit you."

"Not a good idea," Michael said. "Those boys climb all over you."

"They wouldn't if they knew I was hurt," Gabriel said, but he really wasn't in the mood for a ton of visitors, family or not. "Thanks, though," he told Balthazar. "For letting them know what happened."

"Not a problem," Balthazar said honestly, which was at least two surprises in one. "I mean you're hardly in a situation where you can do it yourself."

"Don't remind me." Gabriel let his head tip back so he was staring at the ceiling, which wasn't very interesting. "If Michael has their way I'll be here forever."

"If it takes that long for you to heal." There was a smile on Michael's face.

"Psshh, I'll be outta here in no time." Gabriel turned to look at the two of them.

"Sure," Balthazar deadpanned. "Meanwhile I suppose it's now my job to make sure none of your kids manage to sneak in here and cause chaos."

"We're not even in the same country as they are," Michael said.

"They're Gabriel's kids."

"Yeah, Michael," Gabriel said. "Come on. You think I wouldn't pass on this ingenuity?"

"You call it ingenuity," Michael said. "I doubt anyone else does."

"What do you call it, then?"

"Causing trouble?" Balthazar suggested.

"Not really," Michael said. "I was going to say it's more like you have a tendency for disaster."

Gabriel snorted and immediately regretted it when it managed to trigger a strike of pain in his chest. "Usually I manage to get out of whatever disaster I'm in the middle of."

"The fact that you say 'usually' and not 'all the time' proves my point."

"Yeah, yeah, fine. You can say I'm wrong all you want, I'm still right."

It manifests first as an itch.

It's just one more thing on a whole list of things that have been plaguing Gabriel the whole time he's been stuck in this stupid bed [there's one time every day where the sun comes through the windows at exactly the right angle to shine in his eyes. Michael's usually there so Gabriel can't just snap up a pair of curtains, and when he complained Michael just raised nir eyebrows and told him to deal with it].

So he ignored it, dismissing it as a symptom of him being low on Grace again and still injured.

Except it didn't go away like he was pretty sure most itches did.

"Why do you keep doing that?" Aziraphale asked at some point the day after Balthazar showed up.

"Doing what?" Gabriel had kicked his blankets aside earlier, leaving them half hanging off the bed and him enjoying not having his feet stuck under the blanket. He was hardly hanging off the bed, but to be honest he'd done it just to have something to do.

"You keep scratching your arm," Aziraphale said. Michael glanced up from nir book, giving Gabriel a once-over.

"I'm fine," Gabriel said dismissively. "It's just an-"

He looked down at his arm and froze.

Fuck. Nothing could go right for him, could it?

Michael was next to him in a second. Gabriel had clamped one hand over the irritated spot - reflex and some sort of panic, like that was going to do anything to fix it - but Michael shoved it off his arm.

Ne stared, for a moment, then swore [ne seemed to be doing that a lot lately]. "What the fuck?"

"Oh, dear." Aziraphale was hovering behind Michael. "You don't think it's because of-"

"Because of what?" Michael rounded on Aziraphale. "If you-"

"Aziraphale didn't do anything," Gabriel interrupted, rolling off the bed. If he went fast -

Ow. It still hurt, but at least he'd managed to stand without bending at the waist.

"Gabriel-"

"Don't tell me to lie back down, my vessel's wearing through," Gabriel snapped.

"I can tell you whatever I want and you need to listen," Michael retorted. "What did you do, if Aziraphale wasn't involved?"

"That may be an exaggeration," Aziraphale muttered. "To say I wasn't involved, that is."

"Then explain!"

"Chill out for three seconds, Michael." The look leveled at Gabriel for that comment wasn't enough to dissuade him. "It was a backup plan."

"A backup plan," Michael repeated. "What kind of-"

"I took the magic core out."

Unadulterated shock flashed across Michael's face, then came back and stayed for good. "You what?"

"It was a good plan!" Gabriel said defensively. "It worked! Didn't you wonder why it looked like something exploded?"

"You're telling me you used your own magic as an explosive?"

"Technically it's not even mine!" Gabriel gestured widely and then winced when the movement pulled at his chest.

"And this somehow made your vessel fragile enough that this happened?" Michael gestured sharply at Gabriel's arm where, very clearly, his Grace was wearing through the body he was contained in.

"It was noted that that might be a side effect," Aziraphale muttered. "Not in quite so specific words, but..."

"Whatever!" Michael snapped.

"It worked," Gabriel repeated. "Loosing one vessel isn't the end of the world."

"You're still hurt-"

"Yeah, and I'm still gonna be hurt when this vessel wears through, and we all know what's gonna happen if I'm still here when that happens." An archangel suddenly without a vessel? Not pretty.

"You can't just shoot off and find a new one," Michael protested.

"I don't need to," Gabriel replied immediately.

"You don't?" Aziraphale looked baffled. "Have you been keeping track of the bloodline?"

Michael's brows drew down sharply over nir eyes. "Tell me you don't mean Adam."

"No, I am not planning on possessing Adam Milligan." Gabriel restrained his impatience and concentrated on trying to find where his shoes had gone. "My last vessel didn't wear out, I just had to ditch it." The memory crossed his mind again and Gabriel ignored it. He wasn't about to explain how he'd managed to lie to even himself.

"Oh, so you're only planning on crossing universes." Michael had crossed nir arms. "For a vessel you don't even know is still there-"

"Where else would it have gone?" He'd been planning on going back a few years to make sure - and who wanted a vessel that had been lying around for ages in a rotting hotel?

"I'm coming with you."

"No."

"You're still hurt-"

"I know," Gabriel snapped. "I can do this on my own, you know. I'll come back afterwards so you can get your fill of worried fretting or whatever."

"This is too dangerous-"

"It is not dangerous, you're just being paranoid."

"You haven't recovered," Michael retorted. "You're still low on Grace and it's going to be difficult enough to use it properly even if you were at full power-"

"Let me do one thing where you're not hovering over me, Michael. I'm not going to drop dead if I fly somewhere!"

"I'm trying to stop you from making your injury even worse-"

"I know what I'm doing!" Gabriel was sick of Michael being such a mother hen [and wasn't that something he'd never seen coming]. "Contrary to whatever you seem to believe about me. I need a new vessel, and I can do it without 'making myself worse', thank you very much."

Michael visibly hesitated. "Fine," ne said reluctantly. "But you'd better come back quickly."

"I'll probably hang around there for a little while afterwards." He would need some time to recover. "If I'm gone longer than a week then feel free to panic, but I'll probably be fine."

"What about Harry Potter?" Aziraphale questioned.

Both archangels turned to look at him. Gabriel glanced at Michael - nope, ne didn't look like they understood what Aziraphale was talking about either.

"What about him?" Michael asked. "He's dead, isn't he?"

"For a while," Gabriel said.

"Yes," Aziraphale said, "but I thought everyone was under the impression that you were him? If you suddenly vanish, then the wizarding world is going to have questions."

Right.

Fuck.

"One thing," Gabriel muttered. "All I need is for one thing to go right for me for once. Fine. I'll make a pit stop."

"To do what?" Aziraphale looked puzzled.

"Fake Harry Potter's death. Obviously."

The Elysian Hotel.

Five years previously, or something like that, in that universe's timeline.

Fucking hell.

Gabriel had practically inched backwards through time, getting warier and warier the closer he got. The last thing he wanted was to run into Lucifer - again.

He ended up within an hour of the hotel being completely abandoned.

It had reverted to the old, half-destroyed state - there weren't any gods around to keep it pristine anymore.

There were still traces of power in the building - frayed, faint traces of gods.

And archangels.

Gabriel [vessel-less and probably scorching the walls and floors and ceilings as he passed] did his best to avoid the latter. The lingering cold spots didn't do anything to help him.

More of the exact opposite, really, given his newly rediscovered memories.

Gabriel moved on.

His vessel was where he'd left it - sprawled on the floor. Gabriel hovered for a moment. Baldur was still where he'd been thrown, tossed into the corner - not Baldur, though, just the physical remains of what he'd been.

There wasn't much blood around his former vessel.

The room was dark but Gabriel could make out the stains clear as day - ashy imprints burned into the floor, onto part of the tablecloth when he'd spread them in a desperate attempt to yank himself away.

It hadn't worked.

Gabriel shivered, or at least made a movement that was a close approximation of it, but he couldn't look away when he didn't technically have eyes.

Gabriel sank into the vessel, Grace and the rest of him piling in and filling in all the little corners. It fit like that one old t-shirt every human seemed to have, worn to the shape of him from so many years of use and as comfortable as a vessel was ever going to be for someone whose true form was the size of Jupiter.

Taking vessels involved a certain amount of bending the laws of physics to be able to fit in them, but Gabriel knew what he was doing.

When he inhaled, his lungs itched with the dust that was heavy on the air. At least it wasn't disuse - technically, the last time he'd inhabited the body he'd returned to was half an hour ago.

His back felt unusually sore. There was ash in the air, too, and the smell of it seemed to have permeated everything. The room smelled like a wildfire, and it didn't help that Gabriel had burned part of the doorway coming through in his true form.

Gabriel fumbled, feeling out of place and yet perfectly situated in his body. His fingers found a damp spot on his shirt - just over his stomach - that made him pause, nervousness winning for a moment.

He healed it in a second, blood vanishing, body knitting back together, but he still lay there for a few moments to convince himself that he really was fine.

He didn't try to sit up. Gabriel rolled over, figuring that he could push himself to his feet, and only realized how much of a bad idea that was when he was put literally face-to-face with the scorched imprint of his own wings.

Gabriel closed his eyes, stretched his wings just to reassure himself [they, at least, didn't hurt] and used the table to pull himself to his feet.

He blinked, standing still for a few moments and trying to reorient himself. Even a few moments without a vessel had seriously affected his orientation in one. "I got this," he muttered to himself.

He still felt like shit, though. He could tell that his injury from Belial was going to leave a mark on this vessel, too - it was bad enough.

A breeze drifted through the room, stirring up more dust and ash, and it felt unusually cool on his back. Gabriel snapped his fingers. The jacket and shirt knit themselves back together where the fabric had been burned away, changing to become something different - he liked the jacket, sure, but it would just be weird to walk away wearing the exact same thing he'd worn then.

The use of Grace pulled at what he had left uncomfortably - he'd already used more than he really should have, setting up his last vessel and then coming here. However loath he was to admit it, Michael had been right about that much.

Well.

He had a week to himself to let his Grace recharge, and a little brother hanging out with some humans who could probably use someone messing with them.

Gabriel knew he was late.

He'd meant to be. He'd arrived a while after the service had started, leaning casually against a tree on the hill that sloped up from the graveyard, a separate party than those grouped among the tombstones.

Most of the funeral party had gathered in the church next door. Not because they were Christan - he really doubted any of them had even heard of the idea that they, technically, could be - but because it was the nearest building that had offered to house them afterwards.

Gabriel passed over the fence easily, making his way towards where there was a freshly overturned plot. He stopped at the side of it, not willing to step on grave dirt.

It was probably rude, and Gabriel reflected that it was a rare occasion where he knew someone he wasn't willing to be that rude to.

The tombstone itself was pure white, like the double one next to it, and probably made of marble.

Harry Potter

July 31, 1998 - June 20, 2015

The date was wrong. Gabriel considered changing it, but someone would probably change it back once they noticed. After all, as far as most of the wizarding world was concerned, Harry Potter had lived to be nearly seventeen.

Not one year old.

"You had kind of a sucky life," Gabriel told the grave. "Sorry about the whole possessing you thing. Not personal."

He patted the grave and turned around, meaning to leave.

"I don't mind." The voice was very young.

Gabriel turned back around.

"What are you still doing here?"

The spirit perched on top of the gravestone regarded him curiously. The boy's attention only lasted so long - he looked down at what he was sitting on, one hand reaching down towards the name.

"That's me." He sounded fascinated.

"Yep," Gabriel said. "I thought you were gone?" He had thought that the last he would see of Harry Potter was when the spirit had given him permission to use him as a vessel.

Harry didn't answer him. Just looked thoughtfully at his name, carved into stone.

The spirit vanished in a wash of blue, fading away on the wind and drifting upwards.

Gabriel huffed out a laugh. Even dead, Harry Potter still managed to surprise him.

"Have a nice afterlife, kid."

He turned on his heel and made his way towards the gate.

Gabriel paused just outside the fence, taking in his surroundings. Godric's Hollow, while home to a current funeral party, was still alive with the rest of the town out and about. A nearby window cast golden light onto the ground, competing with the remnants of sunlight that cast everything in a reddish gold tint and sent long shadows stretching across the ground.

He could tell there were plenty of people making the most of the night that was about to descend, having fun and with no plans to return home until much, much later in the night. It wasn't even night yet - evening was when people were first going out and barely even tipsy.

Gabriel wasn't much in the mood to join that crowd, at the moment. Chronic pain had a way of dampening a person's urge to party.

Whatever decision he might have made was made for him when someone shouted out from behind him. "Gabriel!"

Hermione looked hugely relieved to see him. She threw her arms around him, hugging [gently - Michael must have warned her].

"Nice to see you, too," Gabriel said, patting her back awkwardly - she'd trapped his arms at his sides. "How'd you know it was me?"

"I pointed you out." Michael came up behind her as Hermione let go. "I thought you'd be here sooner."

"Not a fan of funerals," Gabriel said. "They're depressing."

Hermione shrugged and made a face in a way that probably meant 'fair enough'. "You're alright?"

"Good as new." Gabriel spread his arms. "New and improved vessel, too - well, not really new, but it's definitely an improvement."

Hermione smiled at that. "I didn't think you would come back," she said. "You never seemed like you were the biggest fan of the magical world."

"Oh, come on." Gabriel grinned. "How could I leave without saying goodbye?"

"Are you leaving?" Michael asked.

Gabriel shrugged. "I dunno. I'd hate to displace the kids. They seem to like London."

"I'm glad," Hermione said. "I'd hate not to see you again."

"I'd visit."

"Not the same," she replied, still smiling. "And I'm demanding that you keep in touch."

"Okay."

"With a reasonable amount of time in between visits."

"I do know how to manage my social life."

"Reasonable for a human."

Gabriel laughed. "You've got everything covered, haven't you?"

"I learn."

"What are you going to do?" Michael asked. "If you're not staying in the magical world."

"Eh," Gabriel said, "I'll think of something."

If you like soundtracks, listen to Taylor Davis's cover of 'The Last Goodbye' during that last scene. Trust me.

It's been wild, guys.

Thank you.