Gabriel Big Bang -- Birds of Passage

[neotoma]

Title: Birds of Passage
Author: neotoma
Artist: cashay
Genre/Pairing: (slash & drama), Sam/Gabriel/Vessel
Rating: NC-17
Word count: ~61,000
Warnings/Spoilers: gore/animal sacrifice, gore, implied past abuse, gore/torture, homophobia/transphobia, set post-S5 SPN/ S1 Jericho
Author's Notes Written for the gabriel_bigbang. I'm taking shameless advantage of the fact that Richard Speight Jr. played Deputy Bill on Jericho for this crossover...
Cheerleading by owleyes_arisen andmikhala_c, proofreading by greenygal, Russian help from alpheratz, and Norse help from ellen_fremedon




Summary: Lucifer is back in his Cage, but one averted Apocalypse doesn't mean much in the face of another, more human one. Sam Winchester, the Archangel Gabriel, and a man millennia out of his own time have wandered into a small Kansas town, where they get to deal with tree thieves, suspicious sheriffs, shady characters, political in-fighting, looming starvation, and the occasional pagan deity passing through. It's just one damn thing on top of another after The End of the World. [Crossover with JERICHO (tv series)]

Prologue: I will lay my burden in the cradle of your grace
Part One: Every highway leads you prodigal
Part Two: Strange dances long undone
Part Three: The twigs and briars
Part four: Blood in the service of the lord of hosts
Part Five: Only the rain knows
Part Six: A voice on the wind, and the wages of sin
Part Seven: every backroad in that broken promise land
Epilogue: A dime and a dollar and a one-way ticket home

Link to art: http://cashay.livejournal.com/17549.html
Also at AO3, if you prefer to read it in one chunk without the art.

Comments

[catyuy]

OMG you posted it!!!!
And damnit I'm at work. *will sneak read when no one is here*

[neotoma]

It's over 60,000 words, sweetie. You might do better to wait until you get off work. :D

I think you can download the file from AO3 and load it onto an e-reader if you have one.

[rakasha]

CONGRATULATIONS! I started reading this literally seconds before I got your email; feel proud of yourself. Feel very, very proud of yourself - you deserve it, every little bit! This was wonderful, and you even managed to sneak that one extra scene in there... Just lovely.

I do have one question, though - a griffin?

[neotoma]

I think I wrote the longest story in the entire fest...

Yup, a griffin. Dante used a griffin to symbolize the blending of human and divine (of course, he was talking about Jesus Christ, not Sam Winchester...) so why not?

[greenygal]

Congratulations, it's finally done (all 60,000 plus words of it)! *breaks out the champagne and confetti for you*

[neotoma]

Thanks to you and ellen_frememdon and everyone who listened to me babble about this for *months*.

I have no idea what I'm going to do next. Something fluffier, I hope...

[greenygal]

Oh, well, you're interesting when you babble. *g*

I have no idea what I'm going to do next. Something fluffier, I hope...

The ostriches are calling to you...

[neotoma]

Ostriches will be a lot of fun and a lot of work, because writing teenage boys? Not actually a talent of mine.

I need a goofy, fluffy plot...

[fyrdrakken]

Hooray! I look forward to reading it, as soon as I download it from AO3 to my Blackberry...

[neotoma]

Ooo, you're taking it mobile! Tell me how that works out?

[fyrdrakken]

I read a lot of fic (especially long fic) on my Blackberry, using either the Kindle app or MobiPocket, and AO3 is great because I can download the entire story as a single MOBI file directly to my Blackberry from my mobile browser without having to load files to Calibre on my netbook and convert them to MOBI and then load them to the phone. (And if I'm using MobiPocket to read it, the links still work -- handy if the story turns out to be part of a series, for instance.)

[neotoma]

That sounds very useful. I hope you enjoy the story when you get the time to read it.

[mikhala_c.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!
Just as awesome reading the finished product as it was cheerleading for you.Even being unfamiliar with Jericho I enjoyed this alot. You already know I love Hrafn. ^_^
Good Job!

[neotoma]

Thanks Mikhala. Now that I'm finished with this, I can write something else -- hopefully Ostriches, and probably more of Knights as well.

[cradle-song.livejournal.com]

Holy fucking hell I am just speechless at the sheer awesome of this story. I'm not a huge fan of Sam or even Gabriel really, but this totally made me love them. And Jericho, yes, I always thought that should be crossed with SPN. They blew up Lawrence for chrissakes!

Anyway. Yes. This is just fucking fantastic, thank you so much for writing it!

[neotoma]

Thank you! It was a lot of fun to write. Crossing over Jericho and Supernatural is actually kind of tricky, since one is a Hard SF and the other is Religious Horror, and so they don't actually mesh easily, but I figured I had wiggle room because of Jake's hallucinations in Season 2 -- the vision of his grandfather could be interpreted as supernatural.

Cashay did a great job with the art, don't you think? She even got a secret message in Morse Code in the cover.