A/N: So funny story, I sat down one day and thought "I should write a fluffy little romance bit for Gabriel." Nothing too big. Maybe 3, 4 chapters at the most.

20 chapters and an epilogue later, I'm pretty sure that plot bunny was laughing at me the whole time, and I blame it entirely on Gabriel! This went from fluffy romance to all out, full scale adventure/drama/angst/romance/family/whump/comfort story of Gabriel's life! facepalm. Thanks, Gabe.

A massive thanks goes out to the best beta reader I could have asked for, Aini NuFire, without whom this would have never been able to happen! Check out her fics for some WONDERFUL family feels and H/C between Team Free Will!

Canon characters belong to Eric Kripke and the SPN writers.

Prologue

Gabriel could pinpoint the precise moment that he had fallen in love with her.

He was neither the first nor the only angel to fall in love, though it wasn't common and it wasn't widely thought of as "love". After all, Gabriel loved all of the other angels. They were his brothers and sisters, in a manner of speaking, all created by the same God. But there was something about Eleanor. Something… more. Something special.

He'd been minding his own business – really, he was, he was completely innocent and already had an alibi prepared for when Michael discovered that someone had been teaching dirty words to the fledglings – and out of nowhere, he had heard music.

Gabriel was never one to let his curiosity go unsatisfied. Baffled, he followed the sound of the music and there she had been.

Eleanor.

Gabriel knew her, had spoken with her a bit in the past. She had been among the first of the angels created after the archangels, no longer a fledgling. He'd never seen her as extraordinary before – a quiet, nurturing, joyful type, who didn't seem to be intimidated by him as many of the lesser order of angels often were.

But what was the music?

"Uh… what is that?" he asked, peering around the little space of Heaven that Eleanor had carved out for herself. Her grace was shining so brightly that she was absolutely radiant with joy and elation, very nearly as bright as Lucifer himself. As soon as she heard his voice, Eleanor spun towards him. Her face lit up and she reached out and grabbed Gabriel's hand, pulling him in.

"Gabriel, I've figured it out!"

"You, uh… what? Where's that music coming from?" He saw no musical instruments whatsoever, just Eleanor and a funny looking picture on the ground. It wasn't a picture of anything, just a series of lines and swirls, but it seemed too deliberate to be idle doodling. "What's that?"

"Look! Come here, look!" The normally composed angel seemed almost beside herself with a giddiness that the stick-in-the-mud Raphael would have frowned upon. Gabriel, however, merely grinned at her exuberance and let her pull him over to the funny picture.

As he got closer, though, Gabriel blinked in surprise to discover that the music seemed to be emitting from the picture itself. What in Heaven was this? He'd never seen or heard anything like it.

"Isn't it amazing? It's taken me ages to figure it out! Look… these marks here are an opening to pull in their particular energy. This series of curves and corners here, you see these? It's to slow the momentum of the energy down so it doesn't explode from the force of their power. And- and these here! These are the buffers, to stabilize the captured energy and muffle the cosmic amplitude! And then these marks, you see this? This was the hardest part, I had to find a way to de-tune and re-tune the energy into a wavelength that's compatible with our aural abilities. And then here, this other opening in the symbol, that's where the music emits out. Gabriel, I've done it! I've finally done it, can you believe it?"

Gabriel blinked, trying to follow a word of what his sister had just said… but the only words that had stuck were "explode" and "music", the rest had all gone far over his head. She was just so excited, though, and he couldn't help but laugh slightly in surprise, then clear his throat.

"Okay, yeah, uh… you're gonna have to dumb that WAY down, sugar. You drew a picture that makes music?"

"No, no, Gabriel!" She didn't even seem to mind that he had no idea what she was talking about. Her enthusiasm and joy were over-powering, as she tugged on the archangel's hand, kneeling down over the symbol carved into the ground and urged, "Listen."

He listened. The music swelled, a pure, crystalline sound like nothing he had ever heard before. It was… perfect. There was something about that music, something so pure, so distant, so noble and perfect in a way that even the angels were not. It was ethereal, other-worldly, unreachable; the song had no words, only the melodies of something unimaginably cosmic, and the harmonies with intervals that couldn't possibly even exist.

It all fit together in magnificent, mind-blowing complexity that could have never been written down or replicated… a billion parts that should have never equaled one whole, and yet did.

The song was achingly, hauntingly perfect, and Gabriel felt a shock of awe race right through him, his entire being shaken to the core from the sheer beauty of what they were listening to.

"So… uh… you drew a picture that makes music?" he repeated with a smirk, to cover the overwhelming emotion that the song created in him. There was a faraway look in Eleanor's eyes, though, and she shook her head.

"Not a picture. A… a sigil. I think it's called a sigil. Gabriel… I've done it. The energy running through this sigil comes from the stars."

Whoa. Gabriel blinked, feeling dizzy and weak as he sat back on the ground and stared at Eleanor. He didn't understand. "The… stars?" But stars were just burning balls of gas, they made no sound and they certainly didn't make any music.

Eleanor turned to him, face so radiant, eyes so bright, such a pure and wholehearted joy evident in her bearing as she whispered, "Don't you understand? The stars are singing to Him. This sigil allows us to hear them. Gabriel, this music is their song, and we're listening to them."

She exhaled softly in a quiet laugh, as dazed and awed as Gabriel himself. "Gabriel, we're listening to the stars!"

And that was the precise moment that Gabriel fell in love.