Characters not mine.

(Originally written for a "temptations" challenge on comment_fic.)

He wasn't entirely certain when it started.

Okay, it probably started at some point during the whole mystery spot thing, but there had to be some kind of impetus before he decided to give Sam his whole Wise Old Mentoring routine. He just wasn't entirely certain what it was.

Possibly it was just the sheer physical difference between the two of them, because Dad knew that a giant like Sam was pretty striking. Possibly it was because he knew something about the Winchesters' past and had a few glimpses of what the future might be like, and Gabriel had some idea what it was like to be the son who wanted to run but kept getting pulled back in in the end. Possibly it was just the part of him that was a contrary little brother, fascinated by whatever it was that Luci wanted so badly.

He didn't know, and if he had been given to introspection, well. . . .

Tricksters didn't do introspection. Especially not Trickster-archangels-with-a-little-bit-of-conscience-left-in-them-still. Because if he really thought about the things he did, about how it was so easy to think of the people he ran into as either schmucks or tools, then he might just see a little more of Michael and Lucifer in himself than he wanted to, and he was done with that. And if he went any deeper than that, he would have to question whether running away had been as much cowardice as it was a tactical retreat because he was so damn tired. It was so much easier just to vaguely accept that "Loki" was a bastard and insist to himself that "Gabriel" had in some sense died a long time ago.

So because Tricksters weren't all that interested in introspection, he had no idea what was so damn interesting about Sam Winchester. He knew it wasn't the "stubborn idiot won't learn" that he found sometimes in the people he wasn't willing to just outright kill for one reason or another. He'd turned Sam into a talking car. Gabriel had enough self-awareness to admit that was more akin to pulling a little girl's pigtails on the playground than anything he'd done in centuries.

Heh. Everyone thought that if he had any kind of fixation, it was the candy fixation. But that was just the Trickster metabolism turned into a nervous habit after centuries of trying to keep up with it. It was something to reach for in those moments that something was making him reach for something.

But if you wanted to talk about real, full attention whenever they were in the same place fixations, candy wasn't it. But Gabriel was starting to develop a fairly sizable Sam fixation.