He comes and goes in her thoughts unpredictably, the way he comes and goes in her life. So it’s not /entirely/ unexpected when Gabriel crashes into Summer’s mind again, some six months after his last visit. She bolted upright in the bed, sleepy cats flicking their ears and looking disgruntled all around her. “Gabriel?” she said to the dark, as if he could hear her. The way it felt, she might only have been having a nightmare; it felt like shadows, long and dark, reached around him with clawed fingers.
“Gabriel, where are you?”
With an ungainly popping sound, the archangel tumbled out of nowhere to land facefirst on the floor, murmuring, “‘m right here,” in a pained voice. He wanted to hide his mental scars from her – but not nearly as much as he had wanted to see Summer again, to know that she was alive and that the darkness had lied to him at least once during the trauma.
The sound of air rushing out of the space he appeared in caused the mass exit of disgruntled cats in all directions. Summer blinked down at him, wincing. “Why are you on my floor? And why do you hurt so much?” She rolled over and out of the bed, wearing just a t-shirt, to kneel beside him.