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Annalise is awkwardly hovering in the doorway to their bathroom. Gabriel, who is smoking a cigarette out the window, weighs the pros and cons of ignoring her. Without Nathan and the ever present dread of people wanting to kill them, their relationship feels strained and awkward. Gabriel has been forced to confront these past few days that despite kissing one and having his life saved by the other, he still does not know these teens very well.
But it’s Annalise, and if he doesn’t give her the attention she demands, she will force him, so he snubs out the cigarette on the windowsill and turns to her with a sigh.
“What do you want?” He asks.
“Where’s Nathan?”
“He went to get food.” And some amount of liquor preferably, but he decides not to mention that.
She hesitates visibly, eyes skipping from him to the bathroom as she tries to make up her mind.
“What do you need?” Gabriel asks with a slight groan and when she smiles and her posture relaxes he realises he’s walked right into her trap.
“I need some help with my hair,” She says as she waves the brush clenched in her left hand at him.
He raises an eyebrow. “You can’t brush it yourself?” He wonders if all British kids are so helpless or if it’s just these two.
“No, it just hasn’t been washed since…” her eyes glaze over as she tries to count how long it’s been since, well, everything. To Gabriel, who is still trying to fill in the gaps in his memory, it feels like it has been months.
She seems to realise it's a futile effort too and settles on: “In a while, and you don’t have conditioner or anything so I need a hand.”
“Well I’m sorry I have a practical hair length and don’t need to waste money on fancy products.”
She hands him the brush with a smile. “And you don’t need any fancy products for your grey hair?”
“Perhaps, darling, this is all natural.”
Annalise sits down on the far end of the bed and Gabriel crosses his legs and scoots over till he’s behind her.
“How old are you again, because if that grey’s all natural…?” She says it as a joke, but a shiver passes through him when he stops to consider the question. Who knows how many years Mercury has stolen from him.
For lack of anything else to say, he carefully runs a hand through Annalise’s damp hair, feeling how tangled and messy it is. He doesn’t remember ever having brushed someone’s hair like this but somehow he knows to start from the bottom, to gently tease the strands of hair loose instead of yanking through them with a brush.
Annalise relaxes minutely and it’s only now that he realises how tense she was, how tense she has been for days. Ever since they walked out of that forest covered in blood and fear and guilt, she has held herself at arms length from both of them, crawling inside her own skin in her grief. Neither Nathan nor Gabriel really know how to cope with that.
He accidentally tugs too hard on a knot and Annalise sucks in a sharp breath.
“Sorry,” He says, and puts down the brush to work out the tangle gently with his fingers. Annalise shakes her head and then quickly holds it still again when she remembers their position.
“It’s okay, it happens.”
She fidgets with the hem of her shirt as the soft scraping sound of brushing fills the air. He notices with faint detachment that it's one of his shirts that he left behind years ago when he last stayed here. He wonders if it would even fit him anymore.
“You’re pretty good at this.”
“Is brushing hair something one can excel in?” He asks lightly, as if he hasn’t been wondering at it himself.
“Absolutely, my dad,” Her voice hitches slightly on that word, “My dad always started from the top and just tried to brush straight down. It was terrible.” She chuckles drily, and then scrubs at her cheek with the palm of her hand.
Gabriel wonders if his parents ever took the time to brush his hair. He assumes they did, but can’t picture the feeling of gentle hands running a brush through his hair.
He knows Mercury used to brush his hair. It’s a feeling he’s still intimately familiar with. She complained endlessly when he cut it short, but it had been one of the few small reliefs he had managed to get from her. After all, long hair could be distracting when one was trying to be an alchemist.
Now done with the lower part of her hair, his hand accidentally brushes the nape of Annalise’s neck and she shivers violently. He draws his fingers back quickly and makes to apologise, but she beats him to the punch.
“Sorry, I just…, keep going please.”
Carefully, Gabriel slips his fingers back beneath her hair, and softly runs his knuckles up the back of her neck to the base of her skull. Annalise exhales softly and leans back into his touch. He picks the brush back up and gently traces a path along the shell of her ear to lift away a section of hair to brush.
“Gabriel?” She says quietly into the suddenly charged air that surrounds them.
He hums softly, focused mostly on the tangled strand of hair in his hand and her weight slowly leaning into him.
“Can I kiss you?”
He hesitates for a moment. He has never kissed someone like her. He never would have thought he would want to kiss someone like her. But she is here, soft and warm and close, and it’s not the same as the boys he finds in clubs and takes home, and it's not the same as Nathan and his soft lips, but still he feels an overwhelming affection for her, still being so close and thinking of her lips on his feels so right (and he thinks he might love her but he won’t say it, can’t say it, because love is the one thing Mercury will always take from him).
So he nods mutely, because he doesn’t know how to say any of that out loud. And she’s already turned around to watch him, and her eyes are still heavy with grief and there are tears drying on her lashes and if he were more poetically inclined he would say they look like stars. As it is, he can only focus on the warm breath fanning his face and the sharp point of her knee digging into his shin. He cups the back of her head gently, a mirror to what Nathan did so long ago on that water tower and she closes the gap between them to press her lips to his. It’s a simple and chaste kiss, their lips barely touching, reveling more in the nearness of it than the action.
Annalise laughs softly when she pulls back a little and Gabriel traces his thumb along the delicate contours of her face, the sound filling him with something giddy and light. She leans forward to press another kiss to his lips, quick and teasing and in turn he lands one on the very tip of her nose. She looks a little more relaxed now, and he thinks that he would spend the rest of his life kissing her if it made the grief clear from her eyes just a little. But things don’t work that way, and so when she turns away from him again, he makes sure to move as close to her as he can while keeping his hands free. Her hair is almost dry now, so he brushes it out with extra care.
When Nathan comes home almost an hour later with bags of groceries and clothes weighing him down, he finds Annalise curled up in bed, sleeping peacefully for the first time since Soul died, and Gabriel by the window, tracing the new name in his book.