The casket was lowered and buried hours ago, but Raphael’s still here, so Gabriel’s not leaving. She’s not crying anymore, just staring at the fresh dirt and occasionally nodding along to some conversation known only to her.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Gabriel chances, putting a hand on her shoulder. Laura isn’t the first friend they’ve lost, or even the only one this year, but this was different. Raphael and Laura were different. She hadn’t even been a hunter, just a normal girl who happened to think Raphael was cool. “You did everything you could. Sometimes bad things just happen.”
Raphael bites her lip, looking up to the sky. “Yeah, well, sometimes the world sucks ass. She didn’t do anything wrong. I should have been faster. I should have- God. Shit!” Her voice breaks and she wipes a tear from her cheek angrily. “I should have been there.”
Gabriel pulls his sleeve over his fist and shatters the window, crawling through and falling to the floor inside. He can’t hear any more gunshots, but that doesn't mean the fighting is over. He rolls to his feet and creeps towards the living room, flashlight out and knife at the ready. Times like these, he’s glad he’s still small. Maybe Lucifer’s stronger than him, but there was no way he was sneaking around like this. Gabe’s a fucking ninja.
As he draws closer to the door, he hears something. Crying. Muffled talking, but just one voice. Definitely no signs of an ongoing struggle. Where was Raphael? He swings around the corner, prepared for the worst, but there’s nothing to fight. Just Raphael, flashlight and sawed-off forgotten, kneeling next to the bloody, disfigured corpse of Laura Knight. Too little, too late, he thinks bitterly. All that tracking, the chase through town, only to have it arrive seconds before them. Or maybe it’d been there the whole time, just jerking them around. This was why Gabriel had asked Michael twice if he was sure about leaving them to finish the hunt alone.
“Hey, if you should have been there, I should have been there, too. That thing was fast, Fae. Faster than us.” Ultimately, the only thing that had stopped the lamia from making a meal out of them was a lucky shot with the blessed knife. Motherfucker was tough.
She shook her head. “No. No, you know what? You’re right. Blaming ourselves is pointless. Maybe we should blame whatever motherfucker of an intelligent creator made a world where things like this happen!” She turns her face to the darkening sky and shouts, “God, you son of a bitch! Are you up there? Yeah, fuck you, buddy! What, you think this is funny? You think this is some sort of a game?”
A man walking by on the sidewalk stops to look at them. Gabriel flips him off, then turns back to Raphael. “Are you having a crisis of faith? Can you even have a crisis of faith if you’re not religious? I thought Daddy Issues McMike was the only one who believed.”
Raphael huffs. “I’m not having a crisis, I’m having an intense conversation with a bastard in the sky who thinks it’s okay to fuck with people who have no hope of ever doing anything about it.”
“You think there’s no hope?”
“I think there’s no hope if we’re going to be pussies and play nice and let things happen, but I’m done with that. What’s going to happen, life is going to get worse?” She scoffs, kicking at the ground. “No. I think the rules are fake at best, and a trick at worse. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, Gabe, and as far as I’m concerned, God is ringing the dinner bell.”