After an exhausting and failed mission, the third time in the last couple of months, the council never made the effort to hide their disappointed scowls or lower their voices while they cruelly hissed the noticeable mistakes you’d made to each other. Their words of disapproval seared and stung almost as much as your battle wounds pained you.

They’d pulled you aside when you were just about to get your injuries tended to, giving you a harsh telling off, no soft murmurs of sympathy, which you would never expect them to do, flinching slightly as their words reverberated around the huge hall, back into your ringing ears. You didn’t listen much at all to their rambling and simply solemnly nodded every so often, your head bowed low. Finally, they had let you leave, but now the virtues were far too busy to treat you.

You stood at his door, tempted to just flee but you’d already knocked, so it was pointless. His door opened a crack, the glint of his white and gold helm just visible. He’d seen you and gently pulled you inside straight away. He had been another archangel on the mission with you, one of the ones to notice your fatigue but half shrugged it off as slightly laziness during the heat of the raging battle.

“You should not have done that, back there.” Gabriel talked to you quietly while he wrapped your wounds with gentle hands. Obviously referring to the fact you had shoved yourself right in the midst of the fighting, gaining more injuries than before when you’d been trying to help.

“It was foolish. Stupid.” He added, glancing up at you, though it would not be seen.

“I do not understand what has been going on with you these past months, but you need to stop being so ignorant in battle. It does not help.” Gabriel murmured, dabbing a cotton pad carefully against a particularly bad wound which earned a quiet hiss of pain from you.