i live in a city sorrow built [open to multiple]

[has_a_horn]

[gabe will prob be here all day]

Gabriel smiles as he moves about the kitchen. It's still a little early for Johnny to be awake, but he's hoping that waking him up with breakfast will make up for the early hour. To add some time and give himself something to do, he's making pancakes from scratch rather than simply creating them. He'd made bacon first, much to Scout's interest. As he moves around the kitchen putting together the pancake batter, Scout follows, begging for a scrap.

"Okay," he smiles down at the little dog and grabs up one of the pieces of bacon. "Don't look at me with that face, you were getting a piece of this anyway." He eats half the piece himself then bends to give the other half to Scout. Scout runs off with it happily and Gabriel wipes his hand off on the front of his jeans as he stands back up.

The world shifts. He's gotten used to the feeling of the rift doing something or other - vomiting up new people or going into fits when it decides to fuck with all of them, but this is different. It feels violent, like the sting of being inside the rift. He braces a hand on the counter-top to keep himself from falling over until the feeling passes, but a gnawing feeling remains. Something isn't right.

He wings down to check on Johnny - still in one piece, still alive and asleep, then wings away again, this time to stumble into the ramble in central park. It's still dark, but out of habit he pushes through to where the TARDIS is supposed to be. Her mind doesn't reach out for him. There is no trace of that mind left here. Before he even arrives in the clearing he knows that she's gone.

He falls to his knees on wet leaves, not caring about the cold morning air or the water soaking through the knees of his jeans. His head dips and his hands fall to the ground to search out an indentation left in the leaves that would prove she was here, once. Instead, his hand brushes through leaves and dirt before it closes on the length of a feather- long and mottled brown and cream, bent and damaged at one end. This is one of his feathers. It's a shock to see it. He blinks away tears and looks around himself- there are more all around him, poking out from beneath the leaves. There are a lot here, but definitely not all that were in the TARDIS.

He realizes now what he'd felt, earlier. The pain of that moment in the kitchen was the pieces of himself aboard the TARDIS getting forcibly pulled into another universe.

He focuses on the hollow feeling in his chest. In the aftermath, the part of himself that's been ripped away is the only proof he has that the TARDIS was ever here. As the day brightens, the cold closes in around him. He doesn't move from the spot where she used to stand.