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"I want to be free!"

He yells it from the rooftop, tottering dangerously on the loose tiles and throwing his hands into the ice cold air.

"Like a bird on a wire!"

Gabriel thinks that if he were writing this down every thing this man would say should end in an exclamation mark. Jubilance mars his otherwise perfection, his yelled words lisped as though his tongue is too big for his mouth. Gabriel thinks he can fix that.

"But what if it's an electrical wire?"

He stands in snow seeping through the bottom of his trousers, ankle deep and still sinking with his fingers buried in his pockets in vain, his low words locked in the same nature. The wind whips his face and his eyes water behind his steaming glasses as the man cackles a hyena laugh into the black night. From here, even from so far down, Gabriel can see his breath plume from his mouth like blood from an open wound. He thinks he can fix that, too.

"God, Gabriel..." The exclamation marks fall from the roof like the tile that shatters before his toes. He doesn't know the man's name, he never has, but the favour isn't returned. "You're always such a cynic... Can't you see?" The wire man, he stares down, and even from here, from so far down, Gabriel can see his eyes, as blue as his fingers.

"Even if it's an electrical wire, the bird's still free!"

He resumes his cackling and twirls. He should be tripping, tumbling, falling, but he's not. Gabriel has checked the Doctor's list, twice, and it mentions nothing of lithe agility. Nothing of sardonic humour and whispered words, delicate skin and delicate bones. After a third check he's beginning to believe those aren't qualities he can carve from the stranger's skull. Those aren't things he can steal, so instead, he watches.

A chill whistles over cracked boards and crumbling brick, and he hums along as though it's a song. A rug of dust drifts over every surface, motes dancing in white light, his fingers reaching out to grab at the twirling, twisting creatures, singing with them and an absent smile. All the while, his eyes are closed.

Gabriel sits in a chair opposite him, staring at the folded form, crossed and laced on a tattered rug straying frays over his jeans. He wants to let the singing hypnotise him. He wants to fade as he has done so many times before, closing his eyes and waking up days later in a different city of a different country. But he doesn't want to have to question why after all that he still finds his way back like a worn and weary bird. A homing pigeon sighing himself back to a familiar scene. So he tightens his hands and breathes in the cold, rocking from side to side and back to front. The man's eyes open.

"What is your name, Gabriel?" he asks, a child singing that same old song.

Gabriel smiles at him. A smile of broken malice and tired eyes.

"Yours," he says.

Stranger, he nods a satisfied 'I know' and closes his eyes all over again, sliding back into his humming like fingers into honey. He rocks as his companion rocks, reaching his hands out to him as he sways a tranquil dance. He's so serene that Gabriel wants to cry. He thinks he can fix that as he grasps those hands, feeling how strange it is, like handling an ice cube. Holding a corpse. His precious little singing corpse, pulling him close with a strength he's never known, dragging him until he's kneeling on the floor and touching his face as though it's something precious. Gabriel can't fix it this time, and he still thinks he may cry.

"Gabriel..." he whispers, and he's no longer singing, sombre as the darkening sky as he touches rough cheeks before hard jaw. "Gabriel, my sin... my dark devil..." Those eyes snap open, wide and blue and drugged. He counts the slivering bloodshots and then counts them once again. "Last night I joined a choir, Gabriel. At midnight, when the bells rang out too many times I sang too many songs." He grins a maddening grin and presses the calluses of his fingertips over the devil's lower lip, pushing until the tender skin eases and wet heat sucks. He tastes of the earthy dust his flesh clings to. "You miss so much when you sleep."

I miss you most of all. Gabriel thinks the words he hates and makes the stranger smile. Fingers stroke over his cheek and then his temple, reaching, pressing inside, searching and making him gasp as the phrase is pulled from his head like a stray piece of cotton, and he's groaning, gripping, eyes fluttering closed in surrender.

The stranger strolls through his mind as though it is his own, a living figure stroking over his thoughts and his dreams, his past and his future. Sorting here and dusting there, picking up something of interest and polishing it to gleaming perfection. He's gentle, careful as he tampers with the most delicate of synapses, tenderly caressing the vulnerable dips and grooves, only to pull back like a fluttering thing, fading like a stream through his fingertips.

He opens his eyes and he's breathless. Trembling against the smiling stranger, the power coursing between them like something electric. He can taste, iron and copper. Then he realises, he's bitten through his lip, and he shivers all the more. The stranger, the Mind Walker, he's looking at him with something touching on pride, brushing his thumb through the thickness trickling down his chin.

"Call me The Reverend," he murmurs, and Gabriel smiles.