mercuryhatter

another prime use of this journal is going to be to foist my OCs off on everyone. I'm not sure that Ishturiel and Belial will ever make it into a coherent story that I could submit anywhere, but I love them very much and have been writing quite a lot about them. Belial is a prince of hell and Ishturiel is a low-ranked angel and they have been married for eons. Belial spends a lot of time getting Ishturiel out of dumb situations because Ishturiel is very sweet and kind but not really the brightest and certainly not the most powerful celestial being that has ever existed. Belial might get made fun of more in Hell for being married to zir except that Belial is a prince and can just eat anyone who tries.

This snippet isn't about Ishturiel getting stuck somewhere stupid and needing rescuing, though. this is something I wrote during a fit of really bad dysphoria as catharsis for how bad it felt to have a human body at the time. it's very hurt/comfort. it's also when I decided that Ishturiel's job is divine inspiration of self-love in trans people.

also, there's a pic I drew of them at the bottom. also also, I hope the cut I tried to use worked properly this time.

Belial felt Ishturiel screaming in the middle of her monthly staff meeting in Hell. She and the angel routinely exchanged emotions over their link, but even when Ishturiel has gotten zirself stuck somewhere, ze didn’t scream like this. Something was wrong. Belial passed the meeting off to an underling immediately and vanished, dispersing the matter she wore until she was nothing but a single intention, shooting along her link to Ishturiel.

She ran into flesh at the other end and rematerialized out of sheer shock. She couldn’t remember the last time Ishturiel had been corporeal. Had it ever happened at all?

“No.” Ishturiel answered the projected thought with a human mouth. Ze looked surprised at the sound, then abruptly nauseous. Zir body convulsed like ze was going to vomit, but nothing happened, so ze just curled onto zir side, looking miserable.

“Darling,” Belial said, out loud this time as she smoothed back Ishturiel’s wispy hair, so odd to see on zir. “What happened?”

“Assignment,” ze said, opening and closing zir mouth after the word emerged, then closing zir eyes with a faint moan. “Oh. You never told me how much this hurts.”

“It doesn’t, for me,” Belial said, feeling anger begin to build behind her eyes. Ishturiel existed to inspire self-love and calm in transgender humans, that had been zir divine purpose for nearly longer than humans had been around to need comforting. Why would ze need to be embodied for a job that ze had been doing successfully from zir favored form for millennia? Who would have forced her to do it when it hurt zir this much?

“Maybe something’s gone wrong,” Belial murmured. She leaned down until their foreheads touched, marveling at the strangeness of feeling her wife’s infinitely familiar presence in such an unfamiliar shape. Zir skin was hot beneath Belial’s, feverish. “Show me, my darling.” With a shaky gasp, Ishturiel’s mind opened to her.

Belial had been embodied herself almost since her own creation, certainly since her fall. It was just how Hell did things. Even Below, where matter didn’t quite work like it did on Earth, Hell was nothing if not all-encompassingly tactile. That was how Belial liked it. She could vaguely remember what it was like to be in Heaven, unenfleshed and unmoored, not pleasant memories for her. She had never really considered what it might be like to wear a body for someone who loved that incorporeality, was truly made for it in a way Belial never had been.

In Ishturiel’s thoughts, Belial felt a brief moment of what Ishturiel felt all the time: a lightness, a freedom, a sense of absolute purpose and absolute love. Then she felt it as that essence was compressed, ripped from the sky where it was one with all the surrounding molecules and gases and pressed into living tissue. Felt it forcibly cooled so that Ishturiel’s starlike heart didn’t annihilate the body, as something delicate and dispersed was made heavy and wet and rigid. She felt the scream she had heard earlier, but this time as if it were her own, the sound a billion beautiful gaseous atoms made when forced into solid rows.

Belial broke away from the link, gasping despite herself. She felt the pain of brand new skin touching solid earth lingering on her own body and raised Ithuriel a few inches off the ground with a gesture.

“My darling, I’m so sorry,” she breathed, ghosting her hands soothingly past Ishturiel’s shoulders, careful not to touch. “Who made you do this? I’ll kill them.”

“Hush,” Ishturiel said, laughing faintly but stopping when the new motion of zir throat made zir turn green again. “This is my assignment. I will get used to it, and if not… I will endure. It is my job. That passed away, this also may.”

“You did your job just fine as yourself,” Belial spat. “There is no reason for you to suffer like this. Was it Haniel? That self-righteous ass, I’ll—“

“Shh.” Ishturiel sat up, touched the inside of Belial’s wrist. “How am I meant to ease suffering that I don’t understand? This is right. I just wanted you here for it.” Ze took a deep breath, seeming more at ease with the mechanics of speaking the more ze spoke.

Belial muttered something very impolite about angels in a language that didn’t translate very well in the mundane air of Earth, but she was used to their conflict of philosophies by now. If Ishturiel thought this was right, that it would make zir better at the purpose that ze loved so much, then ze would endure it. All Belial could do was make it easier.

“All right,” she huffed at last. “Come on, then. I’ll teach you what flesh can do. What it can feel… oh, darling, it isn’t all pain. And sometimes even pain is a pleasure.” She looked into Ishturiel’s eyes. They were a soft, pale blue, like the sky itself stretched out over sclera, iris, and pupil alike. “Do I have your trust, my love?”

Ishturiel smiled beautifully. Holy, of course.

“You know that you do.”

“Then tell me when to stop.” Belial turned her hand palm-up in Ishturiel’s grip and Ishturiel slid her fingers into Belial’s palm, tiny starbursts of sensation flying along the raw nerves. Ze hissed, head tipping back to Belial’s shoulder as zir eyes closed, and opened her mind to Belial again. All that perfect trust and perfect love never stopped blinding Belial, even after all this time.

“Listen to my voice, darling one,” Belial murmured. “Listen to me. You are beautiful like this. All this new flesh under my hands. I can feel you beneath it, so hot and thrumming. It’s all right to inhabit it, my darling. You won’t lose yourself. Let it…” Belial grinned suddenly at her own joke. “Transubstantiate.”

Ishturiel’s eyes opened just enough to glance at Belial sternly, and she laughed.

“I had to. But I’m right. Don’t fight it. I’m at the other side of your flesh. Come meet me.” Belial raised Ishturiel’s hand to her lips and kissed the back of it, then turned it over and kissed the palm, the wrist, the inside of zir elbow, each kiss firmer than the last. She could feel the answering pain in Ishturiel, could feel Ishturiel trying to relax as ze was told, but zir nature was fighting it.

Belial let Ishturiel’s pain flow into her mind and gave back to zir instead the sensations that Belial felt. The sun and wind touching her bare skin, the warm tingling excitement in her lips, the slowly building desire in her chest, crawling lower. Ishturiel gave a small, surprised noise. Ze had never felt desire as it expressed itself in a body before.

“Feel this fire instead,” Belial whispered, placing Ishturiel’s hand low on her belly. “You can still burn in this body. It doesn’t have to hurt.”

But ze was burning, and it did hurt. Belial carefully put aside her flash of renewed rage as she opened herself, letting the pain rush through her.

Belial would have dismembered anyone who tried to make her exist in a way she didn’t want to be. She would have fought God Themself if They ever came down to Hell and told her she could be nothing but a ring of flame again. But Belial’s job had always been to look out for herself, from the moment she dressed herself in flesh and crowned herself a prince. She had stripped self-sacrifice of the Heavenly variety right out of her own nature. She was a demon. But Ishturiel was an angel, and Belial wouldn’t love zir nearly so much if not for all that bright and wild love for others. So Belial would give the pain back when Ishturiel asked and kill no one for the giving of it, but she’d be thrice blessed before she let zir work through this alone.

Ishturiel pressed into Belial with a low, drawn-out sound that stopped Belial’s breath in her throat.

“Oh,” ze managed after the low sound had expired. “Mm. Thank you. Trade back with me now, please.”

Belial huffed in fond frustration, but it was beyond her to say no.

“Lips to mine,” she instructed, and Ishturiel turned zir face up and obeyed. Belial breathed in, drawing her own warmth and desire from Ishturiel’s core; breathed out, returned the pain she was holding. Ishturiel shuddered at its reentry, but seemed to take it easier this time, some of the feverish shine fading from zir skin.

“I have to go now,” ze said, fingertips pressed to Belial’s jawbone, and ze smiled. “I love you.”

“Wow,” Belial said. She wanted to pluck the words from the air and eat them whole. “That packs a punch from a mouth like this.” Ishturiel’s smile widened.

“See? Silver linings already.”