another old snippet - 2012
Mar. 4th, 2019 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mercuryhatter“You’re Caoimhe’s human, aren’t you?” Murray asked after a while, as casually as if this was a completely normal situation that required small talk.
Switch laughed.
“Honey, think outside the pantheon. I’m not anyone’s; I’m practically everyone’s.”
“She carries around your soul like a shield,” Murray snorted. “Might want to be careful with that.”
“I think I know what I’m doing,” Switch said dryly. “Enough so that you might want to shut up, do what you’re here to do, and then get the hell out of here.”
Murray whistled quietly, but stopped speaking, staring up at the sky again.
“Look,” he muttered to Carmine, nudging the other man and nodding up to the sky. Over the place where the sun was lurking behind the clouds, a slice of light had broken through in a slim rectangle of cloud-free sky. The way the clouds were starting to break up at the far edge of the storm was not uncommon, but the way the space seemed to be cut out with a knife and a straight-edge certainly was. Light leaked through, looking almost as corporeal as the rain.
“That where your angel’s popping out?” Switch asked, looking annoyed at the silent conversation that seemed to be occurring between Carmine and Murray.
“Should be,” Murray murmured. “Might want to back up a bit, this isn’t going to be very pretty.”
“Why not?” Switch demanded. “Aren’t angels supposed to have holiness and light shooting out of their every orifice?”
“This one might have a few too many orifices,” Murray said grimly. “It’s Falling. Or, more accurately, being pushed.”
Switch’s phone buzzed in her pocket-- the truly infernal bit of touch-screen technology that Caoimhe had forced on her shortly after their deal. Caoimhe had since abused the thing so much that Switch had threatened to throw it in the nearest swamp if the demon wouldn’t stop texting her whenever she got bored.
“You’re more annoying than a certain snarky trickster god and that’s saying something,” she snapped into the receiver. “What?”
“Are they there?” Caoimhe asked, ignoring the insult. Her voice sounded mildly panicked but that was kind of par for the course for the slightly neurotic demon.
“What, the creepy demigod husbands? Yeah, they’re here.”
“Half-demon, actually, but whatever. I’ll be there soon; is El still there?”
“In the house, yeah.” There was a pause. “If you’re nodding into the phone again I still can’t hear head motions.”
“Whatever,” Caoimhe snapped. The call exploded into white noise as the sky brightened to an almost painful degree, causing Switch to wince and pull the phone away from her ear. The screen was a riot of multicolored static and shuddering, broken lines. Switch briefly wondered if it was just interference from the goddamn falling angel or if Heaven had actually managed to break Caoimhe’s phone, then decided she didn’t care and tucked the useless device back into her pocket to squint up at the fissure in the sky, which wasn’t so much of a fissure now as it was a small supernova. (As far as the adjective “small” could even be applied to something you had to describe as a supernova, anyway.) The two half-demons were wincing and turning their eyes away, but Switch was pleased to find out she could still look if she squinted.
It wasn’t long before she realized that she didn’t particularly want to.
The four archangels touched down on Earth’s physical plane with four separate explosions, shock waves rolling out over the still rain-damp grass. Gabriel gasped as she compressed herself into a physical form, wings flaring out in massive fiery arcs behind her. At equidistant points around her, similar shapes manifested: Uriel with jagged lines of electricity describing the batlike bones of its wings, Raphael with rippling wings of hot solar wind, Jophiel with icy, needlelike wings whirring quicker than a hummingbird’s. Gabriel tightened her hand on her stolen sword, felt it flame in response to her touch. She wasn’t made for battle; she missed the feel of a horn in her hands, but there was no time for that now. She closed her eyes and pulled the flames from her burning wings protectively around herself, letting them crawl over her skin and light her hair, then lunged.
The battle that ensued was confusing to follow even with celestial eyes: the angels sometimes tore through the boundaries of their physical forms; more sonic boom than Cape Canaveral heard in a year ripped through the air in just ten minutes. Then again, ten minutes might have been ten hours—time was strange and much too flexible, stretching a single wingbeat over the course of an hour, or compressing the strike of a sword into a moment quicker than lightning.
Gabriel fought almost blindly, cut off from the shared angel consciousness as she was, and limited by almost-human sight. All she saw was the fire from her Fall, drawn around her like a shield, the razed field around her, scorched to the dirt but frosted with needles of ice that were sharper and harder than diamonds. Small pools of quicksilver, from wounds that were mostly Gabriel’s, gleamed as the light from Gabriel’s sword or Uriel’s wing caught them. Gabriel flared her wings and soared upward, but was almost immediately forced back down by a latticework of lightning with Uriel’s immobile stare in the center. Jophiel darted below her, throwing up darts of cold that was far beyond the human concept of absolute zero, which tore at Gabriel’s protection and kept her in place. On either side, the great walls of heat-distorted air that were Raphael’s wings pushed in closer, hotter than the shielding fire that Gabriel drew closer and closer to herself.
The archangels converged.
Agony exploded in and around Gabriel as Uriel, Jophiel, and Raphael pressed in close around her. She felt Uriel’s electric pulse inside of her, invading her in thready, sizzling jolts. Jophiel’s wings, colder than space, drove needles into her skin, pore by pore, and around it all Raphael’s wings formed an impassable barrier. Gabriel was no longer sure which were the sounds of battle and which were just her own unending screams echoing inside of her head. Her sword melted, dripping white hot metal onto her hands, droplets that solidified and shattered when they came too close to Jophiel, and she threw the weapon away, hoping it at least hit someone before it disintegrated completely. The pain reached a zenith and Gabriel couldn’t believe this was happening on Earth, couldn’t believe she hadn’t flown into a collapsing galaxy somewhere and this was the end of everything—
And then it was over. The archangels were gone and Gabriel felt impossibly tiny and finite, utterly defenseless. Caged into flesh that was never meant to be her own. She opened her eyes, but the weak sunlight that dared to slip through the clouds hurt her retinas, so she let the lids fall closed again. Something hot and sticky, almost acidic, was draining from her eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hidden wounds under her soot-streaked hair. She coughed weakly and spat some of it out, but couldn’t turn her head far enough, so the liquid simply sat on her chin and burned. Uselessly thin and ragged wings twitched convulsively to either side of her, and she was honestly surprised even the wraithlike shells remained.
Slowly, she became aware of presences around her, voices that were muffled as if traveling through oceans to reach Gabriel’s ears.
“You could have mentioned it was going to be a fucking archangel slapfight!” someone was yelling.
“We assumed most of the fireworks were going to happen in Heaven,” replied another voice, this one deeper and slower but still with an edge of surprise.
“Why does she still have her wings? Elemiah’s were ripped right off.” The demon Caoimhe: this was a voice Gabriel recognized.
“I didn’t fight,” a quiet voice explained—Elemiah zirself. “I wasn’t powerful enough to even try, and even then I still barely survived.”
“You survived because I know what the hell I’m doing, and I’m going to make sure this one survives too,” said the first voice, brusque and businesslike. “Everyone out of the fucking way.”
A pair of arms slid carefully beneath Gabriel, who moaned hoarsely as she was lifted off the ground and gathered close to someone’s chest. Her wings, which felt frail and fragile but flayed to the raw nerve, trailed along the ground, making Gabriel arch up in pain.
“All right, someone grab the wings, and be careful about it.”
Soft, soft hands lifted Gabriel’s wings with light butterfly touches—Elemiah, Gabriel thought—and together the two of them bore Gabriel away from the battleground. Caoimhe and Elemiah, the tenor-voiced human and the deep-voiced half-demon, were talking amongst themselves as they walked, but Gabriel herself was blessedly unconscious within minutes.
.
