sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation!
Characters: Raphael, Lucifer, and Gabriel.
When: Christmas morning
Where: the Chateau
Rating: PG-13 or R for angels and character death. :(
Summary: Legitimately the worst Christmas ever.
Christmas morning passed her by without anything at all to mark the time. She spent those earliest wee hours figuring out how to hold a pen. It wasn't that she didn't know how- but she had never needed to before. At some point, her Grace and strength gave out so badly that she couldn't just will the words onto the pages of the book any more. So she sighed and spent the next hours writing it out determinedly, forcing her trembling hands to obey enough to make it legible. Trembling, shaking, lines growing shakier and less readable as the hours went on and her fine motor skills eroded- and still, she wrote.
She kept writing. She had to. It didn't matter that the Chateau was so cold she couldn't sleep for shivering, it especially didn't matter that it was Christmas. Normally there would have been some song, some trumpet-sound to mark the day, but nothing enormous: it wasn't the Messiah's true birthday, and the holiday itself had long since ceased to be purely a swelling of worship and love that echoed back into Heaven. It was soaked in idolatry and greed now, but here she could feel the passing of the day without the requisite tidal wave of minor sins and gluttony. Here, she could stay hunched over her book, hands shaking in cold (that only she could feel).
It was all that mattered. Writing in this ancient, impossibly large book, this book she had been working on all week, since the moment Lucifer opened his mouth. They may take a memory, he had said sadly about the Animus. Keep a record of everything you don't want to forget. So she spent all week populating this book with a record of her life, until her Grace ran dry and she had to crawl to find a pen, she wrote all night to keep herself awake. To keep from thinking about the fact that she was tired. That she was tired, and that for one of the first times in her life she had to consciously force herself to stay awake.
She was just so tired. All she wanted was to lay her head down and rest. Just for a second, the exhaustion called, just this once. Just lay your head down, wayward one, stop fighting your own weariness, and never mind if you don't wake up.
But still she wrote. Of everything: God, Heaven, the angels. The war, the Fall, how pristine and beautiful Earth before. She made sure to record every detail of those early days, of not just the details and the wheres and whens but of how it was, what emotions she could remember herself feeling just in case the Animus tried to take away those earliest parts of her youth. The joy of the highest halls of Heaven when they were still filled with song. How it felt to fly. She wrote painstakingly of the war, and every bloody kill that hurt her and made her strong. Lengthy details of human history, of the long and lonely days she and Michael spent in their high perch over all of Creation.
The waiting. So much waiting. She never wanted to forget how it felt to stay and grow old and gather dust, all while waiting in vain and holding up a world that wanted only to collapse in its own incredibly human depravity. It didn't just make her who she was, it was all that she could ever imagine being. She wrote of the long waiting, and how they grew so tired that continuing to stay alive was an endless torment. Every incident of discipline, how she grew hardened to the screams of the wayward.
The second war, and every step they took down that road. Every deliberate choice to make it happen, and the will of God they wanted to bring about. The moment they stopped caring whether their will was right, and wanted only for it to be theirs.
God and Michael got their own sections. Raphael knew Anna and Rachel lost their memories of their parents, and Adstringéndum was nothing if not a place of patterns. She wrote an enormous chapter about her Father... and four about her brother. Twice, she broke a pen in her grip at the thought of waking up without their memories, and didn't understand her own reaction. She wrote at length about the moment of watching Michael fall to damnation, and the experience of shouldering the world alone. The vicious determination to bring them both back, to damn the whole world and everything in it- the civil war, those many sibling deaths, her rage at Castiel's insolence.
Crowley. Purgatory. The moment of seeing Castiel perverted into something disturbingly not her brother, and the fear that ran deep.
She wrote of everything in Adstringéndum, because every moment was something she needed to remember. So many came back from their deaths with destroyed or corrupted memories. The angels, seeing Michael, Lucifer- Gabriel, alive and well and alive, and the events and how it felt to break her leg. Switching bodies. Oh, and so much about her Grace. Raphael was determined to never, ever forget the pain and the unique mind-destroying quality to it. Not that she was in danger of forgetting- but her secret, desperate hope was that dying would erase the damage to her Grace. It was too secret to tell her brothers, too quiet to put a question to the network about. Desperate enough to risk losing something vital just to have that peace back.
Then, at the end, she wrote about Rachel. Rachel, and the other odd little insects who showed kindness, virtue, and Christian charity, and that were they in her world they would surely have a place in the Garden for their limited prejudice for the only aspect of humanity that made the species worth keeping.
Raphael was just writing in a shaking, unsteady hand about the party and giving Castiel his Grace back - with an addendum about the condemnable wrongness of tampering with any angel's Grace, and that all who do are committing a crime against God Himself - as the final chapter of her book. She knew it wouldn't be long now. Not with the heaviness in her limbs, or how badly she wanted to stop and lay down. Not with the pain wracking her, the coughing fits so spastic that she accidentally ripped several pages with the pen, the coughing that spattered blood on the blanket drawn over her and strobed too-white light on the walls in small fits. It would be days at the most, and then only if she could find a reason to hold on.
No, it would be hours. She was so tired. She hurt so badly. All she wanted to do was spread her wings, take flight on her own (but she got too weak to fly a good four days ago), and flee as far away as her massive wings could take her. To claw something apart with the ounce of strength in her shaking limbs and make someone hurt. There was a strange itch over her skin, an urge to crawl out of her own form and throw up everything she was until something clean emerged, then run past the ends of this unstable world. There was a dissatisfaction and trembling energy in her that she couldn't put a name to. Somehow, it had nothing to do with the low-burning anger at Tom Riddle that she no longer had the energy to think about.
It didn't occur to her that the sick feeling twisting her gut was fear.
When: Christmas morning
Where: the Chateau
Rating: PG-13 or R for angels and character death. :(
Summary: Legitimately the worst Christmas ever.
Christmas morning passed her by without anything at all to mark the time. She spent those earliest wee hours figuring out how to hold a pen. It wasn't that she didn't know how- but she had never needed to before. At some point, her Grace and strength gave out so badly that she couldn't just will the words onto the pages of the book any more. So she sighed and spent the next hours writing it out determinedly, forcing her trembling hands to obey enough to make it legible. Trembling, shaking, lines growing shakier and less readable as the hours went on and her fine motor skills eroded- and still, she wrote.
She kept writing. She had to. It didn't matter that the Chateau was so cold she couldn't sleep for shivering, it especially didn't matter that it was Christmas. Normally there would have been some song, some trumpet-sound to mark the day, but nothing enormous: it wasn't the Messiah's true birthday, and the holiday itself had long since ceased to be purely a swelling of worship and love that echoed back into Heaven. It was soaked in idolatry and greed now, but here she could feel the passing of the day without the requisite tidal wave of minor sins and gluttony. Here, she could stay hunched over her book, hands shaking in cold (that only she could feel).
It was all that mattered. Writing in this ancient, impossibly large book, this book she had been working on all week, since the moment Lucifer opened his mouth. They may take a memory, he had said sadly about the Animus. Keep a record of everything you don't want to forget. So she spent all week populating this book with a record of her life, until her Grace ran dry and she had to crawl to find a pen, she wrote all night to keep herself awake. To keep from thinking about the fact that she was tired. That she was tired, and that for one of the first times in her life she had to consciously force herself to stay awake.
She was just so tired. All she wanted was to lay her head down and rest. Just for a second, the exhaustion called, just this once. Just lay your head down, wayward one, stop fighting your own weariness, and never mind if you don't wake up.
But still she wrote. Of everything: God, Heaven, the angels. The war, the Fall, how pristine and beautiful Earth before. She made sure to record every detail of those early days, of not just the details and the wheres and whens but of how it was, what emotions she could remember herself feeling just in case the Animus tried to take away those earliest parts of her youth. The joy of the highest halls of Heaven when they were still filled with song. How it felt to fly. She wrote painstakingly of the war, and every bloody kill that hurt her and made her strong. Lengthy details of human history, of the long and lonely days she and Michael spent in their high perch over all of Creation.
The waiting. So much waiting. She never wanted to forget how it felt to stay and grow old and gather dust, all while waiting in vain and holding up a world that wanted only to collapse in its own incredibly human depravity. It didn't just make her who she was, it was all that she could ever imagine being. She wrote of the long waiting, and how they grew so tired that continuing to stay alive was an endless torment. Every incident of discipline, how she grew hardened to the screams of the wayward.
The second war, and every step they took down that road. Every deliberate choice to make it happen, and the will of God they wanted to bring about. The moment they stopped caring whether their will was right, and wanted only for it to be theirs.
God and Michael got their own sections. Raphael knew Anna and Rachel lost their memories of their parents, and Adstringéndum was nothing if not a place of patterns. She wrote an enormous chapter about her Father... and four about her brother. Twice, she broke a pen in her grip at the thought of waking up without their memories, and didn't understand her own reaction. She wrote at length about the moment of watching Michael fall to damnation, and the experience of shouldering the world alone. The vicious determination to bring them both back, to damn the whole world and everything in it- the civil war, those many sibling deaths, her rage at Castiel's insolence.
Crowley. Purgatory. The moment of seeing Castiel perverted into something disturbingly not her brother, and the fear that ran deep.
She wrote of everything in Adstringéndum, because every moment was something she needed to remember. So many came back from their deaths with destroyed or corrupted memories. The angels, seeing Michael, Lucifer- Gabriel, alive and well and alive, and the events and how it felt to break her leg. Switching bodies. Oh, and so much about her Grace. Raphael was determined to never, ever forget the pain and the unique mind-destroying quality to it. Not that she was in danger of forgetting- but her secret, desperate hope was that dying would erase the damage to her Grace. It was too secret to tell her brothers, too quiet to put a question to the network about. Desperate enough to risk losing something vital just to have that peace back.
Then, at the end, she wrote about Rachel. Rachel, and the other odd little insects who showed kindness, virtue, and Christian charity, and that were they in her world they would surely have a place in the Garden for their limited prejudice for the only aspect of humanity that made the species worth keeping.
Raphael was just writing in a shaking, unsteady hand about the party and giving Castiel his Grace back - with an addendum about the condemnable wrongness of tampering with any angel's Grace, and that all who do are committing a crime against God Himself - as the final chapter of her book. She knew it wouldn't be long now. Not with the heaviness in her limbs, or how badly she wanted to stop and lay down. Not with the pain wracking her, the coughing fits so spastic that she accidentally ripped several pages with the pen, the coughing that spattered blood on the blanket drawn over her and strobed too-white light on the walls in small fits. It would be days at the most, and then only if she could find a reason to hold on.
No, it would be hours. She was so tired. She hurt so badly. All she wanted to do was spread her wings, take flight on her own (but she got too weak to fly a good four days ago), and flee as far away as her massive wings could take her. To claw something apart with the ounce of strength in her shaking limbs and make someone hurt. There was a strange itch over her skin, an urge to crawl out of her own form and throw up everything she was until something clean emerged, then run past the ends of this unstable world. There was a dissatisfaction and trembling energy in her that she couldn't put a name to. Somehow, it had nothing to do with the low-burning anger at Tom Riddle that she no longer had the energy to think about.
It didn't occur to her that the sick feeling twisting her gut was fear.