(Untitled)

[dontcallmegabby]

Date: June 22, 2000
Status: Private - Ellie and Gabriel (complete)
Setting: The Manor Grounds
Summary: Gabriel takes care of some unfinished business.

Comments

[dontcallmegabby]

For lack of experience in consoling maternal succubae, Gabriel kept his tone business-like and his eyes politely averted as, paled, she took in the information. He would have been less than willing to betray himself to her had their positions been reversed, after all; and yet the questions in her voice and the tension in her posture gave her away, and he found himself wishing he had something of a more comforting story to tell.

"I'm afraid I can't say what happened to her there," he began quietly. "There were few who were even aware of what was going on at the time, fewer still who knew there had been a child. It was something of a hushed situation. I don't think anyone involved really knew what to make of it, so they simply didn't..." His own memories of that time rankled his recount until he promptly suppressed his personal guilt. "Anyway, she was taken to Limbo, and the whole issue avoided. The records of her begin and end with a single report.

"That is, until about a year ago," and now Gabriel couldn't quite resist a peripheral glance at the demon to gauge her reaction, "when the angels assigned to her reported that she'd slipped out of Limbo, and made her way to Earth."

[chantinellie]

"So you're saying," Ellie said in a stiff, carefully modulated voice, "that they exiled her to Limbo and left her there alone for fifteen years, and now they've lost her? Please tell me I'm misunderstanding you, Gabriel." The red was showing in Ellie's eyes now. "Tell me you don't mean that my daughter is wandering Earth alone and Heaven has no fucking clue where she is. Because I really don't think I would take that news very well."

[dontcallmegabby]

"Would you rather I tell you she'd been killed?" the angel snapped, and immediately regretted it upon seeing the dangerous sheen to her eyes. Hostility had been ingrained in his being after the Fall: a safety of sorts, treating every demon with contempt. If they aren't Us, than they're against us; it had been shaken these past months, when his ideas of 'Us' had begun to shift, but it was an instinct which had not been entirely erased.

But he was dealing with a mother here, not a demon. Someone for whom Tali had risked everything, lost everything. He grasped onto that, onto Adam's neutrality and Belial's fondness for the succubus, and consciously let his tenseness dissipate in a breath. "Look, I'm not saying it's pleasant. I'm not even saying it's fair. But it is what happened, and that is what you asked me to find out."

Gabriel was glaring quite intently at the ground now, such that the offending plant that happened to bear the brunt of it might have thought he'd been taking lessons from Crowley; but his voice was steady when he spoke again. "There's something else you should know, as well. Michael - Mictain, now - is in the manor hospital, recovering from an attack. An imp came in with him. I don't know anything for sure, but it mentioned that, just before the fight, they'd seen a strange girl with black and white wings. Neither an angel, nor a demon."

[chantinellie]

Ellie blinked, her anger temporarily derailed by surprise and an odd admixture of hope and dread. "Where did they see her? And why is he in the hospital?" Mictain rivaled Beelzebub on her list of people to avoid running into at the Manor if at all possible, but if there was something out there that could take him down and if there was a chance her child might be in its line of fire, she definitely needed to know about it.

[dontcallmegabby]

"I don't think you need to worry, not about that. I'd imagine the ones he encountered were simply tracking the child down." The conversation was becoming as discomfiting as his abstaining from it had been previously, and even as he said it, Gabriel knew even as he said it that he could hardly be sure of such a thing. Yet he clung stubbornly to the hope that, had something happened to the child, the ramifications of it would have been noticed by now, and continued, "And from what I can piece together, they saw her somewhere near London."

[chantinellie]

"Well...fuck." Nervous energy boiling over, Ellie got up and began to pace restlessly. "How long ago was all this? And is Mictain conscious?" She felt at a loss. The details of the sighting were altogether too vague to justify running out to London and trying to hunt the girl down, especially if much time had passed since the incident. Ellie was a mother, a fact she'd only recently been compelled to acknowledge, but it was a role she'd been given no chance to grow into; her fundamentally demonic instinct was to look after her own interests first and foremost. The impulse to stay where she felt relatively safe clashed jarringly with the desire to get to the bottom of this mystery Gabriel had brought her. She needed more information.

Another question arose in her mind then, and she turned back to Gabriel, her lips compressed into a thin line. "If it is her, and they are tracking her down--what will they do if they catch her?"

[dontcallmegabby]

Expressionless eyes took in the demon's pacing, letting nothing of her nervousness echo in their depths. Gabriel could not quite fathom the situation Chantinelle was in just now, could not even imagine the equivalent in his own experience; and so he resolved to simply let her reactions play out, and tell her as much as he could. He owed Tali that much.

"Take her back to Limbo, I'd imagine," he replied, his gaze sliding from her restless form to some neutral spot on the ground. "They've no reason to harm her. I suspect they just don't know what else to do with her."

[chantinellie]

"Well, they should have thought of that before they took her away," Ellie muttered sullenly. If she were being honest, she doubted she would have known what to do with a halfbreed kid, either. Though she was pretty sure she could have come up with something better than locking her away through her formative years.

She sighed, pushing her hair back behind her ears as she tried to think what best to do. "I suppose I had better speak to Mictain or this imp of his," she said reluctantly.

She stopped there for a moment, chewing her lip and wrestling with conflicting impulses. "Thank you, Gabriel," she added, trying not to sound too stiff. Fair was fair; he'd delivered as promised and answered her questions more reasonably than she would have expected. Most angels wouldn't have done as much.

[dontcallmegabby]

The angel nodded, regarding her quite impassively where she stood. Though his face showed nothing, in that moment, he saw not the attractive figure of a succubus, of an enemy; but a shining strength, a resilience in the face of adversity that many would only aspire to. Few of her own likely even knew how she suffered, but were she on Heaven's side, perhaps, Chantinelle might have been called a heroine. A martyr in her own right.

But then, he realized, a bitter coil in his stomach, if she'd been on Heaven's side, her story would have played out much differently.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, though once he'd spoken, even he did not know why he was apologizing. Sorry I did this to you? Sorry I cannot change what's passed?

"I'm sorry you had to rely on me just to find out this much."

[chantinellie]

Ellie's lips twitched into an approximation of a smile. "Well, there's something else we have in common. If you hear anything else, I...I would appreciate knowing." There, she hadn't made it a demand. Who said you couldn't teach an old bitch new tricks?

[dontcallmegabby]

He knew it was certainly not a good idea to let such a mortal habit ingrain itself in his ways, but the angel found himself wishing they'd conducted all of this over a drink. Something to take the edge off the discomfort of it all.

"Of course," and he nodded solemnly. "I'll let you know."

At this point, there was little else he could do.