daft punk is playing at my house, my house.

[molotovmartinis]

WHO: New Year's Eve Demonic/Celestial Trollothon 2010 (tag in!)
WHAT: a hellish dinner party ( menu, for the lulz DON'T LAUGH AT ME I had fun looking all that shit up)
WHERE: the Counterweight building (the import center)
WHEN: backdated to New Year's Eve, 6:30 PM and onwards
WARNINGS: oh my god so much alcohol
SUMMARY: For the record, Balthazar

Comments

[painhumbles]

"Lucy, don't make a scene," Gabriel said, trying to sound melodramatically annoyed, but his voice was tinged with pain. He wrenched her foot off his chest, using all the strength he could muster, in an attempt to knock her off balance and then rolled out of her reach. His vessel's muscles were starting to protest- too much for him to start healing at once with that damn chip. One or both of them was going to exhaust themselves before this night was over. And one or both of them probably wouldn't have to worry about that.

Probably not both, in that case. It figured, really. He was supposed to die in a hotel room that used to be full of gods. At least this time, he wasn't too late.

He clambered to his feet, shaking both with pain and barely concealed frustration- not anger. No, he could never be truly angry at Lucifer. Just frustrated or disappointed. "Guys," he snapped to the gawking crowd with just enough good-natured humor in his tone to suggest that he was forcing politeness to keep up his facade of having this under control. "I think the party's over."

[abrotherlikeyou]

"Yeah," Lucifer drawled, slamming him down again but using actual force this time- not like the light bitch-slap of before, but most of her strength to put him down and keep him there. "I'm pretty sure it is."

Then, in front of everyone just to make a point, she jumped on him, grabbed a steak knife from Balthazar's table, and carved an Enochian banishing sigil into Gabriel's face faster than a human eye could reasonably track, ending it with a bloodied hand clamping over his nose and now-mutilated lips. The last thing he'd see before erupting in agonizing white light was her sadistic smile as she watched the inexorable pain take him.

[painhumbles]

There was almost no time to react. Angels process things much faster than humans- omniscience isn't about knowing everything, so much is it's about knowing things first. Gabriel's good, Lucifer's better, and there was no way for him to really register what was happening until it was already half-over.

There was, he decided, a fundamental reason why you don't carve banishing sigils into your own body, aside from the fact that it turns you into a divine bomb. Take the pain of a normal banishing, multiply it to infinity, and you still can't imagine the shock of being shaken completely from your vessel, bombarded against the walls of a universe that isn't yours like a sick, twisted version of celestial pinball and then smacking straight back into your vessel with a new scream of agony- the complete loss of most of your Grace. It would come back- that Gabriel knew for a fact, but right now he was in the middle of a desert somewhere- one that was probably nowhere near Truth or Consequences, curled up in a ball and almost wishing Lucifer had just went ahead and stabbed him in the back.

And to make matters worse, that fucking chip redlined and he wound up spending another indeterminate amount of time being repeatedly electrocuted, which was annoying when he was at full power, but was sheer torture to him in his current state. He laid back and took it and hated himself every minute. What was he? A dog? No.

It took thirty minutes for him to return to the Counterweight building. Long enough for Lucifer to have leveled the building and killed everyone in there if she had the urge to and Gabriel wasn't sure that was her intention at all, but that wasn't a risk he wanted to take. The building was still standing anyway.

He looked like something that had been spit out of hell- his face a mess of blood from healing wounds that wouldn't scar, panting and shaking like it took all of his effort to get from wherever he was to here. His eyes were all on Lucifer- he couldn't bear to eye the room to see what had happened. The expression was crystal clear. No malice, no hate, no fury. Just desperation and pain and irritation.

Are you happy now. No, I forgot. You'll only be happy when everyone's dead. Then start with me.

He didn't come to this party expecting to stand up for a bunch of people he didn't know and most of them he probably didn't care about. It was stupid, but it went out to all the gods he didn't save at the Elysion. And all the humans here who might earn Lucifer's wrath.

He still stood in front of them. He didn't want to die here- not for something with no real value to him. But if he had to die, then he supposed this was better than the alternatives.

[abrotherlikeyou]

Gabriel's pain hadn't been lost on her. Connected as they still were, bound by that thin and long-eroding thread of celestial ties and angel radio that was distant to both of them (for different and varyingly self-imposed reasons), she felt the agony of his banishment, the slam-bang of his Grace burning from him only to be slingshotted back into his body from the sheer dysfunction of this universe, and sympathetic echoes of chip-pain ran lightly over her skin once or twice on a level too distant to really register as anything other than deeply buried and quickly ignored sympathy.

He deserved it, for escalating so quickly. For turning what had been a perfectly innocent (acidic blood rain: like picking wildflowers!) on its head with a backstabbing bitch move that she hadn't remotely deserved.

Still. So distinct was her awareness of his pain that she knew the sight of his return would be something shameful and pathetic, and an angel deserved better. It wasn't hard to clear the room: a fireball here, a flying piece of furniture there, a polite address to Death that she really had no intention of killing anybody unless they forced her to, a well-placed friendly smile. No casualties, no injuries, even- her gift to her brother.

So it was that Gabriel returned, looking like something barfed out of a garbage disposal, to Lucifer standing in the middle of an empty room, looking perfectly composed and impossibly sleek amidst the wrecked chaos of the place. Balthazar was lurking somewhere in the building, but if he dared to look upon Gabriel's weakness and their private conversation she'd rip out his eyes.

"Don't use that sigil in this world again, Gabriel."

[painhumbles]

Gabriel had to wait until the cuts across his lips healed so that he wouldn't waste any dramatic comeback sounding like a hairlipped dog, but luckily the moment of silence just added to the tension, rather than making it awkward. It felt like the stand-off that it was.

He spat blood onto the floor, blinked it out of his eyes, and then said, his voice hoarse and still strained with the anguish of several different torments, "Noted."

It wasn't the big dramatic speech he would've wanted, but he'd used all that up at the Elysion and wasn't as roughed up as he was then. He swayed a bit on the spit and then took a step forward, as if advancing, as if planning on running to her, whether in attack, or a brotherly plea for forgiveness- his expression had softened significantly to the point where it was hard to tell which.

And then he just vanished.

[abrotherlikeyou]

The Devil was a being of hatred and shadow, all replete with the bitter tang of resentment and promises unfilled. Her monikers were not unearned: the weaknesses and petty soft spots of emotion rolled off her as water on a duck's back, never fazing that hardened being of antipathy and frost.

But in that moment, not following her little brother, not seeking him out for some bit of explanation or even just some conversation for a simple brush of contact between two lonely beings became one of the hardest things she could clearly remember doing. Her hand twitched minutely, in the ghost of the action of reaching out for him in the spot that he disappeared into.

After a few minutes of utter silence in the empty room, Lucifer spread her tattered wings and alit in her dismal hotel room.