100 Things 4/100: Hell's Afraid
Title: Hell’s Afraid
Fandom: Original Fiction
Series: part of the Angel 'verse
Rating: Gen
Orientation: Gen
Word Count: 2,519
Prompt: For Dark Bingo Fill: “Making Deals with Demons”
No one could say I lived a boring life.
I traveled around a lot as a kid, my old man transferred around the world frequently on business. My mom hated it and gave up somewhere along the way, so it was just me and him for a few years until he got himself killed in a plane crash on the way to a business meeting. Having no other family and no other options, I joined the military as soon as I was old enough.
Two tours in the Middle East taught me a lot more than I wanted to know. Having had enough sand in my teeth to last three lifetimes, I decided to try my hand at civilian life. It took some adjusting, but the contacts I had made and continued to make eased my way into a new life as a “Consultant for Hire.” I was good at it. Very good.
Raking in the cash, I was living the high life, free and easy with plenty of capital and no responsibilities, no one to answer to but myself. I thought it was better that way. No kid of mine would spend his life in boarding schools, or have to listen to parents screaming at each other every night, or wonder why mom didn’t love them enough to take them along when she finally booked ass out of her personal hell.
The day I met Iggy wasn’t especially extraordinary, other than my meeting with him. The coffee at Liv’s Diner on Twelfth Street was hands down the best in town, no froofy, fluffy, frothy stuff, just coffee with cream, the way I like it. Oksana the mid-shift waitress wasn’t hard on the eyes either. Iggy drew my notice because he was so out of place. In a dangerous line of work, I had managed to stay alive as long as I had because I paid attention to the people in my territory at any given time. And Iggy was limping through my territory, dripping blood. It seemed I was the only one that noticed him crossing the diner’s floor, leaving a streak of red across the faded grey and white tile.
I grabbed the sleeve of his ill-fitting sports coat and steered him onto the bench seat across from me. “Do you need a hospital?”
“No, I do not. I merely require time to recover, Gareth Stilson.”
That set off warning klaxons in my head. No one had called me Gareth in forever and a day, not since boot camp, in fact. Everyone called me Stils, just Stils. How did this guy know my full name? No one in this city knew me as anything but Stils, I took great pains to conceal my identity.
I had coffee; I wasn’t drinking the diner’s tap water, so I pushed it across the table to him.
He nodded his thanks and lifted the glass of water and sipped at it slowly. His eyes were glazed over with pain. I don’t usually take note of stuff about guys, but I couldn’t miss the fact that his eyes were an unnatural green, bright, like new spring grass. He also had eyelashes as long as a chick’s. The dude was pretty. The longish blonde hair didn’t hurt the image.
“You know you’re leaking body juice; you left a trail,” I tossed my head towards the floor.
“Unavoidable, my wound still festers.” He spoke very properly, the way people who speak other languages do when they first learn a new one.
“How’d you come by it?” I was aiming for casual, leaning back with one arm along the back of the booth, sipping my coffee and trying not to stare.
He carefully set the water down and stared at me, at the time I simply thought he was taking my measure, deciding how much to tell me. I know better now, I’ve seen that look often enough since then, on plenty of his kind.
“An enemy took me by surprise. I was unprepared and initially unable to properly defend against the attack.”
“Initially?”
“He is vanquished. Do you intend to consume this bread?” He pointed towards the untouched plate of rye toast that had come with my bacon and eggs. I shrugged and slid it over to him. “My thanks, Gareth Stilson.”
The name thing was bugging me. “You have me at a disadvantage buddy, you know my name but I don’t know you.”
“I am called Ignatius,” he replied after swallowing his first bite of toast. I knew he’d have an old fashioned name.
By the time I finished my coffee and he finished the toast, he looked a hundred percent better. “So Iggy, how do you know my name?”
He shrugged elegantly. The sports coat looked completely out of place on him, he should have been wearing something else, I wasn’t sure what exactly at the time, but something else. “Iggy? I like that. I know many things. Names come easily. The nature of a soul comes easily. You are a complex man, Gareth Stilson.”
“I get the feeling you are too.” Any further conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Oksana. I flirted a bit and she flirted back and then gave me the bill. I handed her a twenty for a six dollar tab and told her to keep the change. She flirted some more and then walked away. It was odd; she hadn’t even given Iggy a second glance.
The guy seemed to read minds. “Not odd at all, Gareth Stilson, Oksana Somov did not see me while she was conversing with you.” I’m not a bad looking guy, but I certainly not the type to blind a girl to everyone else around her. I snorted derisively and shook my head at the notion.
“You are the only one that sees me,” Iggy declared. That day, I thought he might have taken a hard bonk to the head when he’d been mugged or whatever; now, I know better. “I must depart. Farewell, Gareth Stilson, your kindness shall not be forgotten, we shall met again, of this I am sure.” I’d like to say he snapped his fingers and disappeared, but there was nothing supernatural about his exit; he slid out of the booth and walked out of the diner.
The next time I saw Iggy, it was quite a different day and the situation was completely out of the ordinary for me. I had botched a job, something I had only done a handful of times in the past.
One of the guys I had been keeping an eye on for a government contract had gotten the drop on me. He and his buddies circled back around the block, came up behind me and hauled me into an alley. These were pros, and it was three against one, I didn’t stand a chance. They broke my knee straight off and then pounded me into the slimy pavement of the back alley. I think we were behind a restaurant, judging by the stench of the trash.
They flipped me over on my back and one of them sat on me. I heard the ‘snickt’ of a knife being opened and the press of cold steel against my throat as I was firmly held on the ground. What a way to end a career, in a filthy alley after being spotted by a mark. I refused to close my eyes and cower. I stared up at the face of my killer as the sharp edge of the knife bit into my skin.
There was a flash of bright light, a boom of noise, and I was suddenly free. I sat up painfully, rubbing at the thin cut on my throat, it was a scratch; I wouldn’t even have a scar. The three thugs that tried to off me were sprawled in the trash a few feet away, out cold. “It is not your time, Gareth Stilson, and so I have intervened.” Iggy walked over to me and offered a hand.
“My knee is busted, I can’t stand up.” I waved at my throbbing leg. They’d messed me up but good.
Iggy crouched beside me and clasped both of his hands around my knee. I would have screamed at the pain, but there was none. The fiery agony had disappeared the instant Iggy touched me. He pulled back and stood, grasping my elbow firmly and pulling me up.
“What are you?” I whispered. The situation was beyond weird.
“A Hand of God, I do his will on Earth. And his will is that you live today, Gareth Stilson. I must leave, farewell.” This time, he did take a powder in an unearthly way. He vanished in the blink of an eye, leaving me to explain to the arriving feds how their suspects had ended up quasi-electrified by an angelic taser.
Iggy popped up fairly regularly after that. I live a dangerous life, and increasingly found myself in need of heavenly intervention as I got older. I probably should have retired and started doing electronic surveillance and other less physical type of jobs. But I loved the adrenaline rush.
The day everything changed was another ordinary, average Wednesday. I still hung out at Liv’s Diner, though Oksana had long since moved on to greener pastures. I was sitting in my usual booth staring out the window when I felt a presence across from me. I knew it was him before I even turned my head. “Hello, Iggy.”
“Greetings, Gareth Stilson. We have need of your skills,” I have since learned that angels do not waste a lot of time with small talk.
I tried to derail him, even though the tactic had never worked once in the past. “You’re never going to call me Stils, are you?”
“I do not believe so. There is a being walking Earth now that should not be here.”
Waving a hand up and down at him, asked, “So, isn’t that what you guys do, hunt down the bad guys?” He was being visible to everyone today, so I didn’t look like a complete imbecile talking to myself.
“Indeed. However, before we vanquish this particular walker, there is a plan to be enacted. This walker is unlike the others, with power the others do not possess.”
“How so?”
“He speaks for the one who should not be named.”
I had never seen Iggy act nervous. He was nervous now and it was contagious. “So the devil’s mouthpiece is out and about?”
“Every few generations this happens. It is an opportunity to act that shall not come again for a long time. It has been decided that you, of all our charges, might be able to see this plan through.”
Not liking the sound of this, I gulped my coffee. “What do I have to do?”
“Come to terms with the walker.”
I had to think about that for a minute. I set my coffee cup down and leaned across the table. “Wait, Heaven wants me to make a deal with the devil?”
“Yes, that is a correct translation to your vernacular.”
“Heaven WANTS me to sell my soul? The thing you and yours have been going out of your way for decades to protect?!?”
Iggy tilted his head and looked surprised at my anger. “I have told you frequently in the past that Heaven had a vested interest in protecting you, Gareth Stilson. This is one of the reasons.”
“Why me?”
“Because of all the charges under our protection, you are the most likely to survive the experience with your true soul intact.”
“My true soul?”
“You are a unique individual, you were to have been twins, but yet you were not. There are two souls within this body,” Iggy put his finger to my forehead and gently pushed me back into my seat. “Your true soul and that of your unfortunate unformed sibling.”
I was supposed to be a twin? That was news. “So you want me to sell my brother or sister’s soul to the devil?”
“It is a shadow of a soul, overlaying your own. When it is separated from you, it shall dissipate, it shall not be imprisoned, it shall not suffer for even a moment.”
“Well won’t Hell be pissed if I sign up and don’t deliver upon arrival?”
Iggy shook his head. “The walker will set the arrangements here on Earth; you will be in place to enact the plan before any of the denizens below realize what has happened.”
“What exactly is the plan?”
An angel’s smile is irresistible, I’ve said before that Iggy is pretty; well, when he smiles, he’s drop-dead gorgeous. “You shall be gifted with the weapons of Heaven; all that we can give shall be yours. The contract you make will put you close enough to strike at the heart and stop the spread of evil here on Earth.”
“You want me to kill Luc…” Iggy’s hand shot up and covered my mouth before I could finish speaking.
“The fallen one, yes. We shall give you the strength and power you need to accomplish this task.”
I sat back and thought about it. “So, when does all this go down?”
He might not speak Stils-ese, but Iggy had always understood my meaning perfectly when I spoke. “You should meet with the walker as soon as possible.”
“And the rest of it?”
“Upon your death.”
I figured I still had a few good decades in front of me, so I wasn’t too troubled to have this eventuality hanging over my head. After all, I sort of owed Heaven for the extra years of life that angels had made possible. I should have known better.
Finding old sulfur breath was easy with Iggy’s help. Cutting the deal was pretty straightforward, I would be granted power in exchange for my soul after my death, blah, blah, blah. Iggy had assured me that the ‘extra’ twin soul was indeed mine, and I could bargain it away. My ‘true soul’ belonged to Heaven; it was their claim on me that was to give me protection in the underworld.
Even Hell-borne power doesn’t mean a hill of beans when Fate is being funny. Fate is fond of irony, I’ve found. I had to take a meeting across the country with the feds for a new contract. The plane had engine trouble in the middle of a storm and crashed into the side of a mountain. Despite my dangerous life, I had departed this world in the same manner as my dear old dad; a plane meeting the immovable force of the Earth. Ironic, no?
I felt the tear of the shadow soul being pulled from my body as I went from the physical world to the underworld. Unlike the other ninety nine percent of the souls in hell, I was clean and shiny and glowing with Heaven’s grace when I arrived.
Heaven had wanted me to do this before taking me to my great reward. Hell should have been afraid that I’d take over.
Because that is exactly what I did.
The End?
Originally posted at http://rinkafic.dreamwidth.org/