Fic: Pains and Portents
Title: Pains and Portents
Characters/Pairings: Kurogane, Yuui and Fai (possible/probable allusions to pairings between the three of them), and some random Archangels mentioned in passing
Rating: T - warnings for stupidity, mild language, biblical references/parody (the author fully admitting she is going to hell for this)
Summary: AU/fusion with Good Omens 'verse. In which Kurogane, Yuui and Fai attempt to be angelic, at least one ends up demonic, and all give each other lots of headaches along the way.
A/N: I've had 'block with the TRC fandom for a while, so dug up some of the stuff that was fermenting on my harddrive and had a play around with it to see if it could kickstart the rest. There is so much I should be working on instead...;;;
Original idea for the scenario is Crys' fault again - she asked, shortly after I'd finished reading GO, about what sort of characters I thought Fai and Kurogane might be in that universe. This is what resulted, and I may come back to play with it some more, yet.
References are drawn heavily from Christian - and in particular Catholic - canon.
*****
“…I think,” an angel said thoughtfully, as he watched the small group of shepherds run off into the distance towards Bethlehem proper, “I may have given them the wrong directions.”
“Eh,” said his companion, another angel, standing beside him, “they’ll get there eventually.” He was conspicuously ignoring the receding figures of the shepherds, smoothing out the feathers in his two wings so that they didn’t stick out at so many odd angles. He’d been doing that for the most of the night, attempting to look like he wasn’t interested, and had studiously avoiding joining in the singing earlier. He didn’t like singing.
“You think so?” The first angel - a Dominion♠ in fact - seemed to glow brighter with the other’s reassurance, smiling up at the starry sky overhead. “I’m glad - this is important, after all.”
His darker companion only shrugged, deliberately ignoring the light emanating from the angel lord beside him by ease of practice. His boss - the idiot beside him - was a glowstick. There was supposedly some logic in appointing glowsticks dominion over the lesser angels - this lesser angel♣ had yet to figure out why. “If you’re supposed to have screwed up, you’ll have screwed up. Can we go now?”
His boss pouted at him, glow dimming, apparently not pleased by the reminder of ineffability - or maybe just not how his underling managed to use the theology to insult him. Either worked. “I’m not a screw-up.”
“And you didn’t just send those shepherds to your favourite Bethlehemian bakery, instead of the stable where they’re supposed to be.”
“…Ah.” The Dominion folded his wings behind him, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly. “I thought the directions I gave them were a little more complicated than necessary…”
“It’s shut this time of night as well,” his underling pointed out, folding his own arms across his chest. “Idiot.” The Dominion laughed, a little weakly, and the Power sighed. “…Come on.” He spread his wings out, sweeping, stream-lined glory better suited for battles than messenger duty. “If we go now we can catch them before they think their Christ is a loaf.”
His companion smiled at him, glowing brightly once more, and took to the sky, his fellow angel beside him. “Yes~!”
And the two flew off, busy with the work of the Lord.
#
♠ The lowest rank of the angel lords, but the highest type of angel of the second tier. They oversaw the lesser angels, and assigned them duties. As a perk of promotion he got a glowing sword, a shinier halo, and a pair of stupidly glossy wings. (The good looks, eternal sunshine and feather-brained attitude, however, seemed to have been things he’d sprung into existence with.)
♣ He was technically a Power, actually, but the irritating Dominion beside him kept taking his sword off of him and refusing to let him go fight things. It was terribly disheartening, especially for a warrior angel.
When later discussing the incident it became clear that the question was very much less why Kurogane♠ had Fallen, and more why it had taken so long for the angel to Fall in the first place. He’d never been the most obviously loving of Heaven’s host, more fond of smacking things or stabbing them with his gloriously shiny sword than producing rainbows and cuddles. Making him a Power, a warrior angel, had seemed the logical choice; Kurogane could go stab the Other Team to his heart’s content, and the celestial creatures of above got him out of their halo-tipped hair.
Kurogane had been quite good at the job too - Michael had approved of the youngling’s prowess♥ and had taken to sparring with Kurogane when the opportunity arose, commending the lesser angel for his talent.♦ Such commendations had earned Kurogane the attention of the Higher Ups, and it with a thought for the Power’s future in Heaven that they re-organised the Dominion overseeing him - as skilled as he was Kurogane could only go so far up the career ladder with his mule-minded attitude; he needed to work on being more ‘well-rounded’ as an angelic individual, produce a few more sunbeams now and then. Or…ever, really. (Even the occasional sparkle would be an improvement.)
And so it was that Kurogane was given into the care of a new Dominion, brought before the presence of the angel lord still bloody from smiting evil on the ethereal planes, sword clutched in his hand. He was rather unimpressed to see that his new lord was without the glowing sword that was given unto all Dominions as part and parcel of their role, and Kurogane remained stubbornly unblinded by the beauty that all Dominions were rumoured to possess. So this Dominion was supposed to be better than the others at spreading Heavenly love around the place, singing a bit more brightly, rescuing a few more trapped kitties from inconveniently-placed trees. Kurogane failed to see how this was going to have any effect whatsoever on him.
The Dominion confiscated his sword.
Kurogane raged - oh, how he raged - in Heaven, but the Dominion overseeing him was stubborn and eluded his temper far too easily with smiles and sunshine, driving away the thunder the Power carried about him. Adding insult to injury he appointed the Power as his personal bodyguard, to shadow him closely - and his air-headed chatter drove Kurogane to distraction, his teasing, his tricks. Kurogane appealed against his boss three times to the Higher Higher Ups - but they denied him, refused to order the Dominion to give back the Power’s sword, and basically told Kurogane to ‘be good’ for the other angel. Kurogane was supposed to be learning, after all.
It felt a lot more like babysitting - the idiot Dominion seemed to have single-handedly set out to make Heaven a living Hell for the Power in his tender loving grasp. The Dominion smiled, twirled, pranced and pounced and draped himself over his victim without the slightest care, hiding under golden-white wings when Kurogane yelled and lunged for him, darting away with a bright laugh. He woke at odd hours and dragged Kurogane down to earth to do nothing more than play with a school of dolphins, flying low over the ocean waves to just skim the tips of the cresting foam with the very edges of his fingertips. He slept in a tree, slung out over a branch like a sleepy cat, and in the morning had a one-sided conversation with a perplexed squirrel that had come out of its nest to find an angel drowsing there. He never seemed to do his paperwork and left Kurogane to take his scoldings for him, swooping out of hiding once whoever was searching for him was gone and cutting short Kurogane’s rant with a well-timed kiss to the cheek, occasionally presenting a pretty flower he’d found and tucking it behind the Power’s ear. Kurogane inevitably spluttered and flushed bright red, and the paperwork was thus put off for another day.
They went down to earth on the Lord’s business, from time to time, the Dominion tasked with some job or other and Kurogane shadowing him, his bodyguard and reluctant student. More often than not on the official visits they passed through the settlements of Man, hiding their wings and taking on the mortal bodies the Higher Ups arranged for them. (Kurogane, unerringly, always opted for male form - but his guide, the Dominion, varied between the mortal sexes with each visit. It didn’t particularly matter much; the way the Dominion acted when amongst Man the humans always somehow ended up referring to the Dominion as Kurogane’s wife, much to Kurogane’s chagrin, and his companion’s amusement.) Thus disguised the two angels went about their task - and then usually headed to the bar immediately afterwards. The Lord had performed many wonders in His Very, Very Long Time, and Man was said to be the glory of His Creation. Alcohol, in the opinion of probably a very large majority of Man and a good few other beings, thingies and general whatsits beside, was undoubtedly the glory of Man’s Creation, so by route of some wonderfully circumstantial, rigorously-applied, perfectly opportunistic logic that many took a great liking to, alcohol was Glory’s Glory and thus had to be properly savoured in order to do true justice to the Divine Wonder of the Lord.♪ Kurogane and his immediate boss obligingly savoured, and on more than one occasion ended up completely and totally ‘smashed’ to use some ‘totally awesome’ terminology that the Dominion came out with when giggling and clinging to Kurogane’s arm so he didn’t faceplant into the dirt road they’d found themselves tossed out onto after drinking the…drinking-place they’d been in all out of alcohol. Said terminology hadn’t really fallen into use by that point in history and wasn’t due for another two thousand years, give or take the odd decade or so. Maybe a few centuries, too. (It was remarkably hard to keep track of all the numbers when one was utterly inebriated. There were lots. Lots and lots. Bugger history; it was far too long.)
“Oi,” said Kurogane, sent off-balance by the extra-weight of another angel on his arm and almost careening straight into a nearby wall. He wasn’t particularly sure why the wall would be an inconvenience - it looked awfully nice and flat and leanable on, after all - but smacking into it would be bad. Probably. Some part of Kurogane’s mind registered that wall-smacking would be bad. They could break the wall. Or something. Maybe the wall had relatives that would ask for blood-money?
“Nah,” the Dominion beside Kurogane announced, just one shade off the ‘nyaa’ noise he’d been making for the past hour and almost pushing Kurogane into the wall again. The poor wall. Kurogane sent it a mild beam of mental sympathy, preoccupying his attentions that way and completely failing to realise he’d voiced his earlier question aloud. “Walls don’t bleed. I think. S’all red. Someone would notice the red, no?” A pause. “Though, there’s that phrase - whatsit, that one.”
“…What one?”
“The one with the blood. Blood and rock. Only there’s not so much blood because someone probably invented something to hide it.”
“…‘Like blood out of a stone’?”
“That one!”
Sense was slowly and dimly returning to Kurogane. “…Idiot, that doesn’t mention rock.”
“Stone, rock…s’the same thing.” His companion pouted at him, still teetering on his feet with his blond hair flopping hopelessly into his eyes. “And don’t call me n’idiot. M’your boss.”
“Dominion,” Kurogane corrected. He refused point-blank to call the idiot beside him ‘boss’ - and that went for any of its derivatives as well, giving his superior something to sulk about endlessly.
“Stupid word…”
“What word?”
“Dominion.”
“You’re stupid?” That didn’t really require a question mark.
“No,” said Kurogane’s boss, completely ignoring the fact that Kurogane refused to even call him - sometimes her, and Kurogane was going to give the ones assigning bodies Upstairs hell for that because dammit, the Dominion was confusing enough without random gender change - ‘boss’ and swivelling about with a swirling fluidity, one hand on Kurogane’s arm, blue-sky eyes looking up at Kurogane’s face with perfect seriousness. “I’m Fai.”
Endless summer sunshine, faraway snow-topped mountains, the curling clouds and drifting snows.
“What?” Kurogane asked - and willed himself sober, immediately, staring at the blond wobbling dangerously in front of him. Sober, because that was too much to deal with drunk. Angel lords never revealed their names to the rabble - only the Archangels let theirs slip out occasionally, as a necessity.♫
‘Fai,’ too, seemed to realise what he’d done, and promptly sobered up as well. Kurogane watched the alcohol-haze vanish from the Dominion’s eyes, quickly replaced with a shuttered disbelief.
“…I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“No,” said Kurogane, and looked very pointedly down at Fai’s hand, which was still on Kurogane’s arm. Fai hastily dropped it, tucking the offending hand behind his back. “You shouldn’t have. Fai.” The name tasted of wind and cold and fire.
“It’s not my real name,” Fai said.
But it was a name, a name of an angel lord, belonging to the Dominion, given to him and naming him and holding power over him, part of the Dominion. Fai.
Kurogane looked at his immediate superior, the angel in mortal guise like he himself was, slim and fair and guiltily looking aside. His hair was a mess.
“Idiot,” Kurogane said, and then hauled the idiot’s behind back to Heaven.
#
♠ Kurogane wasn’t his actual name. Far from it. It had been an alias when he’d went down to earth on missions a few times to get some smiting done in the far east, and he’d stuck with it because he still thought it was rather cool.♣ None of the other angels had aliases that cool.
♣ Not that he was ever going to admit that.
♥ But then again, Michael had approved of Lucifer’s prowess too - and everybody knew how well that had turned out.
♦ Once Michael had, of course, gotten over the fact that the first time he’d met him Kurogane had called the Archangel ‘a posturing, idiotic, loudmouth-pansy in a short sparkly skirt.’ Michael had beat Kurogane into the ground for the remark, and then went to sulk in the corner for a good month about the comment on his skirt.
♪ It was so glorious both Heaven and Hell tried to claim dibs to influencing the inventors, and had been petitioning for the right of commendation for a job well done since the first drunken idiot had nose-dived out of the sky after one mug of mead too many. The Damned had a particular sub-note written into their unwritten constitution about it: ‘Know Thy Enemy.’ The bureaucratic residents of Down Below affectionately referred to it as the ‘The Damn Dram Decree’ after one demon in particular strayed too close to what was then Caledonia and got himself mortal drunk, taking a long dunk in Loch Maree and washing up on the shore in a nice dress. He declared it was the best night he’d ever had and went back to Hell with a Highland Cow - which he later named Maybell, in honour of a bloody great bender.
♫ What exactly counted as a ‘necessity’ only God knew. Personally, Kurogane thought ‘necessity’ was just the Higher Ups’ favourite cover-up word for when one of them had mucked-up spectacularly and just wanted to pretend like they’d known what they’d been doing all along. Some days ‘necessity’ could give ‘ineffable’ a run for its money.
Once, a terribly, terribly long time ago, two cherubs came into being in heaven at the same time, entwined together from the moment of their creation. The Lord God saw that they loved each other dearly, second only to their love for Him, and so let them call each other ‘brother,’ closer to each other than to the other brethren of Heaven’s host. And because they were good, kind, and wise, and loved the Lord God’s Creation with all their hearts He appointed them Dominions, to rule and guide the lesser angels with all the strength their bond gave them. And they ruled wisely and fairly as the Lord God had asked of them from their place in Heaven, for they were of the higher orders and veiled their faces from the eyes of men.
They named each other, for the names that the Lord had given them were too precious to waste and burned their mouths, names that they could call each other and know that these too were gifts and signs of love. And thus - the Dominion known as ‘Fai.’ Who had smiled and kissed his brother’s cheek and sworn he would share his name with no other.
Fai explained this, shortly, in little bits and pieces that Kurogane had to slowly draw out - painfully slowly; sometimes it felt like dragging the teeth out of Lucifer’s three-headed guard-dog would’ve been an easier endeavour - of the Dominion over the span over a century. He never gave his brother’s name, of course, locking the precious information deep inside his heart, but. Still.
“There’re two of you?” Kurogane asked, with the same sort of horror Noah had displayed when the Lord God had done the weather report sometime back and had announced that there was going to be a little more rain than usual that day.
“I think you’d like him,” Fai said, quietly, his voice somehow managing to cut through Kurogane’s internal plans for an early retirement. “He’s very busy and goes very far away at times to do the Lord’s work, but he’s smart and gentle and very kind.”
“…You miss him,” Kurogane surmised, thoughtful.
Fai looked at him, and nodded.
Unfortunately, Yuui and Kurogane didn’t meet until after Kurogane had Fallen, and it was less of a meeting and more of the angel trying to stop some fifteenth century villagers drowning♠ the demon in a lake for witchcraft. Naturally, being in the middle of drowning and the subsequent rather uncomfortable experience of discorporation, Kurogane didn’t see the Dominion unfurl his wings for the villagers - flaming sword and all -, terrify the lot of them out of their questionable wits and send them running in fear of the Lord, but he heard the gibbering of some of them after he was fished up out of the water, seeing blond hair, blue eyes, and a familiar surprised face.
“Fai,” Kurogane said by way of greeting, after he’d spat out a mouthful of lake-water.
“It’s you,” ‘Fai’ said by dint of reply, and promptly dropped the demon back in the lake again.
They had a charming argument when Kurogane finally hauled himself up out of the water - most of it seemingly centred around the fact Kurogane felt ‘please, I dropped you in the shallow end,’ wasn’t an appropriate response to his complaints about being dropped in an overlarge pond at all. Again. The Dominion felt unjustly done to as well - he’d been trying to rescue an innocent unfairly sentenced, not fetch up a Damned One.
‘Fai’ not being Fai came out sometime as Kurogane was drying out his outfit and checking for lake-slime.
“But,” Kurogane said, more than a little confused, looking to the angel sitting on the lakeshore that was stubbornly refusing to look at him. He’d waited, Fai’s brother, even though he’d dropped Kurogane in the lake and didn’t speak much. He’d waited. “You know who I am.”
The Dominion was still glowing slightly, a leftover shine from his appearance to the villagers. “…You’re the only one that knows his other name other than the Lord God and myself.”
“…He told you about that?”
“He tells me everything.”
“…Hn,” Kurogane had said, and seeing no lake-slime on his person had taken a seat at Fai’s brother’s side, looking out at the water. The Dominion lost his wings, to accommodate Kurogane better - but he also shifted away his sword. It was no secret Kurogane - the once-Power - had always liked his swords. “Does he make you do his paperwork too?”
The Dominion didn’t laugh, stubborn - Kurogane would grow to learn that both of the twins were stubborn when they wanted to be -, but he tilted his head away some more, lips curling with the smallest of smiles that fought to break out. It was the start of a friendship.
It still took three centuries; countless more meetings; lots of Wiling; lots of Thwarting; and one incident with six cakes, a cellar-full of absinthe, one monkey and an orange♣ for Kurogane to find out Fai had called his brother ‘Yuui.’
Yuui refused to see him again for the rest of the eighteenth century - something about still trying to blink away the sparkly green lights.
#
♠ Technically, they were ducking him, not drowning him, to see if he floated or sank. Also technically - Kurogane didn’t care. Either way he inhaled half of the lake into his lungs, and looked set for heading Downstairs to explain to the bureaucracy why he was in need of a new body to go Tempting again.
♣ It had also involved a pirate ship (from which they’d removed the monkey), but they’d both been very, very drunk and took that as a good enough excuse to pretend that the incident had never happened. Fai would have never let either of them live it down.
After Kurogane found out Fai was called Fai, Fai took Kurogane off shadowing him and acting as a bodyguard for the Dominion, and put Kurogane on ‘Special Duties.’ Having been assigned to Fai’s renowned tutelage for a good few centuries it was with an interested eye everyone Upstairs watched the Power’s first new job.
Kurogane didn’t fail to provide entertainment, either Above, Below, or in That Smudgy Bit In-Between Place that had the annoying tendency of producing people who wrote about what they saw and were inspired by♠ and went on to stick it in holy books.
1 It was about this time that King Herod started persecuting certain members of the church, because he was bored one day and decided it would be an interesting way to pass the time until someone invented television.
2 He had James the brother of John beheaded,
3 and when he saw that this pleased the Jews, for they too were bored witless without regular updates of I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here, he went on to arrest Peter as well.
4 As it was during the days of Unleavened Bread that he had arrested him, he put him in prison, pedantically assigning four sections of four soldiers each to guard him, meaning to try him in public after the Passover.
5 All the time Peter was under guard the church prayed to God for him unremittingly.
6 On the night before Herod was to try him, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, fastened with two chains to the wall despite his earlier protests to the guards that he ‘wasn’t in to that sort of thing,’ while the guards kept watch at the main entrance to the prison.
7 Suddenly an angel of the Lord stood there, and the cell was filled with a glowing light and the sound of cursing as he banged his head on the low ceiling. None saw him, for all were snoring fit to rival thunder, so the angel bent to tap Peter on the shoulder, having been painstakingly taught the ways of Good Manners by his Dominion and boss.
8 Peter slept on, and the angel of the Lord quickly lost his little patience, scowling. He grabbed Peter by his shirt front and rattled him until the man awoke and quaked obligingly in the face of the angel’s wrath.
9 ‘Shift,’ the angel told him, and dropped Peter to the cold ground, the chains falling from Peter’s hands. ‘We’re leaving.’
10 ‘Leaving?’ Peter queried, and received a mighty smack to the head for his stupidity.
11 ‘You would rather die?’ the angel asked him waspishly - and so Peter hurriedly rose to his feet, keen to avoid another blow. The angel toed the guards at his feet in disgust. ‘I wish I’d brought my sword.’
12 Peter dressed himself when the angel flung cloak and sandals at his head, and followed the angel from the cell. He had no idea where he was going and thought all the events a dream
13 and the angel of the Lord did not do much to dissuade him, being rude when he spoke and speaking little. He was too unconventional, Peter thought, to be an angel and so he had to be dreaming - angels would not bristle like large, angry dogs when asked questions, surely, and threaten three times to take their companions back to their cell and let them rot.
14 After the third time Peter fell silent, chastised by the Lord’s messenger and fearing the angel would take the nearest blunt object to his head.
14 Like this they passed through the first guard post and then the second and reached the iron gate leading to the city. This opened of its own accord; they went through it and had walked the whole length of one street when suddenly the angel left Peter, fed-up with the man’s idiocy.
15 And in Heaven the angel lodged a formal complaint, and refused to ever deal with Peter again. He had his own idiot already.
Kurogane found out later that it had been Fai’s brother that had been sent down on clean-up duty to see the writer, and so it was the first draft of chapter twelve of the Acts of the Apostles was burned, and the evangelist Luke thought it all a most peculiar dream.
Fai put Kurogane back on job-shadowing.
#
♠ Angels gossiped when they acted as muses for writers, some (annoyingly) more so than others.
Characters/Pairings: Kurogane, Yuui and Fai (possible/probable allusions to pairings between the three of them), and some random Archangels mentioned in passing
Rating: T - warnings for stupidity, mild language, biblical references/parody (the author fully admitting she is going to hell for this)
Summary: AU/fusion with Good Omens 'verse. In which Kurogane, Yuui and Fai attempt to be angelic, at least one ends up demonic, and all give each other lots of headaches along the way.
A/N: I've had 'block with the TRC fandom for a while, so dug up some of the stuff that was fermenting on my harddrive and had a play around with it to see if it could kickstart the rest. There is so much I should be working on instead...;;;
Original idea for the scenario is Crys' fault again - she asked, shortly after I'd finished reading GO, about what sort of characters I thought Fai and Kurogane might be in that universe. This is what resulted, and I may come back to play with it some more, yet.
References are drawn heavily from Christian - and in particular Catholic - canon.
*****
“…I think,” an angel said thoughtfully, as he watched the small group of shepherds run off into the distance towards Bethlehem proper, “I may have given them the wrong directions.”
“Eh,” said his companion, another angel, standing beside him, “they’ll get there eventually.” He was conspicuously ignoring the receding figures of the shepherds, smoothing out the feathers in his two wings so that they didn’t stick out at so many odd angles. He’d been doing that for the most of the night, attempting to look like he wasn’t interested, and had studiously avoiding joining in the singing earlier. He didn’t like singing.
“You think so?” The first angel - a Dominion♠ in fact - seemed to glow brighter with the other’s reassurance, smiling up at the starry sky overhead. “I’m glad - this is important, after all.”
His darker companion only shrugged, deliberately ignoring the light emanating from the angel lord beside him by ease of practice. His boss - the idiot beside him - was a glowstick. There was supposedly some logic in appointing glowsticks dominion over the lesser angels - this lesser angel♣ had yet to figure out why. “If you’re supposed to have screwed up, you’ll have screwed up. Can we go now?”
His boss pouted at him, glow dimming, apparently not pleased by the reminder of ineffability - or maybe just not how his underling managed to use the theology to insult him. Either worked. “I’m not a screw-up.”
“And you didn’t just send those shepherds to your favourite Bethlehemian bakery, instead of the stable where they’re supposed to be.”
“…Ah.” The Dominion folded his wings behind him, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly. “I thought the directions I gave them were a little more complicated than necessary…”
“It’s shut this time of night as well,” his underling pointed out, folding his own arms across his chest. “Idiot.” The Dominion laughed, a little weakly, and the Power sighed. “…Come on.” He spread his wings out, sweeping, stream-lined glory better suited for battles than messenger duty. “If we go now we can catch them before they think their Christ is a loaf.”
His companion smiled at him, glowing brightly once more, and took to the sky, his fellow angel beside him. “Yes~!”
And the two flew off, busy with the work of the Lord.
#
♠ The lowest rank of the angel lords, but the highest type of angel of the second tier. They oversaw the lesser angels, and assigned them duties. As a perk of promotion he got a glowing sword, a shinier halo, and a pair of stupidly glossy wings. (The good looks, eternal sunshine and feather-brained attitude, however, seemed to have been things he’d sprung into existence with.)
♣ He was technically a Power, actually, but the irritating Dominion beside him kept taking his sword off of him and refusing to let him go fight things. It was terribly disheartening, especially for a warrior angel.
When later discussing the incident it became clear that the question was very much less why Kurogane♠ had Fallen, and more why it had taken so long for the angel to Fall in the first place. He’d never been the most obviously loving of Heaven’s host, more fond of smacking things or stabbing them with his gloriously shiny sword than producing rainbows and cuddles. Making him a Power, a warrior angel, had seemed the logical choice; Kurogane could go stab the Other Team to his heart’s content, and the celestial creatures of above got him out of their halo-tipped hair.
Kurogane had been quite good at the job too - Michael had approved of the youngling’s prowess♥ and had taken to sparring with Kurogane when the opportunity arose, commending the lesser angel for his talent.♦ Such commendations had earned Kurogane the attention of the Higher Ups, and it with a thought for the Power’s future in Heaven that they re-organised the Dominion overseeing him - as skilled as he was Kurogane could only go so far up the career ladder with his mule-minded attitude; he needed to work on being more ‘well-rounded’ as an angelic individual, produce a few more sunbeams now and then. Or…ever, really. (Even the occasional sparkle would be an improvement.)
And so it was that Kurogane was given into the care of a new Dominion, brought before the presence of the angel lord still bloody from smiting evil on the ethereal planes, sword clutched in his hand. He was rather unimpressed to see that his new lord was without the glowing sword that was given unto all Dominions as part and parcel of their role, and Kurogane remained stubbornly unblinded by the beauty that all Dominions were rumoured to possess. So this Dominion was supposed to be better than the others at spreading Heavenly love around the place, singing a bit more brightly, rescuing a few more trapped kitties from inconveniently-placed trees. Kurogane failed to see how this was going to have any effect whatsoever on him.
The Dominion confiscated his sword.
Kurogane raged - oh, how he raged - in Heaven, but the Dominion overseeing him was stubborn and eluded his temper far too easily with smiles and sunshine, driving away the thunder the Power carried about him. Adding insult to injury he appointed the Power as his personal bodyguard, to shadow him closely - and his air-headed chatter drove Kurogane to distraction, his teasing, his tricks. Kurogane appealed against his boss three times to the Higher Higher Ups - but they denied him, refused to order the Dominion to give back the Power’s sword, and basically told Kurogane to ‘be good’ for the other angel. Kurogane was supposed to be learning, after all.
It felt a lot more like babysitting - the idiot Dominion seemed to have single-handedly set out to make Heaven a living Hell for the Power in his tender loving grasp. The Dominion smiled, twirled, pranced and pounced and draped himself over his victim without the slightest care, hiding under golden-white wings when Kurogane yelled and lunged for him, darting away with a bright laugh. He woke at odd hours and dragged Kurogane down to earth to do nothing more than play with a school of dolphins, flying low over the ocean waves to just skim the tips of the cresting foam with the very edges of his fingertips. He slept in a tree, slung out over a branch like a sleepy cat, and in the morning had a one-sided conversation with a perplexed squirrel that had come out of its nest to find an angel drowsing there. He never seemed to do his paperwork and left Kurogane to take his scoldings for him, swooping out of hiding once whoever was searching for him was gone and cutting short Kurogane’s rant with a well-timed kiss to the cheek, occasionally presenting a pretty flower he’d found and tucking it behind the Power’s ear. Kurogane inevitably spluttered and flushed bright red, and the paperwork was thus put off for another day.
They went down to earth on the Lord’s business, from time to time, the Dominion tasked with some job or other and Kurogane shadowing him, his bodyguard and reluctant student. More often than not on the official visits they passed through the settlements of Man, hiding their wings and taking on the mortal bodies the Higher Ups arranged for them. (Kurogane, unerringly, always opted for male form - but his guide, the Dominion, varied between the mortal sexes with each visit. It didn’t particularly matter much; the way the Dominion acted when amongst Man the humans always somehow ended up referring to the Dominion as Kurogane’s wife, much to Kurogane’s chagrin, and his companion’s amusement.) Thus disguised the two angels went about their task - and then usually headed to the bar immediately afterwards. The Lord had performed many wonders in His Very, Very Long Time, and Man was said to be the glory of His Creation. Alcohol, in the opinion of probably a very large majority of Man and a good few other beings, thingies and general whatsits beside, was undoubtedly the glory of Man’s Creation, so by route of some wonderfully circumstantial, rigorously-applied, perfectly opportunistic logic that many took a great liking to, alcohol was Glory’s Glory and thus had to be properly savoured in order to do true justice to the Divine Wonder of the Lord.♪ Kurogane and his immediate boss obligingly savoured, and on more than one occasion ended up completely and totally ‘smashed’ to use some ‘totally awesome’ terminology that the Dominion came out with when giggling and clinging to Kurogane’s arm so he didn’t faceplant into the dirt road they’d found themselves tossed out onto after drinking the…drinking-place they’d been in all out of alcohol. Said terminology hadn’t really fallen into use by that point in history and wasn’t due for another two thousand years, give or take the odd decade or so. Maybe a few centuries, too. (It was remarkably hard to keep track of all the numbers when one was utterly inebriated. There were lots. Lots and lots. Bugger history; it was far too long.)
“Oi,” said Kurogane, sent off-balance by the extra-weight of another angel on his arm and almost careening straight into a nearby wall. He wasn’t particularly sure why the wall would be an inconvenience - it looked awfully nice and flat and leanable on, after all - but smacking into it would be bad. Probably. Some part of Kurogane’s mind registered that wall-smacking would be bad. They could break the wall. Or something. Maybe the wall had relatives that would ask for blood-money?
“Nah,” the Dominion beside Kurogane announced, just one shade off the ‘nyaa’ noise he’d been making for the past hour and almost pushing Kurogane into the wall again. The poor wall. Kurogane sent it a mild beam of mental sympathy, preoccupying his attentions that way and completely failing to realise he’d voiced his earlier question aloud. “Walls don’t bleed. I think. S’all red. Someone would notice the red, no?” A pause. “Though, there’s that phrase - whatsit, that one.”
“…What one?”
“The one with the blood. Blood and rock. Only there’s not so much blood because someone probably invented something to hide it.”
“…‘Like blood out of a stone’?”
“That one!”
Sense was slowly and dimly returning to Kurogane. “…Idiot, that doesn’t mention rock.”
“Stone, rock…s’the same thing.” His companion pouted at him, still teetering on his feet with his blond hair flopping hopelessly into his eyes. “And don’t call me n’idiot. M’your boss.”
“Dominion,” Kurogane corrected. He refused point-blank to call the idiot beside him ‘boss’ - and that went for any of its derivatives as well, giving his superior something to sulk about endlessly.
“Stupid word…”
“What word?”
“Dominion.”
“You’re stupid?” That didn’t really require a question mark.
“No,” said Kurogane’s boss, completely ignoring the fact that Kurogane refused to even call him - sometimes her, and Kurogane was going to give the ones assigning bodies Upstairs hell for that because dammit, the Dominion was confusing enough without random gender change - ‘boss’ and swivelling about with a swirling fluidity, one hand on Kurogane’s arm, blue-sky eyes looking up at Kurogane’s face with perfect seriousness. “I’m Fai.”
Endless summer sunshine, faraway snow-topped mountains, the curling clouds and drifting snows.
“What?” Kurogane asked - and willed himself sober, immediately, staring at the blond wobbling dangerously in front of him. Sober, because that was too much to deal with drunk. Angel lords never revealed their names to the rabble - only the Archangels let theirs slip out occasionally, as a necessity.♫
‘Fai,’ too, seemed to realise what he’d done, and promptly sobered up as well. Kurogane watched the alcohol-haze vanish from the Dominion’s eyes, quickly replaced with a shuttered disbelief.
“…I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“No,” said Kurogane, and looked very pointedly down at Fai’s hand, which was still on Kurogane’s arm. Fai hastily dropped it, tucking the offending hand behind his back. “You shouldn’t have. Fai.” The name tasted of wind and cold and fire.
“It’s not my real name,” Fai said.
But it was a name, a name of an angel lord, belonging to the Dominion, given to him and naming him and holding power over him, part of the Dominion. Fai.
Kurogane looked at his immediate superior, the angel in mortal guise like he himself was, slim and fair and guiltily looking aside. His hair was a mess.
“Idiot,” Kurogane said, and then hauled the idiot’s behind back to Heaven.
#
♠ Kurogane wasn’t his actual name. Far from it. It had been an alias when he’d went down to earth on missions a few times to get some smiting done in the far east, and he’d stuck with it because he still thought it was rather cool.♣ None of the other angels had aliases that cool.
♣ Not that he was ever going to admit that.
♥ But then again, Michael had approved of Lucifer’s prowess too - and everybody knew how well that had turned out.
♦ Once Michael had, of course, gotten over the fact that the first time he’d met him Kurogane had called the Archangel ‘a posturing, idiotic, loudmouth-pansy in a short sparkly skirt.’ Michael had beat Kurogane into the ground for the remark, and then went to sulk in the corner for a good month about the comment on his skirt.
♪ It was so glorious both Heaven and Hell tried to claim dibs to influencing the inventors, and had been petitioning for the right of commendation for a job well done since the first drunken idiot had nose-dived out of the sky after one mug of mead too many. The Damned had a particular sub-note written into their unwritten constitution about it: ‘Know Thy Enemy.’ The bureaucratic residents of Down Below affectionately referred to it as the ‘The Damn Dram Decree’ after one demon in particular strayed too close to what was then Caledonia and got himself mortal drunk, taking a long dunk in Loch Maree and washing up on the shore in a nice dress. He declared it was the best night he’d ever had and went back to Hell with a Highland Cow - which he later named Maybell, in honour of a bloody great bender.
♫ What exactly counted as a ‘necessity’ only God knew. Personally, Kurogane thought ‘necessity’ was just the Higher Ups’ favourite cover-up word for when one of them had mucked-up spectacularly and just wanted to pretend like they’d known what they’d been doing all along. Some days ‘necessity’ could give ‘ineffable’ a run for its money.
Once, a terribly, terribly long time ago, two cherubs came into being in heaven at the same time, entwined together from the moment of their creation. The Lord God saw that they loved each other dearly, second only to their love for Him, and so let them call each other ‘brother,’ closer to each other than to the other brethren of Heaven’s host. And because they were good, kind, and wise, and loved the Lord God’s Creation with all their hearts He appointed them Dominions, to rule and guide the lesser angels with all the strength their bond gave them. And they ruled wisely and fairly as the Lord God had asked of them from their place in Heaven, for they were of the higher orders and veiled their faces from the eyes of men.
They named each other, for the names that the Lord had given them were too precious to waste and burned their mouths, names that they could call each other and know that these too were gifts and signs of love. And thus - the Dominion known as ‘Fai.’ Who had smiled and kissed his brother’s cheek and sworn he would share his name with no other.
Fai explained this, shortly, in little bits and pieces that Kurogane had to slowly draw out - painfully slowly; sometimes it felt like dragging the teeth out of Lucifer’s three-headed guard-dog would’ve been an easier endeavour - of the Dominion over the span over a century. He never gave his brother’s name, of course, locking the precious information deep inside his heart, but. Still.
“There’re two of you?” Kurogane asked, with the same sort of horror Noah had displayed when the Lord God had done the weather report sometime back and had announced that there was going to be a little more rain than usual that day.
“I think you’d like him,” Fai said, quietly, his voice somehow managing to cut through Kurogane’s internal plans for an early retirement. “He’s very busy and goes very far away at times to do the Lord’s work, but he’s smart and gentle and very kind.”
“…You miss him,” Kurogane surmised, thoughtful.
Fai looked at him, and nodded.
Unfortunately, Yuui and Kurogane didn’t meet until after Kurogane had Fallen, and it was less of a meeting and more of the angel trying to stop some fifteenth century villagers drowning♠ the demon in a lake for witchcraft. Naturally, being in the middle of drowning and the subsequent rather uncomfortable experience of discorporation, Kurogane didn’t see the Dominion unfurl his wings for the villagers - flaming sword and all -, terrify the lot of them out of their questionable wits and send them running in fear of the Lord, but he heard the gibbering of some of them after he was fished up out of the water, seeing blond hair, blue eyes, and a familiar surprised face.
“Fai,” Kurogane said by way of greeting, after he’d spat out a mouthful of lake-water.
“It’s you,” ‘Fai’ said by dint of reply, and promptly dropped the demon back in the lake again.
They had a charming argument when Kurogane finally hauled himself up out of the water - most of it seemingly centred around the fact Kurogane felt ‘please, I dropped you in the shallow end,’ wasn’t an appropriate response to his complaints about being dropped in an overlarge pond at all. Again. The Dominion felt unjustly done to as well - he’d been trying to rescue an innocent unfairly sentenced, not fetch up a Damned One.
‘Fai’ not being Fai came out sometime as Kurogane was drying out his outfit and checking for lake-slime.
“But,” Kurogane said, more than a little confused, looking to the angel sitting on the lakeshore that was stubbornly refusing to look at him. He’d waited, Fai’s brother, even though he’d dropped Kurogane in the lake and didn’t speak much. He’d waited. “You know who I am.”
The Dominion was still glowing slightly, a leftover shine from his appearance to the villagers. “…You’re the only one that knows his other name other than the Lord God and myself.”
“…He told you about that?”
“He tells me everything.”
“…Hn,” Kurogane had said, and seeing no lake-slime on his person had taken a seat at Fai’s brother’s side, looking out at the water. The Dominion lost his wings, to accommodate Kurogane better - but he also shifted away his sword. It was no secret Kurogane - the once-Power - had always liked his swords. “Does he make you do his paperwork too?”
The Dominion didn’t laugh, stubborn - Kurogane would grow to learn that both of the twins were stubborn when they wanted to be -, but he tilted his head away some more, lips curling with the smallest of smiles that fought to break out. It was the start of a friendship.
It still took three centuries; countless more meetings; lots of Wiling; lots of Thwarting; and one incident with six cakes, a cellar-full of absinthe, one monkey and an orange♣ for Kurogane to find out Fai had called his brother ‘Yuui.’
Yuui refused to see him again for the rest of the eighteenth century - something about still trying to blink away the sparkly green lights.
#
♠ Technically, they were ducking him, not drowning him, to see if he floated or sank. Also technically - Kurogane didn’t care. Either way he inhaled half of the lake into his lungs, and looked set for heading Downstairs to explain to the bureaucracy why he was in need of a new body to go Tempting again.
♣ It had also involved a pirate ship (from which they’d removed the monkey), but they’d both been very, very drunk and took that as a good enough excuse to pretend that the incident had never happened. Fai would have never let either of them live it down.
After Kurogane found out Fai was called Fai, Fai took Kurogane off shadowing him and acting as a bodyguard for the Dominion, and put Kurogane on ‘Special Duties.’ Having been assigned to Fai’s renowned tutelage for a good few centuries it was with an interested eye everyone Upstairs watched the Power’s first new job.
Kurogane didn’t fail to provide entertainment, either Above, Below, or in That Smudgy Bit In-Between Place that had the annoying tendency of producing people who wrote about what they saw and were inspired by♠ and went on to stick it in holy books.
1 It was about this time that King Herod started persecuting certain members of the church, because he was bored one day and decided it would be an interesting way to pass the time until someone invented television.
2 He had James the brother of John beheaded,
3 and when he saw that this pleased the Jews, for they too were bored witless without regular updates of I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here, he went on to arrest Peter as well.
4 As it was during the days of Unleavened Bread that he had arrested him, he put him in prison, pedantically assigning four sections of four soldiers each to guard him, meaning to try him in public after the Passover.
5 All the time Peter was under guard the church prayed to God for him unremittingly.
6 On the night before Herod was to try him, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, fastened with two chains to the wall despite his earlier protests to the guards that he ‘wasn’t in to that sort of thing,’ while the guards kept watch at the main entrance to the prison.
7 Suddenly an angel of the Lord stood there, and the cell was filled with a glowing light and the sound of cursing as he banged his head on the low ceiling. None saw him, for all were snoring fit to rival thunder, so the angel bent to tap Peter on the shoulder, having been painstakingly taught the ways of Good Manners by his Dominion and boss.
8 Peter slept on, and the angel of the Lord quickly lost his little patience, scowling. He grabbed Peter by his shirt front and rattled him until the man awoke and quaked obligingly in the face of the angel’s wrath.
9 ‘Shift,’ the angel told him, and dropped Peter to the cold ground, the chains falling from Peter’s hands. ‘We’re leaving.’
10 ‘Leaving?’ Peter queried, and received a mighty smack to the head for his stupidity.
11 ‘You would rather die?’ the angel asked him waspishly - and so Peter hurriedly rose to his feet, keen to avoid another blow. The angel toed the guards at his feet in disgust. ‘I wish I’d brought my sword.’
12 Peter dressed himself when the angel flung cloak and sandals at his head, and followed the angel from the cell. He had no idea where he was going and thought all the events a dream
13 and the angel of the Lord did not do much to dissuade him, being rude when he spoke and speaking little. He was too unconventional, Peter thought, to be an angel and so he had to be dreaming - angels would not bristle like large, angry dogs when asked questions, surely, and threaten three times to take their companions back to their cell and let them rot.
14 After the third time Peter fell silent, chastised by the Lord’s messenger and fearing the angel would take the nearest blunt object to his head.
14 Like this they passed through the first guard post and then the second and reached the iron gate leading to the city. This opened of its own accord; they went through it and had walked the whole length of one street when suddenly the angel left Peter, fed-up with the man’s idiocy.
15 And in Heaven the angel lodged a formal complaint, and refused to ever deal with Peter again. He had his own idiot already.
Kurogane found out later that it had been Fai’s brother that had been sent down on clean-up duty to see the writer, and so it was the first draft of chapter twelve of the Acts of the Apostles was burned, and the evangelist Luke thought it all a most peculiar dream.
Fai put Kurogane back on job-shadowing.
#
♠ Angels gossiped when they acted as muses for writers, some (annoyingly) more so than others.