Chapter Text
A loud shrilling noise that bypasses ears and goes straight into the brain is what parts the red fog in Gabriel’s mind. He comes to at least partial awareness. He groans, finding it impossible to move his head or hands an inch
It does not help whatsoever. The fucking BEEP!!.loud just keeps on playing on loop. The sound file is barely half a second long. He frantically searches for what keeps on playing it just so he can kill it. During that frantic search his cognitive processes brush against another presence with a distinctively organised structure.
Speaking being much easier to focus on than transferring files – Has it been mentioned that Gabriel is not, in fact, a machine, and he is learning the ropes of this as he goes? And he’s been at it for what, ten hours now? Does that include the time he’s been asleep? – he manages: “You can stop playing that. Any time now,” he adds.
The sound stops.
Gabriel’s whole body relaxes. He turns his camera on; why was it off in the first place?
He is prone on badly damaged wooden floorboards. The machine V1 is squatting on his shoulder blades, two left hands holding his right arm twisted in a painful position, and the remaining two pressing his head down. Gabriel’s left hand is unresponsive.
There is a lot of blood in Gabriel’s mouth. Some of it is his, he now knows the taste well. Most of it is bitter, bearing Hell-taint. He swallows and forces himself to keep it down. Blood.
Fresh blood, no less.
Blood blood blood. He wants more.
The red fog creeps back in.
He swats it away. With it comes more awareness: Everything hurts. His thigh especially. His head, too. The dizziness might be remnants of a concussion that he’s already healed through. Some cuts, shallow. His muscles burn, he’s stretched himself to his limits.
Company beeps to alert everyone that it has had the shot ready for a while and it would like to know whether it is going to be shooting or not. Make up your mind about it.
If I let go of you, V1 sends the plainest text possible, carefully scrubbed of all metadata, are you going to try to kill anyone?
“No,” Gabriel says. Why would he?
V1 lets go. Gabriel’s arm falls to the ground and the claws get stuck in the wood. Gabriel winces and forces them to retract. On the other hand, too. When he doesn’t move for two more seconds, the machine gets off his back.
After performing an internal exam, Gabriel concludes he can actually sit up without negative consequences on his health. So he does. He uses this new position to put the left shoulder back into its socket.
“Eugh,” says Zuriel at the popping sound. He’s obviously never had to do that, because he’d find the sound very satisfying otherwise. It’s the sound of things falling back into place as they ought to be.
Zuriel, when Gabriel looks over to him, is standing among pale rubble and bloody mess, and his otherwise pristine visage is marred by two swipes of red over his visor: One vertical, top down, and the other horizontal right to left, intersecting the first one in the upper third. Done by a five-fingered right hand, the markings inform him. It is poetic and hilarious to see the Tree of Life depicted so simplistically in blood blood bl–
Gabriel slams the play on BEEP!!.loud. V1 flinches, but that’s the worst thing that comes out of it. Notably, Gabriel doesn’t leap to decorate his hands with Zuriel’s insides.
“Does this happen often?” the Power asks, his voice strained as he puts in a great effort for it not to break and he along with it.
Instead of asking what should (or rather should not) be happening often, Gabriel skims his camera’s archive footage. He is obviously missing a chunk. He’s lost it in the red fog. In his defense, his demonic mock-up really pissed him off and it was a challenging fight and he… He just felt so alive.
And then there was the bigger one which he had to climb to actually do any damage to and that was like the pit all over again and– Here it is, the footage. So yes, that's the climbing right here. That is shredding the Hollow Night’s face. This is dismantling its right arm.
This is Company stealing the kill from him. This is leaping on Zuriel and– Yeah, that’s feeding him his own glaive, and this is painting the cross on him. This is an attempt to dismantle Cain. This is catching a coin to the head, which explains the concussion. This is V1 taking up most of his field of view. Oh shit, Gabriel feels the secondary satisfaction of just sinking the claws into its chest all over again.
(Does he really sound like that when he laughs? He must never do that again.)
And this is them tumbling on the floor with V1 having the advantage of a steel cable and two additional limbs
So in the end Gabriel answers: “Not often. I usually handle this.”
The empty seats, all splattered in blood and also dust, give another round of applause. No confetti this time. Instead the air is full of satisfaction. Hell has observed. Hell has approved.
Hell will do more to get what it wants and what it wants is for Gabriel to fucking snap.
Appropriate amount of anger, V1 fires at him.
It could have saved everyone the dead certain future trouble this is going to bring by letting Company turn Gabriel’s head to pulp. At his current rate, he wouldn’t regenerate from that. Eventually he will lose it again and do something extremely regrettable. Killing him is a safety measure! By machine standards he is faulty and shouldn’t have survived quality testing! What was Father even thinking when He had let him walk freely?
The loud alarm sound is once again infuriatingly effective at piercing through his brain. Better than a bullet, really.
Gabriel tries to snatch his cable away from the infuriating and smug machine. It grabs his hand before he can manage, though.
Stop playing that. I am through the murder amok.
You are being mean to my angel.
I am being objective and practical.
And mean.
To myself, because I need to get a fucking grip.
V1 crosses its arms and surveys the damage. The curtain goes down and covers them all. Finally it tilts its head and asks: Is it helping?
Gabriel has no answer to give. Instead he turns to Zuriel (and ignores him flinching at that) and asks: “Any sight of what we were supposed to find?”
“No. Not yet.”
The Swordmachine beeps in a very derisive tone, certain that V1 and Zuriel won’t understand it: You didn’t use your swords. You are afraid. You are faulty. And you fucking know it.
All of that is true, although not necessarily are the sentences connected to one another. For example, the sheats might be battered beyond casual recognition, but there is no way in Hell, Heaven or in between that Zuriel – who has functional eyes – wouldn’t recognize Splendour or Justice were they drawn. He might not have trained under Gabriel for a full century, but he still had a close look several times.
So instead, partially to get Cain off his high linguistic horse, Gabriel beeps back that it was not a sword situation. What? It’s a language, albeit simplistic. He’s learned! The machines don’t have to stare at him like that.
The curtains part again. Instead of the ruined seats it shows a door of metal painted red and gold, brightly lit.
The machines all instantly drop their combat stances. Cain beeps that it was about fucking time. Gabriel attempts to imitate their relief without knowing why. He doesn’t think himself successful, but hopefully if anyone thinks it odd, he can write it off as a part of the earlier, uh, malfunction.
He intercepts from V1: Please don’t be a fake exit.
This… sort of explains how the machines manage transstratic movement. Hell is actively allowing it.
The door slides open revealing… a small room of entirely red metal with an identical door in the far wall. The second door is partially obscured by a rectangular object, the details of which are hard to tell in the low light.
This is not what the machines have been expecting, judging by their reactions, but they proceed anyway. Zuriel gallantly insists that no, no, after you. He is not as subtle as he thinks about keeping everyone, especially Gabriel, in his line of sight. Although he moves like he knows what his chances are here.
With all of them in the room, they are all standing too close to each other for comfort. Not that Gabriel can move too far from V1 because of their hardware connection, and he has to stay close because the machine is holding his hand in a… well, it is not a tight grip, but its fingers are firmly locked. It is extremely tempting to just wrench himself free and tear the cable out of himself since the machine doesn’t want to unplug.
Look, he’s fucked up. He is aware. He is taking precautions for this not to happen again. The restraining is unnecessary. And the machine wouldn’t be able to hold him if he really didn’t want it to. He might be taking this unnecessarily offensively, because he is tired and hungry.
He didn’t make the connection himself, it is what the medical diagnostics have just pinged him with. He should eat something, drink water and consider a nap. Fighting is exhausting. Falling into blind rage apparently even more so.
Cain finds a light switch on the wall and slams it with one swing. Gabriel’s camera adjusts to the change in brightness very quickly, so he can now identify the rectangular object. It is a glass display case. That is not so noteworthy.
Worthy of note is his armor displayed there, a little bloodied and mud-covered, and a few of the tassels are gone from the chest piece. But it is his armor. No scratch in it, no bullet holes or drill-marks; like he, it has regenerated since he’s discarded it as unnecessary weight.
He wants it back. It is his.
“That’s fucking it?” Cain voices disappointment.
It is everything.
“All the fucking hassle? That whole flooded cave fuckery? That creepy as fuck demon? Viceripper had a fucking database malfunction for fucking scrap metal?”
Database malfunction?
Like when the group tagged as allies suddenly gets everyone tagged as hostiles and enemies, V1 sends immediately.
You told them that?
They don’t understand me. Cain (metadata: annoying loud swordmachine) has reached that conclusion on his own. It follows up with something else, but Gabriel tunes it out. He stares at the tarnished angelic steel.
“We did it because brother Kushiel has asked it of us. Our mission is to bring this armor back,” Zuriel says. “We went to find the proof and we have found it.”
Company notes that the armor looks a lot like the the one on all those statues and paintings all over Charon’s ship. But Gabriel is still too frozen in place to give it some answer, Cain doesn’t give a fuck, and the rest don’t understand what the beeps mean.
In the end after some deliberations, Company kicks the display case and it topples over. The glass is strongly reinforced and doesn’t even scratch, but the bottom is a whole different story. Zuriel distributes the armor parts among the group more or less evenly. He himself takes the cuirass, which is the heaviest of it, and V1 having four hands ends up with both whole legs. Gabriel is issued the pauldrons. After thinking it through, he loops them on a spare cable and hooks them both around his waist to keep his hands free. He offers to carry the gauntlet for Company who doesn’t have any legs, but it has successfully stashed it in the ammo box.
Only once all pieces of the armor are handled by someone does the other door open. This, V1’s pre-loaded archives inform Gabriel, is an actual exit, as in, the hole in the ground is a way to somewhere else.
Here is the thing: It’s a hole. Smooth metal. Going deep down, not even God knows where to. Gabriel can imagine just fine what it is going to be to climb back up. He can’t fly anymore, and won’t be able to for a long while. Even if he could fly, the shaft is too narrow. He wouldn’t make it. He’s not going to make it back up. He can’t.
When he doesn’t move for a couple of seconds, not even after Company rushes ahead into the free fall, the illusion that this is a choice is taken from him. By the blue machine, to be specific. It leverages the hold on his hand and drags him down with itself.
It has done so before. Metaphorically.
Gabriel’s only solace in that moment is the hardware connection between them. As it is still uninterrupted, he is dead certain that the flood of panic in his mind is transferred to and therefore felt by the machine as well. Or, he will attempt to find a solace in this certainty later when he is, you know, done with reliving the most horrible moments in the Pit of Failures.
After several seconds the machine engages its own air movement support system. It is nothing close to flight, but their descent slows down from deadly plummeting to a speedy drop in elevation – the kind for which organic knees are not grateful, but they’ll cope.
Zuriel is above them, his own wing being significantly shorter than Gabriel’s, and besides half of this is levitation through the holy light for him.
You good?
No, he sends back. Let’s keep going.
Just as he has done that, his whole being does a flip on a metaphysical level. These elevator shafts, he concludes, are the second worst form of trasstratic movement. Right after crossing the hard border and only marginally worse than being moved by Hell itself. And while Gabriel’s sense of existence is adjusting to being turned sideways, he lands alongside V1. The only reason why he doesn’t splatter on the ground is because the machine is holding him.
Zuriel, being also an angel and one unused to Hell at that, flings himself into a wall and keeps standing on it. Only after a few moments his sense of gravity adjusts to the rest of the plane and he falls to the ground.
It is another red metal room. It has a terminal. Cain and Company are already on it, so Gabriel doesn’t get to see the tip of the day, and instead sees Company’s curated list of purchasable ammo. V1 quickly follows them, and Gabriel, still being held, has to go along with it.
At least he gets his cable back so he can plug to the terminal, upload his stupid video and score points for it. It is a P rank, the HUD informs him. Which is good, because anything less than that and He’d lose his fucking mind. Again.
“Can you hurry up with it?” Zuriel “It is cold here.”
Gabriel, who is also cold but has been colder, ignores him in favor of recording a message for the Mindflayer, Iphigenia. (He should ask where she’s got her name from.) It takes effort to put it down without actually speaking out loud, but he manages in brief sentences to say that they’ve succeeded and are hoping to rendezvous with the ferry soon.
A response comes almost immediately: “Hey there, Bodice-Ripper–”
“Don’t,” he sighs.
“On a scale from one to ten, how dreadful is this one?”
Gabriel carefully rests his palm against his helmet and says: “Fish.”
“That is not a number.”
There it has its answer. Rather than debating it further, he asks: “Is Phanuel there with you?”
“Not right now. If you want to talk to a sexy angel, I have Dumah here. He isn’t going to talk back, though.” Iphigenia needs a swift divine intervention regarding the definition of ‘sexy’.
Zuriel leans over to him and when he speaks Gabriel, taken off-guard, nearly jams claws straight into his face: “You have the seducer on the line?”
He nods.
“If she calls my brother that one more time, I shall shatter it to pieces.”
Someone else would probably ask how the fuck can the angel be eavesdropping on this conversation. Gabriel knows better; Dumah and Zuriel have a bond strong enough for Dumah to project his divinity to his brother even when they are realms apart. Dumah is also a terrible tattle for someone who keeps a vow of silence.
So Gabriel just clips a record of what Zuriel has just said and sends it over to Iphigenia.
“Fine, fine, I get it. So, what did you want from the arch-loveboy?”
“We’ve found armor. It looks like the one on all those statues and paintings on the ship.”
A pause. Then a clip of Kushiel’s voice, strongly distorted with hellish whispers: “-em if— the whole set.”
“No. The helmet is missing.” And suddenly, struck by a genius thought, Gabriel asks what no angel would even think to ask: “Is that important?”
“I’ll get back to you. Cutiel has just, uh, lost his marbles. Hey, uh, maybe you darlings want to take a scenic route back to the ship. Until everyone in here calms the fuck down. Did I say we are in Treachery? We are in Treachery. On a bloody lake.”
It is not as helpful a description as the machine probably thinks it is. It also hangs up the call before anything more of use gets said by either of them.
Well, the call itself proves that they are in the same layer
“So?” Cain tilts its head. “Is the helmet important?”
“Iphigenia didn’t manage to say; the angels went nuts.”
It is Zuriel who explains – entirely redundantly to Gabriel, but he must not learn that – with a defeated sigh: “No angel would walk with his face uncovered.”
“You that fucking ugly?”
Millenia spent with Dumah had to teach this Power a trick or two about finer control over his divine presence, because the You’re not funny doesn’t show as words but as a primal feeling. Out loud, with a perfect control over his words and tone, he says: “In a matter of speaking. Living beings tend to… melt.”
That is an entirely unsatisfactory description of what divusdissociation is. But, Gabriel must concede, to a machine – who possesses a sentience and life without having a soul and who processes events by their external appearance – it is good enough.
Cain thinks about it for a while and then puzzles: “Why don’t you just solve all your fucking problems with your fucking melty face?”
“First of all, the process is indiscriminate, so there is no avoiding collateral damage. Had I done it when we were fighting the demon, it would melt. And you with it. And I am not certain what it would do to Hell itself but I would prefer fucking not to melt it while I am still inside of it,” which is entirely the reason why Gabriel has not done this back when he possessed some Holy Fire, because he was a few orders of melting magnitude above a Power.
“And second of all, our faces are not important.”
V1’s fans whirr and it makes a gesture towards its own optics. Everyone watches it intently and then they look to Gabriel expectantly. He makes an educated guess: “But you do have one, right? Face, I mean.” (V1 gives him a thumbs up. Body language is harder than the spoken word, so Gabriel feels pretty good about that for about three seconds.)
He knows for a fact that the Powers have more face than he himself does, but the amount doesn’t sum up to one. It is close. Twenty-six over twenty-seven. It’s fine as long as you don’t try to look at the back of a Power’s head directly, really.
(It’s all very complicated dolphins. Or maybe bats. People don’t like to think about bat faces. Which is a shame, Father really enjoyed making several of them, especially the noses.)
V1 makes another gesture, which Gabriel interprets well enough to disengage from the terminal (he wouldn’t get foodstuff anyway, not with people looking) and connect back to it.
Cain with a mock-offense protests that ew, aren’t they in public? Gabriel flips it off the same moment Company kicks it into nonexistent parts of its anatomy.
What are you thinking about? It’s not Hell and it’s not war. I can tell.
One human – I’ve forgotten their name, but they were of renown – had once claimed that Father must be fond of insects, as He created many of them.
I see. The machine seems bored by it. Yet it asks anyway: And is he? Fond of them?
No. It just took many tries to get them right. Then he moved on to fish.
He gets back a general acknowledgement, so after a moment he adds: He’s stopped making angels, too, eventually. Kushiel and the other Punishers were made later, for Hell. I assume they are the most refined out of my kin.
The machine’s internal fans work hard for a long while. It keeps on whatever process it is working through even when the party finally picks themselves up and pours out of the door and into the inhospitability of Treachery. (This is cold, Zuriel. Take notes.)
After several minutes V1 sends: Later model does not equal better.
Attached to the message is a gigantic (at least ten times larger than what he’s processed so far) data package dubbed v2_compilation.file