Chapter Text
The atoms shift and give way, the very fabric of human reality bends and the clocks in the apartment skip forward by five seconds. Marvin grunts in discomfort as he’s forced out of his more suitable physical form and into another. Demons and Angels were a pure energy that existed outside of the processing of the human brain. The closest anyone ever came to depicting them was Van Gogh in his paintings. They were loud, yet unable to be detected, blindingly bright, but still existing within the shadows of peripheral vision. It was an inconvenience to lose his human form, to say the least.
The angel manifests herself in front of him, a pulsating form of light and sound waves that only few could comprehend. Marvin could see her beauty just as clearly as if they were still in Heaven together.
Her energy reaches out and inspects Marvin’s apartment. He can practically sense the huff of ‘I thought it would be nicer’.
Marvin pulls himself back together and glares at her with eyes that swim with colour.
“Are you quite done being almighty, yet, Trina?”
The angel, whose name had once been Dina, gives Marvin a disapproving look as she forms in front of him, “I can announce my arrival with trumpets if you prefer.”
He ignores her comment and stab at his heavenly profession. Marvin puffs out his wings similar to how birds do and brings his left one around so he can run his fingers through it to help shed any dead feathers, “If you were wondering, no, Reagan isn’t one of ours.”
“He’s not one of ours, either,” she says. She brings her hands up to inspect them and changes her nail polish to compliment her outfit.
There was a certain amount of understanding and respect between them. Like a defense attorney and a prosecutor, they may have been on different sides, but that didn’t mean they hated each other. A certain distaste, was more like it.
“There you are, then. Humans and free will,” he mutters.
Trina sighs. She had not spent enough time on earth to come to the same conclusion as Marvin had: that sometimes, bad things happened not because of Hell, but because people were people. That much was clear when she’d held him five stories above an Olympic pool and threatened to bless it and drop him in after the election of Hitler. In her eyes, Marvin was still the dumb, young angel who followed a handsome devil to his doom. And she was not so wrong about Marvin following handsome devils, either.
Marvin looks up from his grooming and sees her nervously clasp her hands together.
“Okay,” he grumbles, “I’ll ask. Why are you here?”
“Sometimes I get a feeling… like something bad is going to happen and the Creator hasn’t told us about it,” she admits, hugging her wings tight to her back.
Marvin snorts, “As if He tells us anything. I was stranded, clinging to a tree, when he decided to flood the whole world for forty days and forty nights, remember? Not even a heads up.”
“Yes, but you’re not exactly in the loop anymore.”
Marvin stretches his wings out with a small noise, “Thank you for the warning and the foreboding atmosphere you’ve just created, but I have other things to do.”
“Tempt some poor souls?”
“Much better than singing a thousand songs of praise up in the clouds dressed in a white sheet and carrying a harp,” he snaps.
Horns and tails, halos and harps, all things that artists had made up over the years. Though, the two never failed to not bring it up to annoy the other.
“Don’t. Start,” she warns. They were not going to have this argument again.
“Don’t blame me for the failings of humans.”
She groans, “You and your humans, Marvin. Always refusing to see the good in them; never acknowledging that they are better. I think it might actually physically hurt you to say that they were better than you.”
Marvin flicks his wings in irritation, “They are capable of much worse things than any demon conjure up. They are killing this world and you expect me to find good in them?”
“You certainly have with whoever was here. I can feel the energy of them.”
“Interest, not goodness,” Marvin corrects, “And am I not superior to them for having realized that evil is not to blame for th-“
“I refuse to have this chat with you again,” she grumbles. Annoyance underlies her words and she shakes her head, “I came here to possibly warn you. I see I’m not welcome.”
She spreads her wings and Marvin takes a step back from the force with which she unfurls them. Her holiness in that moment burns him. He grits his teeth and refuses to admit it to her.
“I’m right and you know it. You’re just afraid of The Fall.”
She disappears in a mighty roar of wind and reality snapping back in to the space she had occupied. Marvin snarls up at the ceiling after her. It does nothing but make him feel dumb.
Humans were flawed, imperfect; capable of greatness, yes, but also of terror.
He refused to bow down to such inferior creatures.