Chapter Text
Oh how he hated that visage.
Any visage that crossed his line of sight on his rapid descent.
He hated this swampy, stinking, damp, covered-in-refuse place; he hated the sounds his pristine shoes made on the moist floor and even the idea that something here could rub off onto his expensive suit, soil and deface it; he hated the irreverent and derisive looks that hit him out of every corner, every room, every nook and cranny; he hated the flying sparks and the flickering sickly lights from the antediluvian light sources along all corridors; he hated the posters that were sticking on each wall and that would probably amuse somebody who possessed roughly the maturity of a mayfly. A thoroughly wicked, tasteless and evil mayfly. All this was backed up by a hardly audible, bur nevertheless omnipresent humming or whirring, Heaven might know where that originated.
Most of all, tough, he hated the sight of this place’s inhabitants. The very idea that they once had been his brethren made him quake from inside out; it was incomprehensible to him how anybody could let themselves go quite so much.
Perhaps, he thought sluggishly, trying to touch as little of the resident flora and fauna as possible, perhaps it would be worth considering having Michael and Uriel assemble their troops and set some things straight down here, military-style. If what he saw was representative of the level of technological advancement Hell as a whole was on conquering them would be child’s play, really. Whatever did they need Earth and the Riders and that thrice-damned Antichrist for if they could simply invade this backward place and raze it to the ground, now that the time obviously had come? Archangel Gabriel felt his thoughts and ideas divert from the Great Plan, but he hardly reacted with a twitch of his mouth. There was no time and no room for weakness and second thoughts while he was down here.
Michael, Archangel of Hell after all, had offered to be his bodyguard on this mission – Gabriel, though, had ordered her to fill in for him as long as he was gone. He fully expected himself to be able to deal with a swarm of mayflies; that quite apart from the fact that he suspected duplicitous motives behind her suggestion.
He had to admit that he was worried about her and her conduct. Since the executions of the deserters had failed, Michael made such a pinched face most of the time – and, Gabriel might be daft or mistaken, but he thought she mostly contemplated him with it. He could almost watch the cogs turn behind her forehead, and that he couldn’t tell in which way and with how much strength they forced her on unsettled him considerably. As if the lamentable past events had made her question her loyalty… as if she now suddenly found it upon herself to question him and his authority.
Quite likely he would have to come up with something concerning her… but maybe he should start by putting pressure on Uriel. Uriel was exceptionally close to the Archangel of war, and if she was second-guessing Gabriel, Heaven, Michael or herself she hid it masterfully. Quite apart from that, Gabriel thought her to be weaker, easier to crack and influence than Michael onto whom, as he hoped, he could stretch his impact using her deputy.
But this was neither here nor there now; he would tackle his own employees and their disloyalties later, as soon as he had finished dealing with the egomaniacs down here.
Beelzebub, he thought grudgingly as he approached the meeting room he-she had reserved for them. Beelzebub, you… he couldn’t even think of the right attributes to grace him-her with, nothing that would properly express his aversion, his abhorrence of him-her. For the first, he-she couldn’t even decide for one unambiguous appearance – if one had to wear a meatsuit, what was the problem with marking it as unified, as one clear thing in and of itself? What about order, destiny, rules? And then those vermin that kept swarming him-her – that couldn’t be hygienic. This face, endlessly distorted with wrath and distaste, the ratty hair, this… object on his-her head of which Gabriel never quite could tell whether it was alive; then there was the smell and the general fashion sense. But in this he-she wasn’t alone, he had to concede; nobody in Hell seemed to know the address or number of a decent tailor.
Beelzebub was expecting the Archangel already, sitting at the far end of a beaten conference table in a room that was overflowing with files in deplorable states and other things Gabriel didn’t even want to take a closer look at, wearing the usual uniform and glaring daggers at the entering angel. His-her arms and legs were equally spread in his-her current posture; a more sensitive angel than Gabriel would have found it scandalous. On the table in front of him-her sat a bottle containing a nondescript, dark reddish-black fluid; Gabriel couldn’t discern the stuff’s smell over the distance, but he already wrote a note to self that he wouldn’t be forced to touch a drop of it.
“Leave us,” he-she grunted, without ever lifting a glance off Gabriel’s eyes, addressing the lower-ranking demons going about their despicable businesses.
“Close the door behind you, you cretins,” Gabriel added and was promptly ignored. The Archangel couldn’t help but think these nimrods undercut his authority on purpose… he could see Beelzebub smirk benignly as he turned, rolling his eyes, to close the door himself.
How Lord-damned much he hated that visage.
“Now,” he began the conversation, sparsely and professionally, sitting down opposite Beelzebub and slapping his briefcase on the table, “I think we ought to discuss the one or the other thing.”
“For example the fact that you seem unable to control your field staff,” Beelzebub croaked.
Gabriel gave a derisive snort. “Something I might very well say about you. After all, it was your field worker who misplaced the child. Our agent had nothing to do with it.”
Beelzebub screwed up his-her face – half amusement, half murderous rage. “Think about that again, poultry.”
After all, was what he-she most probably thought but didn’t say, you know just as well as I that where the one is, the other won’t fail to turn up shortly after… they follow one another like stink follows the maddened skunk. They are symbiotic, like the crocodile and the Egyptian plover, like moss on a stone, like mushrooms or moss on soggy, decaying bark. It would be astounding indeed if one could come to a binding decision without first having consulted the other…
“Just saying.” Gabriel spread his hands, mock-apologetically. “If red riding hood, what was his name again, had taken that child to the right place, it would have been spoiled and everything would have gone according to plan. We would have fought our War, this place here would have been reduced to rubbish, ash and soot, and we wouldn’t have any problem with each other. Nobody would have any problems. Everything could have been said and done, and everything could be calm and quiet. But since you entrust your most incompetent employees with…”
The angel interrupted himself as if to reconsider.
“Forget what I said, Lord Beelzebub. It is not as if you had the best agents at your disposal.”
A contemptuous smirk burrowed into Beelzebub’s features. “And you do have them? Then I would be thrilled to hear why you sent Goldilocks of all angels to Earth. If you don’t even manage to burn him to a cinder…”
“So?” Gabriel’s voice was sharp as a predator’s tooth. “May I remind you, Lord Beelzebub, that you didn’t manage to dissolve sunglasses-in-the-dark in Holy Water? It was in Michael’s report. I would have made him drink it, every last drop… we could have seen whether he had ascended far enough to stomach that.”
Silence set in – an aggressive silence in which both participants were very well aware of the other one scheming in the back of their heads, devising a tactic for most efficiently going at the other’s throat. Though this was not all that was to it, at least for Gabriel, it was not – the silvery one was endlessly irked by the very idea that a subject like what had once been the simple and very unremarkable builder Rahtiel, answering to Kokabiel, himself, and finally Metatron, who had earnestly deserved his Fall had the honest-to-the-Lord possibility to one day ascend to Heaven again. Was someone like him even deserving of celestial fairness, and lenience? Michael and Uriel, as well as all the angels in their troops, hadn’t worked this hard to cleanse Heaven of traitors and renegades to have them flow back at first opportunity.
“So,” Beelzebub finally broke the silence, contemplating his-her opponent with fire in his-her eyes and a grave voice, “what to do now?”
What to do now? The question of questions. It didn’t merely apply to this conference, but to Beelzebub’s and Gabriel’s, if not Heaven’s and Hell’s whole existence. What indeed would they want to do now that the Great Plan had been foiled? There were no orders, no guidelines for a situation like this. It just had not been… written. Nobody, especially nobody in Heaven, could now hope to find their magnetic north in the consoling but rigid word of the Almighty, and this was very disconcerting, to say the least.
Hell surely adjusted more easily to this…
“I don’t know about you,” Gabriel muttered, leaning back with arms crossed in front of his chest, “but I, for my part, would disturbingly much feel like retrieving Aziraphale and plucking each feather individually from his wings.” That was petty and spiteful and unnecessarily cruel, the Archangel was well aware, but probably the most truthful and brazen thing to have come over Archangel Gabriel’s lips these past centuries.
“You seem to think little of your own time,” Beelzebub commented leisurely.
Gabriel remained silent, resting his chin on his thumbs and his nose on the index fingers.
“I can sympathize with the idea, though – apart from the fact that it is not severe enough by far,” he-she added broodingly.
“What would be severe enough?” Gabriel posed the – second question of questions.
“Well, since he shows such a desire to be a demon, one could split his tongue down to the root,” Beelzebub began, sounding almost bored, lifting a hand to watch a mutant-big, blue-green-black shimmering beetle tumble over it, “one could dip his wings in tar or blacken them with fire… one could blind him. His eyeballs would certainly be an apt addition to Hell’s collection of trophies. One could flay his skin and turn it to one of these coats or shirts he likes so much. One could open wounds in delicate places and fill them with liquid metal, little stones or nails. My pets and allies would certainly gladly burrow into his body at eyes, ears, mouth and nose and eat him up from within… the last thing he’d hear would be this.” As if commanded to do so, the beetle lifted its chitin shield and hummed intensely.
Gabriel shivered.
Beelzebub smirked.
“It would be in his head, so he could never escape. Possible that this sort of treatment would leave scars on his astral soul so he would end up… irreversibly insane. But maybe it would suffice to spray him with Holy Water, since he’s descended enough so Hellfire won’t harm him anymore.”
Gabriel kept his silence a bit longer, visibly green-faced and trying to hide how sickened he was. “Do you know no shame,” he muttered, rubbing over nose and lips.
Beelzebub didn’t respond – but his-her pride was evident.
So this was what had become of…
Gabriel pulled himself together before he would finish this despicable thought. He felt utterly, almost desperately, like packing up, disrupting the conference and returning to the cleanliness and relative calm of Heaven – Michael and Uriel would gladly arm themselves…
“But now that I have told you what punishment we would make your traitor suffer,” Beelzebub took up the thread again and the Archangel jumped, knitting his brows half thoughtfully and half in irritation, “tell me, poultry, what torture you would have for ours.” I would be willing to extradite him, said his-her testy mien – if you make it worth my while.