Chapter Text
When an angel Falls, they say, it is an excruciating pain unlike any other.
That as the grace is forcibly wrenched from the angel, it is not the banishment that brings the tears to their eyes, but the unspeakable, unfathomable pain ripping through their very veins, as though the angelic grace is being torn from each drop of their blood.
And though the pain subsides, the angel is forever marked, by their darkened wings.
An angel’s wings are the unmistakable symbol of their grace; those magnificent, feathered markers of God’s own.
A fallen angel’s, then.
A fallen angel’s wings are marked, such that even in flight, their darkened color will stand out starkly from the clouds.
Taehyung’s wings are red.
A rich, deep crimson hue, that in the cover of nightfall appear almost to meld with the inky blackness, save for a faint glimmer of red each time he moves.
They say, that his wings are red, for they have been dyed in the blood of all the angels he has slain.
“They want to send the angel-blooded child? Here.”
Taehyung’s voice is laced with enough incredulity that it makes even Yoongi - features ordinarily arranged into some mix of sleepy resignation and solemn brooding - grimace. It’s gone as quickly as it appeared, vanished behind Yoongi’s barely contained sigh as he scratches at his left brow.
“It’s not like you can go there,” comes the bland reply, but it makes the both of them lapse into a moment of silence, nonetheless.
Indeed, Taehyung cannot enter Heaven.
Never again.
Not after he - all of them; he and Yoongi and, not quite in the same way but with the same devastating result, Jimin - had chosen the wrong side in the great war that had split those winged soldiers of Heaven along a faultline that, even now, never truly knit itself back together.
Not after they had been banished, their wings turned dark and marked, as those who would never enter Heaven’s golden gates again.
“Besides,” Yoongi drawls. “He’s far from a child. He’s Heaven’s very best,” he says, words laced with a dry amusement that makes Taehyung’s jaw clench.
He doesn’t need God’s precious, favored golden boy, coming into the one place in which they’d managed to craft a semblance of a home after they’d been stripped of everything they’ve ever held dear.
Jungkook.
The perfect soldier, whom they say was built in God's very image, himself.
The warrior who has, not once, fallen in battle in nearly decades of the bloody and ruinous war between Heaven and Hell; the name whose mere utterance raises fear in even the most wretched of demons, for he is the strongest and mightiest of the winged avengers to be borne in the Heavens in centuries. The boy whose wings, they say, have been touched by the golden light, as though even the great sun favors this angelic creature.
How sacred, Taehyung thinks, not above sneering at his future husband to be.
Once, that word had been something to aspire for; that virtuous height that all angels sought. In the years since his Fall, however, the word has become more of a slur, for Taehyung and the others.
"This is a farce," Taehyung says, through tightly clenched teeth.
Fury crackles along his veins, simmering just underneath the surface of his skin, making him feel alight with it. "Jungkook? The golden archangel? They're going to send their precious poster boy into Hell?" Taehyung scoffs, harsh and grating. "That's as good as sacrilege."
"Romantic," a new voice laughs, teasing and wicked.
The two of them look up.
Jimin stands in the doorway, leaned against the frame with a slender shoulder and a devious little grin tugging at his lips, arms crossed. Jimin, for one, has been ecstatic at the news, as though an angel in their midst is something to celebrate.
Then again, Taehyung thinks. Jimin hadn't been banished, like the rest of them; no, he's the single angel to have, in the history of God himself, willingly given up his wings to Fall.
Taehyung's gaze flits unconsciously to Yoongi, who's staring back at Jimin the way he always has; each and every time, for the past century: like Jimin might be a miraculous, divine blessing, here to pull his soul from the depths of Hell and straight into the Heaven they'd been banished from.
Like Jimin is his salvation, wrapped up in a pretty, wicked smirk.
Taehyung has never understood it, in all his immortal life.
What could convince an angel to willingly strip himself of his wings and submit himself to the ruinous Fall; and what could make a former angel gaze at another like he's benediction, even when surrounded by the clamor of Hell.
Jimin slinks over to Yoongi, delicate fingertips coming up to trail along the curve of Yoongi's jaw with a lurid smirk. Taehyung rolls his eyes.
It's funny.
In the Fall, Taehyung had lost... everything.
His home. His wings. His singular purpose in life, the very thing he had been created for; being an archangel had been all that he'd ever known, serving His purpose with a near manic zeal, because it had been the one and only love he'd ever held.
Yoongi, too, had chosen the wrong side. (There are times, even now, that Taehyung wonders - if Yoongi had chosen Lucifer's side for Taehyung, and if Taehyung's sins run even deeper than he'd already known them to.)
And Yoongi had Fallen, just as Taehyung had.
But Yoongi, unlike Taehyung, had had another love, separate from their love for their duties as angels.
He'd had Jimin.
And when Yoongi had lost one love of his life, when he ought to have lost everything, just as Taehyung had, the other love of Yoongi's life had lifted his chin, and said no.
Jimin, the other love of Yoongi's life, had followed him straight into the depths of Hell.
Had willingly given up his wings and his angelic Grace, to be marked as the first angel to have, of their own volition, given up their holy divinity to join those lowly ranks of the underworld.
And, looking at Yoongi and Jimin now, Taehyung can't help but find it humorous: that for two angels who had, supposedly, lost everything, they seem to be holding everything that matters in their arms.
Taehyung isn't jealous (what is he to be jealous of, when his soul is already blackened and damned as it is; what can a lowly demon like him covet, anymore?), but he is... empty.
He supposes he's glad, that at least someone among the damned have managed to, incomprehensibly, attain a happy ending.
Yoongi holds Jimin close, his arms wrapped securely around his waist where they belong, and the two of them glance back at Taehyung, still draped decadently across the chaise lounge. Jimin's still wearing that amused little smile on his lips that, on the best of days, manages to drive Taehyung insufferably mad.
Taehyung raises a slow brow. "Right, so, I’ll just deal with the fact that Heaven has offered up their precious golden boy as a sacrificial offering to bind me in marriage on my own, shall I? Seeing as how the two of you are so busy, and all.”
Jimin snorts. Rolls his eyes, not at all extricating himself from where he’s practically intertwined with Yoongi, sparing his friend but a glance backwards. “What, you scared, or something?” he taunts, eyes glittering wickedly as he throws Taehyung a grin. “Heard that Jungkook boy’s decimated entire battalions on his own.”
Yoongi’s own lips curve into a mirroring smirk, and Taehyung has the luxury of witnessing two identical, shit-eating, insufferable grins on his two friends’ faces. As though, somehow, anything about this situation were at all humorous. “Maybe the kid’ll be strong enough to put Taehyung down,” Yoongi drawls. “Better watch your back, lest Heaven’s strongest warrior slay you. In your sleep.”
“Because,” Jimin sings. “You know. You’ll be sleeping in the same bed. Since, you’ll be married-”
“Yes,” Taehyung grits. “I got it.”
“Who knows, Taehyung,” Jimin says, voice still teasing but expression laced with something soft - too soft, softer than anything Taehyung can reasonably bear, these days - that belies something a tad too genuine to be purely a joke. “Maybe you’ll fall for the boy.”
Taehyung laughs, dark and bitter and hollow.
A demon and an angel.
It sounds like a particularly tasteless joke, more than anything else.
Besides; even with the glaring issue of, oh, Taehyung being that which they call the most wretched demon Hell’s wicked ranks have to offer, and Jungkook the angel so pure they say even God favors him, aside, there’s just one more problem with Jimin’s fanciful (hysterically ridiculous) notion.
“I’ve already Fallen once, Jimin,” he says harshly. “It was hell.”
Literally.
He smiles, bland and empty. “Not quite interested in a repeat.”
It makes Yoongi stiffen uncomfortably. Enough that he steps back, gently untangling himself from Jimin’s embrace.
Over a hundred years, and Yoongi still has yet to forgive himself for the matter of Jimin’s Fall.
“I’m going to go check on Seokjin,” Yoongi murmurs. Jimin looks at him with an expression that seems as though he wants to protest, but something in Yoongi’s eyes makes him bite his lip instead, nodding as he watches Yoongi slip out the door.
Jimin turns to Taehyung with a sigh. “Finding something to end your centuries of pitiful self-destructive loathing wouldn’t be the worst thing, you know,” he says. It isn’t unkind, but Jimin isn’t one to hold his punches, either.
Taehyung presses his lips together.
“I haven’t been-”
“Yes, you have,” Jimin snaps. “You don’t do anything, anymore, if it isn’t to dig your soul into the lowest depths it can fall to-”
Taehyung ignores the darker accusation, there. “I’m a demon,” he sneers. “I’m doing perfectly well, just because I’m not simpering after-”
“Slaughtering our own kind isn’t the equivalent of perfectly well.”
Taehyung’s hand curls into a fist. “There’s a war,” he fires back, just as derisively. “If you haven’t been aware, that’s simply what one does, in a war.”
And then, because Taehyung is feeling particularly aggravated in the moment, he lifts his chin. “And they’re not our kind.”
Jimin stills.
“I don’t know why it’s such a hard concept for you to grasp,” Taehyung continues, blistering in a way that isn’t in his nature, but one that feels fitting.
He’s a demon, after all.
“We Fell. We’re not angels, any longer. These wings?” He spreads one of said wings, plumed in a lush scarlet, magnificent even in their darkened state. Once, they had glowed nearly white, with how pure they had been. “They’re more like shackles, than the wings of an angel, now.”
Fallen angels can still take flight, but never to the one place that their wings had been meant to carry them to; never again, will they be able to fly high enough to reach Heaven.
And what use is an angel’s wings, that cannot carry him to the one place he belongs?
Jimin stares at him with a measured, rebuking gaze, long enough that it makes regret well in Taehyung. But Jimin is not hurt, either; having spent a hundred years, watching one’s friend sink into the darkness he believes he deserves, tends to take much of the sting out of such barbs.
Taehyung looks away.
“Well,” Jimin says lightly. A peace offering, one that Taehyung is too grateful to take. “Perhaps falling in love will take some of that grouchiness out of you,” he says, teasing.
“Such things as love, are a weakness I have no interest in,” Taehyung replies, rolling his eyes.
Jimin laughs. In Taehyung’s face. Bright and open and so utterly, confidently defiant, that it strikes Taehyung still. “Don’t be stupid,” Jimin says, smiling. Taehyung frowns. Jimin’s smile turns a tad wicked around the edges, then, in a way that makes Taehyung think, being a demon, somehow, is strangely fitting for Jimin. “Do you think it is weakness, that allowed me to willingly Fall?”
To submit oneself to that ruinous, agonizing devastation, of having one’s angelic Grace ripped straight from one’s veins; the other, less physical but no less terrifying, loss of one’s place in the hallowed grounds of Heaven.
Taehyung looks at Jimin, and sees nothing but a lightweight steadiness to his features; the way Jimin had always accepted the blistering grounds of Hell with such ease, that it had always made Taehyung marvel, a bit.
His eyes are anything but light, however, where they bore into Taehyung’s. “Love isn’t a weakness,” Jimin derides. “It is the most powerful, endless strength in the world, that can give even an angel the courage to Fall into the depths of Hell.”
But Taehyung knows that he is far beyond the reach of such sacred things.
After all: he’s a demon, now.
Nothing more, nothing less.
When a mortal human dies, there are two places his soul may go:
If he has led a good and peaceful life, he will ascend to Heaven, to be greeted by those choirs of angels and the hallowed, golden gates to the promised land. There, the soul will spend the rest of eternity, enjoying those bountiful, happy luxuries as a reward for his grace.
But if he has led a bad life, he will instead descend to Hell, to be greeted by ash and dust and a bleakness that surrounds the landscape like a perpetual cloud. There, the soul will spend all - or part - of eternity, repenting for those sins that had precluded his ascension into Heaven.
Once, they say, it had been possible for a soul to dream of ascending to Heaven, if he cleansed enough of his sins in Hell.
Once.
And then, the Great War had occurred.
Lucifer - once, the greatest and most powerful of angels, favored singularly by God as his most trusted and treasured disciple - had seen the fallacies of humanity, and sneered at their creation and existence. That such great divine creatures as angels, were to be submitted to the care and wellbeing of these lesser beings, was something Lucifer found unacceptable.
And so, Lucifer - God’s greatest pride - rebelled against the very hand that had created him.
He rose, declaring war against God, and in the aftermath, angels fell along the dividing line to take their places on either side in a war that would, for hundreds of years thereafter, shake Heaven to the very core.
The fighting lasted a mere ten years, after which all those angels who had taken Lucifer’s side - the ones who had not already perished in the war - were banished to the Fall, descending from Heaven to the depths of Hell.
But the bloodshed would go on for much, much longer.
In Hell, Lucifer established his new domain. He and the most powerful of the Fallen angels - those who had, once, been fellow archangels in the heavenly ranks - would rise to preside over all those innumerable souls and demons that comprise the damned.
That ought to have been that.
But here’s the thing, about the aftermath of a decade-long war that had turned brother against brother, and caused friend to slay friend in the name of a holy cause that neither was willing to back down from.
The mutiny and hatred and anger does not simply dissipate, once one side has been declared the winner.
No, it continues, well into entire centuries of violent antagonism, divine blood spilt on both sides in a fervor that only seems to grow more magnified with each passing year.
Human souls have become the collateral in the veritable tug of war for dominance and power between the leaders of Heaven and Hell.
One in which demons - once, simply the neutral arbiters of the domain of Hell - have now become active pursuers of chaos and evil, seeking to influence humanity in the worst possible way, so as to inflate their own numbers in the numbers of souls damned to Hell.
One in which angels and demons have been locked in a violent, rage-fueled conflict for centuries, coming to blows each time one comes into the sight of another, in an antagonistic treachery that’s decimated the ranks of either side.
One in which human souls are no longer permitted to ascend to Heaven after cleansing their sins in Hell; not when Heaven will never open its doors to any inhabitant of Hell, and not when Hell will dig its claws into each and every soul with a possessive hunger.
But even divinity are not infallible, it would seem, particularly when they are hellbent on destroying one another.
The bloodshed, now, has reached a fever pitch that neither side can reasonably sustain.
And so, the two sides have proposed a truce.
But to simply declare a truce, would do little to truly halt centuries of hatred and antagonism. No, they need something larger, something significant, strong enough to bind the truce on both sides.
And so it came to be, that Heaven and Hell have agreed to wed one of their own, in a marriage that will fasten each side to its promise to halt the violence.
From Hell, the wicked have offered their most wicked creature of all: Taehyung.
Taehyung, who had once been one of the most promising angels in Heaven, and the prodigious mentee of Lucifer himself. Taehyung who, after the Fall, has singularly been responsible for countless victories in the demons’ name, whose incomprehensible power seems only to have grown after his descent into Hell’s nefarious depths.
Taehyung - he whose crimson wings, they say, are red, for they have been dyed in the blood of all the angels he has slain.
But that is not the most surprising part.
No, the cause for true surprise, is the sacrificial lamb Heaven has offered: Jungkook, Heaven’s very own golden boy.
The boy whose wings, they say, gleam golden, as though he is favored not only by God himself, but by the very sun. He, who is God’s strongest soldier, whose very name strikes fear into even the most vile of demons, with how powerful he is known to be.
He, who has single-handedly taken down entire battalions of Hell’s ranks.
To think: that Heaven would offer their most precious, treasured angel, to the devils below.
It makes an amused smile, dark and sneering, flit across Taehyung’s lips.
Because what utter sanctimonious bullshit it is, that Heaven would claim such moral superiority and good, when it would turn around and offer one of its very own - its best - to what amounts to a sacrificial altar?
Marriage? Taehyung sneers. What a farce.
To willingly cast their precious angel and submit him to an eternity in hell, married to the very bedeviled creature who has been said to revel in the slaughter of angelic creatures, is nothing short of a sacrilege.
And this is why Taehyung loathes those heavenly beings.
Not because he had Fallen, no.
But because they, too, are every bit the flawed and terrible creatures they condemn others for. Because those virtuous angels are nothing but dirty, sanctimonious hypocrites.
In the end, like everything else in Taehyung’s life - whether it be his Fall, or now, the matter of his marriage - it is beyond his control.
No matter how much he lashes out, in a desperate escape the marriage that feels, to Taehyung, as though he has been shackled by his very neck, Lucifer is unmoving.
But Taehyung had expected as much.
Lucifer had been his mentor in Heaven, and Taehyung is well familiar with his methods; with the cool, expressionless stare that Lucifer pins him with, and the gentle, but damning and frigid, voice with which he simply says, “The wedding is in three days.”
The same voice that had damned him, all those centuries ago, and damns him yet again.
And it is Lucifer’s iron hold, that keeps Taehyung helpless but to submit, until it is the day of his wedding, and he is standing at before an obsidian dais in the center of the grand hall of Lucifer’s own palace.
When Lucifer was banished, he remade Hell into a perfect inverted replica of Heaven, but grander.
A towering, obsidian palace, blessed not with the golden glow of Heaven, but with the red glow of the underworld. Marked by all the excessive, material wealth that Heaven had frowned upon. And Lucifer had leaned back in the throne he had crafted for himself, wearing a lazy, dead-eyed smirk, and drawled, “What sanctimonious hypocrites they were, to decry material wealth as though the roads and gates themselves were not paved in gold,” and Taehyung, then, had agreed.
Taehyung resolutely avoids looking at Lucifer, now, who stands beside him as the self-cast officiant of the ceremony.
All this time, Taehyung cannot help but get the sense that he is amused by it all, and it makes Taehyung’s jaw clench even tighter.
All around him, the entirety of the hall is bedecked in the magnificent, ostentatious splendor of Hell’s finest wealth. And how strange it is, that for a land so barren and desolate, its esteemed leaders are nonetheless able to enjoy gold gilded walls and ornate finery and crystal chandeliers, in stark contrast to the unending misery as far as the eye can see, immediately outside the palace doors.
Taehyung cares little for any of it.
He has slaughtered his own - no; not his own, he reminds himself; never his own, not now that he is but a wicked demon - in Lucifer’s name, and never once has he experienced a surge of nausea quite like this.
But his face is impassive and stony, where he stands, waiting for his angelic sacrifice husband-to-be.
Taehyung hears the clamor, before he sees him.
Hears the astounded murmurs that reverberate through the gathered crowd like a rippling wave, and cannot help but to wonder, just what the esteemed warrior from Heaven - God’s strongest soldier - must look like, to cause such a stir. (And he can sense, with a morbid sort of humor, the edge of panicked fear, that some demons cannot keep under wraps.)
Taehyung looks up.
For a moment, all he can see...is gold.
Shining, brilliant gold, ethereal and luminous and something entirely otherworldly, in every celestial sense of the word.
Heaven’s very own golden boy, indeed.
Standing before him is a creature so divine, that for just a moment, Taehyung cannot help but to wonder if he has somehow miraculously entered Heaven once more.
The boy is everything those fabled lores describe of angels.
Golden hair curling at the nape of a slender neck that is, incomprehensibly, a temptation of the most wicked degree; round cheeks flushed with a ruddy vivacity that stands out in the bleak depths of Hell with marked pronouncement; lips that are stained the color of cherries, that only highlight the unmarred, perfect alabaster skin.
It is as though this boy has been crafted in the image of every lovely thing to exist in the known universe.
Taehyung stares, immobile, as the boy looks up at him through lush, dark lashes, and his eyes are drawn to the bow curve of his lips as they pull into--
-in a sight that is utterly beguiling and mystifying, both-
-the faintest of smiles, small and bashful and exquisite, even as strained as it clearly is.