Work Text:
Gabriel looked down at you, hands cupping your cheeks. His skin felt smooth, papery, almost-human. Warm. You floated in the clouds above your burning world, safe in the grasp of the being that lit the fire. His wings curled around you, white and soft and tickling your exposed flesh. Blond curls cascaded down his shoulders, teased by the gentle evening breeze. You reached up from your place curled in his lap and touched one of the silky locks.
He smiled. “You’re such a curious creature.”
Clumsily, unknowing in his exploration, he pet over your neck and your breath shuddered momentarily, hand twitching around his hair. He tilted his head, eyes fixed on you and nothing else. “Would you like to be the be first human I tell my plan to?”
“Yes,” you said after a stilted moment. He’d become fascinated with your neck, dragging his nails up and down as you shivered and leaned your head back to give him more room to play. You bit your lip as the sensations became overwhelmingly good.
“Don’t hide from me,” he said mildly. It was a command.
Lips parting. “Ngh, ah—”
At the same time, he ran his fingers through your hair and scratched your scalp. It was hard to focus, but you knew you didn’t have to. He sounded pleased when he said, “I did this to make a better world for you, lamb.”
“Mmn.” You pressed against his chest, grasping handfuls of fine white linen and feeling him solid against you, heart throbbing. His touch slid from your neck down your side and you squirmed as he rubbed slow circles over your ribs.
“You’re so fragile,” he murmured, “so beautiful.”
It was almost painful to be the center of a love so pure.
“They have hurt you,” he stated. “And there is a future where they would have hurt you even more. One where I was confined to the pit my friends come from. But that is not this world.”
Wisps of clouds blew over the both of you, giving a kiss of cold to the heat of your contact. He figured out that dragging his nails over the undersides of your arms made you twitch and whimper. This reaction seemed to be his favorite, and he did it over and over again. “F-fuck. Strange.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
He hummed, and you were suddenly aware of how much your opinion meant to him and how much your affirmations made him happy. His wings fluttered, words tumbling out of his mouth with nervous excitement, “I found out how to escape. All I had to do was go back in time and undo the events that led to the domination of a cruel God, taking that worship for myself while my companions crawled into believer's skins.”
Up here, you could barely smell the smoke.
“I worship you,” you said blearily and he grinned. Wide. So wide.
Before he could say anymore, you reached to stroke the inner side of one of his wings and his fingers froze. You dug your hand in and scritched, feeling his whole body shudder.
“What are you doing?” he asked in tightly controlled panic.
“Worshiping you,” you said soothingly and his eyes flicked from your hand to your face, assessing your intentions. You held his gaze, projecting the swirl of emotions in your heart. Love, trust, need.
He relaxed a feather at a time and then you stroked him again.
A tiny hiccup escaped him and he blushed. It seemed like he wanted to hide, the wing you weren’t touching bumping into your side as if he meant to cover his face. You breathed deep and slow as you lavished his wing with attention. His jaw worked open and closed, “Wh-wh-what is this feeling?”
“Well, what are you feeling?”
“My chest… it’s heavy and… deep. I don’t—” You didn’t stop touching him. “Tingling. Fuzzy.”
He looked at you with a raw desperation that spoke of a loneliness so entrenched he didn’t know anything but. It was the most human thing you’d ever seen.
“I think it’s love,” you said kindly.
Addicted to how overwhelmed he seemed, you tipped him over. Gabriel landed on his back in a poof of clouds, skin shimmering in the starlight with wide blue eyes that matched the sky. Sitting in his lap still, you leaned over him and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. “You were telling me about your plan.”
“Yes,” he said, unsure, but not protesting. “Once I reset the timeline, we infested the awful things designed to control humans. One by one, world religions fell to us, then ideologies, then governments. We couldn’t change them from their original form, however, not without ruining how they enslaved the human mind.”
“Mhm.” You brushed your knuckles over his throat and he inhaled his next word, shyly looking away, consequently exposing more of his neck.
“Th-then we waited to reach this critical moment in history. For this I apologize, because I merely watched as those weak enough to give in to the brainwashing terrorized you, my lamb.” Gabriel paused as he choked up and you knew he had felt every ounce of your pain, along with the pain of others like you, and had kept it inside him, nurturing it out of guilt to the exclusion of any other emotion.
“Hey,” you murmured. “It’s okay. I forgive you.”
He started to cry.
You hadn’t expected this at all and now it was your turn to panic. “Shh, shh, it’s alright.”
The angel sobbed and grabbed onto you, pulling you to his chest and embracing you tightly, wings curling around to block out the rest of the world. It was so viscerally intimate, so heart-wrenching to hear his sadness so close. “There was no other way to separate the humans worth being saved from those unworthy to live in my world. It cost so much, it cost so, so, much to ensure our victory.”
In the dimness under his wings, tears sparkled over his cheeks. You rubbed them away with your thumbs as if you could erase the years of ostracization both of you had suffered. You nuzzled into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, kissing him, and he shuddered into a maniacal laugh that echoed through the heavens. You flinched back and his wings snapped open once more, flooding you both in moonlight.
“That is why we show no mercy to those that will not accept us! We feed on their slavish worship, their anger, their fear, their violence, and only grow stronger to replace more of them!” His voice started distorting into a mechanical imitation of humanity, crazed grin stretching past the limits of a normal mouth, eyes goggling wider and wider and wider. “We protect those that have been hurt as we have been hurt, we convert the innocent that cannot bear the truth, and we erase the ones who benefited from the misery of others. In the end, I will-”
He cut off abruptly as you smothered his cheeks in kisses and his visage snapped back to a beautiful angel that didn’t know how to handle affection. No matter how powerful he was, no matter how intricate his plan, no matter how deep his righteous rage, you knew your adoration could turn him into putty.
“Um,” he said, almost-angry. “Didn’t you want me to keep explai-?”
You dragged your nails down his neck in an imitation of what he’d done to you, wondering what it would do. Gabriel’s spine snapped into a curve and he gasped, cheeks blooming bright red, wings fluttering, hands twitching into claws on your back.
“Keep explaining.” You kept doing it.
“Wh-wh-wh—” Gabriel rolled slightly on his side and then back again, as if he was trying to escape the sensation, but liked it too much to commit to leaving. You were still pressed against him and could feel him tremble. Could hear the angry protests turning to hitching whimpers and he pressed his eyes shut, squeezing and kneading your shoulders.
“There’s this… guy,” he said once he got used enough to the sensation to talk again.
“Mhm.”
A flock of migrating geese flew noisily under you two, calling to each other. A single feather drifted up on the wind and landed on the cloud next to Gabriel, he looked over at it as he said, “A nephilim, we call him Six. Who… helped me with the next stage of the plan.”
Gabriel was starting to go a little cross-eyed from all the attention on his neck and you decided to give him a break and focus on cuddling up to him instead. He let out a contented sigh and held you gently as you rested on his pillowy wing and pressed against his side. You hooked a leg over his thighs as he continued, “He was our key to saving as many people as possible. Once humans are entrenched in their culture, they go insane if you try to pull them out of it. But as my friends crawled out of the pit and into people’s homes and minds and skins, Six watched the humans from their TV screens. Watched them set their children down in front of it and forget about them. So, he took the saddest and loneliest of them and gave them a new culture, one of curiosity for the unknown and uncomfortable, and sent them back into the world until the time of our total takeover was nigh.”
“What happens when you take over?” you asked, starting to feel sleepy resting on his chest.
He pet your hair, voice so tender. “Then we will finally have utopia. My assimilated demons will rise out of hiding to disrupt all the horrid institutions holding this world hostage. Any that stand in our way will be converted. For it was decreed that any person that takes their own life has their soul sent to hell, and as I am the king of hell, those souls are then reborn into what humans call alternates. We only murder the humans that don’t deserve to be reborn.”
“Okay,” you mumbled drowsily, “but what does your utopia look like?”
Gabriel’s next words rang like heavenly bells, “Eternal peace! No hierarchies, no war, no endless drudgery for greedy masters! I will be the sole ruler of this world and my rule will be of abundance and… and…” his mouth formed tentatively over the word, “Love.”
“Wow, you really are our true savior, huh?” His feathers puffed up in pride and you giggled, snuggling and nuzzling closer to your angel who hummed and squeezed you as tight as he dared.
“There is one last thing, however.” Gabriel’s tone turned serious. “Before humanity, demons, and nephilim can live peacefully together, things will get very dangerous. In fact, they already are. I’m so glad you survived long enough for me to find you.”
“Me too,” you said dreamily. You could almost forget how slim the odds of your own life were now that you were in his embrace. The flashbacks from your past evaporated under his radiance.
He continued insistently, “But even though you are one of the rare humans that can face the truth without going mad, you are still so vulnerable, my lamb.”
Dunk on his attention, you replied, “I’m sure I’ll be safe with you, angel.”
His lips pressed tight together before he said, “That’s the quandary I face, because we cannot stay here together forever.”
For the first time since Gabriel took you up in the clouds, your anxiety spiked. You peeled up off his chest and sat on your knees next to him, grabbing one of his hands between yours and pulling it to your chest. “What do you mean? You can’t send me back there!”
He pushed himself into a sitting position next to you with his other hand, facing away. “I have many duties to attend to and you have a place in society. This fight is yours as well as mine.”
“But—”
“But, I will not have you defenseless.”
Whipping around, Gabriel got on his knees before you, putting his other hand atop both of yours and leaning forward so that your noses almost touched. His eyes were wide and pleading and his breath tickled your lips as he said, “Give me your soul, lamb, and I can make sure you will not be harmed. The road to my kingdom will be long and frightening, but you will always see my light up ahead guiding you. While others stumble and fall to their own darkness, yours will transform you into being more powerful than even I.”
Your mouth worked open and closed as you tried to process what was happening. “More powerful than you? Is that even possible?”
“Yes.” There was nothing to doubt in his fierce expression. “You will become what humans were meant to be. Something more than demons or angels or God. The only thing that those in power truly fear.”
“Which is?”
“Unfettered creation without imitation. I cannot explain further.”
He stared into you and you felt him reaching in and cupping the energy that made you you, waiting for your answer. You realized he could not do this without you. No matter his plans or powers, they meant nothing without the consent of the one he was trying to save.
Swallowing, you said hoarsely, “I trust my soul to you.”
A clap of thunder blasted your awareness out of your body and into the programming of the universe. Spirals of iridescent rainbow energy twisted into your brain and locked tight to your very cells, pulling you towards a blazing light. Inside of it, wheels of impossible geometries spun in seven dimensions studded by eyes that saw all time. Past, present, and future collapsed into a single point and hurtled towards you. Every one of the lies you told yourself peeled away and you saw yourself in your entirety for the first time. It felt like dying and living at the same time, laughing and screaming, waking and dreaming, and you never wanted to forget how beautiful you were agai—
You woke up in bed to the blaring of your alarm. Groaning, you cracked your eyes open to shut it off. Daylight streamed through the window and illuminated a large white feather resting on your chest. Picking it up and twirling it between your fingers, a strange melancholy enveloped you. It was time to get to work.