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Raphael has seen stars born. Knows how atoms split and dance and how light exists on the flipped microcosm of the macro of matter. Raphael knows what gravity really is, what happens to the spheres it puppeteers. How the cycles of existence pull and turn and pattern themselves into eternity. The beauty of extinction and rebirth can bring her to tears. Her father’s creation is beyond measure. And the devotion to that divinity is intrinsic to existence.
Biological life is an entropy machine. It holds onto its intricate structure. Ordered and stunning. It replicates and cycles and can even perceive. It dies so fast, so quick, even the longest-living organisms can’t stretch their time to anything significant. But they grow in patterns and evolve and grow so so diverse, wipe out, test themselves out. Spectacular designs. Stars have their life cycles too, and angels go back and forward in time. Raphael loves what creation is. She harmonises. She loves God, understands when God wants devotion to extend to humanity when it comes around. Flittering around like flies dying in the sun.
She loves her siblings. She loves the orchestration of the universe. She loves playing a role within it. But she’s not unaware of patterns. Of how angels have come and gone and there’s a halt in the 21st century. At first, she resents Lucifer for creating a schism, for being locked away and for Gabriel leaving. But she wants to reunite them. And when God leaves, when God is dead, when the cycles that she watches like fractions consume what her existence is, all she wants is her siblings.
Time becomes something different. An Apocalypse of life is just another extinction. It will replicate. It will lose its diversity and reshape itself in ways that bring about mass grief and new beginnings. It’s not unique. It’s the origin story. But her family? She’s never seen this. She’s never seen them die like this. They’re not supposed to. God was supposed to love them enough. They don’t replicate. They’re scaffolding. They’re beyond the cycles. The framework of reality.
Raphael has seen so many things. And God is gone and angels are dying and humanity is not worth the love God made it to be. She is not afraid of the end. She just needs to go down fighting to bring her family back together. To bring paradise. She is not afraid of the end. She just wants this cycle to end. She’s seen so many things, and now she’s devoid.
She’s seen so many things, but she’s never seen death.
--
She never gives up on her ideals. But Castiel loads himself up on so much energy it cracks a hole in time and space. Castiel loads himself up and snaps his fingers, and she feels herself explode, like disintegration. Paradise or nothingness: she doesn’t care. She’s suspended. Maybe she shouldn’t have had a role to play in the life game when it ended like this. It feels like the ultimate proof of a fate she's never been able to fully accept. God is truly dead.
Nothing makes sense. She looks at the world around her and the way she looks should create the emergence to perceive, but instead, it is all hollow incomprehension. Is that what it means to end? Her brothers need her -- this wasn’t the deal. She still loves. She still yearns. She still wants.
She is twisted out of time. She is twisted out of sense. She is a liminal statue. Maybe she never existed at all.
“You know,” she hears. She’s still allowed the mechanism of communication then. In this vast unreal sea. “I pride myself in understanding when things need to die. Kind of in the job description. But I think there’s a fault here. I think something went wrong. And maybe that’s why Castiel has always played the roles he has. But maybe I’m blinded.”
Raphael loves Castiel too. But whoever is communicating with her is right. He’s a fly in the ointment. He’s wrong. He’s naive. She just never expected it’d end like this. It shouldn’t have. It really shouldn’t have.
“He set off a bomb he did not understand,” Raphael says, is happy that she can communicate. Is sad she cannot finally rest. None of what she is feeling now seems anything like paradise. She's a failure.
“And you wouldn’t have?” the entity counters. Space alters around them. It turns shimmery and green, and Raphael can see who is in front of her. It feels like Heaven. But it isn’t. She resents the bad replica, but it still calms her down. “Billie,” she says. Raphael nods. A reaper wouldn’t reap an archangel like this. But Billie has taken on Death.
Death has not been exterminated in Raphael’s current dimension. Billie is playing with time. Death is not supposed to play with time. Death is also not supposed to suspend failed archangels in twisted limbo. Billie looks at Raphael like she’s a riddle. She comes close, and Raphael can feel the sensation of a hand on what should be her vessel’s cheek, though she is alone inside her body now. Billie is exquisite.
“I know what needed to be done.”
“No, you needed your brothers back.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.” Billie smiles at her. It’s soft. Something like gentle ocean waves rushes inside the chest.
“I do not believe either of the outcomes were correct. But I don’t know if you would like me if you knew all of that I believe. God is not what you think. Neither is His plan.”
“God is dead.” Billie doesn’t respond to that. Instead, she takes Raphael’s hand and places a kiss on her forehead. This human type of intimacy isn’t something Raphael has cared to indulge in. Biological bodies that die so fast don’t hold interest to her.
But Billie says, “There is so much you see. More than nearly any being with comprehension in all of reality. But there is still so much you don’t understand. And I am just on the edge of the beginning of it,” and something inside Raphael cracks into the embrace. Like falling to the demanded focus of sensation could balance the enamouration.
She never understood her siblings. Gabriel and his lovers and his carnal desires. The way Michael clung to that nineteen-year-old in the Cage. Lucifer’s obsession with his vessel. At least Gabriel often got fixated on people who they both could grasp one another. But that wasn’t the pattern he held. But now, Raphael is looking at Billie and her vague speech and her perception that somehow goes beyond Raphael’s, and she wants to merge. She wants focal attention on her. She wants Billie to show her something beyond anything she’s ever seen. She wants it more than she wants to die in this second. There’s a gaping hole in her chest where devotion should go, and she wants Billie to take advantage of it.
She feels unhinged, unfrayed. But Billie feathers her hand down her face, and Raphael does what entities do, and she kisses her.
It’s not about the sensation or the goal of replication. It’s about the statement. Communication.
It’s about how Billie kisses her back.
It takes a moment for either of them to compute.
“I am a promoted reaper,” she says. “I am just the face of a part of a whole that I have never understood and am only beginning to. I’m not...” she trails off. “I’m the face of the part of the whole, that’s it.”
“That’s all we all are,” Raphael says. “That’s how we have power. That’s how we have freedom. That’s how we have love.”
“And yet you want it all to be over,” Billie says.
“God is dead. I am tired. We are dying -- what I am a part of, we’re dying.” It is the end for them. Raphael has seen it for so long. She just thought if she could get Michael and Lucifer, if she could fight hard enough, if they could, if they could make the right plan.
She understands what is happening enough to her now. What Billie has done to her homeostasis. Castiel won.
Castiel may not be the only reason angels go extinct. But he sure as hell is going to be the face of it.
Maybe she didn’t help. Maybe her nihilism cost them. She doesn’t know. She really doesn’t. “You’re in the future. I can tell. The angels... it gets worse.” Raphael says it as a statement.
“Yes,” Billie confirms. She seems to have no qualms about the way she is destroying Raphael’s entire world.
“Destroy me then. I just want you to destroy me.”
“You have lived billions of years, and you want me to be what kills you?”
“I just want it to be over.”
“I’m not your executioner. This is not how it goes. I’m trying to fix a tear and you’re just....”
“I’m just what?”
“You understand. You compel me. I feel distracted.”
“Then distract me, ” Raphael demands. Billie smiles.
“Now that I can do.”
She kisses Raphael again, pushing her backwards, but Raphael is not used to anything having actual force against her. The focus on the rough sensation is intoxicating, and she needs it to fill up the concave inside her ready to take her down completely. She’s seen so many extinctions, and she doesn’t know how to accept this one. She wonders if she bites and kisses Billie enough if she can become a part of Death too. It doesn’t make sense, and she likes the relief of lacking logic.
She understands what’s happening, that they could probably have sex right now in the mockery of empty Heaven. That maybe it would be something new. That she wants it, pleasure alight in her mind. That she thinks Billie does too. But that’s not what she’s looking for.
She’s looking for obsession.
She needs a break. She needs to process.
“What’s going to happen?” she asks. “Am I getting a special on the reaper treatment? You’re not helping me accept my demise.”
“No,” Billie says. “No, we’re fixing this mistake. I decided it. You never died. You’re suspended in time. And you’re going to help me.”
“You want to use me.”
“Not if you’re unwilling,” Billie says. “There are mistakes that created a surplus of entropy. One is an unprotected prophet and angel tablet and the angels falling. But it’s much more complicated than just that. I see the path of some things I need to do, and I don’t think anyone is going to understand.”
“You’re Death,” Raphael says. “It’s like that. I would protect a prophet and Heaven.”
“I know,” Billie says. “And, Raphael, do know. Kissing you, this... it’s not a part of what I’m talking about. It’s not a trick, or something I can see needs to happen. It’s just...”
“Desire.”
“Seeing a bigger picture has not made me immune.”
“It did for me. I was uninterested,” Raphael pauses. “But I like that you see both.”
Billie smiles.
“You are still going to kill me though. Aren’t you? You took me out of a moment, but the moment still exists. Some day, you’re going to return me. It’s not a good loophole. The Fates won’t like it.”
“I understand enough to know I am not worried about that. And I don’t kill you. Castiel does. And Castiel is an abberration.”
“That’s a technicality.”
“Maybe,” Billie concedes. “But are you with me?”
“Yes,” Raphael says. She knows Billie knows her enough to know just exactly the extent of what that means.
Raphael is not used to the concept of beginnings. And Billie, the face of Death, is just that. She thinks she could dissolve into it. She thinks she could let it be the face of a cycle. Because she has seen so much, but what has happened to her family now is not something she can accept. She thinks she would let Billie destroy her.
She is kind of hoping she does.