Chapter Text
Vaggie might die soon. Maybe not. Hell if she knows.
Speaking of hell.
She is surrounded by red and fire and pain. The air is thick and smoky, hot and invasive in her lungs. The gravel of the alleyway digs into her cheek as she lies prone on the ground, each bit of rock cutting undetectably yet oh so overwhelmingly at her skin. It makes her want to scream. She would cry - no one would notice at all, a cacophony of screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounds her - but she learned long ago not to cry. It never helps.
It’s hard to resist the temptation, though. It’s really fucking hard. It’s hard because she is missing an eye and both of her wings because they just got brutally cut and ripped out of her and off her, respectively, and she has been left to bleed to death in an alley. Unless she can’t die, in which case she has been left to bleed to despair.
Everything hurts. The pain in her eye socket and on her back, torturous and extreme, has spread beyond its domain to rack her whole body in fits of agony thanks to a dubiously helpful trick of the mind. She feels as if she is being burned alive, her body a rejected log of wood tossed casually and uncaringly into the flames of a bonfire.
She should get up, go somewhere safe and calm so she can bandage her wounds. She’ll die if she doesn’t. Maybe she’ll die anyway. Maybe she won’t die at all. All her life, she’s been told that she can’t be killed. That other exorcists could hurt her, but they couldn’t kill her. But right now she doubts that because she can feel herself slipping away with every second that blood drips from her eye socket and runs down her back. She wonders if sparing that child has taken her immortality away, somehow. A divine punishment for disobedience she was previously unaware of.
An especially blood-curdling scream pokes its way out of the din, reminding her of the slaughter outside her tucked-away alley. Going somewhere safe and calm might be a futile effort - at least for the time being. The extermination - the annual slaughtering of demons by heaven’s exorcist angels - continues in full force, despite her lack of participation. This makes her wonder how much she ever really meant to the operation - to her fellow soldiers. Not much, if her current wounded, abandoned state is anything to go by. Although…she had fucked up, gone against the singular order she had to follow on extermination day: kill as many sinners as possible.
Why is she such a coward? All of the others could kill more than a hundred demons a year without a single second thought - just the pure efficiency of the killing machines they were made to be. For some unknowable reason, she’s different. When she looks at the sinners she slaughters, she can’t help but see the humans they were in life. The humans they still are, deep down. When she saw the kid, just a scared little boy, she was faced - in a violent, jarring way - with that thought. She couldn’t kill him. So she let him escape.
She lays on the ground of the dirty, battered alley for what feels like an eternity, staring with her one good eye at the gritty brick wall in front of her. She continues to slip away, each moment feeling more vague and more blurry. Time begins to pass in a strange way that she feels detached from, like a rowboat with its rope cut slowly drifting out onto the lake. The pain slowly fades into a white noise as her brain gives up on reminding of her ruined state. It’s still there, but less obtrusive and crippling.
Eventually, the clock tower rings. The screaming stops. The extermination ends. And Vaggie is left with no excuse not to pick her sorry ass up and get somewhere, anywhere , else. Maybe she can find a very recently abandoned building and something inside it that will serve as a crude recreation of proper medical supplies.
But then again, why should she even bother? She’s in hell. There’s not really hope for a bright future filled with happiness and joy. Even if she does manage to find something to patch herself up, she’s still stuck in the realm of eternal misery and punishment. Maybe it would be best for her to just let herself die. Unless…
A beautiful idea dawns on her. What if she can return to Heaven? If she can prove herself, maybe they’ll want her again. Maybe they’ll take her back. She wonders if there’s someone up there that could completely heal her eye and wings. But if no one can, she’ll still be okay, because she’ll be in Heaven again.
Actually, it might even be best to never get them back. Without wings, she won’t be able to participate in the exterminations anymore. She can just rest and relax in Heaven, like any other winner. She knows it’s a selfish thing to want - killing sinners is an honor, a service for all humanity - but she dreams anyway.
Heaven, specifically the exorcist dormitory inside of it, is the only home she has ever known, and as she lays dying she longs for it. Her life before she’d woken up in heaven and immediately begun her training to slaughter the wicked had been cleanly and perfectly wiped from her mind. She still knew common things about the world and how to be a person in it, but anything with emotional weight was long absent in her memory. She was left with only her life as an exorcist, which had been spent training and fighting and killing and living in those dorms. The thought of a life outside of them terrifies her, suddenly.
Spurred on by this new motivation, she pulls herself off the ground with gritted teeth and suppressed screeches of pain. As she pulls up one knee, then the other, and shifts the muscles in her back to do so, her pain returns in sharp, jagged spikes. She presses on, though, and shakily manages to get her feet flat on the ground.
She’s lightheaded, and feels like she’s going to faint or cry or throw up or all three at once, but she’s standing. She takes a moment to reorient herself and breathe. Each inhale is as small as she can make it to avoid the biting agony in her back escalating. It’s a futile effort.
She still doesn’t cry.
In a moment of unexpected mental clarity, she remembers her spear. Well, that might just be useful. She bends down to pick it up off the ground. Fresh blood from fresh cuts torn by the motion drips down her back as she does so.
The weight and shape of the spear is alien in her hands. She has no idea why, though. She’s been wielding this exact same spear for years, she was given it the very day she woke up in heaven. Something about it is different now. She runs her hand along its shaft slowly, dipping her fingernails into each divot in the black metal, then moves her hand to the spearhead and traces the edge of the blade with her finger, cutting a thin gold line of blood into her finger. Has she changed?
She staggers out of the alley, focusing on the motion and weight of each step so she doesn’t collapse. She tries to recall the path she took to get here, to remember any hospitable-looking buildings along the way. She comes up blank. During an extermination, her mind is engulfed in an adrenaline-fueled haze only capable of slaughtering the next sinner. Regrettably, appreciating the scenery - or what counts for scenery in Hell - is the last thing she cares about. Also, Hell doesn't really have “hospitable-looking buildings”. It has dangerous-looking buildings, less dangerous-looking buildings, and more dangerous-looking buildings.
Despite visiting it once a year, Vaggie has no idea what the geography of Hell is like on a larger scale. She knows what it looks like from the sky, of course, but that's hardly a map. She’s just vaguely aware of its shape and where the most people are. The job of dividing Hell into sectors, each for a separate squadron of exorcists, had always gone to people much smarter than her. She was never the smart one, only the strong one.
One of the best killers in the whole army.
She walks down the street in the direction opposite of where she flew in from. It’s an arbitrary enough decision, and a vague desire to leave everything that has just happened behind her makes it for her.
She passes corpses, so many corpses. They lie discarded on the street, tossed aside by charging exorcists like ragdolls. Gore slickly coats the street beside each carcass. In some corners, sinners who were not blessed with a quick death lie bleeding out and whimpering. They look at her with panic, recognizing her uniform and spear.
She pauses. She could grant them mercy, stab them through the heart with her spear and let them pass away in moments. It would be the right thing to do. But then again, she’s in critical condition herself. And the thought of stabbing anyone, even as a mercy killing, makes her sick.
“Please.” The whisper barely reaches her ears, and for a moment she thinks she dreamed it. She searches the decaying, ruddy buildings surrounding her and the dark, inky shadows at their edges and in their corners for the source.
Her gaze lands on a sinner dragging himself toward her from within an alley not too unlike her own. His back, which has a deep, jagged crimson pit carved into it, is bared to the sky. He pulls himself forward with his arms, his legs limp from damage to the spinal cord. Blood drips from his mouth, pooling at the corners of his lips. He wears a maroon suit and a top hat and a monocle which look incredibly silly on their own but are made even more silly thanks to the fact that, underneath the suit, he’s a human-sized anthropomorphic rat. In a different and much less morbid scenario, Vaggie might have smirked.
“Please,” he repeats. His coarse whiskers twitch wildly as he speaks, despite his mouth moving only imperceptibly. “Just kill me.”
Vaggie knows that she should kill him as quickly as possible, fulfill his wish - but she has to ask something first. She’s never been face-to-face with a sinner before, never had the chance to simply talk to one. And every time she has ever killed one, there’s been a question crowding her conscience that she so desperately wishes she could ask: “What did you do to end up here?”
“Where? Dying? I got stabbed, dumbass. By one of you.” He coughs, spraying her feet with sanguine fluid. “Do your job. Kill me.”
“I mean Hell. What did you do to end up in Hell?”
“Why do you care?” He coughed again. “Aw, fuck, whatever. I was a conman. Scammed people out of their money.”
“What kind of people?”
His answer comes sharply - he’s frustrated at her hesitation. “Anyone I could get my grubby paws on.”
“Do you think you deserve to die - eternally - for that?”
“That question’s already been answered for me,” he sighs. “Just finish the job. Let me die.”
She’s torturing him at this point. She breathes in, lifts up her spear, breathes out, brings it down. The sinner dies almost immediately, letting out a trembling exhale as he passes. Softly, she says: “I’m sorry.”
Vaggie pulls her spear out with a heave, wiping the fresh blood off on her uniform. A small tear is cut into a fraying area of it as she does so. She should take it off soon - wearing an exorcist uniform will probably attract unwanted attention once sinners start emerging from the holes they’ve been hiding in. They can’t physically harm her, but she fears what else they could do.
She pulls the armor on her arms and legs off then cuts open the top with her spear, unwilling to deal with the pain of taking it off properly. She’s left with a thin yet sturdy white and gray undergarment, black pants, gloves that reach up past her elbows, and thigh-highs of the same material as the gloves. It makes her feel naked, being out of her uniform in public, but she dismisses this notion quickly knowing full well that she’s more modestly dressed than at least three quarters of the denizens of hell. She throws it all in a trash can down the same alley the rat man had crawled from. She steps cautiously over his body to get there - it seems wrong to disrespect the dead in such a way.
She collapses in front of a dumpster by the trash can, exhaling deeply and closing her eye. Her spear falls to the ground beside her. It’s pitiful that she’s already this exhausted. Dying is no excuse to be so weak. However, despite knowing this, she doesn’t get up. Not yet. She isn’t ready yet.
It feels like she’s waiting for something; something cosmically important. Something that will change the entire trajectory of her life. She has no idea what that something is, or why this strange idea has come upon her all of a sudden. Maybe she’s going insane.
Performing a morbid facsimile of a peaceful rest, she sits there for a while with her eye closed. For a short time, she lets herself think about nothing, feel nothing, ignore everything. It’s nice in a fleeting way.
Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the feeling of waiting for something disappears with a jolt. Her eye shoots open, she jumps forward, and her heart rate spikes. She looks around wildly, scanning the alley for threats. There has to be something triggering her panic, something she can’t detect but a sixth sense of hers can. She discovers nothing. She’s alone.
She takes the disappearance of the strange waiting feeling as a sign to get up. That’s it, nap’s over, she tells herself. Better get up now, or else you’re never going to. Bracing herself against the dumpster, she does so. The movement reawakens the agony stabbing at her back - she ignores it. She’s learned to ignore the pain, both in her back and in her eye, pretty well by now. She knows this is a very bad sign and that she needs medical help immediately, yet she can’t help but see it as a relief. At least for now.
She continues on her trek to find a safe, empty house. The heat of Hell persists, and she has a feeling that it will keep persisting forever because it’s Hell. She’ll just have to learn how to get used to it. She already has, kind of. It’s become similar to the pain of her wounds. Present and unpleasant, but tolerable. She still longs for the perfectly temperate and clean air of Heaven, though. She comforts herself with the reassurance that she’ll figure out how to get back someday. Hopefully someday soon.
An explosion sounds in the distance, then another. Vaggie stops in her tracks and turns toward the source. Two great blooms of smoke spread slowly and maliciously through the sky from about a mile away. The violent punch of gunfire - lots of it - follows. Finally, shouting and screaming is heard. It’s loud and panicked, though not desperate and pitiful in the way the screaming generated by the extermination is. She recognizes this event from her Hell 101: Why Sinners Suck And Deserve To Die class she had to take before her first extermination. The turf wars have started; Hell will be back to its usual dangerous and sinful state before too long. She needs to hurry.
More explosions, more gunshots, more screaming come from all sides, each new battle starting one after another in quick succession. Her heart thuds to the arrhythmic beat of the bombs. The din of the battles fills her with a tense panic, and this tense panic reverberates through her as powerfully as the force of the explosions.
Her standard of resting place lowers rapidly with every moment. She needs to get somewhere safe, she needs to get somewhere she can rest. The adrenaline she’s been riding on since she first got up is stretching thin, and the stress of the turf wars currently closing in on her isn’t helping.
She rests her eyes on a tiny, rotting shack built of maroon bricks and tan wood slumped between taller, yet equally decrepit buildings. It seems like it could collapse any minute, which makes her slightly nervous. She guesses that no one has been in it for years - a house home to nothing but bugs and rats.
It’s good enough.
She passes the door, a misshapen plank that hangs open on rusted hinges, pulling it as shut as it can be behind her. The inside of the house is dark and musty. The only intact lightbulbs are long dead; the only windows that could provide light or ventilation are filthy and boarded up. The whole place is oppressively quiet - the kind of quiet that rings loudly in your ears. It feels as if she’s violating a grave.
And she discovers, as she scans the cracked wooden floor of the one-room hovel, that she is. The corpse of a bug-themed sinner lies strewn on the ground in front of her, the gore spilling out of her swarmed by a multitude of hellish insects. An exorcist had broken in and killed her. Maybe it was someone Vaggie knew.
She ignores the corpse - that’s a problem for later - and sits down at a rickety wood table in the center of the room. She leans her spear against it, the hook of its blade gently digging into the soft wood. The only furniture besides is a sagging couch to one wall, and a shredded mattress sitting on the floor with a filthy blanket on it to another. Maybe she can use the blanket as a bandage. Honestly, it’s all she’s got. The room is incredibly barren, hardly lived-in at all. She speculates that the bug sinner was just hiding in here for the extermination, and it was really someone else’s place. Or maybe it was no one’s place at all.
After giving the room one last desperate once-over for anything else, she grabs the blanket and rips it into two pieces - one smaller, one bigger. She wraps the smaller one around her face, covering up the gaping hole in her head. Simple enough. It’s very likely that it’ll get infected, and she should look for something at least a little bit cleaner as soon as possible, but it protects the delicate, exposed flesh and stops blood from pouring down her cheek and into her mouth, which is good enough for now.
Bandaging her back is harder. She has to take off her top first, which is a torturous endeavor, and then she has to reach behind her back several times as she wraps the dirty fabric around her torso, which is even worse. However, regardless of her misery, she forces herself to push through the pain.
Once she’s bandaged, she slips her top on again, then gently lays down on the mattress. Laying flat on her back without her wings feels strange. Sleeping in a room she has to herself feels even stranger. None of that really matters to her right now, though - she’s exhausted, physically and mentally.
As she starts to drift away, her mental barrier collapses. For the first time since she was so cruelly maimed and left to die, she is allowed to think about Lute.
She should have expected as much for sparing the child. Her threat before the extermination all but laid out such a fate in ink: I’ll be watching you. If you fuck up, I’ll know. And personally make sure you face the consequences. Then Vaggie had fucked up, and faced the consequences.
So why does it feel like a betrayal?
It doesn’t make any sense. She’d broken up with Lute months ago, so it isn’t like Lute had had any personal ties to her. In fact, if anything, Lute had made it very clear that she hated her for a variety of reasons, some of them justified, some of them absurd. She’d been especially suspicious of Vaggie’s growing hesitancy regarding the exterminations. She’d ruthlessly lectured her at every turn, maybe in a last-ditch attempt at keeping Vaggie on her side - no, on Heaven’s side.
Lute’s loyalty had always been to Heaven first. Never Vaggie. Everything was second to Heaven, and maybe Adam now, to Lute.
Why does she still feel betrayed?
If anything, she’s the one who betrayed Lute. She’s the one who disobeyed orders. She’s the one who spared a child behind Lute’s back and had the audacity to act surprised when she was caught and horrified when she was punished. Honestly, she deserved the punishment she’d received - especially when it came from someone much more righteous than she.
…Maybe. She’s half-asleep already, so she isn't thinking very clearly. Thoughts of Lute’s betrayal - not - maybe? - and the nature of it swim through her head, shifting and jumbling and blurring.
As her breathing evens and her thoughts slow, a tear pools at the corner of her eye, then falls softly down the side of her skull.
So much for not crying.