Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

2013

Ellen would have liked to believe they'd lost the pursuit, but she was pretty sure the demons would be back on top of them as soon as they felt like it. Twice before, they'd thought they'd lost them, only for the same demons to turn up a few weeks later. Ellen had turned their gear inside out looking for demonic tracking devices, Rufus had grilled everyone for anything they might have done that tipped the demons off, but they'd found nothing, no way for the demons to find them again after a couple of weeks and a couple of states. Jo had made up a bullshit story about delayed tracking witchcraft to calm the civilians down, but all three hunters were pretty sure the demons were just toying with them, chasing them across the country picking them off a few at a time.

She had a pretty good idea who the next two were going to be. Jo, knee shattered by friendly fire, wouldn't be running anywhere anytime soon, and Ellen wasn't going to leave her.

The rest of the party needed to get going, or they were all going to get killed by croats before the demons even arrived. The old auto shop the seven of them were holed up in was made of concrete, but the garage door was missing and none of the windows had any glass. Things kept getting delayed because Rufus and Jo both thought -- incorrectly -- there was some chance Ellen could be persuaded to go, too. (Also, Hank of the itchy trigger finger seemed to hope that if they rested just a little bit longer, Jo would be well enough to travel. Which was ridiculous, but more likely than Ellen leaving Jo.)

"All right, how about this," Jo said. "You guys double back, then turn and go off in a different direction. The demons will follow you, and I'll stay here and hide. It's easier to hide one person than two."

"Not when you can't walk," Ellen replied.

"Mom--"

Which was when a canister came sailing through one of the narrow windows to land in the middle of the floor.

"Tear gas?" Rufus demanded incredulously as it started to fume, and then things got a little hard to follow.

Ellen kept hanging on to Jo's hand through the paroxysms and the dizziness and something picking them up and carrying them into the wan sunlight.

"...strictly necessary? You know I hate that stuff."

"So don't sniff their asses, then."

"Ha ha. I don't want to be in a closed vehicle with them until they're not walking chemical spills."

"They're really edgy and almost half of them are Hunters. We weren't going to be able to talk our way in."

The first voice growled. It did not sound human.

"Don't give me that-- Whoa!"

"Christo!" That was Rufus. Ellen opened her eyes enough to see him struggle to his feet, hurling water at their captors. He must have had a flask in his pocket.

The two men he hit failed to smoke. A third man, built like a linebacker, grabbed Rufus from behind

"I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but no," one of the men -- the second voice -- said to Rufus. "Is this guy one of the Hunters? Which are the other two?"

The question seemed to be addressed to... a fox?

"The girl with the hurt knee and her mother," the fox said. "That's the one hanging on to her, if you couldn't figure it out. None of the others have Hunting backgrounds, though the one in the camo jacket thinks very highly of his skills at sniping the infected."

Not a fox, but a "fox". Skinwalkers generally couldn't speak in canine form... five tails. Some sort of kitsune, had to be, though she'd never heard of them running around as actual foxes. It must have been spying on them for days.

"That knee's going to be a mess," the first voice said. "Maybe I should--"

"No."

"But she--"

"No."

"What if--"

"No, Jackie. If she's a Hunter, she'd probably rather lose a leg than be a skinwalker anyway."

Not demons. Monsters.

Being eaten was probably preferable to being possessed or infected, but she really wasn't sure what was going on.

"Somebody chloroform that guy so Con can do the assessments--"

"What the hell is going on?!" Hank croaked.

"--and that guy, dammit, we have to hurry up."

Ellen slitted her eyes open enough to see first Rufus, then Hank get knocked out with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. Viv's eyes were open and alert, but the monsters didn't seem to care.

After easing Rufus to the ground, the linebacker-type took a few steps away and… turned into Rufus. "Rufus Turner," the shapeshifter said. "Long-time Hunter, retired for a while, got active again when the world went to shit. He's a pro. I'm not sure he'd have the patience to stir up a rebellion in a Reserve, but he'd want to." There was a pause, then Ellen heard her own voice continue. "Ellen Harvelle. Married to a Hunter, ran the Roadhouse until it was destroyed--"

"Man, I hated that place."

"Been hunting off and on since then. Wouldn't call her open to the idea, but her top priority's her daughter." Another pause, and Jo's voice. "Jo Harvelle. Much more into hunting than her mother, she'd be causing trouble even with the leg."

"So all three of them should go to Secure," the second voice concluded. "I'll get them on their way -- Jackie, can you manage not turning any of them if I leave you in charge here while Con checks the civilians?"

Jo shifted next to her and breathed, "Did they just use a shapeshifter to decide if we were going to make trouble in their… I don't even know what?"

"Play along for now," Ellen whispered back.

Ellen, Jo, and the still-unconscious Rufus were loaded into the back of a van and handcuffed to benches. The five-tailed fox-thing sat on one of the benches staring at them. One of the monsters -- something that could look human -- gave them water, and gave Jo some pills it claimed were antibiotics.

That was about all Ellen could take. "What the hell are you doing?" she demanded.

"We're trying to keep you alive," the monster replied. "And out of trouble."

Chapter Text

July 2015

The monsters had several... spokesmonsters? Liaisons to the humans in the Reserve. There was a suave, charming vampire called Marcel who spoke with a faint French accent and seemed to be trying to play on vampire trendiness; rumor had it his real name was Mac and he was from Pittsburgh and only about sixty years old. (Rumor also had it that he was gay, but that was mostly adolescent male rumor, so apparently some things never changed.) For those who found charming vampires creepy, there was a no-nonsense middle-aged werewolf called Miranda Williams, who'd been a school superintendent in Michigan before everything fell apart. For those who found Marcel too effeminate and Miranda too female and/or black, there was the occasional visit from Vlad. Vlad was a dragon and never pretended to see humans as anything but a natural resource, and he scared the crap out of most people. (Vlad spoke with a Eastern European accent, but -- according to rumor -- only because he chose to.)

All three of them were present at the Forum, which probably meant something unusual was going on, so the elected Representative Council was joined by unusually many spectators. Even more unusually, Marcel directly addressed the audience as well as the Council.

"I'm glad to see so many people in the audience, because this is an announcement the whole Reserve should hear," the vampire opened with a smile. "This is a conversion opportunity."

That got everyone's attention. Monsters turned humans all the time -- outside the Reserve. Inside the Reserve, humans were supposed to stay human, because they were a vital natural resource and needed to be... kept. Conversion meant becoming a monster -- and becoming a person, outside the Reserve. It meant never having to worry about Croatoan. Moreover, monsters could designate certain humans as blue-tagged.

At the moment, blue-tagged didn't seem to mean anything, and the monsters said vaguely they were just trying to get the system working for "later", but none of the keepers had actually denied that blue-tagged would mean "don't touch" when the monsters decided there were enough humans they could resume eating them.

After the murmuring died down, Miranda took over. "Some of you already know that the demons didn't start this war alone," she started. "I'm not going to go over the whole sordid story, but there were things calling themselves angels running around for a while. They started the war, let the demons run loose, then took off and left us all to burn when things didn't go exactly to their plan. While they were here, the angels possessed people, like the demons do."

Marcel smoothly picked up the spiel. "We are now looking for former angelic hosts to help with a special defense project."

In the middle of the back row, Claire went still.

It was an opportunity, not a requirement -- at least not yet. Claire might have held back if her mother had still been alive. It would kill her that the angels were finally, indirectly, taking her daughter away, too. But her mother was dead, left behind when the angel wearing her father's body only had the strength to carry one of them out of the inferno devouring their town. Her closest associates these days had all been met after the world started ending, and probably appreciated the value of a conversion opportunity more than she did.

He'd wanted to take Claire with him, after, but she'd refused as viciously as she could. He'd folded, and smuggled her into the nearest functional refugee camp. It had only stayed functional another five months, but Castiel hadn't come back when they had to run. Maybe he thought her refusal freed him of obligation. Maybe he'd gotten weaker still, and couldn't come, or didn't know. (She couldn't decide if it mattered.) Claire probably wouldn't have made it another month if she hadn't been grabbed by vampires trying to maintain a herd of uninfected humans. The Reserve had been a big improvement.

"Who are you going to blue-tag?" Sylvia asked from the top bunk. "Do you have any family left?"

Hayfa rolled her eyes dramatically. "You're not fooling anybody, Sylvia, and talking around it doesn't make it any less tacky to lobby for a blue-tag from your roommate."

"People have gone off more distant relationships than that."

"Yeah, usually with people they knew Before."

Claire sighed. "I don't even know if they're going to take me, guys. I was a vessel for less than a day, years before the angels ditched."

"Bet they will," Hayfa said. "In fact, I'll bet you they want anyone with the potential to be an angel host, just to take them away from the angels.

Claire... had very little problem with that. "Should I bring my toothbrush? Do monsters get tooth decay?"

"You can probably get another one if they do, but I don't think anyone wants to keep yours." Sylvia paused. "Are you taking your umbrella?"

"I'm not sure it's even mine, it was here when I get here," Claire replied. "I think -- I'm not taking any extra clothes. Or my toothbrush. But wait until you know I'm gone before you divide up my stuff, okay?"

"Scout's honor," Sylvia replied.

"I'll keep an eye on her," Hayfa promised. "Are you taking... oh, it's in your hair."

(It was too long for a hairtie, a little too short for a belt, way too long for a bracelet, and could function as a headband but not as well as an actual headband, but tying it to a body part made it easy to hang on to. She lost all of the purse besides the strap ages ago. She wished she had a better memorial of her father than the tie she'd torn from an angel's neck.)

She left her good shoes for Hayfa, and walked to the gatehouse complex in flimsy canvas slip-ons.

"Claire Novak," she said to the shapeshifter on guard duty on the inside gate. "I was vessel to the angel Castiel in 2009."

It studied her -- probably reading her mind -- and sent her in.

Chapter Text

Gabriel still remembered being newly-made and following Michael and Lucifer to meet the protogeneroi. There was a trick to communicating with them, because they didn't really think at the same speed or in the same shape as angels. A lot of the lesser angels never did get it -- but that came later.

Michael had wanted to introduce him to Aether first, as someone relatively friendly and non-threatening, but Aether could be hard to pin down and hadn't responded to any greetings. Lucifer had suggested Nyx; Michael had pointed out she was ever harder to pin down, and likely to mess with the baby angel to see what would happen.

They'd ended up with Gaea, of course, who was probably the easiest to pin down. She'd been… very large. She'd kindly offered to explain the processes of life to Gabriel in detail if he had any questions. He hadn't -- Father had given him everything he needed to know -- but he'd been polite.

As they were leaving, a river had started cursing Father for creating them.

"Ignore it," Lucifer had said shortly. "That's Apsu, the fresh water. He's always like that."

The more angels there were, the worse Apsu had gotten, until he was outright attacking angels, and Father had sent the archangels to cast him into the pit called Purgatory.

That was when they got to know Tiamat.

"She loved him from the beginning," Father had said sadly, when Gabriel carried word of yet another not-quite-alive creature that was all mouth leaping from the sea and swallowing angels whole. "It was too much to hope for -- that she'd take this quietly."

Tiamat had been a harder fight than Apsu -- only fitting, considering the relative volume of salt and fresh water. They had wrested away great quantities of her water and blocked it away in ice to keep her from drowning the planet in her fury.

The other protogeneroi had watched. Silent. Judging.

When they finally cast Tiamat down after Apsu, Gabriel had thought there would finally be some peace. And there was, for a little while.

The next time he'd seen Tiamat, she had been wearing a body, calling herself Echidna, and messing with Father's humans like a child drawing in the sand. He'd been too exhausted and heartsick from fighting his own brother to do anything to stop her.

Most of the pagan gods depended on humans for sustenance -- one way or another -- but owed their existence to either Gaea or Nyx. (Very few of them were able to directly communicate with Gaea or Nyx, which was kind of hilarious, especially when they were reduced to consulting with Gaea through a human oracle.) Tiamat-Echidna-whatever-she-was-calling-herself mostly ignored the gods if they steered clear of her; Gabriel never risked her breaking his cover.

But now, angels were of interest.

Some of the gods were better at identifying angelic artifacts than Gabriel would have given them credit for. Many of the monsters were amazingly bad at it. Most ghouls seemed to have trouble distinguishing between cursed and blessed objects when they were right in front of them. Most humans could do that even if they didn't believe in cursed or blessed objects.

("Well, there's no reason we'd need to," a ghoul explained when a god wanted to know how they could possibly mistake a demonic scrying bowl for an angelic artifact. "All we need to know is if it's strong enough to be dangerous to us or not. Doesn't matter what's making it that way.")

Lugh was particularly good at identifying artifacts -- could even tell something angel-touched from something only blessed. Unfortunately, he had to handle each item individually to make the determination. He'd spent most of the last eight months searching human religious sites.

The cathedral vault he was presently entering contained, Gabriel could have told him, four genuinely holy relics, two caskets containing dangerous cursed objects, three caskets containing objects erroneously believed to be cursed, the poorly transcribed ramblings of an eleventh-century prophet, and the skull of some poor bastard who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time and gotten his eyes burned out of his head. The angel responsible had -- to his credit -- attempted to clean up his mess, but he'd botched the healing job and restored the man's vision but not his eyeballs, leaving him with two glowing orbs of light instead. He'd been killed by panicky neighbors inside a month. The orbs of light were still attached to the skull.

Not as much angel power as you'd get from an angel, or an angel's grace, or a real angelic weapon, but more than you'd get from floors burned with wing impressions. (Or Anna Milton's mother's body, what the fuck were they even thinking?) Lugh would find it.

Gabriel easily slid past the searchers into the vault. He wasn't worried about discovery; there were some gods who could see him when he didn't want to be seen, but Lugh wasn't one of them, and the rest of the entourage was even more small potatoes. The skull was wrapped in rotting velvet in a cedar chest, and it it wasn't incorruptible it would not be in good condition.

He'd thought about approaching Gaea as a go-between, but Gaea was hard to read. She wasn't as bad as Aether, who had only gotten more difficult to pin down, or Nyx, who might have made a physical body for Death just because she liked him and had definitely embodied the other Horsemen because she felt like it, but Gaea loved all living things while somehow remaining completely untroubled by predation, parasitism, and extinction events.

Firstborn were strange, and Gaea was no exception. And she didn't have Tiamat's grudge against angels, but she wasn't very friendly, either. Angels were nothing of hers.

He was going to write Tiamat a note, instead.

He didn't use Enochian. That would have been an insult, under the circumstances. But there was another kind of ur-writing, that the Firstborn used to send non-urgent or context-dependent messages. (Apsu had scrawled ANGELS KEEP OUT all over the planet.) She'd understand that, and it was very unlikely anyone else would even notice it.

I'M WILLING TO TALK IF YOU ARE.

It might not come to anything. Tiamat might be holding a grudge against archangels, and if she wasn't going to settle for anything less than tearing his wings off to feed her angel-hunting monsters, Gabriel was not going to cooperate with that. But if there was an amicable solution... he was so tired of fighting.

Chapter Text

Dear Ms. Heinlein,

Thank you for your inquiry of 12/19/2014, "Was Zeus as stupid as the myths make him sound?" I mean this quite sincerely, as I'm afraid I hadn't realized you were systematically testing limits with your earlier emails and uploads.

I'm sorry. I corrupted your data. I've been steering your content away from anyone I thought likely to take offense at it, because computer programming is one of my things, you're a gifted computer programmer, and I wanted to keep you out of trouble.

The Internet Gods can read any email they transmit, and most of them do peruse a haphazard sample out of curiosity if nothing else. Not all gods are any good at decryption, but many of the ones who can decipher codes are also on the internet committee, so security is sort of a relative thing.

Many gods do care what you say about them and about other gods. With the Mother of Monsters in charge they can't hurt you, but if Freyja knew about that drawing you sent in November, she would probably demand that your internet access be terminated indefinitely. The jokes about Zeus wouldn't have been much of a problem at this point.

I followed the development of the internet over the last several decades, and I understand where you're coming from. Please stop trying to antagonize the gods on purpose. It never ends well.

Finally, I did not interfere with the torrents you set up, because the early seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess didn't offend anyone except the Olympians, most of whom are dead. However, the later seasons will upset almost everyone in one way or another. I recommend not going there.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me through email or prayer.

Urania, Muse of Astronomy, Mathematics, and the Hard Sciences
The Internet Committee

June 2015

"Erato, if you keep that up I am going to change all the online dictionaries to say your name is etymologically related to Eros," Urania said. "I am not having sex with her, or dating her, or even flirting with her. She's a gifted programmer with some complex questions about the mechanics of a god-based internet. That's all."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why?"

"Why is that all? She's attractive, she likes women, her future won't be destroyed if someone finds out she has a lover, she's in your sphere -- why aren't you pursuing this?"

"That's really not how I work."

"Are you still bitter over Copernicus turning you down? Or afraid of rejection?"

"That was a misunderstanding, and I'm not going to discuss it with you."

"What would Clio say if I asked her?"

"She'd say she's on my side, and did you ever tell anyone the whole Byron story?"

Terpsichore folded her arms across her chest. "How long have they been doing that?"

"Two hours and ten minutes," Calliope replied, without looking up from the maps in front of her. "To be fair to Erato, Urania came in and regaled us with an enthusiastic description of her current favorite human's critique of internet censorship. Most of us don't get that moon-eyed over an artist without at least a little crush. Did Copernicus really turn Urania down?"

"Technically yes, but she wasn't actually propositioning him at the time." That had been... messy. Urania had dropped in to offer helpful astronomy pointers, and he'd mistaken her for a courtesan or possibly a succubus. Urania's feelings had been hurt, but she'd learned a valuable lesson about appearing to people without carefully considering their reactions. "What are you doing?"

"Attempting to pinpoint the current location of the last active prophet. Echidna asked. It's been a while since he wrote anything, so it's not simple, but I still have some sense of him."

"He's still alive?"

"Oh, yes. I'd know that talentless hack anywhere."

"...She's not planning on sending you out to get him, I hope?"

"He's in an uncontrolled area, she doesn't have that much faith in my abilities."

"I mean, she is sending someone to keep you from smacking the poor man around too much? It's not actually his fault he's a prophet."