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Jesus is taken to a hill where his execution awaits. They laugh and mock as he bleeds and suffers.
Michael is brimming with rage. Unadulterated wrath as endless and vast as God. It is his brothers, more sagacious than he in this stinging moment of betrayal, who hold him back, who admonish him and remind him of God’s will. “Control yourself, brother,” Gabriel hums; Michael almost doesn’t hear him.
“They have slaughtered our Lord! They deserve to die.” He shall do it slowly. Every last one of them. Until the earth bleeds red.
“The will of God,” they remind him, doing nothing to quell his loathing and his fully-body trembling.
“It shall be done.”
Michael knows this. He knows God glimpsed this before the concept of execution was even realized by man, before Michael had a mortal Messiah to protect, he knew, and he descended to earth nonetheless. The blood of Jesus was always meant to be spilt.
All Michael wants to do is hang each human being on a cross and sneer at their cries.
He is not an archangel at this moment, ever loyal to his Lord and the occupation of protector of humanity. Not even Satan nor his vile adherents could conjure the sheer bloodlust coursing through the totality of the archangel’s being. The sword clenched in Michael’s right hand needs only one swipe, a single utilization of divine energy, and the foul beasts of humanity are wholly expunged, forever lost to blight.
But he does not move from where he stands, shakes, incorporeal and hidden from the world of the mortal.
The angels watch silently and weep as Jesus draws in a final breath.