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Raphael sees red – crimson gore splashing across her vision, Castiel’s (if that was still her brother’s) impassive stare ordering her destruction with a finger-snap, the terror that seeps into her vessel’s mind despite the barriers she desperately pulls up. There is no time to breathe, no time to scream or gasp, no pain to feel.
Then, Raphael sees black – comfort, numbness, rest after millennia of waiting for the End, after years of toil and despair, after months of solitude – the only archangel left, gone to join their kin. She is not alive, not dead; nothing. Sleep, echoed and all-encompassing.
And then, Raphael sees white. Or rather, light grey, speckled with dust and stained with dirt. Cold fills her insides, seeping through her toes and nostrils. She feels something hard under her skin, something like concrete, and she frowns, because she shouldn’t be sensing the pavement and the whiteness and the cold. She should be removed from her vessel’s nerves, but when she tries to retreat she finds a wall, fleshy tethers around her limbs and lungs.
A small, barely perceptible groan escapes her throat, and the rise of her chest informs her this body has taken a staggered breath in. Something shifts hurriedly beside her – fabric, perhaps.
“…-phael? Raphael!”
That voice is not quite familiar, high-pitched and wavery, but she gets the distinct impression that she knows who it belongs to. It brings back memories she has long since shelved in her mind, buried under millennia of working, leading, toiling away for the End she so desperately wanted. Honey. Meteor showers. Bells. Laughter, light and mischievous.
“Raphael, is that you? Come on, wake up. Come on, you big stupid - !”
Fear sits wrong on this voice – breaking at all the wrong places. She thinks it might have been created for song, or jokes. But then again, she thinks, none of them had ever been made for fear.
Clumsy hands flutter above her; they hesitantly touch her face, then retreat, before landing on her right shoulder. They’re slightly warmer than the ground, and she lets out another groan.
“Yeah, come on, wake up.”
Eyelids drift ajar, heavy. Flecks of snow fall from her lashes, disturbed by the movement. The world meets her sideways, encased by walls of white and grey.
She shifts her head, and suddenly her vision is flooded with chestnut hair that gleams almost golden in the blind light. Hazel eyes flit nervously above her face, checking her over like a bothersome butterfly.
“Thank – Raphael – that’s you, right? You’re – I think I can tell – yeah. You’re awake.”
She blinks furiously, frowns, tries to get her vessel’s head to stop spinning. This person is too close for comfort, and when she finally gets a grip on her arms she manages to lift herself from her elbows. The stranger doesn’t retreat – his eyes follow her like magnets. But he doesn’t fight her when she pulls herself back, placing necessary distance between the two of them. His hand leaves her shoulder, and the treacherous body she can’t seem to get rid of laments the small heat it loses.
“Hi,” he says.
Raphael goes still. She’s in a city – dull and too much at the same time, with the stomach-churning smell of exhaust fumes and human waste. Humans are loud; engines and chatter seem to surround their everyday, and fill the few empty spaces between the buildings. Dead trees sprout up from carefully-constructed holes in the concrete; some sort of park, perhaps. Snow flits in the biting wind in cluttered, dirty flakes. The sky hangs low, mingling with the ground in a nebulous, choking fog. Something – heart, she registers a second late – clenches within her. Wrong, it chants on repeat. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Raphael,” comes the voice again. The one that makes her breath shallow.
Her eyes snap back to him.
“It is you, right? Man, it sure would be awkward if you turned out to be – I don’t know, some human named Adele. If you’re a human named Adele, just – forget you ever –”
Raphael grits her teeth, and her voice descends two tones lower in the pitch she reserved for her battalions. “Who are you? How do you know my name?”
The figure blinks, before a pained expression glides over his features – his eyebrows knit together, and his lower lip quivers ever so slightly. Then he smiles, a small, wistful, hopeless thing.
“It’s Gabriel, brother. It’s me.”
The wind blows between them, lifting her loose hair up across her own face. A crow rattles its vocal cords.
Raphael feels fury rise inside her, heating up her cheeks with foreign blood.
“I don’t know what you’re playing at,” she snarls, and the stranger’s eyes go wide, “but you will not use that name with me. Now identify yourself before you regret it.”
She reaches for her wings, willing them to extend, for a glimpse of their terrifying beauty to be revealed to this interloper, to cow him into listening to the might of Heaven –
And feels nothing.
“What’s wrong, Raphie?” the stranger continues with that smile that manages to be sad, and this cannot be him, it just cannot – “I know I’ve had quite the makeover, but I never thought you’d forget about little old –”
“That’s impossible,” Raphael breathes, feeling for her wings again, only to be met with human deltoids, collarbones, shoulder blades, nerve endings.
The man laughs nervously. “Impossible’s my middle name, hermana.”
“Stop that!” she barks, and scrambles further from him. Tries with a flick of a wrist to summon her blade. Why isn’t her essence bowing to her will? Why is she on Earth – why is she even alive?
She was finally supposed to rest.
The stranger with the singing voice notices something in the movement of her shoulders, and his lips thin. “You too, huh? Gotta say, there’s other ways to make a guy go sober than going whole ass cold turkey on angel grace.”
Pebbles rake against her palms, scraping up skin and smearing dirt under her fingernails. Angel grace?
She shakes her head. “You cannot be Gabriel.”
The man makes a face at that, his face scrunching up towards his nose in a rather childish gesture. “Well, no fair. What else am I supposed to be? All the other dudes are a no-go now.”
“He’s dead.” She knows there is no waver in her voice – she has trained it for millennia not to show anything but resolve. Even her mind, dull and retreated, barely registers the pain of the statement. “He left, and then I felt him die.”
Despite the archangel’s prolonged absence (so much so that many lower angels had forgotten him entirely), his death had left a gaping wound in Heaven. One that neither Michael nor Raphael had acknowledged; but the moment it had happened, they’d watched each other and known they were feeling the same pain. It had been done; there was no turning back.
“You are not Gabriel,” she concludes in a low voice. “Now go, before I kill you myself.”
“Oh, screw this,” the man says suddenly, and finally, a flash of anger crosses his features. “You’re all as stubborn as when I last saw you.”
He stands up, brushing dirt off his jeans. “Sorry to rain on your parade, Raphie, but yeah – it’s me. In the flesh, or whatever meatsuit we have at the moment. And I’m real sorry we can’t do the reveal twist justice, but we definitely have a bigger problem right now.”
And he gestures behind him.
Raphael’s eyes follow his movements.
And widen.
Lying on the park ground, a few yards away from a steel swing set, limbs sprawled and unresponsive, are Michael and Lucifer.
And Raphael… shuts down.
It is as though the world collapses, as though she cannot find a grip on its crumbling reality. Her eyes unfocus without her consent, and through the blur she can still make out her first brother’s still form.
“Michael,” she chokes.
Her body refuses to move.
“Yep,” says the man – says…
“Gabriel,” she whispers, and trails her gaze back to that familiar not-stranger, this voice shaped like spring and wild clover.
“One and only,” he says, quietly, and gives her a wry, two-fingered salute. “Good to see ya, sis.”
“Gabriel,” she repeats, like a strange taste.
“Hi,” Gabriel says again, and swallows, then licks his lips.
She watches him then – wants to ask him all the questions he expects, and others he might not, and the fury that had dissipated in her gut starts to appear again. For a second, she knows she is about to let the storm out on him in torrents of hurt and incomprehension. For another second, she wants to be close to him, to grieve and wrap her wings around her long-lost brother.
She closes her eyes, tightly. Breathes out; puffs of steam coil out of her. And then the feelings get mute again, shrouded in numbness, neatly packed away and blocked from her mind.
She opens her eyes again. Time to get this sorted.
“Where are we?”
Gabriel frowns, stretching and wriggling his neck like he’s dislodging an uncomfortable insect. “Columbus, Ohio.” He wrinkles his nose. “Someone knows how to tell a joke.”
She does not know what he means, and is not about to ask. Slowly, her vision strays back to the two slumped bodies behind Gabriel.
“I didn’t try waking them up,” says the latter. “Didn’t want to risk – well. I for one had enough apocalypses to fill my belly for a few thousand years.”
His eyes flash with something – anger, perhaps. She doesn’t understand many of the emotions that travel through Gabriel’s expressive features, like wild birds in the mist; indistinguishable and strange. It makes her ache, dully.
“I didn’t bring them back,” she breathes. It was a failure, another in the list she bears on her back like another pair of wings. She lost them to Castiel and his short-sightedness, to his pride and ignorance.
She straightens.
“We need to get back to Heaven,” she announces, and takes Gabriel’s outstretched hand to get back on her feet.
She needs to see if there are any survivors. If Castiel has destroyed them all. If the remains of her family can be salvageable.
“Uh, yeah, no can do,” Gabriel says. He rubs his hands together and blows on them to bring warmth to his body. Like a human would. It’s disturbing to watch on her brother – Raphael looks away, some unknown grief gnawing at her unresponsive spirit. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re a little short on juice at the moment.”
He clicks his fingers, once, twice, then another to make sure, and his jaw twitches in annoyance. Finally, an emotion she can understand on him.
She checks on her own grace – there doesn’t seem to be any wound, but it seems muted, static, flat. One-dimensional, like the paintings humans used to try to emulate their Father’s creation. Her fists clench; whoever is responsible for this, she will make sure will never see daylight again.
Is this Castiel’s doing? Even with the powers she had sensed disgustingly roiling inside his vessel, she struggles to believe he would have enough to strip four archangels of their power, let alone free two of them from their Father’s sturdiest prison, and one of them from Death’s jealous hold.
Slowly, she steps toward the swing set.
Michael is in the vessel he wore the day he fell, the day everything went so very wrong – the youngest Winchester. Sandy hair flops onto his still forehead, and a worry line creases between his brows. When he had first entered the body, she didn’t think it suited him – the face was too young, unbecoming, frail. But in her hurry to get the End over with, she had simply nodded at him, and he had flown down to meet their fallen brother.
Lucifer…
Lucifer is not wearing Samuel Winchester. Raphael has never seen the human – dark blonde, middle-aged with premature wrinkles around his eyes. Angry, crimson welts cover his skin, painful and raw, ravaging his body like a disease.
She has kept watch over his movements from Heaven, of course. She was in charge of surveying his position, the demons’ numbers and advances, in an unspoken agreement that Michael should not risk seeing his brother before the End. But she has never gotten close. There was nothing left to say, nothing but the same arguments and unanswered questions, looping between them all like threads in a tapestry.
She knows his temporary vessel had been damaged, as all imperfect vessels are. Donnie had served well, but when the time to leave had come, she had done so with no second glances.
Michael’s body is sprawled out, a mess of limbs shooting in every direction like sunbeams. Lucifer is small, in comparison – curled up and folded, as if he’d been bracing for a landing.
It only occurs to her then: that they are together.
Absently, her hand goes to feel Michael’s forehead. It is hot to the touch, but not burning. She softly brushes a lock of hair back, and buries her fear when Michael breathes a sigh.
She does not know what to do.
Gabriel has moved towards Lucifer, his index and middle finger pressed against the jugular. His movements are careful, his gaze stormy, like he’s touching a wild animal. One that has bitten him already.
He used to run towards the Morningstar and tackle him with spread wings, often tangling up with each other in a mess of feathers and intermingled grace.
Raphael buries that, too. She narrows her eyes. “Why are you doing that?”
Gabriel tilts his head like a confused dog. “Doing what?”
“Checking for a pulse.” As if the Morningstar needed something as base as a heartbeat. As if the damage to their grace wasn’t far more important than anything their vessels are currently enduring.
“Because, my sceptical brother, it looks like we have one now.”
Raphael’s eyes don’t go wide. But she immediately brings her hand to her own neck – and there it is, a rapid thumping deep inside her, carrying blood through branching veins.
It isn’t like a vessel’s heart stops working, once an angel takes its place inside it. But the mechanisms are not instinctual – the grace maintains the body as much as the body grounds the grace. There isn’t a need for heartbeats, for lung work, for digestion and immune systems and nail clippings. It is all taken care of, lying in the hands of the most powerful beings in creation.
Raphael is not in control of the body. Her heart is beating by itself, her lungs expanding and shrinking through no will of her own.
In Heaven she is a Healer – a holy balm, a repairer, a solution for damaged grace. On Earth she is a destroyer, storm-bringer, leaving her vessels broken and insane.
She does not know how to fix this.
“Gabriel,” she breathes, and her voice comes out disgustingly short, choked and small.
Kneeling at Lucifer’s side like a surrealist Pieta, her brother’s lips are thinned, eyes darting from Raphael to Michael’s unmoving form, from the empty park to Lucifer’s scarred body. His lips are slightly blue.
Something must have shown in Raphael’s expression, because Gabriel straightens. Breathes in, that strange, voluntary action humans make to calm down.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Okay.”
She watches him stand up, watches him bite his lip and tap his shoes and breathe on his fingers once more.
“First things first, we need to get the sleepyheads somewhere safe. And, uh, warm, for that matter. I’m not so keen on turning into a popsicle.”
His teeth chatter as he speaks.
“Where?” Raphael asks, voice calm and collected and in control. “You said yourself, there’s no way to contact Heaven. If we knew who did this, we could…”
Gabriel hesitates, licking his lips. He pierces Raphael with his stare, up and down, gauging her like a soldier.
“Alright, screw it,” he says at last, throwing his arms up in the air. Up, to where humans think Heaven lies. “I have a place.”
“A… place.”
“An apartment. Not far from here. Used it while I was busy doing… While I was busy. We can stay there and figure it out when we’re not freezing our asses.”
Raphael cannot stop staring. “You have an… apartment.”
Who is this new entity in the shape of her brother? Were a few millennia enough to transform him so completely, from a proud leader of the Heavenly choir to this city-dwelling, heartbeat-checking being?
Gabriel sighs. The slowly-gathering snowflakes get caught about his hair, white freckles on a golden canvas. “Just – trust me, ‘kay? I’ll get us somewhere safe.”
That voice she recognises: the pleading tones of a younger brother, desperate to be heard.
A beat. Then, slowly, she nods.
Gabriel smiles at her – one of the only genuine, angelic things she can find in him. “Thank you,” he says.
The clouds part for a moment, and between the snowflakes Raphael can see rays of light fall from the Heavens to the sprawling city below.
The heat gently seeping from her palm barely makes up for the searing disgust she feels as she watches the liquid slosh, red and steamy, around the ceramic bowl. It is rather smooth, marred only by the occasional herb flake bubbling up to the surface and the cream slowly melting into the preparation, lightening its surroundings into a warm orange.
“It’s soup, Raphie. Not a nuclear bomb.”
She scowls. “The very thought of ingesting this disgusts me.”
Gabriel makes a sound not unlike a stifled snort. His own hands curl around a sweeter beverage, poured from a tin into a cup of steaming milk.
“Trust me, Chuckles. It’ll do you good.”
She sends him a disbelieving glare.
A whine comes from underneath her, high-pitched and pleading. A furry head looks back at her, tilted at an angle – its black eyes shine with uncanny intelligence. Its tail thumps against the red-and-yellow carpet.
“Your dog is…”
“If the next word you say isn’t on the line of perfect, adorable or freakin’ fabulous, I’m making you eat a second helping.”
Raphael says nothing.
Her legs ache, dull spasms travelling through frayed nerves. Despite Gabriel’s assurances that the apartment wasn’t far, the walk was arduous even without carrying two inanimate human bodies between them. Gabriel held Lucifer like something breakable and explosive – the tips of his fingers curling where they touched his limbs. Raphael’s own hands were tight against Michael. He was frighteningly easy to carry. His blue lips hung loose, steaming out sighs that froze in the city air. There must have been people around, but she could only focus on the weight in her arms and Gabriel’s shivering form. Occasionally he would brush her elbow, gently guiding her to Father knew where.
Father-knew-where turned out to be up a small metal staircase, in a brick-layered building that looked three weeks away from tumbling down. Two overhead lights buzzed to life above them – one of them died on their struggling way up. With a click of jingling keys Gabriel had shoulder-pushed the door open and wrestled his body inside. Lucifer’s arm dislodged from where it had nestled across its chest and swung down, bumping against his brother’s legs. She had stood in the entrance, carrying that strangely fragile burden; had watched her younger brother deposit Lucifer on an emerald velvet couch. His fingers lingered a second – seemed to stray towards the pockmarks on his neck.
Then he stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and heaved a heavy, unending sigh, a weary breath of air that settled in every corner of the room. His eyes closed.
She doesn’t know how much time passed; her standing frozen on the threshold, like a spirit. Untethered. Gabriel just breathing, the centrepiece in his eclectic collection of furniture.
“Home sweet home,” he said.
Raphael bit her lip. Hard.
Her grip on Michael tightened.
Gabriel’s gaze fell back on him, and he sighed again. “Better put him somewhere else for now. I’m not dealing with either of them ‘til I’ve had two cups of cocoa in me.”
Confined to Gabriel’s bedroom, Michael’s breaths are inaudible from her seat in the kitchen. She can’t hear him live, can’t be sure he still exists, that he’s not inside a Cage, trapped inside a hungry void. The only source of reassurance is Lucifer’s form on the couch, barely visible from her seat at the kitchen table. If he is here, then so is Michael. His chest rises, and Raphael imagines iridescent wings folded tight around his form. He isn’t relaxed, the way Michael was in her arms, limp and unresponsive; his muscles tense with each breath in, his shoulders hunched under the woollen blanket Gabriel had thrown over him. Sometimes noise escapes his throat, small and tight and smothered out by sleep.
Gabriel catches her glance. His lips purse, and he rests his head on his right hand, watching the couch with a careful melancholy. “D’you think he’ll wake up any time soon?” he asks, and she shakes her head. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think she’s ever known anything.
“How’re you holding up?” he says.
She doesn’t respond. The dog – Fen, Gabriel has called it – trails over to its master’s side, evidently tired of Raphael’s lack of response. Her brother absently scratches behind its ears, and it lets out a contented sigh.
“All this time.” Her voice comes out unbidden – she hadn’t meant to talk. It worries her, how impulsive this body feels.
Still, she continues, staring at the soup. “All this time. You’ve been here?”
“Well,” Gabriel says, “Mesopotamia, for a while. Then Rome. And then I hung out in Norway for a few centuries.”
Fen has started to lick Gabriel’s fingers – Raphael’s lip curls, but her brother doesn’t seem to mind.
“Became a god for a bit. Hung out with the pagans. Got in trouble. Been doing my own thing ever since.” He glanced at the sleeping body. “Until these two bozos crashed the party.”
Raphael stiffened. “And then what? You threw yourself at Lucifer’s mercy?”
“I prefer: heroically threw a wrench in everyone’s plans, and saved the day while looking extremely dashing in the process.”
Her fingers itch for lightning. Instead, they curl into fists that don’t even crack the porcelain bowl.
Why hadn’t he called? Why hide away for millennia, washed away with lesser gods?
Does she matter so little to anyone in her family, that they would rather go anywhere than stay in Heaven?
Gabriel is watching her, his eyebrows raised ever so slightly. Like he’s expecting – something. A laugh, perhaps, or a smite.
But she shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, and her fingers stop shaking. “None of it matters.”
Gabriel looks away. “Right,” he answers, swallowing. It looks familiar, she thinks. The way his shoulders hunch. Keeping the peace.
They sit, heavy silence wrapped tight around them as the last of the day seeps into golden-red light.
Lucifer shifts under the sheets.
Both their heads snap to him, and Raphael is up before she even notices. Her soup rests on the table, untouched and forgotten. Gabriel’s fingers curl around Fen’s neck.
Lucifer’s awakening is quiet; all soft groans and fluttering lids. It saps all noise from the room – even their ever-present breaths seem to stop, merged with the silence of their brother’s journey back to the surface of his thoughts. It’s slow, and agonising, until it isn’t.
Blue eyes shoot wide open, and suddenly the blanket writhes over panicking limbs as Lucifer yells out an aborted cry. Scrambling upright, he blinks furiously, shaking out the subdued light of Gabriel’s abstractly-shaped lamp.
Raphael has tried, while Lucifer was asleep, to make sense of her brother. She has tried to picture his grace – or whatever was left of it – nestled inside this scarred body. She has tried to imagine her brother’s pristine immensity huddled inside a human, and has always fallen short. Even with Samuel, she had struggled. Perhaps it was because she had never been inside a true vessel; never had the luxury of a container fitted entirely for her. Or perhaps her memory of her brother had been… corrupted, in some way, after all these centuries. Perhaps she had started to imagine him larger somehow.
Nevertheless, it is only when she sees those eyes – pale, stormy, anguished and trapped – that the Lightbringer truly dawns on her.
“Lucifer,” she breathes.
His gaze snaps to her. It doesn’t stay there long. It darts around like a panicking bird, knocking against walls and getting stuck at the corners. His knuckles are white where they grip the edge of the cushions.
“Where,” he chokes, then stops. “What –”
“Brother,” she tries again, and tries to move closer, but then Lucifer rears so quickly his back hits the couch with a loud thump.
She stills. Waits.
Lucifer’s breathing does not slow as he eyes her up and down.
“Raphael?” he says finally, small and disbelieving, with a crease between his eyebrows.
Raphael stays exactly the way she is – in view and predictable. Or, as predictable as she could be to one she hasn’t seen in millennia.
Once, long before anything else, the archangels had raised each other like this – one by one, in the exact opposite order. Welcoming each other into the world. Filling each other with their love.
Lucifer’s breath is not slowing. He extends a hand, and she debates inching closer so he can touch her. But then it stills; he frowns, twitching his fingers, watching his scarred knuckles in terrified awe. Raphael can feel strong, painful thuds inside her chest.
His eyes shift back to Raphael; they stay there, drinking her presence.
“Is this real?” he asks in a voice Raphael has missed as much as her own Father. His bare feet dig in the carpet – they, too, bear red burn marks. Mortal, imperfect skin branded by the Devil’s holiness.
Raphael doesn’t quite know how to answer. She is an angel; she has never known what it is to dream, or to doubt the veracity of incomplete senses. She doesn’t even know why Lucifer trusts her with this knowledge, when she isn’t even convinced her own essence yet lives.
She tries anyway, like she has been doing for millennia – pretending to be tethered, when she’s the most adrift of all of them. Persevering. She nods, small and quiet.
Lucifer’s lips tremble. His fists clench even tighter, fingernails almost cutting through the fragile fabric underneath.
“What is this,” he says, a storm underneath his voice that makes Raphael think of the other archangel currently slumbering in the room down the corridor.
“Brother,” Raphael answers, because Gabriel is being disturbingly quiet. “What do you remember?”
Lucifer frowns. His shoulders hunch, and his jaws clench so much she can see the tight muscles under his gaunt skin. “Falling. Again. It was dark, loud, and Michae-”
His eyes go wide. “Michael,” he says in horror. He scrambles to his feet, wobbles there for a beat like a fawn learning to stabilize. Then he turns to Raphael.
“Where is Michael?” he asks in a low voice.
Raphael is so tired of being the bearer of answers.
“Michael is fine, brother,” she says anyway, which is a lie. None of them are remotely close to alright; she cannot sense any of their lights.
Her eyes land on Gabriel, who frantically gestures at her to abort the next words out of her throat.
Tough. “Lucifer, Michael is fine. And… so are all of us.”
Lucifer picks up on the emphasis; follows her line of sight with a slow, sweeping turn.
Gabriel recovers from the world’s most dramatic wince, and waves a casual hand in his brother’s direction.
“Try not to kill me this time,” he says. Carefully, disturbingly light. “I’ve lost count of my nine lives.”
Lucifer’s eyes widen, his fingers twitching at his sides for something that isn’t there. His jaw shakes with tension. Gabriel watches him – she isn’t sure if he looks like a predator or a prey. Raphael doesn’t know who to protect, should they come for each other’s throats.
“What,” says Lucifer finally, cold with grief and rage, “happened to me.”
Gabriel crosses his arms. “You took a nice nap. Raphael and I had to haul your snoozing behinds halfway through the city before you ended up missing three fingers and two toes. So, you’re welcome.”
Lucifer looks back to Raphael, pleading for straight answers again.
She shakes her head. “You slept longer than we did. Gabriel and I, we woke up… We were…” Weak. Disgusting. Unclean. Physical. “Diminished, somehow. Gabriel guided me to this place. It’s his…”
And she glances at Gabriel.
“Safe house,” her brother provides with forced neutrality. “I used it while I was away – warded to hell and back. Pun only slightly intended.”
“We don’t know who did this,” says Raphael, ignoring the way Lucifer’s shoulders tensed. “Not many creatures have this kind of power, and we don’t have the means to contact any of them. We can stay here until we figure out what to – ”
“No,” Lucifer cuts out abruptly.
Raphael stops.
Gabriel gives him an affronted look. “Excuse me, no?”
“No, I’m not staying here. You’re not real,” he adds quietly. Dangerously. “None of you are.”
“Lucifer,” says Raphael.
Her older brother is shaking – the cold of the outside still gnaws at his blue-tinged fingertips, spiked with the sting of fear. “I fell in the Cage. I’m not – this isn’t real. I’m not – I’m in the Cage again.”
“Oh, come on,” mutters Gabriel.
Raphael takes a step forward and raises a hand towards him.
But Lucifer jerks back. When he speaks, his voice is like a snowstorm, dark, menacing.
“Let me go.”
Hurt she refuses to acknowledge pools at her stomach. “You’re not a prisoner, brother,” she placates. Slow. Careful.
“Let me go,” Lucifer repeats.
Crouched between Gabriel’s legs, the dog behind them growls.
There is nothing she recognises within the strange, unseeing creature before her, all frayed edges and dripping with fear. Primal emotions she didn’t even know angels could feel barrel through his face like passing trains. He looks at her like a stranger, with no acknowledgment of who they once were. It infects her with his terror. With searing bitterness, she realises Gabriel is not the only one who has changed beyond recognition from their time apart.
“Lucifer, you idiot, just listen before – ” says Gabriel in frustration, before he stops, head jerking sideways as a muffled thump comes from the short passageway to the bedroom.
Silence falls as Michael stumbles through the doorframe.
He looks haggard, vessel thin, drowning inside the folds of his own shirt. His eyes are dazed and muted, and he white-knuckles the walls like an infant, unaware of its own weight.
“Oh, perfect timing,” grumbles Gabriel.
Michael doesn’t react. He blinks at the overhead light; sweeping over the room without ever settling. Until, like a lightning bolt on a mountain pine, his eyes land on –
“Lucifer.”
It’s a short and holy breath, one that settles heavily in the space between them all. The dog stops growling, head swivelling between the two angels, unsure of which one to threaten.
A crash – Lucifer has backed up all the way to the front door and knocked over the plastic lamp; his shoulders quiver erratically; his hands grope blindly behind him, searching for the handle. Raphael’s eyes flick to Gabriel, and he returns her gaze with a helpless shake of the head. They had stopped existing. There had always been a tunnel between her two older brothers – a black hole that captured and erased everything else in their orbit.
Not you, she thinks he mouths.
“Lucifer,” Michael repeats. His brows frown, projecting dangerous shadows over his clear features. “Brother, what did you do?”
And Lucifer flees.
In the half second it takes Raphael to blink those new eyes of hers, her brother has thrown the door open and rushed into the outside corridor – a gust of freezing air hits her cheeks, prickling at her barely-healing nerves.
“Oh for Dad’s sake,” comes Gabriel’s voice from behind, “we just split our backs carrying you in!”
The event processes inside Raphael’s weak neurones: that her brother, Lightbringer, second half and catalyst of the Apocalypse, has run away, tail between his legs. Has chosen cold, humiliating death over his family once again.
Michael stumbles past her, wobbling, frantic, ready to chase him down.
Her hand shoots out before she even comprehends it. It grips Michael’s shoulder hard enough for her to feel the muscles underneath, the spot where they connect to bone.
“Let me,” she says, a plea so calm it almost comes out an order.
Michael looks back at her. Thousands of years of togetherness swirl between them now; an eternity of broken management and repressed exhaustion. Of incomprehensible grief that neither of them had ever shared. He hesitates.
She has never, ever asked anything of Michael. Has always stayed by his side, faithfully, like her Father asked her to before He died. Now, in the cramped-up space between mortal concrete, she asks for this one leave. And hopes it will not break her vow.
Michael’s eyes search hers. Only Raphael would recognise his gaze – frantic, lost, latching on to whoever might know more than he. He has always searched for someone else to shoulder responsibility. Has always found others unworthy to bear it. When he looked upon Raphael, she sometimes knew he was looking for traces of their Father.
But he had always, always trusted her.
He nods, once. Then he stills, deathly so, like he’s afraid the slightest move might change his mind.
“Go,” he says. Come back, he doesn’t say.
Raphael allows herself exactly one look back, as she crosses the threshold. Michael’s eyes are glued on her, blinking furiously like they just became aware they had to. Behind him, muted, sits Gabriel, face twisted with a flurry of emotions Raphael cannot read. His fingers are twisted in Fen’s fur, so tight it must hurt. But the dog says nothing, just watches her with big, round eyes and allows its master to abuse its skin.
Raphael closes the door on her two brothers, and hopes they won’t have killed each other by the time she finds the third.
The cold finds her instantly. Her fingers seem to numb much faster than they had when she’d first awoken – as if they’d gotten used to their weakness, as if they’d stopped fighting it. She hadn’t even thought to find a human coat before she left the apartment. Would Gabriel even own one?
Carefully, hesitatingly, she brings her hand together and breathes on them, like she saw her brother do. The fleeting burst of warmth only seems to taunt her.
The building’s exit gives way directly to the street. Night has fallen, unforgiving – the snow tinges blue from the lampposts. It mutes the lone cars that still roam the streets, wipers locked in endless battle against the falling flakes. A few apartments still have their lights on, their strange, unimportant human lives poorly hidden behind a curtain.
Lucifer’s footprints have already started to fill with new snow, and Raphael has to adapt her already-brisk walk to keep up. Her nose is stinging, and something liquid is starting to drip down from it, and she has to stop thinking about it otherwise she will go mad with revulsion. She follows the prints down the pavement, adding her own marks beside her brother’s on the freshly-fallen substance. It crunches under the leather shoes.
Suddenly the footsteps swerve right, down a narrow, barely-lit alleyway that vaguely smells of refuse. Raphael has to squint to make out her surroundings, which don’t add up to much: filthy brick walls, crumbling gutters, a smear of paint sprayed on by local youths, lone cigarette butts peeking out from under the snow and tinging it soot-black.
And there, huddled into himself, back pressed against a dumpster, sits the Morningstar.
He has wrapped his arms around his legs, desperately hanging on to his body. She cannot make out his face, buried as it is in the nook between his knees. He’s shaking all over, and his muscles tense with each new snowflake that appears on his blueish skin. She wonders if they hurt when they land on the burn scars. He makes no noise; if his shaky breaths weren’t violently wracking his shoulders, Raphael would not have noticed them. As it is, she doesn’t need to know much about human anatomy to conclude they are much too rapid, and much too shallow.
She moves up to him – he twitches when he hears the crunch of her steps, but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge her presence. With all the carefulness her shivering body can offer, she slides down against the side of the dumpster and lands in a crouch next to Lucifer. Frozen water instantly seeps into fabric, and she winces as her thighs come into contact with the snow.
Lucifer finally rears his head up, but he doesn’t look at her. He fixes his sight on the wall in front, searches it with an empty gaze.
They stay silent for a bit, allowing the cold to damage their bodies. Eventually, Raphael shifts her knee, and presses it gently against Lucifer’s. The contact feels electric to her, like her wings. How she misses her wings.
Lucifer stills, just for a moment, before he resumes his shivering. But the breathing has changed – more grounded, perhaps, no longer lost in his own memories. Strange, terrifying, how something as trivial as a touch can influence the mortal minds. Even more worrying, that they have been reduced to touch to cement each other’s presence. They cannot reach each other in any other way that the collision of atoms.
“This wasn’t me,” says Lucifer. It comes out as a croak, lungs abused by misuse and the inhospitable air. “Raphael, believe me, I didn’t do anything. I don’t know what –”
His breath dies, and his arms tighten around his legs.
Raphael breathes; rests her head against the plastic behind her. “I know,” she says. Well, she doesn’t. She has no idea who caused their fall.
But she thinks she recognises the slump in her brother’s shoulders, and the thousand-light-year stare, and the monotone edge to his voice. She knows the weight of mourning, even wrapped in the fleshy appendages her brother now wears.
“I tried to get you out,” she says quietly, when the silence is thick and claws under their skin. “When you fell the second time, I tried to get you out.”
Lucifer stills, and finally looks at her. His vessel’s eyes are sharp, reflect the icicles that hang from the gutters.
She measures each of her words carefully, the way she would with Michael. Weighing their sincerity, conscious of their intimacy. It doesn’t make it easier to get them out.
“I tried everything,” she continues. “I made so many sacrifices. I led Heaven against itself.”
It was, ultimately, her own fault that Castiel’s corruption had spread this far. The filaments had been scattered in Michael’s time, easily purged. She had let the rot take root, transform into the mycelium that led to her family’s implosion. There could be no forgiveness for her negligence. Not that there had been anyone left to forgive her.
“I wanted peace,” she says finally.
I wanted us. I failed. I wanted rest.
In the corner of her eye, she sees a tear trail down Lucifer’s abused cheek. “It was supposed to be over,” he breathes. “It was supposed to be over. It was supposed to end.”
Raphael bows her head, heavy with grief.
“Why won’t it end?” asks Lucifer. Jaw tense with cold and desperation, searching her with these new eyes.
Raphael is tired of answers.
She brings her right hand out from between her knees. It travels, like a slow comet, past the space between their bodies, before landing feather-light on Lucifer’s own hand. It’s freezing, even more than Raphael’s. Lucifer inhales sharply, eyes locked on her movements. Her slender fingers curl around his; heat transfers, for just a moment. Raphael can feel her brother’s heartbeat, that disgusting, unnatural pulse so disconnected with their true self – and cannot help but feel relief, that he is here for her to feel.
She knows there is anger in her towards Lucifer, somewhere. She certainly remembers a time where there had been. But it is cold, and it is dark, and she is so very tired.
Slowly, Lucifer rotates the hand underneath hers, and wraps his own coarse fingers around her palm.
“Raphael,” he says. The name holds pain and anger and untold grief, but mainly it washes through Raphael like wine, warming her from the chest outward. She doesn’t remember the last time he has called her name this way.
“I’ve missed you, brother,” she replies.
The snow is gentle, enveloping the street in its damp cocoon. She squeezes their intertwined hands, a lifeline in a storm.