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So that was it.
This was the end? How ironic.
If you were one for nitpicking and reading instruction manuals, then you could argue that this was technically exactly as it was supposed to be.
After all, only very little was known about the end. Michael would fight the final battle.
Sure.
She would rise again, as the daughter of Good, she was.
She, with her total devotion, would once again become the tool of the Almighty.
She would finish what had begun eons ago.
And then there would be peace.
In the end, God would rule again.
Everything would be over, it all would fall into place.
So…She was doing the right thing.
The only right thing.
She was following the Plan, the Original Plan.
Now what had begun millennia ago would finally end. It had to be over at last.
She had worked so hard. It was her one and only purpose.
Her holy duty.
Michael was done waiting, just for some stupid, incompetent angel to take this away from her.
The flames blazed higher. With every sheet of paper thrown to them as feed, they rose more greedily.
Spark by spark, the great nothingness spread. More and more ash gathered before her eyes.
She just had to finish this damn thing.
There went Canada. And New Zealand. What the hell was Luxembourg?
YOU killed us. You killed us. You killed us.
You will still remember us, Michael.
There is certainly a harmless explanation.
Michael, this is your little sister, Uriel. Take good care of her.
“Be QUIET! ALL OF YOU!” Micheal knew it was useless, shouting at the dark.
You will remember us.
“You’re not real, none of you are. You’re just in my head.”
Michael knew she was talking to herself.
Tears were running down her cheeks.
And although she surrendered page after page to the flames, it seemed that she herself was the one burning.
You killed us.
It was not Uriel. Suddenly she was back.
Over six thousand years had passed and still… There was no getting away from it.
There was no forgiveness, no rest, not for her. She killed them.
Then, in the first battle, she killed for God.
She stripped angels of what made them celestial beings.
She damned them to a life of horror. Michael tried to breathe.
Suck the air deep into her lungs.
It was the right thing to do. It was God’s Ineffable Plan.
She gasped for air, her fingernails digging deep into her thighs.
Nobody had told her about the panic attacks before the fight.
That the screams of the fallen would follow her in every moment. She tore another page from the book.
Who needed bubblegum anyway?
The flames ate the paper in seconds. All that was left were crumbs of dust. It was strangely soothing, watching the flames burn high.
Michael was about to rip the next page out when her eyes caught the name on it.
Dagon.
Her fingers brushed gently over the little portrait on the page like an old reflex.
Rip it out.
Are we nothing to you?
Did we die for nothing?
There were hundreds of faces burned into her head. Hundreds of names wiped out.
Just for some superiors to change their minds?
It couldn’t all have been for nothing.
Something, no, somebody grabbed her arm.
“Michael, stop!”
God’s creation consisted of roughly 8.7 million species of meaningless little creatures.
8.7 million species that, throughout their pitiful existence, possessed no higher purpose.
Hundreds of thousands of genera that blasphemously spent their miserable little lives on this utterly overcrowded planet as slaves to their instincts.
A trillion individuals who, in complete ignorance of Heaven and Hell, ruined every single one of God’s gifts through their own incompetence.
And of all those despicable lifeforms on this ridiculous blue planet, it had to be the pathetically naïve Principal- the Supreme Archangel Aziraphale and the Deamon Crowley.
She recognized them by their scent before her eyes could even leave the flames.
“Get out! There’s nothing you can do. The Ineffable Plan is going to happen.”
“How do you know this is the Ineffable Plan?”, Crowley asked.
“Because it has always been the plan before you two came around and decided to mingle!” Michael’s voice was icy.
Her eyes cold, her gaze frantic, her cheeks streaked with tears.
“Why, Michael? What would be so terrible about happiness… about a happy ending for everyone?” Aziraphale could not understand it. Could not comprehend what was happening here.
“I am the only one who can carry out the Original Plan,” Michael said tonelessly.
With a sharp movement, she tore herself free from Crowley’s grip.
Mercilessly, she continued ripping apart the Book of Life.
With every page she managed to seize, reality lost another fragment of its color.
There was no happy ending for her but this.
“That’s enough!” Crowley lunged for the book.
There was a brief struggle before Michael managed to seize Crowley by the throat.
Her fingers dug mercilessly into the pale, yielding flesh of Crowley’s throat.
“Michael, please!” Aziraphale was clearly desperate,“Is everyone being happy really such a terrible fate?”
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” was the only cryptic answer Michael was willing to give as she drove her hands tighter around Crowley’s neck.
The demon clearly struggled against her grip, trying desperately to gasp for air.
It was only when Crowley’s eyes turned red that she stopped. At the very last moment, she let go of him.
Almost immediately Aziraphale dropped beside his boyfriend, awkwardly trying to find his pulse.
It was only after Crowley assured him multiple times that he was alright that Aziraphale finally let go of him.
The Book of Life… shit.
Both Crowley and Aziraphale snapped around, nearly expecting to see Michael finishing the book off.
Instead, they were greeted by a hyperventilating angel clearly on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Her eyes were wide and unfocused, staring at the flames, following something that only she seemed able to see.
She pulled her legs closer, trying desperately to steady herself.
Her hands were slightly shaking as she looked at them in horror.
Michael was murmuring something that Aziraphale couldn’t really make sense of.
He was only able to make out a few bits of what Michael was repeating again and again.
Mother… what?… why me?… We attack from the south… I-I can’t… the Great Plan must work… what have I done? I let her go, it was my fault. I promise to be better… I should have saved them.
The Plan must work… Suddenly the brunette moved.
She tried to grab the book again, throwing it once and for all into the flames.
But Crowley was faster.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Michael.”
The demon snapped the book from Michael’s hands, bringing it out of her reach.
“No, please…” Michael cried out. “I must… I have to make the Original Plan work. I am the only angel that can do it.”
“You know what? Fuck the Great Plan! Fuck God!” Crowley sneered at her.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Supreme Commander sobbed in panic. “You just don’t understand.”
Tears were once again trickling down her face, her left eye twitching slightly as she sobbed uncontrollably, repeating again and again: “You don’t understand.”
Aziraphale was taken by surprise. He looked helplessly at his boyfriend.
Crowley didn’t seem to have much sympathy for the seemingly fallen angel.
He just crossed his arms and shrugged, as if to say I have fucking no idea what’s going on.
Aziraphale supposed that, considering she had tried to strangle him not a minute ago, it was a reasonable reaction.
“I killed them,” Michael whined.
Aziraphale looked sympathetically at the broken angel.
It was a strange scene. Seeing God’s fearless warrior, the slayer of demons, breaking down and striking her head against a pillar.
Michael dragged her fingernails under her skin, drawing blood from her arms.
“Who did you kill?” Crowley finally asked, just to stop the archangel from crashing her head against the hard stone.
Michael looked at him in shock.
Then she murmured like a little girl, “I killed them all,” as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“I don’t think I understand,” Aziraphale began carefully. “Do you mean Sandalphon?”
Michael flinched, but then shook her head. “No,” she whined.
“Darling? Are you even listening?” Two piercing blue eyes looked up at her, glistening as though they were oceans themselves.
It had been so long since she had seen those eyes looking at her with so much love.
So long since she had lain in her lover’s arms. So much time had passed since she had brushed one of her red strands out of her face.
So long since she had something for herself.
Michael shook her head hysterically. It was all in her head.
None of this was real.
“Michael? Michael?”, the archangle snapped back into reality, as Aziraphale touched her shoulder carefully.
Just to fall back in her head, too caught up in her old memories.
“Catch me if you can!”
A little cherub giggled at her as he tapped her on the shoulder, only to fly away again.
Never going far, always making sure Michael was following him.
“You’re too fast, Rafael!” Michael laughed, slightly out of breath.
“Be careful!” Gabriel shouted at them from above.
Of course, None of them listened. They only laughed.
You killed us.
Michael couldn’t bear their accusing faces.
She grabbed Aziraphale by the collar, suddenly possessed by enormous strength.
“Please, it has to stop.”
In all the eons Crowley and Aziraphale had lived, they had never once heard the mighty Archangle Michael say “please.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Aziraphale looked helplessly at her, truly troubled by the other angel’s devastation.
“If we don’t continue the Original Plan, then… then it was all for nothing,” Michael whispered the last part.
Crowley understood faster than his angel.
He had seen this kind of self-destruction before. It was the same pain he felt when falling.
Michael needed the Original Plan to be true because otherwise all the violence, all the sacrifice, all the atrocities she committed would become meaningless.
“You mean the first battle?” the demon carefully asked.
Michael nodded, tears filling her eyes.
“I killed so many of them. I cast them out.
I did my duty. I served God.
I defeated my twin. I chased my big brother away.
I gave her up.
What if it was all for nothing?”, Michael looked up at them.
For the first time in her existence, she truly didn’t know what to do.
She didn’t know what to believe in anymore.
She could still taste the dust of the first battle on her tongue.
Still hear the screams of the falling angels
Hear her scream.
See Gabriel drive his divine sword through her beautiful wings
Feel the shared pain as he cut them off.
Eons of doing the right thing weighed upon Michael’s shoulders, threatening to crush her.
And suddenly she no longer knew what the right thing was.
She just knew that it was pain.
Michael knew it didn’t matter how much she tried to be perfect, to please God, she would never make up for all the lives she destroyed that day.
God knew she had tried.
She had thought that if she followed the Great Plan precisely, the very plan that had begun on that day, everything would be alright in the end.
She supposed that was where she had been wrong all along.
There was no forgiveness for her.
“Who did you give up?” Crowley asked carefully.
For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the flames.
Then Michael murmured, a strange softness entering her voice.
“Dagon.”
“I would forgive you everything, my love.”
Three heads turned around and there she was.
Dagon, Master of Torture, in all her demonic glory, leaning against a pillar half hidden in the dark.