Chapter Text
It would be extremely unfair to say that Gabriel has hit the rock bottom. First of all, it wasn’t rock, it was muddy flesh. And secondly, he has yet to touch it; the tip of his feet are dangling some two three inches above it.
He struggles again, which rewards him with another sound of tearing, yet another shot of agony through his left wing, and a brief contact between his toes and the unsolid ground.
The wings finally, mercifully, give out. Now Gabriel has hit the bottom, after some twenty minutes left in suspension. He lands in a heap of blood, feathers, pained howling and screamed curses. He allows himself this display of weakness only because he knows nobody is watching. Nobody, not even Hell.
At the very bottom of Hell lies the circle of Treachery. And at the very bottom of the already inhospitable treachery lies a pit. It is about ninety feet in diameter, its walls are a cold, rough rock, and as it gets deeper, there are strong sharp spines protruding from the walls, craning themselves up like desperate hands reaching for a hope of light. Until fairly recently, Gabriel has presumed the pit is bottomless.
Into this pit Hell throws whatever it has lost interest in. Sinners too broken to comprehend eternal torture. Failed demons. Machine carcasses. Gabriel.
So, no. Hell was not looking. The almighty archangel was free to remain curled up in a ball and feel sorry for himself, safe in the knowledge that no one but he was the witness of it. Although both of his wings have just been torn to shreds – his reaction is entirely understandable. Not that there is anybody to understand him.
To be entirely honest, Gabriel has hoped for a warrior’s death. A clean kill, if possible. Probably an extremely messy adrenaline trip involving being shot at with nails, rockets, coins, cannonballs, you get the idea. The point is the irritating enlightening machine has bested Gabriel twice, he thought it would finish the job the third time.
He thought that it was going to be it when that fucking coin got him in the head – he saw a lot of stars and then a whole lot of nothing. But when he came to, he was falling, too fast to manage a flight, then he hit a side of one of the spikes and– Well his inglorious descent was halted when his wings got speared.
Alright, he can probably focus on breathing now. Sit up, slowly. Dematerialize his shredded, useless wings and halo. The halo, turns out, has also taken considerable damage on the way down.
For most angels, none of this would be an issue. Denizens of Heaven are blessed with great regenerative abilities, wings and halo especially so as they are the most frequently damaged.
Gabriel is not most angels. Specifically, he no longer has any blessings, no holy fire, and he is surviving on a dwindling speck of divinity, a spark that is going to die out in a–
He knows he doesn’t have long. The timer is in the back of his mind, measuring out how many nanoseconds he has left to live.
Fine, he has failed to die in a way that would be meaningful or pleasant. Right now he has an amazing opportunity to die unobserved in a shitty hole full of semi-liquid flesh, surrounded by desiccated husks and scrap.
He’s going to pass on that.
Which means he has to get out of the hole.
With his wings out of commission…
Gabriel turns his face up, towards the spikes, in hope to sense the opening somewhere far above him. No such luck; beyond the spikes there is merely dim darkness.
This is going to be a very, very long climb.