Category: Darksiders I & II
Rating: T
Couples: Vapula/Azazel
Warnings: AU, Set in Angel of War- Universe
Chapter: One-Shot
Copyright: Characters & places © By Appropriate Copyright-holder, Plot & OC´s © by me
Author's Note: Gonna post snippets of things I'd like you peeps to know, but which would explode the original story. Feel free to request things! (keep in Universe though)
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He had always been called 'the Mad Smith', even back in Heaven. It would be what finally drove those in charge to cast him from the City and the Legion itself. He had found his fascination for science and being a smith when he was still young.
At age fifteen, he had managed to receive an apprenticeship in the massive smithies that supplied Heaven of the many metal objects it required, be it armor, weaponry or decoration. At the end of the first year the smith in charge of his study declared him to be 'exceptionally talented, with astonishing focus' and allowed the youngster to work for as long as he liked. By the end of the second, the 'astonishing focus' had turned concerning. If not stopped, the teenager would not leave the smithy until the current project had been finished to perfection. With his still somewhat crude skill, and high expectations, that meant projects could well last weeks until he was satisfied.
The smithy-master felt unsure as to how to approach this problem: either he let the still talented youth do as he wished and risk him keeling over in exhaustion or he forced the boy to pace himself and quite obviously hold him back from his full potential…
The problem was solved in quite the unconventional way: the smithy-master had a daughter, a decade older than the young apprentice. She too had this insatiable need for ever greater projects to ever higher standards, but she lacked much of the talent that was needed for them.
Once, her father had asked her to retrieve something from the smithy for him. Hours later, he found her and the apprentice in a deep discussion about the merits of a particular form for a particular component for one of the boy's projects.
More importantly: the boy himself suggested continuing their talk over dinner, her father's request quite forgotten by the girl. It had been love on first sight for the both of them, gladly allowed by the smiths as the youngster now willingly paced himself to spend time with the girl.
Teaming up, they forged things they'd have been unable to on their own. Some of the wonders of angelic engineering came from them, rather than the master smiths they were apprenticed to.
But something changed over time. Whether it were the fumes of the smithy affecting him after he had spend days on end in there with no break, or whether it was something else, no one could quite tell… Regardless, the boy's focus shifted from forging weapons to forging parts. At first, it was still innocuous: simply a mechanical wing or other limb for a crippled warrior to improved replacement limbs for greater efficiency. But then at one point, he no longer was content with the occasional cripple coming his way. He wanted to improve all angels, cripple or not.
When the smith-master one day saw his daughter in the smithy, blood-covered and one of her very healthy wings replaced with a 'mechanical monstrosity' as he called it, the true troubles began.
Unwilling to swear he'd stop these practices, the young apprentice, by now a full-fledged smith, was deemed too dangerous by the White City Assembly. At the furious insistence of the girl's father - since the healers proved unable to restore her wing - he was declared unfit to set foot in the City and cast from it.
For a time, he might truly have gone mad after that. Despite everything, he loved the girl dearly and with all his heart. But as no one would believe him that she had consented to being his test-subject, he had not even been allowed to see her one last time.
He had lost all sense of time when one of his sprees of madness-induced rage was stopped by her in front of him. One of her wings was still pearly white, but the other a prosthetic forged by her father. She too loved him with all her heart and had willingly abandoned the white spires of the Heaven to stay at his side.
A couple months later, they came upon Caim's company. The girl's father had actually hired the Fallen to search for his child. She refused to return to the White City, pleading with the long-winged Fallen to not force her to abandon her lover.
Caim had send word to her father shortly afterward that he had only been able to find the girl's corpse. He presumed that demons had found her before she had found her lover and thus, safety. The young couple, he offered a place in his company, which they gladly took.
So grateful was the smith, that the Commander had gained the ability to do something that before that only the female had been able to do: exercise complete control. Even if he complained regularly about how hampered he was by his closed-minded elder.