Authors Note | This idea has been in my head for a while, and I wanted to see how it looked down on paper.
Or virtual paper.
Summary | (AU) When Massie Block dies, the charge to the guardian angel by the name of Derrick blindly saves her from the realm of the dead, she attains the ability to see through the glamour protecting guardian angels and demons from being seen, threatening her life from both the demons around her and the fatal attraction to her golden-eyed charge.
Disclaimer | I do not own the clique.
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Derrick was an angel, but he sure as hell wasn't perfect.
His gold eyes flickered over as his charge crawled into her amber bedspread, clad in only an oversized green T-shirt that ran down to her thighs and a pair of black boyshorts. It was hot that night so the brunette girl only pulled the thin sheets over her, too hot to push the covers up her lithe body further than her tanned stomach.
He knew that she had always been afraid of the dark. He remembered when the beautiful girl was young, asking her parents to check her closets for monsters. He knew her fear for monsters had dimmed after she had watched Monsters Inc, a movie she would never admit presently that she still loved.
Like any eighteen-year-old girl would be, she was concerned always for what people would think or say about her, whether or not anyone liked her, or how to fit in. He had lived through dozens of charges, and every one of the humans he had guarded has the same need to be admired by the people around them.
Humans were afraid of rejection, something Derrick could never understand.
He had watched the amber eyed Massabielle change her name to Massie because she was teased so much, seen her pretend to hate to read because people mocked for it so much, heard her sob into her pillow when a Landon Crane had broken up with her because he love done of her friends. He had remembered wanting to remove his glamour and reveal the realm of the guardians just so he could punch the bastard who had broken Massie's delicate heart.
Then again, Massie had always made him more reckless.
He had always wanted to hit or burn any man he had seen who would ever make Massie smile or laugh, any man who would lay a hand on the beautiful amber-eyed girl, or any man she would look at who wouldn't look back at her.
He had never, and would never be able to touch her.
He had never made her laugh or made her smile.
He stood nimbly, moving with a soundless grace that only an angel could achieve. His golden hair fell in his eyes as he moved, shaking away the hair that blocked his vision from her.
The night was pitch black, but he could see through the pure-gold aura that radiated around him. The glamour placed on him made him invisible to her, something he was grateful for. The band of golden light around him would wake her up; Massie needed her sleep.
She had fallen asleep by now, her restless state of sleep causing her blankets to swarm tightly around her long, tanned legs. He knew that she would wake if her sheets were too tight around her and gently tugged the sheets, untangling them with nimble fingers and pulling the thinner sheet back over her waist. His knuckles brushed against her flat stomach with the gesture, the shirt pushed up from her tossing, turning, and kicking.
He didn't feel it.
This was the work of the heavy glamour on him. Even if his skin was to come into contact with hers under this glamour, he wouldn't feel it. It had less of a sensation than touching a wall—there was a layer of glamour between them that kept him from feeling her skin, the same with touching skin with any one of his past charges.
Massie was different from any of his previous charges.
He had had a dozen different charges, living for nearly a thousand years now either guiding them away from trouble, leading them to safety, or simply protecting them.
He had never fallen in love with one of his charges.
He had never pictured himself falling for anyone, in actuality. While it was common for his race to fall in love, it was less than normal for a guardian to fall in love. They were always moving without their own agenda—they didn't have a choice where they would be able to go, or what they would be able to do.
The only way a guardian could truly be beside someone they loved was if the other was another guardian, and they worked with a charge close to the others charge. They could only be together when their charges were together, and even then it would be for a finite amount of time.
His work was his reason for existence.
Guardians were created to protect humans, and simply that. The blood that ran in them (golden blood, as he had found out) was designed as an instrument of perfection. They were made to be strong, smart, fast, and brave.
They were designed to protect their charge.
They weren't allowed to love their charges.
Love is blind, but love is also blinding. Blind eyes can never protect a charge, and blindness is a weakness. A guardian couldn't be weak—weakness is a flaw, and guardians are simply, structurally perfect.
It was difficult to tangle love into perfection, for what you loved would be your greatest weakness.
Derrick knew he was weaker now than he ever had been simply because of the sleeping girl with eyes made of amber and hair made of silk.
He would do anything for Massie, and would go to lengths further than a guardian was allowed to keep her safe.
The later it grew, the colder it became. He saw a gentle shiver go over his charge and went to her, gently pushing the comforter and sheets over her and wrapping the edges around her shoulders in the way that she always loved. He knew she felt safer, and had sweeter dreams when the covers were tight around simply because she felt more protected than she had before.
"Good night, Massie."
She couldn't hear him.
ஜஜ
Derrick was walking glamoured five feet behind his charge as she slipped into her English class, taking her place in the middle row and turning to the boy next to her as he spoke to her. He was too far from her to hear what the two were saying, but the same spike of jealousy went through him that he felt are too often.
"Derrick."
Derrick swore in a way his race had been taught not to as the air shimmered by him, moving slightly in a display of gold dust before his apprentice materialized next to him, glamoured as heavily as Derrick was.
"Goddamnit, Cam."
"It seems like with your demon count you'd learn by now not to shit your pants whenever I'm next to you." Cameron grinned at Derrick, his blue and green eyes flickering over to Derrick's charge.
Derrick let his wings unfurl for a moment, beating the feathers lightly a single time to sit atop a tall cabinet. Cam did the same, his inexperience with the powerful wings causing his head to slam against the ceiling, cracking the ceiling where his apprentice's head hit. They were, like every guardian was, too strong for their own good, and it took centuries to learn to control the strength they needed to protect their charges.
Derrick laughed softly as the students in the room looked up, seeing only a suddenly cracked wall and looking back down at their papers.
"Control yourself, Cameron."
Cam grinned at his friend, his green and blue eyes going over Derrick.
Of every guardian he had met, Derrick was the one to look most like an angel. His friend had gold, wavy hair like a Greek and eyes a thick molten gold color, the color of his eyes matching the raw, pure aura around him, looking like bands of spun gold around the reckless boy. His skin was tanned, making his straight, white teeth stand out, giving him a charming smile. His eyebrows and eyelashes were a dark enough shade to stand out against his evenly tanned skin as well, giving him striking features all around, making him a strange sight to look at. He was beautiful in an inhuman way—he was as beautiful as an angel, in such a way that if he were to let his glamour down, the thought of an angel would be the first one to come to mind when seeing him.
Cam was different. While more attractive than any human man, he didn't stand out as an angel. With extremely light skin, black hair, pointed canine teeth, and one blue eye, the other green, he could more easily be taken for a vampire than an angel—without, of course, his aura of gold, light gold halo that circled his raven-haired head, and broad white wings, the marks of an angel.
That, and the power of sunlight each angel held, guardian or not.
Though he had usually no need to use it—he preferred hand-to-hand combat or fighting with a weapon crafted from obsidian, the only element able to kill a demon—he could control and harness sunlight, using it as a weapon to burn predators or a demon lusting after the blood of a human.
Demons rarely attacked guardians—the golden blood that ran inside an angel was lethal to demons, and even the stupidest demons would be too intelligent to attack a guardian personally. It was suicide either way, and the magic of an angel was impossible to harness.
The black-blood of a demon could only only mix with the red-blood of a human or beast made from the earth—the underworld could not feed on their own or beings of heaven, the reason which the demons had invaded the grounds of earth originally.
The same reason guardians were needed.
Derrick absently pulled out one of the obsidian blades in his pockets, looking it over to see any traces of navy or black blood left from the beast he had killed days ago attacking Massie's best friend. It wasn't his job to protect the people around his charge, but he knew how badly the death of someone close to Massie would affect her, and therefore protected the people with her when he guarded her.
The girl whose life he had saved was easy prey for a demon. She was lithe and small, bathed in an innocence that made her vulnerable to any beast from the underworld. She was extremely alike and different than his charge, yet someone he had found to balance out the amber-eyed girl perfectly.
Her name was Claire Lyons—he had liked her name, though not understand the human need for surnames. Because angels were created by crafters, they had no family, and were born the age they looked. Derrick was born nineteen, created to be a guardian, given wits, strength, and agility so that he would be hard to fight or kill like any guardian.
He didn't, however, like the green-eyed girl's name as much as his apprentice did.
Derrick chuckled softly as he saw Cameron's gaze fall on the girl with the long, soft-blonde hair at the front of the room, sharing secret looks and smiles with her best friend and Derrick's charge as the teacher droned on about the Civil War, something Derrick's charge a hundred or so years prior had fought in. His charge had died rather young in that war, leaving Derrick for half a decade without anyone to watch over, something a bit strange for him.
A paper airplane sailed through the room, hitting Cam in the chest. The glamour around the apprentice left the people watching the plane oblivious to the heavenly creature it had crashed into, seeing only the plane crashing into an invisible wall.
The glamour put on Cam caused their minds not to question it.
Derrick both lived by and hated glamour.
He knew that the guardians needed to live, but he hated the barrier he had between his world and the human world.
He hated the reason he could never touch the amber-eyed senior he had fallen in love with.
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The apprentice would seldom stay by Derrick's side.
He wasn't Claire's guard. He had no business by her, and wasn't to have an agenda to watch her—his priority was to be to stay behind Derrick for a hundred years time (ninety-five now) and observe him so that he could understand the work of a guardian angel, a process Derrick had been through, and hundreds before Derrick had gone through as well. His purpose now was to watch Derrick and follow his every command—not to follow the little blonde girl and watch over her.
Cam knew Derrick was in love with Massie, possibly the reason Derrick had never reprimanded him for watching over the green-eyed girl. Cam didn't know what yet he felt for the small blonde girl he currently watched paint a rose, but he knew it was something, something he couldn't at all shake away from him.
He wanted her safe, and he didn't trust anyone else to keep her safe.
He was different from Derrick.
Derrick had always been wild, always reckless. Cam had never felt Derrick's jealousy—for him, it was enough to simply watch Claire laugh or smile. It was enough to watch others cause her joy or happiness, and it was always enough to hear the angelic sound of her laughter that would spike whenever she heard a joke or was tickled in a certain place.
He never thought the way Derrick did simply because he didn't know if he could bear to.
Looking at Claire and knowing he would never be the person making her happy would just about kill him.
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Massie was in a room with four girls he had come to know well—or rather observe well. They were sleeping over with each other, conversations he usually wasn't fond of hearing—especially when the names of whatever boy Massie liked or admired was present on their lips. It was irrational, he knew—because of the golden blood that ran inside him he was worlds more attractive than any of Massie's crushes, yet he felt the same jealousy whenever they were mentioned.
He felt suddenly cold.
The cold chill through him didn't pass, something that he knew didn't come from the temperature—he never felt hot or cold, the only times he would ever feel hot if he was too close to sunlight, and the only times he would feel too cold was when a beast from the underworld was present.
His golden eyes snapped to the window, watching as the leaves of the oak outside the redheads window shuddered ever so slightly. The golden eyes of the guardian narrowed, and his wings spread, shooting out the window with a nimble grace only a guardian could achieve.
"What's up?"
Cam materialized beside him, his apprentice's habit of coming at the worst possible times. Derrick swore more violently than before, his incandescent golden eyes directing his friend to the window the girls were inside.
"Guard them for me."
"What? I don't see—"
"You won't until you're fully trained."
Derrick let his aura and halo dim enough so that he wouldn't be so bright, not wanting to alert the demon he was hovering ten feet over of his presence until truly necessary. Cam gave his friend a hesitant look, and Derrick brightened his eyes only slightly, the essence of the sunlight in them stunning Cam into moving, quickly beating his wings so he was inside the room, watching the girls carefully.
Dimming the sunlight from his skin as best he could, Derrick unsheathed the obsidian sword from his belt, pulling it from his pocket and going to the ground soundlessly.
The demon was uglier than it had seemed from above.
It was breathing heavily, the sound raspy and unclean as though it had the blackened lungs of a human smoker, the sound amplified. The body of the beast seemed to be twisted, with a spine and bones that jutted out of the thin, sickly layer of flesh that seemed to be rotting, disintegrating, and growing back with every rising and falling of its chest.
It hadn't noticed the guardian behind him.
Derrick rammed the obsidian blade into the thin skin of the demons back, twisting the sword once it was as deep as it could go. The hit wasn't lethal, but it wasn't made to be; it was made to be a moment of pain or torture before Derrick sent the demon back to whatever hell hole it crawled out of.
The vibrations of some echoing words came from the demons lips, a demonic language no creature of heaven or earth could understand. Derrick only laughed from the sound, a rich sound of sadistic amusement as the demon whirled around, hissing at him through the forked tongue of a snake and glaring with the beaded eyes of a spider.
Grinning, he ducked under the demons swing, sidestepping easily so the beast would fall before hitting him,
"Haven't I killed you before?" He ducked under the claws of the demons, the look of happiness he held towards killing a demon strange to say the very least.
"I can't tell—it's hard to tell one ugly face from another."
The demon shrieked as Derrick became bored of playing games with it, illuminating his obsidian blade with the sunlight he controlled and emitted and rammed the blade into the place where its heart should have been.
Demons didn't have hearts.
The shriek sounded as though the sound was being sucked away with a vacuum as the beast disappeared, twisting into blackness and falling into the dust Derrick was so familiar with creating.
Derrick wiped the black blood off of the obsidian sword with his black jeans, wrinkling his nose when the substance burned through his jeans and left a mark on his tanned thigh. He forgot frequently just how lethal the blood of a demon could be to his kind, but with the number of demons he had fought it seemed as though the golden boy should have remembered.
He couldn't remember now how many demons he had killed.
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Authors Note | Any questions just ask, and the most pertinent ones ones will be answered at the end of the next chapter, the rest PMed you you (unless you're a guest)
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