Author's Note: Hello and welcome to "Rebirth". This fic is my take on the "Audrey survives the accident" scenario, which I have always been intrigued by but somewhat nervous to attempt myself because, well, I do dislike Audrey. However, I must say, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting in her head while writing this story and I think I just might like her now.

I was originally hoping to keep the chapters of this fic short (roughly under 2,000 words) but as I have an inherent tendency to be long-winded, I doubt I'll stick to my word count, haha. Anyhow, thank so much for stopping by! I do hope you enjoy.

Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Legion.

Rebirth

Chapter One Conception

The two angels landed in the desert, their boots crunching on the hard-packed sand as they settled and shook the cold air from their wings. The dark had crept in-between their feathers and had crawled into the marrow of their bones, leaving them shivering with gooseflesh raised along their arms. It was a tremulous sort of night, the great plains of the earth still echoing with the sound of the final trumpet, the last, lonely dirge of a dying and forsaken world. And the angels were like jewels, set against the stones of the wasteland. Figures of austerity in a stark landscape. Ascetics in the wilderness.

Uriel stood amidst the wreck. He stood amidst the jagged metal teeth of a discarded bumper and the pieces of shattered windshield and the gasoline that leaked from the battered cruiser, filling the wind with a smell that was not unlike blood.

The highway was empty.

The angel lowered his head and wept, silently, softly, into his hands. They were not here. He had hoped, he had prayed to find them, but they were not here. Gabriel and Michael, gone. Gabriel and Michael…dead.

Hot tears trickled over his fingers.

"I hate them both," Raphael said from some distance away.

Uriel opened his eyes to look at her. She was crouched down close to the road, close to the sticky blacktop that stank of burnt rubber and melted tar and blood. Yes, there was blood.

Vulture, he thought, noticing the curve of her wings. Her expression was that of a scavenger's. A picker of bones and rotten meat.

A ripple of disgust ran through Uriel. "You should not say such a thing," he admonished, surprised at her bitterness.

Raphael had never been vicious. She had never been cruel. But this night had done horrible things to her, had taken her face and misshapen it into something ugly. Had put darkness into her eyes and unnamable sorrow. Had made her a vulture.

Bone-picker. Wretch.

It pained him to see her so. He thought briefly of leaving her, of continuing the search on his own, but then he remembered that she had asked for his help. And he could not deny her now.

It would be heartless to do so and he was not heartless. Unlike Michael. Unlike Gabriel.

Why? Why had they done this?

"We will find them," Uriel said, his voice boasting a confidence that he himself did not feel. The absence of it left him cold. Hollow. His heart was punctured, pouring bile into his gut, mixing noxious fear with sorrow and yes, maybe a little anger.

Anger at Michael for disobeying Father. Anger at Gabriel for obeying, for being willing enough to kill a brother. Anger at himself and Raphael for being too weak to stop them, although they had tried.

They had tried.

Uriel stared at his feet, the black of his boots standing out against the straight yellow lines that divided the road into two lanes. He had never felt so hopeless. And he had never seen Raphael so wretched.

Wretched. Wretched. They were all wretches now.

"Do you realize," he began, keeping his eyes on his feet, "that tonight is Christmas?"

Raphael had wandered further away from him, her nose nearly pressed to the ground. She brushed at the bits of metal and glass with her healer's hands. "Ironic," she muttered and said nothing more.

"We are hardly the angelic host we were at Bethlehem," Uriel replied. A gust of wind spiraled down from the distant mountains, unfurling along the flatlands in with low, piteous moan. Things were so different now, so different from what they were…

"Hark! The herald angels sing," Uriel uttered, his voice dampened by withheld tears. "Glory to the newborn king, peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners reconciled…" He stopped there, unable to continue.

Such hope. Such hope. This is what it had come to. The end.

"Sentiment," Raphael said. She had her back to him. "It is inappropriate."

"And yet your heart is broken," Uriel said, sparing his companion one sidelong glance.

Raphael's posture became rigid, but she did not stop her search. Uriel knew he had wounded her, struck a sensitive chord and he felt ashamed of his thoughtlessness. They needed each other, after all. Needed each other now that Michael and Gabriel had turned from them, had broken the only love and bond that every truly mattered.

Tears trickled down Uriel's cheeks. He brushed them away with a thumb and tried to gather himself. Raphael was right, as usual. Sentiment was inappropriate.

"They cannot have gone far," he tried to say, but the words came out as a stammer. "They cannot-"

Raphael straightened up, something in her hand. It caught the tepid light of the stars and Uriel saw at once what it was. Long, tapered, lethal. A hint of crimson about the quill, where it had been cruelly plucked from a wing.

He winced in sympathy and in recognition. "Gabriel. He was here, then. He was-"

"Hurt." Raphael threw the feather back to the ground, where it landed with a soft, metallic ring, a little silver bell jangling against the tar.

The noise was shrill in Uriel's ears. It set his teeth on edge. "Do you think it might have been Michael?" he asked, feeling his pulse rise and beat in his throat, just above the line of his iron collar. "Do you think they-"

"Fought?" Raphael spat out the word. She turned away from him, the edge of her cloak whispering over the broken glass. "I do not doubt…I do not…Uriel, I hate them both for this!" And then she was sobbing, wildly, inconsolably. It was a primitive sound. Animalistic. Hysterical.

Uriel's heartbeat quickened, the blood rushing to his ears. This, he thought. Yes, this.

This awful reckoning. This end…this definitive and decisive end. Gabriel and Michael. Gabriel and Michael. It should not have come to this, it should not….

Uriel's face felt hot. "We will find them," he said, but his assurances were faint, too feeble to steady Raphael. She was even now wavering, standing on the edge of some great abyss. And he would hate to see her fall.

No one would be there to catch her if she did.

"They are gone," she declared savagely. "We should not have come looking for them here."

"We could not wait."

"Do you think we might have stopped them? Do you think they would have ever listened to us?"

"I would have tried."

"I did!" Raphael cried, her face pale and waxy and like a death-mask. "I tried. And here it is now. Here it is. I hate them both for this. I hate them-"

"Enough!" Uriel shouted, the word straining in his throat until he was hoarse.

Silence reigned. An uncomfortable quiet. The wind moved and cried, disturbing the bone-white boughs of the low, stunted desert trees. Bruised clouds skirted the horizon and then disappeared. Muted moonlight shone down on them.

Raphael went rigid. She shuddered and emitted a final, whimpering sob. "They might be dead," she muttered. "There is blood."

Uriel recoiled, repulsed by her hopelessness. "You are wretched," he said at last.

"They have made me so."

And it was true. Uriel thought that he might hate her then, if he did not feel the same pain splinter his own soul, tear at him and gnaw at him until he thought he had fallen and was burning in the Pit.

Michael and Gabriel, he thought, as the first of her bitterness reached him and settled in his breast. You have destroyed us all.

And they had tried to stop them. They had tried, but failed.

He saw Raphael pacing frantically. Saw her step over the vines of twisted metal and the shreds of tire and the places where the road was scarred with skid marks, where the car had gone off onto the shoulder and flipped, tumbling through the desert in a spray of sand and gory, human debris.

And Michael and Gabriel, had they too been part of the carnage?

Perhaps.

More than likely.

Raphael could be right. She usually was.

Uriel's knees weakened. He doubled over and finally retched, hearing the disapproving click of her tongue as he did so.

"Do not be weak," she accused. "Do not be weak like them."

"They were not weak," he rasped, cringing as saliva spilled from his lips. He was disgusted with himself in that moment. Revolted by his trembling hands and the tears that made his eyes bleary and his failure, his utter and complete failure. This night, this night, it had done horrible things to him too. "Michael and Gabriel, they-"

"Michael disobeyed Father."

"And Gabriel obeyed," Uriel countered.

It was the most awful paradox, the only thing that could tear two brothers apart. And it had. Violently. Perhaps fatally. And they were left behind. Raphael and Uriel. An awkward, nervous pair, searching for what they had lost in a ruin of a world on the very night of the apocalypse. Searching, and finding nothing.

"No one is too blame," Uriel continued, although he wasn't sure if he believed himself. Michael had always been stubborn. Gabriel had always been righteous. And Raphael had warned them as she always had. She had seen the end before they ever did.

Cassandra, he thought, remembering the Greeks and their fantastic tale. No one believed poor Cassandra either.

He heard Raphael snarl, the noise sounding foreign when coupled with her fluting voice.

"Do not be naïve," she began. She was still striding over the wreck, moving down the road, away from him. "Do not be-"

She stopped. She stepped back.

Uriel noticed her shoulders tense, saw her wings raise in warning, the warrior poised and alert.

He gripped the hilt of his sword.

"Raphael?" he questioned, all traces of trembling and uncertainty banished from his tone, his voice becoming the steady tenor once more.

Raphael lifted her hand and beckoned to him. "Come see," she said. "I think it lives yet."

Gabriel, he thought numbly. Or Michael. His legs filled with lead and ached. Like a lame man, he dragged himself down the road, caution keeping his steps slow, keeping his arms tense and stiff with adrenaline. Raphael was bent at the waist, a few strands of her hair dusting the ground. Her nose wrinkled in disgust.

"Oh!" Uriel's gut heaved when he saw what she had found. It was horrible. A tiny human all twisted and bunched together like the pieces of metal and the discarded bumper. Some of her skin had been scrapped off by the road and she was bleeding and broken and ugly.

A stench rose from her, the pungent, rotten odor of impending death and decay. But the human wasn't dead yet. She moved. She twitched. She moaned. Blood matted her feathery hair to scalp and there were strange trails of black down her cheeks, as if she had wept ash. Pale bubbles of mucus and fluid frothed around gaping mouth. Her clothing, which appeared scant to begin with, had been torn in many places, leaving her left breast exposed, along with most of her buttocks.

The angels stood over the human and watched her.

After a moment of quiet curiosity, Raphael's anger seemed to fade and her face became sorrowful. "I hate to see such little things suffer," she told Uriel.

"Mercy," he replied, even as a sigh parted his lips. This creature was not one of them, It was not Gabriel. It was not Michael. Only a little human. A poor, little human.

"He taught us to be merciful," Uriel rattled on, struggling to speak even though he was faint with relief. "You should kill it."

"I should," Raphael said. She reached for the human, her fingertips touching a hunched shoulder, the muscle knotted beneath the bloodied flesh. "I do not wish to see it suffer."

"Father has ordered us to forsake their kind. Kill it," Uriel almost begged. Vaguely, in the back of his mind, he wondered if it was Gabriel who had done this. Or Michael. They were both of them capable of violence and if this human had gotten caught between them…

…so much blood, there was so much blood.

Raphael kept her fingers on the human's shoulder. "I do not want it to suffer," she repeated. "I do not-"

But then the human stirred. Then she jerked awake. Her eyes, with their tears of ash, opened wide and scared and in pain. In horrid, desolate pain.

Uriel thought the human would scream and he braced himself, waiting for the sound to wash over him, to haunt him with its sad, empty lament. But the human did not scream. She did not even cry.

"Mommy," she said, looking at Raphael with a glazed and dumb expression. "Mommy."

And then the pain took her and she fell back into a stupor. A crumbled little thing. A smudge of red and white against the hard blacktop. The stench of death rose from her. It was coming. It was coming.

"Please," Uriel said, grabbing Raphael's wrist and shaking her. "Do it."

But Raphael was slack-jawed. "I cannot," she said simply. "I cannot."


Author's Note: The archangel Raphael is accepted as one of the canonical archangels in Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Islam. Appearing in the Book of Tobit, Raphael is sent in human form as the guardian of Tobias. Generally, he is depicted as male. In this fic, Raphael will be portrayed as a female angel. The issue of Raphael's gender, however, along with the appearance in the Book of Tobit, will be discussed at length later on in chapter four.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read! If you have a free moment, please leave a review. Feedback always makes my day. The next chapter has already been written and should be posted in a week. Take care and be well!