His first thought, when consciousness returned to snap at his toes and burn his shoulders, was 'Bollocks, I'm back in Hell.'
If he was back in Hell, then he had to be in a really shitty part of it. It was hot, and dry, and the dirt he laid on was that awkward middle ground between comfortable and unbearable that was sure to drive anybody mad within a few short weeks.
It couldn't be Hell, though. The gravity was too…clingy. It dragged at every atom of his being, wrapping around his bones and keeping him firmly locked to the ground in a way that his domain never had. Gravity in Hell was more "friends-with-benefits" than "overbearing-significant-other"; it liked him, true, but it wouldn't hesitate to let him float away if he insisted on a little space.
Plus there was the lack of muffled screaming, an absence of drifting ash settling across his body, the missing scent of sulfur and decay, the empty space in his head where the whispers of his demons usually churned…
So probably not Hell, then.
Which was neat, but that meant that he had absolutely no idea where he was, or why his entire body ached, or why he felt like he had been dunked in lava.
One thing at a time.
Opening his eyes would be good; a nice 'phase one' in Operation: What The Probably-Not-Literal Hell. That sounded like a plan.
So he did that, and instantly regretted it.
Light stabbed into his eyes, searing his corneas, his lenses, his retinas…there really wasn't a part of his eyes that didn't ache. He would say that his brain hurt, but he was fairly certain it was being used as a hockey puck at the moment. What else could explain the migraine-inducing rattling in his head?
Another problem: There was sand everywhere.
That in and of itself wasn't that big of an issue. He was okay with sand. Beaches were nice, although after the day he'd had, he was beginning to have mixed feelings about them.
This wasn't a pretty little strip of sand, separating a parking-lot or grass from the Pacific Ocean. This was strip after strip after strip, stretching as far as he could see, until a purplish haze of distant mountains broke apart the pale blue of the cloudless sky. It was awful to look at, and made his stomach flip in a way he didn't quite care to interpret at the moment.
Honestly, he would have rather woken up in Hell.
At least he would know where he was in Hell. It was an instinctual thing, kind of like how a bird always knew which way was south. The Mortal Plane, Earth, whatever—that was different. His direction sense was still nothing to scoff at, but it was like comparing a basketball to the moon.
Which meant he should probably stop lying about. Time to stand up, be an adult, and try to remember what wild party he had to have attended to end up out in the middle of the desert.
He felt like he was missing something.
Like his blazer, for starters.
It was gone. As was his shirt. He was more perturbed about the blazer than the shirt; he had liked that one. That was mildly upsetting.
He could still feel his pants, though, which was even more upsetting. So it had been a wild night, but not the kind of wild he was most entertained by.
And where in the ever-loving fuck were his shoes?
A problem that he had originally put on the backburner-emphasis on burn-returned to his attention the moment he twitched.
Suns were hot, and could apparently be little shits, since they still saw fit to charbroil the one that had lit them millennia ago. Vindictive sons-of-bitches.
'Ha! SUNS-of-bitches.' He paused. If he was the one that had lit them, did that technically make them his children, and therefore make him the bitch?
It was too early for such contemplation, and he was much too busy.
He pushed through the pain, looking down upon his torso in muted, detached horror. His flesh was peeling, flaking off like the outer layers of an onion.
It reminded him of how he had looked directly after his Fall, when his skin had slowly cooked from the inside out, peeling away in an agony that lasted for decades. Because his Fall hadn't been as quick as a simple plummet. It had been long, and excruciating, and one of the more traumatizing events in his life. Time worked differently for a celestial creature. Seven days in Heaven lasted for millennia on Earth; a few minutes spanned centuries.
No, it wasn't time to dwell on that. That could wait for later, when he thought about how star-parentage was supposed to work, and whether or not he could claim them on his taxes. This wasn't his Fall. This was not him awakening from a very detailed acid trip, where he dreamt and hallucinated all of human history. The physical result of his Fall was a numb itch beneath his conjured flesh, the pain tempered by time. That horror was millennia in his past. This was new. A simple sunburn, and nothing more; something to be ignored until he could procure an entire factory's worth of aloe vera, and fill the pool with it.
So he did his best to ignore his peeling flesh, and the way it made his fingers shake and muscles coil at the memories and the phantom pains.
He hauled himself to his feet, and cursed his lack of shoes, because damn that sand was hot. He was immortal, and the sand was normal sand, so it wasn't like it would do any lasting damage, but it still burnt the soles of his feet and made him grimace.
And shit, could the sun get any brighter? It was like it was taunting him, hanging up in the coolness of space, not disorientated at all because stars didn't do that. Its smugness irritated him. He would ground it, if he could, but that would just roast the planet, and he had a feeling not too many people would be very pleased with that. He could count himself among that number. Also, that wasn't actually how grounding worked, or so he'd been told.
He held up a hand to try and spare his eyes and lessen his headache, and to put a physical barrier between himself and the sun's gloating. All that did was stretch his burns, and remind him that gravity was still a thing that clung and dragged and pulled at every part of him, even parts of him that didn't exist anymore.
'Wait.'
He craned his head around, and his heart leapt into his throat, sucker-punching his gag reflex so hard he almost vomited then and there. He was all for new experiences, but that wasn't one that he wanted, thanks.
Another thing he didn't want? He was staring right at them; two impossible objects that were somehow both innocent, and more smug than the sun that mocked him. He inspected every inch of both of them, from where they sprouted near his shoulder blades, all the way down to where the pinions brushed at his ankles.
He spread them, all twenty feet of them from end to end, just to make sure that they weren't a mirage or a hallucination or a dream. And Hell's bells were they probably not any of those things, because coaxing them to move made his entire back and chest cramp and ache, long-forgotten and atrophied muscles suddenly forced to become active again in a way that they hadn't for years; the chump change of time when it came to him, but significant enough that what should have been a simple flex made him want to lie down and swear.
He held the stretch, hoping that his wings—his freaking wings, what the SHIT—would stop screaming at him sometime this year. That, and he realized that he had no idea how to work them anymore. Muscle memory could only get him so far. It had been years since those muscles had had to remember anything; entire lifetimes, the length of which most couldn't fathom.
Lifetimes since he had been restrained. Lifetimes since he had screamed and thrashed as his back was carved into, muscles and tendons torn and bones shattered in an agony that had left him begging—
No. Now wasn't the time for that. There was never time for that. There would be no remembering that later; just more shoving it down as far as it could go, and hoping that it would be another few decades before that came up again. Just a glance at a feather, and he knew that wouldn't be the case. Not anymore.
Still, he was the master at being evasive, and avoiding anything that even came close to emotional or mental vulnerability. He would shove that shit onto the backburner until it was black and charred and unrecognizable.
Maintaining what his in-denial brain refused to call anything but a well-deserved stretch, he craned his neck skywards, towards where his instincts and memory told him the Silver City lay. That was never something he would forget.
'What?' He wanted to ask, but while his lips moved, the words refused to. His throat was bone dry, his lips cracked and tongue feeling like cotton-wrapped lead. So speaking wasn't going to happen. Luckily his Father wasn't one that needed the verbal word to get the message. His Father worked with thoughts, and feelings, and intent; all things that he had in spades, and was definitely prepared to throw around like half-priced ping-pong balls.
Unsurprisingly, he received no answer.
Wonderful. His Old Man couldn't have bothered to leave him a note, at least? Even a little "LOL, Punked"? Cool. Whatever.
No, he would figure this out on his own.
Right after he remembered how exactly to get his wings to fold comfortably again.
After a long five minutes that he would never speak of again, filled with colorful swearing in a number of forgotten languages, he was finally at least marginally comfortable with how his wings rested against his back. His muscles still ached, and he felt like someone was trying to play the marimba on his scapulae, but it was acceptable. He had sufficient enough control, at least, to wrap them a bit around his shoulders, sparing his abused flesh from cooking any more.
Putting his back to the sun—more to protect his eyes from it than because he actually knew which way he was going—he set off at a meaningful shuffle. How he would have traded just about anything to simply fly. He could be back in his penthouse, sorting out whatever the hell had happened, within a few seconds; perhaps with a quick stop at a market to pick up that aloe vera. He would by lying if he said he hadn't thought about trying, but the idea of forcing himself into the air made him a bit nauseous. The way his body was still screaming at him, he doubted he could maintain even a shaky glide.
Again: No lasting damage if he were to fall during an attempt, but that shit would still hurt.
So walking it was, then. Like a peasant.
Delightful.
It took him probably twenty minutes to remember that cell phones were a thing, and that he had one. Still had one, as the case was, as it was sat comfortably in his pocket, nestled in a tiny pool of sand that had crept in while he wasn't looking. That probably wasn't good for the charging port, which actually sucked quite a bit, because he was fairly certain that his phone was dead. Either that, or overheated. In any case, it wasn't turning on, making it about as useful as pancake mix in the middle of the ocean.
How come cell phones weren't charged by solar power yet? Why wasn't that a thing? First thing he was going to do when he got back to Los Angeles was call the patent office.
Well. Best make that the fifth or sixth thing he did.
Finding whoever had dumped him in the middle of the desert should probably take priority, because the more he thought about the night before, the more he remembered, and the clearer it became; there had been no party. He could remember sitting in the hospital, checking in on his dear doctor after she had been caught between the celestial family grudge match that he had dragged her into. Doctor Linda Martin, Therapist to the Literal First Family. He could remember seeing her, so bloody and beaten, and could remember that seething rage that had simmered in his chest.
He could remember, in much too vivid of detail, the phone call that he had made afterwards; could remember how his throat had tightened and how his heart had decided its normal tempo wasn't interesting enough. He could remember the voicemail he had left, word for word.
He peered at the sun again, guessing the time since he had left that message; at least fourteen hours, if not more. Probably more, knowing his luck.
Oh, Father above, Chloe was going to think that he had skipped out on her again, and was definitely going to skin him alive.
Well, the joke was on her, because the sun had already beaten her to that. So. Ha. Take that. Never mind the fact that he was kind of technically the victim here. He was the one that had been knocked out and shuttled off into the middle of the desert.
He could remember the feeling of something striking the back of his head, too. He could count the number of times he had been knocked out like that on one hand. Well, two now, he supposed. It didn't happen often, mostly because it was so difficult to do. Someone had to swing really hard to make his brain throw in the towel for a couple hours. Someone had to be really strong; supernaturally strong.
'Amenadiel, if this was your doing, I'm going to rip out your spleen and make a hat out of it.'
He shoved the thought along towards his brother, wrapped up in a nice little bow to make it a pretty prayer. If his time powers were returning, maybe he could get those again? Even if not, the threat was surprisingly cathartic.
After a moment of deliberation, he added, 'Ditto for Maze.'
That still didn't explain the wing thing, though, the incessant ache making it impossible to ignore them like he had planned. Neither a fallen angel nor a demon had the ability to return his wings or gift him with new ones. Only his Father—and other angels by proxy, technically—had the power to do that.
But why would He? What had he done that made him deserving of this? It couldn't be that he had earned them back because of his act of mercy towards his Mother. If it was something as simple as that, wouldn't dying for a mortal carry more weight? If that hadn't been enough to regain this aspect of divinity, why would finding a loophole in a contract with God Himself count? He didn't dare consider the possibility that he had actually been forgiven, because that just didn't happen. Divine creatures did not have the power to pray and have their sins wiped clean. That was a uniquely human trait. Maybe he should have asked for that, rather than free will.
And oh, look, he was thinking about the wings again. Lovely.
There had to be a road out in the desert somewhere that would allow him to drive away from these ideas and thoughts.
An hour later, and not only had he yet to come across a road, but he was also pissed off and thirsty as hell. Celestial beings couldn't actually die from dehydration, but enough weird crap had been happening lately that he wasn't entirely sure that was the case anymore.
Whatever he was feeling, he could believe that it was dehydration. His tongue had yet to come unstuck, instead feeling heavier than it had before. He wouldn't have been surprised if he found a brick surgically implanted where his tongue was supposed to be. That would be disappointing for him, though. What was he supposed to do with a brick for a tongue?
Everything spun around him in a dizzying blur of color; like an acid trip, but a lot less fun. He felt like he was on a ship in the middle of a sea storm, swaying on great waves that tilted the horizon and spiked his vestibular sense directly into a wall. He knew he was weaving all over the place; he had to be. There was no other way he could possibly be managing to stumble over every single desert shrub he was coming across.
If anybody asked later, he would vehemently deny the amount of times that he tripped.
Oh, look now and behold the Lord of Darkness, felled by a tiny plant.
He would never hear the end of it.
Another hour, and he was considering just biting a cactus to try and drink the water inside. That was how that worked, right? He had already tried to use the sharp primaries at the ends of his wings to slice through them, but that had been an absolute train wreck. Bending his wings like that required precision, and a degree of muscular control that was definitely not happening.
All he had managed to do was smack the cactus he had found with the broadside of his wing, crushing the poor plant and spilling any water within out onto the scorching sands. He had thought about picking up the pieces and licking them for water, but he had been of sound enough mind to decide that getting needles stuck in his tongue would do nothing to improve his mood.
After that, time became a bit muddied, like California's mountain roads during landslide season. The minutes slammed forward or lagged back at random intervals. At one point, he picked a distant Joshua tree to gauge how fast he was covering ground. On one blink it was a rippling smudge on the horizon, and on the next, he was staring up at the bayonet-shaped leaves just out of reach, wondering if they would be able to pierce the next cactus he found.
It had to be centuries old by that point, stubbornly thriving in an environment where God had done His level best to make success impossible.
'You and me both, mate.'
Putting his back to the rugged survivor, it had to have taken him three decades to put fifty measly feet between them.
His attention lapsed for what felt like a second, but it was enough time for the sun to swing around above his head and blind him with its Cheshire grin. It cackled as it sank behind the mountains, flipping him the bird with its last rays of light as the sky darkened and the farther stars blinked awake, raising eyebrows at his predicament. Yeah, he didn't get it, either.
None of them offered him aid, which he found to be quite rude.
'Okay, Amenadiel? I take it back. You can keep your spleen. Just help a brother out and come pick me up.' He paused, thinking. 'Oh. Be an angel and bring the Macallan 30.'
With the day he was having, he was prepared to chug the entire bottle.
At least the chilly night wind soothed his burnt flesh, rather than irritate it further. He liked to look on the bright side.
Something a little ways off caught his eye. He would have broken into a sprint, if he didn't already feel like his tromping shuffle was too much movement.
There, waiting beneath a twisting Joshua tree with a bottle of he-didn't-care in one hand—he would take cooking wine at this point—and a new shirt in the other, was Chloe.
His eyes burned like he should of been tearing up, but his face remained painfully dry.
He tried to call her name, he really did, but all that came out was a rattling croak that hurt his throat something awful, as if he had thrown back a shot of lighter fluid and then snacked on a lit match.
She smiled brightly at him, and the relief that flooded him made his body so light, the ache in his back was momentarily abated. She wasn't mad at him for not showing up. No, she had come to help him. What a wonderful woman she was. She deserved everything. Like the truth.
First thing, though, was the biggest hug he had ever given.
Instead of wrapping his arms around her and breathing in her unique scent of lilac and gun grease, he rammed face-first into the trunk of the Joshua tree, his teeth cutting into the inside of his mouth.
He fell backwards, landed on his wings—and damn did that hurt—and smiled wanly at the stars above.
No, that would have been much too easy.
He thought about just laying there and waiting for...whatever, but a jolt of pain through his back had him sitting up in an instant. Once he was that far, he figured he might as well get up and keep going.
The moon was directly overhead—not bragging like the sun, but silently tutting at him in disapproval, the judgmental bitch—when his next visitor bounced up alongside him.
"Hello, brother."
'Goodbye, Uriel,' he had wanted to say as he picked up his pace, but the rough approximation of those words that he managed were pitiful and incomprehensible at best. He thought he had gotten over this guilt. Perhaps parting with the last thing Uriel carried—Azrael's blade—had hit him harder than he had anticipated. For all intents and purposes, he had thrown out his dead brother's final possession. 'Like yesterday's rubbish.'
Oh. Oh. His sister was probably going to be pissed. He hadn't actually thought about that until now.
Uriel still strode alongside him. Lovely.
"You have your wings back," Uriel observed; always stating the obvious. "Aren't you going to thank me?"
'You had nothing to do with this,' he thought, unintentionally bundling the words into a prayer that drifted away across the sands like a tumbleweed. What happened to prayers sent to angels that had been wiped from existence, anyway? They carried the word of a thought but the power of a prayer, with no receiver to close the connection; an open-ended font of power that traveled freely without a cork to stop it. That seemed dangerous.
"Oh, but didn't I?" Uriel asked, much too lively for somebody that was much too dead. "I'm the Angel of Patterns, in case all those years in Hell boiled your brain and made you forget."
How could he forget when Uriel constantly reminded him? He hadn't actually thought that—too little energy to spare on a thought like that—but Uriel got the message anyway.
"Oh, Luci. I see all of the patterns, remember? Drop a napkin in Indiana, and a building collapses in India." So pompous, Uriel. So confident; too confident. "All events hit against one another, falling one by one into the next, like dominoes."
'I hate dominoes.' Whoops, and there goes another prayer, drifting away. He tried to snatch it back, because that was energy that he couldn't waste. But it was gone already, useless without a destination.
But no, it had a destination. Uriel was right there.
No. Shit. He was dead, right? He wasn't going to fall into the same trap again.
Wait, what trap? There were no traps. And he wasn't falling. That was a long time ago. Or yesterday, maybe.
What was he talking about? Who was he talking to?
Oh, right. Uriel was there. That was pretty cool. Uriel looked a lot happier without a sword in his gut. Where had that sword gotten off to, anyway?
Uriel just kept on talking, his face twisting as blood stained the front of his vest and poured out of his mouth to paint his chin. That probably tasted awful. "Perhaps my death was just one domino in a long line of them. A necessity, if a rather unfortunate one. My death brought you the first piece of the sword, my words helped lead you to the rest, and the assembled sword was what gave you the choice that led you here," Uriel said, spreading his hands to gesture to the desert around them.
'Here?' he echoed. 'There? Where?' His eyes rolled around, looking for a landmark. Certainly wasn't Heaven; he wasn't allowed there anymore. 'Hell? Purgatory? Sheephole Valley?' That place was supposed to be awfully hot this time of year. It was a bit nippy. A shirt would have been nice. All he had were his defective wings; not a very good substitute.
Wings? Oh right. Stuff had happened.
'Your death was not part of this,' he insisted, more to himself than his phantom brother. 'This was not one of your patterns. If you saw your death coming, why would you allow it?'
"To help you on your path, brother. And what a wondrous path it is."
Everything about him hurt. He frowned. 'My "path" is not worth your life.'
Uriel smiled, crumpling in on himself and shrinking. Bye, Uriel. "Perhaps you believe that now, brother, because you cannot see your destination. You cannot see the pattern."
And then Uriel was gone, folding and stretching, like taffy on a pulling machine at the fair. What a disgusting flavor. Too many feathers for his liking.
He didn't get taffy, though. He got a hellhound, which stopped and stood its ground, staring at him. He stopped, too. He had had enough. His brain had chugged along—slow as it was—and formed conclusions at long last. Mirages were stupid; hallucinations were even more so.
He swung an arm through the hellhound, intent on dispelling the image. It might not have been real, but even the ghost of eyes watching him was unnerving.
It leapt, and latched onto his wrist with dagger-like teeth because holy shit that thing was not a hallucination.
Not a hellhound, either, as its teeth didn't pierce his flesh—although the scraping of fangs along his open sores sure stung—so maybe a half-hallucination.
He punched the dusty coyote with all he had, which was admittedly not much. So he showed it the damage that a divine Fall could do, and flared his wings—oh, what marvelous things instinctive muscle memory could accomplish—and roared in a way that no other creature could.
Speaking was out of the question, but snarling with the sound of one thousand rabid panthers never was.
The coyote turned tail and fled faster than he could figure out how to resettle his wings. Again.
His trek after the overgrown rat had fled was remarkably boring and quiet. He almost missed the vivid hallucinations, which had at least offered him company and broken up the monotony. He remained as lucid as he possibly could, too, just in case the coyote came back with friends. He didn't have to worry about becoming a late night snack for a pack of mangy canids like a wayward mortal would—because of his relative immortality and all—but he was already in a rotten enough mood, and he didn't think the muscles in his torso would accept another flare of the wings. They were already starting to whisper of mutiny, their displeasure making him twitchy.
He didn't even notice at first when the sliding sands beneath his bare feet solidified into a rough, stabbing slab. It radiated the residual heat of day into the cool night air, which almost made up for the fact that the ground was currently attacking his feet with tiny, dull knives. Or gravel. It was probably gravel, since he stood on a road.
A road. At last. Civilization. Progress. A nice two-lane highway, smack dab in the middle of the desert, snaking away between the dunes and mountains.
He ground his toes experimentally into the gravel on the road's shoulder, waiting to see if it too was a hallucination that would reveal its deception after a bit of scrutiny. The road stayed a road, and he stayed standing at its edge, staring blankly at it like an idiot.
At least he had a less-than-vague direction to walk in now. Before, he had just guessed. Now he could make an educated guess. There was a tiny, minuscule difference.
Which way was home, though? Or did the road not even lead towards home? He still had no idea where he was. Maybe home was away from the road, and deeper into the desert. Maybe if he followed the road, he would never get back to Los Angeles. Chloe said that happened, sometimes; people would walk away from their homes, and just never come back again. Those were mostly children or older people, she had said. He was kind of like an old person, right? One of the oldest, by human standards. But he looked young, and acted young, and felt young. Did that exclude him from that? He should have asked Chloe more questions before getting lost in the desert.
Bright lights blazed to life and drew nearer, like fallen stars that rushed towards him. Perhaps some of the stars in the sky had finally taken pity on their creator, and were coming to his aid. He didn't know what stars could do to help, but he appreciated the sentiment. Maybe they would be better conversationalists than hallucinations of murdered brothers that loved to lecture, or real coyotes that saw his feathers and mistook him for a roadrunner.
No, no wait. The hallucinations were back. Wonderful. Why else would Maze be riding those too-bright stars that growled and rumbled like hellhounds?
"Lucifer!"
Maze rushed up to meet him, but hesitated on her toes just out of arms reach, her eyes wide as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She looked like the result of concern and anger being thrown into a mixing bowl, garnished with disbelief. Add salt to taste.
"What the hell?"
'No no no, not Hell,' he thought. Too bad hallucinations and demons couldn't get prayers. 'Gravity. See?' He tried to lift his wings to demonstrate, but his muscles moaned in protest—or was that actually just him?—and gave out, the weight of the feathers and flesh and bone dragging him down along with them. So his demonstration had kind of worked, because gravity dumping his ass on the ground proved his point well enough.
Maze reached out a hand towards him, but then Amenadiel was there, all tall and imposing, and the demon hesitated, looking to him when he said, "I don't understand."
'Oh what a surprise,' he thought. And then, wrapping up his words into a prayer that he lobbed towards the sky, he thought, 'Hey, brother, your hallucination is better looking than you!'
Amenadiel's eyebrows raised and then furrowed again, his head tilting to the side. "Hallucination...?" Understanding dawned, and Amenadiel crouched down to his level. When had he gotten so small? "Brother, I-" Maze elbowed him, hard. "We are no hallucination."
"You bet your ass we're not," Maze snorted, tossing her hair over her shoulder with a snapping flick of her wrist. "Do you have any idea how long we've been looking for you? You've got an assload of explaining to do." Her eyes trailed to and lingered on his wings again. "Make that a metric shit ton."
Yeah, he wished he had an explanation for that one, too.
He blinked at the two slowly, his vision fuzzy. He reached out with a cautious hand, weary of being attacked by another disguised danger, and jabbed Amenadiel in the knee. Instead of snapping fangs or lashing claws, his fingers hit cool denim. So unless the desert fauna had suddenly developed a fashion sense...
He opened his mouth to speak, and croaked like a bullfrog. Maze immediately offered a flask, which Amenadiel smacked away with a reproachful glare.
"Alcohol won't help his throat," Amenadiel admonished. Maybe not, but it would help his mood.
Instead, a bottle of water was offered, with the instruction to take small sips, unless he wanted to throw it all back up.
After a few gulping mouthfuls that left him the tiniest bit nauseous—he was nothing if not a rebel—his vocal cords no longer felt in danger of rending apart when he tried to speak; they still twisted and grated against one another painfully, but he could work with that. "How...?" Okay, kind of work with that.
But Amenadiel got the message, just as he had gotten the prayers; every single one that had been sent, whether to him or not. Apparently directionless prayers could be intercepted by any angel, even the fallen-but-maybe-not-anymore ones. That was something to remember for later.
Tracking him down via the prayers had been a bit trickier.
"You mentioned Sheephole Valley in one, so we came straight here."
Was that where he was? He vaguely remembered mentioning that. Maybe his sense of direction on the Mortal Plane was better than he had thought.
He took another sip of his water. It was dreadfully bland. He formed another prayer, carefully addressing it for his brother this time. 'Don't suppose either of you brought any Cognac?' Maze raised her eyebrow and the flask, both of which Amenadiel shot down again. Well, maybe his brother shouldn't have bothered "translating" the prayer, then. 'A shirt? Aloe vera?'
"We've got a blanket in the car," Maze offered with a shrug.
That was good enough for him.
Cramming into Maze's car was...interesting. The back seat wasn't designed for a tall man with even taller wings. But they would make do. They had to, with a three-hour car ride ahead of them.
Once on the road, one wing covering him to muffle the whispered conversations between angel and demon in the front seats—discussing him, as if he wasn't sitting right there—the tension finally bled out from his sore and wailing body.
There was still so much to do, so much to figure out. Like who had dropped him in the desert, why he had his wings back, and holy shit, what was he supposed to do about and say to Chloe now?
The Devil did not do fainting.
So he took an abrupt nap instead.
He could deal with everything else later.
A/N: Originally posted on AO3 on 6/7/2017 under the same handle. I'll upload more chapters soon, hopefully!
