Seven devils all around you
Seven devils in your house
See I was dead when I woke up this morning
And I'll be dead before the day is done.
— Seven Devils, Florence + the Machine
Constance always told him that, in the Bible, Michael was a warrior. An angel. God's chosen one, his favorite little boy after Lucifer decided to "go his own way", aka get hurled out of heaven and sent to walk among the commoners. Michael was the one who was going to pave the way, fight God's fight against evil, yadda yadda yadda.
Michael Langdon didn't know about God— honestly it all seemed like shit to him— but he couldn't deny he'd always been somewhat of a warrior. A twisted, fucked up one, but he fought. He fought against the voices and the impulses and he fought not to strangle every other person he saw. He fought against this house and his grandmother.
He fought not to rip his "father" limb from limb every time he saw him— he was a freak and a killer and wrong wrong wrong, all because of him— because it wouldn't do much difference anyway.
You can't kill the dead.
At least not in usual ways.
Constance still didn't know he knew. The woman was blind. She wasn't the perfect mother or wife or grandmother or anything. She was just a catty, proud old woman who wouldn't admit her own mistakes. If there was one thing he agreed with his "father" on, it was that she was, in essence, a cocksucker. A no good cocksucker. A cocksucker who had manipulated him all of his life, and maybe that was why he was fucked up and his father was fucked up and their "family" was dead and burned and the ashes were scattered.
None of this would have happened if not for her.
Michael would have killed her long ago, if he hadn't known better. Killing her would just send her somewhere else. She needed to suffer. Because, as much as she faked it, she hadn't suffered nearly as much as she deserved. Her family was still around, partly. Her son and grandson. They were still here, just across the road.
That was about to change.
He remembered her talking about the seven cardinal sins, one time he was stuck listening to her God-lectures.
The house worked in sevens too. All the extras had passed, slowly, fading away into nothingness. Maybe that had been the point from the beginning. To narrow the playing field down to the seven of them.
The first was wrath.
It was a silver thumb ring shaped like a snake and an old toy truck that had been slid down a hallway once while a child's mother was asleep, cigarette still smoking, her head on foreclosure bills. It was one too many coke lines snorted by a teenage boy in his basement. It was a gasoline tank poured on a middle-aged man. It was a gun firing, bang bang bang, into students' heads on what should have been a normal Thursday morning. It was a black suit made of rubber. It was deceit and love and hate and forgiveness and a wolf in a sheep's skin. A devil hidden by an angel face.
The reason Michael was here now.
He set the ring and the truck on the ground. The suit would have been good, but that had been thrown away— for real— a long time ago, useless and forgotten.
He felt the air almost tingle. He needed to get going.
The second was greed.
He hadn't had any trouble finding the next two items. An old white dress and a baby mobile. Simple. Frilly. Like the woman they described, though so much more on the inside. Red dresses and lipstick hid harsh words over a dinner table to a husband. A baby mobile morphed into a baby corpse, which became a monster. Longing. Regret. "Life's too short for so much sorrow." She'd been wrong. Life was sorrow. Life was sorrow and pain and unhappiness. At least in this place. No light. Ever.
She'd figured it out eventually.
Michael supposed he was doing her a kindness. The dress was draped over the toy truck and the baby mobile was set beside it.
The third was sloth.
And the sloth, being who she was, had been extremely easy to steal from.
Michael dropped a few violin strings and a baby blanket onto the pile. Babies. The women in the house were just far too obsessed with them. Sloth had been consumed by one. She just lay around, all the time, living out her perfect fantasy in which she was a mother of a newborn. Humming and lying and a never-ending trance. She hadn't done anything about her falling-apart family, hadn't done anything about her shit of a husband, wasn't doing anything about her situation now.
She was definitely one to be despised, though by far not the worst.
The fourth was pride.
He'd been trickier. Pride didn't like to let go of things, after all; he was far too stubborn and stuck up for that. It had taken quite a bit of stealth to get the objects Michael placed on top of the baby blanket: a wedding ring and a case file. Simple and meaningless, really, but the man had been too hardheaded to let go of them. He'd already broken his marriage, already failed his patients. He just hated admitting it. So he sat shut up in this little world of "It's not my fault, it's not my fault, it's not my fault, it's the world, it's not me". When it really was all his fucking fault. If not for him, his family would be alive, or at least dead by natural causes.
Not in this place.
Michael despised him even more for that. Wrath was the only one who beat Pride in that respect.
The fifth was lust.
That one had been… interesting. Quite a bit of… work had been put into getting the French maid apron and the little yellow book. Necessary work, he reminded himself. Lust was tricky and deceptive, and could change forms as easily as breathing. Old and young, sweet and cunning… It hadn't been the easiest job in the world.
Okay, maybe Michael was a little weak on this sin, but he was a teenage boy. As weird as it was knowing she was an old maid half the time too. A teenage boy easily swayed by seductive redheads.
He shook his head, not wanting to think about that. He'd gotten what he needed. He'd succumbed to all the sins at least once. In a way, they all lived in him. Lust was just a particularly… prominent one.
What was next?
The sixth was envy.
She'd been easier than Pride or Lust, too caught up in her own misery and anger to really notice what was going on around her. Eternally caught in a cage of bitterness— bitterness for her lost baby and youth and future. Bitterness towards the man she followed, the man who killed her. Bitterness towards every single scrap of happiness in this house. She wouldn't notice the maternity shirt and the knife missing from her collection.
Michael didn't care about her. She was pitiful, but only a threat outwardly. She was still a little girl inside— a slightly unhinged and crazy little girl, but a child nonetheless.
The last was gluttony.
But where was it?
Billie Dean had promised to help him get the ones he missed.
Dammit.
He almost cried out in anger and frustration before he caught the sight of golden hair out of the corner of his eye, her dark eyes almost staring a hole through him. He turned to see her, still just as young and still just as sad as she'd been when he first saw her, when he escaped to the house at only the age of eight, to get away from Constance and the other house and to see what his grandmother had been speaking of when she said the Murder House was "different".
"Bille Dean said you needed the last of it," the girl whispered, holding out to small objects. A razor and a withered black rose with half its petals gone. Michael hesitantly reached out and took them from her, turning them over in his hands. Nothing remarkable, not really. But they had to have some significance.
He was surprised it was her. Of all the ghosts, she seemed the most… innocent. The victim, no matter how strong she was. From the first day he'd met her, when she'd found him as a child crying in a corner, he'd liked her the most. No matter how fucked up that was, considering her past and the reason she was here. But her sadness, her pain, her anger seemed to mirror his own.
Maybe because they both existed for similar reasons.
"I wasted my life," she clarified, as if reading his thoughts. "I didn't do anything to change my fate. It was just razor cuts and then a pill bottle downed with vodka. My whole future, thrown away with a few swallows." She sounded so unbearably sad. He moved forward, but she just took a few steps back.
"Just do it." He could hear the tears in her voice.
Slowly, gently, he turned and set the razor and the flower on top of the rest. A pile. Ordinary objects that had so much more meaning than anyone else would have thought.
She walked up to stand beside him as he poured liquid out of a tank, all over everything in the pile. He'd already finished spreading it around the house. He shook out the tank until he was sure it was empty.
"May I?"
Her voice was soft, a murmur, almost drowned out by the sound of a match being drawn. He nodded. Handed it over to her. Their hands brushed, and she gave him one small, sad smile.
Flick, fwoosh. Flame. Falling. Fire.
One.
The screams started.
Two.
Running footsteps. Violet collapsed. Michael couldn't move. He didn't know why. He just couldn't.
He could feel smoke and flame and heat. Silhouettes flickered. Michael saw him— Wrath, Tate, Taint, boy-man-druggie-killer-devil— barge into the room, followed by Envy and Pride. Lust would have the good sense to stay away from the violence. Sloth would be somewhere else. Greed was probably trying to stay away to save herself.
Michael dropped to his knees.
Three.
Shaking, shaking. "Why would you do this?" All he can see is blonde hair and dark eyes, so similar to his own, and Michael just laughs and laughs and laughs, laughs like he knew his so-called father did when he was doing the exact same thing, only to people who were alive.
An angel's face with a devil's soul.
Like father like son.
He should have seen it coming.
Four.
Then came the pain.
He'd been expecting it.
Violet was there, he thought, and her sad smile had turned triumphant, almost wicked, and that unnerved him but even through the pain and the crackling and the agonizing cries he could hear her "thank you".
Five.
This was what dying felt like, wasn't it?
Six.
Maybe he would be an angel. He had gotten rid of evil… Hadn't he?
Seven.
Death was darkness.