How Full of Briers is This Working-Day World
Rating: PG-13/T
Genre: General/Drama/Tragedy
Summary: Atropos-centric. Some days she really hates her job.
Author's Note: I managed to get a screencap of Atropos' book right after she kills the travel agent in My Heart Will Go On, and I started reading all the names of the people that were there… You'll see what that got me here.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. It belongs to Eric Kripke. The title is a quote from William Shakespeare.
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Some days, Atropos hated her job.
In the beginning, she'd hated it with a passion.
Clotho spun the thread. Lachesis measured it. Atropos cut it.
Clotho made the representation of a person's life.
Lachesis decided how long a life would be.
Atropos ended it.
It wasn't that she didn't think it was necessary. There was a plan, a script that needed to be followed, and order needed to be upheld. If people had to die for that order to be kept, then so be it.
But Atropos was not a sadist. Killing some jackass insurance salesman, or a murderer or a crook? That was easy. Fun. She felt better making those deaths a little on the ironic and even humorous side. Her greatest and best remembered piece, to date, had been a child-molesting performance clown that had met a nasty end with a rabid sea-lion and a number of squeaky horns.
It was when good people had to die that Atropos became solemn.
In the beginning, when she was new at her job and ending life, taking the lives of innocent, good people had been almost excruciating. Causing a young father, the only provider for his family, to fall and snap his neck did not cheer her. Causing a wise and giving old man who spread joy to those around him to drown in a boating accident weighed on her heart.
The first time she had ever cried over it, though, had been when she had first been forced to kill a child.
The child, a pretty little girl with shiny dark hair and large brown eyes, should not have been born. When you were maintaining the fates of thousands of different people, sometimes mistakes like this took a while to get sorted out. By the time Atropos got to her and her mother, the woman who was supposed to die in a fire two years before her daughter's birth, the girl was already five years old.
She was a good child. Her mother was a good woman, barely out of her teens (mothers were so young in this time so long ago). If this girl grew up, she would be a very good person.
But she was not destined to grow up.
It had taken Atropos hours to finally muster up the ability ("courage" or "heart" sounds so wrong for something like this) to go through with it. She tried to make it quick, painless, without time to feel fear or grief. They were both crushed when a "poorly constructed" building collapsed on them. Atropos had stood, silent and still, watching as others rushed to the scene to help. It was only when they moved a stone and revealed the child, revealed that she still managed to cling to life, eyes wide, her skull half-crushed, that Atropos let out a sob and fled.
She hadn't left her and her sisters' home for a week. Lachesis and Clotho tried to comfort her, but nothing they said or did could erase the image of that little girl's horrified, partially destroyed face from her mind. She had killed many before, but this was the first time that she felt like a true murderer, a monster, loathsome and worthy of nothing but pain and death.
Eventually, the Host became aware of the fact that Atropos was neglecting her duties and sent a few down to speak with her.
"We understand that your job can be unpleasant," Zachariah said, high and mighty as ever. He reminded her unpleasantly of Raphael, and vaguely recalled Anna mentioning that he was a favorite of the archangel's. "But it must be done."
"There is a path to be followed," Uriel agreed with his superior. "And you must do it without flinching. If you don't do it, no one will." They were encouraging her, but Atropos knew that they may as well have been ordering her. If she continued to fail to do her job, they'd get a visit from Michael or Raphael next, and that would not be as pleasant.
The three angels that had accompanied Zachariah to earth were Uriel, Rachel and Castiel. When the meeting concluded, Zachariah turned on his heel and left the room, Uriel close behind (The sisters had the house semi-angel proofed, solely so that no one could pop directly into the house unannounced). Rachel had hesitated for but a moment, moved by Atropos' pain, but then followed after, slowing only when she saw that Castiel was still there. "Castiel?"
Castiel had always been an oddball amongst the Host, a bit on the naïve side, his head in the clouds (no pun intended). But he had a good heart, and he could clearly tell that the conflict in Atropos' heart was weighing heavily on her. He walked up to Atropos and gently touched her arm.
"It's God's will," He said softly. "And those who are good and righteous will find eternal peace in heaven, far more than they could ever know on earth." He seemed to think for a moment, but could muster nothing else to say. After a moment longer, he followed Rachel from the room and house and returned to heaven.
Needless to say, Atropos forced herself to get back to work.
Thousands of years later, killing was second nature to her. She had, after that incident, learned to numb herself to emotion and pain, learned to shut off everything and anything but her sense of absolute efficiency while she was working. Killings that would have bothered her deeply before barely registered as uncomfortable, and even then, it never showed.
All the same, though, Atropos was still not a sadist, and killing good people gave her no pleasure whatsoever.
In 2011, Balthazar- That bastard- had un-sunk the Titanic. Atropos had been quick to deduce that it was actually under Castiel's orders (though she wasn't unwilling to believe that Balthazar would un-sink a ship solely because he hated the movie), and had been nothing short of livid over it. How dare they? Wasn't it bad enough that Castiel and his pets had changed the future? Couldn't they leave the past alone?
Living with the future changed was bad enough, but the past was- and should be- written in stone. The only reason humanity hadn't been wiped out through one means or another thus far was because they- some of them, at least- managed to learn from the mistakes their species had made in the past.
Atropos had set to killing the descendants of the survivors with a fervor she'd never known. No one had ever been so bold, so reckless as to pull this off, especially not for such a conceited purpose. She took a certain degree of savage pleasure in killing the descendants of the survivors solely because it would piss Castiel off.
Atropos smartly crossed out Ronnie Gibbons, an English fisherman from her list, and automatically flipped her gaze down to the next name.
Duncan Jeffs.
And to the right, under 'occupation': Infant.
Atropos swallowed briefly, and felt a rush of shame.
Turning off her emotions for the sake of her job was one thing. But her fury with Castiel had made her forget that it wasn't right to take pleasure in the deaths of good people. Innocent people. Seeing that her next victim would be a mere infant was enough to remind her, enough to bring her up short and make her think about precisely why she was doing this.
Upholding the order was okay.
Revenge was not.
Upholding the higher order had a greater purpose.
Revenge was selfish.
Shaking her head and steeling herself once more, Atropos disappeared off to America to find her next victim, silently swearing to kick Castiel squarely in the ass for putting her through this.
-End