Title: Hope Dies Last
Fandom: Les Miserables, Supernatural
Summary: Everyone forgets that there were once seven archangels. Grantaire remembers, Grantaire can't forget. After all, Hope dies last. Grantaire just wishes 'last' would hurry the fuck up and happen already.
Characters: Grantaire, (Enjolras, literally the whole cast of Les Amis and Co. will show up later)
Pairing(s): future Grantaire/Enjolras, may pair up other Les Amis later on too (but canon like Marius/Cosette will remain true)
WARNING: All canon deaths and tragedies happen as they did in canon, Grantaire is bitter AF, and hates himself, and hates God, and really hates everything and everyone at some point, reincarnation, I mixed my imagination with real religious stuff, Sorry not sorry.
Disclaimer: Supernatural, the Bible, all other religious info about angels etc., and Les Mis, does not belong to me.
AN: None of this is Betaed by anyone but me so sorry for any mistakes. This is based on a) the fact that I always wondered where the other archangels were in Supernatural since there are typically seven with Lucifer not included in that count and Uriel was portrayed as not an archangel which makes only 3 or 4 out of 7 in Supernatural and b) the fic "Under My Wings You Will Find Refuge" by Fiver on ao3 (or tumblr, which I don't do) that I just read a couple days ago and love. GO READ IT! NOW!
Chapter 1: how long is the journey to understand ones own nature
Remiel is the Angel of Hope and so they hope that their brethren will not rebel and fight against their Father's commands. Remiel is also the Angel of Divine Vision and so they know that their brethren will rebel and fight against one another, for they have seen the whole of it. For all that hope is a weapon, sometimes used to fight off any number of negative emotions, it is primarily a shield. Hope is meant to protect; it wards of depression and guards dreams, it is meant as a boat to keep one afloat at sea regardless of how endless an ocean it may seem. Or perhaps it is just a piece of driftwood that floats by at the right moment to be grasped and clung to. Hope is not truly a weapon, not always. In this way Remiel is not a warrior, not truly, not always.
Of course all angels are soldiers. None more so than the archangels created to fight off the monsters that would consume the world if given the chance. But even that duty can be considered one of protection. So Remiel was always more comfortable fighting to protect someone, creation, humans, younger siblings of the Host, than for the purpose of their own personal rights.
They cannot support this rebellion. Not just because they are created to love and protect, not just because angels are create to follow and not lead (free will is for humans, and monsters or demons, but not angels, never angels, until, eventually, it is). Truly they cannot support the rebellion because they have seen how much beauty the humans will bring into the world. They have seen joy and love and sorrow and anger and so many things. The things the humans will bring into the world make their being burn in odd ways and what might have been tears run from the closest things they have to eyes at the moment.
The humans don't last long, true. They are petty and willing to deface Father's magnificent creation, true. They have not power like angels do and are miserably flawed, every one of them. But oh how they shine! Remiel Sees them. And Remiel falls in love with humanity before even Adam is created.
So no, when Lucifer starts talking of rebellion and a refusal to love man, Remiel can't support that cause. True loving Father is or has been their highest calling before, but now there are beings who will laugh and sing and dance and paint and create poetry. There are beings who will give birth to fragile infants they will love more desperately than anything in the universe. They will suffer broken hearts and live to love again. There will be great cruelty and great sacrifices. Some of these humans will love the Father better and more than any angel will ever manage. How can they refuse to love these little siblings Father will make for them? Remiel is the first angel to love mankind.
Remiel is the first angel to love mankind even more than they love Father. They are also the first angel to wish that they too could be human, could live as only a mortal creature can, to experience free will and creativity and emotions (and taste buds, they seem so interesting), most of all they wonder what it is like to need to do things before they run out of time. Time is such a foreign concept to a being who was created before there were planets to rotate stars and still has all of eternity to exist. Remiel finds themselves wondering.
Hope and Divine Vision are two very contradictory things. Or so it seems to Remiel. On one hand Remiel can See the truth of what is to come, a third of the Host will follow Lucifer and be cast out for the crime. Yet on the other hand Hope. There is always hope that maybe even just one of them will not make that choice to rebel. (It takes a few thousand years but eventually Remiel learns to stop hoping.) Remiel of course does not know every being at all times, nor do they See every event that will come to pass, they See only what they are meant to. They are the angel of Divine Vision which of course means visions sent from God.
When Father sends them the vision of their own future they are grateful. Father gives them a vision of them doing what they wish most to do: leaving Heaven behind and living on earth with humankind. When Father sends them, really allows them to go as Father sends them visions of the Host in rebellion and Remiel on either side along side the vision of Remiel going to earth so even Remiel can tell that Father is showing them the three paths they can take, Remiel flies and doesn't bother saying good bye.
One thing Remiel always trusts is their Vision. Even when they give up on hope they never give up when it comes to trusting what they See. Remiel knows that they must not let any of the other angels know where they have gone.
(Remiel does not know that Father has helped them hide by falsifying their death to the rest of the Host, because their Divine Vision does not show them that had any of the other angels known Remiel was still alive then Remiel would be killed by Lucifer after Gabriel or later by Castiel when they choose to purge the last of the archangels. Remiel does not know that their death sparks a war.)
They go to earth. They watch Adam and Eve be tempted by their brother. (They mourn their brethren who fell.) They watch Adam and Eve populate the earth. And one day, when the humans have grown plentiful enough that they do not all know each other well enough to tell that a stranger is not also human, Remiel joins them.
It starts like this: there is a girl. She is brave and bold and young but not very beautiful in the eyes of men. She allows a being calling itself an angel into her body. In return they share it. The two of them travel the world, and it is easy to do when one has the powers of an angel at their command, because that is what she has always dreamed of. They experience many things together and then one day she tells the angel she is tired of traveling and wishes to stay with a man they have met. She wants to settle down for love. And the angel is happy for her so they leave her body and watch over her family instead. Man and woman join, as these things go, and soon have children.
This is the line that ties itself to the angel, the family angel if you will. Stories will be passed down (mama shared with our angel for a time, your grandfather took our angel to war with him, our angel traveled with me for three years before I met your mother) and the angel will always have a willing vessel. Someone young and brave and wanting to travel, or scared and wishing for a companion in a dangerous time.
Because they are careful not to allow much of their Grace into the humans, careful to share and not burn out the soul already there, ever so careful not to stay too long, the angel never hurts one of their humans and never has to worry about a 'true' vessel (even though said true vessel will come of this line one day).
Because they cannot afford to have their full and true name spoken the angel calls themselves R.
Several thousands of years of this the angel and their family have migrated across continents, survived plagues and natural disasters, fought innumerable wars, and the angel is tired. They still love humanity but it has grown to be a distant faded love and they do not have as much hope in anything anymore. It is hard to hold onto hope when one sees suffering and pain and the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. R has learned that you can't stop them no matter how you warn, like silly children, each and every one of the humans wants to make each and every mistake, commit every sin, that their parents did before them.
R is tired but does not See themselves going back to Heaven or revealing themselves to any other angels or demons, so R stays with the humans. Slowly hope seeps away as they watch countless lives pass and end without purpose or meaning.
One day, not many years after the life of Christ has played out, a few hundred, no more than a thousand, the angel's true vessel is born. The boy has curly black hair and bright blue eyes, a rather common combination in their family. He's a stocky thing and grows up to enjoy fighting a bit too much as his nose is broken several times before he has lived a dozen years and it eventually heals crooked. He woos himself a wife from their village with little handmade trinkets, jewelry he twisted into being himself of leather scrap and pretty rock chips, and they are poor but content. They have three children when he is called away to war.
Not every generation feels an urge to call upon the angel. Some people are quite happy to live and die simple lives in simple villages and never see any more of the world. Until the end this boy was one of those people. The only time he calls R is when he lays dying on a battlefield, fighting for an cause he doesn't understand and an empire that conscripted him. All he asks of the family angel is that his wife and children be taken care of. He never wanted to travel, never needed adventures, and now his death has come early. Although they are bitter and jaded by this point, has seen so many millions of human die in pointless conflicts like this through history, R takes his prayer and fulfills it.
It is R who goes back to the village. R who tells their wife that her husband died and he is the family angel (it is a story the family freely shares with all new members). R who raises his children and pretends to age (illusions because he is the Angel of Divine Vision after all and can show people the things he wishes them to see) and eventually buries his wife. And one day all the children are grown up and the wife is dead and R leaves.
He goes to find how best to waste away eternity. R is tired. He does not hope.