A/N It admittedly gets a bit awkward when I ship a few Avengers pairs really hard, then realize I've made them all siblings. Hmmm.

VIII

Pastor Phillip Coulson wasn't entirely sure what he was meant to be doing. It was absolutely brilliant, of course, to be in a ship as grand as this one—to not only speak and sing of angels, but actually be in the presence of one, of six, seraphim. He actually could not quite process the fact that he was going through such an utterly surreal experience, and had to take several moments between each burst of action to find a place in which he could lean back, close his eyes and breathe and process everything that was crashing down on him at once.

One could say that he was honored. It was something close to honor, in any case—perhaps a little more than that. It had been enough to merely communicate with Raziel, and then to find Gabriel; no, both were overwhelming, practically worked his heart into overdrive. Utterly amazing to go through, yes, but also overwhelming. Though he had believed in the angels for as long as he could remember, it was a reserved sort of faith, something that he never believed would come into daily life, even after his registration at Holy Shield, a church which turned out to be quite far from ordinary.

Far from ordinary. Well, the exact opposite of ordinary. Violently abnormal.

It was in one of these moments of reclusion that Coulson found himself now, leaning against the splintered wall of one of the massive ship's distant hallways and running his hands obsessively over his shirtfront. At Fury's commands, he had reluctantly changed out of his pastoral robes, instead donning a loose, informal shirt that he had already managed to coat with dust and dirt. He rather wished for the soft comfort of the heavy fabrics that he was adjusted to while working, but he wouldn't disobey his superiors, and he certainly didn't want the angels to think that he was overenthusiastic. Well—he did hope to express enthusiasm, of course, but not pining, not... well, would that be better? Should he absolutely kneel before them? Was that the polite way to be doing this all? Should he—but, no, groveling would only look pathetic. He was their servant, not their pet. He... well...

"Pastor Coulson," a deep voice greeted.

"Ah—" Coulson's feet slipped on the very solid ground, and he found himself flailing slightly in an attempt to stay up straight, turning and looking up both at once with an expression caught between delight and terror: the result was wide eyes and parted lips, one hand grasping at the wall while the other caught the front of his shirt in an attempt to remain steady. "Ramiel! Or—sir, that is, your grace, um—"

Ramiel, standing tall with his hands and wings each folded, strong jaw high, paid no heed to Coulson's uncertain mumbling. "How aware are you of our current plans?"

"Uh, well, I haven't been... hearing much. That's Fury's job, I believe." Focus, Phil. Focus and you'll do much better. Don't strain yourself, though. Breathe, how about that? Just breathe. Alright, that's too much breathing. At least it's not Michael. There you go, keep talking. How does Maria stay so cool? He's staring at you. Keep talking. What did he ask? "That is, I know we have Lucifer, and that we need to know where the Tesseract is. But whether we want to... to torture him, or..."

"Not torture, no. Fury is very set against torture, and I likewise agree that it would be far too extreme."

Coulson found his eyebrows lifting, cutting into a forehead layered with nervous perspiration. He did wish that he could be as calm as Maria or Fury, both of whom seemed practically normal in the face of the angels, as though they weren't dealing with centuries-old phenomena, personifications of power and holiness—but, no, he couldn't start thinking about just how much was contained in the shell of the blonde man across from him, or he'd become overwhelmed once more. "Right, because... you still consider him your brother, right? That's why you were—" —Exiled. But he shouldn't have been talking like that, that was arrogant; he had no place in Ramiel's own affairs with the rest of his family. It was only Coulson's position to learn, and to respect above all. He had no right to scorn Ramiel for his choices, and he didn't, but it would be all too easy to convey the wrong impression, especially when he was this nervous already. "Well, anyways, yes. I agree. That torture is too extreme."

"Do you?"

"Oh, certainly. He's still human, after all. Well—he's not human, of course he's not. That was a figure of speech. A poorly used one. I'm sorry."

"...Very well." Ramiel sighed, and his pale blue eyes flickered briefly to the worn ceiling of the hallway before drifting back towards the floorboards. Coulson took a slow breath. Despite the power that radiated from every fiber of his holy being, there was something about Ramiel that seemed... tired, and he could almost sympathize. Of course it would be overwhelming for any being, surely—though he would never presume to know anything about the workings of the angels' consciousness, and perhaps he really shouldn't have been thinking anything like this in the first place—but the fact remained that, fundamentally, Ramiel was being thrust back into the center of a family that he disagreed with on a number of levels, for the purpose of capturing and perhaps hurting a brother whom he was still sure to love.

"I'm... sorry," Coulson found himself mumbling.

"Excuse me?"

If Coulson had not trained himself expressly out of using curse words, his mind would have been flooded with expletives. "Oh, nothing. It just must be very tiring, I'd think, to have to deal with... all of this, all of a sudden. After so many years of seclusion... I don't know, though, I'm nowhere to judge."

Ramiel shook his head. "It is not judging. You speak the truth, Pastor. It is a challenge for me, as it would be for anyone. Perhaps that is why I sought you out. You seem the least tense of all those on board."

The least tense. Coulson had to bite the edge of his tongue to stop himself from commenting on just how wrong Ramiel really was; he couldn't possibly critique the angel's observations, after all. And yet Ramiel was wrong. If a single being on the ship was more stressed than Coulson was, he was amazed that they hadn't gone into some sort of panicked shock at this point.

"You don't believe me," Ramiel noted.

"Well, I—"

"You miss my meaning, Pastor. You are certainly afraid. Of many things. Of us, perhaps? Of Lucifer. Yet you do not hide it, from us or from yourself. That is very brave of you, Phillip Coulson. You will go far in that way. I do believe that many of us could learn from the way you behave."

"Learn—you? No, no, I'm sure that—not to—"

His desperately modest words fell on empty, dusted air; Ramiel was gone.

"Raziel."

Lucifer sighed the name through unmoving lips, his golden eyes hidden beneath thin, milky lids. A slow smirk wandered up the corner of his mouth as the last syllable dissipated from his tongue, lingering in the air for several instants beyond when his voice faded. He knew that she heard, and equally that she wasn't surprised. His sister was smart. She knew that even she couldn't enter the room without his being aware.

"Lucifer," she replied. Her tone was more of a shove than a caress; she had no mind to savor the moment. She was probably displeased that he was here at all, though he was nowhere near foolish enough to believe that such was due to her actually caring about him. She wished that it was all over. And the reason for that desperation, to him, couldn't be clearer.

Perhaps she knew he was aware, just as she had been conscious of the way he detected her. He wouldn't be surprised. As two of the most acutely intelligent of all of the angels' ranks, the siblings had an odd connection, regardless of the fact that she had been little beyond a child when he was first cast down. He remembered her, respected her for the mighty being that she was. And somewhere, deep inside, buried beneath all the bitter notions that their other brothers and sisters had fed her, she felt the same way towards him.

"I didn't think you would come," he commented honestly, still not opening his eyes to look at her. She was doubtlessly staring at him, or at least what she could glimpse behind the walls of shifting fire, but he felt no self-consciousness. There was nothing that she could possibly garner from his appearance alone. "What on or below Earth could have summoned you to me now?"

"I want to talk."

"About?"

"About Uriel."

The breath that he did not need escaped him in a low sigh, rippling with the smoothest of dark giggles. Uriel. Oh, but of course it would be Uriel. Slowly, he let his eyelids lift, lashes hanging low over green and gold stained irises as he regarded Raziel. She was stiff, still strictly confined to her vessel, with even her wings tucked into invisibility and her weak, pale human chin held high in an attempt at strength.

"You're concerned about your brother," Lucifer chuckled, watching her eyes for any sort of response. They remained hard, well aware that they were his fixation, but he noticed other barely perceptible giveaways: the faintest quiver of her lips, a hot breath pulsing in her throat. "You still care about one of them, at least."

"Hardly. It isn't an unreasonable care. I owe him for several things... he helped me achieve the power that I possess today. It would be weak of me not to utilize that in order to help him."

"Yet your current actions require the utilization of no power whatsoever. Instead, you resort to petty bargaining. Oh, Raziel... it is a shame, don't you think?"

"It is not a shame at all," she contradicted. To her credit, he noted, she was remaining incredibly calm, her red hair not so much as swaying around her pale cheeks: a sign that she was managing to hold her vessel in perfect steadiness. She really was dedicated to this, then; not just performing such an action out of obligation. She really did believe that her position was to save Uriel—to save him from a menace that she wasn't even aware of. Raziel had no idea of just how much pain Uriel was in, just how agonizing it was to be trapped within one's own mind and soul, twisted and distorted into a creature of repulsion, of constant, unending internal conflict, of pure, primitive pain...

"Perhaps not. In any case, it is a futile effort. I can do nothing for you. I owe you neither information about Uriel, nor a confirmation of his well-being. For all you know, he may be dead."

He threw the words like arrows over his shoulder, not bothering with the bow of an acid tone, knowing quite well that the truth would hurt her no matter the way he pronounced it. She took a sharp breath—perfect, then; he had actually managed to penetrate the perfect stillness of her vessel. Admirable on his part.

"He will not," she protests. "You can still use him. You wouldn't waste an angel."

"Oh, no, but I'm sure he would prefer nonexistence at this point, darling. What he's experiencing now, it is worse than Hell... and I can promise that is quite literal, as I've spent a good deal of my years in the place." He tilted his head to regard her more fully, savor the desperate half-terror that was beginning to clasp her features. "Of course, I may kill him eventually... but you have just provided a manner in which I might enjoy myself all the more thoroughly beforehand. You see, I can use you first, Raziel. I can take him, take his mind, and implant within it the brutal desire to kill you. To rip you apart, to scorch your eyeballs out with holy fire, to lattice your pretty pale skin with iron, to choke and drown you in oil... to set you aflame, and only then, as he watches you burn, will I allow him to wake fully, to be aware of what he has created. He will hear your screams as you blaze into ash, sweet sister, and then... then, as he tears his throat open with the volume of his own sobs... only then will I allow him to die. To find peace... though angels don't at all, do they? There is no return to Heaven. Instead, he will no longer exist. He will be forced out of reality and into nothing. He will vanish like a shadow under the sun, and then, maybe then, your debt will be repaid. Just how does that sound, then, my sister?"

A gasp flew from her lips like blood from a stab wound, and her shoulders jerked once, trembling fingers rising to move over her jaw, trace her cheekbone as if eradicating from it the all-too-human liquid that Lucifer knew she could never release. "You're... you truly are an abomination," she breathed, words muffled through the tangle of her shaking hands. Her eyes fixated on the ground rather than on him, and he felt a grin tickle his own still lips.

"An abomination? Me? Oh, but I am not the monster of us all. You know who that is... you know very well who that is. Only one of us is anywhere near an abomination, Raziel, and that someone is not myself."

She took another breath, this one steadier, and her shoulders flickered once more, as if rearranging the wings that he could sense only on the edge of his perception. Then, slowly, she lifted her head more fully, red locks falling away to expose an expression of almost bored neutrality.

Lucifer felt his vessel's stomach jerk.

"Ezekiel," Raziel noted. "You think that you can use Ezekiel against us."

"Whatever would compel you to believe something like that?" Lucifer spat, desperation climbing in his tone despite his continuous attempts at coolness. There was nothing to be done, though; he had, surely enough, revealed himself, and she knew it quite well. Barred by the leaping tongues of golden flame, Lucifer was restrained to little beyond an infuriated hiss as his sister turned on her heel and snapped out of visible existence.

Ezekiel himself was in a room tucked into the higher reaches of the ship, one humming with a number of gilded instruments, some of them even constructed by his companion: Gabriel, who stood at his side, massive wings finally sheathed so as not to disrupt any of the delicate machines that surrounded them. The two were oblivious to their sister's doings however far below them, choosing instead to fixate on what they needed to: attempting to detect the location of the Tesseract.

"It really is tricky," Gabriel mused, running his fingers over a fragile craft that rather resembled a bronze weathervane. "It's a very unique substance, but there are plenty of unique substances out there..." The thin beam of the vane began to circle slowly, almost lazily, despite the fact that his hand wasn't making a single movement. "We can't search for the material itself, as we aren't aware of what it exactly consists of. Yet it's also unwise to conduct a scan for all unknown elements, because that... that will lead to billions of results, even on this planet alone. It's almost annoying, how many phenomena and freaks of nature there are floating around out there."

"Mm." Ezekiel had his eyes trained on a large disc of glittering glass-like substance, rainbows dancing around its golden rim. Gabriel's own gaze shifted over to his partner's, and a wry smile curled his lips.

"Right, freak of nature. Sensitive subject."

"Hardly... what I am is nothing near natural."

"On the contrary"—apparently growing impatient, he snapped up the vane between two of his fingers and cast it into a twirling motion that it somehow maintained, its tip cutting a sharp glinting path through the still air of the machine room—"just about everything is natural, when you get down to it. There's no force at the root of anything but nature. Well, and Dad, but they're pretty much the same."

Whatever response Ezekiel might have had was cut off by the entrance of Fury, who stepped into the room with no hesitation, his long black coat snapping and rippling behind him. "Any progress?" he inquired. Before the wide wooden door could creak shut, he was followed by Ramiel and Raziel, both of their faces fixed into expressions of deliberation, presumably over the same subject. In Gabriel's opinion, it really was a lot of fuss—yes, of course Lucifer was a big deal, but they did have him captured now, and if they could find the Tesseract themselves, they wouldn't even need him to release its information. They could find it, too—it might take a while, perhaps a couple of decades, but there was nothing to stop the fire burning. Humans were hopelessly impatient. Humans and Ramiel and his sister.

"Not much," Gabriel opted to speak up when Ezekiel remained silent, gazing curiously at his own expression in the glass, the reflected shine of acid green that he hadn't thought to be visible in his eyes. "We've narrowed its location down to the billions, if that helps."

Raziel exhaled heavily, her lashes drifting down momentarily to obscure her gaze. There was, Gabriel noticed, something taxing her—something beyond the usual flicker of tension that he had grown used to being present on his little sister. She was being strained, somehow; whatever it was quite possibly related to Lucifer, but he couldn't identify what that thing could possibly be. She was at least as clear-minded as him, and surely would be perfectly aware that they were in no immediate danger—unless, of course, she knew something that they didn't, but that was highly unlikely.

"It doesn't help," Fury growled unnecessarily. He took a pace closer to Ezekiel and narrowed his single eye towards the looking glass, as though he could possibly understand the complex twinings of light and shadow that danced about its crystal curve. "We need results."

"We're trying to get results." Despite himself, Gabriel was beginning to feel annoyed—more than annoyed, in fact. Fury had no right to be so arrogant, especially when he was doing nothing beyond commanding the angels, shoving them to one place or another. If he wanted results, perhaps he ought to try at them himself—Gabriel wasn't particularly bothered by the idea that it would take several of Fury's lifespans for him to so much as understand the complexities of the instruments they were using, much less utilize them.

"Perhaps you should try harder, then."

"Try harder so that you can let us down?"

The new voice, rich with the angelic power that the other tried so hard to suppress, broke through the uneasy pause like an axe, and the five other occupants of the room turned to see Michael standing precisely in the middle of it, golden head high, a stack of stapled documents clutched between his fingers.

"Would you like to explain this?" he inquired sharply, and the piercing direction of his azure gaze wasn't needed to communicate that he was speaking to Fury. The pastor, in fact, wasted no time in pretending that he wasn't aware of what was confronting him—quite to the contrary, he released a long sigh and lowered his head, a tension that Gabriel hadn't even noticed seeping slowly from his shoulders.

"We hardly plan to let you down," he began.

"Wait—slow down," Gabriel commanded, and, despite his best efforts, a hint of his true power leaked into his voice, giving it a shadow of its natural resonance that he knew would begin to throb against Fury's skull. "What are those?"

Rather than bothering with a spoken response, Michael delivered the information directly into Gabriel's mind—and those of the rest, as well, judging by the widening eyes and tensing lips that the ring of angels quickly grew to possess. Fury took a slow breath, and Gabriel, bombarded with brutal knowledge, found his teeth clenching, a sudden viper of anger rearing inside of him as he regarded the pastor.

"You want to use it on us?"

"No," Fury replied immediately, before another one of them could get a single word out. "No, I absolutely do not. The Tesseract is a very valuable item, and there are all manner of things that humans could do with it... one of them being to—"

"To restrain angels like me."

Ezekiel, unlike Gabriel and Michael, didn't sound angry in the least. Instead, his tone was soft, almost velvet, so smooth that it caught Gabriel twice as aware as the fury in his older brother's had. There was a reserved well of subtle menace to the dark-haired angel's words, and Fury, from his widening eye, was just as conscious of it as the rest of them.

"It was an old plan. We scrapped it years ago, practically before it was formed. I don't even know how—"

"It was deep in your archives," Michael growled, "which were transported to this ship, along with all other surviving items of the church's extensions. Perhaps you would not have been able to find it at this point, but it is foolish to attempt to hide anything from an angel."

"We weren't trying to hide it!" Fury insisted, his tone gaining volume but still remaining far from aggressive, in contrast to that of the much more powerful being who glared so bitterly at him. "It's nothing. It's... it's scrapped," he repeated, pulling forth the same word once more out of pure desperation.

"To restrain angels like me," Ezekiel began again, just as steadily, as though he had never been interrupted in the first place. All stares snapped back to his, and a humorless smile drifted over his pale lips as he began to recite the information that Michael had poured hotly into his mind. "Those documents are emails. Communication between you and your associate pastors—Coulson, Hill, a few others. You suggested the idea of using the Tesseract to your own advantage. To the humans' advantage."

"I—"

"You thought that it could be useful not only in restraining demons, but, as you phrase it, volatile angels... I'm not cited as a precise example, yet... the alliance between us and the Holy Shield has not always been two-sided, has it? You call upon us now when you require our services the most, but all this time you have been plotting against us."

"Not all this time!" Fury insisted, the syllables ringing with emphasis. "Nothing near all this time. You must understand, all of you—these emails are from several years ago. I was younger, and I was more foolish, and I was afraid. Admittedly very afraid of you angels, and of your power. I respected you, I worshiped you, and yet I feared you. So I sought a refuge, as did my associates. I am sure, absolutely positive, that none of us would ever have followed through with the plan if we could. At that point, we weren't even sure what the Tesseract did—the theory of its being a key to Hell was one of thousands, and was forgotten long before the truth was revealed. It's by mere coincidence that our suspicions were correct. Coincidence. Nothing beyond that. Every one of us are wiser men and women now, and I can assure all of you that you are in no danger—no, that we are in no danger of the consequences that would come along with trying to work against you in the slightest."

The silence was a solid entity, settling over all of their shoulders, and Gabriel dragged in a slow breath to sustain his vessel, though his mentality was so perfectly ice-steady already that it was far from needing the support of additional oxygen. For several seconds, there was no sound at all but the rough, stifled jerks of Fury's own half-gasps, elevated by the heat of his arguments. The noiselessness was as pure as crystal, and then the fire exploded forth.