IX

The heat was furious against Raziel's cheeks and forearms, not burning, but instead immersing her in the suffocating totality of absolute raging warmth, cloaking the nose and stinging the eyes of her weak vessel with unforgiving smoke. She was so utterly consumed by the burst of vividness around her that she barely noticed she was falling; her wings, even if she had thought to extend them, wouldn't have been worth the risk, anyways. Though there was no sharp pain against her skin at the moment—she noticed this somewhere in the back of her mind, the part that wasn't utterly wrapped around the panic frothing inside of her despite her best efforts to remain calm—there was still a change that some element of this orange and gold tempest was holy fire, and she couldn't afford to lose her most powerful weapon against Lucifer and anything else that might ever pit itself against her.

She was falling, though—as soon as this thought fully formed in her mind, she was hitting the ground, feeling the impact of powerful wood against her bones as if from a distance. It was dangerous to distance herself from her vessel's sensations, as this could lead to considerable damage being dealt to her without her knowledge, but she had no time for the distraction of pain right now.

Still, gray and black pulsations attacked her eyes for several more seconds, and it took a long handful of dredging gasps to gather herself together to the point of becoming aware of the set of her jaw. The bone had been knocked aside by its impact with the wood, twisting the muscle; suspending the wince of annoyance that would only worsen the injury, she took a brief half-instant to concentrate the power of her heavenly grace on rearranging the damaged area, fixing it back into its proper position.

There. She had bruises and scrapes aplenty besides that, but she could take care of them later, once she had a better idea of what was going on.

Slowly, breathing in shallow huffs despite the fact that the smoke was mostly gone by now, she brought herself up onto her knees and elbows. A few coughs seized her pathetic human lungs, before she cooled them with another burst of grace out of pure annoyance. Better, but there was still a scintillating pain at the back of her head, one that she couldn't quite manage to shake.

What had happened?

She had been in the room with Gabriel and Ezekiel, had entered at the foot of Ramiel. Fury was there... yes, that was it; and recollection came to her now in a vivid flash, drowning out every other one of her uncertain streams of thought and uniting them into one sharp flow. Fury was there, and Michael arrived in the middle of the pointless discussion they'd been sharing in order to tell them what he'd found in the Holy Shield archives that had been transported onto the ship. Documents—documents proclaiming that Fury and the other priests intended to use the Tesseract to confine rogue angels to hell, where they'd suffer for all of eternity alongside their damned, rotten counterparts.

Anger reared like a snake inside of her. How dare he? There wasn't the slightest fragment of doubt in the whole of her galaxy-spanning being that she was one of those angels who would be classified as, by Fury's precise word, volatile. She certainly obeyed Heaven often enough—being the designated secret-keeper, it would be disastrous if she weren't to—but, when not on a specific mission, she had no problem with doing what she missed. Much as she attempted to value human lives, she supposed she'd thrown away a few in her time. More than a few, honestly, but she never counted those who discovered what she was and attacked her first; she hadn't had any choice with them.

Regardless, there was mortal blood on her hands, and that would be more than enough to throw her to the status of an outlaw, if the Holy Shield pastor and his ranks had any say in it, or so it would seem. Yes, Fury had said that none of it was true, that he wouldn't dream of doing such a thing to them... but how much faith could be stored in his words, truly? Raziel's stomach burned and oozed with pure repulsion at the thought, and, swamped as she was in disgust, it took nearly a full second for her to turn her mind around again, orient it properly towards the thought of what had happened in the time since Fury's inadvertent revealing.

Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't the doing of him or any of the other humans, she knew. The flames that still sang around her now were far more dangerous to humans than they were to her, and she knew quite well that they would only destroy any person who dared to set them. No, there was something else interfering with their ship—perhaps Lucifer, though she couldn't imagine how he could possibly do something as stunning as set the vessel on fire from where he was confined. Lucifer—

And then the other thoughts came to mind, burning her all down her spine. For it was unmistakably the truth, and even her consideration of it seemed to cement it into definite reality, grinding against her recently healed skull, trembling along each of her ribs as though they were little beyond a human child's xylophone.

Uriel.

It had to be Uriel—and perhaps Selvig, but a task this massive could only truly be the doing of an angel, and he was the only one operating under Lucifer. Just the memory of her gold-eyed brother's words less than an hour earlier caused Raziel's eyes to narrow and her teeth to glint in the low light of the dying flames—his threats, his promises to hurt Uriel, to kill him only after he killed her...

She wouldn't think of that now, though. If Uriel was here—and she knew he had to be, somehow felt it in the electrified crackle of the air despite the fact that his telepathic signature would be unrecognizable at this point—if he was here, then she had a chance of getting him back, of rescuing him from whatever disgusting possession Lucifer had clasped him within.

Find Uriel. That was what she would do, then. The motivation fueled her easily to her feet, arms spanning out to provide proper balance in the absence of her still-hidden wings, and she took a long breath through her teeth, squinting around. She had fallen through the destroyed floor of the instrument room—sure enough, there were shattered golden fragments strewn amidst the bruised wood and siftings of ash lying around her. The fire had dulled now, but a thick layer of smoke obscured the fracture that she had fallen through, blocking her off from whatever might be seen above. The result was that she was in a very confined space indeed, practically blinded by the redundancy of gray and orange, and, despite herself, she couldn't quite manage to retract the long tendrils of her supernatural perception from the far recesses of the ship, which she probed again and again for any sign of the being that was once Uriel—rendering her, of course, nearly blind to her present situation.

Perhaps it was for that reason that she didn't realize she wasn't alone until she heard the snarl.

Her throat tightened as it wound through the air, raking invisible claws down her spine, and her pale eyelids slowly closed, so as to better optimize her other senses. There was someone else here, down with her. Something else.

Panting breaths. Then another hissed snarl, this time more high-pitched, narrowed into desperation. It wasn't human, certainly, but wasn't angel, either—too powerful to be a demon; she didn't need the sharp return of her seraphic awareness to know all too well what was slowly rising behind her.

Ezekiel.

She turned in a single swift movement, red hair slapping her cut cheeks, and her eyes locked on others—blank of pupil or sclera, but instead a solid veil of shrieking acid green, absolutely unrecognizable as the stare of her brother.

"Ezekiel," she got out, her gaze fluctuating over the rest of him—his shoulders were pulsing, near thrusting forth his wings, but he was still keeping them restrained; that meant that some part of him was still sane, still breathing beneath the monster that his wild grace was twisting him into.

"Ezekiel, it's alright. It's going to be alright. We're going to get out of this." Her firm vocal tone was only present in order to appeal to the more animal aspect of his nature; deep inside, she was firing each syllable forth with enough power to crush a small pyramid, pressing hard and fierce into his skull and whatever traces of reason might still be contained within it. Thoughts of Uriel hadn't fled her mind, but rather skated somewhere towards the back, where they huddled in seclusion, waiting for her to get herself out of the current situation, so that she could then worry about the concern of finding the angel who wasn't thrusting her into immediate, life-threatening danger.

Ezekiel groaned—a slow, eerie wail, building from behind his clenched teeth. His hands spasmed, fists flying wide until his fingers were sprawled out, clawing against the air. She tried voicing his name once more, striking forth with the energy of a thousand lightning bolts; Ezekiel—

"Ezekiel—"

His wings burst forth in a shuddering explosion of dark gray, shot through with twistings of that same awful pale green like poisoned veins laced under the thick, quivering feathers that arched above and around his lowered head. They flew wide, reaching what had to be at least a fourteen-foot expanse, then snapped together again, the force of a gale contained inside the brief beat. Raziel found herself tripping backwards, her throat sealed off and her wide blue eyes unblinking, the demented tempest of black and green reflected in their slow shine.

Ezekiel...

He roared, voice thundering forth in a noise that could be likened to the speech of neither human nor angel. It was a primitive call that shot terror through even Raziel's hardened blood, fueled with nightmares and pure anger, and she found herself turning, knowing in every part of her mind that the only thing left to do was run.

Run. Dodging pillars of flame, choking on smoke, forcing her legs to the point that might have torn the muscle were they not reinforced by her presence within them—run, run, run, but it still wasn't quite fast enough, and she knew that he would catch her any moment, knew from the crashes and shrieks of him coming from behind her like a material wrath, destroying each of the obstacles that she so carefully avoided, ripping the ship to shreds.

Ezekiel—

His name raged through her mind in cursed repetition, unable to steady itself, its distinct syllables the only thing she could hang on to in the storm of chaos that everything had suddenly become for her. The hallways of the ship that she had once thought herself familiar with seemed to go on forever, veering up and down and sideways, and still she pressed forth—it would have been easier, much easier if only she could release her wings, but, despite instinct's scream, every remaining scrap of rationality that she possessed reminded her that she couldn't risk them, she couldn't. For all she knew, this could be some sort of sick trap... still surely set by Lucifer, or one of his attendants...

This was it.

The knowledge hit her in a short, static burst, and a gasp of muted fear fell from her lips, resulting in a stumble that nearly sent her into Ezekiel's blind grasp.

Lucifer—his plan to unleash Ezekiel, to turn the deadly powerful angel's venom against those who were meant to be his allies... somehow, through physical triggering that must have come with the destruction of the ship by one of the Devil's lieutenants, that was what was beginning.

The realization, rather than terrifying her yet farther, cast a slow film of gray calmness over her previous panic. Of course. Lucifer was behind this, as he seemed to be behind everything; Ezekiel, beneath his shell of chaos, was good, and what she had to do was pierce past the resilient ferocity of his demented form and seek that last shade of kindness that dwelt underneath. However—and she knew this now, as she ran—doing so would be a near-impossibility. The safer course was to keep moving, but she couldn't forever; at some point, inevitably, she would have to turn and face him.

Her anxieties were cut off by a blast of thunder.

The sound preceded the shot of golden shadows that suddenly twisted and flexed around the hallway before her, throbbing before they condensed into the steady form of a broad-shouldered man, his head ducked but blue eyes still glittering powerfully. Snow-white wings extended like massive banners from his powerful sides, and clutched in the broad fingers of one hand was a hammer, its head heavy and silver, handle wound in leather that shone dimly, illuminated by his grace.

Ramiel.

"Brother," Raziel choked out, but he needed no cue—already, he was pulling back his arm, muscles straining around a thin layer of sweat, and then his hammer was swinging forwards, slicing across the path between his sister and the renegade Ezekiel, stopping the green-illuminated angel in his tracks. Ezekiel's teeth gleamed faintly lime as his jaws parted in a marrow-chilling howl of fury, but Ramiel was unfazed; he knew that this was what he had to do. He didn't need Raziel's brief flash of telepathic information to inform him that she was off to find Uriel. He was just as aware as her that the archer was the only one who could have set the ship forth towards the devastation that still gnawed away at its structure, and he equally knew, even ignorant as he was of the complexities concerning his estranged siblings' relationships, that she was perhaps the only one who could stop him, pierce through the cloak of ignorance and cruelty that Lucifer had wound tight around his mind.

Ezekiel, recovering from the initial shock of having the weapon thrust before him, was regaining his momentum, ragged dark wings pulsing and shining with burst after burst of static green energy. The acid-hued cloud consuming him now was unlike anything that Ramiel had ever seen, and he knew, beyond anything else, that it was dangerous, despite the fact that its appearance wasn't shrouded in the gold he'd come to associate with Lucifer, with evil. Whatever Ezekiel had transformed into now wasn't evil—on the contrary, it was remarkably natural, and perhaps that was what was so terrifying about it. He now was neither seraphic nor demonic, but instead something rawer, something lower than human, something born from the very depths of the primitive, iron-wrought Earth that their father had forged so many millennia ago.

What Ramiel confronted now was a beast of the ages, harnessed between the velvet wings of the creature he had once called brother.

He could afford to see Ezekiel as nothing but an enemy.

This thought flaming through his mind, he slipped forwards, his legs tilting sideways as he raised his hammer once more towards the center of his quarry's forehead. Ezekiel dodged easily and ducked around to his other side, where there was nothing to stand between him and the last red flash of Raziel's retreating form—rather than pursuing his sister, however, he flipped back towards Ramiel with a bellow. Ignorant of a creature as he was, he could do nothing like hold onto a single target for any extended period of time. Instead, he turned all of his pale emerald attention towards the being who was currently assaulting him: Ramiel.

"Give up, brother," the blonde-haired angel panted, his shoulders hanging heavy with the exertion of a mere few thrusts of his hammer, which remained, beside Michael's shield, one of the most powerful objects to exist in this plane or any other. "You are destroyed. You must wait until sanity finds you—"

Ezekiel had no desire to wait.

Frothing, his eyes twin green tempests, he hurled himself directly towards Ramiel, all the strength of his supernaturally reinforced stature contained in the single swift movement. Ramiel's mind flashed like the lightning that he knew so well, and, in an instant, he had swung around, wings tearing through the oxygen particles that formed the air, hammer arching in the opposite direction and soon colliding directly with the ripped shirt that sheathed Ezekiel's chest.

The impact, as the hammer with the shield had been, was momentous, a strange violet wave pulsing under his vision as his arms trembled furiously, absorbing the last traces of might that had gone into mustering the swing. Ezekiel drew in a ragged gasp, his form trembling in the half-second that it possessed before he crashed to the ground in an ungainly heap, releasing a wail of distress as soon as his head collided with the rough wooden floor; the boards had fallen away, exposing the splintered skeleton of the ship, and even its grace-strengthened structure shuddered under the weight.

Without thinking, Ramiel continued to push forwards, shoving the silvered head of the hammer into the part of the chest where the breastbone of his brother's vessel lay. The lungs beneath it, useless to the being trapped inside of them but fluttering with pure desperate instinct, heaved three or four times, then slowly relaxed.

Ramiel exhaled, suddenly aware of the sweat that ran under his hair and down his back, staining the inside of the loose, light clothing that he'd never bothered to change out of. As he rose to his full height, he noted Ezekiel's eyes—twin points of acid green, fixated on him with what now appeared to be an almost eerie calmness. The horrific creature was still awake, still stifling the consciousness of the angel lingering beneath, but Ramiel knew it couldn't last for much longer. He had extinguished, or at least suppressed, the anger, and there was nothing to be done now but wait, as the beast was unable to move, and wait for Ezekiel to fade back into his vessel's mind.

"I am sorry, brother," he murmured to the blank, pupil-less orbs that rolled and shifted, as if tilting about his image, appraising it from every angle. No words emerged from the pale lips, nor any sound at all, even the unintelligible snarls that Ramiel could still hear echoing through his skull after the brief but bone-shaking tussle. "To be trapped within yourself... why, it must be a whole new definition of hell."

Ezekiel did not respond, but his eerie, silent eyes shone brighter than ever.

Uriel was close.

This was the one thing that Raziel knew for certain as she pressed onwards through the hallways. She had reached the less destroyed sector of the ship, where only the faintest charring showed around the edge of the walls and painted ceiling, and an unshakable stillness clasped the air. In absence of pursuit, her heart beat too slowly, too steadily, and it was all she could do to keep her breath a measured motion, not to force the silence into nonexistence with the interruption of hasty lungfuls of air. She didn't need to breathe at all, of course, but it had somehow become a comfort, and she needed that steadiness now, even if it did have to be noiseless. It was nice this way. Even.

She was alert, and she would know—had to know—if anything was approaching.

Nothing was, for now. So she continued onwards, one foot after another, following not any psychic trace of Uriel, but instead pure instinct; she had always been closer to him than her other siblings, and they ended up behaving somewhat like twins, despite being some centuries apart in their actual age. Hide-and-seek was a loved game even among the seraphim, and they had always managed to find each other easily, despite the adamant, unspoken rule never to trace one another... she could do that now. He wasn't himself, yet he was still buried within the wrappings of his vessel, somewhere deep down, and it was that spark that she sought out now, counted towards with each breath and footstep.

Yet before she could quite detect it, the spark erupted into a flame.

It crashed against her ears and eyes and every other sense all at once—nothing near as consuming as the literal fire that had devastated the ship mere minutes before, but somehow all the more impactful for the way it blazed against her. Uriel—she knew it was him, could taste his presence underneath the panting bitter exterior that shoved her against one of the ship's walls now, the motion so aggressive that she could feel a few of the boards straining and even splintering behind her shoulders.

"Uriel." She hissed his name out through aching lips, drawing air past the blockage that the hard bone of his arm forced against her throat. Eyes were fixated on hers, the only thing she could see—not the flint blue ones that she knew so well, but rather glazed pools of stark gold, a shade she could liken only to the one she had detected in the depths of Lucifer's glare. "Uriel, I know it's—I know—"

For the briefest, briefest second, something inside of him shuddered, and then she was shoving forth, twisting him around until their position was reversed, and it was her marble-strong fingers wrapped around his throat, holding him in place. Articulate thoughts had long since fled her mind, but other motivations still sang through it, wordless yet brilliant—don't hurt. Restrain. He doesn't know. Make him know. His head—it's in his head. Lucifer.

"Uriel!" she exclaimed again, and this time it was a roar, bracing against her own ears and straining her throat. There was still no reaction beyond the slightest half-loosening of his muscles, and that only for a tiny fragment of a half-second before he surged forth once more, all of his unnatural strength pounding against her.

"This isn't you," she forced out, but the last syllable was flattened by one of his knees, suddenly up and in her stomach. She released a yowl of frustration as her pathetic human vessel curled and tumbled backwards, back stinging against the floor. He stood over her now, staring down, unaware—inside of him was Lucifer, and all Lucifer wanted was—

For him to kill her. She could remember his words, now—his horrible words, sending waves of torment through her; for it hadn't been acting, when she was horrified; not at all. The acting came later, when she mustered an even expression, pretended not to care—pretended not to care that she was being torn apart from the inside out at the mere image of her and Uriel being put through such twin torture, but not it was more than an image, now it was fact and it was boring down on her with all the weight of his eyes as he took one half-step closer, bending before her, the powerful tendons of his forearms standing out sharp against skin as he flexed his fingers, prepared to secure them around her whitened neck, extinguish the breath that her vessel now forced her to pull in desperately, heave after heave.

Uriel...

But his name was no help. Not now.

She had to take action.

At last, after suppressing them for so long as they ached against her, her wings flew forth behind her, beating down against the thin sheaf of air between her body and the floor, launching her up into the air high above him. Her heart rang out without noise as she brought a leg back, and there was only time for Uriel's features to soften in what might have been the slightest beginnings of doubt before she lunged forward, her foot colliding with his forehead and extinguishing the gold from his eyes like rain would a fire.