Author's note: I just want to thank you all again for the lovely reviews. :D They really motivate me because, I guess I get excited to feed people more!
This chapter's a liiitle bit heavy, but it'll only make future parts sweeter, I promise. ;)
Don't forget you can read more regular chunks of this and discuss stuff in more depth over at my journal: hasu-hime. livejournal. com!
Something was manifesting over the coals, visibly stretching the air like a balloon and yet consuming all of the little surrounding light, creating a dense mass of darkness. It grew quickly, pulsing like a great, black heart, and Lucifer leapt between it and Audrey, sweeping her in against his lean frame just as it exploded in a supernova of emptiness, enveloping them in almost total sensory shutdown. The only things left that told her she was still alive were the thrashing against the inside of her ribcage and the rapid rise and fall of the heat-dampened torso she was locked against.
The crackling of the ground was gone; there was no divan beneath her, nor gravity to fix her down. A strange pressure expanded around them, and Lucifer's arms tightened. She froze in unadulterated terror as she felt the familiar, deceptive caress of her marine ex-boyfriend across her cheek, just like he used to touch her before he swung his fist. A sharp scratch on the crook of her elbow nauseated her as she recalled the price she once paid for her first and only hit of heroin. Her tears flowed freely and her breath came short and shallow, exactly as it had before; she could feel the dealer's hand slithering up the inner side of her thigh.
"Puella non tua," Lucifer snarled over her head. The silent, horrific attack continued. "SISTITE!" He bellowed into the vacuum as her weeping became cries of physical pain.
A brightness erupted around them, forcing the darkness back and eliciting a gasp from Audrey as the pain transformed into something else. The shadows retreated and dissolved until the cavernous room returned to the way it previously had been, leaving her breathless and weak but, comparatively, incredibly calm.
It lasted only the brief moment it took for the light to blow away the darkness, however, before Audrey was snatched from Lucifer's protection and hauled into the air by a mighty arm about her middle. She screamed in shock, though she knew precisely whom it belonged to. Struggling against it, she watched Lucifer's platinum-framed face shrink, full of fury, as she was stolen away. The huge, gloomy room seemed to slowly glaze over the higher she was pulled, like a window into another world.
Her mind swarmed with questions – some of which only Lucifer could answer, others, she suspected he could offer a less biased answer.
"No!" Audrey protested; "Wait!"
It was too late. They were surrounded by white mist, which diffused as Gabriel descended again to reveal the flat roof of the store below. She continued to push on his steadfast grip despite their altitude, enraged over a thousand different things.
He released her the second he landed, setting her down gently, but she stumbled a little anyway in her determination to break free. He turned to her, disorientated, as though she'd just told him that Hell wasn't really so bad.
"Did he hurt you?" His hands came up to cup Audrey's face but she took a step backward, raising her own in absent command.
She couldn't think straight. Nothing made sense; she had a billion reasons to hate Gabriel, and a billion more for his outcast brother, and yet she couldn't decide whether to deck or pity either of them.
Trying to pace her breathing and clear her thoughts, she looked around. The group of explorers looked on from the doorway of the supermarket; Jenny's fingers were wrapped around the handle of a shopping cart carrying Samson, still sleeping, while the others ducked to pick up things that had fallen off the mountain of food and supplies in another.
The prophecy; the key; her parents' incarceration; Lucifer's 'fall'; Audrey couldn't concentrate on any one issue. Her brain was an angry, frothing pot on a stove, overflowing with fat, glistening bubbles full of absolutely nothing. She'd still be none the wiser, she knew, because for the first time in her life she was thinking before she spoke. She couldn't bring herself to hurl cutting, accusatory questions at Gabriel; he was already acutely aware of his misdeeds. All he'd done was exactly as he'd been told, by the highest authority in existence.
She held her tongue, not even daring to look him in the eye, but her heart was too full of rage to contain – it had to disperse somehow. There was nothing for her to do but cry in exhausted frustration.
He moved to comfort her, and she turned and walked away, back toward the temple of He who had destroyed her life. Ironically, it was the only place she'd found any kind of solace since this madness had begun.
Gabriel was left standing in the middle of the road, feeling more lost than he ever had in all his millennia. He was sure she wept over the lies Lucifer had no doubt fed her, but he'd thought she were smarter than to listen to him.
He looked at the group once more before bending his knees and kicking off from the road, into his Father's bluest of midday skies. Recalling the protective way Lucifer had held her, as if trying to shield her from Satan's torture, he tried to piece the situation together. He doesn't want her dead, he construed; If he did, he's losing his touch – he's had plenty of chances.
Sailing aimlessly on the breeze, he cleared his mind of everything but Audrey. She obviously wished to be alone for a while; he wouldn't begrudge her a little space, despite the continuously increasing ache he felt without her in his arms.
He wondered if it was a similar kind of ache humans felt without God. He'd never been this long away from His side. It was strangely exhilarating, yet Gabriel couldn't help missing His physical presence. The thought of thousands of years of this feeling, as humanity had endured since Adam and Eve's defiance, made his heart heavy; he turned his thoughts back to Audrey.
The sound of her laughter at the statue over the cathedral door reverberated through his memory. He smiled at the endearing way she'd blushed over her noisy hunger pangs, and his breath hitched as he remembered the way she'd kissed him back upon the altar. He'd tried so hard to hide his disappointment when she'd pulled away, wishing feverishly for more. It wasn't the only thing he'd had to hide as he'd lifted her and carried them both up onto the balcony, either.
He faced the same sort of problem now, as he perched on the edge of the cathedral's topmost spire in the sunlight. Judging by its position, about an hour had passed since he'd left his love to walk away in tears. Gabriel closed his eyes and replayed the rescue from Hell over again in his mind, searching for what could have made her so angry with him. He knew he'd done something to upset her – she'd made that clear when she'd flatly rejected his embrace. Surely she wanted to be rescued, he conjectured; Had I not, the inconceivable agony would have killed her, and there'd be nothing even Lucifer could do.
His brother still had some residual angelic abilities, he knew, but the Elatio Divina was not one of them. Whatever protection from Satan's attack he may have been trying to provide her, he thought, climbing in through one of the bell tower windows and making his way down the spiral staircase, he could not provide light, for he has none.
As he closed the bell tower door behind him, Gabriel's eyes immediately pinpointed Audrey by the silvery glow of the new corona surrounding her fawn-brown head, invisible to her limited human vision, but blazing like a beacon across the pews to him. She'd been marked. She was now a part of a series of mysterious foretellings that neither he, nor the Lord himself understood.
She sat at the end of the front bench on the left, using the new supplies to tend Cecille's son's head wound. The boy, he saw as he drew closer, sat wide-eyed and calm upon his mother's knee, despite the sting of Audrey's touch against the cut. She was already using the gifts that came with sainthood, completely unaware.
Gabriel smiled down at her bowed, illuminated head as he rounded the end of the pew.
"You perform the duties of an angel well," he praised, watching her ministrations proudly.
"Yeah, that's me," she answered without looking up, her deadpan tone like a sudden lead weight in Gabriel's chest; "Human bandaid, makeshift angel – what exactly are the duties of an angel, anyway?" She looked up now, having secured a fresh dressing on the child's forehead. "To kick us down, or to care for us?"
She couldn't help herself. The dregs of bitterness inside her had festered in his absence, and after all he'd done he had the audacity to compare her to an angel. Audrey could see he was hurt, but so was she.
"To carry out God's will," Gabriel replied, almost sheepishly.
Her old, derisive nature reared its ugly head as she thought of the mindless, morality-deficient mob that had snatched her father from her very arms.
"I thought God's will was that the human race be slaughtered like the runt of the litter?" His head jerked back a little, as though she'd struck him. "God never asked me to do this, and it's not for His sake I do it."
She got up and began to climb the chancel steps, heading for the solitude of Jenny's sketch-strewn side chamber, but stopped at the top with a weary sigh.
"I've heard the phrase 'all Hell breaking loose'," she murmured over her shoulder, "but Hell was like a nice little vacation from what I've suffered at the hands of your kind. You don't expect that from the good guys."
A twitch of irritation sprung through Gabriel; an Apocalypse might not have been the best way to address the problem but it wasn't by any means unprovoked.
"Maybe that's what He got tired of," he defended.
"What," she laughed indignantly, turning back to face him, "being the good guy?"
"Being taken forgranted," he replied, unconsciously straightening up in authority. His fingers curled restlessly in waves as he fought to keep his temper.
"If patience isn't His thing he should never have created us," Audrey argued.
"I wouldn't know personally, but I'd imagine raising children is a difficult business."
"Only for hypocrites," she reiterated the opinion she'd given Lucifer. "Why is it that parents expect us to follow the rules, but they can break them without consequence? How can God lay down the law, yet get away with murder Himself? Tell me," she fumed, "how is that at all fair?"
Audrey's voice resonated throughout the cathedral now, but they were both oblivious of their audience.
"Humanity hasn't followed the commandments for thousands of years," he scoffed.
"Some still do! Some are still under the delusion that He loves us!"
Gabriel's handsome features softened in sympathy. His chest tightened at the thought: Is that it? He wondered. People don't believe because they doubt His love?
"He does love you," he reassured her softly; "He loves all of you."
"Bullshit! We're expendable to Him – He's just proven that!" Audrey didn't even care about maintaining the virus lie anymore. "We're just crops for the crows. This harvest didn't turn out so well – never mind, He can always plant more!"
"We should not question him," Gabriel countered, running out of viable contentions.
"Says who?" She scorned. "God? That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me."
"His wisdom is unparalleled," he claimed uncertainly.
"Yeah, that's how half the planet ended up dead, is it?"
Gabriel said nothing; there was nothing to be said. She was right, and there was no way around it. He brushed away the tear that charged down his cheek, ashamed that she'd managed to make him doubt the Lord. His Father was the only thing he'd ever been absolutely sure of.
He turned, stretching his wings abruptly, before soaring down the nave and disappearing through the front door, which the group had left open upon their return to combat the midday humidity in the atrium.
Fear gripped Audrey's heart as she realised what was happening. No, she prayed to the God she hated as she sprinted down the aisle after him; Fuck, no!
She lurched through the doorway, stopping just short of the steps.
"You swore you'd never leave me!" Hollering at the disappearing dot in the cloud-streaked sky, she wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly very cold. "I love you," she reasoned, but it was a whisper Gabriel never heard.
Glossary (I don't actually speak Latin so if anyone happens to, feedback would be appreciated!)
Puella non tua : The girl is not yours
Sistite : Stop it