Chapter Text
Michael is falling.
He is falling too fast for his thoughts to keep up. There is wind, and pain, and he spreads his wings to try and slow his descent, to pull out of this plummet, but the moment his bad right wing catches the rush of heated air, it twists and crumples. Michael screams as blinding pain erupts along the now-useless limb, radiating from the point of attachment where there is a hideous sensation of tearing. His other wing flaps desperately for a moment, but that only sends him into a spin, making him even more disoriented than he already is. He tries to pull his wings in tight, but only one responds. The other vibrates and snaps like a flag in a hurricane and he can’t feel anything other than the thrumming agony.
Why am I falling…?
Michael remembers being angry at Samael…but when has that not been true? They fought…of course they fought. There is a stripe of pain across his face, almost lost in the blare of agony from his wing. A memory flashes of Sam with a demon blade…dragging it up Michael’s cheek...
He is falling into Hell. This much he knows for sure. Even without the dense miasma that passes for air, the stench of sulfur and worse from below, he would have no doubt where he is. His very divinity burns at the contact with the infernal, all his instincts tell him to flee. He has felt this before, the handful of times he has come as far into Hell as the Gates, but it is much more intense now. The fact that he is plummeting helplessly down certainly contributes to his frantic desire to escape.
He has no armor, no sword, no other weapon. He is dressed in the sort of clothes that he would wear on earth.
I’m not on fire , he thinks and wonders why. He remembers Samael Falling all the way from Heaven, wreathed in flame, and his mind shies away from the comparison. I am not Falling. Not that way.
The impact, when it comes, leaves him stunned, unable to move, the pain so intense that he is beyond pain and into shock. His senses feel disconnected. He thinks he can see and hear but he can’t process the information, certainly could not react to it, even if he could conceive of how to try. But there is nothing. His soul screams HURT and his body is still as death.
Michael has no idea how long he lies crumpled there. HURT. Time is too abstract to have meaning. Even though his soul continues to sing his agony, he feels like the pain in his body is distant somehow, his mind only vaguely aware that it must be terrible.
Michael’s first sense of change, of time passing, is that the pain starts to become a little less abstract, not quite so far away.
Then, from one moment to the next, the pain is not distant at all. The shock that has shielded him drains away, and Michael cries out as his wings twitch, and his right side lights up with agony. His hoarse scream echoes around him, and is followed by the sounds of voices.
The voices are strange, the language harsh and guttural. It must be Lilim, or some other infernal language.
Fear is Michael’s domain, but as the Angel of Fear, he pulls fears from others , he wears weaponized fear around himself like a cloak. Rarely over the eons has he felt true fear himself.
Michael is certain he has never been so afraid as he is now, not of pain or death, but of how he will die. It will be at the hands of demons, while he lies helpless and broken on the rough ground of Hell. An ignominious end for the disgraced Commander of the Host. Failure. Once and always a failure.
He tries to push himself up with his left hand, so he can face his certain death any way other than lying prostrate. He mostly fails but raises his head enough to see the half-dozen or so figures approaching rapidly. He curses them in Enochian, sees at least one—a dark furred, toothy thing—shake its head in discomfort at the sound of angelic speech.
Then they are upon him and he expects to be spitted to the dirt with any of the many weapons they carry. Instead, he feels many hands—or talons, or paws—gripping him, pressing him down. He screams at the rough handling of his injured wing (even in his blind agony he can’t bear to think the word broken ). The demons are growling and shouting to each other as they pin him down, and Michael chokes and sobs, wild with the pain, his face pressed hard into the gritty ground. He lifts his good wing with enough strength to throw one of them off, and instantly another one drives a spear into the flesh of that wing, scraping between the forearm bones and staking his wing to the ground. He screams yet again. He has barely registered that damage before multiple spikes of pain erupt in both wings. He thinks they are stabbing him many times, until something long and dark flutters to the ground in his line of sight.
“NO!” The word is torn from his throat, filled with terror. They are tearing out his pinions. Even without the other damage, this will take away his ability to fly…to escape. Moments ago he expected to die. Now he realizes with horror that they don’t plan to kill him, and that is much worse.
Far, far too late, he tries to blade up—to make the small movement that would turn his flight feathers into razor-edged weapons. Nothing at all happens on his right side. On the left, he hears one demon squeal and hopes he at least gave it a deep cut. But then there are a few more sharp yanks and the hands holding him down release him.
Michael doesn’t move. His left wing is still impaled by the spear, but the spear is just a minor inconvenience. Despair is what pins him to the ground now. He can’t fly. He can’t even get to the relative safety of Lucifer’s towering throne, much less escape Hell entirely. As much divinity as blood is pouring from the rents in the relatively delicate skin of his wings, smoking where it hits the ground.
The demons are still growling at each other in their own language. Michael doesn’t speak any of the languages of Hell, but he catches Lucifer’s name mentioned more than once.
A hand grips Michael’s hair and pulls his head up. Two of the demons are crouched in front of him. One has a relatively normal bipedal form, like a human or angel, except that it—he?—is covered in greenish scales, mostly smooth where Michael can see, though the scales on his head rise into spiny excrescences.
The other demon is a bony, multilegged thing, vaguely insectoid in outline, except that where a head might be there is the torso and head of a thin, human-appearing woman. Hell’s hideous version of a centaur, with a skeletal locust in place of a horse’s body.
The scaled one runs a clawed finger along the fresh wound on Michael’s face, drawing a choked gasp from Michael, as he says something to the…insectaur? It—she?—nods. Then she speaks to Michael in English. Because of course his polyglot twin’s subjects would have learned Samael’s current favorite language.
“You are the King’s brother,” she says, in a disconcertingly pleasant voice. “You are Michael.”
It is not a question. Michael curses himself at an opportunity missed. The moment he saw the demons approach, he should have pretended to be Lucifer. Even if he couldn’t entirely pull it off, it might have bought him enough time to think, to fight. Michael stares, hating his own helplessness, waiting. She nods to someone outside his field of view and the spear is wrenched out of his wing. Michael bites back the cry of pain that tries to escape him.
The demon grips Michael’s clothing and lifts him to his feet. His wings drag limply and his scream is prolonged and hoarse. The human head of the insectaur looms taller than Michael. She releases the grip on his clothes, and to his shame Michael’s legs can’t hold him and he collapses back to the ground, keening his agony through clenched teeth.
“Galgor, you bring the celestial,” she says to one of them. Her voice comes closer. Michael’s forehead is pressed to the ground and he does not look up. “You belong to us now.”
At some point in being carried and dragged along with the group of demons, Michael blessedly loses consciousness.
Unfortunately, he subsequently awakens.
Michael finds himself in a large room that has the feel of a dining hall—long tables, lined with benches and stranger-looking seats, a massive fireplace. There are several demons standing near a doorway, talking. No one sits at the tables. He is lying face-down on the floor near the fireplace—currently empty and cold. He tries to move, to see if he can, without jostling his wings. He draws his knees up slightly and is startled by a clanking sound. There is a shackle around his left ankle, fixed to a chain leading to a ring sunk into the wall near the fireplace.
Michael isn’t sure whether they consider him dangerous enough to need restraining at the moment, in which case he should be flattered, or whether they have just chained him in mockery of his weakness. Whatever their intent, the shackle is hardly necessary. Michael doubts he can even stand yet.
His eyes fall on his own splayed wings and he barely stifles the sob that threatens to crawl out of his throat.
He used to think his right wing was hideous, and so did the rest of his family—twisted and ratty, an embarrassment of an appendage on an archangel who was made to be clean-limbed and perfect.
Now…the gruesome things hanging from his body certainly look like they belong here in Hell. He has been viciously plucked. He knew this but seeing it anew is horrifying. His skin is bared along the underside of his limbs, pale and mangled, oozing blood from numerous places. The worst parts are where the skin has been ripped open from the violent removal of his flight feathers. His coverts are matted with sticky blood. His right wing still hangs limp and nerveless. It is definitely dislocated and may be fractured…the only positive is there are no breaks severe enough to make discontinuities in the long bones; the only bends in the wing are at the joints where they should be.
The demons from the doorway are now standing next to Michael. It seems sudden but who knows how long he has been staring in revulsion at the wreckage of his wings. Michael struggles to his hands and knees, whining pitifully at the pain in his wings, but can’t get any farther than that. He looks at the three demons in front of him. The insectaur is not among them, but her scaly companion is. There is a lumpy, blocky bipedal creature that Michael thinks is the one that dragged him here…Galgor. The third demon is smaller than the others, with a face like a twisted crocodile and a body covered in pale fur.
“What…the fuck…do you …want?” Michael rasps, trying for a tone of haughty disgust. He knows defiance is foolish, that he is entirely helpless, yet somehow he has to speak. Prove he is still the Sword of God. That he still exists.
His reward is for Galgor to lift him entirely off the ground by his hair. The shock of pain to his wings as they shift and droop in a new direction makes him scream hoarsely again, despite his attempts to stop whimpering like a prey animal with every movement.
“We want you, of course,” the scaled one replies in a sibilant voice. “We have use for a celestial.” He nods to the crocodile-faced one and the two of them strip Michael efficiently, tearing any clothing that does not otherwise come off easily. Michael breathes sharply through clenched teeth, struggling to not cry out again. He is startled to see that his body is a mottled palette of black, purple and red. His angelic invulnerability had protected him from shattering to jelly upon impact, but the landing still marked him more than he had thought.
Michael dangles from Galgor’s fist while the other two circle him, inspecting. “He will survive, Ferocorde,” the small one says. “I suggest we resolve that wing so we can fold it as needed.”
Resolve? Michael has only a moment to consider what that could mean before instructions are barked in incomprehensible Lilim and Galgor wraps his free arm around Michael’s shoulders and chest, pulling him into a violent parody of a hug. Other hands grip his right wing, careless of the many wounds, and he realizes they are about to reduce the dislocated joint. He has just enough time to suck in a deep breath before they haul vigorously on his wing. Michael’s vision goes white and everything goes away.
