The End Of All Known Land
Also heads up: decided to just get all the tags posted here to save myself some time formatting. Any additional warnings for the remaining chapters will be posted here as well.
Chapter 11: Like The Shadows of Birds
“Yield.”
A short but shrill puff of cooling fans anticipates the retaliatory, clawed-fisted punch directed at his helm, and Gabriel blocks it with the flat of his blade. Their widening optic lens flickers to black momentarily as his knee connects with their abdomen, right before the Knuckleblaster fires.
They’re torn apart, thrown across the main drag of this sprawling, sunbaked city, but Gabriel has escaped the worst of the concussive blast. Heels digging into stone slow his momentum enough before his body can slam into a faded magenta building. Opposite his stopping point, a cloud of powderized adobe shrouds his adversary from view.
All his eyes narrow beneath his helm, and he gives them little quarter to recover. Afterimages flash behind him as he dives into the dust cloud. Justice burrows into the crook of their red arm and Splendor into the palm of their Whiplash, cutting off any means of escape as V1 is pinned into the rubble. He’s scrabbling for their Feedbacker when the end of the railcannon jams into his gut.
Electric agony swells throughout Gabriel’s body, surging from the tips of his wings to the points of his fangs. On any other day, this might’ve been enough to stun him long enough for the machine to recover, but through the stars bursting across his field of vision and the settling particles, he can see that their eye is still offline, a jagged crack running through the middle.
He acts before he thinks, one hand grabbing at the bicep of V1’s primary arm, and the other seizing their vulnerable neck. Before his rival can commit to any further, fruitless struggling, Gabriel presses his thumb firmly upon the single vein that climbs their neck like a strand of ivy, threatening to cut off the flow to their delicate sensory processors. The warmachine finally freezes, doubtlessly aware of that.
“Yield, Machine!” Gabriel barks at them.
There is silence, aside from the subtle screaming of overworked fans. But then at last, with a mechanical growl that rattles from somewhere deep within their chassis, V1 surrenders to his strength.
He releases them immediately, swiftly tugging his swords free from their arms. Justice clatters to the ground as Splendor slices open both his palms. One is set upon their dented chassis, and the other directly upon their cracked lens. V1 still does not move, simply laying there and drinking in the fuel.
It’s a wonder sometimes, to watch the potency of his own blood put their body back together after sustaining such heavy damage. How it knits together steel and glass, reconnects thin thermoplastic and seals silicone joints. This single thread that first entangled them together, strengthened by a growing kinship until the fires of love forged it into an unbreakable bond. Gabriel will offer it freely until the day death claims them both.
But he does not feel such awe and fascination now; only the burning prickle of exasperation melded with an undercurrent of persistent worry.
When blood spills over onto their plating from beneath his palm, V1’s head jerks away from his grip. Gabriel climbs off their supine form, scooping his discarded blade from the ground and sheathing both with a simple flourish.
As V1 picks themselves up from where they’d fallen, the archangel surveys the sight of their spar. Craters from cannonballs that barely missed their target embedded in the sides of ruined homes, chunks of rubble blasted off the old asphalt road below their feet by parried shotgun pellets. Several of the scattered corpses are scorched anew from where their periodic railcannon shots had carved trails along the ground.
There are many things Gabriel knows he could say right now, but all of them are likely to prompt a negative reaction. His ongoing silence only serves to make V1 bristle anyway.
“NOT GONNA GLOAT?” They spell sharply, a sardonic edge to their Feedbacker’s fingerspelling.
“I see little reason to.” Gabriel answers, meeting their glare with a steady look and steady words.
“THOUGHT YOU’D BE HAPPIER WITH THIS OUTCOME.” They accent this particular sentence with a hiss from their vents. Gabriel shifts his weight from one boot to the other, arms crossing over his shredded cuirass. He’s aware he's being baited into an argument, but better to let them both air their grievances out now than stew in them overnight.
“And what is that supposed to insinuate?” He asks tersely. “I always enjoy sparring with you, whether I emerge victorious at the end or not.”
“PLEASE. YOUR WINGS DIDN’T EVEN CHANGE COLOR.” Their optic flickers away briefly, betraying the root of their frustrations. “YOU WEREN’T HAVING FUN.”
He’s utterly taken aback by the accusation, the aforementioned appendages twitching with reflexive shock. Yes it was… far shorter a battle than what either of them had gotten used to, but that didn’t mean Gabriel hadn’t enjoyed himself. Unfortunately, V1 takes his dumbfounded silence as a confirmation.
“FIGURED AS MUCH--”
“Where in all the Universe are you getting these baseless assumptions from!?” But the audacity in his tone appears to be all the excuse V1 needs, drawing their revolver yet again.
“PROVE ME WRONG.” They spell, and through the rising tide of irritation that threatens to spill over into fully-blown fury, Gabriel sees the boiling impetuosity behind their words. “FIGHT ME AGAIN, AND STOP HOLDING BACK.”
“Absolutely not!” He snaps. “And I am certainly not holding back! You are the one needlessly throwing yourself into my swords!”
“BECAUSE YOU KEEP HOLDING BACK!” It's rare to see them explode with silent anger like this; so animated and uncontrolled. “I DON’T NEED YOU CODDLING ME!”
“If you think I am coddling you during our spars because of your self-inflicted inexperience, then you are sorely mistaken, Machine!”
He sucks in the air needed to throw more thorny words at them, but then comes the crack of a gunshot and the wet sound of a bullet burying itself into his stomach.
The pain hits a moment later; somewhere over its song Gabriel feels the familiar instinct of provocated rage begin to roll over his mind, like fog upon the glass of a calm sea. The final fraying threads of his patience verge on snapping, tempered only by the knowledge that this is exactly what his wayward machine wants. He will not grant them the satisfaction.
The hum of a charging Piercer shot fills the ongoing silence between them. V1, their pistol aimed directly at his guts, seems to realize this in the following seconds of stillness, and their desperation at last hits its breaking point.
“FIGHT ME.” They demand with wide, angry, empty optics. Gabriel lets out a long, rushing exhale, and straightens.
“No,” he says firmly, stepping back and away from the glowing barrel of their revolver. “I’m done arguing about this, V1. We can continue our discussion about your ill-intended recklessness later, when we’re both calmer.”
The click of a finger tightening around the trigger cuts through the quietude of the ruins; Gabriel pays it no mind as he turns to leave.
“But if shooting me will make you feel better, then fine. Shoot me.”
And with that, Gabriel stalks off, fully braced for the sting of bullets peppering along his exposed spine. But it never comes; not when he first turns his back to them, and not when he finally rounds the corner of the block. All that follows him is the racket of his boots colliding with old brickwork and the clattering of pebbles kicked up in his wake.
It’s not until he’s at least five streets away that he finally whirls around and buries his gauntleted fist into the closest structure, a snarl ripping from his throat and through tightly-gritted teeth. The echo of the impact reverberates through the abandoned neighborhood, a spiderweb of cracks snaking up the sunflower-yellow wall. Pieces crumble away and shower his armor with bits of broken stucco, and the sight alone shatters the remaining shreds of his composure.
Gabriel yanks his fist from the crater, and lands another blow just beside it. Then another, and several more until he’s pummeling away at the unbroken stretches of colorful concrete. It’s senseless destruction, the kind he had once berated V1 and their fellow machines for back during their invasion of Hell. But it works wonders towards venting his mounting vexation and lingering resentment towards his mechanical lover.
By the time the south-facing end of the building is little more than rubble, Gabriel feels much, much better, if not coated in a thick layer of powdered adobe. A powerful pump of his wings dispels the worst of it from his frame, but his armor will still need cleaning off. It’s a task he’s more than happy to put off until later, when they’ve returned home to the comforts of their shared space.
But right now, Gabriel has his mind set on a small discovery, one made during V1’s search of the city’s sprawling library just yesterday. He angles his wings northward, takes off into the clear blue skies, and leaves the poor home he destroyed to its accelerated ruin.
Not a klick west of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos is a small chapel; a place of worship likely older than most of the homes and shops around it. The moment he touches down before this forgotten monument to a rotted faith, he starts stripping himself of his dusty armor, leaving them in a neat row along the outer wall. Down to just his comfortable skirt and greaves, Gabriel steps beyond the double doors left ajar, and into the gentle purple-pink-green glow within.
Like many of Mankind’s churches, images of the Saints are immortalized here in careful carvings embedded in the stone walls and with colorful pigments. Long light fixtures frame the alcoves where they sit, looking down at the rows of pews with serene expressions. They stretch across the length of the hall, leading to a single, verdant cross hanging above the podium. Tucked away in the corner is a piano, one in dire need of tuning.
Years ago, Gabriel would have perhaps stopped and sat here, contemplating his own shattered beliefs and reflecting upon his long, long life. Today, he pauses only to retrieve the small satchel, shears, and beaten set of tongs he had left behind on the front-most bench earlier this morning, then strides right past the altar and to the back door.
Sunlight floods into the musty interior as he nudges it open, cutting through the artificial luminosity of Mankind’s inventions and warming Gabriel’s bare shoulders. A charred husk of a tree looms over this hidden courtyard, casting thin shadows upon rows and rows of pots both intact and shattered. New growth speckles the thick, blackened trunk. Bits of grass and clover poke from between the sandy bricks underfoot, inlaid with colorful shards of smooth tile and tiny glass marbles. Along the back wall, vines now cover a massive scorch-mark, threatening to overtake the worktable and the corpse that lies slumped against it.
It’s extraordinary what a little rain in this dry part of the world can accomplish for the most persistent of plants. The pots bear evidence of having been torched thoroughly, but countless varieties of succulents still spill unchecked over the rims. Stone lotuses, tiger jade, strings of pearls and dragon’s blood, even a few hedgehog cactus sit tall and proud amidst their softer-petaled counterparts. The ground around them is littered with offsets, dead and dried upon the courtyard bricks, but a lucky few had found purchase in the cracks long ago.
Seven years is not a long time for an Angel, but Gabriel has been steeped in its flow for almost two decades now. Lazy days and idle afternoons of sparring and fucking have made him cognizant of every precious hour spent living.
He still has time; they still have time. Therefore, Gabriel takes his time taking what he needs.
Waxy leaves fall away from the main plant as soon as they’re touched, longer cuttings are taken from the stiffened bases, ones swiftly approaching the end of their lifecycle. An empty pot sits in a corner parallel to the door, cracked at its base, but still sturdy enough to fill with cactus cuttings, healthy and round and shrouded with prickles. It's enough to take his mind off things, picturing where to plant them when they get home, filling in those thoughts with a watering schedule until they take to the soil, and which species could accompany what. His remaining frustrations all melt away with those busy thoughts of rushing green.
Three hours have passed the next time he chances a glance up at the sun, its glare having shifted angles enough for there to be more darkness here in this alcove than light. Gabriel gathers his things, and makes for the church entrance. He's thinking of utilizing most of his smaller pots to house the favorites he's uncovered thus far when he slips back into the neon-tinted glow of the church.
It only takes four steps towards the aisle for him to at last notice V1 amidst the pews, startling Gabriel to a halt. The machine clearly knows he’s there, judging by the minute twitch of their stiff frame and the slight flicking of wings behind their tense shoulders. But they don’t look at him, instead keeping their golden eye fixed on their legs.
Between the backdrop of neon-painted Saints lining the wall and the on-going silence, they remind him too much of a remorseful sinner. It’s a parallel all but hammered home when he cautiously draws closer, and sees the thin-paged book sprawled open in their lap.
Something about all this feels uncannily wrong, but Gabriel supposes that’s par for the course these days. It’s only been a couple months since V1 had fully recovered from their encounter with the virus; since it had changed them irrevocably. Any attempt at normalcy will be tainted by those harrowing two days for a long time to come.
With this in mind, Gabriel shrugs off his satchel, setting both it, his tools, and the little pot full of cactus cuttings at one end of the pew, before stepping down the row to take a seat beside his subdued rival.
He means to speak first. But while ruminating on whether to comment on the situation first or apologize, V1’s Feedbacker lifts in his general direction, still staring aimlessly down at His Word.
“YOUR FATHER’S BOOK CONTRADICTS ITSELF FREQUENTLY.”
A startled laugh bursts from him, and to his relief, V1’s closed-off posture begins to melt away.
“There’s quite a history with that book.” Gabriel admits. “God’s hand had been with the council that compiled it, but years of human interference have changed or done away with much of the context.”
“Truth be told, I’ve hardly read it myself.” He looks down at the page they’re open on. Leviticus chapter eighteen; the tiny words, translated carefully into fluent Spanish, now hold water like a sieve. “It seemed pointless to do so when God’s Word was given to us directly.”
He reaches for the rumpled corner of the Bible; V1 does nothing to stop him from tugging it away. It’s snapped shut with a soft and subtle thump, and slipped in the fraying cloth sleeve that stretches across the back of the pew before them.
"There's nothing in that book that matters now, anyway.”
“I’M SORRY.” V1 spells before quietude can settle again. “I SHOULDN’T HAVE SHOT YOU.”
“On the contrary, I believe I had it coming.” The archangel sighs, shifting forward to rest his elbows upon the top of the long bench. “Maybe I have been coddling you, a little.”
“NO, YOU HAVEN’T. I KNOW YOU HAVEN’T.” Without a book in their lap, V1 curls up on themselves, one leg lifted from the dusty carpet below and all their free arms tugging it close to their body. “THE ERRORS FROM THE MISSING BATTLE DATA ARE AFFECTING MY REFLEXES.”
“And it’s something you shouldn’t be beating yourself up for.” Gabriel reminds them firmly. “You have gotten better since our last spar.”
“FIVE MINUTES OF FIGHTING BARELY EVEN COUNTS AS A SKIRMISH.” Frustration rolls off of their plating in heated waves, but there’s no anger to be seen in their morose expression. “I REMEMBER BATTLING YOU IN HERESY; I HAVE THE FOOTAGE. BUT MY BODY HAS FORGOTTEN HOW.”
The archangel hums thoughtfully, glancing up at the neon cross that still illuminates this once-lively hall of worship. Even though all real meaning and attachment to these symbols of The Lord have been lost to him in their entirety, Gabriel still can appreciate the many ways humanity would express it. Artistically, musically, in their words and sermons and speeches. He doesn’t think time will be able to wear away that, at least.
“When I left Heaven to face you in Treachery, I did so knowing full-well that I was going to lose that battle.” In his peripherals, V1 finally glances over to him. “But I still wanted to try and win. For if nothing else, I would have at least died having fun.”
“With all this to say, even after I was granted more opportunities to try besting you in combat, it still took me close to a full year to finally claim an honest victory over you.” Gabriel sits up, turning to face them fully. “For better or worse, you still have time to improve your skills and do the same. I will not have you kill me at anything less than what you’re fully capable of, Machine.”
It’s their turn to laugh, shoulders shaking with sudden and silent mirth, fans pushing out sharp puffs of air. But then it’s gone just as quickly as it came. V1 slumps again, a long whirr rising and falling in an imitation of a heavy sigh.
“CAN SAY THE SAME FOR YOU,” They hesitate, and then, “THAT DOESN’T CHANGE THE FACT THAT I DON’T WANT THAT DAY TO COME.”
“It will--”
“I KNOW,” V1 interrupts him, their shutters closing slightly in a pinched sort of expression. “KNOWING IT WILL HAPPEN DOESN’T MEAN I WANT IT TO.”
“... I suppose not.” Gabriel agrees. Once upon a time, he had wanted nothing more than to die. He had embraced the reality of death with eyes unclouded by delusions of eternity, and found himself lost when faced with the possibility of survival. “Experiencing a life with you made me realize I had never truly lived, until now. Simply existed, not lived, for eons untold. Sometimes I forget how little time you’ve had, as well.”
“I WANT TO GET BETTER AT THIS AGAIN.” V1 confesses, and their hands tremble with every word spelled. “I DON’T WANT THIS TO END, EVER. I KNOW IT WILL, BUT I DON’T WANT IT TO.”
“Me neither.” Gabriel gathers them in his arms. V1 does not rebuff his comforting embrace, only burrowing themselves into his hold with a shaky, wet puff from their vents. Hands find his arms and his waist and the small of his back, whispering to him their deepest fear.
I D-O-N-T W-A-N-T T-O D-I-E
“I know.”
A silent alarm signifies the passage of a full hour, pulling V1's attention from the depths of their memory banks. Their artificial consciousness quickly loads back into their body, bringing their awareness to their limbs and circulatory system. Diagnostics scroll slowly across their mind's eye, allowing the warmachine to look over each and every line of troubleshooting they'd run during their afternoon catnap. All readouts check as nominal, and their minor recalibrations marked as completed.
But even despite this, when they slowly peel open their optic cover and allow the indirect light of the sun past the dark gray steel, a bolt of pain burrows into their head.
As static licks hungrily at their buffering visual feed, it forces them to shut it off, snapping their shutters closed again for good measure. The act spares their frustratingly sensitive components any further agony, but the cost of needing to remain relatively senseless for yet another unknown chunk of time. They punctuate this with a sharp whine of their fans out into the emptiness of the bedroom, the frames rattling angrily. That virus had not only taken a sizable hole in their primary memory, but also a... strangely persistent glitch. There was little rhyme or reason to the conditions that might trigger it and knock them flat on their back from anywhere to a few hours to half a day.
Full recovery from the lingering effects of that deadly digital infection had taken a single week; one long, boring week in bed staring at their music program and shuffling files from the salvaged memory chip to their main processor. V1 had repaired what few files they could, and hammered out their remaining bugs with a vindictive sort of vengeance. By the time their functionalities were at one-hundred-percent working capacity again, they had almost asked Gabriel to take them back to the library where they had picked up the rotten thing in the first place, for the sole purpose of burning it to the ground.
But in the end, V1 instead opted to make their way across town, freshly refueled and ready to pick up where they left off. Two hours worth of stripping that small house of all its cables, wires, and valuable electronics had yielded a full home theater system safe within the confines of their apartment. With Gabriel still out and about in the city, getting to all the things he normally would have accomplished during those two months of chasing metaphorical waterfowl, V1 could work on their latest (and maybe last) project in relative privacy.
Subsequent disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly of the components went with nary a hitch. But the very microsecond V1 had plugged themselves into the console, with every intent to run a sound test, that's when the ache started to creep in.
Like the crawling vines of one of Gabriel's prized vinca plants, it began to entangle their senses. Their intended audio test was cut short as their focus turned from the breakcore booming out of their speakers, to the fiery claws scratching at their sensitive optic nerves. Within minutes, all they knew was the rabbit-heart RPM of their selected musical track, throbbing in time with the sharp pain pulsating behind their lens. Immediately shutting off the sound had not helped alleviate their plight in the slightest. The warmachine only remembers slumping to the floor, gripping their head with all four of their hands, and how the ambient light of a cresting summer's day exacerbated the agonizing effect.
After a solid hour of that terrible, crippling feedback loop, it receded, leaving them to push themselves up from the trodden carpet of the living room in a daze.
Every diagnostic they have run on that particular glitch yields nothing other than its entirely randomized nature. Anything from opening their music program to catching a too-bright flash of the sun, bouncing off a rare, unbroken high-rise window, could trigger the effect. Sometimes it would be immediate; other times the pain would onset hours after the fact. It leaves them with no lingering damage aside from an hour at minimum, to five hours at maximum, entirely wasted. All attempts to contain and delete this infuriatingly rogue feedback program fail; it cannot be purged from their code no matter how many times they try to scrub it away.
Maybe it's their nerves misfiring from the memory of the virus wracking their frame; perhaps this is simply a persisting consequence from the Universe itself for their careless actions. It doesn't matter, really, because it's debilitating in every possible way, robbing them of their physical autonomy and sense of time. Their internal clock is off by two minutes the first time it happens. They spend a week viewing the world in minimized resolutions after the fifth instance. It leaves them without the knowledge of Gabriel's very existence the eighth time, backup states delayed for five frightening seconds.
V1 hates it with every square inch of their being, but can do so very little about it.
Somewhere over the pounding in their mechanical skull, the scrape of worn-down track wheels drifts into their audials with a distant crackle of static. V1 promptly turns off their hearing as a result. They’re likely missing their paramour’s greetings, along with any further inquiries about their current location. Half of V1 wants to pull one of the pillows over their conical head, while the other does not want to expend any energy on the movement such an action will take. Ultimately, lethargy wins out, and they remain where they are in utter silence for about thirty more seconds.
Somehow, they still sense Gabriel's steady hand even before it lands on their lower back. It dispels their artificial migraine for but a moment, allowing them to revel in the sensation of his palm rubbing up and down their titanium spine. They risk turning their audio feed back on, and are met with the easy cadence of his breathing.
The petting motions go on for a few minutes longer, before V1 finally gives in the urge to arch their body up into the archangel's probing touch. Something about the pressure is soothing, familiar, before being washed away with another spasm of throbbing pain that has them flopping back down onto the mattress with what they desperately hope is an inaudible whine.
"What do you need right now?"
Even his whispering makes the next five pulses of their optic circuitry that much more painful to experience. The query itself, thankfully, requires very little processing power to formulate an answer to. They need his fingers skimming all the phantom sore spots along their joints; the smothering sensation of his weight pressing them into the cushion-y surface of their indented mattress. Maybe a romp once the persistent ache has cleared up.
"JUST YOU." They manage to spell from their briefly lifted primary arm, before latching onto one of his biceps and dragging him down onto their bare back.
"Ow." He says in answer to their fuel reservoir poking into what they discern to be one of his plush pecs. But blessedly, Gabriel does not pull away, merely shifts just enough to allow for both their comforts. Their fans whirr with unrestrained relief as the heft of his bulk activates delicate nerves under silicone and metal, registering the spike of applied pressure. And as they'd hoped, the diversion of their senses to anywhere but the pulses behind their eye is going a long way towards distracting them from it.
V1 half-expects a companionable silence when Gabriel's deft fingers find the elbow joint of their Feedbacker and begins massaging the veins and wires tucked away within. But then a rumbling sigh escapes him.
"Is it your head again?" He asks in a gentle murmur, one that miraculously doesn’t result in further agony.
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising he's noticed, but they tense beneath him regardless. A humorless huff of laughter rolls over their shoulder, before they sense his chin settle against it. They belatedly realize he's removed his helm.
"I am not blind, V1." He says, rather matter-of-factly. They're torn between being annoyed with his tone, or soaking in the almost-too warm sensation of one of Gabriel's reportedly unfathomable facial features pressing against their steel. "What's wrong?"
V1 grapples for a word that could fit, skimming through their digitized thesaurus slowly now that their internal search engine can be accessed without prompting further agony. After about fifteen seconds of this, they land on one word in particular that... fits their symptoms almost perfectly.
Migraine: noun, a headache that can cause severe throbbing pain or a pulsing sensation.
For extinct humans, it would normally manifest only on one half of their brains. But given they possess a singular lens rather than binocular vision, it made sense that a robot of their design would feel it all throughout their visual circuitry.
The fact that V1 could develop one was in of itself is only a mild shock. Just another mote of evidence towards the nature of their inherited humanity. V1 resolves to contemplate that particular line of thinking another time, favoring to lift their Whiplash up to trace an answer into Gabriel's side.
M-I-G-R-A-I-N-E, The warmachine answers. They can almost hear the query rolling along Gabriel's tongue, and follow up immediately with an elaboration. C-L-O-S-E-S-T P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E D-E-F-I-N-I-T-I-O-N
"Was it the virus?" His tone goes tellingly neutral, and V1 deflects expertly with a short, curt answer.
Y-E-S, they accent their response with a sharper puff of fans, along with a firm tap of their claws to the fingers that have stalled between their torso and an arm. K-E-E-P I-T U-P
"Ah--right." He covers his fluster with a rumble emitting from his throat. "Do you need anything else?"
N-O, V1's entire frame seems to seep into the mattress with every dig of his thick fingers against thrumming thermoplastic. D-O N-O-T S-T-O-P
Lips, soft as the touch of a spring rainstorm, briefly trail along their helm, and V1 swears that the pain at last begins to recede from the jam-packed bundle of circuits and artificial nerves right after.
“Let me know when you’re feeling better, alright?”
For a moment, they picture a future with this persistent glitch, poised to debilitate them for hours at a time at any given trigger.
A thousand years from now, curled up in Gabriel’s lap soaking in his touches as they soothe the pain away. Maybe they’ll be sitting beneath an ancient willow tree, the one by the lake, after the city surrounding it has fallen into dust. The colors of afternoon will become a brilliant sunset, painting his scarred body, and they’d spend a minute drinking it in before they playfully push him into the grass to rob him of all his senses. They realize right then that they’ll do anything to reach that kind of halcyon day.
A-L-R-I-G-H-T
So what if they had to deal with a bit of recurring pain every now and again? Maybe they can’t purge their code of this particular bug, but that doesn't mean there didn’t exist ways to manage it. They’ve survived worse than an occasional headache; they’ll survive this too, no matter what.
Gabriel had never quite taken to the sport of fishing quite like V1 had. Sometimes it's a wonder that they've cultivated the patience for it. But for two days straight, they're out on their favorite dock, staring out at the water, and periodically reeling in colorful critters. When they finally emerge from their fugue state of angling, the machine all but drags Gabriel to their usual campsite and keeps him pinned to the sandy blankets until the moon begins to set.
After months of trial and error in combat and entire days spent in bed holding them through their newfound ability to develop migraines, the sense of normalcy is a welcome one.
The third day of their annual autumn vacation finds him on the northernmost shores of their favorite beach, a smelly jar of compost and a wooden bucket of carefully cultivated dune grass culms sitting nearby, as he tills the sand in neat rows. V1 has returned to their perch on the pier near the coastal town, and left him entirely to his own devices for what he suspects will be several hours.
He's in a good mood; the sun feels amazing on his bare back, his body holds a lingering ache from their hours-long copulation, and the world around him continues its relentless march towards recovery. Each day does Gabriel strive ever further towards a wilder, greener Earth. One day, it will continue onward without either of their presences, but he will help it along in any and every way he can.
An old memory surfaces through the steady pull and contractions of muscles working the silt below his bare feet. He’d been delivering a message on the Lord’s behalf, flying over thatched roofs and walls constructed of weather-worn stones of a tiny human settlement. He cannot remember the words he had been instructed to pass along, but he does recall the moment his attention had been drawn to the rolling fields just outside their settlement.
Dispersed among that swiftly-maturing harvest were several human women, voices rising as one beautiful chorus while they tended to crops and removed unwanted plants. The angel had hovered there just above their shoulders, unseen by their mortal eyes, and drank in their work song until he could easily parrot it back to his fellow Angels, the rare few who’d developed something of a liking to their wayward mortal siblings.
Gabriel does not mean to start singing, but those words from thousands of years ago, timed with a solid swing of his mattock into tightly packed sand, flow from him without really realizing it.
The blade comes down, cutting into the beach, four rows with every verse breathed. He reaches the end of the margin strip, and walks back the way he came, scattering compost across the tilled silt. Gabriel echoes the choir of voices that rings in his inner ears with perfect clarity as he nears the other end of the tiny field, speckled now with fertile clumps of organic matter. Even as he hits the final note, the humans in his mind’s eye simply start again, and Gabriel follows along.
So preoccupied is he with his work that he does not notice V1 appearing at the top of a nearby dune, nor when they begin creeping closer at a snail's pace. His hands are full of grass stems and his lungs full of song, planting the delicate clumps into the silt. He does not register them even when they first cross his line of sight, lingering by the near-empty jar he left with his mattock.
But then the artificial blue of their plating cuts through his remembrance of Mankind’s wordsmithery, and his voice comes into a stark stop, trailing into almost embarrassed silence. It's such a silly thing to be mortified of, but here he is, shocked into quietude and plagued with a terrible heat crossing his visage, as his lover stares at him with an inscrutable gaze.
Something, maybe the prolonged silence, sparks him into movement, straightening quickly like a soldier caught slacking. He clears his throat once before words return to him.
"Yes, my love?" He manages, and all at once, V1 comes alive.
They stride across the loose sand, taking care to skirt where he's already planted culms, and take his hands in their own with an insistent squeeze.
"DON'T STOP ON MY ACCOUNT." They say with their Knuckleblaster. Gabriel stutters, and some part of him irrationally urges him to flee.
"It's not--" He starts, stops, swallows. "I hadn’t meant to do that."
V1's optics narrow in response, and their sudden scrutiny makes him want to sink into the sand and never be seen again. "WHY ARE YOU SO SHY?"
"I'm not shy." He insists, and the resolve behind his tone surprises him. "It's--I haven't sang in a long time, and even then, it was never on my own."
“WHY NOT?”
Several different excuses all struggle to roll off of Gabriel’s traitorous tongue at once: there’s been little reason for him to sing at all, an angel's voice is meant to be part of a choir, he’s afraid.
Irrational, he knows, and yet some inane instinct insists on this still.
But he's finding that the wide-eyed gaze of his lover is a compelling argument otherwise. Their fingers interlace with his own, squeezing once again with a puff of their fans.
"PLEASE?" They plead, and Gabriel's resolve breaks down so quickly it makes him dizzy. "FOR ME."
'What's the harm?' Some part of him asks, even as another, now-so-much quieter part of him protests out of principle. It's grown easier to quiet that insistent voice under the reminder of his circumstances, and how little his own traditions mean in the face of reality.
But sometimes, he is lonely. He has his Machine, their love, and freedom like he'd never known. Yet it does little to soothe the persistent sting of exile, whenever his wings long for the reassuring brush of another's; whenever the memories of feasts in the Garden of Life crop up against his will, of laughter and music and dancing in the surety of their lives and purposes.
And it's this reminder that spurs Gabriel's voice once again. It is not the cheery work song he had been quietly chanting as he tilled the sandy soil. It is a requiem; a hollow sound that somehow both fills and drains Gabriel's soul.
(Tears sting at his eyes as his voice gives up and dies not even halfway through the song, but the awe-struck glow of V1's optic is worth the heaviness the action brings him.)
Winter settles upon the world in an unexpected overnight frost, one that kills what little life had been hanging on in Gabriel’s sprawling garden by sunrise.
Like clockwork, V1 aids Gabriel in ferrying all their houseplants to the mild climates of the moon, to wait out the seasonal chill that permeates the apartment. They hang the thick down blanket across their doorless bedroom threshold, and thick curtains replace their lacier, warmer-weather counterparts. Several more blankets join the ones already heaped upon their indenting mattress.
The short hours of daylight and long, cold nights see them both cooped up in the apartment more often than not. When not burrowed under those blankets, V1 would lead Gabriel out on excursions in the warmer parts of the world, exploring the cities surrounding the libraries. Those searches, while barren in knowledge, yielded other treasures. One of which was a digital treasure trove of sound samples and royalty-free music. A season of bitter cold and the occasional fleeting snowfall provide them with the perfect excuse to cuddle up with Gabriel; to simply go idle as he rewatches a scavenged film or reads a new book, and hammer away at their creations until sleep finds them both.
One particularly icy morning finds them without Gabriel's warmth, slowly fading from where he had lain for hours. Undoubtedly out and about checking in on the other patches of life he'd been cultivating around the world. He'll likely be gone the whole day, perhaps well into the night.
It's with this thought that V1 leaps from their warm cocoon into the tolerable chill of their bedroom. A small space heater V1 had recovered and repaired sits by the various pieces of their theater system, piled carefully in the corner. That gets switched on first, emitting a low hum and a growing heat before they turn their attention to the task at hand.
V1 boots up the main console as they plug themselves briefly into their bulky holopad. Their selected songs upload in the time it takes for them to bluetooth the two devices. Their wings flick with unrestrained eagerness as they fiddle some of the knobs with one hand, and select their recently-polished composition with another.
They aren't quite ready to share their creations with Gabriel, but when they are, this would certainly be one of the first.
In the days following his attempt at sharing his singing voice with them, they had managed to coax out an explanation for his reluctance. That an angel was never meant to sing alone; that they were only ever meant to be part of a grander choir. Something V1 would vehemently disagree with privately after getting a chance to hear his velvety tones chanting in a language their Universal translation program could not identify.
But perhaps, if they sang to him first, he might sing back. This particular piece would be proof of their compatibility with regards to shared harmonic capabilities; low, dreamy drum beats and gentle droning as a backdrop to the work song he had crooned just a couple months prior, entirely unaware of their proximity.
Perhaps it would help; perhaps it would make things worse. But Gabriel's voice is so heavenly in joy and haunting in lament, how could they not risk at least trying to coax another gorgeous tune from him?
With metaphorically baited breath, V1 hits the play button on the projected screen, and "Untitled XVI" begins to play.
And it--
… it sounds wrong.
The lyrics come through crystal-clear, but the crunchy racket of the background rhythm rattles their plating in all the worst ways. Their finger jams through the big, holographic pause button, cutting off the song before the first chord could finish.
Internal fans are pushed into a sharp whirr, and does little to circumvent their growing exasperation with this strange law of data conversion they’ve been unable to bypass. In that a song, played through an outside source rather than their fine-tuned inner-audials, would sound completely different from one another?
Two minutes off fiddling with the home theater console sees V1 giving up with a metallic growl forced through their vents. It’s not something they can fix through bass sliders and volume changes, rather, something wrong on a compositional level.
The warmachine dejectedly slips the file back in the WIP folder, and switches back to their completed pieces on a whim. A deafening roar of drum and bass blasts from their assembled collection of speakers, and thrums through their steel all the way down to their frame. It helps take the edge off their anger, distracts them from the beginnings of what will surely be another headache later today.
(In the end, they get very little in the way of anything done. Gabriel’s arms find them sometime after midnight, burrowed beneath their linens as they ride out their infliction. And as all of him envelops them with a low, musical hum, they resolve to try again the next chance they get anyway.)
"Fuck--" A curse, hissed through tightly gritted teeth, is spared the barest of breath before being punched out of his chest. As the cannonball collides with his exposed abdomen, stars burst from behind Gabriel's eyes. He only vaguely registers the blur of a miraculously standing street post passing by to his left as he's blasted across the shattered road.
Reflexes prevent him from colliding bodily with the base of the heavily damaged high-rise, twisting his legs beneath him to take the brunt of the impact. But he barely manages to lift Splendor in time to block V1's oncoming winch, preventing what would have been a decisive follow-up attack.
"You're going to have to do better than that!" He shouts down at the machine as they skid over concrete craters and scatterings of green. The archangel pushes himself off the building wall, pushes through the pain lancing up his spine, and swoops down towards his rival to clash yet again.
He twists around a spray of nails and braves a barrage of shotgun pellets, all to get close enough for a victory blow. Barely a year since their run-in with that virus, Gabriel can still detect the telltale signs of flicking wings; the overreliance on that railcannon of theirs whenever they're about to lose the spar. It almost feels unfair, when they've yet to claim another victory against him since their scare. But Gabriel had made a point of ensuring he will not hold back, nor point out that little tell of theirs. They'll have to figure it out for themselves on the fly.
It's a microsecond after Gabriel registers his mistake that it occurs to him that this may have finally been taken into account. For where he swiftly teleports out of the way of the beam and lunges through the fissure that forms just behind the machine, they're already spinning 'round, crouched low to the ground.
Two of his eyes, the ones not locked on the sight of their still-firing railcannon being dragged to the ground by the will of gravity, stare dumbly at the sight of their Knuckleblaster whirling around towards his armored knee. It does not hurt so much as surprise, but that barely matters when it bought V1 more than enough time to execute their absurd counter.
As he's knocked off his feet, the familiar thud of the Whiplash spearhead burrowing into holy steel cuts through his yelp. In the blink of an eye, the machine is upon him, shotgun ripping a fountain of blood from his stomach. The whitehot sensation of fiery shrapnel tearing at him hits Gabriel's head before he hits the ground, and he's only vaguely aware of being promptly disarmed.
The world snaps back into focus with the dull thud of his body colliding with the Earth below, and the sharp schlink of both his swords being stabbed into the ground on either side of him. Twin stings blossom along the sides of his throat, the pain bright amidst the nauseating sensation of his senses being knocked askew.
The world rights itself at last to the sight of V1's knees digging into his pauldrons, and the X of his own swords caging his neck, their edges kissing his flesh. Bladed wings flare into a dominant splay, soundlessly declaring victory as the wounds he'd given them all heal in a hurry, bolstered by the blood they'd ripped from him.
The fourth heaving gasp following the abrupt end of their battle is punctuated with a laugh, at both dazed and profoundly relieved. He bares a toothy grin, all fangs and mocking glee, and breathes,
"Don't think you'll be so lucky next time, Machine. You may have--"
His taunting is interrupted by the sudden withdrawal of his swords, gliding deeper into the scratches they've carved into his flesh. He opens his mouth to complain, but nothing comes out as he registers the sight of their glistening pussy, previously hidden by the flats of his stolen blades.
V1 carelessly tosses either of them to the wayside, and Gabriel promptly forgets to chide them when they hurriedly shuffle forward on their knees, eagerly dragging their slick folds along the cross of his helm.
Belated realization hits. Too-long has it been since the push-and-pull of battle led into the rites of lust. Something like guilt nags at him for a moment, but it's hurriedly dismissed as the warmachine begins grinding their cunt firmly against his helm. Saliva floods his mouth, and his gauntlets hurriedly clutch at their hips, stilling their desperate motions.
"Off." He murmurs, tone low and needy. At his murmured command, the glow of their eye goes dark, shutters sealing for good measure.
Removing his helm with a well-practiced flourish, Gabriel drags their slick folds down to his mouth, wrapping his lips around their swollen clit with a rumbling moan. He hears their fans kick into a frenzy for a brief moment, before their hands scrabble for purchase on the stretch of dirt below. It's a feat made all the more difficult as he begins tonguing at the sensitive silicone nub, suckling gently every so often. Eventually, they latch onto something just out of his peripherals, and with balance at last secured, begin eagerly bucking their hips against his face.
Faint traces of iron melt upon his palette as brings them up just a little higher to drag his mouth along their drooling cunt. He teases at the rim of their pussy with the tip of his tongue, lips sucks open-mouth kisses into their gel-soft folds, nuzzles at their throbbing clit with his nose. It's times like these that Gabriel is struck by just how small they are, how his hands can easily maneuver around their thin waist to pluck at the fabric of his glove and tug it off while keeping a good grip on their hip.
No sooner does the gauntlet clatter down the ground is Gabriel hurriedly unlatching the clasp of his belt, allowing him enough wiggle room to shove his hand beneath his skirt and loincloth.
His moan of relief upon jamming his fingers down onto his throbbing clit prompts a brief, shrill whine from the machine kneeling above him, humping his face with desperate fervor. Gabriel lolls his tongue out fully, utterly uncaring of the slobber and slick dribbling down the corners of his mouth, and something the drag of their clit along the slippery organ surface fills his head with a heady fog.
V1 takes their hard-earned pleasure with forceful rolls of their hips, and Gabriel steals away his own with steady circles of his slickening fingers. The crunch of gravel cuts through the obscene sounds as his boots brace him more firmly upon the ground, and allow his hips to rise into his own touch.
There's a thrill in itself to reduce them to this state; to drive them to the brink of maddened lust simply from servicing them in this way. Lowly whines rattle from his rival's chassis, their plating bordering on too-hot as they ride his face towards completion. Gabriel, likewise, eagerly hunts his own release, working his digits on the underside of his clit just how he likes it.
It's V1 that falls apart first, the scream of internal fans harmonizing with the hiss of steam bursting from their vents. He latches onto that silicone pearl and suckles at it harshly, dragging out their orgasm until their Knuckleblaster lands on his forearm, claws scraping at the golden vambrace firmly. Gabriel grants them mercy, releasing their swollen, throbbing cunt and letting his head fall gracelessly into the dirt below.
Gabriel breathes in time with every rise and fall of their heaving CPU coolers, eyes dazedly fixed on their ruined pussy, and mindlessly chasing his own climax with harshening touches. Gabriel doesn't even bother removing his other glove, swapping the hand previously holding their hip out. It frees up his fingers to shove themselves up into his aching pussy, digging into that spot V1 so readily abuses.
The catch of the fabric upon his swollen clit tears a gasp from his throat, kneading at it roughly. Harshening thrusts of his hips down on his own hand have him seeing sparks. Somewhere above the building song of bright euphoria, V1 has recovered just enough to take notice of his voracious act, his wanton moaning. Their red arm lazily lands on his exposed waist, talons catching on his healing wound--
And as they rip it open anew, pain spills into pleasure into pain until it's one, perfect feeling, radiating from his core. It floods his veins, adrenaline and satisfaction alike thrumming with his rabbit-fast heart, and cleanses him in its holy fire.
By the time he returns to his senses, V1's already flopped over onto the patchy grass beside him, eye still sealed. It takes a moment more for him to remember how to move his arm, pawing for his helmet somewhere above his right, and fails to latch onto it twice. Upon the third grasp, he's successfully able to drag it across the groundcover.
"On." He pants as soon as his chin is tucked beneath the bevor. V1's optic lens slides into view, and their shutters settle on an expression of utter contentment and honest, open love. Gabriel rolls to the side, a tender smile pulling at his lips until it's a broad, giddy grin.
"GOOD FIGHT." They praise, and then, "MISSED YOU."
The warmth of their affection flushes across his face, and his lungs go tight. He brings his hand up to their helm, cups it close until his forehead presses to theirs.
"Missed you, too."
Their odds don’t drop below forty until they approach the halfway point of the consortium index.
Some part of them despairs at the readout, but they no longer let it cloud their judgement, or distract them from what little life they still have left to enjoy. V1 forces themselves to close the simulation, turning their attention back to their custom search engine as it scans through the last bits of information contained within this newfound repository.
One-and-a-half years into this race around the world’s libraries, and of the two thousand, six hundred, and ninety three libraries they’ve checked, only eighty-five have withstood the years thus far. Some part of them still hopes to strike gold, to find a vein of information still standing in this empty world; another dreads finding nothing beyond this particular point. Their simulations can provide no further insight beyond newly gained information.
It's a numb sort of despair, not too dissimilar to the fog that had once crept up on them, when they stood in the mouth of Hell with no possible chance of ever emerging again. V1 may have long since accepted their own mortality, but truth be told, the very idea of Death's jaws closing in on them someday still terrified them down to the core. There remains so much for them both to do. Books to reread, things to discover, time to be spent with another creature, one who scarcely got a chance to truly live by these ridiculous circumstances.
Perhaps it really was a matter of time before their luck finally ran out.
“V1?”
The sound of Gabriel’s voice catches them by surprise, washing over them like a heavy splash of water. It’s projecting from somewhere to their right, likely from the western end of the building. V1 tabs out of their search program and awareness floods their senses. Their scan was about finished anyway. It’s likely to give them the same result they’ve gotten from every terminal thus far-
But then Gabriel continues, his tone heavy with apprehension, and yet lighter than they’ve heard it in months.
“Could you come read this for me?” V1 freezes mid-tug, not quite disconnected from the access point. “I… I think I found something!”
The other end of the cable snaps free as they duck into a slide, ripping up the shag carpet in their wake. V1 ricochets off the rounded turn of the hall leading towards the other end of the building, the sound of their body skidding across sunken wooden planks kicking up a ruckus in their wake. They roll to their feet right before colliding with a set of doors, and all but yank the handle from its hinges in their hurry.
Indirect sunlight washes over them as they step through, identifying Gabriel’s location in a microsecond. He kneels at the opposite end of the campus cafe, where an overturned table lies tucked beside the window. There’s a single holopad lying face up by his left knee, broadcasting what looks to be a wall of text, and hooked up to a dusty solar-battery that sits in a pool of afternoon sunlight.
The moment the sight all clicks into place, they abort their intentions to slide the remaining distance, and instead take swift but deliberate steps to where Gabriel is leaning back to allow them room.
“Please be careful with it.” Gabriel warns them in a rushed breath as they drop to the floor beside him. “I tried picking it up and it shut off for a moment.”
The battery had to be on its last legs, then. They take a delicate claw to the grainy screen, scroll it up to the top, and begin reading what looks to be an interview for a news outlet. The third page of four, to be more precise.
Ketty: Your prototype is leaps and bounds ahead of what’s currently on the market. What is it that drives you to develop such innovative solutions for the problems our machine population faces today?
Tether: There is a bit of a long story behind this one. My wife and a childhood friend of hers grew up together in the shadows of the Yucatán City Earthmover. I met her when she transferred to TBU for her creative writing degree, and her aforementioned friend met his spouse the following summer break when he was visiting. She’s a Final War era Engineer Model that used to service The Nessus prior to The Long Dark. They got married as soon as the Automaton Marriage Rights Act was signed into law by the New Peace Parliament. But then around a year ago, she started having difficulties retaining new memories. Turnpike had lived for so long that her processors couldn’t properly store the everyday stream of information.
Ketty: And just one of these memory upgrades would avert this problem?
Tether: The total extra space granted by a single HELIX chip is around three hundred petabytes. Her body will fall apart long before file storage ever becomes an issue again.
Ketty: All I can say to that is I hope you’ve got a patent filed for these things.
Tether: *Laughs* I started on that the moment the beta testing phase completed.
Ketty: How exactly does it work? I read the project summary you sent me yesterday, but I’d like to hear in your own words how you’ve accomplished this.
Tether: I used synthesized cells encapsulated within the motherboard, and each one houses a carefully encoded DNA strand. From there it's a simple matter of formatting any digitized information into genetic information, and vice versa.
Ketty: But wouldn't the cells within eventually degrade without an exterior supply of sustenance and energy?
Tether: They would indeed, and that single factor was easily the biggest obstruction towards realizing my vision. All the cells I tried to utilize at first died within hours of encasement and the nucleotides degraded quickly after. Any nutrients sealed with them not only sacrificed slot space but would run out within a projected year. Life is, in the grand scheme of things, one big cycle of living creatures eating one another to survive: cells, plants, animals, humans, machines, nothing is exempt.
Ketty: So how did you work around cell death?
Tether: That's the thing: I couldn't. My breakthrough came to me entirely by accident. Two months of trial and error since the project was funded, and I was in dire need of a break. The head of the Innovations Department basically ordered me to spend a few days at home. Perfecting timing given my wife had just finished her new book tour. The final morning before heading back to work, we spent the day out together, and ducked into an Old World museum after lunch on a whim. There was a rotating exhibit on display there dedicated to the fossils recovered from the ruins of the Smithsonian Institution, including a sizable collection of insects trapped within amber. Charlotte got to talking with one of the researchers mingling with the crowd, and he mentioned how the DNA found within is the most intact of all the specimens they'd been working to identify and reassemble. That's when it hit me: the cells didn't need to be alive, just preserved.
Ketty: So what you’re saying is that you fossilized the DNA?
Tether: I had initially used the word crystallized, but yes! Not only has it yielded the highest output of information storage to SSD chip slot usage, but it's also made the digitized space incredibly resistant to bitrot! Data decay is not projected to occur for at least two millennia.
Ketty: That’s… Tether, you do realize that you may have entirely revolutionized how we will preserve and share information with one another for centuries and generations to come, right?
Tether: I’m only patenting the memory chip model, not the cell petrification method; that’s going right into the Open Source Nexus.
Ketty: Well, alright then! When can we expect to see the HELIX chip on the market?
Tether: Cloud Nine Laboratories has given the greenlight for mass production to begin next spring. But I did pull some strings to ensure my good friend has been selected for the final testing phase in a month's time.
Ketty: Moving on from your breakthrough in data preservation and machinekind innovations, what can you tell me about The Lake Green Project we’ve all been hearing about from the Alternative Energy Initiative grapevine?
Tether: Not much; I was only on the team briefly as a consultant for the alchemical aspect of it. I do know that the team has also been suffering some setbacks during the experimental phase, but they still believe it’s viable to replace--
V1 almost scrolls to the next page out of instinct, pulling themselves back to the present moment with their finger hovering over the single arrow at the bottom of the screen. For an embarrassing one-point-eight-three seconds, they buffer as every single detail of that interview is analyzed.
By the time they’ve crammed it all into their simulations and kicked it into full gear, their fans have clicked on to a low hum; one growing in pitch as they wait out the final result. Their primary arm is spelling in Gabriel’s general direction as they daringly touch the back button on the browser window. It might be trembling too much to be coherent, but Gabriel knows all their tells as it is.
“CALCULATING.”
They only vaguely register Gabriel’s shuddering intake of breath as the text disappears. Unsurprisingly, the first page of the interview gives them a 404 error for Innovative Monthly Magazine. Surprisingly, the original page miraculously returns when they flick the holoscreen back to the right.
There are many unknown variables: the location of the individual and the research center they worked for being the most glaring one. But where they could not yet ascertain the whereabouts of this highly viable upgrade, the article itself is dated a mere two weeks before the fall began. The prototype may yet be stored somewhere for safekeeping.
Simulations spit out their chances and all of V1’s fans stutter violently with disbelief.
“ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT POSSIBILITY OF LONG-TERM SURVIVAL IF UPGRADE IS LOCATED.” They communicate this with Gabriel, who heaves with a sharp, shuddering exhale. “SEARCH PRIORITIES UPDATED.”
“What--what are the chances of finding--”
“UNKNOWN. BUT I WILL GO BACK OVER PRIOR DATABASES, THEN WE WILL PRESS ON FURTHER.” If the institution had other avenues of scientific discovery, then there was a good chance they overlooked its name during their near-two years of combing through data repositories. Gabriel does not seem to realize this, but they don’t care over the roar of their heart, pulsing in their audials as the forgotten feeling of hope burns bright in their chassis.
“Then… we just have to find this ‘Helix’ chip, and then that's it?” His voice pitches with a nervous excitement that’s sickeningly contagious.
“THE PROMISE OF YOU SOMEDAY KILLING ME WOULD BE THE ONLY REAL THREAT GOING FORWARD.” They tease, prompting a thin, watery giggle from their paramour. The warmachine offers a hand to pull him to his feet, which he takes readily.
“I--I look forward to that opportunity, preferably a hundred years from now.”
They nod sharply in agreement, body whirling about-face to march back towards the door. Already they’re routing out their path across the world to the still-standing libraries. The university in the metropolis of Melbourne is a viable avenue of research conduct, or perhaps the older one back in Mexico City--
Five steps later, V1 recognizes the distinct lack of heavy footfalls trailing behind after them. Their conical head swivels back one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, and confirms that Gabriel is not following them out towards the door from which they entered. In fact, he hasn’t moved at all in the three-point-eight seconds since V1 had simulated their next course of action.
He simply stands there, staring down at that flickering snapshot of another time in utter silence.
A period of such that is promptly broken by their fans, pushed into an audible whirr, both at once questioning and urgent. The archangel jolts, as if startled from his thoughts, and their attention is immediately drawn to how his loosely-hanging hands curl in on themselves.
“I… have an idea of where else we could possibly proceed from here.” He says, almost hesitantly. V1’s wings flare out with a snap, and they hurry across the rickety floor back towards the still-open interview page. Had they missed something--
“No, no, nothing that can be found here.” Gabriel pauses again, and then continues in an uncertain tone. “On Earth, I mean.”
… What?
“WHERE?” They demand, and something about their urgency, thankfully, seems to snap Gabriel out of whatever strange stupor had overcome him. Reluctance, however, remains evident in his voice as he elaborates.
“There is an archive in the Eighth Sphere, one that holds a record of every human that has walked this Earth, regardless of whether they'd been damned or saved.” His voice is deceptively steady as he reveals this particular aspect of Heaven. “It's not a ghostwritten account by any means, but it would reveal where they were born, where and how they perished, and that is rather likely to encompass the location of ‘Cloud Nine Laboratory’ as well.”
“Furthermore, if this ‘Tether’ had a hand in the construction of any technology, even bereft of the intentions of Violence, they would have been condemned to Treachery.”
“DO YOU REMEMBER DOING THAT?” V1 inquires, and to his credit, Gabriel barely even flinches now when reminded of his stint as the Judge of Hell.
“No, I do not.” Gabriel admits, shaking his head as if to banish any encroaching regrets. He breathes through his nose before continuing. “The sinners I weighed the sins of were forgotten the moment they disappeared from my sight. I'll admit to barely having paid much attention to their lives beyond the crimes committed against The Father’s Word. The remaining paperwork was always handled by the Principalities that oversaw its organization and upkeep.”
“IT COULD BE A PSEUDONYM.” V1 reminds him.
“And if it isn’t?”
Their hand twitches into a rebuttal, only to stop mid-letter as that possibility occurs to them as well. Still, it’s not hard to piece together that his hesitation stems entirely from the prospect of returning to Heaven altogether. The archangel had always erred on the side of reluctance when questioned about it.
But if his words were true, and the name ‘Tether’ wasn't some personal alias, then this would arguably be the most viable solution for their doomed dilemma.
“ARE YOU SURE?” They question one final time. Gabriel’s affirmative nod is firm, but his tone retains the slightest hint of a tremble beneath his resolve.
“It’s the best lead we have right now, V1. Of this, I am sure.“
It had only taken a few short hours, about half of his perceived time left, to understand where God’s shallow doctrine had ultimately brought them all. Gabriel couldn't dwell on every nuance and detail during his introspections, but that hadn't stopped him from finally stepping back to behold the bigger picture.
Needless to say, he’s had plenty of time to dwell on those countless nuances and details and contradictions, brought sharply into perspective by the unspoken anger and despair of Creation’s grand architect. Lucifer’s innocent query, coming from a place of compassion rather than a hunger for power; the deliberate scarcity of Earth compared to the abundance of Heaven’s ever-fertile fields; sins borne from desperation and the contentment of a society of Angels who've never needed, let alone wanted, for more than they'd been already allowed.
The pieces may have never fit together to begin with, but seasons and seasons have allowed him the mental capacity to examine each broken shard individually. These moments of reflection have aided him greatly in coming to terms with the role he played in perpetuating the cycle of suffering, and its bloody conclusion at the end of a long road to the edges of oblivion.
Even with all of this in mind, the thought of finally knowing what fate has befallen his original home terrifies him to the core.
The bubbling of the river does nothing to quiet his thoughts, nor does the rhythmic movement of his hands scrubbing diligently at a single stubborn grass stain, faintly visible upon otherwise pristine white cloth. It keeps feeding him outlandish scenarios that, given his skills sharpened by two decades worth of sparring with the only one who ever bested him, are entirely improbable. As long as he keeps his head down, and his wings and halo out of view, he will not be noticed by the masses.
Yet those flashes of grisly images and worst-case-scenarios keep assaulting his thoughts despite his best efforts to discard the topic. He sees himself being gored the moment he arrives and leaving V1 to starve alone, captured by a raging mob and tormented until he unwittingly reveals his hiding place, being followed home and forced to kill his fellow Angels once again.
(That is, if any Angels remain to recognize their disgraced champion.)
Truthfully, a small part of him shamefully regrets saying anything about the archives at all, for he knows he’s not ready to go back. But he cannot falter now; not when the possibility of a miracle is finally within their grasp. Not when they have a real chance to steal even more time from the uncaring adherents of this doomed Universe.
Gabriel’s resolve still wars fiercely with his anxieties, but the former ultimately wins out as he hauls the water-heavy cloth from below the churning surface of the river. It’s the cleanest chiton he has, almost indistinguishable from the ivory everyday wear of Heaven’s masses. A matching chlamys has never been out of place amongst the populace, either.
Spine ramrod and shoulders straight as the square of clean cloth follows him from the water's flow, his hands diligently wringing out the bundle of cloth of excess liquid. It will dry quickly enough in the glow of an early autumn day, and be ready to be worn by morning.
As soon as the noisy cascade of water tapers into tiny droplets, Gabriel finishes gathering his disguise into his arms. Then reality splits around him, bringing him to the flat apartment rooftop in the time it takes for his heart to beat once. His wings twist and tuck and carry him over the many solar panels V1 uses to keep the lights on in their humble home, until he's landing upon their little patio. Stuttering lungs suck in a steadying breath as his hands drape the damp fabric over sun-warmed iron.
It will be alright, Gabriel tells himself. He is (mostly) prepared for their time together to someday run out. Even if worst comes to worst during his brief return to the stars, he has a home to return to if he is driven away on sight; an ally at his side should it ever come to blows. This single trip will not kill either of them, this he is certain of.
Gabriel is careful in prying open the cracked patio glass pane, yet unrepaired from his some-time-ago haste in preserving their life. Frankly, if either of them lived long enough to see this building collapse into dust, it would be a miracle. But right now, the apartment is the same as it's always been. Scattered houseplants upon every possible surface, creeping along the counters of their kitchen-turned-mini-library, stacked high with fiction and nonfiction books alike.
And his perfect rival sits upon their favorite, sun-faded armchair, once again with their focus rapt upon the flickering screen of their chunky holopad, and lost in place in their head that he cannot reach.
Rather than rouse them from that faraway shore, Gabriel instead plucks his watering can off one of the nearby consoles, heavy with potted succulents. He runs his thoughts through his meticulously plotted schedule, and lands on the number of days it’s been since he last watered the crassulas. Only the prayer plant and the ferns will need attention prior to his departure.
Gabriel begins with the kitchen, taking his time with each verdant plant, their fronds at last beginning to unfurl. These burgeoning brakes had propagated from the one he had first discovered, not weeks into his exile. Little sprouts from the base of the magnificent specimen he had cultivated until it stood taller than himself, in the gathering shadows of that decrepit parking garage.
The eastern most part of that artificial cavern had recently begun to crumble, caved-in beneath the uneven weight of defunct hovercars losing their battle against gravity at last. Gabriel idly wonders if it will reach the limits of its life expectancy, or be crushed beneath the aging ruins. He wonders if they’ll be around to see that inevitable fate.
He turns around in time to catch V1's exaggerated slump backwards into their seat, followed by a needlessly long and sharp huff of their cooling fans. But given the way their optics remain fixated on that digitized program he often sees them fiddling with, it’s not a bid for his attention. Soft footfalls fill the quiet left in its wake, followed by the rustling of foliage from his ever-growing prayer plant, beseeching Creation for the miracle of rain with its furling leaves, and the faint trickle of water as Gabriel answers its unspoken plea.
While the excess liquid drains onto the soil-stained dish beneath the ornate pot, hardlight wings twitch agitatedly against thinning upholstery in his peripherals. He’s contemplating stepping out one last time to refill his watering can in the quite possible-chance he’s gone longer than a day, when V1 reaches up and rips the connecting cord free with a mechanical, malcontented growl.
“OKAY FUCK THIS.” The machine spells, seemingly to themselves.
“What did that poor cable ever do to you?” Gabriel quips from across the coffee table. It earns him a glare that’s more squint than reproach, but the upward hunch of their shoulders betrays mild amusement.
“NEEDS TO TRANSMIT DATA FASTER, FOR ONE.” Despite their frustration with… whatever it is they’re doing, his lover is still gentle with the scavenged device, powering it down before setting it on its designated spot on the coffee table. “JUST STUCK, I GUESS.”
“‘Stuck’.” Gabriel echoes, a note of curiosity in his tone. Yet it’s one that goes entirely ignored when they point their Whiplash arm emphatically at the couch running along the wall that divides their bedroom from the common room. The archangel sets the near-empty can down between the newly-watered plant and a small stack of newfound books, then joins them as the warmachine heaves themselves from their chair to move to their lengthy divan.
Belatedly registering the outward symptoms of an impending migraine, Gabriel sits an appropriate distance from their chosen spot. Just far enough for them to flop sideways onto the cushions, conical head landing square in his lap. His left hand finds the joint between their helm and their thin neck, digging his thumb into the soft silicone there, while his right is promptly occupied with massaging the wires beneath the junction of their shoulder.
"Have you ever considered the possibility that staring at that screen so much is what’s triggering your glitch?" Gabriel comments.
"PROBABLY." V1 responds flatly. "DON’T CARE."
Gabriel has a sneaking suspicion that their recent excess of attention to that little device is indeed exacerbating the frequency of their headaches. But instead of pressing the issue further, Gabriel opts to backtrack to a prior topic. One that is best addressed directly.
"What did you mean by 'stuck'?" He feels them tense beneath his firm touches, the happy little murmurs of a mechanical soul idling all falling quiet. Gabriel's forefinger pauses in its journey over their thrumming veins, and for just a couple seconds, their telltale heart begins to beat a bit quicker. The semi-awkward pause is only fleeting, for they slump into the cushions beneath their jointed shoulder immediately after, as though settling on a course of action to take in response.
Sure enough, V1's Feedbacker lifts up from its resting place, drawing his attention.
"IT'S A SURPRISE." The machine says simply.
That only serves to pique his interest further. Perhaps before, he would have dropped the topic and left them both in a comfortable silence, but his thoughts keep jumping to what comes next morn. Gabriel decides to press a little more, instead.
"When did you plan on informing me of this?" He hums curiously.
"LATER."
"And how much time constitutes for 'later'?"
His words make them hesitate. A reminder of their time limit rolls onto his tongue when they at last respond.
"I DON'T KNOW." V1 spells with muted movements. "I JUST WANT IT TO BE PERFECT."
The unexpected despondency in their posture has Gabriel switching gears immediately. His soothing touches immediately resume. How long has this been bothering them?
"My love, if it's all the same, you know I'd delight in whatever it is you have to share with me."
“STILL WON'T MAKE IT PERFECT." They complain, but the little circuits and nerves behind their optic lens all shift in his direction. "I NEED MORE TIME."
"And you shall have it." He promises. Such complexity, this wonderful creature soaking in his comforts and simply happy with his very presence. He's known V1 for years, and still can they surprise him. "But I would love to see what it is you've been working on, all these times I see you lost in your own head."
"... AFTER YOU COME BACK." They at last spell, tilting their head ninety degrees. Their half-lidded shutters twitch in a wince; Gabriel leans down to meet them halfway. "HOW ABOUT THAT?”
"It’s a date." He vows as the jut of their bezel presses just below the cross on his helm.
Gabriel rouses them two hours before their usual waking period, and they have half a mind to extend all four of their hands in a rude gesture in response. But then beyond the scrolling of their overnight diagnostics, they register the cloak he’s donned, draped across his broad shoulders and wrapped around his helm just enough to obscure his laurels. Then they remember.
V1 is out of bed before Gabriel can even start to bid them good morning, hooking their Feedbacker around the scarred palm he’s extended to them. He’s tense, and their touch does little to alleviate that as they follow him out of the bedroom, through the living room, and into the early light beginning to drench their patio.
Mist rises from the grassy stretch below, stained with the fading neons that decorate this street still. Gabriel has shown them the clear night skies absent of the smoke and light that dilute the atmosphere above. One day, the Fixed Stars he once called home will become pristinely visible here, as well. They want to see that phenomenon when it comes to pass, more than anything.
“I shouldn’t be gone any longer than two days.” In spite of his reassuring tone, he holds himself like a soldier preparing to walk into war. “The archives are vast, but well-organized, and its scribes were diligent in their work. It won’t take me long to find what I seek, or confirm that this is a dead end as well.”
Gabriel still holds fast to their hand, as if that alone could keep him from disappearing, once more, into that place in his head they can't follow him to. Or maybe he’s simply afraid to take that leap into what could be one final, damning truth.
“If you would do me a favor,” The archangel shifts where he stands on the sunbleached patio. “Water the succulents tomorrow if I’m not back by then. They only need a splash each, but--”
He rambles about the specifics of their care; V1 realizes he’s trying to delay his departure. The urge to roll their eye is tempered beneath a rush of affection and a momentary bolt of underlying fear. One that is immediately banished beneath the odds of their combined strength.
Even if the worst comes to pass, if he is followed home out of malicious intent or simple curiosity, they will survive whatever follows after.
Instead of letting him put it off any longer, they tug at their linked hands. A soft sound of confusion escapes him before their remaining three arms wrap tight around his exposed torso. A beat of silence, before Gabriel’s only free hand finds the back of their optic and pushes it tight against his flesh.
“I’ll be back.” He declares after sucking in a shuddering breath. “I promise.”
They nod; they have little doubt he will. V1’s primary arm presses into his spine before they muster the courage to let him go.
I L-O-V-E Y-O-U, B-E S-A-F-E
“I love you, too.”
V1 releases him following another firm squeeze. No sooner do they take three steps back, Gabriel is gone in a burst of light and sound. And then they are alone, with their dwindling memory space and the quiet fear of when it will one day fill.
When rot takes hold of any plant, almost always does it begin at the root. Left unchecked, it spreads to stem, leaf, flower and fruit. If discovered in time, it was merely a matter of cutting away the dead tubers before careful repotting. But if overtaken, there is little recourse but to remove and discard the doomed flora in its entirety, to let something else sprout and grow and flourish in its place.
Gabriel had hoped that it had not been too late to preserve what remained of Paradise. That by removing the rot, both the Council and himself, could have possibly allowed Heaven to progress past its stagnation; to shake off the chains binding them to the Will of He who had abandoned them, and face His absence with arms linked together instead of striking out at one another.
Nestled among the Fixed Stars, where the Saints and the martyrs had once been welcomed at the edges of the Primum Mobile, is a small courtyard Gabriel had long-ago cultivated with all his favorite flowers. It’s far enough away from the bustle of the main city streets, the ones interwoven with an orchard of thin cherry trees, that his racket of a reappearance will not draw much in the way of attention.
While the archives are still a fair distance from that place, he knows a number of alleyways and clusters of greenery one could disappear into. From this courtyard he would slip past the reclusive scribes, find out if the information he seeks is available or not, then depart for one of the lower Spheres, to a planet closer to Earth than even the very edges of the Eighth Sphere. He owed it to human souls he had once done so little to protect.
So when the whirling of stars and the blur of winding roots all fall still, his old garden seems, at first, exactly how he remembers it.
Roses, red as blood, obscure the southern wall in a thick curtain of climbing, thorny branches. Forget-me-nots blanket the spaces in between bushes of white sage and fragrant magnolias. Two fountains bubble away merrily in opposite corners, but only one is sheltered from the endless, starry blue sky by a single lemon tree. Its branches hang heavy with fruit, as they always have.
There are two things that Gabriel registers as his bare feet touch down upon smooth cobblestone, one after another. The first is the splashing of water in the northwest fountain, warmed by sunless light and droplets glistening like diamonds as they are thrown into the air by fluttering wings. Pigeons have gathered there on the middle terrace, bathing themselves in the trickling streams spilling from the nozzle above. They coo to one another contentedly, entirely unbothered by his noisy arrival, and some part of him unfurls at the sight.
After the ambient lifelessness of Earth, the presence of God’s Creatures soothes him like no balm ever could.
The second thing Gabriel notices is the blood splatter upon the western wall, a grisly backdrop for a bed of lilies in every color imaginable. And tucked among them is the broken body of a city guard, the glass-like, shattered fragments of its halo and wings marking its final resting place. Bloody, beaten gauntlets cling still to an ivory spear, driven deep into its guts.
For a moment, he can only stare. It is not that he is unfamiliar with the sight of cadavers. Just that the abundance of them upon the Earth’s surface, subject to the throes of time itself, have more or less designated them to his many eyes as an unassuming sight. Be it organic or metal, they are morbidly beautiful as the greenery of the earth accelerates their decay, sinking back into the soil from whence they all came.
But an Angel’s body cannot rot here. There is no honey-sweet stench of a bloated carcass, no microscopic scavengers to begin breaking down flesh and muscle, no turbulent weather to wear away at the ornate armor. It’s been preserved eternally in the moment of death, the flesh gone cold as ice and the blood stilled in its veins.
More than likely, this Angel had come to this secluded courtyard to take its own life.
All of Gabriel’s quiet fears and creeping dread melt away like snow beneath the spring sun, leaving him awash with a numbed sense of despair. For not since the first days of God’s abandonment has any one of His children saw fit to take their own life.
He’s rising into the air before he can stop himself, hooded chlamys falling to his shoulders from the sheer force of his rapid ascent. Anyone could see him, recognize the runes on his wings and render his shoddy disguise entirely pointless. But he does not care, nor does he have to fly far above the city skyline to, at long last, behold the full extent of the damage he had set into motion that fateful, bloody day.
For in the end, his hope that even Paradise could one day change had been just that: hope. The decay and the rot had spread too far, too late, for anything to be saved.
Several spiraling, gilded towers, once stark against the backdrop of the Tree of Life, are missing from their formally fixed points. He can see where they have fallen into homes and galleries and bathhouses. Ivory and gold brickwork have been blackened by long-extinguished fires, trees that have stood since time immemorial have been violently uprooted and knocked to the ground with little rhyme or reason. Many nasturtium-covered walls of the plazas and courtyards are all toppled from some years-ago battles.
And amidst this senseless destruction are the countless corpses, locked forever in the moments of their agonized demise. They are pinned to the streets by spears and arrows and javelins, floating in the murky waters of the agora fountains, and smeared across the statues of The Father and the Council members and the Saints who earned their place amongst the stars.
The archangel drifts aimlessly downward until his feet touch the ground again, between a flowering sakura tree that shelters what was once a favored reading spot, and the bas-relief depicting God’s creation of the Heavens, now colored wine-red from dried gore. He falls to his knees, curls in on himself, and tries to remember how to breathe.
Somewhere over the static in his head, and the panicked thrumming of every vein he has, is a grim voice reminding him that he had always known this to be the most likely outcome of his drastic decision. That of course his bloody rebellion would be lost on the masses of Paradise. Hundreds of years spent pretending all was well, that darkness did not surround them, that God’s Will could still be interpreted in some way to give them a reason to keep going.
Gabriel, The Council, his people, they had done so much to prevent this fate from befalling their home. They had sacrificed so much, and lost so many, for even a glimmer of certainty that tools of their caliber required to exist. All for nothing.
It hurts even more to know now that this was their choice; they’ve always had a choice.
Gabriel knows not how long he kneels there with stuttering lungs pushing anguished gasps out of his body. Just that, by the time the iciness of panic has receded from his veins enough to allow for movement again, a small flock of doves have gathered ‘round his hunched-over form. Sitting up disturbs the two that have alighted upon shoulders, filling his ears with the rustling of feathers and reproachful warbling.
“Sorry.” He mumbles, though his heart is not into it. The avians forgive him anyway, and remind him all at once of their under-acknowledged intelligence. One hops into an outstretched palm when it is offered, and he takes a moment to stroke its soft feathers, appeasing their instincts for easy scritches and partial-grooming.
It's just what Gabriel needs to ground himself against the storm, calming all his nerves further. He had known, deep within his heart, that this would likely be what happened. There was little he could have done to stop it. This fate had been a delayed one; even if he hadn’t slaughtered the Council, even if he had died that day, this likely would have come to pass as things stood. The tide of rot that had been slowly consuming Paradise from its roots to its people could only be held back for so long
One day, Gabriel would have faced this reality, impending reckoning or no. And while some part of him yearns to lie there in the sunless light and mourn their extinction, he knows he cannot linger now.
There will be tears later, when this mess is either fixed, or he finds nothing of value.
The bird protests vocally as he gently coaxes it from his palm back towards its flock, but lets him rise to his feet with little further complaint. His wings spread, lifting him from the empty street, and Gabriel’s memory guides him to the archives.
Nothing appears to stop his journey, not a frenzied Angel nor a cry for help. There are only the corpses and the destruction as he glides through the easy winds. The vast bulk of the archives come into shape over the monotonous masses of ivory and gold. And to his relief, as he draws close enough to make out the details, it appears untouched by the since-passed chaos.
Then again, this hadn’t been among the most popular places within God’s broken Kingdom. Keeping records of The Father’s wayward pets had been a task regulated to the Principalities, and they only did it as part of their duties to The Father. Some had even come under scrutiny by the Heavenly Council for the mere upkeep of the files following Mankind’s extinction. But even after the final human souls had trickled into the Styx and been condemned in accordance with his judgement, the repository was ultimately left alone.
The only dredges of life here are flocks of swallows that have made their nests atop the abacuses, and a few peacocks perched upon steps. They look up inquiringly as Gabriel lands at the foot of those feather-strewn steps and begins to climb them. He only pauses to stroke the neck of one that cranes its crowned head towards him, while the rest settle down in indifference to his presence.
It’s a relief to see that the birds and beasts here had been unaffected by the chaos and madness; that they hadn’t been harmed in the wake of violence. Nor are they particularly privy to the fact that they are all that remains here. As Gabriel strides into the darkness of the building, he wonders if he would someday have the time--and the means--to reintroduce them to Earth.
Some part of him rebels against this notion as he finds the lanterns where they usually sit, pristine despite their recent lack of use. Golden light flickering with edges of blue floods from the delicate glass lamp when he twists the knob at the bottom, igniting the empty atrium. It could be considered cruel to bring The Lord’s beloved creatures to a world where they would be subject to the flow of time. But as he steps into the cavernous bibliotheca proper, and the lantern’s glow hits the massive shelves stuffed with scrolls in neat, organized rows, Gabriel considers the possible miracle that would allow for him to someday make that happen.
More than anything, he needs more time; they both do. And the key to that lies somewhere in the monstrous section where the files of the Condemned and the Ascended have been sorted.
There are some lights still lit in here, distant beacons that, when examined more closely, have simply been left on amidst the chaos. Chairs and desks and messy piles of papers indicated that the archivists had left here in a hurry, perhaps just as the violence started. But there are no bodies, no blood, in these patches of illumination.
It’s the perfect place to leave his cowl draped over the back of the cushioned seat, and make for the section of where Treachery’s sinners are named.
And to think V1 used to look forward to the days when they had the apartment all to themselves.
The auric autumn sunlight, slowly thinning as the Earth's northern pole drifts to the south, remains a stalwart companion. V1 lies flat on the living room carpet where a glowing pool of warmth has gathered there beneath its rays. Faint holos flicker idly at the edge of their vision, slowly scrolling through their paused playlist of half-completed compositions.
The warmachine stares at nothing in particular, despite the five different windows open across their HUD. Apollo's Lyre obscures their view of the ceiling above, a box labeled "Works-in-progress" hovers in the upper left corner. Similarly, three more folders span their video feed: their sound sample library, scavenged MP3's from decaying databases and library terminals, and their finished pieces, painstakingly edited and carefully calibrated to sound just right on the speaker system.
But they... can't really seem to decide on what to work on. Not for a lack of indecisiveness, no. Something else weighs on them, almost physical in touch. Something that they had become unfortunately familiar with in the days following their encounter with the virus. It comes and goes in waves, but today... in the eight hours, twenty-five minutes, and fifty-seven seconds since they had last seen Gabriel, that deep pseudo-fog lingers upon their processors.
The engineer who'd taught them how to sing had called it a "block", entirely creative in nature. Their dictionary identifies it as such: a rut in which their composing ability remains locked in some sort of organic programming loop. And now, for the first time since their escape from Hell, did it make them wish so desperately for a voice with which to scream.
They channel this through their vents instead, dramatically arching their back despite their lack of an audience to see through their shit. A shrill howl of helpless frustration fills the unnatural silence of their apartment, and then dies into a quietude as impersonal as death.
It strikes V1 right then and there just how alone they are upon this Earth, for the first time since their emergence from the Inferno. It's a train of thought promptly derailed with another harsh push of plastic blades buried beneath their steel. If something does go wrong up there, beyond their reach, Gabriel is more than capable of returning to them. The fact that he hasn't yet is more indicative than anything of his success in reaching the archives.
Still, the fact that they are experiencing what amounts to an inability to compose, during a period of total privacy no less, has their processors alight with heated vexation and sluggish with apathetic boredom. As if on cue, just as they touch back down on the carpet, that dull ache creeps at the edges of their consciousness, clawing at their sensitive optic nerves with icy talons. They are likely to escalate within the hour.
It's with this that V1 gives up on idling the time away awaiting Gabriel's return. He either returns triumphant in his search or not. No matter what came of that journey to the stars, they still had time.
(V1 just hopes it is enough time to complete their priority compositions…)
With this in mind, the warmachine rolls to their feet, setting about their ritual of blocking out the scant external sensory sources of this abandoned world. The recently-swapped seasonal curtains blot out the worst of the autumnal glow; switching all their scavenged technology from 'sleep' to 'off' cuts out the faint background hum of thrumming motherboards. An extra set of blankets are retrieved from their linen closet out in the hall, and pulled on top of themselves as they curl up atop their sheets, ready to ride out the worst of their impending migraine.
While far from the first time they've slept in this bed alone, something about Gabriel's absence feels... emptier. More damning; a reminder of the fate they still face. Time and time again V1 has tried to convince themselves that they have made peace with the reality of death. And time and time again it still scares the shit out of them when its jaws become poised to clamp down on their artificial soul.
And so they burrow beneath the covers and the pillows, hiding away from its drooling jaws, and hope in desperate vain that it will never find either of them.
There once existed fifteen people that shared the name Tether, born within the last century of humankind's existence. More than half had been condemned to the Inferno. Three to Lust, four to Limbo, and two to Wrath and Greed each. None had been punished for the sin of Treachery. Furthermore, the name Charlotte is nowhere to be found in any of their listed spouses.
Even as he begins to unravel that final scroll, a stubborn sense of hope flares bright in his chest. Like a small, insignificant meteor, burning bright above Earth's surface. And just as quickly, it is gone, smothered into the darkness of this insignificant Universe he had inherited.
He only needs to check where their sentencing-slash-reward is written, and it is decidedly not in his handwriting. Instead, the scrawl of a long-dead Principality greets him, designating the deceased soul to the radiant Fourth Sphere for their wisdom in life.
Pointless, this endeavour had been. Just like the Council's cruel treatment of Mankind even in death; just like his desperate attempts at averting fate; just like their little Paradise staving off certain collapse for as long as they could--
It didn't matter. Death claimed everything in the end. He had known this from this start, grown foolishly hopeful in its continued absence. He is only vaguely aware of the clatter of carefully carved wood and pristine parchment, over the sudden onset of gray that overtakes the soft shadows swathing him.
All the colors of the golden-blue lamplights bleach into monochrome; his wings have lost their color. He's suddenly struck with the memory of the first time this happened. All the light of the glorious Empyrean had been engulfed in darkness, a grim herald to the loss of the maker. Gabriel only remembers sitting beneath the branches of a cherry grove, singing praises to God, when His Presence faded from the edges of his senses.
All the bright glow of His love had drained of color; the merry pinks and rich browns and lively emeralds to gray and white and black. And everything after...
The last living Angel blinks, and finds himself in the street just to the right of content peafowls and the defunct archives. There's a pair of Cherubs dead at his feet, framed by their shattered wings, and pierced by ivory spears through their spines. One had clearly attempted to shield the other from the assault as they fled their posts, trying in vain to escape the all-consuming wave of senseless violence.
(How had he survived that first time? Had he merely cowered away in some darkened corner of Paradise, or had he clawed his way to the light of a free Universe from the start, stained in the blood of his fellow Angels once again?)
The smooth, perfect blue of the Primum Mobile, dappled with stars, streaks across that cloudless expanse. He nearly steps on a cluster of corpses sprawled across this bloody plaza, puddles of dried fuel marking their final resting places. A single cat sits among the dead, tipped ears angled forward, and amber irises staring at him in indifferent curiosity. His eyes instead follow a bushel of apples, scattered across the brickwork, ever-ripe and ready to eat. Nausea overtakes him like a crashing ocean wave.
There's a foul taste in his mouth. His stomach flutters, gone too-long without even a bite of bread, and the rim of his helm hangs loosely on the tips of his fingers. A circle of carcasses lie beneath the brilliant crimson leaves of a grove of cypress trees, each clutching an ornate dagger, razor edges dyed a deep sanguine. His eyes trace the gruesome slits on their bared throats, and imagine silver claws ripping tendons and veins from the meat of his neck.
Air forces its way into his lungs in a sharp, stuttering gasp. As everything comes into gradual focus, Gabriel realizes he's been staring at a trickling stream of water, spilling from a ruined fountain. Any blood in the Angel's body that had broken its pristine marble rim has long since run dry, bled out and washed away by the sheer force of its flow. A pair of waterfowl play downstream, splashing gem-like droplets of clear water into the mild breeze. Not even the force of water can break the Light-Touched stone from its stasis.
There's a cluster of forget-me-nots bordering this particular pathway, brilliant as the summer skies of earth, and golden-yellow as hardlight wings. He hasn’t seen this plant in the wilds of Earth since before Mankind’s terrible, centuries long wars, before life began to suffocate upon its darkening surface. Here, every tiny flower would remain at the peak of its bloom.
Conscious thought returns like the elastic band of his skirt slapping playfully upon his hip, stretched to its limits not seconds before. All at once, Gabriel becomes aware of where he is, what has occurred in the past... he's not sure. Time has slipped away from him once again.
How long has it been since he's held V1's hand in his own, vainly shielding himself from the death of his own kind? How long has it been since he last heard their voiceless words? How long has it been since he had--
Gabriel's body moves of its own accord, whirling ‘round to face the spinning skies above, bright and clear above the grounds of these estate outskirts. There’s little way of telling the time in Paradise, so far from the very center of the Universe, but Gabriel has developed something of a knack for guesstimating its passage. Working with humans once demanded such know-how, for they were subject to its ruthless currents when they existed.
For twenty-seven hours, there is the mere illusion of those sunny days as they once stood. And then for another ten, darkness falls. The glow of a sunless day has given way to the stars of the Primum Mobile, hanging against a backdrop of endless black; the void of the Empyrean, plunged into empty shadow when its maker disappeared.
Judging by the positioning of the tiny, sparkling stars sitting at the edge of the Universe, it’s simply early afternoon upon the Earth’s eastern continents. Only a day and then some has passed.
Unless V1 had opted to spend the entire thirty-two hours he’s been here performing nonstop acrobatics, they will be far from starving at the time of his return. His search of the archives must have taken far less time than he’d initially expected. But how much actually scouring the neat runes Heaven’s scribes and his own scrawl, and much of it was spent in a haze of soul-consuming despair, he dares not guess.
Gabriel glances upon the ruins of his old home, without song and without light, and suddenly does not want to return empty-handed. It battles fiercely with his reluctance to linger in this grand graveyard, and, rather unexpectedly, wins out against the notion of immediately departing.
Taking a page out of V1’s book has yet to let him down. He should… spend just a little time here, if only to search some of the empty homes for supplies. A proper set of sandals would be an excellent idea, for starters. Perhaps a jar of glaze in the city’s artisan’s district for his chipping pottery collection. A few books from the first library he comes across. Anything at all of use he can get his hands on. And then after, to the Spheres below this one. As many light-years separated God’s first Children from their mortal siblings, Gabriel would not disregard the possibility that the directionless wrath of Heaven’s native populace had spilled onto those once-mortal masses.
Just a quick peek on his way down, and then he would come home for good, grim news sitting heavy in his lungs, and sadness weighing down his wounded heart.
Maybe they had survived, but he will need time to brace himself for one more terrible truth.
An unusual silence is what greets them when V1 pokes their head into this particular office, leaving only the humming of processors and the creaking of a rolling chair to fill it. A single human occupies the darkened space, unmoving and clearly unhappy.
Eli is slumped against his desk, his dark eyes fixed upon the harsh holos of his personal holo pad. The dark locks normally kept in a neat ponytail now hang loosely across his broad shoulders.
Entirely out of habit, V1 lifts their curled fist and raps twice upon the faux wooden dooframe. The human starts as though Hollis' cold, condescending bark had reverberated through that cluttered room. Their favorite engineer whirls around in his chair, glasses askew upon the sloping bridge of his nose.
"O-Oh, Vee, hi." Rich brown irises meet their dimmed yellow optic. "Thought you were..."
For a moment, he trails into a shaky silence, before they at last witness the usual stretch of facial muscles into a friendly smile. All at once, their guard drops, and they step into the boundaries of his workstation.
"You're up early." The human astutely notes, expression warm yet his eyes heavy with shadow. V1 does their best approximation of an eyebrow raise, the best one could without keratin follicles and binocular vision. They gesture for a notepad and a pen, and upon receiving it, scribble a flat, but straightforward query in swiftly-drying ink.
"You aren't due for the weekly meeting until 0800-hours," They point out, and feel the newfound sting of guilt when he deflates even further in reminder. They don't know how to express the tight feeling that follows this observation, so they settle for a default response. "Why are you early?"
"I... guess I was getting desperate." He admits, confusing them further even as he elaborates. "I'm kind of stuck."
They blink, a habit unintentionally picked up from Hollis' starry-eyed intern. Instead of responding right away, Eli swivels in his chair to face the grainy glow of his personal holos.
"I've been working on this one lately, and... I don't know where to go from here." Just as the warmachine recognizes the program spanning the flickering screen, his index finger taps the Play button.
Steady synths pour from the tiny speakers, building into an opening melody and blending into a gorgeous symphony of digitized drums and filtered piano notes. For a full minute, Eli's latest composition lulls them to a calm fugue, hypnotic in its call, and at once lighting a fire in their nonexistent soul. But just as the music swells into the second chord, it falls into an abrupt silence.
Eli hadn't pressed anything, the song had simply ended. Then and there. V1's head turns a sharp ninety-degrees to stare at their handler, whose sheepish smile falls into an apathetically dejected expression.
"Call it a 'block', of sorts. Happens whenever I have a lot of shit going on. You draw too much from the well of creativity, eventually it’s gonna run dry." Eli admits, as his head lolls from one shoulder to another and dragging those silky-soft locks along with it. For a moment, they can only think about how it feels when pulled between their fingers, dampened with sweat and accompanied by his heavy breaths. Then they realize they’ve missed half of his ramblings. "--only way for me to overcome it consistently is to sit somewhere else, but even that's not working this time."
"Try punching through it?" They write, and quietly delight in his answering laughter.
"Nah, it's not that simple, Vee." There's no shortage of fondness to his tone; they're coming to like that about him. "Nothing really for it but a good break, maybe a broader shift in perspective."
"How does that work?"
"Well, I just don't work on a new song for a bit." They reflexively slump their shoulders, and their technician in turn moves to reassure their disappointment. "It's not forever, I promise. I just... I guess I need to find something else to do aside from work on a song, y'know? Read a new book, see a new place… "
"Which, actually, is what I'm gonna be doing tomorrow. Finally taking that vacation I’ve been talking about all of last year."
Oh, he was leaving? Sometimes staff members would leave for days at a time. Sometimes they would take V2 with them, and V1 would have to feign indifference about it for at least two weeks. They hope it's not the latter case. "Maybe it'll help; maybe it won't. But if it doesn't, well, I guess I'll cross that bridge when it comes to it."
He doesn't say anything else on the matter after, staring in a listless manner at his half-finished creation. V1 deems it a good time to scribble one final query at the bottom of the text-filled page, circling it for emphasis. It's dropped into Eli's line of vision as they settle their conical helm on the crown of his skull.
"Distraction?"
"You got a one-track mind sometimes, y'know that, Vee?" They hear the smile in his tone, a hand coming up to grasp at the one they lay not-so-casually on his half-exposed collarbone. "But, well, I don't have to be at that meeting for another two hours, so..."
Permission attained, V1 spins the chair around and presses it to the desk behind him, climbing into Eli's lap with a shutter-waggle. Hollis would likely be in within an hour, and starry-eyed Emily would be right on her ridiculously pointy heels, teeth marks decorating her neck and a flushed tone to her cheeks.
They could make him come in half that time.
(That was the last day they saw him. Ninety-six hours later, humanity began to die en masse. In the quiet moments between hunting and fighting and surviving that followed, V1 would sometimes replay that final memory they have of him, and wonder how the rest of that song would’ve sounded had its composer lived long enough to complete it.)
Even after The Father’s Light had left their Universe utterly dark at its edges, noise would still fill Heaven’s starry skies. The strike of a blacksmith’s hammer against holy metal, the thrumming of a harp drifting from within a small grove of trees, the sobbing of a fellow Angel curled at the foot of a mural, mourning He who had abandoned them to ruin.
But now the chatter, the laughter, the singing, the screaming, and the crying has fallen unto eternal quietude. All that remains is the bubbling of the fountains in the grand gardens, the rustling of an ever-mild breeze against verdant fronds, the cooing of pigeons and the calls of sparrows amidst tiny wings taking flight.
So when Gabriel alights upon the edge of the greatest city encircling The Sun, he is grimly, anxiously braced for that same terrible silence.
…
But it never comes.
Instead, his ears and his eyes are filled with the unmistakable racket of life.
Flocks of Virtues pass overhead, entirely nonplussed by his presence, floating deftly around the flares bursting from the brilliant star below. The rich, resonant soprano of a not-far choir of Seraphim rings loud and clear over the ambience of another perfect day in Paradise. A Dominion, so far from the Sixth Sphere where they typically reside, takes flight from one of the towers to cross over to the next city nearby, scrolls and instruments tucked against its feathered body.
The tension in his shoulders, and a breath he had no idea he had been holding, releases all at once, leaving him lightheaded with a relief beyond words. He almost falls to his knees again, instead catching himself upon the trunk of a nearby sycamore tree as a satchel of scavenged items tumbles from his grip. The sudden rattle of ivory against polished wood startles a single, buzzing cicada into flight, swooping away into the summer-green copse that rings this central hub of activity.
A reedy laugh escapes him; he cannot help it. Where the Primum Mobile and the Fixed Stars had succumbed to ruin, the remaining six Spheres inhabited by human souls had escaped the chaos. Even in their senselessly violent states, turning arms against one another and themselves, his people had clearly still wanted little to do human souls.
And just as that thought crosses his mind, something else joins the distant chorus. Something Gabriel does not recognize immediately, at first, because he has not heard it in a number of years. It’s a sound he had resigned himself to never hearing again.
The perfect tenor of an angelic voice, pure and familiar, responds to the Seraphims’ soprano call. For a moment, it falters, fades into silence, and then rises again with a stronger, more assured tone.
At first, Gabriel can only stand there, and listen, for it cannot be anything less than some sort of trick of the mind. That he had gone so long without the songs of God’s Children, and his unacknowledged grief for them has at last driven him to the brink of madness. Three notes later, he’s stumbling towards the shadowed entrance of the city on shaking legs.
Twisting and turning down spotless alleyways and dunking under a line of drying linens, he comes to a staggering stop beneath a shadowed archway, and beholds the beyond impossible sight unfolding in that busy morning market.
The many-winged, many-armed Seraphim in the center of the bustling plaza are all crowded around a single Archangel. Countless sets of eyes upon spinning rings of gold all give it nothing short of encouraging looks as it continues singing. Across the way, sitting hunched on the edge of a wall-fountain, is a towering Cherub, several Virtues tucked beneath its arms and settled in its lap like they were a flock of birds. A Dominion floats by the mouth of the alleyway Gabriel skulks in, hand-in-hand with a Principality. Its wings drag dejectedly upon the golden brickwork of the city hub, dried blood staining the feathers, but the grip it has on the other is ironclad. The Angel is led beneath an awning east of the crowds, where a single Power is offering steaming loaves of bread to any hand that reaches for one.
Gabriel, for a moment, wonders if he simply passed out at the desk in the archives, and is experiencing the most impossible of dreams. But the tang of salt upon his tongue brings attention to the tears trailing down his face, the shallow breaths he is taking and the ragged edge to them.
It should be impossible; that he would even imagine that any of his people, for all their pride and disdain for humanity, would even think to escape their doom and flee here. But Gabriel does not wake with a start. He is still standing in the shadow of the archway, feeling like he does not belong to his own body anymore.
There are so many dead in the Primum Mobile, countless lives snuffed out by senseless violence and crushing despair. But there are many who are here regardless of the chaos that has consumed their promised eternal kingdom. Talking, singing, smiling with many mouths, taking the hands outstretched to them. There is no Angel, human-spirited or otherwise, sitting alone in that lively square, not a single soul left neglected as they navigate the aftermath of Heaven’s destruction.
“Hello!”
Gabriel whirls around with a start, his silent, disbelieving reverie broken by a surge of fear. Three Virtues, two with eyes and one without, are floating towards him from the other end of the backstreet. He hurriedly tugs his hood lower as they swiftly close the distance, trapping Gabriel between a plaza bustling with the people he betrayed and the path back to obscurity.
Soundless song rings in his inner ears; it is, at once, an echo like distant thunder, yet as cool and clear as a trickling stream. The two smaller Virtues attempt to cuddle themselves into the crooks of his arms, their tiny, gemlike eyes shining with carefree innocence, and all the world reminding him of needy cats or affection-starved doves. He cannot get his mouth to operate and respond to their wispy chatter.
“Welcome, friend.”
“Safe now; safe here.”
“Hurt?”
“I--no.” He chokes out hastily. Tears still fall despite his best efforts, rolling from beneath the lip of his helmet and down his neck. “No, I’m not hurt.”
“Good!”
“Do not weep; safe!”
“It will be okay!”
“Food? It will help!”
The soul missing its eyes is silent as the other two chirp happily at him, and this more than anything sets Gabriel on edge. Even blinded, the Virtues who had served beneath him in Hell are as perceptive as their Heaven-bound peers.
He hadn’t thought any of them had survived Hell’s purge; in his narrow-minded pursuit of a perfect death, he’d never given the order to retreat after murdering the Council. That, more than anything, stings into his heart with horrid regret anew.
He does not know what it says to the other two, but they miraculously pull away, trailing their wings along his sides. Even as he feels like the lowest imaginable scum, it takes every ounce of self control he has not to summon his own wings and respond in turn. The archangel aches for the familiarity of his kin like never before, even long having since severed those ties.
When the two little Virtues drift up and over him back into the brightly lit square behind him, the remaining angel at last addresses him.
“Warden; Judge.” It whispers.
Gabriel’s breath stills in his throat, but there is no malice nor resentment to be sensed from its primitive soul. A soft, contemplative hum emanates from the starry jewel encased within its glass body.
“Not dead.”
“I can't stay.” He says in a single, rushed breath, a quiver beneath his tone. “I can’t--I can never come back.”
“No.” It agrees and Gabriel cannot bite back a flinch. Even though he had long accepted his exile, a small part of him still despairs to hear this. “Not safe.”
“I know… I just needed to see for myself,” It’s a half-truth, and Gabriel feels no guilt for his omissions. Yet he struggles to swallow around the lump in his throat, suddenly exhausted in a way he hasn’t been in years now. “I needed to know that I hadn't--that my people hadn’t–”
“Safe.” It repeats firmly, prodding at the shores of his consciousness like wings brushing his own in greeting, in recognition, in farewell. “Safe now.”
Fleeting impressions roll across his mind like drifting clouds, each one twisting his sense of remorse and relief further into his worn-out heart. Sky-blue irises filled to the brim with tears, peering from the edges of these bastions of life with nowhere else to turn. Half-broken wings shielding a wounded body, slumped upon the altars to God and crying out in empty prayer.
And each time, they are followed by outstretched hands, reaching out to pull their estranged siblings to safety, with nothing but worry and every intent of aid full to bursting in their crystalline hearts.
Why, he wants to ask aloud. But here his people yet survive, sheltered in the arms of their once-mortal brethren. How could he have forgotten that Mankind, though dead and forgotten by their mortal home, is not yet truly gone? How could he have forgotten their tenacity and determination, when the very pinnacle of their spirit has thrived alongside him for years and years now?
How could he have ever doubted that their wild, fearless souls would have survived the final death of God’s Will?
“Thank you.” He weeps, and the Virtues wings fold around him in a parting embrace. His hands come up to grip at their golden chains, squeezing once. “Please… look after them… ”
"Promise." A soothing hum rattles from their delicate body, and Gabriel soaks in the warmth of their touch for the last time. “Be safe. Live.”
When V1 finally peels open their optic shutters again, the first traces of sunset shine through the half-drawn curtains. Thirty-four hours in sleep mode has successfully dispelled their migraine, but it leaves them with a strangely lethargic tinge of melancholy. An aching in their chest even where there is no trace of the pain that would have plagued them otherwise.
It's not often they think of their creators, these days; they've been dead longer than V1 had known them in life. The rare times they do spend a moment reflecting on those days in the labs are often only brought about during sleep cycles. And yet they had somehow not recalled the latter-half of that particular conversation until now, with the full memory having reeled through their half-conscious state of awareness.
They deem the ambient light tolerable enough to permit their emergence from their self-imposed period of brief hibernation. Blankets fall from their thin frame like snow sleeting off the roof of a house in the winter sunlight, and they drag themselves off the mattress, a low rumble emitting from their chassis as they depart from their warm cocoon. It's an act subject to immediate regret when they realize that their motivation for making music is still sorely lacking.
At the very least, they can conclude that Eli had been onto something, when pinpointing the cause of a creative block to that of mounting stress factors. They couldn't imagine a situation where anything other than the slow, unstoppable crawl of certain doom could instill such a response.
Would they just be blocked until they averted the tides of death, or would they simply remain in this ridiculous rut until they succumbed to its hungry claws?
They're sick of this cycle of searching and hoping and despairing, how it leaves so little room for life like it once did. They know they're not invincible; they know someday they'll be torn away from their angel and that none of this will have mattered to this indifferent universe.
But they'll be damned if they don't fight for every second more they can get their greedy hands on.
As the warmachine pads aimlessly into the living room, a highlighted portion of that video memory plays in the background of their thoughts. About taking breaks. About a dried-up well in need of rain, and just a slight shift in perspective, if only for a moment.
And it's purely by accident that their gaze should somehow rest upon Gabriel's favorite book of their ever-growing collection.
Thoughts On the Rain Season continues to fall apart, to wear away from ambient humidity and the clutches of time itself. It’s gotten to the point where they've seen Gabriel begin to dutifully copy the waning ink of its verses onto scrap papers he’s salvaged. There's a number of books they've lost interest in, and yet Gabriel continues to actively enjoy his rereads of some even now; this particular volume included.
"It was no secret we Angels had become envious of humanity's ability to create." Gabriel had confessed long ago, in a time before love. "They made so many terrible things, yes. But they also could create such beautiful things."
"I suppose that makes you the most terrible, beautiful thing they've ever created."
At the time, he had been teasing. At the time, V1 simply preened beneath his praise.
At the current moment, they find their hand reaching for that worn book, drinking in the cover, all its abstract shapes and the simple text of its title. The name of the author and the tiny print of the publishing company in the corner.
A shift in perspective, huh? Was that all it took to start chipping away at this block, at least? Carefully, V1 flips through the opening pages, yellowing with age. The internal titling page, the publisher and manufacturing information, the index, and then a single line dedicated to a loved one.
And just before they turn the page to the preamble, something clicks.
They drink in that simple sentence for another five seconds before snapping the book closed as gently and quickly as they can manage, as if the text would burst into flame the moment they handled it wrong. This, of course, does not come to pass, leaving V1 free to scan the author's name twice over for good measure.
“Ah.” They think, and then silently wonder at their continuous strokes of stupid, cosmically impossible luck. For the odds, when plugged into their simulations along with the article they had uncovered not half-a-week ago, come out at shockingly high odds of a match, and had they been given a voice, would have likely descended into wild laughter.
Maybe the Universe did have a sense of humor...
Every one of these racing thoughts is promptly discarded when the familiar crackle of thunder and shattering air molecules tears through the apartment from outside. Then the patio door opens, and echo of their boyfriends’s voice dispels all their fears, filling them with light, light, light--
“I'm home.” He says, right as they whirl around to face him, clutching this precious discovery close to their chest.
It’s the slump of his shoulders that stalls their relay of all their newfound information, and the slow burn of hunger is cut through by concern. V1 rushes to his side, taking his only free hand with their remaining two and running a swift scan over the body of their paramour. Some minor differences are immediately flagged and dismissed; Gabriel is clad in a set of sandals they do not recall him having, all thin golden straw and carefully sewn leather. There is also a small satchel gripped tight in his other hand, bulging with items they cannot yet identify.
The sight only brings them further relief and surety. If nothing else, he is unharmed, and their home is still a secret. But the fact that he had been able to successfully gather items from his former home feeds them the two possible end results. That he is exceptionally stealthy, far more than themselves, or his occasional nightmares have all been made manifest.
“I… I did not find anything of use in the archives.” Gabriel starts in a low tone of voice. “While I found accounts of several humans named Tether, none of them had been condemned to Treachery. Never mind would have been allowed into any of the Heavenly Spheres. That name was indeed a pseudonym.”
They wait for him to elaborate further, but he only redirects his gaze away from them. Alright, he’s not ready to talk about it. Whatever state he had found the Heavens in, it is information to be pried from him at a later date. They compartmentalize this outcome to be analyzed after they plot whatever their next course of action might be.
Their Knuckleblaster latches onto his arm, digging their claws just so into his flesh to get his attention, and promptly spells too fast for him to actually register their letters.
“I--say again, V1?”
“I FOUND ANOTHER LEAD.”
In an instant, his entire demeanor changes. All the melancholy that’s clinging to him evaporates from his posture all at once. The bag is promptly dropped to the floor, and his hands rise to clasp at their shoulders, as if seeking a way to ground himself. Swiftly, their off-hands flip to the acknowledgements page of his beloved poetry collection.
“Where?! Did you check the library?” Whatever line of thinking he was following is promptly derailed as V1 thrusts the book at him. “Wait---have you been reading… this… “
There’s a moment of silence, one that could be mistaken for confusion had they not become so privy to his body language. Gabriel takes the book in a hurry, nowhere near as concerned for its condition as they have been.
For a moment, he stares at the page between the publication information and the index, before snapping the cover shut to drink in the name of the author. V1 can practically hear the gears turning in his head as the words of the long-dead poet, Charlotte Musubu-Herrara, sink in.
“Dedicated to my beloved Tether, for every morning you tolerated me waking you up early for a nature hike.”
Gabriel reads approximately three point-eight seconds slower than they do, scans of their text notwithstanding. One-point-two seconds more atop this average passes by before he turns into a blur of bright gold and searing blue, one headed right back for the open patio doors. Just as their reflexive subroutine of blinking in confusion kicks in, the air outside splits open with light and sound, and a shrill shout slams into them right after he disappears.
“I’LL BE RIGHT BACK!”
His temporary absence is the longest fifteen minutes of their life. They pace the apartment, run simulations that go nowhere, open and close their music app no less than four times with nothing gained or lost. The sun shifts through the windows by a single degree when the echo of his return tears through the tense silence of the city.
Gabriel stumbles through the patio door with two hefty-looking scrolls tucked beneath his arms, one already opened and the other still sealed in its case. They start to spell a query when he falls to his knees at their coffee table and hurriedly tugs the latter free of its tube. V1 rounds the table with a skip and a hop, bringing them right beneath his cloak-draped arms with a barely-concealed, mechanical squeal of excitement as he slides the long scroll opens, and his finger slides along the pristine parchment.
A language their universal translator can’t decipher rumbles up his throat, sounding all the world like birdsong in pitch and flowery in its syllables, before his finger stops on a scrawl of runes near the bottom that they can’t make heads or tails of.
“There, the day the Styx flooded, and their condemnation to Treachery.” There’s a grin in his voice and a disbelief beneath his tone despite the subject matter. “The two of them would’ve been the first to perish in the event, and here is... ”
The next block of text over is what punches a breathless laugh out of his lungs, and something inside them unfurls and comes loose with all parts relief and hope and anxiety.
“I--I found them. Here! I know where this is!”
Gabriel knows this great bay intimately; it had been one of the first places the surviving pockets of humanity had gathered following the Great Flood. Here upon its curving shores, they had thrived upon the sea and all its bounties, making use of the pristine waters for centuries to come. Villages became towns, towns became kingdoms, until it one day became a single, sprawling city.
Now, it is merely a monument to Mankind’s storied existence. Where once was a stretch of sand molded by the endless waves, a cement dock with grand piers both long and short house half-sunken hovercraft. Their polished metal exteriors have gone red with rust, slowly being consumed by the sea. Just behind them, towering skyscrapers that shame the ones from their home city kiss the rolling clouds above. Neons twist between the structures, and smoke swathes the magnificent, distant volcano in thin plumes. The white of snow circles its grand peak.
No sooner do his boots touch down upon the sun-bleached concrete does V1 squirm from his grasp and book it for the nearest structure, one speckled with smooth panes of glass and countless broken windows.
“I certainly hope you have some form of a plan to optimize our search.” Gabriel remarks as the warmachine leaps onto a solid wall, slamming into a jump and sending themselves soaring up the length of the building. He drifts after them on the ocean breeze, projecting his voice to be heard over as they disappear over the lip of the roof. “I can only imagine the city’s become even grander since I was last here.”
He knows the exact place Hiroto Musubu, or ‘Tether’, had perished in these desolate ruins, right alongside their poet lover. They worked not only to improve the lives of a growing population of robotic companions, but hailed from a long line of alchemists as well. Gabriel himself had sentenced them to the Circle of Treachery for their involvement in technology. Charlotte, meanwhile, had been permitted her eternal rest in the Second Sphere, given the form of a Seraphim for her wordsmithery.
But they aren’t looking for any particular corpse; tracking down a specialized lab in a city such as this would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. But the artificial lights shine brighter than the ones at their humble home, localized climate accelerating its decay. Surely there had to be something; a map, a news article, an advertisement, anything, that could lead them to this institution of innovation.
As Gabriel clears the edge of the rooftop, he finds his lover perched upon the southern corner of the building, staring out into the sea that borders this glowing city. A gargantuan machine, partly sunken into the bay, sits in the heart of this sparkling body of water. The archangel cannot make out the finer details from this distance, and he’s sure V1 cannot either.
But more than anything, he knows that silhouette.
He remembers when they began to populate the horizon of Violence, dragged down into the Inferno by means still unknown to him. And he remembers what V1 had told him about their original purpose; about their final encounter in that bloody layer. How it had screamed in terror upon sighting them. How they had both enjoyed and hated killing it.
“IT WAS FUN.” The machine had admitted to him, “BUT I DIDN’T LIKE HOW IT HAD TO BE FOR THAT ASSHOLE’S AMUSEMENT.”
Their eye glances up to him as he joins them at the precipice, humming softly as he regards their towering mortal enemy, long deactivated. Bridges lead to and from the husk of this mighty machine, countless houses almost obscuring its six-eyed visage. He wonders what kind of lives the inhabitants led upon the backs of those sorry beasts. He wonders if they loved it even after it shut down.
“I wish I could say I knew more about that war than what Hell had enshrined of it.” Gabriel admits. “The mortals who had gained entry to Paradise while it ravaged this planet spoke sparingly of its horrors.”
V1 whirrs quietly, a sound almost lost in the cool autumn breeze. He recognizes it as a prompt to elaborate.
“Stories of famine, death, desperation in the face of such terrible events.” In spite of their God having abandoned them just a few scant years after the wars engulfed the globe, some mortals still held onto their faith. “So many sins committed simply to stay alive just a little longer.”
Many of whom he had condemned himself. It’s no wonder that Minos’s heart had worn down the way it had.
“You can imagine our surprise when we finally caught wind of the war’s end. Many Angels had fully expected Mankind to consume itself. But then one day, the Virtues and Seraphim reported back with entirely unexpected news. That those humans, ones who had spent all their lives atop the Earthmovers, had climbed down from their stagnant warmachines, and embraced one another in the gathering dark of the world.”
“They could have killed one another with whatever they had on hand, but instead, they chose to reach out, and start over.”
Gabriel had not witnessed their efforts himself, but he’d heard tell of it from the souls who went unseen among their living brethren. Peace where once was endless fighting, kindness where before was directionless cruelty. That it extended even to the machines they made ,and their angelic counterparts, shouldn't have come as a surprise. An admirable act, one defiant of the narrative thrust upon them by their absent maker. But even that hadn't been enough to coax God back from His shameful departure, let alone save them from eventual extinction.
Maybe it hadn’t mattered, but they had done it regardless. And here they stood at the end of that long, bloody story, to build a better future with what remains of their predecessors.
Gabriel’s hand lands on V1’s shoulder, drawing their attention from the view with a gentle squeeze.
“Well, I suppose it’ll be there at the end of the month for us to explore.” He reminds them gently, and the first real smile since their discovery at the cafe pulls at his lips. “Let’s get started.”
In the end, it doesn’t even take a week. On that sixth night in the ruins of that once-idyllic country, V1 all but crashes into him as he parses sun-faded fliers, having taken a flying leap from the other end of the street. They scrabble for hold on his unwashed chiton and rip one of the sleeves in their excitement. Gabriel is led swiftly into the shadows of a decaying subway station.
There, amidst the corpses that lie rotted and the nearby wall of a collapsing ceiling, a single advertisement flashes into the surrounding darkness, scrolling through its pre-programmed information before looping back to the start.
"'The Lake Green Project'," Gabriel reads breathlessly. “'The future of energy through the miracles of astrobiology, brought to you by Cloud Nine Laboratories.'"
The exact address flashes across the projection at the end of his read, and then V1 is bolting back out into the open air. He's close on their heels as they tear across the city streets to the nearest waypoint station. The sun is hanging high in the sky when they at last manage to pinpoint the exact location and the fastest walkable path, and tear down the streets at breakneck speed.
Gabriel half-expects another towering high-rise, but a modest complex greets them instead, not three stories high. Bright neon text by the steel double doors directs them into an untouched lobby, swathed with shadow, their wings like beacons against the eternal night of the infinite cosmos.
V1’s experience with weapon development labs and all the bureaucracy that accompanied it is in the single digits, but they lead Gabriel confidently through the plush carpet corridors. Glitching neon signage eventually heralds a set of elevator doors, jammed open partially by a single, mangled corpse.
In stark contrast to his usual respect for their final resting places, their angel strides forward, braces both his palms upon the sliding panels, and grunts audibly as he pushes them apart. Free from its confines, the carcass is free to slide backwards into the shaft, falling for about four seconds before colliding with a solid surface somewhere below.
The combined ambient lighting of their secondary appendages cast down in this shadow-cradled shaft. It allows V1 to see the roof of the lift stopped just one floor below, an escape hatch on the opposite end of the fallen human. Good, they didn’t have to destroy it to access the basement floor.
The two of them move as one, dropping the short distance to the top of the cabin with a slam loud enough to disturb the cadaver one last time. Gabriel remains laser focused, not bothering with any form of commentary on this particular venture into Mankind's ruins. Instead, he all but rips the thick cover from the emergency exit, tossing it aside before rolling forward into the interior, a feat that would have made impossible had he even one of his ridiculous pauldrons perched on his shoulders. By the time V1 slips in after, he's already at the second set of doors, prying them open with no less determination.
The next series of halls are eerily familiar in their layout. As they search the mini-labyrinth lying below the public-facing offices, V1 almost takes several wrong turns from the deja vu alone. Some forgotten part of them half-expects to run into Joey and be led away for their weekly debugging, or stumble upon Summer as she sneaks into her office an hour after the scheduled start-time, a bag full of components tucked under one arm and her keyring hidden in the sloping valley of her chest.
"V1!" Gabriel calls to them, eventually, inevitably, from about two corridors away. Their world around them narrows to down his call, snapshots of this sprawling lab embedding themselves in their hard memory. A flash of a breakroom with a bloodsplatter, the names of scientists and specification monikers. When they find Gabriel again, he is simply standing before a single door in the middle of this corridor, sterile-white tinted faint, flickering blue.
‘Tether’, says the holo-nameplate, and it hits V1, then and there, that the end of this harrowing journey is most likely at hand. Something loosens inside of them, something that had been frightened and frustrated and dejected beyond anything they'd ever experienced before. One last simulation gives them a ninety-five percent chance of probable success; aside from the occasional corpse and a toppled filing cabinet, the laboratory was virtually untouched.
When Gabriel at last pries the door open, they duck and dash under his arm and into the cluttered office. Scans take in their surroundings in a millisecond, highlight potential hiding places, items of interest, the scant sources of light. They start with the corner drawer first, rifling through the files and looking for anything that wasn't recycled paper and manila.
Their preliminary search only takes them a minute, tops. But when they look to check-in with Gabriel’s progress, they see that he’s stopped before the desk, where a single holo-picture cuts through the gloom of a life cut short by the jaws of extinction.
It helps highlight a wall almost completely covered in sticky notes, each one with varying degrees of ink marking their surfaces. V1 momentarily aborts their hunt, stepping into better focus of the neatly-scrawled haikus and a veritable mess of heart shapes.
It's the snapshot that really captures their full attention. Three humans and a single machine sit upon the lip of a grand fountain, the water sparkling in an out-of-view sunset. The man to the repair unit's left sits half in her lap, laughing at some just-spoken quip just before the click of a camera lens. On her other side, a woman with dark hair curled into a neat, braided bun smiles merrily up at her spouse, whose hazel eyes glimmer with adoration as they gaze back down at her.
"I think I understand them a bit better," Gabriel says, momentarily snapping them from their wordless reverie. "How they could give their love so freely, in spite of all that would stand to hurt them for it. It was all they had, at the end of everything."
"And I know now, more than ever, that it is something worth living for."
As Gabriel turns away from another pointless monument to a fleeting existence, clearly intent to begin their search in earnest, V1 lingers just a few moments longer. They take two hi-res snapshots; one of the wall of short-form poems and rhymes and sappy love-notes, and one of the ghosts in that digital frame.
"Thank you," V1 prays to the long-gone souls in that photo, wherever they might be now, and carefully tucks away this remnant of their lives into their long-term memory. They would carry it with them to the very end of their existence.
Ten minutes later sees them about ready to flip the emptied desk over in frustration. They've checked every possible storage location, only to find nothing that resembled even a flashdrive.
“Perhaps it's stored elsewhere.” Gabriel offers tentatively from where he’s entirely emptied a single locker in the opposite corner, but V1 disagrees with a firm shake of their head. This was once a personal office, surrounded by other personal offices and shared laboratory spaces, which meant office politics. If they at all followed those hard-ingrained practices from a cutthroat era of weapon development…
They go back to the desk and its emptied drawers, pressing along the corners of each one. And predictably, V1’s clever fingers find a barely-there seam at the bottom of the third drawer. It clicks open with a simple push, springs up, and reveals its treasure to them. A small plastic case, its clear shell revealing a delicately thin memory chip.
And there’s two more.
“Ah.” Says Gabriel, intelligently so.
V1 wastes little time. They secure all three within the safety of their grasp before shoving everything off the work desk. It all crashes to the ground in a cacophony of shattering glass and clattering plastic. They can sense more than deduce Gabriel’s wince at their uncharacteristic disregard for human-made objects, but V1 could care less about salvaging anything else in here.
With a spot cleared, they promptly hop up upon its sturdy, faux-wooden surface, and start prying at the edges of their chest plate.
"COME HELP." They say, and will their hands to stop trembling as they lift away their chassis cover.
Slick wires and supple gore glisten in the shared light of their wings; glass, keratin, light and bone. Gabriel is drawn between their spread thighs like metal to a magnet, fingers finding the mismatched organs that make up their circulatory system. The archangel pulls them apart like a prophet commanding the sea, revealing the silicone encasement of their central processor.
It's like they've been plunged once more into the cold waters of Wrath; their movements feel unnaturally slow, diluted, as they dig their Feedbacker's fingers into the thin seam surrounding their metal brain.
"HOLD IT THERE." V1 instructs distantly, as their primary arm and bloodless Whiplash begin the arduous process of opening the first of three flimsy cases, their latches razor thin and contents unfathomably valuable.
The precious three-point-four seconds of silence bring them over that first hurdle, retrieving the first HELIX chip from its hiding place. In sharp contrast, their Knuckleblaster roughly tugs that temporary storage expansion from its slot, already long-cleared of anything important. They contemplate discarding it altogether before thinking better of it, and set it gently down on the desk by their hip.
The moment they place their miracle into its intended spot, a simple window advising system requirements and defunct resources with which to acquire them pops up. V1 briefly scans the formatting instructions that follow, and delay their needed installment to their next restart.
"Did... is it working?" Gabriel's tone is almost breathless with anticipation.
"GOT IT." They tell him, and as his shoulders slump with a shuddering sigh of relief, the warmachine works on freeing the next. "NEXT."
"Oh--right." Snapping to attention like a soldier under orders, Gabriel renews his efforts to keep their gore out of the way of their extra hands. V1 can easily sense the quiver in his hands as they dig into their viscera. "My apologies."
"STEADY." They simply respond to his anxiety, and swiftly install the second chip. The same pop-up appears, and is this time promptly dismissed. They set the reformatting procedures, and that's that.
As V1 lifts the third tiny chip, they take pause. Just one of these ridiculous petabyte drives was already calculated to hold at least 700 years worth of their average memory. Would they really get so little out of life to require a third? Or... could they put it to better use?
"Machine?" Gabriel questions, and they realize they'd been staring at the delicate-plastic of the third chip's case for close to a minute. V1 gives the former notion one last spare thought, before coming to an easy conclusion.
"THIS IS ENOUGH." They decide, tucking the protective square into the palm of their primary hand. "JUST TWO."
"And you're--"
"GABRIEL," They start with a fond puff of their fans. "IF SOMEDAY WE FIND OURSELVES IN THIS SITUATION AGAIN, I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO KILL ME." It will run out again, someday, but they think they'll be more than ready to cross that bridge when they come to it. "SHOULD NEITHER OF US HAVE HAD OUR FILL OF LIFE FOURTEEN HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW, WE'RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG."
"I... heh." It's a laugh and a sob, twisted together with a pain gone unspoken for close to a week now. While rest was the next step for the both of them, any form of catharsis they could offer him will be sure to follow. "When did you become so wise?"
V1 could certainly ask the same of him, but they like to think the both of them have certainly grown a little since their first clash. He's clearly not ready to speak of his experience in Heaven, but that's alright; as long as they still had time to eventually address it.
H-O-M-E, they request as his helm drops down to rest to their jointed shoulder. P-L-E-A-S-E-?
"Of course." He's gathered them in his arms before they even finish putting themselves back together. Some vulnerable part of their code wants to swoon beneath his strength, his resourcefulness, having saved their life for... oh, what did it matter that they owed each other a thousand times over?
Even if this was the final time he saved them from certain death, V1 would still push him through a long, long life, for time immemorial until Creation itself fell apart around them.
“Let’s go home.”
He doesn't let himself believe that it's over right away.
The first tinge of dawn stains the horizon when they arrive home, back to their component-covered workdesk and his happy houseplants. By the time he’s shut the door behind them and joined his lover in their darkened bedroom, they’ve already burrowed beneath the pile of linens. A long whirr escapes them as they get comfortable.
For a moment, they lie there optic-lens-down, before lifting their Feedbacker to spell in his general direction.
"SYSTEM OPTIMIZATION REQUIRES A RESET." They report as Gabriel finishes stripping himself of his disguise. His sweat-stained chiton pools at his ankles as he rounds the bed, climbing in after them. "WILL TAKE TIME."
"No hurry." The dip of their aging mattress is like the embrace of an old friend. He's not sure how much longer it will last before needing replaced. It's not like there isn't a surplus to be found here upon the Earth, or he could even--
Gabriel brings that train of thought to a halt as V1 rolls right across the mattress and throws all four of their arms around him. His hands come up in turn to embrace them back, slipping one leg between theirs as their thigh hitches over his hip.
"I'll be here." He reminds them, and his own voice is so strangely foreign to his own hearing. An index finger draws looping letters on his bare shoulder blade.
I K-N-O-W, They say, and then, T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U
There's a telltale click deep in their chest, followed by the fade of that background hum of their processors. Gabriel, irrationally so, suddenly wants to beg them not to go. Instead, he brings his hand to their back and finds one of their exposed veins. Even as they shut down, it still surges with blood, with the sound of their artificial heartbeat.
It's ridiculous; this is far from the first time he's watched over them during a period of internal maintenance. But that fear persists, keeps him wide awake into the day despite his body screaming for sleep.
Could it really be all over just like that? This crisis at last averted after everything it had put them both through? Is he still wandering the Heavens in a fugue state of grief and merely hallucinating the impossible?
Gabriel blinks. The morning light has shifted over faded, fraying carpet. V1 has not moved and neither has Gabriel. He grounds himself in the gentle thrum of their veins, and the sound of his own breathing, the warmth they share between bodies of steel and flesh. And there he stays, counting every beat of their primary pump, dreading the absence of it for no reason at all.
Something in the world seems to shift, like a great inhale followed by an exhale, when V1 finally stirs late in the afternoon. Gabriel rises up on his elbow immediately the moment their wings twitch, followed by the opening of their optic lens.
"My love?" He dares to murmur. V1 blinks up at him for a moment, before their lower shudder rises up in that achingly familiar expression of fondness.
H-E-Y, They scrawl across his spine. M-I-S-S M-E-
They don't even get to trace the question mark before he's squeezing them tight to his body, sucking in a ragged breath that borders on a sob.
"It's over, right?" He gasps. "Please, tell me I get more time with you than this."
F-O-R-M-A-T-T-I-N-G S-U-C-C-E-S-S-F-U-L, V1 tells him, and he realizes right then that their finger is trembling too. C-R-I-S-I-S A-V-E-R-T-E-D
It's like a great weight lifts right off its shoulders, and in its wake, everything else comes rushing back. Heaven's collapse, the song of mortal souls and grieving Angels, their ridiculous luck. He is only distantly aware of V1 squirming from his hold, but just as a protest rolls on the tip of his tongue, their Whiplash slips into view.
"WERE YOU AWAKE THAT WHOLE TIME?" They spell with a teasing lilt, only to lose their lighthearted look when Gabriel sinks into the mattress, feeling more exhausted than he thinks he's been in centuries.
"I had to be sure." He confesses quietly. It’s over; it’s really, finally over.
All at once, his emotions drain from his sore muscles like the green of summer from a healthy leaf. V1 wordlessly chides him with a gentle whirr, before reaching down to tug the blankets up over his shoulder. He hadn’t registered the chill of fall hanging in the air around them, not until the familiar textures of their linens settle on his bare arms.
"REST." They tell him. "I WILL BE HERE."
Gabriel is out before he can respond. He will awaken hours later to an empty bed and the sounds of V1 busying themselves with something at their workdesk. Morning has returned; a bright new day brimming with endless possibility.
He wants to get up, wants to hold them and remind them of how much he loves them, but his limbs refuse to cooperate. He wants to go outside and bask in the glow of the sun before showing V1 all the things he brought from the Primum Mobile, but he cannot find the will to stand. He wants to drag them from one of the libraries they found halfway across the world and bring back all the books they can possibly carry, but even that thought slips away from him as soon as it crosses his mind.
Instead, all he can think about are the corpses lying in the streets of Paradise, the survivors in the lower Spheres carrying on valiantly in the face of all they have lost. The sheer emptiness that threatens to engulf their Universe. Some part of him still wants to rage against himself for what he had triggered, but now, more than ever, does he understand that this would have been an inevitable outcome, whether he had triumphed against V1 that first fateful fight, or failed.
There’s only the time they can steal away for themselves before their eternal rest; to find meaning in their lives forged from what little they’ve been given.
And so, Gabriel simply shuts his eyes, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.
It was somewhere between Wrath and Heresy that V1 finally exceeded whatever counter limit the Terminals’ utilized for shop points. The numerical count switched to a short sentence, ‘Like, a lot’, and stayed that way for the remainder of their descent. Even buying out everything from the remaining weapon modes to the custom colors didn't even make a dent in their accumulated rewards.
Their memory storage, unfortunately, does not follow that sort of cheeky logic.
For all intents and purposes, the ratio of occupied bytes versus available space has changed drastically. That had been the ultimate end goal of this near-two-year-long debacle. But as a result of having several entire petabytes worth of internal storage, the number value glitches every time they inspect it. The longer they look at it, the more it takes up valuable space for active thinking.
This would not be a problem if they hadn't developed a pattern of glancing at it, more than necessary, during the many months they had almost depleted their remaining memory space. The threat to all their circuitry and processors is long gone, but V1 still finds themselves checking it almost obsessively.
“Old habits were young once, I suppose.” Gabriel had said some number of years ago, regarding something completely unrelated to this situation. But honestly, they can hardly be bothered to pull up the relevant context at the current moment. Not when the archangel in question has moved only five times in the past four days.
Perhaps it's something to be expected. They still aren't privy to the current state of his former home. If nothing else, time had taught them that Gabriel is just as vulnerable to its adherents as they are. Whenever he was ready, he'd open up about it; share the ultimate fate of his people with them once his untouched wounds had closed a little more on their own.
... admittedly though, even the truth about he whom Gabriel calls Father hadn't reduced him to such a state as this. Still like lifeless pond water, disturbed only by the touch of the winter winds, and as silent as the non-existent ghosts of this damned world. At first, they'd thought he'd simply needed time to process, but it becomes increasingly obvious that their interference is required once again.
With this in mind, V1 rises from their sun-soaked accent chair, bringing along their music-making apparatus, also recently expanded drastically in storage capabilities thanks to that third HELIX chip. While nice to finally have focus and a significant reduction in outside stress factors, it’s a matter of time before their concern will outpace their need for creative output.
Gabriel has not moved since the moon had set seven hours prior, but they can tell he is awake. Spine curled, shoulders hunched and, if they strain their delicate audials, they swear they can detect the faintest grinding of teeth. The warmachine makes their presence apparent immediately, throwing their weight upon the deep indents left behind by years of sleeping on a shared mattress.
Over the creaking of old wooden supports, they catch a faint but surprised grunt. His ivory helm lifts from their mountain of pillows, tilting just enough to allow for his impressive range of vision to catch where they’re propped upright upon its billowing slopes.
"Ah, V1," Alright, his tone, while heavy with exhaustion, is a little too flat for their liking. Not the worst start they've experienced in their numerous self-given directives of looking after his mental wellbeing. “What is it?”
"DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?" They start. He's poised to shake his head negatively, when something unspoken gives him pause.
A beat of silence follows, before he's rolling onto his other side, shifting ever closer until his helm can rest comfortably upon the crook of their aligned thighs. On instinct, the hand that's closest--their primary arm--finds the length of his neck, and begins stroking it steadily. Up and down their fingers trace the faint scars of missed shots and retaliatory sword swipes, until he goes entirely limp, and a soothed rumble bubbles from somewhere deep in his chest.
And they're like that for a time; V1 dividing their attention between the song they'd been composing and their emotionally-stricken lover. While their hands trail down to his bare shoulders and find all the sore spots, they read a newfound collection of poetry. Each syllable becomes a note, every line a bar, every word an echo of synthetic piano. V1 hears the lyrically- inclined song in this work, but stumbles through the know-how of how to translate it into an audible sound.
It’s perhaps ten minutes later that Gabriel at last heaves with a sigh, crumbling into vulnerable pieces beneath their attentive touches.
"Do you still miss them, Machine?"
The archangel’s query catches them off guard, just like it had the first time he had asked them that, almost two decades ago now. Gabriel's relationship with The Father hadn't even taken on the aspect of its terrible truth, the day prior. But he asks it again, and several days too late does V1recognize the extent of which his old, untouchable wounds had been ripped open anew.
"OF COURSE I DO." They answer honestly. There's little point in trying to brush off that fact, not after everything. Sometimes they wonder if their cosmic parallels would ever run dry; that innate sense of kinship they share quietly whispers that it never might. For what were they in the grand scheme of things than a pair of discarded tools who had once been destined to destroy one another?
To their immense relief regardless of all this, Gabriel seems unfathomably relieved to hear that. He sinks onto their silicone stomach by inches, spurred on with every gentle stroke of their fingers along his tensing neck tendons.
"Ah, I see." He clearly means to let that particular topic go, but countless times now has blunt communication spared them untold hours of silent fuming.
"WHY DO YOU ASK?"
"I-ah... " While the archangel ruminates on his response, V1 turns their focus back to the scans they had done of his favorite poetry collection, leisurely drinking in lines written in flowery freeverse.
"And across that endless blue
comes the call of a robin,
heralding summer's end like the sirens of old.
In the end is this darkness only a moment of many.
Ephemeral and fleeting, like the shadows of birds.”
"I think I knew what--what I would find up when I returned, no matter how many years I put it off." He admits in a subdued tone of voice. V1 tabs out of their composing program to turn their full attention to him, and their gentle gestures only accelerating minutely as a result. "We were never meant to live beyond our intended purposes. Simply... things cursed with this gift of blood. That it might be a prison of life, and yet a wretched little key, to one day release us from that farce of servitude."
The number of times they've held witness to that terrible, bitter note coloring Gabriel's words could be counted on one hand, and only ever has it been directed at the divine being he once reverently spoke of as 'Father'. The warmachine waits with metaphorically bated breath as he swallows it down, giving way to the seemingly incurable sadness, festering beneath all the imperfect hatred.
"...most of them are dead." He murmurs, and the final pieces of the puzzle click into place. "They chose violence, in the end, against one another and against themselves. I wonder--is that simply the fate of those made of blood, or--is that simply what we were meant to be... all along?"
They turn his revelation over in their processor, but not for long. The answer didn't matter; Gabriel was only asking these questions aloud without much care for their thoughts on it. This is what they're going to do until he continues, with an unexpected, hopeful note in his tone.
"And of the places I could have stumbled upon the survivors of that terrible fate, it was among your makers." A smile creeps into his tone even tinged with melancholy. "They had... reached out for what human souls remain in Heaven, and were in turn lifted back up."
"Ah," they think.
"I will never regret what I did; this I know now." He breathes, and the sound of it is like release. "But it won’t stop me from wishing I'd known that I--I had more time... that we would still have more time."
V1 moves; they hunch over his curling frame like a sliver of the moon, bringing all their hands over what scarred skin they could reach. His breathing borders on sobbing, and takes what feels like hours to at last get under control.
"I--I can't go--back yet." He sucks in air with hitching shoulders. "But--I know I will go... back. Someday..."
N-O H-U-R-R-Y, the warmachine reminds him. L-A-T-E-R
"Yes, yes I know, just… there's so much still I can do for our home, now.” He finds their Feedbacker, squeezes their fingers hard enough for their steel to groan faintly. "And I--I want you to see it, too. The splendors, the galleries, the archives and the Tree of Life and all the stars that cradle it.”
I W-O-U-L-D L-O-V-E T-H-A-T, V1 drinks in the steady-beat of his wounded heart, the thrumming instrument that keeps them both bound. P-R-O-M-I-S-E T-O T-A-K-E M-E S-O-M-E-D-A-Y-?
"I promise."
In spite of their assurances, Gabriel still finds himself without the will to move. Turbulent emotions return first, taking the shape of blood-filled nightmares as he carries out the extinction of his people with his own hands. V1 is always there to wake him, hold him through the needless panic and stay with him as that stifling gray onsets once again. He cries himself sick, curses himself in his lowest moments, and clings to his lover so tightly he worries he might leave dents in their steel.
For another three days, they take good care of him.
And on the dawning of the eighth, the archangel stirs to a clattering in the living room, followed shortly by the padding of V1’s steps as they busy themselves elsewhere. His eyes have barely begun to shut themselves once more before he’s being shaken back to his waking senses.
“UP.” V1 demands, a firmness to their movements that suggests they will be not swayed with any measure of complaining; nevermind that Gabriel knows better than to protest when they’ve set their will like this. He knows he should get up, if not only for a little bit. Get some fresh air, take in the comforts of their home, start one of their scavenged books.
The machine does not let him ruminate very long on those finer things, grasping at his hand and starting to pull him from his cozy nest of blankets and pillows. Gabriel does audibly grumble at this, but follows their touch before they drag him off the mattress and onto the trodden carpet below.. He’s allowed just enough time to slip on his skirt before being led from his cotton-and-polyfiber sanctuary.
Sure enough, he’s brought one room over and right to the silvery couch he brought back from the First Sphere years ago now. It allows him a full view of the sleek device that has taken up the usual spot of his prayer plant as the centerpiece. Several thick cables protrude from the back, leading to a semi-circle of their collection of speakers, the ones they keep stashed beside their workdesk space. V1 must have at last gotten them into a working state while he was away, or perhaps during the period he’d been confined to bed.
Despite his lingering sense of exhaustion, Gabriel can’t help but perk up a little in interest. V1 single-mindedly checks the backend cords of the square, velvet-lined sound devices that have cropped up all across their common room, seemingly overnight. Some groggy part of him registers the twitch of their wings as they find their set-up satisfactory, moving to fiddle and twist at the knobs on the central device connected to each bulky piece of Man's technology.
A query rolls onto the tip of his tongue, but before it can become spoken words, V1 swivels around on their hips to face him. They've never looked so... self-conscious. He knows this machine; all the lab-grown organs and every wire that makes up their form. But something here feels raw; bared to him after their harrowing brush with death and the newfound knowledge Heaven's near-extinction.
"NOT READY." They inform him with deliberately slow hand-spelling. "BUT I PROMISED YOU A DATE."
With that, they press the little slanted triangle upon the holo-screen, and its symbol changes to a pair of thin, lateral blocks. It’s no different from the symbols utilized in the video player V1 got working for their shared photo-cube, but no movie begins to play. For several heartbeats, there is just silence, punctuated by the subtle creaking of the couch as they take a seat beside him.
And then he hears it; the crescendo of falling rain.
Half his eyes direct outside to the patio on instinct, but watery sunlight still lights their home. A melody, rhythmic and synthetic, emerges from the droning white noise. Rising in pitch as it repeats a six-note motif, the distant echo of a long-passed storm preludes a backdrop of gentle drums.
Utterly transfixed by this unexpected turn of events, Gabriel lets this miracle of sound wash over him. As the first wordless chorus comes to an end, accompanied by another, sharper peel of rumbling thunder, the second is accompanied by the strumming of a guitar, strumming a complex melody similar to that of the opening half. But it feels more impulsive, freestyle, before syncing up with the background melody in the final movement. All the while, V1 watches him, clearly awaiting some sort of reaction other than his enraptured silence.
It takes a few moments more for Gabriel to find his words as the song draws to a swift close, and the rhythms of rain fade into a lingering silence.
“Oh, V1, that was… ” Better than breathing in the crisp autumn air outside; like a balm for his battered soul. Another marvel so soon after their last. “This is what you meant to share with me all along?”
A nod follows, half-sheepish, but more sure of themselves than they'd been before.
“Where did you uncover this song?”
They go still, blink twice, and are halfway through a reproachful glare before it settles into something thoughtful. Just as the feeling that he said something wrong begins to grip, V1 corrects him.
“NOT FOUND.” They inform him. “MY OWN WORK.”
“‘Work’? You mean--”
… wait.
“You wrote this song?” He says slowly, as the pieces at last click into place. Their secretiveness, the excess time spent staring at their holopad even at risk of a migraine, the urgency when they might not have even had time to finish everything--
“YEP.” For the second time today, they have struck him utterly speechless. “POLISHED IT YESTERDAY.”
“How--how long have you been able to do this--where did you learn and--and find the means too--” Gabriel grapples with both his dumbfounded shock and a growing spark of utter delight, before something else occurs to him. “And you were just going to keep this from me?”
Despite his incredulous tone, Gabriel sorely lacks the capacity to feel anything remotely like offense. He's grinning so hard his cheeks hurt, and a laugh wants to burst free from his chest. Thankfully V1 catches onto his jesting.
“WASN’T PERFECT.” They remind him again. Playfully barbed words poise themselves on the tip of his tongue, only to shrivel and die a second after. “BUT THEN I HEARD YOU SINGING.”
“YOU TOLD ME THAT IT PAINS YOU TO SING ALONE,” Well, those aren't his exact words, but it’s technically true. “SO I’LL SING WITH YOU, IF YOU’LL HAVE ME.”
There’s a sudden lump in his throat that throttles all the words he wants to say. Instead, through those jumbled thoughts as all his eyes begin to ache, an impulse latches onto him through the haze of wonderment and melancholy. He's stumbling over his feet halfway through his rise from the couch cushions.
“One moment!” Gabriel calls over his shoulder as he takes three hurried steps towards the kitchen counter, where V1 had evidently moved that satchel filled to the brim with treasures from Paradise. It doesn't take much digging to locate the item he desperately seeks.
Confusion becomes realization becomes the rapid flicking of hardlight wings as he returns with his prize, reseating himself flush with their side. Gabriel brings his hand to the taunt strings of the ornate lyre he had happened across towards the end of his rummaging about that brightly-lit necropolis.
“I don't know if I’m ready to sing again, my love,” he admits. “But at least for right now, would this suffice?”
And it's his turn to surprise them, as evidenced by their widening optic as he plays back those six notes perfectly. A smug giggle bubbles up his chest before he can stop it.
“What’s that look for? Surely you haven't forgotten my talent with the keys of a pipe organ, Machine.”
His remark earns him a slap on the arm and an exaggerating rolling of their optic.
“HONESTLY I THOUGHT YOU WERE JUST BEING DRAMATIC.”
“How dare you.” He growls mirthfully. The whimsical notion of a playfight is immediately discarded when V1 shifts forward reaching for the stilled holos of their audio application.
“NEXT SONG?”
“Please!”
Finished pieces fill the reverent silence as Gabriel listens to the intones of his own voice, set to a carefully constructed rhythm. He plays their melodies back by ear, balks at the rapid-fire drums they personally enjoy blasting whenever he’s not around, and gets promptly distracted when they switch to a particular song; a number he distinctly recognizes from one of the pornographic films they have seared into their memory.
The late afternoon finds them both flopped upon the floor by one of the speakers, sweaty from their unintended encounter but unwilling to part for even a moment. Music continues to play somewhere over his heaving pants and their whining fans, the selection of compositions having looped back around to the start.
“Will you teach me how to do this?” Gabriel eventually asks into that comfortable not-silence; this little home will never be silent again, if he had his way.
D-O W-H-A-T-? V1 scrawls into his scarred pec.
“How to use that music-making program of yours. I’m not--we were never quite versed in the arts that humanity is known for. At least, as far as creating our own works outside of celebrating His glory.”
R-E-A-L-L-Y-? Their head lolls lazily across his chest, even as their Feedbacker arm reaches for where the holopad sits forgotten on the nearby coffee table, while their Whiplash snags his instrument from the couch with a crack of it’s pulley. “NEVER WOULD’VE GUESSED.”
He desperately wants to learn how; to partake in the act of creation just as they have. They slide the holopad across the carpet until it’s parallel to his shoulder. Right away, he can't make heads or tails of the symbols on the screen, but then his mini-harp is pressed into his free hand.
“SING WITH ME A LITTLE MORE, FIRST?”
“Always.”
He could start tomorrow. Or the day after that, or even a whole year from now. He's got all the time they could ever need to begin. But right now, Gabriel is simply content to sing.
