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Vehuel looked around the throne room, at the guards who had bound her with what must be hell-forged shackles and dragged her in here. She glared at Nisroc, who was, as per usual, on the throne, not so much sitting as lying, with her legs over one arm and some pillows propping her head up against the other arm. "Hey, gorgeous!" said Nisroc, with an absolutely shit-eating grin. She turned to the guards. "Leave us alone, okay? We've got some catching up to do."
The guards left. Nisroc looked back to her.
"Hate what you've done with the place," said Vehuel.
"Aw, really? I've been taking such good care of it since the last time I killed you," said Nisroc. "And the time before that. And the time before that. Your pretending-to-know-Raphael-to-get-recorporated-fast routine not working so well lately, is it?"
Vehuel smiled humorlessly. "Something like that." In the past, she could've seen telling Nisroc her latest recorporation horror stories, over drinks; she could imagine Nisroc's wild hyena laugh and her helpless smile as she poured Vehuel another drink. In the past, even their most ferocious of battles had ended in rough kisses and the victor pinning the other down and doing whatever she liked with the loser. (The loser usually liked it plenty too. Vehuel was fairly sure Nisroc usually lost on purpose.) Neither looked forward to the inevitable discorporation afterwards, but they had always tried to make it quick and painless.
These days, not so much. Nisroc had killed her on sight four times so far, although at least Vehuel had managed to poison her once and watch over the city for forty-odd years before being hunted down and carefully disemboweled by a silent, scowling Nisroc.
"Wow. Guess you can't fix everything, can you?" said Nisroc. "It's almost like sometimes shit happens and you can't do anything about it!"
"I mean, you keep killing me, that's not the mysterious forces of Fate, that's the plainly obvious forces of Hell," said Vehuel. "Was there a point to this? I mean, it's nice, you letting me get a few words in before killing me. I feel like we used to do more of that, you know?"
Nisroc looked at her with such disdain, like she was just so stupid, and said nothing.
"So are we actually gonna talk or are you just gonna gloat?" Vehuel asked.
Nisroc sprang to her feet and advanced towards her. "You think this is gloating? You actually think I'm enjoying this? You think I like this?"
"Why are you doing it if you don't like it?" Vehuel asked.
"You know damn well what you said," snarled Nisroc. She pressed three sharp talons to Vehuel's throat. "You know damn well why I'm pissed off."
Vehuel forced herself not to flinch. Nisroc had ripped her heart out of her chest the first time they'd seen each other, after... well.
She knew why Nisroc was pissed off, it was true. And she probably ought to apologize. But she knew she had been right. So she stood her ground, and tried to figure out how she was going to get out of this one. She saw an easy way to talk her way out of it, but it was a way that would require an apology she was not prepared to give.
And, if she was honest with herself (which she often wasn't), Vehuel was also still pretty pissed off. So that wasn't happening. She had Nisroc's talons at her throat, and these shackles were heavy on her wrists, but she was going to wait for Nisroc to do something.
They stared each other down for a few moments, and then Nisroc put her hands on her hips. She said, "Really, nothing? Not even some sanctimoni-- hghh." Because Vehuel had interrupted her with a mouthful of hell-forged chain.
She pushed Nisroc down to the floor, her wrists at either side of Nisroc's face. "You can go to Hell," she snapped. "It's been a century and a half of this shit and you brought it on yourself, and you can go right to Hell, and leave me and my humans out of it."
Nisroc bit through the chain, then punched her so hard that when she sat up on the other side of the room, she spat out a few teeth. Nisroc dragged her up by her neck, at first to her feet, and then off them. "I'm gonna drag you down with me one of these days," she said, her eyes gleaming. "Fuck, I can't believe I bought into your stupid righteous hero bullshit --"
"I never -- I never said --" Vehuel managed to choke out.
"-- for so goddamn long, you asshole, and then when I needed you, when I needed you, you just -- you fucking -- you had the gall to blame me?" She threw Vehuel down to the floor again, and Vehuel tried to pull one of her legs out from under her, but Nisroc stomped on her hand and it hurt so much Vehuel had to bite down on her lip to keep from shouting. "I thought you loved me," spat Nisroc.
Vehuel looked up at her, furious and in too much pain to think of anything witty or cutting. "I did," she said.
From the look on Nisroc's face, that hit home more than Vehuel had actually meant it to. She dragged Vehuel up again, pressing her against the wall. "You fucking liar. If you'd ever cared about me you wouldn't have said -- you wouldn't have blamed me when I came to you needing...." She trailed off.
"Well, if you'd cared about Grendel, you would've --" Nisroc punched her again, the talons of her other hand digging into Vehuel's neck. "I'm just saying," said Vehuel, unrepentant. "I found a solution, and you just let them kill him!"
Nisroc was trembling in rage now, and her eyes were shining. She cupped Vehuel's cheek with her free hand, and tears streamed down her face. "I miss the person I thought you were," she said. "I don't know you, but I miss her. She would never have --" She released Vehuel, turned away, and broke down in tears. It was hard to tell what she was saying now, she was sobbing so hard, but Vehuel thought it was "Would never have said... never have..."
Well. She couldn't just stand there. Cautiously, Vehuel took a step forward. "Nisroc, I --" Her hand hovered above Nisroc's shoulder. "I miss you, t--"
But as soon as her hand brushed Nisroc's shoulder, she turned and shoved her against the wall again, wrapping both hands around her neck. "Don't you touch me!" she snarled. "Don't you fucking dare!" Nisroc's claws were ten points of razor-sharp pain as she squeezed, and Vehuel didn't really need to breathe for the most part, but it was harder to live without blood, and in a few moments, everything went black.
When she woke up in Heaven, she wanted very badly to cry, but that was a physical response, and she'd left her physical body lying on a floor somewhere on Earth, with a weeping, furious demon crouching over it.
So instead she let the recorporation technician help her to her feet. "You're Vehuel, right?" said the stranger.
Oh no. "Yeah?" she said, cautiously.
"Raphael, um. He said -- he said, next time you came in, if it was -- I don't know what this means, but he said if it's the same one again, he wants to see you. He said you'd know the way to his office."
The Archangel Raphael had not been amused when he'd discovered she'd been making up authorizations on his behalf, and he was grumpy at the best of times, so Vehuel was sure this wasn't going anywhere good. "Yeah. Yeah, I do," she said, grimacing.
"And, um, it says your last body lasted you, um... three and a half days?" said the tech, frowning at his clipboard.
"That sounds about right," said Vehuel.
"Well, um. That's." The tech looked worried. "Good luck?" he said, giving her a smile that he clearly thought was encouraging. It wasn't.
"Thanks, but I'm sure I won't need it," she lied. Luck wouldn't save her now, true, but on the other hand, she'd already been murdered once today; it could hardly get worse, right?
Right?
She hoped not, anyway.