Sunset ^beta

"It's not too late to stay here," Vehuel said, hopefully. "I'll go for you and that way you can just do whatever you want until we get back."

"No, no, I have to go, Lucifer wants me there," said Gadreel, glowing with pride. "I'm his favorite."

Vehuel bit back a remark about this; they'd had this discussion too many times already, about how Lucifer treated his favorites, and about how Gadreel deserved better than that. He could be as proud as he wanted of what Lucifer said to him, but Lucifer was careless and cruel, and used flattery very deliberately, and Vehuel hoped very much that he would be remade into a better version of himself after all this. Perhaps a version with less authority over Gadreel. A version that would grovel in apology for the deeds of his predecessor, and would never make anyone tremble with fear because they'd made a very small mistake with gravity that hadn't even been permanent, and that would also maybe stand still while Vehuel punched him. That seemed fair; it wasn't like Vehuel could hurt him, after all. But it would be cathartic. "I'm sure he wouldn't want you to get hurt for his sake, then," Vehuel lied. "Since he likes you so much." Gadreel's wings flicked in irritation, because he knew that wasn't true, but he didn't dare call her on it.

"I'll be fine," Gadreel insisted. "And besides, I'd love to see the look on that wanker Gabriel's face when we storm in and take Heaven. Aren't you looking forward to that?

"Yeah, I guess," she said. She did kind of want to see Gabriel's face when it turned out she'd been the one to save all of Heaven from Lucifer's poorly-thought-out plan. (Gabriel would not be there; he and all his underlings would miss the entire war for a lengthy meeting of the Human Design Team. He would never see Vehuel as anything but a troublesome and suspicious remnant of Lucifer's forces.) "I'm just worried something bad will happen to you," she said.

"You're always worried something bad will happen to me and it never does, Vehuel, I don't know why you think I can't take care of myself," said Gadreel. Vehuel stopped herself from reminding him of the time he'd almost licked a raw singularity. She would regret that restraint later. "Besides, God told you not to worry, didn't She?"

Vehuel snorted; she knew he was being difficult for difficulty's sake. "I thought we were disobeying Her now?" she asked, with an ironic twist of her spirals.

"I'm just saying," he said. "Anyway, why don't you lend me some of your eyes? Then I could see trouble coming."

If he saw trouble coming, Vehuel knew, he'd leap right into it. "I really don't want to, sorry," she said, drawing her wings over herself nervously, to hide some of the glow of her halo. At least Gadreel wouldn't doubt her sincerity. He didn't know she had the mysterious thing Michael had given her, the Weapon. It ought to have made her more confident, but it frightened her that Michael thought she'd need it. "I'm kind of worried I won't be able to take care of myself?" she admitted.

"What?" he asked, sounding almost outraged. "No! Why? You're bigger and meaner than me, I need the eyes more."

"No, you're definitely meaner than me," she said. "Remember what you did to poor Len?" She'd been very sad about Len breaking up with her, sure, but it wasn't really his fault she was clingy and annoying and didn't love him enough.

"He deserved it," said Gadreel. "It was justice. It's not really meanness if it's deserved, is it?"

"I don't think anyone really deserves to be tied to a comet and left for a few million years until he's missed at the next all hands meeting," Vehuel said.

"Sure they do! Anyway, you're still bigger than me."

"By a smidge, Gadreel, it won't matter if either of us has to fight -- I don't know, Michael or someone like that." She prayed Gadreel would have the good sense never to fight Michael, and knew in her heart that Gadreel would never have any good sense. "Listen, how about you stay in front and I go behind you and watch out for anyone trying to sneak up. We'll work together." They always worked well together, even when they weren't getting along.

"Oh, fine," he said, rolling his (apparently insufficiently numerous) eyes. "But you'd better pay attention."

"I'm not gonna let anything happen to you!" she said.

"You'd better not," he warned her. "I won't let you forget it if you do."

"I know, that's why," she said, shoving him. "You'll be fucking insufferable for eternity otherwise."

"I'm going to be fucking insufferable for eternity anyway," he said proudly.

Gadreel might be an idiot, but he was her idiot, and even if she was planning to betray the rest of them, she would never let anyone hurt him. So when he'd lunged at an archangel like a nitwit as soon as they got to Heaven, she pulled out the strange, sharp Weapon that Michael had given her to deter Lucifer from hurting her. If it could deter Lucifer from doing something cruel, of course it would be able to deter Gadreel from doing something stupid.

Michael had neglected to mention, however, that it would carve through his spirals like he was nothing but a dust cloud, cutting him nearly in half. He looked back at her, terrified and betrayed, and then some stupid seraph knocked Vehuel out of the way to get at somebody more important, and though she looked for Gadreel the whole time, she didn't see him again.

* * *

Vehuel was just being released from the hospital when the Archangel Michael came to see her. This would be her third set of wings; the first had been sheared off by a comet Lucifer hadn't warned them about, and the second had burned up in a supernova she'd thrown into the middle of the battlefield. She wondered how long her third set would last.

"We've decided to give you a metal," said Michael. "For your bravery."

It hadn't been bravery. It had been pretty much the opposite of that. "Thank you," she said, curling tightly in on herself. "What... um, what does that mean exactly?"

"It's a new concept," said Michael brightly, and Vehuel couldn't understand how Michael could be so cheerful -- how everyone, really, could be so unceasingly positive. She hadn't felt a single negative emotion off of anyone while she was here, but she was miserable. No one seemed to notice, though. They kept calling her a trooper.

She didn't want to be a trooper. She wasn't sure she wanted to be anything.

But now Michael was explaining about metals, and electricity, and reflectivity. "I know what metals are. The substance. I know those," said Vehuel, who had worked with them before. She'd had to jury-rig her own out of helium, even, when she and Len been tapped to build those two gas giants. "What I mean is --"

"Oh! Oh, of course, the part about giving you one," said Michael. "It's -- well, it's sort of decorative. It's to show everyone that you're a hero. It was very brave, what you did out there with the supernova. Saved us a lot of time, and maybe lives. How did you know you'd get out?"

It had not been brave in the least, but Vehuel had lied to Lucifer, and she knew she could lie to Michael. "It was a calculated risk," she said, trying to make it sound carefree, like it had been nothing to throw an unstable white dwarf into the battlefield. She tried to make it sound like she'd known she would probably get out all right. That maybe she hadn't expected her wings to catch fire, but that the sacrifice was minor in the grand scheme of things.

She tried to make it sound like she'd been planning to get out all right in the first place, and not that she’d panicked and regretted her choice as soon as she’d made it.

"I heard I didn't get Lucifer, though," she added. "Is that true?" He was the only one she'd wanted to actually... end. Or make different, anyway. She didn't know if she had wanted to end anyone, really. It hadn't occurred to her that people could stop existing.

"No, I dealt with him later," said Michael. "Don't worry, though, he's far away."

But he still exists, she thought, and as for being told not to worry, Vehuel had never obeyed that command.

"Do you want your metal now?" Michael asked.

"Um. Okay?" said Vehuel, who didn't know how this was going to go. Michael extended one of her hands, and suddenly Vehuel's whole being felt warm and strange, and she saw that in among the whorls of blue and purple that made her, there were specks of gold, like stars.

"Isn't it nice?" Michael asked brightly. "I thought the gold would go nicely with your eyes."

"Ah. It. Um. I. Guess?' said Vehuel, her halo flaring. She resisted the urge to cover herself with her wings, because it would hurt like anything, but for some reason the idea of the Archangel Michael having noticed her in an aesthetic capacity was terrifying and thrilling all at once and she didn't know what to say. What did you say to that?

But Michael was already moving on. "Rest up! We're going to need you for the rest of the stars," she said, and Vehuel was both relieved and disappointed. She wanted to talk to Gadreel about it, only he would have made fun of her. Or asked her how exactly this was any different from the way Lucifer behaved. But Lucifer had been doing it on purpose, and Michael surely wasn't, and also, she would never be able to talk to Gadreel again, because he was gone forever.

* * *

Vehuel went right back to work after as soon as they'd let her, because she felt like, for the very first time, her mind was empty and echoing. There was nothing for her to worry about anymore. The worst had already happened. She had made it happen.

So she drifted into the outer reaches of Earth's solar system -- also very empty, but not, thankfully, echoing -- and she filled it up with little things. On her best day, she made a weird oblong object that looked like a potato -- or, rather, several millennia later, when she first held a potato in her hand, she would think My god, this looks just like Haumea! But at the time, she'd only thought, This looks so stupid, I love it, before giving it two tiny moons and sending it hurtling end over end on its eccentric way.

On her worst day, she tried to build a fitting memorial for Gadreel. She remembered that first conversation she'd had with him, playing with gravity and sparks; she remembered how beautiful she'd found that tiny binary star system they'd ended up making by accident, and how much care and creativity they'd put into making it out of real starstuff in real space, and she tried to make something like that out of rock and ice, but she kept adding onto them, trying to make them the same size, and eventually the bigger one was nearly as big as a real planet, and the little one kept going unstable and breaking little crumbs of itself off when she added to it, so she gave up. They would have to be close enough.

She wondered why she was here. She couldn't imagine that humans would ever come here or see these things she was making -- they were such fragile, helpless little things that apparently a little bit of hard UV could knock them right out of commission forever.

But eventually, once she'd done all she could in the Kuiper Belt and was back in Heaven filing shitty paperwork for shitty archangels, a posting on Earth happened to open up -- well above her rank, but then again, she had the metal Michael had awarded her, and she hoped that would count for something. So after calling in some favors with the physics office and making very sure that her halo wasn't the wrong kind of UV, she put in her application. Maybe she could find a new thing she was for. Maybe she could be good at protecting someone. Even if it wasn't Gadreel.