Work Text:
Hannah skirts over the instrument with two of her hands. Curiosity makes her want to touch it, but that feels almost disrespectful with Jophiel standing there – just barely peeking at it with only two of her eyes, her feathers almost seeming to strain themselves to pull as far away from it as possible.
“What does it –?” she’s not sure if she should ask.
“What does it feel like?”
The four biggest of Hannah’s rings tilt in agreement. She knows what it does. She knows what Naomi did in this room. Brainwashing their siblings. Even Naomi’s own underlings, like Jophiel. Bringing them in line with how she thought they should be operating. To maintain her control over Heaven. Power. Hannah doesn’t need this explained to her – she’s heard enough about Naomi. She understands the egotistical, self-aggrandising ends to which Naomi used these tools. But the niggling question she can’t stop herself from asking, even when all of her senses are telling her that this is something Bad, when the only word she can think of to describe it is Slicing…
“Yes.” The shared frequency between them barely ripples. “Yes, if you –”
“I don’t remember. They – That part I don’t remember. I just know…” Jophiel’s two smallest wings have folded in on themselves completely. “But I remember watching well enough. I think even if they’d wanted me to forget it, I’m not sure…”
“I’m sorry, you don’t have to say anything.” Jophiel had been reluctant enough to come in the room with her at all, it was only because she knew how important it was to Hannah to understand what had gone before – the mistakes that had been made, that she would avoid replicating.
“The Fall,” Jophiel says steadily.
“What?”
“I think that’s what it’s most like. Falling.”
Hannah feels her own broken wings go tense.
“I always thought that I must remember every time I’d seen it, because the sounds of anguish... I didn’t think I could forget those. And then, when we were Falling, and everything was frightening and new and so intense… That bit was familiar.”
All of Jophiel’s eyes but one are looking away, and her rings are whirring. Hannah wants to reach out a hand or two to calm them, but if she did that her shaking would become visible too.
She doesn’t think she made a sound when she Fell. She remembers the cries of her siblings, just part of the overwhelming chaos as the tie between her wings and Heaven broke. Just the pain of that split on its own would have been enough to overwhelm her, she’d have thought, but she had also been plummeting to Earth, somehow more alone than she’d ever felt, even as her siblings Fell with her. There was no communion in the sounds they made – only fear and pain, and that coursed through her so strongly already that she wanted nothing more than to shut it out. She had retreated to a small corner of her trueform where she could pretend the ground wasn’t coming, pretend she wasn’t being torn into pieces – pretend, more than anything, that when she returned to her surroundings again, she would still be home where everything made sense.
Less sense than it had before the apocalypse, and less than it had been before the war and the Leviathan, of course, but still – making sense in the way she had worked so hard to preserve. The head of her garrison had been killed by the Leviathan in that horrible chaotic year, but Hannah was familiar enough with the pattern of his orders after so long, that it was easy enough to intuit what was needed to keep her their small corner of the cosmos running how it should, and to act accordingly. Sometimes another member of the garrison would question whether it was still necessary, but she’d remind them. They had been doing this for millennia. With how everything was in Heaven, more than anything that was reason to continue.
She hadn’t actually been to Earth before. Or – she didn’t really count it. She’d watched the formation of mountains and rivers, of course, but she’d never been to the surface. Certainly never inhabited a vessel. Right after the Fall, she had been able to hear her siblings desperately searching for vessels – even concocting schemes amongst themselves to try and maximise the vessels available to them – while she had been afraid to. With her wings broken, she had had the run of just the one narrow, constricting plane that she’d happened to land in, but the thought of remaining there was still less frightening that the thought of squeezing her trueform down into a human body – being forced to have human senses act as a cloudy filter over her own.
Caroline had been a surprise. Hannah had remained safe in the little plane she’d found herself stranded in for several weeks, until she had felt Caroline through the dimensional barrier. She had noticed many humans passing near her – as she had kept herself occupied watching her Father’s creation – so this was not in itself particularly striking, except that Caroline seemed to feel her too. Feel that she was lost, trapped, frightened – things Hannah hadn’t fully conceptualised herself before. She had simply been waiting until she would be able to go home. If there was anything she knew how to do it was wait.
But Caroline had wanted to help her. Or, she didn’t know that it was Hannah, but she had wanted to help the Thing she could sense – had even called out. Perhaps if she hadn’t, Hannah would just have stayed there. Certainly, in the days of chaotic bloodshed as various factions vied for her membership she had wondered if it would have been better if she had: if she had just stayed put and never entered the alien world she and her siblings had been flung into – had been torn down into.
Hannah flexes her still useless wings and turns back to Jophiel. “So you… you think it feels the same as Falling?” Her own rings have started spinning at the same rate as Jophiel’s, and she tries to focus to bring them back to their usual lazy motion.
Jophiel’s rings slow a little with the effort to speak. “Yes. And also because… Our bodies. That’s what Naomi tore at, that’s how she’d ‘correct’ us. I could see that it went deep, but I wasn’t… She didn’t want me to learn how to do it – I wasn’t trusted enough – just to know how to assist. But Falling, that was… something fundamental was ripped from us” – she gingerly moves her own dilapidated wings – “and I think… that’s where Naomi was operating too. Right in the core of our bodies. So it must have felt like Falling – like being torn like that. Only, not tearing. Cutting.”
Hannah can feel a distinctive sensation creeping into the motion of her wheels. A habit she had picked up on Earth. Anger. She had been embarrassed when she had first come back to Heaven to find that the way injustice had sent heat into Caroline’s cheeks now manifested in her trueform. She directs her discomfort at that towards Naomi too. “And she did this to us – her brothers – just to keep us under control. Just to keep Heaven –”
She’s cut off as Matriel glides into the room, cogs turning apologetically.
“Please excuse the interruption, Brother, but we have news of Nithael.”
Hannah’s annoyance melts away into alertness, and she blinks some of her larger eyes in encouragement for him to continue.
“It was Raguel who found him,” says Matriel. “Or rather – he found her. He tried win her to his cause – persuade her to abandon Heaven too. But she gained the upper hand – she has him contained now. It’s about half a day’s journey, but she’s bringing him home.”
Home. Returning to Heaven hadn’t really been like coming home. However optimistic it feels to her in hindsight, Hannah had imagined it would be. That once she and her siblings were all restored to where they belonged, all memories of the conflict fought over the best way of getting them there would be forgotten, and things would resume exactly as they had been before. Peace. The methodical tasks that had formed the pattern of her life for millennia. A restored sense of purpose. But a surprising number of her siblings – angels like Nithael – did not want this return to the respite of order – had engaged themselves in thwarting the prospect of harmony that was dangling so tantalisingly in front of all of them.
She’d already come to terms with its loss once. When she’d reconciled herself to a future under Metatron, she was also resigning herself to a Heaven that could not truly be the one she had longed for, but by that point… Castiel had been her last hope. Her only true grounded hope since the Fall, really, that her siblings could be brought to work together, and that the Heaven they sought to return to could be one functioning as it was supposed to. Not driven by factions or ideology, but simply by how things should be.
But then Castiel… He hadn’t been able to choose his siblings over that – those – Winchesters. Hadn’t been able to choose her. What Metatron claimed Castiel had done didn’t seem likely, but given his grace, and his lack of loyalty to the cause, how could she even know anymore? If the Heaven Castiel had brought them all together to work towards had been just a mirage then at least with Metatron… At least with Metatron they would return home. And as long as Heaven seemed to have unified behind him – more or less – there would be a clear ruler. Again – finally. And she was so tired.
Once they had established a Heaven free of Metatron, though, she had thought maybe Castiel’s vision could be realised. Everyone else must want it as much as her. Collaboration. A return to how things had been. An end to the chaos – surely – now that they were no longer on Earth. The state of affairs amongst angels had been decaying for a while, but really… If anything she’d have thought being banished to Earth would have been a point of realisation. Of just how bad things could get, if all the rogue elements went unchecked. But instead, she was faced with not just less eagerness than she had expected, but an alarming amount of reluctance. Even from angels she had once considered friends, like Sachiel, Jehoel, and most notably at the moment, Nithael.
This reluctance was misguided, of course, even if she understood where it came from. Being on Earth opening their eyes to human things was unavoidable, but those things… They weren’t for angels to enjoy. She had come to understand that more, really, the more she also indulged herself. Enjoying the Earth’s view of the night sky was one thing; an innocent indulgence, an act of worship towards her Father, arguably. But when things went further, using more of her human-filtered senses, even using her vessel to kiss Castiel’s… These weren’t reasons to stay on Earth. They were things to be left to humans, reasons to stay in Heaven, away from them, not being distracted by all of these complicating factors that angels were never meant to experience.
But still so many of her siblings sought to stay away, and worse – tried to encourage others to do the same. She had thought, when she had left Caroline, and returned to Heaven more or less permanently, that most of these impulses had been quelled, and perhaps in the short term they had, but it hadn’t taken long for them to bubble up again. The example of Daniel and Adina didn’t seem to discourage those dissenters. The inevitable end facing those who sought to abandon Heaven – who sought to live a life outside of it. Some even accused her of being responsible for their deaths, by not letting them remain on Earth undisturbed, but they didn’t understand. Any deviation risked letting chaos into Heaven. Castiel she had to let stand as an exception, but beyond him…
So Nithael’s capture is more than a relief. Hannah lets some of her gratefulness show in her most distant feathers as she starts to answer Matriel.
“Thank you for telling me, Brother. This is good news.” She arches some of her flames in a pre-emptive farewell, but Matriel doesn’t make any move to leave.
“We still… we need to discuss what to do with him,” he says, a confusing ultraviolet bleeding into his rings.
“Is that not already clear? Seeking to remain on Earth is one thing, but going so far as to try and sway other good, loyal, angels away. He needs to be made an example of.” Hannah hopes that none of the frequencies her voice travels on show anything other than certainty. Nithael was a caring, trustworthy companion when they were both part of Castiel’s army, but with how he’s been undermining her authority… She doesn’t have any option other than to be firm.
The intensity of Matriel’s ultraviolet only increases. “I’m afraid… not all of us agree, Brother,” he says very deliberately. The doorway to the office grows in accordance with his will, and Hannah sees a small group of angels gathered just outside, clearly listening.
“I see.” Hannah lets her feathers become a little crystalline. “Was my policy towards rogue angels not clear?”
One of the angels – Eremiel, formerly of Bartholomew’s faction – steps forward from the group. “It is, and I told the others there was no need to ask you to… to clarify it, but…”
Advachiel, another comrade of Castiel’s army, after defecting from Malachi’s, steps forward. “But I insisted. Brother –”
Hannah stills her wheels abruptly in a request for silence, and then joins the other angels outside of the room. Matriel and Jophiel follow in her wake, Jophiel’s fractals trailing listlessly after them.
“Yes, Advachiel?” Hannah sets her wheels in motion again, but ominously slowly. “Please tell me why you think this rule needs to be re-discussed.”
Advachiel’s rings are twisting into helixes. “Brother, I know the rogue angels and the lure of a life on Earth are depleting our ranks, but punishing Nithael is not the way to resolve this. He thinks –”
Eremiel cuts in before Hannah can. “It’s not about ‘depleting our ranks’, it’s about what’s best for all angels – for all of Heaven. Nithael is leading others astray, and we can’t allow him to continue.”
A ripple passes through Advachiel’s northernmost flames, which ease their way to a colour matching Matriel’s. Matriel starts speaking:
“For him it isn’t about leading them astray, and us punishing him is not going to weaken the appeal of his argument. Things are different since the Fall – the expectations of angels have all changed. For those who want a different life, showing them a Heaven that wants to compel their loyalty by force –” his flames start to flicker, blues and greens now intertwining with the orange “– I fear it won’t help our cause.”
“Well, what do you suggest?” Hannah can feel the rhythm of her wheels becoming more uneven, and works to bring them back under control. They all know how difficult it was to bring even the amount of angels they have together as one unified group. Force is necessary to maintain that – as a leader, that’s something she understands. Or rather, she’s become a leader because she’s one of the few prepared to recognise that. Clear rules, clear consequences.
“We bring Nithael in,” says Matriel, “talk to him, explain how his actions are detrimental to Heaven. Hear his side. Perhaps meet some sort of compromise.”
“Of course we cannot allow him to return to Earth,” Advachiel cuts in. “He can’t be trusted. But some of the life that he made there since the Fall… That doesn’t need to be lost to him entirely.”
A few of Hannah’s flames start budding in frustration. “Preserving things that came about since the Fall should not be important to us. What we’re trying to do is prevent something like the Fall happening again. No compromise. Nothing that could disrupt the order we’ve built here. It’s much too dangerous. If he goes unpunished, it will only encourage more dissenters. We can’t risk that. The situation with Daniel and Adina nearly led to both mine and Castiel’s deaths.”
“Daniel and Adina were killed unnecessarily,” says Matriel, and Hannah sees some rust harden on some of his cogs. “They could have been left to their own devices, or simply reasoned with –”
“There’s nothing simple about reasoning with rogue angels.” Hannah is relieved to hear Eremiel on her side again. “The strongest, clearest message is to make an example. That is how we’ll be able to maintain the stability we’ve carved out for ourselves – carved out for ourselves against all the odds.”
“If we make an example of him the message we’ll be sending is that they were right to oppose us! That we are the cruel force they paint us as being. That Nithael is right to argue for another way!” Advachiel’s intensity is leading her to develop new asymptotes. “We cannot be seen to be punishing angels just for wanting to think for themselves.”
Hannah can feel some of the angel onlookers trying to confer over frequencies distorted for secrecy, and one of her wheels starts moving in a parabolic motion in response.
“‘Think for themselves’ – he’s the one swaying them! Undermining us. That sort of dissent needs to be shut down.” Eremiel’s rings are sharpening.
“But this isn’t –”
“And besides – do you remember what it was like? All of us slaughtering each other in the streets? That’s what we’re seeking to avoid here.”
“That’s not what’s going to –”
“Enough!” The majority of most of the gathered angels’ eyes are turned towards Hannah. She ruffles some of her lattice structures back into order to give a show of composure. “We need… We need to take a strong line. None of this discussion is getting us anywhere. Discussion didn’t get us anywhere with Daniel and Adina, and it won’t get us anywhere with Nithael either. The answer is simple and already agreed upon. Other angels need to know what will happen if they go against us in this way.”
The angels who had just watched the discussion all look suitably cowed, even if Advachiel in particular looks ready to burst out into argument again.
“You can all leave me now.”
Eremiel’s lower spirals are green-violet in satisfaction, even as Matriel and Advachiel’s cogs pulse in agitated harmony as they leave.
Jophiel hangs back as the other angels file out, spokes flapping a little in what Hannah takes to be consternation.
“You must understand why I have to. We can’t allow disruptions like Nithael’s to continue. Everything that Naomi did… That’s what happens when we allow chaos to persevere. So I have to.”
Barachiel is near the back of the line of angels leaving, and he turns to face them at that.
“Naomi? Naomi was trying to prevent chaos.”
It hadn’t surprised Hannah that he hadn’t spoken at all during the discussion – what surprises her is that he is speaking now. She feels a couple of sparks form along the edges of her fiercest teeth.
“Have you bought into that story from all those silly faulty angels of Naomi as some rogue malevolent force?” Barachiel continues, and Hannah sees Jophiel make herself smaller. “Naomi was always doing what was best for Heaven. We wouldn’t be in this mess at all if she had had her way.”
“She tortured angels,” Hannah says coolly. “Our brothers. Her brothers. Just to keep power.”
“She helped them. In the name of what was best for Heaven.”
Hannah had never spoken to Barachiel when they were all on Earth. She knows he wasn’t part of Castiel’s army – in fact she’s not actually sure who he had aligned himself with. He has been most notable to her, really, in presenting very little opposition to her plans for a restored, ordered Heaven, which is much more than she’s got from many of their other siblings, so mostly she has been grateful to be able to pay him very little thought.
“That might be how she justified it to herself.” The posture of his body is surprisingly confident given the baldness of his claims. Nothing leaking into other dimensions, his two biggest heads directed towards her. “That might be how you justified it to yourself, working with her, I presume. But you must really know that it’s not true.”
“You’ve been in her rooms. With Jophiel. She explained it to you?”
“Yes. I saw Naomi’s tools and her chair. And heard about what she did. Slicing into angels’ bodies just to bring them into line with her goals. Disgusting.”
“Restoring them. Repairing them. For the good of Heaven.” A ripple of frustration passes through Barachiel’s feathers. “I don’t think you understand. Where do you think Naomi and all her knowledge came from?”
“What do you mean? There was chaos in Heaven and she took advantage of it to seize power for herself.”
“No. She had held that position – for millennia – in order to prevent Heaven from falling into chaos. I mean, she was just a practitioner originally, but with all of the damage wrought, she stepped up. It was never supposed to be just her in charge of the division, but in the end it was – her shouldering that burden, trying to keep Heaven from crumbling further. Perhaps if there’d still been more, the Fall would never have happened. But with so many problematic angels…”
Hannah scoffs with two heads, a tic she picked up from spending so long envesseled. “It was Metatron who was the problem. She only had to stop him. If her priorities had been focussed that shouldn’t have been difficult. Instead there were so many innocent angels who she…”
“Oh, yes. They were innocent. None of our siblings could help the way corruption crept in. Much like Nithael, really. But there were so many of them to help.”
The idea of Nithael as in some way blameless startles her slightly. She pulls some of her spiralling crystals back into alignment. “‘Helping’? You can’t call torturing them helping them.”
“They don’t remember the pain. Jophiel could tell you that. But the peace they feel afterwards…”
“What are you talking about?”
“It seems this has all been explained to you rather badly. It’s a relief – of course it’s a relief. We are meant to be perfect beings of faith and obedience. All Naomi was doing was correcting aberrations from that.”
Hannah begins to raise the amplitude of her resting waveform to interrupt, and but he fans out his most outward-facing feathers to forestall her.
“I would also think it was blasphemy if I didn’t know better. But I think you understand the principle. You know it’s not natural for angels to want to remain on Earth. Well, it’s the result of a flaw creeping in. I think Naomi thought this only happened when an angel was deficient in some way – she was always so frustrated when the same angel had to be corrected repeatedly, which happened more frequently than she’d really want to acknowledge. But as I see it it’s the opposite. There’s nothing faulty in the design, or rather, it’s the design being too good. In my experience, problems come when there’s an excess of worshipful fervour – too much to fully sate. This is what makes the imperfections and – thus, the errors – arise, which we would then do our best to address, for the good of the angels in question. It’s a distressing experience for them, of course it is – the lack of fulfilment, and then the doubt that follows it. And so then we need to check this doubt before it leads to disobedience – even rebellion. Or going so far as to urge others to rebellion, like with Nithael. And Castiel.
“So you understand it was all necessary. For the good of Heaven. To maintain order. That is all Naomi’s work always was. Maintenance.”
Hannah doesn’t know how to respond. “You have a good way with words, Brother.”
“I’m only speaking the truth. And of course angels don’t want to be at odds with Heaven, with their purpose – not really. Naomi’s work – the work of all the practitioners – it was a kindness. To return them to their peaceful state. The seed of doubt extinguished. Free simply to obey.”
An almost brazen clarity comes into the stained glass of his eyes. Hannah looks away. She never felt any doubt. Not in thousands of years. She had known what her purpose was, and she had found comfort in it. The simplicity of orders, and the drive to follow them. She imagines having lost that, and something of the envesseled sensation of nausea creeps in to some of the most central, private parts of her, but she thinks it’s safely hidden from Barachiel. She knows she had never felt doubt, while in Heaven. She had had order. Any creeping thoughts that had tried to taunt her, she had been able to dismiss easily. She had always been able to keep confidence that that order would remain.
It was only the Fall that had wrenched that all away from her. Now she gives orders. It would have been unthinkable before. She had stepped into the breach when the leader of her garrison had been lost, but that wasn’t the same. That was simply passing on what their orders would have been anyway. A mouthpiece for the will of Heaven. Soothing. So very different to having to make decisions for her siblings, and win them over to them.
“That’s not – You can’t pretend torturing our siblings was a kindness. You can’t pretend it’s what our Father would have wanted.”
Barachiel looks at her strangely. Some of her flames dim a little.
“It was simply necessary for the ordered running of Heaven. You of all people should understand – really, Brother. Wanting to make an example of Nithael. You understand the utility of these things.”
“You’re lying. My garrison never needed it.” It feels almost feeble, but she fluffs out her feathers as she says it anyway.
The movement of Barachiel’s wheels teeters slightly, and she’s confused for a moment, until they start to glow in derision.
“Do you really believe that? What makes you think you would know?”
“I… I know them.”
“What makes you think we’d let you remember anything out of place? Maybe we fixed one of them tidily, and they were just seamlessly returned to you – causing less disruption than before. Or maybe we had to wipe you too.” He smooths out a cog of his, that’s been oscillating out of time with the rest. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true.”
“And is… Is this what you think I should do to Nithael, and to the others…?”
There’s a clatter in Jophiel behind her.
“This is a very different Heaven,” says Barachiel slowly. “Policy was never my domain.”
“But you think…?”
“I could… I could use a human analogy.”
This surprises her. She gestures tentatively with three of her hands for him to continue.
“We were tools in a tool shed. All used properly, and put back neatly, but sometimes, faults arise anyway. And they would be fixed. Then the apocalypse didn’t come, and the Leviathan did, and a lot of us were gone, and we started being overused – used for the wrong tasks. The faults became worse and more frequent, and the repair carried out less diligently.” He fixes a good half of his eyes firmly on Hannah. “You understand, of course, that I only mean ‘diligence’ for the sake of the analogy. With her reduced forces, and with so great a need for her skills, Naomi did do her very best.”
Hannah thinks of being driven along twisty forest roads, her vessel’s stomach swirling in the passenger seat. “…yes.”
“Well, the situation – quite simply – was bad. And now all of the tools have been tossed out of the tool shed entirely, on to the ground – have become used to the grass, and the air… Have sustained damage in a way they never had done before, and have become accustomed to it. There’s only so much repair work that can be done.”
Hannah does feel rather like that sometimes, she supposes. A rusty tool lying on the ground, trying to persuade the rest of the tools to return to their shed. They should welcome it though, is the baffling part. A return to safety and security after lying discarded on the earth, regardless of what the earth had to offer.
“But you would prefer…?” she tries again.
“I would prefer that Naomi had succeeded. I would prefer that Castiel had never made us Fall.” One of his smaller heads examines his battered feathers deliberately. “I would prefer that Naomi had been there to keep us together and lead us back to Heaven. But now…”
“Now?”
“You’re our leader. I don’t have to make the decision.”
Hannah is sure she can feel some of her wheels come to an abrupt halt in frustration. All of Barachiel is still smugly in motion. Hannah never asked to be the leader. It was a breach she stepped into. She never asked to have to decide how to deal with her wayward siblings – to have to persuade them to act in the good of Heaven. They shouldn’t need persuading after all. Maybe after the Fall, the ‘faults’ Naomi had always been there to correct had appeared in more of them than normal. Maybe it was that that was driving Nithael. Maybe she should feel pity. It wasn’t malice that had crept into him, but merely a malfunction that he was blameless in.
No such malfunction had emerged in her though. It was the world that had cracked around her, while she had remained just as true as she had always been. Undistracted from the importance of a strong, ordered Heaven – one that kept safely to itself. After all, it was only when they’d started to interact with humans that problems had started to emerge. Castiel…
She was aware, vaguely, of Castiel’s role in his war with Raphael. The conflict hadn’t had any importance for her personally – a ragtag group trying in vain to shake the control of their eldest remaining brother. Hannah had simply trusted in Raphael’s ability to do what was best for Heaven, and to shrug off this small, rebellious nuisance.
It had only posed a problem for her once, when one of the members of her garrison, Kushiel, had come to them with a message he’d received from one of Castiel’s soldiers. Kushiel had taken the occasional rumblings Hannah was always so careful to quash one step further and suggested that God had shown them that they didn’t need to keep following their orders – that God had let the apocalypse be derailed and brought Castiel back because they didn’t need to follow any plan, that they should be free to pursue their own paths instead. This was of course just laziness on his part, Hannah had been sure, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous as a message for him to be spreading to the rest of their siblings. Tiring of your tasks, on occasion, was understandable, but the leap to thinking that you didn’t need orders at all…
Hannah hadn’t let her agitation show, she had turned only the calmest parts of her topology towards him, and asked him simply what he would do with this ‘free will’, if he thought God wanted him to have it. He hadn’t been able to answer her, and she had thrummed in relief. Sometimes she was jealous of her past self, getting to live in a simpler world, where dangerous misconceptions like that could still be quashed so easily. With the regrettable situation with Daniel and Adina things hadn’t been so straightforward. And then now with Nithael, and, even worse, the disagreement over him… But back then, it had been simple, and neither Kushiel, nor the rest of the garrison had raised the question of Castiel’s message again.
As for Castiel himself… The Castiel Hannah had met still held traces of the one she had heard tell of, but weakened – eclipsed enough that he was an angel she could place her trust in. No corrupting ideology tainted his leadership – he was motivated only by the good of Heaven, just as she was. Or at least, no corrupting ideology other than his baffling prioritisation of Dean Winchester. But crucially, no politics. She supposes after the debacle with the Leviathan, he had learnt. Free will only leads to ruin. Pursuit of power for power’s sake only leads to ruin. It’s hard to understand how the Castiel she knew had done those things – a Castiel so focussed on the good of his siblings, a Castiel that would let himself die, rather than take another angel’s grace. The thought that that Castiel had once tried to seduce others to his side with promises of freedom…
She’s glad that on that front he’s improved, at least. That he understands now the importance of preserving order in Heaven, even if he was reluctant to take the hard stance against rogue angels necessary to avoid chaos. She wonders if the violent leviathan scars on his angelic body serve as a reminder to him – help to keep him on the right path. All of the angels that died at the hands of the Leviathan is a great tragedy, of course, but she can’t help but be grateful that it gave her the Castiel she knew.
Though even that wasn’t enough for him to still choose his family. A cruel, bitter part of her thinks that after what he did, he should. That he owes it to them – to her – to all of them, to be leading them now. She never wanted this. Metatron’s rule would have been tyranny, she understands, but it would have been rule at least. And maybe if she hadn’t known…
She almost wishes the crack were in her, and not the world. That just by excising a part of herself, she could return to how things were before, to security and certainty. To the Heaven that she wants to be able to provide for her siblings, however much they seem determined to resist.
Barachiel and Jophiel are still watching her, and it makes her wheels want to start flashing infrared. To glow black. Translucent, even. She assembles herself authoritatively.
“You can both leave me now.” There’s a distinct curve in one of Barachiel’s formants that she doesn’t like. “Thank you,” she adds firmly. Jophiel looks almost relieved to acquiesce as she and Barachiel leave together, all of her heads still turned away from him.
Hannah is left alone. The doorway to Naomi’s office is still the gaping archway that had been convenient to Matriel, and she enters through it, and then pulls it into a slit behind her.
They’re just broken. Or, that’s how Barachiel sees it. How Naomi would have seen it. Those of her siblings that defy her – Nithael – they’re just broken. There’s no fundamental ideological disagreement, just errors that have crept into them. Errors that she’s managed to stay free of.
A kind, just leader would fix them. Heal them. She knows that she… Feeling at odds with the world is painful, frightening. It would be an act of compassion to free them of that.
The instrument looks at her. Not with eyes. With something deeper. It resonates with some of her most engrained, most core, frequencies.
But the world simply isn’t a world made for good angels anymore. What she – what all of them – were made for was being part of a full, structured Heaven. One in which she had wings and the clear, comforting lines of orders to navigate. Now… Now she doesn’t even know what shape one of her siblings would have to be carved into, to fit in the monstrous debris they’ve all been left in.
She starts to reach out with a few tentative feathers, and – without making contact – it’s as though the instrument pinches her. Rebukes her.
Part of her recoils. The reproach feels justified. She can’t help but feel as though she’s just a little too cowardly – not quite strong enough – to really take control of her vision the way Naomi did.
And she doesn’t have the power – sufficient faith placed in her. She’s failing in comparison to the angel under whose watch the Fall happened. Even if she were to begin to order each of her siblings to come in here, she doesn’t seem to be the sort of leader that they’re eager enough to obey.
She smooths out her matrices and faces the instrument again. It’s moot anyway. Things aren’t reparable in that way anymore. Maybe to Naomi they would have been, but with Hannah’s knowledge and resources…
It’s a very different Heaven. One where perhaps, really, they’re even past the point of making examples of particular angels having any real effect. The world that they find themselves in is simply too conducive to the spreading of dangerous messages like Nithael’s, regardless of what she might do to him. Force isn’t enough to extinguish it. Persuasion and negotiation are irritating, ineffectual tools, but perhaps the only ones that remain to her. If even her own most loyal soldiers can’t be trusted to agree, then they seem to be ones the broken world is forcing her to use.
Some of her feathers glint in sympathy with the instrument and she tucks them away. The idea that Castiel would be content with – perhaps even admiring of – the methods she’s been forced to adopt occurs to her, and she’s not sure what to do with it. She folds the instrument away into a pocket dimension, and pretends she can’t still see its edges.
