The Wheels On The Bus Chapter 32

Jack falls to his knees, one hand immediately going to his chest, feeling like he’s just been punched in the sternum. His eyes are wide, his arms are shaking, and he’s aware of that sickly feeling of his insides buzzing around with anxiety.

Something’s wrong.

He tries to stand, and then immediately buckles again at the feeling of bile rising up to his throat. He takes in a shaky breath, swallowing sour saliva and trying not to throw up.

Slowly, very careful, he sits up.

Around him, everyone else seems to be picking themselves up from the ground too. He frowns. He’d been on his way to the commentator’s booth to get a good vantage point, in case the fight ever got to the gym - and to protect the injured since they’d been moved from the infirmary to the booth - but then that feeling of being knocked off his feet had come out of nowhere.

And it hadn’t been just him, it seems.

He stumbles forward. One step, another, and then slaps a hand over his mouth as he actually feels like he’s going to hurl.

“What the fuck…” someone says, faintly.

A few feet away from him, someone else actually throws up.

Jack puts his hands on his knees, focusing on his breathing. In, out. In, out. He can’t be put out of commission. Not when he’s the only one in this base with a fighting chance against the entirety of the Heavenly Hosts.

He tries to stand again, slowly. It feels like minutes until he can actually straighten up. His head feels like it’s buzzing.

“What is that?” he hears someone say, and he turns, still in that agonizingly slow manner.

“An earthquake?” a girl asks. She looks just as shaky as he is. Everyone does. They all look like they’re about to be sick.

Jack blinks, and then looks up at the lights above them. Some of the lamps are swinging slightly.

One at the corner flickers.

The angels?

No - no, not the angels. He tries to focus on the buzzing, as much as he can. It’s not the angels. It can’t be the angels. The energy feels too infernal, too lacking of Grace to be angels. Besides, the angels sound like shepard tones, their wavelengths frequent and high and piercing. This buzzing is low, malevolent, deep.

Hateful.

Something is angry, Jack thinks. Very angry.

He turns away, as best as he can, and trudges to up to the commentator’s booth. He’s still got a job to do.

-

Something’s wrong.

Michael feels it reverberate throughout his whole being - past the human flesh he’s wearing and down to the very atoms of his Grace. Whatever’s happened has enough force to knock his flight off-course, and he finds himself being thrown to the side, barely having the presence of mind to make sure to hold on to his father’s sleeve. Thankfully the man is too weak to manifest out of his physical form, and Michael keeps his grip on him.

It feels like a bomb has just gone off. If the Cage’s space weren’t so warped, Michael’s sure he would have slammed into the wall of it.

He hears Chuck laugh.

Michael tightens his grip on his father’s sleeve, and with his other hand, stabs his sword into the ground to push himself up.

“Did you feel that?” Chuck asks him, the glint of blue in his eyes suggesting something malicious. “Something powerful just died.”

Michael’s brow furrows.

“Something powerful enough to challenge even your powers - something powerful enough to rock the foundations of the universe,” his father says, clamping a hand over Michael’s. “How curious that you and your lot have gotten reinforcements like that.”

No - no, no, no.

Jack?

Had someone hurt Jack? Had someone killed -

Chuck nearly takes his head off with a sword that definitely wasn’t in his possession before. Michael leans back, but the movement makes him let go of the man, and in the time that it takes for him to get his footing, Chuck has already put some distance between them.

He’s standing several feet away from him, straightening out the creases in his clothes.

Michael raises his sword, carefully gripping the hilt with both hands. A disappointed look crosses his father’s face.

“You’re still loyal to them?” he asks, “After everything?”

“What do you mean, after everything?” Michael asks. “After they’ve been nothing but kind to me?”

“Have they?” Chuck asks. “You’ve had to sneak out of the bunker, because they think you’re a loose cannon. They don’t trust you to help them, so you had to go behind their backs to help. You and your friends have been told to stay out of the way, so you had to weaponize that.”

“Please do not insult my intelligence,” Michael says, taking a step to the side. Chuck does the same thing, in the opposite direction, as they both start to circle each other. “That works with other people, but do not think for a second that I do not know you, father.”

Chuck smiles. “But do you?”

Michael feels his stern expression falter, and then grits his teeth as he tries his best to put it back on.

“Do you believe the millenia you’ve had with me?” Chuck asks. “Or the months you’ve had with your friends?”

“They always say the time you spend with someone doesn’t matter, only how you spend it,” Michael says, trying for a cheeky grin. Chuck laughs.

“And how did you spend it?” Chuck asks. “In hiding? Doing the most mundane things to entertain yourself?”

“I told you already, that doesn’t work on me.”

“Michael, I can rebuild the universe,” Chuck says. “Into something better. Into something greater. Your friends can still be there - I’m just starting over. Don’t you see? In a universal reset, everybody lives. All the dead rise again. It’s just everything starting over, back to the beginning.”

Michael frowns.

“Technically,” he says, after a while, “But I still don’t want it.”

His father stops in his tracks. Michael does as well. Neither of them say anything for a minute.

“I see,” Chuck says, nodding to himself. “This is a shame.”

“Indeed.”

“Hmm,” Chuck says. He rolls his shoulders back, like he’s working out the burn in his muscles. “I can’t say I tried, Michael.”

Michael tenses, legs ready to move at any moment -

Chuck blasts him back with a burst of Grace, but he’s quick on his feet, immediately jumping to the side, incorporeal wings flared up and flapping once - and he’s suddenly right in front of Chuck, swinging. His father idly deflects his blade with a hand, taking steps backward as Michael continues to attack him.

As Michael swings down, Chuck catches the blade, and Michael immediately wills the weapon to change into a morningstar, its spikes impaling Chuck’s hand as it changes in the space it takes for both of them to blink. The man hisses, pulling his bloody hand back.

It knits itself back up, albeit slowly, and Michael grins, taking his weapon back and letting it return to its former shape.

“Enough.” Chuck clicks his tongue and snaps his fingers.

Michael drops his sword, curling in on himself at the sudden pain on his back. It feels like something is burning him, burning his flesh and his Grace, and his wings -

Oh god, his wings.

He looks behind him, not with his physical eyes, and watches as his wings are wrenched away from his being, pulled back sharply, and disappearing into black smoke as they’re fully ripped away from him.

His throat hurts, he then realizes, and his cheeks are wet. He‘s screaming. When had he started screaming?

“Goodbye, Michael,” Chuck says, and Michael barely has the time to react before he’s being thrown back by a force, landing on his back against the ground.

He screams again at the sudden pain. His clothes are wet, and his back is sticky and warm.

His physical form is bleeding.

He tries to get his arms to move, push himself back up, but they’re not responding to him. He can’t feel anything, actually, aside from the searing pain on his back, the way it’s still burning him - the way it burns his chest and his insides, like he’s being cooked alive, inside out.

“I tried, Michael,” his father says, softly, and he almost says it with remorse, but Michael can’t be sure. He doesn’t know if he can afford that luxury. Not when the man’s machinations may have killed Jack. Not when he’s just torn his wings out.

His wings.

Oh god, it hurts.

Michael stares up, at the open mouth of the Cage, the faint light above him that he knows comes from Hell’s caverns. He’s seen this view before. It’d been the same view he’d looked up at with Adam when Hell had opened up.

Adam - is he okay? Michael’s only been on the same plane as him for a few minutes. He hasn’t had the time to check if he can connect with their old mind link.

He hears Chuck walking, feels the familiar hum of his father’s power as the man begins to ascend up to the mouth of the Cage. Belphegor was supposed to slam the thing closed. Had something gone wrong?

He has to get up. He has to stop Chuck.

Michael manages to move a hand, pushing himself up shakily -

His hand slips on his blood and falls back down with a cry.

“Shit,” he mutters. His father isn’t even sparing him a second glance, a faint light in the emptiness of the Cage, already rising upwards and upwards towards its mouth.

Someone, he thinks. Someone help us. Please.

If his father gets out, it’s all over. If his father wins, they’re all dead.

Michael closes his eyes. He’s still crying. He’s never cried in his life until now.

Someone, he prays. Someone save us.