foreigner's god wip part v (unedited)

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“Explain yourself.”

Gabriel stands in the middle of the meeting room, looking down at the floor. Michael waits, expression stony. 

They’re the only ones here, since Raphael is ordering their team to tend to the wounded, and Lucifer isn’t here for obvious reasons. Michael’s handed authority over to her second in command to gather the able-bodied of her troops to barricade the city. 

And Gabriel is here, cheek stinging, shame washing over him as realizes he might have made a grave mistake.

“Gabriel,” Michael says. “Explain yourself.”

“They were getting violent.”

“And so you let them go?”

“I thought it would be optimal if both parties got away from each other and ceased trading blows,” he says, hazarding a glance upwards. Michael’s expression hasn’t changed. He looks down.

There’s silence for a while. Finally, when Gabriel feels like he’s going to be sick from the nervousness, Michael walks away, pacing. 

“Lucifer has shown himself to be capable of resorting to violence, Gabriel,” Michael says. “Together with the dissent he’s stirred, he’s dangerous.”

Gabriel thinks his ears are ringing, even when he knows it’s impossible. He turns to look at Michael. “What are you going to do?” he asks.

Michael pauses in her pacing. She rests her hands on the table in front of her, leaning her weight on her arms as she lowers her head, defeated. “I don’t know,” she says, after a long while. “I don’t know, Gabriel, I just know this has to stop.”

Relief loosens in Gabriel’s gut. Michael doesn’t want this to be happening as much as he does. 

“We have to protect everyone in the city,” Michael says. “We don’t know what Lucifer will do.”

“He was attacked first,” Gabriel says.

“What?”

“He was attacked first. That’s why he retaliated,” Gabriel says. 

Michael pauses again.

“I think you should talk to whoever struck him first,” Gabriel says. “If one side keeps being violent, then this is going to keep happening.”

“Even if we stand down, we don’t know what Lucifer and his angels will do,” Michael says, instantly defensive. 

“Michael, you know we can always talk to him,” Gabriel says, the slightest hint of frustration leaking into his voice. “We can talk to them - we have friends on Lucifer’s side too. They can be reasoned with.”

“Eiael isn’t the only angel Lucifer has roped into his delusions, Gabriel.”

Gabriel feels his wings flare. “Don’t be stupid, Michael,” he says, fully turning to face her now. “They’re still angels. They’re still our friends, and our brethren.” 

“What brethren of ours disrespects our Mother?”

“Lucifer is still our brother, Michael!”

The room is silent. This time it feels like Gabriel has been dropped into the cold, cold ocean of Creation’s first form. Michael looks up at him, very, very slowly, the light of her true form glowing past the eyes of her corporation. 

“That is, why, Gabriel,” she says, “That what he’s done is unforgivable.”

Gabriel has never felt betrayed before. At least, until now, and even then, he thinks that what he’s feeling is nowhere near to what Michael feels; Michael who’s been with Lucifer since he was a fledgling, and who’d watch him grow and grow and grow, and then one day, she didn’t recognize him anymore.

-

Lucifer and his angels return. They stand at the edges of the barricades, asking again to be let into the Archangels’ temple to seek Mother. They are refused. They don’t leave. Unsurprisingly, another squabble happens, and both parties retreat with several injured.

Michael has the barricades fortified, asking for volunteers to stand guard in case Lucifer and his angels return - they do, and the same thing happens again, and then again, and then again. 

AR is assigned to keeping track of who’s injured and who’s not, who is present in the city and who is unaccounted for, so Gabriel throws himself into the work. The office gets busy again, and they try not to talk about all the empty desks that painfully stand out in their already-little department.

Eiael hasn’t come back. No one’s sure if they will. Haziel hasn’t been spotted in a while, and neither has Caphriel. 

They do their jobs, they keep their mouths shut, they have a schedule to take a census every few days or so in order to check if anyone’s snuck out of the city and defected or seen the error of their ways and returned. Gabriel tries not to look too hopeful every time they have the census, waiting for word that maybe, just maybe, some of his coworkers have returned. 

No such luck every time.

It’s during one such census that there’s a scuffle in the barricade again. Michael’s angels have taken to wielding large slabs of metal and holding them up in order to block off any of the angels that try to get through the barricade - it’s happened a couple of times, resulting in said angels getting bodily tackled to the ground - but Lucifer’s angels persist anyway, shouting their demands to be let in, because it’s their city too, they built and lived here too. 

Gabriel’s just on his way back to the office, passing by a part of the barricade, when he sees it: one of Lucifer’s angels strikes Michael’s, making them drop the metal slab they’re holding up, effectively creating an opening to the city. 

In the split second that the angels notice this, Lucifer’s angels are already shoving their way past the opening, running and trampling on the angel that’s fallen, calling on the others to get in, get through, and get to the temple. Michael’s angels immediately crowd the opening, pressing close to each other, while a few others drag the injured angel away, shouting for one of the medics, but some of the rogue angels are already inside, and most of them have already spread their wings and are flying towards the temple. 

“City breach!” Gabriel hears, over his shock at seeing angels taking to the sky.

Then, it’s like something that’s never occurred to Lucifer’s angels clicks. All this time, they’ve ask for their demands to be heard while they’re on the ground, shouting what they want, fighting when pushed back or told to cease - but why be content with that, when they can just plow through the barricade, or better yet, fly over it? Why wait for people who would never listen to hear them out, when they could just take what they wanted?

One by one, angels start breaking through their corporations, shooting up to the skies in blazes of light. The barricade guards look at them, surprised, before the realization washes over everyone watching, and as the idea spreads from this point of the barricade to the rest of the dissenting angels. 

If they won’t be heard, then they’ll make themselves heard, even if they have to storm the city.

-

It’s chaos. Angels left and right are dropping from the skies as Michael’s angels tackle Lucifer’s, they crash into buildings and roads, wrestling to either get free or to subdue the other. 

There’s seven angels from AR out and about doing the census, aside from him. 

Gabriel runs. If the angels hit any of the buildings in their foundations, the whole things could collapse. He’s not sure what would happen if any of them are injured too much, but he doesn’t want to know either, so he runs, reciting the list of which of his angels are assigned where. 

He finds Lailah first - she’d been assigned the area closest to his - and tells her to forget the census run back to the AR department. Surely, no one’s going to come looking there. The AR department has nothing that is of interest to Lucifer’s angels, so unless they’d be trying to escape Michael’s, they have no reason to be there. They want to get to the temple, so that’s where they’ll be going.

“What about the others, sir?” Lailah asks. 

Gabriel blanks out for the shortest of moments. “Find them if you can, but if the area is getting too dangerous, get back to the office,” he says. “I’m going to find Dagiel.”

Dagiel had been assigned nearest to the temple. If anything happens, there’s a possibility she’s going to get caught in the crossfire.

Lailah nods and takes off running. Gabriel only watches her go for a bit before he’s running down the streets again.

Something crashes in front of him, hard enough that he has to close his eyes and raise his arms to instinctively shield himself at the debris kicked up by the impact. As he has to skid to a stop, he loses his balance and falls backwards, landing on his back. 

He pushes himself up, after a second, opening his eyes and waving away as much dust floating about him as he can.

There’s a sharp blow, like bone connecting with bone, and a sick crack. 

Gabriel opens his eyes. In front of him is an angel, only vaguely familiar because he knows he’s seen their face before when he’d handed them their assignments, because he’s seen everyone here before, he’s talked to all of them before. Said angel is pulling their arm back and striking their fist down at the angel they’ve gotten pinned to the ground. 

The corporation’s nose breaks as their head snaps to the side. The angel pulls their arm back again and does the same thing. 

Again, and again, and again.

Gabriel watches red spray on the ground, on the angel’s knuckles, and on their robes, watches the fury in the angel’s eyes, and he can’t do anything but freeze.

This isn’t supposed to happen. None of this is supposed to happen.

Heaven is supposed to be a happy place, with everyone getting along and making systems out of chaos. They’re all part of the same Host, all created by the same Mother, and none of them are supposed to be hurting each other. 

But the angel in front of him is still punching the other, whose corporation at this point is nothing but a bloody mass of battered flesh. Gabriel notices the injured angel reach for something at the side, something Gabriel can’t see, and the angel on top of them is readying for another punch to notice. 

The punch never lands. Instead, Gabriel watches as the injured angel shoves a broken piece of a metal window frame straight through the underside of the attacking angel’s jaw; it goes straight through the skull. 

The angel stills, goes limp, and drops. The injured one shoves it to the side. They crawl away from the body, huffing and panting, one of their eyes swollen shut and their mouth and nose profusely bleeding. On the ground, the other angel doesn’t move. 

Gabriel turns away from the sight and for the first time in his life, throws up.

-

He finds Dagiel later, after he’s no longer shaking and his mouth tastes a lot less like bile. She’s a few ways off from the temple, said that she’d nearly been done with her work when the first few angels started fighting around them.

She’s splattered with blood. 

“What - ” Gabriel’s voice breaks as he takes in the sight. There’s blood on her robes, on her face, and her hands. “What happened?”

Dagiel stares at her hands. Slowly, tears start rolling down her face.

“They wouldn’t stop,” she says. “I saw them fighting and they wouldn’t stop, so I tried to make it stop.”

Gabriel looks away. He hears Dagiel burst into sobs.

“It’s okay,” he says, holding his arms out to her for a hug. She collapses against him, crying. “It’s okay, Dagiel.”

It’s not. They both know it’s not, but nothing like this has ever happened before. Neither of them have had any idea of what to do in situations like these, because situations like these weren’t even supposed to exist. Away from the alley they’re both hiding in, angels are turning against each other. They can both hear the screaming of their brethren in pain, and they don’t know what to do.

“What’s happening, Gabriel?” Dagiel asks, between her sobs. “What’s going on, why is this happening?”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know why any of this is happening, because surely, their Mother wouldn’t have wanted this, right? 

Dagiel continues to cry in his arms. Gabriel says nothing, instead just holding her tight, waiting for the chaos around them to stop.