stilljustandrew | [detroit!AU: Summoning]

The wind of those wings flattens him against the wall, lashes his face with his hair, drowns his cry of terror with its thunder.

When the holy fire dies, the last of his nerve fails him; he lurches to his feet and makes a panicked break for the window.

The awful presence grows, doubling in magnitude as the light swells and flickers like shadows on the bottom of a pool.

(For an instant, the image of another pair of wings dances through them, there and gone.)

An iron-fast grip closes around the back of Andrew's shirt and yanks him up short, shoving him with a brusque efficiency into one corner of the room as the figure turns toward Lucifer. His smile's as perpetually amused as ever, and his eyes are very cold, and very hard.

"Yeah," he says, stretching the word into a long drawl. "About that."

"Gabriel."

Utter and absolute shock rings through the single word as Lucifer stares at him.

"You? You would choose to finally interfere, now? For this?"

He throws his hand out, indicating Andrew.

Andrew blinks the blur out of his eyes -- sweat or tears, he can't tell -- and clings to the wall as though standing at the edge of a pit. Which, he's aware, he very much is.

The newcomer is familiar -- but not a trickster spirit after all, an archangel, Gabriel. And he may be here to protect him, but in this revealed aspect, he's no less terrifying than Lucifer.

"Um...yeah," says Gabriel, as if this were the most obvious answer in the world; his eyebrows tick up on the yeah for extra emphasis. Folding his arms as he shrugs, "'Cause, last I checked, this whole apocalypse you're starting up?"

He untucks one hand long enough to sketch a quick circle in front of himself, finger pointed down.

"Involved our Dad's work. Not this guy."

Lucifer's smile is terrifying and beautiful at once.

"He was the one who chose to call upon me. I answered his prayer, not to put too fine a point on it. He's mine, Gabriel. And I intend to have him."

One eyebrow arches even higher.

"Just because he wanted to pick up the phone and say hi?"

"Oh, I'm sure you realize he did more than that."

A cold, keen edge threads through his voice, whispering of bright steel and distant battles.

"You've gotten better at questioning, brother. There's still a place for you, too, if you want it. I wasn't the one who turned away, remember?"

That note in Lucifer's voice -- Sam Winchester's voice -- sends a helpless shudder through him, and Andrew turns and hides his face against the wall, leaking tears.

"Please." He's not aware of whispering it aloud. "Please no."

The rippling water-shadows on the wall go still. Gabriel's smile tilts at an unpleasant angle before it vanishes altogether.

"Yeah, funny thing about that," he says, and there is nothing of amusement left in his voice. "I never stopped knowing both sides shared the blame."

"But not you."

There's no hint of a question.

"Never you. You stand apart, rejecting all equally."

A beat.

"Until now."

Gabriel unfolds his arms, and with the movement comes a new shiver to the shadows like a pebble tossed in a lake.

"Really?" he asks, cocking his head. "That's what you think this is?"

His gaze flicks to the spent holy oil in a quick, automatic judgment of caution; then, he takes half a step closer. Not enough to put himself far away from Andrew. Not enough to give the Morningstar an opening.

As he pulls a face of exaggerated contemplation, "Because...way I see it, all I'm doing is calling the plays as they come. And this one is way out of bounds, bro."

"Yet out of your jurisdiction, if such it ever were."

The air stirs again, whispering around all three of them.

"But not mine. It is my vessel who is the reason for the connection, after all."

He darts a bright, laughing glance at Andrew.

"Isn't that so?"

Andrew flinches as though scalded by his gaze.

"Don't --"

"Don't what? Speak the truth?"

Lucifer smiles, even as the look in his eyes hardens.

"Because it is the truth, and we all know it." A beat. "Put not your trust in our Father's messenger boy, Andrew Wells. If he could have preserved his vaunted neutral balance by giving Sam Winchester over to me himself, he would have gladly done so."

"Ex...cept not?"

Gabriel's eyeing him sidelong.

"Because of the whole thing where me actively shoving him your way would've made me lose any neutrality in the first place?"

The air's thick with the smell of water, of rising humidity and oncoming storms.

Edited 2010-03-25 04:39 (UTC)

"Unless you could have given Dean Winchester into another's hands at the same time," he returns, and once again the room shudders under the pressure of unconscionable force as a gleaming white brightness begins to grow as if rooted in the very air itself.

His dark, rich laughter resonates around them.

"Tell me, how's that working for you?"

Very emphatically, like he's talking to a particularly slow child, "Well, seeing as I can't give him to anybody..."

And swiftly, he cocks his head.

"Just curious, did -- " Gabriel levels a hand at Lucifer. "Did the fire cook your brain? Are you high on brimstone fumes right now or something?"

Because, seriously.

The insult passes unremarked. Instead, Lucifer smiles.

"No. You can't, can you."

A beat.

"They're going to lose this war, Gabriel. And so are you."

White fire explodes forth around him, filling the room in a burst of painful brilliance.

The light stabs right through his closed eyelids. Andrew cries out again and throws one arm up to shield his face.

Nuclear explosion. It's a swift confused thought, scrabbling for a foothold in the torrent of fear. This whole place, no time to warn everybody, oh god no --

The light blots the water-shadows from the wall, and Gabriel reels back as if struck.

(Hidden by the stumble, behind his back, his hand closes tight and not terribly kindly on Andrew's arm.)

He lifts a hand; the blinding fire bends at its edges like damp, cockled paper, revealing quick glimpses of the darkened room: here the leg of a chair, there the barest edge of a bedspread. Gabriel grits his teeth and spreads his fingers.

The shining light spreads back, then flashes outward in an arc that circumscribes half the room and holds along the line where it meets the resistance of Gabriel's power.

White brilliance surrounds him, turning Sam's face and body into an exalted figure outlined in incandescent glory, painful in its beauty. Lucifer laughs again, and the dark bronze welling sound is at once joyous and exultant.

"It's been a long, long time, brother."

A single beat, and a delighted, challenging smile.

"Will you stand against me?"

The light around him grows more intense, brightening, brightening--

"Just this once?" Gabriel grins a dark, wicked grin, and pushes. "I'm thinking yeah."

The light curls...and then, in a slow excruciating bending, pushes back against Gabriel, an inch at a time, gaining ground on the shrinking corner that houses him and Andrew.

His spread fingers begin to tremble with the effort.

His smile warms into a thing of pure pleasure.

"Good."

Lucifer bows his head to Gabriel, and for one moment an impossible hushed stillness blankets the room--

--and then white light explodes outward in a shattering blast, smashing through the walls into the hallway and out the window and the skylight above into the lakeside space beyond.

As startled shrieks and screams of fear and despair begin to echo down what's left of the hallway along with the frantic beeping of smoke alarms reacting to clouds of dust, he walks forward and looks down at the crumpled shape lying on the carpet.

Andrew's eyes are gone, burned from their sockets; his body is twisted by the blast, one clawed hand thrust helplessly outward as if to defend himself.

There's no sign of Gabriel.

Lucifer prods the corpse with a foot, watching as it shifts limply in reaction to the pressure and falls still again, then shakes his head and turns away without a second glance.

He crosses to stand under the hole where the skylight used to be, looking up into the sky above as he smiles with rapturous anticipation.

"Soon."

A flicker passes through the air in the room, and he's gone.

For two more minutes, all is still.

And then, in a rippling heatwave shimmer, the body of Andrew Wells fades away to nothing.

Out in the forest, a demon bunny hops placidly through a wide clearing some distance in, carrying what looks like the back leg of a squirrel in its mouth. Birds chirp. Insects whine.

Abruptly, the rabbit stops, ears perked in fear, then dashes away as two muffled thumps drop onto the grass.

Andrew's going to have some nice finger-shaped bruises on his arm in a couple hours.

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