Gabriel (Come the War)

when gabriel receives his first orders, he storms into michael's makeshift headquarters. (it's carved from a large quasar group, held up with old bits of armor, a broken spear or two, chewing gum and hope.)

earth? gabriel snarls, thrusting the dispatch in michael's direction. you're sending me to earth? are you trying to insult me, I'm a prince of heaven and you're sending me so far rearward that I might as well let my sword rust! I won't see any battle, michael!

earth needs defending as much as heaven, brother, michael replies gently, but gabriel will not be turned aside.

reverse the order!

do not rush into war so eagerly, gavri'el.

there are fledglings younger than I on the front lines! I will not be exiled to a coward's place--let me fight beside you!

you have been given your orders. I cannot alter them.

they are your orders! It is within your power to alter them!

I will not, then.

Is this your way of punishing me? have you so little love for me, brother, that you would see my name be blackened forever--did you even think what they will say of me, michael? they will call me coward, a prince of heaven who traded on his rank to secure a position of comfort rather than honor--we have already suffered the fall of one archangel. do you think the host can lose another? I beg of you--

I promised lucifer, michael interrupts stiffly, and gabriel's voice dies in his throat.To send you far from the field, I...I promised lucifer. I gave my word. so that you would not see what war makes of your brothers.

there is a long silence.

(when? gabriel could ask. did you know it would come to this? was this one of those whispered conversations you were always having, did you say to one another, we must not let gabriel come to glory, never let him step out from our shadows, defend his father and his brothers and his home--did you laugh, brother? did you laugh at the thought of little gabriel, still trying to keep up with the Sword and the Morningstar?)

instead, he turns and leaves his brother there.

he does not understand until later--until he has spent millennia guarding earth and its precious hairless monkeys, receiving only dispatches from the front lines (third sphere retaken. stop. lucifer gravely wounded. stop. I am so tired. stop.) until the war is over, and lucifer and lucifer's forces flee to earth--until he sees his elder brother for the first time since the Fall, and the morningstar has become a black hole, monstrous teeth and greedy, starving, preying on the innocence of men too young to know what fear is.

brother, lucifer says, the first time gabriel draws his sword in defense of one of those hairless bipeds their father loves so much. (she is nineteen, all dusky skin and dark eyes and proteins and calcium and one, irreplaceable irrepressible infinitely precious shard of the divine, lodged somewhere amid the carbon atoms.

but brother, lucifer says, brother, don't you recognize me brother

I do not know you, gabriel says, and gabriel goes to war.