tryingitall: (artwork (trueform))
The Angel Balthazar ([personal profile] tryingitall) wrote in [community profile] kore_logs2013-06-22 08:44 pm

consumed by either fire or fire

Who: Balthazar, everyone and anyone! (Balthazar's vessel may also make appearances!)
Where: Memories, mindscapes, and dreams.
When: Days 83-88
What: An orgy, the Titanic, Heavenly angst, and Art. The city is also an option, I just didn't write a blurb for it.
Warnings: Sex, angst, potential violence, possible deaths depending on scenario.


The room is a mess. Blankets and cushions are strewn about the floor, a lamp has been knocked over, and someone has spilled liquor across of the piled clothing in the corner. The scent is overwhelming in the humid heat: sex, incense, sweat, alcohol.
It’s hard to tell how many bodies are entwined together here. A dozen? More? There are four on the bed, one person clinging so hard to the headboard that it creaks with every movement. Three more are clustered around a chair, the occupant’s whines and moans muffled by the close press of nude bodies. In a corner, a young woman is giggling as another girl licks drops of wine out of her cleavage.
Somewhere amidst the knots of slick bodies, there is an angel. He may be hard to track at first, but his voice winds its way through the gathering, burning through the noises of panting and the smack of skin against skin, a litany of soft endearments and reverent curses. There, good, yes, don’t stop, don’t stop…



The sky is black overhead, dotted with frosty stars, and the water rolling beneath the hull of the ship is the color of gray pearls. Titanic is far from shore, and her passengers are cheerfully oblivious to the danger drawing near. Balthazar rode this ship once before, as a faux-first-mate. This time, he’s a stowaway, a dark figure leaning against the railing near the bow. Only an observer to a history irrevocably written down.
“Pretty night,” a man pauses to greet him, on a stroll around the deck. “Cold as hell, but pretty.”
“It is, isn’t it?” The angel agrees, looking up at the sky. “I daresay it’ll get colder before the morning comes, though. We’ll see if you still think it’s pretty then, shall we?”
The stranger laughs. “Or I could just go inside.”
“No. Enjoy the beauty while it lasts.” Balthazar gives a small, deadened smile. There’s ice close ahead. The tragedy will begin and end in only a few short hours.



Balthazar’s not sure why his mind works so selectively. He can remember vivid flashes from his first days in existence. Comets sailing past the earth, the bubble of the primordial sea, and laughter, from an archangel, that seemed too big and bright for the skies that echoed its refrain.
After Lucifer’s Fall, the memories get dim and tangled. Heaven went darker, quieter, but how quickly did it happen? How soon after the clash did Gabriel go, too? He can’t be sure, and it’s unsettling for a being that isn’t supposed to suffer from age.
Still, the young angel has his own recollection of the moments after Gabriel was gone, when it felt like Heaven itself had a gaping wound.
He’s in a garden drenched with dew, like a morning in late spring. There are no flowers, only bare lily stamens left after petals fall away. It’s quiet, and gray, and Balthazar can feel his Grace aching, trembling on the edge of collapse. Can’t you bring him back, Father? Can’t you bring them both back?
There’s no answer, but he’s not sure he expected one. God doesn’t talk to the youngest angels. Perhaps they’re too frail to hear the Divine Voice directly. Thy will be done, he adds as an afterthought, but he doesn’t mean it, and he knows it.
Still, if God isn’t hearing his prayer anyway, there’s no harm in lying. A thousand angelic eyes blink rapidly, as if to clear themselves of tears they weren’t even designed to shed.



Dead. Castiel: dead. Uriel: dead, along with the siblings he murdered. Anna: locked away, untouchable, maybe soon to die, too.
Cas. Dead.
The walls of the Heavenly armory are thick, and Balthazar is the only one inside it now. The snap and ripple of energy from a thousand enchanted weapons dances over the walls, casting shadows of his own wings that seem to shiver in constant motion. His Grace is clenched into a dense, dark knot in the center of his being, a core of emotion drawing tighter, tighter, until everything outside it feels numb. Floating.
One by one, he closes all of his eyes, and time twists away from him. He’s not sure how long he blacks out, but when he’s sensible again, the wards are smashed, the weapons strewn all over, and both vessel and trueform ache, blue with bruises.
Balthazar looks blankly at the mess for a long moment, then moves to pick things up, piece by piece. It’s not until his arms are full that he realizes he has no intention of putting them back in their proper places.



Everything is light and fire and eyes. The human within the angel feels the pressure of power and age, burned to cinders and crushed into diamonds by the being within him (or is he within the angel now?). He’s died a hundred thousand rapturous deaths, cried in pain until his voice is transmuted into something ethereal and sharp as an ofan’s wing. But he’s still there, here, everywhere the angel is, and he remembers, and dreams.
Ink slices across a page. A fine gray haze of graphite dust hangs in the air. Paint drips and rolls down the shaft of a brush, stains his hands and sleeves, rich and sensual. If he could erase his mistakes and paint himself over, he would use shades of blue and gold; he would rip himself off the canvas and re-stretch to his limits and beyond.
He curls and uncurls his fingers, and suddenly his hands are wings, fine-boned and light, brittle and soft at the edges and heavy all the way down his arms.
“I promise, you’ll have Heaven,” the angel told him. “Someday.”
“Fuck it,” he answered. “I don’t need Heaven.”
Levi has what he needs: a half-wild brainfever, an infinite blend of Paradise and Perdition where the Muse is the only God that matters. Being a vessel hasn’t taken that away. Nothing ever will.
servingmichael: (An empty throne room)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-07 04:57 am (UTC)(link)
It never stops being a punch in the gut. That, combined with Michael, had been what had finally twisted Raphael away from any remaining loyalty to God.

"It's a good part of it." Things would only continue to get worse. "Children like that boy, his brother? I said, there are millions more like him. How many more do you think there will be? How many more worse? How many before him?" Too many. Far too many in Raphael's opinion. "And us? We've spilled enough of our Grace. Michael and I just wanted peace, paradise, for all of us."
servingmichael: (God is dead)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-07 05:30 am (UTC)(link)
Raphael is difficult to read under the best of circumstances, and now it's harder. His eyes are a bit glassy, but mostly he just looks like he's shutting down. "That is all that's left. But there's a difference between a quick end and a slow, lingering decay. The four of us...we could have held it together perhaps. But not now. We're tired Balthazar. We did the best we could and it's not going to work. There's no reason to delay it any further." He'd told Castiel this, once. He hadn't listened. Had refused to listen. He didn't actually expect any different this time around.
servingmichael: (Broken little tin soldier)

keywords.

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-08 03:08 am (UTC)(link)
Raphael stops. Just stills. It's almost like seeing someone freeze framed while everything else moves around them. 'You should come with me.' It's the first time in...he doesn't know how long that anyone other than Michael had wanted Raphael at their side. Finally his head cocks to the side, much more movement than anyone normally gets out of him.

"I can't." It's not argumentative. "I can't abandon them just because others have abandoned us." He didn't mean Balthazar. He meant God, Lucifer, and Gabriel. "Running Heaven would kill Castiel. Or worse. And I can't betray Michael in that way."
servingmichael: (Poor deluded little thing)

i warned you

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-08 03:33 am (UTC)(link)
Raphael thinks, he's not sure yet, that he's had a similar conversation with Gabriel. Time is odd, he dislikes the dreamscape.

"None of us have ever really been good at letting go." Except God. And Metatron, he thought. "Why should that change, no matter how impossible the circumstances?"
servingmichael: (Default)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-08 04:36 am (UTC)(link)
"The question is, what does it change now?" Raphael wouldn't tamper with the past, not unless he has no other option and he'll be hesitant then too.
servingmichael: (Lecturing little brothers.  Again)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-12 10:20 pm (UTC)(link)
"There are always Plans, little brother. Always, even if you don't know them." It wasn't augmentative, it simply was. Death himself had plans and designs, Castiel's radical beliefs didn't change that fundamental fact. Everyone had a plan. "And while I do applaud loyalty, it's not my approval of it matters." He was still - always would be - bitter about Michael's betrayal. If loyalty to family mattered...Michael was the most loyal.
servingmichael: (I see.  Maybe)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-17 06:33 am (UTC)(link)
Raphael couldn't argue that it did matter in the grand scheme of things - with God gone, it was a slow crawl to everything ending. But to him, his siblings matter. "What happens to the Host matters to me." And while the comment didn't surprise him - he remembered, too well, Lucifer's Rebellion, he is saddened to know that Balthazar will die - and for an instant, it shows, a quiet blinking of his eyes and a look away. "You could come home."
servingmichael: (An empty throne room)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-19 10:08 am (UTC)(link)
"We may, we may not. We won't know until then." There's a steadiness to it that Raphael doesn't actually feel, something he'd perfected in his time running Heaven. It's not that different from his actually sincere tone - it would take a practiced ear to hear the hollow ring to it, the lack of angelic weight. "You can still fly, can you not?"

If so...how 'late' could it be?

He's silent for a moment, considering. He hasn't said that (yet?), and he's not sure he wants to know what prompted it, given what he's walked into here. "I managed not to set Gabriel on fire when we were young," though he had been sorely tempted many times, "I suppose that set my tolerance level rather high."

He reached over, wrapping his hand around Balthazar's bicep. Yes it was a possessive grip, he didn't entirely mean for it to not be, but it's not aggressive either.
servingmichael: (It's simple really)

[personal profile] servingmichael 2013-08-22 09:31 pm (UTC)(link)
"Yes, there is." After all, different times didn't mean much, time was malleable, after all.

He squeezes gently as Balthazar places his hand on Raphael's. "That is what I have been trying to do." Other than Castiel and even then...he hadn't hurt him much!

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