Chapter Text
“Do you think I’m evil?”
Angel was lying beside her, eyes closed, resting in bed, like they really needed to.
“I don’t think you’re anything,” Angel didn’t open their eyes as they spoke, murmuring words into the darkness of the room.
Isaac had gone to bed long ago, exhausted after a school field trip. It was nothing to do with them, but it was good to know where he was, what he was doing.
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Angel cracked an eye open, peering at Lucy through a lidded gaze.
She almost wanted the light to be on just so that she could look at him, take in his face just a little bit longer. They didn’t get much time together like this, after all.
“I mean, I think it's all subjective. Don’t you?”
She looked over at him, curling in towards herself, grateful for the darkness if it meant she could hide her own face.
She’d never really liked her face, never liked the way the light played tricks, casting shadows, making her look like something worse than she already was. How Angel could stand to be around her, she wasn’t sure.
“Have you ever…” she didn’t finish her statement, leaving the comment open for interpretation, but it was pretty open, she could have been asking anything.
Angel peered over again, pulling her in for a hug.
There was this weird energy between the two of them, some kind of static, some kind of electricity. It almost felt like a leg going numb, the way it would tingle over her body when they were close. If she ignored it, she could almost be comfortable.
“Ya know… when he made me…” she didn’t say who she was talking about, it was rare she spoke about her father, even rarer for her to speak kindly, “he guaranteed I could never… ya know…”
There were a lot of things the celestial beings couldn’t do, things that kept them from truly walking and talking amongst the humans with complete ease.
“I don’t want children, but still, it’d be nice if I could… ya know… be with someone…”
She was the literal devil, but she was still so shy when it came to sex.
Violence, sure, killing and viscera were one thing, but the softness, the intimacy that she’d curated, gently squeezed together with Angel… she didn’t like to talk about.
She was always afraid her father would take it away from her, rip the one thing she’d ever wanted out from between her hands.
She pulled Angel a little tighter.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Angel chuckled, tugging her into his side, pulling her leg over, so it wrapped around them.
“You don’t…” the darkness seemed to swallow them both up.
The things she’d see in the dark, some darkness, some guilt, the way the shadows cast tricks on her eyes, making her think she was seeing something she wasn’t.
She’d never understood human feelings, the fleeting of mortality, the grasping at things that would only fade, but there, somewhere in the back of her mind was always this fear that things would slip out of her grasp.
Not slip, she knew who would be taking them, she never really trusted that her father would leave her much of anything good in this world. Still, she wanted Angel to stay.
‘You don’t know that,’ she’d wanted to say, but it wasn’t worth it to burden them with her own pains, her own anxieties.
“Hey,” Angel grabbed her face, hand brushing over rough skin. It was never the texture it was supposed to be. There was always something wrong with her form, “don’t do that.”
She could tell they were trying really hard to hold their form, to keep their eyes straight, staring forward into hers.
She was sure she looked terrifying.
She wanted to give some sort of rebuttal, to turn away, but Angel had her eyes locked in on theirs. She couldn’t look away.
Not when they were looking at her with such intent.
She didn’t even ask what he meant, just let that look sooth her, bring her back to this moment, not to those apocalyptic fears, not to the anxieties of what may or may not happen.
She didn’t want to lose this.
“Don’t,” she started, tucking herself into Angel’s chest, curling in where he couldn’t see her face, “please, don’t go.”
The static was all over her body, painful, even, like there was something just out of reach that she couldn’t soothe.
This isn’t how she wanted to hold him, this isn’t how she wanted to be here, but she couldn’t let go enough to resettle, to find something safe, something secure.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The statement echoed, resounding somewhere, miles away from Lucy, bouncing off the walls of some universe that didn’t exist.
How many times had this played out?
How many times had he left her?
How many times had she watched him walk away? Watched him slowly slide out of frame as she got lost in her own mistakes.
He was so human, he was so… so simple, so everything Lucy was not.
He held this light… this fucking light. He’d tried not to point it out, Angel didn’t seem very secure in their… ‘humanity’ but it was impossible to hide, the way Angel would glow, not literally, just… this energy behind everything they did. If he wasn’t literally the devil he might still have felt inadequate next to them. They were just like… a good person. They always seemed to care, to hope, to trust that things would work out.
With as sceptical as Angel was about so many things, they seemed truly capable of experiencing… joy, something that Lucy may have genuinely been programmed not to feel.
They could never tell how much of their ‘feelings’ were real, or just something that had been buried under their skin, a role they were always meant to play.
They thought they could escape it, some days, but it was like their father was laughing in their face, reminding them at every step of the way that they just /weren’t,/ they weren’t in control, they weren’t human, they weren’t anything other than the villain in a story that they had never asked to be written into.
Even if Angel said they wouldn’t leave, even if he held on as tightly as he wanted to, it was one of the worst things in the universe, the understanding.
She understood how this would play out, had watched it unfold a million times, in a million realities.
She never said as much to Angel, but even this moment here, was fractured into several realities, things that swam around in her head.
She was never really ‘in the moment,’ always swimming back, trying to keep herself here, keep herself holding onto him.
How many times had she lost him?
How many times had she let him slip away?
Even now, in the back of her mind, in a million realities, he was leaving.
“I don’t want to be here.”
She didn’t mean it.
This was the only place she ever wanted to be, but she didn’t know how to say that.
The static was transforming into a migraine, something skull splitting.
He wanted to find something sharp, an upturned axe, an odd angle and crack his skull open.
Fuck, why was it so hard just to be here with Angel.
Sometimes he’d let himself cry, force all the emotions out in one burst of human feeling.
Isaac’s mom must have been prone to migraines, because it would hurt for days afterwards, some kind of chronic dehydration, but he let it happen, some sort of punishment for taking up Angel’s time. He didn't deserve it, didn’t deserve to be around them.
Angel pulled her to his chest, running a rough hand through her hair.
She was always scared to say the wrong thing. She’d seen it happen so many times, watched Angel fade away into a memory after he was too honest, too open.
Mostly, it seemed Angel just hated the way he talked about himself, but he couldn’t tell.
He couldn’t fucking tell.
Nothing that Angel did ever made sense and he just wanted… he wanted Angel to stay, just this once.
Sometimes he thought, no, he knew, this was all part of some scheme, something that nobody understood, except for him, except for the parts of himself that thought the worst and expected the worst from the world, from ‘him.’
Angel didn’t really love him, there was some trap waiting somewhere. ‘He’ just wanted his eyes back and he’d probably do anything, not barring playing with whatever semblance of a heart he’d given Lucy.
That was probably why he felt this pull towards Angel anyway, some deep, in-built emotion that had been planted there. Nothing was organic, nothing ever worked out in Lucy’s favor. It wasn’t meant to and he knew that.
“Hey Ang?”
For a brief moment, the whole world seemed to slip out from beneath Lucy, flickering in and out of existence, leaving her back in some hellscape void she’d built to entertain herself, the only place she had left to go when things slipped away like that.
It was mostly nothing, just a room.
Just a room with no furniture.
It was a place she went to be alone, painfully alone, a place she could scream for hours and nobody would ever come.
All the doors locked, Angel couldn’t even find her here.
“Ang… “
Angel flickered back into existence for a moment, tingling and all, sending static stinging through her body once again.
“Fuck Ang, I just…”
There was a bang, a large crash somewhere out of frame.
She just wanted to be there, in bed for one moment, but she could literally feel the walls coming down around her.
She sighed, letting the moment slip away, leaving her in the dark once again.
Even her room was out of frame this time, leaving her in this open space.
This wasn’t her space, this wasn't her mind, this was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to go, somewhere she didn’t want to be.
There was a light, something blinding, something sharp, a far cry from the warmth of Angel’s side, even with the tingling, Angel was more pleasant than whatever this was, who this was.
She skipped over this, tuning out, fading out of her own mind as the scene unfolded.
She didn’t want to talk to him, wasn’t going to talk to him, but it was like sprinting, like running from something bigger, stronger.
In all of the cosmos, there was never really a safe place.
Still, she ran, begging the universe, someone, something.
There was nobody for her to pray to, but still, she could try. Usually, that just summoned things to her that she would have rather avoided. But still, in moments like this, she felt like a scared animal running for its life.
She wasn’t above begging.
___
She wasn’t sure how long she spent running, maybe all night, maybe eons, before she found a patch of light, real light, real warmth.
“Tang?”
It was spoken, more than thought, but she wasn’t sure she actually said any words out loud.
Still, Angel heard, turning over in bed to face her.
She wasn’t sure what timeline this was, where they were, which version of Tangle she would get.
“Babe?”
He morphed, for a second, not the lovely angel she’d lay in bed with, not the beautiful boy she’d take to the grocery store, something more grotesque, closer to a true form than a glowing star.
It snarled at her for a second, still wary, still cautious, but she ran towards it, facing down rows of gnashing teeth, misplaced eyeballs floating in some cosmic space between. This was her baby, her safe place, she just needed to be there, where he was, where they were. She needed to be there with them.
Tangle reached out, some big gangly limb.
When they were trapped together in this big cosmic space, he could be anything. They could be anything they needed to be, and often Tangle would take on a form not unsimilar to this, something beastly, almost dragon like, but she loved it, loved him, could fall into this a million times over if it meant that she knew where he is.
He reached out, snatching Lucy up, like this, Tangle was about a million times her size, dangling her upside down like a sack of potatoes, but also like she weighed nothing, maybe she did. Nothing here was truly finite.
“Heyyyyy,” she chuckled, looking forward into the eyes of a beast that was definitely about to eat her, “long time no see.”
The beast blinked at her, more surely in the form of a dragon now than anything.
She wasn’t sure if Tangle was doing that on purpose or if she was doing that to him, but he was slowly but surely taking shape into a tangible monster instead of a mess of limbs and eyeballs.
She would say he was cute like this, because he was, but he thought he looked tough, so she wasn’t going to argue.
He didn’t say anything, just unhinged his jaw, revealing an inconceivable mass of teeth and eyeballs inside before dropping her in.
She didn’t fight back.
After how long she’d been running, this felt like home, this felt like coming back where she belonged.
He dropped her in and things went black, slowly snapping back to reality.
___
She was on a park bench with Tangle seated next to her, light brushing off his sunglasses, so she could barely see his face.
It took on that form sometimes, not visibly out of shape, but literally impossible to look at, just another trick of the eyes that angels had developed to hide their true forms.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. She was never sure how long she’d been gone, if Tangle could tell how long she’d been gone either. It was like waking up in another person’s body. Of course, she literally was in another person’s body, but somehow she always managed to find her way back here, always tried to at least, usually, eventually she would, because at least, right now, she was here, and that was what mattered.
She could feel herself wrapping around Angel, she hadn’t even realized she’d turned into a snake until she felt herself curled around his leg, slithering up it like she was zoned in for the kill.
“Fuck-” she snapped back so that she was sitting on the bench again, icecream in hand.
When had they gotten ice cream?
She didn’t say anything, barely holding onto the moment as she could feel the edges fraying, something pulling her back away.
Why was it always like this, why was it always so exhausting.
Something was tugging at her back, reality threatening to slip through her fingers again.
Angel gave her this look, like pity, accompanied by a sigh.
He didn’t say anything.
He was bleeding, she didn’t know where, she didn’t know how, but she could tell it was her fault.
She’d hurt him.
She always managed to fucking hurt him.
She wasn’t trying to.
Reality flickered again, two twin trees, and somehow she could tell she was one of them, roots latched onto the other, draining all of the life out of it.
Like she burned everything she touched, fire spreading everywhere, flashes of smoke rising up swallowing up both trees, and she could tell it was her fault.
Everything was her fault but she couldn’t stop it. She didn’t know how.
___
She let the picture fizzle out of frame, settling back into the darkness of her own ‘room.’
She flickered between a few forms before settling on a little boy.
When she was alone like this, there was nobody to perform for, no one to keep up an appearance for, so she let herself get small.
Not naked, not overly exposed.
These were precious moments, seconds to regain her peace, moments to settle into her own nothingness.
She imagined Angel, their smile, their crooked face, the way they’d lie in bed under her as she’d tried to make either of their bodies feel something other than the pain of being crammed into a mortal form.
She imagined the way Angel would look, crawling in bed, over her, under her.
She tried to summon her body back into something tangible, something Tangle would like.
A smile, a body, limbs, legs the way he liked, body the way he liked.
She wasn’t sure what he actually liked about her body, she could never tell.
Sometimes she’d have these weird burn marks that would creep their way up their limbs.
Whether they were hers or from Isaac’s mother, he could never tell.
He wasn’t sure if Tangle really knew who he was, if they could feel the millennia leeching off of him, if they felt it too, that they both belonged to each other, that Tangle was theirs, and they were Tangle’s.
It was something intangible, but bone deep, deeper than bone deep, and still, she felt so shy around the other, like she didn’t belong, like she was embarrassed of every fiber of her being, like Tangle had something figured out that she never could.
Was Tangle keeping that to himself?
A brief moment, a flicker of a scene in bed with Tangle, twisted up in sheets, Tangle’s face right up on hers.
Fuck, he was so beautiful in a way that she could never be.
“Ya know,” she said, speaking out into the dark of her room, her space.
Tangle wasn’t there, but she prayed that he could hear, hoped.
“I never really realized how much you meant to me until I found you.”
The only answer she got back was silence, dark walls that weren’t really there, but they echoed her words back to her all the same.
She wasn’t sure if Tangle actually knew how to speak to her, if he could hear her from here, but she kept speaking, assuming, maybe wishing fruitlessly that the words would reach him.
“And when you’re not here, I find myself just wandering around speaking to you, and then you’re… you’re never really here, are you?”
The room felt colder than usual.
Nobody was here, but she found herself bound, tied hand and food on some cosmic floor that seemed to hold her in the darkness.
“I just… I keep finding myself thinking about you, and then you’re not there… Why are you never there.?”
There were doors, of course. Openings to rooms she never went into, walls with no end in sight.
She looked to one. She was pretty sure Tangle was on the other side, but he never really… opened it.
She could phase through it, she was pretty sure, intrude on some reality she didn’t belong in, some space Tangle had created for himself, but she wouldn’t.
She let the ropes wrap a little more tightly around her arms, something secure, something to hold her while there was nothing else there.
‘I miss you,’ she almost said into the darkness, but it wouldn’t do any good.
If she really missed him, wouldn’t she be there, where he was right now? Wouldn’t she be in bed, still lying beside him?
Where was she anyway?
The silence wrapped around her head, a ringing in her ears.
Whatever form she had now was barely human, probably a far cry from whatever Isaac’s mom looked like.
If Tangle were here…
If Tangle were here, it might be worth holding a form… it might be worth…
But Tangle wasn’t here, and she… she didn’t know where to find him, how to get back to them, so she just let whatever passed as ropes in this cosmic space envelop her, tighter and tighter until she was sure she couldn’t breathe.
She wasn’t sure she needed to breathe here.
She wasn’t sure how much of this was real.
She closed her eyes.
It was so fucking cold in here.
She let herself start to slip away again.
Hopefully when she woke up she’d be back in bed.
But she wasn’t sure.
She wasn’t sure she’d even remember Tangle.
She might have just made that up in her mind.
“I’m sorry…”
The words barely slipped out into the void, but she was pretty sure Tangle heard them, wherever he was.
But he didn’t reply.
He never fucking replied.
But he didn’t need to.
She understood.
She could get the message.
She could stay in place.
And maybe someday he’d remember her, maybe someday he’d come find her again and she could stop running, stop hiding, but she just lay there and wished it all away.
Another day, another eon.
He’d find her again, somewhere, probably.