Chapter Text
He was moving.
He was being moved.
Stop it. Stop it. Fucking hurts.
He forced his eyes open. Red sky.
That…wasn’t right. His mind was too sluggish to figure out why, though.
It took all of his effort just to turn his head. Puddles of gold blood. A blank exorcist’s mask staring at him. Concha. Dumb bitch must have left it there on the ground. Lute would tear her a new one for being so careless with her uniform. Leaving it there with all that blood on it.
He tried to reach out for it. Careless of her. Leaving things lying around. His arm didn’t want to move, and the effort sent lightning bolts of pain shooting into his chest.
He coughed.
He stopped moving—being moved.
“Holy shit! He’s alive!”
He tried again to reach for Concha’s mask. Thoughtless…sloppy…
Boots emerged from stage left and kicked the mask away. It went spinning, and something fell out of it. Adam blinked. Part of him realized it was Concha’s head, with her jet-black locks. They had always stood out from the rest of his girls’ silvery hair. But if that was Concha’s head…where was the rest of her?
The boots crouched down. “Ffffuck,” a voice drawled out. “Yeah, we got another live one here.”
“Okay, so add ‘im to others, then. But be careful.”
The boots moved out of his view, crunching somewhere close to his head. Then there was a face looking into his. A face he didn’t know. “Alright then,” the face said. “Up we go. You’re kinda a big one.”
Adam felt a pressure under his arms and he was moving again. Moving upwards. The pain in his chest spiked.
Stop! Stop! It hurts!
He gasped, and then the world went dark.
When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t moving. There was a ceiling overhead, with fluorescent lights and those nasty popcorn-flake tiles. Pain thrummed through his chest, but it felt distant, somehow, and muffled. Somewhere, someone was screaming.
He turned his head.
Across from him, Fitta was thrashing around on a bed. One of those hospital gurneys. She was hooked up to blinking machines, an IV bag feeding gold into her arm. Her wings shed feathers as they beat against the gurney. Her entire body jerked. She screamed again.
“Fitta…”
He reached out for her, but his arm caught on something. He looked down and noticed he also had an IV line.
Fitta continued to scream, shredding her voice as figures moved around her. Figures in scrubs. He caught flashes of surgical tools and gold-soaked gauze flying between them, all while Fitta wailed and seized in agony.
Help her!
He fought against the IV, but something tugged at his wrist. Something soft but also unforgiving, with no slack. When he pulled against it, there was no strength in his arm.
Fitta let out one last blood-curdling shriek and then stopped. Her body collapsed onto the gurney, and the sounds of beeping machines took over. Long, low notes.
One of the figures pulled off their mask. There was a demon face beneath. “Shit, lost another one.”
No, no, no, what did you do, you fucker? What did you do to Fitta? I’ll rip your throat out!
“She was already too far gone when they brought her in,” one of the other figures said.
The demon nodded, put his hands on his hips, and let out a sigh. “Alright, might as well get a line running on her. Hook her up to this one.” He jerked his thumb at Adam without really looking at him. “No sense in letting fresh blood go to waste.”
The other figures moved in around Fitta’s body.
Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her!
The unmasked demon finally turned, and his face flashed surprise when his eyes landed on Adam. “Oh, you’re awake.”
I’ll kill you!
Adam jerked against whatever was holding him to the gurney.
“Okay, just one second…” The demon came up to the bedside, brandishing a syringe, which he fed into the IV line. “You’ll heal faster if you just sleep for now,” he said in a gentle voice that made Adam want to tear his vocal chords out. But his mind was already getting foggy. The edges of the world started to turn gray. “Really, you’re lucky to be alive at all.”
That was the last thing he heard before the dark reclaimed him.
After that, there were snatches of consciousness. Glimpses of the ugly ceiling. Masked faces bending over him. Pain that ebbed and surged. It was hard to snatch any thoughts out of the tumultuous ether.
He couldn’t move.
It hurt to breathe
Gradually, the world started to coalesce again. But it happened slowly.
The pain came into focus before anything else. Shit, his chest hurt like a motherfucker. He’d never felt pain like this before, he was pretty sure. It had been a long-ass time since he’d actually felt pain of any kind, but this was on a level he’d never imagined.
He looked down at himself, mind and eyes bleary. His chest was bare, wrapped in bandages soaked in old blood. He smelled like of sweat and rotting flesh. The IV was still in his arm, feeding gold into his veins with a steady drip-drip-drip. His hazy mind wondered if it was Fitta’s blood. His wrists were bound to the sides of the gurney with padded leather cuffs. A blanket covered his lower half, but he could feel similar cuffs on his ankles when he tried to move his legs.
What the shit? What was going on here?
He remembered…
He remembered a fight. A battle.
He’d been winning.
They’d been winning. He and his girls.
And then…
And then he hadn’t been.
Lucifer!
That fucker! That absolute fucker!
If he hadn’t stepped in, Adam would have made quick work of that fucking pathetic hotel. Those fucking losers. Even with their newfound knowledge of how to kill angels, his girls had been winning. They would have won!
But they hadn’t.
They’d lost.
He’d lost.
He’d been…
A sharp pain lanced through his chest, and he gritted his teeth.
Fuck!
Had he died? Had he double-died?
His head was spinning with the implications when he heard the sound of hurried footsteps coming closer.
Instinctively, he tried to sit up, but the cuffs held him down. His eyes found a door on the far side of the room, where a shadowy figure was moving behind the frosted glass. His heart jumped up, sending another wave of pain through his body.
The door flew open, and he was startled to see Kusit grasping the doorframe. She was dressed in a medical gown, rather than her exorcist’s uniform, and her eyes were wide. They roved around the room before landing on him. “Sir!” she cried, running to his side.
“K-Kusit.” His voice sounded like sandpaper. Felt like it, too.
She immediately began undoing the cuffs on his wrists. “We need to go.”
“Wh…what’s going on?” The world was still a little fuzzy.
“I don’t know,” she answered as she undid the other cuff. “This place is fucked. I was able to get free, but we need to get out of here.” She pulled the blanket back to free his ankles and didn’t even flinch that he was completely naked underneath. “Do you think you can walk, sir?”
He tried to shake the cobwebs from his thoughts, but they continued to cling. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. Blood rushed from his head and his vision swam. The IV tugged at his arm, and in annoyance, he ripped it out. “Y-yeah,” he managed to grit out. “I think so.” He clumsily wrapped the blanket around himself, toga-style, so at least his dick wasn’t hanging out.
“Lean on me,” Kusit said, even though she looked like she wasn’t in much better shape than him. A growing bloodstain soaked the side of her gown. Still, Adam draped his arm over her shoulder, and together they shuffled from the room.
There was a long hallway on the other side of the door. More fluorescent lighting. More ugly ceiling tiles. Rows and rows of doors. Both directions looked the same, except one way had bloody golden footprints smeared along the floor.
“We need to get back to heaven,” Kusit said as they began hobbling along, with her leaving more blood as an easy trail to follow. “We can come back for the others later, once we—we’ve regrouped.” She winced and fumbled.
Now Adam was the one holding her up. “The others?”
He remembered Fitta and her screams.
“How many others?”
“I-I don’t know,” Kusit answered, with a quick glance over her shoulder. “I was the only one left in my room when I escaped. They—they killed the others I was with.” She ground her teeth together. There were tears in her eyes. “That’s why we need to get to heaven. To avenge them and save the rest.”
Adam’s legs shook, and he didn’t know which of them was breathing heavier. Sweat dripped from his forehead. He was sure his body hadn’t undergone so much exertion since he’d been alive on Earth. By his side, Kusit looked on the verge of collapse. She was far paler than she should be.
“Keep up,” he urged. She could take it. His girls were tough.
They were halfway down the hall when the shrieking of rubber soles on tile assaulted his ears. “Hey!” an angry voice called after them.
Shit!
“Hurry!” Kusit cried. She picked up her pace, and so did Adam.
He did not want to go back to the gurney. Fuck that.
“Orderlies, we have a security breach! Subjects are trying to escape!”
Footsteps pounded after them, but Adam didn’t dare look back to see who was chasing them or how many. He flapped his wings, testing their strength. If they could find a window, they could break the glass and he could fly them to freedom. They just had to be a step faster than whoever was behind them.
They rounded a corner.
Hellish red light spilled in through the window.
Adam’s heart swelled with relief in the brief second before he noticed the thick metal bars separating the glass from the world beyond.
Dead end.
Freedom denied.
By the time they spun around, their pursuers had already caught up: at least three burly demons dressed in orderly whites and a pair of smaller demons in scrubs, one with a lab coat. “See here,” the one with the lab coat said, stepping to the front of the bottleneck. “You need to go back to your rooms immediately. You’re in no shape to be up and about.”
“Fuck you.” Kusit spat at his feet.
The lab coat fucker sighed and shook his head. “Orderlies.”
At their cue, the burly demons moved in.
“Stay the fuck back.” Adam pushed Kusit behind him. “I’ll blast you all to fucking Kingdom Come with holy light.”
That got them to stop.
He raised his hand to summon a beam to make good on his threat.
One beat passed.
And then another.
The expected build-up and release of power never came.
He looked at his palm. Something was…not right.
The lead orderly smirked and continued his advance, with the other two close behind.
Frantically, Adam threw out both his hands, to the same results.
Nothing.
“Oh, fuck.”
“Looks like you’re not doing so hot there, Mr. Exorcist,” the lead orderly said, pounding one meaty fist into his open palm. “So, are the two of you gonna come along like good little angels or are we going to have to rough you up?”
“Be careful with the subjects!” the lab coat fucker cried. “We don’t have an endless supply of them, you know.”
“Fuck you!” Kusit screamed again. She darted out from behind Adam and threw herself at the nearest orderly. “You’re not taking me back there!”
The orderly balked, clearly taken aback by a woman easily half his size launching at him. She hissed like a feral cat, nails raking across his face, teeth latching on where they could.
“Holy shit, Kusit!” Adam yelped, taken off guard by her ferocity.
Her thumbs found the guy’s eyes and dug in. Just as he started to scream, the other two orderlies rushed in to help their buddy. One grabbed Kusit and yanked her free and slammed her up against the wall.
A loud crack split the air like a gunshot.
Kusit let out a whoomph, and her eyes went wide in shock and pain. She opened her mouth, and a rivulet of blood dribbled down her lip.
“Oh, fuck,” the orderly cursed, loosening his hold on her. “I think I might have broken her ribs.”
Kusit’s eyes found Adam. Something gurgled up in her throat, some sort of noise. Words? Or just pain? He took a step towards her, reaching out for her.
She slumped in the orderly’s grip, head lolling forward. Blood trickled to the floor.
“Shit, shit!” The orderly stepped back, and Kusit collapsed, eyes wide and unseeing.
“Kusit!” Adam ran for her. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. Angels couldn’t die. Not from something like that.
Something yanked him back, stopping him from going to her. He fought against the grip on his shoulder, the hands pulling his arms behind his back. A stream of swears from every language known to man fell from his lips as he struggled to get free. Fuckers! Fuckers! He’d blast them all with holy light!
“Idiot!” the lab coat fucker screamed, and Adam could barely hear him over the rage singing in his veins. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Sorry, boss,” the orderly who’d killed Kusit grumbled. “I must have punctured her heart or something.”
“That was the last of our female specimens! What am I going to tell Amon?”
The orderly shrugged. “Sorry,” he repeated. “At least you’ve still got one left.”
The other two orderlies had wrestled Adam to his knees now. He didn’t even feel the pain in his chest or the fresh blood soaking through his bandages. He felt only the wrath of heaven raging through him.
“Fuckers,” he ground out. “Fuckers, I’m going to—”
“Stop that,” lab coat fucker tutted. “You’re just going to hurt yourself, and we can hardly afford that. Not after this little mishap.” He reached into that fucking lab coat and pulled out something that glinted in the ugly fluorescent lighting. A syringe, filled with a clear liquid. He came at Adam with it.
Adam snapped with his teeth, but an iron-strong hand grabbed his chin and kept his head still. He squirmed as he felt the poke of the needle in his arm. His racing heart sent the drug coursing through his bloodstream, and in a matter of heart beats, he felt his body growing heavy. He fought to keep the fire burning, but the battle was over before it had truly begun. He slouched in the orderlies’ arms, his eyelids growing heavy. Mind foggy.
“Shame about that specimen.” The lab coat fucker’s voice chased him in unconsciousness. “I’m sure Amon will have a solution.”