caveofsapphires | smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

WHO: EVERYONE. All PCs thus far will be in this log, through active tagging or implication.
WHAT: THRILLS. SPILLS. Hiking trip toward the Diamond City.
WHERE: The Overworld.
WHEN: Forward-dated to May 1st (Tuesday) through May 7th (Monday).
WARNINGS: May contain violence or other mentions of physical harm. This is not summer camp.
NOTES: More information can be found on the OOC post here. Please read it!

Gathered in the morning haze, Sleepers were brought to the mouth of the Cave with plenty of supplies and equipment. Compasses that would point them toward the City. Backpacks full of clothes and food, medical kits, tents and even weapons. Stun rifles and knives — to fight off any unwanted company, they said. ("Watch out for their bite," Ryan had commented. "Those fuckers are downright feral.") The straight and narrow path would get them there in six days if they kept a good clip. They were sent off just like that. Refusals to leave were met with a wall of guard force officers blocking the entrance back into the cave city. No way to go but forward, unless someone was particularly stalwart about remaining.

From the exterminator's station near the mouth, leaving the Cave was as simple as a short hike upward into the fresh air of the Overworld. Dust and an uncomfortable sort of heat pervaded the atmosphere, light winds stirring up the sand and teasing the meager bits of vegetation that had grown. No matter what direction you looked... it was all wasteland, cracked ground and desolate emptiness. Jutting up from scarred ground were boulders and small spires made entirely of glass and patches of stone; instead of reflecting the harsh sunlight, they seemed to absorb it and only add to the muted loneliness of the atmosphere. As far as the eye could see, there was no life to be found.

With no other option, the Sleepers eventually made their way onward.

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Adrenaline was such a lovely and terrible thing. Aziraphale made it to the gap in the rock in record time, skidding to a stop just inside the lip of it. When he saw Balthazar coming, he stepped aside and made room, despite the fact that, if he had chosen a cowering companion, the likelihood of it being Balthazar would have been very low. While it was (had been) his job to have compassion for all creatures, Balthazar had laughed at him several nights ago, and as a result a very small, very unangelic part of him (the part that was not terrified by the oncoming storm) relished the look on Balthazar's face as he ran.

Hot on the other man's heels came the storm, and Aziraphale closed his eyes briefly against the wind. This was so unnecessarily unpleasant.

"Just bloody lovely," was all Balthazar managed to get out before the beast of a storm made its way over them like a freight train. For the first time in, maybe, ever, he flinches slightly at the howls of it. This is quite possibly the worst day of his life, not counting the whole dying thing, but it's pretty close to that. Balthazar heaves a relieved sigh when he knows they're safe (for now), the tension in his muscles slowly bleeding out.

He managed a glance at Aziraphale, smirking despite himself. "I would say thank you, but you honestly look like you would rather I just leap back out into the storm."

Squinting out at the storm, Aziraphale didn't register Balthazar's words at first. Instead, he was torn between marveling at the strength of the wind - even being trapped in it, it was magnificent - and hoping it would end soon. The air was close in here, and the sound of the wind echoed off the stone walls.

When he did realize what Balthazar had said, he turned to the man quickly, schooling his expression into one just slightly more pleasant than neutral. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and it was mostly true.

An eyebrow was raised at the rebuttal, but Balthazar let it go. Instead, he drew his legs up, put his arms over them, and put his head down for a moment. The noise outside was a little dreadful, but eventually it all drained into the same, static background noise. Enough to relax him, anyway. Eyes closed, breathing evening out, he could fall asleep like this. A nap would be harmless, right?

"I should've picked a better meat suit to parade around in." The statement was mostly to himself, the exhaustion suddenly settling in.

Aziraphale clicked his tongue in distaste. Meat suit. He was tempted to say It's yours now, you might as well make the best of it, but thought better of it. It wasn't as though he was particularly pleased with his own body at this moment.

"They all wear out after this kind of thing," was what he settled with, allowing himself to sink to the floor. His posture was as prim as it could possibly be in such an odd space: hands clasped on his upright knees, back straight against the wall. He was tempted to slump, but kept a lookout outside the opening instead. If Balthazar was going to take an impromptu nap, someone out to keep an eye on things, just in case the thing from yesterday came back.

Balthazar really tried not to answer with a smartass retort, the words on the tip of his tongue naturally forming out of stubborn habits. He managed to succeed in not being an ass, but he mostly attributed this miracle to his tired mood. "Yes, I realize that now," was what he got out. "Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but unfortunately this body was the only thing I could find in a hurry." He wasn't sure what Aziraphales' angels were like, but they had to deal with bloodlines and such. A hassle, at the very least. The poor bastard he had burned out of the body hadn't been devout; just begging the only God he knew for a way out.

He lifted his eyes to gaze out into the storm and wondered how long it would rage on. "Father's displays of power were always more enjoyable with a bird's eye view."

"It is a shame when we don't get something that entirely suits us." His tone was completely neutral, betraying none of his growing irritation. Part of it stemmed from confusion. He was uncertain as to the extent of the differences between their - universes, or whatever Gabriel had decided was the most likely theory; however, he could tell from the way that Balthazar was speaking now and the way Gabriel had discussed it before that their corporeal forms were different than his and Crowley's - not created, but inhabited. That unsettled him.

The rest of his irritation came from a niggling sense of something he did not experience nearly enough to be used to it, which was simple dislike. Something about Balthazar was rubbing him entirely the wrong way, and as not liking people - brothers, even, as it were - was not very angelic at all, Aziraphale planned to keep it to himself.

Although that might be difficult. He cleared his throat and readjusted his legs, which had begun to fall asleep. "Displays of power?" he asked lightly, as if for clarification.

He dropped the conversation about vessels, simply chalking this up to bad luck. The body was at least fit, despite its age, so Balthazar didn't need to worry about it being completely out of commission after this mess. Although he fully planned to sleep for the next week after all was said and done.

"Storms. Natural disasters, and the like. You know." There was only one Father in the universe who had ego-contests with his own children. At first, a little storm was all it took to wipe out a settlement, but now that humans were so sophisticated, Daddy had to juice up all the disasters. Earthquakes measuring 9 magnitudes, tsunamis bringing whole countries to their knees, tornadoes the size of hurricanes, and hurricanes the size of God Himself. "I was never quite sure where the humans always got these ridiculous stories of their deity being loving and caring. Daddy always did have a very mean streak."

"Mm." He'd thought so. Glancing up at Balthazar, he bit the inside of his cheek in a brief fit of nerves. Instinct told him that he shouldn't engage in this conversation. It was dangerous. Anyone could be watching and listening.

Although they weren't. They hadn't been for years, thanks to Adam, and aside from that he was even less significant now than he once had been, not to mention somewhere else. Even if someone was watching him, what could they do? He was already human. Still, it was so deeply ingrained that every moment of questioning came with a queasy thrill of anticipated punishment.

The other point, of course, was that questioning and disrespect were two entirely different beasts, and the way Balthazar was speaking was practically disdainful. After a moment, Aziraphale looked at the opening of the crevice again and thought carefully before he spoke.

"A coping mechanism," he said, "perhaps. It's easier to understand a God who is kind, or for that matter cruel, than one who is . . . ineffable. Incomprehensible." He ducked his head and added, "In any case, I wouldn't know much about the bird's eye view. I never spent much time in Heaven."

"Ineffable. Well, that's a laugh." To say that Balthazar was upset by his Father's disappearance was an understatement. They had once had a good family, the whole of Heaven, and they had all been content to serve and never ask a single question. The angels loved each other as fiercely as they had loved their Dad and even Balthazar had bern more prone to his loving, older brother role. Then the whole thing with the humans started and it had all gone to shit. True, it was Lucifer who divided Heaven in the first place, and Balthazar held hin accountable for it, but all the blame could be traced back to their Father. After all, if He was truly omnipotent, onniscient, and overall, the Being they had belived he was, then he would have never brought the humans about in the first place. He would have never made off into the night like a bandit, leaving Heaven without guidance and letting his brothers tear at each other's throats.

But, anyway... "I'm not quite sure how your offices were run over there, but perhaps it was for the best you didn't have to deal with the political side of it all." Lord knows Balthazar had his fill of it.

"Is it?" Aziraphale said mildly. "I would call it factual. Although I'm sure there are differences between our Fathers' histories." He wasn't. Not to mention the fact that it was ridiculous to act as if there were two Gods. There was something absurd about the entire concept of disparate Heavens, and Aziraphale truly wished he had evidence to contradict it, but at this point he couldn't present a more reasonable theory.

With a sigh, he shrugged, letting his legs stretch out as much as he could; his muscles were tensing up. "I was never asked to. I wasn't particularly important. But it would have been - frustrating. Difficult." He thought, too, that it might have changed him, or rather kept him the same. He had been happy on Earth, more or less, and he'd never met a happy angel in Heaven, because happiness was not a concept that had meaning in Heaven. Nor contentment. Just . . . existence, and service.

Service was all well and good, of course, but there had to be something more to it all than that.

"Well, then, I suppose our homes have more in common than I thought." Being in Heaven had always been frustrating in some way or another, but in earlier days, it had been a good frustration. When they were new and the world was new, there was frustration because of Gabriel and Lucifer's pranks, frustration because they were still learning of their Father's universe. Despite that, Balthazar had never imagined that one day he would be fed up with it all. In fact, to think of such a thing would have been ludicrous, something laughed off.

But now Heaven was so clinical, so militaristic, so...cult-like. It became frustrating in all-new, infuriating ways. Ways Balthazar became disgusted to think about. Once he had been a loyal soldier; loyal to his Garrison, loving of his brothers and Father. Now he was a thief. A drunk. "You're lucky; you're not brainwashed like the rest."

"No." Despite himself, Aziraphale smiled, a bit wistfully, at nothing very much. "I suppose I'm not, anymore. Purely by virtue of never being in Heaven." Not to mention unsavory acquaintances.

Turning to Balthazar, he added, a touch of curiosity in his voice, "But nor are you." It had been in the back of his mind since that vague night at the bar with the other two angels. Neither of them were anything like the angels he'd known back home, but Balthazar was miles more bitter than even that brief glimpse Gabriel had shown him, and he wore it on his sleeve. It was fascinating, in an incredibly morbid way.

"I was, a long time ago." And happy about it, he failed to mention, but then everybody had been in those days. Now everyone was some measure of bitter about everything, even those who had sided with Raphael, the angel who went over the cuckoo's nest. "But then I saw how absolutely insane my family is." Michael had been the first to catch the crazy, which then just trickled downward. He remembered the first time an angel had been submitted to 'Re-education,' how he had become disgusted with everything to the very core of his Grace.

But, even now, he couldn't decided whether leaving Heaven like he had, had been a good decision or not.

Aziraphale sometimes wondered at the fact that his questioning had not been a more conscious process. Perhaps it was due to a general passivity, or to fear, or simply to a lack of observation - but he had questioned more or less without realizing it over years and years, and only truly discovered how distant his views were from Heaven's on that day when he'd phoned up the Host and discovered that the Apocalypse was to progress as planned, no matter what.

He didn't really have a good response. He looked at Balthazar, though, and nodded slightly before letting his head fall back against the stone. That, at least, made sense, the tremendous discomfort and shock of realizing that you and your fellow creations, your brothers, were on entirely different planes of understanding.

"Hard to know what to do, really," he mused. "After all that time."

"You're thinking too hard about it." Why do anything? Why feel like you had to do anything? If Balthazar knew anything about Heaven after all this time, it would be the more things changed up there, the more they stayed the same. His family would never change. Hell, even his dear, naive brother Castiel, the one who had ripped all the pages out of the book, burned them, and then stomped on them, had ended up back in the same routine.

It was a little depressing. Too bad there wasn't any alcohol around from him to help chase away the thoughts. "Leave it all be."

His head rolled sideways again so that he could see Balthazar out of the corner of his eye. Exhaustion swept suddenly through his bones, and he slumped further down the wall, probably the least upright he'd been in centuries. He just wanted to sleep and not think about this sort of thing for a while.

"Given the fact that we're trapped in a hole in the rock hiding from a sandstorm, yes, maybe I am," he admitted, and closed his eyes, breathing out slowly.

"Yes, I think so," he finished. This was probably the most he had talked about the family or home in such a long time, and it didn't bring good memories with it. Sure, he had some (he thinks) warm thoughts about Heaven, but the bad so much outweighed the good that it was absolutely exhausting to think about it.

Best to just leave it be, as was his mantra, and get a bit of shut-eye.

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