Chapter Text
As predicted, their next days in the office are tense to say the least. The crew seem to be oddly distant and shaken up. Shane has only ever seen them this way a handful of times, after one of the demon locations and a few particularly creepy ghost infestations who’s occupants weren’t immediately cowed by Shane’s presence.
But these next days are fraught. The crew, though not initially worried when finding them after their allotted five minutes has passed (at least in real time outside of Shane and Ryan’s bubble) had grown increasingly uneasy as the shoot drew to a close.
Shane could only do so much to keep anxiety from taking hold of him when they went on patrol through the forest nearby. Ryan said little while they walked, content with watching the swinging of his flashlight beam as it panned from one side of the path to the other, keeping a watchful eye.
His face had remained blank for the rest of the shoot and through the drive back to their hotel. Little was said in the hotel room. Shane did not sleep well.
The crew began to loosen up on the flight home, but the atmosphere of the night before, even though they didn’t know half of what went down, seemed to stick to everyone and keep them watching their backs. The mood persists into the following days.
Shane knows he and Ryan will need to address the events of the shoot. It’s not every day you’re outed as a demon, nor your best friend an angel. It’s not every day you each threaten the other’s life.
Shane takes notice of the unspoken pact to avoid one another that he and Ryan have forged. There’s lots to do after just getting back from filming an episode. They have to look through footage with the editing team, there’s narration work in the studio, they have to look at an array of prospective haunted locations to research and film at next, so they already have a lot of their collective plate.
But they can only get away with this for so long.
It’s only been a day since they got back and their work week is almost over, so the weekend will be open for a conversation. Shane opens his calendar and checks the next few days: the weekend is clear. All he needs to do is message Ryan. Hell, maybe talk to him, ask him if he’s free.
Shane looks up across their office space and sees Ryan chatting with one of the video editors before straightening up and maneuvering back to his desk. They make eye contact across the room. Ryan looks petrified for a moment, a look that quickly devolves into embarrassment and anxiety.
Shane looks back at his phone, sighing. Questions upon questions, queries and concerns and wild thoughts run rampant in his head. It feels as though the seams in the bone of his skull are straining to hold the in the pressure.
Being demonic—or simply non-human—means that Shane doesn’t get migraines or even headaches, but he supposes this is what is must feel like. At this point, it doesn’t matter when or where he and Ryan meet, they need to talk.
Shane barely catches Ryan as he’s leaving the office building, stopping him just outside the door. He made the critical error of deliberating on how exactly to approach him, and by the time he’d decided, Ryan was already leaving.
Shane also makes the mistake of tapping him suddenly on the shoulder, because the reaction Ryan gives him prompts Shane to back down quickly; Ryan looks like he might just drop his disguise out of fright.
“Hey.”
“Hi, Shane.”
Ryan avoids his face, surprise replaced with apprehension.
“Hey. Uh, so, you free on Saturday? I think—maybe we can—We should talk.”
The instant the words leave Shane’s mouth he wants to kick himself for how weirdly professional it sounds, but Ryan seems to take the hint. He remembers what they are. Shane sees a flicker of it when Ryan looks at him directly. He sighs, pulling out his phone and checking his calendar.
“I can do the afternoon…but it‘ll be a bit late.”
“Oh, that’s fine.”
“Um. Ok, how’s 5:00 at mine?”
“Good.”
They stand face-to-face for a moment, silence and tension bayoneting a conversation already at death’s door. Shane can tell Ryan wants to leave.
“Well. Bye.”
Ryan offers up a half-hearted smile and turns quickly on his heel, barely letting Shane get in a goodbye.
Sitting in his car, Shane massages his temples, an old habit he’s filed away just like all of those other basic, automatic behaviors. Sniffing, drumming his fingers, fidgeting, hell, eating and sleeping: all behaviors he’s learned.
And even though eating and sleeping do provide him energy—though it’s no where near what negativity or the occasional (even non-human) soul gives him—the lack of necessity reminds him at the worst of times that he is eternal.
Shane has made plenty friends in the past, loved plenty of times over, and every time he worries about the loss of the mortals he attaches to. They’re fragile, some are even beautiful, and Shane counts his lucky stars that he’s met some quality people.
But stars die. Shane’s made peace with that.
He went through the same process when he met Ryan. Ryan, so curious and fiery when the mood struck him, so fun, so funny. A fantastic human. Ryan, a scaredy-cat, but so brave to be putting himself out there.
And Shane, though he would inevitably part with Ryan, maybe even age himself as Ryan would naturally to stay with him for a little longer, made peace with their eventual parting. He knew he would be heartbroken to leave him. But the heartbreak is nothing new.
Ryan wouldn’t be just another death, but Shane would know to think of him as the best of the times they shared. Somehow, the discovery of the fact that Ryan would endure with Shane for as long as the universe existed shakes Shane more than the possibility of his demise.
———
Ryan’s thoughts are moving faster than he can finish thinking them as he collapses on his bed. There is so, so much to think about.
If Shane is a demon, then who is he? Definitely one of note, but that doesn’t quite narrow it down. How had he kept his head down for so long? What did he feed on? How the hell had Ryan not noticed him?
So Ryan does what he always does before a demonic shoot. He pulls out his books.
It’s a coping mechanism. On normal shoots he’ll reach out for the presence of ghosts, lending a silent hand by unbinding them from their deathly prison if they reach back with desperation and fear. It’s the least he can do.
Some are content and well-mannered, best left alone. It’s easy enough.
But demons hurt people, and Ryan will not stand for the suffering of his camera crew and his co-host. It was his job to deal with demons and keep the cosmos in order before everything fell apart, so he’s fit for the job of hemming in a demon for the night of their shoot and keeping it quiet if it’s not immediately on the defensive.
He does this with every hellish entity he comes across, and they in turn avoid him if both have their wits about them. But it’s best to be informed, so Ryan read up.
He keeps his book collection in opaque plastic boxes beneath his bed so that they rarely see the sunlight. Grimoires, summoning guides, texts on demonology, even a loose copy of Paradise Lost: some are hundreds of years old, (first editions he prides himself on keeping in such good condition, but miracle magic does help) others are modern and written by studied authors.
‘Shane Madej’ won’t be listed as a page header, but looking at entities that take a large bird-form will narrow down his options. Ryan cracks open and leaves it floating in mid air as he unloads pages of notes and other books.
He closes the curtains and locks his door. There’s so, so much work to do.
———
The sun is already setting when Shane knocks in Ryan’s door, his stomach churning. He feels as though he’s sealed some terrifying pact when he knocks on the door, the sound a promise to go through with what they agreed to do. Shane hears footsteps from the other side of the door.
“Hey, Shane.”
“Hi.”
Ryan greets him with a set face, nervousness leaving him rough around the edges. He looks haggard. Still, Ryan steps aside and gestures for Shane to cross the threshold of his house.
Immediately, warning bells begin to go off in Shane’s head. He feels something mildly threatening here, not so much that it would endanger his life and safety, but enough for it to inspire curiosity and mild concern. His instincts tell him to survey the area for some trace of angelic magic, a trap or snare, but he trusts Ryan enough not to try something like that. He wouldn’t.
He wouldn’t.
The journey between Ryan’s front door and his living room is short, only spanning a hallway and somewhere under ten seconds, seconds that feel much longer when Shane is probing for more possible threats. Sigils, salt circles, a triangle trap, anything. But there is no chalk or salt or paint in sight, although Shane finds himself doubting that Ryan would use something as mediocre as that.
His assumptions are confirmed when he sees the organized mess of Ryan’s combined living room and kitchen. Books and notes and pages and pages of old, old drawings and even older languages are stacked neatly throughout the room on just about every surface. Some of the ink has faded from the pages, yellowed and ragged around the edges, the sharp corners of fresh paper softened by time.
Shane spots a few books that look due for a replacement of their bindings. Others look rather new: large books with intricate printed cover art with cover corners worn away by excessive use despite how young they are.
A handful of books, both old and new, are still floating listlessly in the air, open to a random page. And that threatening aura is all over here, and it is so pungent that Shane begins to have second thoughts.
He needs to look, really look. For only a second or two, Shane peels back the glamour around his eyes to survey the room.
He isn’t met with the icy, stomach-churning rush of fear he anticipated, a fear Shane can only now feel in the presence of Ryan’s power. Instead, what he feels is more of a chilly trickle of disappointment and confusion, something that makes Shane want to turn tail and leave, not with fear at his back but a feeling of betrayal.
It only takes a second or two for Shane to spot the blue-white glowing ghost of a sigil encased within a triangle on the floor. His sigil.
It makes Shane feel nauseous.
Ryan has clearly just wiped the spell and the invisibility charm from its place on the floor judging by bright but fading afterglow it casts, and he was clearly confident enough when he made the decision not to include a protective circle.
It makes Shane wonders if Ryan would have kept him there to interrogate him, trapped him there, a sword to his throat. That was his job after all.
Regardless of where or what you were in Hell, you knew of the Powers. One of the many angelic ranks, it was there job to take care of anyone causing a ruckus on earth, making a demon’s job potentially life-threatening.
Shane has seen the end of a handful of demons in his time, all close calls on his part, and it seems far worse than anything he could do to a fellow demon. Shane allows himself to entertain the idea that this might be the end of a very, very long line. He dismisses it. Ryan wouldn’t.
Come to think of it, that can’t be Ryan’s name. Shane isn’t Shane’s true name. He looks again at the sigil on the floor. Another thing to ask about Ryan: his name, and supposedly how he found Shane’s. Ryan is staring at him. Shane realizes he’s been staring at him without a glamour.
“Sorry, I—Just a bit nervous.”
Ryan seems to put two and two together, resulting in a moment of embarrassed epiphany. He turns away, gesturing with both hands to the piles of books and pages and making them rise into the air. With a move along gesture, Ryan sends them soaring into neat and balanced piles in the corner of the room.
“There’s not much I can say to make that better, is there?”
Shane gives a non-committal shrug, avoiding Ryan’s eyes.
“ . . . I didn’t go through with it.”
Shane sighs, waving away Ryan’s excuse and asking with a jerk of his head if he can sit. He settles on the couch, back to the window. Ryan sits at the short end of the table on a smaller couch. The quiet becomes oppressive as already-slow conversation grinds to a halt. Shane, already bursting at the seams with questions, can’t take it.
“So. Should we . . . set down rules?
Shane realizes how odd it sounds the instant the words leave his mouth. This conversation is going to be fairly structured and the questions have already been asked, but the stakes are so high it seems it is only right to promise honesty to each other. Ryan seems to be thinking along the same lines.
“No lies. No omission.”
Ryan looks Shane in the eye.
“Agreed?”
Shane breathes a long, heavy sigh.
“Agreed.”
Silence falls again.
“So . . . “
Shane draws out the word.
“Should I go first?”
Ryan snorts quietly, a strained grin on his face.
“Sure. Shoot your shot.”
“ . . . How did you learn my name?”
———
Ryan freezes. Of course. Of course it had to be that. Of course it had to be a reminder of the fact that he’d entertained and nearly gone through with the idea of trapping his best friend in a demon snare. Shane is a demon, but Shane is Shane.
Ryan can’t bring himself to call him by his real name. That’s not Shane.
He gestures wordlessly to the books. A particularly old tome rises out of the stacks, flipping open to a well-worn page.
“You’re listed in the Ars Goetia.”
Ryan looks away as Shane examines the page with a mix of mild interest and apprehension. He touches the worn, soft pages lightly—almost with reverence—tracing over fading ink with careful fingers until he finds his name. One of them, whichever he’s chosen to adopt. Ryan can’t help but ask.
“Which…Which one did you go by?”
Ryan sees Shane’s expression twitch at the present-tense irregular verb, as though he’s bothered by the insinuation that the still treats it as a name, bothered by the implications of the title and the duties it would bind him to. After a beat or two of silence, Shane speaks, the sigh in his voice evidence of how difficult this conversation was likely to be. He sounds exhausted.
“I went by Shax.”
The confirmation is an odd one. It feels surreal, like Ryan’s mind is quite literally running in circles, stuck in a loop of this can’t be real, to it can, it is, to it just doesn’t seem real. But of course, it is real.
His friend has told him to his face that he is Shax, is Shan, is Scox, is the thief of senses and of the wealth of kings, is the discoverer of truths, but a liar himself. His friend is a demon, his friend has just told him, out loud and with complete clarity, his true name.
It’s a lot to digest. It just seem so casual, the amount of trust an action like that displays. Trust that Ryan won’t abuse the power of a name, of the confession he’s just borne witness to. Shane closes the book with care, minding not to damage or fold the already wrinkled and dog-eared pages.
“I actually settled on Shane because someone mispronounced Shan once. Sounded human enough.”
———
Shane leans back on the sofa with another heavy sigh. This conversation has ventured into far touchier territory far quicker than he expected. Silence falls between them again, silence that gives Shane time to organize the firestorm of unformed, voiceless questions into something resembling a line. He needs order. Hell, half of the questions he has he doesn’t even know how to turn into sentences.
The seconds tick by and the roiling chaos trapped within the bounds of Shane’s skull makes no effort to organize itself, so he starts simple, something easy to pick up off the ground.
“What about you?”
It’s a touchy subject, Shane knows, but he wants his turn. They’re in this hole so he might as well learn something while they’re down here. Ryan sighs just as heavily as Shane, and he can imagine Ryan dredging up memory after memory, sifting through and carefully constructing each sentence from whatever recollections ride the line between honest and buried. Entombed for good reason.
Shane knows the look, has spoken to a handful of others who made it out and made good time getting far, far away. He would never have dreamed that horrid mixture of regret and insecurity, confusion and fear might make it onto the face of an angel.
Angels, who were unruffled and orderly and graceful and poised, who serve their God, who follow their orders without question and without hesitation. Honed to perfection, cut and polished, and Shane can’t help but feel a little bit of envy coil in his gut at the thought that Ryan had lived in such grandeur and comfort, in blessed ignorance.
Ryan brings him out of his thoughts, staring straight ahead at the wall, fixing one of his many, many books with a blank, glazed stare.
“Rathanael. Bit of a mouthful. And a giveaway.”
Ryan barely moves his mouth when he speaks.
“Honestly, it’s kinda embarrassing. Sounds so official for an asshole who sits behind a desk and talks about old murders.”
He laughs it off, but Shane knows that response, a response he is guilty of all too often. But it’s easier, so he plays along.
“Nah, I get what you mean. You read through the Goetia’s descriptions only to realize the demon you’re looking for is just human Bigfoot.”
That earns a hearty wheeze. Shane feels the atmosphere relax just a bit as they talk, as they readjust to each other ever so slowly. It’s not like getting to know each other again, Shane thinks, more like finding out that you and a friend have a passionate and personal interest in common.
It’s a bit odd at first, knowing one another for so long, and not knowing this thing you share, but it opens the door to more shared experiences, more stories to swap, more jokes to make. Eventually, Shane finds himself feeling safe, finds himself adjusting to Ryan’s new space in his life and in his mind and his view of the world on a cliff top.
He used to sit on the metaphorical rocky outcropping overlooking the roiling ocean of time as it passed, watching the little flickers of fish and sea life go by, admiring them, treasuring the glimpses he caught. Occasionally he might spot someone in the distance along the cliff side, watching as time sped by while a select few remained still and watched it, and maybe Shane would wave, but they would vanish from sight soon enough, obscured by clouds and fog.
But Ryan, Ryan had approached him, had sat next to him on their little outcropping and Shane has a distinct feeling that they’ll enjoy watching time pass together.
They begin to talk about stupid things, about minute details and close calls, about favorite foods, and favorite mortals who’ve come and gone, the worst of the worst and the best of the best.
They talk of the raucousness of the late 1900’s, the wild times of change they witnessed, of the early decades full of war. Of watching the protests of the Civil Rights Movement, watching its ripples spread from America outward, watching the effect it had on the world. Of the horrors of war, and of one of humanity’s darkest hours.
They talk of the hight of the aristocracy, Ryan nearly choking on his own saliva while Shane regales him with a variety of times he walked in on affairs in progress. They talk of battles and royalty, of serving in courts and advising, something Shane finds Ryan made a very lucrative habit of in the heyday of ancient empires.
They talk of watching the development of humanity from afar. Watching empires be born and die, all while having prime viewing seats. They talk and talk and talk and jump around an abstract timeline of miscellaneous events. They laugh. And maybe, Shane thinks, they’ll go back to normal.
It will take a while, but eventually the knowledge of the secret best kept by each of them and now between them will find their place in their friendship. Shane has lost his appetite for difficult conversation. They can deal with it some time in their fairly nebulous shared future.
———
Ryan finds himself relaxing into their usual banter and the sun begins to slide lower in the sky. He decides the painful questions can be asked on another day, despite the itch that persists in his mind. He can ask hard questions later.
———
Shane had hoped that they might be able to dodge the subject, that it might not, like some starving, feral predator, push itself into the center of their path and make it so that they would have to go through it to get to where they wanted to go. It would have eventually, but Shane really hadn’t wanted to ruin the night.
He sits here and he remembers that he wants to keep the terribly painful questions, the uncomfortable ones, locked up for another time. Until he can’t. Until the question is accidentally implied, or it’s more like the opportunity is dropped into his lap in such a way that he can’t ignore it.
Shane can’t quite recall what they had been talking about before (“…not since Heaven,” or something like that? He still can’t recall), but the name now rings in the air between them, the only thing occupying the deathly silence that has so suddenly fallen.
Ryan is very clearly looking an inevitability directly in the face, and while he still has the time, is scraping together his pride and his resolve. He will not flinch in the face of it.
The seconds tick by, one after anther, and Shane has never really thought about it that way. Sure, he’s experienced many lifetimes of embarrassing and awkward moments, but none quite like this. For once, he’s truly aware of the passage of time, despite the lack of a clock in the room to tick. He can count the seconds, time them down to decimal points in his mind, and Shane is sure he has never been so nervous in his life.
He has been hurtling towards this moment for only a handful of days now, but he has traveled so very, very far, fueled only by pure, unrelenting curiosity. And here, at the start of this moment so very highly anticipated, he has lost all momentum.
He has ground to a sudden standstill, unable to do anything, and for some time it seems the world has come to a stop alongside him.
Shane chokes on words he can’t quite form. Ryan is begging him with his eyes to just ask or his resolve might break. It is so, so much effort to start it up again. It would have been nice to deal with hard questions later.
“So…what happened to Heaven in the Aftermath?”
Shane rushes the words. Ryan seems to crumble just a bit, and Shane sinks back into his seat. Ryan’s face is in his hands, and he runs a hand through his hair.
He turns to face Shane with hard, haunted eyes, and sighs shakily. Not hard, brittle. Ryan looks like he knows he’s going to cry and is just waiting for tears to well and fall. He breathes deeply and fixes his eyes at a spot on the wall to his right. Shane stares at his hands. When Ryan speaks, it is quiet and halting.
“Heaven fell apart. Simple as that. Anyone still fighting on the home front probably died. I…don’t know if I feel lucky or guilty that I happened to be on Earth when it happened and not in one of the Nine Circles or any of the Heavenly Palaces. I saw bits of the destruction—all of my friends—Everyone there…Sorry.”
Ryan is crying silently, eyes foggy and red and distant in horrible, horrible remembrance. His jaw is set, so much so that it looks painful, and tears drip steadily down onto clasped hands locked tight together in his lap. But he doesn’t shake or sob or wail. It is silent and terrified, and it is so much worse.
Shane remembers.
He doesn’t recall the why or how of it all (everything is so hazy now, did they even tell him what was going on?) but he knows he had mobilized the legions under his command and was part of the cavalry charge. He recalls their screeches of rage and revenge against Heaven, against God and all of the torture they’d endured because of It.
Then only chaos and bodies falling around him and light. Holy light. Silver. Shane remembers the crisp, clear freshness of Earth’s air, of his first breath, something akin the the sharpness of mint, of how, for fleeting moments, he had wondered if it was even better in Heaven, even though he had been consigned to Hell by the occupants of that same holy sanctuary.
Unjustly.
Without trial.
Without mercy, and how was God so merciful?
He remembers how these thoughts drove him to such rage, how now, after the slaughter, Shane might just deserve Hell. He does. The terrible voice of criticism and self-deprecation, something he seems to have picked up from humanity and can’t ditch somehow, tells him he does.
He finds himself half-inclined to believe it.
Shane realizes that he’s been staring blankly off into space, wallowing in his own trauma and past terror when Ryan is sitting here, crying quietly. Shane should be comforting him. So he reaches out awkwardly, fining he has to stretch to pat Ryan on the shoulder, and for a few moments he stays like that before making a strangely difficult move in getting up and sitting next to his—his friend.
Not an angel, not some servant of God, his friend. Ryan. Shane wraps an arm around him while his tears subside. When Ryan next speaks, his voice still shakes, but there is a conviction in it that was not there before.
“I remember very vividly—I guess I don’t know how or when, I’d never lost it before when dealing with, well, demonic interference—my headpiece was knocked off in a scuffle somewhere, lower atmosphere I think? It must have been, I could see the landscape below me. I’d just—Sorry—r-run someone through, some foot soldier who’d lost their mount. I just remember looking them in the face. There was something so terribly innocent about it, just so…afraid, i-in pain. Questioning the mercy of death. T-the glory of battle, I think. And then they were gone and falling and I—“
Ryan swallows hard, breathing slow and steady.
“I looked down to Earth, and the green had been turned to dirt and bodies. Everyone was stained with blood. And I think I realized that this wasn’t God’s divine will or conquest or righteousness or anything, it was slaughter. I think…I struggled with disillusionment.”
There is a certain energy in the room now, in the dim light of fading day and in Ryan’s sudden confessions. Something truly, utterly potent and powerful. Something to be feared. There is a buzz thrumming just under Ryan’s skin now, something not holy or human, something purely emotional. Something fizzling and bubbling that Shane can only identify as a dark drive of some kind.
There is hatred and regret in Ryan’s face, now made stony by a set jaw and eyes wide with wild fury. And something snaps in that look so suddenly, and Ryan seems to deflate, dragging himself out of the depths of his own horror.
“I…I’m sorry. I….”
Shane leaps in, trying to make up for his silence.
“No, no, take your time.”
Ryan shakes his head, smiling wryly. There’s something overwhelmingly sad in it.
“I—You don’t need to hear this. The side I fought for condemned you—I guess—I dunno, I’m practically the reason you’re…you. You’re too good to deserve it.”
Shane pauses for a moment to think on Ryan’s words.
“You’d defend me?”
Ryan looks incredulous, like Shane’s said something redundant, and in those seconds they are simply human, simply friends, and nothing more.
“Well, yeah…you’re my friend, it wouldn’t matter what you did. We’d get through it ‘cause that’s what we do.”
Silence falls between them, Shane finds himself unable to do anything but sit with it, reconciling years of agonizing hatred with whatever has just been said.
“Thanks…Thank you, Ryan.”
Shane says it, and he means it more than the words can do it justice.
———
The seconds between them shine bright with joy and trust, and Ryan can’t help but revel in it. But these are seconds and they do not last, and soon enough he can’t stop questions from clawing their way up his throat and scraping against his teeth, fighting against the pressure of his jaw to slip by to freedom.
But his selfishness—humanity, human wants and behavioral patterns—can’t compete with Shane’s fragility now, with the balance they’ve achieved. He can’t bring himself it break it. Ryan will have to wait for it to pass.
He only has to wait seconds before expectant silence swallows them whole again, before they return to the reality that they are friends and then quite a bit more. But the question, no matter how desperately Ryan now wants to ask it despite the klaxon-like voice of anxiety telling him no, seems to have lodged in his throat in it’s desperation to escape. So Ryan coughs a bit to clear it, shattering the silence.
“So, uh…what did you do?”
Shane doesn’t answer immediately, instead taking his time to think, Ryan can practically see memories flicking past his eyes as though on a projector screen, searching, scanning, picking through for an answer in amongst eons of preservation.
Ryan can tell he expects the question, but that makes it no easier to answer. He doesn’t know how long they sit there, Shane staring, glassy-eyed, into the middle distance. It makes Ryan’s gut churn when Shane speaks.
“Nothing.”
He half-heartedly throws up his hands, sinking back into the couch with a look of aloofness.
“What…?”
It’s barely a croak in response. Ryan doesn't quite know what to think, how to react. How is that possible?
God wouldn't have thrown someone from paradise without reason, it was simply not done. Ryan had seen rebellious, lost souls, even a handful of his friends stray from their path, but all knew what they had done and stood trial for their actions.
They were questioned by the holiest, the most omnipotent, those held in highest regard and trusted to carry out the deeds from the mouth of their Creator. The system was, by design, flawless. What crack in the foundation of such beautifully burnished marble had allowed Shane to slip through?
"I didn't do…anything."
Shane looks like he's searching his memories again, speaks like he's trying to find something incriminating, some little stain on his record that would explain it all away, but still he comes up with nothing.
He sounds like he's gone through these same motions so many times before, like he's searched these exact memories before hoping for some bizarre reason they might change and reveal what he seeks. He hopes to find some evidence of a transgression, however minor it may be, but comes up with none.
Shane looks at Ryan, confusion and weariness written all over his face. And then the pieces put themselves together. His voice is quiet and horse when next he speaks.
“Were you a part of Lucifer’s rebellion?”
Shane laughs, bitter and mirthless.
“Nope.”
“But how—”
Shane sighs.
“So Morningstar kicked up a fuss and rallied together any likeminded angels, right? Rebellion and defeat, blah, blah, blah, but….well, Heaven was no place for war, was it? And in the sheer panic of the situation—there were people who were screaming about how it was the end of the world, really—I guess…anyone in the wrong place just got swept under the rug.”
Ryan can’t quite speak. The terror wrought by an angel of such high standing was horrid, not counting his accomplices.
It was a sight to behold: Heaven, momentarily turned into a radiant Hell. Ryan remembers the confusion, the incoherence, the speed with which such a perfect ecosystem was reduced to ashes, but perfection is fragile by nature.
There are few things quite comparable to this masterpiece of day-lit horror, watching chaos bloom as his traitorous comrades rocketed through the heavens like something he would come to know as planes, like bombers, laying waste to what they saw as tyrannical? Unjust?
Perhaps, seeing as Shane had slipped through the cracks, it was. How many others had been consigned to an unwarranted hell? Ryan breathes a shaky sigh.
“And afterwards…?”
“I dunno. I suppose it was kinda like locking kids in a classroom on their own. Power structures formed, and somehow I ended up in a place where I was whatever could be called ‘safe’ down there.”
Ryan can only shake his head in disbelief.
“Fuck…”
“Really.”
“…So, do you happen to know what started The End?”
Shane shakes his head, clearly eager to divert to a less personal, though no less grim topic.
“No. No, I was never really invested in the beef between Heaven and Hell. Don’t know what made ‘em so angry or why they decided to wage war on each other seeing as they’d spent so long after the rebellion ignoring each other.”
Shane studies him for a minute.
“Hoping for a different answer?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t think anyone knows why, honestly. I think—“
Shane pauses to consider his next words, the dark of the hastily falling evening casting heavier and heavier shadows across his face.
“—I think it might have been a private vendetta, y’know? Lucifer just trying to get back at God again, or maybe vice versa? I don’t think it was a…a democratic decision or whatever.”
Ryan weighs the words in his mind one at a time, carefully rolling each one in his hands like marbles, testing them.
“Isn’t that the argument against war? That the powers that be have no right to make us fight their battles and be the means to their selfish ends?”
“Yeah…”
Shane scoffs bitterly, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes and propping his thumbs under his chin, his fingertip under his nose.
“So…where do we go from here?”
Shane leans back into the couch looking at Ryan’s face, or lack thereof, seeing as he’s largely obscured by fuzzy shadows.
Regardless, he sees Ryan. He still sees Ryan.
Nothing has changed between them, he realizes. This has only added a new chapter to their friendship and their bond (and perhaps quite a large prequel), but they’re still the same people.
“We just…keep going.”
“Keep being demon proof?”
Ryan laughs, full-throated and pure and human.
“Yeah, sure. Sure.”
And they do. They talk until the sun goes down, and a few minutes after, a few minutes too long, just as friends. As people.
And as Shane waves goodbye from the door, as he peels away into the street, he can feel the start of another moment flowing seamlessly into the end of one.