07-18-2018, 02:52 PM
[align=center][div style="borderwidth=0px; width: 55%; line-height:115%; text-align: justify;font-family: calibri;"]Gabriel knew what it meant to be an angel, knew how one looked and sounded and felt surrounding his body. He knew what it felt like to be holy, or the closest thing that one could become to that word in this damned earth, and sometimes he felt like he had known it just as well as he had known blood and pain.
His mother had been an angel, fallen from the sky to fall for a demigod that was closer to hell than he was to the heavens. She had loved him, as he had her, but in the end nothing ever turned out to be what anyone wished. They had had a litter, Gabriel among them, a small runt with no significant powers compared to his siblings who had managed to inherit their father's abilities and succeed him. He had been abandoned, deemed useless, with nothing to his name but the pair of glistening black wings that marred his back and cloaked him like a shadow.
They lasted him a year before they were brutally dismembered from his body, leaving him with nothing but scars as a memory of who he had been, of where he had come from and the only thing that had ever made him useful. He was left with nothing but the constant ache, the constant rearranging of his dying molecules, the infinite curse that was immortality. It seemed his father had left Gabriel with something, the inability to die and to suffer indefinitely, half dead and half alive and hurting no matter what he did and where he was.
Gabriel Grimm. Son of an angel and a demigod. Cursed child that had grown into a man with a golden heart but hands too cold to match what he had always wanted to become. The only thing that had kept him close to the heavens was his wings, and they had been gone for three years.
Yet it seemed that three long years were brought to a halt in one day.
They had appeared in the night, when Gabriel had allowed troubled dreams to overcome him for a little over an hour to get some much needed rest. It was impossible for him to stay asleep for long, one thing or another always ripping him out of the trap which was his mind, yet it seemed enough time to have woken up to find a sudden weight settled firmly and comfortably upon his shoulders.
Yet, despite what some might have thought if they knew of his past, Gabriel found no joy in the feathers. It was another weight of history that seemed determined to cut it's way back into his life even as he tried so desperately to let it all go.
(But that was a lie, wasn't it? The dog tags around his neck still burned with his old name, searing it into his skin every day and he still refused to chuck them away despite claiming that Gabriel Grimm was dead.)
His mother had been an angel, fallen from the sky to fall for a demigod that was closer to hell than he was to the heavens. She had loved him, as he had her, but in the end nothing ever turned out to be what anyone wished. They had had a litter, Gabriel among them, a small runt with no significant powers compared to his siblings who had managed to inherit their father's abilities and succeed him. He had been abandoned, deemed useless, with nothing to his name but the pair of glistening black wings that marred his back and cloaked him like a shadow.
They lasted him a year before they were brutally dismembered from his body, leaving him with nothing but scars as a memory of who he had been, of where he had come from and the only thing that had ever made him useful. He was left with nothing but the constant ache, the constant rearranging of his dying molecules, the infinite curse that was immortality. It seemed his father had left Gabriel with something, the inability to die and to suffer indefinitely, half dead and half alive and hurting no matter what he did and where he was.
Gabriel Grimm. Son of an angel and a demigod. Cursed child that had grown into a man with a golden heart but hands too cold to match what he had always wanted to become. The only thing that had kept him close to the heavens was his wings, and they had been gone for three years.
Yet it seemed that three long years were brought to a halt in one day.
They had appeared in the night, when Gabriel had allowed troubled dreams to overcome him for a little over an hour to get some much needed rest. It was impossible for him to stay asleep for long, one thing or another always ripping him out of the trap which was his mind, yet it seemed enough time to have woken up to find a sudden weight settled firmly and comfortably upon his shoulders.
Yet, despite what some might have thought if they knew of his past, Gabriel found no joy in the feathers. It was another weight of history that seemed determined to cut it's way back into his life even as he tried so desperately to let it all go.
(But that was a lie, wasn't it? The dog tags around his neck still burned with his old name, searing it into his skin every day and he still refused to chuck them away despite claiming that Gabriel Grimm was dead.)
♔ — I want brimstone in my garden