Fic: Impression, Sunrise (Angel the Series/The Sandman) [1/1] - for miss_magrat
Dearest miss_magrat,
Happy birthday! ♥
And a very good year. Have fun, fulfil your dreams, be shallow, be materialistic, but most of all - be happy.
Here’s a little something by the way of your birthday gift.
Title: Impression, Sunrise
Author: girlupnorth
Rating: PG
Length: 1,380 words
Fandom: Angel the Series/The Sandman
Characters: Illyria, Lucifer
Spoilers: AtS 5x22, AU to After the Fall; The Sandman: minor spoilers to The Kindly Ones, but nothing you wouldn’t know from the back cover blurb
Summary: Sunsets are bloody marvellous, you old bastard. Satisfied? (Lucifer in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman)
Warnings: Gratuitous literary references.
Notes: For miss_magrat, on her 20th birthday.
Many thanks to novin_ha for swift beta-reading.
This was actually my first idea for the third prompt in the third round of our lovely ZWL, but since it came to me in English, and since I had a major case of laziness, I didn’t manage to finish it on time. Here it is, now.
The title is borrowed from Monet’s painting.
Impression, Sunrise
“Your place is with the rest of your people: dead and turned to ash,” the human tells her. Illyria senses his despair and anguish, ill-concealed by arrogance and self-righteousness. He is so weak; she could kill him without moving one finger. “Nobody lives who would remember you.”
How little does he know and how faulty his perceptions are.
He has found one picture of her from the old days, a picture in which she is shown wielding weapons in her tentacles, and he believes it to have been her true -and only - form. She doesn’t correct him.
He is wrong in saying that nobody remembers her, too.
The humans, it seems, have fallacious methods of measuring time. Bound to one timeline, they assume that this is the case with everyone. They fail to grasp that once, several paralleling timelines could exist, occasionally interweaving. They take for millions of years what has been but thousands. They look at the conflicting accounts of their world’s creation, not considering for even a moment that they are all true, that Earth could have been created - and destroyed, and rebuilt anew - a thousand times over, and more.
This knowledge has mostly been lost, but there are still beings out there who remember about all that and who remember her, if, sometimes, under a different name. Mostly, however, they live far outside this city, away from what seems the main playground of the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart. Some have visited it, leaving still discernible traces. Another old god, who fought by her side against savage tribe from the West. A demon, one of the proper ones, who once wrought mayhem in the southern hemisphere. So many others, some who at her time were nothing, now apparently grown into power. She walks the city, gathering the bits and pieces.
And then there is one more trail, burning the air despite being years old.
She remembers him as an angel, still, back at the dawn of time; remembers his Fall, which tore the sky in half and shook the very fundaments of the world; remembers how he took to ruling the underworld, the first of many hells; remembers meeting him, and laying out schemes of world domination. It has been such a long time.
Illyria rests her hand against the rough wall of the building, listening to the echoes of conversations long past.
*
An apocalypse reigns over the city. The Wolf, the Ram and the Hart rejoice, while Illyria grows wearier with every passing day. The shell, the body she wears, misses that human who took Illyria’s powers away from her; it is easy to give in, to take the still-alive impulses of the shell for her own and begin to experience emotions.
Illyria doesn’t miss anything and anyone, but her own self.
She has no conscience and no heart. She also lacks a purpose, aside from staying here and aiding those who were friendly with the shell. This is her only way of making her name remembered, now.
The mist and clouds covering the sky only clear up in the hours before the sunrise, showing cold stars on the paling sky. Illyria doesn’t know the constellations; they, too, have shifted .
*
Los Angeles has become a wasteland, but one crafted with far less taste than the unreal cities in Eliot’s poem. The little demons’ hold over the city seems uncertain and, if the reports are true, threatened by beings even lesser, vampires and humans.
It is of no matter, really. He had but world enough and time to grow indifferent, to take to watch the things occurring around him with nothing but mild amusement, and Los Angeles never truly belonged to the most alluring cities of the world, not even when he lived there.
However, there are only so many things that can be found a diversion nowadays and eventually he decides to pay a visit to LA.
He has not expected to find Illyria there. The news of her alleged resurrection did reach him, but there was no confirmation: the world continued to exist and be run by humans.
It is oddly disconcerting to see her that much changed. She, who once could make the seas boil and the lands tremble with her mere stare, whose powers almost equalled his, stands now constrained to a shell of a human body. She is cold and distant, and inertia, rather than passion, drives her actions now. When he catches her eye, it appears more hollow than the city around them.
She does not talk a lot; she never did. “I found my armies turned to dust and my worshippers among humans,” she says, and adds with a trace of anger: “And I found this world mad.”
There is some truth to her words, although that the world has always been mad is also true. It must be they that have changed, then.
He accompanies Illyria as she prowls the city in this human form, looking for temporary diversions, demons to kill or scare off. Since she doesn’t talk, he begins to, a little. It is rare enough to find someone who has not witnessed the ascension of the humankind to power, rarer still to find an entity who has never grown to loathe or fear him.
It has been such a long time.
*
She listens to his talking with mild curiosity; already more that could be expected of her. Back in her days of glory, she never cared for anyone but herself.
He talks about Hell, Earth, Heaven, the dynamics of power between the dimensions. He is as self-important and arrogant as he used to be, though some things have been changed about him.
“You do not wish to rule the world anymore,” she says. From the top of the high-rise buildings it is possible to watch the sunrise, far away on the horizon, in the place which the apocalypse has not reached; they do so, one morning.
“There is no point,” he replies.
She can see his meaning. There used to be better players and bigger stakes in this game. It played out between gods; no mere demons dared to attempt to interfere. Overcoming them was a constant, uncertain struggle; and it was the struggle that made it all worthwhile.
It would only be demeaning to fight for power with the small demonic overlords of this world. She slaughters them without any effort, then moves on to another kill.
Soon he is bored, and tells her that he is going to leave.
“You should go too,” he says. “Los Angeles is not all there is to this world. There are other places.”
Illyria slowly shakes her head, even before the shell responds, protesting.
“What is there to this world?” she asks. “What keeps you here?”
He doesn’t reply at once. Illyria looks away, to the sky.
*
There is no answer to her question that would not make him seem weak in her eyes. This world is neither better nor worse than the other ones, he wants to say; it has become comfortable over the centuries, like a well-fitted glove. It is nothing to be proud of.
“Old habits. The music. The sunsets, sometimes sunrises,” he says, dismissively.
“Music.”
Illyria turns to him, a slight curiosity in her eyes, a certain brightness in her tone. All echoes of the shell, nothing more.
“I used to play the piano in a restaurant in this city,” he says.
She laughs, for the first and only time.
*
It is break of dawn again as she watches Lucifer walk away and then vanish in the distance. She ought to feel sad, the shell suggests. She does not.
She walks the city alone, noticing the small signs suggesting that there is not much time left for this dimension. A change approaches; another reality to collide with this one, overwriting the hell of Los Angeles with a proper human version of the city. Or maybe, she thinks, for a moment a god-king again, a dimension in which she has returned in all her glory.
Or maybe a dimension in which she has never been resurrected.
Illyria looks to the sky and sees the morning star burning above the horizon.
Whatever they say, she is not alone.
Happy birthday! ♥
And a very good year. Have fun, fulfil your dreams, be shallow, be materialistic, but most of all - be happy.
Here’s a little something by the way of your birthday gift.
Title: Impression, Sunrise
Author: girlupnorth
Rating: PG
Length: 1,380 words
Fandom: Angel the Series/The Sandman
Characters: Illyria, Lucifer
Spoilers: AtS 5x22, AU to After the Fall; The Sandman: minor spoilers to The Kindly Ones, but nothing you wouldn’t know from the back cover blurb
Summary: Sunsets are bloody marvellous, you old bastard. Satisfied? (Lucifer in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman)
Warnings: Gratuitous literary references.
Notes: For miss_magrat, on her 20th birthday.
Many thanks to novin_ha for swift beta-reading.
This was actually my first idea for the third prompt in the third round of our lovely ZWL, but since it came to me in English, and since I had a major case of laziness, I didn’t manage to finish it on time. Here it is, now.
The title is borrowed from Monet’s painting.
Impression, Sunrise
“Your place is with the rest of your people: dead and turned to ash,” the human tells her. Illyria senses his despair and anguish, ill-concealed by arrogance and self-righteousness. He is so weak; she could kill him without moving one finger. “Nobody lives who would remember you.”
How little does he know and how faulty his perceptions are.
He has found one picture of her from the old days, a picture in which she is shown wielding weapons in her tentacles, and he believes it to have been her true -and only - form. She doesn’t correct him.
He is wrong in saying that nobody remembers her, too.
The humans, it seems, have fallacious methods of measuring time. Bound to one timeline, they assume that this is the case with everyone. They fail to grasp that once, several paralleling timelines could exist, occasionally interweaving. They take for millions of years what has been but thousands. They look at the conflicting accounts of their world’s creation, not considering for even a moment that they are all true, that Earth could have been created - and destroyed, and rebuilt anew - a thousand times over, and more.
This knowledge has mostly been lost, but there are still beings out there who remember about all that and who remember her, if, sometimes, under a different name. Mostly, however, they live far outside this city, away from what seems the main playground of the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart. Some have visited it, leaving still discernible traces. Another old god, who fought by her side against savage tribe from the West. A demon, one of the proper ones, who once wrought mayhem in the southern hemisphere. So many others, some who at her time were nothing, now apparently grown into power. She walks the city, gathering the bits and pieces.
And then there is one more trail, burning the air despite being years old.
She remembers him as an angel, still, back at the dawn of time; remembers his Fall, which tore the sky in half and shook the very fundaments of the world; remembers how he took to ruling the underworld, the first of many hells; remembers meeting him, and laying out schemes of world domination. It has been such a long time.
Illyria rests her hand against the rough wall of the building, listening to the echoes of conversations long past.
*
An apocalypse reigns over the city. The Wolf, the Ram and the Hart rejoice, while Illyria grows wearier with every passing day. The shell, the body she wears, misses that human who took Illyria’s powers away from her; it is easy to give in, to take the still-alive impulses of the shell for her own and begin to experience emotions.
Illyria doesn’t miss anything and anyone, but her own self.
She has no conscience and no heart. She also lacks a purpose, aside from staying here and aiding those who were friendly with the shell. This is her only way of making her name remembered, now.
The mist and clouds covering the sky only clear up in the hours before the sunrise, showing cold stars on the paling sky. Illyria doesn’t know the constellations; they, too, have shifted .
*
Los Angeles has become a wasteland, but one crafted with far less taste than the unreal cities in Eliot’s poem. The little demons’ hold over the city seems uncertain and, if the reports are true, threatened by beings even lesser, vampires and humans.
It is of no matter, really. He had but world enough and time to grow indifferent, to take to watch the things occurring around him with nothing but mild amusement, and Los Angeles never truly belonged to the most alluring cities of the world, not even when he lived there.
However, there are only so many things that can be found a diversion nowadays and eventually he decides to pay a visit to LA.
He has not expected to find Illyria there. The news of her alleged resurrection did reach him, but there was no confirmation: the world continued to exist and be run by humans.
It is oddly disconcerting to see her that much changed. She, who once could make the seas boil and the lands tremble with her mere stare, whose powers almost equalled his, stands now constrained to a shell of a human body. She is cold and distant, and inertia, rather than passion, drives her actions now. When he catches her eye, it appears more hollow than the city around them.
She does not talk a lot; she never did. “I found my armies turned to dust and my worshippers among humans,” she says, and adds with a trace of anger: “And I found this world mad.”
There is some truth to her words, although that the world has always been mad is also true. It must be they that have changed, then.
He accompanies Illyria as she prowls the city in this human form, looking for temporary diversions, demons to kill or scare off. Since she doesn’t talk, he begins to, a little. It is rare enough to find someone who has not witnessed the ascension of the humankind to power, rarer still to find an entity who has never grown to loathe or fear him.
It has been such a long time.
*
She listens to his talking with mild curiosity; already more that could be expected of her. Back in her days of glory, she never cared for anyone but herself.
He talks about Hell, Earth, Heaven, the dynamics of power between the dimensions. He is as self-important and arrogant as he used to be, though some things have been changed about him.
“You do not wish to rule the world anymore,” she says. From the top of the high-rise buildings it is possible to watch the sunrise, far away on the horizon, in the place which the apocalypse has not reached; they do so, one morning.
“There is no point,” he replies.
She can see his meaning. There used to be better players and bigger stakes in this game. It played out between gods; no mere demons dared to attempt to interfere. Overcoming them was a constant, uncertain struggle; and it was the struggle that made it all worthwhile.
It would only be demeaning to fight for power with the small demonic overlords of this world. She slaughters them without any effort, then moves on to another kill.
Soon he is bored, and tells her that he is going to leave.
“You should go too,” he says. “Los Angeles is not all there is to this world. There are other places.”
Illyria slowly shakes her head, even before the shell responds, protesting.
“What is there to this world?” she asks. “What keeps you here?”
He doesn’t reply at once. Illyria looks away, to the sky.
*
There is no answer to her question that would not make him seem weak in her eyes. This world is neither better nor worse than the other ones, he wants to say; it has become comfortable over the centuries, like a well-fitted glove. It is nothing to be proud of.
“Old habits. The music. The sunsets, sometimes sunrises,” he says, dismissively.
“Music.”
Illyria turns to him, a slight curiosity in her eyes, a certain brightness in her tone. All echoes of the shell, nothing more.
“I used to play the piano in a restaurant in this city,” he says.
She laughs, for the first and only time.
*
It is break of dawn again as she watches Lucifer walk away and then vanish in the distance. She ought to feel sad, the shell suggests. She does not.
She walks the city alone, noticing the small signs suggesting that there is not much time left for this dimension. A change approaches; another reality to collide with this one, overwriting the hell of Los Angeles with a proper human version of the city. Or maybe, she thinks, for a moment a god-king again, a dimension in which she has returned in all her glory.
Or maybe a dimension in which she has never been resurrected.
Illyria looks to the sky and sees the morning star burning above the horizon.
Whatever they say, she is not alone.