Fic: All Legs and Wings
Title: All Legs and Wings
Author/Artist: hellzabeth and megkips
Character(s) or Pairing(s): Maya, Gilber
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Swearing
Summary: Unlikely passengers speak of curses and things past. They are delighted to find out that they have helped each other in their plans.
Gilbert is many things. Cruel, capricious, vindictive, self-centered and awesome in all the wrong ways. He delights in the suffering of others and delights more in causing it - using virtues like honest and trust to ensnare souls for Hell. But he himself is not without some essence of what he was before he fell. He is, on occasion, capable of sympathizing with what he can only call mud monkeys, and it worries him.
He and Maya first meet when she yells at him. They are in the Kirkland mansion, and he refuses to open any of the doors. The sun is dawning and there is one vampire left out of doors. He pays her no regard then and she does the same.
The second time they meet, they are both in America, going about their private business. Gilbert is walking in a human’s body to another bar, and for a moment he swears someone recognizes him. Maya walks past, alone, her cheeks ruddy and face discontent. They say nothing to each other.
Third time’s a charm. They are both sitting in a train station in Japan, waiting for a departure. Gilbert is in no mudmonkey suit - he is simply himself, horns shrunk down to be obscured by his hair and tail hidden in his trousers. He almost looks human - plain suit and tie, briefcase with nothing in it - but not even the cologne he wears can mask the scent of Hell’s brimstone. Maya is the only one who dares to sit near him, and he pays her no mind until, in some mix of terror and anger she hisses, “Demon!” at him.
Gilbert stiffens for a moment - because he doesn’t know the speaker and if there’s a hunter next to him, he’s fucked - but when he sees Maya he simply frowns. “Do I know you, lady?”
“England. 1866.”
“...” Gilbert says in return. He tries to gather his thoughts. “Shit. I thought all you fucks were dead.”
Olive-brown eyes remain cold even when she smiles. “Good. That’s how I wanted it.”
A moment’s silence settles on them, awkward and suffocating.
“How did you--” they both start. “After you---”
Maya takes the awkwardness and veers the conversation away from herself as quickly as she can, “What’s a demon doing in a train station in Japan anyway?”
“Going to a meeting,” Gilbert says.
“And you can’t fly or teleport?”
Gilbert frowns and readjusts his tie. “You don’t teleport into the lands of foreign gods. Pisses them off.” He check the time again and stands. “Where are you headed?”
When Maya informs him that she’s off to Tokyo, they both scramble for their tickets and sigh upon the revelation that they’re seated next to each other.
“New rule,” Maya declares. “You don’t talk to me, I don’t talk to you, we never speak of this again. Got it?”
“And might I ask what it is I’ve done to you personally that you feel the need to be a grade A bitch, Kirkland?”
In the back of his mind, Gilbert curses vampiric reflexes as Maya’s hand slaps his cheek that he’s nearly sent flying across the railroad tracks. He manages, at the very least, to look undignified and to be wearing a large, red hand print on his cheek. Maya glares back at him.
“That was never, and will never, be my surname,” she says. Gilbert moves to reply, but is cut off by a train whistle and a flurry of motion by other passengers to get aboard.
Once on board and in their seats, the vampire and the demon try their best to ignore each other. Two hours is a long time to sit next to someone whose very existence makes your blood boil. They succeed for a little while - Gilbert busies himself with an iPhone and Maya buries her nose in a book. On occasion one shifts and bumps the other, only for the other to shrug it off.
Eventually they both become bored. Gilbert pockets his iPhone and begins to fidget and Maya finds herself unable to concentrate on her book. She shoots him looks to get him to stop fidgeting, but he only fidgets more.
“Why’d you leave?” he asks finally.
“We stopped pretending rather fast, didn’t we?”
“Hey, forty five minutes is impressive. So really, why’d you leave?”
Maya stares at Gilbert, forgetting to blink entirely. After what seems like an eternity, she snaps her book shut and puts it aside, folding her hands neatly in her lap. “Because he ruined my life,” she says plainly, but for all of her calmness, there is hate brimming just below the surface. “And because I believe in karma.” Another pause, and a suddenly more confident tone.“You have a lot of time to think of ways to torment one’s tormentor when you’re immortal. After 200 years, I saw my chance, took the one thing I cared about, and left.”
Gilbert raises an eyebrow and smiles. “Did you do anything to say, ensure that karma?”
“Are you really so ignorant about other religions that you have to ask that?”
“Fuck you,” Gilbert shoots back, offended by the notion. “I’m asking because when that fucker and his butt buddy exorcised me, I cursed the bastard to die alone and unloved.”
Maya stops entirely and for a moment, she looks like a perfect corpse. Gilbert watches her eyebrows rise and eyes widen, and he thinks perhaps in horror. It’s when her lips twitch and purse together, twitching upwards, that he is proven wrong.
A few restrained sounds came from the vampire, stifling a laugh.
Eventually she bursts into hysterics, doubling over and grabbing at her stomach. Her laugh is perfectly human, loud and lovely and still gasping for air that her lungs stopped needing long ago. Tears well in her eyes, and it takes here a while to spit out anything close to a coherent sentence. Eventually she manages, “Y-you, that’s- he’d never- I can’t even begin- oh Shiva this is just mad!”
“I fuck you not!” Gilbert grins back, his pride beaming through. “Shit, I think I owe you a giant bit of gratitude for making that happen.” He finds himself laughing too at the sheer absurdity of the situation. For this to happen - to be sitting next to someone that emotionally damaged one of the few creatures on Earth that Gilbert loathed more than humanity - it is too rich, and he soon finds himself in hysterics too. If any of the other passengers are bothered by it, they say nothing.
Maya regains her self control first, fanning herself with her book. “I was doing it for myself, and for Li Shui, not for you. Don’t be grateful because I’m selfish.” She shakes her head. “There were some good people in that coven. People who probably didn’t deserve what they got. But...” her eyes narrow and her face becomes so much colder, as if she’s staring down a version of Arthur Kirkland that’s sitting across from her. “No matter how much good there was in them, Arthur deserved to lose them. Because they were so good, it would hurt him more. Because he loved them, he would hate himself for losing them.” Her voice drifted off, as if there was more to say. If there was, Gilbert never heard it because she then brightened, saying“Oh, I haven’t told you the best part of it all yet.”
“Hold up, hold up,” Gilbert says, his face lighting up with chidlish delight that looks so, so wrong on his face. “There’s more?”
Maya smiled at Gilbert, and perhaps had he not been a demon he would have been worried. It was a fond smile, but fond in a way that recalls something wonderful and terrible. He knows he look - he’s worn it many times himself.
“You’re probably aware what keen gossips vampires are.” she starts. “They’ll pass around a story as fast as a bat can fly, the more scandalous the better. And with the whole Kirkland coven but one eradicated, there’s got to be a culprit somewhere.” She glances over to Gilbert. “I’m sure you remember Gabriel dos Anjos as well as I do.”
Gilbert stiffenesat the mere mention of the name. “I’m familiar with the son of a bitch who should have been exposed the minute he left his mother’s womb, yes.”
“Very true. Not only is he a hunter, a hypocrite and a murderer, but he also has a tendency to leave women at the altar before letting his vampire boyfriend take them home as a snack. Pick one little Indian girl from a village in the middle of nowhere, get engaged to her, save her from zombies, and then leave her to an entirely different kind of monster.” Her lips twitch into a snarl at the recollection, and a tiny part of Gilbert finds himself feeling sorry for Maya. “Arthur’s life was easy to ruin once I had taken his precious hunter away, and if I can ruin Gabriel’s life as well, then that’s two birds with one stone. Gabriel thought it prudent to avoid the Kirkland home and let Arthur grieve. Of course, by the time he did get there, Arthur believed it had been Gabriel who had ratted out the coven’s location in the first place. After all, who else knew their hiding place but him? Who would have the motive to do it?” Thin, delicate looking fingers tighten on the book in her hands. “He never once thought about me. For all his gentlemanly posing, he never thinks about how a woman can be just as effective as man in all things.”
“I could kiss you for such brilliance - on the mouth, with tongues, even - if I wasn’t utterly certain that you’d smack me again.” Gilbert laughs unsteadily, but beams none the less. The word brilliant is all he can think, and he wants to repeat it over and over again. “Fucking -- Christ, that’s beautiful. Perfect planning and execution, you know that? I mean, that’s talent, using anger like that. You’d be a better demon than about ninety percent of the mud monkeys and Hellspawn we recruit Down Below.”
“As they say, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” A wry smile crosses Maya’s pale lips. “ “And from you, I’ll take the praise. But don’t forget that I had a lot of time to plan, and the Hunters already had an inkling on our coven’s location. I just made it especially obvious.” She pauses to steal a glance out the window. The lights of Tokyo shine in the distance. “If Gabriel had actually tipped them off, then he deserves even more punishment. A bastard he may be, but he was at least loyal to one thing. Even if it wasn’t me.”
“In my experience,” Gilbert says, “Loyalty is rarely a saving grace.” He glances out the train window, watching the countryside morph into the city as they spedd down the rails. The lessons of what the right thing to be loyal to swirl in the back of his mind, and he quickly pushes them aside. “Anyway, how long you in Tokyo for?”
“Couple of nights, visiting a friend, seeing the night life. I like cities. They’re always full of life, even in the dead of night.” She shrugs. “Can’t leave the boys at home for too long or they’ll set the house on fire. How about you?”
Gilbert groans, “Work for the Downstairs for three days, then I’m back to the regular job instead of this quasi-diplomatic bullshit.” The intercom interuptes Gilbert’s train of thought as it cheerfully announces that the train would be arriving in Tokyo in five minutes. “We should, however, grab a bite to eat at some point. Literally if you’d like.”
Maya takes a moment to consider the offer then nods. “Literally may happen.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” Gilbert says. “It’s child’s play compared to Downstairs.”
They both go about getting up and gathering their things in silence - but this time it isn’t one full of resent and irritation. It is a comfortable one, one that demonstrates a surprising amount of understanding for the other.
When the train comes to a hault and the passengers are permitted off the train, they shuffle after each other, eyes focused straight ahead and grumbling about the people in front of them moving at a snail’s pace.
They part in opposite directions once they’re on the platform, Gilbert promising to call when he has an evening break and Maya laughing, saying she’s looking forward to it.
When he’s certain she’s out of sight, Gilbert blinks and shakes his head once or twice, trying to gauge what just happened. It isn’t sympathy for a mud monkey - she isn’t that, not quite - but it isn’t an encounter he can shrug off either.
He quietly decides that he should put in a claim for Maya’s soul when he returns to work. Not because he intends on devouring it, but because he has not found someone so well suited for demon apprenticeship in centuries, and it certainly has never been someone he’s genuinely enjoyed speaking to.
Fin
Notes
--Title comes from David Bowie's 5.15 the Angels have Gone
--yes this stupid fic made me ship it i regret nothing
Author/Artist: hellzabeth and megkips
Character(s) or Pairing(s): Maya, Gilber
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Swearing
Summary: Unlikely passengers speak of curses and things past. They are delighted to find out that they have helped each other in their plans.
Gilbert is many things. Cruel, capricious, vindictive, self-centered and awesome in all the wrong ways. He delights in the suffering of others and delights more in causing it - using virtues like honest and trust to ensnare souls for Hell. But he himself is not without some essence of what he was before he fell. He is, on occasion, capable of sympathizing with what he can only call mud monkeys, and it worries him.
He and Maya first meet when she yells at him. They are in the Kirkland mansion, and he refuses to open any of the doors. The sun is dawning and there is one vampire left out of doors. He pays her no regard then and she does the same.
The second time they meet, they are both in America, going about their private business. Gilbert is walking in a human’s body to another bar, and for a moment he swears someone recognizes him. Maya walks past, alone, her cheeks ruddy and face discontent. They say nothing to each other.
Third time’s a charm. They are both sitting in a train station in Japan, waiting for a departure. Gilbert is in no mudmonkey suit - he is simply himself, horns shrunk down to be obscured by his hair and tail hidden in his trousers. He almost looks human - plain suit and tie, briefcase with nothing in it - but not even the cologne he wears can mask the scent of Hell’s brimstone. Maya is the only one who dares to sit near him, and he pays her no mind until, in some mix of terror and anger she hisses, “Demon!” at him.
Gilbert stiffens for a moment - because he doesn’t know the speaker and if there’s a hunter next to him, he’s fucked - but when he sees Maya he simply frowns. “Do I know you, lady?”
“England. 1866.”
“...” Gilbert says in return. He tries to gather his thoughts. “Shit. I thought all you fucks were dead.”
Olive-brown eyes remain cold even when she smiles. “Good. That’s how I wanted it.”
A moment’s silence settles on them, awkward and suffocating.
“How did you--” they both start. “After you---”
Maya takes the awkwardness and veers the conversation away from herself as quickly as she can, “What’s a demon doing in a train station in Japan anyway?”
“Going to a meeting,” Gilbert says.
“And you can’t fly or teleport?”
Gilbert frowns and readjusts his tie. “You don’t teleport into the lands of foreign gods. Pisses them off.” He check the time again and stands. “Where are you headed?”
When Maya informs him that she’s off to Tokyo, they both scramble for their tickets and sigh upon the revelation that they’re seated next to each other.
“New rule,” Maya declares. “You don’t talk to me, I don’t talk to you, we never speak of this again. Got it?”
“And might I ask what it is I’ve done to you personally that you feel the need to be a grade A bitch, Kirkland?”
In the back of his mind, Gilbert curses vampiric reflexes as Maya’s hand slaps his cheek that he’s nearly sent flying across the railroad tracks. He manages, at the very least, to look undignified and to be wearing a large, red hand print on his cheek. Maya glares back at him.
“That was never, and will never, be my surname,” she says. Gilbert moves to reply, but is cut off by a train whistle and a flurry of motion by other passengers to get aboard.
Once on board and in their seats, the vampire and the demon try their best to ignore each other. Two hours is a long time to sit next to someone whose very existence makes your blood boil. They succeed for a little while - Gilbert busies himself with an iPhone and Maya buries her nose in a book. On occasion one shifts and bumps the other, only for the other to shrug it off.
Eventually they both become bored. Gilbert pockets his iPhone and begins to fidget and Maya finds herself unable to concentrate on her book. She shoots him looks to get him to stop fidgeting, but he only fidgets more.
“Why’d you leave?” he asks finally.
“We stopped pretending rather fast, didn’t we?”
“Hey, forty five minutes is impressive. So really, why’d you leave?”
Maya stares at Gilbert, forgetting to blink entirely. After what seems like an eternity, she snaps her book shut and puts it aside, folding her hands neatly in her lap. “Because he ruined my life,” she says plainly, but for all of her calmness, there is hate brimming just below the surface. “And because I believe in karma.” Another pause, and a suddenly more confident tone.“You have a lot of time to think of ways to torment one’s tormentor when you’re immortal. After 200 years, I saw my chance, took the one thing I cared about, and left.”
Gilbert raises an eyebrow and smiles. “Did you do anything to say, ensure that karma?”
“Are you really so ignorant about other religions that you have to ask that?”
“Fuck you,” Gilbert shoots back, offended by the notion. “I’m asking because when that fucker and his butt buddy exorcised me, I cursed the bastard to die alone and unloved.”
Maya stops entirely and for a moment, she looks like a perfect corpse. Gilbert watches her eyebrows rise and eyes widen, and he thinks perhaps in horror. It’s when her lips twitch and purse together, twitching upwards, that he is proven wrong.
A few restrained sounds came from the vampire, stifling a laugh.
Eventually she bursts into hysterics, doubling over and grabbing at her stomach. Her laugh is perfectly human, loud and lovely and still gasping for air that her lungs stopped needing long ago. Tears well in her eyes, and it takes here a while to spit out anything close to a coherent sentence. Eventually she manages, “Y-you, that’s- he’d never- I can’t even begin- oh Shiva this is just mad!”
“I fuck you not!” Gilbert grins back, his pride beaming through. “Shit, I think I owe you a giant bit of gratitude for making that happen.” He finds himself laughing too at the sheer absurdity of the situation. For this to happen - to be sitting next to someone that emotionally damaged one of the few creatures on Earth that Gilbert loathed more than humanity - it is too rich, and he soon finds himself in hysterics too. If any of the other passengers are bothered by it, they say nothing.
Maya regains her self control first, fanning herself with her book. “I was doing it for myself, and for Li Shui, not for you. Don’t be grateful because I’m selfish.” She shakes her head. “There were some good people in that coven. People who probably didn’t deserve what they got. But...” her eyes narrow and her face becomes so much colder, as if she’s staring down a version of Arthur Kirkland that’s sitting across from her. “No matter how much good there was in them, Arthur deserved to lose them. Because they were so good, it would hurt him more. Because he loved them, he would hate himself for losing them.” Her voice drifted off, as if there was more to say. If there was, Gilbert never heard it because she then brightened, saying“Oh, I haven’t told you the best part of it all yet.”
“Hold up, hold up,” Gilbert says, his face lighting up with chidlish delight that looks so, so wrong on his face. “There’s more?”
Maya smiled at Gilbert, and perhaps had he not been a demon he would have been worried. It was a fond smile, but fond in a way that recalls something wonderful and terrible. He knows he look - he’s worn it many times himself.
“You’re probably aware what keen gossips vampires are.” she starts. “They’ll pass around a story as fast as a bat can fly, the more scandalous the better. And with the whole Kirkland coven but one eradicated, there’s got to be a culprit somewhere.” She glances over to Gilbert. “I’m sure you remember Gabriel dos Anjos as well as I do.”
Gilbert stiffenesat the mere mention of the name. “I’m familiar with the son of a bitch who should have been exposed the minute he left his mother’s womb, yes.”
“Very true. Not only is he a hunter, a hypocrite and a murderer, but he also has a tendency to leave women at the altar before letting his vampire boyfriend take them home as a snack. Pick one little Indian girl from a village in the middle of nowhere, get engaged to her, save her from zombies, and then leave her to an entirely different kind of monster.” Her lips twitch into a snarl at the recollection, and a tiny part of Gilbert finds himself feeling sorry for Maya. “Arthur’s life was easy to ruin once I had taken his precious hunter away, and if I can ruin Gabriel’s life as well, then that’s two birds with one stone. Gabriel thought it prudent to avoid the Kirkland home and let Arthur grieve. Of course, by the time he did get there, Arthur believed it had been Gabriel who had ratted out the coven’s location in the first place. After all, who else knew their hiding place but him? Who would have the motive to do it?” Thin, delicate looking fingers tighten on the book in her hands. “He never once thought about me. For all his gentlemanly posing, he never thinks about how a woman can be just as effective as man in all things.”
“I could kiss you for such brilliance - on the mouth, with tongues, even - if I wasn’t utterly certain that you’d smack me again.” Gilbert laughs unsteadily, but beams none the less. The word brilliant is all he can think, and he wants to repeat it over and over again. “Fucking -- Christ, that’s beautiful. Perfect planning and execution, you know that? I mean, that’s talent, using anger like that. You’d be a better demon than about ninety percent of the mud monkeys and Hellspawn we recruit Down Below.”
“As they say, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” A wry smile crosses Maya’s pale lips. “ “And from you, I’ll take the praise. But don’t forget that I had a lot of time to plan, and the Hunters already had an inkling on our coven’s location. I just made it especially obvious.” She pauses to steal a glance out the window. The lights of Tokyo shine in the distance. “If Gabriel had actually tipped them off, then he deserves even more punishment. A bastard he may be, but he was at least loyal to one thing. Even if it wasn’t me.”
“In my experience,” Gilbert says, “Loyalty is rarely a saving grace.” He glances out the train window, watching the countryside morph into the city as they spedd down the rails. The lessons of what the right thing to be loyal to swirl in the back of his mind, and he quickly pushes them aside. “Anyway, how long you in Tokyo for?”
“Couple of nights, visiting a friend, seeing the night life. I like cities. They’re always full of life, even in the dead of night.” She shrugs. “Can’t leave the boys at home for too long or they’ll set the house on fire. How about you?”
Gilbert groans, “Work for the Downstairs for three days, then I’m back to the regular job instead of this quasi-diplomatic bullshit.” The intercom interuptes Gilbert’s train of thought as it cheerfully announces that the train would be arriving in Tokyo in five minutes. “We should, however, grab a bite to eat at some point. Literally if you’d like.”
Maya takes a moment to consider the offer then nods. “Literally may happen.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” Gilbert says. “It’s child’s play compared to Downstairs.”
They both go about getting up and gathering their things in silence - but this time it isn’t one full of resent and irritation. It is a comfortable one, one that demonstrates a surprising amount of understanding for the other.
When the train comes to a hault and the passengers are permitted off the train, they shuffle after each other, eyes focused straight ahead and grumbling about the people in front of them moving at a snail’s pace.
They part in opposite directions once they’re on the platform, Gilbert promising to call when he has an evening break and Maya laughing, saying she’s looking forward to it.
When he’s certain she’s out of sight, Gilbert blinks and shakes his head once or twice, trying to gauge what just happened. It isn’t sympathy for a mud monkey - she isn’t that, not quite - but it isn’t an encounter he can shrug off either.
He quietly decides that he should put in a claim for Maya’s soul when he returns to work. Not because he intends on devouring it, but because he has not found someone so well suited for demon apprenticeship in centuries, and it certainly has never been someone he’s genuinely enjoyed speaking to.
Fin
Notes
--Title comes from David Bowie's 5.15 the Angels have Gone
--yes this stupid fic made me ship it i regret nothing