I finally finished my second BtVS/Xena crossover fic
Previous story in this series: Even Archangels Get the Blues
Previous chapters in this story, "Apocalypse, Now and Then":
1. To Send a Message
2. Waste Not, Want Not
3. War...What is it Good For?
4. Dying is Easy; Comedy is Hard
Or see Twisting the Hellmouth for both stories in their entirety.
[So sorry for the unconscionably long delay, but I've decided to post this problematic chapter and the two final chapters that come after it just as they are, with all their un-beta'd flaws, lest another four years pass before I finish what I started.]
APOCALYPSE, NOW AND THEN
Chapter Five: “Apokalypsis, or Dropping the Veils”
Servant of God, well done; well hast thou fought
The better fight.
John Milton, Paradise Lost. Book vi. Line 29.
Meanwhile, back in Angel's corner of reality . . .
Angel felt as though he was teetering on the brink of an abyss of hopelessness, now that most of his Ares memories had been restored. It had taken him the better part of the twentieth century to begin to get past the guilt and despair in his soul over his crimes as Angelus, and this was much worse, in a way. Ares might never have delighted in the extended torture and destruction of individual human beings in the intimate way that Angelus had, but centuries of being a god of war had made him directly and indirectly responsible for a body-count that even Angelus couldn't have imagined. When it came to causing human misery and horror, Angelus was an old-fashioned artisan, creating his hand-crafted, one-off "masterpieces" of terror and death, while Ares had been an industrialist in comparison, capable of mass-production.
Angel swayed and had to lean against the nearest wall to keep from physically collapsing, though from somewhere deep inside he felt compelled to snark at the archangel. "If I didn’t already know I was damned before, then I might be really upset right now. I never had a chance for redemption, did I?"
Michael was looking at him quizzically, as though Angel was some species of creature that the archangel had never seen before. "Cordelia really wasn't kidding about you and your talent for Olympic gold medal brooding, was she?" he remarked.
The archangel's comment achieved its desired effect. Angel was momentarily distracted from contemplation of his own wretched misdeeds.
"Cordelia? You've seen her, talked to her? Is she alright?"
Michael smiled, but his eyes glittered with mockery as he answered, "She's a non-corporeal, supposedly spiritually enlightened, eternal pain in the butt. So yes, by your standards, she’s alright . . . .”
Angel felt a twinge of relief at hearing that Cordy was still so very much herself. Perhaps he no longer needed to count Cordelia Chase, at least, among those he’d failed to save or whose deaths he’d caused.
Again, the archangel’s eyes seem to indicate that he could clearly hear and see the thoughts going through Angel’s head as he continued, “. . . And she's still watching out for you and yours, even though she's not supposed to, in case you were wondering. You might want to remember that - and a few other things - the next time you feel tempted to throw yourself headlong into the pools of hellfire you think you so richly deserve."
Angel stiffened in resentment at Michael's scoffing tone. He might sometimes tolerate that sort of mockery of his character and beliefs from Spike, but Spike was . . . well, Spike: an idiot whose supposed ‘insights’ could be easily dismissed. To hear that same irreverence for his century of guilt and grief coming from a supposedly higher being was intolerable. Especially now that he knew how much more guilt his soul had to carry.
Angel lashed out: "This is all just a game to you, isn't it? Human life? My life . . . or un-life, anyway? You just sit around up there, wherever you come from, and don't give a rat's ass about any of us here on earth. War, suffering, death, and despair -- it's all just a Saturday matinee to you, is that it? Buffy, the Slayers, me, Connor, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred . . . hell, even SPIKE: we’re all nothing more than toys for you to toss around!"
"Ah, self-righteous anger!" Michael exclaimed. "That's an improvement over despair, at least. At the risk of swelling your formerly mortal ego too much, weren’t you the guy who once gave his son the ‘doesn’t matter what we’ve suffered or where we came from’ speech?”
As if the archangel’s words were a command, Angel found himself mentally reliving that first confrontation with Connor after Wesley had rescued him from months of starving on the bottom of the ocean. He’d still been pretty light-headed and borderline delusional at the time, but he dimly recalled telling his son, “Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us: Champions. Doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be . . .”
Angel shifted uncomfortably. “You know, I may not have been entirely in my right mind, yet, when I said that, what with the starving . . . ." He trailed off, sounding whiny even to his own ears. Something about this current bubble of space-time seemed to resist attempts at self-deception.
Michael’s smile almost reached his eyes this time, as he replied, “I’m sorry, but if you’re going to be childish about this, Angel, then you should know that I called ‘no take-backs’ before. So I guess you’re stuck with those words and the commitment they represent. Like it or not, you’re a Champion . . . when you choose to put your body and mind where your mouth used to be.”
“But . . . !” Angel knew there was something wrong with the archangel’s attitude and argument, somewhere, if only he could put his finger on it. He briefly wondered when it was that he’d lost his brooding momentum in this conversation. “But . . . now that I know the full extent of what I’ve done, the people I’ve hurt not only in these past few centuries but back when I was still Ares, how can I ever make up for it -- for any of it? How can my soul ever be anything but damned? What am I supposed to do with the rest of my immortality, since I didn’t wind up a pile of dust tonight as I was supposed to?”
“’Supposed to’?” Michael quirked an eyebrow at that last bit. “I hate to break it to you, Angel, but that’s not really for you to decide. Your will is as free as anyone else’s to decide where you go and what you do and how you’ll love, and you’re as free as anyone else to make good or bad choices. But destiny and damnation? No, THAT you don’t get to decide for yourself. It’s simply not your business.”
Angel opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it, realizing that -- though he thought he’d learned a lot and figured out quite a few things about heaven and hell over the course of his existence -- he might be getting way out of his depth, now.
Michael took advantage of Angel’s momentary speechlessness and pressed his advantage: “This might be hard for you to accept, Liam, but your father’s opinions and God’s opinions aren’t necessarily one and the same. That fellow Freud was mistaken about a lot of things - and yes, I told him so, personally, when his soul returned to us that time and he was in no position to argue - but some of what he said about fathers and sons and your mortal ideas about God were right on the money, from what I’ve observed.
“I can accept the possibility that, on some level, your soul remembers a time when your father Zeus really WAS the supreme deity, as far as you or anyone else you knew was concerned. But in your current incarnation? Not so much!”
Michael paused to take an unneeded breath, giving his words a second to sink in before bringing out what might be his ‘big gun’ against the champion’s stubbornness.
"I know you may have a couple of millennia worth of father-issues to work out here, since you never got much in the way of approval or encouragement from any of the fathers you’ve had in any of your incarnations. But try not to let that slop over into other aspects of existence and blind you to better possibilities, will you? Or in other words, and this is a direct quote from Cordelia, ‘GET. OVER. IT.’”
Angel’s lips twisted into an expression of mockery as he said, “What? You mean heaven’s started grading on the curve, suddenly? You mean all those lives I destroyed, all the suffering and misery I caused -- they don’t really matter in heaven’s eyes, as long as I’m willing to be a good little soldier now? Are you telling me that mass-murder and unspeakable tortures really CAN be wiped out by a certain number of heroic saves?”
Michael refused to take the bait. Angel had been trying to provoke him, to distract him from a topic more painful, somehow, than the prospect of his own eternal damnation. But Michael had seen it all before, over the many millennia of his existence, and he’d been tired of this particular drama back when the pyramids were new. No matter how screwed up a parent-child relationship might be, there were children who’d prefer to believe any number of horrible things about themselves and their ability to be loved or forgiven, rather than admit that Mommy or Daddy might have been WRONG about something that important.
Though Michael was never anything but pleased about having been created as an angel, it was times like these that made him give even more profound thanks that he’d never had parents as the mortal world knew them, and so wasn't tempted to spend the rest of Eternity obsessing over them or blaming them for his non-existent (he was an archangel, after all) flaws.
Naturally, he reflected, Angel would prefer to pick a fight with an immensely powerful archangel who could (in all modesty) swat him like a fly, rather than allow this uncomfortable conversation to proceed. But Michael wasn’t falling for it.
He was, however, starting to run out of patience (which had never been his strongest trait at the best of times). There was a reason why they usually sent someone else to do the more 'touchy-feely', non-fatal-type mortal interventions. Michael had always been far better suited to changing minds through changing someone's anatomy with a really big sword than to trying the non-violent, soft-sell approach. They had specialists for that. Unfortunately, this assignment called for both sword-wielding and counseling, and the Boss had decided that Michael could jolly well do the talking, as long as he was here for the hacking and cleaving.
Now, he was actually feeling tired. He hadn’t fought this hard in centuries, perhaps not even once in the millennia since he'd battled Xena for control of heaven, and though he was created before the dawn of time to relish warring against evil, he knew he’d . . . what was that human expression again? . . . Ah, yes, he’d ‘feel it in the morning.’ The archangel’s tolerance for Angel’s self-flagellation was about used up, for now, and there were things that needed to be said before Michael could restore this pocket of reality to normal space-time and return with his comrades to heaven for some much-needed R&R (Rest and Re-inspiration).
Messed up or not, Angel would just have to ‘suck it up’ and listen, this once.
Besides, apart from the whole 'greater good' issue, Michael had made a bet about Angel with the soul that had once been Sigmund Freud, and when archangels stooped to wagering of any kind, they really hated to lose.
“No, you’re right about one thing, at least,” Michael continued, trying not to let his sardonic tendencies become too overbearing. “Heaven doesn’t grade on a curve, Angel. But we DO give extra points for courage, especially the courage to keep on doing good in the absence of any hope of success or gain, or even hope of salvation. When you mortals - and ex-mortals, and even ex-immortals - transcend your own limitations out of genuine love for others, we . . . Well, let’s just say we take notice. Of course, so do those on the other side, and they go to some lengths to make the cost of courage so high that no-one will ever want to pay it twice.
“But you’ve figured that part out for yourself, haven’t you, . . . Spike?”
------------------------
On to Chapter Six: Working Out Your Own Salvation
[Second 'mea culpa' note: I cannot apologize sufficiently to readers of this story -- if you're still out there -- for letting this sit unfinished for the past four years. I found and revised my draft of chapter five this afternoon, after work, and even though it lost none of the 'preachiness' that my beta readers had been concerned about back in the Spring of 2007, I decided to go ahead and post it . . . IF, that is, I also finished the final two chapters that were meant to follow it. Which I've done tonight, amazingly enough.
The next two chapters are completely un-beta'd, but at least they're a little bit more fun than this chapter, which was so very heavy on the psychological and theological exposition, in spite of my having four years to try to come up with a better way to finish this part of the story.]
Previous chapters in this story, "Apocalypse, Now and Then":
1. To Send a Message
2. Waste Not, Want Not
3. War...What is it Good For?
4. Dying is Easy; Comedy is Hard
Or see Twisting the Hellmouth for both stories in their entirety.
[So sorry for the unconscionably long delay, but I've decided to post this problematic chapter and the two final chapters that come after it just as they are, with all their un-beta'd flaws, lest another four years pass before I finish what I started.]
APOCALYPSE, NOW AND THEN
Chapter Five: “Apokalypsis, or Dropping the Veils”
Servant of God, well done; well hast thou fought
The better fight.
John Milton, Paradise Lost. Book vi. Line 29.
Meanwhile, back in Angel's corner of reality . . .
Angel felt as though he was teetering on the brink of an abyss of hopelessness, now that most of his Ares memories had been restored. It had taken him the better part of the twentieth century to begin to get past the guilt and despair in his soul over his crimes as Angelus, and this was much worse, in a way. Ares might never have delighted in the extended torture and destruction of individual human beings in the intimate way that Angelus had, but centuries of being a god of war had made him directly and indirectly responsible for a body-count that even Angelus couldn't have imagined. When it came to causing human misery and horror, Angelus was an old-fashioned artisan, creating his hand-crafted, one-off "masterpieces" of terror and death, while Ares had been an industrialist in comparison, capable of mass-production.
Angel swayed and had to lean against the nearest wall to keep from physically collapsing, though from somewhere deep inside he felt compelled to snark at the archangel. "If I didn’t already know I was damned before, then I might be really upset right now. I never had a chance for redemption, did I?"
Michael was looking at him quizzically, as though Angel was some species of creature that the archangel had never seen before. "Cordelia really wasn't kidding about you and your talent for Olympic gold medal brooding, was she?" he remarked.
The archangel's comment achieved its desired effect. Angel was momentarily distracted from contemplation of his own wretched misdeeds.
"Cordelia? You've seen her, talked to her? Is she alright?"
Michael smiled, but his eyes glittered with mockery as he answered, "She's a non-corporeal, supposedly spiritually enlightened, eternal pain in the butt. So yes, by your standards, she’s alright . . . .”
Angel felt a twinge of relief at hearing that Cordy was still so very much herself. Perhaps he no longer needed to count Cordelia Chase, at least, among those he’d failed to save or whose deaths he’d caused.
Again, the archangel’s eyes seem to indicate that he could clearly hear and see the thoughts going through Angel’s head as he continued, “. . . And she's still watching out for you and yours, even though she's not supposed to, in case you were wondering. You might want to remember that - and a few other things - the next time you feel tempted to throw yourself headlong into the pools of hellfire you think you so richly deserve."
Angel stiffened in resentment at Michael's scoffing tone. He might sometimes tolerate that sort of mockery of his character and beliefs from Spike, but Spike was . . . well, Spike: an idiot whose supposed ‘insights’ could be easily dismissed. To hear that same irreverence for his century of guilt and grief coming from a supposedly higher being was intolerable. Especially now that he knew how much more guilt his soul had to carry.
Angel lashed out: "This is all just a game to you, isn't it? Human life? My life . . . or un-life, anyway? You just sit around up there, wherever you come from, and don't give a rat's ass about any of us here on earth. War, suffering, death, and despair -- it's all just a Saturday matinee to you, is that it? Buffy, the Slayers, me, Connor, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred . . . hell, even SPIKE: we’re all nothing more than toys for you to toss around!"
"Ah, self-righteous anger!" Michael exclaimed. "That's an improvement over despair, at least. At the risk of swelling your formerly mortal ego too much, weren’t you the guy who once gave his son the ‘doesn’t matter what we’ve suffered or where we came from’ speech?”
As if the archangel’s words were a command, Angel found himself mentally reliving that first confrontation with Connor after Wesley had rescued him from months of starving on the bottom of the ocean. He’d still been pretty light-headed and borderline delusional at the time, but he dimly recalled telling his son, “Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us: Champions. Doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be . . .”
Angel shifted uncomfortably. “You know, I may not have been entirely in my right mind, yet, when I said that, what with the starving . . . ." He trailed off, sounding whiny even to his own ears. Something about this current bubble of space-time seemed to resist attempts at self-deception.
Michael’s smile almost reached his eyes this time, as he replied, “I’m sorry, but if you’re going to be childish about this, Angel, then you should know that I called ‘no take-backs’ before. So I guess you’re stuck with those words and the commitment they represent. Like it or not, you’re a Champion . . . when you choose to put your body and mind where your mouth used to be.”
“But . . . !” Angel knew there was something wrong with the archangel’s attitude and argument, somewhere, if only he could put his finger on it. He briefly wondered when it was that he’d lost his brooding momentum in this conversation. “But . . . now that I know the full extent of what I’ve done, the people I’ve hurt not only in these past few centuries but back when I was still Ares, how can I ever make up for it -- for any of it? How can my soul ever be anything but damned? What am I supposed to do with the rest of my immortality, since I didn’t wind up a pile of dust tonight as I was supposed to?”
“’Supposed to’?” Michael quirked an eyebrow at that last bit. “I hate to break it to you, Angel, but that’s not really for you to decide. Your will is as free as anyone else’s to decide where you go and what you do and how you’ll love, and you’re as free as anyone else to make good or bad choices. But destiny and damnation? No, THAT you don’t get to decide for yourself. It’s simply not your business.”
Angel opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it, realizing that -- though he thought he’d learned a lot and figured out quite a few things about heaven and hell over the course of his existence -- he might be getting way out of his depth, now.
Michael took advantage of Angel’s momentary speechlessness and pressed his advantage: “This might be hard for you to accept, Liam, but your father’s opinions and God’s opinions aren’t necessarily one and the same. That fellow Freud was mistaken about a lot of things - and yes, I told him so, personally, when his soul returned to us that time and he was in no position to argue - but some of what he said about fathers and sons and your mortal ideas about God were right on the money, from what I’ve observed.
“I can accept the possibility that, on some level, your soul remembers a time when your father Zeus really WAS the supreme deity, as far as you or anyone else you knew was concerned. But in your current incarnation? Not so much!”
Michael paused to take an unneeded breath, giving his words a second to sink in before bringing out what might be his ‘big gun’ against the champion’s stubbornness.
"I know you may have a couple of millennia worth of father-issues to work out here, since you never got much in the way of approval or encouragement from any of the fathers you’ve had in any of your incarnations. But try not to let that slop over into other aspects of existence and blind you to better possibilities, will you? Or in other words, and this is a direct quote from Cordelia, ‘GET. OVER. IT.’”
Angel’s lips twisted into an expression of mockery as he said, “What? You mean heaven’s started grading on the curve, suddenly? You mean all those lives I destroyed, all the suffering and misery I caused -- they don’t really matter in heaven’s eyes, as long as I’m willing to be a good little soldier now? Are you telling me that mass-murder and unspeakable tortures really CAN be wiped out by a certain number of heroic saves?”
Michael refused to take the bait. Angel had been trying to provoke him, to distract him from a topic more painful, somehow, than the prospect of his own eternal damnation. But Michael had seen it all before, over the many millennia of his existence, and he’d been tired of this particular drama back when the pyramids were new. No matter how screwed up a parent-child relationship might be, there were children who’d prefer to believe any number of horrible things about themselves and their ability to be loved or forgiven, rather than admit that Mommy or Daddy might have been WRONG about something that important.
Though Michael was never anything but pleased about having been created as an angel, it was times like these that made him give even more profound thanks that he’d never had parents as the mortal world knew them, and so wasn't tempted to spend the rest of Eternity obsessing over them or blaming them for his non-existent (he was an archangel, after all) flaws.
Naturally, he reflected, Angel would prefer to pick a fight with an immensely powerful archangel who could (in all modesty) swat him like a fly, rather than allow this uncomfortable conversation to proceed. But Michael wasn’t falling for it.
He was, however, starting to run out of patience (which had never been his strongest trait at the best of times). There was a reason why they usually sent someone else to do the more 'touchy-feely', non-fatal-type mortal interventions. Michael had always been far better suited to changing minds through changing someone's anatomy with a really big sword than to trying the non-violent, soft-sell approach. They had specialists for that. Unfortunately, this assignment called for both sword-wielding and counseling, and the Boss had decided that Michael could jolly well do the talking, as long as he was here for the hacking and cleaving.
Now, he was actually feeling tired. He hadn’t fought this hard in centuries, perhaps not even once in the millennia since he'd battled Xena for control of heaven, and though he was created before the dawn of time to relish warring against evil, he knew he’d . . . what was that human expression again? . . . Ah, yes, he’d ‘feel it in the morning.’ The archangel’s tolerance for Angel’s self-flagellation was about used up, for now, and there were things that needed to be said before Michael could restore this pocket of reality to normal space-time and return with his comrades to heaven for some much-needed R&R (Rest and Re-inspiration).
Messed up or not, Angel would just have to ‘suck it up’ and listen, this once.
Besides, apart from the whole 'greater good' issue, Michael had made a bet about Angel with the soul that had once been Sigmund Freud, and when archangels stooped to wagering of any kind, they really hated to lose.
“No, you’re right about one thing, at least,” Michael continued, trying not to let his sardonic tendencies become too overbearing. “Heaven doesn’t grade on a curve, Angel. But we DO give extra points for courage, especially the courage to keep on doing good in the absence of any hope of success or gain, or even hope of salvation. When you mortals - and ex-mortals, and even ex-immortals - transcend your own limitations out of genuine love for others, we . . . Well, let’s just say we take notice. Of course, so do those on the other side, and they go to some lengths to make the cost of courage so high that no-one will ever want to pay it twice.
“But you’ve figured that part out for yourself, haven’t you, . . . Spike?”
------------------------
On to Chapter Six: Working Out Your Own Salvation
[Second 'mea culpa' note: I cannot apologize sufficiently to readers of this story -- if you're still out there -- for letting this sit unfinished for the past four years. I found and revised my draft of chapter five this afternoon, after work, and even though it lost none of the 'preachiness' that my beta readers had been concerned about back in the Spring of 2007, I decided to go ahead and post it . . . IF, that is, I also finished the final two chapters that were meant to follow it. Which I've done tonight, amazingly enough.
The next two chapters are completely un-beta'd, but at least they're a little bit more fun than this chapter, which was so very heavy on the psychological and theological exposition, in spite of my having four years to try to come up with a better way to finish this part of the story.]