Chapter Text
The first thing Michael ever knew was the feeling of their brother’s blood on their hands.
Ten millennia later and they still remember how it felt. This was before feeling existed, technically; before Heaven, before Hell, before the fall. Before everything, and just a moment after nothing.
No one, not even the angels, ever experienced the Nothing.
But Michael experienced the after-nothing, and they remember. They remember that it was not light, or fire, or some bright supernova in the inky expanse of void that birthed the first angels. That would come later, when later existed.
No. In the beginning, it was blood.
And Michael can still feel it. The wet warmth lingers, sticky beneath their nails, thick against their eyelids. They remember the itching, the grinding of bones as one being was split down the middle, until they were no longer one thing, but many things, all at once—eyes and limbs, steel and gold, incinerating heat and crystallizing cold.
In the mess of it, they struggled, one hand wound in the others’ guts, another sifting through fine feathers and broken veins, one more gripping the ridges of a single spine, clinging, clawing, clinging. There was black ink in their eyes, bitter water down their throats, a splitting that rendered them from skull to heel—
And that was existence.
(Maybe this, Michael thinks now, is where it all went wrong. The splitting of a single soul under God’s knowing hand—a hand that cannot do wrong by nature, and to even think it, of course, would be blasphemy.)
(But if He hadn’t, Mic thinks. If He had not cleaved them, split the divine clay that was their perfect flesh, then maybe . . .)
What did it matter? For a moment—the first moment—they were one, and when that moment was over, they were two. Michael watched as their brother’s bones reformed, eyes shifting, as if he knew immediately where they ought to go. Michael stayed, bone shards in their belly, limbs disorganized, golden blood flowing in the void. It hurt, but this was how they were Made. Why would they change?
Of course, it was Lucifer’s hands that dug into their skin, bold enough to sculpt. Lucifer’s fingers that pried open an airway, before there was ever air. Lucifer’s thumbs, pressing, insistent as they tried to form their lips into a smile. Let me help, his hands seemed to say. Like this. See?
And Michael did see. Through their brother’s glowing eyes, they saw themself: grey skin, darkening as it pulled tight over angelic bones; a dozen pale eyes, learning to blink; six silver wings, unused, stretching, flaked with glittering viscera; their mouth under Lucifer’s hands, unmoving, set in a rigid, iron line.
It was the first and last time Michael saw anything the way Lucifer did.
But it would not be the last time they felt his blood on their hands.