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Andrew doesn’t know how long he’s been driving. The sun was high in the sky when he started, but now it’s starting to set, lighting the sky with fire that slowly spreads outwards from the horizon. He’s ten minutes out from the motel room Aaron has been staying in, but he’s taking the scenic route, letting himself enjoy every second of the drive, the convertible top and the way the wind ruffles through his hair.
He doesn’t remember exactly why he left the room. Maybe it was something about the angel, Kevin, the way he loomed over Andrew, who was still covered in the dirt of the grave he crawled out of. Maybe it was the way he lectured Andrew about potential, about responsibility, about prophecy.
Maybe it was about Riko, the other angel, how he shot disgusted looks at Aaron every other minute, and used the word ‘purge’ too freely when speaking about the impending apocalypse. Maybe it was the existence of an apocalypse in and of itself.
Maybe Andrew left because of Aaron, how he looked at Andrew with fear in his eyes instead of welcome, how he seemed more upset that Andrew had resurrected than grateful or relieved. Even when Andrew had sold his soul to the crossroads demon for Aaron’s soul in the first place, Aaron still hadn’t been particularly enthused about his second chance at life.
Then again, at the time, Aaron had just been resurrected himself, and as they later learned, resurrection comes with a host of other problems.
Maybe the Minyard twins were just born to die. Maybe they kept fucking it up by sacrificing themselves to save the other. Maybe Andrew should have stayed buried in that grave instead of climbing his way out.
Then again, maybe Andrew was driving because he missed his damn car.
He pulls into the parking lot of the motel and puts the car into park. The sunset is obscured by the motel, but he leans back on the hood of his car and tries to watch it anyways.
In Hell, there wasn't any sunset. There was only the fire and the searing pain of metal through soul made flesh and every other horror devised by man or demon. Andrew has been dead for six months, but here he is, watching the sunset over another shitty motel. It’s almost like he never died at all.
There’s a sound in his periphery, one that hails trouble in every form.
“I was wondering if you were going to show up,” Andrew says, still facing forwards.
“I didn’t want to intrude on your super special angel meeting. I don’t think they would be particularly thrilled to see a demon with the Righteous Man.”
“I thought you three were friends,” Andrew says, as Neil walks into Andrew’s field of view.
“Why would you assume a demon and two angels are friends?” Neil asks.
“I wouldn’t assume that, but you all carpooled to get me,” Andrew says, lighting his cigarette. “So, I’m willing to reconsider some of my stereotypes.”
“You told Kevin you didn’t remember anything about your time in hell,” Neil says, moving to stand next to Andrew by the car. Andrew shakes his head ruefully. Just because Andrew didn’t see Neil earlier, doesn’t mean he wasn’t listening somehow.
“I lied,” Andrew says, taking a deep drag of his cigarette.
“You usually don’t do that,” Neil says, but his voice is light, void of any judgement.
“Hell must have changed me,” Andrew says, the ghost of a joke fluttering around his consonants. “You were supposed to watch Aaron.”
“No, I was supposed to keep Aaron safe and off demon blood,” Neil retorts, “which I did.”
“Semantics. You know what I meant.”
“Yeah, well, Hell changed me too, at some point,” Neil replies, his eyes flashing black. Andrew -- against all reason, against all instinct, against all of the experience he’s had with Neil -- flinches.
Neil steps back, his eyes their typical bright blue again. He turns from Andrew, his face a rictus of anger and something Andrew can’t place. Andrew doesn’t speak, just exhales a shuddering breath, and then inhales another lungful of smoke.
“I was too late,” Neil finally says, his voice hoarse and low. “They had you for so long.”
“It was six months,” Andrew says.
“Which is forty years in hell,” Neil snaps back, his voice as hot and sharp as one of the blades of the Head Torturer, Proust. Andrew now knows how to make that comparison. Neil looks at Andrew intensely and then turns away again. “That was forty years of torture, the worst torture hell can offer, all of an innocent man.”
“I’m no innocent,” Andrew dismisses, putting his cigarette back between his teeth for lack of anything else to do.
“A good man, then,” Neil says, still turned from Andrew. “The best of them.” There’s emotion in his voice, almost tangible in the air, deep and dark and inscrutable.
“How did you keep Aaron from getting back on the blood?” Andrew asks, hoping to lessen the tension enough that he can breathe. Aaron discovered that particular addiction the year before he died, before Andrew sold his soul to bring him back, when the demon Tilda revealed that she had chosen Aaron as one of her heirs. Andrew will never know why she chose Aaron’s cradle instead of Andrew’s to claim. He’s grateful either way.
After Andrew sold his soul, Aaron went off the reservation, experimenting with demon’s blood and the powers it gave him to stave off Andrew’s inevitable execution by the hounds of hell. Neil had attached himself to their duo at that point, and Andrew, who had given up on finding a way out of his deal, asked for his help in keeping Aaron away from the blood that was slowly but surely corrupting his soul.
A part of Andrew hadn’t expected Neil to follow through; after all, demons are relentlessly selfish, and unless they make a deal that secures a soul, they don’t adhere to bargains. Neil had followed through, however. Aaron showed none of the signs of being on the blood, the intense secrecy, the prolonged nightmares, the dark circles under his eyes even while appearing to be at the height of energy and power. He just looked like Aaron, the same way Andrew still looked like Andrew, and they both still looked like each other. Only their souls burn differently.
“I found a witch to monitor him above ground while Kevin and I were in the trenches,” Neil answers.
“A witch?” Andrew asks archly. “Like one of the ones we hunt for a living?”
“She’s been very good for him. He smiles now. He’s even reconsidering medical school.”
Andrew feels like the relative realms fucked up when choosing which of the brothers to champion. Aaron’s med school bleeding heart shit seems much more angelic than Andrew’s murder count and lack of general compassion or goodwill.
Even comparing their different deaths, Aaron had died righteously, saving people, hunting things, and Andrew died after he made a deal with a literal demon, sending his soul to hell to get Aaron back, but the angels still thought Andrew was the Righteous Man and Aaron was the Enemy.
“Great,” Andrew snarks around his cigarette, “is he turning in applications before or after our very existence causes the apocalypse? Or was he planning on putting that on his resumé?”
“He’s in love,” Neil says. “Anything is possible when you’re in love.”
“And what does a demon know about love?” Andrew asks. It’s intended to be cruel, but it comes out curious instead.
Neil doesn’t respond, but Andrew didn’t expect him to. Andrew has thought about the whole question of Neil’s origins before. What put Neil in Hell? Was it a crossroads deal as well? Most pressingly, why would a demon, even one that has spent most of their life as a human on Earth, help them at all? Neil’s help has stopped coming with strings for a long time now, which is antithetical to most demonic activity. Andrew still doesn’t have answers. The fact doesn’t worry him as much as it should.
“What’s your take on the main angel?” Andrew asks, genuinely curious. Neil has good instincts, even if he tends to paranoia, and Neil spent all forty of the years Andrew was in hell fighting through it with Kevin. He has to have some kind of insight.
“He’s a pedantic son of a bitch with a stick up his ass,” Neil offers immediately. Andrew barks a laugh, the first since he was resurrected. “But he fought like hell, pun not intended, to get to you. I respect that, at least.”
“And the other? Riko?” Andrew asks. Neil’s eyes flash black again. Andrew doesn’t flinch this time.
“Watch your back around him,” Neil says. His voice is forbidding. “Hell is, well, Hell, but heaven isn’t exactly a picnic. Angels are soldiers first and foremost. Angels like Riko are mercenaries, glory-hounds with control issues and a newly freed leash thanks to the largely absent Archangels. He doesn’t care about you, and he especially hates Aaron.”
“Why especially Aaron?” Andrew asks.
“He’s Lucifer’s Vessel. He will break the seal and bring about the end times. It is prophesied. He is tainted with demon’s blood, and thus cannot be of heaven,” Neil says, his voice shifting as he speaks, each word ringing with dull power, as though something else is speaking through his mouth. “Riko is an angel. Aaron’s very existence is reprehensible to him.”
“Well,” Andrew says, taking another drag of his cigarette, before dropping it on the ground and grinding it under his heel, “if he wants Aaron, he’ll have to go through me.”
“He won’t,” Neil says, shifting back into his usual cadence. “You’re the Sword of Michael. You’re the Savior. Riko won’t kill him because he needs you to. For both of you to be chosen as vessels, you needed to be brothers, but now they need you to be at war. They’ll exploit every disagreement, create a schism between you, and then they’ll use you both to bring about the end times.”
“Kevin says he’s trying to prevent the end times, not bring it about,” Andrew says.
“Kevin does not speak for heaven,” Neil says. “He’s relatively young for an angel. Most angels have been raring for another war, especially the older, more powerful ones. A war means a balance of power can shift, and there are many waiting in the wings ready to swoop in and take control of the Host.”
“How do you know so much about angelic politics?” Andrew asks. Neil blinks, and stumbles backwards from Andrew, looking caught out.
“I can’t tell you,” Neil finally says. Andrew blinks in surprise. He expected a lie.
“Okay,” Andrew says.
“Okay?” Neil asks skeptically.
“You’ll tell me soon,” Andrew says. “Before all of this is over, you’ll tell me.”
“You think so?” Neil says, retaking the ground he lost to stand next to Andrew. His eyes focus on Andrew’s profile.
“I don’t know. But anything’s possible, I guess,” Andrew says, turning to look Neil in the eye.
The sun has long past set, and Andrew can barely make out the lines of Neil’s face. Andrew shifts closer to Neil’s frame, and Neil mirrors the movement. There’s a new moon tonight, and Andrew thinks that if anyone saw them, they wouldn’t be able to differentiate between their silhouettes.
Neil hasn’t broken eye contact. Slowly, he reaches out to Andrew’s forearm, where a handprint sits, blistered upwards on Andrew’s skin under Andrew’s jacket sleeve.
“I gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” Neil whispers, in a faded mockery of Kevin’s proclamation when he approached Andrew on Earth for the first time.
“Was your handprint a tramp-stamp?” Andrew asks, and Neil smirks.
“Kevin was in charge of resurrecting your body and reuniting it with your soul, which is why your body bears his mark. I’m the one who retrieved your soul in the first place,” Neil says, before sliding his arm from Andrew’s forearm to his chest. “Which is why it is your soul that bears mine.”
Andrew’s breath catches at the gentle pressure on his sternum, the intense focus Neil has on his face.
“You’re not a demon at all, are you?” Andrew breathes.
“I’m really much more of a trickster,” Neil responds, his hand sliding up Andrew’s chest to cup his neck. His head dips down and Andrew raises his own in response. Their breath is intermingled now, puffing out in little clouds between their lips, hot in the cool air.
“I still get the feeling you’re lying to me,” Andrew murmurs, ignoring the fact that apparently Neil has been lying the entire time.
“That’s part of the trick,” Neil says, and Andrew almost laughs. Neil leans forward infinitesimally, until his forehead is resting on Andrew’s. Andrew sighs, half relief and half resignation.The first moment Neil started helping them on hunts, showing up with that smirk and fierce competence, Andrew was doomed to exactly this fate: pressed against Neil, whatever entity he is, having done nothing to escape.
“Do you really think we can do this?” Andrew asks. “Prevent the apocalypse?”
“I don’t know,” Neil responds. “But I guess anything’s possible.”
Neil leans in slowly, and when Andrew doesn’t move away, brushes his lips against Andrew’s. Andrew responds almost immediately, closing his eyes and grabbing the back of Neil’s shirt, using it to hold him close. Neil doesn’t taste like sulphur, he thinks with a degree of surprise. He tastes like candy and light and fire, something crackling and sweet.
Andrew pulls back after a little bit, and Neil steps back as well, albeit reluctantly.
“I should go,” Neil says, voice low and hoarse, and just raw enough for Andrew to want to push him against the car again. “You’re under angelic protection now, and none of them want me around you, regardless of how we worked together getting you out of Hell.”
“They don’t know what you are either, do they?” Andrew asks. Neil smirks.
“Keep an eye on Aaron,” Neil says. “Not every demon is as friendly as I am, and a lot of them will be tempting him in the worst possible ways in the very near future.”
“No demon is as friendly as you are,” Andrew says. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“I trust you,” Neil says. He opens his mouth to say something else, but no words come out. He raises his hand to Andrew’s chest again before blinking out of existence.
Andrew doesn’t walk back into the motel room right away. The angels are bound to be waiting to give him a laundry list of orders and expectations, and Aaron might look at him like a curse, like bad karma. Instead, he lies on his back against the hood of the car, staring up at the constellations peppering their way across the black expanse of space.
He thinks the sound Neil makes when he appears sounds a lot like the flap of feathery wings.
Angelic protection indeed.