#//angelic proposals b hardcore af and he's still human w something to prove

[originemesis]

@kugel-bitch cont. from xxx

The increasingly harmonic symphony of sounds does not escape her notice. So many years studying and bending the nature of music to her will has attuned her senses to even the most unassuming of rhythms in her environment. Anything. Anything at all can be the substructure of a song. Even ugly things. And how often had they verified this truth, when they'd crooned their derisive requiems over the anguished howling of the wicked and damned. They, with their canorous chemistry, could make any cacophony of dissonant noise into a beautiful hymn. Not that they would have to exert themselves here to achieve such ends; by the nature of earth's first safe haven, everything in this place seems to be in perfect harmony with itself. It might be blasphemous to consider, but she'd argue that even certain corners of heaven itself paled in comparison.

But what is this really about? That is what she's still trying decipher. Though certain clues in his increasingly solicitous demeanor are starting to paint a heart-fluttering first draft of an idea, but it almost seems too grand of a concept to chalk up as factual. After all these years, for him to suddenly decide he wants to become interlaced into something so eternally binding with her? It's...not impossible to believe. Not necessarily. But if those are the facts of the matter, does he comprehend the intricacies of such an arrangement? Does he understand the implications? Yes, he has taken to her people's customs like a shark to water, so much so that it is very easy to forget that he had ever been human at all, but he's also exceptionally impulsive. Has he considered that dropping anchor with somebody of her unremarkable social standing—a direct subordinate no less, might rub some people the wrong way?

I mean, all of that would be entirely irrelevant if it turns out he's actually just yanking her chain, which he has long since gotten into a pretty consistent habit of doing. Something like this, though? This would be a new low for him for certain. Something she's not entirely sure she could so readily forgive. It is no secret, after all, that her devotion stretches well beyond the bounds of an ordinary boss and attendant affiliation. For him to use something like that against her—

She feels his fingers curl snugly about the circumference of her hand which rouses a mirrored reaction from hers and she quickly decides that, no, she knows him better than that. For all the mischief and trouble he's prone to stirring up he has never been that cruel to her. So where does that leave them?

Teetering on the brink of a new chapter in this co-authored, political tragicomedy, she supposes.

When he decides to unearth the topic of V-day (if only in a passing remark), which she had made the executive decision of burying six feet deep In her psyche with every other regrettable affair her vicious temper has inadvertently landed her in, she all but shrivels like a popped balloon poodle, aptly adjoined by a truly miserable whimper of a chirp.

"...that was...I was just in a mood...it didn't mean anything...i—"

But he's not angling for apologies—she understands that when he captures the cherubic curves of her face in the tapered tines of gloved claws. Gentle. So gentle for something capable of the sort of horrifying destruction that could drive even the rat-gobbling, feather-clad bureaucrats of hell into hiding. Sometimes she wishes she had that sort of power, if only for the sole purpose of evicerating anything and everything that has, does and hopes to bring him any measure of harm. Every light in every eye that looks at him with anything but pure, unadulterated adulation; she would snuff them all out. She can't help the way she angles her face to catch the pad of his thumb under her lips. She feels vulnerable. Autopsied. Scalpeled open and splayed out with all her soft parts on naked display. Somehow she doesn't mind. Let him reach beneath the bird-cage of her ribs and feel how her heart flutters for him if he so pleases. This close, he might even hear how it rattles at the bars, like it's trying to break out and crawl up under his. Close isn't close enough.

She hates that fucking helmet.

But she reckons it serves a purpose here, so she won't kick up a fuss, settling for preening at the edges of the display instead, cooing her ardor so that it condenses against the sleek obsidian.

"I'm listening."

She's all too happy to spend the prelude to his performance tangled up in his wings, because she knows that once he takes off it could be days, if not weeks before she's granted another opportunity to hold him. People who don't know Adam might call him lazy and unmotivated but she knows exactly how hot the fire within him burns when he gets himself good and worked up. He isn't going to make this short and sweet. There isn't a doubt in her mind that he's going to give it everything that he's got. And so, she spends every last second of that first day priming him for the arduous endeavor he is about to undertake; preening feathers, kneading the intricate system of muscles responsible for maneuvering him through the air, chirping sweet nothings against the shell of his headgear.

Suddenly, when he breathes that first word, the garden of Eden might as well be any ordinary community park in the golden city. Enraptured is the only verb that comes anywhere close to being an apt descriptor for the flurry of emotions which overtake the "picture perfect porcelain" beneath Adam's knuckles. She chases the touch like a street mongrel who's only recently learned of the warmth and kindliness stored inside a human hand, swallowing thickly when he inevitably begins his ascent. Letting go of him is the hardest thing she's had to do in a hot minute—but she does all the same, granting him the space he needs to carry on with his performance.

Day bleeds into night bleeds into day. Every time she thinks he's left her thoroughly dazzled with the range of his croons or the intricacies of his tonal structure he outdoes himself. Again and again, until she's so helplessly enveloped inside the emotional turbulence rattling inside her mind that she can do little more than dazedly meander about the meadow, trying to keep track of him wherever he flutters.

And when his axe materializes in a brilliant flash of holy light, like she knew it eventually would, the resonant waves of sound which rattle through every atom in a radius which undoubtedly stretches far beyond the parameters of the garden shake loose the beady tears which had been performing a strenuous balancing act on her waterlines for a good long while now. Rolling, falling and landing on the verdant foliage below like shimmering morning dew.

[follows up from 3:12-5:24 ~]

The guitar's thundering addition to the intricacies of the little world he was building up with all manner of the garden's sounds would prove her right about his impulsiveness. It was not something so easily shaken from humanity quite like fruit from the tree of knowledge- even after the sort of transformation that heaven expected would fix. In truth, it was simply a Band-Aid that could get wet and peel off at the oddest times like the feathers he molted. If he had any second thoughts, there was simply no stopping him now that he had something to prove. And how he wanted to prove his worth to someone...amongst the shadows of the sanctimonious that looked more on him like a beloved family pet too novel to impound once his temperament took a turn for the worse.

He wouldn't wait for sunrise- he let there be light with every sparking shred of the double-edged weapon until the night around them bled gold. The divine energy that erupted from each fall of his arm sent bursts of thunder booming all around the clearing, rattling the boughs of trees and knocking their leaves loose into the swirling tornado forming around the launch pad of garden he'd picked- causing the firmly rooted flowers to bend over themselves as if they bowed to the source that would shred them just easily as it did sinners in the exterminations. Through the night, he devoted the collection of the mounting pressure born of his own special sound that even his own helmet couldn't fully replicate if it should ever fall into the possession of an imposter. She ought to know him by the sound alone, and he took enough time to allow her to feel every pulse of his being and all its twanging fibers.

"I could be your per~fect disaster-" He finally flung down a sentiment to reach her on the ground unshredded by the waves he wrought. There was a simultaneous desire to keep building their own little world, and to see her. No- he had to see her. Seriously, what if she'd already wandered off and he'd been doing all this for nothing (again-)? When he spotted her below, his crooning commenced.

"You could be...my-...!?"

Voice skipping a beat when he spotted the golden wet hue streaked down her cheek and welling, he drifted upside down into the tornado's swirl, allowing it to pull him to her as he continued strumming and feeding the sky with the axe pointed above them. With his face close to hers, he'd quietly arch a wing over to gently dust off gathered tears and flick them away as he murmured a "got you, babe" before starting the verse back up again with a light flap of his wings to help carry him back into the pull of the gathering storm's edges. "-I got you ~ a perfect disaster. You could bring my ever after! Yeah. You could... be my ever after- after all." After all they'd been through, if there were any lingering doubts, he let the storm shred them while it whipped and worked at splicing their soul sounds into the perfect mashup.

"We could be a perfect disaster....we could have an ever after!"

And on the fourth day, he would make the climb. He'd take their storm to heaven the way humans had tried many a time before- a mission doomed to fail, he knew. Symbolic and needed for the ritual of her kind. As he quieted the guitar to the demand of heaven's violins that he press on and not look back again if they were not to succeed, he used each elegant demand as stepping stones up the side of his summoned disaster until he reached the top of the tempest. Perched there there, he fed the beastly force a blast of drums collected in his sound files from all the exorcists - the beating of their weapons on the ground when they sought to synchronize their flight to hell before take off.

"Nobody told ya-" Mask flipped back to offer one challenging squint at the sky as the force behind him cupped him from beneath like the palm of a great hand lowering him back towards the ground. "-this was gonna fold ya?" With the axe at the ready just in case he needed a strum two or more up on high, he grinned as the pressure reached its limit against him holding it back beneath his angelic weight. "We'll go marching in-" with all the power preened from his and Lute's melodies, and the fluttering sounds of their flock stitched in for additional support. "Like toy SOLDIERS-!"

And with that, the storm of the godly fist flung him into the air with his wings tucked tight at his side to aid him in the first most perilous period of the ascent. And though his music was temporarily muted while he grit his teeth and relied on the storm's enduring power to push further into the atmosphere and past it, heaven's violins would follow his progress as he crooned to himself. She would hear it down below- irreparably bound if only for this moment should she not be there when he returned. "... to have and hold ya. Over sold ya..." He'd taken her for granted so many times, and he still did. But she convinced him cradled against his chest in the dark after a miserable night not knowing if she was really serious about returning that time or not. She would always be there bound as much to his soul as his axe was- why he hadn't realized that sooner when he even playfully held and used her as a makeshift guitar for his impromptu air solos, he didn't want to think about the farther he stretched the length of their bond tethering him down to her on Earth as if he worried such a thought might cause it to snap and leave him stranded amongst the stars. Stars... he could see them now - just nearly there when he felt the dwindled force beginning to pull back on him. Teeth grit, he willed a heavy step up and climbed the last few rungs of the divine violins' challenge before he hit the pocket of space that put the stop to his ascent once and for all.

And on the fifth day, he drifted amongst the vast emptiness of space, his way lit by stars, the moon and Earth at his back swirled blue and streaked white like a favorite marble in a collection amongst the rest. In the slowness of it all, he searched with softened reprieve. "Somehow don't ...you dare fail. Fail me now?" His talons grazed bits of space rock along his path as he approached the blinding brilliance of the moon. Pieces of it were left floating far out from every meteor that grazed it passing through, and he shifted his fingers through them like sand, searching for shards. "Ever After - somehow." Once he found two appropriately sized pieces, he pressed them against his chest which opened up a golden portal inside himself, sealing them away for safe keeping shortly before he drifted back to the drop off point.

"Don't - you dare fail. Fail me now, Ever After. Somehow...?"

He held the note in an uneasy warble caught in his throat with the apple, floating back upside down as he had to her earlier until he was lined back up with the Earth and Eden below him. Could she see him all the way up there - his golden light refusing yet to extinguish until he'd made it back to her? At the impatience of the violins that sang to him 'face the music when it's dire', he huffed. It would take the sixth day to fall. Though the first half of the descent was powered by more thundering slams of his guitar to help launch him back out of orbit and cut through the forces of the atmosphere seeking to catch him like a kite. He forced his way through it with each strum guiding a swirling nose dive down. As the ground eventually made its way into his perioherals- and the unmistakable glint of the gold in her eyes his eagle ones caught even up so high, he smiled. "Somehow don't- you dare fail. Fail me now, Ever After...?" And with a forceful strum to knock his dive speed back a notch, he grimaced hard as his wings helped to catch the brunt force of the original descent. He wouldn't be flapping any time soon now...throbbing and struggling at the currents as he used the last bit of his song's strength to float head first over Eden and crooned.

"Once upon a time...this place was beautiful and mine. But now it's just...a bottom line." The sentiment stung. He'd referred to the place in bitter contempt in the past as if convincing himself it wasn't as precious as memory could paint it. "Barely comes to mind..." But when he saw her amongst it...waiting for him- he knew that he was right. The beauty of Eden need not exist in his head because it was no longer there, but found in the stalwart gaze held below.

"Ever After, what is mine?" The First Man wondered to the sky, a hand outstretched as if an arm might reach down to save him from himself.

At the peak of the seventh day, he dropped- his energy spent and his wings too weak to beat, but outstretched in a hope of catching a current as the wind's edges beat the bruises into every feather and flung him to his fate.