#OUUGHHH having a mike breakdown. i love him so bad. blorbo from my thoughts

[cherubchoirs]

A thought for plant!mike(dk if youd decide it to happen ornot so i'll treat it as an au) gives such a great sense of hope if you think about it. Like a new era sprouting and it causing old wounds to heal slowly but surely. Obviously it needs new tending to, new ways of tending to oneself, learning how to treat oneself better, but there IS hope. There IS a way to keep going, even if it's not like it used to be.

I hope i dont sound like mad ramblings but michaels healing and becoming a living garden is just such a gentle thought of hope

i really think so too...michael is ultimately representative of god's rule, he defines himself purely in terms of god's kingdom and what he did for it. so naturally, in god's absence, he becomes a living corpse - everything he was, his whole identity, has died yet he has not, a body given so wholly over to its service passing away while michael himself is left behind. i talked about this a bit, but the archangels are meant to reflect the fallout of a fundamentalist family after a fracture, with michael as the child that took over the place of someone who "betrayed" the family (in lucifer) and so forced himself to become the perfect version of faith and loyalty. he didn't want to end up like lucifer, he didn't want any other angels, especially his siblings, to suffer in the same way, so he hollowed himself out to be nothing beyond a perfect servant. he is the prince of heaven under god's rule, and so in god's departure he shambles on, a zombie rotting away even as he becomes more desperate than he had ever been to be perfect for a now absent father. an ideal martyr, yet repellent to the cloistered halls of heaven.

but that world is falling apart as much as he is and he can now only collapse entirely to ruin...or he can adapt. he can find his place without god, something once unthinkable, revolting even, but that comes into more clarity as he grows close with v2, as his brothers continuously reach out to him, as he sees a heaven still in need of help. like gabriel, it isn't something that's easy or clean, instead revealing a staggering amount of regret, a terrible, suffocating guilt he'd forced away so he was no longer michael but just a prince. so often in it, he can't believe he actually deserves a second life, but he is stilled by the plants that cling to him, the plants that slowly stitch him back together with the help of v2 and raphael. they need him....humbling in so many ways, but they weave into him and bring him back to life. he lives through them and they through him, a symbiotic life forming out of a crumbled empire closed up in the body of its prince. he is the whole world reclaimed by nature and revived from the dead - his body the skeleton of decayed monuments now made more beautiful by the verdant life that wraps all around them. his trips to earth with v2 would be so much more then, he would see himself all around and see this is what life is, what god left to them all. he knows he is still a corpse beneath it, but he's blooming with life again, he can care for this new self and actually find his true happiness in this body. he feels through the flowers, he sees them change their colors for him, and to care for them is to care for himself once more.