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She was a wreck. A ruin.
Once, Vaggie had been the pinnacle of strength. Heaven’s perfect weapon, forged through relentless training into a spear aimed at the throat of Hell. Corded muscle defined her body, divine flesh marred only by well-earned scars. Devotion writ large upon her skin. Decades had gone into training her skill on the wing. Countless nights spent running the obstacle courses, sprinting in circles around the track. She would stay out until curfew and be up at dawn. It had been her solace, one of only two allowed the exorcist. An escape from the killing.
All of that was in the past now. Torn from her at the hands of the woman she loved. Now Vaggie rested, not by choice, but by necessity. Muscle atrophied from disuse. Two weeks spent learning to walk in a straight line. Not even as a fledgling, born fully grown into the nightmare realm of the Hatchery, had she felt so helpless.
Three months in Hell and she had started to have good days. Those were the days where she could eat three entire meals. She would have the strength to help Charlie out with whatever renovation she was working on that day, slowly transforming the ruined hotel into something habitable. Fixing it.
Vaggie related more to the old building than she cared to admit. Both were unwanted, cast aside and left to rot, only for Charlie to come pick up the pieces and patch them back together with her boundless optimism.
Was her new definition of a good day pathetic? She thought so. She knew Lute would think so. Charlie disagreed, and Vaggie didn’t know which voice to listen to. That of her lieutenant, telling her to keep pushing; pride evident in her tone even if all she’d ever say out loud was a curt ‘passable’ or if Vaggie was lucky, ‘good job’. Or did she listen to Charlie, the Princess of Hell, who wore her heart on her sleeve. Who told Vaggie every day that she was proud of how hard she was working to get better, who cheered and clapped like an absolute dork when Vaggie achieved the barest minimum.
The war roiled inside her head at night, two voices pushing and pulling in an eternal battle for the right to rule over Vaggie’s thoughts. Day by day, little by little, the Princess was winning. It was a victory that seemed inevitable, for Lute had laid her low by her own blade and left her for dead in a nameless gutter. Centuries of love and loyalty thrown aside in seconds.
Though inevitable, victory never came without cost; for Vaggie that cost was paid in bad days.
When she woke from a dream where warm wind blew over black and white feathers Vaggie was afforded a moment, but a single moment of grace. For that moment she could make believe that she was whole, that the sky was still her domain to command; that she was a warrior of Heaven, blessed and ordained. Only a moment, before pain and reality dug their vicious talons into her ruined flesh and she was torn, kicking and screaming, away from her peace and slammed face down into her bed.
Liquid fire dripped from nonexistent feathers. Every nerve ending in her back insisted vehemently that her wings were still there, but they weren’t, they just weren’t, and Vaggie was running out of words to describe it, or maybe her brain was so addled by the pain that she couldn’t find them. Each severed muscle, each mutilated nerve pulled, and tore. Ten times, a hundred times worse than when Lute had ripped them from her in but a second because this never ended, it continued in an unending assault that threatened to overwhelm her.
Every muscle in her back spasmed, trying to move appendages that simply were not there, in a futile attempt to shake off the nonexistent source of her agony. Tears poured from Vaggie’s eyes, staining the red silk pillow, red, like the blood she had spilled but not the blood she bled. A single, agonized sob tore through her, her whole chest heaving from the weight of it, the only sound she made before biting down on the pillow lest she scream.
When fangs tore through the pillowcase she nearly screamed anyway, for she had not had fangs upon retiring the night before. Hell, staking its unholy claim upon her flesh. Yet another violation of her body, for she had shown mercy and oh, what a sin that was, that her autonomy should be stripped from her by the powers of Heaven and Hell.
It wasn’t fucking fair, she had spared a fucking child! How then, did she deserve this torture, this eternal damnation to a life of pain? Pain that still worked over her body, her phantom wings being shoved through a woodchipper one excruciating inch at a time. She could feel each pass of the steel blades as they chewed at the sensitive flesh, as they tore her feathers out one by one and ground them to dust. The heavy rollers crunched each delicate bone, each snap echoing like a gunshot.
Vaggie never noticed the splinters that tore through her hands when the posts of her headboard snapped like twigs in her grasp.
What she did notice, out of the corner of her eye, was her. Lute. Sword in hand, dripping gold with divine blood. A cruel sneer etched into her porcelain skin, and pure, unadulterated hate burning in those golden eyes that had once held so much love, so much care in them. God, Lute could be a harsh woman, but Vaggie had seen the kindness that hid behind the walls she built around herself and even now, even after it all she couldn’t bring herself to hate Lute. Not truly, not really.
Not even as her wings were burned off her back, eaten by wild animals, dissolved in acid, again and again and again, each minute a new flavor of tormented agony as Vaggie screamed and howled into her ruined pillow.
Don’t be loud. Don’t draw attention. Don’t disturb anyone. Be perfect. Be strong. Be a good exorcist.
All the while Lute circled her. Savoring her suffering like one of her expensive whiskies. Tears distorted her form, the horns of her helmet flickering shades behind her white hair. Over her shoulder, always watching, amusement playing out on the damned mask he never took off, was Adam. Her Commander. He Who Meant More to Lute than the woman she professed to love.
“You deserve this,” Lute hissed, leaning over her, head vanishing from view. “You failed us. Failed me.”
“No… please…” Vaggie whimpered, begging but what was there left to beg for? Lute had taken her wings, her eye, her place in Heaven and her heart. Taken them all, and thrown them all aside to lie beside Vaggie in the gutters of Hell like so much garbage. Maybe that’s all she was. Garbage. A failure. Unfit to be an exorcist. Unfit to love Lute.
A pang of regret, sharp and burning, spears through Vaggie even as her back spasms still, though the pain has begun to fade as she has bucked the sheet from off her back. Regret for so many things, because Lute was right, she was weak, she was sinful filth, she was a fucking bleeding heart and she had gotten what was coming to her. Regret, for loving Lute. Regret, for sparing the child.
Most of all, regret that Lute had not taken her life as well.
Vaggie’s voice was small and broken as she choked out a single plea through sobs of pain and grief. “Please, Lute. If you ever loved me. End it. Kill me. Please, Lute, baby, please make it stop, please, please, please…”
She trailed off into a wordless moan, a low howl of anguish filling the room, any thoughts of silence long forgotten.
Two golden eyes met her own swollen, bloodshot eye, the redness of Hell already corrupting it, staining white to red. Lute grinned, madly, the predatory grin she saved for the sinners she laid low on extermination day, and answered Vaggie’s pleas with a single, devastating word; carrying in her tone the weight and authority of Heaven itself for she was Heaven’s Wrath, and Heaven’s Judgement, and Vaggie had been found wanting.
“No.”
Vaggie’s heart had been made hard throughout the years. Brutal training, Adam’s casual cruelties, vicious nights with Lute softened only by the light of dawn. Brittle is the hardened steel, and a single word could carry the weight of a hammer blow.
Her hardened and brittle heart shattered into a million pieces.
Each sob contorted her body, tugging on the ruined and severed muscles that once sent her soaring through the air. Phantom pains, already consuming her mind, body, and soul were intensified but Vaggie couldn’t help it; not that it mattered, not when Lute would not even do her this final kindness of finishing her off. Of making it all just stop.
“I’m not real, babe.” Lute growls, nipping at her neck (just like she did when they were alone and she had Vaggie pinned to the mat, or her desk, or the wall). “Even if I was, something as disappointing as you? No, you deserve this. Hell is forever, and sinful filth like you does not get to take the easy way out.” Her voice hardens; fingers ghost through Vaggie’s hair and her neck tenses. “Not on my watch. I decide when you get to leave. Not you. Not that demon you’re cozying up with. Not even Hell itself. You are mine, Vajjie.”
Lute had never once called her that. Centuries, and she had never slipped up, never once used Adam’s pronunciation for her name. Vagina. That moment, that name, that voice. It was all too much, the final straw to break the camel’s back. Vaggie had thought her heart could break no more, oh, how wrong she had been. Burying her head in the pillow, Vaggie cried like she had never cried before. Breaths came too fast for her to get any air, drowning her in tears. Her body shook and spasmed, and she screwed her eyes shut against the visions of her.
No escape would she find there. Only the glowing white lines of Lute’s mask, stitched on the inside of her eyelids, watching her, grinning with sadistic glee as Vaggie broke completely, broke like never before. Not even on the cold asphalt of the alleyway had she broken so wholly, no.
Behind her the door creaked open. Slow. Tentative. Instinct took over and Vaggie froze as best she could. Hard to stay still, when pain and heartbreak lit up every nerve in her body like a fireworks show.
“Heyyy, sorry for intruding, I thought I heard yelling and crying and…” Charlie’s voice petered off, but the burning imprint of Lute’s mask had vanished from Vaggie’s vision. So too had the phantom teeth on her neck and the fingers in her hair, the hissing, hateful voice of her former lover that had spewed such venom at her. All that was left was Charlie, sweet Charlie, a demon of Hell through and through and yet without a doubt kinder than any exorcist, indeed, kinder than almost all the angels that Vaggie had ever met (though most of those were exorcists).
“Are you okay? No, stupid Charlie, obviously she isn’t okay. Shit, let me get some things, I’ll be right back, you just stay right here okay?”
A groan of protest was all Vaggie could get out, too little too late to stop Charlie from ducking back out. The door swings gently in the wake of her passage, all wild and untamed energy. Without Charlie to keep her voice at bay, Lute leers at her from the full length mirror propped against the wall.
“What do you think she’d say, if she knew? Do you think she would care for you then, if she knew the butcher that you were? We both know better than that, Vagina.” Lute cocked her head. “Have fun, babe. I’ll be waiting.”
Just like that, she was gone, and Charlie’s hooves skittered across the wood flooring before she found the carpet and her grip. Vaggie stayed where she was, face down on the bed, sweat pouring off her as the waves of pain crashed over her. She was at Charlie’s mercy, now; the only person left in all Creation who still wanted her, broken and useless thing that she was.
Vaggie could only pray, as Charlie massaged a numbing cream into the scarred wasteland of her back, that the Princess never found out about her past.
Lute is wrong. I do not belong to her, not anymore. My life, my soul – it belongs to Charlie now, as long as she will have me.