what_wings_dare | Fried food can kill me. A mugger can kill me. You're not so special down here.

[Time was Gabriel would have smelled him coming a mile off; these days, that sensitivity is gone, but he's a perceptive man. Even when he's just a man. So when he walks in, Gabriel notices, and he smiles. It doesn't take a personification of the end of things to recognize one, but a little experience helps.]

You know... It's very generous of you... But it doesn't work like that.

[Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings, eh? Gabriel misses his in an abstract sense, but he's getting by well enough. As an angel he never enjoyed a beer, for one.]

[Oh, there he is. At the sound of the remark, Death (or Bastian, rather, he's not really here on Official Business, though he'd be the first to argue that barbecue chicken poppers are the utmost in official business) turns and zeroes in on the table, his surprisingly youthful face breaking into a wide smile.]

Hey! You look terrible, what're you doing here? Did you come for the chicken poppers? You know it's funny because people say they're to die for.

[Like an old friend, he slides into the other side of the booth and promptly makes himself at home. He's probably neither, but you know what, who's going to tell him otherwise.]

I'm pretty sure that's, you know, figurative. But you never know!

[As a mortal man Gabriel probably ought to be reasonably terrified of the thing sitting across from him, the thing that looks like an energetic and presumably hungry young man; as an impossibly old angel of death, though, that seems like kind of a silly position to take, so he's not flustered.]

If I choke on them... I guess you got it covered,

[he says calmly, as if the thought of an embarrassing death strangled by fried food doesn't bother him. It doesn't, really. He's had worse.]

They didn't give me much choice, you know. [About the looks. This was supposed to be a punishment, after all.] No newer models around. I get by. It drives okay.

[Had he voiced that thought aloud, Bastian might've taken personal offense to his characterization as a "thing", but objectively speaking it's at least more accurate and concise than the alternatives. "Person" isn't exactly right, and "personification" just gets wordy. "Thing" is pretty good, all things considered (pun intended), even if it does kind of remind him of disembodied hands and crusty Marvel superheroes.]

Yeah. I know how that goes. You know they tried to make me do the specter-face full time? I don't know what they were thinking, you can't pick up girls with a bony old skeleton mug.

[As if for emphasis, he flashes his Rather Handsome grin again.]

Don't worry, though, I'm off the clock right now. Only thing I'm killing is time.

[Damn, he's so witty.]

You never know. Some girls go for that, these days.

[Goth girls are weird. Mostly Gabriel's girls are the kind who aren't picky at all, who've got bills to pay, but hey. If you got it, flaunt it. Time was, he was a real ladykiller himself. In multiple ways.]

I punched out for good, you know? [Or technically, he was fired. He's not complaining. The Boss doesn't call but Gabriel would like to think if he did, he'd actually hear it again. He paid an incomprehensible price to end up with his faith back, but most days it's worth the trade. It beats the alternative, anyway. Gabriel hated his stint in Hell enough that he annoyed the devil into spitting him back up.] There's plenty of time to kill down here. Good cheeseburgers, too.

They have pasta shaped like ninja turtles down here, too. I never get that, when people make it out like this is such a terrible place to be. I mean yeah, it's full of war and strife and obviously I'm here so that's, y'know, a super downer for some people no matter how cool I am or how you slice it. But like...you think in the afterlives anybody's thinking up pasta shaped like ninja turtles? I'm sure the only reason why there isn't a black market trade in the stuff between here and some of those places is because having a functioning black market would kind of defeat the whole point of the nature of the afterlife in the first place.

[He sits back in the booth, regarding the man across from him with a long and careful look. That which is mortal of him would probably start to find it unnerving before long; plenty of men cheerfully look Death in the eye, but they rarely ever win staring contests with him--for good reason.]

By the way, did anybody ever tell you it really screws some of us up when your guys go around halting people's deaths, keeping people stuck between the two, forcing that really weird gray area where nobody's exactly sure who's got jurisdiction anymore? Not to mention it makes me nauseous as all get-out, but you know.

Infinite grace poured into this planet and they come up with a hundred thousand shapes of pasta. I like the ones in the can, with the little perfectly round meatballs, you know?

[Gabriel shrugs, and he looks back, though he's not making any effort to win a staring contest. He'll blink. He's old-- to say older than he looks is laughably inadequate. They might as well be old friends, if Gabriel had ever been the sort to actually consider anyone a friend.]

Yeah, well. You don't have to worry about that, anymore; I learned to drive.

Makes everything better, doesn't it?

[It's hard to say whether he's talking about the pasta in the can with the meatballs, or the learning to drive. Maybe it's both.]

What else would you spend infinite grace on, anyway?

Lots of things.

[Both of those things are good things. Consolation prizes. Driving is actually way cooler than he ever gave it credit for; it's probably for the best he never got the hang of it before. Heaven on wheels, he'd have run down half a city.]

I dunno. I used to think I had some good ideas.

You know what they say about good intentions. I mean, supposedly. I think good intentions are usually pretty good, personally, but everybody likes to be a Debbie Downer about 'em.

[He shrugs. It's probably a little tacky to bring up the road to hell around this guy in particular, but you know what, Bastian's got about fifty plastic keychains dangling off his hot pink Razr Deathphone, so tacky sort of comes with the territory.]

They say. [he says agreeably, and almost looks like he's about to laugh.] Mostly it's... bubbling pitch, and the shards of sacrificed ideals.

[He'd ask how you fit that in your pocket, Bastian, but he knows how convenient being a being not of this world is. The limitations of the laws of physics can be a little grating. Honestly, he doesn't covet other bodies, but sometimes he does remember fondly what it was not to be tied to a physical form.

Other nights he scrapes up the dough to remind himself that every cloud has a silver lining.

And he looks down, and shrugs.]

I gotta say my intentions probably weren't that good.

I think that's what they made my work uniform out of. Bubbling pitch and the shards of sacrificed ideals. Plus a little deep-seated abject mortal terror and I guess sort of a nice cotton lining so it doesn't chafe.

[The waitress hasn't swung by yet, which strikes him as a little odd, and so he pauses in the discussion to flag one down; one order of chicken poppers and a cherry coke later, he's back in action, reaching across the table to steal a potato chip and making very sure not to accidentally touch the guy across from him as he does so.

It wouldn't kill him outright, probably, but it might take a couple years off his borrowed life. Close brushes with Death usually do, for people.]

You think someone's gonna hold that against you, in the end?

Wouldn't spring for linen?

[The waitress has talked to Gabriel enough that she knows there's only so much she can stand to hear. He's never been cruel to her, but something about the way he winks, the way she can't tell him anything he doesn't know, is hard to take in large doses. Gabriel knows this because it doesn't take an angel to overhear her chatting with her friends by the kitchen door.]

Eeehhh, I try not to worry about it. They don't like me much in the basement either. [Besides, he's not entirely sure whether he even has a soul. Angels, strictly speaking, don't; and though he's human, he's not really human. You'd think he's handled enough souls that he ought to be able to tell, but this is a special case.

Honestly he thinks when he goes, probably, he'll just be gone.]

I tried wallowing in self-pity a while but it got boring.

There was a linen shortage when they made it. Something about using it all to wrap the actual dead people. Or maybe that's just my office manager screwing with me, who knows. He does that sometimes.

[In all honesty, it's something Bastian's never thought at any great length about, what it would be like to actually...not exist. The term they use around the office is "conquered"--someone picked it up from the lingo the fundies were throwing around, and it stuck. Life ends, Death is defeated, but there's really only two ways you could ever manage to achieve that.

One's the way that he used to be apprehensive of, eons ago, back before they'd figured out that Eternity was playing them against each other--breeding fear in Life, their favored daughter, who didn't know any better than to think he wanted to snuff her out; whispering threats to his existence, reminding him that his days were numbered, that someday he'd be defeated and she would win out over him. They might still be at it, too, if he hadn't fallen in love with the girl next door who just so happened to be Her, and made it possible for everything to get straightened out without the input of Eternity in the mix.

The other is the way he's still apprehensive of, but that he figures will almost certainly never come to pass. Death can't exist without a universe to exist in, so they could get rid of him by unmaking reality and starting over. That would always do it, too.

But they probably won't, and that's kind of a downer thought to dwell on anyway.]

You know what a great place for wallowing is? Cancun. There's this great place, right on the beach, and they bring you pina coladas with the little umbrellas in 'em, like, right out of coconut shells.

I always went for linen. Soft on the skin, breathes, keeps pretty clean...

[Not great for the bloodstains but he never needed a shell to last that long, anyway. People these days are so trigger happy. The holes and powder burns make the stains look like nothing.

How the mighty have fallen, eh?]

Wallowing on a beach sounds nice. It's... a little outta my pay grade, these days.

[Trumpet players on the street don't make so much, no matter how good they are. And he's good, when he's really working it. Good enough that he probably could find real work, but he doesn't have the sense that it would serve the Plan.]

[ n a m e ; ]	Gabriel (formerly the archangel)
[ c a n o n ; ]	The Prophecy films
[ g a m e ; ]	Bein' weird @ teleios

Fried food can kill me. A mugger can kill me. You're not so special down here.

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