Falls
She remembered the rain. More than the rushing air, or the dark, or the impact, or the chill, the rain had pelted the skin like tiny needles, unrelenting and driven by an early winter wind. It had stung. And then it was dark.
It wasn’t dark now. She knew that before she even opened her eyes, the light penetrating the backs of her eyelids in an aggressively cheerful way. She blinked against it, raising a hand that no longer had streaks of blood across the back of it.
That was strange.
Even stranger was the landscape before her appeared to be entirely made of clouds, the already too bright light glinting in an impossible array of brilliant shades off the enormous golden gates in front of her. The air was soft and warm, like an eternal gentle hug, and--
Wait. Her eyes widened at the realization. Golden gates?
“Am I…” she asked the empty expanse, looking left, then right, then down at her immaculately clean hands. “Shit.”
“Hold on, I forgot my—” the owner of the voice, a man of middling stature with brown hair and a large pair of angel wings, wandered in and jumped at the same time she did.
“Oh! You’re early! That, aha, that never happened before,” his voice and expression held an offensive amount of trepidation as he approached the podium she hadn’t noticed until now and opened a large book.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone for another hour so…there go my lunch plans!” He flipped a few pages as he continued in a low grumble, “Which I never get invited to…”
There were too many context clues to ignore. “You’re Saint Peter,” she stated with as much certainty as she could manage.
“I am not supposed to be here.”
While Peter didn’t roll his eyes, the tone behind his smile indicated he very much wanted to, “Of course you are! Or you wouldn’t be here you’d be, haha, down there you know so,” he thumbed off to the side with his left hand while his right traced a list of names and dates and times.
She glanced to the right, taking several backwards steps to peer over the edge of the fluffy, yet sturdy cloud. Below her seemed to stretch the entirety of the universe itself, an infinite field of stars, and two strange looking nearby planets. One of them covered by a large, red pentacle. Could that be—
“If I could just get your name please?” Peter’s voice snapped her back to reality. Or whatever this was. She turned back towards him, but the only answer she gave was to take a definitive step backwards.
Peter snatched up his book, hastily moving out from behind the podium, “Hey, hey! Don’t get too close to the edge! You could—”
She didn’t hear the rest, extending her arms to the side and closing her eyes as she leaned back, surrendering herself to the whims of gravity for the second time that day.
And fell.
Alone on the edge of the cloud, Peter clutched his precious book to his chest and watched with wide, horrified eyes until he could no longer distinguish her from the other faint stars in the sky . “Well,” he said finally, “That’s a first.”
It only took a few seconds for her to regret her decision. What she’d intended to be a controlled descent almost immediately sent her tumbling and twisting at a rate of speed so intense she didn’t realize at first that sound she was hearing was her own scream. Part of her had wondered if she would wake up from this obvious nightmare with a jolt and find herself—well, probably not in a better situation than this, frankly.
But she wasn’t waking up. She was screaming and falling, hurtling through the sky with wild abandon. She screamed until her throat was raw and struggled to control the spinning until at last she managed to keep herself steady and see where she was going.
To a whole lot of nowhere. From the clouds, the planets had seemed directly below. Not close, but not too terribly far. And now she realized that whatever the rules of physics were wherever she was, they were not the ones she was used to. The red pentacle seemed a very, very, very long ways away.
She stopped screaming. While the air was no longer soft and seemed warmer than before, she didn’t appear to be burning up even with the incredible speeds she was falling at. She could still breathe, which seemed strange if she was dead just in general, but all in all could be seen as a good thing.
“Not one of my better ideas,” she said aloud, though it was hard to say if she did or if she just thought it, since the sound of the air rushing past was so loud she couldn’t hear anything else. The initial panic of falling subsided the longer it went on. It seemed silly to panic about anything when sure she was falling, but none the worse for wear while it was happening.
It got boring after a few hours. While it was difficult to judge the passing of time, she at one point started counting stars, which gave her a general sense of how long it had been. Doubt crept in at several points. Would she be falling forever? Had she given up the comforts of Heaven only to be stuck in this strange limbo for eternity?
“No,” she decided with a shake of her head, stretching her hands out in front of her like some goofy superhero. “I must be falling towards something.”
As if the universe was affirming her decision, she noticed the air around her fingers heating up exponentially as that red pentacle finally seemed to be getting closer. A mixture of relief mingled with a sudden, rising panic.
“…should’ve probably thought about the landing before I did this.”
When little bursts of flames ignited around her hands, she started screaming again.
Below on the street of Pentagon City, several sinners stopped to look up as what appeared to be a gleaming, shooting star began to make its way across the sky.
One of them, a thin, sharp looking man with eyes as red as his hair, sat on a hotel balcony with coffee mug in hand and a folded-up newspaper on the table before him. His narrowed gaze tracked the path of the star until it became clear that it was not only getting bigger but headed directly towards the building he was currently occupying.
With a sigh, he set down his mug “Always when I’m enjoying my breakfast,” he mused with a crackle of radio static and a glow of green around his pupils. His ever-present smile widened as four inky black shadow vines burst from his back, lifting him into the sky to meet the threat head on before it could cause any real damage.
She really should have thought about the landing before she fell.
As the city came more into focus, her panic only grew. She was going to crash. She was traveling at such high speeds there were actual flames around her and she was going to slam into the ground and die. Maybe not die, that had already happened once today, but she was relatively sure whatever was going to happen when she did hit the ground was going to be awful and painful. Worse, it appeared that she was headed directly towards some sort of multi-story building—
And then suddenly a man appeared in the sky in front of her. At least she thought it was a man. Was that hair or ears? She didn’t really have time to think about much of anything, panic consuming her as she screamed, “WATCH OUT!”
It was an absurd thing to do, and it was hard to say who was more surprised, the red demon man or her as she slammed into him. Instinctively, she threw her arms around his shoulders, holding on for her dear, undead life. She felt his arms likewise clasp around her as her descent stopped, and in her panic, scrambled to grab the back of his neck to try to pull herself up as one last fuck you to gravity.
As soon as her fingertips slid across the skin of his neck, a flash of light overtook her vision. Her eyes burned a searing, bright white as his flashed green, filling the sky with twirling mystical symbols of the same color. She felt like she was burning from the inside out now, a constant, livid flame from the center of her very being draining away, pushed on to whoever this red savior was.
And then as quickly as it appeared, the light vanished and she slumped in the man’s arms, the exertion of whatever burst of power that had been too much to maintain. The man looked down at her unconscious form, adjusting his grip now that she was nothing more than dead weight, a calculating smile taking up most of his face.
“Interesting.”
