Spn Archangels - Tumblr Posts
Archangels are fierce. They’re absolute. They’re Heaven’s most terrifying weapon.
So this is a dumb one, but it occurred to me while talking to a friend earlier and now I can’t stop thinking about it.
When I was first getting into books, I went through a trashy romance novel phase, where I once read a story framed around this one rich guy who had a ridiculous number of kids. Twelve, twenty, maybe more–I can’t remember. The people in the town where he lived were constantly joking about how ridiculously fertile he was, made all the worse because he was also evidently a man-whore. The poor guy could barely smile at a woman without a baby coming from it. In the story, it’s eventually revealed that he is not actually all that fertile or sexually experienced, but is actually just a huge softie, and all the poorer families in town understood they could leave babies on his doorstep and he would raise them as his own, no questions asked.
There’s a part of me that kind of wants to see the first part of this concept somehow applied to a human AU, with Chuck actually being that fertile and just having an ongoing stream of kids coming into his house. With Chuck still being the worst dad. He’s constantly in the background, calling up condom companies to complain about their products never working, and arranging paternity tests that he doesn’t tell the kids in question are paternity tests–like, he’ll pick up a toddler-aged Zachariah and play a few half-assed peek-a-boo games with him, then abruptly stick a cotton swab in the kid’s mouth for a DNA sample, hand him off to a sixteen-year-old Michael, and say he’s got to go. Has to stop by the post office on the way to his tinder date. Don’t wait up.
And Michael’s just like, “This is perfectly normal."
Later when Chuck comes home, Michael will still be awake, humming to himself while heating up a bottle in the kitchen. He’ll greet Chuck with, “Welcome home, father! I hope you had a great night. Someone dropped off twins. We’ve named them Anna and Hannah."
Any time an outsider asks if someone is adopted, Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, and Gabriel all say no in unison and look at the person in question as if they’ve just asked the rudest question imaginable.
Adam and Michael are assigned to work together for a school project. At first they try working together in the library during lunch, but Adam points out that they’re not getting the work done fast enough in that limited amount of time. Which is true, but Adam also has a crush on Michael and wants to get to know him better. They wind up going to Michael’s house, because Michael needs to help Lucifer, Raphael, and Gabriel take care of the children. Adam is not put off by this, but then it comes out that Michael’s afraid to engage in any kind of amorous behavior because Chuck’s always grumbling under his breath about how he can barely even says hello to someone without making a baby, and he’s never actually sat any of his children down to have The Talk.
Michael’s lack of knowledge comes out one day when Adam and Michael share a scandalous moment–HOLDING HANDS.
"Wait, are you saying…Michael, we can’t make a baby no matter what we do.”
“Why not? Contraceptives are a scam.”
Adam takes a moment to just digest that answer. Due to his own family situation, Adam himself learned about the birds and the bees by way of daytime television, whereas the TV in the Shurley house is kept in a perpetual loop of Disney movies and Blue’s Clues reruns. And he’s met Chuck. He reasons to himself that it’s not that crazy for Michael to be the age that he is and still be that in the dark.
“Michael–where do you think babies come from?”
“The front door.”
Lucifer, who is also in the room, adds, “Sometimes the back door.”
Adam tries his best to keep a straight face, but winds up snort-laughing as Gabriel, who is much more worldly than either of his brothers, calls from the hallway, where he’s running back and forth while dragging a blanket loaded up with younger siblings along for the ride, “I ASSURE YOU THEY DO NOT!”
the tango dynamic is just so different from the actual archangel dynamic while i also try to preserve enough of what makes the archangels so integral to each other, because they’re so codependently important to one another’s development that it means so so much to me and so much to each other’s stories that even though i’ve altered their dynamic by changing the setting (making them human, making god human, giving them peers, siblings), it’s still been my mission to make it clear that there’s something deeply, deeply intrinsic and strange about the four of them
like you can’t simply look at raphael, or gabriel, or lucifer, or michael, you have to look at all four of them, or at the very least two of them, to get this kaleidoscope understanding of their collective psyche because they were the only ones old enough to really understand
it’s the four of them or it’s none of them but it’s also all four of them in pairs (because gabriel looks up to michael in his way, because gabriel and raphael are twins, because lucifer and michael cling to each other even when at one another’s throats, because no one has ever understood raphael and lucifer’s sharpness like each other, because raphael leans on michael more than anyone else, because gabriel has always been lucifer’s favorite), and all of them are so explosively strange. they just,,, mean so much to me
when I was twelve, my father moved out
left with a whimper, not with a shout
Archangels + “Pity the Child,” Chess
oookaaayy bitches when ppl write fic where michael's wings aren't original, where chuck added them on after he was born, where lucifer was actually the first angel born with wings my fucking beloved. makes me think of the scene in guardians of the galaxy where nebula tells gamora that thanos would pull her apart and add bionics to her every time she failed to beat her sister in combat. kill.
Incredibly important triangle of tangled emotions going on in apartmentverse between Michael “Lucifer asked me to back down and I said no because that’s what I believed my Father wanted from me, and I would have killed him, but I failed to do that, and failed even in interpreting my Father’s will because who else could have put us here so clearly he never wanted Lucifer dead at all, and I never even wanted to do it but I would have. I would have. He’s not dead, but he should be. I’m glad he isn’t.”
and Raphael “Everything we did, we did to get to the end of the Apocalypse, and Michael had one job, just one, and he failed, and I resent him for failing because he negated everything I sacrificed to stay with him, and now none of that meant anything because Lucifer is here and alive and we’re supposed to be a family again. And also I know Michael would have gone through with killing him if no one had interfered, and I love him for that. And Lucifer is somehow the least complicated brother for me to love because his betrayal was clean, was simple, was understandable, even if it was unforgivable, and I love him. And I wish Michael had killed him. And I’m going to bandage up his hand because he hurt himself again.”
And Lucifer “Michael told me no a second time, called me a monster, would have won and run me through if we’d come to blows. He wakes up at night and checks to make sure I’m still sleeping on the couch. Raphael waited thousands of years for me to die and usher in paradise, and they seem more hurt by the fact that they lost their chance at peace forever than that I would have been lost. They do everything in their power to keep me alive and healthy now. They betrayed me. I betrayed them. We eat breakfast together.”
Do you think there’s a song that only Michael knows? Like a song so old that even with his perfect memory he can’t remember the entire melody or where exactly he heard it, but he hums it to himself all the time at his most loneliest. And it should bother him this hole in his memory but it doesn’t matter cause Michael’s so hurt and the song brings so much comfort.
Like Michael is the first thing God made that stuck, that wasn’t swallowed whole by his ever loving sister. And there was a moment, just a second, where it was just the two of them. When Michael wasn’t a brother and God was just a father, maybe God would hold him close and hum an unfinished song of creation to soothe him. The only sources of light in overwhelming darkness.
His first son, his greatest weapon.
Neither God or Michael remember this; Michael’s got siblings that need taking care of and It’s been a long time since God was a father.
But maybe in their umpteenth year in the cage, when they’ve huddled together after a particularly bad day, Michael starts humming a half remembered melody and when Adam asks him where it came from as goes the game they play, for the first time Michael confesses he doesn’t know.
And just maybe, on the other side of the plane, when Chuck’s writing a new chapter of his latest novel, deep in thought contemplating the relationships of fathers and sons; he starts humming a half remembered song in response and wonders where he heard it.
Do I even need to explain all the ways in which this is Michael or can you see it? Does it rip you apart or are you normal?
Like this is him after the cage. He’s the last archangel all his siblings are dead. God abandoned him for a millennia, and is still missing. Heaven is dying, he needs to go back.
Or he could not. He could stay here, have this
For the first time in his incomprehensingly long life, he has a choice, a real honest to god choice, and as he looks at the boy infront of him, completely housing the greasiest burger he’s ever seen, he can’t pretend he hasn’t already made it.
For the first time since the universe blasted into existence in a bang of light. Michael chooses himself.
- Andrea Gibson
Michael and Adam.
You get the themes the poem is right there. Michael was the first being ever made by an imperfect god. He in himself is practically a big bang how do you begin to explain that to someone? Let alone the one other person you’re stuck in a lifetime of isolation with?
Brothers
I KNOW THERE'S BETTER BROTHERS
BUT YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE THAT'S MINE
murder by death - brother // titian - cain and abel
It’s the way this could be about any pairing of the archangels.
But the one that’s really speaking to me is Gabriel and Raphael I’ve always imagined them as twins two different halves of the same whole. Their not each others favorites but at the end of that’s their twin the only one I have.
I can imagine Raphael saying this after Gabriel left. Like she thinks he’s a traitor and a coward but that’s still her brother her twin the only one she has.
But this could be about the obvious Lucifer and Michael doomed to be on opposite sides. Michael doomed to cast his brother into hell but that’s still his brother.
Lucifer and Gabriel. Gabriel knowing that Lucifer is wrong and the path he’s going down will lead to nothing but pain for everyone but that’s still his brother.
Michael and Raphael, Raphael and Lucifer, Michael and Gabriel, all four brothers together for every misstep every wrong done that’s still my brother.