I eventually figured, over the course of about one frustrating hour, Doppel would reliably shapeshift with the right vocal cues, usually by being an utter dick and bringing up the man in green or the lake they'd fallen in. Usually they picked a different person each time, seemingly at random- I could repeat the same dialogue and intonation and end up with a different person on my couch. At time they'd repeat, too, twice falling back as Christina McKean (and neither time remembering anything we'd done together the first time they'd taken that form).

It was honestly exhausting to yell, push, and psychologically damage Doppel, but they retained no memory, just a few anguished moments before they took on the life of someone else. Speaking of, I'd decided to stop while they were Kell, just for a laugh.

Kell was a stubborn bastard, and Doppel, in perfect mimicry, was no different. He (Doppel- pronoun use was going to drive me up the wall) had come to accept his sudden existence on my couch with relative ease, but had immediately said something to the likes of 'if I'm going to have to deal with you, I'd like something to drink', and had proceeded to name the most expensive wine I kept in my kitchen.

Though at this point I was nearly certain Doppel wasn't feigning ignorance towards his true nature, there were odd lapses. I couldn't recall if Kell had actually ever been in my kitchen or enquired about my alcohol purchasing habits, but Christina-May certainly would've seen the bottle. And, within the perfect strangers, they all seemed sure they knew me. Old weirdo men, young children, suspiciously well-off women- all regarded me as if I was an old, slightly worrying friend.

It all came back to Nichael.

"Why are we here?" Doppel-Kell asked, though the way he asked it, there wasn't a question mark. He had these bright green eyes that were charming, but felt out of place on him, like he might've stolen them from the corpse of a boyband lead. He was less youthful but still painfully good looking, and because I was a disgustingly horny bugger, it was pretty hard convincing myself not to see if he'd let me lay him.

Thank God for hyper-fixation. I was too busy solving mysteries and shit to bone, or else consider the ethical-moral concerns of using a shapeshifting amnesiac to fulfill sexual fantasies (spoilers: it's pretty damn despicable!).

"You remember the Christina doppelgänger? Probably the result of a rogue demon, right? We must have files somewhere for every incubus that's just fucked off on the job."

"Most of our records were lost with the burning of the archives several years ago." Doppel tapped his fingernail against the glass, producing an irritating ping-ping-ping. "Only about one quarter of the records were digitalized from before... Oh, I think we started properly doing it two cycles ago?"

"Hell has better computers than Earth though. Beyond sky-dome and the ecofarms, you guys have had access to late 2010s technology for ages now," I pointed out. "What's up with the lateness on the switch?"

"I only arrived in Hell three cycles ago, and cannot tell you what anyone was thinking in regards to its planning. There's a solid chance we stuck to paper simply for the aesthetic," Doppel said, "And in regards to technology, we may have some bits left from before the cycles, that fabled era known as 'post 2010'. But those fifteen years were one hundred and ninety years ago."

"You didn't miss much. Well, a lot, but most of it was complete shit."

"We do have some records of that time," Doppel said, nearly playfully- a tone the real Kell would never take with me. "But you know, it ought to be your civilian duty to fill in the gaps. Why are you asking me this? Surely, ancient immortal that you are, you don't need a refresher?"

As Doppel sipped irritatingly at my best wine, I was busy mulling over my next course of action. Part of me really wanted to screw around with this fake Kell (screw around, not screw), but another part was largely frustrated by how little there was to go on. Yes, I'd found a way to bully him into becoming a facsimile of someone else. Yes, somehow I was connected to all this. But without records, or eyewitnesses, or any memories from Doppel, all I really had was a man, potentially green, and his apparent murderous intent.

AKA, jack shit.

I'd sort of shoved away the thought of seeing Irem in a distracted fit, but maybe I'd try that again? 'That' of course being something vague. Sitting around in my apartment all day was my preferred hobby, but it wasn't going to get me anywhere with Doppel.

I was connected to this, or Nichael was- every form of Doppel seemed to treat me like Nichael had, worried, but friendly. Oddly obedient and loyal, trusting of any odd tick I had. Hey, okay, new thought:

First I dug around for a clean sheet of paper and a pencil, and I got about halfway through my sketch before I remembered I'd drawn Nichael countless times before, so I crawled on the floor and rifled through a stack of notebooks next to the TV.

Doppel leaned over from where he was sitting, still working through his wine. "Michael, what are you doing?"

I found one of him, eventually, a pretty good sketch. Not to sound like an egotist but I was a fucking good artist usually. Two hundred years of drawing gets you that far, as does two hundred years of living in the woods with no internet. It was a nice, near photo-realistic pencil drawing of Nichael as he'd looked in Hell, his hair a little ragged, stubble dotting his face.

I held it up to Doppel triumphantly.

"That's Nichael," he said. "What about him? I don't enjoy having to hold conversation with you like you're a well trained dog. Tell me what I'm supposed to be taking away from this."

"Become him," I asked, a little forcefully, quite out of breath.

Doppel downed the rest of his wine and stood up, straightening at his waistcoat. "Always lovely to speak with you, Michael."

Before he could move, I stood up and blocked him. "You are him. You woke up as him, you were going to die, and then you were him. You are him," I said, "Remember the lake?"

Doppel's face fell, which I'd never seen Kell's do before- just sort of collapsed, his mouth a little open, his eyes wide. I could almost see something horrific come to mind, some glimpse of a memory that was lingering until it melted away, until Kell was gone and Nichael was there.

Content again.

"Michael!" He exclaimed, with a small angelic salute (fist against heart).

"You were in the water for some time," I said, trying not to miss a beat. "Do you remember what happened before you fell in the lake?"

Nichael's face first registered confusion, then straight obedience. He was well taught, properly ingrained- made me miss the days of Heaven, when all angels were like him. "I was hurt. Bleeding out," he frowned. "...Dying."

"You're still alive," I pointed out.

It seemed to help. "There was something about you. Something about blood, and a flask, and... war in Heaven. Michael, wait."

"Yes?"

"I think I hate you."

There was a solid beat where I felt things, and considered them, and then remembered my end goal: solve a fucking mystery, no time for any other thoughts. "And you died in that lake."

He died there. He bled out. Right right right. Nichael was Graceless, or half-Grace: I'd taken away too much, burned his wings and tore his skin and bled him of his Grace. And then he'd died in that water.

Grace was a tricky substance. The man who'd first put it in us (that bastard, that wily Old Friend of mine, Alexander Scott) was the first to study it. Hell had been, in the old days, there. Full of demons who didn't really know why they existed, held under a dictatorship that made sure they didn't question things.

Then revolution came, and with the dictator dead, I'm not sure who was left who knew the true nature of Hell. It surely wasn't really called that, for one, just as the demons were really demons.

I think it was a bunker at some point, some kind of secret government program to make a better world in case the nuclear apocalypse came by. Hence the farming, and the weather simulation, and the big, repetitive city of Pride. And maybe they were trying to make better people, too, but instead found something a little odder than that.

Grace was what made angels. It was a thick, shiny white-clear substance. I remember it entering my veins clearly, even if it was centuries ago, simply because of how it felt: hot, and slimy, like a worm was wriggling instead every blood passage at once. I could feel my skin bulge like my veins were about to burst, trace the path of the slushy magic as it seemed to freeze every part of my body.

It had hurt, and then I'd been fine, never sick again, less tired. I don't know if it did anything else, I don't know if Alexander studied it to the point where he really learned what it'd done. It was part of the angels, though, part of us now: nearly a parasite.

It would hide your wounds and keep you healthy. With a bit of trickery it could become anything you wanted it to- a fiery sword, sure, but I'd learned how to make it jewelry once, learned how to paint gold stripes on my skin. When I felled angels, I would remove most of it with a blade- it clung to itself, silver dots in the blood like oil on water.

Then came the day in Heaven where I lost all of it myself, where a certain Old Friend had done some draining of his own. And then I found out that I couldn't live without it. Even as an immortal, I needed it to keep my body running. Without it, I started to wither, my skin increasingly red and blotchy, quick to bleed like my skin was wet paper-mache, prone to slipping aside and exposing the flesh below.

My solution to this was, well, to get more. But we were out of it, it turned out- I came to Hell again one day in hopes of finding another unused vial, of making myself whole again. But while I found a little, still fresh after all these years, in a little test tube... it didn't work. I shot it through my veins and I sweat and I shook and I died, and nothing had happened.

(Side note: yes, there's something fishy about all this. For example, when I had died in the past before, why didn't I reset to my Grace-ful self? After all, I did have Grace at the time that my body was stuck at. Good fucking question, I say.

(Answer: The universe is out to get me, and Grace is some kind of legit reality-bending magic that doesn't play fair. It was wormed around my 'soul' or whatever, following me in each body I'd taken. My old corpses, for example, didn't have any Grace either. It was just my current form, like Grace was some alien entity devoted only to me.)

Anyway, I found I could keep my Grace-dependent body by drinking Grace, when I found it, and introduced a new funeral rite: hey guys, let's drain the blood of bodies before burning them. Oh, no real reason really. Just for symbolic purposes. Your leader totally isn't drinking it!

My point is that my Grace and my body had become two parts of a whole, and suddenly my body wasn't willing to accept any other Grace (even pure, untouched), and no other dead man's Grace was willing to accept me.

Where is this all leading? Well, if Grace was somehow attached to someone's 'soul', if it remembered its host and refused to bond with someone else...

Nichael had still had a few drops of it left when he'd died in the lake. Grace never deteriorated. Grace had healing powers, a strong will to prevent illness and close up wounds.

Doppel might've fallen into the water, cut open, and stirred up in that dirty water a few drops of Grace- and while normally it refused a new host, if it had somehow, somehow carried a faint 'memory' of its last host, and Doppel had shape-shifted in response to become Nichael, and... well, then the Grace might've clung to his blood, might've climbed into his veins and patched him up.

(And another mysterious thought: why had it failed to save Nichael, but had been able to save Doppel? Probably Doppel hadn't been as hurt as Justice had assumed, while Nichael had been an utter wreck, too dead to save.)

Oh, it was ridiculous. Man, it was a bit of stretch.

But it also made a lick more sense than a lot of other things. It meant that Doppel was imprinted towards me in whatever form because some bizarro liquid had nested Nichael into their core, and it also meant if I could remove it, Doppel might be a tad more coherent. I wasn't positive he'd suddenly remember his true identity, but then I didn't trust Justice had really talked to him before trying to kill him.

Even if he was confused, Grace was bound to make things worse.

Take it out, save his life.

Okay, okay, okay.

-

-

-

Is this a bit ludicrous or what. I feel the need to put an 'XD' here.

"It just works"

-me