She woke, extremely unwillingly, as her head was pounding in a way she hadn't experienced since being human...or since her death, since that train accident. Oh heavens above... She tried to pry her eyes open, and at the first flash of light, winced and changed her mind, lying back on the concrete-hard bed. Something prodded its way through her unhappy consciousness. My bed is soft. Where is this? She couldn't seem to remember anything - panic slightly rising through the sickening, dizzying pain, she remembered...the airport, seeing off Steve. Sensing something wrong. Running to help. And then...

Blankness. But that wasn't quite right, was it? There was something before. Those eyes...something about them that had caught her attention...

She lay back with a little groan, curling into the monstrously uncomfortable slab beneath her...she just couldn't. She hadn't felt this bad since she'd been alive; something akin to the loathsome recovery period after anaesthetic where even if the mind is panicking and chattering, desperate to wake and think and move, the body simply won't. Something horrifying was screaming in her hindbrain but of all the pathetic times, she couldn't focus on it. She seemed to be alone, at least, and that was about all she could comfort herself with.

"Helena?" she whispered, just in case. No response, from her mentor or anyone else. This didn't feel like Heaven, and it didn't feel like her home, either, but something beyond her strength was compelling her to give up.

She let herself pass out again.

-

His boss had locked her - sedated with his infernal power - in one of the hospital-like antechambers down a back corridor where nobody above a certain rank was allowed to wander, on pain of pain. He had the clearance, however, and the short, stocky demons on guard didn't seem especially inclined to stop him walking in. The corridor was deserted otherwise, a sticky-floored mockery of the kind of place screaming relatives ran down as the fragile lifethread of their beloved ones frayed away - the usual nasty mint-green and off-white of hospitals, dim strip lighting and over the windows of each locked door, slat blinds, pulled mostly shut. When he reached the one room with a light on, the blinds were slightly ajar, allowing him to look in at the limp form of the angel inside.

She was tiny and prone, and she had those stupid logic-defying wings that sometimes were existed and sometimes didn't - some lesser demon scholar had tried to explain it to him once, about wings that existed on some other realm to allow them to move among humans undetected, and he'd stopped listening after about five minutes. Didn't matter; he could see the ephemeral white fluff protruding from her back, fluttering in her sleep, presumably with worry. Bloody angel wings were always so sensitive. Could read their feelings from their wings a mile off. She was turned away from him, curled into a ball, clearly out of it, still. Any hopes she might be powerful or useful after all, deflated.

Ya didn't have to be here. If ya'd just stayed away or been quicker or whatever. He shook his head, aware he wasn't meant to think that. Why would he, anyway? She was just pathetic, that was all, hardly the kind of angel who'd be any sort of useful hostage whatsoever. Look at her. He could pick her up in one hand, he was certain, if the mood took him. Crush her in a heartbeat - he smirked bitterly - the heartbeat he no longer had. He wondered what she'd think of him if she woke up and looked. Fear, of course. To fall on her knees and beg for her life. Fear and power. That's the thing.

As he stared, she rolled over, her little rosebud lips parting in a small whimper he couldn't hear. He stepped sharply back from the curtains in case she woke, and after a moment examining her soft features - not precisely pretty after all, but...sweet, endearing - ugh - the fall of fringe over her high forehead - he rolled his eyes and walked out.

Yeah, just my luck. Catch an angel, the runty kind who ain't more use than a round of used bullets. This ain't worth it.

-

And now she knew she was dreaming because she didn't have her wings, but she was airborne; she was wearing the glasses she'd needed in life and they felt strange on her face after a few years without, now...the mist around her was sensuously choking and absolutely blinding, but strangely comforting; there was no fear.

Someone was whispering her name.

"Listen. Feel. You have to listen...it is coming."

"What is?" she said, turning in the nothingness, but there was nobody there. Her voice echoed hollowly around her.

"You have to remember."

She jolted awake with a gasp, and what she felt, instantly, brought no comfort; it was nothing obvious, nothing quantifiable, and any other being wouldn't have felt a thing, but there was an energy around her in this place. An energy she she knew, she'd been warned of, she'd foolishly thought she'd never encounter outside of a lesson...the energy of hell.

Breathe. You have to breathe. Well, not strictly true. But pretend. You have to...the thoughts tore through her mind at light speed - panic, stifling terror, the knowledge that she had to cling onto something, anything, that her subconscious recognised as 'normal' to work out what to do. I'm still so human. If I was a proper angel...She squashed that thought, too. Not now.

The room resembled nothing so much as a hospital room with the barest decoration. A table and chair, the bed in which she lay, and a small screen at the end. Rolling slowly over, she let her legs hang out from the cheap, thin sheets, and slid numbly out, her bare feet pressing to the cold tiled floor. Moving like a sleepwalker, counting and measuring each determined breath. She nudged the screen with a finger. It slid aside to reveal a rudimentary bathroom. The normalcy of that brought helpless hysterical laughter bubbling up in her throat, and she tottered on feet that felt six times their usual side back to the horrible bed and sat down on the very edge, her head dropping into her hands.

I'm a prisoner. This is a cell. And she couldn't imagine what happened to the prisoners of hell...well, that wasn't true either. She could imagine only too well.

"Nothing of hell can touch a pure being," Helena's calm voice repeated in her head, certain and serene as only a senior angel can be. "The agony to them would be beyond imagining. Sins cannot face virtues."

She sat back further and drew her knees up to her chest, allowed her wings to open out and wrap around her as if they could shield her from whatever would come, squeezing her eyes up tight. Let that be true. Oh, please, let that be true.

-

His boss stared at a point just over his left shoulder. He dutifully stood to attention in front of him, expression neutral, eyes carefully focussed on the floor. Any tiny hint of insubordination was not tolerated.

His boss had an honest-to-gods office, of all things, albeit spartan; currently he was steepling his long, long fingers and leaning his elbows on the desk, thinking. The boss never spoke much, and he preferred it that way. Anything he did say generally resulted in orders or pain.

Currently he was, apparently, considering what to do with their little prisoner.

He felt strangely uncomfortable about the though that this, she, might become his problem, and that niggled in a way he also couldn't define. I'm not some sort of...minder. I have a job. Bein' some sort of petty security guard ain't somethin' I deserve. I got power here. The thought of being demoted was mortifying, a punch in the gut he wasn't sure he could take. Why didn't ya just run, angel? That had to have been his reasoning. The moment something glowy and sickeningly pure like that had walked onto the scene he recognised a potential thorn in his side, in his ambitions. That was it. She'd get on with Daniel, I bet. A pretty pair to piss me off and take everythin' that should be mine. Hah. Maybe they know each other. No way he ain't in heaven. He ground his teeth, and forced himself to relax before his boss noticed the reaction. Sometimes he found it amusing; at first, he'd laughed at his vengeance and ambition and promoted him. Other times...he did not. This is a harvest, Boss would bark. Stop messing around. You're not here to enjoy yourself. Hell is a job. You forget your place. You are not human any more.

"They will inevitably look for her," Boss said, at last, impassively. He didn't respond; it wasn't a question. He was used to being talked at like a tape recorder, as well. "I have a better plan." Boss leaned back in his leather chair, and paused. "When you can control your emotions you can be efficient."

He tried not to react. Praise? Really? Of a sort, anyway. The kind that made him want to roll his eyes, if he knew he wouldn't have lost the eyes for the act. He still remembered the screams of the last demon who had done so.

"At first I had considered turning her over to one of the incubi," Boss continued. "Make her fall. If they search for her, they cannot take back something tainted. I do not, on reflection, think this will be efficient, however." His lips tightened. "It is too late. And realistically I will need to keep her very existence here as quiet as possible. The masses will not take kindly to an angel in their midst, I feel. Yet there are other ways and means. I have been working on a way of simply repressing human memories from incoming...colleagues, so that they do not..." He allowed himself a thin smile. "Deviate from their purposes."

That was a dig, he knew it. Quite a concept, though, although it made something inside him shudder in a way he thought he'd forgotten how to. Fear. Because then there'd be no way out. And that was pathetic. He was fine here. He liked it, even. Had to. Power and immortality. It was all there was, and he had it. Nothing else mattered. The world had taught him that. Everything else, you lose. All you have, is what you take. He tried to focus.

"This is a place of singularity rather than the free will of humanity and the chaos of heaven. Everything in its place. And its place is to be under myself and the Princes of Hell. As such, she will be a fine test subject," Boss finished. "You are a reaper. And I now require you to reap her memories."

-