Kind of Angel AU
So Angel is a Term used kind of Loosely
Angels were a very strange sort of being to be. The books of humanity had their interpretation, of course they did. That was more or less what humanity did with its spare time.
Because of this, they got as much wrong as they got right. After all, they had a whole lot of time to envision, and re-envision, and guess. And guess more. The things they came up with were genuinely baffling sometimes, in fact.
But the Angels didn’t interfere, and the Demons just thought it was a grand comedy. The jackasses.
See the line was a whole lot looser than humans seemed to think it was. It was a simple one too. Angels created and destroyed. Demons destroyed and created.
Or perhaps not so simple?
In a broader sense, Angels are those whose first love is creation, and their destruction was in the service to others. Demons destroyed for the love of that, and created only when they had a great need.
The line became muddled on the ones who created and destroyed with equal vitality, or the very odd ones that somehow ended up doing either task with extreme prejudice.
All of them could fly, though the wing concept was one that left both angels and demons baffled. What need had they of wings when they could simply shift their very beings and become… more?
Though it would explain the many stories of falling. Lucifer was a notoriously horrible flyer when he was young. Crashing was not unheard of. He also had a horrible sense of humor.
Which probably led to him being such a villain in so many stories, because humans had an exceptionally amazing talent for holding a grudge.
And the names. They were so silly with their strange rules. After all, Lucifer’s name broke most of them right off, and no one seemed to notice that.
One thing though, that humans never quite seemed to grasp, was that the Angels were among them, but that didn’t mean they properly remembered.
In the case of some, they didn’t remember at all, but kept a portion of their talents as they took a… vacation of sorts, in being born a human. Such situations were always always at the mercy of the brothers and sisters that were around an angel when they changed the weft of their soul to one that could fit a human lifespan and bound it down. Because they didn’t get to pick who they were born as.
In Tony’s case, it was a particularly mischevious healer he’d poked fun at one too many times who dropped him in as an attention starved little boy. He’d certainly done well enough, in many respects, but his angel had bled through. He couldn’t help it, he was one of the greater creators of his generation of angels, and he always felt compelled to keep at it.
He healed more swiftly than other kids and didn’t get sick. He could sleep less and eat unhealthily and be fine. And he just intuited everything to do with creating, making. Howard had, of course, been thrilled by his genius child and had further isolated him in his pride.
It wasn’t until he died the first time that something changed. One doesn’t die and come back without a change, everyone knew that, but the kidnapping when he was sixteen was… a mess. An accident. He hadn’t been willing to shut up and be docile and they accidentally smothered him too long in an effort to shut him up.
His body had been dumped, and he’d ended up crawling home, alight with the idea for his AIs and desperately driven to impress. He also badly wanted to learn to fight, because obviously this wasn’t a thing he wanted to have happen again. He didn’t know he’d been killed, he just knew he had an ache in his throat for a day and no bruises to speak of.
And that he’d been filthy, which had horrified his roommate Rhodey something terrible.
That need to impress had turned his gaze on weapons, offered willingly and eagerly to be perused and used by Obadiah and the company after his parents died. It was useful, he could protect people that way, and he’d been glad for it.
And then Afghanistan.
He’d died again and knew more this time. He realized he’d for the first time in his existence created so much only to destroy and knew, knew that wasn’t what he was supposed to be. So he’d flipped the entire thing on its head and set out with single-minded focus to right his wrongs, to living as long as he could even with the whispers of a different, brighter life curled around the edges of his awareness.
Creating something that could fly was easy, and felt right in a way nothing else really had. It wasn’t hard, flying, and he could see why so many loved it in the more limited sense most used. He was good at it.
When it came to it, and the entire Loki and Thor situation came down, well. That was when his awareness really cracked open the rest of the way as he died again. For the Third Fucking Time. Clearly, an Angel had at some point been at fault for that saying because it always took three blows to open up the memories.
And Thor was a god damn Demon. He could see it now, feel it in his bones, and he about laughed himself sick when he realized that. No one had understood why after waking and taking a glance at the people standing around he’d done that, but he hadn’t been able to help it.
He’d just offered the god slash demon his hands and played it off as a result of his little accident with the portal. No biggie.
He healed faster after that, and chortled at all the angels and demons he could see now. Thor was the only other Avenger who was, actually, though Tony admittedly had to do something of a doubletake that Fury was apparently an angel? What?
He wouldn’t have guessed that one.
He kept it under wraps though, not mentioning it.
But holy shit, then DC… And the fucking Winter Soldier. Another displaced Angel.
It was about then that Tony realized he should fess up because damn it. He could see that he wasn’t the only one who remembered being an angel, and that one there? Was not happy.
Unhappy angels weren’t something he’d wish on anyone.
The whole fire and brimstone thing? Raining fire from the sky?
Not as made up as a lot of other stories, and even a human caged angel was still going to be… a lot to deal with. Yep.
Damn it Steve, and your admittedly amazing taste in friends.
Bits about Angels
Angels and Demons are part of a sliding scale of the same species. They’re actually all one type of being, with their natural drives and inclinations marking them as one or the other.
Think boys and girls with the genderfluid in between, rather than arch enemies across country lines.
The natural inclination of a Demon is to destroy things, or cause destruction. They can create, but are not compelled to as they are to, well, wreck things. Some do this in careful asides that tear down relationships. Others just come in swinging and leave a mess behind them.
Angels are driven to create and to preserve their creations. This doesn’t mean they can’t wreck things. It just means that when they wreck things they REALLY REALLY wreck them so they won’t have to do it again anytime soon. Stories of avenging angels are sadly not terribly exaggerated.
Those between have both destroyed and created, or have somehow managed to do neither. They’re often the ones without a drive or with perhaps too much of one, depending. Michael was an Archangel by human reckoning, for instance, but was actually one of these between beings that both created and destroyed in equal measures.
All Angels and Demons can fly, as can the beings that aren’t quite either one. They cannot do this in human form.
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory are inventions given to the humans by some of the more mischievous angels. Demons have since taken advantage of this in their various jaunts to earth to see how much mayhem it can lend their efforts. Thus, the Crusades.
They all, instead, live in a side along dimension of sorts where they can interact with the human realm, but it’s somewhat iffy and takes a serious toll on any Angels who try. Usually, they don’t bother unless they’ve been bound to human form first.
Most Angels and Demons come to Earth because they’re bored, curious, or both. It’s a rare Being that gets talked into it, but a less rare one that uses it as a kind of vacation to get away from the ‘relatives’.
An Angel must bind themselves and their power before someone else sends them off to inhabit an unborn child. No exceptions. Someone trying to bind from the outside would only succeed in killing the Being they’re attempting to bind.
Angels and Demons live for a really long time, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t family units and generations. A generation, however, tends to be a few hundred years instead of the human 20 to 50.
God is a confusing concept to a lot of Angels. They’re aware of what the humans say and believe, but it’s a rare one that claims to have met the Being that goes by that name. Some say it’s a Being that’s genuinely immortal.
When a Being is bound to human form, they remember nothing. They’re born and live as humans do, and tend to live a rather long time.
The first time they die, if it’s a ‘gentle’ death (say, decapitation, or being gutted, you know VIOLENT AND MESSY DEATH? is not) then they will revive. If they can be saved from the death they’ve been landed with, then they recover, and have a small sense of purpose. This purpose is whatever their inclination was as a Being before their binding.
The second time a Being dies, they recover faster than before, healing from things at a rate that’s more than the average human (or whatever race they’ve chosen), but not overly unusual. These things are influenced by the body they have. If they’re, say, given the Serum, that boosts from the Serum levels. If they’re just a normal flimsy human like Tony, it’s notably less. Along with the healing is an awareness of being different, of being more and other Beings begin to seem a bit more real than other people do. Usually, the small inkling of the first death will flare into a full-blown need to do what they once did as an Angel or Demon, what made them have purpose.
The Third death is the most important, and hikes healing dramatically. It also gives the Being some of their abilities back, and they can remember their lives as a Being outside of their human life.
But hey, Fourth Time’s a Charm!
None of these deaths give back the ability to fly. But they do make slapping a permanent death on a Being a fucking hell of a lot harder.
If you wanna kill one, do it before they know what the hell they are, basically.
If you kill the body, the Being survives it and returns to what they were with their new experiences.
If you kill the soul, you kill the Being.
Beings are, and will perpetually remain, vulnerable until their human form dies. No exceptions. Anything that can be done to the body will still affect them as it always would have. They have no safety against mental invasion, though there is the saving grace that Being memories, not being attached to the body, are inaccessible by mind readers.
Beings who have unlocked their memories can always recognize one another, by what they are at least. It takes nicknames and names to clear up actual identities.
By that coin, most beings have Nicknames. Tony’s, for instance, is the Life Architect. No guesses as to why.
AND A LITTLE MORE.
Beings are energy life forms. That’s part of why they want to have human lives, much of the time, because Humans have the kinds of limitations these beings don’t, but they also have things that they can’t quite grasp. Their sort of machinery isn’t like human machinery, and would be impossible on our plane of reality, for example. Then again, they can also create a whole animal species if they tried hard enough.
Beings still have a society, it’s just. Different. There are less of them for one, and for two, when one dies, it never goes unnoticed. It’s pretty much never by age because they don’t age, as such, but a great work, either creative or destructive, can use up all they are and leave them dead at the end of it. This is the most common way to die when a Being feels they’ve accomplished all they need to.