Chapter 116: 17.1.4
The sweet, maintained dose of Class-Js was a marvel of celestial pharmacology. It kept Koen in a state of placid, affectionate contentment, his baseline hostility replaced by a cuddly, tactile warmth that made him seek out Gabriel’s presence like a sunflower tilting towards light. It was, Gabriel thought as he signed off on a stack of soul transit waivers, the perfect equilibrium. The hunter was tame, but not a vegetable. He could hold a simple conversation, he ate with relish, he even smiled sometimes at nothing in particular—a slow, uncomplicated softening of his features that made him look his actual, youthful age.
He was currently sitting at Gabriel’s feet, his back against the archangel’s leg, methodically braiding and unbraiding a loose thread from the hem of his own tunic. The fire crackled. The paperwork was mundane. It was, for the first time since the acquisition, genuinely peaceful.
“Pet,” Gabriel said, not looking up from a particularly dense clause on inter-realm tax exemption.
“Hmm?” Koen’s head tilted back, resting against Gabriel’s knee. His orange eyes were hazy, but focused.
“Fetch the ledger from the side table. The one with the blue binding.”
A simple command. A test of both comprehension and compliance. Koen blinked slowly, then unfolded himself. He padded barefoot across the room, found the specified book, and brought it back. He didn’t hand it over immediately. He stood there, holding it, a faint line of confusion between his brows. “This one?”
“That’s the one.” Gabriel held out his hand.
Koen placed it in his palm, his fingers brushing Gabriel’s. A small, pleased flush crept up his neck at the contact. Instead of returning to his spot on the floor, he lingered, shifting his weight. “Can I… stay here?”
“You are here.”
“No, I mean…” Koen gestured vaguely, then, with a boldness fueled entirely by the xenodrugs, he climbed onto the wide plush chair beside Gabriel’s, tucking his legs underneath him. He settled in, a warm, solid presence about a foot away, close enough that Gabriel could feel the heat of him. He let out a soft, contented sigh and went back to fiddling with his thread.
Gabriel returned to his work, hiding a smirk. Progress. Excellent progress.
The problem announced itself not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Gabriel received an urgent summons via a chime that shattered the afternoon’s calm—a live, tripartite communion with the Principality of Order and the Seraphim of Records. It required absolute concentration, a shielded environment, and at least two hours of his undivided attention. Standard procedure.
He stood, stretching the kinks from his shoulders. “I have a call, pet. You’ll remain here. Behave.”
Koen, who had been dozing lightly in the chair, jolted awake. The placid haze in his eyes flickered, replaced by a sharp, animal alertness. “Where?”
“My study. It’s shielded. I’ll be back when it’s done.” Gabriel began walking towards the arched doorway that led to his private sanctum.
“Wait.” The word was too loud. Koen scrambled off the chair, the braided thread falling forgotten. “Can’t I come?”
“No. It’s private.”
“I’ll be quiet.” He was following now, two paces behind, a shadow with frantic eyes.
“That’s not the point. Stay.” Gabriel infused the command with a thread of compulsion, the lightest mental nudge.
Koen stopped as if he’d hit a wall. But his face did something terrible. It crumpled. Not into anger, but into a wide-eyed, breathless panic that was wholly new. His tan skin paled. “How long?”
“As long as it takes. Read a book. Look out the window.” Gabriel waved a hand, already partitioning his mind for the diplomatic hellscape ahead.
“Gabriel.” The use of his name, raw and strained, made Gabriel pause at the threshold. Koen was standing in the middle of the room, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. He looked, for the first time since the conditioning began, truly lost. “Please. Don’t… don’t go in there.”
It was irrational. It was illogical. It was deeply, profoundly inconvenient.
“It’s two hours,” Gabriel said, his voice cool. “Sit down.”
He stepped through the archway. As the magical seal began to shimmer into place behind him, the last thing he saw was Koen taking an aborted step forward, one hand outstretched, his mouth open in a silent plea.
The communion was, as expected, a bureaucratic nightmare. Two hours stretched to two and a half as the Principality and the Seraphim argued over the metaphysical classification of a recently departed philosopher-king. Gabriel navigated it with flawless, icy precision, his tone never slipping from its razor’s edge of polite authority. But a small, distracted part of his mind was tuned to the house wards. He felt it. A low, persistent thrum of distress. Not an attack on the wards, but a psychic resonance of acute anxiety, bleeding through from the main salon.
When he finally dissolved the communion seals and stepped back into the salon, the scene was not one of quiet repose.
Koen was pacing. A tight, frantic path between the hearth and the divan. His hair was mussed as if he’d been running his hands through it constantly. He’d bitten one of his nails down to the quick, a tiny bead of black demon blood welling on the cuticle. He spun as Gabriel entered, his expression a stark relief that twisted instantly into something accusatory and wounded.
“You were gone forever,” he choked out. His voice was hoarse.
“It was two hours and thirty-seven minutes,” Gabriel corrected, calmly removing his formal over-robe. The emotional noise in the room was palpable, a sour taste at the back of his tongue. “You are intact. The world did not end.”
Koen didn’t seem to hear. He strode forward, stopping just short of touching Gabriel. He was vibrating with pent-up tension. “I thought… I didn’t know if you were coming back.”
“Where, precisely, would I go?” Gabriel hung the robe on a stand. “This is my home. You are in it. Your conclusion lacked foundation.”
Logic was a stone thrown into a stormy sea. It sank without a trace. Koen’s breath hitched. “It felt wrong. It felt… empty.” He wrapped his arms around himself, a self-hug that looked painfully tight. The demonic side was screaming in the gesture—a creature of packs and territory, abandoned in the den. The Class-Js had hijacked that instinct and amplified it a hundredfold. The desired clinginess had metastasized into a dependency disorder.
A flaw in the protocol. An unintended side effect. Annoying, but not unmanageable. Everything was manageable.
“You survived,” Gabriel said, moving past him toward his desk. “The experience, while apparently traumatic for you, is over. You will need to acclimatize. My work is not optional.”
Koen trailed him. “What if you have to leave? Actually leave?”
“I will inform you.”
“What if you can’t?”
“This is tiresome, petal.” Gabriel sat, pulling a new scroll towards him. “The matter is closed.”
But the matter was not closed. It became the new constant.
The next day, a standard quarter-hour check-in with a lower choir required Gabriel to retreat to his study for a brief auditory link. He administered a mild sedative beforehand, a simple Class-Z to encourage drowsiness. Koen was asleep on the divan when he left.
The psychic shriek of panic that echoed through the house wards ten minutes later was not mild. It was a sharp, silent spike of pure terror. Gabriel, mid-sentence with the Choir Vice-Administrator, had to force his concentration not to fracture. He concluded the call with abrupt, uncharacteristic brevity and strode back into the salon.
Koen was on the floor beside the divan, tangled in the blanket, chest heaving. The sedative had been violently metabolized by his adrenal response. He was slick with a cold sweat, his eyes wild and unfocused.
“You vanished,” he gasped, clawing at the carpet. “The room… it got quiet. The fire sound changed. I woke up and you were gone.”
“I was fifteen feet away, through a door.”
“It felt like gone!”
This was unsustainable. The anxiety was a feedback loop: the fear of separation caused distress, which made him hyper-aware of Gabriel’s absence, which intensified the fear. The Class-Js, designed to create bond-seeking behavior, had fused with Koen’s own deep-seated abandonment scars and produced this crippling echo.
Gabriel needed silence. He needed to work. The celestial machinery did not stop because a half-demon was having an existential crisis in his parlour.
The solution was inelegant but necessary: a pivot in chemical management. He couldn’t lower the Class-J dose too quickly without triggering withdrawal or a resurgence of baseline aggression. But he needed to blunt this acute anxiety response immediately.
He retrieved a different case. Class-M xenodrugs. The emotional and neurological equivalent of wrapping a mind in thick, soundproofed cotton wool.
The next time a priority summons came, Gabriel didn’t explain. He simply took Koen’s chin in his hand, tipped his head back, and administered the M-dose via a slender dropper onto his tongue. It was fast-acting.
The change was immediate. The frantic light in Koen’s eyes dimmed, softened, then spread into a warm, blank placidity. The tension bled from his shoulders. He smiled, a slow, easy thing with no origin. “Oh,” he murmured, his voice syrupy. “That’s nice.”
“It is nice,” Gabriel agreed, guiding him to the large, padded window seat. “You’re going to sit right here and watch the clouds. Can you do that for me?”
Koen nodded, his movements loose and dreamy. He sank into the cushions, turning his head to the sky beyond the glass. He barely blinked. “So pretty,” he whispered, to no one.
Gabriel attended his meeting—a full hour—in perfect peace. When he returned, Koen was in the exact same position, still gazing out the window, a beatific smile on his face. He didn’t stir until Gabriel touched his shoulder.
“Welcome back,” Koen slurred, leaning into the touch. The anxiety was gone, chemically erased. But so was everything else. The curiosity, the fleeting smiles, the small attempts at interaction. He was a beautiful, breathing doll.
This was the stopgap. Gabriel began a careful, dual-regimen titration. He very slightly lowered the maintained Class-J dose, milligram by milligram, over days. He used the Class-Ms as a bridge, only during necessary absences. The goal was to weaken the separation anxiety without losing the foundational bond the Js provided.
The days took on a new rhythm. Periods of gentle, affectionate interaction—Koen following him from room to room, sitting quietly at his feet, accepting touch with a soft, needy press—punctuated by sudden, scheduled voids. Gabriel would say, “Time for quiet, pet,” and administer the M-dose. Koen’s face would go smooth and empty. He would be placed somewhere comfortable, and he would simply be, immobile and peaceful, until Gabriel returned and the world slowly swam back into focus for him.
The anxiety still lurked. You could see it in the moment before the dropper came out—a tightening around his eyes, a quick, shallow breath. Sometimes, if Gabriel was preparing a scroll and ink for a long session, Koen would appear silently at his elbow, not speaking, just standing there, a living, breathing question mark full of dread.
“It’s only for a little while,” Gabriel would say, not unkindly, as he measured the clear M-liquid.
Koen would nod, swallowing hard. He’d take the dose without protest, his eyes fixed on Gabriel’s until the chemicals swept the fear away and left only vacant, peaceful blue in its wake.
It was a imperfect system, a temporary patch on a faulty design. But it was functional. Gabriel could work. The house was quiet when it needed to be.
One evening, after a particularly long session under the M-drugs, Koen was slow to return to himself. He was curled on his side on the divan, blinking languidly. Gabriel sat beside him, reviewing a missive.
Slowly, a hand crept out from the blanket. Koen’s fingers found the edge of Gabriel’s tunic and clutched it, not pulling, just holding. His eyes were half-closed, his breathing deep.
“You’re here,” he mumbled, the words thick.
“I am.”
“Good.” Koen’s grip tightened, a faint tremble in his fingers. The M-dose was wearing off, but the J-dose, now slightly lower, wasn’t fully buffering the underlying fear. The anxiety was quieter, more of a deep hum than a shriek, but it was still there, woven into the fabric of his calm. A flaw in the tapestry. A thread that refused to be smoothed. Gabriel looked at the white-knuckled grip on his clothes, the helpless, sleeping need of it, and knew the problem was not solved. It was merely contained. And containment, in his experience, was always temporary.
And containment, in his experience, was always temporary. The balance was too delicate, a house of cards built on shifting biochemical sand.Gabriel continued his slow, meticulous reduction of the Class-J dose. He charted the levels in a separate ledger, noting time of day, Koen’s responsiveness, and any signs of anxiety. The goal was to find the sweet spot: enough Js to maintain the bond and the pleasant, tactile sensitivity, but not so much that a closed door sparked a psychic meltdown.
For a week, it seemed to work. Koen remained affectionate, following him from room to room with a soft, persistent need.The anxiety was quieter, a background hum he could mostly ignore. The Class-M doses became less frequent, reserved only for extended, high-priority communions. Gabriel allowed himself a flicker of satisfaction.The system was being perfected.
Then, on a Thursday, he miscalculated.It wasn't a dramatic error. A marginal over-correction in the titration, a belief that Koen's system had acclimatized more than it truly had. The dosage that morning was a full fifteen percent lower than the previous day’s maintenance level. Gabriel administered it in a honey-sweetened tea, which Koen drank while leaning against his leg, humming some tuneless, contented noise.He seemed fine.Better than fine, even—more alert, more present. His eyes held a clearer focus when they met Gabriel’s.
“You’re chatty today, petal,” Gabriel remarked, sorting through a stack of endorsements for miraculous interventions.
“Feel good,” Koen said, stretching his arms over his head until his shoulders popped. It was a gesture from his old life, fluid and powerful.He rolled his neck, a hunter working out kinks. “Kinda… buzzy.”
Gabriel filed the observation away. Possible side-effect of the reduced sedative qualities of the Js.Increased energy.Manageable.The first sign was subtle. Around midday, Gabriel reached out to tousle Koen’s hair as he passed his chair. It was an automatic gesture, a habit of ownership. Koen’s head snapped around, not with the usual nuzzle into the touch, but with a sharp, startled jerk. He didn’t pull away, but his body went taut for a second, his orange eyes flashing with something that wasn’t fear.It was a spark of pure, undiluted irritation. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, replaced by a familiar, dazed softness.
“Sorry,” Koen mumbled, leaning back into the touch belatedly, as if remembering his script.
Gabriel withdrew his hand, his fingers tingling with a faint, unexpected charge.“No need to apologize.”
The second sign was auditory. Gabriel was dictating a particularly complex edict into a recording crystal, his voice low and steady. From the window seat, Koen began tapping his fingernails against the leaded glass. Tap-tap-tap-tap.A rapid, erratic rhythm. It was a small sound, but it drilled into Gabriel’s concentration.He paused.“Please stop that.”
The tapping ceased. For about thirty seconds.Then it started again, faster now, a frantic percussion. Taptaptaptap.“Koen.” The name was a warning.The sound stopped. Silence hung heavy in the room.Gabriel finished his dictation, sealed the crystal, and set it aside. He looked over.Koen was staring out the window, his jaw working, chewing on nothing. The pleasant, placid expression was gone.In its place was a tight, restless scowl. The lines of his face were harder, older. The freckles stood out like flecks of dirt on stone.“Is something the matter?” Gabriel asked, his tone neutral, analytical.
“It’s nothing,” Koen said, but the words were ground out. He stood up abruptly, the movement sharp and graceless.He paced to the fireplace, turned on his heel, paced back. His bare feet slapped the stone floor. “Just… cramped.”
“You have the run of the salon.”
“I know that.” The reply was too quick, too hot. Koen stopped pacing, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. He looked at Gabriel, and the haze in his eyes was completely burned away.What remained was a clear, sharp, hostile intelligence. And beneath that, a well of black, boiling confusion. “Why am I here?”
The question, so blunt and undrugged, landed like a physical blow. Gabriel leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “You are here because this is your home now.”
“Bullshit.” The word was a snarl.Koen took a step forward. The demonic heritage was in full command now—the lowered center of gravity, the slight crouch, the canines visible behind his curled lip. “I had a home.I had a life. I had… I had a gun.”
The last word was shouted, ripped from a place of profound, personal loss. Memory was punching through the chemical fog, and it was angry.Gabriel remained seated, a monument of calm. Inside, he was recalculating frantically.The drop was too steep. The aggression wasn’t just returning; it was reconstituting with the clarity of sobriety, fueled by fresh grief and the humiliating recall of weeks of docility.“That life is over.This is better. Safer.”
“Safer for who?!” Koen roared. He swept an arm across a side table, sending a crystal decanter and two goblets shattering against the far wall. The crash was spectacular, a symphony of breaking glass.The smell of expensive sherry filled the air. “Not for me!You drugged me! You keep me in this… this gilded cage! I’m not a pet!”
“You are whatever I say you are.” Gabriel’s voice dropped, losing its pleasantry, becoming the cold, resonant tone of celestial authority. He stood, finally, unfolding to his full height. The difference was still there, but it felt less definitive now.Koen wasn’t looking up at him with needy eyes. He was staring him down, a cornered animal with nothing left to lose.
“I’m Koen Delano,” the hunter spat, pounding a fist against his own chest.“I kill things like you.”
He moved.
It wasn’t the clumsy, desperate lunge of the early days. It was the efficient, brutal violence of a seasoned monster hunter.He didn’t charge head-on. He feinted left, then used the momentum to grab the heavy wooden chair Gabriel had just vacated, swinging it sideways like a battering ram aimed at Gabriel’s knees.Gabriel flicked a hand. A kinetic shield shimmered into place, and the chair exploded into splinters against it. But the force of the blow still rocked him back a step.Koen was already inside his guard. He’d used the chair as a distraction.A fist, hardened by a hundred street fights, connected with Gabriel’s jaw.
The impact was shocking. Not for its power—it was less than what Gabriel could deliver—but for its reality. The crisp crack of knuckle on bone, the bright flare of pain.It had been centuries since anything had touched him without permission. He tasted the metallic tang of his own blood, celestial and sharp.
He saw the wild triumph in Koen’s eyes, the savage glee of landing a hit.It lasted a microsecond.
Gabriel’s patience, already thin, evaporated.He didn’t bother with complex magic. He simply reached out, faster than Koen could react, and grabbed the front of his tunic. He lifted him off the ground and slammed him backwards into the stone mantle of the fireplace.
The breath left Koen’s body in a pained whoosh.Before he could suck another in, Gabriel slammed him again. And again.Methodical, punishing impacts that rattled the hunter’s bones and shook the ancient stones. A small, choked sound escaped Koen’s lips.
Gabriel leaned in close, his flawless face inches from Koen’s, his light blue eyes blazing with a cold, divine fire. “You are a celeset,” he hissed, each word precise and glacial. “You are mine. Your aggression is a faulty circuit I will repair. Your memories are relics I will bury. You do not get to touch me.”
He dropped Koen. The hunter crumpled to the fur rug, gasping, one hand clutching his ribs. A trickle of black blood ran from his hairline where it had connected with the stone. He glared up, panting, but the violent rage was already fracturing, overwhelmed by pain and the dawning, horrifying understanding of the power gap. The clear aggression was receding, muddied by shock.
Gabriel straightened his tunic, wiping the blood from his lip with a thumb. He looked at the crimson smear on his skin, then down at the broken creature on his hearthrug. The ledger was upended. The careful titration was a failure. He had gone too low, too fast, and the raw material of the man had reasserted itself with a vengeance. He needed to restart. A stronger baseline dose. A complete reassessment. This… this was a setback.
Koen tried to push himself up, his arms trembling violently. His orange eyes, clouded with pain and a lingering, stubborn fury, locked onto Gabriel’s. “I’ll remember this,” he growled, each word a struggle.
“No,” Gabriel said, his voice returning to its detached, clinical calm. He walked to the pharmaceutical case, his movements efficient and unhurried. “You won’t.”
He selected a syringe this time, not a dropper.A high-concentration cocktail of Class-Js and a powerful Class-B amnestic. He turned back, the needle catching the firelight.
gabriel continues to slowly lower the class-j dose. unfortunately gabriel miscalculates and goes too low too fast causing koen’s baseline aggression to come back violently. all told from gabriel’s pov