Chapter 117: 17.1.5.1
told from gabriel’s pov. gabriel is violent with koen, wanting to physically harm the hunter for daring to lay a finger on him. koen just wouldn’t stay down, so gabriel ends up beating koen close to a bloody pulp by the time koen finally stayed down. only then gabriel administers the class-b xenodrugs
The metallic tang of his own blood was a profound insult. Gabriel stood over the crumpled form on the rug, the echo of the hunter’s fist still vibrating in the bone of his jaw. He touched the spot again, his fingers coming away clean; the minor wound had already sealed itself. The physical evidence was gone, but the violation remained, raw and screaming. This creature, this thing he had pulled from the mud and painstakingly polished, had dared to strike him. Not just resist, but land a blow. A calculated, skilled blow.
The splintered chair, the shattered crystal, the sherry soaking into the fur—it was all chaos. Unacceptable chaos. And Koen, gasping on the floor, was its source. The clear, hostile intelligence in those orange eyes was still there, watching him, burning with a hate that was purely Koen.
“You won’t remember this,” Gabriel had said, the words cool and automatic. But as he looked down, a hotter, darker impulse unfurled in his chest. The clinical plan—administer the amnestics, recalibrate the dosage—suddenly felt insufficient. It was too clean. Too merciful.
Koen tried to push himself up again, his arms trembling but still functional. His regenerative power was already at work; the cut on his hairline had closed, leaving only a smear of black blood. He spat a gob of the same onto the stones, a vulgar, defiant gesture. “Fuck you,” he rasped, the words thick with pain but absolutely clear.
That did it.
The cold fury crystallized into a white-hot need to dismantle. To punish. To break. Gabriel didn’t reach for the pharmaceutical case. He took one step forward and drove the toe of his boot into Koen’s side, just below the ribs.
A sickening, wet crack echoed in the room, followed by Koen’s choked scream. He curled inward, agony twisting his features.
“You do not,” Gabriel said, his voice low and perfectly even, “get to touch me.”
Koen’s response was a feral snarl. He lunged from the floor, not to strike but to grapple, to get his hands around Gabriel’s throat.It was pure, desperate instinct. Gabriel let him get close, let those strong, calloused fingers brush his skin. Then he moved. He wasn’t an elegant brawler; he was a force. He grabbed Koen’s wrist, twisted it until the bones ground together, and used the hunter’s own momentum to slam him face-first into the edge of the heavy oak table.
The impact was brutal. Koen rebounded, staggering back, a bloody gash now splitting his eyebrow. He blinked, stunned, but still didn’t fold. He came again, swinging a wild haymaker.
Gabriel caught the fist in his palm, absorbing the shock with a slight tremor up his arm. The audacity of it, the relentless, stupid bravery, fanned the flames of his anger higher. He squeezed. He felt the delicate bones of the hand begin to compress, to creak in protest.
Koen cried out, a sharp, animal sound, and tried to kick. Gabriel shifted, letting the kick glance off his thigh, and drove his own knee up into Koen’s diaphragm.
All the air left Koen’s body in a whoosh. He folded, gagging, but Gabriel didn’t let him fall. He held him up by the broken hand, then released it to grab a fistful of ashen black hair. He yanked Koen’s head back, exposing his throat. “Stay. Down.” The command was a snarl. For a second, it seemed to work. Koen’s body went limp, his eyes glazed with pain and lack of oxygen. Gabriel released him, and he dropped to his knees, retching.
Gabriel took a breath, attempting to regain his clinical distance. It was done. He could administer the drugs now. Then Koen looked up. Blood streamed from his nose and brow, his breathing was ragged, but the fire wasn’t out. It was dimmer, clouded by misery, but it was there. A low, demonic growl rattled in his chest.He planted one foot on the floor, pushing himself upright once more. His left hand, the one Gabriel hadn’t crushed, was clenched into a shaky fist.
Something in Gabriel snapped. The carefully maintained facade of the bureaucratic archangel evaporated. This wasn’t about correction anymore. It was about eradication. He would beat that defiant light out with his own hands.
He didn’t bother with blocks or technique. He simply waded in and hit. A closed fist to the already-damaged ribs. A backhand across the mouth that split his lip against his own sharp canines. Koen tried to cover up, to duck, but Gabriel was everywhere, a storm of precise, brutal violence. Each impact was a cathartic release of the insult he’d been dealt.
Koen’s regeneration fought a losing war. A bone would crack, then begin to knit, only to be shattered again by the next blow. He was a canvas of rapidly shifting trauma: bruises bloomed deep purple and yellow only to fade as new ones were painted over them. He stopped trying to fight back. He tried to flee, scrambling backwards on his hands and heels until his back hit the stone wall.
There was nowhere to go.
Gabriel followed. He didn’t speak. The only sounds were the sickening thuds of impacts, the ragged gasps for air, the occasional choked sob that seemed to escape Koen against his will. The hunter slid down the wall, a broken doll. Still, his chest rose and fell. Still, his eyes, swollen nearly shut, tracked Gabriel’s movements with a fading, pathetic awareness.
Gabriel stood over him, his own breath coming faster now, not from exertion but from fervor. He looked at the blood—so much of it, black and slick, coating the stones, smeared across Koen’s tan skin, matting his hair. One of his eyes was swollen completely shut. His nose was clearly broken, sitting at a slight angle. His breath bubbled wetly in his chest.
He wasn’t getting up this time.
The hot fury drained away, leaving a hollow, cold satisfaction. It was quiet. The chaos had ended. The insult was washed clean in blood, his blood.
Only then did Gabriel turn back to the pharmaceutical case. His hands were steady as he selected a heavy-gauge syringe and a vial of clear Class-B solution. He filled the syringe, the liquid catching the firelight. He walked back to where Koen lay in a heap against the wall.
Koen flinched as Gabriel knelt beside him, a full-body shudder that had nothing to do with the cold. He tried to shrink away, but there was nowhere left to shrink to. A low, pained whine escaped him.
“Shhh, petal,” Gabriel said, his voice returning to its soft, melodic register. He brushed a sticky strand of hair from Koen’s forehead with a tenderness that was obscene given the context.“The hard part is over. This will make it all better.”
He found a relatively unblemished patch of skin on Koen’s neck and slid the needle in. He depressed the plunger slowly, watching the liquid vanish beneath the skin.
The effect was not immediate, but it was profound. The terrified tension in Koen’s body began to seep away. The pained, wet gasps evened out into slower, deeper breaths. The one visible orange eye lost its sharp focus, the pupil dilating until the iris was a thin ring of fire around a black abyss.
Gabriel cupped his face, his thumb stroking over a bruise that was already fading to a faint yellow smudge. He leaned close, his voice a hypnotic murmur.
“Listen now. You had a bad fall. You were cleaning the high shelves in the library, the ones you love to dust because the sun hits the manuscripts just so. You lost your footing on the ladder. You fell and hit your head. That’s all. It was an accident. You’ve been hurt before, and I’ve always taken care of you. I always will.”
He repeated the simple story, layering it, weaving it into the synaptic gaps the drug was carving open. He added sensory details: the smell of old parchment and lemon oil, the warmth of the sunbeam, the frightening moment of weightlessness. He painted over the raw, violent minutes with a scene of domestic mishap.
Koen’s eye drifted shut. His body went completely limp, relaxed. The last signs of pain smoothed from his face.
Gabriel sat back on his heels, surveying his work. The bloody pulp was already reconstituting itself. The broken bones were aligning, the cuts sealing into thin pink lines that would be gone by morning. The physical evidence of the beating would disappear, as if it never happened.
The memory of it was now a shallow, empty thing, a story about a clumsy fall. The hostility, the calculated attack, the defiant rage—all of it was scooped out and discarded.
He reached out and carefully gathered Koen into his arms, cradling him against his chest. He was heavy, but pliant. Gabriel carried him from the ruined salon, away from the blood and the broken glass, and took him to the bathing chamber. He needed to be clean. The new memories required a clean slate.
As he lowered the unconscious hunter into the warm, scented water, gently wiping the blood from his face, Gabriel felt a serene sense of restoration. The vessel had been cracked, but he had repaired it. The faulty, aggressive circuitry had been violently removed. He would begin again tomorrow, with a higher, more stable baseline dose. And he would be more careful. He would not underestimate the raw material again.
Koen’s head lolled against the porcelain, a soft sigh escaping his lips. In his drug-scrubbed mind, he was dreaming of sunlit libraries and a concerned, gentle voice calling him ‘petal.’ The hand that had beaten him senseless now washed him with meticulous care, rinsing away the last physical traces of the truth. The house was quiet. The balance, for now, was restored.
Gabriel worked through the evening amid the deep quiet of the house, the only sounds the scratch of his pen and the crackle of the new fire he’d lit in the cleaned hearth. He occasionally glanced at the divan where Koen lay, swaddled in a clean blanket, his breathing slow and even. The regeneration had done its work; by midnight, only the faintest shadows of bruises remained beneath his tan skin, pale myths of violence soon to vanish completely.
The new memories, Gabriel knew, would need reinforcement upon waking. He prepared a second, milder syringe of Class-B, and alongside it, a vial of viscous, pearlescent Class-W. The aphasia inducer. It was a prudent measure. A confused mind often sought to articulate its confusion, and Gabriel preferred to control the narrative entirely, without clumsy, stumbling questions. He administered both while Koen was lost in the deep, healing sleep his demonic heritage demanded, the needles slipping into the vein at his inner elbow without eliciting so much as a twitch.
He returned to his correspondence, losing himself in the minutiae of a territorial dispute between two minor choirs. The celestial clock on the mantle, its face a constellation of slowly shifting stars, chimed three times before a sound from the divan broke his concentration. It was a soft, groaning sigh, the sound of someone surfacing from depths unknown.
Gabriel set his pen down with a quiet, precise click and watched.
Koen’s eyelids fluttered. He blinked slowly at the vaulted ceiling, his brow furrowing. He tried to lift his head, then let it fall back against the cushion with a dull thud. A hand crept out from the blanket, fingers flexing in the air as if testing its substance. He turned his head on the pillow, his orange eyes landing on Gabriel. There was no recognition in that look, only a deep, fogged-over bewilderment. He opened his mouth, his lips moving soundlessly for a moment before a rough, wet sound emerged. It wasn’t a word. It was a vowel-heavy garble, “Aaaaahh… f-f-flll?”
The Class-W was in full effect. Gabriel felt a cool wash of satisfaction. He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “Good morning, sleepy thing. Or good night, I suppose. Time gets away from us, doesn’t it?”
Koen stared, his pupils wide and dark. He tried to speak again, a more determined push of air. “Wuh… wuh-sss… pinnn?” The words were mush, collapsing into nonsense before they left his tongue. A flush of frustration colored his cheeks. He understood Gabriel’s question—his eyes tracked the archangel’s lips—but the connection between his thoughts and his mouth was severed, a highway washed out by the pearlescent drug.
“You’re home, petal. Safe and sound.” Gabriel kept his voice a soft, unwavering stream, a beacon in the chemical fog. He rose and moved to the divan, sitting on the edge beside Koen’s legs. The hunter flinched at the movement, a full-body jerk, but then stilled, his confused gaze clinging to Gabriel’s face as if it were the only fixed point in a tilting room. “You took a nasty spill. Do you remember? The library ladder.”
Koen’s brow furrowed so deeply it looked painful. He was trying, Gabriel could see the effort straining his features. He was rifling through the new, flimsy files he’d been given, searching for the memory of sunlit parchment and a sudden fall. He gave a tiny, hesitant shake of his head. Then a nod. Then he just looked lost.
“That’s alright. Head injuries are tricky things.” Gabriel reached out and smoothed the hair back from Koen’s damp forehead. The touch made Koen blink rapidly, but he didn’t pull away. He leaned into it, minutely, a demonic instinct for comfort overriding the confusion. “You’ve been sleeping it off. Your body does the hard work for you, doesn’t it? All that mending.”
He let his hand rest there, a warm weight. Koen’s eyes drifted shut for a second, then snapped open, afraid the anchor would disappear.
“I’m not going anywhere. Just checking your temperature.” It was a lie, but a useful one. The gesture established care, ownership, a reason for the touch. Koen’s skin was warm, the furious regeneration finally settling into a low hum. “You might feel fuzzy for a while. That’s normal. Words might feel like slippery fish. That’s normal too.”
Koen made a soft, distressed sound in his throat. He lifted his own hand, staring at his fingers as if they belonged to a stranger. He turned it over, examining his palm, the calluses from a lifetime holding weapons that no longer existed in his mind.
“That’s your hand,” Gabriel said, a thread of amusement in his tone. “You have two of them. Ten fingers. Count them if you like.” It was a gentle tease, the kind you’d offer a child.
Obediently, Koen’s gaze dropped to his hands. He tried to curl his fingers, one after the other. He got to three before losing track, his focus dissolving. He looked back at Gabriel, a helpless, overwhelmed expression on his face. The frustration was returning, a storm cloud in his hazy eyes.
“Shhh, none of that.” Gabriel’s thumb stroked his temple. “Thinking too hard will just make it ache. Don’t think. Just be here. The fire is warm. The blanket is soft. My voice is…” He trailed off, letting the sentence hang, implying a comfort Koen had no choice but to accept.
Koen let out a long, shaky breath. The fight seeped out of him, leaving behind a pure, pliable exhaustion. He nuzzled his head back against the cushion, his eyes half-lidded, watching the firelight dance on Gabriel’s pristine skin. A question formed in his eyes, but all that came out was a sigh.
“You’re wondering who you are,” Gabriel interpreted, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “That’s the simplest part. You’re mine. You’re my celeset. Your name is Koen, but I call you pet, or petal, because you’re delicate and you need looking after. Especially after being so clumsy on that ladder.”
He watched the words land, sinking into the fertile, blank soil of Koen’s mind. There was no resistance. No memory of a different name shouted in defiance, of a different life. There was only the fuzzy now, and the anchor of Gabriel’s presence, and the soothing, authoritative narrative being woven around him.
Koen’s lips moved. “Puh… puh-tul.”
The attempt was heartbreakingly earnest. He’d heard the word, grasped its sound, and tried to give it back. It wasn’t a question. It was an offering.
A raw, unformed sound given up from the void of his own mind. Gabriel smiled, a real one that touched his eyes. He let his hand slide from Koen’s temple to cup his jaw, his thumb resting on the pulse point there. It beat a slow, drugged rhythm against his skin. “That’s right, petal. You’re learning.”
Koen’s eyes drifted shut under the praise, then fluttered open again, as if he were fighting the weight of his own eyelids. He tried to speak once more, his throat working. “Guh… gahhh… ssss.” The sound dissolved into a frustrated exhale. He looked from Gabriel’s face to the roaring fire, then to the strange, high ceiling. His expression was one of profound, simple wonder, as if he were seeing flame and stone for the very first time.
“This is the hearth,” Gabriel said, his voice a steady, educational murmur. “It keeps us warm. You like to sit here. You often doze right where you’re lying.” He was constructing the world around Koen brick by verbal brick, painting furniture and function onto the blank canvas of his perception. “That’s your blanket. The grey one. It’s the softest one, because you prefer it.”
As if on cue, Koen’s fingers, which had been lying limp, slowly curled into the woollen fabric. He pulled it tighter under his chin, a slow-motion gesture of unconscious comfort. He made a small, affirmative noise in his throat. “Hmmm.”
“Yes. Good.” Gabriel shifted, settling more comfortably on the edge of the divan. He watched the play of confusion and nascent trust on Koen’s face. It was a fascinating chemical ballet. The Class-Bs had scrubbed the slate, but the Class-Ws ensured Koen couldn’t scribble any of his own chaotic questions onto it. He was a prisoner in his own skull, with Gabriel as the sole interpreter.
“You must be thirsty,” Gabriel stated. He didn’t ask. He reached for a crystal goblet of water he’d placed on the side table earlier. He held it to Koen’s lips. “Slowly now.”
Koen’s coordination was off. He tried to lift his head but couldn’t manage it. Water trickled from the corner of his mouth, tracing a cool path down his neck into the collar of his tunic. He blinked, startled by the sensation. Gabriel used the edge of the blanket to dab it away, his movements methodical. “There. Better.”
He took another sip, this time managing to swallow. His eyes closed again, this time for longer. The simple act of drinking seemed to exhaust him. The regenerative energy that had rebuilt his bones was now focused inward, leaving his consciousness adrift in a warm, murky sea.
“You should rest more,” Gabriel said, but he didn’t move. He was cataloging every micro-expression. The faint twitch of a muscle under Koen’s eye. The slight part of his lips as he breathed. This was a unique opportunity to observe the foundation of a celeset being laid, without the interference of personality or history. It was pure, malleable clay.
Koen’s hand moved again, not towards his face, but outwards. His fingers brushed against Gabriel’s thigh where he sat, a light, searching touch. He didn’t grasp. He just let his fingertips rest there, a point of contact. A grounding wire.
Gabriel let him. He didn’t acknowledge the touch verbally, but he didn’t pull away. This was progress more profound than any obedient action. It was the instinctive seek for the source of safety, for the voice in the fog. It was the first brick of dependency being laid by Koen’s own hand.
“The confusion will pass,” Gabriel lied smoothly. The aphasia would last as long as he maintained the W-dose; the fuzziness was the permanent state of the Js. “You’ll wake up clearer. You’ll remember your duties. You like keeping the ledgers organized for me. You have a neat hand.”
Koen’s fingers pressed a little more firmly against Gabriel’s leg. He was listening, absorbing the fiction, weaving it into the fuzzy core of his being. A ledger. A neat hand. These were facts now, as real as the fire’s heat.
“And you never, ever go into the west wing alone,” Gabriel added, his tone dropping, layering in a gentle warning. “The archives there are too fragile. You understand? You wait for me.”
A slow blink. A slight nod. Koen’s throat worked, and he produced a sound that was almost a word. “Waihhht.”
“Exactly.” Gabriel rewarded him with another stroke of his hair. The ashen black strands were soft, clean. All the blood was gone. All the violence was a forgotten ghost. “You’re so good when you try.”
Koen’s lips twitched upwards at the corners. It wasn’t quite a smile. It was the physiological echo of one, a puppet string tugged by a voice that promised approval. His eyes were glazing over, the pull of chemical sleep and physical repair dragging him back down. The hand on Gabriel’s thigh went slack, sliding off to rest on the divan.
Gabriel watched him sink, the lines of confusion finally smoothing into blank tranquility. His breathing deepened. In the firelight, he looked peaceful. Unburdened. A perfect, empty vessel.
He stood, looking down at his work. The silence was absolute, save for the crackling logs. He had rebuilt the broken thing, and this time, he had taken the extra step of removing its ability to even ask why it had been broken. The animosity of the beating was gone, replaced by this profound, manipulable calm. He turned and walked back to his desk, the soft scuff of his soles on stone the only sound.
He had a report to file on the “successful stabilization of a previously volatile subject.” The words would come easily. He picked up his pen, the smooth weight of it familiar in his hand. From the divan, Koen mumbled something in his sleep—a slurry of consonants that meant nothing at all.
Gabriel didn’t look up. He began to write.
all told from gabriel’s perspective. hours later koen wakes up and he is still drugged out of his mind. he’s confused his head is fuzzy he doesn’t know where he is he doesn’t even really know who he is but koen isn’t panicked he’s just confused. it doesn’t help that gabriel had also given koen class-w xenodrugs (Aphasia inducing xenodrugs. Can make any attempts at speech turn into nonsense while preserving the subject’s ability to understand other speech, vice versa, or both.) while koen was still asleep so gabriel does all of the talking