Chapter 120: 17.1.5
The syringe was cool in his hand, a precise instrument of forgetting. On the rug, Koen tried to push himself up again, a low growl rumbling in his chest, but his limbs were uncoordinated, betrayed by the pain Gabriel had just administered. The fury in his orange eyes was a dying fire, smothered by pain and the dawning, helpless realization of his own vulnerability.
Gabriel watched, detached. The animosity that had surged through him moments before—the bright, hot offense of being struck—had already crystallized into a cold, analytical resolve. Anger was inefficient. This was a system failure. The subject had reverted to a hostile state due to incorrect dosing. The solution was not to punish the subject, but to correct the error and reset the parameters.
He knelt, the movement graceful and effortless. Koen flinched, trying to scramble back, but Gabriel’s free hand settled on his shoulder, not with violence, but with an immovable, steadying pressure. It was the grip of a restainer, not a brawler.
“Be still, petal,” Gabriel said, his voice a soft, reasonable monotone. “This is for your own peace.”
“Don’t you fucking touch me with that,” Koen slurred, his head lolling. The impact with the mantle had done its work; his regenerative physiology was already knitting the bone and sealing the cut, but the consciousness within was dazed, sluggish. Perfect.
“I’m not asking.” Gabriel located the thick vein in the crook of Koen’s arm, pulled the skin taut with his thumb, and inserted the needle. The plunge of the plunger was silent. Koen gasped, a short, sharp intake of breath as the cocktail entered his bloodstream—a tide of chemical oblivion, scourging the recent past and laying down a new, more palatable foundation.
The Class-B xenodrugs were elegant, insidious things. They didn’t just erase; they edited, they spliced, they filled the empty spaces with convincing fiction. As the amnestic component began dissolving the last hour, Gabriel leaned closer, his lips near Koen’s ear, and began weaving the new narrative into the silence with whispered, compelling certainty.
“You had a bad fall,” Gabriel murmured, his tone laced with a gentle, fabricated concern. “You were excited, clumsy. You tripped on the hearth rug and struck your head. You’ve been confused. Aggressive. But you’re safe now. I’ve been looking after you. You’ve been so good, so worried you’d upset me. You haven’t. You could never truly upset me.”
Koen’s struggled ceased. His body went limp under Gabriel’s hand, his breathing deepening. The hostile glare melted into glassy, unfocused confusion. His pupils were wide, swallowing the orange of his irises. “A… fall?” he echoed, the words thick and slow.
“A silly accident,” Gabriel confirmed, brushing the hair back from Koen’s damp forehead. The gesture was possessive, clinical. “You’ve been restless. Anxious. But you’re mine, and I fix what’s mine. All that frustration, that anger… it was just the pain talking. It wasn’t real. It’s gone now.”
He continued, layering the new memories over the scorched earth of the old. A week of pleasant, hazy obedience. Of seeking comfort after a frightening stumble. Of Gabriel’s patient care. The shattered decanter was explained away as Koen’s own clumsy attempt to help clean. The ache in his ribs was from the fictional fall, not from being slammed into stone.
For a long time, Gabriel sat there on the fur rug, cradling Koen’s head in his lap, speaking softly into the quiet room. He was an architect, rebuilding a mind to his specifications. The sun outside the leaded windows completed its arc, the fire burned low, and by the time the chemical processes had solidified, the Koen who had thrown a chair and drawn angelic blood was no longer present. He had never existed.
Consciousness returned in a slow, syrupy tide several hours later. Gabriel was at his desk, working by the light of a single glow-orb, the broken glass long since vanished. A soft, disoriented groan came from the divan.
Gabriel looked up. Koen was pushing himself onto his elbows, blinking rapidly. He looked around the room with the wide, lost eyes of a newborn animal. His hand came up to touch the now-smooth skin of his forehead where the cut had been.
“Easy,” Gabriel said, not rising. “Take your time.”
Koen’s gaze found him, and instead of fury or fear, a profound, sheepish embarrassment flooded his features. He flushed a deep, mortified red from his neck to the roots of his ashen hair. He looked down at his own hands as if he’d never seen them before.
“I… I’m sorry,” Koen mumbled, the words barely audible. He shuffled, pulling his knees up to his chest in a gesture that was purely, vulnerably demonic—a chastised puppy. “Gabriel? I… my head’s all fuzzy. Did I… was I bad?”
The anxiety in his voice was there, but it was different. It wasn’t the primal terror of abandonment. It was the social fear of having displeased his owner. It was perfect.
Gabriel set his quill down and offered a small, forgiving smile. “You had an accident, darling. You’ve been unwell. But you’re feeling better now, yes?”
Koen nodded, too quickly, eager to agree. He uncurled slightly. “Yeah. Better. Just… empty.” He rubbed his sternum, frowning. “Why do I feel so… sorry?”
“Because you’re a good celeset,” Gabriel said, standing and walking over. He sat on the edge of the divan, and Koen immediately leaned into his space, seeking the contact, his earlier violence unimaginable. “Good celesets worry when they think they’ve caused trouble. But you haven’t. The trouble is forgotten.”
He reached out and ran his thumb over Koen’s cheekbone, catching the lingering heat of his blush. Koen’s eyes fluttered closed, and he pressed into the touch with a desperate, grateful little sigh. The transformation was total. The feral glint was gone, replaced by a docile, foggy warmth. The hostility wasn’t buried; it was excised. A cancerous limb removed with biochemical surgery.
“What do you remember?” Gabriel asked, his voice a gentle probe.
Koen’s brow furrowed in effort. “I remember… the tea. It was sweet. I remember sitting with you. And then… it’s like a shadow. A loud, angry shadow. And then I was here, and you were working, and I felt… awful.” He opened his eyes, looking up at Gabriel with heartbreaking sincerity. “Did I say mean things?”
“Nothing that matters,” Gabriel assured him, his hand sliding to cup the back of Koen’s neck. The hunter leaned into the grip, his muscles going slack. “The mean things weren’t you. They were the injury. This,” he said, squeezing lightly, feeling the compliant dip of Koen’s head, “this is you.”
For the next three days, Gabriel observed. He maintained a stabilized, moderate dose of Class-Js, enough to keep the bond affectionate and secure, but with a new, foundational layer of placidity provided by the memory edit. The separation anxiety was still present, but it was milder, tempered by the implanted belief that his own past aggression was a shameful mistake he must atone for by being extra compliant.
Koen was endlessly tactile, clinging, eager to please. He blushed at the slightest praise, flustered when Gabriel used more elaborate pet names. He followed instructions without a hint of rebellion. When Gabriel had to take a call, he’d administer a tiny, preventative drop of Class-M, and Koen would accept it with a trusting tilt of his head, sinking into peaceful stillness without a flicker of the old terror.
It was a victory. A complete and total recalibration of a living being.
On the fourth evening, Gabriel was reviewing a particularly dense trade agreement between Upper Purgatory and the Seventh Heaven. Koen was at his feet, meticulously organizing Gabriel’s collection of sealing wax sticks by color, his tongue peeking out in concentration. The domestic silence was profound.
“Pet,” Gabriel said, not looking down.
“Yes?” Koen’s head popped up immediately.
“What’s your name?”
Koen blinked. A slow, confused blink. He opened his mouth, then closed it. His orange eyes went distant, scanning an interior ledger that now had several pages cleanly ripped out. He looked back at Gabriel, a faint line of distress between his brows. “I’m… yours?”
Gabriel smiled, a genuine curl of his lips. “Yes, you are.” He reached down and tapped Koen’s nose lightly, making him blink again, the distress replaced by a flutter of pleased confusion. “But before that. What did they call you?”
Koen sat back on his heels, staring at the rainbow of wax sticks. He picked up a deep crimson one, rolling it in his palm. His voice, when it came, was soft, unsure. “Koen… I think. It sounds right. Does that sound right?”
“It sounds perfect,” Gabriel said, returning to his scroll. He let the silence hang for a moment, the only sound the crackle of the fire and the soft click of wax sticks being sorted. “And what did you do, Koen?”
This time, the pause was longer. Koen’s fingers stilled. He looked into the fire, his face a blank page. Gabriel watched him from the corner of his eye, tracking the minute shifts—the tension in his jaw, the slow beat of a pulse in his throat. The hunter was searching the ruins.
Finally, Koen looked down at his own hands. He turned them over, studying the palms, the calluses that no amount of chemical bliss could erase—the legacy of gripping weapons, of holding a gun. A faint, puzzled recognition stirred in his eyes, followed immediately by a wave of guilt. He clasped his hands together, hiding them as if they were shameful.
“I hurt things,” he whispered, the confession meant for the flames. He looked up at Gabriel, his expression stricken. “I was a thing that hurt other things. That’s why you saved me, isn’t it? To stop the hurting.”
Gabriel felt a surge of profound, icy satisfaction. It was more than he’d even implanted. The narrative had taken root and grown its own, perfect thorn. “To stop the hurting,” he echoed, his voice gentle. “Yes. Exactly.”
Koen nodded, absorbing this as absolute truth. The guilt on his face melted into a weary, grateful relief. He crawled the short distance to Gabriel’s chair and laid his head on Gabriel’s knee, a heavy, warm weight. “Thank you,” he murmured, his eyes closing.
Gabriel let his hand rest on the ashen black hair, stroking it absently as he returned to the trade agreement. The room was warm, quiet, perfectly ordered. The subject was calm. The parameters were stable. The aggression was not buried, but eradicated. He had not simply pacified a monster; he had rewritten it into something grateful, something that saw its own salvation in its cage.
He had won.
The certainty was a quiet, humming pleasure in his veins, smoother than any celestial wine. It lasted through the night and into the next two days, a serene backdrop to Koen’s soft, attentive presence. The celeset was a study in placid devotion, his earlier violence now just a phantom limb Gabriel had amputated.
The message arrived via a fluttering, light-dappled sparrow that materialized on his windowsill. It chirped once, then dissolved into glowing script that hung in the air. Heard you finally landed a pet. We’re coming to see the merchandise. Be there by sundown. - R & M. Raphael and Michael. Nosey bastards with too much time on their hands and a vested interest in the Celeset Program’s success. Gabriel sighed, the sound lost in the quiet salon. A showcase. It was inevitable.
He looked at Koen, who was carefully folding a stack of linen napkins into lopsided swans, his tongue caught between his teeth. How would he react to strangers? The separation anxiety was managed, but this was an intrusion, not an absence. A new variable.
“We’ll have guests tonight, petal,” Gabriel announced, keeping his tone light.
Koen’s hands stilled. He looked up, his orange eyes wide. “Guests?” The word came out fragile, like thin ice.
“My friends. They want to meet you.” Gabriel walked over and plucked a badly folded swan from the pile, reshaping it with a deft twist. “You’ll be on your best behavior, of course.”
“Of course,” Koen parroted, but the nervous flicker in his gaze was already there. He began rearranging the already-perfect stack of firewood beside the hearth, a pointless, fidgeting task. “What should I do?”
“Whatever you’re told. Speak when spoken to. Be polite.” Gabriel cupped his chin, tilting his face up. The blush started immediately, a warm wash under tan skin. “And stop looking so terrified. They won’t bite. Much.”
By the time the first chime echoed through the house wards, Koen was a tightly coiled spring disguised as a person. He’d changed his tunic twice, finally settling on a simple grey one, and now stood slightly behind Gabriel’s chair, his posture rigid. Gabriel felt the minute tremor in the air around him, a silent vibration of pure social dread.
The door opened without anyone touching it, and the two archangels entered Raphael first, all sharp angles and curious green eyes, followed by Michael, whose presence always felt like a sustained, quiet chord. They brought the scent of ozone and distant rain with them.
“Gabriel. You’ve redecorated. It’s less… overtly threatening,” Raphael said, his gaze sweeping the room and instantly landing on the figure trying to vanish into the shadow of the chair. “Oh. There it is.”
Michael nodded, his expression unreadable. “The half-demon acquisition. We read the procurement report. Unorthodox.”
“This is Koen,” Gabriel said, his hand finding the back of Koen’s neck with casual ownership. He could feel the frantic pulse hammering under his thumb. “Say hello, pet.”
Koen’s mouth opened, then closed. A soft, incoherent sound escaped. He managed a jerky nod, his eyes fixed on the floor near Raphael’s boots. The blush was catastrophic, painting his cheeks and the tips of his ears a vivid, mortified crimson. He looked like he wanted the stones of the floor to swallow him whole. He didn’t just look shy; he looked genuinely, physically paralyzed by it.
Raphael’s eyebrows shot up. “Speechless? The report mentioned aggression issues. This seems… counter to that.”
“The report was prior to domestication,” Gabriel said, his thumb making slow, deliberate circles on Koen’s neck. He could feel the tension there, wire-tight. “He’s still acclimating to new people. Aren’t you, darling?”
Koen gave another frantic nod. He finally managed to lift his gaze, but it skittered away from Raphael’s inquisitive stare and Michael’s impassive one, landing somewhere on the wall. “Hello,” he breathed, the word barely audible.
Michael took a step forward, and Koen flinched back so sharply he nearly upset the side table. The blush deepened impossibly further. Gabriel hadn’t anticipated this degree of social terror. It wasn’t the anxiety of separation; it was the sheer, overwhelming weight of being perceived, judged, by beings whose power thrummed in the air around them. It was, against all odds, utterly charming.
“He’s not a threat,” Michael stated, not unkindly, as if diagnosing a minor ailment.
“Obviously,” Raphael chimed in, a slow grin spreading across his face. He circled slightly, watching Koen track his movement with the wary, overwhelmed eyes of a cornered fawn. “Look at him. He’s practically vibrating. Can he speak in full sentences?”
“He can,” Gabriel said, a flicker of something protective—or maybe just proprietary—stirring in his chest. “When he’s not being gawked at like a specimen. Sit. Have a drink. You’re making him nervous.”
The two archangels obliged, settling into the high-backed chairs near the fire. Gabriel poured three glasses of a honey-colored nectar from a fresh decanter, the old one’s destruction now just a phantom in the room. He didn’t pour one for Koen.
“Come here,” Gabriel said, not a request. Koen crept out from behind the chair and stood at Gabriel’s side, his shoulder almost touching Gabriel’s arm. He was trembling, a fine, constant shiver Gabriel doubted the others could see. “Sit.” He nudged the space on the floor beside his own chair with his foot.
Koen folded himself onto the indicated spot instantly, drawing his knees up. He was trying to make himself small, inconspicuous, but his presence was a live wire in the otherwise casual atmosphere.
Raphael took a long sip, his eyes never leaving Koen. “So. Koen. Gabriel tells us you had a bit of a rough start. A fall.”
Koen’s head snapped up, his eyes flying to Gabriel’s face in a panic, seeking verification. At Gabriel’s slight nod, he looked back at Raphael, swallowing hard. “Y-yeah. My head. It was fuzzy.”
“Must have been quite a fall,” Michael mused, his tone flat. “To necessitate a full behavioral recalibration.”
Gabriel kicked Michael’s shin under the table. Not hard. A warning. “It was handled.”
“I’m better now,” Koen blurted out, as if his worth depended on them believing it. He winced at the volume of his own voice. “I don’t… hurt things anymore. I help. I fold things.”
Raphael choked on his nectar, coughing to cover a laugh. “You fold things.”
“And… other stuff,” Koen mumbled, digging his fingers into the plush rug. The confession seemed to drain the last of his courage. He leaned his temple against Gabriel’s calf, a silent plea for rescue, his face still turned away from the guests. The trust in that small gesture, the desperate seeking of sanctuary, was profoundly satisfying.
Gabriel let his hand rest on Koen’s head, fingers tangling in the ashen hair. “He’s very diligent,” he said, and he didn’t have to fake the mild pride in his voice. It was adorable, this stark contrast between the hunter’s physicality and his current, flustered docility. “A quick study, once given the right incentives.”
“Can he do tricks?” Raphael asked, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. The question was deliberately provocative.
Gabriel felt the jolt go through Koen, a full-body cringe. Before he could answer, Koen did something remarkable. He turned his head just enough to peer up at Gabriel, his orange eyes glassy with a confusion so deep it bordered on distress. “Tricks?” he whispered, his brow furrowed. “I don’t… know any tricks. Should I know tricks?”
The raw, uncalculated honesty of the question disarmed even Raphael. There was no guile, no understood insult. Just a bewildered pet trying to understand a new, incomprehensible demand.
Michael set his glass down with a soft click. “He’s not a performing hound, Raph. He’s a celeset. The point is calm integration, not circus acts.” He studied Koen for a long moment. “The aggression is truly gone? You’re certain?”
“The evidence seems rather conclusive,” Gabriel replied, his hand stilling on Koen’s head. He looked down at the hunter, who had now hidden his face completely against Gabriel’s leg, overwhelmed. “He’s shy. Not volatile. It’s a preferable alternative.”
The evening wore on with Raphael and Michael discussing celestial logistics, their conversation occasionally punctuated by attempts to draw Koen out. Each one was a miniature tragedy of social anxiety. Asked about his favorite food, Koen stammered about the sweetness of the morning tea. Asked if he missed anything from his old life, he went pale and silent, his fingers clutching at the fabric of Gabriel’s trousers until his knuckles were white.
He was, Gabriel observed, not just shy. He was socially gutted. The memory edit and the constant chemical pacification had left him without any framework for interaction beyond his bond to Gabriel. Every question was a labyrinth with no exit.
Finally, as Raphael launched into a story about a misplaced soul, Gabriel felt Koen’s breathing even out into the slow, deep rhythm of sleep. The stress had literally exhausted him into unconsciousness there on the floor. His head was a heavy, warm weight on Gabriel’s foot.
“Well,” Raphael said, noticing. “He’s certainly not a bother.”
“He’s perfect,” Gabriel corrected, his voice low. He didn’t move, reluctant to disturb the sleeping form. The visit had confirmed the totality of his success. The nuclear option had worked. Here was the proof, sleeping on his rug, utterly dependent, adorably non-threatening.
As his friends made their farewells, Gabriel remained seated. He listened to the door seal shut, leaving the salon in familiar quiet, broken only by the fire and Koen’s soft, sleeping breaths. He looked down at the tangled black hair, the relaxed line of Koen’s shoulder, the way his hand was still loosely fisted in Gabriel’s trouser leg even in sleep.
The shyness hadn’t been part of the design. It was an emergent property, a unexpected byproduct of the psychological remodeling. It was, he decided, a beneficial one. It would keep Koen close, keep him from seeking out other interactions, make him value Gabriel’s attention all the more.
He carefully extricated his foot and stood. Koen whimpered softly in his sleep, his hand searching the empty space. Gabriel bent and, with an ease that still felt novel, gathered the sleeping hunter into his arms. Koen was solid, heavy with muscle, but he curled instinctively into the hold, his nose pressing against Gabriel’s collarbone.
Gabriel carried him to the adjacent bedchamber and laid him on the thick duvet. Koen didn’t wake. In the dim light, his sharp features were softened, the freckles like dust across his nose, the dreadful blush finally faded. Peaceful. Owned.
Gabriel stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching. The visit had been an intrusion, but it had also been a demonstration. He had not just tamed the half-demon; he had transformed him into something so harmless, so endearingly timid, that even Heaven’s most jaded bureaucrats could only remark on his silence. He had taken a weapon and crafted a secret.
He closed the door gently, leaving Koen to his chemical dreams. The house was his again, silent and ordered. The pet was safely in its place, emotionally disarmed, socially crippled, and completely, terminally his. The experiment was a triumph. All that remained was to enjoy the results.
told from gabriel’s pov. some of gabriel’s friends heard that he finally got a celeset of his own and come over to visit to meet the new pet. gabriel is surprised to see koen is actually really shy and it’s just adorable