by a_seagulls_hubris
Rating: Mature, Other, Complete Work
Published 6 January 2025
Gabriel picks up the pieces of the Ferryman's broken body.
The machine has cleaved a burning path of destruction through Hell. What would that destruction look like when it turned against him for the last time?
~~
Or, Gabriel gets off to the thought of being devoured by the machine.
Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Gabriel/V1 (ULTRAKILL), Gabriel (ULTRAKILL), Ferrymen (ULTRAKILL), Mentioned V1 (ULTRAKILL), this is a metaphor for gay sex, or at least a guy thinking about gay sex, Religious Guilt, Graphic Description, Blood and Gore, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, me projecting onto the silly angel, RIP Ferryman V1 needed that p-rank, Heavy Sexual Undertones, me when the religious sexual guilt hit
notes from my google docs:
-you see religious trauma has many different aspects
-especially the guilt
-i am being watched i am being watched. He is gone and he is dead but he is still watching me
-wanting feels so wrong
-but it feels so good when my viscera is on display
-intimate in a way. Bloodshed i mean.
-nothing to drive home the reality of god being dead than this base violence. Nothing but flesh in the eyes of the machine
-we’re all going to die.
At his feet is a pile of bones, stained blue from devotion.
Broken and twisted, marrow on full display. Gabriel recognises the damage of revolver shots, peppering a series of holes in the Ferryman’s holy cloth, now drifting in the wind. Femur, tibia, fibula, scorched with the lightning-shock of a railcannon. The ribs, shattered with a shotgun, point-blank, smaller fragments dotting the rain-lashed docks.
His own wounds, still healing beneath dented cuirass and torn gauntlets, ache as if in recognition.
Of course the machine would not have spared even the Ferryman. Virtuous or sinful, penitent or tainted, all of Hell’s denizens bleed. Eventually it will be himself facing down a revolver, one last futile struggle away from the machine’s endless hunger. Before it, too, rends him apart and crushes his still-beating heart, the last of his blood splattering over thin metal chassis. Feeding its almost hedonistic violence.
Gabriel wonders how it must feel.
He has fought the machine twice, but not to the death. If given the opportunity to tear this warm body open, he thinks it would do him justice. An angel with bloodstained swords, now as much a sinner as the poor souls that still reside in the lower layers. Perhaps even worse. After all, he was created virtuous, without the excuse that was free will.
He glances down at the Ferryman’s corpse, loose bones strewn across the wooden walkways that connect the few intact buildings left in this part of Hell. Tossed overboard from his beloved ship. Already the permanent storms of Wrath were threatening to scatter those bones further, disjointed from the holy cloth that had proved their devotion for so long. Gabriel extends his wings, sheltering the corpse from the worst of the winds.
That last shotgun shell tasted like heaven.
Each dodge, each of his own attacks thrown back at himself. The last of the Father’s light in his veins, once so steadfast, then coursing through him with the burn of Phlegethon. Unworthy. There was shame, he was sure, but all he can recall now is the dance on a tightrope, each shot finding his flesh.
The storm surges around him and pulls him over the edge.
The machine, greedy, hedonistic thing it is, would make a show out of opening him up. First the cuirass, splitting it down the centre with that sawed-on shotgun. No—Gabriel would not stay still long enough for that to happen. He would match the machine in its macabre performance, maybe even carve a path or two through that red arm that it so liked to use when he was close. He will laugh and laugh as he tries and tries to hit it, his wings tinted with the yellow of its wings. But after…
It will not say grace before it goes for his limbs first, shot through with nails that spread across his chest, embedded between his ribs. It will be hungry and desperate, but it has been marching towards its end, joyful and indulgent, for days now. Why not spend some time to look at him, optic lens large and brilliant and alive, before it takes off his arm with its saws?
It will cut through bone, a clean dissection. He cannot decide if it will simply continue to pin him down, basking in the spray of broken arteries, or if it will lower its head to the wound, fans whirring as it takes in its fuel.
His wings shudder, from the cold or from the strain of holding them up. He leans down to scoop the Ferryman’s remains into his arms, gathering the smaller fragments into the rain-stained cloth. For old times’ sake, he thinks wryly.
The Styx roars around him as he shields the bones in his arms, heading for the wooden house connected to the docks. This river—no, ocean—no longer howls at the end of the world. Even Wrath must shiver in the face of nothingness.
The door is broken down and stained through completely with blood. A Virtue’s broken core crunches underneath his feet, and the parts of other, weaker machines pepper the staircase.
Upstairs, he sets the Ferryman’s bones on the bed.
He pushes away the remains of a broken Idol at the table and takes a seat.
‘Forgive me for intruding,’ Gabriel says out loud. ‘Allow me a moment of respite from wrathful winds.’
The Ferryman’s bones lie on the bed, unmoving. He should set that broken femur when he leaves.
Unbidden, his thoughts return to his own body. The machine will surely take his legs too, the arteries there larger. He thinks it will cradle that limb, its chassis almost completely red, the claws of its red arm digging into his broken thigh. More, more.
Gabriel catches his breath. The candle flames burning low before him stutter.
It will tear through his chest, breaking his ribs one by one, spreading the skin open to expose the bone and guts. Will he pass out then? Shudder as it runs a claw over his heart, digs out the bullets from his punctured lungs? Will it unspool his intestines, wind them around its capable arms, and see that the gore is good?
And oh, the things that infernal machine will do to his neck. Unconsciously, his fingers find his throat, wandering to rest against his jugular. He presses down, imagining warmed steel around his windpipe, squeezing, but not enough to kill yet. Then it will remove its fingers, leaving his neck painfully empty, and it will hold the muzzle of a revolver to his jugular. And this time it will push down with all its strength.
His own gasp pulls him back to the present. He braces himself against the table, breathing heavily, his body entirely too warm in contrast with the torrential rains. The heat pooling in his stomach retreats, to be replaced with something rancid, something that urges him to claw at his skin until he is clean.
And he is drifting downwards.
Gabriel gets to his feet. Something the shape of shame burrows beneath his skin and he fights the instinct to move, to act, anything to quell the itch.
But before that—
Ah, it felt good. It felt so good.
Be still, he commands his heart, still beating too fast. His time will come. The machine will wait.
He is allowed to want, is he not?
The god-damned itch remains. Gabriel thinks of his swords at his hip, still sharp. Hungry for the blood of one more angel. Cut himself open and tear out the nerves and abandon them on the floor right here and now. And then he will tell them, he is free. He is free, so why do they still tremble?
But it awaits him now, down below. And to waste any of his blood on anything other than their dance… unthinkable. Heresy, even.
How easy it is to find something new to worship. He closes the door on his way out.
Back in the rain, he runs, and he tells himself it is to get out of this godforsaken storm as soon as possible.
spent money on this game. the writing reached out through the screen and wrung my neck until i was ready to admit some things about myself. gabriel is just like me fr.
sometimes i miss being able to believe.