These aren't actually drabbles, because I can't do 100 words or less to save my life. They are fairly short, though, and are both, as seems to be mostly the case with me these days, Brimstone.


For wal_lace. It's... kinda... well, it's sorta.... I no longer have any idea how to quantify any of Ash's relationships, but whatever the relationship she had with Ros is, it's got an element of that:


She's never been stupid enough to fall in love. Four thousand years or more--time blurs and fades, in Hell, and it was less precise in the time she died in to begin with--she has kept her heart to herself. Which is not to say, oh, of course not to say, that there has not been love, been passionate embraces, long hours in the heat of the sun or the cool of the moon, skin on skin and breath to breath. She had been a favored of her Goddess, after all, and considered a beauty as well, a prize, a worthy wooing. She had even, once found a man fair enough to her that she chose to conceive, to have her child, her beautiful daughter, Seri--and there was love there, too. But to fall in love.... No.

Her heart has always been her own.

The years in Hell changed that not at all, or so she thought--long years, and even if she was only a confined spirit for a small fraction of them, what was there in this prison of torment that could ever assail the careful protections she had placed around herself? But she was a good actress, might have been a star in the world she emerged into, and when Lucifer encountered her by chance and seemed to linger a moment longer than he normally might have, a faint glimmer of the plan that would eventually free herself and one-hundred and twelve other captives of the pit came to her--and so she smiled at him more favorably than she might otherwise have done. And while she would not lie and say the game she played with him was entirely unpleasant, all the love that there was there came, remarkably enough, from him--and she used it without compunction.

Now, standing on an overlook of the city of angels, a place she once visited with another person and left too soon, Ash has to admit the truth: if she has never been stupid enough to fall in love before, this is no longer true now. There is no solution for this, she thinks, no remedy, save perhaps time and distance, which is why she is here now, taking one last look at LA before leaving it behind in search of greener pastures. Safer pastures. Earlier this night she held a knife to the throat of a woman she'd slept with, while facing down the man she hadn't quite, and in her momentary hesitation--which she could only hope Zeke had read entirely directed towards him--Ash had realized the full depth of just how far she'd fallen, as if all those millennia of guarding her heart had come to be paid back in full and with a vengeance. A mistake, to have ever sought Rosalyn out; a mistake, not to have done her best to leave Zeke alone entirely. And it's too late now, because she's in love, finally in love, and that grants a power over her that is not to be bourn.

Ash looks over the city one last time, then turns her back and heads away. It's too late, but she has to try, anyway. Four-thousand years, and a parade of extraordinary souls, culminating in no less than the greatest fallen angel of them all, were not enough to move her, but somehow a few months in Ezekiel Stone's presence were enough to ruin her, enough to slowly doom her, and perhaps make the next thing inevitable. But what's done is done, and the fortress of her heart has cracked wide open, and she is in love, yes, finally.

With them both.

---

For apocalypsos. It occured to me rather too late that the first paragraph spoils several major things, but oh well. With 13 episodes, not doing that is really hard.


It was incredible how many rotten things could happen to you after you died. You could go to Hell, for a starter, and that, Zeke had to admit, probably still qualified as the rottenest. But it had been at least consistent. Because it was pretty rotten to get pulled out of Hell, set to hunt escaped Damned souls who were by and large a lot nastier than you would ever be, forced to live on thirty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents a day, and be told your wife was still alive but you couldn't be with her until you finished your job. You could then up the rotten by trying to ignore that restriction and nearly getting her killed, because of another rotten thing that had happened where you almost fell for this really amazing woman and cop you kept running into, who turned out not only to not be a natural blonde, but also to be one of those escaped souls, and, oh yeah, also three or four millennia dead. And also apparently involved with your boss, the thought of which usually makes you want to desperately scrub out your brain will bleach, since said boss is no less than the Devil himself, Satan, Lucifer, Prince of Lies and Extreme Pettiness, Master of Hell and, at the present at least, wearer of an extremely irritating face. Which you would know, because in yet another rotten thing, the Devil can't seem to resist showing up on a near-daily basis to poke, nag, harass, and otherwise bother you about your job and your efficiency at doing it, or lack thereof. Hell had sucked worse than this did, but had been sort of an even suffering, which had something to recommend it.

All and all, Zeke would say he was having a pretty lousy afterlife. Which didn't look to be getting any better soon, because it was barely past dawn and the Devil had already appeared to nag him for the day, shoving open Zeke's hotel room curtains to let in a flood of sunlight that made Zeke want to burrow under the covers to hide. The problem was, the last time he'd done that, Lucifer had incinerated the quilt with a touch, leaving Zeke to sneak out of the motel to avoid paying the expense bill. Looking at the Devil's unnaturally bright and sharp smile this morning, Zeke decided not to chance it.

"What are you so happy about?" he muttered, sitting up and raking a hand through his hair.

The Devil's grin got even wider. "Come now, Ezekiel! It's a beautiful day! Clear, sunny, warm-"

"We're in the middle of the Arizona desert during what they consider a heat wave. Warm is a little-"

"Like you feel it. And besides, it's one of my favorite holidays."

"Holiday?" Zeke wrinkled his face, trying to remember what day it was. About a month after the thing with Ash, but he hadn't checked a calendar in a little while and sometimes the days could blur, with a job like this. "What, it's not like the anniversary of the Crucifixion or something, is it?" he asked, trying to remember whether Easter had happened already or not. He was pretty sure he remembered a bunch of eggs and pink marshmellow chicks and things, but he'd been in Nevada at the time and not sure how much of it was just the weirdness of the area.

The Devil gave him an exasperated look, his smile briefly gone. "No. You're off by weeks according to the modern belief and months according to what really happened."

"So sue me. Okay, what am I missing? What holiday aside from Easter is in April?"

The Devil's smile returned, even brighter than ever. "It's Tax Day!" he announced, in a delighted voice.

"Oh great," Zeke said, and dropped back onto the bed.