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" all the clouds in me are raining "
- r. h. Sin
Pain.
Everyone saw it differently— for some it was like this empty hollowness that becomes every part of their soul, eating away every type of good that one may feel. For some pain was being numb— being disconnected from the very thing that made them a person. For others, the pain was a reminder, a reminder that even after every battle lost and every bone broken— they were still alive.
Josephine used to think that pain was like sandpaper— it would hurt in the beginning as it scratched every part of her but in the end, she would emerge out of the war victorious. Every time she broke, she realized she couldn't be more wrong.
Her earliest memories of pain went back thousands of years ago, to the days of the Rebellion when war was shaking the Silver City. Josephine had been very young then, a mere servant born to tend the needs of the Archangel Jophiel. It was also around the time she had fallen for Lucifer— or Samael, as he was called. His sibling hated her for it, even Jophiel not taking her side for falling in love with the light-bringer. To Josephine, the worst pain was being held down against her will as she watched Michael— the one who had the same face as her Lucifer, cut her face with his lance. It wasn't the agony that was brought upon her that hurt Josephine the most, but the face she loved that brought her so much pain.
Even after they fell, it had taken Josephine years to not cry in her sleep when that day happened again and again in her sleep. She couldn't even look at Lucifer sometimes, the scar on her face being the ultimate reminder that she was no longer an angel of beauty— she wasn't beautiful anymore with that dreadful wound that ran across her face. That's why she couldn't even blame Lucifer for sleeping... She wasn't his angelus pulcher anymore.
For Josephine, the pain changed its meaning every millennium.
The pain of a simple hurt baffled Josephine. It wasn't much— more of a sting really but it had been a thousand years since she bled. No one ever dared to hurt her— at least not physically but the blood dripping down on Chloe's floor told her that something much bigger was at play here. She was confused because surely her friend's stairs weren't made of something that could kill her, right?
Josephine was snapped out of her thoughts as she felt a tiny figure colliding with her body, hugging her legs. The angel hadn't even realized when Chloe had started to tend to her wound and was bandaging her.
