After The First Day Of The Rest Of Their Lives

Hastur, Ligur and Michael In 'Heaven'

Ligur tagged along behind Michael as she walked down a busy street. They were on earth. It was raining and Ligur was getting wet. He hadn’t heard back from Agares, or Dagon, or any of the demons and was feeling a bit abandoned. He didn’t even know if they were reading his reports. They had gone ahead with the liaison meeting, totally ignoring his message to put a stop to it and now he was stuck going along as well. Maybe he would get just a few moments alone with whoever they sent. Hopefully it was someone with a few more braincells than Agares.

He had a sudden moment of panic again that they might have involved Hastur, but reassured himself. Even Hell couldn’t be that incompetent could they? Surely? He had a sinking feeling that they could. He just hoped Agares had got the message to Dagon so at least they didn’t mess up that badly.

Michael turned in at a set of gates and made her way up the drive towards a house painted all in white. There was a depressingly holy aura around it and Ligur guessed it was one of Heaven’s outposts. They really called them that ‘outposts’ like they were in the wild west or something. He thought about Gabriel’s bungling leadership and decided that it was about right - Heaven really was a cowboy operation. He then remembered what Hell was like, if Heaven were cowboys then Hell were….were… well something worse than cowboys, cows maybe? They arrived at the door and he followed Michael in, feeling the holy aura envelop him as he crossed into what was technically Heavenly space.

Unbeknownst to him Hastur was stomping through London just behind Ligur and Michael. The rain followed him and soaked through his new suit. He was in a foul temper. Even worse than usual. He was going to have to meet Michael, who he had always hated, and Ligur who he newly hated. That utter and complete bastard. How could he be that evil? He stopped himself, Ligur had always been evil so of course he could be *that* evil. It was just the being evil to him in particular that was making him angry. He didn’t mind if Ligur was evil in general, or even evil in particular so long as it wasn’t directed at him.

Didn’t he realise what he’d done? Bastard. He would kill him. Soon as he’d got him back in Hell he would make his existence Hell. No scratch that he would make his existence something worse than Hell, he would make it… At this point his brain ran out of ideas. The only thing he could think of that was worse than Hell was Heaven and, as Ligur was there already, he didn’t think that was much of a threat. It didn’t sound right either ‘make his existence Heaven’ sounded like he was going to be nice to him when he actually wanted to do quite the opposite.

Thinking like this was making his temper worse. He arrived at the gates and stabbed at the intercom until his finger hurt. They must have had a camera at the gate as it opened smoothly for him and he stomped up the dive towards the house.

The meeting room was large and very spacious. There was a big oval table in some dark wood with multiple seats around it. Each place was set with an upturned water glass and a notepad and pen set. In the centre was a telephone attached to a speaker ready for people to dial into cross-departmental Heavenly meetings. The back wall was a whiteboard and seemed to be covered in scribbles with boxes and arrows and the occasional word, Ligur could make out ‘trickle down’ and ‘hearts and minds’ but not much else.

Michael huffed and reached for a board-wipe to remove the previous angelic presentation before their demon contact arrived. The writing wasn’t rubbing off, someone had used a permanent marker pen rather than the special whiteboard markers, the ones that always ran out of ink. He watched her futile attempts to clean the board disinterestedly. He was more concerned about who Hell were going to send to this meeting and how he was going to get her out of the room so he could talk to them alone.