Chapter Text
Before we begin, I ask you to accept a few inconvenient truths.
Robert fell for Mandy.
Robert and Mandy cut Victor instead of Janelle.
Robert recruited Herman after Victor was cut instead of Katon-Ur.
Robert told the Z-Team that he was Mecha Man.
Robert supported Courtney’s reformation efforts, causing her to embrace heroism.
Robert spared Elliot’s life.
Victor failed to destroy Los Angeles, allowing Robert to welcome him back to the Z-Team.
For a fleeting stretch (four, maybe five months) Malevola had almost forgotten she was a murderer.There she was, elbow-deep in heroics: taking orders from Mecha Man, debating plot twists with Blonde Blazer and Brickhouse at book club, actually convincing herself she might be a bona fide superhero. She learned where the good coffee in Headquarters was hidden. She stopped sleeping with her knife under her pillow. For once, she entertained the absurdity of it.
Of course, good things never last.
Three months after Shroud’s arrest, the first visions of Hadramiel slithered back into her brain, and Malevola felt a sting of self-disgust for having forgotten her at all. Hadramiel (a half-angel, a deva, an aasimar depending on who was doing the talking) was, to Malevola, simply a relentless pain in the ass. Operating somewhere just south of Los Angeles, probably Anaheim, Hadramiel had a knack for turning any quiet day into a celestial demolition derby.
Malevola didn’t remember how the duel had started—she probably deserved it. Some disturbance, some minor trespass at a gentrified paradise like The Gardenwalk. Next thing she knew, the sky tore open: Hadramiel and her husband descended, wings shimmering gold, weapons bigger than sense itself. A crossbow clutched in Hadramiel’s hands, her husband brandishing a battleaxe that could cleave a small car in half. The air smelled like cheap cologne and wet asphalt. And there was Malevola, caught between remembering who she was and wishing she’d just stayed in bed.
Heroes. The word scraped across Malevola’s teeth like sandpaper.
The fight was almost laughably quick. Angels weren’t fighters. When their big, shiny weapons and righteous intimidation didn’t work, they collapsed like wet cardboard. Six seconds. That’s all it took. By the time Hadramiel’s husband flapped off into the night, choosing to postpone vengeance for another day, Malevola had already severed Hadramiel’s wings with her broadsword.
Even then, Malevola felt nothing—no triumph, no spark of joy. Killing Hadramiel hadn’t been about pleasure. Hell, she didn’t even know why she’d done it. The only saving grace? A few witnesses with a shred of empathy and a court system that was willing to call it second-degree murder instead of first. A short stint in prison later, she applied to the Phoenix Program, scraped through on good behavior, and emerged into something that resembled a normal life: saving lives for a paycheck, surrounded by people who were kind, competent, and not fixated on her demonic visage. Comfortable. Predictable. Mundane, almost.
And yet… none of it mattered.
Hadramiel was dead.
Malevola snapped awake, her chest heaving, sweat slick against her skin. There she was, Hadramiel, hovering in the air before her, unnaturally still, as if invisible strings held her aloft. Her hair drifted around her head like black smoke in slow water, and her eyes… oh, her eyes were wrong, too wide, too bright, fixed on Malevola with a hunger that had nothing human about it. Her mouth opened in a soundless scream, and Malevola’s own shriek tore out before she could stop it, a raw, ragged thing that bounced off the walls and seemed to echo from inside her skull. Every instinct screamed to flee, to run, but she couldn’t move. She was pinned to the bed by the weight of her own terror, and the shadow of Hadramiel’s presence seemed to seep into the room, into the air, into her veins, until even her heartbeat felt like it belonged to someone else.
xXx xXx
“You’re early,” Janelle observed as she stepped into the locker room. Malevola didn’t look up. She kept working a cloth over the flat of her broadsword, polishing in short, meticulous strokes. If she couldn’t see her face in it—every horn, every scar, every twitch—it wasn’t clean enough.
Janelle was in civilian clothes again. Weird. Malevola could count the number of times she’d seen Janelle outside the full hero ensemble on, like, two-and-a-half fingers. Even at Robert’s housewarming party she’d shown up armoured like she expected a villain to pop out of the punch bowl. Same thing at Elliot’s trial. The only t-shirt sightings in recorded history were Colm’s birthday two weeks ago and that pool party where someone had to convince her that massive electronic wings were not, in fact, “pool-safe attire.”
“Am I?” Malevola asked, still polishing.
“We’re not on shift for thirty-seven minutes,” Janelle said. She opened her locker with the same reverence some people reserved for church pews and began gently extracting her wings from their case.
Janelle was halfway through securing the left wing when Malevola finally spoke.
“Hey… can I ask you something?”
Janelle didn’t look up. She rarely did when the conversation threatened to be personal; she preferred to give people plausible deniability. “Depends,” she said. “Is it about Colm stealing your yogurt again? Because I warned you that boy marks snacks like a raccoon.”
“No.” Malevola wiped a smear she’d already wiped twice. She swallowed. The sword’s reflection wavered with her breath. “How do you deal with… y’know. Guilt. For the people you killed. Before.”
A stretch of silence. Lockers hummed faintly with the building’s old wiring.
Janelle stopped adjusting the wing harness. “That’s a big one,” she said at last. She leaned back against the metal lockers, wings half-attached, half-forgotten. “Honestly? I don’t think you deal with it. Not really.” She tapped her sternum. “You just carry it in a different part of your body as you get older.”
Malevola waited. She’d expected a joke, a deflection, some zen-crime-boss nonsense. But Janelle’s eyes had drifted to the floor. Somewhere far past it, really.
“Was there a moment,” Malevola asked quietly, “when it stopped crushing you?”
Janelle huffed out a dry laugh. “No. But there was a moment when it… shifted. When I realized I wasn’t doing the work to erase what I’d done; just to make sure the next kid who got trained for this life didn’t end up like me.”
Her fingers flexed involuntarily, as if remembering the feel of a different weapon. “I had a mentor once. Knox.” She said the name with the tenderness of someone handling cracked porcelain. “He taught me everything. How to aim. How to vanish. How to keep your pulse steady when someone’s begging. He was… sharp. Too sharp. Like he was always working double-time to hold himself together.”
Janelle cleared her throat, straightened a strap on her wings that didn’t need straightening.
“One day, March 18th, 1997, he told me something I never forgot: ‘The trick to living with ghosts is accepting they’re going to ride shotgun.’” A beat. “He didn’t say it like it bothered him. That’s how I knew it did.”
Malevola studied Janelle’s face; still, but not unreadable. “Is he still around?”
A micropause. “Haven’t seen him in a while,” Janelle said. That was all. But something brittle passed behind her expression, quick as a hairline fracture. Malevola decided not to interrogate her on that. She had enough going on. Janelle clicked the last buckle on her wings and forced her posture back into its usual, hyper-competent rigidity.
“Anyway,” she said, adopting her lighter tone again, “killing people sucks. Don’t recommend it. But guilt means you’re not lost.”
Malevola let that hang there. The sword felt heavier in her hands.
“Thanks.”
“Sure,” Janelle said, already moving toward the door. “And if the ghosts get loud again, tell me. I’ve got… experience.”
Malevola watched her leave, feeling a creeping dread she couldn’t name, like she hadn’t asked Janelle about ghosts so much as accidentally summoned one.
xXx xXx
One of the reasons Malevola liked being dispatched by Robert (and why he’d managed to survive nearly seven months in a job most people bailed on before the ink on their employee badge dried) was that he actually paid attention. Not to the noise, not to the drama, not even to the public perception. He watched them, the Z-Team, with this unnerving mixture of empathy and spreadsheets. Within a few weeks he’d started pairing people not by “compatibility,” but by whatever occult math he used to keep everyone’s nerves from detonating.
Unless the city was actively on fire, he stuck to his pairings.
Courtney with Bruno. Janelle with Colm. Chad with Alice. Herman with Katon-Ur. And for Malevola, almost always, Victor.
Victor and Malevola just… worked. In a way that didn’t require words or emotional check-ins or, God forbid, team-building exercises. He was a charmer, which was hilarious considering the bat face. People trusted him anyway—maybe because he had that steady, earnest voice, or the polite smile, or the “my mother raised me correctly” vibe that radiated off him like a faint lemon scent, unless of course you heard him talk about cryptocurrency or boobs for longer than two seconds.
Also, he was smart. Painfully so. He could slip Harvard into a conversation the way other people slipped in “uh” or “like.” And no matter how many times he reminded them of his alma mater, often enough that Colm once threatened to put a tally board in the break room, it was still true. He was clever, quick-thinking, observant in ways Malevola wasn’t.
What he wasn’t good at, unless he fully hulks into his giant bat-monster form, was fighting.
Malevola was.
She was the one who moved first when things got violent. The blade. The muscle. The forward momentum.
Victor handled talking, de-escalation, basic situational diplomacy. Malevola handled the “if that doesn’t work, we don’t die today” portion of the job.
They fit together like two mismatched puzzle pieces that shouldn’t make a picture but somehow did—his charm and her menace, his brain and her steel, his “let’s think about this” and her “I’m already halfway through solving it with violence.”
And because Robert understood that—understood them—he kept them together.
It made the city feel less hostile.It made the job feel less like penance. It made the ghosts in Malevola’s head quiet, at least most days. Which is probably why it felt so profoundly wrong when Robert dispatched her alone the morning everything went to hell.
Everyone was spread thin that morning.
The Freegoes, the ebiker gang (yes, an actual gang now, complete with matching helmets and generational despair), had decided to make a move on Yatchie territory. The Yatchies, Malevola’s favorite crew of ascot-wearing cokeheads who all wanted to sleep with her out of some combination of lust and poor life planning, were suddenly getting hammered all across greater Torrance.
Robert hadn’t paid much attention at first. His working theory, shared by Malevola, was that both groups were paper tigers. Loud, posture-heavy, conflict-averse. They were the kind of criminals who would schedule a turf war for “later this week” and then cancel because someone forgot to charge their vehicles
.
But something must’ve cracked in the Freegoes’ leadership chain, because now this cluster of teenagers and twentysomethings on ebikes were absolutely steamrolling the Yatchies. Not outmaneuvering. Not wearing them down. Wiping. Them. Out.
Colm, first on the scene, had called in with a tone usually reserved for biblical plagues and malfunctioning coffee machines.
“They commandeered a boat. A full boat. These little assholes hijacked a yacht and are doing drive-bys on jet skis.”
Robert stared at the report like it personally insulted him.
The Z-Team scattered to deal with the multiple flareups, everyone getting yanked in a different direction.
Which left Malevola, predictably, to cover whatever calls fell through the cracks.
And that meant she was the only one available when the accident came in.
The dispatch came through as she was tightening the straps on her greaves:
MULTI-CAR COLLISION. POSSIBLE MASS CASUALTIES.
No villain signature, no gang tags, no supernatural residue. Just a bad morning on bad asphalt. Exactly the kind of thing Robert usually sent Herman and Katon-Ur to, clean, efficient, soothing in that “saving strangers keeps us from unraveling” way.
But Courtney was busy shepherding a group of terrified Yatchies into safe zones (“Stop screaming, sweetie, you’re very coked-up, I know, but the jet ski boy is gone now”), and Bruno was literally holding up a capsized motorboat with three Freegoes clinging to the railing like wet possums.
So the call bounced down the list and landed squarely on Malevola.
“You good to take this solo?” Robert asked, voice calm but stretched thin.
“Yeah.” She lied with the confidence of someone who’s had a demon-haunted dawn and hadn’t processed it yet.
She teleported to the location, a scorched stretch of the 405 off-ramp near Carson, and materialized into pure chaos. Cars folded like aluminum origami. Glass glittering across six lanes. The sickly burnt-sugar smell of airbags and overheated coolant. Civilians wandering in shock, like misplaced NPCs trying to re-pathfind (Malevola may have been spending too much time with Bruno). Malevola waded in automatically, sword sheathed, voice steady, hands gentle. This was the easy stuff. The clean stuff. The work she understood. She lifted crumpled metal, checked pulses, cracked open jammed doors. And then she sensed him before she saw him.
A prickle. A shift in the air pressure. A faint hum, like a tuning fork someone had struck behind her sternum.
When she turned, there he was.
James Angel.
Six foot six (not often Malevola doesn’t have to look down at someone), broad-shouldered, golden aura dialed down to “non-threatening celestial presence.” His wings were folded neatly behind him in that too-perfect way angels did, less like limbs, more like accessories someone had clipped on as a visual aid.
He was kneeling beside a trapped driver, murmuring something soft, soothing, irritatingly noble.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. They just stared.
James blinked first.
“…Malevola?”
She felt something cold and reptilian crawl up her spine—a memory, a blade, a courtroom, a woman’s scream swallowed by six seconds of violence and a head rolling in front of the Bubba Gump Shrimp by Disneyland.
Her fingers tightened around the warped car door she’d been holding. Metal groaned under her grip.
James stood slowly. Not afraid, angels didn’t fear mortals, but wary, like he’d just remembered the universe had sharp edges.
“I didn’t know you were… out,” he said, voice cracking on the last word despite the divine echo built into his larynx.
Malevola shrugged, because it was that or scream. “Good behavior,” she said. “Systems work sometimes.”
A beat.
“You look well,” he added.
“I killed your wife,” she said before she could stop herself. Just… blurted it into the morning air like conversational small talk.
James flinched, barely, but it was real. A tiny fracture in the angelic calm.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You did.”
The sirens wailed somewhere behind them. Civilians cried. A tow truck rolled onto the scene.And Malevola, standing in broken glass and sunlight, realized she had never felt more exposed in her life.