📖"Cupids, Valkyries, Heralds, & Seraphim"
Rated: Teen
Pairing: Steve x Bucky
Tags: wing fic, angel Steve, veterinarian Bucky, supernatural, hurt/comfort, humor, meet-cute
Summary: Apparently there are all sorts of angels, and Bucky has been saddled with Steve: a terminally incompetent Cupid.
(Oh wait, I should probably go read Part 1 first)
Bucky stood there, arms crossed and blank-faced, staring, for maybe a full five seconds. “God smited you,” he repeated slowly. “... By throwing shrapnel in your wing?”
Steve sighed. “No. The shrapnel was from the fall. God just hit me with lightning.”
“'Just' some lightening?" Steve glared a little bit at Bucky from where he still sat—thankfully no longer naked, as Bucky had located some scrub pants—on the clinic’s exam table. "And yet somehow that didn’t hurt you?” Bucky checked.
“I told you: normally I can’t get hurt.”
“Riiight. Because you’re immortal.”
“Because I exist on another metaphysical plane, yes. And God took me off of that plane and put me onto yours as a punishment. Temporarily,” he added after a moment. “I hope.”
Bucky squinted. “Uh huh.”
Steve, bless him, actually seemed rather embarrassed about what had happened, because apparently it was like a work mistake or something for the guy.
“I was out on a job,” he explained. “I missed my mark. Hit the wrong guy.”
Hit? “Your ‘mark’,” Bucky repeated. “What are you, some kind of angelic hitman or something?”
Steve’s lips twisted. “I mean, you could say that. I’m a Cupid.”
“A what now?”
“A Cupid. It’s a—”
“Yeah I think I know," Bucky cut him off. “So, what? You missed your mark and God got angry and, and smote you? … Er, smited you … smote you?”
"Yeah." Steve stared glumly down at his lap, as if God smiting him was the equivalent of him getting a bad performance review on his employee evaluation or something. "It was an easy job, okay? I got distracted when I shouldn't have, wound up impaling the wrong person."
"'Impaling'? Don’t you mean ‘shooting’?" Bucky's eyebrow rose. "As in people, with arrows?”
“Bolts,” Steve corrected. “I impale people with bolts."
"Yeah, that sounds way less violent."
"Well they don't feel it," he defended. "I told you: I operate on another metaphysical plane.”
“Riiight.”
His shoulders slumped in defeat. “It doesn't matter if you believe me or not," he mourned. "Doesn't change anything. I'm still stuck here. I still missed the shot. Still impaled the wrong guy—”
“Could we maybe stop saying ‘impaled’?”
“—And now he's going to fall in love with somebody he wasn't meant to be with. Don’t you see?”
Bucky shrugged. "You must mess up all the time then, ‘cause I hate to tell you this, pal, but that's very common." Steve glared at him and Bucky shrugged. "I mean, have you seen the divorce rate?"
"Well that's not my fault," Steve argued. "It's not like I'm the only one."
"The only what?"
"Cupid!" Steve exclaimed. "There's tons of us."
"Oh." Bucky nodded after a beat, because what was the benefit in arguing, at this point? "Okay. I didn't know that. So ... God's pissed at you and he threw you down here?"
"Yeah," Steve grumbled. "He put me on your plane of existence as punishment. So now I can get hurt—obviously. And people can see me."
Bucky's eyes widened. “Oh, shit.” He’d been taking out the trash when Steve had suddenly crash-landed in the alleyway out back. It was currently the middle of the night and the clinic was closed (thank God—or wait: no, this was God’s fault!), but so far Bucky hadn’t thought very far past which color Coban the angel wanted his wing bandaged with (he’d chosen the roll of hot pink with purple pawprint pattern on it). He certainly hadn’t considered what he was going to do with the guy after this. "Did anybody else see you?" he asked worriedly.
“No,” Steve said, his cheeks flushing. He looked back over his shoulder at the bend of his bandaged wing. “I need to hide out somewhere. People can’t see me.” He turned his big, stupid-pretty blue eyes on Bucky. “Will you help me? Please?”
"What am I supposed to do with you?” Bucky complained. “I can't exactly conceal those."
Oh God, the clinic would be opening in a few hours. Steve couldn’t still be here when Yelena and Peter showed up for work! Bucky ran his hand through his hair in stress, looking over Steve’s very conspicuous form sitting on the metal exam table. Aside from the friggin’ twelve foot wingspan issue, Steve was also a big guy in general: very blond and perfect and half-naked and eye-catching. Bucky would’ve given him a scrub top to wear along with the pants, but: wings.
"How long until God unsmites you?" he asked. “Like a day, a week, a year?”—Oh God, please, please don't let it be a year.
Steve shrugged, then winced when the motion made pain flare in his injured wing. "I don’t know yet. I'm waiting on a Herald."
"A what now?"
"A Herald: Another type of angel."
Bucky squinted. "Wait, how many types are there?"
Bucky brought his car into the alley and made Steve throw a blanket over his shoulders to cover up most of his wings. He told him to lie down in the back seat, drove them back to his apartment building, and anxiously hustled him upstairs.
Steve said they should be getting a visit from one of God’s messengers soon, and to just sit tight. Bucky resigned himself to a night of no sleep and put on a pot of coffee. He showed the half-naked angel on his couch how to use Netflix.
Only there was no relaxing. Certainly not for Bucky. He was getting increasingly antsy when, after another two hours, the mysterious “Herald” still hadn’t arrived. He made sure that Steve knew he couldn’t just live on his couch watching Bridgerton indefinitely: “I can’t just keep you here, Steve. My lease has a forty pound pet limit!”
Steve suggested that they make their way up to the roof, which Bucky fiercely argued against but lost the battle over anyways. The city was still mostly asleep, but Steve kept the blanket draped around his shoulders and his wings tucked in demurely—or as demurely as he could—so that if they did run into anybody, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of explainable, why Bucky was sneaking around with this oddly-shaped, half-clothed, smokin’ hot blond guy.
Steve went over to the building’s edge, watching the minimal activity of the night time streets. Bucky stood beside him and asked about the Herald again, and thus began Steve’s very long-winded explanation of how there were four main types of angels, with each type serving its own purpose.
Cupids were exactly what Bucky thought they were,
Heralds served as God’s messengers and harbingers,
Valkyries served as warriors,
and Seraphim, as far as Bucky could tell, were the closest thing to actual “angels” like most people thought of them.
Steve clearly wasn’t under celestial a gag order of any type, because he was all too happy to tell Bucky all sorts of stuff. He talked about God like he didn’t know the guy very well, but also made it clear that God did not tolerate “stupid” mistakes from his servants—which apparently Steve's mistake was. God had certainly told him so to his face, just before smiting him right out of the sky with a bolt of lightning.
Bucky winced as he thought about that, looking out on the city with Steve at his side. “So … God’s kind of a dick, huh?”
Steve laughed. “Eh, sometimes. Not always though. I mean I did mess up pretty bad. It’s embarrassing. And now at least a couple of other people are going to have to get shot too, wind up with different romantic futures than they otherwise would have, just to get everything back into the right order again.” He sighed. “It was an avoidable mess.”
“Well why’d you miss?”
“What?”
“The shot.” Bucky looked over to find Steve looking at him. “Earlier, you said you’d gotten distracted from the shot. What distracted you?”
Steve’s lips parted and his cheeks began to turn pink. He started stuttering over an explanation, but before he could eke out any real response, a loud whooshing and clatter came from the roof behind them.
Bucky spun around—his eyes the size of dinner plates, probably—and immediately clutched his chest at what he saw. “Shit!”
Standing only a few yards away, was a massive, gleaming white horse. … with wings. Riding it was what Bucky could only assume was another angel.
“The fuck,” he exhaled, all the adrenaline leaving him at once as he realized that they hadn’t just been caught by other apartment dwellers come up to the roof for a smoke or something. The woman hopped off the horse and walked over to Steve like this was a totally normal occurrence. Bucky glared at her. “Christ. Do ya think the people on the floor below might’ve heard that?!”
Given that she’d arrived on a flying horse, Bucky felt pretty safe in assuming that this newcomer was also an angel; though she didn’t have wings like Steve did, and she wasn’t naked like he’d been. In fact she seemed to be wearing a bunch of badass looking white armor.
“Steve!”
“Brunn, hey! What are you doing here?”
“Checking in on your dumb ass, of course. That’s him, isn’t it? God, you’re so predictable.”
They greeted each other as friends, with smiles and ribbing and big, back-clapping hugs, so Bucky figured he was safe to turn away to go and block the roof’s access door with an old chair that was sitting nearby. Once he’d done that, he walked back over—making sure to leave a wide berth between himself and the unnaturally large horse.
The horsewoman looked Bucky up and down when he got over there, her mouth ticking up faintly at the corners. “You must be James ‘my-friends-call-me-Bucky’ Barnes.”
Bucky blinked. He wasn’t caffeinated enough for this. “Uh huh.” He looked over at Steve. “Is she the Herald?”
The woman snickered and Steve explained that no, she was one of the Valkyrie-types of angels. The warrior types. Okay, Bucky thought. The armor made more sense, then. As did the swords and daggers he was noticing on her person, now. Damn.
“I heard through the grapevine that Saint Steven had fallen,” the Valkyrie was saying. “I volunteered myself for messenger duty, just so I could pop down here and take the piss out of my favorite fallen angel.”
“Aw, you shouldn’t have."
“You’re fallen?” Bucky blurted, alarmed. “A fallen angel?"
“It’s not as serious as it sounds,” Steve muttered, embarrassed, and Valkyrie continued to tease him about what a clutz he was and how he had a ‘penchant for pretty boys’, whatever that meant.
“Let’s see the damage then, Stupid-Cupid,” she said, trying to get at the blanket to yank it off from Steve’s shoulders. Steve danced around trying to prevent it,
“Stoppit! I’m not that hurt. It’s nothing.”
But eventually Valkyrie won. “If it’s nothing then you can let me see it.” Steve squirmed self-consciously as the blanket fell and she peered at his bandaged wing. “What happened?” she asked. “Bad landing?"
“Yeah. Some shrapnel from a junk pile I fell into,” Steve said, shrugging sheepishly when the other angel raised a brow at his bright pink, purple pawprint bandaging. “Um, Bucky’s a veterinarian.”
Valkyrie pursed her lips and nodded. “Well, he was gonna need you sooner or later," she said to Bucky, surprising him. "Thanks for looking after him."
“Oh, um, you’re welcome.”
“So what’s the word?” Steve asked. "Has he told you? Did he say how long I'm banished for?”
'Banished?' Bucky mouthed
“Negligible," Valkyrie said. "Just a month."
Steve gave a big sigh of relief at the very same time that Bucky yelped out, “A month?!”
Valkyrie snorted. “Oh trust me, that’s hardly even a slap on the wrist. You fuck up bad enough, sometimes you’ll get a decade or more. A month is nothing.”
Bucky’s eyes bugged out at that. A month wasn’t nothing! A month was a month!—Well, at least it wasn’t “a decade or more.” Yikes. Still, Bucky protested, “Hey, I have a job, you know. A life. I can’t just put that on hold to babysit an angel. And–and I live in the middle of New York City. There’s like nine million people here!” He gestured wildly at Steve’s hulking, winged mass standing only feet away. “How the hell am I supposed to keep this hidden for a month? He’s got a twelve foot wingspan!”
"Fourteen," Steve muttered petulantly.
Valkyrie rolled her eyes. “It doesn't matter. 'Cause God smited him and cast him down, not anything else. Why do you think he was butt-ass naked when he showed up?"
Bucky frowned, looking back at Steve in confusion. "What?"
"His wings," Valkyrie clarified. "They're of Heaven. They don’t exist on this plane. Just like my armor doesn't, or like Icarus back there. doesn't.” She nodded at the horse. “Humans don't perceive those things. It’ll be fine.”
Steve glanced down at his own naked torso. “Ah … might need to to get some shirts, though.”
“Well I hate to break it to you, Angel Lady, but I can see all of those things.” Behind Valkyrie, the very large and visible horse scraped its hoof impatiently against the rooftop. “Yeah,” Bucky said. “Definitely see ‘em.”
Valkyrie walked back to her horse and mounted it in one, graceful leap. “You can see them,” she corrected. “Because you’re the human he’s tied to. You're still perceiving his true form. But everybody else on this plane just sees his fallen form."
“What? 'Tied to'?" Bucky frowned. "What are you talking about?"
She ignored him and looked back to Steve. “Toodeloo, Butterfingers. Have fun with that.”
In a very unangelic way, Steve flipped her the bird as she kicked the horse into motion. It spread its wings with a great 'whoosh' and beat them up and down: once, twice, three times as it ran across the roof. It went airborne, and in seconds they were gone.
Bucky watched them flying, shrinking further and further away. He felt Steve approach at his side, and they stood there together in fraught silence, until finally the Valkyrie was indistinguishable from any other flickering star in the night sky.
“Okay, buster,” Bucky said. “Spill. What the fuck was she talking about, you’re ‘tied’ to me?”
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