Chapter Text
A Heavenly court deliberated your fate.
One angel argued for your acceptance into heavenly embrace, while another debated for you to be cast to Hell.
They hadn't asked for your opinion.
Your form had no mouth with which to defend yourself.
You weren't fully corporeal, nor could you move from the pulpit in the center of the courtroom. Your body was on Earth, after all. It was no use to you or anyone else now. Not after what it went through.
“Due to the gruesome and violent circumstances of this soul’s death, the Court of Heaven should find that sinful punishment has already been enacted, and it should be saved from eternal damnation," the angel you thought of as 'Angel Number 1' argued.
“However, it can be argued that its death could have been avoided. The defendant had many opportunities to leave the relationship and situation," Angel No. 2 countered. Neither of them even tried to mask the disinterest in their voices.
Your eternal fate was in their hands, and they hadn't even looked at you after you’d been initially summoned to the podium. The Angels of the presumed jury acted like they'd rather be anywhere else, passing notes, napping, or on their phones. You didn't know they had phones in Heaven. Cool. But what wasn't cool was that your eternity was to be decided by them.
“The poor thing was led astray, manipulation and coercion were obvious in these circumstances.” The lawyer angels kept taking cursory glances at some magic orb ball thing that showed off different experiences from your life like some sort of Wayback Machine for human life, it made you feel both scrutinized and forgotten. Only clinical duty caused any of these holy creatures to give a shit about anything you’d ever done.
"A soul dead from such a violent death would sully the golden roads of Heaven. What would be gained by a creature enraged and bitter over something that won't change?"
"Plenty of souls here have arrived due to violent circumstances but have been able to grow and appreciate our holy glory. What's to say this one can't do the same?"
You didn't care what they said anymore. You tuned out the ongoing debate to focus on what you needed to say. Every last flame of rage in your soul fueled your spirit to let everyone know just how you felt.
Send me to Hell.
Your words echoed in the now silent courtroom. The vaulted, intricately carved ceilings reverberated with blasphemy.
Every eye in the room turned to your soul. Interested murmuring broke out in the jury. The angel who had been arguing for the very thing you’d just requested tilted its haloed head at you in skepticism.
“You have a chance to go to Heaven, yet you would beg for the opposite? Not many souls even have the energy to project their thoughts, you should be asking to stay, kid.”
Beg? Beg? This was not begging. You had plenty of that in life, and it brought you here.
Every fiber of your being shook with rage at the casual indifference, at the assumption that you would want to keep company with these apathetic beings, that you would beg to them, and you used it to fuel your spirit to project again. It was draining, but you would be silent no longer.
Send me to Hell.
“Why would you refuse eternal bliss for Hell???”
With the last dredges of your willpower, your essence trembling with the effort, you managed to grate out the single, simple word that held the reason for your unholy desire.
Revenge.
-*~*-
Plummeting to Hell was unsurprisingly unpleasant. The landing was even worse. You were surprised you didn't just splat like a bug on the windshield of a car going 90 in a 45.
One could say that it hurt like hell.
You kept your eyes squeezed shut as the ground flew at your face, and curled up into a little ball midair to protect yourself.
The sound you made when you hit the ground could be onomatopoeia-ed as a mix between ‘WHACK’ and ‘SHPLAT’ and the sound of your head popping off your neck was more of a wet squelch and a thud.
Right. You had been decapitated. You didn’t know the action would carry over into your afterlife.
When you opened your eyes, you could make out your own decapitated body a few feet away, but it was blurry through the tears and the probably-concussion.
Idly wondering if the other scars from your death followed you into Hell, you blindly groped around for your head. It was really disorienting to be watching your headless body crawl and flop around from a few feet away. You eventually oriented your aching body to crawl toward your head, and you got a good look at yourself while doing so.
You were dressed in the clothes you died in, a bloodsoaked robe with nothing but your underwear and a bra on underneath. The vivisection bisected most of the skin of your torso, a horizontal cut on your lower stomach just above your pelvis, connected in an ‘I’ shape to another laceration across your collarbones. It was hideous. It was done to you by someone you trusted. Someone you loved. The man who asked you to marry him, the man who tortured you to death.
Half crawling, half dragging yourself out of the road and onto the sidewalk, you could see that you were impeding the flow of foot traffic, earning a “Watch it, bitch!” from one such pedestrian. In all the disorientation and pain, your middle finger still knew how to work. It only resulted in the offended shoes kicking your head even further away. Asshole.
Closing your eyes, your head spun and rolled until you crashed into something that felt like a brick wall. When you opened them, you saw that you were at least five more feet away from your main body. This fucking sucked.
You finally reached your fallen head, grasping at the What the fuck why is it fuzzy?! Were those horns you felt?
You tore your decapitated gaze away from your mangled chest and stomach to take in the rest of your features. Oh. You had furry legs. A tail, too. Looking closely at the rest of your body, you were mostly covered in fluffy, curly fur, lengthening around your hips and down to your feet- nope, hooves. Those were hooves. Cute little sheep or goat or cow hooves. Whatever. You had bigger things to worry about.
Breathing deeply through the hole in the stump of your neck, you mentally tried to put all your emotions and fears into a little box and shove it under a carpet. Emotions later. Act now.
Picking up your head by the horns, you aligned it as best you could without a mirror. The vertigo would have knocked you right onto your ass if you were standing up, and you had to lean against the nasty ass wall of the building next to you to stop from toppling over.
Using the belt of your bathrobe, you tied your head to your neck. With your eyes and ears back on top of your body, you finally took in the landscape of Hell.
It looked like shit.
The whole sky was red, bathing the dilapidated buildings around you in the same hue. There were two… people? Sinners? Demons? Two whatever were locked in a vicious fight on the opposite side of the street, and the other inhabitants of Hell just stepped around them or cheered them on. You were being ignored by passersby as well, but those who paid attention to you looked far too interested in your body and its lack of proper clothes. There was an alley less than ten feet from where you were curled up against the wall. If you could just get there without being stepped on.
Standing was a lot easier now that you had your head on straight, literally. The wall was doing most of the work as you forced your strange furry legs to stand. Hooves were hard to walk in without practice. One hand kept your robe closed, and the other pressed against the wall to help you keep your balance.
You received a few odd stares from passersby, but hey, it was Hell, this probably wasn't an uncommon occurrence. You finally staggered your aching body over to the alleyway, ducking into it and almost collapsing. You were glad that you had hooves now because you could see that the ground was covered in broken glass and what looked to be needles, which also meant you had to stand. So you had to compose yourself against a dingy, disgusting alley wall.
There was commotion further down the alley and you wished you hadn’t looked, because there was a couple really going at it against the wall. What a welcome party.
As the shock and panic receded from your body, you were able to think more clearly. The fall hadn’t actually hurt that bad, it felt like you’d fallen five feet instead of, like, five thousand. You were okay. You could be okay.
It was getting easier to stand, your mind adapted quickly to digitigrade legs, it kinda felt like standing on your tippy-toes. The couple fucking against the wall dramatically announced their orgasms to each other. Pedestrians kept walking past the alley. You were dead.
He wasn’t. You had time to prepare. To plan. That stupid piece of shit had no idea what was waiting for him after his death, but you would be ready for him.
This could be fun.