Notes: I suppose that you could call this the first fic in this particular 'verse. (I am in need of a good project name.) Written as a sort of response to every 'Will You Go To HEAVEN Or HELL?!!!!!' test ever created. I mean no offence, obviously, and this is mostly playing around with the characters (all of whom I love and adore).

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Are you gay?

Al chewed his pen thoughtfully. Not right now, he wrote, because there's a bullet stuck a couple of inches into in my chest and I'm too nervous to think properly.

Usually, Al thought, he was very gay, at least in comparison to Anthony. Then again, everyone was gay compared to Anthony – it was hard to be sourer than a perpetually scowling man with a pink shirt and a personality like someone had stuck something long and pointy up his rear.

Al winced slightly. Sock was rubbing off on him, then, at least a course, it couldn't be helped, and anyway, it probably wouldn't change much in any case, mostly on account of Al being dead.

Do you repent for your sins?

No. At least not officially, which was probably the way that counted.

Al wasn't exactly sure when he had died, but it was probably somewhere in between Sock telling him not to fall asleep and the grey-faced lady shoving a small mountain of papers and a pen into his hands and telling him to fill them out. When he thought about it, he wasn't exactly sure why he was filling out the papers either. The woman had said that it worked like a final exam to see if you could get to Heaven. This didn't really make sense, but Al wasn't about to argue – mostly because the grey lady looked like she knew how to use the hairpins that seemed to grow from her head.

Do you ever lie?

Sometimes.

He turned the paper. This was the fifth page, and the questions weren't getting any more inventive. Al wondered why someone felt that it was necessary to ask them; he didn't know anyone who wouldn't answer 'yes' to almost all the questions, and if you knew that everyone answered the same, then what was the point in asking the question in the first place? It was like ... like asking someone if they were wearing clothes when it was quite obvious that they were. And if this was the way to Heaven – well, God was supposed to know everything, so it really was rather pointless. Al wasn't going to comment, though. Someone had gone through the trouble of making this test, after all, and he didn't want to make them think that he resented them or something.

... And so it was, two hours later, that Al put the last word on paper. His back was aching, it felt like someone was playing squash inside his head, and if he had known what it was, he would have suspected that he'd contracted the carpal tunnel syndrome. He picked up the test and hobbled over to the Pin Lady. (It turned out that his leg had partially fallen asleep as well.)

'Um,' said Al, with all of his usual intelligence.

'You done?' The Pin Lady hardly looked up from the computer screen. She was chewing on something, and Al decided not to take a closer look, just in case.

'Er, yes.'

'Hand it here, then.' She reached out a hand. It was stained yellow with nicotine, and her French manicure was chipped. Al found himself staring at it in fascination. Maybe everyone who failed the test were shanghaied to spend eternity here, behind a desk, endlessly filing paperwork...

Al suppressed a shudder.

'Mister,' the Pin Lady said, and there was just a hint of acid there, 'the test.'

This time, Al did shudder. 'Oh, yeah...'

The Pin Lady snatched the papers from him, glared at him for a moment, and then threw the entire thing in the waste basket at her feet. Then it caught fire. Al's eyes widened, and he could only stare in horror as more than two hours' work turned into charcoal. Eventually the flames died out. Al made a choked sound.

'When you're done impersonating a goldfish, you go down the corridor to the left and take the first blue door to the right,' said the Pin Lady, as if her waste basket hadn't been a small inferno half a minute ago.

'Buh – but-'

The Pin Lady gave him a dispassionate glare. 'We all have things to do, Mister Lucas. I can't do my job with you doing the fish impression right in front of me. It's distracting, and you're wasting my air.'

Al's mouth snapped shut. Staring straight ahead, he turned to the left corridor and got going. This place was really starting to confuse him. Maybe this is Hell, he thought. It wouldn't have been a bad attempt at eternal damnation. He stopped outside the door the Pin Lady had told him to find, and stared. It was a nice kind of blue, that door, like the sky on a really good spring day. The colour wasn't a problem. The problem was that on the door there was a big, bronze monster of a doorplate. It read, quite simply,

JUDGEMENT

in big, gaudy lettering, and Al felt a bit like running in the opposite direction, or hiding under a table, or even going back to the Pin Lady. He considered this for a moment, and supposed that whatever this room could throw at him, it couldn't be that bad. The Pin Lady, Al decided, was scary. He breathed heavily through his nose to calm himself, and opened the door.

It was white. Al felt his eyes sting from the sheer brightness. Gradually, the light levels adjusted to 'tolerable' instead of 'excruciatingly painful'. Blinking, Al took in his surroundings. It was a nice room – a tad too white, maybe, but it had big windows and it smelled like lilacs and it wasn't dirty or anything. An ornate oak desk had been placed in the middle of it, and it looked misplaced and very alone. Al sighed, not really sure if he should be relieved or disappointed. It was a nice room, but a bit anticlimactic after the sign on the door.

'Alexander Lucas, yeah?'

Al stared as a tall, dark man with dreadlocks came up from behind the desk. 'Um. That would me me, yes?'

'Right,' the man said, grinning slowly, 'I am Gabriel.' He looked like a big cat when he smiled like that. Al swallowed.

'N-nice to meet you.'

'We have looked at your test results.' Gabriel lost the grin, opting instead for an equally unnerving glare. 'You didn't pass.'

'... oh.' Al wondered why his throat felt so constricted, or why he felt hollow.

'That's it? Just 'oh'?'

'Should I say anything else?'

'Well, a dramatic monologue of how you don't deserve this would be great.'

Al thought about this for a while before speaking. 'I do not deserve this. I am a good man and a semi-honest one and I don't have sex with people. And also I am kind to animals.'

Gabriel smiled again, and Al had to fight the impulse to run out the door screaming. It was an urge he was starting to get familiar with.

'Good one,' Gabriel said, 'and you might want to prepare for the longest journey of your life.'

'... I haven't been outside the city,' Al told him, 'the longest journey of my life doesn't have to be much longer than that.'

Gabriel snorted. 'You're really something, you know.'

'Why am I being sent to eternal damnation?'

'You failed the test.'

Al crossed his arms petulantly. 'It was a stupid test.'

'Yeah?' There was wicked amusement in the other man's eyes.

Al looked away, blowing his fringe out of his face. 'The only way not to fail is to lie, and then you're cheating, so it doesn't count.'

'Maybe that's the test.'

Al's face snapped up to look at him, and Gabriel's grin widened, just a little bit. 'But that wouldn't make sense,' Al said, frowning, 'because then you'd have to know in advance what the truth was, and ... and that woman burned my test, so how could you know that I failed in the first place?'

'No secrets in the Afterlife.'

'... but – but then I sat there for so long for nothing?'

'You made Miss Parker happy, yeah? She always gets a kick out of the new ones.'

'Er ... so the test wasn't really a proper test?'

'Not in the way you're thinking, no.'

'But ... why did I have to-?'

'Well, first of all, Miss Parker insisted. Secondly, so did over fifty thousand other people.'

'Why would they do that?' Al was feeling more confused than ever, and that was saying something.

'Seems like some people have a very fixed opinion of what to expect when they get here,' Gabriel said, rolling his eyes, 'and they thought that the Management was being too ... easy on people.'

'But that would be a good thing, right?'

'You'd think that, wouldn't you. As is, they were pretty sure that they'd pass anyway, but when it came to ... people who didn't suit their standards ... well, they didn't want Heaven to be 'sullied by those wretched heathens'. I think one of the questions used to be 'Are you female?', but that didn't exactly sit well with the feminists...' Gabriel's eye twitched slightly as he said it.

'Huh. So you send people to Hell because they don't suit other people's standards?'

'We don't really send people to eternal damnation. There is no point, and there are only so many souls to go around. Purgatory works on the worst of them.'

'I'm going to-?' Al began, and had to suppress a wince at the squeak in his voice. He wasn't well versed in religion, but whatever Purgatory was, it sounded painful. Gabriel looked at him, as if he was expecting some sort of punchline here, and the room went almost painfully quiet. And then Gabriel burst out laughing. It was hoarse, and it sounded like he hadn't laughed for a while. Al stared at him.

'What?'

'Did you – did you really think we'd send you to Purgatory?'

Al had crossed the boundaries of confusion and was now well on the way past bewilderment. 'Yes?'

Gabriel looked bemused. 'Lucas, you're a piece of work. Why would you of all people be sent to Purgatory? No offence or anything.'

'You said that I had failed the test.'

'Everyone fails the test.'

'Oh ... but I asked you why I was going to eternal damnation and you said that it was because of the test.' Al bit his lip, staring at the other man. 'Aren't you forbidden to lie, or something?'

Gabriel looked slightly uneasy. 'I never actually said that you were going to Hell. And I told you the test was fake, yeah?'

'So I'm not going to Hell?'

'No.'

'And I'm not going to Purgatory?'

'Nope.'

'Ah ... where am I going, then?'

The silence stretched over a good three minutes, and Al began to feel slightly uneasy under Gabriel's flat stare. He tugged at his hair in an attempt to distract himself, not quite daring to say anything. It seemed like too much time had passed when Gabriel sighed and spoke again.

'Lucas, you're a piece of work.'

'I know,' the piece of work in question muttered, 'you said.'

'Look, if you rule out Hell, there aren't exactly a lot of choices left.'

'So...?' Al knew what he was talking about, but he didn't want to say it now, for some reason. It felt like asking for trouble. Gabriel gave him an almost defeated smile, and Al thought that it looked a lot nicer than his other smile.

'You're going up, Lucas.'

And right now, Al realised, he was very gay, despite the fact that there was a bullet in his chest.

-fin-

Postscript: Reviews are vastly appreciated, of course.