Authors Notes: - This is all going someone, I promise. Anyway, I have no idea where I'm going to go with this but once again it'll be independent from my other stories. It'll have angels and demons and all the fun stuff in between. So yeah… I'm feeling morbid.

PS: Bête Noire is French of black beast. Look it up, it has greater meaning than just that.

Bête Noire

Tears are the silent language of grief.

-Voltaire

The blade bit into flesh and sinew, slicing through muscles, veins and tendons with disturbing ease. The hand guiding the blade barely trembled as he forced the knife through his own limb. Feathers wavered and fell from their mooring as the blade slipped past them. The knife was abruptly stopped when it met bone. Slowly he released the white knuckled grip on the blades hilt and lowered it to the blood soaked ground beside him. Reaching back with an unwavering touch he gripped the massive, now drooping wing and pulled.

A scream of anguish briefly escaped his mouth as the last bits of tough flesh clung to the bones as they parted, reluctantly to let go. The wing fell from his shaking hand and crumpled to the cement floor. It lay limply, no longer grandiose and beautiful, but blood splattered and grotesque.

With a ritualistic steadiness the man retrieved the discarded dagger lying by his leg and again angled it towards his back. Just as deliberately and carefully as before he slipped the blade into his flesh where skin met feathers. He sawed at the thick wing base, cutting away the strong muscles that anchored the flinching limb in place. Once the blade had detached all the meat it could he dropped the blood stained dagger to the ground, where it clattered harshly in the silence of the voluminous room. Reaching behind him he gripped the limp wing tightly and in a sharp motion pulled it from its socket.

The now wingless angel collapsed forward, his wing resting under the tips of his fingers. With tear filled eyes he studied the contours of the feathered appendage. It was covered in soft white feathers with each individual tip colored a gentle silver, as if they had brushed through moonlight and carried away a portion of its quiet light.

Drawing himself back upright he reached out to a small box. A spool of thread and a large sharp silver needle rest inside it, on top of a pile of gauze bandages. His hands, barely steady from the pain that wracked his body, carefully took hold of the needle and thread. Holding the needle up to the firelight that illuminated the room it took him several tries before he managed to thread the strong string through the eye of the needle.

Blood poured freely from the massive wounds in his back. Bone glinted amid the sea of red, peaking out of his flesh. In the light cast by the dozens of candles that littered the room his form reflected in the pools of blood that gathered around his body and soaked into his torn white robes. The feathers of his first wing darkened as they absorbed the viscous liquid from the spreading puddle. The bare cement floor did little to slow the spread of gore.

Using his hands to guide him the angel stabbed the needle into the torn edges of his skin and drew the thread across the gaping wound to seal it shut. He moved slowly, his eyes closed and moisture beading on his tightly knit brow. With every new stroke of his fingers across the wounds his body briefly gave way to weakness and shuddered in agony. The skin strained, too tight over the wounds, but this didn't deter him. Like a morbid tailor he sewed the tattered flesh shut, until only a small trickle of blood wept from the twin lesions down his back.

He sobbed raggedly and fell to his side, amid his own blood and cried. The taut stitching nearly broke as his shoulders shook. A snap of wind rushed through the abandoned building, snuffing in one stroke all the candles that had lit the room. Darkness enveloped the angel, a comforting blanket, covering his shame and misery.

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