Lisa didn't become an angel all at once.
It happened in pieces.
Small ones.
The kind no one writes songs about.
She was sixteen the first time she skipped school to help someone she didn't know.
A homeless man had collapsed outside a liquor store, coughing blood onto the sidewalk. Everyone else stepped around him. Lisa knelt.
"Hey," she said, shaking him gently. "Don't die. That'd be super inconvenient for both of us."
She called an ambulance. Paid for his food. Stayed until help arrived.
Then she went to school and got detention.
That became a pattern.
She missed classes to sit with dying strangers. Used her tips from waitressing to buy groceries for families who couldn't afford rent. Got fired twice for giving food away.
"Stop helping people," her manager told her once. "You're not a charity."
Lisa smiled. "Yeah, I know. I'm worse."
She never kept count.
The universe did.
At seventeen, she started drinking.
Not because she was sad.
Because it was easier to laugh when everything hurt.
She drank at funerals for people she barely knew. Drank after working double shifts to cover coworkers' rent. Drank when she realized no matter how much good she did, it was never enough.
The first time she blacked out, she woke up behind a church.
With wings.
Big ones.
White.
Glowing faintly like they were embarrassed to exist.
Lisa stared at them for a long time.
"…This is a prank," she said hoarsely.
A voice spoke inside her head.
Your kindness has been acknowledged.
She laughed until she cried.
"Oh, screw you," she told the sky. "I didn't ask for this."
The wings didn't go away.
By nineteen, people had noticed.
Cults tried to recruit her. Governments tried to capture her. Criminals tried to sell her.
Lisa punched most of them.
She healed the sick when she could. Burned the wicked when she had to. Still drank like she was racing death.
Someone once asked her why an angel would swear so much.
She replied, "Have you met humans?"
Her miracles weren't clean.
She healed a child and accidentally blinded a man standing too close. She smote a murderer and collapsed a building next door.
Every time she tried to be perfect, something broke.
So she stopped trying.
She helped anyway.
The bar incident happened on a Tuesday.
She'd only gone in for one drink.
One turned into six. Six turned into an argument. The argument turned into a fight when a man accused her of faking the wings.
"Real angels don't drink," he sneered.
Lisa smashed a bottle over his head.
"Real angels don't exist," she said. "I'm a problem."
That was when the guns came out.
She burned half the room by accident.
She laughed while dodging bullets.
She cried when someone got hurt who didn't deserve it.
And then—
He showed up.
The dead man.
Rye.
She watched bullets tear him apart while he kept moving, watched him stand between her and people who wanted her chained.
For the first time since the wings appeared, Lisa felt something unfamiliar.
Relief.
Later, when the fires were out and the screaming stopped, she sat on the curb with him, wings folded tight, bottle empty.
"So," she said. "You recruiting broken miracles now?"
Rye looked at her calmly. "You help people even when it costs you."
She snorted. "Yeah. Bad habit."
"…You in?"
Lisa stared at the sky. At the stars that never answered her back.
Then she smiled.
"Sure," she said. "If I'm gonna be an angel, might as well be a useful one."
The wings flared once.
Bright.
Unapologetic.
And for the first time, Lisa didn't feel alone