"How goes the night, brother?"
"Still. Not a sound nor a soul stirs."
Save yours."
"…Yes."
Michael is at the entrance to their tent, their desert watch post, retracting his wings. Within, their sisters sleep, exhausted from the weeks and months of devastation and slaughter. The Amphorae lie spent in their cupboards, awaiting their next holy use. And Gabriel stands, a silent, immobile watchman, as God's wrath descends upon humanity once more.
He is not surprised when his brother's voice pierces the dark silence. The beating of his wings, so familiar, had heralded his arrival for miles. Where he'd come from, Gabriel knew not. 'He Who Is Like God' may go where he pleases. But even in the heat of the day he had, through their bond (so immeasurable in its intensity and its reality) felt the warmth and light of their home. To see Father then? Perhaps. Gabriel cannot understand why he should. The task at hand was as clear cut as the alabaster pillars in Pharaoh's hall. He'd not had that sort of clarity for eons. Clarity of purpose, method, outcome. But this time his hands are bloodless - he is feeling the spur of action too many hundreds of years too late.
Gabriel hears the shifting of the individual grains of sand as his brother walks to stand by him.
"Father says this will be the last of the plagues. After this we may return home." Gabriel winces - his brother's voice cuts the air beside ears. He turns for a moment - blue eyes meet gold - and then returns to his vigil. Yes, his brother is trying to make conversation, fine, very good, but Gabriel does not want to converse. He wants to think and ponder because things are no longer right. Things haven't been right since the blood first touched his hands.
So he says nothing in response - he refuses his brother this. He will not see this night of hidden and silent torment broken again by any pitying, falsely illumined voice. They stare wordlessly at the expanse of desert stretching out before them. For a night built of shadows deeper than the seas, there is much light. Candles and torches flicker in the dwellings of slaves, citizens and oppressors alike. Gabriel knows the moon is ripe and full of light, but the humans do not see it - the effects of the Amphora of darkness are lingering.
Michael sighs. Gabriel can feel a spark of annoyance in his brother's heart. Again, the stillness, so tense, is cut by his voice. "Is Azrael yet afoot?"
Gabriel points wordlessly into the night. A wisp of cloud, the colour of starlight, is descending upon Memphis. Azrael does his work efficiently and in silence. He winds quietly through the streets, slipping into dwellings and stealing away the shallow breaths of the young. From their vantage point, the two archangels watch as, one by one, the bright lights in the windows go out. The screams will not start until morning, by which time the bodies will have long since turned cold.
Perhaps Michael sees that same chill in Gabriel's eyes - or perhaps he feels its echo in his own heart. He puts a hand on Gabriel's shoulder, but Gabriel does not relax. He remains taught as a bowstring. He doesn't even deign to look at his brother.
Azrael's light pulls slowly back into the heavens, and the night returns, along with the chill desert wind. A gust sweeps Gabriel's long hair back from his face, and flutters his cape until it near entangles itself with Michael's. He beats his hand to pull the fabric back to himself. It does not come away easily.
Interesting, isn't it?" Gabriel says at last, abandoning the effort. His throat seems to scratch at itself as he speaks - the sand from the desert, perhaps, nothing more. "Father commands his children to wipe the blood of lambs upon their doorposts. Does he not trust Azrael, his Angel of Death, to distinguish between who must live and who must die?" A Hebrew hovel and Egyptian house are not so similar after all.
"Even the wisest angels can make mistakes in the dark." From the corner of his eye, Gabriel sees Michael trying to smile, and now Gabriel's composed face breaks into a scowl. It was not a flippant remark.
"Especially the wisest," he hisses, and stalks further along the dune. He shuts out Michael's flash of confusion, his twinge of hurt. Michael had slipped into that dark after all, and made a terrible mistake. And worse, Gabriel was privy to it - part of it - got blood on his hands because of it. His heart will not blame Michael but his head sees no alternative. "Perhaps father trusts none of his children anymore."
"Gabriel." Michael's voice is stern, it checks him. He stops on his path across the dune. "You've been brooding, and should you think I neither feel nor see it you are sorely mistaken. Whether you blame yourself or me, anger won't serve you in any good way."
Gabriel can't bring himself to turn around and snap back a reply. He kneels down and puts his hand in the sand. "I blame us both, don't you know."
The clump he lifts out slides across palm and through his fingers, falling like so many crystals back into the great waterless sea from whence they came. It feels, he recalls, like blood. Since that day he has not felt blood on his hands. His brother has made well sure of that.
What can he say to Michael? I blame you, for not heeding my advice, for turning those cities upside down, for forcing that man from his home until he found his way onto the end of my sword? I blame myself, for feeling the rush of the blood too late? Now you've taken a different path to try and regain Father's trust but you can't, and neither can I.
"I couldn't follow his orders, and you followed them too zealously," he ends up saying quietly. "The darkness slipped into both of us. And yet now you use the amphorae" - that he would himself had used, once, before - "as a mercy killing from Heaven; and I can no longer see the good in its entirety. Our roles are reversed, Michael. We are never truly done, we just take turns feeling and not feeling. It's Father's punishment - he no longer trusts us to be ourselves. You, me, Azrael, our sisters. He marks the doors to which Azrael must go. He makes me like you and you like me. Do you not see why I brood?"
His brother's eyes are icy, and Gabriel can feel the denial and worry pulsing through him. "Father's trust is intact, Gabriel, your bitterness is misguided. Why must you see this as a punishment? We are still ourselves - Father is only showing us a new way for us to know ourselves."
He steps forward and puts his hand on Gabriel's shoulder. Gabriel wants to reach up and hold it but he is stubborn. He does not. He can feel the sadness he knows must be swimming in his brother's eyes.
"If I could, I would that you'd never drawn your sword that day," says Michael softly. "That you'd lingered quietly in the tent, to be pleased now that all these years later I've turned away from that darkness and would gladly use the amphorae. Do you think I wished blood on your hands? I told you that yours was a light I coveted."
"You also told me that when blood hits snow, it steams. What does it do when it hits sand, I wonder? Does it simply slip between the grains? Down and down and down…" He stands abruptly. He knows Michael speaks sense, and he, delirium. He refuses to acknowledge it. He turns back, tries to restrain the dams breaking behind his eyes. "Brother, how can you covet a light you covered?"
"Gabriel, stop." He reaches forward and wipes the sand from his brother's hand. Almost no nicks or cuts, no ancient scars. His hands were red once and never again. Then he embraces Gabriel. "You blame me, I know it. You've tried to hide it from me but I sensed it in you. Why would you pretend you thought me innocent? If you want to believe it, then I broke Father's trust."
"It was my mistake," says Gabriel quietly, his brother's armor cold in the chilled nighttime air of the desert.
And yet it is Michael's mistake too. He'd broken Father's trust. He'd brought torment beyond his divine orders upon innocents, he'd desecrated sanctuaries. He had not gone to such lengths as other subordinates of his - those fiends - but he had drawn a line in the sand that day, whether he knew it or no. And now, Father is sharing his messages with his worldly creations. Slaughter a lamb, and paint the doorposts with its blood. So He'd said. It was a small instruction, but it spoke volumes. Would Azrael needlessly slaughter Hebrew children before reaching his real targets, even if Father, and Michael, had told him no? Evidently, Father thought so. No matter what Michael says, Gabriel knows this is a punishment. But he refuses to talk the blame solely upon himself. He is, after all, never truly by himself. Not as long as Michael exists. And Father? What of him?
Gabriel stands back, his head hung low. He knows Michael's sadness - and frustration. His need for Gabriel to open up to him. But Gabriel will not. Not of himself. Other things concerning them both are more important - and more difficult to understand. He sighs, deeply.
"Father doesn't trust us anymore." He moves back to the tent, his vigil over. "Next thing you know, He'll stop speaking to us altogether."
Thank you for reading!