We'll Live A Long Life
(perhaps too long, longer than we deserve.)
"Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?"-Thomas Daggett, The Prophecy
He's different, she decides, from the moment she first starts drawing him, furious lines across paper. Not quite real and not quite unreal, half substance and half something else she can't identify. Her art is consumed by him, drawing after drawing, capturing every movement, every essence of the nameless man who haunts her as the months go by, and she tries to convince herself that he isn't real, because even then there's something about him that both draws and repels her, like a moth and the heat of a flame.
She meets him, in the flesh, on a busy street, one day, and he's exactly as she's drawn him, all swagger and bravado, with the crackle of magic and the pull of a cup of water in the desert. There's nothing extraordinary about him on the surface, nothing striking in his appearance, and yet there's a way about him that gathers people to him, some strange spell he casts over them that has nothing to do with the mystical words always lingering on the back of his tongue.
She tells herself she'll stay with him only a little while, that she'll leave anytime, but anytime never happens, like a addict seeking a mythical last fix again and again and again.
She screams at him, finally, when there's three people dead and he's standing there without a scratch, as Chas jerks back to life. She hits him, fists against his chest, and he doesn't move, her fingers curled over the scars his father burned into his skin, doesn't try to defend himself, because she supposes, he thinks he deserves it as much as she thinks he does, and her hands drop to her sides.
It's the possession that destroys him, she decides, even if it isn't entirely true, because he was always being destroyed, piece by piece, and inch by inch, slowly consumed by magic and darkness and death, because John is only human, after all, and a human was never meant to gather so much into themselves and fuse it to whatever remained of their soul. He's spun of anger and self-loathing, woven of pain and guilt, and its only a matter of time until he unravels.
"Why don't you leave him?" She asks once, through numb lips, as Chas hauls him off the floor where he's passed out, drunk and no doubt high on something that should never be combined with alcohol. He only looks at her, with an expression of sorrow and a flicker of something she faintly recognizes as resignation. The question is foolish, she knows, because Chas, even with how John has wrecked every aspect of his life, crafted him into something inhuman and irreparably damaged, would never leave him, anymore than she can.
She should have taken Ann Marie's advice when she still could, she thinks, run as far and as fast as she could away from the man who got everyone around him killed, everyone except himself. But she was never any good at following advice. Chas holds another victim as they die, and she tries to shut out the world, narrowing only to the trembling of her hands curled into fists and the emptiness of John's eyes.
John disappears for three weeks after that - on a bender, Chas mutters, and she only shrugs, seeing him lying in the gutter with alcohol poisoning.
He turns up again in the middle of the night, when Chas is out, with hands that won't stop shaking - no alcohol then - and a wound that won't stop hemorrhaging, and he mutters spells through clenched teeth and white lips as her fingers turn numb from holding down on the wound.
Later, when he's sleeping, still too pale, but healing, she lies next to him, his head against her shoulder, and she paints him in her mind as she once did, in yellows and whites, and dark colors of the night sky.
"You know you can't save him." Manny says quietly, with a rustle of folded wings.
"I know."
She's always known, she thinks, from the moment she drew him, from the day she met him on the street. He's a dying star, long past its lifespan, slowly burning himself and everyone he sucks into his orbit, without even meaning to, because its who he is, who he's always been, and she can't change him, can't save him, can only patch up the wounds and hold him together for as long as she can.
And so, when Manny's gone, and time starts again, she presses her lips to the side of John's forehead and pretends it stops the nightmares for both of them.