Title: Wheeling Tiltwise
Summary: How do you cope in a world you've Fallen into? Oneshot: Gabriel, Gabriel/OC.
O
He put on righteousness as his body armor,
and placed the helmet of salvation on his head.
He clothed himself with a robe of vengeance,
and wrapped himself in a cloak of divine passion.
Isaiah 59:17
O
He's walked at the side of the road for what seems like decades. It is the only way he knows how to navigate without wings, without the sprawl of the earth wide below him. The plum-colored desert—like a vanquished bruise—soon turns into jaundiced plains, turns into lush deciduous forests that flank him like the walls of the Red Sea, splitting beneath Moses' staff and the Hand of God. The wages of sin are death; the wages of obedience, however, are apparently something far worse.
Gabriel only wishes he could decipher, exactly, what that something-worse is.
Once, on the road and searching God, he'd found a broken-legged deer instead—or perhaps the deer had found him. Perhaps the deer was God, and Gabriel hadn't known it. Perhaps the deer was Gabriel himself, and in that brief moment, Gabriel had been God.
The animal's eyes had been rolling; it had been begging for death. He'd obliged.
He remembers: he had wished that someone would do the same for him.
Now loneliness has become something bitter on his tongue, an herb or a poison which turns his bones brittle. For the first time since his creation, he spends his nights weeping, and it has taken weeks to realize that the hollowness inside might be shame, though he isn't sure why he might be feeling it.
It is not long and it is far too long—it is the worst kind of eternity—before he comes to one town, and another: full of humans, each one. Their sinfulness wrenches his guts; nearly makes him vomit. He rolls his tongue in his mouth, trying to rid himself of the sour taste.
Without his wings, they do not recognize him; they do not see him for what he is.
Or perhaps they see him for exactly what he is, but that particular thought is too painful for Gabriel to bear.
He can't allow himself to look yet, to give a word to the thing he's become.
O
They give him cold glares, or suspicious looks, or sympathetic ones. They eye his armor. He longs to show them the blinding light of his own righteousness, to smite them down, to tell them that he once spoke the language of God and sang hosannas while covered in the glory of ferocious battle. But he has learned enough to know that in his current state, he would only reaffirm their arrogant beliefs. They would see him as a ragged madman, and nothing more. A creature to be feared, but only for his sheer size and perceived instability—not his greatness.
What are you? they ask with their eyes.
He wants to say: An Archangel of the Lord.
He wants to say: A thing with no home.
O
He follows the highways. He moves North, and East, and each road seems to take him further from wherever he'd once meant to go.
In Missouri, he hears young humans—they are all young, but these are calves and foals—snicker and sneer and question his intelligence, his sanity, his common sense. In Indiana, he steals human raiment from a clothing line, and is surprised by how sweet it smells: like sunshine and pollen and trees. He struggles over the hills of Pennsylvania, and though he still sees evidence of the apocalypse in the tattered edges of the cities, he marvels reluctantly at how these humans have pieced themselves back together.
How they have picked up, and carried on.
In every state that he passes, he leaves a bit of himself behind: a vambrace he can no longer carry, a pauldron that has grown too heavy. His armor is littering a swath throughout the country: a trail of breadcrumbs, and he thinks sometimes while he sleeps that perhaps, if he turned around tomorrow, he could still use it to find his way home. By the time he reaches Vermont, he carries nothing of his old self with him except the scars on his back and the tattoos on his arms, and wounds in his heart, and a certain translucence in the eyes.
At first glance, he could be any human being, clad only in sorrow and stolen clothing.
O
It is then that he realizes—he doesn't remember.
The psalms, the holy words, the language. Later, alone, safe from the prying eyes of the people who think he's one of them, he mutters fevered, fervent prayers. He stays awake all night, weeping, gnashing his teeth, feeling his own eyes grow wider and wider—his heart more frantic—when each word that issues forth is in English.
O
It is autumn again when he reaches Maine, and he stands at the edge of the ocean and grapples with the realization that there is nowhere left to go. That night he sleeps on the shore, and the first chilling frost overtakes him, glazing his skin. He wakes up with his teeth snapping against each other like ricocheting bullets, and he briefly contemplates the merit of suicide by cold, or how one shoots oneself in the head with one's own teeth. He sits up, and stares out at the endless waves, at how high they are, at how they are crowned with thick froth. Once, he had swung across this wide sky with his brothers, and they had laughed and caroused and dipped their hands and feet in the brine, scooping and flinging fistfuls of cresting waves at each other.
In this moment, more even than all the others gone before, he knows what it means to be insignificant. The wages of sin are death, yes; but apparently the wages of obedience are life, and he thinks perhaps he hates it.
The tide rolls near, and then away.
O
And then—there is a girl.
He bows his head. He watches. The water is cold, and the waves foam around her ankles. She's carrying a basket full of empty shells and driftwood: skeletons, he thinks, and dead things.
But there is something haunting about the way her pale yellow curls wisp around her head in the chilled wind. He has seen human depictions of angels, and perhaps she looks like one. Her hair is a halo. Her hands are kind. The cold has pinkened her cheeks and the tip of her nose: she is aglow.
He has been sitting in the same place, half-frozen, too hollow to move lest his bones crack and break. He has been sitting for forty days and nights when she sees him, and her brows furrow, and she slowly makes her way between the serrated blades of dune-grass. She asks him questions which he cannot answer, because he does not know what to say or because perhaps he has forgotten, in his loneliness, how to speak. His mouth feels clumsy; his voice is so hoarse and low even he can't make out the words that he doesn't mean to say.
She tucks herself into his side and—amazingly—lifts him, or helps him lift himself. When he considers resistance, she scolds him with words like frostbite, hypothermia. Later, when he catches his voice again from wherever it has gone, she will listen to the way he speaks and her eyes will grow heavy with a sadness she can't name, with a struggle for something lost, something she can't remember.
What is your accent? she will ask him many times. It sounds so familiar, but I can't place it.
Humans. So far from grace they don't even realize they were born in it.
He will evade her questions, even as she persists:
Mister, who are you?
He cannot answer. He does not know his name.
O
The nights grow longer. At first he resents her moving him from the sand, quietly broods on her disruption of his slow seppuku. But the warmth of her little house creeps under his skin, and sometimes when he lies awake at night and listens to the patterns of her breathing, like small concentric circles of light, he wonders if perhaps he isn't mad, if perhaps he imagined Heaven after all. Sometimes he wakes frantic and panicked, not knowing where he is, where he should be, what is real and what isn't. These nights she comes to him; she cradles his head against her shoulder. Come morning, she feeds him. She teaches him to wash his clothes, puzzled by his apparent naiveté.
His defenses, like the scar tissue on his back, break apart painfully in the face of these few daily things:
-trips to the supermarket in town
-finding lost keys
-overcooked carrots
-his first papercut
-candelight while she tells him stories
-storms on the water
-a coat, too tight in the shoulders
-learning to drive
-an ugly and lopsided scarf she'd knitted him.
These things hurt him, but he bears them. Like the pieces of armor left behind him in his exodus, his defenses shell away beneath their tender and steady onslaught, beneath the strange piercingness of them that she calls beauty and sweetness and light.
They hurt him, yes. And he bears them, yes.
And soon he finds he can move again.
O
She comes to him one day while he is out on the shore, gazing into the pearly, dove-colored sky, watching the gulls as they dip into the salt. He's staring so intently that she's afraid to say anything, afraid even to touch him, his eyes transparent and lancing as they track the birds banking right, sweeping left, wheeling tiltwise.
I know this, he says after a moment, though his eyes—like lightning storms on glaciers—never leave the gulls. They are fierce in their stare, consuming. I know this.
What does it mean? she asks him.
To be free of the earth, he tells her, and a slave to the wind.
It's hard to tell, just from listening to him, which existence is better—and maybe even he doesn't know. There is a sort-of silence, the kind of lonesome surrender made of crashing surf and the mournful calls of sea-birds. The emptiness engulfs them. Her hand reaches for his. Fingers tangle.
He draws in a breath, and finally looks at her.
And sees.
O
Even so, it takes almost another year before he will let her peel back the blue fabric of his stolen shirt, faded from countless washings. Her fingers will glide over the muscled planes of his flesh. And if he looks almost, strangely, frightened—as though this shirt were his last shelter against a brutal world—well, she will only press her lips gently to his skin, as though her mouth has always longed for him, and whisper, Let me be your armor.
Her fingers will skate over his strange tattoos, followed by her mouth. She will worship him through the lines of ink. What do they mean? she will ask, and he'll grope in the darkness for the memory, but he won't be able to respond because he no longer knows.
And then she will ask, Did I hurt you? because the look on his face will suggest it—the flare of something piercing and bittersweet in his eyes, the way his lower lip will curve. But somehow the question will seem to wring from him a greater sadness, a deeper wistfulness, the look of something precious lost and something cherished gained.
No, he will tell her gently, folding her hands tenderly into fists, which he will hold like apples and press his mouth against. No. Only—I did not think I would be happy.
She does not know if that means he is happy, or if perhaps he isn't. But either way, the sun will warm his skin, or maybe it is her own warmth that does it, and he will say her name like a prayer.
Afterward, when they lay on top of her sheets, and the sun slants through the vertical blinds, and a new autumn sends rimes of frost against the window pane, she will touch the scars she has never before seen, as though they are a wound in her heart.
What are you? she will ask, a little desperately, her fingers longing to make him whole again. His back, prickling with splinters of lost bones that lead nowhere, will grow warm beneath her palms.
Just a man, he will reassure her, and she will hear the thickness in his voice once more, as though he is speaking around a mouthful of his own heart. And she will wish—will crave, desolately—that she understood what this means, and if it is grief that laces him together, or love.
Just a man.
O
The next morning will find her bed still warmth from the furnace of his body, but he won't be there. She's not the sort to panic, though, and when she looks out the window she'll find his figure at the edge of the ocean, too broad and dark against the gray dawn to miss. She'll come behind him, wrapping them both in the scratchy crocheted quilt from her bed, pressing her cheek to the tattoos on his spine. He's staring at the sky, and it takes a long moment, but eventually his hands rest heavy on her forearms, which are locked at his waist. He'll stroke the bones in her wrist delicately, but his eyes are only for the sky, only for the sea-gulls and their reeling, dipping wings. His eyes are burning blue and transparent, and the birds bank right, sweep left, wheel tiltwise.
I know this, he'll tell her after a moment, though his eyes never leave the gulls, and he sounds so broken that her heart spills open in her chest and her tears wet the slick muscles of his scarred and wounded back.
I know that I know this.
O
Author's Note:
I seriously wrote this forever ago…while I was grappling with Tongues of Men and Angels. I had totally forgotten about it till now.
So…the inspiration for this started out like the opening line to a bad joke:
The Archangel Gabriel walks into a supermarket.
All I could think about was the fallen Gabriel, trying to survive in a human-run world. This was originally intended to be a lighthearted romp (Gabriel in buying groceries, learning to drive, all those little things mentioned in the story)…but stories often have minds of their own, I suppose, and frankly? I have no idea what this oneshot means, or what it is. Is it happy? Sad? Hopeful? Tragic? Is it about loneliness, or comfort? Triumph, or loss? Is it about forgetting in order to survive, or being haunted by memories you can't bring yourself to be rid of?
The answer, I think, is only "yes."