If tomorrow is judgment day
And I'm standing on the front line
And the Lord asks me what I did with my life
I will say I spent it with you.
(Whitney Houston, feat Bobbi Kristina Brown: My Love is Your Love)
New York greets him with a kiss of snow.
Soon after come the scent of cigarettes and liquored lips, the flavors of gravel and steam.
He can't really taste anything the way humans can of course. An angel's purpose is to glide between the layers of material existence, sifting through the grainy texture of mortal lives without ever leaving a mark.
Still, the cool un-flavor of the city is a kind of home where he waits, snow-dusted on the street corner, until his new charges arrive ( he had been told there were two).
The woman that climbs out of the passenger seat is petite and sure-footed, with dark, dandelion curls of hair escaping from under a soft grey hat. The snow drifts lovingly around her, rendering her almost ethereal but for the bittersweet line of a jaw tight with determination. Beside her, her husband is nearly a foot taller, long-legged and too alert for grace, his face something between craggy and youthful.
"De Martel Corp emailed me again," the woman says with a derisive snort. "They want to know if I'm absolutely sure I don't want that research job."
"Tenacious, aren't they?" the husband says, smirking a little. "Can't blame the bustards. Gifted neurosurgeons are hard to find."
"Yeah, especially where they're needed the most," she replies, with a cynical twist to the mouth as they clasp hands and pass together into a building bearing the name Sheila Bennett Memorial Hospital.
They are younger than he expected, and luminous with life.
There's been some mistake.
"There's no such thing," the senior angel who goes by Vincent informs him from his perch on the edge of a roof. His wings, amber and soft black, are untouched by snow. The flakes dissolve before they touch the shimmering feathers. "They may not be close to death, but they need you nonetheless."
"I'm an angel, not a marriage counselor," he says, with a touch of irritation. His place is with the dead and dying, those lost ones he loves the way you can only love bruised and broken things. That moment when their souls depart their bodies, that brief, revelatory second they can finally see him, feel his presence: it's a startling and precious intimacy, a feeling like warm ashes pressed to your palm. By contrast these young, bright ones are like shards of broken glass, radiant yet no comfort to hold.
"Ah well, perhaps it is you who needs them," Vincent says in that airy way of his that sets his teeth on edge. It's the wings, he decides. All the winged ones have this same distant, lofty manner about them.
"I gauged their spirits when I saw them this morning, Vincent. I fail to see how- "
Vincent only chuckles. "You have four days, my friend."
"Four days?" he snorts at the rising figure. "That's impossible-,"
But Vincent is already melting into the ether, his wings spread across the sky like a sunset.
Resigned to his task, he walks the corridors of the hospital unseen, slipping between nurses and paramedics and gurneys. Centuries since he'd watched schoolboys get blown to bits and the world's carnage still looked the same: young bodies with bleeding and broken limbs, young faces that seemed overcome with a shock of realization.
The hospital has seen better days. He doesn't miss the stained corners of the floor, the overcrowded waiting room, the nurses and doctors rushing between rooms. And yet, there's no cold whiff of detachment as he's glimpsed in other such places of death. He's not sure what to attribute this to until he winds up by a framed portrait of the eponymous founder.
Sheila Bennett smiles knowingly down at him, a string of pearls about her neck and a stethoscope in one hand. Her dark eyes have the look of a woman who's used to triumphing gracefully over those who underestimate her.
"Have you been helped?" a soft, deep voice asks beside him. The petite woman with her crooked jaw looks inquiringly into his face. He'd been absorbed in his observations and allowed himself to grow visible.
He glances at the portrait and back at her. "Forgive me but, am I correct in seeing a resemblance?"
A tired smile curves her mouth. "She was my grandmother. I'm Dr Bonnie Bennett...are you here to see a patient?"
He fumbles for an answer. When he shadowed those close to Death, watching their lives go sometimes quietly and sometimes like a firework into the dark, they never saw his silent companionship until the very end, until that moment on the precipice of oblivion when he held their hands and, with his touch, their memories and misdeeds and triumphs all connected so that they understood their lives with blinding clarity.
Being visible so easily, he finds, robs him of mystique. "I was cold," he says. "I thought I might step inside for a moment."
She lifts an eyebrow. "And instead of a bar or a store you chose a hospital?"
"I find them...familiar," he says, expecting her to show him the door or perhaps even call the security guard. Instead, she nods in commiseration.
"When I was a kid, I begged Grams to bring me to work with her. I thought she was a superhero, or an angel," Dr Bennett says with a fond half-smile, looking at her grandmother's face.
"Who's to say she isn't?"
"Me," she snorts. "Grams worked herself to the bone to keep this place running. Wherever she is, I hope she's resting."
He says nothing. The scales of compensation are beyond his knowledge to weigh.
The device on her hip emits a small beeping. She checks it quickly. "I have to go. If you shake the vending machine in the cafeteria you'll get some free snacks. It was nice meeting you...," she waits expectantly for a name.
All angels have a name that summons them, imprinted on their spirits at that moment when flesh is transmuted into something other than human.
But before that, he'd had another name. A name tall as a tree, that a boy could scrape his knees trying to climb. This is the name he tells her.
"Elijah."
She smiles, and there's a strange, bright quality to her that he can't quite understand, and for a moment, he has the disconcerting and utterly ridiculous notion that their roles are reversed.
"Nice to meet you, Elijah," she says, sticking out her hand. He takes it without thinking, and the contact fills his ears with a curious, familiar rustling. A breeze dancing on green, green leaves.
Then she's gone, hurrying down the hallway to minister to the fallen, while he stands frozen, another name rising to his lips. A name he hadn't spoken in decades, a name he'd buried under his tongue until it dissolved like communion wafer to become forever a part of him and yet mercifully intangible.
Celeste.
"Is this what the Powers intended? To drag me unceremoniously down memory lane?" he bites off each word while Vincent watches patiently on their rooftop perch.
"Angels can't be tethered to their mortal lives. We must shed them and grow wings in their place-"
"Yes I'm well aware of the Celestial Oath," he snaps.
"Are you?" the other angel asks. "Then you know that Angels are not wracked by guilt or attachment, they do not carry regret. We are pure vessels, guided by the purpose of Divine Law, even when we do not understand-,"
"And that is all I wish to be!" he roars, causing a flock of pigeons to startle and rise noisily into flight. "A vessel has no use for memory, for nostalgia, I-,"
He flexes his fingers and images of a long lost afternoon come flooding back, like blood from an old wound. The teasing lilt of her voice. Her knowing smile while adjusting his collar. Her gentle hands in his hair as they sat beneath a roof of sun-dappled leaves. In life he'd never been a praying man, but he could've sworn that God himself was in the sunlight that danced across her face that day. Celeste Celeste Celeste. The pain lances through him, making him wish he could blot out the sun and hide her face forever.
"I have fulfilled every command, shepherded a hundred souls to their death," Elijah continues. "Please - don't ask this of me."
His fellow angel gives him a look of tender pity.
"I don't want to remember her, Vincent."
"Just complete your task," Vincent says, gentleness in his voice. "That is all you can do. You know this."
Elijah stands impervious to the kiss of snow, watching black and golden wings disappear over the horizon.
They called it the Great War.
People spoke of it like an inevitability, like a flood or blizzard, something beyond human control. His family hailed from dirt farmers before they filled the factory floors, and his father said there were two kinds of men: the ones who made the storms and the ones who weathered them.
But Elijah was tired of hunkering down while the winds passed overhead. So when the call for enlistment rang down London streets with desperate fervor, he was among the first to join. Three years later, none of the boys he joined with were left alive. One day in the French trenches he looked around at a host of strange faces, scarred and young and twitching with barely-concealed fear, and had the cold realization that everything was a lie.
He charged in front of the lines, determined to end - to end something. He took a hail of shrapnel to the shoulder and watched the sky darken overhead.
Two days later, he woke up to Celeste's golden face.
"Welcome back," she said with a smile like summer. "You are very lucky, monsieur."
And in that moment he wanted to forget - he did forget - the men he knew were dead, the men still waiting to die, the war still raging on. All he could think of was plucking daisies to weave through her black hair. Of hauling buckets of water up as many flights of stairs as she wished, just to watch her reclining in the bath. Of kissing her bare shoulders. He thought perhaps she belonged to another world, a world of sunlight and goodness, a world without war. He thought perhaps he was in that world too.
"Please," he rasped, clutching her hand. "Tell me I'm dead. Tell me we're both dead."
She startled at his vehemence but recovered quickly. And he saw the shadows in her brown eyes, the things she kept hidden behind a summery face.
"Rest now, Elijah," she said, wiping his brow. "Rest while you can."
"Nik...I'm pregnant."
There's a smile trembling at the corner of her lips. Nik holds her by the waist, lightly, his mouth opening and closing without words while nurses and patients wheel by them.
Invisible once more, Elijah observes them from a few feet away.
"Say something," she urges her husband softly, a hand on his chest.
Instead, Nik hoists her up in his arms, making her squeal as her small feet dangle above the floor. They're both in blue scrubs and sneakers. Tucked away in a stolen corner, for a stolen moment, they look terribly young, like two candles in a wasted world.
"What are we going to do?" she asks, face buried in his shoulder.
Nik heaves a sigh, setting her gently on her feet. "Well, I suppose I could start taking DeviantArt commissions on the side-,"
"Nik this is serious," she chides, before her face dims a little. "I could take De Martel up on their offer."
"And spend your days helping greedy bastards who couldn't give a damn about people?" He snorts. "You wouldn't last a minute in those vile ranks."
She chews her lip. "Maybe I could split my time between here and De Martel Corp-,"
"So we'll see each other even less than we do now?" he shakes his head, running his hands up and down her arms. "Besides, Sheila made us promise to look after this place, remember?"
"How could I forget?" Bonnie says, dryly. "Her speech was longer than the maid of honor's."
"We might still get that grant, and if the city council votes for the funding bill-,"
"And what if they don't?" she asks, green eyes bright with worry. "What if this place is on borrowed time, and I'm too dumb to realize it? I don't- ,"
"Dr Mikaelson to OR 3 please. Dr Mikaelson, they need you in OR 3."
Nik swears under his breath, still holding on to his wife. "I'll think of something, I promise." He cups her cheek, his eyes burning with tender regard.
"Go," she sighs, nudging him. "Go, we'll talk later."
He leans down to kiss her again, and she rises on her toes, angling her head into the brief caress while her fingers dance light across his furrowed brow. Then he's rushing off, and Elijah watches her slump a little against the wall, a moment folding into itself, before she too is called away.
They had four weeks together. Four weeks while he recovered and his wound healed. The small country hospital needed his bed for someone more gravely injured, and he was only too happy to walk about and accompany Celeste on her rounds, or sit outside in the spring sunlight with her during her rare days off.
Her family lived in Haiti and had sent her to finish her education in Paris. When the war began, she'd offered her skills as a nurse to several hospitals, only to be turned away because of her race. So she and some friends had left for the countryside where, bereft of their doctors who'd all been sent to the front, the local hospitals welcomed them with open arms if not always open minds.
"They no longer look at me strange," she tells him one afternoon, sitting under her favorite apple tree, the green and golden leaves of which flutter behind and above her like wings. Her mouth quirked in that dry way he's come to love. "To think, it only took a war unlike any the world has seen for them to let me bandage their wounds. For them to let me hold them as they die."
"They should count themselves fortunate," he said, stung with a helpless anger. "You should pack your bags and leave France while you can, leave them all behind."
"Leave you too?" she teased, playing with his collar.
"We could leave together," he said, his heart beating in his throat. "I would look after you, Celeste. Everything I can give you, I will."
She sighed, leaning away from him. "There's no place we can go that war wouldn't find us. To think otherwise is a dream."
"A worthwhile dream," he said, pulling her close again.
She laid a hand against his cheek, her face wearing that same look he'd seen when she helped the doctor remove gangrenous limbs from screaming soldiers, when she held their hands in the death throes. "My great-grandfather died fighting for Ayiti. He thought if the French are ousted, we would be free. It was, as you say, a worthwhile dream." She shook her head. "All that heroism, all those years, and Ayiti is still poor and starving, and France is still France. Does that mean the slaves should never have taken up arms against their masters? Did my great- grandfather die in vain?"
"But this is not your war," he urged, pulling her even closer. "Why stay and nurse their dying and dead, when they would turn you away given a moment's notice?" He wanted to understand, but more than anything he wanted to see her whole and unscathed. To see her outlive this.
"Elijah," she said in a soft voice. "Even if I agreed, we both know you are too noble to turn your back on your brothers-in-arms."
She was right. He would never be rid of their ghosts. They would surround him and follow him and embrace him all his life, like an old lover's haunting perfume. But she made him want to make himself anew. To leave the ghosts and the dust of war behind. For her, and only her, he believed he could.
"I don't wish to be noble," he said, his voice hoarse and urgent. "I wish to be with you."
On the third day, he finds the diminutive physician by her grandmother's portrait again.
"Elijah, right?" she asks, a slight smile across her face. "Not tired of this place yet?"
"You might find this difficult to believe, Ms Bennett, but being here reminds me -," he pauses, sees the sunlight dappling Celeste's face. "It reminds me of a time I was happy. Of someone I loved."
"Oh," her face sobers. "I'm sorry for your loss."
There was something missing, a piece of memory still hidden from him, buried under pain and denial. What did Celeste tell him, that last day? Why did he not flee France, desert the army, take her with him to safety? Why-
"It's been five years since Grams died and...it feels like just yesterday. Memories are funny like that."
"Indeed." He stares at the portrait again. "She must have been a remarkable woman."
"Oh that she was," Bonnie says, with a look of almost wistful awe. "She believed in the Hippocratic Oath, like truly believed it." She points to a sentence in the engraved paragraph beneath Sheila's portrait: In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.
"This place started as a backroom in her house. Nobody was turned away, no matter the color of their skin, or how poor they were." Bonnie gives a humorless laugh. "But doing what she did...she made a lot of enemies, brought a lot of wars to her doorstep. They're still around, waiting for this place to fail. Sometimes- sometimes I wonder if it was all in vain -,"
"No," he says. "No, never-," His fingers take hold of her arm, and the floodgate of memory swings wide.
"Elijah, my love, don't you see? If we believe in what we have, in what this is, then we must be able to stand and fight. No matter where, or how overwhelming the odds. If we can't do that, then -then we have nothing."
And she kissed him that last afternoon, her hands carding through his hair in practiced, loving motions that made him weak. He grasped her against him like she and she alone - her slender arms, her scent of pressed flowers, those knowing eyes, her enduring heart - could ward off the coming storm. Like she was both talisman and the power that infused it. Like she was everything that made life worth living.
"Be with me," she breathed against his mouth. "For as long as you can. Nothing else matters."
"Elijah...?" Bonnie steps gently away from him. "Are you ok?"
His throat wells with words he can't speak. There is so much he can't make her grasp, so much he's never understood until this moment.
"...maybe you should sit down. I'll get you some water-,"
"She didn't die in vain," he murmurs, half to himself, grappling with this new knowledge. "And neither did I. I remember."
Bonnie peers into his face with concern.
He notes the bright green color of her eyes for the first time and thinks of light on the leaves of an apple tree. Thinks of how he died with her name on his lips like a prayer. Celeste Celeste Celeste.
Oh he'd been an angel for decades, and yet so blind.
"It wasn't in vain," he says, over and over. "The ones we love. The ones for whom we go to war- "
"Okay... I'll get you some water," Bonnie says, leading him to a chair with dutiful tenderness. "Here, sit down. Don't move."
"Ms Bennett," he grasps her arm again, knowing he will melt from her memory as soon as her back is turned. Once their work is done, once the lesson is imparted, an angel must come and go like the wind or the spark of dreams, never lingering, never clinging to mortal need. "Thank you."
She smiles a little, patting his shoulder. "Just doing my job."
On the fourth day, he watches them leave the hospital early. Bonnie pulls Nik along by the hand, leading them to their car.
Nik laughs, letting himself be commandeered. "I would just like to point out that we have never left work early, not even the day before our wedding-,"
"Caroline and Stefan got it covered. Plus I think it's time we hired some new faces."
"Really?" he raises an eyebrow. "I thought we needed to cut back."
"Nope," Bonnie declares, her face alight as she turns to him. "I was standing by Gram's picture today and...it was like an epiphany Nik. We're going to fundraise, and hire at least two new nurses. We're going to fight the city council and the mayor too if we need to." She tilts her smiling face into the snow. "And that's all that matters."
Elijah allows himself this small trespass: to follow them home, to see them behind their door, see Bonnie hang up her coat and shake snow from her dark hair. See Nik touch the small of her back and kiss her neck, kiss the snowdust off her skin. See them grasp each other with fervent, starving hands. See himself and Celeste, young and yearning, revived in their eyes.
You are everything.
Touch becoming memory, slipping over the familiar contours of back and spine, reacquainted with the slopes and curves of desire, returning home.
"You have a new assignment."
Elijah says nothing, standing beside Vincent on their familiar rooftop simply watching the snow drift down on the city. Celeste would've loved this sight, this moment, all these bustling people with their quiet, gnawing lives, their secret joys. A strange shivery feeling descends on his shoulders at the thought.
"Tell me," he says.
"Afraid I can't do that, old friend. You must fly to the source of the call yourself, discover what they lack, amass other angels for help if the need arises-,"
It takes a moment for Vincent's words to sink in. Elijah feels the tingle along his shoulders grow stronger and a warm breeze sweep over him. Fly. There are wings sprouting from his back, outstretched behind him, shimmering and light. Wings as green as the leaves on Celeste's apple tree, speckled with the golden sunbeams that kissed her face. And he passes through a river of emotion to arrive at a shore unlike he's ever experienced. Something too deep for joy, too vast for comprehension. A glimpse of pure understanding, all the links in a chain clasping momentarily into completion. Snow touches his lips like tears.
"Come on," Vincent calls, already airborne. "You have work to do."
Elijah takes one last look at the city below. I will find you again, my Celeste. Over and over, in old faces and young faces, in battlefields and sick rooms, in the sunlight and the snow, always you, never fading.
The rising happens with almost no effort, like his bones are full of light.
He joins Vincent in the grey sky.
Nik's mouth drifts along her shoulder, kisses melting like snowflakes on the bare, warm skin while she curls up in his arms. "Remember when we first met?" he murmurs, a hint of amusement in his voice. "How you loathed me-,"
"Yeah, and everyone else worshipped the ground you walked on," Bonnie replies, arching her neck to face him. "You were this hotshot resident from England. I figured you had a head the size of a continent."
"And then you saw beneath my charming veneer to the wonderful fellow beneath all that-,"
"...Right. A wonderful fellow with a head the size of a continent. I hope the baby doesn't take after you," she teases, nuzzling into his stubbled jaw.
Nik gathers her closer. "People used to say we'd kill each other before graduating as surgeons."
Bonnie smiles. "I remember."
"Nik?"
"Hmm?"
"I'm going to call De Martel."
"Love-,"
"And I'm gonna tell them they can kiss my ass."
He starts in surprise, before chuckling low into the nape of her neck.
"I thought you were worried about the hospital surviving," he murmurs after a few moments.
"Have you met me?" she laughs. "Of course I'm still worried."
She wriggles and turns around in his arms, her head coming to rest on his shoulder while she toys with the dog tags around his neck he wore in memory of his old friend Lucien. And she thinks of fallen soldiers, and the war swirling outside their bedroom window that they would have to return to, and kisses Nik softly in answer to his quizzical look.
"We survived each other, didn't we?" she says, close against his mouth. "We already have everything we need."
A/N: Happy new year klonnie fam! I apologize for the EXTREME corniness of this piece, but it wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. What can I say, my corniness goes into overdrive during the holidays. You'll also be glad to know that I'm like 2/3rds done with the new chapter for "a case of you", so look out for an update soon-ish. My goal for this spring/summer is to focus on wrapping up a few of my existing fics, so if you see me taking larks into new AUs GET ME IN LINE. LOL
In other news: PLEASE do yourselves a favor and go read "USS Spock" by SixIIVII here on fanfic dot net. It's an amazing Klonnie Star Trek AU that's simply and indescribably good. Go read and leave her some reviews!
Also, let me know if you liked this! And if you don't watch any other movie this season, watch The Preacher's Wife.
**Ayiti is the Taino/ indigenous name for the island of Haiti