T H E W A S T E L A N D

Disclaimer: not mine.

Warning: AU, for my very personal take on Andrew's background.

....let there be healing!

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EPILOGUE

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But the boy must go on. In silence, the ancient sorrow brings him to the ravine,

Where a whiteness gleams in the moonlight: the source of joy.

Reverently, she gives him his name. In the human world, she says,

It is a stream that carries you.

They stand at the mountain's foot,

And she embraces him, weeping.

(The Tenth Elegy)

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An eternity later, back at the motel, Monica was lying in bed, snuggled into Andrew, who was very silent. Thinking about it, she began to grasp a certain logic behind Andrew's sudden recovery, but it had taken quiet a bit of rhetoric proficiency to, well, adapt the truth to the limited predilection of mirakles found in contemporary hospitals. In the end, Andrew had just signed out Against Medical Advice, and they'd left it at that. Even if she didn't understand completely what had happened, she was happy to take a tired, but utterly healed Angel of Death back home. That didn't change the fact that she still felt guilty about what had happend to him.

"What's up, Angelgirl?" Andrew's voice was soft in the darkness. "Come on, I know you're brooding about something."

Monica sighed. Apologizing would be a start.

"Andrew, I'm sorry for what happened to you. I... I know that it was to teach me a lesson, and I am so terribly sorry that you had to suffer on my account."

"Hold on." There was a strange glimmer in Andrew's eyes. "Let me get this straight. You're apologizing for me being ill?"

"Yes. I know now all that was about me, and I was so terribly thick. Maybe if I'd understood earlier..."

His chest beneath her face was moving, and for a terrible moment, she thought he was going to be sick again. Then, she realized that he was laughing.

"Oh, Angelgirl, walking on this earth wouldn't be half as interesting if it weren't for you."

He drew her into an embrace. "Who's the one suffering from hubris now, Miss Wings? This story might have taught you something, but rest assured that my pneumonia was of purely earthly origins. See, your body was created for the use of an Angel – mine was, is and remains human. If someone hits me, I bleed, just as I'll continue to pick of all kinds of bugs. It happens, now and then, and usually, I just hole up somewhere, pitying myself, and Tess comes around to cook chicken soup. And do you want to know a funny thing? Dying didn't even cure me from heyfever. God does have a sense of humor, I guess."

Monica smiled at the thought of Tess fussing about a defensless Andrew, but the uneasy feeling remained. She could feel him beside her, smell him, and yet, the picture of a human Andrew, different, but still Andrew, slicing at his wrists with such self-loathing and desperation, refused to leave her mind.

"I'm still thinking that Tess used some pretty heavy methods to get the message across", Andrew remarked, brushing a tear from her cheek. "Even if she was right on one thing: that you have a right to know everything. I am very sorry that it had to be this way. I can't change what you have seen, but there is one thing I can do."

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Utterly surprised, Monica felt the now familiar shift once more. As she opened her eyes, she found herself in a churchyeard. Andrew was standing in front of her, donning a black tuxeda complete with high-collared shirt, and as she looked down, she noticed she was wearing a light summer dress. Andrew bowed courteosly,a nd she took the offered hand. The church was modernly built and beautiful with its splendid white walls and the huge, curved wooden roof that gave it the impression of an abstract ship. The windows were made of colored glass, and there was fountain in front of it. In the parking lot, there stood rows and rows of cars.

"Are we going to service?"

"Something like that", Andrew replied. "Did Tess tell you what I did for a living before I... changed business?"

"You were a... carpenter." Monica remembered the form she'd filled out at the hospital. She'd not known were the answers came from, but she a had somehow been able to fill out every detail.

"Right."

Andrew pointed up to the church roof. "I helped building it. It is in here I found a home after the realeased me from hospital. A friend of the hospital's social worker took me into his family, saying he'd five girls aged five to fourteen and was craving male company. Imagine, I had grown up as an only child and all of a sudden, I had five little sisters."

"... and every single one of them fell utterly in love with their new brother before he'D even finished unpacking his things." Monica completed, having a pretty good picture of the scene in mind.

Slightly embarassed, Andrew rubbed his nose. "Yeah, well, kind of. The point is, a lot of good things happened to me, and they're worth being remembered, too. But come on, I'll show you something."

He led her through the high, beautifully carved portal, and Monica gasped at what she saw. The church was marvellous. The ample altar room was flooded with light, a simple granite altar with white candle and an onyx cross behind it being the only furniture. Behind the altar, an orchestra was set to play, with a choir behind it. Just as they entered, the orchestra began t play, and the sound sent shivers down her spine.

"See the first cellist?" Andrew whispered into her ear. "That's Becca, my favourite little sister. She plays for the Boston Philarmony, but sometimes, she takes a few colleagues for a holiday trip to Mississippi and the give the local school orchestra a little brush up. She's been a force of nature ever since she was five years old,a nd she loves life with a vengeance that's contagious. Imagine, she named her daughter after the piece of music she was playing when the contractions started."

Andrew smiled at his own memories. Then, he led her further along the corridor between the rows of benches, pointing at a group of people sitting among the others. "They've all come to hear her play. Jakob, the man who took me in, has died more than ten years ago, but Aunt Phyllis has a big enough family to keep her busy. Ruth, her eldest daughter, lives with her, and each morning, some assorted grandchildren are dumped on her porch."

Andrew pointed out a woman with short, red hair. "Ruth is an English teacher – she's done elementary homework five times over, so the choice came pretty naturally to her. Her marriage has long since ceased to exist but on paper. Then there is Esther. She's the third child, always stuck in the middle, and quite tough – Mississippis most feared state attorney, even if she's a soul of a girl in private. She'll have to be, for there's a cancer node in her breast, even if she doesn't know yet. But she's brave and she's got family, and whatever happens, she won't be alone. Neither will be Miriam, who bears her first child. And there comes Noa, always late. She's struggling the hardest; she's a pretty good writer , but nobody wants to print her books, so she changes jobs as frequently as boyfriends. Not really surprisingly, for even if she hasn't noticed yet, she's in a pretty stable relationship with her female flatmate. They're all different, everyone with their own problems, smaller and bigger. But each month, they get together, complete with boyfriends, husbands, children and dogs and have a family barbecue. And they will be fine."

He looked at Monica, smiling. "You wanted to know how life was. Well, life is like that. It's laughing and crying, barbecues on summer evenings and math exams, it's despair and friendship, it's spring rain and birthday cakes, cats and embraces and sometimes…"

As if on cue, the choir began to sing, and Monica recognized the solemn notes of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that filled the room with grace and beauty, reverberating in her stomach and filling her heart with joy.

"… sometimes it is better not to try and explain things. In some rare and precious moments, life can be like this, too."

A little girl with long, black curls and incredibly dark eyes full of life came running towards them, arms reaching out. Andrew scooped her up into his arms, flew her high, and she squealed with delight. And in the same instant, Monica knew her name: Joy.

The end.

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The poetry in this story is from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, which are among the most beautiful pieces of literature I know. Rilke has some pretty depressing views on life, but, boy, can the guy write! Me, I'm just stumbling along, and, as you guessed, I'm only playing in the fields of English grammar. Thanks to everybody who came along for the ride, anyway!

Liked it? Hated it? Review!

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