WATCHING GOD
Warnings and Spoilers: the only warning I'd put is one for run-on sentences, which I'm very fond of...in this fic, run-ons abound. Spoilers are for ITSOTGM.
Note: It turned into a very religious fic, focusing on the Greater Picture of what might have been happening during the few seconds that it took for the senior staff to drop to the ground.
"They sat in company with the others...their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."
-excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
In the heartbeat before they fell, slowly, despairingly, without ever realizing it, they reached out to God with their eyes, grasping blindly, then catching to hold that immortal gaze.
The moment held them, transfixed in their fall like puppets whose strings had been clenched from above. They stared at the unbearable truth before them, uncertain, faltering-wanting to live, but not having enough willpower to do so.
And finally they could not bear it, the fear of death and of judgement ran in their veins, so that they wept and wrenched away, burned by the confrontation, to fall, falling quickly, soundlessly, to the pavement of glass.
When they stood, trembling and reaching for each other for support, the shock of the brutal intent of the assassins remained; yet, simultaneously, they were no longer afraid. For who, once brushing eyes with God and living to remember His mercy and terrible power, could fear another mortal?
They drew themselves up, their limbs shivering, but with a part of themselves waiting, steady and comforted. They had been granted the bliss of another day.
END
One was not with the others, though-he lay without human solace, his eyes dropped, feeling God's timeless gaze passing over him, reading his sins even as he cried, silently repenting, pleading for life. He crouched below-he, a man who had never bowed to another.
Warnings and Spoilers: the only warning I'd put is one for run-on sentences, which I'm very fond of...in this fic, run-ons abound. Spoilers are for ITSOTGM.
Note: It turned into a very religious fic, focusing on the Greater Picture of what might have been happening during the few seconds that it took for the senior staff to drop to the ground.
"They sat in company with the others...their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."
-excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
In the heartbeat before they fell, slowly, despairingly, without ever realizing it, they reached out to God with their eyes, grasping blindly, then catching to hold that immortal gaze.
The moment held them, transfixed in their fall like puppets whose strings had been clenched from above. They stared at the unbearable truth before them, uncertain, faltering-wanting to live, but not having enough willpower to do so.
And finally they could not bear it, the fear of death and of judgement ran in their veins, so that they wept and wrenched away, burned by the confrontation, to fall, falling quickly, soundlessly, to the pavement of glass.
When they stood, trembling and reaching for each other for support, the shock of the brutal intent of the assassins remained; yet, simultaneously, they were no longer afraid. For who, once brushing eyes with God and living to remember His mercy and terrible power, could fear another mortal?
They drew themselves up, their limbs shivering, but with a part of themselves waiting, steady and comforted. They had been granted the bliss of another day.
END
One was not with the others, though-he lay without human solace, his eyes dropped, feeling God's timeless gaze passing over him, reading his sins even as he cried, silently repenting, pleading for life. He crouched below-he, a man who had never bowed to another.