Title: Tongues of Men and Angels
Rating: TA for implied?romance.
Summary: In the desert, she find him broken. Through the grace of God…all things are made new.A series of drabbles. Gabriel/OC.
Disclaimer: *obligatory insert*
Chapter IV: Vigil
Be vigilant; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.
1 Corinthians 16: 13-14
She peeled back his armor, sticky with blood, wincing as she did. His wound looked weeks old, the edges curling, though it smelled remarkably clean. She supposed that angelflesh could not be so easily corrupted.
She mended him as well as she could, though she didn't have much experience with wounds like his. Several times, his eyes opened and he muttered fierce things in his alien tongue, and everything about his became fiery and condemning. But now she didn't seem to notice—or at least, she wasn't burnt through quite so cleanly by his furious beauty. She supposed in its own way it was tragic, that she could so easily as a human be desensitized to even his blinding glory. Instead, she focused intently: on his damaged ribs, his sliced abdomen, the grazes on his face, the ache she thought she heard deep in his voice, beneath the foreign words and the ferocity.
She kept watch all night, crouching in the corner of the bed of the truck, or perching on the rusting wheel-well. She couldn't in good conscience leave him, especially not when he had shown a habit of lunging half-awake in his delirium, nearly tearing open his wound a number of times.
And his dreams. She'd thought her own were bad—of Armageddon, of savage-eyed neighbors and friends, of torture and blood in the streets, of her parents, of the look in her sister's eyes—but his, the anger in him, and the devastation…sometimes in the night, when his nightmares shook the Ford and Joy stared through the back window of the cab in fear, sometimes Bethany just clung to him to try to keep him still, to try to soak up some of his pain. Though his innermost feathers were pillow-soft, a few times the sharp edges of his wings scored the skin of her back in shallow cuts, ribboning her shirt and jacket. She tried to anchor him to the earth, tried to hold all his broken parts inside. Twice she cried, silently and stoically, her tears slicking the side of his throat where the strange collar bit into his skin. She wasn't typically the crying sort, but something in him pulled on her heart. She could look at the lines of his face and see how they'd been carved for tragedy.
Not from it, but for it. As though he'd been made to experience pain.
Now, slumped against the wheel-well, she found her heart kept lurching in her chest as she watched him. She patted her sternum with one open, bandaged palm, trying to soothe the ache there. She wished she had some words to offer him, as she had once offered her sister: shared memories and stories, love-words to help him survive the night.
"I feel you," she whispered to him instead, and she prayed he'd hold onto her voice. The stars prickled in the cold sky overhead. "I'm with you."
Word Count: 487
Date Completed: April 10, 2011