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 V: Divine Law
...Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
Romans 13:10
When Gabriel awoke, it was to an aqua and lavender dawn. His eyes snapped open, suddenly alert and aware; he took in his surroundings quickly, one hand smoothing over the bandage-covered sutures at his side. The work was sloppily executed, but earnest, and the rough mending had been enough to facilitate his angelic healing.
He sat swiftly, easily subduing an instinctive wince at the pain. His eyes narrowed on the frail shape of a human girl, folded and tucked into a corner beside him. He took in the makeshift nest of blankets, which smelled of human cleaning chemicals and mothballs. He was in the bed of a rusting vehicle, and he could sense another girl dozing on the backseat inside a girl in the backseat, her arms latched around his throat as he burrowed between human bodies like a monster—
He rose abruptly, dashing the memory aside. The vehicle shuddered with his displaced mass, jarring the girl in the corner. She jolted awake, eyes wide and bruised-looking when they latched on him. They were the color of pennies, he noted detachedly, and her soft human features were streaked on the right side by a deep, new-looking scar. It cut from her scalp, bisecting one eyebrow and reappearing on her cheekbone to slice diagonally down to her jaw. The wound was ugly and raw, symbolic of her weakness and sin, and he dismissed her readily, unfolding his wings and testing them instead. Reluctantly, he drew them back in when he felt them strain. He was still weak, though he supposed a few shabby human sutures couldn't be expected to restore his strength like heavenly healing.
If only the gates hadn't been closed—
The memory sliced through his belly, sharper than Michael's sword.
"Hi."
He turned his gaze toward the honey-eyed woman. Her voice was sweet too, and golden. Fraudulent, he thought, and he gazed down at her with disdain. "Child," he acknowledged coldly, then hesitated. "You have shown good heart," he added grudgingly, "in offering aid to an angel of God." You shall be rewarded in heaven, he almost said, but was no longer certain of his own place in his Father's favor.
"Oh," she said, and sounded surprised. "All right. Uhm. Thanks."
He gazed around, ignoring her for the moment. They were outside an opulent—if abandoned—human dwelling. He imagined its original inhabitants had been exterminated in the recent apocalypse, and that his current hostesses might be preparing to seek asylum there—yet they had not entered; at least, they had not slept inside. He turned to the small woman at his feet—small even by human standards—and his lip curled in contempt despite his halfhearted attempt to quell it.
"You did not enter the domicile," he said, wondering if he should somehow aid her and her kin in return for their own threadbare hospitality. Was that now how mankind worked? An eye for an eye, a gift for a gift?
But she looked surprised, and said, "I couldn't leave you," as though such a thing were obvious. Then: "Where will you go?" she asked, sounding childlike in her curiosity, expecting nothing from him.
He stared at her inscrutably, then looked out at the landscape. The lawn was a burnt span of drying grass, an acre of parched earth which had once been a manufactured oasis in the desert. Now the garden was dead, and even in the mild heat of dawn, the leaves on the trees were curling and dropping into the in-ground pool, which smelled rank. He tilted his head and studied the sludge-dark water before deciding that something had died in it during the battle—probably something human.
He sighed, and turned back to the woman in the bed of the truck. Another set of eyes, darker and younger and far more frightened, now peered through the back window at him.
He sighed again. "Where, indeed."
Word Count: 651
Completed: April 13, 2011