Title: Tongues of Men and Angels
Rating: TA for implied?romance.
Summary: Glimpses of grace: the story of one brother and two sisters. Through the grace of God, all things are made new.A series of drabbles. Ish. Gabriel/OC. Ish.
Disclaimer: *obligatory insert*
Chapter XV: Be Saved
Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side,
I will not believe.
John 20: 25
Now (present day):
"What caused this?" he asked one night, as they sat companionably on the roof. She was almost leaning against him, and he could feel the fragile warmth of her soft human body. Now he reached out with blunt, calloused fingers to trace the air above her scar, a silent benediction.
She touched her wound lingeringly. It was healing nicely, though his own sliced abdomen was already completely made-new.
"Love," she said, and her eyes were haunted and soft. "I don't mind it—most of the time."
He wondered when she did mind it. He remembered her bowed low on the bathroom floor, her face pressed to cold porcelain, her soft and anguished words in the darkness.
"It is a sin against God," he told her solemnly, and he meant that she'd been made so-lovingly-that the wound seemed somehow profane. Grudgingly, haltingly, he was beginning to recognize that there was something very sacred here. Haphazard, conflicted, full of grace: he could think of a thousand things that his Father had created— tidal waves, thunderstorms, caterpillars, sunrises—and she somehow encompassed them all.
She had, he conceded silently, a strange ability to see inside a thing, to the heart of it, and urge it out into the light.
But she responded slowly, thoughtfully, her eyes full of questions and yeses. "Humans—we hold onto our pain," she told him after along moment. "So tightly. We don't know how to let it go; we're afraid to. It carves us into who we are. In some ways, it's how we identify ourselves. It's—such a large part of how we know who we are."
He eyed her consideringly. His finger came out, calloused and blunt, and she flinched when he touched the edge of her scalp—then went very still as he lingeringly traced the ragged scar that ran the length of her face. She was blessed, he thought again, that it had missed her brilliant amber eye.
Nevertheless, the scar did not make her. "You are not carved by pain," he told her firmly.
She raised her eyebrows: the finely arched left one, dark and flawless, and the one on the right, which had been divided by her wound. "No?"
He shook his head, almost reluctantly. "I know you by your laughter, by the way you touch your sister's face."
Word Count: 389
Completed: April 27, 2011
These two chapters—Repent and Be Saved—are companion pieces.
In case you didn't notice (I always struggle with the visual component of these cues), Repent takes place approximately two weeks prior (sometime after Fear Not, but before Exile), while Be Saved rejoins us in the proper, chronological narrative stream, right here and now.
Regarding Be Saved: This is one of those chapters (originally entitled Doubting Thomas, for pseudo-obvious reasons) that I loved originally and now am uncertain of. I hope it does not assume too abrupt a leap in Gabriel's perception of Bethany (I am always afraid of my characters falling in love too quickly, the poor dears).