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*
Interlude: Baptism
And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water;
and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.
Genesis 21:19
"Holy—" Bethany started, and she cut herself off before casting a radiant grin at Gabriel. "Sorry," she said sunnily, in a way that made him think she wasn't sorry at all.
Joy was skipping in circles. He did not think he had ever seen her so—pleased. When she began wriggling out of her jeans, Gabriel recoiled, almost stumbling backward out of the bathroom door, if only his heavenly grace had allowed it.
"Gabriel," Bethany said lightly, teasingly. "Are you blushing?" She pulled her own sweatshirt over her head, grinning.
"Men are the same everywhere," the younger sister sniffed. "Even in heaven. Pigs."
Clad only in a pair of short boxers and a snug white tank top, Bethany climbed over the edge of the whirlpool bathtub while Joy rifled through the cabinets, singing, "Bubble bath, bubble bath, where are you?"
"Hurry up, monkey-face"—monkey-face?—Bethany directed at her sister, and clearly the angel had been forgotten in favor of warm water and heated jets.
Stiffly, Gabriel turned on his heel and closed the door behind him. He was uncertain why he felt so uncomfortable—it certainly was not as if he were particularly vulnerable to the temptation of human flesh. Nevertheless, the thought of the older girl, half-dressed and surrounded by water, presented conflicting responses in his person.
The tub itself was huge. Joy had screamed when she'd come across it while exploring the night's new lodgings. Both Gabriel and Bethany had come running, and when they'd burst through the bathroom door, the archangel had made it a point to fan his wings in front of the older sister in order to better protect her.
He did not acknowledge that it had been an instinctive move, rather than simply a logical one.
But Joy had only been grinning—grinning! a thing Gabriel had never seen before on her young and haunted face—and indulging in some strange combination of ridiculous gyrations and arm gestures apparently meant to convey triumph. Bethany's mouth had responded in kind, stretching into a smile that should have turned her ruined face into a hideous caricature of God's creation, but instead made Gabriel suck in a breath of surprise.
Now he heard laughter from behind the closed door: water running, and splashing, and giggles. Monkey-face, he heard again in Bethany's timbre, and Fuzz-Noggin! He leaned back against it and—just for a moment—closed his eyes and listened. Something of their lightness pierced him: he didn't think, in the last few weeks, that he had heard either of them sound so carefree, so happy.
Innocent.
The piercing sensation left a wound, which welled with an emotion he couldn't name—regret, perhaps. For a moment he grappled with the feeling, trying to lock it away, before reminding himself that the words of the heart were his Father's way of speaking. When he brought out the emotion—to examine it, experience it—he suddenly knew without a doubt that the apocalypse was the reason for these sisters' perpetual sorrows.
That he was the reason.
His heart twisted in midleap, and he furrowed his brow in confusion. He had always viewed Armageddon as…necessary. Inconvenient. Irritating, perhaps. For the first time, shrouded in creeping steam from beneath the bathroom door, he found it vaguely—painful.
The water in the bathroom turned off, turned on, turned off again. The sisters' voices grew quieter, confidences punctuated by moments of silence or Bethany's low laugh. He waited, waited, waited some more, till the sun was setting and he heard a sweet, quiet crooning from inside.
He hesitated, then turned and tapped lightly on the door. He had charged himself with a duty to protect these humans, and they needed to eat. When he opened the door, the room was full of clouds and the low rumble of the whirlpools, bubbling like some artificial hot spring. Bethany was propped against one side of the tub, a chair for her sister; Joy had leaned against her, back-to-chest, and was dozing with her head tucked into her older sister's shoulder.
Bethany stopped her wordless singing. "Hi," she said softly, and Gabriel remembered his first glimpse of her in the back of their pickup truck. In her loose embrace, Joy shifted; Bethany scooped a handful of her sister's cascading hair back from the younger girl's brow.
"Our parents had a tub like this," Bethany said softly. "When we were kids, we used to put on our swimsuits in the winter and play in it like a swimming pool. When I went away to college, every time I would come home—it became a sort of tradition. I'd come visit and we'd steal their bathroom for a few hours as a place to tell each other all our secrets. It was—such a safe haven."
He watched her silently, carefully, and did not speak, though the steam had already crept between his feathers, leaving his wings heavy and sodden and straining at the roots. Something was different about this story, and it took him a moment to realize what it was. Bethany might pretend to be an open book—she might be more forthcoming than her little sister when it came to ideals and interpretations, to discussions of concepts like mercy and love and humanity. But he thought it was the first time, perhaps, that she had told him something of herself—of her story, who she was and what she'd seen. This was the source, he realized: of all her Great Truths, and many of the small ones. The Book of Bethany, so to speak.
He didn't want to interrupt, and risk silencing her.
"I had taken a week off of work to visit for the holidays," she recalled in a faraway voice, her eyes on her sister. "Afterward—after the apocalypse—we were both covered in blood, and Joy couldn't stop—panicking. Crying. She would sob and sob, then look at her bloody hands and start screaming, or smell it in her hair—most of the real danger was over and she was safe, but I wasn't sure she would make it." She pressed her lips to the crown of her sister's head, and the sunset light reflected off the mirrors in patterns of dusk-purple and gold. Her eyes were distant and coppery, shining; between the two girls, their clothing drifted, filmy and transparent in the bath. "I managed to get her into the tub, just to try to get the blood off of her. I washed it out of her hair, off her skin. She fell asleep on me then, too. We stayed in the water for—two days? Maybe three. There was—so much of it."
"Blood?" he asked quietly.
She nodded. "Our parents'," she said softly, stroking her sister's brow in the curling mist. "Some of our neighbors'. I wasn't sure she was ever going to be okay." She looked up into his eyes, and he suddenly wondered if anyone had worried about whether or not she would be okay, or if there had been someone to wash the carnage from her hair. How clearly he could see it: Joy, hunched over and weeping, her spindle-thin shoulders rising from the water while her older sister, with wounded eyes, quietly cleaned her of blood.
"We left the next day," Bethany said. She looked around the bathroom. "This—here and now?—it was like being home again, for just a few hours. Before—everything."
She touched her sister's forehead again, and her own torn face, and she shivered.
"I'm so cold," she said, although the steam was still rising in streamers from the water.
Silently, Gabriel reached for a towel from the shelf, and held it open.
Word Count: 1,281
Completed: April 29, 2011
I'm not sure if I can fairly call this installment a drabble, as it totally broke the 1,000 word rule I generally try to follow. I suppose I could have divided it into two "interludes," but I think I am very happy with the way it turned out.
Thanks again to those of you who have left reviews, especially the ones that are honest and direct, yet still encouraging (and very detailed!). I appreciate it so much and it really gives me some good material to inspire, sculpt, and edit my future entries. As a writer, I know what's going on "behind the scenes," so it's very good to hear from the objective audience everything that works and/or doesn't work. Not only that, but since I am not a very faithful reviewer myself (I tend to avoid doing it unless I can leave a thorough, well-articulated comment), it always amazes me when my readers are willing to take the time to craft a thoughtful response to my chapters. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful weekend!