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.
Disclaimer: *obligatory insert*
Chapter XIX: Samaritan
The greatest among you will be your servant.
For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Matthew 23: 11-12
Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine,
you did for Me.
Matthew 25: 40
When they'd pulled into a ramshackle gas station that afternoon, preparing to raid the shop for bottles of water and fill up Baby's tank, an old man had exited the store, rifle in hand and ragged hat pulled low on his brow.
Gabriel had watched as they conversed from above—Bethany and the stranger—both gesturing while Joy hung back in on the other side of the truck, a palm shielding her eyes from the sun while she searched the sky for him. He'd dropped beside the younger sister, just in time to hear the end of Bethany's conversation with the old man.
"—no, not many. Most people we've run into were heading North or East in small…er, like caravans? They're kind of…congregating in the cities. If you're looking for a community, that's what I'd suggest."
"And no-one's given you two lasses any trouble on the road? I'd heard note of some more violent-types, raiders and such. I found a working radio station—they said there'd been looters lookin' for anything with wheels, that runs—to salvage for parts an' fuel," the man had asked, and Bethany had laughed.
"Well, Baby's hardly hanging together at this point anyway," she said, just as Gabriel stepped from behind the truck. "And anyway, we've been fine—like I said, we haven't come across many people—"
He'd noticed the man's eyes—they'd widened, just a bit, but it was all the warning Gabriel had needed.
"Down!" the stranger had yelled abruptly, shoving Bethany aside as he leveled the rifle at the archangel and pulled the trigger.
Gabriel had turned just in time to shield himself and Joy from the bullets, which pinged off his armored feathers and ricocheted harmlessly into little explosions of sand.
"Hey!" Bethany had yelped, and Gabriel had turned just in time—appalled, heart slick with something like horror—to see her clinging to the man's right arm desperately. "Stop! What do you think you're doing?"
The man had shaken her off, but she'd given him pause. He'd eyed Gabriel warily, suspiciously, taking in the way the angel had shielded the teenager beside him—the teenager who was glaring with dark and furious eyes. The barrel of the rifle was still trained on him. "Lady," the stranger had said, "Do you know who this bastard is? What he's done?"
"Better than you can imagine," Bethany had said tightly, her hands locking on the barrel of the gun and pulling it firmly from the gas station owner's hands. The man had released the rifle readily, holding his hands up, palms out.
"Yeah, we know who he is," Joy had added loudly, stepping in front of Gabriel before he could think to stop her. "He's our family."
For a moment Gabriel had stood in silence, and for the first time since his creation he felt—
—stunned.
"This—thing—its friends and the other things like it—they're the ones—responsible for all this madness. They're responsible for my—for my wife—" And the man's face had crumpled abruptly, like wet tissue paper, and he'd dropped his hands helplessly.
Bethany had set aside the rifle on top of a cement garbage can and reached out to him with entreating hands and said, "Please, let's go in. Gabriel will stay with my sister—"
And so, somehow, a brief stop that had originally been meant to take only ten minutes had turned into six-and-a-half hours. Gabriel watched, silent and fiercely intent, from a distance as Bethany and the old man conversed. They walked around the perimeter of the gas station yard; they hovered out back at a picnic bench coated in dust. Bethany sat on the table and swung her slender bare legs, listening with a tilted head to every word the widower said. Gabriel couldn't see her golden eyes from this distance, nor the scar that lopsided her face, but her caramel-dark hair spun on the breeze behind her like a shining banner, twisting in the air.
"Your staring at them so hard might make them burst into flame, but it won't make you hear them any better," Joy said at last, rolling her eyes. "Relax. You suck at being company today, Big Brother."
He said nothing, only narrowed his eyes. Perhaps if he squinted, he could read their lips.
The teenager sighed dramatically. "I can tell you what they're saying anyway."
Now he did turn to her, sharply, his mouth grim and turned down at the corners, but Joy was staring at her older sister. "He's telling her his life story. He's talking about the wife he loved more than anything, and how she was killed—but probably not till after she'd been possessed by some avenging angel." Her smile was close-lipped and wintry, her burnt-umber eyes like pieces of stone. "Maybe he had to kill her himself, the poor dear."
There was something in her hard gaze that chilled him. "Joy," he beckoned softly, calling her back, and she shuddered and glanced at him with a half-smile, half-shrug.
"And Beth will make all the right cooing noises, and ask all the right questions, until he's talking about all the sweet things instead of the sour, until he's forgotten that his wife was—lying dead on the kitchen floor, or in the bathroom, or down at Smoky's Bar with a hole in her head. Instead he'll be thinking about her apple pies, or how she looked working in the garden with a smudge of dirt on her nose. And soon Beth'll probably convince him to go to one of the cities, and she'll give him way more money than we can actually afford in the hopes that it's still worth something wherever he goes, and then we'll move on and we'll probably end up driving all night instead of stopping, because Bethany will be crying too constantly and—too inconsolably—to be willing to rest."
"Why?" he asked after a moment, his eyes returning to the gold-skinned girl with the swinging legs, her head cocked at a listening angle, her hair a twisting, gleaming flag behind her. He didn't know, though, if the question referred to this exchange between two lost humans after the apocalypse, or his own safety in this little family, the way that these sisters had somehow taken it upon themselves to be his guardians, rather than the other way around—their insistence on welcoming him in.
And in silence, on the edge of the roof, Bethany's hand on his knee, white with moonlight and sharp stars—
Just let me do this thing for you.
Joy sighed again. "Because that's what Bethany does, Gabe. She calls people out of their pain."
Word Count: 1,114
Completed: May 5th, 2011
I am so impatient to get through and post all these chapters! I am a little anxious with wanting you to read it all, at least through the first revelation, which is coming up soon…I'm trying to remind myself that patience is a virtue and that timing is everything, haha. In the meantime:
Here's the rough sketch/sneak-peak into Chapter 32 (simply copy & paste it into a browser address bar and remove the spaces). Thanks again to all the incredibly supportive reviewers!
http :/ fyrefly-nyxa .deviantart .com /# /d3figm5
****Most of you probably recognize this title as it's a pretty well-known concept, but I will elaborate anyway. One of Jesus' parables is about a travelling Jew who is accosted by brigands and left for dead. Two of his countrymen, both supposedly men of spiritual fortitude, pass him by and ignore his plight. He is saved by a Samaritan instead (Samaritans historically did not have rapport with Jews), who cares for him and makes sure he is safe and looked-after before continuing on his way. [c. Luke 10]