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 XXI: The Fighter
So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him,
he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man.
Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered. Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,
because you have struggled with God and men and have overcome."
Genesis 32: 24-29

He peered into her ruined face. He was surprised by how precious it had become to him. The air-conditioning unit hummed to life, and the stars outside the window stabbed the sky, and she shivered in the manufactured breeze and warmed her palms between his.

"Her eyes turned black," Bethany said softly, and for a moment he didn't understand.

Then his skin tightened, and his bones grew heavy inside him, and his heart and stomach both caved in.

"I've never seen anyone move so fast," Bethany whispered. Her voice rustled in the shadows like ghosts, like fallen leaves. "She was too quick, and I couldn't stop her. She killed our parents, and the old woman who lived across the street, and two neighbor-kids on bikes—they were ten or twelve, I think; no older. The things she did to them—" She shivered again, and he realized it wasn't the cold. "She remembers most of it, in bits and pieces. She—I—"

He had never spared a thought for what might become of the humans possessed by the armies of heaven. He had perhaps assumed that they were all dead—even now he supposed it must be so for most of them. Surely their bodies no longer habitable, too broken and mangled and burned by the rigors of hosting an angel.

But if one had managed to hold on—

"She tried to execute you as well," he said softly, and the revelation burned through him. Brother against brother, sister against sister. He didn't know how he hadn't seen it from the beginning.

He didn't know how he had ever considered this battle justified.

"Yes," Bethany breathed. "Yes." It sounded like sudden relief, as though he had lifted some deep burden from her. "I wish she had tried sooner," the woman spilled out in a hushed whisper. "I don't know—what it was, or why, or how, but somehow, when we fought, I got the upper hand. I just—I hung on to her, as tightly as I could, all night. She was so—feverish. I had blisters all along my arms and chest, anywhere we touched. I thought she would die, certainly, or have brain damage from the heat of it—God, the way she writhed—"

Now he thought, and his wings shuddered just slightly behind him: If one had managed to hold on—

—or to be held—

He could see it clearly in his heart: the two sisters locked together, one tearing and thrashing while the other embraced her tightly, arms locked around arms, unflinching. He could almost hear Bethany's voice:

Come back to me, Joy. Come home.

And he understood, suddenly, what it must have cost her: to pull him from the desert, to anchor him with her body while he fought her in his sleep, fevered with dreams.

You only save them because you can, he heard Joy tell him. Because a hero doesn't know how to do anything else.

He thought perhaps it was the loneliest, saddest thing he'd ever heard.

"If I'd gotten to her sooner," Bethany whispered, "maybe I could have spared her some of that…death." The guilt in her voice speared him neatly between the ribs, and if he hadn't been so focused on the feel of her hands in his, he might have staggered. "Gabriel—I was so tired and sore by the end of it," she said brokenly, and the words were a breathless, wounded confession, a raw scar hidden in the dark. He watched her eyebrows as they furrowed and curved upward; agonized, but she forced herself on. "I was—so weak."

The disgust and recrimination in her voice tore at him; the tendons in his wings ached with the heaviness of it.

"It went on for—hours and hours—and hours." A sob caught in her throat. "Everything in me hurt. I didn't think—I could hold on any longer? I was so afraid—not that she would kill me, but that I would…give up on her." Her hands turned in his, holding onto his wrists now, which were too large for her fingers to span. Urgently, she said, "We can't give up on the things we love, Gabriel. Nothing is more certain to destroy us." A faint, self-mocking smile flickered briefly at the corner of her mouth. "Not even angels."

And he found himself thinking of Michael. I gave Him what He needed.
And himself: I would not have shown you such mercy.
And Bethany, just a few short hours ago, with her voice so wry he felt parched just imagining it:

I'm pretty good at hanging on to things.

Father! his soul cried out, as lost and abandoned as that holy Child's, cradled protectively in its mother's arms.

"Just when I thought—this is it—and I was thanking God that she would kill me, because I couldn't live with—I couldn't live—just then, her eyes cleared…and she started screaming." She shuddered so convulsively that it raced the entirety of her frame, right down into her fingertips, folded around his wrists. He watched as her whole body was wracked with it. "She couldn't—stop. At all. It went on…so long. Far longer than the—than the fight itself. It went on forever. I never—" She shuddered again, her muscles so brittle he thought they might break, and she looked up, met his gaze squarely. "I never want to hear that sound again."

He stepped backward and stared down at her, voiceless. He pulled her hands from his wrists, holding her slender palms against his armored chest because he couldn't think of what else to do with them—they were as fragile as birds, and trembling. "Did you know what it was?" he managed at last, though the words were strangely strangled. "Inside her." It was not in his nature to hide things, but he thought—he would have liked to spare her the knowledge.

And spare himself.

Her eyelids fluttered closed slowly. "She did," she said softly. "She told me. Later. When she could speak again. What it felt like, shoving itself under her skin. All the—the holy fire, she called it, and how it filled her, packed inside so tightly she thought her body would split open and boil." She shivered again: a small one this time, but somehow even more haunted, and she seemed more fragile than anything he'd ever known. "She said it recited back to her—her every sin. Her every wrong choice. Everything that has ever haunted her, and more. She said—it knew her name."

And the echo of Bethany's voice in his memory, colder than he'd ever heard it before or since:
Something definitely crawled up inside her where it didn't belong.

"Gabriel," she said suddenly—"you're hurting me."

He looked down at their joined hands pressed against his armor, and her fingers were clenched whitely between his own. He released her as quickly as if he'd been scalded, staring at his own hands and the damage they'd wrought. His stomach clenched; he turned abruptly, one hand braced against the wall and the other pressed into his abdomen like a fist.

He hadn't eaten since he'd been Home, so when his body heaved—again and again—it was only slick bitterness that filled his mouth.

Word Count: 1,220
Completed: May 7th, 2011
****This title goes hand-in-hand with the bible verse accompanying it, in which is about how Jacob, one of the forefathers of the Jewish nation, wrestled with an unnamed, unearthly man for a full night, and won. Scholars debate whether this man was an angel of the Lord or God Himself. Most seem to assume the former, though the (rather ambiguous) text may imply the latter. [c. Genesis 32]