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 XXII: Mark of Cain
The Lord said, "What have you done? Listen!
Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground."
Genesis 4: 10
The next morning, after seeing the untouched remains of Joy's abandoned breakfast, he found her sitting out at the edge of the dusty road. Her legs sprawled limply in the sand.
"Don't look at me," she told him dully.
He hesitated, then crouched at her side, watching as she drew patterns in the grit with a dried, slender branch. For long moments, they sat in silence. He felt the tension around her, thicker than he ever remembered, more tightly-coiled—more nervous and cringing.
"Joy," he said quietly, though he was certain he hadn't the right. "I had thought you no longer feared me."
She kept her gaze averted. "I don't," she said. "But I didn't want you to know."
Carefully, she placed her stick to one side, then turned her gaze out to the horizon. He followed the direction of her eyes, content to stare at nothing alongside her if this was her will.
"I killed them," she said at last. "Our parents. Those two little boys. That sweet old lady." She paused. "I almost killed Beth."
"Joy," he beckoned softly. "Joy, that creature was not you."
She looked at him then, her eyes surprised at his denial. "Forgiveness, Gabe?" she asked softly. "You love my sister."
He held her gaze steadily. "As I love you."
Her lip quirked in a ghost of a smile. "Not quite as you love me." He had no time to puzzle over this—she had reached for him, her beringed fingers tracing a line down the right side of his face. He stilled at her touch: very different from her sister's, but just as strangely sweet. "That scar on her face?" Joy whispered. "I gave her that." A pause. "Did she tell you?"
He was silent.
"Of course she didn't," Joy answered for him. "She wouldn't—shame me like that. But I remember it, Gabe. Every time I look at her, I see—what it meant to do to her. What I would have done to her. Gabe"—her fingers curled in fistfuls of her own wheat-pale hair—"it never goes away."
He remembered how it had felt to kill Michael, like the splitting of his own heart. He had wept as he had done it, had he not? In this moment, he felt it again: a ripping inside, a gaping wound. He thought—if he had known her before—he might never have been able to do this thing, to lead the legions of God on a war campaign against humanity.
Her eyes—darker than her sister's, more bitter and prone to angry tears—stared into his face, searching as though to discover his true intentions. And then, frantically, she burst out,
"Please don't tell her—please, Gabriel, don't—I don't want her to know—"
He reached for her instinctively, and was surprised when she didn't pull away but let him grip her shoulders gently. "What, child? What am I not to tell her?"
"I know," Joy said. "I know why the angel chose me—how it got inside." Her voice rippled pleadingly. "I know it's because I'm weak."
He stared at her, dismay painting itself across his stoic features. "Joy—"
"I know, Gabriel. I know everything that went through its head. I saw it all. And I know it was my fault that it could take me, and that's why it's my fault they're dead, and that's how I killed them. And I don't want her to know that I—I don't want her to think of me that way, Gabriel. Please."
I am here to watch over you, he had told her once. And what was it she'd said, frightened and oh—he realized now—so very brave?
I didn't think angels did that kind of thing anymore—not unless it was to point out your every sin.
He thought he might be sick again. The muscles in his throat worked rebelliously; he tipped his head to the heavens, trying to fight back the reflex.
"I will not," he said at last. "I will not tell her. But Joy…I do not think there is anything in all of Heaven or earth that could convince your sister that you are in any way less than perfect, or less precious."
"I—thank you, Gabe," she said, and all the tension went out of her bones. She sagged beside him, held up by his hands on her shoulders. "Thank you. Thank you." Tears had spilled over her cheeks; he wondered how he had not noticed them before. Her lips pressed together and he recognized that look from a hundred prophets gone before: he knew, if he let her, she would be kissing his knuckles right now.
Unlike all the times in the past, it humbled him now. Shamed him. His mouth was so dry he could barely speak. "I...am sorry," he said. His voice rumbled and broke, cracking like thunder on the horizon, with no hope for rain. "Joy, the words mean nothing, but I am sorry." I am sorry I did this thing, he thought, and for the first time the apology had nothing to do with his Father. It had nothing to do with obedience and adoration; it was simply sorrow for sorrow's sake, for the havoc he had wrecked on these two small and precious lives.
"Beth," she said after a moment, her voice hesitant and tremulous, an offering she still wasn't sure he'd accept, "Beth always says we do what we think we have to. To survive."
And he remembered the raw pink line, bisecting one side of Bethany's brow and cheek, the way Bethany had touched it reverently. I could survive many things, she'd said. Not one of them includes losing her. And he understood, in those words, the truth she'd given him—how much bravery it must have taken her, how determined and courageous a heart she must have had: to tear him from the desert, to watch over him in the night, to mend his open wound and send him out into the street to talk to her sister and invite her in for frozen pizza.
Perhaps humans possessed a bottomless capacity for depravity and evil, but in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—their capacity for grace was even more astounding.
And grace was exactly what Joy was offering him now.
His heart shifted in his chest at her words. For the first time in centuries—in millennia—he was utterly moved, almost beside himself. She must have seen it in his eyes. She slid from his grasp and leaned in against his side. And when she wept like a child, she let him hold her, and he thought it to be the most unbearably bittersweet gift he'd ever been offered from anyone other than God.
Word Count: 1,134
Completed: May 7th, 2011
Whew. I feel wrung out.
I wrote the foundations and first drafts for these three chapters while listening to Have Faith In Me by A Day to Remember. Just saying. I kind of imagine it in the context of Bethany to her sister on the night of Armageddon.
****Most people think the Mark of Cain refers to part of Cain's punishment—that he underwent some physical disfigurement (or scar) for killing his brother (Abel), which set him apart from humanity as a whole and isolated him as a murderer. In fact, however, Cain's punishment was essentially an inability to cultivate crops (it was withholding his own harvest that led to Cain's greater sin, after all) and, by extension, a generation sentence of being a "wanderer" (presumably, a hunter-gatherer), or someone with no home. Interestingly, the Mark of Cain was actually a mark of protection God placed on him, so that he would not be targeted for violence by other people who already knew of his crime.
So. Who is Cain in this story? Who is Abel? And who bears the Mark? [c. Genesis 4]