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 XXIX: Agape
He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?"
Jesus replied, "You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand."
John 13: 6-7
She stared at him from across the master bathroom. Farmhouse it might be, but rugged it was not.
"You've never had a bubble bath?" she asked incredulously.
He eyed the tub disconcertedly. "No."
"Gabriel," she said, "you are a witness to miracles. And you've never had a bubble bath."
He lifted his chin haughtily to hide his sudden discomfort. "This conversation is trivial, and childish."
A mischievous light glinted in her eyes—the first he'd seen in the days since her sister died. "Are we not intended to come to God with the heart of a child?"
He was silent, still. And then, before he could stop himself, he leaned forward, peering into her luminous amber eyes. For a moment, he searched them.
She softened. He saw it around all the edges of her: a tendering, a gentling, as though the sharp corners of the last few days had been worn delicately away. And then her hand was between them, open, palm up.
"Join me," she said.
He reared back, horrified and stunned and—perhaps, just a little bit—tempted.
She almost rolled her eyes. He saw it. How could she know—you are a lily among thorns—that her invitation struck more intimately than she supposed, and for entirely different reasons? But instead, she retreated, and smiled kindly, and said, "I'm no danger to you, Gabriel. I'll swear an oath that your maidenly virtue is safe with me." She grinned self-deprecatingly. "You do realize you're four times my size, built like a Coke machine, and have inhuman strength, right? Take off your metal," she added without waiting for a response, and she stepped up and into the pool full of iridescent froth—still fully-clothed. And she knelt, sighing and closing her eyes as the warm water rose above her breasts. She cupped her palms in the suds, and lifted them to him, full of bubbles like a gift.
"Look at these," she coaxed. "Take off your armor and look, Gabriel." She smiled, looking at her own hands, and he found himself secretly delighting in her eyes, in the flash of her teeth. "Each one is a perfect sphere," she said, and now her voice was hushed and marveling. "Every color is kept inside them, and they're so easily broken."
For a moment, he thought not of soap, but of human beings.
"Who engineers such things, Gabriel?" she asked wonderingly, and when he looked up from the delicate whorls of light, he found her eyes were a welcoming haven. "Gabriel," she repeated, "who?"
Everything in this world is a prayer.
He moved so quickly she didn't even register it; if she had, she would have jumped backward, frightened, and possibly slipped on the glossy porcelain. Instead, one moment he was a few feet away, staring at her with such wounded intensity, and in the next his face was only inches from hers, his broad hands cupping either side of her jaw, his fingertips grazing the tendrils of hair at her temples as he steadied her. He leaned into her, the searching look back in his gaze. He moved his eyes into her deeply, as though there were some hidden truth buried within her, as though she held all the answers to his innermost questions: about God, the apocalypse, his own striving toward salvation. If he could only understand the wonder in her, and how it could exist so easily inside a human so beset by loss and tragedy, perhaps he could grasp God's love for them, and Michael's, and be able to love all of them the way he thought he might love her.
He thought perhaps he could bow before her—and mean it—in a way he hadn't for any other human being.
"Gabriel?" she called to him softly. Then her face crumbled, bit by broken bit, the scar dissolving in the expression of her hidden pain. "Please—don't look at me like that—" as though any small kindness or show of love might be her undoing.
And he remembered the darkness of another bathroom, shrouded in steam and shadows, where two sisters lay together—and the sound of Bethany's first secret story unfolding like a frightened flower in the night, and the quiet breath of a sleeping teenager who was now buried in the sand under a cairn of stones at the foot of a flowering cactus.
Abruptly he straightened, and untied the fastenings and medallions of his armor, and his pauldrons and vambraces and chestplate fell heavily to the ceramic floor, and he stepped in beside her.
"I am here," he said, and sank into the froth behind her. She went still at his sudden movement, her shoulders curving upward as though she could protect herself from the world. With one cautious hand, he reached out and gathered the curtain of her hair. She jumped at the unexpected contact, but he ignored the movement. The steam made the strands curl damply at the nape of her neck, and when he wet it, it became a heavy cascade of dark silk, gleaming so brightly it made him tremble in ways that he had not felt since the last time he was in the presence of God.
He twisted the fall of it gently in his warrior's hands, willing himself into a place of infinite tenderness, and proceeded to wash her hair.
Word Count: 895
Completed: May 22nd, 2011
This is one of my favorite drabbles for this fanfiction.
****Agape is a Greek term for a specific "type" of love (along with platonic, erotic, etc). It describes a kind of love that is spiritual, holy, and unconditional. In Christian theology it generally refers to the love of God/Christ for humanity.