Chuck will feel awful in the morning, sick with the rage of God's suppressed dreams. He is flesh and blood, chemical reactions inside a brain a thousand drafts edited, still flawed. Raphael has one that's almost exactly the same, spare a little grey matter, a few hundred cells, the electric impulses that guide autonomic reactions an archangel doesn't need.
What they have, and he does not, is the power to take away a little of his pain.
Raphael does not heal him.
If he didn't want to suffer, he'd accept God's gifts with more grace. Instead, he's slumped over his desk, drunk, asleep, insensate. Raphael casts their gaze over the dark computer screen and the empty bottles. They don't clean up his mess. He'll just make another one.
There are scattered pages of the new gospel across the floor, stained. Some are marked up with notes. His prose rarely improves. His grammar fares better. Raphael steps on them to cross the room.
Chuck snores. The archangel forced to watch over him wrinkles their nose in disgust.
They shake his shoulder. He snorts. He buries his face further into his folded arms. He ignores them.
Raphael shakes him harder. They force him to acknowledge them. All that comes of it is a waved hand, a shooing gesture. They drag him up from his chair to his feet, and he nearly falls again without their support. With heaving steps, they move him across the house. The weight of him would barely be enough to make their vessel stagger without them behind its muscles. It's a struggle anyway.
Chuck's bed is as messy as any other room in his house. Raphael dumps him there. He rolls away, mumbling about things that make no sense to them.
They leave.
Chuck doesn't notice. He rolls over onto his back.
They come back quietly. Their presence barely makes the house shake. Only one of the windows cracks. He doesn't wake up. Raphael walks around the bed. They kick a pornographic magazine under it to sit with the dust bunnies.
They have a hard time looking at this wretched thing, knowing that God's word bleeds from his fingers. He cannot come to harm under their watch. He should be more grateful for that. Otherwise, Raphael might open him up to see what else of their Father he's selfishly hiding inside.
Raphael pulls his shoes off. His socks. They drop them to the floor without care.
What makes him fit for instruction while they continue to live, hollow?
They tug the covers out from under his legs and spread them over his sleeping body.
He doesn't look any less pathetic like that. They resent him. He has everything they want, and he appreciates none of it. Even while sleeping, he creates new burdens for them.
Raphael leaves again. They plan to stay away.
Later, when he begins to retch, Raphael is there to shove him to the side of the bed where he can throw up instead of choke to death on his own vomit.