"Who's there?" Olivia snapped, peering into the darkness. Jesus, it was dark out here, darker than it ever got in the city; she was pretty sure she'd never been so far from a street light in all her life.
"Fear not," the voice answered drolly, "for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy."
She'd have shot her mysterious visitor right then, if only she could've seen the bastard.
"I'm not fucking around," she called back. "Show yourself."
To his credit - and it was, she saw in a moment, a he, or at least he was presenting himself as one - he did as he was told, stepped forward from the shadows into the circle of light extending out from the open door where Olivia crouched with her gun in her hand. It was an angel - though she'd had no doubts on that score, given the theatricality of his arrival, what with the great flash of light and everything - wearing a long white robe, his shimmering wings extending behind him, brilliantly white and fluttering softly as he moved. His hair, his face, were nondescript, the sort of face a person might forget in an instant, though it seemed to tug at Olivia's memory. She couldn't quite say why he seemed familiar; her memory went back a long, long way.
"It's good to see you," the angel said. "I understand you're calling yourself Olivia now."
"Do I know you?" she asked, feeling a little bit petulant about the whole thing. She'd met an angel, once, outside Damascus in another life, and she supposed it was possible that this was the same angel, but it was hard to know for sure. An angel could change their appearance at will; what if he only seemed to be familiar? What if it was the one who called himself Michael in disguise?
"We met once, long ago," the angel told her. "On the road to Damascus. We spoke at length, you may recall, about what it means to be an angel, about what it's really like, on the other side of the veil. You were young then, and angry. I recall I liked you, tremendously."
"Gabriel?" she asked warily. That was the name of the angel she had met there; she might not have recalled his face, but she knew his name. She was beginning to think he might be trusted; if it were Michael in disguise, he could have attacked her by now, had nothing to gain by continuing to chat with her, except perhaps entry into the house, but given the way Michael had burst through Elliot's apartment she didn't really think he was the sort to try to bluff his way inside. Michael seemed to prefer violence.
"The very same," the angel told her, smiling. "I've been sent to deliver a message. Will you receive it?"
"Yes," she said, though she had not moved from her position just inside the door, though she had not yet put down her gun.
"You're doing well," Gabriel told her. "He is pleased."
There was no point, really, in asking who He was. Olivia knew.
"He doesn't want McKenna dead, then?" Olivia asked. They'd been wondering about that, Olivia and her brothers, wondering whether Michael had been sent to eradicate the nephilim child, and she needed to know for sure.
"Of course not," Gabriel said, sounding baffled by the very idea.
"It's not like He hasn't tried to wipe out the nephilim before," she reminded him.
"Yes, well. Things change."
That was the thing about angels, she supposed; they existed to serve a higher power, and didn't really have the luxury of questioning it. Or did they? They must have had some free will, she thought, or else how would any of them ever have been able to fall? It didn't really matter, in the moment, but it was the kind of question she'd like to argue about with Elliot.
Elliot. She really, really didn't want to think about Elliot right now.
"You're right to be afraid for her. The one who calls himself Michael is coming for her. He will find you here, eventually. And when that moment comes, do not be afraid."
"You came all the way down here to tell me that?" she asked. You've done well, do not be afraid, was that all the advice an angel sent from God had to offer?
"What would you have Him do, Olivia?" Gabriel asked her.
In response she rose to her feet and stepped at last from the doorway, still holding the gun though she'd lowered it, was no longer pointing it at him. In the faint glow of the lights from the kitchen she could see his face, and she could see that he seemed amused, and the thought that anything about this mess might be funny to him left her all but shaking with rage.
"Anything!" she burst out. "You know as well as I do He could stop all this right now, if He wanted to. It's sick, Him just sitting up there and watching. She's a child, she can't protect herself, she - "
"Do you really want to argue theology with me, little one?" Gabriel asked, crossing his arms over his chest. "He knows all, He sees all, but you are free to choose. He knows already what choice you will make, but does knowing mean He made that choice for you?"
"Jesus Christ," she muttered, rubbing her thumb across her brow. She could feel a headache coming on.
"Not quite," Gabriel said cheerily. "Anyway. You've done well, that's the message. But I've something else to tell you, if you're willing to hear it. This doesn't come from Him, this comes from me."
"Is there a difference?"
"Oh, yes," he said. "You have your choices to make, and so do I. I was watching you, before I came down here. I saw you fight with your man."
"He's not my man," she said, almost reflexively. Sometimes it felt as if he was, as if he belonged to her, but Olivia knew better; Elliot had never been hers to claim, hers to choose. Even now, separated from Kathy and well on his way to divorce - again - he was not hers, and would not ever be. There could be no happy ending for them, the human and the nephilim, the mortal and the cursed; he deserved the chance to live, and she could not bear to mourn him. And now, having spurned him, she was certain there would be no going back; he was a proud man, but he had a gentle heart, and she wounded both, his pride and his heart, and he would not forget that injury. She'd be lucky, she thought, if he ever talked to her again after this.
"Oh, but he is," Gabriel told her, his voice gone soft, and strangely gentle, as if he were talking to a child. "You are so clever, little one, and you see so much, but you are blind to the truth that's right in front of you. You have a soul, and so does he, and his soul has been bound to yours from the very beginning."
It was a nice thought, but not one she could allow herself to entertain. It hurt too much, the hoping. From the moment they first met Elliot had felt familiar to her, almost as if she knew him already, and they thought so much alike, ached so much alike, raged so much alike; she found such comfort with him, and loved him, yes, loved him, whether she was willing to say the words out loud or not, but his soul was destined for heaven, and hers would never reach it, and she could not, would not, let him bind himself to a curse.
"I can almost hear you thinking," Gabriel said. "But you're thinking small, Olivia. Did you not wonder, when you met him, why you seemed so drawn to him? Did he not feel familiar to you?"
Gabriel had assured her once that while angels shared insight into one another's thoughts they enjoyed no such connection to their nephilim children, but she couldn't help but wonder, in the moment, if he could read her mind. Yes, Elliot had always felt familiar, but how did Gabriel know that?
"There is a purpose for every soul," he told her. "Your man, his soul has a purpose, and he will not rest until he fulfills it, though it has been the work of many lifetimes. Think, Olivia. Think of his voice, think of his eyes. You've seen them before, you know you have."
Very slowly Olivia turned away from Gabriel and retreated just far enough to reach the three short steps leading down from the house to the grassy yard, and she sat herself down there, and covered her face with her hands.
Yes, she'd seen those eyes before. It was her first thought, upon meeting Elliot, how familiar were his eyes. How much they reminded her of a man she'd known once, when she was very young. So young that she did not know yet the extent of her curse, so young that she had been foolish enough to love, to give of herself to another. The man's name was Elam, and he had been her husband, and she had left him behind when she discovered she could not bear children, when she learned that she could not die, when she learned, for the first time, the price of her birth. She'd set him free, let him go so that he could find someone else, so that he might have a chance to have the family he wanted, the life that he wanted, and she had mourned him for millenia.
And Elliot's eyes, they looked just like his.
But not just him; Elliot was not the only man she'd met who reminded her, so strongly, of her first love. There had been others, over the years, each of them a blue eyed man with a fighter's hands and a tender heart, each of them a man she cared for, though she never could bring herself to say it out loud. Elam was first, in the village where she grew up. Zacharias, in Damascus. Jake, when she was living on a farmstead in Oklahoma, Jake the widower who used to come and sit around her fire sipping whiskey in the evenings, whose blue eyes told her he wanted to kiss her, though she'd never let him. Lenny, in Detroit in the 1950s, when she was working as a secretary in the precinct, who never seemed to want to go home any more than she did, who brought her coffee sometimes and made her laugh. All the lives she'd lived; there hadn't been a man every time, not every time, but there had been some, and each one had broken her heart just that little bit more, but she'd never considered - never even dreamed - that they might have, all of them, been the same man.
"Some souls," Gabriel told her, "can't rest until they do the thing they were made to do. He was made to love you, little one, and you never let him, and he won't stop coming back until you do."
A great, choking sob worked its way up the back of her throat, and for once, she let it out. She let herself weep, let the terrible, gut wrenching flood of her tears loose, and did not try to stem their flow. It was a truth too overwhelming to contemplate, a joy and a grief so vast she did not think her body could contain it. All she'd wanted, all she'd ever wanted, was a family, a place to belong, a heart to love her, and she'd made her peace with the idea that she'd never have it, that it wasn't meant for her, really she had, and she'd pushed him away, time and time again, left them both lonesome and aching for one another, and yet he had not given up on her. Through all the seasons of her life he had tried, again and again to reach her, and she mourned, in that moment, for all the lives they'd never have, and for the irredeemable mess she'd made of this one.
And yet there was joy, still, in the knowing. In the knowing that there was a heart that loved her, as fiercely as she'd always longed to be loved, in knowing that while she had lived five thousand years and more believing herself alone she never really had been, because he had been there, always. Elam, Elliot; it was all the same. It was all him, loving her.
"I fucked up," she choked out the words, and startled when a gentle hand came to rest on her shoulder. She looked up sharply and found Gabriel standing over her, his expression achingly fond.
"There's no sin in love," he told her. "And there is no one, no human or nephilim, beyond redemption. You have loved him, and tried to protect him for you for the sake of that love. I just thought…I just thought someone ought to tell you that you don't have to. You can love him, Olivia. You're allowed."
That only made her cry all the harder, but as she wept Gabriel knelt down, and wrapped his arms and his wings around her, and held her close while the torrent of her tears ran their course.