the first day

*

Well, I never pray,
But tonight I'm on my knees, yeah.
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah.
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind , I feel free now.
But the airwaves are clean and there's nobody singing to me now.

- the verve, "bittersweet symphony"

*

The exhaustion that came from a high, fast burn was rather like opium sleep. It wasn't the normal sort of exhausted sleep that came on when you'd worked yourself into death standing. She'd known that sleep well enough frequently enough, whether she was walking the sickbeds of Glastonbury or on her knees scraping at the floors in Anagni -- that was mortal sleep, even if you collapsed and looked bent and broken, your mouth open and a slick line of drool connecting you to the floor because your body didn't have enough left in it even to remember to close up your orifices. That kind of sleep was hard sleep, hard rest, but it was nothing like the stone-death of post ascension sleep. She'd had post-ascension sleep twice before, once in Glastonbury and once in the mud of Normandy, when they'd left a crater the size of Buckinghamshire in the coastline. She thought they called it St. Michael's Sea now -- Mer San Michele. It always was Michael, wasn't it?

Opium sleep made your pulse slow and thick like syrup, poppy milk over your fingers like pulped dandelion blossoms or semen and it was a breath, a heartbeat almost too slow to read. In another age she might have been buried alive. Someone had had the presence of mind to close her eyes in the ambulance, if only because the sightless blue staring, deep as moonflow lakes, was chill in that slack little face, not meant or called for mortal men to see. Ascension sleep was a sleep without dreams. It was dead, unmoving stillness.

They put her on an IV drip to keep her hydrated while her body knit itself back into a shape that could hold itself and keep her conscious. At Glastonbury they had wrapped her head in wet cloth because they had not yet learned the trick of intravenous feeding. As it had been before at Glastonbury, it was now. After fifteen hours she sat up straight with a snap like a mousetrap and wondered how it was that she wasn't dead, her dark hair streaming behind her like a banner as she looked for all the world like a jack-in-the-box mounted on a piston.

He dropped his pocket watch on the bed from the sheer startle of it, in an attempt to press her back down into a saner position. He was worried that she would pull her IV out thrashing before it could be properly drawn out and tied off. Once she realized who it was who had her pressed so firmly down into the thin mattress, she went still and tried to breathe. He held her there silently for a moment and she shook.

"I'm sorry, Duriel."

He didn't say anything, only let a little of his weight off of her and moved a hand to rest on her head as he picked up his forgotten pocket watch. He closed it with a snap and stowed it away in his waistcoat pocket.

"Fifteen and a quarter hours. Orfiel was correct to the minute," he said, as if this explained everything. She drew her hands together under her chin and felt shattered from the force of holding her muscles so strained.

"Duriel, the baby, the baby, did I save the baby?" her voice was reedy, tremulous and strained, all torn to broken bits. So many times before, when she had tried to save her babies they had slipped through her fingers like blood in water. She hadn't been able to hold them. Rachel in Lucifer's garden. Lumina stick thin with no marrow. Ramondanielchristophersusanelizabethjonathan: the children of her cancer ward. So often, no matter how much she gave, it was not enough to save her own children, she never gave enough, not like her mother -- "Please tell me, Duriel. Please, if I'm here and he's not, if I couldn't do it, not even this time, then I'll -- "

" -- You will sit here very still and listen to me tell you the situation, Gabriel," he said sharply, and what had verged on hysterics stilled to only a frenetic sort of panic, "The child -- our grandson -- " he corrected, "Is alive and he would not be had it not been for you."

She closed her eyes and went mostly limp, breathing slow, easy, deep. He was alive. That was enough, worth all the lakes and mountains and churches which were not named after her. Little Canaan. The land of milk and honey.

"However," he added darkly, and there was always a however with Duriel, in situations like these, "You have nearly succeeded in killing yourself again. You are the most worrisomely full-hearted, idiotic, careless woman I have ever known and furthermore -- "

"I am the most idiotic, full-hearted, careful woman who has ever lived," she contradicted she squirmed close enough to put her head against her husband's hip, "Or the luckiest. Either way, it is not something to complain about."

He pulled her close to him, and the hand on her back still as a stone, weighty as granite, but she knew it was too much for him to think about living without her. It was too much for her. One of his hands was running slowly through her hair, like a shuttle on a loom – soothing her, soothing himself. She closed her eyes, "What matters is that Buboe is safe now. I only wish I'd had more to give. I feel like I'm getting so old and worn, Duriel -- "

He grunted and it was dry and mirthless, "You are forty three. Tell me that again when you're past a thousand."

She shook her head against him, cheek to the tweed of his trousers, and then took a deep breath, speaking again tentatively, "There's more, isn't there? About Buboe."

"There's more," he said simply, their phases and shifts as easily read, one to the other, as if they had been plain-speaking books.

There was always more.

*

In a way, it was much worse to see him.

Azrael was right; all of his son's pretty platinum curls had been shaved off, leaving him naked, quiet, slightly swollen underneath the hospital lights; he was stuck full of wires and drips and shunts like a particularly well-stuffed Christmas pudding of fruit, kept alive by tubes feeding, wires monitoring his brain. Buboe's brain had switched off like a light; there was nothing, hardly any reading, a dead cell. People had had their life support switched off for less.

His wingspurs stuck out near the wires like little bundles of pale pipecleaners, rather droopy, flat and limp in the wake of his coma. Azrael could look at the terrible bandages on his head, the bandages on his body, the terrible bruising and pitting; but it was agony to look at his son's face, quiet, unthinking, lips pale and eyes hollows. Buboe just looked solemn and frail; half live, half dead. For long moments - despite the nurse's recommendations, despite everything - Azrael just sat in his plastic chair, not feeling Jibreel's hand in his, and stared. His wingspurs didn't quiver; his mouth didn't move; he just stared and stared and stared and stared, ate himself full and sick with the image of Buboe, beyond the reach of anyone in the room.

Almost anyone.

Jibreel did not think of the stacks at the natural history museum and beetles and pinboards when she looked at her little boy. She did not allow herself the disconnectedness of such thoughts. It had been one thing to think of her little boy as a dissected bird, pinned open on a table, when he'd been closed off from her on the mysterious stage of the operating theater, but now he was here, spindly and broken and knitted back together, taped and tubed and so very small. She wondered where they put his hair. She would have liked to have kept some of it. She remembered her mother frocking him up in sailor suits and how Eden had even put little ribbons in his pale hair, and what a beautiful little girl everyone had told her she had. She swallowed a whimper and her fingers laced slowly between his.

"Do you remember, baby?" she heard herself saying, trembly and soft, "Do you remember Christmas when you were two years old? It was when Papa-Tristan was still living, do you remember? And he came in from Turkey and brought you a pony. A splendid little Palomino pony. And he and mum got into the hugest argument, because he said that you should learn to ride immediately, and she said that two years old was too young. She was so angry. She almost beat him half to death. Treated him like he was one of her sons more than her father. And then he told her that maybe if it was all right, that you should wait to learn to ride until you were three years old, and she kissed him."

"Remember Christmas when he was three?" They'd shut out the morning light from them both, drawn the blinds down so that the sunshine was muted, diffusing. Azrael had to swallow before he could go on again, clearing his voice; they had been sitting here ever since the doctors had let them in, since Buboe had come in from recovery. They had to talk, they had to talk, they had to bring him back. They could bring him back. Of course they could bring him back. "When he liked the paper more than the presents. You liked the ribbons more than anything else, didn't you, kid?"

"He did. He ate half a spool of the tinselly kind when I wasn't looking. I thought I was going to die, but then he spit it right back up, and all that cranberry pudding all over Uncle Eden," she leaned forward, her hair swinging over her shoulders. Her braids were coming loose. It had been a long time now, that she'd been on her feet.

"I think everyone's vomited on my father." The robot-music of the machines was terrible to hear; beep, beep, beep, Buboe's heart a symphony of monotones. Azrael looked at him, and thought about cranberry pudding. "He was such a good baby."

"He's the best baby. The very best baby. He's never minded when I did everything wrong or backwards, when I was putting his diapers on back-forward and feeding him that terrible organic baby food," she smiled faintly as she leaned her head against his shoulder and tried not to think about what it would be like if this were the end of the patchwork of memories that included her little son, "Sometimes it was very hard, but it was always so very good. He was always smiling, like he knew something I didn't."

"I know he knew something I didn't." The frustration on Azrael's face was palpable now, visible, art in motion. Rotten bananas. The sun shone on bits of Jibreel's hair, making it chestnut; he desperately looked at it, not wanting his son, not wanting the tubes or the beep beep beep. "I was waiting for him to grow up and tell me."

She drew away from him and paced a slow circle around the bed, eyes dark and wide, reading at the tubes and shunts as if they might have been antennae or wing coverlets on her cocooned boy, as if at any moment his back might split open and something new might emerge, radiant and beautiful. If the frost was too hard, some insects never came out of their pupae. She tried to distance herself from Azrael's frustration, as if this might make her own hurt less, "I know Mister Bun misses you very much. I'll get him for you the next time I go home. You'll like that. When you come home, we'll both get books and curl up on the couch and we can take turns reading to him. Won't that be nice? I'll even read Winnie the Pooh if you like, but you'll still have to do the voice for Piglet," her voice wavered as if she'd been jerked hard backward, whiplash, "I can't manage it."

Her once-lover put his head in his hand, eyes closed, smelling disinfectant and sounding dead. "It's a wonder he's not too old for Pooh, being eight."

She tried desperately to bite off the finish of that statement in her head, what if he never has the chance to outgrow it? But it came out anyway and made a part of her liquid dead. She did not realize she had said it aloud until Azrael stood up.

He crossed over to the window again, leaning against the cool glass, his hair falling out of his braid; he'd never looked so tired in his life. "I've never done this before," he murmured, and it wasn't apparent as to who to. "I don't know how to do this. Jibreel, how could we ever have thought we knew anything without knowing this? I thought we were idiots before, but know I know it."

She closed her eyes and spoke very quietly, "I have lots of experience with death, Azrael," and then her voice dropped off as if she were still a child, alone and lost,"But I don't know what to do when it isn't me who's dying."

"I've watched hundreds of people die who I cared about and I never did this. I thought it was natural. People died, you got over it. I thought it was the byproduct of being an angel. Being me. I had to be strong." His voice was a whisper. "It was never my son."

She didn't look at him, only went back to her chair and pulled it closer to the bed, "Three little mice," she murmured softly as she began to slowly untie her already loose braids, "Three little mice sat down to spin. Pussy passed by and she peeped in. 'What are you at my fine little men?' 'Making coats for gentlemen.' 'Shall I come in and cut off your threads?' 'Oh no! Miss Pussy, you'd bite off our heads.' Do you remember? We saw them last year at the Tate and you wanted to take them home." The had also seen Da Vinci's Burlington House Cartoon that year, in low light, soft charcoal – Anne, Maria, Iesus.

Jibreel was in a place far beyond him now. Somehow, she'd managed to make herself even thinner and gaunter after a night of worrying; she looked as if she was going to join Buboe at any moment, collapse, crumple to the floor like a broken butterfly. Azrael stalked around the room like a large black cat, checking machines, reading charts; as if he hadn't read them already, memorised everything in them, devoured greedily the mathematics of how his son's brain had quietly gone to hell.

He wanted Gabriel. He wanted, suddenly, the father that everyone said Eden had been but Azrael had never had; he wanted Samael, he wanted anyone, he felt trapped in some kind of horrific labyrinth as Jibreel launched into another story about Swallows And Amazons and hiding games with the rest of the Eisenreichs. All he could do was watch, impotently.

As if she had been summoned -- speak of the angel and she doth appear -- Gabriel fluttered in as if she had not just spent the previous fifteen hours in bed hooked up to a slow IV drip. She was wearing fresh clothes, and her hair was twisted up into some kind of complicated knot on top of her head. She had a tray in her arms with several Styrofoam cups and an orange in the middle of it. Her eyes settled on the little boy for only a moment, going slightly glazed in a way that might have been only shadows dancing over her face as she stepped into the muted sundapple of the window.

"I've brought you all some juice," she announced pleasantly, settling her tray on the small metal table by the window, "I couldn't find carrot juice, darling," here she was apparently addressing her empty-eyed daughter.

The angel of clemency had also appeared, white coated and silent, near the door. He was carrying a new and thinner sheaf of papers between the two dominant fingers on his left hand. He was motionless except for his eyes, which tracked his wife's movement as she floated around the room, straightening things. She caught Azrael in the corner of the room like a little corgi and herded the much larger man back to the window and the juice.

"I've brought orange and grape and grapefruit and apple. I hope there's something that you'll like, Azrael darling."

He stopped mid-herding; rather abruptly, he put his arms around the angel of life, like a little boy who had just had terrible news about his puppy. Even his hug was limp, terribly needy, reeking of tiredness. He was so grateful that he could have vomited it up like cranberry pudding and tinsel ribbon and it was just a crusade trying to ignore the voices, the voices that said it didn't matter, who pointed at the chart statistics and said better off dead. "Aunt Gabriel," he said, into her hair, getting a slight mouthful of it. "Gabriel."

She put her arms tightly around his middle, as if he were one of her little boys, all grown up now and towering over her, "It's all right, moppet. Everything will be all right. You'll see," she hummed something that might have been Mozart or the first few bars of of a Gershwin song, "I didn't beat the holy hell out of the Creeping Darkness only to be defeated by a butcher's truck." She rubbed his back as if he might've been her Rachel, so irate with colic that he'd nearly driven her to self-mutilation. "We're all together now, aren't we? It will all turn out. He just needs a little time to rest and pull himself back together," she bodily tugged him over to the window and gently suggested he seat himself against it while she flourished assorted juice cups at him, "Apple for you, Jibreel darling? Oh, no, that's probably too processed. Orange then. Or Grapefruit."

If Jibreel heard her mother bustling about she gave no sign, but Demi didn't seem worried by this. She turned back to Azrael, a flurry of goodwill that left him little time but to follow her suggestions, and she offered him a cup, "Is grape all right with you, or shall we send for something else?"

He took the grape wordlessly, knocking it back in one thirsty gulp; at least, even if he forgot to eat and drink, Azrael ate and drank on command like a talented poodle. He took the grapefruit; he moved to Jibreel's chair and held it there, her indentured servant, steady and waiting for her to take it. "... How long have you been up?"

It was waiting game, self-torture, not to run and snatch the papers out of Duriel's hands. He kept flicking his eyes to them, quickly, surreptitiously, like a snake's.

Gabriel's eyes traced the little cup of grapefruit juice held untouched before Jibreel's face and for a moment her mouth trembled, and she was no longer in this year, but some twenty seven before, with a different little girl in braids who'd refused everything offered to her. But then the look was gone and she'd moved to take the apple juice to her husband, looking over her shoulder at Azrael as she went, "Only a few minutes, moppet. Time enough to get dressed and arrange a few things. When I first woke up I felt like I'd been kicked in the head by a donkey -- and don't tell me I don't know what that feels like, because I do. I can thank your idiot father for that one as well." She turned her attention to the little pack of bandages and pale flesh and spoke clearly, her low caramel voice pitched so it might fill the room, "If you'll wake up, you can have the apple juice now, Dewdrop. Otherwise I'm going to give it to your stodgy old grandfather and we'll order more for you later."

For a heartbeat, Azrael looked at his son, as if the order would make him wake up. Stillness. Beep, beep, beep.

He still determinedly held the Styrofoam cup before the younger woman; you can lead a Jibreel to juice, but you cannot make her drink unless you keep on trying. "Aunt Gabriel, you were just in the wake of a seraphic ascendance. You shouldn't be up. You're probably dehydrated. Duriel, you should take her home, once you get past the reporters."

Duriel grunted and looked as if he might have said something further, but Gabriel put her hands on her hips and faced Azrael squarely, "I've had four liters of saline in fifteen hours thank you. In case you didn't know, Doctor Sefiros Hawkesby, that is quite a lot. What I should stop for, really, is to use the bathroom. I have been in the wake of seraphic ascendance twice more than anyone in this room. The day that your scorecard tops mine, moppet, then I will be glad to take your advice. Until then, I am taking my own," she finished this rather stony comment by smiling gently and crossing the room to tug on his braid, "Your concern is duly noted."

He gave her a rather lopsided smile, cup still extended to Jibreel as if he was a restaurant robot. Go on. Take it. You need to keep up your fluids. "I know I'm not good at it yet."

Jibreel finally looked up at the cup dully and took it into both her hands, eyes focused on it as if it were a deeply interesting representative of the solifugid family. Gabriel squeezed Azrael's arm and then bent to look at her daughter, hands on her knees as if she might have been a short-stop during the ninth inning, "Pet, you've taken your hair down. Did you mean to?" she asked gently, splaying her fingers through the braid that was now fully loose.

Jibreel blinked slowly and then looked from her juice to her son, eyes half-closed, "Mama," she spoke very softly, whisper fine as down, "Why hasn't he woken up?"

Gabriel curled around her daughter as if she were some sort of fashionable stole, holding her deep and safe as she spoke very gently by her ear, "He's resting now, baby-mine. He's resting because I had to knit him back together out of crickets and beetles and field mice. We'll tell him that when he wakes up and I bet he'll laugh. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails," She ran her hand through her daughter's hair and rocked her as if she were still a very small child and Jibreel didn't fight her, just let herself be held, still and quiet.

Azrael had to look away again for long moments, one hand at his eyes momentarily, wiping everything away - his expression, his eyes, the heat in both - to move closer to the Man in the Iron Labcoat. One hand was open for the folder; composed - like a volcano topped over with creosote - he placidly met Duriel's gaze. Everything was starting to crumble. It was only the first morning and his arms were gone, his legs were gone, he was blind and paralyzed and yelling as hard as he could. For one of the angels of the line of Death, he handled it as if it was an ugly and strange weasel. "They started the therapy already?"

Duriel passed over the sheaf without acknowledging that the younger man had said anything, "It's his SPECT scans and analysis from the tests this morning. I doubt they'll start therapy for a few days at least. Not at four on the Glasgow scale."

Gabriel looked up at her husband and for a moment her look was unguarded worry, but then stood, hands still in Jibreel's hair and announced, "If we leave you two gentlemen alone with the baby for a few minutes will you promise to be good to one another? Jibs and I would like to go on a little walk." Jibreel did not look particularly if she wanted to go on a walk, but she said nothing to protest her mother, who had taken her arm.

Her nephew nodded only distantly, flipping through the scans as if they were lover and mother both. He didn't even notice or acknowledge their leaving; he read through everything on file twice, squinted at the new scans like a poverty-stricken hobo looking for the Virgin Mary in a quickly drying puddle, and the ex-Lord of Pain was privy to his expression crumbling and crumbling towards unguarded misery as the news was made clear.

Gabriel brush-passed her husband, digging indiscreetly into his front pocket for his keys. He didn't move until after they had left, although he inclined his head slightly to watch them go. For a long while afterwards he said nothing, simply watching the other man paw through the scans as if they might have some deep secrets to impart. He moved to the foot of the bed in a few measured steps and then stood there, looking at his only grandchild.

"At four on the Glasgow scale there is a seven percent chance that he will shift into a vegetal state where he could stay for months. That is the good news," he said, clipped, dry, almost as if he were not talking to Azrael himself, but more to the empty room, "I have never had much faith in percentages," he turned his head and squinted at Azrael for a moment before continuing, "Where my wife is concerned," he abruptly shifted topic, "Orfiel was right. Thomas Albert Kincaide is currently in protective custody."

"Several months at a rate of brain degeneration that would make him even more of a vegetable than he might be now." They were both talking to the room in general, maybe the dust-bin, maybe Buboe. "Protective custody will save him from the mob but not the manslaughter charges. In my day - " What was Azrael's day, anyway? - "they would have given him the guillotine."

"I have no doubt," Duriel said keenly, "That he will be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law," he turned back to his battered grandson before continuing, “Human law, animal law,” he said it as if there were not much of a distinction to him. He laid a hand on one stockinged, blanketed foot, "However, there are times when the law cannot be long enough or harsh enough for adequate retribution." He stopped and considered the moon pale head of the shaved child and then muttered, "The guillotine is a child's fancy. Too clean and therefore useless for any purpose."

Azrael's smile was terrible. "Not if you use the guillotine starting from the feet up, Duriel."

The former Lord of Pain raised his eyebrows over half lidded eyes as if his grand-nephew were a lap dog who had done a particularly charming trick, then he folded both hands in his pockets, ancient and terrible and kept in check by the bishop that was his petite wife, "You would require a matter of hours," he said simply, "I would be satisfied with nothing less than weeks," he shifted his eyes away from his grandson to the gray walled buildings out the blinded window, "Regardless, Thomas Albert Kincaide will not live to see next Sunday. That is not my word. That is simple fact."

The other angel mouthed the words rather than said them, stared them rather than verbalized, put into his mouth all the rage and hate from five thousand years down:

thank you.

*

Duriel's office was where it had ever been, the fifth floor of St. Sebastian's hospital. The staff elevator had been replaced after one too many red-eyed interns and shock-tired ER doctors had nearly plummeted to their early deaths. As she steered her unresponsive daughter into the clean and antiseptic smelling space she could only wonder if her husband missed it. A young resident waved for them to hold the elevator, but once he got close enough to see the spurs behind the ears of the two near identical women, one copper brown and slender-plump as a mouse, the other taller and sparer, hair the color of an old penny, he took a half step backward and waved them on. Demeter Serraffield chose to read that as an act of charity rather than one of fear. She did not think her daughter was cognizant enough to make such a distinction.

Demi avoided the main corridor and nurses' station, shepherding her daughter in front of her like an occasionally belligerent lambkin who wheeled to grimace like a rebellious cat. She didn't want to be here. She wanted to be there. She wanted to be with her son. She wanted desperately to be near Azrael. Her mother was humming Gershwin again, something about lovers in bloom, blissfully ignoring her openly bared teeth.

It was a rattle of keys and then she was being pressed into a familiar leather chair, her mother bustling about to turn on the lights and fiddle about in drawers, as if this might have been her office to straighten and not her husband's. Jibreel sat with her head bowed until her mother came back with what she had been searching for: a worn wooden boar-bristle brush that Jibreel could remember from ages back when she'd been newly three and her mother was always steering she and Rachel into their father's office for quick brush-ups and hair-fixings, face-wipings, clothes-straightenings. The sorts of things that mothers always do. Her mother began gently hitching her other braid loose, singing softly to herself.

" -- Girls do love to be in love and boys do love to marry -- "

The brush was one Demi had had for ages, lost to her for a time, part of her personal detritus that Duriel had collected over the year and spare they had stalked each other around nightdark London. Later, in the sweeter times, it had served a useful purpose, always being on hand to tug the tangles out of her children's hair whenever they were stranded at St. Sebastian's looking like they'd been wrestling calves in farmyards (which occasionally, her youngest son had). Her fingers pulled the loops out of her daughter's hair and it came away smooth and rich as silk. Jibreel's hair had always been finer than her own. She carefully grasped the spill of dark umber near the scalp and held it firmly while she pulled the brush through it, so she would not tug at her daughter's head.

" -- and it's one, two, three, four, five, and six, ring the bells of Aberdovey."

Jibreel said nothing. Gabriel sighed.

"You have so much of your father in you that it often makes you very difficult to deal with," she announced to the room at large.

Still Jibreel said nothing.

"Your business is your own business, Jibs. It always has been," Gabriel said softly, pulling a ribbon from around the brush's handle, tied and coiled there for a dozen years at least. She began to gather her daughter's hair to plait it, "But I wish you didn't have to make everything so difficult for yourself. You don't deserve this. He doesn't deserve this."

"It's not that simple," her daughter retorted, ducking her head and forcing her eyes shut as she nearly howled. Gabriel kept braiding as if Jibreel had only delicately sneezed.

"Things are only complicated when you make them complicated," she answered, fingers swiftly weaving up the plaits as they had the evening before woven up thread and crickets and ants and voles, all into the brain of her grandson.

"You have never understood me," Jibreel said bitterly, hunching forward and pulling her knees to her chest, pill bugged and sullen hurting.

Gabriel pulled the ribbon from her mouth so she could speak more clearly, "You have always thought so," she said somewhat tiredly, "But I do understand one thing that you don't, Jibs, and that's that he's going to need you. Men are very funny and sometimes backwards stupid in knowing what they need. He'll probably be keyed up neurotic looking after you, like you're his little star of Bethlehem, but he's going to need you to hold him when he gets lost, or I'm afraid -- "

She did not say what she was afraid of and Jibreel did not ask.

"Look after him Jibreel," she said again, smoothing her hands over her daughter's long braids, "It's what we were put on this earth to do. You're temperance. Temper his wrath and temper his hurt. Maybe when you have," her mother smiled, weak and tired into the top of her daughter's hair as she leaned in to kiss it, "You'll understand a little of me."

And she had nothing to say to that.

*

There is eventually a time when the parents can do nothing, and you send them home.

A word in the ear of the doctor; a word in the ear of another doctor; a word in the ear to Matthias Eisenreich, with Gabriel being the first in the deeply retarded game of Chinese whispers anyway. It was not request: it was forbidding command, and as expected, neither liked it at all. They both looked stricken, as if they were being recommended to leave their son in a ditch somewhere; it was obvious that they had been gearing themselves up to live or die in plastic hospital chairs.

No, said the father. I'm going to be here when he wakes up.

And you are a fool if you think that is going to happen in the first twenty-four hours. Go home.

No, said the mother. No, I won't.

And her mother said: There will never be a time when he's not watched.

And her father said: Jibreel, go home.

(So, thus defeated and too tired to fight, they went out to the parking lot.)

Azrael looked at the encroaching dusk of St. Sebastian's in the night-time, the still-warm summer evening of London, and at the hollow-cheeked and thin-handed woman beside him. Then he took the keys out of her bag, and opened the car, and put her in the passenger seat and him in the front; he clicked her seatbelt as if she was a baby, and then his, and adjusted the rear-view mirror from where she usually had it. His voice was steady, scratchy, deep; it was final, quiet, finished.

I'm not leaving you.

And Jibreel said, for good or for ill: All right.

And that was that.

*

The flat was strange, dark and unknown. Of course, there had been times in the past when her baby's room had been dark. Her mother was always begging to keep him and sometimes Jibreel found herself so avalanched under with stale bread sculpture that she was given to oblige, and then sometimes he visited his father for weekends to listen to him softly strum out guitar melodies, but then she'd always known that he was safe and well, tucked into a warm bed, snuggled up with his favorite rabbit and worn little Marvin the transvestite Monkey. Now her flat seemed cold and empty, devoid of all life, including her own.

She followed behind Azrael as if he might have still been her mentor and she his ever attentive student, as if the door he unlocked was not hers, but his own, as if the darkened space was his territory and not hers. He could not find the light switch. She flipped it for him and then wordlessly left to shower again, leaving her clothes a littered trail on the ground as she went. She did not care if he saw her. She was far beyond modesty. Besides, it was nothing he hadn't seen already.

After her shower she wrapped herself up in a terry robe, a bundle with two thin legs sticking out from the bell. She left her hair down if only to rebel against the thought her mother had left her with. She found him standing awkwardly in the kitchen, looking at one of her beetle terrariums.

"You can take a shower if you want. There are clean towels in the cabinet above the toilet."

"Later." Azrael was looking at the beetles as they lumbered across their little unnatural terrain, bright-backed, like little moving jewels. Calasoma scrutator, strategus aloeus, chrysina gloriosa. His hair was falling out of his braid at a rate of knots; he kept on having to push long strands aside, glowing deep burnished cinnamon or amber or blackrust underneath the lights. He straightened up to look at her, wet from her wash; as if on cue, the microwave beeped angrily to remind him that there were contents inside.

"I made you some soup," he said, by way of explanation to the beeping, moving to the microwave, brows furrowing in that helpless way they always did when he handled machinery. Azrael always seemed as if electronics was about to elude him. "I found it in your cupboard. Canned chicken. I put jalapeños in it."

(A very many long years ago they had both wrapped each other naked in a blanket and shared things out of cans, having not eaten for full hours, spoon and fingers on pieces of diced pear as they warded off the cold. Buboe was conceived under one of those blankets, maybe, with the taste of fruit still heavy and rich on her tongue.)

She choked slightly," You put jalapeños in the chicken noodle soup?" She bent her head and drew her hand to her face but she could not hide the fact that she was laughing softly. She struggled to get it under control, "I -- Thank you, Azrael. It was a very nice gesture," he looked so bewildered that she had to lean against the counter to catch her breath.

"I like it spicy." He looked totally and completely lost, as if the concept of chicken soup plus jalapeños just because you like spicy is not right was one that was totally and completely lost on him. He wore the slightly pained expression of a man who is in love with the takeout menus below his phone. "There's another can, Jibreel, I can make another right away. Did I do something wrong? Aren't you meant to put them in? Do I put them in after it's cooked?"

She looked at him, standing so unsure, ready to take a hundred cans down from the cabinet make them if she asked, jalapeños or no jalapeños, and she smiled at him, "No, no you haven't done anything wrong," she assured, "I just," a laugh quivered inside her again, "I just don't usually put jalapeños in my chicken soup. It's all right," she said, moving to hand down bowls from a high cabinet she had to fetch a stool to reach, "Perhaps it will be interesting."

They put the soup into two bowls, and he buttered some fresh bread that she had bought to actually use as an artistic prop; the soup proved to be incredibly interesting, and even Azrael had a rather peculiar expression as he took the first spoonful. He abandoned the spoon to try to mop it up with some bread, instead; he stood opposite her at the kitchen counter, chewing.

"How is it?" he asked, rather too hopefully.

She obediently took a taste, lowering her face to her spoon so she had less chance of spilling it on her robe. One taste was enough. One taste was more than enough. She schooled her features and tried to make a face to fit a gourmand, "It's very -- It's very -- " she was still struggling with how very it was when she looked at him again and then ran her hand through her wet hair, laughing gently, "It's very horrible Azrael. But I love your horrible soup. Thank you."

He pushed the plate of bread-and-butter towards her, looking gloomy, still attempting to manfully sop up the soup with the bread and eat it that way. There was more than one reason to focus on the bread; because when she laughed, she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life, he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss all over her damp hair. "It tastes like lighter fluid, Jibreel. I think you can put this in petrol tanks. Please eat the bread. I'll eat the soup."

He proceeded to attempt to do just that; his facial expressions were delightful. He looked as if he was being sodomised by a rhinoceros. A zombie rhinoceros. "I wasn't going to tell you in case you got angry, but - he - us - we always got take-out."

She sat on the counter and took a piece of bread like she was told, nibbling tiny bits of it to appease him, as if she were a mouse, "As long as you aren't constantly eating fast food, then I don't mind," she said, and tried very hard not to think of how much she wanted to curl up still in his arms, still as a little stone over his heart; how much she wanted to take his hair down from that braid and feel it against her bare skin again, down her spine, over her stomach, "Fast food can cause liver failure faster than alcoholism," she said, as if liver failure were really a concern for either of them, or for their boy. If his liver failed now, it would not be from too many hamburgers.

"It's Thai," Azrael said, as if that made everything better, as if Thai food was the bastion of both health and good eating. He was still fighting the soup and looking as if it was too close to suicide. The soup even smelled poisonous. "I always made him eat all the vegetables. And I taught him how to use chopsticks. We only ate bad pub food when he came to, well, my gigs."

Somehow, talking it over with her - the knife to his heart - was a knife to his heart he could bear; he could bleed, he could leak plasma, he could die in front of her. "Eat that whole piece."

"But I don't want the whole piece."

"You haven't eaten with me in the whole time..." He looked for different words. "... you've been with me. If you don't eat it, I'll make you eat it."

She frowned, "You can't make me eat it, Azrael. I'm not hungry right now. Maybe I'll eat in the morning."

"I can make you eat."

"You can't," she insisted stubbornly, "I'm not eight years old any more."

"Jibreel. Don't make me make you eat."

She was looking mutinous; he ripped some of the bread from her portion and looked her in the eye, squarely, contemplatively. His hand started to twitch; and then Azrael calmly made the age-old 'aeroplane' movement in the inexorable journey from hand to bread to Jibreel's lips.

It was too much. It was just too much. She laughed so hard she threw her head back and banged it on the cabinet and went slightly cross-eyed, stunned and still laughing, as if she didn't know anything else in the world that she could do. She didn't.

He had half-stood when she banged her head back; Azrael relaxed as she laughed and kept on laughing, but there was an edge to it, a keen sort of piercing without humour or light that he didn't like. He looked at the soup; and then he committed it to the deep down her garbage disposal, with nary a regret.

"You're overtired," he said, half-gentle. He was going to make her eat in the morning. He had to. "I'll put you to bed, Jibreel."

She stopped laughing all at once, as if her voice had died there, and just watched him, cornered. He shook his head; what answer to the question it was, if it was answer, if there was question, was not readily apparent.

"I'm sleeping on the couch."

She slid off the counter and stood in front of him, looking thin and veined as a katydid, "I -- " she started, but then she didn't know where to go, as if all the words had left her, so she just put her arms around his waist and ducked her head against his chest, squeezing him as hard as her little bird body would allow.

He didn't say anything, not even how she hadn't voluntarily cuddled him like this in all the time that Buboe had been walking on the earth; he wrapped her up in his embrace, smelling like sweat and leather and Azrael, and for a moment the world rotated on its axis and it was just Them and nothing else in one symbiosis of grief. Then he put his arm around her waist and gently herded her off to her room.

She crept into her bed without protest, changing her robe for an old shirt, and bundling up in the covers like it was winter and she needed a place to hibernate. She felt ancient and so very tired that her eyes were starting to tear at the corners just from exposure to the air, "There are blankets in the linen closet in the hallway," she said to him, "You'll need to take one of the pillows from my bed. There aren't any spares."

Azrael didn't answer immediately; just pulled the blankets over her, and tucked her hair out of the way so that she wouldn't lie on it as she curled up in its depths. He closed the curtains, switched off the lights, only turned on the bedside lamp to throw her into childhood again as it shadowed her face; his hand hesitated over her foot, a breath of a touch. "I have sedatives if you can't sleep."

"I'll count bark beetles," she said.

"Knowing you and beetles, that'll just keep you awake. Goodnight, Jibreel." He took one of her pillows, and he hesitated by her door. "I'm down the hall if you need me."

"I'm glad," she said tremulously, and then regretted it.

*