the third day

*

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
She's just like a maze
Where all of the walls all continually change
And I've done all I can
To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands
Now I'm starting to see
Maybe it's got nothing to do with me

- john mayer, "daughters"

*

Twenty-seven years previous the man whom all legal documentation called Matthias Eisenreich Senior had told the angel of life rather adamantly that sleep was not among the requirements of a greater Lord of Hell. In this day and age, without an empty, gaping maw in place of his soul, he no longer found this statement entirely true. He still had more stamina at a stretch than most cross-country Olympic athletes, but when the day was drawn and thin and dawn threatened on, the angel of clemency found that even he needed some rest.

He was more realistic about the ramifications of running himself until he dropped, certainly more realistic than his fairy wife was. She, he was sure, was only going home when ordered because she had enough to busy her there with the organization of the home front that she did not have time to dwell on the fact that she was not at hand to organize things at the hospital. This, she left to him, with a wan smile and fingers that laced themselves over his stomach when she embraced him from behind.

Given such responsibility as managing what there was left to be managed concerning the life or death of their grandson, he could not allow himself to run aground on pikes left hidden in the snow, so although he would have been infinitely more at ease stalking around the hospital and generally glowering at everyone, handling what there was to be handled with grace and precision, in the thin hours of the morning he retired to his office and sat back in his great leather chair with the lights off and he listened to the hospital breathe, candleflames all around him flickering on and flickering out as time crept slowly around the dial of his pocket watch, laid open on his desk.

It was not sleeping, not really, but it was a measure of peace, there in the dark as he sat very still and counted out the beats of Fur Elise, which came faintly from a small jeweled music box that his wife had given him on their first Christmas.

Of course, it could not last.

There was a light rap at the door and he was not even granted the quarter to move before the door was pushed open by the man legal documents called Sexton Delaney. Raziel leaned slightly on the handle and then slipped inside the door, closing it behind him and blinking in the gloom. The only light came from outside the window, which was drawn and closed, covered by blinds.

Raziel shrugged, "It was open."

"It was locked," he denied, rough as gravel. He damn well knew the state of his own door, kept so that interns and residents and worst, the ground feeding press, could not ambush him here in his personal sanctum. Frankly, he thought a little judicious violence would do a great measure towards making him feel better as well as keeping the media under control, but he did not even have to ask his wife to know that she would gently disapprove. Or perhaps not so gently. There was a great deal of filed iron in her now, built up from the years of fighting and storming and suffering, and she was just as likely to bite as to roll over quietly now, when she was riled. It was a development that he found deeply interesting on many levels.

The elder man's smile quirked for half a second as he held up a single silver-gold object on a thin brass ring: the Rosicrucian key, bladed like a tiny axe and smithed over five thousand years past to turn any lock, "Oh, but not to those who bear the key, Duriel." He palmed the key in one graceful motion and then had tucked away into the inside pocket of his waistcoat. Sexton Delaney was a respected member of the gentry and several exclusive literary circles. He looked the part. "Peter is downstairs with Harahel. When I left them, I believe they were arguing over whether to read Blake to the boy or to read Sullivan. Perhaps the racket itself will wake up the child."

Duriel closed the music box on his desk without a word, sure beyond doubt now that this was not a social call and that Raziel would eventually get to the points he wanted to discuss. Until then, a few more minutes in the dark, even with Raziel, were a few more minutes of peace.

Raziel had moved to one side of the office. He was leaning casually against a bookshelf and thoughtfully studying the family portraits on the wall which were updated relatively consistently. The newest one contained the small, blond grandson, dressed as some sort of musketeer for a school recital. After a long, slow moment, Raziel turned his piercing eyes on the man whose acquaintance he'd kept for over five thousand years, avec souls and sans souls, through blood and murder, holocaust, Hell's dominion, brandy, and Merlot.

"It is worse than I anticipated," he said flatly.

"He is clinically brain dead," Duriel answered, his voice low and dark and echoing visions of things done to the living, like pulling the wings off a butterfly, but these butterflies lived, nerve endings burnt to surge-overload, even after being drawn and quartered, lived through the grace of suffering, "The press -- "

Raziel raised one finger, a swift strike meant to silence the other man, " -- that is not what I was talking about."

Duriel was silent, eyes narrow, carnelian so deep they nearly burnt. If the angel of arcane mysteries was privy to information that was not at clemency's disposal, there was no point in asking for it. Raziel was currently preparing to deliver it up in his own time, in his own way. Keenly aware of familial bonds that were still taunt and drawn even across five thousand years, if Raziel thought he had insight into the situation, he would offer it. This was a truth Duriel was certain of -- Raziel was viscerally aware of the bonds of blood.

After a few moments, Raziel turned his back on him and stood reflectively staring at the door.

"Have you ever considered the nature of your great-nephew, Duriel?"

Duriel made a low, unpleasant sound in the back of his throat and Raziel waved him off impatiently.

"Not personally. Archtypically. You have welcomed the angel of apocalypse into your family."

"Jibreel's decisions are Jibreel's decisions," Duriel said shortly, "And I respect them."

Raziel cocked his head to look at Duriel over his shoulder and his expression was very serious, "I know you do," he paused, "There are some things, perhaps, that are impossible to avoid. Serendipity in its finest form. Fate and destiny become like unto art."

"Raziel," Duriel had no patience at the moment for one of Raziel's wandering and critical sermons on the universe at large.

"I've been querying," Raziel said abruptly. Just who Raziel had been querying, Duriel did not have to ask, "They are agreed that the outlook is not positive."

Of course. With Raziel, it was always the immediate retreat to a higher authority, as if he felt inadequate in making such decisions on merely the basis of his own experience. Duriel had never had that luxury, had never bared that weakness. "Raziel, I do not need outer fiends to tell me the state of my grandson's health. I have been privy to all the test results."

Raziel wheeled on him, looking harried and pressed to the edges, frantic, frenetic, as if he did not know what to do with himself, "Still, you do not understand. Who is your grandson, Duriel? What is his name?"

" . . . he doesn't have a name. When he was born, Jibreel couldn't -- "

" -- she could not read his name inside him the first time she held him," Raziel finished agitatedly, beginning to pace from one side of the rug to the other, "Counter to every other angel, nigh unto Metatron. That child is not named because he is unnamed. He is The Unnamed."

Duriel frowned, the lines in his face sharp and unforgiving, "So you have said before."

Raziel was gesturing bombastically now, as if by movement he could contain his statements, lessen their import, bely the truth, "'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation.'" He continued to prowl, "'Behold, I make a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been wrought in all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord; for it is a terrible thing that I will do with you,'" He stopped suddenly and folded his hands into his pockets, "The English is a passable translation of the Hebrew, and the Hebrew bears only a vague resemblance to the original prophecy, but that is the gist," Raziel laughed and it was not a pleasant sound, raw and edged hard as steel, "Azrael is your apocalypse of fiery wrath. The fire that rains from heaven to smite the earth, the flood that covers even the highest of mountains. With him, the four horsemen ride. This is a fact we have known for ages, since he was born. That the world would perish in fire. Ragnarok, Loki, and Fafnir," he slumped and seemed very suddenly tired, "But then, as things often happen, we were granted a final mercy. That mercy is the Covenant."

"The Covenant," Duriel answered snappishly, like a cornered animal, "Is my grandson."

"'Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals," Raziel said, by way of agreement, "Azrael was made to stone the world dead in fire, should the time ever come for such. That child," he said slowly, "That child was meant to stitch the world whole again. Azrael is its final death. That child is its resurrection."

"He is brain dead," Duriel said abruptly, steepling his fingers, "There is nothing that can change that. Not even the wishes of my wife."

Raziel had stilled, arms folded across his chest, "Ask yourself, angel of clemency, what will become of the world when your great nephew succumbs to his anger and despair and brings armageddon down on us all and there is no Covenant to answer him?"

There was nothing. He had nothing in his ancient catalogue of experience with which to answer this. He turned his attention to Raziel, focused, like a hawk about to drop should the other man provide a less than satisfactory answer, "What is it that the voices say?"

"They say nothing, Duriel," Raziel hissed, hands folded as if he were at altar, "They say nothing because Apocalypse barring Covenant was never intended to happen."

*

There was only so much time you could spend lying in bed counting her eyelashes; Azrael woke only a little while after the birds and had shaped Jibreel's face in the thin light, over and over, still and stiff on the other side of the bed. Eventually he couldn't bear it; he very carefully rolled off the bed, feet soundless on the carpet, and walked to the kitchen to douse his face in water. Sleeping next to her was - something he'd hardly done, not without all their smug pretentious teenage (he had regressed so badly) knowledge that what they had done hardly anyone would like at all; they had come together almost out of rebellion, but then found their bells ringing for each other. In the end, that had been the start of his long fall down; her, the bells, every inch of her body and the way she moved her hands. Jibreel. Jibreel in essence.

He'd looked in his son's bedroom, and thought about sitting in it to look at the football posters and the books and the prints and the slightly leaking collection of felt-tip pens; but it wrenched him senseless and he sat in Jibreel's study. Sick with sleeplessness, he pulled the first thing out of her stack of accounting books to read; a little dull leather bound diary, thick and worn.

Curiosity killed the angel of apocalypse. The book turned out to be nothing about accounts.

-- Mater and Pater don't understand how I feel for him, neither Rachel, neither Samand'riel, neither Zadkiel, neither him himself; standing near him is to slit my throat and nothing to bubble out, I want him like a coffin wants a body and the flowers want the sun and dry brush wants fire --

There were a few lines of very bad poetry. He didn't know if he wanted to smile or not. Things have changed since I was your mentor, Jibreel.

He flipped a chunk of it, towards the end, another three years when Buboe had been born and was a small golden-haired toddler with a big grin. When you looked into the Abyss, the Abyss looked back; he couldn't stop devouring every composed word in her careful handwriting. It wasn't like him; he respected Jibreel's privacy devoutly, like a religion, because it was. She had always been private. The thoughts they had shared when they were younger had been such their own secret that he never told another living soul, and never would.

... nobody can hold my attention and I can hold nobody's. I do not let the men they send out in droves get to know me. I am the princess on the top of the glass mountain, and nobody has any golden apples or shining armour with a horse. Does anyone care about what I have to say? Or who I am?

I am only Gabriel's daughter, a photographical accompaniment. Let them come. I have nothing to say to them...

He shut the book, feeling burnt and strangely unnerved, and didn't exactly know why.

*

There were times when one needed a shower. Having woken once in the night, curled against Azrael's side, bundled in all the blankets like a little mole and with the fingers of one hand nestled in the belt loops of his trousers, Jibreel had known that this was such a time. Sleep had lulled her silent again, but when she had awoken again, alone and dull white in the morning light, she had untangled herself and squirmed away from the empty hollow he'd left without words, burrowing under the blankets like a little worm until she emerged, feet first, at the opposite edge of the bed. Then she had gone to shower. By not looking for him, guilty as a thief, by not speaking to him, she knew she hurt him, drew lines down his flesh as surely as if she had done it with a knife.

Here, now, so close to him, with the echo of him still in her bed, she could not bear to do either. It would lay too much of her open, bare and hollow for him to see. So instead she fled like a coward, into the bathroom where she locked the door behind her, as if she thought he might follow.

Under the water that ran at first as cold as December, she tried to think of other things, like the yarn and string bundle that was her fractured little son -- and not his father, burning hot under his skin and looking as if he might eat her heart whole and beating, looking so fiercely that she would beg for it later, being consumed, the consummation. Sometimes the world seemed so dark and empty, and he was nothing if not the space to fill her up -- synthesis to her antithesis. She had dreamed of him too many times in that bed to wake up beside him, small and hollow and aching. She wanted to wash it all off, the guilt and the wanting, wanted to wash it away so she was left serious and clinical and thinking only of beetles and the brain patterns of her son, his only marks on her, his only claim to her the fingerprint bruises he'd left on her shoulders from holding her too hard. There were times when she did not like life because it was too complicated. She would have preferred endless algebraic sets to the wild and indiscreet mess of fractal theory that had birthed her Jibreel Eisenreich and that had eventually led her down the path she walked, to the bed where she had slept with that man.

"Sicut in caelo et in terra," she murmured to herself as she turned the valves of the shower closed and the water died to a trickle.

"Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus," was the called answer, familiar, easy, as if Latin had been his mother tongue.

She wrenched down the towel and wrapped herself in it tightly, shaking, as she swept back the curtain. Caine was idly sitting on her sink, watching her like a cat, as if it were perfectly acceptable for him to be comfortably sitting there while she stood, mostly nude. He always infuriatingly made it seem that any room he tenanted was his sole dominion and that you existed in it at his pleasure and his whim. The bathroom window stood open, and the chill morning air raised goose-bumps on her flesh.

"What do you think you're doing here?" she hissed, as softly as she could manage, unwilling to alert Azrael and be accessory to bloodshed this early in the morning.

He smiled faintly, "Why, I've come to see you, Kiddo."

"You couldn't have come in the front door like a normal person?"

"Like a normal person?" he chuckled softly, throatily, "No. Not at all. Also, I suspect that our brother has little interest in seeing me. I don't want to upset him."

"He's not my brother," was all she could think of to say, standing there and dripping on the tile.

He smiled, thin lipped, "By association," then his face seemed to draw into a strange expression, "I know I'm not welcome with the family proper -- Philistines. It's why I haven't come. I know that no one wants me there," he focused on her and his eyes were as deep and verdant blue as her mother's own, "I've come to ask you to take care of my boy."

"He's not your child," she raised one hand to her temple, as if in attempt to ward off the eventual migraine that was always the product of talking with Caine who ordered the world through his Absinthe-colored-glasses as he saw fit.

Her half-brother leaned forward, as if to get a better look at her, chin propped on his palm, "You can't prove that."

She watched him, empty and half-lidded, "It is biologically impossible."

He slid off the counter and crossed the space to corner her in the shower, his strange, sooty-black, sloped swoop-baked swallow wings folded awkwardly in the tight space, "Stranger things have happened, mie Maria pietatis."

He stooped to kiss her forehead, strangely gentle and pious, and then repeated, "Take care of my boy." He brushed the wet hair out of her face and added, "Take care of yourself."

The once nephilim-having-Become turned from her suddenly and wrenched an ash black secondary from his back and pressed it to the skin over her heart, "Sympathetic magic," he explained, his grin cockeyed, and then he had gone out the window and into the dawn, free-falling the eight story drop backwards.

She watched until he caught himself with lately flared wings and then closed the window and drew the sash.

*

"... and so Rogue is getting all up ons with Magneto and you can hear all the shippers cry from here, and everybody saying 'oh no that is so gross' but between you and me, Buboe, I don't think it's that bad. I mean, your grandma and your grandpa are the hottest things ever and your grandpa is totally the Old Man of the Sea, so there's nothing wrong with Magneto and Rogue anyway, is there? I mean, Gambit can't even take her on a date. She can only ever kind of get jiggy with Colossus or Magneto. Anyway, so in the next panel - "

Azrael made a cough in the back of his throat. Shaktiel's bright head looked up from the comic book and made a sort of oh; she waved at him, at the guitar in his hand, and held up the piece of reading material. "Didn't see the time. I'm going off shift already? This sucks, Buboe is the best listener ever. We were doing the Age of Apocalypse hardcore which is kind of funny if you think about it, but I'm going to move him on to Silver Sable. I think he's ready. Him and me, we understand the plight of Rogue and old dudes. He also gives charming relationship advice that I will put into practice."

"... Thank you. I think."

"Don't mention it." The butterfly put the comic lovingly back in a plastic wrap, giving it more care and tenderness than she often showed members of the human race. "Where's Jibs? Hey, have you seen my little sister? Mum said she was coming over and I'm dropping her home, she probably got lost in the cafeteria. Or the morgue. I hope it's hard to get into the morgue. You'll find things getting lost."

"Jibreel's with her mother in Duriel's office. I am pretty convinced Yomvael is not in the morgue."

"You better hope so or you'll be missing bodies." Shaktiel stood up and squeezed one of his son's stockinged feet. "You wake up soon, little guy. You are no fun to dance if you're in a coma. Nothing to dance. When you're out I'll show you the comic that totally and definitively proves Remy is massively gay."

"Mia Vanessa Moonflower Naaktgeboren, the hour of departure is at hand," came the strangely echoing soprano trill that announced Yomvael as directly behind Azrael. He jumped slightly and sidestepped, as if unwilling to have the keening angel of the unsolved behind him.

"Why didn't Mum get a puppy?" Shaktiel asked the world in general, plaintively, shouldering her bag and eyeing the smaller black-haired angel as one might do a horrible spider. "You're harshing my buzz. Okay, say bye to Buboe and we'll be off. You haven't seen him, have you?"

She slipped to stand next to Azrael, giving him what she obviously thought was a sly look and elbowing him slightly. "Jibs looks really cute lately, doesn't she?"

He was completely floored, and panicked for a moment that in the desperation to join the Eisenreichs Shaktiel had done an Orfiel and gone gay. "... Yes?"

"Hee hee."

Yomvael was being ignored. Yomvael did not like being ignored.

"I have no interest in seeing The Unnamed," the dark haired girl announced, folding her arms almost smugly over her chest, "Frankly I am delighted by his current state. It gives me more room to work."

Azrael stared.

So did Shaktiel, for a moment, in deep mortification; then she casually drew her hand back and gave her sister such a ringing slap that Yomvael's head turned with it.

"If it was you in there, nobody would come to see you, you little misbegotten Dalek," she said calmly, with a slight emphasis on gritted teeth and capital punishment. "I'd make you apologize to Azrael but I don't think he deserves to have to see you, freaktard. We're going. Now."

She yanked one of Yoyo's hands in hers; she muttered something that sounded like a garbled apology at Azrael, tripping over itself, uncharacteristically uncomposed. He watched her drag her sister bodily down into the corridor, brushing his hair off his forehead and carefully taking seat in the place where Shaktiel had sat; his son lay as peacefully as if it hadn't happened at all. For some reason, he felt terribly disquieted, even though he knew that Yoyo had nothing to do with it and that he would have killed her already if she had.

"Well," he said, drawing his fingers up to fret, "that's why we don't let you two play together. All of Raziel and none of Raziel. We shouldn't have worried, should we? You always were just happy being with your mother."

G-minor. "Don't tell anyone, but I know the feeling."

Puff the magic dragon...

*

Gabriel never liked having discussions like this one. She hadn't when she'd been walking the pavilions, five thousand years ago in the soot and the blood and the rain, and she did not like it now when she sat cross-legged on the corner of her husband's desk, fidgeting with the small gilt music box that sat by her hip, her daughter before her, seated in the heavy leather chair that sat before the desk for visitors, the same chair that Demi herself had sat in the first time in this office, longer years ago than she was keen to admit. The passing of the years was always blurring for her, and when faces in the mirrors didn't change at all past a certain point, it was easier to pretend that her children really did grow up like weeds around her and it was not the weight of time that drew her down into the sand.

Rightly, Gabriel did not like having discussions like these because she felt that she should always, by nature and law, be on the other side of them. She was always the one arguing for the slim chance, dragging hard on the thread of hope like she was a champion bass fisherman, ready to haul that bastard into the boat and beat it with a paddle if necessary. When no one had thought it could be done, they had rolled the creeping dark.

So when it came to unbeatable odds, Gabriel sorely did not like being reasonable, because being reasonable was often being defeatist.

But she had seen the charts and statistics herself, been privy to the reports spread over Duriel's desk, making his office into a war room and painting the enemy who stood outside the rider on the pale horse. She had run her fingers over all of it, reading the SPECTs and the EEGs and understanding intrinsically what they meant even if she could not have explained the science behind them. Once in 1905 she had entertained friends at a party for hours by pulling random bones out of a box while both thoroughly drunk and blindfolded, and naming not only the bit, but also the Linnean name and the general species description. This was a similar party trick, although notably grimmer.

The child, her little golden-haired fairy grandchild, was not in a coma. That was a euphemism that the press had put to page and that Azrael had taken up as his ward against the encroaching dark.

The angel of the covenant was no longer even Glasgow four. He was Glasgow three. He was beyond that. It had already passed around in whispers. They were only stalling the inevitable.

The child was clinically brain dead.

The halo and spurs were keeping the medical establishment at bay at the moment, because the public still did not fully understand or comprehend the nature of the angelic, but it was only a matter of time until the doctors circled and wanted to turn the little boy's life support off.

In a way, it was better. He was so small and broken, and even with what she had done -- she had had time to consider it now, and it seemed cruel to keep his soul pinned in a body with a still brain when he might simply still to sleep and then wake up beautiful and live some place else, a new little boy with a new place. Life and death were always walking the road together, hand in hand, or at least elbow-in-ribs. Death was a part of living, and the reincarnation that came as blessing to all of them was something that should not be denied.

No matter how much it hurt to let go.

Somehow she had to convince her daughter of this. Azrael she had no hopes of managing at this point, but if Jibreel were convinced, then Gabriel felt sure that she would be able to still the rage and terror and frustration that was boiling inside Azrael. She would have to. Gabriel was now working damage control. Azrael was a problem that needed to be contained, and the only containment she had any faith in at all was the drawn little bundle of limbs that sat before her curled in the chair.

"Jibs," Gabriel began softly.

She looked up, wary, "I thought you said we were waiting for father."

"I just thought you might like to hear a little bit about it from me, baby," Demi felt herself slipping backward, away from the prissy Englishwoman and into the deeper heavier weight of Gabriel as she had been through five thousand years. This was a bit beyond 'darlings' and Demeter Serraffield, "Since I was there to weave him back together, knot him out of the green. You know I can see it. I thought you might want to hear a little from me first, before your father gets here."

Her eyes were large and dark, with circles under them like coffee smears, like she'd gone to bed wearing mascara, as Eden did, "No. I'd rather wait."

"Jibs," Gabriel sighed, shaking her head in loss and uncertainty, unable to do anything but call out her daughter's name impotently.

"I know where I stand with my father," her daughter said flatly, closing her eyes and sitting in quiet repose. The implication then, was that Jibreel did not care for the position she stood in with relation to her mother. Gabriel picked at the weave of her slacks, worrying a small hole in them.

They might have stayed there for ages, each unwilling to relinquish ground that they had claimed as their own, had Duriel not turned the key in the lock and let himself in. He carried another sheaf of papers. She looked up at him hopefully, as if by sheer force of will and wishing could smith miracles in these days past the Creeping Dark, but he shook his head imperceptibly and she quietly schooled her features back into gentle comfort -- the only face she'd been wearing in public recently. Her muscles were beginning to ache around her eyes.

She tracked her husband as he circled his desk, deposited the file, and then came to stand behind her, one hand on her shoulder. Jibreel still sat with her eyes closed, so Gabriel gave her husband an imploring look, lost and unsure, and he slipped his fingers once through her hair and then cleared his throat.

"Jibreel."

This time her daughter opened her eyes slowly and looked up without rebellion, only a tiny kind of hurt that made Gabriel want to wrap her daughter up in fresh smelling linens and sing to her until she fell asleep, until Gabriel could drag all the hurt and pain and fear and despair out of her, until her baby could rest still and peaceful. She dug her finger into the hole in her slacks and cursed herself and her inability to say anything that would do anything except make the pain deeper to the quick, more impossible to struggle against. The ball had been called and held. The time for fighting had passed. She could almost let herself drift as she listened to Duriel speaking behind her, implacable as cold iron. It was a time for stillness.

It was a time that required her husband's concentration, his relentless, still logic that mirrored Jibreel's own.

It was a time when Gabriel did not know what to do with herself.

When it all had been said, Jibreel crawled into her father's lap and sobbed like a child, unkempt, messy, and like unto vomiting, and Gabriel could do nothing but go away into the corridor quietly and stand by the door of the empty room where she'd once held the corpse-frail hand of her dead daughter.

*

The days were all blending together, slowly, subtly, sinking like water into sand. It seemed to be long moments of watching his son on a hospital bed and then finding himself on Jibreel's couch, with Jibreel, waiting for the sun to fall and nothing happening. Azrael was all burnt out inside, exhausted. If this is what dying felt like, he willed it to all be over quickly.

Measure my days in cups of coffee. Measure my nights in terrible infomercials on Jibreel Eisenreich's couch.

Maybe it was like this in the days of the Holy War; when you looked quiet dire horror in the face and turned away, when you had to, when you sat there shell shocked and desperately reached out for anything else in the world so that you could feel it on your skin. They'd watched a lot of Lifetime movies. They'd eaten a lot of candyfloss. He couldn't even carry his son in his thoughts at times; the moment Buboe entered his brain, the horror began, his mind switched on for real. He and Jibreel were numbing themselves. It wasn't going to work for long.

Every day was the trenches and this was their night. Mutually assured destruction.

He'd started growing a beard. The stubble was reaching a bad length. Azrael knew he had to shave it off; beards did not look good on him, and the hospital staff were starting to look at him as if he was a drunk hobo. None of his family looked good with beards. Duriel could pull off a neat goatee; Samael looked as though he was sprouting spider-legs, when Eden forgot to shave the the fuzz that sometimes grew on his face. He couldn't remember if Rachel had attempted to grow anarchic facial hair back in the days of the wars between bands; whatever the case, it probably hadn't been pretty.

Azrael put one hand on his face. Like he cared about beards.

"What are you thinking about?" That was Jibreel, small, thin and brittle, slim, long-fingered, owlishly quiet as she sat beside him on the couch and they watched the third airing of the marvels of the Wondo-mop (TM).

"The black Astroturf growing on my face."

She laughed softly and leaned out in front of him, peering up into his face at the stubbly growth, "Well, I suppose it isn't too obscene, if you're fond of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle," she offered by way of consolation, raising her hand to brush her thumb lightly over the stubble as if it were a marvel -- like frogs raining from the sky or the sea turned to blood.

That was much too intimate; his breath on her fingers, the itchy reality of him, smelling like coffee and slightly like sweat and the curve of his lower lip caught as she moved her thumb. "I look like a Visigoth, Jibreel. You could use the lower half of my face as a medieval spear trap."

"Well," she said thoughtfully, thumb still playing over the bristles that pricked the pad like the needles on a thousand storybook spinning wheels, "The world needs ditch-diggers too. And spear traps. It is good to be useful."

"Do I have to be useful with half the world's gorse bushes located on my chin, Jibreel?"

She smiled perhaps half-genuinely at that, and her eyes went hazily half lidded as she settled her hand, fingertips pinpricks all their own on the curve of his jaw, "I'm not going to protest -- "

Suddenly it was like too many things were happening too quickly, although in reality it was only one thing that happened too quickly, broken into a thousand facets, like a mirror thrown on the pavement. The sound died in Jibreel's throat. Her eyes rolled back, too much white. They closed. She went stiff. She went limp. She pitched sideways.

Seizure. He caught her before she could roll off the sofa entirely; then they were down on the floor, a better workspace, him moving her into recovery position on her side while every alarm bell in his head rung. Azrael could barely hold her, suddenly all thumbs, shaking like a leaf; all he could hear was his own hissed swearing, amusingly in Russian. "Jibreel! Jibreel! Jibs - Jibs, please no, not now, please - I can't handle this - don't do this to me - "

Pulse. Pulse pulse pulse. Eyes: pupils not responding. Pulse - it was there, thready in her wrist; Azrael stumbled over the furniture in his desperation to reach the phone, knocking a sheaf of paper off the sideboard, letting it flutter down to his feet like slippery rain. He had to dial the number twice; the first time, his fingers mashed the number pad, calling nobody in either heaven or hell; he had to take two very deep slow breaths and do it once more, half-weeping in frustration and fear.

The phone picked up before it had time to properly ring once, "Jibreel darling, do you need something?"

"It's Jibreel." Azrael sounded like he was halfway in hysterics now. "Gabriel, it's Jibreel, I can't wake her up, she's thrown a fit - "

On the other end of the line, Gabriel caught her breath all at once and then her voice seemed to steady, calm and reassuring, "Azrael, tell me exactly what's happened."

He took another deep breath, slightly shuddery, words coming at only a slightly less breakneck pace. "She was touching me on the cheek and then her eyes rolled back and she almost fell off the couch her pupils aren't tracking and her pulse isn't steady and I've checked her over but do I call the ambulance because it doesn't look like a normal seizure or a normal fainting fit - "

There was a soft sigh and then Gabriel interrupted him, her voice rolling with a soothing pitch, "Azrael, hush, hush. It's all right. She's laid on hands. I expected this would happen. It was just a matter of time. She never really had a fine control over her touch. Don't worry baby, she's going to be fine. She just needs to rest. I would wrap her up in a blanket and make sure she has some liquids when she wakes up."

"She - she what?" He sounded totally and utterly bewildered, though coming down off his panic that Jibreel was not in imminent danger of dying. "I don't - what did she do? Did I do it? She wasn't touching me in... She wasn't..."

"Darling," Gabriel said gently,"It's happened because she was worried about you. You haven't done anything wrong. It's just that when she touched you, she must have on some level wanted to stop you from hurting. Just do as I say and wrap her up and keep her warm," here, Gabriel paused for a moment, as if she was considering, "Or -- "

"Or?" Her greatnephew sounded depressingly eager.

There was a pause and then the sound of a door closed quietly, "You know that transcended angels have an energized cellular regrowth rate. We heal damage swiftly and things rarely permanently scar. What Jibreel has done is thread loose her greenlines. I think that it's something that all the women in the family do. If you wrap her in a blanket and keep her warm and still, she'll come back together on her own, but she'll come to herself faster if her body knows it can draw greenline from you -- off the top, as it were."

There was a long, embarrassing pause; it was obvious to Gabriel what kind of things were going through Azrael's head, and it took him a few moments to try to get the euphemisms out. His braincells had worked furiously on the theory involved in healing between one person and another, especially life angels, and sadly come up 'embarrassing'. "I... Well, I... How much skin, Aunt Gabriel, are we talking about?"

If a smile could be heard over a wireless connection, then Gabriel was smiling. It was a tired smile, perhaps, but it was still a smile, "Anything will do, Azrael, so long as it stays constant. And she has to be the one who initiates it."

"I. Uh. Okay." He sounded, however, deeply grateful. It was only now - now that the panic was gone, and the fear, did he realize what was happening; his body felt as if she had cleaned him out, made him light, taken away all the sleep from his head and the pain. It would come back. He still felt it, dully; but she'd given him light, warmth, everything, subtle and sweet like sugar on his lips. "All right. ... Gabriel, why did she do this? She's hurting just as damn much as I am."

"I can tell you why I would, do, and did," answered the angel of life, "But I cannot answer for my daughter. Perhaps she will be able to tell you herself when she wakes up."

"I'll go be with her right away." His voice was quiet again; but it didn't carry the same shadow as before. The temporary all time high. "Thank you."

"Thank you, Azrael," Gabriel finished softly, "For taking care of my child. You can call if you need anything else. I'll be awake."

He muttered something so quietly and gratefully incoherent that she couldn't make it out; and then the phone was clicked down, and that was that.

She'd laid on hands to give him a moment's peace.

Azrael stripped the blanket from the bed, and after a moment, took his shirt off; it was easy enough to set her in his lap and lie down on the carpet with both of them wrapped in it, hoping that the movement of her there was enough to count for her instigation; he buried his face in her hair, and thought ruefully that the peace mattered nothing if she wasn't there to share it with him. It was just about a matter of guilt; but he took her gift within himself, and thought about every time he'd held up his son, from the cradle to the operating table. Buboe was the penultimate of what they had achieved together. He was the candle.

She felt soft and still next to him, braids spilling over to his shoulders. He'd redone them for her, when she'd taken them out; sat there very carefully weaving her hair back into two long ropes, tied up at the ends, safe and secure. He loved her with her hair out. It was always crimped, chestnut silk, obnoxious and lovely and aggravating and intensely erotic. Azrael. Stop. It was even harder with the aftereffects of her touch on him; he was at peace, too much at peace with the thought of her in his arms, sweet and easy where despair had thoughtfully clamped down the way his body reacted to hers.

It wasn't the time. It would never be the time. It was not an option.

But, oh God, he wanted to make the hurt go away.

"I'm here," he muttered to her hair. For good or for ill. "I've got you, Jibreel."

*