the fourth day

*

this name is the hair shirt i wear
and this hair shirt is woven from
your brown hair
this song is the cross that i bear
bear with me
bear with me
bear with me -
- be with me tonight
(i know it isn't right)
be with me tonight

- bare naked ladies, "what a good boy"

*

It was usually only Christmas that brought him home. Christmas and Easter and sometimes other sporadically occurring lulls that cropped up with no regular pattern. Usually he had jobs lined up for months at a time, day after day and week after week of sleeping on dirt floors, or lumpy motel beds, in dirty little European garrets, spending his days either hip deep in the dismembered pieces of undead monstrosities or wandering among poltergeists and spirits, hands in front of him, fingers splayed, doing his best to to settle them into their final rest. In these days there was no Creeping Dark, but there were plenty of vile things still about in the corners of the world, and Rachel felt somehow comforted by the fact that he was a very real solution to the problem. Whether he was calming the restless dead with his presence or calming the walking dead with the sharp end of his polearm, as his sister had said, it was good to be useful.

The world also needed Rachel Eisenreich, Freelance Hunter of the Infernal and Spirit Guide.

He was rarely, if ever, not busy, so his trips home outside of holidays were rare. He always looked forward to them when they did come -- barring a little unavoidable violence -- because it was a chance to eat his mother's cooking and sleep in his own bed. It was a chance to rest without the prospect of leeches in his underwear or a midnight zombie uprising. For Rachel, going home was a blissful sort of retreat into a fairyland of square meals and people constantly looking after him.

He had never really thought that he would ever regret a chance to go home.

That was, of course, before the call.

After the call, there had been no questions about it. He had maelstromed through a Bolivian cemetery like a hurricane, leaving ghouls and ghasts in so many meaty pieces and leaving his client to clean up the aftermath. He would have commonly stayed to supervise, lest zombie bits were be improperly disposed of. As it was, he'd left detailed instructions concerning incineration and then had gone straight to the airport to catch his plane without even stopping to wash the grave-stench off of himself. The other passengers on the flight had been less than pleased.

In Houston he'd had a layover, and enough time to rinse most of the filth off before his non-stop to London-Gatwick. In Texas he'd been grateful for two things: the first, that he had not been born seraphim, so that he had no visible wingspurs to alert the press as to his identity, and secondly that America seemed, as always, very much uninterested in the problems plaguing the world at large. While England sat rapt beside its television set waiting for news of his sister's child, the top story on airport television seemed to be the triumph of the Chicago Cubs after an embarrassing losing streak. He drank juice from a machine and ate four bags of candy-coated chocolates as he waited for his flight. By the time he actually boarded, he was so exhausted that he promptly fell asleep on a young Indian boy, who, unattended, delighted in going through Rachel's bag until he pulled out a box containing several hissing, clicking beetles and then what appeared to be a small mummified animal paw. He was so upset that a flight attendant removed him to a different part of the aircraft entirely and Rachel was sent to spend the rest of his flight in the bulkhead seat with no one around him. He stretched out and slept the sleep of complete exhaustion -- the one his mother knew well -- head against the window and mouth slightly open, snoring softly until the plane touched ground in England and he knew he had no more quarter for rest.

He somehow avoided the press at the airport and hailed a taxi. However, he was not clever enough to have himself dropped at the back of the hospital, so he was forced to bull his way through reporters with his shoulder and his suitcase, making very fine use of several refined Portuguese curse words that he'd recently picked up as well as the infinitely viable 'No comment.'

He'd then had sense enough to take the staff elevator up to his father's floor and ask the head nurse there for directions to his nephew's room, thus bypassing much of the rubbernecking and morbid curiosity of the hospital's main information desk.

At the door to the CCU room he had put down his suitcase, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and had been at a loss. He was not sure what he would say to his sister when he saw her, what he could do at all. He had come from halfway around the world to see her without a thought, but now that he was here, he was strangely shy. He had been gone so much in the years since the screamy little blond tot had been born, he didn't even know if he had rights to be there. Jibreel might not want to see him. He did not want to intrude, uninvited, on her grief.

So he stood there, outside the door, and leaned against the wall, staring at the floor as he thought about what he might say to her.

He was saved from thinking for long moments by the opening of the door; what came out purported to be his cousin and the father of his nephew, but it was Azrael all blurred around the edges. There were deep smudges of shadows underneath his eyes, and badly-shaved stubble, and droopy dark wingspurs; he looked like the kind of thing that Rachel would have to shove his polearm into and send back to the grave, the walking dead, the dark-eyed horror of the Bolivian kirkyard.

"Rachel," he said, and to the other man's surprise, there was a very obvious note of grateful relief in his quiet voice. Azrael and he had never gotten on from the start; there was too much snobbishness in the angel of the apocalypse for Rachel, too much idiocy, too much emo. "Nobody told me you were here. Jibreel will - she'll - she'll be glad to see you."

He ran a hand through his whitelocked hair, so much like Rachel's own, looking slightly embarrassed for having the audacity to open the door. "... I was just going to get some cigarettes and some coffee, you know?"

Rachel thought about Azrael for a long moment, thought of all the times they'd traded blows in the past, thought of how his kid sister had looked in a maternity skirt with her school bag slung over her shoulder. Then he thought of his nephew, smile as bright as a new penny, golden as a duckling, and he thought of his sister at Christmas with her boy on her lap, always with eyes too deep to read, and he thought about what his family meant to him. Then he slowly drew one hand out of his pocket and offered it to the other man. After a moment of hesitation that was probably more shock than anything else, Azrael took it, and they shook hands not like competitors before a match, but perhaps more like friends.

Rachel found his voice at the back of his throat, "It's good to see you, Azrael."

If anything, for a split second, Azrael looked even more desperately grateful; and that meant something was wrong, because Azrael had the blood of Duriel in him and was as proud as a lion. They dropped hands; but the tension was gone, dissipated.

"It's good to see you. I hope your flight wasn't too bad," Azrael added, sounding like Gabriel. "The last time I went anywhere from Bolivia they put me in freight. Do you, uh, want some coffee? I get it down the hall, it tastes like motor oil."

Rachel wrinkled his nose once and seemed to relax a little bit, "Well, I did scare the testicles off one kid, I think, which is good for something. I slept most of the way. I think the in-flight movie was one of Tabris remakes," he made a disgusted face, "I think it had a ballet sequence. Anyway, I'd love some coffee. Even the kind of shit that's bound to be on tap here. I take it black." Of course he did, "So Jibs's in there?" he asked lamely, eying the door with some trepidation, "I know this probably isn't the best time, but I've brought her some beetles. I think they may spit acid."

"I don't think there's ever a bad time for beetles with Jibreel," Azrael said honestly, because there probably wasn't. The fact that both of them took their coffee black as sin also did not elude him. They both groped desperately for conversation topics. "Especially ones that spit acid. And, yeah, she's in there. We just went back on shift. Shift watching him, I mean. We watch him most of the day."

Rachel's brows clouded slightly, "Look, I don't want to sound totally and completely like an asshole, but coming on shift? You look like shit. You look like you need something stronger than coffee. Take a break, man. Have a cigarette. Do whatever," he studied the door, "I'll go see her, go see them. Give her her beetles. I'll handle it for a few minutes."

Azrael obviously hesitated. "I'll just have a quick cigarette. I swear I inhale the damn things. I promise. I'll be back soon, don't let her... I mean, if she worried..."

He obviously pulled himself out of it, shaking his head; he nodded at Rachel, tight and composed. "Coffee. Black. Cigarette. I'll be back soon. She'll like the beetles."

And then he was off, down the corridor, slouching slightly with his hands in his pockets as he meandered to find the coffee that tasted like motor oil.

Rachel watched Azrael shuffle off down the hallway and again thought of the walking dead. Then he exhaled slowly, picked up his bag and nudged the door open with his foot. He was greeted by what was an audible kind of silence, marred by the the sound of two people breathing almost in sync and punctuated by a multi-layered symphony of electronic chimes, like a bad synthesizer song played on a midi keyboard with only two fingers.

The kid -- the kid didn't look like he was properly alive, not really. He looked more like he had been fused with alien technology, too many tubes and shunts, like he might have been the next stage in human evolution if human evolution had suddenly taken a distinct turn for the comatose. That it was his nephew there was no doubt, and that left the last foot to fall somewhere in Rachel's stomach. Until he'd seen it himself, he had kept hoping that it had been exaggerated, that it was somehow not true, that it had not happened in his family. This was his sister's Buboe, the little golden-haired sprog, shaved naked and bare. He wasn't even breathing on his own.

Jibreel hadn't look up when he'd walked into the room. Tall and dark-haired, he apparently read so much like Azrael from her periphery that she didn't even need to look up to check. Or perhaps she didn't care to look up, too absorbed in running her thumb over the back of the kid's splay-fingered hand. She looked drawn and thin and tired, more than she ever had at any point that he could remember. She'd always been thin and pale, eyes too big, wrists too small, breakable almost until she hauled off and socked you in the stomach, but now she was almost spiderweb wispy, gaunt, with circles under her eyes like charcoal smudges. She was huddled over in her chair with what he could only assume to be Azrael's jacket around her shoulders.

If Azrael looked like the walking dead, then his sister looked like a lost spirit. He sat his case down quietly and looked, for some reason, at her feet. She was wearing black Chinese shoes. It was so like her that he wanted to grab her up and hold her right there, pick her up and turn her upside down and shake her until all the hurt and suffering came out, squeeze until there wasn't any pain left and she could sit, maybe a little empty, but a lot less raw. But then, he never really knew how to go about doing something like that, so instead he put his hands back in his pockets and said what you say when there's nothing else to say.

"Hey."

She looked up, all eyes in her thin face, and she smiled very faintly.

"Hey," she answered.

And he went to sit beside her.

*

They'd eventually sent Rachel off to go and eat in the cafeteria, because he had watched like a trooper the endless tableau of nothing happening; Azrael sat on the plastic table beside Jibreel and picked out chords on his guitar. When he didn't, they both drowned in each other's silences; the pauses; the conversation that was even more halfhearted than before she had woken up from her lifecoma to find him shirtless and sleeping with his arms around her.

There had been something in her eyes that had burned him. He couldn't quite meet them again.

Azrael set down the guitar, plunging them headfirst into the gloom; the metronome of Buboe's life support machines was no rhythm to play to, anyway. He looked too small; about five years old, which probably would have distressed him, if anything at all distressed the angel of the covenant. Nothing ever seemed to. He - as Jibreel had said - loved everything; he always would; he was perfect, he was the only thing that was perfect in the whole wide world.

"I think he looks better today," he said, and startled himself by speaking. "His ribs must have healed."

She looked at the backs of her small hands and then looked at her son. Maybe he did look a little better. She couldn't see like her mother did, couldn't see anything at all really, almost as if she were blind, "It's good then, that that's happened. That's a good sign."

"It is a good sign."

It seemed to be strictly rehearsed conversation topics with them now, that could be easily answered and not disagreed upon; the weather is nice, yes. The coffee is bad, yes. The hospital is cold, yes. They were enormous echoes of one another, a cave, a scream from one end to the other that ribboned around over and over again.

"Did you like your beetles?"

"Coleoptera: Nitidulidae: Nitidulinae: Amborotubus clarkei, I think," she said, looking for a moment at the box by her feet which still hissed and clicked from time to time to remind the room that its contents was in fact alive, "I don't know though. They could be anything. They could eat human flesh for all I know," she sighed softly, "But yes, I like them. Beetles. What about you? I guess I've never really thought to ask before."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with beetles," he said blankly. Echo, echo, echo. He looked at coleoptera: nitiduliae in their box, making an un-beetlish racket, and then once more at the bed. "I think Rachel said they spat acid. I suppose some beetles are nicer than others. When I was little, Acheliah fed me bugs. When she wasn't rolling around in the flower beds. I always used to think it was poor of her."

"Poor of her to roll around in flower beds, or poor of her to feed you bugs?" she asked quietly. There was a deep part of her that could not imagine Azrael being young, toddling, eating inappropriate things. It was beyond her.

"I was fine eating the bugs. I didn't like her rolling around. It was messy, and she took off her clothes, and it was embarrassing. Everybody looked at us." The angel of the apocalypse thought about it for a moment. "I was three. Mama used to take us to your house and give me to Duriel. I don't think we liked each other much, even then."

"You and I, or you and my father?" she prompted again, eyes half out of focus as she thought very hard about a rug before the fire and Yule parties and somehow tried to reconcile the dark toddler with the man beside her. She faintly remembered finding him a little tiresome when she had been so grown and adult and very much five years old and very much the cleverest thing that had ever walked on two legs, although at least then he had been quiet and solemn, even at three, even as he was now, and that had suited her tastes far more than his rosy sister who had eaten a box of her chalks.

"Your father and I." He quirked one of his lopsided smiles at her, the ones that nowadays didn't meet his eyes. "We had the same glare. You and I... I think I used to pad after you. Acheliah liked you. Acheliah liked everyone. And then she used to show off her ruffly panties. That was embarrassing, too. It's hard when your twin sister is Tigger in a shorter skirt."

"It means that people like her," Jibreel commented absently, "Who doesn't like Tigger?" She did not comment that she did not really like Tigger, "I think it is perhaps easier than being Eeyore."

"Nobody likes Eeyore."

She curled her toes inside her shoes and looked at the floor, "I like Eeyore."

He was even quieter, half a whisper. "You're the only one."

She didn't look up, only moved in her chair until she was leaning toward him and laced her fingers through his, her palm cool, her bones thin.

"Maybe I am."

*

The Eisenreich household was the same as ever; a little more subdued, a little less raucous (especially where Eden was concerned) and a little dimmer. They'd told Samand'riel and Zadkiel to pick up some grocery items for dinner; that would generally keep them out of the way until they had finished talking. Zadkiel and Samand'riel managed to have trouble finding the baking goods section. It was surefire.

They didn't even have to arrange a meeting; there was a chorus of shared glances once Rachel came home from the hospital, his bag in the hallway, in-between Eden doing the dishes and Gabriel making coffee and Duriel next to the kitchen sideboard. It had only been half an hour before Rachel's mother had gaily announced dire need for dinner ingredients; with the puppies gone, and Petya sulking in his room, it was just them. It probably would have been more somber if Eden had stopped crunching biscuits loudly. Then again, it probably wouldn't have been.

Sometimes the strongest people in a family crisis designate themselves; it felt like a warped, terrible episode of the Superfriends. Eden quietly designated himself Aquaman.

Rachel leaned in his chair, rocking it back on two legs, his head against the wall before he dropped it again with a noise like a gunshot, the resounding echo of heavy legs against hardwood. He leaned in over his hands, "So. They don't look good, do they?"

His mother had moved to sit on the counter, her legs dangling as if she were a little girl. She had folded her hands in her lap, "No, they don't look good."

"In fact, they look like crap," Eden volunteered warmly, dipping his ginger biscuit into his tea and crunching on it. Rachel was obviously Batman, and Gabriel Wonder Woman. Duriel was Doctor Assmunch, an original character addition. "They look like you should bloody well wear garlic an' recite a Hail Mary before they lurch at you an' eat your brains."

"Garlic doesn't work on zombies. It's Holy Water that you need," Rachel said promptly, then he shook his head, realizing how deeply unimportant an observation that was in relation to the conversation at hand, "Have they even been sleeping?"

"A little," said Gabriel, shaking her head, "Not enough, I don't think. Not enough to do anything but keep them from collapsing. It's been very hard on them, what with the baby in a coma -- "

"Gabriel."

That stopped her and she looked down at her hands, caught in the same sort of false comfort that they had all clung to, at first. She cleared her throat and tried to keep her voice steady, "Well then, let's be plain and square. The baby is clinically, legally brain dead." It really surprised her how quiet and contained it had come out, like she was ordering beef at dinner. She wanted to sob until her throat was empty with the coughing. She didn't.

Rachel let out a soft grunt, "There it is, then."

"Buboe's dead." Eden sounded deceptively calm; his mouth was half-in his tea, and his eyes tracked all over the room. Maybe Jibreel was the Thing. Wait, that was Fantastic Four. And Buboe was - Buboe was - "Jibs and Az are on their way, they're nosediving. I saw that look before. Saw it on addicts just about to OD. And the problem is - apart from them topping themselves - is that my stupid bastard of a son ain't just gonna OD himself. He's gonna bubble that needle into the vein of the world's arm. This is what we're here for, right? 'Cos my son's going nuts, and if you ain't seen if then I'm blind in my eyes."

"It doesn't need to happen," Gabriel wrung her hands emphatically, pulling her wedding ring off and then absently putting it back on the wrong hand, "We don't know for sure that it will. Jibs can -- "

"Jibs can my ass." It was surprisingly gentle; Eden tentatively reached out and brushed her on the shoulder, like a butterfly's wing, fleeting. "Jibs can't stop it. At all. She's in no condition to. Yeah, if it warn't her problem, but that's her kid dead on the table and she's not gonna do shit when Gargamel starts going wingy and reciting Ode To Joy."

Gabriel said nothing. Her ring switched fingers again.

Duriel was leaning silently in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, precisely, "This Apocalypse," he said, as if there might have been some other apocalypse scheduled that they had to differentiate from, "Is something we have to avoid. Regardless of costs."

"Well, that's pretty goddamned obvious, Cap'n Regularity," Eden snorted, frowning.

Duriel's expression did not change, although his eyes narrowed slightly, "Raziel has been querying," with Duriel there was never a surplus of words. It was always concise and sharp, vicious and in perfect focus, "This was not intended to happen. If this Apocalypse rains, it may be final death. For everything."

Rachel started, as if he had never really considered before exactly who Azrael was, "You mean -- "

Gabriel had shut her eyes tight and pulled her legs to her chest, "It'll be the very end of the green. Everywhere. The end of the green. There will be ash and death and nothing else, ever again."

Samael thought about that a few long moments. Then he sighed, deeply. "The Malake Habbalah rides again. Hey, Old Man Sullen, do we make Rachel a club member? Does he get the handshake and the code ring? Rach, you have to learn the handshake. What you do is you extend your hand, touch index fingers, then thumbs, rotate the wrist, hit knuckles, then you let Shateiel stick her hand down your trousers - "

"Sams," Gabriel called him down before her husband could, rolling a newspaper from the sideboard and and whacking him on the head with it as if he were a very stupid puppy. As she did, her wedding ring dropped to the floor and rolled under the refrigerator. She cursed very beautifully in Turkish and went down on her hands and knees after it, "I hardly think that was actually a part of the ritual -- "

"You don't know that, fizzywings. You weren't invited -- "

"This is a family matter," Duriel said sharply, and they all turned to look at him, Eden from the sink, Rachel from the table where he sat, his hands still folded, and Gabriel where she was crouched, one arm underneath the fridge.

"We will handle it inside the family."

Eden downed the rest of his tea thoughtfully, crunching on yet another ginger biscuit and flipping his long hair away from his face. "Oh, Christ, not another one of these horrible incest sequences. Okay, Rachel, Uncle Eden's on top this time, Father Fiber holds the video camera."

Rachel closed his eyes hard and looked as if he were gritting his teeth, "Shit. Does anyone listen to what you say? I goddamned hope not," he opened his eyes again and they were chipped carnelian, hard as iron rust, "What are you saying here? Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

Gabriel sat back on her haunches and looked at her son, and began speaking very quietly, lulling soft. She was almost rocking gently to the rhythm of it, "If it comes to the end of the world, and the end of the green, we have to be prepared, baby. We have to be willing. We can't be selfish. It's the weight of the world on the other side of the scale. Everyone in it, everyone everywhere -- "

"If you're telling me I have to be prepared to kill my sister -- " there was rage rising in Rachel's voice.

"Final measures." Short, clipped, brusque.

"And they'll always come back, baby. We always do, we always come back, and the baby will come back -- " Soft, rhythmic, gentle.

"This is us getting fucked with a hairbrush by the bellhop at the Last Resort, Junior -- " Frenetic, bitter.

"All right, all right," his fist came down hard on the table and upset a teacup. It rolled off the table and shattered on the polished wood and Rachel just stared at it, his eyes dark and strangely unreadable. "All right. If it comes to that. Goddamn I hope it doesn't."

*

After the impromptu meeting of the black cowl society had broken up, Gabriel had not really known what to do with herself until the clock chimed the hour that gave her leave to take her youngest son back to the hospital and sit vigil, so she had chased Eden out of her kitchen and rearranged all the cabinets. She had just set out all the silver to polish, deeply embroiled in her work, when Samand'riel had knocked lightly at the kitchen's door facing and roused her from her workaholic fit. She had showered, changed into fresh clothing, and had remorselessly left Eden to polish all of the silver. Despite several rude comments he looked almost grateful for having been given something to do. He sat Rachel down in the chair opposite him, forced a polishing cloth on him, and proceeded to regale him with off color stories from his youth, both at the Watchtower and in the streets of London. Rachel punctuated these breezy accounts with his own dry observations.

Duriel had retreated to the parlor, where he sat with an open book on his lap and stared into the pages, only the barest pretense of reading. Occasionally Zadkiel attempted to engage him in conversation from where he sat on the floor, surrounded by his work, but Duriel answered monosyllabically, if at all. He was thinking deeply and carefully, and Gabriel's mind did not have to wander very widely to know just what strengths and weaknesses he was assessing.

In the end, she was happy to be out of the house. The hospital was a grim refuge from the realities and problems that faced her at home.

Her son, ever attentive, knew something was bothering her, but he did not press her and for this she ruffled his hair affectionately. He filled up the silence with news of the peonies in the back garden.

The hospital was still and largely quiet, visiting hours over, nightshift reigning. They met Azrael at the door to the room, empty and half crushed Styrofoam cup in his hands. Samand'riel had given his mother's back a gentle rub, as if giving her a silent cheer, and then slipped into the partially open door to see his sister.

Gabriel tried not to reflect on how gaunt the angel of apocalypse looked, on how frayed and pushed. She smiled.

"Did you sleep well, Azrael, darling?"

"Yes," he answered, more than a little dishonestly. Azrael looked as though he'd never slept in his life. He was coffee and pure nerves, over six feet of tired angel, looking greyish around the edges of the warm tan of his skin. He was all coffee and cigarettes and Jibreel's soap. "I did. Jibreel's flat is... very nice."

At least that was honest. Azrael even liked the beetles. He liked the sweet smell of bananas that hung around, of fixative, of Jibreel herself.

"I've always liked it," Gabriel agreed, settling her fingers on his arm to give it a gentle squeeze, "Even when she's keeping spoiled milk in the fridge on purpose," her smile quirked a bit, and then it fell more serious, "Azrael, has she been eating?"

His face fell more than a little. "I try," he murmured, quiet and hollow, as if he was admitting to Gabriel that he murdered kittens. "I try. I almost spoon feed her. When she does eat she throws it up in the morning. Or she doesn't eat at all. I cook anything - not even the jalapeño soup any more - and she won't eat it. Even easy things. Like mashed up banana and sugar, energy food."

She squeezed his arm again, "You can't do anything but try, baby," her wingspurs perked nervously behind her ears, "Azrael, there's something I need to tell you, and I don't want you getting upset over it. It's just something you need to be aware of."

He looked upset already; he drew deeper into the corridor, so that Jibreel wouldn't hear their whispering voices, and he leaned by a water-cooler. His eyes were dull when he looked at her; usually he had beautiful eyes, depthless liquid-dark, but they were shadowed and lifeless. "... What is it, Gabriel?"

"Jibreel is," Gabriel began, "Jibreel is," she repeated and then faltered, brushing the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand as she struggled for the words, "She's not always in love with life. She hasn't been in the past. You need to be careful of what you eat and drink and what she eats and drinks." She did not let herself dwell on the idea that little misplaced rat poison in tea would solve all of their problems of impending Apocalypse. It was just not right to withhold warning. This was a candle that Gabriel had been burnt on herself, "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

He stared at her for a long while, as if he hadn't heard what she had said in the first place, as if he hadn't listened; just stared and stared, dead-eyed, fixed in place like a marionette. "Are you saying Jibreel would kill me? Kill us?"

"I am saying that this is how she has solved similar problems she was not equipped to cope with in the past," Gabriel said gently.

Azrael crumbled visibly, head against the cool wall, standing with his eyes closed as if he was straining towards oblivion. "I wish she would."

To this, Gabriel had nothing to say, and her instincts overrode what her brain was telling her about staying objective and trying not to get involved when she might, at any time, be called in not as Gabriel the mother, but as Gabriel the archangel of life, who had to, by very definition, by the way her bones fit together inside the sack of skin that was her body, stand against the Apocalypse as last representative of the green. She wrapped her arms around Azrael and held him as best she could, having had much practice over the years at holding onto and balancing men who dwarfed her hugely.

"Azrael, you mustn't give up. You mustn't lose faith. If you love her, then live for her. That's much harder than dying for her. I know."

His head was buried in her shoulder; he was again the little boy who tripped outside her house back in Holy War and needed his knee bandaged, looking woeful all the time at having done such a thing. He didn't even notice that Gabriel had mentioned what he thought was his own secret, that he loved Jibreel; Eden had mentioned it, but Eden was Eden and was believed less than Cassandra. There was a long way to drop his head; Gabriel was tiny, so it was more of a half-collapse with him bolstered against the wall than it was a drop of his head. "It's so hard. It's like we both die a little more each hour."

"You can't let it. You can't let it happen that way. You can't roll over and play dead and hope that it's easier that way. It's not. It never is. It's only worse. Life is about fighting, as hard as you can for as long as you can. There is no 'comfortably numb.' That's an illusion," she sighed and rubbed his back and for a moment sounded almost petulant, "You're so deathy. You remind me of your father."

That startled him out of his depression momentarily, giving her a doubting eye. "I remind you of Eden?"

She clucked her tongue slightly, "You remind me of Samael. A famous poet once said 'Life is sometimes just one long scream that rakes your throat into raw meat, but the screaming means you're breathing, and the moment you stop, silence rules and you're deader than a Bixby's hamburger.' What she meant was that we hurt to feel. If you stop hurting, you stop feeling. If you stop hurting, you stop loving. You be the foundation stone. She deserves that, no matter what else you may have to say about her. If you give up, then she's as good as dead. Can you sentence that woman to death?"

His response was a dead whisper. "If I lose her I lose everything."

"Then stop being selfish," Gabriel said, almost crossly, "You have a responsibility to take care of her. When one person goes, it is no solution for everyone else to go with them. You live, Azrael. You live, Sefiros Hawkesby. You live or by god the next time I see you I will beat you into so much mash that Jibreel will have to put you in a jar on her mantle just to keep you."

He raised his head, and Azrael offered the seraphim his first shy glimmering smile. "I can see why people love you, you know. If you love life, then you love Gabriel by default. It's the same with Jibreel, in a way. If somebody likes breathing... They've already accepted you two into their house, into their home."

"It's all right," she clapped him on the back easily, "We're good guests. Jibreel has excellent manners and I always bring a casserole. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't want us over."

The angel of apocalypse sighed deeply again. "Casseroles. What do I feed her? I won't let her feed herself, or touch my food. She just won't keep anything down, even when I make her eat. Not even sugars."

"It's not what she eats," Gabriel shook her head, "It's got to be that she wants to eat," Gabriel looked at the ground for a long moment, "I did this too. I couldn't keep anything down, not even dry bread. She's got to want to eat. You have to figure out how to convince her that eating is worth it, that living is worth it. I -- she doesn't listen to me, but maybe she'll listen to you. Talk to her," her brow wrinkled, "She likes grapes."

Azrael nodded, a little bit of his resolve back; Gabriel could still see that he was hanging by a thread, fragile, nigh on exploding, but he had something to hold on to. He had grapes. "I'll go get some grapes. She needs fruit."

She needs her son.

*

He bought grapes.

There was a big bunch of green and purple grapes on the sideboard of her kitchen; he'd taken a few and popped them in his mouth, seedless, purely because they had nothing else to do. Dinner was heating up in the oven; something sent over by her mother, or by Orfiel, which neither of them really felt like eating. Azrael never felt like eating with Jibreel around now; it had rubbed off on him, the lack of food, the total joylessness of putting it in your mouth. He brushed out his hair and rebraided it, to keep his hands busy; he changed into a ratty, worn-thin pair of sweatpants, clothes he had brought over in a haze from his own house, and he sat on the end of the couch. They had been in total silence on the way home; every time he opened his mouth to try to engage her, he had seen her face and thought better of it.

Talk was dying. Everything was dying.

The flat was so dark now; there was only the kitchen light on, turning everything in the living-room to gloom. The curtains were closed; none of London's lights. The only goddamn ambient music was the far-off noise of traffic, which haunted him rather than soothed, the honks and the hiss of someone fishtailing on the balmy summer night. He'd believed Gabriel. He'd believed Gabriel until he got in the car, until he'd come home with Jibreel to this place, that he could do anything.

Jibreel had put on a pair of thin leather gardening gloves and stood in the far corner of the living room, having emptied her new house guests into an unused terrarium. She held one between two fingers and examined it. It hissed and clicked at her, but she was nonplussed, "It doesn't spit acid," she explained without looking at him, "It secretes it, from a gland on its back. It's a defense mechanism so no one will want to touch it."

"What a great souvenir. I should have asked Rachel to bring back one for me, too." It wasn't cruel; just gentle and exhausted, and slightly bemused. "I prefer stag beetles. I once kept one in a matchbox. The hedgehog's dilemma."

Jibreel rubbed one gloved finger down the back of the beetle and it hissed and clicked in what might have been an affectionate way. She let it loose in the terrarium and then sealed the lid, turning to him, one eyebrow raised, "I hope it was a large matchbox."

"It was. Everybody smoked a lot back in those days."

She circled the room restlessly, moving to stand by her desk, where she sat and slowly stripped the gloves off of her hands, "You shouldn't smoke," she sighed, "It makes you taste like nicotine."

"I didn't think you'd been tasting me lately, Jibreel."

It was a mistake the moment it was out of his mouth; he winced, and slouched over to pull another few grapes off their bunch. His white forelock fell over his eyes, hiding any shame from her, bare-chested in the harsher light of the kitchen. His wingspurs looked like dark gashes on his back.

She turned her head to study the beetles in the terrarium, hissing and clicking at each other by way of communication. Then she stood and turned her back to him, "You are nothing if not correct, Azrael. Maybe I should just go to bed." She sounded as if she were talking about the grave and not the bedroom down the hall.

He chewed again, swallowing his mouthful, his back to her; back against back, worlds apart. "... I'm sorry."

She stopped in the doorway. Her voice was so small it might have been nothing, less than nothing, an atomic particle of despair. It was half sob, "I miss you, Azrael."

The other seraphim's feet were silent on her floor; it was only apparent he had moved when his arms laced around her waist, face pressed into the back of her shoulder as he drew her close to him from behind. If Azrael didn't taste like cigarettes, he sure as hell smelled like them. His mouth was at the nape of her neck, half-kissing, half-pressing; his words were slurred into her skin. "I'm here, Jibreel. I'm right here."

She whimpered, a pathetic, childish sound, and then she gave up fighting and leaned back against him, letting him take her weight. His mouth was still against her neck, and she was running hot and cold all at once as she raised a trembling hand behind her, questing for the side of his face. She found it, his skin feverishly warm under her fingers. She couldn't think of anything else but him, couldn't think of anything else but his scent, too much like tobacco or misery. She tried to choke back a sob, but could only manage a strangled cough.

Her fingers found his cheek, the side of his nose, his mouth; he kissed her palm, arms tight around her, locking and enfolding and refusing to let go. Jibreel could feel the tremble of his skin against her, the slight shudder that ran through him. Their lips meeting was almost afterthought; the aftershock of her head turning round in his embrace, her cheek brushing his cheek, the kiss a heartbeat clumsy thing. And after that, they couldn't stop; one kiss followed another, and another, until she was turning around in his arms and he was kissing her in earnest as if she was sixteen again.

He didn't say, I want you; it would have broken the spell. He just kissed her, one hand at the back of her head twining in the ropes of her braids, tasting her hot little mouth and her tongue and her teeth as she responded in dreamlike kind. They hardly said anything because they were hardly thinking; Azrael forgot about Gabriel and Duriel and the warning and hospital, forgot that there was no such thing as comfortably numb, and left a trail of clothes as they stumbled to the bed.

Azrael had lived for thousands of years. It seemed like only last week that she'd been naked like this, before him, shockingly unshy; her long thin body and her capable hands. She'd never been lush; the breasts he cupped were fuller from their baby, her hips a little more prominent from the same - there were shining stretchmarks like small white gashes on her belly, even whiter than her paperpale skin, pink mouth and pink nipples firming underneath his fingers. Everything else was white noise: she was sixteen again, this was the first time, nothing else was happening. It was all sweet and clean and good, her hands on his wingspurs until he quivered and snarled, his hands parting her thin thighs to reach between. Too fast to think about. Too fast, too fast, too gone.

He stopped waiting for her to say no. He stopped waiting; they were too much pressing together, schizophrenic hands over each other's bodies not knowing where to touch, him painfully hard and her face in his shoulder as he touched her, madly liquid. Jibreel made no sound as he straddled her, lifting her hips, sliding deep. She just arched up to meet him with her eyes closed like a supplicant, even when he pushed so deep it was like a pain, one unit in too-intimate conjunction. And then it was just them; their languageless hisses the only noise in the apartment, the vague creak of a too-old mattress, the shock of sweat between them both as the grapes lay useless and abandoned on the counter.

All at once it was done, like a cramping spasm to finish off a seizure, her hands deeply twisted in the blanket underneath her, nails biting into her palms. Her cry was wordless, desolate, as if it came from a little girl lost down a well. She felt ancient and dead, like something summoned from a blood circle. She didn't want to look up, didn't want to open her eyes to see him, because he'd be looking at her with those deep-if-by-night-black eyes and what had she done? What had she been thinking? Nothing, she had not been thinking. She'd been groping for anything to hold herself against in the dark. She had touched him. She had broken underneath him. She was worthless, useless, less than worthless. She was criminal and selfish and she hated herself for it.

She felt him pull away from her and she held her breath until he sat back. He called her name, softly and that was the final straw on the camel's back. Before he could do anything else or say anything else she had rolled away from him, onto her feet. She darted into the bathroom and locked the door. It was the least she owed him before the sobbing began in earnest, doubling her over until she sounded like an asthmatic. She wasn't crying; she wasn't shedding tears; it was as if her whole body was squeezing itself dry, and what little water was left in it was coming out her tear ducts. She tried to breathe, but that only started a coughing fit.

He was everything, everything that ever mattered to her at all, outside the little piece of sunshadow taped to that table. He was the only thing that mattered in the universe, and she had been too weak to even keep him safe from her complications.

She stumbled to the toilet and clung to it, knees wide on the tile, head bowed as she quivered and shook, coughing wracking her body. No more tears came, as if she'd already spent them all, so she just sobbed softly in the back of her throat.

She had ruined everything, broken everything.

She had nothing left.

It was only through sheer will that Azrael - instead of pitching himself out the window, falling without flight - pulled on his abandoned sweatpants near the doorway and stumbled towards the bathroom; the lock was badly made, and he wrenched the handle off in his quiet and dazed desperation to get to her. The door opened after a labored clang; he dropped to her side, too afraid to touch her, strands of white falling down and stuck to the sweat at his hairline. "Jibreel - Jibreel, what's wrong, did I hurt you, did I - "

All at once her stomach heaved so hard it threw her forward over the toilet and she was vomiting again, clear, milky, stomach fluid and nothing else. She was panting as if she'd just run a marathon, snotty, vomity, thick with mucus. She crouched against the porcelain bell of the toilet bowl and tried so hard not to think that her brain seemed to snap and she just went liquid inside. "I'm so sorry Azrael, I'm so sorry. It's my fault and I've ruined everything and I'm so weak and stupid I'm so sorry --"

He held her hair back as she retched, trying to soothe, hands at the sides of her head as she sobbed and wept and spat. "Shhh, Jibreel, just shhh, get it all out - "

"I didn't mean for it to happen this way, I didn't mean for this to happen. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Oh god, I can't, I can't, I can't -- "

Azrael slapped her and then held her very still, wiping her mouth and fastidiously cleaning her up with toilet paper. "Jibreel, breathe. Get a hold of yourself. You're scaring me."

Dazed and now entirely unable to order her thoughts at all, she flung herself into his lap and clung to his waist, dry sobbing, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. Oh god, I love you -- "

He died; was reborn; he didn't hear at first, cradling her on his lap, stroking her hair over and over and pulling her suffocatingly close. "I love you, Jibreel, I'll never stop loving you. I never stopped. Don't cry, don't cry, please. It's all right. It's going to be all right. You didn't do anything wrong."

"I've done so many things wrong, so many. Thoughtless, always so thoughtless about everything. Self-centered. Me. I wanted to make it so that it couldn't hurt you anymore. All I've ever done is make your life a mess. Blood is thicker than water, and I'm just water. You went through five thousand years content and then I ruined all of it, everything, all of it. I ruined your family, I ruined your peace. Everyone hated the two of us together, everyone. Your people and my people, they don't go. I broke your life. I'm so weak and stupid I couldn't stay away from you, couldn't do even that one thing right. I'm so sorry -- " her voice was soft, shaking, she was still trembling like a little animal in its death throes.

The parting hadn't been because she hadn't loved him. It had been because she was pushing him away. He wanted, absurdly, to weep; but instead he pulled her even closer, her head against his chest, and rocked her in his arms very quietly.

"Jibreel," he said. "Jibs. In five thousand years nothing as good as you has ever happened, or will happen again. Regret nothing. Don't try to save me from hurt. Don't you think I've been through it before? Don't you think I've felt it all? Don't try to make life decisions for me, of all people."

"I'm sorry," she said again, strangely quiet and still, "I've made a mess of everything, haven't I?"

"Nothing that I haven't exacerbated," Azrael said. "Nothing that can't be fixed."

"Adoro te devote," she shook her head against his chest, "No matter what I tried. Confiteor Azrael, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I'm so sorry I've hurt you so much just by being so stupid. How is it that you don't hate me?"

He just held her, clutched to him like a rag doll, both of them fever-hot and tired-out . "Because I loved you. More than I ever possibly thought I could, what I had in me, what I considered myself capable of. I don't want to go without you any more. I let you go because I thought it would make you happy. I couldn't stop loving you."

She sniffled, "Well, this ought to make my mother happy. I think she's wanted to beat me to death with a poker for years now."

"Who cares about your mother?" He kissed her fiercely, vomit and mucus and all, though it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. "Jibreel, I'll never leave you ever again unless you truly want me to."

It was too much, almost like she was going to break into renewed sobbing. She found her voice on a prayer which seemed the only way to say it.

"Yisborach v'yishtabach v'yispoar v'yisromam v'yismasay, v'yishador v'yis'aleh v'yisalal, shmay d'kudsho, brich hu, l'aylo min kl birchoso v'sheeroso, tush'bechoso v'nechemoso, da,ameeran b'olmo; vimru Omein,” she chanted softly, singsong. “I love you, Azrael. I do so desperately I could break. I couldn't -- I can't -- I'm sorry -- "

The angel of the apocalypse pressed his finger against her mouth, tilting her head up, looking at her eye to eye. "It's all over, Jibreel. It wasn't even that long to me. Not to me. I swear. We have the rest of our lives to be together. And we'll be together. And our son will be very, very happy about it."

She smiled weakly, but genuinely, "He will. Maybe I'll get him a dog. He's always wanted a dog."

He took her in his arms again, as if to make sure that she was really there, quiet and relieved and burnt-out like a firework. "We'll all be happy."

She laid her head against his shoulder and thought about her son playing with a dog in her parents' yard. She thought about Azrael being there at family dinners that didn't fall on holidays. She thought about sleeping next to him for an endless smear of nights that hit a vanishing point near oblivion. She thought about all of this and as she was reflecting, she felt very very queer.

"Azrael?" she began thoughtfully, "I'm so hungry."

For the first time in quite a few days, Azrael beamed.

And then blanched. "Oh, fuck!"

The seraph deposited her gently to the floor, scrambling to his feet, hurrying to the kitchen where the forgotten casserole was discreetly turning into charcoal in the oven. Jibreel could hear him laugh, loud and sheepish, as he turned it off; he deftly deposited it in the sink and started running water before the fire alarm could buzz, the gunshot crack of the casserole dish splitting sharply down the middle the cost of the abbreviated cooling process. He just looked lost, as if the difficulties of kitchen physics were beyond him.

She followed after him at a slower pace, pulling on her robe and belting it. At the scene of the smoking charcoal briquette, she wrinkled her nose.

"Maybe we should order Thai?"

*