the sixth day

*

tomorrow
leave the windows open
as fear grows, please hold me in your arms
won't you help me if you can
to shake this anger
I need your gentle hands
to keep me calm

- elton john, "the last song"

*

They were ghouls now. It sucked the color out of Jibreel's ever-delicate rosepetal skin until she was the sort of porcelain doll that only ever appeared in horror movies, it ashed underneath Azrael's tan like crumbled granite, both their eyes were dull and their fingers shook when thy enfolded each other's hands. They were going further and further away; locked into each other, comatose along with their son, a sort of curling-up hedgehog's defense.

Azrael found he almost had to cling to the minutiae of everyday life so that he did not Ascend, go the last step from Cherubim in the shower, letting his despair finally firework out the window along with his sanity. He had to think about how the towels in Jibreel's house didn't dry his hair properly. He had to think about the traffic. He had to think about her; how her hair was too fine in his fingers, almost translucent-dark, how her hip fitted very neatly into his when they curled up together in her bed. He had to think about coffee and cigarettes.

Life was suddenly so goddamn tired. In all his five thousand years, he hadn't known that life could be this bleak horror, this structure of the minute-to-minute nothings, the purposelessness and the ugliness and the horrid water biscuits. Who the fuck had invented water biscuits? He was slipping into the grasp of mortality, practically wading through the decay. He was shutting down and closing off. Caffeine. The Apocalypse.

They sat in the little office, he and Jibreel, and Duriel and Gabriel, and he knew that something was about to happen if Duriel and Gabriel had to be there just so that he did not lunge out the window wholesale with Jibreel jumping after in the wake. Usually he liked the doctor that was giving the results; it was a staid, quiet, sympathetic, no-nonsense man, but that day Azrael might have killed him and regretted nothing. It wasn't even the old sort of spitefulness he reserved for Pazriel; it was all cold and strangulation with his mouth dry, wanting to cover Jibreel's ears, wanting to shut it out.

"Dr. Hawkesby," the man said, very slowly (and he put his hand in Jibreel's hand and wished for death), "Ms. Eisenreich. What I am going to say will be very difficult."

Gabriel was sitting calmly, both hands delicately folded in her lap, but both feet were planted surely against the floor, toes pointed slightly inward in her designer mules, ready to be on her feet and restraining in the half beat of a second if necessary. She knew she could not really do much to hold back Azrael physically if he lunged forward like a rabid dog, but she had taken the seat at the east window because it afforded her the best position to get between him and the civilian medical establishment should mortal massacre be the foreplay to whatever was smoulder-bubbling in his blackened mind. It was strange, her holding the east when she had always been a girl of the west, the Summer country, but this time her husband occupied the west position, standing, arms folded over his chest. If Azrael needed to be tackled down to the ground -- held still, as if that would keep him from the manic shift of the ascension slide, then that was Duriel's province. It could all get very messy right here, and the two of them had already silently divided the room into hexagons of influence, of responsibility. I shall do this. You shall do that. They fit like interlocking pieces of a Chinese puzzle, near a level of clairvoyance in their symbiosis. Too fast the cards were being discarded, traded, thrown down, and she did not think -- even as they were and had ever been -- that they really had a chance of holding this hand.

But it was not in them to let this pass unchecked.

Jibreel's ears were swimming with audible silence, the white-static of noise that roars often when one has fallen into a state of disconnected limbo. If she had been examined by a psychiatrist at that moment, he would have found her more than mildly disassociative. She was not herself. She was not anyone. She was not really listening. She had known that this would come, had already heard it from her parents, and now she would sit still and inattentive as they explained these truths to Azrael. She knew he would not listen and that was her luxury. His denial was protection, protection for the other-Jibreel that was herself, the other-Jibreel that cared; the other-Jibreel who was involved. She thought of holidays in the Lake District and whether the price of pure Vanilla would rise again this year.

The white-bread man in front of them shuffled his papers again and coughed a little at their universal family orchestra of blank looks. Jibreel and Azrael looked as if they had both been shot in the head and were tied to the chairs to keep them upright. "Your son is brain dead. He has had no response. He is currently on Glasgow scale three. There are no brain waves. He is kept alive only by the machines in the intensive care unit. Generally, by this time... We are legally allowed to turn him off."

It was interesting, this modern phraseology. Allowed to turn him off, as if he were a nightlight or the coffee pot left plugged in too long, as if he were a fire hazard. She remained only half interested, calm and silent as she waited like a crocodile -- waited for her dinner or for extinction, whichever came first. This ball was Azrael's. She had already wept the spongy sea-grapes of her lungs dry. There was very little left.

The doctor looked at both of them; Azrael's eyes were dead, his mouth a dark and emotionless slash, like a tall and morbid statue sitting in the chair in front of him. Jibreel was no better, both of them unflinching, and he was not idiot enough to think that this was because they both understood him loud and clear. "We sympathize with your situation," he said, and he tried to be gentle, he tried and he tried but nothing would ever be enough. "The last thing we want to do is switch off the life support. However, at this point, there is no chance of Matthias ever waking up again."

Gabriel had already thrown her eyes into the wide-array that painted the room in spindles of green. If anyone in this room was feeling up ascension, then she'd read it first in the pattern before there were any tells physically. She would read the green boil and pitch upward, climbing, reconstitution, the lacing of a matrix of higher magnitude. Her daughter was silent as if she might have been dead and this Gabriel could not take as a good sign. She had seen her like this in the past, but not as Jibreel Eisenreich. She had seen this deathstill moth in Lumina Calloway. She chanced the barest glance at her husband. He had not moved, although she could feel his focus even from across the room, could taste that intensity. This was their first razor walk. It would not be the last.

The white-coated man was looking at both of them, side to side, as if it was a tennis match. "Due to the inherent differences in angel and human physiology," he added, cautious, as if very slowly putting out a candle with his thumb and forefinger, "and the fact that if anyone will receive a miracle, you will, we will give you a little time to decide on your course of action. However, as the doctor presiding in this case, I have to tell you that even if he did wake up, there is probably no chance of him leading a normal life. He is clinically brain dead. He would be in a vegetative state with very little consciousness. Sometimes - " He cleared his throat. "Sometimes you have to let things you love go. Sefiros, surely you know what I mean."

"No," said Sefiros Hawkesby.

"Azrael," Gabriel began gently, weaving slightly from side to side in her chair, "You've looked at everything yourself. You've seen everything. The baby -- don't you think it's selfish to keep him like that? He'll come back. You know that. But right now, it's like he's under water, chained to a stone -- "

"No," Azrael said again. It was mechanical, as if he had been wired to say that word and only that word, the simple statement of biblical and gospel fact: No. "No."

"Dr. Hawkesby," the doctor said quietly, "Your son is not in a coma. He is dead. He is being kept breathing by machines, artificially."

"I am not sure," Jibreel's head was bowed, and here she raised it slowly, her words measured and quiet, "That you heard him. He said 'no.'"

The doctor sighed, and he rubbed his temples, and glanced over to Gabriel as if for moral support. It was only fleeting; he turned back to Jibreel and was calm again, very tired. "Ms. Eisenreich, this is not a case where we are against you. You are prolonging your own suffering, stopping the grief process. It is not a case of if we are going to turn off your son. It is a case of when, and I think you know that."

"I think that is a very interesting theory," Jibreel answered patiently, as if all of this were very tiresome, like little children refusing to play the game by clearly stated rules, "And you are, of course, entitled to your opinion. However, having heard Dr. Hawkesby's thoughts, I am forced to hold a contrary opinion."

Gabriel caught the slight muscle shift that preceded what she knew would be her husband sharply calling down their daughter, and she raised her hand to still him, swift was water, rising to turn lightly on one foot and settle both her hands on the back of Jibreel's chair.

"Baby, you know he's telling the truth. Don't you love your baby? This is for your baby -- "

"My son is my son," her daughter responded with the finest edge and Gabriel's hands twitched on the back of the seat.

The doctor spread his hands helplessly. "There is nothing I can do - "

"I do believe," Azrael said deliberately, white lock falling into his face, "that there is a mortal phrase, and it goes something like this: over my dead body. I think it's quite apt. He'll come back. He's going to come back." The chair clattered as he stood, too tall, something too dark in his eyes, all shifting as if he were about to go Ofanim any minute. "Jibreel, we don't have anything further to discuss here."

It was like calling a dog to heel, and she stood, folding both hands behind her back as she looked for a moment at the small company of surgeons as if she found their plight sadly pathetic.

"You have to understand," she said deliberately, as if she might have been herald or crier, "That this is no longer a situation where you hold sway."

He held her hand as they left, in the wake of one of the more awkward silences ever recorded on earth.

"Mrs. Eisenreich?" Another resident, the psychologist, looking over at Gabriel with a faintly pained expression as the two main players left. "Do you think you could talk to them? At this rate they'll need a psych profiling to see if they're actually fit to make this decision. Please. You're probably the only one who can get through to them."

Gabriel bowed her head and studied the pattern of the seat in front of her and thought of weaves and threads pulled and some children who were perhaps better off dead. She would not cry in front of these people. Demeter Serraffield -- Countess, Annunciator, Reweaver -- her tears had long ceased being things meant for mortal men to see. There were already rumors -- spread wildfire fast and wildfire sharp -- of the healing miracles sprung from archangelic tears, and this was her grandchild, her little duckling bundle of warmth and feathers. This was her dead child. This was her world. The quiet, serious men grouped at the far end of the room did not understand that they were all staring down the barrel of a gun, hair trigger, cocked, safety off. Her mouth twitched. She was careworn, tired, and not so much schooled or as in control of this situation as she felt was ever required of her. Nothing was ever too much for the Green Dream of Normandy, so she told herself.

So others believed.

It was dreamy, easyslow, cool as linen when she finally raised her head again and graced them with her calm smile.

"Your faith in me is touching, gentlemen. I hope for all our sakes it is not misplaced."

*

"Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers."

Her voice was soft and low, but it carried over the mechanical chimes that marked off her child's new biological clock, dependent, as they had said he was, on machines to live, on machines to breathe.

"And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men -- "

"Jibreel," his voice was gentle, although there was a hint of restraint in it, as if he were keeping himself from saying something harder, saying something with a final complexity.

" -- it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

"Jibreel, while I'm sure he appreciates you reading to him," he began again carefully, "Maybe now isn't the best time for that particular book."

She closed the worn leather book and her eyes slowly crept back to his face, as if they would circle there and hide themselves.

"I've just finished it, Azrael."

They sat as they always did now; he would put his arm to her, his hand on her hand or her hair or the back of her neck, and they would sit close like watcher-grigori and wait out the mechanical minutes. If he was not touching her he was playing his guitar, sometimes falling back into a rut and ceaselessly playing the opening chords to Paint It Black over and over again and remembering Woodstock and remembering, remembering everything. There were things in his life that he had never told her simply because there was so much to tell. He was going to tell her and his son about everything he had walked, breathed, blessed, touched, drank, his penance for immortality, the telling of the story.

"Jibreel," he said. The faltering primal French. "It will be all right."

Her mouth was weak when it moved, just a touch, answering in English, soft, reactant, "I believe it because you have said it."

"And so it shall be done. Amen."

Neither of them heard his step, bare feet light against the floor. Neither of them heard the ghosted crystal rain of quartz stones on the tile. Neither of them knew his presence at all, although this in itself was something of an impossible thing, since they faced the door and only looked away from it for bare moments at a time, to instead focus on one another, or the seamlines in the floor, or the grain of the wood on Azrael's forever-old guitar. The law of averages stated that there was simply not enough time in the scattered windows when they were both looking away -- looking deep, looking apart -- for the old style messiah to cross their path unnoticed and enthrone himself against the windowsill, framed by slats of golden sun coming through the glass, a scattering kaleidescope shimmer of rainbow soup and prism-split light as the photons hit one another and bounced off the crystal array that numbered just a few of his seventy-two wings.

Neither one nor the other of them actually saw him, but they felt him all at once, a quickening shiver that slid up their spines as suddenly his countenance was upon them.

"Could it possibly be," his voice was mellow and faintly cool, as it ever was, mysterious, perhaps amused, "That you have found religion?"

There was the soft music of crystal as the Metatron shifted slightly against the window and answered his own question.

"Or perhaps it is that religion has found you."

Azrael was immediately on his feet; he made a complicated gesture, lips, heart, tongue to forehead, fingers flying before he inclined his head at the softly radiating Angel of Epiphany. The angel of apocalypse himself was fiercely, brutally proud - but he knelt to the messiah, he genuflected, if only to give himself a moment to cover up the stilling of his tongue as the full wave of the Prophet hit him.

The Revelation he could handle standing most days; it was only later that he kicked himself, wondered why he hadn't panicked, before realizing that it was his heady self-delusion. The dark-haired angel stopped; he tasted salt, and every trace of blood in his body seized up in cold coma as he understood.

your son is dead

No, he screamed, at the same time that he screamed, I know, at the same time that everything folded very quietly around the edges and he saw all the reflections in the windows and every leaf on the potted plant on the window tub outside Buboe's room. Hedera helix. Paeonia lactiflora. His mind was a linen sheet that he had split up blood on, trying to cover up the mess, take away the stain, hide a secret. Azrael staggered.

Then his mind said: - o come ye now to old canaan and hear the wise -

Then his mind said: Wait.

Then his mind said: It has cut but it has not dried.

Then his mind said: - the rose once blown and withered forever dies -

He sat back down in his chair, limp, as if he was still young, and for some reason he thought about Mohammad and the desert sand in Gabriel's hands as she laughed. In some aspects, - probably the most dangerous aspects - Metatron was no prophet. Metatron showed you not just what was going to be, but what was, and the sudden unblanketing of illusion was beyond everything he had considered himself capable of conceiving. Azrael's eyes closed, to shut it out, to shut out the light. His existence banked upon his ability to not see.

"Messiah," he said, and wondered how the hell he managed speech. "You weren't expected."

"To be expected is to be contained," answered the angel of epiphany naturally, something in his voice kin to the even crash of waves against the rock spires of the new shoreline of Mer San Michele. He smiled and it was a private thing, half curled around his mouth like threads coming out of a seam. His eyes were hooded with the light behind him, a thousand beetle green facets that glinted deep olive in the empty glow of the florescent lighting. Jibreel looked at him, his bare toes curled against the sill as he perched there, flesh and bone and answers and mysteries and a symphony, symbiosis -- slow like the drip of morphine down the line into her son's arm -- he was majesty, "It is measure. It is countable."

She opened her mouth to ask a thousand questions, knowing even as she did that speaking to the Metatron was kin to talking oneself in circles against a mirror -- but she had not even been doing that. She ached. She wanted her mother. She wanted her father. She wanted the careful closeness of her family. And she hated. She hated deeply, and she hated herself for hating, and in this she again found herself wanting against her mother's measure, for the angel of mercy should not hate, and in resentment it bubbled slick in the back of her throat like bile and she wanted to scream because she was mercy and spared none for herself, like her mother gone before, and in this they had a deep kinship, and in the hatred, Jibreel loved.

And the Metatron knew this.

And she knew that the Metatron knew this.

And he smiled faintly and it was like moonshine in a jar.

She opened her mouth again to thank him, but he simply raised one hand and answered cryptically, as if he might have been at altar,

"I do."

There was no gaze shift because his eyes were not made to shift, a thousand facets watching a thousand fragments all at once. There was just suddenly his voice again, cool as chalk.

"But then, who truly can map the face of God? I enjoy this child. He makes me think of music when it ran through the crystal seams of limestone. He makes me think of mitochondrion and wren hunting. There is a stillness here," he paused for stretch that seemed to sound over the quiet like a watchbell, and then he leaned forward over his hands, "This is interesting. I would not have done it this way."

It was useless to say 'done what'. Azrael found himself feeling particularly mortal. "Done what?" he asked, faltered, feeling like a child even before the man who married Zeruel and sat in the birdbath and had four intensely strange children. "Metatron, who has done what? What is my son doing?"

"Being," he said, and hung over the word as if this might be the totality of his answer, but then it rocked full and fine to conclusion, "Himself."

"Messiah," Azrael said again, feeling like Job, or like anybody who had ever asked God a question in the bible and then come away with what sounded like part of the script to Twin Peaks. "Metatron, I - " He felt absurdly like a child again, wanting to beg, coming up nothing. Please help my son. Please be the god in the machine. "Is my son part of the Life thread or the Death thread?"

"More telling perhaps to ask whether his state is particle or wave, a similar set of classifications and misconceptions," answered the man, said the presence who was both crown and kingdom, heaven as well as earth, base and iteration. He paused and seemed to sense that this answer would be deeply unsatisfying, and for once, in infinite mercy, he chose to further explained himself, "Life, death," he began again reflectively, "It is not a true/false state. In living there is always a part of death, and in death a part of living. There is life in her and death in you. There is death in her and there is life in you. There is death in that child, but there is also life in that child. The meaning you distill from that is your own and cannot be claimed by another."

He blinked very slowly.

"If you want simpler answers," he continued, staring at the two, no, three of them, very intently, as if they might have been single issue bottlecaps, "Then you can find the meaning of those yourself. He breathes, and that in itself is a miracle of no small scope for anyone born into this hard land. Is that not enough for you?" Metatron's wings shifted in layers to punctuate, smooth like silk being dragged off a tree, dragged off mothworms and butterflyworms, and the light washing them all reset spectrum -- blues and golds and reds.

Jibreel stared hard into the palms of her hands, at the lines that marked her life, at the wells where stigmata had been drawn once, anciently. For her, the truth was There is Death in you. For Azrael it was There is Life in you. She was laid bare in cowardice and love and longing. There was no reason to speak to Metatron.

But she did.

"Will he come back to us, father?" she asked absurdly, as if he might be the father of all things, as if he might be St. John Wilkston. As if she thought he would give her a more satisfying answer.

"That," said the Metatron, rising in a song of glass and crystal, "I cannot say."

"Cannot say, or will not say?" it was venomous, as if she might have been the worldsnake, and out of her mouth before she could hold it.

The Metatron cocked his head thoughtfully to the side and stood, bare feet on linoleum, "In the end that is a question whose answer bears no relevance at all to you, trumpeter. The truth to it does not change the reality for you."

Pathetically, she felt like laughing, long and hard, sob-laughing her despair.

"You aren't telling," she translated, as if they might be children at odds over a bag of marbles.

Metatron's laugh, sweet and low, androgynous, was all consuming, quivering along the spine until it settled in the kidneys or some other deep place.

"Perhaps," there was another considered pause as he again absorbed the world broadband, before turning to walk away, "I am not allowed."

And with that, Alexander Franklin left their company.

*

Zadkiel Eisenreich loathed hospitals. He nursed an egg salad sandwich with three bites taken out of it and a Styrofoam cup of very bad coffee, hands clasped around it so that the backs of his knuckles could brush his brother's, dark hair falling in his eyes. Zadkiel had eyes that could be very depressed; now they were blue like storms, the rolling-over of clouds into deepening bruise-steel azurite, morose and dull.

He took his sandwich and had another bite, then looked as if he wished he hadn't. He'd done all of his trig while he and Samand'riel had sat with their goldenfluff nephew, marking out the numbers as his brother kept up a soft and breezy stream of chatter, the words that were easy for Sama but impossible for him. He had hardly said anything to Buboe. He had told him hullo; and when they left, he had touched Buboe's foot through the sheet, and said goodbye, and felt absurdly like weeping.

He loathed hospitals. He hated the place where his father worked. He hated morgues, he hated identifying, he hated check-ups and thanked whoever watched over him that being born as your own grandson does not apparently impede your immune system. The smell of disinfectant was going to stick to his skin.

"I don't like them either," his younger brother said suddenly, thoughtfully, pushing little bits of potato salad around his plate with a fork, "I'd have him out on the green grass and in the clean air. Being cramped inside a place, inside a place like this especially, it's never done a body any good," he let out a defeated sigh, "But then, what have I ever known about anything but lambs and dogs and peonies?"

Zadkiel had long stopped being surprised at his brother-lover answering the question that he had only asked inside his head; he just grimaced at Sama's expression, taking another sip of the coffee out the Styrofoam cup. "H'n. Don't put yourself down. Lambs and dogs and peonies mean that you know a lot about how things should grow and live. It's not as if I can save his life with calculus."

What truth Samand'riel found in this statement he did not say, simply reached over to take possession of Zadkiel's half-finished egg sandwich and took an thoughtful bite out of it.

"Mam," he said deliberately around thorough chewing, "Is preoccupied."

The angel of forbearance took decisive and strategic vengeance by stealing a forkful of Samand'riel's potato salad, chewing rather lugubriously. This was washed down by more of the coffee. "When is Mum not preoccupied in these situations? I'd be worried if she wasn't preoccupied. We - we just have to look after her. Father - " Zadkiel never knew quite what to call his father, considering at one point he had called him 'student'. " - is doing all he can. We have to remember how much is at stake here."

"It's a lot, isn't it?" the younger asked, studying the unnatural blue of the Formica tabletop as if it might reveal some great mysteries, "More than you'd think. It's so strange, when I see him, all wrapped up like this," Samand'riel held up his calloused hand, fingers closed like a blossom shut, "It doesn't make any sense. None of it does." He was drinking milk. His eyes were lost in the cup, lost in the froth of bovine mystery, "Did you ever think it would end up this way? Jibreel's -- she's death, Zads. She's death gone cold. It almost hurts me to look at her."

Zadkiel's eyes were on the other man, searching, mouth a tight line of understanding he didn't want. "Her flower's going?"

Samand'riel leaned forward, his russet-cinnamon hair falling into his eyes as if this could hide the weariness there, the lines around his mouth and eyes already getting worn into his face, worn in on a boy who did not yet deserve the carelines. He rubbed the back of his hand over the stubble on his chin and shook his head, "It's not going. That implies in the process of. It's almost gone. It's almost done. I spoke with Mam, she says the greenlines are still there. She's still living, if you mean the breathing and heartbeat part, but her will is going. Her will is gone. I think if it were possible for her to stop her own heart through wishing for it, she'd ha' already done it."

His brother closed his eyes, very briefly, as the world revolved. It was almost as if he was mentally counting to something; then the angel of forbearance opened them again, and the look was pure and frank grief. And resolve. Maybe a little denial. Zadkiel was like that.

"We can't lose her," he said, and his voice was steadier than he felt. "We won't lose her. It won't happen. Damn it, Sama, what do we do?"

The younger man ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head again, trying to ignore the strange feeling pawing at his spine.

"The way I see it is this. I had a talk with Azrael, but that's been several days ago, so maybe he doesn't know how it is, how she is now. I don't guess you can see it in her unless you look around the corners of her eyes, and even then, people expect her to look tired, see? I had a talk with Azrael and I don't think he's a bad sort really, at all, even. He has a good heart and I swear he loves her like a man possessed," here a tired smile crept at the corners of his mouth briefly, memory-fondness, kinship through devotion, "But this thing, neither of them are made to handle it, and she's lookin' to him and he doesn't know where to look. Da', he's Da', and never big on the welcoming hands, but maybe we could try. Maybe it would help them both if he felt like he belonged. May' it would make it so he thought he had some place to go back to. That may make all the difference in the world."

His mouth moved strangely as if he meant to say more, but he dropped his chin to a propped hand and finished, "I don't really know, Zadkiel."

There was a pause as Zadkiel dissected this and drank the Worst Coffee Ever In The World. Then he touched Samand'riel's hand, featherlight, and the look on his face was not so etched in despair, and his eyes were no longer quite so dead and dull. He had an odd sort of realization about his face: resolve; resolve always looked good on Zadkiel.

"There's nobody who's as good as being brothers as us."

Samand'riel looked up at Zadkiel for a long, strange moment. Then his forehead hit the table as he burst into low, near incoherent laughter. He was still at it, nails biting into his palm as he curled his hands into helpless fists and shook, when they were joined at the table by a vaporous gentleman whose slacks did not match his coat.

"And some people say fate has been unkind to you," came the amused wuff from Alexander Franklin, whose feet were still bare on the tile of the cafeteria.

Zadkiel, who disliked being laughed at and planned on getting back at Samand'riel the moment the lights went out, made a discontented rumble at the back of his throat as he leaned back in his chair. He gave Sama a pointed gaze which, as ever, contained too much smoulder, before looking up at the man who was Zeruel's husband. There was obvious surprise; but then he guarded it out of manners.

"Won't you join us, Metatron?" The dark-haired angel gestured at the snickering angel of fertility. "As you can see, my brother is occupied."

Metatron settled himself onto a stool across from the both of them, hooking his toes into the metal of rungs. As Samand'riel recovered, he studied the angel of epiphany's feet.

"They just let you go around like that? Isn't that against some hospital rule?" he looked as if he dearly wished he could take off his own socks and shoes and go as nature had intended. Metatron shrugged.

"No one ever says much of anything to me outside of Ivona, and I'm used to that. After all," his smile quirked, "It's not as if I'm likely to step on a tack," he paused to consider, "Unless I want to step on a tack, of course."

"Have you been visiting?" Zadkiel asked, before Samand'riel got any more ideas about taking off his shoes. The hare-cherub would probably step on every tack that came his way, and his brother would have to carry him home. Not that he would have minded that much. "Do my sister and Azrael know you're here? What do you . . . " He guarded his tongue. "Pardon me. Have you seen him?"

"Yes," he answered mildly, as if this neatly covered all possible meaning and responses and then he seemed to focus on Zadkiel's Styrofoam plate, "May I have your Jello?” he asked, rather like a child wanting permission to fondle a puppy, “I love Jello." Of course he did.

The plate was pushed over immediately. It was not as if Zadkiel felt any personal loss at the passing-over of his Jello. In fact, had Metatron not arrived, he was going to cajole Samand'riel into eating it. He watched the Messiah's face; not so much in his bare base state, hidden from the world's view, all green eyes like his reincarnated sister, and strange and arresting zen. "Metatron, what do you think?"

"You are nice and have given me your Jello, so I will tell you a great secret," announced the Metatron, and Samand'riel leaned forward, both of his palms flat on the table. Metatron raised a fork of wiggly lime Jello before his face and studied it for some moments with a creaseless wonder. He was so caught in a boundless, easy joy that the other two young men began to wonder if he might have forgotten them entirely, lost in the dance of gelatin.

Zadkiel lost his patience first; he was leaning forward, eyes alight with anticipation, looking like a movie poster where the dashing American WWII soldier goes and socks it to the Nazis. His breath was caught; he had to clear it again, just in case Metatron was waiting for some sign. "Um. Metatron, what is the secret?"

Metatron glanced up after a moment, blinking slowly, and then consumed the Jello before answering, "Things happen as they should happen. We live in the best of all possible universes."

The angel of forbearance sat back and massaged his temples, and through steady discipline did not look so disappointed that he could break something. He sighed, tension singing hard between his shoulders, the one ray of possible hope gone into the ether. And with the Jello into Metatron's stomach.

"Thank you, Metatron," he said dully.

Metatron frowned at the Jello as if it suddenly no longer interested him and stood abruptly, stretching.

"Tell them I suggest Naples, when they ask," he said comfortably, and tucked both hands into his pockets, ready to saunter off in another apparently aimless direction, Nazca-lined in pattern. Neither gods nor men could begin to plumb the astronomic depths of his motivations. Perhaps he just had to go to the toilet.

The dark-haired man's mouth twitched; he threw caution and patience to the wind and spun in his chair, hands on his knees, voice carrying more than a little hint of his desperation as Metatron prepared to go off to where ever his next destination was.

"What do you mean, 'Naples'?"

Metatron looked back at the younger man, shoulders skewed as if he might have been in an eternal half-shrug. His eyes were patient although perhaps also a touch of amusement, as if he felt he were explaining something particularly obvious to a slow child, gentle, repetitive.

"If they go in November. The weather will be nice. They should stay in Un posto al Sole. But then, that is just my opinion."

The angel of forbearance watched the mismatched coat and the mismatched slacks disappear into the small, quiet bustle of the cafeteria, squinting after him, before relaxing down in his chair and looking inconsolable. Zadkiel folded his arms and sank down into them, cheek on his forearm, momentarily defeated in the wake of Epiphany.

"Naples," he said. "Naples."

"Well," his brother said decidedly, "Italy is a nice place."

"Samand'riel."

*

There were things in life which you simply could not Jeyes away in a cloud of lemon-scented dopamine, of which included monkey paws, bits of guns, ten boxes of ammunition, something labeled a 'saint medallion', and a first aid kit that looked more like a big white tin box labeled 'HP' for no apparent reason. Eden Ardith was of the opinion that if Rachel had left them out, then he wanted them all to smell like lemon polish, so with a vengeance scrubbed them all down and sorted them out in the man's childhood bedroom.

(He also hung a little freshness pine tree scent from the shotgun, in a knot that Rachel wouldn't untie quickly.)

When Eden needed to keep his hands busy, he cleaned. He dusted Jibreel's posters from The Gloria Revolution, the books she hadn't taken to her flat - which included things like Eighth Form At Malory Towers and Three Cheers For Head Girl, all hand-me-downs from her mother - beat out the carpet, rearranged the closets, vacuumed three times and cleaned the windows. He shortsheeted both beds, just in case anybody tried to get in them. He was happy when he cleaned. He scrubbed until his hands through the surgical gloves were red raw and then sprayed various corners with verbena spray until the ensuing bouquet would please anybody who worked at a Home & Gardens magazine. (Eden subscribed to the Home & Gardens magazine, and drew mustaches on all the people in it. And the homes. And the gardens.) It was that or going stir crazy and he'd bloody well want to see Jibs and his retarded son and the little sprog, and he couldn't, he couldn't and he couldn't and he couldn't.

He stacked some zombie skulls on top of one another. Then he put a doily over them, just because.

The con side to being the Angel of Death was that you were the angel of death. Eden often watched the American musical that the shits in Hollywood had produced, Angels Never Came Down: The Musical, and his lines were the best in the whole play. In the flashback sequence he got to say, Gabriel, now I truly know that death is my gift and not my life, and Eden had specifically bought the t-shirt. Unfortunately, the movie had totally randomly hit on the con side. Death was his gift. If he walked in on Buboe unannounced he might hand it over to the little bit of thistledown fluff like it had been wrapped up all specially for him, and that would be the end of it.

So if he never saw Buboe, he'd never see the fall.

So he'd clean.

"Is your intention to destroy the ozone layer yourself through the abuse of aerosol cleaners, or were you just aiming to destroy the family's brain cells once and for all?" asked the patriarch dryly from where he stood, arms folded and leaning against the door. They were the only ones at home, so of course they ended up drawn together like opposing magnets, drawing comfort in mutual torment. There had been several books written already on the deep nuances of their relationship: Death and Clemency. They were a particular favorite of alternative lifestyles classes at University. Duriel did not like to dwell on the fact that his wife seemed to enjoy reading these books.

"Darling," Eden trilled, lifting up the scrubrag, "you musn't see me, I ha'n't got my make-up on. My, you have dreadfully untidy kids. What the fuck's up with all these goddamn skulls? That's why Rach can't get a girlfriend, he's into necrophilia, only gets hard for zombies. Sumatra's just a long dirty weekend for our Rach. Don't you like the smell of polish? I could huff this shit all day, I could. Why are you pesterin' me? Peter not puttin' out?"

"Peter's quiet, for once. I think he finally decided that he had nothing to add to the discussion."

"I bet he's only quiet 'cause he's drinking,” was the automatic response, “You should maybe lock the liquor cabinet, but then what would princess muffin sunshine do when she needs a toddy to get through the night next to you, Count Fossilpoppleus?”

Duriel was so impressed with the quality of Eden's snappy repartee that he forgot himself in awe. Either that or he was counting the seven cardinal virtues quietly to himself as a reminder that his wife generally disapproved of bloodshed inside the house.

“It sounds like the sky is falling, dear." Eden continued, as he focused his attention on the dresser, which was littered over with forgotten ribbons and a spine-broken Portuguese dictionary. "You know that the two signs of apocalypse are my son and my housemate."

"Samael, why are you in here? I know you rarely intend to make despoiling Rachel's collection of skulls your first priority on most days. Why now?" Duriel's eyes tracked Eden as he dropped the cloth with a manic burst of negligence.

"You know why." He answered, gritty in softness. "You know why, you old bastard. I know what I am." Eden laughed, a bark down a drainpipe, "after all, you're the one who showed me, boss."

"You know how much I care for the child,” It was terse, bitten, as if it cost, “For the parents. I know you are the same."

Eden looked up, angry, "So what? I'm worried, I'm distracting myself here. I can't go there. I can't help -- " He stopped short, then continued, "I won't be any use there." Eden's expression grew bitter. He attacked the rubbish basket with some ferocity.

"Samael, none of us are capable at this point. It's out of our hands."

"What about Darth Apocalypse?" Eden queried snarkishly, “I bet he'd disagree, but only minorly, right.”

"I . . . don't know what to think about that." Matthias Eisenreich felt old just then, very old and useless. "Samael, he is your son. Whatever happens, don't drown yourself in distraction. They deserve our attention."

"Some lecture from you," Eden bagged rubbish violently. "I haven't seen you at the bedside, Doc Feelgood."

Duriel stared silently for a moment, unmoving. "I was afraid to look, you know. I still am." Duriel turned his head slightly, grimacing as he spoke. "Gabriel is never afraid." She was an invocation as always, Saint Anne, keep me safe from this storm.

Eden turned silently to face his former mentor. "Afraid." It was a cold, quiet statement, like a munitions report in a movie. We've got six bullets left between us. Let's make them count.

"I see the candleflames burn. Some of them are bright, some dim. Some of them tremble like they're riding out a storm," Duriel intoned, death steady, his eyes rolling in his head meet Eden's. "I'm afraid to look at the child too closely, Samael. I do not want to see that candle snuffed."

Eden paused for a long moment, awkwardly clenching his fists, staring at the hardwood like he might ionize the top layer of it, leaving only ash and the fresh scent of pine. He said nothing in return.

Duriel sighed, and turned to withdraw, ready to count the confrontation as a calculated mistake. Such things happened. His was not prescience nor even a very well constructed understanding of human psychology. Sometimes he felt he knew no one other than the green whisper, not even himself. The world was an old, hard place, and in this way, perhaps he suited it.

A hand fell on his shoulder.

"Well Boss, I haven't exactly heard that from you very often." Samael grinned in Eden as Duriel turned just barely, giving up ground. "I guess we're all fucking terrified even if we can't so much admit it."

His grin crimped a bit at the edges, and Samael continued "That's me. Maybe I'm sorry for being such a prick about it." Maybe. They were always building their ladder from maybes.

One eyebrow rose at the apology. "I think the only one who does not seem to feel it is Gabriel, and I know that's just her throwing shadows." Duriel's gaze was focused and distracted all at once. "She needs support."

"I know, old man, I know. I'll do what it is I do, maybe not so much teacup derby." Eden snapped a finger at Duriel, glassy-bright. "In exchange, you'd better be more collected yourself, old bastard. It may not seem like it, but some goddamn morons in this house look up to you,” it was rictus, canary-eating. It was Samael. “Don't leave 'em hanging."

As he left, Duriel found it fit to call back, like a shipman hailing shore, "I'll do my best, apprentice. I expect nothing less from you."

Maybe Eden smiled as Duriel left the room, and maybe not from the lemon fumes. Maybe he felt better. Maybe. Maybe Duriel was right was right; maybe they all needed to shape up. His son could become very dangerous in the next few hours. Maybe it would be death, blood and the Habbalah again. Maybe it would be sons and fathers who were straight Kafka. Maybe they were all fucking doomed.

Maybe.

It was a dangerous ladder.

*

Upon careful reflection -- which Demeter Serraffield seemed to be doing a lot of these days, a consequence of hours spent at the bedside of the corpsechild, knitting folded absently in her lap, scarves and mittens spun of colored yarn and care and worry and perhaps even broken despair --before this week, this age, this new era, AD, after death, AL, after lorry, she had not really spent so much time in St. Sebastian's Hospital during the graveyard hours since she had been in little plaid kilts and penny loafers, straining as hard as she could, until her fingers bled, aching to shift the pattern of what had come and what all others thought would be.

Now she was aching again, straining hard, pulling all the muscles in her body until they unraveled into thread and sinew. It would never be enough. She was so very tired. Jibreel and Azrael had curled in this room like a rigor mortis fist, and only the most patient cajoling had convinced them to go home, as if they expected a hit squad of surgeons to burst into the room at any moment and confiscate life-support equipment like repomen. She had had to call Raziel in to lay a stasis circle around the bed before she could persuade them out the door. It had been a long day. She had cleaned up the chicken blood herself.

She hoped it was chicken blood.

She was telling herself it was chicken blood.

Gabriel let her head loll back on her shoulders, eyes closed briefly before opening one slowly and affixing it on her husband who sat with his hands folded, silent as a stone, strange in that ugly vinyl pumpkin chair. She had spent matchless nights in those chairs, asleep out in the hallway or in the individual rooms of his ward, unmolested because no one ever dared to tell her go home.

Except for him.

And they were far past all of that.

They had been home and found it empty and wanting, so they had come back to sit vigil. It was her watch anyway. No one really bothered to number the watches she sat -- or so she thought.

"I like to think of summer holidays," she confided, smiling faintly, "When he was so very small. He has always been a summer child, I think. Jibreel is autumn turning winter. My Rachel is winter turning spring. The baby has always been high summer. I like to think of him in the grass, when Jibreel was first teaching him how to hold a racket, even when it was nearly as big as he was. Do you remember how he used to go after the shuttlecock?"

Duriel eyed his wife patiently, listening to her try and fill the empty room with conversation. He knew how long she'd spent at the child's side; everyone else could guess, but he knew the numbers, the minutes and seconds, the days and hours.

"He still seems small, doesn't he, Demeter? But in that, I suppose, he is not all that different from the rest of us."

She raised a tired eyebrow, "Feeling genuflexive Duriel?, she asked, a tremble in her voice that might have been a laugh or might have been something different, "I suppose we all should, in times like these."

She kicked off her mules and wriggled her toes once, as if checking, out of curiosity, to see whether or not they still worked. She tucked them under herself and picked half-heartedly at her knitting.

"His scarf was going to be mulberry this year," she noted dully, "Now I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Perhaps I'll give it to Rachel. I suppose spirit guides could always do with spare scarves."

She studied the baby's small, limp hands for a moment in the silence, nails that had been trimmed by nurses once already, so that if he moved suddenly he would not cut himself. Oh, if only he would move, even a death spasm.

Her mouth trembled slightly and she ducked her head so that her hair fell into her face.

"I know that there's no chance of him breaking Glasgow three. I know that there's no response to any external stimuli. I know that there's nothing really -- oh Duriel, I'm so tired."

The last words fell from her mouth strained and limp, surprised, as if this was a state of nature it was nigh impossible for Gabrielbendium to reach, solid hydrogen, clear despair, the lost.

Duriel rose from his chair to place a hand on her shoulder, reflexively checking the room, as though there were someone there who was causing all this distress, someone hiding, invading his family's peace of mind, boiling waters turbulent. If there was a source, it could be dealt with – those words being defined in the old style.

"Gabriel, there are some problems which even you cannot solve. The child . . . it's all out of our hands." For a moment, the eternally rigid face was run through with frustration, care. He thought of his daughter, hollow-miserable, his sons' faces taunt with controlled grief. He thought of his wife, and looked down, wondering just how much longer his family could take this.

"I wish it were out of our hands," she shook her head, her hair flurrying around her as it had done in earlier days, "But it's not. It's all in our hands, all of it, right here in our laps. Christ, I thought he was going to ascend today, right there in the conference room. Duriel, what are we going to do?"

"All we can do is wait. Azrael has shut himself off from everyone save Jibreel, who is unlikely to disagree with him. If he ascends . . ." Duriel stopped, as though considering. "If he ascends, then we'll just have to do what we can. We wait, for now."

She closed her eyes again, fingers laced together over the abandoned knitting, "I've always hated waiting. You know that."

"You've never been very patient, it is true. However, when you wish to be, you are extremely deliberate, Gabriel. I know we can wait." He tightened his grip on her shoulder.

She bent her neck so that her cheek brushed his fingers and thought of Sorrento and Bath and the Lake District and a hundred other summer memories, "I'm sorry," she said and meant it, "I'll try to be better. It's not like me to be like this. I can't be like this. Other people can't afford for me to be like this. You're right. We'll wait, and when it comes time, we'll do. We'll do whatever it is we have to do, because that's all we can do, and no one can expect more."

"Gabriel." Duriel faced her sharply. "You misunderstand. You are doing nothing wrong. Everyone seems to think that it is all right to shift weight to you and you never say differently." He paused, closed his eyes tiredly, then continued. "Gabriel, I am here. Don't hide from me; I can see it."

She looked up, all eyes, suddenly feeling chastised and not so much like forty-three as thirteen, "I'm sorry," she stammered again, "I don't mean to. I really don't, there's just been so much and you've been doing so much and I've always been other places or there've been other people," her voice was tremulous and she was on the momentum, full tilt, "I don't mean to hide it from you, not from you, but I can't afford for other people to see that in me. They wouldn't know what to do. It's my place to be this way, but I could not begin to be this way without you. Yesod; foundation," she stilled suddenly and tried to smile, "I suppose I am terribly trying, aren't I? You have immense patience to put up with me."

Duriel smiled, a small smile that he reserved solely for the woman before him. "You never need to apologize for anything, Gabriel. I think you may touch on the Platonic form of worry. You cannot help but be who you are."

He looked closely at his wife of forty-three, the woman who looked sixteen, the angel who was as old as twenty seven summers at Glastonbury Tor, the life which outpaced them all. "It's perfectly all right to lean a little, Gabriel." He leaned close, as if afraid of being overheard. "I love you."

Her laugh was soft, bare, private.

"I know."

*