by Jane Lebak
“I’ll go then,” Raphael said, and Gabriel only looked up at him with blank eyes, sharp eyes. Raphael felt the chill in the air between them where there ought to have been fire and steel. “You’re sure? It won’t take long.”
Gabriel looked back at his book. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
I can’t ever make it right, can I? But Raphael didn’t say it, didn’t project it, and didn’t try to send the grief through their bond. Instead he flashed to the rooftop of his house.
Raphael’s home stood on a hill a couple of miles from Gabriel’s library. Gabriel hadn’t had the place for a very long time; it was only about a year after he’d returned from Tobias that he’d decided to build it, and he’d asked Raphael to help select a location. Thrilled, Raphael knew the perfect place, and it was here, in sight of his own home. Gabriel had declared it suitable, and he’d begun to make plans.
Gabriel had gone one midnight to Tobias’s household and taken two seeds from one tree and then a cutting from it as well. He’d set them in pots where they’d eventually be planted and nurtured them until they were saplings about waist-high. Raphael had asked why he wanted them. Although he’d been evasive, Gabriel had admitted they were to remind him. And Raphael had said, Why would you want to be reminded of that? to which Gabriel had replied that he couldn’t bear to learn it all again.
Gabriel had inscribed a name over the door, “Three Trees Library,” but no one ever called it that. It was always just “Gabriel’s library.”
It had been so different when Raphael had built his house. He’d done little more than ask the Spirit to make it for him. It had taken him half an hour to find a nice place, and that had been that. Gabriel in contrast had drawn pictures, blueprints, diagrams. He’d made sure there was room to add new wings as the collection required them. He’d changed the slope of the terrain, modified the landscape, and then set out stakes to mark where he wanted the building, the terraces, and the three trees.
Then, with half an hour until the designated time to put the thing together, Gabriel had reversed the design.
Raphael had come up behind him while he was working on the blueprint, and he’d pointed out that as the library grew, the trees would no longer be visible from his house. Without disengaging from the paper, Gabriel had said, “It’s better this way.” No reason. Raphael knew better than to argue with Gabriel when he felt he had all his proofs in a row, and because Gabriel had been fully engaged in reversing the design, he’d let it stand.
But now, as he sat on the roof of his own house unable to see the trees, Raphael realized Gabriel had kept him from seeing a monument to his failure every time he looked out the window.
Gabriel just back from that year had been so scarily quiet. He’d hung back from group interactions even as he sought them out, analyzing where he fit. No one had treated him differently, but he’d changed the way he treated everyone else: gently, as if fitting them together like piecework. Gabriel had clung to Raphael so hard in those early days, and Raphael had felt Gabriel’s rawness because for the first time he was gauging what they thought of him too.
How many times had Gabriel wandered onto the balcony or gazed from the stacks out at those trees, remembering how badly Raphael had let him down? And he’d never given any hint about it.
Raphael focused with long-distance vision through the windows of the library. Gabriel was still at work, books and papers spread over the entirety of the desk.
He lay back on the sun-warmed terra cotta tiles. I did all I could, he prayed. And when the Sprit prompted him, he added, All he’s let me do. The Spirit swirled through him, and Raphael flared up into a simmer. No, I don’t want to let him go. And then nothing, and he wondered, and he thought.
Gabriel had faced something like this three decades ago, when he’d lured Raphael out with that snowball fight. It must have been difficult to plan it all, just because that kind of thing was alien to a Cherub. Maybe he could make some kind of peace overture, and maybe in that way coax Gabriel to reopen the dialogue. How to do it, though?
It took Raphael two weeks of searching Creation to find the perfect gift for Gabriel, something as engaging to a Cherub as the snowball fight had been to him. In frustration he rejected idea after idea, wondering if maybe the reality was there was nothing Gabriel hadn’t studied in total. But when he found it, he knew, and he bubbled with a barely-leashed excitement he kept suppressed in case Gabriel were to sense it.
It had taken Gabriel ten minutes to come up with the idea for a snowball fight and two days to plan it; it had taken Raphael two weeks to find a gift and three minutes to come up with how to present it.
When Raphael brought it to Gabriel, there were other angels gathered with Mary, and a sharp-eyed Gabriel wore the same cautious tension he’d had for a month. Raphael kept the gift cupped in his hand, shielded but emitting little pulses of its power.
The other angels watched. Gabriel prickled with curiosity.
Raphael started to part his hands as Gabriel came forward. But then he took a step backward, and Gabriel followed. Raphael laughed inside, and Gabriel darted for him, trying to see the object.
Raphael launched away, and Gabriel took off in pursuit.
Left behind with Michael, Remiel said, “I think we just witnessed Raphael deciding eternity wasn’t long enough to wait for Gabriel to make the first move.”
#
Raphael streaked through Creation, always faster than Gabriel but careful not to strip him off, keeping enough power streaming from the gift to make him curious. He left a trail for Gabriel to follow as he chased him from place to place. At every moment Raphael could feel Gabriel’s determination growing, and before it yielded to frustration, he carried the thing to its home. There Raphael turned to face Gabriel as he arrived, his hands cupped and the gift easily visible. The smaller gift, that was.
And Gabriel got to see it, round and singular and beautiful like a lone question mark in a sea of periods and commas. He probed it without self-consciousness before Raphael’s delighted eyes, only Raphael still vibrated with anticipation.
Gabriel looked up, and in the next moment gasped with awe.
Raphael laughed out loud. Gabriel opened his senses to take it all in: a star field, the space dust, and two black holes within a light year of one another. The black holes working against one another had dotted the entire area with singularities, contorting the fabric of space itself and bending light into insane folds. The thing Raphael had held was one of the singularities. The real gift was the location.
Gabriel went loose in it, first surveying, then examining, getting it from every angle. No angel had been here before Raphael; even when he had, he’d kept his signature suppressed to leave no trace. Gabriel was the first, and he played with it, tested it, explored it. He popped in and out of the pair of black holes, pushed through space so thick it would have taken five years to move a wingspan’s distance (until Raphael flashed him out). He encircled the singularities, then watched the rippling energy of the black hole pair warp space again to generate a new one.
Raphael burned. He started to reach for Gabriel, but the Spirit cautioned him to wait.
Gabriel immersed himself in the wild geometry of contorted space, ecstatic with the learning. Then, when Raphael felt the Cherub on the verge of reaching for his fire, just when Raphael would have expected to feel that cool grasp in his heart, instead Gabriel clenched his teeth and kindled up on his own.
Raphael protested to the Spirit, who again urged patience.
But I could have fired him up!
He had to learn to do this when you were separated, the Spirit replied. It takes the edge off. It’s not the same. A moment later, Wait for him. He’s as hungry as you are.
Abruptly Raphael realized what violence this was to Gabriel’s nature. This inner fire wasn’t something Gabriel wanted to do nor found easy. It must have been awful for him to be fire-free and excluded from his Seraphim for an entire year. Raphael had seen Gabriel get nauseated after a week
’s immersion in a theoretical problem. Multiply that by fifty. Just something else to regret about that year. Raphael had never wanted to know.
The Spirit was right, though: it wasn’t much of a fire, a candle to Raphael’s hearth. Enough to help in a pinch, but it couldn’t meet the need.
Gabriel extended his senses until he located a cluster of space dust, which he streamed toward the black holes like a river. They watched the particulate matter churn like rapids over rocks around the singularities, picking up speed as it rushed toward the pair of gravity wells.
Isn’t it beautiful? Raphael glowed, and the particles picked up a hundred different hues of his light, shimmering as they frothed.
Gabriel started forward, then stopped. He clenched his hands. "I can't." Raphael stared, but Gabriel shuddered. "You're giving me a gift I can't accept."
"Why not?" The heat inside scorched him, and Raphael’s entire plan vibrated on the edge of collapse. "You keep not letting me work it out with you. I don’t want you to keep punishing me for one mistake for the rest of our lives.”
Gabriel's eyes gleamed. Raphael reached out his hands. "I'm sorry. With everything I am, I'm sorry."
Gabriel was locking down, but Raphael felt the Spirit telling him to stay, that whatever they did they needed to settle this now.
Gabriel choked, "Why do you want me around?"
"How can you ask that?" Raphael shook his head. "You’re my friend.”
Gabriel was shedding the sensation of a fruit with its rind stripped away: exposed, naked. Friend wasn't going to do it for him. Raphael said, "You’ve got an incredible perception of the world, and I love hearing the way you see things."
Gabriel’s voice broke. "Know-it-all."
Raphael said, "You keep calm in a crisis."
"Ice-hearted."
Raphael clenched his hands. "You don’t mind changing the things you think if you find a better way to do something, and you’re always looking for a better way.”
Gabriel wouldn't look at him. "Arrogant. Legalistic"
Raphael shook his head. “I hit every one of your best characteristics and twisted them into something awful. I was wrong. But that's not you. That's me.”
Gabriel still looked ready to run. It was probably an act of God that he hadn't fled already. "But you also told me… I deserved getting kicked out of Heaven. You said what I did to you can't be forgiven."
Raphael’s vision fuzzed. "What?"
Gabriel’s voice was thready. “A long time ago, you told me nothing good had come of the year.”
Raphael blinked. “I wouldn’t have!”
“You did!” Gabriel’s head snapped up. “So just like that, you negated everything I learned because of that year, so you must think I’m still that same wretched soul!”
“I never thought that!” Raphael exclaimed.
“And if you’re still just as ashamed and disgusted with me as I was at myself—”
“Wait a minute,” Raphael said. “Stop! I don’t feel anything of the sort!”
“The way you said You deserved it means that all of it you were glad for—that you were gloating—that you laughed at the way everyone walked away from me, the isolation—”
Raphael was right in front of him, face to face. “I never laughed!”
Gabriel shoved him away. “I can’t go on as your bad debt!”
Gabriel covered his face, hemorrhaging grief and shame.
“I don’t understand!” Raphael couldn't feel anything over the emotional torrent. “You don’t owe me anything! I accepted that God said it was necessary. But I never, not for one second, felt smug. I prayed for you every day. I didn’t give up on you.”
Gabriel doubled forward. What was going on? What did he mean by a bad debt? When it was Raphael who owed him from the start?
Raphael touched the edge of Gabriel’s wings with his own. “Look at me. Please. You don’t owe me anything. I don’t spend my spare hours compounding the interest on any kind of debt.”
Gabriel whispered, “You said I can’t make it right.”
Raphael shook his head. “You came home, and that made it right.”
Gabriel wrapped his arms around his stomach. “That’s not what you said! That’s not the reality you’ve lived with every day — every day. You said— We had an agreement.” His voice broke. “You said if I wouldn’t talk about it, then you would ignore it, and we’d be okay.” Gabriel huddled down on himself in space. He wasn’t running, but Raphael could feel him pulling clouds of matter toward himself. Like Adam in the garden: I was naked, so I clothed myself. Raphael burned inside, horrified: what had he done? How had he done this to Gabriel?
Gabriel covered his face with his wings. “You’ve every right to be ashamed of me, but how could you fling it in my face like that? Using that as a weapon means there’s nothing sacred between us. When I thought all along there was everything.”
Fling it in his face? When Gabriel had been the one flinging it in his face that Raphael hadn't been there for him? The rage flared inside, but Raphael pushed it down.
“Look.” He struggled to steady himself enough to do damage control, sweeping his wingtips forward just enough to touch Gabriel’s. “Please don't say that. I am not now and never have been ashamed of you.”
Gabriel glared up for the first time, his eyes burning sharper than the stars. “Don’t you dare lie to me.”
Raphael backed off. “I’m not lying.”
Gabriel flared his wings. “You said you were ashamed.” He advanced, and Raphael backed away. “You told me your feelings hadn’t changed. You told me there was never any doubt.”
“When—?”
“Always!” This anger had blown up out of nowhere, and Raphael flailed for a reason, or even when he might have said these things. Always? When he couldn’t remember saying it even once? Gabriel snapped, “We’re bonded, remember? Why do you think I wouldn’t feel how mortally embarrassed you are every time the subject comes up?”
Images pushed into Raphael’s head: snow banks, snow forts, a tortured conversation driving into a Cherub’s heart like icicles.
Raphael gasped. “I wasn’t ashamed of you.” He grabbed Gabriel by the arms. “I’d never be ashamed of you.”
Gabriel looked unsteady. "Even though you'd do anything short of throwing me into Hell to get me to shut up about—”
“I let you down!” Raphael pushed him away. “The one time you really, honestly, truly needed me, I over-reacted and couldn’t be there for you!” Gabriel looked shocked, but Raphael couldn’t stop because it just kept coming. “You were burnt to the ground and rebuilt, and I wasn’t there for you, and it was my own lousy fault! And then over and over you kept saying how everyone helped you, but it wasn’t everyone, was it? It was everyone but me. And they all know it, and you know it, and you’ll never let me forget it, and I can never make that up.”
Gabriel only said, “I didn’t hold you accountable for that.”
“That’s great.” Raphael turned away. “So you never even expected anything better of me. That makes it more shameful.”
Gabriel glowered at him. “Be rational for a minute. It’s not a matter of expectations. I’d have lost contact with you regardless. I couldn’t feel you from the moment God took the Vision away. He suspended all my bonds, not just yours. The only thing you lost was the ability to know about me.”
Gabriel actually sounded like himself. Raphael pressed on. “I also lost the ability to tell Michael how to help you.”
“So by extension you lost the chance to be sobbing right alongside Remiel while I responded to Satan’s commands like a domesticated dog. I’m glad you didn’t get to witness that. You’d be twice as ashamed of me then.”
Raphael snapped, “I’m not ashamed of you.”
Gabriel regarded him with no expression. “Do you really expect me to believe you carried that for six hundred years? And then didn’t learn enough from it to apply the brakes this time?”
Raphael clenched h
is fists. “You have to believe me!”
Gabriel pulled back. No, clearly he didn’t have to believe it. He was so hard to read, especially when he went into that Cherub mindset and weighed everything like a scientist gathering data.
Raphael groped for whatever he remembered of that snow-ball conversation. What had he said back then? “My feelings haven’t changed. There was never any doubt: the whole time you were gone, I only wanted you back. You’re my best friend, and I love spending time with you, and I’m proud to serve God at your side.”
Gabriel closed his eyes. But the steel was yielding, and he wasn't withdrawing anymore. Raphael could feel Gabriel processing. Re-working new information in with the old; re-interpreting; challenging.
Raphael finally said, “You asked me, so let me ask you too: why would you stay around if you thought I felt that way?”
“Because I love you.” Gabriel’s light dimmed. “I’m sorry I let you think I blamed you. I was too ensnared in your opinion of me.”
Raphael hovered in front of Gabriel so they were eye-to-eye. He rested his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders.
Gabriel brought his wings around Raphael and put his hands into Raphael’s hair. He prayed.
Raphael joined him. Father, I don’t know how to fix this. Please let me be trustworthy for him.
God, Gabriel wove into Raphael’s prayer, he can’t prove himself trustworthy unless I trust him first. Please give me the strength to trust him. Please help me get past this.
Peace settled across both of them, and then Raphael felt the Holy Spirit talking directly to Gabriel. He couldn’t pick out the specifics, but it felt like encouragement. It felt like reassurance and an invitation to faith.
With a deep breath, Gabriel reached into Raphael’s heart and started drawing off fire.
Relief washed through Raphael like a tidal wave. Gabriel’s thoughts and sensations flooded him, and Raphael reflexively reached for Gabriel’s heart.
“I’ll ask again.” Raphael looked him in the eyes. “Please accept my gift.”
