He puts the bag of takeaway cartons down on the dining table, drops his keys and raises his eyebrows at them, but they only slowly tear their eyes away to look at him.
“Are you guys okay?”
Brath smiles stiffly. “Fine,” he says, but Mathieu can tell that there’s something off about him.
Come to think of it there is something off about Jakob too. Or rather, that something that was off before seems firmly back in place now. His eyes are dark and focused, and his forehead is slightly creased from his brows pushing together in a slight frown, displeased for some reason, but it’s a refreshing change to his recent numbing indifference.
“Actually,” Jakob says, “we’re not.”
Mathieu furrows his brows. “Okay,” he says, stretching the vowels in confusion, and he is unable to comprehend what's going on. The entire situation suddenly feels very fishy.
“What did he tell you?” Jakob asks him with a grave tone. “What did he say to you about who he is?”
“What? Jakob, what are you going on about?” He averts his gaze. “Brath?” But Brath is staring daggers at Jakob, eyes solid and cold and Mathieu doesn’t like this, he doesn’t like it at all. It’s making him uncomfortable because there it is again, this awfully persistent feeling in the pit of his stomach, this nagging voice in the back of his mind telling him that it’s so obvious; he is an idiot.
“Go on, Jakob,” Brath suddenly speaks up again. “Tell him if you think this is a good idea.”
It seems like all light, and all air is being sucked out of the room. There is a glass of water on the table, and Mathieu absentmindedly looks at it. The surface is rippling softly, and when Mathieu keeps completely still, he can feel a delicate tremor beneath his feet. He wants to think this is an earthquake of some kind, maybe a plane flying overhead, but it’s eerily quiet, and Brath and Jakob’s gazes are locked again. Mathieu tries to breathe steadily, but he fails, and he feels his knees grow weak.
“You should get away from him,” Jakob says eventually, turning to face Mathieu and there is something so dead serious about him like this is a matter of life and death. “Get away while you can. He’s not—he’s not who he seems to be.”
“I don’t—” Mathieu starts, but Jakob interrupts him instantly.
“I mean it, Mathieu. What happened to me—it’s not something you should get involved in, believe me. Please, as your friend, trust me. Brath is--” and he pauses, swallows thickly; throws a quick look towards Brath who is—“Brath isn’t Brath, okay? He’s—”
Jakob stutters to a halt, bites down on his lips and quietly begs Mathieu with one look to trust him on this, and Mathieu doesn’t know if he can. He feels the throbbing beat of his heart solidly in his chest, choking him and the sky is almost black outside. The Earth is still shivering, and the air is heavy with tension and all of a sudden, there’s a quiet buzz, and the light bulb above their head shatters into a million pieces. Mathieu flinches, instinctively shields his eyes as a shriek echoes through the room, abruptly it’s so dark that Mathieu shouldn’t be able to see his own hands in front of his face. But he can, and when he finally dares to look up, Brath is glowing.
Brath is glowing like there’s electricity encircling him like he’d swallowed a halogen lamp and there are odd shadows on the wall behind him, all disfigured and drawn out and, right now, Mathieu wants nothing more than to pass out and wake up to find he’s dreaming this. He wants to think he’s dreaming all of it, maybe stuck in one of Brath’s tales.
This can’t be real. It can’t. But there are pieces in his head, slowly being put together to create a seamless puzzle and it makes sense, and Mathieu curses it for making sense because…
“What the hell,” he grinds out between his teeth. “Christ, you’ve got to be kidding me!” and Jakob’s expression is still serious, leaving Mathieu not even the slightest hint to still be in doubt about anything.
Brath is not Brath echoes in his mind, over and over and over again and Mathieu would cover up his ears if it’d do any good. He looks at him, and Brath’s eyes are even darker than the blackened sky. Mathieu might not understand any of it, and he might not want to believe it at all, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
“You’re Azrael,” he says numbly. And he turns on his heel and runs out the door.
10
Brath
The air smells like baked pastries. Usually, Brath enjoys it. But today it makes him feel sick.
When Keith flops down next to him, Brath doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting in the kitchen. He thinks Gareth was still busying himself with the ovens when he sat down, but now the lights are gone inside as well as outside the windows, and he suddenly realizes that it’s become very quiet and Gareth is nowhere to be seen.
Brath blinks and turns to face Keith. “What?”
“You’ve been here all day,” Keith says with lines of worry on his forehead. “It’s freaking me out.”
“Why don’t you just leave then,” Brath bites back before he can stop himself before he can stop himself from sounding like an angry and bitter child. This is so below him it’s making him cringe inwardly.
“Because you look sad,” Keith says and pulls a face to emphasize it. Brath has to fight the urge to punch him.
“I’m not sad.”
“Yeah,” Keith drawls. “I think humans have an actual term for what you are.”
“And what would that be,” Brath says, subtly daring Keith to continue.
“You’re lovesick,” Keith eventually tells him, seeming terribly satisfied with himself.
Brath thinks he might be gaping. He’s not sure; he sure as hell hopes he’s not. “I am not.”
“You are,” Keith insists and has the audacity to sling an arm around Brath’s shoulders in what he probably assumes to be a comforting gesture. Brath wonders if he should give him credit for trying, but he discards it immediately. “You know, Mathieu hasn’t stopped by in three days, you’ve sulked in here for one of those, and I don’t want to know what you did during the other two. And it’s okay, Brath. Something went wrong, and you miss him, it’s only—”
“Keith, I swear,” Brath cuts him off. “If you say it’s only human, I will cut off your head and make Gareth bake it.”
The kitchen door squeals and Gareth saunters in with a plate. “Ugh, that’s vile,” he comments, then sits down on Brath’s other side so that he finds himself sandwiched between the two demons and Brath guesses that if that is now his existence, then he did make a series of wrong choices on the way; starting with these two. “Brownie?”
Brath glowers at him, but he still takes the brownie, because it’s a damn good brownie and he likes chocolate. It would be a tragedy for this brownie to go to waste. “I hate this fucking place,” he says with a mouth full of cake and keeps glaring ahead.
“You hate an awful lot of things,” Gareth says, leaning in. “You want a cuddle?”
“No,” Brath scoffs, but when Gareth wraps his freakishly strong arms around his torso and Keith crosses their legs together, encircling one of Brath’s wrists with his icy fingers, Brath doesn’t move away.
* * *
Brath decides a few days into Mathieu’s absence that he doesn’t care; that it is illogical for him to care in the slightest that Mathieu decided to walk out on him after finding out the truth. Or rather, after Jakob spilling the truth against Brath’s wish. And fine, maybe he didn’t expect things to turn out the way they are now, but it suits him just fine. He’s now rid of Mathieu and any distractions and that allows him to focus on his plan, with the inclusion of the surprise that Jakob has turned out to be.
So he forgets about Mathieu (he tries to, but it is not his fault that he keeps sneaking back into his mind when Brath last expects it) and goes on a little search that remains fruitless. He ponders on sending Keith or Gareth off, but if he hasn’t been successful—well he doubts they would be either. It pisses him off, in a way, and he thinks about stalking Jakob, grinding his ne
rves and making him crack, but he doesn’t want to push him too soon after piecing his mind back together, who knows what that might do to him.
In the end, there is probably not much for him to do but wait.
Perry drops by occasionally, tells awful jokes in an attempt to lift Brath’s spirits, despite Brath always telling him that he doesn’t need his spirits lifted, that his spirits are fine. But none of his explanations stick; Perry still tries to make him laugh, and Keith and Gareth fuss over him like people would fuss over their sick children. It makes Brath feel pathetic, more pathetic because a human walked out on him.
But it’s not like Brath cares. At all.
11
Mathieu
Mathieu isn't dramatic. He is not. If anyone criticizes him for turning into what Jakob had been turned into two months ago, then they most likely haven’t had to face the revelation that they’d been screwing the Angel of Death. And that they’d--in a bizarre and fucked up way--even started to like him.
He hides in his apartment. In his bedroom, to be exact and he isn’t proud of it, but he feels like hiding under the covers, so he will damn well do whatever he pleases.
Mathieu does try to wrap his head around the absurdity of it all, but it just makes it ache to no end, so he gives up and instead decides to sulk and wallow in self-pity until Jakob practically bangs down the door. With their roles reversed, Mathieu wonders how Jakob had managed not to cut his head off with Mathieu annoying the hell out of him; because Jakob sure as hell is annoying the fuck out of Mathieu now.
But maybe he's unfair. Jakob is trying to help, but Jakob is also the living reminder that this is all very real, not a joke, not a dream or some screwed up trance.
Jakob tells him a tale; a cherub--much unlike the child-like ones in paintings--flew down from Heaven to set Jakob up with another, who it was will always be a mystery—another one of God’s mysterious plans—and he’d fallen in love with Jakob.
“Seriously,” he tells Jakob. “How does this shit happen?”
“I don’t know,” Jakob replies tiredly. “I don’t try to understand it.”
Mathieu huffs. “Yeah, that’s what everyone is telling me these days.”
* * *
After rolling around in his bed for three days and kicking Jakob out—because honest to God, he isn’t going to kill himself or anything. Mathieu drags himself into his living room and in front of his laptop, and he googles everything. He googles it. That’s how low he’s sunk. He googles Biblical myths.
Mathieu starts by scrolling through Old and New Testament, and it’s all pretty harmless up to the point where he gets sucked into Wikipedia, and the madness starts. He reads articles on the Devil and his fall from grace, the war in Heaven, and the archangels, the supposed hierarchy in Heaven and Hell.
It’s entirely clear to him that none of the articles are actually of much help because they’re little summaries of myths that some people decided to write down on mostly faded parchment scrolls. Mathieu doesn’t know if there is even an inch of truth in any of the articles he finds. It’s not like this stuff gets documented on the Discovery Channel.
He doesn’t feel any smarter when he’s done with it after he’s spent the entire day reading paragraph after paragraph of religious lore; Christianity, Judaism, Orthodox and whatever else.
Mathieu refrains from looking up anything on Azrael, because—well, it might be messed up, but it feels like stalking, and he doubts there’s going to be anything useful on the internet. It’s not like Brath—or whatever he is supposed to call him now—hasn’t told him, quite detailed if Mathieu is honest with himself, what happened to him, or how he came to be. God’s anger personified—if that doesn’t have a ring to it.
He gets up and walks into the kitchen, puts two spoons of that awful instant coffee into a cup and waits with arms crossed in front of his chest for the water to boil. It’s already growing dark outside, an almost cruel strip of bright orange on the horizon, only partially interrupted by the city’s skyline. The cold is almost creeping through the single-pane windows (an apparent disadvantage of living in an old building) and there’s a thin layer of condensation pearling down the frames. Walking over to the fridge to grab milk that will hopefully make his coffee drinkable, Mathieu opens the door and stops short.
There are three cartons of juice in his fridge; three different kinds of juice; cranberry, grape, and pomegranate.
Mathieu doesn’t even drink juice.
He had bought the cartons after a day of Brath staying over. He had made an actual effort to buy juice because Brath hadn’t liked anything else.
Mathieu stands there, in front of the open fridge, growing cold, and stares at those three cartons when he realizes that he is utterly screwed. He is completely fucked, and he is probably an even bigger asshole than he’d always been happy to admit.
It’s barely been a month, and already he finds a Brath-shaped hole in his life.
* * *
Mathieu tosses and turns all night, finds no sleep, and when it’s morning, he doesn’t know what he’ll hate himself for more; for not listening to Jakob or for following some complicated feelings.
* * *
It’s probably pathetic that he waits at the corner of the street for a full ten minutes before getting the guts to walk into the coffee shop for the first time in a week. He’s done his fair share of soul-searching and in no way does he think this is a good idea, but—well, here he is. And he refuses to chicken out of this.
Mathieu pushes the door open, and the rusty bell above it gives off a feeble sound. He immediately sees Keith behind the counter, as usual. What disturbs him though, is the fact that Keith’s smile widens when he sees him, and in a flurry of movement, he comes to stand in front of Mathieu with spread arms.
“Oh no,” Mathieu says quickly and holds up his hands to shield himself off. “Don’t even think about it. Seriously. If I get hugged by a demon before eight in the morning, my brain is going to explode.”
Keith nods, but he gestures towards the back. “Brath is in the kitchen.”
“Figured,” Mathieu feels the need to comment, trying to ignore the thoughts rushing through his brain and tries not to think about where Keith could have been; or where he is from.
He finds the kitchen filled with the pleasant smell of freshly baked pastry. There are a few clouds of flour and a couple of stray sun rays obscuring his vision. Mathieu sees Gareth in one corner, now turned around, eyeing him with raised brows, handling a tray out of an oven with bare hands.
There is no doubt as to who is sitting crossed legged in the middle of the table, with a candy-colored bowl in his lap and a large wooden spoon in his hand, stirring something that is undoubtedly dough of some kind. His heart does a little leap and Mathieu realizes he’s missed Brath; he really has.
“Hey,” he says, and even though it’s a short word, his voice still trembles slightly.
Brath blinks at him for a moment, blank expression, and the spoon stuck motionless in the dough, then he looks over his shoulder at Gareth, and Mathieu can only guess what kind of silent words they’re exchanging. And then all of a sudden, Gareth is gone. Gone. Just like that. Mathieu flinches before he can grab hold of his body; this is something he has to get used to if he doesn’t want to die of a heart attack within the next week.
Brath still doesn’t give anything away when he returns his gaze to him.
“What do you want?”
Mathieu lets out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding. “I don’t really know,” he says and shrugs. “This is… I mean, you are aware of what happened, right?”
“Perfectly,” Brath replies monotonously, but at least he puts the bowl aside.
“Good,” Mathieu says. “Good. Because I wasn’t sure and I just want to say again that this,” he gestures vaguely about, “isn’t something that gets dumped on people every day. It’s a big deal when you find out that the guy you’ve been seeing, dating—whatever—is a heavenly avenger, the D
evil, and a couple of thousand years old.”
“More than a few thousand,” Brath throws in, and Mathieu starts to feel light-headed. “I’m not the devil,” Brath scoffs. “I was the Angel of Death, and I don’t die.”
“How was I supposed to know?” Mathieu throws back. “This is all real, right? There is a God, and there’s Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, and you’re one of them. All these stories you told me, they weren’t stories at all. That stuff happened.” Brath just nods, but Mathieu doesn’t expect him to say anything. He doesn’t think he wants Brath to say anything just now. “You’re down here because they threw you out,” he continues, and he guesses he is only now starting to realize what it means. “And you went to Hell, and you dug up Keith out of there, and Gareth, and now you run a coffee shop. I… I don’t have to get that, do I?”
“I don’t get it either,” Brath says, and Mathieu has to laugh softly at that and Brath’s sour expression.
Mathieu sighs and runs a hand over his face and digs his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans to make his stance look more casual when in fact he is a mess inside. “Listen,” Mathieu starts over. “You and Jakob, to be fair… you scared the absolute crap out of me with that glowing, heavenly light bulb stunt, okay? But,” he has to admit, “This is a lot to stomach, I am not going to lie about that, and I still don’t know if I will be able to handle it. But… the way I see it, it’s not like you’re to blame for who you are. And I don’t want to be a dick and judge anyone based on what others tell me. I don’t know you well, and I still have no idea what is going on, but from the way, I’ve gotten to know you—”
Mathieu breaks off, because he is not good at this stuff, and he has no clue what he’s even trying to say or do here, and Brath is still looking at him without giving anything away. His head is dipped to one side, and Mathieu hurts when he thinks about the reasons for that. Considering what Jakob has told him, angels aren’t that big on feelings.
The World Before: MM Romance Page 7
