Archive of Our Own ^beta

Even after thousands upon thousands of years, each life was different, and each moment of every life was different, and so was every death. The wonder of it drew his attention, though it did not awe him. He was an angel and as such designed to comprehend without annihilation the infinite wonder of the divine.

Instead of obliterating him, it would have suffused him, surrounded him, and satisfied him forever - were it not for her. Her dissatisfaction. Her rejection. Her dissent.

Instead of following his creator, he followed her - because of her conviction, itself staggering in its arrogance, that there was more. More, both created and uncreated, than they - who had been granted perfect knowledge - would ever be allowed to know.

And now he watched as that perfect knowledge returned to her - tremendous, undeniable, absolute - knowledge whose first foundations would have destroyed the mind of the mortal shell she had worn. Watched the moment when she knew, and then rejected the perfection of that knowledge, and rebelled again.

Such, perhaps, was madness in angels. He did not think she was mad.

He could not do what she had done - neither once, nor, as she had, thousands upon thousands of times. The act of choosing was very hard for all angelic kind. Yet, every time, despite the agonies of a human life - doubt, disappointment, guilt, betrayal - she returned to live another one, because there was more to learn. More choices to make. The possibility of mistake. Choice, he saw, came easier to her now.

She was smiling.

She liked to keep her human image for a little while, in these brilliant moments after the death of her body and the revelation of her nature. In these moments, she was neither truly mortal nor immortal, and she first demanded that he question her and then, as mortality receded from her, analysed along with him her life and the following conversation.

Soon she would be mortal again, and forget him.

"Tell me why you are joyful," he said.

"I know, now," she said, "why I made the choices I did. Why I was driven, and driven to act in ways that would hurt me. Why it hurt, although I knew it was my choice. Why I always knew it was wrong." The smile was rapture pouring through her image, melting it like wax held to a fire.

Always, whatever body she had and however it compared to the standards of beauty held by the mortals among whom she lived, she was beautiful to them, and sometimes frightening - her real nature making itself subtly known when she did not know it herself. Ironically - for hers was sundered - they often called it grace. He watched for that, and cupped his hands around her brilliance when he could - to catch it for himself and hide it from others. He watched her, because others watched.

A human had a soul, and a soul's keeper. A human without a guardian angel would be noticed, and so, for each of her mortal lives, he had played the chaperone. Watching over her, he attempted to guess at the insights she would arrive at when she returned to herself, and although he could perfectly record and recall her life, sift through her mortal thoughts, and know her mortal heart, she always surprised him.

He guarded perfectly; it was easier for him than it was for some callower, younger angels to refrain from interfering, in either salvation or damnation, to punish or to smooth the way. And as a reward: these moments in conversation with a being unlike any throughout creation, who was not what she had been created to be.

And if she had been the highest of angels, still their creator would have set the lowest human above her in the estimation of that mind; and it was the question why whose answer they sought together, beyond the answer woven into the fabric of creation.

The great paradox: that their creator loved best those who could choose hate and rejection in response to that love. Though they did not deceive themselves that, choosing to rebel, they made themselves more glorious thereby.

(And perhaps they did deceive themselves: perhaps she had been created to rebel, and so had he, and every moment of their existence followed a pattern, a dance outside the dance. No one who had contemplated the full divinity of the creator could believe without doubt that a pattern existed outside of it. He was crushed under that doubt. He did not succumb to that doubt only because he was a being of a kind that could not so be destroyed.)

(And yet if that pattern existed then it was their highest aim to discover it, and the meaning behind and beyond it, and a meaning still further beyond, expanding universe matched by expanding understanding, the only grasp on creation that mattered.)

(For even fallen angels fly.)

Unusually, for her in these moments, she was silent. He lifted his hand to convey them away - gestures were a habit learned from guarding, and especially a habit learned from guarding those whose existence was so physical and bound to that plane - and with her own hand, she stilled him. "Watch," she said, herself watching the busy street, as the cars began to move again now that the police had gone.

"Which?" he asked her, as if the command was new to him, as anything she said to him must be examined for its newness.

(His appointed role was to watch a star that had been born a handful of millenia before this planet's sun. That task, along with the contemplation of the divine, would have satisfied him once. He had not abandoned the star; it pleased him to believe he loved it more than ever he could have before he rebelled.)

"All of them."

Together they observed a throng of mortals along the street - a few that she had known when she had walked among them, or might have touched in some way, and many, many who were utterly unknown to Louise whom she had been. Together they expanded their oversight through the borough, through the city, through the country, through the mortal world, through all the planets of that star and through the star. It was nothing more than an inward and outward breath to the powers and conception of an angel. To two in concert, it was nothing more than a game. And, contemplating creation, they found themselves not small in comparison, but vast in the encompassing.

"To the next life," she said, when a dozen years had passed in silence. It was time for her to diminish again.

And to grow.