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Chapter Text

• when you fall in love with an angel, you must understand that there are things you will not understand.

She remembered the words that her uncle had told her so long ago, when he was thin and frail and wasting away. How his eyes had been fever bright as he stroked her hair. He would tell her the most fantastic stories, and she was young, only eleven, and didn't understand why all the other adults spoke of him in hushed whispers when he wasn't around. She wasn't sure if they thought that she couldn't hear, but she could, and it hurt to see them cast disapproving looks at him. He was, after all, her favorite.

As she had grown older, she had thought they were just stories told to her by an ill man who was dying. Beautiful stories that would help to ease the pain of his passing. But now, she understood the odd looks her family gave him, and why they spoke in hushed whispers around her uncle. They had thought him crazy. But he wasn't crazy.

Or maybe she was crazy too. Maybe it ran in the family.

It was just that what she was seeing couldn't be real. This tall creature with six wings and golden eyes and a head of fiery red hair couldn't actually exist. And yet he was, standing in front of her desk in the library where she had been editing her essay, watching her with his wide eyes.

She wasn't sure what to say. Her mouth might have been hanging open, she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure of anything at the moment.

That wasn't true. She was sure of one thing: her uncle hadn't been telling her stories. He had been giving her guidelines.

“Some people,” her uncle had said, before he had gotten sick, before he had started to die, “are different than others.”

He was sitting at the edge of the pond by his house. She often stayed there as a child, when her father was away on business trips and couldn't watch her.

She turned to face him, ankle-deep in the water while minnows poked at her ankles and she tried to perfect her skipping technique with small flat rocks the two of them had collected earlier. “Obviously,” she said, sounding very bossy and grown-up for a seven-year-old.

Her uncle favored her with a choice smile. “Some people fall in love. Some people don't. And some people fall in love with people they shouldn't.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I'm never falling in love,” she declared, turning back to the water. “Boys are gross. And they have cooties.”

Her uncle laughed. “Do I have cooties?”

“No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Grown-ups don't have cooties.”

He chuckled again, and kept talking. “It is hard when you fall in love with people you shouldn't.” She wouldn't notice this until she was older, but her uncle sounded far-off, almost wistful. “And sometimes there aren't any words involved. You simply see them, and you know that you are made for each other, even if you aren't the same.”

“Like the poor boys who marry princesses in fairy tales?”

“Just like that. Just like that.”

She could feel it now, looking into the creature's eyes, a strange burning in her veins that extended to every part of her body as she took him in, wings and all. She opened her mouth to speak, but the creature beat her to it.

“I found you.” His voice was incomprehensible, three different voices in three different registers that flowed out in a beautiful harmony from his lips.

She blinked, a little stunned and trying to pull herself together. “Was I lost?” she asked.

He simply looked at her, face unreadable and impassive. And MC thought, as she set her pen down on her notepad, that she very well might have been. Even if that didn't make sense.

• when you first go to run your hands through his hair, his halo will slice your palm. and it will hurt. he will mend it with the touch of one golden finger, and will leave so abruptly that he is gone almost before you blink. the last thing you see will be him standing in the doorway, a terrified expression on his face and blood in his hair.

(later, he tells you that he didn’t realize how breakable humans could be. when he explains what it takes to make an angel bleed, you start to understand.)

He was so warm. That was MC's thought as she sat straddled across his stomach. She ran her hands up his chest, the impossibly smooth fabric of his shirt sliding like water underneath her fingers. It had been weeks since they first met, and now she had him alone in her house. The possibilities were endless.

The angel (her angel, he always reminded her) was laid back on her bed, watching her with an alert and curious expression. Half of his wings were folded up against the wall, and she could see bright dots on his face, almost like freckles.

“What are they?” she asked, fascinated. He closed his golden eyes when she ran her fingers across them.

“Stars,” he replied, the multiple layers of his voice bouncing around the room. He wrapped his fingers around hers, moving them to his neck, where she could see a rippling line of green and red discoloration. “These marks are nebulae. If you pay attention, they move.”

She watched them with wide eyes for several minutes before she felt the angel (her angel) laughing underneath her. “It takes hours, my sweet.”

“I can be patient,” she murmured, leaning down and ducking under his jaw to kiss the line.

His gasp filled the pit of her stomach with a strange burning, and she kissed him in the same spot, harder this time, and added a touch of teeth to it. More than enough to leave a small bruise, she reasoned.

But when she pulled back, there was nothing except for the line and a slight shine of saliva where she had kissed him.

His eyes were slightly wild as they looked at her, pupils expanded, and it struck her, not for the first time, how inhuman he was. No man could ever dream of looking the way the angel (her angel) was looking at her now. And when he ran his hands up her neck, cupping the base of her head, and pulled her in for a kiss, she knew in an instant that anyone else had been ruined for her.

She lost herself in his lips, making small moaning sounds as their mouths opened and tongues touched. Something about it must have surprised him, because he pulled back with eyes that had gone even wider if that were possible, and he looked at her like he had never seen anything so wondrous and complex before in his existence.

And then he kissed her again, lips curling against hers in a smile, and she wondered if everything they were doing was new for him, and whether or not that mattered to her. She carded her fingers up his scalp and through his hair, only to draw back with a hiss as her finger ran across something sharp she couldn't see.

She jerked back from the kiss, looking at a finger that was trickling blood at a somewhat alarming rate. Immediately, she pulled her hand close and wrapped it in her shirt, wincing at the stinging pain that was beginning to register in her head.

His hair was so red that she almost couldn't tell there was blood in it. Capable hands maneuvered her so that she sat on the bedspread while he leaned over her, gently unwrapping her finger. When the bloody appendage came into sight, he glowed slightly for a moment, then ghosted a finger across hers. The wound instantly healed.

And when she looked up to thank him, he was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, looking a little wild and a little ravished and utterly terrified as he winked out of existence before her eyes.

She awoke the next morning to find him kneeling on the floor next to her bed, arms folded on the edge of it and his chin resting on his forearms. She didn't dare to breathe for a moment, scared that this was a dream and she would wake up and he would be gone, but then he reached out and cupped her cheek and she could smell him, that strange scent that she could never place and didn't have a name for and was completely intoxicating.

“I'm sorry,” he said, voice barely even a whisper. “Forgive me.”

“Why did you leave?” she asked, leaning up into his hand to place a gentle kiss on his wrist, right where a human's veins would be. Did angels have veins?

“I did not realize,” he said. “I did not realize you were so fragile.”

“You won't break me.” Her laugh was breathy, but it died on her lips when she realized he could break her. He could wipe her off the face of the planet and it would be no more difficult for him than breathing. Did angels need to breathe?

“I won't break you.” He did not say it as though it were impossible, as she had, but as though it were a promise. That he would protect her.

She moved to the wall, and he climbed in beside her, letting his wings hang off the edge. On his neck, she could see that the line had moved up to the underside of his jaw, carrying a veil of red-blue-green behind it. She let her fingers trace the colors on his neck, the skin that was no longer the same tawny gold it had been.

“There's no bruise,” she said, tracing the spot on his neck.

His hand moved up next to hers. “It would take far more than that to leave a bruise on me.”

“What would, then?” She pouted and looked up at him from under her eyelashes.

He smiled, and his whole face seemed to glow. “Disappointed, are we?”

“Perhaps a little.” She shifted so that her body was in line with his, barely touching him. “What would it take to leave a bruise?”

The angel (her angel, her angel) was silent for a moment before gathering her into his arms. “Angels are born inside the cores of dying stars. When they collapse, we emerge in a cloud of stardust, fully formed and burning with heat. If such an event did not cause injury to me, I struggle to think of anything on your planet that could harm me.”

She had ducked her head under his chin when he brought her in close, and she stared for a moment at his collarbone, at the start of a furrowed white line that could only be a scar. She shuddered and pulled herself closer. “Oh.”

His only response was to hold her tighter in her bed that wasn't really big enough for two, and to start humming a song she didn't recognize.

• ask him about the sky, about stars and suns and galaxies light years away, about how the universe looks like a blooming garden.
  do not ask about lucifer, because your angel will become a soldier before your eyes.
  do not, do not, do not ask about god.
  do not ask about rebellious older brothers and absentee fathers, do not infer about a war you know nothing of.

She rubbed her eyes and sighed. Her story wasn't working, her ideas weren't working, nothing was working, and she had five thousand words due in the morning that she hadn't even started.

Her angel was lying on the floor, dangling a feather in front of her cat, who swatted at it gleefully. He looked up at her, one arched eyebrow raised.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asked drily, leaning back in her chair.

He smiled up at her and his eyes were soft. “Quite. Mars is an excellent companion.” He paused, still eyeing her up and down. “Is something the matter?”

“Everything is matter.” She sighed again and propped her elbows on the desk so she could cradle her head. “Except anti-matter, and maybe my thoughts.”

It was worth it to hear him laugh. A small smiled curled the corners of her mouth.

“Can I have a real answer this time?” he asked.

She lifted her head and laced her fingers under her chin. The cursor blinked back at her from an empty document. Her brow furrowed in thought for a moment, then she sat up, placing her hands on the keyboard.

Her uncle's words drifted back to her. It seemed that the longer her angel was around, the more she remembered of her uncle. Do not ask of Lucifer, or fallen angels, or God, or brothers, or fathers, or war. Do not ask questions you are not ready to hear the answers to.

She wanted to hear the answers. But she did not think she was ready. And her uncle had been right about everything else he had said. Why start to question him now?

“Tell me about the universe,” she said.

“Which one?”

She whipped around in her swivel chair, eyes wide. “I'm sorry, you did not just offhandedly prove the multiverse theory to me.”

His eyes flicked from side to side, and he looked unsure of himself. “I'm sorry?”

A laugh burst out of her, something that sounded almost hysterical. “Okay, questions I'm not ready to hear the answers to. Um, this universe. Tell me about this universe.”

He still looked unsure, but he sat up, wings trailing behind him. Mars pounced on one of them, and her angel shook the cat off with a good-natured chuckle. “Are you sure?”

“I have five thousand words due at nine in the morning,” she said firmly. “Yes, I'm sure.”

“Well.” He paused, lost in thought. “There's a lot. What did you want to know.”

She pursed her lips. After a minute, she said, “Tell me how an angel sees the universe.”

And he did. He told her about the beauty the of endless rotations of planets and systems and galaxies, and how impossibly black a black hole was, and what it felt like to fly through a nebula, and the heat of a supernova. He told her about other worlds and their unique characteristics that all seemed impossibly strange to her.

He told her about things that were darker, too. The crush of silence in the vacuum of space. The vast distance between planets and stars and galaxies. How it could be so achingly lonely, alone in the vast darkness.

Her fingers flew as she typed, trying her best to keep up with his words. And when he finished, he returned to playing with Mars, and she spent the rest of the night moving and cutting and adding and editing into something that resembled a narrative, something that would make sense.

When she got it back a week later, she received full marks and a barrage of praise and comments. And her angel smiled when he read it.

• iv. in a science class you are taking simply to get the credit, your teacher will be talking about quantum physics. she will call planets “celestial bodies” and suddenly you will only be able to think of the way his mouth curls in at the sides, of all the puckered scars that criss-cross his torso, of the graceful arch on the bottom of his foot. when the teacher calls on you and asks you if you are alright, you will flush an even deeper red.
  (at times it is lovely to be in love with an angel. but other times, it is not.)

“The rotation of celestial bodies is a pivotal point in quantum physics.”

There was nothing sexual about the words themselves, but the words “celestial bodies” were impossible to ignore.

It summoned images into her head, of the nebulaic colors that drifted across her angel's skin. About the stars that glowed on his form. About his red red hair and his golden eyes that glowed whenever he looked at her.

The words made her think of kissing him in the dark, unable to see but able to feel. The long lines of his soldier's body and the upraised scars beneath her hands. His lips curling and open-mouthed beneath hers, how they curled whenever his dexterous tongue pulled noises out of her. The firmness of his core, trapped between her knees as she dipped her head to kiss his neck.

She thought of other things too. Him hovering over her, wings raised as if to shield her from the sight of all others, eyes wild, mouth soft, moving slowly as if to prolong every moment, savor each second he had with her, his multiple timbres echoing around inside of her.

More innocent things as well. Him sitting on the counter, watching her cook. Playing with Mars on the floor. Throwing himself backward off the top of a building so she could watch him fly, three sets of wings pumping in a beautiful dance through the air.

At that moment, she understood the dreamy look her uncle sometimes got when he had looked up at the sky, or when he spoke to her about angels. And she understood – he had once been in love with an angel too.

She can feel the heat in her cheeks when the professor calls her name. “Yes?” she asks, slightly breathless and hating herself for it.

“Are you alright? You look ill, do you need to go home?”

Her blush deepened and she shook her head. “I'm fine. Please, continue.”

She told him about it that night when she got home, and he laughed so loud he scared Mars

• when you fight, it is like the world is ending. his anger conjures a thunderstorm, and soon the entire state is three inches deep in water. you shatter a picture frame. a bolt of lightening catches the house across the street on fire. you are screaming at the top of your lungs—something about duty, something about god—and there is a crash of thunder that shakes the house. the weathermen talk about the storm for days, and you change the channel.

Her head ached from how much she had cried. It had been days, and still her phone kept pinging her with updates about the freak weather system.

She didn't know how long she had been in bed. The only time when she had left was when Mars needed feeding, or she needed water. Each time, she returned to burrow under the covers. Several shirts lay around the pillows – she had run out of tissues days ago. Every time she thought the tears had stemmed, she found more from somewhere deep in her soul, and she clutched the few odd feathers that had been left scattered around her house.

She couldn't even remember what they had been arguing about. All she remembered was the maelstrom of emotions whirled inside her, and how frightening her angel had looked, how torn. He was dressed for battle, in armor she found she couldn't quite remember, let alone describe. The sword she could remember just fine. It glowed blue and purple, and the cold it exuded had seemed to make her blood freeze in her veins.

Her phone started to ring, and for a moment, her heart leaped at the thought that it might be him. Until she remembered that angels didn't have phones.

But she picked up regardless, without saying hello.

“Oh, thank God, you picked up! It's been days, are you ok?”

No, she thought. “Bad stomach bug,” she said, voice lifeless.

“Oh no, that's terrible! Do you want me to bring over some of my mother's kimchi?”

“I've been throwing up for days. I doubt I could keep it down.”

“Oh. Right. I knew that.” There was a pause. “Do you need me to come over?”

She shook her head, and the useless effort made her head throb. “No. I don't want you to get sick. I'll call you when I'm better.”

“Okay. Get some rest! Text me when you're better and we'll go out for coffee.”

The phone hung up, and she dropped it onto her nightstand.

She could feel tears begin to surface, and she wished, not for the first time, that she was a sponge, because at least sponges dried out eventually. She was hollowed out, like someone had scooped her insides with a melon baller and all that was left was skin. Empty and impossibly sad.

It was days before she finally forced herself to crawl out of bed and strip out of her clothes. The shower floor was covered in cat hair, but the water was hot and felt good on her stagnating muscles. By the time she finished washing her hair, the water was turning cold, and thought she didn't feel better, she certainly didn't feel worse. She changed into a clean set of pajamas, methodically running a brush through her wet hair and braiding it with slow fingers. She tried not to imagine her angel's fingers running through it, getting tangled in it.

She took a deep breath. Then two. Then three. And when she didn't absolutely fall to pieces, she figured that it wasn't nothing, and that she could manage to email her professors and come up with some excuse. Maybe a stomach bug was believable enough. The best lies were the simple ones, the ones that contained mostly truth and as little lie as possible.

When he came back, she almost wasn't expecting it. Two weeks had gone by, and she was laughing as her blonde friend dropped her off on her front steps after their coffee date. “Thanks so much,” she said earnestly. “I really needed this.”

“Anytime! And I know you don't play very often, but my guild is doing a raid later tonight – you're welcome to join us if you want!”

She smiled back. “Thanks. I'll think about it. Have a good day!”

“Good luck on your story!”

“Thanks!”

Her keys turned easily in the door, and she sipped carefully at her coffee and kicked the door shut in one smooth motion. And when she looked up from toeing off her boots, she choked on her drink.

Her angel was up from where he had been sitting on the floor and by her side in a moment, patting her gently on the back as she coughed. When she had successfully cleared her throat, she stepped away and fixed him with a watchful gaze. “I thought you left for good. What are you doing here?”

“I missed you,” he said, face unreadable and impassive like it was when she first knew him.

Her stare was flat, and even though every bone in her body was screaming at her to wrap him in her arms, she held her ground. “Do you know how long it's been?”

He shook his head. “When I'm not with you, it is difficult for me to keep track of time as humans do.”

“Are you even sorry? Are you at all apologetic that it's been two weeks and I've missed classes because I was crying over you? Does it mean anything to you that this is the first day I've actually gotten out of bed to do something? Do you even care?”

His face was no longer impassive, and she wanted to take her words back because the pain etched into his features was so palpable that it made her start to cry again. “I don't want to hurt you,” he said. “But I cannot make the promise that I will always be here. I cannot do that, as much as I would like to.”

“If you loved me, you would stay,” she whispered. But she knew that wasn't true.

“It is because I love you that I can't.” He took a hesitant step towards her, and she set her coffee down on the table before she threw herself into his arms. When he wrapped his arms and wings around her, she felt the fractured pieces of her heart meld back together again.

“I have obligations. It is my duty and my honor to serve. And now that I have you, there is all the more reason for me to go. I have something to protect now, and it's you.”

She sniffed loudly and looked up into his eyes, running one thumb over his cheekbone and the blue line there. “You can't promise that you'll stay.”

He shook his head.

She took a deep breath. “Then promise you'll always come back.”

Her angel leaned down and placed a kiss between her eyes. “Always.”

• then there are the times when he doesn’t visit for months on end, and when he finally comes back to you, he is not himself. there are new scars across his chest, and he does not speak. he sits with you in his arms for hours, his nose buried in your hair and his arms squeezed tight, so tight.
  he does not cry. you do not cry.
• you do not cry.

He missed her graduation.

Not that she had expected him to be there for it. She wasn't really sure whether or not angels did the whole “public function” thing. But she had written him out an invitation anyway, and it had sat in the same place on her desk for – a couple months now, at least. She wasn't really keeping track of the days.

While he was gone, it was like a piece of her was gone, too. Every minute was one minute closer to the day when he would come back to her, because he had promised he would and she would hold him to that promise.

So she dressed in her gown and received her bachelors with a smile, and threw her cap along with everyone else in her class. She smiled and laughed and posed for pictures and drank champagne with her friends. But instead of staying out, she went home early. She dressed in her pajamas slowly before moving to pick up the invitation.

Her fingers ran across her name on the little insert, the raised calligraphy smooth against her hands.

She had wanted to write his name somewhere on the invitation, but every time he said it to her, it slipped from her mind like water down a slope. So instead, he gave her a number to call him by, his place in his unit with the other soldiers.

A little while later, she moved. She told herself it was to be closer to her job, but really she knew it was because that everything in that house reminded her of her angel. What she didn't consider was that the memory of him would follow her. Now she walked around empty hallways feeling hollow and haunted.

It had a backyard, her new house. It was small, yes, but it had room for flowers, something her other house hadn't. So she set about gardening, planting bulbs and shoots and clippings. When spring rolled around, the garden was full of blooms – red, blue, green, purple, yellow. The edges of her yard looked like a nebula.

She sat down in the garden, and she cried.

Most of the flowers had died by the time her angel returned. It was late, and the sight of him sitting on her bed nearly made her jump out of her skin. When she ran into his arms, he did not smile at her. His eyes were deep and haunted, and he wrapped his arms around her like she was his anchor against a tide she could not see or comprehend.

He did not let go for some time, and she could see new scars on his bare chest, puckered and angry. He shuddered when she touched them and held her tighter. He did not cry. She could not cry, because she did not understand. So she simply let herself be held, even if it meant she fell asleep upright with her head resting on his shoulder.

• when you fall in love with an angel—oh, sweetheart. it’s too late to take it back now.

Her uncle was at the forefront of her mind some weeks later, when she was watching her angel play with Mars in the backyard. He had always seemed so lonely, and a little bit lost. What had happened to his angel? Where had they gone? Had they ever come back?

Would the same thing happen to her?

The thought chilled her to the bone, and she shuddered.

“Are you married?” she had asked her uncle once, so long ago.

He grinned as he pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven. “Nah.”

“Why not?” She rolled out tinfoil for the cookies to cool on and ripped it off at the end.

“I have somebody that I like already, and I don't want to marry anyone else but them.”

“Why don't you marry them?”

Her uncle pulled a spatula out of a drawer and flipped it into the air before catching it behind his back. “Sometimes it just doesn't work like that.”

“Oh.” She paused halfway through reaching for one of the cookies she knew would be too hot. “But you still love each other?”

“Yes.”

He was right. Of course, her uncle was usually right, she had found out. There wasn't anyone else who could ever compare to her angel.

There was nobody else, period.

And when he looked up from the cat and smiled at her, she knew that her family would give her the same sidelong looks and hushed whispers they had given her uncle. She knew she would be subjected to the same gossip and comments. She knew that she would end up being the black sheep of the family.

And the truth was, she didn't mind.

She didn't mind at all.

Chapter Text

• when you fall in love with an angel, you must understand that there are things you will not understand.

Space was so cold, and the angel was so warm, burning to his core.

He could remember his birth. A swirling of stardust and fire. The sudden light that shot through him, the incandescent flames that swirled around him.

The blackness just beyond the light.

It had been so long ago.

He was not alone. A soldier was never truly alone. Though he had a brother, formed in the same dying star as him, it was a different kind of brotherhood that bound them to each other. But despite the camaraderie, the shared goal, the unconditional love that flowed between them, he still felt alone.

Sometimes, he wondered if it will kill him. It hurt that much.

He liked Earth, though. It was a new place – at least relative to his own existence. The humans on it were endlessly fascinating. It was like watching a colony of ants, if ants were intelligent and very, very pretty. So close to himself, and yet so far.

Fascinating.

Libraries were the best places. In his mind, they were the pinnacle of humanity. His favorite one burned down long ago, an atrocity that he was not permitted to interfere with, despite his protestations.

He found himself in one now. The movement from “outer space” (the thought that any space can be outer is a pleasing one to him – almost as pleasing as the International Space Station) to a university library was instantaneous. It took no longer than the snapping of a finger.

Universities were a close second to libraries – university libraries were the most superior of all libraries. He liked the buzzing of knowledge and ideas. It reminded him that there were things worth protecting, that there was a deeper purpose to his existence, even if it was not himself.

It was dark outside the windows, and there were very few people inside. He moved past them, through them – he was not on the same plane of existence as them right now. When he moved to pass by another student, he stopped cold.

She was… she was vibrating.

Everything vibrated, that wasn’t so strange. It was simply a part of how particles and molecules functioned. But this girl, she wasn’t vibrating… right. He couldn’t place it, but it was as if part of her was existing on the same plane as he was. It didn’t make any sense.

The angel moved to stand in front of her. He could see the faint glowing lines on her skin – he knew once why humans had those markings, but he couldn’t remember anymore, maybe it had something to do with radioactive decay – and he could see the bright color of her eyes as she squinted at the screen in front of her.

She leaned back in her chair and rubbed at her eyes. He wondered how long she’d been here, if she’d been taking care of herself, if she’d remembered to eat. A sharp tugging pulled at the center of his chest and he felt so vulnerable all of a sudden. A flurry of emotions swirled around in his chest, and he recalled how one of his fellow soldiers told him that an entire class of angels had once shirked their duties and fallen because they found humans so compelling.

The angel thought that for the first time, he might understand. He also thought that compelling was the wrong word. But that was beside the point, in his opinion.

She looked up at him, and he wished he could breathe because he was almost certain that he would have gained the understanding of what it meant to have your breath stolen. (An entirely nonsensical sentiment, because breath cannot be stolen, but now he understands, he understands.)

And she could see him. He knew she could, because her eyes were wide, impossibly so, and her mouth was open.

She was silent, and he thought of how she was composed of stardust, of how he was also made from stardust, and how it was likely that at one time, perhaps, her stardust and his stardust mingled in the vast darkness, and how perhaps their atoms had come back to each other, and the feeling he was feeling right now (totally indescribable, utterly indescribable, truly incandescent) was joy at having rediscovered the other molecules. In different forms, to be sure, but the stardust, the same stardust.

“I found you,” he murmured, and he was a bit dazed or he would not have been thinking out loud.

But she snapped out of her stupor and blinked, stunned at the multiple cadences with which he speaks. “Was I lost?” she asked, and she sounded dazed as well.

He cannot respond. He didn’t know if she was lost. He cannot help hoping that maybe, just maybe, she had been. And that she might not be lost anymore.

• when you first go to run your hands through his hair, his halo will slice your palm. and it will hurt. he will mend it with the touch of one golden finger, and will leave so abruptly that he is gone almost before you blink. the last thing you see will be him standing in the doorway, a terrified expression on his face and blood in his hair.

        (later, he tells you that he didn’t realize how breakable humans could be. when he explains what it takes to make an angel bleed, you start to understand.)

Her fingers were so cold.

She sat on top of him, one leg on either side of his stomach. Her fingers ran up his chest, underneath his shirt, over the faded scars and hard muscles. His physical form is close to that of humans – not near as impressive as some of the higher-ranking angels.

Her house was small, but clean and comfy. He had liked it immensely the minute he set foot in it. (He had never seen the inside of a human abode, and he decided that they looked just as cute from the inside as they did from the outside. Humans were fascinating.)

The bed was small. It was clearly made for one person, or perhaps two very small people – certainly not a human and an angel with six wings (three of which were squished up against a wall, but he couldn’t have cared less). But she didn’t seem to mind the cramped quarters. If anything, she looked pleased, if he was reading the flush in her cheeks right.

(He could not remember the last time he had been so happy. She was so extraordinary, with the way she was and the way she made him feel. He could watch her for hours and never tire.)

She was staring at him, eyes fixated on his face, and she touched his right brow with one soft finger, the hard edge of one nail brushing his skin. He could feel the contrast between her cold fingers and the hot speck. “What are they?”

He closed his eyes as she ran her fingers down his brow. “Stars,” he said. It was a whisper for him, but the multiple layers of his voice bounced around the room. He lifted one hand and wrapped it around her palm, dragging both their hands down to his neck and the slightly warmer expanse he could feel there. “These marks are nebulae. If you pay attention, they move.”

He did not tell her how he got them. About how every star was one he saved, every nebula the mark of thousands and millions of years of war waged. About the pain and the fear and the aching loneliness that accompanied each glowing mark, each colorful shroud. They were beautiful, he knew she thought so. He did not want to ruin her admiration.

Her eyes widened at his words, and she stared at his neck without blinking for several seconds. He started laughing, his stomach expanding and lifting her as his muscles pushed against her thighs. “It takes hours, my sweet.”

(The nickname was new. She had let him taste her peach lemonade. The taste nearly made him gag. With that much energy, it was no wonder she glowed. He wondered if she tasted as sweet as her drink. He bet she did.)

She blinked several times before letting her eyes become half-lidded, making him swallow. “I can be patient,” she murmured. When she leaned down and ducked under his jaw, he felt his breath catch (it did feel like he thought it would, and it was glorious!). When she kissed the edge of the nebulae, he gasped.

The only response she had was to kiss him again in the same spot, harder, adding a bit of a bite to it. He felt a strange aching spread through his body, and a surge of emotion so strong he was sure he was going to combust into stardust then and there. Nothing had ever come close to what he was feeling now, and he was at a loss for how to respond. Did humans feel this way always? How did she even function? What would it be like, for this overload to be the everyday, the normal?

(Part of him hoped she only felt like this with him. She exuded confidence, and he wanted to know if she had ever done this, felt this with anyone else. But he kept silent, knowing he could not begrudge her anything that brought her joy.)

She pulled back, lips slightly swollen and wet, and her eyes were shining, a wide smile lifting her cheeks. He ran his hands up her arms, and then up the column of her neck to gently caress her chin. She was so fragile, so delicate. (All humans were, but he was so aware of it with her. He could break her like it was nothing. If he wasn’t careful, he would.)

He pulled her down to his mouth, kissing her as if he could make her understand every emotion he couldn’t comprehend himself. Surely, she could understand.

Surely.

Her response told him that she just might. She twisted her head, opened his mouth with hers, exploring his mouth with the same feverish intensity he felt. And the noises she was making – it was driving him wild. Small moans, little gasps of breath, his soldier number that he had given her when pronouncing his name had proved impossible. When her tongue slipped into his mouth, he seized up in surprise and pulled back, looking at her half in shock and half in something burning that he didn’t have a word for. (It was awe-inspiring in its intensity, in its mix of love and something else.)

She looked concerned for a moment, but he kissed her again, his lips curling up in a smile. Her surprises were just one more thing that he loved about her.

Her hands ran up his arms and into his hair, gently raking nails across his scalp and running through his hair.

He wanted to pull away to tell her to be careful, but he wasn’t quick enough. She inhaled sharply, taking the breath from his lungs, and jerked back with a hiss.

His eyes shot open to see her frowning softly at a finger covered in red.

It took him a moment to realize it was blood.

By the time he did, she was already wrapping it in the hem of her shirt and wincing at the pain. He wrapped his hands around her hips, lifting her off him in an effortless motion and getting his legs out of the way so that she was sitting on the covers. He stood and leaned over her, taking her finger and unwrapping it.

(The shirt was already soaked, there was so much blood. How could he have been so stupid? What had he done to her?)

Terror filled every inch of his body, but the soldier in him took over. He ghosted a finger over hers, mending the flesh with a single thought. A thousand different ways he could kill her flashed through his mind, unbidden, unwelcome. There was no way he could protect her from himself. Not when she was so breakable.

In a blink he was in the doorway, as far he could move from her. Her eyes found him in a moment, looking bewildered. Her mouth opened to say something, and the panic swelled in his throat.

He couldn’t stay.

And like that, he was gone.

It took him a little while to calm down. He returned as the sun rose (so cute, how the humans said the sun rose, as if the earth were the center of the universe), the missing her filling every part of him and overriding his fear, his caution, his common sense.

Being away from her was a torture all on its own.

She was asleep in the same sleeping pants she had been wearing (even more cute, how the humans had special clothes for sleeping) but a different shirt. He knelt next to her in what he might have called a supplication if he were capable of forming a coherent thought. She was beautiful, in the gentle dark of a room with curtains, chest rising and falling with breath.

The bed creaked when she shifted, and her eyes flickered open as she yawned and stretched. She stopped moving when she saw him, then sat up on her elbow.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and this time his voice was barely a whisper, so soft it was hard to tell he had three different timbres. “I did not realize you were so fragile.”

She smiled at him, and suddenly everything seemed a little better. “You won’t break me.” She laughed breathily, but it died as realization settled onto her face. The realization that he could break her.

“I won’t break you,” he said. His voice was a little louder, and it sounded like a promise. He would not break her.

She scooted over to the wall, and after a moment of hesitation, he crawled up onto the bed, slipping underneath the blankets and letting his wings dangle over the edge. She snuggled up to his and let her fingers trace the nebulae lines that had moved up under his jaw. The pressure of her fingers (still cold, always cold, or maybe he was just hot, it didn’t matter, he loved her) moved to the spot she had kissed last night.

“There’s no bruise,” she said, tracing the spot.

His hand moved up to cover hers. “It would take far more than that to leave a bruise on me.” He thought. He wasn’t sure he could bruise, if he was being honest.

“What would?” Her face was pouting, and she looked impossibly adorable staring up at him from under her eyelashes.

“Disappointed, are we?” he asked, chucking her softly under the chin.

“Perhaps a little,” she admitted. She shifted so that she was facing him, almost touching. “What would it take to leave a bruise?”

He was silent for a minute. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her so that she fit to his chest, her head under his chin. “Angels are born inside the cores of dying stars. When they collapse, we emerge in a cloud of stardust, fully formed and burning with heat. If such an event did not cause injury to me, I struggle to think of anything on your planet that could harm me.”

She shuddered and nuzzled closer to him. “Oh.”

He swallowed and held her tighter. After a moment, he began to hum softly to himself, the same song he sang to his brother when the sounds of war became overwhelming. She relaxed against him again, and kissed a scar on his neck. He smiled.

• ask him about the sky, about stars and suns and galaxies light years away, about how the universe looks like a blooming garden.

         do not ask about lucifer, because your angel will become a soldier before your eyes.

         do not, do not, do not ask about god.

         do not ask about rebellious older brothers and absentee fathers, do not infer about a war you know nothing of.

He liked cats. He especially liked fluffy grey cats named after planets.

Mars jumped up to swat at the feather that the angel had pulled off one of his wings. It had been coming loose anyways. It was amusing to watch the cat’s eyes track the feather as he wiggled it across the floor, watch Mar’s hips wiggle as he prepared to jump, see him pounce with unadulterated glee in his eyes only to just miss it and repeat the process all over.

She sighed, and he looked up from where he was lying on the floor. Her face was bleached white with the light from the computer screen, and she was rubbing her eyes. He arched one eyebrow when she looked over at him.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asked dryly. The chair squeaked as she leaned back.

He gave her a smile that she returned instantly. “Quite. Mars is an excellent companion.” He paused, giving her a once over. She was tense, irritated. “Is something the matter?”

“Everything is matter.” She heaved an even deeper sigh, and he watched as her body curved to rest its weight on the elbows she propped on the desk. “Except anti-matter, and maybe my thoughts.”

He laughed and gave Mars a scratch on the ears, letting the cat have the feather. “Can I have a real answer this time?”

She lifted her head and rested it on her interlocked fingers. The computer screen’s light washed over her in a sickly pallor, highlighting the dark circles under her eyes and the furrows in her brow.

After a moment, her spine straightened, and she placed her hands back on the keyboard. Another few minutes passed before she spoke. “Tell me about the universe.”

A hundred thousand things flashed through his mind at once, followed by another hundred thousand things. There was so much, and he wasn’t sure what to tell her. What would she believe, and what would have to wait until humans discovered it?

“Which one?” he replied.

Another moment of frozen silence from her. Then she whipped around in her chair, eyes wide as saucers. “I’m sorry, you did not just offhandedly prove the multiverse theory to me.”

He froze. Did he say something wrong? He knew humans were incredibly arrogant when it came to their own existence (what other creature would assume that they were the only things in the universe, or that there was only one universe?). Did he mess up? He looked from side to side in a slight panic, dizzy from his own slip-up. “I’m sorry?”

A laugh burst out of her, something that sounded almost hysterical. “Okay, questions I'm not ready to hear the answers to. Um, this universe. Tell me about this universe.” She turned back to the computer, hands at the ready.

He pursed his lips, still worried. He sat up, wings trailing behind him, and Mars pounced on the mass of dragging feathers. He turned to look at the cat, who stared up at him with wide eyes and blown pupils, and the angel gave a good-natured chuckle as he shrugged the cat off. “Are you sure?”

“I have five thousand words due at nine in the morning,” she said firmly. “Yes, I'm sure.”

“Well.” He paused, lost in thought. “There's a lot. What did you want to know.”

She pursed her lips. After a minute, she said, “Tell me how an angel sees the universe.”

And he did.

He told her about how he would watch the rotations of a celestial body orbiting a star, how the rise and fall reminded him that even when it seemed like there was nothing tying anything together, there was always something there. He didn’t tell her that for every one mass he saw orbiting, a hundred thousand were drifting and aimless.

He told her about standing on the edge of a black hole, how impossible it seemed, how hungry, how indifferent. He left out the part about watching the enemy falling into it to their demise, and the indifference of himself the angels standing next to him.

He told her about how it felt to fly through a nebula, to feel the scratch of stardust and the buzzing of the gases. He did not tell her about the things that nebulae hid, or how he was in them so often that he was properly sick of them.

He told her about other worlds and the things that set them apart. He did not tell her about the aliens, about how much worse or how much better or how similar they were to humans. He did not tell her about how being around them made him feel incredibly lonely, and how they were nothing compared to her, not to him.

He told her about darker things too. The crushing silence and all-encompassing darkness in some of the vast reaches of space. The vast distance between planets and stars. The soul-wrenching feeling of being so alone that even your thoughts sound like intruders in the silence.

He did not leave anything out of those descriptions.

He watched her fingers fly across the keyboard as she typed. When he finished, she got down from her chair to stretch and kissed him soundly before returning to her computer. He went back to playing with Mars.

A week later, she came bouncing back, eagerly waving a paper that she said had full marks. She read every comment the teacher had left out loud to him, and he smiled while she did.

• in a science class you are taking simply to get the credit, your teacher will be talking about quantum physics. she will call planets “celestial bodies” and suddenly you will only be able to think of the way his mouth curls in at the sides, of all the puckered scars that criss-cross his torso, of the graceful arch on the bottom of his foot. when the teacher calls on you and asks you if you are alright, you will flush an even deeper red.

         (at times it is lovely to be in love with an angel. but other times, it is not.)

“My teacher talked about quantum physics in class today,” she said.

He looked up to see her carefully braiding her hair. A faint blush was covering her cheeks, and it made him smile. She was so beautiful.

She looked over at him expectantly, and he realized he hadn’t responded. “Yes?”

“Yeah.” The smile she gave him was soft. She turned back to the mirror and cleared her throat before speaking again. “She used the phrase ‘celestial bodies.’”

The angel nodded slowly, not sure what she was getting at. Mars walked across the floor and hopped into his lap, purring insistently. He scratched the base of the cat’s ears. Mars kneaded his paws into the thigh of his pants. “Planets, comets, asteroids, yes. What did she say about them?”

She finished her hair and sat cross-legged in front of him, giving Mars pets. “Oh, she talked about their role in quantum physics. It was interesting, I guess. Just the phrase ‘celestial bodies’ really threw me for a loop.” She stared at him intently.

It took a moment before he could put two and two together. “Oh. Oh.” He laughed then, suddenly and loudly enough to spook Mars, who darted off his lap and straight under the bed.

She was laughing too, rubbing the back of her neck. He could see that her blush had spread to where her hand was. “Yeah. Um, she asked if I was sick, and if I needed to go home. It was super awkward.”

He smirked and leaned forward, pulling her into his lap. She let out a small shriek of surprise that he silenced with a kiss. It was soft, long and chaste, full of contentment and love.

When he pulled back, arms still wrapped around her waist, she looked up at him, a little dazed. Then she smiled, and it was brighter than any star he had ever seen.

Her arms came up to wrap around the back of his neck, and she pulled him down until their foreheads touched. It was an odd position for him – he curved almost entirely over her.

“I love you,” she said. She looked straight into his eyes when he said it, and her voice was soft. The vulnerability was terrifying – he was not used to vulnerability.

He swallowed and closed his eyes before opening them again. If she was brave enough to do it with her eyes open, then so was he. “I love you too.”

Nothing happened for a moment, but it felt to him like everything had changed.

Like the world had suddenly realigned.

Like everything was right.

Like everything was ok.

• when you fight, it is like the world is ending. his anger conjures a thunderstorm, and soon the entire state is three inches deep in water. you shatter a picture frame. a bolt of lightning catches the house across the street on fire. you are screaming at the top of your lungs—something about duty, something about god—and there is a crash of thunder that shakes the house. the weathermen talk about the storm for days, and you change the channel.

Space was so quiet.

He hadn’t realized how used he had grown to her presence. Her heartbeat, her breathing, the rustle of fabric against skin when she moved. Now that he wasn’t there, space seemed too quiet.

He crouched in another dimension, another world. Around him were his fellow angels, all dressed for battle, all armed to the teeth and three times as deadly combined. They gave each other smiles, but they were sharp. The spoke to each other, but there was no sound. They were together, but it was grim.

And he missed her.

He had already gotten in trouble. Disrupting weather patterns as violently as he had was bound to attract attention, and it had. It wasn’t anything more than a slap on the wrist, but no punishment could have hurt more than the pain in her eyes, the rawness in her voice as she screamed at him, the unadulterated fury when she had thrown a picture of her and her uncle across the room.

He remembered every detail with clarity. The anguish it caused him was exquisite. He had promised he would not break her, that he would protect her. How could he have known that protecting her would mean breaking her?

But he could not wallow. He had promised he would protect her, and that was what he would do.

His brother, the one born from the same star as him, stood by this side, his red and orange bow with the holy fire arrows the contrast to his blue and purple sword. It burned with a fire so hot it was cold. The enemy awaited them, and the angels were not ones to disappoint.

He did not remember much of the battle. Only a blur before he was removed from duty there. The odd look in the other angels’ eyes told him that his change had not gone unnoticed.

He did not know how long he had been gone. He only knew that he needed to see her again. He had to see her.

He didn’t know if this was heartbreak, but if it was, he understood why she cried every time a breakup song came on the radio.

She wasn’t home when he got here. He checked everywhere three times. When he conceded that she was gone (and worked through the panic that told him that she was taken, she was kidnapped, she was stolen, that he hadn’t protected her after all, that she was well and truly gone), he sat on the floor and waited to see if she was coming back. He would have waited forever, if that’s what it took.

As it turned out, he did not have to wait forever. Only a few hours.

He heard voices outside the door, a young man’s and hers, chatting amiably. A pair of footsteps faded away, the sound obscured by the jangling of keys and the turning of the lock.

Watching her move was like staring at water after he hadn’t drunk any in weeks. She sipped something – coffee, probably, with a pump of vanilla and cinnamon on top of the whipped cream – and kicked the door without spilling a drop before using her feet to slip off her boots. And when she looked up, her eyes went wide, and she began to cough violently.

Panic rushed through him and he was at her side in a minute. He patted her on the back, trying to help clear her airway.

When she stopped coughing, she stepped away from him, wrapping her arms around herself and eyeing him with caution. “I thought you left for good. What are you doing here?”

A thousand different answers ran through his mind. He gave her the simplest one, unsure of where he stood in her eyes. “I missed you.” He was careful not to let any emotions show, to wait and see how she reacted.

Her jaw tensed, but her gaze was flat. “Do you know how long it’s been?”

He sucked in a sharp breath. “When I’m not with you, it is difficult to keep track of time as humans do.”

Anger surfaced on her face, and he felt relief sweep through him. Anger was good, anger meant she cared, anger meant he still had a chance. “Are you even sorry? Are you at all apologetic that it's been two weeks and I've missed classes because I was crying over you? Does it mean anything to you that this is the first day I've actually gotten out of bed to do something? Do you even care?”

Each word felt like salt in an open wound, every last one more punishing than anything he had berated himself with because it was confirmation of what he had done to her. There was nothing he could say, no way he could make it better. But the look on her face told him that if he said nothing now, he would never get another chance to say anything.

“I don't want to hurt you,” he said. “But I cannot make the promise that I will always be here. I cannot do that, as much as I would like to.”

Her voice was a whisper, and her eyes were bright with tears. “If you loved me, you would stay.” But it didn’t sound like she believed it.

“It is because I love you that I can't.”

She threw herself at him as he stepped towards her, and he wrapped his arms and wings around her. Her heartbeat echoed through him, the sound of her hitched breathing music to his ears, the wetness from her tears soaking his shirt a confirmation that she was real, that this was real.

This was real.

“I have obligations. It is my duty and my honor to serve. And now that I have you, there is all the more reason for me to go. I have something to protect now, and it's you.”

She sniffed loudly and looked up into his eyes, raising her hands to cup his jaw and running one thumb over his cheekbone and the edge of the nebula there. “You can't promise that you'll stay,” she said, sounding impossibly sad.

He shook his head, reveling in the smell of her hand lotion. Flowery, but light. There was no scent in space, and it made her all the more real.

She took a deep breath, pulling one hand back to wipe away her tears. “Then promise you'll always come back.”

He leaned down and placed a kiss between her eyes, both hard and soft at once. “Always.”

• then there are the times when he doesn’t visit for months on end, and when he finally comes back to you, he is not himself. there are new scars across his chest, and he does not speak. he sits with you in his arms for hours, his nose buried in your hair and his arms squeezed tight, so tight.

         he does not cry. you do not cry.

         you do not cry.

The stars were still silent.

There was no heartbeat, no breathing. He was still grim, still determined, still a fury in battle. His brother told him once, softly, that he was glowing when he fought. He smiled, and it was sharp.

But he was not alone.

He was never alone, not with the other soldiers. And while he still felt lonely, he didn’t feel alone. It was a small distinction, but one that changed everything.

His memories of her accompanied him through every battle, through each planning session, tactical meeting, interrogation. She was with him always. Her love for him, and his for her, swirled together like a double helix inside him, intertwined and inseparable.

But the battles wore on him. One right after the other, no respite from the endless onslaught. He was tired, and he was wounded, and he knew that they would scar, in part because they always did and in part because there was simply no time for him to leave for proper treatment.

The wounds burned hotter than a thousand stars, and the pain lanced through him with every movement. But he battled on. In part because he had no choice – there were few reinforcements, and every angel was needed – but mostly because he simply did not trust any angel with the protection of humanity, specifically her, in his stead. If he was on the battlefield, he knew that she would be safe.

He was drained by the time it was over. The other angels said it was over, too – it was not a victory. But the enemy had been pushed back, fought to a standstill with mass casualties, and the angel counted that as a victory.

Anything that was not a loss was a victory, because it meant she was that much safer.

The first thing he found upon returning to her apartment was that she had moved. A young man was living there now – he had his own merch scattered around the house and large packets of paper stapled together.

The angel did not stay.

He could feel her presence. Whether it was because of months of constant proximity to her, or because their atoms had known each other when the universe was young, or because they were meant to be together, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he could find her.

Normally, he would fly to her, admiring the cities below him and all the fascinating things that humans had achieved. But after so long away, he was not himself, or possibly not the same person he used to be, and he just wanted to see her.

It was late. He knew it was, because of how dark it was outside. A couple lights were on in the main room of the new house where she was, and a passing thought that she had moved on, found someone else, occurred to him. Who knew how long it had been?

But he pushed the thought to the side. She wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t insult her by dwelling on the thought.

He waited on her bed, sitting upright and letting his wings drape over the sides. The comforter was new, a black bedspread with an artistically rendered nebula across it.

He took it off and folded it away in the closet. He had stomached more than enough space for the moment. He sat back on the fuzzy white top sheet, reveling in the softness and waiting for her.

She entered through the door with a big yawn. He noticed a few things right off the bat – her hair was longer, and the circles under her eyes had lightened, although not so much that they were gone. He was glad to know she was getting enough sleep.

And then she saw him, and she froze.

Her eyes said everything that he couldn’t.

She threw herself onto the bed, tackling him back onto the pillows and peppering his face with kisses and elated but soft ‘I love you’s. He hated that he couldn’t bring himself to smile, to shower her with all the affection she had missed while he was gone. But she realized quickly that something was off, and she rolled to his side, looking at him with confusion, but no hurt.

“Is everything alright?” she asked.

And there were so many answers, and none of them were right, and he was not okay. So instead of speaking, he held out his arms, exposing the still-healing scars on his chest and praying that she would understand.

She did.

She crawled over and into his arms, wrapping him in an embrace that was almost laughably weak to him but one that he was sure that was a strong as she could manage. He held her back as tightly as he could without breaking her, suffocating her. It wasn’t tight enough, but it had to be enough.

He did not cry. And when she gently touched the scars, he shuddered less at the pain and more at memories, holding her tighter in response. At some point, he sat upright so she could rearrange herself in his lap, and he continued to hold her long after she fell asleep and long after the sun began to shine through the windows.

• when you fall in love with an angel—oh, sweetheart. it’s too late to take it back now.

She still had Mars. And she had a backyard. She walked him through every flower she had planted, and she told him about when they bloomed, about how she had seen a nebula in the blooms and sat down in the grass and cried.

His heart ached at her words, and he kissed her deeply, passionately, with all the love he hadn’t been able to give her. He felt that perhaps he would always be making up for the times when he left her alone.

When he expressed this, she laughed and shook her head. “I love you. I will always wait for you to come back to me, no matter how long it takes. Never feel like you have to make that lost time up to me. Every second I have with you is a blessing. And anyway, I’m strong.”

He knew she was. But he peppered her with kisses for good measure. She deserved everything he could give her.

It was several weeks after he returned that he was playing in the backyard with Mars. Slowly, day by day, he was beginning to feel like himself again. She was endlessly patient with him, and he loved her for it.

When he looked up at her, sitting on the steps had led down from the back porch. She watched him, a furrow in her brow. He recognized that look – she was lost in thought. He wondered what she was thinking about.

Then her face cleared, and her eyes refocused.

And she smiled at him, impossibly wide and impossibly happy.

They were together. He knew that they wouldn’t always be, couldn’t always be. But they were together now, and they were in love.

And everything was okay.