Chapter Text
Jacquariel is carefully polishing the metal detailing around the doorway to tade latest room in the Great Library. This will be the first ta has completed in the decade since ta left Earth, and it is, by far, tade greatest creation. Not because it is more creative, or more innovative, or more attractive than the one next to it, or than any other room in the Library. Because of what it houses, what it will house, which Jacquariel, for the first time, had a hand in taziji. Because of what ta can see reflected on every wall, in every decorative flair, in every single choice ta made in its design—love and devotion above and beyond that which ta was born to feel for all of humanity, a deep well of inspiration unlike anything ta had experienced before tade time on Earth.
"Jacquariel?"
Ta looks around. There is a Guardian approaching, far off still; Jacquariel can only just hear tade voice.
"Jacquariel!"
The Guardian breaks into a run. Jacquariel, curious, starts down the staircase to meet ta, but only gets halfway down by the time the Guardian reaches the bottom stair.
Ta stops there, seeming unsure as to whether ta is welcome to come all the way up to meet Jacquariel. Ta is bouncing slightly, excited, and Jacquariel is mesmerized by the way tade fire and ice glow and flare and swirl in the most exquisite patterns ta has ever seen.
Jacquariel ventures down a few more steps, just enough to get a little closer, to be sure of what ta is seeing.
"…Bittiel?"
The Guardian's face breaks out in a rapturous smile. Jacquariel realizes, suddenly, that ta has never seen Bittiel smile, not as an angel—though even in his angelic face, there is something of Bitty there, just enough to feel familiar.
"I just finished my debriefing with the Council," Bittiel explains. "I came right here, I couldn't wait one more moment to see you."
"Come with me," Jacquariel blurts out, motioning eagerly for Bittiel to follow ta up the stairs to the Library room. "I want you to see what I've been working on."
Ta dashes back up the stairs, only stopping once to make sure Bittiel is following. Bittiel's smile has dimmed a bit with confusion, but his fire is burning as brightly as ever as he makes his way up the stairs.
Jacquariel waits for him at the door. Ta longs to reach out and touch, but… that may not be what Bittiel wants, not anymore, not now that they're both back in Heaven. Jacquariel realizes tade own hands are shaking a bit, suddenly nervous, suddenly not sure that this will be a welcome surprise, but ta pushes the door open anyhow and motions Bittiel through.
Bittiel walks a few feet into the room, then stops abruptly. Jacquariel hangs back by the door, and so can't see Bittiel's expression. Guardians don't even have any eyes on the backs of tamende bodies for him to watch. Tamende wings can communicate much about tamende emotional state, but Bittiel's wings are as frozen as the rest of his body. Finally, Bittiel's head turns to one side to take in the lefthand wall, and Jacquariel can briefly see the way his mouth hangs open before his head starts a slow pivot to take in the room from one side to the other.
Suddenly, Bittiel dashes away, past the first row of shelves to the mural that starts on the left side of the room and curls all the way around to the door. He scans over the first few sections quickly, then slows down when he gets to a painting of two men lying in grass. Jacquariel hangs back, watching as Bittiel runs his fingertips over the image, his nose just inches away.
"Oh," Bittiel says softly before moving on to the next image, and the next. "Oh, sweetpea."
Several of Jacquariel's many eyes sting with tears at the sound of the nickname ta hasn't heard in years. Ta has managed to drop nearly all of tade verbal tics born of using human language for so long, but ta can't help hoping that Bittiel keeps a few.
Bittiel continues down the wall, exclaiming quietly now and then, letting out a delighted laugh at some images. Jacquariel watches his progress from the center of the room. When Bittiel gets to the end, he looks at Jacquariel for a moment, biting his lip, looking more like Bitty than ever, before taking a few steps toward the shelves. There are rows and rows, but most are empty. Only the first shelf at the front contains a few scrolls.
"Jacquariel," he says softly, indicating all the empty shelves. "What is this? What is this room meant to hold?"
Jacquariel swallows and goes to stand by Bittiel's side. Ta can't quite look at him, instead looking out over the empty shelves with him.
"This is… us," ta says, motioning to the scrolls that have already taken their place. "Our stories, and Larissa's, and Shitty's. And our children. And… eventually… all of our descendants. This room will be filled with the lives of our family, all the humans who will ever exist because of three angels."
Ta hears a sob, and looks over to see Bittiel wiping his face and shaking his head. He takes in the mural again, turning three hundred and sixty degrees to look at every wall, then up at the ceiling where there's already an image of Lily.
Jacquariel is fairly certain that these are tears of joy, but it's hard to be confident when the fact remains that ta has hardly known Bittiel as an angel. What if, despite all the evidence so far, he's nothing like Bitty? What if he's saddened by how much work Jacquariel has put into this instead of moving on? What if—
"I just feel so ridiculous." Bittiel interrupts Jacquariel's thoughts before they can get out of control. "I was so scared…" He shakes his head, then turns to face Jacquariel head-on. "You've had a decade in Heaven to forget me, to go back to your old angelic life and move on and decide that our time together on earth was just a diversion, just some unimportant blip in such a long life. I'd just about managed to convince myself that I'd come running to find you, and you'd treat me like another acquaintance. Someone you knew once. And then it turns out, all this time…" He looks around again, fresh tears pouring down his ever-shifting face. "You weren't moving on, you were… you were doing this! You were creating the most beautiful space in all of Heaven, all to honor our lives together. You were devoting every day to us."
He suddenly throws his arms around Jacquariel's neck, and Jacquariel grips him back reflexively. Ta closes most of tade eyes, focusing on how it feels to have Bittiel in tade arms again. For the first time, really, as ta is reminded by the new mix of sensations that weren't there when Jack touched Bitty. The soft heat of Bittiel's fire, the sharp chill of his ice, the velvet of his feathers. No skin anywhere, not the way a human has skin—not even the way Jacquariel has skin—but that's fine. Jacquariel wants to learn these new textures, to become as familiar with them as ta was with the soft skin just below the joint of Bitty's jaw or the scar across Bitty's knee after he had surgery.
"I thought you might have moved on, too," ta confesses, still holding Bittiel tight. "Or that as soon as you were an angel again, you'd realize that what we had was a human connection best left behind with our human lives."
"No," Bittiel whispers. "No, no, I've missed you so much."
He pulls back, but only enough to see Jacquariel's face. They stare at each other for a moment, and then they're kissing.
Angels don't kiss, as a general rule. Angels aren't physical beings in the same way humans are physical beings, and don't have the same need for physical affection, but Jacquariel knows that this, physical touch, will always be a part of their relationship. No matter how far removed they are from their human lives, this is something they will always crave from each other in a way few angels ever experience.
Angels can't have sex. Tamen have nothing resembling genitalia, for one thing. No sensations that feel like even a metaphor for a human orgasm. Sex had eventually become an important part of Jack and Bitty's relationship, even if Jack still never fully understood that kind of physical attraction, never looked at Bitty and immediately wanted the way Bitty claimed to feel toward him. He'd been right that it didn't stop him from enjoying sex, and he cherished the unique intimacies it allowed them.
Jacquariel will always treasure those experiences, but ta won't miss sex, not exactly, not when ta and Bittiel have other ways to connect in their true forms.
Kissing, though, they can still do, and Jacquariel isn't sure ta realized just how much ta missed it until now.
"This is weird," ta murmurs against Bittiel's mouth, unable to keep tade own from stretching into a grin.
"What is?" Bittiel asks, then kisses ta again.
"You're so tall."
Bittiel lets out an offended huff, but Jacquariel doesn't let him pull away. It's true—angels are all the same height while in Heaven, and it is a bit of a change after fifty years of kissing someone six inches shorter.
Eventually Bittiel pulls away for real. "I want you to show me the mural," he says, and Jacquariel is more than happy to pull him over to the wall and go around the room with him, hand in hand.
It starts with three parallel stories—Bittiel, Jacquariel, and Larissa, all of tamende lives in Heaven. Given that the rest of the room is devoted to a few decades, Jacquariel summed up thousands of years in a rather small stretch of wall, but ta thinks ta hit the important events that led each of tamen to be who tamen were when tamen fell.
It shows Larissa falling first, and Shitty becoming part of her story. Then Bittiel and Jacquariel's stories become intertwined as soon as they fall and stay that way. Their story and Lardo and Shitty's story come together and move apart as their lives did, back and forth across the years.
Their first years fallen, adjusting, all living together in that house. Jack getting his degree, Bitty graduating from culinary school. Then Bitty and Jack moving out into their own apartment around the time that Lardo and Shitty get married. Lardo and Shitty moving to Vermont when Shitty got a wild hair about getting closer to nature, then moving back to the city only a year later. Bittiel stops at the picture of Bitty and Jack's wedding, his fingertips brushing over this detail and that as he squeezes Jacquariel's hand tightly.
Images go by of various jobs, memorable holidays—and then the two stories come back together. Shitty's father died and, to Shitty's great shock, left him his enormous house. Shitty and Lardo had no desire to live there on their own and were planning to sell it, but Jack and Bitty started having problems with their landlord and Shitty convinced them that clearly the answer was for all four of them to live in his father's house for a while "just for shits and giggles."
Once they were all living together, they discovered that both couples had started talking about having children soon. Bitty and Jack worried that they would have trouble raising a human child at all when they themselves hadn't experienced a human childhood. They also needed a surrogate, and at first Lardo had talked about volunteering herself but ultimately wasn't sure she could handle growing a child in her body and being their biological mother but then giving them up and only being peripherally in their life.
It was Shitty who first suggested it. They'd been in the house together for over six months by then, and it really was big enough that the two couples could hang out together when they wanted but also have as much privacy as they needed. Why not stay there, and raise their kids together? Lardo could be not just biological mother to Jack and Bitty's kids, but their real mother in every sense.
Lardo, Jack, and Bitty all had the vague feeling that if they were normal humans they would think it was a ridiculous idea; but as it was, they weren't, and they didn't. Without a real reference point for a human childhood, almost anything could feel "normal" to them, so they thought they could make the odd arrangement work.
And so their timelines intertwined as Lardo gave birth to three children, each with a different biological father, all of whom considered themselves to have one mom and three dads.
As the two angels walk through this part of the mural, reminiscing, Bittiel updates Jacquariel on what their children and grandchildren have been up to recently.
When they reach the birth of their second granddaughter, Bittiel glances toward the small figure on the ceiling. "You know what happened to Lily, then."
Jacquariel follows his gaze. "Yes. I've come down to earth regularly to look in on all of you. When I saw how sick she was, I started coming more often. I spoke to her Guardian, found out when her time was so I could be there when she passed."
"Oh, sweetpea," Bittiel says, wrapping a wing around Jacquariel as he presses into tade side. "Did she get to talk to you before her Guardian took her across?"
Jacquariel shakes tade head. "She would have been terrified to see me like this. We should go and visit her, along with Larissa and Shitty, but hopefully Larissa can warn her about what we really look like first."
When their children were grown, they'd sat them down and explained what three of their four parents really were. It was never clear if any of them truly believed it, but all three children had admitted that the complete lack of childhood photos, any information on who their grandparents were, or any other information whatsoever about Lardo, Bitty, or Jack's childhoods (when information on Shitty's had been abundant) had always seemed odd. It had become a family tradition to explain it all when a grandchild turned eighteen, but Lily had only been twelve when she'd died.
"I was so glad we knew what was waiting for her," Bittiel says, gazing sadly at Lily as an infant. "It didn't make it easier, though, I don't think. For a while, I thought the Council had really made a mistake, sending me down into that particular life to have that particular experience, because as it was happening I was more sure than ever that no parent should ever have to lose their child. Heaven or no Heaven. I had fantasies of becoming this renegade Guardian who would protect all the children, Siming be damned. They'd just have to find another way to manage the flow of souls."
Jacquariel wraps tade arms around him. "I could see it," ta says, gazing at Bittiel's beautifully righteous face. "If anyone were going to lead an angelic uprising, you would be an excellent choice."
Bittiel shakes his head. "I got past it, don't worry. It's easier, now, being back here, knowing that she's here, too, and she's with Lardo and Shitty, and that Max and Annette will be with her someday. It's easy to forget, sometimes, as a human, how much better Heaven really is in most ways."
Once they reach the part of the walls where all three children are grown and moved out, the two timelines diverge again—with no children at home, both couples had longed for real privacy, and so they'd moved out of the huge old house. They'd gotten apartments just down the street from each other, though, so that it was never difficult for their whole family to be together when they wanted to be.
They spend some time reliving memories of their travels after that—especially once they'd both retired, they'd realized that they hadn't seen nearly as much of earth as they'd always meant to, and tried to remedy that.
Soon, though, they get to Jack's death, and then Shitty's and Lardo's. Jacquariel hasn't added Bitty's yet, but ta points out where it will go. It's a somber way to end, and Jacquariel suddenly wishes ta had thought to include something happier at the end of the mural.
Maybe, ta hopes, the two of them aren't quite finished with their story yet.
"I know you just got back," ta says, turning to Bittiel and gripping his hands in two of tade, "you probably want some time to adjust to being an angel again. So I don't need or expect a real answer right now. But… do you think there's any chance that eventually you'd still want…"
"You still want to bond with me?" Bittiel asks quietly, finishing the question that Jacquariel was stumbling over. Jacquariel can only nod.
"I don't need time," Bittiel says, voice soft and gentle as he shakes his head fondly. "I don't need to adjust. We've been talking about this for decades, and I'm just as sure as I was the day we got married. Are you sure, though? I'll be spending so much time on earth, we'll go years, maybe even decades, without seeing each other—"
"I just went a decade without seeing you," Jacquariel points out. "All the more reason for me to want to keep a piece of you with me always, even when you're gone. And to send a piece of myself with you."
An angelic bond is nothing like a human marriage. For one thing, it's a permanent physical change—each angel gives up a bit of tade grace for the other to absorb. There is no way to reverse it.
"Yes," Bittiel says, and Jacquariel's grace soars. "That's exactly how I feel." He looks around the room briefly. "And I can't imagine a better place for it. Jacquariel... you've spent all this time creating a bonding altar for us, haven't you?"
Jacquariel hadn't thought of it that way, but ta realizes that Bittiel is right—consciously or not, that's what ta has been creating.
In most human cultures, a wedding is a public declaration for many reasons. It's the uniting of two families; often it's a political or financial transaction as much as a romantic one; it's a statement about the parentage of the coming children. An angelic bonding, on the other hand, is considered to be a very private thing, only to be shared between the two angels bonding. There's no ceremony to plan, no reason for them not to do it immediately.
While many human cultures also have particular places for weddings to happen, or rules about where it can or should be, two angels can bond anywhere. It just needs to be a place that is holy to the angels, to the two of tamen as a couple. The more connected tamen are to the location of tamende bonding, the stronger tamende bond will be. This room, Jacquariel knows, will be as powerful a bonding altar as they could possibly hope for.
"I suppose I have," ta admits. "You're right. This is where it has to be. It's perfect."
Bittiel pulls ta across the room, coming to stop in front of the image of Bitty and Jack's wedding. That night was the first time they'd talked about bonding, and they'd agreed immediately that it was what they would want as soon as they were both back in Heaven. They'd only brought it up a few times in the rest of their life together, but they never wavered in their commitment. They still don't.
The two of them stand close, hands joined between their chests.
"Jacquariel," Bittiel begins. "My love for you is perfect, and I give it freely, without obligation or expectation. If our permanent joining is not what you desire, I will continue to love you without reservation. Do you wish us to establish an eternal bond?"
"I do," Jacquariel says firmly, mesmerized by Bittiel's beauty. "Bittiel, my love for you is also perfect, and I also give it freely, without obligation or expectation. If our permanent joining is not what you desire, I will continue to love you without reservation. Do you wish us to establish an eternal bond?"
"I do."
They place their hands against each other's chests, moving even closer, until they're almost close enough to kiss.
"As I give my love, I give myself to you freely," Bittiel says, eyes not leaving Jacuariel's face. "I will be with you always."
'As I give my love, I give myself to you freely," Jacquariel repeats. "I will be with you always."
They both close their eyes, and reach out to each other with their grace. Jacquariel can feel tade hands sinking into Bittiel's being, and Bittiel's hands sinking into tade own, as their graces draw them together and begin to flow between them.
It's like nothing Jacquariel has ever experienced. It's not sexual, but it's an ecstasy beyond anything a human body is capable of. Ta loses taziji in it, figuratively but also literally as their grace continues to flow away from them for the first time in their life, then back in, moving and shifting along with Bittiel's grace. As it continues, they lose all awareness of their own body, their own grace, and Jacquariel ceases to exist; there is only Jacquariel-and-Bittiel, one melded being.
The two of them spend hours there, joined together, unaware of anything other than the euphoric bliss of a connection they can only experience with each other.
Little by little, Jacquariel starts to come back to taziji. Ta realizes, at some point, that ta have tade own body, separate from Bittiel's, which is disappointing. Ta can feel tade grace slowly receding back into taziji and out of Bittiel—but it never makes it completely back. As Jacquariel opens tade eyes, ta can feel the piece of taziji that ta has permanently given over, to live forever inside of Bittiel, and the piece of Bittiel that ta will forever cherish within taziji.
Even after the bond is completed, the two of them stand there, clinging, gazing at each other.
"We are one," Jacquariel finally says softly.
"We are one," Bittiel repeats.
They stare for another beat, and then pull each other into a tight embrace. Jacquariel remembers wishing, as a human, that they could be this close, that they could melt into each other. It's everything ta had hoped it would be.
"I love you so much," Bittiel whispers, not loosening his grip. "I'm so lucky I found you."
"Being sent to earth is the best thing that's ever happened to me," Jacquariel says. "Because it's where I found you."
"I have an idea," Bittiel says as he finally pulls back. "We should take a honeymoon."
"A honeymoon?" Jacquariel laughs. Angels don't take honeymoons—but tamen don't kiss, either.
Bittiel nods. "I have some time before I'm sent back to earth," he explains. "A month or two, probably. Let's take a week or two of that and go to the other side of Heaven, visit Shitty and Lardo and Lily."
"That's a great idea," Jacquariel says, beaming. "And the rest of the time... we have so much to reacquaint ourselves with."
"And acquaint ourselves," Bittiel points out. "There are so many angels I want you to meet, places to see together for the first time..."
"Like our homes," Jacquariel says, realizing. They'd spoken, as humans, about how to combine their homes in Heaven. "Mine is still the smaller. I am happy to leave it."
"We have time to decide," Bittiel says, but Jacquariel doesn't let him continue.
"I've told you, it isn't particularly important to me. I am not attached to it as you are to yours. And I..." Ta pauses, looking for words. "It still feels right to me, coming to you. Becoming a part of your space, instead of you a part of mine. I have so many fewer attachments in Heaven than you do, it sometimes feels like I have been waiting, all this time, for you to find me and fit me into your life. And with us apart so much, it will be a comfort for my life in Heaven to be touched by you everywhere I look, even while you are on earth."
It's clear that Bittiel is moved by tade words. "You are truly all that has been missing from my life. Come home with me, Jacquariel."
Jacquariel follows him out of the Library, and knows ta will continue to follow him everywhere he asks, forever.