Archive of Our Own ^beta

(Did)n't:

The first phase of sequencing is emotional resonance, synchronism. Feeling what the angel feels, as though they are connected twins, given and close. Jimmy suspects this phase will be easy: He already loves God so much.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

They are in this parking lot for some holy reason, Jimmy knows. Cas would not have brought him here otherwise. The stores are all closed and dark, and only a few pure drops of yellow streetlight illuminate the grid of empty asphalt. There are six or so other cars parked in a fray along the edges of the rough acre---a maintenance van, some bait-car Mazda left for the overnight---but these are vacant chambers; They are alone in this place. Jimmy keeps the doors locked anyway, all of the windows all the way up.

A great, black boar trots purposefully into the closest circle of light, shadowed by a second, fat mass. It is the boar's shadow, but it moves on the air somehow, flat and not wholly immediate. Jimmy pulls his seatbelt tighter, terrified by the thought that what he sees is real. Are these other angels, come to judge him? Castiel has mentioned having comrades, divine siblings. Could animals be vessels too? Is he meant to worship these figures? Or have they come in pilgrimage to honor Cas?

He knows that Castiel is still in the car with him, somewhere, as surely as he knows his feet are on the ends of his legs, or that the glass of the windows would be cold to touch. But the angel volunteers no answers. There is no sound at all.

A second boar enters the dim circle, its breathing shuddering and visible with every step. The boar-sized shadow extends along the contours of the present light, belonging briefly to the first animal---a true thing---before spreading over the ground. Jimmy cannot see where its outline ends. The second boar, its legs hobbled and weak, collapses. It is dead.

Jimmy begins to weep. At first he is gasping, unblinking, and then the tears come, and great sobs rise up in his throat. He howls and squeezes his hands white on the steering wheel.

"Why?" he begs aloud. His own voice sounds strange to him. The car stereo makes a soft, crackling sound.

"It is an approximation of something that happened to two of my brothers. It has... always affected me."

"Did they... What were their names?"

The radio is silent.

(Did)n't:

Jimmy tacks the Subaru---engine fluttering, without closure---sixty-and-one-sidewalk-squares-to-go until the driveway, full in the middle of the housing lane, as though not yet willing to give up either himself or Claire to their waiting home lives. Claire gets a sick feeling in her stomach. She is a knotted vise. What is this about? Had she done something wrong? She hadn’t even known to dread being picked up after school. She feels foolish for having lived through her morning and midday, naive of this.

Jimmy switches off the radio all at once, but he leaves the windows open, accepting the afternoon noise of the neighborhood. Claire can’t see her father’s face in any of the mirrors, and the unlocked doors and open air do nothing to remedy the car’s feeling like an airtight trap: sound and oxygen rationed; pistons cycling breaths.

Claire’s father is no sermonist, and Claire knows that he is feeling out this period of created quiet, waiting for the precise right moment to speak to sound spontaneous, or composed. Claire wonders how long she’s been in trouble, and for what, for him to have rehearsed this.

“An angel spoke to me today.”

Claire nods. Angels are always speaking to her father, reminding him to be good, or patient, or not really mad at Claire anymore for talking back to her teachers. She is a little scared, however, of where she fits into this holy dialogue.

“What... what’d it say?”

“He told me to listen.”

Two boys go by on bikes outside. If this was a movie, Claire thinks, they’d be ringing silver bike bells that would echo as they rode away. But---she refocuses---she is still inside the car and not running on the April pavement after them, and Jimmy has gone back to his poor-practiced script. She doesn't know why she wants so badly to escape, only that she does. She is afraid.

“He told me, that I was special, and that he had need of me, and that he would speak to me again.”

It doesn’t sound like Claire is in trouble. It sounds like her father in trouble, and is trying his best to confess himself to Claire before it is too late. Or it is already too late, and this is apology and apology.

Jimmy changes his grip on the steering wheel. “A great blessing has come into our family.”

He winds up the radio again and shifts back into drive. Claire doesn't ask anymore questions, but she notices, then, that even when he’d wanted it completely quiet he’d never actually turned the station [off], only spun down the noise to a faint line, lower and softer than any human could ever hear.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Claire finds her father waiting in the parking lot the next day after the last bell rings, listening to the car radio, all the doors locked, all of the windows all the way up. Claire knocks twice on the hood and Jimmy looks almost surprised to see her until he leans over to undo the latch.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

At dinner that night, Jimmy collects Claire's and Amelia's hands and the three of them form a ringed chain engirdling the cheese casserole and the chicken and the asparagus. Claire has to stretch to grasp her mother's hand at a point halfway over the tablecloth. Jimmy is trying not to grip too tightly.

“Dear Lord,” Jimmy begins, “thank you for this food.”

Jimmy stops, and he doesn't let go of their hands. This is not rehearsed, and he is fighting an awful nervousness. He looks up from the head-bowed pose of Grace and Amelia meets his eyes.

“An angel spoke to me today.”

Claire's mother doesn't say anything, but she doesn't let go, and she doesn't break his gaze. And now Claire will discover what her father had meant in the car earlier. It will be brought into the open and her mother will know what to say and understand what is trying to come out of him. And it will no longer be Claire's to worry about, and even if her father has only weeks to live or owes money to bad people or has decided to join the army, it will be understood and clear to all of them.

“He reminded me how lucky I was to have you. Both of you.”

He squeezes his wife's hand---not too hard---and then picks up his fork and knife, keeping the smile on.

“Jim!” Amelia smiles, bright and wide. “You're so sweet.”

And Claire doesn't look at Jimmy, and she doesn't look at her mother, because she realizes that her father trusts her most in this, trusts her not to speak, and to act normally, and it is thrilling. And it almost doesn't matter that Jimmy is still frightened, scared of a few angels, because the courage is theirs together.

(Did)n't:

His dreams are not his own, and on the day of the third phone call he wakes---himself---having fallen through a memory of the time of the first human vessels. It was something before cities, before names: not before God, but before the hope that God could save. He cannot remember it. His face feels hot, and his soul seems to rest somewhere on his tongue: a taste. Amelia shifts in bed beside him, still asleep. Cas is already within the house somewhere, and Jimmy tries to imagine he can hear him in the emptiness of the home, coming to life in the first light. Early riser, making breakfast, the crackle of cooked eggs under the vent fan.

Breakfast turns out to be toast and grapefruit, and eating it, playing checklist to the arsenal of schoolstuffs Claire will need that Tuesday, Jimmy wonders what trials would've risen to him in slumber, unbidden, free of the influence of the angel. He pretends that this is a day capitalized by surreal visions of 6th grade detention; of twirling a forming world of cotton candy like a gondolier; of being torn from his wife and daughter. The nightmares are easy to write, but he doesn't know how the dreams should coda: whether he’d wake anew, or emptied. He does not know why the question should be so consuming, leave him chewing vacantly at his bit of bread until the sound of Amelia's car starting jars him from his thoughts. The Lord, he knows now, does not speak to man in dreams.

"Do angels dream?" he'd asked. Castiel had made no reply.

There are no cubicles, no dividers in the office where Jimmy works---"for the sake of openness", the consultant's secretary had quoted---but he wouldn't mind if there were. The world is openness to Jimmy now. For months he has noticed little changes in "James Novak", little encroachments of the angel's mind onto his own, and one of these is that rooms and spaces now seem to be more than distances between walls and doors. Architecture has become shapes, mazes to trace with his body from above. He is remade in other ways too: He will never again be seasick; He now abhors the taste of strawberries.

He cannot sleep.

"What did I see this morning, Cas? Was that a memory? A vision? I was awake, wasn't I? Were you there with me, in the blood? Or... or on my hand, when I touched his arm? Is it going to be like sleepwalking forever?"

The phone on his desk won't ring for another two hours, and Jimmy will spend that time fighting to keep his eyes open, reliving every moment he will almost swerve off the road on the way home, blinded by low headlights, while Amelia shifts in bed beside him, before cities, before names.

(Did)n't:

“It is nothing to us that you should mutilate yourself. We will destroy you a thousand times.”

(Did)n't:

In the end, it's the angel that's embarrassed, though whether for Jimmy or for itself, Jimmy isn't sure.

They'd been staked in the pickup loop for a whole half hour before the release bell rang, but at the first sight of Claire and her friends Jimmy found he was too impatient to wait out the final minute. He left the car idling in the clog of vehicles and half ran across the bus lane too meet his daughter on the slope of steps.

"Dad?"

Jimmy looked around, pointed at another student: a boy, Claire's age. "Claire, what do you see when you look at that backpack? What color is it?"

"Red... It's red."

"Ever since this morning, I've---" Jimmy stops. He blinks, once, slowly. Cars are beginning to honk. There is no sense of there being just the two of them---the three of them---there; they are in a crowd of other people, other glimpses of the color. Even the boy has turned around to stare at them, bands of the brilliant shade yoked on his shoulders.

"Dad?"

"It's red. It's red. Yeah..."

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, let's---You have your stuff? Let's... let's go."

They make their way back to the metric dinging of the Subaru, and pull forward into the traffic, and Jimmy doesn't say anything else for the rest of the ride home.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Later that night, when Claire and Amelia are asleep, Jimmy kneels before the old TV set the angel likes to speak through, face close to the dials. Without preamble, the soft buzz of static becomes an understanding in his head.

"I'm sorry. Human eyes are... different. I've never had them before." The angel doesn't say anything else.

In the dark, Jimmy Novak is only a shape. A figure, indistinct.