Chapter Text
“You know,” the old woman mused. “Of all the angels to take me from this world, you are not what I was expecting.”
Ronan quirked an eyebrow. He supposed he couldn’t fault her for thinking him an angel of the Lord, but one look at him made the idea completely outlandish. Shaved head, sharp eyes, clad in black and leather. Ronan couldn’t help the corners of his mouth curling in amusement.
The woman was a stout, hunchbacked old woman with a fancy curl of grey hair. Ronan had seen her at church before, decked in costume pearls and obnoxiously bright skirts, tugging at her rosary, but he never learned her name. The woman knew him, of course. Most everyone at St. Agnes’ knew of the Lynch brothers. They were rather hard to miss. But if any of the Lynch brothers were more notorious than the others, it was Ronan Lynch, the middle brother.
“I’m no angel,” Ronan said, taking a seat beside the woman in the church pew. It creaked beneath his weight. If he was an angel, he’d have more direction in this endeavor. A divine plan. A job description, perhaps. “I’m just here to keep you company until your death fully takes hold.”
“So this is dying, then. Not a dream.”
“It’s a dream. It’s also dying.”
The woman’s dream was about exactly what Ronan would’ve expected. The church pews they sat in were the same ones Ronan sat in every Sunday morning. But the dreary church walls were gone. They sat in an endless green field, with a cathedral door to nowhere behind them, Bibles on the grass beneath their seats, and a great Ash tree at the end of the aisle of seats before them. Ronan knew that if they walked in any direction, they would find themselves staying exactly where they were, like taking a stroll on a hamster wheel. Ronan wondered if they would stay here, if she would go peacefully. Maybe she would dream of her children or grandchildren for one last moment with them before she goes. Maybe she would want to hear the church choir again. It would not be the first time he’d experienced that.
The woman sighed. She took one of the Bibles out from under her seat and gripped it in her lap.
“I must say, I’m rather disappointed in myself,” she said. “Fell down the front steps. I was hoping to go out guns blazing.”
The thought of this jewelry-clad ninety-year-old woman of God charging into battle with a pair of handguns made Ronan smile. He let it happen. He will always let it happen for the people in his dreams. If he could not save them, and he never could, they deserved to see someone kinder than him in their final moments. He could pretend.
“Well, you have until you cross over, or until I wake up,” Ronan said. “What do you want to do?”
To the woman, it was a call to adventure. To Ronan, who knew she was already gone, it was just another failure.