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Of all the angels in all the choirs of Heaven, of all the multitudes upon multitudes that He hath made, Jack had the misfortune of meeting Bitty.
It went like this:
A few years ago, Jack had been comfortably positioned as one of the Highest Angels. He stood attendance by a Throne and shouted exaltations all day long, and that had suited him. It was fine. It was good. He was exactly where he was meant to be.
And then it all went sideways, and when he was no longer worthy of being spit upon by his peers he was gently but firmly ousted out of his ring of heaven and given new duties.
He used to stand in the penumbra of a Throne, and shout exaltations. Now he had to visit the mortal plane, like a common peon. His wings once outshone the blazing sun. And now he sullied his hands with a sword of flame and shouted orders to his pokey choir.
“I’m just saying,” Bitty said, wingtips making delicate circles in the air while he ran a whet stone of light over the flickering edge of his blade, “that the creator, whoever he was, whatever he was—“
Jack could hear the lowercase letters in that sentence. It made a muscle in his eye twitch.
Bitty was a Problem. He was good with his sword, and he was the fastest angel Jack had ever met, able to make a roundtrip to Earth at half the speed of light. But he had a bad habit of seizing up in the middle of a fight. Like, full on, wings locking down, face scrunching up, flaming sword going out as if it had been doused, and then falling from what passed as the sky on this side of reality. Holster and Shitty were pretty good about hooking a hand or a foot around Bitty’s robe as he fell, but it was a huge hindrance.
And the other angels laughed at them.
All of this, Jack could have dealt with. The atheism, he could not.
“Be quiet,” he growled, only to see Bitty’s face sour.
“I’m just telling the truth!” he snapped, and raised his right hand. “With you as my witness, I speak only the truth or may I be smited with extreme prejudice.” He was not smited.
Angels were meant to serve humanity, but Jack still felt an overwhelming wave of squeamishness when he did a healing. His choir, as of Ransom’s burst of zeal the other day, were forbidden from performing miracles, which meant healings took three times as long and required an in-person cameo. Jack could never get the hang of a corporeal body, something Bitty picked up on.
“What are you wearing?”
Jack frowned down at his azure scrubs. “Um, the work uniform?” On second glance, he could see that Bitty managed, in the twenty minutes they had been here, to tailor his outfit. The scrubs fit him well, showcasing the narrowness of his waist and the breadth of his arms. There was a thready decal on his breast pocket. And accent stitching in lavender along the hems.
“Oh hon, that’s not a uniform that’s a crime,” Bitty moaned. He picked his way through the nursing home and rested a hand on one of the resident’s foreheads. “I’ve got you, sweetheart,” he murmured. The woman sighed and her body sank a little further into the armchair. “Brb.” He zipped off with the soul in hand, and was back before Jack had the laundry turned over.
Jack hopped up on the dryer and regarded Bitty with a cool eye. It did not escape his notice that Bitty returned with a latte and was sipping it cheerfully. “Riddle me this,” Jack said, knowing he was opening a huge can of worms but unable to help himself. “If there’s no God, then how are we here?”
“Evolution,” Bitty replied, smooth as silk. A bit of whipped cream clung to his upper lip.
“So, what, angels evolved from some kind of proto-angels and we just haven’t found the fossils yet?”
Bitty lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “Could be. Or maybe we’re the product of human imagination. It could be that the beliefs and hope of billions of people, compounded over generations, produced idealized versions of themselves that live primarily in a realm of light and energy.”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Jack sighed. He slid off the dryer and checked the time on his phone.
Bitty drained the last of his latte. “Not as many answers as I’d like.”
Prayer duty isn’t Hell, but Jack’s limited imagination couldn’t conjure a reality more hellish than ten straight hours of prayer work. He conjured himself a physical form just for the sake of being able to crumple to the temple’s marble floor, exhausted.
Bitty joined him some minutes later and, after a moment’s consideration, settled on the floor beside Jack. “Okay,” he said suddenly, breaking the silence. “Say that there was a God.” Jack threw an arm over his face and resisted the urge to scream. Bitty slapped lazily at his shoulder. “No, shut up, listen. Say there was a God, who created the Heavens and the Earth, right? Where is He now? How come He never answers prayers Himself, huh? Why is it angels that have to carry the prayers to where they need to go?”
“Shut up!”
In the beginning, God created more than enough angels. There were really quite a lot of them. Multitudes upon multitudes. But the work was really overwhelming. For every human on Earth at any given moment, there might be two angels, but that didn’t mean both angels were good.
There were messages to give, fates to carry out, miracles to perform. But all of that got put on the backburner when the demons got frisky.
“Jack!” Bitty screamed, sword raised, and Jack turned just in time to catch sight of that swing, Bitty putting his back into it, teeth gritted. The demon dodged, the blade sizzling harmlessly under his arm, but the maneuver brought him within Jack’s reach. Jack brought his sword down, and the demon looked up just in time for Jack to get a good look at his face. His eyes were wide, mouth parted, cheeks flushed, beautiful in the way all angels are beautiful, soul barely tainted by the maw of Hell.
I knew you, once, Jack realized. But the sword had a momentum of its own, and it arced down and cut the demon deep, separating his wings from his body. The demon reached out a single hand, and then he fell in the most permanent way possible.
Bitty’s wings rustled by Jack’s ear. “Oh my goodness Jack!” he panted, flushed with victory. Jack withdrew his outstretched arm and closed a fist in the fabric of his robe. Bitty chattered, hugging his sword to his chest. “I got an assist! I got an assist! And you were amazing! The kill was such a beaut!”
“Bittle.” The flames flicked out. Jack stared out over the battlefield, and watched as his choir dispatched other demons back to Hell. How many of them did he personally know? How many demons had he served beside, or under, before they had become demons? His shoulders sagged under the weight of his duty.
“Jack?”
“It was a lucky shot,” he gritted out.
“It’s not so much that I don’t think there’s a God,” Bitty explained to the newest additions to their choir. “I just fervently hope there isn’t.”
The tadpoles, as they had come to call them, looked perplexed, but it was Chowder who eventually asked, “Um, but why?”
The entire choir bivouacked near a half forgotten cemetery. Jack watched an elderly couple walk between the sunken headstones, bracing himself to intervene in case one of them tripped over a mole hill but he couldn’t help but follow the conversation.
Bitty picked at his fingernails. “I guess I just don’t agree with the kinds of things our hypothetical god does,” he fussed. “Like, supposing he made the angels. And then he made humans. Like, what, angels weren’t good enough? And then we’re the custodians of humanity, which is all so superior to our fine selves, but they get treated like crap because they’re not perfect. Excuse me, but the whole draw of humanity was that it’s flawed in cool and interesting ways, yeah? Like crystal formations—not perfect but cool to look at. But those same flaws—which are features, not bugs, btw—keeps a whopping half of them (maybe more) out of even the lowest rings of Heaven. That’s not even whimsy. That’s just poor planning.”
Jack got up from the ground and stalked further into the cemetery, and didn’t realize a tadpole was coming with him until Dex nearly walked into him.
“Sorry, Jack! Sorry!” he rushed to say.
Jack exhaled in a huff and tried to put on his most disarming smile. “It’s okay, Dex. I didn’t see you there.”
“I just wanted to say it’s an honor to meet you, sir,” he said in a rush. “Is it true you met Sandalphon?”
“I served under Sandalphon, yes,” Jack confirmed.
“Gosh!” Dex sighed. The elderly couple planted a pair of geraniums in the mushy soil by one of the less sunken stones, watered the plants and then went on their way again. They watched them go. “Is Bitty…?” Dex’s voice trailed off, uncertain.
“Bitty is good with people. He is devoted to his duties, and he is very…compassionate. He identifies with the humans he helps. But he does not speak for the choir, and he does not speak for me. Do you understand?”
“Yessir. I guess I just assumed a guy in Jack’s choir would be less…yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Hello, sweetheart,” Bitty said softly. The little soul looked up from the gray waves, the shell-shocked gasp permanently affixed there. He reached down and pulled her free of her broken body, brushed her hair out of her face.
Jack didn’t know how Bitty got to be so good at ferrying the dead to where they needed to go. He supposed Bitty must have had practice, and lots of it. He wondered if it ever got easier. Judging by the redness of Bitty’s eyes when he returned from Heaven, though, he didn’t think that was the case.
Prayer duty was awful. In theory, an angel could never grow weary or hungry or corrupted, but the very limits of his angelic endurance was tried whenever Jack got stuck doing extended prayer duty. He stared listlessly at the flickering candles in the church. All those prayers. He could hear them drowning out the sounds of the city, and every time he closed his eyes he could see the supplicants. He saw them, hands clasped together, eyes scrunched shut, mouths pursed. They begged. They wept. They fell to their knees because when all else failed, they still had hope, and when nothing else could be done they still folded their hands and bowed their heads and let the angels work.
Jack didn’t know how they did it. He could never imagine himself praying to God, of having so much hope and faith that he could hold up a single whisper and let a passing angel relay the message heavenward.
Perhaps, that was the real reason humanity was His favorite.
“Jack?”
“I’m here,” he rasped, not bothering to rise from the cool marble floor.
Bitty knelt beside him and touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, hon.” He rubbed small circles into Jack’s back.
“Bitty,” he whispered, “what do you believe in?”
The hand pressing between his shoulder blades paused, then disappeared. Jack sat up to find Bitty digging out his phone. He tapped in the passcode and opened one of the apps, and tapped for a moment before showing Jack his phone.
A list of names.
“These are all the people I follow on Twitter,” he admitted, a shy smile tugging at his mouth. He opened another app. “And these are the people I follow on Tumblr.” He opened another. “And this is my LinkedIn.”
Jack had never noticed the way Bitty’s wings dwarfed his body. But they did. His wings were objectively huge, long and broad and golden, warm as they settled around Jack. “I believe in people.”
“People are unreliable,” he pointed out.
“That’s why they’re worth putting faith into. Otherwise it’s not faith anymore, it’s facts. Does that make sense?”
It didn’t. Nothing made sense when he was around Bitty.
Another bloody battle. Another bout of prayer duty. Another healing, an illicit miracle, another batch of new recruits. Jack paused in front of a skyscraper and caught his reflection in the glass. He lifted a dagger from his sash and used it to cut his hair. And when he had done so, he saw that it was good.
When Kent came to tell Jack that he could return to his post, that the higher ups were impressed with his numbers, that he could return to his place by the Throne and shout exaltations all day, that he could come home, it wasn’t even a question.
“Go,” he snarled, sword springing to hand already aflame. “Go and leave my choir alone.”
Jack found Bitty in his material form, dressed in azure scrubs and laying on the floor. He had taken care to pull the sheet over Marilyn’s body. Jack dropped down to the grimy, faded linoleum and wrapped an arm around Bitty.
“Jack,” he sniffled.
“I’m here.”
Bitty pressed his face to Jack’s chest, and hot tears sank through the soft fabric of his shirt. “They say that God made everything in the universe,” he whispered against Jack’s sternum. “They say he made every possible concept and thought any of us have, and since he knows anything and everything we could ever say, God has no need to be able to hear us. Is God deaf, do you think? How come He can’t hear us?”
“I don’t know,” Jack murmured. He never met God—most angels hadn’t. He pressed a cheek against the top of Bitty’s head.
“What do you believe in, Jack?”
And wasn’t that a puzzler. A year ago, he would have said he believed in the all-encompassing mercy and forgiveness of God, but a day in the nursing home put those beliefs to rest pretty quickly. He rubbed small circles against Bitty’s back. “I believe in the way water droplets sit on rose petals,” he whispered after some thought. “I believe in the desert night sky, and the way wind chimes sound when the wind isn’t very strong.
“I believe in the corruption and exhaustion and hunger of angels. And I believe that such things will pass. That this, too, shall pass. I believe in my choir, that they have my back in battle and in life. I believe the way Chowder laughs could save the world one day. I believe in the weight of my sword when I am at rest, and the lightness of it when I am not. I believe in the unchecked cruelty of men, and the boundless kindness of men, and the fact that a single individual is capable of both, usually in the same breath. I believe in Holster’s jokes and Ransom’s passion and Shitty’s camaraderie. I believe in one God, and I hope that one day He’ll believe in me.
“But mostly, I believe in you.”
It goes like this:
Jack had been comfortably positioned as one of the Highest Angels. Now his hands are rough from wielding a sword of flame. His wings are permanently ruffled from traipsing to and from Earth like a common peon. He ferries souls and prayers and he takes an interest in the affairs of men. Angels cannot be exhausted, but he feels exhaustion in every fiber of his being at the end of every day, and he is so full of love for his work he could burst. He is exactly where he was meant to be.
Of all the angels in all the choirs of Heaven, of all the multitudes upon multitudes that He hath made, Jack had the privilege of meeting Bitty.