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As the wind picked up, a single white feather tore from his wings and began to float along the current. It mingled with the litter and dried leaves of the city autumn, bringing Alex as close to the humankind he had fallen so deeply enamored with as he would ever be. He knew that even Guardian Angels such as himself were supposed to maintain a safe distance from the humans that they were watching over. It was for their safety, to prevent them from joining the ranks of the Fallen, and for the safety of the humans, to prevent them from being pushed out of their herds for believing something to be real when so many others had given up even the concept of it.
Alex didn’t think that it was truly as risky as his supervisors had suggested it would be. Surely, if being around the humans was enough to push them both into the boundary of Falling or being driven mad with divinity, then God would have created something that separated them. If he was born from stardust with the sole and singular purpose to watch over a soul through each lifeform that it took, then he was also meant to see what said soul did when it didn’t particularly need his help. That was how he had found himself perched on the edge of a rooftop and looking down at a cafe, peaking glances of his human whenever the nipping wind moved the parasol to the side enough to reveal sun-bleached golden curls.
The soul that Alex had been created for had only been through a few incarnations so far. A dog was the most recent ones, a beloved hound owned by a trapper in the western United States before it had been called that. Before then, he had been a tree and a rabbit. This was his first time being a human, and that made him so much more interesting. An animal had base needs that were required to be fulfilled, had preferences and hatreds, but didn’t have the higher complexity of life that humans had made for themselves.
Alex’s soul was about twenty five years old, a quarter of the way through a normal human lifespan. He was taller than most of the humans around him with gangly limbs and a head full of golden curls. He had a deep voice that he used primarily for making all kinds of music, which he had gotten rather famous off of. He had a few friends and lovers scattered across the world that he treated with the respect and courtesy that he deserved. Alex had only stepped into his life during the period of time after his father had died, when he had nearly gone to jail. Alex had thought that he would lose his job for the stunt that he pulled to get his soul sent to a reform commune in the American west, but it had paid off. Matt, the name of Alex’s soul, had found comfort in the vast expanse of red rock and sagebrush just as he had when he was a hound.
A small smile graced the angel’s face as he watched the loose feather from his wings settle on the ground beside Matt. “What kind of bird d’you think that came from?” he asked the friend that he had gone out for coffee with. He reached down to pick up the item, but the wind picked it up and sent it down the road before he had the chance.
The friend in question laughed and began to joke about increasingly big geese. Alex didn’t feel indignant or offended at the idea that something as beautiful as his pure-white feather could have come from a being such as a water fowl. They were creations of God and hard work from other creator angels, he would be honored to share a likeness with them.
“It’s addictive, isn’t it?” a voice from behind him asked.
He had felt the presence as soon as it arrived, but he had refused to turn around and acknowledge that she was there first. He still jumped when the cutesy voice cut through the thick silence that had rolled over them like an incoming fog.
His first instinct was to say ‘no’, but the words got caught in his throat like a red hot volcano. It would have been a lie and while Alex had done a lot of things that an angel was strictly told they were not meant to do, he would never lie like that. At the same time, he didn’t want to admit to the implications of what she was hinting towards. So instead he said, “It’s nice to see you again, Mouse.”
She stepped up beside him then with her pale hands clasped behind her back. Her hair was still split down the middle, one ponytail swinging a light purple while the other pink one rested on her shoulder. She was wearing a strappy black dress in the lolita fashion, wings folded down her back so that the claws of the leathery appendage barely touched the tip of her legs. Her horns were the brightest thing about her, vibrant black or red or purple depending on the way that one tilted their head.
“Aww, did you miss me?” she giggled at him with that teasing lilt that made his heart soften despite it all.
He nodded his head and then turned back towards the umbrella where he’d seen his human before. “You could go talk to him, you know. I could help you sort out this look that you have. So that he wouldn’t know that you were his Guardian.”
“No,” Alex shook his head. “The rules explicitly say that we’re not supposed to interact with the Soul that we’re assigned to unless we’re helping them to their next form or stopping them from interrupting the Divine Plan.”
Mouse was quiet for a while. She placed her hands on the edge of the concrete divider between the roof and the rest of the world. With a soft ‘hup’ she had hoisted herself over the edge of the building and was sitting on it like a curb, clunky boots tapping together with each dramatic swing of her leg. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird?”
“What is?” Alex questioned.
“That we have to stop them from interrupting that Divine Plan that you were going on about. If God didn’t want the souls to interrupt the plan that He had come up with, then He shouldn’t have given them free will. The fact that he did makes me think that maybe us downstairs are in the right,” she grinned at him.
His stomach flipped and his heart fluttered with nerves as his brain rolled over and over what she had just said. He had been friends with Mouse since before she had Fallen, known her when she was angelic and following after a young man named Connor in Wales. He wasn’t quite sure which rule she had broken or what had happened, but the next time that they had talked she had been in the form she was presently. She talked about her Soul as if it were a close friend that she had nowadays, which was what she was not-so-gently shoving Alex towards doing.
She didn’t seem unhappy or in a constant state of torment like Alex had been warned that she would be. He had grown up throughout his entire life thinking that an angel couldn’t live happily in Hell. The place had been made miserable by the overwhelming light and heat from the Morningstar, something that once made the land flourish scorching it with anger after he had been cast from Heaven. Mouse seemed to like it, though, and she often joked around that she was actually Satan.
“How did you know that you were ready?” he asked.
“For?”
“Falling,” his voice was quiet as he uttered the word. It felt as though he were going against everything that he had ever stood for and been taught by only being curious.
Mouse tapped her pointed nail against her pale cheek for a moment before she said, “I just did. I couldn’t keep watching Connor from afar. You know what they say, when a Soul takes a human form that means that they’re almost ready to go into the Beyond. I wanted to get to know the Soul that I had been watching for so long. So I did.”
Alex’s fingers dug into the crumbling material of the concrete beneath his palms. He didn’t know why his thoughts were doing down this path. He had always known that his job was to try and inch Matt towards the right decisions so that he could go into the Beyond, it was what all souls longed for. And once Alex had done it enough times, he would get to join them all in that Nirvana.
Their breathing petered out in his ears until he was focusing once more on what Matt was talking about. He stuttered through his sentence and then swore loudly when one of his awkwardly long arms swung right into the drink cup next to him. He managed to catch it before the styrofoam had tipped over, but not before the straw and paper top fell out and toppled down onto the ground. Leaning underneath the matel table to pick it up, he banged his head back on the way up. Laughter emitted from the two humans next to each other while he rubbed the spot in shame and tossed the litter into the trash.
Alex’s heart was hammering harder than it had been since he had begun to talk with Mouse. He needed that like he needed life. He needed to be close to Matt, to hear that laugh be caused by something that he had said and feel those hands against his back and smell the musk that was unique to each human.
He let out a tense breath before he asked, “What do you do? If you want to fall?”
Alex returned home with fear making his gut clench around the meal he’d shoved down before going to watch Matt. He walked with hurried footsteps past the curated houses that emulated Earth where the angels all worked. It turned into a blur of pastel, gentle colors and perfectly manicured gardens that he couldn’t care less about. His feet were taking him where he needed to go and that was the only thing that mattered. His pace picked up so that he was walking as quickly as he could without running, bringing him past the endless hallways and doors where other offices lay until he was finally standing before the leader of the Guardian Angels.
He stopped then and tilted his head up towards the grand sign. The words that Mouse had whispered in his ear rung over and over again while he forced them up through his throat and into the stagnant air in the depths of the building.
“I’m in love with a human.”
And then he was falling. The ground had opened up around him so that there was nothing beneath his feat. He reached his wings out so that he could catch himself, but there were bits of stretched out and frail paper where there had once been pinfeathers in shining white. The wind ripped the air out of his lungs to prevent him from screaming while his skin felt as though it were being peeled off inch by inch.
His back hit something flexible, yet not soft, and he whimpered in pain as he tried to take his bodily inventory. He was wearing a pair of baggy blue jeans with no top, and where his wings were had been replaced instead with something that looked like strips of plastic. He could feel a tingling sensation in the tips of his fingers and his lungs ached with the effort to fill and empty, now crucial instead of something that made him feel more attuned to the living being he was watching over.
Alex slowly pushed himself onto his elbow and rolled out of the dumpster he had fallen into onto another pile of cardboard. He pushed himself up slowly, his eyes falling onto a pair of sneakers and then trailing upwards until he saw the face of a man that was so inherently familiar to him that his heart felt like it had taken over his entire body. “Matt, hi.”