Pablo DaCosta | The Angel (phoshilaron) wrote in monsterheartic, @ 2017-04-14 07:50:00 |
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Current music: | The Clash - Armagideon Time |
remember to kick it over, no one will guide you
Who: Pablo and the archangel Uriel (NPC)
What: Siri, why does God allow suffering?
Where: DaCosta residence.
When: April 14th, midafternoon.
Warnings: Just language.
Status: Complete
Pablo had seen the video.
It was hard to miss, kids at school talking about it in the hallway, gossipping about whether it was real. One of Pablo's friends even texted him the link with the comment holy fuck yo idk how they did the effects but this is gnarly. Izzy had been out of school for a couple of days, and there was no mistaking her figure, her hair, her skin. It was her.
Pablo had stormed out of school in the middle of the day, and he didn't know where the hell he was going or what he was doing. Just that he couldn't sit in class when this had happened. He walked home, letting himself into the garage but not going inside the house; he knew his father was home, probably cleaning one of the rooms upstairs after their last guest had checked out, but Pablo didn't want a lecture about skipping classes.
Instead, he just folded up on the concrete step by the door, his phone clutched in his hand, watching the video over and over and feeling sick. Turning the sound on and off again, at one moment too stricken to be able to listen to it, at another moment feeling like he should force himself to hear. He'd been wasting his time here, he'd been complacent, he hadn't given Izzy the help she needed, he hadn't been close enough to her to know that she was planning to go after things like this, and therefore he hadn't been there. He couldn't even clearly identify her assailant.
But he would. He could sure as fuck guess who was responsible, and it was well past time for him to say hi to Ezra and Cooper. Which you should have done as soon as she told you.
He finally made himself stop watching the video, shaking with rage. He'd got up to pace around the garage and was a heartbeat away from putting his fist straight through a wall when a voice interrupted from behind him.
"You don't want to do that."
The garage was dim, barely lit by the one thick-paned, dusty window high over the door, but suddenly the air was suffused with light, soft-edged, warm and golden as a midsummer sunrise. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, as if some natural radiance had been released from all the mundane objects in the space: the gas cans were luminous, the garden tools glowed, the snowblower shone.
Pablo turned around, seeing exactly who he'd expected to see. Uriel's vessel was a tweedy, rumpled guy who was pushing forty, a math professor with a Russian accent. He didn't look powerful or important, but he was, on a level that even Pablo could barely comprehend.
"Don't tell me what I don't want to do right now," Pablo snarled at him. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Sit down, sit, sit." Uriel guided him back to the concrete step with a firm hand on his elbow, the touch of his skin warm even through his sleeve. Uriel himself sat down on a stepladder that was set up next to the metal shelving unit. "Why are you asking?"
Pablo was still pissed off. "Why are you asking why I'm asking, the fuck do you think is going on here? You guys just let her die, you must have known it would happen and you didn't tell me anything, maybe I could have helped her—"
Uriel interrupted. "Two days from now in Botswana. Nineteen-year-old girl will get murdered and dismembered by three men, two of them blood relatives," he said calmly. "Now. Very long flight from Boston to Gaborone, twenty-five hours at best with stops in D.C., Accra, and Johannesburg, and then from Gaborone you would have to get a ride out to her town and find her, but if you leave right away you could just about make it. Can you come up with three thousand dollars in the next half hour?"
"What—no—"
"Could you have done that for Izzy, if I had told you that you could save her in time?"
Pablo was just angrily confused now, a normal reaction to conversations with Uriel. "I don't have three grand on me, man, but how the fuck does that matter? That wouldn't have saved her. But at least I could have tried. Don't we have angels who are already in Botswana?"
"Of course," said Uriel. He was a tranquil, serene presence who never reacted much when other people were frustrated with him, which was often. "So you're willing to trust the system, when it comes to a very nice girl in Botswana. Her name is Nyaga, by the way. You feel confident that angels in her area will take care of things appropriately?"
Pablo snorted. "No, actually, I super don't."
"Then why aren't you turning the house upside down looking for things that you could pawn for three thousand dollars?" Uriel asked. "Or you could try asking me, or even mugging me—my vessel doesn't have more than..." He got his phone out of his jacket pocket and checked his bank balance. "Twenty-five-forty, vot eto da, where'd that come from? Oh, this is Friday, isn't it? I got paid. So that'd get you well on your way, if you wanted to muscle me over to an ATM."
Pablo was resting his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. "Uriel, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I'm supposed to go to Botswana?"
"No, you're not," said Uriel, putting his phone back in his pocket. "But I warned you about a terrible tragedy that's about to happen there, to another girl. It's something you could feasibly prevent if you went far out of your way. You might have made that sacrifice for Izzy. But I don't think you intend to do it for Nyaga. Do you? No wrong answers."
"My main priority is finding the motherfuckers who did this to Izzy."
"I know. Why?"
"Because Izzy didn't fucking deserve this," Pablo snapped, barely remembering in time that he should lower his voice to a hiss, in order to keep his father from hearing him from inside the house. "She never asked to be a Chosen One, she was a normal girl, she was good—"
"Nyaga's very sweet. I don't think she deserves what's going to happen to her. But we're close enough to my point that I can drop my Socratic argument thing, I suppose," said Uriel. He reached out to touch Pablo's shoulder, unfazed when the boy violently shook it off. "This is not about warnings or tragedies. This is because you knew Izzy. That's the real reason you asked me this question. That's why it hurts. You knew her. Not best friends, but she mattered to you. You wanted to know her better—you just assumed you were going to, given time. You thought there was time. And now you know that there was not."
Pablo hadn't looked up, still hunched over on the concrete step in the strange brightness of the garage. His eyelids felt hot and swollen but he hadn't been able to cry over this, too swamped with guilt and horror. "But why, why wasn't there time? Why do we keep letting this happen?"
"You're asking questions when the answers won't help, achi." It was Uriel's preferred form of address for other angels, the Hebrew word for brother, adjusted to achoti for angels in female vessels. "Answers won't help because these are not questions. They look like questions, but they aren't. On a hot day in summer, you can see puddles on the highway, but they're not puddles. They're mirages caused by the difference in refractive index between the hot air at the road surface and the cooler air above it. And your questions look like questions but really they're just grief, grief that bends and refracts as it interacts with the logical mind. A grief that seems to have these gaps in it where an answer to a question could fit, but in reality, there's no space there at all. Approaching a mirage won't help if you're thirsty, and answering questions won't help if you're grieving."
"But can't you just tell me, even if it won't help?" Pablo knew full well that he wasn't going to get a real answer, and if he did, it would likely be something that he wasn't capable of understanding. "Can you try being useful for a second here, can you make this make sense?"
Uriel shook his head. "From where you're sitting, anything I said about it would only sound profoundly disrespectful to what she's suffered. And it would damage you too. You're not at fault for this, achi."
"One town. One tiny fucking town in Maine," Pablo muttered, pressing the heels of his palms into his closed eyelids. "And I can't even handle that. Why do you guys even want me back?"
Uriel reached out again for his shoulder, and this time Pablo let it connect, exhausted and finding that he actually wanted the comfort. "Your job here is not to 'handle' the entire town. Izzy, yes, arguably that was her job. She did everything in her power to do that. She fulfilled the decree that was set out for her and she did it well. If you want to take a more active supportive role with the next Chosen One, good, please do. You'll be meeting her soon. If you want revenge, you should understand that it's complicated and that certain things are already in motion. And that it's possible for a fight to go the wrong way. You could end up just like Izzy did if you're not careful. We very much need you to be careful, okay?"
At next Chosen One Pablo had just groaned wordlessly, but now he lifted his head. "Why is this the way things work, though? Call one girl to some big important destiny, hope she gets enough instructions and training to do it, run her into the ground, watch her die, pick the next one? There's seriously not a better way to handle threats like this? Some way that wouldn't involve so many dead kids?"
Uriel sighed, and moved his hand from Pablo's shoulder to rest the tips of his long fingers on the boy's temple. A stream of mental images flowed directly into Pablo's skull: the Earth itself, enveloped in a dizzyingly complex array of overlapping petals of energy, spiderwebbed together with currents and connections that were (at the particle level) made up of stories, then words, then letters, then numbers. The image wormed its way through time itself, growing and shedding those petals constantly, digesting and recycling them, hybridising, negotiating, rewriting, until the petals and spiderwebs were no longer just layers of story but worlds unto themselves, each still rooted to their place of origin while being infinite. Heavens, hells, worlds that defied labels, mythologies, systems, mysteries, secrets.
"So you see, the short version is that in one of those mytho-temporal claudications," Uriel said, jabbing one of the petals of energy further into Pablo's consciousness, although it looked just like the others, "it's necessary to have a Chosen One, and it's necessary for it to happen like this. In others, it's not. But our own causal structure is interdependent with the claudication in question, for chiefly but not exclusively historical reasons, including prior diplomatic arrangements with non-dimensional entities. Therefore we cannot interfere with architectural elements that preserve its stability, such as the qadar of an individual who has been assigned Chosen One status in the aforementioned claudication. Even in our own substrate, we have several internal competing causality-functions whose truth-values are equal and mutually exclusive! But even those things which are utterly true in our own substrate, without dispute, simultaneously have no valency whatsoever for another."
"What..." Pablo had a pounding headache even though the images were already fading from his mind. It was an influx of information that he probably could have tolerated in his true form, but in a human body it was simply too much. He no longer had access to a superhuman intellect, even though he recognised some of the terms that Uriel was using. "Dude, I didn't need you to do that. Fuck, ow, I'm sorry I asked. So, what, you're saying like...'not my division'?"
"Kind of. Except it also is our division, and that's the problem. See? You don't see. It's fine." Uriel reached into his pocket again and got out an Altoids tin with some extra-strength Advil inside. "Here, I'd just heal it for you but that doesn't work when overload of celestial energy is the original problem. I get those headaches all the time, my vessel's brain can't hold it all either. Even though it's a pretty good brain." He passed Pablo a couple of the Advil. "Take these. You want my advice?"
Pablo rolled his eyes but threw his head back to swallow the pills dry, a skill he'd learned lately since he was pretty much always dealing with aches and pains of some kind. "No. Yeah, actually. I don't want to be saying yes because I'm pretty sure you're going to tell me something ridiculous, but I wish to fuck I knew what to do here. So you might as well take a shot."
"You should take a nap," Uriel said firmly. "You want to avoid tough questions with your father, I'll bend the rules this time and make sure he doesn't notice you're home until school's out. See, that's not a silly suggestion, I can be practical sometimes. Take a nap, shower, rest, eat. And when you meet the new Chosen One, help her. Because it's the right thing to do and because it will honour your friend."
Pablo was still no closer to crying—he kind of wished he could, because instead he was just getting a runny nose, as if he had allergies rather than a sick feeling of shock from watching a girl he knew and liked get murdered on tape. He sniffed sharply. "Do I get a clue about who she is this time? Or do I still have to guess?"
"Her name's Sarah. Big green eyes." Uriel got up from the stepladder. He quoted something in Russian, the words reverberating with meaning, penetrating Pablo's mind even though he didn't know the language. It wasn't one of the angelic gifts that he normally had access to in this vessel, but he was being given a glimpse of it now. "But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts, you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it—at that very moment, I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of God, who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you. Dostoevsky. Very insightful mortal. But if you could see the universe from end to end, achi, you would see what I do, which is that the Lord is close to the broken-hearted. Go sleep."
And then he was gone, the light fading from the garage like the last gleam on the wick of an extinguished candle. Over the smells of motor oil and unfinished wood and concrete, the air smelled heady for a moment, like lilies and sandalwood.
Pablo got up, not quite steady on his feet, his head still pounding. He opened the door and went inside, walking right past his father, who happily ignored him. As if Tamiel were still what he had once been, a bodiless and unseen being. Pablo went up to his room and dropped down on the bed, burying his face in his pillow, and finally started to cry.