Re: [misha & jude: the capital]
[Misha was right, the asking was as inevitable as breath. The angels, who looked like nothing a church or a synagogue had managed to make as real, were not something Jude had affinity for. Oliver had dropped clean out of Jude's mind, as had all rules and careful schooling of expression. Jude found no fear in angels waiting. P'raps he ought, but he didn't. His face was a palimpest that held impression of hope on cleaned-off underwriting.]
For everyone? [Death, in Jude's small experience, was not beauty in the doing of it. It was slow and painful and torturous or it was quick and violent. It ended in a human way, where the body was not a shell that crumpled like insect wings to be swept away on a breath of wind, but something manifestly solid, unpleasantly real that had to be dealt with, clay that held the impression of somebody for whom you'd lingered on after they'd died long enough that the death meant something. There had been one, for which Jude had not been in the room. He thought of the little boy with the woman whose face held creases on creases.
It did not occur to Jude that it needed explaining.] They didn't look bad. [Misha was preoccupied with explanations and dire warnings and Jude reached fingers-brush over the fabric of Misha's shoulder.] They weren't bad, sunshine. They were beautiful.
[But Misha sank as if the weight of this was too heavy to stand under. Jude didn't know precisely how this was the fault of Misha's own mind but Misha appeared convinced and he sat down beside Misha, warm and solid and contained carefully within the bounds of his own knees and wrists and feet. The pattern of people ebbed around them, as if it were entirely usual to observe them sitting thus, temporarily marooned amidst the churn of evening-goers.]
I don't want to forget. I don't want them not to be real. Does everyone have one?