Re: [misha & jude: the capital]
[Believing stretched the range, in Jude's experience (and his experience was very practically curtailed by virtue of living circumstances - find me a boy who believes in benevolent God within household of abuse in amongst the cynics, etc, etc). It took a tour of fate, the scenic route included predestination, premeditation and predetermination along with the impossibility of escaping all of it, circled those hip-deep in agnosticism and Jude's own people who believed as if it were an inevitable byproduct of culture, history and genetics. Jude had spent time with the Bible. His own belief was mismatch, with the translucency of faint hopelessness. Not that all of this was necessarily clear to the angel perched on the steps beside him, thank you.
Misha had fallen into a specific tone of voice that made Jude think of snow. It fell thinly over whatever had been there previously, until you could make out the shape and substance without the lividness of its presence.]
Dying can be a relief for some people, sunshine. I like knowing it's an inevitability. [It was a punctuation, an oxford comma if you were feeling generous about afterlifes, or the world beyond, or a full-stop if you liked clean endings. Jude spoke with the calm good-feeling of a boy who believed in an afterlife, but the truth might have been a kernel darker than that. Wishing for death might have been boy's secret (shameful) hope for a mother long-sick and fear bedded in at home until it was guardian angel of its own, or it might have belonged to the house in the city.
Jude listened then. The explanation didn't take in hierarchy, leastways it didn't in a fashion Jude could comprehend. He thought of it as music, the way harmony split apart from melody in a way wholly mellifluous. There were guardians who accompanied - malakhim, internal narrative thus corrected with archaic language fitted to metaphorical tongue - and those who waited at stopping points.]
Do they get to choose? [He meant the waiting, the half-step between guardians and watchers. Jude's face held peace the way a candle might hold up to a mirror, true and constant without shadow.] I don't plan on shouting it from the rafters, sunshine. But it was a beautiful accident, even if it was an accident.
[Misha joked and Jude blinked startlement from the step as he rose himself and dusted off the seat of his pants.]
Sunshine, if I do dinner with an angel and tea with a vampire, I have no earthly idea what I do with breakfast. Next time, dinner.