"Confrontation"

[jeriendhal]

Note: "In Nomine" and related characters and other matierial is copyright Steve Jackson Games and Siroz

Christopher walked the streets of Calcutta in the Vessel of an Indian boy, absorbing the vibrancy of life to be found here, even as he despaired at the poverty he saw as well. Children laughed and chased after each other in the crowded streets, while their sisters, barely a year older perhaps, stayed in well-defined shadows and offered themselves for a handful of American currency. There was too much hurt here for even Archangel to fix, even if the Ethereals of the Indian pantheons would permit it. He could pour resources into this place like water, but he’d never get ever child selling themselves off these streets, even if Lust was dead.

He’d permitted himself too much self-pity, for he almost missed the wild, drunken Anglo man, dressed in a ratty fatigue jacket and smelling of alcohol. Christopher would have passed him by if it had not been from the paint box open at the man’s feet. The Anglo had a brush in each hand, and was painting a mural onto the wall of a building marked CONDEMNED. In it, angels flew above Calcutta’s teeming streets, while a female child chased them, grasping for the wing feathers that blew in the wind.

“Eli…” Christopher breathed softly. The man turned and gave him a gap-toothed smile, teeth stained yellow from tobacco.

“Ya like, kid?” he said. He slipped a brush into the front pocket of his fatigue jacket, heedless of the paint, and dug into another pocket for a wad of dinars. “Go down the street and get me another bottle, and I’ll paint ya in there if ya want.”

“No thank you, Eli,” Christopher answered, his face darkening.

“S’right,” the man said amiably, and turned back to his painting. Christopher grabbed the bottom of his jacket and spun him around so they were face to face.

“Eli, look at me.”

The man blinked. “Eli…? Ya got the wrong guy, kid. My name is…” He paused, looking confused.

“Eli, I’m Christopher. Look at me and see.”

The man blinked, and looked Christopher up and down. He blinked again, then his eyes came into focus and he straightened to his full height, all pretense of drunken mortality gone from him.

“Christopher,” Eli said, running the name over his tongue, like he was tasting a fine wine. “It’s been a while.”

“Over fifty years, yes,” Christopher agreed. “What are you doing here?”

Eli chuckled. “Hiding out from the Cloak, ain’t it obvious? Triads have to lay low in this country, much as that has to burn Dominic’s butt.”

“You misunderstand me, Eli. What are you doing here?”

“Doing?” Eli gestured towards the wall. “Painting!”

Christopher fought the urge to grab Creation’s jacket and start shaking, instead taking a deep breath to collect his thoughts. “Doing a mural on the wall of a condemned building doesn’t strike me as particularly practical, Eli. And it doesn’t help the people around here who are wondering where their next meal is coming from.”

“It looks pretty, ain’t that reason enough?” Eli said. “Feeding folk ain’t my gig, kid, inspiring them is.”

“So you decided to go on walkabout to commit random acts of Art? I doubt the servitors you abandoned will find that comforting.”

“Ah, they’ll get over it,” Eli said, grinning again. “Anyway, who put a stick up your ass anyway? Why don’t you play with the kids instead of trying to out stonie David?”

Christopher matched Eli’s grin with a razor sharp line of his own. “Actually, it was Andre who ‘put a stick up my ass’ among other things.”

Eli blinked again. “Huh?”

“Look at me again, Eli,” Christopher said carefully, all pretense of humor gone. “Resonate my nature.”

Creation frowned and squinted at Christopher, humming quietly to himself. Then he took in a sharp breath. “Shit, kid! What happened to you?”

“Andrealphus happened to me. More accurately he captured me, mostly through my own stupidity. Then he tortured me. Then he told Truths to me. And then I killed him.”

“You killed…you killed Andre?” Eli’s face was a mixture of shock and grief. “You killed Love?”

“I killed Lust, Eli. Andrealphus hadn’t been Love for a very long time.”

Eli slumped to the ground, next to his paint box, his face blank. “He was Love once… could have been again… Oh, Lord, Retzel must be mad by now.”

“Retzel is fine,” Christopher reassured him. “Andrealphus wanted to trade me for her, but God gave me the strength to prevent that from happening. She saw him before I destroyed him, and finally saw what his Fall had twisted him into. If anything, she regrets wasting all those years keeping herself safe for the sake of someone that no longer existed.”

“Ahhh… Andre is gone. Raphael, Metatron, Oannes gone, gone, gone… There are so few of us left now, that remember the world as it was.” Eli clutched his head and stood up again with difficulty. He took in another breath and visibly centered himself, then tried to smile. “But you are still with us, and there are other Archangels that were not born before the Fall. The wheel turns, the wheel turns. What are your plans now?”

“Cleaning up after my own mess. I made quite a hash of things before my capture. I was teetering towards a Fall, when Laurence let Druiel be seduced by his Word. Once that’s done I have longer term plans. Pushing Retzel for the Word of Love for starters. No one deserves it more than she. All those years of self-imposed confinement, and she maintained her faith in Andre’s goodness, and held hope of his Redemption.”

“That’s good,” Eli agreed. “She’ll do well.”

Christopher nodded. “I’m betting she’s promoted to Archangel before the century is out. I’ve also got a couple of other long term projects on the books.”

“What do you have in mind, kid? Taking out Drugs once and for all?”

“Fleurity is no longer my concern. I expect Laurence or Michael to kill him shortly. He’s come up with something that finally made him a sufficient threat to angels, as opposed to Humanity, for the whole of the Seraphim Council to sit up and take notice. At the moment, I think his lifespan can be measured in a few weeks at most.” Chris clasped his hands behind his back, and decided to plow straight ahead into the next bit. “My primary project at the moment arranging for the Grigori to come home.”

“What did you say?” Eli asked, more to give Christopher a chance to retract what he’d just said, rather than genuine confusion, the younger archangel suspected.

“The Grigori are, one way or another, coming home, Eli,” Christopher said again. “They have been exiled from Heaven for over thirteen thousand years. That’s long enough by anyone’s measure.”

“You can’t do that, kid,” Eli said, his face growing flushed. “You can’t do that. They were Outcast!”

“Thirteen thousand years ago, Eli,” Christopher repeated. “They’ve suffered enough.”

One of the paint brushes in Eli’s hand snapped in half. “Suffered enough? They haven’t suffered half as much as what Humanity experienced when the Nephalim were loosed on the Symphony. I won’t allow it!”

“Not all of them were guilty of the crime, though those who weren’t were perhaps guilty of Pride for demanding to be tried with their fellows. Enough is enough. We don’t treat the newly Redeemed with such hate, why should we treat those who never Fell so badly?”

“They perverted my Word,” Eli spat. “Then they tried to conceal their perversions! I won’t allow them to return and risk them tainting Creation again.”

“You lost your vote on the matter, unless you intend on returning to Heaven and taking your seat on the Seraphim Council back,” Christopher noted coolly.

The elder Archangel shook his head. “Can’t. I’m not done down here yet.”

“Doing what? Painting?” Christopher said in disbelief, gesturing towards the doomed wall.

“Painting, singing, dancing, talking,” Eli shot back. “Do you know how often I actually spoke to a human being, before I came down here? Not often enough, I’ll tell you, and I’m supposed to be a Mercurian. We’ve let ourselves become too distant, kid. That was the Grigori’s whole problem. They got so caught up in the threads of their own family’s lives, they weren’t looking at what was happening to the world around them.”

“So is that why you murdered First Children, because she had become too concerned with her own affairs, not Humanity’s?” Christopher asked with deceptive gentleness.

His words seemed to hit Eli with the force of a physical blow. The Archangel of Creation stumbled back a step, and asked, “Who told you that? Andre? You might want to question the nature of your source.”

“Andre told me that, yes,” Christopher agreed. “Then Zadkiel confirmed it. Then so did Michael and Dominic. I was only able to reach for my Word because I inadvertently stood on the body of the one who held it before. So did you kill her, Eli? Or was it David?”

“I didn’t kill her, and I don’t think it was David either,” Eli said, and to Christopher’s eternal relief his words scanned as total Truth. Eli rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Uriel, maybe, but he wasn’t the sort to do such a thing and not crow about it.”

“Did you know about it?”

Eli turned his face away from Christopher, instead looking into the eyes of the child in the mural. “She called to me, tried to summon me. She put everything she could into that call, and I chose not to listen. And then the Symphony cried out a moment later, and I knew she was dead.”

“And what did you do, when other Grigori started turning up dead, and your servitors could not explain what they had been doing when the crimes occurred?” he pushed.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

“Because they perverted my Word, and they deserved to be punished for it. More than simply being exiled to the Earth, where they’d always been the most comfortable anyway.”

“Did you think their wives and husbands, their children deserved to die as well?”

Eli’s answering smile was bitter. “I thought, given the problem with the Nephalim, it was better not to take chances.”

Christopher closed his eyes, trying to will the pain in his Heart away.

“It was for the best, kid. Do you think I liked the idea of my old servitors dying? Sometimes we have to what is necessary, instead of what is right.”

Christopher opened his eyes again. Eli was still there, trying to explain, trying to make him understand. He’d probably stand there and talk for a year, if Christopher let him.

“Eli, you don’t get to call me ‘kid’, anymore.”

He left him to his painting.

The End

Comments

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

Nice to see the story continuing, but I have one minor nitpick with an awkward sentence.

There was too here for even Archangel to fix,

There was too what?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Meh. (this what I get for posting before a beta read) Fixed now!