“Oh, please. I’ve tried bashing my head against a brick wall before,” Siobhan scoffed. “I’m not interested in trying it again. I’m…” She paused, her voice trailing off until she cleared her throat. “I’m here for my own purposes.”
His eyebrows rose expectantly. “And what purposes might those be, child?”
Siobhan felt herself bristling, but she beat back the urge to snap about how she was not some toddler having a tantrum.
“What was the point of destroying Chambersburg?” she asked, tamping down her temper. There was no point in mincing words with him--either he would answer or he wouldn’t. Trying to talk in circles around him would not change the outcome.
“It was cleansed,” he answered, his words holier-than-thou, which Siobhan supposed was rather fitting. “Bit by bit, sin will be erased from this world to begin again. We are offering a fresh start.”
Siobhan’s eyes narrowed sharply, and she pulled the shooting star from her pocket. The archangel recoiled, as if he was expecting it to be a weapon of some kind, only for his expression to furrow in confusion as she simply dangled the plastic bauble by its bit of string.
“This was part of a toy. Meant for babies,” she explained, her voice low. “I pulled it out of what was left of Chambersburg.” It was strangely gratifying to see the archangel look away. “Did this baby do something unclean? There were over a hundred thousand people living in that city. How many do you think were kids? And how many do you reckon were just people going about their lives without hurting anyone? Were they all sinners?”
“That was not for me to decide,” he replied, his voice low. “The seraphim made the decision and acted on it.”
“And you went with it, and showed up in the wreckage afterward to make sure everything went according to plan.” She scoffed and shoved the shooting star back into her pocket. Her lip twisted into a sneer. “It’s disgusting,” she informed him, her voice sharp, before she turned on her heel and stormed out of the storage room.
*
“Are you sure you should be talking to him?” Jack asked the next evening, his voice low. Even so, he handed over his cell phone as requested. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that Siobhan was going to do whatever she damn well wanted to do, and his own opinions on that only had minimal bearing.
Siobhan stared down at the collection of cell phones in her hands. “Maybe not,” she conceded, “but I feel like I need to. I need to understand it.”
“These heavenly bodies aren’t the same as supernovas, Siobhan,” he pointed out, but he said it with the tone of a man who knew he was not going to be winning the argument. “He could decide he wants to hurt you.”
Siobhan scoffed and tossed her head, flinging a curl of hair out of her face. “He can try, and maybe he might scuff me up a bit, but I doubt it would get far before half the manor was on top of him. Everyone’s on high alert already, so even if he managed to hurt me, I’d still be in one piece, and I’d be fine in a couple of days.”
Jack was silent for a moment before he sighed slowly and leaned in to kiss her, one hand curling around the side of her neck. “Just be careful?” he bargained as he leaned away again, his hand falling to her shoulder before he let go of her entirely.
“No promises,” Siobhan returned wryly, leaning forward to bump their foreheads together before she turned and made her way back to the ground floor, Barton trotting at her heels.
*
With a grumble, Barton laid down on the floor just outside the door of the storage room. Siobhan didn’t want to bring him inside with her, just in case he decided the archangel was threatening her, regardless of what he was actually doing, but if he was at least nearby, then he would make a fabulous alarm system for the rest of the manor if something went wrong.
The archangel regarded Siobhan placidly as she stepped into the storage room, closing the door quietly behind herself. He arched one eyebrow at the stack of cell phones she had precariously balanced in one hand.
“Do angels have names?” Siobhan wondered curiously, setting the phones down on the floor, only one of them remaining in her hand.
“We do,” he confirmed quietly. “It would be rather nonsensical, not to mention inconvenient, if we did not.”
“What’s yours, then?” she asked, prodding at the phone in her hand until she got to the photo album. She had not taken any pictures in Chambersburg, but plenty of the others had, and most of them had been willing to hand their phones over without much of an argument.
The archangel remained conspicuously silent. Rolling her eyes, Siobhan let the matter drop, instead kneeling in front of him and turning the phone so he could see it.
“This is Chambersburg,” she said simply, scrolling from a picture of a wrecked street to a picture of an apartment in rubble. “Thoughts?”
She scrolled through image after image, of destruction and death, pausing on each picture only long enough to really let it sink in. A townhouse that had been rendered to a pile of bricks and mortar, with only a four-poster bed identifiable. A pet shop with red pooling beneath the rubble. A child’s toy box, partially caved in from a piece of the wall collapsing on it. A crib, the blanket inside it soaked in red and dripping.
When one cell phone ran out of relevant photos, she simply switched to the next one. She had close to a dozen phones beside her. She had plenty of evidence to present her case.
The archangel’s face was difficult to read, but with each phone she set aside and replaced, Siobhan was pretty sure he looked more and more uncomfortable. Good. If she could get to him, then it meant it was working. It meant it wasn’t hopeless.
‘Hopeless’ was not something Siobhan needed. If there was a way to prove that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, then she was going to reach for it for as long as she could. Even if that meant keeping company with an archangel.
Jack’s phone was the last one she picked up. There were few pictures on it, but it was a good way to end her little slideshow, as she scrolled to the final picture he had taken of Chambersburg.
A pile of rubble beside the remnants of a front stoop and a doorframe. Sticking out of the rubble was an arm, presumably attached to a body beneath the pile. It was pale and bloodless, and too small to be anything but a child’s, the ear of a stuffed rabbit still clutched between fingers that would never open again.
Siobhan held Jack’s phone in front of the archangel for a very long moment after that.
“They would have felt no pain,” the archangel explained eventually, his voice faint. “They would have died instantaneously. It would have been merciful.”
“Compared to what?” Siobhan asked sharply, setting the last cell phone down. “Compared to slow agony, sure, but compared to just letting them live?”
“Living in sin?” he demanded, though he sounded unsure as he said it.
“Whose sin?” Siobhan snapped. “Who decides that? Some immortal jackass who’s too puritanical to realize that the world changes every day? Who’s so eager to declare the entire world collateral damage to get rid of the few who pissed him off?” She heaved out a sigh and dropped her forehead down into one hand for a moment before she began to gather up the various cell phones. Most of the other vampires in the manor, Lords aside, were not as willing as Siobhan to abide the archangel’s company, so forgetting a phone would be the same as forcing the owner to simply accept its loss.
She got to her feet, the phones cradled in one hand as she reached for the doorknob.
“Why are you so intent upon this?”
Siobhan paused, her hand on the knob. Slowly, she turned to look over her shoulder at him. “Because I need to know that you guys can change,” she stated quietly. “Even if it’s only one of you. I need to know that however long you’ve been alive, it hasn’t been enough to erode whatever empathy you have.”
She turned toward the door once again and stepped out, closing it behind her with a quiet click.
*
“How’d it go?”
Jack wondered, his fingers closing around his phone as Siobhan handed it back to him. “Did he see the light?”
“Maybe a few sparks of it,” Siobhan returned blandly, leaving the rest of the pile of phones in a heap in the kitchen. People would find them in their own time.
“Do you think it’s actually possible that he’ll come around?” Jack wondered, opening the fridge and peering through it absentmindedly for a moment before he pulled out two bags of blood. Siobhan caught the one he tossed to her.
“I don’t know,” she sighed, before she bit through the plastic and began to drink. She waited until she had emptied the bag and thrown it out before she carried on. “I hope so. And he seemed kind of bothered by it, at least. That’s something, right?”
“That’s something,” Jack agreed, halfway through his own bag. Once he finished it and threw it out, he suggested, “Sparring practice in the yard?”
Siobhan shrugged. “Yeah, alright,” she agreed. The pair of them had dealt with a few angels on their own in the past, but after only a few weeks as a vampire, Siobhan’s combat skills were still less than spectacular, limited mostly to relying on brute force and hoping she was more clever (or at least less arrogant) than her opponent. She could always do with some practice, and at least it gave her something else to think about other than the current mess.
*
It was another three days before Siobhan stepped back into the storage room, letting it click shut behind her. Once again, Barton kept watch in the hallway outside.
“Can you read?” she wondered, glancing down at the book clutched in her hands. She suspected the answer was yes, but she felt like she had to ask regardless. After all, if angels thought they were so much better than the creatures that lived on Earth, how was Siobhan supposed to know whether or not they thought they were too good to bother with any of the world’s languages.
He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
“Here.” She dropped the book on the floor in front of him, scooting it toward him with her foot. “Read this.”
“Why?” he asked warily, even as he reached over to grab it.
“Because you’re probably bored in here, and because you could learn something from it.” She folded her arms over her chest and leaned back against the doorframe. “It’s about a homeless teenage boy and the make-shift family that grows around him as he learns how to ask for and accept help to put his life back together. With a few cute references to Albert Einstein.”
“The mad man who designed your explosives?” the archangel asked dryly.
“The scientist who never stopped repenting that invention, gave us a considerable amount of our understanding of the world around us, and ceaselessly campaigned for equality,” Siobhan fired back. “Just read the fucking book.”
With that said, she turned on her heel and stormed out.
*
Two days later, Siobhan stepped into the storage room again. The book was sitting by the door, and she looked expectantly between the paperback and the archangel.
“A quaint way to while away a day,” he eventually acknowledged. Siobhan couldn’t tell if ‘quaint’ was being said genuinely or if he was being sarcastic. Tone modulation seemed to be something that angels viewed as slightly optional, as far as she had seen. “What is your name?”
So, he was getting curious. If that was progress or just a sign of boredom, Siobhan wasn’t sure, but she was tentatively optimistic. Even if it wasn’t progress, at least she was being no less productive than the Vampire Lords were.
(Not that she had any plans on actually mentioning that to any of the Lords. She was pretty sure even Allambee wouldn’t take it particularly well. If someone else wanted to criticize them, well, more power to them. Siobhan was just not going to be that person.)
“You tell me yours; I’ll tell you mine,” she returned blandly, her eyebrows rising toward her hairline. The archangel remained conspicuously silent. Siobhan couldn’t bring herself to feel surprised.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and sat down on the floor. Within a few moments, he was peering curiously at it as she scrolled through news archives, pulling up picture after picture, article after article about disasters. Plenty of natural disasters, yes, but also disasters caused by people. If she wanted him to listen to what she was trying to pound through his head, she couldn’t be too blatantly biased.
One of his wings twitched as he finished reading an article about tsunami relief efforts, and Siobhan scrolled to one about Japanese pensioners volunteering to deal with clean up after the nuclear meltdown.
Several articles and photographs later, she offered quietly, “Always look for the helpers. No matter who or what caused the problem, there will always be helpers.”
The archangel was silent, and Siobhan got to her feet. She paused for a moment before she set her phone down in front of him, picking the book back up as she straightened up. There was nothing overly important on her phone, and even less that she thought he might find interesting or noteworthy. There was no harm in letting him hold onto it for a day or two to keep reading.
Book in hand, she stepped back out into the hallway. She needed to think what she was going to do next.
*
“I’m running out of things to show him,” Siobhan whined, her voice muffled as she lay face down in the middle of the bed. “I don’t want to just start repeating things. He’ll think I’m running out of steam.”
“Why not just try talking to him, then?” Jack asked dryly, not even glancing up from his tablet beside her. “My distaste for angels aside, he seems like a reasonably intelligent being, by your accounts. Presumably good, old fashioned ‘use your words’ could work.”
“I suppose,” she returned, already sounding thoughtful. She had never considered herself much of a diplomat or a wordsmith, but she supposed it was worth a try. She just needed to think of an angle to attack from.
*
Slowly, Siobhan sat down on the floor in the storage room, scarcely two feet between her and the archangel. She was quiet for a moment, staring down at her lap as she put her thoughts in order. She only snapped out of it when he dangled her phone expectantly in front of her face.
“Find anything interesting?” she wondered, her fingers closing around it only to then drop it into her lap.
“Perhaps,” he answered evasively. “Have you nothing to show me today?”
“Nothing but my words,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders lackadaisically. Despite that, she was quiet for another moment. When she finally spoke, it was to ask, “What does mercy mean to you?”
The archangel jerked, straightening up slightly, and Siobhan was surprised to see that he looked startled. She…hadn’t quite thought it would be possible to startle him. Not by just asking a question.
It was a question he didn’t answer immediately, instead staring blankly down at his lap. His wings rustled restlessly behind him. His jaw worked soundlessly a few times, but he said nothing. She had, evidently, managed to strike him speechless with just six words. She was almost proud of herself.
“It means…when a punishment is given, it is just,” he began eventually, his words coming slowly, each one carefully picked. “There is no unnecessary pain.”
Siobhan waited for him to keep talking, but when he didn’t, she cocked her head to one side in bemusement. “And if a punishment isn’t necessary?” she coaxed. “What then? What if you decide someone does something wrong, but they don’t need to be punished for it?”
The archangel’s brows furrowed. “That does not make sense,” he stated bluntly. “If someone has done something wrong, why should they not be punished?”
“Because sometimes people repent without punishment,” Siobhan returned flatly. “Sometimes people repent when they realize something is wrong, and punishing them further is just cruelty.” She tipped her head to the side. “What then? What counts as mercy when your definition of mercy assumes that the one being punished feels no guilt?”
“Surely your hypothetical guilt-wracked criminal is a rarity,” he argued, his eyes narrowing slightly.
“Why do you assume we’re wicked by default?” she asked with hardly a pause in the middle. “Why do you assume that humans are automatically bad?”
He didn’t answer her, and his wings pulled in tighter to his back.
“Do you just not know how to handle someone who isn’t made from a mold?” she asked, giving him a pointed once over. He looked as perfectly symmetrical as every angel she had met before, save for the variations in his color palette. For just a moment, she was reminded of a video game, where all of the enemies were the same, just with different color schemes. She shooed the thought away before she could laugh. That wasn’t what she was there for.
His eyes darted up, narrowing as he scowled at her.
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