Work Text:
places of worship are her favorites to rest in. there is something lovely about them. not just the christian churches, but all places where people come to pray and contemplate and beseech. she has lost count, over the long, long years she has spent wandering and watching, of how many times she has sat in the pews of a deserted cathedral and listened to the whispered thanks and desperate pleas of her father’s children.
many times she waits, sees if another angel will respond. then she watches for a reaper, or one of the sisters of fate. if none appear, then she takes it upon herself to answer. she knows better than to disrupt the world’s natural order – knows quite well that her sympathy for a dying child could mean the lives of many others who should have lived longer. but there are many times when the path is open, when nothing stands to hinder her and all are too busy or too callous to listen, and in those times, she acts.
her brothers and sisters in heaven do not understand. they are just humans, they say. they are passing comets to your burning star. you could smite a thousand with a twitch of a finger. they will die and pass to heaven faster than your vessel could blink. why do you care?
but she does not want to smite thousands (she has done that already, slaughtered wholesale because her father commanded, and somewhere around the ten thousandth body she began to wonder if maybe she was too comfortable with the blood on her hands). she has watched the human race for hundreds and thousands of years. she has seen their worst and their best, and yet, she loves them. because for all of the bad that happens, she finds pleasure in the routine of daily human life. for every person cut off by another on the road, someone tarries a second longer to hold a door for another person with full hands. small blessings, small heroics, small acts of kindness – these are what she loves about humans.
she is called the archangel of joy. she has always thought it somewhat fitting, because while her brothers in heaven remain removed from humanity – at least michael and raphael do; gabriel has been gone for centuries and no one has heard of metatron in even longer, and lucifer of course was cast down long ago – she revels in diving straight into it. she will ride subways and trains for hours, watching the dawn turn to midday into dusk into midnight and back into dawn. she flies down city streets faster than any human eye could see, working up breezes as she passes and showering warmth on a shadowed and cooling street. she climbs to the top of skyscrapers and stretches her wings after being cramped in a tiny human form, shouting hymns that few hear and fewer still understand (the words resonate somewhere deep in their souls, and for a minute their hearts rejoice for no explicable reason). she sits at bus stops as a coming storm gathers overhead, the air crackling with pent up energy, and she looks up and winks hello at her father’s work. she sits in coffee shops and utters blessings with true power to the tired baristas who serve her another cup with a strained smile. and it is all wonderful to her.
gabriel once told her to sit in a park for a very long while and just watch the world pass by, and she might understand why god chose humanity rather than angels as heirs to the earth. she wishes he was still around for her to tell him that he was right.