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The shades of tired gray rode belligerent ocean waves casting their icy spray across the sand. The droplets stung her bare feet as reddened pricks alighted across her skin. Winter burn. She could not feel her toes or her ankles or her lips or her lungs.
This is where he had first come. Battered and blistered, this is where he had dropped in the midst of a cloudy night he’d seldom described. But she could imagine all the same, the sand clinging to his dark suit, the wet droop of his long eyelashes. Had it been warm then? He’d never said. This memory he’d kept close, closer than even her. Something sacred in ways she had only begun to understand in the past year.
Ways she feared she would understand no more. Because there were no angels on this frozen bit of shore.
Yet, still she came here. Sometimes often, sometimes not. Twice months had passed between visits - time treacherously gorging itself on her, stealing away the hours and minutes.
She was wedged in an hourglass. He had been born again in the sand. Did it mean anything? Or was this the human condition, seeking metaphorical connection where there was none? Squint hard enough at coincidences and they’d make a pattern, a downward spiral.
Police Academy rule number three - don’t speculate.
The tide was dragging its way unsteadily in and bits of debris were flung, dipping and twirling across the surface. One of those dark shadows, a branch or bit of trash, could have been his head and shoulders.
Was that how it had gone? Had he landed in the ocean and swam to shore with ocean salt crystals gleaming in his hair? It was easy to see - the way he would pop from the turbulent depths, dark eyes violently sweeping as he searched for shore.
He’d swallow mouthfuls of water - not that it would have hurt him, not when this was before she had ever met him - as he chugged along. What sort of form? Had he been able to swim at all? She’d never asked. She’d never learned. Years they’d wasted, unbearable unreclaimable years and she knew him, didn’t she? Knew some of him. Maybe most of him. But enough? Enough to know how he would have swum, confident strokes like a well-trained swimmer slicing through the water and riding out the waves that harmlessly beat at him. Kicking until there was earth beneath his feet, even if it was just shifting temporary sand, and he could haul himself.
Crawling the last bit on his hands and knees, he would have been messy and hollowed and amazed too. That much she knew. As he crawled from the ocean to where she stood, wrapped in a jacket which did nothing to deflect the cold, he would have been awed in some small way by the newness of the experience.
Maybe so awed he wouldn’t have seen her standing there waiting. Always waiting. Always patient.
Her shadow, left stubby by the barely-risen sun, would have fallen across his way. And he’d have stopped as droplets of water continued to drip from his hair and clothes. And he’d have raised his eyes in increments, eyes now bloodshot by her nearness and he’d have known.
“Lucifer,” she would have greeted, the name always resting on her tongue.
“Chloe.”
It was so easy to imagine even if it would never happen.
The ocean had reached her fully now, ripples tugging at her feet, inviting her to play in the shallows. She resisted, pulling herself free as she turned away from the ocean and began the trek back to her car and her job and her life.
Maybe she will come tomorrow.
She probably won’t.
Maybe he will fall tomorrow.
He probably won’t.
But should he, unlikely as a future as that may be as they both know, this tragedy neither of them asked far written not with feathers upon sand but blood upon stone, she should be here. Just in case.
Just to ensure that if he ever fights his way to shore once more she’ll be able to show him that they’ve not yet reached their end.