fannishliss

title: An Ancient Hymn to Love
author: fannishliss
spoilers: SPN 9.03 I'm No Angel
rating: G
Pairing: None, though, Death/God maybe?  feat.  Death, Reapers, the usual Crew, and April Kelly.
1800 words

summary: Death relinquished his grip on the Order just enough that his servants flew free.


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In the beginning, All Soul was without form, and God divided and molded it like clay.

And in the beginning, Death as well was there, the darkness against which God created light.  And there was light, and the evening and the morning were the first day.   And Death saw that it was good.

God breathed out, and his Heavenly Host sprang forth, Seraphim and Cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, all the Warriors and Watchers resplendent in their ranks, praising God and singing, Holy Holy Holy is the LORD GOD MOST HIGH.

Death sat back, and a black smile warmed his regard, for he saw the swords the Seraphim carried, and he knew the portents of Warrior and Watcher before the legions took to their garrisons.

Death knew whom he would reap.  He was patient, a lover of souls, appreciative of graces.  While God divided the waters from the waters, positioned the greater lights and the lesser, and set to work on the creeping things, Death turned his attention to the Heavens: the highest Heavens he left to God, who had arrayed his Seraphim and Archangels to sing his praises as befitted his Glory.  Death needed no such laud.  He went to work on the ethers, the passageways, the channels, the foundations, the bedrock and core of God's realities.    Death made the afterlife, and his servants he created to carry souls to rest when their time serving God had been accomplished.

Then God breathed into the Humans, and the dice were cast.  Death sat back and watched as his children fell to their work.  God subdivided as humans thrived, multiplying as they multiplied, until God was a thousand thousand faces and his Angels sang in a thousand thousand Heavens.  Death smiled as Order fanned out into a cosmic web so intricate, the galaxies themselves in all their shining revolutions could not match the realities for beauty.  Death was at the heart of it all, Death was the dark force that held the realities together, and his servants carried God's souls to their Heavens with exquisite efficiency.

All was in Order.  And Death saw that it was good.

—

Time progressed apace. Complexities spun and interwove.  Death was amused.  God grew weary.  Angels trudged their well-trodden tracks.  Seraphim and Cherubim sped to do his bidding.  God walked away.  This was new.

Death frowned as the Order unravelled.  Angels struggled to find their purpose.  Watchers looked to their own hearts, tore out graces, fell into lives. Warriors sharpened their swords and waited for holy orders, not forthcoming.

Archangels seized upon portents, omens, prophecies, anything to for a sign.  Cherubim were dispatched with orders (not Order).  Death grew annoyed.  The balance was skewed.

The Archangel Lucifer festered in his cage, unable to fathom that he had been cast down.  The Angels interfered and rocked the Order, until mere Men dared look Death in the face, dared demand Death respond to their petitions.

Death was impressed.  God had made a plan, and that plan was Love.  Mere free will was nothing without love — as though Decision were anything more than a shadow in the darkness.  Love was light, and Death recognized it.  Love burned in the hearts of men, and Death bowed before it.

Death relinquished his grip on the Order, just enough, that his servants too flew free.

—

Hell passed from hand to hand like a pestilence (Death's younger sibling).

Heaven fell to ruin.

Even Purgatory choked up its gall, spat it out into creation.  The Order wobbled as it spun.

Yet Love was at the heart of all this Chaos.  God was gone. But Death found the play intensely absorbing.

—

April Kelly was no stranger to Death. Death had rearranged her life, and she had looked Death in the face.

April was in middle school when her mom got sick. In less than a year, she was dead, leaving a horrible hole in April's life that would never again be filled.   April's daddy took it even worse.    He drank harder and harder, until he was never quite sober.     As Detroit shut down around them, his job got more and more precarious and he got worse and worse at it, until his boss told him not to bother coming back.  He went on unemployment, and then on welfare, until the night he wrapped his car around a telephone pole. April's parents' house wasn't paid for, so the bank took it and all their assets.   April wasn't even out of high school.  She went into foster care and spent the next three years lying low and doing what she was told. April's parents had been good people. She had loved them so much, but that didn't stop an agonizing death from taking away her mom and grief and rage and helplessness taking away her dad.

April's parents diminished before they went, her dad made small by grief and drink, her mother wasted to nothing by sickness, despite how hard she'd fought. She died at home, drops of morphine hushing her asleep.  April sat holding her hand, as her breath evened out and faded back, until her heart stopped.  There was a stillness in the room, an expectant hush.  April could almost feel her mother's spirit hovering near, the thin cord tying her to life getting threadier until it finally parted, and she moved on into the light. 

April sometimes dreamed of that moment:  the glowing wisps of cloudy silver as the Angel of Death hovered over her mother's body, waiting to guide her spirit on.    April hoped that when she died, that merciful angel would come for her, bringing her peace and carrying her away from this vale of tears to the beautiful country where every tear was wiped away.

April sat at her dad's bedside, watching the machines beep on long after he had gone.  The thin air of the hospital room was vacant. The Reaper had come for her dad, he was already gone. Somehow April knew.

April had been fifteen when her parents followed their reapers through the veil.  She dwelt on her mother's peaceful passing and her dad's vacated body, how it had gone in seven pieces to help those less fortunate than himself.  She survived three years in a decent foster home, got her high school diploma, went into waitressing, made her own way.   She had a pretty face and a friendly smile.  Customers thought she was sweet and conscientious, so even when times got rough, she made it through.

April was mostly happy.  She had regulars at work who were almost like friends.  On days off she went for long walks in the parks around Detroit.  Once, she tried to visit the house in the suburbs where she had been a child, and it was a burned out ruin, a monument to Devil's Night, most of the neighborhood gone to tall grass and empty lots.

Every so often, she'd go and sit in the big church downtown, not during services, but just when it was quiet, when the sun would stream in through the stained glass, making the dust motes glimmer.  She thought of her mom and dad and prayed, just in case anyone was listening, that they'd been taken to a better place.

April never thought it was odd that she often dreamed of her mother's reaper.  When a reaper appeared before her own startled eyes, she embraced it without thinking twice.  Her time had come, and she went peacefully into the light.

She didn't question why it had come in the middle of the morning, just after she'd given her lunch to a guy who looked like he really needed it.  She didn't even notice that her body still lived on.  April didn't care, because when she saw her mother, beautiful and young, and her dad, clear-eyed and smiling, her soul flew to them, light as a feather, into the arms of Love.

---

No one alive loved April Kelly.  Still, she had managed to live.  This was the strength Death fostered in Humans, after God went away.  Death was always nearby, his reapers always at hand for the hungry, the ailing, the forgotten, the dispossessed.  April Kelly had been Death's disciple.  She'd learned Death's lessons well.

When she met the lonely, she offered them a word. When she saw the hungry, she offered them food, because she knew there would never be a "next time": only now.  When she ran by chance into the Angel Castiel, she offered him a sandwich, a kindness that no Angel in his wholeness would even have noticed.  Death had an inkling that God still had a plan, but that was of little consequence.  He would reap them all in the end.

April's reaper hovered near.   It scented on April's careworn soul the fallen Warrior's  blessing. 

As Death watched, the reaper made a choice.   April had lived a hard life.  She had known loneliness, gnawing grief, despair.  Death was a blessing, and so the reaper gave it.

The reaper took a mission — bring the fallen warrior Castiel to justice, restore the Order.  The reaper failed, mission unaccomplished.

Death gathered his Angel home, comforting it with nepenthe, and wove its obedience back into the Order.

—

Castiel slipped for a while into the realm of Death, skinny-dipping in a starlit pond. 

Death looked into the confused blue eyes the Warrior wore even now beyond the veil.  "God has plans for you, little Warrior," he amused himself by remarking.

"Tell me," the Warrior demanded, valiant, the tattered traces of his wings bravely mantled.

Death merely smiled as the Angel faded back into life, gasping as he surfaced from Oblivion.

There was Love, in the heartfelt relief of the Winchester.

There was Love, as the fallen Warrior found comfort in the strength of his friend.

Death was intrigued by the schemes of the rogue Warrior, Ezekiel.  How would the Winchesters fare, with Love set at cross-purposes to Love?

Love pulled the Order awry, but Death could not fault it.

The Order careened and diverged into a wilderness of complexity, vital, alive and thriving.

God had set the universe loose and threaded it through with Love.

And Death saw that it was good.

--

The speeches of men and of angels, without love, are as empty as a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal.
Prophecies will cease;  tongues will be stilled;  knowledge will pass away, but Love never fails.
These three remain: God, Death, and Love. And the greatest of these is Love.  — An Ancient Hymn to Love