In London, Lucifer had been holding the same glass for two hours and fourteen minutes.
A new glass, this time -- he had poured it with the ceremony of a man marking an occasion, the occasion being that he was standing at his window watching October do its level best with the city below, with the dedication of a craftsman, to have feelings about it in the most aesthetically defensible possible configuration. Or in other words, a Victorian prison.
The amber of the lamp at exactly the right angle, the glass at exactly the right height. The look of a man with a drink and a window, which communicated a particular melancholy he had been refining for the better part of a century.
Which is deployed with the dedication of someone who had decided that if you were going to have feelings you might as well have them with style.
He felt the grandmother arrive the same way he felt everything from down there -- distorted, in the frequency just below the one he was officially not paying attention to.
The keeper, the archival letter, Twelve handwritten pages.
He took a sip.
Good scotch... The scotch, at least, was consistent.
He looked at the city below -- the bus, the pigeons maintaining their grey parliament on the railing, a woman walking a small dog that was conducting a formal and furious grievance against a lamppost.
The dog was winning. He felt, briefly, a sincere fondness for it, which was irritating -- he had been carefully dismantling sincerity for a very long time and it kept reassembling itself when he wasn't watching, usually in response to things he had no professional obligation to find charming.
"Sixty years," he said to the window. To his own reflection in it, the dark eyes distorting light around it.
"All that patience and she reads better than most of us." He laughed dryly. "God, she'd be insufferable at dinner."
The pigeon nearest the window ruffled its feathers in a manner he chose to interpret as tacit agreement.
He looked at his glass, at the amber of the lamp in it, then at the floor beneath him, the several storeys of London between himself and the ground, the sea between himself and the desert, the forty-three metres between the desert and the garden that had been sitting in the dark since before there was a him to have opinions about it.
Something in the register he did not officially attend to received the grandmother's arrival the way it received everything from down there -- the feeling that had been living in him since the name was spoken, the thing he had described to himself as something being returned and had not examined any more closely than that because closer examination had a cost he was currently not willing to pay.
He noted it. He was very good at noting things, He had been doing it longer than noting things had a name.
He raised his glass once, toward the floor, toward the forty-three metres, toward the garden he had not seen since before it had a seed.
He said nothing.
He didn't need to. He was alone in the room, And he already knew whom the toast was for~
. . .
Kinvara was reading when he came to her.
The first scroll, the lamp she had brought in her bag lit beside her -- sixty years of reading by this lamp or its predecessors and the habit was ingrained -- and she was in the second column, the one with the oldest hand, the language before it had agreed to be anything.
She did not notice Vothanael approach, or rather she noticed the way you noticed weather, the way the air changed quality without announcing why, and looked up to find him already there.
Crouched before her, The forty-five degrees tilt of his head. His hands in his lap, loose, the marks at the knuckles visible in the lamp's light.
He looked at her face.
Not at the scroll, not at the lamp but her face -- the way he had looked at the spectral analyser, at the stone, at the rope, at everything Amara had placed in his radius over thirteen days. From the outside in.
Without the shortcut of prior knowledge, giving it the full quality of his attention. The wrinkles of sixty years, the morning's vindication and grief still echoing there, the way large things lived in faces when they had recently moved through them and hadn't yet found all their places.
He looked at all of this for a long moment.
Then he reached out and placed both hands over hers.
Just ~ over them, the warmth arrived immediately, the warmth that had no temperature behind it, the warmth that lived in the grass in his radius and in the ember-copper tree at Amara's back every night without asking anything in return.
It radiated through his palms, through the backs of her hands and through the sixty years of age in the skin of them, through the tendons, the old ache in the joints and the hip.
Kinvara went very still...
The silver bloomed once more. Not the flash of it, not the sudden blooming from a contact point -- slower than that.
The frequency of the infinite visible because something finite was detected in its sight. It moved through his hands and through hers in the lamp's light, finding the wrinkles of hers, the long specific particular lines of a life lived fully, without apology and at considerable cost, and it moved through them the way the warmth moved through them, the way something settling into its correct place felt from the inside.
The lamp beside her flickered. It did not go out but instead Brightened.
The silver receded as he took his hands back slowly.
He set them in his lap and looked at her face with the forty-five degrees while waiting.
Kinvara looked at her hands.
The lines were smoother. The sixty years were the same -- she was young, she understood immediately what happened. The weight that those sixty years had accumulated beyond the years themselves -- the hip, the thing that had fed on her quiet and slow for however long it had fed, the exhaustion that lived in the marrow below the tiredness -- that was gone. The body remembering what it felt like to carry only its own age. Nothing else...
She pressed her palms together, separated them. Pressed them together again, slowly, feeling the spryness of it -- the full pressure, no stiffness in the joints.
"...Oh," she said, quietly.
She looked at him, at the forty-five degree tilt, at the expression on his face that was not the almost-smile -- something quieter than that, from further in, from the place that had known what it was doing -- the expression of someone who has returned a thing to its rightful keeper and the satisfaction of a thing finally being where it was supposed to be.
"Thank you," she said.
This one landed in a different place than the first, and he received it.
The lamp brightened a tad bit more...
Amara saw it from the ember-copper tree.
She had been watching without giving the tells, the peripheral awareness of someone who had learned to track this garden by feel -- by the quality of the air, by the depth of the green in Vothanael's radius, by the warmth in the sourceless light when something significant was settling.
She saw his hands over her grandmother's hands, she saw the silver, she saw the lamp brighten.
She saw her grandmother press her palms together and separate them and press them again with the specific focus of a woman taking inventory of something new in a familiar place.
She stood up.
Rania looked over from the documentation
table, then she looked at Kinvara's hands.
She bolted up.
Yosef turned from the Wall, he looked at Kinvara, at the lamp, at the silver still fading in the air.
His arms fell loose as he made a sound in the back of his throat that was not a word at all -- which Amara would think later -- the complete compressed biography of thirty years of fieldwork failing to calibrate from a scientific point of view.
Khalil turned from the shaft,
He looked at Kinvara's hands, his mouth pressed flat once in the way that Amara had learned to read as: the ground is telling me something I did not expect it to say and I am deciding whether to respect the surprise or just delete it from my brain directly. He buried it.
Said nothing and returned his eyes to Kinvara's face in the lamp's light, the sixty years of it, the new quality in it, the specific lightness of someone from whom something has been removed that they had stopped noticing the weight of.
Dawud set down his coffee cup in the grass. He stood from his post at the seventh tree and looked across the garden at Kinvara with the expression of a man whose instrument had returned, after two weeks of extraordinary readings, something he had genuinely not anticipated.
Which was, for Dawud, its own category of extraordinary.
Kinvara stood up from the grass.
Slowly -- not because she needed the slowness, but because she was paying attention to every second of it.
Sixty years had taught her that the things worth waiting for were worth arriving in completely, She straightened as she stood at her full height.
She looked at her hands one more time. She looked at Vothanael, still crouched before her, the forty-five degrees tilted up now that she was standing.
Amara's mouth was open.
She became aware it was open. She closed it, It opened again anyway.
Rania's pen had been in her hand since she stood up, she looked at the open notebook, at the blank page.
Her hand was not moving. This was unusual enough to be alarming separately from everything else that was blaring alarm bells.
Shai had picked the analyser back up -- the reflex, the reaching for the instrument, the same motion that had kept him functional for two weeks in a garden that declined to function within any framework he had -- and the number on the display was not zero.
It was not null, It was something... A reading in a register the instrument had not known it possessed until this moment, a number so far outside the expected range that it had wrapped around the scale and come back from the other side of it wearing a different face.
He looked at the number.
He looked at Kinvara.
He looked at the number again.
"What the fff--"
The garden absorbed the silence that came after.
As though this, too, were simply something that lived here now -- another thing that had arrived in the sourceless light, that has been received by the grass, the trees and the Wall at the northern end and the seventh tree above it, holding its single pale gold leaf perfectly still...
To be Continued...
(Author's Notes: Hello Dear Readers! We are back again with A bit of Lucifer and our dear Vothanael saying No to Age for our dear Grandma. Willpower broken enough to say no to reality huh... Anyhoo, tell me your thoughts as I'm Writing for you all, to share this brainchild of mine with you.
Tell me if it's good, if it's bad. Tell me if you wanna see me go at this pace or tighten it up. Tell me anything!)