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“[...] memories which might
remember, in the same way,
any other love story. Memories that
distort. That create.”
Marguerite Duras, from India Song
(Grove Press 1994; first published 1973)
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Vices were an odd thing.
A vice - so often associated with weakness or sin- was prevalent in her realm. An inescapable concept; everyone had a vice. Something they couldn’t quite say no to, even in their best moments. Temptations mixed with illicit decisions. Deeds committed in bright lights or dark corners, where prying eyes were subject to sordid judgment.
Charlie was expected to veer far away from these things.
She’d seen her fair share, of course. Necrosis, creeping up broken veins from dirty, dull needles filled with the worst substances she could fathom. The stale scent of spirits on a Sinner’s breath, hours after the sun’s light had trickled down from Earth to start a new day. Bitter hearts on display, so ragged and broken after misled nights of passion, where pleasure turned painful in the aftermath.
These were among a few of the most common. Several others existed. Sadism and masochism in twin reflections of cruelty. Bloodlust and power-stoked individuals who sought the worst the world had to offer.
She shrugged them off, indifference slipping from her shoulder like a strap she couldn’t keep in place. When her head was high, above the utter mess below her, she was royalty. She was a leader in her own right; a dreamer in the making. It was her birthright to dream. And she inherited it with vigor, taking every single aspiration she had, channeling them through a funnel of purpose. Where the conclusion rested high upon the hills of Pride.
She was the difference, come alive. The voice for the voiceless - or those who didn’t know they had one, yet.
And Heaven listened.
At least, they were more willing to when her patrons weren’t feeding into their vices.
To some degree, Hell had her willpower to thank for such mercy. Charlie was better. She was something more - a light in this dark place, shining where her parents had dimmed. She was hope anew, she was inspiration, she was love-
Yet, despite the many, many things Charlie was, there were still a select few things she was not.
Those were admittedly private. Soft, small titles that only she bore witness to. She, and sometimes Vaggie. Although she was hesitant to bear her heart too directly to her beloved angel, damn the beating thing. Vaggie certainly had enough on her plate.
And telling her partner about these imperfect qualities that lay within her felt raw. Exposed, in a way that even she could not force herself to cope well enough with. They were memories, turned to rapid heartbeats. They were thoughts, turned gnawed teeth with sharp, matching canines.
Tonight, they were memories. Memories turned to action.
Regrettably, she shuffled behind the bar, blinking exhaustion out of her eyes.
Decisions, decisions…
Her mother would drink something refined on a night like this. Merlot, or perhaps an aged cognac.
Charlie let out a deep sigh, reaching for a rather heavy glass and a half-empty bottle of vodka. The cheap stuff Husk kept around when Cherri was rant-flushed and rambling. Steps away from sickness, the quality liquor not worth the consumption.
She poured a rather sizable shot into the glass, the clear liquor reflecting in the soft, ambient lighting of the bar. If… whatever brand she had in her hand was good enough for Cherri, it would certainly suffice for her.
Beelzebub would vehemently argue otherwise.
The nagging thought pulled at her mind, threatening to water her eyes over. Before she had the chance to ruminate any farther, she lifted the glass to her lips and tilted her head back. The shot burned down her throat - like Hellfire turned liquid with regret. Her eyes did water in response to the horrific taste.
Fuck, she’d poured more than she’d thought-
“Geez, that water must taste disgusting.”
Charlie’s eyes shot open, and she immediately choked on the vodka, slamming the glass down on the bartop and sputtering everywhere.
“Whoa, whoa! Easy, Princess- Princess Charlie, right? Do you go by Princess? Just Charlie? Charlotte? Probably Charlotte, gosh, where are my manners? I swore I heard somewhere it’s Charlotte-”
“Abel,” she croaked, his name rough on her tongue. The air still didn’t sit quite right in her lungs, and she couldn’t process the words pouring from her rather unaccounted visitor’s mouth. “When the f-...” She faltered, her face warm from her clear lack of decorum - and the rather compromising situation he’d found her in. “Uh… when did you get here?”
He quirked a brow, glancing back at the portal from which he’d emerged, just barely out of sight from the bartop’s counter. “Like… forty seconds ago.”
Charlie let out a shuddering breath, taking in deep breaths of air. Forty seconds ago. Right. Was Heaven supposed to be here right now? Did she have some meeting scheduled that she’d completely forgotten about?
“Sure,” she strained, processing the information, straightening herself up. Her throat was still raw with discomfort. “Forty seconds ago. Of course. May I ask… why?”
“Why forty seconds ago?
“No,” she said, her voice a little flat. “Why you teleported into my bar at 02:00 AM.”
Abel snapped his fingers, and a sudden projection of a wristwatch appeared in front of him. He squinted his eyes before a rather pleased expression passed over his face. “Oh, see, that’s my bad. I got the time change wrong; it’s already morning in Heaven. I lucked out from running a condition drill with my father’s Lieutenant.”
Charlie blinked, listening to him. Her mind was barely working, and that half-assed shot certainly hadn’t helped - even if she had choked the last fourth of it up. She fiddled with the hem of her sleeve, feeling a bit awkward. “Uh… don’t worry about the time change. But did I forget something? Is everything alright in Heaven?”
Her mind jumped to the worst of possibilities, perhaps a bit easier than it would be any other day. Was Sera angry? Was Pentious okay - still living as a pilot of redemption in its construction? Was their political alliance suddenly void?
Abel shook his head, smiling at her. “No, no, nothing like that. Emily left this scroll behind that I heard she ran by you; she said it was still a rough draft and she had to revise it with the Council. Should be…” his voice trailed off, eyeing the far end of the bar. “Ah! Right there!” He shuffled over, careful not to trip over his robes, taking the tightly-bound scroll off the laminate bar counter. “That’s all,” he said. “Just a scroll, nothing crazy.”
Charlie faltered, but then nodded, trying to clear her mind of all relevant distractions threatening to overtake this rather impromptu visit. “Right, the proposal,” she muttered, pinching at her brow. “We were working on that all afternoon. I didn’t even see that she’d left it behind.”
“Hey, it’s no big deal,” he said lightly. “No one’s mad. No one’s awake here to even care. Except for you, I guess.” His eyes drifted to the bottle, and his expression shifted slightly. “Different kind of thirst, then.”
Charlie flushed and immediately moved to cap the vodka bottle, tucking it back under the bar. “You’ve… all got sacramental wine up there. I’ve seen it before. It’s not exactly a sober haven.”
Abel chuckled at that, tucking the scroll into a messenger bag slung around his shoulder. “You’re right about that. Wine wasn’t ever my speciality. It took a different kind of skill to ferment it - definitely not my thing.”
Curiosity, present as ever, nipped at the edges of her interest. “What… is your thing?”
“Well, it was shepherding,” Abel scoffed. “Not really a popular gig anymore.” He gestured up to his halo, the dent in it somehow appearing deeper in the dim light of the bar. “But look where that got me.”
Charlie studied his halo. The tale of the first murder was one she’d recounted thousands of times in her life. Some of the Sins used to tell stories to her about the one called Cain, who roamed the darkest parts of Hell. Never to be seen since his descent from Earth, lurking on the outskirts of her parents’ Ring. Of course, that often would end with her mother covering her ears and glaring - usually at Wrath and Greed respectively; Lucifer promptly enacting a blessing over his peers. Something temporary and annoying, like their drinks turning bitter, or their speech garbled and senseless for a minute.
Soft reassurances would follow. That no Sinner would ever harm her. And the remnants of Cain were scattered through Canaan, destroyed and desolate as his fate had deemed worthy.
She hadn’t thought much of the story as an adult. But faced with Abel, the second, most favored son, she couldn’t help but recall it. He was there, dented and real in front of her.
It was odd, in truth, to think about.
“Looks… painful,” she finally offered.
He hummed, seeming rather indifferent, as he leaned against the bar across from her. “It was,” he said easily. “But the murder wasn’t the worst part of it, you know? A couple of bashes into the skull-” he made a raspberry with his mouth, the sound somewhat amusing. “Kaput. That’s it, you’re done.” Abel’s humor seemed to fade from the edges of his smile. “The… aftermath was worse.”
The aftermath?
Charlie thought for a moment about his story, told in whispers throughout her childhood; the consequence of something far beyond the understanding of her youth. There was no aftermath she could recall.
“What… happened after?”
He pressed his lips together, appearing contemplative for a rather long moment. “Well,” he said softly, “I didn’t exactly ascend right away. I don’t know if Heaven was… ready for a human soul to take on a physical form up there, yet. My spirit hovered over the outskirts of Eden, where my parents were banished.”
Adam and Eve were banished East of the Garden, Charlie thought, the recall surprisingly easy and remarkably uncomfortable. It was a lesson she’d committed to memory, the long-lasting consequence of sin well-known through her childhood. They had two sons - Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.
“They didn’t want to admit we were gone. Cain was Marked and banished far outward to Nod. But… they found me.”
Charlie winced, hearing this. A bit gruesome, but she couldn’t pull herself away.
Abel continued, his voice a bit wavery on the edges. “I don’t know why my father did it. He was told that he’d return to dust for what he and my mother did. I am theirs. And I died first.” Abel looked up at Charlie, his eyes shining faintly in the low light. “They sacrificed my flock to the Creator. My father killed all of them on an altar, and blood stained his hands for weeks afterward. My mother took the responsibility of burning down Cain’s crops. Every last stalk of grain, every last living thing. They tried to do something to appease Them. But… it obviously didn’t work.”
He put his hands on the counter, wringing them together. “I made it to Heaven, eventually. And my father, after me. But when I saw him, something had changed.”
Charlie recalled Adam. The cruel expression both on his mask and face. The snark of his voice. The harshness of his words. Had he truly always been like that?
The thought occurred to her a moment later. The discrepancy in Heaven, separating good from evil. And a broken family, all together.
“Eve didn’t join him,” she whispered.
Abel shook his head softly, letting out an unsteady breath. He only stared at his hands, suddenly looking as though moving his gaze would damn him. “No. She… never showed up. And I think… between Cain’s sin and the reminder of me, just being there, it was too much for him.”
She considered this for a moment, thinking of her childhood once more. For all of the ghost stories the Sins had told her, Eve had never come up. She was, of course, the lynchpin in humanity’s downfall. Someone had to bear the brunt of the blame. And she was the unlucky one who’d fallen victim to Free Will, as well-intentioned as her parents may have been.
Where was Eve?
She didn’t have an answer. But there was something familiar in Abel’s voice. Something staring at her, at the bottom of the shotglass. Something in the lights of the bar, something in the caverns of her heart.
“... Do you miss your mother?” She finally asked him.
Abel looked up at her, as though the question had been unexpected. “Do I miss her?”
“Do you miss your mother?” Charlie repeated. “Do you think about her, ever?”
A smile pulled at his lips again, this one reminiscent, rather than pained. “Oh, all the time,” he answered. “She- god, she was the best mother. She was so kind. She knew how to make the worst situations better. One time, it was hailing outside our hut. The temperature dropped, and we were all freezing. My father was in charge of the fire, and she was just tending to us. I don’t think she had ever seen hail before. But I remember it; she told us the Heavens were playing for us. They were drumming on our roof. And she kept telling us stories. Until…” His voice trailed off for a moment.
Charlie, damn her curious mind, urged him on. “Until what?”
He beamed at her, the expression suiting him. “Well, that’s just it. I don’t know if the hail ended first, or if I fell asleep. Her voice was the only thing that mattered.”
And those words are the ones that make her heart ache. The ones that make the vodka sting, the ones that make her mind race late into the night.
Charlie’s expression must’ve faltered, because Abel’s seemed to fall with hers. “You… must understand.”
Her face heated, and she felt a bit indignant for a moment. It was no secret that her mother was gone. Heaven knew it as well as Hell. Her disappearance was a marked thing across Eternal Elevation.
But what Abel didn’t know about tonight’s significance wouldn't hurt him.
“... I do,” Charlie sighed. “She used to sing to me, often. Her voice… was like magic. It was magic, actually; it's where her power was stored. Her songspells could carry across the realm.” Her words were starting to pick up after such intent listening. And now speaking, Charlie felt as though she couldn’t quite stop.
“People everywhere used to congregate to hear her sing. Thousands of years before I was born, when Hell was very young, it was just crowds. There were no amphitheatres or stages. There were no microphones or radios. It was just her, and anyone lucky enough to hear her voice carry.
“But… she never made me strain to hear her.” Charlie thought about being a child, much like Abel had been. A strange thing, really. Most people here didn’t talk about their childhoods. Hers had been a rather private affair limited to the Sinners of Hell. Abel’s had been obscured by a nonexistent population. “She’d sit on the edge of my bed and run her fingers through my hair. Sometimes, when I was upset from a nightmare, she’d come into my room and pick me up in her arms. Even when I was way too big to be held- she… she still did. And she’d sing to me until the spell calmed my mind and I was able to sleep again.”
The words poured off of her tongue, so readily available. Her fondness for her mother had never ceased; in her absence, it had only grown stronger.
“She told me that I was her miracle. Which… didn’t make sense to me, because, I mean, come on, she married my father. A whole Archangel.”
Abel chuckled at this, a notable absence of resentment present toward her family.
“But she still said I was her miracle. Her… daughter. The only one she’d ever have.” Charlie looked up to Abel, meeting his gaze. “I never had any siblings.”
“Wouldn’t recommend it,” he said lightly. “They’re a headache.”
They stared at each other before they both snorted with laughter, unable to stop giggling at the rather crude joke - all things considered.
“I mean it,” Charlie laughed, settling back against the lip of the counter. “I had no one my age growing up. Some friends at school, I guess… but my parents were always there.”
Abel hummed lightly in acknowledgment. “They call you the Daughter of the Morningstar.”
“They do,” she sighed. “They all do. Except… Adam.” She paused, her eyes widening slightly at the realization. “He knew me to be my mother’s child.”
Abel’s expression tightened slightly, as though pained. “He didn’t speak often of Queen Lilith.”
She pressed her lips together, feeling a sudden lightheadedness at the entire conversation. That she was speaking to the son of her mother’s former husband.
Someone she could’ve been related to, perhaps, in another life.
“I imagine he didn’t.”
The conversation dwindled for a moment. She watched as Abel’s fingers tapped silently against the countertop, moving without meaning.
“... I think he detested me because I look like my Ima,” he admitted. “He never confessed that. But so many angels in Heaven say I resemble her.” He blinked, emotion heavy in his voice. “I don’t mind that, you know? That… I have some of her life in me. Parts to look at and remember.”
She did know of that. So much better than he could possibly imagine. Although Charlie looked remarkably similar to her father, there was so much that she emulated of Lilith. Or, that she desperately attempted to.
The Overlords knew it. They threw it in her face, spitting at her failure as though they could shame the Queen through her stupid, dreaming daughter.
“I know,” she answered. “Sometimes… that hurts to think about. And other times, it feels good.”
Charlie was quiet, and the nerve caught her. She then moved before she had time to second-guess herself.
She reached down, below the bar again, feeling sentimental. Two small glasses were set on the counter; with a snap of her fingers, Charlie summoned a bottle of apple moscato from thin air. She’d been practicing with her father’s help to channel her powers. It just so happened that he was overly interested in creating spirits influenced by the fruit of their family’s downfall.
A tad ironic to present to Abel, in truth.
His eyes widened, watching as she uncorked the bottle, pouring a bit of wine in each glass. “Oh, your- your Highness, I really shouldn’t. Heaven doesn’t really encourage recreational drinking.”
She raised a brow at him. “Come on. Don’t make the Nephilim quote scripture at you.”
“Charlotte-”
“‘Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart,’” she grinned.
“That's not quite what that verse means.”
“Well, I’m a terrible scholar,” Charlie said. “So what do you think it should mean?”
Abel hesitated, then let out a breath, reaching forward for his cup. He took it in hand, lifting it to Charlie. “It means that we drink to our mothers’ wellbeing,” he told her softly. “Wherever they may be.”
This caught the breath in her chest. That both of their mothers were seemingly gone. Caught in a haze, their children and husbands left in their wake.
Her hand shook slightly, taking her own glass in hand, lifting it to Abel’s. She willed herself to speak the commencement aloud. “To our mothers.”
“To our mothers,” he replied.
And they both drank. The wine was sweet and tart - dark in the low light of the bar. They were quiet, setting the glasses back down. The dull clink of both vessels rested against the wood.
It wasn’t so terrible with him, really. Not in the reflective quiet. Not knowing that they both experienced loss in such a way.
It was actually kind of nice.
Abel’s thumb traced along the ridge. “I should get back,” he said. “Em is waiting for the scroll. And… it’s very late here.”
Charlie hummed in agreement, feeling exhaustion start to pull at her. As difficult a day as tomorrow would be, there was still an angel sleeping in her bed, likely waiting for her return. She would be there for her, which felt like a newfound comfort.
And, perhaps, an unexpected ally had already shown her solidarity, on a day as painful as this one.
“You’re right,” Charlie replied. “Go home. They’re all waiting for you, I’m sure.” She worried her lip for a moment, thinking of their mothers. Complicated women, entrapped in a mess that their children had inherited. She was here, now. Tispy and tired. Heartbroken and comforted, all the same. "Thank you for the drink.”
He smiled at her and gave a firm nod. The portal back to Heaven opened, and he turned to enter it. Although he only made it a few steps before her voice rang out across the bar.
“And Abel?”
He looked over his shoulder as soon as she spoke. “... Yes?”
She relaxed her shoulders, knowing her demeanor was softer. Earnest. And he deserved that.
“It’s just Charlie.”
He paused, but a subtle gratefulness seemed to fall over him. “Goodnight then, Princess Charlie.”
“Good morning for you.”
He grinned, shaking his head with a soft laugh. “Right. It is morning.”
He waved goodbye to her, and she waved back to him. The portal closed as soon as he stepped through it, casting the bar into darkness once more.
Charlie stayed still a moment. Twin glasses rested in front of her, a chilled bottle of moscato starting to perspire without refrigeration. She clicked her tongue, feeling the sharpness of fangs in her mouth. A mirror of her mother. Much like Abel had said he existed within.
She smiled to herself. The heartache present, but eased. Just for the time being.
“To our mothers,” she whispered again, so softly. “I miss you, Mom.”
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