I was a bit surprised today to learn that Freya has gotten started on her writing. I would have thought that between work, training with me, and her shifts on the chat, her time would be full. But this evening I came to join her and found her with laptop and two notebooks spread out on the bed, her hair pulled back in a bun and a somewhat wild look in her eye.
“What have you been doing?” I asked her.
“Writing,” she answered. She sat up and looked at me as if I had come to pull her out of a sinking boat. “I owe Kara an apology. This is hard shit and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Then how can I help you?”
“I don’t know that you can. You can’t write the thing for me, right?”
“Not if you want it to do what you believe it can.” I settled down next to the bed, stretching out my wings. It had been a long day doing flight drills with Ruhamah. “What we want with this story is the same result we want when we join forces in battle—for the force of earthly will to further the will of heaven.”
She groaned and dropped herself back onto the bed. “See, you can just roll out that kind of beautiful language. Everything I am putting down is just so stilted. It reads back like I’m trying way too hard. Which I am.” She turned her head to me. “How do you write so much, so easily?”
I thought about the question. “I usually don’t write very much at a time, first of all. And then when I do, I am simply trying to relate what I have experienced.” I shrugged, and my wings shifted and traced the edges of the room. There was a cobweb in one corner of the ceiling, and I concentrated on removing it, then turned my attention back to Freya. “What you call beautiful language is just the way that I express myself. Maybe I learned that with time, or maybe that is simply the way we communicate in heaven. But I think you should write with your own language, with what comes naturally to you. And I think you are thinking too much about it. In fact, I can see that you are.” I reached out to run a hand over her head, over the furious heat of frustrated thought raditating from it.
“Kara would say I’m letting my inner editor take control.” She picked up a pillow and dropped it onto her face. “But I’m a fucking editor. How am I supposed to turn that off?”
I waited until she emerged from the pillow, so that I could be sure that was not a rhetorical question. “When I have trouble focusing on my writing, I try to go back to the main thread of the story,” I said. “The most important details, the things that lead to the message I am trying to get across. What is that for you?”
She frowned and sat up. “Maybe that’s where I’m getting lost. Because I know what I want people to get out of the story, but I’m not totally clear on the story itself.”
“What is the story that you want to tell?”
“Well, our story—I’m writing mostly about myself, how I started to realize that something was going on that wasn’t quite normal. It’s not completely autobiographical, or it won’t be once I get to the second draft, but that’s the main inspiration.” She picked up a pen as if to make a note, and then scratched her scalp with it. “Except I keep getting distracted. I keep trying to fit in all of the details of angels and heaven, which is cool, but not narratively compelling.”
“Then you have too much heaven in your story?” I asked.
The comment accomplished its goal as she looked at me and smiled. “If such a thing is possible.”
“Would it be too challenging then to tell other stories at the same time? After all, the format of my own writing has been the telling of many stories at once.” Except recently, because I am living only one story now. “I would be happy to share more stories of my own charges.”
She grimaced. “Even if I changed it a lot, I’d still feel weird writing a story about someone I’d never met.”
“Mary, maybe? Or Anna?”
“No—honestly, I’d be worried about Mary guessing that it really was about her. I’m half wondering if she isn’t starting to suspect some of the truth about you.”
I sat up straighter. “What makes you think that?” She had been perfectly normal in my last conversation with her, or at least so I thought.
“Just some of the things she says about you.” Dismissing this line of thought a bit more quickly than I would have hoped, Freya went on, “And Anna—maybe, but her experience wasn’t nearly as involved with angels as mine was, and I’d want a story that was roughly comparable to mine, so that they could feed off of one another.”
And then the idea came to her, and it was strange to watch it crash on her aura, because the immediate reaction was for it to leap up in excitement, but then the flames vanished in a blue wash of worry. When she looked at me, I knew that the worry was for me.
It didn’t take a great deal to know what she was thinking. “A story like Shannon’s?” I murmured.
She held up a hand. “If you don’t want me to, then we don’t have to say one more word about it.”
I considered it. If she were to write Shannon’s story, she would have to get it almost entirely from me. Would it hurt me to tell Shannon’s story over again? More importantly, would I be able to tell it without my own guilt and anger coloring it?
“Do you really think it could help the work as a whole?” I asked, buying myself some time.
She lay down on her stomach, putting her face very close to mine. “I do think so,” she said. “You yourself have compared the two of us more than once. And thematically it could be very powerful—one soul rising while the other falls, and both of us loved by the same angel.” She folded her hands under her chin. “And not to set myself up as the one and only example on how to get into heaven, but it could get it into people’s heads what not to do. It can only help if it makes some of the people reading it more open to what their angels might be saying to them.” Then she sat up and shook her head, laughing.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I just can’t get over how corny I sound. Even I don’t believe in all the things I say sometimes.”
I understood—there have to be moments that I don’t seem real to her at all.
She reached out and walked her fingers in the air over the edge of my wing. “Will you tell me Shannon’s story, Ace?” she asked. “Maybe she can still help other people after all.”
And when she put it that way, how could I say no? And so I settled down with my legs folded, wings curled lightly around both myself and Freya, and as she scribbled notes in a journal, I began.
“She was the first charge I had been given that I just did not like. Shannon Kilkenny was twenty-four when I came to her, but she was still in college…”