27 days left! And so I bring you "Wings of Desire"
Okay, I've been promising shoemaster forever that I'd post something here, and I came up with...this. It's a little longer than a drabble and it's maybe part of a larger story, but I need another epic AU like I need a whole in the head. In conclusion, snippets.

Oh. I should say - this is a fusion between Wim Wender's incredible 1987 film "Wings of Desire" and due South. Yeah. And it's not wingfic, I'm sorry to say.



Wings of Desire

There are angels on the streets of Chicago.

They have watched mankind since time began in a lost garden. They will watch until the world of man fades away and everything is dark and silent once more.

They watch.

Two of these angels – Cassiel and Ray – are perched high on the El track at 87th and Irvine. They meet once or twice a day to tell each other what they have witnessed, what they have learned. Each tries to determine if humans have a soul. And some days Ray thinks, “Yes, of course” and sometimes Cassiel says, “No.”

Cassiel begins because Ray needs a little time to collect his thoughts. His notes are always disorganized and he speaks with a rapidity and a lack of precision that has confounded Cassiel since the sixteenth century.

Ray is a very good angel.

“Sunrise at 4:34am. Sunset at 8:22pm. An old woman fell on the ice outside her apartment building. She lay there for a long time and watched the snow drift down from the sky. It melted on her eyelashes and she did not think about getting up.”

“That’s good.” Ray is watching people pass below on the street. They seem both very close and very far away. “That’s very good.”

“A suicide at dawn,” Cassiel continues, still reading from his notebook. “I sat with the young man all night but in the morning he jumped anyway. On the way down he thought about the smell popcorn makes when it cooks too long and burns.”

“Hmm,” Ray says into the wind neither of them can feel. “Why?”

“I think it was pure chance. He might have thought about his mother’s housecoat or the way rain sounds against a tin roof. Or perhaps something about falling reminded him of it. Do you think death would smell like burning popcorn?”

“To humans. But I’d really like to know.”

Cassiel frowns. “You know we could never-”

“Yeah,” Ray says quickly, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his long black overcoat. He shrugs and begins to pace along the edge of the track. “But wouldn’t you like to know? What it feels like to have a cigarette? Or a cheeseburger? To say “maybe” instead of “always” or “forever”? To make love? To fall? Don’t you think it would be good?”

They’ve had this conversation before, many times. Cassiel feels as though they will always have it. “I’d like to understand temptation,” he says, his voice quiet above the wind. “I want to know evil. To pluck the apple and take a bite. To be led astray.”

Ray shakes his head. Cassiel, who knows so much, never understands.

“I saw a man in a red tunic dive onto the back of a moving car,” Ray tries to explain. No need to look at his notebook. “He clung to the top for six blocks until the driver made a mistake. And then the man rolled away and dusted himself off and kept order until the police arrived. A woman in the crowd called him a hero. Later he went back to his apartment and wept.”

Cassiel’s eyes narrow. “Why?”

This is a question Ray can answer. “He thinks he’s alone.”

“He is. They all are.”

“They have us,” Ray insists. And with the softness their kind can sense in the sunset: “He has me.”

Cassiel nods. This is why Ray is such a good angel.

They leave one another without saying goodbye. Cassiel goes to the library to read with one of the humans. There he will ponder temptation as an intellectual puzzle; he’ll never get any closer than that.

Ray goes to the little tenement on Racine. The red tunic hangs neatly in the closet, and the rest of the apartment is bare. The man sleeps in a small, hard bed. Ray thinks of Saint Simon and lies down next to the man.

The man stirs a little, mumbling in his sleep. Ray puts a hand on his chest and wishes he could feel the man’s heartbeat. He wishes he could be seen. The man settles and grows quiet; he dreams the dreams of angels.

Ray closes his eyes and thinks, This is what it’s like to fall.



Part II: Angels and the Modern City