Chapter Text
Do you remember the first time you forgot me?
It was after the Fall. I'd always had the impression you had a rather good memory before then. You always seemed to recognize me, at any rate, and have some idea when we'd last talked to each other, even if we didn't know each other well. When you slithered up to me on the walls of Eden and started chatting it felt like renewing an old acquaintance, picking up the threads of an old conversation. When the first rain began to fall, you started shuffling toward me before I had even lifted my wing. You knew what I was going to do. You knew me.
At least, you knew me then.
You approached me like you expected to be known when we watched Noah build his ark. But days later when we met in the wreckage of the Flood, you treated me with suspicion and cold reserve. At the time I thought you were angry with me because you were angry with God. When I pointed out the rainbow, you acted as though you had never heard of one before.
When we met next, in Babylon, the reserve was gone. We watched the tower of Babel rise the same way we watched Adam and Eve leave Eden: wincing, feeling the Almighty's attention and a vague sense of a coming storm, wondering whether we've done what we were meant to or not. You were my first conversational partner when Language became languages. We tried them out, one at a time and then mixing them together, sifting them for nuance, for the new knowledge contained in the subtle differences among them. Even then, although I knew it was meant to be a punishment, it felt to me more like a gift. To have so many new forms of communication opened up, so many words that expressed things that had lain unexpressed before. So many ways to speak, to sing, to pray. You felt the same, I could tell (except perhaps about the praying). Already on that meadow by the tower of Babel you were better at it than I was, finding double entendres and subtle suggestions in the new linguistic forms. I listened to you with wonder.
When you jumped like something had poked you and abruptly said you were overdue to report, we discovered a week had passed while we talked.
The next time we met, you fumbled vaguely through a few moments of small talk before telling me you didn't know me and moving away. I took it as a hint. We really ought not to have been fraternizing.
It still stung.
It stung enough that when we met over the matter of Job's goats I couldn't resist a little jab, telling you I hadn't seen you since the Flood. That was, after all, the last time you had sought me out, instead of vice verse. The casual way that you agreed troubled me. I had seen you speak in hints and codes in Babylon, and this did not seem like more of the same. But I doubted my understanding. For all I knew, you had been punished for that week, for your tardiness in reporting. You may have meant to set a boundary, and been grateful that I acknowledged it.
Except that the events that followed--our collusion to save Job's children, my first taste of food, the way you challenged my understanding of everything from God's will to your own--made it clear that setting boundaries was not your forte. Breaking them, perhaps. But despite your relentless attacks on my comfortable understanding of the world, you concealed my trespasses from my fellow angels, followed my cues to protect the children like we'd rehearsed it, and even subdued your amusement to comfort me when you saw I was genuinely distraught. We knew each other now, not just as friends but in the profound way of knowing things about each other that no one else knows. I was not certain why you had been acting like you couldn't remember half our interactions, but I was confident you would never do it again.
I was wrong, of course.
~*~
By the time of King David, I was almost certain something was terribly wrong with your memory. Since Job you had never completely denied knowing me, but you could be evasive--or, worse than that, confused. I had dropped hints about it once or twice, nothing that you ever responded to, but I didn't truly expect that you would: how can a person who keeps forgetting things be expected to remember why they forget? But I came to a point that I couldn't let it go any longer. I would like to say it was only concern for you that drove me to seek out answers, but I admit I was also motivated by my own bruised feelings. It is a terrible thing to have the only person who truly knows you forget the moments in which he knew you best.
So I questioned Heaven.
I did my best to frame it as knowledge I needed if I was going to remain permanently stationed on Earth. How to thwart those wily wicked demons, and all that. I am sure it will not surprise you to learn that Heaven cares very little for the inner psychology of demons, and that I was brushed off or looked at askance for even the most roundabout inquiry. Although I didn't believe I was technically doing anything wrong by associating with you, I knew most angels did not share my opinion. I could not afford to draw any scrutiny as to why I was so interested in demonic memory. I bided my time.
And while I was doing that, I learned to navigate it. I learned to love that you always recognized me now, even if you weren't sure from where; that you always knew my likes and dislikes and odd little foibles, even if you didn't recall how you had learned them. I learned how to gently steer the conversation away when a look of confusion crossed your face. I learned to sift for the difference between something you wouldn't acknowledge because of pride or resentment or the constant threats that hung over us, and something you couldn't acknowledge because you had no recollection of it.
Once, as we sat together just outside of Athens, your words started to wander with the wine and you spoke to me in many tongues, shifting through linguistic family trees in a way that was achingly familiar. You asked me if I remembered Babylon, the week we lost exploring all the earthly languages that ever were or will be.
I had to bite my tongue so hard a human would have had a mouth full of blood before I could bring myself to answer. Yes, I said, in Greek, in Pashto, in Igbo and Nahuatl and Estonian. I remember. I had suspected before then that the same memory could be lost and retrieved and lost again, but now I knew for certain how unstable the sands you stood on were. I wondered if you were aware of it. If it hurt you.
The depth of my own hurt was how I learned the depth of my love.
Not long after that an angelic record keeper whose penchant for gossip I had been encouraging showed me meeting notes wherein the archangels discussed, in passing, a fallen angel whose memories had been deliberately altered at the Fall. The reason for this was apparently so well known to everyone in the meeting that it was not discussed. It was the first thing I had learned in thousands of years of trying, and it told me almost nothing. Almost. It did not answer the question of why, or how many, or whether Heaven even knew of the ongoing problems it had caused, but it told me one vital thing: Heaven was responsible. Any further query would be met with the circular justification that as Heaven had done this thing, it could not be wrong. I stopped seeking answers.
~*~
That's not true. I stopped seeking answers seven days later, all of them spent in prayer. When God did not speak to me I knew the fault to be in myself, not the Divine, and I tried to be a better angel.
I did try.
~*~
When you first suggested the Arrangement, it frightened me. What would happen when you forgot about it? But the idea of doing less work seemed to be the one thing you weren't ever going to forget, and over time you wore me down. I liked seeing more of you, being better able to keep tabs on you and ensure you remembered me and weren't getting into trouble. I was astonished and delighted to discover how much you liked keeping tabs on me, too, especially if it meant you could help me out of a jam. I was careful to remind you, when it seemed you might be forgetting, that we were still on opposite sides and must give the appearance of being enemies. If there was one thing that neither of us could afford for you to forget, it was that.
Sometimes I suspected you were aware of something wrong. There was a subtle flavor of overcompensation to your endless giving, not just of material things but your time, your energy, your emotional labor. Perhaps I didn't always conceal it well enough when your lack of reaction to something I thought we shared would cause a little flicker of sorrow. It seemed that you knew something was troubling me, and instead of talking you preferred to dance around it, offering me another diversion, another gift, another reason to stay.
I stayed. We circled each other, me protecting you from yourself, you protecting me from everything else. Some days it felt like it would never end. Some days it felt like it had to.
~*~
The first time I told you I loved you, I spoke Tamil. It was on a day that you remembered Babylon, a day in 1685 when we had just come from seeing Hamlet once again and your mind was afire with language and all its possibilities. Hamlet was one of your gifts to me, but that night I was tired of being told you loved me with plays and poets and fine wine, with the way you guided me through crowds or walked between me and the street. Tired of saying it back to you in ways you could not hear, if your surprise was anything to go by. It broke me a little, to see your astonishment. To realize you didn't know. But it only took you a moment to get past that surprise, and tell me you loved me in K'iche', in Pictish and Armenian and Xhosa and Malay and Navajo. We told each other in all the earthly languages that ever were or will be, and then with older, wordless ways. The world could have ended and we would not have known.
I should have been prepared for the possibility that you would not remember.
I wasn't.
You spent the first half of the 1700s apologizing over and over without knowing why. Coming to me with invitations to experience new foods, new music, anything you thought might make me smile, all with this helpless, unhappy air of believing you had done something wrong and not knowing what it was or how to fix it. I did try to put you at ease, but it was never enough. I had not been able to conceal the first shock of pain from you and it had sunk into your subconscious, something you could neither fully remember nor fully forget.
I didn't want to be treated like I needed courting. I didn't like seeing you act like I needed a bribe, some bauble or new entertainment, to consent to share your company. You had told me you loved me with words, with the touch of your lips and the circle of your arms around me, and for a time it hurt to be told in any other way. But even as I brooded over my resentment, I knew it was terribly unfair to you. The languages of attention and protection were the only ones you remembered you had permission to speak. So I got over my hurt, and I told you I loved you again.
I told you in London in 1733, and in a small village in Wales in 1739, and back in London in 1747. I told you when you pulled me out of a barroom scuffle in 1781, and after you freed me from the Bastille in 1793. I told you every time we met, with words and more than words, with every way I could think of to say it.
There was always that moment of astonishment painted across your face, that gobsmacked pause before you hastened to give the words back to me. You always kissed me like it was the first time, like you'd never experienced something so good before. Always asked me if I was sure.
It was the only thing you consistently forgot. I knew it meant something, but whether it spoke to the damage to your memory or to your own doubts and insecurities, I could never tell. By the time the 1800s came around I had stopped telling you every time we met. That moment when you were yet again surprised to know I loved you had begun to hurt too badly.
Then, in a graveyard in Edinburgh in 1827, I saw you dragged down to Hell. It shocked me out of my selfish preoccupation over whether or not you knew how I felt. It had always been my responsibility to make sure that whatever else you forgot, you remembered the rules we must abide by. I had neglected that in favor of trying to force you to remember something you clearly could not, and you were paying for it. I had to do a better job of protecting you from yourself.
And that is how we wound up not speaking for most of a century.
~*~
I had plenty of time to reflect during those eighty years. There was a time I would have thought nothing at all of not seeing you for a century or two; now I was facing the reality of how accustomed I had grown to you. How careless I had let us be. You looked to me for cues when you forgot something, I had long since learned that, and I had been giving you cues that it was safe for us. I could have destroyed you with my selfishness. Nothing either of us felt was more important than making sure you always remembered the danger.
All of which was very difficult to remember when you danced into a cathedral on burning feet, staking your earthly existence on my quick understanding, saving my body and my books and saying I love you in absolutely every way but words.
You got caught that night, again, and it was my fault, again. I managed to steal the incriminating photograph, and you were kind enough not to point out that there wouldn't have been a photograph to begin with if I'd acted more sensibly. I wondered at what Furfur said, the memory he had of you that you did not have of him; I wondered how many demons lived their lives by broken pieces like you did. But of course there was no time to ask, and likely no point. We went back to the bookshop and didn't speak of the eighty years apart. We burned the photograph in candle flame, drenched the ashes in wine, and vowed to be more careful. We weren't.
~*~
We fell into circling each other again. You still said I love you in all the wordless ways. Turning up with tickets to a new show; delighting in solving my problems. Literally circling me at times, in a way that suggested putting yourself between me and danger--even that of a potentially reckless driver or a sketchy-looking passerby--had become second nature.
I tried to be more cautious about reciprocating. I couldn't shake the fear that next time you got caught, you would be in more trouble than I could solve with sleight-of-hand. I needed you to protect yourself by second nature, the way you protected me. So I hurt you. I rebuffed you, I reminded you we were hereditary enemies, I tried to teach your subconscious that there was something about loving me you had to be careful about. But contrary demon that you are, the more I asserted that I did not like you, the more you seemed to know I did. You would laugh or call my bluff as often as you would leave offended, and even when you left you never stayed away. It may have been wishful thinking, but there were times I could swear that while you couldn't remember I loved you, you had come to know, anyway.
After Armageddon, your memories were haphazard. You usually remembered the Bentley burning; you usually forgot you had stopped time. You rarely remembered how close the Earth had come to destruction, how necessary it had been for us to fight for it. You never forgot what the archangels had said before casting you into Hellfire, and I pondered if the memory stayed so diamond-bright because it had happened to you in Heaven, or if it was only the strength of your own hatred.
It was impossible to know what would happen now. How much danger we might still be in, now that we had effectively been fired; what freedoms might or might not be ours. There were days you fell asleep in my chair when the afternoon sun warmed the bookshop. Nights we chased each other's words through all the earthly languages that ever were or will be, courting nuance, courting meaning, finding ways to wink and smile with words. We talked constantly, but our entire history lay unspoken between us. I was no longer confident I knew what we kept silent about because we had to think of our safety, and what we kept silent about because you could not remember, and what we kept silent about because we simply couldn't bear to speak of it.
I wish, now, that I had asked you more often what you were thinking.
The end of our time off from Heaven and Hell came walking naked into my bookshop on an otherwise ordinary day. Your diamond-bright hatred of him was reason enough for your refusal to help Gabriel, but I still wondered if somewhere inside you was a shattered sense of recognition, of kinship with what had happened to him. I believe I truly would have protected him for no other reason than that he was alone and asking for my help. But that was not why I did it. I was closer than I had been in six thousand years to knowing what had happened to you.
I was not sure how to take the revelation of Beelzebub's involvement. It did not seem likely to me that your memories were roaming about in a fly somewhere, but it seemed equally unlikely that your memory loss and Gabriel's were completely unconnected. And it seemed most unlikely of all that Beelzebub should get to solve Gabriel's problem and save him with so little effort. They left and you and I had to watch, standing right next to each other, as far apart as we'd ever been.
It shouldn't be surprising that I wasn't fully paying attention to anything right after that, not even Metatron. Not until he said your name, and millennia of hard-won instinct made me focus so I could deal with the threat. Only it wasn't a threat. What he said was, It would certainly be within your jurisdiction to restore your friend.
He saw me start when he said the word restore, and I noticed him noticing. We spoke without words then, me raising an eyebrow, him nodding in return. And I started listening.
~*~
There was only one time when you told me first.
Even then you did not manage the words I love you. You could barely string any words together, let alone those three. I could tell when I cut you off that you thought I had not registered what you were trying to say, but nothing could be further from the truth. I heard you. I just needed you to listen.
It wasn't fair that it happened on a day you couldn't remember most of Armageddon, couldn't remember that the world was still very much at stake with no one but us to fight for it. Nor was it fair that you were genuinely incapable of understanding what you needed, why you needed it, what this chance meant. I couldn't find the words to tell you.
Every other kiss that you thought was our first had been loving. But in that moment you grabbed me like it was your last option, like you had to seize me and hold me still for it to happen. Like you thought I didn't love you.
It hurt. It wasn't your fault. I forgave you.
And I hoped, for the first time, that you would forget something that happened between us.
~*~
I can't promise you much now. I've no idea what I'm up against, and I've never had to do anything like this without your help. All I can guarantee is if I fail, it will not be for lack of trying. And one more thing: that no matter what else happens, whether the world can be saved a second time or not, whatever you choose to do you will choose knowing everything you are, and everything that's happened to you.
You will remember that I love you.