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"Richard finished his glass of wine. He felt it warming him, running through him. He had the strange feeling that if he looked down at his fingers he would be able to see the wine glowing through them. As if he were made of light…"
Richard stood up on awkward, wobbly legs, his wooden chair scraping against the ancient floor. He cringed at the sound as if he had sneezed loudly and wetly in the middle of Christmas Mass. Door said nothing; she was drooping slightly where she sat, her eyelids fluttering softly. The Angel Islington smiled placidly, its fingers interlaced as if about to recite a children's rhyme. 'Here is the church, here is the steeple…'
"Right," Richard said, his eyes catching the glimmering diamond-bottle of wine. He was struck by a sudden and most insistent urge to urinate. Heat crept up his cheeks. "Is there a…Can I, um…" He made a vague gesture with his hand. The angel continued to smile, its immaculate eyebrows raised slightly as it waited for Richard to finish.
It seemed vaguely blasphemous to ask an angel about bodily functions, so Richard hoped his bladder was made of iron. The wine had been most potent indeed. "Could I wash up?" he asked instead.
"Of course." Islington outstretched one slender, elegant arm, pointing to the waterfall at his left.
Nodding in thanks, Richard took shaky steps away from the table. He listed, lightheaded, and tried to right himself, for falling on his face in front of an angel would rob him of his last ounce of dignity, which he clutched close to his chest with sweaty, white-knuckled fingers. It was only a few short steps, but Richard felt a bit like those drunks in old black-and-white films, the sort who swayed and stumbled and slurred their words in a comically exaggerated fashion that no real drunk person ever did.
He bent down on one knee when he reached the rock pool, the dizziness slipping out of his head, and cupped his hands in the cool, clear water. Flickering candlelight danced in the water's surface, making Richard squint the way he would when facing the morning sunlight with a hangover. He splashed the water over his face, and for a single precious second it was the sweetest thing he had ever felt. Then the water seeped under his eyelids, and the cold, pure water stung like seawater, stung like—
Smoke in his eyes, the fire so close now, the fire and the screaming and the wailing. Voices begging for mercy and voices crying for retribution. The terrible heat of it, and the light, so bright and red it blinded him. Tremors under his feet now, violent shaking, and the world fell apart, it fell apart and it burned, until finally the waves swallowed the fire, swallowed everything—
"No!" Richard startled himself with the sound of his own voice, opening his eyes wide in horror and shock. He blinked several times to reassure himself of his presence in the angel's Great Hall. He was here and alive and the vision was…the vision was…
"My apologies," said a soft, truly penitent voice from behind him. Richard raised himself up, his spine like a steel rod, and met the eyes of the Angel Islington. He had not heard its approach.
"A reflection," it explained, head bowed as if performing a eulogy. "This water, like the wine, is from Atlantis. Each drop carries a memory…and some are less than pleasant. The water cannot forget, just as I cannot forget. The last water of Atlantis…" Its voice drifted off, the last note of an ancient song.
"I'm sorry," Richard replied, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand and knowing it was the very least he could say.
The angel raised its chin and smiled thinly. "No, I am sorry, Richard Mayhew. It has been so long since I have had visitors. I did not think of how it might affect you."
"Visitors," echoed Richard. He snuck a glance over Islington's shoulder, saw Door at the table. She was slumped forward, head resting on folded arms, her dark hair a curtain falling over her face. Faint, peaceful snores escaped her lips.
He thought it might be good to lighten the mood, and the question slipped out of him before he realized it might be a very stupid thing to do. "No visitors. So…Gabriel never stops by, or anything?"
Something flickered in Islington's eyes, like a candle's flame. But the smile remained.
"No. Not Gabriel. None of my heavenly brothers."
"That must be lonely," Richard admitted, feeling a surge of sympathy for the implausibly glorious being in front of him. "No one seeing you…"
"Ah." Islington's expelled breath was a musical note; whenever anyone said, 'he sings like an angel,' Richard would now know how wrong they were. Nothing could compare to this voice. The longer he looked into its shining face, the more his incredulity and lingering doubt evaporated. "Angelic" was the only adjective his brain could supply. But perhaps that was the wine talking…
Islington took a step closer. Richard held his breath. "But you are seeing me now, yes?"
"Yes," Richard answered dumbly. As if it would be possible to look away. He almost took a reflexive stepped back, but then realized he would be falling into the rock pool. He did not want to make contact with that water ever again, so his feet remained bolted to the floor.
The candles surrounding them and filling the Great Hall seemed to shine brighter as Islington's gentle smile broadened. Firelight danced on the ceiling, on the still surface of the water, on Islington's body. The angel's golden hair seemed to absorb the light, and then Richard, in a moment of drunken brilliance, realized: a halo. It occurred to him at that moment that Islington was the most beautiful person (angel, his swirling, wine-addled brain corrected. Angel-person) that Richard had ever laid eyes on, and he wondered what that meant, since Islington was neither a woman nor a man.
In the brief, endless seconds it took Islington to reach for him, Richard remembered two things: once, when he was particularly clumsy child of nine, he had knocked over his Aunt Maude's Christmas tree; the angel topper hit the floor in a carnage of tinsel and porcelain and fake pine, and he had felt a special shame in breaking it, in denting the pretty girl-angel's wings, because there was something unmistakably wrong in flinging an angel down to earth; and two, when he was a marginally less clumsy boy of eleven, he had gone sledding after a heavy blizzard, and the enormous field below the hill had been a sheet of immaculate, unbroken snow, white like Islington's robes, but it also caught the sunlight of that bright blue December day, and the snow had glittered like stars, so bright it hurt his eyes, so beautiful and yet so cold.
The angel's long fingers drew Richard closer, caressed his neck. "Richard," it whispered, making his name sound more beautiful than any hymn he had ever heard in London Above.
He had never been a religious man; the closest he came to prayer was thinking, Oh god, oh god, oh god please when running to catch the tube on Monday mornings, and he was repeating the prayer now, not even realizing he was saying it out loud. "Oh god, oh god, oh god please."
Islington's lips brushed his ear, soft as a moth's wing. "God is not here," it may have whispered. Richard would never be sure.
And then there were lights behind his eyelids—fireworks and supernovas and tiny blinking Christmas tree lights, the candles were blazing all around them—and a distant, sober part of Richard's brain remembered that there was another angel, whose name he could not place, who had been known as the "Light-Bringer."
The Angel Islington pulled away slowly and turned from Richard. Beneath the rustling of its robes there was no sound, only silence, a deep and almost terrifying silence.
"Richard?" Door's sleep-softened voice. She rose from her chair, brushing the hair from her face like cobwebs.
"I'm here," he answered, stepping away from the waterfall and the rock pond. He did not touch the angel as he passed.
Her fire opal eyes glittered at him. "Did I fall asleep?"
Richard forced his lips into a tight smile. "No."
"We should go," she said, brightening up immediately. She wasn't any more sober than he was, though her voice was level. She reminded him of their mission. "The Black Friars…"
"Yes," said Islington, spreading its arms. "Time, as they say, is of the essence."
Door curtseyed and thanked the angel for its hospitality, though Richard could do nothing more than stand and stare at Islington. Had any of that been real? But Islington did not look at him; its gray, immortal eyes were fixed only on Door as it whispered good luck, and then there was the sound of mighty wings...
---
"You have been gone for eight hours," Hunter would say when they stumbled back to her, giggly and topsy-turvy like naughty children who have snuck into their parents' drinks cabinet. When Richard inevitably woke up in Serpentine's stable, the wine of Atlantis would claim some of his memories, and there were some things that, as the hangover faded, Richard would forget.
But there would be nights in the Underside where Richard would wake up to feel a hand on his neck and see lights dancing in his eyes, and he would turn over, and grit his teeth, and pray for darkness.
End.