[spn] David (Part 1/2)
David (Part One)
Supernatural, Mature (but not explicit, Castiel!Emmanuel/OMC, 17k
Summary: What if the person who found amnesiac!Cas when he stumbled out of that river in Colorado had been a man and not a woman? And what if when Dean caught up with him, he found that Cas had a husband?
Notes: Set during 7.17 The Born Again Identity. I started thinking about this pretty much immediately after seeing the episode, and started writing it soon after that (yeah, it's been a while). I hated that Daphne was made into a throw-away character and felt that her story could have been really interesting. Simultaneously, I wondered how Dean would have reacted if he'd found Cas married to a man. The two ideas blended and I got sort of carried away. Thanks to thirstyrobot and eggnogged for being encouraging! (Also @ AO3)
God first speaks to David during a dream about baseball. David has had the dream a few times since he was a kid. In it he is playing outfield in a pickup game near the edge of a cliff, and as he goes for a long out he steps right off into nothingness. Happens every time but this time, because this time there is someone in his way.
"Hi, David."
David doesn't know that this small, unshaved, harried looking man is God. He won't know until a few days later.
"Who are you?" David asks, trying to catch his dream-breath and watching the ball soar overhead and then down, down into the darkness where, this time, David does not join it.
"That's not really--" The God that David doesn't know is God sort of laughs and rubs at his beard and clears his throat. "Look, just... he needs you."
"Who?"
"By the river," the man says. "You'll find him by the river. He won't need a doctor. Just you. Find him, David."
David hadn't gone after the ball but when the man reaches up and lays a hand on his shoulder he feels a sensation like falling anyway. He wakes in his bed, in his home, on his own street, alone, a morning like any other, and though he goes through his day as usual and tells himself that it had just been a dream, shakes his head over coffee, and again during morning sermon, he thinks that there might be no harm, surely nothing wrong with taking a walk down by the river.
_____
David walks by the river twice a day every day since that first Sunday morning. It could be any river, he realizes, but there's a stretch near home where he runs whenever he remembers that he enjoys it, and where he's taken some of the youth group to fish. He walks before work and he walks after work and sometimes, if he cannot sleep, he walks by the river at night, air cold and unwelcoming. He's not afraid of the dark or the water, black and noisy under the moon, and he's not afraid of the shadowy figures that he sometimes passes, on the street, even on the trail. Sometimes he knows them and they say hello and he says hello back, but often they are strangers, or unrecognizable in the dark, mummied in their coats, and do not speak.
He knows a lot of people in town, more than he would had he moved here alone. His father is gone now, ten months gone, but people remember him, and David is left behind like something the town inherited. He wonders what his father would think of his walks, his dream, and he wonders if doing this, believing even a little, might make him a bit crazy or worse, vain, to think that such a thing, a vision perhaps, could come to him of all people. But what he fears more than burning bushes, what he fears in equal measure, is that he might actually find the person his dream said he should find, and that he might never find them at all.
_____
On Wednesday morning he wakes and walks out to the river in the early still-dark, coffee steam and breath pluming in the cool morning air. He finds nothing but a rock worn smooth by the river which he rinses in the freezing water and stuffs into his coat pocket, and is home again in a little over an hour, shoes and pantslegs soaked from the dew on the grass, his mug long empty so he starts a fresh pot, pulls the rock from his pocket and puts it with the others in a bowl on the kitchen table. He thinks as he showers that he will probably be late for the first job, but there is still time to ask himself, as he bows his head beneath the warm spray, just what he thinks he's doing.
He's an electrician, because the Air Force had helped him to earn a degree in electrical engineering, and he had been trying for bigger and better and more, but he realized eventually that he really just liked helping people feel safe in their homes.
That morning he installs a dimmer and pocket lights for some newlyweds, toothachingly happy in their new-old house (which he rewired three weeks before), then spends the afternoon replacing outdated panels at the high school gymnasium. Some of the kids there know him from church and shout "Hey, David!" and "see you tonight!" over the hollow, echoing sound of young feet pounding on waxed floors.
That evening he sees them again as he attends service and teaches a study group of eight or so twelve and thirteen-year-olds which has somehow become part bible study, and part tutoring. He talks to them about the Valley of Elah. They ask him about long division.
"You look miles away," Shirley says to him before the last of the kids have gone home. She's one of the oldest members of their congregation, and one of the most active. She plays piano Sunday mornings while David plays guitar, and where David is best at math, the kids come to her for English.
"I've got something I need to do," he says, packing up his things and wondering if that's really true.
"Haven't we all?" She asks, smiling with a mouthful of improbably pearly white dentures until he has to smile back, then asks him to walk her home, even though she only lives next door.
_____
The night is windy so the river is noisy, choppy and dark but for white foam ripples and the arcs of wings pale under the moon when he walks too near the bank and flushes a bird from the shallows. The man in his dream had said he would find someone here, but so far he has found only birds and frogs and a homeless man (who accepted his money but would accept nothing else). He knows by now where not to step to avoid washouts and foot-sized holes where small things have burrowed, and to walk closer to the edge of the woods when he passes the place where a still inlet turns the usual river-smell to something like death and he hopes that's nothing to do with what he hasn't found.
"Who cooks for you all?" he asks an owl that calls overhead, mimicking its own strange tone, then there's a silent shadow of wings over the moon and another call farther off.
The footbridge appears ahead, picked out black against the reflecting water. He has always turned back by this point but he has no appointments tomorrow and maybe that's never been far enough, so he stuffs his hands deeper into his pockets, glad for the heavier-than-usual coat, whisper-sings the song they've been practicing for next Sunday and keeps walking. He walks until his toes are a little numb, then further until he doesn't recognize anything, until up ahead the woods clear to an open sky, cut through from one bank to the next by the patterned shadow of a crumbling railroad trestle. The upright timbers, faded white at the top, plunge into blackness at the base, and if there is a way through he has no flashlight to find it.
He didn't grow up here. Twelve years ago he came from New Mexico in his father's old jeep with his father too small and frail on the seat beside him. He thinks that if he had grown up here, he might have played by the river, the trestle, every day, maybe even broken an arm falling from a rotten span, and he'd know the way through blindfolded.
It's after midnight and it's been three days. It's hardly even a disappointment anymore.
Halfway home he whistles at a heron that ignores him, but when he passes by he hears it take off. He turns to watch, wings white in the moonlight, but something more catches his eyes, something just behind him, pale and tall and not a bird. It staggers and reaches out and he hadn't realized he was so close to it, or it to him, but when it falls forward he catches it under the arms.
"Easy," he says.
"I find it very difficult," the man says, rough and serious and shaky.
"I mean take it easy."
"What am I meant to take? I don't understand."
The man is heavy in his arms and naked, damp and dirty and when he lifts his face, his eyes, to meet David's, to face the weak moonlight and the stars overhead, David thinks he knows then what to call the man who had come to him in a dream.
_____
"I don't understand. Who are you?"
The man has a lot of questions. They're all the same ones: "Why do I feel so strange? Why am I here? How did I get here?" David has no answers for any of those, no more now, standing in his bathroom, than he did on the river bank when the man had first asked them, wrapped in David's coat and making that face of intense concentration, like he might answer them himself if he just thought hard enough. But this is the first time he's asked about something besides himself, something that David can answer.
"I'm David," he says, toweling the man's shoulders dry after the bath he hadn't been able to take on his own. David hadn't known that at first, not until after fifteen minutes of silence behind a closed door, only to find the man still standing in the room where he'd left him.
"David was a king of Israel," the man says, muffled beneath the towel. He seems to have no injuries, no signs of exposure to a cold Colorado February evening.
"Yes, he was."
"He was an ancestor of Christ and he slew a giant with a stone." There's gravel and gravity to the man's voice, as if something more than words are meant to come from the use of it.
"That's right."
"It's a very good name, David. It means 'beloved' in Hebrew."
The man's hair is probably dry enough but David thinks he's gone red so he takes his time. He used to bathe his father before church on Sundays. This is very different. "You sure remember a lot for remembering nothing."
"I seem to know a lot, it's just there. But I don't remember anything. Does that make sense? I don't remember my name. It could be David as well for all I know."
David pulls the towel away and the man looks up at him, hair wet-wild and eyes vivid blue and open and trusting and David doesn't know what he's supposed to do with that.
"I don't think it is, though," the man says solemnly.
"It's okay," David says, with a confidence from somewhere he cannot place. "We'll find it."
___
It is nearly two a.m. by the time he lays himself down to sleep, the stranger silent in the guest bedroom where no one has slept since his brother and his brother's girlfriend had flown in from Nevada last year. He's not sure that anyone is sleeping in it now.
"I don't think I am tired," the man had said, standing stiffly in a pair of David's too-big sleep pants and an ALLEN ELECTRIC t-shirt, one of hundreds he'd had made a few years ago, his store of them even now only reduced by perhaps a dozen.
"Maybe you're in shock. But I've got to sleep, and--" I don't know what else to do with you, David had not said as he pulled the covers back and offered the bed and the man just looked at him. "Do you want to lie down?"
"Should I?" the man had asked, and then, "... want to?"
That was how he'd left him, sitting in the lamplight of his guest room in clothes too large and a world even larger for all that he didn't know about himself, and for all the places David didn't know where to look to help him find answers.
That night, when David finally does sleep, he hopes that he will dream of another pickup game, and the dream-prophet who had set him on this path, but he doesn't remember what he dreams, and in the morning the house is so quiet.
"Did you sleep at all?" he asks the man when he knocks and finds him precisely as he'd left him.
Confusion and a furrowed brow are the answer he receives, along with a flat and uncertain, "Should I have?"
___
He considers the Bible for finding a name, because the man needs a name. David needs to call him something. Calling him nothing makes him more alien than David is prepared to handle, and he's handled a lot already.
"You should eat," he says, bringing his laptop to the table because, after a bit of thought, there are too many strange names in the Bible.
The man nods, agreeing in some very objective way, and picks up the toast on the plate David had sat before him earlier, nodding again as it crunches between his teeth. "This is your home?" he asks, crumbs flying as he looks around the kitchen, pronouncing the word as if he's never spoken it before.
"Yeah. Where's your home?" Maybe if he asks the right question, the man will have an answer without thinking.
"I don't know. I think it must be very far away."
"Far away like another country?"
"Perhaps."
"You don't have a foreign accent," David says, but the man just nods again. The plate and the walls and the towels in David's kitchen are blue because his father had liked blue and David has changed very little about the house since his father's passing. It's unnerving how normal the man looks sitting in his kitchen, with eyes that almost match the room, eating toast, dropping crumbs on David's shirt.
David clears his throat. "Can you read?"
There's a moment before replying when the man looks at nothing, as if searching internally for the answer, then nods emphatically, yes, so David pushes the laptop over, stands to lean over the man's shoulder.
"This is a list of names. You can choose one. Move down like this." He shows him which key to press to scroll the page, and suddenly there are long fingers and elegant hands that make David's seem too large.
"Adam was the first man. I don't think I'm him."
"Let's hope not."
"Jonathan might be appropriate."
"Does it feel familiar?"
"No, but he loved David above all others."
David straightens then because they had somehow become very close. "How is that appropriate? You've only just met me," he says, trying to let it sound good-natured.
"Precisely. You're the only person I've met."
"Keep looking, okay. We'll keep it in mind."
When he finally chooses 'Emmanuel', David tries to at least take the italicized God is with us next to it as a sign that maybe the guy isn't from Mars.
____
He has no jobs lined up but there is choir practice in the evening and before that, Shirley had asked if he could move a bureau for her. She likes making up things for him to do, excuses to feed him, to get him to stay and talk, and to make him watch American Idol. Emmanuel will have to come with him, because he can't leave him alone, and because he doesn't know what else to do with him.
"How did you know where to find me?"
David looks up from where he's searching a rack of clothes for something that might better fit Emmanuel than a pair of David's old jeans cinched with a belt and that same t-shirt that fits okay but seems strange all the same. They're standing very close again. It seems it's something Emmanuel does, no matter how many steps David takes in the opposite direction.
"How do you know I knew?"
"I think you did. I feel that you did. Did you?"
"I had a dream."
"The dream told you?"
"Someone in the dream. It could have been a coincidence."
"Do you believe that?"
"No. Here, I think this will fit."
"Do you know who the someone was?"
"No. Would you try this on, please? Not here, in the-- c'mon. In here."
"And you just believed them? The person in the dream?"
"I don't know. I guess so."
David herds him into a dressing room, shuts the door, then leans on it when it drifts open again.
"Is it customary to help others find clothing?" Emmanuel asks him through the door.
"I guess if they can't help themselves."
"Is that why that woman is helping that child?"
The woman two aisles over looks toward the dressing room and David tries to smile at her. She looks uncertain but smiles back.
"It's probably her daughter," he whispers.
"Do you have any daughters?" Emmanuel asks, and then "How do I know if they fit?"
"No," David says when he opens the door again, "I don't have any daughters or sons. How do they feel?"
"I'm not sure."
David tests the waistband by tugging on them the way his mother used to do to him, and tries not to think about the warm skin his hand brushes, but Emmanuel's face is only curious.
"I think they're fine. Put these back on."
"Have you dressed many people?"
Once or twice, David has had to fill in watching the five to seven year Sunday school class, and couldn't answer their questions fast enough. This reminds him of that.
"I helped my father," he tells Emmanuel through the door once again. "Before he passed he was very sick. I had to help."
"I'm very sorry to hear about your father. But I think you're very good at it."
"At what?"
"Helping. Can I come out now?"
"Yeah. Let's find you some shoes."
____
It makes him real, bringing him into public, introducing him to Shirley, proving to David that he hasn't just made him up, that he hasn't been talking to himself all afternoon, buying clothes for invisible people in his mind.
"Where did you find him?" Shirley asks and it takes him a moment to remember that she can't possibly know and that it's just one of those things people say. She had raised an eyebrow at Emmanuel's introduction when they came to move her bureau, but waited until after choir practice, with everyone scattered around the sanctuary, to ask.
"He's a friend."
"Well I hope so." She smiles and brushes his arm with her shoulder. "He's very handsome."
"He's a friend," he stresses.
"You said that already. He must be alright. The girls like him. They're very discerning."
The girls are her great granddaughters, twins. They are sitting beside Emmanuel, telling him secret eight-year-old things, information which he receives with the utmost sincerity.
It's something he hasn't wanted to admit to himself, that Emmanuel is, in fact, very good looking, tall, dark and everything. But only by the grace of Disney or the Brothers Grimm do people find their true love washed up on a river bank and, a cynical outlook on love and questions of morality concerning amnesiacs aside, he only has a bearded man in a dream to thank.
It is generally known in their small community that David is gay. He hasn't dated often since he and his father moved to town but when his father was still alive he had set David up (with the eager help of Shirley) with a couple of men from the congregation who, through David, later met each other and now live together six blocks away. David installed track lighting in their living room a few months back.
What he did in college could not be considered dating, and of the men he has met since, none have understood or even completely believed his devotion to faith. They seem to think it is a phase, in the same way that he was told by his high school counselor that liking the other boys was a phase. It wasn't, and it will never be, and while he never doubted the truth of it, he once questioned the fairness of it.
"Bring him to dinner?" Shirley suggests.
"Maybe Sunday."
____
That evening David makes dinner for two for the first time in a long time and Emmanuel sits across from him, watching him as if for cues: what to eat first, how to eat it, how much of it. He matches David's gestures silently.
After dinner, David turns on the television and sits Emmanuel down in front of it, not the news because that could be overwhelming, and not a sitcom because he's not sure Emmanuel would understand the jokes, and no reality television because, really, that's not reality, not the reality of anyone he knows, anyway.
"What is this?" Emmanuel asks and David pauses on a channel. Emmanuel sits forward, studying the screen with some intensity, so David sets the remote down and tells Emmanuel that he will be in the kitchen washing up, the smooth jazzy tunes of the weather channel filling the room when he leaves it.
David takes his time washing dishes, bypassing the dishwasher and doing it by hand. It's a mindless task and he doesn't have to think about what he's meant to do with each dish, or where the forks came from, or if the glasses would be better off in someone else's care.
When he can no longer pretend to be busy, he returns to the living room to find that Emmanuel has learned to use the remote and is watching something David probably saw once, years ago. He knows the actress but he can't remember the name of her love interest and he tries desperately to recall if there is a love scene, because he doesn't want to answer any of those questions. But Emmanuel is silent, taking in every line of dialogue and watching every movement as if filing it away for later, squinting at the screen in a way that makes David wonder if he sees very well.
He falls asleep in a chair, watching Emmanuel watch television, and wakes to the same thing a little while later. Emmanuel hasn't moved but the movie has changed, another romantic comedy that earns the same somber concentration.
"I have to work tomorrow," he says to Emmanuel as he stands from the chair and stretches and Emmanuel looks up at him. "Just for a few hours in the morning."
"You're going to bed," Emmanuel says, like it's a phrase he just learned.
"Yes."
"Should I?"
"If you want. Aren't you tired? You didn't sleep last night."
Emmanuel concentrates inwardly again, in the same way he had when David asked if he could read, or earlier that afternoon when David asked if he was hungry.
"I don't know," is all he says.
David convinces him to try and shows him how to use the toothbrush he'd bought for him that morning. Emmanuel learns things quickly, precisely. He watches David brush his teeth and mimics it down to the stroke and spit and then asks if he should bathe like last night. David tells him he can if he wants, and asks if he could do it alone this time and Emmanuel says that he can and David brings him clothes to sleep in and new underwear and shows him how the shower works if he'd prefer that.
"Will you be alright on your own tomorrow?" David asks when they're standing in the guest room. "It will only be for a few hours." He's still not sure that it's a good idea but you don't keep business by canceling jobs.
Emmanuel nods with certainty.
"There are books downstairs if you want to read or anything. Or watch television. It's just a little while," he says again.
"You said that."
"Yeah. You can call me. I showed you how."
"You did."
David nods, runs his palms along the flannel of his sleep pants. "Do you want to see a doctor?" he asks, even though what he meant to say was 'good night'. "I mean... maybe they could help."
There's a clock on the wall that ticks softly, three times before Emmanuel says, "Do you think a doctor could help?"
A breath, a shrug. "I don't know." Six ticks. "Not really, no."
"I think you are helping," Emmanuel says.
David shakes his head but says, "Alright. Good night," but before he can turn away, Emmanuel steps forward, arms open, and closes them around David, chin on David's shoulder, hugging him good night. He must have learned it from one of those movies. David wonders what else he's learned.
"Good night, David," Emmanuel says close to his ear, and then steps away, climbs into bed and turns off the bedside lamp like he's done it every night of his life.
____
In the morning, Emmanuel is not in bed. David finds him downstairs reading a book on how to lay, repair, or replace tile work. It seems to be as engrossing as the films he'd watched the night before, but he looks up when David says his name.
David owns a lot of books on do-it-yourself work, basic and advanced. His shelves are also full of books on control systems, circuitry, biographies of Tesla and Edison (which he's never read and were given to him as gifts), ham radio, build-your-own telescope, shrubs and trees of Eastern Colorado, and various other subjects that might be applied to this project or that, requiring hands and effort and time. He has a lot of books on spirituality, too, though he doesn't always agree with them.
Emmanuel doesn't want breakfast. He asks if that's okay and David tells him that's fine. It is fine. Some people don't eat breakfast.
He showers and shaves and dresses for work and Emmanuel is still there on the sofa, frowning over an in-depth explanation of grouting choices when David tells him, once again, that he won't be long.
The job is across town at a manufacturing plant that's having new machinery delivered and installed and David knew it would be quick work but he wants to stop by the police station before he goes home.
Jack is a cop that David met the first time he'd had to call rescue services for his father, because, to his surprise, a police car and a fire truck had arrived along with the ambulance. He is middle-aged and married and his daughter is one of David's youth group, although Jack himself only ever attends church for weddings, funerals, and once for his nephew's baccalaureate service.
Sitting in the police station, all hard surfaces and shiny metal and waxed tile and Jack's desk cluttered with paper, David can't reconcile this corner of the world with the one in his home, where Emmanuel is alive and real and reading about grout.
"Is someone missing?" Jack asks, clicking through something on his computer that David can't see from across the desk.
"No... maybe. Do you have a database of people reported missing?"
"Sure, but..." Jack squints at him. "Have you found someone?"
David's stomach drops and he wonders if he's still very good at lying. "No, of course not. I'm just curious."
Jack looks skeptical. "Jesus, Dave, you didn't find a body or anything, did you?"
"I'd report a body, Jack. Give me some credit. I was just-- look, nevermind."
"No, now, wait. Here," Jack scribbles on a piece of paper as he talks, "you can look on the D.O.J. website, there's pictures and everything. And of course you can see the Fed list, just search "missing persons". It shouldn't be hard to find."
The note when Jack hands it to him has a web address. "Of course. I don't know why I didn't think of that."
Jack asks about practice, they talk about his daughter and having lunch some time until Jack walks him out, blocks the door in that bodily, cop-like way he has sometimes without realizing it.
"Hey, you'd let me know if you needed help, right?" he asks as he shakes David's hand goodbye, one hand on David's arm, reassuring.
David has lied to his parents and his teachers and drill sergeants and boyfriends (a word he uses loosely), but not for a long time. "Of course," he says easily, and smiles.
_____
That night Emmanuel asks if they could go for a walk. He'd finished the book on tile and moved on to bathroom plumbing. When he asks if they can walk by the river he sets aside Drywall for Dummies and David says, "yeah, sure."
It's nearly eight o'clock but it's not dark, not yet, and somehow the river looks different, whether it's because he's here with no purpose, or because he's not here alone, he can't be sure.
"Did you build your home?" Emmanuel asks, that same flat, serious tone, keeping pace with David on the path by the water.
"No, I bought it.... My father bought it. Then he died and it became mine. Why?"
"You have all of those books on how to build a house."
A couple of runners pound up from behind with a chorus of "on the left" and David pulls Emmanuel to the side to make way. The sun is low and rosey through the trees, painting the water pink and orange and yellow and the frogs are noisy in the shallows. He lets go of Emmanuel's arm but they don't drift far from each other.
"They're for repair. You have to maintain a house, when things get broken or worn."
Emmanuel seems to consider this, then repeats, almost a question, "For repair."
"Right."
"Am I broken?" Emmanuel doesn't look up from watching the ground just ahead of them.
"I don't know. Maybe a little."
"Do you think there is a way for me to find out who I am?"
That afternoon David had searched missing persons databases in Colorado, and surrounding states just in case, and then of course the federal list. He will look again, expand the search, but he has no real expectations. Emmanuel must have come from somewhere, that's clear enough, but maybe no one is missing him. Maybe no one had been looking for him. No one but David.
"I don't know."
Emmanuel stops walking. When he looks up he squints at the sky, at the sunset, and then at David.
"I thought if we came here I could remember... something. I know I must belong somewhere. I feel that I do, but... I only remember you finding me."
"What about before? I mean immediately before?"
Emmanuel closes his eyes, that inward search David recognizes easily now, then sighs and his shoulders slump and it's so... normal. David feels guilty that it makes him feel just a little better.
"Just the water," Emmanuel says when he's looking at David again.
David nods. For some reason he thinks of the thing he's been wanting to say, practicing in him mind, but it doesn't come out any easier for it. "You know, I'm not... you don't have to stay with me. If you'd like to, I don't know. If you need to find something or someone else..."
Emmanuel only looks at him, blue eyes a little wide and alarmed, more confused than David's seen them yet, and David regrets it immediately. He has read about the importance of touch in development and healing, in times of distress or illness, in infants and the elderly, and everyone in between, and remembers last night, standing in the guest room.
Emmanuel is stiff in his arms at first, until David says that he's sorry, and that he didn't mean to say that, and Emmanuel softens, goes a little heavy, so David just holds him for a while, the sky darkening overhead.
"Do you want to go back now?" David asks, stepping back but with a hand on Emmanuel's arm.
"Yes. Thank you."
It's fully dark by the time they are home again, scuffing their feet on the mat in front of the door, removing their shoes and hanging their coats in the entryway closet, side-by-side. They watch Jeopardy and Emmanuel knows the answers to all of the history and science and geography and potpourri categories, but nothing about pop music or Disney princesses or business and industry. David is close enough to touch his shoulder and a few times he does, then he leaves his hand there and maybe he needs that contact, too, and maybe it's a relief that Emmanuel doesn't know everything, and though he wouldn't have thought so yesterday or even this morning, maybe it's a relief that he's still here.
_____
Saturday morning comes bright and almost warm, a hint of false spring, and David teaches Emmanuel to shave. He's very precise, watching David in the mirror with all the concentration of a bird of prey, still and silent and absolute. They dry their faces and David smiles at him but Emmanuel only looks thoughtful, brows drawn together.
Not today, then.
Lying in bed the night before, listening to the distant, muffled voices from the television, David had made a few decisions. He wouldn't push the issue of sleeping or eating breakfast. He wouldn't ask again what Emmanuel might remember. He would stop waiting for signs. He would stop locking his bedroom door. And he would find out what it takes to make Emmanuel smile, a real one, not the thing he imitates from films.
Maybe tomorrow.
_____
Emmanuel would like to build something. He tells David this as he watches David eat breakfast and stacks toothpicks like a log cabin that won't stay together. He doesn't know what but he wants to make something. He feels that he should.
David may never get used to hearing that.
He has a book on building birdhouses and window boxes and dog houses and other things. It's from 1963 and the illustrations are of a boy with a handkerchief tied around his neck and he's had it since he was in Scouts. He remembers building a birdhouse that never did hang in a tree, but Emmanuel likes the plant boxes.
They need a couple of one-by-ten planks and brackets from the hardware store, David has most everything else. While they're there, Emmanuel chooses a seed pack each of impatiens and dahlias and daisies, and a small can of paint and a bag of soil. They don't even know if the flowers will thrive together, or if the warm weather will last, but David thinks there's no harm in trying.
It only takes once. Anything Emmanuel wants or needs to learn, he only needs one lesson by example and he's off on his own. In spite of this, David cuts the boards on the miter saw himself, with Emmanuel watching close enough that David has to push him away, has to not laugh at those serious eyes behind the safety goggles. But the rest is done by Emmanuel with minimal assistance, careful and precise, consulting the book just once, and maybe he was right to feel the need to make something. His hands are adept at creating.
In the afternoon they leave the unfinished box in the garage, clamped while the glue dries, and David drives them to the middle school where several of his kids are in a soccer match. David explains the game and introduces Emmanuel to cotton candy, which he eats without reservation or coercion, so David buys him another bag to take home.
The home team loses but the kids don't seem too upset, just sweaty and tired and a couple of them ask David if he'll take them for ice cream if their parents say it's okay. Three of them pile dusty and hot into the back of David's Jeep.
"Are you one of David's friends from the air force?"
"Did you move here from New Mexico, too? Is New Mexico anything like real Mexico? David says it isn't."
"Do you live with David?"
"Do you play baseball?"
"What's wrong with your voice?"
"Are you coming to church tomorrow?"
David helps to fend off the questions that Emmanuel can't answer and the kids quickly lose interest in favor of ice cream or talking about school, or that special brand of violent flirting that twelve-year-olds perfect. Emmanuel watches them like he watches his terrible movies or reads David's do-it-yourself books. Maybe children aren't the best teachers, but these are lessons he couldn't learn anywhere else.
"You were a soldier?" Emmanuel asks later when they're sitting on the sofa, eating half-flattened cotton candy and watching Vertigo, because David thinks Emmanuel watches too much of the Lifetime network.
"I was a technician. Spent most of my time stationed at Holloman base in New Mexico. I learned a trade and got a degree but I never saw combat.”
“You sound disappointed.”
David shrugged. “I’m not. I think I kept a lot of people safe, twisting a few wires and turning a few screws.”
“But you feel you could have done more?”
Emmanuel is looking at him very earnestly. David had decided that Emmanuel is probably a little older than him, but with that look in his eyes he seems, somehow, as if he might be far, far older.
“I felt I could have,” David admits. “My dad fought in the infantry in Korea and I always felt he would be disappointed. I guess that was most of it. But he never was.”
"I would think that fathers fight wars so their sons don't have to."
"Yeah, that's what he said."
Across the room, Jimmy Stewart is chasing Kim Novak down a rocky shore, along the backdrop of a technicolor blue ocean.
“What was your father like?”
“Don’t you want to watch the movie?”
“I’d rather hear about your father.”
“He was kind. Maybe too kind. He worked iron, buildings, and bridges, way high up. The only time he complained about it was when they started making him wear a safety harness. He was in his late forties when I was born. Most of the time people thought he was my granddad. My mom was a lot younger. She left us when I was fourteen."
"Why would she do that?"
"You'd have to ask her."
Emmanuel frowns, confused.
"It's a figure of speech. It means I don't know why. She was pretty young. I still talk to her."
The film has been completely forgotten. "What else? About your father?"
"He taught me about small engines and baseball... and he had a lot of faith. The whole time I was growing up it was all I heard about. God and steel and cattle--he grew up on a farm. He didn’t force it on me, though. I stopped going on Sundays as soon as I realized he couldn't make me anymore. Then I joined the air force and the first week of basic someone suggested I go to church, that it was the only break I’d get. So I went, after years of avoiding it. I said I wouldn’t but by the end of the week I was so exhausted, and that first Sunday I cried like a baby and called my dad as soon as I could. He got sick a few years after I finished college. One of my cousins lived up here and she was a nurse. She got married and moved to Missoula last year. He’s why everyone’s so nice to me. He didn’t meet a stranger and no one treated him like one. They all remember him. Even the kids.”
“Surely you have your own character to thank for the way that people treat you.”
“Maybe. I try not to disappoint them.”
“Or your father?”
“Or him.”
______
On their second Sunday together, Emmanuel shaves himself and at church he repeats the things that David had told him to say if anyone asks certain things, and David only leaves his side during the service, leaving Emmanuel seated neatly between Shirley's twins, solemn during the sermon, during prayer, during hymnals. He watches only David, playing guitar, singing, praying, unless the girls speak to him and then he bends his head low as they church-whisper something into his ear.
Shirley insists they come to dinner but David promises next week, definitely next week, as Emmanuel joins them, one twin holding each hand until the sanctuary is almost empty and the girls tug away to follow their mother and father and grandmother.
"Did you like the service?" David asks on the way to the car in the overflow parking out on the grass.
"It was fine."
"Honestly, it's the people for me, more than anything. I guess I shouldn't admit that."
"I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What is God without people to worship him?"
David shrugs. "That's a good point." Something touches his hand but it's only Emmanuel's, sliding into David's palm the way the girls' had surely found his. He doesn't squeeze but after a second David does, and he doesn't think the smile that Emmanuel wears then is anything but his own.
_____
This is how the weeks go by.
Winter slides slowly away for good and spring arrives in the four window boxes that were built while David slept, and the other dozen given to their neighbors. Emmanuel does many different things while David is asleep. He builds things and learns things and after a thoughtless Saturday afternoon when David let him watch as he'd cleaned the bathroom, he cleans things.
David works most days and holds his study group and coaches baseball for the church team. Sometimes, if Emmanuel is not too busy in the corner of the garage he's made his workshop, he will watch them practice. He attends every game. He drives (very carefully) and he cooks (with perfection but little creativity) and he smiles. He does it for real. Every time is like the first time for David, and every time is a little better.
They have that dinner with Shirley and her family, and have had several since. They help with clothing drives and food drives and most people are too polite to ask about the nature of their relationship, even in an open-minded UCC, but everyone is curious, and they tell their stories even when they don't ask his, so that Emmanuel knows nearly everyone David knows and a few others besides, by name and handshake if nothing else. People like to tell Emmanuel things.
He's even met Jack, who gave David a long, suspicious look, standing in the plumbing aisle of Home Depot where the two had run into him, until Emmanuel offered to help replace the pipe that was leaking beneath Jack's bathroom sink (he'd read a book on it). Afterward, they all had a beer in Jack's kitchen and Jack told David, grinning, slapping him on the back, that this one was a keeper.
Emmanuel has made the guest room his own. David moved out some of the things that he'd been storing there, old trophies and clothes that haven't fit him since basic training and boxes of photo albums filled with people he can't name, because they were his father's and they came from his father's father.
Now there is a shelf of poetry books and art books and another of things he has made: a crystal radio, a carving of a dog, a speaker made from a styrofoam plate, a shadow box of stones they have found on walks by the river, a journal with drawings of different grasses and flowers and trees, carefully labeled and dated. He is an accurate artist and a very poor poet.
They hold hands in church and in the library or the grocery store or wherever Emmanuel reaches for him. There are hugs at night and in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon, in the kitchen or the garage, just half-holding one another as Emmanuel presents his latest project for David's approval, smiling that smile when he receives it.
But there's always something else to make or do. Immediately. Nothing seems to satisfy, David notices, and Emmanuel voices it one day, almost two months after he'd crawled cold and naked onto the banks of the river and into David's arms.
"I feel like... there must be something else."
He is not smiling when he says it and it might be the lack of it or the words themselves but David aches at the implication. Sometimes he forgets that Emmanuel doesn't remember, that there's a life he's left behind and that one day it will catch up to him.
____
April arrives with a new project: a tree house for a family two houses down. They have three boys, each about a year apart, and Paul, their father, has been out of work for six months. It’s not exactly help but it’s something, and it had been Emmanuel’s idea. He borrows books on treehouses, including something from the children’s section but David tells him the Lundgren boys do not need or have room for thirteen storeys and a bowling alley in their old oak tree.
It takes a few days and by the end of the third David is bone-tired when they are home again that night, sweat dried on his skin and his muscles aching. Emmanuel looks messy, paint on his t-shirt and his hand and his cheek, but otherwise unaffected. His dark hair could use a trim but it’s looked that way since he climbed out of the water and David tries not to think about that, pours Emmanuel a glass of water because he can let a few meals slide when Emmanuel doesn’t seem to lose any weight, but everything needs water.
"Aren't you tired?" he asks, shifting on his feet as they lean against the kitchen counter.
"Not now.”
“Does that mean you were?”
“I have experienced it, yes.”
David laughs, even though he's not sure it's a joke. He stretches out an arm behind Emmanuel across the counter and Emmanuel shifts, leans closer. He can feel the warmth of him against his side, a contrast to the almost cold damp of his t-shirt.
"Tougher than you look. I don’t understand where you get it all from.”
Emmanuel smiles secretly. The shadow on his jaw and his chin never seems to go past five-o'clock, no matter how long he goes without shaving. "I think I might rest tonight."
"That's good. I wondered when you'd get some sleep."
"It don't find sleep all that restful. I don't know if it is sleep. But the days seem very short to me."
"Me, too. When I was younger they lasted forever. I mean they seemed to," he adds when Emmanuel looks confused. "Now there's not enough time."
"Time for what?"
"I don't know, there just doesn't seem to be enough."
"Do you think the Lundgrens' children feel that time is slower?"
"Maybe."
"I don't remember being a child."
"I know. I'm sorry."
David lets his hand slide from the counter to Emmanuel's waist, the same kind of easy embrace they've shared dozens of times.
"The Lundgrens care very much for each other, don't they?" Emmanuel asks.
"I think so."
"And we care for each other?"
It's a simple question and with an arm around each other and the warmth between them it should be a simple answer, but there's a skip in David's chest all the same. "Yeah, we do."
"Then why do we not sleep in the same room? Share a bed?"
That thing in his heart drops to his stomach and he thinks he should pull away but he won't. "There's more to it than that, Emmanuel."
"I know about sex," Emmanuel says matter-of-factly, turning to face him, "it's not a book I haven't read or a film I haven't seen. I came from that river with the knowledge of it, along with several dead languages and the capital cities of Europe." He sighs. "And I have been watching Sex In the City."
David laughs, grateful for the opportunity. "I don't think that's a complete education."
"Regardless of that," Emmanuel continues, "the times I feel most rested, are when I am with you."
There are flecks of blue paint on Emmanuel's cheek, from a brush wielded with enthusiasm. David touches them, rubs his thumb over them and the prickly stubble there. The paint is not the same color as Emmanuel's eyes, but he's not sure what blue ever could be, and his heart is hammering but his hands are steady, and though he knows he should hesitate he does not.
It is a ghost of a kiss that Emmanuel doesn't return, until David pulls back and Emmanuel follows, pressing his mouth to David's with the same eager need to learn with which he mimics David at everything, and as with everything, David leads by example, so that when his hand on Emmanuel's waist seeks out skin, he feels Emmanuel's palms slide warm against his side, up, up until there is the cool air of the kitchen and Emmanuel's hand on his back. And when he pulls Emmanuel against him he is held closer in return, kissed in return, small sounds from one and then the other, heartbeats racing in tandem and a hardness to match his own.
David pulls away, pushes at Emmanuel just enough.
"I shouldn't have done that," he pants out, eyes closed because he couldn't say it otherwise.
"Why not?"
He can hear the confusion in Emmanuel's, and when he has the nerve to look, it's even plainer to see.
"Because you don't know yourself."
Emmanuel frowns, brows deeply furrowed and his hands are still on David's bare skin beneath his rucked up shirt, just the pressure of fingertips but it's a weight like gravity. "One's decisions and desires are not solely dictated by memory alone. I am proof of that."
"But you could be married. You could be straight or a monk or I don't know what. You don't know what."
"Would you care for me any less if you knew?"
"Of course not."
After a few silent, still moments with no sound but house sounds and crickets muted through the window, Emmanuel takes his hands away and David feels the loss. It is the first time since finding Emmanuel that he truly regrets the dream, and wishes for different circumstances. Nearly anything that wasn't exactly this.
"Do you want to sleep in my room tonight?" he asks.
It's early still after they've both showered so they play backgammon and listen to Bobby Darin because a week ago Emmanuel had found a box of David's father's things in the garage and both the board and the records were in it and Emmanuel had learned and taught David to play and David had found a record player at a pawn shop.
He thinks it will be awkward but sharing a bed with Emmanuel turns out to be as easy as sharing any other part of his life, and Emmanuel is a warm presence in the room, at his back, even though they don't touch much. In the morning he wakes alone but he can smell something cooking so he rolls over onto the other side of the bed, into the body-shaped disturbance in the sheets. When he gets downstairs there's pancakes and he asks if Emmanuel got plenty of rest and Emannuel says, with one of those smiles, that he did.
______
There are a few things that are remarkable about the day that David learns of Emmanuel's abilities. It is a Sunday and Emmanuel is still in bed with him when David wakes. He is never there in the mornings and when David asks if something is the matter, Emmanuel says no, nothing at all, and touches David's face and lying there in the early morning light, David nearly kisses him again, but then Emmanuel asks if he would like scrambled eggs and David says that he would.
As they are getting dressed for church there is a knock at the door. Mrs. South from two blocks down has brought them a casserole.
"For the-- well," she hesitates, face red from the walk and the cool morning but she looks upset enough that David invites her in, unburdening her of the heavy glass dish. It's still warm. She must have been up early (or late) cooking it.
"No, no, love, I'm fine." She smiles at something over David's shoulder, Emmanuel standing a little behind him. "Just to say thank you," she says to Emmanuel, a quiver in her voice as if she might cry, and then she's off, leaving David standing on his doorstep in bare feet holding a casserole dish.
"What was that about?" He asks Emmanuel when they are both in the kitchen.
"I guess she wanted to thank me," Emmanuel says, though he will not look at David.
"For what?"
"For helping."
"Helping with what?"
"Mr. South has been ill."
"Oh," David says, sliding the casserole into the refrigerator after he's made room for it. "Okay." He knows, of course, that Mr. South has been sick, that he'd been on the prayer list, that their only daughter is away at college and that an extra hand might be appreciated. But he's still trying to ignore the feeling that, perhaps for the first time, Emmanuel is keeping something from him.
They see Mrs. South again in church that morning, Mr. South, too, clearly back on his feet, lively and smiling. The pastor even mentions it, praises the Lord for the health of brother South. But Mr. South does not seem to share his wife's appreciation of Emmanuel's assistance, and during the sermon, David notices him watching Emmanuel more than once, the cold, distrustful scrutiny of a man who doesn't know what he's looking at.
After worship there is a second Sunday dinner in the fellowship hall and outside some of the children chase each other in a game of tag with rules in flux to the whims of the oldest players. David and Emmanuel sit crosslegged in the grass under an oak, David having his lunch and Emmanuel hiding his lack of appetite from well-meaning ladies who would recommend their own potato salad, baked chicken, and cherries jubilee as the cure for it.
One of the children, Alison, is the youngest of four sisters, and as she hurries past to catch the others she trips over her own dress, the other children running even faster in the opposite direction.
David hurries over to her, Emmanuel at his side, and helps her to pick herself up, but her shin is bloody and so is the torn hem of her dress. She hisses at the pain, but that's not why she cries.
"My dress," she says, high and soft, "momma will be mad! She said she wouldn't buy me another one if I got it dirty."
"It's okay," David tries, "It was an accident, she''ll understand."
But Alison shakes her head and cries a little louder.
"Let's get you to your mom, okay?"
"No, no, no!"
"May I?" Emmanuel asks, reaching for her.
"Not to my momma."
"No. May I see?"
Alison nods, wiping her eyes, and David shifts to allow Emmanuel room. She calms as soon as Emmanuel's hands are on her, and if there's any way to explain what he sees, David does not have the word for it.
That's not true. He has one, but he doesn't think he could say it aloud.
When Alison opens her eyes, having shut them tight as if expecting something far worse, her knee is clean and there is no cut, no blood, on her leg or her dress, and no tear in the lace. She accepts this far sooner than David, who looks to Emmanuel for an explanation, but Emmanuel is only smiling down at Alison.
The oldest Massey daughter is headed over, and before David can speak past the thing sitting stone-heavy in his throat, before he can say it, Alison sees her sister and she says it first.
"Please don't tell, Mr. David," she whispers. "Momma would be so mad." Then she brushes herself off and meets her sister halfway, where they exchange words David cannot hear, and then both head toward the other children to continue the game.
The drive home is quiet, except when Emmanuel says, "You're angry with me," and David says that he's not.
He has to make it home first. It might all make sense there. But there are no more answers inside of the house than there were outside of the church, so they're standing in the foyer when David finally, against everything that's in him, asks.
"What was that, Emmanuel? What did you do?"
Emmanuel is frowning, sorrow clear on his face, in spite of the words, "I healed her."
David nods for a moment, silent, then shakes his head. "You can't... how can you do that? Have you always been able to?"
"I think I have. I didn't always know."
"How long have you known?"
Emmanuel is wearing one of David's old coats, even though it's too warm for it, one he bought in New Mexico, for when he had a little time to leave base and didn't want to wear a uniform. Nights in the desert could be brutal in many ways. He can't make that world and this one fit together. This one, where the man he thinks he might be in love with is walking science fiction.
"I've suspected for some time, but I've known for a few days."
David runs a hand over his mouth, across his brow, through his hair.
"Jim South?" he asks at last.
"Yes. I'd just wanted to help... to fix what was broken. And I did."
"How long had you suspected? I mean, why--"
"The window boxes. When I was making so many of them, I cut myself on the miter saw."
David flinches, the image coming unbidden.
"There was a lot of blood, and then there was none."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You told me so many times to be so careful. I didn't want to disappoint you."
"That's it?"
"That and... sometimes," Emmanuel says, stepping closer, "I feel that you are afraid of me."
David realizes that he's got his back against the door, having backed away as Emmanuel had moved closer. He does the math, counting backward to the window boxes. Six weeks at least. Six weeks that Emmanuel has had to keep this from him, working through it on his own, thinking that David would be too frightened to accept him.
It doesn't seem possible, this gift of Emmanuel's, and though he is afraid, it doesn't change anything, not really. He's always been a little afraid.
There's a sound Emmanuel makes when David embraces him, a sound of surprise so normal and human that all of the knots and stones and heavy things in David's chest and stomach all let go, and the relief comes out in a rush against Emmanuel's ear.
"I'm not afraid. Okay? I won't ever be, I promise."
"What if there's something else?" Emmanuel says, uncertain, but his hands come up to David's sides, his back, holding him, as if to keep him there.
"Is there?"
"I think this is what's missing. The thing I keep trying to find. It's not something I can build. I think that I'm meant to help people, only not with plant boxes and tree houses. I feel that I must."
It's in the way he says it, like an apology. David can only bury his face in Emmanuel's collar, coat and shirt and undershirt and skin, the smell of soap and aftershave and the something that lingers on sheets on bright spring mornings.
"Mrs. South has a niece who needs help... in Nebraska. She says she will drive me."
David steps back, just enough. "On your own?"
"I'll be fine." Emmanuel smiles, his hands on either side of David's face, thumbs just nearly touching the corners of his mouth.
"Alright," David says, willing himself to be convinced, "alright," and this kiss is everything the first one was, but without the regret when they part.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you," is spoken hot against his ear.
"It's okay," he says into Emmanuel's collar. "If there's anything else... I wish you'd tell me. I can't help if I don't know."
"I will, David." The words are damp on David's neck, and then something that sounds like a laugh. "Is this how you show me you're not afraid of me?"
"Yes," he whispers.
"It's very effective."
PART TWO
Supernatural, Mature (but not explicit, Castiel!Emmanuel/OMC, 17k
Summary: What if the person who found amnesiac!Cas when he stumbled out of that river in Colorado had been a man and not a woman? And what if when Dean caught up with him, he found that Cas had a husband?
Notes: Set during 7.17 The Born Again Identity. I started thinking about this pretty much immediately after seeing the episode, and started writing it soon after that (yeah, it's been a while). I hated that Daphne was made into a throw-away character and felt that her story could have been really interesting. Simultaneously, I wondered how Dean would have reacted if he'd found Cas married to a man. The two ideas blended and I got sort of carried away. Thanks to thirstyrobot and eggnogged for being encouraging! (Also @ AO3)
God first speaks to David during a dream about baseball. David has had the dream a few times since he was a kid. In it he is playing outfield in a pickup game near the edge of a cliff, and as he goes for a long out he steps right off into nothingness. Happens every time but this time, because this time there is someone in his way.
"Hi, David."
David doesn't know that this small, unshaved, harried looking man is God. He won't know until a few days later.
"Who are you?" David asks, trying to catch his dream-breath and watching the ball soar overhead and then down, down into the darkness where, this time, David does not join it.
"That's not really--" The God that David doesn't know is God sort of laughs and rubs at his beard and clears his throat. "Look, just... he needs you."
"Who?"
"By the river," the man says. "You'll find him by the river. He won't need a doctor. Just you. Find him, David."
David hadn't gone after the ball but when the man reaches up and lays a hand on his shoulder he feels a sensation like falling anyway. He wakes in his bed, in his home, on his own street, alone, a morning like any other, and though he goes through his day as usual and tells himself that it had just been a dream, shakes his head over coffee, and again during morning sermon, he thinks that there might be no harm, surely nothing wrong with taking a walk down by the river.
_____
David walks by the river twice a day every day since that first Sunday morning. It could be any river, he realizes, but there's a stretch near home where he runs whenever he remembers that he enjoys it, and where he's taken some of the youth group to fish. He walks before work and he walks after work and sometimes, if he cannot sleep, he walks by the river at night, air cold and unwelcoming. He's not afraid of the dark or the water, black and noisy under the moon, and he's not afraid of the shadowy figures that he sometimes passes, on the street, even on the trail. Sometimes he knows them and they say hello and he says hello back, but often they are strangers, or unrecognizable in the dark, mummied in their coats, and do not speak.
He knows a lot of people in town, more than he would had he moved here alone. His father is gone now, ten months gone, but people remember him, and David is left behind like something the town inherited. He wonders what his father would think of his walks, his dream, and he wonders if doing this, believing even a little, might make him a bit crazy or worse, vain, to think that such a thing, a vision perhaps, could come to him of all people. But what he fears more than burning bushes, what he fears in equal measure, is that he might actually find the person his dream said he should find, and that he might never find them at all.
_____
On Wednesday morning he wakes and walks out to the river in the early still-dark, coffee steam and breath pluming in the cool morning air. He finds nothing but a rock worn smooth by the river which he rinses in the freezing water and stuffs into his coat pocket, and is home again in a little over an hour, shoes and pantslegs soaked from the dew on the grass, his mug long empty so he starts a fresh pot, pulls the rock from his pocket and puts it with the others in a bowl on the kitchen table. He thinks as he showers that he will probably be late for the first job, but there is still time to ask himself, as he bows his head beneath the warm spray, just what he thinks he's doing.
He's an electrician, because the Air Force had helped him to earn a degree in electrical engineering, and he had been trying for bigger and better and more, but he realized eventually that he really just liked helping people feel safe in their homes.
That morning he installs a dimmer and pocket lights for some newlyweds, toothachingly happy in their new-old house (which he rewired three weeks before), then spends the afternoon replacing outdated panels at the high school gymnasium. Some of the kids there know him from church and shout "Hey, David!" and "see you tonight!" over the hollow, echoing sound of young feet pounding on waxed floors.
That evening he sees them again as he attends service and teaches a study group of eight or so twelve and thirteen-year-olds which has somehow become part bible study, and part tutoring. He talks to them about the Valley of Elah. They ask him about long division.
"You look miles away," Shirley says to him before the last of the kids have gone home. She's one of the oldest members of their congregation, and one of the most active. She plays piano Sunday mornings while David plays guitar, and where David is best at math, the kids come to her for English.
"I've got something I need to do," he says, packing up his things and wondering if that's really true.
"Haven't we all?" She asks, smiling with a mouthful of improbably pearly white dentures until he has to smile back, then asks him to walk her home, even though she only lives next door.
_____
The night is windy so the river is noisy, choppy and dark but for white foam ripples and the arcs of wings pale under the moon when he walks too near the bank and flushes a bird from the shallows. The man in his dream had said he would find someone here, but so far he has found only birds and frogs and a homeless man (who accepted his money but would accept nothing else). He knows by now where not to step to avoid washouts and foot-sized holes where small things have burrowed, and to walk closer to the edge of the woods when he passes the place where a still inlet turns the usual river-smell to something like death and he hopes that's nothing to do with what he hasn't found.
"Who cooks for you all?" he asks an owl that calls overhead, mimicking its own strange tone, then there's a silent shadow of wings over the moon and another call farther off.
The footbridge appears ahead, picked out black against the reflecting water. He has always turned back by this point but he has no appointments tomorrow and maybe that's never been far enough, so he stuffs his hands deeper into his pockets, glad for the heavier-than-usual coat, whisper-sings the song they've been practicing for next Sunday and keeps walking. He walks until his toes are a little numb, then further until he doesn't recognize anything, until up ahead the woods clear to an open sky, cut through from one bank to the next by the patterned shadow of a crumbling railroad trestle. The upright timbers, faded white at the top, plunge into blackness at the base, and if there is a way through he has no flashlight to find it.
He didn't grow up here. Twelve years ago he came from New Mexico in his father's old jeep with his father too small and frail on the seat beside him. He thinks that if he had grown up here, he might have played by the river, the trestle, every day, maybe even broken an arm falling from a rotten span, and he'd know the way through blindfolded.
It's after midnight and it's been three days. It's hardly even a disappointment anymore.
Halfway home he whistles at a heron that ignores him, but when he passes by he hears it take off. He turns to watch, wings white in the moonlight, but something more catches his eyes, something just behind him, pale and tall and not a bird. It staggers and reaches out and he hadn't realized he was so close to it, or it to him, but when it falls forward he catches it under the arms.
"Easy," he says.
"I find it very difficult," the man says, rough and serious and shaky.
"I mean take it easy."
"What am I meant to take? I don't understand."
The man is heavy in his arms and naked, damp and dirty and when he lifts his face, his eyes, to meet David's, to face the weak moonlight and the stars overhead, David thinks he knows then what to call the man who had come to him in a dream.
_____
"I don't understand. Who are you?"
The man has a lot of questions. They're all the same ones: "Why do I feel so strange? Why am I here? How did I get here?" David has no answers for any of those, no more now, standing in his bathroom, than he did on the river bank when the man had first asked them, wrapped in David's coat and making that face of intense concentration, like he might answer them himself if he just thought hard enough. But this is the first time he's asked about something besides himself, something that David can answer.
"I'm David," he says, toweling the man's shoulders dry after the bath he hadn't been able to take on his own. David hadn't known that at first, not until after fifteen minutes of silence behind a closed door, only to find the man still standing in the room where he'd left him.
"David was a king of Israel," the man says, muffled beneath the towel. He seems to have no injuries, no signs of exposure to a cold Colorado February evening.
"Yes, he was."
"He was an ancestor of Christ and he slew a giant with a stone." There's gravel and gravity to the man's voice, as if something more than words are meant to come from the use of it.
"That's right."
"It's a very good name, David. It means 'beloved' in Hebrew."
The man's hair is probably dry enough but David thinks he's gone red so he takes his time. He used to bathe his father before church on Sundays. This is very different. "You sure remember a lot for remembering nothing."
"I seem to know a lot, it's just there. But I don't remember anything. Does that make sense? I don't remember my name. It could be David as well for all I know."
David pulls the towel away and the man looks up at him, hair wet-wild and eyes vivid blue and open and trusting and David doesn't know what he's supposed to do with that.
"I don't think it is, though," the man says solemnly.
"It's okay," David says, with a confidence from somewhere he cannot place. "We'll find it."
___
It is nearly two a.m. by the time he lays himself down to sleep, the stranger silent in the guest bedroom where no one has slept since his brother and his brother's girlfriend had flown in from Nevada last year. He's not sure that anyone is sleeping in it now.
"I don't think I am tired," the man had said, standing stiffly in a pair of David's too-big sleep pants and an ALLEN ELECTRIC t-shirt, one of hundreds he'd had made a few years ago, his store of them even now only reduced by perhaps a dozen.
"Maybe you're in shock. But I've got to sleep, and--" I don't know what else to do with you, David had not said as he pulled the covers back and offered the bed and the man just looked at him. "Do you want to lie down?"
"Should I?" the man had asked, and then, "... want to?"
That was how he'd left him, sitting in the lamplight of his guest room in clothes too large and a world even larger for all that he didn't know about himself, and for all the places David didn't know where to look to help him find answers.
That night, when David finally does sleep, he hopes that he will dream of another pickup game, and the dream-prophet who had set him on this path, but he doesn't remember what he dreams, and in the morning the house is so quiet.
"Did you sleep at all?" he asks the man when he knocks and finds him precisely as he'd left him.
Confusion and a furrowed brow are the answer he receives, along with a flat and uncertain, "Should I have?"
___
He considers the Bible for finding a name, because the man needs a name. David needs to call him something. Calling him nothing makes him more alien than David is prepared to handle, and he's handled a lot already.
"You should eat," he says, bringing his laptop to the table because, after a bit of thought, there are too many strange names in the Bible.
The man nods, agreeing in some very objective way, and picks up the toast on the plate David had sat before him earlier, nodding again as it crunches between his teeth. "This is your home?" he asks, crumbs flying as he looks around the kitchen, pronouncing the word as if he's never spoken it before.
"Yeah. Where's your home?" Maybe if he asks the right question, the man will have an answer without thinking.
"I don't know. I think it must be very far away."
"Far away like another country?"
"Perhaps."
"You don't have a foreign accent," David says, but the man just nods again. The plate and the walls and the towels in David's kitchen are blue because his father had liked blue and David has changed very little about the house since his father's passing. It's unnerving how normal the man looks sitting in his kitchen, with eyes that almost match the room, eating toast, dropping crumbs on David's shirt.
David clears his throat. "Can you read?"
There's a moment before replying when the man looks at nothing, as if searching internally for the answer, then nods emphatically, yes, so David pushes the laptop over, stands to lean over the man's shoulder.
"This is a list of names. You can choose one. Move down like this." He shows him which key to press to scroll the page, and suddenly there are long fingers and elegant hands that make David's seem too large.
"Adam was the first man. I don't think I'm him."
"Let's hope not."
"Jonathan might be appropriate."
"Does it feel familiar?"
"No, but he loved David above all others."
David straightens then because they had somehow become very close. "How is that appropriate? You've only just met me," he says, trying to let it sound good-natured.
"Precisely. You're the only person I've met."
"Keep looking, okay. We'll keep it in mind."
When he finally chooses 'Emmanuel', David tries to at least take the italicized God is with us next to it as a sign that maybe the guy isn't from Mars.
____
He has no jobs lined up but there is choir practice in the evening and before that, Shirley had asked if he could move a bureau for her. She likes making up things for him to do, excuses to feed him, to get him to stay and talk, and to make him watch American Idol. Emmanuel will have to come with him, because he can't leave him alone, and because he doesn't know what else to do with him.
"How did you know where to find me?"
David looks up from where he's searching a rack of clothes for something that might better fit Emmanuel than a pair of David's old jeans cinched with a belt and that same t-shirt that fits okay but seems strange all the same. They're standing very close again. It seems it's something Emmanuel does, no matter how many steps David takes in the opposite direction.
"How do you know I knew?"
"I think you did. I feel that you did. Did you?"
"I had a dream."
"The dream told you?"
"Someone in the dream. It could have been a coincidence."
"Do you believe that?"
"No. Here, I think this will fit."
"Do you know who the someone was?"
"No. Would you try this on, please? Not here, in the-- c'mon. In here."
"And you just believed them? The person in the dream?"
"I don't know. I guess so."
David herds him into a dressing room, shuts the door, then leans on it when it drifts open again.
"Is it customary to help others find clothing?" Emmanuel asks him through the door.
"I guess if they can't help themselves."
"Is that why that woman is helping that child?"
The woman two aisles over looks toward the dressing room and David tries to smile at her. She looks uncertain but smiles back.
"It's probably her daughter," he whispers.
"Do you have any daughters?" Emmanuel asks, and then "How do I know if they fit?"
"No," David says when he opens the door again, "I don't have any daughters or sons. How do they feel?"
"I'm not sure."
David tests the waistband by tugging on them the way his mother used to do to him, and tries not to think about the warm skin his hand brushes, but Emmanuel's face is only curious.
"I think they're fine. Put these back on."
"Have you dressed many people?"
Once or twice, David has had to fill in watching the five to seven year Sunday school class, and couldn't answer their questions fast enough. This reminds him of that.
"I helped my father," he tells Emmanuel through the door once again. "Before he passed he was very sick. I had to help."
"I'm very sorry to hear about your father. But I think you're very good at it."
"At what?"
"Helping. Can I come out now?"
"Yeah. Let's find you some shoes."
____
It makes him real, bringing him into public, introducing him to Shirley, proving to David that he hasn't just made him up, that he hasn't been talking to himself all afternoon, buying clothes for invisible people in his mind.
"Where did you find him?" Shirley asks and it takes him a moment to remember that she can't possibly know and that it's just one of those things people say. She had raised an eyebrow at Emmanuel's introduction when they came to move her bureau, but waited until after choir practice, with everyone scattered around the sanctuary, to ask.
"He's a friend."
"Well I hope so." She smiles and brushes his arm with her shoulder. "He's very handsome."
"He's a friend," he stresses.
"You said that already. He must be alright. The girls like him. They're very discerning."
The girls are her great granddaughters, twins. They are sitting beside Emmanuel, telling him secret eight-year-old things, information which he receives with the utmost sincerity.
It's something he hasn't wanted to admit to himself, that Emmanuel is, in fact, very good looking, tall, dark and everything. But only by the grace of Disney or the Brothers Grimm do people find their true love washed up on a river bank and, a cynical outlook on love and questions of morality concerning amnesiacs aside, he only has a bearded man in a dream to thank.
It is generally known in their small community that David is gay. He hasn't dated often since he and his father moved to town but when his father was still alive he had set David up (with the eager help of Shirley) with a couple of men from the congregation who, through David, later met each other and now live together six blocks away. David installed track lighting in their living room a few months back.
What he did in college could not be considered dating, and of the men he has met since, none have understood or even completely believed his devotion to faith. They seem to think it is a phase, in the same way that he was told by his high school counselor that liking the other boys was a phase. It wasn't, and it will never be, and while he never doubted the truth of it, he once questioned the fairness of it.
"Bring him to dinner?" Shirley suggests.
"Maybe Sunday."
____
That evening David makes dinner for two for the first time in a long time and Emmanuel sits across from him, watching him as if for cues: what to eat first, how to eat it, how much of it. He matches David's gestures silently.
After dinner, David turns on the television and sits Emmanuel down in front of it, not the news because that could be overwhelming, and not a sitcom because he's not sure Emmanuel would understand the jokes, and no reality television because, really, that's not reality, not the reality of anyone he knows, anyway.
"What is this?" Emmanuel asks and David pauses on a channel. Emmanuel sits forward, studying the screen with some intensity, so David sets the remote down and tells Emmanuel that he will be in the kitchen washing up, the smooth jazzy tunes of the weather channel filling the room when he leaves it.
David takes his time washing dishes, bypassing the dishwasher and doing it by hand. It's a mindless task and he doesn't have to think about what he's meant to do with each dish, or where the forks came from, or if the glasses would be better off in someone else's care.
When he can no longer pretend to be busy, he returns to the living room to find that Emmanuel has learned to use the remote and is watching something David probably saw once, years ago. He knows the actress but he can't remember the name of her love interest and he tries desperately to recall if there is a love scene, because he doesn't want to answer any of those questions. But Emmanuel is silent, taking in every line of dialogue and watching every movement as if filing it away for later, squinting at the screen in a way that makes David wonder if he sees very well.
He falls asleep in a chair, watching Emmanuel watch television, and wakes to the same thing a little while later. Emmanuel hasn't moved but the movie has changed, another romantic comedy that earns the same somber concentration.
"I have to work tomorrow," he says to Emmanuel as he stands from the chair and stretches and Emmanuel looks up at him. "Just for a few hours in the morning."
"You're going to bed," Emmanuel says, like it's a phrase he just learned.
"Yes."
"Should I?"
"If you want. Aren't you tired? You didn't sleep last night."
Emmanuel concentrates inwardly again, in the same way he had when David asked if he could read, or earlier that afternoon when David asked if he was hungry.
"I don't know," is all he says.
David convinces him to try and shows him how to use the toothbrush he'd bought for him that morning. Emmanuel learns things quickly, precisely. He watches David brush his teeth and mimics it down to the stroke and spit and then asks if he should bathe like last night. David tells him he can if he wants, and asks if he could do it alone this time and Emmanuel says that he can and David brings him clothes to sleep in and new underwear and shows him how the shower works if he'd prefer that.
"Will you be alright on your own tomorrow?" David asks when they're standing in the guest room. "It will only be for a few hours." He's still not sure that it's a good idea but you don't keep business by canceling jobs.
Emmanuel nods with certainty.
"There are books downstairs if you want to read or anything. Or watch television. It's just a little while," he says again.
"You said that."
"Yeah. You can call me. I showed you how."
"You did."
David nods, runs his palms along the flannel of his sleep pants. "Do you want to see a doctor?" he asks, even though what he meant to say was 'good night'. "I mean... maybe they could help."
There's a clock on the wall that ticks softly, three times before Emmanuel says, "Do you think a doctor could help?"
A breath, a shrug. "I don't know." Six ticks. "Not really, no."
"I think you are helping," Emmanuel says.
David shakes his head but says, "Alright. Good night," but before he can turn away, Emmanuel steps forward, arms open, and closes them around David, chin on David's shoulder, hugging him good night. He must have learned it from one of those movies. David wonders what else he's learned.
"Good night, David," Emmanuel says close to his ear, and then steps away, climbs into bed and turns off the bedside lamp like he's done it every night of his life.
____
In the morning, Emmanuel is not in bed. David finds him downstairs reading a book on how to lay, repair, or replace tile work. It seems to be as engrossing as the films he'd watched the night before, but he looks up when David says his name.
David owns a lot of books on do-it-yourself work, basic and advanced. His shelves are also full of books on control systems, circuitry, biographies of Tesla and Edison (which he's never read and were given to him as gifts), ham radio, build-your-own telescope, shrubs and trees of Eastern Colorado, and various other subjects that might be applied to this project or that, requiring hands and effort and time. He has a lot of books on spirituality, too, though he doesn't always agree with them.
Emmanuel doesn't want breakfast. He asks if that's okay and David tells him that's fine. It is fine. Some people don't eat breakfast.
He showers and shaves and dresses for work and Emmanuel is still there on the sofa, frowning over an in-depth explanation of grouting choices when David tells him, once again, that he won't be long.
The job is across town at a manufacturing plant that's having new machinery delivered and installed and David knew it would be quick work but he wants to stop by the police station before he goes home.
Jack is a cop that David met the first time he'd had to call rescue services for his father, because, to his surprise, a police car and a fire truck had arrived along with the ambulance. He is middle-aged and married and his daughter is one of David's youth group, although Jack himself only ever attends church for weddings, funerals, and once for his nephew's baccalaureate service.
Sitting in the police station, all hard surfaces and shiny metal and waxed tile and Jack's desk cluttered with paper, David can't reconcile this corner of the world with the one in his home, where Emmanuel is alive and real and reading about grout.
"Is someone missing?" Jack asks, clicking through something on his computer that David can't see from across the desk.
"No... maybe. Do you have a database of people reported missing?"
"Sure, but..." Jack squints at him. "Have you found someone?"
David's stomach drops and he wonders if he's still very good at lying. "No, of course not. I'm just curious."
Jack looks skeptical. "Jesus, Dave, you didn't find a body or anything, did you?"
"I'd report a body, Jack. Give me some credit. I was just-- look, nevermind."
"No, now, wait. Here," Jack scribbles on a piece of paper as he talks, "you can look on the D.O.J. website, there's pictures and everything. And of course you can see the Fed list, just search "missing persons". It shouldn't be hard to find."
The note when Jack hands it to him has a web address. "Of course. I don't know why I didn't think of that."
Jack asks about practice, they talk about his daughter and having lunch some time until Jack walks him out, blocks the door in that bodily, cop-like way he has sometimes without realizing it.
"Hey, you'd let me know if you needed help, right?" he asks as he shakes David's hand goodbye, one hand on David's arm, reassuring.
David has lied to his parents and his teachers and drill sergeants and boyfriends (a word he uses loosely), but not for a long time. "Of course," he says easily, and smiles.
_____
That night Emmanuel asks if they could go for a walk. He'd finished the book on tile and moved on to bathroom plumbing. When he asks if they can walk by the river he sets aside Drywall for Dummies and David says, "yeah, sure."
It's nearly eight o'clock but it's not dark, not yet, and somehow the river looks different, whether it's because he's here with no purpose, or because he's not here alone, he can't be sure.
"Did you build your home?" Emmanuel asks, that same flat, serious tone, keeping pace with David on the path by the water.
"No, I bought it.... My father bought it. Then he died and it became mine. Why?"
"You have all of those books on how to build a house."
A couple of runners pound up from behind with a chorus of "on the left" and David pulls Emmanuel to the side to make way. The sun is low and rosey through the trees, painting the water pink and orange and yellow and the frogs are noisy in the shallows. He lets go of Emmanuel's arm but they don't drift far from each other.
"They're for repair. You have to maintain a house, when things get broken or worn."
Emmanuel seems to consider this, then repeats, almost a question, "For repair."
"Right."
"Am I broken?" Emmanuel doesn't look up from watching the ground just ahead of them.
"I don't know. Maybe a little."
"Do you think there is a way for me to find out who I am?"
That afternoon David had searched missing persons databases in Colorado, and surrounding states just in case, and then of course the federal list. He will look again, expand the search, but he has no real expectations. Emmanuel must have come from somewhere, that's clear enough, but maybe no one is missing him. Maybe no one had been looking for him. No one but David.
"I don't know."
Emmanuel stops walking. When he looks up he squints at the sky, at the sunset, and then at David.
"I thought if we came here I could remember... something. I know I must belong somewhere. I feel that I do, but... I only remember you finding me."
"What about before? I mean immediately before?"
Emmanuel closes his eyes, that inward search David recognizes easily now, then sighs and his shoulders slump and it's so... normal. David feels guilty that it makes him feel just a little better.
"Just the water," Emmanuel says when he's looking at David again.
David nods. For some reason he thinks of the thing he's been wanting to say, practicing in him mind, but it doesn't come out any easier for it. "You know, I'm not... you don't have to stay with me. If you'd like to, I don't know. If you need to find something or someone else..."
Emmanuel only looks at him, blue eyes a little wide and alarmed, more confused than David's seen them yet, and David regrets it immediately. He has read about the importance of touch in development and healing, in times of distress or illness, in infants and the elderly, and everyone in between, and remembers last night, standing in the guest room.
Emmanuel is stiff in his arms at first, until David says that he's sorry, and that he didn't mean to say that, and Emmanuel softens, goes a little heavy, so David just holds him for a while, the sky darkening overhead.
"Do you want to go back now?" David asks, stepping back but with a hand on Emmanuel's arm.
"Yes. Thank you."
It's fully dark by the time they are home again, scuffing their feet on the mat in front of the door, removing their shoes and hanging their coats in the entryway closet, side-by-side. They watch Jeopardy and Emmanuel knows the answers to all of the history and science and geography and potpourri categories, but nothing about pop music or Disney princesses or business and industry. David is close enough to touch his shoulder and a few times he does, then he leaves his hand there and maybe he needs that contact, too, and maybe it's a relief that Emmanuel doesn't know everything, and though he wouldn't have thought so yesterday or even this morning, maybe it's a relief that he's still here.
_____
Saturday morning comes bright and almost warm, a hint of false spring, and David teaches Emmanuel to shave. He's very precise, watching David in the mirror with all the concentration of a bird of prey, still and silent and absolute. They dry their faces and David smiles at him but Emmanuel only looks thoughtful, brows drawn together.
Not today, then.
Lying in bed the night before, listening to the distant, muffled voices from the television, David had made a few decisions. He wouldn't push the issue of sleeping or eating breakfast. He wouldn't ask again what Emmanuel might remember. He would stop waiting for signs. He would stop locking his bedroom door. And he would find out what it takes to make Emmanuel smile, a real one, not the thing he imitates from films.
Maybe tomorrow.
_____
Emmanuel would like to build something. He tells David this as he watches David eat breakfast and stacks toothpicks like a log cabin that won't stay together. He doesn't know what but he wants to make something. He feels that he should.
David may never get used to hearing that.
He has a book on building birdhouses and window boxes and dog houses and other things. It's from 1963 and the illustrations are of a boy with a handkerchief tied around his neck and he's had it since he was in Scouts. He remembers building a birdhouse that never did hang in a tree, but Emmanuel likes the plant boxes.
They need a couple of one-by-ten planks and brackets from the hardware store, David has most everything else. While they're there, Emmanuel chooses a seed pack each of impatiens and dahlias and daisies, and a small can of paint and a bag of soil. They don't even know if the flowers will thrive together, or if the warm weather will last, but David thinks there's no harm in trying.
It only takes once. Anything Emmanuel wants or needs to learn, he only needs one lesson by example and he's off on his own. In spite of this, David cuts the boards on the miter saw himself, with Emmanuel watching close enough that David has to push him away, has to not laugh at those serious eyes behind the safety goggles. But the rest is done by Emmanuel with minimal assistance, careful and precise, consulting the book just once, and maybe he was right to feel the need to make something. His hands are adept at creating.
In the afternoon they leave the unfinished box in the garage, clamped while the glue dries, and David drives them to the middle school where several of his kids are in a soccer match. David explains the game and introduces Emmanuel to cotton candy, which he eats without reservation or coercion, so David buys him another bag to take home.
The home team loses but the kids don't seem too upset, just sweaty and tired and a couple of them ask David if he'll take them for ice cream if their parents say it's okay. Three of them pile dusty and hot into the back of David's Jeep.
"Are you one of David's friends from the air force?"
"Did you move here from New Mexico, too? Is New Mexico anything like real Mexico? David says it isn't."
"Do you live with David?"
"Do you play baseball?"
"What's wrong with your voice?"
"Are you coming to church tomorrow?"
David helps to fend off the questions that Emmanuel can't answer and the kids quickly lose interest in favor of ice cream or talking about school, or that special brand of violent flirting that twelve-year-olds perfect. Emmanuel watches them like he watches his terrible movies or reads David's do-it-yourself books. Maybe children aren't the best teachers, but these are lessons he couldn't learn anywhere else.
"You were a soldier?" Emmanuel asks later when they're sitting on the sofa, eating half-flattened cotton candy and watching Vertigo, because David thinks Emmanuel watches too much of the Lifetime network.
"I was a technician. Spent most of my time stationed at Holloman base in New Mexico. I learned a trade and got a degree but I never saw combat.”
“You sound disappointed.”
David shrugged. “I’m not. I think I kept a lot of people safe, twisting a few wires and turning a few screws.”
“But you feel you could have done more?”
Emmanuel is looking at him very earnestly. David had decided that Emmanuel is probably a little older than him, but with that look in his eyes he seems, somehow, as if he might be far, far older.
“I felt I could have,” David admits. “My dad fought in the infantry in Korea and I always felt he would be disappointed. I guess that was most of it. But he never was.”
"I would think that fathers fight wars so their sons don't have to."
"Yeah, that's what he said."
Across the room, Jimmy Stewart is chasing Kim Novak down a rocky shore, along the backdrop of a technicolor blue ocean.
“What was your father like?”
“Don’t you want to watch the movie?”
“I’d rather hear about your father.”
“He was kind. Maybe too kind. He worked iron, buildings, and bridges, way high up. The only time he complained about it was when they started making him wear a safety harness. He was in his late forties when I was born. Most of the time people thought he was my granddad. My mom was a lot younger. She left us when I was fourteen."
"Why would she do that?"
"You'd have to ask her."
Emmanuel frowns, confused.
"It's a figure of speech. It means I don't know why. She was pretty young. I still talk to her."
The film has been completely forgotten. "What else? About your father?"
"He taught me about small engines and baseball... and he had a lot of faith. The whole time I was growing up it was all I heard about. God and steel and cattle--he grew up on a farm. He didn’t force it on me, though. I stopped going on Sundays as soon as I realized he couldn't make me anymore. Then I joined the air force and the first week of basic someone suggested I go to church, that it was the only break I’d get. So I went, after years of avoiding it. I said I wouldn’t but by the end of the week I was so exhausted, and that first Sunday I cried like a baby and called my dad as soon as I could. He got sick a few years after I finished college. One of my cousins lived up here and she was a nurse. She got married and moved to Missoula last year. He’s why everyone’s so nice to me. He didn’t meet a stranger and no one treated him like one. They all remember him. Even the kids.”
“Surely you have your own character to thank for the way that people treat you.”
“Maybe. I try not to disappoint them.”
“Or your father?”
“Or him.”
______
On their second Sunday together, Emmanuel shaves himself and at church he repeats the things that David had told him to say if anyone asks certain things, and David only leaves his side during the service, leaving Emmanuel seated neatly between Shirley's twins, solemn during the sermon, during prayer, during hymnals. He watches only David, playing guitar, singing, praying, unless the girls speak to him and then he bends his head low as they church-whisper something into his ear.
Shirley insists they come to dinner but David promises next week, definitely next week, as Emmanuel joins them, one twin holding each hand until the sanctuary is almost empty and the girls tug away to follow their mother and father and grandmother.
"Did you like the service?" David asks on the way to the car in the overflow parking out on the grass.
"It was fine."
"Honestly, it's the people for me, more than anything. I guess I shouldn't admit that."
"I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What is God without people to worship him?"
David shrugs. "That's a good point." Something touches his hand but it's only Emmanuel's, sliding into David's palm the way the girls' had surely found his. He doesn't squeeze but after a second David does, and he doesn't think the smile that Emmanuel wears then is anything but his own.
_____
This is how the weeks go by.
Winter slides slowly away for good and spring arrives in the four window boxes that were built while David slept, and the other dozen given to their neighbors. Emmanuel does many different things while David is asleep. He builds things and learns things and after a thoughtless Saturday afternoon when David let him watch as he'd cleaned the bathroom, he cleans things.
David works most days and holds his study group and coaches baseball for the church team. Sometimes, if Emmanuel is not too busy in the corner of the garage he's made his workshop, he will watch them practice. He attends every game. He drives (very carefully) and he cooks (with perfection but little creativity) and he smiles. He does it for real. Every time is like the first time for David, and every time is a little better.
They have that dinner with Shirley and her family, and have had several since. They help with clothing drives and food drives and most people are too polite to ask about the nature of their relationship, even in an open-minded UCC, but everyone is curious, and they tell their stories even when they don't ask his, so that Emmanuel knows nearly everyone David knows and a few others besides, by name and handshake if nothing else. People like to tell Emmanuel things.
He's even met Jack, who gave David a long, suspicious look, standing in the plumbing aisle of Home Depot where the two had run into him, until Emmanuel offered to help replace the pipe that was leaking beneath Jack's bathroom sink (he'd read a book on it). Afterward, they all had a beer in Jack's kitchen and Jack told David, grinning, slapping him on the back, that this one was a keeper.
Emmanuel has made the guest room his own. David moved out some of the things that he'd been storing there, old trophies and clothes that haven't fit him since basic training and boxes of photo albums filled with people he can't name, because they were his father's and they came from his father's father.
Now there is a shelf of poetry books and art books and another of things he has made: a crystal radio, a carving of a dog, a speaker made from a styrofoam plate, a shadow box of stones they have found on walks by the river, a journal with drawings of different grasses and flowers and trees, carefully labeled and dated. He is an accurate artist and a very poor poet.
They hold hands in church and in the library or the grocery store or wherever Emmanuel reaches for him. There are hugs at night and in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon, in the kitchen or the garage, just half-holding one another as Emmanuel presents his latest project for David's approval, smiling that smile when he receives it.
But there's always something else to make or do. Immediately. Nothing seems to satisfy, David notices, and Emmanuel voices it one day, almost two months after he'd crawled cold and naked onto the banks of the river and into David's arms.
"I feel like... there must be something else."
He is not smiling when he says it and it might be the lack of it or the words themselves but David aches at the implication. Sometimes he forgets that Emmanuel doesn't remember, that there's a life he's left behind and that one day it will catch up to him.
____
April arrives with a new project: a tree house for a family two houses down. They have three boys, each about a year apart, and Paul, their father, has been out of work for six months. It’s not exactly help but it’s something, and it had been Emmanuel’s idea. He borrows books on treehouses, including something from the children’s section but David tells him the Lundgren boys do not need or have room for thirteen storeys and a bowling alley in their old oak tree.
It takes a few days and by the end of the third David is bone-tired when they are home again that night, sweat dried on his skin and his muscles aching. Emmanuel looks messy, paint on his t-shirt and his hand and his cheek, but otherwise unaffected. His dark hair could use a trim but it’s looked that way since he climbed out of the water and David tries not to think about that, pours Emmanuel a glass of water because he can let a few meals slide when Emmanuel doesn’t seem to lose any weight, but everything needs water.
"Aren't you tired?" he asks, shifting on his feet as they lean against the kitchen counter.
"Not now.”
“Does that mean you were?”
“I have experienced it, yes.”
David laughs, even though he's not sure it's a joke. He stretches out an arm behind Emmanuel across the counter and Emmanuel shifts, leans closer. He can feel the warmth of him against his side, a contrast to the almost cold damp of his t-shirt.
"Tougher than you look. I don’t understand where you get it all from.”
Emmanuel smiles secretly. The shadow on his jaw and his chin never seems to go past five-o'clock, no matter how long he goes without shaving. "I think I might rest tonight."
"That's good. I wondered when you'd get some sleep."
"It don't find sleep all that restful. I don't know if it is sleep. But the days seem very short to me."
"Me, too. When I was younger they lasted forever. I mean they seemed to," he adds when Emmanuel looks confused. "Now there's not enough time."
"Time for what?"
"I don't know, there just doesn't seem to be enough."
"Do you think the Lundgrens' children feel that time is slower?"
"Maybe."
"I don't remember being a child."
"I know. I'm sorry."
David lets his hand slide from the counter to Emmanuel's waist, the same kind of easy embrace they've shared dozens of times.
"The Lundgrens care very much for each other, don't they?" Emmanuel asks.
"I think so."
"And we care for each other?"
It's a simple question and with an arm around each other and the warmth between them it should be a simple answer, but there's a skip in David's chest all the same. "Yeah, we do."
"Then why do we not sleep in the same room? Share a bed?"
That thing in his heart drops to his stomach and he thinks he should pull away but he won't. "There's more to it than that, Emmanuel."
"I know about sex," Emmanuel says matter-of-factly, turning to face him, "it's not a book I haven't read or a film I haven't seen. I came from that river with the knowledge of it, along with several dead languages and the capital cities of Europe." He sighs. "And I have been watching Sex In the City."
David laughs, grateful for the opportunity. "I don't think that's a complete education."
"Regardless of that," Emmanuel continues, "the times I feel most rested, are when I am with you."
There are flecks of blue paint on Emmanuel's cheek, from a brush wielded with enthusiasm. David touches them, rubs his thumb over them and the prickly stubble there. The paint is not the same color as Emmanuel's eyes, but he's not sure what blue ever could be, and his heart is hammering but his hands are steady, and though he knows he should hesitate he does not.
It is a ghost of a kiss that Emmanuel doesn't return, until David pulls back and Emmanuel follows, pressing his mouth to David's with the same eager need to learn with which he mimics David at everything, and as with everything, David leads by example, so that when his hand on Emmanuel's waist seeks out skin, he feels Emmanuel's palms slide warm against his side, up, up until there is the cool air of the kitchen and Emmanuel's hand on his back. And when he pulls Emmanuel against him he is held closer in return, kissed in return, small sounds from one and then the other, heartbeats racing in tandem and a hardness to match his own.
David pulls away, pushes at Emmanuel just enough.
"I shouldn't have done that," he pants out, eyes closed because he couldn't say it otherwise.
"Why not?"
He can hear the confusion in Emmanuel's, and when he has the nerve to look, it's even plainer to see.
"Because you don't know yourself."
Emmanuel frowns, brows deeply furrowed and his hands are still on David's bare skin beneath his rucked up shirt, just the pressure of fingertips but it's a weight like gravity. "One's decisions and desires are not solely dictated by memory alone. I am proof of that."
"But you could be married. You could be straight or a monk or I don't know what. You don't know what."
"Would you care for me any less if you knew?"
"Of course not."
After a few silent, still moments with no sound but house sounds and crickets muted through the window, Emmanuel takes his hands away and David feels the loss. It is the first time since finding Emmanuel that he truly regrets the dream, and wishes for different circumstances. Nearly anything that wasn't exactly this.
"Do you want to sleep in my room tonight?" he asks.
It's early still after they've both showered so they play backgammon and listen to Bobby Darin because a week ago Emmanuel had found a box of David's father's things in the garage and both the board and the records were in it and Emmanuel had learned and taught David to play and David had found a record player at a pawn shop.
He thinks it will be awkward but sharing a bed with Emmanuel turns out to be as easy as sharing any other part of his life, and Emmanuel is a warm presence in the room, at his back, even though they don't touch much. In the morning he wakes alone but he can smell something cooking so he rolls over onto the other side of the bed, into the body-shaped disturbance in the sheets. When he gets downstairs there's pancakes and he asks if Emmanuel got plenty of rest and Emannuel says, with one of those smiles, that he did.
______
There are a few things that are remarkable about the day that David learns of Emmanuel's abilities. It is a Sunday and Emmanuel is still in bed with him when David wakes. He is never there in the mornings and when David asks if something is the matter, Emmanuel says no, nothing at all, and touches David's face and lying there in the early morning light, David nearly kisses him again, but then Emmanuel asks if he would like scrambled eggs and David says that he would.
As they are getting dressed for church there is a knock at the door. Mrs. South from two blocks down has brought them a casserole.
"For the-- well," she hesitates, face red from the walk and the cool morning but she looks upset enough that David invites her in, unburdening her of the heavy glass dish. It's still warm. She must have been up early (or late) cooking it.
"No, no, love, I'm fine." She smiles at something over David's shoulder, Emmanuel standing a little behind him. "Just to say thank you," she says to Emmanuel, a quiver in her voice as if she might cry, and then she's off, leaving David standing on his doorstep in bare feet holding a casserole dish.
"What was that about?" He asks Emmanuel when they are both in the kitchen.
"I guess she wanted to thank me," Emmanuel says, though he will not look at David.
"For what?"
"For helping."
"Helping with what?"
"Mr. South has been ill."
"Oh," David says, sliding the casserole into the refrigerator after he's made room for it. "Okay." He knows, of course, that Mr. South has been sick, that he'd been on the prayer list, that their only daughter is away at college and that an extra hand might be appreciated. But he's still trying to ignore the feeling that, perhaps for the first time, Emmanuel is keeping something from him.
They see Mrs. South again in church that morning, Mr. South, too, clearly back on his feet, lively and smiling. The pastor even mentions it, praises the Lord for the health of brother South. But Mr. South does not seem to share his wife's appreciation of Emmanuel's assistance, and during the sermon, David notices him watching Emmanuel more than once, the cold, distrustful scrutiny of a man who doesn't know what he's looking at.
After worship there is a second Sunday dinner in the fellowship hall and outside some of the children chase each other in a game of tag with rules in flux to the whims of the oldest players. David and Emmanuel sit crosslegged in the grass under an oak, David having his lunch and Emmanuel hiding his lack of appetite from well-meaning ladies who would recommend their own potato salad, baked chicken, and cherries jubilee as the cure for it.
One of the children, Alison, is the youngest of four sisters, and as she hurries past to catch the others she trips over her own dress, the other children running even faster in the opposite direction.
David hurries over to her, Emmanuel at his side, and helps her to pick herself up, but her shin is bloody and so is the torn hem of her dress. She hisses at the pain, but that's not why she cries.
"My dress," she says, high and soft, "momma will be mad! She said she wouldn't buy me another one if I got it dirty."
"It's okay," David tries, "It was an accident, she''ll understand."
But Alison shakes her head and cries a little louder.
"Let's get you to your mom, okay?"
"No, no, no!"
"May I?" Emmanuel asks, reaching for her.
"Not to my momma."
"No. May I see?"
Alison nods, wiping her eyes, and David shifts to allow Emmanuel room. She calms as soon as Emmanuel's hands are on her, and if there's any way to explain what he sees, David does not have the word for it.
That's not true. He has one, but he doesn't think he could say it aloud.
When Alison opens her eyes, having shut them tight as if expecting something far worse, her knee is clean and there is no cut, no blood, on her leg or her dress, and no tear in the lace. She accepts this far sooner than David, who looks to Emmanuel for an explanation, but Emmanuel is only smiling down at Alison.
The oldest Massey daughter is headed over, and before David can speak past the thing sitting stone-heavy in his throat, before he can say it, Alison sees her sister and she says it first.
"Please don't tell, Mr. David," she whispers. "Momma would be so mad." Then she brushes herself off and meets her sister halfway, where they exchange words David cannot hear, and then both head toward the other children to continue the game.
The drive home is quiet, except when Emmanuel says, "You're angry with me," and David says that he's not.
He has to make it home first. It might all make sense there. But there are no more answers inside of the house than there were outside of the church, so they're standing in the foyer when David finally, against everything that's in him, asks.
"What was that, Emmanuel? What did you do?"
Emmanuel is frowning, sorrow clear on his face, in spite of the words, "I healed her."
David nods for a moment, silent, then shakes his head. "You can't... how can you do that? Have you always been able to?"
"I think I have. I didn't always know."
"How long have you known?"
Emmanuel is wearing one of David's old coats, even though it's too warm for it, one he bought in New Mexico, for when he had a little time to leave base and didn't want to wear a uniform. Nights in the desert could be brutal in many ways. He can't make that world and this one fit together. This one, where the man he thinks he might be in love with is walking science fiction.
"I've suspected for some time, but I've known for a few days."
David runs a hand over his mouth, across his brow, through his hair.
"Jim South?" he asks at last.
"Yes. I'd just wanted to help... to fix what was broken. And I did."
"How long had you suspected? I mean, why--"
"The window boxes. When I was making so many of them, I cut myself on the miter saw."
David flinches, the image coming unbidden.
"There was a lot of blood, and then there was none."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You told me so many times to be so careful. I didn't want to disappoint you."
"That's it?"
"That and... sometimes," Emmanuel says, stepping closer, "I feel that you are afraid of me."
David realizes that he's got his back against the door, having backed away as Emmanuel had moved closer. He does the math, counting backward to the window boxes. Six weeks at least. Six weeks that Emmanuel has had to keep this from him, working through it on his own, thinking that David would be too frightened to accept him.
It doesn't seem possible, this gift of Emmanuel's, and though he is afraid, it doesn't change anything, not really. He's always been a little afraid.
There's a sound Emmanuel makes when David embraces him, a sound of surprise so normal and human that all of the knots and stones and heavy things in David's chest and stomach all let go, and the relief comes out in a rush against Emmanuel's ear.
"I'm not afraid. Okay? I won't ever be, I promise."
"What if there's something else?" Emmanuel says, uncertain, but his hands come up to David's sides, his back, holding him, as if to keep him there.
"Is there?"
"I think this is what's missing. The thing I keep trying to find. It's not something I can build. I think that I'm meant to help people, only not with plant boxes and tree houses. I feel that I must."
It's in the way he says it, like an apology. David can only bury his face in Emmanuel's collar, coat and shirt and undershirt and skin, the smell of soap and aftershave and the something that lingers on sheets on bright spring mornings.
"Mrs. South has a niece who needs help... in Nebraska. She says she will drive me."
David steps back, just enough. "On your own?"
"I'll be fine." Emmanuel smiles, his hands on either side of David's face, thumbs just nearly touching the corners of his mouth.
"Alright," David says, willing himself to be convinced, "alright," and this kiss is everything the first one was, but without the regret when they part.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you," is spoken hot against his ear.
"It's okay," he says into Emmanuel's collar. "If there's anything else... I wish you'd tell me. I can't help if I don't know."
"I will, David." The words are damp on David's neck, and then something that sounds like a laugh. "Is this how you show me you're not afraid of me?"
"Yes," he whispers.
"It's very effective."
PART TWO