100 Things 17/100: Full of Grace
Title: Full of Grace
Fandom: Original Fiction
Series: Monday’s Child
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 676
Prompt: Dark Bingo Fill: “Paranoid Delusions”
Notes: for
camshaft22 , a Tuesday’s child.
Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
“You have to help me, please. They’re chasing me.”
With an air of boredom the nurse behind the glass asked, “Have you been coughing or had flu symptoms?”
“No. I’m being chased!”
The nurse slid the glass door open and handed him a clipboard. “Please fill that out. Someone will be with you as soon as possible. I’ll need your insurance card and photo ID, and how will you be making your co-pay this evening?”
Auggie rolled his eyes and dropped his backpack on the floor beside him as he fumbled in his coat pocket for his wallet. He yanked out the cards and handed them to her. She took them and walked away to a photocopy machine and presumable to run his credit card. He quickly filled out the paperwork. The nurse took the clipboard when she returned and pointed to the waiting room.
He retrieved his backpack and hugged it to him, watching the doors and windows as he went to the furthest seat in the room and sat down. He huddled fearfully in the chair, his eyes in constant motion.
“We should intercede,” Steven said to his brother.
“We shall watch, for now, as we have been charged to do. He has found a blessed place, they will not be able to enter there,” Zeke replied, pointing to the sign that read, ‘Saint Christopher’s Memorial Hospital.’ “The Catholics are predictable, this is a consecrated place, within these walls he is safe enough.”
The electric doors to the ER slid open and Auggie jumped, staring at the entrance, not relaxing until a family came through, the mother holding a sobbing child in her arms. Nothing moved towards him. H slumped back and watched the courtroom program on the TV mounted near the ceiling in the corner.
Later a nurse came through the doorway for the treatment rooms and called “Augusto Gennaio?”
Auggie leapt to his feet and ran across the room. The nurse beckoned him to follow and made him sit in a chair in a curtained area, telling him the doctor had been called and would be there momentarily.
The Doctor came in a few minutes later. “Auggie, I thought the new medication was working, what brings you back here?”
“They’re following me again, Doctor Phillips. You have to help me. You have to let me back into the ward; they don’t follow me in there.”
“Now Auggie, you know these things are not real. You only imagine that you see monsters. There is nothing trying to get you, I promise you. I’m going to give you a new prescription; you probably just need an adjustment.”
“Why will no one believe him?” Steven asked Zeke as the doctor left Auggie sitting there.”
The seraphim replied, “Because he has a history of seeing things, he has since his childhood. Like most prophets, he is thought mad. If not for the grace of our father, for the protection his blessing extends, the darklings would have long ago found, caught and destroyed Augusto. His essence is rich, his soul pure.”
“Yet you do not wish to intervene?”
“He is comfortable within the safety of the ward here, if he had wished to remain, I would not take him from a place he knows and likes. But it seems they will not be keeping him. He shall be sent out into the night once more. We shall keep watch, and protect him.”
Steven frowned as he looked at their charge, his charge, his first as a Protector. “He seems so lonely and broken.”
“Sometimes the burden of faith and grace is a hard one to bear. It makes the marked a beacon, and not always one that attracts the goodness of the world. This is why we are sent, why it is our task to watch.”
Grace was indeed a tricky weight to balance. As proved by Auggie Gennaio’s case, not all beings could properly maintain the balance. Sometimes they cracked under the strain.
The End
Originally posted at http://rinkafic.dreamwidth.org/