(Untitled)

[dontcallmegabby]

Date: June 22, 2000
Status: Private - Ellie and Gabriel (complete)
Setting: The Manor Grounds
Summary: Gabriel takes care of some unfinished business.

Comments

[chantinellie]

Presently, Ellie came in answer to the Messenger's call, walking hurriedly with her arms wrapped close around her body, anxious and at the same time reluctant to hear what he had to say. Rebuking him for the long wait was not foremost in her mind. She wasn't blind to the fact that she was probably the first succubus (retired or otherwise) who had ever managed to goad an archangel into performing such a favor, and while grateful wasn't precisely the right word to use, she was suitably impressed that he had actually followed up on their conversation.

She spotted him immediately upon stepping out the Manor's back door, and paused, for once unconscious of the figure she presented with her body taut and limbs drawn in close as though for protection. Vulnerability was something she could fake with practised ease, when necessary, but she wouldn't have intentionally allowed the real thing to show, if she'd been aware.

"Gabriel? You have news?" she greeted the angel abruptly, for the moment unable to muster up the will for casual insults

[dontcallmegabby]

The angel turned at her arrival, not quite able to summon up a smile, but willingly following her example of earnest directness. "I do, indeed," he said, and something tightened in his gut as he spoke, as though somewhere along the way his impartiality had given way and the outcome had come to mean something in his own mind, as well. Perhaps simply for another angel's sake. "It seems your child - Tali's child - is alive. Kept in Limbo all these years."

[chantinellie]

Ellie went white.

"Alive...?" she repeated blankly, and for one awful vertiginous moment she thought she was going to faint, right there in front of the Snob. Her knees started to buckle, and she caught herself reflexively on the edge of the bench, sinking down next to Gabriel more by necessity than choice.

She hadn't believed they would allow the child to live. Not really, not after what they'd done to Tali. The best she had permitted herself to hope for was a report of a quick, merciful execution. Now as Gabriel's words started to sink in, a whirlwind of questions threw her thoughts into chaos, and she flailed for the means to express any of them intelligently. "Why--how?--they kept her in Limbo?" She seized onto that ominous word, kept. Dangerous animals and criminals were kept, not children. And Limbo, where she and Tali had often met secretly for their forbidden liasons, was no more than an empty, sterile void between worlds. How could anyone contemplate raising a child in such a place? "What did they do to her? Is

[dontcallmegabby]

For lack of experience in consoling maternal succubae, Gabriel kept his tone business-like and his eyes politely averted as, paled, she took in the information. He would have been less than willing to betray himself to her had their positions been reversed, after all; and yet the questions in her voice and the tension in her posture gave her away, and he found himself wishing he had something of a more comforting story to tell