Matters

   "I think we need to talk," the girl says, eyes scrunching as she scowls in an expression too vile for a 15-year-old student.

   Unstartled, the teacher simply hums and turns on his chair to look at her, his dark unruly hair giving him a much softer appearance than the student thought was sensible. The silence stretches in the room and she doesn't move; keeps looking at him as she leans on the frame of the door, arms crossed in her chest as she makes the nastier scowl she thinks she has ever worn— if anyone were to witness it, she was sure her reputation as the gentle and quiet kid would be as good as dead. Thankfully, however, they are alone. 

   "Do we?" He says, at last, eyes moving back to the window sitting by the chair he was perched upon, a calm smile settling in his face. He adjusts the thin glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose, and the girl's scowl deepens further. 

   "Yes, we do." she practically growls, patience growing thin by the second.

   "What about, Maria?" the teacher asks, not seeming the least invested in the conversation. He knew where this was going— and the girl knew he knew.

   Which only made for the affronted way she scoffed at the name.

   "Don't call me by that," she says, scuffling her feet, "I know my brothers already talked to you about me. You know my name."

   "Brothers?" The teacher asks, showing genuine emotion for the first time as his brows scrunch up in confusion. The student rolls her eyes at that— and it seems to kick his memory into working. "Oh, yes. Those two. If you'll forgive me, I had forgotten you called yourselves 'siblings'." He smiles innocently, "It's been a while since we've last talked, you see. How have they been, Naomi?"

   Naomi, as the other had called her, barks a laugh, expression soothed.

   "You call that a 'while'?" She asks in genuine amusement, her thin eyebrow arching upwards and almost hitting her hairline, "They can't recognize you by face anymore."

   He hums.

   "It's been half a century, Nikolas."

   "So it seems."

   There is a heavy silence, stretching beyond Nikolas simply not wanting to talk as his eyes gloss over and he looks pointedly at a marred spot in the carpet—and Naomi moves.

   She closes the distance between them, standing tall beside the other who is not simply sitting down, but also seemed to grow smaller and smaller with each step she took. Her lips peel back to show her pointy teeth as a growl makes its way up her throat. He still won't look at her.

   Calmly, she places her right hand against his adam apple, feeling it bob behind her palm. She squeezes, feeling the pull of the taut muscles in her arm. Nikolas still doesn't move. He still won't look at her.

   "You," she begins, voice strained, "are filthy."

   His feet scuffle on the floor, and if she strains her eyes, Naomi thinks she could see his wings move underneath the layers upon layers of thick, unstable magic that made up the man's illusion of a mortal body.

  No, she corrects herself— Not a man.

   Nephilim.

   "I don't care for your past", she says, grip still iron-tight around Nikolas' windpipe, "The things you've done before. The things you've been through."

   And this feels wrong, wrong, wrong. She had heard of Nikolas before. She had been enamored with his resolve on life.

   "I'm different from my brothers. I wasn't there for whatever happened back then."

   But she had heard the stories. Had heard them, and was amazed. Was sad. Was angry.

   "What I do care about is the present." She squeezes more, and thinks she can see his flesh slowly give in. His eyes remain firmly trained on the ground, unbothered and unseeing. "The things you do now."

   She wants to spit on his face for stooping so low.

   "So if you're going to get a... job— a normal human job and play house by yourself, don't think I'm going to think highly of you." The girl spits, words laced in venom, and leans to whisper into his ear, "And don't think I'm not going to see it for the farce that it is."

   The pliant body underneath her hand turns stiff, and she knows she's struck a chord. She leans back to look at his face, and is met with a calculated nothing. She clicks her tongue and crosses a bridge.

   "Those two are going to be very disappointed once they learn their dear friend is working together with—"

   Something snaps.

   His eyes are suddenly on hers– he's looking at her, and it's Naomi's worst nightmare come to life; shining, soulless eyes that spoke of divinity and commanded obedience. 

   Not for the first time that day, she remembers that Nephilim still meant he was born of an angel.

   (It disgusts her that she hadn't seen the betrayal coming decades ago. An apple won't fall far from its tree, she muzes.)

   Nikolas grabs her wrist and, without so much as a shake in his shoulders, manages to take her hand away from his throat. She curses at the sheer difference in strength between them— she was using all of her power, yet it seemed useless in the face of who she was against. Even the small indentations like crescent moons her nails had made on his skin were slowly fading before her eyes; skin tying on skin, dark blood turning shades darker as it coagulated, and all traces of her are gone.

   "Don't forget your place," Nikolas says, voice low and hoarse as he tried for a smile. Naomi could only scowl at how unnerving it looked. "I'm the teacher and you're the student, remember?"

   "My place," Naomi begins, snatching her arm from the other's grasp, "is not even in this plane to begin with." Scoffing, the girl massaged her wrist. "Stop with the jokes already, Nikolas."

   "Stop– just... Just call me Nikos, Naomi. For old times' sake, no?" the Nephilim says, throwing his back further into the cushions of his seat as he pinched the bridge of his nose, "And if you're so eager to go back down to that hell of lost souls, I'd be happy to help you out."

   "I should just call you traitor, is what I should do." Naomi hisses, putting some distance between the two of them. "I don't need help from the likes of you."

   Nikos raises his eyebrows in mock surprise, and Naomi loses sight of one of them behind the Nephilim's low bangs.

   "Traitor? Me?" He asks, voice carefully devoid of emotion. Naomi only rolls her eyes.

   "No, the stray cat you keep feeding." She says, sarcasm dripping like venom from her voice, "Don't try to act all coy, like you don't have a clue what I'm talking about."

   "I don't, in fact," Nikos says.

   "Bullshit."

   He massages his forehead.

   "I can see why you're enrolled as a student," he murmurs low, "You act like a child."

  The girl huffs a laugh, throwing her weight back into the cushions of a sofa on the far corner of the room. That bitch, she thinks, anger boiling low in the pit of her stomach as she tries to prove a point by ignoring the plain bait in the other's mockery.

   "I'm not in the mood for jokes, half-blood," Naomi says instead, earlier grimace coming back full force, "In fact, I'm not in the mood to even talk to you, but after yesterday I feel obligated to."

   Nikos crosses his legs, and as his eyes pierce her's, Naomi can almost see the gears turning in his head, as well as the question clear on his face.

   What had she seen?

   Yesterday. 

   She can see the exact moment understanding dawns on him.

   (It's pretty impossible not to, really, when he goes rigid as a rock so quickly, slowly coiling back from his position like he's a winding spring getting closer and closer to its limit, ready to bolt, to jump; to get away and to do so quickly.)

   A low growl tears itself free from her throat. Any piece of possible doubt in her mind is squashed then and there. He is guilty, and knows it.

   "Done with your little games?"

   The soft ends of his mouth, always locked in fake courteous smiles, pull down. He makes the face of a man gutted open, brows scrunched up and trembling in tandem with the rest of his features, his hands, his scuffling feet. Naomi's ire deflates so suddenly she can feel the edges of a whiplash.

   "He is guilty and knows it," her mind repeats.

   But guilty of what?

   She was all too familiar with the faces of lost children, both in life and in the unending not-death or whatever it was she was experiencing. Faces of grief, despair, of fear; in Those Wandering as much as in painfully human faces. Faces too young, hearts too fragile.

   This was it. This is what it looked like.

   (Nikos may be centuries older, she thinks-- but she had her own fair share of spent years and pained lives. Her own share of staring into the abyss and having it stare back at you, when at the cusp of breaking down and giving up. Had come back.)

   (Had almost not. Understood the temptation.)

   This was it. This is what it looked like.

   One deep breath, a shaky exhale that comes in shattered pieces. A broken facade, barely put together.

   "How much did you see?" His voice is raw, barely audible from the other side of the room where Naomi stands, but she thinks it is enough. It's for the best she's here, and not there.

   Nikos looks too human for his obvious ancestors but is still too holy for flesh and red blood. He is shaken, mentally unstable-- and she is still a demon. The antithesis to his existence, a rival whose blood sings in his pain and whose decaying soul hurts when the air he purifies invades her lungs. His angelic inclinations are dangerous – have always been – but there is simply no telling what he will do now. What he can and can't control.

   Naomi huffs shortly, careful as she breaths back in (stupid angels and stupid growing auras of holy filth, getting in the way of her trachea).

   "Everything I needed to," she says curtly, "And what I didn't, too."

   Nikos lip pinch and tremble, he leans forward dizzily and runs a hand in his throat. Naomi recognizes the motion. What it means.

   (Naomi knows the face of lost children, lost souls. This is it.)

   "You don't know what you're talking about. You really don't," Nikos says.

   It brings Naomi to spit again, disgust boiled low in her gut and fighting as it climbed up his throat to finally be thrown out.

   "He had a collar tight around your neck like a little pet, what else is there to--"

   Nikos brings a closed fist to the chair's armrest at his side, and the less holy of them can hear the wind parting for his hand, followed closely by the sharp cry of breaking wood and flying splinters as said armrest is ripped clean off the seat. Naomi cringes at the mess on the ground. Not that clean.

   "I am not a filthy--!" Nikos starts, choking on his own words and emotions and Naomi tenses, thinks what the fuck am I doing, a cacophony of shit, shit, I'm dead, because his voice sounds raw and furious and not meant to be heard. Like it's a private kind of anger, of pain, and it's cutting his lips and making his tongue swell as it escapes his mouth.

   Naomi thinks hard-- back to when she had just surfaced in a world so familiar and yet so different from her memories, where nothing she remembers is anymore; not the streets she would take from the hut she called "home" to the ghettos she called "work", not the corpses and skeletons of her neighbors who had been sitting by the village's entrance, strapped to poles and naked of dignity (she couldn't read at the time- hadn't learned, couldn't afford to - but even she could pick up the subtle letters carved in each cranium of the dead that spoke of “don't be foolish”, too and “or else” and spelled “warning”), and not that one patch of dried blood on her way to the cemetery where she would bury her knees in the dirt. 

   (She remembers looking down at herself, at that time, and seeing unblemished skin and supple muscle and live flesh. She knew, then, it wasn't her body, and her brothers -- who had ever so kindly found her stumbling around what now was; houses of brick and cement and new, winding streets made of cobble and clean of blood but dirty still, towering buildings in the distance that were coughing smoke like the old lady she always saw in a flower stand by the cemetery who held a pipe in her mouth and breathed hard, unnatural, dark clouds -- were kind enough to explain how it all worked and she had stood and heard and understood, on a fundamental level, like she knew but she didn't because, fuck, she had never met the endowed man who granted her this second life, she wasn't chosen by hand like her brothers, and it stung to rely on simple instincts.)

   She thinks, harder, to back then-- and listens in her head to the voices of her brothers chatting her ears off about this man, this incredible man (this incredible man who she remembered, thought of every time her head rested on a flat surface, this incredible man who was so much and meant so much and she wants to cry, cry, cry because it isn't her story-- this isn't her story, it's this incredible man;) and the one they loved so much. The one who was gentle enough to swipe the heart of a beast and treat it carefully, keep it like one would a prized jewel. The one who was born of misery and hatred and everything so unlike love, but was the definition of the very word. 

   The one who had survived-- through thick and thin, beyond his own choice --, while that incredible man hadn't, and she thinks.

   As Nikos stands there, hands pressing against his eyelids so hard Naomi doesn't know whether it's to keep tears away or to blind himself so he doesn't have to stare at her one more second, she thinks this can't be it. How can he be it? Why him? There must have been some mistake, somewhere.

   He looks ready to tear his own head off, and Naomi thinks, good. He wasn't deserving of the life gifted to him.

   "I'm not a filthy pet," the Nephilim finally says, words scrambled and mushed and staggering out of his mouth like they're made out of barbed wire. She can hear the wetness in his voice, too, like he's gurgling tears as if they were mouthwash. Naomi thinks her respect for him can only drop so low, and she stops caring.

   If he wants to cry, let him cry. It doesn't change things.

   "If not a pet, then what?" Naomi asks, willing herself to humor Nikolas this once. "His personal assistant? The secretary?" 

   There is no answer, and Nikos' lips part and close like he's a fish out of water but also like he's drowning, mouthing around silent words that scream save me. 

   Naomi scoffs elatedly, "I saw you stretching those wings to him, pretty bird. You can't lie to me."

   And there it is again. Her daily reminder that even a species as immortal as hers could turn very delicate very quickly when up against those made of non-human flesh and blood like liquid gold.

   Nikos lifts his head, brown eyes turned a feverish yellow, and seems more than eager to exert divine punishment upon her.

   Naomi scrambles for words – anything that could fall from her lips and count as prayer beside his feet is what she thinks of, first, but stops. Forces herself to. She wouldn’t fall so low. 

  So she chooses venom.

   "Mao-li," Naomi says, in a strangled kind of way she wasn't ready to dissect yet, and it's like a spell. The heavy aura of unfiltered energy is gone, dispersing in the air and flowing out of the room through creak and crevices like they're water in a bathtub and someone had pulled the plug covering the drain. 

   Naomi breaths, finally. Nikos shuts up, his eyes calm and shoulders relaxed. Naomi can't stand it, the way he seems to write the phrase “so that’s what this is about” in the scrunch of his eyebrows.

   "I was with him before," she says, feeling something ugly twisting her insides and scrambling beneath her skin at how petty she sounds, carefully choosing her words to sound as ambiguous as they can as if it would give her any leverage against the Nephilim, "Before you."

   He straightens, then blinks, and Naomi changes her mind just like that: maybe she wants to disappear into thin air, actually, because she doesn't feel like being here anymore. Nikos nods, and it's a confident thing. It makes Naomi want to puke, to bend over right then and there and wretch until she has cleaned herself of whatever it was that weighed the pit of her stomach, pulled her gut and wrenched around her heart and made her feel, foolishly.

   She knows what's coming, but it doesn't make it hurt any less.

   "I was with him when it mattered." Nikos says, simply, like he hadn't just trampled over her little world, tipped it upside down— like he wasn't admitting to the most heinous of crimes.

   (Naomi hates angels with a burning passion, and couldn't care more about their moral code-- but even she knows how the holier-than-thou creatures despised mortality and everything that came with it. Love, for one, was something that went beyond taboo.)

   Nikos smiles a genuine, fragile thing.

   "And when it didn't, too."

   And it’s poison on his lips, drip-drip-dripping along the words and onto the floor beneath his feet. A snake on his voice, curving around each syllable, squeezing at Naomi's chest like her heart was its prey.

   “So you say,” she begins, feeling too much and trying not to but failing so, so much that it’s audible in how ragged her breath comes out. “But I saw you with that...”

   She huffs a crazied sort of laugh, at loss for words, because fuck, it suddenly seems worse than at the beginning. Naomi thinks to the night before, and although she hadn't been much preoccupied with the other party's identity until now, she thinks fuck, because—

   "Fuck, that was archangel, wasn't it?" Naomi says as a wild smile breaches her face in a flash of white teeth, framing it as a question but letting it very clear that it left no doubt in her mind. Nikos pinches his eyebrows, eyes shining with something she can't name, and it's really all confirmation she might need. “You mingle with an archangel, of all things, let him put a leash on you— and you try to sell me that? That you still care for Mao-li? That you cared at all?”

   Nikos looks placated, like he doesn't fear her words anymore, and simply stares, for a while. Something shines in the hazel color of his eyes again, and he sighs like his patience is growing thin. Naomi thinks how novel of him.

   “Having to… mingle, as you have put, with Raziel makes me no happier than you.” The Nephilim says, quietly but so loudly in the silence of the room, and with a rasp to his voice Naomi has to wonder if his throat truly wasn't damaged. She is about to open her mouth to call bullshit, because there is no way she will believe the words of someone whose blood ran so contrary to hers, when he cuts her and continues, “As I have said, you don't understand what you are sticking your nose into.”