~~Young~~

Chapter Twenty Three

   “It started as curiosity as she watched you. Then it became pity as you succumbed to your darker nature. Then concern when it seemed like you had wholly embraced the dark. It wasn’t until she watched you mourn the death of your friend, the mortal Alfred, that it turned into something…more. That’s when she knew there was still hope for you, that’s when she made it her life’s work to help you,” she turned to Sera then, “and as much as it killed me to do it, to send you away, I was the one who smuggled you to earth when you felt you could do no more from here. With Death’s help of course, when that mortal woman tried to kill her unborn child she saw that as the perfect opportunity to find you flesh. At least flesh that wasn’t at the expense of cutting off your wings like Mercy,” she smiled and took Sera’s hand, “because unlike her you promised you’d come back. And you did, you came back with your mission fulfilled because your spirit was stronger than that mortal child’s, you kept that mortal flesh alive through that pregnancy even as the child’s spirit succumbed.”

   “My…my mother tried to…abort me?” Sera asked sadly.

   That wasn’t what Gage had gotten out of that little history lesson though he was surprised that Sera felt anything over her mother’s actions at all considering the loveless association they had had.

   “Oh no, not you, me she did, but you she tried to kill by poisoning her body with drugs and alcohol. A miscarriage wouldn’t have tarnished her image in the way an abortion would have.”

   Sera sighed heavily, “Yeah… yeah that sounds like mom.”

   She slumped into Gage in dejection, unable to accept that she truly was unwanted by her mother.

   Again he kissed her head as he ran his hand between her wings in attempts to comfort her, “why would he let her keep those wretched memories and not of the full life she had before,” he asked Josephine, “why did he let you keep yours when you came to earth?”

   “Because there was one big difference between us-” she stopped suddenly at the sound of breaking glass and they all looked over to see Death stomping on another broken trinket on the floor. The two of them were still in the thick of their argument, a fact that seemed to relieve Josephine when she continued even if she picked up the pace, “he didn’t know she had left heaven until she had already been born so he had to take them to keep her from talking. Me…” she sighed, “I was still in the womb when he figured it out so he simply took away any chance I had at communicating with the mortals. The mortal physicians didn’t question it; they called it a birth defect.”

   And that sounded very much like God.

   “But what did it, what sparked her to have any interest in me, one of the damned, in the first place?”

   Josephine huffed and scrubbed at her forehead, “You just don’t get it do you, you’re not one of the damned, you never have been Gage,” she refuted him even as her eyes kept flicking back to the argument that had now moved to the other side of the bed, “it was by your own choice you left, and by your own choice you could have come back. He never banned you, only made you believe such a thing out of his feelings of betrayal over your actions. That was what incited her curiosity; she wanted to know what made you leave in the first place.”

   Sera pulled away from Gage slowly and looked up to him, “I knew it,” she said firmly.

   Well then that made one of them, “knew what?” he asked her.

   “That you were an angel.”

   “No,” he sliced a hand through the air, “we’ve been over this, there’s no way-”