0. fool

Satan will live a mortal life until they learn to love humanity.

i. magus

Uriel and Reuwel grew up side by side in a town where the tallest building was three stories.

Uriel climbed trees. He shook the branches from high above Reuwel’s head, hooked his knees around them and dropped upside down.

“C’mon, it's not scary.”

Reuwel shook his head. His eyes were wider, childish. Uriel liked his face better as an adult. He didn’t know how he knew.

“I don't wanna,” Reuwel insisted.

“It's fun. You can touch the sky.”

Reuwel looked at the ground. “I like it better here. People belong on the ground.”

ii. popess

Reuwel’s mother had a marigold garden in the window basket. Uriel and Reuwel sat backwards on the couch and flung open the window to watch the butterflies.

Reuwel quieted whenever one landed. He nudged a finger forward and let it crawl on.

“Go on,” he whispered, bringing his finger close to ease the butterfly into Uriel’s palm. “Be gentle.”

Gentle was not Uriel’s job. The butterfly flew away.

iii. empress

The apple tree on the edge of the town never had good apples. Nevertheless, Uriel climbed it and picked two whenever Reuwel begged.

It was cut down the summer they were ten.

iv. emperor

Uriel was never stupid. He knew how he was meant to act. He understood what mothers meant when they gathered and watched the other boys wrestle in the grass. ‘Boys will be boys’, they laughed.

Reuwel and Uriel sat on the playground bench squished together. Uriel read. Reuwel played with a string on his shirt.

“Reuwel,” his mother called. They both looked up. “Time to go.”

Reuwel left with his mother. Uriel put his book down to play with the other kids.

Mothers never liked Uriel. They worried about how the other kids scattered when he tried to play with them, and how when he finally cornered one of the boys, he was allowed to play with them.

Perhaps mothers do know best. But Uriel never did anything wrong. Other people have always liked to follow him. He never understood why.

It doesn't matter.

v. heirophant

Reuwel was religious. He wore a cross on days he woke up feeling sad. Uriel did not understand why, but he never questioned it; crosses were not the polite subject of intense inquiry, however curious he may be.

Uriel was familiar with the Christian scripture. He never read the Bible, but it was popular enough that he heard about it.

Every time Reuwel wore the cross, Uriel made a point of asking him to tell a story from his beloved Bible.

Uriel saw him tuck the cross under his shirt. Reuwel turned to him with a grin, tugging his Bible off his bookshelf and bouncing on his bed, as eager to meet Uriel’s demands as he is to teach him what he learned in Sunday school. Uriel didn’t like Sundays. They couldn’t play together on Sunday mornings.

“I’ll tell you about Satan.”

“Satan,” Uriel mimicked. “The demon.”

“He wasn't always a demon.” Reuwel started flipping through his pretty book. “He was an angel once. One of God’s favorites. Then he made Him angry.”

“How?”

“Satan...he was Lucifer then. God told Lucifer to love humans, but Lucifer loved God more. So God threw him out of Heaven.”

This did not make sense. Uriel frowned. “But Lucifer was only doing his job. He was an angel, so he had to love God, right?”

Reuwel did not talk to Uriel for a week after that. Uriel knew he was angry, but he didn't know why.

vi. lovers

Reuwel was not good at taking care of himself. Sometimes he did not eat or pick up the phone. Uriel had to ride his bike over to Reuwel’s house and watch him put food in his mouth.

Uriel always noticed when Reuwel wore long sleeves in summertime. He never mentioned it. It would do no good.

vii. centurion

Uriel was smart. Reuwel always told him so.

“It’s just college,” Uriel insisted. “It’s just more school.”

Reuwel knocked him sideways on the street with his shoulder. “Yeah, but this is college in high school. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you no one starts courses for their Bachelor's in their sophomore year.”

Uriel looks at his shoes. Education is not admirable, it is expected. Perhaps Reuwel would forget his pride if he knew more than what he was supposed to.

viii. strength

Uriel and Reuwel moved to Manhattan the spring they were twenty-three, where the tallest buildings reached the sky--Reuwel was still afraid of heights.

Uriel brought his bike and got a chain for it. He did not consider that it wouldn't be enough.

He was coming out of their apartment when he caught the the thief. He marched forward and broke the man’s nose. Then, he called Reuwel and asked him to come downstairs.

“What emergency? Are you hurt?” Reuwel’s voice drove high into the phone, his shuffling a backdrop.

Uriel looked down at the man he was sitting on and up at the crowd gathering at the sight of blood. “I...You won't like it.”

“What did you do, Uriel?” The elevator pinged somewhere distantly over the speaker.

“I’m going to get arrested I think.” At this, he looked back up into the crowd to find a policeman pushing his way through. He corrected, “I’m getting arrested.”

“Uriel,” Reuwel hissed. “Tell them to wait for me.”

Uriel would rather be in a jail cell than face Reuwel’s disappointment. He shuddered at just the thought of Reuwel’s world-weary sigh.

“Sorry, Reuwel. Do you forgive me?”

Reuwel paused. Uriel already knew the answer. He hung up the phone and ran.

ix. hermit

Uriel went to church with Reuwel to make up for the bail.

Halfway through the sermon, he remembered why he knew what Reuwel looked like so many years ago and why Uriel preferred the sky to the ground.

Uriel did not belong in church. He stayed anyway.

x. wheel of fortune

He did not come home for a month.

Reuwel was prone to worrying. Uriel turned his phone off that month, and when he turned it on, he was met with a hundred missed calls from the only person on his contact list. He sat down the night he ran out of money to pay for the room and listened to every single one, from the night he slipped out to earlier that morning.

Uriel had to dig his key out of his bag. He closed the door quietly behind him, intent only on returning for cash under his pillow, but he passed the open bathroom door, and he stopped.

“Uriel?” Reuwel murmured. Uriel nudged the door open. Reuwel’s face split in two. “You came home.”

At first, Uriel thought Reuwel spilled wine in the bathroom. Then, he remembered the summers full of long sleeves and how he cowed at the idea of swimming in the lake only a mile’s walk from his own backyard. Reuwel didn’t want him to see.

Uriel was not supposed to care. He wanted to shut the door and walk back out, to forget entirely about Reuwel and his bathroom tile wine. But Reuwel did not drink wine, and Uriel knew he would never forget that. So instead, he crouched in front of the sink, dug out the first aid kit, and toed off his shoes before he could approach.

“I’m sorry,” Reuwel offered. It’s Uriel who should have apologized. Instead, he admired the brilliance of wine on dark skin.

Uriel didn't mean to stay the night, but he did. He told himself it was to keep an eye on Reuwel, to honor his duty to care for him, to get the cash under his pillow and get back out.

Uriel didn't even think of the hotel after a day.

xi. justice

It was not Uriel’s fault.

Springtime the year they moved to Manhattan, a butterfly landed on the windowsill. Reuwel turned around on the couch when Uriel did.

“Why are you watching a butterfly?” Reuwel asked.

Uriel finally remembered the butterfly. It did not fly away.

“Do you remember the butterfly on the window bed garden?”

Reuwel’s brows crumpled. “You do?”

Uriel didn't answer. Reuwel--humans in general--like to ask questions they know answers to, and Uriel never liked answering them. Humans are silly like that.

The butterfly did not fly away. It tried to, yes, but Uriel was so intent on keeping Reuwel’s prize that he smashed a hand over it instead. And he liked the way its body popped like a blister.

xii. hanged man

Uriel forgot. During his time at the hotel, his body began to remember. It was as if Reuwel’s very being was ingrained into his subconscious.

He still did not tell his friend. Uriel could not gauge his reaction.

xiii. death

The world ended at the sunset of Reuwel’s life.

It takes Satan hardly a minute, or perhaps an hour, or a thousand years, to remember why. They were placed on Earth because God did not love them. God loved humans more than He loved Satan.

Satan throws rocks into the frothing oceans, the sulfuric sky, and imagines their mouth looks as hellish. They tear apart the humans around them and throw bodies into the oceans with no consequence. God does not care. God has never cared.

God does not care because it does not matter. Satan remembers this, so they go back to the apartment in Manhattan and sit in the bathroom to wait for God to acknowledge their failure.

“Do you repent?” God asks after what could quite possibly be anywhere between a handful of minutes to an eternity. Satan does not care as long as Reuwel’s body is still slumped in the bathtub, long since stopped dropping red wine to the tiles.

Satan looks at Reuwel. They do not repent. Humans do not deserve an apology. The only one Satan would still tell the truth for--Satan does not repent--is Reuwel.

For an infinite loop of time, Satan has lived the same life, knowing in their intermissionary periods that they can simply say no and Reuwel will live again. They realized their mission long ago.

Still, they do not repent. Satan hisses at the sky.

The world begins anew.

xiv. temperance

Uriel is once more a child. He knows how to meet Reuwel; he must go to the lake a mile from Reuwel’s backyard, where Uriel will teach him to skip stones and he will teach Uriel how to catch frogs.

Uriel does not go. He wants it to be different this time, just to see what God will do.

He meets Reuwel anyway, on his way home at sunset. Reuwel asks him why he is crying. Uriel doesn’t know.

xv. devil

Uriel wonders where he has to start if he wants to change it. Reuwel will die when he is twenty-seven, and Uriel will not die until Reuwel doesn’t. Perhaps it begins the day he offers to go to the lake.

“Where we met,” Uriel explains.

“We met on the road.” Reuwel draws a softened brow in confusion. Yes, adulthood suits him more, Uriel decides.

“The lake a mile behind your house.”

Reuwel pulls the sleeves down to his wrists. Uriel remembers now, that it started in the last life when he was thirteen. Uriel didn’t understand until he remembered. But this life is different. Now, he remembers everything, from the butterfly in his palm to the blood like wine.

“I don’t want to,” Reuwel murmurs.

In the last life, Uriel thought it best to let him be. But he wants it to be different. This time, he takes Reuwel’s hands and pushes up his sleeves.

“Uri--,” he protests, but Uriel is speaking already.

“It’s because of this.” Uriel doesn’t ask questions. He stopped asking questions a long time ago. Instead, he states what he wants simply. It’s Reuwel’s--the human’s--job to ask, to be curious, and Uriel’s job to answer and guide. That is how it should have been, but it is not. Uriel doesn’t like it.

“It…” Reuwel takes a shuddering breath. Under layers of fragile bone and muscle and mind, his heart beats. Uriel wishes he could hear it, because this Reuwel of fragility is not the Reuwel he knew. Uriel wishes he never asked, that it would be the same as always, because he would live the same life countless more times if it meant he could live it with Reuwel.

“Sorry,” Uriel apologizes, and only he knows why he means it.

“It’s okay.” When Uriel tries to replace his friend’s sleeves, a child’s soft hand covers his own. “You can ask me, you know. It’s okay if it’s you.”

It’s okay if it’s you. Silently, Uriel agrees. It’s okay if it’s Reuwel, everything is okay if it’s for his friend’s sake. Uriel doesn’t roll down Reuwel’s sleeves, but he doesn’t ask about the cuts either. He’s done enough for today.

xvi. tower

This time is different, Uriel decides as he pads in his socks back to his bed in the Manhattan apartment. So why is he leaving Reuwel to spill wine in the bathroom again?

Uriel tries to keep memories of the last life from his nightmares. Rich people spill richly, and Reuwel is rich in only one sense. He has no money, but he spills richly, intoxicating, and Uriel wants him to stop. He does nothing to change it.

Reuwel will die again. That is just how it is. The world will end again, and Uriel (Satan) can do nothing to stop it. But, perhaps, he can change it. He can disrupt God’s pattern.

He can destroy the world before Reuwel dies.

xvii. star

It takes Uriel a month to come up with a plan that will destroy God’s world. It is not his job to save Reuwel’s life, but destroy everyone else’s. If that requires breaking the countries apart, he will do it. It’s not a matter of if, but of how.

He figures it out.

“I can’t believe it.” Reuwel’s smile is dazzling. He laughs deep in his chest, and Uriel finds it hard to believe that he is so sad. “A job in Kiev? I told you you were smart.”

“It’s just an interview.” Uriel hauls his computer bag onto his shoulder. “I may not even get it.”

“Of course you will.” Reuwel tails him down the hall to the kitchen. “You’re a genius, I’m telling you. I just…” he bounces onto the counter, swinging bare feet. “It’ll be lonely without you.”

“I’ll be back,” he promises.

“In a month.”

“Three weeks.” Three weeks to start a war. He’ll only be in Kiev two days, but Reuwel doesn’t need to know that. Three weeks of country-hopping, of turning these mortals against one another, and a day to get back to Manhattan before Reuwel is swept along with the chaos as well.

“Still.” Reuwel offers him a grin when he passes in a vain search for his passport. When Reuwel comes up behind him, he puts it in Uriel’s hand. “Three weeks is a lot. But you’ll call, right?”

“I will.”

“When you land?” Uriel nods. “And when you take off?” Nod. Reuwel crosses his arms. “I’m just... worried, I guess. Sorry.”

Uriel snags his suitcase on the way out the door. He pauses in the doorway before turning around. “Promise me…”

“Promise what?”

“Stay safe,” Uriel wishes in lieu of everything else he wants Reuwel to promise him. Eventually, after fishing for words on a long breath that puffs his chest, Uriel decides simply on, “Stay.”

He heaves his bags out the door.

xviii. moon

Uriel calls home on a payphone in Nice. It only rings once, even though Reuwel was probably asleep. But Uriel couldn’t wait for him to wake.

“Hi,” Reuwel greets with a yawn that sounds stuffy over the phone. “It’s four am.”

“Sorry. I had to call.”

Uriel can almost hear Reuwel’s nod of agreement. “No problem. I’m glad you did.” His voice lowers, the static of a whisper exploding in Uriel’s ear. “How’s the interview going so far?”

“Alright,” he answers vaguely. “How are things over there?”

Reuwel’s voice only lowers further. “The news is exploding lately. Something about a new age of arm’s race. Ukraine and Russia are...Isn’t Kiev in Ukraine? Are you okay, Uriel?”

“I’m fine.” Uriel leans on the plastic-glass and looks up at the stars. “It’s nothing to worry about. They must be keeping it a secret...or something. Hey, my time’s almost up.”

“Expensive payphone?”

“Expensive payphone,” Uriel repeats distantly. The payphone is not expensive. “I’ll see you in a few weeks. Stay safe.”

“You too.”

He hangs the phone on its receiver and hurries away from the airport.

xix. sun

In Cairo, Uriel runs into his first problem. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi simply cannot see him today. So Uriel resigns himself to the streets, where the stone melts the soles of his shoes and dries his skin as if potato peels have been poorly stapled there instead.

He goes searching for a payphone. It is here that Uriel runs into his second problem.

America has cut off foreign contact. They’re hiding, he realizes, and that means he cannot contact Reuwel.

xx. judgement

Uriel sneaks back into America through a refugee movement that gets him past the Canadian border and straight into New York. He doesn’t realize how quickly the world had crumbled.

Manhattan has been evacuated. When Uriel tries to call Reuwel on his cellphone, the call drops after the first ring. So, praying though he knows he has no right, Uriel takes the steps up to the apartment three at a time.

Uriel finds Reuwel on the sitting room couch, window open to the dead flowers in the box. He sighs, nudges his friend’s feet out of the way, and sits to wait for the world to end.

He does not find the peace he was looking for. But, he thinks grimly to himself, this is what he wanted. To be alone with the only true person in the world forever.

“You’re home,” Reuwel murmurs, rubbing brown eyes the same rich shade as his skin. “I was worrying about you. I kept your advice. I stayed.”

Uriel says nothing. There’s nothing he could say, not when he can see Reuwel’s wrists beneath his sleep-crumpled sleeves, and only wonder to himself if that is his punishment for ruining this world. It is a fair trade after all, and God is only fair--one awful thing is made better, and a perfect thing must be slashed up in return.

“Uriel,” Reuwel asks after a while. “Did you have something to do with this?”

“This?” Uriel mimics, though he knows what Reuwel means.

“The war.” It’s not accusatory, but Reuwel never was. He is only inquisitive, only fair, and he does not interact. Reuwel is better than humans, better than the world.

“I only wanted to help you.” And then, because he only got to truly apologize to Reuwel once before, he adds, “I’m sorry.”

“This is what you wanted, right?” Reuwel asks, gesturing to the trio of airplanes like angry hornets streaking across the sky. “You wanted them to kill each other.”

“I wanted you to live,” Uriel corrects him. “Because I am Satan, and this is my punishment. I have to live until I learn to love you.”

“You didn’t love me already?” Reuwel sighs, leaning back over the arm of the couch to watch the empty, withered stems of flowers rock with the shock of the bombs across the coast. “That’s cold.”

“I did,” he admits. “For a while.”

“How long?”

“Years.” But years are short, so he tries to say lives, but those are short as well. “Eternities.”

Reuwel hums a response. “So why are you still here?”

“It stops when you die, so we’ll have to wait until then.”

This time in agreeable company, Uriel (Satan) settles back on the couch in Manhattan to listen to the world end.

xxi. world

The world does not end with its own destruction like Uriel expected. But instead, on the evening of August the third, two years after he left for Kiev, when he was trying to eat his dinner.

Uriel feels it. He puts down his fork, the only sound in the silent apartment.

“What’s wrong?” Reuwel asks.

Uriel looks out the window over the couch. “That’s it,” he announces. This is the end of the world.

Reuwel glances around. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

“The last human is dead.” Uriel looks at Reuwel pointedly. “Besides you.”

“This is what you wanted.”

Uriel nods. This is what he wanted. When Reuwel reaches across the table for the salt, Uriel stops his hand and turns it over, tracing the crisscross of long-faded scars with the pad of his thumb. Reuwel only reaches for the salt with his other hand, and asks, eyes on his plate, “What happens now?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Reuwel agrees, cheeks ballooning around his food. “I guess it doesn’t.”

He saved Reuwel, and now, he gets to live his life. His life was never a punishment for hating humans, but a game he finally figured out the answer to--if God wanted him to love so much, then he will, on his own terms.

All that’s left to figure out now is what will happen when one of them finally dies. But that, Uriel decides, picking up his fork again, is a bridge to burn another day.

xxii. fool

Uriel knows when Reuwel finally dies. He had years left, lifetimes, so long that Uriel at first wonders if he’s mistaken. And though he knows that, however much he may want to spite God, He is never wrong.

Reuwel dies for the last time in the bathtub in Manhattan. Uriel presses his ear to the door, listening to the drip drip drip of wine on the tile.

Somewhere, somehow, he went wrong. And this time, he may not be able to change it. Uriel sits in the silent hallway, tuned in only to the dripping on the other side of the door, until it slows and stops and the sun sets and rises again.

Maybe, and this is only a passing thought like a gunshot of despair, Uriel would have lost anyway.

“Do you repent?” God asks.

Satan wonders if all of the butterflies have disappeared yet. They only hang their head.

“You are sad,” God tries. “You have no right to be.”

“I know,” Satan (Uriel) murmurs. They are not allowed to be sad or angry or thrash their teeth and rip apart whatever humans aren’t rotten yet.

“Do you repent?” But He knows the answer. Satan will only tell the truth to Reuwel, because only Reuwel deserved the truth.

“I do not.”

The world does not begin anew.

Satan (Uriel)  watches the sun rise and fall from the window. After far too long of this, they go searching for butterflies.