Say Hallelujah, Say Goodnight

Chapter One: The Begining

Humankind has always had the notion that it is neutral. A pervasive school of thought has endured for thousands of years and through the rise and fall of dozens of trendy religions that says people have the choice, even the responsibility, to be good or bad. Righteous or evil. Heaven or Hell.
People are wrong. And people have been wrong for thousands of years.
No person is born a clean slate. They are free of sin, sure, free of vices and humours and evils, but so were demons, once. No, people are born with souls already predisposed to one of two things: golden souls belong to the Light, silver souls belong to the Dark. They can fight their natures all they want, but good people will be good in the end, and bad people will be bad. That is humanity's one truth.
But, then again.
There are sometimes situations where things are, figuratively, a little less black and white. Or, literally, a little less silver and gold. Things are murky. Unclear. People can be swayed; people can be won over.
Those souls, those contested ones, those are Louis' responsibility.
But it's not simple, not as easy as snapping his fingers, batting his eyelashes, and coercing a human to behave, to be righteous, to be good.
No, for every drop of good in the bucket, there's a drop of bad to match. Nature needs balance. For every golden soul born into the world, there's a silver one born too. For every guardian angel protecting the innocent, the virtuous, the pure, there's a crossroads demon making deals with the corrupt.
For every soldier of the Light, there's a warrior for the Dark.
So to balance Louis, there's a Harry.
And they've been dancing for millennia.

But, of course, it wasn't always that way.

Elis, Greece | AD 41
There's a boy sitting just over there with hemlock woven in his hair, and for a moment, just a brief moment, Louis wonders if he's an angel.
But, no. He shouldn't be; couldn't be, in fact. Louis, by right of his given place in the cosmos and all, knows every single angel born or made. He's a Dominion, after all, and that's what they do — angels are their purview. Every other immortal being spends their time wrapped up in themselves or their offerings or the humans that outnumber them like ants around a spider; they make sure the humans don't get wild ideas in their heads to do something ridiculous that'll blow up the planet; they stand at the Gates and judge the humans who want to enter, or they lounge in comfort behind the Gates and laugh at the mortals who are turned away.
But not Louis. Not the other Dominions. Their job is to watch the angels and the other immortals, the minors and majors and those that call themselves gods now and those who are trying to pass as humans. Every angel is Louis' to guide, to watch, which means he knows every single one of them, their names and ranks and fears and triumphs.
And Louis might have spent the last year caught up in the Caligula drama in the Roman courts, but he never forgets any of his angels. Those are his brothers, his sisters, his family; new angels aren't created so often that he wouldn't recognize one in front of him. 
And yet, there's a boy sitting on a steep set of stark stone stairs, and he wears hemlock in his hair, and he looks like a face that Louis should recognize. 
A breeze ruffles the chiton around the boy's knees, the cloth white as untouched snow, his feet wrapped in rough sandals and crossed delicately at the ankle. The hemlock sits like a crown on his head, little white blossoms of poison braided through dark, curled hair. He's watching the crowd around him as though it's more interesting to study them than to interact with them; his every expression is so clear it's like plucking a thought directly out of his head. He doesn't like that man in the bright, flashy blue standing at the Phillipeon and staring at the statue of Alexander as though he too will one day have the epithet "the Great" attached to his name; he thinks that the priest's apprentice currently scrubbing the grime off the frieze that runs along the front of the temple doesn't deserve his honored position and that he himself could do a much better job; he thinks that the girls giggling nearby and peering at him from behind the palaestra are silly and superficial.
The boy scans the crowd; Louis can't see his eyes, wonders at their color, wonders at their depth. Louis wonders if he lives near here, if the Grecians are so used to him that none of them stop and do a double-take anymore; Louis, in direct contrast, can't pull his gaze away. 
The boy keeps scanning, keeps scanning, and then his eyes catch on Louis and it's like Louis has been pinned. They watch each other, angel and boy, as though sizing each other up.
The boy gets to his feet. Louis has a moment — ten seconds, perhaps — to decide. Does he run? Does he stay? Louis isn't supposed to interact with the humans, technically, they aren't his worry.
Well, they weren't his worry, but then Louis watches the boy trip and nearly get run over by a chariot, and he starts to think that maybe he's a little worried about this one after all.
"Τί πράττεις," the boy greets when he's finally (safely) crossed the road. He's pink-cheeked from the near-miss with the chariot, but otherwise fine. "I'm Herakleitos."
Glory of Hera. Well, it's a fitting name, as the boy could pass for Hera herself with his wild, unrestrained curls and pale, soft skin, the feminine bow of his lips and the faint flush of his cheeks.
Louis smiles and digs in his head for the proper return greeting — sometimes it takes a while, all those languages rattling against each other up there, some of them not even invented yet — but the boy continues before he can say a word.
"You were watching me," he says.
"You're very beautiful," Louis replies honestly.
"Oh." It seems to stop the boy — Herakleitos — in his tracks. Then he smiles, and in that moment Louis loses his ability to catch the breath he doesn't need, his throat going dry like an old well. "That's alright, then."
He lives just in the Pisatis district, north of the river, or so he tells Louis, but his mother is in a malaise and his sister is off with her friends, so he's come to see Hera in her temple. Maybe an offering will soothe his mother's headache and his sister's irritability, he says, and shows Louis the lump of honey candy he'd smuggled out from under his mother's nose. 
"Hera likes sweets best," the boy whispers, as though Hera's statue, her marble ears, could hear. Maybe he thinks that's true — it's not, as Hera is miles away on top of her mountain engrossed in her own affairs, but something about the gesture strikes Louis as endearing. 
"I saw Hera, not too long ago," Louis says. "Nice lady."
And then he remembers that Hera, to this boy, is an untouchable goddess. Not someone who can just be popped in to check on from time to time, not someone name-dropped casually into conversation. Not just another immortal in the legions that exist, who Louis has met countless times in the millennia before this boy's branch of the family tree even blossomed.
Louis pretends to inspect the nearest temple's cornices so as not to watch the dawning realization cross Herakleitos' face. He can feel the boy's brow wrinkling in confusion, can already hear the polite excuse so he can get away from the madman saying he's chatted with the gods. 
And this is why Louis doesn't often actually talk to the humans, no matter how much he might want to.
Herakleitos, though, doesn't mock or run or back away, muttering prayers for safety. Instead, he laughs, bright and loud like the horns on the warships out at sea, and the noise startles a pair of geese who had been minding their own business in a small fountain nearby.
"You're very strange," he says with a grin.
"You have no idea," Louis tells him truthfully.
Herakleitos gestures widely behind himself, his eyes still caught on Louis' face. "Sit with me?"
The Greeks were the ones who gave meaning to the olive branch in the first place, and this certainly feels like one being extended right now. Louis shouldn't, he knows; Hera herself — who really is a perfectly nice lady but also quite a jealous old thing — would roll right off her throne if she knew one of her worshippers brought an angel to her temple. If she was in a really bad mood, something like this might even start a war, and Louis would never hear the end of it from the boys Upstairs.
But then Herakleitos says, "Please?" and, for some reason, that works. Louis inclines his head and Herakleitos grins once more, wide and dimpled, his eyes alight. He gestures again and Louis falls in step, the two of them weaving across the busy road and through the crowds flowing to the marketplace outside of the gates.
They're outside the edge of the Olympian sanctuary, a sacred spot of land where all the temples and memorials and important villas are grouped conveniently together on top of a hill. The sanctuary is blocked in by thick walls, outside of which cats lay supine on sun-warmed limestone and children chase each other as their parents gossip and bargain. Louis lets himself fall a half-step behind Herakleitos, up the steep stairs he'd been sitting on earlier, through the Propylon, the great gate winged by tall, thick columns, and into the sanctuary proper. Hera's temple is the first building inside the gate, modest compared to the temple of her husband but no less powerful in Louis' eyes, pulsing with the ancient sigils and seals meant to keep immortals such as himself away but that are invisible to the eyes of the humans who come and go.
The peripteros, the boundary line around the temple made by bleached stone columns, is Hera's last line of defence to keep out anyone unwelcome. But Louis is more powerful than she or her devotees will ever be, and he passes between two of the columns and into her courtyard with no more than a light shudder. 
"You didn't give me your name," Herakleitos says as they take a seat at a bench near another fountain. The stone isn't really comfortable, but it is warm from the midday sun. 
"I'm Louis," he answers. It's a truthful answer as much as it is an outright lie; Louis will be Louis one day, or maybe that day starts today, but he also is and forever will be known as Leilel among the immortal classes. Still, he prefers Louis. Less ancient and clunky.
"Louis," Herakleitos repeats slowly, the syllables foreign in his mouth. "I've not heard that before, what does it mean?"
"Famous battle. It's French," Louis answers unthinkingly. And then he realizes. "Or that's what it will mean. Someday." That's not making it any better. "When French is invented." And that's the worst thing he could say at all.
Still, though, Herakleitos smiles delightedly, like Louis is his favorite new form of entertainment.
"So strange," he repeats to himself, shaking his head a little. Then, "Louis. I like it."
Louis finds himself biting back his own smile. "I'm glad."
"Where do you come from?" Herakleitos asks, head tilted. "Not Greece."
"No, not Greece," Louis agrees. He considers saying, I'm from Heaven, actually, and if you look hard enough you'll see my wings just to see Herakleitos smile his bemused smile again, but he decides to play it safe. "I was in Rome, and when the new emperor took over I was able to leave, so I came here." He doesn't mention that he had to leave because the new emperor took over, his job finished and history continuing as it was meant to do, but that's also probably for the best.
"You're not Roman," Herakleitos disputes. "I have friends who are Roman, you are not anything like them."
Louis isn't anything like anyone but, again, that's not exactly something he can say. He dithers for a moment, watching a hawk dip overhead. It's quiet here, among the silent stone and trickling fountains, the statues not able to give away any of Louis' secrets. Worshippers and priests are respectful in their quiet discussions, heads together as they confer about the needs of their gods or their own small, tiny lives, the chattering crowds of Elis outside the sanctuary made quiet by the thick gate and walls.
"That's not what Zeus looks like," Louis says instead. He nods towards the god's temple, larger and more ornate than his wife's. The statue of Zeus visible in the space between columns is, frankly, ridiculous, sitting tall and judgmental over everyone else, his chest like barrels tied together, his legs mighty and muscular, his hair like coiled ringlets. Louis suddenly wishes he had a reason to visit Olympus, if only to poke fun at Zeus' wish fulfillment in the form of ivory and gold, and to ask if he personally visited the artist himself to make sure the statue came out exactly as he wanted.
"Oh?" Herakleitos chuckles. "Did you meet him when you met Hera?"
Louis was there when Zeus plucked his first lightning bolt from the sky, actually, the same way he was there when Quetzacoatl was given his wings and when Amaterasu and her siblings painted the landscape of the island they'd claimed for themselves. He was there when the earth Became, and he will be there when the earth dies.
But, also, yes; he did see Zeus the last time he met with Hera to discuss their family's ridiculous squabbles and revenges, so he gives the easy (well, easier) answer.
"Yes," he says. "And he's much shorter than you'd think."
"That says quite a lot, coming from you," Herakleitos says mildly, and Louis turns to him, a shocked hand pressed to his chest.
"I am perfectly normal sized," Louis disputes. "I checked to make sure before I came here."
"Of course," Harry says, then laughs again. The sound rings against the stones and trees, pure joy conjured up by Louis that lights him up inside like manna, like an offering in his name; he's greedy with the sound, hoarding it, knowing without a doubt it's a greater gift than Hera could ever deserve. 
From outside their little bubble inside the column boundary, there comes a low whistle. A girl stands nearby, her long hair tied up and bound by a kekryphalos of gold netting, the thread shining in the sun, her chiton dyed the distinctive pink of madder root. "Herakleitos," she calls. "Mother is calling for you."
"I have to go," Herakleitos apologizes, getting to his feet. His sister flicks a curious glance at Louis, but doesn't say a word as he hesitates, as though he doesn't quite want to leave. Louis understands completely.
Still, meandering, somewhat meaningless conversations can't last forever. Louis waves his hand. "It's fine. Ὑπίαινε, Harry."
"That's not my name."
Louis just grins; Herakleitos is doing that smile again, the bemused one, like it's a private joke between them even if he doesn't quite understand.
"Harry," Herakleitos echoes, rolling the word around. Then, as though it was his idea in the first place, says, "Yes. I'll take it."
"Good," Louis chuckles. "Now go, your mother's waiting."
Harry follows his sister, tugging playfully at a curl of hair that's escaped her hair net. The sanctuary seems duller now, even the sigils on the temples pulsing less brightly than they were before; sound rushes back in now that Louis isn't hanging on Harry's every word, idle conversation and the wind harmonizing around him.
"Will you be here tomorrow?"
Louis jumps, turns. Harry is there once more, watching him, leaned against a white pillar. Not quite pleadingly, not quite hopeful. Like he's already resigned to a no, and he's telling himself it's okay. Still, there's something there that makes Louis want to say yes, that tells him Harry wants that too. To say of course, to say I'm not leaving anytime soon.
But no. He shouldn't be here tomorrow. There's a man dying in China and he's taking his dynasty with him, there's a civilization in the deserts of what will someday be the New World that could use help pulling water from the ground to survive, there's a Grecian goddess on a nearby mountain who Louis should probably placate since he used her temple as an excuse to talk to a human boy with a lopsided, wonderful grin.
But.
"Yes," Louis says. "I'll be here."
The smile on Harry's face is worth anything Hera could throw at him.