Dreams of Angels, and the Falling Thereof

Ministration 2.2

Three cups of coffee later, and I felt no better. On further inspection, I was fairly certain that the murky brown water the motel's coffee machine had impotently drizzled into my cup didn't even have any caffeine in it. Rather than coffee, the fluid tasted as though someone had stirred dirt into lukewarm tap water. Admittedly, this particular flavor sensation was quite similar to what most teas tasted like. Coffee, though. Coffee was supposed to be better. Messing up coffee this immensely felt like some sacred infringement, as though I'd desecrated holy ground. It was wrong, immoral, inhuman--well, insuperhuman--to make and consume coffee like this.

I took another sip. I was, after all, part of the problem. Horrible or not, I needed to rouse my system from the suffocating shroud of drowsiness.

"Are you good?" Jada asked, without moving to look at me. "You sound like you'd rather be doing literally anything else than drinking that right now."

"I really would," I took another sip, screwing up my face in exaggerated discontent. "And yet, here I am. Doing it anyway." I could practically hear her rolling her eyes from the bathroom.

I downed the rest of the coffee in one, resisting the urge to spit it back out as I was hit with the full extent of the taste. The styrofoam cup joined the other two at the bottom of the waste bin beside the bed.

Jada's room was nearly identical to mine, right down to the mildew beneath the sink. She had invited me in after catching me pacing about the halls. I was sitting on her mattress, as she straightened her hair out in front of the bathroom mirror. The only noticeable difference between her room and mine was a small, thin quilt spread across the top of the bed bed. It looked handmade, made up of pink and blue, scattered without pattern across it. I ran my fingers between two of the squares, feeling the rough stitching.

"I'm guessing this is yours?"

"Mhm." Jada said, poking her half-combed head out from the bathroom. "Yeah. My mother made it while she was pregnant with me. Couldn't decide if she wanted a boy or a girl, so she just used both colours." Her lips split into a smile, and she chuckled under her breath. "Look at me, big bad monster hunter carrying around her mommy's blanket everywhere she goes. You must respect me at least 50% more now."

"If anything, it just makes it even harder to get a read on you people. I mean, one minute you're a bunch of practiced Angel-killers, the next you're telling me about your childhood blankie. It's a bit of whiplash."

"For a Mask, you sound an awful lot like someone who's never met a Mask before. We're people, jerk." She retracted her head, returning to sorting out the frizzy mass on her head. "People have childhood treasures. Well, some of them, anyway."

I shrugged. "Yeah. Some of them, for sure." I took a moment to pause, staring at the quilt. She couldn't have been much older than me, right? I was overwhelmingly curious to know why she had left home, if only to get a better sense of whether or not these people--I really should have figured out what they called themselves, using 'you people,' 'those people,' 'them crazy broads,' was getting confusing--could be trusted. I resisted the urge to ask, however, not wanting to spoil whatever goodwill I had with her.

I heard her set down something on the bathroom's linoleum countertop counter, and a moment later she stepped out, moving to lean against the door frame. Her hair was finally settled, it seemed. It hung in loose coils around her, cascading like a river of chocolate down her bare shoulders. I blinked.

"Not you, little miss runaway?"

"Wh-- Huh? Pardon?"

"You don't have anything you still hold onto from when you were younger?"