Joints

Joints
It was a quiet night in the city, the buildings glowing gently to themselves and only a few cars winding their way through the streets. If he was honest with himself, he had no idea where he was. There was a light cloud cover and the moon was full, making the whole sky glow a misty white. It was truly magnificent to sit there on the highest peak and look at the world that God had put there, but it was just as magnificent to look over the edge of the building, down the sheer glass and steel walls, at the world that man had put there.
He sighed in contentment. He had a hard job after all. There was a lot of this glorious world, both natural and artificial, that he had to protect not just with his like but his soul. He had lost friends, students, teachers and lovers during his job and had come to question whether he should just give up more times than there were humans on the face of the earth. Then he would find a brief lull in the fight, find himself a corner out of the way and sit. It was moments like this, where he could see the joint between worlds that made him remember why he fought.
He felt a drip on his face and, before he could overrule his reactions, he was pointing a sword at the sky, his left hand curled by his head and glowing with raw power. He knew it was rain, and he knew it wouldn't hurt him, but nerves tightened by hours of fighting had triggered reactions honed by centuries of killing.
He sheathed his sword without looking down from the sky, and absentmindedly shook the energy away from his hand. As it rippled through the air, spreading and diffusing into the natural energies found around the earth, rain gently fell onto it and sizzled to steam. He stood as the rain gently fell on and around him, slowly working its way up to a heavier patter, and appreciated another joint between worlds. As he stared, the city would be changing. People would move indoors, insects and such wouldn't come out and instead the night took on a deeper calm, with only the noise of the rain intruding on the thoughts of the passive figure.
He shook his head after what must have been ten minutes of staring. Water trickled from his face and gently slid down the light clothes he wore, black as the shadows he so often hid himself in, and black as the hair that waved gently in his face. He chuckled to himself as he saw another joint, between the rain and the dryness under his clothes. He quickly realised he was becoming absorbed in thought again, and became active. The figure that had been there, gently standing and merely observing the world suddenly became the foreground. Rather than being the observer, he was the interesting one.
He shook his head more vigorously and water flung across the air. After rubbing his eyes lightly, he stretched his limbs in turn, paying careful attention to each and making certain he was limber. That done he gestured to the air, and there was a sudden rush from behind him. What once contained nothing but air, now contained a pair of jet black wings. They were easy to hide, and the actual process took moments and practically no energy or thought, but it was unpleasant to have them constricted into dimensions of space that they shouldn't normally sit in.
A brief flap satisfied him that they were in working order and he proceeded to stretch them as if they were just another limb, which technically they were.
Without another second of hesitation, he ran back to the edge he had looked over and leapt over it. He plummeted, his wings tucked in around him to increase his aerodynamics and making him streamlined enough to accelerate father than anyone watching would have thought possible. A journey that would have take ten seconds to fall, took him less than three. The pavement raced towards him and he glanced sideways, seeing raindrops hanging perfectly in the air beside him as he matched and overtook them. The city was a blur of colour and light, flashes as each floor went past too quick for the human eye to trace. Fortunately for him, human was one noun that had been applied to him only by accident. His eyes flashed as fast as the floors, taking in the world as he fell in a series of still shots. Each one was another joint, between the one before it and the one after, the past and the future, the sky and the land, the natural and the artificial.
He gazed at the ground, time stretching to infinity behind and in front of him. His existence was a series of battles, never lost, and it would forever be until that fateful day that Lucifer himself managed to finally finish his task and kill him. His life was nothing but a countdown to his death, his freedom and choice limited to a few moments here and there, never long and never truly free. He had a temptation to finally let go. After all, his wards would notice his death but their worries would no longer be his, they wouldn't have a say in it. The ground edged closer, moving at a snail's pace as his mind raced, arguing back a forth about things he knew and had argued to himself on many occasions but still had not resolved.
Whilst he couldn't physically sigh, as he was travelling too fast, he mentally sighed and snapped open his wings. His descent turned from a graceful plummet into a swoop that took him within touching distance of the road. It wasn't deserted and he saw the telltale blur of yellow light from a car's headlights encroach on the corner of his vision. With a few powerful flaps, he sailed over it, and it shot under him speeding on into darkness again.
He swooped through the buildings, using them as a rudimentary obstacle course as he wound amongst them without thinking. He tried to focus on the pure joy of flight but found his mind drifted again to joints... this time much more subtle, the joint between the inside of a human dwelling to the outside... the joint between the rain and the air, the rain and the surface water, the energy of one and the passive power of the other.
He twitched one wing and spiralled down a tiny alleyway, flying perpendicular to the ground now. He wove his wings in a complex and demented looking wiggle to provide the thrust necessary to clear the long alley, before bursting out into another main street and levelling off. There were more lights here and they flashed and blinked invitingly at him. He pondered how simple it must be to live as a human, just to do what you wanted rather than the road laid out for you carefully by someone out of your control. Nobody in the entire city would have an enemy. Certainly, the country fought for petty things like land or power, but they weren't enemies.
He knew of an enemy, a being who devoted their entire life to harming you in any way they could, ranging from a petty insult to the final demonstration of loathing. Luckily, it had yet to come to that, but he and Lucifer had come to blows many times directly and they had never failed to hurt each other as much as they themselves were hurt. That was an enemy; not simply someone you disliked.
He redirected himself again, this time soaring up in a gently slope. He brushed the tops of buildings he flew over and gently touched clouds he flew under. He gazed at the city once more, and this time not just with his eyes but his ears and his nose. He could smell a thousand different things at the same time, all intertwining in a collage of a hundred thousand living beings in a small space. He could practically taste steel, the scent of hydrocarbons was heavy in the air and the cloying smell of living overpowered him for a moment.
Then there was the sound. Lord above it was perfect. The city caught in a moment of unawareness, the sound of the occasional car puncturing the gently percussion of the rain on a thousand different surfaces. People living in their houses and apartments made the brass notes of life itself. A dog bark gave some texture to the piece, and finally the glorious sound of the buildings as they hummed and groaned was the melody, cumulating the climax of the symphony and it all came together right here, in this place, at this time, for this person. He smiled widely to himself and casually flipped over so he was facing the moon and flying on his back.
The moon was just as breathtaking, and the sudden dampening of noise only pronounced it more to his mind. He revelled in what he protected, and sought redemption from his earlier thoughts in what the citizens of his world had achieved.
His wind drifted once more to joints, and this time he followed the trail of thought through;
"I am a joint myself," he muttered to the moon "for I am Azrael, I am more than any man and yet less only than the Divine himself. I am the joint between humanity and their God, and I am more powerful than both. I take the good from each side and leave the bad, or at least try to, just as all joints do.  I realise why I dwell on them so much, for everything I have witnessed in my lifetime is simply a joint. This entire world is but a joint between what was before, and what will be after. I need not worry about winning or losing, because I am merely a joint between our creation and our destruction.
"But then, maybe being a joint isn't a bad thing, after all I may be the equal of any human in spirit, and the equal of any divinity in power, but am I greater than all of creation? I cannot take that onto myself, and if creation is but a joint then who am I to complain about being a joint as well?
"I shall settle for my life as it is, predetermined and controlled but still Mine."
He felt a prickle at the edge of his mind and looked to his left. A sliver of light appeared briefly and vanished again. He sighed once more, before folding in his wings and dropping to the street again. Rather than open his wings, he simply landed and cracked the pavement. A cloud of dust shot up around him, obscuring him for a moment. With a wave of his hand, his wings vanished, and the dust condensed into larger balls of dirt that orbited his head. He looked in the direction of the flash, and began to run.