All It Takes

Juran looked down at the young woman from where he was floating. With her ink-black hair pulled back, revealing her delicate profile, the woman gingerly made her way toward the narrow alley, her boots sinking into the thick snow. One hand pulled her worn jacket tight around her shoulders, the other trailing an umbrella along the snow. “Why am I out in this biting cold?” she asked herself, as a shiver racked her body. Steamed buns, she remembered. She had a sudden urge for steamed buns, of all things. Which was strange, because she did not even like them.

A few streets away a man who appeared quite young, with a slender but not frail build, found himself in a similar situation. With the bus service suddenly suspended he had no choice but to brave the weather and walk home. But even though he had walked this route many times before, he took a turn, and then another, and to his utter bewilderment, found himself lost. The snow had seemingly rearranged the streets into something unrecognizable, every corner looking like the last, every alley a quiet white mirror of the next.

Floating serenely overhead, Juran smiled smugly at his machinations.

As a newly graduated love angel, Juran had chosen this moment carefully. Of his three interventions, he had chosen to spend the first one here, in the snow, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Because look at it, just look at it, he thought. The rooftops were draped in white. The alley ahead was a perfect, narrow corridor of quiet. When the man and the woman walked into it from opposite ends, it would look like a scene from a painting. The kind they hung in museums and people stood in front of for hours without speaking.

Juran had been mocked for this, of course.

“The 118-life pair?" Luna had asked with sardonic delight. "You chose the 118-life pair as your first assignment?"

"I wanted a challenge," Juran had replied.

“So you chose Titanic?” she asked. Then immediately clarified, “I mean the ship, not the blockbuster film.”

Luna was from the Department of Misery. Juran felt this explained everything.

The Department of Misery was, in his considered opinion, the great institutional injustice of the celestial order. Obscenely overstaffed, absurdly well-resourced. An entire army of super angels who could bend circumstance, redirect fate, and show up at the precise moment of maximum impact with the efficiency of a well-funded operation. All for spreading misfortune and unhappiness.

Where was the justice in this.

Juran had raised this concern in a departmental review. He had suggested, with what he felt was compelling logic, that if the resources and powers allocated to Misery were redistributed even partially toward Love, the net result for humanity would be transformative. The review committee had listened politely, though he had noticed a few eye rolls. Luna had somehow heard about it and had been insufferable for weeks.

But even Juran’s supervisor, the usually unflappable Elder Maris, had looked at him with something that might generously be called concern, and more accurately pity, when she found he had chosen the 118-life pair.

"Juran," she had said, in the voice of someone choosing their words with great care, "do you understand that seventeen of our most senior angels have worked this case?"

"Yes."

"And that across one hundred and eighteen lifetimes, this couple has been in the same city sixty-three times, the same neighbourhood twenty-two times, the same room on at least twelve occasions —"

"I know."

"— and has still never managed to look each other in the eyes?"

"That," Juran had said, with great feeling, "is exactly why I'm taking the case."

There had been a long silence.

"You're going to be fine," Elder Maris had said, in a tone that suggested she believed approximately none of it.

But matches like these were Juran’s purpose. Souls that, in this eternal loop of lives, only found each other once in thousands of years. If the stars and timing and a stubborn love angel all conspired together. Though this pair had been unlucky for eleven dozen lifetimes, that wasn't going to deter him.

The alley was just ahead of them now. Juran drifted forward, watching with the intensity of a mother duck herding her ducklings.

The woman was approaching from the south end. The man from the north. The alley was narrow—barely wide enough for two people to pass. There was no crowd, no noise, no distraction. Just snow, and silence, and two people who had no idea that the universe had been trying to introduce them for over a hundred lifetimes.

Juran pressed his hands together.

They stepped into the alley.

Just look up, Juran thought, with every atom of his being.

With all the meddling he was allowed to do, the rules were simple—he could not manifest physically or make them look into each other’s eyes. They had to do that part all by themselves.

But Juran was leaving nothing to chance.

The girl's boot punched through a thin crust of snow and she stumbled, catching herself with a small, undignified sound.

The man looked up.

And...the sky fell.

Not a patina of frost. Not a few wayward, picturesque flakes drifting down like something out of a snow globe. Not the kind of gentle, cinematic snowfall that Juran had so carefully, so lovingly selected this moment for. No. The sky opened its mouth and poured. A wall of white, sudden and absolute, as if the clouds had been holding it in for hours and had chosen this precise second to let go.

The woman yelped and fumbled with her umbrella, fingers working fast, and snapped it open above her head. Tucking her chin down, she kept moving.

The man, for his part, made no sound at all. He simply dropped his head in shock, and pressed forward.

They passed each other in approximately four seconds.

Neither looked up.

Juran hung in the air above the alley, utterly still, snow falling through him the way it always did because he was, after all, not entirely a physical thing.

He stayed there for a long moment.

A very long moment.

“What…,” Juran thought, with a quietness that was more alarming than a scream, “…was that.”

He looked up at the sky. Which, having apparently decided its work here was done, was already beginning to ease.

Juran kept staring at it, but it offered no explanation.

A sudden burst of laughter, high and light, broke the quiet.

He didn't need to turn around to know who it was.

Luna materialized beside him with the easy, unhurried grace of someone who had marked this date in her calendar, set a reminder, and arrived early to get a good spot. An angel of misery witnessing misery firsthand.

"I was in the neighborhood," she said.

Juran ignored her.

"I wanted to witness history," she said with an expression of exaggerated reverence. "The 118-life pair, finally finding each other."

Juran’s jaw clenched.

"Though I suppose we're calling them the 119-life pair now." she added with a hum of appreciation of someone who relished a good catastrophe.

“They still have this whole lifetime to find each other,” Juran pointed out, on the verge of losing his patience.

‘Right” Luna said. “A hundred and eighteen lifetimes. Surely this is the one” she added with an eyeroll.

With a dismissive “can’t wait," and a mocking two fingered wave, she was gone.

Leaving Juran floating above the alley. Looking down at the two sets of footprints running parallel in the snow, never quite meeting.

***

Fifteen years later

Juran floated above the pedestrian crossing on a Tuesday afternoon, hands clasped behind his back, watching. Below him, on opposite sides of the road, two people were waiting for the light to change. The woman was checking her phone. The man was adjusting the strap of his bag. Neither of them knew the other existed.

Having spent decades as an involuntary biographer of their lives, Juran knew everything about them. He knew that the woman had a job that she loved. The man had moved apartments thrice, owned five plants, and none of them had survived. That she laughed loudest at things that weren't meant to be funny. That he had a habit of reading the last page of a book, finding comfort in knowing everything was going to be alright in the end.

And Juran also knew the number of times they crossed paths and missed each other.

They had been in the same city for fifteen years. They had been on the same subway line, same general hour, for a period of four months in year three. And their paths had crossed a total of nineteen times. They had managed to do all this over a decade without ever once looking at each other long enough to matter.

He had tried to match them of course. Once in year seven and then again in year eleven. The details of which he had reconstructed, deconstructed, and buried so deeply in his memory that they now existed only as a kind of formless, wordless shape that he referred to internally as The Incidents. And after each one, without fail, Luna had found him. Every single time. He was not going to think about what she had said. He was simply not going to do it. There were limits to what an angel could revisit on a Tuesday afternoon and remain functional.

And then there was the misdial.

The man had been trying to reach a restaurant, had misdialed, and had somehow, in the spectacular lottery of misdials, connected directly to her. They had spoken for forty seconds. She had laughed once, and told him he had the wrong number. He had apologized, charmed and a little flustered. She had said it was no problem. They had both lingered. A kind of pause that is either the beginning of something or the end of it.

It had been the end of it.

She had hung up. The restaurant, when he finally reached it, had been fully booked.

Juran had gone home then. A quiet between-space where angels went when they needed to not feel too much, and had stayed there for a while.

The hardest part for Juran was knowing what they were missing.

They had built good lives. Objectively, measurably good lives. They were fine. They would probably always be fine. Especially not knowing what they were missing. That was the particular cruelty of it. You couldn't mourn something you'd never known. They would live full, complete, genuinely happy lives, and somewhere underneath all of it would just be this faint, sourceless sense of something unfinished.

Soul-deep peace, Juran thought. That was what the scrolls called it. The specific, unreplicable peace of being known by the person who was made to know you. Transcendent was the word Elder Maris used. It wasn't happiness exactly. Happiness came and went, happiness was weather. This was more like ground. The feeling of standing on something that would never move.

He wanted that for them so badly it was almost embarrassing.

Juran watched as the light was about to turn green. They were perhaps twenty feet apart, on opposite sides of the crossing, waiting.

This was the last time. The last time their paths would cross in this lifetime. After today, the geography of their lives would simply stop overlapping, and that would be that. And since he had no more interventions left, he was completely useless to them. No longer their angel, but a mere spectator.

So why was he here, exactly?

He had asked himself this on the way over. And a thought, highly unpleasant, almost masochistic for an angel, had occurred to him—maybe they didn't need him. Maybe, after one hundred and eighteen lifetimes of almost, the almost had built up into something. Maybe the universe could nudge two people into looking at each other across a crossing.

It was, he acknowledged, an extremely optimistic reading of events considering everything.

But he was here. And they were here. And the walk signal flickered on.

They stepped off the curb.

She was looking slightly to the left of him. He was looking slightly to the right of her.

Fifteen feet.

Look up, Juran thought, with everything he had, with every atom of belief he had carried.

Ten feet.

Look at each other.

Time slowed. The city noise fell away. The other pedestrians blurred. The whole world compressed itself down to two people, five feet apart, walking through the same patch of light.

They passed each other in the next beat.

Of course they did.

Juran just hung there. Not even surprised.

Right, Juran thought, to no one.

Right then.

He supposed he should file the report and started to turn.

Just then came a sharp crack and a cry, followed by an old woman falling onto the pavement at the edge of the crossing. She was tremendously old, one frail hand gripping her impacted hip, the other reaching for a cane that had escaped several feet away.

Juran stilled where he was floating. On one side of the road, the woman stopped and turned. On the other side, so did the man.

With his non-existent heart in his throat, Juran watched them both run toward the old woman.

They arrived simultaneously, both crouching, both entirely focused on the small woman between them. The man retrieved the cane. The woman took her hand. Together, without a word exchanged, they helped her up.

And still. Still. They hadn’t looked at each other.

Just as the woman gave the old lady one last satisfied look and began to pull back, a wrinkled hand shot out and caught her sleeve. For someone who had just fallen, the old woman’s grip was remarkable as she shoved her.

Startled, the woman gasped as she pitched forward. But she was caught mid-fall. Her stumble absorbed entirely into the steadiness of the man. She came to rest in his arms. She looked up, slightly out of breath. And he looked down.

They looked at each other.

Juran pressed both hands over his mouth. Holding back tears he was not, technically, capable of crying.

Because they were looking at each other. Into each other’s eyes.

Lips parted, eyes shining, there was a flash of something across both their faces–not recognition exactly, because they had never met, not in this life, not in any life they could remember. I know you, it said, in a language neither of them had words for, and needed none.

The city continued around them. A bus went past. Someone's phone rang.

Neither of them moved.

It lasted four seconds perhaps.

It was, Juran thought, the smallest thing in the world.

It was, Juran thought, absolutely everything.

It was over. He did it. Though he realised, he hadn't really done anything.

Remembering her, he looked for the old woman. He thought, suddenly, what if angels have angels too?

When he found her, she was already walking away. With a step so light it was almost smug, the bent back was gone, there was no limp.

Wait, Juran thought, what… his thought trailed as he moved toward her —

She was nearly at the edge of the crowd now, about to disappear into the ordinary afternoon that had somehow contained the most extraordinary moment.

As if she heard him, she raised her hand.

Just two fingers. A small, lazy wave.

A wave he had seen and detested so many times before.

And realisation dawned.

Oh, Juran thought.