The minutes blurred into hours, the hours into something with no length at all. Maria's arms, which had once been alien, had become the only steady thing in the room. Her hums, her whispers, they no longer stung the way they had when he first arrived. They caressed him in a rhythm that felt, despite everything, human.
And yet the storm inside him hadn't stopped. As he closed his eyes, he dreamed. In the space between memory and meaning, he saw himself: old, bitter, standing at a podium giving a speech. Then he saw the boy on the shelter floor, wailing with no one to acknowledge his plight. Then Maria, kneeling beside a grave, weeping for someone he couldn't see.
As if from the depths of the dream, a voice spoke.
"Even the powerful must walk the fire of rebirth."
He turned around to see a figure cloaked in starlight, standing with hands folded behind its back.
"You're here to learn, John."
Learn what? he tried to say — but again, only the coo of a baby escaped him.
John had spent his final moments grasping at the pieces of himself that made any sense. His name, his legacy, his speeches, the polished wood of the Senate chamber, the crackle of applause on command. Now, as Gabriel, they were slipping away. Each memory arriving with more fog, more silence, a dimmer light behind it.
He tried to scream out who he had been, as if to forcefully jog his memory. But only soft hiccups answered him, from a body that had never agreed to obey him.
That was when the tears came flowing down. It was not the body's this time, but his.
John wept for the walls he'd built. For the voices he'd silenced with a signature and a folder marked NO. For the hands he'd never shaken because he'd never had to. He wept for every face in every room like this one that he had never once seen as anything but a number on a page.
And now here he was, not a senator, not anyone but a child. One of them.
For the first time in his life, and his afterlife, he saw them. Not as others. Not as a line item. Just as people, the way he had always insisted that he already saw everyone, without ever quite believing it himself.
Maybe this wasn't hell after all, he thought.
Maybe it was justice, just like the voice said.
And soon, after what felt like an eternity, another thought arrived, gentler than the rest. Maybe this was retribution. This time, it was not to be paid off in grand speeches or courtroom apologies, but in silence, in vulnerability, in starting over with nothing. For reasons Gabriel couldn't name, warmth spread through him. Not just his body's warmth, and not his mother's either. It was something else. It was something repairing.
He finally stopped fighting it. Later, as Maria fed him, he didn't recoil. His fingers curled around hers. He looked up at her, and for the first time, he didn't see her as 'other'. He saw her as home.
He had finally chosen to stay. To start over. Maybe, eventually, to belong.
But just as the thought settled into his now-fading mind, the voice from the dream whispered once more:
"One step closer. But redemption is not given. It is earned."
To Be Continued…