Chapter 71: Ch-71: Yosef’s Denial of Reality
Yosef looked down at his hands.
He held them there for a moment, palms open, as if something ought to still be in them -- something weighty, something that explained things -- but there was nothing.
Just skin, faint dust along the knuckles, the memory of pressure that had nowhere to settle now.
He flexed his fingers once, slowly, as though testing whether they still belonged to him in the same way they had an hour ago.
They did.
He slipped both hands into his pockets.
It was a small motion, but it steadied him. The kind of gesture you made when you needed to contain yourself without drawing attention to it.
He drew a breath through his nose and lifted his gaze back to the ceiling.
Four holes.
Three of them carried sunlight in steady, deliberate shafts that cut through the warm, sourceless glow of the garden without disturbing it.
The light didn’t compete. It simply joined. The fourth hole -- his eyes lingered on that one -- sat darker, sharper around the edges, as though it had not yet decided whether it belonged here.
He followed the lines of each opening, tracing their angles, their spread, the way the stone had given way. It was a habit.
Geometry, structure, cause and effect. The world had always made sense when you approached it like that.
It did not make sense now.
"Thirty years," Yosef said.
His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t fall. It simply arrived in the air the way his conclusions always did -- flat, precise, carrying its own certainty whether anyone acknowledged it or not.
"Thirty years," he repeated, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling. "I follow the evidence."
No one answered.
He wasn’t surprised.
He could feel them all in the space around him without looking -- Uriel somewhere off to his right, still holding himself like a drawn line that refused to slacken, Lucifer near Gabriel with that effortless composure that felt, suddenly, absurdly out of place, as though elegance itself had wandered into the wrong century and decided to stay.
Angels.
He let the word sit in his mind for a moment.
Angels.
Not as metaphor. Not as layered cultural artifact or theological shorthand. Real, Present and Tangible.
Arguing.
The thought struck him, not all at once, but in pieces.
Angels... that were bickering.
He almost laughed.
It didn’t come out. It stayed somewhere in his chest, a tight, strange pressure that didn’t know whether it belonged to disbelief or something closer to exhaustion.
And among them --
His gaze flickered, just briefly, not enough to turn his head, but enough to register.
Lucifer.
Of all possible configurations of reality, of all the ways the world could have chosen to fracture open and show him what lay beneath --
Lucifer was standing in a garden beneath the desert, dustless in a coat that had no business being intact, calmly inserting himself into an argument about ceiling damage.
Yosef let out a slow breath.
"The evidence," he said, more quietly now, though the tone didn’t change, "led here."
He didn’t expect an answer.
He got one anyway.
"Yes."
Dawud’s voice came from the roots of the seventh tree, steady, unhurried. He didn’t turn his head. He didn’t need to.
The word carried cleanly across the garden, simple and complete.
Yosef’s eyes remained on the ceiling.
"The evidence led to this," he said again.
"Yes."
There was no correction in it. No attempt to soften the truth or reshape it into something more manageable.
Just an agreement.
Yosef pressed his lips together for a moment, the faintest hint of tension there before it smoothed out again.
"I would like the record to note," he said, "that I followed the evidence correctly."
He heard, distantly, the faint scratch of Rania’s pen as it paused, then resumed.
"Noted," Dawud said.
Yosef nodded once, a small, almost imperceptible movement, as if that settled something that had needed settling.
Behind him, the tension hadn’t quite broken.
He could feel it without turning -- Uriel still holding the spear, the air around him carrying that quiet edge of held restraint, the kind that came when someone had decided not to act and was still in the process of honoring that decision.
Lucifer, on the other hand, did not feel restrained.
Lucifer felt... conversational.
It was surreal.
That was the word for it, he realized.
Not impossible, not incomprehensible.
Surreal.
Angels arguing in a buried garden beneath the Negev. Lucifer making commentary about architectural features.
An angel who had just been driven through forty-three meters of bedrock holding a spear because the conversation had crossed some internal threshold that required it.
Yosef almost turned then.
Almost.
But he didn’t, he didn’t wanna get into that surreal mess.
Instead, he looked at the way the sunlight fell through the holes in the ceiling. The way it touched the grass. The way it coexisted with the other light that had no source and no shadow.
The world was still behaving like a world.
That, somehow, made it worse.
"Uriel," Gabriel said.
Her voice moved through the space differently. Not louder, not sharper, just... certain.
It didn’t push, It didn’t demand.
There was a pause.
Yosef felt it then, the shift.
The decision passing from resistance into acceptance.
The spear disappeared.
Just like that.
No flourish. No lingering. One moment it was there, and the next it wasn’t, as though it had only ever existed as long as it was required.
Yosef closed his eyes briefly.
Of course it worked like that, Of course it did.
Uriel sat down again.
Yosef heard the movement -- the faint rustle of grass, the quiet shift of weight. When he opened his eyes again, Uriel was back where he had been, palms pressed into the ground like he was anchoring himself to something that did not move.
The grass received him, It always did.
Lucifer moved next.
Yosef watched him this time.
Not directly -- he didn’t turn his head -- but he let his attention follow the movement. Lucifer crossed the space with that same effortless ease, as though none of what had just happened required adjustment on his part.
He sat down again.
This time, not quite as close.
Yosef noticed that.
The difference was small. Measured. Intentional.
Lucifer had shifted just far enough to acknowledge the tension without conceding to it.
Close enough to remain part of the moment. Far enough to suggest cooperation.
It was... almost respectful.
Almost.
Lucifer leaned back slightly, one hand resting against the grass, his gaze drifting upward toward the ceiling again.
"It’s still a very neat hole," he said.
Yosef let out a breath through his nose.
Of course...Of course he said that.
Uriel did not respond.
Yosef didn’t dare to turn.
He found himself staring at the fourth hole again -- the one that hadn’t quite settled into the garden’s rhythm.
He tried, for a moment, to imagine explaining this. Writing it down. Presenting it as evidence.
He pictured the report, then he pictured the reactions.
He stopped picturing it.
Rania turned a page.
The sound cut through the space, small but definite. Yosef glanced at her then, just briefly.
She was writing again, faster now, her pen moving in tight, deliberate lines. She paused once, frowned, crossed something out, and continued.
He understood that.
Write it down before it dissolves.
Shai shifted nearby, the analyser still in his hands. Yosef glanced at it, then away. The device felt... irrelevant now. Not wrong.
Just... insufficient.
Khalil adjusted his stance near the shaft, his focus unwavering. Yosef envied that, a little. The ability to fix your attention on something that still followed rules.
Yosef looked back up at the ceiling.
Four holes.
Three with sunlight.
One still deciding what it was.
He let his gaze settle there and stayed with it, because it was something he could look at without needing to understand.
And behind him, angels breathed, and argued, and settled, and Lucifer sat in the grass like he had always belonged there.
Yosef stood in the middle of it all, hands in his pockets, and wondered --quietly, privately --when the evidence had stopped leading him forward and started leading him somewhere he had never thought to look...
To be continued...
Author’s note: A full Chapter of Mortal Yosef, trying to make sense that beings only told of in stories are now infront of him behaving entirely like human beings. Arguing and bickering like siblings! Wonder what will happen next?
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