Being a saint was not, of course, the same as being an angel- not by a long shot. But it did carry with it certain privileges, intangibility and super-speed amongst them. It might not be quite so romantic as flight, but it served Vincent well enough; it let him keep up with his ravens, anyway, although he never had managed to figure out their affinity for him. Still, there were worse companions to pass the millennia with- angels, for example, tended to border on insufferable whenever they took it into their celestial heads to bother with you. It made a body question the existence of heaven, it really did.
The super-speed was also especially helpful for doing his rounds- he could make it around the perimeter of the hospital faster than a mortal could blink. Sure, taking the time to actually stop and do the occasional miracle might slow him down a bit, but not by more than another mortal blink or two.
He didn’t always careen at near light-speed, however. Some days he preferred to saunter, trusting the ravens to alert him, should he be needed in a crisis. The number of Catholics had dwindled over the past few centuries, so it was much rarer for him to be summoned by name. When he was, he must appear, but for the most part he was left to his own devices. His own devices had led him to the hospital.
The angels had tut-tutted, of course.
“What are you thinking?” they would demand. “You’re a patron saint of vintners, not healers! You have countries that need looking after!” Vincent ignored them and went about his business. It was not his fault that he was but rarely called upon by “his” people. Whenever he was, he made it a point to show up promptly and help out (again, the benefits of super-speed) but sometime over the past few centuries he had realized that he was being called on less and less often- and that, by the Father, he was bored. Hence he had gone in search of entertainment. And nothing, nothing was more entertaining than mortals. He sometimes had a very hard time believing he had ever been one- although it was easy enough to believe that the angels hadn’t. They hadn’t a humorous bone in their bodies (nor humerus, for that matter).
Anyway he wasn’t going around helping out the healers- they had more than enough help. Saints, angels- even the occasional foreign spirit or deity. No, the healers did just fine without Vincent’s intervention. What interested him were the patients. And not even all the patients- although he helped where he could, regardless of his own personal interest (he was a saint, after all). He was particularly fascinated by those patients who were cheerful atheists. They were, as one might expect in a hospital, few and far between, but that was part of their appeal.
He liked to visit them in his human aspect- sometimes as a doctor, sometimes as a janitor, sometimes as a fellow patient- and engage them in conversations about their lack of faith. It seemed a wonderful joke to him, the idea that he was talking to someone who not only didn’t believe that he existed, but also didn’t believe his boss existed. The angels found such patients an affront- worse than the patients who summoned up the foreign gods (whom the angels inevitably ignored with a pointed sniff, which Vincent thought was rude considering all their shared history).
Vincent, however, found such patients delightfully refreshing. He had vague memories of having died for his faith (although it had been so long ago he sometimes wondered if the angels hadn’t made it up to keep him in line) but for the afterlife of him he could not remember why, at the time, it had seemed so important.
(St. Vincent by Night)
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