Work Text:
Loving him was the holiest form of desecration.
Stolen moments echoed through memory like sacraments to the heart: lingering glances, tingling touches of skin, kisses that spoke of something holy and inglorious all at once. Blasphemy to the Crown shadowed them, forgotten in the shining moments but left behind when the feeling of another’s lips left his skin, and the horizon which had always seemed so suffocating, as if some vengeful deity had deemed him damned, metamorphosed into something flickering, uncertain: the future dependent on the battle between duty, whose hands had always been clenched around his throat but were loosened by the same swelling, golden feeling that battled against them on the side of that hallowed feeling too vibrant, and complex, for a little word like love to capture.
It felt like a confessional, being with him. As fallen angels weep for heaven, so he atoned for every cruel word or cold shoulder, gazing up at the aureole that meant so much more to him than a crown. But a lover’s blessing transcended all transgressions, binding their hearts together with a golden string and a promise that it was them now - their own worship for one another against the false idols which would have them stray from this path of faith in love, declaring it sacrilege.
For he had turned his hands, once bound by the string of fate to a crucifix, to grasp it with a desperate cry that I will write my own story. Words whispered against skin are the holiest of sins and that was the cross he chose to bear, the power of a hand held in his own shattering the pane of glass he’d lived his life behind.
And anybody could tell him that his halo was bleeding, molten gold painting his face as it dripped, and it would no longer matter. Not from the Crown once so immovable, now proven a martyrdom to ideals lost in the sands of time; not from the town so freeing, as two-dimensional as any underneath the painted glow but harbouring sacred memories nevertheless. For he was a saint of his own making now, prostrated before the one he loved of his own free will, safe in the knowledge that he would do the same.
Theirs was a church built from the ashes of the one immolated in protest against them, a sanctuary made from touches of hands, brushes of lips, skin on skin and mind to mind in the purest form of intimacy. And it was one that they would burn with together, brighter than the shadows others would cast in one last message to the world: we are in love. And love, paired with hope, is unbreakable.