Work Text:
I watch, transfixed and completely unable to look away as you walk towards me, the moonlight streaming through huge glass panes of the conservatory, highlighting your glorious fiery mane that reaches below your shoulders, moving lightly as you sway towards me. Those hips! I long to have my hands on them, to feel how they move from side to side, just like the serpent that you are, that you always have been. You have always tempted me, never deliberately, no, never that! (Although I could make an argument for the ox ribs being a temptation). Always tempting, always pulling me in, even when I refused to see it as such, lied to myself, but I refuse to continue that lie. It took me so very long to recognise the truth and, considering what occurred between us the last time we spoke, I will not do either you or me the disservice of denying it any longer.
You were absolutely correct when you said that the last few years had been different. I finally felt that we were safe enough (that YOU were safe enough from Hell) to fully embrace my feelings and try to show you them, to try to elicit the truth from you of your feelings for me. For I was certain that you cared for me deeply; surely someone who specifically uses a demonic miracle to save the silly books of a silly angel, knowing how much they meant to said silly angel, would have deeper feelings than just friendship to that being? Yet despite the things that I said or did (the looks that I gave you!), you kept your feelings wrapped up tight. I would occasionally think that I felt a little flash of love from you, but it would be gone almost as soon as it appeared. Were you really in such denial about how you felt, or were you just so protective of those feelings, certain that I could never feel anything so deep for you (I wouldn’t blame you, considering some of the things that I have said over the centuries, or millennia even) that you had wrapped them tightly within yourself, never to be shown?
Something changed however, just before we last spoke. You tried to tell me how you felt, I know you did; even if it wasn’t terribly eloquent it was terribly you. But I couldn’t hear it; you were finally saying it and it wasn’t the right time for me to hear it! I fumbled my response, could not say what I needed to in return. Oh Crowley, how could my words fail me? But I fear that there was nothing that I could say that would have been adequate in that moment.
Then we parted, with possibly the maximum heartbreak that we two could generate. We never could do anything important without being dramatic, could we darling? This time, however, there was no one else there that could save us from ourselves and our own incompetence around our feelings for each other.
And now you are here, just out of my reach, tears streaming down your face, and mine. I cannot resist and take that small, but oh so large, step to you and pull you into my embrace. One hand sweeps around your lithe waist, the other flies to the back of your head, stroking your silky locks as you bury your face into my shoulder, your arms clinging to me so tightly. I need you closer still, somehow even more in my embrace so I pull out my wings, flare them out to their fullest extent and wrap them around you too. You are cocooned within as much of my corporeal body as I can give you and yet it is not enough, for this cannot last. Will not last.
For this is a dream. I do not know how I have fallen asleep in Heaven; you know that I do not sleep, and I am so rarely left alone for more than a few minutes at a time. I know that dreams can be representations of our desires so it is certainly no surprise that I dream of holding you, being with you, being the “us”, but it is also so cruel of my own brain to allow me to know that it isn’t real, to know that, even as I experience the incandescent bliss of finally having you in my arms, that it will all be gone in just a few brief moments. I cannot even give myself a respite from my unhappiness in my own subconscious.
For now, I shall take advantage of what little I have given myself and tell you the truth, even if you are not really hearing it. I tell you how your presence is my true happiness, how I could lose myself in your glorious eyes forever and how your laugh makes my heart sing. For I love you, and I whisper those words into your ear, moving my head to plant delicate kisses on the side of yours.
I can hear your own whispered words, your lips moving gently against my shoulder, “Please, let me keep him, please don’t take him away again.”
My heart breaks, again. I squeeze you tight. “Oh, my love, do not pray to Her; She is unworthy of hearing from you. Send your prayers to me, for I swear that I will answer them. I swear to you that we will get through this, and I will make this right with you, that we will be together properly, if that is what you wish. You are my everything and this is what I will give you of myself, everything.”
Your trembling slows and you gently turn your face into my neck. “Angel,” you breathe against the skin there and a moment later your lips are there too.
It is too much for me to take; the light grows as if the sun is rising outside the cottage in which we stand but it is not the natural warm sunlight that greets my eyes as I open them; it is the unnatural, sterile white light that is so pervasive here in Heaven. I had created a desk and chair for myself in this tiny corner that I claimed as my own and there is where I find myself; arms empty, wings tucked away and no mischievous, red-headed demon in sight.
The only things from the dream that are real are my love for you and the tears still running down my cheeks.