#wow im still speechless man
A Good Omens Ficlet inspired by this art by Lilpy.
Read and comment on AO3, if you prefer
He knows he needs to burn it. All it takes is a snap; it hurts, pulling that Hellfire out of his fingertips, like the ignition of a Hand Of Glory, but it’s the one way to assure that even an angel’s words can’t be resurrected by a miracle.
He can’t. Not quite yet.
I dream of a time when we might ignore the summons of our superiors, the imperatives of our respective sides, the clamour of the world itself. When we might cease to play a game within another game, as it’s come to seem to me. Who would we be if those strings were cut? If we were nothing more than two gentlemen, taking the air in St. James’ Park, or sharing a box at the Royal Opera? We would walk arm in arm, or place our feet up on the fender on a damp night while we warmed ourselves with a good claret.
How many years has he slept? When he drifts toward waking, he’ll sense that weeks have passed, then months. He’s felt the hair brush his jawline as he shifts in the enormous bed; the next time the clouds of sleep part briefly, it’s reached his shoulders. But the letter’s still in his hand.
He should burn it, before Hell decides to pay a call.
He can’t.
I cannot say when my regard for you grew into a bond of true affection. Attachments arise from custom, yet no such communion has ever grown from associations with my own kind; common ends make comrades, yet all we have in common arises from our charge to thwart one another. I know only that there came to be a time when the sound of your voice was more cherished than any music; when I came to know the turn of your foot, the tilt of your head, out of a multitude of thousands.
When did you become dear, so dear, to me?
When did the letter arrive? Fifty years ago? Sixty? Not long after Paris. He told himself then that he’d wait a day, a week; later, that it was safe to hide it at the bottom of a chest, or tucked between the pages of a book. Kept it as things became more dangerous, the angel’s manner more brusque and fretful.
Needless to say, we shall not speak of this when we meet again. We dare not. I only need to know that I have spoken, the once, before courage fails me.
When did things change?
The sun’s coming in at an autumn angle. There’s the sound of early traffic in the street below: here a costermonger’s wagon, there one of the new Hansom “safety cabriolets.” He’d imagined sharing one with the angel – a brief space of privacy, two gentlemen going to adjacent destinations. In safety, with no one to see a quick handclasp.
Their hands had all but touched in the park. He’d burnt thatnote.
Words are poor things. I say this from within an edifice of words. I walk between aisles of words, like the aisles of trees in an old forest; I dwell in the house of words. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Her. Words are the currency of my existence. And yet they fail when I need them most.
Do you remember how Plato compared the knowledge of ourselves to the image reflected in another’s eye? I only feel I truly exist when I see myself in your perfect eyes, the pupilla reflected in that rarely-revealed darkness, that must exist to define the light.
It’s been a long time since he’s risked setting aside the smoked glasses, even for a moment. He tries to avoid seeing his own reflection without them. Your perfect eyes.
It is madness to write this, I know, and greater madness to send it, and you must destroy it once read, but I have spent the evening in writing sterile dispatches – a soul turned to charity here, Her grace accepted there. And all I can feel is the slow ebb of grace in my own soul, the dissolution of faith in a Plan, until I cross your path again and am reminded that is is your – I can hear you scoff, but – your grace which I crave.
He should burn it.
What if we had our own Plan? What if everything we did, we did on our own? Needing nothing and no one but each other? If we came to rest, would you rest beside me?
I know it for folly, but I dream of a garden – nothing so grand as Hers, with nothing like so high a wall – and a tree in it, and we should eat of the fruit together. It would be the tree, not of knowledge, but of forgetfulness, where we would set aside the old rules and make our own. We could lie side by side beneath it, and watch the sun through the branches.
I don’t know where, or how, that could happen. But before you reduce this letter to ash, dream of it with me.
He’s dreamed of nothing else, since he fell into sleep. He hears other words when he drifts towards wakefulness. You are Fallen. Fraternising.
The sun’s hot on his face now. He holds the sheet of foolscap to the bare skin of his chest, as if the words could enter into his heart by some alchemical diffusion. The page would be left blank, but the message would remain.
It’s all he has. If I lay here, would you lie with me?
As long as the letter exists, they’re together. The words aren’t spoken. They haven’t parted.
He knows he should burn it.
He can’t. Not quite yet.
