#like i have fics that are almost 300k but have never seen the outside of google docs

[akaiikowrites]

What work took you the longest to write?

if we're counting ongoing WIPs that i'm actually still working on... dcmb has been crawling along since 2018. no i'm not crying who's crying because it's totally not me in terms of completed works, though, they call you refugee took the longest since the initial drafts were posted in december 2017 and the last chapter was posted in may 2022.

(what we can learn from this is that i'm very slow but i almost always get there eventually.)

[charmingpplincardigans]

I wish you would write a fic where... it's just a 300k epic detailing crowley's relationship with poetry; what poets/poetry he influenced personally (and those a certain celestial being on the Other Side might have); the nature of poetry as it relates to humanity; the nature of humanity as it relates to poetry; and, of course, the multitude of ways poetry manages to encapsulate emotions in ways nothing else really can manage to do. But, y'know, no biggie 😘❤

Thank you for indulging me with this. Can I tell you, I saw it and immediately went into a fit of glee. Please imagine me draping myself across a chaise lounge, fanning myself with a peacock embroidered fan, and moaning ‘I WISH MY FRIENDS KNEW ME AT ALL. IT’S SUCH A BUMMER THAT NO ONE REALLY GETS ME. I’M SUCH AN ENIGMA. SO HARD TO CRACK.’ By which of course I mean this is so up my alley I don’t know what to do with it AND YOU KNOW THAT, BLESS YOU. Also, in a twist that will surprise no one, I’ve had an outline for almost this exact fic since that person left the comment on What’s Done In the Dark asking if Rilke had been an inspiration for it. SO. 

Here is a piece of what that will maybe become, which I have plucked from the middle of the outline at random even though it’s the very first thing I’ve written on it and wouldn’t it have been easier for me to just write the beginning? OH WELL. 

[Send me an ‘I wish you would write a fic where…’ ask.]

. . . 

Aziraphale had accused him once—in an argument about something that turned out to be inconsequential, as things always did when compared to not being friends at all—of malevolently giving poets certain ideas about heaven. 

Crowley had scoffed, and then laughed, and then said, in a tone of voice more appropriate for a crowded pub than the angel's small and quiet backroom, "I never even met Rilke!" 

Aziraphale had blanched even paler than he usually was at that and made himself busy searching for the meaning of life in the bottom of his mostly empty wine glass. And didn't that just prove it. Every angel was terrifying, except for this one in certain moods, but especially when he was called out on being so. There were at least three astronomical units of space between the angel Aziraphale was—soldier, protector, celestial being of waspishness and petty vengeances—and the person Aziraphale wanted people to think he was. Unfortunately for Aziraphale, Crowley knew exactly where to find the parts that he didn't want seen.

Crowley had taken another sip of wine to let the moment really settle in and then said, "so it was you."

After that Aziraphale had sobered up quite quickly and changed the topic.

The truth of it was that Heaven did not need demons or angels to turn poets for or against it. It had done that quite efficiently on its own by being alternately vengeful and vague. The knowledge that there was no real sure way to please the all-powerful organization in charge of one's post-life eternity was more than enough to drive a person to either fanaticism or atheism. Poetry, as far as Crowley could tell, was an appropriate response to both. 

Because really, there were just as many poets for heaven as against it. Crowley remembered little Hilde and the pain that would eventually drive her to ecstatic fits. He remembered Dante who had got so much wrong and so much eerily right. He remembered young Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad from Balkh and his mentor from Tabriz. What had happened with Shams was one of those small things Crowley was still bitter about some near thousand years on.

All of this was, thankfully, a subject Aziraphale rarely broached with him, because Crowley had protested too much over the years that he didn't read books and Aziraphale had assumed that meant he didn't have an interest in literature. In reality Crowley had as much interest in literature as he did anything else, in so much as literature was just the chronicling of the lives happening around them all of the time. What Crowley didn't have an interest in was discussing it and beating the lives of mortals to death in search of meaning. If an overarching meaning even existed, the two of them surely lived outside of it, just as they would have lived outside of the plight of humanity had Armageddon properly kicked off. 

"Crowley," Aziraphale said. His voice broke into Crowley’s reverie, but still sounded far away.

The difference in priorities between the two of them and the billions of humans was a matter of scale. As was, he suspected, the difference in intensity of a certain predilection for sentimentality. Which way he thought those particular scales tipped depended entirely on his mood and whether or not he and Aziraphale were on speaking terms at any given time. 

"Dearest," Aziraphale said, more quietly this time.

They were currently on speaking terms, which was a good bit of luck. If he'd been alone this line of thought could have spiraled for literal decades—had done in the past—and he would have missed many of the wonders of the world finding its footing again. Wonders like the way the fall afternoon light was staining Aziraphale's shirt cuffs and hands a warm yellow where they were folded over the book in his lap. 

Crowley shook himself from the depths of his reverie and opened up to the warmth of the room and the light and Aziraphale's curious gaze. "Yeah?"

Aziraphale gave him a small, tight, close lipped smile. It was the one that said 'you have kept me waiting, but I will continue to wait' and 'you would tell me wouldn't you, if something were wrong?' and 'thank heavens you're here, thank someone anyway.'

"Where did you go?" he asked. 

Crowley shrugged. "Nowhere." 

Aziraphale nodded the easy nod of an unconvinced man and placed the book on the coffee table between them. Robert Frost, comfort reading Aziraphale had picked up in the early twentieth century the last time he and Crowley had not been on speaking terms. Comfort reading meant there was something eating at Aziraphale and it might be years before he could find the words to let Crowley know what it was.  

"I would like to go for a walk," Aziraphale said. He looked down at the book and then up into Crowley's eyes. "If you would join me."

"Sure, okay," Crowley said.

Perhaps moving forward, after everything, it would not take years. 

Crowley unfolded himself from the couch and took a few minutes to exaggeratedly stretch out his limbs while Aziraphale puttered around, putting on his overcoat and checking the stove was off and that no candles had been lit. He checked these things all the time now, even when they hadn't been set to warming or burning in the first place. Once you’ve had your whole sanctuary burned to the ground, twice shy, Crowley supposed. 

He pulled his jacket off the back of the couch and slipped it on, perched his glasses on top of his head, and stepped into a square of sunlight spilled across the carpet to wait. Crowley closed his eyes and tilted his face up into the light. He let himself get lost in the feeling of relief that washed through him sometimes when he thought too long about how the sun would still rise over London for a time and how some small part of that was down to him. He didn’t hear Aziraphale approach. 

Aziraphale’s hands landed gently on Crowley’s shoulders and Crowley felt his weight shift. When he opened his eyes and looked down Aziraphale was leaning up onto his toes and using Crowley for balance. He kissed Crowley’s forehead and his cheek and then his lips. The kisses were soft and chaste, landing with all the weight of a feather hitting the floor. 

Crowley did not press for more, even has his hidden wings shivered and another set of jaws somewhere inside of him opened wide, ready to devour. This new thing between them was probably not as fragile as he feared it to be, considering what they’d been through just to get to this place, but that didn’t mean he wanted to test the boundaries of it either. Not yet, anyway. 

When Crowley had imagined touching Aziraphale with intent he had always thought of them outside of these bodies, in the pure existence somewhere between what Heaven and Hell had shaped them into: feather and talon, scale and air, shadow and flame. They’d had that too, but practically, because of the jobs they had decided to keep and the space they took up on this plane, they had this more often. 

It was a lot of work after all, slipping into a separate plane of existence just to quickly touch someone and tell them you were glad they were there. Crowley was so, so glad Aziraphale was still here, that the angel had decided to stay on earth and with him. It was more than he’d expected. It was almost all that he’d wanted. There would be time for the rest, maybe. 

Legend had it that Shams-i-Tabrīzī had prayed and prayed for another person who could endure him, see him for who he was and accept all of it, want to keep all of it. One night, a voice answered him, asking what it was he would give in return for finding this happiness, this other he sought. Stricken, one imagines, and desperate and lonely, Shams replied, “My head!” Satisfied with that answer, the voice told him to seek out Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī in Konya. The two men had four years together: learning, teaching, writing, seeking the infinite bliss of knowing God in the way a drop of water knows the ocean it resides in. And then one night, legend further had it, Shams was called away from Rumi, out the back door and into the night, never to be seen again.

Romantics liked to imagine he was murdered as recompense for knowing another person too well, for being too beloved, but Crowley had been to the tomb in Khoy and knew it was more likely that the teacher merely left his student once the student no longer needed his guidance. Left alone, Rumi had devoted reams and reams of words to his teacher and friend, his faith letting him feel the absence as if it was another presence. It was these knowing departures that Crowley feared most, the form of taking that cut the deepest.

There was so much poetry in the world that would not exist without otherworldly pain. And if there was one thing Crowley knew intimately, it was otherworldly pain. He tried not to think about his own capacity for poetry too much. When he did, he became almost as waspish as Aziraphale. He enjoyed poetry and poets, but he did not think he had it in him to write it. He had been, for the last six thousand years or so, too busy living it.

Aziraphale pulled away and settled back onto the soles of his shoes. He raised a hand and placed it against Crowley’s cheek. 

Crowley turned his face slightly, pressed into Aziraphale’s palm to chase the added warmth. “Where to?” he asked. 

“Regent’s Park, I should think. I have a feeling that it’s going to be an all out beauty of a sunset this evening.”

“A feeling or a doing?” Crowley slipped his sunglasses down over his eyes as Aziraphale pulled his hand away. 

Aziraphale wiggled his fingers like he was warming up for a coin trick. “I guess we’ll see when we get there.”

Crowley bit down on his lip to hold in the smile. Better to not reward this behavior in the long run. But when Aziraphale turned and headed for the door Crowley followed after him, which he hoped was reward enough for another sort of trick altogether.