Musi

Your local person obsessed with music and franchises 🖖|| I DO TAKE COMMISSIONS ||

[amusicfreak]

Fandoms I'm In:

-Avatar (James Cameron)

-Baldur's Gate 3

-Broadway

-Creepypasta

-DC

-Doctor Who

-Fallout

-Good Omens

-Hazbin Hotel

-Helluva Boss

-How to Train Your Dragon

-Lord of the Rings

-Marvel

-Masters of the Air

-Pirates of the Caribbean

-Skulduggery Pleasant

-Star Trek (mainly shows)

-Star Wars (shows and movies)

-Stranger Things

-The Hobbit

-The Music Freaks

-The Righteous Gemstones

-The Walking Dead

-The Witcher

-Top Gun

-World of Warcraft

[amusicfreak]

hey, all! Some friends and I are working on an EPIC: The Musical fan song that is meant to be an epilogue for the musical. This is going to be a summer project so don't expect it anytime soon, but just thought I'd give the fandom something to look forward too!

[amusicfreak]

EPIC: The Musical fanart!

[randomreasonstolive]

Reason to Live #14030

Having Nutella on my bread slice or eating it with a spoon 😋

  – Guest Submission

(Please don't add negative comments to these posts.) 

[amusicfreak]

The Olive Tree Has Roots (Based on the song "Would You Fall in Love with Me Again")

The bookshop smelled of old paper and something that had no name, something that had simply accumulated over centuries the way sediment accumulates at the bottom of a river. Crowley stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets and told himself, for the four hundred and thirty-seventh time, that he was only here to water the plants.

The plants didn't need watering. They were immaculate. They had been immaculate for six months, two weeks, and an indeterminate number of days, because Crowley had been coming here every few days with no particular purpose and leaving with less dignity than he'd arrived with. He'd rearrange a shelf. He'd make a cup of tea he wouldn't drink. He'd sit in Aziraphale's chair and then get up almost immediately because sitting in Aziraphale's chair was, it turned out, its own specific variety of unbearable.

He was currently doing the thing where he stood in the middle of the shop and simply stood, which was not as easy as it sounded.

The bell above the door rang.

Crowley didn't turn around. People wandered in sometimes — he'd never bothered to lock it — and they always wandered back out when they found the place had a peculiar atmosphere. A chill. A sense of something unresolved, hanging in the air like a chord that hadn't resolved to its tonic.

"Crowley."

He turned around. 

Is it you? Have my prayers been answered? 

Six months and change, and Aziraphale looked—

He looked like himself. That was the first thing, the thing Crowley's traitorous brain grabbed onto before anything else. Same face, same curling hair gone silver-white, same round softness. The coat was the same. Of course the coat was the same.

But Crowley had spent six thousand years learning to read the particular grammar of Aziraphale's face, and he could read it now the way you read a manuscript — not just the words, but what lay beneath them, the erasures and revisions and the places where the hand had pressed too hard.

You look different. 

Not the shape of him. The light in him. It was there, still there, but it was like a lamp that had been moved to the wrong room and kept bumping against unfamiliar walls. His eyes were tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. His smile, when it came — tentative, waiting at the door of his own expression — arrived with a slight delay it had never had before.

"I wasn't sure—" Aziraphale began. He stopped. He was still standing in the doorway. "I wasn't sure you'd be here."

"I water the plants," Crowley said, which was not really an answer to anything.

Aziraphale looked at the plants. The plants looked frankly excellent. A small, complicated expression moved across his face.

"May I come in?"

"It's your shop."

"I know. But—" He paused again. "May I?"

The thing about Aziraphale was that he had always been constitutionally incapable of simply walking into a room. He considered rooms. He weighed them. Crowley had once found this unbearably endearing. Right now it was doing something to his chest that he couldn't classify.

"Yes," he said. "Obviously. Come in." 

Aziraphale came in. He walked through the familiar dark aisles with the careful deliberateness of someone navigating a home they were no longer sure they had the right to touch. His fingers brushed the spine of a Chaucer. He did not take it down.

Crowley watched him from the center of the shop and said nothing. He was very good at saying nothing. He had spent significant portions of six thousand years perfecting the art.

"Heaven is—" Aziraphale started, then stopped. "Heaven was—" He stopped again.

"You don't have to."

"I want to." Aziraphale turned around.

Your eyes look tired… Your smile torn. 

 His face was very open in the way it got when he was frightened and deciding to be honest anyway. Crowley had always found that particular expression difficult to look at directly. He looked at it directly. "I want to explain. I need to. Because I—I made a mistake, and I need you to know that I know I made a mistake, not because it changes anything necessarily, but because—"

"Angel."

"—I was wrong. I was so terribly wrong, and I knew it almost immediately, and I need you to know that I know—"

"Aziraphale."

Aziraphale stopped.

"I know," Crowley said. "Alright? I know."

A breath went out of Aziraphale that he seemed to have been holding for months. His shoulders dropped half an inch. He pressed his lips together and looked at the floor, and then back up.

"That's not enough," he said quietly. "Just — knowing that you know isn't enough. I owe you more than that."

Crowley said nothing. He was still very good at it, but it was getting harder.

"I wasn't—" Aziraphale moved to the armchair. He didn't sit in it. He stood behind it, with his hands on the back of it, like it was the railing of a ship. "I wasn't the person you knew, up there. Or perhaps I was, and that's worse. Perhaps that version of me — the one who looked at you in that lift and said what I said — perhaps he was always in there, and you never saw him, and I—"

Would you fall in love with me again, if you knew all I've done?

The echo of the thought moved through the room like the weather. It wasn't spoken. It didn't need to be. Crowley could hear it in every careful pause, in the way Aziraphale was looking at him — not with the soft certainty that Crowley had spent years cataloguing, but with something raw underneath it. Something that was asking a question it was afraid to ask aloud.

"Stop," Crowley said.

"I'm not finished—"

"You're about to say something," Crowley said, "that you're going to regret. And I'm going to have to stand here and listen to it, and then we're going to have to find a way past it, so I'd rather you didn't say it."

Aziraphale stared at him.

"I know who you are," Crowley said. It came out rougher than he intended. It came out like a fact he'd been sitting on for a very long time. "I have known who you are for six thousand years. I know the version of you who hid under Heaven's rules because it was safer. I know the version who once gave away his sword because he couldn't bear the idea of a family going hungry. I know—" he stopped, pushed his glasses up with one finger, bought himself two seconds— "I know the version who made the worst decision of his life in a lift, and I know it was the worst decision, and you know it was the worst decision, and that's all we need to agree on."

"Crowley—"

"The question isn't who you've been," Crowley said. "The question is who you're going to be now that you're back."

The silence that followed was the kind that had weight to it. Crowley could feel it pressing against him from all sides, and he stood inside it and waited, because waiting was another thing he'd become exceptionally good at.

I know that you've been waiting, waiting for love.

Six thousand years of it. Waiting in gardens and on walls and in Bastilles and on the edges of conversations that kept almost getting to the thing they were actually about. Waiting in a bookshop that smelled of centuries, in the terrible specific silence of a lift that had swallowed something irretrievable. He'd been waiting his whole existence. One more moment was not going to kill him.

Aziraphale came around the armchair.

He moved slowly, the way he moved when he was being deliberate. When he was making a choice.

He stopped in front of Crowley. Close enough that Crowley could see the tiredness in his eyes that had nothing to do with sleep, and underneath it — still there, still there, the way the sun is still there even when you can't see it — something warm and irreducible that Crowley had first noticed in a garden at the beginning of everything and had been unable to stop noticing since.

"I came back," Aziraphale said, "because of you. Not only because of you. But — mostly because of you."

"I know," Crowley said, for the second time, and this time it sounded different.

"And I need to know—" Aziraphale's voice broke, very slightly, at the hinge. "I need to know if you can—if we can—"

"Yes," Crowley said.

"You don't know what I was going to ask."

"Yes I do."

Aziraphale looked at him. Crowley looked back. Neither of them moved.

Would you fall in love with me again?

The answer was yes. The answer had always been yes. The answer was yes in every language Crowley had ever learned, in every century he had watched Aziraphale make the wrong choice and the right one and all the complicated choices in between. The answer was yes in the tired eyes and the careful hands and the six months of standing in this shop watering plants that did not need watering. The answer was yes in the way Crowley had fallen, once, and had been falling ever since — not down, but toward, always toward, with no particular intention of stopping.

"I would fall in love with you again," Crowley said, and his voice was quite steady. He was fairly proud of that. "I have been falling in love with you again, repeatedly, at regular intervals, for roughly six thousand years. I don't anticipate stopping."

Aziraphale made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob and was extremely unfair.

"That's—" he started.

"Ridiculous. I'm aware."

"I was going to say rather a lot."

"Yes, well." Crowley adjusted his glasses. "That's what you get."

Aziraphale reached out and took his hand. Not dramatically — no grand gesture, no music swelling, just his soft warm fingers closing around Crowley's in the particular way they had, the way that said here, this, I choose this.

"I would," Aziraphale said quietly. "In case you were wondering. I would, and I have, and I will."

I will fall in love with you over and over and over again.

Outside, London moved its ceaseless way — taxis and tourists and pigeons and the six-o'clock light going amber through the windows. Inside the bookshop, nothing moved at all.

They stood there, the demon and the angel, in the place between what had been and what came next, and they held on. They had always been good at that part. Holding on. Waiting out the long spaces between one thing and another, finding each other again in the aftermath.

I've been waiting, one of them might have said.

I know, the other might have answered.

So have I.

The bell above the door didn't ring. The plants didn't need watering. The books stood in their shelves in the particular companionable way they had when the shop was full.

It felt, for the first time in six months and change, like a home.

[amusicfreak]

The Shape of a Name You’ve Always Known

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." — Terry Pratchett For Terry. Ineffably. 

The Bentley was never meant to fly. 

That had always been more of a guideline than a rule, really — the same way “don’t fall” had been a guideline, and “don’t go native” had been a guideline, and “do not under any circumstances, develop feelings for the opposition” had been the sort of guideline that entire theological frameworks crumbled around. So when Crowley hauled back on the steering wheel with both hands and the old black car lurched upward through a sky that was increasingly less of a sky and more of a wound in the fabric of something that no longer had a name, he supposed he was keeping a very consistent track record. 

The radio played “Don’t Stop Me Now.” 

Of course it did. 

“She’s burning faster,” Aziraphale said, his voice pitched carefully calm in the way it always got when he was in fact the precise opposite of calm. He was gripping the dashboard. His knuckles had gone white. His halo — he’d stopped bothering to hide it, somewhere around the time Uriel had been unmade — cast a pale gold light across the instrument panel. “Crowley. She’s burning faster.” 

“I see that.” 

“The Crab Nebula is gone.” 

“I know.” 

“Crowley—” 

“I know, angel, I can see it going, I can feel it—” And he could. That was the horrible part. He could feel each page like a cold draft through a window that didn’t exist anymore, a small erasure, a breath going out. Six thousand years of knowing the shape of the world, and now the world was being unknotted, thread by thread, and every thread was a small screaming nothing. It was worse than the Fall. The Fall had been an act of violence. This was an act of tidying. 

Michael had always been the worst kind of bureaucrat. The kind who genuinely believed in the paperwork. 

The Eternal Flame was visible now — a pillar of white fire that wasn’t fire at all, burning in the center of something that wasn’t space, at the coordinates of what had once been the middle of everything. It had no heat. It had no warmth. It predated the concept of warmth by a considerable margin, and regarded warmth the way a shark regarded the notion of friendship: theoretically aware of its existence, entirely unmoved by it. 

And there was Michael, standing at its edge, the Book of Life open in their hands, face tilted upward in the expression of someone who has spent too long in meetings about the apocalypse and finally, finally gets to see the deliverable. 

The last hundred or so pages were fanned in their hands. 

“Get me closer,” Aziraphale said, and there was something in his voice Crowley hadn’t heard there before. Something terribly old. Not the old of six thousand years on Earth, living among humans and acquiring opinions about restaurants. The old of before. The old of being present hen the hydrogen coalesced. When the first light said yes. 

“If I get you any closer the Flame will—” 

“Get me closer, Crowley.” 

He got him closer. 

The Bentley screamed. Not metaphorically — she screamed, every molecule of her magnificent 1926 construction protesting this particular aeronautical indignity with an eloquence that British engineering rarely achieved. The temperature gauges spun. The radio flickered. Freddie Mercury briefly became static became silence became Freddie Mercury again, urgent and defiant. 

“MICHAEL.” 

Aziraphale’s voice came out of him like a chord. Not a single voice — a chord, every octave he’d ever had, every tone from the dawn of the first morning. Crowley’s ears rang with it. The Bentley’s windscreen cracked in a single clean line. 

Michael looked up. 

In the white light of the Eternal Flame, the Archangel looked very small. That was the thing Crowley had never been able to articulate about Heaven’s soldiers — how small they looked when you stripped the certainty away. Michael had spent all of eternity being absolutely sure, and absolute sureness, it turned out, was a very efficient substitute for actually being large. 

“Aziraphale.” Michael’s voice was conversational. Politely surprised. “You’ve brought the demon.” 

“His name,” Aziraphale said, “is Crowley.” He had opened the car door. He was standing on the running board — actually standing on it, in the void between everything and nothing, his coat whipping in a wind that had no right to exist, his hair gone golden in the light of the Flame. “And I am asking you, as Supreme Archangel, as someone who has served Heaven since before this universe existed — please stop.” 

“The plan—” 

“The plan,” said Aziraphale, with a gentleness that was somehow more devastating than fury, “was never this. I have read every version of the plan. I have stood in rooms where the Metatron spoke for God and I have watched miracles and I have—” His voice caught. Just briefly. “I have made every mistake that it is possible to make, trying to serve something I thought was bigger than myself. But this isn’t the plan. This is you, Michael. This is what you want. And I’m asking you — I’m begging you — don’t do this because you were afraid of what I was changing. Don’t unmake everything because Heaven felt like it was becoming unfamiliar.” 

Michael’s hands tightened on the Book. 

“The Second Coming was supposed to mean something,” they said, and for just a moment Crowley heard it — the grief underneath the bureaucratic certainty. Real grief. An Archangel who had believed so completely and so long that belief had calcified into something that couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and was now destroying the world rather than let the world ask questions it didn’t know how to answer. “It was supposed to be the fulfillment. And you were going to make it a — a party. A picnic. You were going to have him shake hands with people in a community garden.” 

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “I was.” 

“That’s not—” 

“It was going to be lovely.” Aziraphale’s voice broke open. Not with sadness — with something that sounded almost like joy. “It was going to be exactly as lovely as anything he ever did when he was here, and I was so proud of it, Michael. I was so proud because for once — for once — I thought I had understood what all of this was for.” He spread his hands. The empty hands of an angel at the edge of everything. “It’s for them. It has always been for them. Not to test them. Not to judge them. Not to end them on schedule. It’s because they are extraordinary, and they know that they’re going to die, and they love each other anyway, and I have lived among them for six thousand years and I am still not done being astonished by it.” 

Silence. 

The Eternal Flame burned without burning. 

Crowley, who had not moved from the driver’s seat, who was technically still gripping the steering wheel with both hands because his body had apparently decided that was a thing that needed doing, felt something in his chest do what it always did in Aziraphale’s vicinity: go embarrassingly warm. 

“Give me the Book,” Aziraphale said quietly. 

“If I give you the Book,” Michael said, “everything comes back.” 

“Yes.” 

“Every page I burned—” 

“You haven’t burned the last ones. And the Eternal Flame doesn’t destroy what it unmakes — it holds it. You know that, Michael. That’s why you chose it. Because somewhere underneath all of this, you didn’t want it to be permanent. Because you’re not a monster.” Aziraphale’s voice was gentle now. “You’re just very, very frightened.” 

Something crossed Michael’s face that had no name in any language that humans had ever invented and several that they hadn’t. 

Slowly — slowly — they held out the Book. 

Crowley exhaled. 

What happened next was — not simple, exactly. Nothing about the restoration of existence was ever going to be simple. But it was faster than it had any right to be, because Aziraphale turned out to be very good at it, which probably should have surprised no one given that he had spent centuries perfecting the art of finding things that were lost. 

He sat in the backseat of the Bentley — which was hovering, technically, in what was technically still a spatial location, more or less — with the Book of Life open across his knees and his eyes closed, and he remembered. 

That was all. He just remembered. 

He remembered Alpha Centauri, specifically the smell of it, which was not a smell anyone had a name for but which Aziraphale had always privately thought of as ambitious. He remembered the exact specific amber of autumn in the Cotswolds. He remembered the way the light hit the Thames on a clear morning in October. He remembered a bookshop in Soho, and the weight of old paper, and the particular satisfaction of finding a first edition that everyone else had overlooked. He remembered a garden, and a wall, and a sword, and an apple, and a conversation that had changed everything about everything. 

He wrote it all down, in the Book, in his careful copperplate hand, and the universe unfolded itself back into existence like a letter that had only been waiting to be read. 

Crowley watched him do it. 

He told himself he was watching to make sure nothing went wrong. He told himself he was watching because someone had to, practically speaking. He told himself many things, and all of them were true, and none of them were the point, and the point was that six thousand years was a long time to watch someone, and Crowley was beginning to suspect he could have done it for six thousand more without finding anything tedious about it. 

“Crab Nebula,” Aziraphale murmured, frowning slightly at a page. 

“Still there,” Crowley confirmed, checking what remained of his metaphysical awareness in the direction of the Crab Nebula. “You got it back.” 

“Good.” A small, satisfied nod. “I’ve always liked that one.” 

“You’ve never said that before.” 

“I’ve always thought it.” He turned a page. “I haven’t said a great many things. I’ve been working on that.” 

The radio had come back on. Freddie Mercury, uninterrupted now, finishing what he’d started. 

Outside the cracked windscreen, stars were reappearing. 

Michael, when it was over, stood at the edge of the Eternal Flame and looked like a very old building after the scaffolding had been taken down — smaller than expected, but also, somehow, more itself. 

“What happens to me,” they said. Not a question. Not quite. 

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said honestly. “That’s above my authority. It always has been.” He paused. “But I don’t think the question is what happens to you. I think the question is what you do next.” He tilted his head, in the way he always did when he was choosing words carefully. “Heaven needs to change, Michael. It needed to change before I was given this job, and it needs to change now. The question of whether it changes well depends rather a lot on who is left inside it, willing to do the work.” 

Michael looked at him for a long time. 

“You were always the strangest of us.” They said finally. It didn’t sound like an insult. 

“Thank you.” Said Aziraphale, as though it wasn’t. 

Jesus — the actual Jesus, who had spent the last several hours being extremely patient about all of this while hiding in South London — was retrieved from a community garden in Peckham, where he had been having what witnesses would later describe as "a very nice chat with some bloke about compost." He seemed entirely unbothered by the whole situation. He shook Aziraphale's hand. He shook Crowley's hand. He looked at Crowley with an expression of friendly, total comprehension that made Crowley feel profoundly seen in a way he found extremely uncomfortable, and then he said something very quiet in Aramaic that Crowley would not translate for anyone later, no matter how much Aziraphale asked. 

The Second Coming, when it happened — on a bright Thursday in late May, in a community garden in Peckham, with almost no preparation and a great deal of cake that someone had brought because someone always brought cake — was not what anyone had planned.

It was better.

They didn’t talk about it until they were back in the bookshop. 

That was where things tended to get resolved, eventually. The bookshop had an unusual talent for it — something in the walls, perhaps, or the particular quality of the dust, or just the accumulated weight of so many years of two beings refusing to say what they meant in a space that had slowly become the most honest place either of them knew. 

Crowley sat in his chair. Aziraphale sat in his. Between them, on the little table, a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Aziraphale had opened without comment, and two glasses, and the silence that was currently doing the work of a very long conversation. 

“I should apologize,” Aziraphale said. 

“You shouldn’t—” 

“I should, and I’m going to, so please don’t interrupt me, I’ve been practicing.” Aziraphale looked at his hands. “I have spent six thousand years believing that there was a correct way to do things, and that if I could just find it— if I could work hard enough, be good enough, serve faithfully enough — then everything would come right. And I kept asking you to wait. For me to be certain. For circumstances to be better. For it to be the right moment.” He exhaled slowly. “And then I accepted a promotion, and I watched your face, and I thought — I’ll explain later. I’ll make him understand. It’ll be alright.” A pause. “I had the same thought several times during the last six thousand years, actually. I’m beginning to see a pattern.” 

Crowley said nothing. 

“The truth,” Aziraphale continued, still looking at his hands, “is that I was afraid. Not of Heaven — or not only of Heaven. I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped waiting for permission. Because if I stopped waiting, then I would have to admit that I had already made my choice, and I’d made it a very long time ago, and the choice was—” He stopped. He looked up. His eyes were very bright. “Well. The choice was sitting in the other chair. Wearing extremely tight trousers and pretending to read a magazine he held upside-down for forty-five minutes.” 

A beat. 

“I was reading that.” Crowley said. 

“You absolutely weren’t.” 

“It was a very abstract piece.” 

“Crowley.” 

“Fine.” He set his glass down rather harder than necessary. “Fine, yes. I know what you’re saying. I’ve known what you were saying for — for considerably longer than I find comfortable to admit, actually, given how long it took either of us to say it out loud.” He looked at the ceiling, which was easier than looking at Aziraphale, except that it wasn’t really, because there was a water stain up there in the shape of something he’d always found personally significant. “For the record. When I walked away in the street. After.” He stopped. Started again. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want to stay.” 

“I know.” 

“I couldn’t stay and pretend that was all right. Watching you go back. I couldn’t—” He stopped again. There was a significant and undignified pause during which Crowley contemplated his wine, the ceiling, and the general unfairness of having survived six thousand years and the literal apocalypse only to be undone by something as embarrassingly human as this. “I missed you,” he said finally, at the ceiling. “Every day. The whole time. I took up gambling and drinking and I was honestly terrible at both of them, and it didn’t help even slightly.” 

Silence. 

Then: “Anthony.” 

He looked at Aziraphale. He hadn’t called him that in — he couldn’t remember. Centuries. Maybe ever. 

Aziraphale had gotten up from his chair. He was standing in the space between the chairs, which was not a large space, and which was now occupied entirely by an angel looking at him with an expression that had no name in any language, but which Crowley had spent a very long time memorizing the exact shape of. 

“I made you wait,” Aziraphale said quietly. “For a very long time. And then I left. And you deserve better than that. You deserve someone who—” His voice went slightly uneven. “Who says it. Clearly. Without making you guess.” 

“Angel—” 

“I love you,” said Aziraphale. Simple as that. The way you’d state a fact that had always been true and simply hadn’t been said yet. “I have loved you for so long that the shape of it is just the shape of how I understand the world. You are — you are my constant, Crowley. You always have been. And I’m sorry it took me this long to say so plainly, and I will quite understand if you need time, or if you’re angry with me, which you have every right to be, or—” 

“You’re doing it again,” Crowley said. 

“Doing what?” 

“Apologizing and then pre-emptively managing my response so you don’t have to feel the full weight of saying it.” He stood up. Which put him considerably closer than the space between the chairs had been designed for. “Stop managing it.” 

Aziraphale stopped. 

Crowley looked at him. The bookshop was golden around them — late afternoon light through dusty windows, the smell of old paper, the familiar specific quiet of this particular place that had always felt like a kept promise. Crowley had been in every great city in the world. He had watched civilizations rise and fold like linen. He had seen the whole long arc of human history, brilliant and terrible and funny and strange, and he had spent most of it orbiting this one specific being as though he were a planet that had forgotten he was supposed to be free. 

He’d done it entirely on purpose, was the thing. 

“Yeah,” he said. “All right. For the record: same.” He made a vague gesture that encompassed, in no particular order: the bookshop, Aziraphale, the last six thousand years, the general direction of the restored universe, and everything he’d never been good at saying. “All of that. Every word. Back at you.” 

Aziraphale laughed. It was an unsteady, relieved, slightly tearful laugh, the laugh of someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had just been told they could put it down. 

“That’s the least romantic declaration in the history of any world,” he said. 

“Six thousand years, angel. I think we’re past romantic declarations.” 

“We’re absolutely not.” 

“We’re so past them—” 

Aziraphale kissed him. 

It was not a particularly dramatic kiss, as kisses went. There was no soundtrack — or actually there was, because the radio was still playing, and it had moved on to something by the Proclaimers, which was so perfectly absurd that Crowley felt a wave of affection for the universe so overwhelming it nearly knocked him sideways. It was just a kiss, in a bookshop, between two beings who had been finding reasons to touch the same books and sit in the same rooms and stand slightly too close in the same gardens for six thousand years. 

It lasted a while. 

When they separated — slightly — Aziraphale had the expression of someone who has been proven right about something important, which was an expression he wore with what Crowley could only describe as the most infuriating serenity imaginable. 

“See,” Aziraphale said. 

“Don’t.” said Crowley. 

“I’m not saying anything.” 

“You’re absolutely saying something, with your face—” 

“I’m saying nothing. I’m merely—” He gestured at himself. At the general state of affairs. At the bookshop around them, which remained exactly what it had always been: dusty and overstocked and slightly impractical, a monument to the stubborn insistence that beautiful things deserved to exist. “I’m merely noting that I was right about this being worth the wait.” 

“You made me wait on purpose—” 

“I made both of us wait, and I am sorry for it, and we are going to discuss it at length over dinner—” He was already moving toward the kitchen, because he was an angel and some things were sacred. “ — but first you need to eat something, because you have the look of someone who has been gambling and drinking in an alley for two years—” 

“I’ve been fine—” 

“You have not been fine, you’ve been miserable, and I can tell because I know exactly what you look like when you’re miserable—” 

“I was very stoic about it—” 

“You were stoically miserable, which is the very worst kind.” Aziraphale paused in the kitchen doorway. He turned back, and his face was — open, in the way it so rarely was, all the careful management of expression simply gone. Just him. Just this. “Stay,” he said. 

Crowley looked at him. 

Outside, London was doing what London always did: going on. Cars and voices and the distant particular music of a city that had been more or less continuously inhabited for two thousand years and fully intended to keep at it. The universe was whole and turning. Jesus was apparently considering attending a series of community meetings, which everyone agreed was very much in character. Heaven was having some significant conversations about governance. Hell was, as far as anyone could tell, sulking. 

The bookshop smelled of old paper and the particular quality of dust that accumulated only in places where someone had chosen, on purpose, to stay. 

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “All right.” 

He meant: yes. He meant: of course. He meant: I was always going to, I’ve been staying in one way or another for six thousand years, you absolute impossible angel, and I would do every single ridiculous minute of it again without changing a single thing except possibly the part where we didn’t say it out loud for quite so long. 

He meant it the way he’d always meant the things he said to Aziraphale — sideways and dense with implication, a code that had been built up over millennia until it could carry the weight of anything. 

Aziraphale heard all of it. He always had. 

“Good,” he said, and went to make dinner. 

Later, the bookshop was lit with the soft light of an evening that knew it was going well. Two glasses. One bottle, mostly gone. An argument about whether the Principality of Darkness was more or less organized than the Department of Celestial Affairs (Crowley: more, on the ground that at least Hell had the good sense not to use the word principality). The radio on, softly. The city outside. 

Crowley had his feet up on the little table and was reading something he’d found wedged between a 1952 edition of Bleak House and what turned out, on closer examination, to be a handwritten manuscript with Aziraphale’s copperplate on the front cover. He’d asked about it once and been told, with considerable dignity, that it was private, and had elected to take this at face value while making a mental note to ask about it every few decades until the answer changed. 

He watched Aziraphale out of the corner of his eye. The way he moved through the bookshop — tidying, occasionally speaking to a book that had ended up in the wrong section, running his fingertips along spines with an expression of soft and specific happiness. The way he’d been doing it for the better part of a century. The way Crowley had been watching him do it for most of that time. 

He thought about Michael’s face at the edge of the Eternal Flame. About God’s plan, which remained, as it had always been, ineffable — but which had a strange persistent tendency to point, from whatever direction you approached it, toward this bookshop and these two chairs and this specific quality of evening. 

He thought about six thousand years. 

He thought about what came next, which was more six thousand years, more or less, assuming the universe maintained its recently-restored cooperative attitude, and felt something settle in him like the last piece of a very complicated sentence finally finding the right word. 

Aziraphale looked up and caught up gazing. 

“What?” he said. 

“Nothing,” said Crowley. 

Aziraphale smiled. It was a small smile. The kind that knew it was the right answer. 

He went back to his books. 

The radio played on. The city went on. The universe, mended and whole, turned its enormous slow patient turning. 

And in a bookshop in Soho, at the end of the world that wasn’t ending after all, two beings sat in two chairs and said everything they needed to say in the language they’d been building together for six thousand years — the language of staying, and of knowing, and of choosing, again and again, the same answer. 

The answer had always been the same.

[tesb]

The Force will be with you, always. HAPPY STAR WARS DAY!

[dustysalmon]

"I'm sorry."

[thrawnnn]

man I love animation

[maizexe]

Maul: Shadow Lord (2026)

[amusicfreak]

my Maul: Shadow Lord OC!

[darth-memes]

STAR WARS: MAUL - SHADOW LORD COMES OUT ON APRIL 6TH!!!

[amusicfreak]

The Last Mercy

She found the blood first.

A dark smear along the bark of a pine, chest-high, the kind of stain that didn't come from bark or sap or anything that belonged to the forest. Emily Dixon crouched low and pressed two fingers to it. Still tacky. Recent. Her stomach turned over once, hard, like an engine catching on a cold morning.

"Daryl."

She said his name quietly, the way you say a prayer when you're not sure anyone's listening. The woods around the Hilltop's eastern perimeter were quiet in that wrong way — birds gone, wind dead, everything holding its breath. She'd been sent to find him an hour ago when he hadn't come back from a solo sweep. Carol had asked her with a look that tried too hard to be casual, and that look alone had made Emily's chest go tight.

She followed the blood.

He was sitting with his back against a fallen oak, crossbow across his knees, head tipped back against the rotting wood like he'd chosen that spot to rest and not because his legs had given out. For one terrible half-second she thought he was dead and the whole world went white at the edges.

Then he opened his eyes.

"Em."

His voice was rough, scraped out of him. He looked at her the way he always looked at her — like she was something that surprised him, even now, even after twenty-some years of her being alive in his orbit. He'd been nineteen when she was born. She had exactly one memory from before the world ended that felt real: his hands, calloused and too large, lifting her onto a chain-link fence so she could see over it. She didn't remember what she'd been trying to see. She just remembered the hands.

"Hey," she managed. "Hey, you're — you're okay, you're—"

"Em."

The way he said it stopped her. One syllable, flat and deliberate, a door closing.

Her eyes dropped to his arm.

He'd wrapped it himself, torn fabric from his flannel, wound it tight just below the elbow. But the cloth was soaked through and the edges of the wound — she could see the edges where the wrapping had shifted — were ragged in a way that wasn't from a blade. Wasn't from wire or glass or any of the hundred sharp things the world was made of now.

Her brain said no before any other part of her could process it.

"When," she said. Her voice didn't sound like hers.

"'Bout forty minutes ago. Maybe more." He watched her with those grey-blue eyes, steady as stone. "Came outta nowhere. Whole cluster of 'em in that ravine past the creek. Got clear, but—" He tilted his head toward his arm.

Emily's legs crossed the distance between them without her deciding to move. She was kneeling in the dead leaves in front of him, her hands hovering over the wrapped arm, not touching it, because touching it would make it real and she needed another few seconds in a world where it wasn't.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. We have to get you back. Siddiq — or Dante, or — there's got to be something, there's got to be a way to—"

"Emily."

"Stop saying my name like that."

"You know there ain't."

She did know. Of course she knew. She had watched enough people turn, had held enough hands while the light went out of enough eyes, to know there was no surgery for a walker bite, no herb, no prayer. She'd known since the very first week of this world, when she was four years old and too young to understand anything except that the people around her kept getting fewer.

She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. Hard. Hard enough to see static.

"How long," she said.

"Few hours, probably. Maybe less. I can already—" He paused. "I can feel it movin'."

She dropped her hands and looked at him. He was sweating despite the cold, a faint grey undertone starting beneath his tan. His jaw was set in that ironclad way of his, the way he looked when he was carrying something too heavy and refusing to put it down.

"I need you to do somethin' for me," he said.

"Don't."

"Em—"

"Don't ask me that."

"Ain't nobody else." He said it simply. Not cruelly, not even sadly — just as a fact the way the earth was a fact, the way the cold was a fact. "I don't want Carol doin' it. I don't want any of the others. They got enough on 'em." He held her gaze. "You're my sister."

"That's exactly why I can't."

"That's exactly why it's gotta be you."

She stood up. She didn't know she was going to until she was already on her feet, already two steps back, her arms wrapped around herself like she could hold her own ribcage together by force.

"There are other options," she said. The words tasted like cardboard. She didn't believe them.

"Name one."

She couldn't.

The woods were still doing that wrong-quiet thing. Somewhere far off, a branch cracked, and Emily's hand went reflexively to the knife at her hip. Old instinct. Older than thought.

Daryl pushed himself slowly to his feet. He moved carefully, the way he always moved when he was hurt and trying not to show it, that particular brand of Dixon stubbornness that she recognized because she'd inherited a watered-down version of it herself. He crossed to her.

He was still so much bigger than her, even now. She was twenty-three years old and had survived the apocalypse and she still fit under his chin the same way she had when she was small. He put his good arm around her, drew her in, and she let him, pressing her forehead to his chest and listening to his heart — still beating, still steady, for now — and hating every second that she loved.

Daryl holds Emily in his arms and looks at her with his big, grey-blue eyes.

"No." Emily says firmly.

"Em.." Daryl starts.

"No!" Emily exclaims a little louder, fighting his grip before she drops to the ground, sobbing.

The sound that came out of her didn't feel like something her body was capable of making. It came from somewhere below language, below dignity, some chamber of grief she hadn't known she had. Her knees hit the earth and she pressed both fists against her mouth and cried the way she hadn't cried since she was small — ugly and total and without any armor left.

Daryl didn't try to pick her up. He sank down beside her. His good hand found her back.

"I know," he said. "I know."

"You can't ask me to do this." Her voice was wrecked, barely there. "You can't — Daryl, you're all I have. You're the only—" She couldn't finish it.

"I know." His thumb moved in slow circles between her shoulder blades, the same motion she remembered from nightmares and fevers and every bad thing that had ever found her. "I know, Em."

They stayed like that for a while. Long enough for the light to shift, for the shadows to stretch longer across the dead leaves. She cried until there was nothing left in her and then she sat in the emptiness that replaced it, leaning against him, listening to the sound of his breathing change by degrees — slower, heavier, that faint wrongness creeping into the rhythm.

"Tell me somethin'," he said eventually. His voice was thicker now. She could hear it.

"What."

"Somethin' good. From before." A pause. "Somethin' you remember."

She thought. It wasn't easy. Before was mostly fog and fragments, colored by things she'd understood only in retrospect.

"You put me on a fence," she said. "I was little. Like, really little. I don't even know where we were. But you lifted me up so I could see over it." She swallowed. "I don't remember what I was trying to see. But I remember—" She stopped.

"What."

"I remember feeling like nothing bad could happen. Because you were holding on."

Silence. Long enough that she was afraid.

"Daryl."

"Still here."

She pulled back and looked at him. The grey in his face had spread. His eyes were glassy at the edges, but they were still his — still that particular color that had no good name, blue or green or grey depending on the light and the season and his mood. Right now they were the color of winter sky.

"I'm scared," she told him. She'd never said it so plainly to him before. That was maybe the most honest thing she'd ever given him.

"Me too," he said. Which was more than she'd expected. More than he'd given most people in his entire life, she thought.

She unsheathed the knife.

Her hand wasn't steady. She didn't pretend it was. The blade caught the pale afternoon light and she stared at it and thought about everything it meant to hold it and everything it would mean to use it and how those two things were the exact same weight pressing down on exactly the same place in her chest.

"Hey." His voice was gentler now. Going soft at the edges the way it only ever did with her. "Look at me."

She looked.

"You're the best thing that ever happened to me," he said. "You know that?"

"Daryl—"

"I mean it. You were this little—" He stopped, swallowed hard. "Little screaming thing. And I didn't know what to do with you. But I figured it out." The ghost of something crossed his face. "Figured it out together."

Emily pressed her lips together so hard she tasted copper.

"You got people here," he continued. "Carol. Connie. Judith loves you. You got—" He had to stop again. His breathing was labored now, each inhale a little more work than the last. "You got a whole life. You hear me? You got a whole life left."

"It doesn't feel like it right now."

"I know." His eyes held hers. "But it is. And you're gonna live it." He said it the way he said all the important things — not as comfort, not as consolation, but as instruction. Do this. This is what we do. "You're gonna live it and it's gonna be hard and someday it's gonna be good again too."

She was crying again. She hadn't known she had anything left.

"Close your eyes," she whispered.

He did. Without argument, without hesitation — the most trust she had ever been given and the worst moment she had ever lived, compressed into a single unbearable instant.

"Daryl." She needed him to hear her. "I love you."

"Love you too, kid."

She did it the way he would have wanted. Quick. Certain. No hesitation once she'd decided, because hesitation was cruelty and she loved him too much for that.

She held his hand until it went cold.

Carol found her an hour later, still sitting in the leaves, the knife cleaned and sheathed and her arms wrapped around her knees. She didn't ask questions. She sat down beside Emily in the dirt and put an arm around her and stayed, the way people who have survived too much learn to do for each other — in silence, in presence, in the simple stubborn fact of not leaving.

"He told me I had a whole life left," Emily said finally.

Carol was quiet for a moment. "He wasn't wrong."

Emily looked at the place where they had been, where the leaves were disturbed and the earth told its quiet story, and she thought about chain-link fences and hands that were too large and the particular color of grey-blue sky in winter.

"I know," she said.

She didn't mean it yet.

But she thought, maybe, in time — she would.

[randomreasonstolive]

Reason to Live #13794

To actually feel like you’re worth something to someone.

Even if that someone is you.

  – Guest Submission

(Please don't add negative comments to these posts.) 

[writingdose]

[trailertrashgrog]

this might be genuinely too niche of a post to get any traction but i have to say it. i feel like the critical role fandom might benefit from watching the righteous gemstones. not just because it's a good funny show (it is). but because there was this very strange meta narrative around it with fans that really didn't know what to do with a character who was haunting the narrative.

the quick and dirty of it is that the righteous gemstones is about a wealthy televangelist family that has very recently lost their matriarch. she was the guiding moral force of the family. it is both a satire of prosperity gospel grifters and televangelism and also just a comedy about a family rendered utterly dysfunctional without their moral anchor.

the people who loved aimee leigh loved her unconditionally, and there were a few people who hated her for reasons that were varying levels of valid, but broadly this character, before her death, was well-liked and respected even when shitty things happened.

but every single season of the show, people were wildly speculating about what ridiculous twist was going to come up to completely destroy her legacy and memory. it was, seemingly, impossible to accept that maybe aimee leigh was just good. maybe her character flaws were the ones we saw on screen and she didn't have any secret skeletons in her closet. maybe her faith was real, and maybe a show that skewers capitalistic evangelism can also be earnest about people's faith.

i think it's just a microcosm of how "haunting the narrative" has become a buzzy phrase with no meaning anymore to certain kinds of fans

like, haunting the narrative does not mean that a character is a horror movie ghost. it does not mean that there are things that need to be uncovered about their life, even, necessarily. it means that their absence is a significant part of the story. it doesn't mean they've done some wrong you must right to free their spirit.

and i think watching that specific show, where the narrative is haunted by a flawed but ultimately benevolent character, and then thinking about why so many fans spent so much time insisting this woman must be evil, might help people understand how absurd all of these theories that paint thjazi fang as somehow having committed some villainy before his death actually sound

[randomreasonstolive]

Reason to Live #13776

Singing traditional songs. There's something poetic about them surviving through many generations as a group effort even when audio recording didn't exist until recently :)

  – Guest Submission

(Please don't add negative comments to these posts.)