"Paris, The City Of Light" - Anaxagorus x Astrologist! Reader
(Honestly speaking, this song is very unrestrained and enigmatic in a way then reaches a calmer more serene moment. Think it's very fitting of him during a grand speeche or something n' the reader comes in frame. Or perhaps an event of some kind they go to alongside each other.)
“Vanity in the Time of Love”
Summary: Amidst the grand halls of a celestial symposium beneath, Anaxagoras—the heretical scholar known as the Demised—delivers a blistering speech on truth and defiance, watched by the one person who has ever made him falter: you, a fierce and emotionally scarred astrologist once known only for your wrath and loyalty. Through quiet glances and a shared history carved in loss and memory, the two of you navigate the blurred boundary between philosophy and affection, intimacy and isolation, as the stars watch in silence. The city around you pulses like music—unrestrained, enigmatic, fleeting—and for a moment, so do you both.
Warnings: Mentions of past enslavement and trauma (?), Hints of emotional manipulation, Oblique references to death and loss, Introspective melancholy, Academic/religious heresy, Existential themes (mortality, divinity, vanitas), Subtle romantic tension with emotionally complex dynamics.
The auditorium swelled with murmurs, a sea of scholars, dissenters, zealots, and gods-in-hiding filling the Grove’s shattered heart—now a sanctum of forbidden discourse. Moonlight leaked through fractured glass, casting broken constellations upon polished stone, and at the center of it all stood Anaxagoras. Not a man anymore, not entirely. A ghost of genius, draped in defiance and golden embroidery.
You leaned against a pillar at the rear, arms crossed, stars glinting within your eyes—not the reflection of chandeliers, but something innate, celestial. The child you protected—small, curious, and seated beside you—gripped the hem of your clothing, their breath caught between awe and fear.
Then his voice rang out—sharp as frost, warm as flame:
"They call me 'The Foolish,' and perhaps I am. For I do not tremble before the gods, nor do I kneel. The truth needs no altar, only fire."
The music of his words—resonant, unshackled—carried across the marble veins of the hall. Each phrase was a rebellion. Each pause, a provocation. The crowd responded like shifting tides, some cheering, some jeering, others too spellbound to move.
He saw you.
Of course he did. He always saw you.
A flicker—his pale aqua eye met yours, briefly veiled by the golden-patterned patch. The magenta shimmer behind his iris flared, a silent recognition. And suddenly, that unrestrained symphony shifted, grew quieter, gentler.
He spoke not just to them now, but to you.
"I have dissected souls and transcribed screams into scripture. I've danced with death, and I have not wept. But I have feared only one thing in this life—that the stars might forget their names. That the cosmos, vast and ancient, might abandon its promise to those who still gaze up from the dirt."
Your heart tightened.
He was talking about you. About the night you first met, when you mistook him for a charlatan trying to mock your astrological charts. You had nearly slit his throat when he laughed, not cruelly, but in wonder.
“Ah. A fighter who reads the heavens. A contradiction. A poem.”
He had seen through you then too, peeling past rage and pride, down to the trembling hands of someone terrified to hope.
Later, you walked the garden ruins together. The child slept beside a sculpture of an eyeless deity. The air was cool, kissed by the scent of crushed Antila petals.
"You shouldn't have said those things," you muttered.
"What things?"
"About the gods. About the scholars. About me."
"But they were true," he said, brushing his fingers against a wilted flower. "And I’ve spent too many years with liars."
You sat beside him, the stars above softening in their brilliance. The silence that passed was not awkward—it was rare. Sacred.
"Do you still see souls?" you asked.
"Only when I want to," he replied.
He turned to you, gaze no longer blazing but soft, mournful. "Yours… was the first that didn’t try to escape when I touched it."
You laughed. "That’s because I didn't know how."
He reached out, gloved fingers brushing your cheek. A gesture too intimate for someone so cerebral. But there he was, trembling again—like the boy with the mechanical bird.
"You should’ve run from me," he whispered. "But instead, you… stayed. Even after I failed. Even after I became a vanitas."
You leaned into his touch.
"Because I saw the truth too, Anaxa. Not the kind in equations or soulflames, but the one that makes you human."
He closed his eyes, and for a moment, the music of the world stilled—no lectures, no experiments, no divine verdicts. Just the lingering heat of your presence. Just the quiet acceptance of a man who had scorched the heavens and found, somehow, love in the ashes.
You rested your head on his shoulder.
The stars above blinked slowly, like ancient eyes closing in reverence.
And below, in the ruin where gods once dwelled, a former slave and a fallen scholar held each other, both pretending for just a little while that truth did not hurt.
"If I die tomorrow," he said softly, "burn my body into ink. Let someone write something kinder with it than the world ever did."
You smiled faintly. "Then you'd better live. I've already written your name in my stars."
And like that, the music swelled once more—an enigmatic sonata turning serene, twining through the ghosts of memory, threading into fate.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: American Housewife (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cooper Bradford & Oliver Otto, Cooper Bradford/Oliver Otto, Cooper Bradford & Katie Otto
Characters: Cooper Bradford, Oliver Otto, Katie Otto
Additional Tags: Coming Out, Implied Mutual Pining Cooliver, Emotional, Katie & Cooper bond, Written before 5x04, Technically canon-compliant, Takes place a few days after 5X03
Summary:
Cooper needs to talk to Katie about something important.
