How do I get a comm from you? Do I have to be part of the Patreon/Discord?
Currently my comms are closed, people usually DM me, BUT I am in the process of repricing things, to make the work-pay ratio more fair. I realised I was charging £5 for any Pokemon, but an oddish and a idk, a drampa require totally different amounts of time, so I have to take a moment to assess the best way to price stuff. Plus when folks buy a full team of 6, usually it’s 6 fully evolved huge Pokemon, often complex dragons or big 3rd evos, which with a trainer, becomes very difficult to pose and set up in a pleasing way. Takes like double the time haha.
If you wish to commission me, I am open to all, not just patreon members. I also do work for other franchises and projects, not just Pokemon stuff. I will be posting a fully updated, clean and vibrant commission post soon, and reopening them, so you and others get a chance to grab some art!
Thank you for your patience, and hopefully with these small adjustments, things are still affordable for many.
Ok. I know I said I wouldn't do this anymore, but I also know it's been awhile since I last uploaded. I've been working on something that we probably won't see in the story for awhile yet... but... it's good.
***
Luz raced along the forest floor, trying desperately not to think too hard about all the movies and shows she watched where the person being chased tripped and fell. She couldn't afford to trip here. Couldn't afford what would happen if she did.
Behind her an explosion ricocheted dirt and grass past her ear. They were much too close for comfort now. A nervous laugh filled her chest and she let it escape to try and keep breathing. How did they find her?! It was just a quick disruption mission...
"THERE. BETWEEN THE TREES."
Rain began to fall as Luz's situation got immensely worse. She hissed as she felt the first drop of Boiling Rain burn her skin. The guards crashing behind her paused in their pursuit to put up protective glyphs but all Luz could do was keep running.
A terrible day to leave my cloak at home. Luz thought bitterly as she pulled up the cat hood on her shirt, desperate for any protection.
Lightning flashed above her as the storm began to roll in. Moving quicker now, the light helped her see where she was. Ahead loomed a familiar shadow of a building. Luz deftly cut under some trees that protected her for a few precious moments as she shifted course. The confused shouting from behind her told the human that it was the correct decision.
Running up behind the manor, Luz scooped up several loose pebbles as she continued her sprint. Skating to a stop, the rain beat down relentless on her skin, making her wince in agony. Locking her eyes on what she prayed was the correct window she chucked rock after rock, occasionally glancing behind her and praying that the guards were far enough back to not hear.
"Come on... come on, please Ami..."
***
Ok. Well. If you made it this far, I apologize. You have now wasted more time with another April Fools. This little snippet was taken from my own personal SAH Bad End AU that I work on when I need a little more angst in my life.
Anyways I'm not awful. I know it's been a long time since I updated and I have been slowly working on the next chapter in between all my daily stresses. So I'll share it with you, the very very few people who will actually read it. :D
***
"No..."
A familiar voice cried softly.
Amity's eyes shot open. She was in Luz's bedroom, in Luz's arms. Only this wasn't like her dreams at all. Her girlfriend was shaking in fear against her, clinging to Amity as if she was afraid to let go. For a moment Amity's heart stopped. Luz's head was dug tightly into her shoulder, but that wasn't what worried her most.
At the angle both of them were, Amity couldn't see her eyes.
"Not again..." Luz whimpered weakly, still in her sleep.
Her voice spurred Amity into motion. Although she knews Luz was strong, it doesn't take much to break from the vice like grip around her body. Spinning around, her arms reached up and over Luz's as Amity held her tightly, wrapping her hands around her shoulders and back.
"Luz." Amity called out firmly, despite the beating fear in her chest.
A delayed whimper is all she got as a response. Holding her tighter, Amity nuzzles her face into Luz's shoulder, holding her there as slowly, Luz's shaking slows and her breathing becomes calmer.
She tried again.
"Luz please look at me."
The human shivered again, swallowing her shakey breath with a gulp as her eyes slowly opened. Amity stares into them as relief washes over her. Although she knew that what she feared wasn't possible, the haunting image of Luz's lifeless glowing blue eyes was burned into her memory.
To see them free of that blue, that glow... that control... it made her mouth dry and the words stick in her throat.
Luz's eyes grew wider the longer Amity stared in silence, the fear becoming evident as the human drew her own conclusions in the quiet.
"How? Amity... how is it possible?! I... I... magic isn't supposed to exist here! How can he find us?!" Luz cried, trying to push back and out of Amity's arms. The witch didn't let go.
"It isn't-"
"I saw it Amity! The portal was completely gone and there was magic everywhere. How could I see that if he wasn't still connected, if he-"
"Luz!" Amity stopped her sharply, grasping at her arms with her long nails and trying to bring the girl out of the panic she had woken up into. Deep inside her own stomach twisted in fear. After all Luz had been through, she hadn't ever seen her fearless champion this frightened before.
She growled, not out of anger at Luz, but at the witch responsible for this in the first place.
"Watch me." Amity commanded firmly as Luz's eyes finally focused. The witch drew a large and purposeful circle in the air. No magic trailed from it, no tingle throughout her body brought the spell to life. She let her hand fall limply down as Luz watched curiously.
"No magic."
Amity could tell her statement had an immediate effect on Luz, the girl's shoulders falling in relief, but not losing all of their tension. Concern still coated her eyes.
"Maybe he doesn't need magic. Maybe we just are connected now..." Luz shakily thought aloud. Amity sighed. So that approach didn't work.
"Do you know what I see right now?" Amity asked her girlfriend sharply. Her heart now beating so rapidly that she felt a bit lightheaded.
Luz didn't answer, but instead cocked her head to the side.
"I see brown eyes. Big. Dopey. Brown eyes. Not blue." Amity assured her, a small sheepish smile forming on her lips. 'Your gorgeous brown eyes...' She added silently to herself.
Neither of them are expecting it, of course. The world had failed to end over a year ago, and Heaven and Hell hadn't so much as looked sideways at them since the kidnapping. As they had taken six thousand years to plan the apocalypse, and their first move against Crowley and Aziraphale had failed so miserably, the duo had assumed they had more than a little bit of time to relax before they had to start watching their backs again. Crowley had moved his flat into the upstairs of the bookshop – quite literally, much to Aziraphale's dismay to find one afternoon – and life had continued on exactly the way it shouldn't have: happily.
Unfortunately, the ever after part proves trickier after only a year.
They exit the bookshop they'd been visiting, one they'd found in southern France that had ended up with a book Aziraphale had grudgingly sold nearly a hundred years prior. Crowley holds the door open so that Aziraphale does not have to stop pawing through his reclaimed book, looking for damages and tutting about the care the book has been given while out of his.
As such, neither one of them is paying attention to anything else. The door clicks shut behind them as Aziraphale runs a finger over one of the lines of text, and ahead of them the sky darkens and cracks open the way a window does when impacted by a baseball bat. Light cascades through and within it, Crowley sees gleaming, tawny feathers and lion-clawed hands reaching for Aziraphale.
Gabriel.
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Crowley reacts on instinct, dropping all pretenses of mortality in order to meet Gabriel's true form with his own, the only way he will stand a chance. Knowing the element of surprise will be his only advantage and that it will only last seconds, Crowley hits the Archangel full force, wings out and wheels spinning. The contact sears, but Crowley knows the hellfire licking at the serpent wheels of his true form will hurt Gabriel just as badly.
Gabriel twists to grab at him with snapping, lion-like jaws, and the serpents wheeled up to cage Crowley's core release their tails, flipping to form chains around Gabriel's magic instead, like a snake coiled tightly around prey. All six of Gabriel's golden wings flare out to escape the prison, and Crowley's grip tightens around the scalding core of holy light sitting in the hollow of Gabriel's open chest. It will destroy him, but Crowley will burn himself out to take Gabriel down, will ruin them both, if it means protecting Aziraphale.
He forces his will upon time, but Gabriel is just as outside of it here as he is, and it only slows around them, the seconds muffled as they pass. Distantly, Crowley is aware of his corporation's name being called. He feels the sharp bite of Gabriel's teeth sinking into his shoulder until they touch inside of his chest. He will lose this corporation. It doesn't matter. Neither of them will make it out of this.
Crowley mantles both of his wings around them to contain his attack and his core brightens, burning with hellfire and magic. He was seraphim once, made to create and destroy in the beginning, his song made to grant power to the Almighty, Herself. He had given stars his ability to go supernova, to destroy themselves in the process of creating something new, the way he intends to do now.
"CROWLEY!"
Aziraphale's voice cuts through the static of Crowley's burn, and time speeds up and Gabriel yanks him down to the cement with him. Crowley half-folds one wing and slams the bend of it into Gabriel's eye, the brilliant purple one set in his lion's head and he hears bones crunch. He wonders whose they are. He cannot feel his corporation properly anymore.
For one, crystalline moment, Crowley sees Aziraphale standing behind Gabriel, his vision of the angel fragmented by the thousands of eyes all over his true form. Aziraphale's wings blaze with holy light. Crowley can see four animal aspects in him. Principalities only have one. He hasn't run. Aziraphale is still here, and he has a sword in his hands, and that's too familiar for Crowley.
They had stopped the end. It isn't supposed to go like this.
His wheels constrict tighter, but he can feel Gabriel's essence burning brighter in his hollow chest, and Crowley knows he will not survive that kind of holy light for much longer. Gabriel's skin crackles like bacon under Crowley's grip, but it is not enough.
Crowley pushes back with everything he has left, a battle of wills, but even Seraphim are a lower order than the Seven Archangels, and he is outmatched in a knowing fight. His well of magic, though vast, is finite, and Gabriel's well is deeper. Crowley's life force will give out first, the way a human's does when they have lost enough blood.
Something clangs off his coils, and he opens the eyes there to see Aziraphale pulling his sword away.
Aziraphale had struck him.
Aziraphale? he says, inside and out. He tastes blood in his mouth, but he can't tell which one. That can't be good.
Aziraphale had struck him.
Gabriel's light is burning through his magic faster than he can replace it, faster than he can regenerate, and Aziraphale had attacked him with a flaming sword. Hadn't they sent that away? Dizziness drags at him. He is losing.
"Let him go!" Aziraphale shouts, his voice chambered, and Crowley realizes the words have come from all of his heads. "Crowley! You have to let him go!"
Gabriel writhes in Crowley's grasp, six wings battering at him. He'll escape Crowley on his own in a moment; Crowley is fading too quickly to stop him anymore. Aziraphale is right, he has to let Gabriel go. It will kill him. Gabriel will kill him, and Aziraphale will be next.
They'd had a good run of it, he thinks, full to the brim with regret that this is how it will end.
Crowley's magic reaches the bottom of its well, and his coiled wheels slack as he begins to lose cohesion. Gabriel is on him in a second, claws outstretched and holy light so bright as to be unbearable. Crowley does not have the strength to meet him again.
There is a sound, a crackle like a bonfire coming to life but a thousand times louder, and the light twists as Gabriel howls, clawing at something else, something Crowley cannot see.
Aziraphale, Crowley thinks, trying to pack himself back into his dying corporation. He doesn't have the magic left to heal any part of himself. He barely has the dregs of magic left to hold onto existence just a moment longer. He had used everything to give Aziraphale a chance, and Aziraphale hadn't taken it to save himeslf. He had stayed, to fight a battle he could not possibly win.
He had not left Crowley to die alone.
Crowley wishes he had. He cannot bear the thought of a world without Aziraphale, even if he, himself, is no longer in it.
Gabriel's shrieking stops, and for one sinking, horrible moment, everything holds so still Crowley thinks maybe time really did stop.
And then the light returns, scorching even through Crowley's closed lids, and he surrenders to it without a fight.
Without Aziraphale, surviving has no worth.
He had thought they would have more time.
------
Crowley wakes to the searing pain of holy light seeping into his wounds like honey, thick and sticky and destroying him. He struggles weakly against Gabriel, hoping for a swift end to the agony, and finds a firm but gentle hand pressed into his uninjured shoulder. He is aware of screaming, and thinks it might be his own, but he can't tell.
He can't see. He can't see anything.
Thousands of eyes and he can't see a damn thing.
Fear courses through him like a live wire- he nearly loses consciousness from the force of it, and then a voice cuts through the panic.
"I'm so sorry," he hears, and it's Aziraphale. "Please try to hold still, Crowley. I'm not sure- I'm so sorry, I'm doing my best, but-"
Alive. He's alive.
Relief chases hard on the heels of the fear, like a hound after a fox, and Crowley really does pass out then.
-----
The next time he struggles awake, everything is quiet, but it is the sort of quiet that implies calm, not absence. There is still holy light coursing under his skin, through his true form, and it makes his entire body feel like he's been pressed under a hot iron, but it isn't killing him anymore. He seeks it out inside, ready to purge it, ready to sink back into the soft, comforting dark, but he realizes almost too late that the light is all that holds him together.
He should be dead, he thinks, in the distant sort of way people think things as they are dying. He should have died.
Opening his mouth, he tries to speak, but the motion brings with it fresh agony, and all that comes out is a wordless scream.
Footsteps and voices skitter under the raw sounds Crowley makes as he tries to breathe before he remembers he doesn't have to, and stops. Anathema – Anathema?? – appears in his line of vision, and more hands than she has press him back onto the bed. White feathers mantle high over her, and he manages to loll his head to the side far enough to see Aziraphale.
"Stop thrashing!" Anathema commands, and Crowley nearly manages to obey. His entire body is shaking too badly to listen to anyone, so although he goes slack, he still moves. "You're safe but you're very badly hurt, Crowley," she continues. "Do you understand? Your boyfriend came and got me to help, but I've never patched up an angel before."
"Angel-" Crowley echoes, hand spasming. Everything hurts. "How-"
A hand slides into his, and maybe it would have been warm on a normal day but it feels like an icy balm now, so much colder than the molten lava coursing through his veins. He was not made to contain anything holy, not like this. Anathema touches his other side, touches something that sends a shock through him, as if she can touch his true form with mortal fingers.
"You fought Gabriel, you silly thing," Aziraphale tells him, throat closing up on the words and Crowley doesn't have to see him to know there are tears. The bed beside Crowley dips as Aziraphale sits against his hip. "You saved me, now let Anathema save you."
She's human, Crowley thinks, clinging to the last shreds of wakefulness. She's never healed an angel- she doesn't even know he's a demon. Crowley wants to laugh, but he thinks it might kill him to do it, so he just lets go again and everything fades back into the painless nothing.
-----
The room is dark and silent and everything aches before he even opens his eyes. There is still holy light thrumming inside of him and he lies there unable to do anything except tolerate the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. He has nothing left with which to stop them, no strength of will or scrap of power, so he lets them flow until they are through.
No one comes for him.
When his tears are spent and he only trembles finely again, he struggles onto his side. His wings are out, no power left to hide them, but they are bandaged and folded to his back, held in place with more bandages. He doesn't remember injuring them, but they ache like the rest of him so he must have. He lies on his side, not breathing, just staring into the darkness.
"Aziraphale?" he eventually calls, voice wobbling such that it threatens to collapse entirely. When he uses his lungs, the deep bite wounds on his shoulder and chest flare with pain as if they are being torn in all over again. He closes his eyes but it doesn't stop fresh tears from welling. His blood pounds against the inside of his skull, erratic and relentless.
There is no answer. He is alone.
He doesn't know how long he lies there. It feels like eternity. He calls for Aziraphale again, but it feels like trying to rip his heart out of his chest every time, so he stops. Aziraphale isn't close enough to hear him, isn't close enough to feel his distress. Maybe Gabriel had come back to finish what he'd started. Aziraphale wouldn't have stood a chance by himself, not against an Archangel.
Crowley struggles to get upright. Holy light surges inside of him, seeking to heal and only succeeding in tearing at his seams. His own power wraps around it, suppressing it, but there's not enough of his own yet to sustain him. His essence requires magic to exist the way humans require blood to live, and he'll make it the same way- slowly. Until then this- this- donation is filling in the gaps.
It may yet kill him, but for the moment it is the only thing keeping him alive.
The floor is chill against his overheated feet as he sits on the edge of the bed, panting from the effort and the rolling waves of nausea. He calls out again, Aziraphale's name shattering over a dry sob at the excruciating sensation the motion brings. He receives no response. Blearily, he stumbles to his feet, desperate to go in search of him, to see him and smell him and touch him and know he is still alive.
The world lists sharply to the right, or maybe Crowley does, and the floor comes up to greet him. His last thought is of how lovely the cold floorboards are about to be.
--------
He is back in the bed.
His head still hurts, and the holy light in his blood still clamors around inside of him looking for cracks to split open, but as he stares up at the ceiling he realizes it hurts less. His own magic is starting to recover by degrees. His skin and bones are knitting, but slowly. He might actually live.
He takes an experimental breath, and stops immediately because that still feels worse than dying. Gabriel had nearly taken his arm off; Crowley suspects he would have lost it, except for Aziraphale's desperate attempts to heal him. He vaguely recalls seeing Anathema, and hearing her say she was going to heal him, and wonders if that was real. The bandages certainly feel like the work of a human and if he focuses, he can find the vestiges left behind by human magic lingering inside of his corporeal wounds. Maybe it had been real, after all.
Something in the dark room shifts, and Crowley startles at the figure seated in a chair near the door, an armchair that had most definitely not been in the bedroom last time he'd been conscious.
"You're alive," She says, and his response to Her presence goes right down to his core: fear and respect and a bone deep longing he'd thought he'd left behind millennia ago. She's sitting right there, one leg crossed over the other and a New Aquarian open in her lap, like She hadn't abandoned him at the first opportunity. Like She hadn't ruined him.
He wants to say something, but he doesn't know what words he could possibly say to address what sits between them. She watches him for a long moment, waiting with an unfamiliar amount of patience, before She finally looks back down to Her magazine.
“You're just full of surprises,” She remarks, not looking up again. “You shouldn’t be. I certainly didn’t make you that way, Crowley, but... here you are.” She sounds almost… impressed. Fond, if She is ever such a thing. "Do you remember why you're like this?"
Crowley swallows, the taste of apple still sweet on his tongue after so many millennia. He has tasted nothing but ash since that day- not because She had cursed him, but because he had cursed himself by partaking. Nothing will ever again slake his thirst for knowledge. No food will ever taste as sweet as an answer. Of course he remembers- he's been unable to forget.
“I thought as much,” She says, with a small, sad smile, as if she has heard his thoughts. Maybe she has. “My dear, sweet serpent. You’ve made such a mess of things, haven’t you?”
She rises then, approaching him, and he finds he does not have the strength to recoil or fight, even if it would work. Desperately, he wishes Aziraphale were here, so he could at least say goodbye before he is burned out of existence. So that he could just see him one last time. He closes his eyes, unable to watch his death approach, knowing he is helpless.
Her touch, when it arrives, does not burn. It soothes over him, settling the pain, until She reaches for the light within him, pulling it out of him like a thread from a spool. He struggles against the strange sensation, aware that Aziraphale's light is the only thing keeping him alive, no matter how much pain it causes. Gently, She disentangles his hold, and the last bit of it slips free of him.
Dizziness floods in and his vision goes black even though he thinks he is still conscious, and Her voice filters through the fading reality.
"He loves you," She says, almost idly. He can feel himself dying. "Light like this should have killed you, but you've soaked into every bit of him, haven't you? His power recognized you as part of itself and sought to heal you. Sought to redeem you. Can you imagine, holy light healing a demon?"
Her chuckle rolls over him and then he feels another touch, the same cool calm as the first, and something... twists. His stomach drops and rises and his head spins and something lances into his true form. This is it, then, he thinks weakly. She waited to kill him until she had recovered Aziraphale's light from him, and now her patience with him has truly run out.
"Do you know why you lost your wings?" She asks. If he had been breathing, he would have to stop now, with how tightly She grips onto his true form. He cannot answer Her, but mercifully he knows she needs no answer for such a rhetorical question. They both know he'd lost them to the sulfur pools when She cast him down.
But when the answer comes, it is not what he expects.
"Because you no longer needed them."
He did, he wants to tell Her, he had still needed them, still wanted them, but She digs into his essence before he can even try to explain now. Aziraphale's light returns to him, changed, and all of the pain She has held at bay floods back with it. All he can do is scream, thrashing in her grasp, until he loses consciousness for a moment. He knows it is only a moment because he can still hear the echo of his own voice when he comes to, weak and listless and entirely unable to fight.
Only when he falls still does She draw a finger along his essence, along the very core of him, and from the raw wound, a new wing slowly unfolds. She repeats the motion on the other side of his core, and twice more after that, until he is whole in ways he has not been since he sang Her praises. Gently, She wraps a hand around the break in his mortal wing, and the bones leap to obey her in ways he cannot, knitting together in perfection.
"I gave you two bodies," she tells him gently, finally releasing him, "and you've no regard for either of them, it seems. He does though, your Aziraphale."
There are a thousand, a million, a billion things he wishes to say to her. He has asked so many questions over the ages, cried them to the heavens, whispered them in vain into pillows. He has railed at her for millennia, for longer than that, about the injustices done to him and to others.
However, only one question matters now.
Crowley sucks in a breath, ignoring the pain that brings with it, and asks: "Where is he?"
"With the other angels, I expect," she says. "Do you know what he did for you?"
Eyes closing, Crowley's body goes completely slack around him, and he can't find the strength to answer her. There can only be one answer to that question; Aziraphale has Fallen, or he's about to, and there's nothing Crowley can do about it from here. He'll Fall, and won't even have the comfort of doing so with others the way Crowley had done. If he survives it, and Crowley knows there is a good chance he will not, there's no guarantee he'll remember anything from before. Crowley does, but that seems like a fluke, considering how many other demons do not. He remembers just enough to know what he's lost, a fact made infinitely worse by knowing that is why he cannot just forget.
It hurts more for him to remember. It will hurt Aziraphale worse to forget.
Crowley can do nothing about it for either of them, and that is perhaps worst of all.
"He's killed an Archangel," she continues, almost as if she thinks the words should placate him. "Gabriel is slain, between the two of you. Aziraphale will face the others for it."
"Please," Crowley croaks, trying to pry his stubborn eyes open, trying to see her so he can beg properly. She is the only one who can stop them from hurting Aziraphale. Of the two of them, she is the only one who can save him. "It was me, take me instead, punish me instead. Please- don't-"
A soft hand smooths over his fevered forehead, down his temple, to rest upon his cheek. "Hush now," she soothes. "I well know your place in this. That is why I am here. You know, I imagined a lot of things when I created you, my little serpent, but nothing like this. Never a demon so willing to sacrifice for something holy. Never an angel so willing to protect one who had Fallen. What am I to do with the two of you?"
"Please," he begs, on the edge of losing consciousness from the adrenaline and fear coursing through him. He cannot lose Aziraphale. Not now, not after everything.
The contact dissipates on his cheek, and for a moment he thinks she must have gone. Tears leak heavy down the sides of his face to soak the pillow, his throat closing up, and still his muscles will not obey, his magic too weak to carry him. He hadn't expected her to help him or Aziraphale, but he had hoped. He had hoped that her showing up after so long would be something other than another punishment.
"Oh, no more of that, Starshaper," she tells him, with all the tenderness of a bone-deep bruise. "Come here. Give me one of your flighted wings."
Though he does not think he can move, and does not want to give her anything, he somehow lifts the wing closest to her, one of the two used for flight, and she takes it gently. She smooths her other hand along the patagium, and then meets his eyes in a way she has never done before. He has the wings, now, to cover his eyes and shield himself from her but finds that she had been right. He has no need of them.
"You were willing to give all of yourself to protect him," she says, so plain a truth that it aches. "Are you still?"
"Yes," he answers, without hesitation.
"Then give of yourself to me," she tells him, but gently. It is a request, not a demand, and he understands why. He had already used anything he might have given her. What he has left is barely enough to keep him alive- giving up even a little will kill him, and they both know it.
But it is Aziraphale, and so Crowley nods his consent.
She strokes one palm down his primary feathers, and the holy light inside of him responds to her touch, following the contact. Beneath her fingers the rich, black color fades, leaving clean, white feathers limned in black, and when she draws her hand away, some vital part of himself comes with it.
He has just enough time to think how very much his wing looks like that of a magpie before the drain of his power sends him face first into oblivion.
Btw - I am participating in STS today! It'll just be a hot minute before I can do it, because my family's putting in new flooring. As soon as I can get out of helping am no longer needed, I'll send my question out!! :D
