hi i'm not dead <3 came across a post that reminded me of this wip that was supposed to be multi-chaptered but that i'll never finish so. here's the 1k words i've written for the first chapter. the plot is hanahaki with a twist
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"He pointed out the spot where many a blue-belled flower grew, and there they met, and vowed to be constant unto death."
Excerpts from The Demonic Code of Conduct, written in ink shortly after The Great War and subsequently misplaced, and thus unknown in its specifics to any demon.
Thou shalt not utter the name of the Lord, nor use the Devil's name in vain.
Thou shalt not commit honourable acts. To do so is to be unworthy of what its existence constitutes.
Thou shalt not love another sentient being. A demon that offers its heart to another in any shape or form, be it of its own kind or otherwise, shall have that other of which it loves turned upon it as punishment and take over it till its life's end, for the wages of sin is death.
John 1:1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was—
Life is poetic, Crawly muses, coiled up under the shade of a tree. The tree, to be specific. The one that would get the ball rolling, though he still has a while before the lady comes wandering around to this side of the garden.
Life is poetic. Life is poetry. He thinks this now because he feels the cool grass brushing against his scales, sharp but delicate, the bright and incomparable scent of dew, and he knows how they would taste on his tongue without ever having tasted them. He rests his head softly between some small blooming flowers and he knows that they mean.
Life is poetry, because everything has its own language and yet can never be separate from anything else. Whether Crawly has been cursed or blessed to know every language in the world he's not sure, but it all speaks to him. The written language, of course, that would come into fruition as strokes and lines that will somehow become words, the Word; the language of science, with the intricacies of atoms settling around and inside him, or exploding above, the inherent yet overwhelming knowledge of how it all works; the language of flowers, with all their meanings filling his nostrils and resting on his tongue like honey.
It could be a curse if he were human, maybe, with a mind not meant to hold this much information or to know what to do with it. But he's not human, and he'll live a long enough life to be able to digest it all—although he knows even now that some things are too great to comprehend, too intricate and ineffable to fathom. It's a blessing, he decides now. (Although in a thousand years he'll look up at the Tower of Babel, everyone around him speaking a hundred different tongues as God's idea of a plague, and he'll wonder if the universe has got curses and blessings all twisted around.)
He flops over onto his back—though it's not much of a flop, really, in this long form; it's rather like the unravelling of a scroll—and flicks out a tongue towards the flowers drooping right over his head. They're a vibrant yet deep shade of blue, not sharp enough to hurt, and they hang from arched stems like grapes from a vine.
Bluebells, he decides, and they look a little like they're twinkling right at him, light and pleasant chiming sounds like the laughter of stars. Besides, God only specifically told Adam to name the animals, so he supposes everything else is fair game.
There's a certain lightness in being surrounded by beauty and new creation, a particular surreal quality to the colourful loneliness of nature that he thinks he'll never get tired of, and he's feeling playful. Instead of moving just his eyes, he rolls full-body around in the grass to different clumps of flowers, and their names slip off his tongue like he's not actually naming them, but as if they're introducing themselves to him. In the Garden, there are no rules as to where or how nature grows; the plants and flowers all coexist, thrive off each other, and it's something he'll grow to miss.
A stalk of orange flowers with tapered and curled petals wave to him from their nest at the root of a tree. Hey you. Crawly flicks his tongue back at them. Hi, lilies. Their name dances off his tongue, delicate and happy.
A dark red flower smiles serenely at him from the underbrush. Rose, he greets, a name no less elegant for its simplicity.
He coils around the pink viscarias as they twirl and sway to their own wind, and sits in silence with the marigolds. All of the flowers, chrysanthemums and tulips, anemones and violets, petals tapered or round or bright or dull, are equal to him in beauty, for he finds that there is beauty to be found just in understanding. He doesn't have a favourite yet, but then again, he doesn't have to play favourites.
And so in the Garden of Eden, Crawly finds himself falling in love for the first time.
The woman comes along then, and tempting her is as easy as a conversation, an icebreaker. An apple, he hisses in her ear, and the way her tongue sounds the word out for the very first time couldn't be anything but divine.
After all has been said and done, Crawly gently plucks out a flower from its bush, and scales the wall like poison ivy to meet the angel, curious, always curious. And it turns out that there's more splendour to be found in the view from above, if less intimacy. While he had gotten to meet the flowers up close beforehand, delighting in their individuality amongst the acres of green grass, now they all seem to blend together in harmony, like one living, breathing being. An organism in itself, with its own systems and its own language.
Crawly shifts into his human form and presents the flower to the angel with a light magician's flourish. "I'm guessing you haven't had the privilege of being among the flowers yet," he says by way of introduction.
The angel looks down at the red petals Crawly is holding out to him, surprised. "I haven't indeed. And who is this lovely thing?"
Crawly's heart jumps at the question, unable to stop his face from splitting into a grin as the angel gently takes the flower from him. "It's a rose," he says. "She can mean whatever you want it to mean, right now."
And everything is everything is everything: nothing can exist without the other. There in that garden, and then on the wall and beyond, the meanings Crawly and Aziraphale breathe into the flora emerge and grow their roots over generations, and to the end of time.The angel looks up him, eyes shockingly blue and crinkling with delight, and Crawly thinks of the bluebells in the garden, leaning over him in shelter. Warm, steady, protective. Those are my favourite, he decides, and at the back of his throat, he thinks he knows how they taste.
