#something tender

Fandom: Good Omens | Relationship: Aziraphale/Crowley | Category: M/M | Rated: G | Chapters: 1/1 | Words: 2,097 | Author: scullyphile

Summary: It's difficult to make friends when you never leave your home. That's why Aziraphale tries to open the shop whenever he can, reaching out for whatever, or whoever, is missing from his life.

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Happy birthday, @spectrallydistracted (have I said that enough times yet today? No. One more time for the people in the back.) 🩵 Writing this fic was totally last minute and not planned, but I'm glad I did it.

Thank you again to @kneelbeforeyourdogbabylon for beta reading this at midnight for me. You only have yourself to blame because you said you knew I was already giving her the podfic but that you wouldn't mind if I wrote something last minute and yote it at you. So I did. God, I love a challenge. And you. Both of you.

Thanks to @goodomensafterdark for having a birthday committee. I love being on it.

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Excerpt:

The shop would be open whenever Aziraphale’s heart was open, and so its hours were irregular and impossible to pin down. Nothing inside was for sale, not really, but he would throw the doors wide when he craved human connection badly enough.  On one such day, he stood in a rectangle of sunlight on the floor, approached the threshold, and breathed deeply. Toes abutting the line that separated him from the world, he stopped.

But reversed.

I want Kara waking up in Lena's body, feeling the smooth high-threadcount sheets, in a room far cleaner than her own. I want her to run her hands through the thin strands of Lena's hair, the feel so different to the human touch.

I want Kara going to the bathroom and staring at herself as Lena in the mirror, appreciating the line of her jaw, and the way her eyebrow naturally seems to arch its way up.

I want Kara to lift her shirt and run a tender hand over the little pooch of Lena's belly, cupping it affectionately.

When she's done in the bathroom, she finds Lena's phone on the bedside table and scrolls through the contact list to find her own name. The other end picks up immediately.

"Lena? Yeah-- lucky guess, considering I'm in your... apartment. Yeah, of course. Sure... meet you at the Tower?"

Kara pauses for a moment, catching her own eye in the mirror of Lena's boudoir. She gives herself a soft smile.

Day 19 for Mys Mes Inktober list

now, with some distance (emotional, physical—distance in every dimension), i see that i haven’t had it yet. i’ve had some big ones, but not a great one. not yet.

as you sleep in your bed, i climb out of mine wrapped in the same sheets i waited too long to wash after you left for a sunnier shore. i let the sheets fall to my feet as i walk, fingers tracing walls, naked back bent as i sit at the baby grand piano you bought.

you told me: stop running as if distance is a measure of your endurance, and run instead to the one whose distance you cannot endure

but i didn’t, and let you chase me till the soles of your shoes were all but gone, till your feet blistered red, till your heart pumped love dry— though you’ve never been closer and never farther away, i sit here and sing the words i pray i one day have the courage to say: i am sorry it took ten poems, three time zones and a year’s worth of distance between us for me to let my hair down and hang up my running shoes, i am sorry that my memory is kinder to you than i was, and that it took me this long to notice that the devil i thought was you was on my shoulder the whole time.

to the yellow boy lying behind the chapel gentle underbelly of sin—

don’t you know God is white? marking degrees from straight narrow tightrope falling