𝒜ngus .

oc art too😳

It had pained you that his cousin had abandoned him in his last moments and the woman he had fought over had barely spared him a parting glance.

So while your friends were occupied with their bets and jests, you had fallen to your knees beside him. He was muttering under his breath as his color drained away from his already pallid skin. Your hands hovered atop his as if you were comforting him. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but the sentiment was there. And when his breath finally left him and his hands went limp, you were the first one he saw.

His eyes had caught yours—a rich brown with a lighter ring of bronze around the pupil. The eye contact had made you gasp for air you no longer needed.

"Are you an angel?" Thomas had asked, faintly as if he wasn't believing what he was seeing. Instead of pain in his eyes, there was a familiarity—a softness—that seemed to fit him.

With him finally dead, your hands could finally meet. His skin was cool against yours as he shifted them to cling back onto yours.

In the days following, while he was getting used to being a ghost, he was always one step behind you.

"Are you sure this is not heaven, and you my guardian angel?" He would ask.

"I would not be a very good guardian angel considering you're dead, Thomas."

He would pout and sigh and gaze out the window of the estate, watching as people went about their normal, living days. The other ghosts liked him well enough; Kitty was fascinated with the wound in his torso, Humphrey had new ankles to gaze at, Robin had another soul to play pranks on, and Annie and Mary were just excited to finally have another person to talk to. Thomas was like a breath of fresh air to you and it was something you didn't want to let go of.

"I wish I were still able to write my thoughts down." He complained to you. "I finally have the muse I spent my life searching for and yet I am unable to compose anything."

"A muse?" You had asked, interested. Thomas had taken up flattering you on a day to day basis but he never called you his muse until then.

"An angel has presented themselves to someone as unworthy as this poet, you are certainly the muse I needed." His hands, still chilled with the blood loss he sustained during death, had clutched yours. "I shan't let this go to waste! Every stanza will be devoted you, my dear."

"Oh, Thomas...you flatter me so..."

"You are heaven-sent. Ethereal in the way your skin glows in the afternoon light, otherworldly when your eyes glimmer with the moonlight." His tone breathy in the emptiness of the house.

His words draped over you like a sweet song without even trying. When he was trying, however, his verses were clumsy and wordy, but you never minded. They still held the devotion he held solely for you and you always loved it no matter how many metaphors he jumbled up or phrases he never quite used correctly.

"If you are not an angel," he started one year after he had died while looking out into the gardens from a second-story window, "then why were you the first thing I saw after passing?"

His eyes were trained on the tree he was left slumped against a year earlier. The melancholy hung over him like a rain cloud. That was typical for death anniversaries but poets always managed to feel more than the average person, you found.

You had taken up the spot next to him, standing so your shoulders were touching.

"I know what it is like to die alone, Thomas. No one deserves that cruelty." You watched a game of croquet being played on the lawns with little interest.

"And the others do not?"

"The others are...more desensitized to death by now. To them, you were just another person passing on. They were more concerned with whether you were going to join us or pass on to whatever comes next immediately."

"You are very kind." Thomas says after a brief moment of silence. "You have not yet convinced me you are not an angel." He smiles for the first time that day, brown eyes finally meeting yours.

"You poets and your sweet talk." You laughed.

"You angels and your beauty." He had countered.

You had hummed in response, relishing in the quiet of the room. Faint laughter was heard from below, the players on the lawn having a grand old time, unknowing of the ghosts watching over them.

"My angel..." Thomas had sighed out, the hand at his side moving to press closer against your own. The backs of his fingers brushing the gaps in between your own.