About embers and wind

by GladiaDelmarre

Summary:

Love is hard, especially if you see things in total opposite ways.
Two short poems of how Crowley and Aziraphale experience love, and how they suffer from it.

Chapter 1: Embers

Walking slowly on hot embers,

On the path you traced carelessly,

Blessed by your steps and your purity.

It would be enough to rest for a moment. Get off the track, cool off in a pool, put my battered feet on the fresh grass.

Yet I cannot, or the path may disappear.

What if this is the only chance I have?

What if once I lose sight of the road, even for a fraction of the time, it vanishes?

 

You are not always in sight. Sometimes, I follow you from afar.

Sometimes, it's just your smell.

And sometimes it's nothing, just a glimmer of embers under the ashes.

I rest a little in those moments—rare moments of stillness in which I almost no longer feel the heat.

Or maybe it's just being so used to pain that makes it more bearable.

 

When I get close, you burn me inside.

When I'm close enough to touch you

It's like going on fire.

And I stubbornly, one step after another, persistently burn.

 

Demons know hellfire.

Deep red, purplish.

Nothing stands against the white and golden heat you radiate.

You, made of honey and precious spices, splendid and cruel, unaware of your power.

 

So I continue, swallowing words of pain and accusation

Why are you doing this to me?

Why do you leave me to burn on a low flame?

Why don't you hold me in your arms?

 

Humans have choices.

Free will, the gift of choosing the apple I offered to them.

It's ironic that I feel I have none.

You tied me up

Ropes of braided hair, that shine like your own pale locks

They cut my flesh deeply, leaving indelible marks for my eyes

Perhaps, invisible to yours.

Chapter 2: Wind

Sitting under a ginkgo tree in early autumn,

its leaves created a golden carpet at my feet.

All I can think of is that your eyes take on this shade sometimes.

 

How often you do hide them,

You hide parts of yourself from me.

But much more often I see you walking, holding your heart in your hands

Reckless and untamed. 

 

I see you in the rich, mottled red and orange heads of buttercups

And in the starry skies reflected on your face and shoulders.

 

You follow my steps

Without ever hesitating.

 

Sometimes I believe - I hope - that you finally let me go

That tired of my eternal contemplation

You have taken the whirlwind of your actions elsewhere.

 

Because you are fire, and getting close to you makes me burn with strength, pain, and passion, all that I have tried to slide under me in my quiet life.

Because I am air and wind, I caress you from afar and make you crackle, but if I get too close, we burn together.

 

I cry sometimes.

 

You think maybe it's a pale reflection of your pain,

When a smile stretches your lips

And it drags on your face, without reaching your beautiful golden eyes.

 

I know pain, too, but it's different from yours, so primordial and deeply rooted in the heart and stomach.

Mine passes through lungs and mind, through eyes and memories.

I collect them

How I keep the books.

They are in bulk, resting on the walls on dusty shelves that I don't touch so as not to stir up even a tiny speck of dust.

 

Everything has its own story.

Everything has its time.

 

You are still there.

Chapter 3: The stubbornness of water

Time had no meaning for me before
Five years or ten,
Or maybe even a hundred.

You would still have been there
Unchanged and unchanging.
Radiant smiles for anyone - even for me, even for me -
Dimples and white teeth
And that overwhelming, almost oppressive kindness
That I never thought I deserved.

Each day seems like a thousand
Minutes, seconds dripping away so slowly,
Bit by bit, digging a hollow in my heart
An emptiness that deepens
Like stone that gives way in the face of water's stubbornness.

So my lips
Will bear the shape of yours imprinted
For the rest of my existence.
Whether Death comes tomorrow or never
No mouth will find mine fit again
For yours has changed it permanently.

There is a before and an after
Of the desperate kiss
On that day, when I lost you.

And if once I didn't count the passing years,
Now four hundred and thirty-seven days I waited for you
In silence,
Hoping you'd come back to give me back my breath.
As I'll wait, perhaps, maybe a hundred more times as many.

I'll still be there,
Maybe only in a pile of fragments
That you will bring together with your mere presence.
It will be your hands that will pour gold
Into the spaces I cannot fill by myself.

And so fill me again
Make my shadows bright
Kiss my lips
Hold what's left of me.

For only with you,
In spite of myself
I can be whole.

For only together we can be an Us.