Prompt #8

Prompt #20

The world is run by the intelligent, and the dumb are considered as lesser humans.

(Character A) is one of the most elite, knowledgeable people, and holds a high ranking. Contrastingly, (Character B) isn’t smart, and is looked at as scum.

However, both of them find each other through the internet, and as they talk more and more, they realize that the system may be rigged.

hopeless

It goes like this.

A snake meets an angel in a garden of peace and figures that knowledge was more important than that peace. The angel believes they were not destined to be. He gives a sword to the first two humans, and does not fall.

The snake is decidedly not jealous.

He will never be jealous of not falling, because it was what he was always meant to do anyways, wasn’t he?

He was always meant to go down in a blaze of searing flesh and bone and fire, fire, flames that burnt him and swirled around him as he screamed and screamed but it wouldn’t stop, it would never ever stop because all his tears were evaporating and it’s like they never existed and it’s been so long now, is this his new forever? Is this what he is meant to be? Merely an angel for an instant, a plaything to be thrown away for simply asking the wrong questions at the wrong time?

Is this his fault?

(If all the tears he cried wouldn’t have gone up in smoke, maybe they would have been the water to fill the ocean).

It’s fine.

It’s what he was made for, to be tested. The angel wasn’t.

He was fine.

Anyways, he may have gone and fallen in love with said angel.

He was just so wonderful and sweet and genuine, and he was everything the demonic snake would never be. In fact, the demon hadn’t even known that he could love anything until now.

He wasn’t supposed to love anything at all, but here he was, stupidly pining for someone who could never love him.

Hopeless.

—

It goes like this.

Holy water is passed from an angel to a demon, no longer in the form of a snake, and it doesn’t burn the demon. It doesn’t even touch his skin. Not for a second did he even think it would.

They have changed a whole lot since they met, but they have sown trust, and they have sown a bond. A new bond.

Never before has there been a pair of genuine friends that consisted of a demon and an angel, never before has there been a pair that has come close to even fraternization. Not even after the six thousand years they had known each other.

And yet...

He is still going too fast for the angel.

And he doesn’t know how.

“Too fast?!” He throws a plate to the floor, and it shatters. The shards scatter all around the room, and it almost desperately trying to get away from him, hiding under the sofa and under the space between the counters and the floor. His plants are shaking like they never have before, terrified of his unheavenly wrath.

“It’s been so long,” and he sharply pulls on his hair and now he’s crying and tear tracks are running down his face. He doesn’t care. “I’ve waited so long. I’ve tried my best. I’ve-“

He chokes on nothing but his own despair.

He’s kneeling in the shards and they’re digging into his knees. He couldn’t care less.

“What do I need to do?” He was asking someone, anyone, whoever could give him any semblance of an answer, but nobody did. He didn’t know if anyone could.

“How do I be enough? How long do I have to wait until I’m worth more to somebody?” The unknowing of what comes next cut his heart out with a butcher knife made of his own desperation. The only sound to answer his pleas, his prayers, was his own shaky breathing and his plants shuddering.

“Can he even love me?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it? He clenched his eyes shut and put his hands over his ears, alone but surrounded by so much noise, a ringing in his ears that wouldn’t go away. He could hear his decorative heart beating, pounding away, like a symbol crashing with crescendo of a whole orchestra his ears.

He was making up noises at this point, wasn’t he? Trying to deafen the silence with his own imagination. As if it could take away everything that there wasn’t. His plants had stopped cowering. They knew the only thing he wanted to yell at right now was himself.

How had God made him this way? Why did he have to exist like this, confused and incapable of accepting the simple fact that he was unlovable? How had he been cursed with a heart that cared about everything?

How had he been cursed to love when he couldn’t be loved himself?

And as he was breaking down for the thousandth time exactly in his lifetime, the angel was fixing himself a cup of tea and humming a simple melody, settling down to read one of his more recently acquired books, completely and utterly unaware of any of it. And he was still alone.

Utterly hopeless.

—

It goes like this.

The Armageddon’t was averted, and the angel and demon have saved the world. Neither of them were expected to, and neither of them were supposed to, but they did. They exist just the same as they did before.

They still drink too much together and dine at the Ritz and talk about dolphins and whales and ducks and live quite normally.

(Well, as normal as you can expect it to get.)

The demon still has yellow snake eyes and listens to Queen almost obsessively and drives too fast, and the angel still loves fancy restaurants and reads old books and barely sells any of them to his customers.

And the demon still loves.

And he still hates that he does.

“I hate caring,” he says one evening, half-way into his third bottle of fine wine. There’s no way he’s sober at this point. He had been drinking since he had arrived at Aziraphale’s bookshop, despite Aziraphale himself declining to partake in it. “I just hate it so much.”

“I know, dear,” Aziraphale raises an eyebrow and turns a page of the book he’s reading. Crowley’s pretty sure it’s one of Jane Austen’s earlier novels. “You’ve told me many times.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Crowley waves him off, but just a bit too enthusiastically, and leans forward on his knees. “But I just hate it. Too much.”

“Too much what?” He asks. He turns the page, but is almost certainly not reading it. He seems more focused on the conversation now.

“There’s too much. I feel too much. Not s’posed to.” Crowley pulls a disgusted look. “Demons ‘r not s’posed to love ‘n stuff.”

Aziraphale frowns and it looks almost like he’s trying to figure out a puzzle in his head. “You can love?”

Crowley chokes like he did so long ago, and there’s something trapped in the back of his throat, a lump that’s suffocating him, and he almost hopes that he could really die instead of just discorporate.

“I-“ he swallows deep, “I wish I couldn’t. God- Satan- Somebody,” he doesn’t know who somebody even is.

“I wish I couldn’t, so bad. So bad.” He wishes he weren’t so drunk, too, but he doesn’t want to sober up, and the love thing precedes the drunkenness by a large portion.

“Why would you not want to be able to love?” Aziraphale questions, a concerned look in his eyes. “Why would you ever want that? That would be horrible!”

“No it wouldn’t.” Crowley is completely serious, and it’s clear that Aziraphale doesn’t understand at all.

“How could not loving ever be a good thing?!”

“How could it ever be a good thing?”

Aziraphale pinches his nose and sighs. “I’m really arguing with a drunk Crowley right now,” he mutters under his breath. “Sober up.”

“But-“ Crowley whines, and Aziraphale shushes him with a finger. He huffs. “‘Kay...”

He sobers up in less than a minute, and opens his eyes to see Aziraphale with his arms crossed in front of him.

“Explain your argument.” He asks politely, and Crowley is so ready to destroy him with his debate skills.

“I love a lot, unfortunately, and people can’t love me.” He lays it plainly out in front of them, and can’t understand for the life of him why Aziraphale looks so pained.

“... Are you okay?” asks Crowley, and is completely surprised and overtaken by Aziraphale squeezing the living daylights out of him. He makes a noise that is not a squeak (it totally is, but he will never admit it) as his rib cage is practically ground to dust.

“What-“ he lets out a breath as Aziraphale hugs him closer. “What’s this for and also I can’t breathe please let me go what are you doing-“

“I’m hugging you,” says Aziraphale simply, and only lets Crowley have a bit of breathing room.

“But why?” Crowley asks with a furrowed brow.

“Because you need one, clearly,” and that’s the explanation he gives.

Crowley is still not following. “Why would I need a hug?”

“You can be loved,” and Crowley’s lungs are screaming for another reason as all his air is stolen, along with his words.

“You can be loved so much, Crowley, you can be loved, you can be loved, I love you and you don’t even know how much, I promise you I’ll never hide it ever again, I promise, you go so fast but I think I’ve caught up, Crowley, oh dear...” There’s tears dripping and soaking his shirt, but he doesn’t care, because he’s ruining Aziraphale’s coat too.

“I-“ How does one say that they have loved another for thousands of years? Since the garden of Eden? Since they knew each other?

“I love you so much I can’t think anymore,” is what he goes with. “I just never thought that anyone could love a demon.”

The angel, his angel, was still holding him in his arms. “I’m not sure if being a demon suits you, darling. I think you may be the only exception.”

And so they live as exceptions.

Mutual exceptions, a demon who didn’t quite suit being a demon or an angel, and an angel who didn’t quite suit being an angel or a demon.

In the end, they were quite human.

And they were quite happy with that.

Maybe they weren’t quite hopeless.

Prompt #18

(Character A) is a rebellious angel. (Character B) is a caring demon.

(Character B) tries to stop (Character A) from being too crazy, (Character A) tries to influence (Character B), and they’re both a mess.

burn

It wasn’t about him. It was never about him.

In fact, she never meant for him to have any involvment in the matter, never meant for him to ever know about it. He was never meant to know anything.

It had started long before she ever knew him.

It started when her father had brought out a lighter one evening. He opened his pack of cigarettes and took a long drag, his shoulders relaxing. He sunk into the chair. He no longer cared about hiding his addiction from his daughter, playing with a doll idly on the carpeted floor, six years old and quiet as a mouse.

She was known for being a rather emotionless child. Not once had she laughed or grinned or cried. Her mother fretted about her, but her father didn’t mind. No tantrums was fine with him. The lack of feelings wasn’t a problem with him. She watched with glazed eyes as flaky ashes fell to the carpet. She stared at them as they floated gently to the floor, choking and coughing a bit from the fumes.

She stared even longer at the lighter. How could a fire be hiding in the tiny object?

Late into the night, she snuck into the living room where the lighter was still lying next to the ashtray, and stole it. The next morning, she hid it in her backpack and ran off into the woods to play.

It was yellow and shiny and had a grey top that flipped open. She immediately was fascinated, entranced. Her eyes lit up for the first time. It was so small, but had such power! When she mimicked her father’s motions, it let out a fizzling spark once, twice, thrice, and then burst into a tiny flame.

She knew what she was doing tomorrow. Her eyes burned with the fire she now possessed.

Her mother found the neighbor’s cat later that month, half-decomposed and covered in soot, and she had screamed. It was the kind of scream from a horror movie that got half-hearted reviews, one that never really sent shivers down your spine. It never even got under her skin. She didn’t care that she had been found out. The cat was annoying anyways. Her flames were bright, unstoppable, unable to be extinguished, and she would feed the fire until everything came down around her.

Years later, in her twenties, she met him. Her lover. He was sunny and bright and passionate and emotional and everything she wasn’t. He was her fire. She wanted him, in a way that she hadn’t wanted since she’d laid her eyes on that lighter over a decade ago.

And eventually, she got him. It seemed like she had attached herself to him, in a strange way. She wanted him to be hers, and only hers, but shied away from affection and emotion. She didn’t know how to respond to his hugs, how to smile for him. She didn’t know how to be genuine.

And that meant that she had to avoid him, and that meant that she left the house often, coat over her shoulders and lighter in her pocket.

She didn’t know what she wanted more, him or her fire. And that scared her.

She hadn’t known what it was like to be scared before.

She flicked the lighter, and threw it down on the large pile of dry grass and twigs at her feet. The willow tree sheltered the newborn flame, and it slowly climbed higher and higher. As it began to lick the tree top, she backed away to admire the light in the drizzling rain. Her light.

Her eyes gleamed.

Her fire burned.

Her lover still smiled for her when she came home. He smiled through watery eyes, and she wasn’t sure if it was from her late return or from the water drops tapping out a rhythm on the sidewalk or from the ash that clung to her shoulders, even through the rain. She didn’t know how to understand what he felt on their best days together.

He hugged her close and securely whenever she came home, and she responded the same. Her eyes were as dry as the Sahara, saved from the rain by her umbrella, glazed over with disinterest. Waiting for the next opportunity to buy another lighter. To buy more gasoline. To build a stack of sticks and grass. To relish in the newfound brightness.

To burn.

(She never thought about how he had had an umbrella of his own when she came out to greet him, and how his clothes were dry.)

She would set the world on fire just to watch it go ablaze, and she would smile the same smile she always had before. An answering smile. An answer to the questions, to the counselors at school and the dead cat her mother found covered in charcoal and gasoline, to the classmates who were afraid of her in kindergarten, to the prescriptions in her cabinet, ever fluorescent.

To her lover, whose eyes were still full of water on the sunniest day of the year. She still ignored the drip-dropping of water on her neck whenever they hugged.

(It wasn’t raining.)

(She didn’t know how to explain it, so she avoided it.)

(Sometimes, she thinks that he cries because he doesn’t know what to do anymore.)

He cried when she left and cried when she came home, and he cried when he was alone and cried when she was with him. He cried when she smelled like a campfire and when she had ashes sprinkled in her hair, and he cried when their budgeting started to include lighters and gasoline.

He cried every tear that she never could.

Sometimes she wished that she could cry for him instead. He must have been so dehydrated.

(For his birthday, she bought him a nice water bottle. “So you can stay hydrated. You cry an awful lot,” she said. He grinned and hugged her, then pulled away quickly.

“Thank you.” His lips were wobbly and saltwater streamed down his cheeks. She smelled like a campfire.)

She always had grey peppering her clothes. Her smile was subdued, but her eyes were distant and wild. Like they knew something. Like they had already watched the world burn down in their head a million times, and enjoyed every second.

A psychopath.

An arsonist.

Someone who burned trees and papers for fun. Someone who bought too many lighters in too little time. (The gas station attendant had never seen so many lighters be laid out on the checkout counter.) Someone who watched her lover cry and looked away with disinterest. Someone who didn’t leave the house one day to burn.

(He was still home, crying in the corner. She didn’t notice him until the end.)

Someone who never cried when she watched her lover scream and his tears evaporate, ugly crying, with eyes of crimson and half moon bruises underneath and snot running down his face, saltwater on his tongue and dripping off his chin just to go up and evaporate in flames and smoke.

Someone who died with her lover by accident and didn’t care. Someone who watched the flames with gleaming eyes until the end.

(Her eyes were still gleaming when they burned to the ground.)

He doesn’t know what to make of it.

It’s ugly and it’s not, it’s beautiful and it’s not, it’s simultaneously everything he could have wanted and everything he dreaded.

She was leaving him.

She was leaving him, and wasn’t that fantastic? Wasn’t that horrible? Wasn’t that everything he could think of, alone but together with himself and a bottle that he could’ve sworn had fused to the callouses on his fingertips, had been superglued there and never ever left.

She was leaving him.

He still had his wedding ring, stuck to his finger in a different way than when you try on a ring and have to take it off with soap and water and time. It was stuck by the adhesive of his own mind. Trapped. He couldn’t take it off, couldn’t bare to pry it away.

She had taken hers off long ago, so why was his still stuck, like the bottle to his callouses and to his lips and permanent streams of saltwater that clung to his cheeks for days and days and days? Why?

All of his breaths were shudders and all of his thoughts were endless strings that never had a conclusion, an essay with an infinite word-count. He could still see the amber spilt on the floor through watery eyes, and still found it ironic that he was back to crying over spilt milk and spilt Jack Daniels and spilt tears and he was crying over everything and nothing and whatever was in between, so why did it matter anyways?

He clenched the bottle even tighter in his hand, and he wasn’t sure how much of it was alcohol and how much of it was his own tears at this point, and he knew he had to stop.

He had always known he needed to stop. He knew he needed to stop the first time he took a secret sip from beer in the fridge and the first time he had a serious hangover and the first time and the first time he met her and the first time she left him and the first time she came back and the first time she left a second time.

So many firsts. To him, the milestones didn’t matter a single bit. To him, all that mattered was that he didn’t have to care about what really did matter. And he was incredibly proficient at that in particular.

So he was good at knowing when to quit, but he was never quite as good at quitting. He was still stuck on that one time she smiled at him and she had looked so genuine, so real, and how she had looked just as real and tired when she said that she wanted a divorce and that she had had another.

She had another, didn’t she? Of course she did, she was always good at back-up plans and back-up-back-up plans. He knew it when she had a beer spilt on her shirt that neither of them liked (like the Jack Daniels on the floor and the milk knocked over to the ground and his heart to hell fires). He knew it when she came home with her lipstick smeared and with her eyes wild, he knew it when she stopped looking him in the eye and started looking at the wall behind him.

(The last time she looked him in the eye she told him straight to his face that she had another.)

(The last time he looked her in the eye he didn’t say a word.)

He stood up and slipped on the whiskey and prayed to whoever was out there that he wouldn’t be able to get up. It didn’t work.

It never worked, did it? Whoever was out there doesn’t care much for people like him anyway, and he could hear in the back of his head the whisper screams of ‘alcoholic’ and ‘acute mania’ his own screams weren’t loud enough. The shards of the bottles scattering everywhere when he smashed them to drown them out hid under his couch and beneath the coffee table to escape him and he understood why, because he was running from himself too, like her.

He didn’t know if there was a God anywhere.

Why do people want flat stomachs so super badly????

Like, I don’t hate people with flat stomachs at all, it’s not a bad thing, but like

Why only accept completely flat, hard stomachs when you can also have

Squish

it went to voicemail

“I want you to understand that I’ll never be sorry for doing this,” he choked out. He couldn’t cry now, not now, when he was already so close. “Remember when I said that there’s probably only one thing in my life that I’ll never be upset about messing up?” His eyes were shifting now, across the moonlit skyline that showcased about five percent of the stars in the sky and the skyscrapers edging higher and higher in a desperate attempt to reach them. His phone, clutched tightly in his white-knuckled grasp, was shaking from where he held it.

“This is the one thing.”

He closed his eyes, staring at the backs of his eyelids flashing a billion fireworks.

“I want you to know that this isn’t your fault. It will never be.” There were tears falling now, falling to the near-empty pavement below and not even leaving a dot on the concrete to remember. He was a fool to think he could keep them in. His free hand clings to the railings and he leans back. His feet are almost dangling off the edge.

“I always loved you, you know? I was so stupid,” and now he was laughing and soaking in his own saltwater tears, as if he came straight from the ocean. “I was so stupid.”

The neon billboards were just as bright as the backs of his eyelids, and now he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. “I know you will probably delete this voicemail. I know how you hated to listen to them. I know, I know, I know,” and he was near hysterical now.

It had been three weeks of drinking straight vodka and not even recoiling, two weeks of experimenting with drugs he’d never heard of just in case he could finally learn what it was like to forget, one week of crumpled up paper balls because he couldn’t write his own suicide note correctly, how pathetic is that?

Every minute since the Words has been the worst minute of his life. They weren’t gone yet, not even close, and he didn’t know what to do to get rid of them, so he did the next best thing.

“I’m in love with somebody else,” had never been words he would expect from his lover’s mouth, never ever ever. Not a single nightmare had brought up this terror, not a single time had he woken up in a cold sweat thinking of the possibility.

And maybe that’s why he was so affected.

“I still love you, and I hate that. I don’t know how to hate you. I don’t think I have the ability to.” He was talking so fast, so brokenly and so close to a sobbing mess that he could taste the salt lingering on his tongue.

“I… The thing is, I don’t know how to be without you. I never have. And that’s not your fault.”

He can’t blame him for anything, no matter how much he wanted to be able to shout what he’d done wrong and shriek to the high heavens that he had been wronged, no matter how much he wanted to scream at anyone who walked by that he wasn’t okay, no matter how damp his pillow was and how parched his mouth always was nowadays.

“This is the best for me. This is the best for you. This is the best for us, for everyone!” He was smiling too now, and he had to remind himself to hang on for a little longer because his grip was getting loose.

“So, sayonara. I don’t know if we’ll meet again in another life. I don’t know if either of us will want to.” Only a little while longer. “Just… Know that I love you. It’s not your fault-“

And the voicemail crackles and muffles the last words. His last words.

No one knows what he said. What his final goodbye truly was. Nobody could hear him, from twenty-five floors above the ground and wind howling like a banshee. And so nobody will know what his last tears sounded like when the hit the ground, whether or not the left a mark, or whether or not he was still smiling or laughing through the tears, or what he even had to say.

“I still love you. I’m sorry.”

His last words echo across the starless skyline, around the neon signs, through the desperate skyscrapers, away from the roaring sirens and boisterous lights, and never reach anyone’s ears except his own.

He was still smiling.

it hurts

“It hurts,” says the ice to the sun, “It hurts me to be with you.”

“But it hurts me too,” says the sun. “Have you ever thought about how your dripping water sizzles on my skin?”

The ice was confused. “Your pain comes from my destruction, yet you invalidate my pain from my own destruction with it?”

“But my pain is important too!” The sun screams their pain louder than the ice ever could.

“Okay,” says the ice, and caters to the sun’s sizzling blisters, not acknowledging their own mutilation.

The blisters do look rather serious, of course.

And so the ice suffers in silence.

Prompt #13

(Character A) has the ability to imagine a scenario and make it come true. The problem is, they figure this out after they have already written fan fiction. Specifically, self-insert fan fiction between them and (Character B), a fictional character.

Now, they’re real, and having an existential crisis as the two of them travel through each fanfic. (Character A) wants to make things go back to normal, so that (Character B) can live their ‘normal’ life again, but is starting to genuinely fall in love with (Character B). They feel selfish, but can’t help their feelings.

(Character A) tries to deal with their guilt, and all the while, they’re oblivious to (Character B) beginning to fall in love with them.

Obviously, mutual pining ensues.

Prompt #10

Soulmate AU where when you touch your soulmate for the first time, you see colours.

(Character A) doesn’t touch anybody, because of their fear of being stuck with someone forever.

One day, (Character A) accidentally touches their long-time best friend, (Character B) and sees colours. Since (Character B) doesn’t react, they assume (Character B) doesn’t see colours too, and is their soulmate, but (Character A) isn’t theirs.

(Character B) does see colours, but thinks that (Character A) doesn’t, and pretends they don’t see them.

Mutual pining and angst ensues.