Anael

[goodfellow]

Robin loved museums. All the history, all the memories. Paintings especially. All the painters he'd known over the years, all the subjects, all the models. Sometimes it was a strange sense of melancholy, sitting in a room full of images from the past, from his past, ad feeling consumed by it for just a few moments.

A little masochistic even, sometimes.

He sat on a bench in the National Gallery, looking at a painting of Achilles and Patroclus. It had been so long since he'd seen them. Those souls, the pair of them, sometimes brothers sometimes not, who had appeared over and over again throughout the ages. Achilles and Patroclus were just one of the incarnations. And it had been decades since Robin had watched a version of them die again.

Still, these were some of his favorites. Even if the Trojan War had been a hell of a time.

His gaze lingered on Achilles. The beautiful body, the blonde hair. Something tugged inside him.

Comments

[goodfellow]

Robin seemed positively cheerful as they made their way out of the museum. "You'll find paintings of me scattered across the world, you know," he said. "I was quite the model, back in the day. Though they're usually not to scale."

[whispersoflove]

"I've seen enough live renditions of you," Anael replied easily, the innuendo apparently passing him by. None of the ones he had met had felt any love, but maybe he had just been unlucky.

[goodfellow]

"But I'm definitely your favorite, right?" Robin asked with a grin.

[whispersoflove]

Anael huffed out a quiet laugh, but admitted, "So far." He was the only one he had felt love from, after all.

[goodfellow]

"That's because I am vastly superior to all of them," Robin said matter of factly. "So. Angels. I forget, are you lot always changing faces, or is this you?"

[whispersoflove]

"Some of us might," Anael replied after a beat. "I've never bothered, though." It didn't really matter, the way he saw it. This was just a physical manifestation of himself. Not the true him.

[goodfellow]

"I like it," said Robin. "You've got a gorgeous mouth."

[whispersoflove]

"Are you still trying to scandalise me?" Anael asked curiously, as they neared the exit of the museum.

[goodfellow]

"Nope," said Robin. "That was simply a statement of fact. If I wanted to scandalize you I'd tell you what I thought you should do with said gorgeous mouth. But that is an entirely different conversation."

[whispersoflove]

"Not one much more likely to succeed," Anael gave him fair warning, but he was smiling slightly.

[goodfellow]

"I assure you that my innuendos come from a place of genuine affection," Robin assured him. He couldn't quite bring himself to say 'love.'

[whispersoflove]

"Even less scandalising," Anael pointed out with a smile, eyes sparkling warmly. "The word won't burn you, you know."

[goodfellow]

"What word?" Robin asked breezily, and then smiled charmingly at Anael as he opened the door into the hotel for him.

[whispersoflove]

Anael stepped in front of him, turning on his heels to rest his hand over Robin's heart briefly. "Love," he told him, with a warm smile, and turned again to get out of the doorway, and walk into the hotel proper.

[goodfellow]

It threw Robin off balance for a split second but then he walked in behind him and led him past the reception desk to the bar. "What do you drink, my feathered friend?" he asked.

[whispersoflove]

"Are we friends already?" Anael asked curiously, and apparently genuinely. "I did not think that getting into your heart would be so easy, Robin." It was absolutely payback for calling him feathered, as if he were a simple bird. He shot Robin an utterly innocent smile, then answered. "Red wine. A bordeaux, maybe, today."

[goodfellow]

"Oh it's not," Robin said cheerfully. "Not nearly so easy as getting into my trousers, for example." And he left Anael at a table so that he could go retrieve some wine for them.

[whispersoflove]

Anael watched the puck walk away with a smile, and then chuckled quietly, shaking his head. So far, he seemed entirely more likable than those of his kind Anael had met before, but of course, he knew just how biased he was, on account of that love he had felt earlier.

[goodfellow]

Robin returned a moment later with a waiter just behind him, and he uncorked the bottle of very good wine for them and poured too glasses, leaving the bottle of the table.

"I suppose you'll want to toast to love," Robin drawled.

[whispersoflove]

"I was going to suggest Achilles and Patroclus," Anael replied genuinely. "But - same difference, I suppose." He smiled, and thanked the waiter with a soft smile as he picked up his glass, and tilted it against Robin's.

[goodfellow]

Robin wasn't sure it was the same at all, but he didn't argue.

"You know," he said instead, conversationally, after taking a sip of the wine, "the first angel I met called me an over-sexed, disease-ridden, humping, sinning goat who would burn in Hell for all eternity while forced to consume my own flaming intestines if only he had jurisdiction."

[whispersoflove]

"A good thing that he did not have jurisdiction, then," Anael remarked easily. It did not surprise him. So few of his brethren shared his love for all of Creation. "Did you bear that many diseases?" he curiously added.

[goodfellow]

"I did not," Robin said with roll of his eyes. "Pucks cannot catch sexual diseases. There was one time, one, that I became afflicted with a pixie version of chlamydia and my penis radiated pink, yellow, and green for a month. But that was a thousand years ago at least. And besides, it was amusing that my cock was mistaken for the Aurora Borealis."

[whispersoflove]

"So you can only catch very specific sexual diseases," Anael worked out for himself.

[goodfellow]

"... I think that may have been some kind of anomaly," Robin argued. "Once in the amount of time I've been alive. And the amount of sex I've had... definitely an anomaly."