Title: Such Heavy Bones
Fandom: The Vintner's Luck
Rating: G
Length: ~ 500
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox is an amazing novel and the central theme in it is a male/male love story between the vintner Sobran and the fallen angel Xas. I read it last year and thought it really deserved a wider audience/fandom.
Summary: For a long time, dancing was the closest Xas could get to flight.


Dancing was the closest Xas could get to flight for the long stretch of time between the removal of his wings and the humans gaining the ability to build at a height that made the freefall worthwhile.

He had never danced with Sobran, his true love. Their - Sobran's - world had been too far removed from fashionable Paris salons, from wider human society as a whole.

He sneered at Apharah's advice now, in his wingless state; at her opinion that making friends would do him good. Friendship - love -had cost him his wings. Wouldn't he be better off not having made friends at all?
It was a useless comparison. It had been Lucifer who has cut Xas' wings, for no other reason than because he could , but it had been Sobran who had cut Xas' heart, had somehow penetrated the indestructible stuff angels are made of and left an open wound behind.

Dancing, entertaining, being among humans - these things barely got Xas through. There was someone, there was always someone who let Xas sleep in their bed after Xas had kissed them once. God only knew why He had created an angel this way - a creature that was not meant to have any commerce with humans, yet was irresistible to them once they'd swallowed his spit.

They, like the dances, were disteactions; people who kept him going, gave him the illusion of forward momentum when in reality his existence spun in a circle like the couples on the dancefloor, except Xas had been dancing this waltz without a partner and he always ended in the same position on the morning after that he had been in on the night before.

He hoped that living as one of them would give him a way to see things as one of them; that knowing time intimately, slowly, as it ticked by second by second, might mean time would have the same effect on him as it did on them: the healing of wounds.

But in this, he was forgetting that himans are not usuallt granted a second lifetime after spending the entirety of one with another; with their true love. The human heart is not built to withstand such loss.

Oblivious of this, Xas kept on dancing, his weightlessness making him lighter on his feet than all his companions. Yet he was heavier and bound to the pull of gravity more strongly than he let any of them comprehend. Even in the throes of human passion, he always kept the lights low and his shirt on and let no one touch his back.

More than once, he had toyed with the idea of writing to Lucifer. A part of him wanted to confront the archangel over what he had done to Xas' wings. But it was impossible, as Xas well knew. Meeting Lucifer would end in his certain destruction.

They were playing their own perverse game, Lucifer and the Almighty, and Xas was no longer a part of it; could no longer "go freely", and so making his own fate was all that was left.

He brought his thoughts back into the room with a jolt, kissed his dance partner, and waited for the next revolution.