Work Text:
six years later
It’s high school all over again.
Eridan sighs and leans his chin in the palm of his hand, his fingers itching to loosen his tie. He just wants to get home. It’s been a long day again, and the room is cold because the fucking school can’t afford heating in December, apparently, even though it’s New York and there’s a fucking blizzard outside the window.
The kids won’t shut up. Was he this obnoxious when he was seventeen? He feels a flash of sympathy for Mr. Droogs. God knows how someone could put up with this bullshit day after day.
Eridan casts a longing glance at the clock. There’s only fifteen minutes left until the day’s over, and he’s barely gotten half the lesson done. The fucking teenagers have the attention span of goldfish.
“Okay,” he says loudly, standing up from the desk chair. “If you can all shut up for the last few minutes, we can finish the readin’ before the bell rings an’ you won’t have homework over the weekend. It’s Friday, you don’t want homework, right?”
It succeeds in making the first couple rows shut their mouths, but the rest of the stupid adolescents don’t even turn around. Eridan wants to scream.
How the fuck did he end up as a high school history teacher?
It’s not that he doesn’t like his job, or his life. Eridan actually loves it. It’s nothing like what he’d planned, or what he’d expected. But now that he’s living it, it’s grown on him. He just wishes there was a job for History majors that didn’t involve dealing with such fucking obnoxious students.
But really, it’s turned out alright for him. He can even put up with the city kids. It’s only a week before Christmas break, after all; he’s antsy, too. And teaching isn’t a bad gig at all. In fact, he’s grown to like it a lot, and he wouldn’t change a thing.
They get the reading done just before the shrill bell pierces the air, and the kids are gone in a blur of curses and winter coats, college-ruled paper settling in their wake. Eridan straightens up his desk, adjusts his scarf, and follows them out into the brisk afternoon.
On any given day, New York City is either the best or the worst place in the world. Right now, Eridan’s inclined to think it’s the first one. It’s Friday, and he’s got the whole weekend ahead of him with no papers or tests to grade. He’s got a nice, warm, cozy apartment to return to. The snow is falling at just the right angle with the right intensity, dusting the whole city with powdered sugar, and it looks a little bit magical.
There’s just one thing missing, he thinks, and his hand drifts involuntarily to his right pocket.
The line at Starbucks is long today. Eridan stands impatiently in line, glancing between his watch and his cell phone every few seconds as it ticks closer and closer to four. He doesn’t want to be late, but he doesn’t want to arrive without coffee, either. It’s important, especially in this weather.
When he gets to the front of the line, his favorite barista’s standing behind the counter, looking haggard. He musters up a tired smile when he sees Eridan. “Hey, man,” he says. “The usual?”
“Yep,” Eridan says, and hands over his Visa.
While the barista’s swiping his card, he asks “so, you asked her yet?”
“Nah.”
There’s much more to it than that, but Eridan doesn’t want to get into it in public. He likes the barista well enough—as well as he likes any barista in this city—and he’s told the guy a lot already, but his reasoning behind this one is too convoluted for a chain coffee shop and two minutes while the guy makes his lattes.
The barista shrugs and hands Eridan two large cups. “Good luck, then,” he says, just like always.
“Thanks,” says Eridan, and breezes out the door.
The American Museum of Natural History is only a few blocks from PS 172, almost exactly halfway between his school and the apartment. Eridan usually walks slow, enjoying the walk and his coffee, but today, he’s late and it’s damn cold and his nose is about to turn into ice and fall off. He rushes through the doors, waving to the security guard, and hunts down the fossils section.
He can hear her voice before he even rounds the corner into the exhibit. She sounds particularly excited, telling some curious museumgoer about a recent dig in Peru, and when Eridan catches sight of her, he can see why.
Aradia is standing in front of the Triceratops skeleton, bending down so that she’s eye level with two little kids standing rapt before her. They’re completely fascinated, staring between the Triceratops and Aradia’s face as their mother looks on in amusement.
“They found skeletons here, too,” Aradia is saying. “Right here in New York City. Just think—millions of years ago, dinosaurs could have been walking right here! Isn’t that amazing?”
“Wow,” the kids say in unison, and Eridan can’t help but let out a little chuckle. Aradia looks up and her face transforms into a smile. She waves surreptitiously.
“Alright, I’ve got to go now,” she tells them, and the kids say “aw” and pout. “But I’ll be back on Monday, okay? Come visit me! We can talk about the T-Rex next.”
“Ooh,” they say, and Aradia laughs and winks at their mom and Eridan’s heart swells.
“Hey,” he says when she walks over, and kisses her on the forehead and hands her coffee.
Aradia smiles gently and slips her hand into his. “Hey, yourself. Let's go home.”
They got the apartment on East 93rd Street their sophomore year of college. Aradia wouldn’t let Eridan help pay for any of her tuition—she’d been saving herself, she said, and she hadn’t gone through high school working a job six nights a week for nothing—but after freshman year, he convinced her that his dad had a spare apartment that had been empty for a while now on the Upper East Side and they could always more in there for the rest of their time at Columbia. He didn’t have to tell her that his dad had only owned the apartment for a week when Eridan had bought it for them without telling her.
And they’d stayed there ever since. There was no reason to leave. They had everything they needed right in the city—jobs they loved, plenty of things to do, interesting people to meet, places to explore, and each other. As far as Eridan is concerned, it’s all he’ll ever want in life.
It’s not a huge apartment, but it’s the perfect size for the two of them, their neighbors are nice, and the view is amazing, especially in winter. The doorman waves to them and smiles as they pass through the wide glass door, and Eridan grins back. Today is a good day, and he feels magnanimous. And maybe a little nervous, too, but that’s completely unrelated.
They see the woman who lives two floors below them in the elevator, and she smiles and awws at them and makes small talk about work until she gets off and moments later, Aradia unlocks their apartment door and falls into his arms.
“I miss you,” she says between kisses. “During the day. I miss seeing you all the time like we did in high school.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, we’ve got all weekend,” he tells her, gasping for air. And the rest of our lives.
But he has work to go over, lesson plans and quizzes, so Aradia stands in the little kitchenette and tries to make dinner (even though Eridan’s the one who actually knows how to cook) while he sits at the table a few feet away, his glasses pushed down to the tip of his nose. She dances around, singing to Christmas songs on the radio while she boils water for pasta, and she’s so enchanting and beautiful that Eridan spends more time watching the way she moves, her exact motions, the smooth planes and curved lines of her than he does on grading.
She overcooks the pasta and burns the garlic bread, but Eridan lights two candles and gets out a bottle of red wine and it’s like a high school date all over again, except everything has changed and yet nothing at all has. They’re older now, but not so old that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young and so achingly in love that sometimes it’s hard to breathe. Eridan still feels it sometimes—when the candlelight catches the highlights of Aradia’s face and makes her glow like something that’s too otherworldly for this messy little city apartment, and suddenly, his chest seizes up and he can’t feel his body for a second. Even after seven years, it’s the same.
And it’s times like these, the completely mundane moments he’s seen hundreds of times before, that he realizes he can’t imagine his life without Aradia in it, now or ever. If that’s what love is, he’s been wholly in love with her for as long as he can remember.
Eridan eats every last bite of dinner, even though it’s rubbery and overcooked and Aradia barely even touches hers’, disgusted by her own cooking. She laughs and teases him and they both drink a little too much red wine, enough that Aradia’s cheeks grow flushed and her eyes sparkle even more than normal and she’s just slightly unsteady on her feet. She asks him to put on some music, and he finds an old Snow Patrol album, one he’d had since high school, and he bows and takes her hand and leads her out of her chair and to the middle of the living room, where their stockinged feet slide over the hardwood floor and Aradia leans on him and giggles and breathes into his chest, her breath warming a small circle on his shirt just above his heart. And god, god, he loves everything about this moment, everything about her, so much, and there is nothing else he will ever want in this world, and he knows the meaning of life at twenty five, and he knows that it is this, that it is to love someone as deeply as he loves her.
Aradia leans up and kisses him then, long and slow and sensual, her fingers slipping under the hem of his sweater, dancing over his skin. She says his name, soft, languid, lovely.
Eridan bends down and sweeps her off her feet. Aradia laughs, throwing her head back wildly, her throat long and pale and her hair tumbling down her back and her mouth curved up into a red crescent. She wraps her arms around his neck.
He carries her to their bedroom. He sets her down on their double bed and gets up to pull the curtains to, opaque enough to block them from the bustling city, transparent enough to let the mechanical lights of Manhattan show through and guide them.
He shows her every single way that he loves her, and then he falls asleep with her in his arms, her heartbeat a warm flutter against his fingertips.
*
Eridan wakes slowly, in bits and pieces. First comes warmth. Next comes feeling: the texture of sheets tangled around his feet, flannel on his legs, long hair tickling his shoulders and hands. Then sound, or the lack of it; the only thing he hears is soft, even breathing in his ear.
Lastly, he opens his eyes.
It’s bright inside his bedroom. Sun is spilling in through the translucent curtains, blowing in the air from the radiator, showing snatches of a snowy sky outside. The walls and the sheets are white, pure, reflecting the late-morning sun.
Next to him, Aradia is still asleep. Her eyelids are pale, fluttering, fragile over her brown eyes; her lips are parted just enough to allow breath in and out. Her hair is a tangle that engulfs the pillow, her freckled shoulders peeking up from beneath the heavy duvet. She looks peaceful. Beautiful.
Eridan smiles and tightens his arms just the slightest bit. God, he wants to wake up like this every single morning for the rest of his life.
You can, says a quiet voice in the back of his mind. You can. You can.
He could. It’s be so easy—well, at least in theory. He’s got everything he needs already. He has for a few months now. Every day he tells himself this is it. This will be the day. And every day, there have been moments when it would’ve been perfect, but he’s never been able to do it. Call it nervousness, call it superstition, it’s just never felt right.
But this—this feels right. This feels like it. This feels like the moment. Everything is perfect, and Aradia looks like an angel, tangled in sheets and sunlight, and he is done waiting.
“Ar,” he says quietly, and reaches over to the nightstand and gropes around for the box in the drawer.
She comes awake slowly, too, a statue coming to life after years of frozen slumber, and blinks awake with a lazy smile on her face.
“Morning,” she says.
“Morning,” Eridan says, and kisses her softly.
It’s gentle and quiet, a sleepy kind of kiss, like they’re still drifting in the gray area between consciousness and dreaming. He breaks it gently after a minute, and she looks up at him with her big brown eyes, expectant, sensing something is coming.
“Hey,” says Eridan. “Hey. I love you.”
“I love you too,” she says without any pretense.
Yes, this is the moment he’s been waiting for. This is it.
“So,” he says. “I was gonna make a big deal outta this. I really was, because you deserve it, an’ I love you a lot—way too much, really—an’ I was gonna take you out for dinner at a fancy restaurant an’ buy you flowers an’ all that, because you’re worth it. But. It just didn’t feel right. So I—uh—Ar, I…”
He stops and furrows his brow and his hands are shaking really badly, so badly he fumbles the box and can barely get it open, and oh god he has never been more nervous in his life, every inch of him is trembling, and meanwhile her big doe eyes are so calm, filled with silent questions--he never wants to lose those eyes.
“I guess what I’m tryin’ to say is that I want this moment, Ar, I want it forever, for every day until we both die an’ I want you forever more than anything else an’ I can’t ever let you go and Ar do you maybe wanna marry me?”
Too late, he realizes he’s supposed to be on one knee. He’s done it all wrong, oh God, he fucked it up like he knew he would.
Aradia’s staring at the ring as if she’s entranced, her eyes wide. “Eridan,” she says, hushed, and he bites his lip and crosses his fingers and hopes and prays.
"Married?"
"I mean..." Eridan trails off. She didn't want it after all, did she? This is the worst he's ever fucked anything up--
“Yeah,” she says, quiet, almost to herself. “Yeah. Yes. I want to marry you. Yes.”
“Yes,” he repeats, testing, confirming.
“Yes.”
“Yes!”
He sits up, and she does too, and then he stands and takes her into his arms and holds her tight and picks her up and spins her around and crushes his face into her hair and breathes her in. And he says “yes,” and she says “yes, yes,” and he says “we’re gonna get married,” and she says “yeah.”
He says “I love you,” he says it quiet and then loud and then he nearly screams it. He wants to tell the whole world. He wants everyone to know because she said yes, Aradia said yes, they’re going to get married and she’s going to be his wife and they’re going to buy a big house on a hill and every morning, he will wake up with her next to him. Every morning for the rest of his life.
She is his, and he is hers, and that’s all there is. This moment is the beginning of forever for them. And in that little white bedroom in that messy apartment in that big, snowy city, in a world full of people, his world is only Aradia, and forever looks perfect to Eridan Ampora.
*
this is the first day of my life
swear i was born right in the doorway
i went out in the rain suddenly everything changed
they're spreading blankets on the beach
yours is the first face that i saw
ithink i was blind before i met you
now i don't know where i am
i don't know where i've been
but I know where i want to go
and so i thought i'd let you know
that these things take forever
i especially am slow
but I realize that i need you
and I wondered if i could come home
-first day of my life, bright eyes