Pairings: Abbie/Ichabod, Katrina/Ichabod
1. ichabbie. ichabbie. ICHABBIE.
2. let's face it that on-screen kiss with Katrina could've been much hotter
3. this ficlet hits every genre from fluff to musical to tragedy; dun worry gais, i got you covered
4. the 2014 spell is partially adapted from the poem "Four Winds" by Sara Teasedale, who is splendid FYI
Disclaimer: Sleepy Hollow belongs to Fox & sundry.
2013
"That is appalling," Crane declares as he catches sight of the television screen. On the program Abbie's been half-heartedly following, a young man takes his love interest's palm and raises it to his lips, smirking as he pretends a kiss. The actress blushes girlishly, and Abbie depresses the pause button to investigate her friend's latest complaint.
"What's wrong with it? I thought gentlemen were big on kissing a fair maid's hand back in your day." She raises her eyebrows at him because what the hell, she likes this show.
His nose twitches in that disdainful way that reminds Abbie of a cat, and he slinks his long form around the couch to stand before her. That he's blocking the television doesn't escape her notice; he seems to have developed a toxic love/hate relationship with her home entertainment system. Today is one of the downward swells. Crane takes a pause to glare at the flat screen as if it embodies and eclipses all that is sinful in the twenty-first century, but by tomorrow night Abbie knows he'll be cradling the remote like a beloved child again.
Crane eyeballs the man on screen, then glances at Abbie. His gaze travels right down his nose, and he stands like a giant willowy tree in the center of her living room. His accent positively drips when he says, "I've seen performers in the poorest playhouse on the foulest streets of London genuflect with more grace than this...actor."
"Oh really?" Abbie returns, entertained despite herself. She sits forward on her cushion, ankles crossed and tone mocking.
One of her favorite things about Ichabod Crane is how intuitive he is toward a challenge. In a rustle of fabric he spins to face her fully and drops to one knee, coat spread out like a royal garment as he scoops her right hand up in his long fingers.
With his eyes matching hers blink for blink, he bows over her hand. His lips hover not over her knuckles but much higher—nearly the base of her wrist—and it's only at the very last moment that he drops eye contact and presses his soft, closed mouth to her skin.
His beard is wiry but soft, his eyelashes are long against his cheeks, and the whole vision is simultaneously so romantic and so ridiculous that Abbie lets out an involuntary snicker.
Crane raises his head just enough to wink, blows lightly on the spot he'd just kissed, and then releases her hand with a flourish. He stands, and when Abbie slow-claps he accepts the praise with a preening tilt of his head.
"A true gentleman understands proper posture and the allure of a gaze well-met," he imparts, all graciousness now. "It remains an amazement to me that the men in this era find wives at all."
1775
"Are you certain you've committed us to the righteous path?" asks his wife. They stand together in her dressing chamber, two pairs of eyes watching the ships pass through the harbor below. Ichabod curls his arms around her waist and kisses her neck, then her shoulder. She relaxes into him, and they sway to the music of the ball downstairs. This is the last social event Ichabod will waste a coin on, and Katrina claims to be as glad to be rid of the pageantry of good society as himself.
"There are many ways to fight a war, Ichabod." His lips find hers, always seeking home, but she breaks off to add, "There are others paths we might take."
"Washington arrives tomorrow, and his missive requested my presence directly. They're going to appoint him General and Commander-in-Chief. Katrina, my love, the time has long passed for us to step from the shadows and support the Colonial cause publicly. Ferrying goods in secret was useful for a time, but even among our peers we are suspected, and soon our reputation will be of little use for subterfuge. Though it may cost friends to declare ourselves, such men would've been proven no true friends regardless."
Katrina pivots in his arms, her head tucked beside his, and her breath moves the fabric of his collar in warm exhalations. "So it's to be war, then, at last."
"We've prepared for it," Ichabod assures her.
She winds her fingers through her husband's as she promises, "You must know I will follow you. I will make a place for myself in any campaign you undertake. I won't be the painted dove that sings for her lost love at dawn."
"It'll be my greatest terror and my deepest comfort," he admits.
2016
Ichabod swings the grave shovel, his only weapon to hand, and with one staggering blow smashes the skull of the gremlin. It looses the beginning of its nightmarish, tooth-breaking squeal before its brains cave in and the pressure of the impact pops its eyeballs out of its sockets. Panting, ankle deep in dirty creek water, Ichabod watches it waver and collapse onto the wet rocks.
Not twenty feet away, as if a puppet whose strings have been cut, Abbie drops at least four feet from the mist suspending her. Immobilized, she hits the ground before he can get there to catch her, and Ichabod curses as he scrambles up the muddy bank to his partner's prone shape.
"Leftenant!" he snaps, brushing hair out of her face. He tracks grimy streaks every place his fingers touch, and a far-away part of his mind distresses to mark her skin so. With a grim expression Ichabod turns her onto her back on the forest floor, cataloging every part of her damp body for injury. He's done such triage in battle more than once, but never for this companion, and never in this time. He does not like it, and likes even less when he can find no visible damage. "Leftenant," he repeats, then, "Abbie. Abbie!"
She's unmoved by his words, and shows no breath of life. He's just begun a panicked hunt for her phone when Abbie rolls to one side to stare, unfocused, at the ground. She gags, and Ichabod almost jumps backward when her mouth opens and a small, blue frog hops out.
"Lord in Heaven!"
"Catch it," she wheezes, and Ichabod obligingly shoves the creature into his coat pocket before it can vanish beneath the greenery.
Grimacing, he buttons the pocket shut and once more examines his partner. Abbie winces as she sits upright, bracing on his forearm for balance, and admiration sweeps through him at the mental fortitude of such a woman. To be beaten, enchanted, and to wake up with enough presence of mind to trap the spirit in its true form! This cruel and heinous world does not deserve so magnificent a defender, of that Ichabod is certain.
Unable to hold back a moment longer, he takes Abbie's swollen cheeks in his palms and presses his lips to her mud-streaked forehead.
"Miss Mills, you are a marvel."
2013
"Do not take him!"
Abbie's snarl cuts through the babble of the physicians restraining him, and a stabbing pain in his leg distracts Ichabod. Before he has time enough to reprimand these strangers for assaulting his person, the serum takes effect. It dulls his senses to the grip of the attackers, and carries him forward on a wave of nausea. His eyes shut out the bright lights, and when they open again, his world is a palace of fog.
He does not belong in this place, and the night shifts before him.
At first he believes the woman to be part of the surroundings, merely a tall silhouette amongst the trees. Then the shadows of this Hell twist beneath the moonlight and Ichabod sees her for what she is: his wife, Moloch's prisoner.
Still as beautiful as the stars, still as lonely as his dreams.
"Katrina," he whispers, and the strangest thought rises to the forefront of his conscience: he does not recall this sadness she wears. He does not know this person she's become.
"Ichabod? Are you really here?"
The sound of his wife's voice slides through the mist, wraps around him like a song. It breaks the spell of reticence, brings memories of nights bent together against the winter chill and days at the market walking hand-in-hand. Ichabod recognizes and welcomes the feeling that thrums in his chest. This is no dream, no vision. His Katrina, his love, his wife, stands before him, and he'll not let another moment pass without touching her.
When he slides his hand to her cheek and finds her tangible, he heedlessly slants his mouth to her own. It's a familiar dance, his chapped lips on hers petal-soft, and home has never felt so far away.
They separate for a breath. "Ichabod," she begins, but he doesn't want to hear enchantments or prophecies. He doesn't care if this is Hell, or Purgatory, or the end of the world. He only wants to bury his hands in her hair and hold her mouth to his as if he could will true life back to her with the fervency of a lover's kiss.
Katrina's hands weave beneath his coat, finding their familiar place at his back, until she pulls back a second time and stares at Ichabod with a measure he cannot identify.
"You're not well," Katrina murmurs. Her voice catches on the words, and night darkens around them.
2017
Hell's torrential wind scrapes the topsoil off the hillside, lifts and flings it until Abbie can't see, can't even breathe. She staggers, blind, her right hand still knotted through the rancid hair of Famine's decapitated head. The Horseman's hell steed shrieks and neighs, but without a master it's become insubstantial: one more shadowy blur fading into the dust and the storm. Light leeches from the corner of Abbie's vision, and she holds her sleeve over her mouth to breathe.
An explosion reverberates through the tumult. Louder than any gunshot, any canon, it's the most terrible and awesome thunder Lieutenant Mills has ever heard in her life. She feels an insidious wetness trickle from her ears, and wonders if it's blood. As if all the power buried in Sleepy Hollow has been expended in one final burst, the wind ceases. Dirt and pebbles fall around her, no longer propelled by the forces of nature gone awry. Above, the noon sun beats a path down through the last swirls of dust to illuminate a broken field, a circle of bodies, and the crooked corpse of the second Horseman to challenge Heaven's Witness.
Reeling from the magic and the noise and the dust, she forces her battered feet to take one step, then another. As she walks Abbie moves her tongue over her chapped lips, and tries to build up saliva in her dry mouth. Each step taken and each breath taken with it calms her drumming heart, brings her back to solid ground. Before her is a low hill, and just cresting the top, in his tall boots and his ridiculous pea coat, stands Ichabod Crane.
"Leftenant Mills! Leftenant Mills!"
Abbie's feet move a little quicker. She steps higher and lands with more force until she might be running. His voice changes, and she can almost see his expression take shape.
"Abbie! Abbie! ABBIE!"
Her feet eat up the distance, her arms swing as she pushes faster, farther. Out of the periphery of her vision she sees a weathered Captain Irving and tosses the monstrous head in his startled direction. Five more paces, three, and then—
—warmth, safety, long limbs that swing her round until she can't feel the Earth and her body presses tight to Crane's.
He's chanting something over and over in her ear—alive, alive, alive—but the words don't matter because he's still there to say them. Her friend is solid and safe and undamaged. She presses her face tight to the curve of his cheek and prays to God for the gift of him.
"You're alive," she sobs, "Thank God, you're alive. The wind—I thought—"
Whatever fear she might have voiced hangs unspoken in the dusty haze, because Crane cups her face in his hands and kisses her.
Once she might have thought him a prude, so formal and delicate in his propriety, but Ichabod kisses like a man without doubt or inhibition. His lips are rough with grime, as rough as her own, and she barely opens her mouth before his soft tongue is there too. Abbie dazedly remembers that he was once married, that men do not change no matter the century they were born, and as her fingers tangle in his hair he hikes her up against him.
There's no hesitation in this; the time for hesitation is over between them. Abbie bends her mouth into Crane's as if she could climb inside him, because every point where they touch is not close enough. His hands cup her bottom as she wraps her legs around his waist, and Abbie would laugh at the spectacle they must make if she weren't busy trying to breathe between desperate, aching kisses.
"We're done waiting," she says as their mouths join, separate, then join again. It's not a question, and if her throat didn't hurt so much she'd be shouting it to the sky.
"Yes," he replies. "Yes."
2014
He drops kisses like raindrops: her temple, her eyelids, the crest of her cheekbones. "Did you know this would be?" Ichabod asks. The familiar lilt of his voice cracks, and Katrina's heart twists for the sound.
"Truthfully, my love, I did not," she replies. "But I won't fight it. Power is born of sacrifice, Ichabod. I paid the price two hundred years ago and I pay it again willingly."
"No! You must fight it!" he demands. He squeezes the folds of her gown, bunching it at the waist, and she can see tears at the corners of his lovely eyes. "Fight it, you must fight it Katrina. You cannot leave me again with only one day to share between us."
"It is one day more than I thought we would have, my husband. For centuries I kept a deity at rest and I kept your soul intact. Can you not grasp the depth of that? I've exceeded my mother's mother, and done what no witch before me dared dream of. I shepherded you to the path you were born to take, through time and blood."
Ichabod's shoulders tremble beneath her hands, and he shakes his head at the damning words. "I am sick with talk of paths and prophecies, Katrina. What has it brought us? This era is no better than the one we left behind. Two hundred years makes meager difference in the hearts of men. I'd abandon this fool's quest if that would keep you here."
"No, Ichabod," she whispers, and dips her fingers through his soft hair. The scent of it has changed from the man she slept beside for seven years. Now Ichabod smells like the Lieutenant's world: an amalgam of metal and sugar, blood and paper.
It breaks Katrina's heart but she clings to him just as tightly, and whispers a charm into the texture of his skin. There's no need to hide her power from Ichabod now, and she has strength enough for a final gift.
"Love go where my love goes, through ash and ice. In the eye of Mars, by the fires of fury, let my warrior be steadfast, safe-kept, and victorious. Love find him, and love shield him."
"Katrina, wait. Please." Although his arms encircle her, sound seems farther away than it ought to be. Screwing her eyes shut, Katrina speaks the words as swiftly as they come to her. It's on old spell, burning on the edge of her tongue and bubbling at the back of her throat.
"In the tempest thrust him forth, but let no winds touch him. Not zephyr of the East nor gale of the West. Not gust from the South, nor storm from the North."
"Stop it, please. It's not time yet. Katrina!"
She opens her eyes, but she cannot see him. The soft scrape of his beard is a fading memory.
"KATRINA!"
"When the journey is more cruel than he, then will love be kind, and love be free."
2015
The racket is deafening as uniformed bodies crowd the center of the Sleepy Hollow Police Headquarters, passing pizza and chips from hand to hand. The cacophony is enough to give Ichabod a headache, but he suppresses it for the sake of the laughing people around him. Warriors all now, bonded by belief and duty to fight the forces of darkness. There's no room left for skeptics on the force, and because of their willingness to believe the world is safe again from the terrors in the night. Knowledge burns in Ichabod that this but a beginning; they have five more years of trial and flame laid out before them. How desperate will they be in two years, or three? How many of these good men and women may perish before destiny is finished with Sleepy Hollow?
From his place against a door frame, Ichabod listens to the merriment. This is his triumph as well, but he still feels somehow apart from it. With his eyes shut this could be another room in another war, with a different band of soldiers cheering their victory.
A woman shouts "Crane!" and Ichabod glances round to see Miss Mills flying toward him, all smiles and warm beauty, a green bottle of some exorbitant label swinging in her left hand.
She snags his collar, yanks him down with an athlete's strength, and before he has the chance to escape, purses her pout into a kiss. Ichabod thinks she must have meant to reach his cheek, but their height difference and the alcohol in her laughter unbalances them both. Abbie's lips land on the corner of his mouth, burning him in a way it hurts contemplate. He wonders if he's finally been marked by her, scalded with an nigh-invisible brand that says Possession of Grace Abigail Mills, witnessed by her peers and championed by Providence.
In the end, it remains but a kiss. The feel of her mouth is different from women he's known; Ichabod has the impression of round softness, the sweet damp of champagne, then all sensation is gone as the lieutenant steps back. She raises her hands out before her, smiles wider than the sun and shouts at him, "No apocalypse!"
Behind her, a whole precinct's worth of Sleepy Hollow police officers roar "NO APOCALYPSE!" in unison, and Abbie whirls to face them. She thrusts her open wine bottle to the ceiling, jubilant in a way he's never seen a female act publicly before. The crowd hollers even louder, glasses raised in cheer, and Ichabod can no longer resist the exuberance around him.
The journey ahead is a mystery, yet the sun will still rise tomorrow, thanks be to every soul in this room. Officer Linda Huynh claps Ichabod on the shoulder and shoves a cold beer into his hands before being swallowed once more by the congregation. Ichabod takes a cautious sip, and has just decided its taste is tolerable, if bit weak, when a commotion on the East end of the party catches his attention. An older gentleman—he thinks it might be Ghirlandio from Racketeering & Extortion—has begun to sing.
"Show me the way to go home.
I'm tired and I wanna go to bed."
The vocalist braves it alone at first, then in the usual way of liquor ballads it sweeps the crowd as a tide of human expression.
"I had a little drink about an hour ago,
And it's gone right to my head!"
The song is unfamiliar to Ichabod, but the rhythm is simplistic and it's not so different from any other drinking hymn popular in a war camp. This is a unifying display of celebration and brotherhood he's never seen before in Sleepy Hollow, and he observes in wonder as even the reticent Captain stomps his boot to the measure. By the second repetition, Ichabod can read the words as they rise up on the lips of every law enforcement officer who made it through it the night.
"Wherever I may roam—"
He scans the uniformed multitude for a sight of Miss Mills, finds her standing beside Morales with her face bright and her song as loud as her fellows.
"—by land or sea or foam—"
Ichabod takes a long drag of the beer, steps free from his spot by the entrance, and joins his voice with theirs as he makes a new path across the room.
"You can always hear me singing this song,
Show me the way to go home!"