You Can't Always Get What You Want
Fantasy is the last refuge of the frustrated. And don't we all know it.
A few adjustments to canon before we proceed: let's pretend Hawley is still here, is NOT a colossal dickface, and was never embroiled in a poorly-defined series of hookups with Jenny. Since the show has removed every single available man for Abbie, we must make do. Let's pretend that little spark of interest he showed in Abbie grew and grew and, since in our world he wasn't a selfish, immoral asshat who was fucking her sister, she finally agreed to a drink with him. Anything to get Crane off her mind.
This is not the first time Ichabod has found himself outside Miss Mills' apartment, out of his mind with yearning.
But this is the first time he has stayed so long, the first time desperation has won out over shame and respect for his partner. This is the first time his legs did not lead him, overcome with self-loathing, back through the forested night to his cottage.
He came here the day they rescued Katrina. A coward to beg for Miss Mills' love, but as much a coward to retreat to his wife's side once again, his plea left unspoken. Katrina woke when he returned to the cottage; he made a poor excuse but she believed him.
He still cared for her. But not enough. Not enough to withstand her lies.
Not enough to prevent everything from being brighter, more saturated with color, with scent, more sumptuous and meaningful when Abbie is with him.
Abbie, not Miss Mills. In his mind, she is only ever Abbie now. Abbie: her name is a plea, a groan.
Betraying Katrina was once the line he would not cross. Not anymore. He sees his marriage clearly now for the forced, brittle thing it is. Katrina seemed pleasant once, mild, the very picture of the bride he wanted. But he knows better now. Beneath her secrets and deceit, she shares only a glimpse of herself. Perhaps that is all there is.
He believed their love timeless, but now, here, he knows what timeless love feels like. He knows what it is to love through to your bones, to need with every fibre and knot in you.
And in the face of this truth, Ichabod has no tether, no external restraint.
He would recognize Abbie's step, the weight of her footfall anywhere. Quiet, now louder. Unmistakable. He stands straighter, stares helplessly at where the front stairwell opens onto the hallway.
She cants her head when she sees him. "This a stakeout?" she asks, flip at first, but underneath there is an ember that hasn't gone out for months now. It burns their every conversation.
He should leave, for both their sakes. But he is cemented to the spot.
She stands just beside him to unlock her door. "Crane. What's wrong?"
"Please forgive the intrusion. We must speak," Ichabod tells her, strained as catgut on a viol.
"At 10:30?"
He is holding onto himself by the thinnest of threads. "Yes."
She opens the door and he follows her inside. Keys on the counter, gun, badge, wallet beside them, jacket off and over the back of a chair. Her extensive armor takes long moments to shed. Ichabod is pacing.
"What's going on?" she asks.
"I am no saint."
He darts a look at her; her eyebrows rise in question. He resumes winding back and forth in front of her couch.
"I am a soldier, an erstwhile scholar, a spy. I may have been chosen to be a Witness, but it was not, I am certain, for my nearness to divinity."
Abbie folds her arms. "What did you do?"
"Nothing yet. Nothing and everything."
"Crane." She has only so much patience. He must out with it or leave.
"I have been silent, circumspect. Well-behaved." The words come out almost a snarl. "I have stayed away from you as you asked. I have stood by and let that wart of a man ogle you. I have been faithful."
"You have."
"But not in my heart!" It comes crashing over him, finally, and he lets it go, all of it, like a flood over them both. "In my heart, in my mind, you haven't an inkling how I long for you! How many times, how many ways have I kissed your lips, have I replayed every second I held you in my arms?"
She doesn't speak, doesn't even seem to breathe.
"Your every touch means something to me."
He clenches his fists at his sides, lets his eyelids drift closed with a deep breath, anything to clear his head, but when he opens his eyes, everything is her.
"That first night. Your body under my hand. Why did I hesitate? God, if I only had one night to live again, give me that night. Give me that night once more, to lay your body bare, worship you, memorize every line. Every curve." His voice breaks with longing, the last word a whimper.
"You're gonna make yourself crazy," she warns him with a voice lighter than fog.
He stops in front of her, faces her. "Abbie, please."
Her breath hitches. Her eyes glisten with unspent tears.
"I thought I knew what it was to love, but that anemic regard pales beside this." Ichabod crashes to his knees. "I am yours."
She hesitates only a moment before she brushes her hand over his hair like a benediction and then, turning his face up with sure fingers, presses her lips to his.
This is not the first time he has found himself outside Miss Mills' apartment, out of his mind with yearning. Nor is it the first time he escapes down the back stairs before she returns, the truth still unsaid, still stale and unwelcome in his mouth.
In the stairwell up to her apartment, Abbie imagines Crane waiting for her. He won't be there: she's given explicit instructions never to be alone with her.
Every second of Nick's kiss, she wished it was Crane. His warm body, his beard scraping her cheek, his hands splayed wide across her back were Crane's warmth, Crane's beard, Crane's hands, so much bigger than Nick's and so much stronger. She kept her eyes closed after she pulled away, just to make the fantasy last that much longer.
Abbie wants Crane to be there waiting for her so bad she can almost taste it.
Impossibly, he is. He faces her, hands twisted into claws, his body straight as a rail.
"Were you with him?" he demands.
She huffs a laugh to herself; she barely was. But instead of giving him the lie-stained truth, she turns it around on him. "What are you doing here?"
His brow furrows. The two of them, hopeless and wrecked.
She unlocks the door. Crane doesn't move. "Want a drink?" she asks when he doesn't answer her first question, then goes inside. He follows, pulling the door closed behind him.
"Were you? Were you with him?" he asks again, softer this time. She can hear how much it hurts him to ask.
"Not that it's your business, but." She can't look at him. "Depends on what you mean by with."
"Do not play games with me," he pleads.
She whirls around, throwing her jacket to the floor. "Yes, okay? Yes, I was with Nick. And you," she says, "you do not get to be jealous! You have a wife! She may be shady as hell, but she is your wife and I know that means something to you."
"You don't. You don't know."
"Goddamn it, you are taken! I don't get to have you so yes, I'm flagrantly using Nick and maybe that makes me a terrible person. He may look like an overgrown teenager but he is something and right now? I need something. Because if I don't get you out of my head... We have a seven year contract and I can't live like this."
"Abbie," he begins, but there is nothing he can say that will make it not true.
"Don't Abbie me. You are off limits. And fuck it, I can't even distract myself with Nick!" And now she's too incensed to hold back the truth. "He kissed me tonight."
Crane looks like she slapped him across the face. On some level, she's angry enough that she's glad it hurts. But more than him, she's angry at herself.
"But what makes it so much worse is that, in my mind, it was you. I was kissing you. I let him think I was there for it when I just wanted him to be you holding me, your hands, your mouth -"
In one move, Crane cups her face in his hands and kisses her, finally, kisses her exactly like she's known he would kiss her and being angry doesn't matter anymore.
In the stairwell up to her apartment, Abbie imagines Crane waiting outside her door. But when she reaches her hallway, she is alone. Just like she asked.
Katrina steals back into their silent cottage like a thief in the night. Ichabod feigns sleep rather than confront her. He is far too distracted.
The squeal of the thick wood slats in the entry are the first to betray her. He hears a tittling breath, the lightest laugh and can imagine her face, eyes closing, one eyebrow wisely raised and that knowing grin he adores.
There is a rustle in the kitchen, the dull rub of leather against leather, the muffled jingle of her keys placed on the table. One boot removed, then the other. She moves so gracefully that every step yields only a hint of noise, a rush of fabric. He listens to her tiptoe through the sitting room and then the bedroom threshold.
"I know you're awake," comes Abbie's tantalizing whisper, her lips poised just over his.
He could parry with a witty rejoinder, yes, but he wants nothing in the world as desperately as her lips. Eyes still shut, he stretches himself the inch that separates them to capture her mouth with his own. Her kiss is sublime, precious and tender and generous, a perfect thing. He savors her there until it occurs to him that he might play, that it is only a matter of physics to pull her down onto him, of turning slightly, tugging her toward the center of the bed to frustrate her balance. Ah, and he is rewarded with another delicious giggle as she falls.
"You're here," Ichabod marvels.
She lays one small, cool hand on his bare chest. "I see you were expecting me."
Like an adolescent, his moods swing precipitously from earnest to playful to heartstruck again. "In my wildest fantasies, I never once expected this."
A pale slice of moon casts the only light upon Abbie's face. It brushes blue across her cheekbones, her neck, and now the smooth skin of her shoulder as she eases it from inside her shirt. Her skin warms against his palm. She kneels to shed her clothing and he traces every curve in its wake until she slips under the blanket, uninterrupted expanse of hungry skin against skin.
His greedy fingers cup the weight of her breast, the plane of her belly, the swell of her hips. She opens her mouth beneath his, licking at the tip of his tongue just as he urges her legs apart.
Katrina steals back into their silent, midnight cottage like a thief. Ichabod feigns sleep.
Crane drops his crossbow on the heavy table with a flash of pride. These are the hardest times for Abbie, high on victory and amped to the gills. These are the times when she can barely contain herself.
"We prevail once again," Crane declares into the echoing silence of the archive.
Abbie grins at him, still thrumming with adrenaline.
He meets her excited gaze with a sparkling eye. He lifts an eyebrow and shrugs his coat from his shoulders.
Abbie has gotten used to the coat. Can't imagine him without it now.
Now the tie at his throat. With practiced fingers (long, talented fingers) he unties it, then crosses his arms over his body to tug it from his trousers and, in one fluid movement, over his head and off.
"Here?" Abbie asks, teasing. "In the archive?"
With one short stride he's pushing her jacket off her shoulders by the leather lapels. "Here," he answers. He takes a blanket from the desk chair and drops it at their feet. "Patience is not a virtue I possess." He bends to nibble at her earlobe and, as if to prove the point, unfastens her jeans at the same time.
Abbie laughs. "You're better than me. I almost nailed you against a tree when you made that last shot tonight."
Crane gives a slow groan, slipping his slim hand inside her waistband, gripping her ass. "Next time. Promise?"
And then, as so often happens with them now, they engulf themselves in a whirlwind of hands and clothes and mouths until, fevered and bare, they pause to savor lips on skin.
Tonight, Abbie presses Ichabod back on the blanket. She is ready, has been ready for hours, to sink down onto him and ride him like a jockey but he pulls her hips higher (he is stronger than he looks), up over his belly, over his chest with a hungry groan and then, yes, holds her above his mouth. Oh and now, now she sinks down.
Crane drops his crossbow on the heavy table with a flash of pride. These are the hardest times, high on victory and amped to the gills. These are the times when she can barely contain herself. "See you tomorrow," she calls back, already out the door.
A note to my exquisitely patient readers: I am sorry. I am so, so sorry I left you high and dry.
Sometimes when a show goes sideways, fanfic writers get riled up. They write more, loads more, giant piles of What If and Fix It Fic and AU. Certainly that is how I have felt in the past, and thank heaven for all the gifted writers who responded that way to this season of Sleepy Hollow. But something about the way Crane was written – dopily listening to his crapstorm of a wife and in so doing, putting Abbie in danger (not to mention ignoring her and taking her for granted) – well, I got turned right off. Couldn't muster a sentence about Abbie wanting anything but Crane's absence, to be honest. I'm still not back exactly, but this last ep made a slight difference.
Anyway, this? It's not resolution. It's not anything when you get right down to it, just two frustrated people and their unfulfilled fantasies. But sometimes that's all we have.