Abbie absolutely does not spend the next few hours wondering if Ichabod was drunkenly flirting with her, because she’s not a damn teenager any more, and he’s married, and the whole thing is a waste of time. She doesn’t think about it the next time she sees him, either, because they’re trying to save the world. And after awhile, the weeks pass, and they put down more demons and watch more TV together, but nothing else happens, so she stops freaking out. Friends. They’re friends.
And friends can go to the movies together, especially if one of those friends has never seen a real movie before, with a huge screen and surround sound. Abbie wants to show him something different, so she takes him to a sci-fi flick. On the drive to the theater, she explains the concept of space travel, and how a man really has walked on the moon and NASA has sent a spacecraft past the edge of the galaxy, but none of it works like in the movies. “So we have this thing called science fiction—,”
“Cyrano de Bergerac, Voyage dans la lune, 1657,” he says crisply. Abbie parks, and Ichabod shuts the car door as if to make his point. “We may not have understood space travel in my time, but we were still possessed of imagination.”
—from How Sweet the Sound by MoreThanSlightly
Being a fan of both Sleepy Hollow and the Ichabbie ship is a difficult situation to be in. On one hand, Ichabod is canonically married and his wife is still around, and fandom has mostly evolved to a point where we’re uncomfortable writing off a female character to support our OTP. On the other hand, because Katrina Crane spent most of Season 1 trapped in Purgatory being little more than a spooky omen, many fans found Ichabod and Abbie’s interactions much more compelling and fanfic-worthy.
How Sweet the Sound by MoreThanSlightly begins with Abbie’s adventures in introducing Ichabod to modern everyday life. But when grocery stores, Netflix, and Beyoncé start to overwhelm him, he lashes out, and she is forced to try a different approach.
This is a fascinating fic to read because it presents Abbie as being in the same weird place that we Ichabbie shippers are. Is Ichabod flirting with her? Is she a bad person for wanting him to be? Why is she so invested in bringing him up to date on the ostensibly less crucial-to-survival parts of modern culture, like baseball and TLC’s “No Scrubs” and trashy soap operas? And if, by some off chance, Ichabod is interested in her too, is she noble enough to make the right choice and spurn perfectly welcome advances in the name of a woman she’s never met? Is that even the right choice?
Brb crying forever about height differences.
This fic is bittersweet and moving and wonderful, and it also clocks in at a relatively brief 5k. You can read it here at the AO3.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 