'Here Comes The Flood (an extravagance)'
Title: Here Comes The Flood (an extravagance)
Author: Signe
Fandom: Good Omens
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale (if you squint a bit)
Rating: PG
A/N: Written for mosca's Free Verse Challenge. Beta by the incomparable hackthis, who loves St James Park as much as I do - my favourite line is hers!
In the distance rain drains the roof
an extravagance that's unearthly falls in the garden.
Secrets do not make us strong.
The rungs have worn down.
- 'All that surrounds you' by Jill Jones
*
Aziraphale vividly remembered the days before rain.
Everything had seemed so perfect then, the pretty little solar system with this glorious globe as its highlight. The earth had been rich with blues and greens and some nice autumnal reds and browns - colours he'd never even dreamed of before. He'd clapped his hands and furled and unfurled his wings in excitement when he'd been given his first glimpse of it; they all had, even though they'd been woken up early on a Sunday morning to see it. It had been a veritable explosion of joyous sound, clapping and loud applause and rustling wings echoing around the heavens.
Of course, things had gone downhill after that, once the humans had been created. Aziraphale never felt any real ill will towards them on that account, but still, there was a pervasive sense of 'hey, I was here first!' among some of the lesser angels. They all got over it, eventually.
The first thunderstorm had been rather a shock. He'd been busy feeling sorry for the two humans who were wandering aimlessly trying to find shelter, and wondering if it'd be all right if he gave them some hints. 1 He'd decided that, on top of the gift of the flaming sword, it might get him into a spot of trouble, and so he hadn't paid the storm much attention.
But then the thunder and lightning had started.
And just when Aziraphale had thought he'd become accustomed to the idea of all the noise and light and the horrible crashing, a couple of millenniums later, give or take a century or two, along came the Flood. There was hardly any time for acclimation. (It took Aziraphale a while to adapt to change).
Aziraphale always felt a trifle uncomfortable remembering the Flood: after all, Crowley had had a very close call. He had been entertaining himself and a bevy of nubile maidens and young men in a tent outside Beer-sheba, rather noisily, and hadn't heard the Flood coming until a deluge of water and rocks and other nastier detritus had caught the tent and swept it away. Aziraphale knew it wasn't easy flying with soaking wet wings; poor Crowley had only just made it away. Crowley had only spoken of it once, when he was very drunk on a surprisingly delightful German wine that Aziraphale had discovered. It was quite likely that he didn't remember telling Aziraphale about it.
Crowley wasn't generally forthcoming about his less fine moments, and Aziraphale had his own reasons for preferring to forget that particular event.
He'd always had a soft spot for humans (in general, if not necessarily in specific cases) and the Flood had all been rather too messy and violent for his liking. Though at least it had been better than fire and brimstone - that smelled something awful. He'd never been able to go anywhere near Sodom or Gomorrah for years after that particular purging. On the other hand, fire was cleaner, afterwards. The thick layer of oozing mud left everywhere after the Flood wasn't exactly sweet smelling (Aziraphale rather thought that goats that had been rolling around in their own mess smelled better) and it didn't wash out of the hems of white robes easily.
As if that weren't enough, all the familiar landmarks were gone, which left Aziraphale feeling a bit lost - he did like the familiar. After the Flood, however, he'd found mountains where he was used to seeing hills, and lakes where there had been valleys, and it was years before there was a decent grape harvest.
Aziraphale had come extremely close to questioning the wisdom of God after a few years of no grapes, and hence, no wine.
But the rain, ah, the rain. That was the one really good thing that had come out of the Flood - before that, there'd been the occasional angry storm, usually after humans had done something outstandingly stupid, but otherwise there was just the morning dew, and that didn't satisfy in the same way that rain did.
Aziraphale sighed in a burst of pleasure at the thought of rain.
He'd had thousands of years of it, and, living where he did these days, he'd had an abundant share of it, but he still never tired of a good rain shower. Of course, it wasn't his place to question the Divine Design, so he didn't think any such inappropriate thoughts as 'it was strange that rain had been left out of the equation to start with'. No, he just enjoyed the rain now that it had been created.
St James Park, where Aziraphale was wandering now, was an ideal place to enjoy rain. The beds of tulips, ranked by colour, glistened under their coating of raindrops, the ducks shook out their feathers but otherwise ignored it, and, best of all, the tourists vanished. 2
So, Aziraphale was free to amble around, safe from poking umbrellas or camera flashes or escaping toddlers, or people pushing maps at him and pointing and asking questions in languages so shrill they gave him a headache.
The day was warm for April, and even the rain didn't chill the air. Aziraphale would have liked to open his wings and spread them out under the gentle shower - he could feel them twitching under his shoulder blades, eager. But even though the rain had banished the tourists to Madame Tussauds and Oxford Street there were still a few people around, unfazed by the rain. In fact, some seemed to be enjoying it as much as he was: a love-struck couple too engrossed in each other even to notice the shower, a young woman in shockingly ripped jeans tilting her head back, tongue out, to catch raindrops, the inevitable, slightly furtive looking pair of men in dark raincoats, pretending not to be talking to each other, and a tall, dark figure striding along, perfectly dry.
Wait.
That wasn't right.
Aziraphale humphed. Crowley should know better. It was bad enough that he was still wearing sunglasses, but the dry jacket and trousers were really too much.
He humphed a little louder and, sure enough, the figure turning his way was Crowley. He looked rather miserable.
Aziraphale bit down the smile that wanted to surface when he saw Crowley's expression and made sure that his face was suitably sympathetic.
"Not enjoying the April shower?" he asked.
Crowley probably glared at him, but his sunglasses gave him quite a disadvantage when it came to glaring. Still, Aziraphale knew him well enough to picture the glare that was largely hidden.
"It never rains in Hell," Crowley said wistfully as he dropped into step besides Aziraphale. "It's always warm and dry there."
He sighed.
"I imagine that's quite a selling point." Aziraphale's lips twitched.
"For the side that's still promoting the harp playing aspect of things, I don't think you're in a position to criticise."
"But marketing's supposed to be your people's forte. All that lusting with the flesh and lusting with the eyes is a lot easier to sell to humans these days, especially since so few of the poor things remember to read the fine print."
"I don't know," Crowley offered consolingly. "You've got the love angle. That has to entice a few to good deeds and holiness."
"But we're offering agape, philia and storge whereas you've got eros all sewn up." 3
"True," Crowley replied, rather smugly. Too smugly for Aziraphale's liking. "Though it's not as though we're not willing to share that one. You should try it some time."
Crowley inched a bit closer, close enough that the rain suddenly stopped falling on Aziraphale's left side.
"Stop trying to tempt, my dear," Aziraphale replied without any malice. "And do let the rain fall naturally. It does look a little obvious that you're bone dry, and I'm rather damp."
"I've no quarrel with the obvious." 4
Aziraphale didn't need to respond. He just looked at Crowley in admonition, and, sure enough, the demon caved and rain drops started to appear on his shoulders and in his hair. Aziraphale half-expected to see steam rising (even though he knew it wouldn't), but the rain just darkened Crowley's jacket and hair further, with no supernatural side-effects.
"There, isn't that pleasant." Aziraphale beamed at Crowley and headed them both towards the lake to claim one of the benches. "I've always thought that rain was one of His best creations." He refrained from mentioning the accidental side of the creation, and Crowley restrained himself from pointing that out too, probably because he was distracted for a moment while he dried the bench for them.
This was another delightful side effect of the rain: getting a bench to themselves at lunchtime would normally involve Crowley doing something that Aziraphale should disapprove of. He generally tried to look the other way when tourists fled screaming from a sudden visitation of large spiders or when an irascible swan started honking aggressively at the occupants of their favourite bench, the one situated conveniently between Inn the Park and Duck Island. They'd had another favourite bench, in Green Park, but the squirrels in that particular park disliked Crowley and tended to throw nuts at him.
As they sat down, Crowley blinked up at the sky and a nice, good-sized black umbrella appeared above them. It was just about large enough for the two of them, but Aziraphale scooted in a bit closer to avoid the nasty drips that always collected on the edge of umbrellas. Crowley did likewise, no doubt for the same reason. Crowley looked much happier, and as Aziraphale slung an arm companionably around his shoulders, he might have been heard to remark, if one had hearing as good as an angel's, that the rain wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Aziraphale was glad they were in agreement.
*
Fascinating, Educational and Reasonably True Footnotes compiled by the author.
1. He'd finally succumbed, with a great deal of guilt both for helping them and for not helping them sooner, and shown them how to make linen from flax and how to waterproof it, and he'd even designed a really rather practical unisex rain coat for them (though he'd called it a me'il mayim which he had to admit was a bit tricky to say after even just one glass of mead). And after all that they'd dressed themselves in animal skins, which even Aziraphale knew had always been out of fashion. Well, apart from that brief glitch in the 1960's, but thankfully he'd managed to sleep through most of that. [return]
2. One day Aziraphale would have to have a word with Crowley about Tourism: while it wasn't as obviously evil as the M25, Glasgow or Manchester, the insidious, cumulative effects of it mounted up to, well, hellish proportions. Though it was entirely possible that Crowley had had as much a hand in it as he had in the Spanish Inquisition - i.e. none, but he liked to promote the idea that it was otherwise. [return]
3. Agape is the pesky kind of love that tends to involve dying for someone or other unfortunate sacrifices. Aziraphale was all for it, of course, in principle. It was just that, in practice, he favoured something a little more long-term, preferably something that involved living. As for philia and storge, they were all well and good (with emphasis on the good), but they didn't quite reach the same parts that eros reached. Not that Aziraphale was going to mention that to Crowley. [return]
4. He did, however, have a quarrel with the ends of sellotape that always vanished just when you needed them, and with twenty-four hour clocks that confused everyone after noon, and, most especially, with arrogant TV chefs (and in his opinion, the arrogant variety was the only variety). The last quarrel was one that had been going on for a little while now, since around 52 BC, even though it obviously hadn't started off with the TV variety of chefs. Back then there'd been all the cocky Roman chefs who were convinced that theirs was the only true way to create a soufflé of small fishes or that their recipe for Caroenum was the only good one and that everyone else's was too sweet or too sour or too syrupy, and that customers who asked for extra salt were insulting their profession. Crowley could be quite vociferous at times about this particular quarrel, and Aziraphale had to admit, though only to himself, that he did have a point. Aziraphale always preferred to season his own food. [return]
Author: Signe
Fandom: Good Omens
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale (if you squint a bit)
Rating: PG
A/N: Written for mosca's Free Verse Challenge. Beta by the incomparable hackthis, who loves St James Park as much as I do - my favourite line is hers!
In the distance rain drains the roof
an extravagance that's unearthly falls in the garden.
Secrets do not make us strong.
The rungs have worn down.
- 'All that surrounds you' by Jill Jones
*
Aziraphale vividly remembered the days before rain.
Everything had seemed so perfect then, the pretty little solar system with this glorious globe as its highlight. The earth had been rich with blues and greens and some nice autumnal reds and browns - colours he'd never even dreamed of before. He'd clapped his hands and furled and unfurled his wings in excitement when he'd been given his first glimpse of it; they all had, even though they'd been woken up early on a Sunday morning to see it. It had been a veritable explosion of joyous sound, clapping and loud applause and rustling wings echoing around the heavens.
Of course, things had gone downhill after that, once the humans had been created. Aziraphale never felt any real ill will towards them on that account, but still, there was a pervasive sense of 'hey, I was here first!' among some of the lesser angels. They all got over it, eventually.
The first thunderstorm had been rather a shock. He'd been busy feeling sorry for the two humans who were wandering aimlessly trying to find shelter, and wondering if it'd be all right if he gave them some hints. 1 He'd decided that, on top of the gift of the flaming sword, it might get him into a spot of trouble, and so he hadn't paid the storm much attention.
But then the thunder and lightning had started.
And just when Aziraphale had thought he'd become accustomed to the idea of all the noise and light and the horrible crashing, a couple of millenniums later, give or take a century or two, along came the Flood. There was hardly any time for acclimation. (It took Aziraphale a while to adapt to change).
Aziraphale always felt a trifle uncomfortable remembering the Flood: after all, Crowley had had a very close call. He had been entertaining himself and a bevy of nubile maidens and young men in a tent outside Beer-sheba, rather noisily, and hadn't heard the Flood coming until a deluge of water and rocks and other nastier detritus had caught the tent and swept it away. Aziraphale knew it wasn't easy flying with soaking wet wings; poor Crowley had only just made it away. Crowley had only spoken of it once, when he was very drunk on a surprisingly delightful German wine that Aziraphale had discovered. It was quite likely that he didn't remember telling Aziraphale about it.
Crowley wasn't generally forthcoming about his less fine moments, and Aziraphale had his own reasons for preferring to forget that particular event.
He'd always had a soft spot for humans (in general, if not necessarily in specific cases) and the Flood had all been rather too messy and violent for his liking. Though at least it had been better than fire and brimstone - that smelled something awful. He'd never been able to go anywhere near Sodom or Gomorrah for years after that particular purging. On the other hand, fire was cleaner, afterwards. The thick layer of oozing mud left everywhere after the Flood wasn't exactly sweet smelling (Aziraphale rather thought that goats that had been rolling around in their own mess smelled better) and it didn't wash out of the hems of white robes easily.
As if that weren't enough, all the familiar landmarks were gone, which left Aziraphale feeling a bit lost - he did like the familiar. After the Flood, however, he'd found mountains where he was used to seeing hills, and lakes where there had been valleys, and it was years before there was a decent grape harvest.
Aziraphale had come extremely close to questioning the wisdom of God after a few years of no grapes, and hence, no wine.
But the rain, ah, the rain. That was the one really good thing that had come out of the Flood - before that, there'd been the occasional angry storm, usually after humans had done something outstandingly stupid, but otherwise there was just the morning dew, and that didn't satisfy in the same way that rain did.
Aziraphale sighed in a burst of pleasure at the thought of rain.
He'd had thousands of years of it, and, living where he did these days, he'd had an abundant share of it, but he still never tired of a good rain shower. Of course, it wasn't his place to question the Divine Design, so he didn't think any such inappropriate thoughts as 'it was strange that rain had been left out of the equation to start with'. No, he just enjoyed the rain now that it had been created.
St James Park, where Aziraphale was wandering now, was an ideal place to enjoy rain. The beds of tulips, ranked by colour, glistened under their coating of raindrops, the ducks shook out their feathers but otherwise ignored it, and, best of all, the tourists vanished. 2
So, Aziraphale was free to amble around, safe from poking umbrellas or camera flashes or escaping toddlers, or people pushing maps at him and pointing and asking questions in languages so shrill they gave him a headache.
The day was warm for April, and even the rain didn't chill the air. Aziraphale would have liked to open his wings and spread them out under the gentle shower - he could feel them twitching under his shoulder blades, eager. But even though the rain had banished the tourists to Madame Tussauds and Oxford Street there were still a few people around, unfazed by the rain. In fact, some seemed to be enjoying it as much as he was: a love-struck couple too engrossed in each other even to notice the shower, a young woman in shockingly ripped jeans tilting her head back, tongue out, to catch raindrops, the inevitable, slightly furtive looking pair of men in dark raincoats, pretending not to be talking to each other, and a tall, dark figure striding along, perfectly dry.
Wait.
That wasn't right.
Aziraphale humphed. Crowley should know better. It was bad enough that he was still wearing sunglasses, but the dry jacket and trousers were really too much.
He humphed a little louder and, sure enough, the figure turning his way was Crowley. He looked rather miserable.
Aziraphale bit down the smile that wanted to surface when he saw Crowley's expression and made sure that his face was suitably sympathetic.
"Not enjoying the April shower?" he asked.
Crowley probably glared at him, but his sunglasses gave him quite a disadvantage when it came to glaring. Still, Aziraphale knew him well enough to picture the glare that was largely hidden.
"It never rains in Hell," Crowley said wistfully as he dropped into step besides Aziraphale. "It's always warm and dry there."
He sighed.
"I imagine that's quite a selling point." Aziraphale's lips twitched.
"For the side that's still promoting the harp playing aspect of things, I don't think you're in a position to criticise."
"But marketing's supposed to be your people's forte. All that lusting with the flesh and lusting with the eyes is a lot easier to sell to humans these days, especially since so few of the poor things remember to read the fine print."
"I don't know," Crowley offered consolingly. "You've got the love angle. That has to entice a few to good deeds and holiness."
"But we're offering agape, philia and storge whereas you've got eros all sewn up." 3
"True," Crowley replied, rather smugly. Too smugly for Aziraphale's liking. "Though it's not as though we're not willing to share that one. You should try it some time."
Crowley inched a bit closer, close enough that the rain suddenly stopped falling on Aziraphale's left side.
"Stop trying to tempt, my dear," Aziraphale replied without any malice. "And do let the rain fall naturally. It does look a little obvious that you're bone dry, and I'm rather damp."
"I've no quarrel with the obvious." 4
Aziraphale didn't need to respond. He just looked at Crowley in admonition, and, sure enough, the demon caved and rain drops started to appear on his shoulders and in his hair. Aziraphale half-expected to see steam rising (even though he knew it wouldn't), but the rain just darkened Crowley's jacket and hair further, with no supernatural side-effects.
"There, isn't that pleasant." Aziraphale beamed at Crowley and headed them both towards the lake to claim one of the benches. "I've always thought that rain was one of His best creations." He refrained from mentioning the accidental side of the creation, and Crowley restrained himself from pointing that out too, probably because he was distracted for a moment while he dried the bench for them.
This was another delightful side effect of the rain: getting a bench to themselves at lunchtime would normally involve Crowley doing something that Aziraphale should disapprove of. He generally tried to look the other way when tourists fled screaming from a sudden visitation of large spiders or when an irascible swan started honking aggressively at the occupants of their favourite bench, the one situated conveniently between Inn the Park and Duck Island. They'd had another favourite bench, in Green Park, but the squirrels in that particular park disliked Crowley and tended to throw nuts at him.
As they sat down, Crowley blinked up at the sky and a nice, good-sized black umbrella appeared above them. It was just about large enough for the two of them, but Aziraphale scooted in a bit closer to avoid the nasty drips that always collected on the edge of umbrellas. Crowley did likewise, no doubt for the same reason. Crowley looked much happier, and as Aziraphale slung an arm companionably around his shoulders, he might have been heard to remark, if one had hearing as good as an angel's, that the rain wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Aziraphale was glad they were in agreement.
*
Fascinating, Educational and Reasonably True Footnotes compiled by the author.
1. He'd finally succumbed, with a great deal of guilt both for helping them and for not helping them sooner, and shown them how to make linen from flax and how to waterproof it, and he'd even designed a really rather practical unisex rain coat for them (though he'd called it a me'il mayim which he had to admit was a bit tricky to say after even just one glass of mead). And after all that they'd dressed themselves in animal skins, which even Aziraphale knew had always been out of fashion. Well, apart from that brief glitch in the 1960's, but thankfully he'd managed to sleep through most of that. [return]
2. One day Aziraphale would have to have a word with Crowley about Tourism: while it wasn't as obviously evil as the M25, Glasgow or Manchester, the insidious, cumulative effects of it mounted up to, well, hellish proportions. Though it was entirely possible that Crowley had had as much a hand in it as he had in the Spanish Inquisition - i.e. none, but he liked to promote the idea that it was otherwise. [return]
3. Agape is the pesky kind of love that tends to involve dying for someone or other unfortunate sacrifices. Aziraphale was all for it, of course, in principle. It was just that, in practice, he favoured something a little more long-term, preferably something that involved living. As for philia and storge, they were all well and good (with emphasis on the good), but they didn't quite reach the same parts that eros reached. Not that Aziraphale was going to mention that to Crowley. [return]
4. He did, however, have a quarrel with the ends of sellotape that always vanished just when you needed them, and with twenty-four hour clocks that confused everyone after noon, and, most especially, with arrogant TV chefs (and in his opinion, the arrogant variety was the only variety). The last quarrel was one that had been going on for a little while now, since around 52 BC, even though it obviously hadn't started off with the TV variety of chefs. Back then there'd been all the cocky Roman chefs who were convinced that theirs was the only true way to create a soufflé of small fishes or that their recipe for Caroenum was the only good one and that everyone else's was too sweet or too sour or too syrupy, and that customers who asked for extra salt were insulting their profession. Crowley could be quite vociferous at times about this particular quarrel, and Aziraphale had to admit, though only to himself, that he did have a point. Aziraphale always preferred to season his own food. [return]