Being predictable after a long night at work
Oh look! I wrote Good Omens slash. What a surprise.
Posted to lower_tadfield earlier:
A while back, linnpuzzle posted this beautiful pic for irisbleu's birthday. Well, she did say she didn't know what was going on in it, and I got hit between the eyes with one of countless possible answers so I asked her if I could, uh....:)
Title: Messenger of Sympathies
Rating: PG-13, I guess, for strong suggestion
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale, again.
Summary: What does a poor demon have to do to get a good century's sleep? Aziraphale is sad and uncertain. Crowley is jealous and cranky. Oil, meet water. (A bit tenser and angstier than my usual, but not a real wrist-slitter either.)
Messenger of Sympathies
O Thou who plumed with strong desire
Would float above the Earth-beware!
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Two Spirits-An Allegory”
It’s true that Crowley did sleep through most of the nineteenth century. But not consistently, and certainly not uninterrupted.
The eighteenth century had been so bloody stressful; once in a salon he’d gotten his head twisted around so far by some smooth talker he’d been halfway convinced that he was just a figment of his own oppressive, medieval imagination, at least until he sobered up. Really, what function did he serve, anyway? To hell - literally - with the Spanish Inquisition, his dull-minded organization couldn’t have come up with even anything so elegant and efficient as a guillotine.
Blessed colonies. Blessed debtor’s prisons. Blessed slave trade. Blessed batshit king. He was out of his league. And tired.
Far more compelling to him than any of that was that was his new discovery - redeemed if he wasn’t getting the hang of something that seemed kind of like the way he’d heard humans describe dreaming. It was almost as good as watching life, and one always got to be warm.
It was only every few years he was roused enough to hiss at the meddling angel invading his bedroom periodically, who seemed personally affronted by such a spectacular performance of Sloth. It was as if Aziraphale didn’t know what to do with himself in Crowley’s absence. Crowley had suggested some very rude, and physically impossible in human form, things he could do with himself.
Then Aziraphale had found ways to occupy his attention after all, and Crowley almost wished he hadn’t said anything. Such heady ideas in the air, the angel had said, delight and concern dancing in his eyes. I worry for them being in error, but the writing is remarkable. The young people seem to believe they can change the world with their thought.
How depressing, the demon had said, and pulled the well-used blanket back over his head.
***
Autumn, 1822
This time the angel’s manner was far removed from his usual cheer. About time for a bit of a stretch, anyway, Crowley thought, and the room was warm enough he didn’t mind throwing off the covers and sitting up, feeling a breeze on his skin for the first time in half a decade.
“I thought you were in Italy,” he said finally to Aziraphale, who knelt at the edge of the bed, chin in his hand.
“How did you know?”
“You told me you were going there the last time you woke me up, didn’t you? Or maybe I dreamed it. Anyway.”
“Yes. I was.”
“With your friend? That scribbler?” Crowley actually didn’t know for certain how he knew this, but he did; something he had felt through his fog perhaps, or mayhap the angel himself had babbled in a besotted fashion to his inert form and he’d absorbed the information anyway, but there was definitely in his mind an image of Aziraphale walking in pretentious, overgrown gardens with that young man with the thick, lush hair and the thicker, lusher way of speaking - birds and bones and waves and weather and eloquent invective against religion spilling from his streams of thought and out of his too-pretty mouth. “Where is he now, anyway? Waiting outside composing a new philosophical epic while you dither around up here?”
“He died,” Aziraphale said quietly.
“That’s too bad. How? Brain fever? Did his pontifications finally give him an infection? Or was it syphilis?”
“He drowned, actually,” Aziraphale said even more quietly, clearly trying to shame his longtime acquaintance with the display of hurt and sorrow on his face.
In your eyes, angel? Crowley felt something too close to contrition for his comfort. “You know perfectly well mortals do that all the time. Not drowning specifically, I mean - there is a seemingly infinite number of ways they can snuff it. The mortal coil is designed to be shuffled off, that’s why they call it that. They’re so brief and fragile, that rather seems to be the point of them. I don’t know why you keep-“
“It’s complicated,” said Aziraphale, looking up, showing that shade of blue that existed nowhere else in Creation.
“I fancy myself reasonably intelligent - try me,” Crowley shot back, sitting up straighter. “Why do you torture yourself this way? They’re always gone as soon as you get used to them! Every hundred years or so I see you like this, mooning over some lovely mayfly whose body’s rotted and gone by the time you get to me.”
Aziraphale took a deep and unnecessary breath. “The problem is. The problem is. You have to see each one for who he or she truly is…”
“A unique snowflake?” Crowley sneered halfheartedly.
“Yes! And here for so little time, and sometimes they burn so, so terribly bright, as if they know how little time there is. Sometimes they have whole worlds inside them they’re trying to get out, to convey…”
“So did you carpe his diem then?”
The angel looked positively scandalised. You’d think he’d have learned a new appalled face by now, but no, it had been unchanged for centuries. Crowley thought he’d first seen it unveiled in response to his new collection of tasteless Black Death jokes.
“Once, only once,” said the long-suffering angel, who could probably have lied if he wanted to but it was too much bother. “And it was completely lovely, but I don’t know what you’d understand about that. If I know you, you’re probably just going to smirk about adultery.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Crowley lied easily. Or maybe it was true. It was an awfully petty thing to gloat about, and he was hardly in the mood. He could neither take away Aziraphale’s sadness nor enjoy it properly.
“It was his way of thinking, you know,” Aziraphale mused. “That adultery is deceit, it’s lying, it’s the theft of love - it’s not inherent in the lovemaking itself. Love is no sin unless it desecrates itself with dishonesty. Free love, he called it. Certainly no more wrong than anything I’ve heard of people trying over the millennia, and rather touchingly innocent. So passionate, all of them…”
Crowley really had little to say to this. Aziraphale’s rationalisations were getting shakier with each passing century. His hand tangled in the sheets nervously, he trembled just a little bit, and he almost wished he’d thought to button his trousers now that the room seemed to be growing chilly and he could feel the angel’s eyes upon his skin as solidly as a touch. “And yet…” he finally said, “You knew it couldn’t last long.”
Aziraphale seemed almost to retreat into himself, and when he emerged he was another side of himself, chanting softly:
“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”
“That’s…nice,” said Crowley, who had indeed liked the parts about sickening and odors, and was resisting with all his strength the parts about beloved’s beds and senses quickening. “One of his?”
Aziraphale nodded. “He wrote about death and memory a lot. Beautifully, always. For someone in the prime of life he never thought death was very far away. He probably had a poem prepared for the occasion of his own.”
“I’m sure that took Azrael by surprise.”
“Not much does,” Aziraphale smiled, his first real one.
“At any rate,” said Crowley, “I’m…ssss-sorry.” It wasn’t so hard; after all, it was a ‘sorry’ of sympathy, not a ‘sorry’ of claiming responsibility or seeking forgiveness; it wasn’t as though he’d killed the man personally. Though he realised with some disgust that if he’d actually witnessed the poet helping himself to Aziraphale, that possibility wouldn’t have been so remote.
Which is why he had no response when the angel stretched up on his knees, reaching out, his knuckle lifting Crowley’s chin, his expression fiercely intent behind his affected spectacles. Crowley had already been cramping up his hand clutching the sheet, struggling desperately to keep from committing some act of irreversible honesty.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale asked with a terrible urgency, “Do you think we cherish life…existence …less than they do?”
Crowley leaned a little away, against his impulse. “Why would you think so? Because we don’t write poetry?”
Aziraphale was searching him. Crowley hated it when he did that. It obligated him to search back.
“Because we take it for granted…” Aziraphale nodded at the bed, at Crowley’s run-down, stuffy little temple to Morpheus, so clearly biting his tongue from making some awful trite point about wasting time as if time were like food or currency or family or fame or any of those things mortals cared so desperately about…
“I’m too ssssleepy to think about this now,” Crowley sighed. “At least I’m fully in my trifling pleasures even if they aren’t Romantic enough for you.”
“What’s going to be here when you wake up again, Crowley?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion.” You, I expect. None of the others around now, but you’re inescapable. “Probably a lot of sickly sweetness you’ll have been working without me around. You’re tireless; it’s oppressive. I’m happy for your mortal, though. At least he’ll be remembered til the end of time, by you if nothing else. Can’t say the same for all the poor anonymous bastards who died in the streets in the time we’ve been talking.”
“Damn it, Crowley, damn it!”
“Damn what? When is that ever helpful?” Yet another Deadly Sin had joined its compatriots, reassuring and familiar. Had Aziraphale come to him for comfort? The gall! The unmitigated naïve gall. With his fingers on his chin and his arm along his chest Aziraphale could hang all over him like that and try to initiate some kind of bloody metaphysical….
“You are very beautiful,” Aziraphale said, downright clinically.
“What a startling revelation that is,” Crowley said dryly. “Vanity, you know. It’s expected of me. What’s your excuse? No, wait. After all these years I know what you’re going to say. You’ve got a little more time on your face than I do. Humility and all that rot. But it’s not as if it’s any more honest.”
Aziraphale blinked just once, but did not remove that awful, wonderful gaze. And Crowley couldn’t take it for another pulsebeat; he unclenched his hands from the sheets and gathered up Aziraphale’s face in them and claimed those lips roughly with his own. There was a sound like a startled yelp in his mouth, but he did not believe for an instant it implied sincere resistance. Indeed, it went on far too long. No suggestion of struggle or smiting, only Aziraphale’s mouth opening, tongue rising to meet him. Crowley moaned softly in encouragement but kept his eyes open and saw the angel’s sink closed. Yes, once one’s turned it on, it doesn’t turn off. Since no one was stopping him, he let his hands move back - one tug at the ribbon at the back of Aziraphale’s neck and sandy hair came falling free over his shoulders. That foppish neckwear would have to be the next to go: Crowley tugged at it, pulling Aziraphale up to sit next to him, and gasped just a little as the angel’s hand awkwardly slid over his bare shoulder, then sank down his chest slowly to his hip, cloth pushed aside against his hand.
Aziraphale drew away suddenly, and Crowley didn’t like the look in his eye at all. Something hesitant there, almost watery. Not a good element for him. Angels are mostly airy beings, but Crowley wanted to feel some earth and fire.
“Well?” he finally managed to rasp.
“I…You’re angry with me,” Aziraphale said at last, a little coldly. “I can feel it.”
“Well, I was certainly starting to feel better about the situation.”
The blue eyes hardened more than Crowley thought was possible in the circumstances. He hadn’t seen that look since…well, the last time he saw Aziraphale, to be honest.
“How can I be sure,” Aziraphale said, “you aren’t just doing this out of some kind of bizarre…covetousness?”
“What in Hades’ name are you talking about?”
“That…” Aziraphale almost hesitated, almost thought better of what he was going to say. But against his better instincts, out it came. “That you aren’t just…trying to erase him somehow?”
Crowley took one of those deep, hissing breaths he didn’t need to take, but the dramatic effect made him feel a good deal better, or so he thought. “Do you really think I’m such a twisted little shite I’m not even capable of honest lust? That I can’t even want you without some infernal ulterior motive? No, you’re sort of right in some horrifically wrong way. I have wretched timing. You’re in mourning. You should be in black crepe and a veil. Go lay yourself down under the twilight beneath some melancholy willow tree and pine. I’m going to go back to sleep. Don’t wake me up again unless you really want my company. Or maybe not even then.”
Aziraphale looked genuinely stricken. “Crowley, I-“
“OUT!” Crowley bellowed, making his eyes flash as dangerously as he knew how, which was saying something.
“I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry,” Aziraphale said, drawing himself up tall and backing away towards the door. He glanced once at the empty bed, the indented pillows, and made one small move with his hand, as if to…well, it didn’t bloody matter what he was trying to do. Crowley lunged after him to make sure he was truly getting himself gone. At the door he took one last handful of the angel’s white shirt, feeling expensive linen beginning to rend in a satisfying way under his nails.
The glance that flashed between them shuddered something violently open and then weakly, artificially shut again. Then Crowley almost gently pushed Aziraphale back through the door and then shut it in his face, making its bolt click ostentatiously.
He stalked back to his bed and threw himself on it, waiting to hear footsteps shuffle down the rickety stairs.
He set about sorting his tavern brawl of emotions, most of them awful. Guilt was the worst - it made him feel slightly ill, like some kind of invasion by outside force, as he was sure he wasn’t supposed to be feeling it. He had wanted to make Aziraphale feel better. He just couldn’t manage it.
Once that was more or less sorted, beaten into some self-pitying submission, then he could turn to the far more productive rage and the frustration that desire turned into when it sat out in the sun too long. That enabled him to deal with his lingering physical…problem…which matter he took in his own hands, dreaming of ways in which he might punish his wayward angel. Birch switches and flavoured Italian ices both figured prominently. Daydreams blended into night dreams again, as day and night had no meaning anyway for a creature with a supernatural ability to sleep.
He did wake again of his own accord ten years later to use the lavatory and have a bit of a wash. He was awfully sticky. The trousers were a total loss.
Going back to sleep with cool water on his face, he snuggled back under the blankets, into the perfectly Crowley-shaped indentation forming in the mattress, and stretched out his hand under the pillow, which is when he found the piece of brittle paper.
In Aziraphale’s calligraphic hand, it said:
Lines From ‘The Serpent Is Shut Out From Paradise.’ (They called him ‘little serpent’, eerily enough. It was a pun on his name in Italian)*
Therefore, if I see you seldomer….
Dear friend, know that I only fly
Your looks, because they stir
Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die.
The very comfort which they minister
I scarce can bear; yet I,
(So deeply is the arrow gone)
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
A bit hyperbolic, I think. But still all too true in its way. Please forgive me.
-A.
Crowley stared at it in disgusted disbelief until its words carved themselves into his mind. Then it went up in flames in his fingertips.
It took him almost a month to get back to sleep.
***
Much Later
When he was next gently shaken awake, the old wooden walls of his room had a noticeable sag to them. Aziraphale sat on the edge of his bed. Crowley didn’t even hiss at him.
“Crowley,” the angel said carefully, “I’m sorry to wake you. I have to tell you - I’m being sent away on assignment.”
“Eh?” groaned the demon blearily. “Why? Where to?”
“America. Cassiel’s overwhelmed, it looks like all…er, heck…is going to break loose soon.”
“What year is it?”
“1859. It’s spring.”
“What’s happening?”
“No one’s sure, but it’s very messy. Very messy. Some are saying it might be war.”
The angel must have opened the window. Downstairs and outside on the filthy cobblestones, a street singer was howling some attempt at a hoary old tune. Crowley was just glad Aziraphale had managed to scrape the horseshit from his shoes before coming upstairs. Or perhaps it didn’t stick to his kind.
“War? With whom?”
“Themselves. It’s very complicated. We’re hoping to avert it, or at least make it quick and decisive.”
“Sounds dreadful. You’ll hate it. I don’t think there are any poets over there.”
“What do you know about America?”
“Not much, except that you’ll probably get your sweet round arse kicked. Think of me when it happens.”
Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed. “You haven’t changed.”
“Why would you think I would have done?” Crowley lifted one of Aziraphale’s soft hands to his lips and kissed it. “I’m still angry but I wish you the best. Do come back in one piece. No one’s allowed to kill you but me.”
“I feel so…sheltered in your warm regards.”
“I don’t think it’s me you should worry about at the moment,” Crowley said, basking in something like the upper hand and shrugging off enough blanket so that Aziraphale couldn’t miss that he’d long since given sleepwear of any kind up for lost. “So…off to the war,” he grinned salaciously. “Doesn’t the soldier boy always want a last…”
“I don’t want to start something I can’t finish,” Aziraphale said firmly. “Not this time.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s no finish. I’m not going to tragically and conveniently expire - knock wood - “ he patted the bedpost. “One long awkward morning after dragging on until the end of the world, is that what you’re afraid of?”
Aziraphale wrinkled his brow. “You know, there might be something to that.”
“Well usually I think you think entirely too much, but-“
“I have to go.”
“Of course you do. Well, bring me back some…rawhide or something.”
Aziraphale’s look was so sad it was almost kitsch - although the concept of kitsch had not yet taken hold in mass consciousness Crowley already understood it all too well - but it still hurt, and Crowley was not too unhappy to see it gone.
What he was truly unhappy about was the street singer, bare minutes after the outside door slammed behind the angel.
“She….diiiiiiiied…o’ the faver…..and nooooooothing could save her…CROWLEY. WE KNOW YOU’RE UP THERE. GET YOUR LAZY HIBERNATING REPTILIAN ARSE UP. YOU’RE NEEDED ACROSS THE POND. THAT BLESSED COCKY NEW COUNTRY OVER THERE IS FALLING APART, AND WE WANT AS MANY OF OUR PEOPLE AS WE CAN SPARE, INCLUDING YOU, TO HELP IT ALONG.”
“Alright. Fine. ‘S’not like I have a choice, right?”
“YOU GOT IT. COULD BE WORSE. AT LEAST YOU’RE IMMUNE TO DYSENTERY. DO A GOOD JOB, OR WE CAN CHANGE THAT….but her ghoooooost wheels the barrow…..through streeeeeets broad and narrow….”
With a heroic sigh of resignation, Crowley padded naked to the window to see what the peasants were wearing these days, and wished himself wearing something better.
He grudgingly admitted some fresh air might do him good.
~fin~
*true, according to Norton. Bischelli is “little snake,” a pun on Bysshe Shelley (the author of all poems quoted here, and the source of the title).
If you think the ending part could be a setup for an appalling American-Civil-War-drama sequel (Gone With the Wings?), with Horsepersons involved and perhaps even Aziraphale hooked up briefly with Walt Whitman, you would be someone who thinks a lot like me. Well, at least when I think of sending English (or "English," in this case) characters to America I wouldn't give them fake tans and deck them out at Hot Topic.
Posted to lower_tadfield earlier:
A while back, linnpuzzle posted this beautiful pic for irisbleu's birthday. Well, she did say she didn't know what was going on in it, and I got hit between the eyes with one of countless possible answers so I asked her if I could, uh....:)
Title: Messenger of Sympathies
Rating: PG-13, I guess, for strong suggestion
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale, again.
Summary: What does a poor demon have to do to get a good century's sleep? Aziraphale is sad and uncertain. Crowley is jealous and cranky. Oil, meet water. (A bit tenser and angstier than my usual, but not a real wrist-slitter either.)
Messenger of Sympathies
O Thou who plumed with strong desire
Would float above the Earth-beware!
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Two Spirits-An Allegory”
It’s true that Crowley did sleep through most of the nineteenth century. But not consistently, and certainly not uninterrupted.
The eighteenth century had been so bloody stressful; once in a salon he’d gotten his head twisted around so far by some smooth talker he’d been halfway convinced that he was just a figment of his own oppressive, medieval imagination, at least until he sobered up. Really, what function did he serve, anyway? To hell - literally - with the Spanish Inquisition, his dull-minded organization couldn’t have come up with even anything so elegant and efficient as a guillotine.
Blessed colonies. Blessed debtor’s prisons. Blessed slave trade. Blessed batshit king. He was out of his league. And tired.
Far more compelling to him than any of that was that was his new discovery - redeemed if he wasn’t getting the hang of something that seemed kind of like the way he’d heard humans describe dreaming. It was almost as good as watching life, and one always got to be warm.
It was only every few years he was roused enough to hiss at the meddling angel invading his bedroom periodically, who seemed personally affronted by such a spectacular performance of Sloth. It was as if Aziraphale didn’t know what to do with himself in Crowley’s absence. Crowley had suggested some very rude, and physically impossible in human form, things he could do with himself.
Then Aziraphale had found ways to occupy his attention after all, and Crowley almost wished he hadn’t said anything. Such heady ideas in the air, the angel had said, delight and concern dancing in his eyes. I worry for them being in error, but the writing is remarkable. The young people seem to believe they can change the world with their thought.
How depressing, the demon had said, and pulled the well-used blanket back over his head.
***
Autumn, 1822
This time the angel’s manner was far removed from his usual cheer. About time for a bit of a stretch, anyway, Crowley thought, and the room was warm enough he didn’t mind throwing off the covers and sitting up, feeling a breeze on his skin for the first time in half a decade.
“I thought you were in Italy,” he said finally to Aziraphale, who knelt at the edge of the bed, chin in his hand.
“How did you know?”
“You told me you were going there the last time you woke me up, didn’t you? Or maybe I dreamed it. Anyway.”
“Yes. I was.”
“With your friend? That scribbler?” Crowley actually didn’t know for certain how he knew this, but he did; something he had felt through his fog perhaps, or mayhap the angel himself had babbled in a besotted fashion to his inert form and he’d absorbed the information anyway, but there was definitely in his mind an image of Aziraphale walking in pretentious, overgrown gardens with that young man with the thick, lush hair and the thicker, lusher way of speaking - birds and bones and waves and weather and eloquent invective against religion spilling from his streams of thought and out of his too-pretty mouth. “Where is he now, anyway? Waiting outside composing a new philosophical epic while you dither around up here?”
“He died,” Aziraphale said quietly.
“That’s too bad. How? Brain fever? Did his pontifications finally give him an infection? Or was it syphilis?”
“He drowned, actually,” Aziraphale said even more quietly, clearly trying to shame his longtime acquaintance with the display of hurt and sorrow on his face.
In your eyes, angel? Crowley felt something too close to contrition for his comfort. “You know perfectly well mortals do that all the time. Not drowning specifically, I mean - there is a seemingly infinite number of ways they can snuff it. The mortal coil is designed to be shuffled off, that’s why they call it that. They’re so brief and fragile, that rather seems to be the point of them. I don’t know why you keep-“
“It’s complicated,” said Aziraphale, looking up, showing that shade of blue that existed nowhere else in Creation.
“I fancy myself reasonably intelligent - try me,” Crowley shot back, sitting up straighter. “Why do you torture yourself this way? They’re always gone as soon as you get used to them! Every hundred years or so I see you like this, mooning over some lovely mayfly whose body’s rotted and gone by the time you get to me.”
Aziraphale took a deep and unnecessary breath. “The problem is. The problem is. You have to see each one for who he or she truly is…”
“A unique snowflake?” Crowley sneered halfheartedly.
“Yes! And here for so little time, and sometimes they burn so, so terribly bright, as if they know how little time there is. Sometimes they have whole worlds inside them they’re trying to get out, to convey…”
“So did you carpe his diem then?”
The angel looked positively scandalised. You’d think he’d have learned a new appalled face by now, but no, it had been unchanged for centuries. Crowley thought he’d first seen it unveiled in response to his new collection of tasteless Black Death jokes.
“Once, only once,” said the long-suffering angel, who could probably have lied if he wanted to but it was too much bother. “And it was completely lovely, but I don’t know what you’d understand about that. If I know you, you’re probably just going to smirk about adultery.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Crowley lied easily. Or maybe it was true. It was an awfully petty thing to gloat about, and he was hardly in the mood. He could neither take away Aziraphale’s sadness nor enjoy it properly.
“It was his way of thinking, you know,” Aziraphale mused. “That adultery is deceit, it’s lying, it’s the theft of love - it’s not inherent in the lovemaking itself. Love is no sin unless it desecrates itself with dishonesty. Free love, he called it. Certainly no more wrong than anything I’ve heard of people trying over the millennia, and rather touchingly innocent. So passionate, all of them…”
Crowley really had little to say to this. Aziraphale’s rationalisations were getting shakier with each passing century. His hand tangled in the sheets nervously, he trembled just a little bit, and he almost wished he’d thought to button his trousers now that the room seemed to be growing chilly and he could feel the angel’s eyes upon his skin as solidly as a touch. “And yet…” he finally said, “You knew it couldn’t last long.”
Aziraphale seemed almost to retreat into himself, and when he emerged he was another side of himself, chanting softly:
“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”
“That’s…nice,” said Crowley, who had indeed liked the parts about sickening and odors, and was resisting with all his strength the parts about beloved’s beds and senses quickening. “One of his?”
Aziraphale nodded. “He wrote about death and memory a lot. Beautifully, always. For someone in the prime of life he never thought death was very far away. He probably had a poem prepared for the occasion of his own.”
“I’m sure that took Azrael by surprise.”
“Not much does,” Aziraphale smiled, his first real one.
“At any rate,” said Crowley, “I’m…ssss-sorry.” It wasn’t so hard; after all, it was a ‘sorry’ of sympathy, not a ‘sorry’ of claiming responsibility or seeking forgiveness; it wasn’t as though he’d killed the man personally. Though he realised with some disgust that if he’d actually witnessed the poet helping himself to Aziraphale, that possibility wouldn’t have been so remote.
Which is why he had no response when the angel stretched up on his knees, reaching out, his knuckle lifting Crowley’s chin, his expression fiercely intent behind his affected spectacles. Crowley had already been cramping up his hand clutching the sheet, struggling desperately to keep from committing some act of irreversible honesty.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale asked with a terrible urgency, “Do you think we cherish life…existence …less than they do?”
Crowley leaned a little away, against his impulse. “Why would you think so? Because we don’t write poetry?”
Aziraphale was searching him. Crowley hated it when he did that. It obligated him to search back.
“Because we take it for granted…” Aziraphale nodded at the bed, at Crowley’s run-down, stuffy little temple to Morpheus, so clearly biting his tongue from making some awful trite point about wasting time as if time were like food or currency or family or fame or any of those things mortals cared so desperately about…
“I’m too ssssleepy to think about this now,” Crowley sighed. “At least I’m fully in my trifling pleasures even if they aren’t Romantic enough for you.”
“What’s going to be here when you wake up again, Crowley?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion.” You, I expect. None of the others around now, but you’re inescapable. “Probably a lot of sickly sweetness you’ll have been working without me around. You’re tireless; it’s oppressive. I’m happy for your mortal, though. At least he’ll be remembered til the end of time, by you if nothing else. Can’t say the same for all the poor anonymous bastards who died in the streets in the time we’ve been talking.”
“Damn it, Crowley, damn it!”
“Damn what? When is that ever helpful?” Yet another Deadly Sin had joined its compatriots, reassuring and familiar. Had Aziraphale come to him for comfort? The gall! The unmitigated naïve gall. With his fingers on his chin and his arm along his chest Aziraphale could hang all over him like that and try to initiate some kind of bloody metaphysical….
“You are very beautiful,” Aziraphale said, downright clinically.
“What a startling revelation that is,” Crowley said dryly. “Vanity, you know. It’s expected of me. What’s your excuse? No, wait. After all these years I know what you’re going to say. You’ve got a little more time on your face than I do. Humility and all that rot. But it’s not as if it’s any more honest.”
Aziraphale blinked just once, but did not remove that awful, wonderful gaze. And Crowley couldn’t take it for another pulsebeat; he unclenched his hands from the sheets and gathered up Aziraphale’s face in them and claimed those lips roughly with his own. There was a sound like a startled yelp in his mouth, but he did not believe for an instant it implied sincere resistance. Indeed, it went on far too long. No suggestion of struggle or smiting, only Aziraphale’s mouth opening, tongue rising to meet him. Crowley moaned softly in encouragement but kept his eyes open and saw the angel’s sink closed. Yes, once one’s turned it on, it doesn’t turn off. Since no one was stopping him, he let his hands move back - one tug at the ribbon at the back of Aziraphale’s neck and sandy hair came falling free over his shoulders. That foppish neckwear would have to be the next to go: Crowley tugged at it, pulling Aziraphale up to sit next to him, and gasped just a little as the angel’s hand awkwardly slid over his bare shoulder, then sank down his chest slowly to his hip, cloth pushed aside against his hand.
Aziraphale drew away suddenly, and Crowley didn’t like the look in his eye at all. Something hesitant there, almost watery. Not a good element for him. Angels are mostly airy beings, but Crowley wanted to feel some earth and fire.
“Well?” he finally managed to rasp.
“I…You’re angry with me,” Aziraphale said at last, a little coldly. “I can feel it.”
“Well, I was certainly starting to feel better about the situation.”
The blue eyes hardened more than Crowley thought was possible in the circumstances. He hadn’t seen that look since…well, the last time he saw Aziraphale, to be honest.
“How can I be sure,” Aziraphale said, “you aren’t just doing this out of some kind of bizarre…covetousness?”
“What in Hades’ name are you talking about?”
“That…” Aziraphale almost hesitated, almost thought better of what he was going to say. But against his better instincts, out it came. “That you aren’t just…trying to erase him somehow?”
Crowley took one of those deep, hissing breaths he didn’t need to take, but the dramatic effect made him feel a good deal better, or so he thought. “Do you really think I’m such a twisted little shite I’m not even capable of honest lust? That I can’t even want you without some infernal ulterior motive? No, you’re sort of right in some horrifically wrong way. I have wretched timing. You’re in mourning. You should be in black crepe and a veil. Go lay yourself down under the twilight beneath some melancholy willow tree and pine. I’m going to go back to sleep. Don’t wake me up again unless you really want my company. Or maybe not even then.”
Aziraphale looked genuinely stricken. “Crowley, I-“
“OUT!” Crowley bellowed, making his eyes flash as dangerously as he knew how, which was saying something.
“I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry,” Aziraphale said, drawing himself up tall and backing away towards the door. He glanced once at the empty bed, the indented pillows, and made one small move with his hand, as if to…well, it didn’t bloody matter what he was trying to do. Crowley lunged after him to make sure he was truly getting himself gone. At the door he took one last handful of the angel’s white shirt, feeling expensive linen beginning to rend in a satisfying way under his nails.
The glance that flashed between them shuddered something violently open and then weakly, artificially shut again. Then Crowley almost gently pushed Aziraphale back through the door and then shut it in his face, making its bolt click ostentatiously.
He stalked back to his bed and threw himself on it, waiting to hear footsteps shuffle down the rickety stairs.
He set about sorting his tavern brawl of emotions, most of them awful. Guilt was the worst - it made him feel slightly ill, like some kind of invasion by outside force, as he was sure he wasn’t supposed to be feeling it. He had wanted to make Aziraphale feel better. He just couldn’t manage it.
Once that was more or less sorted, beaten into some self-pitying submission, then he could turn to the far more productive rage and the frustration that desire turned into when it sat out in the sun too long. That enabled him to deal with his lingering physical…problem…which matter he took in his own hands, dreaming of ways in which he might punish his wayward angel. Birch switches and flavoured Italian ices both figured prominently. Daydreams blended into night dreams again, as day and night had no meaning anyway for a creature with a supernatural ability to sleep.
He did wake again of his own accord ten years later to use the lavatory and have a bit of a wash. He was awfully sticky. The trousers were a total loss.
Going back to sleep with cool water on his face, he snuggled back under the blankets, into the perfectly Crowley-shaped indentation forming in the mattress, and stretched out his hand under the pillow, which is when he found the piece of brittle paper.
In Aziraphale’s calligraphic hand, it said:
Lines From ‘The Serpent Is Shut Out From Paradise.’ (They called him ‘little serpent’, eerily enough. It was a pun on his name in Italian)*
Therefore, if I see you seldomer….
Dear friend, know that I only fly
Your looks, because they stir
Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die.
The very comfort which they minister
I scarce can bear; yet I,
(So deeply is the arrow gone)
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
A bit hyperbolic, I think. But still all too true in its way. Please forgive me.
-A.
Crowley stared at it in disgusted disbelief until its words carved themselves into his mind. Then it went up in flames in his fingertips.
It took him almost a month to get back to sleep.
***
Much Later
When he was next gently shaken awake, the old wooden walls of his room had a noticeable sag to them. Aziraphale sat on the edge of his bed. Crowley didn’t even hiss at him.
“Crowley,” the angel said carefully, “I’m sorry to wake you. I have to tell you - I’m being sent away on assignment.”
“Eh?” groaned the demon blearily. “Why? Where to?”
“America. Cassiel’s overwhelmed, it looks like all…er, heck…is going to break loose soon.”
“What year is it?”
“1859. It’s spring.”
“What’s happening?”
“No one’s sure, but it’s very messy. Very messy. Some are saying it might be war.”
The angel must have opened the window. Downstairs and outside on the filthy cobblestones, a street singer was howling some attempt at a hoary old tune. Crowley was just glad Aziraphale had managed to scrape the horseshit from his shoes before coming upstairs. Or perhaps it didn’t stick to his kind.
“War? With whom?”
“Themselves. It’s very complicated. We’re hoping to avert it, or at least make it quick and decisive.”
“Sounds dreadful. You’ll hate it. I don’t think there are any poets over there.”
“What do you know about America?”
“Not much, except that you’ll probably get your sweet round arse kicked. Think of me when it happens.”
Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed. “You haven’t changed.”
“Why would you think I would have done?” Crowley lifted one of Aziraphale’s soft hands to his lips and kissed it. “I’m still angry but I wish you the best. Do come back in one piece. No one’s allowed to kill you but me.”
“I feel so…sheltered in your warm regards.”
“I don’t think it’s me you should worry about at the moment,” Crowley said, basking in something like the upper hand and shrugging off enough blanket so that Aziraphale couldn’t miss that he’d long since given sleepwear of any kind up for lost. “So…off to the war,” he grinned salaciously. “Doesn’t the soldier boy always want a last…”
“I don’t want to start something I can’t finish,” Aziraphale said firmly. “Not this time.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s no finish. I’m not going to tragically and conveniently expire - knock wood - “ he patted the bedpost. “One long awkward morning after dragging on until the end of the world, is that what you’re afraid of?”
Aziraphale wrinkled his brow. “You know, there might be something to that.”
“Well usually I think you think entirely too much, but-“
“I have to go.”
“Of course you do. Well, bring me back some…rawhide or something.”
Aziraphale’s look was so sad it was almost kitsch - although the concept of kitsch had not yet taken hold in mass consciousness Crowley already understood it all too well - but it still hurt, and Crowley was not too unhappy to see it gone.
What he was truly unhappy about was the street singer, bare minutes after the outside door slammed behind the angel.
“She….diiiiiiiied…o’ the faver…..and nooooooothing could save her…CROWLEY. WE KNOW YOU’RE UP THERE. GET YOUR LAZY HIBERNATING REPTILIAN ARSE UP. YOU’RE NEEDED ACROSS THE POND. THAT BLESSED COCKY NEW COUNTRY OVER THERE IS FALLING APART, AND WE WANT AS MANY OF OUR PEOPLE AS WE CAN SPARE, INCLUDING YOU, TO HELP IT ALONG.”
“Alright. Fine. ‘S’not like I have a choice, right?”
“YOU GOT IT. COULD BE WORSE. AT LEAST YOU’RE IMMUNE TO DYSENTERY. DO A GOOD JOB, OR WE CAN CHANGE THAT….but her ghoooooost wheels the barrow…..through streeeeeets broad and narrow….”
With a heroic sigh of resignation, Crowley padded naked to the window to see what the peasants were wearing these days, and wished himself wearing something better.
He grudgingly admitted some fresh air might do him good.
~fin~
*true, according to Norton. Bischelli is “little snake,” a pun on Bysshe Shelley (the author of all poems quoted here, and the source of the title).
If you think the ending part could be a setup for an appalling American-Civil-War-drama sequel (Gone With the Wings?), with Horsepersons involved and perhaps even Aziraphale hooked up briefly with Walt Whitman, you would be someone who thinks a lot like me. Well, at least when I think of sending English (or "English," in this case) characters to America I wouldn't give them fake tans and deck them out at Hot Topic.