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malicehaughton!
Dec. 27th, 2010 11:29 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
musegaarid.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
go_exchangeTitle: Etiquette
Recipient:malicehaughton
From:unravels
Rating: PG-13 for mild language
Summary: Aziraphale had been acting oddly ever since the failed Apocalypse. Crowley suspects he knows why, and is determined to find out for certain.
Notes: Many thanks to my last-second beta! And to my recipient - I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed writing it. :)
It hadn't been long at all since they'd saved the world. Of course, that whole 'saving' bit had been sort of an accident if you really wanted to examine the thing, but in many ways they'd both tried hard, and even success with a footnote denoting utter failure was still a sort of a success, in Crowley's book. So he certainly expected a bit of oddness here and there, but there was something consistently off about the angel. They took up the habit of long, lazy lunches again, but Aziraphale would make anxious noises before they'd even gotten dessert and look meaningfully at his antique watch. [1]
Crowley wasn't sure what the etiquette was in this situation; not that he was generally concerned about things like that, of course. The angel had been through a lot, after all. They'd both been through a lot, and the Arrangement wasn't the sort of thing that one should fiddle with because of a nebulous gut feeling. It was only that the angel always seemed harried; he rushed around as though Crowley wasn't there, or was just another piece of furniture to be dusted past. He was perfectly polite, as always. And very distant.
Crowley still dropped by the shop every so often - just to check, you understand, that everything was still more or less normal, that nothing that wasn't supposed to happen had happened, and that Aziraphale hadn't been contacted by Above. But he was beginning to get suspicious about that last, and the circuituous route of that train of thought led to nowhere good. If he was right, Aziraphale was violating their Arrangement. And he wouldn't do that, Crowley felt certain, unless there was a very good reason for it. And if there was a good reason... it didn't bode well for the demon, put it that way. If Heaven was getting chatty about something, it most likely meant that Crowley was about to be in big trouble from Below.
He tried to be nonchalant about it. Etiquette, and all that.
"So, Angel, heard any news? Any communication from the high-and-mightys? I don't mean just about what happened in Tadfield; I mean about what might happen anywhere."
"Not a thing, my dear. Could you give me a hand with this desk? I'd just like to move it a little further into the light."
And then Aziraphale wouldkick him out suggest he had some work to be getting on with.
To He-- Somewhere with etiquette, then. Crowley tried to be a bit more demanding about it.
"I'm sure you've heard from them, Angel; you may as well tell me the bad news."
Aziraphale only looked at him blankly. "I haven't heard anything at all, and if you're so certain there's bad news then you might as well just make something up."
And then Aziraphale wouldkick him out say he had a lot of complicated work to do and it would perhaps be best if Crowley wasn't there.
Crowley finally tried sulking out loud.
"I'd tell you if I'd heard something."
"As would I, my dear. And I really should be getting on with this shelving, so if you'd be so kind..."
He could smell Heaven on the angel. It was like a very particular cologne made of spiritual ozone. But to confront him about it, to accuse him of lying... he simply couldn't bring himself to take that step. What if it turned out, in every logical sense he could imagine, to be true? The idea that Aziraphale had a secret that was shared with his superiors and not with Crowley was infuriating. Frustrating.
Devastating.
They were friends, right? he mused as he sauntered down Shaftesbury Avenue, hands in his pockets and stepping into the path of as many tourists as possible. Friends confided in one another. Friends didn't keep nasty secrets from one another for weeks. The angel either didn't have a secret, which was absurd, or wasn't his friend, which... wasn't absurd at all, when you got right down to it.
This waffling was ridiculous, he decided. He turned sharply, neatly causing a near-collision of pedestrians on the busy street [2] and headed back toward the angel's shop. He was going to burst in. He was going to demand an explanation. He was going to find out once and for all what the bloody He-- Somewhere was going on.
He went around the back. One out of three, he reasoned, was a perfectly acceptable ratio. Aziraphale had blocked most of the windows with some sort of special paper to filter the sunlight, and had then stacked books on the windowsill anyhow, but Crowley could see around the edges if he stood on a crate. Whatever was on the ground was squishing unpleasantly anyhow, so he climbed up rather than looking at the mess on his python-skin shoes, and tucked his sunglasses into an inner pocket so that he could see more clearly.
The angel was in his back room. [3] And there was - ah-ha a faint blue circle of light coming down from somewhere above. Crowley squinted at it. He should be feeling something, given the proximity - wall or no wall - but there was nothing. Aziraphale stepped carefully inside, turned his round face up toward the source of the light, and then - nothing. He just stood there, eyes closed and (beatific) expression complete. His lips weren't even moving. Crowley wondered if he'd learned how to communicate mentally, the way that Downstairs could just dump information into the minds of its minions. On the heels of this thought he became very rapidly paranoid about whether the angel could read his mind; maybe that was why Aziraphale didn't want to be around him much, and how detailed were those thoughts anyway, [4] and maybe all the excuses and the lies about what was in the back room were just Aziraphale putting up a wall between them, and conversations in the park or over wine in the shop or dinner at the Ritz or the time they'd saved the world together, maybe all of it meant nothing, and then the crate snapped.
It made a very loud noise. He had a glimpse of Aziraphale's eyes flying open and his head turning precisely toward the window before he fell below the sight-line, right into whatever squishy thing his boots had been dirtied by when he climbed up. [5]
Crowley was both panicked and furious. He flew (not literally) up off the ground and was down the alley and about to turn onto the main road when Aziraphale caught him. He was grabbed at the back of his collar by a no-nonsense-thank-you hand, summarily turned around and looked over by a very stern pair of blue eyes. He could see Aziraphale taking in with a glance the broken crate, the indecisive footprints in the mud, and the little hole in the covered window where he'd peeked.
"Inside," Aziraphale ordered, and marched him through a door in the back that Crowley, now mud-free thanks to the angel, had never noticed before. [6] Crowley was grateful for the clean-up until he remembered Aziraphale's pristine book collection, and fell directly back into a sulk.
They went right past the area Crowley had been peeking at, and to his shock the blue light was still there. He shied away from it instinctively before realizing that the light was muted and small, like a low-watt light bulb. He could feel the holiness from it now, but he knew that sort of portal was capable of much more. Aziraphale was always careful to conjure such power only when he was safely away.
They reached the couch, but rather than sitting Aziraphale turned him around once more. To Crowley's astonishment, he had put on the mantle of righteous fury in the few seconds between here and that dark alley behind the shop.
"How long were you there?" he demanded, eyes flashing.
"Long enough to see that you've been lying about your lack of contact from Upstairs," Crowley shot back miserably. He didn't mean to sound so pathetic; accusing was more the style he'd been aiming for.
"Contact through that?" the angel sputtered. "I'm not lying, and I'm not spying on my counterpoint from the gutter, either. I have a well-developed sense of Right and Wrong. I should have known when you--" He broke off with a frustrated sigh, which Crowley knew well and had always hated. "That pitiful little connection isn't nearly enough for communication."
"What is it, then?" he asked poisonously. "Practicing your mental telepathy skills? I was only trying to see what's such a huge secret that you won't even tell me."
"I missed it, that's all," Aziraphale shot back, and then looked mortified.
Crowley gave him a single betrayed look, and then his entire expression turned to stone. He just-- well, he wasn't going to give him the satisfaction, that's all.
"You don't like it there, Angel," he managed. "A little visit a few years ago was enough to remind you of that, remember?"
"I don't want to go there," Aziraphale explained more gently, deflating before his eyes. Damn him anyway, Crowley thought. He could always see far more than the demon was willing to show him, and Crowley's attempt to hide his relief was token at best.
The angel, on the other hand, was looking increasingly uncomfortable. Crowley tried not to feel sorry for him. "Some days I only. It's only that it's a bit. Overwhelming. The whole of it. There are a lot of terrible things happening down here, you know."
"I know," Crowley agreed. He didn't sound at all self-congratulatory, and Aziraphale didn't sound accusatory. It simply was.
"And there are times when I need to - I don't know, exactly. Be reminded. That feeling we had in the Garden, you remember. That everything was going to be all right," he added, sounding rather defeated. "I miss it."
"I didn't have that feeling," Crowley said flatly. "It was more the 'I'm really going to get it if I don't make some fireworks up here, so panicked malice is the order of the day' most of the time."
"Oh. Well, it was very nice," Aziraphale said. "I remember it fondly."
Crowley frowned. He was getting a headache, and he never got headaches. Not ones that he couldn't make go away with a snap, certainly.
"So, wait. You're rejecting me because of a feeling? One you barely remember, and have probably romanticized to the point it's not even true?"
"No," Aziraphale said. He definitely sounded calmer now, even if he wasn't making any sense. "I'm not 'barely remembering' it, and I'm not 'rejecting' you. What a ridiculous notion."
"You sure act that way when I turn up, though."
"It isn't like that at all," Aziraphale said, so quickly and earnestly that Crowley was inclined to believe him before he could help himself. "It's rather an embarrassing habit. I didn't want you to - well. Think less of me."
"I already knew about it!"
"You asked if I'd been contacted," he corrected. "What you thought you knew and what was actually happening were completely different things, you know." He looked glumly at the blue light. "I really should stop, I suppose. It's just. Very easy. That little boost means so much."
Crowley looked at his unhappy face and found he couldn't muster up any more indignation.
"Everything will be all right," he tried. Aziraphale smiled at him weakly.
"That's very kind of you, my dear, but you don't really believe that."
"Maybe I do," Crowley insisted, chin rising in defiance. Exactly why he was insisting, he wasn't certain. He was telling the angel one of his most closely guarded secrets, whether Aziraphale believed him or not.
Aziraphale looked like he was about to deny this again, then paused. And then there was a longer pause.
"Oh," he said, as though he'd never seen Crowley before. Crowley didn't know what to say, now that he'd confessed. He put his hands carefully on the angel's shoulders and looked him straight in the eyes.
"It's going to be all right."
Amazingly, Aziraphale slipped his arms around Crowley's waist and laughed against his chest. It was a muffled, hiccupy sound that Crowley decided he'd rather not investigate too thoroughly. "No, it's not," Aziraphale said.
Crowley grinned into his hair. He ran his fingertips up the angel's back, then down again, then pulled him closer. It was amazing, really, how someone as fundamentally bad at compassion as a demon could manage to soothe an angel, but he was clearly doing it.
"Are we going to argue about this?" he murmured. "It really is. Know how I know?" Aziraphale relaxed against him, and Crowley allowed his eyes to close.
"No."
"Because," Crowley said, and moved to kiss the angel on the forehead just as Aziraphale lifted his face. Their lips met awkwardly.
It wasn't much of a kiss, and both of them were too shocked to react beyond staring dumbly and then depositing themselves, still facing one another, on the patched couch Aziraphale had determined was too worn for the shop proper. [7]
"Because," Crowley said again.
Across the room the blue light wavered, then flickered out completely with a tiny noise like a sigh. Aziraphale, otherwise occupied, didn't even notice.
[1] Which hadn't even worked in years.
[2] The congestion charge had only made the pavement more crowded and the bus-riders more impatient, so it was a good job, if Crowley did say so himself.
[3] A requirement for narrative law, and also for spies everywhere.
[4] Pretty damn detailed, he thought; he'd had a while to perfect them.
[5] It was only mud, but Crowley was too distracted to look.
[6] Because it had never been there before.
[7] More accurately, their knees gave out, but both would swear later that it had been entirely on purpose.
Happy Holidays,malicehaughton, from your Secret Author!
Recipient:
malicehaughtonFrom:
unravelsRating: PG-13 for mild language
Summary: Aziraphale had been acting oddly ever since the failed Apocalypse. Crowley suspects he knows why, and is determined to find out for certain.
Notes: Many thanks to my last-second beta! And to my recipient - I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed writing it. :)
It hadn't been long at all since they'd saved the world. Of course, that whole 'saving' bit had been sort of an accident if you really wanted to examine the thing, but in many ways they'd both tried hard, and even success with a footnote denoting utter failure was still a sort of a success, in Crowley's book. So he certainly expected a bit of oddness here and there, but there was something consistently off about the angel. They took up the habit of long, lazy lunches again, but Aziraphale would make anxious noises before they'd even gotten dessert and look meaningfully at his antique watch. [1]
Crowley wasn't sure what the etiquette was in this situation; not that he was generally concerned about things like that, of course. The angel had been through a lot, after all. They'd both been through a lot, and the Arrangement wasn't the sort of thing that one should fiddle with because of a nebulous gut feeling. It was only that the angel always seemed harried; he rushed around as though Crowley wasn't there, or was just another piece of furniture to be dusted past. He was perfectly polite, as always. And very distant.
Crowley still dropped by the shop every so often - just to check, you understand, that everything was still more or less normal, that nothing that wasn't supposed to happen had happened, and that Aziraphale hadn't been contacted by Above. But he was beginning to get suspicious about that last, and the circuituous route of that train of thought led to nowhere good. If he was right, Aziraphale was violating their Arrangement. And he wouldn't do that, Crowley felt certain, unless there was a very good reason for it. And if there was a good reason... it didn't bode well for the demon, put it that way. If Heaven was getting chatty about something, it most likely meant that Crowley was about to be in big trouble from Below.
He tried to be nonchalant about it. Etiquette, and all that.
"So, Angel, heard any news? Any communication from the high-and-mightys? I don't mean just about what happened in Tadfield; I mean about what might happen anywhere."
"Not a thing, my dear. Could you give me a hand with this desk? I'd just like to move it a little further into the light."
And then Aziraphale would
To He-- Somewhere with etiquette, then. Crowley tried to be a bit more demanding about it.
"I'm sure you've heard from them, Angel; you may as well tell me the bad news."
Aziraphale only looked at him blankly. "I haven't heard anything at all, and if you're so certain there's bad news then you might as well just make something up."
And then Aziraphale would
Crowley finally tried sulking out loud.
"I'd tell you if I'd heard something."
"As would I, my dear. And I really should be getting on with this shelving, so if you'd be so kind..."
He could smell Heaven on the angel. It was like a very particular cologne made of spiritual ozone. But to confront him about it, to accuse him of lying... he simply couldn't bring himself to take that step. What if it turned out, in every logical sense he could imagine, to be true? The idea that Aziraphale had a secret that was shared with his superiors and not with Crowley was infuriating. Frustrating.
Devastating.
They were friends, right? he mused as he sauntered down Shaftesbury Avenue, hands in his pockets and stepping into the path of as many tourists as possible. Friends confided in one another. Friends didn't keep nasty secrets from one another for weeks. The angel either didn't have a secret, which was absurd, or wasn't his friend, which... wasn't absurd at all, when you got right down to it.
This waffling was ridiculous, he decided. He turned sharply, neatly causing a near-collision of pedestrians on the busy street [2] and headed back toward the angel's shop. He was going to burst in. He was going to demand an explanation. He was going to find out once and for all what the bloody He-- Somewhere was going on.
He went around the back. One out of three, he reasoned, was a perfectly acceptable ratio. Aziraphale had blocked most of the windows with some sort of special paper to filter the sunlight, and had then stacked books on the windowsill anyhow, but Crowley could see around the edges if he stood on a crate. Whatever was on the ground was squishing unpleasantly anyhow, so he climbed up rather than looking at the mess on his python-skin shoes, and tucked his sunglasses into an inner pocket so that he could see more clearly.
The angel was in his back room. [3] And there was - ah-ha a faint blue circle of light coming down from somewhere above. Crowley squinted at it. He should be feeling something, given the proximity - wall or no wall - but there was nothing. Aziraphale stepped carefully inside, turned his round face up toward the source of the light, and then - nothing. He just stood there, eyes closed and (beatific) expression complete. His lips weren't even moving. Crowley wondered if he'd learned how to communicate mentally, the way that Downstairs could just dump information into the minds of its minions. On the heels of this thought he became very rapidly paranoid about whether the angel could read his mind; maybe that was why Aziraphale didn't want to be around him much, and how detailed were those thoughts anyway, [4] and maybe all the excuses and the lies about what was in the back room were just Aziraphale putting up a wall between them, and conversations in the park or over wine in the shop or dinner at the Ritz or the time they'd saved the world together, maybe all of it meant nothing, and then the crate snapped.
It made a very loud noise. He had a glimpse of Aziraphale's eyes flying open and his head turning precisely toward the window before he fell below the sight-line, right into whatever squishy thing his boots had been dirtied by when he climbed up. [5]
Crowley was both panicked and furious. He flew (not literally) up off the ground and was down the alley and about to turn onto the main road when Aziraphale caught him. He was grabbed at the back of his collar by a no-nonsense-thank-you hand, summarily turned around and looked over by a very stern pair of blue eyes. He could see Aziraphale taking in with a glance the broken crate, the indecisive footprints in the mud, and the little hole in the covered window where he'd peeked.
"Inside," Aziraphale ordered, and marched him through a door in the back that Crowley, now mud-free thanks to the angel, had never noticed before. [6] Crowley was grateful for the clean-up until he remembered Aziraphale's pristine book collection, and fell directly back into a sulk.
They went right past the area Crowley had been peeking at, and to his shock the blue light was still there. He shied away from it instinctively before realizing that the light was muted and small, like a low-watt light bulb. He could feel the holiness from it now, but he knew that sort of portal was capable of much more. Aziraphale was always careful to conjure such power only when he was safely away.
They reached the couch, but rather than sitting Aziraphale turned him around once more. To Crowley's astonishment, he had put on the mantle of righteous fury in the few seconds between here and that dark alley behind the shop.
"How long were you there?" he demanded, eyes flashing.
"Long enough to see that you've been lying about your lack of contact from Upstairs," Crowley shot back miserably. He didn't mean to sound so pathetic; accusing was more the style he'd been aiming for.
"Contact through that?" the angel sputtered. "I'm not lying, and I'm not spying on my counterpoint from the gutter, either. I have a well-developed sense of Right and Wrong. I should have known when you--" He broke off with a frustrated sigh, which Crowley knew well and had always hated. "That pitiful little connection isn't nearly enough for communication."
"What is it, then?" he asked poisonously. "Practicing your mental telepathy skills? I was only trying to see what's such a huge secret that you won't even tell me."
"I missed it, that's all," Aziraphale shot back, and then looked mortified.
Crowley gave him a single betrayed look, and then his entire expression turned to stone. He just-- well, he wasn't going to give him the satisfaction, that's all.
"You don't like it there, Angel," he managed. "A little visit a few years ago was enough to remind you of that, remember?"
"I don't want to go there," Aziraphale explained more gently, deflating before his eyes. Damn him anyway, Crowley thought. He could always see far more than the demon was willing to show him, and Crowley's attempt to hide his relief was token at best.
The angel, on the other hand, was looking increasingly uncomfortable. Crowley tried not to feel sorry for him. "Some days I only. It's only that it's a bit. Overwhelming. The whole of it. There are a lot of terrible things happening down here, you know."
"I know," Crowley agreed. He didn't sound at all self-congratulatory, and Aziraphale didn't sound accusatory. It simply was.
"And there are times when I need to - I don't know, exactly. Be reminded. That feeling we had in the Garden, you remember. That everything was going to be all right," he added, sounding rather defeated. "I miss it."
"I didn't have that feeling," Crowley said flatly. "It was more the 'I'm really going to get it if I don't make some fireworks up here, so panicked malice is the order of the day' most of the time."
"Oh. Well, it was very nice," Aziraphale said. "I remember it fondly."
Crowley frowned. He was getting a headache, and he never got headaches. Not ones that he couldn't make go away with a snap, certainly.
"So, wait. You're rejecting me because of a feeling? One you barely remember, and have probably romanticized to the point it's not even true?"
"No," Aziraphale said. He definitely sounded calmer now, even if he wasn't making any sense. "I'm not 'barely remembering' it, and I'm not 'rejecting' you. What a ridiculous notion."
"You sure act that way when I turn up, though."
"It isn't like that at all," Aziraphale said, so quickly and earnestly that Crowley was inclined to believe him before he could help himself. "It's rather an embarrassing habit. I didn't want you to - well. Think less of me."
"I already knew about it!"
"You asked if I'd been contacted," he corrected. "What you thought you knew and what was actually happening were completely different things, you know." He looked glumly at the blue light. "I really should stop, I suppose. It's just. Very easy. That little boost means so much."
Crowley looked at his unhappy face and found he couldn't muster up any more indignation.
"Everything will be all right," he tried. Aziraphale smiled at him weakly.
"That's very kind of you, my dear, but you don't really believe that."
"Maybe I do," Crowley insisted, chin rising in defiance. Exactly why he was insisting, he wasn't certain. He was telling the angel one of his most closely guarded secrets, whether Aziraphale believed him or not.
Aziraphale looked like he was about to deny this again, then paused. And then there was a longer pause.
"Oh," he said, as though he'd never seen Crowley before. Crowley didn't know what to say, now that he'd confessed. He put his hands carefully on the angel's shoulders and looked him straight in the eyes.
"It's going to be all right."
Amazingly, Aziraphale slipped his arms around Crowley's waist and laughed against his chest. It was a muffled, hiccupy sound that Crowley decided he'd rather not investigate too thoroughly. "No, it's not," Aziraphale said.
Crowley grinned into his hair. He ran his fingertips up the angel's back, then down again, then pulled him closer. It was amazing, really, how someone as fundamentally bad at compassion as a demon could manage to soothe an angel, but he was clearly doing it.
"Are we going to argue about this?" he murmured. "It really is. Know how I know?" Aziraphale relaxed against him, and Crowley allowed his eyes to close.
"No."
"Because," Crowley said, and moved to kiss the angel on the forehead just as Aziraphale lifted his face. Their lips met awkwardly.
It wasn't much of a kiss, and both of them were too shocked to react beyond staring dumbly and then depositing themselves, still facing one another, on the patched couch Aziraphale had determined was too worn for the shop proper. [7]
"Because," Crowley said again.
Across the room the blue light wavered, then flickered out completely with a tiny noise like a sigh. Aziraphale, otherwise occupied, didn't even notice.
[1] Which hadn't even worked in years.
[2] The congestion charge had only made the pavement more crowded and the bus-riders more impatient, so it was a good job, if Crowley did say so himself.
[3] A requirement for narrative law, and also for spies everywhere.
[4] Pretty damn detailed, he thought; he'd had a while to perfect them.
[5] It was only mud, but Crowley was too distracted to look.
[6] Because it had never been there before.
[7] More accurately, their knees gave out, but both would swear later that it had been entirely on purpose.
Happy Holidays,
malicehaughton, from your Secret Author!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-28 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-28 09:41 am (UTC)And the awkward kiss after Crowley tried in comforting Aziraphale was a lovely way to end it. Everything might not be alright, but as long as they stick together through it, it will be.
I definitely did enjoy reading it and had a wonderful holiday. I hope you had the same.
And, stuck on the end here, yay footnotes!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-29 01:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-30 06:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-30 03:38 pm (UTC)That sums it all up beautifully. This is adorable <3