Happy Holidays, Tomato_Greens!

[goe-mod.livejournal.com]

Title: The Last Exit
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violent imagery, historical nastiness.
Pairing: Very slightly implied Pepper/War and Aziraphale/Crowley.
Recipient: For tomato_greens.
Prompt: A combination of your first and second prompts--"Aziraphale/Crowley, French history," and War/Pepper to the tune of Be Brave.
A/N: This ended up a bit darker and tonally dissonant from canon than I meant it to, but I hope you find it enjoyable. Happy holidays!

There was a hill not far from the tower. At noon, after the eighth round of questioning came to an embarrassed close, Aziraphale climbed it. A little fresh air, he thought, would set him at his ease. But he was short of breath and temper by the time he reached the sunny top, and his dearest wish, privacy, remained elusive; someone had taken his customary seat under the oak tree at the crown.

If you could call them a someone. “Hello,” said War, her glance flashing like the excellent sherry that the diplomats drank before writing the Treaty of Troyes. “I was wondering when you'd show up. Been in town long?”

“Ah...”

Aziraphale debated the merits of turning around and walking back to the tower. The Horsepersons were unmanageable. You couldn't exorcise them, or offer to swap favors, or politely ask if they'd faff off. They wouldn't have understood the concept of faffing, for starters. They were devoted to their work. And while they could theoretically be located wherever humans gathered, in the high places and the low—practically speaking, they showed up in the places that were most awkward. If they hadn't literally been anthropomorphic personifications of unfortunate events, he would have called them the anthropomorphic personifications of unfortunate events.

It was all very unsatisfactory.

On the other hand, the prospect of returning to that dark little prison cell—with its steady-handed occupant—struck him as still more lamentable. And after all, he had been on Earth a long time, encountering and warding off all sorts of baddish influences as he went; he could probably manage what was commonly known as the worse part of valor.

“I suppose you're here about the young lady,” he said, sitting down in the leaf-littered grass. “While I understand your interest, I'm afraid—”

War waved a dismissive hand.

“Dear Jehanne,” she said, putting a breathy edge on the aitch. She had murderous consonants; her vowels were the whistle of an arrow that's just missed your naked ear. “Don't worry. I won't interfere. Yeah, I came here with a jailbreak in mind, but now I see you've got dibs...”

She grinned at him.

“Thank you,” said Aziraphale, ignoring this. “That's very helpful. I have to admit, I thought you might object.”

“Oh, you've got to follow the Plan. Even we know that.”

There was a meaningful pause.

That was the other trouble, Aziraphale thought. They did know. The Horsepersons. Crowley, he could put off with dinner and a well-timed penguin mention. War was quite another matter.

Still, he made the effort. “Perhaps you'd like to leave me to it, then?”

“And miss all the fun?” said the thing beneath the oak tree. “Please. But I'm sure...” A pause, as if wrestling with an unfamiliar language. “We can all get along.” She spat on the grass and wiped her mouth.

Certainly, thought Aziraphale, if it weren't for the detail of your essential nature: but he didn't voice it. Frankly, he was impressed that a peasant rebellion hadn't already started up in the abandoned clearing. A convention of squirrels were mauling one another on a nearby branch, but to human eyes the scene was one of bright serenity. “Would you mind if I started on my lunch? It's been a very long day. Morning. Trial.”

“Sure it has.” War smiled, whitely. “Go ahead and eat. I'm not Famine.”

That was undeniable. Feeling overcommitted, Aziraphale opened his satchel and took out a roasted chicken, a flask of good vin de Bourgogne, and a small tablecloth[1].

“So are there any other good guys hanging around?” said War, having declined his offer of a manifested wine glass and accepted his offer of a wing. Shreds of gristle glistened attractively here and there in an armory of incisors. His own shoulderblades itched under the cassock. “Or is this a personal project?”

“No, of course not,” said Aziraphale coldly. “It's all very official. Michael and Gabriel—”

“Michael,” said War, with a dreamy blink. For a moment her pupils reflected, not the pastoral greenery or the view of the city beyond, but the sparks and movement of a battle that antedated death. It was easy to forget who went back furthest of the four: but listening to War sigh over the Prince of Mercy like a starstruck groupie, Aziraphale remembered. “Michael, in a town like this? Has he punched any mountains yet?”

“Strictly in an advisory capacity,” Aziraphale said.

“He's splitting open mountains in an advisory capacity?”

“He is come,” said Aziraphale, “to guide the girl.”

“Where to?”

Aziraphale thought ruefully that he had been mistaken. What they knew wasn't the worst thing. The worst of it was when the inhuman work ethic and sense of unvarnished realism, surpassing that of any demon or angel, fell away—and they looked at you, as War did now, with pitiless irony. When you remembered that they belonged to the minds of men, much as vice versa.

“Her reward,” he said, and had a prim bite of his drumstick. The judgment of all the peoples of the earth, filtered through one body's orange, watchful gaze; but it was very good chicken.

“Oh, well, that's all right then,” said War, her smile broadening. Aziraphale swallowed and washed the meat down with more wine.

So when are you going to burn her, Crowley had asked, over a barrel of pale Fromenteau. The demon was still recovering from the 14^th century, and under the circumstances Aziraphale was willing to forgive him a moment's melodrama. Crowley had never really gotten over the invention of stoning. Executive innovations since made the poor boy feel quite outclassed.

But:

“I'm here to see to it that the trial records are thorough,” Aziraphale told War, as he had told the Enemy the night before. “Nothing more.”

“Mm-hmm?”

They were wonderful records. Aziraphale had tried to explain that to Crowley, too, with small success. She had said splendid things. They would outlive her. She had looked at him that morning, when the chief assessor asked, “Did not the angel fail you, when you were taken prisoner?” Had said, “...since it pleased God, it was better for me to be taken prisoner.” Not included in the records was the fact that she had then winked at him. Her brief, bright amusement, quite distinct from War's: her mouth unpainted, her freckled face pale as the sides of a trout. In her as well, however, it had had the quality of re-opened wound.

Even earlier, during her first interrogation, she had said, “It is true that I wished and still wish to escape, as is lawful for any captive or prisoner.”

Aziraphale wondered whether her Voice had told her that. Probably not. It was hard to imagine the Person who had made the Garden, and beyond that the world, being quite pleased with the urge to walk, run, leap from towers. Crowley would say, He was the one who made apples edible, and what did He expect, with a marketing campaign like that—but Crowley was a demon. Even the Adversary had never tried to flee. All very well to rebel and be cast out, but escape, now: escape was a human notion. A species that could look at the marvelous, intricate, interesting world—could savor all the bounties of matter and free will—and still crave some release: that was humanity all over. Humans had imagined Heaven before anyone had a spare moment to sit down and explain it to them. Not only that, but they had imagined Heaven to be unimaginable. A kingdom truer, purer, and more real than Earth, the one with sushi!

And yet—he had been a long time away from home. Jehanne d'Arc trusted to her saints to save her, and Gabriel had assured him that they were keeping the lines as clear as possible until the end. It would have pained him to admit it, but Aziraphale felt a modest confidence in his grasp of ineffability: definitional paradox aside, he could accept the merely transcendant and inscrutable. What worried him was the thought that Jehanne understood—something simple. Something he'd never heard.

“Pass the thighmeat,” said War, after a while. Her eyes were closed. He had optimistically convinced himself that she was napping, and that she was capable of it. He passed the leg.

“This is the longest I've ever seen you in one place,” he said. “Without something... happening.” He gestured expansively at the sunlit clearing, endeavoring to suggest the whole breadth and scope of a tavern brawl in the space between thumb and wiggling forefinger. “Yes? Isn't that odd?” He was tipsy, he decided, with the precision of the seriously drunk. He refilled the flask.

“Not odd,” she said. “After all, little angel, you're in a war with yourself...”

“What?” said Aziraphale. After a moment's consideration, he staggered to his feet. “No, no.” He began to fold the splintering breast and bones of the chicken into the cloth. There was a robin singing, somewhere not far off, and a shaft of sun cut across his eye like the edge of some much vaster eminence. “That's what Crowley said too,” he told her, sternly, and received a puzzled look for his trouble. “That I was tempted. To stop—to stop—”

“The trial?” said War. “No, I never thought that. But you want to ask her something, don't you? Want to take her aside, and say—?”

She was looking human again. After a while, everything did. Trees, grass, sun, bones. The wind, from this high up, sounded grandmotherly. Aziraphale closed his eyes. If Jehanne had a piece of God that no one would ever share, he thought; if she died having never told anyone about the revelations granted her—well, was any knowledge lost? Because he hadn't touched it, felt it, spilled wine on the corner, argued with dead scholars on the margins? Trust in God. Commend thyself to God.

“Goodbye,” he said, beginning his descent. He watched to see where he was going, of course, but his mind was busy with the problem of Jehanne. War's laughter followed him, but he set that aside too. He was thinking about what it might be like to experience gravity as a law rather than a suggestion. Of the narrow stone ledge of her one window, and how she must have balanced one foot on it, her bare ankle white in the darkness as a chunk of bone exposed through layers of an age-old family recipe; how she must have paused, her fierce face turned into the cold, her expression the immortal countenance of teenagers about to sneak out after curfew everywhere. What had she seen? What was it they all saw, that they could give up the ornaments of the world—everything they knew or hoped to know—for an object itself beyond knowing? The darkness, and a scattering of stars.

[1] Which had been plain when he put it in the satchel, but which now exhibited traces of culturally inappropriate plaid. In times of great moral stress, Aziraphale always pleaded quilty.

***

Slightly less than six hundred years later, War accepted another humanoid's offer of a drink.

“You hit me with the motorbike,” said Pepper, but she let the barkeep put it on her tab. War's cocktails were remarkably cheap, anyway; War's ideas about reality were about a decade behind current inflation rates, probably because she'd spent that time as a noncorporeal haze of aggression. Now, embodied, and in lieu of answering any questions about how she'd gotten back—or why in her presence Pepper felt neither fear nor anger, but a sense of cozy superiority—she was telling Pepper about Joan of Arc.

“...and if she'd won the Hundred Years' War, you can bet she wouldn't have gone home then, either; she was already grumbling about the Hussites, wrote them the loveliest C&D letter—”

“All right, all right, a really empowered and bloodthirsty sort,” said Pepper, sipping her lager. “Didn't realize you got nostalgic about these people. Your generals.”

War gave a slow blink, like a leopard accused of pinstriped shorts. “I am educating you,” she said, “about your heritage.”

“My what?” Then, with the decent indignation that every member of the Them felt when good fortune befell unprovoked by Adam— “Don't tell me I'm a direct descendant of Miss Crusading Warrior Queen. You know, intersectionality...”

“You beat me,” said War. “That means you get all my anecdotes, kid.”

“Oh.”

“Cheer up,” said War, not unsympathetically, and sucked the pith out of her slice of lemon. “Some of them end with lots more explosions.”

“I thought they burned her!”

“Oh, well...” War made a throat-slitting gesture. “That's not my territory. Death, you know... it's so one-sided. None of you put up a proper fight.”

“You would think exactly that,” said Pepper, rolling her eyes.

Across the room, an argument began over the pub's selection of board games. “I would,” War said amiably. She turned to sit facing Pepper on her stool, one elbow caressing the counter, and added: “You do look like her. There are always other generals. But it's nice, isn't it: to get back something that was lost?”

“Now you're fishing for compliments,” said Pepper, but secretly she was pleased. For someone who five hours ago had been several million nasty tempers, War cleaned up nicely. “Fine, so you're not into people being set on fire by the government. What about the stuff before she died?”

“Ah,” said War, and smiled to herself, like a woman who having been a while out in the cold night air—having seen for herself the closed flowers and indecisive moon—comes back into the warm, and shuts the door. The dark centers of her eyes were enormous in the low light of the pub. Each one might have been a keyhole, or the hole made by a bullet. “Yes. I can tell you about that.”

~end



Happy Holidays, tomato_greens, from your Secret Writer!

Comments

SO MUCH LOVE. SO MUCH CAPS LOCK. THANK YOU!

[tomato-greens.livejournal.com]

THIS. IS. MARVELOUS.

It is truly everything I could possibly ask for, cheek-bitingly funny and terribly, terribly sad at once, which is my favorite combination. I'm in shreds––and you wrote Joan so wonderfully (you spelled it Jehanne!! you quoted the trial records, which really are things of beauty!! you made her absolute humanness the point of it all!! you genius, you lovely genius), you wrote Aziraphale so convincingly, the way he perches between human and divine and distressingly tartan, you wrote War as both sympathetic and as a knife in my gut which is an incredibly difficult balance, and you wrote Pepper as her irrepressible self but I can see the solemn warrior queen she has in her bones. THIS IS PERFECT. YOU ARE PERFECT. I AM REALLY EXCITED TO RECOMMEND THIS TO EVERYONE I KNOW POSTHASTE.

Seriously, I can't even go through and list all the things I love most because it's every single sentence of this brilliant fic, but certain lines hit me with a particular punch: Her brief, bright amusement, quite distinct from War's: her mouth unpainted, her freckled face pale as the sides of a trout. In her as well, however, it had had the quality of re-opened wound. KILL ME. And, oh, He was thinking about what it might be like to experience gravity as a law rather than a suggestion. . And The dark centers of her eyes were enormous in the low light of the pub. Each one might have been a keyhole, or the hole made by a bullet.

Not to mention that I legitimately giggled at several key points, notably War's years as a thousand bad tempers and Aziraphale's unfortunate obsession with plaid and Michael punching a mountain in a strictly advisory capacity, oh my GOD. THIS IS SERIOUSLY AMAZING.

Okay, and maybe this will sound kind of weird, but please take it as the compliment I mean it to be: your writing style here sounds like how I always want my writing style to sound whenever I write GO fic, except I usually fail and you make your beautiful oscillation between genuine tragedy and hilarity seem totally effortless. AGHGHGH, IT'S SO GOOD.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[possibly-thrice.livejournal.com]

Belatedly: thank you--this was such a generous, detailed comment to come back to, after the holiday haze. I loved working with your prompts, and only wish I'd timed things so as to be able to write a longer fic for them; I might still expand this one, if I get a chance. Reading the trial records for the first time was a real eye-opener. Anyway, I'm very glad you enjoyed it! It was a lot of fun to do.

[hsavinien.livejournal.com]

Very nice integration of War into that particular bit of history. (The Hussites getting a Cease & Desist made me giggle despite the otherwise sombre tone.)

[possibly-thrice.livejournal.com]

Thank you! When I stumbled across mention of that correspondence on the Wiki page, I knew I had to throw it in. :'D