Happy Holidays, Tomato_Greens!
Dec. 31st, 2014 05:08 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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go_exchangeTitle: The Widening Gyre
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tomato_greens
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Characters: Aziraphale, Crowley, War, William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne MacBride, John MacBride, George Russell (AE), Aleister Crowley
Warnings: Vague, passing references to domestic violence and child sexual abuse, as well as possible attempted sexual assault by a waterfowl.
Summary: In the spring of 1916, some in London and Dublin were fighting a war on two fronts. Three, if you include the heart. (Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of it.)
Author’s Notes: If you notice any especially beautiful lines in this story, you can be sure they’re Yeats, not me.
“The storm approaches, the gold which the English have made out of the blood and tears of millions of human beings attracts the covetousness of the world. Who will aid the pirates to keep their spoil?” [Maud Gonne, 1900]
Scarlett sighed when she received the assignment. Leaving the battlefields of the Continent even for a moment, now, in her greatest triumph, in her moments of complete and total ecstasy, for a backwater where violence was always so petty and personal and small-scale? So old-fashioned, so trivial, so . . . last-century.
But it was a war of many, many fronts, and this one was at least a place that Sable was fond of and recommended highly. Scarlett found it dull. But maybe, she could change that – and she'd do it in the recollection of an old friend.
Not so bad, Scarlett thought once she’d arrived and breathed in the smouldering tension of Dublin. Not all the hot-blooded young men had been drafted into England’s war, then. And despite what England liked to think, the sedition wasn’t all the work of German spies (though the Kaiser still had a few resources to spare to rouse a little rabble on England’s back porch, and a steady stream of spies travelled from Germany to Ireland and America and back, bringing news and promises of arms - some materialised, some did not, and some were sunk in the cold waters of the British seas).
***
“Something rash is brewing,” the poet muttered into the dust motes of the London bookshop.
“Yes,” said his friend the mystic and scholar. “I hardly know of a safer place to speak of it than here.”
“Why is that? The walls have ears here, I can sense it.”
“But nothing goes beyond the walls. Surely you can also sense that. There’s no place like it in all London.”
“This is a place of business, gentlemen,” said a crabby voice from the other side of the wildly disorganised Natural History shelves.
“My dear Mr. Fell,” said one of them, deliberately speaking in what he liked to call his A.E. voice, which he believed was a little more sharply tuned to the aethers. “A strange business you’re running indeed, because Willie and I have been consistently trying to buy books from you for twenty-five years, and you stubbornly refuse to sell the ones that pique our interest most.”
The bookseller was a prim, slightly plump, unassuming-looking man - undoubtedly English, unmistakably intelligent, and as thoroughly inverted as the spheres of the Qlippoth in a funhouse mirror. He was also inclined to be suspicious and careful in this particular company, because the Order of the Golden Dawn had made no little bit of trouble in the celestial realms in its heyday, and neither of the two men in his shop - Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats - were as completely oblivious as humans ought to be.
“You always pick the ones I’ll not part with,” Fell said warily.
“Illusory treasures,” said Yeats, shaking his head. “Presented only to tempt us.”
“No, no, that’s my department,” another voice cut in as Crowley swept through the shelves, doffing his hat and promptly stumbling over a floor-stack that hadn’t been there the last time he’d visited. Which was only a few hours ago.
“And where you have you been?” Aziraphale asked impatiently.
“Continent. Trying to keep Casement’s keister out of the fire. Failing.” He appeared to notice Fell’s visitors for the first time. “Oh, you. So Connolly and Pearse said it’s on then. If you want to stay out of trouble, stay out of Dublin. Not that you heard it from me. Or from anyone. I’m no one. Er.”
“Who said we want to stay out of trouble?” Yeats said carefully.
“Have you ever fired a gun in your life?” Crowley asked cheerfully.
Yeats blushed and looked down at the ground. “A few times. . . um, duck-hunting.”
“He missed. Always,” said Russell helpfully. “Maybe not even on purpose.”
“That’s the natural order of things, then, isn’t it?” Aziraphale said. “Poets don’t blow up things. Poets write about it afterward.”
“Maybe poets incite them sometimes,” Russell said with a cagy grin. “Beforehand.”
“Well yes, I suppose that’s happened,” said the bookseller, putting on his ‘we’re about to be closed, my goodness look at the time’ face.
This didn’t work very efficiently on most people, but it did on Yeats and Russell - that is one of the drawbacks of mysticism.
“All right then,” Crowley said once Aziraphale had let him into the back room of the bookshop, drawn the curtains and barred the doors. “Cards on the table then. Who's your side got?”
“What about yours? You go first.”
“I asked you first. Do we have to go through this every single time?” Crowley took a sip of wine.
“I suppose not,” Aziraphale said. He listed seventeen names. Crowley listed fifteen. Eight names were on both lists.
“Oh, so it's just like usual then,” Crowley said. “I find that nearly reassuring.”
“You would,” Aziraphale said, a little accusingly. “You like the status quo, don't you?”
“'That’s rich, coming from you. You and your gavotte,” Crowley said. “But the status quo is gone now, isn't it? This war's going to destroy it. Nothing is going to be the same for them for decades, if not centuries, if not ever. We might still be around long enough to get over it, though. Should we start getting over it now and save time?”
Aziraphale took another long sip, because he wanted to be drunk enough for Crowley-logic to make sense. It was going to take a lot, but that was all right – they had a lot. “I think we probably have to get through it first. You seem to know a lot about this, were you - ?”
“I was in Ireland too,” Crowley said happily.
Aziraphale blinked.
“Well,” Crowley said, “that's the nice thing about this Celtic Twilight pagan revival twaddle. It means the serpents can come back, if they're careful and they know what they're about. It's been a thousand years, but I haven't been missing much.”
Aziraphale sighed. “At least one of the worst offenders is ours. He gets carried away sometimes.”
“Him? One of yours? Even with that occultist business on the side?”
Aziraphale took another long sip and wiped his lips primly. “His order has taken steps to reign in their more . . . extreme elements. Mr. Yeats is an honest seeker after truth.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Crowley said, taking off his tinted glasses so Aziraphale could see his eyes roll. With his slitted snake eyes, it was a remarkably disturbing effect. “The world always needs more of those.”
“So what's going on in Ireland besides sentimental theatre?”
“The usual. Revolution, sedition, explosives. Your pet poet probably knows more than he's telling you.”
“I presume that he does,” Aziraphale said.
“You haven't appeared in any dramatic visions, have you?” Crowley said, tilting his head. Old habits die hard. In immortal beings, they're unlikely to die at all.
“I prefer to save that for extreme measures,” Aziraphale said. “Rather showy, after all. Not my preferred style.”
Crowley smiled. “You just don't like the way modern poets write you. Did you ever get as far as the Romantics, or are you still hoping the Elizabethan style will come back?”
“I was partial to that Wilde fellow,” Aziraphale said waspishly. “But you slept through most of the important parts.”
“Probably for the best,” Crowley said, with some slight hint of bitterness.
“Your type is all in favour of modernity,” Aziraphale said. “Honestly, dear boy, I’m surprised you’re here in old London and not some dreadfully forward place. America even.”
“I was there,” Crowley said. “I was told to go make some trouble on some cruise ships. Twice is the charm - I still can’t believe I got plunged into the drink twice in three years. And neither one was my fault, before you ask. Never doing that again. Bloody Germans. Bloody icebergs.”
“Pity. It seemed more relaxing that way. Flying is hard work. The adverts made it looked so civilised.”
“And whose side do you think invented adverts?” Crowley said, waggling his eyebrows.
***
“And our world is changing, so it's the least we can do to bear witness -” the poet said, a little sadly, ruffling his hands through this floppy hair – more grey than black now, still thick and unruly. And then he froze dead still. Crowley and Aziraphale had heard it too. A scratching and a tapping at the window – the fourth-floor window.
Shocked into stillness, poet and demon and angel watched as – bold as you please – a man pushed the window open and gave himself ingress, kicking a little mud off his boots on the window frame, and casually tossed the rope and grappling hook to the side once he was in, denting the parquet with his spiked climbers' boots. He pulled off his hat to reveal a round bald head and and an insufferable smile.
Willie roared into action – for a mild, soft-spoken man, he could throw a terrifying face of rage. “You! How dare you? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Saving the Commonwealth as usual,” the intruder said, shrugging. “Why does everyone always think I'm the bad guy?”
“Well,” Aziraphale ventured, “If you keep calling yourself the wickedest man in the world so often and so loudly, sooner or later someone is bound to believe it.”
The stranger turned on Aziraphale suddenly, and Crowley saw the piercing, spine-chilling uncanniness of his eyes. “Oh no,” the man said as he stared at Aziraphale and saw. “I can't be seen with any of you lot. Not right now.” Crowley barely had time to try to lunge before the man executed a simple banishing spell, in flawless Enochian. Aziraphale vanished in a puff of featherdown and book dust.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Willie screamed. Crowley knew. He wasn't panicking. It is scary the first time you see it, true, he thought. Mortals are always seeing things for the first time.
“I just banished him back to his fusty old bookshop, he's fine. Surprised you didn't do it yourself. Oh wait – you didn't see, did you? That's the trouble with poets. They never see what's right in front of their eyes. They think everything is a metaphor for something else. You're a sad case, Willie. Got involved in Magick to impress a woman, and it didn't even work. Oh, but wait, there's a big day for MacBride coming up soon. Pity it's a firing squad – Maud always did like them well-hung. You probably think you'll have a chance again, you poor thing. I'll bet you haven't had a hard-on since she got married.”
“GET – OUT- OF – HERE,” Willie snarled.
“Not until you write a poem good enough to convince me I should. That'll take years. There's a war on, don't you know?”
Crowley had been trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, and wasn't at all trembling in his spats, no, not one bit, not when those eyes turned upon him and saw. “Er . . . nice to meet you,” he stammered. “I'm Crowley.”
The urban mountaineer laughed. “I know. So am I.”
If he'd been thinking straight, of course Crowley knew that too. “Aleister. Of course. Everyone knows who you are.”
“You especially ought to, Anthony,” said Aleister, nodding. “Which of course isn't your real name. But if it's what you want to be called, I'll be polite.”
“I appreciate that,” said Crawly, who was feeling rather small and scaly underneath that stare.
“Don’t be scared, little snake,” said Aleister Crowley. “I’ve got nothing on you that I care about. I’ve been in America, seeing who the fake Fenians in New York and Boston want to throw their money at, and where they’re throwing it. Casement will hang, the diaries are real, no one’s going to risk their reputations defending a flaming poof.”
“You lie,” Yeats snarled. “You’re a forger and a liar and a charlatan and a traitor.”
“Liar?” Crowley-the-Spy said, laughing. “Oh no, Willie. I always fact-check my slander. I know he’s a poof because I fucked him myself. I could do so much worse. I will burn all my agents right now. Fielding, Reuss, Altamont, Quinn, Devoy - see, now you know who they are. And you’ll forget, because I say so. Even you, little snake.”
“What names?” Crawly-the-demon said, feeling very blank. Small.
“It’s too bad, Willie,” said Crowley the secret agent and occultist, “You really could have made a passable mid-level mage, if you weren’t so easily distracted.”
None of them remembered a thing.
The only one who had any sense of it at all was Aziraphale, who felt a bit queasy for several hours, and didn’t even wait for his counterpart’s arrival before digging into the medicinal spirits.
***
John MacBride was not a man to expect much in the way of miracles. And yet, chance had conspired in his favour, had it not? (Had it?)
His old circle hadn’t even invited him to their bloody revolution. He’d stumbled upon it happening in the streets of Dublin, planned without him, and he’d abandoned his bloody brother’s bloody wedding and jumped into the fray. He wasn’t about to be shut out of the moment his whole life had built up to, not this time.
(Too well known to the British as an agitator. Too much of a great mean bloody drunk, staggering down the street promising the English a death he could never deliver, not anymore. Not at all the man he used to be.)
I’ll never see my son again, he thought. Maud will never forgive me now, she’ll never have the chance. And I won’t be able to look Iseult in the eye in Heaven any more than I could on earth, for I’ll never pass those gates.
So there was nothing for it now but to wait til morning, and with it the gunfire, and with it perhaps the mouth of hell. So be it.
And yet, through the window of his jail cell, there was a glow. Infernal, and yet somehow pure. Distant sound of roaring gunfire, the surging roll of explosions, the screams of the wounded and dying.
Somehow it made him feel young again.
In the window there was a silhouette that shaped itself into the aspect of a woman, tall and beautiful. For a moment he thought of her as she was in her youth - but she hadn’t had that bright red hair.
“Cathleen?” he whispered. “Cathleen ni Houlihan?” He wouldn’t get an angel, that was sure, but perhaps Ireland herself might bring him a comfort in his last hour. “Is this your true face, when you’ve thrown off the weight of the oppressor and are no longer a beggar in disguise?”
The woman laughed like a rifle loading. “I remember you,” she said. “Irish Transvaal Bridgade. Oh, Ladysmith, that was a battle.”
“You - you were in the Boer War?” MacBride said, confused.
“I am in every war,” she said. “By definition. I’m not Cathleen. You can call me Dearg-Rua.”
“Aye, that you are,” MacBride said, sitting back against the wall. “So I know you haven’t come to free me.”
“That would be a very unsatisfying ending to your story,” Dearg-Rua said. “It wouldn’t be fair to you or to me. Everything you think you did for Ireland, you also did for me.”
“I didn’t do it all for you,” MacBride laughed. “I did most of it for another woman.”
Dearg-Rua nodded. “I know her. A friend of mine, of sorts. Even in your marriage house with a woman like that, you couldn’t lay down your battles, could you? You never forsook me, not even when you should have found peace.”
“Well, at least I had her and that poet didn’t. Pretty words, no guts.”
“No one has her. I wager she’ll mourn his death more than yours.” Dearg-Rua was many things, but very very few people would ever venture the word kind. It wouldn’t be in the top ten thousand. (And yet, to some, her cruelty was better than all the kindness of all the nice people who’ve ever lived.)
“Well, I won’t be around to see that,” MacBride said, coughing a little. “I will still die a warrior’s death tomorrow.”
“Would you have it any other way?”
“No, lass, I wouldn’t,” said MacBride. “No blindfold for me. Guns have bright eyes, like yours. I’ll die starin’ ‘em down.”
“That’s my boy,” said Dearg-Rua. “You are, you know. You truly are. When it’s time for the final charge in the Last Days, you’ll be in my army. You have my word.”
***
George Russell’s house, Dublin
George Russell - A.E. to those of a mystical bent - was an eccentric artist and writer, so no one blinked when he did things like admitting beggars boldly, through the front door of his respectable house in Dublin.
Yeats was already on his feet as the poor old woman began to shed her dirty rags and unfurled her long hunched back.
She was good at this by now. She’d given so much of herself to Ireland, burned herself out like a Roman candle to raise its rebel spirit, walked among the poor and the angry like Joan of Arc through the flames - and for years now she’d been reduced to this, living in far-off France and sneaking into the country of her heart only rarely, hidden so well there had to be a touch of magic to it.
Of course, she had been an actress. She’d been on the stage, many times, often with Yeats’s own words glorified in her clarion voice (...rode to harriers. Until her voice grew shrill). But even Yeats had to admit this, she’d never been a great actress. There were none more beautiful, but there were many more skilled at becoming different people on the boards of the Abbey.
Until now. Until she had to.
(“I can’t go back,” she’d said to the angel, weeping. “I can never go back.”
“Now, now dear,” the angel had said. “Please don’t cry. There must be a way. It’s true you might be arrested, but -” and he looked a little prim and disapproving. “You’re no stranger to that.”
“It’s not that,” she said, her chin proud even with tears dripping from it. “I’m not afraid of the police, how dare you! I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid he’ll take our son. I’m afraid he’ll hurt my daughter again.”
“Oh,” Aziraphale said, understanding at last. “Well, that’s a very different matter. Ahem, well, I suppose - this is highly irregular, of course, I’d rather this not be spread around. Just - oh, all right. Let’s just let this be our little secret. I, well, I have been on the stage a few times myself, you understand, performing little tricks of wonder and prestidigitation - for amusement only, of course. I have a little skill with illusion and sleight of hand. Here, dear, close your eyes, just for a moment, this won’t hurt very much. It’s only a tiny bit of knowledge. Just enough.”
There was a tiny shimmer of light, and Maud sat up suddenly, wincing.
“I’m sorry about the headache,” Aziraphale said. “It can’t be helped. It will go away soon. But now you know he won’t see you, not unless you want him to.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Bless you.”
“No, I think I just blessed you. Only doing my job.”
“I made a terrible mistake,” she said.
“Do you think you married the wrong man?” Aziraphale said. “Only it’s a horribly common mistake, you’ve done no worse than millions. Not that I’m calling you common, it’s just that--”
“I shouldn’t have married at all,” she said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”)
John MacBride never saw his wife again.
***
Through any disguise or faery glamour or even the protections of Heaven, he would see her. And he was never the one from whom she needed to hide. But as her beauty emerged from its concealment, the poet had to realise that she was becoming an old woman in truth. The Muse who drove him did not change much, but the real woman did. O she had not these ways when all the wild summer was in her gaze.
No matter. He was no spring shoot any longer himself. When you are old and grey and full of sleep . . . The second Troy that this Helen burned was not Dublin after all - it was the vast, populated imaginative center of his own heart.
“Maud,” he said.
“Willie,” she said, and when she smiled, the lines in her face shone out like the rays of a sun.
***
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Aziraphale said.
“It certainly is not,” Crowley drawled, forked tongue flicking at the edge of his wine glass. “It’s not even close. There are millions of things more damned than that. Me, for example.”
Aziraphale was always so brick-wall unaware when he’d said something rude. It was endearing, really. Wasn’t endearing three thousand years ago, but somehow it was now. (Crowley thought he’d never regret throwing that palm wine in his face, never - until Gomorrah burned and he’d never ever been able to find anyone else who knew how to make it just right and he’d give almost anything for that taste of it he’d wasted.)
“You’re not a . . . echidna.”
“A what?”
“You know - a puzzle. A mystery.”
Crowley gave Aziraphale the side-eye and realized he’d fallen way behind on the drunking. The dranking. Whatever. “That’ssss not what an echidna is. Echidna’s an animal. Spiky thing. Like a hedgehog but if my people made them, not yours. Lays eggs.”
“See? That’s weird. Why does it lay eggs? That’s a mystery.”
“Still think that wasn’t the word you were looking for.”
As the last deep draught hit Crowley’s increasingly soggy brain, he realised he couldn’t produce the right word either. “Sssso, what’s the echidna here? With them?”
“She loves him. I can tell.”
“Can you now?”
“‘m an angel.”
“Don’t remind me. Whasss the echidna though?”
“Why won’t she marry him?”
“Don’t know? Does he have spikes? Does she lay eggs? Might be, what’sss the word, incombatiple. Like a horse and a donkey can mate but a horse and a goat can’t, y’know? And it’s not like they haven’t tried, right?”
“I don’t even want to know -”
“Oh, the thingssss I’ve ssseen, angel.”
“People and swans aren’t, you know, wotsit, can’t breed. But Yeats said he wants to write a poem about it. Rather . . . risqué, if you ask me.”
“What poem?” Crowley said, now vaguely interested. His taste in poetry tended to run to the sort of verse found on the walls of Pompeiian bath-houses (or would be found when archaeologists got around to it).
“‘Leda and the Swan,’” Aziraphale said pensively, now sounding all too sober. “Well, there is a story there, of course. A real story. But -” he stopped himself up short. “It’s idolatry, I suppose. I really shouldn’t be the one to tell it. Now you, Crowley, I think if you told it, that would be all right. Because it’s the kind of story your people are supposed to tell. I think.”
“That might be,” said Crowley. “I’m sure I should. But there’s just one little problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not the one who’s claiming to know the real story. I don’t know it. I wasn’t there. Can’t tell it if I don’t know it, right? But -” he leaned in a little, and Aziraphale leaned in to meet him. “If I heard it from someone who knew it, just once, I could tell it again.”
“You’re doing that temping thing.”
Crowley sighed. “Temting, Aziraphale. TempTing. My people won’t invent temping for another 40 years.”
Aziraphale sighed. “All right. So the Greeks came up with this, of course they did.”
“Is this a dirty story?”
“Yes, it’s Zeus again.”
“Oh, of course. It’s like the bull and the shower of gold, is it?”
Aziraphale nodded, relieved Crowley’s imagination could probably do most of the dirty work. “A swan that time.”
Crowley gave a full-body shudder that stretched all the out to the tips of where his wings weren’t. “Why’d Zeus think that was a good idea? That’s what every mortal woman wants, right? A bloody swan.”
“I know this is a sensitive subject for you,” Aziraphale said cautiously.
“Damned - blessed - straight. Nasty creatures, swans. That one that took a bite out of me at Versailles- I didn’t fly right for weeks.
It had been a very impressive aerial battle, Aziraphale had thought. A staggering blow, a clash of great wings. “I still don’t know if it was trying to kill you or mate with you.”
Crowley flushed even redder than the wine had painted him. “Guess that’s how swans got their reputation, then.”
Aziraphale reached for his glass and nearly knocked it over, then trailed a manicured fingertip in the drops of red that had sloshed. “Gotta stick to what’s combatiple, that’s how to make it work. Your own kind.”
“Not my own kind,” Crowley said. “Cause have you seen them?”
“I meant more in general,” Aziraphale said gazing steadily at the tabletop and steadily not at Crowley. He had never seemed so fascinated by wine-stained woodgrain before. “I mean, we don’t have our own kind here. Earth.”
”Our own kind,” Crowley said as if the idea had never occurred to him before, which was completely untrue. “We are, aren’t we? More the same kind than not anyway.”
Aziraphale nodded, and let his wings rip through his shirt and open, knocking over bookshelves on both sides of the room. They didn’t look much like swans’ wings at all, Crowley was relieved to confirm, and even less like those of fighter planes.
“So did Willie write that poem yet?” Crowley asked, suddenly desperate to get back to the subject, to make sense of things, to go back to normal.
“What poem?” Aziraphale said with his wine-dark mouth.
“The . . . dirty one. With the swan.”
“No, not yet. It’ll be years. He’s working on the one about the Easter Rising still. Pulling his hair out. Won’t take any direct help,” Aziraphale said, but his slightly unfocussed eyes never left Crowley’s bare face, devoid of his tinted spectacles. Crowley didn’t usually feel like he needed to hide his eyes from Aziraphale, but he suddenly felt horribly naked now. “I think you owe me one,” Aziraphale finally said.
“That’s . . . entirely possible,” Crowley admitted. “We can do each other’s jobs . . . sometimes.”
Aziraphale nodded. “I think it’s because we’re . . .”
“Combatiple?”
“I don’t think that’s the word. We don’t fight nearly enough for that.”
“Maybe we should,” Crowley said, trembling as Aziraphale came closer, closer always closer - and then he reached out with his clean, soft hands, and stretched out his vast, feathered wings. And Crowley reached back with his face, and then his hands, and his lips, and his long, slightly forked tongue.
Far away, a poet was dreaming while awake, of clashing, crashing wings - aerial maneuvers, the fighting and mating of massive winged creatures.
I have looked upon these brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
***
I have seen them coming in the evening
No, no, no. Awful.
Their faces are vivid against the grey counters and desks. We exchanged polite, meaningless words…
Argh. Hideous. Close, but not there. Close isn’t good enough.
We were all exchanging jokes, living as we did where motley is worn.
I don’t even know what I’m trying to say anymore.
Regardless, they all changed a great deal.
Pitiable. I should drown myself if this is the best I can do. Even the worst of them deserves better than that.
He was so sensitive, he could have been famous.
He was famous, you dolt. Certainly made the papers at the end.
This other man I had dreamed a drunken, vainglorious lout.
All right, that line at least is true. I’ll keep it for now.
He too has exited the stage in this bloody comedy.
Ew. Shakespeare’s chamberpot, that’s awful. I suppose he changed a lot too.
I’m a wretched excuse for an Irish poet. There’s no excuse for writing this badly sober, and I can’t even hold my liquor. Much less the woman who’s treading not lightly on my dreams, oh stop you maudlin self-plagiarist.
Anyway, what’s the point of all this? England may keep faith for all that is done and said. Sure, sure, and I may win a great international prize for literature someday and fly away on a unicorn. With a fairy hand-in-hand, from a world more full of weeping than I can understand. Oh fuck me, I’m dreadful. What a poseur.
They dreamed and are dead. What a waste. What a goddamned waste. (Except MacBride. No better way for him to go out, really. I don’t think I can get away with even pretending to mourn that one.)
I have to go on. I can’t go on.
Wings at the window. A muttering voice.
“Yeah, the angel’s right, I owe him one. All right. Inspiration it is. Now he’s going to owe me drinks, because you’re a rough customer.”
An angel? At my window? Oh, Mr. Fell, I’m not as blind as you think - oh wait, it’s the other one. Heaven must be a very disturbing place.
Heaven.
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
That is . . . workable. For a draft.
Wings at the window. So different now, in the moonlight, against the glass, transforming as he flies . . .
Transformed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born.
***
“I don’t like your poem,” she said. Her tone was stern, but her eyes were merry. By now he was well used to this, and he almost cherished the little blade in the heart whenever she was harsh.
“Why not?”
“It’s not worthy of him,” she said, shaking her lovely, aging head.
He hadn’t expected that. “Not worthy - I - I hate him for what he did to you. And to Iseult. I was generous. If anything, I was much, much too kind.”
“But he’s beyond that now. He’ll answer to a higher judge. It’s not your place. Or even mine.”
He shook his head, incredulous, and took her still-graceful hand in his. “You really are a saint, aren’t you? Even at your worst you’re closer to holy than I’ll ever be.”
She laughed then, high and free. “Oh no no no no, very much not so. But even worse, the poem’s not worthy of you.”
“Perhaps it should answer to a higher judge as well. Maybe it’s not our place,” he said, smiling.
“If anyone remembers it in ten years I’ll eat my hat,” she said. “It’s far from your best. But I only say that because your best is so very good.”
“You flatter me.”
“Maybe. But I still won’t marry you.”
“You knew I was going to ask again.”
“Of course I did.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt it the tightness of it in his chest.
***
When the war ended, Crowley paid Aziraphale a visit (and brought the wine this time, since he’d lost the wager. This time. He was going to bet on the winning side next time even if he had to descend to low places to beg for inside information.)
He was glad to see the shop didn’t seem to have any poets in it, or any magic-circle-flingers either. “So that wasn’t the big one after all,” he said cheerfully. “Almost everything’s still here.”
Aziraphale nodded, distracted, flipping through a small but well-respected magazine of verse he always received in the post even though he’d never requested or ordered it, or indeed even read an issue all the way through. “You say that because you haven’t been to France recently.”
“True. Rather proud of that achievement,” Crowley said, struggling with the corkscrew for a moment before deciding to demon up and hex the thing open.
“You don’t think it’s the ‘war to end all wars’ then?” Aziraphale said, with a little touch of bitterness.
“No,” Crowley said, taking a sip. “You can tell this wasn’t it because there are still humans left. Besides, we’ll have a front-row seat for that when it happens.”
“It’s hard to imagine, how much worse it could get,” Aziraphale said. “But they’re clever. They invent things.”
“I’m sure it will surpass everything our limited imaginations can come up with,” Crowley said unhappily. “Bet some of the current crop of mortals will be ready to try again. They never give up.”
“They have a lot of help,” Aziraphale said, brushing his hand over Crowley’s softly, and then laying it to rest there. Crowley turned up his palm and laced their fingers together.
“Not from me,” he said. “I’m a demon, you know. I never help.”
“‘Course you don’t, my dear. Of course you don’t.”
When Aziraphale knocked the wine bottle over in a clumsy grab for a kiss, it was Crowley who caught it and put it upright again.
He still worried, though. The conflagrations were just going to keep getting bigger and bigger until the big one. Might as well seize the day, and the night, and the angel.
***
Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Immortals are condemned to watch the whole goddamn play no matter how long it drags on; how stilted the dialogue and hackneyed the plots. They don’t even get to escape to the loo at intermission (metaphorically).
But human players enter and exit the stage at unpredictable intervals, and when they pass on they leave only a shimmer of memory behind, and perhaps if they’re very lucky and very skilled, some enduring words that some will remember the next time high water rises and hell breaks loose.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death
Horsepersons, pass by!
~end
(Poems by W.B. Yeats referenced here include: “Easter, 1916,” “Leda and the Swan,” “No Second Troy,” “The Folly of Being Comforted,” “When You Are Old,” “The Stolen Child,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “The Second Coming,” and “Under Ben Bulben.”)
Happy Holidays,tomato_greens, from your Secret Writer!
Recipient:
tomato_greensRating: PG-13
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Characters: Aziraphale, Crowley, War, William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne MacBride, John MacBride, George Russell (AE), Aleister Crowley
Warnings: Vague, passing references to domestic violence and child sexual abuse, as well as possible attempted sexual assault by a waterfowl.
Summary: In the spring of 1916, some in London and Dublin were fighting a war on two fronts. Three, if you include the heart. (Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of it.)
Author’s Notes: If you notice any especially beautiful lines in this story, you can be sure they’re Yeats, not me.
“The storm approaches, the gold which the English have made out of the blood and tears of millions of human beings attracts the covetousness of the world. Who will aid the pirates to keep their spoil?” [Maud Gonne, 1900]
Scarlett sighed when she received the assignment. Leaving the battlefields of the Continent even for a moment, now, in her greatest triumph, in her moments of complete and total ecstasy, for a backwater where violence was always so petty and personal and small-scale? So old-fashioned, so trivial, so . . . last-century.
But it was a war of many, many fronts, and this one was at least a place that Sable was fond of and recommended highly. Scarlett found it dull. But maybe, she could change that – and she'd do it in the recollection of an old friend.
Not so bad, Scarlett thought once she’d arrived and breathed in the smouldering tension of Dublin. Not all the hot-blooded young men had been drafted into England’s war, then. And despite what England liked to think, the sedition wasn’t all the work of German spies (though the Kaiser still had a few resources to spare to rouse a little rabble on England’s back porch, and a steady stream of spies travelled from Germany to Ireland and America and back, bringing news and promises of arms - some materialised, some did not, and some were sunk in the cold waters of the British seas).
***
“Something rash is brewing,” the poet muttered into the dust motes of the London bookshop.
“Yes,” said his friend the mystic and scholar. “I hardly know of a safer place to speak of it than here.”
“Why is that? The walls have ears here, I can sense it.”
“But nothing goes beyond the walls. Surely you can also sense that. There’s no place like it in all London.”
“This is a place of business, gentlemen,” said a crabby voice from the other side of the wildly disorganised Natural History shelves.
“My dear Mr. Fell,” said one of them, deliberately speaking in what he liked to call his A.E. voice, which he believed was a little more sharply tuned to the aethers. “A strange business you’re running indeed, because Willie and I have been consistently trying to buy books from you for twenty-five years, and you stubbornly refuse to sell the ones that pique our interest most.”
The bookseller was a prim, slightly plump, unassuming-looking man - undoubtedly English, unmistakably intelligent, and as thoroughly inverted as the spheres of the Qlippoth in a funhouse mirror. He was also inclined to be suspicious and careful in this particular company, because the Order of the Golden Dawn had made no little bit of trouble in the celestial realms in its heyday, and neither of the two men in his shop - Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats - were as completely oblivious as humans ought to be.
“You always pick the ones I’ll not part with,” Fell said warily.
“Illusory treasures,” said Yeats, shaking his head. “Presented only to tempt us.”
“No, no, that’s my department,” another voice cut in as Crowley swept through the shelves, doffing his hat and promptly stumbling over a floor-stack that hadn’t been there the last time he’d visited. Which was only a few hours ago.
“And where you have you been?” Aziraphale asked impatiently.
“Continent. Trying to keep Casement’s keister out of the fire. Failing.” He appeared to notice Fell’s visitors for the first time. “Oh, you. So Connolly and Pearse said it’s on then. If you want to stay out of trouble, stay out of Dublin. Not that you heard it from me. Or from anyone. I’m no one. Er.”
“Who said we want to stay out of trouble?” Yeats said carefully.
“Have you ever fired a gun in your life?” Crowley asked cheerfully.
Yeats blushed and looked down at the ground. “A few times. . . um, duck-hunting.”
“He missed. Always,” said Russell helpfully. “Maybe not even on purpose.”
“That’s the natural order of things, then, isn’t it?” Aziraphale said. “Poets don’t blow up things. Poets write about it afterward.”
“Maybe poets incite them sometimes,” Russell said with a cagy grin. “Beforehand.”
“Well yes, I suppose that’s happened,” said the bookseller, putting on his ‘we’re about to be closed, my goodness look at the time’ face.
This didn’t work very efficiently on most people, but it did on Yeats and Russell - that is one of the drawbacks of mysticism.
“All right then,” Crowley said once Aziraphale had let him into the back room of the bookshop, drawn the curtains and barred the doors. “Cards on the table then. Who's your side got?”
“What about yours? You go first.”
“I asked you first. Do we have to go through this every single time?” Crowley took a sip of wine.
“I suppose not,” Aziraphale said. He listed seventeen names. Crowley listed fifteen. Eight names were on both lists.
“Oh, so it's just like usual then,” Crowley said. “I find that nearly reassuring.”
“You would,” Aziraphale said, a little accusingly. “You like the status quo, don't you?”
“'That’s rich, coming from you. You and your gavotte,” Crowley said. “But the status quo is gone now, isn't it? This war's going to destroy it. Nothing is going to be the same for them for decades, if not centuries, if not ever. We might still be around long enough to get over it, though. Should we start getting over it now and save time?”
Aziraphale took another long sip, because he wanted to be drunk enough for Crowley-logic to make sense. It was going to take a lot, but that was all right – they had a lot. “I think we probably have to get through it first. You seem to know a lot about this, were you - ?”
“I was in Ireland too,” Crowley said happily.
Aziraphale blinked.
“Well,” Crowley said, “that's the nice thing about this Celtic Twilight pagan revival twaddle. It means the serpents can come back, if they're careful and they know what they're about. It's been a thousand years, but I haven't been missing much.”
Aziraphale sighed. “At least one of the worst offenders is ours. He gets carried away sometimes.”
“Him? One of yours? Even with that occultist business on the side?”
Aziraphale took another long sip and wiped his lips primly. “His order has taken steps to reign in their more . . . extreme elements. Mr. Yeats is an honest seeker after truth.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Crowley said, taking off his tinted glasses so Aziraphale could see his eyes roll. With his slitted snake eyes, it was a remarkably disturbing effect. “The world always needs more of those.”
“So what's going on in Ireland besides sentimental theatre?”
“The usual. Revolution, sedition, explosives. Your pet poet probably knows more than he's telling you.”
“I presume that he does,” Aziraphale said.
“You haven't appeared in any dramatic visions, have you?” Crowley said, tilting his head. Old habits die hard. In immortal beings, they're unlikely to die at all.
“I prefer to save that for extreme measures,” Aziraphale said. “Rather showy, after all. Not my preferred style.”
Crowley smiled. “You just don't like the way modern poets write you. Did you ever get as far as the Romantics, or are you still hoping the Elizabethan style will come back?”
“I was partial to that Wilde fellow,” Aziraphale said waspishly. “But you slept through most of the important parts.”
“Probably for the best,” Crowley said, with some slight hint of bitterness.
“Your type is all in favour of modernity,” Aziraphale said. “Honestly, dear boy, I’m surprised you’re here in old London and not some dreadfully forward place. America even.”
“I was there,” Crowley said. “I was told to go make some trouble on some cruise ships. Twice is the charm - I still can’t believe I got plunged into the drink twice in three years. And neither one was my fault, before you ask. Never doing that again. Bloody Germans. Bloody icebergs.”
“Pity. It seemed more relaxing that way. Flying is hard work. The adverts made it looked so civilised.”
“And whose side do you think invented adverts?” Crowley said, waggling his eyebrows.
***
“And our world is changing, so it's the least we can do to bear witness -” the poet said, a little sadly, ruffling his hands through this floppy hair – more grey than black now, still thick and unruly. And then he froze dead still. Crowley and Aziraphale had heard it too. A scratching and a tapping at the window – the fourth-floor window.
Shocked into stillness, poet and demon and angel watched as – bold as you please – a man pushed the window open and gave himself ingress, kicking a little mud off his boots on the window frame, and casually tossed the rope and grappling hook to the side once he was in, denting the parquet with his spiked climbers' boots. He pulled off his hat to reveal a round bald head and and an insufferable smile.
Willie roared into action – for a mild, soft-spoken man, he could throw a terrifying face of rage. “You! How dare you? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Saving the Commonwealth as usual,” the intruder said, shrugging. “Why does everyone always think I'm the bad guy?”
“Well,” Aziraphale ventured, “If you keep calling yourself the wickedest man in the world so often and so loudly, sooner or later someone is bound to believe it.”
The stranger turned on Aziraphale suddenly, and Crowley saw the piercing, spine-chilling uncanniness of his eyes. “Oh no,” the man said as he stared at Aziraphale and saw. “I can't be seen with any of you lot. Not right now.” Crowley barely had time to try to lunge before the man executed a simple banishing spell, in flawless Enochian. Aziraphale vanished in a puff of featherdown and book dust.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Willie screamed. Crowley knew. He wasn't panicking. It is scary the first time you see it, true, he thought. Mortals are always seeing things for the first time.
“I just banished him back to his fusty old bookshop, he's fine. Surprised you didn't do it yourself. Oh wait – you didn't see, did you? That's the trouble with poets. They never see what's right in front of their eyes. They think everything is a metaphor for something else. You're a sad case, Willie. Got involved in Magick to impress a woman, and it didn't even work. Oh, but wait, there's a big day for MacBride coming up soon. Pity it's a firing squad – Maud always did like them well-hung. You probably think you'll have a chance again, you poor thing. I'll bet you haven't had a hard-on since she got married.”
“GET – OUT- OF – HERE,” Willie snarled.
“Not until you write a poem good enough to convince me I should. That'll take years. There's a war on, don't you know?”
Crowley had been trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, and wasn't at all trembling in his spats, no, not one bit, not when those eyes turned upon him and saw. “Er . . . nice to meet you,” he stammered. “I'm Crowley.”
The urban mountaineer laughed. “I know. So am I.”
If he'd been thinking straight, of course Crowley knew that too. “Aleister. Of course. Everyone knows who you are.”
“You especially ought to, Anthony,” said Aleister, nodding. “Which of course isn't your real name. But if it's what you want to be called, I'll be polite.”
“I appreciate that,” said Crawly, who was feeling rather small and scaly underneath that stare.
“Don’t be scared, little snake,” said Aleister Crowley. “I’ve got nothing on you that I care about. I’ve been in America, seeing who the fake Fenians in New York and Boston want to throw their money at, and where they’re throwing it. Casement will hang, the diaries are real, no one’s going to risk their reputations defending a flaming poof.”
“You lie,” Yeats snarled. “You’re a forger and a liar and a charlatan and a traitor.”
“Liar?” Crowley-the-Spy said, laughing. “Oh no, Willie. I always fact-check my slander. I know he’s a poof because I fucked him myself. I could do so much worse. I will burn all my agents right now. Fielding, Reuss, Altamont, Quinn, Devoy - see, now you know who they are. And you’ll forget, because I say so. Even you, little snake.”
“What names?” Crawly-the-demon said, feeling very blank. Small.
“It’s too bad, Willie,” said Crowley the secret agent and occultist, “You really could have made a passable mid-level mage, if you weren’t so easily distracted.”
None of them remembered a thing.
The only one who had any sense of it at all was Aziraphale, who felt a bit queasy for several hours, and didn’t even wait for his counterpart’s arrival before digging into the medicinal spirits.
***
John MacBride was not a man to expect much in the way of miracles. And yet, chance had conspired in his favour, had it not? (Had it?)
His old circle hadn’t even invited him to their bloody revolution. He’d stumbled upon it happening in the streets of Dublin, planned without him, and he’d abandoned his bloody brother’s bloody wedding and jumped into the fray. He wasn’t about to be shut out of the moment his whole life had built up to, not this time.
(Too well known to the British as an agitator. Too much of a great mean bloody drunk, staggering down the street promising the English a death he could never deliver, not anymore. Not at all the man he used to be.)
I’ll never see my son again, he thought. Maud will never forgive me now, she’ll never have the chance. And I won’t be able to look Iseult in the eye in Heaven any more than I could on earth, for I’ll never pass those gates.
So there was nothing for it now but to wait til morning, and with it the gunfire, and with it perhaps the mouth of hell. So be it.
And yet, through the window of his jail cell, there was a glow. Infernal, and yet somehow pure. Distant sound of roaring gunfire, the surging roll of explosions, the screams of the wounded and dying.
Somehow it made him feel young again.
In the window there was a silhouette that shaped itself into the aspect of a woman, tall and beautiful. For a moment he thought of her as she was in her youth - but she hadn’t had that bright red hair.
“Cathleen?” he whispered. “Cathleen ni Houlihan?” He wouldn’t get an angel, that was sure, but perhaps Ireland herself might bring him a comfort in his last hour. “Is this your true face, when you’ve thrown off the weight of the oppressor and are no longer a beggar in disguise?”
The woman laughed like a rifle loading. “I remember you,” she said. “Irish Transvaal Bridgade. Oh, Ladysmith, that was a battle.”
“You - you were in the Boer War?” MacBride said, confused.
“I am in every war,” she said. “By definition. I’m not Cathleen. You can call me Dearg-Rua.”
“Aye, that you are,” MacBride said, sitting back against the wall. “So I know you haven’t come to free me.”
“That would be a very unsatisfying ending to your story,” Dearg-Rua said. “It wouldn’t be fair to you or to me. Everything you think you did for Ireland, you also did for me.”
“I didn’t do it all for you,” MacBride laughed. “I did most of it for another woman.”
Dearg-Rua nodded. “I know her. A friend of mine, of sorts. Even in your marriage house with a woman like that, you couldn’t lay down your battles, could you? You never forsook me, not even when you should have found peace.”
“Well, at least I had her and that poet didn’t. Pretty words, no guts.”
“No one has her. I wager she’ll mourn his death more than yours.” Dearg-Rua was many things, but very very few people would ever venture the word kind. It wouldn’t be in the top ten thousand. (And yet, to some, her cruelty was better than all the kindness of all the nice people who’ve ever lived.)
“Well, I won’t be around to see that,” MacBride said, coughing a little. “I will still die a warrior’s death tomorrow.”
“Would you have it any other way?”
“No, lass, I wouldn’t,” said MacBride. “No blindfold for me. Guns have bright eyes, like yours. I’ll die starin’ ‘em down.”
“That’s my boy,” said Dearg-Rua. “You are, you know. You truly are. When it’s time for the final charge in the Last Days, you’ll be in my army. You have my word.”
***
George Russell’s house, Dublin
George Russell - A.E. to those of a mystical bent - was an eccentric artist and writer, so no one blinked when he did things like admitting beggars boldly, through the front door of his respectable house in Dublin.
Yeats was already on his feet as the poor old woman began to shed her dirty rags and unfurled her long hunched back.
She was good at this by now. She’d given so much of herself to Ireland, burned herself out like a Roman candle to raise its rebel spirit, walked among the poor and the angry like Joan of Arc through the flames - and for years now she’d been reduced to this, living in far-off France and sneaking into the country of her heart only rarely, hidden so well there had to be a touch of magic to it.
Of course, she had been an actress. She’d been on the stage, many times, often with Yeats’s own words glorified in her clarion voice (...rode to harriers. Until her voice grew shrill). But even Yeats had to admit this, she’d never been a great actress. There were none more beautiful, but there were many more skilled at becoming different people on the boards of the Abbey.
Until now. Until she had to.
(“I can’t go back,” she’d said to the angel, weeping. “I can never go back.”
“Now, now dear,” the angel had said. “Please don’t cry. There must be a way. It’s true you might be arrested, but -” and he looked a little prim and disapproving. “You’re no stranger to that.”
“It’s not that,” she said, her chin proud even with tears dripping from it. “I’m not afraid of the police, how dare you! I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid he’ll take our son. I’m afraid he’ll hurt my daughter again.”
“Oh,” Aziraphale said, understanding at last. “Well, that’s a very different matter. Ahem, well, I suppose - this is highly irregular, of course, I’d rather this not be spread around. Just - oh, all right. Let’s just let this be our little secret. I, well, I have been on the stage a few times myself, you understand, performing little tricks of wonder and prestidigitation - for amusement only, of course. I have a little skill with illusion and sleight of hand. Here, dear, close your eyes, just for a moment, this won’t hurt very much. It’s only a tiny bit of knowledge. Just enough.”
There was a tiny shimmer of light, and Maud sat up suddenly, wincing.
“I’m sorry about the headache,” Aziraphale said. “It can’t be helped. It will go away soon. But now you know he won’t see you, not unless you want him to.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Bless you.”
“No, I think I just blessed you. Only doing my job.”
“I made a terrible mistake,” she said.
“Do you think you married the wrong man?” Aziraphale said. “Only it’s a horribly common mistake, you’ve done no worse than millions. Not that I’m calling you common, it’s just that--”
“I shouldn’t have married at all,” she said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”)
John MacBride never saw his wife again.
***
Through any disguise or faery glamour or even the protections of Heaven, he would see her. And he was never the one from whom she needed to hide. But as her beauty emerged from its concealment, the poet had to realise that she was becoming an old woman in truth. The Muse who drove him did not change much, but the real woman did. O she had not these ways when all the wild summer was in her gaze.
No matter. He was no spring shoot any longer himself. When you are old and grey and full of sleep . . . The second Troy that this Helen burned was not Dublin after all - it was the vast, populated imaginative center of his own heart.
“Maud,” he said.
“Willie,” she said, and when she smiled, the lines in her face shone out like the rays of a sun.
***
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Aziraphale said.
“It certainly is not,” Crowley drawled, forked tongue flicking at the edge of his wine glass. “It’s not even close. There are millions of things more damned than that. Me, for example.”
Aziraphale was always so brick-wall unaware when he’d said something rude. It was endearing, really. Wasn’t endearing three thousand years ago, but somehow it was now. (Crowley thought he’d never regret throwing that palm wine in his face, never - until Gomorrah burned and he’d never ever been able to find anyone else who knew how to make it just right and he’d give almost anything for that taste of it he’d wasted.)
“You’re not a . . . echidna.”
“A what?”
“You know - a puzzle. A mystery.”
Crowley gave Aziraphale the side-eye and realized he’d fallen way behind on the drunking. The dranking. Whatever. “That’ssss not what an echidna is. Echidna’s an animal. Spiky thing. Like a hedgehog but if my people made them, not yours. Lays eggs.”
“See? That’s weird. Why does it lay eggs? That’s a mystery.”
“Still think that wasn’t the word you were looking for.”
As the last deep draught hit Crowley’s increasingly soggy brain, he realised he couldn’t produce the right word either. “Sssso, what’s the echidna here? With them?”
“She loves him. I can tell.”
“Can you now?”
“‘m an angel.”
“Don’t remind me. Whasss the echidna though?”
“Why won’t she marry him?”
“Don’t know? Does he have spikes? Does she lay eggs? Might be, what’sss the word, incombatiple. Like a horse and a donkey can mate but a horse and a goat can’t, y’know? And it’s not like they haven’t tried, right?”
“I don’t even want to know -”
“Oh, the thingssss I’ve ssseen, angel.”
“People and swans aren’t, you know, wotsit, can’t breed. But Yeats said he wants to write a poem about it. Rather . . . risqué, if you ask me.”
“What poem?” Crowley said, now vaguely interested. His taste in poetry tended to run to the sort of verse found on the walls of Pompeiian bath-houses (or would be found when archaeologists got around to it).
“‘Leda and the Swan,’” Aziraphale said pensively, now sounding all too sober. “Well, there is a story there, of course. A real story. But -” he stopped himself up short. “It’s idolatry, I suppose. I really shouldn’t be the one to tell it. Now you, Crowley, I think if you told it, that would be all right. Because it’s the kind of story your people are supposed to tell. I think.”
“That might be,” said Crowley. “I’m sure I should. But there’s just one little problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not the one who’s claiming to know the real story. I don’t know it. I wasn’t there. Can’t tell it if I don’t know it, right? But -” he leaned in a little, and Aziraphale leaned in to meet him. “If I heard it from someone who knew it, just once, I could tell it again.”
“You’re doing that temping thing.”
Crowley sighed. “Temting, Aziraphale. TempTing. My people won’t invent temping for another 40 years.”
Aziraphale sighed. “All right. So the Greeks came up with this, of course they did.”
“Is this a dirty story?”
“Yes, it’s Zeus again.”
“Oh, of course. It’s like the bull and the shower of gold, is it?”
Aziraphale nodded, relieved Crowley’s imagination could probably do most of the dirty work. “A swan that time.”
Crowley gave a full-body shudder that stretched all the out to the tips of where his wings weren’t. “Why’d Zeus think that was a good idea? That’s what every mortal woman wants, right? A bloody swan.”
“I know this is a sensitive subject for you,” Aziraphale said cautiously.
“Damned - blessed - straight. Nasty creatures, swans. That one that took a bite out of me at Versailles- I didn’t fly right for weeks.
It had been a very impressive aerial battle, Aziraphale had thought. A staggering blow, a clash of great wings. “I still don’t know if it was trying to kill you or mate with you.”
Crowley flushed even redder than the wine had painted him. “Guess that’s how swans got their reputation, then.”
Aziraphale reached for his glass and nearly knocked it over, then trailed a manicured fingertip in the drops of red that had sloshed. “Gotta stick to what’s combatiple, that’s how to make it work. Your own kind.”
“Not my own kind,” Crowley said. “Cause have you seen them?”
“I meant more in general,” Aziraphale said gazing steadily at the tabletop and steadily not at Crowley. He had never seemed so fascinated by wine-stained woodgrain before. “I mean, we don’t have our own kind here. Earth.”
”Our own kind,” Crowley said as if the idea had never occurred to him before, which was completely untrue. “We are, aren’t we? More the same kind than not anyway.”
Aziraphale nodded, and let his wings rip through his shirt and open, knocking over bookshelves on both sides of the room. They didn’t look much like swans’ wings at all, Crowley was relieved to confirm, and even less like those of fighter planes.
“So did Willie write that poem yet?” Crowley asked, suddenly desperate to get back to the subject, to make sense of things, to go back to normal.
“What poem?” Aziraphale said with his wine-dark mouth.
“The . . . dirty one. With the swan.”
“No, not yet. It’ll be years. He’s working on the one about the Easter Rising still. Pulling his hair out. Won’t take any direct help,” Aziraphale said, but his slightly unfocussed eyes never left Crowley’s bare face, devoid of his tinted spectacles. Crowley didn’t usually feel like he needed to hide his eyes from Aziraphale, but he suddenly felt horribly naked now. “I think you owe me one,” Aziraphale finally said.
“That’s . . . entirely possible,” Crowley admitted. “We can do each other’s jobs . . . sometimes.”
Aziraphale nodded. “I think it’s because we’re . . .”
“Combatiple?”
“I don’t think that’s the word. We don’t fight nearly enough for that.”
“Maybe we should,” Crowley said, trembling as Aziraphale came closer, closer always closer - and then he reached out with his clean, soft hands, and stretched out his vast, feathered wings. And Crowley reached back with his face, and then his hands, and his lips, and his long, slightly forked tongue.
Far away, a poet was dreaming while awake, of clashing, crashing wings - aerial maneuvers, the fighting and mating of massive winged creatures.
I have looked upon these brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
***
I have seen them coming in the evening
No, no, no. Awful.
Their faces are vivid against the grey counters and desks. We exchanged polite, meaningless words…
Argh. Hideous. Close, but not there. Close isn’t good enough.
We were all exchanging jokes, living as we did where motley is worn.
I don’t even know what I’m trying to say anymore.
Regardless, they all changed a great deal.
Pitiable. I should drown myself if this is the best I can do. Even the worst of them deserves better than that.
He was so sensitive, he could have been famous.
He was famous, you dolt. Certainly made the papers at the end.
This other man I had dreamed a drunken, vainglorious lout.
All right, that line at least is true. I’ll keep it for now.
He too has exited the stage in this bloody comedy.
Ew. Shakespeare’s chamberpot, that’s awful. I suppose he changed a lot too.
I’m a wretched excuse for an Irish poet. There’s no excuse for writing this badly sober, and I can’t even hold my liquor. Much less the woman who’s treading not lightly on my dreams, oh stop you maudlin self-plagiarist.
Anyway, what’s the point of all this? England may keep faith for all that is done and said. Sure, sure, and I may win a great international prize for literature someday and fly away on a unicorn. With a fairy hand-in-hand, from a world more full of weeping than I can understand. Oh fuck me, I’m dreadful. What a poseur.
They dreamed and are dead. What a waste. What a goddamned waste. (Except MacBride. No better way for him to go out, really. I don’t think I can get away with even pretending to mourn that one.)
I have to go on. I can’t go on.
Wings at the window. A muttering voice.
“Yeah, the angel’s right, I owe him one. All right. Inspiration it is. Now he’s going to owe me drinks, because you’re a rough customer.”
An angel? At my window? Oh, Mr. Fell, I’m not as blind as you think - oh wait, it’s the other one. Heaven must be a very disturbing place.
Heaven.
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
That is . . . workable. For a draft.
Wings at the window. So different now, in the moonlight, against the glass, transforming as he flies . . .
Transformed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born.
***
“I don’t like your poem,” she said. Her tone was stern, but her eyes were merry. By now he was well used to this, and he almost cherished the little blade in the heart whenever she was harsh.
“Why not?”
“It’s not worthy of him,” she said, shaking her lovely, aging head.
He hadn’t expected that. “Not worthy - I - I hate him for what he did to you. And to Iseult. I was generous. If anything, I was much, much too kind.”
“But he’s beyond that now. He’ll answer to a higher judge. It’s not your place. Or even mine.”
He shook his head, incredulous, and took her still-graceful hand in his. “You really are a saint, aren’t you? Even at your worst you’re closer to holy than I’ll ever be.”
She laughed then, high and free. “Oh no no no no, very much not so. But even worse, the poem’s not worthy of you.”
“Perhaps it should answer to a higher judge as well. Maybe it’s not our place,” he said, smiling.
“If anyone remembers it in ten years I’ll eat my hat,” she said. “It’s far from your best. But I only say that because your best is so very good.”
“You flatter me.”
“Maybe. But I still won’t marry you.”
“You knew I was going to ask again.”
“Of course I did.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt it the tightness of it in his chest.
***
When the war ended, Crowley paid Aziraphale a visit (and brought the wine this time, since he’d lost the wager. This time. He was going to bet on the winning side next time even if he had to descend to low places to beg for inside information.)
He was glad to see the shop didn’t seem to have any poets in it, or any magic-circle-flingers either. “So that wasn’t the big one after all,” he said cheerfully. “Almost everything’s still here.”
Aziraphale nodded, distracted, flipping through a small but well-respected magazine of verse he always received in the post even though he’d never requested or ordered it, or indeed even read an issue all the way through. “You say that because you haven’t been to France recently.”
“True. Rather proud of that achievement,” Crowley said, struggling with the corkscrew for a moment before deciding to demon up and hex the thing open.
“You don’t think it’s the ‘war to end all wars’ then?” Aziraphale said, with a little touch of bitterness.
“No,” Crowley said, taking a sip. “You can tell this wasn’t it because there are still humans left. Besides, we’ll have a front-row seat for that when it happens.”
“It’s hard to imagine, how much worse it could get,” Aziraphale said. “But they’re clever. They invent things.”
“I’m sure it will surpass everything our limited imaginations can come up with,” Crowley said unhappily. “Bet some of the current crop of mortals will be ready to try again. They never give up.”
“They have a lot of help,” Aziraphale said, brushing his hand over Crowley’s softly, and then laying it to rest there. Crowley turned up his palm and laced their fingers together.
“Not from me,” he said. “I’m a demon, you know. I never help.”
“‘Course you don’t, my dear. Of course you don’t.”
When Aziraphale knocked the wine bottle over in a clumsy grab for a kiss, it was Crowley who caught it and put it upright again.
He still worried, though. The conflagrations were just going to keep getting bigger and bigger until the big one. Might as well seize the day, and the night, and the angel.
***
Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Immortals are condemned to watch the whole goddamn play no matter how long it drags on; how stilted the dialogue and hackneyed the plots. They don’t even get to escape to the loo at intermission (metaphorically).
But human players enter and exit the stage at unpredictable intervals, and when they pass on they leave only a shimmer of memory behind, and perhaps if they’re very lucky and very skilled, some enduring words that some will remember the next time high water rises and hell breaks loose.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death
Horsepersons, pass by!
~end
(Poems by W.B. Yeats referenced here include: “Easter, 1916,” “Leda and the Swan,” “No Second Troy,” “The Folly of Being Comforted,” “When You Are Old,” “The Stolen Child,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “The Second Coming,” and “Under Ben Bulben.”)
Happy Holidays,
tomato_greens, from your Secret Writer!
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