Happy Holidays, macdicilla! Part 4
Dec. 24th, 2017 05:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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go_exchange12. December 2020 (N.S.), Ma-no Umi (Sea of the Devil)
Nearly two months, over three dozen failures, and a handful of deep-sea traps later, Crowley thought he should just give up. Mountain-sized or not, apparently the sea beast he was looking for had hidden itself so well that it could have as well been non-existent. And time was nearly up.
“All right, just one more trip,” he told his exhausted reflection. Gone was the optimistic, well-groomed demon with the perpetual nervous energy. And the decidedly un-demonic optimism. Crowley had gift-wrapped his first treasured Bond book over a month before, as his quest continued to be unsuccessful. He briefly considered contacting Adam, then, just to ask if he had encountered any spare occult sea creatures when he nearly ended the world at the ripe old age of eleven. He quickly dismissed the idea, though, once he said the question out loud as practice. “Armageddidnt, and let’s just leave it at that,” he had thought to himself.
So now it was the long-awaited day of the anniversary, and he was flying towards Japan to look for Rahab in one final potential hiding place. Specifically, towards the country’s Southern coast, where a patch of water had carved out the name of “Dragon’s Triangle” or “Devil’s Sea” for itself, mainly by gobbling up boats and planes, as well as probably causing some hallucinations.
Once he arrived within seeing distance of Miyake Island, Crowley dropped into the water, and willed himself to sink to the bottom of the seabed – only to regret his every choice immediately.
Why, oh why had he ever been so stupid as to want to find a sea monster a hundred times his own size? And then he hadn’t even considered power relations yet. The volcanic island in the distance appeared decidedly tiny compared to Rahab’s enormous beastly form.
And worse still: the sea monster was sleeping right in front of the entrance to an underwater cave, which had a faint, but decidedly holy aura to it. Which meant that Crowley was definitely in the right place. Well, at least near the right place. He would still have to walk around the enormous creature. Without disturbing its uneasy sleep, if he wanted to survive this adventure.
“Quiet. Just be quiet. Just keep everything quiet. Just. Don’t. Wake. Him. Up.”
The reminder was completely unnecessary, yet Crowley’s mind helpfully kept replaying it with every awkward and painfully slow tiptoeing step he took. The human body was decidedly not made for stealthy movement – not underwater, at least. He would have much preferred to still be a much smaller and far less noticeable serpent… but changing forms was currently somewhere beyond the further edge of impossible.
A deep rumbling noise reminded him what exactly he was trying to leave behind, and he quickened his steps on the slippery cover of algae over the ground. A moment later, he could have screamed-
(“Shut up, shut up, shut up, don’t make a sound!”)
- when a distant shipwreck began a blood-freezingly loud, creaking descent from its unsteady resting place. The rumbling started up again, the beast sounding less sleepy and much angrier this time around. Subtlety be blessed, Crowley kicked himself off the rocks of the seabed, and swam towards the cavern as fast as he could.
Although he hadn’t used his wings underwater in centuries, they still carried him with more speed than he had hoped for: he overshot the entrance to the cave entirely, and got caught up in a current that definitely should not have been there. It carried him along spiky, serpentine corridors, throwing him against hard walls and pushing him up and down impossibly long shafts, all of it with the swiftness of a misaligned comet falling into the Sun…
… only to spit him out into a large, dry chamber underneath a dome of water.
At first, he did not dare to move.
“Is he awake? Is he… does he know?”
Apparently though, no one knew that he had found the place he had been looking for. (Or the place had found him. Semantics.)
The desert-dry and void-quiet chamber was still enough to keep him unnerved.
“Best get this over with.”
He stood up on the eerily lifeless ground, took care of his bruises with a few miracles, and hid his wings – there wouldn’t have been much use for them down wherever on Earth this was. Aside from the water-dome on top, the chamber possessed only one exit: a hole barely tall enough for a man (or man-shaped creature in this case) to go through without constantly bumping their head into the artificially smooth ceiling. Crowley could barely wait to reach the end of the claustrophobic corridor. To him, such a structure was very suspect: why would such a simple (albeit uncomfortable) path lead to such unspeakable treasure? With every step he expected to find himself in the mouth of a trap.
However, the tunnel simply opened into a much wider corridor, which, again, led straight ahead into impenetrable darkness. And steeply down. Not that a demon would not be used to that. After the stormy entry, this part was almost enjoyable.
“Just like Indiana Jones,” Crowley thought to himself proudly. Only, this artefact would be beyond the wildest dreams of any human professor of archaeology, fictional or otherwise.
Barely had Crowley reached that conclusion, he tripped over something, and fell flat on his face. As the ground and the walls of the tunnel both started rumbling, he forgot all about the sound of a wire snapping that his ears had only just been able to catch, and scrambled to his feet. Looking for the source of the vibrations, he whirled around just in time to see a section of the ceiling open up and slide entirely out of view, letting a giant boulder fall into the now very understandably inclined corridor.
“Just like Indiana Jones,” he thought bitterly, as he turned away from the ominous spectacle, and started to run.
2. December 2020 (N.S.), Ma-no Umi (Sea of the Devil)
Possibly the happiest moment of Crowley’s recent existence was the one in which he leapt into the chamber at the end of the corridor, leaving the deathly boulder behind. Even if in the very next second, that same boulder blocked the exit.
An inhuman growl shook the cavern.
Rahab was definitely awake.
Crowley shivered on the floor where he lay.
“Blesss it,” he hissed. “I mussst hurry.”
As calming as it felt at first to finally break the eerie silence, it quickly turned out to be a bad idea. Or an unsettling one, at the very least. Because, Crowley could feel it clearly, this wasn’t just the return of his tendency to hiss in anxiety. This was an echo of the very same power he had already been subjected to once. If ever he would have had any doubt, now he could be certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that Raziel’s book was near.
He only had to get past the floating golden letters first.
Shaking his head to clear it of the unexpected (and vaguely blessed) radiance, Crowley scrambled to his feet and deciphered the series of obscure sigils with ease. (All that time spent with possibly the most bookish angel in existence did not just pass without a mark.) The twinkling combination of thin, glowing threads was only a simple question:
What do you seek?
“The Book, of course,” Crowley thought. It did not sound like an acceptable answer, not even in his head. So, what would Raziel – and by proxy, his Book – value?
“Knowledge,” the demon mumbled. The sigils of light fell upon the floor immediately, only to reveal a messy collection of tiles on the floor, each of them inscribed with a letter. This was… almost too easy.
The boulder and the chamber both trembled with the force of an enormous impact. Although no breaks were showing just yet, Crowley could hear myriads of tiny cracks race through the walls, the floor and the ceiling – the entire system of tunnels, as it were. To punctuate the sounds of imminent collapse, Rahab let out another angry cry – right on the other side of the boulder.
“Knowledge,” Crowley repeated, forcing himself to focus on the task at hand instead of imagining all the ways the larger demon could torture and kill him once he got in. “K…” he started spelling it out, and put his left foot on the tile with the letter k on its centre.
In the next moment, he jumped back against the blocked exit, just to get as far away from the electric burn of heavenly light that had abruptly begun streaming from the cracked tile.
The boulder shook as Rahab rammed into it again. One or two more such collisions, and it was sure to give way.
“Blessed angels and their fancy ways,” Crowley murmured. He got up again, and jumped on a different tile with feigned confidence. “S…”
So far, so good.
“… a… p… i… e… n… t…”
He stopped short.
“Seriously? Jump all the way back over there?!”
A crack appeared on the boulder after the next impact. Crowley did his best to shake off the mind-numbing dread, and leapt again.
“… i… a.”
Two things happened at once: a dizzyingly high replica of the Tree of Knowledge materialised right in front of Crowley… and Rahab broke into the chamber.
“Serpent!” he snarled. Although he had given up his beastly size and appearance for the moment, he still did not sound entirely human-like. “You will not lay your tainted hands on the Book!” Rahab yelled on the top of his lungs.
“Lisssten, let’sss jussst talk about thisss…” Crowley tried. However, he swiftly found himself thrown across the room, probably sporting a sizable bump on his head and a concussion to last. He still could count himself lucky that his currently useless wings hadn’t been broken.
By the time he finished taking catalogue of his injuries, Rahab seemed to have forgotten about him entirely. Instead, he was completely immersed in staring at the ginormous tree, trying to pick different pieces of fruit from it, and snatching his hand away repeatedly whenever said fruit would turn into light, and he would get burnt.
Watching him finally made one thing clear to Crowley: Rahab wasn’t especially smart. He might have possessed nearly archangelic (now archdemonic) strength, he might have been a devout admirer of the Book (and, by proxy, its author) all his existence… but he was also… just Rahab. He was strong and arrogant like all the higher ranks, but he was missing any quality that could measure up to Raziel’s holy wisdom. Or even to Crowley’s nervous, mundane wit.
In the meantime, the choice was narrowed down to two identical green apples. Save for those two orbs, the tree had been plucked bare. (Rahab’s entire form was still smoking from the aftermath.) He reached for the apple to his right…
“No, sssstop!” Crowley cried out, even he had no idea why. Rahab would surely not listen, and, more importantly, why did he want to save the other demon, again?
“Silence!” Rahab rumbled, and gave Crowley a shove of raw occult power for good measure. Before the serpent could have regained his voice, Rahab’s fist closed around the apple… and he was reduced to a pile of ashes in the blinding flash of light that followed.
Crowley let out a long (still slightly hissing) sigh. Witnessing the permanent death of any demon was always terrifying in a very unique way.
“He dessserved it,” Crowley mumbled, mostly just to convince himself. Rahab had discorporated Aziraphale, after all. And far too little time had elapsed since the fifties for Crowley to let that go unpunished. Not that he had much to do with this… But who was he to stop natural selection, if it wanted to work among the ranks of demons, too?
After a few brief minutes of well-deserved rest, Crowley got to his feet, limped back to the tree, and sank to his knees next to the other demon’s ashes.
“This isn’t the Garden,” he told himself. Anything was better than the unnatural silence. “It’s not the real Tree. The fruit is not a fruit, and it can’t be taken. It’s Raziel’s Book on an emerald tablet, and the original apples were red, anyway. Any self-respecting demon knows that. So. This is the Sefer, and that knowledge can’t be taken. Blessed proud angels.”
He bowed his head, and reached forward, his hands locked in a gesture of humble begging. Nearly deafened by his own frantic heartbeat, Crowley whispered the incantation he had heard from the late Rahab about three millennia before the demonic angel’s demise. He finished the spell not a moment too soon, just as the ever less fruit-shaped tablet fell into his slightly trembling hands.
In the very first instant of contact, the unnatural paralysis vanished without a trace. Nothing was compelling Crowley to hiss anymore, or keeping him from changing shape, and his wings filled with glorious life again. He wasted no time flying out from the severely damaged cavern. As he left the whole Dragon Triangle behind, he briefly debated whether he should feel grateful to Rahab. Without the deceased demon’s spell, after all, Crowley would have had no idea how to prevent the holy artefact from burning him (or worse). But then again… it was Rahab. He doubted anyone truly missed the bastard.
12 December 2020 (N. S.), St James’ Park
It was nine o’clock, and keeping people from noticing anything was becoming rapidly more exhausting and utterly boring at the same time. Far from enough to keep Crowley’s own mind occupied. And he would have desperately needed the distraction…
He had arrived home with exactly fifty minutes to spare, his wings aching from the exertion he had grown unused to, his clothes in charred tatters, his hair damp with half-congealed blood, and most of his skin covered in scars or burns from low-grade holiness. Even with a shameless series of very vain miracles, it took Crowley nearly half an hour to look close to presentable again. He would have gone on to fuss about recreating an “effortlessly” cool appearance…
… but he couldn’t let the ceaseless, shaky ringing of the doorbell just go on and on and on. And once he answered it (twenty minutes to eight), he sort of forgot about his original plans. He signed for the big, mysterious box in an illegible scribble, and tore the packaging open while he was still kicking the door shut.
He didn’t have to count the rainbow-coloured candles to know there were exactly one thousand of them. He could easily envision the Them, a band of supposed adults, enthusiastically counting and recounting them before sending the package on its way. Probably only a few hours prior to its delivery, putting their unshakeable trust in things working out how they wanted them to. Even when they were up against mailmen.
Was the gesture over-the-top? Sure, but hadn’t the whole Indiana Jones-style questing been, too? A millennium rolled around only once in history.
With these thoughts, Crowley took the candles, covered the hard-earned artefact in velvet packaging, complete with an elegant black bow, and rushed to the park to make the final preparations. Which would, apparently, now include wishing a giant cake into existence to fit all the candles.
He had thought the candles were store-bought. To be fair, they might have been, but that certainly didn’t stop them from being enchanted. Based on their size, none of them should have been able to last over an hour once they had been lit. Yet here they were, burning ever brighter.
Just like Crowley’s worries.
Seeing as this was a decidedly exceptional occasion, he kept telling himself to be patient. But it was half nine now, and standing on the footpath crossing the lake with a man-sized cake that put a Christmas tree to shame… It was doing things to his mind.
Taking deep, not at all calming breaths, he fished out his cell phone from his pocket, and dialled his angel’s number. His hands were trembling a bit with every annoying beep of the machine, his heart rate growing a little faster and a lot more erratic with every missed ring.
Even when he was calling for the thirtieth time, one whole hour later, and Aziraphale was still not picking up.
While the greater part of Crowley’s mind was preoccupied trying to come up with tactics to avoid thinking that the angel had forgotten all about their rendezvous, or that he didn’t even care about the anniversary, these very thoughts were always just a tiniest bit ahead of his efforts. And who could blame him? While he had been moving every stone for a suitable present for two months, the blasted angel never even tried to call him. Or write him. Heck, he would have even taken an old-fashioned compulsory summons over this silence.
“But what if something has happened to Aziraphale?” his mind finally supplied. As far as excuses went, it was a good one. As far as worries went, though… this theory made everything so much worse. Forgetting all about the brightly lit cake (angel cake of course), as well as subtlety, Crowley took off from the park on mildly protesting wings.
He wanted to go so fast that he nearly crash-landed in front of the bookshop. The windows were still brightly lit, so seeing inside was no problem. Seeing the scene that greeted him, however…
Aziraphale was perfectly fine (thank Someone), sitting behind the counter, leaning over an old codex, without a care in the world. Expertly ignoring the phone right next to his plump, ink-stained hands.
That was as far as Crowley’s denial and self-control went.
“He’s forgotten,” he whispered, to his own utter horror. It sounded even worse, when it was more than a thought. A statement of fact.
“He doesn’t care,” Crowley went on, his hands balled into fists so tight that his nails were drawing blood.
“Well, then, neither do I,” he added, and stormed off into the night.
He was far past the point of caring about the explosions or the fire that kept most of the city’s inhabitants awake that night.
13-24 December 2020 (N. S.), a linear combination of the pubs in London
“Excuse me, Sir, but could you either pick up your phone or put it on silent mode? It has been going off ever since you came in,” the waiter pointed out to the dark-haired man sitting alone in the corner. He received a look from behind cracked sunglasses, and did not go near that table ever again. Interestingly enough, the table still never ran out of wine.
Half an hour later, Crowley grumbled, and checked his messages.
“What on Earth happened?! Why didn’t you call us?! We even offered!!!”
That was a text from Brian, but currently Crowley couldn’t remember the reason for his outrage. Nor did the particularly care.
“Just be glad you didn’t pull this stupid stunt in our town,” Wensley pointed out in one of his very wordy and lawyer-y messages.
“Pictures! Now!” Pepper demanded.
“Hey, are you all right?” Newt was inquiring. “Anathema has been calling both of you non-stop. Just pick up when you can, okay?”
“That would be exactly never,” Crowley mumbled, slamming the phone on the table. There was no both of them. There was him, with important vices to indulge in, and there was the blessed angel, who could do whatever he wanted to, as far as Crowley was concerned.
He sighed. People were staring, and it became progressively more annoying. He ought to move on to the next drinking establishment. Too bad he had already been to all of the closest ones.
Crowley nearly fell asleep driving. He thought some music might help keep him awake, though.
“Can anybody find me somebody to love?” the supposedly instrumental track whined. Of course: it had been over two months since he’d even sat in the Bentley. And these newest players didn’t even last two days, let alone two weeks. Months were out of the question.
He reserved himself to singing along to Queen’s greatest hits. Had he been more sober, he could have even appreciated the melodies. In his current state, volume was his primary focus.
At some point, unable to remember where he had last parked his beloved car, he wandered back into St James’ Park. Not that he was able to recognise it. The candles had really been made magical – so leaving them unattended wasn’t exactly a bright idea. It took the fire brigade hours and hours to put out everything, and by that time, it was definitely too late for any plants.
A lone drake was waddling along the edge of the blackened water in the pond, sending disapproving quacks Crowley’s way.
“Bless you too, mate,” he practically growled back at the clueless bird.
He ended up giving away his phone in a drunken haze – all he asked in return was that the man who would take it text or tell everyone to just leave him alone. When that was settled, he finally headed back to his flat (visiting a few more pubs on the way, leaving behind a minor fight everywhere), fully intent on sleeping through a few more centuries.+
Next - Part 5!
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Date: 2017-12-25 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-01-04 08:04 pm (UTC)