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go_exchange2018-12-01 09:43 am
goe_mod) wrote in go_exchange2018-12-01 09:43 am
Entry tags:
GOHE 2018 BEGINS: HAPPY HOLIDAYS, ARGYLEHEIR!
Title: An Invitation You Can’t Decline
Recipient: Argyleheir
Characters/Pairings: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: M (SFW, but there’s kissing, closeness, and innuendo)
Word Count: 1,730
Notes: The prompt I went with was good wine and bad ghost stories on Christmas Eve. I’m absolutely nobody to turn down the chance to have characters tell ghost stories, so thank you very much, dear recipient, for giving me the chance to write this for you! I’ll be the first to admit there’s indeed some Queen-related humor in play, starting with the title.
Summary: “You can ravish me later,” Crowley whispered with charming chagrin. “Let’s tell ghost stories.”
Aziraphale made an irritated noise and sipped his champagne. “I don’t know any ghost stories.”
“You, surrounded by books all the live-long day,” Crowley laughed, “don’t know any?”
Having just bundled three delightful guests into their coats and seen them off, Aziraphale sagged with his back against the front door. It had been a near thing, shooing them by sundown, but they had readily agreed that Christmas Eve was best spent with one’s family.
Aziraphale’s family—by the metric of six millennia as friends, the latter two weeks of which had marked the start of much more—was in the living room. And he wanted more wine.
On his way back through the kitchen, Aziraphale erred on the side of champagne, pulling a bottle of Moët & Chandon from the fridge. The disadvantage to entertaining humans was the necessity of seeming human. This entailed stocking one’s cold-storage appliances with alcohol.
Crowley was curled up in the corner of the sofa when Aziraphale returned, fiddling with the juniper-handled Laguiole waiter’s corkscrew that their guests had brought as a gift. He stopped long enough to push his sunglasses up into his hair and make grabby hands.
“They’ll have me doing this the old-fashioned way yet,” Crowley said, sticking the bottle between his legs while he pried a serrated steel claw out of hiding at one end of the tool. “The blade part’s pointless, I used to think,” he mused, using it to slice through the gold foil, “what when fingernails work just fine, but—”
Aziraphale bent down and kissed him, and then took a seat beside him on the sofa cushion.
“I might’ve cut myself,” Crowley groused, flushing pink, but he was smiling as he painstakingly peeled away the foil and got down to business twisting the corkscrew. “Reckless.”
“Not so bad,” Aziraphale said, sliding his arm surreptitiously around Crowley, “wearing a jumper, is it?” He plucked at the charcoal-and-grey Fair Isle pattern over Crowley’s shoulder, and then smoothed the wool. “You look quite fetching,” he murmured in Crowley’s ear.
Leveraging the cork free, Crowley gave Aziraphale a withering look that bordered on fond.
“This isn’t what I had in mind when I told you not to get me another espresso machine,” he cautioned, setting the tool-impaled cork down on the coffee table. “Blessed thing itches.”
“That’s why you ought to have worn something underneath,” Aziraphale said, reaching for their empty glasses. He held them while Crowley filled one after the other to the brim.
Crowley read the bottle’s label, brow knitting in realization before he set it down. “Seriously?”
“Nineteen ninety was a good year,” said Aziraphale, raising his glass with a straight face.
“Lower the tone, why don’t you,” Crowley sighed, but he clinked the rim of his glass off Aziraphale’s all the same. “I guess we’re meant to toast to the future and all that rot.”
“We’ve already had more of one than we thought we’d get,” Aziraphale reminded him, drinking deeply. “Fifteen years, imagine that. I’ll gladly drink to fifteen more, my dear.”
Sucking down about three quarters of his glass in one go, Crowley tipped into Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Yours is itchy, too,” he muttered, rubbing his cheek there anyway.
Overcome with the unprecedented ease of such contact, Aziraphale plucked the sunglasses out of Crowley’s hair and kissed his forehead. “At least I didn’t insist on matching ones.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t have worn mine,” Crowley admitted, patting Aziraphale’s cheek. He waved his hand, and the sunglasses vanished from Aziraphale’s grasp. “Simple as that.”
“Don’t be silly,” Aziraphale scoffed, taking another sip. “Our company would’ve harped on it.”
“Oh, as if that would’ve stopped you,” Crowley replied, shifting to straddle Aziraphale’s lap.
Aziraphale wasn’t over the fact that Crowley wanted this. Wanted him, to be precise.
“Finish up,” he urged, guiding the glass back up to Crowley’s lips, “so we can have more.”
Crowley snapped his fingers, and both of their glasses were full again. “I know we’re doing this human-style and all, but I refuse to move,” he said, pressing their foreheads together.
Cupping Crowley’s cheek, Aziraphale pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Is that so?”
“Fact,” Crowley confirmed, shivering as he took an undignified slurp from his glass. “Mmm.”
“You wanted to end the day like we started it,” Aziraphale reminded him. “Just the two of us.”
“I wanted a proper Christmas Eve,” Crowley agreed, “and I’m getting it. What else do humans do in front of the fire, eh?” He swallowed more champagne, and then kissed Aziraphale lingeringly on the mouth. “I’m not one for carols. Maybe ghost stories, or, I don’t know—”
“No Dickens rehash,” Aziraphale cut in, horrified. “I forbid it. That hack’s overdone enough.”
“I liked Dickens,” Crowley protested, pouting. “Paid by the word. Can you blame him?”
“I’d as soon watch one of the adaptations,” Aziraphale said. “At least then it gets interesting.”
“Muppets or nothing,” Crowley offered, glancing sidelong at the telly. “I forbid Disney.”
“I fear we’re at an impasse,” Aziraphale said, downing the rest of his glass. “Thirds, dear boy?”
Crowley filled their glasses again, and Aziraphale noticed that the level of champagne in the bottle on the coffee table was, indeed, diminishing. He kissed Crowley slowly this time, sussing out whether Crowley’s clinginess meant he wanted to take this elsewhere.
“You can ravish me later,” Crowley whispered with charming chagrin. “Let’s tell ghost stories.”
Aziraphale made an irritated noise and sipped his champagne. “I don’t know any ghost stories.”
“You, surrounded by books all the live-long day,” Crowley laughed, “don’t know any?”
Strictly speaking, Aziraphale knew any number of banal supernatural narratives that humans had devised to occupy themselves in the dark of the year. He also knew a number of true ones to which Crowley had also been privy, and dwelling on those wasn’t wise.
“Please?” Crowley asked softly, eyes luminous in spite of the fact he was backlit by the fire.
Aziraphale supposed there was no harm in dredging up the pedestrian, perhaps even the anecdotal. That was the bread and butter of apparition-related oral tradition, wasn’t it?
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear something from London,” he ventured at length.
Crowley snorted, sending his glass to the coffee table, where it materialized beside his sunglasses. “You overestimate my homesickness. The novelty of being here hasn’t worn off.”
“The point, I thought, was for it not to wear off?” Aziraphale ventured, suddenly perplexed.
“Anything’s a novelty until it settles,” Crowley said, clearing his throat. “No, I don’t mean…”
“I know what you meant,” Aziraphale reassured him, banishing his glass, too. “I read a news feature once that claimed London has more ghosts per square foot than anywhere on earth.”
“Dare you to dig up one that’s new to me,” Crowley said conspiratorially. “I know spooky.”
You like to think you do, Aziraphale thought, mulling over his options. They were vastly dull and grimly overdone, no small thanks to the city’s plethora of ghost tours.
“How about we just debunk some?” Crowley suggested, his brow furrowing as he watched Aziraphale think. “Here, I’ll go first. That stuff about Handel House is rubbish; Hell has him. I appreciated the exorcism they did four years ago, though. Cleared my sinuses for a week.”
Aziraphale brushed at the corner of Crowley’s mouth as it twitched up, half-smiling with him.
“I might have spirited you away for a while, had I known Mayfair was in for one,” he admitted.
“Ineffective. They ought to’ve jettisoned exorcisms and stuck with Holy Water,” Crowley said.
“This isn’t so much debunking as clarification,” Aziraphale ventured, thinking of something offhand. “That couple in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel is real enough. Helen and Gary. A colleague of mine couldn’t persuade them away, not even with the promise of Heaven. Night after night, they’re content to stroll the place they first met. Romantic, I always thought.”
“Can’t blame them,” Crowley said, leaning forward to huddle against Aziraphale’s shoulder. “We’re hung-up enough on the place we first met. Defended it to the bitter end.”
“An end that didn’t come,” Aziraphale reminded him, wondering if champagne on top of the wine from earlier had finally gone to his head. He rubbed Crowley’s back.
“You ought to do something about the dead monk at Great St. Bart’s,” Crowley suggested.
Aziraphale sniffed, thinking of the last handful of times he’d got the low-down on that.
“I have it on sound authority that Rahere’s harmless enough when he’s not tripping alarms.”
“They ought to just put the sandal back in his tomb. I can relate to a man fond of his shoes.”
Aziraphale wrapped his arms around Crowley’s waist. He rested his cheek against Crowley’s hair, feeling warm and pleasantly drowsy. They really had drunk quite a lot.
“There’s something I ought to have told you,” he said hesitantly, “about these very premises.”
“Nuh,” Crowley yawned, nuzzling into Aziraphale’s neck. “Not possible. Sss’not haunted.”
“Perhaps not at present,” Aziraphale agreed, “but one of the former residents did die here.”
“Thought two of ’em died while living here, but not necessarily in here,” Crowley said.
“The one just before us passed in hospital,” Aziraphale said, trying to recall the chat he’d had with their agent over the paperwork. “But the one before that…”
Crowley shrugged, tucking a kiss beneath Aziraphale’s earlobe. “All this place feels is loved.”
“I’d have it stay as such,” whispered Aziraphale, with the abrupt clarity intoxication imparted.
Crowley’s fingers curled and uncurled at Aziraphale’s nape, combing through the wisps there.
“I can manage that,” he said. “Loving you has been no grief anywhere else, so why not here?”
Aziraphale held Crowley tightly, closing his stinging eyes. “Loving you has been all my joy.”
Crowley sighed, but in concern rather than in exasperation. “Is it time to cut you off, angel?”
“I rather fear your ghost-stories gambit failed,” Aziraphale said ruefully. “Yes, perhaps so.”
“Don’t wanna sober up,” said Crowley. “I bet some version of Christmas Carol’s on.”
Aziraphale made a successful grab for the programming guide that was on the coffee table. Flipping through it one-handed on the sofa cushion while Crowley made content noises against the side of his neck was a chore, but he got the job done.
“Our choices are Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on BBC One,” Aziraphale read, “and Miss Marple: 4.50 from Paddington on BBC Two.”
“I’m not watching Miss Marple,” Crowley said emphatically, nipping the spot he’d just kissed.
Aziraphale waved the Potter film on, knowing they wouldn’t pay that much attention anyway.
Recipient: Argyleheir
Characters/Pairings: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: M (SFW, but there’s kissing, closeness, and innuendo)
Word Count: 1,730
Notes: The prompt I went with was good wine and bad ghost stories on Christmas Eve. I’m absolutely nobody to turn down the chance to have characters tell ghost stories, so thank you very much, dear recipient, for giving me the chance to write this for you! I’ll be the first to admit there’s indeed some Queen-related humor in play, starting with the title.
Summary: “You can ravish me later,” Crowley whispered with charming chagrin. “Let’s tell ghost stories.”
Aziraphale made an irritated noise and sipped his champagne. “I don’t know any ghost stories.”
“You, surrounded by books all the live-long day,” Crowley laughed, “don’t know any?”
Having just bundled three delightful guests into their coats and seen them off, Aziraphale sagged with his back against the front door. It had been a near thing, shooing them by sundown, but they had readily agreed that Christmas Eve was best spent with one’s family.
Aziraphale’s family—by the metric of six millennia as friends, the latter two weeks of which had marked the start of much more—was in the living room. And he wanted more wine.
On his way back through the kitchen, Aziraphale erred on the side of champagne, pulling a bottle of Moët & Chandon from the fridge. The disadvantage to entertaining humans was the necessity of seeming human. This entailed stocking one’s cold-storage appliances with alcohol.
Crowley was curled up in the corner of the sofa when Aziraphale returned, fiddling with the juniper-handled Laguiole waiter’s corkscrew that their guests had brought as a gift. He stopped long enough to push his sunglasses up into his hair and make grabby hands.
“They’ll have me doing this the old-fashioned way yet,” Crowley said, sticking the bottle between his legs while he pried a serrated steel claw out of hiding at one end of the tool. “The blade part’s pointless, I used to think,” he mused, using it to slice through the gold foil, “what when fingernails work just fine, but—”
Aziraphale bent down and kissed him, and then took a seat beside him on the sofa cushion.
“I might’ve cut myself,” Crowley groused, flushing pink, but he was smiling as he painstakingly peeled away the foil and got down to business twisting the corkscrew. “Reckless.”
“Not so bad,” Aziraphale said, sliding his arm surreptitiously around Crowley, “wearing a jumper, is it?” He plucked at the charcoal-and-grey Fair Isle pattern over Crowley’s shoulder, and then smoothed the wool. “You look quite fetching,” he murmured in Crowley’s ear.
Leveraging the cork free, Crowley gave Aziraphale a withering look that bordered on fond.
“This isn’t what I had in mind when I told you not to get me another espresso machine,” he cautioned, setting the tool-impaled cork down on the coffee table. “Blessed thing itches.”
“That’s why you ought to have worn something underneath,” Aziraphale said, reaching for their empty glasses. He held them while Crowley filled one after the other to the brim.
Crowley read the bottle’s label, brow knitting in realization before he set it down. “Seriously?”
“Nineteen ninety was a good year,” said Aziraphale, raising his glass with a straight face.
“Lower the tone, why don’t you,” Crowley sighed, but he clinked the rim of his glass off Aziraphale’s all the same. “I guess we’re meant to toast to the future and all that rot.”
“We’ve already had more of one than we thought we’d get,” Aziraphale reminded him, drinking deeply. “Fifteen years, imagine that. I’ll gladly drink to fifteen more, my dear.”
Sucking down about three quarters of his glass in one go, Crowley tipped into Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Yours is itchy, too,” he muttered, rubbing his cheek there anyway.
Overcome with the unprecedented ease of such contact, Aziraphale plucked the sunglasses out of Crowley’s hair and kissed his forehead. “At least I didn’t insist on matching ones.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t have worn mine,” Crowley admitted, patting Aziraphale’s cheek. He waved his hand, and the sunglasses vanished from Aziraphale’s grasp. “Simple as that.”
“Don’t be silly,” Aziraphale scoffed, taking another sip. “Our company would’ve harped on it.”
“Oh, as if that would’ve stopped you,” Crowley replied, shifting to straddle Aziraphale’s lap.
Aziraphale wasn’t over the fact that Crowley wanted this. Wanted him, to be precise.
“Finish up,” he urged, guiding the glass back up to Crowley’s lips, “so we can have more.”
Crowley snapped his fingers, and both of their glasses were full again. “I know we’re doing this human-style and all, but I refuse to move,” he said, pressing their foreheads together.
Cupping Crowley’s cheek, Aziraphale pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Is that so?”
“Fact,” Crowley confirmed, shivering as he took an undignified slurp from his glass. “Mmm.”
“You wanted to end the day like we started it,” Aziraphale reminded him. “Just the two of us.”
“I wanted a proper Christmas Eve,” Crowley agreed, “and I’m getting it. What else do humans do in front of the fire, eh?” He swallowed more champagne, and then kissed Aziraphale lingeringly on the mouth. “I’m not one for carols. Maybe ghost stories, or, I don’t know—”
“No Dickens rehash,” Aziraphale cut in, horrified. “I forbid it. That hack’s overdone enough.”
“I liked Dickens,” Crowley protested, pouting. “Paid by the word. Can you blame him?”
“I’d as soon watch one of the adaptations,” Aziraphale said. “At least then it gets interesting.”
“Muppets or nothing,” Crowley offered, glancing sidelong at the telly. “I forbid Disney.”
“I fear we’re at an impasse,” Aziraphale said, downing the rest of his glass. “Thirds, dear boy?”
Crowley filled their glasses again, and Aziraphale noticed that the level of champagne in the bottle on the coffee table was, indeed, diminishing. He kissed Crowley slowly this time, sussing out whether Crowley’s clinginess meant he wanted to take this elsewhere.
“You can ravish me later,” Crowley whispered with charming chagrin. “Let’s tell ghost stories.”
Aziraphale made an irritated noise and sipped his champagne. “I don’t know any ghost stories.”
“You, surrounded by books all the live-long day,” Crowley laughed, “don’t know any?”
Strictly speaking, Aziraphale knew any number of banal supernatural narratives that humans had devised to occupy themselves in the dark of the year. He also knew a number of true ones to which Crowley had also been privy, and dwelling on those wasn’t wise.
“Please?” Crowley asked softly, eyes luminous in spite of the fact he was backlit by the fire.
Aziraphale supposed there was no harm in dredging up the pedestrian, perhaps even the anecdotal. That was the bread and butter of apparition-related oral tradition, wasn’t it?
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear something from London,” he ventured at length.
Crowley snorted, sending his glass to the coffee table, where it materialized beside his sunglasses. “You overestimate my homesickness. The novelty of being here hasn’t worn off.”
“The point, I thought, was for it not to wear off?” Aziraphale ventured, suddenly perplexed.
“Anything’s a novelty until it settles,” Crowley said, clearing his throat. “No, I don’t mean…”
“I know what you meant,” Aziraphale reassured him, banishing his glass, too. “I read a news feature once that claimed London has more ghosts per square foot than anywhere on earth.”
“Dare you to dig up one that’s new to me,” Crowley said conspiratorially. “I know spooky.”
You like to think you do, Aziraphale thought, mulling over his options. They were vastly dull and grimly overdone, no small thanks to the city’s plethora of ghost tours.
“How about we just debunk some?” Crowley suggested, his brow furrowing as he watched Aziraphale think. “Here, I’ll go first. That stuff about Handel House is rubbish; Hell has him. I appreciated the exorcism they did four years ago, though. Cleared my sinuses for a week.”
Aziraphale brushed at the corner of Crowley’s mouth as it twitched up, half-smiling with him.
“I might have spirited you away for a while, had I known Mayfair was in for one,” he admitted.
“Ineffective. They ought to’ve jettisoned exorcisms and stuck with Holy Water,” Crowley said.
“This isn’t so much debunking as clarification,” Aziraphale ventured, thinking of something offhand. “That couple in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel is real enough. Helen and Gary. A colleague of mine couldn’t persuade them away, not even with the promise of Heaven. Night after night, they’re content to stroll the place they first met. Romantic, I always thought.”
“Can’t blame them,” Crowley said, leaning forward to huddle against Aziraphale’s shoulder. “We’re hung-up enough on the place we first met. Defended it to the bitter end.”
“An end that didn’t come,” Aziraphale reminded him, wondering if champagne on top of the wine from earlier had finally gone to his head. He rubbed Crowley’s back.
“You ought to do something about the dead monk at Great St. Bart’s,” Crowley suggested.
Aziraphale sniffed, thinking of the last handful of times he’d got the low-down on that.
“I have it on sound authority that Rahere’s harmless enough when he’s not tripping alarms.”
“They ought to just put the sandal back in his tomb. I can relate to a man fond of his shoes.”
Aziraphale wrapped his arms around Crowley’s waist. He rested his cheek against Crowley’s hair, feeling warm and pleasantly drowsy. They really had drunk quite a lot.
“There’s something I ought to have told you,” he said hesitantly, “about these very premises.”
“Nuh,” Crowley yawned, nuzzling into Aziraphale’s neck. “Not possible. Sss’not haunted.”
“Perhaps not at present,” Aziraphale agreed, “but one of the former residents did die here.”
“Thought two of ’em died while living here, but not necessarily in here,” Crowley said.
“The one just before us passed in hospital,” Aziraphale said, trying to recall the chat he’d had with their agent over the paperwork. “But the one before that…”
Crowley shrugged, tucking a kiss beneath Aziraphale’s earlobe. “All this place feels is loved.”
“I’d have it stay as such,” whispered Aziraphale, with the abrupt clarity intoxication imparted.
Crowley’s fingers curled and uncurled at Aziraphale’s nape, combing through the wisps there.
“I can manage that,” he said. “Loving you has been no grief anywhere else, so why not here?”
Aziraphale held Crowley tightly, closing his stinging eyes. “Loving you has been all my joy.”
Crowley sighed, but in concern rather than in exasperation. “Is it time to cut you off, angel?”
“I rather fear your ghost-stories gambit failed,” Aziraphale said ruefully. “Yes, perhaps so.”
“Don’t wanna sober up,” said Crowley. “I bet some version of Christmas Carol’s on.”
Aziraphale made a successful grab for the programming guide that was on the coffee table. Flipping through it one-handed on the sofa cushion while Crowley made content noises against the side of his neck was a chore, but he got the job done.
“Our choices are Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on BBC One,” Aziraphale read, “and Miss Marple: 4.50 from Paddington on BBC Two.”
“I’m not watching Miss Marple,” Crowley said emphatically, nipping the spot he’d just kissed.
Aziraphale waved the Potter film on, knowing they wouldn’t pay that much attention anyway.