Happy Holidays, HoloXam!
Dec. 22nd, 2018 05:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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go_exchangeTitle: Dinner Party
Recipient name: HoloXam
Rating: G
Pairing: Aziraphale and Crowley, could be read as gen or romantic
Warnings: slightly gross recipes/ingredients mentioned
Prompt: Any characters grocery shopping. Any pairings. Rated G (mostly, with slight elements of a different prompt: some higher-up demon (or Satan himself? It's absolutely up to you!) from Hell's management want a "tour of the premises," and Crowley has to take them around London for sightseeing, as well as showing off his projects. Possibly he has to take them out for drinks. Aziraphale might help out, making sure that Crowley gets some points. A/C, established or pining, or no pairing, I'm not picky. Rated G or T.)
Summary: Crowley’s superiors are coming to Earth for the first time post-apocalypse. In an effort to keep the carnage to a minimum, Crowley is attempting to entertain them at his place while he fills them in on his assorted wiles. The only problem is he has only the vaguest idea how to throw a dinner party. He enlists Aziraphale’s help.
Notes: the bulk of this fic is the grocery shopping prompt, but while thinking about what they would be grocery shopping for I remembered the second prompt and thought that would be a great setup even though I didn’t write the dinner party itself. (I picture it going about as well as that dinner party in The Good Place that Trevor attends, only with like, four Trevors, and Crowley gets to complain in Aziraphale’s arms for three hours afterward.) Thanks for such a fun set of likes to work with (bickering! drunk scenes! snark!) and I hope you enjoy! Happy holidays.
1. The supermarket, eight hours before
“I still don’t understand why we’re even here,” Crowley said, his grumbling undermined somewhat by the fact that he was pushing the shopping cart ahead of them both and then hopping on the back to ride it at intervals. “I don’t think Heaven actually requires you to do everything the long way around.”1
1 He genuinely wasn’t sure at this point. Aziraphale did things like buy real clothes and stock real tea in his cabinets and throw out the eggs in his freezer when they went off (which was still usually quite some time before they had expected to go off, but by contrast Crowley’s fridge had never let anything expire in its life). But then he also did things like convince an honestly bought Riesling to become a several-decades-extinct Bordeaux with an idle thought. It was hard to tell which of Aziraphale’s quirks were Heavenly mandates and which were just Aziraphale.
“Stop complaining, dear,” Aziraphale murmured over a display of Brie. “I’m supporting local businesses, not to mention doing you a good turn, and you’re reinforcing the idea that humans have to pay money to fulfill their basic biological functions. Points for both of us.”
“Huh.” Crowley turned this over in his head and couldn’t find fault with it.
“And you get more for annoying me, don’t you?” Aziraphale asked in the same disinterested tone, but Crowley caught the edge of his sly smile and kicked him in the ankle as he rolled past.
“If that were true I’d never have to do any work at all.”
“So it is true, then.”
“Hey! I spent six months this year on websites that look like they’ll let you stream full television episodes but actually require a cable login. I deserve a bit of a break.”
Aziraphale hummed skeptically, catching the cart with one hand to tip in his pile of cheeses with the other before Crowley could push off again.
“They won’t want wine and cheese anyway,” Crowley said, frowning morosely at the cart. “More into entrails, that crowd. I don’t drink… wine, sort of thing.”
“The cheese is for me,” Aziraphale said primly. “Trust me. I have some ideas.” He passed his handwritten list to Crowley, who peered at it with interest.
Beef carpaccio: tenderloin, capers, Parmesan, vinaigrette
Fugu sashimi: torafugu, daikon, ginger, sake, mirin, soy sauce, dashi
Veal sweetbreads: veal thymus, vinegar, shallots, capers, dressing
Larb: minced pork, pork blood, onion, cumin, cloves, anise2
2 By the time they were finished shopping, the cashier was somewhat surprised to find themself checking out several ingredients that Crowley was sure the little market hadn’t carried before a certain angel had stepped in with a firm plan in mind, but one beaming smile from Aziraphale ensured they were only concerned with conscientiously arranging the purchases in his reusable bag.
“Oh, very good, angel,” Crowley said. “I might actually survive the night.”
“Certainly, if I have anything to say about it.”
2. Crowley’s flat, 3 hours before
“So now what am I supposed to do with all of this?” Crowley asked, back at home in his flat, fairly certain that his pristine kitchen had never seen so many unassembled ingredients before at once. There were meats and organs leaking blood into the sink, an arrangement of vegetables on the hastily materialized marble cutting board that were notably not-yet-sushi-shaped, an array of spices that Crowley hadn’t seen in jars since they were still being used as currency scattered on the island. The few bottles of ready-to-use sauces gave him a small measure of hope, but he had the nasty suspicion that at least a few of them were meant to be mixed together before they were put on plates.
“Well, you cook with them,” Aziraphale said, with all of the unearned confidence of an ethereal being whose home-cooking skills were essentially limited to taking cured meats and cheeses out of their packaging but had been to enough restaurants with quick service to be sure it couldn’t be that difficult. He started unloading cookbooks from his bag onto the bar, opening each to a bookmarked page. “I did come prepared.”
“Have you ever actually followed these recipes or do you just read and catalogue them?” Crowley asked. Aziraphale waved a dismissive hand and optimistically picked up one of Crowley’s knives3 to attack a daikon with it.
3 top of the line, very expensive, never used
As it turned out, Aziraphale really wasn’t horrible at cooking. His knife skills were very precise, something Crowley parlayed into several sword jokes before they were finished. Crowley’s part in the whole adventure consisted mainly of surreptitiously miracling away any mistakes he caught Aziraphale making while drinking his way through large quantities of the sake, not to mention tempting Aziraphale to the same. At some point, perhaps sensing the increasingly cheerful atmosphere in the kitchen, Crowley’s speakers had turned themselves on and were currently blasting something that wasn’t yet Queen but probably would be soon. Crowley was trying to get Aziraphale to taste the sweetbread dressing from the end of his finger when the sound of a doorbell ringing cut into the music.
“Oh shit,” Crowley said, knocking the last bottle of sake into a bowl of vinaigrette as he stumbled away from the counter.
“Sober up!” Aziraphale hissed, dissolving into giggles halfway through the admonition.
“You sober up!”
“They’re your bosses!”
Crowley made an inarticulate noise, squinted, winced, and immediately looked terrified. Aziraphale passed him the sake bottle, suddenly whole and full again.
“One… one drink,” he instructed, still suppressing giggles. “One… maybe two.” Crowley took three large gulps and thrust the bottle back at Aziraphale.
“Right,” he said. “Right. It’ll be fine. They already didn’t end the world, what else could happen?”
“Ooh, don’t say that. S’dangerous, going around saying stuff like that.”
“Big help you are,” Crowley muttered. “All right, get out of here. Leave the cheeses. Shoo.” He flapped his hands at the now-sulking angel as the doorbell rang out again, somehow managing to sound distinctly peeved this time.4
4 Crowley paid it no mind; it would have been very un-demonic of him to answer the door on time anyway.
“But, Aziraphale--” Crowley caught Aziraphale by the elbow before he could leave the kitchen fully. “I’m coming to yours after. I’ll call you?”
“Of course, dear,” Aziraphale said, beaming. Crowley nodded back with a tentative smile, then turned to face the forces of Hell wrapped in business casual who were waiting at his front door.
3. Aziraphale’s bookshop, two hours after
“...and absolutely no manners, not a single one of them, I mean, Beezsssslebub literally just, just had flies everywhere instead of just having one mouth and using that to eat…” Crowley gave a theatrical shudder, dislodging his head from where it had been resting against Aziraphale’s knee. He was sprawled on the floor in Aziraphale’s back room while Aziraphale slowly slumped farther and farther into the squashy loveseat, a bottle of wine balanced precariously in one hand.
“Well, did he like it?” Aziraphale interrupted. Crowley stopped abruptly, mouth working soundlessly as he visibly attempted to change the tracks in his brain to answer.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, everyone liked everything. And I did get a conv- comm- you know, a ‘thanks for making the internet even worse’ paper bit.” Aziraphale nodded sagely.
“Good for you, my dear.”
“Yeah! So there, Beesssss… thing.”
“So there,” Aziraphale agreed. Crowley’s head came back to his knee with a sleepy sigh. The bottle next to Aziraphale finally overturned, leaking a thin stream of red onto the couch. Aziraphale frowned sternly at it, but Crowley waved an unconcerned hand.
“Worry ‘bout it tomorrow, angel,” he said with a slow, rare blink.
“Hmm. Yes. Tomorrow.” Aziraphale closed his eyes, relaxing further into the cushions as Crowley took a deep breath, caught a second wind, and started his diatribe anew on the 30-year backlog of paperwork Dagon had left him. Aziraphale didn’t fall asleep, exactly, but the way he relaxed into the buzz of wine inside him and the hiss of Crowley’s words outside was something very similar, and even more peaceful.
Recipient name: HoloXam
Rating: G
Pairing: Aziraphale and Crowley, could be read as gen or romantic
Warnings: slightly gross recipes/ingredients mentioned
Prompt: Any characters grocery shopping. Any pairings. Rated G (mostly, with slight elements of a different prompt: some higher-up demon (or Satan himself? It's absolutely up to you!) from Hell's management want a "tour of the premises," and Crowley has to take them around London for sightseeing, as well as showing off his projects. Possibly he has to take them out for drinks. Aziraphale might help out, making sure that Crowley gets some points. A/C, established or pining, or no pairing, I'm not picky. Rated G or T.)
Summary: Crowley’s superiors are coming to Earth for the first time post-apocalypse. In an effort to keep the carnage to a minimum, Crowley is attempting to entertain them at his place while he fills them in on his assorted wiles. The only problem is he has only the vaguest idea how to throw a dinner party. He enlists Aziraphale’s help.
Notes: the bulk of this fic is the grocery shopping prompt, but while thinking about what they would be grocery shopping for I remembered the second prompt and thought that would be a great setup even though I didn’t write the dinner party itself. (I picture it going about as well as that dinner party in The Good Place that Trevor attends, only with like, four Trevors, and Crowley gets to complain in Aziraphale’s arms for three hours afterward.) Thanks for such a fun set of likes to work with (bickering! drunk scenes! snark!) and I hope you enjoy! Happy holidays.
1. The supermarket, eight hours before
“I still don’t understand why we’re even here,” Crowley said, his grumbling undermined somewhat by the fact that he was pushing the shopping cart ahead of them both and then hopping on the back to ride it at intervals. “I don’t think Heaven actually requires you to do everything the long way around.”1
1 He genuinely wasn’t sure at this point. Aziraphale did things like buy real clothes and stock real tea in his cabinets and throw out the eggs in his freezer when they went off (which was still usually quite some time before they had expected to go off, but by contrast Crowley’s fridge had never let anything expire in its life). But then he also did things like convince an honestly bought Riesling to become a several-decades-extinct Bordeaux with an idle thought. It was hard to tell which of Aziraphale’s quirks were Heavenly mandates and which were just Aziraphale.
“Stop complaining, dear,” Aziraphale murmured over a display of Brie. “I’m supporting local businesses, not to mention doing you a good turn, and you’re reinforcing the idea that humans have to pay money to fulfill their basic biological functions. Points for both of us.”
“Huh.” Crowley turned this over in his head and couldn’t find fault with it.
“And you get more for annoying me, don’t you?” Aziraphale asked in the same disinterested tone, but Crowley caught the edge of his sly smile and kicked him in the ankle as he rolled past.
“If that were true I’d never have to do any work at all.”
“So it is true, then.”
“Hey! I spent six months this year on websites that look like they’ll let you stream full television episodes but actually require a cable login. I deserve a bit of a break.”
Aziraphale hummed skeptically, catching the cart with one hand to tip in his pile of cheeses with the other before Crowley could push off again.
“They won’t want wine and cheese anyway,” Crowley said, frowning morosely at the cart. “More into entrails, that crowd. I don’t drink… wine, sort of thing.”
“The cheese is for me,” Aziraphale said primly. “Trust me. I have some ideas.” He passed his handwritten list to Crowley, who peered at it with interest.
Beef carpaccio: tenderloin, capers, Parmesan, vinaigrette
Fugu sashimi: torafugu, daikon, ginger, sake, mirin, soy sauce, dashi
Veal sweetbreads: veal thymus, vinegar, shallots, capers, dressing
Larb: minced pork, pork blood, onion, cumin, cloves, anise2
2 By the time they were finished shopping, the cashier was somewhat surprised to find themself checking out several ingredients that Crowley was sure the little market hadn’t carried before a certain angel had stepped in with a firm plan in mind, but one beaming smile from Aziraphale ensured they were only concerned with conscientiously arranging the purchases in his reusable bag.
“Oh, very good, angel,” Crowley said. “I might actually survive the night.”
“Certainly, if I have anything to say about it.”
2. Crowley’s flat, 3 hours before
“So now what am I supposed to do with all of this?” Crowley asked, back at home in his flat, fairly certain that his pristine kitchen had never seen so many unassembled ingredients before at once. There were meats and organs leaking blood into the sink, an arrangement of vegetables on the hastily materialized marble cutting board that were notably not-yet-sushi-shaped, an array of spices that Crowley hadn’t seen in jars since they were still being used as currency scattered on the island. The few bottles of ready-to-use sauces gave him a small measure of hope, but he had the nasty suspicion that at least a few of them were meant to be mixed together before they were put on plates.
“Well, you cook with them,” Aziraphale said, with all of the unearned confidence of an ethereal being whose home-cooking skills were essentially limited to taking cured meats and cheeses out of their packaging but had been to enough restaurants with quick service to be sure it couldn’t be that difficult. He started unloading cookbooks from his bag onto the bar, opening each to a bookmarked page. “I did come prepared.”
“Have you ever actually followed these recipes or do you just read and catalogue them?” Crowley asked. Aziraphale waved a dismissive hand and optimistically picked up one of Crowley’s knives3 to attack a daikon with it.
3 top of the line, very expensive, never used
As it turned out, Aziraphale really wasn’t horrible at cooking. His knife skills were very precise, something Crowley parlayed into several sword jokes before they were finished. Crowley’s part in the whole adventure consisted mainly of surreptitiously miracling away any mistakes he caught Aziraphale making while drinking his way through large quantities of the sake, not to mention tempting Aziraphale to the same. At some point, perhaps sensing the increasingly cheerful atmosphere in the kitchen, Crowley’s speakers had turned themselves on and were currently blasting something that wasn’t yet Queen but probably would be soon. Crowley was trying to get Aziraphale to taste the sweetbread dressing from the end of his finger when the sound of a doorbell ringing cut into the music.
“Oh shit,” Crowley said, knocking the last bottle of sake into a bowl of vinaigrette as he stumbled away from the counter.
“Sober up!” Aziraphale hissed, dissolving into giggles halfway through the admonition.
“You sober up!”
“They’re your bosses!”
Crowley made an inarticulate noise, squinted, winced, and immediately looked terrified. Aziraphale passed him the sake bottle, suddenly whole and full again.
“One… one drink,” he instructed, still suppressing giggles. “One… maybe two.” Crowley took three large gulps and thrust the bottle back at Aziraphale.
“Right,” he said. “Right. It’ll be fine. They already didn’t end the world, what else could happen?”
“Ooh, don’t say that. S’dangerous, going around saying stuff like that.”
“Big help you are,” Crowley muttered. “All right, get out of here. Leave the cheeses. Shoo.” He flapped his hands at the now-sulking angel as the doorbell rang out again, somehow managing to sound distinctly peeved this time.4
4 Crowley paid it no mind; it would have been very un-demonic of him to answer the door on time anyway.
“But, Aziraphale--” Crowley caught Aziraphale by the elbow before he could leave the kitchen fully. “I’m coming to yours after. I’ll call you?”
“Of course, dear,” Aziraphale said, beaming. Crowley nodded back with a tentative smile, then turned to face the forces of Hell wrapped in business casual who were waiting at his front door.
3. Aziraphale’s bookshop, two hours after
“...and absolutely no manners, not a single one of them, I mean, Beezsssslebub literally just, just had flies everywhere instead of just having one mouth and using that to eat…” Crowley gave a theatrical shudder, dislodging his head from where it had been resting against Aziraphale’s knee. He was sprawled on the floor in Aziraphale’s back room while Aziraphale slowly slumped farther and farther into the squashy loveseat, a bottle of wine balanced precariously in one hand.
“Well, did he like it?” Aziraphale interrupted. Crowley stopped abruptly, mouth working soundlessly as he visibly attempted to change the tracks in his brain to answer.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, everyone liked everything. And I did get a conv- comm- you know, a ‘thanks for making the internet even worse’ paper bit.” Aziraphale nodded sagely.
“Good for you, my dear.”
“Yeah! So there, Beesssss… thing.”
“So there,” Aziraphale agreed. Crowley’s head came back to his knee with a sleepy sigh. The bottle next to Aziraphale finally overturned, leaking a thin stream of red onto the couch. Aziraphale frowned sternly at it, but Crowley waved an unconcerned hand.
“Worry ‘bout it tomorrow, angel,” he said with a slow, rare blink.
“Hmm. Yes. Tomorrow.” Aziraphale closed his eyes, relaxing further into the cushions as Crowley took a deep breath, caught a second wind, and started his diatribe anew on the 30-year backlog of paperwork Dagon had left him. Aziraphale didn’t fall asleep, exactly, but the way he relaxed into the buzz of wine inside him and the hiss of Crowley’s words outside was something very similar, and even more peaceful.
