Happy Holidays, Lilyaceae!
Jan. 4th, 2019 05:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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go_exchangeTitle: War and Peace Pranks
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Fic Summary: In this human AU, Crowley has determined Aziraphale is the man he wants to spend the rest of his life with. Aziraphale's daughter Carmine has determined Crowley is an untrustworthy bastard.
Author's Note: Happy holidays Lilyaceae! I hope you enjoy this fic. There's actually a lot here pulled from real life and people I've known, and I'm a little sad that I ended up cutting so much but maybe I'll come back to this later. I love the idea and did way too much worldbuilding, and found out I own As You Wish by Cary Elwes but not The Princess Bride by William Goldman, which just seems strange. Also thanks to my friend Holly for going over this.
It’s been half an hour since the last text; a non-committal “k” sentencing Crowley to the purgatory of a rainy high-school parking lot. He feels distinctly creepy about the situation; forty-something and lurking after-hours in a place meant for the education of teenagers. He reminds himself he has a legitimate reason to be hanging about. He’s doing a favour for Aziraphale, is all.
Crowley looks at his phone again and considers sending another text and how to word it, but instead of the texting app he opens Facebook and selects a political group page at random and trolls people in the comments for another ten minutes. He checks his text messages again and stares at the screen, thumbs hovering above the keyboard, the rain roaring judgmentally in his ears.
He knows Carmine isn’t going to answer. She enjoys making him squirm and takes every opportunity available to make him feel like a worm dangling from the fingers of an excited five-year-old.
They'd likely get along well enough if their first meeting hadn’t been a quiet and strained, yet thorough, disaster, but it’s a little late for first impressions now. She hadn’t taken well to finding out a strange man she hadn’t known existed had stayed the night, and viewed him with a connoisseur's blend of suspicion and resentment. He’s a little disappointed that staying to cook breakfast well past the time he should have left for work[1] did nothing to save his image, or his ego. He’s also disappointed that the span of a year hadn’t ironed out their misgivings.
His phone jingles out a text notification and he opens the message with a mixture of relief, anticipation, and dread; the emotional equivalent of Neapolitan ice cream.
[need muscle]
And then another:
[got any, noodle man?]
Strange, she usually avoids asking him for help. He texts her a reply.
[Only in my left pinky. What’s the emergency?]
[set fell. drama instructor is too squishy to lift it]
Then:
[ur not funny]
Crowley grits his teeth and shoves the car door open.
It hadn’t been too bad with the drama instructor’s help. The fallen piece of set had been fairly thin plywood and only truly awkward due to size. The worst part was the circling flock of teenage girls presumably waiting for them to screw up like a better-dressed venue of smartphone-wielding vultures.
“You guys couldn’t, uh, help him yourselves?” Crowley asks quietly afterwards, as the crowd disperses, deprived of their carrion.
Carmine shrugs, retrieving her knapsack from behind the audio equipment. The theatre suddenly feels very open and exposed. He’s disappointed her, but can’t imagine how. Something about the whole things stinks like a set-up that didn’t pan out.
Crowley shuffles closer to the soundboard, and gets an idea. He gets the kind of idea that makes his his palms feel strange and his fingers twitch.
“Next rehearsal...” he begins. “It’s the last one, right?”
Carmine decides not to cold-shoulder him on this one, but it’s clearly a consideration.
“Yeah.”
Crowley hums an acknowledgement. He casually reaches for the cables plugged into what he assumes must be the audio input and swiftly begins to rearrange them. Carmine watches with a deep frown.
“What are you doing?”
Crowley, the Grown Adult in this situation, Prospective Parental Figure, Idiot In Question, and Impulsive Dipshit, freezes with a cable in each hand and swallows the urge to ask if it’s a trick question.
“Something funnier than my texting, I hope,” he says in a small voice.
Carmine smiles, to their apparent mutual shock, and turns away quickly as if embarrassed. She has Aziraphale’s dimples, and Crowley can see his future husband's influence, for a moment, in the girl’s face that isn’t quite his warm shade of brown.
Crowley clears his throat and looks down at the cables in his hands. He plugs them into ports at random, feeling a cozy sort of accomplishment.
“Well,” he says, straightening up and gesturing to the exit with as much flair as could be assumed to lack sarcasm. “Lead on, Macduff.”
“Mom would have your head for that one,” Carmine says in the flattest tone he’s ever heard out of her, and Crowley beams.[2]
It’s midnight, and Aziraphale is still silently chewing over the film adaptation of The Princess Bride, tucked into Crowley’s side on worn couch of his two bedroom flat. His thoughts remain unsaid, but they play out plainly in his expressions.
“It’s different,” he says finally, and Crowley grunts out a half asleep assent with his face a good ways buried in Aziraphale’s pleasantly scented hair.[3]
Footsteps on the hardwood from the hall, and a head of blood red hair pokes around the corner and voices her disgust before continuing on to the kitchen. The two men on the couch stare at the place she had appeared with slightly different levels of resignation.
“That’s an improvement,” Aziraphale notes with a nearly sardonic cheerfulness. “Not a single gagging sound.”
“She smiled at me today,” Crowley informs him, an edge of bewilderment breaking through the sleepy haze coating his words.
Aziraphale’s smile flips from strained to genuine and he kisses Crowley softly on the cheek.
“We’ll make family out of you yet,” he promises, low enough it won’t carry out of the room.
“As you wish,” Crowley mumbles, the film fresh in his mind. His mouth presses into a self-satisfied grin before his eyes finally slide closed.
He has an idea now. The strange and twitchy kind. The kind that involves a certain level of harmless mischief and a potential prankster protege. The kind that has possibilities for bouncy balls dropped from high places, and hide and seek in show-homes, and escalator races, and using his access to professional printing equipment to make some interesting signs to leave at the market.
[1] He hadn’t exactly been eager to go anyway, clients never understood his job; they had the most ridiculous complaints, and he couldn’t even be rude to them about it. He went to school for this, he’d been in this industry for two decades. He knows what’s appealing to put on a magazine spread and it is not that, and yes, he expects to be paid for the two weeks you spent making him edit the same five pixels. Honestly he should go for a management position, he couldn’t possibly be any more incompetent at it and he’d be able to delegate the bitchy emails to someone else. [return]
[2] Aziraphale had begun his transition when his daughter was around six, and the title had already stuck. He’d privately admitted to Crowley that he had always found the surprised reactions of by-standing strangers in the supermarket amusing when they saw a middle-aged man answer a tween girl calling out for her mother. Misquoting Shakespeare however, wasn’t looked upon as charitably. [return]
[3] Avocado, or something. He’s not sure he remembers what avocado smells like, but it’s the kind of scent he’s decided avocado should have. [return]
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-08 11:25 pm (UTC)