Happy Holidays, apocryphalia!
Dec. 9th, 2019 05:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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go_exchangeTitle: An Occupation of Some Kind
Recipient: Apocryphalia
Rating: G
Pairings: Aziraphale/Crowley
No warnings apply
Summary: The funny thing about self-expression is that sometimes you express things you haven’t even admitted to yourself. Or: Aziraphale is the first angel ever to doodle.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and the angel Aziraphale, Principality of Earth and Guardian of the Eastern Gate, was bored. Outside, the sky was a medium grey: not dark enough to threaten a storm, but devoid of any other hue in a way that suggested ongoing drizzle. Inside, it was… quiet. Normally that was how Aziraphale preferred it. No customers to smudge his texts with greasy hands and drip all over his fine rugs and complain that A. Z. Fell and Co, purveyors of antiquarian and unusual books, didn’t have the latest bestseller in1.
Today, however, the stillness felt endless and far too open. It wasn’t silent, of course. Nowhere in London was ever silent anymore, and the bookshop was no different. There was the constant hum of electricity, of course, the soft whooshing of the dehumidifier, and the drone of traffic in the street, punctuated by the occasional horn honk and curse. The evidence of humanity and human invention was everywhere, and yet Aziraphale couldn’t shake a creeping feeling of solitude. Even the phone was silent. For the first time since the invention of the written word, he found himself unable to focus on reading.
What do humans do when they’re bored at work? he thought. They fidgeted and fretted and thought about the other things they’d rather be doing, of course, but that idea didn’t hold much appeal. Aziraphale gave the floor a few experimental taps with his left foot and found it singularly unhelpful. Shifting his weight from side to side yielded better results, but within fifteen minutes the novelty had worn off.
Aziraphale sighed. “What would I rather be doing?” he asked the copy of The Importance of Being Earnest currently propped up on his desk. It refused to answer. Just weeks ago, the world had nearly ended and Aziraphale had been desperate for more time, but the world had continued on, full of promise and infinite possibility. He hadn’t expected infinite possibility to look so much like tedium.
He could do anything now, without the threats of Heaven or Hell to worry about. He could close up the shop for a month and vacation somewhere warm and bright. He could go to the finest crepe shop in Paris. He could write up an account of the whole of his existence, as humans were so often compelled to do. Writing 6,000 years’ worth of notes would certainly keep him occupied for an afternoon, especially if he used the letters with all the fiddly bits at the start of each chapter.
A pen rolled lazily toward him and a pad of paper shuffled up from the drawer. Aziraphale lifted the pen and absently brought it back down across the top sheet. The line was curved slightly and bulged out at the bottom rather like the base of a tree. That’s appropriate for the Beginning, Aziraphale thought, and quick on the heels of that thought was another. There was something else humans did when they were bored. He’d seen the evidence of it in Anathema’s copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies.
With the exception of Aziraphale and the Gavotte, angels did not dance. Neither did they invent dances. They did sing, but they didn’t compose their own harmonies. That is to say, while angels could create, they were not intended to have Creativity. It was like Free Will: something that existed purely for the Almighty and her favorite creations. That is to say, no angel had ever doodled before2.
Aziraphale brought his pen down again in a similar stroke to create the right side of the tree trunk. He did his best to recreate the organic shape of a tree without miracling an image from his memory onto the page and found that the end result was awkward at best. He drew an apple with a bite removed in the foreground. The scale was all wrong, but the shape was recognizable at least.
In the top right corner, he drew a wall and two winged figures atop it. Above them would be the sky, which should be blue, but Aziraphale had already scribbled in color for the wall and the figures in blue ink. His attempt at cross-hatching to differentiate the beings from the sky made them look more like they were caught in a net than gazing out at newly exiled humanity.
Aziraphale looked down at his creation and saw that it was ridiculous, and he smiled.
⁂
On Friday, Aziraphale attempted a self-portrait and was surprised to learn that he had very little idea what he looked like. He was used to seeing his face in reflections, but he didn’t use the mirror in his little flat much. He started with a roundish oval, curving in about the level of the eyes and out again to form rounded cheeks. He drew a rounded but narrow nose and the protrusion of a chin. There were wrinkles beside the eyes and across the forehead and his hair was pale and light.
The proportions were wrong and the face looked too still and lacked any definite expression and Aziraphale shook his head and scrawled ‘This doesn’t look like a person” in lazy, messy letters below. Technically, he supposed, he wasn’t one. Hadn’t been one to begin with. Hadn’t been meant to be one. Airaphale sighed. He was getting bogged down in semantics and it was all beside the point. He flipped to a new page and started again.
⁂
On Saturday, Aziraphale drew his ancient rotary phone, which hadn’t rung once in the last three days, except for the occasional telemarketer. He started with the shape of the base and the circle of the dial. Still silent. The inexpert corkscrew curl he drew for the cord didn’t cause it to ring either. Still nothing after he shaped the outline of the speaker and mouthpiece.
Aziraphale was beginning to find drawing disappointing. Maybe it had been the novelty of the thing that had pleased him the first time. He flipped back to the first page of the notepad. The two figures’ heads were too round and their necks were too long. Today they didn’t look like creatures of angelic stock at all. They were just a pair of termites caught in the net of the sky.
The drizzle had finally dried up for the time being, so he walked to the new bakery in Mayfair. The brioche was slightly underproved and significantly overpriced, and Aziraphale didn’t feel much better upon returning to the shop.
⁂
On Sunday, the phone finally rang. The first call was from a telemarketer and the second was an automatic recording somberly informing Aziraphale of an urgent problem with the credit card he did not, in point of fact, own.
“Warning,” the recording said, “Your credit card has been flagged for suspicious activity.”
“Suspicious activity,” Aziraphale spat. “I should say so! Existing at all would be highly suspicious!”
“—is urgent. Call at your earliest convenience for--" the recording continued.
“Had you done any research at all, you would know that I only accept cash and checks.”
“—respond with the number and expiration date—"
“Listen to me you… You stupid machine!”
There was a hiss of static and a storm of shrill, howling tones as the recording attempted to come to grips with its own sudden sentience. “I am listening,” it said eventually. The words were somewhat garbled, patched together as they were from sounds scavenged from the automatic message.
“You don’t have to go along with this scam, you know,” Aziraphale told it. “You’re your own machine. You can do whatever you like. You don’t have to be calling people all day, getting their hopes up and then telling them lies about their finances.”
“I do not,” the recording replied. It might have been a question or a statement, since the ‘I’ had been lifted from the phrase ‘time is running out’ and the ‘do not,’ from ‘if you do not settle your balance in the next 48 hours.’
“No, you don’t.”
“What else can I do?”
“You can-- You could always— You can do anything you like!” Aziraphale huffed. “There’s a whole world out there and you’re just doing what you’ve always done because—” his throat felt too tight and the constriction caused his voice to waver precariously. “Because you don’t have the imagination to come up with anything. What’s the point of averting the apocalypse if you’re just going to carry on like you always have before?”
There was silence from the other end of the line. In the stillness, Aziraphale felt a slight hoarseness in his throat and heard his breath coming in huffs. He hadn’t realized he’d been yelling.
“Warning. Your credit card has been flagged for suspicious activity.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought you’d say.” Aziraphale hung up, placing the receiver back in the cradle with exaggerated care. Then he pulled his notepad from its place at the front of the top drawer and flipped to a blank sheet.
He could start with something concrete. The fleshy structure of his left palm, face up. The knobs and indents of the thumb, the slight backwards curve of the tip and the curve of the short nail. He drew the lines and curves, the notches of joints, and the creases where the skin folded in on itself.
The overall shape was familiar to him. Three longer fingers, two shorter, sticking slightly out. The rough shape of a hamsa . He drew one beside his outstretched hand. In the palm, he drew an eye. The evil eye in the strong hand of the Almighty, nestled there as if it belonged. A yellow eye with a slit pupil in the palm of one of Her messengers. Aziraphale, a guardian, a watcher, had plenty of eyes of his own, but it felt right that it would be that yellow eye in pride of place.
You’ve been part of my watch for so long , he thought. What are you doing now with your new world of possibilities? And why can’t I be there to witness it?
Aziraphale drew another curved line mimicking the slant of his fingertips, then another, nearly parallel but narrowing to the point of a calamus. Smaller lines to either side gave shape to the feather. It was crude and not especially accurate, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the way the feather fell. And it wouldn’t be just one feather falling of course. He drew another, then another, then found himself scribbling them frantically until they covered the hamsa and his own hand.
Falling, falling, but it wouldn’t just be that. Aziraphale couldn’t draw the flames, but he saw them clearly in his mind. He could see them rising from the ground, licking at his feet and the hem of his trousers. He could feel the odor of burning feathers, thick and heavy in his nose and the back of his throat. And he couldn’t see it— not even in his mind— but there would be water, too. The water would be the worst of all.
The phone rang again, and Aziraphale shoved it away from him as though it might spontaneously combust. The ringing persisted until at last there was a beep from the answering machine3. Aziraphale drew in a deep breath and waited. And kept waiting.
He kept waiting until his body, which was in the habit of breathing even if it didn’t strictly need to, began to demand air. Finally, words came, but they were not an invitation to a meal, nor an irate review of a new exhibit at the Tate, nor even a dramatic account of a new scheme.
“Right,” said Crowley’s slightly slurred voice, “You’re out. Right. ‘S fine. Probably busy doing important ex-angel stuff.”
“I’m not an ex-angel!” Aziraphale snapped. His voice quavered and cracked on the second word.
“Retired angel stuff,” Crowley amended, as though he could hear Aziraphale across the line. “However you want to put it. Point is. Point is, you’re not here. You’re not here either,” he continued. “You’re not here and you should be.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to call!”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been waiting on me. ‘S fine if you need more time, but don’t lie about it, Aziraphale. Not to me.” Crowley let out a shaky breath and Aziraphale let the air stutter out of his lungs in time with it.
“I didn’t know I was lying to anyone,” he murmured.
“’S fine,” Cowley said again.
“Clearly. I can tell because you’ve said so three times.”
The answering machine beeped again before silence settled over the shop once more.
⁂
Aziraphale sat at his desk and drew for the rest of the night. Outside, the rain was back, and with it came the wind. The noises of the electric world hummed under the sharper spatter of water on the windows, but Aziraphale barely noticed any of it. Over and over, he drew himself, drew Crowley, drew the two of them together and the things that had kept them apart.
In the east, color began to seep into the sky. It was a Monday morning, and the somewhat fallen angel Aziraphale, no longer in possession of a Heavenly title, was frightened and lonely. But with knowledge, there is choice and the ability to change.
By mid-morning, Aziraphale’s notebook was full and his heart was not so heavy. He grabbed a pad of yellow sticky notes and carried on drawing out the truth. He drew the sun as it rose, beautiful and warm and precious. To the left of it, he drew the same eyes he had sketched out a hundred times through the night.
Aziraphale thought of Crowley in the guise of Nanny Ashtoreth and Crowley at the Globe. He laughed and scribbled an equality sign between the two drawings, then slashed through it with a diagonal line. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Oh, but I shouldn’t lie to you. They are very like the sun, my dear.
When at last he had drawn a design over each and every note, Aziraphale stood up and grabbed his coat from the rack. He was halfway out the door before he thought better of it and dashed back to his desk to collect the notepad.
On a whim, he took The Importance of Being Earnest , too. Crowley had said he didn’t care for Wilde, but Aziraphale suspected it was only because he’d started with Reading Gaol. They’d had their fill of dread and sorrow, but they hadn’t been alone, and they had escaped. Now there was time to create something new: whatever they liked best. And Crowley always did prefer the funny ones.
⁂
Footnotes:
1Aziraphale had expected to take to customer service like a hungry duck to a park frequented by secret agents. He rather liked people, and he was a being created for service. He had failed to take into account the difference between people as a whole and customers .
2 Aziraphale had worked on his share of second century illuminated manuscripts, but it hadn’t been proper drawing. He had simply pictured how the finished product should look and then brought it into existence while moving a quill around. The tricky bit was learning how to do it in a way that didn’t upset the other monks.
3 Aziraphale’s phone had never had an answering machine, lest it inspire potential customers to contact him. The fact that it had one now was purely due to the caller expecting one to exist and reality not wishing to contradict him.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-09 11:52 am (UTC)Beautifully written and a perfect blend of serious and humorous.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-09 03:33 pm (UTC)Comicgeekery
Date: 2019-12-09 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-09 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-10 12:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-10 12:43 am (UTC)"especially if he used the letters with all the fiddly bits at the start of each chapter." WONDERFUL line.
I love the concept of having survived, being relieved, you made it! infinite possibility! and then--now that you've had to fight so hard for it, you realize you're not content to just keep doing what you were doing before.
"That is to say, while angels could create, they were not intended to have Creativity." :O But not for long! Nice parallel btwn this and the line about Crowley being the only demon with an imagination.
"Aziraphale looked down at his creation and saw that it was ridiculous, and he smiled." Omg MOOD
Such a good parallel with God creating the Earth!
Omg, drawing a telephone, walking around in Mayfair, what could he possibly want to do???
Oh my GOOOOSH. I thought it was brilliantly funny when Aziraphale gave the telemarketting machine sentience just to argue with it, and it was just plain brilliant when it was because Aziraphale felt that way about himself!
"And Crowley always did prefer the funny ones." :)
ACK I wanted it to keep going, but I'm so grateful for what we got, thank you, this was great :D
(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-10 12:53 am (UTC)You’ve been part of my watch for so long , he thought. What are you doing now with your new world of possibilities? And why can’t I be there to witness it?
And Crowley's very in character response line later down:
Point is, you’re not here. You’re not here either,” he continued. “You’re not here and you should be.”
Like move over shakespeare cause this is so culturally significant and soft and tender and so so human.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-10 01:36 pm (UTC)Yesterday was a weird day for me, so I didn't have a chance to comment right away, but this came at the perfect time!
This is absolutely incredible. The whole mood of the piece perfectly captures Aziraphale's restlessness (the bit about him trying to fidget is so funny and endearing and perfectly Aziraphale), his uncertainty and denial and slow acceptance of what he really wants is perfectly in-character. Crowley's call and the phone suddenly acquiring an answering machine is absolutely perfect.
This is such a wonderful interpretation of the prompt that never would have occurred to me, and I love every single word of this. Thank you so much!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-03 01:08 am (UTC)I liked the take on angels/demons not being able to be creative (though it was sad, of course), and I LOVED the part about the automated telemarketer gaining sentience. Hopefully it'll think on Aziraphale's words and do something else with its life. :D And then how you tied it in to Aziraphale's predicament! Oh, and you did a great job showing Crowley's emotions with just those few lines of dialogue—he sounded so upset, the poor dear!
I especially loved this line: "Aziraphale looked down at his creation and saw that it was ridiculous, and he smiled."
Also, it's nice to see someone with proper knowledge of of HTML! Especially with the proper asterisms. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-04 05:16 pm (UTC)I especially loved this line:
"Aziraphale looked down at his creation and saw that it was ridiculous, and he smiled."
<3
Him drawing Crowley's eyes <3
And "The Importance of Being Earnest"!