Happy Holidays, HSavinien!

[goe_mod]

Title: Silk Road (But It's A Barge In A Harbor)
Recipient: hsavinien
Rating: PG?
Summary: A vignette set in an AU where Crowley and Aziraphale were assigned to Asia, featuring Crowley in late Imperial China not too long before the First Opium War. There is some period-appropriate racism, but I try to keep it low-key. (And Crowley just doesn't like any of the humans he's dealing with.)

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Crowley shifted on his feet slightly, pulling in the salt air through his lips so he could properly taste it. Even when he wasn’t being a snake, even when the body wasn’t created from scratch for him, there were some habits that he couldn’t shake and things that just weren’t normal. Aziraphale had suggested that those kinds of details were to try to keep demons from going native and then Crowley had brought up some of the similar issues the angel’s human forms persistently had and nothing had happened really.

It wasn’t like he had meant to poke at old scars. Especially wing scars. Crowley knew how sensitive those could be, and… Well. Crowley was still not sure who on his side that he had offended…or earned a favor from, it was dreadfully hard to tell the difference sometimes. At least this time having looks that weren’t properly Han were not the disadvantage they usually were. And Aziraphale couldn’t claim that smuggling opium was against the arrangement; it just was the most profitable part of Crowley’s loads.

It’d have looked strange to the Europeans he traded with if he had been willing to take the opium but refused to take the occasional missionary or load of Bibles over, anyway.

Not like he and the angel were sure which side would like that. They’d listened to some of those missionaries.

Crowley was very certain that he’d go ahead and try smoking opium if he and Aziraphale got commendations for that impending disaster.

The opium, though, was definitely going to please his side, for all that it was really quite annoying and all the humans involved were quite annoying. For all that Aziraphale insisted that the Mandate of Heaven was not a Thing, thank you, Crowley was not entirely convinced. When you got down to it, Aziraphale was a good way to tell if the current dynasty was going to last much longer, and the angel had not hidden in the least that he would ignore a lot just to get his hands on European books.

So even the local representative of Heaven could be said to be in favor of trading with the foriegn barbarians. Not that Crowley would consider Europeans to be any less civilized than the Chinese or local barbarians. He would forever insist to the angel that actually civilized people would not have him waking up after sleeping away the 17th century to discover that his side had sent him multiple commendations for…things he didn’t have anything to do with.

Sichuan was not something he wanted to take credit for, especially since he’d been asleep for it, and he still was wanting to know what the Ming had done to offend Aziraphale.

But here and now? He had some idea what might be offending the angel. Opium might not be precisely an acceptable trade good for reasons—Crowley had appreciated discovering that it seemed to get some humans to pick up on his snake-hood especially when it came in the form of discovering that there were people into that—but it wasn’t like the Qing were willing to allow trade in goods. Crowley felt that they had set this in motion. It would have been better to let the foreign barbarians sell trifles than have them importing opium.

Standing out on one of the barges set up for smuggling it in, though, and being stuck looking like some sailor’s left-behind offspring? Crowley did not really favor either side. The English had sent diplomats, and even if they had left rather a lot to be desired on the competency front they had (very badly) tried. The Chinese court, however, was as complacent as ever.

It likely said a lot about the world that their Agreement was, well, triggered by their frustration with that. They had both been on Earth for nearly all its existence, at least the parts that hadn’t been basically retroactively brought into existence to ensure proper backstories for everything. If anybody on Earth would know if things had changed, it was likely the two of them, and if nothing else the sanitation had definitely improved and the entertainment options tended to as well.

Trying to pretend that things always had and always would be the same just couldn’t end well. Crowley had a sizable stack of commendations to back that up, though he’d also seen the ones Aziraphale had gotten for roughly the same thing because, apparently, angels (fallen or not) tended to like the idea of things staying unchanging and the same, which…

Well, it did explain a depressing number of things about his and the angel’s bosses.

All the more reason to hope that they got the opportunity to derail the Apocalypse, Earth was simply a much better place to be. It might even get them a bit of a chance to roam; for all that the Chinese liked to believe that the entire world (at least, the parts worth seeing, anyway) existed within their borders… Crowley could tell, just from the bits and pieces he picked up while playing an ambitious merchant with slightly better morals than many others, that there were things going on elsewhere, and the speeds at which the opium cutters went…

If there was a bit of chaos, there might be a loosening of the traces for a bit and an opportunity to just hop onto one of those ships and sail off for a while. He wasn’t sure Aziraphale would go with him, at least not without the thought of maybe obtaining additional books for the ever-growing collection, but… He could handle going off on his own, at least for a while. That was the main thing, right?

But for now, business and seeing if this would be the time that the Chinese authorities would come looking to destroy contraband. Crowley didn’t quite care, he had taken care to have it be mostly other people’s money just to add to the chaos he was sure would happen, but it would be inconvenient to be out on the water for the raid.

Comments

[hsavinien]

Fascinating! I love it. I really enjoy seeing what Crowley's getting up to and the indictment of complacency is very apt. I'm amused by Crowley's encounters with the snake fanciers. Oh dear...