Happy holidays, Quantum_witch!
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quantum_witch
Author:use_theforce_em
Title: Something Like That
Rating: R for metaphysical smexing
Prompt: Crowley/Aziraphale, Crowley/Aziraphale/Anathema as many of these as the giver cares to try for - sex is always consentual, voyeurism is fine, sex in the bentley or open air is good stuff, can be metaphysical rather than physical; absolutely no wangst, please, R
Summary: In which Anathema learns that bachelorette parties are actually baby showers, that neighbors aren’t always as bad as you think they are, and that angels and demons are far more interesting when they fog up the windows of old automobiles after good night ofséancing cards. Crowley and Aziraphale don’t learn anything, but that’s to be expected. ;)
Notes: I hope you enjoy it, quantum_witch! I tried to get everything in there. :) All my love to my anonymous betas, and undying love to my dear friend who translated my very British dialogue into very French French. You rule the world, love. Or you pwn France, at least, which might be better.
It was Adam Young’s fifteenth birthday party, and all the younger children required to attend had decided that the kind, middling-aged chap with remarkably blue eyes and horrible bow tie was the perfect model to “tart up” with any accessory they could get their hands on.
The young man that the afore mentioned chap had arrived with was busying himself with something that looked like Sprite but definitely wasn’t. In between sips, he would glance over at the scene, watch bows and scarves and pink makeup kits go flying, and try to stop himself from slipping off his chair in hysterics. That shade of gloss really did suit him, in a 1980s prostitute sort of way.
He was determined to prevent a conversation between himself and Mr. Young about keeping cars “in such good shape”. He didn’t know what Turtle Wax was , and he was quite certain that he didn’t want to know.
Didn’t stop Mr. Young’s son from sitting down next to him for a few minutes. He tried not to fidget or cringe, but he expected the young man knew he wanted to, so there was really nothing for it.
The finely-crafted, serene face looked wickedly amused. “So you’re just going to let ‘im handle that all on his own?”
“Yup.”
“Don’t even feel sorry for ‘im?”
“Nope.”
“Not even a little?”
“ I didn’t drag him here. Anyway, you know how long it’s been since it was widely fashionable for men to wear makeup? Enough for him to join the trend?”
“I reckon I do.”
“Then you should realize why I would find it so incredibly comical. That’s not even taking into account how they name all the colors something embarrassing nowadays.”
Mr. Young’s son nodded sagely. “Yes, I believe one of them told me that the first shade was Girl About Town, but that they now have him in Please Me.”
Crowley sprayed his not-Sprite all over the table. Luckily, no one was sitting there but the two of them, which left them free to laugh wildly at their private little joke. Eventually, as the demon brushed tears from the corners of his eyes, the young man stood up and said, “I should be getting’ back to the party. Don’t be anti-social. You should talk to some people, it might do you good.”
Crowley peered at him inquisitively, but decided not to ask for a more detailed rationalization on that comment. He intended to stay exactly where he was for his part, but he said nothing as Adam Young walked off in search of heaven-and-hell knew what.
It turned out that it was perfectly fine for him to stay exactly where he was. Company came a moment later in the form of a pair of obsidian black eyes and hands that folded neatly on the table, like all the cards were already there and all she had to do was read them straight out.
“You know, I wanted to – ”
“Apologize for your rude behavior the day we met,” Crowley finished for her. He could play that game too, if need be.
She paused at that, but when he looked up she was all smiles. “Maybe you should apologize too. You weren’t exactly a pussy cat yourself.”
And you would have liked that, wouldn’t you, you broomstick wielding, rodent gut reading, cycles-by-night, polytheistic, cauldron wench? He didn’t think it in a mean sort of way, actually, it was more in a fond I used to go join the circle myself in the old days and I haven’t had that much fun at a Sabbat since sort of way. “Mm. Well, you didn’t exactly catch us at the best time; Things were going on you know.”
“Mm,” she echoed. “Yes, we were all concentrating ferociously on Things. I suppose it turned out all right in the end, since the book ended up with your friend. But I thought you were both highway rapists when I got into the car.”
Crowley looked affronted. “Have you ever met a highway rapist who dresses like this?”
“It was dark.” She grabbed her wine glass off the table behind them and started sipping thoughtfully. “You know, I thought you two were – ”
“Not yet,” Crowley corrected. “That happened after.”
“Ah.” He could hear the smile in her voice that time. “So then I wasn’t completely off the mark when…”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t act like you’re so shrewd, you only thought that because the angel acts poncy. And everyone picks up on that, even him, he just doesn’t care enough to change it.”
She blinked like his voice was applying mascara to her lashes by stabbing the brush into her eyes. “Actually… you were the one who made me think it.”
That stopped him mid-swallow. “Ngk?”
“Yes, it was you,” the witch told him, sounding more pleased than the hellhound currently receiving a belly rub on the far side of the lawn. “When you told him to get back into the car. You called him ‘angel’ and you seemed very, how do they put it? … ah yes, ‘old, Jewish and married.’”
Crowley chuckled. “Only one out of three, I’m afraid.”
Her jaw dropped in mock horror. “You’re Jewish?”
“You know, I don’t remember you being nearly this sharp when I met you.”
“You’d hit me with your car.”
“Ah, so that’s the excuse they’re using these days?”
It was her turn for a quiet laugh, and she took her time with it, staring up at a sky that dared not be anything but shatteringly picture perfect. No one in Tadfield ever seemed to notice that on this particular day every year the clouds were always cut in the same readable shapes, the temperature always unchanged down to the tenth of a degree.
“You two should drop by on occasion. We’d like the company. Don’t get many visitors, since they all think I’m some crazy ancient hag that foams at the mouth when you bring bibles close and dances naked around my backyard, screaming like a banshee.”
The demon raised an eyebrow impudently. “Do you?”
“Only when Newt forgets to take out the garbage.”
He snorted, his eyes tracing the yard without thought. “Right, Newt, he’s your…”
She tilted her head left. “He’s over there. Talking to Sergeant Shadwell, Retired.”
And indeed he was, or rather, he was being thumped heavily on the back and wincing as the former Sergeant pointed to his ugly forehead importantly and waved his arms about like a three-ring circus on absinthe. Newt was doing a fairly good job keeping his feet on the ground and his eyes on his drink.
“You’re not married yet.”
“Not yet. Soon.”
“You’ve got a date set?”
“No. I just know it’s going to happen soon.”
“Right.” Crowley paused to finish off his drink. “We’ll take you up on that offer, I imagine. See, the angel never turns down invitations, especially when he feels guilty about prior experiences.”
Anathema turned her head just as Mrs. Young made the announcement that it was time to go into the house and cut the cake. “How did you know I asked h–”
“You’re the psychic, I’m just the demon,” he answered smoothly with a wink, getting up from his chair. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
“I’ll be seeing you, then,” she said smiling cheerfully. Then she stood as well and followed the others inside, as she knew, like any good Lower Tadfieldian knew, that Mrs. Young’s chocolate cake was not a thing to be missed.
The children certainly knew that, and had immediately abandoned Crowley’s driving companion on his tiny yellow stool, their glossy, shimmering clutter still littering the ground at his feet. At least he was in the shade under a tree, so the sun wouldn’t have the opportunity to make him look anymore the part of a clown. The older-looking man stood up in as stately of a manner as he could seem to muster, withdrawing a pristine handkerchief from his breast pocket and starting to wipe off vampy smears of pink and black and blue. Crowley strolled over to him, hands in his pockets, smirk on his lips.
“Well, now we know for sure,” the demon said with a sigh, “you’d make one ugly woman.”
The angel’s eyes narrowed venomously at the man-shaped thing approaching him, and he pursed his lips in a thin line that told Crowley he was about to be snapped at. “You abandoned me to wolves, you inconsiderate prig.”
“Language,” the demon tutted, walking directly into what many overpaid specialists would call ‘Aziraphale’s personal bubble’. “Maybe you should stick with the liner. Makes your eyes pop.” His eyebrows went up behind the sunglasses. “Maybe I should start wearing it.”
“You did,” the angel said miserably, continuing to mop at his cheeks in dismay, unbelieving that there could be that much powder on his face. “During the seventies, I recall. And many times before that, particularly in Egypt.”
“I’m flattered you remember,” the demon hissed lightly at the stony expression. But he wasn’t really interested in that at the moment, and with a swift shift he had pulled one hand from a pocket, set it against Aziraphale’s chest, pushed him up against the tree, and proceeded to kiss him soundly for the next two or three minutes.
He preferred the angel’s lips pale and wet, waiting to be bruised, but at the moment the change was oddly welcome. It was fun to have the upper hand here, against rough bark and the smell of summer wind.
“What are you doing?” Aziraphale gasped weakly, his resolve having broken somewhere on the journey that Crowley’s hand had taken down the front of his trousers.
The demon leered in more bastardly fashion than he had any right to, even given what he was. “What your lipstick told me to do, darling,” he cooed obnoxiously, and decided that now was the perfect time to get right to it.
Luckily, no one went back into the yard for a good long while.
Somewhere in the midst of the cake cutting, Adam Young rolled his eyes and slapped a palm to his forehead, but really, he had sort of known that was coming.
* * *
Anathema Device had been perfectly honest with Crowley about Newt. They were going to get married soon. The next year, in fact. Putting it off had made her even less popular with the town women, all of them believing it was just strange to have a man living in your house like that when you weren’t properly bound, but she simply refused to hurry it along.
Newt would never ask. He was terrified of her saying no, and she was well aware of that.
Truthfully, there was a reason they hadn’t gotten married, and it was perfectly logical in Anathema’s mind: she knew they would. Agnes’ prophecies had spoken. No matter how annoyed she got with him, no matter how many identical dates they went on, no matter how plump or unattractive either of them got, they were supposed to be together and inevitably would be. Granted, the book had never detailed a wedding ceremony for them, but she had her feelings about it. She always did.
And she had been delighted when Crowley and Aziraphale had shown up to her house for supper one month after Adam’s party. They came by again at New Years, and once more in the spring. She just kept trying to set up dates for them to drop by, and they usually involved good food, good wine, and exceedingly odd conversation.
It was probably crazy of her. She had nothing to go on that told her it was important.
But Anathema wasn’t like Agnes. She couldn’t remember everything that would happen in the future, especially not anymore with the second book gone, and she was forever inquisitive. She felt that had to be a genetic trait, so she could at least blame it on something. And so when her instincts told her to keep those two in plain sight, she did so without question.
It eventually occurred to her that she wasn’t exactly normal herself, and maybe that was why she craved their company. Newt, bless his heart, didn’t know what she was doing most of the time when she put the cauldron on and pulled out her pendulum. Aziraphale, when faced with that sort of thing, had a tendency to burst into a chatter about women from Romania who used to cure consumption with an infusion of cherry bark, bat’s blood, hawk eggs and a well-spoken prayer. “Holy gypsies,” he called them.
Crowley had a tendency to laugh ironically, make a dark comment about the midwife he’d lived next door to for a spell in the twelfth century, and pour more champagne.
It was a good combination. Mainly with the champagne.
Newt had gotten looser over the past few years. It was easier for her to the take time to realize it when she was drunk, and it was true. Things didn’t bother him at all anymore, even when he didn’t understand them, and she had a feeling that anything that happened in their house, short of Lucifer himself coming up to have a chat with her, would result in nothing more than a, “Great, I’ll put on tea. Two or three biscuits, love?”
And so, of course, when Adam Young decided that he really didn’t feel like having such huge birthday parties any longer, Anathema decided that she would be the one to monopolize next August with a wedding.
Her proposal to Newt had gone something like this:
“Anathema, what is all this stationary for?”
“It’s not stationary, they’re invitations.”
“Ah. To what?”
“Our wedding. On August 28th.”
“Ah…. Great, I’ll put on tea. Two or three biscuits, love?”
It couldn’t have gone any better. He had smiled all the way through the entire pot of Assam.
* * *
The only thing left was to plan the other events surrounding the wedding, like the rehearsal dinner and meetings with the caterers, cake sampling. And then of course, there was –
“Now, what are these invitations for?”
“Your bachelor party, darling.”
“Ah, right my… my what?”
“Bachelor party. And don’t feel guilty, I’m having one too.”
“Having one what?”
“A bachelorette party.”
“Oh. And who’s going to be at these parties, then?”
“Oh, relatively safe crowds. You’ll have Adam and his two friends there. And Shadwell, I’m sure. I’ll have the every woman who’s curious in town, I imagine. I just thought we’d have them so that no one would get on our cases about not having them. Nothing very interesting bound to happen in them around here.”
And maybe because she knew that, the whole shindig was destined to turn out all wrong.
* * *
Crowley really did need to learn to dress all the way when he was loitering in the kitchenette.
Or at least, that’s what Aziraphale thought. Damned near impossible to do the crossword with him standing there, shirttails out, the shirt itself wide open and giving him a dastardly glimpse of traceable collarbone when the demon turned to reach that tiny cabinet….
Crowley often made breakfast by hand on mornings like this, and the angel suspected it had something to do with him knowing how much Aziraphale hated being watched while he did the crossword. He was thankful for the courtesy, although he’d never said as much.
At the same time, the fact that the demon never bothered to dress decently led Aziraphale to believe that one part of his nature was butting heads with the other.
“Do sit down, Crowley, your toiling is giving me a headache.”
“No,” the demon answered petulantly, one hand scrabbling blindly at the top shelf of another dusty cupboard. “I’m looking for the honey.”
The angel sighed and materialized a pot of it on the counter next to Crowley’s hip.
Yellow eyes glanced over a shoulder and gave him a look. “All right, I can take a hint,” he muttered, setting himself heavily into the chair across from Aziraphale’s. “What’s got your curls in a twist?”
Aziraphale was about to say that didn’t make a bit of sense when he was distracted by the pile of mail on his left that he still hadn’t gone through. He started shuffling through it, let it help him get back to his train of thought. “I have an assignment, and I have to leave the country for a time.”
“How long?” Crowley’s attempt to sound nonchalant there failed miserably and the angel winced on his behalf.
“Only two months, nothing serious.”
“Where to?”
“China. Don’t ask, it’s all rather depressing.”
“Oh lovely, something new and different for that country,” said Crowley sarcastically as he wished up two very Chinese teacups in preparation for the kettle boiling. “All right, I can hold down the fort while you’re gone, I suppose. Just don’t expect it to be perfectly balanced in your absence.”
“I wouldn’t even hope for it,” Aziraphale answered, suddenly very caught up in one particular envelope in his hands. “Would you look here, there’s a letter for us.”
Crowley’s attention snagged the same way his eyes did when he found something shiny on the sidewalk. “Addressed to both of us? Who on earth would do that?”
“Anathema Device.”
Between her and a certain blonde young man, it was a wonder they didn’t have entertainment executives knocking on their doors, asking them to do a reality television show. The demon told Aziraphale as much.
“Do stop exaggerating. We’re both quite fond of them, no matter how you’d deny it. Let’s see, it’s an invitation to… oh. Newt’s bachelor party.” His eyes went to the wedding invitation already tacked onto refrigerator (Crowley had insisted he start using magnets instead of shoving everything into that large date book of his, since he had a tendency to forget things in there).
“He’s having one of those, eh? Well, I’m not going there by myself, so you can just send them one of those authentic, calligraphic quill-written responses of yours telling them that – ”
Aziraphale was shaking his head. “Oh, it won’t be a problem. It’s set on the very day I get home, wouldn’t you know.”
“The very day?” Crowley stiffened.
“Yes, the very day. So I hope you’re ready to have ‘a wild time of it’ when I get back.”
The demon put his face in his hands . “Please, Aziraphale, I beg you. It sounds painful when you say it, just leave it alone.”
Aziraphale smirked over-sweetly. “Just trying it on, dear boy.”
* * *
Two months later, Crowley hurled the map onto the back seat of the Bentley and thought the whole situation was far too familiar.
“You said you saw it signposted.”
“I thought you said you knew where you were going.”
“Stop talking,” the demon snapped, raising hands to his temples.
Aziraphale sniffed. “Well, there was no need for that. I’ve only been back two hours, you know.”
“Yes, exactly!” Crowley shouted. “Two hours, and of course we had to leave from bloody Heathrow and go straight here because we had to be on time. On time for a bachelor party. Do you have any idea how asinine that is? If I’d had it my way, we’d have already polished off half your liquor cabinet back at the bookshop, and we’d be – ”
The angel laid a hand on his arm. “Aren’t we close to – ”
Crowley ripped off his sunglasses and glared at the angel in a way that brought the conversation to an over-aware halt. “If you touch me again, I am pulling this car over and we are not getting out.”
“Oh.” Aziraphale removed his hand quickly. “Sorry.” There wasn’t much more you could say to two yellow eyes that glowed practically neon and Morse-coded the message two-months-with-only-my-hands-don’t-you-dare-tempt-me-you-right-bastard straight into your chest and gut and throat.
Aziraphale watched the road as the shades returned to their rightful place, finally meandering back around to the point. “I was going to say, aren’t we close to Jasmine Cottage?”
“Yesss.”
“Well… we could stop there and ask for directions.”
The demon gave a sibilant sigh, shifted the car into gear, and went from zero-to-eighty in the blink of an eye.
In reverse.
* * *
Anathema, surrounded by teacakes and tiny sweaters (they all seemed convinced that “bachelorette party” was just a covert way of saying “baby shower”), reflected that she wasn’t sure why she’d thought this was a good idea. The party had turned out exactly as she suspected, which meant that it was, in a word, boring as hell. Well, three words.
And from what she’d been told by a certain demon, hell could be pretty bloody boring.
The event of the evening came in the form of Mrs. Hodgkin coming by with a landscape painting she’d just finished in her weekly art class. It was the talk of the house. It was also uglier than the three-legged, twice-electrocuted cat that lived out by the Tadfield car dealership.
So when the doorbell rang cheerfully, she practically ran to it, hoping that she was about to be saved by a tall, dark knight in the guise of a water main repair man.
She was… way off the mark.
“So sorry to interrupt,” Aziraphale said kindly. “We got a bit lost.”
Crowley scowled.
Anathema eyed them both speculatively and after a moment said, “Then lost you shall stay, gentlemen.”
Neither of them quite knew what to make of that.
“Save me,” Anathema whispered, drawing them toward her old grandfather clock, where they wouldn’t be seen. “They’re about to drive me insane with all of their drivel. I don’t know what to do to liven everyone up, you’ve got to help me!”
Aziraphale nodded compliantly, though as a rule he was rather clueless as to how one went about such things. “But this is a party for all women, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes.”
He looked nervously at Crowley. “Er, should we change form?”
Crowley sneered. “Absolutely not.” In this situation, not being able to change back would be disastrous for the demon. The angel would have to run him over with the Bentley, all so he could go Downstairs and try to explain the problems of sexism and push-up bras to a brand new desk clerk who probably wouldn’t get it and would send Crowley back as a woman again just to spite him.
“I don’t think you’ll have a problem anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
Anathema tried to think of ways to explain. Somehow she thought that the words “gay boyfriend” wouldn’t really get across to either of them. “The women will trust you. Especially coming together and being…”
She waited for the appropriate eyebrow raises and dropped jaws in recognition.
Instead, it was only Crowley who narrowed his eyes a bit evilly and said, “Ah.”
Aziraphale turned his head and stared at his companion charily. “Ah?”
The demon ignored him. “Have they been drinking?” he asked softly, a definite air of planning about him.
Anathema sighed. “Not a drop. They all think I’m pregnant, so they won’t out of respect or something.”
He looked pained on her behalf and promptly withdrew a silver flask from his inner jacket pocket. “Here, take a few gulps.” Then he leaned to the side a little to get a clearer view of the room before saying, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do….”
* * *
They buzzed and they twittered, like some sort of odd exhibit at the zoo that made all the children cry and the adults wonder what they had spent their money on. Unlike the dolphin tank, this exhibit had no tricks up its sleeve, no special shows to give, it just sat and ate and occasionally got up to use the loo.
It wasn’t even fluffy and cute. Unless you counted the furry …something that was wrapped about Madame Tracy’s shoulders like the prize pelt of an exotic princess. Well, it was fluffy, at any rate and looked like something Shadwell might have killed with a hatchet.
Nevertheless, the whole thing was really quite dull.
That was about to change.
“All right everyone! So sorry to keep you waiting like that. These are our friends from the city, Anthony and Ezra, they just drove up.”
The room gaped and twittered again and smiled cautiously.
All except one young lady in the corner with blazing red hair. She was scowling to beat… well, Crowley a moment ago.
Crowley smiled charmingly and squeezed his hostesses’ arm affectionately. “Bring out a bottle of wine would you, darling?” he said, the pronunciation of ‘darling’ giving the impression that while his friend fluttered his hands physically, he was certainly doing it mentally. No one heard him mutter as an afterthought, “And don’t forget the cards….”
But the room relaxed considerably after that.
“Oi!” the redhead shouted, looking positively affronted at their mere presence. “Why do they get to be here, and I can’t go over to the other party?”
“Well, because, dear…”
“Well, they’re, you know…”
“Fine, then I’m a lesbian,” the freckled young woman decided, heading toward the coat rack. “Now can I go?”
“Oh, no you’re not, luvvy,” Madame Tracy cooed. “I saw you under that apple tree, kissing – ”
The girl shot the older woman a glare that would have silenced a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness with a weekly quota. No one said a word to her after that. Might have been the curling fist that did it.
She ran out of the house and onto the street. Three boys were waiting for her then, though they hadn’t been there before.
“Come on, Pep! We’re gonna be late!”
They were all on bikes, and the one boy in front seemed to be holding an extra one ready for her. They took off moments later and a collective sigh echoed through Jasmine Cottage.
“Well, you know Them…” one said softly.
The women all nodded sagely.
Crowley seemed to be stifling an attack of some sort, raising a hand to his mouth and coughing. “I bet they have a knitting circle every Tuesday,” he muttered into his companion’s ear.
“Quiet,” the angel hushed with a smirk. Then without warning, he went to inspect the painting set proudly on an easel in the corner. “Oh, dear…”
Mrs. Hodgkin frowned with rehearsed ease and stared at Aziraphale stiffly. “Yes?”
“My dear lady, it’s clear you have talent, but….” The angel struggled to be tactful. “Could I possibly give you a tip or two about the composition? And the use of color? I’m no artist, certainly, but…”
Hopeful eyes turned on him in earnest.
Well, that was one half of the room taken care of.
The dark-haired unfamiliar woman sitting closest to where Crowley stood had a few words for him, which she hummed in a deep, rich tenor. “Oh, he is just charming. What a dear man.” She turned her gaze on the demon knowingly at the same time that he turned his hidden stare on her. She had an air of Katherine Hepburn about her, which endeared her to him instantly. “However did you two end up together?”
He smiled. “You’d never guess. I’m sorry, I don’t believe we were introduced?”
“Martha,” she said, extending a soft and wrinkled hand, the bangles on her wrist clinking to create a discordant melody that tingled the demon’s spine inexplicably.
Crowley took her hand thoughtfully and raised one eyebrow. “Would you mind very much if I sat down?”
She grinned slowly and scooted over on the couch so he had room. They were soon in a low and seemingly intimate conversation that the other half of the room struggled to hear.
A few minutes later Anathema came in with a bottle of claret and two glasses for Crowley, and after handing them over, she held up something in her hands that was wrapped in shimmering black velvet. “Who’s going to have the first reading of the night?” she asked boldly.
The room went terrifyingly silent. Many gaped again and held their breath. It was one thing for Anathema to be… the way she was, but to bring it up in a public situation was just… well, it wasn’t very prudent.
Crowley side-glanced the figure to his right.
Martha straightened up and sat forward. “I will, dear.”
The trap was sprung.
* * *
The party wasn’t yet done when Anathema bid Crowley and Aziraphale goodnight, but she was sad to see them go. With them seemed to have come a gradual knowledge of something she had once thought impossible: she liked her neighbors.
After Martha had deigned to be the first lamb, they lined up one after the other before the cards. And then it was as though every question they’d had about her and the occult needed to be answered immediately. In the end, they were all sitting around the dining room table while Madame Tracy tried to call Beatrice’s husband back from The Beyond for a quick word about family heirlooms. They were tipsy and giggling like schoolgirls and half of them were painting with the supplies that Aziraphale had “brought from the car,” and the pictures all looked quite nice.
Crowley kept kicking the legs of the table to make people shriek during the séance, and Anathema had the insightful suspicion that he was enjoying himself just a bit too much.
And Martha was a witch. She was certain of it. She couldn’t believe the woman hadn’t told her before. Or that she hadn’t sensed it.
By the time the festivities had wound down, they had all made plans to do it again, every one of them wishing Anathema their happiest congratulations, and telling her they couldn’t wait for the wedding next week (because Anathema was a sensible girl who knew you didn’t have any sort of wild party on the night before your wedding, no matter the tradition, unless you fancied having a hangover when you said I Do). It was surely the oddest gathering she’d ever attended in this town, and when one of your neighbors was the Antichrist, that was saying something.
All of it being over with, she was looking forward to finishing the clean up and going up to her room with some cocoa. She stuffed paper plates into a large sturdy garbage bag swiftly, and as she passed by the windows –
She noticed that there was still a Bentley parked in front of her cottage.
Huh.
Well, she had better tell them to shove off before they got in the way of… something.
Setting the trash bag down, Anathema walked out into the crisp warm air and closed in on the beautiful old automobile, its windows fogged like it was standing in the middle of a blizzard in February with no running heat or occult manipulation helping it along. The stars weren’t telling any secrets, twinkling cheerfully bright even when a scandalizing gasp issued from somewhere inside the vehicle.
Really. She’d known teenagers who were more discreet.
So she thought she’d be equally insufferable and opened the back door silently, slipping into the backseat without a word and slamming the door shut behind her.
Crowley’s head jerked up from the front seat and twisted to find out what had destroyed the solitude. In the process, he hit his head on the dashboard. “Who the – ow, fuck. Oh.”
Aziraphale sat up too then, his hair sticking out at the oddest angles, and he placed a hand at the back of the demon’s head. “Are you all right? I – Oh.”
They both blinked sheepishly. She could tell because Crowley’s sunglasses were off and… aha. So that’s why he wore them.
She smirked, arms folded across her chest. “Were you just staying out here to make sure everyone got a good show as they left?”
Aziraphale coughed quite embarrassedly while Crowley grinned as though that had been the entire point all along, though she was certain it hadn’t occurred to him before. “Well, that works both ways, you see,” the demon pointed out. “Why are you in my car watching?”
“Maybe I wanted to.”
Crowley opened his mouth like he had a zinger for that, and paused halfway into it. The train had derailed, rolled away from the track and come to rest near a canyon where it would most likely fall and meet its doom.
The angel noticed as much. “That wasn’t quite how you imagined that argument going, was it?”
“No,” Crowley mumbled perplexedly, still trying to figure out where he had gone wrong.
She was sort of shocked that she’d said it herself. But then, she wouldn’t have gotten into the car if that weren’t partly true, would she? The air was stifling and still inside the car, and maybe that was it. Maybe it was fogging up her brain. Of course, she was much too sensible to allow herself that excuse.
She seemed to have forgotten that she was still rather drunk on top of things.
“It’s no small wonder to me, you know, the two of you,” she pointed out slowly, still working it out for herself. “You may not think twice about it – ”
“Oh, believe me, we have,” Aziraphale admitted with a sigh. “For all the good it’s done. In the end, you sort of have to figure….”
“What the heck,” Crowley finished for him helpfully.
“Well, not exactly like that,” the angel grumbled.
“That was pretty close to what you said, actually – ”
“Oh, enough, really. If we’re going to be having this conversation now, I’m moving to the back seat so I don’t strain my neck.”
“You can’t – ” but Crowley was cut off by the car door opening, and he whimpered slightly. While Aziraphale fussed and struggled with the doors, the demon climbed between the front seats and moved to the back, facing the rear window and sitting on his knees. “He’s doing that to get away from me,” he informed Anathema in a low voice.
She smirked. “Then why are you moving back here?”
“To make things inconvenient for him. You should know by now how much I enjoy doing that,” he said with a supercilious leer as the back door opened on the other side of him.
That’s not the only reason. You didn’t want him to go.
Anathema had never thought that snake eyes could prove to be so distracting. Even when they held your gaze for Too Long.
The back door shut and an irritated sigh reverberated more heavily than it should have been able to using earthly sound waves. “Er… what were we talking about again?”
“How she likes to watch,” Crowley reminded his companion, all the while staring at her luridly. Anathema could feel herself blush in the dark, because that wasn’t exactly how she had meant it, of course…
How exactly had she meant it?
“You’re embarrassing her,” the angel said then, mercifully kind in his own way, though the fact that he was pointing it out was equally embarrassing. The ease of his voice seemed to make the demon go cross-eyed for a moment.
There was something else here that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, some shifting that she felt but didn’t see at the edge of her mind, something that wasn’t hers to know, but she seemed to get snapped up by it anyway.
She felt the need to defend herself even though she’d lost the upper hand some time ago. Who had it now remained a mystery, and it wouldn’t have mattered what she said anyway, as Crowley started speaking at that moment instead…
In another language.
“Pourquoi est-ce que cette situation ne t’inquiètes pas de tout ?”
The angel blinked and replied confusedly without struggle. “Quoi? Ce n’est pas un problème de lui parler. Sauf si tu es… nerveuse ? Vraiment ? Parce qu’elle est ici ?”
Snort. “Ne sois pas absurde. C’est juste que ce soit chié étrange. C’est tout.”
“Tu me dis que tu n’avais jamais voulu le faire?”
“C’est différent.”
“Parce que tu la connais ?” An sensible eyebrow raised archly.
“Je suppose que oui.”
“Mon aime, tu es en vérité, au plus profond de ton être – ”
“Pas aucune mot, crétin.”
“I hope you don’t mind my interrupting,” Anathema interjected quite loudly.
Both heads snapped back in her direction fretfully.
The pause was quite welcome because several things were put on hold.
It wasn’t just the conversation that was making Anathema feel out of touch, it was the other conversation. That’s what it was, she realized. A conversation taking place in the subtle movement she’d just started to feel, each gesture of their human bodies laden with five other points she wasn’t hearing. It was aggravating. She found herself wishing she weren’t halfway sensitive, wanting to go on oblivious to that dance like the rest of the world because it made her feel very simple in her own structure. Small. How had she never felt this before when she was around them?
Had to be the alcohol.
Perhaps it was more aggravating that she could see it and not decipher it. The way one hand twitched and one knee jumped as if in response, but you could barely see it unless you were looking for it. “I just….” She struggled to catch words on the fuzzy moonlight coming in through the summer-iced window. “I’m sensing this now. What’s going on here. I wasn’t expecting it, but I can feel…”
The angel looked concerned and reached out to her –
Before his hand brushed skin, she felt her body go limp and she sharply drew in breath to compensate, her eyes sliding shut without her explicit permission. She normally didn’t go relaxed that fast unless she – “Show me how you do that.”
Another pause. Full of that movement again, but this time she didn’t have to see with her eyes to know it was there.
Crowley coughed awkwardly. “You know that’s – ”
“I know what it is. Show me how it happens.”
That… had to be the alcohol too.
She gulped. Well, she wasn’t taking that back now. It made less sense than saying it. She wrenched her eyes open to see what the damage was.
Crowley was staring at Anathema good and hard, seriously, as though he were weighing some options. A pin dropped somewhere, though no one heard it. “All right,” he said slowly. “If you really want to know, I… think we can give you some idea.”
Aziraphale blinked like he was stammering. “We can?”
The demon shrugged. “Why not? Long as we’re careful. She’s curious, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy waiting until we get back to London.” She had been deliberately ignoring how much Crowley tremored from the lack of attention, but it was hard not to feel guilty amid his desperation. “It’s her bachelorette party, after all. Her choice.”
Anathema was then expecting some kind of lecture about the virtue of marriage and the ones you loved –
Instead, the angel sighed wearily, like he was sure that he’d left the oven on at home and it was such a shame to let it go like that. When he looked at her again, she knew he was losing the fight because his eyes burned so tragically bright. Seemed the tide pulled just as hard on the other end no matter how virtuous it was. “You’re certain, dear girl?”
She couldn’t say no when given the choice. There were things she had been curious about since long before tonight. To see the differences for their sort and how they matched up. To see them with all the barriers stripped away, without their convenient personas. She knew how other people judged them, but how did they judge each other?
Did they at all?
“I’ll stay,” she said at last, and she did sound certain. More than certain. Resolute.
The two looked at each other first. They had to reach their own decision.
Crowley leaned toward her carefully, moving slow and watching her face. He was intent and almost too careful when he laid a hand on her chest, right below the base of her neck. There was surprisingly nothing coarse or sensual about the gesture, it was simply a touch, a warm palm against –
And then it wasn’t anymore.
Then it was something else entirely.
Anathema gasped and squeezed her eyes shut. She was flooded, drowned, frozen in some instant shock of pleasure that was so very good she felt like she needed something painful to contrast it, to help her feel all of it the way it was intended. She had this unerring certainty that she would never feel hunger again, never want for good weather or a change of scenery, never need another dream late at night when she was wakeful or crave good poetry when she felt alone. It was an odd succession of thoughts, but also the neatest way of puzzling it out without short-circuiting. Sensation was too enigmatic for her mind to reconcile.
Her nerves danced together, her mind was coaxed away and held above at a distance, the same way those cheap parlour conmen talked of out-of-body experiences, only it was real. She could look down and know she was beautiful, know she was safe and wise and cherished, know she was comprehensively whole. Something like that.
It felt like an amplified ricochet of something that she wished to remember, but she couldn’t keep a single thought in her head….
“You feel that?”
She nodded dumbly, staring at the car ceiling.
He sighed heavily.
“That’s me, right now,” the demon said quietly, grudgingly honest.
Through her oil paint-blurred vision, she thought she could see Aziraphale’s expression go a little awed, a little pained. “My dear…”
His hand left, the sensations with it, and Anathema slumped into the seat. She couldn’t explain what it felt like to leave that, it was somehow devastating and relieving at the same time. Pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, she fought to recover her breath.
“I think you’ve frightened her off,” the angel said, gently teasing, reaching out to brush a lock of hair from her cheek.
“No,” she managed after a long inhale. “No, I’m all right. It’s fine.”
Crowley smiled small in the dark, calming into the situation. “Well, then, do you mind if I – ?” He tipped his head toward the other side of the seat where the angel waited tranquilly, as though there was nothing remotely strange or potentially awkward about the situation.
“No, not at all,” she said softly, and her voice was daunted and dry without her intending it to be.
She doubted her answer would have made a difference, anyway; he was moving already, knees sliding over a few inches to put what he wanted more easily within his reach.
There was less showmanship than she had expected with her as audience. Crowley passed a hand close to the angel’s face and his index finger flicked up, like he was snapping on a light switch. And in that moment they breathed in unison, sighed the sort of sigh one heard when someone was taken leisurely with aching care. Except no one got to assume a role like that here. Too close to the core to even think of it.
“You… don’t have to touch?” Anathema asked breathlessly, her pulse having pushed over the breakers in the middle of it somewhere, lost.
Crowley didn’t open his eyes, though he did grin. “The physicality is… a perk. A nicccce side-effect.”
“I wouldn’t call it only that,” the angel murmured tersely. “And neither would you, though I shouldn’t have to remind you of that, with the way you…”
“No, not always,” the demon chuckled. His spine seemed to move independent of his body as he shifted just slightly closer, the silk on his back rippling like it was drawing a charge from the air. “You remember the first time?”
The angel laughed in echo, self-satisfied smile on his curved lips. “Mmm….”
Crowley glanced sideways to catch Anathema, draw her in further. She bit her lip hard, knew she was being baited and fell into the trap anyway, caring little for the cost.
“Didn’t even have to touch him,” the demon whispered to her, brushing a thumb down the side of the angel’s face, centimeters away, like he had meant to touch him and just missed. Aziraphale groaned. “He came so fierce… and I never laid a finger on him.”
Anathema felt her chest clench up tight and lock in.
“No repeat performances tonight,” the angel commanded.
“Of course not.”
She had half expected them to be done with it and roll around naked on the back seat after that, but only one action took place. Aziraphale took one of the demon’s fingers into his mouth when it passed too close to his cheek again, sucking gently like he’d known the way to do it for millennia.
Which, of course, couldn’t be true. But she wondered if had it occurred to him in times past. Had he dreamed of it before he had ever come close enough to Crowley to touch him like that?
“Yes.”
The answer was the angel’s.
“How did you – ?”
She would never know if he’d heard her thought or not. It was for the best, she decided later on.
Aziraphale moved closer to the center of the seat and the leather upholstery squeaked in approval, though Crowley looked confused. He shifted his position so that he straddled the angel’s lap and seemed more than appeased then. Aziraphale rolled his eyes in disproval but comfortably set one hand on the demon’s thigh, reaching his other hand over to hover above Anathema’s forehead. “You not helping her to understand it. She’s going to overload with it if you don’t.”
“Oh, so that’s why you moved so wantonly into my clutches,” Crowley said dryly with a sardonic twist of his mouth.
Anathema, for her part in all of this, had never thought of one’s forehead being an erogenous zone, but she was learning very quickly.
“You have centres of energy, so you can focus it, you see,” the angel said, trying to keep his voice steady while Crowley rolled up his own shirtsleeves for self-distraction.
She did see. Like when you spilled red wine on a pallid tablecloth and it spread out through each fiber, but always stayed darkest at the center. She saw perfectly well. It was everywhere, but you were meant to feel it –
Aziraphale trailed his hand down and she felt her entire frame light like a trail of Chinese New Year firecrackers, igniting from fixed points, but leaving waves of smoke to soak in. Her throat, her heart, solar plexus, navel, all the way down between her legs that she didn’t remember spreading wide like that.
He didn’t have to touch, he could draw it out of her, out of those places that vibrated and blazed like –
“Chakras…” she hissed, snapping her head back against the cushioned seat.
“By George, I think she’s got it,” came the amused rejoinder.
She could hear the eyeroll in answer. “Distasteful Rex Harrison impressions aside, I’d say you’ve got a good measure of it,” the angel conceded. “They were created for a reason, after all. Some people figure it out and put it to paper or doctrine. Though you’re more bound to feel it through physical sensation than we are. And we don’t tend to… er, fixate on certain places for pleasure like this. It could be somewhere different each time.”
“And he’s a challenge,” Crowley murmured low, like he could wrap his voice around the form before him and be done with it, “because it always is somewhere different.”
“Be a dear and find it then, won’t you?” Aziraphale growled, slipping one soft finger through a gap between shirt buttons and pulling the demon closer.
Anathema’s hand went to the door handle and she made a gallant attempt to sit up. “Er, I can – ”
“Just relax,” Crowley told her. “Riding it out always makes it easiest. If you left now it would leave you with a twitch that’d bother you for much longer than it’s worth.”
She had to smirk. “You speaking from experience?”
Fine pupils slid from her face back to that curved, beckoning mouth. “He’s a challenge,” the demon said again, rocking his hips just once and closing his eyes to it.
Anathema didn’t know how, but she could feel him searching through ether for it, searching the spreads of the angel’s psyche, feel her conscience colliding and threading so that she could view it at her own distance. Her body told her something else completely through all of it, thrashed and surged and reached out for air as though it were necessary.
She had to remind herself that it was.
Undulating shadows were caught in their own vibrant circles, and the fog on the window began to bead and roll, sweating and slipping to match their movement. The desperate cries glanced off the interior of the small space and ragged breath created an odd symphony of want for anyone lucid enough to listen for it.
She had never had this much control over her own power before, but in this state, with their support on either side of her conscience, Anathema could reign over herself with ease. She could decide what she felt, where to set her nerves on fire, when to shake. Nothing was hidden, but all within her grasp.
For them it seemed more complicated.
Aziraphale gave a piercing intake of breath. “There – ”
Crowley’s eyes slammed open and nearly rolled back into his head. “Oh, yes… I feel that…” He gasped the same rhythm that pulsed through Anathema’s blood.
She felt it too. Something coiled tight within the angel spun apart, like pulling one loose thread on the edge of a tapestry, watching it fall to waste because it was so satisfying see it relieved of its confines.
Aziraphale tilted Crowley’s chin down so he could see the demon’s eyes. They were brassy yellow and white where the moon hit them.
Anathema grazed her fingernails along the column of her throat and let it tip her over the edge, screaming and senseless with the heat.
She had thought it would pass without either of them noticing, but the reaction seemed to be opposite; everything stepped up a level, heightened and sharp, like her own energy was bleeding through –
Like a wine stain.
Aziraphale grabbed Crowley by the tie and pulled him forward until their lips met.
She had never seen them kiss before.
She wasn’t in the right state to remember that she had never seen them do any of this before.
Still. It was strange, sort of awkwardly beautiful. The sliver of tongue, the darkening of lips, the sound of Crowley moaning so softly, ardently against angelic lips that weren’t quite as perfectly formed as the world would believe. The way the demon’s hand fisted so urgently in scratchy fabric that he had to abhor.
“Please,” Aziraphale whispered.
“Yes…” Crowley panted in answer without hesitation. His knees clenched in at the angel’s hips, locking himself in place as the other’s breaths began shuddering violently.
From then on there were no words from either of them, only mad clashing on some level above and around them, twining bolder and brighter between them and shaking through the atmosphere, saturating everything within their branching reach. It ended surprisingly undramatic, Aziraphale’s teeth fastening on Crowley’s neck as he muffled a cry against pale flesh, the demon choking on his last moan and bowing his head, resting his jaw against a tilted sweat-slick temple.
She understood then. It was obvious what held them together, even if it was only present on an intangible level. It was so obvious that it couldn’t be put into words.
Obvious things were funny like that.
Outside a gentle breeze blew. They could hear it rustling the trees.
Anathema wondered blurrily if they’d created it.
The moments passed in silence held nothing that needed to be said. Which was comforting for everyone involved. The only problem was… how to extricate.
“I should… go,” she said inadequately after a few minutes.
They didn’t seem to mind her laughable exit line anyway. “We’ll get out of here and leave you be as soon as we’re… able,” Crowley concluded.
“Right, take your time,” she said hurriedly, grasping for the handle and quickly throwing open the door. She stepped carefully out of the Bentley, making sure she had her feet before turning around. Her afterglow made it less discomfiting, but the oddness of the situation was still there. “Erm… I don’t really know what…”
“Don’t be so fussy, dear girl, it was our pleasure,” the angel said, his voice thick and slow, like well-churned cream. His eyes found the demon’s then and they both had an indecent chuckle over the clumsy double-entendre.
“Yes…” Anathema finished slowly. Her eyes brightened keenly again. “I’ll see you both next week then?”
“Of courssse.”
“Absolutely.”
She smiled as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and shut the door politely, heading back inside.
Crowley arched his back in a stretch and fell onto the seat beside Aziraphale. He laughed again, more from post-coital haziness than anything else, and decided to lay back and rest his head in the angel’s lap. “That wasn’t on my daily list when I woke up this morning.”
“Nor mine,” Aziraphale answered lazily. “Probably good for her in the end. Helped her learn to focus her sensitivities more.”
“Ah, so we were helping her then? That’s how you’re justifying it?”
“I’m an angel, I don’t have to justify anything to you.”
“Mm, that’s the sex talking.”
Aziraphale snorted. “Probably.” He brushed some damp hair from the demon’s flushed cheeks and glanced up at the abandoned steering wheel. “Are we going back to London soon? I sort of want to get home, since I haven’t been back yet. Check on the shop and all.”
Crowley’s face fell ever so slightly, but he reached an arm over the back seat for leverage. “Right,” he said, pulling himself up. He didn’t stop to consider the possibility of dizziness and promptly ended up back in the angel’s lap. “Fuck me,” he grumbled, raising a hand to his eyes in annoyance.
“Later, dear boy, when we’re somewhere more comfortable,” was the furtive reply.
The hand slipped down an inch and two intent eyes peered up at Aziraphale’s decidedly un-dithering face.
“Right,” said Crowley purposefully, lifting himself from the seat with renewed enthusiasm.
They were sure to get back to the city in record time, with or without proper road signs.
* * *
Anathema fell asleep at the kitchen table with a cup of cocoa by her head.
Because she fell asleep, she didn’t hear the door open. She didn’t hear a coat get hung up, the door get locked, or the heavy footsteps that went into the bedroom and then out again, into the dining room, the living room and the loo before finally getting to the kitchen.
“Anathema? Ana, love?”
When she opened her dark eyes and found his plain brown ones staring back, she kissed him instantly.
He seemed to enjoy that greeting.
“I thought you’d be all scathing questions and severe looks, and checking me over for lady’s perfume.”
Which she did promptly after he suggested it. But there was no scent that offended, and she really hadn’t been worried anyway.
“Did you have fun?”
He shrugged. “Not really. You?”
She smiled, but there was nothing hidden in it. “I had a good time actually. It was a really nice party.”
“Good,” he said, running some fingers through her hair and frowning when he hit a snag. “I think you got cocoa in your hair….”
She laughed. “Well, that was clumsy of me.” But she stilled his detangling hand nevertheless and enveloped him in a hug. “I missed you,” she said into his neatly trimmed hair.
“I… missed you too,” he answered back confusedly.
He would never find out what had brought that on. There was no way for her to explain what had entered her head –
She could look down and know she was beautiful, know she was safe and wise and cherished, know she was comprehensively whole. Something like that…
And it was all wrapped up in a rumpled blue shirt, a gawky stoop and a too-long nose. That echo she’d been looking for. She squeezed him so tight that he coughed, and hummed into his shoulder when he held on tighter for it. “You want some cocoa?” she murmured.
“That’d be great,” he said softly, releasing her and moving to the cabinet.
She counted down for it.
“Two or three biscuits, love?”
Grinning like a mad something-or-other, she yanked him back by the collar of his shirt and kissed him again, good and proper this time around
His eyes went so wide when he was breathless.
“You pick.”
END
quantum_witchAuthor:
use_theforce_emTitle: Something Like That
Rating: R for metaphysical smexing
Prompt: Crowley/Aziraphale, Crowley/Aziraphale/Anathema as many of these as the giver cares to try for - sex is always consentual, voyeurism is fine, sex in the bentley or open air is good stuff, can be metaphysical rather than physical; absolutely no wangst, please, R
Summary: In which Anathema learns that bachelorette parties are actually baby showers, that neighbors aren’t always as bad as you think they are, and that angels and demons are far more interesting when they fog up the windows of old automobiles after good night of
Notes: I hope you enjoy it, quantum_witch! I tried to get everything in there. :) All my love to my anonymous betas, and undying love to my dear friend who translated my very British dialogue into very French French. You rule the world, love. Or you pwn France, at least, which might be better.
It was Adam Young’s fifteenth birthday party, and all the younger children required to attend had decided that the kind, middling-aged chap with remarkably blue eyes and horrible bow tie was the perfect model to “tart up” with any accessory they could get their hands on.
The young man that the afore mentioned chap had arrived with was busying himself with something that looked like Sprite but definitely wasn’t. In between sips, he would glance over at the scene, watch bows and scarves and pink makeup kits go flying, and try to stop himself from slipping off his chair in hysterics. That shade of gloss really did suit him, in a 1980s prostitute sort of way.
He was determined to prevent a conversation between himself and Mr. Young about keeping cars “in such good shape”. He didn’t know what Turtle Wax was , and he was quite certain that he didn’t want to know.
Didn’t stop Mr. Young’s son from sitting down next to him for a few minutes. He tried not to fidget or cringe, but he expected the young man knew he wanted to, so there was really nothing for it.
The finely-crafted, serene face looked wickedly amused. “So you’re just going to let ‘im handle that all on his own?”
“Yup.”
“Don’t even feel sorry for ‘im?”
“Nope.”
“Not even a little?”
“ I didn’t drag him here. Anyway, you know how long it’s been since it was widely fashionable for men to wear makeup? Enough for him to join the trend?”
“I reckon I do.”
“Then you should realize why I would find it so incredibly comical. That’s not even taking into account how they name all the colors something embarrassing nowadays.”
Mr. Young’s son nodded sagely. “Yes, I believe one of them told me that the first shade was Girl About Town, but that they now have him in Please Me.”
Crowley sprayed his not-Sprite all over the table. Luckily, no one was sitting there but the two of them, which left them free to laugh wildly at their private little joke. Eventually, as the demon brushed tears from the corners of his eyes, the young man stood up and said, “I should be getting’ back to the party. Don’t be anti-social. You should talk to some people, it might do you good.”
Crowley peered at him inquisitively, but decided not to ask for a more detailed rationalization on that comment. He intended to stay exactly where he was for his part, but he said nothing as Adam Young walked off in search of heaven-and-hell knew what.
It turned out that it was perfectly fine for him to stay exactly where he was. Company came a moment later in the form of a pair of obsidian black eyes and hands that folded neatly on the table, like all the cards were already there and all she had to do was read them straight out.
“You know, I wanted to – ”
“Apologize for your rude behavior the day we met,” Crowley finished for her. He could play that game too, if need be.
She paused at that, but when he looked up she was all smiles. “Maybe you should apologize too. You weren’t exactly a pussy cat yourself.”
And you would have liked that, wouldn’t you, you broomstick wielding, rodent gut reading, cycles-by-night, polytheistic, cauldron wench? He didn’t think it in a mean sort of way, actually, it was more in a fond I used to go join the circle myself in the old days and I haven’t had that much fun at a Sabbat since sort of way. “Mm. Well, you didn’t exactly catch us at the best time; Things were going on you know.”
“Mm,” she echoed. “Yes, we were all concentrating ferociously on Things. I suppose it turned out all right in the end, since the book ended up with your friend. But I thought you were both highway rapists when I got into the car.”
Crowley looked affronted. “Have you ever met a highway rapist who dresses like this?”
“It was dark.” She grabbed her wine glass off the table behind them and started sipping thoughtfully. “You know, I thought you two were – ”
“Not yet,” Crowley corrected. “That happened after.”
“Ah.” He could hear the smile in her voice that time. “So then I wasn’t completely off the mark when…”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t act like you’re so shrewd, you only thought that because the angel acts poncy. And everyone picks up on that, even him, he just doesn’t care enough to change it.”
She blinked like his voice was applying mascara to her lashes by stabbing the brush into her eyes. “Actually… you were the one who made me think it.”
That stopped him mid-swallow. “Ngk?”
“Yes, it was you,” the witch told him, sounding more pleased than the hellhound currently receiving a belly rub on the far side of the lawn. “When you told him to get back into the car. You called him ‘angel’ and you seemed very, how do they put it? … ah yes, ‘old, Jewish and married.’”
Crowley chuckled. “Only one out of three, I’m afraid.”
Her jaw dropped in mock horror. “You’re Jewish?”
“You know, I don’t remember you being nearly this sharp when I met you.”
“You’d hit me with your car.”
“Ah, so that’s the excuse they’re using these days?”
It was her turn for a quiet laugh, and she took her time with it, staring up at a sky that dared not be anything but shatteringly picture perfect. No one in Tadfield ever seemed to notice that on this particular day every year the clouds were always cut in the same readable shapes, the temperature always unchanged down to the tenth of a degree.
“You two should drop by on occasion. We’d like the company. Don’t get many visitors, since they all think I’m some crazy ancient hag that foams at the mouth when you bring bibles close and dances naked around my backyard, screaming like a banshee.”
The demon raised an eyebrow impudently. “Do you?”
“Only when Newt forgets to take out the garbage.”
He snorted, his eyes tracing the yard without thought. “Right, Newt, he’s your…”
She tilted her head left. “He’s over there. Talking to Sergeant Shadwell, Retired.”
And indeed he was, or rather, he was being thumped heavily on the back and wincing as the former Sergeant pointed to his ugly forehead importantly and waved his arms about like a three-ring circus on absinthe. Newt was doing a fairly good job keeping his feet on the ground and his eyes on his drink.
“You’re not married yet.”
“Not yet. Soon.”
“You’ve got a date set?”
“No. I just know it’s going to happen soon.”
“Right.” Crowley paused to finish off his drink. “We’ll take you up on that offer, I imagine. See, the angel never turns down invitations, especially when he feels guilty about prior experiences.”
Anathema turned her head just as Mrs. Young made the announcement that it was time to go into the house and cut the cake. “How did you know I asked h–”
“You’re the psychic, I’m just the demon,” he answered smoothly with a wink, getting up from his chair. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
“I’ll be seeing you, then,” she said smiling cheerfully. Then she stood as well and followed the others inside, as she knew, like any good Lower Tadfieldian knew, that Mrs. Young’s chocolate cake was not a thing to be missed.
The children certainly knew that, and had immediately abandoned Crowley’s driving companion on his tiny yellow stool, their glossy, shimmering clutter still littering the ground at his feet. At least he was in the shade under a tree, so the sun wouldn’t have the opportunity to make him look anymore the part of a clown. The older-looking man stood up in as stately of a manner as he could seem to muster, withdrawing a pristine handkerchief from his breast pocket and starting to wipe off vampy smears of pink and black and blue. Crowley strolled over to him, hands in his pockets, smirk on his lips.
“Well, now we know for sure,” the demon said with a sigh, “you’d make one ugly woman.”
The angel’s eyes narrowed venomously at the man-shaped thing approaching him, and he pursed his lips in a thin line that told Crowley he was about to be snapped at. “You abandoned me to wolves, you inconsiderate prig.”
“Language,” the demon tutted, walking directly into what many overpaid specialists would call ‘Aziraphale’s personal bubble’. “Maybe you should stick with the liner. Makes your eyes pop.” His eyebrows went up behind the sunglasses. “Maybe I should start wearing it.”
“You did,” the angel said miserably, continuing to mop at his cheeks in dismay, unbelieving that there could be that much powder on his face. “During the seventies, I recall. And many times before that, particularly in Egypt.”
“I’m flattered you remember,” the demon hissed lightly at the stony expression. But he wasn’t really interested in that at the moment, and with a swift shift he had pulled one hand from a pocket, set it against Aziraphale’s chest, pushed him up against the tree, and proceeded to kiss him soundly for the next two or three minutes.
He preferred the angel’s lips pale and wet, waiting to be bruised, but at the moment the change was oddly welcome. It was fun to have the upper hand here, against rough bark and the smell of summer wind.
“What are you doing?” Aziraphale gasped weakly, his resolve having broken somewhere on the journey that Crowley’s hand had taken down the front of his trousers.
The demon leered in more bastardly fashion than he had any right to, even given what he was. “What your lipstick told me to do, darling,” he cooed obnoxiously, and decided that now was the perfect time to get right to it.
Luckily, no one went back into the yard for a good long while.
Somewhere in the midst of the cake cutting, Adam Young rolled his eyes and slapped a palm to his forehead, but really, he had sort of known that was coming.
Anathema Device had been perfectly honest with Crowley about Newt. They were going to get married soon. The next year, in fact. Putting it off had made her even less popular with the town women, all of them believing it was just strange to have a man living in your house like that when you weren’t properly bound, but she simply refused to hurry it along.
Newt would never ask. He was terrified of her saying no, and she was well aware of that.
Truthfully, there was a reason they hadn’t gotten married, and it was perfectly logical in Anathema’s mind: she knew they would. Agnes’ prophecies had spoken. No matter how annoyed she got with him, no matter how many identical dates they went on, no matter how plump or unattractive either of them got, they were supposed to be together and inevitably would be. Granted, the book had never detailed a wedding ceremony for them, but she had her feelings about it. She always did.
And she had been delighted when Crowley and Aziraphale had shown up to her house for supper one month after Adam’s party. They came by again at New Years, and once more in the spring. She just kept trying to set up dates for them to drop by, and they usually involved good food, good wine, and exceedingly odd conversation.
It was probably crazy of her. She had nothing to go on that told her it was important.
But Anathema wasn’t like Agnes. She couldn’t remember everything that would happen in the future, especially not anymore with the second book gone, and she was forever inquisitive. She felt that had to be a genetic trait, so she could at least blame it on something. And so when her instincts told her to keep those two in plain sight, she did so without question.
It eventually occurred to her that she wasn’t exactly normal herself, and maybe that was why she craved their company. Newt, bless his heart, didn’t know what she was doing most of the time when she put the cauldron on and pulled out her pendulum. Aziraphale, when faced with that sort of thing, had a tendency to burst into a chatter about women from Romania who used to cure consumption with an infusion of cherry bark, bat’s blood, hawk eggs and a well-spoken prayer. “Holy gypsies,” he called them.
Crowley had a tendency to laugh ironically, make a dark comment about the midwife he’d lived next door to for a spell in the twelfth century, and pour more champagne.
It was a good combination. Mainly with the champagne.
Newt had gotten looser over the past few years. It was easier for her to the take time to realize it when she was drunk, and it was true. Things didn’t bother him at all anymore, even when he didn’t understand them, and she had a feeling that anything that happened in their house, short of Lucifer himself coming up to have a chat with her, would result in nothing more than a, “Great, I’ll put on tea. Two or three biscuits, love?”
And so, of course, when Adam Young decided that he really didn’t feel like having such huge birthday parties any longer, Anathema decided that she would be the one to monopolize next August with a wedding.
Her proposal to Newt had gone something like this:
“Anathema, what is all this stationary for?”
“It’s not stationary, they’re invitations.”
“Ah. To what?”
“Our wedding. On August 28th.”
“Ah…. Great, I’ll put on tea. Two or three biscuits, love?”
It couldn’t have gone any better. He had smiled all the way through the entire pot of Assam.
The only thing left was to plan the other events surrounding the wedding, like the rehearsal dinner and meetings with the caterers, cake sampling. And then of course, there was –
“Now, what are these invitations for?”
“Your bachelor party, darling.”
“Ah, right my… my what?”
“Bachelor party. And don’t feel guilty, I’m having one too.”
“Having one what?”
“A bachelorette party.”
“Oh. And who’s going to be at these parties, then?”
“Oh, relatively safe crowds. You’ll have Adam and his two friends there. And Shadwell, I’m sure. I’ll have the every woman who’s curious in town, I imagine. I just thought we’d have them so that no one would get on our cases about not having them. Nothing very interesting bound to happen in them around here.”
And maybe because she knew that, the whole shindig was destined to turn out all wrong.
Crowley really did need to learn to dress all the way when he was loitering in the kitchenette.
Or at least, that’s what Aziraphale thought. Damned near impossible to do the crossword with him standing there, shirttails out, the shirt itself wide open and giving him a dastardly glimpse of traceable collarbone when the demon turned to reach that tiny cabinet….
Crowley often made breakfast by hand on mornings like this, and the angel suspected it had something to do with him knowing how much Aziraphale hated being watched while he did the crossword. He was thankful for the courtesy, although he’d never said as much.
At the same time, the fact that the demon never bothered to dress decently led Aziraphale to believe that one part of his nature was butting heads with the other.
“Do sit down, Crowley, your toiling is giving me a headache.”
“No,” the demon answered petulantly, one hand scrabbling blindly at the top shelf of another dusty cupboard. “I’m looking for the honey.”
The angel sighed and materialized a pot of it on the counter next to Crowley’s hip.
Yellow eyes glanced over a shoulder and gave him a look. “All right, I can take a hint,” he muttered, setting himself heavily into the chair across from Aziraphale’s. “What’s got your curls in a twist?”
Aziraphale was about to say that didn’t make a bit of sense when he was distracted by the pile of mail on his left that he still hadn’t gone through. He started shuffling through it, let it help him get back to his train of thought. “I have an assignment, and I have to leave the country for a time.”
“How long?” Crowley’s attempt to sound nonchalant there failed miserably and the angel winced on his behalf.
“Only two months, nothing serious.”
“Where to?”
“China. Don’t ask, it’s all rather depressing.”
“Oh lovely, something new and different for that country,” said Crowley sarcastically as he wished up two very Chinese teacups in preparation for the kettle boiling. “All right, I can hold down the fort while you’re gone, I suppose. Just don’t expect it to be perfectly balanced in your absence.”
“I wouldn’t even hope for it,” Aziraphale answered, suddenly very caught up in one particular envelope in his hands. “Would you look here, there’s a letter for us.”
Crowley’s attention snagged the same way his eyes did when he found something shiny on the sidewalk. “Addressed to both of us? Who on earth would do that?”
“Anathema Device.”
Between her and a certain blonde young man, it was a wonder they didn’t have entertainment executives knocking on their doors, asking them to do a reality television show. The demon told Aziraphale as much.
“Do stop exaggerating. We’re both quite fond of them, no matter how you’d deny it. Let’s see, it’s an invitation to… oh. Newt’s bachelor party.” His eyes went to the wedding invitation already tacked onto refrigerator (Crowley had insisted he start using magnets instead of shoving everything into that large date book of his, since he had a tendency to forget things in there).
“He’s having one of those, eh? Well, I’m not going there by myself, so you can just send them one of those authentic, calligraphic quill-written responses of yours telling them that – ”
Aziraphale was shaking his head. “Oh, it won’t be a problem. It’s set on the very day I get home, wouldn’t you know.”
“The very day?” Crowley stiffened.
“Yes, the very day. So I hope you’re ready to have ‘a wild time of it’ when I get back.”
The demon put his face in his hands . “Please, Aziraphale, I beg you. It sounds painful when you say it, just leave it alone.”
Aziraphale smirked over-sweetly. “Just trying it on, dear boy.”
Two months later, Crowley hurled the map onto the back seat of the Bentley and thought the whole situation was far too familiar.
“You said you saw it signposted.”
“I thought you said you knew where you were going.”
“Stop talking,” the demon snapped, raising hands to his temples.
Aziraphale sniffed. “Well, there was no need for that. I’ve only been back two hours, you know.”
“Yes, exactly!” Crowley shouted. “Two hours, and of course we had to leave from bloody Heathrow and go straight here because we had to be on time. On time for a bachelor party. Do you have any idea how asinine that is? If I’d had it my way, we’d have already polished off half your liquor cabinet back at the bookshop, and we’d be – ”
The angel laid a hand on his arm. “Aren’t we close to – ”
Crowley ripped off his sunglasses and glared at the angel in a way that brought the conversation to an over-aware halt. “If you touch me again, I am pulling this car over and we are not getting out.”
“Oh.” Aziraphale removed his hand quickly. “Sorry.” There wasn’t much more you could say to two yellow eyes that glowed practically neon and Morse-coded the message two-months-with-only-my-hands-don’t-you-dare-tempt-me-you-right-bastard straight into your chest and gut and throat.
Aziraphale watched the road as the shades returned to their rightful place, finally meandering back around to the point. “I was going to say, aren’t we close to Jasmine Cottage?”
“Yesss.”
“Well… we could stop there and ask for directions.”
The demon gave a sibilant sigh, shifted the car into gear, and went from zero-to-eighty in the blink of an eye.
In reverse.
Anathema, surrounded by teacakes and tiny sweaters (they all seemed convinced that “bachelorette party” was just a covert way of saying “baby shower”), reflected that she wasn’t sure why she’d thought this was a good idea. The party had turned out exactly as she suspected, which meant that it was, in a word, boring as hell. Well, three words.
And from what she’d been told by a certain demon, hell could be pretty bloody boring.
The event of the evening came in the form of Mrs. Hodgkin coming by with a landscape painting she’d just finished in her weekly art class. It was the talk of the house. It was also uglier than the three-legged, twice-electrocuted cat that lived out by the Tadfield car dealership.
So when the doorbell rang cheerfully, she practically ran to it, hoping that she was about to be saved by a tall, dark knight in the guise of a water main repair man.
She was… way off the mark.
“So sorry to interrupt,” Aziraphale said kindly. “We got a bit lost.”
Crowley scowled.
Anathema eyed them both speculatively and after a moment said, “Then lost you shall stay, gentlemen.”
Neither of them quite knew what to make of that.
“Save me,” Anathema whispered, drawing them toward her old grandfather clock, where they wouldn’t be seen. “They’re about to drive me insane with all of their drivel. I don’t know what to do to liven everyone up, you’ve got to help me!”
Aziraphale nodded compliantly, though as a rule he was rather clueless as to how one went about such things. “But this is a party for all women, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes.”
He looked nervously at Crowley. “Er, should we change form?”
Crowley sneered. “Absolutely not.” In this situation, not being able to change back would be disastrous for the demon. The angel would have to run him over with the Bentley, all so he could go Downstairs and try to explain the problems of sexism and push-up bras to a brand new desk clerk who probably wouldn’t get it and would send Crowley back as a woman again just to spite him.
“I don’t think you’ll have a problem anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
Anathema tried to think of ways to explain. Somehow she thought that the words “gay boyfriend” wouldn’t really get across to either of them. “The women will trust you. Especially coming together and being…”
She waited for the appropriate eyebrow raises and dropped jaws in recognition.
Instead, it was only Crowley who narrowed his eyes a bit evilly and said, “Ah.”
Aziraphale turned his head and stared at his companion charily. “Ah?”
The demon ignored him. “Have they been drinking?” he asked softly, a definite air of planning about him.
Anathema sighed. “Not a drop. They all think I’m pregnant, so they won’t out of respect or something.”
He looked pained on her behalf and promptly withdrew a silver flask from his inner jacket pocket. “Here, take a few gulps.” Then he leaned to the side a little to get a clearer view of the room before saying, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do….”
They buzzed and they twittered, like some sort of odd exhibit at the zoo that made all the children cry and the adults wonder what they had spent their money on. Unlike the dolphin tank, this exhibit had no tricks up its sleeve, no special shows to give, it just sat and ate and occasionally got up to use the loo.
It wasn’t even fluffy and cute. Unless you counted the furry …something that was wrapped about Madame Tracy’s shoulders like the prize pelt of an exotic princess. Well, it was fluffy, at any rate and looked like something Shadwell might have killed with a hatchet.
Nevertheless, the whole thing was really quite dull.
That was about to change.
“All right everyone! So sorry to keep you waiting like that. These are our friends from the city, Anthony and Ezra, they just drove up.”
The room gaped and twittered again and smiled cautiously.
All except one young lady in the corner with blazing red hair. She was scowling to beat… well, Crowley a moment ago.
Crowley smiled charmingly and squeezed his hostesses’ arm affectionately. “Bring out a bottle of wine would you, darling?” he said, the pronunciation of ‘darling’ giving the impression that while his friend fluttered his hands physically, he was certainly doing it mentally. No one heard him mutter as an afterthought, “And don’t forget the cards….”
But the room relaxed considerably after that.
“Oi!” the redhead shouted, looking positively affronted at their mere presence. “Why do they get to be here, and I can’t go over to the other party?”
“Well, because, dear…”
“Well, they’re, you know…”
“Fine, then I’m a lesbian,” the freckled young woman decided, heading toward the coat rack. “Now can I go?”
“Oh, no you’re not, luvvy,” Madame Tracy cooed. “I saw you under that apple tree, kissing – ”
The girl shot the older woman a glare that would have silenced a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness with a weekly quota. No one said a word to her after that. Might have been the curling fist that did it.
She ran out of the house and onto the street. Three boys were waiting for her then, though they hadn’t been there before.
“Come on, Pep! We’re gonna be late!”
They were all on bikes, and the one boy in front seemed to be holding an extra one ready for her. They took off moments later and a collective sigh echoed through Jasmine Cottage.
“Well, you know Them…” one said softly.
The women all nodded sagely.
Crowley seemed to be stifling an attack of some sort, raising a hand to his mouth and coughing. “I bet they have a knitting circle every Tuesday,” he muttered into his companion’s ear.
“Quiet,” the angel hushed with a smirk. Then without warning, he went to inspect the painting set proudly on an easel in the corner. “Oh, dear…”
Mrs. Hodgkin frowned with rehearsed ease and stared at Aziraphale stiffly. “Yes?”
“My dear lady, it’s clear you have talent, but….” The angel struggled to be tactful. “Could I possibly give you a tip or two about the composition? And the use of color? I’m no artist, certainly, but…”
Hopeful eyes turned on him in earnest.
Well, that was one half of the room taken care of.
The dark-haired unfamiliar woman sitting closest to where Crowley stood had a few words for him, which she hummed in a deep, rich tenor. “Oh, he is just charming. What a dear man.” She turned her gaze on the demon knowingly at the same time that he turned his hidden stare on her. She had an air of Katherine Hepburn about her, which endeared her to him instantly. “However did you two end up together?”
He smiled. “You’d never guess. I’m sorry, I don’t believe we were introduced?”
“Martha,” she said, extending a soft and wrinkled hand, the bangles on her wrist clinking to create a discordant melody that tingled the demon’s spine inexplicably.
Crowley took her hand thoughtfully and raised one eyebrow. “Would you mind very much if I sat down?”
She grinned slowly and scooted over on the couch so he had room. They were soon in a low and seemingly intimate conversation that the other half of the room struggled to hear.
A few minutes later Anathema came in with a bottle of claret and two glasses for Crowley, and after handing them over, she held up something in her hands that was wrapped in shimmering black velvet. “Who’s going to have the first reading of the night?” she asked boldly.
The room went terrifyingly silent. Many gaped again and held their breath. It was one thing for Anathema to be… the way she was, but to bring it up in a public situation was just… well, it wasn’t very prudent.
Crowley side-glanced the figure to his right.
Martha straightened up and sat forward. “I will, dear.”
The trap was sprung.
The party wasn’t yet done when Anathema bid Crowley and Aziraphale goodnight, but she was sad to see them go. With them seemed to have come a gradual knowledge of something she had once thought impossible: she liked her neighbors.
After Martha had deigned to be the first lamb, they lined up one after the other before the cards. And then it was as though every question they’d had about her and the occult needed to be answered immediately. In the end, they were all sitting around the dining room table while Madame Tracy tried to call Beatrice’s husband back from The Beyond for a quick word about family heirlooms. They were tipsy and giggling like schoolgirls and half of them were painting with the supplies that Aziraphale had “brought from the car,” and the pictures all looked quite nice.
Crowley kept kicking the legs of the table to make people shriek during the séance, and Anathema had the insightful suspicion that he was enjoying himself just a bit too much.
And Martha was a witch. She was certain of it. She couldn’t believe the woman hadn’t told her before. Or that she hadn’t sensed it.
By the time the festivities had wound down, they had all made plans to do it again, every one of them wishing Anathema their happiest congratulations, and telling her they couldn’t wait for the wedding next week (because Anathema was a sensible girl who knew you didn’t have any sort of wild party on the night before your wedding, no matter the tradition, unless you fancied having a hangover when you said I Do). It was surely the oddest gathering she’d ever attended in this town, and when one of your neighbors was the Antichrist, that was saying something.
All of it being over with, she was looking forward to finishing the clean up and going up to her room with some cocoa. She stuffed paper plates into a large sturdy garbage bag swiftly, and as she passed by the windows –
She noticed that there was still a Bentley parked in front of her cottage.
Huh.
Well, she had better tell them to shove off before they got in the way of… something.
Setting the trash bag down, Anathema walked out into the crisp warm air and closed in on the beautiful old automobile, its windows fogged like it was standing in the middle of a blizzard in February with no running heat or occult manipulation helping it along. The stars weren’t telling any secrets, twinkling cheerfully bright even when a scandalizing gasp issued from somewhere inside the vehicle.
Really. She’d known teenagers who were more discreet.
So she thought she’d be equally insufferable and opened the back door silently, slipping into the backseat without a word and slamming the door shut behind her.
Crowley’s head jerked up from the front seat and twisted to find out what had destroyed the solitude. In the process, he hit his head on the dashboard. “Who the – ow, fuck. Oh.”
Aziraphale sat up too then, his hair sticking out at the oddest angles, and he placed a hand at the back of the demon’s head. “Are you all right? I – Oh.”
They both blinked sheepishly. She could tell because Crowley’s sunglasses were off and… aha. So that’s why he wore them.
She smirked, arms folded across her chest. “Were you just staying out here to make sure everyone got a good show as they left?”
Aziraphale coughed quite embarrassedly while Crowley grinned as though that had been the entire point all along, though she was certain it hadn’t occurred to him before. “Well, that works both ways, you see,” the demon pointed out. “Why are you in my car watching?”
“Maybe I wanted to.”
Crowley opened his mouth like he had a zinger for that, and paused halfway into it. The train had derailed, rolled away from the track and come to rest near a canyon where it would most likely fall and meet its doom.
The angel noticed as much. “That wasn’t quite how you imagined that argument going, was it?”
“No,” Crowley mumbled perplexedly, still trying to figure out where he had gone wrong.
She was sort of shocked that she’d said it herself. But then, she wouldn’t have gotten into the car if that weren’t partly true, would she? The air was stifling and still inside the car, and maybe that was it. Maybe it was fogging up her brain. Of course, she was much too sensible to allow herself that excuse.
She seemed to have forgotten that she was still rather drunk on top of things.
“It’s no small wonder to me, you know, the two of you,” she pointed out slowly, still working it out for herself. “You may not think twice about it – ”
“Oh, believe me, we have,” Aziraphale admitted with a sigh. “For all the good it’s done. In the end, you sort of have to figure….”
“What the heck,” Crowley finished for him helpfully.
“Well, not exactly like that,” the angel grumbled.
“That was pretty close to what you said, actually – ”
“Oh, enough, really. If we’re going to be having this conversation now, I’m moving to the back seat so I don’t strain my neck.”
“You can’t – ” but Crowley was cut off by the car door opening, and he whimpered slightly. While Aziraphale fussed and struggled with the doors, the demon climbed between the front seats and moved to the back, facing the rear window and sitting on his knees. “He’s doing that to get away from me,” he informed Anathema in a low voice.
She smirked. “Then why are you moving back here?”
“To make things inconvenient for him. You should know by now how much I enjoy doing that,” he said with a supercilious leer as the back door opened on the other side of him.
That’s not the only reason. You didn’t want him to go.
Anathema had never thought that snake eyes could prove to be so distracting. Even when they held your gaze for Too Long.
The back door shut and an irritated sigh reverberated more heavily than it should have been able to using earthly sound waves. “Er… what were we talking about again?”
“How she likes to watch,” Crowley reminded his companion, all the while staring at her luridly. Anathema could feel herself blush in the dark, because that wasn’t exactly how she had meant it, of course…
How exactly had she meant it?
“You’re embarrassing her,” the angel said then, mercifully kind in his own way, though the fact that he was pointing it out was equally embarrassing. The ease of his voice seemed to make the demon go cross-eyed for a moment.
There was something else here that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, some shifting that she felt but didn’t see at the edge of her mind, something that wasn’t hers to know, but she seemed to get snapped up by it anyway.
She felt the need to defend herself even though she’d lost the upper hand some time ago. Who had it now remained a mystery, and it wouldn’t have mattered what she said anyway, as Crowley started speaking at that moment instead…
In another language.
“Pourquoi est-ce que cette situation ne t’inquiètes pas de tout ?”
The angel blinked and replied confusedly without struggle. “Quoi? Ce n’est pas un problème de lui parler. Sauf si tu es… nerveuse ? Vraiment ? Parce qu’elle est ici ?”
Snort. “Ne sois pas absurde. C’est juste que ce soit chié étrange. C’est tout.”
“Tu me dis que tu n’avais jamais voulu le faire?”
“C’est différent.”
“Parce que tu la connais ?” An sensible eyebrow raised archly.
“Je suppose que oui.”
“Mon aime, tu es en vérité, au plus profond de ton être – ”
“Pas aucune mot, crétin.”
“I hope you don’t mind my interrupting,” Anathema interjected quite loudly.
Both heads snapped back in her direction fretfully.
The pause was quite welcome because several things were put on hold.
It wasn’t just the conversation that was making Anathema feel out of touch, it was the other conversation. That’s what it was, she realized. A conversation taking place in the subtle movement she’d just started to feel, each gesture of their human bodies laden with five other points she wasn’t hearing. It was aggravating. She found herself wishing she weren’t halfway sensitive, wanting to go on oblivious to that dance like the rest of the world because it made her feel very simple in her own structure. Small. How had she never felt this before when she was around them?
Had to be the alcohol.
Perhaps it was more aggravating that she could see it and not decipher it. The way one hand twitched and one knee jumped as if in response, but you could barely see it unless you were looking for it. “I just….” She struggled to catch words on the fuzzy moonlight coming in through the summer-iced window. “I’m sensing this now. What’s going on here. I wasn’t expecting it, but I can feel…”
The angel looked concerned and reached out to her –
Before his hand brushed skin, she felt her body go limp and she sharply drew in breath to compensate, her eyes sliding shut without her explicit permission. She normally didn’t go relaxed that fast unless she – “Show me how you do that.”
Another pause. Full of that movement again, but this time she didn’t have to see with her eyes to know it was there.
Crowley coughed awkwardly. “You know that’s – ”
“I know what it is. Show me how it happens.”
That… had to be the alcohol too.
She gulped. Well, she wasn’t taking that back now. It made less sense than saying it. She wrenched her eyes open to see what the damage was.
Crowley was staring at Anathema good and hard, seriously, as though he were weighing some options. A pin dropped somewhere, though no one heard it. “All right,” he said slowly. “If you really want to know, I… think we can give you some idea.”
Aziraphale blinked like he was stammering. “We can?”
The demon shrugged. “Why not? Long as we’re careful. She’s curious, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy waiting until we get back to London.” She had been deliberately ignoring how much Crowley tremored from the lack of attention, but it was hard not to feel guilty amid his desperation. “It’s her bachelorette party, after all. Her choice.”
Anathema was then expecting some kind of lecture about the virtue of marriage and the ones you loved –
Instead, the angel sighed wearily, like he was sure that he’d left the oven on at home and it was such a shame to let it go like that. When he looked at her again, she knew he was losing the fight because his eyes burned so tragically bright. Seemed the tide pulled just as hard on the other end no matter how virtuous it was. “You’re certain, dear girl?”
She couldn’t say no when given the choice. There were things she had been curious about since long before tonight. To see the differences for their sort and how they matched up. To see them with all the barriers stripped away, without their convenient personas. She knew how other people judged them, but how did they judge each other?
Did they at all?
“I’ll stay,” she said at last, and she did sound certain. More than certain. Resolute.
The two looked at each other first. They had to reach their own decision.
Crowley leaned toward her carefully, moving slow and watching her face. He was intent and almost too careful when he laid a hand on her chest, right below the base of her neck. There was surprisingly nothing coarse or sensual about the gesture, it was simply a touch, a warm palm against –
And then it wasn’t anymore.
Then it was something else entirely.
Anathema gasped and squeezed her eyes shut. She was flooded, drowned, frozen in some instant shock of pleasure that was so very good she felt like she needed something painful to contrast it, to help her feel all of it the way it was intended. She had this unerring certainty that she would never feel hunger again, never want for good weather or a change of scenery, never need another dream late at night when she was wakeful or crave good poetry when she felt alone. It was an odd succession of thoughts, but also the neatest way of puzzling it out without short-circuiting. Sensation was too enigmatic for her mind to reconcile.
Her nerves danced together, her mind was coaxed away and held above at a distance, the same way those cheap parlour conmen talked of out-of-body experiences, only it was real. She could look down and know she was beautiful, know she was safe and wise and cherished, know she was comprehensively whole. Something like that.
It felt like an amplified ricochet of something that she wished to remember, but she couldn’t keep a single thought in her head….
“You feel that?”
She nodded dumbly, staring at the car ceiling.
He sighed heavily.
“That’s me, right now,” the demon said quietly, grudgingly honest.
Through her oil paint-blurred vision, she thought she could see Aziraphale’s expression go a little awed, a little pained. “My dear…”
His hand left, the sensations with it, and Anathema slumped into the seat. She couldn’t explain what it felt like to leave that, it was somehow devastating and relieving at the same time. Pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, she fought to recover her breath.
“I think you’ve frightened her off,” the angel said, gently teasing, reaching out to brush a lock of hair from her cheek.
“No,” she managed after a long inhale. “No, I’m all right. It’s fine.”
Crowley smiled small in the dark, calming into the situation. “Well, then, do you mind if I – ?” He tipped his head toward the other side of the seat where the angel waited tranquilly, as though there was nothing remotely strange or potentially awkward about the situation.
“No, not at all,” she said softly, and her voice was daunted and dry without her intending it to be.
She doubted her answer would have made a difference, anyway; he was moving already, knees sliding over a few inches to put what he wanted more easily within his reach.
There was less showmanship than she had expected with her as audience. Crowley passed a hand close to the angel’s face and his index finger flicked up, like he was snapping on a light switch. And in that moment they breathed in unison, sighed the sort of sigh one heard when someone was taken leisurely with aching care. Except no one got to assume a role like that here. Too close to the core to even think of it.
“You… don’t have to touch?” Anathema asked breathlessly, her pulse having pushed over the breakers in the middle of it somewhere, lost.
Crowley didn’t open his eyes, though he did grin. “The physicality is… a perk. A nicccce side-effect.”
“I wouldn’t call it only that,” the angel murmured tersely. “And neither would you, though I shouldn’t have to remind you of that, with the way you…”
“No, not always,” the demon chuckled. His spine seemed to move independent of his body as he shifted just slightly closer, the silk on his back rippling like it was drawing a charge from the air. “You remember the first time?”
The angel laughed in echo, self-satisfied smile on his curved lips. “Mmm….”
Crowley glanced sideways to catch Anathema, draw her in further. She bit her lip hard, knew she was being baited and fell into the trap anyway, caring little for the cost.
“Didn’t even have to touch him,” the demon whispered to her, brushing a thumb down the side of the angel’s face, centimeters away, like he had meant to touch him and just missed. Aziraphale groaned. “He came so fierce… and I never laid a finger on him.”
Anathema felt her chest clench up tight and lock in.
“No repeat performances tonight,” the angel commanded.
“Of course not.”
She had half expected them to be done with it and roll around naked on the back seat after that, but only one action took place. Aziraphale took one of the demon’s fingers into his mouth when it passed too close to his cheek again, sucking gently like he’d known the way to do it for millennia.
Which, of course, couldn’t be true. But she wondered if had it occurred to him in times past. Had he dreamed of it before he had ever come close enough to Crowley to touch him like that?
“Yes.”
The answer was the angel’s.
“How did you – ?”
She would never know if he’d heard her thought or not. It was for the best, she decided later on.
Aziraphale moved closer to the center of the seat and the leather upholstery squeaked in approval, though Crowley looked confused. He shifted his position so that he straddled the angel’s lap and seemed more than appeased then. Aziraphale rolled his eyes in disproval but comfortably set one hand on the demon’s thigh, reaching his other hand over to hover above Anathema’s forehead. “You not helping her to understand it. She’s going to overload with it if you don’t.”
“Oh, so that’s why you moved so wantonly into my clutches,” Crowley said dryly with a sardonic twist of his mouth.
Anathema, for her part in all of this, had never thought of one’s forehead being an erogenous zone, but she was learning very quickly.
“You have centres of energy, so you can focus it, you see,” the angel said, trying to keep his voice steady while Crowley rolled up his own shirtsleeves for self-distraction.
She did see. Like when you spilled red wine on a pallid tablecloth and it spread out through each fiber, but always stayed darkest at the center. She saw perfectly well. It was everywhere, but you were meant to feel it –
Aziraphale trailed his hand down and she felt her entire frame light like a trail of Chinese New Year firecrackers, igniting from fixed points, but leaving waves of smoke to soak in. Her throat, her heart, solar plexus, navel, all the way down between her legs that she didn’t remember spreading wide like that.
He didn’t have to touch, he could draw it out of her, out of those places that vibrated and blazed like –
“Chakras…” she hissed, snapping her head back against the cushioned seat.
“By George, I think she’s got it,” came the amused rejoinder.
She could hear the eyeroll in answer. “Distasteful Rex Harrison impressions aside, I’d say you’ve got a good measure of it,” the angel conceded. “They were created for a reason, after all. Some people figure it out and put it to paper or doctrine. Though you’re more bound to feel it through physical sensation than we are. And we don’t tend to… er, fixate on certain places for pleasure like this. It could be somewhere different each time.”
“And he’s a challenge,” Crowley murmured low, like he could wrap his voice around the form before him and be done with it, “because it always is somewhere different.”
“Be a dear and find it then, won’t you?” Aziraphale growled, slipping one soft finger through a gap between shirt buttons and pulling the demon closer.
Anathema’s hand went to the door handle and she made a gallant attempt to sit up. “Er, I can – ”
“Just relax,” Crowley told her. “Riding it out always makes it easiest. If you left now it would leave you with a twitch that’d bother you for much longer than it’s worth.”
She had to smirk. “You speaking from experience?”
Fine pupils slid from her face back to that curved, beckoning mouth. “He’s a challenge,” the demon said again, rocking his hips just once and closing his eyes to it.
Anathema didn’t know how, but she could feel him searching through ether for it, searching the spreads of the angel’s psyche, feel her conscience colliding and threading so that she could view it at her own distance. Her body told her something else completely through all of it, thrashed and surged and reached out for air as though it were necessary.
She had to remind herself that it was.
Undulating shadows were caught in their own vibrant circles, and the fog on the window began to bead and roll, sweating and slipping to match their movement. The desperate cries glanced off the interior of the small space and ragged breath created an odd symphony of want for anyone lucid enough to listen for it.
She had never had this much control over her own power before, but in this state, with their support on either side of her conscience, Anathema could reign over herself with ease. She could decide what she felt, where to set her nerves on fire, when to shake. Nothing was hidden, but all within her grasp.
For them it seemed more complicated.
Aziraphale gave a piercing intake of breath. “There – ”
Crowley’s eyes slammed open and nearly rolled back into his head. “Oh, yes… I feel that…” He gasped the same rhythm that pulsed through Anathema’s blood.
She felt it too. Something coiled tight within the angel spun apart, like pulling one loose thread on the edge of a tapestry, watching it fall to waste because it was so satisfying see it relieved of its confines.
Aziraphale tilted Crowley’s chin down so he could see the demon’s eyes. They were brassy yellow and white where the moon hit them.
Anathema grazed her fingernails along the column of her throat and let it tip her over the edge, screaming and senseless with the heat.
She had thought it would pass without either of them noticing, but the reaction seemed to be opposite; everything stepped up a level, heightened and sharp, like her own energy was bleeding through –
Like a wine stain.
Aziraphale grabbed Crowley by the tie and pulled him forward until their lips met.
She had never seen them kiss before.
She wasn’t in the right state to remember that she had never seen them do any of this before.
Still. It was strange, sort of awkwardly beautiful. The sliver of tongue, the darkening of lips, the sound of Crowley moaning so softly, ardently against angelic lips that weren’t quite as perfectly formed as the world would believe. The way the demon’s hand fisted so urgently in scratchy fabric that he had to abhor.
“Please,” Aziraphale whispered.
“Yes…” Crowley panted in answer without hesitation. His knees clenched in at the angel’s hips, locking himself in place as the other’s breaths began shuddering violently.
From then on there were no words from either of them, only mad clashing on some level above and around them, twining bolder and brighter between them and shaking through the atmosphere, saturating everything within their branching reach. It ended surprisingly undramatic, Aziraphale’s teeth fastening on Crowley’s neck as he muffled a cry against pale flesh, the demon choking on his last moan and bowing his head, resting his jaw against a tilted sweat-slick temple.
She understood then. It was obvious what held them together, even if it was only present on an intangible level. It was so obvious that it couldn’t be put into words.
Obvious things were funny like that.
Outside a gentle breeze blew. They could hear it rustling the trees.
Anathema wondered blurrily if they’d created it.
The moments passed in silence held nothing that needed to be said. Which was comforting for everyone involved. The only problem was… how to extricate.
“I should… go,” she said inadequately after a few minutes.
They didn’t seem to mind her laughable exit line anyway. “We’ll get out of here and leave you be as soon as we’re… able,” Crowley concluded.
“Right, take your time,” she said hurriedly, grasping for the handle and quickly throwing open the door. She stepped carefully out of the Bentley, making sure she had her feet before turning around. Her afterglow made it less discomfiting, but the oddness of the situation was still there. “Erm… I don’t really know what…”
“Don’t be so fussy, dear girl, it was our pleasure,” the angel said, his voice thick and slow, like well-churned cream. His eyes found the demon’s then and they both had an indecent chuckle over the clumsy double-entendre.
“Yes…” Anathema finished slowly. Her eyes brightened keenly again. “I’ll see you both next week then?”
“Of courssse.”
“Absolutely.”
She smiled as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and shut the door politely, heading back inside.
Crowley arched his back in a stretch and fell onto the seat beside Aziraphale. He laughed again, more from post-coital haziness than anything else, and decided to lay back and rest his head in the angel’s lap. “That wasn’t on my daily list when I woke up this morning.”
“Nor mine,” Aziraphale answered lazily. “Probably good for her in the end. Helped her learn to focus her sensitivities more.”
“Ah, so we were helping her then? That’s how you’re justifying it?”
“I’m an angel, I don’t have to justify anything to you.”
“Mm, that’s the sex talking.”
Aziraphale snorted. “Probably.” He brushed some damp hair from the demon’s flushed cheeks and glanced up at the abandoned steering wheel. “Are we going back to London soon? I sort of want to get home, since I haven’t been back yet. Check on the shop and all.”
Crowley’s face fell ever so slightly, but he reached an arm over the back seat for leverage. “Right,” he said, pulling himself up. He didn’t stop to consider the possibility of dizziness and promptly ended up back in the angel’s lap. “Fuck me,” he grumbled, raising a hand to his eyes in annoyance.
“Later, dear boy, when we’re somewhere more comfortable,” was the furtive reply.
The hand slipped down an inch and two intent eyes peered up at Aziraphale’s decidedly un-dithering face.
“Right,” said Crowley purposefully, lifting himself from the seat with renewed enthusiasm.
They were sure to get back to the city in record time, with or without proper road signs.
* * *
Anathema fell asleep at the kitchen table with a cup of cocoa by her head.
Because she fell asleep, she didn’t hear the door open. She didn’t hear a coat get hung up, the door get locked, or the heavy footsteps that went into the bedroom and then out again, into the dining room, the living room and the loo before finally getting to the kitchen.
“Anathema? Ana, love?”
When she opened her dark eyes and found his plain brown ones staring back, she kissed him instantly.
He seemed to enjoy that greeting.
“I thought you’d be all scathing questions and severe looks, and checking me over for lady’s perfume.”
Which she did promptly after he suggested it. But there was no scent that offended, and she really hadn’t been worried anyway.
“Did you have fun?”
He shrugged. “Not really. You?”
She smiled, but there was nothing hidden in it. “I had a good time actually. It was a really nice party.”
“Good,” he said, running some fingers through her hair and frowning when he hit a snag. “I think you got cocoa in your hair….”
She laughed. “Well, that was clumsy of me.” But she stilled his detangling hand nevertheless and enveloped him in a hug. “I missed you,” she said into his neatly trimmed hair.
“I… missed you too,” he answered back confusedly.
He would never find out what had brought that on. There was no way for her to explain what had entered her head –
She could look down and know she was beautiful, know she was safe and wise and cherished, know she was comprehensively whole. Something like that…
And it was all wrapped up in a rumpled blue shirt, a gawky stoop and a too-long nose. That echo she’d been looking for. She squeezed him so tight that he coughed, and hummed into his shoulder when he held on tighter for it. “You want some cocoa?” she murmured.
“That’d be great,” he said softly, releasing her and moving to the cabinet.
She counted down for it.
“Two or three biscuits, love?”
Grinning like a mad something-or-other, she yanked him back by the collar of his shirt and kissed him again, good and proper this time around
His eyes went so wide when he was breathless.
“You pick.”
END
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-21 06:49 pm (UTC)The description of how Crowley felt while with Aziraphale... so very sweet and rather poignant. As though he's less distant from heaven than he thinks. And Aziraphale opening Anathema's chakras. The passion of Crowley chasing, hunting Aziraphale's down... wow.
And these parts particulary:
Crowley passed a hand close to the angel’s face and his index finger flicked up, like he was snapping on a light switch. And in that moment they breathed in unison, sighed the sort of sigh one heard when someone was taken leisurely with aching care. Except no one got to assume a role like that here. Too close to the core to even think of it.
From then on there were no words from either of them, only mad clashing on some level above and around them, twining bolder and brighter between them and shaking through the atmosphere, saturating everything within their branching reach. It ended surprisingly undramatic, Aziraphale’s teeth fastening on Crowley’s neck as he muffled a cry against pale flesh, the demon choking on his last moan and bowing his head, resting his jaw against a tilted sweat-slick temple.
She understood then. It was obvious what held them together, even if it was only present on an intangible level. It was so obvious that it couldn’t be put into words.
Obvious things were funny like that.
Utterly. Perfect.
Thank you so much, this was a far better gift that I could have dreamed!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-21 06:52 pm (UTC)Thank you for keeping Anathema and Newt the soulmates they are :) That was icing on the cake.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 12:45 am (UTC)And you picked out so many key points and sections, which thrills me! I think part of the problem with writing metaphysical sex is you end up wondering as the author if it will only make sense to you because it's coming from your brain, and I'm so excited that it worked for you.
It's funny because Crowley's feelings around Aziraphale were actually the first little bunny for the smexing part of the fic. That teeny piece sprang into my brain and ran away from there. And I'm so releaved that it was rational! Again, I was worried that maybe my mind had run away with it. XD
I'm so happy that you enjoyed it! That makes it all worth it, and I hope your holidays are fabulous!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 02:30 am (UTC)There are other significant things in this story that I loved... Anathema's calm deliberation of how her life was going to unfold. How physicality is a 'perk', and clearly enjoyed by both. The description of A/C's first time. Oh my (fans self). The metaphor of the wine stain... the metaphor of the tapestry unravelling. Those really got me.
Your mind can run away with this idea all it wants to, it was incredible! *super hugs* Thanks again for a wonderful gift :D
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-21 06:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 12:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-21 09:16 pm (UTC)Somehow it was soooooooo much hotter than human run-of-the-mill sex would have been.
Not that there's anything wrong with run-of-the-mill human-style sex.I truly envy Anathema, sitting in the back seat of the Bentley with them, and feeling all that ..... 89(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-21 10:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 12:10 am (UTC)Oh, gotta tell you a story, and this is as good a place as any:
I just had dinner with an old friend from public school whom I haven't seen in aeons, and who was telling me about her husband and home out in the country. It seems that all the other people on their road have the same surname, and the road is named after them ... five generations of Youngs have lived on Young Road ... all decendents of ... yup, Adam Young.
Perhaps there's a time machine involved ....?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:12 am (UTC)And that is a truly an interesting story. I think you may be right.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-23 03:06 pm (UTC)And of course there's my first story in the fandom, one of yours, called Love Calls You By Your Name. (http://library.good-omens.com/viewstory.php?sid=242) Which set a similar tone in the fandom for me .... ;]
Back on topic, though: Secret Author, I'm really not surehow you did it with the honestly-not-really-sexual images you used, but. O. M. G. This tale was even hotter on re-reading. Seriously: cold shower now. ;9
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 01:01 am (UTC)I thought it would be fun and a nice challenge to do the metaphysical sex with very little blatant sexual language in there, which is why it came out that way. Much more fun to let your own mind fill in the gaps sometimes....
I think we all get to envy the girl in this one... for a change.... which is kinda weird in this fandom. XD I think you're right about this fic - while we all love our good old-fashioned smut, it probably wouldn't have worked in this particular setting. Which was what made it such a blast to write. ;) I can't tell you how glad I am that you liked it!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-23 08:46 pm (UTC)And Geez... to be Anathema for just one night.
excellent!
W
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 01:03 am (UTC)I know, really. Girl needs to share the wealth... of experience. Yeah, that's it.....
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-24 10:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 01:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-28 03:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-29 02:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-09 11:17 am (UTC)Nice that it has lots of Anathema, as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-01 09:56 pm (UTC)Came here via Crack_Van, btw.
I'm grinning like a fool and full of warm fizzy happy. I love how you've done Anathema, AND Aziraphale & Crowley! Good lord, the scene in the car was just... steaming!!! Without anyone getting undressed. HA, unbelievable!
Just excellent, all the way 'round.
EDIT: BTW - Am I missing it or is the French translated somewhere? I would really like to know what was said there. *hopeful look*
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-24 09:50 am (UTC)The angel laid a hand on his arm. “Aren’t we close to – ”
Crowley ripped off his sunglasses and glared at the angel in a way that brought the conversation to an over-aware halt. “If you touch me again, I am pulling this car over and we are not getting out.”
“Oh.” Aziraphale removed his hand quickly. “Sorry.” There wasn’t much more you could say to two yellow eyes that glowed practically neon and Morse-coded the message two-months-with-only-my-hands-don’t-you-dare-tempt-me-you-right-bastard straight into your chest and gut and throat.
Aww, poor sexually frustrated Crowley! *glomps him*
“Fuck me,” he grumbled, raising a hand to his eyes in annoyance.
“Later, dear boy, when we’re somewhere more comfortable,” was the furtive reply.
The hand slipped down an inch and two intent eyes peered up at Aziraphale’s decidedly un-dithering face.
“Right,” said Crowley purposefully, lifting himself from the seat with renewed enthusiasm.
They were sure to get back to the city in record time, with or without proper road signs.
That just sums up Aziraphale's inner bastard PERFECTLY.
And oh my, need I even mention how JEALOUS I was of Anathema? Although I must say, as a Hindu and as someone who practices crystal therapy and a bit of yoga, I never considered such a use for chakras.
The sex was BEAUTIFUL. It wasn't traditional human-bits sex and yet it wass sstill sso ssenssuouss that it hass me hisssing like thisss. Ssexy. And did I mention how jealousss I wass of Anathema?! And ooh, I loved the physicality bringing nice perks bit!
However, I do not speak French and I have no idea what they were saying; a translation would be lovely. ;)
All in all, an absolutely lovely fic, and I am in awe of your writing skills! You win the Internets!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-28 05:31 pm (UTC)I loved the whole car scene, but the best was when
And, of course, the very end, which was both fluffy and a bit funny, and I loved so much.
As I said, great.^^
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