Happy Holidays, Lady_Oneiros!
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vibishan
Recipient: Lady_Oneiros
Title: Thou Breath of Autumn's Being
Title Stolen From: Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"
Characters: Crowley/Aziraphale, Zacharael, three mortals
Words: 1,882
Rating: very light R
Warnings: some science-babble, potentially squicky genderless-sex
Summary: Fallen or not, Crowley loves the 'Hectic Red' of autumn leaves.
Notes: Thanks to Quantum_witch whose fic “Love Calls You by Your Name”
provided the angelic name of the serpent of Eden.
“Crowley, what on this earth would I want to go to America for?” Aziraphale asked finally. Crowley grinned. The angel just couldn’t hold out against protracted wheedling.
“It’s lovely this time of year, angel. We’re always so busy, we haven’t gone since before it became America.
“We were there just forty years ago!”
“But we didn’t go in autumn, angel.” Aziraphale pursed his lips. Aziraphale wouldn’t have said he disliked America, but that was because Aziraphale took pride in remaining unfailingly polite.
“Come on,” Crowley coaxed. “Don’t you think all those stressed, materialistic, commercial American souls need some guidance? It’s not their fault they were born on the wrong side of the pond.”
Aziraphale consented.
***
“Welcome to Boston!” Crowley beamed as they emerged from his states-side phone in a flat he had used intermittently for two hundred years. He always expected the red brick edifice to still stand when he returned, so, despite two collapses and eight lawsuits, the old colonial building had yet to be condemned.
Aziraphale glanced out the window toward the harbor.
“Isn’t this the town where they desecrated an entire ship’s worth of tea?”
Crowley ginned.
***
In Boston, everyone drove like Crowley. On the wrong side. As they shot through another intersection (the city was completely devoid of anything as sensible as roundabouts), Crowley shouted back at all the other drivers, honking continuously. He grinned, clearly in his element. Aziraphale quietly, and vehemently, prayed.
Finally, they pulled into a suburban neighborhood near Harvard square in Cambridge. Crowley slowed and they cruised down a residential street lined with graceful trees.
“Look at the leaves, Angel,” Crowley murmured, and Aziraphale stared at him. Then he turned to the trees. Sure enough, every single one blazed a deep crimson or orange, with the occasional flare of canary yellow for variety.
“We came to America to look at the leaves?” Aziraphale clarified shakily. Crowley grinned.
“Best autumn leaves anywhere, angel. They look practically painted.”
Aziraphale inhaled sharply.
“Do you remember –” he asked in a rush, then looked abruptly away. “Never mind.” He stared out at the flamboyantly hued foliage flowing past. “You were saying something about the leaves?” he asked deliberately. Crowley gave him a strange look, then returned to his explanation.
“Yeah. See, it’s something about the sudden temperature drop, and the difference between day and night temperatures, that makes all the colors, and in New England all the weather conditions are perfect for it –” He broke off as a family came into view. A man in jeans and a red flannel shirt was diligently raking his lawn, while a girl and a boy, around seven and nine, fenced with sticks near the sidewalk. Crowley slowed the Bentley to a crawl.
“This is absolutely the best thing about autumn leaves,” he whispered conspiratorially. The man finished one side of the lawn and raked the last few strays into one bright flame colored pile. He set the rake against the side of the house and told the kids not to leave the yard as he got a drink of water.
The minute the door closed, the children dropped their sticks, ran across the grass and canonballed into the leaf pile. They rolled around in the dead leaves, shrieking delightedly as they crunched and crackled. Soon they were flinging handfuls of leaves at one another in an exuberant preview of inevitably upcoming snowball fights.
The neatly raked pile was decimated, scattered back across the grass. Crowley smirked. Aziraphale smacked him lightly on the arm, and the bizarre autumn wind recreated the majority of the pile. Crowley pouted.
“Aw, come on, angel…”
“Now, Crowley, they had their fun, and so did you, but the poor man will likely have more leaves in his yard again tomorrow morning. Besides, don’t you want to teach those children they can make minor mischief without consequences?”
Aziraphale smiled indulgently at the children, now fully occupied in trying to climb the tree as they drove away. Crowley thought about it.
“I suppose.” A branch broke, but the boy landed miraculously on feet, despite the fact that he’d been hanging upside down.
***
A time when the world was not
“Hey, Aziraphale!” Aziraphale looked up from his scribblings on the potential concept of protagonist.
“Yes, Zacharael?” Aziraphale asked the Dominion politely. The most flexible and laidback of the angelic taskmasters grinned.
“You up for a little more trouble shooting work? It’s just a touchup to the plant project,” Zacharael tossed off casually. Aziraphale’s eyes widened. He’d done adjustments to a number of minor pieces of creation in addition to his own work on the eventual development of literature, since that didn’t need to be done until well into Time, but the plant project was far more significant to The Plan than anything he’d fiddled with so far.
“I’d…um…I’d have to ask Gadriel if he minds me taking the time off from our work again –” Aziraphale stammered.
“Nonsense!” declared Zacharael with a wave. “He’s helping you invent conflict, right?” Aziraphale nodded.
Zacharael rolled his eyes.
“One of the weirdest things in the blueprints,” he muttered, “But hey, whatever He wants, I guess.”
Aziraphale nodded.
“Of course,” he said earnestly. Zacharael smiled.
“Have Gadriel take a look at this plant problem too. Do both of you some good to think about something else for a while.” He waved one glowing hand, and the schematics, carefully delineated in light, appeared before Aziraphale. The hitch had been dutifully noted in precise celestial script beside the three dimensional diagrams. “Call me if you come up with anything,” Zacharael instructed as he flew gracefully away.
“So what do the high-and-mighties need us to fix now?” asked Gadriel wryly as he landed. Aziraphale swatted him.
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” he reprimanded lightly. Gadriel raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, you shouldn’t,” Aziraphale muttered. He turned to the image of the planned chloroplast and reviewed the notes for a moment. “It’s like this. These pigments –” the chlorophylls he meant pulsed with slightly stronger gleam. “– absorb most light that makes it through the atmosphere, except the reflected green, and converts it into energy so that it’s available to organic life, right?” Gadriel followed the relevant information as sections of script highlighted themselves as Aziraphale mentioned them.
“Okay, I’ve got that. What’s the trouble?”
“Well, it absorbs too much of the light – it heats up, and the chemicals start to become damaged.”
Gadriel frowned. “I was thinking we add another few pigments, in lower concentrations, to reflect a fraction of the light from other wavelengths and disperse some of that extra heat, but I hadn’t really got much past that.”
Gadriel nodded absently.
“We’d be better off using reds and oranges – they’re closer to infra red, which is heat, right?” Aziraphale nodded.
“So…we add low levels of carotenoids…but not enough to obstruct the functioning of the plant…” They started scribbling calculations to determine the right amount of other dyes to add, and what genetic sequence would have to be inserted to code for it.
Suddenly Gadriel sat straight up.
“Hey! Doesn’t all the chlorophyll decay during that – that anti-summer, what’s it going to be called?”
“Winter,” Aziraphale supplied.
“Yes, that! Anyway, won’t all the leaves be ugly and brown after that?”
“Well, I suppose…”
“We ought to design these…these carotenoids not to break down as soon as chlorophyll does, so that the leaves stay bright and dashing!” Aziraphale didn’t really see what purpose it would serve, but Gadriel sounded so exited about the idea that he couldn’t help smiling.
“All right. Let’s do it.”
***
“This man is really, fundamentally annoying.” Aziraphale glanced up from his second edition of Antigone to see Crowley flipping through Rene Descartes’s Meditations. “I mean really,” Crowley continued. “The ‘Imp of the Perverse.’ Hmph. As if I didn’t have better things to do than make him think he wasn’t a pretentious twit writing about the certainty of his own massive ego.”
“Crowley, why did you take me to go see the leaves?” Aziraphale interrupted. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but it was unexpected. They did odd things together all the time; Not asking why kept everything simpler.
Crowley muttered something and scuffed his feet.
“What was that?” Aziraphale asked kindly.
“I said, I missed you,” Crowley snapped. “Every time I went to see ‘em, I’d turn around thinking you ought to be there. And I got tired of being wrong.”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale sniffed. Then he took Crowley’s chin between his fingers, pulled him forward, and kissed him, light and sweet, on the lips.
“Angel, what –” Aziraphale cut him off, kissing harder.
***
A time when the world was not, later
They had no genders, but they had hands and mouths and hips. They slid along one another, reveling in smooth sensation of angelic skin on angelic skin. They undulated, pushing their hips and chests together, rolling into each other to increase contact. Their legs twined together, curves and lines neither masculine nor feminine traced by elegant hands as they caressed one another. Fingers dragged through pearlescent white pinions as their wings thrashed wildly around them.
Gasping, Aziraphale let his head fall forward onto Gadriel’s chest as the other angel sifted his fingers through Aziraphale’s fine hair.
“Promise you’ll always love me,” Gadriel asked suddenly. Aziraphale sat up, gazing into Gadriel’s bright gold eyes with a worried expression.
“Of course I will,” Aziraphale told him, bewildered. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Gadriel felt an apprehensive clenching in his chest. The silver words of Lucifer crawled through his mind, and he had to admit there was sense to them, but he still felt that something, something new and different and utterly incomprehensible, might be coming.
“Just promise me,” Gadriel begged. “No matter what happens, promise.” Aziraphale leaned down and kissed him deeply. As they parted, Aziraphale cradled Gadriel’s face between his hands.
“I swear it,” he murmured softly, “On my own immortal soul, and yours, and on Our Lord above us, no matter what happens, I will always love you.”
Gadriel sighed in relief and they kissed again, lingering in the pleasant embrace of their bodies.
***
As they lay boneless, wrapped around each other on Aziraphale’s couch, Crowley muttered,
“Mind letting me in on what spurred this, angel? Not that I’m complaining, or anything.”
“I’ve missed you too,” Aziraphale explained simply. When Crowley tried to ask what that meant, Aziraphale kissed him again.
“Aziraphale I’m worried about you!” Crowley protested as he pushed the angel away from him. “Are you sure you’re…”in your right mind“…okay?” Aziraphale stroked his cheek.
“Do you remember anything about heaven at all?” Crowley stared at him.
“Not…really, I mean, the memories are there, but you can’t think about ‘em. It hurts too much.” He swallowed. “I remember being really, really happy though. And…I think there was…” he shook his head. “No, I can’t, I can’t think about it.”
“Try,” Aziraphale whispered.
“I think…I think I knew someone….special, I don’t – I can’t remember details, but…” He grinned cheekily.
“It’s actually one of the reasons I like you, angel. You…remind me of…whoever it was.”
Aziraphale sniffed.
“One day, Crowley, you’re going to remember. Everything. And then you’ll understand.”
“How do you know?” Crowley asked curiously. Aziraphale smiled and kissed Crowley’s temple.
“I have faith.”
fin
Happy Holidays, lady_oneiros!
vibishanRecipient: Lady_Oneiros
Title: Thou Breath of Autumn's Being
Title Stolen From: Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"
Characters: Crowley/Aziraphale, Zacharael, three mortals
Words: 1,882
Rating: very light R
Warnings: some science-babble, potentially squicky genderless-sex
Summary: Fallen or not, Crowley loves the 'Hectic Red' of autumn leaves.
Notes: Thanks to Quantum_witch whose fic “Love Calls You by Your Name”
provided the angelic name of the serpent of Eden.
“Crowley, what on this earth would I want to go to America for?” Aziraphale asked finally. Crowley grinned. The angel just couldn’t hold out against protracted wheedling.
“It’s lovely this time of year, angel. We’re always so busy, we haven’t gone since before it became America.
“We were there just forty years ago!”
“But we didn’t go in autumn, angel.” Aziraphale pursed his lips. Aziraphale wouldn’t have said he disliked America, but that was because Aziraphale took pride in remaining unfailingly polite.
“Come on,” Crowley coaxed. “Don’t you think all those stressed, materialistic, commercial American souls need some guidance? It’s not their fault they were born on the wrong side of the pond.”
Aziraphale consented.
***
“Welcome to Boston!” Crowley beamed as they emerged from his states-side phone in a flat he had used intermittently for two hundred years. He always expected the red brick edifice to still stand when he returned, so, despite two collapses and eight lawsuits, the old colonial building had yet to be condemned.
Aziraphale glanced out the window toward the harbor.
“Isn’t this the town where they desecrated an entire ship’s worth of tea?”
Crowley ginned.
***
In Boston, everyone drove like Crowley. On the wrong side. As they shot through another intersection (the city was completely devoid of anything as sensible as roundabouts), Crowley shouted back at all the other drivers, honking continuously. He grinned, clearly in his element. Aziraphale quietly, and vehemently, prayed.
Finally, they pulled into a suburban neighborhood near Harvard square in Cambridge. Crowley slowed and they cruised down a residential street lined with graceful trees.
“Look at the leaves, Angel,” Crowley murmured, and Aziraphale stared at him. Then he turned to the trees. Sure enough, every single one blazed a deep crimson or orange, with the occasional flare of canary yellow for variety.
“We came to America to look at the leaves?” Aziraphale clarified shakily. Crowley grinned.
“Best autumn leaves anywhere, angel. They look practically painted.”
Aziraphale inhaled sharply.
“Do you remember –” he asked in a rush, then looked abruptly away. “Never mind.” He stared out at the flamboyantly hued foliage flowing past. “You were saying something about the leaves?” he asked deliberately. Crowley gave him a strange look, then returned to his explanation.
“Yeah. See, it’s something about the sudden temperature drop, and the difference between day and night temperatures, that makes all the colors, and in New England all the weather conditions are perfect for it –” He broke off as a family came into view. A man in jeans and a red flannel shirt was diligently raking his lawn, while a girl and a boy, around seven and nine, fenced with sticks near the sidewalk. Crowley slowed the Bentley to a crawl.
“This is absolutely the best thing about autumn leaves,” he whispered conspiratorially. The man finished one side of the lawn and raked the last few strays into one bright flame colored pile. He set the rake against the side of the house and told the kids not to leave the yard as he got a drink of water.
The minute the door closed, the children dropped their sticks, ran across the grass and canonballed into the leaf pile. They rolled around in the dead leaves, shrieking delightedly as they crunched and crackled. Soon they were flinging handfuls of leaves at one another in an exuberant preview of inevitably upcoming snowball fights.
The neatly raked pile was decimated, scattered back across the grass. Crowley smirked. Aziraphale smacked him lightly on the arm, and the bizarre autumn wind recreated the majority of the pile. Crowley pouted.
“Aw, come on, angel…”
“Now, Crowley, they had their fun, and so did you, but the poor man will likely have more leaves in his yard again tomorrow morning. Besides, don’t you want to teach those children they can make minor mischief without consequences?”
Aziraphale smiled indulgently at the children, now fully occupied in trying to climb the tree as they drove away. Crowley thought about it.
“I suppose.” A branch broke, but the boy landed miraculously on feet, despite the fact that he’d been hanging upside down.
***
A time when the world was not
“Hey, Aziraphale!” Aziraphale looked up from his scribblings on the potential concept of protagonist.
“Yes, Zacharael?” Aziraphale asked the Dominion politely. The most flexible and laidback of the angelic taskmasters grinned.
“You up for a little more trouble shooting work? It’s just a touchup to the plant project,” Zacharael tossed off casually. Aziraphale’s eyes widened. He’d done adjustments to a number of minor pieces of creation in addition to his own work on the eventual development of literature, since that didn’t need to be done until well into Time, but the plant project was far more significant to The Plan than anything he’d fiddled with so far.
“I’d…um…I’d have to ask Gadriel if he minds me taking the time off from our work again –” Aziraphale stammered.
“Nonsense!” declared Zacharael with a wave. “He’s helping you invent conflict, right?” Aziraphale nodded.
Zacharael rolled his eyes.
“One of the weirdest things in the blueprints,” he muttered, “But hey, whatever He wants, I guess.”
Aziraphale nodded.
“Of course,” he said earnestly. Zacharael smiled.
“Have Gadriel take a look at this plant problem too. Do both of you some good to think about something else for a while.” He waved one glowing hand, and the schematics, carefully delineated in light, appeared before Aziraphale. The hitch had been dutifully noted in precise celestial script beside the three dimensional diagrams. “Call me if you come up with anything,” Zacharael instructed as he flew gracefully away.
“So what do the high-and-mighties need us to fix now?” asked Gadriel wryly as he landed. Aziraphale swatted him.
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” he reprimanded lightly. Gadriel raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, you shouldn’t,” Aziraphale muttered. He turned to the image of the planned chloroplast and reviewed the notes for a moment. “It’s like this. These pigments –” the chlorophylls he meant pulsed with slightly stronger gleam. “– absorb most light that makes it through the atmosphere, except the reflected green, and converts it into energy so that it’s available to organic life, right?” Gadriel followed the relevant information as sections of script highlighted themselves as Aziraphale mentioned them.
“Okay, I’ve got that. What’s the trouble?”
“Well, it absorbs too much of the light – it heats up, and the chemicals start to become damaged.”
Gadriel frowned. “I was thinking we add another few pigments, in lower concentrations, to reflect a fraction of the light from other wavelengths and disperse some of that extra heat, but I hadn’t really got much past that.”
Gadriel nodded absently.
“We’d be better off using reds and oranges – they’re closer to infra red, which is heat, right?” Aziraphale nodded.
“So…we add low levels of carotenoids…but not enough to obstruct the functioning of the plant…” They started scribbling calculations to determine the right amount of other dyes to add, and what genetic sequence would have to be inserted to code for it.
Suddenly Gadriel sat straight up.
“Hey! Doesn’t all the chlorophyll decay during that – that anti-summer, what’s it going to be called?”
“Winter,” Aziraphale supplied.
“Yes, that! Anyway, won’t all the leaves be ugly and brown after that?”
“Well, I suppose…”
“We ought to design these…these carotenoids not to break down as soon as chlorophyll does, so that the leaves stay bright and dashing!” Aziraphale didn’t really see what purpose it would serve, but Gadriel sounded so exited about the idea that he couldn’t help smiling.
“All right. Let’s do it.”
***
“This man is really, fundamentally annoying.” Aziraphale glanced up from his second edition of Antigone to see Crowley flipping through Rene Descartes’s Meditations. “I mean really,” Crowley continued. “The ‘Imp of the Perverse.’ Hmph. As if I didn’t have better things to do than make him think he wasn’t a pretentious twit writing about the certainty of his own massive ego.”
“Crowley, why did you take me to go see the leaves?” Aziraphale interrupted. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but it was unexpected. They did odd things together all the time; Not asking why kept everything simpler.
Crowley muttered something and scuffed his feet.
“What was that?” Aziraphale asked kindly.
“I said, I missed you,” Crowley snapped. “Every time I went to see ‘em, I’d turn around thinking you ought to be there. And I got tired of being wrong.”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale sniffed. Then he took Crowley’s chin between his fingers, pulled him forward, and kissed him, light and sweet, on the lips.
“Angel, what –” Aziraphale cut him off, kissing harder.
***
A time when the world was not, later
They had no genders, but they had hands and mouths and hips. They slid along one another, reveling in smooth sensation of angelic skin on angelic skin. They undulated, pushing their hips and chests together, rolling into each other to increase contact. Their legs twined together, curves and lines neither masculine nor feminine traced by elegant hands as they caressed one another. Fingers dragged through pearlescent white pinions as their wings thrashed wildly around them.
Gasping, Aziraphale let his head fall forward onto Gadriel’s chest as the other angel sifted his fingers through Aziraphale’s fine hair.
“Promise you’ll always love me,” Gadriel asked suddenly. Aziraphale sat up, gazing into Gadriel’s bright gold eyes with a worried expression.
“Of course I will,” Aziraphale told him, bewildered. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Gadriel felt an apprehensive clenching in his chest. The silver words of Lucifer crawled through his mind, and he had to admit there was sense to them, but he still felt that something, something new and different and utterly incomprehensible, might be coming.
“Just promise me,” Gadriel begged. “No matter what happens, promise.” Aziraphale leaned down and kissed him deeply. As they parted, Aziraphale cradled Gadriel’s face between his hands.
“I swear it,” he murmured softly, “On my own immortal soul, and yours, and on Our Lord above us, no matter what happens, I will always love you.”
Gadriel sighed in relief and they kissed again, lingering in the pleasant embrace of their bodies.
***
As they lay boneless, wrapped around each other on Aziraphale’s couch, Crowley muttered,
“Mind letting me in on what spurred this, angel? Not that I’m complaining, or anything.”
“I’ve missed you too,” Aziraphale explained simply. When Crowley tried to ask what that meant, Aziraphale kissed him again.
“Aziraphale I’m worried about you!” Crowley protested as he pushed the angel away from him. “Are you sure you’re…”in your right mind“…okay?” Aziraphale stroked his cheek.
“Do you remember anything about heaven at all?” Crowley stared at him.
“Not…really, I mean, the memories are there, but you can’t think about ‘em. It hurts too much.” He swallowed. “I remember being really, really happy though. And…I think there was…” he shook his head. “No, I can’t, I can’t think about it.”
“Try,” Aziraphale whispered.
“I think…I think I knew someone….special, I don’t – I can’t remember details, but…” He grinned cheekily.
“It’s actually one of the reasons I like you, angel. You…remind me of…whoever it was.”
Aziraphale sniffed.
“One day, Crowley, you’re going to remember. Everything. And then you’ll understand.”
“How do you know?” Crowley asked curiously. Aziraphale smiled and kissed Crowley’s temple.
“I have faith.”
fin
lady_oneiros!
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