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Title: Past No Man’s Land
Recipient:

b_c_draygon
Author:

erushi
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG-13
Note: Happy holidays,

b_c_draygon! I did my best to work all your prompts into the fic one way or the other, but I’m afraid the price my twisty mind demanded in return was for the tale to be set in WWII. I sincerely hope that this will work for you, and that you’ll enjoy it!

They had just picked up their forks when the first shells began to fall.

Aziraphale had insisted over a glass of the Ritz’s best red on their current eating house, that the proprietors made some of the best devilled eggs this side of London, positively divine, really my dear you must try some. The best devilled eggs this side of London now huddled in their leafy nests of lettuce, whites wobbling in time to the tiny tremors that danced through the polished wood flooring and beneath the legs of Crowley’s chair.

Half the diners had rushed out to the doorway at the first rolling boom; the other half stood on their chairs and craned their necks over other craned heads. Crowley remained seated, watched the orangey-pink ribbon grow across the horizon, did his best not to think of Sodom and of Gomorrah. The Gravlax on his plate no longer seemed quite as appealing: the pink-edged curls of bright orange were too bright against white stoneware, the dill and mustard sauce too sharp.

Their walk to the Bentley was made against a backdrop of muffled whoopwhoopwhoop, of persistent cracklings and drones. Acrid, the night-air discouraged further conversation, and Crowley calmly curled his fingers around the cool metal curve of a door handle to the grindings of engine-noises playing a crescendo overhead, watched on the bonnet dull reflections of vast metal harpies with outstretched wings flying in perfect formations of five. One of them dived, prey sighted, gradually climbed back up; it left in its wake bursts of flame and smoke and loud noises, starbursts at the backs of watering eyes and ringing ears. The silence between them lasted long after they had entered the car.

Somewhere in the clouds the engines of a Dornier backfired, its choking a compressed gunshot in macro scale. Neither of them looked at each other.

They certainly did not look up.

*

Two weeks later, Crowley told Aziraphale that he was being sent to Germany.

“They’re sending me over to Germany,” was what he said, features impassive and fingers picking at a fraying thread from the tablecloth. There was no question who They were: it was the way he said it, tongue clicking against the backs of front teeth, Uppercase. “Reconnaissance. Reports. You know, the usual.” His fingers stilled.

He would return almost two years and a third later, stumbling into the gloom that was Aziraphale’s newly-installed backroom swathed in its blackout-regulation darkness, his cheaters askew. Aziraphale would say nothing, only hold his arms wide open. All the wine in the flat above the bookshop would be drunk that night, and the alcohol would be both too little and too much.

=-=-=-=

Friday differed from Thursday and from Wednesday in that the seven bottles of miraculously-conjured wine drunk were four and five bottles fewer than what was consumed twenty-four and forty-eight hours ago respectively.

Too sober to remain still for long, Crowley had insisted that they go out. His voice was just a little too loud in a room just a little too small. Green leaves rustled their little leafy sighs alongside the scritch-shh whispers of antique paper and leather (Aziraphale had opened his door one day to a shivering cluster of plants on his doorstep and a scribbled note asking him in a handwriting that was all sharp corners and sinuous curves to be so kind as to Look after them while I’m away please – C); when they pinned up the blackout curtains the square space delineated by bookshelves suddenly seemed stifling. Aziraphale had said yes.

Outside it was more crowded than an early evening in the middle of winter and of war usually warranted. It took Aziraphale four minutes and thirty-six seconds before he realised that growing used to the War had made people more careless, or that Christmas had made them more jovial, or perhaps even both; when he turned to Crowley to explain his revelations the other man had drifted towards a passing group of American soldiers and into a cloud of hail-fellows-well-met. Then it was all ’Ere mates have ye met me uncle, helps run th’ factory, ammunitions, y’ know before he trailed after them into the nearest pub, the only male in the vicinity seemingly below the age of fifty and dressed in civilian garb. It made him feel conspicuous and queer, rather like coming face to face with a wild baboon only without cage-bars in between.

(Crowley had managed to conjure an RAF uniform somewhere in those four minutes and thirty-six, lieutenant bars gleaming in the illicit crescent of light which spilled briefly onto the streets as they slipped in. There were pockets and buttons too, and the fingers of one blond captain which brushed the latter every now and then as one might with tokens of luck.)

He doubted he would ever grow quite accustomed to it.

*

Fuel rationed and consequently scarce, The Green Man wasn’t so much heated as made uncomfortably warm by an over-crowding of male bodies in scratchy uniforms and the sour smell of sweat gone stale.

Comfortably nestled in his corner of smoky pub and well into his second pint, Aziraphale was quietly having epiphanies. These ranged from the appalled realisation that cheap watered-down wine the likes of which he had last tasted in the 14th Century (in a seedy tavern on the road to Canterbury and across a rather amiable chap with poetical aspirations) apparently still existed in 20th Century England to a rather impromptu (and honestly quite shocking) lesson on the thirteen variable verses of a seaman’s chantey involving a man and a mermaid. Chief of them, however, was a heretofore undiscovered loathing for large blond men who spoke with flat vowels and drawls and whose arms, long and gangly, seemed to have acquired an alarming tendency to cradle the backs of chairs of RAF men, Yessir I’m quite comfortable thank’ee very much for askin’ sir.

For the seventh time in twice as many minutes, he watched as a square-cut finger surreptitiously traced whimsical circles on the blue-grey sleeve of a dark-haired and seemingly-oblivious British pilot.

Aziraphale would never be quite sure afterward what it was which had eased him off his ladder-backed wooden perch, calf muscles protesting as they stretched from a cramp which had developed over forty-seven finger-drawn circles and ninety-four minutes of prodigious restraint. What he did know was that Crowley’s face had looked strangely bare without its customary darkened lenses, pale and haggard and lost, and that the loathsome finger had begun its forty-eighth round. It was perhaps just as well that America was in no way a neighbour of England. One had to take these things literally sometimes, and some were unfortunately a tad harder to love than others.

Somewhere by his side, one of the captains had obligingly paused in his fond speech of this red-haired bird he had met one day in the aftermath of battle, mighty fine she was my boys, had a smile like the sharpened edge of a knife and a laugh like a hail of bullets. Six pairs of American gazes now followed him with the unconcerned curiosity of the inebriated as Aziraphale carefully picked his way towards one very drunk demon who leadenly watched his approach from behind the smudged glass of an empty mug and through twin fractured halos (Blue, they were blue – when did Crowley last have blue eyes?).

“Really my dear, we must move along now. Your Aunt Phyllis will be waiting, and you know what a terror she can be when in the mood.”

Crowley merely blinked at the neatly-manicured hand laid firmly on his shoulder.

*

When they re-emerged into the night it had taken a turn for the cold, and the air smelt of frost and of December, wet and damp and chill. They huddled into their coats of brown camelhair and of dark standard-issued wool, kept their eyes trained on dirty cobblestone and carefully ignoring the gutted gaps in once-familiar rows of buildings, these lingering spectres from the fire of ’41. A chair greeted them when they rounded a corner three steps too fast, lying on its side all charred legs and faded cushions. Aziraphale, who had kept indoors as much as possible since the first fateful night precisely to avoid these awkward ghosts of habitation, respectfully averted his eyes. Five steps behind became seven when Crowley suddenly quickened his pace, and Aziraphale found himself very much obliged to lengthen his stride.

Shaftesbury Avenue proved even quieter than Wardour Street and the latter’s myriad of branching tributaries, abandoned theatres pathetic beneath unlit streetlamps and bereft of glossy pictures. At the foot of what might have been the Queen’s Theatre if one carefully squinted (and politely ignored the gaping mouths and grasping fingers of shattered brickwork, of course) they hovered uncertainly for all of five seconds before their feet impulsively carried them towards the war-darkened once-lights of Piccadilly Circus. Just another two men meandering down streets lined with sandbags piled high and windows crossed with sticky tape, their shoulders touching but not quite and broken pavement making their jagged edges known to feet through worn rubber soles and woollen socks. Neither of them chose to mention it when the other unconsciously sidestepped the denser shadow of a barrage balloon, strange and dark and ominously bulbous.

In the end it was the Trocadero which proved their undoing, a hastily-opened door disgorging a group of drunken carollers to a discordant chorus of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; in their haste to avoid flailing arms and careening bodies they stumbled over their feet and into each other. The reaching out was instinctive, and for a while they stood as they were, exhaling white clouds in miniature that shredded in the brisk night breeze almost as soon as they were formed. Then Crowley straightened, ball-and-socket joint rolling beneath skin and wool and fleshy palm, no longer quite as drunk though far from sober.

On hindsight Aziraphale would have called it regret, this faint sense of loss as he carefully uncurled his fingers from his tightly-gripped handful of bony shoulder and folds of dark-coloured coat. For now, however, he was content to map the tracings of blue veins across prominent cheekbones and to study purple-toned shadings of hollow eye sockets. There was something strangely familiar about this not-quite-Crowley, human and lost and wrapped in brittle bravado. Impulse led him to braille paper-thin lids and feathery lashes over unfamiliar eyes, pinkish whorls ghosting over ivory. Change back was but an afterthought, the Please a whisper; the kiss a whim, clumsy as firsts usually were, and wet, teeth and lips scraping and bumping between syrupy ropes of saliva stretched thin.

The second was better, cautious bursts of colour and taste as tongues flicked in and out of moist caverns between pigeon-wing rustle-startle-sighs, a pair of yellow eyes held wide and unblinking in their surprise. Eyelids drifted down on the third, were firmly shut by the fourth.

(18th Century France, after the guillotines – that was when Crowley had last had blue eyes. And before that, it was 15th Century Spain.)

Someone had drawn a sprig of mistletoe against the wall, shades of green and stylised leaves sharp against the faded cream of peeling wall paint. It wasn’t quite what he’d have imagined, Aziraphale reflected as he gently pressed the unresisting demon against a loopy Merry Christmas hastily scrawled in red, but one generally had to make do in times of war. And as kisses went, he thought it all turned out rather well, really.

***

Happy Holidays,

b_c_draygon, from your Secret Writer!

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

prestissima.livejournal.com

Oh dear.

This is just gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. It is so sensuous and winding, and it hits my scene-painting buttons along the way with such ease that I can only hope for more as I am slowly seduced by the movement of the words and the feelings between them, the way you let our knowledge of their relationship fill in the hints and familiarities and quiet spaces. I love it!

From:

Happy Holidays, B_C_Draygon!

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