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htebazytook!
Jan. 2nd, 2009 09:36 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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go_exchangeTitle: SEVEN SIGNS, SEVEN SEALS (DELIVERED – I’M YOURS!)
For:htebazytook
From:vulgarweed
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: R
Also featuring: A Horseperson, several Antichrists, and lots of Americans.
Summary: As if the 2008 Presidential election of the United States wasn’t surreal enough without divine and diabolical intervention.
It had been such a nice day.
Crowley had just put the finishing touches on a splendidly insinuating, tastefully flame-war-provoking post to the RaptureReady.com bulletin board, but not so inflammatory as to get him banned again – he was starting to run out of clever usernames, and it was only a matter of time before someone would notice they were all characters from outdated D&D modules, not that any proper American Evangelical should have too much acquaintance with that sin-inducing pastime. Alas, as Crowley knew all too well, it led only to covetousness of those disturbingly genital velvet dice bags and maybe if he got really lucky, a caffeine- and junk-food-fueled fist fight over stats.
And just as he’d hit ‘POST’, his flat-screen HD television had hissed itself on, and he’d heard a voice he’d gone blessfully without for years, informing him he’d had travel reservations made for him. It didn’t help that the voice was using the face of one of a bewildering but probably completely interchangeable parade of American Presidential candidates.
Right. Election year.
***
It had been such a nice day.
Aziraphale had finally resolved himself to switch off the computer, as his bookkeeping for the week had been finally perfected to a googol value of pi, and besides, the RaptureReady.com bulletin board was giving him a halo-ache.
Since he had no television set at the moment, the message from that sanctimonious flight-attendant with delusions of grandeur had come through the radio, taking over the voice of a middle-aged gospel singer who, nonetheless, still had panties and hotel room keys tossed at his feet when he sang about the Power and the Glory. Unfortunately, Aziraphale felt the commandeering was an improvement. Heaven had learned something from Hell and, as usual, found a way to make it saccharine.
It had to be a punishment, it had to be. America was bad enough, but Americans were never so thoroughly American as when they held elections. If Plato had suspected that democracy was vulgar, the Americans had proved it with great gusto, in that muddy-pawed slobbering-dog way they had about them.
Aziraphale realized he was going to have to contact the being he knew with the greatest intimate knowledge of vulgarity.
***
Said being was currently frying his unblinking eyes on Wikipedia, trying to make sense of the difference between a “primary” and a “caucus” and to understand why, precisely, there had to be quite so many United States, and why it seemed none of them could agree on anything.
“Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” he called out as Aziraphale’s unmistakable shuffle marked his stairs. “You have a real knack with bureaucracy.”
Aziraphale just, could it be, smirked an amount that Crowley was sure he would call a ‘tad.’ “I would have thought politics would be a specialty of yours.”
Crowley looked affronted. “Please. I’m a demon, not a hack.”
“So I take it you’ve been—“
“Yeppers!”
“Excuse me?”
“Just practicing. Alright, you too? Cards on the table time. Who’s your side got?”
“You first.”
“Nope.”
They recited names at the same time, just to keep it fair. Aziraphale had thirteen, Crowley had fourteen, and there was an overlap of six. Neither claimed Dennis Kucinich.
***
“And I stand before you today to announce—“
“He should be wearing a hat. It’s frightfully cold. Didn’t he learn anything from William Henry Harrison?”
“Who?”
“I imagine you slept through that, didn’t you? Died of pneumonia after thirty days.”
“Well, that would make our job here shorter, wouldn’t it?”
“It’s reassuring to know I can still usually rely on you to choose the most selfish possibility no matter what.”
“What part of ‘demon’ don’t you understand?”
“The part where you talked me into saving the world.”
“Don’t suppose I can call a takeback on that.”
“Absolutely not.”
***
“Well, at least the weather’s better in Florida.”
“Bit muggy if you ask me.”
Crowley looked away behind his shades. He hadn't asked, after all. And as far he as knew, Aziraphale had always been warm-blooded in all his incarnations. Hot weather always made the angel testy. It had made all those centuries in the desert a trial.
But after six millennia, if they’d learned anything, it was that weather wasn’t much of a subject most of the time. They’d often thought that politics wasn’t either.
“This one seems to have a bit of a disaster fixation.”
“Well, it was a horrible blight on their national psyche, the poor sheltered dears…but I thought you slept through that too, didn’t you?”
“It was pretty early in the afternoon by our time….oh no, you’re still brooding over that, aren’t you?”
Aziraphale looked down, trying not to seem put out and thus seeming all the more so. “It’s just that, well, I did feel – I mean, I have been here since the Beginning. It hardly seemed a job for raw recruits to the comforting and inspiring department who’ve hardly spent any time among people, and…”
“And Raguel and Castiel, you think, just don’t have the people skills – but they do toe that party line, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, in a way that might have been bitter in a human but couldn’t possibly be in an angel. “Everybody’s a hero; the new core values. I might almost think America is beginning to rub off on them.”
Crowley suppressed a shudder and turned his pretense of attention back up to the man speaking. “Isn’t that the sodding genius who decided to put the emergency command headquarters in the World Trade Centre in the first place?”
“How did you know that when you slept through it?”
“I don’t need to be anywhere in personification anymore, Aziraphale, I have the Google."
“And yet, you’re here.”
“Eyestrain.”
There were discreet passings of a flask that somehow did not catch any Not-in-the-Least-Bit-Secret-Service eyes.
“He’s…not quite what I expect in a President, somehow.”
“They don’t all look like Gregory Peck, you know. Or even Harrison Ford.”
“Pity. But I thought Harrison Ford was a President,” said Aziraphale, bemused.
“No, you’re thinking of George Hamilton,” Crowley said confidently.
“No, he was not a President, you’re thinking of George Clinton.”
“No, he makes soul music. Not Soul Music, of course.”
They decided it was time for an extremely discreet—in fact, completely and totally unnoticed—exit when the candidate interrupted his own speech to take a cell phone call from, allegedly, his wife.
“Well, that was gauche,” Aziraphale huffed.
“I took a call from you during a Reciting of the Deeds once,” Crowley sulked.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Less so than letting your ringtone play."
***
God may be omniscient, but Hell has the best surveillance technology. As Crowley lay in his dressing gown and scaly slippers in his luxury suite in the Watergate Hotel listening to his frightening array of nationally-placed bugs (quite disturbingly literal in Hell’s case)—the Clintons scheming, the McCains cold-shouldering, the Huckabees praying, the Obamas making their bed squeak like Uni students in a dorm room—what he felt most of all was a nattering resentment.
Caught in between Adam’s directive to stop messing people about and millennia of habit in doing the opposite, Crowley wanted nothing to do with his job anymore. Not for the first time, but perhaps for the strongest, he wondered what it might be like to be able to wreak his havoc for sheer joy of it, not because he had to and wasn’t supposed to even know how to do anything else anymore.
This is how artists who sell out must feel, he thought. Except that Crowley had never had a chance to try his luck in a free market to get the best possible price.
If there were anything he’d ever begrudged humans, it was their ability to simply be as if that was all they had to do. Free will meant that they were more or less entitled to just exist (at least to start out with); they weren’t reduced to a mere personification of a function that never allowed them a moment of slack. Billions of them decided to spend their brief physical lives doing not much more than commuting to a box every day, gambling, and masturbating, and that was, if not what their Designer had had in mind, sort of okay. Sure, they might grow poor and fat and die without either notable achievements or original teeth, but after a while even the most fervent street-preacher would give up on trying to remind them of their metaphysical responsibilities. Supernatural beings got no such peace.
I’m not going to bow down to Your naked ground-apes, Lucifer had said. You gave them All the Potential In the Universe, and they’re just going to put all their energy into hedge funds and ‘Yo mama’ jokes.
Or maybe that was just what Crowley wished he had said. Strange, the way memory started to get fuzzy after all this time spent on earth. That sort of thing didn’t happen Up There, or Down There, as he recalled. But humans were good at forgetting, or remembering things the way they should have been instead of the way they were. Some of the ones Crowley had dealt with, well, they’d forget their own names if they weren’t printed on their credit cards.
So it got downright painful, liking people the way Crowley hated to admit he did.
And being assigned to follow politics was like having his nose rubbed thoroughly in what people really are. And people are fundamentally political animals by nature and by nurture both, since the first lawyer-born-too-early longed to argue with God (well, actually she hadn’t been born, strictly speaking, at all).
Crowley knew that he and Aziraphale both had had their respective panic attacks at the radical notion of democracy for very different reasons. Aziraphale was relieved it didn’t necessarily mean complete anarchy, and Crowley that it put no end to sedition.
In fact, in the terms of a few old worlds long gone by except in the minds of immortals, a case could be made that the current political system of the currently most powerful country in the world, was pure sedition, from start to finish, all sides cheerily mouthing Enlightenment-vintage platitudes while sharpening Renaissance-vintage daggers, and harnessing every resource for pure power.
It left Crowley feeling utterly redundant, for one thing. He couldn’t even thoroughly enjoy the angel’s blanching reaction whenever some Congresshack invoked the Name to no greater purpose than as some kind of magical debate-ender. It happened so often Crowley wondered if Aziraphale might be feeling useless, too. But at the moment he was too far away to ask. (Far away, so close.)
It must be hard for a Principality, Crowley thought. I’ll bet it gives the old boy vertigo.
For a tempter, what drove him mad was the glimpses. Wild ambitions rose and swirled that made Faustus look like a teenage wastrel preoccupied with Playstation. They made humans crazier than any drug, any carnal lust; they spun them in impossible directions, tangles of intrigues that Crowley himself could never have foreseen despite his millennia of resources. With such astounding blind idiot timing and choreography and, well, audacity.
Whereas a human tends to only hear lies, and choose to believe them or not, a demon cannot help but see them. They appear a little like glowing filaments, metallic threads across the fabric of reality: elaborate spiderwebs gleaming with pearlescent droplets of soul-sheddings, dewdrops of lecher’s sweat, and glutton’s drool. The content of a lie is not any more seductive to a demon than it is to you or me, and usually considerably less so, but its form and its substance have a tendency to bedazzle.
So there it was. The war hero who was tortured never broke, never sang. The former First Lady ran across a runway with her daughter dodging bullets. The rising star is such a boy scout he never stabbed a rival in the back. The preacher never hated, never doubted.
Oh yes. The truth was not so much buried as utterly irrelevant.
Hell had never even told Crowley which one they wanted to win the blessed thing. He had a sinking feeling that was probably kind of irrelevant too, and to even ask would be to reveal that he was still pretty dangerously naïve.
Half asleep, he lay there thinking about how frightening it would be if all the tales were true.
He dreamed himself standing by a window at the end of a long conversation (hours – hours, that was how humans measured things, not in centuries, that’s all wrong) to feel a presence at his back.
To feel fingers pressing down the groove of his spine, their warmth burning through the thin organic silk of his designer shirt, and a breath at the base of his neck.
Impossible – a fancy only, just his bare skin writhing against the high-thread-count cotton of his hotel bed.
What good is all this power, he thought. Really. It doesn’t address the basic hunger that comes with the body type, to touch and be touched.
He took off all his clothes and lay there in the air-conditioning, letting the voices of the talking heads wash over him, to no avail.
The closest he could even get to a good erotic dream in this context was a mental image of Bill Clinton offering him a cigar and leering.
***
“So how many of you don’t believe in evolution?”
Hands went up.
“Ha, the fake fossils worked on the other ones!” Crowley snickered.
***
“If I hear that sound bite one more time—“ Crowley whimpered, nursing an existential headache.
Fox News, being Fox News, complied. “NOT GOD BLESS AMERICA! GOD DAMN AMERICA!”
“Ow,” Crowley snarled.
“Really, I think that hand’s being very overplayed. When you look at the entire extent of Reverend Wright’s career, and consider that he’s an elderly gentleman with a fair amount of not-wholly-unjustified anger concerning racism, I really think…”
“Careful, angel. You’re starting to sound like a liberal.”
“He’s a man of the cloth,” Aziraphale said primly, picking at the cheap duvet in the Pennsylvania motel.
“You sure you don’t want to play a little—“ Crowley leered and licked his lips, “Hannity and Colmes?”
Aziraphale sighed.
Crowley pouted. “All right, can you at least change the channel? I like that show with the meekrats or whatever you call them.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be working?”
“Well, you already rejected Lust for tonight, so at least let me have a little Sloth.”
“Hm,” said Aziraphale primly. “Well, since we’re on your shift for thwarting, I suggest we call down to room service for some Gluttony.”
“Alright, fine, put it on my tab and call it Charity,” the demon pouted.
***
“This is the celebrity candidate this time around, believe it or not,” Crowley said as the elderly gentleman droned on in a monotone.
“He’s no Ronald Reagan,” said Aziraphale.
“He’s not even a Bonzo. The chimp at least had some charisma.”
“I can’t even put my finger on what’s wrong with him.”
“I can. He doesn’t want it. He just thinks he ought to want it. That’s not good enough.”
***
“I suppose he’s saying all the right things to appeal to a particular demographic, but—“
“What?”
“It just doesn’t go with the hairstyle.”
“Bit of the snake oil salesman about him, don’t you think? And coming from me, that’s saying something.”
“Yes, but I do like his wife.”
“Well, it’s a pity she’s not running then, isn’t it? Don’t put too much stock in that, by the way. If you had a heart, he’d break it.”
“I do have a heart, Crowley. At least at the moment.”
“Mmmh-mm. And what is it telling you?”
“Probably that I shouldn’t have eaten that funnel cake.”
“You’re trying too hard to go native.”
***
BeeeEEEeeeEEEeeeeEEP
“Hell-o, this is Anthony J. Crowley—“
“You’re not fooling me with that one again. Look, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this at all, but I’ve just got an assignment to investigate a rather blasphemous rumour, and I’d very much appreciate it if you could apprise me on any parallel developments from the other side, if you should happen to hear anything. You can look it up on something called the ‘Bagman blog’. Oh, and chow.”
***
Marvin O Bagman had not been quite as badly damaged as one might imagine from his involuntary lapse on the air some eighteen years previous, when something claiming to be an angel debunking the Rapture spoke through him, only in italics.
He’d been thinking about getting out of the country-gospel racket anyway—that audience was rapidly aging, and rather, well, rural. And churchy. Reverend Bagman (divinity degrees from an unaccredited institution) had found that there were far greater opportunities, with much younger and prettier devotees available, in inspirational Christian fiction, homeschooling textbooks, contemporary Christian pop, youth camps, and, well, blogging. Particularly the latter, since he had found that preaching was actually rather exhausting, and coming up with new signs of the End Times rather imaginatively taxing, and there were thousands of people out there ready to do their own rather hallucinatory legwork, and pay him for the privilege.
From time to time, things got just a little out of hand, and that was when Bagman liked to start speaking in tongues and sidle slowly out of the chatroom and let the hand of God take over.
Sometimes the rampant imaginations of the e-congregration led to rumours which started to take on a certain perverse reality, which led to situations like the one that had Aziraphale trembling against a campaign office wall, thankfully invisible, though no doubt all too perceptible to at least one entity in the room.
“Um…you’ll have to pardon me, I usually don’t…I mean, did you have an appointment?” said the candidate, rather flustered, his usual cool breaking down into a bit of sheer incredulous bewilderment.
“No, Mr. Obama, and I’m sorry,” said the handsome golden-haired young man from Tadfield. “I know you’re real busy right now. It’s just that some people are accusin’ you of bein’ something—or should I say, somebody, I guess. And you shouldn’t worry about it, because, y’know, I found out when I was just a kid that I am. And it’s alright. I didn’t have to be a bad person if I didn’t want to be. So I try not to be, and it’s been alright so far. So even if you are—which I don’t think you are, because I know I am, and I think there’s only supposed to be one—it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
“Oh, spare me your sanctimonious shit,” snarled another young man, this one dark-haired and American. “You’re a fake. You all are. Only I had the strength from my father Satan to kill even as a child. Only my hellhound’s snarl rattles the gates of Heaven—“
“You’re all so crass,” said yet another man, this one also blond, but with a lilting Eastern European accent. “You—“ he said, looking at Obama. “Running for President. Why, I was but a lowly Romanian congressman, and I was a humble man. I had no desire to be greater or more powerful. It was only that my people, out of faith and love, beseeched me to take over the United Nations, and---“
“I know it’s crass of me to say this,” said the Englishman, Adam Young, staring down the American and the Romanian. “But I’m pretty sure that at least two of us in this room are fictional characters.”
Aziraphale blinked and trembled in his corner. He had often suspected, wondered, what the full extent of the powers of the true Antichrist might be. He remembered Crowley once, drunk and shuddering, confessing to him, “It’s not that he could kill me…it’s that he could make it as if I’d never been.” Was it true? Could Adam pull a Jericho on the fourth wall if he were pushed? Would he dare?
“’Course, I won’t dwell on that too much if I don’t have to,” Adam Young went on. “Mr. Thorne, wouldn’t you rather just set up somewhere nice and breed Rottweilers? And Mr. Carpathia, don’t you have some e-mail spamming to do?”
Adam aimed a little nod in Aziraphale’s direction as the room cleared, and then the angel remembered just how much human bodies enjoy breathing.
Then there was just a very un-fictional Senator in the room, rubbing his temples.
“I suggest less green tea in the evening, sir,” Aziraphale whispered. “You probably aren’t getting enough sleep, what with the stress of the campaign and all. It can affect your clarity of thinking.”
The candidate fell asleep at his desk and dreamed of what he liked best, which was surfing, jazz (bebop, as it happens), and pie.
***
Aziraphale crept, nervously, into a dark room at the Watergate Hotel. One just couldn’t live an experience like that without telling someone. For nearly twenty years, he and Crowley had…well, they hadn’t discussed it much. But somewhere in the back of Aziraphale’s mind, at least, the idea must have come from somewhere that Adam Young had put away his power and his terrible self-awareness, onto some kind of back burner where it wouldn’t get in the lad’s way, much less endanger the world. Now he wanted to get Crowley’s opinion—and doing so seemed more urgent than it had in years—for, well, though he didn’t want to make the demon uncomfortable, of course he must have some insight into the workings…
He wasn’t looking forward to waking Crowley up. The last time he’d had to do so, nearly 200 years ago, hadn’t gone well.
The pang that struck him on finding the luxurious bed empty was more than mere disappointment.
***
It’s easy enough for those of us living in the temperate zones of the world to believe that the Witchfinder Army of olde is a thing, well, of olde. Had Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell been able to get past his all-purpose racism and even more all-purpose misanthropy—well, that and the fact that until his adventure with a Jezebel and an Apocalypse, he hadn’t left his smoky flat to do more than buy condensed milk, tobacco, and newspapers since 1974—he might have found a renewal of purpose in the passion of his comrades in warmer climes.
Then again, he would probably just have accused Witchfinder Bishop Murthee, of Kiambu, Kenya, of voodoo himself. (For that matter, like most Westerners, he probably wouldn’t have known the difference between Kiambu and Nyang’oma Kogelo.)
But Murthee was a Witchfinder of the old school – utterly ruthless, and perfectly happy to be paid in fame and acclaim and controversy. Never mind that the Mama Jane who he’d branded a witch back home had a lot of car accidents in front of her house due more to a nearby palm-wine maker and a treacherous switchback than to witchcraft. Murthee was a man who knew how to pray.
***
Crowley had seen that blurry footage of Sarah Palin getting herself exorcised so hard her hairdo shook, and the way she seemed to intensely enjoy it, and he’d recoiled. But he’d also seen that this was something wrought by the payrolls of Heaven and Hell, managing to backfire spectacularly once again.
He didn’t want to be here. Alaska was cold, and the campaign plane was cramped and smelly, and the suits and sunglasses the Secret Service wore didn’t conform to his standards, and the Bluetooth made his ear itch, and the presence of preachers was just kind of slimy in exactly the way that snakes aren’t.
He didn’t even know what he was supposed to do.
He just knew that Palin was such a parody of religious zealotry underneath her flirty exterior--sort of the anti-Hillary, a heart of zinc in a velvet glove or some other mixed metaphor--that there had to be some opportunities for encouraging trouble.
***
He and Aziraphale had been through something like this before, when the governor from Arkansas who looked like a children’s talk show host said, “Well, I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do – to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than to try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”
Crowley was just a little startled by how pained the angel’s expression became.
“Thought your side was all in favour of theocracy,” he muttered.
“Current thinking disfavours it,” Aziraphale said. “It never reflects well on theology.”
“Well, I suppose things were simpler in the Divine Right of Kings days.”
Aziraphale hmphed. “Tell that to the Romanovs.”
“I wish I had,” Crowley said slyly, “during that hot night with Anastasia in a herdsman’s yurt in 1932.”
“What?!”
Oh yes, very indignant. “Did you know the word ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary?”
“It certainly is, Crowley. But I’m afraid 'discorporation’ isn’t.”
***
They’d sidestepped around it. There was one very large elephant in the room, and it was armoured and covered in nasty spikes.
“It’s true what they say,” whispered the stunning redhead who took Governor Palin shopping for smart suits and extremely powerful guns. “About the anointing, that is. Dreams don’t lie! Maybe you are chosen by God.”
“Hmmm….I do get awful tingly sometimes.”
Great. Holy war.
Terrorist. Kill him, they shouted.
Crowley, once more, was terrified by the hearts of humans. He saw all sorts of terrible things coming, written between the lines of whether Palin was anointed as the new Esther or the new Deborah or the new Judith…
The new Helen? The new Charlotte Corday? The new Squeaky Fromme? The new Imelda Marcos? Did it even matter?
Crowley saw all sorts of horrible things coming. What he didn’t see coming was the literal anointing, with the blessed Wesson oil, which to a demon is nearly as good as Smith & Wesson. The eagerness of Palin's holy-spirit-addled supporters led the oil to go wild, which led to Crowley's poor ragged, half-disembodied essence shivering in and out of reality and winding up leaking through the rattlebag Alaska Airlines charter plane and skittering uselessly through the sky over North America until it nearly got sucked into the engines of another plane, this one painted with the word CHANGE in monumental letters.
“I’m trying,” Crowley moaned.
He ought to call for Aziraphale. He didn’t. He just dragged himself back to the Watergate and lay there, waiting for unholiness to set in and do its healing work. He didn’t have to wait too long; there was always cable TV. And with enough John McCain speeches, he was able to sleep long enough to let his occult aether knit.
Until he was awakened by a furious angel.
“And where have you been? I thought you were going to sleep through the whole thing. I can’t do your job the whole time, I don’t have the skills you do and I’m starting to get a little tired, I mean, I’m well aware the incident with the girl with the B on her face was not up to your quality of work, and it would have been nice if you had been around because I was going to insist that you give McCain some divine ecstasy because he is in desperate need of inspiration, and I can’t possibly….Really now, Joe the Plumber? That’s the best he can do? I know you would have better ideas, and I’m just so tired Crowley, keeping people from fainting at Obama rallies and trying to keep Bill Clinton on the straight and narrow and…”
Crowley sat up at lightning speed and seized Aziraphale’s collar. “Shut up! You dithering do-gooder, don’t you see I’ve been hurt?”
“Oh. Oh, Crowley,” said Aziraphale, who with careful study could discern that Crowley did still seem a bit pale and oddly insubstantial. “I’m so sorry, I—“
“No pity,” said Crowley. “Don’t comfort me.”
“It is a bit of a bad business, I’m afraid. You took the worst of it. There is a war on, isn’t there?”
“Yesss, exactly. Below the surface. We need to make it stay there.”
“Crowley, I can think of one way, but---“
“Exactly. Keep it here.” Crowley yanked Aziraphale forward and kissed him. There was no supplication, no questioning, no tenderness. This was a plundering and a challenge, a first raid across the border.
Aziraphale reacted at first defensively and then with a counterstrike. This is how wars happen, after all, especially holy wars – one small infraction, and then no quarter given.
“I’ll smite you,” he whispered, pushing Crowley back down onto the bed, exploiting the demon’s weakened state.
“You better,” moaned Crowley, guiding Aziraphale’s hand and making sure to show him all the most vulnerable places.
“Cheating. Making it easy. Leading me into a trap,” Aziraphale whispered between bites to Crowley’s neck.
“’ssss what we do. Ask Karl Rove.”
“Anthony Jehosophat Crowley,” Aziraphale declared, putting the brakes on the game. “There’s a certain…effort…that has to be made here, as you bloody well know, and if you mention Karl Rove again, I won’t be able to even think of it for another seven hundred years at the minimum.”
“Eep! Sorry then. Maybe you should lie back—“ he took the opportunity to pin Aziraphale down, “—and think of…”
“England?”
“Me,” Crowley said, and commenced licking his way down, making pit stops at pinned wrists.
“You’ve recovered well.”
“I feel ssooo much better – oh!” Then Crowley was on his back, with Aziraphale above him, and then all was skin and spit and fingernails and mild bruises.
The hotel room was definitely taking the worst of it, as the bed shattered and gouged out carpet, and the bubbly water in the hot tub turned to wine, and stiffened, erect primary feathers inflicted violence on the wallpaper, and Crowley and Aziraphale moved together with an ancient, crackling power diminished only slightly for being contained in some reasonable approximation of mortal flesh that was acting rather like that of teenaged boys.
What they were doing wasn’t just wild-mink-shagging, it was a very potent sort of old magic and 8th-grade science; they were offering their bodies, battering and clenching together, as a sort of primeval lightning rod that drew the energies of the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, of idealism and corruption, of Pride and Charity, into the sort of harmless and preoccupied tangle that left the chattering media with not much to talk about but what sort of puppy the Obama children might want and how Bristol Palin had such a pretty expectant glow.
“You’re…_brave_...” Crowley conceded as Aziraphale shivered violently, staining his belly with holiness that didn’t hurt.
“Practical. I’m practical,” Aziraphale whispered, using his teeth more than was strictly necessary as he went down to demonstrate his practical skills, and made red streams of angry militancy fall impotently out of Crowley’s shuddering hands.
“Couldn’t…fix…the economy though,” Crowley finally stammered, drawing the sweaty angel back up into his arms. It was frightening how much better he felt.
“Didn’t try,” Aziraphale whispered softly. “Enough messing about for one year.”
***
“_One_ police car on fire. Just one. Please?”
“Your Bentley is fine. You don’t need to take revenge.”
“I know, but it’s pretty.”
“Sshh. There’ll be fireworks. Eat your pizza.”
Far below their perch on the roof of a grand old hotel, Chicago let loose a long, long ululation of joy.
“Bullet-proof glass,” Crowley noted.
“I’m glad they’ve learned something,” Aziraphale said flatly.
“We could be stuck here for years,” Crowley said morosely.
“But we won’t be. We’re going home, and if anyone says anything about it, I’ll file a grievance, see if I don’t.”
“You can file grievances up there?”
“Of course I can. And they ship them right down to your people by pneumatic tubes, most likely. Like the Internet. A series of tubes.”
“It’s…” Hopeless. But that was alright – at least America wasn’t. And Crowley at least had learned lots of new things about how to signal seduction in public toilets. That was almost enough, and yet not quite. “You know – they won’t stop. Those End Timers. The ones who think America is a good place for, er, you know, The Laws to be, er, the laws, and…”
Aziraphale looked up at the sky, and down at the celebrating ant-sized people. “Were you expecting them to stop?”
“Well, no, but…”
Aziraphale shrugged. “It’s got nothing to do with us.”
~end~
Happy Holidays,htebazytook from your Secret Author!
For:
htebazytookFrom:
vulgarweedPairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: R
Also featuring: A Horseperson, several Antichrists, and lots of Americans.
Summary: As if the 2008 Presidential election of the United States wasn’t surreal enough without divine and diabolical intervention.
It had been such a nice day.
Crowley had just put the finishing touches on a splendidly insinuating, tastefully flame-war-provoking post to the RaptureReady.com bulletin board, but not so inflammatory as to get him banned again – he was starting to run out of clever usernames, and it was only a matter of time before someone would notice they were all characters from outdated D&D modules, not that any proper American Evangelical should have too much acquaintance with that sin-inducing pastime. Alas, as Crowley knew all too well, it led only to covetousness of those disturbingly genital velvet dice bags and maybe if he got really lucky, a caffeine- and junk-food-fueled fist fight over stats.
And just as he’d hit ‘POST’, his flat-screen HD television had hissed itself on, and he’d heard a voice he’d gone blessfully without for years, informing him he’d had travel reservations made for him. It didn’t help that the voice was using the face of one of a bewildering but probably completely interchangeable parade of American Presidential candidates.
Right. Election year.
***
It had been such a nice day.
Aziraphale had finally resolved himself to switch off the computer, as his bookkeeping for the week had been finally perfected to a googol value of pi, and besides, the RaptureReady.com bulletin board was giving him a halo-ache.
Since he had no television set at the moment, the message from that sanctimonious flight-attendant with delusions of grandeur had come through the radio, taking over the voice of a middle-aged gospel singer who, nonetheless, still had panties and hotel room keys tossed at his feet when he sang about the Power and the Glory. Unfortunately, Aziraphale felt the commandeering was an improvement. Heaven had learned something from Hell and, as usual, found a way to make it saccharine.
It had to be a punishment, it had to be. America was bad enough, but Americans were never so thoroughly American as when they held elections. If Plato had suspected that democracy was vulgar, the Americans had proved it with great gusto, in that muddy-pawed slobbering-dog way they had about them.
Aziraphale realized he was going to have to contact the being he knew with the greatest intimate knowledge of vulgarity.
***
Said being was currently frying his unblinking eyes on Wikipedia, trying to make sense of the difference between a “primary” and a “caucus” and to understand why, precisely, there had to be quite so many United States, and why it seemed none of them could agree on anything.
“Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” he called out as Aziraphale’s unmistakable shuffle marked his stairs. “You have a real knack with bureaucracy.”
Aziraphale just, could it be, smirked an amount that Crowley was sure he would call a ‘tad.’ “I would have thought politics would be a specialty of yours.”
Crowley looked affronted. “Please. I’m a demon, not a hack.”
“So I take it you’ve been—“
“Yeppers!”
“Excuse me?”
“Just practicing. Alright, you too? Cards on the table time. Who’s your side got?”
“You first.”
“Nope.”
They recited names at the same time, just to keep it fair. Aziraphale had thirteen, Crowley had fourteen, and there was an overlap of six. Neither claimed Dennis Kucinich.
***
“And I stand before you today to announce—“
“He should be wearing a hat. It’s frightfully cold. Didn’t he learn anything from William Henry Harrison?”
“Who?”
“I imagine you slept through that, didn’t you? Died of pneumonia after thirty days.”
“Well, that would make our job here shorter, wouldn’t it?”
“It’s reassuring to know I can still usually rely on you to choose the most selfish possibility no matter what.”
“What part of ‘demon’ don’t you understand?”
“The part where you talked me into saving the world.”
“Don’t suppose I can call a takeback on that.”
“Absolutely not.”
***
“Well, at least the weather’s better in Florida.”
“Bit muggy if you ask me.”
Crowley looked away behind his shades. He hadn't asked, after all. And as far he as knew, Aziraphale had always been warm-blooded in all his incarnations. Hot weather always made the angel testy. It had made all those centuries in the desert a trial.
But after six millennia, if they’d learned anything, it was that weather wasn’t much of a subject most of the time. They’d often thought that politics wasn’t either.
“This one seems to have a bit of a disaster fixation.”
“Well, it was a horrible blight on their national psyche, the poor sheltered dears…but I thought you slept through that too, didn’t you?”
“It was pretty early in the afternoon by our time….oh no, you’re still brooding over that, aren’t you?”
Aziraphale looked down, trying not to seem put out and thus seeming all the more so. “It’s just that, well, I did feel – I mean, I have been here since the Beginning. It hardly seemed a job for raw recruits to the comforting and inspiring department who’ve hardly spent any time among people, and…”
“And Raguel and Castiel, you think, just don’t have the people skills – but they do toe that party line, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, in a way that might have been bitter in a human but couldn’t possibly be in an angel. “Everybody’s a hero; the new core values. I might almost think America is beginning to rub off on them.”
Crowley suppressed a shudder and turned his pretense of attention back up to the man speaking. “Isn’t that the sodding genius who decided to put the emergency command headquarters in the World Trade Centre in the first place?”
“How did you know that when you slept through it?”
“I don’t need to be anywhere in personification anymore, Aziraphale, I have the Google."
“And yet, you’re here.”
“Eyestrain.”
There were discreet passings of a flask that somehow did not catch any Not-in-the-Least-Bit-Secret-Service eyes.
“He’s…not quite what I expect in a President, somehow.”
“They don’t all look like Gregory Peck, you know. Or even Harrison Ford.”
“Pity. But I thought Harrison Ford was a President,” said Aziraphale, bemused.
“No, you’re thinking of George Hamilton,” Crowley said confidently.
“No, he was not a President, you’re thinking of George Clinton.”
“No, he makes soul music. Not Soul Music, of course.”
They decided it was time for an extremely discreet—in fact, completely and totally unnoticed—exit when the candidate interrupted his own speech to take a cell phone call from, allegedly, his wife.
“Well, that was gauche,” Aziraphale huffed.
“I took a call from you during a Reciting of the Deeds once,” Crowley sulked.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Less so than letting your ringtone play."
***
God may be omniscient, but Hell has the best surveillance technology. As Crowley lay in his dressing gown and scaly slippers in his luxury suite in the Watergate Hotel listening to his frightening array of nationally-placed bugs (quite disturbingly literal in Hell’s case)—the Clintons scheming, the McCains cold-shouldering, the Huckabees praying, the Obamas making their bed squeak like Uni students in a dorm room—what he felt most of all was a nattering resentment.
Caught in between Adam’s directive to stop messing people about and millennia of habit in doing the opposite, Crowley wanted nothing to do with his job anymore. Not for the first time, but perhaps for the strongest, he wondered what it might be like to be able to wreak his havoc for sheer joy of it, not because he had to and wasn’t supposed to even know how to do anything else anymore.
This is how artists who sell out must feel, he thought. Except that Crowley had never had a chance to try his luck in a free market to get the best possible price.
If there were anything he’d ever begrudged humans, it was their ability to simply be as if that was all they had to do. Free will meant that they were more or less entitled to just exist (at least to start out with); they weren’t reduced to a mere personification of a function that never allowed them a moment of slack. Billions of them decided to spend their brief physical lives doing not much more than commuting to a box every day, gambling, and masturbating, and that was, if not what their Designer had had in mind, sort of okay. Sure, they might grow poor and fat and die without either notable achievements or original teeth, but after a while even the most fervent street-preacher would give up on trying to remind them of their metaphysical responsibilities. Supernatural beings got no such peace.
I’m not going to bow down to Your naked ground-apes, Lucifer had said. You gave them All the Potential In the Universe, and they’re just going to put all their energy into hedge funds and ‘Yo mama’ jokes.
Or maybe that was just what Crowley wished he had said. Strange, the way memory started to get fuzzy after all this time spent on earth. That sort of thing didn’t happen Up There, or Down There, as he recalled. But humans were good at forgetting, or remembering things the way they should have been instead of the way they were. Some of the ones Crowley had dealt with, well, they’d forget their own names if they weren’t printed on their credit cards.
So it got downright painful, liking people the way Crowley hated to admit he did.
And being assigned to follow politics was like having his nose rubbed thoroughly in what people really are. And people are fundamentally political animals by nature and by nurture both, since the first lawyer-born-too-early longed to argue with God (well, actually she hadn’t been born, strictly speaking, at all).
Crowley knew that he and Aziraphale both had had their respective panic attacks at the radical notion of democracy for very different reasons. Aziraphale was relieved it didn’t necessarily mean complete anarchy, and Crowley that it put no end to sedition.
In fact, in the terms of a few old worlds long gone by except in the minds of immortals, a case could be made that the current political system of the currently most powerful country in the world, was pure sedition, from start to finish, all sides cheerily mouthing Enlightenment-vintage platitudes while sharpening Renaissance-vintage daggers, and harnessing every resource for pure power.
It left Crowley feeling utterly redundant, for one thing. He couldn’t even thoroughly enjoy the angel’s blanching reaction whenever some Congresshack invoked the Name to no greater purpose than as some kind of magical debate-ender. It happened so often Crowley wondered if Aziraphale might be feeling useless, too. But at the moment he was too far away to ask. (Far away, so close.)
It must be hard for a Principality, Crowley thought. I’ll bet it gives the old boy vertigo.
For a tempter, what drove him mad was the glimpses. Wild ambitions rose and swirled that made Faustus look like a teenage wastrel preoccupied with Playstation. They made humans crazier than any drug, any carnal lust; they spun them in impossible directions, tangles of intrigues that Crowley himself could never have foreseen despite his millennia of resources. With such astounding blind idiot timing and choreography and, well, audacity.
Whereas a human tends to only hear lies, and choose to believe them or not, a demon cannot help but see them. They appear a little like glowing filaments, metallic threads across the fabric of reality: elaborate spiderwebs gleaming with pearlescent droplets of soul-sheddings, dewdrops of lecher’s sweat, and glutton’s drool. The content of a lie is not any more seductive to a demon than it is to you or me, and usually considerably less so, but its form and its substance have a tendency to bedazzle.
So there it was. The war hero who was tortured never broke, never sang. The former First Lady ran across a runway with her daughter dodging bullets. The rising star is such a boy scout he never stabbed a rival in the back. The preacher never hated, never doubted.
Oh yes. The truth was not so much buried as utterly irrelevant.
Hell had never even told Crowley which one they wanted to win the blessed thing. He had a sinking feeling that was probably kind of irrelevant too, and to even ask would be to reveal that he was still pretty dangerously naïve.
Half asleep, he lay there thinking about how frightening it would be if all the tales were true.
He dreamed himself standing by a window at the end of a long conversation (hours – hours, that was how humans measured things, not in centuries, that’s all wrong) to feel a presence at his back.
To feel fingers pressing down the groove of his spine, their warmth burning through the thin organic silk of his designer shirt, and a breath at the base of his neck.
Impossible – a fancy only, just his bare skin writhing against the high-thread-count cotton of his hotel bed.
What good is all this power, he thought. Really. It doesn’t address the basic hunger that comes with the body type, to touch and be touched.
He took off all his clothes and lay there in the air-conditioning, letting the voices of the talking heads wash over him, to no avail.
The closest he could even get to a good erotic dream in this context was a mental image of Bill Clinton offering him a cigar and leering.
***
“So how many of you don’t believe in evolution?”
Hands went up.
“Ha, the fake fossils worked on the other ones!” Crowley snickered.
***
“If I hear that sound bite one more time—“ Crowley whimpered, nursing an existential headache.
Fox News, being Fox News, complied. “NOT GOD BLESS AMERICA! GOD DAMN AMERICA!”
“Ow,” Crowley snarled.
“Really, I think that hand’s being very overplayed. When you look at the entire extent of Reverend Wright’s career, and consider that he’s an elderly gentleman with a fair amount of not-wholly-unjustified anger concerning racism, I really think…”
“Careful, angel. You’re starting to sound like a liberal.”
“He’s a man of the cloth,” Aziraphale said primly, picking at the cheap duvet in the Pennsylvania motel.
“You sure you don’t want to play a little—“ Crowley leered and licked his lips, “Hannity and Colmes?”
Aziraphale sighed.
Crowley pouted. “All right, can you at least change the channel? I like that show with the meekrats or whatever you call them.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be working?”
“Well, you already rejected Lust for tonight, so at least let me have a little Sloth.”
“Hm,” said Aziraphale primly. “Well, since we’re on your shift for thwarting, I suggest we call down to room service for some Gluttony.”
“Alright, fine, put it on my tab and call it Charity,” the demon pouted.
***
“This is the celebrity candidate this time around, believe it or not,” Crowley said as the elderly gentleman droned on in a monotone.
“He’s no Ronald Reagan,” said Aziraphale.
“He’s not even a Bonzo. The chimp at least had some charisma.”
“I can’t even put my finger on what’s wrong with him.”
“I can. He doesn’t want it. He just thinks he ought to want it. That’s not good enough.”
***
“I suppose he’s saying all the right things to appeal to a particular demographic, but—“
“What?”
“It just doesn’t go with the hairstyle.”
“Bit of the snake oil salesman about him, don’t you think? And coming from me, that’s saying something.”
“Yes, but I do like his wife.”
“Well, it’s a pity she’s not running then, isn’t it? Don’t put too much stock in that, by the way. If you had a heart, he’d break it.”
“I do have a heart, Crowley. At least at the moment.”
“Mmmh-mm. And what is it telling you?”
“Probably that I shouldn’t have eaten that funnel cake.”
“You’re trying too hard to go native.”
***
BeeeEEEeeeEEEeeeeEEP
“Hell-o, this is Anthony J. Crowley—“
“You’re not fooling me with that one again. Look, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this at all, but I’ve just got an assignment to investigate a rather blasphemous rumour, and I’d very much appreciate it if you could apprise me on any parallel developments from the other side, if you should happen to hear anything. You can look it up on something called the ‘Bagman blog’. Oh, and chow.”
***
Marvin O Bagman had not been quite as badly damaged as one might imagine from his involuntary lapse on the air some eighteen years previous, when something claiming to be an angel debunking the Rapture spoke through him, only in italics.
He’d been thinking about getting out of the country-gospel racket anyway—that audience was rapidly aging, and rather, well, rural. And churchy. Reverend Bagman (divinity degrees from an unaccredited institution) had found that there were far greater opportunities, with much younger and prettier devotees available, in inspirational Christian fiction, homeschooling textbooks, contemporary Christian pop, youth camps, and, well, blogging. Particularly the latter, since he had found that preaching was actually rather exhausting, and coming up with new signs of the End Times rather imaginatively taxing, and there were thousands of people out there ready to do their own rather hallucinatory legwork, and pay him for the privilege.
From time to time, things got just a little out of hand, and that was when Bagman liked to start speaking in tongues and sidle slowly out of the chatroom and let the hand of God take over.
Sometimes the rampant imaginations of the e-congregration led to rumours which started to take on a certain perverse reality, which led to situations like the one that had Aziraphale trembling against a campaign office wall, thankfully invisible, though no doubt all too perceptible to at least one entity in the room.
“Um…you’ll have to pardon me, I usually don’t…I mean, did you have an appointment?” said the candidate, rather flustered, his usual cool breaking down into a bit of sheer incredulous bewilderment.
“No, Mr. Obama, and I’m sorry,” said the handsome golden-haired young man from Tadfield. “I know you’re real busy right now. It’s just that some people are accusin’ you of bein’ something—or should I say, somebody, I guess. And you shouldn’t worry about it, because, y’know, I found out when I was just a kid that I am. And it’s alright. I didn’t have to be a bad person if I didn’t want to be. So I try not to be, and it’s been alright so far. So even if you are—which I don’t think you are, because I know I am, and I think there’s only supposed to be one—it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
“Oh, spare me your sanctimonious shit,” snarled another young man, this one dark-haired and American. “You’re a fake. You all are. Only I had the strength from my father Satan to kill even as a child. Only my hellhound’s snarl rattles the gates of Heaven—“
“You’re all so crass,” said yet another man, this one also blond, but with a lilting Eastern European accent. “You—“ he said, looking at Obama. “Running for President. Why, I was but a lowly Romanian congressman, and I was a humble man. I had no desire to be greater or more powerful. It was only that my people, out of faith and love, beseeched me to take over the United Nations, and---“
“I know it’s crass of me to say this,” said the Englishman, Adam Young, staring down the American and the Romanian. “But I’m pretty sure that at least two of us in this room are fictional characters.”
Aziraphale blinked and trembled in his corner. He had often suspected, wondered, what the full extent of the powers of the true Antichrist might be. He remembered Crowley once, drunk and shuddering, confessing to him, “It’s not that he could kill me…it’s that he could make it as if I’d never been.” Was it true? Could Adam pull a Jericho on the fourth wall if he were pushed? Would he dare?
“’Course, I won’t dwell on that too much if I don’t have to,” Adam Young went on. “Mr. Thorne, wouldn’t you rather just set up somewhere nice and breed Rottweilers? And Mr. Carpathia, don’t you have some e-mail spamming to do?”
Adam aimed a little nod in Aziraphale’s direction as the room cleared, and then the angel remembered just how much human bodies enjoy breathing.
Then there was just a very un-fictional Senator in the room, rubbing his temples.
“I suggest less green tea in the evening, sir,” Aziraphale whispered. “You probably aren’t getting enough sleep, what with the stress of the campaign and all. It can affect your clarity of thinking.”
The candidate fell asleep at his desk and dreamed of what he liked best, which was surfing, jazz (bebop, as it happens), and pie.
***
Aziraphale crept, nervously, into a dark room at the Watergate Hotel. One just couldn’t live an experience like that without telling someone. For nearly twenty years, he and Crowley had…well, they hadn’t discussed it much. But somewhere in the back of Aziraphale’s mind, at least, the idea must have come from somewhere that Adam Young had put away his power and his terrible self-awareness, onto some kind of back burner where it wouldn’t get in the lad’s way, much less endanger the world. Now he wanted to get Crowley’s opinion—and doing so seemed more urgent than it had in years—for, well, though he didn’t want to make the demon uncomfortable, of course he must have some insight into the workings…
He wasn’t looking forward to waking Crowley up. The last time he’d had to do so, nearly 200 years ago, hadn’t gone well.
The pang that struck him on finding the luxurious bed empty was more than mere disappointment.
***
It’s easy enough for those of us living in the temperate zones of the world to believe that the Witchfinder Army of olde is a thing, well, of olde. Had Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell been able to get past his all-purpose racism and even more all-purpose misanthropy—well, that and the fact that until his adventure with a Jezebel and an Apocalypse, he hadn’t left his smoky flat to do more than buy condensed milk, tobacco, and newspapers since 1974—he might have found a renewal of purpose in the passion of his comrades in warmer climes.
Then again, he would probably just have accused Witchfinder Bishop Murthee, of Kiambu, Kenya, of voodoo himself. (For that matter, like most Westerners, he probably wouldn’t have known the difference between Kiambu and Nyang’oma Kogelo.)
But Murthee was a Witchfinder of the old school – utterly ruthless, and perfectly happy to be paid in fame and acclaim and controversy. Never mind that the Mama Jane who he’d branded a witch back home had a lot of car accidents in front of her house due more to a nearby palm-wine maker and a treacherous switchback than to witchcraft. Murthee was a man who knew how to pray.
***
Crowley had seen that blurry footage of Sarah Palin getting herself exorcised so hard her hairdo shook, and the way she seemed to intensely enjoy it, and he’d recoiled. But he’d also seen that this was something wrought by the payrolls of Heaven and Hell, managing to backfire spectacularly once again.
He didn’t want to be here. Alaska was cold, and the campaign plane was cramped and smelly, and the suits and sunglasses the Secret Service wore didn’t conform to his standards, and the Bluetooth made his ear itch, and the presence of preachers was just kind of slimy in exactly the way that snakes aren’t.
He didn’t even know what he was supposed to do.
He just knew that Palin was such a parody of religious zealotry underneath her flirty exterior--sort of the anti-Hillary, a heart of zinc in a velvet glove or some other mixed metaphor--that there had to be some opportunities for encouraging trouble.
***
He and Aziraphale had been through something like this before, when the governor from Arkansas who looked like a children’s talk show host said, “Well, I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do – to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than to try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”
Crowley was just a little startled by how pained the angel’s expression became.
“Thought your side was all in favour of theocracy,” he muttered.
“Current thinking disfavours it,” Aziraphale said. “It never reflects well on theology.”
“Well, I suppose things were simpler in the Divine Right of Kings days.”
Aziraphale hmphed. “Tell that to the Romanovs.”
“I wish I had,” Crowley said slyly, “during that hot night with Anastasia in a herdsman’s yurt in 1932.”
“What?!”
Oh yes, very indignant. “Did you know the word ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary?”
“It certainly is, Crowley. But I’m afraid 'discorporation’ isn’t.”
***
They’d sidestepped around it. There was one very large elephant in the room, and it was armoured and covered in nasty spikes.
“It’s true what they say,” whispered the stunning redhead who took Governor Palin shopping for smart suits and extremely powerful guns. “About the anointing, that is. Dreams don’t lie! Maybe you are chosen by God.”
“Hmmm….I do get awful tingly sometimes.”
Great. Holy war.
Terrorist. Kill him, they shouted.
Crowley, once more, was terrified by the hearts of humans. He saw all sorts of terrible things coming, written between the lines of whether Palin was anointed as the new Esther or the new Deborah or the new Judith…
The new Helen? The new Charlotte Corday? The new Squeaky Fromme? The new Imelda Marcos? Did it even matter?
Crowley saw all sorts of horrible things coming. What he didn’t see coming was the literal anointing, with the blessed Wesson oil, which to a demon is nearly as good as Smith & Wesson. The eagerness of Palin's holy-spirit-addled supporters led the oil to go wild, which led to Crowley's poor ragged, half-disembodied essence shivering in and out of reality and winding up leaking through the rattlebag Alaska Airlines charter plane and skittering uselessly through the sky over North America until it nearly got sucked into the engines of another plane, this one painted with the word CHANGE in monumental letters.
“I’m trying,” Crowley moaned.
He ought to call for Aziraphale. He didn’t. He just dragged himself back to the Watergate and lay there, waiting for unholiness to set in and do its healing work. He didn’t have to wait too long; there was always cable TV. And with enough John McCain speeches, he was able to sleep long enough to let his occult aether knit.
Until he was awakened by a furious angel.
“And where have you been? I thought you were going to sleep through the whole thing. I can’t do your job the whole time, I don’t have the skills you do and I’m starting to get a little tired, I mean, I’m well aware the incident with the girl with the B on her face was not up to your quality of work, and it would have been nice if you had been around because I was going to insist that you give McCain some divine ecstasy because he is in desperate need of inspiration, and I can’t possibly….Really now, Joe the Plumber? That’s the best he can do? I know you would have better ideas, and I’m just so tired Crowley, keeping people from fainting at Obama rallies and trying to keep Bill Clinton on the straight and narrow and…”
Crowley sat up at lightning speed and seized Aziraphale’s collar. “Shut up! You dithering do-gooder, don’t you see I’ve been hurt?”
“Oh. Oh, Crowley,” said Aziraphale, who with careful study could discern that Crowley did still seem a bit pale and oddly insubstantial. “I’m so sorry, I—“
“No pity,” said Crowley. “Don’t comfort me.”
“It is a bit of a bad business, I’m afraid. You took the worst of it. There is a war on, isn’t there?”
“Yesss, exactly. Below the surface. We need to make it stay there.”
“Crowley, I can think of one way, but---“
“Exactly. Keep it here.” Crowley yanked Aziraphale forward and kissed him. There was no supplication, no questioning, no tenderness. This was a plundering and a challenge, a first raid across the border.
Aziraphale reacted at first defensively and then with a counterstrike. This is how wars happen, after all, especially holy wars – one small infraction, and then no quarter given.
“I’ll smite you,” he whispered, pushing Crowley back down onto the bed, exploiting the demon’s weakened state.
“You better,” moaned Crowley, guiding Aziraphale’s hand and making sure to show him all the most vulnerable places.
“Cheating. Making it easy. Leading me into a trap,” Aziraphale whispered between bites to Crowley’s neck.
“’ssss what we do. Ask Karl Rove.”
“Anthony Jehosophat Crowley,” Aziraphale declared, putting the brakes on the game. “There’s a certain…effort…that has to be made here, as you bloody well know, and if you mention Karl Rove again, I won’t be able to even think of it for another seven hundred years at the minimum.”
“Eep! Sorry then. Maybe you should lie back—“ he took the opportunity to pin Aziraphale down, “—and think of…”
“England?”
“Me,” Crowley said, and commenced licking his way down, making pit stops at pinned wrists.
“You’ve recovered well.”
“I feel ssooo much better – oh!” Then Crowley was on his back, with Aziraphale above him, and then all was skin and spit and fingernails and mild bruises.
The hotel room was definitely taking the worst of it, as the bed shattered and gouged out carpet, and the bubbly water in the hot tub turned to wine, and stiffened, erect primary feathers inflicted violence on the wallpaper, and Crowley and Aziraphale moved together with an ancient, crackling power diminished only slightly for being contained in some reasonable approximation of mortal flesh that was acting rather like that of teenaged boys.
What they were doing wasn’t just wild-mink-shagging, it was a very potent sort of old magic and 8th-grade science; they were offering their bodies, battering and clenching together, as a sort of primeval lightning rod that drew the energies of the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, of idealism and corruption, of Pride and Charity, into the sort of harmless and preoccupied tangle that left the chattering media with not much to talk about but what sort of puppy the Obama children might want and how Bristol Palin had such a pretty expectant glow.
“You’re…_brave_...” Crowley conceded as Aziraphale shivered violently, staining his belly with holiness that didn’t hurt.
“Practical. I’m practical,” Aziraphale whispered, using his teeth more than was strictly necessary as he went down to demonstrate his practical skills, and made red streams of angry militancy fall impotently out of Crowley’s shuddering hands.
“Couldn’t…fix…the economy though,” Crowley finally stammered, drawing the sweaty angel back up into his arms. It was frightening how much better he felt.
“Didn’t try,” Aziraphale whispered softly. “Enough messing about for one year.”
***
“_One_ police car on fire. Just one. Please?”
“Your Bentley is fine. You don’t need to take revenge.”
“I know, but it’s pretty.”
“Sshh. There’ll be fireworks. Eat your pizza.”
Far below their perch on the roof of a grand old hotel, Chicago let loose a long, long ululation of joy.
“Bullet-proof glass,” Crowley noted.
“I’m glad they’ve learned something,” Aziraphale said flatly.
“We could be stuck here for years,” Crowley said morosely.
“But we won’t be. We’re going home, and if anyone says anything about it, I’ll file a grievance, see if I don’t.”
“You can file grievances up there?”
“Of course I can. And they ship them right down to your people by pneumatic tubes, most likely. Like the Internet. A series of tubes.”
“It’s…” Hopeless. But that was alright – at least America wasn’t. And Crowley at least had learned lots of new things about how to signal seduction in public toilets. That was almost enough, and yet not quite. “You know – they won’t stop. Those End Timers. The ones who think America is a good place for, er, you know, The Laws to be, er, the laws, and…”
Aziraphale looked up at the sky, and down at the celebrating ant-sized people. “Were you expecting them to stop?”
“Well, no, but…”
Aziraphale shrugged. “It’s got nothing to do with us.”
~end~
Happy Holidays,
htebazytook from your Secret Author!Tags:
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