Happy Holidays, romanticidiot!

[waxbean.livejournal.com]

Title: And a Time to Every Purpose

Author: Erushi

Rating: PG-13 (Aziraphale/Crowley)

Summary: In which things are both strange and not after the almost-apocalypse, and Crowley and Aziraphale may have had epiphanies of sorts.

 

 

 

 

In the morning he found the Bentley where he had always parked it, black paintwork a white grin in the bright morning sun.

 

“Huh,” he said.

 

Then he got in. Drove.

 

=-=-=

 

They met at St James’s by quiet consent, each taking what comfort they could in the familiarity of it all. Neither of them spoke for a while, revelled in a shared silence that lasted for almost half an hour and which was marked by measured footfalls on carefully-packed gravel before words and sentences tumbled over each other in frantic cartwheels.

 

“The shop’s all there,” Aziraphale had started to say, broad palms scattering crumbs across the river with an ease which spoke of long practice. “Not so much as a soot mark.”

 

“I mean, you can’t just make an old Bentley,” he remarked instead without waiting his turn, voice a little too shrill for his liking. He could almost hear the grass growing-growing-growing, green and sharp on a Sunday morning which felt both right and wrong, and he decided that he’d rather he didn’t have to hear them grow, didn’t have to hear himself think. He had an Idea, he realised, one of those tricksy things which warranted capital letters when pronounced. It hovered at the tip of his tongue, just out of reach. It also made the air seem just a little too crisp, made his suit seem to stretch just a little too tight about his shoulders like the slick plastic they sold new shirts in (which was ridiculous, because he never bought his shirts). Crowley scowled, talked about the patinas of vintage cars, caused a duck or three to sink to make himself feel better.

 

Afterwards they lunched at the Ritz, at their usual table, on duck confit and veal and a robust red which was just a trifle too dry before a meaningful glare at the glass taught it the error of its ways. He had forgotten what he had wanted to say by then, forgotten if he had even said anything at all, and it didn’t matter because he had forgotten.

 

(He would only remember that he had maybe-forgotten much later, after the sixth bottle of wine shared at his flat and a lively if somewhat drunken conversation about oysters. “It’sss jussss’ no’ th’ ssssssame,” he would say (would hiss), tip of his tongue slip-slide-pressing against the back of teeth. “World a’most end’d. Should show sssssomethin’.”

 

“I know,” would be the reply, Aziraphale’s hand large and warm between his shoulder blades, at the top of his spine.)

 

=-=-=

 

They decided to make a game of it.

 

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were Aziraphale’s, and they were marked by fancy restaurants with clever waiters and smart cafes which had outdoor tables sheltered by brightly-coloured umbrellas, Heard about it just the other day, splendid menu, really my dear we must try it. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were his, and Crowley took immense pleasure in bringing them to the crummiest pubs he knew, an ill-lit establishment for every posh eatery visited the day before, grinning at his companion as they knocked knees beneath a too-narrow tabletop sticky with the ghosts of spilt pints.

 

They still dined at the Ritz on Sundays. There were things which were best left untouched.

 

Some days he just walked, mile upon mile of London pavement ground beneath the heels of his snakeskin shoes. (And yes, they were shoes: he liked having proper human feet, ta very much, and he’d never once encountered any ground which wasn’t unforgiving on bare soles anyway. Plus, he’d always felt that they were very good shoes.) Other days he drove, Bentley speeding down streets and motorways simply because he could, a steady stream of pedestrians left frightened and bewildered as they scrambled onto pavements in his wake. He had always taken great pride in a job well done, after all.

 

One afternoon he had asked the angel along, and he had driven them up to Cornwall. It was still summer, the days long and the nights warm. They had spent the afternoon sampling Cornish teas and watching hordes of sun-reddened tourists throng the cliffs and beaches who had worn floppy straw hats on their round human heads and had cupped waffle-cones of proper Cornish ice cream in their pink human hands. Crowley had managed to persuade no fewer than eight sea gulls to make away with the desserts of eight hapless tourists before he had finally deigned to let Aziraphale make him try some himself, whereupon he had grudgingly marvelled at the milky-sweet wonder that was Vanilla & Clotted Cream. That evening they had drunk frosted glasses of Pimm’s poured from icy jugs, the fruit wet and tart and deliciously cool. Aziraphale had been obliged to tip his head back for the last bites of strawberry, and Crowley had been somewhat disconcerted to find himself very much obliged to look away.

 

=-=-=

 

Summer began its inevitable descent into autumn, as it always did.

 

Crowley spent the mornings of these in-between days sitting at St James’s and looking, just looking. He eschewed worn wooden benches for the prickly edges of grass (still growing-growing-growing, but he was better at ignoring that now), relished the tickle through the fabric of his trousers, watched as August slipped into September and tumbled into October, cold weather seeping in at the edges and green bleeding out into (yellow, red) grey. Aziraphale usually joined him after having finished feeding the ducks. Sometimes the angel even brought a book.

 

“I think we’re on holiday,” he had said, once.

 

“We are, aren’t we?”  had been the reply, comma punctuated by the dry rustle of paper, a page being turned by careful hands.

 

“They don’t know what to do with us, and so they leave us alone. Downstairs, I mean. Possibly Upstairs too. Typical, really.”

 

“Quite likely, my dear. Now hush – Sir Gawain has just met Bertilak.”

 

So he watched instead, committed everything around him to memory and told himself firmly that it was still the same stupid, marvellous world he had slithered on to millennia ago even if he couldn’t quite shake off the feeling that things were just a hair out of alignment (because really, nothing ever survives almost-ending without a bit of change). He eyed the pelican perched on the fence, the goose waddling its clumsy way down the bank. He stared at the pointed tips of his snakeskin shoes peeking out from the ends of dark trouser legs, at Aziraphale’s hands cradling the age-cracked spine of his leather-bound book, nails all pink flush and white crescents and subtle gloss.

 

“Look,” he offered, almost desperate, picking up a conversation left unfinished days and weeks ago. “I just think – ”

 

Suddenly it was just them: sitting side by side on late-summer grass and breathing early-autumn air, shoulders brushing and thighs barely touching, calves neatly aligned, fingers pressing into the cool earth which lay tempting and dark beneath their fingertips.

 

Aziraphale closed his book (when it shut it sounded like finality), said Really, Crowley, you think too much, and smiled.

 

After that they took to sitting at new places, each place strange and new and just different from their usual haunts, a new kind of game. They made themselves comfortable at Hyde Park, at Regent’s Park, before finally deciding that they still preferred St James’s. One Wednesday was spent by the Thames, Remember when the English sailed out to meet the Spanish and You looked right daft those days with that ridiculous ruff. Saturdays were spent in languid conversation over cups of too-sweet tea, at Knightsbridge, at Covent Garden, and for two-and-a-half memorable minutes one sunny afternoon, at the top of the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square.

 

“Wish they hadn’t done away with the pigeons,” Aziraphale had murmured wistfully. “Always felt they added a certain something to this place. Was it your side’s doing?”

 

“Oh no,” he had replied, pausing mid-way in ruining the pictures of his thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, and fortieth tourist. “Thought it was one of yours.” He’d liked the pigeons; they had been most useful in their time.

 

They celebrated Crowley’s hundredth tourist with 99 Flake cones. Or rather, Crowley had celebrated, and Aziraphale had glared at him in such a way as to imply that he was a right bastard for all of five minutes and forty-nine seconds before finally deigning to rescue his cone from imminent melting.

 

The world still wasn’t right, but it was now strangely a little less wrong, and that, he decided as he bit into his Flake with a scatter of chocolate crumbs, was all that mattered.  

 

=-=-=

 

November snuck in cold and wet, as these sneaky Novembers were wont. One evening found them in Aziraphale’s stock room, two man-shaped beings in a room packed with dust and memories and five walls, four of empty bookcases and one of books. The cleared shelves seemed to glare in a manner which could only be described as accusing, and Crowley carefully set the packet of fireworks by the till before shuffling his awkward way towards the centre of the room and to an angel who was crouched there packing, packing, packing.

 

Three hours and a restored stock room later they retired to the flat above the shop, where Aizraphale plied him with wine and apologies and a confession that he didn’t quite know what had brought that strange spell on, he honestly didn’t, but everything had looked the same even though the world had changed and he just couldn’t bear it, he couldn’t, so he had to do something, you know what I mean, Crowley, I’m sure you do.

 

Crowley took the opportunity to kick off his shoes, tucking his cold toes beneath the hem of Aizraphale’s rather garish sweater of blues and greens and taking immense satisfaction in the resulting yelp. He did, as a matter of fact; their Arrangement just didn’t require him to say anything.

 

(Last week his flat had felt too small, too stifling, and he had removed each and every single one of his plants, deposited them lush and green and quaking in their terracotta pots on the doorsteps of undeserving strangers. Three days later he had studied himself in the mirror, stared at the skin stretched paper-thin and tight over too-sharp cheekbones and at the blue veins which blended with the pink of eyelids to form ghastly purple bruises beneath eyes. He looked tired, he had decided, and he had snapped his fingers once, twice. He had for a moment toyed with the idea of calling Aziraphale before deciding against it, preferring the benefit of dropping by unannounced. Instead, he had settled for checking the safe behind the Mona Lisa and grasping the bronze of his doorknob for luck, silly superstitions he had picked up since the almost-apocalypse which he knew didn’t mean anything but which made him feel better anyway.

 

Then he had gone out to purchase five new pots of plants which received places of honour on the balcony.)

 

He drifted to sleep with Aziraphale’s hand cupping large and warm over his feet, and he only remembered the fireworks the next morning when a yawning angel suggested freshly-baked croissants just down the street.

 

=-=-=

 

They counted off the rest of November and most of December with tea every other day and sometimes every day at Aziraphale’s, because Aziraphale apparently had twenty-one different sets of tea things lurking about his flat, and the angel had suddenly decided it was a mighty shame that they were all unused.

 

Crowley magnanimously refrained from pointing out that some of the tea cups had tartan handles.

 

Theirs was a new game now, one they both played with giddy relish because neither knew where it would lead, how it would end. Every afternoon of tea was followed by a night in the Soho, almost-drunken footsteps slow-drumming across invisible feet-worn paths as they stumbled down Wardour Street and its maze of tributaries, Shaftesbury Avenue and its theatres, Chinatown and its red lanterns. Sometimes they even made their way to Oxford Street, where Crowley would take it upon himself to point out that the Christmas lights were ugly as sin, gold and garish and really, angel, it just gets worse every year, surely you can’t approve, I mean, look at that tragic reindeer. 

 

(He found he liked it best when Aziraphale would pause in the middle of his tirade about the meaning of Christmas and goodwill to all men to whisper his reluctant agreement, furtive yes a puff of heat and damp skittering along the curve of his ear and down his spine.)

 

They toasted Christmas Eve with soggy chips held tremulously aloft between greasy fingers, their choice of pub like so many of its brothers which peppered the tiny lanes running through and across the Soho: almost unbearably stuffy, warm with the heat of winter-coated bodies and suffocating with the smells of damp wool, of stale sweat, of sour whisky. Outside came as a relief, night air still chill from the rain, and when they laughed it rang high and loud in the near-empty alley, brassy as a new copper penny. They tripped over their feet, over pavements, over each other, and when one of them stumbled over the threshold to the flat above Aziraphale’s shop the other caught him and both kept  laughing, drunk on too many pints of lager and too much of each other.

 

The first kiss was wet, clumsy, fast, hard: fierce bump of lips, sharp clink of teeth, Bless it, angel! and Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear, I really am.

 

“You said, back in summer, you said –”

 

“In Cornwall, in bloody Cornwall, and –”

 

“St James’s, at St James’s, didn’t realise, didn’t realise until –”

 

“Fuck, I think we’re too drunk for this, angel.”

 

He sobered, blinked. Across him Aziraphale straightened, the angel’s fingers digging into his hips, and he fancied they would leave strange whorl-shaped bruises, purple-reds fading into yellow-greens. The second kiss was a marked improvement from the first, slow and deliberate and sweet and sharp, strawberries in Pimm’s under a Cornish summer sky.

 

“Been a while since I last did this,” he managed to say, eventually, three feet from the bed and suddenly nervous. His fingers slipped on the last of his shirt buttons.

 

Aziraphale’s grin flashed almost white in the dim of the room. “Likewise.”

 

=-=-=

 

It was cold when he woke, the window open five inches too wide behind gauzy curtains that did little to check the honey-spill of light from the street light just outside. He winced his way across freezing floorboards, smiled the entire minute he took to find a pen and a spare bit of paper and to write (a word, a comma, a name: loop of the L’s and curls of the O’s, sharp point of a V and flick of the E’s, a flourish and a curve for the C; the stutter-scratch of the nib was strangely satisfying). He grinned as he folded the paper once, twice, creases sharp and smooth and corners aligned just so. He nearly laughed as he carefully tucked it in a book and the book back on a shelf, blue-lined notepaper nestled against the faded 1609 print of Sonnet 116 for its intended reader to find.

 

Then he crept back, slithered under warm sheets and the warm certainty of a waiting arm, and slept.