I borrowed the themes from the Live Journal Fanfic 100 thing and decided to do them all. The following stories will mostly be a little bit longer than drabble length, most of them being about double-drabble length. Hopefully you will find them all entertaining.
Now, without further ado, onto the part you've been waiting for.
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001 Beginnings.
While the meeting in the Garden of Eden had been the beginning of a long acquaintance, it had not been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The beginning of the Arrangement hadn't been a start of said friendship either. In those early days shortly after they'd come to their agreement, they had been warily circling each-other waiting for the other to be the first to break their tenuous peace. The true beginning of what could be called friendship between the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale had its roots in the fourteenth century, and was in Crowley's opinion the only good thing to come out of that century.
It had started, as almost everything with Aziraphale did, with a book...
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002 Middles.
Lick. Lick. Lick. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
"Crowley dear, what are you eating?"
Lick. Crunch.
" 'Sss called an Oreo. Want one?"
Crunch.
" 'Sss not how you eat it. You're supposed to twist it open, lick out the stuff in the middle, then eat the outside."
Lick.
"Eurgh, what is this?"
"I think it's sweetened lard."
"Sweetened...lard...?"
"They were invented by the Americans. I picked them up on my trip there along with a bunch of other 'Junk food'."
"That explains it."
Lick. Lick. Lick. Crunch. Crunch. Lick. Lick.
"I've also got a bag of barbecue flavored crisps if you want to try some of those."
Rustle. Rustle. Pop.
Crunch.
"Hmmm..."
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
"Seemsss they were right when they said 'You can't eat just one'."
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003 Ends.
It began as all things did with the Beginning. First there was the Word, then the Creator spoke them all into existence from the First, the Morning Star, to the Son who was to rule at the Father's side. Amongst the ranks of the Heavenly Host was a curious and easily bored little angel who got into everything, and a rather bookish angel who was constantly watching the scribes record everything that was currently in existence.
Though they had met a few times, neither angel hung out in the same circles, and therefore one of them wasn't there when the other had fallen in with the wrong crowd and ended up being kicked out of Heaven.
There are several millennia of middle which are initially marked with conflict, then with a tenuous peace, and then with a wonderful friendship that neither would be willing to give up for the world. Both hold the small hope in their hearts that the middle will last forever, but know that it won't.
Crowley doesn't want to see how it ends. He knows that the ending won't be anywhere near as beautiful as the beginning.
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004 Insides.
Crowley smiled as he adjusted his grip on the bat. This was an excellent form of stress relief, and he was quite surprised that he hadn't tried it before. With one last smack, the angel he'd hung from the tree had been beaten to death. All that was left was to gather its insides off of the ground in order to consume them at his leisure at a later point.
As soon as the angel's innards were neatly gathered into a container, he grabbed another angel and hung it from the massive oak. He then picked up the blindfold and the bat.
"Your turn angel." Crowley said as he handed the two items to Aziraphale.
Aziraphale, looking slightly nervous, took them.
"Something wrong angel?" Crowley asked.
"Dear, does the pinata have to look like Gabriel?" Aziraphale asked.
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005 Outsides.
Crowley winced when he saw the DC hanging outside his door.
It would seem that someone had apparently gotten around to reporting the angel missing. He'd done the best he could to cover for him until his return as he had done a number of times since the start of the arrangement, but there'd apparently been a bureaucratic foul-up somewhere, and things were taking longer than usual. Before now, Aziraphale had always turned up within a week of his discorporation. This time however, it had been over two months, and his "He's on vacation." excuse had worn rather thin.
He only had himself to blame for this however. The next time he wanted to test the angel with a logic puzzle that he'd gotten from a Harry Potter book, they both should be sober.
Having the angel try to find their next bottle of wine out of a line-up that was ostensibly of wine, poison, and fire-immunity potion using poorly written clues on a slip of paper had seemed funny at the time, as had the expression on the angel's face as he studied the bottles' unmarked and opaque exteriors. Watching the angel accidentally poison himself because he'd thought it would be funny to put poison in all of the bottles had been absolutely hilarious at the time as well. It wasn't so amusing now.
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006. Hours.
They'd been sitting there for hours. He honestly didn't know why he'd even agreed to come. This was more the angel's thing. Well, based on the look on Aziraphale's face, it wasn't much of his thing either.
It was nine months after the apocalypse that wasn't. Anathema Pulsifer-Device had invited the two of them to share in the joyous experience of the birth of the first Pulsifer-Device child. As a result, the two of them were sitting around Jasmine Cottage while Anathema lay on a bed screaming and a midwife waited to tell the woman it was time to push. The husband, Newton, was sitting next to Aziraphale, panicking, and breathing into a paper bag for some reason.
In all of the advice that Anathema's ancestors had left her over the centuries, there had been one bit of advice that had been forgotten, and that had been "Use a condom".
They could be excused under the circumstances though. It was supposed to have been the End of the World after all.
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007 Days.
When you're for all intents and purposes immortal, and when you've lived for over six-thousand years, unless something particularly memorable happens, days tended to blur one into the next. They're pretty much like what minutes and seconds are to a human being. You're peripherally aware of the rising and the setting of the sun, but it is unimportant.
When one is immortal, you tend to mark time in decades or even centuries. That is one of the reasons that Aziraphale was so behind the times. For him, the nineteen-fifties may as well have been a few days ago rather than the lifetime ago it was for most people. Even Crowley himself, who did his best to be on top of things and at the cutting-edge had found himself falling behind these days.
Crowley, though he prided himself in always being a man of the times, didn't like the fast paced way these times moved no matter how much he pretended he did. With all of the scurrying about he did trying to stay on top of things, he felt tired, and he just wanted to go to sleep for a good long while. He knew he couldn't though. The last time he'd decided to sleep through a century because he didn't like the way things were moving, the entire world had left him behind.
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008 Weeks.
Crowley sighed as he made his way up from the gates of Hell to London. Even skating across the road of frozen door-to-door salesmen on the way back had failed to improve his mood over being forced to visit Hell.
There were times that he regretted giving the guys downstairs ideas. Rather than picking up on the ones he wanted them to, they always managed to latch on to the ones that were most inconvenient for him. The most recent of these that they had picked up on was the idea of the mandatory Staff Meeting. Fortunately for him, despite the fact that such meetings had been arranged to be quarterly, demons tended to mark time in centuries, and he wouldn't be forced to go through another one of them for another twenty-five years.
Eventually, after blowing through a traffic-jam like it wasn't even there, he got back to his apartment where his plants all showed signs of having been tended to by Aziraphale. He would have to properly terrorize them to get them back into shape, but he could do that later.
Sighing, he poured himself a drink, turned on his computer, logged onto his e-mail, and promptly started Blessing loudly when he saw the date.
He'd been in that Go- Sa- Someone Damned meeting for three fucking weeks!
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009 Months.
And, with the final press of a button, he finished the game with a perfect score.
Giving the t.v. screen a slightly manic smile as the main menu came up, he went over to the device he'd recently purchased, pulled out the disc and popped in another one. A few minutes later, he found himself immersed in yet another fantasy world created by the humans. The gameplay on this one wasn't the best, and frankly, the story was crap, but these things were so addicting. Once he finished that game, he popped in another one, and was lost in yet another fantasy world.
In the middle of a particularly difficult battle, his eyes were suddenly assaulted by sunlight. Whirling around to face the source of the light, he found Aziraphale standing by the just opened curtains.
"What did you go and do that for? !" he asked angrily as his character died messily.
"I'm sorry dear, but you've been sitting there for months." the angel said.
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010 Years.
There was a time when the thought of not seeing Aziraphale for years had filled Crowley with joy. That time wasn't now. In fact, on the day that Aziraphale left, he had gotten drunk and broken several somethings, including his fist.
Heaven must have decided that the angel was becoming too attached to England or something, because they ordered him to go help out the starving kids in Africa. Starving kids he might add, that Heaven hadn't seemed to care about before now.
The angel had entrusted him with his book shop, which was a rather stupid thing to do in his opinion. He had half a mind to sell off all of the books that the angel had acquired since he'd offloaded those kid's books onto a bunch of collectors while the angel was gone.
Getting drunk in the back room and playing darts with the religious motivational poster that was tacked to the back door wasn't nearly as fun without the angel there making a half-assed attempt at trying to stop him and completely failing because he was just as smashed himself.
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011 Red.
The first time Crowley had discorporated Aziraphale, he had been surprised to discover that Aziraphale's body actually had blood running through its veins. He should have known that it would be there considering the fact that, aside from the odd hair color and the eyes, his own infernally manufactured body could pass for that of an adult human male. Which there were less than two of at the time.
Seeing the blood had been shocking in a way he couldn't describe however. It was shocking in a way nobody could yet describe, as Cain and Abel were still children who got into the occasional spat and hadn't yet had their little bout of fratricide.
The crimson pool that surrounded Aziraphale's vessel gave off a strange metallic stench that he didn't like, and the red substance that stained his hands was unpleasantly sticky.
Trying to pretend that what had just happened hadn't affected him beyond the initial shock, he went to a nearby stream to wash his hands.
After several minutes of scrubbing, despite the fact that his hands were clean, it still felt like the blood was there.
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012 Orange.
The sounds of parents yelling at screaming kids was practically music to his ears, considering the hours of effort it had taken for them to reach this point. What was supposed to be the Happiest Place on Earth didn't sound too happy, and it had all been because of him. Well, the hellishly hot weather that was common for Southern California in the summertime hadn't, but the rest had been all him.
A couple of ride malfunctions, and the breakdown of every soft-serve ice cream machine in the park as well as the redirection of a couple food shipments, and the sounds of joy turned to bellows of anger and cries of dismay as people's tempers - which had already been frayed by the heat, the massive crowds, and incredibly long lines - finally snapped.
As the sun sank low in the sky and turned from yellow to orange, Crowley had a feeling that there was something missing, but wasn't quite sure what it was. Finally, as the last sliver of the sun vanished beneath the horizon and the sky darkened, his mind supplied the chiding "Really, dear?" a certain angel would have given him were he here.
Now, everything was perfect.
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013 Yellow.
Crowley's eyes had always been yellow, even back before he'd hung out with the wrong crowd and sauntered vaguely downwards towards Hell and everything that came with it. Back then however, they'd been more of a daisy yellow, rather than the venomous color they were now. They had started out pale gold at the edges before shading darker into a buttercup yellow in the center. He'd received many compliments on them before everything had gone to Hell in a handbasket.
His yellow eyes had been the one thing that had made him unique. Every angel had something to differentiate themselves from the others, something that made them an individual, and the eyes had been his gift from their Father. His and his alone.
After the fall, when red was becoming all the rage in eye color amongst the newly created demons, he who had been a follower back then had been tempted to make the change to red, but something had stopped him. He'd ended up going with a rather wicked set of slit pupils instead.
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014. Green.
Aside from white, black, silver, and the occasional touch of crimson, the only color in his apartment was green. That green came from the dozens of lush and near terminally frightened plants that graced nearly every surface of his apartment which looked as if it came straight out of a design catalog, or one of the better home decorating magazines as a prime example of what an apartment in the city should look like.
The plants were one of the few things about the apartment that never changed. That wasn't to say that they were the same plants from when he'd moved in decades earlier, because they weren't; as his plants, despite being the healthiest looking plants around, had a high turnover rate. It was just that, despite the number of times he'd changed the apartment's decor, replacing the apartment's pristine white fridge and countertops with a stainless steel one and black granite countertops for example, he always kept plants in the apartment. He'd always kept plants, period.
If anyone asked why he even bothered keeping the things, he'd just shrug and let them infer that he didn't actually know why he did so. The truth was that it was because there were no plants in Hell, and it was a comforting reminder that he wasn't there. Any day he had to tend to and terrorize the leafy things he'd first seen in the Garden was another day further away from that horrible day when he had Fallen and woken up in chains in the Lake of Fire.
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015 Blue.
Crowley liked Aziraphale's eyes. He'd told the Angel as much one day, and got a blankly puzzled look in return. That had to do with the nature of the bodies that the Heavenly Host handed out to Angels working on Earth. Ostensibly, despite the fact that they didn't all have the same shape, they all had the same curly blond hair and blue eyes.
Back when this decision had first been made, it had been because it gave the angels an otherworldly appearance that marked them as something else entirely, as the vast majority of the human race at that point had possessed darkish tan skin and dark brown hair and eyes. Things certainly got interesting when a certain genetic mutation cropped up amongst the humans a few generations after the Flood. Accusations went flying for centuries, and Aziraphale got called back to Heaven to be interrogated five times.
Aside from being fun to needle Aziraphale about on occasion, that was neither here nor there.
The reason he liked Aziraphale's eyes was because unlike the clear, icy, near emotionless ones of other angels he'd seen, Aziraphale's eyes were warm and expressive. That, and they were slightly imperfect. Whoever was giving Aziraphale his bodies, kept putting a darker blue spot next to the pupil in his left eye.
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016 Purple.
It all started when Aziraphale had gotten rather inconveniently and publicly discorporated by a drunk driver. By the time that Aziraphale returned in a new body, Crowley had been only half-way through with dealing with the mess that had been left behind by the angel's "death". In a world that was now obsessed with documentation, and better able to keep track of it than Hell was - or even Heaven for that matter - a few questions had cropped up, such as exactly where "Mr. Fell" had come from. Despite properly turning in all necessary tax forms every year etc., the angel had forgotten to keep up with the paperwork regarding his identity, and the government had been under the impression that the Mr. Fell who owned the angel's book shop was somewhere around a hundred and ten years old.
If that weren't the least of his problems, the body the angel returned in was that of a teenager. Not a "might pass for eighteen in the right light" teenager, but a tall, gawky, spotty, "Why aren't you in school young man?" teenager. Which meant that in addition to getting the annoying angel another new identity - as Heaven had failed to provide him with any of the necessary paperwork, trusting that either he or the humans would be able to take care of it - he would have to fill out forms pertaining to the angel's guardianship and/or lack thereof.
Another problem cropped up when the angel had tried to wear the old clothes that Crowley had rather considerately packed away for when he returned, instead of burning them as he had been tempted to do. Aziraphale's new body was four inches taller than the old one, and a great deal skinnier. Being an angel, Aziraphale had refused to miracle his clothes to fit on general principles, and a needle and thread couldn't fix this problem. Crowley had ended up sighing at the mournful expression on the angel's face, and handing him a large wad of cash under the condition that none of the angel's new clothes contained tartan in any way shape or form.
"I guess since I look so young now, I should wear something that looks more youthful." the angel mused to himself when he accepted the money. "Maybe I'll even get myself a pair of those denim trousers young people wear these days."
"Yeah, sure, whatever. Have fun." Crowley said as he ushered the angel - who was still dressed in the god-awful white robe that heaven had dumped him back on Earth in since he refused to borrow any of Crowley's clothing and couldn't wear his own - out the door.
The angel returned three hours later and, despite the fact that the angel was wearing a new pair of rather tight fitting jeans when he returned, Crowley was forced to choke back a scream that was equal parts horror and frustration when he walked in the door. After just barely keeping himself from screaming, he was left with the desire to run up to the nearest wall and slam his head into it repeatedly. Go- Sa- Someone, if he'd known it would be this bad, he would have gone out and bought up every square yard of tartan in Scotland and given it all to the angel. He didn't know where or how he found them, but Aziraphale's jeans were purple. No, they weren't just purple, purple wouldn't even begin to cover it, they were PURPLE!.
And the angel wondered why people thought he was gay...
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017 Brown.
Crowley let out a frustrated hiss. There were teenagers in his apartment.
There were teenagers in his apartment.
There were teenagers hanging out in his apartment, messing with his plants, eating his food which he kept in the fridge because you were supposed to keep food in a fridge, not because he wanted to eat it. Two of them were on the couch playing catch while ostensibly watching his big-screen t.v., and his state-of-the-art sound system was blasting rock music at a near deafening volume.
In the middle of the chaos, Aziraphale - who was still in his school uniform - was sitting in his armchair and voraciously wolfing down a tub of ice-cream. That was practically all the angel did these days, read, and eat. That, and go to the Catholic secondary school that Crowley had enrolled him in as a joke.
The angel's head shot up the instant he realized he was there, and he turned to look at him guiltily. There was a brown stain around the angel's mouth indicating that the ice-cream the angel was eating was either chocolate or that coffee flavored stuff he'd recently acquired a liking for. The angel had become a bit messier in his habits ever since he'd been given the teenage body. He cut the poor angel some slack though, since he suspected that this had something to do with morphic resonance, that this phase would pass, and that the angel would be back to normal as soon as he was an adult again. This wasn't the first time the angel had turned up as a teenager. That incident back during the Fourteenth century came to mind...
If the angel didn't show any signs of aging soon however, he would be discorporating him himself.
"What is all of this?" he asked, making an angry gesture that took in the mess that had been the apartment he'd been forced to share with the angel since the authorities had taken a dim view of the angel living in the bookshop, and asked a number of awkward questions, before making a bunch of demands.
"They invited themselves." the angel said helplessly.
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018 Black.
"It's a good thing I like black." Crowley muttered as he made a bunch of black suits that were cut according to this year's fashions appear in his closet.
When demons were in human form, they had to go around wearing black.
He couldn't imagine what life would have been like if he hadn't actually liked black. If he'd liked that rather fetching shade of emerald green that Aziraphale had been so fond of a few centuries back for instance, or that bright shade of orange that had only come into existence during the twentieth century, or that particular shade of indigo which had vanished with the advent of synthetic dyes.
Yes, Crowley thought, it was a very good thing he liked black.
"Screw it." Crowley said a few minutes later before he grabbed his keys and walked out the door dressed in a bright green jacket, orange t-shirt with something witty and vaguely obscene printed on it, jeans that were of a shade of blue that hadn't been seen in a long time, and canvas sneakers that were of a shade of purple which had last been seen on the cloak of a Roman emperor.
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019 White.
Crowley hadn't attended the actual wedding ceremony. That was understandable considering...But, he had been invited to the reception afterwards.
There was an open bar, and he had decided to take full advantage of it. He'd been on his tenth drink when he angel who had been talking to all of the other guests, finally joined him. When the angel had reached his side with a drink in hand, he had decided to ask the question that had bothered him all evening.
"I haven't been around all that many weddings in recent years, but..." Crowley started.
"What dear?" Aziraphale asked.
"Weren't Adam and Pepper living together?" he asked.
"Yes, for three years now. It's something young people do these days." the angel replied, sounding slightly distressed.
"So, what's she doing wearing white?" he asked.
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020 Colorless.
Crowley twisted the shotglass in his hands. Rather than being one of those souvenir shot glasses one picks up in shops dedicated to tourists when one is on vacation, it is clear, and the liquid inside is colorless. After playing with it a bit, he downed the shot in single smooth move that belied his state of intoxication.
" 'S your um... turn, thas it, turn." Crowley's equally intoxicated opponent said from across the table.
An evil smirk crossed his face as he studied the draughts board in front of him before picking up a small glass filled with vodka and making a move that cinched the game. His opponent picked up and snapped back two shots of whiskey in rapid succession before conceding and draining the other glasses left on the board.
That had been his and Aziraphale's seventh game of shotglass checkers that evening, and his fourth win.
"Would you like another game?" Crowley, whose sunglasses were askew, whose necktie thrown across the back of Aziraphale's couch, and whose shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and rolled up to his elbows asked.
"Sure." Aziraphale said before he began to unsteadily set up his side of the board.
There were times when just sitting around getting drunk together got boring. Fortunately, humans were such creative creatures, and they often found ways to make things interesting. This game which he'd picked up when he'd been hanging around near a university campus had been one of them.