Disclaimer: All characters belong to Neil Gaiman. Some belong jointly to Terry Pratchett. I own nothing except maybe this concept. But I bet it's crossed their minds once or twice as well, so probably not.
A/N: Fic, like mould, develops where you least expect it, when you're not paying it any attention. In this case, on the remains of receipt paper in my register, between customers. Somehow, I get paid for this.
"'Zira and Crowley, sitting in a tree..." Finish the chant. Consider yourself warned.
This is a crossover with Neil Gaiman's Sandman, in particular "Sleep of the Just". (The first issue.) The fic itself is set partially on June 9th, several days after Roderick Burgess acquires the Magdalene Grimoire, and mostly on June 12th, 1916. Needless to say, it's also set about eighty years before Good Omens.
Footnotes have been placed at the end of each scene rather than at the end of the fic, since it turned out to be quite long, but they do not begin at (1) again in each following scene. They just keep going. Like the Energiser Bunny.
Edit 29/03/05 – Dear Kryschenn: I am not taking your suggestions as harsh, I am taking them as oh thank the gods. Because if you hadn't pointed my various idiocies out so politely, someone else would have and I would have felt like an even bigger idiot. A 1926 Bentley in a 1916 fic... I can't believe I even wrote that. It's all Crowley's fault for using the phrase 'lead balloon' in Eden; it's very disconcerting, timeline-wise. :dead: Thankyou once again!
Down
Aziraphale was worried about something.
It wasn't something Crowley usually paid attention to, the set of the angel's shoulders or the way his brow furrowed when he wasn't distracted by idle chatter or, better yet, a book. But over the last fifteen minutes, it had occurred to Crowley that something was not quite right with this Enemy who was also his friend.
So halfway through his third cup of tea, and having just taken a mouthful of what he staunchly maintained was his third scone, he said, "What's got you so uptight, angel?"
Aziraphale smiled, though it was a brittle smile, and reached a little hastily for the sugar pot. It was one of those disgusting china ornaments that no one under the age of ninety should ever own - and in Crowley's opinion, in the case of immortal beings, ethereal or otherwise, it shouldn't have even been looked at. But it was like the snuff boxes; one glance and Aziraphale went all gooey and high-pitched, tracing his fingers lovingly over glass cabinets in antique stores and embarrassing the He- the something out of Crowley until the demon savagely hissed that the angel had better buy it or several dreadful things would happen, none of which had been Arranged.
It was an elephant, or it was trying to be. There was a small, brightly coloured litter strapped around its ghastly blue belly, and this was what Aziraphale's slightly pudgy but exquisitely maintained fingers fixed upon to open the pot.
"Uptight? Whatever do you mean, my dear?" The angel was concentrating on moving the wide, flat sugar spoon from the elephant to his teacup without spilling a grain. Crowley raised an eyebrow sceptically, and swallowed his mouthful of scone.
"Oh, nothing. You just look a little like you did in the Garden, when you'd given aw- " A sharp look, and a scatter of sugar granules from the third spoonful. "- I'm sorry, 'lost', your flaming sword."
"I can't imagine why," Aziraphale began, and stopped when Crowley reached across the table and clamped his hand quite firmly across the top of the teacup. The angel, still carefully holding a fourth spoon of sugar, stared at the dark-haired demon in something approaching annoyance. "What are you doing, Crowley?"
Crowley tilted his head so that his sunglasses slid a little way down his nose, just far enough that he could direct a snide look at Aziraphale over the top of them. "Angel, you're about to put your fourth sugar - a Dutch teaspoon, at that (1) - into your tea. And you're telling me you're not worried about something."
Aziraphale's reticent expression started to melt into something more resembling earnest. He took his hand away from the so-called elephant, forgetting to replace the lid. "I've been enjoying sweets more, lately, is all. Worried about... about Gluttony, that sort of thing, you know."
Crowley's sceptical look remained. In the six thousand years he'd known Aziraphale, he'd spent more than a good amount of time taking tea (breakfast, brunch, elevenses, lunch, dinner and supper as well, more often than not) with the angel. He'd not seen a sugar craving yet that would cause the angel to take his tea with three times his usual amount of sugar.
"Assuming I believed that, maybe you'd be better off without the elephant after all." He said, moving his other hand over it threateningly. Aziraphale made a soft sound of dissent, then stared at Crowley almost angrily, nostrils flaring unattractively.
"Don't threaten my sugar pot. It's none of your business, anyway." Aziraphale added in a mutter, but to Crowley's ears, which were ultimately accustomed to finding Doubt, the angel may as well have said he'd converted Beelzebub and then tried to pretend it was none of Crowley's business. Needless to say, the demon was not convinced.
As evenly as he could manage, Crowley said, "You have been telling me what isn't my business for millennia, angel. I suggest you tell me what isn't my business now."
Aziraphale looked rather guiltily between his friend and the sugar pot, and finally settled on the sugar pot. "A... a boy came into my shop, several weeks ago, with his father."
Crowley's stomach lurched oddly within him. Perhaps it really wasn't any of his business. He released Aziraphale's teacup and withdrew the hand that had remained hovering above the pottery elephant, pushing his glasses back into place with his knuckle. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted the angel to see his eyes, just then.
"Quite young. Red hair. Alexander Burgess." A soft sigh. "He and his father knew what I was. They... asked me for a feather." That certainly perked Crowley's interest. And not in a good way, either. Still, the angel couldn't possibly be that stupid.
"They'd brought me a present, an offering in return. The... the 'Buggre Alle This' Bible, though I don't suppose that means anything to you. They just offered it to me, in return for a feather, and... well, I don't suppose it matters, really." Aziraphale took a meditative sip of his tea.
Crowley tried very hard not to bite his tongue. He couldn't have. He absolutely could not have been so stupid as to
"I'm wondering whether it was right to let them take one."
"Ngk," Crowley said.
"Sffp," Crowley said.
And when at last he had stopped having to will his human heart not to explode in his chest, Crowley said this:
"You did WHAT!"
Flocks of pigeons for miles around lifted suddenly into the air. (2) The latest painstakingly developed silent movies became fuzzy and indistinct, and then the machines gave up and blinked off altogether, much to the horror of their creators.
Aziraphale was not as surprised as the pigeons had been, but he was also closer to the noise. This, he felt, gave him the right to screw up his face and hunch his shoulders in a rather pathetic specimen of a cringe. Crowley, either oblivious or apathetic, continued at a similar volume without sympathy for the angel's - or anyone else's - eardrums.
"Do you have any idea the sort of thing a human could do with an angel's feather? Do you know what it could do! Think what it could do, not just to you, you blithering idiot, but to other people! (3) What the bloody Somewhere kind of angel are you, anyway!"
Aziraphale stared at his previously quite calm demonic friend, at the way his eyes were glowing past the darkly tinted lenses of his sunglasses, at the odd way his shoulders were straining against the fabric of his shirt (the seams were splitting in a decidedly otherworldly fashion, Aziraphale noticed, and was he actually beginning to sprout wings? Oh, my.), and said, "Eep."
This, apparently, was too much for Crowley.
He slammed his hands into the edge of the table, forcing his chair back with a scream of splintering wood, and stormed out the door. There were sounds of admiration from pedestrians as the black 1914 Ford Model A parked outside automatically started itself, opened the driver door and belched black smoke all over a hapless old woman who had been admiring it. Aziraphale heard the car door slam and then the screech of tires as Crowley sped away in the direction of Wych Cross.
"Oh, dear," said the angel miserably. "I suppose it wasn't, then."
(1) - Dutch teaspoons, for the information of people without my grandparents, are large, flat, shovel-like, and roughly equivalent in volume to a desert spoon. So, the tea was pretty much saturated after one and a half.
(2) - Of course, being pigeons, they did this quite often anyway. However, they remained conspicuously absent for several days - long enough for pigeon-chasing children to quite lose hope of fun at the park, and for groundskeepers to bless whatever meant they didn't have to spend several hours cleaning Pigeon Business off the statues they were maintaining.
(3) - He had phrased that particular sentence the other way 'round in his head, but decided that saying it that way might have given Aziraphale the impression that Crowley was worried about him, which he most certainly wasn't.
It was a clear and chilly night, and Crowley was lurking (though not very well; he just wasn't built for it) just inside the gates to the Burgess Estate. That was what it was really called - the Burgess Estate. People called it Hell, because it was the abode of the self-proclaimed "Daemon King", but people, Crowley had found, while endearing, were stupid.
Nothing like Hell, Crowley found himself thinking, somewhat indignantly. 's bloody cold.
The indignant thoughts, however, were drowned out with a resurging frustration at Aziraphale. Why in Gwhy on Earth would the angel give away a feather, anyway?
Particularly to this old bastard, Crowley thought glumly. He was one of the top names in Hell's humans-messing-with-the-occult books. Roderick Burgess. He'd been called Morris, once, Crowley remembered. That was what all the books listed him under - Morris. But Crowley, having changed his own name, made a point to remember peoples' names when they changed them. He knew it was bloody annoying when people persistently called you Crawly, and it would probably be really disappointing for Roderick, going down to Hell when this was all over, and discovering that, nope, it's still Morris, sonny jim.
And why the hell was he sympathising with the bugger when he'd stolen one of Aziraphale's feathers? Probably with his own hands! Crowley huffed out a breath rather than immolating something, and stood up straight. Bugger lurking. It was about time he got something done.
He stalked up to the huge double doors, suggesting as he went that they open for him. They did so, hesitantly. Crowley lifted one foot, about to set it down inside, and froze on the threshold.
He hadn't been able to feel it from outside, but there was something deeply wrong with this house. Not even a good, Hellish wrong, either - a wrongness that permeated even demonic insides and made Crowley's flesh crawl. (4) There was something in this house, within these walls, that was never meant to be here. Crowley grit his teeth, settled his sunglasses more firmly upon the bridge of his nose, and stepped over the threshold.
He was somewhat relieved when he didn't burst into flames, or even sizzle slightly.
There were a lot of humans running about the dark corridors - guards, mostly, and Crowley sidled past them carefully in the smaller halls. Suggestion was all very well, but sometimes, like faerie glamour, things went a bit pear-shaped if the subject got too close. The demon kept moving, though, following the trail of ever-increasing guards, the wrongness increasing on the edge of his senses, until he found a study.
In the study, Roderick Burgess sat alone, pondering a hefty tome Aziraphale probably would have liked. Crowley ducked his head to peer at the title - Paginarum Fulvarum, definitely Aziraphale's sort of thing - and Burgess gave a great start and leaped from his chair.
"Who the Hell are- "
Crowley blinked and the man fell silent. "The angel's feather. Where is it?"
Burgess' slackened jaw moved languorously as he answered the demon, eyes vacant. "The angel's feather is kept in the chest." After a moment, as though reluctant to be helpful even when entranced, he raised a knobbly finger and pointed crookedly to a large cedar chest in front of an arch window. Crowley gestured the chest open and grimaced.
Laid out carefully inside the chest on a bed of black velvet (what was it with humans and black velvet, anyway?) were the items used to cast whatever magic had caused the wrongness in the house. There was a simple knife, gleaming as though it had never been used, and a sharpened stick and a stone disc that looked more worn. And in the upper right-hand corner of the chest, Aziraphale's feather. Crowley plucked it from the chest distastefully and closed the lid again.
The angel's feather had done its best to repel the evil of shed blood, but the substance was still crusted along the very tip of the feather. There was also a small droplet at the base of the quill. Crowley frowned a little; they had made the angel bleed, however willingly. He stuck the end of the feather in his mouth to suck the human blood away, staring absently at Burgess. This human... this bloody human... he'd made Aziraphale bleed. And there was still something very wrong here, right in this house.
"What was the feather for?"
Burgess' answer was less grudging, this time. "To summon and imprison Death."
Crowley snorted. "You certainly didn't manage that. What did you snare? Minor demon? Was it Charon? He'll be bloody annoyed when you let him go; the line for that ferry of his- "
Burgess was fumbling with the book he'd been reading, now, tracing fingers along the lines of faded ink. He seemed to be sinking further under, the trance sapping him of coherence. Still, he tried to answer the question, by holding the book up, wordlessly.
Crowley looked at the neat line art, crude but oddly faithful. He read the words.
"Oh, fuck."
(4) - Admittedly, Crowley's flesh (and indeed, the rest of him) had spent quite a lot of time crawling, and was used to the sensation, but it was still bloody uncomfortable.
Crowley was having difficulty descending into the basement. The darkness didn't faze him; it was the raw power that the humans had used in the summoning that was preventing him from moving quickly. It was like struggling through quicksand, or trying to avoid gravity, except magical gravity had a tendency to bite back even when you hadn't fallen off the metaphorical cliff.
He struggled down a few steps more, still sucking at Aziraphale's feather. Maybe that was contributing, too - if the magic had been done using a holy item like the feather, it certainly wasn't going to be friendly toward a demon. Crowley grimaced at the thought of what could happen to him if he walked into a holy circle...
But it was nothing to what would happen to him if Morpheus ever discovered that Crowley could have helped, and didn't.
'Here if faid thee Kinge of Dremef...'
Fuck.
He got to the wooden door at the bottom of the long, slippery staircase, and was hesitant to even touch the thing. The power in the room beyond... was unbelievable. Like standing next to Satan, not that Crowley had done that much. He shivered, and pushed at the door tentatively.
It opened onto a large chamber, low ceilinged and dimly lit. Something like an extremely large goldfish bowl sat in the centre of the room, right on the border of the circle, the reinforced glass held in place by bronze runners covered in arcane squiggles. Aziraphale'd probably know what they said; Crowley had never really paid attention to the writings of the cults he'd inspired - he'd been more interested in how to get any era's equivalent of a decent tequila, to be honest. Two guards were on the door, but a complicated gesture ensured that they would not notice Crowley for the duration of his visit.
The demon cleared his throat uncertainly and stared hard at the glass. "Er. You'd be Lord Morpheus, then, would you?" The power in the room was hard to look at. It couldn't be seen, exactly, but it hurt Crowley's eyes. He put his back against the wall, and crouched, squinting, as the pale figure inside the glass bubble stirred and began to stare back.
Ah. You are Crowley. The representative.
A thoughtful pause.
You sleep.
Dream was thin and pale, nearly wraith-like in the gloom. His eyes were like tiny stars, watching Crowley from the middle of the chamber. He was completely naked.
"Er, yeah. I do." Crowley said uneasily. He fiddled with the cuff of his shirt, and said, "Er. Admire your work." (5)
Dream stared back at the demon, blankly. Crowley's unease grew more noticeable, in the back of his head.
"Um. I don't think I can get you out. Sorry."
Why did you come here?
Crowley puffed out his lips and exhaled, slowly. Wasn't that the question of the century? "Actually, Lord, I was trying to get back this feather, which an, er, acquaintance of mine stupidly gave to Burgess, before something stupid like this happened. But apparently I was a little too late. Sorry," he added again, not quite able to help it. There was something about this god who was not a god, something negating the low-grade evil he'd worked so long to cultivate. It was a little off-putting, actually.
Dream gave Crowley a long look.
This 'acquaintance'... This would be the angel who appears so frequently in your dreams, I presume.
"Fuck off." Crowley turned a shade of pink that would have looked quite at home on Aziraphale's tea set, and, realizing what he had just said, and to whom, said, "Um."
Dream ignored the insult and nodded, seeming annoyed, but resigned.
You will not help me because you do not wish this... friendship you share to become known among your kind. And because you do not wish to endanger the angel.
Crowley thought that was a bit too- well, too something, particularly from a principle of existenceb who was stuck in a giant fish bowl.
"Look, it's not just Aziraphale I'm worried about, here. A lot of it is pure self-interest. That circle you're in doesn't just keep you trapped; it's a pretty effective barrier against everything else, too." Crowley fiddled with the feather. "I can only really touch this, see, because most of its holy power went into that circle. You're lucky I even got this close, I mean-"
Enough. Dream didn't sound particularly annoyed or vengeful, despite the firm tone. I would not have you release me, in any case. I would have my own vengeance upon my captor, as he realises the futility of this exercise. The naked man in the goldfish bowl stretched his limbs idly, and rewrapped his arms about his knees. Crowley blinked.
"Well. If. Um. If you say so, Lord Morpheus." He stood up slowly, using the wall a lot. "I guess coming down here was pretty pointless, then, huh? All right, well, I'll just. I'll just be going. Have fun with your vengeance, I guess. Hope it doesn't take too long, Lord."
Dream's eyes were coolly amused. You hope nothing, without me, demon.
Crowley swallowed, and closed the heavy wooden door behind him. Slightly further from the power and feeling a little better already, he leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.
"I am going to kill that angel."
But he was going to get very drunk, first.
(5) - For of course, Crowley was the only demon who slept, and therefore the only demon who dreamed true dreams, rather than half-hearted fantasies during waking - everyone can do that.
Crowley was perfectly sober by the time he reached Mainly Books.
He'd spent three and a half hours being a noisy drunk, eleven and three-quarter hours being a surly drunk, and about twenty minutes sitting silently and thoughtfully in his apartment, letting tequila drain slowly into his mouth past the fork of his tongue as he stared at Aziraphale's feather.
He'd finally decided that he wasn't going to give it back.
Crowley pushed the door open, ignoring the 'CLOSED' sign and purposefully expecting it to be unlocked. The bell overhead pealed softly once, then again as the door shut behind Crowley. The demon walked in through the store's entrance slowly, wanting and not wanting to see Aziraphale.
The angel had risen from his dilapidated couch, a book abandoned on the coffee table beside a mug of 'hot' cocoa. His expression was unusually grave. Crowley wrinkled his nose. Aziraphale had probably been worried about him.
"Crowley," Aziraphale greeted him, tentatively. "Are you... did everything go...?"
Crowley stopped in front of him, narrowing his eyes behind his sunglasses. (Aziraphale would know. He always knew.) "Oh, everything went, all right. You want to hear about what your feather did in the hands of that human?"
Had Aziraphale been smiling, it would have faltered. As it was, he avoided meeting Crowley's lenses. "...not really." He admitted, guiltily. Crowley snorted, grabbed the angel by the shoulders, and steered him rather forcefully over to the couch. The angel buckled unwillingly into the squashy cushions, and the demon - thinking practically - did not sit down at all, but left his hands on Aziraphale's shoulders and held them firmly against the back of the couch. Aziraphale forgot to breathe for a few seconds, and when he remembered, it was to squeak, "Crowley?" breathlessly. (6)
The demon shook his head briskly until his sunglasses slipped down his nose and dangled beneath his chin, hanging at first from one ear, and then dropping uselessly into Aziraphale's lap. Usually perfect hair askew, glaring from amber eyes, Crowley was definitely A Sight. He also smelled faintly of tequila. The smell wasn't quite pleasant, but intoxicating nevertheless.
"Burgess used your feather to try to summon Death, angel."
Aziraphale blinked. "He didn't. He can't have done." He sounded relieved. That was not what Crowley wanted him to sound.
"Yeah, right, he didn't. He missed, and got Lord Morpheus instead."
Aziraphale gaped soundlessly for a few moments, and forgot to breathe again.
"That's right. If Lord Morpheus blamed you for this, you would be, need I say it, in deep, deep shit, angel. As it is, Burgess is going to pay for this eventually. So keep that poor man's endless nightmares or whatever in mind next time you have that incessant urge of yours to do 'good'. Because d-buggered if I'm going to go find your stupid feather next time." Aziraphale's eyes were softening slowly behind the gold frames of his glasses. It was unnerving. "You can. You can just. Bugger! Stop looking like that!"
The expression in Aziraphale's eyes did not go away, but he did make an effort to appear more serious than he felt at that moment. "Thankyou, Crowley."
"For what?" Crowley grumbled, letting go of the angel's shoulders and swiping the sunglasses from Aziraphale's upper thigh. "I'm not giving your feather back, it's all covered with..." with bad stuff, with evil, trail of magic leading right to your bloody door, I don't think so "...with blood. Make a nice quill for a demon, though. Use it in my reports, if I can find a decent shade of red ink. They never quite get it to look like blood when it dries, do they?"
Aziraphale, who by this stage probably should have looked appalled, smiled faintly and answered Crowley's original question, for all its being rhetorical. "Thankyou for worrying about me."
The soft words cut right into whatever part of Crowley could have most closely resembled a human heart.
"Yeah, shut up. Bloody lucky Morpheus isn't angry with you, angel. Don't know what the H-what Heaven was thinking, sending an idiot like you down as their only field agent..."
Seeking for a change of subject, Aziraphale asked, "What was he like? Morpheus."
Crowley looked startled. "Huh? Oh. Um. Pale. Skinny. Eyes like stars in pools of deep water. Naked. All that."
"Naked?" Aziraphale frowned. "Did you leave him that way?"
Crowley vented a much put-upon sigh. "Not that you'd know, angel, being's you were holed up here with," he paused to examine the book on the tabletop, "Through the Looking Glass, but he said he didn't want any help. And actually, I couldn't get close due to holy properties put on his prison by a certain feather of occult origin."
"Ethereal," Aziraphale put in, looking guilty again. "You're occult. And I'm sorry. Are you hurt at all? You don't seem hurt."
"We're both bloody ethereal, you prat. Nurture doesn't change what you bloody well are. (8) Stop being a soppy idiot. Let's go and have lunch." Crowley was an expert at taking long, complex, philosophical or theological conversations and avoiding questions with them.
"All right; how about that lovely teahouse near the theatre? Just let me make sure you don't have any unsightly holy burns, and grab my hat, and we'll be off." Unfortunately for the demon, Aziraphale had dealt with his word twisting for millennia. A good deal of this time had been spent turning the gift against him, and today was no exception.
Crowley found himself opening his mouth to agree before his brain caught up with his ears. "Y-what?"
Aziraphale gestured, and Crowley found himself suddenly sans shirt. He glared at the angel, who made an imperious circling motion with a chubby index finger.
"Turn around, I want to make sure you're all right."
Crowley glared at Aziraphale for a few seconds and then held his arms out from his sides, turning a slow circle with obvious annoyance. "I'm all wrong, angel; isn't that the point?" The faint hint of scales glistened under his skin. He was facing completely away from Aziraphale when the angel's fingers splayed across his shoulder blades, startlingly warm and soothing. The tension he'd barely had the time to notice vanished from the area.
"Oh, no, dear. You seem quite all right to me."
Crowley spun to face Aziraphale, taking a quick step and a half away from the warmth of the angel's hands and glaring. He gestured, and was properly attired again, and also holding Aziraphale's hat.
The Dream Lord's voice echoed in his head.
This... friendship you share...
...you do not wish to endanger...
...the angel who appears so frequently in your dreams...
Crowley scowled darkly, trying to ignore the phantom pressure of heated fingertips along his spine. "Here's your hat. I don't feel like tea. How about a curry?"
Aziraphale smiled, that odd, soothing expression still in his eyes. "Anything you like, dear."
Crowley stomped for the door. "That's a bloody change..."
(6) - Due to having forgotten to breathe, and not filling his lungs enough to expound the sentence. (7)
(7) - If indeed a sentence it can be called.
(8) - Crowley's perspective on this particular argument was quite forcibly reversed some years later owing to a certain bungled Apocalypse and one Adam Young (Antichrist).
A/N: One-shots have a tendency to spiral out of control, and so do Crowley and Aziraphale. It was going to be a one-shot, but there are at least two related one-shots that I'd like to do. One is going to be quite short, but the other has seven scenes and counting. That said, this is my first GO fic. Please be constructive in your review.