Just a feral neurotic noodle who does what his bosses don't understand and his soft authority-disappointing powerhouse bf monkeying about in a jeep, nothing to see here, Sarge… The Bentley gets jealous.
A/N: I love a good "bus ride" fic from the TV adaptation, but I came to write in this fandom after an Ineffable-shaped pair of Idiots from Red Vs Blue spent iconic hours doing untold things in a stalled army jeep, so I've got to give the bookverse a little more love. The fandom echoes include the OST "Good Fight" by Trocedaro fitting our angel and demon all too well, and the Reds' Warthog playing "Polkas y Hupangos" like it's enjoying the Curse of Queen. While you don't need to look up RvB for the Bentley to sort you out, I do recommend the soundtrack. (And Bentley Rhythm Ace's "Bentley's Gonna Sort You Out," which got repeated in my YouTube list almost as frequently as the title song.)
She came back to herself on the outskirts of an army base, alone. Abandoned. She was uncertain of what had led her here; the last few hours were more of a blur than her usual speeds could account for. Shaking the last of the ash off her rims, she reversed direction and set course for London, ignoring the blank bewilderment from Tommy's replacement and the grumbles from the old man with the dog. "Should have a license for self-driving cars," indeed! She'd been lapping little tire-pissers since R.P. Tyler was his dog's age.
At least it was fine weather for trundling along at a sedate eighty-three miles an hour as she regained her bearings. The country road was damp after a recent downpour, but just at the right consistency to give her a bit of a thrill with the turns - she would never disappoint Crowley and herself with so gauche a thing as wear on her treads, but she could have sworn that her rubber felt dry to the point of cracking when she left the base. It was merely a phantom sensation, but feelings counted a great deal to a car that went fifty years to the gallon. She had gained her abilities, her preferences, even her very sleek updated frame* from her demon, and just because it was done with occult miracles instead of machine tools didn't mean that it couldn't go to pot if she didn't keep up with maintenance. In her case, maintenance meant maintaining belief, and she believed she would put all these uncertainties to rest after a good fussing over from Crowley.
*(In 1926, she had been as boxy as any common Ford, and the dim beginnings of her conscience had been afraid that her owner would kick her to the curb like yesterday's exhaust when the '33 model caught his eye. She needn't have worried. By the eighties, she had begun to look forward to new upgrades, but she had picked her favorite cassette and would no sooner switch it out than change her paint job.)
She could make it home by herself. He expected her to be able to pick him up when he was in a hurry, or too wasted to find his way from Soho to Mayfair,* or in need of a dramatic exit, and so she became a safer driver than he was. The angel might have doubts, but she was perfectly in control running the gauntlet of the M-25 at a hundred miles an hour. But the M-25, yes, that thought made her tires ache, and she promptly decided that she needed a full detail hand-wash to get the fishy smell out of her air filter. Crowley owed her that much for leaving her in Tadfield. With Americans, of all things. Honestly.
*(Crowley had yet to get too drunk to stumble his way through the opposite route.)
There was a brief hesitation as she reached downtown, letting an extra coat of paint between her and the preceding lorry as she pondered whether to turn for the flat or look for her demon at the Soho bookshop. The angel relied on her for most of his vehicular transportation, lacking a car of his own, and if she had somehow truly spooked him into stealing Crowley and running, he would have clambered onto a bus, or a taxicab, if he could find any that far out in Oxfordshire, and made for the store. Certainly, she would be able to find them if they were at the bookshop; she had her own personal parking spot in the fire lane. Much like double decker buses and horses, the angel frightened easily and didn't think his escapes through.
On the other fender, she didn't remember doing anything to her most common passenger, or at least, nothing outside the usual. She wasn't even sure she'd had a passenger when her demon dropped her off - there was a lingering stench that Crowley needed to get rid of before it sank into her interior leather, and she thought she remembered a boy staring so hard that he might as well have attempted to astrally project himself into her well-molded driver's seat, but she was fairly sure Aziraphale hadn't ridden with them. Her "oh shit" handle had gone unwrung for nearly three days. Might as well use it as a coat hanger at this rate.
She prowled once around the block through Soho. The lights were off, the sign was turned to closed, and nothing sat in the limited parking that wasn't her spot, but none of that meant much. Her demon usually came after closing time, or precipitated it. Usually there would be a light left slinking from the back office if they were in there, but the thought of a light in the bookshop made her wheels ache like the odegra she had just escaped. She took off for Mayfair like someone had sprayed down the fire lane with holy water.
There. There she felt her demon and his angel. They were making a right psychic nuisance of themselves, expanding their wards and not hiding the holy presence from anything but the most incurious of humans. Nothing might get in, but that much love radiating down from the flat… ugh. It was disgusting, it was, to think about them just dripping with all that bald affection. Might as well have cut Crowley's break line, for the equivalent physical mess. She was embarrassed for them.
(She would not admit to wanting to have them safely hugged into her backseat and rumbling care at Crowley and Aziraphale herself through the sappiest, loudest of love ballads, no matter what configuration they'd gotten into. She might even stoop to fragments of Mercury's "die Zauberflöte," or Bowie's "für Elise," just for the angel. The Papageno bits were fun.)
Parking should be easy. Even without miracles, Crowley had a covered space reserved just for her. She'd be out of the sun and rain and he damned well kept the dust down and the temperature controlled.
So what did that jeep think it was doing in her spot? She nudged forward, but the awning neither expanded, as would be minimally acceptable, nor dumped the interloper back onto the highway, sideways across the median between two oncoming lorries, as she'd prefer. She revved her engine, flicking on her high beams. Neither the jeep nor her demon seemed to notice.
"Aa-ah! He does the impossible!" her radio sang out. Since when did she get left out of the miracle zone? Crowley might be warded and occupied, but even if he were busy getting far too close to his angel (about time), she should still be treated to some basic decency. Aziraphale might not properly appreciate all her features, but even he recognized a demonically influenced vehicle had certain standards. She had not served for the best part of eighty years to be forgotten in the parking lot now, left to growl at some upstart American utility vehicle in her spot.
There was a snatch of Handel from a staticky radio, left on low. It wasn't a particularly expressive clip, playing straight through from wherever the angel had left off on "Water Music" repeats. Oh no. Even if this was purely Aziraphale's work, she was not getting replaced by this camouflage toaster. She'd met bright red Aston-Martins straight off the automated production line with better senses of subtlety.
She couldn't snap, but the baseline of "Under Pressure" got the spirit across. She had enough of her demon's favor to influence the roads and traffic herself when necessary. This interloper was leaving. Now.
The jeep's parking lights flickered uncertainty to life, but it still remained blocking her spot, not main street traffic. "I wanna make a supersonic man outta you!" Queen growled through her speakers.
The wheel of the open vehicle turned uncertainly. Blessed angelically miracled American boxy rustbuckets, no class and no education. It couldn't even start its own engine, and it claimed to have automatic transmission. Ha!
With a whooshing sigh of air through her filters and a roll of her wipers, she stopped her engine and demonstrated how to turn the key, disengage the parking brake, and set the gear shift into reverse. She then honked impatiently for the jeep to follow. She certainly wasn't escorting it all the way back to Tadfield where it belonged, but the sooner it moved, the sooner she could settle into her spot (and serenade her demon and angel).
The jeep, clumsy mass-produced war machine that it was, let off the brake and rolled forward into the carefully tended walk beyond the carport. Her windshield wipers screeched against the dry pane; Crowley had planted half the topiary around the building from his rejects and he would not be pleased to see them squashed under an all-terrain tire. This was why one shouldn't let the angel take the wheel.
She pointedly shifted to neutral and back to reverse, giving the jeep even more room to back. Not that she wanted to be in range of this off-brand rover, anyway. Sometimes she had far too much patience. She blamed her demon.
The jeep tried again, pulling off the curb with a thump and trail of mud. Fortunate that the guache invader was built for such bumps and messes; its transmission wouldn't have survived if it were a finely tuned sports vehicle. (She had miracles for the occasional badly placed curb; jumping one to zip around traffic was an entirely different beast than tripping over the edge of the road merely because a clod couldn't find reverse.) Maybe she should make it trundle home on low-profile tires just because she enjoyed the mental image of its vulnerable undercarriage left on the roadside. The jeep was lucky that her range of miracles was severely limited without her demon in the driver's seat, or she might have followed through. As it was, she squeezed her way past as soon as it had left her a millimeter for her front row parking, not caring if it backed into a pole as long as she could see the apartment building.
(Crowley had spent how many years banging his head on her steering wheel in frustration, and this jumped-up toaster finally got the angel into the flat? Betrayal. Utter betrayal. It was as if Aziraphale were afraid of her.)
She put on Brian May's "Ode to Joy." Quietly, at least until the interloper took the hint and scrammed. She didn't want to interrupt an intimate moment. But if her demon looked out the window the next morning with bed-head and a smile like a kid on Christmas, the angel shyly coming up from behind and following his gaze a few moments later, she thought it only appropriate.
She still made sure that the jeep was cursed to play nothing but ranchero music when it turned back up on the old airbase. She would not tolerate pretenders to her throne.