Thursday, 15 August 2002 1:33:11 AM
hidoko Matsumoto (aka v0id)
email: voidmatsumoto@yahoo.co.uk
archive: if you really want to, please ask. Scheduled to be at http://xz0ne.cjb.net
pairing: Crowley x Aziraphale
notes: please, c&c. They encourage writers and muses alike. And pleeeaaase tell me if it's too OOC...
Disclaimer: copyright of
some characters are monopolised by a cooperative of neilgaiman and terrypratchett…
NC-13, slash implications (I refuse
to make them say the word "love").
"I called up my friend the good
angel/but she's out with her ansaphone/ she says she would love to come
help but the sea would electrocute us all. nice dream."
-- [nice dream]., radiohead
Crowley had, of course, had
his dream, for the God who governed the world, despite having planned certain
things in store for him in the Ineffable Plan, had also given him enough
luck to get into bed in time before a flustered Aziraphale went rushing
into the toilet. His face was paler than usual, and he retched into the
toilet bowl until all of that afternoon's cake and a bundle of whiskey
had rustled their way out of his stomach.
As for Crowley, he slept on
pretty peacefully. Alcohol made a sleepy person sleepier.
On his part, he had not planned
to dream, but he did.
The Ineffability of all Plans
lie in such that an elaborate drama that would suit a) humans and b) God's
funny sense of humour ensured that the Plan stayed in place as His Majesty
sat in his swivel chair and smiled, eyes twinkling.
Crowley was rather tied
up at that moment—or rather, bottled up, as hoax sites had people believe
bonsai kittens to be.
"God, sir? Is that you?"
The figure turned, and it
wasn't God. It was Aziraphale, a bright smile on his face. Crowley noticed
that he was wearing a maroon vest and khaki, which wasn't all that bad,
at least, he thought, it was better than the dream of ShowMeTheMoney Period*.
"Not God, Crowley."
"Not that I believe in God,
really." Crowley muttered.
"I heard that." Aziraphale
said disapprovingly, "You should believe."
"Why?"
"For one, I'm larger than
you are."
In real life Crowley would
have poked Aziraphale in the gut with his long chain of Things Which Heaven
Lacked Such As Bookstores, but this time, Crowley suddenly felt like Aziraphale
could crush him any moment, could pick the jar up, and drop it to the floor,
and Crowley could have an unpleasant inconvenience.
But in dreams, metaphysics
were different. Crowley also knew that he was trapped, even in consciousness,
and if the jar fell, his soul would break up, into a thousand fragments,
and disperse into that dream world.
Aziraphale smiled, and picked
the jar up with his chubby hands. He touched the jar gently. Crowley found
himself being transformed into a kitten, and he scratched at Aziraphale's
vest, mewing when his claws got stuck between the fabric and Aziraphale
pried his claws free.
"I picked you up from the
cold, remember?"
Crowley mewed, and scratched
Aziraphale on his hand.
Aziraphale blinked, and
smiled, to Crowley's annoyance. He patted Crowley on the head, and scratched
his ears, and Crowley found himself purring, and biting Aziraphale's hands,
and purring.
And all the while, Aziraphale's
form seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, until he towered directly
over Crowley. His fingers were gigantic and could easily crush Crowley,
and as they patted him one last time, he felt his skull crack, and he mewed,
and he mewed, and he mewed…
Crowley had not dreamt about
Aziraphale in such a strange way. Previous dreams had involved Aziraphale's
appearance in hideously tasteless clothes, and embarrassing him in public
and such of the like.
Never so deviously endangering.
Crowley heard somebody puking
in his toilet, and chose to cordially ignore that while he flipped over.
Some days you just couldn't get a proper sleep, he mused.
"Crow… Crowley!" A voice gasped.
He found himself bolting upright
upon recognition of the voice. For one, he was half-naked, and his mind
was recalling strange memories from after they had drunk and forgot to
sober up. It was strange; they usually remembered.
Oh, and Deftone's Change was
on the CD player. He remembered vaguely swaying to the tune of that song…
Goddamn.
And he hadn't known that the
angel was good with his tongue, too.
Aziraphale darted out of his
bathroom in a robe. He was red to the root of his ears, and Crowley thought
for a moment he resembled a certain holy man called Raspurtin. Or at least,
the first time he'd seen Raspurtin dash across the room naked upon realisation
that he'd just done something very wrong—the poor boy had been barely fourteen.
"Er," Aziraphale froze as soon
as he saw that the demon was sitting up straight and was laughing at him,
"What exactly happened?"
Crowley's eyebrow raised itself.
"You have no clue?"
Aziraphale blushed, and hid
himself behind a couch. He shook his head.
Crowley laughed, and said,
"I'm not so sure if I'm awake, either. Some days you just can't tell."
Aziraphale chuckled nervously,
and gradually the chuckles evolved into laughter, and laughter evolved
into chokes. Aziraphale tried patting Crowley on the back, but Crowley
slapped his hand away, and glowered with menace.
"Hands off, angel." He sputtered,
and Aziraphale withdrew his hands in shock.
The holiness… It felt wrong.
"Don't touch me," He shoved
the angel away, and faced the window as Aziraphale tumbled down onto the
carpeted floor. He pulled on his shirt, and kicked the sheets out of the
way.
"Crow—"
"You know what happened," Crowley
muttered, "You couldn't have not known."
Aziraphale shook his head,
hands wrapped around his ears. Pale gold hair fluttered about that beautiful
face, and settled around it. If Crowley had chosen to lift his gaze and
face that angel, he could have seen that the shell of the angel was crying.
"I didn't tempt you, did I?"
"The alcohol bit…" Aziraphale
whimpered.
"I didn't invent it. Don't
blame it all on me."
Denial. Denial. Denial.
Everything was suddenly caving
in.
Sleep was the only touch of
heaven that Crowley had got, of the early days, before they knew what the
word "interesting" meant. Those were days that satisfied everyone, including
even Crowley, who had wandered around the cosmos tending stars and playing
with Aziraphale.
Hell had known whom Crowley
had grown up with. That was part of the reason why they'd sent him down
in the first place.
Crowley had not forgotten those
times, when all were wrapped in eternal gauze that healed all wounds of
the soul. Then souls began to split, from the stars.
And he remembered, from what
he had seen of God, that God was always sitting behind curtains, and the
tone of voice with which he'd spoken with was always one full of mysterious
smiles, the kind that makes you feel like boxing people's ears.
Crowley hadn't felt that way
then.
Then there was the darkness
that seemed to engulf him. He'd been Lucifer's companion, and Lucifer was
the role model for Napoleon. That guy had charisma, and all he said made
sense.
"Why pray to the light?" Lucifer
had said, "Darkness conceives it."
Crowley had admitted that Lucifer
made sense. Then, after the first seas of blood and after many stars had
exploded, Earth formed.
Metatron said to Beezelbub,
"Look, God is making our chess game. It's all part of the Great Plan."
Crowley had been Crawly then,
and Aziraphale had been sent down. Crawly had raised his eyebrows and said
hi. Their friendship from before had been long forgotten—Aziraphale gazed
at him with impossibly innocent eyes. Crowley knew that even if Aziraphale
knew of the days when he'd hid behind the stars and wished for the war
to end, he wouldn't have felt much, because he knew his side was the victor.
More or less.
Crowley didn't want anyone
to win. He just existed, and had wanted to continue to exist for a longer
period of time, without knowing why disappearing into void was undesirable.
A few millenias down the road,
he had asked quite a few times, "What's the point?"
And the fact was, well, he
saw no point. Aziraphale hadn't provided a good answer, either. The Point
was, he had explained, the Great End and the Ultimate Victory. So what
was the point of the Ultimate Victory? Er. Not that I'm being patronising,
but really, one can't help but wonder…
He knew that he had gotten
Aziraphale to question, as well. But Aziraphale never agreed with him enough
to disobey.
Perhaps, Crowley knew, it was
because both of them had no place to run to. Romeo and Juliet got it cut
out, because they died, and dying was a way of evolving into beings in
different planes. A good escapism, that.
But Crowley knew that if he
died he would have died again, and again, and again. And so would Aziraphale.
It was almost like getting
their wings ripped off countless of times, and restored only to install
the memory of pain. Crowley's wings had been carefully groomed not because
of vanity, but because it hurt all the damn time, when his wings had been
ripped off during the first war, and messy feathers poked into the delicate
skin underneath. The fact that those wings were immaterialistic made it
all the more painful mentally.
And the fact that he could
escape from this mental torture through sleep made him love it more. Sleep
rejuvenated him, as if he had been placed in the Beginning all over again.
Even if it was a vague memory of innocence that didn't befit his current
self.
"I… I'm going back," Aziraphale
stuttered, and vanished.
Crowley was still wondering
if he was dreaming as he saw the angel tremble in the cold, and wished
a crimson sweater on the angel. That made Aziraphale cry even harder, but
somehow, Crowley felt colder than before.
Tears. There were so much tears
that somehow it seemed like it would overflow, and drench the entire sky
with its weed-blue, and manifest its melancholy into a thousand blooming
flowers, so that in the end everything would be immersed in its gentility.
Then everything could cry.
And then souls could feel cold,
rightly, too.
He wondered if Aziraphale had
enough sense to use antiseptic, because human bodies were fragile, and
the last thing he wanted was for Aziraphale to be a broken toy, like all
the others had been. He knew that Aziraphale would sooner know how whales
mate than how humans did. He wondered if he had been slightly violent,
and decided he was slightly passive at times, so it should have been okay.
And he slept again. He wasn't
sure why, but when he woke up, where his face was buried into the pillow,
the cotton fabric was drenched.
~~~~
*That was during the Gold Rush—Aziraphale
had given Crowley a few nightmares afterwards, what with his incredible
sense of dressing and all.
C&C welcomed.^_^