Chapter One: A-rhythms & Adagios
It was, as they say, a long time coming.
In the air which screamed things, no longer whispered confidentially to those who cared to listen, told rumors with the best of the barefoot women in petticoats, and was as malicious as those angry enough to store meat cleavers around their persons, just in case, there was the general consensus that these cries were of change, for change, and with change.
It was the best of times and the worst of times. That generally known fact was at least true, for depending on whose side you were on, the Palace or the Streets Below, feelings could either be looking Up or looking Down, or perhaps even a strange conglomerate mixture of the two perspectives.
In the Paris streets wine did not run like blood, for it was thinner than the robust life source of the peasants, and they were also growing more and more attached to their blood, in those days. Obviously, they would not let it spill on the cobblestones to be trampled underfoot of others. The only blood they were going to spill was the blood of the Enemy.
It was white and black, black and white, or perhaps red, the color of that barefoot passion, and violet, the color of that equally passive silk clinging willfully to its current position.
The city was no longer, and really never had been, a thrum of perfect life and unblemished concordance. Peasant to peasant it may have been, as it still was, but certainly peasant to merchant and merchant to nobleman there was a certain amount of curl-at-the-lip distaste from both sides. Peasant to nobleman was truly the worst of them all: the hate in one pair of eyes, the matching condescension in the other. It was a fury and distrust wrought of the misunderstanding and pride cultivated on both sides.
There was nothing to it, then, but blood.
But before all this mess, Aziraphale had truly enjoyed his walks through the lower city streets, watching the small, albeit dirty, children laugh, draw faces with spilled flour on the cobblestone, play prince and princess with their chins tilted up haughtily and their eyes fixed upon the bright sky. He had enjoyed passing by a poor man's inn or two, had enjoyed slipping and watching, unnoticed, the laughter that passed easy amongst the drunken men like beer and rumors were passed between them, easy as he said, and without fees. These were the places where things came free, a man pinching a maid through her thin petticoats, the bright red she turned over her plump cheeks, the smack she repaid him echoing over the men's unwashed, never capped heads, and the laughter that roared up from the watching, and the good humor. It never mattered how many times this scene was replayed. It never got old.
And now the children had grown up thin and nervous, but beneath that nervousness there was anger. They had the pretence of defeat in the way their backs stooped just slightly, though they were still young to the world, and the way their hands writhed, clutched before them in beaten turmoil. But in their eyes, snapping back and forth, was that same haughtiness Aziraphale had seen as they played prince and princess on the street corner, only now they weren't playing games anymore, and they stepped heavier upon the cobblestone ground, gleaned what spilled flour they could find for suppers of thinning gruel.
And the women hid weapons or notes or money they had stolen in their bosoms, walked with a swish to their hips that contradicted the men's act of hunched grovelling. In their dangerous eyes and the flush of their cheeks and the proud line to their backs they spoke volumes, how they would not be ignored and they would not be destroyed. It was the women, Aziraphale thought to himself, who must have started it all. They were the wisest, or at least, they had the hunger for that wisdom aching behind their breasts. For their children, they would not have back alleyways and winter chill and winter cough and winter funerals. For their children, they would have the sunshine, and gardens, and feasts of power, not equality.
The fraternity, then, involved the women, too.
A brotherhood of the angry and oppressed, a sisterhood of the driving force behind them.
We will have what is rightfully ours, the air chanted, but the nobleman turned their backs against it and their ears to midnight music, and the world writhed like the men's twisting hands, in the agony of riot soon to come.
And also the inns had no open doors, now, had shuttered windows and bolts that locked from the inside thrice more than once. The maids had grown older and they sat around the few crude tables resting their feet up on stools. The younger maids who had come to replace them -- for there were always those rushing for what few jobs there were, so desperate were they for work -- had a glint to their eye that was metal, like the sharp blade of a butcher's knife. Together, in these cramped spaces, the men and the women passed anger back and forth between them, instead of laughter, mistrust and outrage free of charge from one chest, through one mouth, into another, and passed along indulgently. Hate was the one thing they truly owned. Hate for those who crushed them down, gave them nothing while they sat on velvet and had everything they desired.
Hate, close to love, closer still to change, fueled all great transformations. Hate and dissatisfaction.
Aziraphale had seen it all happen a thousand times over in a thousand different places. A place before time began as this world knew it was the first, love which birthed hate which birthed change, and wrecked in its foamy wake all that a reluctant few held near and dear to their hearts.
Aziraphale, who walked these Parisian streets now with his eyes cast low, spectacles tucked into his waistcoat pocket so the world around him would become a blur to his eyes, and he would not have to see it. He was not hiding. Rather, he was preferring to remember, in this moment of solitude, the world he wished so deep inside of him he could once again visit, but knew in that same place that he could not.
He was watching now, with his myopic and half-focused eyes, a scene unlike any other unravel before his eyes.
On the hungry, bleeding streets of Paris, a wine barrel on its way to the Palace had broken open, flooding the streets with rivulets of red between the broken cobblestones.
It was as if the earth had opened up, belching forward that pain which had lain for so long dormant inside it.
Curled up around those trickles of wet color against the gray were children, men, women on their knees, drinking in with the dirt and the gravel of smashed cobblestone such sweetness they could not pay for in their own lives. Like beggars, they kept the bruise from their bent knees with the torn hems of their clothes rolled up as cushions. One child sputtered and choked on the stuff, but could not stop himself, thin hands grasping at the sustenance which flowed slowly away, so slowly, but just fast enough to be lost between his equally thin fingers.
It was a last supper, Aziraphale supposed, for the poor.
It was also the last straw, the last bit of time running out, for the rich.
"Did you do it?" Aziraphale asked knowing, turning his head towards the sky in contemplation.
"Yes," said Crowley, who leaned in the darkness beside him, "I did."
"Was it your goal to rob them of their pride?" Crowley shrugged, watching in what appeared to be disinterest from over one fingernail. Hidden in the shadows, Aziraphale could not see his eyes.
"Was it your goal to watch them like a theatre piece?"
"No," Aziraphale said, "I was taking a walk."
"A bit far from the palace," Crowley mused softly, his eyes on the scene before him. A little girl cried out, bowing her head over a bowl made by one broken cobblestone, where a horse hoof had kicked a dent into the stone once, long ago. The wine pooled into the hollow as if it were a fountain, and she, lips stained with wine as they might one day be stained with her own blood, drank greedily from it, drunk not on the liquid but on her own, sudden power, a place where she had and the others around her did not.
"Mm," Aziraphale said. He was watching the same thing. It was one thing, a wonderful thing, Aziraphale supposed, to possess. But possessing without the ability to hold your belongings up, displaying them before those who lacked all but the will to survive -- that was the true point of riches. To have when others had naught.
"Who issss to ssssay," Crowley said suddenly, leaning forward out of the shadows, his snake eyes glinting and that sibilance coming almost unbidden to his lips, "that what I have done wassss cruel or sssselfisssh. Who issss to ssssay that I have not given thesssse foolssss a gift?"
And Aziraphale was speechless as the song of the air struck discord into the hearts of men, women and children alike, as the discord of these bodies struck equal a-rhythms into the depths of angels and the blackened blood of their counterpart demons.