a/n found this in my phone's notes, dated from december 2018

Playing Cards Against Humanity had been Crowley's idea. He'd seen the game on a Walmart shelf at two in the morning and bout it. He'd driven the Bentley, now wondrously no longer turning everything into Queen, aimlessly for nearly the entire day and pondered how he would convince Aziraphale to play. Maybe Aziraphale had just been that bored, or maybe Crowley had just caught the angel in one of those moods, but it hadn't taken much convincing at all. After a lovely dinner at the Ritz, they returned to Aziraphale's bookshop to play. After all, Aziraphale had the better booze…

It seemed that Crowley had indeed caught Aziraphale in a particular mood, because it was the angel who suggested they treat this game like strip poker. Had Crowley been capable of dying from such a mundane cause, he probably would have choked to death on his wine. He wheezed and sputtered as Aziraphale calmly elaborated. "That's not … Angel, that's not strip poker," Crowley said as soon as he could manage words.

"Oh? What is strip poker then?" Aziraphale asked just a little too innocently. Crowley stared at him with a wild sort of uncomfortable, agonized intensity until Aziraphale shrugged and dismissed the distinction as unimportant. It turned out to be much more like strip poker than Crowley thought it would. Funny how you could learn something new about someone you've known for millennia…

…which is how Aziraphale ended up with Crowley's sunglasses perched atop his head, the demon glaring bloody murder as he lost once again. "How in the name of all that's unholy," he demanded, "is an angel winning?" (They both knew, of course, but arguing was all part of the fun.) So far, Crowley had lost three of the five rounds, losing his coat, his sunglasses, and his watch. Aziraphale had lost his coat as well and whatever money he'd had in any of his pockets. Aziraphale shrugged placidly.

"Maybe you've just got terrible cards," he suggested in a conciliatory tone. It was plausible enough, and Crowley made Crowley Noise Of Agreement #3, the one that meant 'I doubt that and I think you're just being nice to me (stop that, angel but don't actually I like it when you're nice to me)'. They played well into the night, going through more bottles of wine than any two humans would have survived. Crowley had been stripped to undershirt and trousers, having lost just about everything.

The game ended when they spent nearly five minutes just saying, "Bees?" back and forth in increasingly ridiculous voices and inflections, laughing until they forgot to breathe.

. . .

Two men, a librarian with kind eyes and some sort of goth who appeared to have no idea how his limbs were supposed to work, stumbled into McDonald's around 3:30AM. Cara welcomed them as usual and asked if she could take her order. The taller of the two stared blankly at her from behind dark sunglasses, seemingly incapable of understanding her question. He and his companion were both drunk, she knew, but they weren't causing any trouble. Usually, she'd have her coworker Erik deal with drunks like this, but these two really didn't seem capable of hurting anything except maybe themselves if they got too close to any stairs.

Sunglasses turned toward his companion as if to ask a question, then snapped back to her and said, "Nuggets!" with such finality and pomp that Cara bit her tongue to stop herself from laughing.

"How many?" she asked.

"As many as we can get," he said, dragging the 's' in the second 'as' in a manner that reminded Cara of a drunk snake. Not that she'd ever heard a drunk snake; it's just that's what she imagined a drunk snake would sound like. He leaned against the counter and offered his credit card, which gave his name as AJ Crowley. Cara liked looking at the names on people's cards and kept a list of the weirdest ones.

"Well, at this hour, I'm gonna have to limit you gents to 50," she said.

"Fifty nuggets will do just delightfully," the librarian said warmly. "Thank you for your gener…jou…" He scowled with drunken determination for a moment, then his face cleared. "Thank you for your givingness, my dear!"

"You're most welcome." She liked these two. She gave them their total, an alarming number that neither batted an eye at, and told them to take a seat since their order would take a while.

" 'ssssss no problem," Sunglasses, proper name AJ Crowley, slurred. "We're not go…going anywhere. You're nuggets!"