"So. Where to next, angel? ", asked Crowley, slurping noodles and beef broth from the huge bowl in front of him. After over a month he'd gotten quite sick of sushi.
"I don't know ", answered Aziraphale, fumbling around on his plate. Unlike Crowley, who could eat gracefully and efficiently with just about anything he had never entirely gotten the hang of chopsticks, but what he lacked in dexterity he made up for in determination.
They were both speaking Japanese. After spending so many millennia on Earth with humans – who, for large parts of their history, had killed other humans for being the wrong colour, wearing the wrong clothes, believing in the wrong god or speaking the wrong language to only name a few – the two of them had long since established a firm habit of switching to the local tongue of wherever they happened to be at the moment [1].
"We've been to 26 different onsen. [2] A week of nothing but shrines and temples. Hiking in Hokkaido. ", recounted Aziraphale.
"Osaka. Nagasaki" continued Crowley and managed not to sneer too much. Both of those had been nostalgic visits for the angel, who had lived in Nagasaki during his time as a missionary and had been there during the construction of Osaka castle. Not necessarily something to sneer at, but after his trip down memory lane Aziraphale had somehow managed to persuade Crowley to take a Calligraphy class with him. After this initial success he'd then attempted to talk the demon into taking several other courses they were offering as well, but Crowley had drawn the line at Ikebana. [3]
"And after you've dragged me through Ginza, Roppongi, Shibuya, Shimokita and Shinjuku ", Aziraphale followed up and counted them off on his fingers. "I think we can cross Tokyo off the list too. "
"Mfff", made Crowley, supposedly in the affirmative but with his mouth full of egg and Kobe beef it was hard to tell. He swallowed. "Tell you what ", he said, waving a chopstick. "Japan has too much bloody culture. Let's go somewhere less civilized. "
"Like what?"
"Like, like..." Crowley wrecked his brain, trying to come up with places lacking civilization that were also not currently war-torn hell holes. "Like Iowa", he finished lamely.
"My dear, I think we can do better than that", said Aziraphale slightly aghast.
Crowley had to agree. Silence fell again, broken only by the sounds of two man-shaped beings eating ramen.
"Still, the States doesn't sound too bad ", the angel said after pondering on this for a while. "Didn't you put the Grand Canyon on the list?"
.
.
[1] After one week of feeling like it was Babel all over again, the natives had finally started to understand Aziraphale. Another week after thattheir faces had stopped twitching in their obvious efforts not to be rude and laugh at his odd way of speaking. While Crowley had been to Japan in the 1980s and only needed to brush up on his slang, the angel's last visit had been as a Portuguese missionary in the late 16thcentury and it had taken him a while to catch up linguistically.
[2] Originally, their goal had been to "visit every single onsen in Beppu" but when there turned out to be several thousand, they had mutually decided to cut that item short. Even Crowley who, due to his serpentine nature, positively relished a nice long soak in hot water more than Aziraphale, had gotten bored after a dozen or so.
[3] Instead, he had gotten extremely drunk on sake and woken up with a purple pufferfish tattooed on his chest the next day. It was badly drawn, but he had chosen to keep it for now - if only as a reminder of the proverbial notch in his bedpost of hell-bound souls. It was a very big notch.