Your gift's arrived, teaandtimecake!
Title: Between the Covers
Recipient: teaandtimecake
Author: mybrokenlocket
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Aziraphale/Crowley, Madame Tracey, Newt, Anathema, Wensleydale
Request: Crowley/Aziraphale. Crowley is responsible for trashy romance novels. He even writes a few himself in between bouts of tempting, and oops, looks like Aziraphale's got an embarrassing stash of his books somewhere in the shop. Bonus points if Aziraphale doesn't realise who the author actually is. Any rating.
Summary: Crowley writes romance novels. Everybody loves them, but no one wants to admit to reading them.
Heaven's stance on erotica was currently the same as their stance on guns- favorable, but only when in the right hands. Hell had a more complicated relationship with the medium. Most demons were pro-debauchery, on principle, but anti-genuine pleasure. As usual, Crowley dealt well with the gray area.
"Just think, there's these housewives out there, and we could reach them all," he said, passing his prototype around the boardroom. "I've got hooks in one of the big publishing companies. Not only do we create a perfect platform for disseminating any message we want, we're also getting them to spend millions of dollars on mass-produced crap that does nothing but waste their time and enhance their feelings of dissatisfaction with their own mediocre lives. A perfect breeding ground for sin, disloyalty, lustful thoughts, fornication."
He would rework the same pitch sometime later to convince his immediate superiors of the myriad possibilities of television.
*****
Madame Tracy's morning customers tended to have less-than-exotic tastes, but you would never know it from the way some of them blushed and carried on when asking for the simplest things.
"Will you read to me, again?"
"Of course, love, the same book as last time?"
"Yes please."
Madame Tracy selected a paperback from a shelf, turned to a dog-eared page, and began to read aloud.
Once they were in the back of the limo, hidden on all sides by tinted glass, Robert dropped all pretense of being a gentleman. His first kiss was hungry, and took Jillian by surprise. As the car began to roll forward, she found herself on her back, pinned to the seat as Robert explored her neck and shoulders with his mouth.
“You look absolutely edible in that dress,” Robert murmured in Jillian's ear. She was gratified to hear that he was breathing heavy. “But I have a favor to ask you.”
*****
Hell had been skeptical at first, but by the 80's, the idea had thoroughly won them over. When he stopped by the bookshop in Soho, Aziraphale did not want to discuss it, and might have turned him away, except Crowley had a particularly nice bottle of pinot noir in hand.
"Really, my dear, I can't say I quite see the point," Aziraphale said, fetching a pair of glasses from a cupboard in the back room. "This doesn't seem like temptation so much as… noise."
"Have you ever read one, Angel?" Crowley had opened the bottle and settled himself at the table.
"I have. For research purposes only, of course. I'm sure I have a copy of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded around somewhere. It seemed harmless."
Crowley snorted. "That's because it was. Anything more recent?"
"The paperbacks from the supermarkets, you mean?" Aziraphale peered down into his wine glass. "I hardly see the point. A waste of time, perhaps, but not dangerous. A guilty pleasure."
"Guilt and pleasure are two of the biggest guns in my arsenal. It follows that anything categorized as a guilty pleasure has to be a win, right?"
Aziraphale rolled his eyes and took another sip of his wine. He was saved from having to come up with a rejoinder by the ringing of a bell, signaling someone had entered the front door of the shop.
"Customer?" Crowley asked.
"I doubt it. I'm fairly sure I didn't have the 'open' sign out."
Aziraphale rose and went to the front of the shop. Crowley, curious, followed. A man in a brown uniform was setting down a cardboard box on the counter. "Hello, sir. Got a shipment for you here. Can you sign for it?"
"Of course." Aziraphale snatched the clipboard from the delivery man's hand, placing his body between Crowley and the box. When the delivery man had been dispatched with a tip, Aziraphale turned to face Crowley. "So sorry to do this, but it's getting rather late, and it looks like I have some inventory work to do."
"Inventory of what?"
"Of this shipment."
"But what's the shipment of?"
"Shipment of new inventory. Don't you have some tempting to do, someplace else?"
"Well, if you're going to be that way, I suppose I do. Be seeing you." Crowley strolled out the door, smirking to himself. He'd caught a glimpse of a very familiar logo on the cardboard box- a publishing house, one that dealt with a very specific type of literature.
*****
“For the thousandth time, Taylor Huntington, I will not marry you!”
Taylor smirked. “I’m not keeping count, but I’m sure you haven’t turned me down a thousand times. Not yet.”
“If I do it a thousand times, will that make you stop asking?”
“Oh, Meg,” Taylor said with a shake of his head and a tone of loving condescension. “Why do we have to go through this every time? Just marry me, and we won’t have to argue about it anymore.”
“I’m sure we would find something else. Now get out!”
"What are you reading?"
Anathema hadn't heard Newt come in the front door. "Nothing. Garbage. How was work?"
Newt sidled over and extracted the paperback from beneath the sofa cushion where Anathema had attempted to hide it. "The Princess and the Cowgirl? What's this about?"
*****
Crowley had dabbled in writing for centuries. He sometimes claimed that he was using his talents to sow the seeds of greed, lust, et. al. in the minds of humankind. The real reason was that before the advent of Hollywood, the literati had all the most interesting drugs and threw the best parties. The best way to get an invite was to be published.
Demons specialize in tempting others to do wrong, so when they want something done right, it can be difficult to delegate. The manuscript that fell into Richard Bonneycastle's hands was lurid and quite debauched, by the standards of the day.* Crowley was extremely proud of it.
Several of the early market-test novels had been his as well. He told himself it was worth the long nights, as once the publishing craze took off he could leave the writing to other hands and let his go back to being mostly idle. The thing was, after the market tests were over and it had all been declared a success both on Earth and Below, Crowley still had all these ideas.
He finally decided that there was no harm in having a hobby, and sent his books off to the publishers. They were always accepted with great praise, but released with little fanfare. They were various types of romance- contemporary, suspense, erotic. Crowley wrote historical romances, usually with a higher degree of accuracy than others in the field.** The only sub genres Crowley avoided were Christian romance, for obvious reasons, and paranormal romance. He'd known plenty of succubi and incubi, and while it was true that some of them were sex fiends, most of them did their tempting on the clock, as it were, and spent their nights off at the pub or watching television, just like everyone else.
*****
“Where did you learn to do that?” Morgan asked, her voice starting out imperious and veering towards shocked.
“I’m improvising,” her lover said, pinning her other wrist to the bedpost and tying another length of silk around it. “Turnabout is fair play, my lady.”
Morgan wriggled, testing her bonds. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, striving to sound as bored as possible when naked and tied to a bed. “Get on with it, then.”
Wensleydale was in bed, reading. He hadn't bothered to hide under the covers, or even turn the light off, but his door was firmly locked. His parents had long since stopped trying to censor anything he wanted to read. They told anyone who cared to ask that this was because they didn't want to stifle their son's inquisitive nature, in truth, it was because he consumed books at such a rate that they couldn't possibly keep up.
It just so happened that his mother had read this particular book before. Wensleydale had found it in the bottom of a drawer when he had been looking for a pair of his father's socks to wear. Later he would roll his eyes when Brian bragged of purloined nudie mags, and it would be years before he admitted to reading the stolen bodice ripper cover-to-cover.
*****
Crowley had mixed feeling about the receiving a commendation for the fad in fictional business class sado-masochism. He thought Aziraphale's glaring disapproval might make him feel better about the whole thing, and he was in the neighborhood anyways, so he headed to the bookshop with the intention of inviting the angel to drinks.
Hidden forces seemed to have positioned the reading chair in the back room- facing the open door to the main shop just enough that passerby could see someone sitting there, but turned away enough that a thoroughly engaged reader wouldn't notice a visitor until he had cleared his throat, loudly. Twice.
"Ah!" Aziraphale started, spilling the mug of tea in his right hand over his lap, and at the same time managing to make the paperback in his left disappear to parts unknown. "Crowley. Didn't see you there."
"Sorry to disturb you." Crowley was doing a very poor job of concealing his amusement. "You looked quite absorbed."
"Yes…"
"Reading anything good?"
"Not particularly."
"Is that why you had to miracle it away when you saw me?"
"I meant to get the tea, actually."
Crowley raised an eyebrow, and the spreading stain disappeared from Aziraphale's trousers. "Give it up, I could see the cover from here."
"I don't believe you."
"Not one of my best works, I'll admit, but it has some good bits. I'm particularly fond of chapter sixteen, after the viscount convinces the page he can teach him how to seduce the prince." Crowley strolled over to the side table, lifted the refilled mug, and took a sip.
Aziraphale frowned. "You wrote this?"
"Yes. Surprised?" Crowley smirked.
"I know you came up with the idea, but now you're telling me you took pen to paper--"
"Er, hands to word processor?"
"--and wrote this yourself?"
"Yes, after many hours of meticulously conducted research."
"You mean…" Aziraphale trailed off, considering exactly what "research" implied, under the circumstances.
"You know, if you like it, this happens to be one of my more prolific noms de plume, so there's plenty more where that came from…"
Aziraphale's expression confirmed what Crowley had been hoping it would. "…unless you have all the rest of them stashed in a cupboard somewhere."
"All right, you win." Aziraphale sank back into his chair and opened his hands in surrender. "Guilty pleasure, indeed."
Crowley considered teasing the angel some more, but then he changed his mind- not so much taking pity as figuring out a more interesting direction for the conversation to go. "I'm working on another one, you know," he said, leaning back against the door frame.
Aziraphale gave him a look. "Am I supposed to jump up in excitement and ask if I can pre-order a copy?"
"No, too early to be thinking about that. But I could really use your input. As a fan."
"I'm not sure I-"
"C'mon, you've just admitted that I'm the author of all your most secret fantasies. How much more embarrassed can you get?"
"Quite a bit, I suspect." Aziraphale shook his head. "Tell me about it anyways."
"I've been thinking of giving paranormals another try. But it's been a while, so I might need to do some research. The two protagonists would be an angel and a demon...”
Notes:
*Richard Bonneycastle, founder of Harlequin books, reprinted romance novels from the British publishing company Mills and Boon for the North American market. At first only the tamer books were reprinted, but then Mr. Bonneycastle decided to see what all the fuss was about.
**This was, of course, not so much because he valued accuracy as because he'd been there. Sometimes the historicals were anachronistic on purpose, since he knew better than anyone that the truth is stranger than pretty much everything, and people didn't want too much honesty getting in the way of their romance.
Recipient: teaandtimecake
Author: mybrokenlocket
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Aziraphale/Crowley, Madame Tracey, Newt, Anathema, Wensleydale
Request: Crowley/Aziraphale. Crowley is responsible for trashy romance novels. He even writes a few himself in between bouts of tempting, and oops, looks like Aziraphale's got an embarrassing stash of his books somewhere in the shop. Bonus points if Aziraphale doesn't realise who the author actually is. Any rating.
Summary: Crowley writes romance novels. Everybody loves them, but no one wants to admit to reading them.
Heaven's stance on erotica was currently the same as their stance on guns- favorable, but only when in the right hands. Hell had a more complicated relationship with the medium. Most demons were pro-debauchery, on principle, but anti-genuine pleasure. As usual, Crowley dealt well with the gray area.
"Just think, there's these housewives out there, and we could reach them all," he said, passing his prototype around the boardroom. "I've got hooks in one of the big publishing companies. Not only do we create a perfect platform for disseminating any message we want, we're also getting them to spend millions of dollars on mass-produced crap that does nothing but waste their time and enhance their feelings of dissatisfaction with their own mediocre lives. A perfect breeding ground for sin, disloyalty, lustful thoughts, fornication."
He would rework the same pitch sometime later to convince his immediate superiors of the myriad possibilities of television.
*****
Madame Tracy's morning customers tended to have less-than-exotic tastes, but you would never know it from the way some of them blushed and carried on when asking for the simplest things.
"Will you read to me, again?"
"Of course, love, the same book as last time?"
"Yes please."
Madame Tracy selected a paperback from a shelf, turned to a dog-eared page, and began to read aloud.
Once they were in the back of the limo, hidden on all sides by tinted glass, Robert dropped all pretense of being a gentleman. His first kiss was hungry, and took Jillian by surprise. As the car began to roll forward, she found herself on her back, pinned to the seat as Robert explored her neck and shoulders with his mouth.
“You look absolutely edible in that dress,” Robert murmured in Jillian's ear. She was gratified to hear that he was breathing heavy. “But I have a favor to ask you.”
*****
Hell had been skeptical at first, but by the 80's, the idea had thoroughly won them over. When he stopped by the bookshop in Soho, Aziraphale did not want to discuss it, and might have turned him away, except Crowley had a particularly nice bottle of pinot noir in hand.
"Really, my dear, I can't say I quite see the point," Aziraphale said, fetching a pair of glasses from a cupboard in the back room. "This doesn't seem like temptation so much as… noise."
"Have you ever read one, Angel?" Crowley had opened the bottle and settled himself at the table.
"I have. For research purposes only, of course. I'm sure I have a copy of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded around somewhere. It seemed harmless."
Crowley snorted. "That's because it was. Anything more recent?"
"The paperbacks from the supermarkets, you mean?" Aziraphale peered down into his wine glass. "I hardly see the point. A waste of time, perhaps, but not dangerous. A guilty pleasure."
"Guilt and pleasure are two of the biggest guns in my arsenal. It follows that anything categorized as a guilty pleasure has to be a win, right?"
Aziraphale rolled his eyes and took another sip of his wine. He was saved from having to come up with a rejoinder by the ringing of a bell, signaling someone had entered the front door of the shop.
"Customer?" Crowley asked.
"I doubt it. I'm fairly sure I didn't have the 'open' sign out."
Aziraphale rose and went to the front of the shop. Crowley, curious, followed. A man in a brown uniform was setting down a cardboard box on the counter. "Hello, sir. Got a shipment for you here. Can you sign for it?"
"Of course." Aziraphale snatched the clipboard from the delivery man's hand, placing his body between Crowley and the box. When the delivery man had been dispatched with a tip, Aziraphale turned to face Crowley. "So sorry to do this, but it's getting rather late, and it looks like I have some inventory work to do."
"Inventory of what?"
"Of this shipment."
"But what's the shipment of?"
"Shipment of new inventory. Don't you have some tempting to do, someplace else?"
"Well, if you're going to be that way, I suppose I do. Be seeing you." Crowley strolled out the door, smirking to himself. He'd caught a glimpse of a very familiar logo on the cardboard box- a publishing house, one that dealt with a very specific type of literature.
*****
“For the thousandth time, Taylor Huntington, I will not marry you!”
Taylor smirked. “I’m not keeping count, but I’m sure you haven’t turned me down a thousand times. Not yet.”
“If I do it a thousand times, will that make you stop asking?”
“Oh, Meg,” Taylor said with a shake of his head and a tone of loving condescension. “Why do we have to go through this every time? Just marry me, and we won’t have to argue about it anymore.”
“I’m sure we would find something else. Now get out!”
"What are you reading?"
Anathema hadn't heard Newt come in the front door. "Nothing. Garbage. How was work?"
Newt sidled over and extracted the paperback from beneath the sofa cushion where Anathema had attempted to hide it. "The Princess and the Cowgirl? What's this about?"
*****
Crowley had dabbled in writing for centuries. He sometimes claimed that he was using his talents to sow the seeds of greed, lust, et. al. in the minds of humankind. The real reason was that before the advent of Hollywood, the literati had all the most interesting drugs and threw the best parties. The best way to get an invite was to be published.
Demons specialize in tempting others to do wrong, so when they want something done right, it can be difficult to delegate. The manuscript that fell into Richard Bonneycastle's hands was lurid and quite debauched, by the standards of the day.* Crowley was extremely proud of it.
Several of the early market-test novels had been his as well. He told himself it was worth the long nights, as once the publishing craze took off he could leave the writing to other hands and let his go back to being mostly idle. The thing was, after the market tests were over and it had all been declared a success both on Earth and Below, Crowley still had all these ideas.
He finally decided that there was no harm in having a hobby, and sent his books off to the publishers. They were always accepted with great praise, but released with little fanfare. They were various types of romance- contemporary, suspense, erotic. Crowley wrote historical romances, usually with a higher degree of accuracy than others in the field.** The only sub genres Crowley avoided were Christian romance, for obvious reasons, and paranormal romance. He'd known plenty of succubi and incubi, and while it was true that some of them were sex fiends, most of them did their tempting on the clock, as it were, and spent their nights off at the pub or watching television, just like everyone else.
*****
“Where did you learn to do that?” Morgan asked, her voice starting out imperious and veering towards shocked.
“I’m improvising,” her lover said, pinning her other wrist to the bedpost and tying another length of silk around it. “Turnabout is fair play, my lady.”
Morgan wriggled, testing her bonds. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, striving to sound as bored as possible when naked and tied to a bed. “Get on with it, then.”
Wensleydale was in bed, reading. He hadn't bothered to hide under the covers, or even turn the light off, but his door was firmly locked. His parents had long since stopped trying to censor anything he wanted to read. They told anyone who cared to ask that this was because they didn't want to stifle their son's inquisitive nature, in truth, it was because he consumed books at such a rate that they couldn't possibly keep up.
It just so happened that his mother had read this particular book before. Wensleydale had found it in the bottom of a drawer when he had been looking for a pair of his father's socks to wear. Later he would roll his eyes when Brian bragged of purloined nudie mags, and it would be years before he admitted to reading the stolen bodice ripper cover-to-cover.
*****
Crowley had mixed feeling about the receiving a commendation for the fad in fictional business class sado-masochism. He thought Aziraphale's glaring disapproval might make him feel better about the whole thing, and he was in the neighborhood anyways, so he headed to the bookshop with the intention of inviting the angel to drinks.
Hidden forces seemed to have positioned the reading chair in the back room- facing the open door to the main shop just enough that passerby could see someone sitting there, but turned away enough that a thoroughly engaged reader wouldn't notice a visitor until he had cleared his throat, loudly. Twice.
"Ah!" Aziraphale started, spilling the mug of tea in his right hand over his lap, and at the same time managing to make the paperback in his left disappear to parts unknown. "Crowley. Didn't see you there."
"Sorry to disturb you." Crowley was doing a very poor job of concealing his amusement. "You looked quite absorbed."
"Yes…"
"Reading anything good?"
"Not particularly."
"Is that why you had to miracle it away when you saw me?"
"I meant to get the tea, actually."
Crowley raised an eyebrow, and the spreading stain disappeared from Aziraphale's trousers. "Give it up, I could see the cover from here."
"I don't believe you."
"Not one of my best works, I'll admit, but it has some good bits. I'm particularly fond of chapter sixteen, after the viscount convinces the page he can teach him how to seduce the prince." Crowley strolled over to the side table, lifted the refilled mug, and took a sip.
Aziraphale frowned. "You wrote this?"
"Yes. Surprised?" Crowley smirked.
"I know you came up with the idea, but now you're telling me you took pen to paper--"
"Er, hands to word processor?"
"--and wrote this yourself?"
"Yes, after many hours of meticulously conducted research."
"You mean…" Aziraphale trailed off, considering exactly what "research" implied, under the circumstances.
"You know, if you like it, this happens to be one of my more prolific noms de plume, so there's plenty more where that came from…"
Aziraphale's expression confirmed what Crowley had been hoping it would. "…unless you have all the rest of them stashed in a cupboard somewhere."
"All right, you win." Aziraphale sank back into his chair and opened his hands in surrender. "Guilty pleasure, indeed."
Crowley considered teasing the angel some more, but then he changed his mind- not so much taking pity as figuring out a more interesting direction for the conversation to go. "I'm working on another one, you know," he said, leaning back against the door frame.
Aziraphale gave him a look. "Am I supposed to jump up in excitement and ask if I can pre-order a copy?"
"No, too early to be thinking about that. But I could really use your input. As a fan."
"I'm not sure I-"
"C'mon, you've just admitted that I'm the author of all your most secret fantasies. How much more embarrassed can you get?"
"Quite a bit, I suspect." Aziraphale shook his head. "Tell me about it anyways."
"I've been thinking of giving paranormals another try. But it's been a while, so I might need to do some research. The two protagonists would be an angel and a demon...”
Notes:
*Richard Bonneycastle, founder of Harlequin books, reprinted romance novels from the British publishing company Mills and Boon for the North American market. At first only the tamer books were reprinted, but then Mr. Bonneycastle decided to see what all the fuss was about.
**This was, of course, not so much because he valued accuracy as because he'd been there. Sometimes the historicals were anachronistic on purpose, since he knew better than anyone that the truth is stranger than pretty much everything, and people didn't want too much honesty getting in the way of their romance.