Happy Holidays, pasiphile!
Title: And Find for Herself a Place to Rest
Recipient: pasiphile
Author: tomato_greens
Rating: PG
Characters/Relationship: Eve; Crowley&Aziraphale
Request: Crowley and Eve.
Author's Notes: Happy holidays! And a huge thank you to irisbleufic for beta-ing at such short notice.
Summary: So long as you avoided the thorns, it was a nice tree.
Crowley has just finished his third glass of a fairly decent Saint-Amour when the telephone in the front room begins to ring.
“Ignore it,” Aziraphale huffs, wrinkling his nose in distaste when he realizes the bottle’s empty.
“It’s Milly Marsham, I’m sure, trying to get her dirty hands on the Jack Cade sequel I snatched up last year, The Merfolds, quite rare but she wants it for a song.”
“Can she sing, at least?” Aziraphale shudders, which Crowley understands to be an emphatic no. “Ah.”
The telephone quiets and Crowley snaps his fingers, pouring Aziraphale a healthy dose of Château Margaux 1990.
“Thank you, my dear,” Aziraphale says. “A surprisingly good year, for all that.”
Crowley shrugs. “Flora are known to respond productively to stress.”
The telephone rings again, and again, until finally Aziraphale groans and stretches up from the table, adjusting his tartan dressing gown around him. He has three blondish, wiry chest hairs poking through the V-shaped neck of his pajamas.
“If you just got a cordless--”
“Not all of us succumb to modern conveniences when we have no real need of them,” Aziraphale sniffs virtuously, and flounces out to the cash register and desk. Crowley contemplates his own empty glass and then steals Aziraphale’s, seeing as Aziraphale, being a Principality and Divine Presence Upon This Our Earth, had no real need for such an excellent vintage, whereas Crowley, being a Fallen Corrupter of Innocents Cursed Above Every Beast of the Field, was practically born for the stuff, had he been born rather than shaped from aether, of course. In any case, anything so delicious had to be a vice, which meant it fell firmly in Crowley’s territory.
“Excuse me,” Aziraphale says from the front room, very loudly and very coldly. Crowley hurriedly filled the other glass on the odd chance Aziraphale had somehow begun to look through walls and was starting a row--but then Aziraphale continues, “I see,” his voice absolute steel. Crowley hasn’t heard that tone of voice in over twenty years; he places the Château Margaux carefully back on the table, lest he drop it from his trembling fist.
Aziraphale pops his head into the room, his cheeks ruddy despite the cool of the bookshop. “You had better come in here,” he says, his voice resigned. “Adam’s on the phone.”
The two glasses, the bottle, the back window, and the screen of Aziraphale’s ancient desktop all crack at once. The wine pulses out onto the table in a slow, priceless ooze, darker than blood. “I--yes. Coming,” Crowley says faintly.
The receiver is thick Bakelite, beige, heavy in Crowley’s hand. It can’t be more than twenty-three years old, given everything that’s happened, but it looks very 1955, which was the first and last time Aziraphale bought a telephone. “Hello,” he says into it.
“Hi, Crowley. It’s been an age and a half.”
“Something like that,” Crowley mutters. Adam’s voice is somehow deeper than Crowley expected it. It’s not that Crowley hasn’t talked to Adam since That Day--he has, mostly at Aziraphale’s prompting, called Adam up once or twice a year to ask after Dog and whether Adam’s finishing his school assignments on time--but it’s the first time Adam has sounded like an adult.
“I didn’t mean to upset Aziraphale,” Adam says apologetically. “It’s just I need your help, you see.”
“Help,” Crowley gulps. “Yes. Sure. Of course. I live but to serve. Help with what, exactly?”
Adam takes a deep breath. “I had to call Anathema up to make sure it was her--she felt so old, I didn’t believe it at first. Older than me, I mean. But Anathema did something witchy and agreed, it’s got to be her.”
“Who, for the love of--?”
“Who else,” Adam says. “Eve.”
“--That’s not possible.”
“I know. But she’s here. She’s in pain. And I need someone to find her before she brings everything crashing down on us again. I can’t--I can’t. So I called you.”
*
The thing everyone forgot about Eden, now that it was gone, was that the Garden was the least of it.
Hell being Hell, they had shoved Crawly into a scaly, legless body--Someone’s idea of a joke, Crawly thought later--and then had said, Get up there and make some trouble.
Crawly had cleared his throat and said, Anything more specific? I’m a details kind of guy, you know.
Just go, Crawly, Dagon had ordered, rolling his eyes extravagantly, so Crawly had hissed his good-byes and ventured glumly upwards. Hell, he’d reflected, was at the very least nice and warm, provided you didn’t get tangled up with the Morningstar’s frankly excessive grieving process.
The same couldn’t be said for Eden, which was strange and cold and lonely, a vast and unknowable space lit only by Hell’s dim reddish glow along the southern edge and the angels’ flaming swords (though Freud wasn’t going to be around for another few eons, Crawly could only think, really). The only thing Crawly could sense every time he flicked his tongue out was something almost, but not entirely, unlike sand, a rawer earth, as yet unformed, that bunched uncomfortably under him as he slithered on.
*
Crowley closes his eyes and, for the first time in years, lets his awareness of the phone and the dusty bookshop and Soho’s peculiar brand of Londoner fade into the foreground. He’s known for as long as he can remember that there’s a certain comfort in the smallness of things--that to start a ripple is safer than to get caught up in its widening arcs--and he’s lost his taste for grand gestures, but he’s never really forgotten what it felt like, back at the start of it all.
With the entire world stretched out before him, Aziraphale flames out like a beacon, and Adam even brighter, two stars in a fainter universe. He sees a woman giving a piece of bread to a hungry child somewhere in southwestern China; a selfless act, she’d have been a saint, once. In Cairo, a nurse strokes the brittle hair off his patient’s forehead. In the dense Californian suburbs, a man pushes his wife into the wall for the last time, a knife in his hand.
Finally, finally, he feels her, a weak throb of fear and longing. He would never have noticed it otherwise, but he can feel her underneath all the other meaty, salty, human tang, her particular bitterness: an unripened fruit. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know where she is, though.”
“No,” Adam agrees, “she’s hard to pin down. Anathema thinks she might be jumping from place to place.”
“Can she do that?”
Adam makes an uncertain noise over the phone. “Don’t see why not. She’s not known for playing by any kind of rulebook.”
“Right,” Crowley says. He rubs the back of his neck, and wonders vaguely where he picked up the habit. His neck doesn’t actually hurt.
“So will you try and find her? If I go, I’ll--I can’t be seen to mess about. Especially not with someone so--”
“--Volatile?” Crowley supplies.
“Right.”
There’s nothing to be done, then. “Yes. Yes, of course I’ll try.” He hangs up as Adam breathes out his thanks.
Aziraphale looks at him, catching his shoulder with one hand. “Are you all right?”
“Obviously,” he says, and then, really feeling Aziraphale’s too-hot fingers pressing through the fabric of his shirt, “not.” He snaps his fingers and folds into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“You needn’t do anything you don’t want to,” Aziraphale frets.
Crowley snorts in disbelief. “Angel--”
“Well, all right, but you don’t have to go it alone.”
“She knew me.”
“You’ve forgotten,” Aziraphale says, and the orange light from the sodium lights limn his face like flames from a lost-again sword. “She knew me, too.”
*
The Garden, when he finally found it, was a lush and verdant refuge from the the hectares and hectares of nothingness. The humid air was redolent with the spicy scent of new growth, and Crawly had never seen anything so green--Heaven had a sort of whitish-bluish-goldish tint to it, and of course Hell had chiefly employed a warmer color palette, since it ward hard to appreciate much else considering the fire and brimstone everywhere.
Crawly surreptitiously took a little roll in the dirt. It was a lovely rich muddy color, and the itch just above his eighth vertebrae finally subsided. He rolled again.
“What are you doing?” a booming voice asked from above him.
Crawly stiffened immediately and raised his head as if to bite the offender, but he discovered, to his dismay, that he seemed to lack any sort of fangs with which to strike. “Just, uh, being a snake. You know. Snakey business. Nothing to see here.”
The angel furrowed his fair, shining eyebrows and leaned on his flaming sword. “Snake?” he said.
“Yeah, you know. Serpent. Hssssssssss.”
“Ah,” the angel said. “Only I was sure they had little feet.”
“No, no, that’s lizards, that is. But it’s an understandable mistake.”
“I see.” The angel raised his eyes to Heaven, although Crawly thought he was off by about thirty degrees. “So many animals, and all of them with the most ridiculous names. I’ll never remember it all. I don’t know what He was thinking, letting a boy like that do all the talking. Foolish.”
Crawly chuckled uncomfortably, backing up as he did so. “Well, you know what they say about those humans.”
“No,” the angel said, interested now, “what?”
Crawly had made it most of the way up a tree, so he didn’t say anything.
The angel’s shoulders slumped as he righted himself and gathered the sword in close. Crawly felt a little bad for him. Probably wasn’t often he got a real conversational partner. Still, angels were the Enemy now, so Crawly slithered further up and out of sight.
*
“Let me get dressed,” Aziraphale says, and bustles into his bedroom. Crowley can hear the snap of suspenders and the rustle of cambric as he busies himself by putting the wine away and trying to fix Aziraphale’s computer screen with little success.
Aziraphale comes back out clad in a particularly awful tartan jacket. “What,” he sniffs, when Crowley raises an eyebrow at him.
“Absolutely nothing,” Crowley assures him.
It’s been a very long time since Crowley flew any real distance--it’s just so much more difficult to get a good glass of bubbly when you’re the one doing the work, not to mention how long it takes to groom your wings back into decent shape afterwards--but like riding a bicycle or saving the world, flying is just muscle memory.
Aziraphale shakes out his pinfeathers with a put-upon sigh. “If only the Concorde hadn’t been retired.”
“We could have done this in style,” Crowley agrees, and holds out his hand.
Aziraphale takes it without hesitation. “Where to?” he asks.
Crowley closes his eyes and--feels. Eve is still a distant ache, but she’s starting to get desperate, the loneliness of the big bad world creeping in; she wants to be found, he thinks, dangerously shy though she seems to be.
“America, I think,” he says.
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale harrumphs, and then, with a flash, they’re gone.
*
So long as you avoided the thorns, it was a nice tree, with big leaves the size of an angel’s palm and low-hanging Fruit clustering its branches.
Crawly took a tentative bite out of one. It was sweet, at first, and refreshing, and as he swallowed his piece all the colors around him sharpened--he realized the Fruit was red--but it left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue.
Someone needed to upgrade Their cultivars.
*
Flying isn’t flying, precisely; it had been, when the world was newly wrought and Heaven and Hell but opposing seas upon the coasts of Eden, but nowadays it’s more like a complicated and slightly less dignified hopscotch maneuver. You have to look at the weave of the universe and then slip through the threads.
Crowley’s never quite understood how the wings come into it, but they must do, because his pectoral muscles always ache the next day.
“Well, isn’t this a nice--mountain,” Aziraphale says, brushing himself off. The landing had been a bit messier than Crowley liked to acknowledge. “Nice trees. Very, hmm, coniferous.”
A keening cry comes from over the next ledge. Aziraphale and Crowley glance at each other, then hurry through the low pines and the blueberry bushes thick on the ground. Crowley feels the tiny bursts as he crushes berries beneath his feet.
He doesn’t see her at first, until suddenly he does, a small, dark woman wrapped only in a blue blanket. She’s on her hands and knees, her face strained with pain, and--
“My dear,” Aziraphale whispers, something closer to reverent than Crowley has seen from him in a long, long time. “She’s with child.”
Eve lets out a long, low wail and clutches at her distended belly with one hand, throws the other into the puddle next to her, which is very large and so black--a hundred undisturbed years of mud and silt--it looks like it’s made of aether.
“She’s going to be without child, soon, if she doesn’t let someone near her,” Crowley mutters, but he doesn’t know the first thing to do, so he doesn’t venture any closer.
Aziraphale takes a deep breath. “Hello,” he calls, his own voice tremulous.
Eve’s head whips up and she spots them, clearly for the first time. She screeches and scrabbles back from them, splashing straight into the puddle. Aziraphale must lose his head because he’s running towards her without so much as a “Be not afraid” when she says something in a tongue so ancient Crowley can’t quite remember it and disappears into the water.
Aziraphale stops, panting. “Did you know she could do that?”
Crowley shakes his head. “Bless it.”
*
Crawly found the Man only a few bright, endless days after he had snuck into the Garden, carelessly eating a handful of berries he had picked and dabbling his toes in the riverbank. He was quiet, content. Rather dull to watch, for he seemed to want for nothing, though he had nothing. Crawly honestly couldn’t see what all the fuss had been about.
He stole away, vaguely disappointed.
*
“Where’s she gone?” Aziraphale asks. “I can’t sense her the way you can. I can’t feel her at all.”
“I don’t know,” Crowley admits, grabbing Aziraphale’s hand again, “I think we just have to--”
*
He didn’t see the Woman much. She was shyer than the Man, or less likely to strike out on her own, and she hid well beneath the Garden’s thick canopy. Every morning as the sun climbed its way out of night’s deep clutches, the Man would say, “I love you,” to the Woman before heading out into the Garden.
The Woman would always nod in response, staying silent. Sometimes she would drink or bathe in the river, or use her fingers to brush her hair, or draw pictures of the beasts she saw in the Garden’s fertile soil, but today she began to straighten their pallet of fresh leaves, frowning all the while.
“What are you doing?” Crawly asked, interested despite himself as she moved all the leaves from one patch of ground to another.
The Woman looked around, finally spotting him in his perch at the edge of their clearing. “Oh, hello, there,” she said.
“Hello,” Crawly said, almost embarrassed to have forgotten his manners--but of course, they didn’t hold with such things in Hell. “What are you doing?” he repeated.
“It’s awfully uncomfortable,” the Woman explained, biting her lip in what appeared to be consternation. “Man doesn’t care, but I do. It hurts my back when I rise in the morning.”
“Huh,” said Crawly. “I never thought of that.”
“I could wish for something softer than dirt,” the Woman sighed. “Who are you, again?”
*
“--go after her,” Crowley says, his words garbled by the fact that they are currently standing under ten kilometers of water. The change in pressure is giving him a slight headache.
Eve is clinging to the side of the trench, her face distorted, her limbs splayed at angles that must surely be uncomfortable. She rests one hand on her belly and screams, a pain so profound that it ripples the water around them, before disappearing again.
Crowley and Aziraphale follow.
*
“My name is Crawly,” said Crawly. “Because I’m a serpent.” He wriggled in demonstration.
“My name is Woman,” said the Woman, “because I come from Man.”
“Wouldn’t you rather a name of your own?” Crawly asked, surprised. I’m thinking of changing mine. I don’t think it suits me.”
“No, you’re too sophisticated to be a Crawly,” the Woman agreed. “But I don’t know about changing my name. I belong to Man, you see. And Man and I belong to the Creator of All Things.”
“I don’t think you belong to anyone,” Crawly said carefully.
The Woman looked at him, obviously skeptical. “Oh?”
“It’s just that you seem awfully independent to me.”
“Oh--oh, no,” the Woman demurred, carefully putting one of the leaves back in its original location. “I couldn’t imagine that.”
*
She blinks in and out of half a dozen places, each one more beautiful and more remote than the last, the top of a butte in Kenya, a valley in Bangladesh, all the great variety that the Earth, pitted and stained as she is from millennia of hard use, has to offer.
“I think she’s trying to find the Garden,” Aziraphale whispers.
“Don’t be ridiculous, she knows it’s gone,” Crowley argues.
But they can’t know what Eve really wants. She moves on. They trail in her wake.
*
The Woman fiddled with the bedding a little longer, but she gave up with an aborted huff, crossing her arms and leaning against Crawly’s tree. “It’s just that there’s no real material to work with,” she explained, “everything’s leafy or woody or stalky. I even tried drying some out just to get some variation in texture, but they just stay fresh and newly picked no matter how long I waited.”
“I can see how that would be annoying,” Crawly said, though he didn’t quite understand the problem himself. Heaven and Hell tended towards same-y when it came to the interior design.
“Man doesn’t mind looking at the same things every day, or if he does he gets to have long talks with the Creator of All Things to see about changing it up, but no one ever asks me. Everything’s so--so perfect all the time, I get so bored.”
Ah, though Crawly.
“Plus, I’m getting really sick of berries,” the Woman admitted.
“I know a place,” Crawly offered.
*
Eve finally sputters to a stop at the crest of a chalk cliff, crouched over a patch of clean, sweet grass. She makes a violent gesture towards them, but is interrupted by a longing, mournful cry.
Crowley surges forward, but as Eve cradles the baby to her chest, he can see it’s just a little girl. One little girl, crying lustily into the cold sea air. Eve looks down at the baby like she’s got the universe in the palm of her hands.
*
“Are you sure?” the Woman asked. “I don’t think we were supposed to eat from this one.”
“It’s really very nice,” Crawly said, winding cajolingly around her neck, hissing right against her ear. She stroked his back, and in their reflection in the Fruit’s skin he could see his eyes glowing like bright jewels. “Take a bite.”
*
Crowley ventures closer. He has a thorn in his fist; he’s not sure where it came from. Eve snatches it from him, sniffs it, before knotting and cutting the umbilical cord that connects her tiny, crying infant to her.
“Thanksssss,” she says. “For everything, Crawly.”
“It’s Crowley now,” Crowley says.
*
“Because you have been kind to me,” she said, “let me warm you.”
“--Er, all right, then,” said Crawly, because she was warm, like a rock that had been set in the sun.
She plucked a Fruit from the tree.
*
“I shall call her Lilith,” Eve proclaims. “Because she owns herself.”
“Ngk,” says Crowley. “Sure. Lovely name, that.”
She wraps herself and her baby back up in the blanket, begins the long walk back to--wherever she came from--away from the sea, through the buttery yellow sunlight, into the bright cornflower of the horizon.
“Whoo-ee,” Crowley breathes.
“I think they make a charming picture,” Aziraphale sniffs. “Real family values, in these troubled times.”
*
“Come, Adam,” she said to Man, her fingers and mouth stained red with its juice. “Eat.”
Man fell to his knees.
*
“The South Downs are rather lovely in this light, aren’t they?” Aziraphale says to Crowley, reaching for his hand again.
Recipient: pasiphile
Author: tomato_greens
Rating: PG
Characters/Relationship: Eve; Crowley&Aziraphale
Request: Crowley and Eve.
Author's Notes: Happy holidays! And a huge thank you to irisbleufic for beta-ing at such short notice.
Summary: So long as you avoided the thorns, it was a nice tree.
Crowley has just finished his third glass of a fairly decent Saint-Amour when the telephone in the front room begins to ring.
“Ignore it,” Aziraphale huffs, wrinkling his nose in distaste when he realizes the bottle’s empty.
“It’s Milly Marsham, I’m sure, trying to get her dirty hands on the Jack Cade sequel I snatched up last year, The Merfolds, quite rare but she wants it for a song.”
“Can she sing, at least?” Aziraphale shudders, which Crowley understands to be an emphatic no. “Ah.”
The telephone quiets and Crowley snaps his fingers, pouring Aziraphale a healthy dose of Château Margaux 1990.
“Thank you, my dear,” Aziraphale says. “A surprisingly good year, for all that.”
Crowley shrugs. “Flora are known to respond productively to stress.”
The telephone rings again, and again, until finally Aziraphale groans and stretches up from the table, adjusting his tartan dressing gown around him. He has three blondish, wiry chest hairs poking through the V-shaped neck of his pajamas.
“If you just got a cordless--”
“Not all of us succumb to modern conveniences when we have no real need of them,” Aziraphale sniffs virtuously, and flounces out to the cash register and desk. Crowley contemplates his own empty glass and then steals Aziraphale’s, seeing as Aziraphale, being a Principality and Divine Presence Upon This Our Earth, had no real need for such an excellent vintage, whereas Crowley, being a Fallen Corrupter of Innocents Cursed Above Every Beast of the Field, was practically born for the stuff, had he been born rather than shaped from aether, of course. In any case, anything so delicious had to be a vice, which meant it fell firmly in Crowley’s territory.
“Excuse me,” Aziraphale says from the front room, very loudly and very coldly. Crowley hurriedly filled the other glass on the odd chance Aziraphale had somehow begun to look through walls and was starting a row--but then Aziraphale continues, “I see,” his voice absolute steel. Crowley hasn’t heard that tone of voice in over twenty years; he places the Château Margaux carefully back on the table, lest he drop it from his trembling fist.
Aziraphale pops his head into the room, his cheeks ruddy despite the cool of the bookshop. “You had better come in here,” he says, his voice resigned. “Adam’s on the phone.”
The two glasses, the bottle, the back window, and the screen of Aziraphale’s ancient desktop all crack at once. The wine pulses out onto the table in a slow, priceless ooze, darker than blood. “I--yes. Coming,” Crowley says faintly.
The receiver is thick Bakelite, beige, heavy in Crowley’s hand. It can’t be more than twenty-three years old, given everything that’s happened, but it looks very 1955, which was the first and last time Aziraphale bought a telephone. “Hello,” he says into it.
“Hi, Crowley. It’s been an age and a half.”
“Something like that,” Crowley mutters. Adam’s voice is somehow deeper than Crowley expected it. It’s not that Crowley hasn’t talked to Adam since That Day--he has, mostly at Aziraphale’s prompting, called Adam up once or twice a year to ask after Dog and whether Adam’s finishing his school assignments on time--but it’s the first time Adam has sounded like an adult.
“I didn’t mean to upset Aziraphale,” Adam says apologetically. “It’s just I need your help, you see.”
“Help,” Crowley gulps. “Yes. Sure. Of course. I live but to serve. Help with what, exactly?”
Adam takes a deep breath. “I had to call Anathema up to make sure it was her--she felt so old, I didn’t believe it at first. Older than me, I mean. But Anathema did something witchy and agreed, it’s got to be her.”
“Who, for the love of--?”
“Who else,” Adam says. “Eve.”
“--That’s not possible.”
“I know. But she’s here. She’s in pain. And I need someone to find her before she brings everything crashing down on us again. I can’t--I can’t. So I called you.”
*
The thing everyone forgot about Eden, now that it was gone, was that the Garden was the least of it.
Hell being Hell, they had shoved Crawly into a scaly, legless body--Someone’s idea of a joke, Crawly thought later--and then had said, Get up there and make some trouble.
Crawly had cleared his throat and said, Anything more specific? I’m a details kind of guy, you know.
Just go, Crawly, Dagon had ordered, rolling his eyes extravagantly, so Crawly had hissed his good-byes and ventured glumly upwards. Hell, he’d reflected, was at the very least nice and warm, provided you didn’t get tangled up with the Morningstar’s frankly excessive grieving process.
The same couldn’t be said for Eden, which was strange and cold and lonely, a vast and unknowable space lit only by Hell’s dim reddish glow along the southern edge and the angels’ flaming swords (though Freud wasn’t going to be around for another few eons, Crawly could only think, really). The only thing Crawly could sense every time he flicked his tongue out was something almost, but not entirely, unlike sand, a rawer earth, as yet unformed, that bunched uncomfortably under him as he slithered on.
*
Crowley closes his eyes and, for the first time in years, lets his awareness of the phone and the dusty bookshop and Soho’s peculiar brand of Londoner fade into the foreground. He’s known for as long as he can remember that there’s a certain comfort in the smallness of things--that to start a ripple is safer than to get caught up in its widening arcs--and he’s lost his taste for grand gestures, but he’s never really forgotten what it felt like, back at the start of it all.
With the entire world stretched out before him, Aziraphale flames out like a beacon, and Adam even brighter, two stars in a fainter universe. He sees a woman giving a piece of bread to a hungry child somewhere in southwestern China; a selfless act, she’d have been a saint, once. In Cairo, a nurse strokes the brittle hair off his patient’s forehead. In the dense Californian suburbs, a man pushes his wife into the wall for the last time, a knife in his hand.
Finally, finally, he feels her, a weak throb of fear and longing. He would never have noticed it otherwise, but he can feel her underneath all the other meaty, salty, human tang, her particular bitterness: an unripened fruit. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know where she is, though.”
“No,” Adam agrees, “she’s hard to pin down. Anathema thinks she might be jumping from place to place.”
“Can she do that?”
Adam makes an uncertain noise over the phone. “Don’t see why not. She’s not known for playing by any kind of rulebook.”
“Right,” Crowley says. He rubs the back of his neck, and wonders vaguely where he picked up the habit. His neck doesn’t actually hurt.
“So will you try and find her? If I go, I’ll--I can’t be seen to mess about. Especially not with someone so--”
“--Volatile?” Crowley supplies.
“Right.”
There’s nothing to be done, then. “Yes. Yes, of course I’ll try.” He hangs up as Adam breathes out his thanks.
Aziraphale looks at him, catching his shoulder with one hand. “Are you all right?”
“Obviously,” he says, and then, really feeling Aziraphale’s too-hot fingers pressing through the fabric of his shirt, “not.” He snaps his fingers and folds into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“You needn’t do anything you don’t want to,” Aziraphale frets.
Crowley snorts in disbelief. “Angel--”
“Well, all right, but you don’t have to go it alone.”
“She knew me.”
“You’ve forgotten,” Aziraphale says, and the orange light from the sodium lights limn his face like flames from a lost-again sword. “She knew me, too.”
*
The Garden, when he finally found it, was a lush and verdant refuge from the the hectares and hectares of nothingness. The humid air was redolent with the spicy scent of new growth, and Crawly had never seen anything so green--Heaven had a sort of whitish-bluish-goldish tint to it, and of course Hell had chiefly employed a warmer color palette, since it ward hard to appreciate much else considering the fire and brimstone everywhere.
Crawly surreptitiously took a little roll in the dirt. It was a lovely rich muddy color, and the itch just above his eighth vertebrae finally subsided. He rolled again.
“What are you doing?” a booming voice asked from above him.
Crawly stiffened immediately and raised his head as if to bite the offender, but he discovered, to his dismay, that he seemed to lack any sort of fangs with which to strike. “Just, uh, being a snake. You know. Snakey business. Nothing to see here.”
The angel furrowed his fair, shining eyebrows and leaned on his flaming sword. “Snake?” he said.
“Yeah, you know. Serpent. Hssssssssss.”
“Ah,” the angel said. “Only I was sure they had little feet.”
“No, no, that’s lizards, that is. But it’s an understandable mistake.”
“I see.” The angel raised his eyes to Heaven, although Crawly thought he was off by about thirty degrees. “So many animals, and all of them with the most ridiculous names. I’ll never remember it all. I don’t know what He was thinking, letting a boy like that do all the talking. Foolish.”
Crawly chuckled uncomfortably, backing up as he did so. “Well, you know what they say about those humans.”
“No,” the angel said, interested now, “what?”
Crawly had made it most of the way up a tree, so he didn’t say anything.
The angel’s shoulders slumped as he righted himself and gathered the sword in close. Crawly felt a little bad for him. Probably wasn’t often he got a real conversational partner. Still, angels were the Enemy now, so Crawly slithered further up and out of sight.
*
“Let me get dressed,” Aziraphale says, and bustles into his bedroom. Crowley can hear the snap of suspenders and the rustle of cambric as he busies himself by putting the wine away and trying to fix Aziraphale’s computer screen with little success.
Aziraphale comes back out clad in a particularly awful tartan jacket. “What,” he sniffs, when Crowley raises an eyebrow at him.
“Absolutely nothing,” Crowley assures him.
It’s been a very long time since Crowley flew any real distance--it’s just so much more difficult to get a good glass of bubbly when you’re the one doing the work, not to mention how long it takes to groom your wings back into decent shape afterwards--but like riding a bicycle or saving the world, flying is just muscle memory.
Aziraphale shakes out his pinfeathers with a put-upon sigh. “If only the Concorde hadn’t been retired.”
“We could have done this in style,” Crowley agrees, and holds out his hand.
Aziraphale takes it without hesitation. “Where to?” he asks.
Crowley closes his eyes and--feels. Eve is still a distant ache, but she’s starting to get desperate, the loneliness of the big bad world creeping in; she wants to be found, he thinks, dangerously shy though she seems to be.
“America, I think,” he says.
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale harrumphs, and then, with a flash, they’re gone.
*
So long as you avoided the thorns, it was a nice tree, with big leaves the size of an angel’s palm and low-hanging Fruit clustering its branches.
Crawly took a tentative bite out of one. It was sweet, at first, and refreshing, and as he swallowed his piece all the colors around him sharpened--he realized the Fruit was red--but it left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue.
Someone needed to upgrade Their cultivars.
*
Flying isn’t flying, precisely; it had been, when the world was newly wrought and Heaven and Hell but opposing seas upon the coasts of Eden, but nowadays it’s more like a complicated and slightly less dignified hopscotch maneuver. You have to look at the weave of the universe and then slip through the threads.
Crowley’s never quite understood how the wings come into it, but they must do, because his pectoral muscles always ache the next day.
“Well, isn’t this a nice--mountain,” Aziraphale says, brushing himself off. The landing had been a bit messier than Crowley liked to acknowledge. “Nice trees. Very, hmm, coniferous.”
A keening cry comes from over the next ledge. Aziraphale and Crowley glance at each other, then hurry through the low pines and the blueberry bushes thick on the ground. Crowley feels the tiny bursts as he crushes berries beneath his feet.
He doesn’t see her at first, until suddenly he does, a small, dark woman wrapped only in a blue blanket. She’s on her hands and knees, her face strained with pain, and--
“My dear,” Aziraphale whispers, something closer to reverent than Crowley has seen from him in a long, long time. “She’s with child.”
Eve lets out a long, low wail and clutches at her distended belly with one hand, throws the other into the puddle next to her, which is very large and so black--a hundred undisturbed years of mud and silt--it looks like it’s made of aether.
“She’s going to be without child, soon, if she doesn’t let someone near her,” Crowley mutters, but he doesn’t know the first thing to do, so he doesn’t venture any closer.
Aziraphale takes a deep breath. “Hello,” he calls, his own voice tremulous.
Eve’s head whips up and she spots them, clearly for the first time. She screeches and scrabbles back from them, splashing straight into the puddle. Aziraphale must lose his head because he’s running towards her without so much as a “Be not afraid” when she says something in a tongue so ancient Crowley can’t quite remember it and disappears into the water.
Aziraphale stops, panting. “Did you know she could do that?”
Crowley shakes his head. “Bless it.”
*
Crawly found the Man only a few bright, endless days after he had snuck into the Garden, carelessly eating a handful of berries he had picked and dabbling his toes in the riverbank. He was quiet, content. Rather dull to watch, for he seemed to want for nothing, though he had nothing. Crawly honestly couldn’t see what all the fuss had been about.
He stole away, vaguely disappointed.
*
“Where’s she gone?” Aziraphale asks. “I can’t sense her the way you can. I can’t feel her at all.”
“I don’t know,” Crowley admits, grabbing Aziraphale’s hand again, “I think we just have to--”
*
He didn’t see the Woman much. She was shyer than the Man, or less likely to strike out on her own, and she hid well beneath the Garden’s thick canopy. Every morning as the sun climbed its way out of night’s deep clutches, the Man would say, “I love you,” to the Woman before heading out into the Garden.
The Woman would always nod in response, staying silent. Sometimes she would drink or bathe in the river, or use her fingers to brush her hair, or draw pictures of the beasts she saw in the Garden’s fertile soil, but today she began to straighten their pallet of fresh leaves, frowning all the while.
“What are you doing?” Crawly asked, interested despite himself as she moved all the leaves from one patch of ground to another.
The Woman looked around, finally spotting him in his perch at the edge of their clearing. “Oh, hello, there,” she said.
“Hello,” Crawly said, almost embarrassed to have forgotten his manners--but of course, they didn’t hold with such things in Hell. “What are you doing?” he repeated.
“It’s awfully uncomfortable,” the Woman explained, biting her lip in what appeared to be consternation. “Man doesn’t care, but I do. It hurts my back when I rise in the morning.”
“Huh,” said Crawly. “I never thought of that.”
“I could wish for something softer than dirt,” the Woman sighed. “Who are you, again?”
*
“--go after her,” Crowley says, his words garbled by the fact that they are currently standing under ten kilometers of water. The change in pressure is giving him a slight headache.
Eve is clinging to the side of the trench, her face distorted, her limbs splayed at angles that must surely be uncomfortable. She rests one hand on her belly and screams, a pain so profound that it ripples the water around them, before disappearing again.
Crowley and Aziraphale follow.
*
“My name is Crawly,” said Crawly. “Because I’m a serpent.” He wriggled in demonstration.
“My name is Woman,” said the Woman, “because I come from Man.”
“Wouldn’t you rather a name of your own?” Crawly asked, surprised. I’m thinking of changing mine. I don’t think it suits me.”
“No, you’re too sophisticated to be a Crawly,” the Woman agreed. “But I don’t know about changing my name. I belong to Man, you see. And Man and I belong to the Creator of All Things.”
“I don’t think you belong to anyone,” Crawly said carefully.
The Woman looked at him, obviously skeptical. “Oh?”
“It’s just that you seem awfully independent to me.”
“Oh--oh, no,” the Woman demurred, carefully putting one of the leaves back in its original location. “I couldn’t imagine that.”
*
She blinks in and out of half a dozen places, each one more beautiful and more remote than the last, the top of a butte in Kenya, a valley in Bangladesh, all the great variety that the Earth, pitted and stained as she is from millennia of hard use, has to offer.
“I think she’s trying to find the Garden,” Aziraphale whispers.
“Don’t be ridiculous, she knows it’s gone,” Crowley argues.
But they can’t know what Eve really wants. She moves on. They trail in her wake.
*
The Woman fiddled with the bedding a little longer, but she gave up with an aborted huff, crossing her arms and leaning against Crawly’s tree. “It’s just that there’s no real material to work with,” she explained, “everything’s leafy or woody or stalky. I even tried drying some out just to get some variation in texture, but they just stay fresh and newly picked no matter how long I waited.”
“I can see how that would be annoying,” Crawly said, though he didn’t quite understand the problem himself. Heaven and Hell tended towards same-y when it came to the interior design.
“Man doesn’t mind looking at the same things every day, or if he does he gets to have long talks with the Creator of All Things to see about changing it up, but no one ever asks me. Everything’s so--so perfect all the time, I get so bored.”
Ah, though Crawly.
“Plus, I’m getting really sick of berries,” the Woman admitted.
“I know a place,” Crawly offered.
*
Eve finally sputters to a stop at the crest of a chalk cliff, crouched over a patch of clean, sweet grass. She makes a violent gesture towards them, but is interrupted by a longing, mournful cry.
Crowley surges forward, but as Eve cradles the baby to her chest, he can see it’s just a little girl. One little girl, crying lustily into the cold sea air. Eve looks down at the baby like she’s got the universe in the palm of her hands.
*
“Are you sure?” the Woman asked. “I don’t think we were supposed to eat from this one.”
“It’s really very nice,” Crawly said, winding cajolingly around her neck, hissing right against her ear. She stroked his back, and in their reflection in the Fruit’s skin he could see his eyes glowing like bright jewels. “Take a bite.”
*
Crowley ventures closer. He has a thorn in his fist; he’s not sure where it came from. Eve snatches it from him, sniffs it, before knotting and cutting the umbilical cord that connects her tiny, crying infant to her.
“Thanksssss,” she says. “For everything, Crawly.”
“It’s Crowley now,” Crowley says.
*
“Because you have been kind to me,” she said, “let me warm you.”
“--Er, all right, then,” said Crawly, because she was warm, like a rock that had been set in the sun.
She plucked a Fruit from the tree.
*
“I shall call her Lilith,” Eve proclaims. “Because she owns herself.”
“Ngk,” says Crowley. “Sure. Lovely name, that.”
She wraps herself and her baby back up in the blanket, begins the long walk back to--wherever she came from--away from the sea, through the buttery yellow sunlight, into the bright cornflower of the horizon.
“Whoo-ee,” Crowley breathes.
“I think they make a charming picture,” Aziraphale sniffs. “Real family values, in these troubled times.”
*
“Come, Adam,” she said to Man, her fingers and mouth stained red with its juice. “Eat.”
Man fell to his knees.
*
“The South Downs are rather lovely in this light, aren’t they?” Aziraphale says to Crowley, reaching for his hand again.