Happy Holidays, Katarzi!
Title: The Orbit of His Own Soul
Recipient: Katarzi
Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley, the Horsepersons, Oscar Wilde (sort of)
Rating: PG-13
Prompts: 1) Every book tells two stories: the story inside the book, and the story of the book. 2) The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time. -- Sir Edward Grey, 3 August 1914
Loquacious Author’s Note: Happy holidays! I combined two of your prompts and took as few historical liberties as the punchlines allowed; I hope you like this, as it felt weirdly experimental to write. With many thanks to my BFFs and fellow Wilde fans RR & NLP, who were my aid and succor, and to the ever-patient mods.
Wilde had been dead for over ten years; still, Aziraphale felt something akin to shock every time he ran his fingers down Dorian Gray’s soft brown spine. Crowley, groggy and disheveled, his cravat decades out of date, had purchased it for him while the rest of London raged.
“About green carnations, of all things,” Crowley had said at the time, clearly bewildered. “Has the whole century been like this?”
Aziraphale had sniffed, “Ignorance is the price one pays for one’s sloth,” and taken the book as the conciliatory gesture it clearly was. Later that night he had read it in one mad rush. One of yours, I think, Crowley had penned into the flyleaf. Aziraphale didn’t know whether he agreed: he had heard rather more about the green carnations, not to mention the boys who wore them, than Crowley’d quite managed to.[1] But Wilde’s death, sudden and undignified, was of a type Aziraphale recognized too well; he had found that martyrdom changed only in its particular horrors. And so Dorian Gray remained on Aziraphale’s shelf, a faun-colored volume he flipped through on dark nights in something like memoriam.
Wilde had been dead for over ten years, and so had poor dour Victoria. Aziraphale would never consider himself precisely British, and a decade was hardly a blink in the face of grand eternity; but it appeared as though evening was fast approaching the Empire upon which the sun, as they said, never set--and though he had seen a thousand kingdoms collapse under their own weight, the first crumbling ache never got easier to bear.
“Maudlin, aren’t you,” Crowley said, smirking, as he made his way into Aziraphale’s sitting room without so much as a by-your-leave.
“I beg your pardon,” Aziraphale huffed, snapping the novel shut.
Crowley laughed, “Oh, you needn’t beg,” and tugged the slim book over. “Wilde? Again? Haven’t you found anything more fashionable to read? Forster, perhaps?”
“I suppose I do tend to return to old friends more than I should.”
Crowley clutched at his heart and staggered into his chair, eyes rolling wild. “You wound me.”
“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth--”
“I hardly think I should be considered a child.”
“Ungrateful strikes me as the most relevant word; and, really, aren’t we all the ungrateful children of G--”
“Don’t!” Crowley yelped, shocking them both into silence. Then, “I’d rather it not get unpleasant so quickly.”
Aziraphale stood, plucked Dorian from Crowley’s grasp, and turned primly on his heel, headed for the crowded bookshelves he kept in the bedroom he did not use.
“You great croaking git,” Crowley called after him, but did not deign to follow.
The house was comfortable enough--it was inherited from a childless widow Aziraphale had comforted through her twilight years when he realized the Host[3] had, while cutting his checks, forgotten to account for inflation several decades running--but it was shabby and much too small for a library. He took a breath he didn’t need and allowed himself a brief nostalgic pang for the thirty self-indulgent years he had spent among the manuscripts of the Tawang Monastery[4] after things got dicey with the Huguenots.
He slid the copy of Dorian Gray into its waiting slot on the shelf. On one side, an exceedingly rare facsimile of Wilde’s letter (the letter, the full letter, a copy that Aziraphale had paid through the nose for rather than touch the poor butchered thing that had been pushed into wider publication). On the other, his Mixed Up Bible, in which Abraham asked God in the city of Sodom, Wilt thou also destroy the wicked with the righteous?
He touched each book as he turned to leave, a habit: his first, though by now far from his only. To think, he’d had human fingers of one stripe or another for nearly six thousand years.
“You’re in a right state this evening,” Crowley’s voice said, quiet, too close.
Aziraphale whipped his head up; Crowley was leaning against the doorframe, his lean shadow stretching out from the bright bedroom into the hall. “Things are changing,” he answered.
“That’s human nature. I should think you’d be used to it by now.”
“It seems faster this time round.”
Crowley shrugged, and Aziraphale recognized it as acknowledgment and dismissal in one. They had been born of the same unchanging cloth, once shaped by the same enduring love; but somehow, after the Fall, Crowley had learned to style his hair, to buy new shoes, to dine with all the right people and read all the wrong books. Adaptability was a survival skill, Aziraphale suspected, and the only thing he’d ever really had to fight was Crowley.
“You need to get out more. See the sights. Smell the scents. Sense the--”
“Sins?”
“Something like that,” Crowley said. In the light of Aziraphale’s gas lamps, his eyes were very gold. “Where would you be without sin?”
“Where indeed,” Aziraphale murmured. Something deep in his chest fluttered. A quarter-century ago, Crowley had been asleep. As a kindness to a devout and lonely man--not Wilde, but one of his less radical admirers--Aziraphale had miracled a quick revelation and then gone to a play premiere with a carnation tucked into his button hole and his wings out for anyone with the eyes to see them. A choice; he still didn’t know whether it had been the right one. Sin, he knew, was a continued negotiation between Maker and Made. The letter of the law evolved. The holy spirit did not. He touched Dorian again, lingering.
Crowley must have abandoned his perch by the door. His distinctive snakeskin boot heels clicked across Aziraphale’s creaky floorboards, and then his angular hand came up to grasp Aziraphale’s wrist. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk, shall we? I need some air.”
Crowley’s fingers were not always this long nor this thin, but they always looked the same reaching out to him. “Why on Earth would you need air?”
“You’ve a knack for turning any room stuffy, and this one wasn’t fresh to begin with.”
It wasn’t an answer, but Aziraphale let himself be led down the stairs and out into the gray twilight. From his front door, the whole city seemed hushed. Waiting.
“Are we going to stand here all evening, angel?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale came back to himself, tugging his arm out of Crowley’s grip. “Come on, then. To the park. I haven’t visited the ducks in ages.”
St. James’s Park had been, variously, a swamp, a menagerie, a French garden, a farm, an English garden, and a memorial in the five hundred years since Aziraphale had started popping in. It didn’t seem to matter to the ducks, [6] who always flocked to Crowley with an animal’s unerring instinct for a sucker. “Greedy things,” Crowley crooned fondly.
Aziraphale looked away, embarrassed for him. Something red flashed at the corner of his eye, but when he turned, he saw only the gleaming lake. “Can’t you control yourself?”
“Not encouraged in my line of work.”
Aziraphale conceded the point with a terse nod. The hairs on the back of his neck had started to rise--a peculiar sensation, not one he liked. This body was perhaps better attuned to its surroundings than the one it had recently replaced.[7] “Do you see anyone?”
Crowley snorted and waved a hand towards a bench farther along the path. The ducks’ beady gazes followed the arc of his arm. “Only the boy over there, and I shouldn’t think he’ll be a bother.”
Aziraphale squinted; indeed, a pale shape resolved into a pale slip of a boy with greasy white-blonde hair, far too young to be out alone at night. Probably looking for customers, if Aziraphale knew what was what, and for a moment he thought about reaching out to the boy, finding him a warmer place to stay for the night, if nothing else--when suddenly there were two figures, one longer and thinner but just as pale, and then they both slid out of focus like oil in water. “Who?” he asked, suddenly uncertain anyone had been there at all.
Crowley gestured more emphatically, then dropped his hand. “Oh. Well. No one, then, I suppose.”
“It’s very quiet,” Aziraphale agreed, and drew his arms in round himself.
“I should think it would agree with you. Serenity and all that.”
“I like it not,” he murmured.
“Oh, let’s not start quoting your precious Bard, we’ll be here for years--get away, you daft things, I haven’t got any more.” The ducks just piled in closer, staring. “Come on now, fly along!”
The ducks were clearly not listening. Aziraphale hadn’t known that birds had whites in their eyes, but they must, for all the whites were showing, and their beaks dropped open in unison to show their gullets.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale hissed, but Crowley was backing slowly away, hands open and in front of him. It looked terribly like surrender. The ducks moved moved forward as a pack, the dark spaces of their mouths seeming to combine, now that night was truly on them, into one--black--maw--
NOT TONIGHT, said someone behind them, a hulking presence Aziraphale could sense but could not make himself turn around to see. Crowley, facing the other way, looked like a man just escaped from a war: eyes round, mouth open, muscles rigid in animal fear. YOU KNOW ME, FRIEND. AND I TELL YOU, SOON. THE TIME IS COMING. BUT TONIGHT IS NOT THE NIGHT, the person continued, and the ducks shuddered back into ducks again.
One let out a piercing, forlorn quack. Its eyes seemed to gleam red, a deep ancient red, and its beak was eerily sharp.
“We should leave,” Crowley said under his breath, so quiet Aziraphale could really only read his lips. “We should never have been here.”
Aziraphale nodded, and before he could stop himself, darted out one arm to link through Crowley’s. They hurried out the nearest gate and found themselves, blinking, out on the street.
“Lord,” Aziraphale whispered, hoarse. Crowley didn’t even contradict him, only yearned forward. And so they began to stagger down the walk, clutching each other far too close for even the most modern sense of propriety.[8] But--damn the carnations; damn Punch magazine; damn the lot of them, Aziraphale thought. There were all manner of things one didn’t dare to speak.
“Above our paygrade?” he asked, voice shaking, once his throat worked again. His heart was pounding even though it did not need to--this was the problem with bodies. Their delicate alchemy was so easily disrupted.
“So far above I can’t begin to imagine the compensation,” Crowley agreed, and pulled Aziraphale in nearer to him. “Let’s go home, angel.”
- - -
[1] Their respective offices had fallen out of the habit of sending holiday newsletters with names listed neatly in GOOD and EVIL columns after France’s first attempt at democracy went pear-shaped in 1789. Aziraphale filed a complaint form in 1809 as a matter of principle, and then again in 1848 when Crowley’s prolonged nap and another series of revolutions had buried him in paperwork. The only response he ever received was a form letter[2] from the Metatron ensuring him that members of the Host were certain they could trust his judgment.
[2] It had been addressed to Engel: Azriaphael. The bloody Enlightenment had changed everything, Aziraphale thought acidly; scribes just weren’t what they used to be.
[3] A notorious tightwad.
[4] He had justified the time to his superiors as “exploring once again the spiritual benefits of asceticism,” a practice he had originally given up shortly after tasting date candy for the first time.[5]
[5] About fifteen minutes after Mankind discovered it and five minutes before Womankind walked back into the kitchen, found the tray empty, and thwapped Mankind across the knuckles with a wooden spoon.
[6] Aziraphale had never been able to ascertain whether Crowley always fed the same ducks or whether each subsequent generation looked and acted uncannily like the one before.
[7] There had been an accident--Crowley, only just woken up, in the billiard room with an unusually heavy bottle of wine. Neither of them liked to talk about it.
[8] Not to mention that they were technically still Enemies.
Happy Holidays, katarzi, from your Secret Writer!
Recipient: Katarzi
Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley, the Horsepersons, Oscar Wilde (sort of)
Rating: PG-13
Prompts: 1) Every book tells two stories: the story inside the book, and the story of the book. 2) The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time. -- Sir Edward Grey, 3 August 1914
Loquacious Author’s Note: Happy holidays! I combined two of your prompts and took as few historical liberties as the punchlines allowed; I hope you like this, as it felt weirdly experimental to write. With many thanks to my BFFs and fellow Wilde fans RR & NLP, who were my aid and succor, and to the ever-patient mods.
Wilde had been dead for over ten years; still, Aziraphale felt something akin to shock every time he ran his fingers down Dorian Gray’s soft brown spine. Crowley, groggy and disheveled, his cravat decades out of date, had purchased it for him while the rest of London raged.
“About green carnations, of all things,” Crowley had said at the time, clearly bewildered. “Has the whole century been like this?”
Aziraphale had sniffed, “Ignorance is the price one pays for one’s sloth,” and taken the book as the conciliatory gesture it clearly was. Later that night he had read it in one mad rush. One of yours, I think, Crowley had penned into the flyleaf. Aziraphale didn’t know whether he agreed: he had heard rather more about the green carnations, not to mention the boys who wore them, than Crowley’d quite managed to.[1] But Wilde’s death, sudden and undignified, was of a type Aziraphale recognized too well; he had found that martyrdom changed only in its particular horrors. And so Dorian Gray remained on Aziraphale’s shelf, a faun-colored volume he flipped through on dark nights in something like memoriam.
Wilde had been dead for over ten years, and so had poor dour Victoria. Aziraphale would never consider himself precisely British, and a decade was hardly a blink in the face of grand eternity; but it appeared as though evening was fast approaching the Empire upon which the sun, as they said, never set--and though he had seen a thousand kingdoms collapse under their own weight, the first crumbling ache never got easier to bear.
“Maudlin, aren’t you,” Crowley said, smirking, as he made his way into Aziraphale’s sitting room without so much as a by-your-leave.
“I beg your pardon,” Aziraphale huffed, snapping the novel shut.
Crowley laughed, “Oh, you needn’t beg,” and tugged the slim book over. “Wilde? Again? Haven’t you found anything more fashionable to read? Forster, perhaps?”
“I suppose I do tend to return to old friends more than I should.”
Crowley clutched at his heart and staggered into his chair, eyes rolling wild. “You wound me.”
“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth--”
“I hardly think I should be considered a child.”
“Ungrateful strikes me as the most relevant word; and, really, aren’t we all the ungrateful children of G--”
“Don’t!” Crowley yelped, shocking them both into silence. Then, “I’d rather it not get unpleasant so quickly.”
Aziraphale stood, plucked Dorian from Crowley’s grasp, and turned primly on his heel, headed for the crowded bookshelves he kept in the bedroom he did not use.
“You great croaking git,” Crowley called after him, but did not deign to follow.
The house was comfortable enough--it was inherited from a childless widow Aziraphale had comforted through her twilight years when he realized the Host[3] had, while cutting his checks, forgotten to account for inflation several decades running--but it was shabby and much too small for a library. He took a breath he didn’t need and allowed himself a brief nostalgic pang for the thirty self-indulgent years he had spent among the manuscripts of the Tawang Monastery[4] after things got dicey with the Huguenots.
He slid the copy of Dorian Gray into its waiting slot on the shelf. On one side, an exceedingly rare facsimile of Wilde’s letter (the letter, the full letter, a copy that Aziraphale had paid through the nose for rather than touch the poor butchered thing that had been pushed into wider publication). On the other, his Mixed Up Bible, in which Abraham asked God in the city of Sodom, Wilt thou also destroy the wicked with the righteous?
He touched each book as he turned to leave, a habit: his first, though by now far from his only. To think, he’d had human fingers of one stripe or another for nearly six thousand years.
“You’re in a right state this evening,” Crowley’s voice said, quiet, too close.
Aziraphale whipped his head up; Crowley was leaning against the doorframe, his lean shadow stretching out from the bright bedroom into the hall. “Things are changing,” he answered.
“That’s human nature. I should think you’d be used to it by now.”
“It seems faster this time round.”
Crowley shrugged, and Aziraphale recognized it as acknowledgment and dismissal in one. They had been born of the same unchanging cloth, once shaped by the same enduring love; but somehow, after the Fall, Crowley had learned to style his hair, to buy new shoes, to dine with all the right people and read all the wrong books. Adaptability was a survival skill, Aziraphale suspected, and the only thing he’d ever really had to fight was Crowley.
“You need to get out more. See the sights. Smell the scents. Sense the--”
“Sins?”
“Something like that,” Crowley said. In the light of Aziraphale’s gas lamps, his eyes were very gold. “Where would you be without sin?”
“Where indeed,” Aziraphale murmured. Something deep in his chest fluttered. A quarter-century ago, Crowley had been asleep. As a kindness to a devout and lonely man--not Wilde, but one of his less radical admirers--Aziraphale had miracled a quick revelation and then gone to a play premiere with a carnation tucked into his button hole and his wings out for anyone with the eyes to see them. A choice; he still didn’t know whether it had been the right one. Sin, he knew, was a continued negotiation between Maker and Made. The letter of the law evolved. The holy spirit did not. He touched Dorian again, lingering.
Crowley must have abandoned his perch by the door. His distinctive snakeskin boot heels clicked across Aziraphale’s creaky floorboards, and then his angular hand came up to grasp Aziraphale’s wrist. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk, shall we? I need some air.”
Crowley’s fingers were not always this long nor this thin, but they always looked the same reaching out to him. “Why on Earth would you need air?”
“You’ve a knack for turning any room stuffy, and this one wasn’t fresh to begin with.”
It wasn’t an answer, but Aziraphale let himself be led down the stairs and out into the gray twilight. From his front door, the whole city seemed hushed. Waiting.
“Are we going to stand here all evening, angel?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale came back to himself, tugging his arm out of Crowley’s grip. “Come on, then. To the park. I haven’t visited the ducks in ages.”
St. James’s Park had been, variously, a swamp, a menagerie, a French garden, a farm, an English garden, and a memorial in the five hundred years since Aziraphale had started popping in. It didn’t seem to matter to the ducks, [6] who always flocked to Crowley with an animal’s unerring instinct for a sucker. “Greedy things,” Crowley crooned fondly.
Aziraphale looked away, embarrassed for him. Something red flashed at the corner of his eye, but when he turned, he saw only the gleaming lake. “Can’t you control yourself?”
“Not encouraged in my line of work.”
Aziraphale conceded the point with a terse nod. The hairs on the back of his neck had started to rise--a peculiar sensation, not one he liked. This body was perhaps better attuned to its surroundings than the one it had recently replaced.[7] “Do you see anyone?”
Crowley snorted and waved a hand towards a bench farther along the path. The ducks’ beady gazes followed the arc of his arm. “Only the boy over there, and I shouldn’t think he’ll be a bother.”
Aziraphale squinted; indeed, a pale shape resolved into a pale slip of a boy with greasy white-blonde hair, far too young to be out alone at night. Probably looking for customers, if Aziraphale knew what was what, and for a moment he thought about reaching out to the boy, finding him a warmer place to stay for the night, if nothing else--when suddenly there were two figures, one longer and thinner but just as pale, and then they both slid out of focus like oil in water. “Who?” he asked, suddenly uncertain anyone had been there at all.
Crowley gestured more emphatically, then dropped his hand. “Oh. Well. No one, then, I suppose.”
“It’s very quiet,” Aziraphale agreed, and drew his arms in round himself.
“I should think it would agree with you. Serenity and all that.”
“I like it not,” he murmured.
“Oh, let’s not start quoting your precious Bard, we’ll be here for years--get away, you daft things, I haven’t got any more.” The ducks just piled in closer, staring. “Come on now, fly along!”
The ducks were clearly not listening. Aziraphale hadn’t known that birds had whites in their eyes, but they must, for all the whites were showing, and their beaks dropped open in unison to show their gullets.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale hissed, but Crowley was backing slowly away, hands open and in front of him. It looked terribly like surrender. The ducks moved moved forward as a pack, the dark spaces of their mouths seeming to combine, now that night was truly on them, into one--black--maw--
NOT TONIGHT, said someone behind them, a hulking presence Aziraphale could sense but could not make himself turn around to see. Crowley, facing the other way, looked like a man just escaped from a war: eyes round, mouth open, muscles rigid in animal fear. YOU KNOW ME, FRIEND. AND I TELL YOU, SOON. THE TIME IS COMING. BUT TONIGHT IS NOT THE NIGHT, the person continued, and the ducks shuddered back into ducks again.
One let out a piercing, forlorn quack. Its eyes seemed to gleam red, a deep ancient red, and its beak was eerily sharp.
“We should leave,” Crowley said under his breath, so quiet Aziraphale could really only read his lips. “We should never have been here.”
Aziraphale nodded, and before he could stop himself, darted out one arm to link through Crowley’s. They hurried out the nearest gate and found themselves, blinking, out on the street.
“Lord,” Aziraphale whispered, hoarse. Crowley didn’t even contradict him, only yearned forward. And so they began to stagger down the walk, clutching each other far too close for even the most modern sense of propriety.[8] But--damn the carnations; damn Punch magazine; damn the lot of them, Aziraphale thought. There were all manner of things one didn’t dare to speak.
“Above our paygrade?” he asked, voice shaking, once his throat worked again. His heart was pounding even though it did not need to--this was the problem with bodies. Their delicate alchemy was so easily disrupted.
“So far above I can’t begin to imagine the compensation,” Crowley agreed, and pulled Aziraphale in nearer to him. “Let’s go home, angel.”
- - -
[1] Their respective offices had fallen out of the habit of sending holiday newsletters with names listed neatly in GOOD and EVIL columns after France’s first attempt at democracy went pear-shaped in 1789. Aziraphale filed a complaint form in 1809 as a matter of principle, and then again in 1848 when Crowley’s prolonged nap and another series of revolutions had buried him in paperwork. The only response he ever received was a form letter[2] from the Metatron ensuring him that members of the Host were certain they could trust his judgment.
[2] It had been addressed to Engel: Azriaphael. The bloody Enlightenment had changed everything, Aziraphale thought acidly; scribes just weren’t what they used to be.
[3] A notorious tightwad.
[4] He had justified the time to his superiors as “exploring once again the spiritual benefits of asceticism,” a practice he had originally given up shortly after tasting date candy for the first time.[5]
[5] About fifteen minutes after Mankind discovered it and five minutes before Womankind walked back into the kitchen, found the tray empty, and thwapped Mankind across the knuckles with a wooden spoon.
[6] Aziraphale had never been able to ascertain whether Crowley always fed the same ducks or whether each subsequent generation looked and acted uncannily like the one before.
[7] There had been an accident--Crowley, only just woken up, in the billiard room with an unusually heavy bottle of wine. Neither of them liked to talk about it.
[8] Not to mention that they were technically still Enemies.
Happy Holidays, katarzi, from your Secret Writer!