Over Beau Jardin, Very Late Wednesday Night/Early Thursday Morning
As nights went, it was a dark and stormy one.
Night, that is, if the impossibly early hour of o’dark-thirty still counted as night, and not as morning. And even had it been clear, it would still have been pitch black, with the moon nothing but a slim pale sliver hanging low in the sky, on the cusp of setting on the gray line that separated the black of the night from the darker black of the horizon.
As for stormy - well, that did much to obliterate the notion of a picturesque and calm night of quiet and peace. Lightning flashed in twisted forks across the sky, and the crashing of thunder rolled over the constant rushing howl of the wind that bent the trees over and ripped the fresh leaves from their thrashing branches. Rain pelted in all directions at once, battering on shingles and roofs as loudly as hail and filling gutters to overflowing in mere minutes.
Struggling through all this ordinary storm came one extraordinary thing: a black-clad girl of eighteen, carrying only an overstuffed ochre haversack slung across a shoulder, and, oddest of all, borne aloft on the slim support of a broom. The girlish, once-jaunty, bedraggled red bow perched atop her head made her instantly recognizable to any who knew her: Kiki Takayama had come to Metropolis.
It was such a night and torrent as Kiki had flown in once before, half a decade earlier, when she had first traveled to Koriko to begin her magical training in earnest. Jiji, the girl’s sarcastic black feline familiar, crouched on the broom handle and liked it no better now than he had at that time.
Kiki, he hissed, digging his nails into the wood as the broom bucked wildly on a gust of wind, this is impossible! Kiki, we have to land!
Ducking her head, Kiki rapidly hazarded taking one hand from the broomstick to hastily wipe the water from her face and push her drenched hair back from her face. It did little to help, and she squinted, trying to peer through the murky night.
“I know, I’m trying!” she insisted. “I can’t see a thing - this is Metropolis, I’m sure, but I have no idea where we are, and I don’t want to set down just anywhere! Who knows where we would end up!”
I told you we shouldn’t have pressed on! We should have found somewhere to spend the night!
“I know,” Kiki repeated, exasperated. “But it’s been so long since I’ve seen -”
The air next to her sizzled for a split second before the brilliance of the lightning lanced across her vision and her hair stood on end with the sparking electricity in the air. Jiji’s fur was too sodden to stand on end, but his whiskers twitched with sensing the charged atmosphere. The explosion of thunder that burst around them stunned Kiki, leaving her shocked and deafened for a moment until the stinging rain drove her back to her senses.
“ - Since I’ve seen Mr. Aziraphale!” she finished, leaning forward to yell in Jiji’s ear. The wind buffeted the broomstick aside, nearly knocking her from the broom, and she strained with the effort of keeping them upright and steady against the forces that seemed to want nothing better than to sweep them off into the depthless night.
“I think we might be near the address,” Kiki raised her voice again. There was no way to check if that might be true, but Kiki was running on instinct. And Jiji was right: they couldn’t stay up in this for very much longer. They would have to land, by will or by force, and just hope that it was a section of the city where they could find shelter, however temporary. Kiki attempted to guide them lower gradually, if such were possible, but a rush of air thrust them down from the sky; through the streaming rain Kiki caught glimpses of sharply gabled houses and sodden spaces of lawn, teeth of picket fences and wrought iron bars stabbing up from the ground like daggers, thorny hedges of briared roses tangling together in the storm, flowers bent over and trampled by the driving rain. It was just the sort of neighborhood as Aziraphale and Wilson had described, only far more attractively under the smiling sunlight of day.
“We must be near, I’m sure of it!” Kiki cried, yanking the broom up again as it wobbled and dove precariously on a surge of wind. There was a growing apprehension in the pit of her stomach that any attempt to touch down would result in their being slammed into the pavement, plunged into the swaying trees, or broken over the pointed ridgelines of the trim houses.
Jiji crept back further into the faint shelter offered by Kiki’s body. Didn’t we pass a park? Can you find it again? He jumped as the thunder lashed around them violently. Kiki nodded; in a park, at least, the danger of being thrown into a house or fence would be removed. She pulled at the broomstick to guide it around back the way she thought they had come, although in the howling storm it was near impossible to know that direction for a certainty.
A sudden waving spruce loomed up beside them, its long feathery arms stretching towards them with a sort of sorrowful violence, and Kiki, with a wordless cry of surprise, yanked the broom aside sharply to avoid it. Successful as she was at swerving away from the tree, she was less so at compensating for the massive gusting wallop of air that batted the frail broom from the sky with careless and forceful abandon. Spiraling out of control, Kiki flailed, struggling forcefully and uselessly to pull the errant broom against the wind.
Kiki! Jiji screeched a single warning, and with a gasp of horror, Kiki saw the ground rushing up to meet them, and knew of a certainty there was nothing she could do to prevent their headlong careen towards it. Odd, that she had the horrified feeling of the ground vanishing from beneath her feet when instead it was appearing beneath them all too quickly. All her energy was devoted to handling the broom but this was looking to be an increasingly futile waste.
She took the few actions available to her in so short a time: dropping some of her magical control over the broom, she flung up a spell of protection to cushion the impact and, releasing the broomstick with one hand, swept Jiji into a tight embrace within her arm and curled over him protectively. Pulling up hard with the other hand, Kiki’s heart leapt into her throat as the rush of wind swept them sideways, and she felt a faint thrill of hope that they would actually not plummet into the muddy lawn. But as successful as she might have been in missing the ground, there was no chance of missing the plate glass bay window that spread before them instead. Kiki ducked her head, burying her face in Jiji’s sodden fur, and braced for the impact.
Over the noise of the storm, the night was split with a most extraordinary cacophony of splintering glass as broom, witch, and cat plunged through the window in a shower of rain and shards. The tangle hit the floor and rolled over once or twice before coming to a stop in the middle of a room that had seconds before been quite an orderly and comfortable one. After a moment, Kiki sat up, dazed and shaken.
*^*^*^*^*
Wilson had fallen asleep with his head pillowed on his lover's lap as they watched the storm roll in. Stretched out on the couch in the library, Aziraphale had closed up the house with a thought, as it appeared that Wilson was going to be asleep for a few hours, lulled into a state of calm by the wildness of the wind and the low roll of thunder.
The storm had grown worse.
A booming clap of thunder following a sharp lightening strike had woken the young doctor in the wee hours of the morning. Phale had been awake the whole time, keeping careful watch over his lover as Wilson slept, and dark eyes sought out blue as another flash of lightening danced across their faces.
The storm was wild outside, a wildness that wanted to seep into the bones of any sentient being and without so much as one word two sentient beings found themselves caught up in Nature's passionate fury.
Technically speaking they were trying to get up the stairs and to the bedroom, but the electrical charge in the air made clothing hateful, shirts and trousers were littering the staircase as they stumbled up it, progress slowed when Wilson tripped over the cuffs of his discarded pants and fell, drawing the naked angel down atop his writhing body.
And they'd almost made it to the second floor landing.
By this point, there weren't too many rooms left in the house that hadn't yet been, er, initiated. But the staircase had remained a sort of taboo location, ever since that Valentine's night when an encounter on the stairs had left Wilson with a broken wrist and Aziraphale with a broken wing.
And strangely enough, except for the storm, this was pretty much exactly how that encounter had started.
The young doctor would likely be feeling bruises on top of bruises the next morning.
Things had been progressing pretty quickly, when there was a sudden and very loud crash. A crash that came from within the house, rather from the storm without.
The young doctor really wasn't too focused on their current location at least not consciously. Subconsciously, he knew, remembered and when he heard a crash his mind immediately jumped to unfurling wings and what pictures had just gone flying off the walls.
Opening his eyes, Wilson dropped his head back, looking up and around.
Huh...pictures were still on the wall...and the vase was still at the top of the steps.
"Is it raining harder?" He asked between heavy pants, certain he heard the rain and wind more clearly now.
How hard it was raining wasn't really what the angel wanted to be concentrating on at the moment, but after a second he replied, "No. Not raining harder."
And a moment after that, he stopped moving, every muscle now tense with alertness and worry rather than passion.
"The shield's been broken. Stay here."
With that, he was off up the stairs, toward one of the second floor bedrooms.
Wilson lay there, looking more than a little shocked.
"The shiel...." He began, then whirled around on the stairs, scrabbling for his pants and moving up towards the landing.
"Raphale...your pants!"
The warning came just as Aziraphale flung open the door to one of the guest rooms, and he stared with surprise at the intruder, until Wilson's words sank in and, with a quick motion of his hand, he manifested a pair of trousers.
"James love, you'd better come up here."
Aziraphale and Wilson took in the scene with shock. Kiki sat on the floor amidst a wild scattering of glass and debris, staring blankly back at what remained of the window, its flanking curtains flapping and snapping in the wind and rain that poured into the room. One arm still clutched the wide-eyed Jiji tightly to her chest, and the hand of the other was pressed faintly to her temple and from under which streamed a trickle of blood thinned with rainwater.
Hearing the noise of them entering, Kiki turned her head and gave the pair a vague look.
“Oh…dear,” she said. “Um. Hi.”
[ooc: And this is why I wanted the thunderstorm :) ]
[EDIT: Preplayed with Phale and Wilson, open obviously to them; open to anyone else who might somehow be in an angel-warded residence in Beau Jardin at three in the morning.]