blargh
Title: Constants
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: G
Pairing/Character(s): Aziraphale, Crowley, mythological figures, and some ducks.
Summary: Odysseus married Penelope, daughter of Icarius and the Naiad Periboea... Penelope, formerly named Arnaea, or Arnacia, had been flung into the sea by Nauplius at her father’s order; but a flock of purple-striped ducks buoyed her up, fed her, and towed her ashore. Impressed by this prodigy, Icarius and Periboea relented, and Arnaea won the new name of Penelope, which means ‘duck’. -- "The Greek Myths", by Robert Graves.
A/N: Um. This... makes perfect sense in my head.
It was a winedark and stormy sea, but it had ducks in it.
One of them swam a little nearer to the shore, and promptly sank.
“No,” said Aziraphale, wearily. “Feed them, I said.”
Crowley looked perplexed. “What for?”
“It's a-- a neutral activity.”
“No, it isn't. Being kind to small fluffy animals is your side's business.”
“It's not in the mission statement,” Aziraphale said, but in the tones of one who is on shaky ground, and knows it.
Crowley stared at him for a moment. He made a gesture with his right hand. The duck rose back to the surface, quacking.
“Mission statement?” he said.
“Look,” said Aziraphale, “do you see those two fellows over there?” He indicated the two pale figures huddled a ways down the coast. “I expect one's a Hittite spy and the other's a Spartan princeling, having a secret meeting. Feeding ducks is what one does when one's meeting secretly.”
“That's no princeling,” said Crowley, slowly. His eyes gleamed through the fog.
“The point--”
“That's the king,” said Crowley, “and his servant. And, if I'm not much mistaken, the king'sdaughter.”
Aziraphale began to speak, and then frowned. “Icarius has a daughter?”
“Had,” said Crowley. “He doesn't want a daughter, I don't think.”
As if on cue, the shorter of the two figures chose that instant to bow his head and hurl a baby-sized package into the waves. It made quite a splash.
“Now that's what I call duck feeding,” said Crowley, with some satisfaction.
Aziraphale did not roll his eyes, although it was a close thing. Instead, he blinked.
The ducks, who had been paddling happily around the same patch of saltwater for some hours now and had seemed quite satisfied with it, developed a sudden sense of focus. Perhaps, they thought, in the murky depths of their small duck brains, it was time to branch out, to push boundaries, to explore other patches of saltwater which would be, well, quite far away from here, and hadn't their mother always told them that the water was greener with delicious scum on the other side of that current?
They set off. A few of them also felt a bit itchy about the pinfeathers, but they put it down to early moulting induced by the excitement of travel. In this they were a little off the mark.
“You must be joking,” said Crowley.
“I don't see anything funny about it,” said Aziraphale, smiling, as the ducks formed a kind of honor guard around the greenish patch of seawater that had closed over the infant's head moments earlier. The one that had been sunk dived.
“The saving, all right,” said Crowley, “you've got a job to do, I might not like it but I can understand that. The ducks, all right, they were there, they were convenient. All right. But-- purple stripes? Really?”
A cloud drifted from in front of the moon, and as the light poured abruptly down in a widening circle of silver, the duck bobbed up again, triumphant, with a beakful of a curly infant hair. The infant dangled, looking suspiciously smug for someone who was busily vomiting brine.
The other ducks quacked congratulations, and, indeed, had purple stripes.
“I wanted to make sure he wouldn't try it again,” said Aziraphale, with dignity. “Purple stripes are a sign of divine work.”
Crowley growled. Whenever the angel managed to get his mind into the 28th century, it automatically gravitated to the 2750s.
But there was no denying that Icarius and his servant were pulling the baby back out onto the beach.
“You know what's a neutral activity?” the demon said. “Drinking. Let's get out of here.”
“Just as you like,” said Aziraphale, who rather felt he could afford to be magnanimous. Besides, winedarkness always did make him thirst.
Title: All things strive.
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: G
Pairing/Character(s): Crowley, Aziraphale, and, ahem, Nettie Pulsifer.
Summary: Everyone is genderswapped and Nettie Pulsifer achieves flight.
A/N: This, on the other hand, doesn't. I have no excuse, just a fondness for genderbending. Also: all better suggestions w/r/t names for girl!Warlock are appreciated-- I'm not satisfied with Jezebel, somehow. And I'll need good names if I want to write page after ridiculous page of this. Actually, the same goes for Newton, come to that.
Nettie Pulsifer, twelve years old, thin, and bespectacled, was making a model airplane to beguile the lunch hour.
Oh, all right, mangling, actually. But the intent was there. And it's only a few letters' difference. Er.
She was also being observed.
“What did I tell you?” said one of the two strange women who would later that day inadvertently cause the headmistress of the school to have a nervous breakdown and advertently cause her to have a very nice dream about a new career path as a painter of pinkish seashells, which combination forced Nettie to transfer schools less than a month later, and for which Nettie would have resented them immensely at the time our story takes place if she'd a) noticed their existence and b) had the precognitive powers of her future husband. Fortunately, none of this was the case, and Nettie continued her work serenely under their fascinated scrutiny. “Technology is my side's.”
“Nonsense,” said the other; “you can't claim all of human artifice for yourself, my dear-- if you did, you'd have to admit to the printing press.”
“Pulp fiction--” the first began.
Her companion gave her a quelling look. She subsided, sulkily. “Modern technology, then. As in invented after my nap.”
“Are you calling that,” the other said, with a nod to the disaster area of plywood and glue at Nettie's fingertips, “modern technology?”
“Not as such,” said the first, “no, but it was inspired by modern technology, see, so my point stands.”
“Your point?” said the other.
“Technology practically does my job for me,” said the first, with enthusiasm. “That girl is a social outcast because of her electronic hobbies, and not only did they make her a pariah, she's incompetent at them.”
Strictly speaking, this was true, although Nettie hadn't noticed yet. The other woman wisely did not say this aloud. Instead she said: “Mm, yes, of course, terribly clever of you.”
Their meandering path took them a little closer to the table where Nettie sat happily, elbow-deep in a model Spitfire which was in its own way far more thoroughly doomed than its, as Crowley might have put it, inspiration, though that had been shot down by Germans and subsequently broken up for scrap. If she had looked up, just then, and if she had also remembered to push her spectacles back up her nose, she would been quite astonished. They made an odd pair: a young woman all in black, most of her sharp face hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses that looked like they could do tricks, underwater, and probably also fund a small African village for a year, and a middle-aged lady with an air about her of that one librarian who all the carnally inclined readers at a given library-- the dog-earers, the margin-scribblers-- hate and fear.
“Are you humoring me?” said the young one, incredulously.
“Well,” said the older, pleasantly, “yes, rather.”
The young one glared. This was detectable even through the black glass of her lenses, because it made her eyes glow red.
Nettie assembled on blithely, the instructions held a bare millimeter from the tip of her nose, glue caking in little vistas of clear stickiness on her grave, pale face.
“It's just,” the woman, or, to be strictly accurate, the woman-shaped being, went on, “it makes her so happy.”
“But in the long run--” began the younger (looking) one.
“The long run, yes, that was what we came to discuss. How is little Jezebel doing?”
The young woman grimaced. “Bubbles.”
“...ah?”
“Spit-bubbles. I really liked that jacket. And those shoes, for that matter.”
“Surely you can get rid of a little saliva, dear?”
“I'm afraid to try. It's the Antichrist's saliva, after all, who knows what could happen?”
The older woman looked rather stricken. “I hadn't thought of it that way.”
“I know you hadn't,” said the younger, triumphantly. “You can't be too careful, see.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said the older, under her breath: “a little Prozac might help things along.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
They gazed at Nettie in silence. She accidentally glued her hands together at the thumbs, but gamely kept on attaching pieces to the frame, which looked, at this advanced stage of construction, quite like the skeleton of a dragon who'd missed the secret passage's mouth by about thirty feet and hit the sheer side of the mountain head-on, instead.
“Happy,” said the young one, shaking her elegantly accessorized head.
Her companion smiled, and made no answer, and they walked on towards noisier pastures. But behind her back she made a complicated gesture, and five minutes later Nettie fell backwards off her bench, because the model airplane lifted off the tabletop, and flew in lurching circles around her head until she was exhausted from turning, and laughing, and turning again.
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: G
Pairing/Character(s): Aziraphale, Crowley, mythological figures, and some ducks.
Summary: Odysseus married Penelope, daughter of Icarius and the Naiad Periboea... Penelope, formerly named Arnaea, or Arnacia, had been flung into the sea by Nauplius at her father’s order; but a flock of purple-striped ducks buoyed her up, fed her, and towed her ashore. Impressed by this prodigy, Icarius and Periboea relented, and Arnaea won the new name of Penelope, which means ‘duck’. -- "The Greek Myths", by Robert Graves.
A/N: Um. This... makes perfect sense in my head.
It was a winedark and stormy sea, but it had ducks in it.
One of them swam a little nearer to the shore, and promptly sank.
“No,” said Aziraphale, wearily. “Feed them, I said.”
Crowley looked perplexed. “What for?”
“It's a-- a neutral activity.”
“No, it isn't. Being kind to small fluffy animals is your side's business.”
“It's not in the mission statement,” Aziraphale said, but in the tones of one who is on shaky ground, and knows it.
Crowley stared at him for a moment. He made a gesture with his right hand. The duck rose back to the surface, quacking.
“Mission statement?” he said.
“Look,” said Aziraphale, “do you see those two fellows over there?” He indicated the two pale figures huddled a ways down the coast. “I expect one's a Hittite spy and the other's a Spartan princeling, having a secret meeting. Feeding ducks is what one does when one's meeting secretly.”
“That's no princeling,” said Crowley, slowly. His eyes gleamed through the fog.
“The point--”
“That's the king,” said Crowley, “and his servant. And, if I'm not much mistaken, the king'sdaughter.”
Aziraphale began to speak, and then frowned. “Icarius has a daughter?”
“Had,” said Crowley. “He doesn't want a daughter, I don't think.”
As if on cue, the shorter of the two figures chose that instant to bow his head and hurl a baby-sized package into the waves. It made quite a splash.
“Now that's what I call duck feeding,” said Crowley, with some satisfaction.
Aziraphale did not roll his eyes, although it was a close thing. Instead, he blinked.
The ducks, who had been paddling happily around the same patch of saltwater for some hours now and had seemed quite satisfied with it, developed a sudden sense of focus. Perhaps, they thought, in the murky depths of their small duck brains, it was time to branch out, to push boundaries, to explore other patches of saltwater which would be, well, quite far away from here, and hadn't their mother always told them that the water was greener with delicious scum on the other side of that current?
They set off. A few of them also felt a bit itchy about the pinfeathers, but they put it down to early moulting induced by the excitement of travel. In this they were a little off the mark.
“You must be joking,” said Crowley.
“I don't see anything funny about it,” said Aziraphale, smiling, as the ducks formed a kind of honor guard around the greenish patch of seawater that had closed over the infant's head moments earlier. The one that had been sunk dived.
“The saving, all right,” said Crowley, “you've got a job to do, I might not like it but I can understand that. The ducks, all right, they were there, they were convenient. All right. But-- purple stripes? Really?”
A cloud drifted from in front of the moon, and as the light poured abruptly down in a widening circle of silver, the duck bobbed up again, triumphant, with a beakful of a curly infant hair. The infant dangled, looking suspiciously smug for someone who was busily vomiting brine.
The other ducks quacked congratulations, and, indeed, had purple stripes.
“I wanted to make sure he wouldn't try it again,” said Aziraphale, with dignity. “Purple stripes are a sign of divine work.”
Crowley growled. Whenever the angel managed to get his mind into the 28th century, it automatically gravitated to the 2750s.
But there was no denying that Icarius and his servant were pulling the baby back out onto the beach.
“You know what's a neutral activity?” the demon said. “Drinking. Let's get out of here.”
“Just as you like,” said Aziraphale, who rather felt he could afford to be magnanimous. Besides, winedarkness always did make him thirst.
Title: All things strive.
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: G
Pairing/Character(s): Crowley, Aziraphale, and, ahem, Nettie Pulsifer.
Summary: Everyone is genderswapped and Nettie Pulsifer achieves flight.
A/N: This, on the other hand, doesn't. I have no excuse, just a fondness for genderbending. Also: all better suggestions w/r/t names for girl!Warlock are appreciated-- I'm not satisfied with Jezebel, somehow. And I'll need good names if I want to write page after ridiculous page of this. Actually, the same goes for Newton, come to that.
Nettie Pulsifer, twelve years old, thin, and bespectacled, was making a model airplane to beguile the lunch hour.
Oh, all right, mangling, actually. But the intent was there. And it's only a few letters' difference. Er.
She was also being observed.
“What did I tell you?” said one of the two strange women who would later that day inadvertently cause the headmistress of the school to have a nervous breakdown and advertently cause her to have a very nice dream about a new career path as a painter of pinkish seashells, which combination forced Nettie to transfer schools less than a month later, and for which Nettie would have resented them immensely at the time our story takes place if she'd a) noticed their existence and b) had the precognitive powers of her future husband. Fortunately, none of this was the case, and Nettie continued her work serenely under their fascinated scrutiny. “Technology is my side's.”
“Nonsense,” said the other; “you can't claim all of human artifice for yourself, my dear-- if you did, you'd have to admit to the printing press.”
“Pulp fiction--” the first began.
Her companion gave her a quelling look. She subsided, sulkily. “Modern technology, then. As in invented after my nap.”
“Are you calling that,” the other said, with a nod to the disaster area of plywood and glue at Nettie's fingertips, “modern technology?”
“Not as such,” said the first, “no, but it was inspired by modern technology, see, so my point stands.”
“Your point?” said the other.
“Technology practically does my job for me,” said the first, with enthusiasm. “That girl is a social outcast because of her electronic hobbies, and not only did they make her a pariah, she's incompetent at them.”
Strictly speaking, this was true, although Nettie hadn't noticed yet. The other woman wisely did not say this aloud. Instead she said: “Mm, yes, of course, terribly clever of you.”
Their meandering path took them a little closer to the table where Nettie sat happily, elbow-deep in a model Spitfire which was in its own way far more thoroughly doomed than its, as Crowley might have put it, inspiration, though that had been shot down by Germans and subsequently broken up for scrap. If she had looked up, just then, and if she had also remembered to push her spectacles back up her nose, she would been quite astonished. They made an odd pair: a young woman all in black, most of her sharp face hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses that looked like they could do tricks, underwater, and probably also fund a small African village for a year, and a middle-aged lady with an air about her of that one librarian who all the carnally inclined readers at a given library-- the dog-earers, the margin-scribblers-- hate and fear.
“Are you humoring me?” said the young one, incredulously.
“Well,” said the older, pleasantly, “yes, rather.”
The young one glared. This was detectable even through the black glass of her lenses, because it made her eyes glow red.
Nettie assembled on blithely, the instructions held a bare millimeter from the tip of her nose, glue caking in little vistas of clear stickiness on her grave, pale face.
“It's just,” the woman, or, to be strictly accurate, the woman-shaped being, went on, “it makes her so happy.”
“But in the long run--” began the younger (looking) one.
“The long run, yes, that was what we came to discuss. How is little Jezebel doing?”
The young woman grimaced. “Bubbles.”
“...ah?”
“Spit-bubbles. I really liked that jacket. And those shoes, for that matter.”
“Surely you can get rid of a little saliva, dear?”
“I'm afraid to try. It's the Antichrist's saliva, after all, who knows what could happen?”
The older woman looked rather stricken. “I hadn't thought of it that way.”
“I know you hadn't,” said the younger, triumphantly. “You can't be too careful, see.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said the older, under her breath: “a little Prozac might help things along.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
They gazed at Nettie in silence. She accidentally glued her hands together at the thumbs, but gamely kept on attaching pieces to the frame, which looked, at this advanced stage of construction, quite like the skeleton of a dragon who'd missed the secret passage's mouth by about thirty feet and hit the sheer side of the mountain head-on, instead.
“Happy,” said the young one, shaking her elegantly accessorized head.
Her companion smiled, and made no answer, and they walked on towards noisier pastures. But behind her back she made a complicated gesture, and five minutes later Nettie fell backwards off her bench, because the model airplane lifted off the tabletop, and flew in lurching circles around her head until she was exhausted from turning, and laughing, and turning again.