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[aj_crawley]

It's a picture-postcard sunrise as Crowley ghosts back through the streets of L.A., headed towards Raguel's apartment, and it gives his face a little colour. He feels strange - flattened and insubstantial, like nighttime in the desert has eroded something out of him, worn it away with cold and dust, from right around the time when he found that it

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[a_fell]

The furniture inhabiting Raguel's apartment is improbably stylish, but the contrast between the owner and the place's understated elegance isn't as jarring as Aziraphael might have expected. It's all rather tasteful, in fact, and he's more than a little certain that Crowley had a hand in it - if for no other reason than that he can't imagine Raguel taking the time to pick it out, any more than he can imagine Crowley suffering Raguel to decorate his pet project with worn but serviceable charity rejects

[a_fell]

"Yes. I see," he says, nodding and trying not to stare. The Mojave is perhaps not so far as it sounds, after all, not when it's as simple as visiting a friend round the corner. Still. There's no hiding the fact that a night alone in the desert was hard on Crowley, sitting there as he is, covered in smudges and weariness.

"Different scenery does wonders, I've found," he continues. "But I'm glad to have met you on your way home."

[aj_crawley]

('Home'.)

There's a thin film of dust on his sunglasses, but he doesn't dare take them off.

"How did you know where - ?"

[a_fell]

"Where to find you?" he finishes cautiously. "Oh, I wouldn't call it anything as dramatic as a hunch. You weren't at your flat, and when you didn't come back for a bit I began thinking about where you might go, and made a phone call."

He glances at his knees. It sounds so simple laid out like that. The more cluttered details can surely wait until another time.

[aj_crawley]

"That rat bastard."

It's more for form's sake than anything else, and it shows. After all, it's not as though he'd told Raguel not to tell Aziraphael.

He hadn't thought -

(But he'd been wrong. And now it hurts to breathe all over again.)

[a_fell]

"Really, my dear, I'm sure he was only concerned for you."

(But the admonishment is more for form's sake than anything else, and it shows.)

"And I was quite relieved to hear it."

[aj_crawley]

Aziraphael wasn't supposed to be here.

(It doesn't make sense.)

"I was just tired," he says to the floorboards.

(And my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.)

[a_fell]

"Yes. Yes, I."

It wouldn't be so hard, perhaps, to just put aside his confession and let the conversation wander where it would. But it's impossible to think he could live with himself if he let Crowley take the fall, so to speak, for his own misery. And he remembers too well how Crowley had looked, bent against those cabinet doors under an invisible, impossible weight. It's not an alternative he could consider.

His hand wraps around the cushion's edge and squeezes.

"I - as it happens, I thought I could do something about that. But I rather seem to have made things much worse."

[aj_crawley]

"It was Christmas," Crowley says, gaze sneaking up, quick, and then back down. At the halfway point: a sliver of parched, desert yellow behind his glasses. "You weren't to know I'd pitch a fit over it."

[a_fell]

"That isn't precisely it. That isn't it at all, as a matter of fact," he says, unhappiness sharpening his determination. If Crowley apologises again, his eyes downcast and with that awful, painful humility that he can hardly stand to look at, then he can't be held responsible, he really can't. Raguel might come home to discover fretful fingerprints pierced right through the leather of his cushion, or shards of broken mugs, dropped from unsteady fingers, littering his floor.

"I couldn't - look, do you remember how dreadful it was last winter, when it was so cold?"

[aj_crawley]

About to say something, Crowley stops, taken aback.

"I 'sspose," he says, after a guarded pause.

Nowadays, in retrospect, it doesn't seem so bad. Or not all of it, in any case.

(After New Year's, if he had to think about it, seemed worse than before. Tuesday or Thursday, his brain echoes, soft and treacherous. They used to do it all the time. Until Aziraphael started pretending that they didn't.)

[a_fell]

"Yes, well. I remember it," he says quietly, clearly doing his best not to.

"And I absolutely hated it. I can't bear seeing you like that, Crowley; you were so miserable, and tired, and you looked as though you could have drawn the circles under your eyes with a marker."

(Possibly that's the hardest. To live through.

His skin shouldn't be cold.)

He looks positively haunted for a moment, but it passes.

"And I began to think - I wasn't truly helpless, was I? It really wouldn't take that much influence to nudge the trade winds a bit. Persistence, of course, and a sharp eye on other effects, but only a very little manipulation would be enough."

[aj_crawley]

This -

There's no way.

The winter's taken its toll. The winter, and the night in the Mojave, and the  argument, and all the long year leading up to it - all of it: the cold. He's exhausted.

"Enough for what," he manages, on the second try.

There's no way he's hearing this right.

[a_fell]

And there it is, beyond doubt: the Moment from which there's no turning back. The angel gnaws at his bottom lip.

"Enough to ensure that this winter would be a mild one."

[aj_crawley]

(don't go far off, not even for a day, because - )

"What?" he laughs.

It's nervous and abrupt, embarrassingly high-pitched at the end.

(It doesn't make any sense.)

[a_fell]

A wary glance. It isn't that Crowley hadn't heard.

"I wanted it to be an easy winter," he repeats.

"But even the simple act of encouraging a few - well, of course, you know this," he says, with the barest flicker of humour, "and there's no point denying it, either. I know very well who was behind that downpour at Proms in the Park last year."

A small, wistful smile surfaces at the memory and then fades.

"So I put in a request Upstairs for a little - what's that word you use that's so very apt? A little oomph."