Cohen Collection: Wild on My Shoulder
Title: Wild on My Shoulder
Author: clodia_metelli.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Aziraphale/War, Crowley/Mary Hodges, Famine, Pollution, shades of Pestilence.
Summary: Continuing the Viennese crossover of sorts, Aziraphale finds himself in a dim attic at the end of a lonely hallway with War; Famine takes a midnight walk by the river; and Mary Hodges is fleetingly curious.
Disclaimer: I own neither Good Omens nor anything Leonard Cohen has ever sung, except in a strictly non-intellectual-property-related way, and I make nothing from this but my own entertainment. And possibly yours? It would be nice.
A/N: Still a darkish shade of crack, still after Leonard Cohen, after Lorca. With thanks once again to possibly_thrice, since this echoes her own awesome work. ♥
Word Count: 1122
Brandy and Death
~ wild on my shoulder ~
Dark stairs, a dank hallway, a dim attic burnished by a wrought-iron blaze of lanterns. The curtains were open when she opened her room, so the night poured in: the cold and the brilliance of it, star-speckled, a sliver of moon floating high on the pinkish billows of a Viennese midnight. The covers were thrown back and her bed was awash with watery grey, pooling in the rumpled pillows and the creases of sand-grained sheets.
Her gown was a page torn from a glossy magazine. Aziraphale smoothed a fold uncertainly over the chair.
“Uh,” he said.
He was still buoyed up on a comforting brandy-cloud, but intimations of unwisdom were beginning to creep into his mind, such as it was. This wasn’t very angelic, they were saying. All this dancing and drinking and, uh, consorting. It had to be at least as bad as doing deals with demons. At least demons and angels were bred from the same stock. Who knew what this, um, woman-shaped personic- persofin- person might be up to...
And then she turned around with the moon behind her, a silver glaze gleaming in the gloss of her hair. Her arms were wet up to her elbows. No: she was wearing her gloves still, red silk on silk skin. Her gloves and her boots and the lace of her knickers, more lace patterning her breasts.
She said, “Yeah?” and shook out her hair, and grinned.
Aziraphale tasted blood. He’d bitten right through his tongue.
“Dancing, er,” he said. “Um.”
War stepped over the skirts of her discarded dress.
“I’ll dance with you,” she said, and slid her hands up his arms, her hands warm in her gloves with the sleekness of skin, which was all he could think of just then. She was as slim as a sword-stick, as straight as a gun barrel. Her eyes burned.
He burned too, and was without words and afraid. He said, “The, uh, gavotte?”
She shook her head, still grinning. Lipstick glistened in the cracks of her lips.
“I don’t, uh,” he said. “I mean. We’ve, uh, for a while, but I don’t know, well. And how this happens. I’m an angel. Drunk. But non, uh, sexualial. Technicicicologically. Uh.”
Her hand was on his shoulder, her breath on his face, brandy-laced. “Sure,” she said, the word a purr. “I love angels. You fight and you fight and you fight... you gave them to me, okay? You gave them your sword and you gave them to me, and when the humans are dead, all of them, when they’ve killed each other, every last one, I’ll still be here, because you’ll pick up the sword, angel, you’ll be fighting to the end...”
Aziraphale opened his mouth to protest, and then shut it again.
“But we’re good,” he said weakly.
When War laughed, her teeth glinted, white as lily-tips. “Yeah,” she said, “I know. Good causes are the best sort. They last forever.”
*
The blood in the water was unfurling like fern fronds. Famine couldn’t see it, because the water was too dark under its mosaic crust of falling snow and floating ice, but a few million frozen microbes had rushed to the feast with delirious abandon and he could taste their glee. The hardest winter in a hundred years, the forecasters said, and they were right. Even the tiniest organisms were starving.
He’d been here before. Pestilence had come for the floods, at least until they’d concreted the river bed at the turn of the last century, and Famine had come with him. They’d made a good team.
He missed Pestilence, sometimes. Pollution just didn’t have the old guy’s élan.
All the same...
Snow was falling and imprinting itself on the water and disintegrating, the momentary patterns a lacelike blur cast over black depths. Famine remembered coming across Pestilence lounging in the marshes, somewhere, enthroned on a bullrush tussock with the afternoon mists rising up around him. He’d been half-sunk in brownish water and picking out pictures in the clouds. Look, sheep... and Famine looked, and saw lilies blossoming on the black water, starved snow lilies vanishing at once into nothingness. He saw chains of blood untangling under the dark. He saw a reflection of hunger and smiled, thinly.
The concrete bank was iced and slippery beneath his shiny businessman’s shoes. He knelt in the snow and leaned down to touch the river’s surface.
Out of water and ice slid dripping white fingers, cold around his wrist.
Famine braced himself, and tugged, and a pale head broke through the thickening crust, streaming water. “Oh,” said Pollution, looking around with a sort of hazy indifference, the grey of his eyes reflecting the falling snow, “it’s you.”
The faded blond of his hair was slick with mud and oil. He lay dreamily in the dark water, the river sluggish around him. Famine could taste blood diluted a thousand times in the droplets he brought to his mouth.
He said, “What died?”
Pollution’s streaked shoulders moved in a lazy shrug. “A man... young... beautiful...”
“Yeah?”
“They fought... he threw the golf club in after...”
“Red's in town,” said Famine.
The white face stared blankly up from the dark of the river. “So?”
“Nothing,” said Famine. “Just saying.” He almost hesitated. “We should do something together. Since we’re all here. We could - go waltzing...”
He saw his answer in Pollution’s unchanged blankness. He sighed in a puff of pale breath and turned away.
*
Mary Hodges was quite enjoying waltzing. She wasn’t very good at it, but the demon wasn’t very good at it either, so that was all right. He’d managed to find her a G&T that was mostly G, which was as it should be, and she was almost completely sure he’d gone to the trouble of buying it from the bar with actual money. It was very late now, and quiet, and the music had taken on a bluesy tone.
She rearranged the flowered silk of her scarf round her shoulders. “Crowley,” she said. “Why does that picture have garlands under it?”
*
And now he was kissing her again, propped uncomfortably on the bed in the dimming dark. A swirl of snow was battering at the window and he was thinking someone should probably draw the curtains, but not very clearly, not clearly at all. The room was a scrapbook of black-and-white photos, of disjointed images torn from a world of grey shadows. Her eyelashes kissed his nose and her thigh was silky under his fingers and the edges of her nails cut the nape of his neck. His own feathers brushed his shoulders.
She’d leaned back on her hands and grinned at him. “Hey,” she’d said, “come here and I’ll quench your flaming sword, angel...”
On to Among the Garbage and the Flowers
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