Happy Holidays, Hsavinien!
Title: World Enough and Time
Gift for: hsavinien
Gift from: A Secret!
Rating: PG-13.
Pairings/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley
Warnings: Nothing in particular.
Summary: Even for immortal beings, time has a habit of passing by all too swiftly.
A/N: With apologies to Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare, and one small bit of the Hindu pantheon. Happy Holidays to hsavinien and to all the mods!
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side / Shouldst rubies find (1400 AD) [#1]
Most days, the town centre quieted down by noon, as the most aggressive of the market stall holders, one by one, retired to the nearby Wells Inn, purportedly to escape the noon heat [#2], their stalls and shops entrusted to the care of those apprentices considered capable of handling the dwindling number of passers-by.
In an out-of-way corner of the marketplace, just past the row where one might expect to find late-arriving foreign merchants, sat Aziraphale. His oat-coloured overcoat hung neatly over the handle of a nearby wheelbarrow lined with straw, upon which his bottled wares were cradled. One such bottle - containing wine from the Bordeaux region - had been opened earlier in the day, and while it wasn't precisely to his taste, he would have to make do until the conclusion of the ongoing war, a series of particularly inconsiderate military campaigns that had made Rhone Valley wines unavailable in England since the middle of the fourteenth century.
As Aziraphale replaced the hemp stopper in the bottle, a man-shaped shadow settled on him. He sighed; the trouble with dealing with the public was, as always, the public. Perhaps he should have considered...
"Hello, angel."
Well then, Aziraphale thought: apparently the shadow wasn't precisely man shaped.
"Crowley," he replied in wary greeting. "What brings you here after such a long time?"
"I've come to help you celebrate the season with a gift from King Bhageeratha [#3], as it were," he said, then handed a bottle containing some rather dubious looking liquid to Aziraphale.
"And this is?"
"The waters of Holy Ganga," Crowley replied. "In case you've been committing any sins recently that need cleansing."
That last was said rather hopefully, if Aziraphale was any judge of vocal nuance, and he didn't know whether to take umbrage at the thought of a demon presuming to offer the expiation of sin to an angel or just to be amused. in the end, he settled for something in the middle.
"No," he said. "No sins. I will, however, accept your gift in the spirit in which it was intended."
In answer, Crowley just smirked - or perhaps he leered, Aziraphale couldn't really distinguish between the two, but whichever was the case, he felt an unexpected and quite strange frisson of delight at the thought of Crowley making the effort to bring him a gift. For the briefest of moments, a warm glow suffused his earthly body, but then his thoughts flew heavenward and Aziraphale was reminded, once again, of how utterly inappropriate it was to approve of anything of a suspect nature offered by his demonic counterpart. And really, it was all suspect. 'He tempts, and I thwart,' Aziraphale reminded himself, all the while refusing to notice how carefully he was building a straw nest for the bottle of river water.
"Well then," Crowley said. "I suppose I should leave and find lodgings of some sort before the sun sets and I'm taken into custody as a vagrant."
"No, you can't!" The moment the words left his mouth, Aziraphale started to feel as if he'd made a dreadful mistake, and Crowley's raised eyebrow wasn't doing anything at all to erase that feeling. "I only meant...that is to say...er."
"You meant to invite me to spend the night in your rooms?" Crowley suggested.
Annoyed by his own transparency, Aziraphale scowled. "Only because we have business to discuss, pertaining to our arrangement."
"Hmm...I see."
"And you're sleeping on a pallet"
"Of course," Crowley said. "I didn't imagine you were inviting me to share your bed."
The smirk on his face, however, told Aziraphale that the demon was, not unexpectedly, lying, and if Aziraphale were perfectly honest with himself (something angels generally were without even thinking about it), he couldn't be certain that a part of him - an infinitesimally small part of him, mind - hadn't been imagining that very thing.
An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes (1600 AD)
Sitting comfortably on the empty stage, his legs dangling over the edge, Crowley unrolled the parchment and began to read. "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate:" [#4]
"You're not supposed to be in here, you know," Aziraphale grumbled.
Crowley peered at Aziraphale over the top of the parchment. "Are you seriously expecting me to accept 'you're not supposed to' as sufficient reason to refrain from doing something?"
"One can only hope."
"I was under the impression that you were an admirer of William Shakespeare's sonnets."
"Of the two I've read, yes."
"And so," Crowley said, waving the parchment at Aziraphale, "here you see 152 additional sonnets."
"Which Mr Shakespeare has not yet made public, which you know full well, you thieving rogue!"
"These poems were not stolen, but merely...borrowed. I could, of course, return them to their owner before sharing them," said Crowley. "Would you prefer I do that?"
Crowley waited patiently, watching as two warring factions took up arms and acted out a psychomachian pantomime on Aziraphale's face. In a matter of moments, a sour expression appeared, followed by an exasperated exhalation and an impatient waving of his right hand, all of which told Crowley that the Forces of Who Could It Hurt? had emerged victorious from this particular battle.
"Oh, go on then," Aziraphale said snappishly. "As long as they're here."
And so Crowley continued to read, secretly amused that this slight tarnishing of Aziraphale's soul would be credited to his own account. However, late in the afternoon, Crowley suddenly became cognizant of the fact that he just spent the past three hours reading love poetry to his counterpart, an act for which he'd receive no reward, material or otherwise, from his Hellish compatriots.
'The better angel' - or at least the sneakier angel - 'is a man right fair,' indeed. [#4.5]
And the last age should show your heart. (1800 AD)
As time passed, it was getting more and more difficult to remember what it had been like to exist solely within a not-entirely-material angelic form, but Aziraphale was certain that before he'd taken on the mantle of humanity, he'd been far less tired.
It wasn't just physical exhaustion which was the problem, as this was something he only experienced very occasionally and even then, only until he remembered that he was, in fact, an angel, and didn't have to suffer from the usual wear and tear to which human bodies were subject. Far more taxing than the physical was the mental exhaustion, particularly since it was becoming increasing difficult for Aziraphale to predict which were the incidents to which he would react most strongly. It had been two years and he was only just recovering after returning from Egypt following the disheartening Battle of Aboukir Bay (under the command of Horatio Nelson, the British forces had emerged victorious, but Aziraphale found he was unable to be complacent about the deaths of thousands of Frenchmen, despite the fact that he'd been living as an Englishman for many centuries).
Sometimes Aziraphale tried to imagine someone like Gabriel sharing his more earthly concerns, but try though he might, he was unable to imagine such a thing. Angels - even Archangels - weren't created to worry about anything but seeing to God's ineffable plan, and the idea of Gabriel worrying himself into exhaustion over concerns about national allegiances or the deaths of individual humans was highly improbable.
The idea of Gabriel suffering due to entirely inappropriate and certainly unreciprocated feelings for a demon was categorically impossible.
Aziraphale sighed.
He'd give it until the turn of the following century, and if at that point Crowley had still shown no indication of any interest, Aziraphale vowed to purchase an unappealing bookshop on the most unpopular street he could find in London and spend the next hundred years or so learning to stop caring entirely.
But at my back I always hear / Time's wingËd chariot hurrying near
As it had been written, so had it come to pass: the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darklness had been born. [#5]
Could Armageddon - and with it, Crowley and Aziraphale's last chance to "carpe" (as it were) the "diem" - be far behind?
Now let us sport us while we may
Since the coming of modern times ("modern" being measured in millennia for those of an immortal persuasion), Crowley's appearance - at least when he was on Earth - had tended towards the less than traditionally demonic. However, there was something about surviving a near-Apocalypse that shook up even the denizens of Hell, spurring them to act in ways they hadn't considered in aeons.
Hastur, for example, took up fishing.
Crowley - restless as only a not-entirely-evil demon can be when the object of his long-sublimated, but apparently-resurrected sexual desires is quite possibly the last being on Earth (or Heaven) who would ever reciprocate those feelings - flew. [#6]. He unfolded his pearlescent wings, spread them wide for the first time in years,and took to the skies, circling the earth once, then once again, his flight taking him across sere deserts and windswept plains, over stormy seas and snow-capped mountains, past jungles echoing with the roars of tigers and the joyous cries of brilliantly-coloured birds, through cities alive with millions of people, all but one of whom had no idea how close they'd been to losing everything they had ever loved.
As Crowley began his third circuit of the Earth, he felt on his back the unmistakable (if infinitesimally light) weight of a shadow. It was far too small to be a cloud or a jet plane, and when Crowley glanced up, he saw Aziraphale, matching Crowley's speed with the strong beat of his own startlingly white wings. For a time, the two immortal beings - one somewhat fallen, one mostly not - flew swiftly in tandem, intoxicated with the simple joy of still being alive...and being together. And then Aziraphale - Aziraphale, of all beings - started to fly in an intricate looping pattern, reminiscent of the barnstormers of the 1920s who performed aerial acrobatics quite as much for their own delight as for the entertainment of their audiences.
Crowley laughed, and for the first time in thousands of years, his laughter was joyous.
And if the sound was not echoed in Heaven (although who can say they're absolutely certain what things bring God pleasure?), it was echoed by Aziraphale. And the demon flew with the angel, mirroring his dizzying climbs and dives and spirals, and the two flew closer and still closer, their wing tips touching, tentatively at first, then with more strength as each, in turn, wrapped the other within the embrace of their wings and of their arms and then, finally, joining - as the poet once wrote - "like amorous birds of prey" [#7].
And for a moment, just the briefest of moments, time stood still.
Notes
1. Section headings taken from "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. (Back)
2. Not that the rays emanating from the pale English sun could ever truly be said to be emitting heat. (Back)
3. For the story of Bhagiratha and the Ganges, click here (Back)
4. From Shakespeare's "Sonnet #18 (Back)
4.5. From Shakespeare's "Sonnet #130 (Back)
5. Description of Baby!Adam taken from p.22 of the Ace Books (May 1996) p/back edition of Good Omens. (Back)
6. The fact that Crowley's wings are never seen in Good Omens doesn't mean they don't exist. After all, as Aziraphale would say, for most of humanity (and even a fair number of the heavenly host), God himself never manifests in a physical form, and ... well, you take my point, don't you? (Back)
7. See note #1. 'The poet,' of course, is Marvell. (Back)
Happy Holidays, hsavinien, from your Secret Writer!
Gift for: hsavinien
Gift from: A Secret!
Rating: PG-13.
Pairings/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley
Warnings: Nothing in particular.
Summary: Even for immortal beings, time has a habit of passing by all too swiftly.
A/N: With apologies to Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare, and one small bit of the Hindu pantheon. Happy Holidays to hsavinien and to all the mods!
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side / Shouldst rubies find (1400 AD) [#1]
Most days, the town centre quieted down by noon, as the most aggressive of the market stall holders, one by one, retired to the nearby Wells Inn, purportedly to escape the noon heat [#2], their stalls and shops entrusted to the care of those apprentices considered capable of handling the dwindling number of passers-by.
In an out-of-way corner of the marketplace, just past the row where one might expect to find late-arriving foreign merchants, sat Aziraphale. His oat-coloured overcoat hung neatly over the handle of a nearby wheelbarrow lined with straw, upon which his bottled wares were cradled. One such bottle - containing wine from the Bordeaux region - had been opened earlier in the day, and while it wasn't precisely to his taste, he would have to make do until the conclusion of the ongoing war, a series of particularly inconsiderate military campaigns that had made Rhone Valley wines unavailable in England since the middle of the fourteenth century.
As Aziraphale replaced the hemp stopper in the bottle, a man-shaped shadow settled on him. He sighed; the trouble with dealing with the public was, as always, the public. Perhaps he should have considered...
"Hello, angel."
Well then, Aziraphale thought: apparently the shadow wasn't precisely man shaped.
"Crowley," he replied in wary greeting. "What brings you here after such a long time?"
"I've come to help you celebrate the season with a gift from King Bhageeratha [#3], as it were," he said, then handed a bottle containing some rather dubious looking liquid to Aziraphale.
"And this is?"
"The waters of Holy Ganga," Crowley replied. "In case you've been committing any sins recently that need cleansing."
That last was said rather hopefully, if Aziraphale was any judge of vocal nuance, and he didn't know whether to take umbrage at the thought of a demon presuming to offer the expiation of sin to an angel or just to be amused. in the end, he settled for something in the middle.
"No," he said. "No sins. I will, however, accept your gift in the spirit in which it was intended."
In answer, Crowley just smirked - or perhaps he leered, Aziraphale couldn't really distinguish between the two, but whichever was the case, he felt an unexpected and quite strange frisson of delight at the thought of Crowley making the effort to bring him a gift. For the briefest of moments, a warm glow suffused his earthly body, but then his thoughts flew heavenward and Aziraphale was reminded, once again, of how utterly inappropriate it was to approve of anything of a suspect nature offered by his demonic counterpart. And really, it was all suspect. 'He tempts, and I thwart,' Aziraphale reminded himself, all the while refusing to notice how carefully he was building a straw nest for the bottle of river water.
"Well then," Crowley said. "I suppose I should leave and find lodgings of some sort before the sun sets and I'm taken into custody as a vagrant."
"No, you can't!" The moment the words left his mouth, Aziraphale started to feel as if he'd made a dreadful mistake, and Crowley's raised eyebrow wasn't doing anything at all to erase that feeling. "I only meant...that is to say...er."
"You meant to invite me to spend the night in your rooms?" Crowley suggested.
Annoyed by his own transparency, Aziraphale scowled. "Only because we have business to discuss, pertaining to our arrangement."
"Hmm...I see."
"And you're sleeping on a pallet"
"Of course," Crowley said. "I didn't imagine you were inviting me to share your bed."
The smirk on his face, however, told Aziraphale that the demon was, not unexpectedly, lying, and if Aziraphale were perfectly honest with himself (something angels generally were without even thinking about it), he couldn't be certain that a part of him - an infinitesimally small part of him, mind - hadn't been imagining that very thing.
An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes (1600 AD)
Sitting comfortably on the empty stage, his legs dangling over the edge, Crowley unrolled the parchment and began to read. "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate:" [#4]
"You're not supposed to be in here, you know," Aziraphale grumbled.
Crowley peered at Aziraphale over the top of the parchment. "Are you seriously expecting me to accept 'you're not supposed to' as sufficient reason to refrain from doing something?"
"One can only hope."
"I was under the impression that you were an admirer of William Shakespeare's sonnets."
"Of the two I've read, yes."
"And so," Crowley said, waving the parchment at Aziraphale, "here you see 152 additional sonnets."
"Which Mr Shakespeare has not yet made public, which you know full well, you thieving rogue!"
"These poems were not stolen, but merely...borrowed. I could, of course, return them to their owner before sharing them," said Crowley. "Would you prefer I do that?"
Crowley waited patiently, watching as two warring factions took up arms and acted out a psychomachian pantomime on Aziraphale's face. In a matter of moments, a sour expression appeared, followed by an exasperated exhalation and an impatient waving of his right hand, all of which told Crowley that the Forces of Who Could It Hurt? had emerged victorious from this particular battle.
"Oh, go on then," Aziraphale said snappishly. "As long as they're here."
And so Crowley continued to read, secretly amused that this slight tarnishing of Aziraphale's soul would be credited to his own account. However, late in the afternoon, Crowley suddenly became cognizant of the fact that he just spent the past three hours reading love poetry to his counterpart, an act for which he'd receive no reward, material or otherwise, from his Hellish compatriots.
'The better angel' - or at least the sneakier angel - 'is a man right fair,' indeed. [#4.5]
And the last age should show your heart. (1800 AD)
As time passed, it was getting more and more difficult to remember what it had been like to exist solely within a not-entirely-material angelic form, but Aziraphale was certain that before he'd taken on the mantle of humanity, he'd been far less tired.
It wasn't just physical exhaustion which was the problem, as this was something he only experienced very occasionally and even then, only until he remembered that he was, in fact, an angel, and didn't have to suffer from the usual wear and tear to which human bodies were subject. Far more taxing than the physical was the mental exhaustion, particularly since it was becoming increasing difficult for Aziraphale to predict which were the incidents to which he would react most strongly. It had been two years and he was only just recovering after returning from Egypt following the disheartening Battle of Aboukir Bay (under the command of Horatio Nelson, the British forces had emerged victorious, but Aziraphale found he was unable to be complacent about the deaths of thousands of Frenchmen, despite the fact that he'd been living as an Englishman for many centuries).
Sometimes Aziraphale tried to imagine someone like Gabriel sharing his more earthly concerns, but try though he might, he was unable to imagine such a thing. Angels - even Archangels - weren't created to worry about anything but seeing to God's ineffable plan, and the idea of Gabriel worrying himself into exhaustion over concerns about national allegiances or the deaths of individual humans was highly improbable.
The idea of Gabriel suffering due to entirely inappropriate and certainly unreciprocated feelings for a demon was categorically impossible.
Aziraphale sighed.
He'd give it until the turn of the following century, and if at that point Crowley had still shown no indication of any interest, Aziraphale vowed to purchase an unappealing bookshop on the most unpopular street he could find in London and spend the next hundred years or so learning to stop caring entirely.
But at my back I always hear / Time's wingËd chariot hurrying near
As it had been written, so had it come to pass: the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darklness had been born. [#5]
Could Armageddon - and with it, Crowley and Aziraphale's last chance to "carpe" (as it were) the "diem" - be far behind?
Now let us sport us while we may
Since the coming of modern times ("modern" being measured in millennia for those of an immortal persuasion), Crowley's appearance - at least when he was on Earth - had tended towards the less than traditionally demonic. However, there was something about surviving a near-Apocalypse that shook up even the denizens of Hell, spurring them to act in ways they hadn't considered in aeons.
Hastur, for example, took up fishing.
Crowley - restless as only a not-entirely-evil demon can be when the object of his long-sublimated, but apparently-resurrected sexual desires is quite possibly the last being on Earth (or Heaven) who would ever reciprocate those feelings - flew. [#6]. He unfolded his pearlescent wings, spread them wide for the first time in years,and took to the skies, circling the earth once, then once again, his flight taking him across sere deserts and windswept plains, over stormy seas and snow-capped mountains, past jungles echoing with the roars of tigers and the joyous cries of brilliantly-coloured birds, through cities alive with millions of people, all but one of whom had no idea how close they'd been to losing everything they had ever loved.
As Crowley began his third circuit of the Earth, he felt on his back the unmistakable (if infinitesimally light) weight of a shadow. It was far too small to be a cloud or a jet plane, and when Crowley glanced up, he saw Aziraphale, matching Crowley's speed with the strong beat of his own startlingly white wings. For a time, the two immortal beings - one somewhat fallen, one mostly not - flew swiftly in tandem, intoxicated with the simple joy of still being alive...and being together. And then Aziraphale - Aziraphale, of all beings - started to fly in an intricate looping pattern, reminiscent of the barnstormers of the 1920s who performed aerial acrobatics quite as much for their own delight as for the entertainment of their audiences.
Crowley laughed, and for the first time in thousands of years, his laughter was joyous.
And if the sound was not echoed in Heaven (although who can say they're absolutely certain what things bring God pleasure?), it was echoed by Aziraphale. And the demon flew with the angel, mirroring his dizzying climbs and dives and spirals, and the two flew closer and still closer, their wing tips touching, tentatively at first, then with more strength as each, in turn, wrapped the other within the embrace of their wings and of their arms and then, finally, joining - as the poet once wrote - "like amorous birds of prey" [#7].
And for a moment, just the briefest of moments, time stood still.
Notes
1. Section headings taken from "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. (Back)
2. Not that the rays emanating from the pale English sun could ever truly be said to be emitting heat. (Back)
3. For the story of Bhagiratha and the Ganges, click here (Back)
4. From Shakespeare's "Sonnet #18 (Back)
4.5. From Shakespeare's "Sonnet #130 (Back)
5. Description of Baby!Adam taken from p.22 of the Ace Books (May 1996) p/back edition of Good Omens. (Back)
6. The fact that Crowley's wings are never seen in Good Omens doesn't mean they don't exist. After all, as Aziraphale would say, for most of humanity (and even a fair number of the heavenly host), God himself never manifests in a physical form, and ... well, you take my point, don't you? (Back)
7. See note #1. 'The poet,' of course, is Marvell. (Back)
Happy Holidays, hsavinien, from your Secret Writer!