the creases and flecks in the map (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tropes) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} lower_tadfield,@ 2004-12-21 02:53:00 |
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| Current mood: |  creative |
| Current music: | "Leslie Anne Levine" by The Decemberists |
Fic: Truncated Symphony
Title: Truncated Symphony
Author: muffinbutt
Words: 1,425
Rating: PG, I guess.
Summary: A slightly late birthday pressie for irisbleu. Aziraphale has Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. XD Aziraphale/Crowley. This started as a 15 Minute Ficlet and quickly spiraled out of control. As usual. Beta by madbonnycaptain.
After the Near-Apocalypse, life as they knew it settled down to Business As Usual.
They had dinner at the Ritz twice a week, and generally stayed out of each others' official endeavours. To all outward appearances, everything was perfectly normal. Aziraphale sold far more books than he ever had before, and he steadily replaced all the semi-rare volumes he could.
Of course, the rarest could never be replaced. He tried to be content with what he had, but it was increasingly apparent to him how close to Greed and Pride he had become, before.
He wanted his books back, he realised.
Once he admitted that to himself, he understood that there were a lot of things he wanted.
He loved sweets, and pretty, useless knick-knacks that cluttered up the little spaces on the shelves he always forgot to dust.
His desire for tea was almost obscene.
And then there was Crowley.
He'd always found Crowley beautiful. It was a fact of their existence, one which he had never examined closely during their 6,000-year acquaintance. Contrary to what Crowley probably thought, Aziraphale wasn't all that silly, or innocent. He knew what was what. He was also excellent at compartmentalizing distracting thoughts about Crowley's golden eyes or his quick, restless hands. He just didn't have time for such things. And it had gotten much easier to ignore the demon's careless beauty after the invention of sunglasses.
After the Incident in Lower Tadfield, it seemed that his mind and body had decided that he had time aplenty for such things. In fact, on bad days, it seemed that he only had time for such things.
He wasn't quite sure what to do.
He had always loved Crowley. There was something essentially loveable about him, somehow. He was so tense and deceptively cranky. Aziraphale had gotten millennia of amusement out of driving Crowley mad with his carefully-crafted daft airs. But it had been a vague, unspecific sort of love, borne of friendship and a shared set of diametrically opposed burdens.
This love, which he had come to think of as his Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder with an hysterical giggle, was very... pointed. He'd begun to notice rather more than Crowley's eyes and hands.
It was most inconvenient.
The park air was chilly, and Aziraphale pulled his tweed jacket closer around him. It was nearly time to begin wearing an overcoat, he idly decided.
Crowley was chucking bits of bread at the ducks irritably. Aziraphale sighed, though not perhaps for the reasons he had sighed in Crowley's general direction before.
"The ducks'll inherit the earth, just you wait," Crowley was saying. "Humanity will incinerate itself all on its own sooner or later, and all that'll be left are the bloody St. James ducks, searching for bits of bread into eternity. And I will fucking disincorporate myself laughing at the irony."
Aziraphale looked over at Crowley, an admonishment dying on his lips.
His lips.
Crowley turned, clearly expecting to be scolded, and paused, cocking his head to the side and frowning even more. "Angel?" He pulled his sunglasses down to perch on his nose and squinted at Aziraphale quizzically, his slit pupils dilating in the waning light.
Aziraphale looked away quickly, focusing on one pair of ducks who were far apart from the rest of the teeming masses, squawking at each other with a petulant, intense focus.
"Do watch your language, dear," he murmured faintly, and kept on staring long after Crowley had gone home to escape the cold.
There was clearly nothing to be done about it. They'd had a perfectly good working relationship for millennia. They'd had a perfectly good friendship for centuries.
When disconcerting thoughts about Crowley cropped up perfectly imperfect, like a half-finished symphony in an unknown mode, he let them come. He had come to be awful at lying to himself, after everything. He suspected it was another of Adam's unconsciously cruel gifts to him.
Of course, it hadn't escaped his notice that Crowley had changed after everything as well. On the outside, he was just as edgy and intense as ever, but his conversation had taken on a nearly desperate tone. He talked constantly, and on even less consequential topics than before. It was as if he were trying to fill the silence.
Aziraphale began to secretly fear that Crowley was bored with him. It was the only explanation.
When Crowley blew into the shop, scowling and cursing the unusual snowstorm, and presented him with a much-battered, nearly disbound volume of the Buggre Alle This Bible for Christmas that year, Aziraphale felt he might fall over from shock. As it was, he stuttered and blushed and offered tea with fingers which only trembled a little.
"Really, my dear, I don't know what to say."
Crowley took his sunglasses off and fixed him with a withering glare. "'Thank you' might do nicely, Angel. For a start." He leaned back in his chair precariously, managing to look both smug and irritated. "'Course, if you don't want it, I could always find someone who--"
"No!" Aziraphale blurted, clutching the Bible to him, momentarily forgetting the distracting combination of pale skin, bright eyes, black suit that some part of him couldn't help but notice and appreciate. Crowley's shirt was unbuttoned at the collar. "I--" He sat for a moment, his fingertips gently running over the broken leather bindings. Crowley seemed to be breathing oddly. For that matter, so was he. He looked up, unable to prevent a grin. "I love it. Thank you, Crowley." He opened up the cover and examined the hinges and boards with a critical eye. "It's in almost as good a condition as my old one. Wherever did you manage to locate it?"
Crowley sat forward and rested his cheekbone on the heel of his hand, looking with him, one hand lightly tracing the foxed edges of the pages. The foxing disappeared under his fingertips. Aziraphale suppressed a shiver. "Connectionsss," he hissed, and Aziraphale was pulled from his close inspection of a set of mouse-nibbled corners to stare at him curiously.
Crowley only hissed when he was angry or otherwise upset.
He didn't look angry. He looked--
He sat there, bent over the Bible as if it was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen; only he wasn't looking at the Bible.
He was looking at Aziraphale. As if--
Not possible.
Aziraphale looked back at the Bible, flushing and thinking fast.
"Care for some claret, dear boy? Only I've just got one in that I think you'll like." He glanced at Crowley out of the corner of his eye.
Crowley was looking at him as if he had just figured something out. Aziraphale inwardly panicked.
"I'd love some, angel."
Aziraphale had hoped, upon many occasions, that perhaps having Crowley once would Make It All Go Away.
He was surprised and pleased to find that being pressed uncomfortably against a bookshelf and kissed by a demon whose mouth tasted of fine claret, whose sooty black hair was softer than he thought it would be, and whose eyes were for once not narrowed in irritation in his general direction, but in something far pleasanter, was something he wanted to happen many more times than just the once.
He was very pleased to find that Crowley was in complete agreement.
Aziraphale had wanted small things for years; he had known he wanted Crowley for months (who knew, he admitted to himself now, how long he had wanted him and hadn't known it); he had never been wanted back.
It was an odd thing to get used to. It wasn't Business As Usual, of course, but it really never had been, after. It was inconvenient, and occasionally awkward, and he loved it.
He loved Crowley. It wasn't perfect, by far. It was a patchwork of heated conversations over dinner, pots of Earl Grey in the back room on rainy days, long quiet evenings at the park, and long not-terribly-quiet nights in bed. It was what they had been coming to for 6,000 years. It was a truncated symphony, distilled to something bright and sharp and incomplete in strange spots, and he would never tire of hearing it.
It was inconvenient and odd and perfectly imperfect, and it was theirs alone.
Fin
