Chapter Text
Crowley was meeting with the architect concerning the next incarnation of his Mayfair property (working title: Obnoxious Tower) when he felt London’s energy shift like an elevator dropping a foot while the doors were still open. If Aziraphale had planned to leave town, he’d have discussed it with Crowley first, and if he’d left on the 4:50 from Paddington or whatever, he would have departed gradually, not fallen out of residual awareness between one breath and another.
The architect’s voice sounded light-years away. “Mr. Crowley? Are you all right?”
Thinking quickly, he projectile vomited on her shoes. Excusing himself from that point was not difficult. Leaving his briefcase on the table and his hat on the rack, he descended far too many floors far too fast, forcing the lift to ignore everyone else waiting to go down, and within sixty seconds was tearing through London. The Bentley’s radio played “Dead Man’s Curve,” which was not encouraging.
By Soho standards, the bookshop’s corner looked deserted this drizzly afternoon, too early for the pubs, night clubs, and less savory establishments to be open for business. Light shone through the dusty windows, and a British Postal lorry sat at the curb, raising the possibility of collateral damage and wouldn’t Aziraphale be distraught if some disaster of his sucked one of his charges down in his wake? Crowley parked in the alley and let himself in through the back.
The postman inside was first taken aback, then deeply suspicious, and demanded: “Where’s Mr. Fell?”
No collateral damage. “How long have you had this route?” Crowley retorted. “Don’t you know any better than to pry into his business?”
“He got me this job when I got clean! But there’s prying and then there’s tea on the rug, isn’t there?”
“Nghch!” Crowley pushed past him.
No matter how crowded, dusty, and uninviting the rest of the shop got, the round rug under the domed skylight always remained clear. Today it was rucked up, damp with still-warm tea, revealing glimpses of the painted circle underneath, one of Aziraphale’s flowered tea cups rolling on the floor beside it. The circle glowed in Crowley’s eyes. He swore, tasting the air. No hellish auras or residues beyond his own, okay. But entering a circle set to transport to Heaven without proper preparation could discorporate - someone - and a properly prepared Aziraphale wouldn’t drop tea - “Did you see anything?”
“Not exactly,” said the postman. “I saw him through the window, got his packages out of the back and brought them in like always and - it’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It might be,” Crowley admitted, twitching the rug to cover the circle. “But this is Fell we’re talking about. I reckon somebody’s in trouble, but we can’t leap to the conclusion that it’s him.” True, as far as it went, despite the sirens screaming in all his nerves.
“So what do we do?”
We? Crowley looked at the postman - an ordinary adult human man, nothing special in his aura, who knew nothing about Heaven or Hell he hadn’t learned in Sunday School, who Sandalphon or Hastur could kill with a casual backhand that didn’t even connect, who knew something mysterious and bad was going on, and was scared about it, who wanted to help Mr. Fell anyway. “Best thing you can do is finish your route and keep your trap shut. I can hold down the fort here. Go on. He didn’t find you that job so you could throw it away.”
The postman’s eyes moved from the teacup, to Crowley’s sunglasses, to his hair. “All right,” he said, confirming a suspicion the demon had harbored for awhile; that the Lore of Mr. Fell included him on some terms or other. If they trusted Mr. Fell they provisionally trusted him, and wasn’t that one more thing to be terrified of? “I’ll hope to see him tomorrow.” The postman picked up the cup and set it on the sales counter next to a stack of padded envelopes and a box.
Crowley locked up after him, setting the wards, before miracling the tea out of the rug, pulling it aside without touching it, and examining the calling circle. He didn’t think the power coming off it was strong enough to be a direct Heavenly link; but who else would have called on that line? He could hardly step in himself to find out! Could he? Not without knowing more, dammit - all their millennia of caution would be undone in an instant, if he appeared in Gabriel’s office just when Aziraphale had talked his way out of trouble. He didn’t dare resort to that. Yet.
Crowley stalked every inch of the building, senses on high alert for anything resembling a clue. The small flat off the mezzanine was neat and relatively dust-free, all ready for the next junkie, abused spouse, or evader of England’s less humane laws to find their way through the door in need of a safe haven for the night. The basement kitchen and bathroom smelled of bacon grease and sandalwood, respectively. The back room and shop remained as he’d left them when he’d stopped in a week ago to discuss Arrangements. The till held the usual amount of change. All the workings remained undisturbed, apart from the circle.
Searching turned into restless prowling. Crowley couldn’t see his way forward. Either Aziraphale’d been snatched through the portal to Heaven, and discorporated, or he hadn’t. If the former, Crowley’d never see him again because Gabriel’d have him where he wanted him at last, and that was unbearable, so Crowley decided it couldn’t be true. If the latter, he’d be back - sometime - and Crowley only had to wait.
If Aziraphale could wait decades for Crowley to wake up, Crowley could wait an indeterminate amount of time for Aziraphale to come back. Look after the bookshop for him. Shouldn’t be hard. The place was entirely a front for angelic activity these days. He hadn’t sold a book since the War, when the natural instability of the district had asserted itself in earnest, and now the only books the local market would support were the kind he couldn’t bring himself to peddle.
That didn’t mean he didn’t buy any, and that might be a problem. In addition to his prophecies and misprint Bibles, he’d continued to accumulate new works, though it wasn’t like the old days, when he’d known all literary London, and literary London was the center of the literary universe, so that he had the complete works of everyone of note inscribed by the authors. He had become selective, based on ineffable criteria, sometime while Crowley slept. Modern romance and mystery, poetry and biography and prose, crammed the bedroom shelves, but the only inscribed copies among them were the spy novels Crowley’d had his old not-quite-workmate Fleming sign for “Angel” Fell. Introducing them to each other hadn’t seemed wise on more than one account, so the last truly personal inscriptions, as far as he knew, were from that Wilde fellow. Crowley had no idea how to keep up the collection for him.
No. He'd be back before that mattered. One way or another.
Crowley washed the teacup, put the kettle on, poured himself something from among the less distinguished bottles, examined the circle again, and prowled some more. Afternoon drew into evening. Neon signs, and their puddled reflections, blinked on up and down the streets. Traffic increased. He examined the packages on the sales counter, thinking that he had no business opening them. Opened them. Three copies of a book of poetry; yet another Bible; something in blackletter which he didn’t even try to identify; Edgar Cayce. Passing streetwalkers looked in at the windows. He drew the shades, scowling.
Suppose Aziraphale had wound up discorporated in Heaven, there still had to be a way to get him out, right? He wouldn’t let Gabriel chain him to a desk. He’d find a way home? Or at least get a message to Crowley? Sure, his boss was a powerful arsehole with lots of powerful angels at his command, but Aziraphale was Aziraphale. He was smart, he was tough, he was resourceful, and if all that wasn’t enough - people wanted to help him.
No, humans and Crowley wanted to help him. Gabriel wanted to control him, Dagon wanted to make him suffer for laughs, Michael wanted to keep him out of her war zones, and even that angel that visited that time in Jerusalem, who’d seemed to like him, had said something to Gabriel that got him yanked out of his nice safe niche to wander Eurasia exorcising demon bears and whatnot. No, Aziraphale couldn’t count on Heavenly allies.
Crowley had a brief, vivid vision of sending out a call around England: “Mr. Fell’s in trouble,” and rallying a raging army of drag queens, actors, poets, abuse survivors, single parents, sex workers, mob escapees, displaced persons, bull dykes, confirmed bachelors, overworked service personnel, and the poor and wretched of all stripes to storm Heaven chanting “Give us back our angel;” but Aziraphale would be furious at him for risking his charges. A one-demon commando raid to an unknown destination would be almost as absurd.
He needed intel, dammit.
“I’ve got to do research, don’t I?” He snarled at his second glass of red, and went to the locked cabinet in the back room to drag out the ethereal tomes.
They were heavy, they were dusty, they were bound in decayed leather that crumbled no matter how careful he was, they were in calligraphy or typefaces that he had almost forgotten how to read, they were unindexed, and worst of all, they were written by humans and therefore riddled with speculation, inaccuracy, and downright misinformation. However, they were also heavily annotated by Aziraphale himself, so they weren’t completely useless. Crowley located two that dealt with calling circles and laid them out on the floor of the back room, lying on his stomach to work back and forth between them, making notes on a legal pad while working on his third glass of wine.
“C’mon, c’mon, less about sigils and more about getting a look through ‘em without getting into ‘em,” he muttered in annoyance; and - Aziraphale was back!
His heart leaped for joy, then crashed as he registered how thin and wavering the radiance was, winking fitfully in the glare of the other aura. The front door slammed open, the bell jangling. Crowley jerked himself into snake form faster than he’d done since his banishment from Ireland and slithered into the shadows behind the door to peer through the crack above the hinge.
“What’ve I told you about warding?” Sandalphon roared, dragging Aziraphale in by one arm and hurling him onto the couch beside the calling circle. Crowley barely suppressed a hiss, and calculated the logistics - movement, size, pathway - of striking.
Aziraphale lay where he landed, crumpled upon the couch, which was possibly the most terrifying thing Crowley had ever witnessed. “I, I can’t have angels suddenly appearing in the shop in the middle of a business day, and I can’t expect Heaven to keep track of when it’s a business day in, in my time zone,” he said, in a voice almost too exhausted to be prim. “You know, if you, if you weren’t going to route me through the infirmary, I could have stepped back through the circle straight from the silo. There was no need to go out of your way for me, at all.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job!” Sandalphon loomed over him. “Fifteen angels. Fifteen angels discorporated. But not you. Oh, no, never you, perish the thought.“
“I know, it’s dreadful. I hope you’ll say a word to Corporeal Supply on the subject. I know Hylochiel, for one, has been complaining about the durability of later model bodies for millennia, but if an angel in your position -”
“You know what I mean!”
“Oh, honestly, I’d hoped you and Gabriel had given up on that,” Aziraphale moaned. “Would you rather the operation had failed? Every time someone discorporated it set us back. And if I understood correctly, Hylochiel’d put me in a key position specifically because of the body’s durability. I couldn’t let her down. You’d be ever so upset with me now, if I’d let her down.”
“You could have buggered it up a little at the end and not spoiled much,” said Sandalphon. Both his hands were fists. “It’s just spite with you by now, isn’t it? You can’t possibly prefer living in this dump that reeks of evil - you aren’t even doing a good job - this whole neighborhood -“
“Is full of people who need my care.” Aziraphale sounded limp and sad and defeated. Crowley slipped through the door in the shadow of a bookcase, eased himself over a stack of commentaries on Nostradamus. “I can’t let them down, either.”
“Better them than Gabriel. You idiot. You could be in Heaven, easy hours, hobnobbing with the best; and instead you’re moldering here getting thoroughly up my nose.”
“Lovely as I’m sure it is, being Gabriel’s lapdog, and touched as I am by your eagerness to have me join you in that state, my duty is here and I will not voluntarily turn aside from it.” What should have sounded defiant came out shuddery and weak.
Sandalphon bent over him, aspect to aspect.
Crowley coiled and tested his fangs. If he struck the neck -
“If I hit you,” said Sandalphon, voice dangerously quiet, “one blow, right there -“ he tapped a meaty fist against the bulb of Aziraphale’s nose - “in the state you’re in right now, you’d discorporate. Drive your nose into your brain, snap your neck with the momentum. Not a thing you could do about it.”
“I’m sure that’s true. And I’m, I’m sure the quartermaster would be understanding, when I explained my cause of death to him.”
“You think I can’t handle the quartermaster?”
“I think I can’t stop you from doing anything you wish to do right now.”
When the elbow draws back, launch. Right on the jugular - you can do this. First time for everything.
“You’re too pathetic to soil my knuckles on,” said Sandalphon, straightening. “So sit here and think about how much easier your life would be if you’d been less stubborn, while your eyes are - Hang on, is that circle still open? Damn carelessness.” He jerked his fist, and the circle faded.
“Hylochiel has been busy,” said Aziraphale. “I’m sure she’d have hung up once she had everything back in order.” His breath wheezed a bit. “Oh, I hope she gets some sort of commendation for this operation. I’m so proud of her.”
“Yeah, and that means a lot to her, I don’t think! I wonder how long it’ll take you to get the eyes back. Be interesting to find out how much of a Guardian you are, with no wings and no eyes. Or - you could trip on something and break that neck after all. Like a sensible angel.”
No eyes?
Aziraphale, hidden by the back of the couch, said nothing.
Sandalphon sneered down at him. “Out of smart remarks, are you? Wonders never cease. Have fun recovering. I’m out of here.” He turned on his heel and slammed through the door, charging through a pack of humans, who protested. One of them tried the door, which remained locked, which meant they didn’t need to be here, and they passed on.
Crowley slithered across the floor and shifted back to himself, kneeling by the couch. “Aziraphale?”
The angel’s face was drained and pale, even his eyes, even the pupils; but he somehow managed a Smile. “Hello, my dear. I’m sorry if I worried you.”
“What happened? You look terrible.”
“I’m a little confused on the details,” admitted Aziraphale, “but Hylochiel - you remember her?”
“Worked with me on the stars, got you sent off to do hero-duty when you’d rather be scribing, sure, I remember her.”
“She has those atom bomb things in her territory in, I’m afraid I didn’t catch exactly where, maybe she’s still in the Caucausus? Anyway, apparently some of your lot came poking around and did something that started a, a chain reaction?”
“What, they set off the bombs?”
“I – suppose so? Or, primed them to go off? I haven’t been keeping up with that sort of thing to speak of. Anyway, a great deal of power was due to be released, right on a ley, and since it was caused by demonic activity the injunction not to meddle with human technology didn’t apply, but the amount of force due to be released was more than she could handle on her own, so she did a localized time stop and sent out a general call, and also specifically summoned me.”
“What the hell did she want you for? Are you blinded?”
“I can detect light, but essentially, yes. Pray don’t be upset. It’s only till the nerves regenerate. This body is very durable, you know. I believe that was her reason for summoning me. Because the original issue of bodies can handle a great deal of stress, and one of the, I believe three things, she had to do was to send excess energy off to the sun.”
“You channeled an atomic bomb?”
“Um, more than one? I think? She had no leisure to explain past the basics, kept stopping and starting time and had one team working on the leys and one team doing something to stop the reactions and one team gathering up energy for me, and angels kept dropping out or discorporating because it was all, all fairly difficult...”
“All right, angel, never mind.” Handling fission and fusion energy had been routine for starmakers, once upon a time. Crowley’d never done it in a body, but he could see how it might be done - in through the locus of power, out through a locus of perception focusing on the destination. He examined Aziraphale’s hands, sunburned and stiff. “In through the hands, up through the arms to the - spine, yeah? To the optic nerve? Bet you’re sore.”
“Less so than you might think. The circle Hylochiel put me seems to have been healing as fast as it could as one of its functions.”
“Yeah, that tracks. You want tea, or Scotch?”
“Yes, please. And could we - I think I’d be more comfortable in the back room.” Aziraphale stirred, trying to rise, and huffed with annoyance as his body, for perhaps the first time since the Flood, refused to cooperate.
“Sure thing. I’ve got you.” Crowley took his hands, and levered him to his feet, glad to feel the familiar solidity intact - he’d been half-afraid that the corporation had worn thin, and he’d be lighter than usual. That not being the case, Crowley didn’t try to lift him, but supported his stiff and stumbling steps to his favorite chair, fetched the tea service and the decanter, and put the cup, piping hot and about half-and-half tea and Scotch, into his hands. “I bet you’re starving, too. What’re you in the mood for?” He put away the books he’d left on the floor.
“Oh, my, now you mention it, I could do with some samosas - or some scones - ooh, or some shrimp fried rice –- or, goodness, anything really. What time is it? I suppose the bakery must be closed by now.”
“Nonsense, the night’s young!” And nobody in a mile radius would refuse to bring food to this address, regardless, how can you not know that? So Crowley called the Indian diner currently occupying the storefront that had housed a succession of new-immigrant-run restaurants for a hundred and sixty years; a bakery that always used the same scone recipe regardless of how often it changed hands; and a Chinese place controlled by a wizened matriarch whom Aziraphale had found wandering lost and returned home with a penny and a sweet when she was three years old.
While awaiting the deliveries, Aziraphale drank tea and Scotch and Crowley did what he could with the damage. Worst was the eyes. The layer of scorched corneal cells came off readily, but the main problem was in the visual nerves, and Crowley did not have the healing skills to do more than supply an improved growth environment. “Sandalphon should have taken you to Raphael,” he declared, giving up in disgust.
“If he’d wanted me to heal, he should have,” said Aziraphale. “But I believe this is intended as my punishment for not discorporating.”
“He wanted to finish you off,” said Crowley, as softly as he could for the rage in his throat. “I’d have killed him, angel. Venom to the jugular, summon hellfire, not a trace left of him.”
“Oh, Crowley, no!”
“He’ll do it one of these days! He’s a thug and a bully and he wants to drag you home and lay you at Gabriel’s feet so you’ll never get back where you belong.”
Aziraphale sighed. “I know, I know, but in his heart, he really does believe that what Gabriel wants is always for the greater good. He thinks he’d ultimately be doing me a favor. He doesn’t understand and he doesn’t want to understand and I’m not denying that’s a problem, but it’s not a capital offense.”
“Attempted murder would be. I’m serious, angel, I can’t stand by and watch anybody do that and I don’t care who it is.”
“I understand, but what you need to understand is that if you ever assault someone you’ll have to go through me to do it.”
“Even when they’re hurting you?”
“Yes! Especially then! You’ve never been a fighter - don’t try to turn into one on my account.”
“What - so you think I couldn’t do it?”
“I think you shouldn’t. And yes, in Sandalphon’s case, I think you couldn’t! He always has his sword handy and he’s always ready to use it. You’re a thinker. He’s a smiter. Don’t oppose his strength to your weakness.”
Crowley opened his mouth, but was saved from whatever he was about to say by a knock on the back door. “Blechl,” he grumped, and opened to find three delivery boys. Aziraphale waved and called them by name as confidently as if he could see them. Crowley overpaid them in accordance with Aziraphale’s custom, spread out the food conveniently for his angel to work back and forth between dishes by touch and smell, and poured more tea, all the while tying up the knowledge that Aziraphale, forced to choose between Sandalphon and Crowley, still believed he should choose Sandalphon, into a manageable knot of pain.
The spread was a big one even by Aziraphale’s standards, and he ate his way steadily through it as Crowley talked about the Obnoxious Tower plan, how the problem was to make it sufficiently obnoxious without making it ugly or boring, because he would, after all, be living in the thing; whereat Aziraphale pointed out that living in it would limit the amount of time he spent looking at it, which Crowley realized was a valid point. Aziraphale’s face and aura both grew brighter as he ate and listened and made the occasional remark; but now the food was all gone and he still only needed a drenching and a torn robe to look as if he’d washed up after the Flood.
Words bubbled half-formed around the knot in Crowley’s chest, as he cleared the cartons and bags and Styrofoam containers away, but Aziraphale didn’t need to deal with his stupid hurt feelings right now. “Any chance of you getting a bit of sleep?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Aziraphale. “I never have understood the appeal, and I don’t fancy taking the stairs to the flat with my eyes in this state. I suppose I’ll have to rebuild my personal reserve with the gramophone, since I can’t read.”
“I could, I could read to you. If you want. If it isn’t anything with big blocks of text.” Crowley changed out the whiskey for wine, as being more sustainable. He wasn’t sure Aziraphale could survive a hangover right now, and he certainly didn’t have enough strength to sober up. “You’ve done it for me often enough.” Of course, Aziraphale read better than him - eyes processing print of all types effortlessly, voice well-oiled and capable of running all night, never tangling itself up in words or syntax, altering itself effortlessly to differentiate between character voices without resorting to caricature.
“Oh, would you? That would be lovely. Perhaps some poetry?”
“You got a new poetry book in today. Let me go get it.”
He’d left the books stacked by the register, with the poetry, the smallest, on top. Plain dust cover, big letters. “Homage to Clio,” he read out, sprawling on the couch and tilting the lampshade to shine away from Aziraphale’s dazzled eyes and onto the page. “W.H. Auden. Seen that name before. He’s one of your queer humans, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes!” Aziraphale sounded pleased. “A clever boy. Self-conscious, you know, though he may have grown out of that by now. He’s American these days, but I met him here between the wars - not to know well, only in passing. I doubt he’d remember me.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Crowley, riffling the pages. The shapes of the verses looked doable; nothing so big as to get lost in. “I bet he recognized his guardian angel when he met you. Might even turn up in a poem, you don’t know.” He couldn’t have defined “queer,” exactly, but knew it was something about sex, gender, loves that dared not speak their names. Knew people so labeled were Aziraphale’s people, and therefore his. Crowley and Aziraphale, queer angel and queer demon, bound together in ways that could not safely be talked about. “Ready?”
Aziraphale managed a heartrendingly small wiggle. “Yes, please.”
Crowley sounded rough and hesitant to himself at first, and couldn’t always make sense of the line breaks, but Aziraphale made no objection to his going back over a bit in order to parse it properly. The poet was clever, all right - a bit too clever for his own good, sometimes, but Crowley could relate to that, and as sure as he got annoyed at some bit of lyric posturing, along would come a good plain round stanza.
“Our race would not have gotten far,
Had we not learned to bluff it out
And look more certain than we are
Of what our motion is about- Oi, can’t get more human than that!”
“Human, yes. Doesn’t describe any demons or angels we know, at all!”
The way history kept steadily moving till things and people that had loomed gigantic became obscure in next to no time; a brutal little poem referencing Eden; one about a kitchen; one on the sin of gluttony, of which Auden seemed to approve more than not, which made Aziraphale nodd and smile and discourse on the human confusion of gluttony with appetite. Then a four-line parable about a watch:
"The watch upon my wrist
Would soon forget that I exist,
If it were not reminded
By days when I forget to wind it. All right, that’s funny, but I don’t know what it means.”
“I think it’s about not noticing things till you need them.”
“Or maybe he felt a need to round out a page and got silly.”
“Maybe. What’s next?”
“‘The More Loving One.’” The knot in Crowley's chest twinged; he didn’t know why.
"Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return? Gkd
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more, more loving one - be me -”
Choking, he dropped the book.
“Crowley -“
The weak, lost kindness in Aziraphale’s voice almost broke him, and he had no business breaking here. “I don’t know how you can stand to read this pretentious stuff!”
“Really? I don’t know how you can stand to listen to popular music.” A dangerous edge, there.
“What’re, what’re you talking about? Pop’s all good fun, silly stuff, here today, gone tomorrow -“
Aziraphale sat up straight, took a deep breath, looked Crowley straight in the sunglasses with his burnt-out pale blue eyes, and sang, in harmony with himself:
I bless the day I found you
I want to stay around you
And so I beg you, let it be me
Don't take this heaven from one
If you must cling to someone
Now and forever, let it be me -
Although he could normally sing the entirety of “Greensleeves,” with lute, on a single breath, he faltered to a stop, air stuttering in his throat, and closed his eyes.
Crowley tossed off the wine in his glass and set it down with care not to let it make a sound. Thin dirty rain ticked against the windows. “Yeah. I should go.”
“You should not.”
“Angel -“ It hurts too much, if I stay I’ll do something stupid, something that breaks you, you’re too fragile, let me through the do not cross line, let me hold you, let me keep you safe even though I’m as big a danger to you as Sanadalphon, if Sandalphon had seen me here I couldn’t have moved fast enough, he would have killed you, how can you not see what they’re doing to you, they don’t love you they never did that’s my job and I can’t -
“We’ve learned many useful things from the humans,” said Aziraphale, sounding stronger now, perhaps bolstered by the familiar structures of lecture mode. “Self-laceration is not among them. They feel so many things, so intensely, of course they occasionally get too on the nose for us when expressing themselves. But they have also provided useful tools for getting out of funks, and I see it’s time to bring out the big guns.”
“You have big guns?” For this?
“The cabinet under the window, with the carved front. Open it, please.”
Crowley sighed and hauled himself off the couch. “All right.” He couldn’t imagine anything in there would improve his own mood, but if it held some panacea for Aziraphale’s ills then he’d read from it till doomsday. “What’s in there? Your porn stash?”
Not porn, no. A motley assortment, thick and thin and short and tall, and he gathered from the range of shades that, if he could see more colors, he’d be seeing a lot of them. One set even named itself a rainbow: The Blue, The Green, The Yellow Fairy Book.
What was all this? Crowley read titles out at random. “Through the Looking Glass? Swallows and Amazons? Now We Are Six? Little Women? What on earth’s a hobbit?”
“A non-human being who lives in comfortable holes, wears waistcoats, and eats seven meals a day, when possible.”
“So - an entire race of Aziraphales?” He pulled the book out and flipped through it, but the text blocks were bigger than he felt up to coping with.
“Essentially, yes, but the one in question goes on an adventure to rob a dragon with thirteen dwarves and a wizard, which isn’t respectable.”
“I dunno, I’d respect anybody who robbed a dragon, no matter how many dwarfs and wizards they had along.” Crowley turned to look at his angel, wondering how, after all this time, he could still pull out a surprise like this. “When did you start reading children’s books?”
“While you slept. Alice began it. I met the author on that run I made up to the universities right before, you remember? I was, well, I needed diversions around that time and took more trouble to cultivate human acquaintances than I normally do, and since he knew I was a bookseller, he revealed the pseudonym to me, and I read it. Dodgson wrote it for his child friends, who were all highly intellectual little girls, so I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised at how clever it is. Also - it gave off this, oh, how to describe it? Sometimes, when I hold a book, before I even look inside, it - doesn’t speak exactly - it’s as if - some books almost have an aura, a quality that - I feel it in my hands - something that tells me, This is a work that lives.”
“Can’t say as I’ve felt any such of a thing, but I can believe you do. Those are the classics, are they?”
“Not, not always. To become a classic a book primarily has to catch the attention, over time, of the, the class of people who can declare that things are classic, and make the designation stick. But the books with this aura reward multiple readings, at least for me. Often for others, too. Alice itself has gone right past classic to byword. Any time a reviewer thinks particularly well of any book for children, I find, the phrase ‘since Alice’ will make its way into the review, even though it’s hard to find ways in which any books since Alice are truly comparable to it. It’s nonsense, you see, a difficult genre to do well.”
Warmth spread through Crowley’s chest and loosened the knot in it as Aziraphale’s voice strengthened, though his hands were too still.
At this point, alas, he pulled himself up, as he did when he thought he was on a conversational vector of more interest to him than to his listener. “Be that as it may. After that I paid more attention to books written for children and I’ve found that, as a class, they have many excellent qualities that are harder to find in works for adults.”
“Like what?” Never cut yourself off on my account, angel!
“Well. To begin with. The authors are aware that they’re competing with the entire world for the child’s attention, so they take pains to be as interesting as possible on every page. I enjoy a nice philosophic diversion as much as the next being -“
“More than me, for sure.”
“But sometimes one simply isn’t in the mood. And then the themes tend to be, not simplistic, far from it, but, not, not personally challenging for me. Issues of maturation and development, basic morality, adapting to the society in which one is raised - they’re of vital importance to the target audience, but I am safely at one remove from them. The, the sorts of issues that have distressed us tonight are almost wholly absent.”
“All right, that does sound nice.” He put The Hobbit back where it came from, and pulled out Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“The fact that they’re written for growing brains, that are not only more likely to reread than not, but which are almost guaranteed to find new layers of meaning every time they open a favorite work, encourages the authors to supply plenty of matter to work on, and they can be wonderfully subtle about it. That alone is a level of artistry worth seeking out. And in the end - one can find tragedy, and sentimentality is to be had for the asking, but I’ve never yet closed a book intended for the young and felt depressed, or weary, or or anything but invigorated. Reminded, you know, of how wonderful and interesting Earth is. So that cabinet’s become my medicine for melancholy. On nights like this when the years get, get a little heavy, something in there is bound to serve as a pick-me-up.”
Certainly this topic was picking the angel up, which endeared the stuff to Crowley off the bat. He paged through the Alice book, which looked readable enough, lots of illustrations and dialog (“...and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”), some interesting typesetting choices. “So you want me to read Alice to you?”
“If you - no, wait! I want to read the Alice books to you sometime. But anything else that takes your fancy.”
“All right, whatever you like. Give me a minute.” Crowley passed his hands along the spines, seeking the aura Aziraphale’d described. It sounded like the feeling he got from his car. He’d flirted with a lot of cars; had assumed at first that he’d treat them as he did clothes and hairstyles; but nothing else felt like his Bentley. Screw automatic transmissions and tail fins - that car had a soul. But these books only felt like books to him. Better get a thin one, to test the waters. This one - no - hmm, possibility - oh. Oh, yes! Good typeface with plenty of room to move around, spot illustrations, and the titular hero bore more than a passing resemblance to Aziraphale.
He carried it to the couch and settled himself, half sitting, with his legs stretched along the seat and his elbow propped on the armrest, leaning toward Aziraphale and the light. “Here we go, then, angel. Let’s see how I do this.”
Aziraphale wiggled, a proper wiggle, turning his faded face and dulled blue eyes toward Crowley and the light. “You will do beautifully, my dear.”
“Hch.” Crowley swallowed, flexed his jaw, and began to read:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump bump bump...