vulgarweed (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vulgarweed) wrote2010-08-17 01:00 am
vulgarweed) wrote2010-08-17 01:00 am
Happy Birthday, Quantum_Witch
BAZMÊLO SOBÔLN
For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quantum_witch on her birthday, 2010
Crossover: Good Omens/Supernatural
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Aziraphale, other angels, Castiel, Crowley. Gen-ish; Aziraphale/Crowley definitely implied, Castiel/Dean implied if you squint
Summary: There’s a new sheriff in town, and he knows how to handle two legendary outlaws.
Author’s Notes: The title means “Midday in the West” in Enochian. Feel free to translate “Midday” as “High Noon” if you like; this story is a Western. Inspired by various art pieces by22by7: this, this, and this. And these by Slinky Milinky: New Sheriff In Town
and An Ocean Where Dreams Reflect
So it seemed one more apocalypse had come and gone without actually happening, and Aziraphale wondered if the sense of anticlimax was ever going to get more bearable. How many more times would he have to exist through it before it became just another ho-hum occurrence, and would the nerves he wasn’t supposed to have survive it?
If he were the angry, avenging sort of angel, he would have been in a state of blasphemous, drunken wanton destruction by now. But of course he was more librarian than warrior, more diplomat than muscle, and the amount of anger in him had never been great enough that he could afford to go wasting it on the bottomless abyss of God. If he were to throw it all at such a vast source, what reserve would he have left with which to properly “enjoy” the Daily Mail?
From what he’d picked up from the ethereal network that Crowley insisted on calling “angel WiFi,” the details of this particular spectacular failure didn’t make much more sense than the one they had endured some twenty years past—with the added surreality that its location and personages had been, in this case, very terribly American. There had been a lot of motor cars more modern than Crowley’s involved, and a prophet who wrote lowbrow literature, and a stubborn insistence borne of who knows what on the part of Michael and Lucifer that they needed human bodies for some arcane reason, and that it really did all come down to sibling rivalry in the end. Aziraphale had to think that, as motives went, that was so far from Ineffable it just made him want to say eff it, and be grateful that there was an ocean in between and that he’d played some small part in getting free of the Colonies.
It was hardly a matter suitable for plagues and blood rivers and rains of frogs – it was, however, admirably suited to some wine-soaked venting. Aziraphale felt himself long overdue for a session of that, and an opportunity to get as much of the other side of the story as there was, and there was only one entity he really trusted to dish the dirt the heavenly tabloids hushed up.
And that was the most disconcerting factor, the only thing that had Aziraphale truly worried. Crowley was missing in action – or in inaction, for Aziraphale had found that he was not in his flat sleeping through the whole thing, as might have been expected. Nor was he to be found in any of London’s houses of ill or high repute, nor in St James’ Park, nor in his beloved Bentley—which seemed unnervingly unused—nor at the Ritz, nor, ever, maddeningly, in Aziraphale’s bookshop, which was where he belonged at least some of the time, blowing dust around and causing distractions.
Crowley didn’t answer his phone. Or his email. Or his post. He hadn’t even, apparently, played any FarmVille or Mafia Wars on his Facebook page. (Or changed his profile picture, which was still as nude and lewd as it had always been.) In fact, any and all attempts to contact him through any usual channels had failed, and with each attempt Aziraphale made his voice got a little twitchier and more fearful, and his anxious imaginings became worse- and worse-case-scenario.
So it was in a volatile mix of worry and annoyance that, for the second time in twenty years, Aziraphale lifted the threadbare rug from the circle set into the floor of his bookshop.
The incense he lit didn’t make the shop smell very nice, and the words he intended to say wouldn’t improve the ambience either – after all, while he certainly had the power and the knowledge to perform a basic demon-summoning ritual, especially since he knew the particular demon he planned to summon so very well, it wasn’t exactly going to be suited to his aesthetic sense. Really, he shouldn’t have to resort to such things. It felt like a demotion.
Still, his hand shook just a little as he traced the sigils at the cardinal points, droned the corrupted words of invocation, and at the very last, took a deep breath and, for the very first time that he could remember, wrote Crowley’s True Name. The chalk nearly fell from his hand.
All of SoHo around him seemed to tremble in silence. The stillness was absolutely stifling, and behind him, something small and fragile-sounding fell from its shelf and shattered. Aziraphale yelped, and the very tip of his trainer breached the edge of the circle.
“Oh, fuck,” he cried, as a blue light shorted out his consciousness. The déjà vu just added insult to injury.
***
When he came to, more or less, he was in his own body, more or less—not anyone else’s, which was a great relief.
But everything else was completely surprising. He was sitting in a very uncomfortable position, rocking in a most disconcerting way. It took him an embarrassing amount of time to muster the courage to look down, and finally understand that the warm, too large, strangely moving mass between his legs was, at least to appearances, an ordinary horse. With a bridle and saddle. That Aziraphale was riding.
The sun beat down hot on a dry, hilly landscape, shaded only by the large brim of a white hat. Beads of sweat were rising on his forehead, and the harshness of the sun was causing him to hallucinate ponds and puddles all around him in the red sand, off in the distance behind the sagebrush and saguaros, just in front of the eerie red church spires of wind-carved stone.
The huge sky showed no signs of relieving clouds. Aziraphale found that he had a canteen on his belt, and took a drink of brackish water. He was wearing a plain beige shirt, brown trousers, sharp-toed brown boots, and a wide belt that for some reason had guns on it.
But the smell of the air was unmistakable, could not possibly be that of any place other than where it was—above the dust and horse, there was a sweet, intoxicating, chilly ozone essence that existed nowhere else in creation. Aziraphale’s hackles rose in fear.
He appeared to be in a cowboy movie, it’s true. But he was undeniably also in Heaven.
***
The nature of Heaven has been described many times, usually by people under the influence of spirits, shrooms, or Hollywood money. In its various depictions it has been utopian, dystopian, and just plain stupid. And one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia and yet another’s just plain stupid, and so multiply it by every person who has ever thought of Heaven at all, and you begin to see the magnitude of the contradictions. But Heaven is also a distillation of the mind of God, who is neither utopian nor dystopian nor stupid—but He sees and remembers Everything and has both the longest and the shortest attention span in the universe. Heaven is stable, but never static.
The fact of the matter is, all the depictions of Heaven—from Dante’s Paradiso, which is nonetheless much less widely read than the Inferno, to horror-writers’ inversions, to that sappy Rainbow Bridge poem—are all true, as far as they go. But they don’t go very far. (No, Pamela Barnes is not stuck at the Meadowlands for all eternity; she really far prefers CBGB circa 1976. She and Joey Ramone have serious chemistry, as it happens. But I digress.)
The only really inaccurate thing about any imaginings of Heaven, no matter how outré, is the idea that there is never any conflict, pain, or fear there. That is false.
***
Aziraphale was wondering what he could possibly have done so wrong in his Seeking to wind up here, and in this particular vision of Heaven, which could never have been his; he was no fan of desert climates.
He was trying to think about conserving water, finding food, petting the horse and learning its Name so it wouldn’t throw him, when he heard a horrible whooping noise to his left and behind him on a hill.
He whirled his neck around, popping a muscle painfully. Instead of the Red Indians he’d hoped he could reason with, what he saw were two beings, also on horseback, riding down at him hard and fast.
They weren’t cowboys, exactly. They were angels. The faster their horses ran, the faster their human appearances burned away and the fiercer they became, all wings and eyes and flame and air. Dominions. Angels of the Hierarchy, furious. They had eight eyes like a spider on one face, huge teeth like a bear’s on another.
“What’s he got?” said one.
“Dunno. Some Grace left, at least. Betrayer. Monkey-lover. Demon-fucker.”
“There will be blood. There must.”
Aziraphale blanched, and his horse fidgeted and reared and he barely held on.
Movies, dammit, he had to be in one for a reason. He drew one of the revolvers at his hip and fired into the air, as a warning shot.
“Cute,” spat one Dominion, driving his steed that now had eight legs and horns.
“You don’t understand, do you?” said the other, pushing forward to ride Aziraphale down, a sword darkly flaming drawn from nowhere. “We’re the last. Of the old order. When only holiness was the Law. When renegades like you were dealt with. There’s no law anymore worthy of the Name. We’d have strung you up at the gallows for what you’ve done and known it was Right. Now there’s no time, we’ll just spear you for your Grace like common bandits.”
“Admirable of you,” Aziraphale said, mouth dry. “Sticking to the Old Ways like that.”
“Are you mocking us, little pigeon? Dirt-dwelling Principality nobody?”
“No,” said Aziraphale. “I’m not mocking you.” He knew that somewhere in his own reality was a sword of his own to draw, but he couldn’t find it yet. He had no Orders, and he had no hate. “I’m just sad that you can’t adapt.”
They advanced upon him, circling him, flaming swords in one hand and black-burning lance in the others. The first one yelped in pain and indignation when Aziraphale did the only sensible thing and shot him.
It bought Aziraphale a little time at least, as the one he’d hit fell from his…riding-thing and landed arse-down in a mud-puddle, trailing an ichor that was really only symbolic blood. Aziraphale suspected his own would be less so.
The other was enraged, and came at him hard, shrieking invective full of Wrath, lance poised. Aziraphale pulled his horse around and leaned down, just hoping to dodge the blow, and whispered something low and quiet, subsonically, aimed mostly at the back of his horse but also partway into the soil, which had to be real Heaven and therefore interconnected.
There was a gunshot in the air. One far, far louder than the one from Aziraphale’s own pistol.
There was another being present, on a white horse on a hill. He wore a white hat and a long tan duster coat, and a gleaming star on his chest, and he held what seemed to Aziraphale’s eyes a disproportionately large rifle, and while Aziraphale was no connoisseur of historical American weaponry, he would not be the least bit surprised to learn it was a Winchester.
“BEGONE,” came a massive, gravelly voice. “TROUBLE THIS FELLOW SERVANT OF THE LORD NO MORE.”
The Dominions rode off, yelping in pain and fear, into the East where the light was fading.
Aziraphale, however, still trembled as the relatively-human-looking blue-eyed, dark-haired-vessel-wearing angel on the white horse began to shift and grow. He stood in the stirrups; he swelled and expanded; his immense, iridescent wings exploded forth—all sixteen of them; his body swelled to the size of a small star; his faces bloomed forth in all their true beauty (the eagle, the lion, the ox, the stag). While he was still on a horse. Yes, absurd—but bloodcurdlingly beautiful.
Aziraphale lifted up his head and felt his own body shifting. If his own true death was at hand, best to meet it in his true form. Wings erupted from his back—six of them, one pair blue, one cream, one copper. When his heads had finished transforming (the stag, the duck, the dolphin, the fox) he spoke in several voices. “I recognise you. Castiel.”
“Aziraphale,” said the being before him, newly-promoted Archangel. “I recognize you as well.”
“ZORGE, LAP—“ Aziraphale began fearfully.
“NOCO MAD HOATH JAIDA,” said Castiel. “I know, brother.”
“Then---“
“They meant you harm,” Castiel said gruffly. “I do not. I do not believe it is our Father’s will that you be harmed.”
“Have you…?”
“Spoken with him?” A flash of sorrow crossed all of Castiel’s faces. “No. I have not. I can only interpret…my feelings of His will. My sense of duty.”
“Well, we all do our best, of course,” Aziraphale said sadly, all his faces sheepish although none of them were a sheep.
“Yes,” said Castiel, with a flash of something resembling human humor, and then he once again looked like a man—handsome but average, a little scruffy, seated on a horse in a way that looked almost natural.
“Er…if I may ask, er, the décor?” Aziraphale asked.
“Yes, well,” Castiel smiled. “I spent time on Earth, as you know. No matter where you are in the United States of America, in a motel, when the humans you watch over have fallen asleep, there is always a cowboy movie on the television.”
“And your favourite human?”
“Is fond of them,” Castiel said, and shut down that line of questioning. “Aziraphale, I know you are seeking someone. I know that’s why you are here.”
Aziraphale’s hands on the reins of his horse started to shake so much he knew his knees were only going to get worse, and Castiel obviously held all the cards, so he thought he would be better off dismounting to answer this question. He did so, awkwardly, with a crick in his knee and a huff of contempt from the horse. But at least the horse had never thrown him, as Crowley often complained….oh. Crowley. What to do? The truth might cost him, but a lie wouldn’t help him.
“I’m looking for my dearest friend,” Aziraphale finally said.
“I understand,” Castiel said and dismounted in his own turn. He smiled slightly at Aziraphale. “You do know Mark 16:17-18?”
“Of course.”
“And have you cast out devils?”
“Yes, because it was late and I was tired.”
Castiel smiled. “And have you spoken with new tongues?”
“All the time. I had no idea I could speak Chinese or Haitian Creole until I had to, and then I was fine.”
“And have you laid hands on the sick and had them recover?”
“I once healed a bicycle,” Aziraphale said. “I got carried away.”
“And have you drank any deadly thing and it did not hurt you?”
“Er….look, Castiel, I know it’s possible I have a problem, and really, when everything has settled down, I will try one of these, er…Ay Ay Meetings…”
“Well, if you do, take me with you. But let’s not get started on that just now,” Castiel said, eyes darting sideways. “Really, the last question is…have you taken up serpents?”
Castiel opened up one of the saddlebags at the flank of his horse and pulled out a burlap sack. Aziraphale watched in awe as the sack writhed. Castiel pulled the drawstring and emptied the sack.
A large rattlesnake with beautiful diamond patterns slithered in the dirt. It lifted its head to peer at Aziraphale with its shockingly soulful slitted viper eyes. Aziraphale knelt down and extended his hands, letting the snake crawl onto them.
“Oh, my dear,” he whispered. “Are you alright? Did they hurt you? I tried so hard to find you, thank….someone…”
The snake curled around his wrists, up his arms to settle around his neck. Its tail was shaking violently—the rattle being a conventional sign of threat, but Aziraphale understood, he was only wagging his tail like a dog, in joy.
“Yes, Castiel,” Aziraphale said. “I have taken up serpents. Many times before now. As you well know.”
“Well,” Castiel said. “As far as I know, you’ve taken up only this serpent. Let him down. On the ground. On my word, he will not be harmed.”
Aziraphale paused for just a second before gently unwinding the resistant snake from around his neck and setting him on the dust. He saw the fear in the yellow eyes. He flashed it back in his own. If this turned out to be a betrayal, he would want to be wiped out himself. He just had a sense in his heart that this was the right thing to do, and he could do nothing but follow, and tears started to build in his eyes, for either result.
Castiel bent down low, to the snake, and touched his forefingers to the snake’s head.
In a flash, Crowley stood beside Aziraphale, tanned and handsome as he always was, in his jeans and sharp boots and black hat.
Aziraphale just pulled him into his arms and let their hats clash. He didn’t care. Castiel was surely no harsh judge of fashion.
“Crowley,” said Castiel, his strong voice pulling Crowley reluctantly out of Aziraphale’s embrace. “You have a choice.” He made a motion with his hand, and Crowley’s black hat turned white. “You can stay. If you want. I appreciate the risks you have taken. And I understand love now.”
Aziraphale drew a sharp breath. Crowley glanced at him quickly, held his eyes for a long second.
“All things considered, lawman,” Crowley said, in an affected cowboy-movie drawl, all landed consonants and flat vowels. “Ah’d like to be on the right side of the law, but it just ain’t me. Ah think you’re a good man, though. Ah got no problem with you, if ya got no problem with me.”
Castiel grinned a little bit, white teeth showing through his human vessel’s pink lips, blue eyes widening. “I have no problem with you. I just thought that perhaps my brother Aziraphale might want to stay. But I suspect he won’t without you, so…”
Aziraphale shivered. “I…think I probably ought to stay, being an angel and all. But now that I’ve met you and know that Heaven is in good hands, I think perhaps Earth needs me more, and…”
“And you want to be where he is,” said Castiel, nodding at Crowley. “And you can’t be together in Heaven or Hell, so of course you both prefer to be on Earth.”
“Well, er, that’s obviously my preference,” Crowley babbled, “but of course Hell is always worse by definition…and…”
Castiel cleared his throat violently. “I GAVE you the choice. You COULD have been redeemed and live here. On the spot.”
“Yes, but…six thousand years, you know?”
Castiel sighed. “I understand. It takes time. In another six thousand years, you might think differently. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime?” Aziraphale asked.
Castiel was staring off into the middle distance. “In the meantime, go back to Earth together and do what you do. All I’m thinking is that, in only about fifty or sixty years, my favorite human will come back to me.”
Aziraphale looked into Castiel’s eyes and understood, as he took Crowley’s hand to make sure they got back safe together.
Castiel looked at both of them. “The peace of the Lord be with you---“
He kissed Aziraphale chastely, and then tried to kiss Crowley chastely and failed, because Crowley did nothing chastely.
“---and also with you,” the demon who had chosen to remain a demon stammered, with his trembling forked tongue in Castiel’s mouth.
***
Aziraphale remounted his horse, and held out a hand to Crowley to help him up. Aziraphale was not a great equestrian, but he still enjoyed the cinematic beauty of riding into the sunset with Crowley behind him, holding tight around his waist, and knowing that they would have to ride hard through the night to get clear, but as soon as the morning dawned, they would wake up on a rickety tiny cot in a SoHo bookshop, holding each other, and knowing that, at last, Heaven was in the hands of a being who had real, gritty, hard-won knowledge of imperfect but all-important love.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY,quantum_witch
I hope you enjoy it!
For
quantum_witch on her birthday, 2010Crossover: Good Omens/Supernatural
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Aziraphale, other angels, Castiel, Crowley. Gen-ish; Aziraphale/Crowley definitely implied, Castiel/Dean implied if you squint
Summary: There’s a new sheriff in town, and he knows how to handle two legendary outlaws.
Author’s Notes: The title means “Midday in the West” in Enochian. Feel free to translate “Midday” as “High Noon” if you like; this story is a Western. Inspired by various art pieces by
22by7: this, this, and this. And these by Slinky Milinky: New Sheriff In Town and An Ocean Where Dreams Reflect
So it seemed one more apocalypse had come and gone without actually happening, and Aziraphale wondered if the sense of anticlimax was ever going to get more bearable. How many more times would he have to exist through it before it became just another ho-hum occurrence, and would the nerves he wasn’t supposed to have survive it?
If he were the angry, avenging sort of angel, he would have been in a state of blasphemous, drunken wanton destruction by now. But of course he was more librarian than warrior, more diplomat than muscle, and the amount of anger in him had never been great enough that he could afford to go wasting it on the bottomless abyss of God. If he were to throw it all at such a vast source, what reserve would he have left with which to properly “enjoy” the Daily Mail?
From what he’d picked up from the ethereal network that Crowley insisted on calling “angel WiFi,” the details of this particular spectacular failure didn’t make much more sense than the one they had endured some twenty years past—with the added surreality that its location and personages had been, in this case, very terribly American. There had been a lot of motor cars more modern than Crowley’s involved, and a prophet who wrote lowbrow literature, and a stubborn insistence borne of who knows what on the part of Michael and Lucifer that they needed human bodies for some arcane reason, and that it really did all come down to sibling rivalry in the end. Aziraphale had to think that, as motives went, that was so far from Ineffable it just made him want to say eff it, and be grateful that there was an ocean in between and that he’d played some small part in getting free of the Colonies.
It was hardly a matter suitable for plagues and blood rivers and rains of frogs – it was, however, admirably suited to some wine-soaked venting. Aziraphale felt himself long overdue for a session of that, and an opportunity to get as much of the other side of the story as there was, and there was only one entity he really trusted to dish the dirt the heavenly tabloids hushed up.
And that was the most disconcerting factor, the only thing that had Aziraphale truly worried. Crowley was missing in action – or in inaction, for Aziraphale had found that he was not in his flat sleeping through the whole thing, as might have been expected. Nor was he to be found in any of London’s houses of ill or high repute, nor in St James’ Park, nor in his beloved Bentley—which seemed unnervingly unused—nor at the Ritz, nor, ever, maddeningly, in Aziraphale’s bookshop, which was where he belonged at least some of the time, blowing dust around and causing distractions.
Crowley didn’t answer his phone. Or his email. Or his post. He hadn’t even, apparently, played any FarmVille or Mafia Wars on his Facebook page. (Or changed his profile picture, which was still as nude and lewd as it had always been.) In fact, any and all attempts to contact him through any usual channels had failed, and with each attempt Aziraphale made his voice got a little twitchier and more fearful, and his anxious imaginings became worse- and worse-case-scenario.
So it was in a volatile mix of worry and annoyance that, for the second time in twenty years, Aziraphale lifted the threadbare rug from the circle set into the floor of his bookshop.
The incense he lit didn’t make the shop smell very nice, and the words he intended to say wouldn’t improve the ambience either – after all, while he certainly had the power and the knowledge to perform a basic demon-summoning ritual, especially since he knew the particular demon he planned to summon so very well, it wasn’t exactly going to be suited to his aesthetic sense. Really, he shouldn’t have to resort to such things. It felt like a demotion.
Still, his hand shook just a little as he traced the sigils at the cardinal points, droned the corrupted words of invocation, and at the very last, took a deep breath and, for the very first time that he could remember, wrote Crowley’s True Name. The chalk nearly fell from his hand.
All of SoHo around him seemed to tremble in silence. The stillness was absolutely stifling, and behind him, something small and fragile-sounding fell from its shelf and shattered. Aziraphale yelped, and the very tip of his trainer breached the edge of the circle.
“Oh, fuck,” he cried, as a blue light shorted out his consciousness. The déjà vu just added insult to injury.
***
When he came to, more or less, he was in his own body, more or less—not anyone else’s, which was a great relief.
But everything else was completely surprising. He was sitting in a very uncomfortable position, rocking in a most disconcerting way. It took him an embarrassing amount of time to muster the courage to look down, and finally understand that the warm, too large, strangely moving mass between his legs was, at least to appearances, an ordinary horse. With a bridle and saddle. That Aziraphale was riding.
The sun beat down hot on a dry, hilly landscape, shaded only by the large brim of a white hat. Beads of sweat were rising on his forehead, and the harshness of the sun was causing him to hallucinate ponds and puddles all around him in the red sand, off in the distance behind the sagebrush and saguaros, just in front of the eerie red church spires of wind-carved stone.
The huge sky showed no signs of relieving clouds. Aziraphale found that he had a canteen on his belt, and took a drink of brackish water. He was wearing a plain beige shirt, brown trousers, sharp-toed brown boots, and a wide belt that for some reason had guns on it.
But the smell of the air was unmistakable, could not possibly be that of any place other than where it was—above the dust and horse, there was a sweet, intoxicating, chilly ozone essence that existed nowhere else in creation. Aziraphale’s hackles rose in fear.
He appeared to be in a cowboy movie, it’s true. But he was undeniably also in Heaven.
***
The nature of Heaven has been described many times, usually by people under the influence of spirits, shrooms, or Hollywood money. In its various depictions it has been utopian, dystopian, and just plain stupid. And one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia and yet another’s just plain stupid, and so multiply it by every person who has ever thought of Heaven at all, and you begin to see the magnitude of the contradictions. But Heaven is also a distillation of the mind of God, who is neither utopian nor dystopian nor stupid—but He sees and remembers Everything and has both the longest and the shortest attention span in the universe. Heaven is stable, but never static.
The fact of the matter is, all the depictions of Heaven—from Dante’s Paradiso, which is nonetheless much less widely read than the Inferno, to horror-writers’ inversions, to that sappy Rainbow Bridge poem—are all true, as far as they go. But they don’t go very far. (No, Pamela Barnes is not stuck at the Meadowlands for all eternity; she really far prefers CBGB circa 1976. She and Joey Ramone have serious chemistry, as it happens. But I digress.)
The only really inaccurate thing about any imaginings of Heaven, no matter how outré, is the idea that there is never any conflict, pain, or fear there. That is false.
***
Aziraphale was wondering what he could possibly have done so wrong in his Seeking to wind up here, and in this particular vision of Heaven, which could never have been his; he was no fan of desert climates.
He was trying to think about conserving water, finding food, petting the horse and learning its Name so it wouldn’t throw him, when he heard a horrible whooping noise to his left and behind him on a hill.
He whirled his neck around, popping a muscle painfully. Instead of the Red Indians he’d hoped he could reason with, what he saw were two beings, also on horseback, riding down at him hard and fast.
They weren’t cowboys, exactly. They were angels. The faster their horses ran, the faster their human appearances burned away and the fiercer they became, all wings and eyes and flame and air. Dominions. Angels of the Hierarchy, furious. They had eight eyes like a spider on one face, huge teeth like a bear’s on another.
“What’s he got?” said one.
“Dunno. Some Grace left, at least. Betrayer. Monkey-lover. Demon-fucker.”
“There will be blood. There must.”
Aziraphale blanched, and his horse fidgeted and reared and he barely held on.
Movies, dammit, he had to be in one for a reason. He drew one of the revolvers at his hip and fired into the air, as a warning shot.
“Cute,” spat one Dominion, driving his steed that now had eight legs and horns.
“You don’t understand, do you?” said the other, pushing forward to ride Aziraphale down, a sword darkly flaming drawn from nowhere. “We’re the last. Of the old order. When only holiness was the Law. When renegades like you were dealt with. There’s no law anymore worthy of the Name. We’d have strung you up at the gallows for what you’ve done and known it was Right. Now there’s no time, we’ll just spear you for your Grace like common bandits.”
“Admirable of you,” Aziraphale said, mouth dry. “Sticking to the Old Ways like that.”
“Are you mocking us, little pigeon? Dirt-dwelling Principality nobody?”
“No,” said Aziraphale. “I’m not mocking you.” He knew that somewhere in his own reality was a sword of his own to draw, but he couldn’t find it yet. He had no Orders, and he had no hate. “I’m just sad that you can’t adapt.”
They advanced upon him, circling him, flaming swords in one hand and black-burning lance in the others. The first one yelped in pain and indignation when Aziraphale did the only sensible thing and shot him.
It bought Aziraphale a little time at least, as the one he’d hit fell from his…riding-thing and landed arse-down in a mud-puddle, trailing an ichor that was really only symbolic blood. Aziraphale suspected his own would be less so.
The other was enraged, and came at him hard, shrieking invective full of Wrath, lance poised. Aziraphale pulled his horse around and leaned down, just hoping to dodge the blow, and whispered something low and quiet, subsonically, aimed mostly at the back of his horse but also partway into the soil, which had to be real Heaven and therefore interconnected.
There was a gunshot in the air. One far, far louder than the one from Aziraphale’s own pistol.
There was another being present, on a white horse on a hill. He wore a white hat and a long tan duster coat, and a gleaming star on his chest, and he held what seemed to Aziraphale’s eyes a disproportionately large rifle, and while Aziraphale was no connoisseur of historical American weaponry, he would not be the least bit surprised to learn it was a Winchester.
“BEGONE,” came a massive, gravelly voice. “TROUBLE THIS FELLOW SERVANT OF THE LORD NO MORE.”
The Dominions rode off, yelping in pain and fear, into the East where the light was fading.
Aziraphale, however, still trembled as the relatively-human-looking blue-eyed, dark-haired-vessel-wearing angel on the white horse began to shift and grow. He stood in the stirrups; he swelled and expanded; his immense, iridescent wings exploded forth—all sixteen of them; his body swelled to the size of a small star; his faces bloomed forth in all their true beauty (the eagle, the lion, the ox, the stag). While he was still on a horse. Yes, absurd—but bloodcurdlingly beautiful.
Aziraphale lifted up his head and felt his own body shifting. If his own true death was at hand, best to meet it in his true form. Wings erupted from his back—six of them, one pair blue, one cream, one copper. When his heads had finished transforming (the stag, the duck, the dolphin, the fox) he spoke in several voices. “I recognise you. Castiel.”
“Aziraphale,” said the being before him, newly-promoted Archangel. “I recognize you as well.”
“ZORGE, LAP—“ Aziraphale began fearfully.
“NOCO MAD HOATH JAIDA,” said Castiel. “I know, brother.”
“Then---“
“They meant you harm,” Castiel said gruffly. “I do not. I do not believe it is our Father’s will that you be harmed.”
“Have you…?”
“Spoken with him?” A flash of sorrow crossed all of Castiel’s faces. “No. I have not. I can only interpret…my feelings of His will. My sense of duty.”
“Well, we all do our best, of course,” Aziraphale said sadly, all his faces sheepish although none of them were a sheep.
“Yes,” said Castiel, with a flash of something resembling human humor, and then he once again looked like a man—handsome but average, a little scruffy, seated on a horse in a way that looked almost natural.
“Er…if I may ask, er, the décor?” Aziraphale asked.
“Yes, well,” Castiel smiled. “I spent time on Earth, as you know. No matter where you are in the United States of America, in a motel, when the humans you watch over have fallen asleep, there is always a cowboy movie on the television.”
“And your favourite human?”
“Is fond of them,” Castiel said, and shut down that line of questioning. “Aziraphale, I know you are seeking someone. I know that’s why you are here.”
Aziraphale’s hands on the reins of his horse started to shake so much he knew his knees were only going to get worse, and Castiel obviously held all the cards, so he thought he would be better off dismounting to answer this question. He did so, awkwardly, with a crick in his knee and a huff of contempt from the horse. But at least the horse had never thrown him, as Crowley often complained….oh. Crowley. What to do? The truth might cost him, but a lie wouldn’t help him.
“I’m looking for my dearest friend,” Aziraphale finally said.
“I understand,” Castiel said and dismounted in his own turn. He smiled slightly at Aziraphale. “You do know Mark 16:17-18?”
“Of course.”
“And have you cast out devils?”
“Yes, because it was late and I was tired.”
Castiel smiled. “And have you spoken with new tongues?”
“All the time. I had no idea I could speak Chinese or Haitian Creole until I had to, and then I was fine.”
“And have you laid hands on the sick and had them recover?”
“I once healed a bicycle,” Aziraphale said. “I got carried away.”
“And have you drank any deadly thing and it did not hurt you?”
“Er….look, Castiel, I know it’s possible I have a problem, and really, when everything has settled down, I will try one of these, er…Ay Ay Meetings…”
“Well, if you do, take me with you. But let’s not get started on that just now,” Castiel said, eyes darting sideways. “Really, the last question is…have you taken up serpents?”
Castiel opened up one of the saddlebags at the flank of his horse and pulled out a burlap sack. Aziraphale watched in awe as the sack writhed. Castiel pulled the drawstring and emptied the sack.
A large rattlesnake with beautiful diamond patterns slithered in the dirt. It lifted its head to peer at Aziraphale with its shockingly soulful slitted viper eyes. Aziraphale knelt down and extended his hands, letting the snake crawl onto them.
“Oh, my dear,” he whispered. “Are you alright? Did they hurt you? I tried so hard to find you, thank….someone…”
The snake curled around his wrists, up his arms to settle around his neck. Its tail was shaking violently—the rattle being a conventional sign of threat, but Aziraphale understood, he was only wagging his tail like a dog, in joy.
“Yes, Castiel,” Aziraphale said. “I have taken up serpents. Many times before now. As you well know.”
“Well,” Castiel said. “As far as I know, you’ve taken up only this serpent. Let him down. On the ground. On my word, he will not be harmed.”
Aziraphale paused for just a second before gently unwinding the resistant snake from around his neck and setting him on the dust. He saw the fear in the yellow eyes. He flashed it back in his own. If this turned out to be a betrayal, he would want to be wiped out himself. He just had a sense in his heart that this was the right thing to do, and he could do nothing but follow, and tears started to build in his eyes, for either result.
Castiel bent down low, to the snake, and touched his forefingers to the snake’s head.
In a flash, Crowley stood beside Aziraphale, tanned and handsome as he always was, in his jeans and sharp boots and black hat.
Aziraphale just pulled him into his arms and let their hats clash. He didn’t care. Castiel was surely no harsh judge of fashion.
“Crowley,” said Castiel, his strong voice pulling Crowley reluctantly out of Aziraphale’s embrace. “You have a choice.” He made a motion with his hand, and Crowley’s black hat turned white. “You can stay. If you want. I appreciate the risks you have taken. And I understand love now.”
Aziraphale drew a sharp breath. Crowley glanced at him quickly, held his eyes for a long second.
“All things considered, lawman,” Crowley said, in an affected cowboy-movie drawl, all landed consonants and flat vowels. “Ah’d like to be on the right side of the law, but it just ain’t me. Ah think you’re a good man, though. Ah got no problem with you, if ya got no problem with me.”
Castiel grinned a little bit, white teeth showing through his human vessel’s pink lips, blue eyes widening. “I have no problem with you. I just thought that perhaps my brother Aziraphale might want to stay. But I suspect he won’t without you, so…”
Aziraphale shivered. “I…think I probably ought to stay, being an angel and all. But now that I’ve met you and know that Heaven is in good hands, I think perhaps Earth needs me more, and…”
“And you want to be where he is,” said Castiel, nodding at Crowley. “And you can’t be together in Heaven or Hell, so of course you both prefer to be on Earth.”
“Well, er, that’s obviously my preference,” Crowley babbled, “but of course Hell is always worse by definition…and…”
Castiel cleared his throat violently. “I GAVE you the choice. You COULD have been redeemed and live here. On the spot.”
“Yes, but…six thousand years, you know?”
Castiel sighed. “I understand. It takes time. In another six thousand years, you might think differently. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime?” Aziraphale asked.
Castiel was staring off into the middle distance. “In the meantime, go back to Earth together and do what you do. All I’m thinking is that, in only about fifty or sixty years, my favorite human will come back to me.”
Aziraphale looked into Castiel’s eyes and understood, as he took Crowley’s hand to make sure they got back safe together.
Castiel looked at both of them. “The peace of the Lord be with you---“
He kissed Aziraphale chastely, and then tried to kiss Crowley chastely and failed, because Crowley did nothing chastely.
“---and also with you,” the demon who had chosen to remain a demon stammered, with his trembling forked tongue in Castiel’s mouth.
***
Aziraphale remounted his horse, and held out a hand to Crowley to help him up. Aziraphale was not a great equestrian, but he still enjoyed the cinematic beauty of riding into the sunset with Crowley behind him, holding tight around his waist, and knowing that they would have to ride hard through the night to get clear, but as soon as the morning dawned, they would wake up on a rickety tiny cot in a SoHo bookshop, holding each other, and knowing that, at last, Heaven was in the hands of a being who had real, gritty, hard-won knowledge of imperfect but all-important love.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY,
quantum_witchI hope you enjoy it!