Chapter Text
Aziraphale knows all about tea. Heavens, he was even there when the first pot was brewed. He was partial to a steaming hot Earl Grey with a dash of milk and half a teaspoon of sugar. Sometimes, it would slip his mind that Crowley wasn’t a tea drinker and when the demon swaggered in to the bookshop unannounced he instinctively put the kettle on. Or maybe, deep down, Aziraphale was trying stubbornly to change his mind tempt him to a cup. Probably in an attempts to save the already-perpetually-manic demon from infernal espresso shots he was always downing.
Usually his offer of “Tea?” as Crowley sunk on to the worn couches at the back of the bookshop was met with a quip about leaf water or how it was a poor man’s scotch, or something equally ridiculous and snarky.
Today, however, he slunk in looking rather ruffled. Before Aziraphale could even offer a drink—
“Angel, I’ve got some tea for you.”
Aziraphale looked blankly at his friend. No, Crowley wasn’t holding anything. Wait, why would he bring his own tea anyway? He knew that the bookstore had a kettle and an array of teas from all over the world (such that the angel had a tea pantry as well as a regular pantry). Maybe he was talking about that particular brand of rum that he sometimes referred to as “spicy tea”? No the demon didn’t have a bottle with him either. Bizarre.
“I was walking up Abbey street. Demonic business, sneaky, sneaky…” Aziraphale wasn’t sure why Crowley insisted on maintaining the pretence that he was doing anything remotely helpful for down below but his eyes were alight with eagerness, and so he didn’t interrupt. “…And I walked past that coffee shop,”
“Oh, the one I pointed out—“
“With the lovely petit fours, yes.” Crowley pressed on with a tone of urgency.
As the kids would say, and as would be lost on Aziraphale, this tea was scalding. The secret burned his throat until he managed to force it out.
“And guess who I saw there? Gabriel and Beelzebub, sitting at the same table, not smiting each other… eating macarons.” The inflection in his voice seemed to indicate that this was the most shocking detail.
“Macarons, angel.” He slammed his hand down on the coffee table as though proving a point and chuckled at the joke that Aziraphale couldn’t quite see. For those following along at home, there was no joke, really, rather the connotations of a fearsome demon and archangel agreeing to have tea together. What’s more, Crowley swore they were making google eyes at each other. He was quite adept at spotting these kinds of things, after all. When he’d finished cackling and had settled down, the bored expression on the angel’s face pushed him to drop the topic altogether. Aziraphale wasn’t a fun gossip. In all his years of knowing him, Crowley would have to say it was one of the angel’s few failings but, boy, was it frustrating sometimes.
He let the room dissolve in to silence. Aziraphale stood motionless in the middle of the room for a few minutes as though faced with an unsolvable riddle. Really, he was still stuck on the fact that Crowley had proposed that he was supplying tea.
“So tea is information?” Aziraphale squinted.
“Just gossip, really.”
The angel wrinkled his nose as if to say “angels of the lord don’t deal in gossip”, but didn’t interrupt. Crowley, however, feeling like a little education was in order, took out his phone and opened Google.
“These word, these sayings, hell even memes are my prized creation. They’ve gone viral.”
“They’re pathogenic? You’re infecting people… why on earth would you—“
“If you got out from that rock you’re under once in a while,” Crowley cut him off, exasperated. “You’d see that they’ve become a useful conduit through which depressed millennials communicate their existential angst. It’s one of my more innovative ideas, dare I say, good ideas. You’d like it at least because it was such a flop when I presented it to hell. I must admit it has done stuff-all to contribute to the collecting souls for hell, but it’s become a pet project.”
“… I like my rock.” Was his only defence.
Like anyone mentally stuck in the late 19th century, Aziraphale sniffed at the idea of adding any new phrases to his vocabulary or betraying his 28 dictionaries (arranged by publication date, the newest being 1878) which contained the sum of all allowable words in English discourse.*
*Although he did have a soft spot for slipping raison d’être in to conversations and it wasn’t technically in his English dictionaries but it was the only phrase he’d found powerful enough to describe his drive to protect his book collection from the prying public.
But there was one thing he was curious about…
“Is that the internet you’re holding?” The angel peered at the small screen. “Why are you of all peo— things entrusted with such a thing. My, it’s awfully small. Are you sure this is the whole internet?”
“No, the internet isn’t a thing— it’s a— ah” he snapped, but Aziraphale’s confusion was deepening.
“Yes,” he sighed “I’m holding the internet.” Blimey. He would have to start the angel off with something basic.
In to the search bar went: grumpy cat
“Why is he grumpy?”
“That’s just what his face looks like. It’s funny, angel!”
“Poor darl.”
Crowley groaned and yanked back the phone, sorry, the internet. He wasn’t in the mood to explain millennial humour to an oblivious angel anymore than morality to a demon, though arguably the latter might prove more fruitful.
“Right, well, just dropped by to tell you that your pal Gabriel and Beezlebub are definitely smashing. T-T-Y-L.” He sauntered to the door, shooting a malicious hiss in the direction of a customer who was getting far too attached to a first reprint War and Peace. She dropped it and fled hurriedly.
There was a lot to unpack, and most of it was nonsense and he didn’t quite want to spend his time deciphering cryptic messages from the demon but Aziraphale sensed that, judging by how the archangel and the duke of hell had been mentioned, it was probably something of earth-shattering importance. Grabbing a notebook from his cluttered desk, he carefully wrote down the words that were causing him confusion:
They were Crowley’s apparent erroneous use of the verb to smash, which seemed to bare no relevance to the sentence topic(s). Also, the letters TTYL which he hoped wasn’t a new fan-dangled swearword that the demon had invented. He didn’t like it when Crowley was annoyed with him.
His vast array of dictionaries couldn’t shed any more light on the message than Aziraphale could discern on his own, obviously. The next he knew he was at the local skate park, surprisingly. He was attempting quite unsuccessfully to flag down one of the millennials that were zooming past, perhaps using a more era specific greeting may have helped.
“Excuse me, good fellow.”
The skater had the audacity to make a profane hand gesture in reply.
None stopped.
Desperate, Aziraphale found a young boy sitting in the nearby sandpit. In an attempt to be friendly and relatable, the angel lowered himself down to the boy’s level and he grimaced as he felt his shoes begin to fill with sand.
“Hello dear.”
The boy regarded him carefully. “Hi,”
Aziraphale jumped straight in to his purpose for his visit to the place where the vagrants (and apparently, seemingly abandoned 10 year olds) lurked. “I need help. Can you tell me what these mean/“ he showed the notebook to the child.
He grabbed the book and held it unnecessarily close to his face. It suddenly struck the angel that maybe the boy couldn’t yet read.
“Well,” he said authoritatively. “That stands for talk to you later.” He stabbed at the acronym.
“Oh, okay.” Aziraphale felt a bit deflated at the benign translation. Helpful, but not altogether meaningful and he’d just wasted an hour trying to brainstorm places where millennials congregated. On the bright side, at least he knew Crowley wasn’t mad enough to stop talking to him?
“Annnnnd…” the kid spluttered a bit at the other word on the page. He passed the notebook back to the angel, glancing furtively at a woman over by the barbecues who must have been his mother, hopefully. The boy leaned in and whispered to Aziraphale.
“Smashing means they’re doing the do,”
“What?” Aziraphale looked blank. The boy had covered his mouth, cackling and shook his head unwilling to say anymore.
“Doing the— Oh!” Aziraphale’s eyes widened and instantly went a deep shade of red. His first instinct was to wipe the boy’s memory of, well, everything, especially wherever he’d picked up that knowledge. The angel bristled and settled just to erase the memory of him having asked. At that time he was far too shocked by the boy’s unsetting insightfulness to think of the broader insinuations in the demon’s choice of words.
It was only later that he began to connect the dots. He arrived back at the bookshop to find a queue of customers waiting patiently for opening time, but as the owner approached they miraculously remembered pressing errands and quickly dispersed. If the angel had been slightly more fluent in 21st century slang it would be an understatement to say he was shook by the idea that their superiors were having… relations. Maybe, “shooketh to the core” would be more appropriate in this instance.
Not prepared to subject any more children any more trauma about whether or not a certain angel and demon were… smashing, Aziraphale decided to preform the proverbial software update of his earthly knowledge by stooping so low as to visit a bookshop. A bookshop that actually aimed to sell books. Almost as ridiculous as what Crowley had suggested, in the angel’s opinion.
“We live in interesting times,” he muttered to himself as he browsed the suspiciously mass-produced books. He could’ve gone the whole hog and asked Crowley where he’d be able to purchase an internet, or ask to borrow his, but that would entail divulging to the demon that he was trying to get with the times. Aziraphale had spent a good couple of centuries stubbornly annoying the times, unless the times happened to produce some great literature or a novel flavour of oreos. He approached a spotted teen reordering the bestsellers.
“Hello, I was wondering if you could please point me in the direction of the slang books?” The teen looked blank.
“The what- whats?”
Well, frankly this was terrible customer service, thought the angel, maybe they were in the business of not selling books.
“I was told, uh… something, something… me-mes?”
“Oh, memes, yeah we’ve got a few books over in the humour section, emojis and twitter posts and—“
Aziraphale tuned out when the boy switched languages mid sentence and just nodded politely as they walked through the store. The shop assistant left him in front of a shelf crammed full of raging neon books and returned to his shelving without a word. He skimmed over the spines of the various iterations of “emojis for dummies” and “memes for morons”. Well, that was a bit rude. He chose the only book that didn’t take a stab at his intelligence, peeking at the price tag, and lamenting that twenty pounds was what it took to get some respect in this century.
It wouldn’t be amiss to predict that Aziraphale took to internet culture in the same way water takes to a duck’s back, in that he didn’t. But one of his three hallmark qualities was his intelligence and having adapted to the various iterations of the English language over the millennia it only took one reading of “So you want to be woke?” And a trip to the local library (where an eighty year old lady abandoned her knitting to help him turn on the computer) before he begun to assimilate the lingo. He found some classical art memes, which were his gateway to discovering entire sites dedicated to niche memes and jokes that were either wildly inaccurate or hilarious or both. Browsing the trending videos on a YouTube led him to vine compilations and how these humans had managed to communicate in such a precise fashion that a 7 second clip left him roaring with laughter was nothing short of awe inspiring.
The angel resolved to test some of his newfound knowledge on Crowley next time he saw the demon.
It would be… reminisce of an incendiary device?… oh wait… yes, lit.