Chapter Text
Her hand shoots out, quick as a striking snake.
And he would know.
The turtle dove barely has a moment to be afraid, and then it's in her hands.
It makes up for lost time as she spreads its feathers. It trembles and twitches, head twisting back and forth. So much fear in such a small body.
He finds the prolonged suffering unpleasant. Snakes don't play with their food.
-
He was driving through central London when "Killer Queen" melted into surprising and unwelcome instructions.
-
"When you hear 'angel', what's the first thing you think of?" she asks.
Aziraphale, is the true answer. But truth has rarely been more deadly. He goes with his safer, second impulse:
"Insufferable."
She laughs. A sound like silver bells. It doesn't suit her. It probably did once. In the beginning. Funny, how they all have little pieces of what they once were. Shards of grace, sticking out of them like splinters.
"Try again," she urges. "Think like a human. They hear angel. What do they think of?"
Crowley considers for a moment. He barely needs to. The answer is obvious.
"Wings."
She smiles. Her canines are too long.
-
She spreads the dove's wings wide like a magician displaying a hand of cards, just before the trick begins.
-
"I'm just not clear on what you're here for," he tells her. "If I could have just killed him I would have..."
"No no," she cuts him off. "No killing. Kill it, and it'll flutter up to Heaven and glide back down in another meat suit. This isn't about killing it. It's never been about killing them."
She leans forward and smiles, like she's sharing a secret. A joke just between them.
"It's about breaking them."
-
It was easy to escalate. Aziraphale was always "wily opponent" this and "cunning adversary" that. And Crowley had started doing it too. It made sense. Talking up the opposition made him look good. It wouldn't do to be thwarted by a middling to average enemy. Much better that they each be formidable.
Just...not too formidable.
Because then someone might think he needed help.
He had not expected Hell to decide he needed help.
But here he is in the Snowdon Aviary, waiting to meet the specialized agent that is going to come and help him with his angel problem.
Angel "problem."
He is going to have to figure out how to solve the problem of Hell's solution to his problem.
He arrives early. He wants to see his "help" before they see him. He feeds handfuls of seed to the birds and watches the crowds for signs of horns or insect parts.
He squints at a man in a lumpy trench-coat, trying to make out if it’s covering hellish appendages or just a suitcase. Too geometric--probably a suitcase. Then he notices the woman beside him.
She isn't overtly demonic. Blond hair, permed like a dandelion, and height are her most striking features. But she’s looking around in a "searching for someone only known by description" sort of a way. And after examining her for a moment, Crowley realizes there’s something odd about her mouth.
He waves her over to his bench.
He's rarely regretted a decision more.
-
"Any imp can rip the wings off a cherub. This is about disassembly. You break apart what defines them."
"First you have to get the wings corporeal. That's actually simple. Focused trauma on the shoulder-blades. I like fire for that, but bludgeoning will work in a pinch."
"Once you have a fistful of feathers, you dislocate the bones from the back. There's some basic defense mechanisms that defuses. Stops the flow of grace. Makes everything easier to handle. Otherwise you'll burn yourself on a pinion."
"You do each feather individually. You strip the barbs while the quill is still in its skin. That way it feels the loss. Every bit of down is a bit of divinity that it hurts to lose. You start at the flight feathers and work your way up to the coverts."
"When you're down to bare skin, it gets a little bloody."
-
She offers what used to be a dove to Crowley, as if he might want a closer look.
The skeletal outlines of once-wings are garlanded with tendons and veins that she's somehow picked out particularly, re-wrapping them around the bones in a mockery of once-cohesive life.
There's not as much blood as there should be, he notes distantly. She did something to the arteries that went in and out of the wings.
The dove's eyes flicker.
Horribly. Impossibly. Miraculously.
It's still alive.
-
"So," she says, leaning back, still smiling. She always seems to be smiling. "Where's your angel?"
"My angel," he echoes, buying time for his brain to catch up with the enormity of this disaster as he makes sure the dove is definitely dead.
"That's what I'm here for." She spreads her hands. "All you have to do is point me in a direction. I'll do the rest. So where is it?"
"It?" his brain stumbles over the odd pronoun as it scrambles for ideas.
"The angel," she clarifies. "Tell me where the angel is."
"Scotland," he says. It's the first location that pops into his head that isn't a bookshop in London.
"Yeah?" she sounds surprised. "From your memos, I thought it was down here, fucking up your shit."
"He telecommutes," Crowley says, the second lie folds naturally off of the first. "It's the bloody twenty-first century. Everything's digital."
"Oh, okay," she accepts this unquestioningly. Crowley's the one who's been on earth for millennia, after all. "You know where in Scotland?"
Crowley just shakes his head.
"No worries. I'll cast around. Try and get a scent. You just keep him distracted and let me know if you can get me a location."
"Sure thing," Crowley rubs his face.
She smiles one last time, all mirth and fangs, and then she's gone.
He doesn't know what to do with the dove. He feels like he should do something with it.
He doesn't dare bring it back to life.
He doesn't want to see what the experience has done to it.