Chapter Text
St. James’s Park, London
1862
Aziraphale leaves the park first.
Crowley is silent, stock-still as Aziraphale stomps off, his steps hasty and ill-considered, tan brogues smothering the grass. That dusty, dirt-road brown. Crowley had always found the hue of them distasteful. He sees it, on the heels of smart businessmen, vicars wanting a change from black, and he thinks of drought. Of sandy desert, forked tongue salt-dry. Dirt will you eat.
On Aziraphale, he thinks of shade, of shelter, a respite from the sun. Of sod-houses nestled in between the whistling prairie grasses. Wax paper in the windows, casting parchment-dimmed light against the mudearth wall.
The brogues are the darkest part of Aziraphale’s dated costume. They are in contact with the Earth, telegraphing his movements. Here I am. Crowley lays his ear to the ground, can hear him better through soil than through air. He digs, carves out a space to listen for Aziraphale, to translate the Morse code of his footfalls. A tapped-out symphony of dots and dashes.
His own boots are black, and they are thin-soled. He feels every change in texture under his feet. On your belly will you crawl. The boots are expensive, made to be worn by men who do not work, who do not touch the harshness of the Earth. They drift above its surface, on Persian rugs and the plush of their boxes at the opera, the red-carpeted hulls of carriages, well-tended garden paths.
Crowley had chosen this particular shoe because he aspired not to work for a living.
“Some living,” he mutters, replaying Aziraphale’s righteous fury, the graze of kid-gloved fingers on his palm as he handed Aziraphale the slip of paper, crease down the middle.
“They’ll destroy you,” Aziraphale had said, the lines of his face contorting in and up, folding shut, like quires in a playbook. Slice across the top with your penknife, divide the leaves. I will put enmity between you. They were from the same stock, originally. Pages cut from the same sheet.
“I know,” Crowley retorts now, aloud, scaring several ducks into rifling up their feathers. “Was going to happen sooner or later.” He thinks of the fine stationery he’d miracled up, cut into thin strips with unsteady hands. He wrote “holy water” out, over and over. Different pens, different fonts. Scrutinized his exhibits with a paleographer’s eye, selected the one the most studiedly casual. Blocky, lower-case letters.
Aziraphale had cast it out. The scrap had fluttered on the breeze in a slow spiral, meandering more than falling. Sauntering vaguely downwards.
Aziraphale had marched off, then. Crowley counts his steps in his head. He knows exactly the route Aziraphale will take, returning to the bookshop. There is nowhere else for him to go. He will step in time with the gravel path, the thousands of tiny little stones. They get in Crowley’s boots, they poke against the thinflap soles, his walking stick lands on them just wrong every time. Bowstrings snapping underfoot. A thorn in the flesh. Aziraphale will not feel a thing.
Crowley releases his iron grip on the spindly, black-chipped railing. He claps his hands together to brush off the chalky rust. The motion kicks up eddies of dust, a sandstorm contained between his two human hands. For a moment, something sparks in him, he remembers the feeling of creation, the gentle, persistent tug of it at his heartstrings. Filling the ocean with a pipette, drop by blessed drop. God saw what he had made, and it was good. But the kindling doesn’t catch, and the spark winks out. The dust smears, spreads itself across the leather, goes dark and lifeless.
Crowley uproots himself, forces his branch-graft legs into motion. He keeps to the grass, does not touch the footpath, not with his thin, betraying shoes. He is walking in the opposite direction of his house in Mayfair. He thinks of Aziraphale crossing the street with bullish stubbornness, blind to carriages or horses or hackney carts.
He picks his way across the main path with a quickset, fallible caution. Walks on across the grass, across its trim soldier’s haircut. No sideburns, not like what Crowley is sporting now. He doesn’t like the feel of hair over his snake tattoo. It doesn’t feel like scales. It feels like he is being stifled, somehow.
It was the first time, ever, that he’d seen Aziraphale with facial hair. He’d always been clean-shaven. He never minded how it made him stand out, appear overly youthful, fussy and indulgent. Crowley had wanted to run his fingers through the unruly blond curls, memorize their texture, stroke them like an ermine fur, reserved for royalty. Let his ungloved hands ghost over Aziraphale’s soft, round cheeks. He hadn’t. He hadn’t soiled Aziraphale’s newfound modishness, hadn’t snuffed out his smile with leaden fingers.
Crowley pats over his own coarse sideburns, from ear to chin. They’re too boxy, he thinks, too polygonal and angular. Aziraphale’s just begin to curve, follow the line of his jawbone. They’re amorphous, yet shapely. He sniffs disdainfully. Crowley had experience, dabbling in fashions that changed like the tides, but never Aziraphale. Military adherence to uniform. Crowley sneers.
He thinks of Aziraphale arriving back at the bookshop, slamming the door. The old glass windowpanes rattle like snaketails.
He exits the park out the eastern gate, leaves the haven of a green space in a rapidly growing city. Abandons the garden that has sheltered them all these years. Rejects the shade of the fruit trees.
He has half a mind to cross to the South Bank, where he and Aziraphale had seen so many plays, crowded among the groundlings. The theaters were closed by plague, again and again. And yet people packed in, arm to sweaty arm, offering up their pennies on Saturday afternoons. They breathed in the same air, the same water-logged atmosphere, tasting of salt and idle prayers and cheap brown ink. Air laden with humanity, immersive and diseased. Your life might be done and dusted in twenty-four hours, but two of them would be spent distracted. It was worth the risk of destruction.
Crowley can still smell the miasma of Aziraphale on him, the laundry scent. Something clean, something fresh, something unstained. Scrubbed raw and pink against a washboard. He does not smell like lye, heavy-duty, harsh soap. Crowley thinks of the intact skin on his hands, unstripped by lye, untarnished by holiness, by an angel’s greying laundry water.
He walks across the thoroughfare of Broad Street, remembers finding Aziraphale mucking out cesspools in the middle of the night. He was covered in grime and refuse, leaning on a shovel, when Crowley found him. Aziraphale didn’t complain about the state of his waistcoat. There were children sick. The cesspools were contaminating the pumps. His hands were tarred with acid. Their lives were frivolities. Aziraphale told him it didn’t hurt.
He gave Crowley directions in a brooked undertone. Crowley lounged by the pumps in dark sunglasses, miracling wellbuckets. He did not know what Aziraphale meant by these tiny inhabitants of water, but he struck them dead all the same. He cursed the water clean. Save us from the fires of Hell. He only muddied waters, blackened them with his silt. He stirred up the peaceful riverbeds. They coughed themselves up, blanketed the fields, receded inexorably slowly. Dragging their nails against the surface of the Earth, marking out territory with gangrened stickfingers.
Crowley crosses London Bridge. Aziraphale had wanted to live on it, two hundred years back. A four-story house, leaning across the way to conspire with its neighbors. Aziraphale had wanted a river for a garden. He’d never liked tending plants, never trusted his own sturdytine fingers. Here, he could look out his back window and feel the steady heartbeat of the river, untilled. His broad, soft palms would bless the barges and flatboats, the passengers paying their tolls.
One gold coin, one bottle of holy water, to have and to hold, not with bare hands.
The bridge is empty, now. Crowley leans out over the edge, farther than he should, farther than he would if Aziraphale were here. He tries to see the bottom, to sound out the depths in the twilight, when night touches day. Evening came and morning followed.
He thinks of grappling for the streambed of the River Styx, desperate for an anchor, blood rushing to his head. He thinks of surfacing empty-handed and invincible, but for one chink at his ankle. You will strike at her heel. How has he never thought to armor it? To armor himself against a sea of troubles. The river gurgles, flowing out from under him.
He could walk to the sea. It is not far, not for him. He could walk, southeast as the river widens, wait until it reaches the endless saltflat water, the unpaved whale-road. He might encounter sea monsters there, Leviathan and the Kraken, hellthings lurking in the wine-darkness.
He does not move from the center of the bridge. Around him, candles and oil lanterns are extinguished. The taverns are letting out. He thinks of sleep, of Morpheus in the underworld. Taking the form of the long serpent. Eternal sleep (perchance to dream). Sloth was a vice, work was a virtue. Look at what work had given them. Crowley thinks of children, small enough to fit in the northern mine shafts, big enough to work spinning mules. He thinks of children hauling water from the Thames. The river stinks of sewage.
He thinks of Aeschylus, even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget. He turns around, never makes it to the burnt-out rubble of the Globe. All the men and women merely players. (What then of angels and demons?) One cannon misfired, and the thatching catches, the whole world gone to ashes.