Chapter Text
Circa 2019
Los Angeles, CA
It was a perfectly lovely day in LA. The sun was shining, the air temperature a pleasant sixty-six degrees. Traffic was moderate by the standards of most major metropolitan areas, which meant it was near-nonexistent by LA standards.
And Ariadne was fine. She absolutely was not white-knuckling the steering wheel as she kept the car on cruise control down a perfectly straight stretch of road. She wasn’t forcing herself to breathe calmly and evenly in a vain attempt to slow her racing heartbeat. And she certainly wasn’t hoping that neither of her passengers would notice these inconvenient bodily reactions, because none of them were happening, thank you very much.
Ariadne. Was. Fine.
“Ariadne—” said Aziraphale from the backseat, and Ariadne tensed, because oh shit, he’d noticed, seen Ariadne’s relief and happiness at the airport terminal melt away like snow under the California sunshine, and now he’d want her to explain, but how could she explain? She was fine, she should be fine, everything was fine and there was no reason[1] her to feel like every inner organ was vibrating and her thoughts were circling so fast they might just reach escape velocity if she wasn’t careful—
Except Aziraphale didn’t ask anything of the kind. “Forgive me, dear, I seem to have forgotten – but what is the plan for, er, Thanksgiving again?”
Thanksgiving? Oh, THANKSGIVING! Right. The whole reason why Crowley and Aziraphale had endured an eleven-hour transatlantic, transcontinental flight. To see her. For Thanksgiving.
“That is,” Aziraphale went on, probably because she was taking too long to respond, “I know you mentioned that you typically have other guests, but it seems to have slipped my mind …”
“Oh! Oh, right,” Ariadne said, and – good, she sounded almost normal there. She tossed her head and rolled her shoulders, because she was fine, really. “So it’ll be pretty small. Most years it’s just Dionysus and me, Semele – Dionysus’s mother, she’s a sweetheart, you’ll love her – and Hermes and Maia, his mother. And it’s the same this year. Plus you. Well, you two,” she said, nodding to encompass Crowley, riding shotgun, in that statement.
Crowley nodded, but otherwise didn’t react. Aziraphale, however, perked up. “Ah, yes, Semele! I’ve heard of—that is, I took the liberty to do some reading—oh, dear, this is not coming out well …”
“What the angel is trying to say,” Crowley said, smirking slightly at Ariadne, “is that Aziraphale’s been doing some internet stalking of your mother-in-law, only without the benefit of the internet.”
Ariadne laughed – really laughed – even as Aziraphale huffed, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean – and that I’ve done nothing of the sort, really.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” Ariadne said, even as a knot in her stomach that she hadn’t properly realized was there began to untie itself. It was reassuring, in a way, to think of Aziraphale thumbing through old books in the hopes of walking into this dinner with some preparation. It wasn’t like she didn’t have a newly bought translated and annotated Tanakh, an annotated Greek Orthodox Bible, and a translated and annotated Quran currently living on her bedside table. One had to start somewhere, if only to come up with the questions she wanted answered.[2]
It was nice to know that she wasn’t alone in that.
“So what do you want to know?” Ariadne asked.
“Well, I, er, I suppose I’m mostly curious to know if it’s true that she was a normal human, before, er—”
“She got knocked up by Zeus, incinerated via some nasty scheme of Hera’s, and then dragged out of the Underworld by your partner?” Crowley asked.
Ariadne threw back her head and laughed, loud enough that she almost didn’t hear Aziraphale’s scandalized, “Crowley!”
“What? It’s true, innit?”
“Let me guess,” Ariadne said. “You’ve been internet stalking my in-laws, too?”
“With the benefit of the actual internet, I will have you know,” Crowley said with a slight sideways smirk.
“Ooh, much more efficient.”
“Hear that, angel?” Crowley said, turning around to face Aziraphale at—really, his spine shouldn’t work like that, but somehow it did. “She thinks my way is more efficient.”
“Efficient, perhaps, but lacking nuance, I’m sure,” Aziraphale replied, sounding as prim and proper as he could be, but if Ariadne checked the rearview mirror – yes, that was definitely a small smile that wasn’t hidden nearly well enough.
Crowley seemed to see it too, because he laughed again, turning back around with a real, large grin plastered on his face.
“To answer your question, yes, Semele was mortal—or, well, close enough. Her mother was Harmonia, Ares and Aphrodite’s daughter, but usually kids from an immortal mother and a mortal father turn out mortal. Don’t ask me why.”
They didn’t. Instead, Aziraphale’s eyes went wide, and Crowley did that impossible-spine thing to turn to her. “Ares? As in, Dionysus’s brother?”
“Yep,” Ariadne said. “We don’t think about that.”
“And Aphrodite,” Crowley continued, “who came from Ouranos’s—”
“We really don’t think about that!” Ariadne said, not least because—well. She’d seen the video of their little jaunt down to Hell and what Satan had said to Dionysus. There was only one conclusion to be drawn from that, and since drawing that conclusion was as sure as sure a path to madness as anything Ariadne had ever seen, she very deliberately was not drawing that conclusion.
Crowley’s eyebrows had arched well over his sunglasses and seemed to be on the verge of making a break for his hairline. “Well,” he murmured. “And here I thought we were messed up.”
“Crowley!”
“What?!”
“It’s ok,” Ariadne said before a spirited round of bickering could break out. “No, really, it’s fine. We’re messed up. I mean—I mean, the Greeks are messed up. And we all know it, and, you know. We deal with it. Somehow.”
Crowley snorted, and Aziraphale shook his head – but both, at least, were smiling, and, well, that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
Or at least Ariadne hoped it was a good thing. Because as soon as she said that, silence fell over the car, and—maybe she shouldn’t have interrupted the bickering. Ariadne had no idea what else to say, and Crowley and Aziraphale weren’t saying anything, either, and they still had a good twenty minutes before they got home—
So Ariadne did the thing many a nervous driver had done when the conversation flagged and they had no idea what to say and still needed to sort-of pay attention to the road, so they couldn’t devote their entire brains to the problem.
She turned on the radio.
However, she had forgotten several things:
- The radio was tuned to the radio, not the music on her phone or to Spotify.
- The last station she’d listened to had been a generally inoffensive Top 40 station.
- It was two days before Thanksgiving, which was, in the minds of some generally inoffensive Top 40 station DJs (or their much more offensive corporate taskmasters), Christmas season.
- Christmas songs had a much, much longer shelf life than other Top 40 songs.
If she had remembered those things, she might – might – have been less surprised when an unholy screeching paired with a borderline toxic dose of holiday “cheer” filled the vehicle.
“BABY, ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS—”
Ariadne jabbed the radio off so hard that her finger nearly went through the button and halfway into the car’s electronics. Which would have been unfortunate.
Although not so unfortunate, perhaps, as what she had just done.
SHIIIIIT!
Aziraphale and Crowley were Abrahamics! Ariadne strongly disliked all Christmas music on principle, but this was their jam, and she’d just turned it off like—like she strongly disliked all Christmas music on principle and hadn’t even thought about the other people in the car with her—
Ariadne glanced sidelong at Crowley, but his expression was inscrutable behind the dark glasses. She checked the rearview mirror, because Aziraphale tended to be more open, and—oh, FUCK!
He was staring at the radio in what could be called shock, or maybe horror, or maybe—Ariadne didn’t even know what to call it. Her stomach plunged.
She hadn’t even gotten home yet, and she’d already messed this up!
“S-sorry,” she said, grip tightening on the steering wheel and barely daring to glance away from the road. “Did you want to listen to that? That song—not my favorite, is all, but if you like it—”
Crowley slowly turned to face her. One eyebrow lifted above the sunglasses.
Ariadne held her breath and held herself very, very still.
“I assure you, Ariadne,” Crowley said, “there is no one in this vehicle with the least interest in listening to the dulcet tones of Madam Carey.”
The words dulcet tones dripped with so much sarcasm that they ought to have come with a wet floor sign.
And Aziraphale was no better. “My goodness,” he said, with feeling, “what on earth was that?”
Right. Of course. Crowley listened to classic rock. And not counting musical theater, Aziraphale’s musical taste seemed stuck somewhere in the nineteenth century. Abrahamics or no Abrahamics – they weren’t going to like that song.
Ariadne could breathe again.
“That was, unfortunately, one of the most popular songs of all time, I think, if you go by charts and sales,” Ariadne said. “But it’s ok. There are better options.” And this time, instead of just turning on the radio, she loaded up one of the two playlists she’d made specifically for this visit. One was called Dad Rock, the other, Dad Not-Rock.
She chose the latter, filling the car with the soothing strains of Vivaldi.
“Oh,” Aziraphale said, wiggling a little, “oh, this is lovely. Thank you, dear.”
“No problem,” Ariadne said.
Crowley, however, was glaring at her in a way that managed to penetrate the sunglasses. “Dad Rock?”
“Oh, you saw that title?” Ariadne replied.
“I will have you know,” Crowley said, “that my musical taste is impeccable.”
“And shared by middle-aged dads the world over,” Ariadne answered. “But let me guess—kids like me just wouldn’t understand?”
“Kids like—” Crowley sat up, not quite straight, but close to it. “You are thirty-eight hundred and sixty-three years old[3], young lady! You are no kid!”
Ariadne threw back her head and laughed.
Because it was fine. Despite her nerves and her stupid overreaction and her chronic case of tied tongue, it really was fine. Her parents were here; they seemed to be enjoying themselves; and Ariadne was not going to mess this up.
It was fine. Ariadne was fine. Everything was fine.
And this was going to be her best Thanksgiving yet.
[1] Well, no reason other than the anxiety of having her parents at her home for the first time ever. Or the anxiety of hosting them for a very important holiday. Or the sudden realization of how very, very close she’d come over the centuries to actually brushing up against her parents, being discovered, and what would have likely happened to the three of them if Heaven and Hell had figured out about her existence any sooner than they had.
[2] There may or may not have been a list on her phone that was growing longer by the day.
[3] Not that he was counting.