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Crowley was beginning to suspect he’d been tricked.
He knew he was a bit of a soft touch when it came to the angel. He was surprised that their respective bosses hadn’t yet cottoned on to how soft he was on the subject. Even the soft subject in question knew it, and though thinking ill of angels was sort of par for the course in Crowley’s whole outlook on eternal life, he didn’t like thinking ill of this one specific angel. That’s why, when Aziraphale called him on the rotary a few nights ago, informing him that there was a party they had to infiltrate together and that it was of the utmost importance Crowley come over and help him plan their disguise at once, the demon hadn’t hesitated.
If he had hesitated, he might have found it suspicious how excited Aziraphale sounded as he tried to impress upon Crowley just how dangerous and vital this mission was. He might have, in his hesitation, given himself a few moments to actually think about what the blazes could be so important to both of them that it would necessitate them going to a party together. He might have thought about how, only a few days earlier, the angel had presented him with a brand new novel written by some bloke named Fleming that Crowley had all but devoured in a single afternoon and then had immediately run out to buy himself a whole new wardrobe. Crowley wasn’t one for hesitating in general and, when it came to Aziraphale, Crowley didn’t hesitate. Especially if he got to wear a disguise. It was only now—after several laps of the room, party in full swing and with a few bottles of champagne packed away between them—that he stopped to think, hang on a minute, this is incredibly suspicious and I might, just possibly, have been tricked.
Crowley had been imagining a very different sort of party to the one he’d ended up at, already swept away by delusions of grandeur about the world of espionage. He probably should have asked more questions when Aziraphale was explaining the dress code, but he’d been too busy thinking about if he could learn to love a martini drunk from a champagne goblet and whether or not he’d look cool holding one. By the time he’d thought to wonder if their costume might not look a little odd amongst the glitz and glamour of whatever shindig they were attending, they were already there and he quickly realised he needn’t have worried. They fit right in. Everyone present was dressed in strange and elaborate costumes, all from very different periods and with very different inspirations but one common theme— everyone had some sort of animal aspect about their person. There were an awful lot of foxes, as well as a few lions, tigers and Crowley couldn’t be sure but he’d either spotted a bear or just a very, very hairy man. It looked oddly like an all-staff meeting in Hell. There was even the same lustre of baseline sin in the air, though Crowley thought that the foul-looking buffet may have been responsible for some of the potent smells.
“Remind me again what we’re doing here, angel?” Crowley murmured quietly into Aziraphale’s ear, trying his hardest not to draw any more attention than they already had. Aziraphale, as subtle as a flaming brick through a stained glass window, let out a little shriek and a giggle. Luckily for the two of them, the other guests in the room didn’t seem fazed by this little outburst. Crowley was pretty sure he’d heard someone introduce Aziraphale as “Fell, the Eccentric” and was hoping that was just an apt description of his personality and not—as he depressingly suspected was the truth—the stage name he used for his truly dreadful magic act. Aziraphale had said they were all part of the same society , whatever that meant. Maybe all these people were magicians? Might explain why their costume was only drawing amazed, solicitous glances and not—as Crowley had briefly feared—appalled, horrified ones. Aziraphale suddenly yelped again, interrupting his train of thought.
“Oh, Crowley! Your tongue really is too much in this form! Can you not control it a little better?” asked the angel, rubbing at the reddened shell of his ear and nudging Crowley’s head away at the same time. Crowley snorted, which was difficult considering the current shape of his nostrils.
“It’sss involuntary,” the serpent grumbled, but managed to stop his forked tongue from flicking out for another brief taste. Was a bit weird, Crowley knew, to go around licking your hereditary-enemy-turned-best friend. Even as a snake. “Question still standsss though. What are we doing here?”
“Reconnaissance and retrieval, my dear,” Aziraphale replied, taking a sip of his champagne and then holding the flute up so that Crowley could dip his tongue in. “There’s an important document that was, ah, temporarily misplaced. Now, one of the humans attending this delightful soirée has it, and we need to get it back before either of our sides realise we’ve let it out of our care.”
“What document is thisss, then?”
“A book of divine poetry.”
“Religiousss poetry? Doesn’t ssseem that important to recover, loadsss of them knocking about.”
“Not religious, Crowley. Divine. Penned by, well, by someone like us.”
“Funny, I don’t recall ever having been the caretaker of sssuch a thing.”
“Don’t be catty, dear, it doesn’t suit you. It’s in both of our best interests that this book doesn’t fall any further into the wrong hands, believe you me.”
“Couldn’t you have jussst—” Crowley tried to mime snapping his fingers, but was somewhat hampered by the lack of them and just ended up causing some of his looped coils to slip onto Aziraphale’s shoulder instead, “—miracled the book back into your angelic clutchesss?”
Aziraphale was pouting as he gently tucked Crowley’s lengths back into place. Crowley wasn’t looking at him directly, but he didn’t have to be to know when the angel was pouting.
“You know I don’t like to use miracles for books, especially not ones that are this precious. It cleans them of all age, and character, and-”
“Yesss, alright, alright, I get the picture,” Crowley sighed for dramatic effect, and tried not to sound too excited when he said “sssubterfuge and theft it is.”
Aziraphale chuckled, and had the nerve—the cheek!—to buss Crowley’s chin. Well, one of his chins anyway. For their costume, Aziraphale had required Crowley to grow several new appendages, and though Crowley had been hoping to hear his friend request something along these lines for a good long while now, he’d never quite imagined it like this. It had been worth it though, when Aziraphale lifted up the curling mass of Crowley and all his new, curious heads, and crowned himself with them.
Crowley’s new heads were, for the most part, purely decorative. He’d had to imbue them with a little of his personality, just to get the full effect they were going for with the costume. Aziraphale had little pops of scales running up and down his exposed limbs and neck, the dark colours a perfect complement to the lush black toga with its gold and red embroidering that clung to his chest and the tops of his thighs. Crowley, to distract himself from the impending reality that he’d get to see Aziraphale wearing this thing, had scoffed upon its delivery that he couldn’t remember Aziraphale owning anything half as fancy in actual Greece back in the day. Aziraphale had retorted with a list of every perceived crime-of-fashion Crowley had committed during the Greek Dark Ages, and that he wouldn’t know Grecian finery if it reared up and bit him on the posterior. It had been a tense few minutes until Aziraphale had emerged from his bedroom in the damned thing and Crowley had all but melted at the sight of him. If Aziraphale wanted to dress as a scantily clad, period-inaccurate gorgon, Aziraphale could bloody well dress as a scantily clad, period-inaccurate gorgon.
Aziraphale, for the most part, didn’t seem too pressed for time in retrieving his book. He happily chatted with several of the party guests, discussing their mutual artistic interests and leading Crowley to realise this must have been a sort of meeting of illustrators, as apparently Aziraphale had commissioned several of them for his ‘personal collection’, whatever that was. Everyone thought it was a scream when Aziraphale demonstrated how he could ‘make’ his headpiece drink from his champagne goblet, and Crowley was just starting to relax and enjoy himself when a human went and ruined it all by grabbing onto one of his heads so roughly that Crowley thought he might have yanked it clean off his body. He had a feeling their hostess wouldn’t appreciate demonic ichor spilling out all over her Lucienne Day rug were that to happen.
“Good heavens, Fell, this feels so real! So responsive!” the perpetrator, who was dressed as a toad in a velvet tailcoat, loudly declared. “One of your little magic tricks, is it? You must tell me how, I’d love to make myself one of these!”
He was clearly drunk, and still hadn’t let go of Crowley’s damned head, and Crowley was about to take out about half a dozen Hastur-based revenge fantasies on this idiot when the toad let out a somewhat pathetic croak before the serpent could strike.
“Now now, Mister Walden,” Aziraphale said, tone somewhere between completely cheery and pure unfiltered rage, as his well-kept hand tightened its grip around the man’s wrist, “as I’ve told you many times before— a magician never reveals his secrets. Why don’t you unhand my belongings, there’s a chap, and I’ll see about unhanding you, hm?”
The man—Walden, apparently—nodded weakly and Aziraphale let him go. He huffed and instantly wandered off, cradling his sore wrist and glaring daggers back at them over his shoulder.
“Well that was unpleasant,” Aziraphale sniffed, punctuating the remark with a pointed glug of champagne. “Odious man, really, such a shame that he was the one who introduced me to this little society. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
Crowley was at war with himself. He was, on the one hand, mortified that he’d been so relaxed and sated play-acting as Aziraphale’s living wig that he hadn’t noticed the great bastard hand about to clamp onto him. But, on the other hand, Aziraphale had just gone all angel of wrath on a man who hadn’t really done much more than yank on him a bit, and it was doing funny things to Crowley’s stomach— not to mention the part where Aziraphale may have referred to him as one of his belongings. For a creature that didn’t currently have hands, it was a lot to have on them. In the midst of all this confusion, his other heads had decided to take matters into their own non-existent hands, peppering Aziraphale’s face with what could only be described as very tiny snake kisses.
“Leave off, you lot!” Crowley snarled, trying to wrestle them back into position. Clearly the part of his personality he had given them was the stubborn part, and they wouldn’t be budged. Aziraphale, who had obviously lost his mind, started giggling away like anything and blushing, which did nothing to deter Crowley’s mutinous heads from nuzzling into his cheeks. Oh sure, it was fine when Crowley’s multiple fake heads purposefully took advantage of their closeness to the angel, but when Crowley’s actual head accidentally stuck its tongue into the angel’s ear, he needed to control himself better.
“Well, as long as you’re alright, my dears,” Aziraphale—the patron saint of the double standard—smiled, stroking a finger along the back of one of the more amorous heads.
“Sssatan’s sake, angel, don’t encourage them,” Crowley groaned, wondering if the latter half of the twentieth century was going to be interesting enough that he’d regret sleeping through it. “Let’sss just do what we came to do, get the book of poetry and get out of here, alright?”
“This book, you mean?” Aziraphale asked, holding aloft a small, battered tome that may have once had something handwritten on the cover but was all-but-illegible now. All of Crowley’s heads stopped their assault on the angel’s face and he turned, as legion, to look at Aziraphale in shock.
“When did you get that?”
“I told you,” Aziraphale said, tucking it discreetly into a hidden fold in his costume, “a human here was in possession of it.”
"Ssso… when you said that thing, about your belongingsss?” Crowley asked, feeling that earlier mortification as it crept right back in.
“I was referring to the book Mister Walden somehow pilfered from me, naturally, though I can’t imagine how he got his hands on it in the first place. But no matter! Now returned to its rightful owner and, thanks to my expert sleight of hand and cunning, he’ll be none-the-wiser until it’s much too late to do anything about it.”
“How’d you know he’d get close enough that even a butterfingersss like you could ssswipe it off him, then?” Crowley was impressed, despite himself. He’d never seen Aziraphale pull off a magic trick with any sort of finesse before, and though this wasn’t so much magic as it was pure pick-pocketing, it was still no mean feat. Aziraphale hemmed and hawed, which was odd, considering he was normally eager to brag about all the other disastrous tricks he attempted.
“Let’s just say I had an inkling as to his, ah, proclivities and leave it at that, shall we? You did wonderfully well this evening, my dear, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it, angel,” Crowley squirmed a little, wondering if it was possible for snakes to blush, “you can jussst let me down once we’re out and I’ll change back, yeah?”
Aziraphale hummed softly, stroking along the underside of Crowley’s actual chin in slow, purposeful movements. Crowley tried to maintain his composure, tried to keep his cool, but the game might have been given away by how all his other heads took it upon themselves to indulge in a collective, dramatic swoon.
“Well, there’s no need to rush,” Aziraphale said. “By all means, if you’re uncomfortable, do as you must but don’t feel you have to swap back on my account. I was prepared for our little mission here to take far longer than it has, so I’m quite content to spend the night with you like this. All of you.”
“Ssspend the— what, really? ”
“Say you’ll come back to the bookshop, won’t you? I could do a reading from the book you so heroically put yourself on the line to help recover. Of course, if a stuffy old angel reading from a stuffy old book doesn’t sway you then I’ll even mix you a Vesper, if you’d like? I’ve been practicing and I think I’m getting quite good, if I do say so myself.”
In the face of all that was on offer, Crowley didn’t hesitate to agree.
Percy Walden was having quite a lovely evening among his peers, especially now that that twit Fell had buggered off back home. Ungrateful lout. Fell wouldn’t have even known about this little society, or the works of John Willie and Bizarre, or any of it if it weren’t for him. If their special interests didn’t overlap so thoroughly, he’d consider having a word with those in charge and having him barred for life. Fell would be lucky if a single artist amongst them took a commission from him again after he’d damn near crushed his hand. It was Fell’s loss, making an enemy of him. He, of all their number, would most have loved the item Percy had brought with him to the party.
“Percy! Percy, come over here at once, would you? Everyone, you remember Mister Walden from our last little get-together,” the hostess, Alexandra—who was currently decked out in all her usual leather equine gear—slipped her arm into his as he made his way across the room to them. “Percy here has been telling me all week about a scandalous little discovery he made in an auction last month, haven’t you darling?”
Percy, happy to be the focus of so many eyes, winked at her. “I normally wouldn’t brag about material possessions, of course, but the book really is a wonder. Not preserved in the best nick, unfortunately, but I suppose that’s what happens when you’re left to rot in a decrepit old inn in Stratford. I’m actually thinking of adapting some of the more explicit sections for our next volume, if we don’t get banned from the new printer’s first.”
“Well don’t keep us in suspense! Tell us what it is!” cried one fox in the crowd, jostling forward and almost dislodging his neighbour’s cat ears in the process.
Percy smiled and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled out the contents of his pocket and held it aloft. An unpublished manuscript of seventeenth century erotic poetry, written from the perspective of a very enthusiastic angel of the Lord wanting to be ravished six ways from Sunday by the Serpent of Eden and not skimping on any of the particulars. It was filth, unfiltered and unrestrained filth. It was the book that was going to make him infamous. It was—
“Boring, Percy,” said Alexandra, “I thought you were bringing the book of naughty poems, not some silly spy novel.”
—a perfectly pressed, first edition, hardback copy of Casino Royale.