Work Text:
It all began with the M25, or so Crowley told himself. No reason at all for a demon of his station to fear a little mud, after all. Nor water either, for the water of the Thames is as unholy as it gets. It was the night he squelched in a squelchy field to move the markers for his greatest creation, the demonic prayer wheel of the possessed freeway. Something about it called to him. Something about the earth and the stones and the promise of treasure.
Well, after all, he didn't actually have to crawl on his belly like the curse had claimed, and even in that form he didn't mind it so much. Still, being a bit bendy could certainly come in handy, now that he had realised that he wasn't at all averse to scanning the ground and squelching about in the wet when he was on a mission. How had he missed this before?
He'd been online looking for some of the most promising multi-level-marketing scams that were sure to ruin family events and office gatherings for the foreseeable future, and the wormhole trail led him to eBay, where the very concept of innocent business transactions goes to die in a shower of sniped bids. There were the obvious fakeries, and the signs of human frailty - one always looked for the very best new exercise gear to sit in a flat completely unused in February and March when the hungover promises of New Year's Day faded out and died from neglect. It never failed to amaze him, the things that humans would pay ridiculous amounts for.
But something else caught his eye, in between the dross and the joss and the designer knockoffs sold for twice the price of the real thing. People were selling tiny, mossy, and broken pieces of the past for impressive prices.
REAL TUDOR ERA CLAY PIPE BOWL FRAGMENTS
I CAN'T PROVE WILL SHAKESPEARE USED THIS BUT YOU CAN'T PROVE HE DIDN'T
IRON PINS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES, SOME LUCKY BUYER MIGHT GET PLANTAGENET-VINTAGE TETANUS
***
Mudlarkers. That's what they were called, and had been for hundreds of years. But now there was a society that was stupidly exclusive, which made Crowley want to infiltrate it all the more. Oh, you need a permit. Oh, you need to know someone to get a permit. This was exactly the culture that being a longtime denizen of down below set one up to understand instinctively.
Permit or no permit, blessing of the Museum or hits on a YouTube channel aside, he simply did what all the scavenger artists did. He walked the foreshores of the Thames at its lowest tide. The river had changed so much since the old days, at least here. He chuckled to it, laughing. "I miss the traitors' heads. It's not a REAL London bridge without even one traitor's head, now is it?"
Except that it absolutely was still the Thames, because when Crowley tripped because he wasn't paying attention, he fell forward onto the gritty shore, and his finger fit perfectly into a tiny shard of a votive from the temple of Mithras that had, of course, been right there, not so very long ago.
That was a big find, and he could have pretended he wasn't captivated by it. But then he'd felt a slight instinct to take a detour to the waterfront near Blackfriars Bridge, and for a while he said he was just passing by - but then there was a gleam of light in the gravel, and then his eyes - slit pupils expanding so that they were nearly round - happened upon something that was a strange shape, in no way quite natural. He took a little time, let the tide draw the water just a little further away, waiting.
It was a carving, very small, human figure. Head missing but breasts still accounted for. Some things never change, do they? Felt like bone, probably. Smelled like seawater and the very specific scent of the tannery works that had been roughly nearby just before the Fire. Crowley stroked it lightly, debated with himself what to do with it. He could return it to the river and the mortals, or...
He slipped it into his pocket. Let them wonder.
***
"I can't tell you why I should care about a tiny piece of an amphora of wine from the Gaulish provinces that, of course, were nowhere close to the level of what we had in Rome proper only a few hundred years before, but it's ridiculous. Once you know what you're looking for--"
Aziraphale looked at Crowley's proud display of broken trinkets that could only appeal to history nerds or immortals - and every bit of detritus tinged memories. "So, you go poking around at low tide? You pick up every little bit that might be tied to old human things? Oh my dear, that would keep your feet wet forever, wouldn't it?"
Crowley hissed a little then, not sure if he was being made fun of. But he still had a card to play. Several, actually. He'd start with the littlest one, to see what might happen. "I found this near where the real London Bridge used to be. You remember." As far as his senses told him, it was a fragment of a forbidden gambling token.
Aziraphale's sigh confirmed it. It sounded a bit like the sigh of someone who had lost often, but was not particularly regretful about that. "Old London Bridge was an absolute menace to ships, of course it had to go. But there was such a good tea shop there, in the 30s..."
"The 1630s," Crowley said. "You have to clarify that, it does all run together after a while."
"Of course."
"And what's this?" Aziraphale asked, picking up a tiny little piece of a broken pin. Metal, brightly colored, just a hint of a pointy shoe.
"Collector's guide says something to do with the Beatles," Crowley said. "Maybe the Beatlemania girls tore apart some poor sod like Maenads and one of them lost her pin."
"Did your lot have anything to do with that?"
"Beatlemania? Not at all. Well, maybe that rumour about Paul being dead. Hell loves a good conspiracy theory, it really reels them in. We don't make them wear badges, though."
"I suppose it's a bit like the old pilgrimage tokens," Aziraphale said wistfully. "Remember those? Chaucer had quite the collection."
"I've found a few," Crowley said. "I don't pick them up without gloves on though. You know."
"Oh, of course," Aziraphale said. "I'm sorry, dear boy, I didn't mean to be insensitive."
***
Crowley was not sentimental. He was not in any way particularly interested in mudlarking near Hammersmith in particular because at the turn of the last century, one of the greatest masters of the art of the typeface had had a falling out with his business partner and spent years throwing the intricately carved lead letters into the river, batch by batch.
They were not easy to find, especially with other obsessive collectors bound and determined to take what they could, and some probably entombed for at least a century to come by more recent concrete repairs to shore up a sagging piling. There was a man devoted to recreating the typeface digitally and making it available and sure, it was pretty to look at. But surely most people would agree, it was not the same.
To hold it in one's hand - river mud and the touch of its maker.
Crowley was ecstatic to find a capital A, and if perhaps he warped the fabric of reality to also find a C to keep it company, perhaps he could be forgiven for this.
It paid off, certainly, when Aziraphale trembled at the touch of them, and was moved to pull a rarely-touched precious Doves Edition from the shelves, and to let Crowley look at it. As if he feared that the glance of an eye could degrade it, but Crowley had passed his test.
“They’re for you,” Crowley said, pushing the precious little bits of type forward on the table. Aziraphale’s hand covered his own.
“For us, surely,” he said. “You shouldn’t separate a set.”
The Dove Type was originally intended for only the greatest and most uplifting of literatures - your Bibles and your Dantes and your whatnots. Not for those letters the yellow-backed lurid novels or the silly romances. But since its creator vandalised his masterpiece in an epic act of spite, surely history will determine he had forfeited his right to complain when his treasure facilitated a kiss that, while technically forbidden, felt as sweet as country cream and also sharp and ancient as a Mesolithic flint.