Chapter Text
“Aziraphale! Didn’t expect to see you here.” Crowley’s face registered genuine surprise. He truly hadn’t expected to see the angel here: at a rock and roll festival of all places. The angel looked profoundly out of place, wearing pristine oxfords and dressed in a soft white suit that had yet to encounter, in its hundred-and-thirty years of service, the matter of mud and grass stains.
“Crowley!” The angel appeared equally startled to see his natural enemy standing in the middle of this densely crowded field, apparently taking an active role in the scene unfolding. He was wearing black Levi’s and a black macrame vest top and holding a black toolbox, far too nonchalantly. Aziraphale’s beaming smile turned wary as it landed on the toolbox. “I suppose I’d better not ask you what you’re doing here.”
“Me?” Crowley replied, in a tone of wounded innocence that did nothing to decrease the angel’s suspicion. “I’ve just been helping to install the sound system. Amplified music,” he added in answer to Aziraphale’s pointedly blank look. “It’s starting to catch on at big festivals like this. Anyway, what are you doing here? Not really your usual scene, is it, angel?”
Aziraphale huffed. “The triumph of our side, not my scene! Well–”
“Triumph of your side?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t be serious. Your side? This one clearly belongs to us, I mean think about it: the throwing off of all inhibitions. Drugs and nudity and very loud music” (he looked particularly proud of this last point). “And they’ll be at it like that for three days, think how many victories that’ll be for Hell–”
“You’re forgetting what brought them all here.”
Crowley considered. “Psychedelic minibuses.”
“No.”
“Then what exactly?”
“Peace and Love.” The angel gave a happy little wiggle as Crowley stuck his tongue out disgustedly.
“Oh, come on!”
“Peace and Love. This whole place is just hazy with it! Surely you can feel it–” (the demon shook his head vigorously), “Oh, you’ll see!”
“Yeah, yeah, angel,” returned Crowley in the tone of the utterly unconvinced. “Well let’s stick around and find out.”
Little determined pink spots flared up in Aziraphale’s cheeks. “You’re on, fiend!”
***
It had just gone 1am and Aziraphale’s gloating had grown intolerable as the fifth act in a row consisting chiefly of protest songs took to the main stage.
“Seriously?” hissed Crowley as the woman onstage launched into yet another crooning rendition of something from Bob Dylan’s morally righteous back catalogue. He eyed the angel darkly: “Are you doing something?”
“Oh? No! Nothing of the sort. All this is completely new to me.” The angel smiled beatifically. Smugly.
“Right,” said Crowley. “If it were up to you we’d be listening to Italian madrigals, I suppose.”
“Oh, you think I’m an old fuddy-duddy,” reproached Aziraphale.
Crowley winced with secondhand embarrassment. “I can’t believe this.” The demon leant back on his hands like a fidgety schoolboy and stretched his neck in various directions. He hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that he was sitting here, atop a tartan picnic blanket, listening to the culmination of the 1960s with this absolute square of a celestial being.
“Well try to get into the spirit of it, Crowley.” The celestial being smiled at him encouragingly. “I think it’s all rather nice!”
“It is,” complained Crowley. All the songs were nice. It was good music, technically speaking. And also theologically speaking: he’d noticed many of the songs used biblical imagery as rather crude metaphors for man’s inner conflict or 20th century geopolitics. Crowley observed that he, Serpent of Eden, never seemed to come out of these metaphors well. “Don’t you find it all a bit preachy?”
Aziraphale frowned, assessing how he found it. “I suppose I find it very modern. You know, how it has all these…” Aziraphale considered, and, after a pause, put into words his critical insight. “Lyrics.”
The demon snorted. In truth, he couldn’t bring himself to mind too much. He hadn’t really expected a hotbed of vice and sin, although it made a good alibi. He’d expected a little sin. Mostly he had just wanted to go to a music festival. And now, here was his oldest adversary on Earth to share it with.
It had begun to rain again. It had been drizzling intermittently all evening, though this had done nothing to dampen the spirits of the excited crowds. Joan Baez was warbling on regardless. Aziraphale himself could and usually did stay up all night, but he noticed that his companion was starting to shiver. His long hair was clumping together, and he looked tired. The rain grew heavier.
Poor cold-blooded creature! Heavenly professionalism wrestled with Aziraphale’s other instincts and lost. “Look, where are you staying tonight?”
“Bentley’s parked… somewhere back there.” Crowley made a limp, vague gesture in the direction of the highway. There were cars and caravans parked up for several miles, Aziraphale had seen earlier. It might be a long walk.
“No, that won’t do. It’ll be cold.”
Aziraphale scrambled up and reached out a hand. Crowley stared at it, and sniffed.
Further explanation was clearly needed. Aziraphale’s blue eyes glanced about a little, and he hushed his voice as if he were afraid someone from work would overhear him. “I’ve got a tent, very close. All the modern conveniences. You’re welcome to stay the night.”
***
Once you were breaking rules, why not go all in? Crowley was cold, and wet, and worn out from the get-in, and there was something about this place that made it easier to accept the angel’s offer of help.
Woodstock festival. He felt disoriented by this place, where there were so many young people who were bad in ways that former generations would have found astonishing, and at the same time good in ways that, for his money, were completely underrated by certain authorities. Like so much that was human, it defied categorisation.
Inside the tent, Aziraphale lit up the fireplace (yes, fireplace) and miracled the rain from Crowley’s person. There was an elegant daybed with a wooden frame, piled high with sheepskin blankets and more tartan. Crowley was too tired to tease, but he smirked quietly at Aziraphale’s take on camping out on the land. “Getting back to basics, are we?” he mumbled, eyeing the tall fridge freezer in the corner of the tent and the vast cherry wood bookcase. The angel fussed him into bed and pulled the covers over him. Crowley ducked and squirmed and swatted away the angel’s attention as he was ambushed by blankets, content in the knowledge that Aziraphale was completely immune to his grumbling and it would have no effect whatsoever.
He’d spent his morning lugging around audio equipment, climbing ladders and yelling back and forth with the technicians. It didn’t take long at all to drift off.
Aziraphale sat on the edge of the bed, reading silently to himself while Crowley slept. Embracing the theme of their trip to the best of his bookish ability, he’d reached for American literature of the last hundred years. He made his way through a stack of beat poets before eventually settling into some Walt Whitman. He’d read it before, of course, but always from the indoor comfort of a soft upholstered armchair in the heart of London. Reading it out here, tent pitched on the earth itself, it did feel different.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, he read, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
His feelings of embodiment were stirred by the strange lullaby, praise for creation dressed in soft blasphemies. It made you want to put bare feet on the ground, run your fingers through the grass. Of course, this sort of thing was very much what humans’ god-given bodies were for. Angels were another matter entirely. For beings like himself, cravings like touch, food, sleep, sensation were more of a side effect to ignore, a waste of office hours.
Narrow glimpses of divine power were all the humans had – a trembling blade of grass, the short-lived blaze of a sunset, a pleasant chord lingering in the air, or the feeling when two’s intertwining fingers fit each other just right – but why should such small, ephemeral things bring pleasure to beings who were party to the whole Great Plan, the universe in all its mind-boggling perspective?
Come to that, why not?
Aziraphale never asked questions, but he read books. It was called: outsourcing.
As he read, his attention drifted often to the demon at his side.
Aziraphale was not really the sleeping type, but there was something so peaceful about Crowley’s quiet, snuffly breathing. At some point in the night, on a whim, the angel put down the book and lay down too, wondering whether sleep might come to him. Almost immediately, without waking, Crowley wound several limbs snakelike around the angel. Aziraphale lay very still, his curious blue eyes open, for the rest of the night. The sounds of Woodstock played distant through the walls of the tent.