Work Text:
Crowley lets the thunder of noise settle over him, and shifts his weight a bit. It doesn’t do a lot to settle his hip or back, but it’s a distraction for a moment. Anything’s better than listening to the planes, or squinting into the darkness for so long that he’s almost convinced himself there’s a fire.
Beneath him, London seems to be holding its breath. The blackout’s being observed pretty well, and although it’s probably the cost rather than altruistic goodwill, there’s hardly even any cars on the roads.
Which makes his job easier, if more boring.
He shifts his weight again and curses the stairs to get up here. France had been a long time ago; so long that it seemed like a nightmare which had happened to someone else, and so recent that he sometimes can’t close his eyes without tasting gas and rot and mud, but most of the time, it’s alright unless he needs to climb stairs.
Still.
It’s a job, and the factory where he’d clawed his way up to be lead designer is currently a still smoking crater, so it’s a rent payment.
He can cope with stairs.
The stars are out, too.
Crowley watches them for a while, and tries to remember their names.
**
Some of the shops stay open just the same, and he’s got more time to spend wandering amongst them now he works at night. The tailors on Carnaby Row are still there, working by lamplight and tallow as they’d done in centuries past. They’re mostly making officers’ uniforms, although one of them is delighted to take on making a new coat for him.
There’s probably rules about what night watchmen are allowed to wear. They’ll have to find him first to complain, and there’s not enough men left in London for him to worry about it too much.
The first week’s interesting, in the way anything new is. He doesn’t read the papers and tries to avoid the radio as much as possible. It’s the same old stories they told the last time around, and most of them will be lies.
The second week, there’s a bombing raid that’s technically not near where he ought to be staying. He goes to help anyway, and wishes he hadn’t. The blood on his hands matches his hair, matches the flames, and the woman’s screaming follows him across the city, asleep and awake.
He tries to keep watching the stars after that, dragging up childhood memories of the stories associated with them. The planes block them out, stars and stories alike; ceaseless lines of bombers whining their way through the sky, met with the howl of air raid sirens and the chatter of anti aircraft guns.
Autumn drags its way into the city, the world turning on even as men try and stop it. He watches the plane trees outside his room turn to flames themselves, red and gold and auburn in the sharp evening cold, and the other flames, the real flames, spread across the rest of the city.
There are so many fires.
Crowley takes to walking when he’s not working, missing the factory and missing the company. He’s bored, more than anything.
He finds the emptiness of what had been London Zoo, the silence of the Tower without visitors, and wonders where the Crown Jewels have gone. Even St James Park is changed from his old haunt; strung across with barbed war on the approach to Horseguards and the grass tramped down by the Home Guard training sessions held there. He feels like a stranger, again.
October and the raids keep coming. He goes to another bombing site, leaves the department store alone while he does it, and this time he only gets a written warning instead of nightmares. There’s a row of houses hollowed out like a trench hit by a shell, and everyone in them had been down the Underground and the only blood is from someone trying to pull a clock off a barely visible mantelpiece and getting a handful of nails instead.
That night, he’s able to remember a few more stories for the stars he can see. Orion striding up into the night sky, and across from him, the Plough pointing North. If he listens hard enough over his own pain, he might be able to hear his nurse reading the book to him, telling him the Greek myths.
**
He’s spent most of his life avoiding Soho. Knowingly, deliberately avoiding it and the rumours of clubs there, of men who might understand. Better not to taste it at all, he’d thought and it was easier not to miss what he’d never known.
He ends up there by accident, one Monday morning. The tube’s stopped again, and he’d got off at a random station, grimacing at the scent of oil and smoke covering everything, and started wandering.
Most of the clubs are still there, advertising their girls discreetly. He’s heard about the other ones, never seen them.
There had been a man in France, in what Crowley still thought of as ‘before.’ His name had been Luke, his hair had been as dark as the trenches and his hands sharp as wire. He’d spoken like that too, all rage and anger, and Crowley had been terrified and fascinated by him. Enchanted, in the oldest forms of the word, maybe. They’d never kissed, and anything else had been a greedy fumble in the dark, edged with pain. He’d died sometime before Crowley had been injured and probably it had been a good thing.
He shakes his head and keeps walking. There’s hours and hours of silence to fill today, before he can go and limp around guarding a shop he can’t afford to buy things from.
The tobacconist's shop is closed, but there’s a bookshop on the corner. The glazed window’s crammed full of books, although he can just about see someone moving around inside. He crosses over and looks at the display for a moment.
A couple catch his eye; there’s a book about racing cars and another about Hollywood, but there’s a leather bound one with an outline of Orion on the front that calls out to him.
He shifts his weight again, tries to find a way of standing that doesn’t hurt. Too many steps climbing out the tube today.
The door opens with a creak that startles him, and he glances across to see a man ushering a customer out. Crowley looks at him for a moment and then tries very hard to look away.
It doesn’t work.
He’s beautiful, and that recognition carries a terror all its own with it. Something else Crowley will never be able to admit to, another layer of guilt and dread.
He should leave. Walk away now before he damns himself any further.
The book’s still in the window.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’
The man’s voice is soft. Doesn’t sound like a Londoner; if anything, Crowley thinks there’s a trace of Wales there.
‘Oh. Umm. I was just looking but… um… that one. The one about the constellations?’
‘I’ll have to go and check. Would you like to come in a moment? It’s rather cold out here, and I think it’s going to rain.’
Crowley follows him under the awning of the shop, which stretches out like a covering wing, and then into a cramped room which on second glance is only cramped because every available inch is full of books.
It’s warm, somehow, although he can’t smell any fire burning. Warm enough that the new wool overcoat suddenly feels too heavy, and the hat’s ridiculous. He takes it off, clutches it which at least gives him something to focus on rather than staring at the man as he wanders across the display and lifts the book up.
He can read the name on the glass from here, even though it’s reversed. A Z Fell & Co. Not that that gives any clue as to his name, or even if he’s the owner.
‘I remember now. I put this one in the window because the back cover is far too damaged to sell. I’ve been meaning to repair it but time is so lacking, don’t you find?’
The man’s come back to where Crowley’s standing. Not quite close enough to be in his personal space but maybe a bit closer than normal. Maybe that’s Crowley’s wishful thinking.
‘Oh. Ummm. That’s fine, of course. Yes. Time is…’ he can’t think enough to get the words sorted. He’s probably making an idiot of himself, which is at least better than exposing himself. Well, he’s made it this many years without coming to Soho, he won’t need to come back here again.
‘Was there a reason you were interested in this one?’
Crowley looks at it for a moment. The stars, glittering in the soft light of the shop, glimmer in a way that looks almost real. The man’s wearing a signet ring on his little finger and that glimmers too.
‘Yes. I mean, yes. There was. I’m working as night security guard at a big department store and I can see the stars from there, and I can sort of remember about them but not properly. I wanted to… I wanted to remember the stories.’
It sounds foolish, to his own ears. A kind of wistful enjoyment of beauty for its own sake, which should have got knocked out of him somewhere around Verdun.
The shopkeeper smiles. Crowley’s thought he was damned plenty of times before, mostly in the guilty silence of his own room with his own hand, and definitely while listening to the sad chorus of shells overhead in No-Man’s Land, but this is the first time he’s actually felt it as something physical, something inescapable and as terrifying as it is intoxicating.
He’s beautiful. He can’t tell what colour his eyes are but they’re shining with all the light of all the stars. He’s wearing a suit that’s a bit old fashioned, and his hair’s a hastily brushed mass of what obviously wants to be dandelion fluff, and, and, and… he’s beautiful.
‘In that case, you may as well take it. Here. It’s perfectly readable, even without the cover.’
He shoves it into Crowley’s hands and their fingers touch for a moment.
‘Thank you.’ He manages that automatically. ‘That’s very kind.’
‘I don’t like selling my books, as you can no doubt tell. But…’ he gestures around the shop, at the piles there. ‘Sometimes I find the right home for one. I’ve never been into stargazing. What can you see from here?’
‘Quite a lot, really, with the blackout. Only I can’t really remember the names, that’s why I wanted the book.’
Another smile. ‘In that case, if you find yourself back here any time, please feel free to come and tell me about them. I’m Aziraphale Fell, by the way. I own the shop, and I live above so I’m normally around most days.’
‘Anthony Crowley.’
The handshake lasts a bit too long for politeness, Crowley thinks. Although, again, maybe that’s wishful thinking. Aziraphale’s hands are soft. He wonders if the other man can feel the fading callouses on his, the last remnants of the man who used to design machines, holding pencils in his hand and a thousand moving parts in his mind.
He stays in the shop, talking of everything and nothing, until the rain stops and leaves with the battered book tucked into the pocket of the oversized coat.
**
He doesn’t dare take the book with him to work. Too many nights spent in the rain, too many evenings spent dealing with more raids and the aftermath. He doesn’t have to help; he tries telling himself he shouldn’t do it but the screaming echoes across London, echoes across France and some of it had been his own screams, and he runs and limps across to the wreckage anyway.
There’s a kid, once. He doesn’t bother going to bed the morning after that.
He settles for studying the diagrams every morning and trying to spot them in the evenings. He’d thought about sketching them a few times but the paper rationing’s tight and his drawing skills aren’t worth wasting what he can get hold of.
November rolls in with a cloud of fog resting across the city, hiding it from sight. The blackout makes even daytime walking iffy and he stumbles on the uneven cobblestones a couple of times. Work is a waste of time; he can’t see across the street, let alone across the rest of the building.
The stars may as well have gone out.
He keeps reading the book anyway.
It’s late November when he runs out of excuses to not go back to Soho. Of course, he hadn’t made a note of exactly where the bookshop was, so he wastes twenty minutes on a Sunday morning stumbling up and down streets he only half recalls. The church bells are lowing.
‘Crowley!’
He looks up abruptly at the shout, cursing as his cigarette gets caught by the breeze and stutters out. Fell’s walking down the road towards him.
‘I thought that was you! Would you care to join me for lunch?’
Crowley blinks at that. ‘I… I would like that.’ He works through some fairly frantic maths and rationing, and it just about works out. Not the most sensible thing he’s ever done, but the most sensible would have been coming nowhere near Soho and this impossible man, ever again, so what’s one more act of folly? Besides, his leg aches.
Aziraphale notices. He thinks Aziraphale might notice entirely too much. ‘Are you injured?’
‘Invalided out, last time around. The cold’s not helping.’
‘Ah. I am sorry. Well. I was thinking, there’s a cafe not far along here. That’s where I was headed. They manage to do quite well, despite everything.’
Maggie’s Cafe is what he thinks of as old fashioned. Bow fronted windows and tiled walls. The woman seems to know Aziraphale and makes a point of greeting him like an old friend; Crowley watches and wonders and catches Aziraphale looking back at him rather than the menu that’s scrawled on a blackboard behind the counter.
He can’t remember, later, what he did eat. Only that Aziraphale had asked him about the book and then the stars and then somehow that had spilled into talking about France and they’d danced around ‘now’ just enough for him to learn that Aziraphale, too, was deemed unfit to fight this time around but not why, and then onto things so unimportant that all he can remember is their laughter.
It’s almost dark when they stand up to leave, the rain lashing against the windows in what Aziraphale says is a fashion straight out of Sherlock Holmes novels. The weary horse in the shafts of a rag and bone man’s cart outside adds to the effect.
‘Would you care for a night cap?’
‘It’s hardly 4.30,’ Crowley protests but weakly. He hasn’t had a decent drink in a long while, let alone with decent company.
‘We could…’ he catches the glance Aziraphale gives him. ‘I have plenty more books on the stars if you’d like to look at them?’
The walk back in the rain passes too quickly, even though it’s running down his back and he’s having to blink almost endlessly to see where he’s going.
‘I had some lovely railings around here,’ Aziraphale says as they reach the shop. ‘But they took them for melting down into tanks, I believe. Now there’s people looking in all the time. I had to move my shelves around.’
He gets a guided tour of the shop. The tiny kitchenette and toilet out back, the comfortable sofa and chairs around a desk behind the shelves where Aziraphale obviously spends most of his time. The wine, which Aziraphale brings up from a locked grate with a grin and a quip about what people don’t know won’t hurt them.
‘Have a seat.’
He does. He catches Aziraphale staring at him again as he pours, a mixture of curiosity and… admiration? Crowley’s never been on the receiving end of that before but he’s fairly sure he’s not imagining it.
The wine’s honey sweet, red and sticky. Too thick for his taste, really. Outside, London slides back into pitch darkness. He wonders if it was this dark when the Romans were here, when it was just a port on a dirty river mouth before that. Inside, Aziraphale’s eyes are still starbright, still fixed on him.
He ought to be afraid.
He’s enraptured. Charmed like a snake. Trapped, and exactly where he wants to be.
‘Another glass?’
Aziraphale’s pouring before he responds. Their fingers brush together. Aziraphale puts the bottle down and reaches for his hand, takes his hand. Outside, the sirens start wailing again, and inside Crowley can’t hear anything except for the thunder of his heart.
‘Stay?’
He isn’t sure if it’s meant for the rest of the evening or the night to come. It ends up being something akin to an eternity.