Work Text:
1990
The spider is not making eye contact with Crowley.
Nonetheless, Crowley distinctly feels like it is.
It is not some little garden spider; it is large and brown and its legs are each at least two inches. It is currently rappelling harmlessly (not harmlessly, Crowley thinks) down a corner of the apartment, and he is cowering in the other corner.
A few thoughts run through his head (among them burning the damn flat), but not one of them include getting anywhere new the bloody thing. Too many legs. All hairy. Nothing he wants to be any closer to.
His flip phone has been open in his hands for a few minutes now while he goes back and forth on what to do with it, and if the only idea in his mind is as foolish as it seems. (It probably is).
He does it anyway.
“Crowley? Crowley? It’s past midnight, is everything alright?”
Stupid as it is, Aziraphale’s voice alone is enough to briefly slow his pounding heart. “There’s a spider. In my flat.”
“A spider?” He can practically hear Aziraphale’s brow furrowing. “Just a spider? Is that… you’re not speaking in code, are you, my dear? Is it really… a spider?”
“No, yes, it’s a spider. Big leggy bastard with too many eyes–”
“Really, Crowley, it’s just a spider.”
“It’s not just a spider,” he hisses. “And it won’t leave the flat. I can’t… smash it. It’ll make a mess.” Not to mention how much he hates killing living things, as un-demonic as that would be to admit.
“Can’t you just… put it in a cup? Take it outside?”
“What if it jumps on me?” The spider is now walking towards him. He begins to shift to the other corner while keeping his eyes fixed on the spiders, one-to-four. His voice is small when he finally speaks again. “Can… can you come get it? Please?”
He feels so silly. Begging Aziraphale to come to his flat in the middle of the night to take care of a stupid spider? That’s not part of the Arrangement. He has no reason to say yes.)
“Please, Angel.” He can hear his own breath echoing on the line. “She’s moving towards the plants.”
(The Arrangement had never followed its own rules, even before it even existed and a certain wing was raised, even after it had been interrupted and then a church destroyed.)
“Alright, I’m on my way over, don’t do anything rash now.” Aziraphale sighs with exasperation, while Aziraphale sighs with relief.
Crowley is still locked in an almost comical staring contest with the spider when Aziraphale arrives at his flat.
“Don’t step on it,” he hisses, pointing out the spider on the cold, grey floor. It is big, at least for a spider, and he knows plenty of humans who would be more than a little concerned by it. But Aziraphale, who’s accustomed to a dusty bookshop that spiders find inhabitable often, is not disturbed.
“Really, she’s just a little thing” he sighs, finding one of Crowley’s cut-crystal drinking glasses and gently guiding the spider into it. Crowley only uncurls his tensed muscles slightly when his hand is clapped over the top. “Probably looking for a place to start a family.”
“Not in my flat, she’s not,” he growls with untoward aggression.
(And what is Crowley supposed to say? That Hell is dark and stagnant and filled with too many legs and things with too many legs and creatures rotting and festering in every corner? His flat is immaculate, it is free of creatures and rot and destruction. A spider in his garden had been enough to make him return to that primal fear.)
The spider taps curiously on the sides of the glass.
“I’ll just let her out on the balcony, then?” He frowns as he approaches the glass door. “Oh, dear me, it’s just started raining out. I can’t drown her.”
“Downstairs then. She can hide under their awning. Old lady wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Aziraphale shrugs, steps onto the balcony, and lets the spider crawl onto his hand, the legs tickling him slightly. Crowley only approaches once he’s seen the spider begin to descend on a web, going down from the angel’s hand to the underside of a little green awning. Finally, it disappears into a corner, and Aziraphale gently flicks off the web.
Without exchanging a word, they agree not to go back in right away.
Aziraphale remains protected from the rain by the thin awning of Crowley’s own balcony, but Crowley chooses to stand in the rain even in all his clothes. He removes his sunglasses as they become clouded with precipitation.
“You changed your hair,” Aziraphale says stupidly, because it’s all he can think of that isn’t some even-stupider comment about the rain.
He shrugs. “Growing it out. Don’t think I like it.”
(Later, Crowley would privately think he should’ve gotten a commendation for the mullet, but Hell never really understood those sorts of things.)
Aziraphale has no further reply as Crowley continues to let himself get drenched by the steadily increasing rain. His hair is plastered to his face and his jeans are darkened by the water.
“Really, my dear, you’re going to ruin your jacket,” Aziraphale says nervously.
He shrugs again. Can always miracle a new one. Probably going out of style anyways.
(And what is Crowley supposed to say? Standing outside in the rain, he can imagine it is like the First. He can imagine fine drops misting down onto him, filtered through the gaps between the feathers on an angel’s wing. He can listen to the thunder roaring around them like it is the birth pangs of a strange new race.
Inside, with the rain beating around him on walls and ceilings, it is like the Flood. Like being trapped in the belly of a ship with a dozen children huddled around him, desperate not to be found out. Desperate to make it seem like a sin, yet knowing that it is just the opposite. Aziraphale was there for that one, too. He hadn’t been able to protect them from the rain, not that time).
Aziraphale watches Crowley with his face tilted up towards the sky. Letting the water run in rivulets down his face.
He looks as if he is being baptized.
“I suppose I’d better be getting back to the shop,” he finally says. “It’s getting late.”
“Give you a lift?” Crowley offers. “For making you come out here–”
He shakes his head. “No, I think a walk could do me good. But thank you.”
“You’ll ruin your coat,” Crowley warns, nodding to his fine cream-and-gold suit jacket.
“Yes, well…”
“Hold on a moment,” Crowley mumbles, then shrugs out of his own leather jacket. He shakes it with a sharp snap, and all the rain droplets fly miraculously off of it. “Keep it dry.” And he tucks it over the angel’s shoulders.
“You didn’t have to–”
Yes, I did.
“Goodnight, Angel,” Crowley says with softness, all the nervousness of the night gone from his voice in one instant.
“Goodnight, Crowley.”