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She has to admit: it’s been some time since she and Aziraphale had last met for more than a few minutes, even with The Arrangement in place. The past five decades or so have been mostly silence, with an occasional ad placed in the city’s newspaper to ask for a quick clandestine meeting at St. James’s Park, and only purely for business.
Tonight had been one of those occasions, but he seemed to be offering more than just more time to meet. Still just a chance to talk over some of their business with the Geneva Protocol, the failing Prohibition laws over in the U.S., maybe a couple of the current civil wars. She can’t talk about her recently-Beelzebub-approved plans for the upcoming economic crash - it’d be an unsarcastic shame for that to be so easily thwarted when such a delicious redistribution of wealth could do so much Evil… and yet balance out to so much Neutral. Hypothetically, of course. She hadn’t put together that second half of the presentation for the Council. Obviously. She was an engineer, after all, not a fortune teller.
Aziraphale is already there when she arrives, sitting primly at the end of a park bench with his back turned toward the centre of the park like a blessed fool, just asking to be caught unawares. She walks past at first, checking around them thoroughly before she circles around to stand next to him.
“Bit keen, aren’t you?” she asks quietly as she gazes over at the familiar gaggle of mixed waterfowl. Aziraphale startles - because of course he does, always lost in the clouds in his own thoughts.
“Oh! Fashionably just-in-time, as always,” he chirps with his usual kind smile that he rarely allows to reach his eyes. While it’s a relief to see that he’s moved on from that atrocious paperboy cap, his new tuxedo and matching top hat don’t feel like his kind of style, either. The cream colour silk fabric with the dark grey collar and the powder blue bowtie are definitely a memorable combination, she’ll give him that. The black eyeliner and the hint of blush are a nice touch - not that she could tell him that. The masculine androgyny suits him. “I would say that it’s good to see you, but… given our respective roles…”
“Of course.” Nothing new, just a dance as old as Time itself.
“Of course. You understand.” A long pause passes between them as Crowley stares out at the mostly graceful movements of the birds bobbing around out in the water, illuminated only by the low glow of the lampposts set along the walking paths.
“Shall we get on with it?” she asks as she turns to go back toward the centre of the park, the theatre being across the midway and two blocks down. She can’t imagine a human trying to make that trek in such high heels, but then again, human shoes were foreign bodies to them.
“Jolly good,” the angel replies nervously as he stands, his expression losing its grip on his face as he turns and sees the demon directly for the first time in several years. Of course they’ve both been working more or less in the same region of the world on the same interventions. He thinks she hasn’t seen him puttering around; she’ll let him think he was being stealthy and that his disguises weren’t obvious. It’s endear- … Well, interesting, is it?
Crowley admits that she’d chosen this dress to get a rise out of others, the dirty heathen of an angel included. It’s in the general style of the dresses humans have recently started wearing, albeit a few centimetres shorter in length at the bottom and with the collar cut lower. An even shorter black silk minidress is visible through the sheer black gossamer dress, mostly held together by the intricate embroidered red swirls and spirals. Both layers are adorned with red sequins scattered around like red supergiants on the universe’s canvas, the closest thing to art that she’s had time for in months now. She isn’t sure if Aziraphale seems more taken by the thigh-high slits cut all around her dress, or by the glossy black feathers she’d saved from her wings to stitch into the matching headpiece. Whichever it is, his mouth has been open for a while now and she hopes everyone who looks at her tonight can see whatever show they want to see. She knows Aziraphale can see her peering at him over the top rim of her sunglasses, but that doesn’t seem to change anything.
“Angel? We should move along.”
“Yes. Yes! Of course. Let us go!” He moves as if he wants to offer her his arm, then he gives an awkward twitch and moves away. The chivalry might come out if someone decides to harass or assault her tonight; in this era, that seems to be par for the course with human men most days. This dress draws even more attention than usual, if the journey here was any judge, but better her than some poor human with no easy means to defend their self. After all, gender is a game that the demon never tires of, even if it makes her weary at times.
“You said you got box seats?”
“I did,” he says excitedly, those two words winding their way through at least five different musical notes. “It’s a dining box, directly above stage left. It won’t be the best view of the performance, to be sure, but I was able to purchase all four seat tickets for that box so as to give us a bit more privacy while we discuss… business matters.”
“Fancy. Put a lot of thought and effort into this, didn’t you?” A soft noise from her right catches her ear and she glances over into the darkness, seeing only a patch of recently trimmed grass bordered by reshaped shrubs and newly planted flowers. “Which play?”
“Oh - uh, a new production, first performed just a couple of years ago. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello.”
“Never heard of it.” Again, that sound catches her ear, more urgent this time as it draws her in. Crowley stops and turns toward the grassy area, pulling her sunglasses fully from her face to give her the best chance of seeing as she squints into the darkness.
“Even better! I’ve read it through already, and I look forward to hearing your first im… pressions of it. My dear, what in Heaven’s graces are you doing?” By now, Crowley has walked over into the hilly grass, still perfectly balanced on very high heels because of course she expects her own feet will always be steady. She crouches down to look into the shrubs, searching with sound and taste-smell now that low eyesight is all but useless in so much darkness.
“Come on. Come here, you lovely little gem.” And she does - willingly, happily, gratefully. She really is gorgeous when Crowley stands and holds her up to see in the light of the lampposts - a metre-long beauty striped with chunky black and thin white, her silky scales rubbing across Crowley’s palm as the clearly abandoned exotic Kingsnake wraps herself around her demonic ancestor’s warmer wrist. “I’ll never get why humans think they can just turn any sort of creature loose in the park. You don’t belong here, do you?”
“Crowley?” the angel calls, his unearthly blue eyes going wide when he sees their new slithery companion. “Oh. Are… are you actually planning to take a wild snake with us to dinner?”
“What if I am? Maybe she’ll like the play.” Aziraphale stands and watches in astonishment as the demon raises her hand to her shoulder, the other hand sliding her sunglasses back into place. She allows the snake to uncoil and wrap herself securely around Crowley’s neck in an armless embrace before she walks causally back to the pathway to stand next to him, waiting on him to gather himself once again. The snake gives a grateful tongue flicker at the side of the demon’s throat before she settles in to enjoy her warm seat to the free show. “Hello, sssweetheart.”
“So you are taking the snake?” he asks, as if she could leave the poor thing out here to get mauled by one of the geese, or bisected by a passing bike, or shredded by the lawn trimmer. She’s only a baby, after all, and the public park is no place for a snake bred and raised in captivity.
“ ‘Course I am. She’s cold, and she might like to taste the wine, too.” When Aziraphale, (stuffy as he always is with rules) isn’t convinced, Crowley begins walking toward the theatre on her own, still hoping to miss the worst of the rush at the box office. With this extra prompting, he finally remembers his feet and he scurries after her. “If anyone says anything, I’ll miracle myself a matching red top hat and a full beard. She can hide in the beard, and the humans will be happy to have something else to mutter about.”
“I-if you think that will keep everyone happy.” Crowley doesn’t bother to bite back the smirk at this fluffy, angelic comment.
“Don’t much care if the humans are happy about it. You know just as well as I do that one of the few things humans hate worse than snakes is gender fuckery.” With this, Aziraphale quirks his eyebrow with a slight head bob, finally falling into step beside the demon. It seems the issue is settled, and she notices Aziraphale adjust his top hat just a notch, as if he hopes that his own genderless gender fuckery will go unnoticed enough for them to enjoy the play and dinner in peace.
“Is she… venomous?”
“Doubt it, if she was being kept as a pet. Then again, you never really know with humans these days - trying to keep all kinds of wild creatures and beasts and beauties in their box of an apartment, wanting to show off how much money they’ve got and how little common sense.”
She pauses for a moment as they reach the edge of the park and check the street for oncoming traffic. Unsurprisingly, the street lighting over here is abysmal and anyone unlucky enough to be travelling outside of a car with headlamps is shit out of luck in terms of visibility. Upon reaching the other side, Crowley continues, amused at the angel’s skittishness over a tiny Earthly snake.
“Besides, even if she is venomous, she’s not more venomous than me. None of the watered down nonsense topside is going to hurt me, and it probably wouldn’t cause you any real harm, either. You’re a bloody angel, for Hell’s sake.” The marquee lights atop the front board of the theatre are within sight now, the curb outside of it lined with the cars of wealthier patrons. Soon enough they’ll be reliable enough for her to track down her own shiny black beetle-bodied jewel. Every year, that moment gets closer.
“Oh? You have venom?” Aziraphale asks with genuine curiosity, as if this thought had never occurred to him before. She hopes for his own good that he hasn’t considered the possibilities of full-body shedding or demonic snake eggs yet, him being the surprisingly naïve bibliophile that he is.
“Of course I have venom! Aziraphale, that’s like me asking if your innumerable eyes can really see the entire light spectrum. It comes with the whole snake-demon gift set and the angel-of-the-lord prize package.” With a small snarky smile which he clearly doesn’t want to be seen as a smile, Aziraphale checks for traffic again before he waves them across the final street. Crowley smirks at the flustered glances he throws toward her heels as they click along the road and the opposite sidewalk, already planning out how to enhance her next version of the same high heels. She can still feel several of his non-corporeal eyes fixed on her as she moves; he gets more human with every passing century.
“We get all of the best designs from Creation, don’t we? A buffet of divine, ethereal, and Earthly powers and delights.”
“And most of the worst, as well - besides the whole permanent-death thing.”
“In what way, my dear fellow?” With another grin, she wonders how the crowd of humans they just passed interpreted that term of familiarity.
“Moulting feathers isn’t even the start of it for some us. Not when you’ve been re-Created to spread low-level passive Pestilence across the planet.” Finally, they come to a stop at the end of the line of patrons winding its way into the theatre, where soon they’ll be able to relax a bit more without being easy to spot together in the open air. “Then again, if not for some of those mild infernal tortures, we wouldn’t have gifts like this gorgeous little monochrome ribbon.”
“You’re planning on keeping that snake, aren’t you?” the angel asks as he watches her run her fingers along the glossy scales wrapped at the side of her neck.
“Might. Can’t think of a reason not to. Got the plants in their climate-controlled room already, all we’d really need would be a heat source and some meals for her. What’s twenty years in the face of eternity?”
“That’s a very… serpentine thing for you to do,” Aziraphale says with his own devilish grin, swallowing whichever overly-holy word he had started with.
“They didn’t ask to be Created and cast aside as nuisances. Might be my fault they’re so stigmatised. Might as well embrace it and try to do right by them. Might even be a descendant of mine - who knows.” The angel frowns as he looks down at the sidewalk, trying to follow this thread of a conversation meant for another time. Instead, Crowley continues. “I know what it’s like, having the world dislike you on sight. Seeing them cringe. Seeing the pity. You don’t need legs, or a halo, or a top hat to be worthy of respect.”
As they step forward, next in line to present their tickets, she hopes this has given him enough to think about to last through the evening and until their paths cross again, whenever that might be. As she watches, the angel’s eyes move from her face to that of the man passing by, whose eyes are locked on her throat - whether her Adam’s apple or the snake, she doesn’t care.
With a snap of her fingers, he suddenly trips on gravity, shoulder-checking himself on the lamppost on his way down.