aj_crawley | (no subject)

(no subject)

It's a picture-postcard sunrise as Crowley ghosts back through the streets of L.A., headed towards Raguel's apartment, and it gives his face a little colour. He feels strange - flattened and insubstantial, like nighttime in the desert has eroded something out of him, worn it away with cold and dust, from right around the time when he found that it hurt too much to breathe. He mostly just sat, after that.

Crowley's clothes are dusty - everything is dusty; his face is smudged with it and his hair is streaked with it, and nobody looks twice as his shadow, long and thin in the early light, glides through street junctions like a stick clattering along a picket fence. The roads are so regular here, predictable as graph paper or prison bars, laid down upon the landscape. He'd do well here, Crowley thinks distractedly, trailing exhaustion beneath a particularly shameless billboard. Under other circumstances, of course. He'd do well here, in this city with its squeaky-clean boulevards and grimy back alleys, its sunsets and sunrises ripe and pink, glorious with air pollution, its smooth, silicone denizens talking the talk and walking the walk, feet on the ground but heads in some celluloid dream. They've all sold their souls to get here, one way or another; in highway rest stops and bankers' offices, in doctors' waiting rooms and studio car parks. What's one more name on the bill of sale? Just name your price.

Crowley could wear this city like a coat, all fashionable angles and hungry grin, designer sunglasses and unrealistic cheekbones. When you get by, it's called 'making a living'. When you succeed, it's called 'making a killing'.

Los Angeles. City of Angels.

He can see why Raguel hates it here.

It still hurts to breathe.

The door to Raguel's building opens without putting up a fight, and it's early enough (for a Sunday, at least) that he doesn't meet anyone on the stairs. It's still cold in here. His shoes don't make much sound on the floorboards, because that's what happens when you trudge, and when you feel so insubstantial that you're barely there at all. He half-expects his fingers to pass through Raguel's doorknob when he reaches for it, but they don't. The door opens when he leans against it, creaking. And then he stops.

Just stops.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The furniture inhabiting Raguel's apartment is improbably stylish, but the contrast between the owner and the place's understated elegance isn't as jarring as Aziraphael might have expected. It's all rather tasteful, in fact, and he's more than a little certain that Crowley had a hand in it - if for no other reason than that he can't imagine Raguel taking the time to pick it out, any more than he can imagine Crowley suffering Raguel to decorate his pet project with worn but serviceable charity rejects.

Nevertheless, Aziraphael can't quite get comfortable. By the time the sun comes up, he's flitted from armchair to couch, one place to another, until he's sat almost everywhere there is to sit, first perched on the edge of the deep cushions and then settling back, then getting up to fetch another cup of tea. Raguel would no doubt be surprised to learn quite how much of it he had in his cupboards.

There's no milk, however.

(His thoughts falter here, chest constricting tightly.)

He'd been surprised to find how clear the path had been, how easy it had been to arrive here, once he'd made that first decision. He's anxious, of course -- his stomach hasn't stopped twisting since Christmas morning -- but whenever a particularly bad flutter threatens his composure, that image of Crowley leaning against his cupboards surfaces again, stark and simple, stopping his thoughts in their tracks. It's an easy choice to make. He'll simply stay until Crowley comes back. He will wait for as long as it takes. And he will make this right again.

Eventually, he settles back into the first armchair, hands wrapped around yet another cooling mug. It's the sound of the door that makes him look up.

"Crowley," he says.

Crowley doesn't reply; doesn't react.

He just stands there, framed by the doorway and - still, so utterly and suddenly still, his hand resting loosely on the doorknob.

He looks - small, there. Small, and so far away.

After a moment (long enough), he leans forward and carefully places the mug on the coffee table, brushes some imaginary lint from his trouser leg. And only then does he stand, and take a couple of steps toward the demon. Crowley doesn't look well at all.

"Are you all right?"

Flat black sunglasses track Aziraphael's movements, follow his hands as he sets down the tea and brushes off his trousers, look back to his face as he gets to his feet.

And still, Crowley just stands there - just looking at him, and nothing else, as though he can't quite process the fact that Aziraphael is here. That despite everything, Aziraphael somehow knew where he was, and came to him, and waited for him, and is here.

"Aziraphael," he says, stupidly.

His sunglasses are supposed to be a shield. A multitude of sins, he'd told Raguel. But there's no hiding the cracks running through the demon's expression. Not like that.

He looks so tired. Aziraphael is not going to let himself go any further than that, just at the moment. He allows one hand to reach forward a little, as though gentling a spooked animal.

"Will you come and sit?"

There's a thick quilt lying half-folded on the couch. When he was 'decorating' Crowley might have decided that the room needed a little visual warmth, but it's unlikely he'd have chosen quite those colours.

"I was," he says, gesturing uselessly behind himself. And then, "Your jumper is inside-out."

He'd had a plan. Rehearsed it and everything, endlessly, out in the freezing desert, revised and reworked and rehearsed it again, how he was going to come back and what he was going to say to put things back the way they were. He'd had a plan.

This just wasn't in it.

Aziraphael isn't supposed to be here.

(It doesn't make sense.)

"...Oh." He blinks down at himself and a tiny hint of a smile breaks through his composure.

"Thank you, my dear; I'll deal with it later, I think. Come sit? There are some things I have to - things you should know."

Again, it takes a moment - for the words to sink in, and for Crowley, still silhouetted against the hallway behind him, to step slowly forward, to turn, to close the door carefully behind him. The distance to the chairs, where Aziraphael is standing, seems immeasurably vast, absurdly, impossibly vast - impossible that he should have reached them already.

Impossible.

He folds himself down onto the couch, spare and precise, avoiding the garish quilt without ever (quite) looking at it.

His forehead is furrowed. Wary.

He sits back down in the armchair (when had he taken those steps away from it?) gratefully. Now that they're here, face to face and in the flesh, he's almost forgotten how he meant to begin.

"Look, you are all right, aren't you?"

...That wasn't it, but he couldn't help it. Crowley still doesn't look well at all.

"I was on my way home," Crowley says, head turning towards the door and then back. "I was going to - "

His hands twitch on his lap, before he fastens them firmly together.

('Home'.)

That still isn't an answer.

"Oh," he says, a little taken aback. Crowley seems very unguarded, for a demon in sunglasses. Well, for Crowley.

"Er. 'Going to -'?"

The beat of silence wrongfoots him - distracts him from from the confusion firing off inside his head, muddling his thoughts - and when he looks up at Aziraphael again, it's with a sense of things finally clicking into focus.

His fingers loosen a little from their sudden, tight cage, and he turns his hands palm-upwards on his knees. A supplication.

"Apologise," he says. "I was going to apologise."

He doesn't say anything at all for a moment. Literally can't, for a moment. The familiar invisible band constricting his chest is back, and all the air has disappeared from the room.

"I'm not sure that's entirely--" he begins in a wavery voice, and trails off before he can finish.

"I have plenty of apologies to make as well, as it happens," he says instead, a little more strongly. "That's part of why I needed to come. And I wanted to be sure you were all right."

(That's a hint, if Crowley chooses to take it.)

"I was just - in the desert," Crowley says, one hand ticking up to rub above his eyebrow. It leaves another dark smudge behind it; dust and dirt. Stuff gets everywhere. "It was cold."

He's exhausted.

(And Aziraphael is sitting here in front of him, and asking if he's all right.)

He has a sudden, strong urge to wrap himself around Crowley and call up as much heat as he can stand, cover them both with that quilt and doze right here on Raguel's couch until Crowley is relaxed and comfortable again.

But he can't, yet.

"I'm sorry," he blurts out. "That's the last thing I wanted, after all this."

"No." He shakes his head once, abruptly. "I just - felt like somewhere that wasn't London."

He needed somewhere that wouldn't make him sick with memories, everywhere he went.

"Yes. I see," he says, nodding and trying not to stare. The Mojave is perhaps not so far as it sounds, after all, not when it's as simple as visiting a friend round the corner. Still. There's no hiding the fact that a night alone in the desert was hard on Crowley, sitting there as he is, covered in smudges and weariness.

"Different scenery does wonders, I've found," he continues. "But I'm glad to have met you on your way home."

('Home'.)

There's a thin film of dust on his sunglasses, but he doesn't dare take them off.

"How did you know where - ?"

"Where to find you?" he finishes cautiously. "Oh, I wouldn't call it anything as dramatic as a hunch. You weren't at your flat, and when you didn't come back for a bit I began thinking about where you might go, and made a phone call."

He glances at his knees. It sounds so simple laid out like that. The more cluttered details can surely wait until another time.

"That rat bastard."

It's more for form's sake than anything else, and it shows. After all, it's not as though he'd told Raguel not to tell Aziraphael.

He hadn't thought -

(But he'd been wrong. And now it hurts to breathe all over again.)

"Really, my dear, I'm sure he was only concerned for you."

(But the admonishment is more for form's sake than anything else, and it shows.)

"And I was quite relieved to hear it."

Aziraphael wasn't supposed to be here.

(It doesn't make sense.)

"I was just tired," he says to the floorboards.

(And my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.)

"Yes. Yes, I."

It wouldn't be so hard, perhaps, to just put aside his confession and let the conversation wander where it would. But it's impossible to think he could live with himself if he let Crowley take the fall, so to speak, for his own misery. And he remembers too well how Crowley had looked, bent against those cabinet doors under an invisible, impossible weight. It's not an alternative he could consider.

His hand wraps around the cushion's edge and squeezes.

"I - as it happens, I thought I could do something about that. But I rather seem to have made things much worse."

"It was Christmas," Crowley says, gaze sneaking up, quick, and then back down. At the halfway point: a sliver of parched, desert yellow behind his glasses. "You weren't to know I'd pitch a fit over it."

"That isn't precisely it. That isn't it at all, as a matter of fact," he says, unhappiness sharpening his determination. If Crowley apologises again, his eyes downcast and with that awful, painful humility that he can hardly stand to look at, then he can't be held responsible, he really can't. Raguel might come home to discover fretful fingerprints pierced right through the leather of his cushion, or shards of broken mugs, dropped from unsteady fingers, littering his floor.

"I couldn't - look, do you remember how dreadful it was last winter, when it was so cold?"