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jneowls · 5 years

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The children piled into Mr. Young’s dinky little car and it had driven off. Madame Tracy and Mr. Shadwell strapped on their helmets and rolled off on that dinky little scooter. That leaves Newt and Anathema to trod their way back to whatever thing they’d rolled in on.

“We could give you a ride. We’re parked just at the edge of the perimeter,” Newt offers.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale accepts.

He and Crowley follow the humans toward a gap in the distant chain link.

“So, you were saying?” Anathema sidles right up to Aziraphale and gives a pointed look to Crowley as she adds, “Before someone shushed you.”

Aziraphale lights up. “Oh, right! Well, in the garden…”

It takes several long-winded minutes just to get to Mesopotamia, so that’s where Crowley cuts in to pick up the pace. “Yeah, the ark.”

“I was getting there—”

“Sure. Then there was Jesus and then the Roman empire.”

“You tried your first oyster—”

“Mhm. Notable point in history.”

He rattles off all the major bullet points like a We Didn’t Start the Fire remix, allowing Aziraphale just enough to express the first thought on each before moving on to the next. The Crusades. The Globe Theatre. The guillotine. Witch Burnings. The Spanish Inquisition—

“You said you weren’t there for that one,” Aziraphale points out.

“I was there. At the right time. Not exactly the same places, though.”

“You were in Spain for the entire Inquisition?” Anathema asks.

Crowley shrugs. “Yeah, probably.”

He has no idea how long the thing actually ran.

She hums and gives him an appraising look. “Aprendiste algo cuando estuviste?”[1]

“Bastante.”

She smiles and it gives Crowley the smug feeling of having passed a test without trying. The conversation continues. In English, so as not to exclude the other two. After a silent struggle to cram his long legs into Dick Turpin’s narrow back seat, he does Anathema the favor of skipping ahead to Adam Young’s delivery. They cover most of the basics, in the convoluted way anything gets covered when Aziraphale and Crowley are explaining it at the same time.

“There’s the bus stop,” Newt interrupts, pulling the car to a halt at the curb. He turns in his seat to face them. “What will you do now?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale answers. Honest, lost, and soft.

“I will fall face first into bed and sleep for a week,” Crowley answers. No exaggeration.

Anathema turns in her seat and says, sweetly, “Entonces, que duermas con los angelitos.”[2]

Crowley’s jaw drops. He wonders if it’s unintentional—Nope. She’s not breaking eye contact. She knows what she said.

“What was that?” Aziraphale asks, oblivious.

Anathema looks at him, then back at Crowley.

“She said sleep well,” he mumbles.

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[1] “Learn anything while you were there?” “Quite a bit.”

[2] Conversationally, “Sleep well.” Literally, “Sleep with the angels.”

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