Chapter Text
It was really not the place for that kind of conversation.
Now, Crowley harboured quite a few doubts whether that place actually existed, but he was fairly certain that the rundown kitchenette in which he was currently standing (well, gracefully slouching) was not it. Even cheap, flimsy tabloids whose best feature was the model in a bikini on page two had some sort of workplace etiquette. After a fashion.
“So, let me get this straight,” he said, dragging that r a little for best effect. “Your librarian asks for an escort, and the first person you think of is me?”
Crowley had an inkling that the most appropriate feeling for the situation would be outrage, but being appropriate wasn’t exactly his best suit, and for as many character flaws he tried and succeeded with frankly outstanding results to cultivate, hypocrisy wasn’t one of them. He tried to aim for incredulous, but he suspected he managed to land just short of amused.
“Oh, Crowley.” Anathema rolled her eyes in the practiced way of a woman who has to deal daily with the idiocy of the average fellow human, and is therefore well-versed in carrying the burden of being the only sensible, intelligent person in the room. It didn’t escape Crowley that the average fellow human, in that specific situation, was none other than him. “Don’t be an ass. He’s a friend, who also happens to be a librarian, and he doesn’t need an escort–just someone to accompany him to a wedding.” Anathema hesitated, long black lashes fluttering slightly as she looked away. “Oh, and he didn’t exactly ask.”
That sentence would’ve sounded plenty alarming, uttered by anyone else, but Crowley had known Anathema long enough to suspect that, if any coercion had taken place, the poor sod had probably been at the receiving end of it.
He cleared his throat, trying to keep his eyebrows under control before they shot over his forehead. At least the kitchenette was empty. Small mercies, he supposed.
“I see,” he drawled, leaning back a little further and bracing his weight onto the counter. He knew that his outstretched arms underlined his silhouette in a way that most people found enticing, and he’d never shied away from using his weaponized thin frame as the shameless deflecting strategy that it was, as often as he could get away with. It’d do nothing for Anathema, of course, unless he learnt to bend backwards in a way that defied every law of physics and could only be explained by demonic possession, but that wasn’t really the point. It simply came natural, by now. An automatic defence reaction, like flinching and protecting the soft bits when spying an upcoming blow. “Let me rephrase that: your friend-slash-librarian is in need of a fake boyfriend, and the first person you think of is me?”
“Now you’re really being an ass.” There was just the subtlest hint of annoyance in Anathema’s voice, nicely drowned by a very real, almost solid wave of exasperation. “He doesn’t need a fake boyfriend either, just a plus one for a wedding.” She scoffed under her breath, before blowing gently over her steaming mug. “Fake boyfriend. You watch too many cheap sitcoms.”
Crowley shrugged.
“Golden Girls is not cheap, and is still a riot.”
Anathema took a small sip of her coffee, studiously watching him from over the rim of her cup. She drank coffee the way he did, black and bitter, no milk and no sugar. One of the many reasons Crowley liked her. He also liked that her favourite mug was a huge, ugly thing in the shape of an octopus -a kraken, she’d corrected him with no little outrage when he’d dared question it-, delightfully tacky even for his standards, and that she seemed to have a bottomless stock of weird dresses and an obsession for horn-rimmed reading glasses.
The real reason he liked her, however, was much more mundane than that; it was positively boring. He liked her because she reminded him of himself, as he’d been–wide-eyed and almost unbearably young, and hopeful and angry and determined and full of ill-repressed energy, as though the world was about to end in a bang and she was sitting right on the lid of the biggest powder keg. Crowley was still angry, sometimes, and his nervous energy still thrummed under his skin on bad days like a drum pulled way too tight, but the rest was long gone. Lost in bits and crumbles, as the years slinked by.
“So.”
The silence had stretched on long enough that Anathema’s voice, soft and almost purring, started Crowley back to the present.
Purring. That was a pretty terrible omen, as far as bad omens went.
Anathema pressed her lips to the rim of her cup and took another sip, large brown eyes deep and wide and steady like those of a thing hunting in the night. The soft waves of her long chocolate hair made them look even bigger, somehow, and darker. She was wearing a dress that was way too thin for the season, an almost ephemeral thing made of delicate black lace and sensible cotton, with puffed sleeves and a skirt that reached demurely to below her knee.
“Are you interested?” she asked.
Crowley scoffed, pushing himself off the counter and straightening up. Great, his hands were sticky now, on top of everything. He didn’t want to know with what.
“Why would I ever be interested?”
Anathema shrugged, feigning disinterest. She wasn’t particularly good at it, but Crowley had a nagging suspicion that that was bound to change, and much sooner than he would’ve liked. Better to take home whatever victory he was able to cobble up while he still could.
“Well. The place’s supposed to be pretty beautiful, from what Aziraphale told me. Somewhere in Sussex. You could think of it as a free holiday.”
“Yes, because the reason I pay ludicrous amounts of money to stay in London is that I love the country so much,” Crowley sneered back, trying unsuccessfully to rub the suspicious stickiness off his hands. “And what sort of name is Aziraphale, anyway?”
“I like it, it’s unique. Never heard it before.”
“I doubt you’ll hear it again,” Crowley grumbled, looking around for a rag to wipe his hands with. There was one, close to the small, derelict sink, but it was a suspicious shade of grey that Crowley wasn’t particularly interested in investigating up close and personal. “And bloody Sussex? I’d rather pay for my holidays and go literally anywhere else on the planet, thank you very much.”
“Free food?” Anathema tried again, and then, realising that she was quickly losing ground, she hopefully added: “Free booze?”
Well, at least now they were getting somewhere. Crowley arched a brow and eyed her suspiciously.
“What kind of booze? Because heavy and cheap I can get here without all that trouble.”
“It’s a wedding, you lush, I doubt they’ll serve anything heavy and cheap,” Anathema grumbled, rolling her eyes.
“Lush? Careful, love. You’ve been here too long, you’re learning the lingo,” Crowley snickered in an exaggerated Cockney slur, thin lips opening in a huge grin. “And where will your lovely American accent go, if you let it?”
Anathema sniffed in exasperation, but she was quick on her feet again, changing the angle instead of firing back and allowing Crowley to derange the topic.
“Alright. Aziraphale, then.”
Oh. That sounded promising.
“What about your name-challenged friend?” Crowley purred, giving up on trying to get his hands less disgusting and leaning back on the counter again. His hands were already sticky, after all. At least the slouch was flattering on his frame. And if he were to freeze to death in a fashionably flimsy black shirt in that icy basement forgotten by men and God, he was going to milk it for all that it was worth.
“You are the worst gossiper I know,” Anathema flung back, tilting up her chin in a deliciously supercilious way. “Aren’t you curious to see for yourself which kind of person would need a fake boyfriend for a wedding?”
“I thought we’d established that he doesn’t need a fake boyfriend,” Crowley slyly pointed out. Anathema did a little one-shoulder shrug, making the flared rims of her lace sleeves flutter softly around her mug.
“That’s what I said, but I’m pretty sure you don’t really care.” Her voice dropped again, low and smooth, gently coaxing and subtly insidious. Crowley was impressed. Perhaps even a little proud. “I’m not asking you to say yes straight away. I’m asking you to consider the possibility. You could meet him. See for yourself what you’d be getting into. You like meeting new people, after all.”
Actually, Crowley hated meeting new people. What he liked was screwing them, which wasn’t exactly the same thing, but he certainly wasn’t going to correct Anathema on that particular point.
He tilted his head, studying Anathema’s carefully neutral expression. A sudden suspicion dawned into his mind.
“Are you trying to set me up with the guy?”
Anathema scoffed.
“Aziraphale doesn’t need me to find a date,” she said, dark brows arched on her tanned forehead, as though the idea was absolutely ludicrous. Crowley noticed she hadn’t said that he didn’t need her help to find a date. He tried very hard not to feel offended by that, though he allowed himself the luxury of a little peevishness. “I don’t think he’d want to drag a new partner in his family’s affairs. You know how nasty families can be.”
Crowley knew. Brief, unpleasant memories of Ligur and Hastur slashed through his mind. He chased them away with practiced ease in the blink of an eye.
“But it would be alright to drag me into that?”
Anathema flashed him a bright, innocent smile. It was so obviously manipulative that Crowley found it endearing.
“You’re a tough one. You can take it.”
Crowley barked a laugh, almost against his will. He’d had blokes coming on to him in clubs on Friday nights wielding a subtler brand of flattery.
“C’mon, Crowley,” Anathema pressed on, sensing an opening and going for it. “You don’t actually have to go, if you decide not to. Just meet him. I know you want to.”
“I do, now?”
“Of course you do,” Anathema practically purred, stepping marginally closer. She was nowhere near enough to touch him, and yet Crowley almost felt like she was rounding up on him. Anathema smelt weakness like a shark smelt blood. “You’re curious, I know you are. And you’re bored. When was the last time something unexpected happened to you?”
“Mrs. Bank’s two-headed calf, I guess. I wrote quite a nice piece about it last month. Then, there was that bit of gossip about the first minister. And the royal family always has a delightful scandal for its loyal subjects to pass the time with.”
Anathema almost growled in exasperation. She would’ve thrown her hands up, hadn’t she been holding her mug in a grasp that was now positively vicious. She disliked not having her way. Crowley found that charming, and not at all because it was a trait they both shared.
“You’re just playing dumb, now. You know what I mean. You were complaining about that not two months ago, how your life was boring and predictable and how you’d go out of your mind if something didn’t happen soon. Now, something is happening. You should jump at the chance, instead of being so unnecessarily difficult about it.”
Crowley remembered that conversation. It’d been just after another one-night stand had done the usual disappearing act on him. A nice enough bloke, nothing special, but apparently way too cool to give Crowley his number, or to send a stupid text to the number Crowley had given him. It didn’t matter, of course, because Crowley wouldn’t let it matter, but it still stung. He’d never been particularly good at handling rejections, which was just ridiculous. He’d been receiving them for so long that he should’ve practically been a pro by now.
“Yes, well, being dragged into somebody else’s family drama was not what I had in mind,” Crowley grumbled back, but he was wavering. He knew it, and most importantly, Anathema knew it.
“Better their drama than your own,” she said with a little shrug. “At least it’s new.”
“I don’t have drama in my life,” Crowley protested, more because he felt like he ought to than any other pretended attempt at sticking to reality. “I’m the most drama-free person you’ll ever meet.”
“Please, you’d be a Shakespearean actor if you weren’t already writing for a shitty tabloid,” Anathema scoffed in return.
“Thank you, you’re ever so kind,” Crowley groused, but without bite. She wasn’t wrong. Especially about the paper.
“You know it’s true. Just like you know you’re too good for this place. But since you’re stuck here, doing the same mindless job every damn day, without even a shred of relationship to look forward to, at least try something new for a change.”
That was a little more truth than what Crowley strictly needed to hear, but he decided that he’d let her get away with it. This time.
(Whom was he even trying to fool? He always let her get away with it.)
Crowley pushed himself up, crossing his long arms on his chest in a way he’d deny until the end of days to be dramatic in the slightest, and used the full head (and then some) he had on Anathema to look down on her in what he hoped was a fearsome looming. Anathema seemed inconveniently unimpressed with the display.
“Just because you and that boyfriend of yours are going through a honeymoon phase, it does not mean that a relationship would solve everyone’s problems.”
Anathema shrugged, taking another small sip of her coffee. It was probably getting cold by now.
“Never said it does. It helps though, to have someone. Makes you feel a little less lonely, if anything.”
Not always, Crowley thought, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her that. Newt was her first proper boyfriend, and she deserved to inhabit her little bubble of happiness as long as life would let her. And it wasn’t like he had any personal experience to draw up from, after all. He was specialised in the kind that didn’t last and didn’t stay. He could write entire dissertations about those.
“Still. Not everyone’s style.”
“Never said that either.” Anathema eyed him for a long, silent moment. “But I think it’d be good for you.”
All right, that was enough. Crowley was only thirty-eight, for Christ’s sake, intelligent enough and not completely repellent. He was not beyond hope for a relationship, thank you very much, and he didn’t need to be pitied by a nineteen-year-old.
“Not really my style,” he replied, cocking up his hip and hoping that his smirk looked condescending and self-assured. And even if he missed the mark, he could console himself with the knowledge that his black skinny jeans underlined his jutting hipbones to perfection when he slouched that way.
Anathema arched a brow, and if there was a new softness to her brown eyes Crowley most assuredly didn’t see it.
“Keep telling yourself that,” she mumbled into her coffee, but low enough that Crowley could pretend he hadn’t heard her. He decided that it was high time to change the subject.
“Anyway,” he said, trying his best for playful and careless, and hoping he wasn’t falling short. “I thought you weren’t trying to set me up.”
“I’m not,” Anathema answered in what could or could not be calculated disinterest, sipping at her coffee. “Aziraphale needs someone to shove down his family’s throat, and you need a distraction. It seemed like a good match.”
“I’m flattered that you’d consider me a relative’s worst nightmare,” Crowley grumbled, but he couldn’t hide the grin. He couldn’t really blame her. Aside from his own personal predispositions, or at least those he would allow himself to have, he was as far away from boyfriend material as he’d ever seen. He was too brash, too crude and too flashy to be easily accepted as anyone’s partner, however tolerant the family was, and his job as a tabloid journalist didn’t exactly help the matter along. But he’d be damned before he invented some kind of benign lie. He was what he was, and if someone didn’t like it, they could go to hell.
Anathema cocked her head, gaze unwavering.
“I think you’re quite the catch, actually, but most people can’t see past their nose. From what I’ve heard, Aziraphale’s family is particularly backwards in that regard, so yes, I think you might be a little too much for them.” She emptied her cup with a little shrug. Crowley did his best to ignore the warm feeling her words had sparked into his chest. He was not that pathetic, not yet. “I might or might not hope that a few of them will go into shock and drop dead, but that’s something it’d be best not to share with Aziraphale. He seems to love his family. No idea why.”
Crowley frowned.
“What’s so terrible about them? The average homophobic arseholes?”
“Oh, no, not at all. The wedding in question is between Aziraphale’s sister and her girlfriend. Well, fiancé. Of the female kind. And everyone seems perfectly cool about that.” Anathema sighed, stepping to the sink to rinse her empty mug. “It’s Aziraphale. They’re just horrible to him. Aziraphale doesn’t really go into details, but I got the impression that his family finds his job kind of demeaning, and they won’t let him forget that.”
“Demeaning? Working as a librarian?”
“They all seem pretty snobbish, from what I hear. The kind of people who have big jobs and are very polite to the help because they have manners, but wouldn’t sit on a bus if the road was on fire and the last car had been blasted to kingdom come.”
“The help? Who’s getting married here exactly, the entire cast of Downton Abbey?”
Anathema put her mug in the dishwasher with a very unladylike snort.
“Maybe. Aziraphale is pretty cagey about his family, and gets very defensive very quickly whenever his siblings are criticised. He’s very protective of them.”
“And showing up with me will help your friend in what way, exactly?”
Anathema shrugged again.
“I don’t know. But it will be good for them. Stirring the pot a little. You never know.”
“This could end very, very badly.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. And you like a challenge.” Anathema smiled at him, wide and impish and bright. She looked out of place in that dingy kitchenette, in that crowded, dank crawl space they called the main office, and he hoped -he knew- that she’d leave them soon for something better. It wasn’t too late for her. Two more years and then she would graduate and get the fuck out of that basement, and Crowley would miss her fiercely, but she didn’t deserve to be stuck there for the rest of her life. “Aren’t you curious to see what could happen?”
“Worst case scenario, they let the dogs loose and shoot me on sight,” Crowley grumbled, but she did have a point. He was curious. He wouldn’t have become a journalist if he hadn’t been, as poor an excuse for one as he was.
“If it makes you feel any better, I think your head would look lovely mounted over an eighteenth-century fireplace,” Anathema all but giggled, though she would deny to the moon and back that she would ever do such a thing.
Crowley scoffed. His hands were still a little sticky, but he decided to ignore it and went for a cup of coffee instead. Anathema had brewed a new pot for herself, and it’d have been a pity to let what was left go stale. It was only his third coffee, after all, and it was already ten in the morning. Barely enough time to squeeze another three or four cups before the end of the day.
“My head would look lovely everywhere, thank you very much, but I like it best attached to the rest of me,” Crowley grumbled, nursing his piping-hot cup and blowing gently over the rim. “But yeah, alright. I might be persuaded to meet the guy. Though I’m not making any promises about anything else.”
Anathema clapped her hands, all but yapping at him like an overexcited puppy.
“Really? That’s great, I’ll set up a date for next week. Any day in particular?”
Crowley thought it over, sipping his coffee. It was wonderfully bitter. Bless Anathema and her flawless taste.
“Wednesday might be best,” he mused. “Nothing going on on Wednesdays.” Nothing had been actually going on since that last fateful one-night stand more than two months before, aside from Golden Girls reruns and reality shows, but he wasn’t about to tell Anathema that, of late, the highlight of his weekends had been Gordon Ramsey hurling abuses at his assistants. He had an image to uphold. “After work, maybe? I could spare an hour for a coffee. If you pay.”
“Yeah, of course. My treat.”
They both knew that the coffee would end up being on him, since Crowley wasn’t going to let an unpaid student waste whatever little money she had on his own damn coffee, but that was beyond the point.
“I could be a Shakespearean fake boyfriend,” Crowley chuckled, heading for the door, hands clasped tightly around his mug. “Never done that before.”
“Never too old for a first,” Anathema quipped from behind him, and they bickered all the way back to his desk.
For someone whom Crowley hadn’t even known existed until a week before, that Aziraphale ended up taking a lot of space in his mind, during the following days. Crowley wasn’t completely sure how he felt about it. He should’ve probably been annoyed at Anathema for dragging him into yet another unnecessary mess (or at his own self for not being able to say no to a pushy nineteen-year-old, though that was utterly beside the mark), but he couldn’t really find it in himself to be all that bothered. It wasn’t like he had much to do anyway, and anything was better than watching the days slither by.
The truth was, Crowley had never been good at leaving a situation well and thoroughly alone. Once curiosity had sunk its talons into his skin, it nagged and prodded at him until it was satisfied, one way or the other, and Crowley had never been particularly successful at fighting it. He was weak. And he was bored, as Anathema had so unhelpfully pointed out.
Whatever was left of Friday rolled by without so much as a how do you do, and the weekend wasn’t too bad either, what with his telly doing what it was supposed to do and turning his mind off with a heap of pointless rubbish. He cleaned his sparsely-furnished flat until it shone (he was not a neat freak, for the record, he just liked to inhabit places that didn’t give him rabies), treated his potted plants with liquid fertilizer and barked threats, and enjoyed the polite cattiness of the participants of The Great British Bake Off until a couple of noisy action movies lulled him straight to sleep.
Come Monday, however, with nothing to think about more challenging than royal gossips and starlets sightings in this or that exclusive resort on the Cayman Islands, his mind was left to wander, worrying at the same bone like a stubborn dog. Anathema had jumped him unaware that same morning to inform him that their Wednesday coffee was very much on, if he hadn’t already decided to chicken out at the last moment, which Crowley had emphatically denied. He did not chicken out of things, especially out of a stupid coffee in a bloody shop around the corner. The obvious result was that he was now roped into the damn thing twice as tight, and there was no avoiding it anymore.
The worst of it was that Crowley wasn’t really sure he wanted to. Anathema’s mystery man was pretty much the most interesting thing that had happened to him in the last month (and how pathetic was that, really?), and speculating on a random stranger was much easier than changing the status quo, especially if he could keep the entire train of thought to himself.
As a result, come mid-morning, Crowley had found himself lolling idly in the decrepit death trap that his boss liked to call a swivel chair, twirling a pen in his hand and staring blindly at the wall, while his mind turned Anathema’s words over and over. He didn’t have much to go on. The man was apparently a librarian at Anathema’s university, had a shite family and was Very, Really Nice. That was about it. Crowley wondered lazily how he looked, what he liked. How old he was. Old enough that Crowley wouldn’t look like a cradle-robber, he assumed, but not so old that Crowley would look like his in-home nurse. He could’ve asked Anathema, of course, but that would’ve meant showing an interest, and Anthony J. Crowley might have been too spineless to hold his own against a girl barely out of high school, but he’d be damned if he ever admitted that she’d been right. Crowley hated it, when Anathema was right. Unfortunately for him, she was right most of the time.
After a great deal of thought, Crowley had reached the conclusion that a man finding himself in need of a fake boyfriend for a family wedding was either a) a guy so ugly he couldn’t get a date the usual way, or b) a perfectly average bloke coming out of a bad breakup who wasn’t ready to put himself out there just yet. There were other possibilities, of course, but Crowley felt that they were merely ramifications of those two basic facts of life. He had briefly considered the hypothesis that this Aziraphale could be uninterested in sex or romance as a whole, but since Anathema had hinted at partners and dating, Crowley had almost immediately dismissed it. Another alternative was that Aziraphale actually was seeing someone, but since he apparently had the world’s worst arsehole family, he’d sagely decided to keep them as far away from his partner as possible. In that case, however, Crowley doubted that Anathema would’ve brought up the idea of Crowley pretending to snog the man on the low, when she could’ve berated the poor man’s unsuspecting partner for being a shameless coward completely unworthy of her friend’s time.
No, Crowley was quite sure he was on the money about the guy. And however little he might like the sheer amount of time he was wasting pondering about a man he’d never met, he was infinitely relieved that his inability to grow a spine hadn’t cost him more than a few hours. He didn’t really fancy the idea of being stuck for a whole weekend with an eldritch horror, though the alternative didn’t sound much better–and it had nothing to do, he emphatically told himself, with the fact that he’d had his heart well and thoroughly shattered by a guy still hung up on his ex a few years before.
(Crowley’s annoying tendencies towards optimism had bit him in the arse more than once in the past, but he could learn, and like a dog that had been kicked once too often, he stuck to what he’d learnt.)
A couple of hours in a coffee shop, however, he could do. It would be quick, and safe, and it would bring a welcome distraction to his dreary routine. He could find out more about this mystery man, if anything, and answer his own idle questions.
Crowley was bored, and he was indeed as curious as the proverbial cat. One day, he would probably end up exactly the same way.