[#008] Some Do It With a Bitter Look (Good Omens)

[catdetective]

Theme Prompt: #008- Schadenfreude
Title: Some Do It With a Bitter Look
Fandom: Good Omens
Rating/Warnings: G
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 999
Summary: What's the point in getting up in the morning-- er, new century-- if you can't enjoy someone else's misery? Or... maybe conjure him up a drink for it.

There’s a small volume of poetry on the countertop, which Crowley picks up. He’s not normally fidgety, or he doesn’t like to think of himself as fidgety, but he feels fidgety now. He’s just located Aziraphale’s current place, having realized it’s been a hundred years or so since last they met, and he’d been hoping for more of a welcome than the distracted ‘oh’ he’d gotten. The angel had had the temerity to simply ignore him!

He’s not sure what he’d been hoping for, exactly. A hundred years isn’t exactly a long time, they’d known each other for thousands, they’d often gone longer than a mere century without seeing each other, but…

But lately they’d been keeping to the same places. Not on accident, as it so often seemed to happen, but purposefully. Hadn’t it been on purpose? It wasn’t something they discussed, but he’d thought it was something they settled into for practical reasons, and because…

Because humans are interesting, but you can’t have a real conversation with one. You can’t have a real conversation with hardly anyone-- he doesn’t want to socialize with other demons, most of them aren’t particularly evil at all but they aren’t particularly interesting, either. He doubts Aziraphale has better luck calling on his own compatriots.

So he’d thought he rated better than ‘oh’, and to be completely ignored. He finds himself fidgeting with the book and pockets it to avoid temptation-- not that avoiding temptation is an area he has much experience in. Aziraphale flutters from shelf to shelf to pile of books and back again and doesn’t even look at him.

“You haven’t asked how I’ve been.” Crowley says pointedly.

“Haven’t I? It’s only been... ninety-five years, is it? My dear boy, you shall have to excuse me, I’ve had a simply awful turn of the century.”

“Oh?” His own attention perks up at that. Of course it’s too much to hope that he might say ‘it’s been dreadfully dull with no one to thwart, and you mustn’t disappear like that for more than eighty years at a time at most’. But still.

“It’s been very difficult. But what have you been up to?”

“Slept, mostly.” He admits, and Aziraphale makes one of those theatrically wounded noises of his.

“But how galling I shouldn’t ask you! Well I hope you had a fine nap, Crowley, I really do, because it’s been a very terrible time here!” He flounces about, like a puffed-up songbird. Even without his wings out, Crowley can just imagine his wings all mussed and fluffed and irritated-looking. “I’ve been having just the worst day since eighteen hundred and ninety five and it really hasn’t let up since!”

“Do tell, then. Do you actually have customers, is that the problem? Has religion fallen out of favor? Did they stop dancing the gavotte?”

“I do, it hasn’t, and they have, thank you. You’re enjoying this!”

He is. A little. But he’s a demon, he’s supposed to enjoy this. He thinks. And anyway, Aziraphale gets so entertainingly bent out of shape over the little things sometimes…

“Of course I’m not, you wound me.”

“Lying serpent. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised, you’re a wicked thing with no feeling for others. My own fault for letting you in.”

“You didn’t let me in.”

“Generally speaking, then.”

He poses a bit, one hand on his hip, the backs of his knuckles pressed to his lips in a picture of anguish, but he doesn’t really know anguish. Even on Earth, he’s a piece of Heaven, he can’t truly experience some depths. Even humans live in Grace. Every mortal soul has the chance right up until a soul’s snapped up, provided a deathbed profession of faith is more than a cop-out… they know agony, and despair at times, more than he thinks an angel might. Back when he was one, he certainly never knew those things, they hadn’t existed yet.

“And what’s worst, I can’t get my books in order and I only just set my Ballad down…”

This is the stupidest thing Crowley’s ever heard. All the misery he’s seen-- all the misery he’s caused-- and Aziraphale’s on the verge of tears over a misplaced…

Oh.

“This one?”

“You had it all along?” He looks downright prepared to smite, at that.

“Only a moment. Is it good? Mind, I only read wicked books…”

“There’s no such thing as a wicked book!” Aziraphale scolds, snatching it from him. “Wicked souls may take wholly different meanings from a book than a good one might! There is nothing at all wicked about this one, or any of them. They-- they’re quite lovely! They’re quite moral!”

“Nevermind, then.” Crowley rolls his eyes, and wonders if Aziraphale can tell he’s doing it. The overdramatic sod… He’s fond of him, yes, but sometimes the angel tests his patience, wittering on so. As if there had been some great war or abomination, but he’d have heard about something of that nature happening in the past five years or so, if there had been. He’s been awake long enough he’d know that.

“Alas! It is a fearful thing to feel another’s guilt!” He exclaims, shelving the slim volume. Whatever in he-- in hea-- in someplace that means. And then, he collapses gracefully to a low pouf that might not have been there before, eyes wet. “We’re not allowed favorites.”

“Suppose not.”

“He was generous, and kind, and he did put his mind to the glory of the Almighty… and at times I thought… I know we’re not allowed favorites. It would have been so easy to spare him, and yet…”

Oh. Oh, dear. He’d gone and gotten attached to a mortal, then. They never last very long, best not to. But in Crowley’s case it was a matter of saving yourself pain. In Aziraphale’s, you weren’t allowed to intercede for your own special favorites.

“There, there, angel.” He tuts, mortified to find he regrets his earlier glee. “Let’s have a drink, shall we?”