un_fallen | (no subject)

"Yeah, but that seems pretty - oh." It strikes him that possibly 'dangerous' was what Crowley had in mind with the entire venture.

"All those people, though. Don't you have to keep them from noticing?"

Crowley eyes Raguel askance, eyebrows raised.

"I dunno about you, but actually I prefer people to be able to see me coming. Maybe it's just a personal preference."

(And of course, it means Aziraphael can't fault him if pedestrians are still stupid enough to get in his way.)

"Make them forget, then. I mean. Ninety? In rush hour? They must at least realize you're not human."

"Nah," he says, leaning easily into the breeze and starting a broad, spiraling descent - not the lunatic dive of earlier, but not what you'd call leisurely, either. "I mean, they might wonder, but as long as I deal with the traffic cameras - who's going to believe them? And anyway, most of the time, people don't even believe themselves - end up persuading themselves they didn't see anything."

"Well, that's convenient, at least," he says, following the pattern Crowley's taking.

"And I guess you'd have to take care of the, you know, not killing anyone part. Probably hard to get hospital coverage on cars that don't exist."

"And I can get rid of the dents myself," Crowley agrees, "but it's the principle of the thing. Vintage paintwork isn't easy to get right."

In point of fact, his driving has never killed anyone (even if he probably hasn't helped any heart conditions amongst his near misses), but Raguel doesn't need to know that.

"Dents, right," Raguel says. From this angle it's unlikely that Crowley can see him rolling his eyes, but the dull horror in his voice is audible under the sarcasm.

"Not much to dodge out here but scrub and mounds of dirt, but they're still challenging if you get low enough."

"Yes," Crowley replies, "I am somewhat known for having my belly in the dust. It's in the Bible, you may have heard of it."

"Yeah, something about that is familiar," he says with a longsuffering sigh. "But-- did you have to dodge things?"

The idea of snake!Crowley zipping along the ground, weaving between trees and stones is certainly amusing, though.

"Birds."

Crowley has the grace to look a little sheepish.

"Ah," he says, taking a moment to digest this. "Yeah, I guess they wouldn't have liked you very much."

They're very close to the ground now so he levels off, gliding calmly along about five feet above the scrub.

"A mongoose, once," he adds a moment later. "That was... exciting."

Raguel manages to hold it in for a few seconds, but then he's learning just how difficult it is to fly a straight line while laughing one's metaphorical head off. Really, the mental picture that makes...

"Yeah," Crowley says, "laugh, go on. You face off against a weasel twice your size and then tell me how hilarious it is."

(There's no real venom - ha ha - in his tone, though. Mostly because he showed that mongoose who was boss.)

"Yeah, I don't doubt it was an epic battle," he says, still grinning widely. "Did you, er, get what you came for?"

"More or less," Crowley replies smugly. "There wasn't room in that burrow for the both of us."

Or more to the point, there hadn't been enough room for Crowley - staring into a pair of beady black eyes and realising his very great mistake - to make a speedy exit back out into the downpour.

"Mmm," he says. "And to think," he adds, pointing in the direction of the fewest settlements and veering that way, "you told me to get out of the 'unspeakably foul' hole I was living in after you fought a giant weasel for one made of dirt."

There's no rancor in his tone, either, but it's clear that he's still suppressing a laugh.

"What do you want me to say? It was raining, it was significantly BC, it was what was available. If I could've fought him for all mod cons and a private garage instead, I would've."

"That kinda sounds like a sitcom," Raguel says, whose last experience of sitcoms was probably the first-run episode of "The Brady Bunch" he happened to see as he walked past a store hawking televisions. Don't get him started on Marcia.

"I doubt we'd've made a very good Odd Couple," Crowley says acidly. "Unless the kind of sitcom you like is short, dark, and bloody."

"A snake in Something BC with all mod cons and a private garage, and a mongoose for a landlord," Raguel says, ignoring him. "You could call it 'Shedding Places.'"

"I'm going to pretend I never heard that, so that we can still b- still speak to one another."

Raguel cackles gleefully.

"Okay, but you'll miss out on the destruction of millions of minds. Not to mention the ad revenues."

He levels out over a fairly even patch. The moonlight illuminates a relentlessly harsh landscape, picking out the unevenness of the ground and the dark shadows of scrub in shades of gray and silver.

"Ready?"

"Raguel," Crowley says, teeth flashing white, "I thought you'd never ask."

Raguel grins in return and goes.

The wind howling past him pulls tears from the corners of his eyes. Patches of silvery landscape flash past with increasing speed, and all Raguel's concentration is bent on avoiding the small hillocks and scraggly plants dotting the earth. He weaves wildly between them, only a couple of feet from the ground.