un_fallen | (no subject)

Crowley shakes his head, as if to say Nothing, looks down at the dirt again - but then flashes Raguel a grin across the firelight, one that is not Nothing at all.

Standing, his wings are two darker spans against the night, massive and black and picked out only where the moonlight gleams against the topmost feathers, and the firelight glows against the lowest.

"Ah," Raguel says, giving up on the stick. He climbs to his feet rather less gracefully, but his grin is just as wild.

"I'm thinking the liquor can wait," he says, stretching his own wings. "Which way?"

Crowley shoots him a look.

You'd never credit it to look at him, built like he is out of steel rope strung on a coathanger frame rather than the meaty, compact muscle of an athlete. But from a crouch, legs bunching like coiled springs, he clears high enough for the first powerful down-stroke of his wings, leaving his answer eddying in the dust, and the streaming fire, and the sound of a huge, soft heartbeat.

"Up."

The wind from Crowley's liftoff is enough to blow the fire into a frenzy, flames licking at Raguel's knees. He doesn't appear to notice, watching Crowley's progress for a moment before jumping after him.

He hesitates in order to make note of the general location of their fire before speeding after the demon.

It's easy enough to keep track of, the only bright pinprick in the vast expanse of desert - and in any case Crowley has not gone far. Only high, beating back and forth for altitude, wings tearing low, thudding sounds out of the wind.

That they can fly at all is a wink and a nudge to physics - and yet. And yet it's thrillingly, viscerally physical, as satisfying as the pounding earth under a runner's feet, still bound by breathless thin-air laws that put only muscle and sinew and a lot of empty space between them and a long drop with a sudden stop.

The wind in his face pulls tears from the corners of his eyes - mostly because Raguel thinks it should, but they are going at a pretty brisk pace. Despite the moonlight he can see quite a few stars, so that Crowley and his furiously beating wings appear as a shifting dark patch in the sky. He glances down briefly. The fire has already shrunk so much with the distance that its size is comparable to that of the stars overhead.

And suddenly, Crowley pulls up short - or as short as is possible in mid-air, shifting from current to current as he stares.

Because suddenly, he's high enough to see a whole new field of stars, spread out below him in the distance.

It's... bigger than London.

With a shout, Raguel swerves at the last possible second to avoid crashing into him. It's a good thing he's been practicing; even a few months ago he might not have managed it in time.

He flies a rough circle around Crowley, slowing so that he can look in the same direction. It's not quite the same as the view from Griffith Park; the lights are farther away, for one thing, and the vantage point is higher, but they look all the brighter for the blankness of the desert leading up to them.

"It seemed a lot smaller from street level," he offers finally - quietly at first, and then a little louder. There's not much up here to make noise, but their wings and the wind do well enough on their own.

"It does that," he says. "Sneaky, the way things repeat themselves. You think you've been somewhere before when it's actually a completely different part of the city."

He knows the whole place backward and forward by now, of course, but he can see how it would confuse a newcomer.

"I remember that bit," he agrees, before remembering that mentioning his brief visit to the city in search of Raguel is something he Doesn't Do.

"How much did you get to see, last time you were there?" he asks. He's trying to get a surreptitious look at how Crowley is using those air currents; the demon is practically hovering, and going in circles is getting tiresome for Raguel.

"Not much," he admits, unconsciously angling broad primaries to counter a slight drift in the breeze. "That is - I did plenty of walking, but mostly I was watching what I was stepping on. Or in."

And some senses are more acute without the distraction of others.

"You walked?" he asks, sounding strangely pleased. "It's hard to get around the whole city in a day, but if you don't stop you can get at least-- okay, how the hell are you doing that?"

He manages an uneven, bouncing glide before the wind drops away and he falls ten feet before beating up again.

"Um," he says, confused, "I dunno? I just am."

Watching Raguel beat up, he tries to adjust his motions to something more obvious, exaggerating the gentle shifting of his wings against the currents, the adjustments in balance to compensate, so that the angel can try to mimic them.

"It's sort of like treading water," he adds unhelpfully, "only different."

Raguel mutters something uncharitable about swimming and tries to mimic Crowley's movements. He does a lot of plummeting down and flapping back up, but eventually manages a badly balanced imitation of Crowley's motions.

"Ha!" he yells, rocking unintentionally back and forth in a current. "I didn't even think this was possible on Earth."

"I find," Crowley shouts over with a grin, "the trick is not to think about it."

He waits, watching as Raguel (sort of) stabilises, before continuing:

"Otherwise, you might start to realise that it's not."

When Crowley starts to lean over backwards, eyes catching a pale yellow from the moonlight, there's a moment of perfect suspension - Raguel lifting to meet the breeze, and Crowley floating on it - before the balance carries over. Before Crowley's lunatic grin disappears, and the demon turns head for foot, wrapping his wings around himself and dropping like a stone.

"Lunatic," Raguel mutters, watching him. He's seen Crowley do this before, but it was at least over water. Never mind that water hit from this height would be just as bad on impact as the hard-packed earth of the desert.

"You can pull up now," he calls down, knowing that he'll be ignored. He keeps watching, trying to keep the concern off his face.

He doesn't, naturally.

Not yet.

If he's making any sound, the rush of his descent is tearing it away, much too fast, much too far to hear, falling out of the sky on a true-line - down, down through shadows towards the flickering pinprick of their fire and suddenly for a split second

CRACK

it disappears.

And then reappears, one solitary light in the flat, unending black.

Raguel stares, unaware at first that he's floating on currents exactly as he'd been trying to do for the last ten minutes. He's not breathing, either, which for Raguel is unusual. He sighs at last and does a few halfhearted flips, but though he's looking, he still can't see any sign of Crowley below.

Finally tiring of gliding in anxious circles (it really has not been long - no more than a minute), he dives after him.

More fool Raguel, because just as suddenly, there, rising out of the far black (on black, on black) into the moonlight in a great, swooping arc, goes Crowley.

It's a little too far to be sure - but it might be, that as they pass each other, Crowley waves.

Raguel's focus is diverted for just a fraction of a second, which at that speed is nearly enough to send him spiraling out of control mid-dive. He manages to calm the wobbling, though (cursing quietly), with a relatively graceful pull up from the dive - quite a bit higher than the point where Crowley caught himself.

When he reaches their previous position to find Crowley hovering again, he's panting just a little through his grin.

"Asshole."

Crowley's hair is wild, his grin even wilder.

"There," he says, a little breathless himself. "Who needs stimulants, right? Still, that said - "

An abrupt flash of silver as Crowley picks his moment, and tosses something across the distance to Raguel.

It's the flask.

He catches it more out of surprise than intention, but he's grateful for the reflexes that have been kicked back into service since he took up the sword again.

"Oh, so there was a purpose to that," he says cheerfully. "Other than adrenaline, I mean."

He unscrews the top and drinks deeply enough that it seems the adrenaline might be getting the better of him.

"Nope," Crowley replies, smiling the same sort of smile that Aziraphael has learned to fear from the passenger seat of the Bentley. "But it was on the ground, I was nearly on the ground... Waste not, and that."