un_fallen | (no subject)

"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.

For a few moments, Raguel is alone.

Then, the thudding sound of another set of wings emerges from the rushing silence, in counterpoint to Raguel's own; and there, far to the left, is a dark shape hurtling over the sand, speeding closer in an arc designed to bring him up as close beside Raguel as their wingspans allow.

Crowley's gaining.

Raguel can see him out of the corner of his eye, but if he diverts any real focus he'll find himself half-buried in a mound of dirt. He does angle a bit more to the left to bring them more quickly into shouting distance, though if he tried, the most he could manage right now is wild laughter.

Crowley tries, and it might be that the wind whips the words away into their roaring wake, or it might simply be that there were no words at all; just a shout of inarticulate delight.

Impossibly - impossibly for anyone but them, for anyone who can't slip outside all governing laws and traverse the length of Europe in a night - impossibly, they're already halfway to the mountains, the great black slabs flying up out of the horizon with shocking speed.

Inevitably they draw closer together until they're more or less on the same heading. Only a few feet remain between light and dark wings, both pushing hard for speed. Raguel is just a little less strict with the sharp, shallow turns that send him weaving between obstacles until he feels the tips of some of the smaller shrubs brushing his arms. He frowns and redoubles his efforts until he can't feel them anymore, but whether his turns are sharper or he's just tuned out the sensation, he couldn't say. The mountains rush closer, the lights of a small town are visible far to the right, the ground is coarser and strewn with boulders, and without changing speed Raguel yells to Crowley "Up!" and arrows toward the sky.

Crowley's managed well, only once or twice remarking some thin, outstretched twig clipping the very tip of his primaries; perhaps there's something to be said for making ninety down rush-hour Oxford Street after all. And what is this, if not taking a corner on two wheels?

The ground is starting to rise under him, now; the nearest outcrop juts out of the desert, ringed with jagged rocks like a barbed-wire fence. And there, there, just a little to the left, there's one that's tipped over, a narrow slab leaning back against the sheer rock-face that's at

maybe

(probably)

just enough

of an incline.

Crowley's answering shout to Raguel is not very loud - but it echoes off the mountains with perfect clarity.

"Speak for yourself - "

Raguel is relishing the coolness of the air after his exertions, and he'd been going at a pace ridiculous enough that when he shoots upward he's almost coasting. He frowns when he hears Crowley's shout, though, and interrupts the movement to turn so that he can see what's happening below.