un_fallen | (no subject)

Crowley has been surprisingly charitable for most of the time spent in Raguel's new apartment - criticizing everything, of course, but only in the most general way. He pronounces it barely habitable, which Raguel takes to mean that he's done a decent job. And if the shower (and by necessity, the bathroom) has slightly larger dimensions when Crowley walks out of it than when he walked in, Raguel doesn't mention it.

It's late afternoon when they step out into the hallway and furtively climb the ladder to the roof. It's not much of a view, but the sunlight through dry air casts sharp shadows that make the grunge a little harder to see.

"You don't think anyone will notice us, with the sun still up?" Raguel asks, a little nervously.

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From:

aj_crawley

"Good," he says, still watching the moon climb slowly into view, the edges of the world start to take on a silvery cast. "I mean, you've built them up, now, so I expect to be shocked and awed."

His voice is a little quiet again, as other people might speak inside a church; again, the slight tone of something that - if you didn't know any better, if you didn't know that Crowley's seen six thousand years of what the world had to offer - you might call 'wonder'.

(As it is, it could be called 'respect'.)

From:

un_fallen

"Yeah, well." Raguel smirks. He doesn't want to build it up too much, but it is pretty amazing, so he's not worried that there will be anything like disappointment.

"Lights or moonlight - like you said, the whole thing is worth more than the price of admission." Each of the bushes and quite a few of the rocks are gaining the sharp outline of a shadow now as the moon climbs higher.

"Want a marshmallow first?"

One-track mind, that one.

From:

aj_crawley

Damn.

"Okay," he says, setting aside the remains of the Chinese and holding his hand out for the bag.

(A stick to roast one on probably wouldn't go amiss either.)

From:

un_fallen

Raguel beams and passes the stick over first, then pulls out a marshmallow for his own stick and tosses the bag to Crowley. He appears to be debating about putting his stick in the fire again, then shrugs and does it anyway. The white goo catches fire and starts to turn black.

From:

aj_crawley

Crowley inspects the stick warily for a moment, then shrugs and holds it out, turning the tip gently in the fire. After a few moments he pulls it back, tapping it gingerly with his fingers before selecting a likely-looking marshmallow and impaling it delicately upon the end.

So far so good.

Finally, when he can put it off no longer, Crowley holds the stick out again as he'd seen Raguel do, just above the reach of the flames, eyes narrowed in concentration.

From:

un_fallen

Raguel is not paying a lot of attention, distracted as he is by waving his own stick around, blowing on it and tapping it against his hand in an effort to remove the black stuff.

Eventually he decides it's a lost cause and just puts a new one on over the charred bit and holds it back over the fire.

"I still can't get them to quite melt all the way on the inside," he confides. "Even if they do catch fire."

From:

aj_crawley

"I don't see how that'd be possible, without them just falling off. Er."

Anxious to not have tempted fate, Crowley redoubles his concentration, turning the marshmallow a few more times over the fire. When it starts to look distinctly saggy, he brings it clear of the flames, and then... eyes it, hesitantly.

From:

un_fallen

"They do get sort of drippy, yeah. That's how you know it's done right," he confides, grinning.

"That one looks pretty good. Have you done this before?"

From:

aj_crawley

"Yes," he says scornfully.

(Lie.)

From:

un_fallen

He can kind of tell.

"Uh. Okay," he says, a little surprised. "So how do you eat them?"

This must be the ~~mean~~ analytical streak.

From:

aj_crawley

Most definitely without a poisonous glare (a credit to both his self-control and his powers of dissimulation), Crowley lifts the stick and assesses it with a critical eye.

Finally, and with extreme delicacy, he nibbles at the outside, biting through the lightly crystallized layer of sugar holding the whole thing together. Pulling it away (and lapping up the long bridge of melted goo that forms as he does so), Crowley then tips his head back and holds the stick overhead; its structural integrity compromised, the marshmallow begins the slow process of oozing into Crowley's mouth, liberally helped along by teeth and tongue.

(All told, the spectacle is probably a contender for 'Most Comical Scenes Ever Witnessed' - but Crowley looks very proud of himself, afterwards.)

From:

un_fallen

Raguel watches this performance, riveted and doing an admirable job of not laughing.

"Complex, but creative. I give it a ten," he says. "I don't know if my way is any better, actually. Probably faster if you're in the mood to get a lot of sugar in you really quickly, but now my hands are sticky."

There's always a price, Raguel.

From:

aj_crawley

It seems like this could be a not very subtle metaphor for something else, but after a moment spent contemplating his own performance, Crowley for once decides not to comment.

Instead, rolling the stick between his fingers, he looks up at the sky, a thoughtful expression on his face. He's adjusted to the cold, now, though the high spirits of the day's warmth are certainly not diminished. And if earlier - if earlier, a certain sense-memory had caught him unawares, the sudden clench of fear is gone, calmed away.

The adrenaline, however...

From:

un_fallen

"Any good?" he asks, nonchalant, but he's looking away. There's a pebble he's trying to convince to prop up his stick so that the sticky end doesn't get dirty. This is a lost cause after the white goo of two marshmallows has been dragged across it, but he is determined.

Finally, he looks up.

"...What is it?"

From:

aj_crawley

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.

From:

un_fallen

"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?"

From:

aj_crawley

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."

From:

un_fallen

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.

From:

aj_crawley

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.

From:

un_fallen

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.

From:

aj_crawley

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.

From:

un_fallen

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.

From:

aj_crawley

"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.

From:

un_fallen

"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.