Hung the Moon

Anyone Who Tends a Fig Tree Shall Eat its Fruit

Aziraphale made his way through St. James Park, sure to keep up the Crowley act down to the last detail. He doubted he would ever get the knack of walking as though his hips were only theoretically attached to the rest of him, but he gave it his best.

Hands jammed in his pockets, he sauntered down the path. Watching everything through Crowley's damnable sunglasses made him realize how little Crowley must see on a daily basis. He had the sad thought that maybe such blindness was part of the point. Dimming the stars he'd helped create, inaccessible to him now? Seeing everyone else through a dissociative fog via smoked glass, glass that made everything feel just a little bit unreal?

As was often the case, the park was as pleasant as a postcard. The famous flowers reached gleefully for the sun, blazing scarlet and cheerful yellow. They were like young maidens at a May pole, lifting their hands to the sky to show their love of the sun.

A weeping fig gave him pause; the plant represented many things, but all Aziraphale could think of was how it symbolized a fall from grace, the marking of something evil. The Snake, coming down to earth to tempt. The leaves that Eve had used to cover her nakedness, after tasting from the Tree.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? Thou shalt see greater things than these. He had to suppress a shudder; Thou shalt see Heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the sons of man.

Well, he thought with an open defiance that was not so much new to him as it was quite recently acknowledged, we shall see about that.

The sense of resistance propelled him the rest of the way, their bench, still empty, in his line of sight. Anxiety came upon him like a bolt of retribution. He remembered the tub full of holy water, what they'd meant to do to his, well, his love, if he were being perfectly honest. Horror made him very aware of the quirks his human body had, as his heart started pounding and he broke out in a cold sweat.

Oh, stop it. You're acting like a morose old man. You know better than anyone that Heaven takes their sweet time. They aren't going to just poke and prod him and let him go.

He took his customary seat, and tried to focus on the pelicans going wild for feeding time at the water's edge. He tried to calm himself by reciting facts about how pelicans had happened to come here in a droning internal monologue, and then switched to the past twenty errors he'd found in his beloved misprint Bibles. Funny how one misprint could change the meaning entirely, wasn't it?

Crowley showed as he was going through all the versions of Acts. Aziraphale looked up and before he knew it he was on his feet and crossing the distance between them, cradling Crowley's face and kissing him desperately. Who cared if they'd switched bodies?

Who gives a fig, he thought, feeling quite mad just then.

"Well," Crowley said when the kiss ended, "it's nice to see you too."

"Hush and give me my body back so I might do that more properly," Aziraphale said in an urgent whisper. He glanced around, the sense he'd done something quite dangerous making hm feel as if he should go and find the nearest hiding spot. Instead he squared his shoulders and adjusted his shirt, turning to the bench and taking a seat again.

He wanted to ask Crowley what it had been like to return to Heaven. And a million other things about Crowley's true identity. He remembered Raphael. Perhaps not well, but he did. It had been hard to miss him, with the dust of the very cosmos clinging to his form on the rare occasions he'd returned to the Throne of the Lord. He'd been more theoretical than physical back then, they all had, but Aziraphale could remember a fine robe, and immense wings cut from the fabric of space itself.