Chapter Text
Romeo and Juliet, according to most historians, was written between 1594 and 1596, and performed somewhere along the way to an audience rumored to have contained the Queen herself. This was rather more accurate than Aziraphale had expected of the humans, though the exact date would always remain a mystery to them.
In fact, Romeo and Juliet was written in the year 1595 over a dazzling span of three months, and performed the day after Shakespeare finished his first draft, with revisions made backstage. Queen Elizabeth was truly in attendance. As was Aziraphale.
Queen Elizabeth was wearing a gorgeous silk and taffeta gown, adorned with scarlet and gold and white, with fur, rubies, and pearl earrings. Her ruff was once pristine, but was recently spotted with running makeup and tears. She dabbed a handkerchief across her heavily powdered face, then offered the cloth to her companion.
Aziraphale thanked her with a little nod. His eyes were puffy, his face blotchy, and his nose runny. He blew as quietly as he could manage, though he shouldn’t have bothered. Everyone around him was sobbing hysterically; one woman had even fainted off the balcony and brought the performance to a short yet memorable halt.
His chest hurt a great deal, which was perplexing. Perhaps his corporal form had a defect. No, that was silly. While Romeo spoke his monologue to his sleeping wife, Aziraphale shook his head to clear it. Something was the matter, yet he had few guesses.
“O happy dagger,” came Juliet’s sweet, sorrowful voice. “This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die.” Onstage, she plunged a dagger into her heart. Scarlet fabric folded luxuriously out of the staged wound, but to all the onlookers, the fountain of blood was a true cascade, bathing the lovers in their violent end.
Blubbering something unintelligible, Aziraphale wrung the handkerchief in his hands. There was the epilogue to come, all the apologies to the audience, but he barely retained those words. He stared blankly at the actors while they bowed. His mind was full of fog and his heart, which had raced only moments before, had turned heavy as lead.
He made his excuses to the Queen as to why he could not accompany her backstage to congratulate the playwright, nor even return to court. Finding it best to gather his thoughts alone, he slipped through throngs of adoring people to escape outdoors.
The air was hardly fresh, what with summer boiling every foul stench to an airborne state. He took great gulps of it anyway. It was no Garden of Eden, but it would have to do for comfort until he could find pastries. That would take a few hours if he wished to uphold his standards, because the street vendors who gathered outside the theaters served barely edible cakes on a good day. He shuddered to recollect what was served on bad days.
Aziraphale walked down the road. A stray dog came loping past, whining for scraps. Checking for onlookers, Aziraphale found none, and in a wink of an eye, the mongrel was fully fed and groomed better than the royal hunting hounds.
“Off you go,” he said, scratching it behind its velvety ears.
It yipped and sped down the street, its once broken tail wagging with wild abandon as it went. Aziraphale smiled, far more cheerful than he had been when his excursion began. Of course, he should have been suspicious. Shakespeare’s tragedies had tried to teach him to treat joy with caution, but Angels were never an entity to change their feathers too fast.
“Ooh, a miracle!” interjected a sardonic voice. Out of the shadows, Crowley emerged, his outfit as dark as Aziraphale’s was light.
“Oh, no,” Aziraphale pouted. He marched toward Crowley, shooing him away as one might a particularly persistent pest.
Crowley simply grinned, retreating into the alley with only a quick raise of his eyebrows at the shooing. “Oh, yes,” he replied in his most dramatic interpretation of the phrase.
They stopped near the middle of the alley. It was bathed in the sun’s warm glow from the east and only cold blackness on its other half. Crowley’s hair blended into the bricks. It could have been comical, had Aziraphale not suspected the camouflage was helpful in demonic plots.
He narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing here? You don’t even like the tragic ones.”
“I’m not here for the play.” Crowley scoffed. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, one leg bent haphazardly beneath him and the other digging into the dirt. He was also squirming. Aziraphale had the insane urge to put his hand on his chest to make him stand still.
The moment passed. Aziraphale said, “Tell me your plans now, and they ought not to involve burning down the Globe, or, or…” He fumbled, fuming. “Or I’ll be angry!” he finished lamely.
“Wouldn’t want that,” Crowley retorted, the words barely gone before his mouth slithered into a smirk. “No, I--”
He stopped speaking abruptly. Aziraphale cocked his head. “Crowley?” he asked. His voice jumped up a considerable amount of the next octave as he repeated the name. Attempting to interject some more appropriate emotion besides fear into his voice, he tried a harsher, “Forget it,” but The Bard would have called it the worst acting he’d ever witnessed.
“Have you been crying?” Crowley’s question was a whisper. His hand hovered beside Aziraphale’s face, and then, softly, as if touching the surface of a peaceful lake, he laid his hand down. The heat of it was shocking when added to the hot tears that had fallen minutes ago. Aziraphale wondered idly how the burn compared to Hellfire.
He did not trust himself to speak at first. When he closed his mouth, a million answers filled up his lungs, and when he opened it, they all died. The result came very close to what he imagined suffocating to be: air piling up into his esophagus until it had nowhere to go and stretched out, infinite, staying and leaving all at once while silver spots danced in his vision.
“I-I-I’m fine,” Aziraphale managed much later. Shrugging, he retreated, yet the blush did not disappear with Crowley’s touch as he’d hoped. He blinked rapidly as a tingling sensation spread over his face, then smiled when the tear tracks were successfully miracled away. “Tip-top,” he squeaked, with a tiny shake of his pounding head. “The tippiest, really.” He would have giggled had his throat allowed it.
Crowley, it seemed, was also at a loss for words. His characteristic simper was instead a gape. His hand was still outstretched to where Aziraphale had stood.
Now he did giggle, a great, nervous sound that filled his belly and went careening down the whole street. Which would not have been an issue if the play had not let out, and filled the square with people, people who had little else to do with the rest of their day except come hurtling down the alley admonishing Aziraphale and Crowley for being too loud.
“It is a popular spot, gentleman. Thus, it requires discretion.” William Shakespeare himself appeared in front of them. His hands were on his hips and he continued pacing as he talked. “Squander not the hopes of the many other young couples fortunate enough to encounter solitude on a summer’s eve.”
“Couple?” Crowley inquired. His shoulders were back in their usual leaning posture, his hips doing that silly thing many of the actors in Shakespeare’s more promiscuous works were prone to do.
Shakespeare smiled like he knew all of their secrets, then made a motion as if to shush himself. “Of course, how erroneous of me to reprimand you when I also throw caution to the wind. Good day, sirs.”
Once again they were alone. Aziraphale cleared his throat, opened his arms, and said, “After you.”
They stopped before they went out and looked at each other. Aziraphale shuffled his feet, stared at his interlocked fingers, and said, “It was his play, if you must know. Romeo and Juliet.”
“Ah.” Crowley made the vowel out to be the explanation for everything that had just occurred in that alley, drawing it out in different pitches and ranging through the whole spectrum of whatever he was feeling. He finished with, “That’s why I prefer the funny ones."
He left, strutting off in the opposite direction. Aziraphale could not help but notice how tightly his hands were clasped behind his back.