patience and the mulberry
"With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown."
Fandom: Good Omens Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) Characters: Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale (Good Omens) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Established Relationship, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Fluff and Angst, Character(s) of Color, Sericulture, silkworms, past religious trauma, but nothing bad happens in this fic I promise, mixed bookverse w/ TV elements, references to Chinese culture Notes: Originally written for the @goodomensfashionzine !
“I'll only be a minute, dear.” Aziraphale kissed Crowley's cheek as he opened the door of the Bentley. “You don't have to see me to the door if you don't want to.”
Crowley tightened his grip on the wheel. “Sure, angel. Sounds good to me.” The sibilants slid far too quickly past his clenched jaw, and he bit his tongue to stop the instinctive hiss from escaping.
Aziraphale gave him a sympathetic look, but shut the Bentley's door behind him and soon disappeared through the doors of the church. Once he was out of sight, Crowley slumped forward slightly, sliding his sunglasses up and rubbing at his eyes. A few deep breaths later, and he felt composed enough to exit the Bentley himself in blatant disregard for the “NO PARKING” sign on the curb.¹
[¹ Given his new job position (or lack thereof), lawbreaking was no longer a necessity, but old habits die hard.]
The bright afternoon sun made him wince a bit, and two robins in a nearby bush were getting frisky in a way he would never be able to unhear, but they made it easier to forget the distant wail of air sirens. Even standing out on the road, Crowley's skin prickled faintly with the remembered sting of consecrated ground.
He pushed the feeling aside and walked resolutely forward. Aziraphale was bound to take his sweet time as he mooned over the church's dusty old tomes, but Crowley had his own investigations to conduct while he waited. No rest for the wicked and all that.
The concrete pavement under his snakeskin shoes gave way to grass, and the tingling sensation in his soles faded. Soon he found himself at his intended destination—an Edenic grove of mulberry trees, clustered together in a ring in the church's backyard. He'd spotted them on the drive over and couldn't resist the temptation of a closer look.
Crowley wandered into the garden with a scrutinizing eye. They were young, for trees, but growing well despite their callowness. A particularly stocky sapling hardly flinched when Crowley gave it a token glare, much to his disappointment. Then again, outdoor plants were rarely as well-behaved as properly cowed houseplants. It seemed this attitude persisted even in ecclesiastic gardens such as these.
He cast a surreptitious glance over his shoulder, then reached a hand up into the tree's umbrella-like branches and tugged. The season wasn't quite right for fruits, but he still withdrew clutching a handful of dark ripe mulberries. Hardly apples, but his lips twitched upwards nonetheless. He plucked a berry from the pile and raised it to his lips.
“Zaoshang hao!”
Only a hasty miracle saved Crowley from choking as he jumped and swiveled around. Hovering right outside the churchyard was a middle-aged human, well-dressed and smiling pleasantly at him. Judging by her formal clothing and the Bible she carried, she was a part of the congregation, maybe even the priest herself. Crowley swallowed and stepped backwards.
“Ni shi jiaohui de xinshou ma?” the human called again, picking her way across the dewy grass in his direction. Crowley eyed the Bible she held, willing himself not to break out into hives.
“Um. Wo bu—er, no. I'm not new. Not here for church at all, actually.” He fidgeted and clasped his hands, still full of pilfered mulberries, behind his back. “Just waiting for someone.”
The human raised an eyebrow. “You're welcome to wait inside, if you like,” she said, also switching to English. “I reckon we still have biscuits left from the children's morning service—”
“No!” Crowley said too quickly, and perhaps too sharply. He winced. “I mean. That won't be necessary. I'd much rather stay out here, if it isn't too much trouble.”
The human gave him a Look. Crowley's cheeks heated and he averted his eyes, willing his sunglasses a few shades darker.
“Beautiful, aren't they?”
Crowley's head shot back up. The human had turned her back to him and was running a hand through the glossy green leaves of the nearest mulberry tree. Crowley could practically see the branches stretch out in delight beneath her touch, like a purring cat.
“Volunteers from our congregation take care of them,” the human continued, smiling at the young tree. “The kids here like raising silkworms, you see, and we welcome them to pick leaves from the trees each week to feed them.”
Silkworms. Of course. Despite himself, a hazy memory rose to the forefront of his mind: Sichuan, China, several hundreds of years ago. A family farm, weathered and cozy and oozing enough sheer goodness to make the average demon ill with it. Crowley wouldn't normally be caught dead in such a place, but he had owed a favour to the angel. His fingers twitched at the phantom memory of butter-soft silk fibres against his skin; long, winding threads that stretched out thin and fine, tangling so easily around his uncertain fingers. With this memory came the golden, moon-round face of a child he hadn't thought about in centuries, grinning toothily as they held out a box to him, a box filled with small pale larvae that wriggled among the spade-shaped leaves. “Zhe jiao can.”
Crowley forced himself to return to the present. The human was speaking to him.
“—waiting on Mr. Fell?” she asked.
Crowley blinked. Shook himself a little. “Yeah. He's helping out with the restoration of some old manuscript or other.”
The human smiled again. It was an unnervingly piercing expression. “I'm aware. I was the one who requested his help. Such a lovely man. Are you a friend of his?”
Crowley tensed. “His husband, actually.”
He braced himself, but the human only brightened. “Goodness, then you must be Mr. Crowley! Mr. Fell talks ever so much about you. Finally gone and tied the knot then, have you?”
Before Crowley could stammer out a reply, something dinged loudly, making him jump. The human pulled a phone out from her pocket and squinted at the screen.
“Sorry, I have to run back inside. But it was lovely meeting you, Mr. Crowley.” She stuck out a hand—thankfully not the one that had been holding the Bible—and after a brief hesitation, Crowley shook it. As quickly as she had arrived, the human disappeared from the garden, leaving Crowley alone and off-kilter amid a grove of mulberry trees.
---
Aziraphale emerged from the church around an hour later to find Crowley seated on the curb next to the Bentley, basking in the last rays of the afternoon sun as he scrolled through his phone.
“My dear,” the angel sighed. His joints creaked as he eased himself down to sit next to Crowley on the roadside. “Don't tell me you've been sitting here the entire time.”
“Nope,” Crowley said, popping the ‘p’. “I toured the gardens for a bit. Swiped some fruits, too. The mulberries aren’t half-bad, for a bunch of church plants, but they’ll need a good deal more threatening before they're really up to snuff.”
Crowley stopped when he saw Aziraphale chewing his lip, brow furrowed as he studied Crowley's face. Now it was Crowley's turn to sigh.
“Really, angel. It's fine. I was hardly bored.”
The expression didn't leave Aziraphale's face. A soft brown hand reached out and brushed aside stray wisps of hair from Crowley's forehead. The demon hadn't bothered to cut it since the Apocalypse-that-wasn't, and it was growing longer and more unruly by the day.
“I'm fine.” Crowley caught Aziraphale's hand and held it, carefully. He pressed his lips against the well-manicured fingers. “It was years ago, angel, and we both came out of it all right. You don't need to worry about me.”
Aziraphale still looked vaguely distressed as Crowley drew him close. With the sun setting behind him, framing his face and curly dark hair in a golden halo, he was the most beautiful thing Crowley had ever seen.
He kissed him then, right there on the road, in full sight of the church and probably Someone Else, too, if She happened to be watching at that particular moment. Once, he would've been terrified of such a public display, but he hadn't gone through hellfire and holy water to care anymore about what others thought of them.
As he helped Aziraphale into the Bentley, he noticed abruptly that the angel was carrying what appeared to be a shoebox, of all things, along with his usual camelhair coat.
“What on Earth is that?”
“Oh!” Aziraphale carefully pushed the box over to Crowley. “Mrs. Lao gave it to me once I'd finished with those manuscripts. She said it was a gift for you, actually. Have the two of you met before?”
Crowley stared down at the box, baffled. “We talked for a bit in the gardens just now, but I can’t imagine why…”
He trailed off, and his mouth dropped open as Aziraphale eased open the lid and beheld the contents with a raised eyebrow.
“Good heavens. Are those caterpillars?”
“Silkworms,” Crowley corrected automatically, leaning in for a closer look. There were so many of them, somehow both smaller and larger than he remembered, all white and wiggly and chomping away busily at the layers of mulberry leaves filling their box. None of them paid any attention whatsoever to their occult observers hovering above them.
“Why would she give you such a thing? Not that they aren't dear little creatures,” Aziraphale added hastily, glancing into the box, “but I doubt I have the means to keep them in the bookshop.”
“No need,” Crowley said before he could stop himself. “I can raise 'em in my flat.”
Aziraphale gave him a curious look. “You know how to care for these… insects?”
“Yeah.” Crowley gently shut the lid of the inhabited shoebox and curled a hand around the Bentley's stick-shift. “I've done something like this, before. I know what I'm doing.”
“If you say so.” Suddenly Aziraphale chuckled. At Crowley's affronted look, he demurred, “I'm not making fun, my dear. It's only that you still manage to surprise me, even after all these years.”
Aziraphale leaned in and pecked Crowley's cheek, making him blush red and sputter. Much to his disgruntlement, the Bentley chirped a light-hearted rendition of Haydn's Crazy Little Thing Called Love all the way home.
---
Crowley had spent the past eleven years co-parenting the Antichrist with Aziraphale.² They had faced this challenge head-on, and in his opinion, it hadn’t gone too shabbily. Now, without the threat of the Apocalypse hanging over his head, becoming a surrogate parent was far less daunting the second time around.
[² Even if young Warlock hadn't really been the son of Satan, it was the principle of the thing.]
Still, Crowley worried. He had always been something of a worrier, and that hadn't changed even after the First Day of the Rest of Their Lives.
After dropping off Aziraphale at the bookshop, Crowley returned to his flat, where he commenced the preparations for introducing his unexpected twenty-odd guests to their new home. This was accomplished by miracling up a small glass aquarium onto his desk, lining the bottom with paper towels, and carefully (read: nervously) placing the silkworms one by one into the tank. Once this was done, Crowley scattered the half-eaten mulberry leaves from the box around the aquarium. The silkworms set upon their interrupted lunch with all the enthusiasm of Aziraphale devouring a meringue pie at the Ritz.
Crowley slumped into his chair, took off his sunglasses with a wince, and rested his chin on his desk, staring into the glass tank.
“I raised your ancestors once, you know,” Crowley informed the wriggling creatures. “Tiny farm in China several centuries back. We'd weave branches together into a tray and let you loose inside. Bit like how manmade beehives work, or something.”
Crowley paused. Watched one silkworm slowly inch its way across a stem to tackle a new section of leaf. “‘Course, humans use wire mesh nowadays, but the general premise is the same. Always thought it was bloody clever, what humans could come up with. If you gave me a bunch of moth larvae and told me to make a living out of them, I definitely wouldn't think to make clothes.” He snorted. “Whoever came up with that, I'd like a glass of whatever they were drinking.”
The silkworms munched on. They ate much faster than they crawled, that was certain. In the quiet walls of his flat, away from prying human eyes, Crowley loosened the knot of his silk tie and tugged it off, easing the tightness around his neck.
“You're the ones who made this, in a sense,” he said, waving the tie at them. He laid the tie beside one glass wall of the tank at just the right angle for the inhabitants within to see. Several silkworms looked up curiously.
Crowley tossed his suit jacket aside, then unbuttoned his shirt collar. He had always prided himself on his sharp, modern attire over the years, the better to tempt humans with—or so he claimed. Despite repeated scoldings from his superiors, his Lust quotas had never been quite up to par.
Sufficiently dishevelled, and feeling all the freer for it, Crowley sank back into his chair to watch the silkworms.
“The only thing I didn't like about the process was the boiling,” he murmured. “Logically, I can see why it was done. And you would all be in cocoons, so it's not like you'd be in any pain. Not like I was.” He exhaled, the sound becoming a low hiss. “But still. Never liked it. Always felt like an awful lot of trouble just for the sake of some silk threads.”
One particularly adventurous silkworm had nosed its way upwards and was now creeping over the edge of the tank opening. Crowley made a mental note to devise a lid of some kind and stuck his finger against the lip of the tank. The silkworm crawled onto his hand without any hesitation. Tentatively, he drew it closer. Its many feet stuck stubbornly to his skin, and it reared up as he approached, swaying slightly, its mandibles twitching.
Crowley stared at the silkworm. The silkworm stared back, and seemed disappointed when Crowley had nothing else to offer. Just to prove it wrong, Crowley materialized a single large mulberry leaf in his other hand and presented it to the insect, who fell upon it with gluttonous enthusiasm.
Staring at the miracled leaf, an idea formed in Crowley's mind. He smiled, slowly.
“I need a hobby, now that I'm jobless,” he said aloud to the silkworm, letting it creep onto his palm. He ran a careful finger over its smooth back. “I think I'll take up sericulture again, for old time's sake.” He reached back into the tank and gently encouraged the silkworm to crawl back inside.
“Humans have to boil you alive to get those nice unbroken threads off your cocoons,” Crowley mused, withdrawing his hand. “Fortunately, I don't have to do things the human way.” He lowered himself until he was eye-level with the inhabitants of the tank. The silkworm he had carried paused in its perpetual eating and turned its head, almost like it was looking at him.
“How's this?” Crowley asked. “You'll be able to grow into a fuzzy, fully grown silk-moth, and I can take your cocoon after you've finished with it and miracle the threads whole again.” He paused and mulled it over. “I guess I could take it a step further and just miracle the finished silk together, but there's still something to be said about the human way of doing things.”
The silkworm bobbed the front half of its body as though in agreement. Crowley smiled again.
“We can make silk, and no one gets hurt. I'm a few hundred years out of practice, but I'm sure I could make it work, somehow.”
The silkworm turned its attention back to its meal. Crowley didn't notice. He was too busy wondering if Aziraphale had any old texts on silk-weaving that he could borrow, just so he could refresh his memory.
The angel would appreciate having a new silk bowtie to add to his collection.
---
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