Chapter Text
The gallery was quiet, but not too quiet. Crowley had been quite careful about that.
It was only early April, but the day was unseasonably warm and the bright sunshine and a sense of the impending summer had drawn Londoners out of their homes and offices and onto the ragged scraps of greenery threaded through the centre of the city. Through the floor-length windows Crowley saw throngs of people spilling out of cafes and bars along the South Bank, far below: jackets discarded, sleeves rolled up, drinks in hand.
But enough of that. Crowley turned away quickly, already cursing his first mistake. After the bright sunlight glinting off the surface of the Thames, the inside of the gallery was cast into impenetrable gloom, and his eyes needed to adjust before he could complete the job.
In Crowley’s line of work, his eyes were everything.
While he waited he strolled around the room slowly, pretending to be interested in a set of small statuary depicting what appeared to be winged angels in a variety of poses. Sculpture had never interested him, but one particular piece did catch his eye and, despite himself, he drifted close enough to read the small print on its label.
“Ineffability,” he read aloud. “Marble copy of a lost Greek original of the third century BCE, thought to have been cast circa 1583. Represents good and evil wrestling, with evil triumphing.”
“Are you certain that they’re wrestling?”
Crowley almost jumped out of his skin. “Holy sh*t! You must walk like a cat!”
“Oh, I am sorry, my dear. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Crowley looked round at the speaker and his eyes widened.
So much for adjusting to the dark. The man who stood before him was dressed from head to toe in light colours: layer upon layer of pale blue, cream and beige. His face looked pale, and even his hair, which stood slightly away from his head like the fluffiest down, was a pure, brilliant white. But that wasn’t it. Somehow, Crowley didn’t quite understand how, the man… seemed to glow.
Perhaps it was his face. Pink lips, perfectly proportioned nose, lively eyes that seemed to glint with just the teeniest edge of something Crowley couldn’t quite identify.
He was the most beautiful man Crowley had ever seen.
“I… uh…”
The man smiled at him politely, waiting for the words to form. Crowley tried to kickstart his faltering brain into action.
Come on, Crowley. Small talk. You can do this. Say something sensible, something mundane and ordinary, then you can both move on.
“I could paint you.”f*cking Hell, Crowley.
For the first time, the beautiful man looked wrong-footed. “I beg your pardon?”
Crowley gaped at him and waited for the world to end. But it didn’t, and there was no way out but through.
“I. Uh. Sorry, s’just… thinking ’bout angels.” He gestured, pointlessly, to the statue right in front of them. “Then saw you. Could paint you, cos you. Look. Like n’angel.”f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck, Beelzebub just take me away now –
The angel’s mouth had dropped wide open as if he were about to speak, but the words never came. Instead -
“If you wouldn’t mind just coming along with me for a minute, sir?”
A heavy hand on his shoulder, another in the small of his back. Police. At least three or four of them, by the sounds of it. No force, not yet, just a very firm suggestion that they, not he, were in control of Crowley’s plans for the evening.
It was a mark of just how discombobulated Crowley was that his very first emotion, instead of the dread, despair and despondency he had always expected he’d feel when his past sins caught up with him, was actually one of relief.
It didn’t last.
This was no spur of the moment thing; the police sting had clearly been well planned. Crowley had been ushered from the gallery into a small office behind a STAFF ONLY sign with the minimum of fuss, and left to cool his heels in a swivel chair on an uncomfortably low height setting. Clearly, they intended to give him plenty of time to think.
How bad was this going to be?
On the one hand, there were positives. He had nothing on him, nothing that should incriminate him in any way at all. Hell, he hadn’t even glanced at the f*cking painting yet, let alone subjected it to the sort of detailed study necessary in Crowley’s line of work. For now, the police could have nothing on him.
And Crowley was protected. Or rather, he had been up until now.
Crowley wasuseful. He was an asset.
Crowley did not believe in false modesty. In truth, there were very, very few people in the world who could do what Crowley could, and that made him extremely valuable to the right kind of people.
Who were, not to put too fine a point on it, the wrong kind of people.
But.. how useful was he? How valuable? There were other artists.
As far as his… colleagues were concerned, would the important thing be to retrieve Crowley, or to make sure that he couldn’t talk?
Crowley sat in silence, arms folded across his chest, and waited for fate to decide what to do with him.
