The Devil's Work

"And then, of course, it had seemed even natural that they should, as it were, hold the fort for one another whenever common sense dictated. Both were of angel stock, after all. If one was going to Hull for a quick temptation, it made sense to nip across the city and carry out a standard brief moment of divine ecstasy. It'd get done anyway, and being sensible about it gave everyone more free time and cut down on expenses." –Good Omens

Chapter One: Snake on a Plane

"I don't know about this one, Crowley, I really don't think I can—"

"Oh come on, angel. You want me to compel a billionaire to set up a homeless shelter where he was planning on building a casino. If I have to do that, I think you can handle urging a couple Indian ministers to accept bribes. Besides, the ones I've listed are already on the fast-track to corruption and scandal anyway; you're just giving them a little nudge to move things along, honestly."

"Well…all right. Fair is fair, I suppose. I did give you a few rather complicated jobs, after all."

"Great, so it's all settled. Let's have a few drinks before we go our separate ways, shall we?"

…

Crowley and the angel had far more than just a few drinks before parting; it would be a while before they saw each other again, after all. As the respective field agents of hell and heaven, they could hardly spend all their time in England—though they hadn't let that stop them from spending the majority of the past two centuries or so there. The invention of the radio and then the television had made it easier than ever to keep an eye on everything even while staying in one place, but every couple of decades they did step out of the country to see in person how the rest of the world was doing.

This time they'd decided it would be most efficient if they simply split the world in half and each took respective hemispheres. Aziraphale had selected the East, saying it had been too long since he'd visited the Orient and that he wanted to see how dear old India was faring now that it was free from Britain. And Crowley had gotten the West, which suited him just fine.

…

Perhaps it was strange for a being who possessed a personal pair of wings to take a plane. But Crowley had done the whole 'fly all the way across the Atlantic' thing several times in the past, and it really wasn't pleasant—nowhere to land for a quick rest stop, and a view of boundless horizon that got very monotonous very fast.

Besides, air travel provided some really golden opportunities for a demon to make some mischief. Slipping a gun into the handbag of a sweet little old lady right before she passed through security; switching the destination tags on luggage so that a suitcase whose owner was headed for Berlin ended up in Peru; tripping people who were sprinting to reach their plane on time; shifting information on the flight schedule boards so that people ended up at the wrong gates—oh, it was a demon's paradise. Crowley hadn't had so much fun since he'd taken the angel to the Olympics last year.

And then there was the flight itself. All those people packed into a narrow vessel, stuck 40,000 feet above the ocean for eight long hours…Crowley had an ominous sort of grin on his face as he headed up the boarding bridge and into the plane. This was going to be entertaining.

…

Jennifer Watkins had been a flight attendant for many, many years. She'd seen passengers pull a lot of crap in her day. And she knew all the tricks to making them behave, to letting them think they were in charge even when she was the one running the show. Passengers who thought they were something special and wouldn't shut off their electronic devices when told, or who insisted on getting up to use the loo when turbulence was particularly bad, or who complained loudly about the fat man snoring in the seat next to them—she'd dealt with it all time and again. There wasn't anything or anyone that could throw her, Jennifer D. Watkins, for a loop.

This was her last flight before retiring from the job, and she wanted it to go perfectly smoothly. One uneventful final lap around the world before her flying days were over, that was all she asked.

She scrutinized the passengers as they headed for their seats. She was searching for the Troublemaker of the lot, the passenger whose seeming sole purpose of being on the plane was to make her life hell; there was one in every batch. The trick was to identify the Troublemaker before takeoff, and thwart his or her every attempt at subversion before it could cause a ruckus. Her gaze soon zoomed in on a well-dressed man with sharp cheekbones, dark hair, and sunglasses as he swaggered onto the plane. Ah. That was the one, no doubt about it.

She watched as he whacked someone in the head ("Ooh, pardon me, a complete accident of course, I'm so clumsy") with his suitcase as he lifted it into an overhead luggage compartment, and then spent a ridiculous amount of time shoving it in, causing a buildup of passengers still waiting to get into the plane. Finally he slipped into an aisle seat of the first-class section, positioning his elbow on the armrest so that it was sticking out and jabbing people as they walked past.

She was still watching as a harried-looking businessman stopped beside the dark suited one and said, "Excuse me, but I think you're sitting in my seat."

He turned his shaded gaze onto the man and drawled lazily, "Why don't you check your ticket again?"

The businessman pulled out his ticket and looked at it. He did a double take. "Oh. My wife told me she'd gotten me first-class," he said irritably; "I guess she got it wrong."

"Bad luck, buddy," the dark one said. "Guess that's what you get for trusting the missus, eh?"

The stewardess sighed; this guy was going to take Trouble-making to a whole new level, she could tell. But it was nothing that she, Jennifer D. Watkins, couldn't handle.

…

Crowley could sense the disgruntled atmosphere he'd already caused to develop in the plane, before everyone had even found their seats. He laughed to himself, thinking about how he already had some great stories for next time he saw the angel*, and he hadn't even gotten to America yet.

Throughout the safety lecture Crowley decided to have a coughing fit, so that the flight attendant had to contend with ridiculously loud hacks and wheezes to be heard. He could see her exasperation rising along with the volume of her voice, especially when his coughing miraculously subsided the second she had finished talking.

He watched in delight as she marched over to him.

"Do you require a cough drop, sir?" she said, her lips curled into a smile over gritted teeth.

"Oh, yes please, as many as you have!" he said brightly. "Just got a little frog stuck in my throat, you know how it is." And he coughed lightly into his hand; it sounded very fake.

Her smile didn't reach her eyes, which were glaring daggers at him. She left and came back with a handful of lozenges.

"Thanks a bunch, um…" he looked at her name-tag, "Jennifer. Can I call you Jen?"**

"I'd rather you didn't call me anything," she said, her smile still plastered on her face. "Now buckle up, we'll be taking off in a minute."

He noisily unwrapped a lozenge and popped it in his mouth as she turned and headed down the aisle to check that everyone had their seatbelts fastened. Those are some pretty high heels, he thought to himself. How does she walk without teetering? Especially once the plane starts moving, that'll be impressive. He made a lazy hand gesture at the stewardess's retreating form.

Suddenly one of the heels snapped, causing Jennifer to lurch forward and almost fall on top of a passenger as she grabbed at his armrest to catch herself. Crowley sniggered as she made some hasty apologies and pulled off her shoes, looking angrily at the offending heel.

As she returned down the aisle in her stockings, he said sympathetically, "Too bad about the shoe. They look pretty expensive. Jimmy Choo, right?"

She shot him an angry glance that she quickly turned into another stiff smile. "Yes, well, luckily I've got a spare pair," she said sweetly.

"Oh, what a relief that is," Crowley said as she walked on. He sucked loudly on his lozenge and grinned when he noticed the annoyed vibes of the man next to him.

The plane began to coast, and as it left the earth he turned to address his fellow passenger.

"Hey, I'm Anthony Crowley," he said, sticking out his hand.

The man took it. "Peter Wallace," he said. "You heading to the States on business?"

"Yep," Crowley said. "Now, just a heads-up, I get airsick pretty easily. But I'll try to lean to the right if I feel anything coming up, don't worry."

Wallace looked appalled. He pulled out the air-travel catalog from the seat-pocket in front of him and busied himself with reading it.

As soon as the plane had reached cruising altitude and the "fasten seatbelts" signal had shut off, he leaned his chair back (causing irritation to emanate from the rather portly woman in the seat behind him) and sprawled luxuriously in his seat, his left leg unmistakably intruding into Wallace's space and his left arm taking up the entire armrest between their seats.

Wallace shifted a bit and his foot hit Crowley's; annoyed to find a leg encroaching in his personal space, he cleared his throat pointedly. When the demon took no notice, he cleared it again, a bit more loudly.

"Oh, where are my manners, Wallace? …Would you care for a cough drop?"

Crowley closed his eyes and basked in the enmity that was rolling off of Wallace's aura in waves.

He only opened them again when a pretty blonde stewardess, not the one from before, came with the trolley to take drink requests.

Crowley chose the least disagreeable brand of wine that the plane offered.

"How about you, Pete—you don't mind if I call you Pete, right?—do you want a drink?"

Wallace deliberately ignored the demon and addressed only the stewardess as he ordered a whiskey.

Crowley considered "accidentally" spilling his drink on Wallace's lap, but changed his mind with a shrug; it wasn't very good wine, but no point wasting it like that.

…

Crowley enjoyed the rest of the flight thoroughly. He willed a handful of bladders to fill themselves to bursting, causing a fidgeting and impatient queue to form at the bathroom in the back. When the in-flight meal was served, a child announced loudly that she had found a fly in her scalloped potatoes and no one had much appetite after that. As night fell and passengers began to try and sleep, he had a baby several rows back begin to fuss (when its cries began to annoy him, though, he made funny faces at it from down the aisle until it calmed down). All passengers who ventured from their seats exposed themselves to sudden bouts of clumsiness; there were several bruised knees and a bumped head or two as the trip went on.

Jennifer D. Watkins was horrified by all the chaos that was occurring on her plane. How could one flight produce so many injuries, contain so many vocally petulant passengers, and generate such a preposterous number of small arguments that nearly escalated into all-out rows? And all the while the dark suited passenger in first class made snide comments as she hurried back and forth past him. She was certain that he was so smug because he enjoyed the commotion...and an instinctive part of her mind even had the niggling feeling that he was causing it. But she shrugged it off—after all, how could he, from his spot in the front of the plane, have had anything to do with the turbulence that caused an overhead compartment all the way in the back to spring open and rain luggage down on her head? But whether he was responsible for the tumult or not, there was something about him that made her dislike and distrust him for no real reason she could pinpoint.

When the aeroplane landed in New York City at last, she heaved a sigh of relief. Her final flight had not gone nearly as smoothly as she'd hoped, but it was over now.

All the passengers were more disgruntled than even such a long flight could merit as they filed haggardly from the plane. Only one, her Troublemaker in his crisp dark suit, wasn't yawning and sullen as he got his suitcase and headed for the exit.

As he sauntered past Jennifer, he turned to her and lowered his sunglasses. She almost gasped out loud as she took in a pair of luminous yellow eyes with pupils that were slitted, like a cat's...or a snake's. He winked at her, and then the shades were back in place and the dark figure had swaggered off the plane without a backward glance.

Footnotes:

* Aziraphale always pretended to disapprove of Crowley's recounted misdeeds, of course; but after a few drinks the angel would stop his perfunctory scolding and laugh uproariously instead.

**People didn't like it when strangers gave them nicknames; Crowley knew from experience. Bad accidents happened to people who dared call the demon Tony.

Author's Notes:
My first multi-chapter story, yay! I hadn't intended for this to be more than a quick fic, but as always seems to happen my words got away from me. So it'll consist of a handful of fairly short chapters. I'm working on the second chapter now, and hopefully I'll get it up pretty soon!