Aziraphale once trapped a mouse in his back room. It had made a little nest for itself behind his Wilde first editions, the hole lined with torn bits of paper and downy threads it had gnawed from the cuffs of his favorite camel-hair coat. Having little experience with matters involving the family Cricetidae, Aziraphale secured the mouse in a jam jar, setting it on the counter where he could keep an eye on it.
He remembered to poke holes in the lid, but only just. Aziraphale tended to forget about things like breathing.
Crowley had a habit of blowing into the bookshop like a well-tailored whirlwind, but when he saw the mouse on the counter he went an interesting shade of green and walked out again. Aziraphale found him on the pavement outside, brushing nonexistent specks of dirt off the Bentley.
"Are you quite all right?" Aziraphale asked.
Crowley's nostrils flared, once. "Oh, I'm just peachy."
"You don't look all right."
Crowley scowled, his eyebrows perfect arcs of displeasure in his narrow face. "I don't like rodentsss," he said at last, and the final sibilant put Aziraphale in mind of ancient constrictor coils, scales colored a vibrant shade of green. Crowley's lip was curling slightly, and his skin was still chalky-pale.
Aziraphale merely nodded, and said, "Oh?"
"Too wiggly," Crowley snapped, and when he spoke Aziraphale caught a flash of his small, sharp teeth.
That night, Aziraphale made Crowley drive him to the edge of town, where he walked out into a field and set the open jam jar on the ground. In a flash of tail and brown fur, the mouse disappeared into the darkness; Aziraphale returned to the Bentley to find Crowley standing with his eyes clenched shut, his mouth a thin, compressed line.
"The mouse is gone," Aziraphale said kindly, and Crowley opened his eyes again.
"I bet you a cat will eat it," he said, but the lines of tension in his shoulders had disappeared and Aziraphale saw only a trace of the serpent in his smile. "Bet you anything."
Nothing is going to happen to the mouse," Aziraphale said. Crowley snorted but didn't argue further, and the drive back to Soho was spent in silence.
