And this week the trend
was to not wake up till 3pm
I took the few conscious hours that I choose to spend
and slept away the rest of them
--Relient K

It had been a great day, the day that Crowley invented the beep for the answering machine. Shrill, startling, and spaced at intervals just far enough apart that one had to twitch every single time it went off. So convenient, said the marketing. Much more noticeable than that silly blinking light! Never miss a message again! Crowley was very pleased with that little number.

Just not today.

"Yes, all right," he snapped at the machine, crawling from the black silk sheets he'd been happily wallowing in for the last four or five weeks and glaring at the blinking, beeping device.

Being blind, it took no notice and beeped again.

Grumbling at the red number glowing on the faceplate—fourteen! Who in the hell had called him fourteen times?—Crowley poked the button to hear the messages a little harder than was strictly necessary.

The first message was from Aziraphale, wondering what Crowley was up to for lunch, roughly the third day after he'd gone to bed.

The second message was Aziraphale asking if Crowley might want to go for a drive this weekend, as he was finding the city a bit stuffy in the heat.

The fifth was a question about wine, the eighth a desire to catch one of those things where they showed pictures very quickly and loudly—Movies, thought Crowley in annoyance, you know damn well they're called movies—and the twelfth was another request for lunch.

Crowley had listened to every single one of the pleasant, rambling messages, because although he had not himself come up with the machines where you had to listen to each message the whole way through at least once before you could delete it, no matter how long and pointless, he certainly had egged on the demon who had done it.

"Listen," he snapped into the phone when he'd finally rung Aziraphale back, "what do you mean by cluttering up my answering machine with all your chatter of drives and loud pictures?"

"Did you get my last message, dear boy?" Aziraphale replied, and Crowley could just picture him leaning against the counter in his bookstore, smirking in that devili—irritatingly benign way of his.

"No," Crowley sniffed. "I've only got through twelve of the things, and I've been at if for a half-hour!"

"Ah."

Crowley was still a bit wrung out from only having gotten five hundred hours of sleep or so, and felt that he could not possibly deal with Aziraphale in this condition. He reached into a pocket of his silk pajamas and pulled out a pair of sunglasses, then slipped them on.

Much better.

"Did you want something, then, Angel?"

"Nothing important, no," Aziraphale said vaguely, and Crowley narrowed his eyes.

"You just wanted to wake me up, didn't you?"

"Hmm." He could hear Aziraphale tapping his fingers on the counter. "Want to have an early lunch with me? Business is slow this morning."

Crowley sighed, and his pajamas became a dark suit.

"I'll be round to pick you up in ten minutessss," Crowley said, then added, "and I'm not listening to that last messssage, either."

"Of course not, dear boy." Crowley nodded in satisfaction as the glowing numbers changed from '14' to '0'.

He was scowling again, however, by the time Aziraphale stepped out of his shop, pausing for a moment with his fingertips on the doorhandle to lock things up properly. Curiousity was the devil's something or other, and all that.

"Angel," Crowley's voice was smooth and light as Aziraphale slid into the Bentley, "what did the last message say?"

"Nothing of much consequence," Aziraphale replied, looking out his window with a faint smile, and Crowley cursed himself for having taught the angel that lying and delivering a vague version of the facts were not exactly the same thing.

"You must have called about something," Crowley tried again, adjusting his sunglasses in the rearview mirror needlessly. "Did you have a question?"

"I realized I already knew the answer." Aziraphale's smile was now deeply peaceful, making Crowley grit his teeth.

"Teassssse," he hissed as he peeled out from the curb.