Gardner/nanny corn

“Darling,” Crowley hums, stretching out the second syllable as he rips another leaf off the daisy he’s plucked himself, “I expect you’ll be finished soon, hm?”

Aziraphale wipes his brow in the crook of his elbow, only glancing over to Crowley after a good long sigh of exhaustion.  “Oh, who knows!”  He leans right over to where Crowley’s sprawled himself in the grass, still wearing his little black skirt and blazer, and picks the poor flower from his manicured nails.  “All these saplings would get planted a lot quicker with someone to help me, that’s for sure.”

Crowley either chooses to ignore the pointed end of Aziraphale’s remark, or genuinely doesn’t get it. His eyes — or the reflective lenses of his glasses, at least — stay staring up to the sun, hot and bright in the midday sky.

“Boring.”  The way Crowley’s vowels change when he’s spent a bit too long using his nanny accent is admittedly very sweet, but Aziraphale doesn’t have time to tease him for it when there are all these fiddle-leaf figs to plant.  Another drip of sweat needles its way down his side.  Honestly, he’s not cut out for this kind of labour.  He should’ve applied to be the family chef instead.

“I’ll entertain myself, s’pose...” Aziraphale’s barely listening, does’t even chastise Crowley for pulling up another daisy out of the lawn.  “Only four more hours until the young Master gets back from school.  Four /lonely/, boring hours.  Hundred and — couple hundred ‘nd something minutes.”

Aziraphale is about to respond with a general, all-encompassing /yes, dear/ when he notices Crowley’s shape begin to change in his peripheral.  At first he thinks maybe he’s turning to his serpent form, which’d tick Aziraphale right off, since red-belly blacks aren’t native to this kind of ecosystem at all.  But then he turns and looks at him proper.

Crowley is still Crowley, albeit with coiffed hair and cherry lipgloss, but he’s wriggled out of his blouse completely, the garment discarded in the grass beside him.  All he’s got covering him is a little bra, one of the ones that are mostly elastic and entirely for show, in a deep red.

“I think you’ve earned a little lunch break, don’t you think?”  Crowley smiles, neck tucked so that Aziraphale can see those bright yellow eyes behind his glasses.

The figs wouldn’t have lasted the year without a little miracle anyway, so Aziraphale really doesn’t think it’s so bad to just tap his fingers on the row of tilled soil and encourage little magical saplings to bloom.  The shade of his little gardener’s cottage, and the impatient pout of his dearest, seem like they’ll make for a much nicer afternoon.