#hnergh it makes me nervous to post this

[burnttongueontea]

If there was ever a good place to pick up bad habits – it was Ancient Rome.

When Aziraphale arrived in Rome, he hadn’t actually eaten anything in about a century. No, that’s a fib; he’d eaten a bowl of goat curry on a high-altitude outpost in the Himalayas, and a side of boar bought somewhere in Gaul after narrowly avoiding a discorporation, and he could remember both of those meals with a depth of detail that was truly remarkable. So, not nothing, but not very much, not since he sent in his report about the Caledonian assignment.

The painstaking project of establishing a chosen family as a prosperous local influence was one that had gone rather well, actually, and he’d submitted his lengthy report with the hopeful expectation that Head Office would be pleased with him for once. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Michael was in his room not three hours after the report got sent up.

‘Three meals a day?’ she’d demanded icily, without preamble, holding the document aloft between a rather disdainful forefinger and thumb.

‘Er,’ Aziraphale had answered, recovering the unlit tallow candle he’d dropped on the ground in surprise when she manifested. ‘Yes. The humans really rather – ’

‘And you didn’t think that was disgusting?’ continued Michael, with dangerous calm.

‘Well… no,’ said Aziraphale, painfully aware that this was the wrong answer. Not that he’d known about it before now. He’d fallen into the pattern by accident, mostly, trying not to be too conspicuously inhuman while settling in to spend a decade with a close-knit tribe. Then it had become apparent just how much the pattern humanised him to his marks. So he’d embraced it. ‘Actually, it helped a great deal with the assignment, so I thought I’d include it in the report as a sort of – as a tip. They really listen to you, when you eat with them. The same way they listen to each other.’

Michael still looked calm. It still felt dangerous. She lifted an eyebrow.

‘You’re saying you want us to recommend that other angels do this kind of thing?’

‘Oh. Recommend is rather strong. I only meant it as a, as a, as an observation. In case anyone else might find it helpful. I just thought… well, as the only angel permanently stationed on Earth, I thought – ’

‘You’re the only angel permanently stationed on Earth,’ Michael took over, ‘so it’s inevitable you’ll be forced to do unpleasant things from time to time. For appearances’ sake. But it’s disturbing that you no longer keep degrading behaviour like this to a minimum, Aziraphale.’

‘Oh,’ he said again, nonplussed. ‘I see.’

To tell the truth, he was rather embarrassed at the discovery that he might have been blithely committing misconduct all this time. He wasn’t quite sure whether this policy against eating was new, or if he just hadn’t known about it before now, but it didn’t seem wise to ask Michael, in case it turned out to be the latter. (Come to think of it, there had been quite a number of times recently when his superiors had dropped in on him while he was eating. He’d found this disconcerting, but hadn’t thought the pattern was intentional. Now he wondered if it was a hint, and he missed it. Oh dear.)  

Nor did it seem wise to ask whether the policy had really come from the Very Top. That might seem impertinent.

So he asked no questions.

Michael went on:

‘Luckily for you, I’d rather turn a blind eye than write out a reprimand for something so vulgar, but I must remind you informally: the more you stain yourself down here, the harder it will be to clean off.’ For a moment it seemed like this was all she had to say, but then she closed her eyes and adopted a perfectly revolted expression. ‘And, Aziraphale. Whatever you have to do to get by on this job… for the love of God, don’t make me read about it.’

Then she disappeared from his room without a farewell, as if unable to stand the sight of him for another second.

So, Aziraphale stopped eating.

This decision turned out to be less straightforward than he expected. Later on, he would struggle to remember when, exactly, the attempt to eat less had evolved into an outright ban. He just knew that it had proved worryingly difficult.

He’d simply never had to think so much about food before. It had always been a part of the job, of course. Not the most disagreeable part, either. He worked with humans, and their social practices made it inevitable that an affable, human-looking sort would get offered food fairly often, if he was hanging around them enough. If it was expedient, or pleasurable, to say yes – Aziraphale would say yes.

It was after Michael’s visit that he first encountered hunger, a feeling angels are not supposed to know. He’d always been able to go months without eating, during long journeys and famines and floods, and never experienced any discomfort. Now, for the first time, when someone offered him food, he had to remind himself to say no, even when it would have been expedient or pleasurable to accept it. And this made him notice something altogether new. Every time he said it, an unfamiliar something tugged at a spot in the middle of his chest. Not a painful tug, exactly, but there. Sometimes, difficult to ignore.

He observed this change in himself with concern. The more you stain yourself down here, the harder it will be to clean off. He’d never accepted so much food as he did in that little Caledonian village, never allowed his corporation to settle into a rhythm of predictable eating before. Clearly, doing so had left a lasting impression.

And why hadn’t he given it any thought? How had he not realised the other angels would be disgusted by it? He’d eaten so much he’d had to go to the midden every day, like a human, not just to pass water but the other thing – oh, goodness. And he’d told Michael about it. No wonder she had been upset. Aziraphale might as well have sent her a long description of his defecation habits.

When this thought dawned on him he went cold all over, and then he couldn’t seem to get it out of his head. It would come back to distress him several times a day, always at very inconvenient moments, and so intensely that he would draw alarmed looks from nearby humans as he groaned aloud and banged his fists on his forehead.

Not to mention the torture he went through after dark. He’d wasted plenty of nights worrying about his professional missteps, of course, but for some reason this humiliation crawled right under his skin in a way his previous errors had not. Aziraphale would go over and over and over the whole incident in his mind: what Michael must have thought when she read the report, what she must have said to the other archangels, whether they had laughed about him, what they now knew. Worrying about it was futile and painful and childish, and soon he was doing it every night without fail, robbing himself of his usual hours of privacy and peace. Just one more lasting consequence to his thoughtlessness. Along with this new need, this hunger.

Still, lasting didn’t have to mean permanent. He had trained himself into it, so he must be able to train himself out of it again. It wasn’t that he planned to avoid food forever. Only until the problem was fixed. If he fought it for long enough, surely, the hunger would go away.

Aziraphale waited to find out how long this would take. The answer certainly wasn’t ‘a short time’. In fact, the more time went on, the harder that something seemed to tug. Soon it was happening not just when he had to say no, but also when he heard others saying yes, or when he passed a group of humans eating together, or when he thought for too long about food. After a decade or so, the tug had become so insistent that occasionally, when someone started enjoying a meal in his vicinity, he would have to simply walk away, because the sight of it was more than he could stand.

But he didn’t give up on the idea of re-training himself. If anything, he felt more committed. His increasing discomfort only underlined the importance of getting rid of the hunger, and resisting it was relatively easy, if not very enjoyable, during that first century. Aziraphale faced little in the way of temptation, in most of the places he passed through. Head Office kept sending him to dusty little villages and remote backwaters, where people had so little that they couldn’t afford to offer any part of it to guests, and that meant there was more than one good reason to turn it down if they did. He got thinner, and people started trying to give him food more often. He miracled himself to look fuller, so they wouldn’t.

He felt pleased with himself, really. He didn’t know when the tug would go away, if a hundred years wasn’t enough, but now he knew how to ignore it, and that meant he could wait as long as it took, until it did.

And then Aziraphale walked into Rome.

Rome where they had just discovered dining culture, and takeaways, and celebrity chefs. Rome where all his wealthy marks flaunted the fact that they had far more to eat than they needed, where guests were routinely greeted by slaves with platters, where restaurant doors were flung open and street vendors sizzled their wares on the street and the scent of it was everywhere you went, like Gomorrah all over again.

Heaven hated them, these big cities, where they drank and danced and touched and ate. Aziraphale tried not to go into them, because of how much he liked them and how much Heaven hated them, but in the end he got an assignment that meant there was absolutely no avoiding the place that was currently the epicentre of everything, so he walked into Rome.

Aziraphale went almost a clean century without eating anything, and then he walked into Rome, and he could not think about anything except food.

(To be continued...)