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He stood on the sand, a vertical line of black outlined against the grey sky, looking down at a piece of toast.
He knelt slowly, tilting his head. A piece of toast, isolated on the beach. Not unlike himself, in its way. Burnt and crusty and entirely out of place. There were places for toast. In a toast rack on a breakfast table. On a plate, smeared with butter or jam or honey. In a toaster, waiting. It didn't belong here.
Neither did he. There were places for Crowley too, in theory. He just didn't know where to find them. Since his most recent fall from grace he'd been wandering, starting from the north and meandering down the coast, looking for...something. He didn't know what. Maybe just a way to kill time.
And now he'd found something, and it was toast.
It earned a brief quirk of a smile, at least, before he stood up again. The waves rustled against the shore to his right, a louder susurrus than the wind that blew around him. He was cocooned by white noise and grateful for it. It blocked other things he might have heard, if it'd been quieter. Other things that might've echoed in his empty head and hollow chest.
Toast, huh. That was a thing.
He pushed his hands into his too-shallow pockets and started walking again, rhythmic and purposeless. His boots dug into the sand and the sand dug back, catching in crevasses, letting his feet sink in deep enough to almost trip him up between steps. But he kept going until he reached the edge of the beach. It was bordered by a low stone wall, and as he put a hand on it and clambered up he noticed another piece of toast lying on the grass a few feet ahead.
That was less of a surprise, really. Where you found one you usually found another. Toast was never solitary. If it didn't come with eggs or bacon or tea or something it at least came with another piece of toast.
Pity this one had gotten separated from the other, he thought, and walked by.
The field stretched out towards a schoolyard and he spotted another piece of toast lying in the middle of a tennis court there. Bloody careless people, letting their toast fall all over the place. Things had a tendency to do that when you let go of them, though. Fall.
Something about the empty schoolyard made him feel colder even than the wind, which bit with the reminder of winter coming on. He walked a little faster through it.
The fourth piece of toast at the edge of the school yard, just by the parking lot, was almost anticlimactic. Kids, maybe. Playing games, throwing things. Frisbees and toast. Maybe toast dreamed of flying. Why not? A lot of things did. Crowley had, sometimes. The speed of it. If you could just keep flying, keep speeding, that'd be it. But landing was such a bitch.
It was the fifth piece of toast that made him wonder. He stopped again for that one, knelt again. Reached out, picked it up. It felt like toast. He wasn't sure what he'd expected.
When he stood up he was still holding it, and his walk was a little slower than it had been.
The sixth and seventh pieces were almost predictable, and joined the fifth in his hand. By the ninth he was halfway down the high street and stopped into one of the shops to get a plastic bag to keep them in.
The trail continued down the rest of the high street at uneven intervals, and through the park. One piece was resting on the shoulder of a statue there, and another on top of a bush. He retrieved those too. The one floating in the canal he had to leave. He liked these shoes. He'd subjected them to the sand, but canal-muck was another matter.
There wasn't one under the bridge. He did check, just in case.
He thought of Hansel and Gretel. Wasn't that who it'd been, leaving a trail of crumbs to find their way back home, out of the deep, dark forest? Didn't really apply. They'd had bread, not toast, and they'd dropped it themselves. Made their own path only to have it disappear behind them, eaten by birds. That wasn't what he was doing. It was overcast and grey but not dark, and he was in an unpicturesque village rather than a spooky portentous wood.
And he thought of toast. Cold and dry, white and brown, utterly ordinary. Utterly extraordinary in how it appeared, kept appearing, led him somewhere. Well, not led. The toast wasn't saying "Hey, you, this way." It was just there. He was the one choosing to follow, to pick up the pieces. There were over twenty now, as he walked out of the village, along the side of the road, darting onto the street now and then to collect another piece.
He couldn't say why he was doing it, even to himself. He just kept going.
By the time he got to a field his bag was starting to overflow, so he balanced the excess pieces haphazardly on his arm. He dropped them now and then, swore a bit as the overgrown grass itched at his hands. Sedge, he thought. Technically it was sedge. Bloody pretentious word for a lot of wet grass. It was a relief once he was on the other side, on a dirt pebble drive leading up a hill. He'd long since lost count of how much toast there was. It wasn't about the toast anymore.
The drive led to a house, a doorway. There was a piece of toast resting on the slate roof above it, like some bizarre parody of a horseshoe nailed above an entrance to keep evil things from getting in.
Crowley was long past letting questions stop him. He walked up and knocked on the door. Quickly; he needed both arms now to balance all the toast.
There was a shuffling inside, some muffled cry of upset or frustration. After a few moments the door opened, and the sun came out.
It didn't really. The sky was as overcast as it had been, the day as grey. But it felt like the sun coming out, as he stared into the face of a man staring back at him. He had white hair, Crowley noticed, and a light brown suit. White and brown, and it suddenly occurred to him how warm those colours were when combined like that, how appealing. Satisfying. The suit was the colour of sand and his eyes were the colour of the sea, a little wildness to break up the sheer wholesomeness of all the toast.
Toast, right. The man looked at Crowley's arms with wide, alarmed eyes. Crowley swallowed. "Hi." He held out his arms a little. Some of the toast wobbled, precarious. "Are all these yours?"
The man's lips parted as he looked down at the armful of toast, the bag, back up at Crowley's face, back down. "Yes," he said finally, and it sounded like angels singing. "Yes, I think they rather must be."
Crowley smiled a little, and then, then the other man smiled back. He stepped to the side of the open door. There was a small hall leading to a kitchen, and on the island there he could see a large pile of white bread spilling everywhere, and a toaster.
It occurred to him that he was hungry. He hadn't noticed until now.
"Won't you come in?" The man asked, and the smile reached his eyes now. "I was just, ah, just making some, some--"
"Toast," said Crowley, and stepped through the door.