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"Why've you dragged me here?" Aziraphale wants to know, adjusting the collar of his coat in a gesture of supreme discomfort as he passed a judgmental glance around the sterile insides of this so-called 'store.'
"I haven't dragged you anywhere, angel, you came of your own, y'know. Inertia." This with a vague wave of the hand. Crowley's attention is not on him at the moment, but on the inventory. "You don't quite understand, do you, that this is the future. The actual future, you know, our future. Well not ours, but... given everything we've learned—did you know Manchester actually exists here, just like it does at home, but without me? Probably a little different, but who can really say for certain—given all that, I think we could have expected to see this tech boom in a few years. In fact, if we ever do get back, you can bet I'll be getting right to it." He extends a long hand to the little device standing on the display before him, stretching his fingers to touch it gently as one might a rare and beautiful artifact. The touchscreen is so marvelously sensitive that it lights up at the merest brush of his fingertips. He coos softly at it. "What a pretty little thing."
"Crowley, would you please stop that," says Aziraphale, aghast.
"Don't you listen to him," Crowley tells the tablet. "He doesn't know an Apple from the tree, wouldn't know it if it clonked him right on the head. Would you, angel?" He turns, briefly, to grin open-mouthed at Aziraphale, tongue flicking briefly between his teeth.
"Are you going to buy anything or just torment me fondling the merchandise," Aziraphale says coolly.
Crowley straightens up. "Oh, I've already bought most of these," he says. "We're not here for me, angel. We're here for you."
"No," protests Aziraphale.
"I'm afraid so." Crowley strolls, saunters, slithers further into the store, toward a particular display near the back. Various off-puttingly affable blue-shirted twentysomethings attempt eye contact or even to approach, but Crowley waves them all off, not so much with a wave but by putting out a feeling, less of an unignorable dread and more of a 'oh don't mind me, I've got this.'
Aziraphale trails after him rather unwillingly. "I don't want to be in here," he certainly does not whine. "I don't know what any of these things are."
"You'll learn," Crowley says mildly. "And I have just the gateway product for you." He picks one up, casually disconnecting the impressively overdone cords tethering it to the display, as well as disarming the alarm; turns, takes Aziraphale's hand and slips the device into it.
Aziraphale holds the thin, unassuming little thing as though it were an extremely startled live skunk. "What is it," he demands.
"It is called a Kindle," says Crowley, "and it will single-handedly put you right out of business. This is the future of reading, angel. The present perfect of reading. Go on, thumb through. No, not like that. Haven't you even used the phone they—oh, just give it here." Exasperated, he takes it back. Aziraphale's ridiculous manicured fingers may be deft at sifting through crumbling pages, and the occasional other action as well, but they might well be a bouquet of sausages they way he tries to go at a touchscreen with them.
"There we are, see?" Crowley turns the screen back to him. "That's your library. You can download hundreds of books onto here. Thousands. As many as you want. All of them, right there. In your bloody pocket. How's that?"
Aziraphale splutters for a moment, brows knitted in some consternation, before he finally looks up at the demon again. "That's awful!" he cries.
"It'll grow on you. Awful things tend to do. Come on now. It's a present; rude to turn down a present."
"You can't just take it," Aziraphale points out.
"I could do, as you well bloody know, but seeing as it's for you, I won't." Crowley smiles sweetly, tucks the Kindle under one arm and Aziraphale's wrist under the other—the angel takes his arm by sheer force of habit—and brings them all to the registers.
"Wrap this up for me, would you?" he says to the fashionably unfashionable bearded man behind the counter. The man takes it, seeming only a little confused that he does not quite recall having unlocked the device himself—and isn't it supposed to come in a box?—and rings the whole thing up, humbly accepting Crowley's ostentatiously gold credit card.
"Crowley," Aziraphale offers after willing a little extra money through the transaction, which appears in the form of a somewhat surprising tip jar, "have you considered I will not use the ruddy thing?"
"You'll use it," Crowley promises him. "Keep things around you long enough and your fingers get itchy. I've seen it happen." He accepts the parcel in a stiff plastic bag and nods his thanks, veering away and drawing Aziraphale along with him. "You've got to learn to trust me, angel."
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"You can thank me for the generosity later," Crowley assures him. "Or now, if you like. There's a sushi restaurant a few blocks down that I'm keen to try."
Aziraphale sighs heavily, enormously put upon, and regards both the package and his companion with the same frank, grudgingly affectionate suspicion.
"You're incorrigible, my dear," he says. "All right then, but it's only because I owe you from the Ritz, not because of that."
"However you like," purrs Crowley, quite forgetting to let go Aziraphale's arm as he guides him down the street.
