Chapter Text
This has been a good day, Aziraphale thought happily.
It had been a productive day at his bookshop, ('productive' meaning he had a grand total of two customers, and neither of them had succeeded in purchasing anything. Though one young man, a student or something by the looks of him, had given him a bit of trouble. After being gently rebuffed at the counter, he had circled around and quietly managed to manoeuvre a copy of Crime and Punishment-how apropos!- into his messenger bag when he had thought no one was looking. How wrong he had been. Little did he know that the bookshop’s proprietor had oodles of eyes, and even the non-ethereal pair in his corporation wore spectacles only for show. The young man was going to be very surprised when he got to his destination and found the bag empty, and only a fuzzy recollection of having put something interesting in there. He would probably get a bit of a frustrated headache and need a nice long nap. The book wasn’t a first edition, and it was unsigned, but it was the principle of the thing, wasn’t it? Aziraphale may not have been a very successful angel, and Heaven knew he had his own struggles with Her commandments (particularly gluttony when it came to food and drink, and being covetous when it came to unusual and very antique Bibles,) but he was a stern enforcer of Thou Shalt Not Steal-especially when it came to one of his precious and carefully curated books.
Aziraphale flipped the sign on the door from Open to Closed, and then went around and pulled down the blinds, adding showers of twinkley golden dust motes to the already dusty atmosphere. He paused for a minute to pull out his pocket watch, gave it a satisfied glance and snapped it shut. Just enough time to nip down to that new patisserie for some éclairs before Crowley made his regular late-afternoon appearance.
They had fallen into a comfortable routine since the world didn't end, spending more and more time in each other's company. They had long lunches at the Ritz and delightful dinners at lovely ethnic restaurants-even a picnic in the park!-and of course, the occasional good bottle or two (or ten,) of wine of an evening in the backroom of the bookshop or Crowley's flat, talking about everything under the sun. Only the picnic was something entirely new, but everything felt like a sparkling new experience without the watchful eyes of Heaven and Hell on them at every moment.
And sometimes, more and more often, when they were sitting together, deeply inebriated in the backroom of the shop or sober on Crowley's sofa, (which had mysteriously and miraculously acquired some tartan sofa pillows which made it much less fashionable and ever so much more comfortable,) their hands would touch and just rest there together, the angel's soft, scholarly hand with the writer's callus on the index finger brushing the demon's long, elegant (and admittedly rather dry and slightly scaly) palm. It was all quite heady and exciting. Aziraphale would feel that enormous, mutually unspoken something bubbling up between them. He would look deeply into Crowley's, er, lenses, and Crowley's mouth would go slack, and Aziraphale would think At long last ...and then Crowley would go off on some drunken tangent about what She was drinking when She came up with marsupials, and Aziraphale would feel the need to defend the Almighty's good judgment (and sobriety,) and they would both drown the feeling with alcohol until one of them (Crowley,) fell asleep.
Well, feelings were easy, weren't they? They'd been feeling like mad since nearly the beginning of time. Words were hard, especially when you've been forced to cram down a multitude of affectionate words and deny them for millennia, so the one you held dear didn't end up as a glittery golden grease-spot, or a Hell-mauled snake-skin handbag hanging on a coat-rack in Dagon‘s office.
Aziraphale sighed deeply and shoved the bothersome thoughts aside, as he tidied up his counter, closing his ledger, (happily, the line under SALES for the day was blank,) scribbling a quick note to Crowley if he should show up while he was out. He put on his scarf and placed a bookmark in his book, which happened to be an epic period-piece romance featuring time-travel and kilts.[1] (Then hid it in the desk drawer because Crowley would tease him about his guilty reading pleasures, and had been, mercilessly, since he caught him reading Pamela in 1740,) and made ready for his shopping trip. Crowley was coming by soon, after an hour or so of primping, no doubt with a bottle of wine, or chocolates, or flowers. He really, truly was such a dear, and Aziraphale vowed to never stop reminding him of that, though the silly demon would be slow-roasted over hot coals before he'd accept the compliment.
He was washing up his cocoa mug when he felt a change in the air, a frigid chill that made his flesh prickle, and tickled his nose with the smell of ozone. Very quietly he put the mug in the drying rack and turned around. Oh bugger. "Gabriel. It's been quite some time."
"Did you really think your little wards could keep me out?" Gabriel said. Aziraphale followed his gaze to the large old rug, which covered the large old Circle, which Aziraphale had happily forgotten since he and Heaven had ceased communications. It had never crossed his mind that it might be not only a means of communication, but potentially an unlocked back door into the middle of his shop. Oh, shit.
Gabriel was looking a bit...stressed. Oh, it was nothing very obvious to the untrained eye. His violet eyes were a bit wide, his tie just a tad crooked, his hair not quite its usual business-like coif. But this was the Archangel Gabriel, 'God is my Strength', Messenger of the Most High, whose one earthly appreciation was a spotless, well-fitting suit or designer pullover and expensive tie. His appearing in such a mussed condition couldn't have been more alarming if he had shown up blood-stained and clutching an axe. The thwarting of his plans for the Apocalypse by a handful of mortals-four of them under the age of twelve- a pint-sized Antichrist that was more interested in pirates and spaceships than destroying the world, and two former agents of Heaven and Hell who then inconveniently refused to be murdered afterward, had obviously done his mental state no favours.
"I've never understood what you see in these things." As he walked towards Aziraphale, Gabriel's hand drifted carelessly over a tall tower of books, causing it to teeter dangerously. "Dusty, ink-stained bits of bark."
Aziraphale's hands twitched with the urge to steady them. "If you have something to say, say it, Gabriel. And do be careful with those books, they're quite old and somewhat fragile. " He needed Gabriel to do whatever he had come for and go away, before Crowley sauntered in all unknowing, please, oh, please. Erasing the Circle had only flitted across his mind, but he had warded the shop after Armageddon, per Crowley's suggestion. Not as strongly as he might have, because he couldn't really believe that every soul in Heaven he had ever known considered him a turncoat and hated his very guts. (Deep in his heart, he still hoped that some lesser angel, perhaps one of his old Sphere, might drop by for tea and a friendly chat some millennia.) Not every angel, surely not. Just all the Archangels closest to Gabriel, certainly. Even without his influence, well, they weren't the nicest angels. Uriel had always been a bit of a stiff, and Michael never had a good word to say to anybody after The War in Heaven, and Sandalphon was...Sandalphon. Still, there had been no need to be so unpleasant that day outside the shop, and Uriel did hit him very hard.
"Pfftt," Gabriel said, with a shrug. The stack of books wobbled helplessly, gave a sad sigh and fell over. "Whatever."
Aziraphale winced. "Gabriel, please state your business." He spoke boldly, as if he was already working up a good hot fireball. He was praying that Gabriel wouldn’t be so unhinged as to dare to call his bluff. Crowley had scared the dickens out of the Archangels with that belch of Hellfire.
"I got an official Reprimand," Gabriel said, in disbelieving tones. "In my inbox. She wrote me up. Me." And it's all your fault was the unspoken subtext there. "After everything I've done for Heaven, all these thousands of years working toward Her Great Plan, moving the organization forward, giving it structure, building a brand. Every angel in the Silver City is talking about it. What did I ever do to deserve this kind of humiliation?"
"Well," Aziraphale muttered quietly, suppressing an eye-roll. "You did collude with Hell and attempt to incinerate me with Hellfire, without so much as a hearing before the Host of Heaven. Perhaps She didn't like that."
Gabriel went right on talking. He was beginning to pace. "And then! And then! Michael called a meeting, which is ridiculous in the first place, because I am the Archangel fucking Gabriel and I call the meetings, I always call the meetings, and I told her so, and then they all wanted to discuss my 'stress levels' and my 'poor executive decisions', and my 'dangerous career trajectory', and maybe I need ‘personal time to reflect’-
The outraged finger-quotes were getting out of control. The fine down on the back of Aziraphale's neck rose to attention and waved frantically. In the time since Aziraphale had last laid eyes on him, Gabriel had obviously become (even more so,) a dangerously unpredictable loose cannon on the deck. He wondered if he just nodded and let Gabriel ramble long enough if he could manage to scoot just a tad closer to the counter. The device Crowley had given him was buried there under a deep drift of old issues of various (mostly defunct) London newspapers, still remarkably crisp and neatly folded, and dating back more than a century. Though Aziraphale rarely touched his nice new phone and often lost track of it in the clutter, it was always on and fully charged, and never ran out of data, or racked up a ridiculous overage fee, mostly because he wasn't aware that was a thing that could happen. He had a vague memory of Crowley once demonstrating a feature on the thing that could call him with the press of a single button. He and Crowley had also watched a film recently on Crowley's enormous television set, (on a American channel that seemed to specialize in programs where a young woman was menaced by some dreadful man who was her boyfriend, or her boss, or a mass murderer, and sometimes all three,) and in one of them Heather or Ashley or whatever, used the clever button in that fashion to call for help. Aziraphale was aware of some uncomfortable parallels between his current situation and the predicaments of the unfortunate young women. He wished he could remember what had happened to them all at the conclusion of their individual photoplays, but it had been such a marathon slog of television viewing, and halfway through Crowley had fallen asleep on his shoulder and the rest of the evening was a giddy blur. He took a subtle half-step towards the counter. "I fail to see what any of that has to do with me."
"You messed with the Plan! I got an Official Reprimand in my Eternal Work Record! And now you get to just hang out down here with your stupid human things, swilling that, that alcohol stuff, and eating raw fish flesh with your foul consort-" With great effort of will, Gabriel cut off the oncoming rant, unclenched his fists and very visibly got a grip on himself. “But it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed, right? Get back in the groove, do something to show everyone why I’m in charge, something big.” Gabriel smiled ingratiatingly, as if selling Aziraphale a beautiful and very expensive car that would lose steering immediately after purchase and fling him off a cliff. “That’s where you come in, old buddy.”
Aziraphale sputtered indignantly, outrage overriding the still, small voice of self-preservation that was begging him to just shut-up and cower already. “Buddy?? Buddy?? You tried to kill me! I am not by any means your ‘buddy’! And I am not inclined to help you! At all!”
Gabriel's jaw clenched and Aziraphale held his breath. At that moment, the old rotary dial phone on the desk rang shrilly. Aziraphale nearly leaped out of his skin. “I should probably pick up, don't you think,” he said, taking another hesitant step.
"Focus, Aziraphale," Gabriel said. "This is important." He had a good idea who was on the line, and he was not part of this little confab. The demon was irrelevant right now anyway. He was an unknown variable since they learned about his holy water immunity, too dangerous to approach without some serious backup. Michael and the others refused to authorize that at the moment, which was...irritating, to say the least. And Hell wouldn't touch the demon, either, so there went some leverage.[2] Not that he needed leverage anyway. Aziraphale was foolish and soft, give him a stern talking to and apply a little pressure in the right place and he would always fold like...like...something soft that folds. Technically, Gabriel had also been strongly advised by Michael not to attempt to lay a finger on the dangerous Principality for his own safety, considering the unknown and potentially unholy amounts of power he possessed, but none of the other archangels had expressly said he couldn't stand at a safe distance and persuade the lesser angel very, very hard. He still felt slightly smug having found that loophole so easily. Thinking outside the box, that's why he deserved the corner office...or something in the Heavenly equivalent of the corner office. Heaven had an extremely open floor plan.
The ancient land-line telephone rang, and rang, sounding put-out at being ignored. Gabriel made a sharp gesture with his hand and the reliable old device uttered a strangled tink! and cut off mid-ring. “All you have to do,” Gabriel said, his smile strained, one eye twitching slightly. “Is repent. Easy-peasy. My Reprimand will be expunged when I bring the wayward one back to the flock, and I can forget about that ’reflective leave-of-absence’ crap. You’ll get a new job, well, yeah, okay, another demotion, probably get busted down permanently to a desk in Souls and Receiving this time but hey, free ticket back into the Celestial Sphere, still a win-win, am I right? Just come back with me now and you can apologize for that whole Antichrist snafu, sign your official reprimand and deny your demonic," Gabriel clenched his teeth and bit out the next word. "...Friend, before the Host-"
"I would never!" Aziraphale actually gasped and clutched at his heart. Betray Crowley? After everything they had been through, after everything they had been to each other through the ages in spite of every instinct of self-preservation or threats from their superiors? Not for the wide world, not for Heaven, not for his life. And certainly not for Gabriel. "The very idea! Crowley has been ever so kind and good to me, even when he was supposed to be my enemy, and the dearest friend in times of trouble, often better than I deserved. He has more goodness and mercy and kindness in his little finger, and true love and wonder for all Her creation, and desire to preserve it, than you have in your entire body! No! No! Absolutely not!”
Aziraphale had worked himself into such a panting fury that any remaining terror he had of his former boss had evaporated. He glowed in the dimly-lit bookshop like a small sun, his wings just on the verge of entering the mortal plane and every feather ruffled in indignation.
The moment stretched out. Gabriel’s brow furrowed, his eyes narrowed, he pursed his lips. “So that’s a hard...maybe?”
If Aziraphale had actually possessed the power to belch Hellfire at that moment, Gabriel would have resembled a sharp-dressed charcoal briquette. Aziraphale turned off the wrathful glow and willed away the stress-headache that wanted to form behind his eyes. “It means NO. Tend to your knitting, and I will tend to mine. I am quite content here with my shop and my books, and I have no desire to return to Heaven under any circumstances. If I had my part to play in the End of Days all over again, I would do it just the same. I do not repent, and I will not become Crowley’s Judas to salvage your job."
Gabriel’s frozen smile had become less of a smile and more a baring of teeth, as it finally began to sink in that for the first time since the beginning of time, no smile was smooth enough, no stern command threatening enough, to make his most annoying underling cave in to his demands. "You can't disobey me. You'll Fall."
Aziraphale considered this. He had already done a lot of wrong things in his career, and he hadn't Fallen yet. "If I am Damned, it will be by Her hand, not yours."
Gabriel fumed, face growing red. "You'll be sorry," he said at last. It was the petty threat of a beaten schoolyard bully.
Aziraphale shrugged. "I doubt that."
Gabriel glared. "I'll make him sorry."
"If you could, you would have used that threat as soon as you arrived, so I doubt even more that you can."
Gabriel stood there, fists clenched, hair mussed, with no other cards to play.
"A reprimand is not really so terrible, you know," Aziraphale couldn't help adding, trying to be positive and helpful, as always, even to someone who had treated him badly. "Even a demotion can be quite the improving experience. It builds character. If you recall, I was once seriously demoted, and I got reprimands from you all the time, and why, just look at me now." He told himself that he actually meant these words with the utmost sincerity, and he did, but possibly he was also being a bit of a bastard and twisting the knife just the tiniest bit. Luckily schadenfreude was not a mortal sin, and there was no eleventh commandment such as Thou Shalt Not be Petty.
Judging by his expression, Gabriel felt the words like a slap in the face. "Go home, Gabriel," Aziraphale added, with something close to pity for his old boss. He had all of Heaven, but he would never know the little, human joys of a good book, or a glass of wine, or the smile of someone familiar and beloved that was meant just for him, and while he might be respected Up Above, even feared, no one really liked him all that much. If he had ever been clapped in chains and threatened with the guillotine, or cornered by Nazi spies, he doubted if anyone among the Host would even turn a hair. "Go back to Heaven, take your medicine, and learn to be better."
There is nothing quite so dangerous as a powerful person in the moment they are denied something they want by a lesser someone who had, on all previous occasions, said yes, and Gabriel had been Powerful with the capital 'P' for a very, very long time. And even worse, the lesser someone pitied him. This sudden desire to physically grab Aziraphale and give him a nasty wrist-burn until he cried, it couldn't be injured Pride, or Wrath. Those were offences worthy of a Fall. Archangels weren't Proud, and didn't do Wrath and they didn't Fall, (except for You-Know-Who, but he got what he deserved,) so Gabriel struggled with what he was feeling. Frustration! Righteous Indignation! Yes! Where did this prissy Principality get off? When it came to mercy Gabriel was the giver, not the givee.
“You, you, you..." Gabriel said, fists clenched. He had always been an excellent middle-manager, but never an angel that could come up with a witty and cutting comeback on the fly. "You and your words, and your stupid sheaves of bark-” The still air of the shop stirred ominously, loose papers fluttered. Gabriel growled and took a step forward. Aziraphale took a step back. “You always talk and talk and talk. Just once, just once, can't you just shut up.”
Somewhere under a neatly completed book of cross-words puzzles (written in ink,) Aziraphale's mobile pounded out a deeply muffled baseline of We Will Rock You. Crowley, Aziraphale thought, and made a dash for it.
The sudden release of angelic power struck Aziraphale like a crashing wave. The world went bright white. Aziraphale felt himself falling backward through a snowstorm of printed pages, a blizzard of cherished written words. Plato's Republic and The Importance of Being Earnest and Hamlet. The Bible and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Pall Mall Gazette and a hasty note to a demon telling him to make himself at home while he was out, he'd be back in a jiffy. And under the blare of car alarms going off all along Oxford Street came Gabriel’s final say on the little drama that had just played out. “Oh. Oh I am so fired.”
*****************************
Crowley had woken up that morning...ish, had a long leisurely, very hot shower (Satan bless modern plumbing,) and spent an hour or two primping in front of the full length mirror in the bedroom, trying on different configurations of gender, outfits, and hairstyles. He finally settled for his usual presentation and the same basic black-on-black Posh Young Professional With A Debauched Edge look he'd been selling to Humanity for the last thirty years or so. Tight black jeans, black silk dress shirt unbuttoned enough to show a little chest hair, hair slicked back and just long enough so it curled against the nape of his neck. He was mostly out of the temptation business, but what the Heaven, it was a classic.
He tended his plants, gave them a good talking-to, then drank another cup of dark, bitter coffee, and cringed at how much tartan had already crept into his sleek, spare interior design since the Little Apocalypse that Couldn’t. Gah, what next, cabbage roses and doilies? He vanished most of it, even though Aziraphale would miracle it right back the next time he came over. He'd be skinned before he'd admit it, but he was actually kind of digging the cushions. They could stay. (Crowley snapped his fingers and the horrible plaid transformed into a much less eye-searing black, red, and gray.)
That had been a good evening, and an even better morning. Aziraphale had been dragging him around to different museums and book fairs all that week, so Crowley had decided to retaliate by introducing the angel to the most tedious modern television programming he could think of. A long, long (perhaps miraculously long,) marathon of truly awful, low budget, made-for-television movies featuring distressed damsels, where they must have blown most of the writing budget on the lead's hair and makeup, had turned into a bit a of a bust. Crowley had thought the angel would lost interest quickly and they could get down to serious drinking, and whatever other possibilities might present themselves to a couple of deeply pickled man-shaped beings in a dark room on a soft sofa, (heh heh.) [3] But Aziraphale had become riveted and surprisingly invested in the perils and tribulations of the cookie-cutter heroines onscreen. Or perhaps not so surprisingly: Crowley knew Aziraphale's secret guilty reading pleasure was a good (or not so good,) romance novel.
Admittedly, Crowley had been involved in a lot of truly awful television-related decisions, but he refused to take responsibility for this tripe, some human hack-writer had come up with it all on their own. It didn't take long before Crowley had been bored to tears, feeling personally, deeply insulted to his demonic soul by the clumsy, evil machinations of the bad guy, and didn't give a howl in Hell what happened to Jennifer or Melissa or Isabella or whatevertheHeaven her name was in the end. He wished he had suggested a classic James Bond marathon instead.[4]
He slouched down in a way that suggested several more vertebrae than the average, and would have made a human spine need quite a lot of physical therapy, and let his head droop heavily over onto Aziraphale's shoulder. He waited for Aziraphale to grumble and gently shove him off, but he merely sighed and settled like a freshly fluffed pillow, and there they sat. Aziraphale felt so warm and soft, and he smelled like book-dust and the salty buttered popcorn he'd been eating, and that underlying angel smell like fresh-fallen snow. Sure, other angels smelled like snow, too, but not the soft fluffy kind that made you think of a warm sweaters and mulled wine and shiny gifts under the Christmas tree, no, other angels smelled like wet sleet in the darkest part of Winter that stung your face and hurt to your bones, and made you want to crawl into a bottle of brandy and hide there until Spring.
Eventually Crowley, being the smooth seducer and corrupter of all things pure and good that he was, fell asleep. He woke up half-buried in an avalanche of plaid pillows with a blanket over him, to the sound of Aziraphale murmuring sweetly to the plants, who had the nerve to perk up and bloom in response. “You’re spoiling them rotten,” Crowley pointed out. “Spare the rod, spoil the...sprout. They’ll never amount to anything if you coddle them, angel.”
“Oh, pooh,” was Aziraphale’s witty and highly intellectual response, then he handed him a cup of coffee and headed off to make a mess of Crowley’s formerly spotless, modern, and completely unused state-of-the-art kitchen. Aziraphale loved fine food, but he also had some limited cooking skills, one of them being the good old-fashioned English fry-up that left a haze of grease in the air, the morning repast beloved of a nation that had an empire to maintain and wars to fight, and after fifty years or so of regular consumption tended to make a mortal heart blow an artery like a cheap gasket under pressure. For Aziraphale that was not really a concern, but he would have considered it a small price to pay for having a good, hot breakfast in you.
Crowley had waited until Aziraphale’s back was turned, then waved one long, damning finger at every leaf, bloom, and branch, particularly the droopy, lazy Begonia Rex the angel had been making kissy-faces over, then bared his fangs and slowly drew said finger across his throat. The mass of greenery trembled to their roots. Crowley then chuckled like a happy axe-murderer and drank coffee, and his angel, er, the angel, smiled at him over his newspaper and ate his beans and toast and sliced tomatoes, and Crowley had thought I want us to do this forever. And then realized, with a rush that left him light-headed, that they absolutely could.
So on this morning Crowley actually hummed as he primped, and misted, and mulched, and made his plans for the day. He felt light-hearted in the lift going down, and didn't incinerate a single pigeon as he sauntered out to his car, (though had he spotted one single, tiny splat of bird-shit on the gleaming windscreen of the Bentley, it might have been a different story.) He was going to suggest a long drive in the country in the next day or two. Coincidentally, there was suddenly quite a lot of nice property for sale or rent out that way as well, complete with charming little cottages. Crowley had paused before he went out the door to sweep up a sheaf of real estate listings. He had been casually slipping them into Aziraphale‘s to-be-read book pile, and many had under-linings and little notations that might pique the angel‘s interest. (Ocean view! Built in bookcases! Wine cellar! Close to local shops and areas of historic interest!) They could make a day of it, pack a picnic or stop for dinner somewhere. Aziraphale could bring his usual thermos of tea. Crowley would bring a treat for the angel to keep him happy on the way, maybe some of those glossy ribbon sweets that Aziraphale had once mentioned enjoying, the enormous chunks that used to be sold every Christmas at Woolworths that never fit comfortably in your mouth and gradually cut the human tongue to shreds after a good, thorough slobber.[5] Nevermind that Christmas was months away and Woolworths had been out of business for more than a decade. Crowley being what he still was that wasn’t much of an impediment, but that clerk at Charbonnel et Walker was certainly going to be surprised to find a nicely-wrapped box of the stuff in stock.
Crowley rolled off at a relatively sedate ninety-three miles per hour, a terror to any living soul who dared hesitate on a cross-walk. He tucked his knees under the wheel and let the Bentley take over while he got out his phone and rang up Aziraphale. It rang twice, then made a weird noise in his ear and cut off. Crowley leaned back and hissed, then hit the angel's number again. A tiny seed of dread planted itself in the black, worm-eaten shell of Crowley's demonic heart. That blasted antique had been sitting in the same spot on Aziraphale's desk, faithfully doing its duty for at least a century. It always worked because the angel expected it to work. It couldn't not work.
Unless something...happened.
To the shop.
Or Aziraphale. Again.
It had been a weird feeling for a demon, feeling happy and free, planning a future. Crowley was still a demon, even if every fiend in Hell would like to see him melted into an oily puddle, or hanging as a dart board in the Infernal Affairs Office recreation room. So in retrospect, he should have expected all the happy things he planned would turn to shit. Demons weren’t supposed to be friends with angels, or watch terrible television with them all night, or amble patiently around behind them at book fairs and hold their shopping bags while they haggled. Or save the whole world and have a life together. He was still a demon, and demons didn’t do love, or happiness, or forever, and they sure as Heaven didn’t get happy endings.
"No no nononono," Crowley muttered, through gritted fangs. "No nononono, we are not doing this, not again." Forget the landline, Aziraphale had a mobile phone, he had given it to him, and it would ring somewhere in that mouse-nest he called a bookshop and he would pick up. It might take a while because Aziraphale was always hiding it from himself and forgetting he had it, under his Cross-words puzzle or in a drawer or propping up an atlas. He was probably upstairs in that dusty little bedroom that hadn't heard a snore since Crowley had entirely too much fun at a music festival and needed a place to sleep it off,[6] and the sound of it was muffled by yet more ceiling-high stacks of books. Or maybe Aziraphale was wandering around downstairs with a biscuit and a cup of tea, wondering what on earth that confounded noise was, and oh yes, it was that new phone thingy again, where had it got to now?
It rang, and Crowley urged, no commanded, that imaginary Aziraphale to put down his tea and his nibbles, use both hands and search a little harder, Satanblessit, and just find the bloody thingy, so his heart could quit pounding in his throat and crawl back in his chest where it belonged.
Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice message system recording. It didn't sound like the usual calm, professional recorded voice. It sounded stressed and ragged, even a bit weepy, a personal assistant having a nervous breakdown her first day on the job and desperately trying to keep her chin up after watching her boss suffer some unexpected calamity, spontaneous combustion, maybe, or an alien abduction. Oh, oh, no. I'm sorry the party you have called cannot be reached at this time, or any time, I suppose...(the voice cracked and started to fade,) oooh, dear...."
Then came the electronic equivalent of a death rattle, and silence. Crowley threw his own phone across the car and pounded the steering wheel, punctuating each blow with a curse. "Shit! Shit! Shit! Fuck!" The Bentley's horn gave a reproachful bleat. Crowley rubbed a shaking hand across the dash. "Sorry, sorry."
It was a good thing that Crowley didn't actually need oxygen, because that tiny, poisonous seed had sprouted and grown into a strangling vine that was squeezing his lungs. He gave a long, whining exhale, ran his talons through his hair until it looked like a dark auburn haystack. His eyes went full predator-yellow, he flexed his hands on the wheel, his knuckles popped. "Bugger this," he snarled. "He is fine, and the bookshop is fine, and everything is fine, because I refuse to be shit on by You again, You hear me? I know You do, You hear everything, and if everything is not fine-which it is-I am, I am...” ( He failed at finding something exceptionally terrible to believably threaten the Lord Almighty with,) “...I am going to be horribly evil and even more than usually pissed off at you." Yeah, that should do it. He stepped on the accelerator. The Bentley roared with approval and lunged forward into traffic. Oncoming cars swerved onto the pavement, careless walkers absorbed with their electronic gadgets re-entered the real world at the last second and leaped for their lives. "Come on, old girl, let's go pick up our angel."
****************
Crowley made the last screaming turn and hurtled into a parking spot. The Bentley flung the door open and rumbled encouragingly. He half-expected a scene of devastation as he stepped out, a smoking crater filled with rubble surrounded by police and emergency services, but there was no crater or flashing lights. The usual denizens of Soho drifted by looking mildly shell-shocked, some of them muttering into their phones about the recent, weirdly localized earthquake. Crowley stepped out of the car, briefly flicking out his tongue to taste the air, and then spat out the bitter taste of sleet and hypocritical purity. Angels. There was the tiniest crack in a corner of one of the shop windows, a mere spider web, hardly noticeable under the grime of centuries, really. The old building had survived city-wide fire, and plague and riot, the bombs of two world wars, and being burnt to ashes and then miraculously restored without so much as a singed shingle by a pre-pubescent antichrist, who had most definitely not added that little cracked pane of glass. So nothing alarming about that little crack at all, nope.
WALK, Crowley commanded his legs, which had decided on general principles and in the spirit of mental and emotional self-preservation to not do that. A few jerky, reluctant steps forward and they recruited Crowley's hands into their protest by going cold and refusing to open the door. Crowley cursed horribly and shoved it open with his elbow and a little push of Hellish willpower.
Crowley took a step or two inside and felt something crunch under his foot. It was the sad remains of Aziraphale's seldom used and often forgotten mobile phone, which had been caught up in whatever whirlwind had hit the interior and shattered to bits. The bookshop looked as though a small, concentrated bomb, made of the collected literary works of three hundred-odd years, had exploded, and Aziraphale was on his knees in the middle of the blast crater, clutching his head.
Thankfully it was still attached to his shoulders and he seemed at first glance to still have all his other important parts, and Crowley inwardly, gratefully took back all the mean, bitter things he had said to, and about, Her over the millennia. For now, anyway. Crowley's own knees were on the edge of a sit-down strike, so he staggered over and clutched at his, err, the angel, for support. "Oh thank Satan! Are you alright?"
Aziraphale clutched him right back, wide-eyed and looking concussed, every hair on end like the survivor of a near-miss lightning strike. "Gone! And never called me mother!"
"Eh?" Crowley said, befuddled and wondering when Aziraphale had found the time, between dragging him to book auctions and watching bad telly and scaring the shit out of him like this, to join some kind of Soho amateur dramatic society specializing in Victorian melodrama.
Aziraphale caught a page that was hovering in the air, one of several that were still drifting down like falling leaves. He jabbed a finger at the page, then pointed at his own eyes and sadly shook his head. His chin wobbled. "Words, words, words."
What do you read, my lord? Bloody Hamlet now, Crowley thought. "Not following you, angel."
Aziraphale’s hands swooped and dived through the air. Crowley grabbed them before they put an eye out. “Don’t know Signing, either.”
Aziraphale gave an exasperated sigh. With Crowley's help he got to his feet, then held up his hand, palm out, in the universal gesture for half a minute. He stepped back, clasped his hands together prayerfully, then simpered up at the ceiling.
"It was another angel," Crowley said. "Right, I gathered that much, I could smell the bastard."
Aziraphale nodded. Crowley watched carefully. Aziraphale held up one finger, held his hands apart, wide, wider. Oh lovely, charades. "One word. Wide. Long. Big. Bigger. Huge. Enormous?"
Aziraphale tapped his nose, then tugged his ear. He gave another sigh, the sigh of someone about to do something distasteful but necessary, like receiving a kiss from a moustachioed great-aunt, or enduring painfully loud bebop while riding in a dear-friend's car as it careened at terrifying speeds through the streets of London on the way to a nice restaurant.
“On the nose. Alright, second word, sounds like. Pull? Stretch?-Ooh, er, what are you doing with your hands now-” Crowley's voice had risen a nervous octave as Aziraphale’s hands dipped below waist-level, making a motion that was very much not a demonstration of how to correctly swing a cricket bat. “Oh! Wank! Wanker! Enormous wanker! Gabriel!" Crowley snarled. "Ooh, that glittery bastard! That Effortless git! I'll rip his bloody wings off and stuff them up his-"
Aziraphale was standing still with his hands on his hips. "Yeah, right, sorry, you were, er, saying?"
Aziraphale blinked rapidly and staggered back, with the look of someone unexpectedly having a million camera flashes going off in his face all at once. He clasped his hand to his forehead dramatically and pretended to swoon. Crowley had the sudden, unpleasant image of his poor angel lying there in his fallen books, like a dying orphan in a snowdrift, while Gabriel stood over him, his clenched fists crackling with ethereal power, the bullying shit. “Did he smite you?”
Aziraphale nodded sadly.
Crowley once again rethought all his long-held beliefs about God and Heaven and any other angel other than Aziraphale, and decided that yes, he still hated Her holy guts with a fiery purple passion, and all of Heaven could absolutely, positively could kiss his sulphurous demonic arse. "Huh," Crowley said. "I didn't know that was a thing that angels did to other angels."
It wasn't. When Lucifer and his followers had been cast out the Lord had done most of the heavy lifting, and the angel's part had mostly been accomplished with a lot of shoving and punching and righteous kicks to the posterior. Oh, there had been some edged weapons waving around on both sides, but those were mostly to, er, lend weight to their moral arguments, so to speak. Smiting hadn’t really become a popular option until after The Fall of Man, and to the best of Aziraphale's knowledge, smiting had never been used against an unfallen angel still full of God's grace. Perhaps that was why he was merely damaged, rather than reduced to a great lot of sparkling component atoms. Well, he could ponder the whys and wherefores later.
Aziraphale picked up another book, pointed at his eyes, then at the page. Crowley felt sick. “You...you can’t read it now. Not any of them? In any language?” He waved his hands around, taking in the general disaster area.
Aziraphale shook his head. He put the book aside as gentle as a kitten, gave it a little pat for good measure, eyes wide and damp and hurt. It was the face he wore when he had come back from a really degrading Heavenly Performance Review, or had just been reminded that his bookshop and everything in it was ashes. “Oh, angel. I’m sorry. You can speak, though, yeah? That's something.”
Aziraphale flopped his hands helplessly. “Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart-”
“So only other people’s words then,” Crowley said. “Have you tried...healing yourself?” Aziraphale gave him A Look. “Yeah, dumb question, probably the first thing you tried.” Crowley rubbed his forehead. “This would all be so much easier if you could just write a note or something...wait...can you?”
Aziraphale’s eyes lit up. He ran to his desk, Crowley close behind, and pulled out a scrap of paper. He searched around until he found a pencil, then eagerly leaned forward. Crowley looked over his shoulder. Aziraphale’s pencil made a long, illegible squiggle and stopped. "Oh.” Crowley said slowly. “Oh, well I guess it stands to reason, if you can’t read, you wouldn’t be able to...
"What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?" Aziraphale said. He covered his face with his hands.
"Shh, angel. We‘ll fix this, I promise. We’ll talk to Bookgirl, and if that doesn’t work we’ll bring out the heavy artillery and get Adam to, to mess everything about again. We‘ll find a way, I promise, I promise. I’ll pull Gabriel‘s GQ arse down from Heaven and tear the fix out of him with my claws, one feather at a time, if I have to-”
Aziraphale's eyes widened and he clutched at Crowley's lapels with panicky tightness. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath!"
"Alright, alright, alright, we'll save the archangel arse-kicking as a last resort." Though they both knew that even Crowley’s unholy wrath wouldn’t give him a win if he tangled with an Archangel. Gabriel would walk away dazed and slightly smudged, while Crowley would end up as a very small amount of dust in an urn on Aziraphale's desk.
Aziraphale's shoulders shook. Crowley wanted to scream at Heaven or bite holes in something (or someone,) but instead he leaned forward hesitantly and held out his arms. Aziraphale clutched him around the waist, digging in with blunt fingers, holding on tight, right where Crowley’s wings were folding around them both on another plane of existence.
It figured, Crowley thought, that he finally got his arms full of angel when they were both too miserable to enjoy the experience.
__________________________
[1] Aziraphale didn't usually read modern literature, (that is, anything published after nineteen fifty or so,) but it was a brand new world and he was expanding his literary horizons. The Lady and The Laird had been highly praised by the nice young manicurist at the nail salon, and Aziraphale had been so intrigued he had immediately acquired a copy for himself. This may or may not have been because the hero was described as tall with red hair, and gave Aziraphale a tingly flashback to when he had crossed paths with Crowley back in the eleven-hundreds, and Crowley's long pipe-stem legs in a kilt, and how nicely the Clan McDonald tartan had set off his complexion.
[2] Gabriel had tried to network with Hell to maybe convince them to take another swipe at eliminating the demon traitor, resulting in a lot of rude fiendish laughter and crude suggestions as to where he could stick his halo.
[3] He had no idea. Or rather he had too many ideas. A demon doesn't spend more than six-thousand years observing and interacting with humanity without getting some ideas, and even occasionally putting those ideas into practice, but practicing with the angel was a whole new, terrifying, kettle of fish.
[4] James Bond wouldn’t have pussy-footed around when he found out Karen or Felicity was the one who had taken the incriminating files from his computer where he stupidly kept all the evidence of his misdeeds in a folder called CRIMES, DO NOT OPEN, nope. Also Miranda or Susan would have been darkly mysterious with a vaguely pornographic last name, and less into yoga pants and sensible shoes and more into tight cat-suits and karate. There would have been snappy dialogue, and at some point there probably would have been a martial arts battle or exchange of gunfire, and an exciting chase in cool cars culminating in someone going off a cliff. Jennifer's Prius was seriously lacking in speed, coolness, or flash gadgets, like hidden machine guns.
[5] Because nothing screamed 'Happy Christmas' like torn flesh and a minor blood-letting. In the interest of lowering morale and increasing overall misery, Hell had glommed up all the old store-stock, gone sticky and decorated with decades of pocket-fuzzies, and placed some on the desk of every demon in a management position. They then forced it on any poor bastard called into their office. It actually backfired, as the lower-level demons with lacklustre work-records spent the most time being called on the carpet, and took to devouring it by the handful and using it to pad their reported Deeds of the Day with a personal blood-sacrifice for Lucifer.
[6] Crowley didn't have a thing to do with the riot and the fires, but he was quite happy to dash off a note to Hell and take credit for it, once he had come down enough to sober up and naked day-glow angels stopped gavotting in the wallpaper