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Chapter Text

Some days, Crowley thought the entire story of his life - well, existence - boiled down to two moments of utter stupidity and fatal mistakes.

One was quite obvious: the day Lucifer and his entourage had been strolling along where he'd been fluffing a nebula into shape, and Crowley* had chosen to wave to them rather than mind his own business.

*He had not been Crowley then, of course, hadn't even been Crawly. But that old name was erased from reality, and Crawly hadn't ever been him, not really, so we must make do.

After that, the agony of the Fall was merely a logical conclusion.

(Now, wait a minute, you might say. Agony? I was under the impression Crowley did nothing more than vaguely saunter downwards!

And you would, of course, be correct, Esteemed Reader. However, we invite you to imagine walking in too-high heels five sizes too small, with your kneecaps taken out, your hip joints dislocated, and your trousers on fire.

This was roughly the kind of saunter Crowley had undertaken, and that's not even mentioning the worst part.

It's not the Fall that kills you, after all.

It's the sudden stop at the end.)

The second Mistake - capitalised for emphasis, and because Crowley liked to capitalise things* - occurred very shortly after.

*Crowley invented Noun Capitalisation,** in case you didn't know. Over the centuries, Aziraphale managed to nearly eradicate this demonic influence in the English tongue, but it doggedly persists in a number of other Indo-European languages despite his best efforts.

**A filing error in Hell resulted in him being credited for the invention of capitalism instead, which Crowley was a little disappointed by. For once he'd done sterling work, and then...

Oh well. Crowley doubted they'd have properly appreciated Capitalisation, anyway.

This was still before the apple and the sword and the wall and the rain, within that short span of Crowley's life devoid of Aziraphale, before he knew what love meant.

(Crowley doesn't like to think back to that time, nowadays.)

It had been a nice day - all of the days had been nice, really, which was just rubbing salt into the open third-degree burn if you were a newly-Fallen demon - and Beelzebub had come up to him and said "go up there, make some trouble".

Crowley, fool that he was, utterly idiotic imbecile with not a brain cell to be found within his skull...

Said no.

It might surprise you to hear that Beelzebub, by and large, was a comparatively lenient Prince. Taking zir leadership duties very seriously, ze had implemented a number of programmes designed to provide support to demons struggling with their tasks, ranging from holiday bonuses to anonymous counselling sessions.*

*Ze had even offered parental leave to those who had Nephilim on earth, but we all know how that turned out...

However, that was now.

Beelzebub shortly after the Creation of Man, shaken and still singed at the tips of zir wings, was a different beast.

Zir authority had never been questioned before. Ze was Prince, and the trauma of Falling too fresh in the demons' minds - usually a backstabbing lot - to rebel again.

And then there was Crowley, saying no.

(He couldn't even remember why, anymore. Not that it really mattered.)

Beelzebub snapped.*

*We would write 'panicked', but fear ze knows where we live, and might take rather drastic measures to make us reconsider our wording.

Before he could as much as blink Crowley found himself chained in the middle of a complicated incantation circle, with Beelzebub buzzing like an angry horse fly, going on about how he was to be made an example of, in case any of the other demons entertained similar thoughts about insubordination.

(The irony of punishing one of the Fallen for disobedience was entirely lost on zir. Demons suffered from two major deficiencies: a lack of imagination, and one of self-awareness.)

Crowley remembered very little of the early days BA.*

*Before Angel, obviously.

But he remembered that moment, kneeling in the soot and dirt of Hell, phantom pains still shooting through the empty space in his chest where God's Love had once been, and Beelzebub looming over him with a piece of Hellflint in zir hand.

"You'll never tell me 'no' again." Ze had hissed, and those words still echoed in his nightmares.

And then, ze had plunged the rock into Crowley's non-Grace, scratching a binding curse into his very being until he screamed.

When he'd come back to his senses, and ze repeated zir orders, Crowley had had no choice but to obey.

(He'd never have a choice ever again.

One 'no' had been all it took. One Mistake.)

"And be quick about it!" Hastur had called after him, and Crowley found himself hurrying.

"Oi, watch where you're going!" Another demon snapped as he barrelled past them, and Crowley suddenly couldn't look anywhere but the path ahead, the curse's sigils burning into his skin if he so much as blinked.

Luckily, he didn't necessarily need to. Perks of being a snake.

(You are likely appalled, dear reader. So were we.

But, already on this very first assignment, Crowley realised that an obedience curse could be made perfectly bearable if one was possessed of a vivid imagination and a talent for finding loopholes.

"Make trouble", ze had said.

How? Where? When? Well, turns out that was still up to Crowley, to a certain degree.)

The Forbidden Tree had been nothing special, really. Just a tree that was not to be touched. The Almighty had silly ideas sometimes, and luring the humans into a little bite would have been trouble, certainly, but no Trouble.

So Crowley had gone to Eve, sweet, foolish, gullible Eve, and talked to her about the Tree.

It never even occurred to her to say no. Never occurred to her that she could.

Given the situation, that had hit a little very close to home; so Crowley made a knee-jerk* decision, and it'd been, perhaps, the first right one in a long time.

*Well, he hadn't had legs at that point, but, y'know, figure of speech.

Taking a piece of his own Free Will - not like he was really going to need it, not anymore - and spinning it into an apple, he made the Tree the Tree of Knowledge, and told Eve to take a bite.

Nobody need ever know of it. God likely wasn't even paying attention to them anymore.

"It'll be our little ssssecret," he'd hissed, gently nudging Eve forward, and watched as humanity acquired Choice.

That had been Trouble, alright.

(Sometimes, Crowley thought he'd made a third Mistake in talking to the angel on the Eastern Wall of Eden.

Then he thought of Aziraphale's smiles, and discarded the notion immediately.)

All in all, it hadn't been the end of the world.*

*Still 6000 years to go for that.

The curse didn't extend to humans, for one. They could give him orders until they were blue in the face, Crowley was under no obligation to obey to any of it.

And as for the demons... well.

As previously stated, demons have, by and large, no imagination.

Crowley never received precise orders, simply because Hell couldn't really think of complex dastardly machinations they wanted him to carry out.

It was always "trouble this" and "murder that", and he quickly found that pushing a vase off the table or stepping on an ant was perfectly sufficient for the terms of the curse.

Report some purely human atrocity afterwards, and head office would send back a commendation, making future orders even easier.

"Do more of what you did during the Spanish Inquisition," eh? So, "nothing and lie about it", gotcha.

If there was any way, any way at all, to remove the curse, Crowley would've been free of it long ago,* seeing as how he'd done such exemplary work on earth.

*He would have been released, but not forgiven, as such. He was a demon. There was no forgiveness for demons.

Aziraphale, now...

Well.

He'd worried about Aziraphale, at the start.

This was the Enemy, after all, and back then Hell had not quite figured out how to distinguish between Heaven and the Fallen in their cursing. If Aziraphale knew he, too, theoretically had Crowley at his beck and call...

Demons had no imagination, and the tentative stirrings of something like "honour among thieves", but angels, well, angels...

(This had been back when God had still tended towards the vengeful, of course, and one would've been very unwise to put one's life in angel hands if one did not have absolute faith in one's pure and unblemished soul.)

Even if Aziraphale would not hurt him, he might well report Crowley's delicate situation to head office, and he was sure other angels had no qualms about telling him to go drink a Holy Water cocktail.

It wasn't worth the risk.

(Crowley had subsequently done his best to avoid Aziraphale as much as he could for the first 4000 years, even though something new and fragile deep within him protested against it.)

Only...

The more regularly they ran across each other, the more Crowley realised there was another viable option.

Aziraphale need never know.

Because, and this was the best part: Aziraphale never demanded a thing of him.

Wheedled, yes. Requested, suggested. But it was all "might we" and "wouldn't you", and the curse slept peacefully through it in Crowley's chest.*

*Much of it was about Intent, you see, and Aziraphale seemed to have no intent to bend Crowley to his will whatsoever.

(That Crowley wished, on occasion, to be bent over certain items of furniture by him, well, that was entirely inconsequential in this context, and we don't even know why we brought it up.)

For instance, Aziraphale invited him for oysters, after Lower Management had bullied him into a trip to Rome. He hadn't been invited to dine in years.*

*The last supper Crowley had been asked to attend had been, well, the Last Supper, and that had found him understandably glum.

When Aziraphale came to meet the black knight, did he order him to fight? To lay down his weapon?

No. They just talked.

(Didn't agree, but, well. Can't have 'em all.)

Disagreements regarding the Arrangement - Crowley's favourite capitalisation - were settled over coin flips,* and at that point Crowley was already so far beyond gone on Aziraphale that he miracled Hamlet into a success with barely any prompting.

*Crowley didn't even cheat, most of the time.

(He'd made it his mission in life to never obey the spirit of any order given to him, contrary on principle; except when Aziraphale was concerned.

In those cases, Crowley was happy to oblige.)

He rescued Aziraphale in France - "cause some deaths", "make some trouble", well, sending an executioner to the guillotine and breaking into a prison ticked those off the list - and was subsequently invited for crepes; and never was he as much as ordered to pass the jam.

It was around that time when Crowley began letting down his guard entirely.

Perhaps that budding trust was the reason it had hurt so much when Aziraphale refused the one time Crowley asked for something back.

Fraternising indeed.

Crowley had gone back to his apartment, and felt so tired of it all.

Humans died, even the best of them;* fellow demons only delighted in ordering him around.

*Though that never stopped Crowley befriending them, brilliant little mayflies that they were.

And the one angel he felt safe around, the one entity he loved, didn't want to fraternise.

Crowley did what one did when one had a bit of a crisis; slept for nearly a century - he'd accumulated quite a few days of paid leave by then - and, once he'd woken up, went and bought a fast car.

(The Bentley, at least, wasn't ashamed to be seen in his presence.)

WWII had worked out, somehow.

"Make trouble", Beelzebub had said, but, as usual, not specified for which side.

So Crowley had joined British counterintelligence.

There was no shortage of Nazi atrocities he could sell to head office when they came knocking, as long as he neglected to mention the dozens of other catastrophes he had worked to prevent.

Like the time he rushed into a church to protect Aziraphale, and saved his books for him - as one did, when one was desperately in love.

Bit hard to sell to Lower Management, that.

(He would never forget the way Aziraphale had looked at him that night. Never. There had been something wondrous in it, for those precious few hours, and though the angel was back to his guarded self in the morning, Crowley's delusions had been fuelled sufficiently.)

And then, 1967.

Aziraphale handed him the Holy Water, still no order passing his lips, but an unspoken plea Crowley could barely decipher.

And then he slipped into the night, gone in a blink, and if Crowley hadn't had the thermos*, well, he might've wondered if he hadn't dreamt it all up.

*Tartan-patterned. Of course.

Crowley was half convinced Aziraphale had chosen that deliberately. He couldn't very well refill the damn thing, could he.

Too fast. Crowley thought glumly, staring out at the flickering neon lights of Soho. Tell me to go slow then, angel, and mean it. I'll always do as you ask.

Whether I want to or not.

The 21st century came, and with it a summons to an old graveyard, the first non-negotiable order Crowley had received in years.

Always him, Crowley thought on the ride to the hospital, the dreadful monster crying helplessly in the back seat. He hadn't meant to Fall, hadn't meant to get humans cast out of Eden, hadn't meant to love Aziraphale and he certainly wasn't meaning this.

End of the world.

In Crowley's eyes, his world had barely started. He needed at least another century with Aziraphale, more, an eternity would be ideal.*

*An eternity was actually a precisely measured divine unit, determined by the average beak-sharpening rate of the African swallow - not the European one, Heaven Forbid - in regards to a certain mountain at the edge of the universe, factoring in travel time by spaceship.

It was a rather impractical unit, by and large, and not really in use anymore.

It was quite extraordinarily long though, and that was why Crowley found it perfect for the sentiment he wished to express.

He couldn't let it happen.

He'd think of something, Crowley was good at thinking of things, he was always angling for the next loophole, wasn't he?

This order was just a magnitude or two bigger than "make some trouble in Edinburgh", that was all.

Choice and Free Will, it all came down to Choice and Free Will, and Mistakes.

Crowley leaned over the back of the Bentley's front seat,* gazing thoughtfully at the child in the basket.

*The Bentley continued driving perfectly unfazed. Crowley's input was honestly more of a hindrance than a boon most days, as far as it was concerned.

It looked so very, very normal. Had Crowley not know better, he would've thought it a regular human. No horns, no sulphur, not even the vague impression of a single hoofiewoofie.

Choice, Crowley thought, and like the day he'd stood before the apple tree, an idea came to him.

Two Mistakes, and two Ideas. It all balanced itself out in the end.*

*Crowley secretly thought the Buddhists had the right of it, at the end of the day, but Hell's PR department preferred he align himself with something a little more Abrahamic.

One snap of his fingers, and somewhere not too far away, a woman by the name of Deirdre Young gasped and screamed "ARTHUR!" at ear-splitting volume.

Wrong child, wrong family. The hellhound would go to the wrong boy, no Apocalypse, Antichrist lost, whoops-a-daisy.

Nobody need ever know, not even Aziraphale.

"It'll be our little secret," Crowley told the baby, reaching over the back of the seat to awkwardly pat its head, bare of any horn-like growths and covered in a few fluffy tufts of golden hair.

The Antichrist, Lord of Darkness and Bringer of End Times, gurgled contentedly and chewed on Crowley's thumb.

Crowley took it as a good omen.

Chapter Text

All in all, Crowley thought he'd done rather well, given the circumstances. The real Antichrist was off somewhere with whichever family had gotten him, ignorant of the powers he might've had, and as far as Crowley was concerned, that would be the end of it.

If nobody taught him, he'd remain just a normal boy...*

*...wouldn't he?

Involving themselves into the upbringing of Warlock was a knee-jerk decision - now with actual knees - mostly fueled by the desire to see Aziraphale more frequently. A nanny and a gardener might have a chat in the rose bushes, and if you heard her sigh longingly afterwards, well.

Humans fell in love, didn't they, and so did nannies.

(Their love wasn't always requited, but such was life.)

Plus, it had the added benefit that Hell left him to his mission, and a gardener could never order a nanny around, so he was safe on those fronts.

The boy's 12th birthday came and went... and no Hellhound came with it.

Crowley had hoped that would be the end of it. That the Hound had wandered off, for want of a master, never to return.

But it hadn't felt like it. The discharge of Evil Intent should've been palpable, but was instead noticeably absent.

And Crowley knew, just knew, long before the Hound found its true master, that he'd made a third Mistake.

Why hadn't he written down the other family's address!? Out of sight, out of mind, eh, Crowley?

You damned, damned fool.

They had to find him again now, before it was too late, before the armies of Heaven and Hell noticed his deception, before...

He glanced over at Aziraphale, who was fussily trying to remove all the cake from about his person, licking it from his fingers when he thought Crowley wasn't looking;* and suddenly he was struck by the terrible reality of it all.

*Oh, Crowley was looking alright. He'd like to never do anything else.

Before Armageddon and the Last War rolled around.

Before he and Aziraphale would find themselves on opposing fronts.

Before... the inevitable.

(The demons could make him fight, after all. They could.

Aziraphale, gentle, loving - though not in the way Crowley truly wanted - Aziraphale, oh, he wouldn't want to. He'd throw that flaming sword of his to the ground and offer his hand to Crowley in friendship once more.

And if some Duke told him "kill every angel on sight" beforehand, well... then Crowley hoped he would be able to do it quickly and painlessly.)

Alpha centauri.

Crowley had done it, put all his cards on the table. Please, angel, you and me, angel, just us among the stars, with no orders and no summons, no Great War, I know you don't want it, neither do I, please, choose me, I know you will, we are friends, aren't we? Come on, angel, please...

And then Aziraphale said no.

And not just to running. To them.

Crowley was a demon. Crowley had no heart, aside from a useless lump of muscle in his chest. Crowley ran on spite alone.

And yet, something cracked and fell apart into a million little shards at that, and Crowley knew pain, every disobeyed order was agony, but... nothing like this.*

*God and Satan both, not even remotely like this.

He stumbled away from the bandstand, feeling so desperately empty.

Aziraphale... he'd thought... now, at the end, after everything...

Crowley's gambles never seemed to pay off. Hand a girl knowledge, get her kicked out of the Garden. Ask an angel to run away, get your heart - Crowley had no heart, stop saying that!* - broken.

*Crowley did, indeed, have no heart... anymore.

He'd miracled the organ itself away in an attempt to reduce the pain, and his metaphorical one, however much he might deny it, was well and truly shattered.

He knew he couldn't leave alone, and Aziraphale, the bastard, surely knew, too. Crowley hadn't exactly tried to hide how blessedly compromised he was in this regard, Aziraphale was just having a right old lark denying it.

A funny pair they made. Crowley who obeyed and never lied, Aziraphale who spoke no orders and kept deceiving himself.

Balance. And the Buddhist fellows did have a point.

When Crowley begged him to come away again, a part of him wished Aziraphale would tell him yes this time, or at least order him to stay, too; they could die together, rather than Crowley being ripped to shreds alone by an incensed Hastur.

(Damn him, damn the Antichrist, damn Heaven and Hell and all the blessed world!)

I forgive you. FORGIVE YOU. Crowley didn't want bloody forgiveness, what was the point in absolving the sins of the past? Nothing, that's what it was. A great, pustulent bollock of nothing.

Crowley wanted, had only ever wanted, one measly little angel, was that too much to ask? One angel, one tiny planet to make home...

...or one grave. At the end of the day - or rather, the world - if Hastur got him, if the Apocalypse went ahead... it would all be the same to him then, wouldn't it.

Crowley knelt among the flames, and his only thought was "why can't the world end already".

He would welcome the Antichrist with open arms right about now. Just curl up in the ashes of the bookshop, and wait for the planet to crumble, why, thank you, Mr. Satan Jr., much obliged.

Crowley took the nearest book - they were all gone, all burning, Austen and Dickinson and Wilde and Shakespeare, what would Aziraphale say? ...nothing, of course, he'd say nothing, nothing ever again - pressed it to his chest, and wept.

The tears evaporated quicker than he could shed them.

He'd returned his heart to his ribcage some time after the bandstand, once it ceased aching quite so ardently, and now he didn't even have the energy to banish it again. It just sat there, a cold, dead lump.

Crowley could relate.

Crowley's heart restarted precisely 48 minutes, 13 seconds and nearly a gallon of cheap booze later, the exact moment he managed to croak "...Aziraphale?" despite the way it was suddenly hammering in his chest.*

*The poor thing had had an unpleasantly eventful few days, though that was nothing against the state of Crowley's liver.

Not gone. Not gone, not gone. It was the only thought in Crowley's quite spectacularly sloshed brain, his mouth running off without him, telling Aziraphale why he hadn't gone to alpha centauri - at least his self preservation instincts had managed to only let "best friend" slip - and it was only the fact that Aziraphale spoke a command - a mild one, but an order still* - when he called "go to Tadfield" through the ether that made him move.

*It was surely not the first time. Little, inconsequential commands slipped through the nets, their effect so light Crowley barely even noticed before he obeyed, but it was certainly the first time that counted.

The curse burned gently through the haze of alcohol, through Crowley's confusion - wiggle on, really? - and pulled him out into the Bentley, towards Tadfield.

Agnes Nutter's blessed book sitting in his lap, Crowley drove off towards Doom, the End of the World, and Aziraphale - the last of which rendered the rest utterly inconsequential.

Apocalypses* were somehow both more stressful and more anticlimactic that Crowley would've expected.

*We wonder if it should not be Apocalypsi, or perhaps Apocalypsae, but somehow, this question is one that has never occurred to scholars.

Perhaps, this has something to do with the fact that there only ever should've been one of them, barring meddlers like Aziraphale and Crowley and the assorted humans on that airbase.

Standing together on cracked tarmac, Aziraphale smiling at him with visible relief, the backs of their hands gently brushing, Crowley took a deep breath, and sent a wry smile upwards. Ineffable Plan or not, he hoped She was watching.

Some part of him that even Falling had never quite managed to extinguish hoped She liked what She was seeing.*

*We, as omniscient narrators, are happy to inform you that God was, indeed, pleased. So much so, in fact, that She spilled celestial popcorn all over Her cloud sofa in Her exuberance, and received a "Mom, you're SO embarrassing!" from Jesus shortly afterwards.

One night.

Crowley had hoped for an eternity, once, over a decade ago, but one night was all they'd ever get, it seemed like. Heaven and Hell might be in disarray, but they were nothing but efficient when it came to administering God and/or Satan's wrath in strategic places.*

*The Fall, for instance, had occurred within less than five minutes of Lucifer saying "actually, guys, what are your thoughts on... rebellion?", and that had been comparatively tardy.

One night of reprieve.

One night of Aziraphale on a seat beside him, sharing a bottle, one night of him in his Mayfair flat, standing there awkwardly, clashing with literally everything Crowley owned and yet somehow completing it.

(One night of the flat being not "the flat" but home.)

One night.

"Angel?" Crowley said tentatively, when Aziraphale was curled up on a hastily-miracled couch, hands wrapped around some hot cocoa. "Alright there?"

"Hm? Oh. Oh yes, dear boy. Splendid. Wonderful." Aziraphale's fingers were whiter than the porcelain of the mug. "Spiffy."

"Do you need anything?" Crowley asked. He'd give Aziraphale whatever he asked for in a heartbeat, bound by so much more than a curse.

Aziraphale looked, briefly, like he meant to demur again.

And then, something slipped and cracked in his expression, and he whispered, as if in terrible pain, "books".

Crowley nearly tripped with how fast he scrambled over to his desk, pulling out all the drawers and gathering together his - rather modest - collection of various novels and other readable material.*

*Crowley would tell anyone who asked, and Aziraphale most of all, that he didn't do books.

This was, in fact, a lie. Crowley did do books; he was, however, well aware that his doing of books was nowhere near the level of Aziraphale's, and if he ever so much as hinted at finding Paradice Lost quite humorous, the angel would want to discuss, and theorise, and generally do things that went miles over Crowley's head.

Therefore, life was easier for everyone involved if Crowley simply denied books altogether.

He carried the stack over to the couch, gently depositing them in Aziraphale's lap, who immediately singled out his Big Book of Astronomy* to cradle in his arms like a child.

*Crowley would adamantly insist he only had it to make the fundamentalists that rang at his door on occasion cry - two of them had tried to tell him that it was only God holding up the planets, and, with all due respect to Her, Crowley had felt the need to introduce them to a silly little thing called "gravity" - but we all know the truth about that, don't we?

"T-thank you, my dear." Aziraphale smiled weakly. "All better now."

Crowley wasn't quite convinced, and it must've showed on his face.

"Oh, will you cease looking at me like that?" Aziraphale huffed. "I am perfectly fine. It's merely been... oh..."

He dabbed ineffectively at the corner of his eyes. "Been a tense couple of days. I shall be fine momentarily."

"It's okay if you're not." Crowley awkwardly tried to find something to do with his hands, but the cut of his trousers did not allow for putting them, or anything else, into the pockets. "I'm not fine either."

"Precisely." Aziraphale sniffed, hugging the book tighter. "One of us will have to be."

The Esteemed Readers likely already know the first impression people get of Aziraphale; so now, we'd like to relate to you the same for Crowley.

Upon first meeting Anthony J. Crowley, people instantly assumed three things about him: one, he was mafia; two, he was cool, collected and assertive, the kind of man who knew what he wanted and took it; and three, judging from the way he moved his hips, he was recovering from being on the receiving end of the single best shag in existence.

Two of these assumptions were incorrect. Whatever Hell might like to think, they were less like organised crime and more like incompetent bureaucrats - even though some people might argue there was no difference; and Crowley was... well, he hadn't... that is to say... since the person he wanted to be shagged by was not amenable, he'd never...

...he wasn't getting shagged, was the point.*

*The more innocent among those who met him sometimes thought he had recently had double hip replacement surgery, or alternatively was in need of one; this was, of course, no less false.

Crowley's hips were perfectly intact, they were just terribly difficult to operate for a being more used to slithering.

The third assumption, well now...

The third assumption was not only equally incorrect, but the single greatest misconception since Columbus had stepped onto the beach, looked around, and exclaimed "India! We've made it!".

Crowley was not cool. Crowley was also not collected, and if assertive had ever as much as passed him in the street, it had avoided eye contact and pretended to see a distant friend at the corner, must dash, ever so sorry!

Crowley was, in essence, a coward. If he knew what he wanted, he also knew he would never dare to make even the tiniest move towards it, much less take it.

And what Crowley wanted most in the world currently sat on his sofa, teary-eyed and shaking, in a little nest of books and begging for a hug with everything except his words.*

*Oh, how Crowley wished sometimes Aziraphale was less polite. How he wished for a clear, precise "hold me" from his lips, "stay", "kiss me", "love me".

It wouldn't be an order then. It would be permission.

A demon could dream, couldn't he.

Aziraphale glanced up at him, and he looked so lost, so helpless, so desperate, that Crowley nearly went and gathered him close until that look went away.

"Ngk," Crowley said, as sympathetically as he could, and then went to bed.

(Aziraphale, the Esteemed Readers might like to know, very nearly called after him; but he was a coward, too, so they spent that one last night in separate rooms and pining deeply and miserably as always.*

*Until Aziraphale pulled Crowley out of bed around three in the morning, nattering on about a prophecy and faces, that is; but, at that point, the moment had passed, and the damage was done.

At least, there was a chance of eternity to make up for it...)

Aziraphale felt strange in Crowley's body, so narrow and jittery and altogether on edge; though that might well be his own nerves.

In a way, it was Crowley's heart he could feel beating in his chest,* his soft breathing, and... well, it was an intimacy Aziraphale would never dream of demanding.

*Irregularly, but Aziraphale wasn't too worried in that regard. The hearts of demons and angels were generally not very good at beating, and sometimes had to pause a while before starting up again, when they thought their owner might not be paying attention.

Hell was. Well. Hell, Aziraphale supposed. Dank and grimy. Crowley had described it to him once,* and while his words had not quite done the real thing justice, he'd known what to expect.

*In that same conversation, conducted while very drunk, Crowley had also spoken of Falling, and evil deeds, and... Aziraphale had had the feeling Crowley had meant to confess something else, but stopped himself just in time. He'd pretended not to remember a thing of it the next morning, which, all in all, had seemed a mutually agreeable course of action.

It might've had something to do with orders and obedience, and Mistakes. Aziraphale wasn't sure.

"Into the water." Prince Beelzebub ordered, and Aziraphale hesitated. For some reason, the Prince had seemed unsettled by his request to unclothe first, and was even now leaning forward in zir seat, white-knuckled and buzzing only ever so slightly.*

*The Esteemed Reader will remember the first and last time Crowley had not instantly obeyed an order, and understand zir disquiet. Aziraphale, of course, had no clue.

"Get. IN! NOW!!!" Beelzebub snapped, and Aziraphale - no, no, Crowley - raised one brow.

"No rush." He drawled, in that incomparable suave manner Crowley exhibited, cocking his hip ever so slightly. "You only die once*, don't you?"

*The real Crowley might've said "live twice", and felt very Bond about it all.

Ze was visibly panicking now. "Do NOT dizzzzobey me!" Ze fumed. "You can't, you know you can't! Guardzzz, THROW HIM IN!"

Aziraphale held up his hands pacifyingly. "Going, I'm going. But only because I want to, mind, not because you've ordered me to."

And it was this, not the subsequent reveal of Holy Water immunity, that actually, truly, put the fear of Crowley into the assembled demons.

"Shup your stupid mouth. And die already." Gabriel said, pulling his face into a terrible grin.

Crowley said nothing. He no longer could, of course.

And then he stepped into the flames.

The Esteemed Reader might worry that the direct order of "die" has sealed Crowley's fate, subterfuge and chosen face be damned.

The Esteemed Reader can rest easily. You can order someone a lot of things, but not to die, never to die.

This is, of course, because dying isn't actually something one is in charge of.

That is Death's domain... and Death cares little for the orders of inconsequential mayfly beings.*

*That includes archangels. Death had been around long before Gabriel, and he would continue on long after he was gone.

Crowley could be ordered to step into Hellfire - or Holy Water - and if that killed him, well, that was another thing entirely.

Gabriel could not order Crowley to die. And, if things proceeded as planned for Aziraphale, well, then it would never again occur to Prince Beelzebub to do so.

As Crowley stepped into the flames and smiled, it occurred to him that he would be free.

Not entirely.

Not truly.

But close enough.

"To the world." Crowley said, gazing at Aziraphale with abject wonder.

Some parts of him still couldn't quite believe he was still there, they were still there, the earth was - well, you get the point.

It felt surreal, and like it was surely, surely, far more than Crowley deserved.*

*Crowley would not call himself one for being maudlin - even though he was - but he had a very clear understanding of what he deserved, and while that mythical collection contained being left alone by Hell and the world intact and not ended, Aziraphale had never been a part of it.

Aziraphale was a gift. Crowley might even say blessing, if the mere word didn't tickle unpleasantly at the back of his throat.

"To the world." Aziraphale echoed, soft and intense.

Their glasses clinked, a nightingale had the sudden urge to explode into song, and the world went on as it always had, nothing whatsoever to see here.

Freedom, Crowley thought to himself, rolling the word around his mouth the same way he would a good sip of champagne - incidentally what occupied his mouth at the time - as Aziraphale related a charming little anecdote about Shelley that Crowley had heard five times and still wasn't sick of, if just for the little twinkle it brought into Aziraphale's eye.

Freedom. Quite nice, like the ring of that.

He could get used to it.

Now that there was time.

(The Esteemed Reader might assume that this is where our story ends. And we agree, it does seem a rather lovely state to leave them in, doesn't it? Champagne and dinner date and all.

However, nothing good can come of dormant curses left unchecked, or of love left unvoiced, or even Antichrists left on earth; thus, even if the account of the Esteemed Sirs Pratchett and Gaiman chooses to end here, we must needs soldier on, and recount the remainder of this sordid tale.

We hope you bear with us despite it all.)

Chapter Text

"Angel..." Crowley breathed, startled. "You... you...."

Aziraphale's face reddened, and he averted his eyes. "Yes. Well."

"You were CHEATING!" Crowley exploded, and flipped the Scrabble board.

"Well. That wasn't necessary, was it." Aziraphale frowned down at the table, and discreetly shook a few vowels out of his sleeve. "I let you put anacondaic, and-"

"It's a descriptive term for something anaconda-like!"

"-and cupboard-y."

"...s'something that resembles a cupboard."

"Do I need to get the dictionary*, Crowley?" Aziraphale raised a threatening eyebrow. "Do I?"

*Always one for being well-prepared - and a bit of a bastard - Aziraphale had naturally miracled the dictionary to always contain exactly the words he wanted it to.

We would like to inform the Esteemed Reader that even a normal dictionary does NOT contain anacondaic or cupboardy, just in case they intend to use it during the next board game night.

"Do I need to filch you, angel?" Crowley countered, eyeing the Q behind Aziraphale's left ear. "Again?"

They glared at each other. Neither backed down.

"Well, this was lovely!" Aziraphale beamed suddenly. "Another game?"

"Sure thing, angel." Crowley grinned, and sipped his wine.

Board game nights had been Aziraphale's idea, and, well, who was Crowley to deny him anything?*

*Secretly, it reminded him of playing games with Warlock - and losing spectacularly, because one did not want the Antichrist in a temper tantrum - so he wouldn't miss it for the world, no matter how many  "bored game" jokes he cracked.

They had yet to play a game to its natural conclusion. From observing the practice in various books and other media, Aziraphale and Crowley had deduced that fighting was an essential part of gaming nights, and diligently recreated this.

"Uno or Monopoly, dear boy?" Aziraphale asked.

"How about-"

"We are NOT playing Snakes and Ladders again, Crowley!" Aziraphale interjected sharply. "I really must put my foot down!"

Crowley huffed. "S'not what I was gonna say."

"Oh? Then do go on."

Crowley opened his mouth.

Closed it again.

Pouted most pointedly.

"That's what I thought." Aziraphale pulled the Game of Life from its shelf. "This one, I think."

"Noooo, angel!" Crowley whined. "S'depressing!"

"It's the miracle of human existence." Aziraphale argued primly. "They get born, they work, they die, all according to the Ineffable Plan. It's an allegory, you'll like it."

(Aziraphale was quietly delighted that they were already getting a headstart with the arguing; they'd become expert players yet!)

Crowley rolled his eyes. "There's no plans for the humans, Aziraphale, not really. They've got Free Will, haven't they? With the Apple, an' all. Ineffable Plan, that's our lots." He drained his wine glass, and poured himself another. "They've Choices, and they're Free. And that bloody game's too linear for that."*

*The last time they had played, Crowley had insisted to let his character run away to India and follow their dreams of becoming a snake charmer.

Aziraphale, diligently carrying out the high-paying 9-to-5 job of his choice - well, "choice" - had not been amused.

"Hum. I did always wonder about that. How the humans obtained Free Will. The briefing never said anything about Apples of Knowledge." Aziraphale mused, briefly distracted. "Funny thing, that. I might've guarded it more closely then."

Crowley studiously neglected to answer, or even acknowledge the question.

"I suppose it scarcely matters. Do pour me another, will you, while I set up?"

Crowley did so, and pretended not to notice Aziraphale slipping a selected career path card into his sleeve.

This was good. This was nice. Domestic enjoyment with Aziraphale. Not too fast, was it? Another few centuries of this, Crowley could take, easily, and wouldn't even get actually impatient.

(And if Aziraphale rolled up his sleeves and undid his bowtie a few times, he might even make it another six millennia.)

The telephone rang.

"I'll get it, I'll get it." Crowley unfolded himself from the sofa, quietly suspecting this was a distraction technique so Aziraphale could shuffle the cards strategically. Or nab the yellow car.

"A. Z. Fell's Books for Burning, you're speaking to the Chief Incinerator, what kindling can we sell you tonight?" Crowley drawled.*

*Crowley liked to answer the bookshop phone with increasingly ludicrous introductions, and pretended not to notice Aziraphale glaring daggers** at his back.

**Pleased daggers, to be honest. Potential customers who got Crowley on the phone never called back.

"I... what? This is, uh, Newt? Shadwell gave me the number for the Southern Pan- the bookshop." Newt hesitated. "Have I got it right?"

"Yeah. What's up?" Crowley frowned a little. What did the Pulsifer boy want, at this hour?

"Look. Um. Anathema said not to interfere, but. I don't think." He swallowed. "Just... watch the news, yes? There's... worrying stuff. Might be... I can't really remember, it's all faded, but... there was something, with Adam, something I meant to..."

Newt trailed off.

"Why did I call again?"*

*Adam could erase the happenings of those fateful apocalyptic days from the minds of humanity all he liked, but when it came right down to it, nothing beat a Pulsifer's quiet anxiety.

"Never mind. Ciao." Crowley quickly set the receiver down, and thought.

Adam.

Something wrong.

Something that made the news.

He should tell Aziraphale. Yes, tell Aziraphale, take care of it together, they'd have it resolved in no time. Hopefully.

Crowley glanced over his shoulder. Aziraphle was humming softly to himself as he sorted little plastic bits, oblivious to the conversation that had just transpired, the very picture of blissful ignorance.

Or.

Or, he could take care of it himself without worrying the angel.

(Adam was Crowley's own satanblessed mess, all things considered, and Aziraphale deserved a bit of quiet without emergency situations.)

He need never know, Crowley thought, sauntering back to the sofa with forced nonchalance.

"Telemarketers." He announced grandly. "Wanted to sell you an insurance package. Explained you don't need one*."

*This was due less to the fact that Aziraphale, as an angel, needed no insurance at all - everybody needs insurance, we believe - but because Crowley, as his own personal coping mechanism after the bookshop fire, had insured Aziraphale and all his belongings meticulously.

It wouldn't really keep them safe, of course, but Crowley felt like he'd done something, and sometimes that was all that counted.

"Oh, hope they're not disappointed, poor dears." Aziraphale said, as if he hadn't personally caused the nervous breakdown of no less than 47 door-to-door salesmen.*

*If the Esteemed Reader would like to know how, we must sadly inform them that even we have absolutely no idea, and neither does Crowley.

(It'd been bugging him quite terribly, to be frank, and he'd spent quite a while traipsing along the Road to Hell, trying to get one of the frozen salesmen to describe their experience, before giving up and sulking for a decade or two.)

"Yup." Crowley fiddled with the purple car, thoughts concerned with anything BUT disappointed telemarketers. "Look, angel... actually, s'getting late. I should, maybe..."

He gestured vaguely towards the door, already slipping on his jacket.

"...what?" Aziraphale startled, evidently taken aback. "But... but Crowley, we were just going to- we can play Pictionary, if you really..."

"Nah. S'fine. I'm tired, too." Crowley yawned exaggeratedly. "Been a long day."

"You slept in until midday!" Aziraphale accused.

Fair. Crowley winced.

"...and how long has it been since then, eh?" He smiled broadly, inching his way towards the exit.

Aziraphale seemed unconvinced.

He bit his lip.*

*FOCUS, Crowley. Do NOT think about lips and sleep-related activities.

Looked down.

"You... you don't have to go." Aziraphale said, softly.

Crowley paused in the doorway.

Looked back.

This was one of those tender, vibrating moments, where something is only just about to crack, hanging in the balance, and we mix all our metaphors to even come close to accurately describing it.

Crowley swallowed. "D'you... d'you want me to stay, angel?"

If Aziraphale said so, he would. No orders needed. Just the admittal he was wanted, needed, was that so much to ask? One word from him, and Crowley would crack open his chest - metaphorically, ouch - and let him know about it all. About Adam, the curse, maybe even his fond, foolish love, just one word, just...

"Oh. Ah. No, I do apologise, that was impolite. You are right, of course." Aziraphale wouldn't look up from his restless hands. "You should go."

"...alright then." Crowley fought to contain the surge of bitter disappointment in his chest. We'll just have more of the usual then, I suppose. "Ciao."

And with that, he slipped out into the night.

Aziraphale didn't move for the longest time.

"He might've at least finished his wine." He finally harrumphed, and then busied himself with cleaning up the games and deluding himself into feeling less terribly lost and forlorn than he was.

Saying Crowley felt guilty would be an understatement.

Crowley felt like he had ripped out Aziraphale's heart and stomped it into little pieces - metaphorically again, Crowley wasn't actually all that good with the ripping out of squishy bits, that had always been Ligur's shtick, Satan rest him - but there was nothing for it.

Crowley was back at the flat in a blink - quite literally, rush hour was something that only happened to other people* - and turned on the telly.

*Unless he wanted to drag out the time Aziraphale spent in the Bentley with him.

(Crowley, when driving alone, barely had time to insert a Mozart cassette into the blaupunkt.

In Aziraphale's company, however, the cassette was not only inserted, but played the entire Best Of Queen album...

Twice.)

"This is the news at 10*, back with an updated report on the situation in Brussels. Bob?"

*Actually, it was the news at about twenty-two minutes and a bit past 9, but if Crowley turned on the telly to watch the news, then, by Satan, there would be news on!

"Well, it seems like the delegates are no longer chained to the table, at least, and the ghostly apparitions of oversized ozone molecules and undersized polar ice caps have ceased haunting them, even though, as of yet, climate change has not been fixed, as per their demands. The whales are still there, however, and singing their mournful songs. I may or may not be crying. >sniff< B-back to the studio."

"Thank you, Bob. Someone give the man a tissue. And now the weather. Cloudy skies all over the British Isles, except for this little bit right here marked Tadfield, where people may enjoy a clear, starry nightsky."

"....oh, wonderful." Crowley groaned. "That's just fantastic, innit?"

(The telly politely turned itself off, so I wouldn't interfere with Crowley's dramatic soliloquy.)

"Human, as far as I can tell, dear boy, no worries, all tickety-wickety-boo." He mocked, managing an Aziraphale impression so accurate it made his heart speed up in Pavlovian response. "Oh, great going,  Aziraphale. Bet you could look Satan in the eye and tell him to floss his teefie-weefies more often!"*

*A demon named Boreas had once attempted to introduce Their Dark Lord to the concept of oral hygiene.

It had... not gone down well.

Suffice to say, Hell's cleaning staff still found Bits of Boreas all about the place.

"You're lucky I planned for this, angel."* Crowley grumbled.

*Look, Crowley was, actually, quite good at alternative ideas and Plan B's, despite what the Esteemed Reader might think.

(Yes, he forgot to also have a Plan C most times, because Crowley was a little stupid in the cleverest of ways, but he usually had at least one backup-failsafe-if-all-else-fails up his sleeve.)

And then he picked up his keys and set off on the long drive to Tadfield.

Adam Young was having a good day.

He'd had a healthy, nutritious breakfast, and then he'd had an actually yummy one, simply because Adam had decided he wanted one; then his chores had found themselves done early with very little input from Adam's side, leaving him to spend the rest of the day doing exactly what he wanted to do.

Life was good, and so Adam was currently on his way to the woods, with Dog bounding along beside him.

(He had a feeling the Johnsonites might try to ambush the Them today, and, of course, if that's what he believed, then that was what would happen.

It was ever so fun, being Lord Of This World.)

"Adam?" A voice drawled, and a tall, shadowy figure peeled itself away from the old war memorial.*

*Dear Sirs, the next letter from R. P. Tyler to the Tadfield Advertiser read. I am shocked to see strange new hoodlums hanging around the memorial, wicked types with dyed-red hair and dressed all in black that frighten my Shutzi terribly. Now, as a concerned citizen... - and it continued on with similar drivel.

"Care to explain... this?"

Crowley held up a newspaper. It read "Inexplicable Impromptu Climate Conference Still Not Explained", and featured a picture of the German chancellor staring somberly - and a tad confused - at a ghostly melting polar ice cap.

"Uh." Adam said.

Life was still good, of course, but maybe a hint less so than before...

"Look." Adam sat down on the steps of the memorial beside Crowley, and R.P. Tyler added the postscriptum of ...and our local hoodlums have joined forces with this mysterious newcomer! What IS this village coming to, I ask you!? 

"I heard about it in the news. How the situation's gettin' worse and worse, and how we need to change things. An' I thought... if everybody HAD to do something... I figured it was what was right. Like preventing the End of the World. S'more of the same, really."

He shrugged sheepishly, Dog copying the motion. "Didn't mean to worry people."

Crowley discreetly rubbed his temples, trying to stave off the blossoming headache. Good intentions, maybe they should have paved the Road to Hell with them.

Well. At least Aziraphale, who still thought he could only get human newspapers from little children shouting in the streets, wouldn't be among those worried, that was a silver lining.*

*All the news Aziraphale was privy to came either from Heaven's helplessly biased Celestial Observer, or from Crowley printing out relevant online articles and sending them over to the bookshop's absolutely decrepit fax machine.

(Aziraphale kept them all in a folder, for later reference, and meticulously annotated and underlined them.)

The dark, festering cloud beneath said lining, however, proclaimed pointedly that he was going to have to give the literal Antichrist, most powerful being in this world and the next, a stern talking-to.

"Adam." Crowley started awkwardly. It seemed like a good, simple place to start. It was the rest that was going to be tricky.

"Adam, haven't you learned? You can't change things for them, it's not how it works, trust me. You can nudge and goad and suggest, but a human will never do what they're told. Ever."*

*Not since Eve had bitten into the Apple, and Crowley honestly much preferred it that way.

"Yeah." Adam nodded knowingly. "Reverse Sykology. Wensley mentioned it, was in his comic."

"Good for Wensley." Crowley eyed Dog, just on the off-chance the mangy thing might feel like snake for dinner.* "But you do see what I'm getting at, don't you?"

*Dog, meanwhile, was cheerfully observing a butterfly, and generally being his non-threatening, couldn't-hurt-a-fly-because-the-fly-would-hurt-back self.

"But, s'not like I meant to!" Adam defended himself. "I jus'...got angry. About how the world was. And suddenly they were all chained to their seats, and the whales were singing. I tried to fix it! S'not easy."

Oh. Oh no.

It was worse than Crowley had thought.

Adam misusing his powers, alright, fine, seen that before, tell him off and he'll not do it again, responsible kid that he was.

Adam losing control over his powers... that was a new, worrying one.*

*He should've expected it, really. An Antichrist hitting puberty, there was a reason the boy should've started the Apocalypse at the tender age of 11.

"An', you know, it worried me, too. B'cause, what if mum ever makes me angry? Or dad. My human dad. I might hurt them." Adam looked genuinely distressed at the thought. "Or the aliens, I'd feel terrible if I hurt the aliens."*

*As far as important people went, aliens ranked just under the Them, and slightly above his cousin Brendol in Swindon, which was honestly more affection than Brendol deserved for telling on Adam for stealing from the biscuit tin the once.

"What would you say, Adam..." Crowley pushed all doubts away, and put on his most suave grin. "If I told you I could make sure you'd never have to worry about that ever again?"

For someone being told there was a solution to all their problems, Adam looked quite concerned indeed.

"You don't have to say yes." Crowley added, abandoning the Tempter's smile for something softer and altogether less insistent. "All I'm doing is offering you a Choice."

"I know." Adam said, and, with a shiver, Crowley recalled that this was Adam, and he truly did know.

Adam plucked at the grass around his shoes. Scratched Dog behind the ear.

Crowley said nothing. It was Adam's decision to make, in the end.

(Though Crowley honestly didn't know what he'd do if he said "no". Leaving Adam as he was, that... that wasn't really an option, no. One had to be realistic about such things when potential Apocalypses were involved.)

"Okay," Adam finally said, and even though he'd quite definitely exercised his Free Will to come to that conclusion, it somehow left the same bitter aftertaste in Crowley's mouth as Eve's response had, so many years ago.

"It doesn't hurt, does it?" Crowley asked, for the fifteenth time since he had begun, drawing sigils into Adam's soul with a gentle hand.*

*It felt a little like drawing onto the rippling muscles of a tiger, always aware of the sheer power beneath his fingers and the fact that it was only the beast's benevolence ensuring he still had fingers.

"Nah, not at all." Adam watched his movements curiously. "Should it?"

It did for me, Crowley thought, but didn't say.

(It wasn't the same, anyway. This specific ritual bound powers, not will. And Crowley would keep telling himself that until his aching curse scars believed it.)

"Not if I do it right." He muttered instead, squinted, and then added a little squiggle.*

*Said squiggle was actually quite vital. It had been omitted during a similar ritual carried out by an unnamed demon shortly before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius; and yes, those two events were part of a rather explosive cause-and-effect chain.

"There. Done." Crowley awkwardly patted Adam's head. "Powers bound."

"And... this makes sure I won't hurt anyone?" Adam bit his lip. "Ever?"

"Never ever, kid." Crowley ruffled his hair, only marginally less awkward. "Just... maybe don't tell Aziraphale. It'll be our little secret, yes? He need never know."

Adam blinked up at him.

(Crowley waited for the terrifying sensation of being Seen down to your very bones, skin like paper with glass flesh beneath, all your secrets laid bare for the Dark Lord to see and know and judge...

...but nothing of the kind occurred.)

"I guess." Adam shrugged. "C'mon, Dog!"

And with that, he was already off to a day of playing, and waiting for an ambush by the Johnsonites that would now never come. A perfectly normal boy, for all intents and purposes.

Crowley didn't really know why he wanted to keep this from Aziraphale.

He was quite certain he'd done the right thing - and wasn't that strange, wanting to do Good - Aziraphale was always harping on about that, wasn't he, even if he himself got it wrong more often than not.

(They'd argued about it, in the Garden. Funny, how Crowley was still better at Right Things than Aziraphale.

Probably symbolic, all that. Good and evil.

But, since symbolism was one of Heaven's,* and quite silly besides, Crowley happily disregarded that.

*Michael's idea, she'd liked the options it opened up for religious writing.)

It was probably force of habit, Crowley thought as he sauntered back to the Bentley. He was so used to keeping parts of his life from Aziraphale, sometimes the lines around what was "safe" to tell blurred.

Well. Never mind that now, it was done, and Crowley was 99% - 89% - well, at least 70% sure it had been The Right Thing.

Mission accomplished. Powers bound.

World - hopefully - saved.*

*The statistics were, perhaps, a bit optimistic, though we can excuse that by pointing out Crowley's essential optimistic nature.

Premature celebation, however, had always been Aziraphale's, and Crowley...

Crowley really should known better.

Chapter Text

Those among our Esteemed Readers in a committed relationship may be familiar with the uncertain feeling of foreboding you experience briefly before a quite spectacular domestic, when you walk into a room and perceive the atmosphere as unmistakably charged with dread and the promise of harsh words.

Crowley took one step into the bookshop, and thought shit.*

*Well, technically he thought a much ruder word in Ancient Sumerian, but once more we must make do for the ease of our Esteemed Reader.

Aziraphale was primly perched on the sofa, icy silence radiating from him - and we mean that quite literally. The anger of angels tended to interfere with momentum on a subatomic level, leading to rapid drops in temperature in their closer vicinity.

The air around Aziraphale happened to be exactly 7.84°C* colder than normal, which, in layman's terms, indicated a quite spectacular level of pissed-off-ness.

*Fahrenheit, as the Esteemed American Reader might have long suspected, are complete and utter devilry - one of Dagon's greatest accomplishments actually, and the only temperature measurement unit in Hell - and since we would rather not incense Aziraphale's angelic wrath any further, we shall refrain from translating into this unit.**

**The editor, however, has no such qualms - perhaps unwisely - and would like to inform you that this amounts to precisely 14.112°F.

"I didn't do it." Crowley said automatically.

Aziraphale ignored him.

(Now, you might not understand the significance of this, so, for context: Aziraphale had only once, in all their long life, ignored Crowley before, and that had been during the late 70s, when Crowley had spilled red wine on his prized Buggre All Thif bible and said something to the effect of "bah, who cares about some dusty old book" - a mistake, if not a Mistake, the Esteemed Reader will surely agree.

And even then, the temperature had only dropped by five degrees...)

"I can explain?" Crowley amended, trying to back out of the bookshop again. Perhaps, if he came back with pastries, Aziraphale would be in a better...

Crowley's back hit solid wood.

The bookshop no longer had a door, or even windows.

Bugger, Crowley thought.*

*And nothing choicer, since it summed up his current predicament quite nicely.

"Can you, my dear?" Aziraphale said, arching one eyebrow at a particularly dangerous angle. "Can you?"

"Well..." Crowley faltered. "No. I can apologise...?"

Another degree Celsius lost. Crowley was suddenly quite thankful for the woolen scarf he was wearing.*

*It had been a present of Aziraphale's, who had attempted to knit him a sweater, gloves and a hat for the coming winter - Crowley was rather sensitive to cooler climes, okay - and had ended up with three scarves of varying horrific ugliness.

Crowley's sense of style had briefly warred with his undying love for anything Aziraphale, but ultimately he'd gritted his teeth and begun wearing the neon-coloured and tartan-patterned monstrosities every chance he got.

Aziraphale folded his arms, expectantly staring him down in a "let's hear it, then, before I smite you" kind of way.

Crowley briefly considered asking what exactly it was Aziraphale wanted explained, but there were only three options, really, and between those, he rather hoped it was "only" about Adam.

(The curse was a secret he would much prefer to keep, and... if Aziraphale reacted to Crowley's love with a shoulder that was not only cold but freezing by more than 8°C, then... well, then all was lost, wasn't it.)

"Y'see, angel." Crowley shifted uncomfortably on the spot. "Y'see. He didn't even mean to do it. Was losing control. I... I had to do something, didn't I? The boy was a ticking time bomb, think Aziraphale, an adolescent Antichrist! A spotty, moody kid with the power to make his crush fall in love with him, to wipe his bullies clean off the face of the earth, or to just end the bally thing altogether when his hormones tell him to! I had to nip that in the bud, I had to. He was going to rip the world apart sooner or later, you know he was."

"That is up for debate." Aziraphale glared. "So you simply decided he could not be trusted and took his autonomy away willy-nilly?"

"Oi, I asked him if he was alright with it!" Crowley quickly defended himself.*

*Not least from his own conscience, which had yet to see a guilt trip it didn't happily embark on.

"Oh yes, what a well-contemplated and informed decision!" Aziraphale huffed, and not in the gently exasperated way Crowley so loved to hear. That was an incensed, outraged huff, the kind that cut Crowley to the quick.

"He's a child, Crowley! He had options! Had you come to me, I could've... oh, I don't know, I'm sure there would've been a way to prepare him for what might come! Teach him to meditate. Breathing exercises. Allow him to exercise himself in a controlled environment, instead of... instead of..." Aziraphale floundered briefly. "ROBBING him of what he is!"

"I... I didn't... how do you know about this, anyway!?"

"Adam told me. Said I do need to know, that you shouldn't be keeping so many secrets from me. What else are you hiding, Crowley, I wonder?"

"That's not... that wasn't his to tell, he shouldn't have-" Crowley was suddenly terrified. If Aziraphale commanded him to tell him about everything, the curse, the Apple, and his stupid, foolish love... "He had no right..."

"Oh, but you had a right to take his powers, did you!? Always going on about Choices, and then, THEN!" Aziraphale's arms were no longer crossed, but their stiff position alongside his body, fists shaking, was probably no better sign.*

*The temperature, steadily dropping further, confirmed that impression - a thin veneer of frost was forming on Aziraphale's near-empty cup of cocoa.

"Tell me, Crowley... if Adam had come up to you asking Questions, would you have burned his wings!?"

Tell me, echoed through Crowley's form.

"No," was wrenched from his throat before he could stop it, curse screaming, searing, burning through his blood. "No, no, never."*

*And he wouldn't, he truly wouldn't. Questions wasn't chaining foreign leaders to a conference table (with good intentions yes, but chaining nonetheless), Questions was just Questions.

"Don't lie to me!"

"Never", Crowley croaked again. "I've never lied to you." And now I never will.

"Oh, but you've kept secrets, Crowley, haven't you? Lying by omission, tell me, are we on our own side or are we not!?" Aziraphale spat. "You hypocrite, thrice-damned hypocrite!"

Crowley reeled. He barely understood why Aziraphale was so furious, vaguely aware that it might be more the secret-keeping than the deed itself - though it really ought to be the other way around, he'd been keeping information from Aziraphale since the dawn of time after all - and every single word, every order, scorched and burned like Hellfire.*

*Except that Hellfire didn't actually hurt Crowley, but the Esteemed Reader surely knows what he means.

In Hell, if somebody attacked you, you retaliated first and attempted diplomacy never.

Crowley, for all that he had risen far above the Hellish rabble, was still, in essence, a demon, and possessed of a demon's instinct.

"Hypocrite, eh?" He spat back. "Seems we still are two of a kind, after all! Tell me, what would you really have suggested? Smiting, or some slightly more humane way of killing? Come on Aziraphale, I know what you're like!"

"I NEVER-" Aziraphale spluttered.

"Oh, but you're allowed to lie to me!? You were going to shoot that kid, angel, and you had the Thundergun to prove it!"

"That was before I knew we could TALK to him!"

"YEAH, and s'what I did! TALKED TO HIM! Like I talked to Eve, I did the right bloody thing, Aziraphale! S'not demon-like, but I BLOODY WELL DID!"

"No. No, no, not at all." Aziraphale glared. "We're going to Tadfield right this instant, and we're undoing it. For once I'll overlook your atrocious driving, get the car-"

"No!" Crowley interrupted him, quickly, before Aziraphale could trigger the curse. "We only just saved this world! If you want to doom it again.... well, fine! Go ahead! But I might as well... as well... might as well ACTUALLY go to bloody alpha bloody centauri!"

And then, Crowley, like a serpent-demon spotting a vulnerable cherub far away from its flock, went in for the kill.

"I wish I'd gone the first time." He hissed.

Aziraphale looked, for a terrible, painful moment, utterly stricken.

Not unlike... not unlike Crowley had felt when... oh dear, that was the kind of expression one wore when one's heart was breaking in one's chest, wasn't it?*

*It was indeed, and Crowley would never fully forgive himself for putting it on Aziraphale's face.

Crowley instantly regretted it, opened his mouth to take it all back, apologise and take Aziraphale out for the best sushi in the world, buy him a first edition or two, whatever it took to-

"Oh. Well. Fine then." Aziraphale said, face a mask of terrible, terrible calm. "Go."

The first bite of the curse was the most terrible moment of Crowley's life to date, and that included the Apocalypse - though perhaps not the times he'd thought Aziraphale gone.

It started so inconspicuous, like a cramp, a twinge, a nerve unfortunately caught between bone and sinew, but Crowley knew what it meant and that knowledge was worse even than distilled agony stabbed into every neuron individually.

"Yes, go!" Aziraphale continued, picking up steam. "Perhaps that would be for the better! No, not another word from you, go to alpha centauri, don't let me keep you! Go right now, and, and..."

Please, angel. Crowley begged, with only his eyes because his mouth would no longer obey him. Please, please don't, I'm sorry, please...

"...and NEVER come back! I'll not have you crawling back here tomorrow with false apologies Crowley, we are... it is done, do you hear? You said we were on our own side, we are evidently not..." Aziraphale, for the briefest of moments, looked heartbroken again, before resolutely re-squaring his jaw. "I-I don't even want to see you ever again, you can... oh, you can bally well stay on alpha centauri until the heat death of the universe, what would I even care!"

No. Oh no, oh God, please no, please have mercy...

"Go." Aziraphale pointed at him, and oh, he was so furious, and yet Crowley couldn't look away, it would be his last chance, never see him again, heat death of the universe, oh Lord, oh Satan, mercy on Crowley's rotten not-soul... "Go NOW."

The command slammed into Crowley like a truck into an Express Delivery man, smashing all his innards into a pulp and ripping his skin apart to reveal the broken heart underneath.

Ah yes. THERE'S the distilled agony.

Crowley was a little surprised to finally look down at his hands and not see bones protruding from them, every little bit of him screaming out in unison, and relief, the only relief, was lightyears away, far, far from here.

He looked back at Aziraphale, this angel he loved and had trusted, always trusted never to make him feel the burn of an order, and let out a soft whimper that turned quite sob-like towards the end.*

*One tiny corner of Aziraphale's mouth twitched into compassion, but the rest firmly pulled it down into displeasure again.

And then the pain built into something absolutely unbearable and Crowley scrambled to obey, whirling on the spot and sprinting for the bookshop's recently-reappeared door on burning legs, with not a single word of goodbye except raw, choked sobs.

This was Crowley's nightmare, quite literally. He'd woken up screaming from scenarios like this.

It couldn't be real, it couldn't. It would all go away, just a bad dream, in the blink of an eye.

Crowley blinked. It still hurt a little, not to look where he was going, even after all these years - and that wasn't even factoring in the tears complicating the matter.

It wasn't going away.

As Crowley wrenched open the door and burst out into a peaceful, slightly drizzly morning for the last time, the last time, THE LAST TIME, useless prayers were running in circles through his head.

Stop this, Lord, please, let me stay with him, break the curse, don't make me go, don't make me, please, Mother, help me Mother, PLEASE...

Nobody answered.*

*Unsurprisingly, the cynics among the Esteemed Readers might quip.

However, simply because a deity gives no answer doesn't necessarily mean that said deity isn't sitting on the very edge of Her cloud-sofa cushions, throwing Her ambrosia-flavoured popcorn at the screen and complaining loudly to Her son about "subverting expectations," and how the plotline had made so much more sense in the earlier millennia.

(Jesus wisely kept his mouth shut and neglected to remind Her that She was Creator Of All - including pining, communication failure, and obedience curses - and that this was therefore ultimately all Her fault.

He had the feeling that would not go down well with Her.)

Chapter Text

Flynn Hastings was an estate agent.

As a general rule, estate agents, unsurprisingly, led horrendously boring lives.

In fact, Flynn's cousin, who was a medical researcher and therefore far more interesting - why aren't we writing about her, anyway? She's just discovered a new type of penicillin! - had once read a paper that postulated that nothing fun or interesting had EVER happened to those in the professions of estate-agenting, bookkeepering, and international espionage, and aside from the statistical error inherent in the last example, the science had seemed sound.

Flynn, however, was the one exception to prove the rule, as we will see when we follow him through a day that, by rights, should be horrendously and predictably boring.

Flynn* lived in a perfectly boring flat in a perfectly boring neighbourhood, which was, perhaps, best described as Soho's conservative aunt who scoffed at her young relative's extravagant lifestyle.

*The Esteemed Reader may point out here that "Flynn" was not, actually, the most boring of names, very nearly bordering on the peculiar; this uncommonly un-boring aspect of him was due to Flynn's mother briefly deluding herself into thinking that her newborn son might actually be in any way interesting - once he was grown up, at least, since he had already been a particularly dreary infant.

She turned out to be sadly mistaken; and now most people assumed the F. of F. Hastings** stood for Fred, or something similarly nondescript.

**A Particularly Contrary - yet still Esteemed, naturally - Reader may also choose to question the boringness of "Hastings", being a battle and involving arrows getting quite uncomfortably close to eyes.

We assure said Reader that, if they ever had the pleasure - or perhaps "pleasure" is too interesting a term to use - the neutral experience of personally encountering Flynn, they would instantly know that his Hastings was not related to the battle one in any way, and therefore not infused with even a smidgen of its interestingness.

His morning routine was so depressingly run-of-the-mill we see no need to describe it any further. Simply think of the most boring morning you can remember, multiply it by a factor of ten, that will very nearly come close to the type of morning Flynn Hastings had.

He put on a suit so boring and devoid of any distinctive features he might as well have been naked - except that would actually have been interesting, and that, you may already have realised, was NOT how Flynn Hastings rolled.

Then he went to work. By foot, and boringly so.

Other people in other professions might hum a tune on their way to work, or plan their lunch, or think about their friends, family and pets.

Flynn thought about being an estate agent, and what kinds of estates he would be agenting that day, in the most dry, clinical and - you may have guessed it - boring words you could possibly imagine.

(We can tell you're drifting off, Esteemed Reader. Please do bear with us for just a moment longer.)

This was, in part, because his way to work led him through Soho, and Heaven forbid he ever note something interesting even in passing.

So Flynn took no notice of the lesbian couple sporking* in a nearby doorway, nor the nice young gentleperson with a broader colour spectrum in their hair than humans could perceive, and unfazedly prepared to cross the street at the corner of A. Z. Fell's bookshop, whose outward appearance was just about boring enough to register with him.

*A rather exciting middle ground between spooning and forking, though not at all compatible with kniving or that delightful activity known under the name of "reverse chopsticks".

And that, Dear Reader - we can hear you snoring, do wake up - was when, for the first time in the history of the universe, something actually exciting happened to an estate agent.

A man in a black suit and sunglasses - as well as an absolutely horrendous scarf - burst out the door of the bookshop with a desperate sound nearly like a whimper.

Normally, Flynn would ignore this, except the man barged right ahead and ran straight into him, and even then continued on, knocking him to the ground.*

*Peculiar since, even with the shades, the man should've been able to see him early enough to adjust his trajectory, had he had a mind - or the ability? - to do so.

"Oi." Flynn Hastings droned, in the kind of voice that was just ever so slightly nasal, and otherwise entirely boring. "Careful."

The man didn't even look back.

Now, until this precise moment, one might still explain this away as strange, but by no means interesting. Gangly men in strange outfits ran over boring men in boring suits all the time, especially in Soho; nothing to write home about.

Except, as Flynn was still sitting on the ground, not so much glaring after the perpetrator than send a vague air of being inconvenienced after him, the man's sharp suit jacket split at the back, revealing a pair of... wings.

They flexed, stretched, beat the air once, twice...

And then, with a sound like a choked sob, the man took flight.

Flynn stared after him.

He had never taken drugs, of course, but suddenly wished he had, if just to use them as a way to explain... this.

He'd seen... seen...

Something inexplicable. Something extraordinary. Something peculiar. Something...

...interesting.

And so, the unprecedented took place, and Flynn Hastings, estate agent, experienced a moment of sheer, undiluted interestingness.

(Later in the day, Flynn would also be abducted by aliens, meet the love of his life, fight a duel for xyz tentacle in marriage, and become intergalactic ambassador of earth, leading the universe into a new golden age together with his beloved...

...but this story isn't about Flynn, is it?

So this is where we will abandon him to his fate and return to our cherished protagonists instead.)

"Well. Good riddance, I say!" Aziraphale huffed, looking up and down the street and finding it empty.*

*Except for a very shaken man in a dusty-yet-still-boring suit, staggering to his feet and blissfully ignorant of the UFO hovering in a cloud overhead, just waiting for its chance.

Aziraphale slammed the door shut, not forgetting to flip the little sign to "closed", and solemnly vowed never to open it to pretend-remorseful serpents ever again.

And Aziraphale stuck to that vow... for all of fifteen minutes.

Five to grumble, another five to quietly seethe, then a handful of seconds to miracle himself a soothing cocoa, and by the time he'd forcefully gulped it down, the guilt was already starting to creep up.

His words had evidently hit Crowley hard, for him to flee so quickly.

And... and the expression on his face...

Aziraphale had seen his fair share of despair.*

*He didn't always acknowledge it, in case Heaven heartily condoned it - like the seven plagues - but he could never quite close his eyes to it.

And what had hushed over Crowley's face that brief instant before he ran had most definitely been despair.

Aziraphale hesitated. Fussed with his first editions. Gulped down another cup of cocoa.

And then, he finally gave in with a soft huff, and reached for the phone.

An operator answered, simply because Aziraphale forgot on occasion that phones no longer worked like that, and cheerfully connected him to Crowley's phone.

"Crowley? Oh, good, you- what are you saying- why aren't you... what's that mean, 'beep'? Look, Crowley, I'm trying to say... that is... I would very much like to still have dinner with you tonight, if you'd be amenable? And... I am sorry, my dear, for my harsh words and... We'll talk about it, yes?"

Crowley did not respond.*

*Mobile service was notoriously spotty past Jupiter - except for Neptune, where you still got up to three bars if the weather was good - so that message would continue to sit idly as vague static sounds in Crowley's inbox.

"Cheerio." Aziraphale placed the receiver back in its cradle, only a hint choked, and hoped Crowley's silence was not a bad sign.

It would all be resolved, surely. Aziraphale could not bear to have a proper falling out, not now that they were, if not on the same page, at least in adjacent and compatible chapters (as long as Aziraphale hid the paragraph mentioning all that "desperately in love" business), and he dearly hoped Crowley would agree.

It could all be talked out, surely.

Surely.

Aziraphale had not made reservations at the Ritz, but then again, he never needed to.*

*The only reservation Aziraphale had ever placed was at the Royal Albert Hall for the 1969 Pink Floyd concert in which Crowley had had a hand, and into which not even a miracle could've gotten him without.

(It had been rather nice, for bebop, in Aziraphale's opinion, though the gorilla suit had perhaps been a bit much, and he wished he hadn't sat quite that close to the cannons.)

He arrived early, was seated at their usual table, and, as always, thanked the waiter profusely to the point of unbearable awkwardness on both sides.

He ordered a bottle of wine - inexplicably better than what the Ritz usually stocked, which was already quite good - and nibbled at a complementary bread roll, waiting idly for Crowley to appear.*

*Aziraphale did not think for a second that Crowley wouldn't. That was simply not how the two of them operated.

When the full hour crept around, Aziraphale snuck one anxious glance after another towards the door.

Crowley had a deep and abiding love for the concept of fashionable lateness, but he was always on time when it came to Aziraphale.

Surely, surely, he would saunter in any minute now, still sulking perhaps, but pleased with the wine - incidentally Crowley's favourite vintage - and they could finally talk things out. Aziraphale would apologise again, of course, assure Crowley that he had been out of line, to say what he said, and that he held him in high regard and would never want to be separated again, that they would find a better solution for the Adam situation, yes, and all would perfectly spiffy and tickety-boo, surely, surely...

Quarter past. The breadsticks were gone. Aziraphale sipped the wine, and unabashedly stared at the entrance, jumping every time the door swung open.

Half past. The waiting staff was throwing him pitying glances, one of them finally daring to ask if he would like to order his meal now.

Aziraphale refused, worrying with the tablecloth.

It suddenly occurred to him that the unimaginable might, in fact, be imaginable after all; Crowley, as out of character as it seemed, as unprecedented as it was, might actually... not come.

And then, another entirely unprecedented happening took place: Aziraphale lost all appetite.

The Maître d'Hôtel* had been head of the Ritz's waitstaff for nigh on six years now. In those six years, Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley had attended the Ritz exactly one hundred and seventeen times, and, without a doubt, they were her favourite guests.

*The Maître d' obviously also had a name, which, in case the Esteemed Reader would like to know, happened to be Anya Kozlowska; however, she was the stern type of professional who firmly believed in keeping business and private life as separate as ex-spouses after a particularly ugly divorce, including a lawsuit, copious savings squirreled away to off-shore accounts, and a custody disagreement over their shared pug which escalated terribly; and therefore rarely thought of herself as Anya during work hours.

Hence, neither shall we.

Some of the younger employees believed the two were business acquaintances, distant friends, but the Maître d', she knew love when she saw it, and had spent the handful of dates shortly after the legalisation of gay marriage carefully checking their hands for rings* - in a discreet, professional manner, of course.

*She was convinced that, one day, she would catch a glimpse of them kissing outside on the pavement, watch their fingers entwined on the tablecloth, or - this was her favourite - some evening, one of them, likely Mr. Fell, would take her aside, and request champagne, handing her a little diamond ring to put into Mr. Crowley's flute.

Only, this evening... this evening, Mr. Fell was sitting all alone, features unmistakably spelling out heartbreak, looking as if he knew, deep down, that his partner wasn't coming, but still could not bring himself to leave, because that would somehow make it all too real.*

*The Maître d' knew the feeling. She'd been stood up a few times, before meeting her wife, and it had always hurt like hell.**

**Not that she truly knew what that felt like. Humans used phrases such as these as casually as only beings could who had never experienced the true hurt Hell could put you through, and no demon - and no angel - would ever make light of it in such a manner.

Making her decision, the Maître d' slipped into the kitchens, and returned shortly after with a plate of macarons.

Macarons were not, technically, on today's menu, but all she had to say was "Mr. Crowley is an hour late", and all the patissiers - plus one junior entremetier, whose enthusiasm was noted before being sent back to his station - instantly dropped whatever they were doing to throw together Mr. Fell's favourite.*

*Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley were well known and loved by all of the Ritz's staff, not least because of the humongous betting pool, which currently held over a thousand quid, a diamond necklace, and the rights to a small ostrich farm in the Australian outback.

"Mr. Fell?" The Maître d' did her best to turn her careful non-expression into something open and - perish the thought, but it had to be done - friendly. "Sir? Would you like-"

"Oh!" Mr. Fell flinched, and gave her a polite, rather distracted smile, eyes consistently flitting back to the doors. "Mrs. Kozlowska, good evening my dear. I don't suppose you've received a call from my usual dining partner? He should be..."

Hands wringing. Shaking. Anya's* heart broke a little.

*And it was Anya, in this instance. Worrying was not done on company time, and if you couldn't help it, you at least did it in your own name.

"...he should be here by now."

"Sadly not, sir." The words seemed to impact Mr. Fell like a physical blow, and the Maître d' offered her plate to soften it. "Would you like a macaron while you wait?"

Mr. Fell shook his head. "No, thank you, I find myself with little appetite."

A chorus of gasps went up from the waitstaff who had been intently listening in, as well as a handful of regulars who had also taken notice of the older gentleman of the pansy-ish variety sitting without his usual paramour.

Mr. Fell, refusing macarons; it was evidently worse than expected.

"I was..." He glanced at his pocket watch, and seemed to acknowledge the grim reality it presented. "...only just going, I suppose."

"Is everything-" The Maître d' tried, because sod discreet professionalism, Anya cared.

"Oh, no need to worry, my dear." Mr. Fell smiled sadly. "We had a little disagreement, that is all - I was, perhaps, uncommonly harsh - and it appears I have... I have not been forgiven yet. Thank you, for the asking, and for the macarons, may I have the cheque please?"

"It's on the house, sir." She responded immediately.

"Nonsense, dear lady, I have been pointlessly taking up one of your tables for over an hour, the least I can do is pay for my wine and dessert!" Mr. Fell huffed, and for a brief, shining moment he was the man who habitually quibbled over the bill with his dining partner.*

*Mr. Crowley usually ended up paying, mostly because Mr. Fell was never trying too hard to convince him, and batted his eyelashes most coyly when he was finally treated to the meal in its entirety.

He settled the bill - tipping generously, as was his and Mr. Crowley's wont - and shrugged back into his coat.

(Fell was not a tall man, but now he seemed even smaller, shoulders rolled inwards and drooping like a snowman contemplating mortality in the early spring sun.)

"We hope to see you again, soon." The Maître d' bid him farewell.

"...both of you." She added, after a brief moment of thought, and actually allowed herself a smile.

"Ah, that makes two of us." Mr. Fell quipped weakly, and with a final "give my best to your lady wife", he slipped out into the night.

Now, the Maître d' would never claim she had the full story, maybe half of it at the very most,* but she nonetheless had the sudden urge to grab Mr. Crowley by the shoulders and shake him quite forcefully - Mr. Fell too, she supposed, if only to be thorough.

*Considering she laboured under the misapprehensions that her patrons were A) mortal, B) not celestial beings, and C) married/as good as/dating, or had, at the very least, enjoyed the pleasure of each other's D), she barely even had a tenth.

People hurt each other, yes, it happened all the time. But not Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley.

She'd never seen two people so deeply and unequivocally in love, as comfortable together as if they had stood beside each other since the Garden of Eden, and nothing short of the Apocalypse could keep them apart.

(And, perhaps, not even that.)

Resuming her mask of Professional Conduct (capitalisations particularly close to her heart), she went to the kitchen to wrap up the macarons. Perhaps her wife might enjoy them.*

*A more superstitious person would not want macarons exposed to such a palpable aura of heartbreak anywhere near their spouse, but Anya was more practical than that.

And if she noticed some of the waitstaff fret and worry in hushed tones, the Maître d' was far gentler with them than she usually would be.

They cared, and there was nothing wrong with caring.

(There was something wrong with sub-par customer service, however, so they were reprimanded nonetheless.)

Aziraphale, after multiple hours of quiet fretting - the details of which we shall omit, since those thoughts rather tended towards the circular and repetitive - went to Crowley's flat the next day, armed with the steely resolve of one who wants to sort an unpleasant business out, and a bottle of extremely fine Châteauneuf-du-Pape which could not have been more obviously a peace offering if the label had read "l'offeauringe d'péaceaux".

He knocked.*

*In Aziraphale's head, doorbells had not developed beyond lionhead knockers and little ropes to pull, and the speaker system at the front entrance had already confused him deeply.

Nobody answered. In fact, the silence was so complete, Crowley was either not home, or keeping very, very still in the hope Aziraphale might assume so, which was hardly any better.

"Crowley?" Aziraphale called plaintively. "I... I cannot apologise enough, my dear. Are you home? We might talk."

Silence.

"I didn't mean any of it, you know that, do you not? Please. Open the door, at least."

The sound of an explosion in a vacuum, which, despite what selected SciFi shows might like you to think, was still silence.

"Look, we can solve this. I forgive you for all the business with Adam, I will always and forever forgive you, all I ask is that you award me the same courtesy, really, very impolite of you not to show for dinner, the looks the staff gave me, but never mind that, I forgive you Crowley, only, just..."

Aziraphale's voice trembled, cracked, desperately searched for something to hold it together, found nothing, and so, ultimately, broke.

"...Crowley, p-please."

Footsteps.

Footsteps behind him.

"Crowley-!" Aziraphale beamed, and whirled around.

Now, Crowley, as the Esteemed Reader might be aware, was a spindly man-shaped being of indeterminate age that leaned steadily towards the middle ground, often seen wearing sunglasses and a besotted expression.

A little old lady, with little round reading glasses perched on her not-all-that-little nose, could therefore not be mistaken for Crowley under any circumstances.

Aziraphale's longing, desperate heart tried for a second or two, nonetheless, before giving up and acknowledging this was merely Crowley's downstairs neighbour.

"Mr. Cowwely hashn't been home shince yeshterday." She mumbled.*

*Despite what the Esteemed Reader might think, she had not forgotten to put in her dentures.

The problem was merely that she didn't actually require any, and forgot that on occasion.

"You could leave a meshage with me, if you'd like, dearie?"

"No, no, that... that will be fine. Thank you."

Aziraphale hurried past her down the stairs, and only got more agitated when he passed the Bentley in front of the door.*

*Crowley had studiously neglected to take it that fateful morning, choosing to walk instead and intending to act very surprised when the time came to return to his flat in the evening and there was no transport to be had, what a shame, might he not stay over?

Not at the flat.

The Bentley still there.

Not even a hint of Crowley's demonic aura far and wide, even if Aziraphale strained and stretched and checked very, very closely.

Crowley hadn't...

Crowley hadn't really gone to...

.......had he?

"Hello? Ah, yes, Ms. Device. What? Oh. Er. Well, well, yes, and yourself? Oh, lovely, my dear. No, I was only wondering, Crowley hasn't... been in contact has he? In the last few days? No? ...I see. Thank y- oh, no, no, it's all fine. No worries. A little domestic, perfectly tickety-boo. Yes. Good day to you."

"Madame? Oh yes, lovely to hear your voice again. ...no, no, this is not about having tea, it's only, Crowley and I had a bit of a fight, he hasn't, perhaps... oh, really, it's not like that. Ludicrous suggestion, I wish you'd take this seriously. Ehem. So he hasn't been calling the past week? ...not Mr. Shadwell, either? ...ah. O-oh dear. No, it's quite alright, dear girl, merely a c-cold, I shall be fine m-momentarily. Give >sniff< my best regards to Mr. Shadwell - I am NOT crying, Madame! - and we shall have tea... sometime. Goodbye."

(And once, during a dark and lonely night, whispered into folded hands, "Lord, send me a sign, show me he is well, only that, and oh, ask him if he has forgiven me yet, tell him I apologise, bring him back to me, Mother please...", but he received as little answer as ever.)

Chapter Text

Adam's life had gotten significantly less good in the past week.

While he was still a child living in a small, idyllic village with his best friends - and there honestly couldn't possibly a better life, the Esteemed Reader will surely agree - Adam had rather grown accustomed to certain commodities which existence no longer provided for him.

Weather, for instance. It was drizzling lightly, as it had been for days, the type of rain that neither allowed for plentiful puddles to jump into, nor provided rainbows, and which only served to make everything unpleasantly damp. And it was still somewhat summer, too! Tadfield had not seen rain like this in years, much less in quasi-summer.*

*Adam's understanding was that the year consisted of 150 days of hot, crisp summer, 150 days of winter with plenty of snow revelry to be had, 50 days of spring around Easter, and two weeks of extra dramatic autumn storms around Halloween.

His chores were suddenly tougher, his parents stricter, and all the games they played got boring more quickly - not to mention the Johnsonites, who seemed much less interested in gang battles and had gone to a tropical fish exhibition yesterday rather than engage the Them in valiant combat, despite the cool mud fort they'd built.

The world was not revolving around Adam anymore, and, as any child that had recently been dethroned by a younger sibling can tell you, that was an altogether unpleasant experience.

But it was good. It was fine.

Adam very firmly told himself it was worth it, because it was. He got to be angry at politicians for destroying the planet without the risk of him destroying the politicians, which, as he had learned the hard, apocalyptic way, was not a viable solution.

And it felt good, to be utterly and truly mad at people, to rant and rave without having to worry about your ranting and raving turning into ravaging and razing-to-the-ground.

Adam had greatly enjoyed shouting at the politicians on the telly, and then at his father - well, his room's door after he was sent to bed early for shouting - and he intended to shout at his teachers when school began again.

(This would likely get him a detention or two, but some things were simply worth it.)

Life was still good. It was.

In a different way, perhaps. Less objectively so.

But good, nonetheless.

(Adam worried, sometimes, about Aziraphale and Crowley, and would rather like to know whether they'd finally talked things out - for grown-ups, they were startlingly bad at talking, Adam thought, even though talking seemed to be all grownups did all day - but since Knowing Things was one of the commodities he now had to go without, he was left to worry and wonder.)

On that day, a drizzly and unpleasant morning, Adam and the Them sat in Hogback Wood, huddled under their raincoats and trying to pretend they weren't cold, damp and just a little bit bored.

 "...Adam?" Pepper began, apropos of nothing and more than a little hesitantly.

(The Esteemed Reader will already guess something quite major is afoot. Pepper, they will surely be aware, did not do things hesitantly.)

"I need to tell you guys something."

Adam, who had been trying and failing to make Dog play dead,* glanced up at her.

*Dog, being a demonic Hellhound, was not all that familiar with the concept of death, and therefore quite confused as to what His Master wanted of him.

"Go ahead, Pepper." He said.

(Well, technically he said "Come on, silly mutt! It's not that - yeah, sure, Pep - not that hard! Just don't move and let your tongue hang out!", but he certainly meant to give her the go-ahead.)

"I think I like girls." Pepper said, matter-of-factly.

Brian and Wensleydale blinked.

Like always when Pepper did something inexplicably Pepper-ish that didn't make sense to them, they looked to Adam first.

Adam looked to Dog, since it didn't really make sense to him, either.

Dog, unsurprisingly, was of no help.

"Well?" Pepper crossed her arms in front of her chest.

"But... you don't like girl things, Pepper." Brian muttered, uncertain. "You always go on about how they're stupid."

"So?" Pepper's stance got a hint more defensive.* "I still like the girls themselves."

*A clear warning sign. A Pepper backed into a corner was a very, very dangerous Pepper.

"Why's that news, then?" Adam finally involved himself in the conversation. "Ev'rybody has people they like, don't they? Don't see what all the fuss's about."

"Yeah, but. I just like girls." Pepper paused for emphasis, and a little bit for dramatic effect. "Not boys."

Now, it may be worth noting that, when Adam first read the term LGBTQ+ in the New Aquarian, he had assumed it to be a species of aliens, and found them quite fascinating, marveling at these beings who were so much more colourful and vibrant than anything boring old humanity had to offer.*

*He was a little jealous, in fact, because having rainbow hair and being able to transform into another gender did sound quite cool, even though Adam specifically had no interest in becoming a girl.

(He did want rainbow hair, though.)

The thought that these were normal humans, being normal and humans and just liking different things... well, that never really occurred to him.

And that might, perhaps, explain why Adam categorically failed to understand what Pepper was trying to tell him.*

*Additionally, the only version of The Talk Adam had ever received consisted mostly of his father puffing his pipe, looking deeply uncomfortable, and eventually grunting "use protection" before going back to his newspaper.

(Of the Them, only Pepper really knew where babies came from - her mother had been very open about these things - since Brian's parents were still arguing over which of them had the dubious honour of explaining birds and bees and what happened when certain body parts were inserted into others, and Wensley had read about mitosis in his comic - Wonders of Nature and Science, it's quite good actually - and assumed it extended to multicellular organisms as well.**

**In the not-so-far future, Wensleydale senior would hear of this, and hand his youngster 20£ with clear instructions to go to the nearest bookshop and purchase a book on anatomy and the human body.

This would greatly further the Them's understandings of How Things Worked, though they all wished they hadn't gotten the illustrated version.)

Now, in poor Adam's naive mind, uneducated in the grisly details of sexual and romantic attraction, Pepper's statement registered roughly as follows:

Pepper says she likes girls.

Pepper says she doesn't like boys.

I'm a boy.

Brian is a boy.

Wensley is a boy.

Dog is a boy dog.

She doesn't like us anymore, because she likes girls instead.

Having connected all these dots, Adam arrived at the heartshattering conclusion:

Pepper wants to join a girl gang and leave the Them behind.

"You CAN'T!" Adam exploded.

Pepper flinched, but only for a moment before the girl that had bitten Adam in the foot for giving her lip rose up from the pit of her stomach, and got her feet-gnawing teeth ready.

"Yeah, I CAN, you misogynistic stupidface!"* She snapped. "NOBODY gets to tell people who they can or can't like!"

*Pepper had learned the word "misogyny" from her mother, and knew that it was the worst of the worst of insults you could throw at somebody's head, because misogynists were Right Up There in the ranking of horrible people in the world, together with chauvinists and climate change deniers.

(The word "stupidface" came from Brian, and Adam was rather upset he hadn't come up with it, seeing as it was so absolutely brilliant for insulting.)

"Actually... I don't understand this, Pepper." Wensleydale inquired politely. "When you say you don't like boys-"

This question would've continued somewhat along the lines of "what about all your best friends being boys?", and Pepper would've explained the difference between liking someone and liking someone, and this all might've been resolved.

However, he never got to finish his sentence, since Adam interrupted him.

"YES, I DO!" Adam shouted. "You don't like stupid girls wif stupid cooties, Pepper, and tha's that!"

They glared at each other.

(We would like to point out to the Esteemed Reader once more that Adam is in no way opposed to the concept of lesbianism. It actually sounds rather grand to him, girls being with girls and boys being with boys.

However, when an insecure little boy on the cusp of puberty is told he is not wanted anymore, is being replaced with others, especially if that little boy is very used to being - quite literally - the most important person in the whole wide world, well, that boy tends to lash out.

Adam was lashing quite forcefully, thinking Pepper might see sense if he just told her how stupid her girls gang idea was.*

*He was clearly forgetting the fact that Pepper reacted to such things by lashing back with equal force; but Adam tended to not think that far ahead when he had an idea, however inadvisable.)

"I hate you, Adam Young." Pepper hissed, coldly.

Adam swallowed hard. Beside him, Dog let out a little whine in sympathy.

"Alright then." He sniffed. "I don't like you, either. We don't want stupid girls in the Them anyway!"

He turned to Brian and Wensleydale with a fake grin.

"Right?"

Brian bit his lip, and took a sudden interest in his shoes. Wensley adjusted his glasses, glancing back and forth between Adam's smile and Pepper's scowl.

"Actually, Adam..." He began haltingly. "The last time you said you could make people be somethin' they're not, it was a really bad idea, an' I just don't think..."

He squared his shoulders a little. "Actually, I think it's very mean of you to say that, an' if liking things you don't like gets Pepper thrown out of the Them, then I don't like you!"

He crossed his arms, and stomped over to Pepper.

"Then... then... Brian and me don't want YOU in the Them, either!" Adam stammered.

"We'll see about that!" Pepper snapped, grabbing Wensley's arm and holding out her other hand to Brian. "You don't want to be in a gang with him either, do you?'

Brian didn't say anything.

Now, Brian, if the Esteemed Reader would care to know, would later in life discover that he actually liked boys and girls equally much, and, after a disastrous blind date in college, a very stupid bet and a drunk dive into a nearby pond - it would be a wild night - come to the realisation he rather liked Wensleydale specifically.*

*A quite mortifying situation, seeing as this would occur to him right as he was tenderly embracing the loo for the second time, and Wensley set his algebra notes aside to rub his back and say "actually, I think the homework can wait".

(Any realisation of feelings that involves the expulsion of fluids from the body even tangentially is by definition a mortifying one.)

Luckily for Brian, Wensleydale was rather fond of him too, so that would all work out for the best.

On that drizzly day in the woods, however, Brian was entirely unaware of any of this, and the only reason he eventually shuffled over to take Pepper's hand was that it was two against one, and Pepper got the biggest allowance to buy sweets with.

 Together, the three left.

Adam stared after them, mouth hanging open.

If he still had his powers, this would never have happened. The other Them had never questioned him, simply because Adam Was Always Right - and if he wasn't, he could make it so.

"Fine!" He shouted after them. "Go! Dog and I don't want you, anyway! We don't need you! In fact, we... we hate you! So there!"

A little tear ran down Adam's cheek. It was not Adam's, of course, he was in no way affiliated with it, and did not endorse what it stood for.

He shouldn't have let Crowley bind his powers. If he was still the Antichrist, he could make them come back. Make them be his friends, now and always.

Make them be sorry for leaving.

One of the sigils scratched into Adam's soul wavered, bent out of shape, and something huge and terrifying and angry (and scared and alone) broke out of him.*

*In a nearby cottage, the radiant edge of a powerful aura flashed through Anathema's field of vision.

However, since she was quite, er, occupied at that point, she attributed this to Newt doing a marvelous little twisty movement with his tongue, and thought no more of it.

It flew through the trees, the Fury of Hell taken metaphysical form, an unseen force ripping through branches and leaves and the very fabric of reality itself, and, if Dog had not barked at the very last moment, prompting Pepper to hesitate for just a fraction of a second, it would've gone straight through...

Would've hit...

Suddenly all the fight left Adam.

He nearly... nearly... he'd nearly.

(Pepper and the others never even noticed, assuming Adam was ignoring them now, and continued on their not so merry and more grumpy way.)

Adam sat down where he stood, and cried.*

*He might as well admit to it, seeing as he'd just almost killed one of his best friends in the world, even if she didn't like him anymore, what was a little thing like crying against that?

Dog whined, and licked the tears from his face, but even his best attempts at playing ....dead.....? could not cheer His Master up.

Far, far away, an angel was miserable, and quite a bit further away by a significant order of magnitude, a demon was even worse off, also by a s. o. of m.; and neither of them was sparing Adam even a single passing thought.

(Unwisely, the Esteemed Reader might agree.)

Chapter Text

Tears were streaming down Crowley's face, first evaporating into the atmosphere, and then hardening into tiny little ice crystals as he reached the vast, cold emptiness of space.

He'd wanted to fight it, had tried so desperately, but Aziraphale's orders were ringing in his head, and the curse was burning into him with every second he failed to obey, lessening steadily but still hardly bearable.

His wings were shaking, his very being trembling, but Crowley could not so much as look back as he fled earth, fled the solar system, fighting his way through the vacuum to alpha centauri.

This was worse than his nightmares, the vague idea that Aziraphale might one day order him to perish by Holy Water. No, that would've been a mercy; to live on, alone, without him, so far, far away, was akin to unbearable torture.

Aziraphale should've just smote him. That would've been a kindness...

(Time went by. It was a long way to alpha centauri, and longer still for an angel sitting in a deserted bookshop by the telephone, trying his best to pretend he was only just expecting a call that would never come.)

It didn't take long for Aziraphale's resolve to crumble.

He slipped through the door into Crowley's flat, gently closing it behind himself and pretending there was some good reason for him to be there other than loss and longing.

The air was stale in the way air gets when nothing has disturbed it for a few days, and a tentative layer of dust had settled on every surface.*

*Excepting Crowley's extravagant chair and desk, of course. Dust would never dare to gather on those, not even if Crowley stayed gone for a hundred years.

If Aziraphale had had any doubts that Crowley had gone, this would've been the final confirmation.

Now, Aziraphale was nothing if not a reasonable fellow.

If one searched all over the world and found no trace, no message, nothing whatsoever, of one's acquaintance after a fight, well...

Crowley surely knew he hadn't meant it. Crowley was many things, but an idiot was certainly not one of them.*

*Now, we would argue that Crowley was, in fact, a colossal idiot; however, Aziraphale was rather bad at recognising his very own brand of idiocy in other people, and this very much happened to be the case here.

He knew Aziraphale would never want him gone, would expect him back by dinnertime, and if he'd left, truly and actually left, well...

That could only mean that Crowley wanted to extract himself from Aziraphale's life. Had chosen to take him by his word and make off for, for who-knows-where, and, and never…

Aziraphale's heart twisted painfully in his chest, and he felt a sudden need to sit down.

(There weren't any tears on his cheeks.

There were not .)

"Just... upped and ran away." Aziraphale huffed forcefully, muttering to himself as he shuffled through the empty flat. "Didn't even take his coat. Or emptied his fridge. Or..."

Aziraphale stopped in front of the little couch he had sat on during... that night.

(He was quite surprised it was still there, frankly. Didn't go with Crowley's aesthetic at all.)

A few books were carefully stacked on a table beside it, and Aziraphale could tell that there were at least ten new volumes among them, carefully selected from authors he had mentioned towards Crowley he enjoyed.

"Oh, Crowley." Aziraphale said softly, guiltily, running a finger along the spine of an aged Dickens. "You dear old thing."

Something rustled behind him.*

*No, no, Aziraphale was NOT falling for this one again, absolutely not. Crowley was not going to simply sneak up behind him, tap him on the wrong shoulder, and grin like a little boy when Aziraphale pretended to fall for it, oh, if he only... he only...

It was a plant.

Correction, a room full of plants, in varying stages of dehydration and trying desperately to show no visible signs of it.

(Aziraphale hadn't exactly taken in much of his surroundings the last time he'd been there, so he hadn't actually been entirely aware of Crowley's plant-keeping habits.)

"Oh dear." Aziraphale muttered, and snapped his fingers.

Now, ceilings, the Esteemed Reader will surely agree, have no business raining. That is a cloud's job, an outdoors activity, and not suited for ceilings at all, even if they featured skylights.

In fact, it was a point of pride for many an upstanding - or uphanging, as it were - ceiling to not have any water leakage whatsoever.*

*The ceilings in Hell did not adhere to this, but, then again, the ceilings of Hell weren't exactly what one could call upstanding.

(They were quite prideful though, despite it all.)

Nevertheless, the ceiling in Crowley's plant room suddenly found itself inexplicably a source of a gentle rain upon the plants, even though it was a mild, cloudless night outside, and where was the water even coming from!?

The poor ceiling was quite confused, and finally decided it must've been a miracle, and that the Great Roof In The Sky might actually be real after all.*

*This was a rather surprising missionary success for Aziraphale, who had always been quite bad at convincing people to believe in a Higher Power. Most times, he managed to start talking about his favourite books instead, and, especially if Crowley happened to also be involved, ended up doubting his own beliefs more than they had ever doubted theirs.

It was quite vexing.

"Poor darlings," Aziraphale cooed, stroking a nearby geranium's petals.. "Look at the state of you!"

The plant, conditioned to fear absolutely anything in the world, but especially humanoid divine beings, recoiled in terror.

Aziraphale frowned.

"Abandoned and afraid," he murmured softly, pouring as much Angelic Love as possible into the poor little thing. "You must miss him terribly, don't you?"

(The geranium felt nothing of the kind, of course, only the fear of Crowley; but Aziraphale was quite soundly projecting by now.)

"How can he leave, knowing his plants depend on him?" Aziraphale asked it. "That you wither and die without him? It's really quite a silly thing, just going off to the stars and leaving your frie- your plants behind. Quite silly, nothing I would ever think of doing, Crowley's quite overreacting, don't you agree, Petal?"*

*Petal being, of course, the most obvious pet - or rather plant - name Aziraphale could think of, and which he would subsequently use when speaking with** his new best friend, even if he privately thought it ought to be named something nice and fancy, like Albertine or Elizabetha.

**Some evil tongues might suggest Aziraphale was speaking at the plant, rather than with it; but said tongues were talking nonsense and should be held quite firmly.

The geranium shook violently. Aziraphale took it as a yes.

"And now he's off, without so much as a return address, did he even consider how it might make you... might... oh, dash it all, how it might make ME feel!? He always returns, and apologises, and I forgive him. Why didn't he... why..."

Aziraphale miracled up a hip flask, and took a generous sip. This was not a line of thought one pursued when sober.*

*Belatedly remembering his manners, he held the flask out to Petal in silent offer, who understandably did not take him up on it.

"Why isn't he coming back to me?" Aziraphale murmured miserably, slumping down to lean against one of the bigger flower pots, Petal's smaller one loosely cradled in the crook of his elbow. "He always comes back, he can't leave me alone, he can't ..."

Rain was drizzling softly into Aziraphale's hair and ran down his face, but the droplets in the eye and cheek areas had very little to do with that.

He drained the flask, held it up until enough rain had collected in it, then drained it again.

(All that water to wine business had to be good for something , after all.)

"You... y'know, Petal." Aziraphale slurred, as much as he ever allowed himself to slur - the miracle alcohol was really kicking in by now. "Maybe... maybe if we both pray hard enough, he'll return, hm?"

The geranium feared as much, and fervently begged any divine being willing to listen for Crowley's continued absence.

"Well - hic! - no." Aziraphale frowned. "No' praying. She's never any help, is She. Wish. Wish upon... upon a star."

He looked up through the skylight, and his mostly decorative heart sunk in his chest.

"Or two stars. Far away." Aziraphale whispered, yearning, straining towards the night sky with whatever angels had equivalent to a soul.

Alpha centauri shone far, far in the distance, as unreachable as... well, as the stars.

And down on earth, Crowley's empty flat was very cold, and the silence deafening.

"I miss you, Crowley." Aziraphale choked out, and began crying in earnest.

And then he fell asleep.*

*Well. Not quite. Aziraphale didn't sleep.

What he did do was slipping into a thoughtless drunken stupor very much like sleep, snores and sad little sniffles and all.

Above him, the ceiling eventually stopped raining, and the stars faded away into dawn; but that was hours away, and for now, Aziraphale slept soundly under their sad, distant light.

Somewhere an impossible distance away, twin stars twinkled an ignored welcome.

Feet touched the rough surface of a planet, whichever planet it was, close enough to alpha centauri to satisfy a terrible curse.

Wings aching with exertion folded, weak, shaking knees buckled, and dust that had never before been stirred found itself making way under a crumpled body.

The lone sign of life in a vast and empty space began crawling, tears still dripping down cheeks, broken sobs rasping unheard in a chest.

Curled up underneath a rock cropping, this figure forced itself to look earthwards despite the pain it caused, staring with desperate longing for as long as was bearable, and then some more until eyes ached and burned with soul-deep agony.

Exhaustion dragged Crowley under eventually, and some stupid, wishful part of him tried to tell itself that somewhere far away, Aziraphale was falling asleep thinking of him, too.

Which would be patently ridiculous, of course.

Even if Aziraphale did sleep.

When Aziraphale quasi-awoke again the next day, it was to the ringing of the telephone.

Confusedly, he blinked around himself, until he recalled the previous night, and drinking in Crowley's plant room with Petal cradled in his arm.*

*The little geranium had spontaneously developed vines in order to crawl away from Aziraphale while it still could. Crowley's plants were capable of a great many things when properly motivated, and naked fear certainly provided due motivation for impromptu evolution.

Aziraphale wobbled to his feet, steadying himself against a terrified little apple tree, and shuffled over to Crowley's desk.

It was quite a lengthy path, however, and Aziraphale's headache - half from crying, half from drinking - didn't allow for very fast movement, so the ansaphone clicked into action long before he reached it.

(Hearing Crowley's voice nearly brought him to his knees, but Aziraphale just about managed to compose himself.)

A beep, and...

Silence.

Except a faint, muffled sound like weeping.

Aziraphale stumbled forward, grasping the receiver. "H-hello?" He rasped, voice hoarse.

"M-mister Crowley...?" Adam whimpered. "I think... I think I've done a bad thing, I dunno what to do, Pepper jus'... an'..."

Aziraphale took a deep breath, and purged his body of as much residue alcohol as he could.

"Not C-crowley, I'm afraid." He answered, as firmly as he could.

"But I'll be there momentarily, my dear child."

Chapter Text

Crowley lay underneath a rock outcropping, curled up in his wings and trying very, very hard to sleep for a century or two.

Perhaps, then, the order would wear off, so to speak, and he might eventually be able to work his way slowly through the solar system until they could at least occupy the same planet.

(Heaven, Crowley would be glad if he could at least bear to look in earth's direction again. As things stood, he had to avert his gaze every five seconds.)

His head had started out pillowed on his garish scarf, but the fact that it was made by Aziraphale made him ache far more than resting it against the cold stone would, so now the unique rough surface structure of alpha centauri rocks was slowly imprinting itself along his cheekbone.

Sleep wouldn't come.

Now that the most immediate exhaustion had been recovered from, Crowley was cold, and uncomfortable, and his mind was buzzing with regrets that kept any drowsiness away.

And, leaving his chest constricted and feeling strangled - despite the fact that air was entirely unnecessary at the moment - were thoughts of Aziraphale, who must, by now, have realised that Crowley wasn't returning to apologise, and likely drawing all the wrong conclusions.

Crowley might've wept, but at this point, he had no tears left to shed.

Aziraphale left a note.

(Not that he truly expected Crowley to read it. But not writing one would mean admitting that to himself, so writing it was.)

It began with only "Crowley", because he feared that a "Dear" would far overstep his bounds at the moment, nevermind the "Dearest" he truly wished to use.

Received worrying call from Adam. Have gone to Tadfield to help, the note continued.

And then, shakier, Yours, (always, always yours), Aziraphale.

His hand hovered over the paper, pen digging into the soft pads of his fingers.

He itched to add a postscriptum, I love you I miss you forgive me, but that would be overstepping indeed, so he carefully refrained.

Aziraphale sighed, and placed the pen down.

He plucked Petal up from where the poor thing had been attempting to pull itself into a secure hiding spot by its newly-developed vines, and set it down on the table, propping the note up against its pot.

"Be good, dear heart." He murmured softly, patting its blooms. "I'm sure he'll be back for us soon."

(The geranium, naturally, took that as an ultimatum, and shivered in silent terror.)

"Well. Best to get a wiggle on."

With another sigh, Aziraphale spread his wings.*

*They were almost ludicrously ungroomed, with old feathers sticking out at odd angles and the metaphysical equivalents of twigs and branches stuck in them, as well as a few wisps of cloud and half a sandwich Aziraphale had spent a week looking for sometime in '52.

He closed his eyes and believed, quite firmly, that instead of Crowley's flat being, well, Crowley's flat, it had acquired a sudden, undeniable air of Tadfield-ness, which was absolutely where he was, oh yes, no question about it, why would he be anywhere else!? 

Reality groaned a little under the impossibility of it, but like a rusty old bicycle, the one you bought years and years ago and can't quite bear to give away, it eventually succumbed to the very firm intent of its user to get from one place to another, and complied.

Aziraphale opened his eyes - and then very quickly closed them again, the sunlight, meagre as it was, wasn't doing his lingering hangover any good.

What little he had seen appeared to be a good sign that he had arrived at his destination, quaint little cottages and war memorial and all.

Though... a little bit of doubt lingered, since the intense feeling of love he would've expected notably failed to slam into his sternum and take his breath away.

Oh well. Quite possibly, this was merely a side effect of… recent developments. He certainly felt like he would never feel happiness again, much less the warm, reassuring glow of love that he'd always felt when… in certain company.*

*Had he cared to check a little more thoroughly, he might've realised that the pain and loneliness and fear he was feeling wasn't all him; but Aziraphale was already trying so hard to shut himself off from his own heartbreak, ignoring that of someone else was almost instinctive.

Once he was reasonably confident he wasn't going to get his frontal cortex stabbed by a stray sunbeam, Aziraphale opened his eyes, straightened his lapels, and set off.*

*He wasn't worried about getting lost. Reality had just accommodated instant transport from Mayfair, London, to Village Centre, Tadfield - making sure Aziraphale was conveniently walking right to Adam's location wasn't even a stretch.

A letter to the Tadfield Advertiser:

Sirs,

I must, once more, complain most forcefully about the shameful state of our village!

Why, only today, a very peculiar man who had obviously been partaking in drink the night before simply APPEARED in its middle! What is our village coming to if strange, hungover fellows can just appear in it from thin air, willy-nilly?

Furthermore, when I related this to the police, I was told to, and I quote, "lay off the fatty spliffers, Mr Tyler". An outrage!

Really...

(It went on like this for a while. However, we're sure this sufficed for the Esteemed Reader to get the gist.)

The thing about alpha centauri was, it was empty*...

*Certainly, Crowley would, theoretically, be able to miracle up lucious gardens, happy animals, a lovely home for two, as he had planned when originally asking Aziraphale to run away with him.

But what was the point, if he would only live in it alone?

...and it was quiet.

The little rock hurtling through space that was to be Crowley's new home had no atmosphere, and absence of air meant absence of sound.

Crowley could only hear his own heartbeat, vibrations of unnecessarily-pumped blood echoing in his skull.*

*Sometimes, he liked to think it was beating for Aziraphale, and Aziraphale alone, pathetic excuse for a demon that he was.

So, Esteemed Reader, imagine Crowley's surprise when he heard a faint static sound in the distance, warbling and barely existent, but still very much audible.

Now.

Crowley had spent enough time around Adam to know that aliens were, at least, a theoretical possibility, if not a reality.*

*Said "enough time" was little more than five minutes. Adam did so love his UFOs.

Sound in a vacuum, however, was an impossibility, Crowley knew that with the kind of certainty one knew the earth was round.*

*We refrain from acknowledging the subset of society convinced the earth is flat, seeing as even Adam, who subscribed to many an outlandish theory, had solemnly declared it rubbish; so it must be very silly indeed.

Shuffling hesitantly to his feet, Crowley looked around.

Alpha centauri's little exoplanet was empty as ever, the most interesting thing in sight a rock formation that looked quite rude if you squinted and angled your head right...

...except for a little gleaming metal thingummy a few paces to his left.*

*North, we would say, but this planet had three magnetic poles, which made navigating by such terms rather impractical.

Eyeing it the way one would an ominously ticking briefcase, Crowley approached it.*

*A ticking briefcase equivalent should never be approached, but Crowley was exactly one Aziraphale-imposed exile past actually caring.

It was a radio.

Quite a sleek little thing, maybe a bit old-fashioned in design, with a fine line of very-nearly-stylish tartan print down the side.

And it was, impossibly, weirdly, buzzing with static.

Crowley stared down at it.

Glanced around himself.

Out of old habit, glanced up.*

*A star twinkled in the distance as if it was winking, but Crowley assumed he hadn't seen right.

He picked the radio up.*

*Again, we deem it necessary to inform the Esteemed Reader that the behaviour exhibited here is quite reckless, and not to be recommended.

Fiddled with one dial.

Queen's Miracle blared from the speaker, tinny and just a little distorted, but clearly recognisable.

"What the..." Crowley murmured, and glanced up again. The star in the distance was now positively flickering.

 He flicked the dial again.

"This is Chattering Tonight, with your hosts, Sister Mary Loquacious, and Sister Ethel Taciturn. Hello!"

(Let us, at this point, tell you the story of Mary Hodges, who had found herself quite adrift following a debacle with real guns and a very strange daydream of whatever she liked best - which had just so happened to be her childhood friend from Sunday Satanist School, who, Mary had realised just then with a jolt, had been her very first crush.

Now, Mary Hodges had spent enough time Finding Herself to know you were never really done with it. You could be doing exactly what you thought would be "living your dream", and suddenly, you realise that there's something better yet at the horizon.

Or, perhaps, behind you.

Mary didn't want to go back to being a simple nun and being scatterbrained. Not really. But she did miss being a Satanist, being part of a convent… and most of all, she missed her childhood love.

So she'd dissolved her business,* rented the convent out to a very nice family of hard-core Goths and their pet hand, packed her bags, and set out to look up little Ethel.

*She wasn't at all worried about such trivial things as career and money. Mary Hodges, upon finding out that she was, actually, quite clever in many ways, had also realised that, if need be, she could absolutely trade her way up into a CEO position from as little as half an egg sandwich - so that was quite alright.

Sister Ethel Taciturn, though possessed of a talkative heart, had, upon her graduation from the Our Lady Lilith convent school, been deemed too shy to serve Satan and St. Beryll, and was subsequently thrown out into the real world.*

*The spirit had been willing, but the vocal chords weak, as the Mother Superior used to say.

Wanting desperately to prove herself, Ethel - now plain old Ethel Wainwright again - had decided to go into radio, and overcome her crippling shyness one hesitant broadcast at a time.

She'd been doing quite well as producer and co-host, though she did frequently rely on a somewhat more talkative partner.

And.

When Mary had called - Mary, who had sat next to her in Blasphemous Education class, and always shared her cherry bubblegum, and had chattered loud enough for the both of them...

Well.

Ethel had rather missed her, you see. And anyway, completely unrelated and coincidental, there was this fantastic opening for a little religious show...)

"Let us recount the deeds of the day - thank you, Ethel darling!" Sister Mary chirped over the rustling of paper.

"Mrs. Chiswick from Surrey has hailed Satan by putting peaches into her cakes, even though Mr. Chiswick prefers boysenberry - well done, Mrs. Chiswick! Annie from Soho considered scribbling a very rude word onto the facade of the local bookshop with its very impolite owner who wouldn't sell her a first edition last Friday, but couldn't make herself do it in the end. Bad luck, Annie!"

Ethel made a compassionate noise.

"But remember, Our Lord rewards intent as well as action, so that's quite alright!" Sister Mary continued. "Little Jeremy W. stuck out his tongue at a Mr. Tyler of the Neighbourhood Watch - so wonderful to hear of young talent, isn't it, Ethel?"

A noise of confirmation.

"The kids truly are alright. And, to round this off, Ethel and I have kissed enthusiastically in front of some bigots, inciting them to wrath. With tongue!"

Ethel giggled.

(Crowley raised an eyebrow. Good for them.)

"Now, before we sing an Antichristmas hymn and say our praises unto Adam, Lord of Darkness, we have a message here for... Anthony Cowwely, from... aw, his mother, isn't that sweet?"

(Crowley's raised eyebrow shot up into the sky, and stayed there, frozen in shock.)

"'Dear child, I hope this finds you well. What am I saying, I know exactly how this finds you, and it's quite miserable. Honestly, it's making Jesus all maudlin, and you know how he gets. Can't you do something Mum, why don't you start the Apocalypse Mum, can't you make them kiss at the Ritz Mum? And I say, to Jesus I say, boy, it's not easy being the Almighty, and you traveled the world with Crowley Magdalene, why didn't you convince her to confess back then!?* But noooooo....'"

*In his defense, Jesus had most certainly tried. Crowley had simply brushed him off every time, and pointed out another lovely landmark of human ingenuity.

It had been very frustrating.

Crowley jabbed the off-button so violently it nearly broke.

One could spend years praying for a response from one's Creator, but that did not mean one was prepared for when it finally came.

For a brief second, all was vacuum quiet again.

"Howdy folks, and welcome back to the prayin' hour!" Marvin O. Bagman's voice boomed from the radio's speakers. "Have ya placed ya donations yet? Bought mah new single, 'The Rapture Is Fake News, But Climate Change Is Real'? All proceeds go to the Be Kind To Each Other foundation. Christ wants ya to be generous to the needy!"*

*Marvin, after having been possessed by a genuine divine being, had had a bit of a change of heart when it came to his preferred expression of Christianity, as you can plainly see. His latest album featured such hits as "Love Thy Muslim Neighbour, Even If He Don't Like Bacon", "Yeehaw To Equal Love", and "God Is A Woman, And She's Smokin'".**

**Obviously Her favourite.

"And can Ah just say, how-" Marvin's voice cracked, and suddenly sounded so vast it echoed through all of existence, and most of all in the empty spot in Crowley's non-soul.

THAT WAS VERY RUDE OF YOU, CROWLEY. I WORKED HARD ON THAT LETTER.

(Oh mah Gawd, it's happening again, Marvin thought, delightedly - and a bit scared, too.)

WROTE IT IN CURSIVE AND EVERYTHING.

"I helped with spelling!" Another voice chimed in, somewhat holy, too, but a good deal more down-to-earth - likely because the owner of it had actually been down to earth. "It was absolutely unreadable before spell-check-"

LOOK, BOY, THAT'S NOT HOW IT WAS SPELLED WHEN I- OH, NEVER MIND. CROWLEY, YOU'RE MAKING A MISTAKE.*

*All of Her speech was capitalised, of course, but rest assured that Mistake was emphasised even then.

YOU BELONG BACK ON EARTH. WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP THERE, FOR MY SAKE!? GO HOME. RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

"I can't," Crowley croaked, because he couldn't not answer, even as a part of him was near-sick with relief that Her order was apparently not one that fell under the jurisdiction of the curse. "Forgive me, Lord, I can't. It's not possible, I wish, I wish I could...."

CROWLEY, LET ME TELL YOU: DO OR DO NOT, THERE IS NO "I CAN'T".  

Crowley cringed a little, and he thought he could hear Jesus groan "oh my Mum" in the background.

EHEM. DON'T PULL THAT SORT OF FACE, SON. WHAT I MEAN TO SAY, CROWLEY, IS THAT ONLY VERY FEW THINGS ARE TRULY IMPOSSIBLE. SO: CHOP CHOP!

"Well, easy for You to say!" Crowley burst out. "Being omnipotent and all. It hurts, Lord, even to look in the vague direction of earth is half tearing me apart! How do You expect me to-"

HOW? THE SAME WAY I HAVE LEARNED TO EXPECT HUMANS TO PERSEVERE. God interrupted firmly, though not unkindly. THEY DON'T HAVE THE SAME POWERS AS YOU, DO THEY? AND YET, THEY ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE ON A DAILY BASIS! IT'S MAGNIFICENT, THE THINGS THEY CAN DO WHEN THEY PUT THEIR MINDS TO IT. IT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE SO DETERMINED, CROWLEY. BECAUSE THEY CARE AND LOVE AND WANT, SO THEY DO.

"...I care." Crowley swallowed around a painfully dry throat. "And I, hng, l-love, of course I do."

I KNOW. YOU'RE NOT EXACTLY SUBTLE, CROWLEY.

Crowley carefully ignored that, and any and all implications stemming from it.

"But I… I'm not like them, Lord. I'm only a wretched demon, and the…" his breath hitched. "The only person I could find the heart to fight for is the one whose explicit orders I would have to fight against. I've not the strength, Lord, please. Have… have mercy, and leave me be."

For a moment, the radio was silent in his hands.

OH. OH, MY CHILD. God said, and it was so soft and sad that it tore at Crowley's heart worse than the curse ever had.

He wanted to scream at Her, scream and shout and sob that he had no need for Her blasted pity, that he would never forgive Her for letting it all play out this way, that he hated Her and Her damned non-interference policy… but he was too weak and heartsick for that, too, so he stayed silent.

No doubt She would bestow some more meaningless platitudes on him, and then hopefully leave him alone.*

*That, Crowley thought with no small amount of bitterness, had always been what She was best at, after all.

THE SITUATION IS MORE DIRE THAN YOU'RE AWARE OF. HE NEEDS YOU, CROWLEY, AND HE NEEDS YOU NOW, NO MATTER WHAT SILLY THINGS POPPED INTO HIS FOOL HEAD A WEEK OR SO AGO.

"...Aziraphale needs me?" Crowley whispered, and found himself quite cross with the plaintive, desperate note in it. He was only asking because he wanted to know why, of course, what sort of trouble that idiot angel had gotten himself into for some culinary delight* or other this time.

*Aside from the crêpes in Paris, there had also been hot buns in London, AD 1666, as well as tea in 1773 Boston, and the less said about the Borscht Incident, the better.**

**It had yet to occur to Crowley that all of these occasions could be directly connected to himself remarking in Aziraphale's presence that he was free of direct obligations for a while, and that he never got himself into trouble Crowley couldn't easily get him out of, fabricating increasingly ludicrous explanations for why he was incapable of doing it himself and required rescue.

Crowley, bless his heart, was more than just a bit dim at times.

HE ALWAYS DOES. BUT NOW ESPECIALLY. YOU'VE DONE SOME VERY SILLY THINGS, CROWLEY, VERY SILLY, AND HE'S CAUGHT IN THE FALLOUT. IT COULD ESCALATE QUITE TERRIBLY, I FEAR.

"I didn't mean… never meant to-" Crowley choked out. Aziraphale's predicament, his fault? Between the exile, a call from Mother, and now this, could his day get any worse!?

I'M NOT BLAMING YOU, MIND! TO ERR IS HUMAN, AND PEOPLE KEEP FORGETTING THAT I CREATED THEM IN MY IMAGE.

YOU MADE A MISTAKE. SO DID HE. AND DEAR AZIRAPHALE HAS BEEN TRYING TO FIX HIS, ALBEIT UNSUCCESSFULLY, SO THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS AWARD HIM THE SAME COURTESY.

"How?" Crowley asked instantly. Damn the curse to Hell, if it was Aziraphale's well-being on the line, he didn't question why he should jump, he asked "how high" and then doubled that for good measure.

COME HOME. God implored him softly. YOU MUST COME HOME FIRST, CROWLEY, THERE'S NO WAY AROUND IT. AZIRAPHALE NEEDS YOU, AND SO DOES MY GRANDSON. THERE IS TIME YET, BUT NOT MUCH. I WISH I COULD HELP YOU, MY CHILD… BUT THIS IS SOMETHING YOU MUST ACCOMPLISH ON YOUR OWN.

Crowley swallowed.

Glanced over his shoulder at his faraway home, and found it still hurt quite a bit to as much as look at it.

If it had seemed a far distance on the way here, pushing him to his (meta)physical limits, then the journey back was absolutely impossible. It was like tumbling down the Niagara Falls on a rickety little raft, and, once down there, being handed a paddle and instructed to row back up the way you'd come.

And then, Crowley thought about humans, brave and stubborn and headstrong, and Adam, trusting him with his powers and his life... and Aziraphale.

His angel, who had broken him with a few careless words, and who Crowley had forgiven almost instantly, because he loved him so impossibly much.

"Alright then," Crowley said, miserable, but reluctantly committed to the endeavour now.

It was going to be a very, very, very long way home.

DON'T DESPAIR, CROWLEY. YOUR HOROSCOPE TODAY IS OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE, YOU KNOW.* God said, which wasn't even half as encouraging as She probably thought it was.

*The Tadfield Advertiser's horoscope on the day in question went along the lines of "you have a great task ahead of you - success is just around the corner"; though it might be worth mentioning that the chief horoscopist (read: the least useful of the interns) had re-used a few crucial lines from the Libra horoscope quoted in the Esteemed Sirs Pratchett and Gaiman's delightful book, which we shall elaborate on later.

"Good luck, old friend," Jesus added, which was a little better.

And with that, the radio crackled, and suddenly all that could be heard on the air was a lightly sputtering Marvin O. Bagman.

"Oh mah- right." Ever the professional, Marvin caught himself for just long enough to transition into a pre-recorded song so he could go hyperventilate in peace. "Howdy again, folks! After that message from, uh, Our Merciful God an' Her Son, which ya only heard t'one side of and are probably mighty confuddled 'bout right now, let's have a listen to "Them's Their Pronouns, For God's Sake", and if ya donate, consider also shootin' a li'l prayer to the stars - Crowley, mah buddy, ya can do it! - this is Marvin, God bless ya!"

Crowley turned the radio off. This time, the dodgy little thing complied.

With the sigh of a condemned man contemplating his reflection in the blade of the executioner's axe, Crowley turned back in the vague direction of earth.

He shrugged off his jacket, undid both Aziraphale's garish, much-loved scarf as well as his thin silver one, and carefully folded them on the ground together with his vest. After placing his glasses and the radio on top, he straightened back up.

The cold of space was numbing him already, seeping deep into his bones and taking residency there, but the less mass he had to haul halfway across the universe, the better - and a bit of numbness would be a welcome relief in the face of the pain he was going to be suffering once he really got started.

For Aziraphale, he reminded himself, shaking out his limbs and spreading his wings wide. For Aziraphale, who needs me. For my angel.

The distant stars were twinkling encouragingly, alpha centauri burning bright nearby, and the prayers of both Mary and Ethel's and Marvin's hearerships were with him.* He could do this.

*One would think that the prayers of Devout Christians would be detrimental to his Occult Energy levels; however, when you got right down to it, a prayer was a prayer, no matter who it came from or who it was directed at.

The important bit was, and always would be, that somebody cared.

And these people, for some reason, did.

And as the radio clicked on behind him and began to play Queen's Spread Your Wings, Crowley pushed off; and, despite the sudden explosion of pain across the surface of his very being, beat his wings once, twice, at the airless void; and hurled himself back home.

Aziraphale shivered slightly, pulling his coat more tightly around himself.

It felt a little like a storm was brewing, the air heavy and crackling with it; and the closer he got to his destination, the denser the clouds above.

It… wasn't a good sign, to say the least.

By the time he reached the very edge of the Tadfield quarry, a light rain was falling - though, notably, only over the quarry, stopping precisely at the fence, which was an even less-good sign.

"Oh dear." Aziraphale muttered, miracling himself an umbrella. "Oh my."

Gripping the umbrella's handle tightly, he stepped within the quarry's boundaries.

(He glanced over to his left side out of sheer instinct. But of course there was nobody there. Of course.)

"Adam!" He called tentatively. "Adam, my boy, it's Aziraphale!"

Silence, except for the gentle pitter-patter of drops on the tartan fabric above his head.

"Adam?"

Still no verbal answer. Aziraphale's took another few hesitant steps forward.

"Adam! Adam, where are you!?"

What if the boy was hurt? He had sounded so scared, the poor little thing, oh, this was precisely why it had been a terrible, terrible idea to interfere with his powers so! Crowley, for all that Aziraphale missed him ever so dearly, truly had been an absolute fool, oh yes he had been, and if- WHEN, when he got back, Aziraphale was going to read him the riot act, he was, once he'd held him close and begged him never to go away again naturally, oh, where could the boy be-

"ADAM! AD-!"

A barking sound, nearby.

Aziraphale broke into a run.*

*Well, the closest he ever got to a run, which... has the Esteemed Reader ever seen a penguin with a bad limp running as if its tail feathers were on fire? It was quite similar to that.

Dog met him halfway, barking and skittish (and looking, for a Hellhound, unusually scared), and led Aziraphale to a little hideaway shielded from the rain.

There sat Adam, hugging his knees and tremors running all over his body - and, to Aziraphale's horror, through the air around him, little warps and rips where reality tore under the strain of… whatever was happening to the poor boy.

Adam looked up.

His eyes were a tumultuous red, like two pools of blood boiling over; and his cheeks were wet with tears.

"Don' come any closer!" He choked out, and there was something in his voice that didn't really sound like a voice at all, never mind Adam's. "It's jus' gettin' worse an' worse, I can't control it anymore!"

Aziraphale noted, with considerable trepidation, that the ground was scorched in a two meter radius around the poor child, and that the old flip phone Adam must've stolen from his father to call Crowley with lay in pieces at his feet, still sizzling slightly.

"Please, please, help me." Adam whimpered. Dog trotted up to him and attempted to cheer him up by nuzzling his face... with little success. "I hurt ev'ryone. If they get close to me. I hurt them. I get angry or scared or anythin', and then I… then…"

A shuddering sob that rippled through the earth and the sky and everything in between.

"Help me."

"Oh." Aziraphale said, soft and sad and more than a little afraid. "Oh Adam..."

All in all, Crowley got further than anyone would've thought - least of all he himself, who wouldn't have bet a brass farthing on as much as managing to remove himself from alpha centauri's immediate gravitational pull.

We must commend him for trying, despite the more than suboptimal circumstances.

Only, regrettably, this wasn't one of those elementary school competitions where everybody got participation awards, and the only important thing was motivating little children into doing some exercise.

This, this was like a jump from building to building, with a twenty-storey drop in between. Anything less than complete success at first try would leave him plummeting down into the dark until the abyss swallowed him up. A failed attempt would be no use at all, and there would be no chance of a second try, Crowley knew that deep in his bones.

If he faltered, if his wings stilled for even a moment, he would never manage to push through the haze of pain and the curse screaming no go leave go back he doesn't want you go away go away into his non-soul, never be capable to force his burning joints into renewed movement.

Crowley knew that, and when he reached the point of utter exhaustion - somewhere in the vicinity of a reddish-green planetary system with too many moons to count, though Crowley hardly had the opportunity to take in the scenery* - all he did was mentally giving it a weak, defeated wave in passing.

*The population of said planet, if they had chanced a look up at the night sky, might've seen a shooting star amid their many moons, and might, perhaps, have made a wish or two. We wouldn't know.

He was running on fumes and the stubborn faith of a few thousand humans who were resolved to believe in a stranger whose name they had heard on the radio, and Crowley felt a sudden kinship with his darling Bentley.

Now he, too, was on fire and firmly telling himself he was not, carrying on out of sheer desperation and love - he only hoped he wasn't about to explode upon reaching his destination.

However, London to Tadfield, even via the flames of the M25 and burning oneself, and 4.367 light years through the freezing cold of the vacuum… that's two very different pairs of shoes.*

*Or, rather, one pair of what had a 50-50 chance of being shoes, and one quartett of tyres.

We hate to admit it, but Crowley never had a chance. A third of the way he managed, yes, which was already a third more than should by rights be demonly possible under the circumstances.

But that was all.

With the solar system still glinting an impossible, unreachable distance away, Crowley managed to get a last, feeble flapping motion out of his trembling, brittle wings…

...and, against every instinct screaming at him not to, they stilled.

Crowley's lungs were expanding and constricting out of some deeply ingrained habit born from millennia of watching humans pant in moments of exhaustion, and tears and sweat turned to ice crystals floating around his face.

The relative proximity to earth made the curse bury its teeth deep in his flesh and twist; but, at this point, returning to alpha centauri, the only relief, was equally impossible. The mere thought of inching even a single, well, inch, either way had his wing joints screaming bloody murder at him.

So Crowley hung in the empty darkness, and felt like he was falling.

There was no going forward. No going back. He was weak, and the curse only continued to make him weaker, flickering static already creeping up at the edges of his vision.

Forget reaching earth.

He would be lucky if he survived this.

And, as we leave Crowley floating exhausted and in pain in the vacuum, we would like to use this opportunity to inform the Esteemed Reader about which parts, exactly, the Tadfield Advertiser's intern recycled* in Crowley's horoscope.

*Very environmentally friendly, all in all.

There were, as it turns out, three.

The first one might be obvious: a friend is important to you. (Which was true, naturally. A certain friend was really very extremely important to Crowley, always.)

The second was: you may be vulnerable to a stomach upset today, so avoid salads.

And third: help could come from an unexpected quarter.

Number three, too, was right on the money, as the Esteemed Reader will soon get the opportunity to see themselves, come next chapter.

(We don't really know why the second bit made it in there, or what it is about salads, specifically, that upsets stomachs so. All we can say is, the universe is a strange, strange place sometimes; but the Esteemed Reader surely is aware of that.)

Chapter Text

Flynn Hastings, ex-estate agent, stood at a window made from a substance decidedly not glass, and looked out at the majesty of the universe.

He had had a terribly interesting life, recently, and to balance it out he was currently occupied thinking boring thoughts about whether his dress uniform needed to be pressed after washing, and which insulation rating he would give the Starships of the Ambassadorial Fleet.*

*Evidently, you could take the man out of boredom, but never the boredom out of the man.

(Usually, we would here employ a proper flashback to that fateful day Flynn had first found himself confronted with The Interesting, but such fanciful narrative tricks really don't lend themselves to a man such as Flynn, so we shall fall back on the tried and true - and far more boring - method of quiet reminiscing and hope the Esteemed Reader forgives us for it.)

Upon his abduction, Flynn had initially feared - or, well, felt a vaguely unsettled emotion that might have been fear in someone less bland - that he was going to be experimented on. He gathered it was what aliens did to people, though he had always found the media depicting it as such a bit too eventful for his tastes, and rather feared they wouldn't get any usable data out of him besides.*

*Flynn was vaguely aware of his own uninterestingness, both in regards to academic research and in day-to-day life, and usually patiently informed any bright young survey-runners that his data set would always be the exact average and they should just save themselves one more evaluation or survey someone else instead.

He had been quite resigned to his fate, and in fact got halfway through unbuckling his (neutral brown, no cloth pattern) belt, when the alien with the quite fetching rear tentacle claws* fell to the closest thing xyz had to knees - the joints in question bent double on the left appendage, thrice on the right, and rotated in place for the just-diagonally-from-the-middle one - and implored him quite ardently.

*Flynn, to his own surprise, noticed. He was not usually in the habit of noticing things about people - or aliens, he supposed - especially not things that were closest described as "rear tentacle claws" and which he apparently considered "fetching".

Flynn was learning quite a lot of new things about himself (which was especially confusing since there hadn't been very many things to know in the first place) and if having a crisis weren't so exciting, he might've gone in for a quiet little panic right about now.

See, when you get right down to it, there's an absolutely unavoidable problem with alien diplomacy: extraterrestrial beings, by and large, are very interesting.

There was always something going on with them, here a flashing light, there a wriggling appendage, a very strange colour pattern just underneath that horn cluster, energy waves with little photons in Hawaiian shirts surfing on them - if we were to pick out even a single one of the 2145-and-three-sevenths ambassadors at the intergalactic summit and described everything noteworthy about them to the Esteemed Reader, we would be sitting here for as long as it takes one of us to die of old age.

Which is, naturally, somewhat… detrimental… to keeping intergalactic peace. Between ambassadors getting distracted by each other on a near-constant basis - on bad days, they barely got out a single sentence before their visual receptor stalks swivelled to follow something rotating or sparkly and they trailed off - more than one peace agreement had ended in a blaze of laser blasts and acidic bullets after someone's lateral thorax glands happened to blink out an accidental insult in rainbow colours.

What the universe needed was a neutral party. Someone so bland and boring that they could arbitrate conflicts and mediate among slighted parties without ever causing offense - and they needed them quickly, seeing as there were currently i2x-3 Imperial Galaxies ready to rip each other apart over a minor social faux-pas at the last attempt to finally pass produce trade regulations.

And at this point of the exposition, the alien, whose name happened to be X'czä7qu, had revealed that he, Flynn Hastings, was the only entity in the entire universe deemed boring enough to prevent the 15th Universe War.

He was, to put it bluntly, xyz only hope.

Now, Flynn hadn't, technically, ever watched Star Wars.

Once he had realised that the movie was not, in fact, just 2 straight hours of Luke hydrofarming in the desert - the promotional pictures had not done the un-boringness of the movie justice - he had left the theatre and gone home to watch the paint on the wall be as dry as ever* instead.

*Watching wet paint dry was just a hint too thrilling for Flynn, and he had been saving the experience up for his inevitable rather mellow and undramatic midlife crisis.

But he had stayed just long enough to see Princess Leia's hologram say "help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."

Of course, his younger self never would've entertained so outlandish a thought as imagining himself in this very same situation; adventure never would've come knocking for him, leaving him to the uneventful life of a Tatooine hydrofarmer forever - and if some stray princess needed help, well, he wasn't cut out to be a hero anyway.

It only went to show, Flynn reflected now with an expression that could best be described as a smile's more boring uncle, that you rarely recognised your calling until it was right there in front of you.

So he had said yes. To the great surprise of X'czä7qu, who had honestly thought that a good deal more convincing would be necessary.

Flynn had then been provided with a dress uniform*, shoved in front of the intergalactic summit, and asked to speak.

*Xye had first attempted to give him a brightly yellow monstrosity with far too many sleeves and gemstone detailing, and it had taken a firm veto and a hunt all over xyz Starship to find the one not neon-coloured object on the entire thing (a very small screw on a panel at the back of the steering console) to explain to xyz what the colour "grey" actually looked like, until Flynn was finally handed something simple in muted shades of beige and grey.

And Flynn Hastings, estate agent-turned-ambassador, had given a PHENOMENAL speech.

It had been dreary, the main metaphor had hinged on the pricing of downtown flats, there had been far too many acknowledgments, unnecessary and repetitive explanations, and the antique machine somewhat reminiscent of a slide projector Flynn had found gathering dust in a corner experienced technical troubles halfway through.

Furthermore - yes, Esteemed Reader, just one extended sentence is sadly not enough to fully grasp the absolute masterpiece of boringness that was Flynn Hastings' speech - there had been no refreshment table, no graphics on the slides, no hand gestures to emphasise his points, and if Flynn's voice had ever risen just slightly from a measured monotone, it had been firmly pushed back into its place forthwith.

The gathered aliens had never witnessed anything so mindnumbingly BORING, and they were in awe.

This man, they had all agreed, to Flynn's mild embarrassment, was precisely the saviour they needed - and even the most stubborn and aggressive of fellow ambassadors agreed to continue peace talks as long as Flynn was conducting them.

And somewhere in between panel talks, discussions and speeches, Flynn had found himself in love with the being who had made clapping-like sounds the loudest at the end of his every speech, who explained to him which colourful buttons to press on the universal translator, and who stood at his side through it all, since the very start: X'czä7qu.

It hadn't been a whirlwind romance, God forbid, and neither had there been a dramatic moment of revelation. No, Flynn had simply fallen in love, in the boring, uneventful way in which people fell in love if they weren't dramatic enough for love at first sight in the Garden of Eden or a Realisation™ in the husk of a bombed-out church.

It wasn't grand. It wasn't a love story for the ages. It was just there.

And yet, it was the best thing to ever happen to Flynn Hastings, ex-estate agent, in all the averagely-numbered years of his life; which, if we're being entirely honest, is always the case where love is concerned.

Later, once the threat of war was averted once and for all, and the events Flynn quietly thought of as "All That Fuss" were mostly over, X'czä7qu had gone to xyz not-quite-knees again to propose.

And Flynn had simply said yes once more.

(And after that, there had been a duel for xyz tentacle in marriage, because if xye went out of xyz way to propose to him in accordance with earth traditions, the least he could do is try very hard to overcome his own nonconfrontational urges and treat xyz to the proposal-fight to near-death xye deserved.

Besides, it really was a very fetching tentacle, and absolutely worth having a duel over.)

He was, even now, wearing xyz ring, a gaudy, glittering thing that flashed in irregular intervals and let out a low hum of thermal radiation at times.*

*Flynn had a more neutral - and boring - gold band for his ambassadorial duties; but in his free time, he rather preferred this one. He found he liked that the evidence of his marriage was the single most interesting thing about him, which was honestly a rather romantic thought for Flynn's standards.

He ran his fingers over the seven-dimensional quasi-diamond set into thetraplatinum, and experienced a wave - well, maybe more of a little ripple - of content.

Flynn Hastings had always been too boring to be actively unhappy… but being actively happy, that he could get used to.

His spouse wavered over to him in that way of xyz's that could give the Ministry of Silly Walks a (quite silly) run for their money, and blursblided* a loving greeting of xyz people

*Xye wasn't exactly capable of anything as simple as saying things.

(Blursbliding, for the interested Reader, sounded a lot like throwing an old gramophone into a blender, set to very highly-pitched dubstep - but with a very loving undertone to it.)

Flynn responded with a very bland "you too", putting an arm around xyz and leaning into xyz somewhat less-sticky side.

Yes.

Yes, this was… good.

Standing here with the entity he was not dramatic enough to call the love of his life (but who was, in all honesty), gazing out at a million glittering stars, planets, an unconscious winged being who looked oddly familiar, and nebula, Flynn truly, truly felt…

...wait.

One of Flynn's eyebrows - the left, somewhat bolder one - briefly contemplated rising up an inch or two... but then decided against it and stayed put.

"Honey?"* Flynn droned.

*X'czä7qu had initially assume xye was being threatened by being compared to an earth foodstuff, until Flynn had explained to xyz that it was nothing so provocative as that, only the most basic and bland of endearments he had heard his parents use when they didn't realise their son was in the room with them due to his sheer unremarkableness.

Sometimes, he also used "dear". But only when he felt daring - which is to say, once in a blue-with-green-dots-and-yellow-stripes moon.

"Let's save that person over there." He continued, in the kind of tone in which other people read out the telephone book. "It looks like they're in a spot of bother."

Now you, dear Reader, might voice some complaints. "A rescue mission!", you might be inclined to exclaim. "How daring! How exciting! How much too interesting an idea to graze the mind of Flynn bloody Hastings!"

And we, regretfully, must disagree.*

*And also advise the Esteemed Reader not to attribute a middle name as interesting as "bloody" to Flynn - his middle name, as you'll be very bored to find out, is actually Finn.

Because, really, what is interesting?

Something that is not the norm. Something unusual. Something, and this is the crux of the matter, that the average human being would not think of doing.

And for all that humanity is capable of great, terrible evil, the average human being, when faced with the broken, the injured, the downtrodden, in short with an opportunity to help, will always, always say "alright there, old chap?" and offer a hand.

The average, most uninteresting and mindlessly boring person is still kind; and really, dear Reader, if that doesn't reaffirm your faith in humanity, I don't know what will.

Chapter Text

"Are… are they dead?"

Crowley, upon a somewhat cursory check, found that he - to all our surprise, and most of all Crowley's - was not.*

*The fact that his heart, after a bit of convincing, could still be coaxed into having a pulse was a rather good indicator, as was the absolute agony he was still in. While curse pain would persist even after discorporation, sore muscles certainly did not.

He didn't quite know how to feel about that besides confused. It had seemed a bit of a done deal, in all honesty, and there were only so many close shaves plot armour could weather before it got too flimsy to explain these things away.

A Deus Ex Machina to be sure - though the Deus in question wasn't exactly involved in any greater capacity besides squealing excitedly at the new development and telling Her son that She had known it would all turn out alright, anyway (no matter how worried She might've appeared to be halfway through.)

So, as much as Crowley felt like death warmed over in one of those microwaves that left the edges of the dish boiling hot magma and the middle a frozen chunk of disappointment, it appeared as if it hadn't been time for him to shuffle off this mortal coil and try to con Beelzebub into handing him a new body before ze realised he wasn't quite as impervious to Holy Water and zir commands as previously advertised.

"Readings indicate neural activity." Another voice chimed in, with the same vaguely artificial quality as the first. "Though they're anything but usual for a humanoid."

"As I'd expect anything I pulled in from space still breathing to be, medbot-20."

"You make an excellent point, utilitybot-3."

"You transmit that message as if it were an unusual occurrence."

"Statistics aren't in your favour."

Crowley desperately wanted to chuckle, but the cost-benefit balance of such an action seemed anything but worth it at the moment, so he contented himself with a weak grin.

"Positive banter reaction recorded. Laughter therapy successful!" The voice of medbot-20 sounded quite triumphant. "The patient is as good as cured!"

"You're a bit of a hack, did you know that?"

"Brave words from a glorified box with thrusters and a grabbing arm who dropped this poor creature twice while trying to drag it in here."

"Touché, old friend, touché."

At this point, it may be prudent to let us introduce the Esteemed Reader formally to medbot-20 and utilitybot-3.

The two had been built on Beta-Z back in the Galactic Year 45231-Y, as parts of a line of spacecraft crew robots with actual personality chips, whose models had been terribly sought after for a while, until people realised how absolutely insufferable most of them were. The models of lines 2 to 42 ("with Character™!!!") were, as a rule, contrary, argumentative, eccentric, and downright useless, and it quickly became clear that the end consumer wanted something to provide necessary Starship repairs, not something to argue philosophy with, especially since the robots tended to eventually resort to the "yes it is, yes it is, yes it is" mode of rhetoric.

They were, in the words of the biggest Beta-Z newspaper, which was as absolutely blunt about it as it was, regrettably, right, "the robot equivalents of most literature and arts majors."*

*The Esteemed Reader is very welcome to take offence at this comparison; in all honesty, your humble author (also a student of the above) is a bit offended herself, but must sometimes quote a harsh bit of investigative journalism in service of the truth.

Furious letters can be addressed to the editor at The Beta-GaZette Newspaper, Beta-Z, third spiral galaxy to the left, Dimension 4B - Readers from other galaxies are advised to attach a lot of postage.

The entire debacle rather proved that human-like - or, well, beta-zian-like - AI sounded much better on paper than it actually was in reality; and after a brief but non-violent robot uprising - that is, to say, a strike* - the robotics world on Beta-Z quietly agreed that Asimov should've included a rule about how robots must never talk back at their creators either, and returned to building emotionless blocks of metal.

*The holo-signs they'd carried contained such gems as "Robots have the right to argue! Yes we do! Yes we do! Yeswedowedowedo!!!" and the especially poignant "Beta-zians are ANNOYING - why can't WE be?", which the good people of Beta-Z found very hard to refute.

Which had left the question of what to do with the robots - or rather, what the robots did with themselves, since the manufacturing companies mostly agreed to ignore their existence altogether and hope they went away by themselves.

In accordance with their particular skill sets and the miserable situation on the job market, most of the robots went into teaching, where they positively thrived; and the few that remained went to the only employers that would not only take on outdated, contrary machinery, but in fact be delighted to do so since they'd fit right in: the government.

Medbot-20 and utilitybot-3 had met on the Beta-Z ambassador's Starship, and, along with about a dozen other robots of their production lines, foisted off as friendly gifts to the first fellow ambassador expressing interest in them. After being donated from one ambassadorial fleet to the next all across the galaxy for a few decades, they eventually found their way into the employment of the new Earth Ambassador; and, by virtue of being marginally less exhausting to deal with than their comrades - since they spent most of their time bickering with each other instead of anyone else - the two had been picked out specifically to serve on the fleet's flagship.

It had been a tremendous honour, and medbot-20 and utilitybot-3 had spent their first day on duty arguing about who of the two was making the worse first impression.

(The answer to which was, of course, both of them.)

To return then, to our protagonist:

Crowley gave his eyelids a very stern mental talking-to - it worked on his plants, after all - until they slowly pried themselves apart, revealing a round plastic-white robot and a cylindrical metal-black robot leaning over him and apparently embroiled in an argument that was 90% goodnatured banter and 9% anti-stress coping mechanism.*

*The final percentage being poorly veiled roboerotic tension.

It reminded Crowley painfully of himself and He Who It Hurt To Think About - though, really, even existence itself was pain at the moment, so what was a few more smarting memories.

"Excuse me, gentlebots, but I can't help but notice I'm not floating in the freezing cold vacuum anymore, but instead lying on the floor someplace that appears to be sharing a colour scheme with a package of back-to-school neon markers, care to tell me what that is all about?" Crowley inquired politely.

Well.

Attempted to.

The noise he forced out was more of a croaked "nnnnnnnngkgah" in reality, but he figured it conveyed all necessary information.

"Oh, they're awake!" Medbot-20 thrilled. "Sir, madam or neuter, can you see what I am holding up?"

Crowley squinted at the screen it had unfolded from its torso and was displaying an uncertain number of appendages on.

"Nnnnthree tentacles?" He tried.

"Oh, close!" Medbot-20 shook a part of itself that might be a head. "But no. It's a xeno-surrealist painting by the famed Ryyný M'agritte, titled 'Ceci n'est pas une tentacle'."

"It's a comment on the treachery of equating a signifier and that which it signifies." Utilitybot-3 added sagely.

"What? No! It critically discusses the limitations of the traditional art of Betelgeuse-13X!"

"Please. It's obviously about paralanguage and S'aussurean xeno-linguistics!"

"No it isn't!

"Yes it is!"

Crowley groaned, and it was only partially due to the pounding curse headache he was nursing.

He wanted peace. He wanted quiet. He wanted Aziraphale, very much, but that want was so constant throughout his existence that it barely registered, a white noise of desire that overlaid everything else.

He wanted to be home. He wanted to be free of the curse. He really wanted these robots to go, and leave him alone - and as always when Crowley desperately wanted something, the universe tripped him up, kicked him when he was down, pointed, laughed, and then made it worse.

The robots did not leave, but were joined by new arrivals instead. Oh joy.

"Mx and Mr Ambassador!" Both robots chimed in unison, sparking vaguely in deference. "The unidentified flying creature has been brought on-board and patched up,* as per your orders!"

*Personally, Crowley didn't feel extremely patched up - but there was a vitals-regulator on his wrist, visibly outdated (ah, so this was a diplomatic vessel, apparently, nobody but the government would use Gen-9 medical equipment in this day and age) and it seemed to be convincing his corporation into feeling at least a little better than it had any reason to.

Crowley, on his occasional holiday trip among the stars,* had met a good many aliens of various factions and planets, and therefore knew to allow himself a maximum of five seconds to stare at the newcomer - any longer, and he would get terribly lost in the closest they had to eyes, which would be of an absolutely remarkable make and rather adventurous number, and thoroughly distract him.

*There was a very nice nebula he sometimes rented out for the summer, though it had become a bit of a tourist trap in recent centuries, and Crowley was getting a bit sick of having to get up early to reserve himself a comfy asteroid via strategic towel placement - and, damn it,  the next alien wearing an inexplicably-Hawaiian shirt and asking Crowley for directions to the restaurant at the end of the universe was going to find their nanobot instant-imaging photodevice turned into a very slimy frog, oh yes.

What he saw in those five seconds was downright fascinating. However, we will not describe the sight any more closely, seeing as we might well remain stuck on X’czä7qu’s appearance for a good 10k of writing and never get on with the plot, and the Esteemed Reader will surely agree that the nearly-three-year hiatus has dragged on long enough already.

In sliding away, Crowley's eyes passed over a grey blob that instantly made them glaze over with boredom ever so slightly.

Then returned. Narrowed.

Crowley had the niggling thought that he recognised this humanoid being, despite the fact that his face had all the recognisableness of a grey dust mote on a grey wall in the worst of the London fog, and certainly wasn't the kind of thing one retained for very long. Unless it was the last human face one expected to ever see, it would likely be discarded from memory instantly in favour of more interesting faces.

And yet...

"I know you." Crowley hazarded, pointing at the man. "I ran you over,* didn't?"

*Between the Device girl and this guy, it appeared like this was actually the most effective way to make new acquaintances, and Crowley fully intended to run into and over more people he thought looked like good fun in the hope of making a friend or two - now that he didn't have Aziraphale anymore.

"You did." The man confirmed, much too measured to sound the least bit upset about it. "Here's my card."

The card he presented to Crowley was a very unremarkable shade of off-white, and read, in one of the more boring fonts, "FLYNN H'CZÄ7QU neé Hastings (he/him, non-psychic)", with "husband of Ambassador X'czä7qu (Peace faction)" underneath, and "Earth Ambassador (neutral)" under that. Crowley was yawning long before he'd gotten to the end.

"And here's mine!" X'czä7qu - who had taken to xyz husband's odd human habits with enthusiasm - libslibsed excitedly, transmitting bright ultra-infra-pink waves that made up the no doubt most uniquely interesting business card in this quadrant of space; though, seeing as it only had Flynn's to surpass, the bar was set low.

"Anthony J. Crowley." Crowley offered weakly, much too exhausted to miracle up a card for himself.* "Uh. Currently he/him, only a little psychic. Charmed."

*He had a stack of them back home in his flat, all of them offering a different thing the J in Anthony J. Crowley stood for and none of them bearing the correct phone number.

The only thing more annoying than being handed a business card you didn't want, Crowley had figured, was actually using that business card and finding yourself talking to the owner of a laundromat in Bristol instead of whoever you were trying to reach.

(He privately thought of it as very diabolical, and Aziraphale hadn't had the heart to tell him otherwise.)

“Likewise,” Flynn droned, though he was quite obviously lying. He was not the sort of man who ever experienced being charmed.* Or delighted, or saddened, or anything that wasn’t a baseline null of emotion.

*Meeting the love of his life being, to Flynn’s own great surprise, the exception.

“CrmCrm’tzaed!” added X’czä7qu, referring to the sort of emotion you felt when seeing a newborn star get hit by a glitterbomb and proceed to recite the Gettysburg Address, because of course xye was far too overall interesting to ever have or express emotion that could be described with fewer than at least two particularly strange and seemingly disjointed metaphors.

“And we-” Medbot-20 began self-importantly, though Crowley, recognising a blabberer when he saw one (from experience with a source that shall herein remain anonymous under A.Z.F. for Crowley’s own protection), quickly cut it off with a strangled “yeah, yeah, no need for any introduction, I overheard”, which seemed to do the trick with only a minimum of electronic grumbling and a few veiled insults thrown his way.*

*The worst of which was, apparently, utilitybot-3’s muttered “you Bachelor of Science”, which had medbot-20 tutting and starting an argument about the linguistic impact of hurtful language and the ethical ramifications of such a statement.

“We will drop you off at the nearest spaceport, once you are well enough.” Flynn, who had always conducted his real estate dealing in a way that went straight from introductions to business, since smalltalk held the risk - God Forbid! - of being even remotely interesting, stated in so boring a manner that we cannot provide an adjective for it. “With enough money to get you at least to your home galaxy.”

“Hng?” Crowley, who was still a bit caught up on near-certain death, terrible longing and heartbreak, and alien interestingness, mumbled vaguely.

“Or, if you’re going our way, towards Pilsuvenia 3-and-a-quarter, we can take you along!” X’czä7qu gobjibbed. “Though, be warned, we will be taking the scenic route over Mousia the Mouse Planet of Mice*.”

*Populated entirely by cats, who thought themselves very clever, lying in wait for the arrival of any and all space tourist rodents.

“Gkh?” Crowley continued, with increasing alarm, as he began recalling his present circumstances and found them rather dramatically lacking.

“We will leave you in the-” a long and meaningful pause in X’czä7qu’s werrebel “-’competent’ hand-like grasping appendages of our bots, and let you know when we’re getting close to port. Goodblurbelbye!”

And with that, the alien and xyz husband turned, and sort of shimmered and very boringly walked (Flynn would never do something as exciting as jog, stride, or - the thought alone! - stroll), respectively, off. Which was, Crowley quickly realised, a rather suboptimal state of affairs that did not suit his purposes at all well.

"Ngkwait!" He called out, trying to get his legs under him and failing.* "You! You have to help me."

*In his defence, he had a lot of leg to direct, and didn't manage particularly well even on a good day.

"That is what we intended to do." Flynn confirmed neutrally. "And, in saving you, already did."

"No, but!" Crowley gasped, struggling to his feet only thanks to medbot-20 hissing "give the man a hand!" and utilitybot-3 complying after only a minimum of muttered arguments about whether or not its appendages could be called hands and what the philosophical complications of altruism could do to the galactic economy. "I need to get back to earth, urgently. My… my..."

Crowley paused. Considered.

"A person who is very important to me needs my help." He finally said, saddened beyond words that he wasn't certain if he could still call Aziraphale his friend under these circumstances. "And I… I don't think I can make it on my own. I’ve gotten as far as I can possibly get by myself, and this is it. End of the line. I care for him so much, I’d look God in the eye and walk backwards into Hell for him - which I can’t advise, easy to trip over the souls of the damned just kind of flopping about on the floor - but there’s still bloody limits, isn’t there? The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak, and cursed, and sort of noodle-y even at the best of times, and all that.”

Crowley sighed, and ran a shaking hand through the most sticky-up bits of his hair, which made them still stick up, just at a slightly different and even more haphazardous angle.

“I need a lift*, if I am ever going to make it back home. And I realise this is not exactly a, hng, negligible request-” (a government vessel like this would take quite a few galactic hours to splutter and putter along the detour, not to mention that there were about five moderately pricey toll booths between here and the solar system) “-but, still… please. Please.”

*With a cautious eye towards copyright infringement and the Douglas Adams estate’s lawyers, Crowley wisely made no mention of hitchhiking across the galaxy (perhaps with the help of a guidebook), and subtly tried to shrug off the towel medbot-20 had draped over his shoulders.

A tear made its dramatic entrance onto Crowley’s face from tearduct left, and strutted down his cheek in that liquid-y way Crowley himself preferred as well.

“You’re my only hope.”

Flynn stilled, and X’czä7qu gludarbled only at a very low, barely noticeable frequency.

They shared a long look, both recalling their memorable first meeting, with xyz thinking of the desperation that had led xye to make the same sort of desperate plea, and Flynn absently making a mental note to write an audience review for Star Wars: A New Hope that would read, roughly, “not enough hydrofarming, but indirectly caused me to help the love of my life and changed my life for the better forever. 2 ½ stars.”

(Even the robots went silent, which was highly unusual and mildly existentially distressing for them.)

“...dear?” Flynn asked for xyz opinion*, at a volume that was neither loud, nor quiet, nor, even, a secret third thing.

*X’czä7qu and Flynn both believed that making decisions together, as a couple, was very important in a modern interstellar marriage - and particular in one with spouses as diametrically opposed as they were.

X’czä7qu considered it, though xye also simultaneously considered rainbow cotton candy, the most swirly route to Blurgon B, and how a-more-boring-version-of-dashing xyz husband looked in grey and beige.

And then, xye nodded with xyz leftmost head, and held out one tentacle-y appendage.

Flynn took it.

And, in unison, they said/spliplipped “yes”.

In the following moments, Crowley had, after a quick explanation of his circumstances combined with a repeat monitoring of his vitals, been led to the cockpit and deposited in Flynn's chair - far more suited to humanoid physique than X'czä7qu's, though Crowley still lounged in it as if he had about one-and-a-half shins too many for the seat - and was now watching the alien put in coordinates while xyz husband was standing in the corner being unobtrusive and the two robots were arguing about the symbolism of the green supernova in The Great G'ats9by, and whether the novel really was about the Saturnian Dream.*

*Medbot-20 was of the firm conviction that it was, in fact, about interpersonal dependency, while utilitybot-3 argued for the importance of social standing within the narrative.

(If the Esteemed Reader cares - which we doubt, but… - intergalactic scholars were currently in agreement that it was, in actuality, a dictionary, which a publisher from Ursa Major had grossly mistranslated and added plot to in order to boost sales.)

He pointedly did not look out the wide not-glass window ahead of him, knowing the sight of earth amidst the countless dots of light would send a stab of pain through his eyes right into the very core of his soul. The agony was going to be bad enough in just a moment, no need to start early, was there.

"And off we go!" X'czä7qu cheeplired, doing the high-tech equivalent of thumping the dashboard once or twice and praying to the saints of transportation to favour you today.

"Ngk," Crowley choked out, bracing himself for the curse being very upset indeed at the acceleration earthwards.

And then, entering hyperspeed with a splutter and a cough, they were, indeed, off.

Sometimes, the universe was kind, and sometimes it was cruel, and sometimes - perhaps worst of all - it was indifferent. Crowley, who had been around the intergalactic block a couple times and experienced his fair share of world and time, knew that all too well. He understood the game, fancied himself familiar with the rule booklet, and had even cheated on family game night once or twice.

(Though he was still mildly confused by the occasional encounters he had with a less-well-dressed body double of his in a blue box, as well as the random people who stopped him on the street and asked for autographs from some David Something-Landlord-Or-Other. Some things would always be beyond his understanding.)

And yet, the thing the Esteemed Reader is most advised to keep in mind regarding life, the universe, and everything, is this: there will always, somewhere in the universe, be people willing to help. There will always be a point to hope. Somewhere out there, there will always be a helping hand (or similar appendage.)

It might take you a while to find them, or for them to find you, but if you scream for help, then someone, -where and -when will eventually answer.

And there will always, however difficult it may be for Crowley to believe at the moment, be love.

(There will also, incidentally, always be a turnip within a three-mile radius. Yes, really. We’re not making this up. Nobody knows why.

All that is certain is that the turnip is incredibly good at hiding… and also, possibly, a persistence predator.)

Chapter Text

CROWLEY?

“Yes Lord?” Crowley sighed, and despite a pained tightness in his voice - this getting-back-home business was aggravating the curse most terribly, though it was made slightly better by the fact that it wasn’t him doing the getting - managed to sound very much like the sort of teenager only just tugging off their headphones* to moan “what now?” and then grumble their way through washing the dishes only under extreme duress.

*Playing, of course, Welcome to the Black Parade, since any songs left in an emo teenager’s bedroom for longer than a fortnight inevitably turned into My Chemical Romance.

NOT TO ALARM YOU, God began. Crowley immediately disregarded that, and was very alarmed indeed. BUT SINCE THE SITUATION IS ESCALATING QUITE, AH, QUITE RAPIDLY, SO YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE MUCH TIME TO GET CAUGHT UP…

(WEE-OOO, WEE-OOO, WEE-OOO! went the alarm siren in Crowley’s head, and worsened his already quite impressive headache considerably.)

…AND I DO BELIEVE YOUR HEAD MIGHT JUST GO ‘POP’ IF I TRIED TO SHOOT YOU A BOLT OF DIVINE INSPIRATION AT THIS POINT…

(WEE-wait-what? went the siren.)

…JESUS CONVINCED ME TO PROVIDE SOME IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT INSTEAD.

Go-back-and-elaborate-on-the-risk-of-head-popping-please! the siren tried with mild* panic - but then one of the screens flickered on, and suitably distracted all of Crowley’s mental facilities.

*Mild, the way a Carolina Reaper pepper dipped in wasabi and set on fire was mild.

Crowley’s heart had a habit of skipping and jumping when laying eyes on Aziraphale - or, indeed, anything vaguely round, tartan-patterned, soft, or winged, which had once led him to have a very strange reaction to an overweight piebald pigeon.

And even now, even as his eyes were watering from the exquisite agony of the curse tearing into his tender metaphysical flesh with hooks and blades and uncomfortably pointy bits with an expertise that would make the best torturers in Hell gasp in awe and feel so inadequate that they’d immediately quit their job to open up a candy store; even then, Crowley’s heart let out a weak little hiccup when the screen showed the image of a certain flustered angel clutching an umbrella for dear life.

There was also a quarry, and a Dog, and…

Oh, bless.

And an Adam, looking distressed, the way a nuclear bomb looked mildly miffed, or a volcano looked rumpled.

DO PAY ATTENTION, THERE’LL BE A QUIZ LATER, joked the Almighty. Crowley didn’t laugh. AND… GOOD LUCK, MY CHILD. I AM CONFIDENT YOU’LL FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT, AND PUT IT ALL TO RIGHTS SOMEHOW.

For a moment, the metaphysical divine frequencies were silent.

YOU AND AZIRAPHALE ARE EVER SO GOOD AT THAT. She finally not-technically-said, half wistfully. ALMOST MAKES ME THINK I GOT AT LEAST SOME OF IT RIGHT, AFTER ALL…

On Crowley’s screen, and in the middle of Tadfield quarry, Aziraphale stood huddled uncertainly under the protective shield of his tartan umbrella, and felt painfully alone.

At least during the last apocalyptic event, he’d had Madame Tracy and Shadwell by his side, and there’d been the other children, and the young witch lady and her technologically-challenged boyfriend…

And, of course, there had been that one entity whose company reassured Aziraphale more than any other, and who he was missing so dearly that merely thinking his name was completely unbearable at the moment.

Really, it was very rude of that certain man-shaped being to abandon Aziraphale in his hour of need, oh yes sir! He had made this out-of-control-Antichrist bed, and now he did not even have the good grace to come and lie in it* - the sheer audacity of him!

*If there were any other thoughts Aziraphale had about Crowley and beds and the lying in them, they were quickly discarded. There was a time and place for hopeless yearning, and it was not this time and place.

But there was nothing to be done. Aziraphale was here, and he was alone, and the boy that had never quite been his godson needed him… or, well, needed Crowley, who he’d called originally. But Aziraphale was determined to be The Celestial Being That Stepped Up, and do what he could.

(And, some fond and foolish part of Aziraphale idly dreamt, when all this brouhaha was firmly behind him and Crowley had gotten over his little snit, they would be able to sit together in the Ritz once more, and talk about this whole mess with smiles on their faces.

‘So sorry for leaving you to deal with that alone, angel,’ Crowley would say, properly chastised and ashamed of himself, as he ought to be; and despite the great hurt it had caused him Aziraphale would magnanimously forgive him, not even because he was an angel and forgiveness was the sort of thing his lot went in for, but mostly because he liked being the bigger man-shaped being in this little fanciful daydream.

Then he would tell Crowley the whole story, and Crowley would make appropriately impressed noises over how well Aziraphale had handled the situation, praise him a little, and order more dessert for him. And perhaps, later in the evening, their eyes would meet and their hands touch, and…

…

…and while Aziraphale was at it, peace on earth and goodwill to all men would be quite lovely too.)

“There there, Adam. There there.” Aziraphale did not dare move any closer to the waves of demonic anguish radiating off of Adam’s body, which unfortunately prevented the consolatory shoulder pat that would be appropriate at this juncture. “Deep breaths, my boy. What’s all this about, now?”

“I did something very bad, Mister Aziraphale.” Adam confessed, and not in the sort of tone naughty little boys used when confessing to stealing from the biscuit jar. No, this was the type of statement that usually preceded something along the lines of ‘...and after I’d killed him, his family, everyone he ever talked to, and anyone who looked even remotely like him, I danced on his grave and wrote a very hurtful mocking epithet about his mother. Who I also killed.’

It was the sort of tone that did not bode well for anything that followed it.

“Oh dear,” said Aziraphale, uncomfortably. Angels didn’t do well with confessions, by and large; hence the outsourcing of them to priests.

“Me’n’Pepper… she said suddenly that she didn’t like me and Dog and Wensley and Brian no more,” Adam choked out, and a gust of wind nearly tore the umbrella from Aziraphale’s grip. “An’ then she upped and away. With Brian an’ Wensley. Not wanting to be friends with me any longer.”

“It sometimes happens, unfortunately,” Aziraphale said, very quietly, “that your dearest friends decide that they want nothing more to do with you, and abscond to the far reaches of the universe, for no reason whatsoever. I’m terribly sorry, Adam.”

“She was right to leave!” Adam cried, like speaking the words hurt him. On a metaphysically-divine level, they certainly hurt Aziraphale, and likely any mildly psychic being in a three-mile radius. “I was so angry, and I thought… I wanted to… I nearly…”

He let out an anguished little sound, echoed by Dog, torn between the little-dog instinct of wanting to cheer his master up, and the hellhound instinct to achieve this by rending the flesh of his master’s enemies from their bones.

“I might’ve killed her dead, if not for her hesitatin’ for a sec - I couldn’t stop it, it just went b-bursting out of me!” Adam curled himself into a tighter ball, as if desperately trying to contain all that horrible nauseating-flickering power inside himself. It didn’t work. “I thought- Mister Crowley said tha’ wouldn’t happen anymore! Why-”

“Is she hurt?” Aziraphale cut in, sharply. “Adam. Did Ms. Pepper get hurt at all?”

“N-no.” A pause. “Pepper didn’t. The Them are fine.” Another, longer pause. “Better off without me, I s’spect.”

Aziraphale made a pained sort of compassionate grimace, and tried very hard not to wonder if Crowley would be better off without him.*

*The answer to that was no, hell no, god no, what are you thinking, absolutely not, where did you even get that idea, cease entertaining it right this instant, NO.

“But then.” Adam’s face was ashen, all that golden boy glow leached out of him, seeming to draw colour from his surroundings. Tadfield quarry was grey and lifeless even on a good day, admittedly, but even those stubborn little weeds pressing their way through cracks in stones looked close to dying, now. “I was a-awfully frightened, so I went t’Anathema, cos she knows all that witchy stuff and I thought she could help. Only, when I explained how fings happened, Newt got a funny look, and he said he’d phoned Mister Crowley about that, which made ‘Thema get upset cos she thought it was right awful, what Mister Crowley did to my aura. An’ suddenly…”

Adam trailed off, until Aziraphale prompted him with a gentle-yet-anxious “go on”.

“Suddenly, they were fightin’. Shouting at each other, ‘bout how it was all t’other’s fault, an’ Newt said strong magic scared him an’ then ‘Thema got all teary-angry an’ asked if she scared him too, an’ they were going on like… like they wanted t’hurt each other with their words. Really hurt.”

“Goodness,” Aziraphale muttered to himself, saddened but... not surprised. If one was a Witchfinder - or an angel - and one was in love with a witch - or perhaps a demon - then one must exert great care to not let such grievances fester, and let one's differences and ensuing fears get between one and one’s love. All too easy, that, and Aziraphale had worked hard for centuries to uphold a friendly relationship with one nature indicated he should abhor, he should know.*

*They both had worked hard towards it, and until… recent events… Aziraphale had been under the impression that they were being quite successful.

Only went to show the value of hindsight, didn’t it.

"I told them to stop." Adam whispered, a shiver going through his thin shoulders and, upon reaching their limit, simply continuing on through the air. "I… I couldn't take it anymore, so I told them t'stop. An'..."

A horrible expression passed over his face.

"...an' they did."

Aziraphale swallowed.

"Adam, my dear boy," he said very calmly, shaking only ever so slightly, "when… when you say they stopped…"

"I tried to make it right again!" Adam cried out, and desperate tears bled from his eyes, the rain thundering down on them louder and stronger. "But… they jus' wouldn't… they stayed like that. Stopped. I can't do anyfin about it! I..."

"Adam, Adam!" Aziraphale called over the rain, taking a hesitant step forward. "Eyes on me, Adam!"

Adam's eyes, those terrible pools of dark red, almost seemed to swallow him up with their gaze, but Aziraphale soldiered on.

"Whatever you did… whatever might have been done to the poor things, I'm quite certain we'll be able to put it to rights again, yes? You just be a good boy and, ah, and don't bring about the Apocalypse, and me and C-Crowley, we'll be teaching you to keep yourself under control in due time. This can all be fixed, my child, I promise."

Adam wavered, and the entire quarry with him.

“Mister Crowley already tried to fix me,” he said, and lightning flashed at Crowley’s name. Aziraphale hardly even knew if that had been Adam, or his own doing. “But it didn’t work, did it?”

“Because you- Adam, you are not what needs fixing, dear boy.” Aziraphale pressed his lips tightly together for just a moment. “And it was very silly of Crowley to think otherwise! He meant well, of course, he always means well, dear sweet man - but you know what they say about the paving of the road to Hell, don’t you?”

Adam blinked. The little blood vessels in his eyelids shone and glowed as if they were lit from behind when they closed over his eyes.

“You are in the possession of great powers, Adam. Great, and terrible, and very, very dangerous, so I suppose Crowley believed blocking them off would be safer, in the long run.” Aziraphale shivered, rain drumming like infinite tears against his umbrella. “And yes, clearly, that did not work. Something else will, I’m sure, and we’ll find it together. Yes?”

“But what if I do it again?” Adam asked plaintively, a lost little boy with corruption crawling across the ground around him. “Even wif what Mister Crowley did, I almost hurt Pepper. I did hurt ‘Thema an’ Newt! I’m gunna hurt you, prob’ly, if you make me angry enough - how do I stop that!?”

Aziraphale opened his mouth.

Hesitated.

He had the distinct feeling that “well, just keep yourself calm, stiff upper lip, and try not to do it” was not the advice Adam was looking for here. Chances were the boy’s powers would only grow more volatile as he aged far beyond apocalypse age - what promises could Aziraphale make, in the face of that?

It seemed like his hesitation was answer enough.

“...I’m a right ‘orrible monster, aren’t I?” Adam’s voice cracked open, and the churning abyss lay under its surface. “Spreadin’ my p-poison ev’rywhere.”

(As he said it, something did indeed start to ooze out of him, something oil-dark and festering, droplets dancing in the air around him in a sizzling ballet.)

“M’hurting ev’ryone around me, jus’ b’cause I can. Like the villains in the comic books, or like the oil executives in real life, or the chauvinist pigs Pepper always talks about. Just by bein’ around, I make their lives worse - the Them’s over and done wif, an’ even if they stop bein’ stopped, ‘Thema and Newt will fight and divorce, and it’s ALL MY FAULT!”*

*Anathema and Newt were not married (yet). It was only that, to Adam, any grownup breakup was called a divorce, just like any grownup job entailed going to an office and staring at a computer for hours, except for firefighters, who were very cool and only went into offices when they were on fire.

"Oh," Aziraphale sighed, with all the soft, loving compassion of an angel, daring to take a step closer. "Oh, darling boy, my precious, precious child. You do not, and none of this is your fault. You aren't poison, Adam. You're a child who only wants to love and be loved, and let me tell you, let me assure you that, Antichrist or not, it is not in your power to cut the ties between people who love each other so dearly."

Adam regarded him through the veil of rain, small and scared and trembling with the power of a thousand nuclear bombs, and his eyes were shards of red glass, cutting open Aziraphale's soul and laying its secrets bare.

For a moment, it seemed like he might believe Aziraphale, like it could all still be fixed.

But only for a moment.

"Mister Aziraphale," Adam finally said, very softly, the way the eye of a storm is soft and calm. "Why isn't Mister Crowley with you."

"...ah." Aziraphale itched to flee,* but knew that would spell his doom either way. "No. No reason. He might've taken the Bentley here, y-you know the traffic on the-"

*Aziraphale had acquired an inkling of a self preservation instinct at one point in the third century BC, after being bitten thrice by the same desert snake and Crowley scolding him for it most fiercely. Most angels never got this far, and, in fact, sometimes walked right off a cloud simply because they had business on earth and it "hadn't looked like too much of a distance" from above.

"Liar!" Adam snapped, and Dog let out a low, too-powerful bark that sounded as if it had been ripped from his little chest against his will.

A wind picked up, slicing through the air and whipping rain drops at Aziraphale, tugging at the umbrella, stronger and stronger.

"It's- we had a falling out!" Aziraphale shouted helplessly, over the agonised howling of Dog and the storm. "Over… over unrelated matters, nothing to concern yourself-"

"LIAR!" Adam snarled, and his legs and feet were no longer touching the ground. "TELL ME THE TRUTH!"

"We fought!" It was as if the truth was drawn out of him bit by grisly bit, and Aziraphale was utterly incapable of fighting it. "Over- Adam, please, it's not like that - over what we should do about you, the threat you p-pose, and he… he left, for, for alpha centauri and - oh Adam, do not make me say this, child - I. I do not think he intends to c-come back."

"I KNEW IT! I KNEW!" Adam wailed, a wave of despair spilling out of him with such force that Aziraphale staggered back as it hit him, gripping on to his umbrella for dear life. "It's my fault! Mine! I, I ruined the Them, an' I made 'Thema an' Newt fight, an' I ripped you two apart!"

"No!" Aziraphale cried out, but the air around him screamed in terror, and any protests he could've cobbled together were easily drowned out. "Adam, that's not what-"

The boy was sobbing now, terrible breathless sounds of pain, curled into a ball hovering just a few inches above the ground. A heartbreaking sight, and, Aziraphale was painfully aware, a very, very dangerous one to boot. Adam was a child in the throes of growing up, and while Aziraphale had never experienced a human puberty himself - and thank God for that, at least She had brought Her angels into the world fully formed and without cracking voices and spots - he was well aware of the emotional turmoil those brought with them.

To a teenager, every fight felt like the end of the world - and with Adam being, well, The Way He Was, it just might be.

Aziraphale made a distressed sound in the back of his throat, blinking slightly-too-acidic rain out of his eyes, and wished so badly that Crowley was here. Crowley had always been better with children, the caring old snake; and surely, surely, now that they’d established that locking away the poor boy’s powers wouldn’t work, he would find some other way to help Adam with all those horrible feelings he was filled to the brim with, ready to burst and take most of existence with him-

And then, it hit Aziraphale.

Adam's powers, and the emotions that fed into them, were, in essence, much like Aziraphale's old tea kettle.*

*This was, without a doubt, one of the most Aziraphallistic metaphors imaginable, only topped by him once mentally likening the feeling he got when sharing Crowley’s company to the comfort of slipping into his most well-worn and well-loved waistcoat and having a bit of cocoa in the middle of his (closed, obviously) bookshop.

There was no point in trying to keep all the steam in. The mere thought was ludicrous, and would sooner or later result in a minor explosion and bits of tea kettle all over the bookshop, and possibly Aziraphale’s person, if he’d happened to stand within blast range at that unfortunate time. Except, of course, said blast range was currently enveloping the entirety of the planet, and perhaps even a good half of the moon, which was certainly adding some gravitas to the situation.

The steam could not possibly be contained, was the point; it had to go out, thus was the nature of tea kettles, and, by extension of the metaphor, Antichrists.*

*Aziraphale’s tea kettle was, as it happened, not quite that far-fetched a metaphor, considering it was marked as manufactured by Luzifa & Sons Ltd., Co., and Etc., and had been a suspiciously wickedly-aura’d gift of Crowley’s.

(Made marvellous Earl Grey, though. And really, what else did you want from a tea kettle?)

Crowley had been quite right in his concerns, too. The hot steam was quite frightfully scalding, and if it went off for too long in the wrong direction, did very unkind things to the tapestry and books stacked in the vicinity. The release of all that steam was a dangerous matter, and the whistling quite annoying besides.

But screwing the little whistly bit shut wouldn’t do any good, not in the long run. It would only lead to tea kettle smithereens, and grievous bodily harm (unaffiliated with the biker of the same name).

In the end, it wasn’t about control, not really. It was about understanding, about healthy outlets, about knowing yourself and your limits, and about having people in your corner when it seemed, to the hormonal, teen-aged mind like the entire world was against you, and you’d rather it went back to being at your beck and call instead.*

*Experiences that were not at all unique among teens undergoing the early throes of puberty, though, no matter what the concerned parent might think, most of them did not also happen to be the Antichrist.

All that, Aziraphale hoped he and Crowley could teach Adam - or, er, find others who could teach him instead, seeing as neither of them had experience with pubertying children, aside from Aziraphale once being sent to babysit a somewhat spotty teenage Jesus on Her behalf and making a quite spectacular mess of it, which he’d covered up so desperately that not even a single misprint bible lived to tell the tale.*

*But if there had been a sole survivor, it might have read something like,

And lo! The angel went unto Jesus’s room, and spake: Child of God, Recall The Command That Thou Shalt Not Smoke Frankincense!, for such was as he was doing. Willst Thou Not Study Thy Letters Instead?

And so spake the Son of the Lord: Get Thee Out Of My Room!, for it was where angels should have fear’d to tread, lest they might step unto something possibly decomposing.

But What Shall Thy Heavenly Mother Think!?, crieth the angel in distress.

And yea, hark! This is what Jesus Christ then declared unto the angel:

Ugh, She Hath Not Born Me In A Stable And Laid Me In A Manger, So She Be Not My Real Mother!

And all the heavenly choirs wept.

But first… first, before adjustments could be made to the kettle to make Adam’s upcoming years of turmoil slightly less armageddon-y (a terrific but not very rule-abiding word to play in Scrabble, it distantly occurred to Aziraphale), it had to be taken off the fire.

The boy needed to be calmed down, and only then could the restrictive bands be methodically peeled off his form, probably leaving him as good as new afterwards - say what you will about the intent behind Crowley’s cursework, but Aziraphale could not deny that it had been laid down with extreme gentleness and great care to not leave as much as a scratch on the boy’s soul. Prying open the valve now and removing the only thing even halfway containing Adam’s volatile powers would do more harm than good, and he could under no circumstances proceed with the boy still wavering at the edges and nearly bursting with steam. No, he would have to simmer down, first.

But there, ah, there, was the crux of the matter.

Aziraphale did not have even the faintest clue how to accomplish that.

Aziraphale, the Esteemed Reader should know, prided (how sinful of him) himself on being non-confrontational. He enjoyed bickering with Crowley, certainly, and would fistfight God Herself over a select first edition, but by and large, Aziraphale, for one who had once been wielding the flaming sword now belonging to War, had very little taste for disagreement and violence. Sometimes he went in for a spot of passive-aggressiveness and discreet extermination of an issue, when the situation warranted it; but overall, a large part of what had made the Great War such an unappealing prospect in Aziraphale’s eyes had been the fact that there would be quite a lot of fighting, and he’d really rather avoid that sort of thing, ta very much.

(And if he did want a bit of havoc, avenging fury, and grim satisfaction of having won a fight… well, Aziraphale had had, until very recently, a demon at his beck and call who would ever so kindly go up and insult the sandwich shop’s owner’s mother, God rest her soul, for forgetting that Aziraphale had asked for no pickles.

He outsourced that sort of righteous angelic wrath nowadays, you see.)

It only turned out… well, when you went out of your way to avoid something as much as possible, you were quite, quite unprepared for the day confrontation found you and stubbornly refused to go away, while you were left without even a Crowley to sic on it.

Aziraphale normally avoided this sort of situation. Defusing it suddenly seemed like uncomfortably high expectations, and only doubly so considering he’d already burnt through nearly all of his reassurances and gentle calls to reason in the conversation so far. He had maybe three empty platitudes and half a “there there” left, and he couldn’t quite see himself reaching a peaceful, non-apocalyptic resolution on that alone.

So Aziraphale did what entities of his persuasion did when left with no other options: he prayed, as hard as he could, for God to send a miracle.

(Usually, he was of the opinion that praying was quite well and jolly good, but usually direct action was a great deal more efficient; an attitude which was, perhaps, not entirely pious, but had proven itself quite practical. Aziraphale preferred to pray social rather than business calls, and it was more evidence of his considerable distress that he was stooping so low - or, er, reaching so high - now.)

“Lord, so sorry to bother you,” Aziraphale babbled through the screeching of the wind, Dog’s helpless growl-whimpers, and Adam’s horrible, soul-rending sobs. “But, ah, I do seem to have gotten myself into a bit of a pickle here, you couldn’t see your way to, possibly-”

Adam screamed, and it reminded Aziraphale of the wailing of a thousand angels Falling in Lucifer’s stardusted wake, and the screech of chalk on hellish blackboards.

"Lord, please," he begged breathlessly, voice climbing an octave or two in his increasing hysteria, folding his hands together in prayer as best as he could while still wrestling an Antichrist-induced hurricane for his umbrella. “Please, he’s your grandson, please-!”

The funny thing was, Aziraphale had not really expected a response miracle to be forthcoming.* God was taking a hands-off approach this millennium, and as long as there were no apocalypsae or similar, Aziraphale was just fine with that, personally.

*God’s request inbox was almost constantly assaulted by new prayers, and most angels privately assumed that She had set up rather effective spam filters long ago and was no longer receiving anything except cute cat videos.

So, when a miraculous intervention presented itself, Aziraphale was wholly unprepared for it. Thankfully, neither was Adam, whose darkness-bleeding eyes snapped upwards, and widened to a size that seemed nearly anatomically impossible even with his entire shape vaguely distorted.

There was a sound like the shrieking of metal atoms scraping over oxygen molecules with some mild radiation wriggling in the back, a light, sharp and bright, and… no rain anymore, though the wind howled louder than ever.

Adam was no longer weeping, both his and Dog’s eyes fixed on the sky, misery wiped from his face for just a moment to make way to stunned surprise.

Aziraphale, very, very slowly, leaned to the side so he could glance up past the brim of his umbrella, only to see...

"Oh, Mother," Aziraphale breathed.

In the air above Tadfield hung a Flying Object that was only insofar Unidentified as it couldn't possibly be what it appeared to be…

...which was, in the bluntest of terms, a Flying Saucer.

The spaceship descended slowly in the visual equivalent of a whirlwind made out of rainbow lights, splashing all over the cold-wet-grey of the quarry. When its landing gear made contact with the ground, chalk stone cracked and crumbled dramatically, until, finally, its massive colourful-shiny bulk steadied and settled.

For a moment, it was very quiet. No more wind, no more rain, no more hyperlightspeed ion motors* humming sharply like a thousand space bees.

*Nowadays, most commercial and private vessels scoffed at hyperlightspeed ion motors, and much preferred vacuum-cold fusion. Government ships, however, were too beggars to be even remotely choosers, and accordingly made do.

“Wicked,” Adam breathed, because even in the middle of an apocalyptic breakdown, Adam Young could appreciate a good flying saucer.

‘Wicked’ was not, as such, the first word that came to Aziraphale’s mind; his was, thanks to a great deal of startled confusion in the face of this development, much ruder.

(Dog cowered, but still bravely positioned himself between his master and this new threat, making a passable show of growling at the evil big metal thing.)

And then, with an appropriately dramatic hiss, a door slid open and a ramp extended, dense white fog spilling down it.*

*This wonderfully cinematic effect was, to tell the truth, due to some minor leakages that should really be repaired one of these days, if only the billing department of Ursa Minor finally processed the application form.

A figure appeared in the foggy doorway, long-limbed and swaying as if it was not accustomed to upright gait, steadied by another figure so indescribably interesting we’re not even going to try describing it, and one that was so boring that it wouldn’t be worth describing, either. Two robots were also there, but hung back a little to discuss depictions of First Contact in what humans would call sci-fi literature, and alien civilisations called nature documentaries.*

*“Hello, I am D’avi5d @tten3orough, and today we will be observing the common Terran. Being of a somewhat shy and reclusive species, these little critters rarely venture past the solar system they were born in, and in fact, most never leave their planet in their lifetim- holy flypswickle, was that a red-haired Terran with wings flying past our camouflage moon camera!?”

The first figure stepped, or perhaps stumbled forward, fog swirling around it, down the gangway. Halfway down, just as the fog was beginning to thin, it spoke.

To Adam’s great disappointment, the alien visitor from beyond the stars did not say “we come in peace, humans”, or even “this is a laser blaster, prepare to die”.

To Aziraphale’s great joy, what the visitor did say, was an inarticulate sound along the lines of “ngk”.

Chapter Text

For an angel, Aziraphale had always been curiously lacking in faith.

Naturally, he believed, the way only celestial beings who had seen the whole thing with their own fire-wheel eyes could - but that was it, really. And to make the matter worse, on top of the believing, Aziraphale doubted.

Not much, mind. Certainly not enough to be shoved off a cloud and hurtle sharply downstairswards, thank you very much. Less, even, than Crowley doubted, though that was a high bar anyway.

But still, doubt he did, in quiet, unassuming ways. A moment of hesitation here, a slight crease of the forehead there. A little “if”, some use of the passive voice. Glances upwards that were not just hopeful - and perhaps a bit searching, you could get away with searchingness - but outright uncertain and mildly worried.

Somewhere in between 6000 years on earth, the Apocalypse, and falling quite irrevocably in love with a representative of The Enemy*, Aziraphale had… not lost, surely, but rather downsized his faith in the Almighty and Her Ineffable Plan, and Heaven as an institution.

*If only Heaven knew - it would make fantastic material for their Just Say No To Demons campaign, which outlined the grievous repercussions of mingling with vile devilspawn, particularly if you didn’t use protection, like holy water and binding circles.

…or condoms.

Aziraphale made do, putting his faith into humanity instead; which he felt sometimes justified in, and utterly disappointed by at other times. Humans contained multitudes, after all, and as long as the former outweighed the latter - which it did, by a reassuringly generous margin - he did not feel as if his faith was at all misplaced.

So he believed a little in divine ineffability, and a lot in the goodness at the heart of humanity; and all the rest went towards Crowley.

Because if there was one thing in all of existence Aziraphale believed in, it was him. His faith that Crowley was a dear old serpent at heart was unshakeable, as was the trust with which Aziraphale patiently waited to be rescued from spots of bother, or the love that filled his soft little angel heart to the brim. After all, who needed to rely on the grace of the ever-absent Almighty, when Crowley was right there and asking if Aziraphale wanted another parfait to get over the fright of being held up by a dastardly highwayman?*

*On that occasion, Crowley, also a highwayman at the time, had dashingly rescued Aziraphale long before he could get even mildly distressed, which had been very good of him, such a stalwart fellow Crowley was, and had not ravished Aziraphale at all in exchange for the rescue.

Pity.

The entire alpha centauri mess had made Aziraphale waver in his certainty that Crowley Would Always Be There When It Mattered just a smidgen, since, well.

He had not been.

Despite Aziraphale needing him most awfully.

Poor show, that.

Still, that had not stopped Aziraphale from believing. From having faith. From hope burning bright and warming in his chest, and his heart knowing, in its very depths, that Crowley would rather walk backwards into Hell, and then a pool of Holy Water, filled with particularly Christian piranhas,* than ever abandon Aziraphale.

*Most piranhas were in fact agnostic, except for a small group in a side arm of the amazon river, which had discovered shinto buddhism in the late 1970s and taken it up with enthusiasm.

So, when Anthony J. Crowley stepped off the ambassadorial flying saucer, Flynn Hastings waving a boringly grey handkerchief in goodbye, and his spouse kurblarging a sequined piece of sparkly cloth cloth at his side, Aziraphale was far less surprised to see him than he might have been.

Instead, something deep in him sighed, nodded, and murmured contentedly “well, that’s alright then,” only barely managing not to tack a “took him long enough”* on at the end.

*Considering it took this humble author three years to finally write about his return, Aziraphale was indeed quite right to be a bit stroppy about it.

Crowley flying in to save him at the very last minute had been a foregone conclusion, as far as Aziraphale’s heart was concerned, and now that he was here, all was…

Not right in the world, not yet. But it was getting there.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale exclaimed with the chime of heavenly bells ringing in his voice, heart beating like the wings of a hummingbird in his chest as relief and joy flooded through him. “Oh, my dear, thank God you’re-”

Crowley strode* right past him, making a rather aggressive beeline - also known as a waspline - for Adam.

*He strode as if his knees were only the start of all that was wobbly about him, legs barely keeping him up, as if he’d forgotten how to walk and couldn’t be arsed to remember… which ultimately wasn’t very unusual for Crowley. Not even Aziraphale, most experienced avid Crowley-watcher in the world, picked up on the subtle differences.

“Well.” Aziraphale blinked, more than a little hurt at the complete and utter lack of acknowledgement, and expressed it in the only way he knew:

“Well I never!”

Adam, meanwhile, seemed well and truly out of his element, blinking owlishly past Crowley at the door of the flying saucer closing again. He was still quite upset and heartbroken, but the churning cocktail of emotion in his chest had eased its pressure somewhat with the addition of awe at the sight of genuine aliens, relief at the sight of Crowley who was a clever magical adult who knew what he was on about,* and a significant deal of confusion, because awesome things like aliens should no longer happen to Adam now that his powers were bound and only came out to destroy things.

*Adam thought that Crowley was a great deal more suave and capable than Aziraphale, mostly because Crowley wore sleek black suits and secret agent sunglasses, and Aziraphale looked like the humanoid equivalent of his grandmother’s favourite armchair.

Being a rebellious young preteen with a developing taste for the occult, Adam had a great deal of respect for demons who dressed like members of organised crime, and considerable suspicion towards the sort of angels that looked like R.P. Tyler would approve of them (if only they weren’t so obviously homosexual).

“Hey kid,” Crowley rasped, space dust and indescribable agony clogging his throat.

“Hullo, Mister Crowley,” Adam responded reflexively, doom-red eyes still big as saucers as he watched one of the flying variety take off somewhere past Crowley’s shoulder - which took a few tries. Government ships.

(“Oh, hello Aziraphale,” muttered Aziraphale under his breath, “nice to see you, sorry for not answering your calls and/or prayers, how have you been…”

Crowley, largely impervious to passive-aggressiveness after fighting in the trenches of Hell’s Great Bitchiness Wars of 314 AD, didn’t even spare him a glance.)

“You,” Crowley pointed at Adam without preamble*, drawing his attention away from the increasingly-distant UFO, “did not tear a-any relationships apart. Got that?”

*Thank (literally) God for divine CCTV (Convenient Crowley Tele-Vision) exposition.

“But-!” Adam protested.

“No. And certainly not-” Crowley vaguely gestured over his shoulder towards Aziraphale, and then snatched his hand back as if burnt. Aziraphale tried not to take that personally, and failed. “The thing you hnng- h-have to understand about adults, Adam, is that we need no help from children whatsoever for our relationships to go to Hell. Sometimes, love works out just fine, sometimes it eventually crashes and burns, and any fights we might have over you - not because of you - are really due to problems we have with each other. If everything breaks down due to outside influence, then chances are the foundation was never solid in the first place. You see?”

Crowley was talking very quickly, only picking up steam in his hasty rambling, half afraid that if he stopped, his aching lungs would not manage to draw enough air to continue. Not that he needed air, necessarily, but it was certainly one of the few things that could still help, at this point.

“If witch girl and her boyfriend can’t find a good middle ground in their stances on magic, then m-maybe, nghk, they’re better off without each other. It happens.”

(With some measure of dread, Aziraphale realised that Crowley might not be talking only about young Anathema and Newt here.

Better off without each other, indeed! Aziraphale could sit down and simply cry his eyes out, he really could.)

“...but I don’ want ‘Thema to be sad and alone,” Adam said, in a very small voice. His feet were touching the ground again, and Dog was pressing his entire body against Adam’s shin, snout pushing into his palm. “Mister Aziraphale was sad and alone wifout you, Mister Crowley.”

“Arnghk,” Crowley choked, and flinched as if struck.

“She will never be alone for as long as she has you to care for her so dearly, Adam.” Aziraphale interrupted, more gently than he felt. “Nothing lasts forever, especially not relationships, and sometimes- excuse me…” he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed at suspicious moisture in his eyes. Crowley still hadn’t as much as looked at him. “Sometimes, it may be better for two people to part ways, if… if at least one of them wishes it to be so. They’ll still be there for you, and love you, of course, but only… separately.”

“Oh.” Adam chewed his lip, and only the faintest of tremors went through the fabric of reality all bunched up around him. “Like Brian’s cousin’s parents. They were shoutin’ at each other all the time*, until they divorced, an’ then there was no more of that, an’ Brian’s cousin got double allowance an’ gifts for Christmas.”

*They also cheated on each other, both with the same yoga teacher (and in very adventurous positions), but the adults involved in the matter had taken great care to keep these details from the Them’s ears.

“Precisely!” Aziraphale’s relieved smile was a bit brittle at the edges. “And perhaps it will not even come to that, since, once you, er, un-stop Ms. Device and Mr. Pulsifer, they might… manage to sit down and have a civil conversation about their fight, and realise that the love they hold for each other is strong enough to make them set aside their differences and put this unfortunate argument behind them.” A hopeful, plaintive note snuck into his voice. “Wouldn’t you say so, Crowley?”

Crowley did not say so.

Crowley didn’t say anything at all, aside from a very, very faint whimper.

Adam considered that at length, and the universe held its breath around him.

“...I s’ppose.” He finally muttered. “But wha’ about Pepper and the Them? They’re not grownups, and it is my fault that we… that she doesn’t like me no more.”

Tears slid down Adam’s cheeks, droplets large and unnatural. Above them, the rain was starting up again, and Aziraphale immediately stepped forward, holding the umbrella more over Crowley’s head than his own.

6000 years since the wall atop the Eastern Gate, and nothing had really changed at all.

“Does that… does that mean we’re better off wifout each other, too?” Metaphysical binding sigils glowed and strained, grief bubbling out of Adam’s physical form like magma*. “I dunno about that, b’cause I do like Pepper, but her not likin’ me makes me so hurt an’ angry that I’m scared of hurting her, so m-maybe it would be better if we, we never again-”

*Wensleydale was not present, but if he were, he would point out to us that, “actually, magma is always under the surface, and if it bursts out of a volcano, it is in fact called lava. There was a very interesting comic about it in Wonders of Nature and Science last week,” after which we would probably lose interest.

“Why did she say she didn’t like you, Adam? What were her precise words?” Crowley interrupted, shakily. If Adam constantly had the air of an explosion waiting to happen, then Crowley’s general bearing was painfully reminiscent of a house of playing cards in an earthquake. “S’important, the, the wording of things.”

(Satan, if there was one thing his existence under this hellish curse had taught him, it was that.)

“Um,” said Adam. A distant-close rumble of thunder, which might have come from the sky, or from underneath the earth, or perhaps Adam himself. “Pepper… she said tha’ it was girls she liked now. Stupid girls wif stupid cooties.”

Adam paused.

“She didn’t say that last part, I did.” He amended. “But she meant it that way. An’ then she said that she didn’t like boys.”

Another pause.

“I’m a boy,”* Adam whispered, in a voice as tiny as an atom, and as vast as all of Creation. “So now Pep likes stupid girls ‘stead of me.”

*In all technicality, Adam was as much a boy as Aziraphale and Crowley were; which is to say, not really, but most of the time they preferred to appear as such and be thought of as such, so for all intents and purposes, they were.

“Hngk,” said Crowley.

“Ah,” said Aziraphale.

“Woof,” said Dog, who felt excluded.

If the world were kind, this would have been the moment Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged a meaningful look, and perhaps held hands, and moved forward as a united front.

However, the world was unkind, love was dead, and Aziraphale and Crowley both started to speak over each other, then paused, then spoke at the same time again, then paused for longer.

(Adam shifted from side to side uneasily. Barely-controlled Antichrist powers or not, there were some adult-y things he’d rather not touch even with a ten-foot pole of infernal magic.)

“There are… different types of liking someone, Adam.” Aziraphale finally pointed out with great delicacy. “I believe young Ms. Pepper might have been alluding to the fact that she… well…”

Aziraphale trailed off, as he had learned all the terms humans used to explain these matters in his Discreet Gentlemen’s Club at the turn of the century (no, the one before that one), and now suspected the euphemisms were all terribly obscure* and outdated at this point.

*In that particular club, there had even been a bit of a trend to refer to one’s husband-in-all-but-law as “my wily adversary”, and the Esteemed Reader will surely never guess who inspired it…

“D’you want to kisssss girls?” Crowley threw in, hissing with visible strain. Aziraphale tried not to be too upset over Crowley finding his presence alone such an ordeal, but wasn’t entirely successful.

“Yuck.” Adam grimaced. “No.”

“Well, Pepper does. And doesssn’t want to kiss boys.”

“But,” Adam’s brow furrowed, “she’s a girl. Girls kiss boys, ‘specially at the end of movies when all the exciting bits are already done.”

Then, he added “ew” for good measure, because Adam had very little fondness for the whole kissing business.

“Yeah. Well. Most girls kiss boys, some kiss girls, some kiss both, and ssssome neither.” Crowley explained, and tried not to think about how some demons wished they could kiss angels. “So, w-when your Pepper said, said she liked girls-”

“Oh,” Adam said, a tremulous smile on his face; and above them, the sun broke through the clouds. “She meant like-like! In the kissy way!”

“In so many words, yes.” Aziraphale muttered, himself quite caught up on the thought of angels kissing demons, because of course he was.

“Then I’ve been really quite beastly to her.” Adam’s expression clouded again, as did the sky. “Tellin’ her she can’t like girls that way,* just because I was a jealous stupidface, when there was nofink to be jealous about, anyway.”

*Sometime soon, Adam would learn the meaning of the word “homophobic”, and be quite appalled at himself for having once acted like it.

“Then, perhaps,” Aziraphale piped up, “you should apologise to her for your unthinking words, which you are very sorry about and did not mean that way. Make clear that it is your fondest hope that you two could be friends again, and promise never to say such beastly things to him ever again.”

“Her,” Adam corrected.

“Of course,” Aziraphale agreed distantly, pleading eyes fixed on the back of Crowley’s head.

(Crowley, for his part, made a face like a sob, and put everything he had left into not collapsing like a wet sack of particularly snake-y bones from heartbreak and that bloody buggering curse.)

“...yeah. Guess I should.” Adam, as a rule, did not like to apologise, which had less to do with him being the Antichrist, and more with him being a pre-teen boy. “And, Mister Crowley… could you…?”

“Hmwah?” said Crowley, who had realised, somewhere in a sea of excruciating curse pain, that he could no longer feel his tail (since he was too out of it to recall he was not in snake form at the moment), and had just been about to panic about it. “Hrgk. Yeah.”

He reached over into Adam’s aura, picked at a dangling spell-thread with shaking fingers, and then proceeded to unravel the whole binding net, not unlike the unfortunate incident of the knit-wool sweater and the playful cat your humble author witnessed in 2015.*

*There had been no survivors, only a great deal of loose yarn.

The metaphorical pressure kettle, now off the hotplate, let out the very last of its steam in a relieved little sigh. Around Adam, colour returned to the world, and he no longer looked quite so much like a natural disaster and a nuclear meltdown mixed together and crammed into the narrow confines of a small boy.

“Tha’s much better,” Adam smiled again, and this time it was a full, true smile, all teeth and the innocent joy of a happy little spawn of satan, free of his bounds. Oh, Crowley was so glad for him - and, naturally, green with envy. “Thank you, Mister Crowley.”

“Hn,” said Crowley, far beyond words at this point. Something deep in him was unravelling, too, except it really, really should have stayed ravelled.

Dog barked, running in a happy little circle, licked Adam’s hands, and was generally feeling a great deal of sympathetic doggy joy at Adam’s own relieved happiness.*

*Dog was a simple dog, and 90% of his emotions directly mirrored Adam’s - the remaining 10% being reserved for the anger of the righteous and vindictive glee he only experienced when locked in eternal combat with the neighbours’ cat.

“Yeah, boy, m’fine now. Good boy!” Adam let Dog slobber all over his face, ruffling his fur for a moment, before glancing up at Crowley (ashen-faced, swaying like a reed in the wind, pained in a way Adam could not only see but See now) and Aziraphale (in a right heartbroken tiff over Crowley ignoring him, but determined to keep his stiff upper lip from wobbling and to only get teary-eyed a little bit).

“Right then. I’ve got to go now,” Adam announced. “To un-stop ‘Thema and Newt, an’ say sorry to Pepper. And, of course,” his face brightened considerably, “to tell the Them about t’aliens!”*

*Aliens, all the Them agreed, were the coolest thing on the planet and beyond it, and Adam had some hope that their mention would smooth things over somewhat. After all, regardless of who of the Them liked girls or boys or both or neither, they did all like aliens.

“You do that, Adam.” Aziraphale agreed indulgently.

But Adam didn’t leave yet. “And you said… um. You said you’d teach me, how to stay in control and such…? Both o’ you?”

“Of course, dear boy,” Aziraphale assured him warmly, even though he and Crowley had both, ironically, flinched at the “ both”. “We shall do anything in our supernatural powers to assist you in, well, finding inner peace and keeping your powers in check.”

“Tha’s good. I do know about inner peace an’ zen, the New Aquarian has a column on medititation.”* A decisive nod. “I’ll practise that, maybe, until you can come and tutor me proper. Bye, Mister Aziraphale, thanks, Mister Crowley!”

*“Imagine before you, a peaceful garden… with flowers, and trees… and bigfoot in a wedding dress…”

Adam headed for the edge of the quarry… but then paused.

Turned.

“An’ you two are gonna be fine as well?” He asked, uncertainly, too-much-seeing eyes flickering once more between Crowley’s curse-ravaged not-quite-soul, and Aziraphale’s abject misery. “Anyfin’ I can do to help…?”

“Oh, no, no, we’ll be quite alright, really!” Aziraphale hurried to demur. “Don’t you worry about it, dear child. Crowley and I will talk, too, and figure it all out by ourselves. Won’t we, Crowley?”

When Crowley made no comment, Aziraphale discreetly nudged him with his elbow, which prompted Crowley to jump and make a sound that one could only very generously interpret as assent.

(Is that true, Mister Crowley? asked Adam’s voice in Crowley’s head* in the meantime - except it wasn’t quite Adam’s voice the way other people heard it, but the one Adam himself heard in his own head whenever he spoke, which sounded a good few years older and a little bit like demonic chanting around the edges. Are you gonna be alright?

*Adam was not normally one to hesitate to say anything he thought out loud, but Crowley was projecting FOR ANYONE’S SAKE PLEASE I DO NOT WANT AZIRAPHALE TO KNOW with such horrifying intensity that Adam had opted to use his inside - the most insidest - voice.

Oh, we’ll be just tickety-boo, Crowley thought back shakily, Adam’s blunt telepathy scraping his already-hurting neurons raw. Tickety-bloody-boo.

Doesn’t much look like it. A tidal wave of clumsy concern that made Crowley wince and remember what God had said about the risk of his head going pop. Are you sure I can’t help? I could try and fix it. Or make it so you were never even cursed in the first place. I could, I think.

That’s… Everything Crowley ever wanted. The easy fix he dreamed of at night. Freedom. ...not a good idea, Adam.

If Adam employed the same blunt force for telepathy as he did for un-cursing, there probably wouldn’t be anything left of Crowley afterwards except for a few snake scales, a pair of sunglasses, and a vague cloud of love for Aziraphale, which no power below, on, or above earth could ever dispel. And if Adam changed the past so that Crowley never had been cursed, well…

The world would be much, much worse for it, for a start, Apple and Apocalypse and all - and that wasn’t even touching on the inevitable paradox. Crowley had seen enough time travellers suffer under a hereditary curse and go back in time to un-curse their ancestors, only to never have had reason to travel back in the first place, putting the curse right back onto their bloodline. Happened more often than you’d think.*

*Privately, Crowley had always thought that people who were already cursed should definitely not stick their fingers into the temporal stream and fiddle around with it - but man’s hubris was infinite, and nobody trusted the well-meant advice of demons. Even if it came from a place of curse solidarity.

But you’ll tell Mister Aziraphale. Won’t you? Adam pressed. It hurt. You’ll let him help you. He’s the only one who can, ‘sides me.

Yeah. Sure. Crowley mentally ngk-ed. ’Course.

If Adam could read the lie off of his brainwaves, then he was at least merciful enough not to mention it.)

“Well, alright then. If you both say so,” shrugged Adam, who might be able to see into people’s souls and telepathically communicate with their minds, but did not understand grownups even remotely well enough to second-guess his quasi-godfathers on this. “Come on, Dog!”

And within moments, he was gone, free and untethered, with all of existence heaving a relieved little sigh as it could finally bend to Adam’s will again.

This left Aziraphale and Crowley, stood side by side under Aziraphale’s tartan umbrella (somewhat pointless now that it had stopped raining and a picture-perfect sun had confusedly made its way back into position) - and neither of them looking at the other, for very different reasons.

Finally, Aziraphale closed his umbrella, adjusted his bowtie, and said “well,” reaching out to gingerly lay his hand on Crowley’s arm.

This was meant as a lead-up to a heartfelt apology, an earnest plea for Crowley to hear him out, and an invitation to discuss the future of their relationship - oh, please, let there still be a future! - over dinner and drinks at Tadfield’s single Indian restaurant.*

*Creatively named The Tad Mahal, and a target of R.P. Tyler’s ire from its founding in 2003 onwards - until 2011, when he had finally dared to eat there, and had subsequently started buying samosas to go every Sunday while walking his dog.

But then Crowley spun away from Aziraphale’s touch, forced out something like “gottagobacktoalphacentauribye” and did a very poor job of convincing his wobbly-stick sad excuses for legs to flee.

"Crowley!" Aziraphale exclaimed, startled. "Crowley wait-"

A heaving shudder ran through Crowley's body, almost a spasm - it looked painful, at least.

"S-sorry, angel." Crowley stammered, trying to evade Aziraphale's reaching hand once more. "Need - hnnnnnngh - need to go, back, back to- away from y-"

He broke off into a groan, and could only just keep himself from doubling over.

Aziraphale flinched back...

...but then something like steel seeped into his demeanour, and he straightened his lapels forcefully.

"No, Crowley." He said firmly. "We must talk, and I will not let you run- CROWLEY!"

Crowley had spread his wings, stumbling under their weight (and, though Aziraphale did not realise this, a great deal of curse-pain), ready to fly.

Aziraphale jumped forward, gripping whatever part of Crowley he could reach, and screwed his eyes shut. His thoughts turned into a huddled mess of home, stay, mine, stay, home, home, HOME - and the earth dropped away beneath their feet.

Chapter Text

Existence whirled past them, a maelstrom of light and sound and force, a lepton here, a myon there, and- oh, see that carbon atom waving to you in the distance?

A photon that had been peacefully existing in a dual state found itself observed and decided on being a particle; time dilated relative to them, and space did a strange little twisty movement that made Aziraphale yelp and hold Crowley tighter.*

*Crowley let out a defeated little sound of pain and giving-up, and then went entirely limp; but Aziraphale was hardly in a state to notice.

A little swirl, a bit of vibration, and all the molecules danced a little waltz* - until, finally, they tumbled out of this strange in-between state into the middle of the bookshop.

*Molecules were fantastic ballroom dancers, though they regularly embarrassed themselves at Dance Dance Revolution.

Aziraphale coughed and gasped for air.

(Not that he needed to, but Aziraphale happened to be one of the few angels to pass the dreaded duolungo exam* Angelic Ressources had demanded in the early days as proof that angels could handle their bodies in an inconspicuous, natural manner, and was therefore quite the natural at lung management.

*The exam had eventually been abolished, since it turned out nine in ten angels failed. Spectacularly.

To quote the transcript of Sandalphon's duolungo exam: "How did you even make your limbic system DO that!? No, no, never mind, I don't want to know. Oh dear Mother, it’s everywhere!")

"Now, really, my dear, what a fuss." Aziraphale muttered crossly, pushing himself up into a sitting position and doing his best to brush leftover tachyons from his coat. "I understand if you're upset with me, really I do, what I said was... quite inexcusable, quite. But one must talk about such things, Crowley!"

 Crowley didn't respond.

Aziraphale huffed. More of the silent treatment, was it?

"I apologise, if that's what you need to hear. Really, my dear, I'm terribly sorry, I regretted it the moment I said it, or very near as. You... oh, Crowley, you are my best friend, please never doubt that, and friends can work around such things. Can't we?"

Still no answer. Aziraphale deflated visibly.

"Poor Adam needed help, of course he did, but from both of us. You and me, Crowley. The Arrangement. Is that all past and gone now?"

Crowley offered no denial, and that was as good as confirmation.

"Just because I said-? Oh, my dear, honestly. We've fought before. Talk to me."

He glanced over. Crowley wouldn't even look in his direction, only kept sulking on the floor.

"You're a hypocrite, is what you are!" Aziraphale snapped, now properly incensed, and more than a little weepy. "I at least forgave you! But no, no, off to the stars without word, without a message, without even hearing me out, oh, I should throw you right out of here, clearly it is done between..."

Aziraphale trailed off.

"Between..."

He glanced back at Crowley's still form.

Now, by and large, angelic instincts were… quite rubbish, really.

Aziraphale was the type to feel not even a twinge of unease when the Antichrist came into his powers, and barely even stumbled when Satan rose up to tear the world asunder. He could walk into a Black Mass and later believe he’d been at a quite lovely Bible Studies class.

But now, now...

His intuition took a good long look at Crowley, wings akimbo, lying as he had fallen, and hesitantly gave Aziraphale’s coattails a gentle tug, pointing and saying "...that's not right, is it...?"

"Crowley?" Aziraphale whispered, voice cracking with sudden panic. "Are you... are you quite..."

He crawled over to him, mindful of the wings.*

*They were in a dreadful state, very unusual for a proper well-groomed demon such as him, and if Aziraphale had paid his attention a little more closely, he might've noticed the curse scars beneath the layer of five-dimensional detritus.

"Please... please say something my dear, I really am quite worried now, that's very unkind of you, not funny at all... Crowley...?"

He gently placed a hand on Crowley's shoulder.

A soft whimper, and nothing more.

"Oh, no. No, no, no." Aziraphale gently turned him on his back, as much as the wings allowed.

Crowley's face was visibly lined with agony, cold sweat clumping his dishevelled hair together, and the less said about the state of his aura, the better.

"Hush, hush." Aziraphale cradled him in his arms, only just curtailing the urge to press a kiss to Crowley's forehead. "You're safe, my dear, I will- I’ll heal you! Yes, no problem at all, one miracle healing coming up!"

Despite the chipper facade, fear was bubbling up from the very pit of his stomach, and he gripped Crowley tighter. "You just have to tell me where the pain is, dear fellow, whatever is the matter with you, oh, tell me..."

Crowley' eyes slid open very, very slowly, blearily attempting to focus on the radiant vision hovering above him, haloed by the bookshop lamps. It was a beautiful sight - and with the way Crowley’s vision was getting increasingly blurry and red-tinted, it would likely be among his last.

It was then and there that Crowley decided that Aziraphale might not need to know, but, perhaps, just perhaps, should.*

*The realisation could’ve come sooner, but better late than never, eh? Eleventh hour and all that.

Crowley should have told him, should have told him all along, or at least years ago, with the Arrangement. Should’ve told him about Choices, about freedom, and about the immaterial chains Crowley had been dragging around with himself like a Dickensian ghost - Aziraphale would appreciate the literary reference, at least - trusting the angel to use the knowledge wisely and kindly.

Aziraphale might be just a bit of a bastard deep down, a little mean, a little selfish, a lot holier-than-thou, the old hypocrite; but that spicy centre Crowley so loved to see glimpses of was still covered in layers upon layers of a good and kind nature, and a sweetness that, Crowley had come to reflect, was not angelic, but rather more human.

(Or, perhaps, it was all Aziraphale himself.)

Aziraphale would have helped. Would have tried. Would have been careful, and never sent Crowley off into exile halfway across the galaxy, however inadvertently. Crowley had been a bloody stubborn fool, making things difficult for himself with his secrecy and his pride and desperate wish to shield Aziraphale from the corruption of Hell carved all over Crowley’s own not-quite-soul.

And now, lying in Aziraphale’s arms (and in terrible agony), Crowley realised that he was the worst type of hypocrite, and had made the biggest Mistake of all. He’d been yearning so terribly for freedom of Choice that he pushed it onto humanity at every opportunity, but at the same time…

He’d given Adam to the Youngs for a human childhood devoid of both Heavenly and Hellish influence, so he could grow into himself freely - and then locked his powers away at the first chance he got. And it was just the same with him giving Eve the Apple of Knowledge - and then turning around to keep rather vital knowledge about himself from the angel he loved for 6000 years.

Well, no more of that now.

I might be very nearly too late - Crowley could feel his meta-infernal essence slowly slouching off under the persistent burning of an angry curse, punishing his defiance too viciously for Crowley to endure much longer - but, at least, Aziraphale would finally know.

Even if it was only at the very End - not of All Things, but certainly of All Crowley.

“A-” Crowley rasped. The curse felt like a monstrous beast’s fangs digging into his throat, unwilling to be spoken of. “A-angel. I- curse. There’s- hrgk- curse.”*

*An insufficient way to summarise Crowley’s millennia of subtle low-frequency constant torment, but there it was.

“A curse?” Aziraphale blinked. “Goodness gracious, are people still cursing one another in this day and age!?”*

*Cursing had gone somewhat out of fashion among divine and demonic beings in the late 14th century, in part because a certain snake demon of our acquaintance might or might not have spread rumours in Hell that Heaven was giving up on the practice, which of course necessitated Hell retiring it as well to satisfy demonic pride - and Heaven promptly followed suit when they heard of it, to satisfy angelic superiority.

“Oldhnnnngh curse,” Crowley only barely managed to force out. He didn’t have many words left in him. “Very old.”

“Oh dear.” Aziraphale’s brows were drawn together in concern. “Let me have a look-see, then, and heal whatever’s the matter.”

Aziraphale, oh Aziraphale, my angel. You can’t, thought Crowley, watching the normally terribly enticing sight of Aziraphale pushing up his sleeves with detached exhaustion. I’m sorry for never telling you, sorry for dying in your arms with you powerless to stop it, sorry for your words having delivered the killing blow…

But it was too late for apologies now. Too late for a lot of things.

Always too late.

At even the lightest touch of Aziraphale’s Holy Grace to Crowley’s wretched soul, the curse buried its teeth deeper in his very being and ripped it apart chunk by chunk - and he couldn't bite back a strangled gasp of pain.

“Oh, Crowley. Oh, my dear, dear boy, I’m sorry, I’ll be gentle…” Aziraphale was babbling apologetically, hands fluttering all over, angelic powers prodding and poking - and Crowley knew he'd found the scabbed scars of the curse when he froze from one second to the next.

A horrified look, as if he could hardly believe his thousands of true-form eyes, turning heartbroken when Crowley managed a minuscule nod to confirm that, yes, this was, unfortunately, exactly what it looked like.

"Goodness." Aziraphale swallowed. Curses of this calibre were considered awfully inhumane - inangelic, indemonic - now, had been for centuries. It was not the sort of thing whose victims survived for long, either. "But then..."

The horrible penny dropped, and Aziraphale slapped one hand over his mouth in horror, as if he could force back his unthinking words.

"I told you..." He whispered through his fingers. "Told you to..."

"Y'didn't know." Crowley rasped, pawing weakly at Aziraphale's sleeve to console him. "Not your..."

"Crowley, why?" Aziraphale breathed. "Why stay close to me for 6000 years, if this is what it- what I did to you? You could've left, alpha centauri, and you did, why did you come back, why..."

Crowley's body felt so numb, and he didn't try to move lest he found he couldn't. The world was fading around him, a dark red encroaching on the very edges of his vision, narrowing it down around Aziraphale’s beautifully-glowing tear-filled eyes. Not a bad sight to go out with, he supposed.

He tried to speak - he didn't even know what he could say that he hadn't tried and failed to tell Aziraphale a million times over - but no words made it past his lips.

"Why?" Aziraphale asked again, weak and faint, holding Crowley close.

Mouth still working uselessly to form often-thought words, because, because you're you and I'm me and I really wish that we could be us, because, because you looked beautiful up on that wall, because you gave your sword away, because, because, I thought we didn't have long, six thousand years gone in the blink of an eye, because, because, because I love you and can't bear to be without you, because, Aziraphale, because your name is my Lord’s Prayer and my love confession, because I see Heaven in your eyes, because Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale, I love you more than life itself, Crowley gazed up at him, drinking him in, as if that was the last chance he'd ever get to see him.

(It might well be.)

And it was answer enough.

"Oh." Understanding dawned on Aziraphale's face, bringing with it something unbearably tender. "Oh, Crowley... really?"

Crowley tried his best to smile and nod, a tear escaping the corner of his eye and rolling down his cheek.

"Dear boy." Aziraphale muttered, brittle with barely contained joy and earnest remorse. "You're… not alone in that. I, too… forgive me, forgive me my cruel words, I never meant..."

Crowley meant to shake his head but coughed instead, tasting copper and electricity on his tongue. The look of horror on Aziraphale's face strongly suggested the wetness on his lips was blood.

"Oh no, no... Crowley, my dear Crowley, I take it back, you hear? You are welcome in my presence, always have been, don't…” A soft, shaky sob. “This damned curse! I didn’t mean it for longer than an instant, oh Mother, I am so sorry…”

Crowley’s eyes were steadily slipping shut, breath coming ever fainter, the heart nestled in his chest slowing its beating to a crawl - and, worse, metaphysical feathers and scales were dulling somewhere in the ether, growing stiff and brittle, falling off his true-form as the curse burn into his non-skin. The pain was unbearable, and Crowley too weak to even scream.

He took a last, long look at Aziraphale, and thought, idly, how he would have wished to see a smile, one last time, before the end… but, ah. This was fine too, these frantic, panicked looks, tears and snot and puffy skin notwithstanding - because it was Aziraphale, who was beautiful, and infinitely beloved by Crowley.

“Is there no way to break this curse? Nothing I c-can do? Oh, Crowley, Crowley…”

Consciousness was a weary burden. Crowley was glad to finally be permitted to leave it by the wayside.

(And really, when it came to dying, Crowley had always hoped that he would one day have the privilege of expiring in Aziraphale’s arms, possibly during Armageddon, ideally sometime after it.

So this was alright, really.

Quite alright.

Quite…

…)

“No!” Aziraphale cried, when Crowley went even-more-noodle-limp-than-usual in his arms. “You can’t simply die Crowley! I’ll not allow it! If I- I command you to live, Crowley, do you hear me? Live, damn you! I’ll never order you to do another thing, but you must live! Wake up! Speak to me! LIVE!”

You might hope, dear reader, that this is what might save Crowley. To be ordered to wake, to answer, to live, the curse forcing him to.

You would, regrettably, be wrong.

One cannot be ordered to die... and neither can one be ordered to live. These things were not up to even the most powerful curses.

So all this did was create more conflicting orders that clashed in Crowley's soul, fighting for dominance, only ripping deeper into him the further he slipped out of consciousness.

Crowley was dying.

And Aziraphale knew it, for all that he wished it were not so.

"Oh no, no… please live, don't die, oh please, stay with me..." Aziraphale gasped wetly, cradling Crowley's head against his chest. "I cannot lose you, please Crowley, I've not even properly told you that I- the most important thing, you must know, please…"

Crowley did not respond. Not even with the tiniest little "ngk", as he would if he was merely lost for words, or that soppy look he reserved only for Aziraphale, the Bentley, and sometimes humans being utterly marvellous.

He wasn't breathing, but then again, demons rarely breathed.

"I need to tell you." Aziraphale whispered into his hair. "You have to hear me say it. I've imagined it so often, the look in your eyes, the way you'd say it back - I always hoped you would, I am ever so glad I wasn't wrong - and oh, your lips as we kiss... wake up, my dear, please. Wake up so I can tell you how much I love you. Because I do, I do love you, so much. More than earth, more than the Almighty Herself, Heaven help me, even more than my books, for thousands of years I was terrified of how much I loved you, until I realised that there was nothing at all to fear and everything to rejoice over, oh please..."

Aziraphale’s shoulders shook with a sob as he bent down and pressed a tear-wet kiss to the side of Crowley’s face, atop the snake mark.

“Crowley,” he whispered, though he was really saying Crowley’s name the way only divine or occult beings could say it; like it was more than a name, an acknowledgement of everything the entity before him was, had been, and would be. “I love you so.”

And, well. The thing about curses is that, when you get right down to it, they're ridiculously easy to break.

Didn't you know?

Don't feel ashamed, Dear Reader, neither did Crowley. Or Aziraphale, or all the demons of Hell and all the angels of Heaven - though Adam, you might have noticed, had a very strong suspicion.

For some reason - some ineffable reason, we might even say - celestial beings had never figured out that there was a trick to it, a simple shortcut. One might almost call it a cheat code, if any of the beings in question had even the vaguest idea of what that was.*

*Hastur still thought that an internet was something you captured interns in.

Humans, well now.

Humans have it all figured out. For quite a while now, actually.

It's in all their fairytales, after all. The way to break a curse, any type of curse, is jotted down in all the margins, scribbled over every page, mentioned twice and thrice over.

Love.

The way to break a curse is always, always love.*

*It even prevents new enchantments, since a heart that loves can never be bound. Had Crowley refused the order after meeting Aziraphale, after falling in love with an angel and humanity and all of earth, Beelzebub could not have touched him.

And it stands to reason that never, in all of existence ever, had there been a love so great, so powerful, so pure, as the love Aziraphale and Crowley harboured for each other.

It was this boundless love, at last spoken and released from the secret confines of their hearts, that settled over Crowley's still form, bundling him up in affection, spreading tenderness through him, soft and warm like a healing balm over the wounds the curse had ripped into him.

And sometimes - most times, even - love is powerless against Death.

But other times, rarely, once in a blueish-pink-with-yellow-polka-dots moon, Death would see two hearts that belonged together, murmur to himself NOT TODAY, NOT YET,* and leave them be.

*But one day, yes, one day their time would come.

All things die. Some are just better at procrastinating than others.

Six-thousand-year-old carved sigils suddenly lost all the power they'd ever had, and Crowley drew a shuddering breath.

It was to be his first as a free demon.

Aziraphale stopped crying instantly.*

*Well, almost. Five tears, half a sob, and a mildly disgusting "snnnrk" sound still made it through.

He blinked down at Crowley, who was currently wondering if this could conceivably be either Heaven or Hell - or some other afterlife - if it had Aziraphale in it.

Crowley opened his mouth, about to croak something incredibly cool and suave, a line worthy of James Bond,* like "hnnnnghwha?", or some such.

*Sean Connery. Obviously.

"No, don't try to speak yet!" Aziraphale blurted out immediately. "Only breathe for a while, yes? Don't-"

"I'll speak if I want to, angel!" Crowley rasped indignantly.*

*He had not been entirely conscious for most of the love confessions, or he would've responded quite a bit differently.

A moment of silence.

Crowley blinked, very slowly and deliberately.

"Order me to do something." He finally said.

Aziraphale shot him the kind of teary-eyed look that implied he was rather too emotional still for this kind of thing, and couldn't Crowley just lie back and let himself be fussed over?

"C'mon, angel." Crowley urged.

"Er." Aziraphale's first thought was ‘kiss me’, but that was not a thing one ordered someone, especially not when there was a fair chance they would be unable to refuse.

"Sing. Sing that bebop song you like, the one where a member of the royal family confesses murder to his poor lady mother and-"

Crowley couldn't help but let out an incredulous laugh. "Aziraphale, that is the worst description of Bohemian Rhapsody I have ever, in all my life-"

"Oh, hush and sing like a bloody nightingale." Aziraphale muttered, only a little bit tetchy. Watching his beloved demon nearly die in his arms did that to him.

"No," Crowley said, and grinned like a loon.

He felt no urge whatsoever to belt out a timeless Queen hit. None.*

*Well. A little urge, maybe, but we firmly believe that everybody wishes at all times to sing Queen, in their heart of hearts.

“...you refused a direct order,” Aziraphale realised, a little slow on the uptake, but under the circumstances the Esteemed Reader surely does not expect lightning-quick thinking. “So you are…”

"I'm free." Crowley said, full of wonder, as it was just beginning to sink in. Never again would he fear the next word out of a demon's mouth - or, Someone Forbid, Aziraphale's - never again feel the burn and sting of an order not yet obeyed. “I’m free.”

"So you appear to be, my dear." Aziraphale smiled softly at him, radiating love like he'd never let himself before. "So, hypothetically, if I said I loved you, and told you to kiss m-"

He did not get any further.

Crowley was kissing him, passionately and desperately and most certainly 100% out of his own volition.

And, as the two sink down into a tangle on the bookshop floor, dizzy with love and recent near-death experiences, we will tactfully fade to black.*

*This has nothing whatsoever to do with any pretence we might make at propriety, and is mostly due to the fact that Crowley is a very private man who DOES, actually, know where we live, and likely will not hesitate to use this fact to his advantage.

Whatever happens thereafter in that bookshop will be done freely, and it will be done with love; and in the end, that is all that matters.

Chapter Text

In the kitchen of Jasmine Cottage, Anathema and Newt very suddenly stopped stopping. That is to say, they stopped being stopped. Them being stopped came to a stop-

…

…the Esteemed Reader must excuse us for a moment while we go get a dictionary and look up some synonyms. Won’t be long. Sorry.

…

Ehem.

In the kitchen of Jasmine Cottage, Anathema and Newt’s state of complete and utter cessation was suddenly terminated, their stoppage at a sudden end.

(There we go.)

The first thing they did, once they were able to do things again at all, was collapse against the kitchen cabinets and each other, scrambling for the paper bag the buns came in, and taking turns hyperventilating into it.

To explain this perhaps slightly strange reaction to their unstoppening - one would think that two people such afflicted would simply continue on as before once the metaphysical pause button had been pressed a second time - it might be worth noting that Anathema and Newt had been fully conscious throughout the entire ordeal.

Physically, they had been stopped, full - heh! - stop. Every single cell had been put into temporal suspension, not a single atom budging from its place in the time-space continuum. They hadn’t breathed and their hearts hadn’t beaten, but neither had they suffocated or a single cell in their bodies died, because it had all stopped. Not even their still-open eyes had dried out.

But their minds? Their minds had carried on as before, trapped in their suspended bodies, and bloody well terrified of the whole thing. It wasn’t very easy, nor very pleasant, to panic without the usual shivers and racing heartbeats and cold sweat and so on, but Anathema and Newt managed perfectly well to have full-blown little panic attacks purely within the confines of their own minds all throughout the hour or two they’d spent in a stopped state.

(Now, Esteemed Reader, we know what you’re thinking here, of course we do. But, hold on, you’re saying, which is your good right and we appreciate your feedback, if they’re completely and entirely stopped, how can they think? How can they feel? How could the neural nets in their brains send information back and forth, without the rest of the human body, those marvellous little brain support factories, there to sustain them!? Impossible, you are surely crying, utterly impossible, and my immersion is ruined!

And, well.

You’ve got a point there; as well as a very rational-biological understanding of how the brain and the whole thinking business worked, which most universities’ natural sciences departments would probably commend you on.

Angels and demons, however, and associated powers such as Antichrists, were very much at odds with those selfsame natural science departments - and “at odds” was putting it mildly. The dinosaur fossil prank alone had soured relations between the Divine and the Sciences quite thoroughly, and the less said about the Darwin matter, the better.

Therefore, it might not be entirely surprising to hear that most supernatural beings, and their powers, operated exclusively on the basis of Cartesian Dualism*, taking a separation of mind and matter as given. So the body might be in a state of complete paralysis, but the mind and soul could still go on their merry way, mightily confused by the way the situation was unfolding, unless the supernatural being in question took great care to cover both of their dual bases.

*Descartes, René. Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur [transl.: Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated]. 1641. Print.**

**Dear Reader, please be kind to the above footnote. It’s a shy little thing, and very uncertain of its welcome, considering it is the only proper scientific MLA-style citation among all these comedic little asides it went to fic with - not unlike a helpless little science nerd who stumbled accidentally right into the drama club clique smoking stage cigarettes and quoting Shakespeare at each other in a disused classroom, while also being quite outstandingly gay.

It will leave the fic either having suffered merciless bullying, or dating the gayest, campest, most-flamboyantest footnote of the lot - there really is no in-between - but in either case, the support of the readers would mean a great deal to it.

Adam, of course, knew very little of Cartesian Dualism, and even less of neurology, despite Wensleydale’s comic’s best efforts - and thus, dear Esteemed Readers, Anathema and Newt went through the most harrowing experience of their entire lives, which, considering they’d had had front row seats to the Apocalypse, was really saying something.)

This horrible state continued until, suddenly, Anathema and Newt could - and in fact had to - move and breathe again, and promptly spent the next five minutes doing very little of the former and a great deal of the latter, finally enjoying* the physical half of that panic attack they’d been saving up during their stasis. There seemed to be little point in continuing their shouting match from before the stopping, after such an experience.

*Enjoying it about as much as the polar caps enjoyed global warming, or a young woman enjoyed her blind date’s third attempt at (poorly) mansplaining the restaurant menu to her.

“Well,” Anathema gasped, finally, while Newt, who’d always had a somewhat more panicky disposition, was still breathing into the paper bag and failing not to cry. “I. Hah. See your. Point. About being. Afraid. Of strong magic.”

Newt made a vague sound of shaky agreement into the paper bag.

“Adam’s. Specifically.” Anathema added, and then wrapped her arm around Newt’s shoulders because Agnes really had been onto something when she’d urged them to reach oute to one anothere in times of crisis. “Sorry.”

With Anathema curled up against him, Newt managed to stop breathing into the bag long enough to remove the last bun from its papery confines, and shook and stuttered his way into “n-no, I’m sorry, I shu-shouldn’t have- s-said what I- it’s not t-that I’m afraid of, of you, n-never you, not even A-Adam really, just the, the magic was- if you w-were hurt-”

“Yeah, I. I get it. Shouldn’t have. Shouted. Either.”

“T-take it all, all back, I was h-hurting you, and sca-scaring Adam, sorry-”

“We’ll talk. Figure it out. I was just. Newt, I was scared you were. Scared of me. So I-”

They both broke off.

Looked at each other.

“I love you,” said Anathema, and “I love you,” said Newt, and of course that didn’t simply fix everything - but it certainly was a good start.

(If just because the ensuing slow and soft kissing allowed them to regain their breath and calm down enough that we need no longer abuse the - and . keys to write their dialogue.)

“You could teach me,” said Newt, when they were done with the kissing, and just sat on the kitchen floor together with the lone bun and the paper bag. “About magic. Things tend to be less frightening when you start understanding them.”*

*Newt could vouch for that, since his life-long fascination with computers could be traced back directly to a traumatic incident when a pocket calculator had exploded right in his hands, scaring him half to death.

“You would want to learn magic?” Anathema blinked.

“Well,” Newt grimaced a little. “Not for magic’s sake, mind*. But for you, and maybe for Adam too - yes. Yes, if it helps.”

*By and large, Newt had about as much use for magic as a polar bear had for a homestead fire insurance that came with a free fridge.

It wasn’t that he was categorically against magic, of course, but some remnant of Thou-shalt-not-commit-Adultery Pulsifer was clearly still lingering on in his blood, and slowly shaking his head at all that witcherly nonsense.

“And I think you should be teaching Adam some things,” Anathema continued, after she’d paused for a moment and contemplated the budding realisation that Agnes might have shoved this man into her arms, but keeping him there was very much her choice.* “About growing up, the uncertainties of teenage life and such - I never had to bother with much of that, as a Descendant. My teenage years were very certain.” So was her childhood, and her adult years, up until the Apocalypse. It hadn’t been all bad, but it certainly hadn’t been very good, either.

*Perhaps, even, a Choice, capital C and all.

“I will.” Newt promised. His hands were very soft as they held hers, though Anathema knew from, er, repeated and plentiful experience that they could be clever too, and surprisingly firm, as the situation demanded - even destructive, but only around electronics*.

*They had learned the hard way that, well, certain types of vibrating marital aids should perhaps stay out of their bedroom for now.

“Actually, er. Speaking of Adam. We should probably…”

A sigh. “We should, shouldn’t we.”

They grasped at each other, and the kitchen counter, in the hope of getting back into knee-wobbly standing positions with a modicum of dignity still intact-

And suddenly, a wave of something passed over them from outside the kitchen window, where a golden head of hair and a wonky dog’s ear could be glimpsed only very briefly before ducking out of sight again.

“Actually,” said Anathema, “I suddenly get the feeling that Adam is fine, knows we’re fine, and doesn’t need checking up on just yet.”

“I’ve had a similar feeling.” Newt’s brow creased into a sceptic’s frown. “Did he just-”

“I think he might have.” Anathema searched Newt’s face, and did not ask the follow-up question brewing in her. Did it scare you?

For a moment, it seemed like the answer was yes.

But then Newt took a deep breath, and smiled shakily at her; and while it wasn’t a no yet, it was certainly more in maybe territory, with a path open towards not really.

Anathema was quite hopeful they could work with that, particularly if they spent more time talking and teaching each other about their respective lives, rather than mostly having (admittedly spectacular) sex.

…though.

Well.

Given the occasion, perhaps they might still make their way to the bedroom and have a bit of (frankly marvellous) make-up sex, first. They were still young, after all, and despite their messy fight, still very much in love - and Newt really was very good with his hands.

It was, Anathema thought, as they pulled each other upright and stumbled upstairs hand in hand - leaving the kitchen empty but for the bun and the paper bag and a relieved boyish grin outside the window - its own kind of magic, too. Wasn’t it?

(Let us take you by the hand as well, Dear Reader, and wander away from that day the world nearly ended again, with a whimper more than a shout - and Crowley very nearly died the same way - towards the bright and glowing promise of the future.

There is much yet to see, and we wouldn’t want you to wait overly long for it - not when we have the narrative power of epilogical time skips on our side.

So off we go, to a time in the rather immediate future, and a galaxy far, far away…)

Not so terribly long after delivering a distressed demon back to earth and dropping him off in a disused quarry*, the universe’s newest power couple, Mx. and Mr. X’czä7qu, were celebrating their Chronaversary.

*X’czä7qu had been quite surprised to see it, actually, since, as the old Doctor Who series so accurately depicted, a lot of alien planets looked remarkably like disused quarries. Xye might only have seen Tadfield quarry for a moment, but still felt right at home there.

This celebration took place when a couple (or polyple, or hivemind, or…) had been in some form of committed relationship for precisely one chrona*. The first Chronaversary was, for most intergalactic peoples, among the most important milestones in a sentient being’s life cycle, and accordingly everyone made quite a fuss about it.

*A timeframe somewhat longer than a blipvlip, though not by much; also sometimes translated into three-and-a-half weeéh, or a xkxksa that’s gotten a bit tardy.

For this auspicious occasion, X’czä7qu and Flynn Hastings of course received a great number of very interesting and utterly captivating gifts from friends, family, and ambassadorial colleagues from the Universal Congress who continued to be deeply, deeply grateful for Flynn Hasting’s facilitation of Galactic Peace.

Their spaceship was positively overflowing with packages in sparkly-colourful wrappers with shifting patterns on them, and for at least a month afterwards, the happy couple spent every minute with Flynn writing extremely bland thank-you notes, and X’czä7qu putting eye-catching holographic stamps and licking envelopes closed with one of their three-and-four-quarters tongues.*

*Flynn’s face always was a monochrome sort of slightly greyish skin colour, but sometimes, when X’czä7qu licked an envelope very slowly and thoroughly, one could almost think that there was a bit of a blush high on his cheeks.

Surely only a trick of the lick- er. Light.

There was one package in particular, a very nice wooden chest that looked as if it was made by a Galilean master carpenter from the first century AD, and wrapped in very droll dinosaur fossil wrapping paper, that had simply appeared in their ship one day, which the two appreciated especially. The tag on it said “Happy Chronaversary, and thanks for being an instrument of My Will - A. L. Mighty (P.S.: my son made the chest, isn’t it lovely? He’s such a talented boy.)” and it contained the following:

- a half dozen family packages of unsalted saltine crackers, which were a food item Flynn felt pleasantly neutral about (a man like him did not have favourites) and which was sadly almost impossible to get among the lavish banquets and exotic delicacies from all across the galaxy.

- a few bottles of chämp’ygne - the real, expensive stuff from the certified vineyards in Space France - which was a sort of sparkly alcoholic beverage that was not just bubbly, but made you feel a pleasant thousand sensations at once while your tastebuds danced a passionate tango with you. X’czä7qu was incredibly fond of it, though even an ambassador’s salary did not allow for more indulgence than at most one bottle per lightyear.*

*Yes, Esteemed Reader, we are aware that a lightyear is a measurement of distance, and not time. What can we say, X’czä7qu’s people did things a little differently, on their planet three weeks and a January away.

- and, finally, the newest book to win the P’ulizzar Prize for Most Intellectually Challenging (And Confusing) Novel, which medbot-20 and utilitybot-3 greatly enjoyed having entirely diametrically opposed opinions about.

However, the one present from this package Flynn and X’czä7qu treasured most deeply (and would put up right in their cockpit to occasionally faintly smile or flugjjid at) was a Star Wars postcard hidden at the very bottom of the chest, depicting the scene where Luke and Han come to heroically rescue Princess Leia.

On the back, it said, simply, “Thank You”, followed by a little wiggle of a signature that seemed to start with a C and looked sort of like a snake if you squinted. Attached to the postcard was a photograph of an angel and a demon holding hands and looking at each other in a way both human and alien immediately recognised as the way they looked at each other, too, albeit with a more conservative number of eyes involved - and a business card.

It was, the Esteemed Reader might be quite touched to hear, the first and only one in all of existence that bore Crowley’s correct phone number.

(Come now, Dear Reader. Let us wander a little further ahead in the fourth dimension as we descend from the far reaches of space back onto earth, and to a time when there is a whole flock of nightingales nesting in the trees at Berkeley Square, descended from that first nightingale who had been there The Day The World Endedn’t, and decided Berkeley Square was nice enough real estate to settle down there and have a dozen or more eggs.

I’m sure this is the part of the future you’ve most been looking forward to seeing…

But on the way back, let’s take a little detour, and have a bit of a listen, first.)

On the somewhat bleak expanse of a rocky little planet lit by the glow of the alpha centauri star system, there lay a little heap of stylish black clothes discarded in preparation for a desperate flight back to home and heart - and atop them, a sleek little metal radio.

(There had been a hand-knitted garishly-coloured tartan-patterned scarf, too, once; but by the power of sentimental value, it had eventually found itself discreetly miracled back onto one of the bookshop’s coathangers, right next to the hat and scarf that kind elderly gentleman had once left behind there, and which Aziraphale was keeping safe there until he might return to pick them up again.

For his part, Crowley had not been particularly enthused about the horrid scarf’s return - it really was quite ghastly, Dear Reader, we’d say you should see it but fear your eyes would not survive the experience - but you can bet that he’d dutifully worn it on his way out of the bookshop, and perhaps even briefly buried his face in it for the smell of old books and good tea and no small helping of dust, which he associated so strongly with the angel he loved.)

Most of the time, the radio was idly playing Queen, because of course it was - it had developed a particular fondness for the Flash Gordon soundtrack - but sometimes it also branched out into playing Beta-Z’s newest daytime soap radio drama (mostly written by sentient robots) for the space worms, and once it had provided the local weather forecast and traffic report* to a little bird passing by on its way to the mountain at the end of the universe for a good beak-sharpening.

*“None” and “barely any” respectively.

On this what-passes-for-an-afternoon-in-the-depths-of-space, however, the radio was exploring just the right frequencies for picking up broadcasts from a certain far-away planet.

After briefly tuning into The Archers, as every radio in the general area of the United Kingdom (which, as many of Britain’s colonialist former rulers might be pleased to hear, apparently included this little corner of alpha centauri) inevitably must at some point, the radio briefly played an advertisement for the newest detective novel whodunnit that people would wander into Aziraphale’s shop to unthinkingly ask for and receive an extremely tetchy “no, we do not carry that, good day” in return.

Until, finally, familiar voices warbled from the speaker…

“Dear listeners, welcome to a very special edition of Chattering Tonight - we are as always your hosts Sister Mary Loquacious, and Sister Ethel Taciturn, and with us tonight iiiiis…”

“Howdy, folks on t’other side of the Big Pond!” Boomed a voice which sounded like the accent equivalent of the fireworks on the Fourth of July. “Ah’m Marvin O. Bagman from the Prayin’ Hour, an’ a mighty big thanks to the good Sisters for invitin’ me to this here international interfaith collaboration!”

“Such a pleasure to have you with us, Marvin.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, ma’ams. Love ta learn more ‘bout other religious systems an’ chew the fat with my believin’ brothers/sisters/siblings from another divine mother!” An approving background noise from Ethel. “So, y’alls are worshippin’...?”

“Our Lord Satan, the Great Adversary and Lord of all Evil, and His Son, Destroyer of Worlds, though apparently not This World because he’s a bit overdue for that and at this point we are just all kind of assuming he won’t get to it anymore, but that’s alright, no pressure.”

“Christ Almighty!”

“Just the opposite, actually.”

“Ah.”

For just a moment longer than should be the case on radio, Marvin was silent. His divine possession Come To Jesus (But Perhaps From The Other Direction Than He’d Been Coming ‘Round The Mountain Before) moment had instilled in him a great deal of tolerance, acceptance, and even love for all them folks that believed differently.

But Satanists.

Everything he had ever been taught and lived by for most years of his life screamed at him that Satanists were a different matter. The Devil was in the details, and those details were lesbian* Satanist° Nuns on the radio. Apparently.

*Not that Marvin minded the lesbianism at all. It was just Ruth and Naomi without the dead husband extra steps, he figured.

°Which really should be a bit more open about the Satanist part on their website, Marvin thought - but that was easier said than done.

There was, unfortunately, not that much difference between Satan Will Destroy All Of God’s Work Through His Evil Machinations (derogatory) and S.W.D.A.O.G.W.T.H.E.M. (celebratory) in practice, and the line between a preppy Satanist and a Christian goth was very thin indeed.

Marvin wavered.

He wondered What Jesus Would Do.*

*The answer was to ask “Crowley Magdalene, are you perhaps a demon?” and then still follow her to see all the wonders of the world because nobody else was offering, and Crowley was quite decent for a Servant of Satan anyway, wasn’t she.

“Well.” Marvin cleared his throat. “If Ah may quote the title of my latest single… It Takes All Sorts To Make A World (And Ah’m Honoured To Be Makin’ One With Y’all).”

And that, he decided, would be his stance on Satanism going forward. If the Devil ever went down to Georgia, then Marvin would be the first to extend his hand and ask if He cared to break bread and share a peach before the whole fiddling started.*

*Marvin would later contemplate a new song titled ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, but unfortunately that idea got scrapped when his copyright lawyers strongly advised against it.

“And we will be playing that single later, so stay tuned for that!” Sister Mary continued cheerfully. “But first, we are recounting the Deeds of the Day - thank you, Ethel my sweet. Actually, Marvin, would you like to have a go at one? We might as well split them up this once.”

“Ah, why the heckety-heck not.” In for a dime, in for a dollar, Marvin supposed, and he believed in giving generously where money was concerned. “Thank ya kindly, Sister Ethel. So, this here says that young Adam from the Lower Tadfield area is not gunna end the world in fire an’ flame, thanks to his meditatin’ exercises - good on ya, kid - but is writin’ a lot of really obnoxious letters to politicians who don’t do nothin’ against climate change gearing up to end it the exact same way, and hopes to incite them to a lotta wrath. And action. Adam, mah boy, great job - and, listeners, whether ya hail Satan or God or Somethin’ Else, consider takin’ whatever action ya can, too!”

“Indeed. Thank you, Marvin! Now, here’s a Deed from long-time listener Annie of Soho, who has finally scraped together enough Evil Intent to deface a very small patch of the outer wall of that bookshop with the impolite owner. Excellent work, Annie, Our Lord of Malice is very proud of you!”

“Hn,” Ethel said, and pointed further down the page.

“Oh. But apparently his goth boyfriend came out of the shop right then and saw her do it, so she got no further than ‘stingy old bast-’ before being chased off by a skinny bloke who shouted after her that she’d burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity, and also get a really bad crick in her neck at the worst possible time. Oh dear, Annie. I suggest you put a cold pack in the freezer while you still can, and pray if not for forgiveness, then at least for revenge.”

Sister Mary flipped the page.

“And our final Deed of the day is frommmm… Anthony Cowwely from Mayfair! He’s writing in to let us know that he intends to spend the evening tempting, corrupting, and utterly turning an angel away from God, binding him in darkness and the Love of the Damned and Fallen for all eternity. Very ambitious, Anthony! Also very romantic. I’m going to say something very similar to Ethel when I propose to her on our anniversary in two months, you know.”

Ethel squeaked, and clapped her hands over her mouth. One could not see it through the radio, of course, but the Esteemed Reader should perhaps know that she was grinning from ear to ear behind them.

“Oopsie!” Mary chirped, unperturbed. “Anyway, let us know how it goes with your angel, and good luck, Anthony! We’ll pray for misfortune to befall anybody except you.”

( Cowelly? Why, that sounds mighty familiar, thought Marvin for a brief, puzzled moment, but then recalled that, no, the name he was thinking of was, in fact, Crowley, and it surely wasn’t the same character at all.)

“And, as our last item before we get to hear Marvin’s song, here is today’s Forecast of Strange Signs and Portents: Ethel and I walked past Berkeley Square on our way to the studio, and heard a whole battalion of nightingales singing what sounded like Vera Lynn’s Greatest Hits.

Which, yes, we know, sounds very ominous, a flock of birds rising up in possibly-infernal choir, right there in the middle of London. But honestly?

We think it’s a good omen.”

(And with that, we’ve probably heard quite enough, haven’t we, Dear Reader?

The vast and cold expanse of endless space is getting a little too chilly to be standing around and listening to the radio, anyway.

And ever onwards we go…)

Chapter Text

The Ritz’s Maître d'Hôtel (also known in her free time as Anya) prided herself on her Professional Detachment, the Esteemed Reader will surely recall.

And yet, some part of her - an inside part, because she certainly could not allow any such thing to disturb the Professional cast of her expression - still sighed in contentment every time she heard the roar of a familiar old motor going down Berkeley Str. at entirely too many miles per hour.*

*Crowley, if asked, would insist that there was no such thing as ‘going too many miles per hour’.

Aziraphale, in turn, would insist that there very much was , and it was at least 10mph below the speed at which Crowley was driving at the mome- dear Lord, watch the road, watch the road!!! -and he should bloody well slow down, or Aziraphale would bloody walk on his own two bloody feet, yes-bloody-sir!

They’d eventually agree to bloody disagree.

She would never forget the first time Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley had returned to the Ritz after whatever unpleasantness had somehow forced the two apart, not for as long as she lived. 

One of the bellhops had heard the Bentley coming from afar, and within seconds, the entire Ritz staff had known, from the Maître d' herself down to the stray cat in the alley behind the kitchens, which the chefs were instructed not to feed but still got plumper each day.

(The cat, because we know our Esteemed Readership is surely always in the market for more information on a cute little kitty-cat, was a round little ball of black fur with some white spots here and there, which a sommelier with a love for both T.S. Eliot and musical theatre had quite fittingly named Bustopher Jones some years ago.

Old Bustopher was in fact female, and had provided half the Ritz staff with quite adorable kittens, including the Maître d', who had brought home a pair of them and unwisely let her wife, who worked as a freelance programmer, name them; so now they had two cats named One and Zero, referred to together as Binary Jones.

Anya was quite fine with that. She mostly just called them kitties or little menaces anyway, depending on her mood and what they had last sharpened their claws on.)

The whole of the Ritz had stood to attention when the sleek black car had rolled to a stop, holding their breath as Mr. Crowley stepped out, looking a little unsteady on his feet and leaning onto the open door, as if he had recently not-quite-yet recovered from having been very ill.

(Which, in a sense, we suppose he had… though, ah, the Esteemed Reader should know that the unsteadiness was also at least in part due to. Er. How to put this.

…it had been the evening after Tastefully-Faded-To-Black events had occurred on the bookshop floor*, we must delicately explain, and Crowley had yet had to recover both physically and mentally from the vigorous and passionate joy of it all, never mind the lingering aftereffects of the curse.

*A rare potential customer had wandered in at one point, which had been a little bit mortifying for Aziraphale and Crowley, though less so for the customer - this was Soho, after all, if you hadn’t ever seen two barely-dressed gentlemen go at it right there on the floor, you’d been going to the wrong shops - who had politely asked if they had the latest of the highly interchangeable detective whodunnits that had been advertised on the radio, eyes firmly averted, and had then sodded off as per Crowley’s forceful suggestion.)

Before half the Ritz’s waitstaff, having at some time or other been tipped outrageously well by him, could jump forward and offer some measure of assistance, the Bentley’s other door had opened, and Mr. Fell was at Mr. Crowley’s side so quickly that, to this day, some of the senior cleaning staff would swear they’d seen him simply spread wings and fly over the car.*

*They were mistaken. Aziraphale would probably be more likely to reveal an ankle in polite company - the scandal! - than to ever show his wings in public outside of Apocalyptic Circumstances. It simply wasn’t proper, in this day and age, and Aziraphale had little desire to become known as a wing nudist about town. Crowley playfully referring to him as an AILF (Angel I’d Like to… Fraternise with…) was quite enough, thank you very much.

“Allow me, dearest,” Mr. Fell had said, and slipped Mr. Crowley’s arm into the crook of his, glowing with joy all the while - which the Maître d' had judged to be a very good sign, as did, judging by the immediate hopeful whispering*, her colleagues.

*The message had been passed on to whoever couldn’t drop whatever they were doing to discreetly gawp in a Telephone Game sort of manner, which did result in one of the assistant receptionists being rather confused why “Mr. Tell and Mr. Bowling just aggrieved together in their Paisley, and look like they’re very much in dove” was causing so much excitement among the staff.

A table had of course been miraculously free anyway, but if there hadn’t been, the Maître d' would immediately have made it so. She’d also taken their orders and waited their table personally, because of course all guests were equally valued and the Maître d' would stab herself with a lobster fork before giving someone undue preferential treatment, but these two men had left tens of thousands of pounds at the Ritz, had a humongous betting pool riding on them, and regularly proved to disillusioned millennial commis chefs that love was alive and real and really enjoyed their mushroom risotto. They were special favourites, there was just no way around it.*

*The generous tipping admittedly helped their case, as did the discreet little blessings and miracles and curses-upon-thine-enemies liberally provided in particular for those staff members at the bottom of the ladder and in the lowest wage classes. Aziraphale believed deeply in charity, and Crowley believed deeply in emancipating the little guys (and maybe inciting them to a little bit of rebellion too), so miracle-tipping had integrated surprisingly well into the overlap of their divine and infernal belief systems.

And now that angels had deigned to dine at the Ritz once more, they would be provided with the best damn service - and the best damn food - the restaurant staff could offer, by God.

(Not, mind, that Aziraphale and Crowley noticed at all.

On that first date after the breaking of Crowley’s curse - and the realisation, affirmation, and consummation of their love - the Maître d' could’ve just chucked a package of crisps and some stale Ritz crackers onto their table, and the two would have been perfectly satisfied. There was very little looking away from one another being done, and even less caring about anything else in the world. Even Anotherpocalypse would’ve been hard-pressed to distract them from each other.)

Halfway through the dessert course (macarons for Mr. Fell, and a slice of angel food cake for Mr. Crowley, which Mr. Fell had insisted on because “you must get your strength up again, dear boy, would you like to have a macaron too?”)* two hands met and fingers entwined atop the tablecloth  - and the entire Ritz breathed a collective sigh of relief. A heavy weight had been resting on their hearts ever since Mr. Fell’s first solo meal in all of history - or, well, the history of the Ritz at least - and it was pure bliss to have it evaporate at the sight of the two so happily reunited at last.

*In the early days of their post-curse romantic relationship, Aziraphale fussed over Crowley like a particularly fuzzy fustilarian, which Crowley very magnanimously allowed and did not crave and melt into bliss over at all.

They’d all feared the worst; and if people like Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley could not keep their love alive, well, then there was absolutely no hope for all the rest of them, was there?

And now, some months later, Anya - she still and always cared when it came to this matter - was happy to report* that Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley appeared to be going steadier than ever.

*In light of their significant impact on the Ritz employees’ finances and morale, an official biweekly report had been instated, noting the frequency of their visits, their orders, and any developments relevant to the betting pool.

Crowley and Aziraphale were aware of it, and Crowley in particular enjoyed deliberately sabotaging the statistics.

Their visits had grown somewhat more frequent, both of them seemed happier than ever, and they had even gotten comfortable with some small measure of public displays of affection: lots of handholding, leaning close to each other, guiding hands low on backs, and once, when it was raining late at night, a kiss under the awning before they hurried back to their car.

Something must have shifted between them after their fight, a new comfortable ease in all their interactions - some of the waitstaff believed they’d only just finally gotten together, but Anya couldn’t quite find herself agreeing with the assessment. Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell had the air of two people who had been two halves of a whole since the beginning of time, and whatever had shifted in their relationship set aside, they’d most certainly been together since long before that.*

*Aziraphale would say it had started with The Arrangement, Crowley would say it had started in Eden, and both of them would quietly wonder if it hadn’t been ineffably planned from the very, very start.

(And the way she’d placed her bet in the pool had nothing whatsoever to do with how firmly she stood by that assessment.)

Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell were dining at the Ritz tonight, as well, seated at a table near the piano - playing an instrumental cover of Queen’s Good Old-fashioned Lover Boy, because the pianist had unwisely left her note sheets in her car for over two weeks - and clearly enjoying themselves tremendously.

Professional as her Conduct always and forever was, the Maître d' had been feeling very nearly cheerful all evening, overseeing the dining room with a levity that was not always a given with the various troubles and stresses of the restaurant business.

It was a lovely night, all in all; and the Maître d' had only just returned from a brief break for a breath of air (and to feed Bustopher Jones some cat-appropriate leftovers) when she was stopped by a hushed voice whispering “oi. Psst. Over here.”

It was not within the tasks of a Maître d' to answer mysteriously-whispered summons. Nevertheless, Anya turned.

Mr. Crowley was doing a remarkably good job of hiding in a little out-of-sight alcove behind the foliage of a decorative ficus tree (which Anya could have sworn had looked a lot less healthy only five minutes ago, and appeared to be lightly shivering in fear) and throwing furtive looks around the room to make sure he wasn’t being observed.

Anya was somewhat reminded of old-school secret agents in the style of James Bond,* and while she had little interest in getting involved in international espionage, she nevertheless stepped closer in response to Mr. Crowley’s urgent beckoning.

*Sean Connery. Obviously.

“Can I help you, sir?” She asked mildly, Professionalism preventing her from tacking on a pointed “and will you please step out of that ficus tree, sir, we’re not in a spy novel here at the Ritz, if your tastes run towards subterfuge and dead drops, may I suggest a stroll through St. James’s park instead?”

“Hng. Yeah.” Mr. Crowley hesitated. “I’d like you to- Mrs. Kozlowska, wasn’t it? I’d like to. Hrngh. To.”

Mr. Crowley hesitated harder. The Maître d', quite accustomed to long delays as customers pondered their orders, patiently waited as his expression behind the dark sunglasses seemed to go through all five stages of grief, including a secret sixth bonus stage and a boss fight at the end.

(For a brief moment, Crowley contemplated fleeing, scuttling back to his and Aziraphale’s table and thinking no more of it.

But no. He’d prepared everything, he’d written up what he was going to say, he’d even told the bloody Satanist Nuns on the radio and could feel their viewership’s dark prayers cheering him on.

Heigh-ho, Anthony Crowley. Brave heart. He could do this.)

“I’d like to order crêpes for dessert. For him.” Mr. Crowley jerked his head over to where Mr. Fell was separated from them by some distance and a great deal of ficus. “And on top… could you put…”

It was only Anya’s years of professional Professionalism that allowed her to maintain a mask of calm when Mr. Crowley fumbled through pockets that his pants seemed altogether too skintight for, and produced a delicate little engagement ring.

“...I see, sir.” Anya took the ring. The stone set into it shone like a star, like galaxies, like something sparkling in the vastness of space. “May I…”

Anya did not normally smile when on duty, and certainly not genuinely. She did it now, because quite frankly she didn’t think she could not.

“May I offer my most sincere congratulations to you and Mr. Fell?”

“You may not!” Mr. Crowley hissed quickly, curling deeper into the alcove and the foliage, a little like a startled snake in the woods. “That would be very presumptuous. He hasn’t agreed to it yet, has he?”

Mr. Crowley peered through the ficus branches towards Mr. Fell (like the Snake of Eden had once peered up at the Guardian of the Eastern Gate, high on the wall) and as always, his sharp-cut face seemed to soften at even the merest glimpse of him.

“All I’m doing is offering him a Choice,” he said, hoarsely, meaningfully, capitalisedly. “Fantastic stuff, Choices, and the freedom to make them. He’s perfectly in his rights to say no, even after all… this. He can say no.”*

*Crowley hoped, of course, for a yes, or a YES, or perhaps even an >unintelligible happy sobbing and frantic nods<, but whatever the response would be, he would accept it.

Choices, and being able to say no, were matters very close to his heart, albeit still a bit further removed from it than Aziraphale was.

“Certainly.” Anya inclined her head. “But, if I may be so bold, sir…”

She carefully slipped the ring into her left jacket pocket - the left, because the right was already occupied, ever since Mr. Fell had discreetly drawn her aside while Mr. Crowley was busy checking in their coats.

He’d put his strange gold signet ring in her hand and closed her fingers over it, whispering with a wink - just like Anya had always hoped would come to pass - that he should like a bit of champagne with dessert, and this ring in his companion’s glass, if she would be so kind.

Anya had smiled then, too.

“I really, really don’t think he’ll say no.”

(The Esteemed Reader is surely not surprised to hear that this assessment was correct, and that he really, really didn’t.)

And on that night, all the nightingales - not just in Berkeley Square, but in all of London and beyond, in Tadfield and all over the countryside, all across the globe and even including that one little nightingale-ish bird on its way to measure the first day of eternity by sharpening its beak on a mountain at the end of the universe - all those nightingales gathered together in bushes and on branches and along little awnings, and serenaded an angel, a demon, and all the world, with songs of love and hearts joined together forever.

If you open your window now, and listen very, very hard into the silence of a warm late-summer night, you might just be able to hear them, too…

(And finally, Esteemed Reader, let’s make a little jump to the left, and then perhaps a step to the right. If we might bother you to put your hands on your hips - yes, just like that - and bring your knees in tight, as well?

Because after all these little expeditions to the future, we will now have to do just a little time warp, and return back to that fateful afternoon when things ended, as they tend to do, with Adam, and the leaving of a garden…)

With the sort of pleased, self-satisfied, but also relieved air of a little boy who was finally on top of the world - metaphorically, mostly, but also a little literally - again, Adam turned away from the window he’d been peering through.* Then he clambered over the low wall around Jasmine Cottage, Dog hopping over it beside him, and left yet another garden.

*‘Sirs,’ read yet another of those endless letters to the Tadfield Advertiser, ‘it might interest you to know that our local ne’er-do-wells have acquired a habit of Peeping and Tomming! Disgraceful, to think that respectable citizens of Tadfield can no longer safely disrobe in the privacy of their own homes! I shall be keeping all my curtains firmly drawn, yes sir! One would think the youth of today had enough pornographics to ogle at on the interwebs to get their jollies-’

And on and on it went in this fashion. R.P. Tyler, as the Esteemed Reader surely already suspects, got his jollies from complaining to the TadAd; and by jove, his jollies were gotten hard that day!

Adam might not be very good at understanding all those messy adult feelings, but Anathema and Newt were no longer shouting at each other in a way that was meant to sting (or possibly stab) and there was no longer the Damocles Sword of Divorce* hanging over their heads; so that was, Adam’s limited expertise suggested, probably going to be alright.

*This was not the sword of Damocles that is most commonly referenced in literature, of course, but the sword of Mrs. Damocles, who had told Mr. Damocles in no uncertain terms that either they would cut the unhappy marital ties between them, or she would cut the string by which she was dangling a particularly sharp sword over his head.

Mr. Damocles had proven himself a reasonable - or perhaps just very anxious - fellow, and divorce proceedings were initiated that very day.

Adam was less sure about the Situation between Aziraphale and Crowley - like Choices and Mistakes, that Situation deserved a capital letter of its own - which seemed to him like quite the can of worms.

Which, well. Adam was generally very much in favour of lots of worms in a can, which you could do all sorts of fun things with, like fishing, or pranking a hated teacher, or betting Brian 50p that he wouldn’t eat one, while Wensleydale muttered things about germs and Pepper muttered about ridiculous gross rituals to establish male dominance.

(And then Dog ate the worm before Brian could get to it.)

But this was a meta-fourical worm can, and Adam by and large didn’t like meta-fours.* He was a very forthright and direct sort of lad, and found it a little tedious when people spoke in veils and pictures instead of just coming right out with whatever they wanted to say. It was what had gotten him into at least a good half of all this mess, after all, things not being said clearly; and he didn’t much care for it.

*Nor meta-fives, though he supposed he could give meta-sixes a point for sounding kind of cool, as any word with an x in it did.

But worms or no worms, he knew Aziraphale and Crowley loved each other. Really loved each other, in that big, overpowering way that Adam didn’t think he quite understood yet - he’d always been told it would all seem quite simple and logical when he was older, but here Adam was, older than he’d ever been meant to grow on earth, and it still made not a lick of sense - but which he imagined to be mostly like the love he had for Dog and the Them, just with slightly more icky kissy feelings involved.

And if Adam believed in nothing else, he believed in the power of Love; which deserved the capitalisation even more than any other word in the dictionary.

So Adam put the worry out of his mind, and let the rain-damp grass wet the hems of his trousers and focused all his attention on not stepping on any nice-looking slugs, or, God Forbid, worms he could come back and put in a can later. Love would be enough, in the end. He believed this with every fibre of his heart; and if Adam believed something, then chances were the rest of existence was coming around to the idea, as well.

(And he had the most peculiar feeling that Someone was putting a warm and grandmotherly hand on his head, and assuring him that, yes, Love of the Capital Kind had indeed won the day, and a demon and an angel were doing wonderful-but-tastefully-censored things to each other in a faraway bookshop; further adding that he was a very sweet boy to care so much, and could have himself a treat if he liked.

Which was strange, because both of Adam’s grandmothers were dead for some years now, and hadn’t really been the treat-giving kind, as far as he remembered.

However, when he passed by a branch hanging low under the weight of the plumpest, reddest, most delicious apple he had seen in a long time, Adam did not hesitate for even the blink of an eye, and promptly had himself one of his favourite treats.

He vaguely thought his immaterial Grandmother might be smiling at him for it.)

Adam wandered among the houses and the gardens and the woods and the fields, dog at his side, until he came to the old pond, picturebook-perfect for swimming in during summer, ice skating on in winter, and fishing from all throughout the year.

Silhouetted against the mirror expanse of the water stood a lone small figure in a red coat, breaking the mirror up into rippling-glittering waves as she threw stone after stone into the pond with very satisfying ka-PLONK sounds.

Adam’s heart skipped a beat, as a sudden wave of Love washed over him. Not the kissy kind, but that did not make it lesser, nor less potentially painful, in any way. It was all Love, big and beautiful and strange; and sometimes Love made you say stupid and hurtful things and broke your heart, and other times it allowed you to patch things up between you. Adam hoped this was an Other Time.

Ka-PLONK, ka-PLONK went the stones into the pond, as Adam slowly shuffled over, Dog padding after him on light paws.

"...Pep?" Adam said, hunched over and hands stuffed so firmly into his pockets one might think he wanted to disappear in them altogether.

"WHAT." Pepper snapped, tossing more rocks into the pond and trying to make it very clear that she was only not ignoring him in the hope he might go away sooner. And also that those rocks could be tossed at other targets if necessary, starting with Adam’s dumb face, which was so reassuringly Pepper that Adam felt that great big wave of Love all over again.

"M'sorry," Adam said, and even though he meant it, it was terribly hard to say. "You were right." (Also hard to say.)

Pepper glanced over at him. Adam and Dog blinked back with identical remorseful expressions.

"Go on then," she said.

Adam grimaced. Trust Pepper to want a Big Apology.

"I fink I didn't understand what you were telling me proper. So I was scared 'cos I really like you, Pep, in the friend way, an' I thought you didn't like me back, in the friend way. But Mister Crowley said you meant liking in the kissy way, and s'alright if you don't like me in the kissy way. An' I jus' wanna say, I like you lots the friend way, jus' the way you are. An' if..."

Adam's grimace increased by at least two degrees of uncomfortableness.*

*On a scale from "oh, this isn't great" to >incomprehensible screaming that might mean "get it away from me"<, this was at least an "ugh, ugh, UGH, no".

"...if you find a girl you really really like, she can even... even be part of the Them, too. So there."

Pepper's eyes grew wide.

This really was quite a Big Gesture to go with a Big Apology - but then again, it was motivated by Big Love, too.

"Adam?"

"Yeah?"

"I like you lots the friend way, too."

A smile very tentatively made its way onto Adam's face, creeping up and quickly spreading all over.

"Even though I'm a misogynist stupidface?" He asked shyly.

"Even though." Pepper smiled, and pulled him into a hug.

In a few minutes, they would disentangle, have a stone-skipping competition followed by a minor argument over whether using reality-bending Antichrist powers to make the stone go farther was cheating, and talk about Adam’s new meditation exercises for when the Big Angry Feelings threatened to consume him; after which they would go and find Brian and Wensleydale, so Adam could apologise to them, too, and tell them about the aliens, of course.

It was going to be a busy day, full of laughter and simple childish joy that was slowly turning into more complicated (but no lesser) teenage joy, and Adam was going to go to bed that night with a smile still and always clinging to his lips.

But for now, Dog barked and skipped around Adam and Pepper’s legs; the sun shone over Tadfield, reflecting off the old pond in a kaleidoscope of brilliant colour; there was going to be jam and scones for afternoon tea; the whole village was filled with lots and lots and lots of Love…

And in the end, life was better than it had ever been before.