Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was a pattern to their days, such as there were days here. There was no real way to tell the time. There were no windows, and no clocks, and the light stayed on, the same buzzing sickly-white of it a constant. But there was a pattern. It was sickening, horrifying, and any number of other unpleasant adjectives Aziraphale has had to numb himself to, but a pattern certainly did exist.

First, Crowley would be taken from him. Trying to fight it bought them nothing but seconds, and cost them his ability to heal the demon afterwards, so he no longer tried to fight. He would beg, still, for them not to take him just yet, for them not to hurt him so badly. It didn't seem to make any difference, but it didn't seem to egg them on either. He kept at it. Maybe one time, someone would listen.

Second was the listening. Nothing at first: Crowley had little save for his pride, after all. But before long there would be shouts, and not long after that Crowley would start screaming.

It always took an awfully long time to cease, and when it did, it wasn't because their captors were showing mercy and stopping. It was because Crowley's voice had given out, and he physically could not scream anymore.

That was the signal for Aziraphale to dry his eyes and get started on the third part of the day: waiting for Crowley to be returned to him. He posted himself by the door, just inside from where it would open up, so he could catch Crowley before they dropped him onto the floor like a sack of potatoes. They'd done just that twice thus far, when Aziraphale hadn't been quick enough. He didn't risk it now. The door would open and he would be there, arms open and ready.

The waiting seemed to last longer and longer with each passing day. He felt like it took hours now: long, terrible hours when he knew they were only continuing to hurt him. There wasn’t anything for it. All he could do was to stand there and wait for the door to open, and try not to pick too badly at his wings. Inevitably, there would be a small mound of feathers by his feet when the door opened anyway.

The door opening signaled the fourth part of the day: setting Crowley to rights. Physically at least. They had to drag him along when they brought him back to their cell, these days. He was never quite conscious, much less able to move under his own power. They dragged him back to their cell, and they threw him inside, and Aziraphale caught him and lowered them both to the floor.

The humans would file in afterwards. There were always five of them: two with their blades of celestial steel drawn and ready, the two that had carried Crowley, and then, finally, the one with a bowl full of holy water.

He wasn’t sure if the humans had been told that Crowley was meant to be immune to holy water. He was quite sure that they hadn’t reported back that they had both instinctively flinched as though he wasn’t immune the first time they brought the bowl in. If they had, Crowley would be a puddle of goo by now, and Aziraphale a small pile of ash.

At any rate, the holy water was a necessary evil. The sigils on the collar fastened around his neck prevented him from being able to access his own power, but he could still channel Grace from another source. With one hand submerged in the water, he could work miracles again.

He had a pattern to that as well. First he would ensure that Crowley was in a deep, dreamless sleep where neither fear nor pain could touch him for a time. Then he got to work on the worst of the damage- and oh, they hurt him so much, so terribly. There must be technical terms for these kinds of injuries- for the bruises battered so deep inside him, for the rubbed-raw abrasions and the wide, weeping tears that left his legs smeared with blood- but Aziraphale didn’t know the words. He just knew it was bad, that it could very easily have discorporated Crowley if he wasn’t here to heal the damage.

He healed the internal injuries first, and then moved on to the demon’s poor worn-out vocal chords, and the sure signs that Crowley tried his best to fight them every time, even now: the ribs kicked in, the eyes blackened, the wrists broken, the joints thrown out of socket. His hips were always dislocated now. He was pretty certain they were doing it on purpose, as though they might accomplish their goal if they could only force Crowley’s legs a little farther apart.

If they let him, he’d then use another miracle to clean him: remove with a thought the boot prints and bodily fluids that always covered Crowley by the time they were willing to give him back. Most of the time, they didn’t let him. They left him and Crowley the moment they realized that the demon was healed, and that left Aziraphale to do his best with the tattered remains of his waistcoat and the tepid bucket of water provided each day after they took Crowley.

One way or another, once the humans had left, he used the power in the lingering drops of holy water to dry himself of them, and Crowley had been healed and cleaned as best as Aziraphale could manage the fifth part of the day began: recovery.

It was far too optimistic a term, recovery, but Aziraphale didn’t know what else to call it, save perhaps more waiting.

Their cell had a small mattress, originally bare but now covered in feathers, two small woolen blankets, and a little hot water bottle that he almost never had the opportunity to miracle warm again. Aziraphale had dragged it so that it would be behind the door when it swung inwards. It gave them as many as three extra seconds to pull themselves together when the door inevitably opened again, though that was not an immediate concern so soon after they had been left alone. Crowley would, mercifully, be asleep for some time yet, and Aziraphale would carry him over to the bed. He’d wrap his jacket around the demon’s shoulders and cover his legs with one of the blankets, and then see about the rest of the cell. He’d gather up his freshly-plucked feathers and add them to the little nest, he’d do his best to get the stains out of his waistcoat, and-

And, more times than not, there wasn’t anything else he could do.

He wouldn’t join Crowley on the mattress, not while he was asleep. They’d learned the hard way that it did nothing but make the demon panic, believing that he’d merely passed out for a moment and that they were about to start right in again, if they’d even bothered to stop. Even after he’d woken up and realized where he was and who he was with, there were wide limits to where and how they could touch without causing more distress than comfort. Not the nape of his neck, not his wrists, not anything below the waist and definitely not his wings, forced into the physical plane just as Aziraphale’s were, but in even worse shape. The humans couldn’t seem to keep their hands off of them, couldn’t seem to stop themselves from taking great handfuls of feathers as souvenirs.

And Aziraphale couldn’t stop them. What he could do was wait for Crowley to wake up, let him lean his head against his chest, keep his hands on the demon’s shoulders, and wrap his wings around the both of them to give them the illusion of privacy.

Crowley cried, sometimes. Other times he ranted and railed against the absolute unfairness of it all. Sometimes they just spoke in low quiet tones about all the things they missed about life on Earth, or in even lower, more quiet tones about the possibility of escape.

Then, eventually, the door would swing open and the whole blessed pattern would start all over again.

And blessed was the right word. Even if he hadn’t been able to recognize the tell-tale signature of Gabriel’s Grace in the holy water, it would have been impossible to miss who was behind all of this.

Chapter Text

Crowley had been missing for three months before Aziraphale was caught as well. Not that he’d felt particularly hunted at the time, or had been taking pains to mask his presence. If anything, he’d made himself more obvious: he had wanted to be available, to anyone and everyone who might have information as to his whereabouts. He moved back to London. He kept the shop open at regular hours, around chasing down leads that proved futile. He even got a mobile.

So when a well-dressed young man walked into his shop and said “You’ve been looking for the demon Crowley,” Aziraphale had simply invited him into the back room without hesitation.

“Do you-” He swallowed back the contradicting impulses, to be polite and make sure he was settled and needed nothing before getting down to business, and to take him by the shirt front and demand he share whatever information he had. “You implied that you have information for me?” That seemed a good middle ground.

“I do,” the man had replied. “I represent the organization that is currently holding the demon Crowley in custody.”

Aziraphale was suddenly distinctly pleased that he hadn’t offered the man any tea. “I see,” he said. “Well. Speak quickly then. I’m not sure what happens to a human who’s been smote but I can guarantee that you won’t enjoy the experience.”

Infuriatingly, the man continued to look perfectly at ease. “I’m here because my organization has seen fit to offer you the chance to be taken to him.”

“I presume there’s a catch?”

“You would then also be in our custody.” The man reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small tinfoil-wrapped packet. “You would take this. It would knock you out until we reached our facility. By then, you’d be contained by other means.”

“I see.” It was one hell of a catch. But, unfortunately, the situation was such that it warranted consideration. “And if I decide that I don’t believe you?”

The man reached inside his jacket. “Proof,” he said, and placed a pair of sunglasses on the table between them.

Aziraphale picked them up with trembling hands. They were unmistakably Crowley’s. Aziraphale had watch him pluck them out of the aether as he said I’m headed into London today, angel. Going to go do demon things, I’ll bring back supper. He’d watched Crowley put them on after giving him a quick peck on the cheek. It had been the last time he’d seen him.

They felt like Crowley, his occult signature impressed into the plastic, metal, and glass. One of the lenses was cracked. There was dried blood on it, and a few strands of brilliantly red hair caught in the hinges.

Aziraphale forced his hands to steadiness as he put the sunglasses down once more. “What does your organization want with an angel and a demon anyway?” he asked.

“We only wanted the demon, really,” the man said. “But it turns out that we also require a healer, and we understand that you would be highly motivated.”

Oh, wasn’t that the truth. Aziraphale nodded slowly, and very carefully didn’t think about how badly Crowley might be hurt, in order to warrant an angelic caretaker. “May I have some time to think on my answer?” If he could get the man out of his shop and agree to come back later, he could make a few calls. Let Anathema know what was going on, perhaps come up with some way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow. He trusted her to come up with some way to break them out.

“A few minutes,” the man told him. “If you take any longer, I’ll leave and I won’t come back.”

“I could stop you from leaving. Or from doing much of anything, ever again.”

“You could try. You’d probably succeed,” the man admitted. “That wouldn’t get you any closer to Crowley, though.”

“I could compel you to tell me where he is first,” Aziraphale pointed out.

“You could try,” the man said again. “But that you’d fail at.” He reached down his shirt front and pulled out a medallion that Aziraphale knew had to have been Heaven-sent. The ethereal energy it put off should have felt like home. It set his teeth on edge instead. “I’ve been blessed, you see.”

It was a saint’s medallion he had hanging around his neck. Saint Anthony, the patron of lost things. Heaven had never been anything less than astoundingly cruel with their taunts.

And, it was clear, Heaven had Crowley.

Aziraphale stared down at the packet. It was a bad idea to comply with this man’s wishes. Probably the worst he’d had since he’d encouraged Nero to take up the fiddle.

He didn’t know what else he could do.

“Right,” he said, reaching for the packet. He tore it open. There were two bright green pills inside. “I suppose that’s that then.”

It wasn’t a wholly terrible idea, or so he tried to console himself. There were security cameras up now, and Anathema would know about them, and be able to use that information to at least learn what had happened to Aziraphale. She was a bright young woman. It was just going to have to be enough.

He placed the pills under his tongue. They worked remarkably fast. Aziraphale barely had time to register the sensation of them dissolving before his eyes rolled back in his head and he was falling sideways out of his chair.

Back in the day- the antediluvian day, that was- angels and demons had been a frequent sight in the world. In a more or less human shape with wings, yes, but also as great beasts and burning wheels of fire and things the mortal mind could only comprehend as ‘a great many too many eyes’.

In hindsight, it seemed only natural that people would begin to worship them. Some of the demons set themselves up with cults dedicated to themselves, and angels were, originally, worshipped as intermediaries between themselves and God. That was how it had been during the time when Enosh was patriarch. By the time Enoch had succeeded him, they had sometimes begun to be worshipped on their own, as the demons were. Idolatry was the word that came down from on high. It was a sin, one of many intended to be wiped out by the Flood, and promptly disallowed in the big overhaul of Heaven’s regulations for Earthly conduct that followed.

Aziraphale had had one. A cult following, that was. Every Principality had had one, once, as they were the highest-ranking angels assigned to walk the Earth. There used to be little shrines for wayfarers set up in his name, stocked with beer brewed sweetly with honey, and bread made with lard that never spoiled and apricots that were always perfectly tart, staffed with acolytes that would record any story a traveler told that they had not heard before. He’d always been very clear that he was but a servant to a greater power and that things were ultimately all in Her hands, but he hadn’t seen the harm in giving out blessings from those shrines, or making it known that he favored scribes who embellished their cuneiform, or bakers who experimented, or gifted storytellers, or talented brewers. That was all long gone and forgotten now, of course.

The Flood hadn’t just been punishment for humanity’s sins, or so the word had been. It had been a punishment for angels like Aziraphale who had gotten too entangled with the world’s sins. The humans were to die on account of their sins, and the angels were to watch them die for theirs, and were watched for any sign of disloyalty as they did.

It could have been worse. He hadn’t ever had children with any of the humans, after all. He’s even reasonably certain that Crowley snuck one of the youngest of his acolytes onto the Ark, though obviously he did not watch, lest he give them away.

He’d never worked up the nerve to ask about that, even after they’d split with their respective sides. Even after he’d begun to wonder how much of what he’d been told was God’s will was actually, in fact, a Heavenly policy decision. Or even after he’d begun to entertain the possibility that, perhaps, God’s will was something that could be argued with.

An exception to the ban on angel cults was made for the Archangels, who were allowed veneration in the manner of human prophets, saints, and mystics- namely, as beings subsumed by the will of the Almighty. It made a clear contrast with the demons, who either slunk back to Hell or slunk their way into the pantheons of polytheistic religions with their own forms of divinity after the Flood had receded.

Gabriel, of course, was an important figure to many humans, particularly those who practiced Islam and Christianity. There were holidays that revolved around him, or at least things he’d done (or had taken credit for). While Gabriel was certainly aware of this, he’d never seemed particularly interested in following up on what was done in his name here on Earth. He’d always proclaimed that it was unbecoming of an angel to be involved with such material matters. Aziraphale had honestly not given the matter any further thought once he knew that.

He regretted it, very shortly after waking up. It happened a bit sooner than advertised. His hands were bound together with those silly-looking plastic ties they used instead of handcuffs now, and his head was pounding. His wings were out, and cramped against the unforgivingly near surface of the ceiling. He was all folded in on himself, and everything was swaying. He rather thought he might be in the boot of a car.

He could change none of those facts. Try as he might, he couldn’t perform even the tiniest, simplest miracle. That was probably down to the collar around his neck. When Aziraphale swallowed heavily he could feel it digging into his throat.

Don’t panic, Aziraphale told himself sternly. They’re taking you to Crowley. You need to keep your wits about you.

But what if they aren’t taking you to him? He thought immediately after that. What if you just signed yourself over to some completely different faction and now there’s no one who knows where you are and no one who can rescue Crowley and-

He took a deep breath, and held it for a time. Enough of that. You’re being taken somewhere, and if nothing else you’ll know more about what you’re up against when you get there, so buck up, Aziraphale.

Thankfully, the car end just a few minutes later, before Aziraphale’s tenuous grasp on his composure could slip. The boot opened, and his pushed himself into a more or less sitting position under his own power, squinting up into the too-harsh lights of the parking garage.

“Ah,” said the young man who had come into his shop. He was trying to sound unsurprised, but didn’t quite manage it. “You’re awake.”

“So sorry to disappoint,” Aziraphale replied with as much dignity as he could muster. It was a wasted effort. In the very next moment, two other men grabbed him roughly beneath the armpit and dragged him bodily out of the car.

“There’s no need for that,” Aziraphale said as they set him roughly down. “I’m quite capable of moving about on my own, thank you very much.” He stretched out his wings, trying to work out some of the stiffness of being crammed into the car.

One of his wings accidentally brushed against one of the men who had lifted him from the car. He responded by immediately driving his fist into Aziraphale’s midsection. Aziraphale doubled over, the air driven from his lungs.

He was a bit shocked by how much it hurt. He immediately tried to numb it, and was immediately reminded that he no longer could. He nearly panicked, but managed instead to straighten himself up as they all began to move forwards. After a moment to catch his breath, he managed to address the young man from the shop, who seemed to be in charge.

“What is your organization, my boy?” Aziraphale asked him. “You didn’t precisely say when you-”

He cut himself off as they exited the parking garage and he abruptly realized that he knew exactly where he was. Good news: he was reasonably certain that he would be able to navigate, if and when he and Crowley were able to make their escape. Bad news: it was in Cornwall, which was a bit of a hike from both London and their cottage in East Sussex.

Worse news: he was only familiar with the area because Gabriel had sent him here to perform blessings quite often. And never once had he questioned what it was about this part of Cornwall that made Gabriel pay such close attention.

“We’re the Fraternal Order of the Heavenly Messenger,” the young man replied.

They rounded the corner and came to the church, which had a stained glass representation of the Annunciation hanging over the front doors since the 1920s. Gabriel had originally been portrayed as rather androgynous, with long hair, a delicately pointed chin, and blue eyes. The stained glass had been reworked, and Gabriel was now distinctly masculine, with short hair, a square jaw, and most tellingly of all, pale violet eyes.

“Oh, bugger,” Aziraphale swore, coming to a halt as he stared up at the stained glass in horror. If Gabriel of all beings was resorting to revealing himself to his cult, it either meant that the rules of engagement had changed in Heaven, or that this operation was entirely off the books. Neither possibility boded well.

“I’m James Truscott, Marshall of the Order,” the younger man continued. At his nod, the two men on either side of Aziraphale dragged him out of his stupor and towards the church. “Come on. The Master of the Rite has been looking forward to meeting you.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

There were two simultaneously true facts about their reunion: firstly, Crowley had been in an absolutely horrific state, and secondly, Aziraphale would give just about anything for them to return him in such condition each day.

He’d been conscious, for one thing. Aware enough to recognize Aziraphale. Able to speak, albeit hoarsely.

“No,” he croaked, one hand reach up for the collar around his neck. He clutched at it as best he could- two of his fingers wouldn’t bend- and pulled Aziraphale down to him. “No. Aziraphale, no.”

“It’s okay, dearest,” Aziraphale tried to soothe. “It’s okay, I’m here now, we’ll figure out the rest later.”

There was no collar around Crowley’s neck for Aziraphale to clutch at in return. They’d etched the sigils directly into the skin on the back of his neck- cut or burned them, and then packed the wounds with something to make them heal into raised, distinct scars.

There was no place to touch him that didn’t look like it would hurt. It seemed like every inch of him was bruised. His eyes were swollen and red, his lips bitten bloody. Some of his hair and several of his feathers had even been torn out, leaving behind patches of raw skin. The absolute worst of it was doubtless beneath the bloody bandages that were wrapped around his midsection- not the red blood of his corporation, like all his other wounds, but the black blood of his celestial form.

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale said, his hands fluttering uselessly over the demon’s supine form. “What have they done to you?”

“Tried to escape,” Crowley groaned. “Stupid. Was stupid of me.”

“No, no,” Aziraphale assured him. “It was very brave of you, I’m sure it was.”

“Far be it from me to agree with a demon, but I do believe he has the right of it, in this instance,” said a voice from behind them. Crowley flinched at it. “Trying to escape is very stupid indeed.”

Aziraphale straightened, and turned just enough to be able to look the newcomer in the eye. He was an unassuming man- not that anyone had, thus far, looked particularly assuming. Every last one of them had been well-groomed, nicely dressed, and smiling politely.

“You’re the Master of the Rite, I take it?”

“Yes. Stephen Lobb,” he introduced himself, holding out a hand.

Aziraphale smiled thinly and clasped his behind his back. For a moment the smile dropped off of Stephen’s face, but only for a moment.

“Please. Sit,” he said, and rough hands grabbed Aziraphale by the shoulder and forced him down into the chair by Crowley’s bedside. Aziraphale jerked himself free of them as soon as he could and sat primly on the edge of the seat. Stephen situated himself across the bed from him, and remained standing.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want you to heal the demon,” Stephen replied.

“In that, we are in agreement,” Aziraphale said. “You’ll need to remove this collar around my neck first.”

“Oh no,” Stephen said. “We will not be doing that. Not any time soon, at least.”

“Well then, I’m not sure what you’re expecting of me.” He chanced a glance down at Crowley, who was laying very stiffly on the bed between them, barely seeming to breathe. “I can pray, but an angel’s prayers are worth less than you might think.”

Stephen chuckled. “No, no. Nothing like that,” he assured Aziraphale. “No, we have an alternative source of Grace for you to channel.”

“Excuse me?” Aziraphale asked.

“Trevor? Would you?” Stephen asked.

“Of course, sir,” the man who was apparently named Trevor replied, before scurrying off.

Aziraphale could not scrape together the faintest notion of what “an alternative source of Grace” might consist of, and was therefore as unprepared for the bowl of holy water Trevor returned with as he would have been for anything else.

“Is that-” His wings fluttered nervously, which hopefully prevented any of the humans from reading too much into the way he threw an arm over Crowley’s body, or the way Crowley tensed and huddled into himself as best he could. “Is that holy water?”

“Blessed by His Messenger himself,” Stephen confirmed proudly. “Contact with it should allow you to channel his Grace in lieu of your own.”

“Should it, now?” Aziraphale said, still regarding the bowl warily.

“We have been assured that it would,” Stephen replied.

Trevor held the bowl steady as Aziraphale cautiously dipped his hand in. For a moment there was nothing, and then there was an echo, and then a whisper. It wasn’t anything like the power he could normally command, much less anything like what Gabriel must be able to command.

“You’re probably wondering if you can use that Grace to fight your way out,” Stephen said. He reached down the front of his shirt and pulled out another medallion. Like James’ medallion, it was clearly of Heavenly make. Unlike James’ medallion, it depicted Gabriel himself. “You can’t.”

Aziraphale reached out a tentative astral feeler, and found he was telling the truth: he couldn’t reach any of the men in the room. Only Crowley was accessible- and himself, but there didn’t seem to be much point in performing miracles on himself.

He’d thought this kind of warding might be possible- that it might be possible to ward a particular being from the effects of one blessing’s worth of holy water, that is. Time had run out before he could make much headway into figuring it out. Crowley was gathering his team for his church caper, and Aziraphale had needed to head him off before he could get himself killed. Once he’d handed off the thermos of holy water, he found himself extremely unwilling to so much as think about the substance for some years.

Maybe he should have kept at it. Maybe he’d know how to counteract this warding now, if he’d only put the work in then.

One thing at a time, he reminded himself.

The wound on Crowley’s side, the one that had pierced straight through to his celestial form, was top priority. Aziraphale sank his borrowed Grace into the wound, feeling out the place where flesh and blood ended and scale and starstuff began. The celestial wound itself was not too terrible, at least. It was just a bleeder, leaking through the scabbed over and stitched shut gash on his corporation. A few moment’s concentration was all that was required to repair the damage.

When he opened up his eyes, the level of the holy water in the bowl had fallen by roughly a third. He hoped the wounds on Crowley’s corporation would be easier to heal- or else that they had more holy water blessed by the Archangel around.

“Do you want to know how he was injured?” asked one of the men who had yet to be introduced or introduce himself.

“No need, I can guess,” Aziraphale said, eyeing the sword he wore on a scabbard.

He took a deep breath, and then turned back to Stephen. This part would be tricky. He’d gotten good at temptations, over the centuries the Arrangement had spanned. He’d been good at making people want things (“I’ll bet you could even sell a book if you put your mind to it,” Crowley had teased him once, and then he'd ducked and laughed when Aziraphale had thrown his napkin at him.) but instilling doubt had eluded him.

But then again, he’d never been as comfortable with doubting as he had been with wanting, pre-Apocalypse. Now that they were on the other end of things, he’d had ample time to get comfortable with the concept. He’d never had to use it like this. Once they had cut ties with their respective peoples there had been no need for an Arrangement, and they’d settled into a relationship based on desire for one another’s company rather than the need to excuse that desire with a trade-off in miracles and temptations. He would just have to hope that the practice was a simple as the theory seemed to be.

“I presume Gabriel brought the weapons down when he provided you with your medallions and blessed your water,” Aziraphale said. He looked up at Stephen, making sure to maintain eye contact and his most sincere expression. “I don’t know what he told you, but I’m sure he seemed very certain that it was true. That it was all God’s Plan. I’m sure he was able to wave aside any concerns you might have had, and that you accepted his explanations, because he’s the Archangel Gabriel, and you should be able to trust him. I know I did. But that doesn’t change the fact that he can only guess as to what the nature of God’s Plan is. He doesn’t know. Not the way he pretends to.”

If his words made the slightest impact of Stephen, he didn’t show it. “Do you want to be allowed to finish healing him?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale replied, and let his gaze drop. Unfortunately, he rather got the impression that there would be plenty of opportunities for him to try again later.

It had been a long time since he’d been called upon to heal any kind of wound more serious than a new fracture or cut, much to heal someone who had been tortured, as Crowley clearly had been. For lack of a better idea, he simply started with the wounds on his head and worked his way down, noting as he did that he couldn’t do anything to the sigils impressed onto his neck.

It was a process- both the healing of the injuries, and adjusting his own ideas about how they’d been inflicted as he went. He’d presumed, at first, that they’d be inflicted either during his escape attempt or as a punishment for it. Not that it would have made it better, but it would have been understandable. It fit. Gabriel had wanted the Great War very badly, and to judge by the arms visible in the room, he’d told his cult that they were to be a part of that, if not that they were fighting it already from the shadows.

But that gash had been inflicted a matter of days ago, while the majority of the injuries Crowley had sustained were older, some of them even weeks older. He was pretty sure that his right shoulder must have been dislocated shortly after he’d been taken, and never actual put back into joint since. It was obvious that they’d been beating him the entire time they’d had him.

Aziraphale couldn’t puzzle out why, but that was a conversation he could have at another time. For the time being, he let his hands hover over Crowley’s body, healing the damage beneath them.

Crowley was oddly silent throughout, but as Aziraphale ensured that there was no lingering damage on his corporation from the celestial blade he spoke. “Okay. That’s good enough, angel, I’m all better now.”

“What?” Aziraphale asked, startled. “No dear, we’re barely halfway done.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley began, and stopped when one of the men drew his blade and held it against his neck.

“That’s not necessary! That’s entirely unnecessary, please put that away,” Aziraphale begged him.

The man looked to Stephen, who nodded. The blade was withdrawn, and Crowley said nothing more.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said carefully.

A minute later as his hand hovered over Crowley’s pelvis, he understood what it was Crowley had wanted him not to know.

“Are you aware that some of your men have raped my husband?” Aziraphale asked Stephen.

“He knows,” Crowley said quickly, before Stephen could do more than raise an eyebrow. “He’s done it. They all have, it’s-” One of the men made a sudden movement towards them, and he closed his mouth with an audible clattering of teeth. The man settled back against the wall with a smirk.

“I...see,” Aziraphale managed. And he did.

Some of the damage left behind by the rapes was old, nearly healed. Much of it was new, or at least newly irritated from healing. Some of it was even quite fresh, inflicted while Crowley would have still been bleeding out from another plane of existence, perhaps even inflicted while Aziraphale had been unconscious in James’ car.

There were a lot of human men in this room, and every one of them was a rapist. There were a lot of human men in this room, and nearly all of them were armed with the sort of weapon that could kill the both of them.

“Why?” Aziraphale asked. “Why would-”

“You’ve had sex with him,” Stephen said. “Lain with him, known him biblically, if you prefer. Why do you do it?”

Aziraphale saw red, he really did. He hadn’t known that was possible. He shook with rage. For a moment, it was all he could do.

“How dare you?” he hissed, meaning both how dare you lay so much as a finger on him and how dare you equate our relationship with your crimes.

“Are you finished healing him?” Stephen asked, looking almost bored.

He very seriously considered trying to make some kind of miraculous distraction, grabbing Crowley, and making a run for it, but there were too many of them and Aziraphale’s ability to work miracles was dependent upon keeping in contact with the holy water.

He took a deep breath, and then something terrible occurred to him.

“You’re going to do it again, aren’t you?” he said. “If I heal him, you’ll just- you’ll do it again, won’t you.”

“We’ll do it whether you heal him or not,” Stephen said.

“He’s telling the truth, angel,” Crowley added. “It’s- you know, now. No point in letting it fester. I’d rather be healed up first.”

“Right,” Aziraphale said. “Right. I can- I can do that.”

So he healed him. Took care of the friction burns and tearing and bruises and the way his knees had been scraped raw, and then he cleaned him of any lingering debris and promptly had the still half-full bowl of holy water pulled out of his reach.

“That’s enough,” Stephen said.

Aziraphale swallowed heavily. His hand was still wet. The power he could get from it was not enough to do anything of substance. It was barely enough to banish the liquid itself.

“What happens now?” he asked, wiping his previously-wet hand on his trousers in what was hopefully a discreet manner. He took Crowley’s hand with his other one.

“Now? Well, it’s late, so we’ll be locking you both up,” Stephen told him. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Chapter Text

Things continued to get worse.

The first few times Crowley had been taken from him, he’d been returned nearly delirious from pain and almost unable to stand. Then he really had been delirious from pain and unable to stand. Then he went from being barely conscious to be unconscious.

And it kept getting worse.

“They were escalating before you got here,” Crowley told him. “I won’t give them what they want. I’m not even sure I can, and they do not like hearing that. So now they’re hoping that if they torture me enough I’ll relent. Simple as that.”

He knew what Crowley was trying to say: that they weren’t just escalating because Aziraphale was now here to ensure that he didn’t die when they went too far. As much as Aziraphale appreciated the sentiment, he had to disagree. They would never be able to take things so far if he wasn’t here to undo the damage, much less take things further and further each day. Oftentimes, as Aziraphale tucked his jacket around Crowley’s shoulders so he could sleep it off in relative comfort, he had to wonder if he was accomplishing nothing but to provide their captors with a blank canvass to work with.

It kept getting worse.

Aziraphale learned. He could not talk back to the wardens, ever. He could swear, but only while he was healing Crowley, not when they were taking him. He shouldn’t say goodbye when he was being taken, as it only made them laugh. He couldn’t do anything to impede them: not fighting them off, not trying to hold onto Crowley. He shouldn’t even be holding his hand when they approached. Begging was permissible. He just had to be careful not to break down entirely, because Crowley was upset by his tears.

He learned. He sectioned his days out: this part for weeping, this part for healing, this part for remembering, this part for comfort.

(This part for his agreement with Thomas, cut off and separate from the rest of this human-made Hell they lived in. It was another place entirely. He crossed over whenever that particular door opened, retrieved their supplies, paid the required price, and when he returned to Crowley nothing else about the pattern was disturbed.)

He learned. Triage was different when it was treating a battle’s worth of wounds inflicted upon one body rather than trying to keep a battalion’s worth of bodies from going cold and empty, and he hadn’t been called upon for triage since the Blitz. It took some getting used to. He learned to work from the inside out rather than the top down. He learned to ensure that Crowley was well and truly out before he got to work, that the demon’s panicked thrashing would only harm him further. He learned the thousands of ways a body might be broken and the thousands he had to fix the damage. He learned to judge the age of wounds in minutes, and the rate of bleeding millimeters. He learned to measure the overall severity by the amount of holy water left in the bowl when they were done, shrinking to lower and lower levels as time marched on.

And still, it got worse.

When Crowley would speak of it, he would call it torture, and he would call it rape, and he would call the rape a part of the torture. From what Aziraphale could tell of the destruction wrought across his body, he might have been minimizing how much time and effort was spent on it, but he wasn’t wrong. They were torturing him too. It was unmistakable.

His hips were always dislocated, now: he was pretty sure that their captors were doing in on purpose. One or both of his wrists were always broken too: he was pretty sure that Crowley himself did that, struggling against whatever they were restraining him with until his body gave out. He started to be returned with welts covering his back, with open lashmarks on his hips, with water in his lungs, with burns on his arms. With a burn on his eye, once: it was small and round, and it had deposited some quantity of ash into the surrounding area. Like someone had been having a smoking break, and then reached over to use Crowley like an ashtray.

“I suppose you want to know who did that,” said one of the wardens with a smirk when he noticed what it was that had moved Aziraphale to profanity this time. His name was either Matt Reed or Matthew Reeve. Aziraphale could never keep the two of them straight, and he didn’t particularly care to.

“I’d really rather not,” Aziraphale replied. “I’m quite certain I wouldn’t be able to restrain myself.” He had no idea how he sounded when he said those words, or what sort of expression was on his face, but whatever they were, they stopped the wardens from any further comment.

Small mercies.

They didn’t help, ultimately, the small mercies they were shown: not the times when the wardens decided to leave them to their own devices, not the small collection of contraband Thomas had unwittingly provided them with nor the small assortment of comforts he willingly brought for them, not even the ability to heal Crowley and then spend however many hours there were pressed together and pretending the rest of the world couldn’t reach them. They didn’t help. It kept getting worse.

And then, inevitably, things got so bad that they went beyond Aziraphale’s ability to heal- or his borrowed Grace’s ability to heal, rather.

Crowley was nearly covered in blood when they returned him, enough to make him slippery and hard to keep a grip on as Aziraphale lowered them both to the floor. Too much blood. The holy water couldn’t arrive soon enough.

He knew what this was, though it had been centuries since he’d seen its use. But there was some sort of historical farming museum in town, and some working sheep farms in the surrounding area that had been there for centuries. An iron comb, meant for preparing wool for spinning but equally capable of tearing someone to shreds, would not have been difficult to come by.

For the first time in- he dared not even speculate how long it had been, but a long time- he didn’t search out internal injuries first. He had to stop the worst of the bleeding before he could consider doing anything else.

He mostly managed it. He thought he’d managed it, though it took a long time and well over half the holy water to close the worst of the wounds and put at least some of Crowley’s blood back in his circulatory system where it belonged. Then he moved onto the usual: the internal injuries, the worn-out vocal cords, the dislocated hips, the cracked ribs, the broken wrists. There was still blood pooling sluggishly beneath him. He put it down to some of the smaller scratches left behind by the comb and focused on healing them.

It took him too long to realize that the scratches on Crowley’s body weren’t the problem, but rather his wings. By the time it registered that the rate of blood loss had not significantly slowed, there was barely enough water left to wet his fingertips.

“I’m going to need another bowl of holy water,” he said, as calmly as he could.

“He’ll survive a few little cuts,” the warden with the bowl of water said dismissively as he pulled the bowl away from him.

“It’s not the cuts I’m worried about,” Aziraphale explained. “It his feathers. Some of the blood feathers he has coming in have been damaged.”

“So?”

“So a broken blood feather is essential a siphon directly from the arteries. It won’t clot, it won’t heal, it’ll just keep bleeding until he exsanguinates,” Aziraphale said. “If you don’t want him to die, I’ll need more water to heal the damage.”

The wardens exchanged looks.

“Oh for Heaven’s sake!” Aziraphale snapped. His own nervous plucking had left his wings with plenty of blood feathers of their own. It was next to nothing to break one of those feathers rather than pluck out a mature one. The difference between biting a fingernail and having it break off below the quick. “See?” His blood began to drip onto the floor.

The wardens exchanged another look.

“I’ll talk to the Master of the Rite,” the warden with the bowl said. Gordon. That was his name, Aziraphale was fairly certain.

“Please do, and please hurry,” Aziraphale said.

They left them alone for several infuriating, terrifying minutes. Aziraphale did his best to find the broken feathers and pull them out- the wounds from a plucked blood feather would scab over, eventually, even if the wound on a blood feather itself wouldn’t clot. There were too many, and whenever he looked back at a section he thought he’d done a good job of going over he found another feather he missed.

So, he stopped going over Crowley’s wings, and reached for his own again. They had to be watching them from somewhere- there had to be cameras. This was England, and as Crowley was always quick to point out, CCTV was ubiquitous and not one of Hell's works either.

They didn’t want Crowley dead, because they needed him for their terrible ritual, but they weren’t much bothered by how much harm they were doing. Aziraphale, on the other hand, they weren’t meant to harm. They had a very loose definition of the term ‘harm’- personally, Aziraphale found being locked in a bare little cell so he could heal his husband once they were finished violently and repeatedly violating him to be immensely harmful- but he was reasonably certain that they wouldn’t want him to bleed out.

He broke another blood feather. And then another. And another. It wasn’t long after that when Gordon and the others returned with a fresh bowl.

He got to work. He healed Crowley completely, cleaned him, did every little thing he could to make things more comfortable for him before seeing to his own broken feathers. It made the wardens a little angsty, but as far as Aziraphale was concerned they could all hang anyway.

Crowley slept through it all. He slept for a long time after that.

At first Aziraphale simply carried on as he had been. This was definitely a day for Oscar’s works, so he ran through all of his plays: An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, Salomé in both French and English, even Vera; or, The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua. He interspaced them with operas: Dido and Aeneas, Tosca, Beatrice di Tenda, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Il trittico, and Rusalka, among others.

It got harder and harder to keep the words straight in his head, so he moved on to purely musical works. Holst’s The Planets. Dvořák’s From The New World. Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25. Stravinksy’s The Rite of Spring.

He’d first seen that last one when it premiered in Paris, alone. He and Crowley still hadn’t been on speaking after their fight over the holy water.

Crowley was still asleep. He probably would be for a long time yet, after such a near-calamity. The wardens had already come in and replaced the bucket of water twice. He supposed, due to a lack of other options, that this meant that it had been two days.

Remembering got to be too hard, so he stopped for a time. It left him in the present, with Crowley asleep on the mattress behind him, breathing gently. Crowley, who had been so horrifically brutalized that if Aziraphale curled up against him he would, upon waking, presume he was being attacked.

Aziraphale tucked his knees in more closely against his chest, and wrapped his arms more tightly against himself. His wings engulfed his body, folding so tightly around him that he doubted anything else was visible. Thinking was beginning to grow too hard as well, so he dug his fingernails into his arms to anchor himself, and settled in to wait, his mind floating, numb and nearly detached, to some nowhere place far away from their cell.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Three days after the incident with the iron comb, Senior Warden Thomas Hooper appeared in their cell once more. Ostensibly, he was there to change their bucket of water, or so Aziraphale gathered from the presence of two buckets.

Not that Aziraphale gathered that much right away. He didn’t even realize that there was anyone else in their cell at first. Still numb and curled in upon himself as tightly as he could go, it was only when Thomas cleared his throat that the rest of the world came crashing in on him.

His wings snapped open before he was fully cognizant of moving. They didn’t touch the warden, but they did knock the bucket that had been by his feet against the wall, spilling water everywhere.

“That was rude,” Thomas chided.

“My apologies,” Aziraphale said automatically, wincing at both his reflexive politeness and the roughness of his voice. He looked the warden over: he was empty handed, and was watching Aziraphale’s wings stretch out to cover Crowley’s sleeping form with a bit more than his usual covetousness. He cleared his throat. “What do you want?”

“I’ve got some news,” Thomas replied. “There’s going to be a little debate tonight. The Order of the Heavenly Messenger is going to hold a meeting, so that consensus might be reached as to what to do about Sleeping Beauty behind you.”

“What about Crowley?” Aziraphale asked.

“Well, he’s been asleep for some time now. People are beginning to get concerned that he might not wake up unless we give him some incentive.”

“Incentive,” Aziraphale repeated, feeling the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“Most people wake up when you slap them a little,” Thomas said. “Or a lot.”

“You can’t,” Aziraphale protested. “You can’t, you- the length of time he sleeps is in proportion to how badly he’s been injured. If you keep hurting him, he may never wake up. You can’t. You can’t want that. You need his cooperation, you can’t. Please don’t. Please.”

“I thought it might be something like that,” Thomas said. “And I can say as much at the meeting, if you like.”

“What do you want?” Aziraphale asked again, his voice breaking in spite of himself.

Thomas looked him up and down. Aziraphale fought down the urge to fold back in upon himself.

“Not much more than what you’ve already agreed to,” he said at last.

“Ah,” Aziraphale said. “Yes. I- very well, then.”

Thomas smirked, and started towards him.

“I believe,” Aziraphale said quickly. “That I’ve clearly set the terms as to when you provide your part of the bargain.”

Thomas stopped, the smirk on his face disappearing. For a long, tense moment he merely glared down at him.

He could very easily press the issue, Aziraphale knew. They both knew that he had no way of fighting back that wouldn’t endanger Crowley’s welfare further, and therefore had no way of fighting back at all. But for whatever reason, Thomas always seemed to require Aziraphale’s agreement before he did anything.

“Who would have thought that an angel would know to demand payment up front like a proper whore?” Thomas asked.

Aziraphale refused to flinch. “I’ve been on Earth for a very long time.” Long enough to watch every profession develop, as it happened. Prostitution wasn’t the oldest of them- that was big game hunting, believe it or not- and all things considered he was of the opinion that it was one of the less destructive ones, provided there was no one holding the prostitute in question in captivity.

“If you make me walk out of here unsatisfied, I’ll keep up my end of the bargain, but I won’t be gentle with you when I come back,” Thomas warned him.

“I don’t expect you to be,” Aziraphale assured him. “I don’t expect you know how.”

Thomas twitched, his expression morphing for a moment into something ugly and more honest than he usually showed.

“Fine,” he spat. “Be that way.”

Then he left him alone with the sounds of Crowley’s gentle breathing and water dripping down the grate.

There was no numbing the days that followed. Aziraphale seemed to drag and jerk and tumble his way through the slow-motion panic and utter dread that followed Thomas’ departure. Time moved too quickly and too slow. He longed for Crowley to awaken and dreaded what would happen to him when he did. The cell was too large and his every breath echoed loudly, and the walls were pressing in upon him so that he could not breathe. He felt very much like he was going mad.

Three days. That was how long it took for them to reach their decision. Three days, marked by three changes of water. And then Stephen appeared to tell him that not only were they going to let Crowley wake up naturally, but they were going to give him a week to recover afterwards.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale told him. Horrifyingly, he meant it. “Thank you.”

He cried for a while, after he left, for some value of the term. He was too exhausted and spent to produce any actual tears, but he did curl in upon himself and shake.

It wasn’t until the following day that Thomas returned.

At first, he seemed intent on just changing the water buckets. Aziraphale watched him warily over his knees. Behind him, Crowley shifted around on the mattress. He’d been doing that for hours. Oh, Aziraphale did hope he wasn’t about to wake up. It would be just awful if he were to wake up now and be greeted by the sight of-

“If you want to keep your clothes intact, you should remove them now,” Thomas said.

Hurriedly, Aziraphale stood, and began to undo the buttons on his shirt. It took time. His hands were shaking very badly. Thomas watched him as he stripped down, and then beckoned him over.

Aziraphale let himself go. He let himself be pushed face first against the wall, and let his legs be kicked apart at the ankles. He just... let it happen.

The last time he’d done this, it had been with Crowley, in their bed, one morning a few days before Crowley had been abducted. They had been face to face, Aziraphale straddling Crowley’s lap so he could pepper his face with kisses. He’d had one hand braced on the headboard, and the other entangled with Crowley’s against his hip. Crowley had said something funny- the words escaped him now- and they’d stopped for a moment to laugh, foreheads resting against one another.

“Christ, you’re tight,” Thomas panted. His breath was hot against Aziraphale’s neck. The stone wall was very cold and rough against his front. The warden withdrew, and something cold and slimy dripped onto his thighs. When he pushed back in, his cock was slick, and it went further in. “I knew you’d be tight, I knew it’d be-”

Then again, maybe he hadn’t ever done this before. He’d certainly never done this with someone who cared so little for Aziraphale’s comfort. He hadn’t expected Thomas to be gentle, but neither had he been prepared for how ungentle he would be. He hadn’t braced for how much it would hurt.

Thomas took hold of him by the base of his wings, and pulled him down onto his cock. Aziraphale couldn’t contain a shout as he felt himself tear open. He knew what sort of damage it would leave behind, the way muscle would need to be knit back together, the way blood would smear on his thighs. He hadn’t known the pain of it, the sharp stabbing that didn’t have a chance to fade before Thomas began thrusting into him, sawing against the wound and ripping it a little more open each time he snapped his hips.

They do this to him every day, Aziraphale thought, as he bit down on his cheek to prevent himself from screaming. They do this to him every day, again and again, for hours. His nails scrabbled uselessly for purchase against the stone wall. Hold it together, Aziraphale. You only have to do this once.

He turned his face away from the wall, and ended up watching their silhouettes move against the cell door, one pinned still and the other rutting wildly.

It took Thomas a long time to finish. He bit down into Aziraphale’s shoulder as he did, hard enough to break the skin. He caught his breath while still inside him, pressing him against the wall as Aziraphale shook, and swallowed blood. One of his nails had broken, and he found himself looking at the bloody nail bed as Thomas panted against him.

Eventually, after too long a time, Thomas withdrew. Aziraphale heard him pull up his trousers and refasten his belt, and did not move.

“Here,” Thomas said. When Aziraphale didn’t react, he shoved a small thermos under his nose.

“Here,” Thomas said again. This time it was clearly an order, but Aziraphale couldn’t make himself move, much less comply. “Heal yourself, you fucking bastard, unless you want to have to heal your boyfriend.”

Slowly, Aziraphale shifted, and raised a hand so he could dip two of his fingers into the thermos. He healed himself. Mostly. Partially. The worst of the bleeding was stopped before Thomas jerked the thermos back.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Thomas said, and then he was, at long last, gone.

Aziraphale stayed where he was, hunched over, naked, and miserable, for a long while after that. He wasn’t sure how long. He couldn’t focus enough to try and make sense of the passage of time. Eventually, though, he had to move.

He went over to the bucket, now full of fresh water, and wet the waistcoat with it. Running it between his legs streaked it with blood. He spent some time looking at it, before admitting to himself what struck him as wrong about it: the blood was red, not gold.

There was no reason for it to be gold. Crowley’s injuries never bled black, after all, that gash on his side from the first day of their joint captivity aside. But it felt like it should have been gold, and that the injury was soul deep.

It wasn’t. It hadn’t been.

He might have stood there and stared at the bloodstain for hours, had it not been for Crowley letting out a small gasp. Aziraphale turned around and found him sitting upright on the mattress, his eyes narrowed as he squinted at him.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley croaked. “Oh, Aziraphale. What happened?”

Chapter Text

The first time they brought him back to Aziraphale to be healed, he’d completely forgotten that the angel was actually here.

It was just. It had been a fantasy of his for so long. For months, apparently. He’d been here for months, and he’d gotten into the habit of imagining Aziraphale comforting him, when they were through torturing him. He’d thought about it in lurid detail, how it would feel to have the angel’s arms around him, or to have his fingers stroke through his hair.

In reality, Aziraphale let out a horrified wail when they shoved him into the cell. His face was blotchy and wet, and he was crying even as he pushed himself upright and lurched towards him where Crowley was frozen in shock, one hand braced on the wall.

“Oh Crowley,” he whispered, his voice cracking. One of his hands reached out, and was quickly snatched back, and pressed to his own lips. “Oh, my dear.”

Of course, in his fantasy he was never hurt worse than a dull, persistent ache that could easily be soothed away with a gentle touch. And he was never dripping fluid onto the floor, much less other people’s fluids.

He was suddenly very aware, as Aziraphale looked at him with such utter devastation, of how much of the mess dribbling down his legs hadn’t originated in his corporation.

“It’s okay, angel,” he tried to soothe. “It looks worse than it is.”

“Don’t,” Aziraphale said. “Don’t, I-” He pressed his hand more firmly to his mouth.

“You can hear it, can’t you,” Crowley realized.

“The- the screaming,” Aziraphale confirmed miserably. “Yes.”

That hadn’t been in any of Crowley’s fantasies either.

The awkward silence that followed might have stretched on for hours, had the cell door not swung inward and the humans started traipsing in. Aziraphale let out a frightened little gasp, and pulled Crowley back against him, one wing curling around him in an attempt to hide him.

“Oh don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t, please.”

“Don’t what?” asked one of the warden. Matt Reed. “Don’t let you heal him?”

Crowley remembered all their names. Partially it was because there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. Mostly it was because the sigils they bound him with took away his ability to filter the psychic detritus people carried around with them. It had taken centuries worth of experimentation and effort to come up with the right sort of psychic defenses that would neither look suspicious to anyone from Hell nor take up too much of his energy, and that was all gone now. He got to take a look at every vice and sin each of these humans had ever thought to commit. He didn't have the option of tuning it all out.

It didn’t add anything to the experience, really, considering.

So. Matt Reed. He had a sister he used to hit a lot, but he felt bad about it now. He liked fire, a lot more than was normal. He pretended to smoke just so he would have an excuse to have a lighter on him at all times. He’d either lit someone’s house on fire, or thought about it so often and with such loving detail that it was more like a memory than a daydream.

He didn’t like screaming. It gave him a headache. Depending on the day, that meant that Crowley either bit his tongue when he was having his turn, or he screamed his head off.

Today he was holding a bowl full of holy water, so Crowley bit his tongue.

“I-” Aziraphale said. His hands tightened instinctively around Crowley, who couldn’t quite suppress a groan as his fingers dug into a tender spot on his ribs. Aziraphale’s grip on him loosened slightly. “I would like to heal him, please.” His voice was small, defeated, and vulnerable in ways Crowley just knew these humans would react to like catnip. “If I may.”

“Say ‘please’, then” Matt said.

Aziraphale had already said please, but he said it again. “Please. Please.”

As bad as it had been, those early days- and they’d been really bad- it was worse now. Being returned to their cell to face Aziraphale’s distress hadn’t been anything good, but it had been honest. He’d been able to tell, to see it with painful detail, what was bothering the angel.

Now he was unconscious before they finished with him, and Aziraphale did a little miracle to make sure he stayed out and even slept a bit while he was being healed and cleaned and tucked away on the mattress. It was hours before he would wake up, normally, and by the time he did Aziraphale had put himself back together. He’d be dry-eyed and calm, and he would smile and speak in a soft, gentle voice that didn’t shake, and his hands would be steady as he cuddled close against Crowley, oh-so-careful to avoid all the places that would make him flinch.

“What do you need, dearest?” he would asked.

‘I need to know you’re okay,’ he never replied.

There was no way for him to know. There just wasn't. Aziraphale would lie about it, if anything was happening, and Crowley couldn’t blame him for that. He got that, he got why Aziraphale would lie to him. He’d tried to hide the rape part of it from Aziraphale at first, because he knew it would upset him even more than non-sexual torture already was upsetting him. If Aziraphale was being hurt in any way, he would try to cover it up to spare Crowley the pain. He knew that, he got that, and he hated it.

It wasn’t like the cultists would let him know, either. The idea of outright asking them was so horrifically bad that it made him laugh, actually physically laugh as they chained him down. And as for what he picked up from there minds, well.

He couldn’t differentiate between what was a favorite fantasy, and what was a cherished memory. They felt the same, and whatever fine distinction between the two he might have been able to suss out was pretty much lost at this point. He was too scared to think it all the way through, and oftentimes in too much pain to think about it at all.

Take James, for example. He was a marshal, not a warden, which seemed to mean that he was out and about a lot. According to what Crowley could see in his mind, he beat up a lot of men he met on dating apps when he wasn't here beating up Crowley. And, according to what Crowley could see in his mind, he’d raped Aziraphale in the backroom of his bookshop while he was knocked unconscious.

Except, he couldn’t have, or so Crowley had realized after watching that scene play out in James' head a good half dozen times. Aziraphale had had the same corporation for six thousand years, and Adam had reconstituted it down to the last detail. He knew his body extremely well. He’d have been able to tell, if he’d been fucked as roughly as James thought of fucking him, and then he wouldn’t have been so shocked when he’d discovered that he’d done the same to Crowley. So, that was probably just a fantasy of his, then.

It wasn’t just James, though, and the images in the other’s minds weren’t so easily dismissed. Stephen was obsessed with Aziraphale: he thought he could be saved, if enough pressure was applied to scare him straight, and that he'd be able to return him to Heaven and Gabriel on a silver platter. The ways he thought of doing it were sickening- he hadn’t seen some of those implements outside of a museum since the 14th fucking century. Thomas was also obsessed, in a more traditionally stalkerish way. He liked that Aziraphale was held captive, and he liked being the one who held him captive, and every time he touched Crowley now, he pictured Aziraphale in his place.

Gordon wasn’t the worst, by comparison, except for the way there was some evidence that he was, actually, plucking out his feathers at random in search for just the right one to use for whatever sort of handicrafts he was making out of feathers at home. Crowley woke up in the middle of a nest made of the potential evidence.

Aziraphale claimed that he plucked out the feathers himself, and Crowley could see that too, could see him going so out of his mind with worry that he started plucking. He couldn’t really say he hated the idea of that less.

There were others, of course. Other cultists, other fantasies. It got hard to keep track of who was imagining what, especially if they'd been going at him for a while. Sometimes, he wasn’t even sure it was coming from any of the cultists. He used to imagine Aziraphale: imagine his soft solid bulk against his cheek, imagine the words he would murmur into his hair. Now he had that, and it seemed like all he could do was imagine Aziraphale being in pain.

‘I missed you,” he never told him. ‘I wish you weren’t here.’

Chapter Text

They had a week. One week, precisely, from the moment Crowley awakened. It wouldn’t surprise Aziraphale to learn that someone had started up a timer, to ration out their allotted recovery time down to the last second.

Not that he was particularly cognizant of that fact at first. There was, for one long and terrible moment, the frantic hummingbird beating of his heart, which was nearly lost under the roaring of blood in his ears, which itself was nearly lost over the sound of the elephant in the room suddenly trumpeting He knows, he knows, he knows!

Crowley opened his mouth. Aziraphale couldn’t even begin to speculate what he was going to say, but he was quite certain that he couldn’t handle hearing it. He opened his mouth in turn.

“I’d like to get dressed first, before we do this,” he heard himself say.

“Yeah, of course,” Crowley said. It sounded like he was speaking to Aziraphale from a great distance, not just a few steps away. “Whatever you want, angel.”

What Aziraphale wanted was for Crowley to snap at him. He wanted his anger. He wanted to hear that he’d been wrong to hide this from him, that they were in this together, on the same side, and here Aziraphale was undermining that again. He wanted to be blamed, even. He wanted it to be laid out in all its harsh ugliness: that he’d been given a choice, and he’d chosen to go through with it, while Crowley was being brutalized and his only recourse, the only thing that might make them relent, was impossible.

But of course Crowley knew none of that. All he knew was that he’d woken up and found Aziraphale naked and bleeding. He wouldn’t know the particulars until Aziraphale told him.

Aziraphale finished wiping himself down, and then he dressed. It didn’t take very long- more than half his clothing had either been taken from him or repurposed, at this point. He still felt very much half naked with only one layer on.

He sat down on the edge of the mattress, turned to Crowley to make some kind of attempt at an explanation, and, humiliatingly, burst into tears.

He hadn’t cried in front of Crowley in a very long time. Not while the demon was awake, at least. It only upset him- and worse, made him feel obliged to comfort Aziraphale when he was the one being brutalized. There were few things quite so upsetting as seeing Crowley bloody and battered and trying to smile and reassure Aziraphale that it was all going to be fine. He’d quite lost his head over it, more than once, which had of course rendered him useless.

So he’d stopped. Or, well- he’d tried to stop it completely, but found it impossible, so he’d shuffled it around. He did his crying while Crowley was out of their cell being tortured, and occasionally while Crowley was asleep after they’d finished with the day’s violations and Aziraphale had healed the damage as best he could. By the time Crowley was awake again, he’d have cried himself out and made himself capable of offering whatever comfort he could possibly provide.

“Oh, Aziraphale,” Crowley said, gentle and soothing, right on cue. “Angel, come here.”

He wrapped his arms around him. It took a moment for Aziraphale to return the embrace. He wasn’t so far gone as to forget that there were large parts of Crowley’s body which were off limits, but it took him a moment to remember which parts were safe and which would make him flinch in fear. He ended up clutching Crowley’s shoulders, pressed knee to knee and forehead to forehead due to a lack of other options.

Crowley did not clutch at his shoulders in return. One of his hands stroked through Aziraphale’s hair, and the other hovered a bit before coming to a tentative rest on his hip.

“Is this okay?” he asked, when Aziraphale had calmed down enough to try breathing again.

“I’m fine!” Aziraphale protested, and then immediately proved himself a liar by breaking into a fresh wave of tears.

Crowley didn’t climb into his lap, like he might have done, once. It was a tricky activity these days, lap sitting, as the easiest ways for Crowley to do it involved either wrapped his legs around or straddling some part of Aziraphale, and that was right out. So was burying his face in Crowley’s neck.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale moaned.

“Don’t, don’t-”

“They nearly discorporated you, Crowley! They nearly sent you back to Hell,” Aziraphale said, feeling utterly wretched. “And here I am crying over a little-”

Crowley kissed him, a desperate closed-mouth press of lips to his own. Aziraphale stopped talking.

“Don’t,” Crowley said again, after he’d pulled back a little. “You just- you let yourself cry, okay? You’ve been so brave the whole time we’ve been stuck here. I’ve got you, for right now. You just let yourself cry.”

Brave? He hadn’t realized that he’d fooled Crowley so completely. He hasn’t been brave. He’s been terrified- at times, quite literally out of his wits. And he’s been impotently, uselessly furious. And he’s been just barely able to hold it together well enough to care for Crowley despite the fact that they hardly touch him.

And he could not stop crying.

Crowley urged him closer, until Aziraphale was nearly on his lap, just barely straddling his knees with his head pressed against his chest, half on the jacket and half on bare skin.

“Who did it, Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, once he’d calmed down enough to stop weeping. “Which of them rap-”

“Thomas,” Aziraphale said. “It’s just him. It’s not so bad- it’s normally not so bad.”

Crowley hissed, and his fingers tightened spasmodically. “How long?”

Aziraphale nearly started crying again. He suspected he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself if he’d been any less tired. “As long as we’ve been getting supplies,” he admitted.

Crowley made a wounded noise deep in his throat.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley protested.

“He gave me a choice,” Aziraphale explained. “He did. He does. I confirm it every time.”

Crowley clutched at him more tightly. “Angel, that’s not a choice, that’s-”

“But it is! I just- I can’t bare the thought of doing nothing when I might be doing something, so I chose this, I-”

“Don’t,” Crowley said. “Just don’t, just- stop, please.”

For a moment neither of them said anything. The just stayed as they were, Crowley with one hand cupping the back of Aziraphale’s head and the other arm wrapped around his middle just beneath his wings, and Aziraphale pressed into his front, clutching tightly to his lapels.

“I’m sorry,” he offered again.

Crowley made another wounded noise and pressed his face into the top of Aziraphale’s head. It was a much longer moment before he pulled back.

“You- it’s been in exchange for supplies, you said.” Crowley sounded terrible, his voice so rough that for a moment Aziraphale feared that he’d somehow managed to miss some damage to his vocal chords.

“Yes,” he confirmed, straightening up with a sniff.

“Then there should be tea, right?” Crowley asked, already looking for the thermos. “There’s always tea, so-”

“Not this time,” Aziraphale said. “It was different, this time.”

“How so?”

Aziraphale took a deep breath. “You’ve been asleep for a week.”

“I- what.”

“A week, presuming they change the water every day, which- I can’t really know for sure, but,” Aziraphale shrugged, and found it was easier to look at the buttons on the jacket than Crowley’s face. “A few days in Thomas came in, and said that they were considering trying to wake you up with force. I was afraid that would simply cause you to never wake up, given the nature of the miracle, and I said as much, and he offered to raise my concerns at the meeting in exchange for- for ‘not much more than we’ve already agreed to’ is how he put it, I believe.”

Crowley made another noise, and reached for him again. Aziraphale let himself be drawn against him, and admitted to himself that he had missed this, missed being taken care of by Crowley.

“Buggery,” he clarified. “Normally it’s fellatio. Which is- it doesn’t hurt, really.”

“It hurt,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure he was talking about this specific instance, or refuting his claim as to the prior ones. “Yes, well. Stephen came by yesterday to tell me that they’d decided to allow you to wake up naturally. And that- and that you’d be given a week to recover, after you awoke.” The paradoxical urge to laugh bubbled up his throat, and he swallowed it back with a gurgle. He was pretty sure that laughing would go the same way as crying: once he’d started, he would be entirely unable to stop. “Buggery well spent, I suppose.”

“Okay, okay,” Crowley said. “Okay, so. It was real, then. That threat. You’re sure. He wasn’t just yanking your chain.”

None of that had been said as a question, but Aziraphale decided to take it as such. “Yes. I always- I always make him prove that he has something for me, first. That’s- that’s generally what I mean when I say that I confirm it every time. And once he’s proven that he can deliver on his end of the bargain I-”

I feel like I should apologize to Madame Tracy for the comparisons to her former profession. I feel like I’m cheating on you. I feel violated, and I don’t feel like I should have the right to that feeling. I feel so deeply ashamed of myself, because I let him have his way with me, and I hate it, I hate all of it, but I do it every time.

Crowley pulled away, bodily at least. One of his hands ran down Aziraphale’s arm, until he clutched it between his own, careful to avoid the demon's wrists.

“Do you think you could stop?” Crowley asked. “Because, listen: I don’t care about the tea, or the blankets or even the bloody sleep, I just-”

“Don’t say that!” Aziraphale protested. “Don’t. Don’t. I could bear it, I couldn’t bear it, I-”

“Shh,” Crowley said. His other hand joined the rest on Aziraphale’s lap, and squeezed. “It’s- let’s sit back a bit, yeah? Let’s just, let’s just sit.”

Aziraphale let Crowley manipulate him how he wanted to sit. They stayed on the mattress, but sat with their backs to the wall, side by side, Crowley’s arm around his shoulders and his wing around his back. Aziraphale kept his wings winched tightly in to accommodate him.

“It’s been bad for you, hasn’t it?” Crowley asked. “Being alone so much.”

Aziraphale didn’t reply. All things considered, he felt like the solitude should really be bothering him less than it did.

“It was bad for me, before you arrived,” Crowley continued. “I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.”

Aziraphale could make no reply but to lean his head against Crowley’s shoulder.

“I don’t know that I could stop,” he said after a moment. “In answer to your previous question. He always requires that I agree, but he also gets quite angry, whenever I remind him of the terms of my agreement. An outright refusal would be worse. He might let it stand, but I have no doubt that he would find a way to make both of us pay for it.”

Crowley nodded. Aziraphale pressed a bit closer to him.

“At least this way we get something out of it,” he added. “And, who knows? Maybe one day he’ll- I don’t know.” Maybe he’ll decide he wants me somewhere a little less grim, and give me the chance to see how we’ll escape in the process. Maybe he’ll leave me with a thermos of holy water to heal myself, and give me the chance to perform a slightly less benign miracle than healing. “Slip up, or something of that nature.”

Crowley gave him another squeeze, with his arm and his wing both- oh, his poor wings. He’d been quite vain about them, before. There had been an entire room in his flat in Mayfair set aside soley for him to preen in, and special kit assembled with the softest of brushes and finely perfumed oils. Now they were in tatters, dull and in some places completely bald.

“What are we going to do, angel?”

“I don’t know.”

Aziraphale turned his face up to the ceiling. Is this part of Your ineffable plan? he wondered. Or is this just one of those things that happen when Your plan involves free will?

No answer was forthcoming, but that was to be expected, and not worth getting upset over. After all, until very recently, he wouldn’t have been able to ask Her anything at all.

He went back over it all, after the failed Apocalypse, his collection of holy books. Not the ones he kept because of the amusing typos or addendums, but the ones he’d collected for the beauty of their illumination, or the poetry of their translation. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but what he’d found were questions.

There had been Abraham, arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom: Will you still destroy the city if there are fifty good men living in it? Or if there are forty-five? If there are forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? There had been Moses, building off the same arguments to spare his people as they struggled out from under the thumb of Egypt in a more metaphorical, spiritual fashion than they had struggled through the parting of the Red Sea, with such force that God was recorded as repenting of evil intent when She relented. There had been Jesus, first in Gethsemane, and then on the cross: Why have You forsaken me? And then Muhammad, when asked about the Day of Judgment, replying with he who is questioned knows no more than the questioner.

There was very little about the human accounts that could be described as nice and accurate- though he did hope that hadith was more accurate than not, as he’s sure Gabriel’s face had been a picture- but he had to admit that there was also very little in their accounts that was fundamentally untrue. For six thousand years, and more, he had held fast to the ideal that faith needed to be blind, needed to be without question or doubt, even as he’d watched that ideal be carved away into something softer and more forgiving by humanity.

How did that bit of wisdom from Michelangelo go? Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. It had just galled a bit, to discover he’d spent his existence looking at the stone with such intensity that he’d missed the fact that it had become the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

He was working on it, undoing all those reflexive demurrals of doubt, letting himself voice his questions. He had been working on it, at least. This wasn’t exactly the sort of environment in which one made any sort of spiritual progress.

Crowley gave him another squeeze. “A week, you said.”

“From when you woke up, yes.”

“Then,” Crowley said, pressing his face in close, his mouth by Aziraphale’s ear. “We’ve got just under seven days to think of something. We’d better make it good.”

“Yes. I quite agree.” They’d been escalating, the entire time they’d been there, and though they had hit a limit with this near-discorporation, he wasn’t sure they recognized that. He didn’t want to wait around for confirmation, one way or the other. “Do you have any ideas as to where we should start?”

Chapter Text

They rarely spoke in English, when it was just the two of them. They were both quite sure that they were being monitored, and neither one of them felt like making the task of keeping tabs on them easy.

Some of the translations would have been easy to make- could probably have been made without the cult having to involve anyone else. French, for example: Crowley had vowed to get Aziraphale’s spoken French up to snuff, and with the complete lack of anything better to do, he might be able to make good on his threat this time.

He used Spanish, which was also a common enough language to learn, to explain what he’d figured out about how this cult was organized, dipping into English to name each title as it came up. The cultists in charge of guarding them were wardens, and a senior warden, oddly enough, was a warden with seniority. A warden pursuivant was whichever warden or senior warden that had been selected to hold the bowl of holy water- it was clearly some kind of honor, or had some kind of qualifications since it kept rotating mainly through the same select group of people, but neither Aziraphale nor Crowley could discern the pattern. There were six marshals, and they did field work or some kind. What kind of field work there was, much less why there was so much of it as to require a team of six was not something they could discern either. There was the Master of the Rite who was also, or so he himself told Aziraphale, the vicar of the church they were based under.

“It’s been affiliated with the Church of England ever since the Reformation,” Aziraphale said. “It saw a fair bit of action during the Prayer Book Rebellion, but it’s been quiet ever since.”

“How do you know so much about this place anyway?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale winced and then explained about Gabriel's repeated orders to do blessings in this general area. “In hindsight it all seems very obvious that he must have some kind of vested interest in his cult, but I must admit, I couldn’t fathom him having any kind of interest in any Earthy matter apart from his suits.” He let out a strained little laugh. “I was even thinking of coming here, for our next anniversary.”

“You were?” Crowley asked.

“Well not here as in the church, obviously,” Aziraphale explained. “But here, the town. There’s a very nice little bed and breakfast, and it’s only two miles out from the Eden Project- you know, those great domed-in gardens they built in that old clay pit.”

“Yeah, I know,” Crowley said. “I’ve been wanting to go out there for years.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “I know.”

They kept the more accessible languages for when they were discussing things they believed to be uncontroversial. For things like escape plans they retreated into the more obscure: language isolates like Mapuche, dead languages like Ge’ez, or preferably languages which were both like Elamite or Sumerian.

Sumerian was a particular favorite of theirs. They both spoke it rather well, since it was the closest and longest-lasting variant of the long-lost Language used by humanity prior to the destruction of the Tower of Babel. They used the eme-te-na dialect, which as a dialect that had been used primarily by courtesans and prostitutes alike was uniquely suited to describe both the intrigues that escape would require and the sort of threats they faced. There was a good range of insults there as well, which they indulged in with some frequency. It wouldn’t do to be so predictable as to use the language solely to plan, after all.

Most of the time they had nothing productive to say, and so ended up meandering through their memories, speaking in whatever language had been in use at the time: Mozarabic for the taifa states, Chaldean for the dying days of Nineveh, and so on and so forth. Always conscious about not presenting a pattern for their captors to recognize, they would switch languages frequently, often in the middle of a discussion. Consequently, they spent a great deal of time discussing their respective and joint adventures along the Silk Road, as there had been a new local language every fifty miles or so and everyone spoke at least five languages for trading purposes. Switching languages came quite naturally to such reminiscences.

By unspoken agreement they came to avoid the languages they used for difficult discussions. They used Etruscan, for example, to discuss how Crowley would wake up and immediately be catapulted into a panic attack it could take hours to come out of, and to come to the conclusion that waking up in Aziraphale’s arms might, in fact, be a trigger rather than the balm they’d assumed it to be. They hadn’t used it since.

English was for when Crowley was just waking up, when he was disoriented and needed Aziraphale to speak in something he would instantly recognize. English was also for the cultists. They couldn’t speak anything but around them, as Aziraphale discovered when he attempted to soothe Crowley in Aramaic one day, shortly after he’d arrived, hoping the language switch would provide them with something like privacy. The wardens didn’t react well.

“Quite the right hook, that one,” Aziraphale said, once it was all over. His eye was swollen, he’d bitten through his tongue, and he was pretty certain that he’d chipped a tooth when he went down, but it could have been worse. They’d nearly broken one of Crowley’s wings at the same time, and he healed Crowley from worse than even that every day besides.

Things showed no signs of abating any time soon. Some swelling and a chipped tooth was nothing.

“Oliver,” Crowley supplied. His voice was very hoarse- Aziraphale hadn’t been allowed to heal any of the damage there, though as this was before they would wear his vocal chords out entirely it wasn’t as torturous as it might have otherwise been. “Oliver Wright. He used to be a soldier. He pulled some shit in Afghanistan- nothing anyone seemed willing or able to press charges about, but some higher-ups pulled him aside and told him not to reup his enlistment. He thinks about killing the officers who did it so often I’m not sure he hasn’t.”

Crowley was a veritable font of information when he was awake. He knew everyone’s names, their ranks, and had even managed to take a peek into some of their minds of figure out what kind of skills they had, what kind of threats they might pose, beyond the standard of terror set by their circumstances. Mostly it wasn’t information they could use in the moment, but once they had some idea as to how they might escape, those details might prove crucial.

And even if it didn’t, the possibility of such helped to keep Crowley from falling into despair, and that was every bit as important as their escape would be.

So Crowley collected little details in the hopes that they might be cobbled together into some kind of effective plan. It was up to Aziraphale to collect whatever tools they might need to enact such a plan. It had been, ever since he and Thomas had reached their agreement.

It had all started innocuously enough.

“Do you think you could maybe cut my hair, if you get the chance?” Crowley asked him. “It’s just- I think it hurt less. The pulling. When it was shorter.” He’d been growing it out before he was kidnapped, for a very Crowley definition of the term. He’d been changing the length up every few days, trying on different styles in the search of which was going to be the new him- or possibly new her, or new they. That part of his corporation was still running on automatic, and his hair was growing steadily.

Aziraphale’s wasn’t. He’d shut down just about everything that wasn’t relevant to searching for Crowley, and it all remained mercifully turned off even with the collar on.

“Of course,” Aziraphale promised.

It hadn’t been until ten days later that he’d actually gotten the chance to make good on his word. Crowley was healed, and cleaned, and before they could take the holy water away Aziraphale trimmed his hair as well.

The wardens reacted predictably. He was slammed into the wall- and it always seemed to hurt a great deal more when the cultists did it than it ever had when Crowley was the one doing the wall slamming- and there was a tender bruise blossoming on his ribs, but no lasting damage had been done to either of them and no injunctions against further personal grooming had been issued. Aziraphale was tentatively willing to call it a success.

Then the door opened, and in strode Senior Warden Thomas Hooper.

Not that Aziraphale had either known or cared to know his name and rank at the time. He hadn’t done anything to mark himself as a greater than average threat, and so Aziraphale had mentally slotted him in under ‘one of the older ones’ and paid him no special attention. He regretted it when he came in alone, and let the door swing shut behind them.

“Hello,” Thomas said, with something that was probably supposed to be a congenial smile plastered onto his face. “I’m Thomas.”

“Hello Thomas,” Aziraphale replied. “I presume you already know my name?”

Thomas laughed, far more loudly than the comment warranted. “Yes, Aziraphale, I know who you are.”

For a moment that was all that was said. Thomas seemed content to lean back against the far wall, and watch the pair of them, Crowley tucked under the jacket on the mattress Aziraphale had piled with his feathers in an attempt to make it less terrible, Aziraphale sitting cross legged next to the mattress. Aziraphale found that he was not content to let him do so, and spread out his wings to block Crowley from view.

“Please, leave him alone,” he pleaded. “He needs his rest.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Thomas said. “I’ve just come for a little chat with you, that’s all.”

That was not as reassuring as it perhaps should have been. “What about?”

“Well, I heard that you gave your boyfriend a little makeover today,” Thomas said.

“I shortened my husband’s hair, as it’s tremendously difficult to keep clean at its previous length under the best of circumstances, which you have not provided us with,” Aziraphale said.

“And it got me to thinking,” Thomas continued, giving no indication that he had heard a word he’d said. “You must really care about making him comfortable.”

“People hardly go around marrying people they wish to see uncomfortable,” Aziraphale remarked. “Not in this day and age, at least.”

“I could help you with that, with making him comfortable,” Thomas said.

“No thanks,” Aziraphale said quickly. “I’ve got that well in hand.”

Thomas laughed again, even more loudly.

“All I have to do to fuck your boyfriend is wait my turn,” Thomas said, still wheezing slightly. “No need to come in here for that.”

“So what have you come here for?” Aziraphale asked carefully.

“You.”

It took Aziraphale a moment to parse that, and once he did he immediately tried to tell himself that there was some kind of mistake. But there was no mistaking the expression on Thomas’ face. He’d seen it’s kind before: at the various gentlemen’s clubs he’d been a member of, during the odd temptation that Crowley had fobbed off on him that required a certain personal touch, and from Crowley himself of course. It had never before felt like a threat, however.

Aziraphale missed have cufflinks to fuss with. He lifted his chin a bit. “And how would that make Crowley more comfortable?”

“Well, it’d be a trade, you see,” Thomas explained. “You make me feel good for a time. And, in return, I’ll bring you things.”

“What sort of things?” Aziraphale asked.

“Tea. Biscuits. Mints,” Thomas said with a shrug. “He used to complain of the taste something fierce, back in the beginning.”

Aziraphale wavered.

“And who knows, maybe if it’s good enough I’ll slip you a blanket or something like that, make the place a little cozier,” Thomas added.

Aziraphale nodded thoughtfully. Thomas took that as agreement, and started towards him.

“Show me yours first,” Aziraphale said.

Thomas stopped, and squinted down at him in confusion. “What?”

“If you truly want my cooperation, you’ll have to show me that you have something worth cooperating for first,” Aziraphale explained.

“What, you want me to go raid the kitchen and then come back?” Thomas asked incredulously.

“If you have nothing on you now, then yes,” Aziraphale said. “Raid the kitchen, or the corner store, or the Sainsbury’s in the next town over, if you like. See if there’s any ginger tea to be found, it’s his favorite.” Toodle-loo, off you pop, he almost added, but he found that this little burst of bravado didn’t extend quite that far.

Thomas continued to squint down at him for a moment, and then he smirked. “Be back in a mo’.” Then he was gone.

Aziraphale spent some time after he left looking down at Crowley. He seemed so small and vulnerable, curled in upon himself under the scant cover Aziraphale’s jacket provided him. It really would be nice to have a blanket of some kind to tuck him in with. And he did complain of the taste, sometimes. There wasn’t anything for, most days. They only had the one bucket of water, and if Aziraphale had to clean him manually rather than miraculously, as he did most days, then it would be all befouled once he woke up.

Would it be so bad, if when Crowley awoke he would be able to tell him that he had something that would make this slightly less grim?

He didn’t spend much time on it, because Thomas returned in short order, with a small half-empty package of Jaffa cakes and a steaming mug which read Skilled Enough To Become A Bishop, Crazy Enough To Love It.

“It’s not ginger, I’m afraid,” Thomas said, as Aziraphale mentally added hubris to Stephen’s list of sins. “We don’t much go for the herbal stuff around here. Earl Grey’s not going to make him burst into flames though, is it?”

“It hasn’t thus far,” Aziraphale said.

Would it be so bad? I wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Crowley wouldn’t see it. He didn’t have to know.

“In the interests of full disclosure, you should know that I don’t currently have any genitalia manifested,” he told Thomas.

For the first time, Thomas looked perturbed. “Can you?”

“Manifest genitalia? Not with this collar on I can’t,” Aziraphale told him.

For a moment, the barest whisper of an idea occurred to him: maybe he could persuade Thomas that if he took the collar off of him for a moment he wouldn’t level the building and fly Crowley to safety.

Then Thomas smirked again. “Well, you’ve still got a mouth, obviously.”

Crowley, he was sure, would be able to do this. He would be able to turn the conversation back, make Thomas want enough to make him stupid with it, persuade him that taking the collar off of him would only result in his greater pleasure. For his part, Aziraphale suddenly found himself unable to speak against the sharpness lodged in his throat.

“Do you have a hole down the other end too?” he asked.

“Yes,” Aziraphale forced out. He’d suppressed his appetite and his corporation’s need for food both, but Madame Tracy had made a point of coming into London twice a week with something for him to eat. That had left him with little recourse but to keep the digestive tract in place, and he hadn’t felt like modifying it from the standard genitalless configuration, even if he did end up just willing the food he’d eaten directly into the sewer after Tracy left.

“Well, we’ll save that for a rainy day,” Thomas said, setting down the tea and Jaffa cakes on the floor. “Why don’t you come over here and hold up your end of things, then?”

It often felt like the only thing of substance he’d been able to accomplish, that trade. It was the only thing that had tangible results that weren’t obliterated the next time the guards walked in. All done in English, of course. And if he was quicker to switch to another language after Crowley woke up on the days when Thomas had come around, then, well, Crowley didn't know enough to comment upon the pattern.

He hadn’t known enough to comment on it before, at least.

They did what little planning they could do in Guanche. It was all done before the guards came in to change the water for the first time. There was only one thing that could be done in order to make them relent, at least a little bit, and very few ways they could convince them it was being done.

They spent the rest of their time trying to keep one another distracted, trying not to second guess their decision. Trying not to think that if they managed to pull this off, it might very well be the thing that killed them.

They’d spent a good six millenia ignoring both their own and each other’s feelings for one another. It should have been easy to ignore their fears for a week, after that.

They were in the middle of a discussion of the use of Shakespeare’s work in Yiddish theatre- Crowley was of the opinion that he would have gotten along well with Jacob Gordin, as they were both snobs, and was taking the stance that “translated and improved” was an accurate byline rather than a sarcastic one mainly so Aziraphale would argue with him- when the wardens returned. Wardens, plural: not the single warden that would come in to change the water, but the full complement meant to escort Crowley out.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. He’d known it was coming today but it still felt too soon. It felt like a punch to the stomach, really.

Crowley was quicker to react. He had already disentangled himself from Aziraphale and was shrugging out of the jacket by the time he’d rallied enough to speak.

“Please, don’t hurt him like that again.” Crowley handed the jacket back to him, and his took it with the barest nod. “Please, you nearly killed him.” A pair of wardens took him by the arms and began to force him out of the cell, like Crowley wasn’t already moving on his own, determined to keep what little dignity he could. “There are limits to what he can stand, there are limits to what I can heal him of, please don’t-” And then they were gone, and whatever ghost of a point his words had left with them.

He took a moment to close his eyes and breathe deeply, and nearly missed the warden who was changing their water bucket.

It was Thomas. Of course it was Thomas.

“I’d like to speak with the Master of the Rite, if I may,” he said before Thomas could follow his fellows out of their cell. “Will you ask him if he’ll speak to me?”

“I’ll mention it,” Thomas said.

Aziraphale rather expected that he would add For a price, but he said nothing more. He just walked out of the door, shutting it behind him and leaving Aziraphale alone to await the sounds of Crowley’s screams.

Chapter Text

It took five utterly frustrating and terrifying days for Stephen to agree to see him, and he was pretty sure that he’d only managed it so quickly because on the fourth day Thomas had been the one to change out their water once again.

Chapter Text

There’s a happy ending to all of this, believe it or not.

There is a day when an angel and a demon stand in front of a cottage within spitting distance of the coast. The angel is wearing a suit that has definitely seen days both better and worse and the demon is wearing more layers than ever he has since petticoats went out of fashion, but they are there, alive and free.

They spend some time outside, peeking into the garage to see the Bentley, looking as pristine as ever, and the garden that knew better than to let itself get overgrown. They don’t spend a long time, however: it feels too exposed, being outside and unenclosed by stone, and it feels too strange, not to have their wings out.

So inside they go, banishing dust and relocating mice with a snap of their fingers. The cottage seems to let out a sigh of relief, and settle down onto it’s foundations, as though content that the owners who loved being here were finally back.

“Should I try making us something?” Aziraphale asks. “The food will definitely have all gone off by now, but I can probably turn it back on.”

Crowley is already shaking his head. “I’m just going to go take a nap. A long one. Might be a year.”

“I might join you,” Aziraphale replies. “If I may.”

“Yeah. Of course. I think we’ve got the trick of it now.”

They lay carefully down on their own bed, swaddled in their own pajamas, cocooned with their own pillows and blankets, and a light shining in on them from the bathroom. Aziraphale lays down first, on his back, his hands resting on the curve of his stomach and his legs pressed close together. He drops off immediately, as he tends to do when he decides to sleep. Crowley takes a bit longer, which is usual even if it’s currently more present and annoying than it used to be. He shifts around on the bed, turning this way and that until he finally finds a position that doesn’t make him feel dread creeping over him: curled up on his side, cuddled against Aziraphale’s side, his legs pressed against his husbands, his feet tucked snugly beneath his shins. He tucks his chin against Aziraphale’s shoulder, and clasps the angel’s hands beneath his own. Then he nods off.

They don’t sleep for a year. They sleep for five.

Not much physically changes in that cottage in those five years. The cottage itself remains relieved to be occupied, the garden stays terrified, and the Bentley waits, with somewhat less patience than she had been waiting before. If you were to peep into their bedroom you would notice no change from month to month, much less day to day- though, of course, no one would dare to peep, or at least peep so close. Psychically, in a general and unconscious way, there is a slight ripple that causes a shift in the village: gossip now says that the people who own that old cottage on the edge of the water were planning to move back in, permanently, at some point.

Anathema drives by, sometimes, and sometimes she can see something out of the corner of her eye that few others could: a many-winged and many-eyed glowing gossamer something draped over a something else that evoked coils made of scale and the hot cores of stars. She leaves things for them: pictures of her children as they grow, newspaper clippings about Wensley and Brian’s ongoing work with carbon sinks that could feed the world, Pepper’s growing influence in conflict resolution, Adam’s skyrocketing career as a politician, the odd postcard that Warlock still sometimes sends and gets forwarded to her by ineffable means. There are no news clippings, no print outs, or anything of that kind that deal with the details of the ongoing trials concerning the activities of the cult unearthed in Cornwall. Nothing about the ongoing efforts to identify the unclaimed body found in the catacombs discovered beneath the burnt remains of the church, nor of the bodies discovered by anonymous tipoff that might very well be connected to the cult’s activities. The media fervor passes them by entirely. There is only a list of names, and the next to them a list of prisons and sentence lengths.

The mailbox remains otherwise untouched.

Aziraphale wakes up first, which is also usual. What’s unusual is that when he wakes, he also gets up. Before, he might have shifted around a bit: reached for the book he’d been reading and start right back in again, or perhaps stroke through Crowley’s hair a bit until he woke up, if it was late enough in the morning for it. During, towards the end of it when he had been sleeping, he’d often just laid there until he was able to fall back asleep.

This is the After now, and upon waking what Aziraphale feels most strongly is that nothing can be the same.

He changes into a fresh suit for the first time in years- the moths haven’t dared to touch them any more than the garden has dared to overgrow- and then he putters. There’s the stale and molded over remains of the food he neglected to clear out of their kitchen for him to coax back into freshness. There’s his sorely missed collection of books to check over. There’s the television, which finds itself fully licensed and up to date on it’s subscriptions, and eager to show off a special retrospective program about major world events of the past decade, should Aziraphale only deign to switch it on. There’s the mail Anathema has carefully curated for them. There’s plenty to putter about with.

Or, that is, there would have been plenty to putter about with had he been able to leave Crowley’s bedside for more than a few minutes without feeling a terrible creeping panic wash over him. He keeps straining his ears, listening for screams. He keeps expecting there to be wardens whose movements he must keep track of. He keeps thinking of their home as a new part of their prison.

He lasts three days before, upon finding himself drawn to Crowley’s side once again, he breaks down into the first real cry he’s allowed himself since they escaped. Some part of him had hoped that sleeping would reset things somehow. That the long rest would somehow allow things to settle. That he would wake up feeling, if not refreshed, than certainly less hollowed out, less torn open, less drained. He’d expected to be less terrified. If nothing else, he should really be less exhausted. It’s not fair, really, for him to have slept so long and still be so tired.

Then again, nothing about this is fair.

Once Aziraphale has finally cried himself out, he starts to work on finding his footing a bit. He times himself- he can spend five minutes away from Crowley, easily. Ten minutes is less easy, but still reliably doable. Twenty minutes he can force himself through, though he cracks the kitchen counter twice as he tries to hold himself in place. Thirty minutes… his chances of being able to force himself away for that long are about fifty-fifty, and about one third of his ‘successes’ end with the realization that time has slipped away from him entirely, and he has been sitting, eyes closed against further tears if they aren’t busy staring blankly ahead, for hours.

Somewhere in there he manages to fix things in the cottage up a bit. The food returns to a state of freshness in the pantry and refrigerator, every room has at least one clock, the solar panels on the roof are updated to be more efficient, and some appear on the detached garage along with a small turbine for catching the brisk sea air.

There’s also plenty to do that doesn’t necessitate leaving Crowley’s bedside. He sorts through the mail, reading every piece and placing it into one of three piles: things Crowley will want to see upon waking, things Aziraphale will summarize for him upon waking and recommend that he not read through himself, and things whose existence he will inform Crowley of and allow him to read or not as the demon desires. He digs up an old phone of Crowley’s from his drawer of mismatched black socks, now hopelessly out of date and in such a sorry state that it would probably have been inoperable if not for a few miracles and the firm belief that it should still work. He uses it to relearn about the world they’ve made their home, and teaches himself how to use some of the apps that are still functional (one of the functional ones is Candy Crush, but he knows better than to open that one).

There are books as well. Aziraphale has almost forgotten how much he loves books, not only for their words but as physical objects. He’s almost forgotten how he loves the heft of them, the way the paper’s edge catches against the pads of his fingertips, the sweet smell of their slow decay. It all comes rushing back the moment he pulls one free of the shelf, and for a long moment he does nothing but press it to his chest and breathe deeply.

He’s reading when Crowley wakes up, a full week after that crying jag. He wakes just as he did back in their cell, gasping and tense.

“It’s just me,” Aziraphale assures him, setting the book aside. “It’s just me, and you’re-” He tears up a bit, but makes himself keep going. “You’re home. You’re safe. You’re going to be all right.”

“Aziraphale?” Crowley croaks, voice still rough from sleep.

“That’s me,” Aziraphale says. “Hello, you.” He holds out his hand. Crowley takes it and uses it to tug him back onto their bed.

“It’s over?” he asks. If Aziraphale has learned anything over the course of the past ten days it’s that they aren’t quite through it yet, but he can’t bring himself to say it just now. He nods instead.

“It’s over,” Crowley says, sounding as wrecked as Aziraphale feels. “It’s - it’s really over.”

“We’re home,” Aziraphale says, because it’s not technically agreement even if Crowley will take it that way.

Crowley buries his face in Aziraphale’s chest. His shoulders shake, and the front of Aziraphale’s shirt grows damp as buries his nose in Crowley’s hair and lets himself breathe.

Eventually, they part. Aziraphale holds out a box of tissues, but Crowley waves it away and sets himself to rights with a quick miracle.

“Any chance of a cup of coffee?” he asks.

“Yes, though you might want to limit yourself to one cup,” Aziraphale tells him. “Apparently while we were... indisposed-”

Crowley snorted.

“Yes, well, at some point in the recent past, somewhere between a third and a half of all coffee trees died off, and the survivors aren’t as productive as they used to be,” Aziraphale said. “I think the beans we had in the cupboard are back to being good, but getting more is probably going to have to go onto the luxury budget.”

“Well that’s not good,” Crowley says. “What is everyone drinking instead now?”

“Tea’s still on. There’s some of it being grown around here now, and on some of the Channel Islands that aren’t flooded out,” Aziraphale tells him. “And they have this new thing now, made from some kind of chicory root and yerba concentrate. Apparently it tastes very similar to the real thing.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Crowley declares, standing up. He stretches, his back popping in a way which sounds both inhuman and immensely satisfying. His clothes change as he lowers his arms- still more layers than usual, Aziraphale notes, though he has no plans to ever point that out. “Any chance of having that delivered?”

“Oh yes, there’s some good news there,” Aziraphale says. “We’re back in Deliveroo range and they appear to have unionized.”

They spend the day together. Crowley declares the coffee beans Aziraphale refreshed to be “not bad” and the cup of not-coffee they’d ordered to be “probably useful for rinsing out the garbage disposal”. Crowley turns on the television, and Aziraphale immediately curses himself a fool for not doing it himself earlier: the voices of the announcers are a soothing presence, it turns out. They’re both women, one from Yorkshire and the other from Wales, so neither one of them sounds a thing like the cultists.

Crowley makes crepes and Aziraphale bakes muffins, and they dance around one another in the kitchen as news they have little to no context for plays in the background.

“We were out for five years, you said?” Crowley asks.

“That’s how long we were asleep,” Aziraphale confirms.

“This is worse than when I woke up from my nap in the 19th century,” Crowley grumbles.

They settle in with their crepes, muffins, and a bottle of sweet wine, and that special retrospective program obligingly starts itself up. It’s a multipart series. They watch it in not quite silence, eating, drinking and occasionally offering up a quiet “Well, I’m glad we missed that” or “Oh, that looks like fun, we should try that” to one another as they go.

“Well, we survived the 30s. Again,” Crowley says once they’re done.

“At least there wasn’t another world war,” Aziraphale says. “Or many water wars, for that matter. I must say, harvesting those asteroids for drinkable water was quite clever of them.”

“And look at that, the bees made it too,” Crowley adds. “Hey, that reminds me, is that place in town still open? BeeBee’s?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t checked,” Aziraphale says. He reaches for the phone, but Crowley is already standing.

“Hang on, let me see if their menu is still in your ridiculous take away folder,” Crowley says, already leaving the room. It’s the first time that they’ve been out of the same room since he woke up. The whole day, they’ve been in one another’s sight, almost always close enough to touch if not actively touching.

Aziraphale lets him go. The television is on, so there’s some other noise in the house besides the thudding of his heart, and it’s not so loud as to cover up the noise Crowley is making as he stumbles through the kitchen.

He’s fine, Aziraphale tells himself. He’s fine. You can hear him, he’s fine.

A few minutes later Crowley appears in the doorway, empty handed. Aziraphale almost asks if the menu for BeeBee’s had taken itself out of the folder, but one look at Crowley’s face kills the words. It’s obvious that he’s not fine at all.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale says instead. “I’d hoped that you wouldn’t feel… well, I was hoping it was just me.”

Crowley says nothing in reply. He just comes and settles back down next to Aziraphale on the loveseat, taking hold of his arm and placing it around his own bony shoulder.

“Well, it’s a good thing neither one of us actually has to shit or anything,” Crowley says after a moment. “Or else this would be really inconvenient.”

“Ha,” Aziraphale says mirthlessly. “I timed myself, while you were still asleep. I can go as long as twenty minutes without seeing you before I start feeling like I’m about to drown.”

“I might need to work up to that,” Crowley admits.

“We have time,” Aziraphale tells him.

Crowley nods.

For a long time, neither one of them says a thing. They just sit. The television is playing advertisements for programs it thinks they might enjoy, but neither one of them is paying much attention to it.

“We were so happy here,” Aziraphale says at long last. “Do you recall? We were so deliriously happy, especially in those first few months. We just kept looking at one another and laughing.”

“We were laughing because we realized that we’d been looking at each other,” Crowley says. “Just all soppy and moonstruck, like a couple of teenagers with a crush they just realized was mutual.”

“I just felt so lucky. I couldn’t believe it sometimes, that we’d finally made it here, with each other.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

“We nearly lost a couple of dinners that way, remember? Because we kept looking at each other and not the stove.”

“We did lose a dinner! You set those scallops on fire.”

“Oh, don’t remind me,” Aziraphale groans. Most species of scallops are now either extinct or in a state of protection. Even the varieties that are listed as 'temporarily protected livestock' won’t be available to eat for another ten years, at best. It could have been worse, he supposed. They nearly lost shellfish altogether, and that would have done some rather unpretty things to the ocean.

“We’ll have that again,” Crowley promises quietly, after a moment for the conversation to lull. “We will. They didn’t take us from here. They don’t get to do it now.”

Aziraphale nods. “We have time,” he repeats.

“We do,” Crowley agrees, sitting up a little and turning to face him directly. “But, Aziraphale- you have to let me know, what it is that bothers you. Even if you think it’s just you- there’s no just you here, but if it’s only you. Even if- even if it’s something that I am comfortable with. We have to do this together, okay?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley turns to him, his face expectant.

“Yes,” Aziraphale swears. “I’ll tell you, I promise.”

“Good,” Crowley says, snuggling back against him.

They take it from there.

They let the rest of the world back in, slowly but surely. First there’s the television and Deliveroo. Then there’s phone calls, with Anathema and Newton, and then Warlock, and then the Them. Then there are visits: never more than one or two people at once, at least at first. Pepper comes at least once a week whenever she’s in the country, and one of the other Thems generally fills in for her when she’s not. Eventually, Anathema and Newton leave the children with Warlock sometimes and come spend a day or two. And later, Warlock sometimes crashes on their couch when between gigs- she’s most often working as a nanny, these days, and Crowley couldn’t be more proud.

Anathema continues to send them pictures with captions like Hype, Sov, and Azi at the zoo. Sometimes Crowley looks at them, but very rarely when they’ve just been sent. It’s the sort of thing he has to build himself up for, and then get over with all at once. Children in general remain a prickly subject for quite some time.

Crowley gets back to his plants, and Aziraphale gets back to his books. They spend the milder days outside, Aziraphale on the porch and Crowley in the raised beds, and the less mild ones (and they get some downright riotous storms with some regularity now) in the greenhouse. Aziraphale reads, looking up from his book every few minutes just to check that Crowley's still there and well enough- he's not reading Oscar’s work, and nor Shakespeare's either, though he has no doubt that he’ll be able to return to them eventually. Crowley hisses invectives at the garden the way he hasn’t hissed at them since before they moved into the cottage. He has one spectacular meltdown in the greenhouse, plants uprooted and thrown about in the air, yelling at every direction. Aziraphale hastily puts his book down and then he simply hovers, unsure if he should intervene, unsure of how. Crowley catches sight of him, standing with his hands curled over the back on his chair, white-knuckled and pale, and that’s all it takes to make him collapse, not quite weeping but not quite coherent either. At least then Aziraphale knows to go to him, knows how to hold him and knows to let him cry it out.

It takes a bit more time, but eventually they start going out as well. In the Bentley, at first, with no small amount of trepidation. Crowley wasn’t sure if he would hate it, feel too exposed behind her wheel, maybe, and then feel like this was one more thing that had been taken from him; or if he might like it too well and find it hard to go back inside. Aziraphale packs a picnic basket for them, and some blankets, and points out that they could spend as little or as much time in the Bentley as they like. Sometimes they don’t leave the garage. Sometimes they simply go for a drive through town, or into the national park; other times they go a bit farther, braving the border checkpoints for Scotland or France. They stick to isolated places at first, without many or indeed any people in them. They go stargazing quite often- the asteroid harvesting endeavours mean that there are shooting stars to observe almost every night. More and more often, they go to places where they have to be around people, and interact with them. More and more often they find that it is not quite a terror to be faced down. Sometimes they even walk, which invites fewer questions than the Bentley these days. Crowley had pretended to convert her engine to biodiesel before he’d been kidnapped. Now he pretends that she runs on electric. There’s even an electric cord now that can be found beneath what was once at least in theory the fuel cap. The humans think that’s clever, and Aziraphale rather agrees with them.

They go back to the bookshop, once. The minute Aziraphale enters, he knows that it will be a long time before he can think of it as home. He can’t stand to be in it for more than a few moments. He can barely hold it together long enough for Crowley to book them a hotel room so he can have his break down in private. The cottage is home enough, though, and he’s perfectly content to sit in the Bentley while Crowley runs in and out, collecting what he needs.

They kiss. It feels safe, the kissing, on the lips or the cheek. On the neck, eventually, first for Crowley and then for Aziraphale. Aziraphale tells Crowley if something doesn’t feel quite right, and lets Crowley guide where his hands go in return. Sometimes that means his hands stay on the couch, or the bed, or simply by his sides. Other times that means that his hands are guided to Crowley’s hips.

One day Aziraphale realizes that he’s finished a book without looking up from it once. Another day comes and Crowley realizes that he’s thrown a leg over Aziraphale’s as they cuddle together in bed, and the position doesn’t bother him. They’re going to have to have that hideously awkward conversation again soon: the one about which genitals they prefer to have, and what they would like to do with them. For now, neither one of them bothers, content to relearn how to be touched without bracing for shame, fear, and pain.

Another day comes, and they plan a brief separation. Brief as in fewer moments than an hour- there is a grave they need to visit, but the ground is consecrated. Aziraphale can go, but Crowley cannot follow.

“Here, leave this for me, will you?” Crowley says once he’s parked, pulling out a stone from his pocket.

Aziraphale takes it, and turns it over in his hand.

“Red jasper,” Crowley elaborates. “I asked Anathema, and then we asked the not-google thingie, and this seemed appropriate.”

It is red- really red, not orange- with a swirl of dull brown, and vaguely heart shaped. Aziraphale smiles. “I think Tracey would approve.”

He spends thirty minutes at the grave, which is close enough to what they’d agreed upon that he speed walks back to the Bentley.

“Interesting graveside conversation?” Crowley asks.

“Thankfully, no,” Aziraphale huffs.

Crowley looks at him askance.

“They put the wrong name on her tombstone,” Aziraphale explains indignantly. “She hated being Marjorie.”

“Did you change it?” Crowley asks.

“Yes, of course, who do you take me for?”

Crowley doesn’t reply, but he grins broadly at him as he puts the Bentley into reverse.

“Do you feel up for braving town?” he asks. “There’s a place there that claims to still serve shellfish, if you can believe it.”

“Oh, it’s not one of those places that serves that dreadful laboratory-grown tosh, is it?” Aziraphale asks.

“I have it on good authority that it serves only the best laboratory-grown tosh,” Crowley retorts.

Aziraphale sighs. “I suppose the eighth time might be the charm, in terms of being able to lower my standards.”

He smiles. Crowley smiles fondly back. The Bentley pointedly does not back into a bench with a disgruntled rumble of gears.

Things get better. There’s a happy ending. There is. It just takes time to get there, is all.

Chapter Text

They weren’t given any warning when they decided to go ahead with things. After months of work, fear, and worry; after a multitude of meetings and decisions and threats; after all of that, they went about arranging for Crowley to be able to shift his corporation without giving them so much as a whit of warning.

That might have been an intelligent decision. Aziraphale wasn’t sure what they could have done with the forewarning, but they definitely would have tried to come up with something.

As it was, there was no indication that anything was going to be differently horrible from the last time they’d been taken from their cell. They walked down the halls, Crowley naked but wrapped as securely up in Aziraphale’s wing as he could be, hands clutching tightly to one another. The guards stuck close by them, and watched them closely, but that was usual. Better than usual, even- they’d been getting handsy lately- very handsy indeed.

“They feel like they’re owed it,” Crowley had explained tiredly, when Aziraphale’s fretting over it had grown too insistent to be suppressed. “It’s been- what, a few years now, that they’ve had us? Three or four or thereabouts? That’s a long time for humans- a long time to get used to having someone around to take out all your pent up frustrations on. A long time to be able to rape with impunity. And now they don’t have that- or don’t have the ritual framework for it, at least. So they’re just- checking. Pushing. Seeing how far they can go without being stopped.”

He’d been trying to get Aziraphale to calm down and, paradoxically, it had mostly worked. The notion that Crowley had already resigned himself to one day in the near future being- being worse than groped, being hurt, being-

They weren’t going to be stopped. Who would do that- Stephen, Thomas? The very idea was laughable. So they were going to keep pushing, and then one day they were going to do it again, only this time they were mostly like going to do it against the walls Aziraphale had previously regarded as perfectly innocuous and do it in front of Aziraphale too. It had necessitated a shift in gears from fretting into crisis management. He needed to keep a cool head.

So now they walked down the hall, and Aziraphale stuck as close to Crowley as he could. They were watched closely, and Aziraphale watched right back, trying very hard to believe that they wouldn’t be separated. Crowley was not quite trembling, but vibrating, imperceptible to the humans but quite obvious to Aziraphale. He could feel it wherever their bodies intersected.

I’m here, I’m with you. Aziraphale thought, hoping at least the sentiment would be carried through touch. For as long as they’ll let me, I’m by your side.

They stopped letting him just inside the door to the medical room. Crowley was guided over to the examination table with those hideous stirrups and the straps to hold him down, and there was no bowl of holy water in sight for Aziraphale to station himself by.

“Where-” Aziraphale didn’t get the chance to finish his question before Thomas put a hand on the back of his neck. He froze.

“Through here,” Thomas said, pushing him forwards.

Aziraphale managed to force himself to walk where he was steered, out of the door into the room he’d mentally term the observatory, in honor of the obvious two-way mirror on the wall in shared with this one. He froze again just over the threshold.

Partially that was because Thomas had dropped his hand from his person, but mostly it was because there was a young woman sitting at the table in the observatory. Aziraphale hadn’t seen a single woman since this started, he abruptly realized. All of the cultists were men- cis men who, according to Crowley, all considered themselves to be unassailably heterosexual.

But here was a woman, really quite young and casually dressed, her eyes wide and wondering as she looked at him.

“Go on, then,” Thomas said, and so Aziraphale walked over to her.

“Gosh, are you really an angel?” she asked. One of her hands reached out, and she looked surprised as anything when it met feathers. Aziraphale grit his teeth and held himself still, though he couldn’t stop his wings from twitching as she sunk her fingers in past all his remaining down until she was brushing up against bare skin. “Oh! They’re real!”

“They are, as am I,” Aziraphale said with a thin smile.

“Isolde,” Thomas said, and the woman let him go.

“I- sorry, I just- wow,” Isolde said, waving at the length of him.

Aziraphale forced another smile. “No need to apologize, my girl. Now, what is this about?”

“You’ve been saying that you need a model,” Thomas answered, before she could.

“A healthy womb,” Isolde said, a slight mocking edge to her voice. “I’ve got one of those.”

“Ah, yes. I see,” Aziraphale said with an involuntary look back towards the two-way mirror. He could see straight through it, on this end. Crowley was visible, strapped down to the table from the waist up and his legs fastened into the stirrups and held up and open. He was not currently being molested, though he looked quite miserable. “That’s very kind of you, Miss Isolde.”

The bowl of holy water was on the table before her. Aziraphale probably should have been able to guess from that.

“I think this will be most easily accomplished if you were to sit upon the table, Miss Isolde,” Aziraphale said.

Isolde shrugged, pushed out of her chair with a scrape of metal on stone, and sat up on the table.

“Need me to take my shirt off?” she asked.

“Entirely unnecessary, thank you,” Aziraphale replied quickly. He plunged his left hand into the bowl and, as had become habit, checked to make sure that there was nothing unapproved that he could do. There wasn’t. This room, like the medical facility next to it, was warded too strongly. The only thing accessible besides himself was Isolde, and she wasn’t armed, didn’t seem to have anything on her that might be of use.

They’d talked about this, again and again, and they’d agreed that if they were given the means to actually make Crowley fertile they should make use of them. The cultists were more than frustrated enough with their lack of progress that too many more disappointments would prove agonizing at best and discorporating at worst. And now that moment might very well have arrived.

Aziraphale felt more than a bit ill. He took a deep breath, and swallowed thickly before continuing. “Now, I’m going to place my right hand in front of your midriff. You might feel a slight tingling, but nothing should hurt. Please tell me if it does.”

“Sure thing,” Isolde said. She swung her legs a bit before catching herself and stilling.

Aziraphale held out his hand and concentrated, his eyes slipping closed.

He’d done this before, sort of, though every time he’d traced this particular set of organs the person in question had been in some form of life-threatening distress. It had been childbirth, mainly: the kind with complications that threatened the life of parent and child alike, though sometimes the traumatic injury had been inflicted from some other source. The last time he’d worked this closely with a uterus, World War I had been going, and an ambulance driver had been impaled on some rubble after a shell explosion had thrown her from her vehicle. It had been a miracle already that she’d survived long enough to reach the medical tents. No one noticed the further miracles that sprang from being in his care- not where he could hear, at least.

That had been part of the problem: it had been over a century since he’d done this, and he’d never done it when things had been in tip-top working condition. He could return it to such a state, or at least to it’s prior state, but he had to rely on the body’s own sense of what that was. He just didn’t know it, in the way he knew how Crowley’s ribs should sit in his chest while he was male-presenting, and how they sat just a little differently when she was female-presenting.

He didn’t know what a healthy womb was, and Crowley’s body didn’t know it either, but Isolde’s did. Maybe that would be enough.

He focused as keenly as he could, affixing all the information about the physical structure and the hormones it produced as possible. He ignored the way his heart was hammering, and seemed to be trying to rise up out of his throat.

“Oh,” Isolde said.

She said it softly, but it was enough to break Aziraphale’s concentration. His eyes snapped open and he withdrew his hand.

“It’s nothing painful,” Isolde said hastily. “I just noticed that tingling you mentioned, is all.”

“Ah, I see,” Aziraphale said. He took a deep breath. It shook audibly. “Right-o.”

He closed his eyes again, and then opened them again when Thomas spoke. “How much longer is this going to take?”

“Just a few minutes more,” Aziraphale told him. He had to fight himself very hard not to let his voice quaver, and the result was a flat, inflectionless tone that probably gave his fear away anyway. “I just want to make sure I have everything present and correct in my mind before we move on to the next stage of things.”

He took another deep breath. His hand was steady when he extended it again, at least.

It really was just the work of a few moments to ensure that all the details were affixed in his mind.

“Right, that should do it,” Aziraphale said, stepping back from the table. He banished the holy water from his hand as the warden pursuivant came to collect the bowl.

“Come on, then,” Thomas said.

“Pleasure to meet you, Miss Isolde,” Aziraphale said, and then went back into the medical room. Thomas followed close behind him.

“Is it enough?” Thomas asked, once the door had shut behind them.

“I hope so,” Aziraphale said. It felt like a lie, those words. “I won’t know for certain until we try.”

He reached Crowley’s side and took his hand, as well as he was able to with the thick leather cuffs biting into his wrist. Crowley waited until Aziraphale had mantled him with his wings before turning to him and dredging up a smile from somewhere painful and desolate.

“Do you have to stand over by him like that?” Thomas asked.

“It speeds the process up considerably,” Aziraphale told him.

Thomas grunted. That was apparently the signal for the warden pursuivant of the day to bring the holy water back to Aziraphale. He submerged his hand once again, and reached out for Crowley.

[[Think this will work, angel?]] He didn’t quite hear Crowley’s voice saying those words- the sigils made this sort of intimate two-way connection nearly impossible to establish, let alone establish with clarity- but he got the impression of them all the same.

[[I think this is the best chance we’ve been given thus far.]]

In theory this shouldn’t be terribly far removed from healing. Theory and practice had, thus far, remained wildly divergent. It didn’t matter how Aziraphale tried to tell Crowley’s body that it was missing a few organs but he had the blueprints for them right here, and it didn’t matter how hard Crowley tried to get his body to accept the instructions. It wouldn’t change. It couldn’t. Every time it felt like something might give, might become malleable, the sigils sent a flash of energy down between them and made change impossible. It did the same when Aziraphale tried to heal the scars that formed the sigils themselves.

The new information wasn’t totally useless. Aziraphale felt much more confident that he could help coax Crowley’s body into the prescribed shape without pain or fear of rearranging his internal organs into some fatal combination, under other circumstances. But the sigils burned into Crowley’s neck prevented any such changes. It wouldn’t let him shift, no matter how slightly, into a different shape. It had been true on previous occasions, and it was true today.

[[Probably best if we make it really obvious that we’re trying,]] Aziraphale suggested.

[[Probably,]] Crowley agreed bleakly. Aziraphale could already feel his despair tugging at him. He tried to soothe it, but he couldn’t. He was too aware: aware of the wardens in the room, of the weapons they carried, of the restlessness in their movements and the complete lack of humanity, for want of a better phrase, they were treated with.

They weren’t human, of course. That was part of the reason right there, that they were able to justify this. They were, in the minds of the cultists, abstract representations of a weak and gullible Good and a wily, cunning Evil, each to be defeated in their own way. These were people who worshiped Gabriel, who followed his direction, and thus they wanted Aziraphale purified and Crowley eradicated.

But they were bound in near-human form, and that gave them several very human weaknesses to exploit. They were so physically frail like this, so easily hurt. They were always outnumbered, always without weapons, always being watched and in danger of watching eyes turning into punishing hands.

And they had each other, of course. Each and every one of the cultists knew that they were frightfully easy to manipulate when the other’s well being was in peril.

It used to be delightful, how people would look at them and simply know that they were an item. Sometimes someone would look at them and feel a measure of solace, like the sight of them added something to their world. Quite a few people found them adorable. Even when people were small-minded about it, there had been something thrilling about the knowledge that their love was so obvious.

Here… it was the only thing keeping either of them sane, and it was the worst weapon their captors had to wield against them. These past few months, when for the first time Aziraphale and Crowley had to contend with their captor’s presence together for extended periods of time, had made it plain that they were quite happy to use their relationship against them. They found it fun. Worse, they found it funny. It was all a joke to them: the love that had been just barely eclipsed by fear for thousands of years, the relationship they’d cautiously, joyously built together after they were free, the marriage they’d had because if they were going to go native they might as well go native with a fancy party and an officiant. As far as the cultists were concerned, it was all just the set up for a punchline they were all too eager to deliver.

That their relationship had to be a matter of some importance to be leveraged against them couldn’t have escaped their notice, exactly, but they didn’t deign to acknowledge it. Aziraphale would boggle at it, but he’d spent six thousand years trying to convince himself that every word out of Gabriel’s mouth must have at least some measure of rightness. He was, if anything, too familiar with the compartmentalization required.

Still. That attitude gave their interactions with the wardens a degree of predictability, at least.

Aziraphale stayed where he was, letting the holy water drain as he spent its Grace on the only useless miracle he could attempt until Thomas called a stop to it.

“It’s not working still, is it?” he asked.

“No,” Aziraphale replied. He didn’t fight the quaver in his voice as he said, nor did he make an effort to suppress the urge to flinch and hunch his shoulders up around his ears when the bowl of holy water was taken away.

Strategic vulnerability. That’s how Crowley had termed it, at least. Pretend to be more frightened than you are, pretend that you couldn’t control your reactions, and let yourself be underestimated. Just as Aziraphale had learned to section parts of himself off in order to appear to be the obedient servant of Heaven, Crowley had learned to show his terror to keep his loyalties to Hell above suspicion. It felt fitting, that the demon’s survival strategies should be of more use here than the angel’s.

Aziraphale heard a rattling sound from behind him, and turned his head just enough to see the blinds being drawn over the two way mirror. He turned back to Crowley, seeing his own alarm reflected back in his eyes.

The drawn blinds were new, and new very rarely meant anything good for them.

“Come over here, Aziraphale,” Thomas said.

Aziraphale gave Crowley’s hand one final squeeze, and then went to stand in front of Thomas. Realistically speaking, he was only standing there for a few seconds, but with the way his mind was racing it felt like longer.

“Wrists,” Thomas said.

“What are you doing?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale quickly offered up his wrists, and Thomas didn’t acknowledge Crowley’s question in any way. He simply withdrew a pair of handcuffs from inside his jacket pocket, cuffed one wrist, threaded the chain around the handrail next to the shower, and cuffed the other wrist. Aziraphale did fight it then: the urge to curl in upon himself and tremble, the tears that wanted to fall. It couldn’t be properly called strategic vulnerability if he’d actually lost control of himself after all.

Thomas made no move towards him, and took several steps towards Crowley. This did not help matters in the slightest.

“What are you doing?” Aziraphale asked.

The question was slightly more successful coming from him than it had been coming from Crowley. “Fixing a problem,” Thomas replied, before turning back to the other wardens. “Turn him over.”

“Oh, don’t, please don’t, please,” Aziraphale begged, strained against the cuffs. The collar negated his usual angelic strength, and he couldn’t break free. “We’re trying, I’ve told you, we’ve been trying and-”

“And the sigils prevent you from being able to alter things that drastically, yes, I remember,” Thomas said. “That’s the problem I’m trying to fix.”

Behind him, his men went about the arduous task of unfastening Crowley from the table. “I can turn myself over, thanks,” Crowley said, but they ignored him, or perhaps were spurned on by his words, and insisted on manhandling him so he was face down on the table. He let out a little frightened noise and trembled all over as they fastened him down again. Aziraphale could only hope that it was exaggerated.

“How?” Aziraphale asked.

“By going to the root of the problem,” Thomas replied as the day’s warden pursuivant left the room.

“What does that mean?” he asked. No one answered him. “Please, will-”

Thomas smirked at him. Aziraphale fell silent.

A few moments later, the warden pursuivant returned holding something that looked very much like the soldering iron Newton occasionally tried to do computer things with. Then he plugged it in, and Aziraphale realized that it was, indeed, exactly a soldering iron.

“What are you doing with that?” he asked.

Crowley tried to turn his head, and was stopped when the closest warden grabbed him by the hair and pressed his face into the table.

“What are you doing?” Aziraphale said, straining against the cuffs once again. “What are you-”

“Wings,” Thomas snapped, and Aziraphale realized that he’d spread them out to their full span. Before he could pull them back in again two of the wardens had rushed over to him and pinned them to the wall with their bodies.

“What are you doing?” Aziraphale asked again, before giving up on the question as irrelevant. “Please don’t hurt him, please don’t, we’ve been trying, we’ve been-”

“Shut up,” Thomas snarled.

“Please,” Aziraphale pleaded.

Thomas sighed, walked over to Aziraphale, and drove his fist into his stomach. Aziraphale doubled over, coughing.

“Pull yourself together,” he said, as Aziraphale fought for breath. “We’re not going to hurt him any more than we have to.”

It was a blatant lie. They were already hurting him more than they had to. The warden holding his head down had his fingers wrapped tightly in his hair, and kept the pressure on him even though Crowley had long since stopped struggling. The warden pursuivant seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in standing over Crowley’s form with the heated iron, the fingers of his free hand tracing over the sigils on his neck as Crowley shook beneath him. Crowley let out a whimper, and he reached out a slapped his bottom, seemingly on reflex.

“Quiet down, Satan,” he said, his hands running along the area he’d just slapped. “You know crying won’t stop anything.”

Stop touching him like that! Aziraphale wanted to shout. He strained mindlessly, fruitlessly, against the cuffs that bound him. He doesn’t like to be touched there, you’ve made him dislike being touched there!

Then the warden pursuivant pressed the soldering iron into the back of his neck. Crowley screamed; so did Aziraphale.

The warden pursuivant dragged the soldering iron across the back of his neck slowly before lifting it up. He studied the burn he’d made for a moment, and then pressed the soldering iron down again and dragged it back across along the same line. He did this a few times before he nodded and finally took a step back from Crowley.

“That should do it,” he said.

“Thank you, Matt,” Thomas replied, before turning back to Aziraphale. “I’m going to uncuff you now. And you’re going to be good, right?”

Aziraphale nodded rapidly, his eyes glued to Crowley’s form. Once Thomas had unlocked the cuffs and the two wardens leaning up against his wings had let them go, he rushed over to him.

The damage wasn’t as bad as he’d feared it would be. One burned-white line that scratched through six of the sigils that had been burned into his neck, surrounded by blisters that rubbed them out entirely.

“May I unfasten him?” Aziraphale asked.

“Keep it brief,” Thomas replied.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said.

He freed Crowley’s legs first, and worked his way up from there. Crowley turned on his side and pulled his knees up to his chest as soon as he was able. Aziraphale gave him a moment before asking him, as gently as he could, “Do you think you could sit up for me, darling?”

Crowley nodded, and sat up. He looked awful, sweat plastering his hair to his head, his gaze unfocused and glazed.

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale said, as Crowley leaned tiredly against him. They were allowed perhaps a minute of this before Thomas interrupted them.

“Get to it,” he ordered.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. Crowley nodded tiredly, and then lay back down on the table. Aziraphale fastened him back down, careful to make sure the straps were not too tight. The warden pursuivant- Matt, he supposed- brought back the bowl of holy water, since topped off and full once more.

Aziraphale sank his hand in, and then winced. The soldering iron had been blessed. He could feel the holiness of it trying to eat its way through Crowley, and removed it first thing, taking it in to himself. It had been very potently blessed, and probably quite recently too. It felt like having a second bowl of holy water available to him. It was Gabriel’s blessing, he could tell. Maybe he’d even been here.

Crowley relaxed as Aziraphale pulled the holiness out of his system, and healed the burn. He began to feel out the wards, to see if there wasn’t anything he could do with that bit of extra power. There wasn’t. The wards over the wardens and the room itself held firm- he couldn’t even stretch out his senses to ascertain whether or not the wards in the observatory might be less well-laid- and he couldn’t heal Crowley of the sigils left behind on his neck, and attempting to do so only sent another shot of energy between them, forcing Aziraphale to expend more energy to reestablish their connection.

[[It’s just the shapeshifting ones that are gone, I think,]] Crowley said.

[[Any chance you could transform into a snake and bite our way out?]] Aziraphale asked.

He was mostly joking, and there was a thread of bleak humor in Crowley’s reply of [[I don’t like my chances against six people armed with swords of celestial steel, do you?]]

[[No,]] Aziraphale confirmed wryly. If they could have fought their way out, they would have done so first thing. [[I think we might be able to secure a bit of a reprieve, though.]]

Crowley’s feelings on the matter were no less conflicted than Aziraphale’s, but he gamely replied with [[Let’s give this another try, then.]]

It was going to work this time, Aziraphale could tell that straight away. There was a certain elasticity to his corporation that simply hadn’t been there before. Aziraphale impressed the information he’d gleaned from Isolde’s body upon him, and Crowley used it to mold his body accordingly, and it changed, he could feel it.

It also seemed to take a lot out of Crowley. He was sweating again before the end of it, exhaustion tugging at him, his face pinched and pale.

“We’re almost there, dearest, almost done,” he said. He wanted to brush his hair back from his face, but he needed to keep one hand over his midsection and the other in the bowl of holy water.

He really wanted to do something that would lead to their direct escape, not just something which might grant them a stay of execution. If that was possible, they had yet to figure out how.

“I think that’s it,” Aziraphale said. He nearly lifted his hand from the holy water when something occurred to him. “Is Miss Isolde still in the other room?”

“She’d better be,” Thomas said. He said it like it was a joke, not a threat. “Why?”

“If I keep contact with the holy water and you prop open the door, I should be able to maintain enough of a connection with Crowley to compare how we’ve arranged things to how they’re arranged in Miss Isolde,” Aziraphale explained. “I’d like to make sure we’ve done it correctly.”

The wardens looked to Thomas. Thomas appeared to think it over.

“Roll down your sleeves,” he said.

The order made no sense to Aziraphale. “Beg pardon?”

Thomas strode over to him and yanked his sleeves down his arms until they came down over his wrists. “Keep your sleeves rolled down,” he said, digging his fingernails into the bruises left behind by the cuffs for emphasis. Aziraphale winced. “You keep your sleeves rolled down, and I don’t want to hear any of your crying or begging, understand?”

Aziraphale didn’t understand at all, but that wasn’t really the question he was being asked. “Yes, I understand,” he said. “I’ll- I’ll do that.”

Thomas nodded. Matt carefully picked up the bowl of holy water, one of the wardens opened the door and held it open, and they moved back into the observatory.

Isolde was still there. She’d stood up, and seemed to have been wandering aimlessly around the room, looking bored.

“Need me again?” she asked.

“If you could hop back up on the table that would be appreciated, Miss Isolde,” Aziraphale said. “I’d just like to check our work.”

Isolde obliged him, and once again Aziraphale held his hand in front of her torso. He’d been hoping that there would be some kind of indication of something he could do to discreetly sabotage their work. Infertility wasn’t uncommon- they could very easily buy themselves a few extra months with some kind of structural or hormonal anomaly that couldn’t be automatically detected, something Aziraphale could pass off as an honest mistake.

They needed time, and they needed time where they weren’t being tortured and terrorized. Unfortunately, he couldn’t glean any information from Isolde’s body. It didn’t know how to be infertile any more than Crowley’s body had known how to be fertile.

“Well?” Thomas asked.

“It seems to be a perfect match,” Aziraphale said, feeling ill. He hung his head, and banished the holy water from his hand and sleeve, fighting down the urge to cry. “Congratulations. The next time you rape my husband you might be able to impregnate him.”

“What the fuck.”

Before Aziraphale had time to process the implications of Isolde’s words, he was grabbed by the shoulder by one of the wardens and propelled away from her. Then he was punched. He stumbled back, raising his arms to block the blows, but there were three of them on him now. Someone managed to get him in the stomach again, and someone else managed to get him in the face, twice. He toppled over, and the punches turned to kicks as he curled in upon himself, trying to protect his head, his stomach, his wings.

Crowley was yelling. So was Isolde.

“He’s an angel, he’s a fucking angel, you told me you weren’t supposed to hurt him, why do you keep hurting him?”

“Stop it! Stop it! What are you doing?”

“Enough!” That was Thomas. The wardens stopped, and then when Aziraphale had cautiously uncurled, one of them landed a kick on his ribs. “I said enough, just keep him down there.”

Matt ended up with the honors by standing with one foot on Aziraphale’s shoulder, his sword drawn and held against his face. He’d fallen just outside the still open door to the medical room. He could see Crowley, straining against the straps that held him down against the table. He could see Isolde, her face very grey and her hands held in fists by her side.

The implications he hadn’t had the opportunity to think through suddenly crashed upon him, and he felt the color drain from his face.

“You didn’t know,” he realized, horrified. “Oh, God. You didn’t know.”

Isolde’s eyes darted around the room before coming to rest on Thomas. “What have you done?” she asked.

“We’ll discuss this when we get home,” Thomas said after a moment.

“What have you done?” she demanded.

“When we get home, Isolde,” Thomas said. “Now go. Wait for me in the car.”

Run, Aziraphale wanted to tell her. Run now. If you’re quick enough, they might not catch you.

Isolde didn’t run, and was plainly not going to. She stalked out of the room, her expression furious, clearly planning some kind of confrontation.

She was quite young, and some relation of Thomas’, clearly. A niece, or perhaps a daughter? Surely he wouldn’t kill his own flesh and blood.

When Thomas turned back to him, he was not sure of that at all.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, I thought she knew, I thought-”

Thomas kicked him between his legs. Aziraphale jerked back with a cry of pain: just because he wasn’t manifesting anything particularly sensitive down there didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to be kicked, and the motion cut his cheek open on the sword Matt was holding against it.

“What did I say about your begging?” Thomas asked. “What did I say?”

Aziraphale fell silent, shrinking back against the stone floor as best he could. Thomas turned from him with a sneer.

“Huh,” Matt said as he lifted up the sword. Some of Aziraphale’s blood was on it- golden blood from his celestial form. “I wonder if that’s worth anything.”

Aziraphale resigned himself to staying on the floor for the next long while.

Thomas went into the medical room, and set about confirming that Crowley had grown all the necessary organs with a ruthless sort of cruelty, drawing out little pained cries here and there, and then repeating whatever motion have provoked them until he grew bored.

Stop it. Aziraphale bit down on his tongue to keep the words in. Stop punishing him. It’s not his fault, it’s mine. I’m the one who messed up.

They put the medical equipment away, and then turned Crowley over again. Something that was not a soldering iron- some kind of electric knife- was used to cut the lines into his skin. They packed the wounds with something white and powdery, and then taped it over with gauze.

“Get him up,” Thomas snapped, and Aziraphale was hauled to his feet.

“You’re going to heal yourself now,” he said. “And only yourself. If I catch you so much as straightening a single hair on your boyfriend’s head, the next thing you’ll be doing is seeing if you can regrow his fingers.”

Aziraphale nodded, terrified beyond words, and plunged his hand into the holy water. He did as he was told, pulled his hand out, dried it, and waited. Thomas took him by the hair and pulled him along before propelling him nearly into Crowley, who was just sitting up after being unfastened.

“What-” Crowley croaked. He cleared his throat, and then tried again. “What is-”

“Take them back to their cell,” Thomas told the other wardens. “Stephen will decide their punishment later.”

Crowley stood, listing slightly. On instinct, Aziraphale wrapped a wing around him, and put a steady arm around his shoulder. Crowley’s hand reached for his, and clutched it with painful tightness. They made the walk back to their cell in silence.

Chapter Text

Of course, that hadn’t been anyone’s original plan.

Crowley and Aziraphale’s original plan was to use the excess holy water to break out. Healing Crowley of the sigils carved into his neck was their best idea. The cultists would likely notice it pretty quickly, but it likely wouldn’t be quickly enough. Once he had access to his powers again it would take roughly two seconds, by Crowley’s count, to freeze time for everyone but the two of them. Maintaining the spell for a long period of time would likely not be possible, but he would likely be able to maintain it for long enough to get the collar off of Aziraphale, and get out of the church.

“I might even set the place on fire on our way out,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale made a protesting noise, more out of habit than anything else.

“It’s not like most of them wouldn’t suffocate on the smoke before being burned,” Crowley protested. “Look, you’re not in these people’s heads. Burning them alive would just be getting the party started early, trust me.”

“I thought Hell had moved away from the burning and more into unpaid internships,” Aziraphale said.

“Yeah, for most people, but for people like-” Crowley stopped, and shook his head. “What am I saying. The minute they hear that I’m one of the people they hurt, they’ll probably give them a promotion to disposable demon right off the mortal coil.”

“One of?”

“Well, there’s you,” Crowley pointed out. “Which won’t hurt their chances for promotion any. And- and I can’t always tell what’s a fantasy and what’s a memory, but I doubt it’s all fantasy. They found all this way too easy to do, for me to be the first person any of them ever hurt in their lives.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, looking down at his hands. He’d turned off the growth of his fingernails after Crowley had been kidnapped and much like the rest of his corporation’s metabolic functions, that hadn’t turned back on when he’d been taken. The nail that had broken when Thomas had taken him against the wall of the cell was still all jagged with half the bed exposed. “I see.”

“So burning them alive might be the only way they actually feel anything about what they’ve done before Hastur or Asmodeus or whoever they land with gives them a slap on the back and relatively cushy position, basically,” Crowley concluded, though Aziraphale could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.

Their second-best idea was getting rid of Aziraphale’s collar first. It would be messier- Aziraphale couldn’t pull off the same time-stopping trick, so they would have to fight their way out. Aziraphale was decently certain that he could manage it, though. Gabriel warded his cultists against things like psychic influences and anything he might do with the Grace he supplied Aziraphale with in the holy water. He likely had not warded them against Aziraphale’s own specific energy, and even if he had, he could not have warded them against things like being hit with all the superhuman physical strength Aziraphale was currently denied. He was decently certain that he could heal Crowley’s neck once his own abilities had returned, but that was likely to be a process of several minutes’ worth of concentration.

Their third best idea- and the only one they were able to make any immediate headway on- was to play for time, and hope that something better would come along.

As for the cultists… well, to be frank, neither Aziraphale nor Crowley were entirely certain they knew what they were trying to do. It was almost laughable, if for no other reason than they really needed to laugh at something.

At first, it was simple enough to go along with it without comment. After three day’s worth of informational videos, however, it got increasingly difficult to keep a straight face.

“While I’m sure Yasmine and Tom have plenty of highly useful information for their viewers in Key Stage 2,” Aziraphale told Trevor, carefully not looking at Crowley. “I’m afraid that we require more technical details. A medical text, perhaps, or even a sort of training video for midwives?”

“OB-GYNs,” Crowley said. Aziraphale chanced a glance back at him, and found him studiously staring up at the ceiling, little divots appearing on his cheeks as a sure sign that he was very close to laughing. He hastily looked away. “They’ve got midwives still, angel, but the midwife just decorates the cake, really. We need to know how to assemble all the ingredients and bake it. So, a training video for OB-GYNs. Or fertility doctors, if those are their own special thing. They must be, right?”

“In this metaphor, I do believe the cake is the miracle of birth,” Aziraphale said.

“Right,” Trevor said, his eyes darting between Aziraphale and Crowley. Aziraphale certainly hoped he was keeping a straight face. “I’ll… see about that cake, then?”

He wheeled the television set out of the room, and the moment the cell door had closed behind him, Crowley let out a little giggle that quickly turned into the two of them clutching to one another and gasping for breath on the mattress.

“Do you know what’s really funny about this, in a way that’s not funny at all?” Crowley asked, once he’d calmed down enough for words.

“Everything?” Aziraphale guessed.

“I mean, yeah, but,” Crowley waved his hand as he let out another giggle. “But! I’m about 90% certain that RSE now includes some mandatory lessons on affirming consent.”

“Oh, it does,” Aziraphale said. “I have a very clear recollection of you reading aloud some of the angry letters people sent into the Daily Mail about it. You wanted the rhododendron to appreciate that we owned it, rather than some other couple of pensioners.”

“Ha!” Crowley said. “Like we got pensions out of the deal.”

As one might expect, not being continually dragged out of their cell to be tortured past the point of unconsciousness had a restorative effect on Crowley’s mental well-being. He smiled, more and more, and he joked and he even laughed- it might be less in mirth and more in nerves, but it was laughter all the same, and quite precious to hear.

Aziraphale committed every instance to memory and pressed every memory of it close to his heart. He needed it, because while Crowley’s torture had for the time being ceased, Aziraphale’s visits from Thomas had not.

“Not here,” Aziraphale had said firmly, over Crowley’s quick, quiet You don’t have to, angel, you don’t- the first time Thomas had walked in expecting an exchange. They had been sitting closely together, and Aziraphale chanced giving his husband’s hand a squeeze. They both knew that he did, in fact, have to.

“Excuse me?” Thomas had asked, unimpressed.

“Not here,” Aziraphale had repeated.

“What, because your boyfriend is here?”

“Because my husband is here and awake, yes,” Aziraphale had replied.

Thomas had snorted. “Bet I could fix that in a jiffy.” He’d lunged forwards, towards them. Crowley had flinched back, and tried to take Aziraphale with him. Aziraphale had stayed where he was, and unfurled his wings. As Thomas liked his wings, and Aziraphale liked blocking Crowley from his sight, it was one of the few tactics he had that might work without escalation.

And work it had. Thomas had stopped, looming over them both but making no attempt to touch.

“I won’t agree to that,” Aziraphale had informed him, as firmly as he could. “I will agree to be taken elsewhere. It doesn’t matter where. It can be just out in the hall, if you so wish. But we’re not doing this here.”

Thomas had considered that for a moment. Then he’d smirked. “Alright, but it’ll cost you. I brought you a tea thermos and a bathrobe today. Pick one.”

Aziraphale had turned his head to ask Crowley which he’d prefer, but Crowley was already shaking his head. “Don’t,” he’d muttered. “Don’t make me choose, I can’t- I can’t do that to you.”

Aziraphale had nodded. He’d understood. Choosing would make Crowley feel like he was an accessory to what was about to happen, in the same way Aziraphale was an accessory to what happened to Crowley every time they took him from the room, confident that Aziraphale would be able to heal whatever damage they inflicted.

He’d taken a moment to think about it. Tea was part of Thomas’ usual payment, though he hadn’t brought any the last two times he’d come calling so it had been a while since they’d had any. On the other hand… oh, it was still so dreadfully cold in here. It would be lovely for there to be something for Crowley to claim as his own to wear, especially something which looked tremendously soft and fluffy.

“I’ll take the bathrobe today,” Aziraphale had said, trying to sound brusk and managing to sound not terrified, at least. He gave Crowley’s hand one final squeeze, and then he’d stood. “I’ll see you in a moment, dearest.”

For a long, agonizing second Aziraphale had been certain that Crowley was going to protest. He hadn’t let go of the angel’s hand, after all. But when the second had ticked by Crowley had withdrawn instead.

“See you in a moment, angel,” he’d said, already curling in on himself.

Aziraphale had nodded, more to himself than anything, and then he’d let Thomas lead him out.

Without realizing it, he’d had the expectation that when he’d returned Crowley would still be curled up on the mattress. He’d been pacing in front of the door instead. Aziraphale had nearly opened the door into him, as a matter of fact.

“Alright,” Crowley had said, after the cell door had swung shut behind them and they’d stared at one another in silence for a moment. “I’ve put fresh water into the thermos, and I’ve wet the waistcoat. Which do you want first?”

“Waistcoat,” Aziraphale had replied. “And I’ve, uh- I’ve got your bathrobe.”

“Right, thanks, yeah, that’s- thanks,” Crowley had said, nodding rapidly.

They’d switched. Crowley had gotten the bathrobe and tried it on, folding up the jacket with care first. Aziraphale had gotten the waistcoat, and used it to clean off his face. Drool, mostly. Maybe a few tears- automatic reflex. He’d doubted there was much else- not unless he’d hacked it up immediately afterwards, and he was generally able to keep the urge to hack under control- but it was still disgusting, having all that slime on him.

Thomas was always rougher with him when Aziraphale made him negotiate, and that day had been no exception. Aziraphale had pressed the waistcoat up against his Adam’s apple for a moment, and wished that some of the coolness would somehow soothe his irritated throat before snapping back to reality and laying the waistcoat out flat to dry.

The thermos had been next. Aziraphale had poured some water into the cap, and then he’d carefully poured that water into his mouth so it didn’t actually touch his lips. No cross-contamination, that way. They could never be sure when they were going to be able to switch this thermos out for a clean one, so it was best not to sully it.

Crowley had watched him intently, until Aziraphale had broken down and asked “Could you look somewhere else for a moment, please?”

“Sure,” Crowley had said, and wrenched his gaze away.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale had said, turning himself more towards the wall.

He’d sipped his water, for some value of the word sip. The silence had been unbearable.

“How’s the robe?” he’d asked, still not turning towards Crowley.

“It’s- good. Soft, fluffy,” Crowley had replied. “A little short in the arms, but it comes down quite a bit lower than your jacket. This is definitely more your color than mine, though.”

“I don’t know, it sort of reminds me of your eyes,” Aziraphale had said.

“Excuse me,” Crowley had spluttered. “My eyes aren’t buttercup yellow, they’re goldenrod yellow.”

“Like the Bond villain?” Aziraphale had retorted.

Crowley had spluttered more incoherently. “The Bond- do you mean GoldenEye?”

Aziraphale hadn’t meant GoldenEye, as a matter of fact. That was one of the films that hadn’t drawn upon the books, and most of what he remembered of seeing it was Crowley’s commentary on the matter. He’d nodded and made an affirmative noise anyway.

“For someone’s sake, angel. That’s not even the name of the villain, it’s the name of the EMP satellite the villains are trying to steal.”

When Aziraphale had turned around to see him, he could tell that he was on the verge of laughter again. He’d taken a moment to memorize it: the little crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the mirth playing on the turned-up curve of his lips.

“You- you heard all that, I presume?” he’d asked. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like he didn’t already know the answer. Thomas had quite literally chosen just on the other side of the cell door as the place to do it, and he knew better than anyone how poor the soundproofing was.

“Hard not to,” Crowley had replied. “Bit of a chatty Cathy, that one, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale had said, feeling quite punched and trying desperately not to show it. He’d never pictured it, how it must be when Crowley was the one at Thomas’ mercy. He couldn’t, not in that level of detail. He just- he couldn’t. Knowing the sort of damage it left behind was more than enough. “Yes, he is, rather.”

After a moment, Crowley had taken a cautious step towards him, and when Aziraphale hadn’t flinched away, he’d taken the jacket and settled it on Aziraphale’s shoulders.

“Here,” he’d said. “I keep getting cold looking at you in just your shirtsleeves.” He’d run a hand along his shoulders, clearly intending to fix Aziraphale’s collar, and had stopped halfway when Aziraphale had shuddered and let out a little “Oh.”

“Aziraphale?” Crowley had asked.

“Oh,” Aziraphale had said again, robbed of words. He’d shuffled forwards a bit, and thankfully that had been all the encouragement Crowley needed to put his arms around him and hold him close.

He’d never pictured this either. He’d never allowed himself to picture this. He’d never even allowed himself to think of it, of what it might mean to be touched gently after Thomas had taken his due. How perfectly monstrous it would have been, if he’d asked for comfort from Crowley mere hours after he’d been brutalized beyond endurance and mere hours before he would be carted off for more of the same.

But the rules were different now, if only temporarily, and being held like this meant a great deal to Aziraphale, as it happened.

Good, some practical part of him had noted, even as the rest of him was content to bask. If this is helping you now, then it probably does something for Crowley when you’re the one doing the holding.

And that was the new pattern, one in which they existed for just about ten weeks. It started with one of the cultists, generally one of the ones who were in the warden pursuivant rota, came in with whatever information the cultist had managed to get their hands on. Videos and old medical texts, at first, but the television was quickly replaced with a laptop loaded with information neither one of them was permitted to directly interact with, materials from some kind of online course they were apparently enrolled in, along with newer textbooks and articles that they were permitted to be handed and allowed to pour over, though they weren’t allowed to keep them unsupervised.

“What do they think we’re going to do with them, MacGyver some sort of weapon out of The Vagina Bible?” Crowley grumbled.

There was indeed a book called The Vagina Bible, so Aziraphale paid that part of the complaint no mind. “Mac...what?”

“MacGyver, you know. It’s that American show. That kid who makes all kinds of improbable spy equipment out of paperclips and shoestrings.” When Aziraphale still showed no sign of recognition, he sighed. “Really, angel, it’s one of those shows they’ve made twice over now.”

“Well, I’ve never seen it,” Aziraphale said.

“You never see anything!” Crowley cried. “How come you never see anything?”

“Well, Hell uses the electronics to communicate, which did provide a strong disincentive to getting a television,” Aziraphale reminded him. “I could hardly enjoy Dr. Spock’s adventures in time and space with the knowledge that one of your superiors might show up on the screen at any moment.”

“Dr. Spock’s- you’re doing that on purpose,” Crowley accused. “I can tell when you’re doing that on purpose.”

“No, you can’t,” Aziraphale retorted.

Crowley laughed, and Aziraphale tucked the sound away to be drawn upon later.

It could be- and frequently was, there was a tiny clock on the bottom right portion of the laptop screen that they could see more often than not- hours before this part, the learning part, of the day was finished. The symposium, Crowley had termed it, one day while they were hacking out how to translate certain things into Classical Greek- there must be better translations in Modern Greek, but since neither one of them had had cause to relearn the language since roughly 1821, neither of them knew the correct words and thus they had to improvise. For example, the cart upon which the laptop sat with all the print materials they had been furnished with became the krater, and the warden in charge of watching them became the symposiarch.

“Now all we need is some flute boys to provide the entertainment and we’re all set,” Crowley joked.

They were each silent for a moment.

“Fuck, we’re the flute boys, aren’t we?” Crowley said.

“I think we might be,” Aziraphale said with a wince. “Just a tad.”

That part of the day necessitated asking the warden watching over them several questions. Some of them were simple requests for the informational material, some were more complex questions about how a body went about forming a uterus in the first place. Their success in getting answers to those questions varied wildly from warden to warden. Trevor and Travis were generally good sports about the whole thing, if not particularly well-informed. Gordon was completely clueless about many things- Crowley had to talk him through how to do something with the laptop more than once. Oliver, Matt, and Matthew were horrible to deal with in every possible way, so they tried to interact with them as little as possible. Thomas was surprisingly knowledgeable. When they had questions about tissue differentiation or some other technical matter, he either knew the answer off the top of his head or knew where they could find it.

“He can’t be some kind of doctor, can he?” Aziraphale asked.

“He’s a psychiatrist,” Crowley informed him.

Aziraphale stared at him until it sunk in that he was telling the truth, and not trying to make some kind of joke in incredibly poor taste.

“That’s quite possibly the most horrifying thing he could be,” Aziraphale said, switching from German to Aquitanian so they wouldn’t be understood. “Good Lord, can you imagine being a patient of his? Trusting him with your innermost thoughts and fears? What must he do to them.”

“Some of them end up here,” Crowley told him.

“What?”

Crowley shrugged. “Travis, Oliver, James, Tim, Matt, Russell… a few others. They were his patients, originally. He uses his practice as a kind of recruiting station. And Stephen refers a few people to him, sometimes, so Thomas can nudge them into being what he needs them to be.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, found he had nothing he could possibly say to that, and closed it again.

Had they come to Thomas for help? Had they recognized their own violent impulses and destructive habits, and gone looking for someone to help them control and overcome them, only to have them validated and given an apparently divinely-endorsed target?

“How awful,” he croaked eventually.

“Yeah,” Crowley agreed. “Yeah, it is.”

Of course, Thomas’ presence in their cell was always a problem, even when he was explaining the answers to the questions they asked, even though he was unerringly professional during the actual symposium. The problem was that they all three of them knew precisely what was going to happen afterwards. Thomas would roll out the krater/cart into the hall, and Aziraphale would follow him out and then drop to his knees.

This happened every time Thomas was their symposiarch; he would also come into their cell an hour or two after the symposium had ended, if it had been five days since he’d last dropped by. It averaged out to slightly less than twice a week, at seventeen times total over the course of those ten weeks.

That was significantly more of Thomas than he’d previously seen, and Thomas clearly expected him to be significantly affected by it. He really wasn’t. Perhaps he might have been if this had all been happening sooner, before he’d learned to numb himself to the act, or before Crowley had found out about it.

As it was, he was quite capable of weathering Thomas’ attentions, and being able to return to their cell and know that Crowley was waiting to hold him again made a great deal of difference. Besides, he came with a selection of two items from Aziraphale to choose from each time now, so they were accumulating possessions at an accelerated rate. A long body pillow to wedge up against the mattress, providing a buffer against the cold stone wall while Crowley was sleeping. A third blanket, a soft knitted thing about as large as the first two combined. A package of thick woolen socks: one pair for Crowley, one for Aziraphale to replace the ones he’d worn holes in with years worth of continual use, and one to hold in reserve along with Aziraphale’s original pair. Two bottles of mouthwash, a small one first, followed by a much larger one. Aziraphale filled the smaller one back up out of the larger one and set it off to the side for later.

They both knew that, more than likely, there was going to be a later that Crowley would want to wash out of his mouth.

After seventy-two days of this, Travis came in, sans krater cart, to take Aziraphale to see Stephen.

The Master of the Rite kept him waiting as he always did, of course. He kept him waiting for an awfully long time, in that horrifyingly well-apportioned room. Aziraphale sat and tried not to fidget too obviously as he listened to Travis expound upon all the trials that his daughter was experiencing as she started the reception year of infant school. He almost asked how she was starting reception when she’d just turned three, but decided against it. It was probably best that he not let them know that he’d noticed, even if he was beginning to get a bit curious as to what his daughter’s actual age was.

He paid attention, though. It was either that, or think about how if Crowley wasn’t all alone in their cell, it was because some of the other wardens had crowded in with him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Stephen said as he walked in. “Paperwork, you know.”

“I remember it well,” Aziraphale said, though what he was remembering most at the moment was Crowley’s story about how whenever Dagon had scheduled a meeting with someone she despised, she would wait until they’d showed, and then pop in an episode of Midsomer Murders to watch before she would actually meet with them. “What’s this about then? This seems a bit early to be one of our semi-annual meetings.”

“Oh, it is,” Stephan agreed. “But you’ve had nearly three months to work on the problem, so I wanted to talk with you about a potential time table for the conception.”

They’d known this was coming. They’d planned for this- indeed, they couldn’t enact their plans for escape without this next stage, the one in which Aziraphale tried to shift Crowley with a greater than usual quantity of holy water. That didn’t quite stop the terror that shot through him at Stephen’s words.

“Well, I would feel better about it if we were able to finish out that course you enrolled us in,” Aziraphale said.

Stephen smiled thinly back at him. Aziraphale got the impression that they were going to be dropped from the course.

“As to the rest… I feel compelled to remind you that right now the question is still if, not when. While we’re now both much more knowledgeable on the subject of reproductive tracts, nothing we have learned indicates whether or not we’ll be able to change Crowley’s body.”

Stephen’s lips quirked up slightly. “So when do you think you might be able to start trying?”

“It’s probably safe to start now,” Aziraphale said, with no small amount of reluctance. “But I just- I want you to be prepared. No matter how hard we try, it might not be enough to-”

Stephen reached out a put his hand on Aziraphale’s own where they were twisting anxiously in his lap. It was the first time he’d touched Aziraphale. He couldn’t say that he found the experience a pleasant one.

“So long as you try,” he said.

“We will.” Aziraphale tried not to stammer too badly. “We will, I promise we will.”

Travis took him back to their cell not long afterwards. Crowley was pacing again, though he stopped when the door opened. When the door closed behind them, Aziraphale threw himself at him, wrapping him up tight in his arms and wings both.

“Oh, angel,” Crowley sighed, pressing his face into Aziraphale’s hair.

“They’re looking to move things along,” Aziraphale told him. “They’re- it’ll be tomorrow, I think, that they’ll bring in the holy water. Oh, Crowley…”

He lifted his head up off Crowley’s chest so he could look up into those beloved yellow eyes. I’m scared. I can’t stop thinking of all the ways this could go wrong, and I’m so scared. He didn’t say it, but Crowley seemed to hear it anyway.

“Yeah, me too, Aziraphale.” Crowley pressed an achingly tender kiss into his forehead, and then Aziraphale tucked his head back against his chest with a sigh. “Me too.”

It was the following day that they got started, though the wardens didn’t bring any holy water into the cell. They took Crowley and Aziraphale out instead. They weren’t kind about it- not that Aziraphale had expected kindness, of course, but he’d forgotten how much worse the wardens got when they operated as a group rather than singly.

“Clothes off,” Matthew ordered.

Without a word, Crowley undid the sash on his robe and shrugged out of it, shimming a little to get his wings free of the slits it had cut into the back of it. One of the other wardens let out a piercing wolf whistle, and Crowley’s face went blank.

“All of it,” Matthew ordered.

Crowley lifted up a leg so he could peel off a sock. There was another wolf whistle, and some jeering.

“Strip, Satan!” one of the wardens crowded out of the cell and into the hall called, to general laughter and other noises of approval.

Intolerable. It was absolutely intolerable, for all that Aziraphale knew that it was only going to get worse. Making his movements as obvious as possible, Aziraphale began to unbutton his jacket. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Matthew noticed.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I thought you wanted our clothes off,” Aziraphale replied, dropping his jacket on top of Crowley’s discarded robe.

“I didn’t mean you,” Matthew sneered. “You keep your clothes on.”

He turned back around to face Crowley only to find that the demon had removed his other sock while his attention was divided. He grunted, and then took Crowley by the arm and shoved him into the waiting hands on the other wardens. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, putting a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder and pushing him along.

They went along, Crowley held between two wardens who nearly dragged him along despite the fact that he wasn’t resisting, as Aziraphale was pushed along behind him. Aziraphale wondered, uneasily, if he was about to find out what kind of chamber of horrors it was that Crowley had been tortured in every day for over three years.

But they ended up in what was clearly a room made for medical work. There was a shower stall of some kind, several cabinets, some rolling carts with very serious-looking pieces of equipment on them, and an examination table.

The examination table had straps on it. While Aziraphale was propelled to the side of the table and no further, Crowley was manhandled on to the table itself and fastened down.

“This really isn’t necessary,” Aziraphale said, clasping his hands behind his back so he wouldn’t fidget. “We want this done as badly as you do.”

“I doubt that,” said Thomas from behind him. Aziraphale couldn’t help but startle a bit. He hadn’t been in the group that had taken them out of their cell, he was quite certain of that. “I doubt that very much, angel.”

Crowley let out a wordless sound of protest. One of the wardens slapped him across the face.

“Please don’t!” Aziraphale tried to dart forwards, but was stopped by Thomas’ hand on his shoulder. He cringed away from it, and in upon himself. “Please, we’re- we’re trying to cooperate, we are, we are, just- please. Please.”

There was a short silence that followed his pleas. The wardens looked to Thomas for guidance. Aziraphale didn’t look at Thomas, though he dearly wished the warden would remove his hand from his shoulder. He looked to Crowley instead. Crowley looked back up at him.

“Well, go on then, Matthew,” Thomas said, and Matthew stepped forward with his bowl of holy water.

Moment of truth, Aziraphale thought as he rolled up his sleeve. He submerged his hand in the holy water, and reached out.

The truth was disappointing.

He couldn’t heal Crowley of the sigils branded into his neck. The first time he tried and experienced the little snap of energy that disconnected him from Crowley he jerked back in surprise.

“What was that?” Thomas asked.

“The sigils, I think,” Aziraphale said, too taken aback to lie. “It’s- they did something, as I was about to change his corporation.”

Thomas did not appear impressed. “You’re not getting off that easily. Try again.”

Aziraphale complied. He tried to heal the scars on Crowley’s corporation, again and again. Each time, he was snapped out of their connection, paltry as it was even for something based entirely in the physical realm. He did this until the water in the bowl was barely enough to cover his fingertips. Then Gordon poured more in, and so Aziraphale continued to try.

His one consolation was that the cultists were clearly just as irritated by his inability to make any progress as he was. As far as consolation prizes went, he could scarcely have done worse. Irritable cultists could not be anything but a threat.

Eventually Thomas called a halt to things.

“Were you able to do anything?” he asked.

“No,” Aziraphale told him miserably. “I was trying to, I tried, I just couldn’t-”

“Oh, get out of my way,” Thomas snapped, shoving him away from Crowley’s bedside. Aziraphale went. He hadn’t much choice in the matter. The other wardens surged around them, two grabbing him by an arm each, and more bringing medical instruments to Thomas.

He recognized a few, thanks to all those instructional videos: speculum, ultrasound wand. The snap of medical gloves made him flinch, and made Crowley shrink back against the table.

“I couldn’t do anything, there’s really no need-”

“Yeah, I’ll not be taking your word for anything more important than a blow job,” Thomas drawled. A few of the warden sniggered; Aziraphale felt heat rise in his face.

“Please don’t hurt him,” he tried. It was impossible to say whether any of the cultists even heard him. They didn’t seem inclined to acknowledge his words in any way.

The examination took… some length of time, Aziraphale really couldn’t say which unit of time should be measured in. Had it been an hour, a day, or even longer? Probably not, though it certainly felt like it. How long did he spend there, watching Crowley flinch and try not to show his terror as Thomas worked on him? Too long, far too long.

Eventually, though, Thomas came to the reluctant conclusion that Aziraphale hadn’t been lying to him, and they were marched back to their cell. The minute they were pushed back into it they reached for one another, mashing themselves together. Crowley bent his head down to press his face into Aziraphale’s shoulder, his arms coming around his waist and his wings wrapping around their legs. Aziraphale wrapped his arms around his shoulders, and his wings around their torsos in return. For a long moment, they merely stood there, as the sound of the door slamming shut echoed in their cell.

“Well,” Crowley said after a moment. “That sucked.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed, wishing fervently that he could just curl up around Crowley and never have to see him harmed again. “It did, rather.”

It was also, unfortunately, the start of a new pattern for them.

First, the door would open: Crowley would strip, and they’d be marched down to the medical room for Aziraphale to try to force his corporation into having the required organs. That was the second part of the day. Aziraphale would, of course, try to find some way to use the holy water to escape instead, but he never had any luck. The room was warded, the wardens were warded, the equipment was warded, there was nothing that wasn’t warded save for Aziraphale and Crowley themselves, and that had limits. He could do nothing to his collar, and nothing to the sigils carved into Crowley’s neck. He could do nothing to free them.

Thomas always oversaw these sessions. He was the one who decided when Aziraphale had tried enough, and the one to inspect Crowley to make sure that there really had been no change. Aziraphale did try to protest, more often than not. It never did any good. No matter that Thomas had to know that he was telling the truth, no matter that there was no need to use such invasive techniques. He would insist upon checking, every time.

There were two small mercies to this pattern: it ended with the both of them being returned to their cell, and Thomas didn’t seem inclined to visit them afterwards. Once left alone they could talk: try to think of something they hadn’t tried yet, or simply complain about the overall unfairness of the situation.

“I mean, what are they expecting to find?” Aziraphale asked one day, after they’d been returned to their cell.

“I don’t know. I mean, if they think we’re not cooperating, then obviously there’s not going to be anything new and exciting going on down there,” Crowley said. “Unless they’re afraid that you’re going to miracle me up some kind of vagina dentata.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Oh no,” Aziraphale said, as a wave of preemptive mortification washed over him.

“Vagina dentata,” Crowley said, grinning. “What a wonderful phrase.”

“Must you?” Aziraphale asked.

“Vagina dentata, ain’t no passing craze,” Crowley began to sing.

Aziraphale gave up. “Fine, get it out of your system, you fiend.”

“It means no penis for the rest of your days,” Crowley continued.

Aziraphale let out an aggrieved sigh.

“It’s our phallus-free, philosophy! Vagina dentata~” Crowley finished. He beamed, and then looked at Aziraphale as though expecting applause.

“Are you done?” Aziraphale asked. “You’re not going to compose a second verse, or anything of that nature?”

“Nope, I’m all good here,” Crowley said, still grinning. It was good to see, even if Aziraphale would have wished for a slightly better cause. “Come on, admit it, it’s a fun song.”

“I still can’t believe you taught our goddaughter that song,” Aziraphale said with a groan.

Crowley snickered.

“She ended up singing it at her mother’s fortieth birthday party,” Aziraphale cried in exasperation. “In front of all the guests.”

“All of whom were sloshed out of their minds and thought it was incredible,” Crowley said. “And anyway, in my defense, at the time we both thought she was- a boy.”

Crowley had clearly only said that because he’d originally thought to say the Antichrist. Aziraphale latched onto it anyway. “What has that got to do with anything? She was seven! That song is not appropriate for a seven year old child of any gender to know. I’m not convinced it’s appropriate for you and I to know, and we’re the oldest living beings on the face of the Earth.”

“Yeah, well, you’re also not convinced that I didn’t write it,” Crowley pointed out.

“You’re right, I’m not.”

“Oh, come on,” Crowley groaned. “I showed you. The humans put it up on the Internet years before our goddaughter was so much as a twinkle in her father’s eye.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Aziraphale pointed out. “You were around for millennia before the Internet was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes.”

“Angel, you’re killing me here,” Crowley said. “If I’d written it, I wouldn’t have buried it in some webcomic. I’d have made a viral video out of it. It would have been everywhere- even you wouldn’t have been able to escape it. It would have been like the talking fox thing, only better.”

They had that conversation in English. Neither one of them thought anything of it at the time. Rhyming schemes were dreadfully difficult to translate, they generally only bothered trying when they wanted something silly to argue about.

But they were always under observation, even in the relative haven of their cell. Neither of them ever forgot it, precisely. But it wasn’t at the forefront of their minds either, not unless they were discussing certain sensitive subjects, such as the identities of their humans friends, or how they’d survived their executions. A bit of silliness didn’t register as anything threatening for the cultists to overhear. Not until the following day, when they were being marched back to their cell when, quite suddenly, Oliver grabbed Crowley by the hair and yanked him into the wall.

“What-” Aziraphale began, trying to throw himself after them. The wardens surrounding him wouldn’t allow it, though. They grabbed on tight, one to each arm and wing, and refused to budge.

“It just occurred to me,” Oliver said. The hand he had in Crowley’s hair moved down to pin the demon by his throat. Crowley made a high pitched noise of distress, and began to tremble, his face ashen and his eyes very large. He made no attempt to fend Oliver off: his hands were curled into fists, but they remained down at his sides. “We didn’t actually check to make sure that he hasn’t sprouted teeth anywhere that teeth really shouldn’t be.”

“Don’t!” Aziraphale shouted, trying to surge forwards. “Don’t, please-”

Oliver paid him no mind. He seemingly paid no mind to anything but Crowley, his eyes glued to the demon’s face as his free hand worked between Crowley’s legs. Crowley made another distressed noise, and tried to squirm away, until Oliver began to apply pressure to his windpipe. Crowley choked, and then choked again as Oliver’s hand found its mark and pressed in.

“Please,” Aziraphale chanted. “Please, please, please please please pleasepleaseplease...”

“All done!” Oliver said cheerfully after perhaps a minute of this, pulling Crowley back away from the wall and towards Aziraphale. The wardens let go of him at the same time, and he wrapped himself around Crowley as best he could.

“I’ve got you,” he told him, as Crowley shook and buried his face in his hair. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

“Get moving,” Oliver ordered, so they went, Crowley still wrapped in Aziraphale’s wing.

They collapsed onto the mattress as soon as they were able. Neither of them said anything for a long time.

That signaled the addition of a new but familiar element to this pattern: escalation. It kept getting worse.

One of the wardens would grope Crowley occasionally on their way back from the cell. Then Crowley was always groped, and it wasn’t long before they began to take turns. Sometimes they pinned Crowley to the wall, other times they pushed him between one another, as though passing a ball back and forth between friends. They forced his legs to spread wide and probed between them with their fingers, they choked him until he went blue in the face and his eyes rolled back in his head, they tweaked and pulled at his nipples and wondered why he had them at all, being that he was a snake. Crowley didn’t resist, and barely reacted at all. Every time he did anything that spoke of more than sheer terror of their captors they would latch onto it as an excuse to make things worse. If he made a noise that sounded too angry or defiant they would slap him repeatedly on the face. If he beat his fists against the unfeeling stone of the walls they would bend his wrists back almost to the point of breaking. If his wings so much as twitched they would pull out his feathers in handfuls and bemoan the fact that none of them had brought a nail gun along with them. It had been a favorite game of theirs, apparently, to nail Crowley’s wings down to a panel of plywood and see how long it took for his panicked struggling to break the board.

Aziraphale broke when he heard that: full-on hysterical crying and shouting and fighting against the arms that held him from Crowley’s side. In his desperation he even offered to fellate Thomas, blurting it out right there in the hallway in front of Crowley and the other wardens.

They found that funny, the wardens. They all laughed, none more loudly than Thomas.

“Do you think you can suck your way out of this?” Thomas asked.

“If that’s what it takes,” Aziraphale said. “Just- don’t hurt him, please don’t hurt him, stop hurting him, please.”

There was another, shorter round of laughter.

“Look at him, he’s gagging for it,” said one the wardens. Aziraphale wasn’t sure who- he wasn’t looking up at any of them. He kept his eye trained down, and found himself staring at Crowley’s feet, bare and vulnerable-looking skin and scale, surrounded by the heavy, hard-wearing boots of the cultists.

“I’m surprised he doesn’t have a stiffy,” said another.

“He can’t get one,” Thomas said. “He’s like a bleeding Ken doll down there.”

“Come off it,” said one of the other wardens. Some of his fellows scoffed in agreement.

“No, seriously, look.” Thomas reached out and began to undo the fly of Aziraphale’s trousers. Crowley made a guttural sound, and was slapped for it. Aziraphale jerked his head up, and for a moment met Crowley’s gaze. His face was a perfect reflection of all his own fear and shame and misery. Aziraphale closed his eyes. Whatever was going to happen would happen, and more than likely it would do no one any good for him to see it.

It wasn’t so bad. A few of the wardens wanted to touch, feel for themselves that there was really nothing there and he didn’t have some kind of secret genitalia. Then Thomas pulled his trousers back up, and they were marched back to their cell.

They crashed into one another the moment they were free to do so, and collapsed onto the mattress in a sobbing heap of limbs. It took them a long time to stop crying. Every time they thought they were done and one of them opened his mouth to speak, he would inevitably break into a fresh wave of tears and set the other off.

Eventually, though, they had to stop crying. Eventually, they ran out of the tears and energy required to do so.

“It’s getting worse,” Aziraphale said, at long last. “It’s- they’re making it worse again.”

“Yeah,” Crowley rasped. “Yeah, they are.” He cleared his throat, and then switched to Kassite. “I think we need to talk about- about actually giving in.”

Aziraphale took so long in answering him that he eventually prompted him with “Angel?”

“Are you sure?” Aziraphale asked. “I mean- no matter what, you’ll be the one to bear the brunt of our decision.”

“I’m sure that if we can’t give them something, it will only continue to get worse,” Crowley said. “And I don’t, I can’t, I can’t...”

“I know,” Aziraphale replied, thinking of that first horrible pattern: the long time waiting with Crowley’s screams, the long time waiting after they were spent, the increasingly grievous harm done to him every time they dragged him back to their cell. “I know.”

For a moment, neither one of them said anything.

“I don’t know if it’s even possible,” Aziraphale said.

“Have you tried?” Crowley asked.

“I have not,” Aziraphale admitted.

“So try, then,” Crowley said. “If nothing else, it should give us a better idea what we’re working with.”

They spent the next few hours regaling one another with tales of antediluvian Babylon, until Crowley, exhausted by the day’s trials and the resultant crying jag, began to nod off. Aziraphale encouraged him to lay down, tucking the blankets up around him, and pressing a gentle kiss into his hair. Then he cured up with his back to the mattress and listened as Crowley’s breathing evened out.

If I could have one wish, just one, Aziraphale though, hugging his knees to his chest. It would be to regain the ability to hold him while he slept and have it be a comfort rather than a terror.

Which would be a waste of a wish, really. He should be trying to escape. They were trying to escape, they just weren’t getting very far.

Please, he prayed. Please let this work, God, please. Let them slip up. Let us be able to go home, let us be safe again, please.

Still no reply. Aziraphale hugged himself a little more tightly, and gave himself a few minutes to try and exorcise some of the wretched misery of the situation.

It was almost funny. He really would have thought that he would have cried himself out by now, and yet...

Well, here he was, crying again.

The following morning, when the wardens came to collect them, Aziraphale found that he couldn’t quite stop himself from doing a bit of escalating himself. The minute Crowley’s clothes were off, he took him by the hand and wrapped him up in his wing, tugging them both towards the door and the waiting crowd of wardens before they could be pushed separately.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, with appalling fragility when the crowd of wardens refused to let them out. “We’re ready to leave when you are.”

After a moment, one of the Senior Wardens huffed and said. “Come on, let’s get a move on.”

They let them walk down the hall under their own power, untouched by anyone but each other. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing either.

Things progressed normally from there, save for the part where Aziraphale tried, really and truly tried to comply with their demands. He had just as much luck with those as he did with all his hopes of escape: none whatsoever.

In desperation, Aziraphale pressed himself deeper and deeper into Crowley’s corporation, into the marrow of him, into the cells, into the DNA that painted his very molecular structure. Then he tried to push deeper still, too deep, and he hit-

Scales, starstuff, and the scene of apple blossoms: Crowley’s celestial form.

They used to do this regularly- embrace, in a Miltonian sense, that was. They’d set themselves up on some afternoon, clothes off, one of them inside the other, and then they’d join soul to soul as they’d joined flesh to flesh.

The flesh was rather an essential component, they’d found. Without the discomfort generated by their perpetual coupling in the physical realm, they could very easily lose over a month of time to one another, as they had the first time they’d tried it. This way they only lost a couple of days at most.

It was just. There was so much time to make up for. Six thousand years. It had taken them six thousand years to finally come together, to embrace, to be able to be so vulnerable around one another without fear of reprisal from either of their sides. Six thousand years of hurts they couldn’t soothe, of connections they couldn’t make, of shared experiences they could never speak openly of because what if someone heard, of the constant fear and bitterness and frustration and doubt.

Good Lord, how Aziraphale had doubted. He’d doubted, because for all his flaws Crowley was still the most endearing creature he had ever met: empathetic even when he couldn’t risk being kind, clever and witty and funny and interesting. And, interested, in Aziraphale of all beings. How could that possibly all be true? And he’d doubted because he’d known that Heaven loved him, of course they did, that was the point of Heaven, and what he felt from his fellow angels was nothing like what he felt from Crowley. At times, he hadn’t quite been able to stop the disloyal thought that he rather preferred Crowley’s feelings, and then he’d felt guilty about it, which had just made things worse.

He came up with all sorts of ways to explain it to himself. Crowley was tempting him, playing him for a fool, and like a fool he was falling for it. Crowley was tempting him, but it was just a reflex, he probably didn’t even realize he was doing it, he probably thought Aziraphale would be immune to it, because of course a proper angel would be. It was his own perception that was flawed, that made Heaven feel cold and remote even as Crowley felt so very warm and homey. It was his own perception that was flawed; he was merely projecting his own desires where they had no business existing in the first place, much less being projected.

It was him, himself, and all himself only. Crowley found him useful enough that he was able to tolerate him, and he should be grateful that there was one being in creation who could manage that much, not grasping for more.

Not that he’d done much grasping, really. No, he’d gotten rather good at keeping Crowley out beyond arm’s length, out of his reach where Aziraphale wouldn’t be able to even pretend that there was more going on than what had to be going on.

And then he’d stood in the rubble of a bombed-out church and known, beyond even his ability to doubt, that he was loved in return. He followed Crowley out to the Bentley in a daze, fully intending to confess to everything, when Crowley had turned to him and said “Don’t be alarmed if Dagon or someone starts talking over the radio. That’s how Hell communicates these days.”

Right. His feelings might be returned, but they weren’t, and could never be, safe. This could never be safe, not for either of them. He said nothing.

He said nothing, until the danger had passed. He said nothing, until there was nothing left to lose. Nothing, until they were finally safe.

(He’d thought they’d been safe, at least.)

Six thousand years of that, and that had only been on Aziraphale’s end of things. Crowley, if anything, had had it much worse, believing right up until after the end was meant to arrive that his feelings were unrequited. They’d had a lot of ground to cover, inside one another’s heads.

In that respect- having a lot of ground to cover- this time was like every time they’d had before. In all other respects it was wholly different.

They hadn’t done this on purpose, for one thing. Neither one of them was prepared. For another, just as the sigils prevented Crowley from accessing his powers, or Aziraphale from changing his corporation, they also prevented them from fully embracing. It was less a matter of laying in one another’s arms and more like holding hands between the bars of a cell.

And it was no joyful union. That was the main difference. Crowley was terrified, and so, so very hurt. Worse still was the shame and disgust, aimed towards himself. He could hear it howling, as though echoed to him from around some distant corner.

[[Oh my dear,]] Aziraphale thought, and he could sort of feel Crowley’s answering surprise, almost hear his reply of [[Aziraphale?]]

[[My dearest,]] Aziraphale thought, trying to pour as much love and understanding into their connection as he could while the opportunity. [[You’re not the things they’ve forced upon you, you’re not what you’ve been forced to act like. You’re still you, my beloved, you’re still you.]] He wasn’t sure if it went through. For the first time since their first time, he felt clumsy and uncertain in this.

“What’s your problem?” Thomas demanded, jolting him out of their connection.

“I don’t-” Aziraphale began, his chest oddly tight, and then realized that he was crying, again. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m trying, I-” He raised his dry hand to his face to try to wipe away the tears that we’re now beginning to blur his vision, and found that it was shaking very badly. “I’m trying, I swear I’m trying.” He could feel Thomas advancing on them, and it did nothing to quell his rising terror, and oh, of all the times he could have chosen to have a blasted panic attack of all things… “Just- just give a moment and I’ll try again, I swear, I’m sorry, please don’t-”

But when Thomas reached Crowley’s bedside all he did was begin to unfasten the straps that held him down. “I think that’s enough for the day, don’t you?” he asked.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale blurted out, after a moment to get over his shock. “Thank you, I- yes.”

Aziraphale took Crowley by the hand, and wrapped him up in his wing again as they made their way back to their cell. Please, Aziraphale prayed all the way back. Please, let them leave him alone, I couldn’t bear to see him further hurt right now, I really couldn’t.

His prayers were answered. Or else the wardens were as taken aback by the sudden display of mercy as Aziraphale was, and decided not to push things today. In any event, they made it back to their cell unmolested.

Aziraphale felt slightly off-kilter, like the world was a radio that wasn’t properly tuned, like he was wrapped in cotton wool, like he was trying to observe everything through a funhouse mirror. He watched Crowley dress, very nearly unseeing. Crowley studiously avoided his gaze.

“I don’t tell you enough, do I?” Aziraphale realized as Crowley finished tying the sash on his robe.

“Tell me what, angel?” Crowley asked.

“How much I love you.”

Crowley shivered, and hissed in a breath, which Aziraphale took to mean that he was right.

“I love you,” he said, stepping closer.

“I know,” Crowley said, sounding gutted. “I know you do. That’s why-” He cut himself off with a grunt of pain, eyes skittering away from him, his hands burrowing deep into the pockets of his robe.

“I love you,” Aziraphale said again. He chanced stepping closer. Crowley didn’t look at him, but neither did he flinch away. “I love you, Crowley, and that’s worth everything.”

“Is it?” Crowley blurted out. He did look up, very briefly, before hunching in on himself. “Do you realize- do you know, what it is that you’re saying right now?”

“Yes, I do.” With the static-woollen-warpness fading a bit from his perception of the world, he was even sure of it.

“Aziraphale, you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me,” Crowley hissed. “You wouldn’t be trapped here in this freezing fucking cell at the non-existent mercy of that pack of rabid, slavering monsters. Not a single one of them would have ever laid a finger on you. You could have come here and stayed at that bed and breakfast and passed them by on the street and none of them would have even noticed you, they never would have dared to think of hurting you and if they had? You could have fought them off. If they didn’t have me to dangle over your head, you would have fought them off.”

Aziraphale took a moment to chew through all of that, and then took a deep breath for good measure. “First of all,” he said, switching to Mughal-era Khariboli. “I’m having a great deal of trouble imagining circumstances where I would have come into proximity of Thomas and not felt compelled to, at the very least, cross the street.”

He waited a beat, hoping Crowley would laugh. When Crowley didn’t do anything but stare at him in blank incomprehension, he decided that it was probably best if he just got straight to the point. “Secondly, and most importantly, they wouldn’t have laid a finger on either one of us if Gabriel hadn’t put them up to it.”

Crowley made a strangled sort of grunt, more disagreement than not, and Aziraphale couldn’t let that stand.

“They wouldn’t have known who or what we were,” he said. “They wouldn’t be armed with weapons that could kill us. They wouldn’t have known how to contain us. I’m not sure they would have even thought to contain us.” He frowned. “I know they weren’t precisely innocents when this started, but they didn’t ever kidnap someone- a fellow human- and hold them like this, did they?”

“Not really, no,” Crowley said, shaking his head. “No, it’s- they used to use this room as a sort of hazing thing. You had to spend a night here to be initiated into the Brotherhood of the High Holy Arsehole of Whatever. Stephen nearly died of hypothermia, after his.” He dipped into modern Hindi, which they’d both relearned in the 1960s, for the words ‘hazing’ and ‘hypothermia’.

“What a pity,” Aziraphale said. The words were a reflex, not an intentionally catty comment, but when they provoked a loud “Ha!” from Crowley he still relaxed, and was glad to have said it.

“Thirdly… there would have been no point in my coming here if I wasn’t coming here with you,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley flinched. “I don’t mean that I wouldn’t be captured if it weren’t for you, as per my previous point. I mean that the whole point of that anniversary trip I was going to suggest was for us to go to the Eden Project. It was my turn to pick, I wanted to pick something that you would enjoy.”

“Sister-fucker,” Crowley swore, looking intensely distressed. “We missed our anniversary.”

“Oh darling,” Aziraphale said. He stepped a bit closer, and held out a hand.

Crowley took it, still radiating misery. “We missed more than one. We must be past our tenth, now. We had all those plans...”

“They were very silly plans,” Aziraphale said, trying to force a smile.

They really had been very silly plans for their tenth anniversary. They were going to go to the American Southwest for a bit. Las Vegas, at first. They were going to secure the most expensive honeymoon suite in the city, find the kitschiest place to renew their vows, and then play merry havoc with the various gambling establishments until the humans caught on. Then they were going to play tourist for a bit. They were going to see Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, and all the rest of it, pop into whatever ludicrous roadside attractions there were, and even rent a camper. Aziraphale was lukewarm at best on the subject of camping, but he rather thought that seeing Crowley’s face as he watched the stars unencumbered by light pollution would be worth the experience. That, and Crowley had promised him fry bread tacos.

“Oh course they were silly plans, angel,” Crowley said softly. “The point of them was to have fun.”

Aziraphale gave his hand a squeeze. “I know that my being here hasn’t been entirely comfortable for you,” he said. He pushed aside the knowledge that they were only able to hurt Crowley so badly because he was there to heal him up afterwards, so he could say what he needed to without it feeling like a lie. “I know you worry about me being hurt, that you worry about me hurting, but please know that if I’ve brought you any respite, any solace at all-”

“You have,” Crowley interrupted. “You do, of course you do, Aziraphale-”

“Then it’s worth it. Being here, even with all that entails, is worth it,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate it here, Crowley, I really do. But I hate the thought of you suffering here alone even more.”

For a long moment, Crowley said nothing. Then he nodded. “I love you,” he said, and Aziraphale felt something seize in his chest.

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale said, throwing his free arm around Crowley’s shoulders. He pressed a kiss onto his cheek, and then onto his lips when Crowley turned to meet him.

“I love you,” Crowley said again, when they parted.

“I love you,” Aziraphale replied.

They ended up on the mattress again, wrapped in a tangle of limbs and blankets, trading gentle kisses and soft “I love you”s.

It had been like this the first time they’d embraced, a little bit, in some ways. It had ached then, too. They had, a bit naively, decided to make a day of it, on the presumption that it was the sort of thing they could do in the space of a day. They’d started out on the bed in Aziraphale’s flat above the bookshop, fully clothed and kissing, and entangled with one another. It was new enough to be intoxicating, and old enough to feel familiar and comfortable. They took their time with it. There was a curious lack of urgency, even as the city began to wake around them, even as Aziraphale could feel Crowley’s hardness pressing into his thigh, and feel the answering pulse beating between his legs.

I love you so much, he’d thought, drinking in the sight of him, all those beloved features he’d spent centuries admiring and never thought he would be allowed to touch: the sharp angles of his face, his cherry-bright hair and his honey-warm eyes. I love you so, so very much, my dear, and I’m going to give you proof beyond all doubt in a moment.

That had been the main reason why Aziraphale had wanted to embrace in such a fashion. Oh, he’d heard it was supposed to feel good, transcendentally so, and he was generally in favor of doing things which felt good. And the union of soul to soul sounded dreadfully romantic, and therefore something they should probably try at least once.

Mainly, however, he’d wanted to try to soothe some of Crowley’s insecurities. The very same insecurities he’d played upon and even ended up feeding into over the years, in the name of keeping Crowley at arms length and therefore keeping the both of them safe.

Not that it had worked, in the end. Your boyfriend in the dark glasses, indeed. That whole little encounter had been as humiliating as it had been terrifying, to know he’d still been so transparent even with all the precautions he’d taken.

And now here they were on the other side of it, free at long last. And Aziraphale was still the person who had said such terrible things, and Crowley, for all that he’d forgiven him, for all that he was visibly annoyed whenever Aziraphale tried to apologize again, had still been hurt by them.

He hadn’t liked that he’d done damage he wasn’t able to fix. He had absolutely hated that Crowley was hurting and he couldn’t find the right words to heal him. He’d hoped that this- a literal baring of his soul- would help, would make how much Aziraphale loved him, how much he regretted his previous actions, something tangible for Crowley.

“Ready?” he’d asked aloud.

“Ready,” Crowley had replied.

And then, slowly, tentatively, they’d begun to seep out of their bodies behind and reached for one another.

Aziraphale had been prepared for Crowley’s insecurities, or so he’d believed, at least. He hadn’t prepared for his own, because at the time he hadn’t thought he’d had any.

He’d thought he had a remarkably clear-eyed view of himself, really. He was too much here (indulgence, credulity), and too little there (courage, restraint), never in quite the right amount, never quite enough. An amalgamation of flaws that could, through sheer persistence, aspire to some kind of adequacy, that was him.

Oh, Crowley loved him, he hadn't doubted that, not by then. He hadn't understood it, but neither did he doubt. It was only with the benefit of hindsight that Aziraphale could see that he’d believed that Crowley loved him exactly the same way he’d feared Crowley perceived Aziraphale’s love for him: a love in spite of who he was, not because of who he was.

He’d been utterly unprepared for the reality of it. Not the sensation of Crowley’s love, which at first had felt like a stream of liquid warmth, and certainly not for the way that warmth coiled around his various attributes, the way Crowley saw them, was fond of them, admired them, even. He couldn’t handle it, nor could he handle Crowley feeling the exact same shock, and he couldn’t say which of them lost control first, but what they’d intended to be a trickle of love quickly turned into two tsunamis crashing into one another, and they were-

Lost. Adrift. Unmoored. There were no adjectives for describing the sensation, and those which came close were all too frightened and negative for what had been one of the very best experiences of Aziraphale’s life, if not more than a little overwhelming. To be able to feel all the particulars of Crowley’s love for him, Aziraphale, vain and fussy and particular and anxious and hedonistic and selfish and sometimes a bit more of a bastard than was worth knowing; and, apparently, constant and caring and determined and funny and intelligent and brave, oh, Crowley thought he was brave…

To know all that, and to also know Crowley’s own joy at knowing the extent of Aziraphale’s love for him… well. It had been 16th May when they’d laid down. And it had been 24th June when a nearby thunderclap had jolted them back fully into their bodies. If it hadn’t been for that storm, they might have stayed like that for years.

As it was, they’d lain there on the bed with the rain pounding against the windows, breathing deeply, getting used to breathing, to having bodies- sticky bodies, at the time, sweaty and tear-streaked and come-stained. They hadn’t left their bodies entirely, and their poor corporations apparently hadn’t known how to interpret their coupling without having several orgasms.

They had looked at one another, then they’d reached for one another, Crowley vanishing his clothes back into aether and Aziraphale hanging his up inside his wardrobe as they had grasped one another. Crowley’s cock had been hard already (still), and Aziraphale’s cunt had been wet already (still) and it took no time at all for Crowley to get on top of him, inside him. They’d both hissed, oversensitive and raw, but there had been no question as to whether they’d wanted to continue.

“I love you,” Aziraphale had said, half-sobbing, for the first time in a very long time feeling like he might be enough, might be precisely who he was meant to be.

“I love you,” Crowley had replied, and there had been tears in his eyes, and Aziraphale had known that he felt it now, how worthy he was, how precious.

Aziraphale had bought the engagement ring a few days later. It had taken him nearly two months to arrange things and pluck up the courage to ask, but he’d bought it, and he’d bought it knowing that Crowley would say yes, and would mean it, and wouldn’t come to regret it.

He remembered that, while they entwined themselves together on their sad little parody of a nest. He thought about that, as their own yawning need for one another seemed to create its own little bubble where they were truly alone. And when there was some sort of noise from the hall, and they both tensed and waited for several agonizing moments before deciding that it had been a false alarm, they turned back to one another, and Aziraphale kept thinking, and kept remembering.

“They don’t get to take this from us,” he said. They’d been switching languages for a while now, and for this Aziraphale defaulted back to Sumerian. “We might not have a choice with literally anything else, but they can’t touch this: our union, our marriage, our love.” He took Crowley’s hand, as gently and carefully as he could, and placed it over his heart. “I know it’s hard. I know how hard it is. But I love you, and you’re worth everything.”

Words were just going to have to be enough. He hoped they were enough.

Crowley kissed him again, and then rested his forehead against Aziraphale’s. “I love you,” he said. “And you’re everything.”

They had another hour or so before the wardens came back for their next session.

And then, a few weeks after that, the cultists brought in Isolde, and things got that much worse.

Chapter Text

In all the years they’d spent being held prisoner, they had yet to argue over anything substantial. Oh, they bickered, as any married couple might be expected to do. They had their debates, largely about the artistic merits of anything they could ever recall having seen, or of the strange malformed bit of stone on the wall opposite the door which was shaped like a mermaid and Crowley insisted must have been carved, or whether or not the concept of artistic merit could itself have artistic merit. But it had never been serious. They had never actually fought over anything.

That changed two days after they successfully forced Crowley’s corporation to accommodate a functioning womb.

“What were you thinking, Aziraphale?” Crowley was hissing again, the first syllable of his name near drowned in sibilance the way it hadn’t been since the early days, when Crowley hadn’t been quite sure if he could pronounce a God-given name any longer. Assssiraphale.

“I was thinking that they wouldn’t let anyone down here if they were uninitiated.”

Part of it was undoubtedly that up until relatively recently they hadn’t actually been spending all that much time together. For the majority of the day, Crowley had either been busy being tortured, or else had been unconscious as he recovered from being tortured. It was only since they’d told their captors that they were capitulating that they’d actually been in one another’s company for the entirety of the day.

Part of it was simply extremity of circumstances. They had precious little to keep them going but one another’s comfort and care, and they couldn’t do anything to endanger it. Crowley, in particular, was so consistently and grievously hurt that Aziraphale couldn’t help but feel duty-bound to avoid anything which might cause him further distress.

That was the greater part of why they hadn’t truly argued while imprisoned. They both knew one another so well that when they did fight, it was always intensely distressing.

“Come on, you’ve been here almost as long as I have. What makes you think they’re going to initiate a woman into their Fraternal Order of Sexual Predation?”

“Well, I hardly thought they were going to offer her a seat at the table,” Aziraphale retorted. “But she was allowed to see us, they told her that we needed her womb, I didn’t think they would hide the fact that we weren’t here willingly. I still don’t see how they could.”

He didn’t think he’d been wrong, precisely. Or, rather, obviously he had been wrong, but he didn’t see how he could possibly have known that before his little misstep.

That was what had set this fight into motion. My little misstep, Aziraphale had said, and that understatement had raised Crowley’s hackles like nothing else in this place had thus far.

“Well, they lied to her, obviously,” Crowley sneered. “Thomas has probably been lying to her for years. They must have come up with some story to excuse it all.”

“Some story that involves angels, demons, and the need to impregnate you without disclosing the fact that we’re being kept against our will?” Aziraphale asked incredulously. “What possible story could that be?”

Some small part of him was perversely grateful for this. Crowley was so often frightened and miserable and wounded, that the fact that he could still fight- could hiss and spit and snarl- was heartening. A larger part of him was annoyed. They were still under terrible threat, and he really didn’t see how he could have known better, why was this what Crowley chose to fight over, why now? Most of him was merely upset. It really was intensely distressing when he and Crowley fought.

“I don’t know, whatever story fits in with whatever it is they’ve been telling their families about all the time they’ve been spending here,” Crowley said dismissively.

“What?”

“It’s been years,” Crowley hissed, exasperated. “Years, of hours at a time spent having a go at me, every day. Even accounting for the fact that they’re not all there at the same time, that’s too much too regularly to go unnoticed. You know this, Aziraphale. You know this.”

“I’d rather thought they would just say that they were doing a church thing and leave it at that,” Aziraphale said with as much dignity as he could muster.

“It’s the twenty-first fucking century, angel, no one spends that much time in a church these days!” Crowley shouted incredulously. “No one ever spent this much bloody time in a church! Nuns don’t spend this much time in a church! The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t spend this much time in a church! People weren’t spending this much time in a church when the Puritans were running amok. They weren’t spending this much time in a church when people were sheltering from Viking raids in a church because it was the only stone building in a village of mud-thatch houses. And you know all of this!”

While that might have been technically correct, Aziraphale rather felt like he hadn’t known any of that. He certainly didn’t know what to say to it.

“You’re not stupid,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale was once again stabbed with the double-edged knowledge that Crowley was one of the few people who ever said it, and that Crowley could make it sound like the direst of insults. “You’re willfully oblivious, sometimes, but you’re not stupid. So what is it here that you don’t want to see, angel?” He took a step closer, eyes flashing. “What is it that makes you think they’ve just been calling home to say Hi honey, I’m afraid I can’t make it to your nephew’s footie match, I’m afraid we’ve just nailed the demon’s wings to the plyboard again and you know whoever fucks him hard enough to make him panic and break the thing will have to buy all the rest of the lads a beer, and you know I can’t say no to the possibility of free beer. What makes you think that?”

Some of that information was new to Aziraphale, and he took a moment to swallow the bile it brought up. “I don’t,” he said shortly. “I don’t think that at all. How could I?”

“Well then what are you thinking?” Crowley demanded.

“I’m not, evidentially.”

“Oh come on, don’t do that,” Crowley told him with a sneer. “You’re always thinking, you’re never not thinking, you’re never not overthinking, you’re definitely-”

“I’m not, I can’t-” Aziraphale swallowed heavily. He was very upset with the argument, and very annoyed with Crowley for having it, and he was even more annoyed with him for being right. There was something he wasn’t willing to think about, and it was the details of how Crowley was tortured, and he could never tell Crowley that. “I can’t read their minds, Crowley!”

Crowley scoffed, and for a moment annoyance overrode all else.

“I can’t read their minds, Crowley,” Aziraphale snapped. “I have no idea what they’re thinking, or how they think. I can guess based on how they are when I’m around to see them, but I have no idea what their lives are like otherwise, and that only changes when you tell me about it!”

Crowley reared back. Aziraphale would have once described the motion with ‘as though he’d been slapped’ but he’d seen that precise motion too many times by now to countenance the simile. He opened his mouth, and then closed in immediately as the door swung open.

Thomas was there, flanked by two wardens Aziraphale well and truly did not care about so long as they kept their distance. The Senior Warden looked between the two of them, seeming amused.

“Trouble in paradise, gentlemen?” he asked.

Oh fuck you, Aziraphale thought with enough vehemence that he needed to bite his lip to keep from saying it aloud. Next to him Crowley was equally silent.

“You’re needed, Aziraphale,” Thomas said, stepping aside so that Aziraphale could leave the cell.

“What for?” Aziraphale asked.

“I’ll explain on the way,” Thomas said, the edge of a threat lurking in his tone.

“Very well, then,” Aziraphale said, before turning towards Crowley. “I’ll see you in a moment, dearest.” He almost left the endearment off, but habit and fear for both their sakes won out over his annoyance.

He stepped into the hallway, and managed not to flinch as the door was shut behind him. He followed Thomas down the hall, the other two wardens trailing at enough of a distance that for a terrible moment Aziraphale was certain that they were going to stand out their cell instead- or worse, go inside it. He nearly breathed a sigh of relief when they began to follow along after all.

“Well, we are underway,” Aziraphale said, after some time of walking in tense, expectant silence had brought them up a few flights of stairs. “Can I know what this is about now?”

“My wife,” Thomas said tersely.

“Your… what?” Aziraphale asked, momentarily thrown. “Your wife?”

Thomas laughed, as though Aziraphale had told a particularly funny joke. “Yes, of course my wife,” he said. “What, you didn’t think I was gay, did you?”

“I most certainly did not,” Aziraphale said, feeling oddly and deeply insulted by the very notion. “I didn’t think you were the marrying sort.” He didn’t think Thomas was capable of even faking the sort of loving commitment that was supposed to typify marriage these days- not for very long, at least, as divorces were now mercifully easy for women to obtain- but he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to say that without being hit as the bare minimum consequence. “What problem is there with your wife? Is she unwell?”

“No, she’s stubborn,” Thomas replied.

Aziraphale stopped short. “I- that’s not anything I help,” he said, feeling very, very ill. He could imagine all too well what Thomas’ wife might be feeling stubborn about. “I can’t influence anyone’s minds- I couldn’t even if you took the collar off. It’s not within my remit.”

“Oh, I think you can help with this,” Thomas said, taking him by the arm and pulling him along the corridor with him. “She’s been in a snit ever since she met you.”

“Since she met-” Aziraphale began, and then came to a sudden halt once more as he realized who that had to be. “Isolde? Isolde is your wife?”

“Yeah, that’s the old ball and chain,” Thomas said.

“Your wife?” Aziraphale repeated incredulously. “I thought she was your niece, or your daughter. Is she even twenty?” Thomas was rather far removed from twenty. He might have been three times that age, and if he was any younger than fifty, Aziraphale would eat his socks- the new pair that didn’t have any holes in them, even.

“Oh, don’t clutch pearls at me,” Thomas said, yanking him along again. “You’re older than whoring, you must have been around when it was common.” He had been around when it wasn’t uncommon, yes, but it hadn’t been as widespread as people seemed to believe, particularly not in this part of the world, and especially not since the Black Death. For centuries, and up until very recently, English women not of the nobility might expect to marry some time in their early twenties to a man of similar age, and to spend the earlier part of their adulthood working and saving their wages for their married life. Or so they might expect if their aims weren’t better aligned with spinsterhood, which itself had been a great deal more widespread than many people seemed to believe.

He doubted Thomas would appreciate the history lecture, however, and stayed silent.

“Come on,” Thomas said, clearly misinterpreting his silence. “How old was Mary when had Jesus- fourteen, right? And was whatsherface, Zipporah, any older when she had Moses?”

“Zipporah was his wife. I believe you mean his mother Yocheved,” Aziraphale said shortly. “And yes, actually, she was one hundred and thirty years of age when she bore Moses.”

“Well, Isolde’s twenty-one,” Thomas told him, after a beat.

“Good to know,” Aziraphale replied, though in all honesty the idea of Thomas being married remained horrifying no matter what age his wife had attained. “I take it she’s upset because she discovered that you were raping demons instead of doing whatever it is you told her you were doing when you come here?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Thomas said.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I still don’t see what I can do about it,” Aziraphale said. “I meant what I said earlier. I can’t change anyone’s minds.” He hesitated for a moment, before deciding that he might as well try. “Now, Crowley on the other hand-”

Thomas interrupted him by slamming him into the wall, hard enough to drive the air from his lungs and make his vision swim. He had the dazed thought that before being held prisoner here he’d never fully appreciated the care Crowley took not to injure him when slamming him into a wall, and then Thomas repeated the motion, more forcefully.

Thomas was saying something- snarling it, actually. Aziraphale could pick up on the tone but not the words over the ringing in his ears. Thomas pulled him forwards only to slam him back again. His ears were ringing rather badly. After a moment, Thomas stopped, gave him a little shake, and said something else a little less aggressively. Aziraphale couldn’t even focus well enough to uncross his vision, much less make out the words. Someone else said something, and then Thomas jerked him back from the wall and tried to make him move down the hall again, but Aziraphale’s knees immediately buckled and he ended up on the floor, retching. There wasn’t anything in his stomach to bring up, though there was something wet trickling down the back of his neck. Thomas had grabbed him around the shoulders and begun to drag him down the hall before he realized that it was probably his blood.

Ah. So this is what having a concussion feels like, then, Aziraphale thought.

Thomas dragged him into a room of some description and dumped him a piece of furniture of some other description. There was a rapid conversation over his head and a flurry of movement around him, and for his part, Aziraphale managed not to fall onto the floor again. Eventually, the sound of pouring water drew his attention, such as it was. Holy water, he realized, quite pleased with himself for being able to make the deduction. Then Thomas hauled him to his feet once more, brought him before the basin, pressed him forwards so his face was submerged and held him there.

Normally he wouldn’t have to breathe- maybe even now he technically didn’t- but Thomas had certainly choked him before- the instinct to breathe was still there- but he couldn’t breathe- he couldn’t- but-

And so he panicked.

He flailed about, but he couldn’t get free. Thomas kept his grip, one hand tight on the back of his head, the other even tighter at the base of his wings, leaning his weight onto them to keep his wings from being able to hit him in the head. It was very much like the way he’d pinned Aziraphale to the wall of the cell, after Crowley had been nearly murdered with an iron comb. That didn’t make him more inclined to find his head, and he’d managed to get water soaked through his shirt and jacket and inhaled quite a bit of it before he remembered that holy water gave him some semblance of his miraculous abilities back.

He expelled the water from his lungs, held what little breath he still had in them, and focused his attention on the head injury- goodness, Thomas had actually fractured his skull, at least there was no splintering, just a relatively small, clean line of breakage- and then he waited, forcing his hands and wings to still.

After a moment of this, Thomas let him up- pulled him up, and away from the holy water. Aziraphale went, stumbling over himself in his haste to put as much distance between himself and Thomas as he could, his breath coming in gasps.

The room they were in- some kind of office, he could see that plainly now- was very small, and he didn’t get more than a dozen or so paces away from Thomas before his back hit one of the bookshelves which lined it.

“It’s healed!” he yelped. “It’s healed, I’ve healed myself, please don’t-”

Thomas remained where he was, back to looking faintly amused by it all. “Sit,” he said, snapping and pointing to one of the chairs that sat before the desk. Aziraphale hurried over to it and sat. “And dry yourself off, for Christ's sake. Grant, go get his things.”

Aziraphale pulled enough power from his soaked-through clothing to dry himself off, and then pulled his knees up against his chest, trying not to hyperventilate. He searched around for something to focus on, and realized that the office they were in must be on ground level, because there were wide windows that overlooked a small car park and the church’s graveyard beyond it.

“Is that a sunset?” he asked, and then immediately felt quite stupid.

Thomas, surprisingly, didn’t laugh at him. “Yeah, that’s a sunset alright,” he said. “There was some kind of volcanic eruption in Iceland last week. Air travel’s a mess, but the sunsets have been spectacular ever since.”

Aziraphale nodded. He hadn’t seen a sunset in years. It was always some kind of indeterminable midday time when he had his semi-annual meetings with Stephen, and the windows of that other cell were so small that he could barely see the sky anyway. From what he could recall, though, Thomas was quite right: this was a spectacular one, the setting sun painting the horizon a burning golden-orange, enclosed by the rapidly expanding bruise-purple twilight.

“Now, about my wife,” Thomas said.

Aziraphale flinched, and drew in on himself a little more. “I really can’t influence anyone’s minds. I’m sorry, I really can’t.”

“I’m not asking for a miracle,” Thomas told him. “Not from you, and definitely not from your boyfriend, so you put that thought out of your head. No, what I need from you is for you to sit with my wife for a bit, and lie your wings off until she believes you.”

Aziraphale was silent for a moment, overcome with the inescapable fact that he hadn’t the first clue what he could possibly say to accomplish that aim. Then he remembered what Crowley said, about the lies the cultists must surely have told their families.

“What did you tell her?” he asked.

“That you’d explain everything,” Thomas replied.

“No, I mean- before that. She obviously knew something when you brought her down here. She knew what I was, and what I wanted her for, even if the rest of the details were kept from her. And- and you must have been telling her something, about the amount of time you spend here.”

Thomas was silent.

“I stand a better chance of pulling this off if my story aligns with your story,” he added. “If I’m confirming that what you said is true, and that what she saw was… misinterpreted.”

“Fair enough,” Thomas said. He took the chair next to Aziraphale’s, rather than the one behind the desk, which struck him as odd. He wondered if Stephen was possessive about that chair, presuming this was Stephen’s office. Or perhaps it was some kind of move to trick Aziraphale into thinking of the two of them as equals? Or perhaps he just wanted to keep Aziraphale within reach as they spoke.

Or, perhaps, you’re overthinking this, Aziraphale thought. Crowley had a habit of being right about a lot of things, a lot of the time. It was, by turns, useful, comforting, and extraordinarily annoying.

“We haven’t told our families much. Just that we’re doing good work,” Thomas explained, and Aziraphale hoped that the twitch his body wanted to make at the description wasn’t obvious. “Most of them think that we’re getting into some kind of prisoner rehabilitation scheme, and we don’t argue with that.” He smirked.

Aziraphale refused to rise to the bait. “And Isolde? I presume you went into greater detail when you brought her down here.”

“Obviously,” Thomas replied. “I told her that you and your boyfriend were both angels, and that you needed the healthy womb to model in order to help increase the size of Heaven’s army before Armageddon started. I said that I couldn’t tell her why you needed that, exactly, because I didn’t understand your explanation myself, and that, in general, you weren’t especially good at communicating. I told her that you didn’t seem to really get a lot of Earth things. Then I told her that she didn’t have to take my word for it, if she came with me I’d show her proof.”

Aziraphale nodded slowly. “I can work with that, I think.” The last part especially, as that was a fairly accurate description of nearly every coworker and boss that had even been inflicted upon him while he still worked for Heaven.

Thank you for my pornography, he recalled, and nearly descended into a hysterical giggle fit.

It was funny, considering what the cultists presumed would be the end goal of all this, but he spent very little time contemplating the apocalypse, and only slightly more contemplating the Archangels, even Gabriel.

We humans are extremely easily embarrassed.

It occurred to him now that this set up wasn’t terribly far removed from the situation in Sodom, when you accounted for the time differential: the violation of two celestial beings by a gang of men dedicated to the worship of a false idol. He wondered what Sandalphon would make of it. Probably not much, given that the two celestial beings in question were a traitor and a demon, and the false idol was Gabriel. At that point, he was fairly certain, it became a matter of violence lending weight to a moral judgement in the Archangel’s eyes.

It was probably for the best. Sandalphon would not discriminate between the cultists and the regular churchgoers when it came to smiting. He probably wouldn’t discriminate between the church and the town, come to think of it.

“Can you?” Thomas asked skeptically.

“Yes, I can,” Aziraphale said. “Rape used to mean something closer to being carried off, rather than being violated.” Never mind that the fact that being kidnapped so often led to being violated was why the meaning of the word had changed. Never mind that they were living in the proof of that fact. “I’ll just pretend that I was referring to you bringing Crowley in to use the in vitro equipment to impregnate him and take it from there.”

“And when she asks about you needing to be beaten into the ground?” Thomas asked dryly.

That was a fair point, and Aziraphale couldn’t think of anything to say to it besides “Well, I certainly don’t recall that happening.”

Thomas was silent for a moment, and then he threw back his head and laughed. Whatever relief Aziraphale might have felt over provoking that reaction didn’t have a chance to manifest before Thomas clapped a hand down on his shoulder. He flinched back from the touch so violently that he nearly toppled over, chair and all.

“Sorry,” Aziraphale said, his voice gone oddly high-pitched. “Sorry, sorry.”

Thomas merely tightened his grip on his shoulder, and laughed more loudly.

By the time the door to the office opened once again, Thomas’ laughter had faded to chuckles, though he kept his fingers dug into the meat of Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Come on, then. Let’s get you looking presentable.”

The warden Thomas had sent out earlier had returned with a box, which turned out to contain Aziraphale’s personal effects: his shoes, his braces, his belt, his handkerchief, his bowtie, his cufflinks, his signet ring. There was only one item missing, but as luck would have it, it was the thing Aziraphale most dearly wished he could hold again.

“What happened to-” He coughed, to clear his throat. “I was wearing another ring, when you took me. My wedding ring. Do you know where it’s gotten to?”

“Everything we have from you is in that box,” Thomas told him.

“I see.” Aziraphale jerked his head up and down in an approximation of a nod, his throat tight. He wondered if the ring had fallen off as James had bundled his unconscious body into the boot of his car, or if it had made it out here only to be stolen by one of the cultists.

“Don’t start crying now,” Thomas warned him.

“I won’t,” Aziraphale promised. He took a deep breath in and held it for a time. He straightened his bowtie, which fastened his collar up high enough to just about disguise the collar he wore. He played with his cufflinks, vaguely grateful to have them once more. He missed having his waistcoat to wear. He didn’t cry. “Is there anything else we need to do?”

Thomas shrugged, and looked down at his watch. “She should be pulling up in a few minutes. Do you want to move this into the kitchen?”

The question was rhetorical. They moved into the kitchen. Stephen was there already, spreading out some nibbles.

“Kettle’s on,” he said as Thomas shoved him towards one of the seats. “Does anyone want some tea?”

The wardens shrugged in a way that Stephen evidentially took to mean yes, and he pulled out several miss-matched mugs from the cupboard.

“And you, Aziraphale? Are you having anything?” Stephen asked.

“No, thank you,” Aziraphale said, smiling tightly. He laced his fingers together on his lap and sat as primly as he could.

Stephen gave him a cup of tea anyway. Ginger, to judge from the smell. Crowley’s favorite, just as he’d told Thomas so long ago. Aziraphale didn’t drink it but he did wrap his hands around the mug and let the stinging warmth sink in a little.

Please, please, let them be leaving him alone while this is happening, Aziraphale prayed. Crowley can yell at me all he likes when I get back, just let them have left him alone.

After a moment, there was a ringing from Thomas’ trousers. Isolde had arrived, and wanted to know where they were.

“We’re in the kitchen,” Thomas told her. He held up his mobile. “See?”

“Hello Isolde!” Stephen said with a cheery little wave.

Someone trod on Aziraphale’s foot, presumably to prompt him, so he hid his wince and said “Good evening to you, Mrs. Hooper.” It was lost in the general cacophony of greetings, but that didn’t seem to matter.

“I’ll see you in a moment, then,” she said, and then seemed to hang up.

“Don’t fuck this up,” Thomas told him, shoving his mobile back into his pocket.

“I have no intention to do so, and every motivation to not do so,” Aziraphale pointed out. His hands tightened around the mug. If he’d been up to his full strength, he probably would have shattered it.

Isolde entered not terribly long afterwards, not looking any older than she had in the observation room. Thomas rushed to greet her, almost boyish in his enthusiasm. Aziraphale wondered if this was what he was normally like with her, and whether or not he found it difficult to keep up the façade.

It was a façade, he had little doubt of that, and little doubt that Isolde suspected as much too. When Thomas bent down to kiss her she turned her cheek to him. Undeterred, Thomas merely planted it on her temple instead.

“The angel?” she asked.

“Aziraphale,” Aziraphale supplied, raising his hand into the air.

“Why don’t you sit down, Isolde?” Stephen said, pulling out a chair for her.

Isolde remained standing. “You said I could speak with him alone.”

There was a very loud silence in the kitchen, which Aziraphale was not inclined to break.

“Of course,” Stephen said, smiling a tad too broadly, just like the Archangel he worshipped. “Why don’t you use my office?”

And so Aziraphale went back to Stephen’s office, along with Isolde and the two lesser wardens who were trying very hard to look as though they weren’t escorting them.

Someone had cleared away the basin of holy water, and he supposed that even if they hadn’t it wouldn’t have been a particularly strange thing for a vicar to have in his office. The sun had dipped below the horizon, leaving the sky painted in cooler colors, violet shading into indigo shading into blue. Then Isolde turned on the light and Aziraphale was looking into their own reflections in the glass panes of the window.

“Right,” Isolde said. “Do you chew gum?”

“Beg pardon?” Aziraphale asked, turning to face her.

Isolde pulled out a package of chewing gum, one that had the sticks all wrapped up in wax paper and neatly placed into an envelope. On the inside flap she had written Are you being held against your will? Take gum if no.

Oh, you are clever, Aziraphale thought. You clever, brave, foolish child.

He thought about it for a moment, and then he shook his head. Better that she know who she was sharing her marital bed with, and how dangerous he was. “I never got the hang of it myself. Particularly the part where you’re not supposed to swallow.” He fought the urge to wince. Thomas would have made something of that. He probably was making something of it from wherever he was listening in, come to think of it.

Isolde’s face fell. “Suit yourself,” she said, and put a piece in her mouth.

For a long moment, the only sound was that of her chewing.

“I understand that you have questions about the issue you helped us with the other day,” Aziraphale said.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Isolde said.

“That’s understandable,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve noticed that it very often takes a few tries before any of you humans are able to hold information about celestial matters in your heads. I’ve explained why we need assistance to impregnate Crowley to your husband a good two dozen times and it still doesn’t seem to be taking hold.”

Isolde nodded slowly, and then looked at him with the expression of someone who was very willing to listen to a lie. “Does it ever do anything else? The whole not being able to hold things in your mind bit.”

It took Aziraphale a moment to realize where she was going with this, but when he did he nearly breathed a sigh of relief. “People do tend to hallucinate. Wheels of flame, four heads, a thousand eyes, and so on and so forth. Why? Did you see something?”

“A few things,” she said cautiously. After a beat, she said. “Crowley doesn’t sound like a very angelic name,”

That… was not where he thought she would go with this at all. “Well, no. Neither is Aziraphale, really. You couldn’t handle hearing our true names, and our first attempt at rendering Crowley’s name pronounceable still produced a bit of a brown note effect. We went with the shortest version possible, that wasn’t also the name of an animal in your language.”

Isolde nodded slowly. “And… was he wearing clothing?”

“Oh, no. Well, I mean. Clothing is a human construct, much like shame. Came about from shame, really. You might recall how upon eating the apple one of the first things Adam and Eve did was clothe themselves,” he babbled. It had actually involved a rather loud squawk of Oh fuck, we’re naked, which had been Aziraphale’s first clue that something had gone wrong, but the Biblical version of events was more dignified, so he’d leave it at that. “Neither one of us ate the apple- I mean, we’re angels, so- Crowley doesn’t see much point to it. I’ve been here before a time or two, so I’m more used to the convention.”

“Ooookay,” Isolde said, looking torn between horror and laughter. “Sure, that’s- yeah, okay.” She hesitated for a moment, before asking in a small, timid voice “And you getting beaten up?”

“I’m sorry, that must have been a terrible thing to witness,” he said, before hastily correcting himself with “To think you witnessed, I mean. It never happened- it never could. I’m an angel, my dear. No mortal means can hurt me.”

“Do you bleed gold?” Isolde asked.

“No,” Aziraphale said. “No, of course not. I might bleed red in this form, I suppose, and in my others I wouldn’t bleed at all.”

This was, Aziraphale reflected with a sort of detached hysteria, perhaps the most outrageous set of lies he’d ever told, and he’d once written a two hundred and fifty-seven thousand hieroglyphics long ‘report’ about the dire consequence that could arise from refusing to eat a meal when offered one.

Isolde nodded to herself, looking thoughtful. “Could I- could I touch your wings again?”

“I, well- yes, I suppose so,” Aziraphale said, a bit too taken aback to refuse.

Isolde stepped up close to him and reached one hand up to him- not to his wings, which he had brought forwards to place more into her reach, but to his throat.

To his collar, he realized- to that thrice-damned blessed thing that kept him cut off from his powers. She was checking to see if it was still there. If she hadn’t imagined it.

He and Crowley had already studied the collar as best they could. It would take a miracle to open it, or so was their conclusion. Otherwise, he might have asked her to do so, and taken his chances with the wardens.

“You should run,” he said instead, as quietly as he could. “If you have anyone you can stay with, any means of doing so, you should leave him and here and never look back.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“It never is, dear girl,” Aziraphale replied sadly. He heard the doorknob begin to turn, and so added hastily, barely speaking more loudly than before. “You’ve caught me in the midst of a molt, I’m afraid. It happens every time I’m down here for longer than a year. Normally my wings are- well, Crowley would be the first to tell you that they aren’t generally tidy, but there are generally more feathers.”

“Oh,” Isolde said faintly as the door opened. She ran her fingers gently along his remaining primaries. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

She hadn’t asked, about what they were doing to Crowley, about how they intended to impregnate him. Perhaps, like Aziraphale, that was a subject too painful to discuss in any great detail.

“All well?” Stephen asked, sounding jarringly chipper.

“I think so?” Aziraphale said.

“Will I be able to remember this?” Isolde asked, which would certainly have been a valid concern had the bulk of what he’d told her not been a pack of lies.

“I… don’t know,” Aziraphale said. He bit his lip, thinking. “Perhaps you could write it down? That way, should doubt ever cloud your mind, you might have proof.”

“That’s a good idea,” Isolde said. “Do you have-”

Stephen had already walked over to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a notepad and pen.

He offered it to Isolde, who took it silently.

Meet with angel, Azirafel. Didn’t take gum, she wrote. The rest was a more or less accurate account of what he’d told her, skipping over his imploring her to run, and ending with Wings real, but messy. Molts when on Earth too long. Presumably she was concerned that Thomas would read over what she’d written. Presumably, she was quite right to be concerned.

“Thank you,” Stephen said. It took Aziraphale a moment to realize that he was being addressed.

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” he said. “I’m an angel. I’m meant to help people.”

Isolde folded the paper up and joined Thomas in the hall. They went off, presumably to return home. Stephen sat down at his desk and turned on his personal computer. No one told Aziraphale to go anywhere, so he sat down on one of the chairs opposite Stephen’s and thought.

He would need to tell Crowley what had happened- not in English, and he’d leave Isolde’s name out of it, of course. He worried that perhaps they were overusing Sumerian for important conversations, and resolved to tell him in Lullubi.

He hoped that it would be enough to end their argument. This was all more than stressful enough without adding an argument with Crowley into the mix. He hoped, too, that Isolde would be able to get away. Thomas would be furious, of course, but he wouldn’t necessarily connect it to them- or, at least, there would probably be other reasons she would want to leave him.

Married, to Thomas, and at such a young age too. He didn’t doubt that that was part of the appeal, that her relative youth and inexperience would be attractive to a vile manipulator such as Thomas. He didn’t doubt that he lied to get her to the altar, and continued to lie once they were wed- of course he’d lied, Crowley was quite right that they must all be lying to their families about what they were doing here. Thomas might tell the other cultists about their bargain, might brag about it to them, but There’s an angel I’m helping to hold captive who’s so desperate for anything that might being comforting that he’ll get down on his knees and suck me off for a thermos of tea was hardly the sort of thing one could say to one’s wife, was it?

“The offer still stands,” Stephen said.

Aziraphale gave himself a little mental shake. “I beg your pardon?”

“The offer of moving you into the other room still stands,” Stephen said. He hadn’t looked up from his screen. His hands were still busy on the keyboard.

“No,” Aziraphale said flatly. Then he took a breath, and forced himself to be more polite. “Thank you, but no.”

“That room comes with privileges,” Stephen said. “You wouldn’t be subject to the same punishment as Satan, if you consented to be separated.”

“If you think for one moment that I would ever consent to leave Crowley alone with whatever torments you devised-” he hissed, before getting himself back under control. He took several deep breaths before he continued. “And he’s still not Satan. And this isn’t his fault. This, with Isolde, this was my mistake. I truly didn’t think you would allow anyone in who wasn’t fully apprised of the details, I didn’t- you must know that I would never risk his safety like that. You must.”

Stephen’s eyes flicked towards him, and his hands stilled over the keyboard, but only for a moment. “What would you do, to move the two of you into your reserved room?”

“Rather a lot,” Aziraphale admitted, his mouth suddenly dry. He wasn’t sure what he had to offer, but quite sure that he wouldn’t like offering it.

“And if I offer to move Crowley- just Crowley- into it instead?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to give the same answer- rather a lot- but then he thought about it, how important it had become that Crowley hold him in the aftermath of one of Thomas’ visits, how they would clutch at one another every time they were released from one of the medical session, how unlikely it was that they would cease to hurt Crowley if Aziraphale was absent.

How infinitely worse it would be to be brought back to any cell and be alone, without anyone else to care for you.

“I’d have to talk to him about it,” he said. “But I don’t think he’d be any more willing to be separated than I am.”

Stephen grunted in acknowledgement. He didn’t say another word until Thomas returned some undeterminable time later, and even then he merely said “He’s all yours.”

“Come on,” Thomas said, clamping a hand around his shoulder once more. “Up you get.”

Aziraphale rose and followed him back into the corridor. No one came to collect his personal effects, but if they wanted him to keep his shoes now for some reason, then he wasn’t about to complain. It felt very strange to be wearing shoes again, after so long going without.

Thomas led him back downstairs, to what Aziraphale was beginning to think of as the cult levels of the church. Two other wardens, probably the same two from before, followed them just in case Aziraphale took leave of his senses and tried to attack Thomas or make a run for it. 

They were very nearly back to the cell when Thomas suddenly grabbed him and once more slammed him into the wall.

He came quite close to trying to fight back, which would have gone rather poorly for him. He’d tried it before, precisely once, and not on purpose: he’d been here for perhaps a week, and they’d come in to take Crowley out of their cell once again, he simply hadn’t been able to force himself to let go of his husband, to surrender him over to be tortured and brutalized again, and when they’d tried to force the issue he’d lashed out.

He’d broken a cultist’s nose, and possibly another one’s rib; Crowley had managed to knock a third fellow’s knee out of joint. It hadn’t been worth it: the beating they’d both suffered, the complete lack of ability to heal Crowley for three days afterwards, it was far too high a price. Once the dust had settled into that now-defunct first pattern, they’d talked it over, and come to the conclusion that if they were going to fight, they were going to have to be smart about it.

He forced himself to go limp, lax against the stone walls, his wings dragging on the floor. He wasn’t in danger of being concussed again, he thought. He was being pressed front-first against the stone wall, but Thomas was keeping his head wrenched painfully far back with an equally painful grasp on his hair.

“You didn’t think we’d forgotten about punishing you for that stunt you pulled, did you?” His breath was hot against his neck. He was already getting hard, Aziraphale realized with a sickening lurch somewhere in the neighborhood of his intestines. He could feel it pressing against him from behind. “Did you?” Thomas demanded, pulling his head back a little further.

“No,” Aziraphale replied dully, and Thomas let go of his head.

He pressed his face against the stone wall, and closed his eyes. He knew what was going to happen. He knew, precisely, how much it was going to hurt. He tried to tell himself that would make it easier.

Steady on, he told himself, as he listened to Thomas fumbling with his own clothes behind him. This is survivable. You’ve lived through this before. This is nothing new and shocking. It’s happened to Crowley so many times. You can take once more.

He should probably unfasten his trousers. Thomas had all but outright said that he was inclined towards ripping the clothing off of him if it wasn’t removed, and he only had the one set. He couldn’t afford to have it ruined.

He also couldn’t bring himself to do it- couldn’t bring himself to bend and submit quite so completely, even knowing the consequences. He squeezed his eyes shut more tightly against the tears that wanted to fall. He couldn’t cry- Thomas liked his tears. He couldn’t cry.

He’d forgotten about the other wardens entirely until they were pinning his wings up against the wall. Aziraphale’s eyes snapped open, focusing on the warden pinning his left wing down. “What-” he began. It was as far as he got before it felt like his right wing was engulfed in flame.

He screamed. The world spun around in greyscale, the colors leached away by pain. His knees buckled, his weight being supported by his wings where they were pinned to the wall.

“There see? I told you the stone was soft enough.” Thomas said, stepping around and coming into view once more. He had a device in his hands. A gun. A nailgun. He pressed it against Aziraphale’s left wing, ignored his gibbering pleas of Don’t, don’t, please don’t, please, I’m sorry- and pulled the trigger. The pain wasn’t any less intense the second time.

After that, things seemed to move very quickly, disjointedly, sometimes repeatedly, like a record skipping back over itself and then playing at double speed to make up for it.

Thomas hauled him to his feet. It lessened the pain a bit, since his wings were no longer supporting his weight. He should try to stay on his feet. His wings might be broken- Thomas might have nicked a bone or two, might have done it on purpose, must have already pulled down or cut or torn his trousers, he’d missed it, his arse was bare and Thomas spat between his cheeks and his stomach lurched again and it hurt. It hurt worse than he remembered. He cried out again and tears streamed down his face and he wasn’t supposed to be crying, he’d been trying not to cry, he’d been trying not to make it worse, but it was worse. It was so much worse. Fire lanced down his wings every time Thomas thrust in hard enough to make him shift his footing. There were no shadows to watch, but there were wardens watching him, blurry malevolent figures he more felt than saw. The pounding noise in his ears wasn’t only his heartbeat.

They weren’t far from the cell- the door was only a few yards away from where Aziraphale was pinned. Crowley was in their cell, the cell where he must be able to hear everything. Crowley was pounding on the door to their cell that was a few yards away and he was yelling.

“Let him go! Let him go! I’m right here, you bastards! It’s me you want, yeah? Let him go, he’s an angel, let him go!”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale sobbed. “Crowley, Crowley!”

“Aziraphale! I’m here, Aziraphale, I’m here!”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale sobbed, and it meant Save me, please, make it stop and it meant Don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t get hurt and it meant You must have a plan for this you always have a plan and it meant I’m sorry, I’m sorry, they’ve hurt you so much worse than this but I don’t think I can bear up. Somehow what came out was “Don’t break your hands! They’re not going to let me heal you if you break your hands!”

Thomas pulled out. He’d come then. Aziraphale could feel something seeping out onto his thighs.

“Don’t think you’re done,” he said. He groped around to the front pocket of Aziraphale’s jacket, took his handkerchief, and began to wipe down his cock with it. “Do you have any idea how many blue balls this little vacation of your boyfriend’s has caused?”

“No,” Aziraphale choked out. It wasn’t in answer to Thomas’ question, so much as a horrified denial of reality. There were thirty-seven cultists, in total. There were… far more than just three of them in the hallway now. “No.”

But there was already a second man taking Thomas’ place, a second man pushing in, a second man of many. And it hurt, it hurt so much worse, the different angle and size pulling at the wound Thomas left inside of him.

Aziraphale screamed. Behind the cell door, so did Crowley.

“Oh, calm down! You can have what’s left of him when we’re done!” Thomas called. It took Aziraphale a moment to realize that he wasn’t being addressed.

Thomas’ hand was on his face, keeping it turned towards him. He smiled when he saw Aziraphale focusing on him. It was an uncanny smile: it reached his eyes, but there was something missing there.

Then, abruptly, he let him go, and said to the man behind him “If you’re having trouble keeping him in place, just grab hold of him by the wings.”

“No, please-” But his wings were grabbed by their base and pulled, and the world fractured with pain, and Aziraphale wasn’t able to think again for a long time.

Chapter Text

Hurt anyone badly enough, or for long enough, and they would start to beg. It was just a fact. There was a point where if people were suffering in silence it was because they couldn’t speak, and just before that came a point where they would try anything to make the pain stop.

Sometimes, it was a bunch of threats with the begging part left off as much as possible, the stop hurting me or I will hurt you worse only implied. On the other end of the scale were open pleas for mercy, humiliatingly honest in their simplicity.

Crowley bargained, when he begged. It was a good strategy in Hell, where everyone was trying to get one over on the other guy. He’d gotten good at it, negotiating through the pain, getting himself a reprieve in return for a favor, or intel, or even the odd personal secret. A little too good- people had started to seek him out. He’d had to start offering to sweeten the pot if they would just skip the beating and ask him for what he wanted with their words instead. The torture tax, he was careful to always call it that wherever anyone else could hear. Inside his own head, he always thought of it as the please-don’t-hurt-me fee.

It worked, in Hell. It didn’t work here. Not that that knowledge had been able to break him of thousands of years of habit overnight. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d offered to make it good for them if they’d just stick their dicks somewhere that wasn’t already raw and bleeding.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry

He wondered if Aziraphale knew- if he’d heard the words, sitting here in this cell. He didn’t think so. He probably would have tried to talk about it, tried to reassure Crowley that it was alright, that it wasn’t him, really, that it was just the terrible, horrible circumstances of being held captive by an Archangel’s cult.

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m- please don’t, please, I’m sorry

Then again, maybe he had. Maybe that had given him the idea for that insane offer he’d made, the day they’d broken down and just plain broke. A blowjob for… he wasn’t even sure what Aziraphale had thought they would get out of it. A reprieve for the day? The option to trade his pain for Crowley’s from then on?

He hoped that wasn’t what this was, now, in the hall. He hoped. There wasn’t much else to do.

Please, I’m sorry, I’ll do better, be better, I’m sorry

He bargained when he begged. Aziraphale apologized.

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry

He sort of felt like he could have guessed that, if he’d been the sort of person to speculate about how his husband would react to being tortured. Aziraphale was just as much a bundle of nerves as he was, he just did less posturing, and more accepting the blame for things he didn’t really need to accept the blame for than Crowley did. Of course he apologized. What else would he do?

Don’t break your hands, he’d said. Crowley realized that he’d been staring down at his- a little bloodied from pounding on the door, trying to attract the cultists’ attention, but not broken, and the cuts were already starting to scab over- and not speaking for a time. He cleared his throat.

“Did I tell you about what I’d planned next for our garden?” he asked. It was almost a serious question. He’d been trying to talk through this, give Aziraphale something to focus on besides the pain, remind him that he wasn’t going through it alone, but he’d lost track of what he’d already talked about. The words left his mouth. The words weren’t scared or angry. They might even be comforting. That was the important bit. “Chilean guavas! Though I guess you would still try to call them strawberry myrtle.” He was trying to stick to Zend, but it was hard: he was also trying to talk about their life outside of here, their cottage, their safety, and Zend was too old to convey a lot of the conveniences they’d enjoyed while they were still free. Besides, after decades of communism (Tajik), religious fundamentalism (Farsi), and communism followed by religious fundamentalism followed by a mess of an occupation (Dari), the modern Persian languages knew how to bite, and he really, really wanted to bite. Contradictory impulses, he knew, but he felt like he was allowed that under the circumstances. “You were always disappointed that Queen Victoria wasn’t able to make them popular, and we can grow them out in Sussex now. I guess climate change had to have a silver lining somewhere, right?”

Aziraphale didn’t respond, couldn’t respond. He’d stopped begging and was now choking, being choked. He knew that sound well, thanks to Thomas. It wasn’t Thomas doing it, this time, he didn’t think. There wasn’t enough talking for it to be Thomas. There was a lot of moaning that sounded like a third-rate tenor’s vocal warm-up exercise, so it was probably Gordon.

Gordon liked a lot of tongue. It got things over with more quickly, at least. Crowley looked down at his hands (bloodied and useless things) and opened his mouth and said “I had to order the plants special, you know, like I did with the goji berries.”

Once he’d realized what was happening- once he’d accepted it, really- he’d started to make preparations. Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot to prepare. He could fill the thermos with fresh water. He could take off his robe so it would be ready for Aziraphale to wear when he got back- he could hear cloth tearing, and he doubted they were ruining their own clothing, they used to get so fucking tetchy when he got blood on their trousers…

He took a deep breath, and pulled the blanket up tighter around his shoulders. He was sitting on the robe to keep it warm for Aziraphale, but that didn’t change the fact that it was fucking freezing, sitting in this cell with only a pair of socks on.

“I only got three of them. I know they’re supposed to make good hedgerows, but we’ve already gotten so much hedged in, and I thought it might be nice to let them grow a bit wild by the porch.”

Aziraphale was no longer being choked. He knew that because Aziraphale was screaming, ragged and hoarse and dissolving into horrible gurgling sobs. He was getting to the point where he was going to stop screaming because it was too painful to scream. He had to be. And once he’d stopped screaming they would get bored and toss him back in here and Crowley could-

Well. He could try to do something, at least, besides just sitting here and waiting.

“I figured you’d want to just be able to pop out and grab them by the handful, once they get going. It’s supposed to take up to two years before their harvest is up to snuff, but I bet I could bully them into providing a decent bounty after a year. They’re another winter fruit, like the honeyberries. I know you’re going to want to go out to get them with just that ridiculous full-body scarf Warlock knitted for you on over your clothes and then you’ll want to warm up which will involve sticking your cold fingers and toes and even your nose on some part of me and you’ll act all surprised that I could possibly object to being woken up via angelic icicle assault and-”

He forgot where he was going with this, and he stopped speaking because he was very close to crying. He wanted that back, his old life, their life, their cottage and their garden and their well-earned retirement with their stupid arguments about appropriate wakeup techniques and what constituted a speed limit and how much clutter was too much clutter and all, he wanted it back.

Out in the hall, still being tortured, Aziraphale moaned and let out a whimpering plea of I’m sorry.

At least he was no longer crying out for Crowley. It was such an awful thing to think that the thought churned in his stomach the moment he had it, but there it was: he was grateful that he didn’t have to listen to his husband calling out for him while there was nothing- absolutely nothing- he could do to help him.

He could sit. He could wait. He could talk. He couldn’t help.

“I love you,” he said, because he’d completely forgotten what he’d been trying to talk about.

Aziraphale whimpered in pain. He had another ugly thought then: at least they’re not making me watch.

He’d thought his main concern was going to be Aziraphale watching, Aziraphale finally seeing him as the pathetic simpering mess that pain had always revealed him to be. It had been hard enough, these past several weeks, knowing the angel was watching him as he was pinched and probed and prodded, as they started joking about all the more elaborate things they used to do to him. He’d had to let it happen because he couldn’t put Aziraphale at more risk and he couldn’t stand more pain and Aziraphale had seen that too.

He’d thought it would have been more of that. They just spent so much time and effort focused in on him that it only made sense that they’d keep doing so. It was a stupid assumption, really. They might be focused on him, but they were growing increasingly bold and presumptuous when it came to Aziraphale: groping him, beating him. Thomas was already raping him, had already raped him dozens of times before Crowley had even known what was going on, of course his next step would be to invite all his friends along.

“I love you,” Crowley said again. “I love you.”

Eventually, Aziraphale stopped screaming. The wardens kept raping him for a while afterwards until the lack of response began to bother them. Then they left, hopefully taking Aziraphale with them for treatment.

It took hours for them to toss him back- literally, they all but threw him into the room. Crowley scrambled, but didn’t quite manage to catch him before he hit the floor with a piteous groan.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” Crowley said, trying to find somewhere to grasp on to him, to make the words true. It wasn’t easy. There were a few places on his body that were cleaned off, some bandaged up, others showing the unblemished skin that must be the result of miraculous healing, but most of him was… not. Bruised and scratched and sticky, coated with tacky, drying blood and come. His face was awful to see: swollen lips, a black eye, and the only clear patches of skin to be found were the tear tracks running down his cheeks. “I’ve got you,” he said, trying to find some way to hold on to him.

And then Thomas walked into the cell and Crowley forgot about anything that wasn’t getting Aziraphale as far away from him as possible.

Since his options were limited to their cell he didn’t get very far. He dragged Aziraphale over to their mattress and then collapsed down on it, clutching the angel tightly to his chest, his wings wrapped around his as tightly as he dared.

“Don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t, don’t- haven’t you hurt him enough?”

Thomas raised an eyebrow, and dropped a large quantity of fabric onto the floor. The remains of Aziraphale’s suit, he realized. He clutched Aziraphale more tightly, until he whimpered, and Crowley forced himself to relax his hold a bit.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Nothing I don’t already have,” Thomas said, leering down at them. “Don’t you agree, Stephen?”

“Just so, Thomas,” Stephen said as he stepped into the cell. “Just so.”

“You- why?” Crowley croaked. It was all he could do not to hold Aziraphale as tightly as he could, but he could hear how painful and labored his breathing was, and he didn’t want to make it worse. “You told me. When you brought him here. You said that you wouldn’t hurt an angel.” Stephen had told him as much, after their impromptu escape attempt about a week after Aziraphale had arrived had ended in disaster. Crowley had been trying to find some way of begging for Aziraphale’s safety when he had absolutely nothing to bargain with, when Stephen had looked down at him and said Let’s not make a habit of hurting angels.

What if he asks for it? James had asked. It had seemed like a taunt, not a question, so Crowley hadn’t paid much attention, too caught up in his relief, and his fear of the upcoming torture session, to tease out the implications.

“Why?” Crowley continued. “Why would you do this?”

“Not much of an angel, is he?” Thomas said with a sneer. His leg twitched, like he wanted to kick them. “With the company he keeps?”

“Actions have consequences,” Stephen said. It sounded like he was agreeing with Thomas, for all that the words didn’t quite match up. “Aziraphale’s actions are no exception to this. His inability to play by the rules merited some kind of corrective response, and so here we are.”

Crowley stared up at them until Aziraphale made another pained noise, and he realized that he was holding him too tightly again. “Let me heal him,” he said, forcing himself to relax his grip. “Please.”

“Heal him?” Stephen asked incredulously. “With what?”

“With my magic,” Crowley said. “Look, I won’t run, I won’t hurt anyone, I swear I won’t, just let me make sure he’s okay.” He might mean it. Some part of him was horrified to realize it, that if they burned the sigils from his neck he might very well sit there quietly and let them cut them back into him again. It was stupid. Of course he should run if they gave him his powers back. He should run and take Aziraphale- he could heal him later, somewhere that wasn’t here, some time that wasn’t while they were being held prisoner. That was what he should do. He just wasn’t all that certain that he would.

“No,” Stephen said, looking like he’d been insulted.

“Look, you don’t know what kind of damage you’ve done. You can’t, and I don’t just mean the wings.” Rape, especially violent, repeated rape, could do all kinds of nasty things to the intestines. He had no way of telling if Aziraphale had sustained that kind of damage without the use of a miracle, much less a way of fixing it, and he doubted that the cultists would bother to check so long as the bleeding seemed to have stopped. They still couldn’t get infections, he didn’t think, but that didn’t mean that the damage would be negligible. “You don’t want him to die. You can’t. Let me help him, he needs healing.”

“Do you think we’re stupid?” Thomas demanded.

“No, I don’t, I don’t, I just- I don’t care, alright? Can you try to understand that? I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me. The only thing that matters is him. Okay? Please, please, let me heal him. He can’t die. Please.”

“I believe you when you say you don’t care,” Stephen said, sounding bored.

“Please.” Crowley was on the verge of tears again. He had nothing to bargain with, and he knew it. He’d never had anything to bargain with in here. First, what they’d wanted was impossible. Now it wasn’t just possible, it was inevitable. Thomas had it right: they already had everything they wanted. They would fuck Crowley until he was pregnant, and probably afterwards too, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it, so there was no point in offering it up. For most of them, that was what they really wanted out of this: someone to fuck who they had complete control over, someone they could hurt and feel good about it later. The Antichrist he was meant to give birth to was just an afterthought at this point. Aziraphale had been too, for a time, but he had the horrible feeling that was about to change. “Don’t let him die. You don’t know what they’ll do to him up there.”

Thomas laughed. Stephen continued to look deeply unimpressed.

“You know, every time I think that there might be something more to you than lies, you open your mouth and say something like that,” he said. “He’s an angel. He’s meant to be in Heaven. If you truly cared for him, you would be happy to see him returned. Instead you cling to him, hoping to keep him here, with you.”

That probably would have hurt the way Stephen clearly intended it to if Heaven hadn’t been behind all of this, from the kidnapping to the fucking torturous gang rape they’d just inflicted on Aziraphale. He’d already known that Heaven was cold to the point of cruelty to Aziraphale, but the fact that they’d stoop to this made the prospect of the angel returning to Heaven even more terrifying. Would Gabriel really not hurt him himself? Even if he did personally refrain, that didn’t mean he couldn’t fob the job off on some other angels, lesser ones he wouldn’t miss if they Fell and who would want to get in good with their boss even if the job was dirty.

“Please,” Crowley said. He didn’t have anything else to say.

Stephen left with a noise of disgust. Thomas… lingered.

“Heaven sent down an angel,” Thomas said after a long, tense moment of silence. “Not his nibs the Archangel, of course, only Stephen gets to meet with him. But a real, proper angel. Nervous, skinny thing. Red hair.” He loomed over them, and Crowley held himself perfectly still as he ran his fingers through his hair. It had gotten long again. It would really hurt, if Thomas pulled it. Aziraphale was still in his arms, wounded and barely cognizant of anything that was going on. “Long-lost relative of yours?”

“Nope. Angels don’t work like that,” Crowley managed. “Demons neither.”

“Anyway she- I think that was a she- made sure that he didn’t have any injuries that could- discorporate him? Is that what you call it?” Thomas continued.

Crowley sagged a little with relief. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s the word.” And if Thomas knew how to use it, then that meant that his story about the angel was probably true.

“She wanted to keep going, heal all of it, but Stephen put her off. It’s not much of a punishment if he can’t feel it, yeah? She stayed to supervise what we did, so you don’t have to worry about us setting his wings wrong.” Thomas continued to pet Crowley’s head as he spoke. Unable to do anything else, Crowley tolerated it with terrified stillness. “So as long as you don’t do anything to aggravate them, his injuries aren’t life threatening, just painful.” There was a moment of silence, and then Thomas’ fingers tightened painfully in his hair.

“Right, yes, thank you,” Crowley forced out quickly.

Thomas released him with a snort. “He’s got a few broken ribs. Normally I’d recommend that he lay down on his back, but-” He gestured towards Aziraphale’s splinted wings. “Good luck managing your boyfriend like that.”

Then he left, the cell door shutting behind him.

It took Crowley a few moments to make himself let go of Aziraphale. He laid the angel out flat on his back. Even with his wings half-folded in splints, it was a cramped fit. He shivered against the stone; Crowley gave himself a little mental slap to the face and went to get the waistcoat.

How does he do this? he wondered. He couldn’t even figure out how to start.

Skin. His skin would be the easiest to clean off. Crowley knelt down, and got to work.

It felt like the hardest thing he’d ever done: harder than standing with Adam in defiance of Armageddon, harder than using Aziraphale’s body to enter Heaven, harder than leaving behind his clothing and walking complacently out into the waiting hands of the cultists. Harder even, in its way, than looking to see who had entered the room and finding that Aziraphale had been dragged into this too.

How does he do this? he wondered again, as Aziraphale tried to flinch away from the cloth and coughed out something that was clearly trying to be another Sorry, so sorry.

Well, he had his powers, at least for the first part of this. He always made sure that Crowley was out and resting, as much as he could. Crowley couldn’t return the favor, obviously. He just had to grit his teeth and bare the way Aziraphale still tried to struggle away from him, squirming and cringing and gurgling out pleas because he had no other way to try to stop it.

“Shhh, shh,” he tried to soothe. “It’s just me angel, it’s just me. I’m just getting you cleaning up.”

Something about his voice seemed to still him, at least, so Crowley cast his mind around for something he could say. What had he talked about already? Nosy neighbors getting on his case about what kind of fuel the Bentley used, his plans for the garden, restaurants he hoped to bring his husband back to one day? How much he loved him?

“Do you ever think about our wedding?” Crowley asked. “I did, the first time this happened to me. It was just- it was a stupid thought, yeah? One of those weird things you fixate on because the whole everything is too much.” He cleared his throat. “I thought No, no, they can’t take that, that’s spoken for, we promised. Stupid thought, like I said. You’re right. We don’t have a choice, about our bodies, so that doesn’t count. It’s not the important bit. And they aren’t giving you a choice, really, even if they frame it like that. They’re not giving you the chance to say no, just decide how you’re going to be hit. It doesn’t count, so don’t feel like you’ve done anything to feel guilty over. If they gave you a decision or they didn’t, none of this is your fault. And if they’re telling you that it’s your pain or mine… I wish I could tell you to choose mine. But I know what my choice would be, and neither one of us wants to watch the other hurt. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, right?”

Oh, he shouldn’t have said that. If it hurt to remember what used to be their normal, with cold noses and bickering, then remembering what had been some of their best days was agony.

But he did remember it- there was no stopping it now. He remembered Aziraphale whispering the words against his thigh in their original Hebrew as Crowley protested that he didn’t need to go through the whole Song of Songs and squirmed against the covers of the bed they’d ended up in after Crowley had picked him up and carried him, bridal style, over the threshold of their cottage, which was just revenge, really, for the way Aziraphale had picked him up after he’d accepted the angel’s proposal because he wouldn’t stop kissing him otherwise, because Aziraphale had looked up at him with the ring in his hands the same way he’d looked at him after the first time they’d kissed and confessed with his fingers still tangled in Crowley’s hair that he never thought he’d be allowed to touch him like this.

Crowley breathed deeply and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. Aziraphale needed him in the here and now, not lost mourning their past.

“Ani l’dodi v’dodi li,” he said, and then, because it didn’t require him to think, he went through the rest of it. He cleaned Aziraphale’s face, chest, arms, and helped him mostly sit up so he could wash his back as well, careful not to wet the bandages.

The come came off easier than the blood, for some reason, and the blood was thickest between Aziraphale’s legs. He switched to old Summerian lullabies then, songs he once crooned to frightened children as they all hid in the bowels of the Ark. He made himself check, as far as he could, to make sure that there really wasn’t any damage still lurking there. Everything looked normal, so he continued on his way down Aziraphale’s legs.

He could always tell, when he woke up, whether Aziraphale had been able to clean him miraculously or had had to do it by hand. There was always a sort of film of filth that remained when he had to do it manually. He could see why now. The water in the bucket had long since clouded over.

His wings were completely clean, probably thanks to that angel. The blood and come in Aziraphale’s hair had mostly dried. He ran his fingers over it, and let as much of it flake down as possible before using the damped waistcoat to work out the rest. He switched to an Old Novgorodian work song, the kind that would have been sung to keep everyone moving at the same pace during planting season, or during harvest. It was rhythmic and it rhymed and the lyrics made no kind of sense because that wasn’t the point of it. The point of it was to keep going as long as you needed to.

Once Aziraphale was as clean as it was possible for him to get, he moved him, as best he could, onto the mattress. He had to pull it away from the wall, as much as possible, to make enough room for him to lay on his back. There was no way to wrangle him into the robe, not with his wings in splints, so Crowley put that back on himself and tucked the blankets around him as gently as he could. He picked up the pile of wrent fabric that was Aziraphale’s suit and, for lack of any better options, put the pile of it by the foot of the mattress.

Then he hesitated. He was tired, so tired. But if he laid down next to Aziraphale he would almost certainly fall asleep- and then wake in a panic, thinking that he was still being worked over by the cultists. He sat down on the edge of the mattress instead.

Aziraphale wasn’t quite asleep, according to the crinkle of pain between his eyebrows, and it wasn’t long before he began to twitch and moan, struggling slightly beneath the blankets.

“It’s just me, angel,” Crowley said, gently placing his arms above the blankets. Hopefully that would make him feel less trapped. “It’s just me, you’re- they’re- I’m the only one here right now, okay?”

Aziraphale settled for a moment, and then started twitching again.

“Enter Barnardo and Francisco, two sentinels,” Crowley said, trying to remember how English had sounded before the Great Vowel Shift had taken hold. “Who’s there?” he continued, pitching his voice up higher. “Nay, answer me, stay and unfold yourself.” He pitched his voice a little lower for Francisco.

Aziraphale kept making him see Hamlet, like Crowley might change his mind about it if they went to see some avante garde production where everyone was in bondage gear and the ghost of King Hamlet kept unicycling through the background of every scene he didn’t speak in. (He had to hand it to the angel- that one had been kind of funny, in a trainwreck way.) He knew the play forwards and back as a result. He could play around with it a little, make Ophelia seem less mad with grief and more knowingly resigned to how the tragedy she found herself in would play out, make Rosencratz and Guilderstein bandy about like they knew this was a play and they’d get another one after they died, and make lightsaber noises during Hamlet’s duel with Laertes.

He did Much Ado About Nothing next. He’d do another gloomy one after. Shakespeare was no Dickens, being paid by the word and flaunting it, but he had written enough to be getting on with.

Or so was the hope.

How does he do this? Crowley kept thinking, whenever he knew the play too well and wasn’t doing enough to keep it interesting. He did this over and over, day in and day out, for years, but how?

His voice started going before too long. When the wardens sent one of their number in to switch out the buckets Crowley drank nearly all of it, telling the water sternly that it was going to prevent him from going hoarse. Since he no longer had access to his powers, it didn’t work.

He kept going. He didn’t bother trying to do the voices anymore, or the accents. He just got the words out. Aziraphale rested, for at least some of the time- his face slackened with sleep instead of pinched with pain. He needed that rest, and Crowley needed to give it to him.

The wardens came in and changed the water bucket again. He drained half of it, and was plodding his way through what had to be the world’s grimmest recitation of Cymbeline when Aziraphale woke up.

“ ‘owley,” he said. The swelling had gone down enough for him to blink both eyes up at him.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley replied, the name leaving him in a single, relieved breath. He held out a hand, and Aziraphale clumsily patted it with his own until it was resting lightly on the angel’s chest. “Hi, how are you?” Immediately, he wanted to kick himself.

“Hurts,” Aziraphale said.

“I know, I know,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale’s hand patted its way up Crowley’s arm until it finally landed on his shoulder. “You?”

“I’m fine,” Crowley said. Aziraphale searched his face, trying very hard to focus his gaze there. “Really, I’m fine. Banged up my hands on the door trying to get their attention, and then talked myself hoarse. That’s it. Nothing happened, they didn’t touch me.”

It was only after Aziraphale had stopped searching his face and closed his eyes that he realized that he’d technically lied. Thomas had touched him- it was just that the creepy head petting didn’t really register as much of anything anymore.

The hand Aziraphale had on his shoulder tugged on him.

“Do you want me to-”

“Here,” Aziraphale confirmed.

Crowley laid down. It took him a moment to work out how. He ended up tucking his head up against Aziraphale’s side, safely under his wings, and folding his legs gently over Aziraphale’s beneath the knees he knew still had to be pretty banged up.

“You didn’t miss much,” he assured him. “You’ve been out for two days, if our guess about the water is right. Other than changing that out no one’s stopped by.”

Aziraphale’s hand found his head. He sank his fingers into Crowley’s hair and said “Sorry.”

“Don’t,” Crowley said, working to keep his voice firm, but not a snap. “Don’t be.”

“Had to hear it,” Aziraphale continued. “ ‘s hard.”

“It is,” Crowley said. “You know. You’ve had to do it often enough.”

Aziraphale was silent for a time. “Worth it,” he said finally.

Crowley’s eyes, which had been drooping shut, snapped open. “What’s that?”

“Still worth it,” Aziraphale said with a pained little grunt, and when Crowley looked up he could see Aziraphale trying to lever himself up a bit to look him in the eyes. His hand slid from Crowley’s hair down to his face. “Being here. You’re worth er’ything.”

Sometimes Crowley really wished that Aziraphale would just stab him through the heart and be done with it.

After a moment, he managed to unstick himself a bit. He cradled Aziraphale’s hand in his own, and placed a kiss to the back of it. “I love you too.” He cleared his throat. “Now, go to sleep. Pain’s exhausting. I should know.”

Aziraphale nodded, but he didn’t settle until Crowley had put his head down next to him again.

He should get up, he knew. He should go back to Shakespeare. But it was warm on the mattress, even on top of the blankets, and it was comfortable being so near to Aziraphale, and he was so very, very tired…

He wasn’t aware of falling asleep, so the next thing he knew was waking up in a panic. It wasn’t sharing the bed with Aziraphale that had set him off, he quickly realized. It was the door to the cell opening, just barely missing Aziraphale’s wings as it did. Crowley spun himself around to face whatever was coming.

It was Thomas. Of course it fucking was.

“He’s still out, then?” Thomas asked.

“Yeah, and he probably will be for a while,” Crowley retorted. “You hurt him really badly, and you wouldn’t let me heal him.”

Thomas said nothing.

Crowley wondered for a moment, if this would be how it started- raping him pregnant, that was. He hoped not, if for no other reason than Aziraphale would be upset if he woke up alone, or worse, to find the cultists cramming themselves into their cell for their turn. But that didn’t seem to be the case: Thomas was alone, and they’d never gone after him alone.

But they’d gone after Aziraphale alone before. Thomas went after him alone. So his next thought was that Thomas was going to complete the flip, offering him a handful of aspirin or something to ease Aziraphale’s pain, if he’d just get on his knees and keep his teeth tucked away.

He’d do it too. Of course he would.

But Thomas merely stood there, eyes flicking between Crowley and Aziraphale, gears visibly churning in his head. He had no idea what kind of calculation he was making, but whatever sum he made of it caused him to nod to himself and say “Well, I’ll be back when he’s more alert.”

He left. Crowley did not fall back to sleep.

Chapter Text

Recovery was slow and painful. Aziraphale slept through the majority of the first several days, waking here and there for a few minutes before dropping back off. Crowley stayed close at hand, oftentimes literally at hand, letting Aziraphale entwine his fingers with his fingers, or his hair, or even the feathers of his wings. He talked, whenever Aziraphale woke, and sometimes he was decently sure while he was asleep, or at least not particularly cognizant. He had a vague memory of singing that he couldn’t place, and an equally vague memory of hearing Hamlet being recited. Eventually, he started being able to stay awake and more or less lucid for longer periods of time. Crowley helped him to sit up; he found the action to be so exhausting that once he’d managed it he’d leaned his head against Crowley’s shoulder and nodded off again straight away.

He was warm when he woke up. Crowley had maneuvered them so that they were sitting with Aziraphale leaned back against his chest to spare his splinted up wings, wrapped in blankets and the demon’s wings. Crowley had his legs bent back and tucked underneath him. His arms were folded loosely over Aziraphale’s chest, and his nose was buried in Aziraphale’s hair.

“Crowley?” he murmured, still-half asleep. He tried to sit up more fully, and then immediately gave it up as a bad job as pain immediately flared up in what felt like his entire torso.

“It’s me, angel,” Crowley said. One of his arms left Aziraphale’s chest so he could intertwine their fingers oh-so-carefully. “I’m right here.”

Aziraphale hummed agreeably and tried to relax.

“I’ve got you,” Crowley added.

“I know,” Aziraphale replied. “Dearest, I know you do.”

He looked down at their conjoined hands and was suddenly hit with the fact that Crowley had gone without this for months. For months before Aziraphale was brought in, there had been nothing and no one to comfort him: no blankets to keep him warm, no husband to hold his hand. He imagined it, how it must have been- Crowley naked and battered and alone, huddling into his wings on the thin, bare, and increasingly bloodstained mattress, trying to rest in between bouts- and he immediately burst into tears.

“Oh, angel,” Crowley said. He gave him a squeeze, gentle and careful and Aziraphale half-turned in the shelter of his wings so he could press his head into his husband’s shoulder as he wept uncontrollably. “I’ve got you, angel, love, that’s it, you let it out.”

“Darling,” Aziraphale said, or tried to. It rather got lost in the onslaught.

“I know, Aziraphale, I know,” Crowley soothed.

He didn’t feel any better, once his tears finally dried up. He felt emptier though- scoured clean- and he ached all over.

“I’ve got you,” Crowley was saying still, his voice very rough. “I’ve got you.”

“I’m here,” Aziraphale said, squeezing his hand as tightly as he could- which, it must be said, was not very tightly at all at present. “I’m here.”

They sat in silence for a time. Some new and horrible facet of the ordeal popped into the forefront of Aziraphale’s mind every few seconds. They did it right by the door. He must have been able to hear every word, he thought in one moment, and then in the next Oh, I hope it didn’t remind him of what they do to him.

It wasn’t just that he knew full well how horrid it was to sit there, listening to your husband’s violation as you remembered your own. How many times had Aziraphale listened to Crowley’s screams being stifled for a few moments, and thought of his encounters with Thomas? How many more terrible memories did Crowley have to be tormented by?

Then there was the hope he couldn’t quite make himself have: that, somehow, it was less horrible for Crowley when they were doing it to him. He knew it hadn’t been. He’d heard the screaming, and seen the aftermath. He hadn’t quite comprehended the rest before now. Not the nearly overwhelming agony of it. Not the way the shame would pierce through at being so helpless and humiliated at the hands of such petty little monsters. Not the waves of horror at how very much they enjoyed inflicting that shame and agony.

Though, now that he was thinking about it… shouldn’t he be in more pain now?

He breathed in as deeply as he dared. Yes, he had a few broken ribs. There were bruises. But he remembered how vicious it had been, how it had torn into him, ripped him open. None of that damage remained.

“Crowley, did you heal me, somehow?” he asked.

“No,” Crowley replied. “I asked, but they weren’t too keen on the idea.”

Aziraphale let out a flat, humorless “Ha.”

Crowley nuzzled him a bit, and pressed a kiss to the shell of his ear before saying “Apparently, Heaven sent down an angel to heal you. They wouldn’t let her do all of it, or so Thomas said, but she seems to have done enough to stop you from discorporating.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. “That’s… significant.”

It truly was. There had always only been two options when it came to the involvement of Heaven in this particular farce. Either Gabriel was acting alone with his own designs in mind, or else this was part of some kind of covert operation that was not acknowledged to be officially sanctioned but very clearly was sanctioned anyway- the sort of extraordinary rendition that ended up in some kind of secret prison some place where they could do all kinds of unspeakable things to you without anyone kicking up a fuss about it, which was certainly how much of Heaven viewed Earth. Up until this point, Aziraphale had really thought it was more likely that this was entirely Gabriel’s doing, but if there were other angels involved, or even just the one angel…

It would have had to at least look like a sanctioned operation. There would have been all kinds of forms to fill in swearing her to secrecy, but the thing about forms was that they created a paper trail that the determined individual could both find and follow. It could not be guaranteed to remain a secret under those conditions. Someone was bound to find out.

They might try to act, if this was a personal project of Gabriel’s. They almost certainly would not if it was Heaven’s doing. They’d tell whatever doubts they might have that Heaven Was Right and show them the door, same as Aziraphale had done year after year for more than six thousand of them.

Not that Aziraphale was so sure that there was much anyone could do. But there were the office politics of Heaven to think of. They’d probably grown more vicious in the years since Armageddon had failed to go off, as there was no longer an end time in sight, nothing concrete to work towards. Someone a bit more socially adept at such things than himself could probably make something of the resultant infighting.

“Significant,” Crowley repeated. “Hah. Sch-yeah.”

“That’s the word I settled on, yes,” Aziraphale grumbled.

“It’s bollocks, is what it is.”

“Yes. Significant bollocks.”

Crowley let out a quiet, derisive “Bah” into his hair, but didn’t actually argue any further. Or, at least, he didn’t before Aziraphale fell back asleep. Pain truly was very exhausting indeed.

He woke up every few hours, was able to have a few moments’ productive conversation, and then invariably fell back asleep. They discussed things like:

“Isolde- the young woman they brought in to model for us- she’s Thomas’ wife.”

“...better than what I was picturing, to be honest.”

“Why? What were you picturing?”

“I was kind of afraid she was his kid.”

“That’s what I thought too, but why would that be- oh. Right. You can see into their minds.”

“Yep.”

“Including, when they fantasize about-”

“Yep!”

And:

“They dropped the remains of your outfit back in with you.”

“Ah. Is it- is any of it still usable?”

“...the socks are fine.”

“Ha.”

“The jacket’s in decent shape too. The shirt’s missing a few buttons and popped a seam on one of the shoulders. The trousers are pretty torn up, and your vest and pants are basically shredded.”

“Well, I suppose I shall have to see if I can’t wear one of these blankets like a toga.”

“You did look good in togas.”

And also:

“Thomas dropped by, after you woke up for the first time. He said he’d be back when you were more lucid.”

“Ah. I don’t suppose he said what he wanted?”

“No. But I don’t think they’re giving out prizes for guessing.”

“No, no, I suppose not.”

Aziraphale had difficulty concentrating, so a fuller account of his meeting with Isolde would have to wait until he was no longer having difficulties keeping languages straight. They were keeping to English mostly- sometimes Aziraphale would reach for a word and it would come out in Sumerian, or Aramaic, or once even French, which Crowley was never going to let him live down- so their conversations weren’t particularly deep. Even as Aziraphale began to rebuild his strength little by little, becoming able to sit up on his own and stay awake for longer and longer periods of time, speaking remained a problem. Aziraphale found it enormously frustrating. Words were meant to be his tools, or so it had always felt like. He didn’t like having them taken from him.

Eventually, as Aziraphale began to be able to stay awake for hours at a time, he managed to persuade poor Crowley, who hadn’t slept a wink since it happened, to take a nap. He was asleep for perhaps an hour before Thomas returned to their cell.

“I brought you something,” he said, holding up a larger thermos than usual. “Holy water! I figure there’s enough here to fix up yourself and your outfit.”

That was... a thing. Aziraphale squinted suspiciously up at him. “At what price?”

“What makes you think there’s a price?” Thomas retorted, sounding far too pleased with himself.

Aziraphale didn’t have the wherewithal to press his point, and so merely glared at Thomas until he smirked and said. “Nothing you haven’t done before. For almost half of the Order’s inner circle, at this point.”

Right. Well, the whole thing might be one pain-fractured blur, but the insinuation was clear enough. “Very well then,” Aziraphale agreed. He staggered to his feet, and then very quickly staggered off towards the wall so that he might collapse against it rather than the floor. Sitting upright might be within his limits again, but standing clearly was not. It hurt.

“Sorry,” he gasped out. “So sorry, I don’t- I’m not capable of much movement right now.” He tried to breathe deeply around his broken ribs; the room wasn’t spinning but it was tilted at an odd angle, and a little blurry at the edges. “I can make it out into the hall. I think. Just give me a moment, please.”

Thomas regarded him for a moment, and then thrust the thermos out towards him. “Here,” he said. “You might as well do it now.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said instinctively, and then dipped his fingers into the water before he could get too humiliated by it.

He healed his ribs first, since they hurt the most. Next were the tender spots along his head, which were the most likely culprits for his communication difficulties. Then he began to heal his wings- mercifully set correctly, he could now tell. He was only partially through that ordeal when the water dipped below the point where he could reach.

“Can you- could you possibly tilt the thermos towards me a bit?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Thomas replied, tilting the water a bit. Then he withdrew the water entirely. “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. Why don’t you drink it?”

“What?” Aziraphale replied. That was not a question he was remotely prepared to answer, nor had ever even contemplated before.

“Why don’t you drink the holy water? It’s one thing when it’s in the basin, I guess, but I’ve brought it to you twice in a thermos now, and you’ve always gone and dipped your fingers in.”

“Well, I- it never occurred to me,” Aziraphale said. “I’m not sure that would work. Saliva might be a pollutant- and whatever I’ve got in my stomach definitely is.” Well, actually, now that he was thinking about it he supposed saliva must not be a pollutant. Otherwise Thomas holding his head under water a few… days? weeks? however long ago his meeting with Isolde had been, that would never have worked.

Thomas mulled that one over, keeping the thermos infuriatingly out of reach. When he spoke, he thankfully didn’t mention the incident. “But you’re an angel,” he said finally. “Wouldn’t your spit be holy?”

“No?” Aziraphale replied, mind boggling a bit. “This body’s more human than not, even when I’m wearing it. There’s nothing intrinsically different about the saliva it produces.” Something truly terrible occurred to him then. “Wait, you haven’t… you didn’t think you were getting some kind of- of- of sacrament or- or blessing something when you- I mean, with our, the whole, the bargain we’ve struck up?”

For a moment, Aziraphale was certain that he’d stammered too badly to be understood. Then Thomas let out a loud guffaw- there was really no better word for it- and doubled over in laughter, causing the holy water to slosh against the sides of the thermos, dangerously close to spilling. Aziraphale’s hands fussed in dismay, flapping about in the air before him as there was nothing for them to fuss with. He was still naked, after all.

“You really thought...” Thomas’ voice trailed off into another round of chuckles.

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale said, half-turning as much as he could while keeping the warden in his sight. Crowley’s back was still to them, and while he seemed to have curled in on himself he didn’t seem to have woken up. Small mercies. “The idea occurred to me and I thought I should ask.”

Still laughing, Thomas held out the thermos to him once more, now tilted at a severe enough angle to allow him access to its contents. Aziraphale dipped his fingers back in, and carried on.

Feeling contrary, he snuck in a few extras. Dearly though he would have loved to, he couldn’t cut Crowley’s hair, not without it being noticed. But he could reinforce the slits cut into the back of Crowley’s robe, heat up the water bottle, plump up the blankets, and refresh the bedding in general as he worked on restoring his clothing- which had been gone through some time before being dropped back, and divested of his belt, his braces, and all the rest of his possession the cultists had been keeping in the box. He saved healing his knees for last. The bruising there was quite extensive, thanks to being repeatedly knocked against the wall and then having to support the majority of his weight after things had moved to the floor. It was a minor injury, though it looked a fright, and Thomas would likely not consider things done until after it disappeared.

Sure enough, the moment that visible damage disappeared, Thomas asked “How much longer is this going to take?”

“Not long,” he said. “Just a moment or so.”

He didn’t actually need to do much of anything by now; he just wanted to spend a few moments collecting himself before it happened. Thomas, predictably, didn’t appreciate this.

“So… what do you look like, then?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Aziraphale replied.

“You said that you’re just wearing this,” he waved with his empty hand, indicating Aziraphale’s body. “What do you actually look like? Is it like you said to Isolde?”

“Sometimes humans perceive us that way, but ultimately it’s no more honest than the corporations, just… flashier,” Aziraphale told him. “Our truest forms aren’t really comprehensible to the human mind. Even we struggle with it, while in these bodies.” They’d tried to describe how they perceived one another while embracing once, not long after they started doing it on a regular basis. Giggling, naked, and curled around one another in the soothing dark of Crowley’s flat, Aziraphale had learned that he appeared as a hooded and cloaked figure with many paper-thin wings and even more eyes, and had informed Crowley that he was a large and imposing serpent, scales strewn with stars, and with horns made of apple tree branches. And he had a smell, too: apple blossoms.

“Apple blossoms? Blossoms?” It had been too dark to properly see Crowley, but he could tell that he’d been wrinkling his nose in disgust nevertheless. “Not apples, the fruit? Or the hideous chemical approximation they put in candy, even?”

“Nope,” Aziraphale had replied. “Apple blossoms. It’s quite distinctive.”

“Well you smell like old books, on any plane of reality,” Crowley had said.

“Crowley.” He’d said it like an admonishment, but they’d both known that he’d been egging Crowley on.

Crowley had obliged him happily, nuzzling against his throat with a low, sultry hum. “Hmm… old books. That’s the truest Aziraphale scent right there.” His tongue had flicked out against his skin and Aziraphale had moaned involuntarily, his hand sinking into Crowley’s hair to keep him there. “Delicioussss.”

Looking back at it now, he had to wonder: would they ever have that again? Could they have that again? Even if they were to escape tomorrow and were one day able to be sexually intimate with one another, could it ever again be so uncomplicated and comfortable an act, so pure and simple a joy? Or would the terror of this place forever taint the act for them?

“Try me,” Thomas said with a smirk.

“Would that I could,” Aziraphale replied.

“What does that mean?”

He’d spoken carelessly before, with that statement, and for reasons he would never be able to explain, he chose to compound it by speaking recklessly in response to Thomas’ questions. “Well, if I could show my true form we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We wouldn’t be having any conversation. The sight of me would have driven you quite mad- reduced you to a state of gibbering ruin, if you were lucky, but more likely simply rendering you catatonic. It would have done the same to any human who saw me. Then I could simply scoop Crowley up and leave out the front door.”

Thomas stared at him, mouth slightly agape. As calmly as he could, Aziraphale withdrew his fingers from the holy water, and banished the remaining droplets from his skin.

“Shall we?” he asked, already heading for the door.

“No,” Thomas replied.

Aziraphale stopped and turned around. “No?”

“We’re not going into the hall.”

Aziraphale turned again, involuntarily, towards Crowley. “But-”

“He’s asleep,” Thomas pointed out. He grabbed Aziraphale by the shoulder and turned him so that he was facing the wall. “We do this here.”

Aziraphale said nothing, but then his input wasn’t really required at this stage, was it. He braced himself against the wall as Thomas began to undo the buckle on his belt.

It wasn’t so bad, this time. Not as bad as last time, certainly, and not even as bad as the first. He could almost see, with a sort of distant horror he dared not contemplate too closely, how he might one day grow numb to it the way he’d grown numb to the fellatio. It still hurt, of course, but it was more invasive than agonizing. Thomas was trying not to wound him this time, dribbling lubrication between Aziraphale’s buttocks as well as slicking up his prick, and he went slowly, at least at first.

Quite frankly, Aziraphale would have preferred to have it over with more quickly, even if he was left bleeding at the end. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the feeling of Thomas inside him, he didn’t like feeling his breath against his neck as Thomas babbled out his filth, he didn’t like trying to dig his fingertips into the stone wall to keep himself from collapsing, and especially didn’t like how Thomas keep reaching around and touching him between the legs, as though he kept forgetting that there wasn’t anything there for him to stimulate.

Eventually, Thomas came. Aziraphale let himself slump a bit more against the wall and waited for him to pull out with relief. Instead, Thomas leaned forwards and placed a kiss to the underside of Aziraphale’s jaw.

“Don’t,” Aziraphale gasped, wrenching his head to the side.

Thomas chuckled, undeterred, and craned his neck around to press his lips to Aziraphale’s cheek, perilously close to his mouth. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?”

“Don’t,” Aziraphale said again, pressing his face against the stone wall. He folded his arms over his head to protect himself as soon as Thomas pulled away enough to allow it. “Please, I can’t...”

“This must be really frustrating for you, mustn’t it?” Thomas asked conversationally. One of his hands wandered down the front of Aziraphale, stroking between his legs. His stomach turned at the sensation. “I mean, you’re some kind of cosmic entities who could have driven us all mad just by existing, but we slapped that collar on you and carved those symbols into him, and now there’s not a thing you can do to stop us.” His free hand grabbed one of Aziraphale’s wrists and forced his arm down.

Aziraphale whimpered and buried his face in the arm he still had folded over his head. The thing was, Thomas was wrong: he could stop this, easily. Thomas was still inside him, after all, and for all that that seemed designed to torment him it also left the warden vulnerable. One twist of Aziraphale’s hips would cause him an incredible amount of pain, and he would have to let go of him then.

Momentarily, at least. That was the problem. The victory could only be temporary, and could only invite reprisals.

“Of course, according to Stephen- by which I mean, according to the Archangel Gabriel- that’s at least half your problem right there. You can’t enjoy any of those pleasures of the flesh without any flesh, right?” His hand traveled up his waist sharply before digging into the rolls of fat around his middle. “And you’ve got quite a bit of flesh to enjoy, haven’t you?”

Aziraphale bit his lip and resolved to give him no response. His resolve lasted until Thomas’ hand went higher still, until he found a nipple and began to trace around it with a fingertip.

“Please stop,” he pleaded. “Please, you’ve got- you’ve got what you came for, just-”

“We’ll have to do this again soon, I think,” Thomas said. His tone was still maddeningly casual; he gave no sign that he’d heard Aziraphale at all. “Maybe after we knock up your boyfriend and he starts getting weird cravings. I’ll fuck you like this, and then we’ll see how long it takes for your squirming to get me hard again.”

Quite without permission, Aziraphale let out a wretched sob. He pressed his face against his arm, trying to muffle the sound, but there was no stopping the tears once they’d started. His shoulders shook, framing the place where Thomas was resting his lips now.

“Pleasure doing business with you, as always,” Thomas said, and finally pulled out at long last. Not a moment later, the cell door shut behind him as he left.

Aziraphale stayed where he was, frozen, trying desperately to stop crying. Crowley was in the room and if he woke up now…

“Angel?”

Oh. He had woken up after all.

Aziraphale lowered his arm a bit, so he could see. Crowley stood there, eyes rimmed red and lip bitten through. It was obvious that he’d heard, if not everything, then more than enough.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said aloud. It was all that he had time for before a fresh wave of tears overtook him.

“Come on, Aziraphale,” Crowley said gently. His hand hovered for a moment before moving with deliberate slowness to his shoulder. When Aziraphale leaned into the touch, he wrapped his arm more fully around him, and guided him away from the wall. “Let’s get you cleaned up, and into some clothes. You’ll feel a bit better, then.”

He did feel a bit better. He almost wished he didn’t.

“How much of that did you hear?” Aziraphale asked. He was laying on the mattress, as Crowley had insisted. He was laying stomach down, so as not to stress his wings.

Crowley was laying next to him, curled up on his side underneath Aziraphale’s outstretched wing. “Pretty much all of it,” he admitted. “I woke up just after he came into the room, I think.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t want you to...” he trailed off, unsure of how to end that sentence. See? Crowley had feigned sleep the entire time, he was unlikely to have seen much. Hear? He’d already heard it all before- Thomas had made sure of that.

“I know,” Crowley said, looking pained. “I know. That’s why I pretended to be asleep. So he wouldn’t try to drag me into it or- I don’t know…” After a moment, he reached out, carefully running his fingers through Aziraphale’s hair. Aziraphale leaned towards him, bumping their foreheads together. “Don’t watch,” he said at long last. “If they- when it’s me. If you’re there for it. If they let you. Don’t watch, Aziraphale.”

The urge to cry nearly overwhelmed him, but he managed to beat it back this time. “I won’t. I promise. Oh, Crowley...”

They both knew it would be him next, and that he’d have it immeasurably worse too. Crowley did not speak of it, and Aziraphale had nothing even remotely comforting to say, and so they merely lay there together until Aziraphale fell asleep through a severe lack of other options.

When he woke up, he discovered that Crowley had fallen asleep too. He gently eased himself out from under the blankets, tucked them back in around Crowley, and sat up to wait for either Crowley to wake up or for the cultists to return to their cell.

Crowley woke up just over two hours- approximately one run of La traviata- later. The cultists took considerably longer.

Aziraphale, no longer burdened by linguistic confusion, was able to tell Crowley all the details of his meeting with Isolde. They were able to spin out several theories regarding the degree to which Heaven was involved in this. Aziraphale looked down at his hands, and realized that he’d completely forgotten to regrow the nail that had broken the first time Thomas had taken him, and had a minor breakdown. Crowley took a nap, and woke up hyperventilating from a nightmare, and made Aziraphale promise, again and again, that he wouldn’t watch. Neither one of them could so much as guess as to why they were being left alone until, about two weeks later, when Crowley began to experience stomach pains.

At first they thought that he’d been poisoned somehow. But the only thing either of them had had for months at that point was water, and Aziraphale had drank from it too, and he was fine, so what could possibly…

They then spent several minutes near the point of hysteria, talking around the possibility that one of the cultists might have put some holy water into their bucket as a joke, before Crowley suddenly sat bolt upright and said “Angel. I’ve got cramps.”

Right. Crowley now had a fully-functioning uterus and all the attending bells and whistles, including the imperative to menstruate every month when not pregnant. It meant that this was very likely PMS, not poisoning. Small mercies again.

Menstruation posed several problems. Physically, it was going to be rather unpleasant for Crowley. Emotionally, it was a symbol of the concessions Crowley had made and the horror he still had yet to face. Practically, it was going to be a mess, because they had nothing in the way of supplies to keep it from being such.

“Cramps generally start one to three days before the main event, according to the textbooks,” Crowley told him, morosely rubbing his abdomen.

“And how long is the main event meant to last, again? Three to five days, was it?”

“Try two to eight.”

“Ah.”

The main idea they had was the Crowley would need to squat over the grate to avoid getting blood everywhere. The idea was so miserable that Aziraphale told him to forget it, they could just get the blood out of the blankets later, only for Crowley to tell him off.

“We need those blankets, and we need them not to be bloody, damp, and growing mold,” he growled. “It is freezing in here, Aziraphale, and those blankets are practically the only nice thing we have.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Aziraphale didn’t bring it up again. He did insist, when Crowley voiced the opinion that he take off his robe so he didn’t have to worry about getting blood on it, that he wear his jacket again instead. It was shorter, and less likely to be bloodied. They also figured out a way for Crowley to wear Aziraphale’s waistcoat as underwear- as wearing Aziraphale’s actual underwear had also been unceremoniously shot down- to give themselves a little extra time to get to the grate before things started getting bloody. That was it. That was all they could do.

Two days later, it came. Crowley peeled off the waistcoat and squatted over the grate, while Aziraphale pulled the mattress up behind him and knelt on it, giving Crowley something to lean back again if he needed to- which he most certainly would despite his protestations, especially if they were going to be stuck with this for eight days.

They were braced for it, as much as they could be. They had plans: debates to be had and re-had about Hamlet, and other works, the relative merits of having a greywater sprinkler system set up in the cottage, even a few plans to be made in the unlikely event that they were given access to Isolde again, or even unlikelier event that they were given access to an angel.

That all got derailed when, not three hours in, Thomas waltzed into their cell with a brown paper bag and a smile.

“Ha!” he said. “I thought so. I woke up at a quarter to five this morning to find Isolde scrubbing out her panties.” He reached into the bag. “The Fraternal Order of the Heavenly Messenger has decided to provide you with supplies. Tampons.” He withdrew a small cardboard box from the bag and dropped it onto the floor. “And sanitary napkins.” He repeated the process with another cardboard box. “You’re welcome.”

Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley said anything, much less anything thankful.

“And, out of the goodness of my heart, I’ve brought some extra supplies,” he shook the bag which seemed to contain at least one bottle of pills. “Trade you for the lot, our usual price?”

Right. Aziraphale took a deep breath in and let it out slowly, before nodding.

“How many times are you going to do this to him?” Crowley asked plaintively. “How many times?”

Aziraphale, who had been easing himself up, froze.

“I didn’t exactly have an end date in mind,” Thomas replied, the amusement in his tone wavering for the first time since he walked into their cell. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”

“You’re holding little shreds of my safety and comfort over his head and telling him to roll over for them, that makes it my business,” Crowley retorted angrily.

Too angrily, Aziraphale immediately feared. He snapped his wings closed around him, shielding him from view, trying to protect him. “Dearest,” he said, speaking as quietly as he could. He didn’t dare speak in anything but English, not with a warden in the room. “It’s fine, really. It’s just the usual, he said. I’ll be all right, truly.”

Crowley growled, and hunched in upon himself more tightly.

Tentatively, Aziraphale retracted his wings and stood. Thomas looked him up and down as he did, his gaze greedy and hungry.

“Do you want this or not?” he asked, giving the bag another shake.

For the first time, he seriously considered answering no, sitting back down, and just spending whatever time they had before the cultists started back in on Crowley in earnest together. Then he saw the expression on Thomas’ face, and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that saying no would not gain him anything of the kind.

“Well?” Thomas pressed.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, defeated. “Yes, I would like the contents of that bag.”

“There, you see? A perfectly fair and equitable working relationship, that’s what we have here,” he said.

Crowley had nothing to say to that until they were both out in the hall and the door was swinging shut behind them. “It’s still rape!” he called out. “Dress it up however you like, you’re still the fucker who rapes angels!”

The cell door lock let out a click, and Aziraphale went to his knees. Thomas grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled as he began to walk down the corridor.

“Come on, up you get,” he said, though he didn’t slow down, forcing Aziraphale to stumble along on his knees for several paces until he could get his feet under him again. “We’re not doing this here.”

“Where are we-”

“Come on!” Thomas still had his hand fisted in Aziraphale’s hair, and he pulled sharply on it. Taking the hint, Aziraphale stayed silent as Thomas led him back to the medical room.

“This is where we’ll do it,” Thomas said, adding at the confusion on Aziraphale’s face “Where we’ll make the Antichrist.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said quietly.

“We’re going to come back here in maybe ten days or so, whenever that stick Isolde’s peeing on says she’s ripe.” Thomas went over and fiddled with the chair, folding the stirrups underneath it and lowering it a great deal. It looked less like an instrument of torture then: it almost wasn’t a surprise when Thomas sat on it, spread his legs, gestured to his crotch and said “Well?”

“Right,” Aziraphale said stiffly, and went over to him.

Had it only been a couple of weeks ago, when he’d thought that he might one day numb himself to buggery as he had fellatio? Well, it was difficult for him to remember at this moment how he’d ever managed to think himself numb to this. The smell, the taste, the way he could not breathe around the intrusion, the pain as Thomas forced himself into his throat over and over and over and over and over…

The things he said. “Fuck, you’re good at this. Like a proper whore. Wish you could teach Isolde. I try this with her, she vomits. Look at you, barely crying, just taking it. Your boyfriend always weeps and tries to pull away when I go this deep, even if he’s offered.”

Eventually Thomas came. He didn’t let Aziraphale go. He shuffled back enough that Thomas’ cock was no longer in his throat but didn’t dare try to get it out of his mouth, not with the hands still painfully tight in his hair and the intent way Thomas was looking at him.

“So,” Thomas said after a moment. “Once we get the green light, we’ll be in here every day for a week. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off.” He cocked his head as though waiting for a response from Aziraphale. Bereft of anything else to do, he blinked up at him. “We does include you, in this case. We need things to take, you understand, so it’s your job to heal him immediately if things get too rough.” Aziraphale blinked again, rapidly, trying to dispel the tears before they fell. “If it doesn’t take, we’ll know when he bleeds again, and we’ll do it again, every day after he stops, until he either takes one up the duff or hops on the rag again. If he doesn’t get pregnant by then, we’re going to assume you did something, and there will be consequences for both of you that make the ones for your little misstep with Isolde look like dinner at the Ritz, do you understand?”

Aziraphale made a desperate noise around the prick still lodged in his mouth.

Thomas laughed, and finally released his hold on him. Aziraphale scrambled back until he hit one of the cabinets, gasping for breath.

“Do you understand?” Thomas repeated.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said thickly. “Yes, I understand.”

Presumably they walked back to the cell at that point, but Aziraphale had no memory of it. It’s as though his being simply cut itself out of the equation until the cell door was shutting behind him and Crowley was standing before him, damp waistcoat scrubbed free of blood in hand and a look of concern on his face.

“Where did he-”

“Medical room,” Aziraphale rasped. “I- I think I might throw up.”

He didn’t, but he spent at least twenty minutes hunched over the grate, dry-heaving. Crowley was tremendously understanding about his not wanting to be touched until his stomach settled. It rather made him want to scream. Here was Crowley, taking such good care of him after such a minor hurt, and all Aziraphale had to give in return was the details of his upcoming violation.

“Here,” Crowley said, offering him his jacket back once he’d finished with the waistcoat. “It’s cold.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. His ongoing chant of They’re going to hurt him again, they’re going to keep hurting him, over and over, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it only grew louder. “Yes, it is.”

He couldn’t cry. He felt like it, but at long last, seemed to have reached the limit of his ability to do so.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “About… about how they’re going to do it.”

Chapter Text

Remember, if you will, that there will be a happy ending to all of this: a day when coffee becomes a luxury few can afford and the world has to be let in carefully to their little fortress of a cottage, but nevertheless a day when they are free and safe, and have many, many more days like it to come.

A bit before that, however, there was a day when an angel and a demon drove to Tadfield.

Or, to put it more correctly, were driven to Tadfield, as neither one of them was behind the wheel. That was Isolde’s job, driving carefully out of town the back way, most of her possessions already loaded in the back of the estate wagon she drove. The seat next to her was empty. The backseat was fully occupied by, in order from right to left, Aziraphale, Crowley, and an empty car seat.

Despite having the window seat, Aziraphale kept looking across the top of Crowley’s head at the car seat. It looked normal to him, though he’d had limited exposure to such things: it was the sort that looked to be descended from the Moses baskets that had once been used for infants, with a sort of awning on the top. There was a little charm, of sorts, hanging off the top of it. It had a picture of an octopus on it, proclaiming I’m a preemie, please don’t touch me!

The child was with Isolde’s mother in Oxford. She’d moved out of Cornwall not long after divorcing Isolde’s father, and moved again with her wife some time after she’d been remarried. No one in town had kept in touch, and therefore they wouldn’t know how to get into contact with her, much less use her to locate Isolde. She was leaving Thomas- had left him some time ago, apparently. It was just to their ineffable fortune that she’d chosen today to come back here and try to collect the rest of her things.

She’d left the child behind with her mother, just in case she ran into Thomas while she was here. Aziraphale found himself peering into the empty car seat once again. They’d been told the child’s name, though it kept taking Aziraphale a moment to remember it was Enid. He kept wanting to think it was Tristian, somehow.

“They’re going to want to know why you didn’t stop,” Crowley said. His head was tucked up against Aziraphale’s shoulder, and he didn’t bother to lift it to speak. “To see what all the sirens are about.”

“I wouldn’t have stopped if I hadn’t thought there was a chance that it was about you two getting free,” Isolde said resolutely. “I want out. I want this part of my life done. If everyone’s distracted and can’t pay attention to me, so much the better.”

The resolution was one part her own, one part a blessing Aziraphale had bestowed upon her, for some given definition of the term. He’d never blessed anyone in such a way except on Heaven’s orders, and it had only ever been a blessing bestowed upon martyrs like Joan of Arc or Saint Alban. It felt like a rotten trick to play on her after what she was doing for them, even if she would need that courage of conviction in the coming days regardless, even if she’d asked for a little something extra, something divine, to see her through. There was nothing he could do about it now that it was done, however.

They drove in silence for a time, long enough that if Aziraphale looked back he would almost certainly not be able to see the plume of smoke rising up from where the Church of the Holy Messenger had once stood, but he didn’t look back. He tangled his fingers with Crowley’s and looked in various directions at nothing in particular.

He didn’t even realize that they had entered into a metropolitan area until Isolde let out a quiet curse.

“They’ve just levied a congestion charge on the M5 for the next two hours,” she explained. “We could take the A3, but that’s got a charge on anything that’s not electric now. I could try switching off the fuel, but if I get pulled over the police might not buy it, and I’m not sure how far I can get on just electric with all the stuff I have in the back.” As she spoke, she maneuvered the car into an empty parking spot.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, exchanging a look with Crowley. The demon was frowning, but it seemed like he, at least, had some idea as to what she was talking about. “I- well, if you need the money...”

“Nah,” she waved him off. “It’ll clear up. It’s about time for a rest stop now, anyway- I skipped breakfast this morning. Do you want anything?” She paused for a moment. “Do you even eat?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said slowly. “But, I. Well. We haven’t had much for… quite a long time, and I don’t think- that is, I’m not at all sure that...”

“We’ve spent the past several years locked up in a cave with no one for company except for each other and our captors,” Crowley said bluntly, when Aziraphale failed to fumble his way to the right words. “Large crowds like this probably aren’t a good idea.”

“That’s fair,” Isolde said. “Any requests?”

“Not tea,” Crowley said, and then buried his face in Aziraphale’s shoulder.

Not having the slightest idea of what else to say, Aziraphale nodded.

“Right, I’ll be back soon.”

She left. The car let out a little chirrup as the windows went dark, and the moment after that the doors clicked shut.

Aziraphale inhaled sharply, and then flicked the lock on the door closest to him open again.

“Whereabouts do you think we are?” Aziraphale asked.

“Exeter, I think,” Crowley said, not lifting his head.

“Exeter?” Aziraphale asked, but even as the word left his mouth, he caught sight of the Cathedral, just barely visible around the corner of the block of shops they were parked in front of. “They’ve done well for themselves.” He hadn’t ever really spent a lot of time in this part of the country, but this seemed significantly more built up than he’d thought Exeter was.

“Nrgh,” Crowley grumbled. “There’s too many people, you mean.”

Aziraphale frowned down at his husband. “Did you remember to put those psychic curtains of yours back up?”

Crowley didn’t reply, but Aziraphale could feel him doing something for a moment, and then he relaxed a bit.

“You could also take a nap,” Aziraphale suggested.

“I’ve just slept for three bloody months, angel,” Crowley complained.

“On and off, yes, and you were quite rudely awakened this time too.” Aziraphale paused before adding “I’ll keep watch, if you like. Wake you when Isolde returns.”

“Yeah, alright,” Crowley said. He gave Aziraphale’s hand a squeeze, which Aziraphale returned, and then said no more.

Aziraphale took a look around as Crowley rested. There were significantly more people in Exeter than there had been when they’d been kidnapped, he was almost positive of that. There were certainly more people using those electric scooters to get around. There weren’t very many street lights, or so he realized after a moment- they all seemed to have been replaced with pillars of water. There were many, many solar panels on the roofs, and more than a few places seemed to have wind turbines set into their eaves. There were goats on the green next to the shop- he gathered from the signage that they were part of some kind of political protest centered around cloned meat, whatever that was. A vendor pushed his cart past them, unseeing and uncaring, and apparently completely legally selling several varieties of marijuana. He couldn’t tell what the closest shop normally sold, as it was offering money for obsolete electronics with such vigor that all its other signage was lost. A small group of women rounded the corner from the direction of the cathedral, striding with purpose, all of them wearing clothing emblazoned with the flag of Seychelles.

It wasn’t that he had expected the world to stay still and unchanged while they were held apart from it. But as time has worn on, and very nearly slipped away from them entirely, he’d largely stopped wondering about what was going on in the world. Looking at it now, even the little part of it he could see from Isolde’s car, he could not help but get the impression that the changes had been vast and far-reaching. It made him feel very small and adrift.

After a few moments, Isolde returned, and Aziraphale nudged Crowley awake.

“Here,” she said, thrusting two cups towards them, along with a small paper bag. “I sprang for chocolate.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said. “That sounds lovely.”

The drinks were chocolate- the concoction that everyone insisted, gratingly, on calling frozen hot chocolate- but the pastries were apple. Aziraphale ate it all, not sure if his lack of enjoyment was due to the circumstances or due to the relative quality of the products. Crowley had no input on the matter either. He ate and drank it all, which would normally be a compliment, but he wasn’t sure what to make of it now.

“I’m going to try to find a parking spot with better sun,” Isolde said, as she turned the car back on. “Let the battery charge up a bit while we’re stopped.”

Aziraphale nodded and Crowley made encouraging noises. Isolde parked somewhere with more direct sun and darkened the windows again. She did something with her mobile to make music play out of the car, and then took a nap. Crowley joined her in slumber; Aziraphale remained awake and watched the world he was no longer sure he knew how to understand go by.

Eventually, Isolde’s phone made an angry honking noise, which apparently notified her that they were clear to leave. The journey up to Tadfield resumed, silence broken up by music- a good third of it seemed to be in Welsh, which made Aziraphale curious, but he didn’t know how to ask about it. He wasn’t sure how to say much of anything at all. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be required- they drove on, sans conversation, until they were in Oxfordshire.

“Are you sure your friends are still here?” Isolde asked. “There’s no chance they moved house, or anything?”

Aziraphale reached out. Newton and Anathema were easy to find, far easier than they had been this morning when he’d tried. They were much closer too.

“We’re headed in the right direction,” Aziraphale said. “Even if they’ve moved house, they’ll be close enough to ask for directions, I think.”

“I’ll keep the car going until you're sure, then,” Isolde said. “Just in case.”

“We appreciate it,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley let out a loud and patently fake snore.

“Oh, don’t be rude,” Aziraphale chided gently, giving his shoulders a little squeeze.

As the no longer quite familiar sights of Tadfield rolled into view, Aziraphale had to work very hard not to tighten his grip on Crowley. We’re almost through, he thought. We’re almost out. We’ve left that awful place behind us in ashes, and we just need someone to help us with what comes next, and then it’ll finally be over.

It should have been a comforting thought. Instead Aziraphale could feel his heart trying to race, and his shoulders try to hunch up around his ears.

Jasmine Cottage looked more or less the same. The rhododendron was quite a bit larger, and they’d finished the extension of the second story, but otherwise it was much the same: the little glass box for Anathema’s herb garden, the snazzy little electric car Newton had bought after Dick Turpin had finally died, the horseshoe over the door.

“Sloppy,” Crowley muttered in the direction of the rhododendron, and Aziraphale nearly laughed.

It was almost over. They were almost done.

He rang the doorbell, and they stood there for what felt like a very long time before the door opened.

His first thought was that they must have moved after all, because the door was opened by a girl who could be no younger than five, and he was almost positive that Anathema hadn’t been pregnant when he’d been taken.

Bereft of anything to say, Aziraphale merely stared down at the girl, who stared right back up at them.

“You don’t look like a grandma,” she said at last.

“Erm, no?” Aziraphale confirmed. “Thank you?”

“Sov! You’re not supposed to answer the door unless you know who it is!” That came from further in the house, where another little girl stood, her hands on her hips. She was older, by a couple of years at least. She was also the spitting image of Anathema.

He and Crowley were most assuredly gaping by this point, when a third person came into view: a woman, fully grown.

“Hype, Sov, don’t-” Her eyes widened, and Aziraphale suddenly recognized her. “Oh my God!”

“Newton?” Aziraphale asked, before giving himself a little shake. “Oh goodness, I’m sorry, you’ve probably-”

“No, no. I kept Newt, just traded Pulscifer in for Device,” she said, pushing her hair back from her face distractedly. “Oh my God. Crowley, Aziraphale- it’s really you?”

Crowley hadn’t looked at Newton yet, seemingly preoccupied with the children, but he spoke now. “How long?” he asked, as Anathema came charging into the foyer at a dead run. “How long did they have us?”

They’d been gone for nearly a decade, as it turned out- almost exactly a decade, in Crowley’s case. The information was disseminated in the same period of time that they saw Isolde off and settled into the window seat in the breakfast nook, but damn and/or bless it all if either of them could recall any details.

Aziraphale stared at the date on the astrological clock hanging next to the kitchen table, and then he stared at the grey hairs and lines on Anathema and Newton’s face, and then he finally turned back to Crowley, who had yet to take his eyes off the children.

“Tea?” Newton asked, her voice far too chipper as she moved to put the kettle on.

“Any chance of something stronger?” Crowley muttered.

“Erm. I. Well-”

Crowley waved her off. “Joke, Lizard Girl. Tea is fine. Just- not ginger.”

Newton bustled off.

“I had a premonition,” Anathema said. “Nothing specific, unfortunately. I just knew that someone- or someones, I guess- who had left our lives a while ago would return in time for lunch.”

“We thought it would probably be my mother,” Newton said. “We- well, we haven’t exactly spoken, since the uh-” She gestured to her face. “Since I came out.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, that’s awful,” Aziraphale said.

“It’s what it is,” Newton said with a shrug. “Honestly, we’ve heard through the grapevine that she’s ill, so we were kind of braced for her to be reaching out just because she needed a donor of some kind.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said again.

They took their tea. There were an assortment of little sandwiches to choose from- including some American-style peanut butter and jelly ones with the crusts cut off for the girls- which thankfully precluded talking, for the most part.

For a time, at least.

“Are you human?” asked the older child, startling them both badly.

“Hypatia,” Anathema said warningly.

“They’ve got really weird auras,” Hypatia said.

“No, we’re not,” Crowley said, before Anathema could intervene. “Well spotted.”

“Oh,” Hypatia said, looking momentarily confused at the confirmation. “You’re not angels, are you?”

“What.”

“Mom says we shouldn’t talk to angels,” Hypatia continued blithely. “Because they look nice but they aren’t.”

“Wise woman, your mother,” Crowley said, as Aziraphale looked at Anathema and tried to get her to communicate what she’d told her children without either of them having to speak in front of them.

“You are, aren’t you?” Hypatia said. Next to her, Sov narrowed her eyes.

“We both left Heaven some time ago,” Aziraphale said, hoping to pull the conversation back on track.

“You’re demons!?” Sov demanded.

“No, they can’t be,” Hypatia said immediately. “Demons look all funny and they smell awful.”

“How do you know?” Sov demanded.

“Because I’ve seen them!” Hypatia scoffed.

“What?!” Aziraphale cried.

“What.” Crowley croaked.

“Girls, why don’t you go play outside?” Newton suggested. “Let us have some grownup time, like we talked about.”

Both girls remained where they were. Hypatia crossed her arms.

“We agreed to let you have grownup time when we thought you were talking to Grandma, not angel-demons,” she said.

“You’re right,” Newton said. “So. Why don’t I go with you?”

“What happened?” Crowley hissed, rounding on Anathema the moment Newton had chivvied their daughters out the door.

“Nothing, really,” Anathema said. “A few demons started showing up periodically, not long after Aziraphale was taken. They wanted Adam to restart the apocalypse- they seemed to think that you had been protecting him, and now that you were gone, he might be vulnerable.”

Crowley snorted, and privately Aziraphale agreed. It wasn’t as though they’d never tried to lay down wards in Tadfield, but rather that they weren’t able to do much that Adam’s love of the place hadn’t managed already.

“They’re still doing fine, then? The Them?” Aziraphale asked. He’d been able to find them, but they were scattered all over the place, and none of them were in Tadfield currently.

“Yeah, they’re doing great,” Anathema said. There was a long, hesitant pause.

“I looked for Tracy,” Aziraphale said at last. “Once we were- once I was able. I couldn’t find her.”

“She passed away two years ago,” Anathema said. “I’m sorry.”

“How did- it wasn’t anything-”

“It was cancer,” Anathema told him. “Throat cancer. She went in for surgery, but there were complications and- she just didn’t make it.”

Aziraphale nodded. Nothing to do with angels or demons, then- just ordinary human frailty.

He still should have been there, to make sure that she wasn’t in any pain, and that there weren’t any complications.

“So always said that you were being held somewhere down here, on Earth,” Anathema said. “That she could feel it.”

“She could feel it!” Aziraphale yelped.

“Not well enough to know what was happening, or where you were,” Anathema said quickly. “Just that you were trapped, and not in Heaven either.”

“We were in Cornwall, actually,” Aziraphale said, trying to calm his racing heart. ”Under a church dedicated to Gabriel. He’s the one who set this whole thing up. He figured that sooner or later one of us would break and tell him how we survived our execution.”

“Not that he actually came down himself until this morning,” Crowley muttered. “Left all the dirty work to his cultists.”

“He told them that they would help ensure that Armageddon was won by Heaven, and that they wouldn’t be punished for any sins they committed during the course of their work for him,” Aziraphale added. “He gave them all the information they needed to find us, to capture us, to keep us, to-” Bile crept up his throat, and Aziraphale pressed the back of his hand to his lips. It really wouldn’t do to throw up, not now.

Newton came back in then. “I’m making lemonade for the girls,” she said. “That’ll buy us a few minutes before they come looking. Do I need to know anything?”

“We should probably wait until they’re asleep before we discuss anything serious in detail,” Anathema said. “Or maybe pack them off to a friend’s.”

Newton nodded, and then looked at Aziraphale and Crowley. “So no questions?”

“What’s Sov short for?” Crowley asked.

“Sovay,” Newton replied.

“Oh!” Aziraphale said, relieved beyond measure to have the conversation pulled onto familiar, unfraught ground. “Yes. Roud seven in the English folk song index. The female highwayman.”

“Highwayperson,” said Newton and Anathema as one, in what was clearly the punchline to a joke they were not privy to.

“Let me go call the Thompsons,” Newton said. “See if they’re okay with a sleepover.”

Conversation stalled after that. Newton arranged for the girls to stay somewhere else that night and took them over. Anathema cleared the table of the remains of their meal, and then brought some clean linens into the sitting room. Crowley nodded off again against his shoulder, only to start awake when Newton returned.

“Right,” she said, sitting down across from them. “I’m assuming you know for a fact that you weren’t followed?”

“We didn’t leave anyone in a fit state to follow, really,” Crowley said flatly.

“They’ve probably shaken it off by now,” Aziraphale said hurriedly at Newton’s alarmed expression. They’d left the congregation- which had included most of the cultists- standing mesmerized across the street from the church’s parking lot. Far enough away that they weren’t likely to be hurt by the blaze, close enough that no one would have to go looking for them, safely contained so that they didn’t need to worry about someone raising the alarm or trying to put the fire out.

“Okay. That’s- okay,” Newton said, head bobbing rapidly.

Anathema reappeared at that moment. “The couch in the living room folds out,” she said. “I’ve put some clean sheets on it. I assume that you’ll need a place to stay for a while.”

Technically, they didn’t need one. They could go back to the bookshop, or the Mayfair flat, or even their cottage. Something about that felt wrong, somehow. Crowley felt so too.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale added.

Anathema sat down. Aziraphale raised his teacup to his lips, realized that it was empty, and put it down again.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Anathema said carefully. “But I’m still going to ask- what happened?”

Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged looks.

“You tell them,” Crowley said. “I’m still knackered from trying to convince them that they’d grabbed the wrong demon back in the beginning.”

Aziraphale nodded, and then took a deep breath. “Right. Well, this was all Gabriel’s idea. I think I said that earlier...”

He kept the details light. He spoke of the cultists’ plans, and the lies Gabriel had told them. He explained his role in their plans, and gave some background into the matter of angel cults. Then he stalled.

He probably didn’t need to say any more. They weren’t unintelligent- they could see for themselves what had happened. Nevertheless, Anathema and Newton continued to look at him, clearly expecting more.

He tried to take another sip of tea, only to find that the cup was still empty. His other arm tightened around Crowley.

“It took them a while to wear us down,” Crowley said, after a long period of silence. “Seven or eight years, I guess. And then it took a while for us to figure out how to actually, you know-” He waved a hand in what would have seemed a dismissive motion, if it hadn’t been shaking. “Never actually bothered with all the reproductive organs. Cambions tend to be more human than not, lifespan included, and childbirth didn’t seem like a laugh either. Wasn’t worth the trouble.” He laughed tiredly, and Aziraphale had to force himself not to tighten his grip around him even more.

“When you say ‘wear you down’, what do you mean?” Newton asked.

“They were a remarkably violent group of people,” Aziraphale said, when Crowley seemingly couldn’t find the words. “Whatever you’re picturing probably happened at one point or another.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Okay. So you’re going to stay here for a while,” Anathema said. “We’ll have to figure out what your next step is sooner rather than later. For tonight though, let’s just order out some dinner and catch you up on how things have been going.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said.

The rest of the evening’s conversation with the Devices was relatively easy, since Aziraphale didn’t have to do much more than make appropriate noises, and Crowley could ask simple questions that had objectively factual answers to them.

Yes, take away sounded lovely. What was diluvian food? Oh, refugees from places that had gotten flooded out were banding together under the name “Diluvian”? How many places? Goodness, that was a lot, how awful. And the dishes had to be made with local ingredients because there was a stiff tax on the import of most foods? Oh, that must create quite a pickle. Where did this rice come from then? Someone imported American wild rice to grow in the Scottish bogs and it turned out to be invasive, but no one was doing much about it because it was also edible, of course. So, what was gone now? Venice, Maldives, New Orleans… Socotra wasn’t flooded, just rendered uninhabitable by an unlucky string of cyclones and wildfires, that was still awful. Oh, Pepper was in Yemen now? How was she doing?

Like that. Aziraphale spoke automatically, never quite sure what he was going to say until the words left his mouth. He also ate automatically. Try as he might, he couldn’t quite recall what he’d ordered. Something surprisingly flavorful for having had to be produced locally- though that might have something to do with the rooftop herb garden greenhouses Crowley and Newton were discussing. Anathema was also oddly silent, something which took him most of the meal to realize. He didn’t know how to bring that up, so he didn’t.

Anathema did that herself, after a fashion, luring him away from Crowley on the pretense of wrestling a folding screen into the living room to give them a bit of privacy.

“Listen, Aziraphale,” she said quietly. “You know you don’t have to be alright, right?”

Aziraphale nearly laughed- he had to bite back the sound. It would have been ugly, and it would have worried Crowley unnecessarily. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m- they barely touched me. Compared to him- it was every day. Every day for years, Anathema. Or we thought it was every day. There was no way to tell the time, so we just assumed it was once a day.” Looking back now, it was obvious that it hadn’t been. The time Crowley spent out of their cell always seemed too long, and the time they spent both conscious and together seemed too short, but he’d been able to measure Crowley’s resting hours easily enough: he’d been out cold for ten, twelve, even fifteen hours regularly. Of course the pattern had taken longer than a day. Half a day could be spent just on Crowley sleeping it off, and it never felt like that had been half the pattern.

Oh Lord, Stephen had probably been telling the truth about their semi annual meetings.

“I’m fine,” he said again.

“I wouldn’t be fine, if I’d had to watch Newt be hurt over and over again for years,” Anathema said.

“I didn’t watch. Most of the time, I wasn’t even in the same room,” Aziraphale said. “They’d take him out of our cell to- to torture him, and I could hear him screaming, but- and then they’d bring him back. I would heal him, he’d recover a bit, and then they’d come back and start the whole thing over again.” He took the folding screen from her. “I’m fine. Worry about Crowley- he needs it.”

Anathema pursed her lips, but let him set up the screen in peace. Newton brought them some blankets, though the weather was warm, and now that they were above ground again they didn’t really need it. Their softness was a comfort. Crowley piled them high around Aziraphale before settling in himself, making a cozy little cocoon for them to cuddle in.

“Lights off?” he asked, his hand hovering by the lamp.

“Shit, angel, I forgot that was even an option,” Crowley said, with a mildly hysterical giggle.

He pressed his face against Aziraphale’s shoulder. Aziraphale took that as his cue, and turned the lights off.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh Crowley, look.”

The pillars of water Aziraphale had noticed earlier were in fact pillars of algae. They were bioluminescent, creating their own light and eating some of the excess carbon out of the atmosphere in the process. Newton had explained that, at some point during their dinner. They didn’t shine as brightly as streetlamps did. It cut down on light pollution too- the downside being that they were very smelly to clean out.

That might have been why the stars seemed to shine so brightly out the window, or it might have been because they hadn’t seen any stars in such a very long time.

Crowley shifted, letting out a little grunt, one of his hands pressed over his stomach. The little cambion must be kicking again. They’d been doing that a lot lately.

“You know,” he said, almost too casually. “I really thought we were going to die down there, angel, I really did.”

Aziraphale half-turned towards him, threading his fingers through the hand on his stomach and gently tugging it away. “Me too,” he admitted. “Me too.” He pressed a kiss to the back of Crowley’s knuckles and let their hands fall between them, on safer ground. “But we’re alive, Crowley. And we’re going to stay that way.”