Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The event known as the "Pulse" began in autumn, at exactly 3:03 PM on the sunny afternoon of October 1st, 2005, on the eleventh birthday of a boy named Adam Crowley. Though, for the rest of the human beings who fell victim to this violent apocalypse, that fact was of absolutely no importance. Just as "Pulse" wasn't exactly the right term for what was about to happen to the world, but by the end of the following day, there wasn’t a single scientist left capable of correcting the mistake. Either because they had been brutally killed or because they had lost their minds.

At 2:50 PM, a man like tens of millions around the world strolled along, swinging his hips as if they were independent from his body. He was heading south along Boylston Street in Boston, his short blood-red hair blowing in the wind, his golden eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. He was there for work; he was a comic book artist on a clear upward trajectory. For the first time in his life, his work was paying off, and he felt like everything was following a natural, proper course. He had waited his whole life for this, after all, not just anyone could boast about making a living off their art, especially without help from family or connections.

His comic was called StarMaker, and it told the story of a space outlaw who had been exiled from his home planet for questioning authority. Years later, he found his way as a bounty hunter, frequently crossing paths with The Principality, a celestial-looking alien who constantly sought to thwart his plans but, in reality, helped him escape his adventures unscathed. It was the story he had dreamed of his whole life, only now, four years after divorcing Lilith, coming out as bisexual, and convincing his editor that his story would be a success, he had finally begun to draw it. It was the first queer story in his publishing house. While its beginnings could be mistaken for mere rivalry or friendship, the latest volume made the characters’ romantic inclinations unmistakably clear after a tragic yet passionate stolen kiss before being separated by their opposing factions.

Now, with a contract for an animated adaptation, two invitations to conventions that winter, and a deal for a thriving franchise, Anthony J. Crowley finally felt like life was smiling down on him. So much so that he hadn’t hesitated to splurge on a birthday gift for his son, Adam. In his right hand, he carried a new snow globe paperweight featuring a dog that looked remarkably like Adam’s pet, Dog, as well as a small box containing a modern cell phone, quite an upgrade for an eleven-year-old. In his left hand, he held a folder with the storyboard for the new StarMaker chapter, the one that would launch him to the stars.

It was an excellent day to be alive.

After wrapping up the non-negotiable meeting for the animated series approval and the new visual novel chapter, he signed his contract for his new salary and royalties. He felt on top of the world, finally capable of spending a little extra without worry. His flight back to Tadfield was in an hour and a half, and he would make it in time for Adam’s birthday at 7:00 PM.

Spending time with his ex-wife and her new husband, Lukas, wasn’t exactly a hardship. Their separation had been amicable. Crowley had long since stopped feeling attracted to Lilith and had finally admitted to her that he had been fantasizing about his (very straight) coworker for months while jerking off. (Though, to be fair, he didn’t use those exact words.) He couldn’t keep lying to himself, nor to his "family." She had taken it maturely enough—so much so that she introduced Lukas as her new boyfriend the very next month.

Luke —for friends— Morningstar was a lawyer. The divorce had only taken two months, mainly due to court formalities, and custody of Adam was shared. Of course, Crowley had loved and desired his wife, enough to want to start a family and share "the best years of his life" with her. But after a lifetime of pretending to be something he wasn’t, neither his late mother nor his few friends were particularly surprised when he finally came out.

The sound of an ice cream truck parked next to the park pulled him from his thoughts. Lilith had pushed him into following a strict diet based on a television model, which had resulted in a constant lack of appetite that, fortunately, had not extended to Adam. However, his new life and more importantly, his new salary, had led Crowley to indulge in a few guilty pleasures, including a certain apple cream ice cream he hadn’t had since childhood.

On the side of the truck, large, childish letters read Mister Sofftie, and in front of it, a line of three people waited their turn to order a treat: a boy not much older than Adam, a woman in a business suit with a dog inside her purse, and a young blonde teenager. Both women were talking on their phones, staring vacantly in opposite directions. Crowley joined the line behind them.

Even though his flight was in an hour and a half, all he had to do was return to his hotel four blocks away, grab his small suitcase, and check out. It wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, half an hour if he took his time eating the ice cream. The airport was only a fifteen-minute taxi ride away.

The sound of someone stepping into line behind him didn’t catch his attention. Instead, the voice of Freddie Mercury blasting through the ice cream truck’s speakers was enough to pull him back into memories of his son.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality

The music playing from the truck was none other than Queen’s famous Bohemian Rhapsody, Crowley and Adam’s favorite band. The idea of downloading the song to set it as the ringtone on his son’s new phone lit up the redhead’s face. The small device Adam currently had was barely functional for calls; they had given it to him when he was old enough to walk to school alone (though he was always accompanied by his group of friends or one of his parents). His ringtone was a poorly recorded snippet of Bohemian Rhapsody, captured in awful quality through his old phone’s recording app, but Adam loved it all the same.

The line moved forward as the boy ran off with his ice cream cone, seemingly looking for his parents. The businesswoman’s conversation grew louder as she ordered (or rather, demanded in a petulant tone) a triple-scoop cone while shushing her barking dog—just as Crowley glanced at the watch on his wrist. It read exactly 3:03 PM, not a minute more, not a minute less.

Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, to me

"I can't hear you, Lisa." said the woman in the suit, taking her ice cream in one hand, the change in the other, and holding her purse with her small dog inside. She walked alongside the ice cream truck. "No... No, I can't hear you, Lisa."

Crowley followed the line, somewhat dissociated in his thoughts, a result of the music playing from the truck. He didn’t notice the woman's dog barking in fear while she raised her voice against her phone, nor the blonde girl clutching her phone tightly against her right ear, shaking her head in a spasm.

"Repeat, repeat, repeat what you're saying, Clarence, I... I'm losing you, losing me..." exclaimed the young woman, ignoring the vendor asking for her order.

The Mister Softee truck guy waved a hand in front of the girl's face. She let out a loud laugh and pointed at the special waffle on the menu board. The vendor sighed in annoyance, fed up with an exhausting job that paid far too little to deal with stupid customers.

In the distance, a man’s scream failed to catch anyone's interest—except for the man standing behind Crowley. A halo of golden curls took two steps back, looking in the direction of the growing shouts, worried.

Mama, ooh, didn't mean to make you cry
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.

"Cla... Cla... Cla... Clarence," the girl stammered with a shrill laugh, looking up at the sky.

The vendor held the waffle in front of her face while, with a repulsive grimace, he stretched his hand too close to the young woman’s skin.

"That’ll be four-fifty," said the Mister Softee guy, losing patience.

Crowley thought about how much ice cream prices had gone up. He wasn’t one to splurge, no matter how secure he felt about his finances at that moment.

Then, closer screams pulled him from his thoughts. Not far away, the woman in the suit had dropped her ice cream, which made the redhead chuckle mockingly. However, his amusement quickly turned into shock when she trembled with rage and hurled her phone onto the pavement, shattering it, while her dog yelped, trying to jump out of her grasp.

"Rast!" the woman cried, looking at the sky with a tone that was a mix of fury and madness. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to Crowley. She could have just as easily said "rats" or some curse.

Crowley turned back to the truck just in time to see the blonde teenager lunge into the air, throwing herself at the ice cream truck window and sinking her teeth into the vendor’s forearm. The man’s scream pierced the air, and in an instant, more cries rose across the park. A distant explosion froze time in Crowley’s mind, paralyzing him while the girl scratched and kicked. The Mister Softee man began punching her face, but she didn’t let go; she only roared louder.

Mama, ooh (any way the wind blows)
I don't wanna die
I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all.

A strong, solid arm wrapped around Crowley’s waist and yanked him back, dragging him out of his shock. It released him almost instantly, and when Crowley turned, he found himself staring into a nest of golden curls, glowing under the afternoon sun. A masculine yet angelic face, and a pair of huge eyes, wide as blue ponds in surprise. He had no time to admire them before the teenage girl fell onto her back with a piercing laugh, her nose shattered as she kicked wildly in all directions.

"RAAST!" The suited woman’s scream drew their attention to her. She had crouched obscenely on the ground, knees spread apart, eating the ice cream she had dropped with both hands.

Her dog seized the opportunity to escape, jumping out of the purse that lay on the ground and dashing toward the road, dragging its leash behind it. Before it even made it halfway across the street, a speeding bus ran over it, turning it into a pulverized mass of fur, flesh, and blood. There wasn’t even a whimper. The bus, full of passengers, continued its infernal journey, running a red light and crashing into the front of a parked taxi.

"Fuck!" exclaimed the blue-eyed man.

"The poor thing reached dog heaven before even realizing what happened to him," Crowley thought, stepping back alongside the man—only then realizing he had said it out loud.

I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me

Crowley approached the girl on the ground, who was still laughing. In his panic at the situation around them (or maybe out of naivety), he genuinely thought she was crying from the beating on her face—until she looked up at him with an unnaturally wide smile, showing bloodstained teeth.

However, the teenager suddenly got to her feet and threw herself against the Mister Softee truck window again, clawing at the air and slamming her face against the glass until it turned red.

The suited woman's growls caught his attention as she dropped to all fours and took off running after a pair of women fleeing the park in terror. Only then did Crowley take in his surroundings, seeing chaos erupting everywhere: across the street stood a Four Seasons hotel, and in an instant, a speeding car crashed through its entrance. A man in a tracksuit chased a Labrador through the grass, the dog running faster than any of the panicked people going in every direction. Just then, another explosion, several blocks away, sent a tremor through Crowley, while screams filled the air more and more.

Spare him his life from this monstrosity...

A choked gasp came from beside Crowley. When he turned, he saw the curly-haired man’s face turning bright red, his eyes bulging as he struggled for air.

Behind him, a man twice his size had wrapped a massive arm around his neck, lifting him off the ground and licking his face. The blonde man kicked and scratched desperately at his captor's face, but the brute didn’t stop licking him.

A gigantic hand slid from behind the attacker and landed on the soft thigh of the curly-haired man, caressing it with lascivious intent. His fingers pressed against the delicate bulge in his pants, making the blond man gasp in pain.

The sheer panic in his eyes spread rapidly to Crowley’s.

Bismillah!

We will not let you go (let him go)

"Mine... little yellow duck... to fuck..."

With a swift motion, Crowley smashed open the box containing the paperweight for Adam and, with a single blow, struck it against the perverted giant’s head. The man barely loosened his grip on the blond, but it was enough for him to break free, collapsing to his knees, gasping for air. The sound of the Mister Softee truck engine roared behind them, and the music blasted at full volume, deafening the frightened men. They barely managed to comprehend what the giant said.

"Who AM I?"

Behind them, the blonde teenager laughed hysterically, tearing at her own hair as she lay on the ground, her face shattered. But it was the giant who held Crowley’s full attention. He stared at the poor blond man, who could barely stand, as if he were about to devour him. Crowley feared that intention might be far too literal when the giant reached a hand toward the blond while the other clutched his own crotch with unsettling force—just as the screech of the Mister Softee van’s tires echoed against the asphalt and sped away, accompanied by a chorus of voices.

Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me.

"WHO. THE FUCK. AM I?!" the giant roared as he charged at the blond man alongside Crowley, his jaw stretching open in a monstrous way, tearing his cheeks apart.

The blond fell backward onto the ground as the giant, with both hands, pressed his waist down with ruthless brutality, trying to pin him. It seemed the massive man had no other thought in his head but crushing the life out of his prey.

Crowley barely had time to react. A pressure in the air and a cold sweat invaded his body in mere seconds as the giant turned toward him, revealing a gaping, mangled mouth like that of a ravenous beast. His eyes widened like black voids, fixated on Crowley with such raw hunger that it chilled his blood. A foul stench emanated from his open mouth—a mix of sour saliva and something much more putrid. It was then that Crowley understood he was about to become prey.

He stood frozen, trembling in fear, yet incredulous at the speed of the events unfolding. His hands clutched the folder with his drawings as if it were the only thing that could save his life, the last shred of his humanity. He thought of Adam, of what his life meant, of the blond man behind the monster, and how his eyes had been the only thing offering him any comfort in this cruel world that had twisted within mere minutes. Just as he felt the crushing weight of death looming over him, the only thought in his mind was that at least the last thing he would see would be those eyes—the piercing steel-blue gaze of that blond man staring at him from over the giant’s shoulder.

The giant lunged with a guttural roar, and Crowley barely had time to brace himself. In that instant, something strange happened—the blond reacted with unexpected speed. With a trembling yet determined hand, he pulled something from the outer pocket of the bag he carried. Crowley barely had time to recognize it before the blond pressed it against the giant’s back. It wasn’t a phone, as Crowley had first assumed, but a taser—a personal defense weapon capable of delivering an electric shock strong enough to take down a man of great size.

The monstrous giant’s body convulsed violently. A spasm shook his massive torso before he collapsed face-first onto the ground with a heavy thud. The crackling glow of the electric discharge still lingered in the air, and the giant—who had, until that moment, been a creature of sheer brute force—now lay motionless, his body nothing more than a lifeless mass on the pavement.

Crowley stared in shock at the blond man, who now looked at him with a surprisingly serene expression. He calmly placed the taser back inside his bag and knelt in front of the redhead, his hands cradling Crowley’s face with a tenderness that made it seem as if what had just happened was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Then, in a voice so warm and soft that it almost sounded paternal, he spoke.

"Are you alright, dear boy?"

The words that left his lips were incredibly gentle, soothing—like a father comforting a child after a nightmare. For Crowley, that softness was the most surreal part of everything that had happened so far. A man who appeared to be his age, strikingly attractive, with the gaze of an angel, yet with the gentleness of a grandfather. It was strange. Even stranger was the contrast between his pristine appearance and the bloody, chaotic scene unfolding around them. Crowley felt a knot in his stomach. The violence, the blood, the chaos—none of it seemed real while that man looked at him with such profound warmth and tenderness that it unsettled him. It was as if, somehow, the world had stopped being dangerous, simply because of that gaze.

In that moment, something inside Crowley shifted, as if his mind had just unlocked a door that had been shut for far too long.

"Shit!" he thought. A crushing urge overwhelmed him—a need to kiss him, to pull him into his arms and hide from everything else. Amidst the blood, the violence, the madness that surrounded them, a primal and wild impulse took hold of him. But within that impulse, there was also a fragility—one he couldn’t quite understand or process.

He looked at him, at the man who had, with a single move, brought down the giant who had threatened him. And all the fear he had felt minutes ago dissolved. What remained was a strange mix of gratitude and unsettling admiration. This man, with his aura of calm and restrained power, seemed to be the answer to something Crowley hadn’t even dared to understand.

And in that moment, the world around them didn’t seem to matter. There was only him—the blond man—and that inexplicable need to be closer.

Until the giant’s voice rose behind the blond.

"Yellow... ru-rubber duck... L-let me h-have you..."

Before Crowley could act, the blond stood up and extended a hand to him.

"We need to get out of here before he gets up or something worse finds us."

Without a second thought, Crowley took the angel’s hand. He got to his feet, still clutching his folder, leaving behind the giant’s body, whose massive hand reached weakly toward the blond man but lacked the strength to do anything more.

They left the park with the intent to cross the avenue in the middle of utter chaos. The streets seemed horribly unsafe—people ran in all directions, strips of flesh hanging from their bodies. Others moved erratically, much like the ones in the park, chasing men, women, and elderly alike—running like rabid animals, their clothes torn and their skin soaked in blood. Just then, from above, a passenger plane flew over them at a horrifyingly low altitude. Within seconds, to Crowley’s horror, it crashed at the far end of the park. A black cloud of smoke rose into the sky from the explosion, and all the crazed lunatics stopped in their tracks, lifting their heads like meerkats before stampeding toward the blast, drawn by the fresh wave of screams that echoed through the trees.

The blond man tugged at Crowley’s hand, pulling him quickly into the street. His sharp eyes never stopped scanning both directions with an almost animalistic focus, as if anticipating any sign of danger—or any vehicle that might run them down. Crowley, dazed, barely registered what was happening until he suddenly realized he was still holding onto the blond’s soft hand tightly—as if his gentle touch was the only thing anchoring him to reality in the midst of chaos.

"What do we do?" Crowley asked, horrified at the charred body hanging from a car at the other end of the street. The flames consumed it, but what was most disturbing was the laughter. The laughter. It came from the corpse, grotesque and filled with agony.

"We need to get off the streets," the blond said firmly. "We’ll be safer inside a store or something. Then we can figure out what to do."

"M-my hotel is just a few blocks away," Crowley said, his throat tightening. "Let’s go there."

Both ran quickly, leaving behind the park and the avenue, with the feeling that the entire world was crumbling around them. Suddenly, something stopped them in their tracks: a child, dressed in the uniform of a private school, was devouring the neck of an old man in a corner next to some trash cans. The man caressed the child tenderly, but they could do nothing for him. It was the kind of horror they couldn't be part of, even if their hearts broke at the sight.

They picked up the pace, dodging people who ran in terror, their eyes filled with fear. The hardest part was distinguishing those who were simply scared from those who, somehow, were no longer afraid and had become heralds of violence. The latter were the most dangerous. Those who had allowed themselves to be consumed by madness.

Suddenly, a naked, muscular man blocked their way. His body was covered in blood, swaying his hips so that his member moved with him. In one hand, he held a butcher's knife; between his teeth, something that looked like a human intestine dangled. His eyes reflected a wild insanity. Crowley, his heart pounding frantically, took a step back.

"Behind me!" ordered the blond man, extending an arm in a protective gesture in front of Crowley. His voice was firm but laden with fear. His hands trembled as he searched for the taser in his bag. "Back! Don't you dare come any closer!"

Just as the mass of muscles seemed to raise the knife to strike, Crowley was about to pull the blond man away to flee when a deafening sound shook them. A gunshot rang through the air, so sharp and powerful that it made them both drop to their knees. A gun barrel —a Colt .45, Crowley recognized instantly— appeared between them, and with a single shot, the bloody man was taken down, his head exploding into a cloud of blood.

"Gentlemen," a deep, firm voice said. Crowley looked up and saw a police officer, weary in posture but serious in expression. "I'm Officer RP Tyler. You are my witnesses in case you're called to the station. This man intended to attack you, so I used my weapon in the line of duty."

"Thank you very much, officer..." Crowley began, but the question gnawing at his mind came out before he could stop it. "Do you have any idea what's happening?"

"No, young man. But the best thing you can do is get off the streets and find a safe place," the officer replied, walking toward his patrol car.

"Officer!" the blonde man shouted, his tone carrying an urgency that surprised Crowley. "Be careful with the cell phones!"

"What did you say?" The officer stopped and looked at him, confused.

"I can't explain it well, sir." the blonde continued with quick, pleading words. "But I'm sure it's related to that..."

"We communicate via radio frequency... makes sense." said the officer, raising a hand in a calming gesture. "I'll report your concern to the station. Be careful."

Before Crowley could react, the officer had already left, tires screeching as his patrol car disappeared into the distance.

"Cell phones?" Crowley asked, jogging beside the blonde as he tried to understand the connection.

"The teenager and the woman..." the blonde began, his voice low, as if trying to process something much bigger than the two of them. "They both had one when they went mad. Also... look at the ground."

Crowley looked down and on the sidewalk, he saw something he had missed earlier: the street was littered with broken screens and abandoned cell phones. All of them were covered in skin, blood, and human remains. The shattered devices gleamed like fragments of an apocalypse, as if chaos had been born from them, as if a virus had spread from those small screens.

Crowley took the lead and started to jog with firm steps, guiding the blonde man through debris that hadn't been there hours before and the chaos of the streets. The ground felt uneven beneath his feet, but he kept the pace, as if his legs were the only thing he could rely on. The blonde's face, beside him, remained alert to every movement around them, but he kept looking at Crowley's hands, as if waiting to reconnect with them, hoping they would offer him some sense of security. For a moment, Crowley forgot everything else and took the blonde's hand that was trailing behind him; he just wanted to get to a place that offered some semblance of normalcy and keep them safe.

When they finally arrived, the hotel stood before them, discreet but well-regarded. Its wooden and glass facade, with a warm brown tone that perfectly complemented the streetlights, appeared intact, almost as if everything else had no bearing on its existence. It was a middle-class building, one of those places where families typically stay, or business travelers who find themselves halfway between modest luxury and everyday comfort. The reflective glass windows caught the light from the few remaining streetlamps, and the dark wooden frames gave it a cozy, almost homely feel. On the door, a metal sign displayed the name of the place, The Old Carpet Inn, in golden letters that still shimmered under the streetlights.

Crowley ran toward the entrance, passing between two red brick columns flanking the door. Through the glass, he could see the lobby: a warm-toned carpet, an empty and disheveled reception, with a floor lamp glowing in one corner. The place seemed deserted, though it didn't feel completely abandoned. There was an eerie stillness, as if all the guests and employees had vanished suddenly, leaving only echoes of a normal life. The blonde stopped for a moment, looking at the facade with a mixture of relief and caution. Crowley, breathing heavily, grasped the door handle and entered, bringing him inside.

"This should be a safe place." he murmured, more to himself than to the blonde man, but doubt was evident in his voice. How safe could a place be in a world that had already crumbled? He tried to open the door, but it didn’t budge—it was locked.

The hotel, which only moments ago had seemed to offer a possible salvation, turned out to be an empty trap. A floor-to-ceiling metal curtain covered the windows, a barrier Crowley had never seen before, not even in his darkest travels through Boston. The entrance, usually free of obstacles, was blocked by two huge, worn velvet armchairs, violently shoved against the door. The silence reigning in the lobby was unsettling, and the air felt even thicker.

"We have no other choice." Crowley murmured, glancing at the locked entrance. He quickly turned around and pointed toward the alley, the only place that didn’t seem completely sealed off. They decided to go around the hotel, their pace quickening as the tension took over.

The alley was dark, dirty, and full of the remnants of what seemed like a normal life before the chaos. Trash, crumpled bits of paper, broken bottles, and cardboard scattered across the ground. The stench of decay filled the air, and the tall, narrow brick walls loomed around them. Amidst the filth, the hotel’s service doors were locked, as if someone had made sure no one could enter from that side. The blonde stopped for a moment, his face tense as his eyes scanned the alley, seemingly trying to listen for something beyond the distant screams and emergency sirens.

Suddenly, a low, almost imperceptible moan came from one of the massive trash bins. These square bins, common in the streets, were always filled with food scraps and waste. But this moan sounded pitiful... Crowley tensed, and the blonde quickly approached the bin, the illustrator by his side, alert. When they peeked inside, they saw something that made them stop dead in their tracks.

Inside the trash bin, curled up among the garbage bags, was a young girl. Barely a teenager, maybe not even of legal age yet. She wore a navy blue dress, adorned with ruffles that must have once been charming, but now were stained with mud, blood, and filth. Her hands, also bloodied, covered her ears as if she was trying to block out more than just the surrounding noises. Her eyes were closed, but as soon as the blonde saw her, he reached out gently and extended his hand toward her.

"You’re safe..." the blonde whispered, his voice soft, contrasting with the harshness of the situation.

The girl, almost as if responding to his voice, slowly opened her eyes. They were completely bloodshot, a furious red that contrasted with her chocolate-colored irises and pupils. In an instant, horror swept across Crowley’s face as the girl, without a word, lunged toward the blonde with a speed that shocked him. But it wasn’t an attack. Instead of biting or attempting to tear at his flesh, the girl hugged him with desperate strength, burying her face in the blonde’s chest. A tight embrace, full of fear and despair, as if, in that gesture, she was clinging to the last bit of humanity left. The blonde, breathing heavily, held her for a moment, unsure of what to do. He glanced at Crowley, who couldn’t stop watching the scene, confused and somewhat horrified by the intensity of it.

"I don’t... know what’s going on, but I’ll get you out of here." the blonde said, trying to calm the girl while still holding her in his arms. Crowley took a step forward, watching, unsure if he should intervene or simply stay still. The girl kept trembling, her hands firmly covering her ears, as if trying to protect herself from something beyond what her eyes could see.

It was a strange, surreal scene. Amidst the chaos and destruction, this moment of human vulnerability was happening in the most unlikely place: a filthy alley in Boston, in front of an apparently safe hotel that cruelly denied them entry. The blonde gently took the girl and, showing a strength that in another situation would have made Crowley gasp with excitement, pulled her out of the trash and carefully laid her on the ground.

"I need you to follow us, we’ll go with you." he whispered now, looking alternately at the girl and Crowley, who immediately understood the situation.

They walked in silence towards the entrance, and if it was barricaded, it was still a place with people inside, fitting the parameters of the previous "normal" day. And if they weren't allowed in by the good people, they would make their way in by force. The air was tense, anxiety palpable. Crowley, visibly frustrated, let go of the blonde's hand and stepped forward, walking furiously towards the massive glass doors. His eyes glowed with a clear threat, the need for protection pressing against his chest.

"Let us in!" he yelled, his deep voice laden with rage. "I'm a guest. My things are inside. And I don't care who I have to get through to keep my people safe. I know you're there, don't make me do this!"

The girl flinched at the shouting, clinging to the blonde, who did not overlook how the redhead referred to them possessively. Crowley grabbed a brick resting next to some flowerpots by the street and lifted it with one hand, ready to smash the glass partition. His gaze locked on the glass, a mixture of desperation and determination reflected in his eyes. The blonde, calmly observing, reached out to the teenager, who had stayed hidden behind him, and placed his hand on hers, hoping the gesture would bring her some comfort.

"Stay with her," Crowley said in a low, firm voice. "She needs protection just as much as we do."

The air was thick with danger, and in the distance, Crowley saw a group of lunatics running erratically. Their bodies were disheveled, clothes torn and dirty, giving off an imminent sense of chaos. One of them carried a sharp piece of metal with a "stop" sign at the end, swinging it like an improvised weapon. Crowley panicked.

"I'll break the damn door down now if you don’t let us through!" Crowley shouted, his tone threatening with no room for negotiation. "I'm talking to you, Brown, I know you're there!"

At that moment, the door suddenly opened, and the blonde, with a quick, unhesitating move, shoved Crowley and the girl inside the hotel. The sound of the door slamming shut and the unmistakable crash of furniture being moved frantically to block the entrance was all that remained when the group took refuge inside.

The hotel’s interior was dim and unsettling. The air was heavy, with a faint smell of dampness, and the wooden floor creaked under their feet. The reception area was small, with a low light above the counter that barely illuminated the face of a middle-aged man dressed in an outdated hotel receptionist uniform. His carefully trimmed mustache and somewhat rugged appearance contrasted with the silent atmosphere of the place. Quickly, the receptionist, who seemed to have been expecting a situation like this, and with the help of the blonde, repositioned two additional armchairs to block the entrance. The scraping sound of furniture against the floor filled the air for a moment, drowning out the shouts of the lunatics running outside. Once the door was secured, the man looked at Crowley with a mixture of relief and concern.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Crowley," said the receptionist, his voice deep. "I was afraid it was another one of those crazies..."

Crowley nodded, his expression still tense but with a reluctant trace of gratitude. "It's fine, Mr. Brown... thanks for letting us in," he murmured, although the discomfort in his voice made it clear that there was still some lingering resentment.

The receptionist nodded and, without saying another word, withdrew into a back room, leaving the three of them in the reception area.

"Do you know him?" the blonde asked, wary of their host.

"I always come to this hotel, Mr. Brown has been the manager and receptionist since it opened."

The blonde approached the young girl, who was still trembling and in shock, and helped her sit on one of the armchairs near the now-extinguished fire, which had tried to provide warmth to the guests on the cold autumn night. The atmosphere in the hotel was strange, as if time had stopped there, and a sense of isolation surrounded them. The blonde, with his soft and charming voice, crouched down in front of the girl.

"What’s your name, dear?" he asked, his tone full of compassion.

The girl didn’t respond immediately, her face still pale and her gaze vacant. Crowley stepped closer, crossing his arms over his chest as he calmly observed the interaction.

"I’m Aziraphale McFell..." the blonde began, looking at the girl with gentle eyes. "And he’s Mr...."

"Crowley, Anthony J. Crowley... just Crowley..." said the man, his tone cold and controlled, though his gaze softened as he looked at the girl with what could have been concern, or perhaps compassion.

A faint murmur escaped the girl’s lips. "Ana..." Her voice was barely audible, as if she was barely finding her voice again after being lost in the abyss. "Anathema Device."

The three of them remained silent for a moment, the weight of the situation settling over them like a thick fog. Crowley, looking at the girl, couldn’t help but think of Adam, just a few years younger than him, wishing that this pandemonium wasn’t reaching him wherever he might be. Ana stood up, searching for what could be the bathroom.

Aziraphale, the blonde, sat down by the fireplace, dropping his suitcase and closing the vent, waiting for it to go out.

"What are you doing?" Crowley asked.

"They don’t fear fire... seems like it attracts them in some way..." Aziraphale said, staring at the slowly dying flames. "Crowley..." He said his name in a tone that somehow relaxed the redhead’s agitated chest. "Thank you for saving my life... it’s a pleasure to meet you."

"You saved me, really..." Crowley said, sitting beside him. "The pleasure’s mine, Aziraphale."

The hotel room fell silent, marked only by the distant echoes of the city, sirens that didn’t stop, the rumble of explosions that wouldn’t cease, as if chaos was about to swallow everything left of the reality that once was known. Aziraphale sat at the edge of an armchair, watching Crowley. The unease in the air was palpable, and though the blonde seemed calm on the outside, Crowley couldn’t help but notice the growing danger around them.

"We need to leave by morning at the latest." Aziraphale said, his voice calm but firm. "It’s not safe to stay in the city. There are more and more sirens, and the explosions haven’t stopped. It’s only going to get worse."

Crowley looked at him, his face reflecting a mix of horror and relief at the same time. Aziraphale wasn’t just a brave man; he also seemed to have a cold, calculating mind, able to see beyond the immediate. In the midst of all the chaos and tension, that quality was something that caught Crowley’s attention. He had met many people in his life, but something about the way Aziraphale viewed the world set him apart from all others. He noticed it in the small gestures, like the way he moved, his posture, and that calmness that was so intriguing. He was also incredibly intelligent... and that intelligence, though sometimes incomprehensible to him, was oddly attractive. A feeling that Crowley wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to explore just yet, but as always, couldn’t avoid.

Aziraphale stood up from the armchair and walked to a small table near the glass door, looking outside. The city seemed like a distant, desolate place, as if it were nothing more than a memory of what once was a bustling metropolis, and barely an hour and a half had passed.

"I think I’m going to return to my bookstore," Aziraphale said, his gaze fixed on the loneliness of the street, not a soul to be seen. "That’s where Jim is, my cat. It’s always been my refuge. We’ll be safe there, it’s far from the city. I was going to take the subway, but now I think that’s impossible."

Crowley watched him in silence, feeling there was something Aziraphale wasn’t saying. But he didn’t push. Instead, he allowed himself to relax a little, observing how the blonde, always so confident, also had moments of vulnerability. His anxiety was evident in the way he kept spinning the ring on his pinky. Crowley couldn’t help but feel uneasy too, partly because somehow, Aziraphale’s words aligned perfectly with his own desire to return to what had once been his life, though that life was shattered now far beyond just a simple divorce or the possible loss of his job. Hell! The loss of the world as he once knew it.

"And you?" Aziraphale asked, turning slightly toward Crowley. "What will you do?"

Crowley took a deep breath, his expression softening. There was something about this blonde man, something that made him feel strange, but at the same time understood, as if he knew exactly what he needed to ask without words. His son, his life... the things he had left behind. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He needed to go back.

"I don’t know, but I know I’m going to find my son." he said, his voice now deeper, more determined. "One way or another, I’m going to find him. I don’t care what happens outside. This place isn’t going to stop me. It won’t. He matters more to me than anything else."

Crowley’s tone left no room for doubt; his decision was firm. Aziraphale nodded slowly, a look of understanding crossing his face.

"Then," Aziraphale said at last, with a faint smile, "I suppose we both have our own paths to follow."

Crowley, still with a weight on his chest, nodded. "Seems so."

They both fell silent for a moment, each reflecting on what was to come. The sound of the city continued to filter in from the outside, the world falling apart in ruins, but in that hotel, in that small refuge, there was a brief respite for Crowley, beside a man he considered an angel. At least for that night.

Chapter Text

Anathema Device was a completely different girl in that moment. Her dress, still soaked with the stench of dried blood and garbage, was now partially hidden beneath Aziraphale’s jacket. The garment, a warm light brown, wrapped comfortably around her waist, covering the stains and grime as if trying to shield her from what had happened. After washing her face and hands in Mr. Brown’s tiny service bathroom, her skin looked clean, though pale—the water could not wash away the horror she had endured. She had pulled her hair back into a high ponytail, and her glasses—now free of dust and dirt—gleamed under the lobby’s dim light. Those small changes were enough for her voice to resonate clearly in the room, asking questions, proposing theories, and crafting plans.

Crowley felt a tug in his chest. A sharp sensation, somewhere between pain and nostalgia. Without a doubt, the young woman would get along famously with Adam. The thought clung to him, filled him with a quiet fear he tried to drown with a long gulp of soda. He couldn’t think about his son now. Not without feeling sick.

The four of them sat in the lobby chairs, surrounded by an unsettling atmosphere. Outside, the sky had begun to take on the colors of sunset, casting long, distorted shadows through the large windows as what remained of the city turned redder—more so than its blood-stained streets and walls could show. The air was thick with tense silence, broken only by the soft hum of the vending machine, still working, offering fleeting comfort in the form of sugary drinks and protein candies. Crowley had emptied it of all the edible things, though the beverages needed to stay inside to remain at optimal temperature—as long as the electricity didn’t fail them too.

Crowley tapped his fingers on the plastic bottle, trying to ignore the ridiculous sting of annoyance he felt about missing his flight to Tadfield. He knew thinking about something so trivial was absurd, especially considering he’d seen a plane crash down into the park and heard the deafening booms of others falling who-knew-where. Even so, the sensation of being stranded made him furious.

“I’m telling you, it’s the phones, Mr. Brown, I’m sure of it,” Aziraphale’s voice rose, breaking the silence.

Crowley blinked, pulling his attention back to the conversation unfolding in front of him.

“That sounds insane, Mr. McFell,” Mr. Brown replied, folding his arms with skepticism. “It doesn’t make any sense. This must be the work of terrorists.”

Aziraphale clicked his tongue, clearly frustrated.

“Dozens of completely normal people attacking civilians with their bare hands? That’s terrorism?”

“God…” Crowley thought, watching how Aziraphale’s exposed forearms tensed beautifully as he clenched his fists. “This man is as smart as he is attractive…”

“I didn’t see any of that, sir. I think it’s an exaggeration to say this is—what? Some sort of failed government experiment or divine punishment?”

“Was it an exaggeration that made you barricade yourself on the hotel’s first floor, Mr. Brown?” Crowley interjected, his voice cold.

The silence that followed was heavy. The receptionist’s face tensed, but he had no immediate reply. The argument was cut short when Anathema spoke in a trembling voice.

“Please…” Her voice was soaked in sadness, a fresh, raw pain no one could ignore. “I think Mr. McFell is right.” she continued, swallowing hard, as if every word cost her great effort. “My mother… she was using her phone when it all began. And she… she seemed to forget who she was. Who I was.”

The crying returned, tearing through her voice. She clung to Aziraphale’s chest with desperation, as if she needed an anchor, something to hold her in the middle of the chaos.

“There, there, darling. Everything will be alright,” Aziraphale murmured, stroking her shoulders gently.

“How is anything going to be alright…?” she sobbed, her voice choked with anguish. “She… she’s… she’s…”

Crowley looked away. He knew exactly what Anathema was trying to say. Aziraphale didn’t try to make her finish the sentence. Instead, he rubbed her back softly, and then, with gentle resolve, leaned slightly to whisper in her ear.

“Come on, dear. Let’s see if we can find something to help in the back room.”

His tone was calm, but there was something in it—a kind firmness that left no room for despair. Anathema nodded shakily, clutching the sleeve of the jacket he had given her. Aziraphale helped her to her feet and gave Crowley a meaningful glance before guiding her toward the back room of the hotel.

Crowley sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. He couldn’t just sit there, waiting for the world to fix itself.

“I’m going to need something stronger than this crap,” he muttered to himself, tossing the empty soda bottle into the trash can by the elevator with a frustrated flick before getting up.

The “back room” was a generous way to describe Mr. Brown’s office. It descended a few steps from the lobby and, being nearly at basement level, received very little natural light. Only a rectangular window about eight inches tall let in the faint orange glow of sunset, casting long, ghostly shadows across the walls. Aziraphale fumbled in the dark until he found the switch, and with an electric snap, the yellowish ceiling bulb flickered to life, blinking a couple of times before stabilizing.

On the central desk, made of dark, aged wood, sat a practical-looking, masculine bag made of burgundy leather, worn at the corners. The brass clasps were tightly secured, and the crossbody strap gave the impression it had endured years of use without losing its functionality. Next to it rested a black landline phone, a relic compared to the modern devices that now lay forgotten and broken on the surface.

The walls were lined with shelves holding portfolios of various sizes, folders organized with meticulously handwritten dates, and thick notebooks labeled with places and hotel records. A small lockable cabinet made of varnished wood, its corners chipped with age, stood against the wall. All of this sat atop a frayed brown carpet, whose design may once have been elegant but was now stained and faded by the passage of countless guests and staff. The air smelled of old paper, dry ink, and a faint trace of dampness.

Mr. Brown appeared in the doorway with a grave expression, a furrowed brow, and one hand buried in his jacket pocket. He approached Anathema and held out a metal key, blackened by time.

“Here you go, dear,” he said dryly, nodding toward the small cabinet. “I keep the things some guests have forgotten in there. Maybe there’s something in your size...”
He shot a disapproving glance at the girl’s ruined shoes, barely held together by frayed laces and worn-out glue, stained by garbage, dirt, and what Brown hoped weren’t human remains.

Anathema took the key with a grimace, her lips forming a thin line, but said nothing. She merely nodded before turning toward the cabinet. Brown then turned to Crowley and Aziraphale with an even darker expression.

“Gentlemen... I need to show you something.”

He walked toward a second door on the right side of the hallway and opened it with a creak. On the other side was an even smaller, darker room, lit only by the glow of several security monitors. The black-and-white footage showed different parts of the hotel: empty hallways, a deserted front desk, a large hall with overturned tables and broken dishes scattered on the floor... but on one of the screens, the main dining room, chaos reigned in full force.

Three women, dressed in maid uniforms, were circling chairs and hurling them at the walls. Their movements were erratic, spasmodic, as if their bodies had forgotten how to behave in the real world. A fourth woman was crouched down, ignoring the frenzy around her, completely absorbed in a far more macabre task. She was sinking her teeth into the thigh of a fifth woman, tearing flesh with each jerk of her jaw.

Brown went pale, his face contorted in horror.

“They’re... my maids,” he whispered in disbelief. “I... I had let them use their phones while they cleaned.”

Aziraphale felt his blood turn to ice.

“My God... how many people are in this hotel...?” he murmured, unable to tear his eyes from the screen.

Brown swallowed hard and rubbed his temples, as if trying to wipe the image from his mind.

“Most of the guests were out of the hotel—everyone’s supposed to leave before noon so we can clean the rooms. We only serve breakfast and dinner. So they're out all afternoon.”

“And what are the chances those women come up here?” Aziraphale asked, slightly calmer.

“I locked the service stairs... but I can’t be sure they don’t know how to use the elevators,” he admitted in a low voice, almost afraid to say it out loud.

Aziraphale turned his head sharply toward him.

“Then the hotel isn’t safe,” he said in a thin voice, desperation creeping into his tone.

“It never really was,” Crowley murmured with a cynical smile, though his amber eyes reflected genuine concern.

And then, the lights flickered violently and went out. A sharp scream tore through the air.

Anathema. The scream had come from the back room.

Crowley and Aziraphale dashed into the hallway, hearts pounding in their chests as the darkness wrapped around them like a suffocating shroud. Each step echoed off the walls, amplifying the sound of their sprint. Brown followed closely behind, cursing under his breath.

“Anathema!” Aziraphale shouted, straining to see in the gloom.

There was no reply, only the echo of his own voice. The entire hotel seemed to hold its breath.

Then, in the distance, the sound of something scratching against wood made their hair stand on end.

“It’s okay, dear, the lights just went out. Where are you?”

Anathema was in a corner of the room, swallowed by darkness except for the small flashlight clutched tightly in her thin hands. Her breathing was erratic, labored, and each exhale came out in shaky bursts. She trembled, her knuckles white from gripping the flashlight, her eyes wide and staring at nothing. Her chest rose and fell rapidly—too rapidly. A sob escaped her throat when she felt a warm hand gently touch her shoulder.

“Anathema, breathe with me, sweetheart.” Aziraphale had knelt in front of her, his worried face lit by the dim glow of the flashlight. “Listen to me, everything’s okay. It’s just a blackout.”

Aziraphale pulled Ana’s arms away from her chest, holding her hands and making space for her to breathe. The girl’s panic was palpable, and at any moment, it threatened to consume her. McFell wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Look at me, Ana. I need you to tell me your name.”

“A-Anathema Device...” she gasped, barely forming the words.

“Good, sweetheart. Now tell me your age.”

“S-sixteen...”

“That’s right, very good. Now, where do you live?”

“I-in Boston... at... 35 Copley Square...”

“Perfect, love. Now tell me something you like to do.”

Anathema blinked, still trembling, but Aziraphale’s voice was like an anchor. She clung to it like a lifeline. “Reading mystery magazines... doing tarot readings... drinking herbal tea...”

“That’s very good, darling, very good. It’s just a blackout, nothing more.”
Aziraphale sat down beside her, and as soon as he did, Anathema threw herself into his arms, burying her face in his chest. The man wrapped his arms around her shoulders and began rubbing her back in slow, soothing circles.

“Breathe with me—come on, inhale... exhale... that’s better. I’m here. You’re not alone.”

Crowley, who had stayed nearby, watched the scene with a strange feeling in his chest. There was something in Aziraphale’s sweetness—in the way he held the girl, in how his voice sounded like a promise of safety—that moved him. He found himself unable to look away. He was like an angel. A true angel.

Mr. Brown approached cautiously, holding a bottle of water he had brought with him. “Here you go, girl. This will help.”

Anathema slowly pulled away from Aziraphale and took the water with still-trembling hands. She took a couple of sips and breathed deeply, regaining some control over herself. But with no electricity, the building’s air extractors had stopped working, and they soon noticed a new smell seeping into the room, smoke and coal.

“Do you smell that?” Crowley asked, his brow furrowing.

Aziraphale stood up, took Anathema’s hand, and led her out of the room, followed by Crowley and Brown. They climbed the stairs back to the lobby, where the blond peeked out through the glass door above their makeshift barricade. His face tensed as he saw what was happening in the street—smoke floated thick in the air, carried by the wind along the avenue.“There’s smoke everywhere…” he murmured, the alarm on his face reflected in the others’.

“Then it’s even more imperative that we get out of here.” Crowley said seriously.

“I found a flashlight, a bat, and some clean shoes,” Anathema said, still a bit shaky, but with determination in her voice as she pointed to her feet with the flashlight.

“Alright, darling, we’re getting the hell out of here,” said Crowley, already pulling on his jacket and looking at Brown. “Mr. Brown, do you have any kind of weapon?”

Mr. Brown frowned and answered Crowley with a forced calm: “That bat is the only weapon in this hotel. I’ve never needed anything else.”

There was a hint of pride in his tone, but also something that betrayed an underlying fear. Brown wasn’t a brave man, but he wasn’t a coward either; he was simply someone who had lived up until that moment under the belief that his world was unshakable.

He sighed and looked around as if searching for something else to offer.

“The only other thing that could be used as a weapon are the kitchen knives and utensils, but those are upstairs… nearly at the rooftop.”

Crowley nodded, spinning the bat between his fingers thoughtfully. Then, with a resolve that tightened his jaw, he spoke in a firm voice: “I’ll go up through the service stairs.”

Aziraphale felt his blood run cold. Until that moment, they’d managed to stay relatively safe, barricaded in the dim basement and the lobby. But the thought of Crowley going out alone through the halls filled with lunatics made his skin crawl.

“You can’t go alone,” he said, his voice a mix of pleading and reproach.

Crowley looked at him with a raised eyebrow, almost as if he were about to make a sarcastic joke, but something in Aziraphale’s expression stopped him. The fear was real. The blond licked his lips and stepped forward, lowering his voice as if afraid that something—or someone—might hear them.

“This is madness, Crowley. We don’t know how many are up there. In the hallways, in the rooms, or in the kitchen...” He swallowed hard. “Right above us is the grand dining hall. That’s where we saw the maids on the security cameras. If they’re still there…”

Just remembering it made Aziraphale feel a knot in his stomach. The images of those women tearing the place apart, one of them devouring another’s leg, still burned in his mind like a nightmare he couldn’t shake.

“The kitchen is empty,” Brown said hesitantly. “There’s no one there. I saw it on the cameras.”

“I’m going,” Crowley repeated, his voice sharp with determination.

Aziraphale felt a stab of frustration. How could he be so stubborn?

“Well, if you’re going, then I’m going with you!” he exclaimed, not giving him a chance to refuse.

Crowley clenched his jaw.

“Aziraphale—”

“No, Crowley, no!” he pointed at him accusingly. “I’m not letting you go alone. Not under these conditions.”

Crowley let out a heavy sigh, rubbing a hand over his face. He was tired, scared, and overwhelmed by the situation, but he wasn’t willing to argue with Aziraphale right then. And then, Anathema’s trembling voice interrupted them.

“I don’t want to stay here alone.” Her tone was fragile, but her face showed pure determination. Her eyes darted from Aziraphale to Crowley with restrained desperation. “If you’re going…” Her voice cracked for a moment. “If you’re going, I want to go with you.”

Silence fell over the room.

Aziraphale closed his eyes for a moment, feeling a torrent of emotions crashing inside his chest. He didn’t want to put the girl in danger, but he also couldn’t leave her alone in that gloomy and vulnerable basement. Crowley, for his part, frowned at Anathema. He knew it was madness to take her with them, but at the same time… it was even crazier to leave her behind with no guarantee of safety.

Mr. Brown, who had remained silent until then, clicked his tongue in annoyance, clutching the leather bag in his hands.

“If you’re going to do this, you’d better not take long,” he said gruffly, though there was worry in his voice. “We have an emergency elevator. It runs on a solar generator and only stops on the rooftop, the kitchen, and the dining hall...”

“Mr. Brown, please come with us, leave the hotel with us,” said Aziraphale gently, taking the receptionist’s arm. “Being alone is the worst thing you can do in these situations.”

“I have to stay at my place.” Mr. Brown replied, pain written across his face. “Ju–Justine… the head of housekeeping, she went to make a deposit at the bank but I lost contact with her when the police arrived and told me to close the hotel. She might need my help… I have to wait here...”

“Promise me you’ll leave with us when we come back, please...” Anathema pleaded.

“Just be careful, little one...” Brown said, ignoring the promise and handing her the bag.

Crowley tightened his grip on the bat and looked at Aziraphale with a mix of resignation and challenge.

“Alright. The three of us go, but we stay together. And if anything goes wrong...” His voice dropped to a dark tone. “We run.”

No one argued.

Time was pressing, and every second they lingered down there meant one more second the world above became more dangerous. Brown led them to a metal door at the end of the hallway beside the service bathroom. A small elevator opened with a faint metallic sound. It was barely big enough for the three of them. With a small nod, Brown gestured before the door slid closed.

The elevator gave off an old hum as it activated, its doors creaking shut slowly. Aziraphale pressed the button for the second-to-last floor with trembling hands, and the soft jolt of the start made them all hold their breath. For a few seconds, no one spoke. Only the quiet purr of the old mechanism accompanied them in the darkness.

Crowley leaned against the metallic wall, the bat resting on one shoulder, jaw clenched, watching the numbers rise slowly. Anathema hugged herself in a corner of the elevator, and Aziraphale kept casting nervous glances at the lights marking the floors from -1 up.

“Do you think it’ll stop at the dining room?” Ana whispered, breaking the silence.

Aziraphale shook his head, though his expression said otherwise.

“It shouldn’t… I programmed it to go straight to the staff kitchen. But this elevator is as old as the hotel itself...”

No one said anything else. They all knew that just on the second floor —only a few levels above the basement— was the dining hall, where the maids had last been seen, crazed, tearing apart furniture and… people.

When the number 2 lit up, the elevator paused briefly. A metallic sound, like a hesitant click, echoed. The three of them froze. Aziraphale held his breath. Anathema pressed herself tighter against the wall, and Crowley raised the bat, ready to strike at anything.

But the doors didn’t open.

The elevator hummed again, and the number 3 lit up, then 4. They let out a collective sigh, but no one let their guard down.
“What a bloody scare,” Crowley muttered, lowering the bat slowly, though not letting go of it completely.

Trying to distract herself, Anathema opened the burgundy bag Mr. Brown had given her. It was a practical, masculine bag, with well-defined compartments and a faint smell of old leather. Inside, a small brush and a phone charger. She found a dark leather wallet. She opened it out of curiosity, flipping through bills and cards until she found an ID. She looked at it for a moment, then raised her voice.

“Mr. Brown is married…” she said in a strange tone, almost guilty. “His name is Rupert. His wife’s name is...” A brief, heavy silence followed. “I hope she’s okay. Wherever she is,” the girl added in a low voice, more to herself than the others.

Then, the elevator stopped with a muted ding. The doors opened.

Anathema let out a sharp yelp. Aziraphale instinctively stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body, while Crowley stepped forward with the bat raised. The kitchen was… empty. Completely dark, except for a red glow coming through a large skylight in the ceiling. And what they saw from there was anything but reassuring.

The city was completely dark. Night had fallen without them noticing, as if the whole world had been swallowed by a curtain of shadow. The only thing breaking the blackness were orange tongues of fire rising where there had once been only urban life —buildings burning in the distance, abandoned cars on fire in the streets, toppled lampposts, and traffic signs turned to scrap. Thick smoke rose from the asphalt, coiling into the sky like a living creature, stealing the air and the moon.

From that height, everything seemed distant, unreal —but it wasn’t a dream. It was the end.

Crowley swallowed hard and stepped inside.

“Nothing… looks safe. Come on, quickly.”

They entered quietly. The air smelled of old grease, flour, and something rancid, but there were no recent signs of human presence.

“Take what you can. We don’t know if we’ll be able to come back here before we leave,” said Aziraphale, opening one of the pantries.

They searched with nervous efficiency, bread, cereal bars, dried fruits, canned goods. Anathema found some apples in a low-energy fridge and stuffed them into the bag without asking. Aziraphale, meanwhile, discovered a drawer full of kitchen knives. He pulled out two large butcher knives, shiny and heavy, and carefully wrapped them in kitchen towels. He handed one to Crowley.

“Here, in case the bat isn’t enough.”

Crowley took it with a tense expression, but his attention shifted when Aziraphale began improvising a belt from one of the tablecloths. The blond stepped closer with steady hands, sliding the cloth around Crowley’s waist to secure the knife in a makeshift sheath.

The brush of his fingers against Crowley’s shirt, the warmth of his hands, the closeness of his face to Crowley’s waist in that cramped space… Crowley went stiff.

“I can do it,” he said with a rough cough.

“You’re trembling, my dear” Aziraphale replied quietly, not looking him in the eye, and gently tightened the knot.

Crowley lowered his gaze, his face flushed in the dim light.

“It’s not fear, it’s… ngk,” he muttered, too softly for Ana to hear.

Aziraphale said nothing. He just pulled away slightly, holding Crowley’s gaze for one more second. A look full of unspoken things.

And then, from somewhere in the hotel, a dull sound echoed through the silence. A thump. Then another. As if someone —or something— had begun moving across the upper floors beneath them. Anathema swallowed hard.

“What if we’re not alone here?”

Crowley’s shoulders tensed.

“We’re not,” he said grimly.

And Aziraphale nodded, his eyes locked on the elevator doors as if expecting something  to try to open them from the outside at any moment.

“Then let’s finish quickly. And get downstairs before the darkness thickens.”

Aziraphale turned to Anathema, rummaging through the remaining utensils in the metal drawer. He pulled out a smaller knife—thin but sharp—and carefully wrapped it in a clean cloth. He handed it to her with both hands

“Just in case...” he said softly.

Anathema took it with a mixture of apprehension and gratitude, nodding before slipping it into her bag with slightly shaky hands.

Out of nowhere, a deafening noise sliced the air like a blade. A brrr-brrr-brrr that shook the kitchen windows. A helicopter.

Crowley moved first. With agile steps, he approached one of the tall windows and unlatched it. As he opened it, a wave of heat, smoke, and soot rushed in, forcing them to turn away and cover their mouths.

The night sky looked like a decaying mural—red, black, orange. Fire and shadow, smoke and destruction. Sirens in the distance cried like metallic wails. From above, the helicopter’s spotlight swept across nearby rooftops, casting long shadows like monsters dancing in the ruins. A male voice, amplified and distorted by loudspeakers, boomed from the aircraft:

“All citizens are advised to evacuate the city. The following streets are secured: Longfellow Bridge, Cambridge Street, Charles Circle, and Storrow Drive. I repeat: Longfellow Bridge, Cambridge Street, Charles Circle, and Storrow Drive. Discard cell phones. Staying in the city is dangerous. Phoners respond to sound and light. I repeat: Phoners respond to sound and light.”

“Phoners. That’s what they’re calling them,” said Crowley.

The silence that followed was deep, like an abyss. The helicopter slowly moved away, its light fading behind a thick cloud of smoke.

Aziraphale stepped closer to Crowley, his eyes fixed on the crimson sky.

“Storrow Drive…” he murmured. “It’s only four blocks away. We can get out of the city through there. It’s on the way to my bookshop.”

Anathema looked at him curiously, squinting through the smoke.

“Your bookshop?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, turning to her. “We can spend the night there. It’s safe. A small neighborhood, far from the city center… I live on the second floor. I have a rooftop garden. No one will find us there.”

Then he looked at Crowley. His blue eyes met the other man’s—trembling, but steady. He reached out and took Crowley’s hands gently.

“Please, Crowley… I won’t stop you if you want to keep going. But please… we need to rest. You need to rest. You need to be well. You need to be alive to reach your son.”

Crowley looked down. The smoke drifting in through the open window stung his eyes, but that wasn’t what was burning inside him. Adam.

A knot tightened in his gut at the thought of him. His son must be so scared… maybe running, maybe hiding. Maybe with Lilith… or maybe not. He knew nothing. Not about him. Not about her. Not about Tracy, his aunt who had been looking after him while he and Lilith worked. No one could answer. The phone was a danger now. A magnet for death.

He felt powerless. Like a father who had already failed before even getting there.

His chest filled with silent rage, with a dull despair. He wanted to break something. Scream. But instead, he just held Aziraphale’s hands tighter, as if he could anchor himself in that warmth, in that gaze that did not judge him.

Finally, he nodded.

“Alright,” he murmured. “Let’s all go to your bookshop.”

Anathema let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Crowley shut the window with a sharp snap and took one last look around the kitchen. Aziraphale double-checked the knives, the food bag, then gestured for them to follow.

They left the kitchen in a line, alert to the slightest noise, and approached the elevator. The doors opened without resistance. The same familiar, rusted interior greeted them, but now it seemed darker, as if the smoke from outside had already seeped into every corner of the building. They entered without a word, lit only by Ana’s small flashlight.

Crowley pressed the button for the lobby. The elevator doors closed slowly with a metallic groan. And the three of them descended together, wrapped in tense silence, ready to face the broken city and whatever remained of it.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, a thick, hot wind greeted them from the lobby. The emergency lights flickered with an intermittent electric hum, as if they too were on the verge of giving out under the chaos. Outside, beyond the dusty windows and metal shutters, the night stretched like an open wound, lit by the glow of red fires licking the rooftops and cars burning like nameless torches.

Aziraphale was the first to speak, in a barely audible whisper.

“Mr. Brown…?” he said, his voice trailing between hope and fear. “Mr. Brown, are you there?”

But there was no response.

“Sweettie, give me the flashlight.” Crowley asked, his voice dry. His body looked wound tight, like a spring.

Anathema handed him the flashlight immediately. He went ahead alone, skirting the front desk toward the small security room they had been in earlier. As he got closer, the silence grew oppressive, thick as tar. The air smelled of burnt dust and stale fear.

He opened the door.

And he saw it.

On the monitors, there was only one maid still in the grand dining hall, standing motionless in the same spot where half a dozen had been before. All the others had vanished. But that wasn’t what chilled him to the bone.

It was that she was still there, standing in the middle of the hall… staring directly at the security camera. Unblinking. Unmoving. As if she knew he was watching her now.

Crowley felt a cold wave run down his back. He slammed the door shut. He had to find Mr. Brown. He had to make sure he was still alive. He couldn’t be the only decent adult left in this hell, not after what they had just heard from the helicopter. He ran down the hallway to the back room.

And when he opened the door, the air left his lungs. One gasp was enough to make him stagger.

Mr. Brown’s body hung from the ceiling, suspended by his own belt tied to the light fixture. A trash bag covered his head. He had jumped from the desk.

Crowley stumbled back, tripped over the rug, and grabbed the wall to keep from falling. His eyes, trembling, fixed on the desk. There was a photo there, framed in simple wood—a woman with a kind face, tired eyes but warm. The same woman who had appeared on the security cameras.

Just above the photo, a wedding ring, gold, carefully placed.

Crowley doubled over and vomited into a corner of the room. The sound was brutal, raw, and echoed like a gunshot in the silence. From the lobby, Aziraphale shouted his name in distress.

“Crowley! Are you all right? What happened?”

“Don’t come!” he yelled back, voice broken, barely able to hold the flashlight.

He slammed the door shut and leaned against it for a moment, breathing hard, shaking. When he returned to the lobby, the flashlight in his hand trembled as much as his pulse. The light landed fully on Aziraphale, illuminating him like an apparition. He was pale, eyes wide, glistening with fear. He stepped forward immediately.

“What is it?” he whispered. “Where is Mr. Brown?”

Crowley didn’t answer right away. Behind Aziraphale, Anathema peeked in, arms crossed over her chest, jaw clenched. When he looked at her, something in Crowley cracked again.

It was Adam.

It was Adam when he asked if he could sleep in his bed during a storm.

It was Adam when he promised him nothing would happen, that Dad would always be there.

And now it was Anathema shaking, waiting for a truth he didn’t know if he should speak. But he couldn’t lie to her. Not to her. Not after everything.

He had never lied to his son.

And he wasn’t going to start now.

He took a deep breath, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said:

“He’s dead.”

“What…?” Aziraphale said.

“He killed himself.”

Silence fell like a curtain. Aziraphale stared at him, face slack, not understanding at first, as if the words made no sense. Until he felt it.

A tug on his shirt. He turned and saw Anathema. She had touched him lightly with her fingers, but she was shaking as if caught in the wind of a world that had suddenly collapsed. A gasp escaped her lips, and then a sob.

“Justine,” she said, barely audible. “His wife’s name is Justine…”

And then she broke down. Aziraphale wrapped his arms around her, as if his body could contain that sorrow. Crowley stepped away, as if he couldn’t bear the weight of what he had just seen or what he had just said.

And yet, he knew there was no turning back.

He knew the world was still falling apart.

And that somehow, the three of them were among the last pieces still holding together.

"Where's your bookshop?" Anathema asked softly.

She walked right between them, behind Crowley and ahead of Aziraphale. The group's silence was comfortable, almost fragile. Even though they moved cautiously, their steps were quick. None of them wanted to linger too long on an open street, no matter how quiet it seemed.

"In Malden," Aziraphale replied. "Once we cross the bridge, it’ll be about three miles on foot... a simple stroll, and everything will be tickety-boo."

Crowley let out a quick, genuine laugh.

"Tickety-boo? Seriously, Angel? What century were you born in?"

Aziraphale turned his head with an expression somewhere between amused and confused.

"Angel?" he asked, blushing visibly in the dim light.

Crowley froze, as if he hadn’t expected to be questioned. His lips moved silently for a second.

"I… uh… well, it's just that… with those grandpa clothes, and that cloud-like hair… those eyes that… ugh…" he stammered, then shrugged with feigned indifference. "If I can’t call you ‘angel’, then it’ll be Corgi. Or… I don’t know… Mr Waffles."

Anathema let out an explosive laugh she tried to muffle with her hand, but it was useless. The clear, sudden sound of her laughter broke the weight of the atmosphere like a flare in the fog. Aziraphale rolled his eyes but couldn’t help smiling. His cheeks were still flushed.

Crowley felt good hearing and seeing that. If Aziraphale was the one who offered comfort, tenderness, and refuge, he took pride in being the one who brought relief, a laugh to loosen the knots in their throats. He had always been like that, even with Adam. Especially with Adam.

The bat hung firmly in his fingers. He also carried his sketch folder under his arm, tied shut with a ribbon, carefully protecting his latest drawing: the Starmaker, his favorite. He had started to consider telling Aziraphale— telling him what he really did, why his pockets were always full of paper and graphite, of faces that didn’t exist and stars that would never shine.

Maybe, just maybe, he could convince him to go together to Tadfield. A small town, with no big highways or too many wires. Safer than Boston. Or Malden.

But his thoughts stopped abruptly. There, right in front of them, a crowd was moving toward the river. Hundreds of people, some carrying children, others dragging backpacks, walking in a neat line. On both sides, armed soldiers flanked the sidewalks, silent, serious, without giving a single audible instruction.

Crowley came to a sudden stop. So did Anathema. Aziraphale approached with a frown.

“We made it,” Anathema said with a shaky sigh. For the first time since they’d met her, her voice sounded relieved.

“Not yet, dear. But soon,” Aziraphale replied tenderly, placing a hand on her shoulder.

Crowley stepped up to one of the soldiers, who was holding his rifle with both hands, eyes fixed straight ahead.

"Hey… do you know what’s going on? Why are people freaking out? Is it safer away from the city center?"

The soldier didn’t look at him. He just replied firmly, “Too many questions, and I’m not authorized to answer. Keep walking.”

More people began approaching the soldiers with similar questions, looking for names, information, answers. But no one responded. The soldiers didn’t speak, didn’t move more than necessary.

Aziraphale shifted uncomfortably beside him.

"I don’t like this," he muttered, almost to himself.

“I have the slight suspicion that maybe,” Crowley said, lowering his voice, “just maybe, the military had something to do with this. Like a tech weapon gone out of control.”

Aziraphale shook his head gently.

"Or maybe… they simply don’t know any more than we do."

Anathema, who walked with her arms crossed over her chest, chimed in thoughtfully.

“We haven’t seen or heard a single lunatic since the sun went down.”

Crowley and Aziraphale looked at each other instantly. They hadn’t noticed it before, but it was true. Since night had fallen, there had been no animalistic screams, no attacks. Just the silence of the city and the steps of the evacuees.

And when they reached the bridge, they saw it. The ground was littered with broken cell phones.

As if someone had stomped them on purpose. As if they’d been hurled in rage. Some had shattered screens, others had been crushed by vehicles. The green battery light blinked weakly on one of them, like a firefly about to go out. Crowley picked it up in horror and hurled it into the river.

No one touched them. Everyone avoided them. The river stretched ahead like a dark mirror. The bridge was packed, but still moving forward. Boston was behind them. What lay ahead was uncertain. But at least they were together. They crossed the threshold of the bridge like stepping across an invisible border. On the other side, the air felt different. Less heavy. Less gray.

The low buildings and barely visible trees were silhouettes outlined by the night mist. But it wasn’t natural fog from autumn. Behind them, the city was covered by a dirty veil, smelling of burned metal and wet rubber. The wind had disappeared, and with it, all sound except for footsteps. Dragged steps, slow, uncoordinated. A thousand feet hitting the concrete with uneven rhythms, as if every person there were a sour note in a symphony of despair.

The people walked like specters.

Many had their heads down. Some cried silently, their cheeks soaked, their mouths tight. Others simply moved forward, their eyes wide, lips dry, the clumsy movements of those who no longer had the strength to feel fear.

Crowley watched, frowning. There were old people dragging broken bags, women with children in their arms who no longer cried, injured men with shirts soaked in dried blood. A couple of them had makeshift bandages made from torn T-shirts. And they all, all, had something in common: vacant looks.

No one spoke. No one laughed. No one screamed. As if horror had become too common to even mention.

Beside him, Anathema began to tense up. Her eyes flicked from one face to the next, growing more anxious. Her breathing became more shallow, as if the air tasted bad to her. Aziraphale watched her for a moment. Then, without saying anything at first, he placed an arm around her shoulders.

“Don’t stray from me, dear,” he said softly, but his tone was far from light.

Anathema looked at him, as if that gesture anchored her back to reality.

Crowley caught up with them, the bat still hanging from his hand, his frown deeper than ever.

“What’s going on?” he asked in a low voice, as if afraid to wake something dormant.

Aziraphale took a second to respond. His gaze swept over the crowd, his expression growing more troubled. Then he murmured.

“Look closely, Crowley. Tell me what you don’t see.”

Crowley raised his eyes. He looked right, then left. And then he noticed it.

At first, it was subtle, like a hunch. But then, impossible to ignore.

There were no teenagers. There were no twenty-somethings.

There were no guys with headphones hanging from their necks, no young couples hugging, no groups of nervous friends chatting among themselves. Just adults, elderly people, and young children.

And of the latter… very few. Very, very few.

The only teenager in sight was Anathema, walking with them as if she were an anomaly in the middle of the crowd. Crowley’s stomach clenched. A cold dizziness crept up his throat. He stopped mid-step and clenched his lips. He tried to swallow, but couldn’t.

“No… damn it,” he muttered. His voice was barely a whisper. “Where are they?”

Aziraphale looked down.

“I don’t know,” the blonde replied. “But they’re not here.”

Crowley felt the nausea tighten in his chest. He thought of Adam. Of his laughter, his drawings, the way he always made up songs for anything and the best games to share with his friends. He thought of Adam’s age and the Others. The age that now seemed to have been erased from the landscape.

A buzzing started to pulse behind his eyes.

“Do you think…?”

“No.” Aziraphale interrupted immediately, but not with certainty, rather with fear. “I don’t know. I don’t want to assume anything yet.”

Anathema watched them silently, swallowing. She didn’t understand everything, but she understood enough. Fear sparkled in her eyes.

The crowd continued moving forward. The bridge trembled slightly under the weight of so many steps, and the river below looked dead, motionless, as thick as lead. Boston was behind them.
And horror had new ways of making its presence felt, like through uncertainty.

They were nearing the end of the bridge when an adult man began walking behind them. He was short, chubby, bald. A shiny head like a billiard ball under the dim light of the street lamps that barely survived. He wore a dirty brown leather jacket and in one hand, a tattered book, warped by moisture and use. His smile was too wide. And in the middle of those yellowed teeth, a gold tooth shone like a warning. He approached from behind. Not in a hurry, but with the disgusting confidence of someone who feels entitled.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked, looking at Anathema.

His voice was sickly, slimy like the saliva of an amphibian. And his eyes scanned the girl’s figure with barely contained lasciviousness, with a calmness that froze the blood. The group ignored him. They kept walking. Aziraphale pressed his lips together. Crowley turned his head slightly, without stopping, sizing up the man with a glance.

The stranger frowned, annoyed at not being heard. But he didn’t stop. A few meters ahead, he reached them again.

“I asked your name, creature,” he said now in a more authoritative tone, approaching Anathema again.

She shuddered.

"Anathema Device," she responded in a low, almost automatic voice.

"Oh! Such a beautiful name..." the man whispered, licking his dry lips. "It means 'Blessed by God.'"

"On the contrary." Aziraphale intervened, positioning himself between her and the man with a polite but dangerous smile. "It means 'Exiled by God.' And if you’ll excuse us... sir... the young lady has been through a lot today."

The man squinted his eyes, still smiling.

"We've all lost someone today, haven't we, Anathema?" he said, completely ignoring Aziraphale. "Who did you lose? Your boyfriend? Your sister? Your mother?"

Anathema didn’t respond. She simply lowered her head and stood behind Aziraphale and Crowley, as if their bodies could protect her. But the man stayed there, stepping along with them like a wet, slimy shadow.

"I’m called Sandy," he said now, in a lower voice, as if sharing a sacred secret. "And today I lost many people from my congregation. But, you know? They’re in a better place..."

Aziraphale stopped dead in his tracks. His back stiffened as if a steel cable had run down his spine. Crowley felt the change instantly and raised his bat almost unconsciously. His knuckles were white.

"So, you should rejoice," the man continued. "The time of the Great Tribulation has arrived. Come with me to read, sweetling… it’s all here..." he caressed the cover of his book as if it were a sleeping animal. "In Revelation..."

Crowley felt disgust deep in his stomach. Of course, the man’s damn book was a Bible.

"I think that’s enough, sir." Aziraphale said, this time without courtesy.

But the man didn’t look at him. He stood tall — short, but carrying the fanatic, rancid authority of someone who felt entitled — and moved even closer to Anathema. She took a step back, shrinking.

"The vial of madness has been poured out upon the sinners!" he suddenly shouted, his voice trembling with sickly fervor. "And only the saints will see the light of a new day! Look behind you, little one! See how the dirty sinners burn in the city of sin!"

Anathema covered her ears with both hands, trembling.

"Please… stop…" she begged, her voice breaking with sobs.

And that plea was like gasoline to the fanatic.

"And from the smoke came locusts upon the earth, and they were given power like the scorpions of the earth. And their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it strikes a man..." he bellowed in a cracked voice, his eyes glassy and shining with ecstasy.

"Make him shut up!" Anathema screamed through her tears, her voice breaking with fear.

But no one stopped. No one. The others kept walking, immobile before the scene, as if madness no longer deserved attention. And neither Crowley nor Aziraphale could blame them for that.

"Take your hands off, girl," the man whispered, bringing his hands closer to Ana. "And listen to the word of God. Come with me. I’ll free you from the yoke of these men who take you with them to fornicate before the gates of Hell and offer you as sacrifice. Listen to my words!" He raised the Bible. "'How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! You are cut down to the ground, you who weakened the nations...'"

And then, as his hand touched Anathema’s arm, grabbing her with greasy, sweaty fingers, Crowley hit him.

A direct, brutal punch, filled with all the rage, disgust, and horror. The impact sounded like a whip. The gold tooth flew off in a flash. The man’s eyes rolled back.

And he fell. Heavy. Dead to the world. Unconscious.

Crowley stood there for a second, breathing heavily, with the bat still in his other hand and his fist trembling. Anathema sobbed silently. Aziraphale hugged her without saying a word.

The rest of the people kept walking. As if nothing had happened.

As if it were just another Tuesday in the end of the world.

Crowley stepped back, surprised at himself, but strangely, after the man lost consciousness, both Ana and Aziraphale seemed to relax.

"Holy shit..." Crowley said, holding his head, panicked. "He was a crazy asshole, but I knocked him out."

"Enough... my dear." Aziraphale said, holding his face between his hands, calming him as he had with Anathema. "He was a madman, and believe me when I say someone like him isn’t far from the telephones... He was terrorizing Ana. Besides, someone like that, a sack of potatoes, won’t be badly hurt from a hit like that."

He released Crowley’s flushed face with a proud smile and pointed to the man. "Look, he’s coming to. Help me get him off the road."

The three of them dragged the man’s body to the other side of the bridge, where the crowd was dispersing in various directions. Slowly, the man came to, muttering curses. They propped him against a café wall, and Aziraphale snapped his fingers in front of him, making him open his eyes.

"I... I was hit," the man said, rubbing his jaw as he looked at them with visceral anger.

"I... yes, I’m sor—" Crowley started, but Aziraphale extended a hand toward him.

"He may be a good human and feel bad, but I don’t," the blonde exclaimed. "You were terrorizing our protected one."

The man turned red with rage, tears falling from his eyes.

"Protected? I’ve heard ways they refer to girls like her, but never like that. You think I don’t know what men like you want with innocent young girls? I can keep her safe, pure, as it says in the Scriptures! 'They did not repent of their fornications, their sodomies, or their...'"

"Shut your disgusting mouth!" Aziraphale shouted. "Or else, I'll be the one to strike the next blow. And unlike my friend, who perhaps had the luck of not growing up among pious people and doesn't recognize the kind of beast you and your kind are, I did. I know what you're capable of. I won't hold back. I warn you... one more word and..."

The man let out a whimpering scream as Aziraphale raised his fist.

Anathema clutched at his shirt, pleading.

"Az... please, I'm fine. It's not worth it..."

The man stood up, hesitantly, adjusting his clothes. Aziraphale approached with a steel-blue look, the same one Crowley had only seen before in front of the depraved giant at the park.

"I'll give you some advice, 'brother'" Aziraphale said in a deep voice. "From now on, neither the police nor the politicians can protect your sanctimonious friends or you. You can’t harass girls at family planning centers, nor spit on couples in gay marriage courts..."

"Let hell swallow those abortion clinics and those sodomites living in sin!"

Then Aziraphale grabbed the man by the lapels and lifted him off the ground. Crowley was stunned. While he had assumed Aziraphale was strong, this display of strength, of courage, and of protection for them made his pulse race, stirring feelings for Aziraphale that he had never felt for anyone he had just met.

"Listen to me. Tonight, the earth is full of crazy telephones eating each other, hurting and raping whoever they can reach. And believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised if, if this is divine judgment, these demons want to start with the hypocritical Christians who sin in the name of God. Hear my words: your freedom of speech died at three o'clock. You better remember that and never come near us again."

He dropped him. The man stumbled and fell on his rear, but Aziraphale didn't move. He didn’t until Crowley held his arm, and instantly, he gave in to the contact.

"Let’s go, Angel... it's not worth it."

They walked in silence, until the lights carried by the bridge soldiers faded away. Far from the city, the moon illuminated the streets, bathing them in a pale, spectral glow. The trees swayed gently in the night breeze. The sound of their footsteps was the only echo among the shadows. Anathema held Aziraphale’s hand in a silent gesture of thanks, and no more words were needed.

"Did you really grow up with people like him? I don’t see the resemblance," Crowley finally said.

"My parents were pretty extreme with their religious upbringing. As soon as they found out that I... well, was as joyful as a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide..." Aziraphale’s smile faded. "Well, they sent me to a conversion camp... But the joke was on them. There, I met my first boyfriend, I ran away, and lost contact with them, who in turn disowned me. The last I heard was that my older sister had been mortgaged due to her church’s debts."

"And your parents?" Ana asked with empathy.

"In heaven... I hope." Aziraphale replied. "They paid a lot of money, thinking that a day like today would come. I hope it was worth it."

Crowley looked at him, and thought about how much he wanted to know more about Aziraphale, the feelings that surfaced in him every time their hands touched or their eyes met, how he should focus on something more than the premise that they both had the same interests in people, but above all, how grateful he was to someone, somewhere, for putting him on Aziraphale’s path that afternoon.

Crowley walked by his side, feeling the weight of the night on his shoulders, but at the same time something he couldn't explain, a strange lightness in his chest. The air was cold, but not as much as the sensation he had felt when seeing the man fall before Aziraphale. That strength his friend had shown. It wasn't just physical; it was something more, something that overwhelmed him. Throughout these years, Crowley had known fear, anger, and even witnessed hate, but he had never seen someone so unshakable. He glanced sideways at Aziraphale, who seemed oblivious to the magnitude of his own courage. And then he thought about everything that had happened, what he had left behind, what still awaited them. He didn't know how everything would end, but for the first time since the madness had begun, a warm sensation ran through his body. He wasn’t alone, not as long as Aziraphale was by his side. He couldn’t say it aloud, not yet, but something inside him told him that maybe, just maybe, he would find something worth saving in the midst of all this destruction, other than Adam.

Chapter Text

The streets near the bridge were completely empty and dark, but it was the silence that seemed to swallow them. A dense, almost physical silence that even muffled their own footsteps, as if the entire city had held its breath.

Whickber Street had a distinctly London air, with its wrought-iron lampposts, weathered brick balconies, and vintage storefronts where eyeless mannequins stood frozen in improbable poses.

It was that air of nostalgia, that reminiscence of his homeland, that had driven Aziraphale McFell to buy the building with his father's inheritance. Across the Atlantic, far from the murmurs of a family that could never love him, much less respect him, he found a corner where at least the air wouldn't judge him. Where he could walk around in a velvet robe without anyone spitting at him in the street.

Turning a corner, Crowley stopped abruptly. A wet, irregular sound shook him. Low growls mixed with animalistic gasps, followed by the tearing of flesh and bone. It came from a side alley, and it was unmistakable: the sound of hunger. Not human.

He instinctively raised the metal bat. Anathema and Aziraphale, without needing a command, went straight for the knives they had salvaged from the Old Carpet Inn. Just as they were about to move forward, Crowley extended his arm to block their path.

"Cover your eyes, Anathema..." he whispered, without looking at her.

"W-What’s happening?" the girl asked, her voice trembling.

"Just trust me... please."

"Take my hand, sweetheart," said Aziraphale, and Ana grabbed it immediately, squeezing her eyes shut and covering her face with her forearm. "Good girl," the blond murmured, his voice trembling.

Their footsteps crunched over the stained asphalt. The first scene was the mildest: a body hunched over another, as if asleep... until the faint moonlight revealed that the lower half of its face was missing. Someone—or something—had torn away the jaw and tongue, leaving the teeth exposed like a mocking skull. Beside it, a torso without legs lay like an abandoned puppet, with internal organs spilled out over the pavement. Human bite marks marred the liver, and fingernail scratches raked the split-open ribs.

Fortunately, the growling sounds were coming from a pair of stray dogs fighting over what remained of a young man. One was tugging at an arm, the fingernails still painted bright red. The other gnawed at a naked flank, growling fiercely, shaking the bloodied bones with animal rage. Viscera dangled over the asphalt like grotesque streamers, and a burst skull lay nearby as if hurled against the wall. The stench was unbearable—fresh decay, dried blood, urine.

Farther ahead, under an overturned van, the bare legs of another woman jutted out, spread at an impossible angle, her bare feet still showing pink nail polish. Her torn underwear hung from a side mirror. The air reeked of blood, fluids, and shame. Aziraphale couldn't stop the horrified moan that escaped his lips—the thought that he could have met the same fate at the hands of that obscene giant earlier that day still fresh in his mind.

A heap of bodies lay beside a dumpster. One seemed to be moving—until they got closer and saw it was just rats gnawing on human flesh, tangled among the exposed intestines. One of the corpses had its throat slashed wide open, and its mouth was coated with black ash, as if it had screamed so hard it burned from within. Crowley knew something had tried to burn it.

"Crowley, stop," said Aziraphale, his voice louder than he intended.

"What is it?" Crowley asked, staring at him. Anathema whimpered, still covering her eyes but trembling with fear.

"I'll go first. I need you to stay behind Anathema."

"But—"

"Dear, I know where we are. We’re almost there."

Aziraphale took the taser from his bag and placed it in Crowley's hands, who accepted it as if it were the most precious thing in the world—and not literally a potential lethal weapon. The blond stepped away from the center of the horrific scenes that had once been his lively, cheerful neighborhood. He tried not to put familiar faces to the bodies—or to identify them at all. It didn’t help much; a meter ahead, he abruptly lunged at Crowley and covered his eyes.

"Don't look," Aziraphale whispered, his voice hanging by a thin thread.

"A-Aziraphale..." Crowley trembled.

"Please, Crowley... I beg you. Wait here."

Crowley simply nodded, mimicking Anathema's posture—still and waiting for Aziraphale's signal to move forward. A few meters away, a blond boy no older than eight sat slumped against a wall, his expression frozen in horror—as if he had died from fear. But it wasn’t fear that had killed him. His tiny chest was split open, his lungs missing, and one of his eyes had been removed with surgical precision. Aziraphale grabbed a tablecloth from a wrecked restaurant and covered the child's body. It was the least he could do for the boy he recognized as the son of one of his fellow shopkeepers. The nausea was overwhelming, but he fought it down; he had less success with the tears streaming down his cheeks.

"Let's go. The street is clear up ahead," Aziraphale said, trying to hide his emotions.

"Can we open our eyes now?" Anathema finally asked.

"Yes, dear, we're almost there."

Crowley swallowed back bile when he saw the small body covered by the cloth, but forced himself to focus on the man who, to him, was the closest thing to an angel he had ever seen. On how Aziraphale had protected him from the infected, how he had risked himself countless times, how he had chosen to shield Crowley from whatever nightmare lay beneath that tablecloth—something that could have broken him far worse than anything else they had witnessed so far. He kept walking without looking back, as if forward motion alone could keep him from collapsing. Aziraphale clutched Anathema’s hand firmly, guiding her with gentle yet determined steps, his lips whispering prayers no one could hear.

Everything took on a dreamlike quality once they reached Aziraphale’s street, lined with much older, clearly less crowded buildings. The only visible chaos was across the street at the café, its tables overturned and glass shattered, as if horror had unfolded inside.

But then, occupying a quiet corner, there was a very elegant two-story building. A narrow structure with a sign above the entrance, worn by time, still readable if one made the effort: "A.Z. Fell and Co. Booksellers and Antiquarians." The golden letters were slightly chipped, and the dark wood of the sign looked as if it hadn’t been varnished in years. The wide front windows, dusty, were covered with thin metal security grilles, barely revealing dark reddish curtains hiding the interior. In the upper corner of one of the door’s windows, a crooked sign hung: Very Closed. No Opening Hours. The facade, made of light-colored stone blackened by the soot of a city that no longer breathed, still preserved its aristocratic air from times gone by.

Anathema let out a sudden squeal and crouched down. From the ground, covered in dust and dry leaves, she picked up what looked like a small baby shoe, white, with lace edges already stained gray.

"Oh God... Az... Don't tell me you..." she murmured, clutching the tiny item tightly, as if all the fear in the world could fit into it.

"No! No, dear, fortunately not..." Aziraphale replied, his voice trembling but firm. His eyes urgently lifted to Crowley, who was staring at the object with an expression that seemed to tear him apart inside. He placed a warm hand on his shoulder. "Dear, Adam is fine. If he’s half as clever as you are, he must be somewhere much safer than we are."

"Yes... he is. Much more than me. Or his mother. Together..." Crowley replied, barely a whisper.

Silence took over the group for a moment. Anathema gently set the little shoe aside on the curb and didn’t look back. Then Aziraphale took a deep breath and straightened his back, like someone who decides to move forward simply because there’s no other choice. With soft steps, he climbed the two stone steps leading to the entrance. From his bag, he pulled out an ornate key, inserted it into the lock, and carefully turned it. The door creaked slightly, just barely ajar. He stood on tiptoe, reached above the top of the door, and fumbled until he found a small golden bell. He took it down reverently, as if it were a relic, and set it on the step beside him, without making a sound.

Then, without needing to push, the door opened in absolute silence. No creaks, no groans.

"Welcome... home, sweet home."

The gloom inside greeted them with the unmistakable scent of old paper, worn leather, and dust suspended in eternity.

Aziraphale closed the door firmly, bolted it, and turned the key. Then he lowered all the heavy curtains, one by one, plunging the place into thick darkness.

Anathema, her hands steady despite her trembling legs, pulled a flashlight from her bag. The beam of light softly illuminated the bookstore’s interior, revealing shelves crammed with books stretching up to the ceiling. There were leather-bound volumes, dusty tomes with handwritten labels, and piles defying gravity stacked in corners and atop upholstered chairs. An old pendulum clock seemed to have stopped years ago, and on the massive wooden counter rested a long-forgotten empty teacup.

They moved through narrow aisles. At the back of the shop, a wrought iron staircase rose with outdated elegance, its thin steps and ornamental handrail spiraling like ivy. They climbed carefully, one after another, feeling the tension ease slightly with each step.

The second floor revealed a cozy apartment, filled with warmth. The air was scented with a subtle mixture of jasmine tea, beeswax, and old wood. A Persian rug covered most of the floor, and a wingback armchair with a knitted blanket sat in front of an unlit brick fireplace. On the mantel, a few framed photos showed English landscapes, and on a small coffee table, several books lay open with handmade bookmarks tucked inside.

Another staircase, this one carpeted in burgundy red, led to the top floor. The floor creaked slightly as they climbed, and the air felt even more intimate. There, a small hallway opened up with several doors: a bathroom with white-tiled shower and neatly hung fluffy towels, and two bedrooms. Everything was clean and orderly, as if Aziraphale had been expecting guests, though he would never have admitted it.

He stopped in front of a light wooden door with carved details. He opened it gently.

It was clearly his bedroom. The walls were lined with bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling, packed with perfectly arranged books. A large canopy bed stood with white sheets and heavy quilts, a couple of velvet pillows in cream and blue tones. A decorative oil lamp rested on the nightstand, and a carefully folded bathrobe lay over the back of a chair.

"You’ll sleep here, dear. This room has a lock on the door, so it’s the safest in case of... well..." his voice faded with a shadow of worry.

Anathema nodded silently. She entered the room on trembling legs, and her eyes grew moist at the sight of the bed, the cleanliness, the warmth.

"Thank you, Aziraphale..." she said with a trembling smile, and for a moment, just a moment, she looked like a child about to break into tears.

"Look in my wardrobe for some pajamas," Aziraphale said softly. "Later, I’ll explain how the shower works, and you can take a hot bath. We don't need electricity for that." He sighed and turned to Crowley, who was leaning in the doorway. "I... imagine that after everything we’ve lived through and seen today... none of you are hungry."

"I don't think I could eat anything right now, angel," Crowley murmured, giving a shy smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Anathema shook her head silently, hugging her elbows.

"Alright," Aziraphale continued, "Come with me, dear. You’ll sleep in the guest room."

They climbed together to the last room down the hallway. Heavy curtains kept the place in total darkness. Aziraphale moved confidently and pulled open the curtain on the window facing the street. The room, located at the building’s front corner, offered a broad view of both sidewalks.

He rummaged through an antique chest of drawers, pulling out a couple of dusty flashlights and a glass gas lamp, old but still functional.

"We'll use the gas lamp," he said as he lit it, filling the room with a warm, trembling glow.

Crowley carefully placed his knife, folder, and bat on a small dresser next to the single bed.

"Where will you sleep?" he asked without turning around, his brow slightly furrowed.

"I'll sleep downstairs," Aziraphale replied naturally. "I can’t allow either of you to take the couch when there’s a bed for each of you..."

"But..."

"It’s no trouble for me, darling," Aziraphale interrupted him with a tired smile, resting his hand on Crowley’s and squeezing it.

The redhead lowered his gaze, feeling the warmth of that simple gesture travel up his arm and into his chest, where his heart began to pound like a frantic drum. Such a simple touch, and yet, so deeply human amidst so much death.

The moment shattered abruptly with a strangled cry from Anathema at the end of the hallway. Both men ran toward the room. The young woman was kneeling on the carpet, her flashlight fallen at her side. In her lap, purring with blatant satisfaction, was a large cat with a gray back and a white belly, its fur clean and fluffy.

"I-I'm sorry," Anathema stammered, pulling her hands away in guilt. "He brushed against my leg and scared me..."

"Oh, my dear Jim!" Aziraphale exclaimed, falling to his knees as well with a choked sob. "You have no idea how much it means to me that you're safe..."

The cat responded by brushing up against his master's legs, purring loudly. With a small meow, he lifted his head and touched Aziraphale's face with his nose, seeking comfort and offering affection in his silent language.

"If... if it hadn't been for him..." Aziraphale's voice broke. "He knocked my phone off the table... and the screen shattered... I scolded him so harshly... but because of that..."

He couldn't continue. Tears welled up and streamed down his face uncontrollably as he stroked the cat's back, clutching him like his only connection to the past, to sanity. His body shook silently as he hugged the cat with desperate devotion.

"Thank you so much, Jimmy," Crowley murmured, approaching with slow steps. He placed one hand on Aziraphale's shoulder and the other on the cat's warm fur.

Anathema joined them. She knelt beside the man who had cared for them, who had opened his home to them without conditions, and gently placed a hand on Aziraphale's trembling back. For several minutes, no one said a word. They simply remained there, together, breathing the same air, sharing the same wound.

After that, the night rushed forward at a dizzying pace. Anathema went into the bathroom with an old pair of Aziraphale’s pajamas and a soft towel. She emerged half an hour later, warm, smelling of lavender, dressed in pajamas far too large for her slender frame. She and Aziraphale got rid of the navy-blue dress. The girl asked him to stay with her until she fell asleep, and only then was she able to cry freely.

She confessed that her mother had clawed at the taxi driver's face when the chaos began, that she had fallen unconscious after the crash, and that when Anathema tried to drag her out, her mother had woken up, screaming that she "should never have given birth to her," and tried to bite her neck. Terrified, Anathema had pulled a long nail file from the pocket of her dress —the one she had been fiddling with during the ride— and stabbed her mother straight through the heart.

Crowley couldn't finish his hotel water bottle after Aziraphale shared that story with him.

They also took some time to shower. Crowley tried to relax, thinking that Adam lived in a small town, that surely he would be safe somewhere with people willing to protect him.

As the water cascaded over his thin, wiry body, the scent of Aziraphale's soap filled his senses. It definitely smelled like him. The man’s warmth wrapped around Crowley deeper than all the horrors of the day. It carried him to thoughts where Aziraphale might smile at him, safe, alongside Adam and Anathema in a distant place where everything that had happened would seem no more than a terrible nightmare.

An hour later, Crowley sat in Aziraphale’s reading chair, a warm coffee cradled in his hands, while the blond man finished his tea and settled into his three-seater sofa to sleep.

They talked about the security of the building. While the ground floor wasn't all that safe, the apartment was much more so. Anyone trying to break in would need more than brute strength to get through the bookstore, and more than just tools to get into the apartment.

Aziraphale was half asleep, curled under a warm blanket, with Jim lying on his stomach, as they chatted about Adam. It was an easy conversation about how hard it had been to explain to a child what it meant to prefer men, despite once having loved his mother.

"It took me years to figure out how to do it," Crowley said, his hand near Aziraphale’s lap as he stroked Jim. "I was so scared he'd hate me... or feel betrayed. His mother was the most honest love I'd ever known, but eventually, it ended. What came after... was me discovering myself, maybe too late."

Aziraphale watched him intently.

"And what happened when you told him?"

"Adam just shrugged and asked if it meant we were going to adopt a puppy together," Crowley chuckled softly. "He was eight years old."

"He sounds like a good boy."

"He is. Brilliant. Sensitive. Wiser than me."

"I would have liked you to be my father, Crowley... Maybe I wouldn't be so alone across the ocean," Aziraphale said with a soft yawn.

"Well, I would have liked to meet you under better circumstances, angel."

"Why do you... call me that?" Aziraphale asked, losing the battle against sleep, lulled by Jim’s soft purring.

Crowley moved closer, sitting on the floor beside the sofa. He began running his fingers through Aziraphale’s curls, and the scent of vanilla and lavender enveloped him. He leaned in a bit more, and even in the dim light, he thought he saw those beautiful blue eyes shining with something close to longing.

"Because you really are an angel, Aziraphale... You saved my life. You saved Ana. You are..."

Aziraphale’s hand slipped out from under the covers and gently stroked Crowley’s blushing face, only inches away from his own.

"Would it be wrong if I asked for a kiss before I sleep?"

"Why would it be wrong?" Crowley asked with the first genuine smile he had managed since it all began.

"Because you barely know me..." Aziraphale whispered, his warm breath brushing Crowley’s lips.

"Az... after everything we've lived through... it feels like I've known you for about six thousand years," Crowley said, letting out a soft laugh.

Aziraphale laughed with him, but then they just gazed at each other. Crowley, wrapped in the warm embrace of his feelings for the blond man, who apparently felt the same, allowed himself to get lost in that connection. Just when he started to wonder if all of this was merely a common reaction to surviving trauma, Aziraphale gifted him a beautiful smile, tracing Crowley’s jaw and lips with a tender finger.

Crowley lost what little self-control he had left and kissed him, stealing his breath away. It was a chaste kiss, lips getting to know each other, expressing fear, frustration, pain, but also a fragile tenderness just starting to blossom between them.

When they pulled apart, Crowley was trembling.

"You should go to sleep, dear..." Aziraphale said with a pleased, sleepy smile, his eyes closing.

Crowley took more liberties than he truly had a right to. He kissed Aziraphale’s temple and stood up, taking the lamp with him.

"Good night, angel," he whispered, watching the cocoon where the blond man slept. He only left when he was sure Aziraphale was completely asleep.

But that didn’t stop Crowley from barely sleeping at all that night.

Crowley fell asleep shortly after the first light of dawn began to seep through the heavy curtains of the apartment. He had been tossing and turning for a while, sitting on the carpet with his back against the bed, unwilling to climb into it, as if the scent of Aziraphale’s sheets were a sanctuary he dared not profane.

The silence of the night had been almost absolute, a luxury he had forgotten. There were no screams. No pounding on the windows, no alarms, no crying. Only the distant hum of the suspended city, the murmur of the calm that precedes the storm. Physical exhaustion, mental fatigue, and the tension accumulated over a day that felt like it had lasted years finally dragged him into sleep. He fell into a disordered, deep, dreamless slumber, as if his body was finally reclaiming what survival had long denied.

He was awakened by a voice. It wasn’t loud, but it was urgent, trembling, close.

“Crowley…” Anathema whispered. “Crowley, please, wake up…”

He blinked, disoriented. His eyes felt dry, his lips sticky. A second later, the headache struck his temples like a hammer. He sat up abruptly, gasping for air as if emerging from underwater.

“How long did I sleep?”

“It’s past noon…” Ana said. Her voice was thin, laden with something Crowley couldn’t immediately identify.

He rubbed his face with both hands, trying to shake off the fog of sleep. The memory of Aziraphale’s kiss flashed briefly through his mind, warm and painful like a soft burn.

“Where’s Aziraphale?”

“On the rooftop…” Ana whispered.

Something in the way she said it made his skin prickle. Then, with a knot in her throat, she added:

“They woke up…”

Crowley frowned. “They?”

“The phone-crazies…” Anathema said, her gaze fixed on a point that seemed miles away from the apartment. “They were asleep… but not anymore.”

The room seemed to grow cold all at once.

Crowley staggered to his feet, his body still stiff from the hard floor and the hours of accumulated tension. He grabbed a jacket from the coat rack and threw it over his shoulders, following Anathema down the hallway in silence. He felt his heart hammering in his chest like a silent alarm.

They climbed the stairs without speaking, only the sound of their footsteps and the faint creak of the wood accompanying them. Ana paused at each landing, as if she were trying to hear something beyond the walls. But there was only that heavy silence.

Finally, they reached the door to the rooftop. It was slightly ajar. Crowley pushed it open and stepped outside.

Aziraphale was sitting by the edge of the security wall, which at that height covered his body entirely, holding a half-empty cup of tea in his hands. His slightly tousled blond hair glinted under the sunlight. He didn’t turn when he heard them.

Crowley approached, holding back the urge to ask if he was alright.

“What did you see?” he asked softly, sitting beside him.

Aziraphale didn’t answer immediately. He simply raised a hand and pointed east. Crowley followed his gesture.

In the distant streets, what at first seemed like a disorganized procession was slowly forming. People —many, far too many— were walking in vague lines. Some were alone, others clustered in groups, but all were heading toward the city center. Some were naked, others still wore dirty, torn, stained clothes. Some walked with their hands raised, as if touching something invisible. All of them had empty gazes.

“They were asleep. There was no activity overnight…” Aziraphale finally murmured. “As if something had deactivated them. But now…”

Crowley swallowed hard. “Did they reconnect?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said, lowering his gaze to his cup. “But this morning, around ten, they started moving. All at once. As if they heard a command.”

Crowley kept watching the scene. There was no chaos. No screams. Only that disturbing silence and the dragging steps of hundreds of bodies… bodies that didn’t seem entirely human.

“Are they… attacking?” he asked.

“Only if they hear noise,” Aziraphale said in a low voice. “But they don’t stop. They never stop.”

Crowley ran a hand over his face, watching the parade of the disconnected who no longer slept, knowing —the three of them knew— that the calm was over.

Then, out of nowhere, a group of the phone-crazies scattered, as if alerted by something no one else could perceive.

At first it was a faint murmur. Then, chaos erupted. Bloodcurdling screams tore through the air, more animal than human. Dull thuds echoed between the buildings. The crash of shattering glass filled the sky as if the city itself were crying out. Something, someone, had been found. And the rage of those creatures knew no limits. They were more than corrupted bodies; they were echoes of a lost humanity lashing out against anything still alive.

Anathema gasped and immediately fled back into the apartment, stumbling over a chair in her desperation to get away. Aziraphale didn’t run. He remained standing, as if terror had pinned him to the ground. He set the trembling cup of tea down on the small iron table. His face had gone pale. Crowley got up, still staggering from sleep and the throbbing headache that had struck him like a slap.

“What was that?” he managed to say, though he already knew the answer.

Aziraphale looked at him, eyes wide, as if he could still see the distorted shapes beyond the window.

“It’s been like this all morning… One person… just one, went out into the street. Maybe they thought it was safe. Maybe they couldn’t bear the confinement anymore. They found them. They died. If it weren’t for the fact that no one else from the neighboring buildings went outside… maybe the screams would have woken you sooner.”

Crowley pressed his hands to his face, rubbing desperately.

“I shouldn’t have slept so long… but last night… I just couldn’t fall asleep…”

“It’s alright, dear… it’s completely understandable…” Aziraphale tried to sound calm, but his voice was broken from within. “But tell me… did you see them on the streets last night?”

“No… completely empty. Same as when we left the hotel…”

Then, silence fell.
A deep, thick, absolute silence.
It wasn't just the absence of noise — it was the sensation that the world itself had held its breath.
No footsteps, no banging, not even the buzzing of a fly.
It was the echo of something finished.
They were gone, as if they had never been in that street.

"Exactly... do you see my point?"

Crowley swallowed hard, still staring at the windows as if he could see miles beyond them.

"I think we have to check... If the phoners only move during the day... I might have a good shot at reaching Tadfield. I just need to take a car and drive at night..."

"That's right..." Aziraphale said, but there was more in his gaze.
Something he was trying to say but couldn't.
"We need to know what Ana is planning to do... and I, I need to know what I'm going to do."

Crowley looked at him.
Really looked at him.

"Angel..."

Aziraphale tensed.
His face, until then composed, slowly cracked, like porcelain under invisible pressure.
Sadness pierced through him with painful clarity.
He lowered his gaze, and in the way his brows furrowed, the way he bit his lower lip, the slight hunch of his shoulders — all of it carried the weight of doubt and fear.

"I must apologize for my slip last night, dear boy... it wasn’t right... I..."

But Crowley had already moved.
As if the other's pain hurt him too.
As if the whole night — the terror, the sleeplessness, the exhaustion — had rushed into this single moment.
He crossed the space between them with a skin-burning urgency.
Grabbing the lapels of the soft, wrinkled blue shirt, so wildly out of place in the middle of an apocalypse, he kissed him.

It was not a clean kiss.
It was loaded.
With fear, with tenderness, with drowned-out desire.
It was the kiss of someone who feared they might not have anyone left to kiss in a few hours.
Aziraphale let out a muffled gasp, not of displeasure, but of surprise.
But he didn’t pull away.
He closed his eyes.
He surrendered.
Crowley pulled back just enough to breathe. His eyes were shining.

"Don’t apologize... never apologize..."

And then something happened that disarmed Crowley more than any frenzied creature running through the streets ever could.
Aziraphale smiled.
Smiled as if there was still a place inside him untouched by horror.
And that smile made Crowley’s heart flutter like a caged nightingale.

"Do it again."

This time Crowley approached slowly, tilting his head slightly, searching for permission in Aziraphale’s eyes before planting a soft, feather-light kiss on his warm, tender lips.
Aziraphale welcomed it without hesitation.
He returned the kiss with desperate sweetness, and in that suspended moment in the attic, there was nothing but the space between them.

And it was enough.

The kiss faded like a sigh, brief yet powerful, and in the warm silence left hanging between them, a high-pitched, insistent meow broke through with all the authority of ordinary life demanding attention.

Crowley and Aziraphale jumped apart instantly, startled.
The grey cat appeared from the darkest corner of the flat, walking with feline dignity, its claws clicking against the wooden floor, and meowed again.

"Jim..." Aziraphale murmured, his voice a mixture of affection and a silent plea not to shatter the moment.

The cat, indifferent to the emotional tension in the room, shamelessly rubbed against their legs.
It meowed again, this time more impatiently, and Aziraphale bent down to stroke its head.

"He's hungry," he said, almost with relief, as if the simple needs of the animal were an anchor to a kinder, more familiar world.

Crowley gave him a half-smile that faded slowly.

"At least someone still has the stomach to ask for food."

The afternoon crept on like an old cat: slow, silent, and cautious.
The sun slipped through the attic window, staining the edges of the world with amber.
The bookshop below remained wrapped in a strange, heavy calm.
The world seemed paused, suspended between chaos and routine.

They took turns sleeping.
Ana curled up on the sofa with a blanket that smelled of stale jasmine and fear, the kitchen knife she had grabbed still clutched in her hand.
Aziraphale stayed awake longer than the others, with Jim in his lap, reading aloud from a novel he wasn’t really paying attention to.
When he finally allowed himself to close his eyes, Crowley took his place by the window, holding a cup of cold coffee and watching the silent streets, repeating to himself that if anything moved, he would be the first to see it.

Nobody spoke aloud about the possibility that the phoners might move at night too.
But they all thought it.

Before nightfall, they climbed up to the rooftop with a cardboard box full of what Aziraphale had classified as "perishable food" — a brie cheese, several fruits, bread that was beginning to go hard, and a bottle of white wine.

Ana sat cross-legged on a cushion salvaged from the living room.
Aziraphale arranged small plates.
Crowley lounged on a garden chair, watching them with his head tilted as if trying to memorize the scene.

Despite the danger, the latent fear, and the unknowns, that shared meal on the edge of the end of the world had something sacred about it.
A small pact of life — a decision to keep living, as long as they could.

"This is madness. I never thought I'd have a rooftop picnic on top of a bookshop," Ana muttered, her mouth full of black grapes. "But... thank you."

"You're welcome, dear," Aziraphale said with a soft smile. "Even in an apocalypse, one must maintain good manners."

Crowley chuckled, and for a moment, he felt at ease — until, chewing his bread with cheese, the thought struck him: maybe Adam had nothing to eat. Maybe he was hurt. Maybe something worse.
They all fell silent for several minutes as the idea settled heavily in Crowley's mind.

Crowley was the first to break the silence.

"I'm leaving tomorrow night. At the latest."

Ana and Aziraphale looked at him at the same time.
He didn’t lift his eyes, just toyed with the empty wine glass between his fingers.

"To Tadfield," he added quietly. "If there's any order left out there... anything at all... I think I'll find it in that town. With Adam..."

He paused.

Aziraphale looked down at the ground, Jim purring asleep against his chest, oblivious to everything.

Anathema gazed at the sky, which was beginning to crash down, her hands trembling.

"I don’t know." Her voice was more vulnerable than ever. "My house is on the other side of the country. In Oregon. My dad works from home. He never left... but he always had that damn phone pressed to his face." She made a grimace between a smile and tears. "All the time, even when I talked to him. But... I want to believe he's okay. That he knew what to do."

Crowley raised his gaze and nodded firmly, as if that could seal the fate.

"You have reasons to think so. Sometimes you... just know. Like I know Adam is safe."

Aziraphale kept his eyes on Anathema, but his voice softened, as if speaking through her.

"I don’t know how I know. But I know your father is okay." He said, turning to Crowley. "And with all my heart, I hope you find your son. That they're okay. That you have a way back."

Crowley couldn't hold back the weight that crashed onto his chest. It hurt more than seeing the old man die in the street. More than any news of the world collapsing. Because in those words, that subtle tenderness full of hope... was the goodbye.

His heart broke.

"What do you mean?" Ana asked, barely catching the strange tone in his voice.

"There must be some military group heading there if it’s an important city," Aziraphale continued, not looking at her directly, as if fearing his gaze would confirm that he wasn’t going with them. "We can go back to the bridge, maybe find some information. If there’s an evacuation, they’ll know something. And I can get Crowley out of Boston. I know my neighborhood. I can still guide you to the road."

The room fell into a silence so thick that only the distant creak of a branch, swayed by the wind, seemed to survive it.

Then, Crowley’s grave and cautious voice cut through.

"And you, Aziraphale?"

Aziraphale gently petted Jim again, not looking at them at first. He finally raised his eyes, and his smile was faint, as if it was crumbling at the edges.

"I have nowhere to go. Except here."

And though his words were simple, they felt like a gravestone.

"Here?" Crowley repeated, furrowing his brow, as if the word made no sense.

Aziraphale nodded. His expression was calm, but his hands, still petting the gray cat asleep on his lap, revealed a slight tremor.

"This bookstore is my home. Not just in the literal sense. It’s... all I have. Everything else I’ve left behind."

Anathema sighed. "Aziraphale, you can’t stay here alone. It’s dangerous. What if they come back? What if they break in? There’s no law, no order... we don’t know how the telephonics behave when there are no stimuli."

"I know. But I’m not completely defenseless," he said with a hint of pride. "I have a weapon. Hidden in a hollow book, in my room. And the neighbors, the ones at number 38, had an armory at home. Gabriel, the head of the merchants’ board, never stopped bragging about it in the meetings. I could take a look, maybe help you get something if you don’t have anything to defend yourselves."

"Go out alone looking for weapons in another building you’re not sure about?" Crowley said, incredulous. "That’s the worst idea I’ve heard since this all started. The city’s burning, Aziraphale. Don’t you see? Those columns of smoke over there on the horizon? It’s only a matter of time before the fire gets here or you run out of food and have to leave anyway. And then you'll be trapped with those things."

"It’s true," Anathema added, leaning her head against his arm. "The telephonics... they could be hiding in houses during the day. Maybe even sleeping, if they still do. If you go in looking for provisions, you could end up facing one. Or worse: someone who still has their mind but wants to protect what’s theirs. There are too many variables, Aziraphale. Too many risks."

"I understand what you’re saying, I really do." Aziraphale lifted his eyes, his gaze almost broken. "But other than Jim... I have no one in this country. I’ve lost enough already. I don’t want to lose this bookstore too. I don’t want to lose what’s left of me."

The silence that fell over the rooftop was not comfortable. It was tense and sharp. Each of them knew they were trying to be gentle with their words, not raising them for fear of being heard by someone else. Or by something else.

Crowley ran his hands over his face, frustrated. He looked out at the street, the abandoned cars, the broken windows. Every corner spoke of ruin or collapse. And Aziraphale wanted to stay. For old books. For walls filled with past history.

"How can someone so smart be so damn stupid?" The phrase slipped out before he could stop it.

Aziraphale froze. Crowley abruptly stood up from his chair and took a couple of steps toward the stairs that went down. The wood creaked under his boots.

"Go to Tadfield without regrets," Aziraphale said, almost in a whisper. "I won’t stop you."

But Crowley didn’t respond. He descended the stairs without looking back.

The rest of the night passed in near silence between Aziraphale and Crowley. Jim, the gray cat, was the only one who dared to meow from time to time, seeking his owner’s caresses or sniffing among the food boxes with a soft purr. Anathema tried to keep calm, giving nervous glances between the two men, as if the space between them had become so fragile that even the slightest sigh could make it collapse.

Crowley didn’t return to the rooftop. He stayed below, on the corner sofa, feet on the coffee table, eyes fixed on nothing. Outside, the city seemed contained in a sigh. Most of the streetlights were off, the smoke from the horizon still swirling, like a bodiless beast breathing slow and deep. Aziraphale remained on the rooftop as if wishing someone would come up to talk to him, but not enough to do it himself.

And then, when there were a couple of hours left until dawn, the ground trembled slightly, and the silence was broken by the sound of engines. A noise that wasn’t chaos or disorder, but something different. Ordered. Human.

From the bookstore windows, they could see the low lights of a military convoy moving slowly down the main street. The vehicles didn’t make much noise, but the dull creak of the wheels on the broken asphalt, the faint metallic clink of rifles as soldiers shifted in the open seats, was enough to alert anyone still able to hear.

Three-quarter trucks were now carrying, in their covered beds, something much more delicate: people. Some families huddled together, faces peeking out from the folds of the tarps; others seemed like solitary individuals, hunched with backpacks on their laps, some bandaged, others just staring blankly with wide-open eyes. It wasn’t a triumphant army. It was an evacuation caravan.

In the cabin of one of the first trucks, a child slept, holding a teddy bear, while a soldier stood guard with a raised weapon. In another, an elderly woman held a photo frame in her hands, as if it were more valuable than any tangible possession. There were also doctors, it seemed, and a couple of paramedics with fluorescent vests, most with deep bags under their eyes and vacant looks.

Anathema carefully approached the window. Aziraphale came out of his room without saying a word. Only when he was beside her did she ask in a low voice, as if the moment deserved reverence.

"Do you think they’re heading south?"

"Maybe," he replied. "Or maybe they’re picking up anyone they can. Heading to a safe point. If there’s any left."

Crowley finally appeared at the foot of the stairs, his silhouette outlined against the dim bluish light that was beginning to shape the night sky. He didn’t say anything. He just crossed his arms, watching the caravan disappear slowly into the low mist beginning to rise in the street.

Silence returned, even denser after the passing of the engines.

Crowley ran down the hall of the apartment, crossed the door to the second floor, and descended the spiral iron stairs of the bookstore with quick, anxious steps. Aziraphale only took a few seconds to follow him, his bare feet on the cold steps, his heart pounding against his ribs.

"Ana, stay here! Don’t open the door until we come back," Aziraphale managed to say before disappearing down the stairwell.

There was no need for words between them. Crowley looked at him once, in the dim blue light, and Aziraphale understood immediately. With trembling fingers, he searched for the key in the pockets of his robe, turned the doorknob of the bookstore’s main door, and pushed it open.

The street stretched out before them, crossed by the military caravan moving slowly, almost solemnly. Crowley went out first. He raised a hand in the air.

"Wait!" he shouted forcefully.

Two soldiers stopped. One of them stepped forward, weapon raised, pointing it at them without hesitation. Aziraphale immediately raised both hands, Crowley did the same, though he huffed with annoyance as he did.

"They're clean," said the other soldier, who wore a device hanging from his chest, with a screen that blinked green as it scanned them. "No signs of alteration, no internal vibrations. They're safe."

"What's going on?" Aziraphale asked.

"We've been ordered to evacuate the city," the soldier replied, dry but not hostile. "You must come with us."

"Where are you taking us?" Aziraphale asked.

"We have secure military facilities for our citizens."

"Tadfield and Portland," Crowley murmured in a low voice, as if clinging to those names. "How are those places?"

The soldier looked at him, assessing whether to answer. It was his partner who spoke, in the voice of a young man.

"We don't have clear news from Oregon, sir. Communications with the West Coast are unstable or completely down. But... from what we know, small towns like Tadfield have been less affected by the situation. The low population density has helped reduce casualties."

"The phones...?" Aziraphale asked, barely a whisper.

"They work under the light of the sun," explained the younger one, lowering his weapon a little as if recognizing the fatigue on their faces. "At night, they go into a catatonic state. We don't know why. We can't give more details."

"Come with us," said the tougher one, placing a firm hand on Aziraphale's shoulder.

"No..." Aziraphale replied, lowering his hands but not pulling away. "Not now."

The soldier huffed in frustration but didn't insist. He looked toward the nearest truck and then spoke quickly, as if he were tired of repeating the same speech to half the city:

"You have until the day after tomorrow to evacuate. Roosevelt School, sector B. We'll be there from dusk until 4:00 AM. After that, there will be extreme sanctions."

Both men fell silent. The soldier who seemed to be in charge turned away disinterested, returning to his place in the caravan. But the younger one stayed for a second longer. He lowered his weapon completely and looked at them with sincerity.

"Come tonight," he said softly. "We won't pass through this street again tomorrow. But... you know where we'll be."

"What will happen to those who don't leave the city?" Crowley asked, straightforwardly.

The young man swallowed, as if the words tasted like rust.

"The military government has ordered to purge the big cities, sir. I can't give you more information."

And with that, he turned and ran to catch the last truck, which was already pulling away with its low lights and tires rumbling on the pavement.

Without saying anything, both returned to the bookstore. The door closed behind them with a sharp click, sounding like a lock in their hearts.

"We'll go to Gabriel's house tomorrow night, and then... we get out of here," Crowley said, his voice dry and determined, like a sentence.

Aziraphale opened his mouth, as if about to respond, but no sound came out. He just stood there, petting Jim softly in his lap.

"I think that's fine. If no other neighbor has already looted it," Ana said, shrugging.

"That's a possibility," murmured Aziraphale. "I was in his apartment once... It has emergency stairs, we could use them if the main door is compromised."

"Then it's decided," Crowley said sharply. "We'll go to Seraph's house. I don't plan on staying to watch them purge this city. I need to get to Tadfield as soon as possible."

"So, should I go to Portland?" Anathema asked, her voice quiet, barely a breath between her lips.

Crowley turned to her, his eyes tired but not cruel.

"Dear... it's not safe to travel across the country. If they're purging Boston, they'll do the same with Portland. Your father probably already evacuated, and if you do too, you might get some information about him."

"I don't want to stay alone..." Ana whimpered, and her words cracked just before breaking into tears.

"Oh, dear..." murmured Aziraphale, trying to approach, but she turned her gaze away.

Her eyes locked with Crowley's.

"I'll go with you, Crowley..." she said in a thin voice, wet with tears. "If I can't go to Oregon... and if we can't stay here... I'd rather go with you."

Crowley froze for a moment, surprised, as if he hadn't expected those words. Then he wrapped his arms around her, holding her with an unusual tenderness. He squeezed her tightly, recognizing in her the same fear and loneliness he had been carrying for weeks.

"Thank you," he whispered against her hair.

But when they pulled apart, both looked toward Aziraphale.

The bookseller didn't look at them, but his profile betrayed a sobbing pout. He just continued to stroke Jim, who purred obliviously, as if the world weren't falling apart. Then he stood slowly, as if his bones ached, and walked toward the kitchen without saying anything, without looking back.

"Az..." Ana pleaded, her eyes tearful.

"Give him time..." whispered Anthony Crowley, looking toward the hallway where Aziraphale had disappeared like a white shadow.

He stood there, rooted, as if something inside him were slowly breaking apart.

Because that was the truth, he had found it. He had found someone who had not only saved him in a city falling to pieces, but also managed, with his sweet clumsiness and absurd stubbornness, to make him believe for a few hours that maybe the world wasn't entirely lost.

And now he saw him walk away, as if that world were claiming him back.

By the time the dawn of a new day broke on the horizon, a pale strip tinting the gray of the night to blue, Anathema Device was deeply asleep in the guest room. Crowley tried to lift her to take her to Aziraphale's bed, thinking she might be more comfortable there, but she murmured a refusal somewhere between consciousness and sleep. Without insisting, he gently closed the door, making sure his footsteps wouldn't disturb the little rest they still had.

Aziraphale was in the bookstore, finishing securing the windows, nailing each board to the shelves he had dismantled with that meticulous gesture that characterized him. They met on the stairs, one going up, the other coming down, their eyes clashing in a moment of silent vulnerability.

"Angel..." Crowley whispered, as if the name itself could hold the moment.

"Crowley..." Aziraphale replied, his voice tinged with sadness, though he still managed to give a trembling smile. "Darling... you should rest."

"You too. Your room is free. I think it's fair that you use it."

"You're my guest," Aziraphale insisted softly as they both entered the apartment and he locked the door. "Please, rest. I'll take the first watch."

But neither of them moved. They wandered around the living room like ghosts trapped in the same loop of indecision. Each one waiting for the other to speak, to propose something. Their soft steps on the carpet, the distant creak of a piece of furniture settling from the change in temperature, and between them, a silence as thick as the fog that was starting to dissipate outside. Finally, Crowley dropped onto the three-seat couch, exhaling in frustration.

"Why are you so stubborn...?" asked McFell from the shadows.

"Are you the expert on this matter?" Crowley responded dryly. "Come with us, Aziraphale, you and Jim... we'll have a better chance of getting to a safe place if we're together..."

"It's feasible, and I agree that you should take Jim... but I won't leave this bookstore, my life is these books."

"Books? They were written by dead people, Aziraphale! And if you stay here, you'll end up the same!"

Aziraphale widened his eyes, offended, and the blush crept up his face like an unexpected fire.

"I-I... how dare you...?" he stammered, his voice tight with contained emotion. "Do you think it's easy for me to make a decision in this situation? I understand that you have reasons to live, a place to go... but I don't. This is all I have, Crowley. Everything."

Tears began to slide down Aziraphale's cheeks with the cruel delicacy of a confession. And Crowley then felt the weight of his own words, of the invisible wounds, and of the broken world between the two of them.

Aziraphale turned in silence and climbed the stairs sobbing. But Crowley couldn't let him go. He followed him up, his heart pounding against his chest as if he knew he was about to cross an irreversible threshold. Just as Aziraphale opened the door to his room, Crowley reached out, stopping him with a firm touch on his shoulder, and then with the other hand, cupped his cheek. He turned him toward himself, with a gesture more tender than impulsive, and stole a desperate kiss.

"What's wrong with you...?" Aziraphale exclaimed, pulling away with shallow breaths.

"It's a lie..." Crowley murmured, his warm breath brushing the wet skin of Aziraphale's tears.

"What?"

"Now you also have Ana... and me. Come with me, Aziraphale. Come to Tadfield, and then to wherever is safe. I can't offer you a bookstore full of your most prized possessions, or a warm apartment above that shop to call home... but I can give you all of me. If you think that's enough."

"We barely know each other..." Aziraphale replied with a wounded whisper, and still, the tears kept rolling down his cheeks.

"I've been through more with you than with anyone else. I want to be with you, Aziraphale. As much as you want me..."

Aziraphale hid his face behind his hands but then exhaled the air from his lungs, stepped toward Crowley, and kissed him, not gently, but with a ferocity that broke all that had been contained. It was a kiss that intensified, full of pain and desire, fear and surrender. He pushed Crowley into the room, slammed the door shut with a dry click, and turned the key.

Aziraphale's hands searched Crowley's face, traced it as if he needed to memorize it by touch. Their bodies met clumsily. Crowley slid his fingers down the blonde's neck, pulling him closer. Aziraphale moaned under the pressure, a faint sound that became music at dawn.

The room, dim and warm, seemed to exist only for them. Every inch of distance was erased by their hands. Crowley unbuttoned the first button of Aziraphale's shirt, then the second, and all the others, never stopping the kiss. Aziraphale's fingers trembled over Crowley's black jacket, but they didn't stop. They shed their layers of clothing, which fell to the floor in a silent dance, until only they remained, skin against skin, breaths entwining.

There were no words. Only sighs, the brush of lips, hands caressing each other's warmth, bodies meeting as if they had been made to match in that instant. They staggered toward the bed and fell onto the pillows.

"I need you, Angel..." Crowley whispered against the skin of the blonde's neck. "Not just now... I need you to move forward..."

He let out a muffled groan when he felt Aziraphale's erection brush rhythmically against his own. The blonde took both in his hands and stroked them in unison. Aziraphale dropped his head onto Crowley's shoulder, seeking refuge, and Crowley wrapped him in his arms with a softness that contrasted with the passion that burned between them. They kissed again, slower this time, as Aziraphale straddled Crowley's thin hips without stopping to sway. Aziraphale reached for the drawer by the bed and took out a white bottle with a dispenser. Crowley rested his head on the pillows, letting himself be carried by the sensation.

A voice in his head slipped through the moans of pleasure, asking if it was wise to surrender to a complete stranger, if it was wise to do so when the world was ending, if it was wise to offer Aziraphale anything more than promises he wasn't sure he could keep.

The viscous sensation of the lubricant pulled him out of his reverie and dragged him back into Aziraphale's arms. The way he touched both of them. Crowley's golden eyes met Aziraphale's blue ones, and he saw himself completely enchanted in them.

Aziraphale's silhouette became golden, outlined by the morning light streaming through the window. He glowed like an angel, just as he was in spirit.

It was in that moment that Crowley realized he was falling in love with Aziraphale at a dizzying speed. He kissed his soft lips while whispering his pleasant feelings and soft sensations.

Aziraphale's warm hands felt like an embrace on his skin as he lost control while stroking them. It was like staring directly at the sun. They swayed together until they felt on the edge of orgasm, then they fell, practically at the same time, painting each other's chests with the other's seed.

And as the sun began to cast its first golden ray on the wooden floor, their chests heaving and their bodies still entwined, they knew without saying it that they had crossed an invisible line together. That there was no turning back. But maybe, just maybe, that wasn't something to fear.

It was hope. Crowley kissed his clavicle, his shoulder, the hollow of his neck as if he could write a promise there. Aziraphale trembled, but not from fear. It was something else. Something bigger. More human.

In the middle of the end of the world, they had found each other.

And for one morning, maybe the last, maybe the first of many, there was no need to escape.

Just to be together.

Just to be them.

Chapter Text

The world was bathed in orange and gold. The sunset light filtered through the curtains suspended in the air, caressing the contours of the room. Crowley woke up first, although his consciousness still anchored him to the world of dreams. Aziraphale’s warm, naked body, almost on top of him and wrapped in rumpled sheets, was breathing against his chest with the calm of someone who had left the end of the world behind for a few hours, forgetting everything.

Crowley watched him as he slept. How his fingers rested open on the skin of his belly and his hair, touched by the light filtering from outside, burned like a halo. He was beautiful.

A part of him wanted to stay like that. To cling to that moment with tooth and nail, to memorize Aziraphale’s scent of old paper and expensive soap and sleep by his side forever. He still felt his skin sensitive, marked by the morning they had shared, as if his soul had softened from loving so much, and he couldn’t help but press a chaste kiss between the parted lips of the sleeping blond.

Aziraphale slowly opened his eyes and smiled at him. Just a little. Barely a trembling curve on his swollen lips.

"Good afternoon, Angel..." Crowley whispered, caressing the pale curve of Aziraphale’s back.

"Good afternoon, dear…" said Aziraphale, framing his face with his fingers, lovingly tracing the lines of expression on Crowley’s face. And without saying anything, he reached for him again.

The kiss was slow. Aziraphale’s hands moved over his body as if trying to relearn it, to trace it with his fingertips like a map. Crowley leaned over him, letting the weight of his body speak for him. He kissed his neck, the line of his collarbone, and his chest while Aziraphale arched his back, surrendering.

Only the sound of skin brushing, muffled sighs, and the creak of the sheets could be heard as they tangled up again. Aziraphale rolled in Crowley’s arms, spreading his legs as he lay face down with his face buried in the pillows, barely showing a flirty smile Crowley wanted to devour.

The redhead found the lube among the sheets and poured it carelessly between his fingers, warming it. He got on his knees and began stroking his own length with one hand, but when he slid the other toward Aziraphale’s hole, pressing in slow circles, a moan escaped his throat at the sight of the bookseller arching his back, presenting his round ass with a growl of urgency.

One finger slipped inside Aziraphale while Crowley watched, wrecked, touching himself as he penetrated his angel, who muffled his moans in the pillow but moved in sync with Crowley’s motions.

"Another… I need another finger…" Aziraphale murmured, moving his hips in search of more friction.

"Yeah… you just have to ask for it with your pretty mouth, Angel," Crowley murmured, his voice an octave deeper. He inserted a second finger with that animal urgency to cling to each other, to anchor themselves together as if the rest of the world was unraveling at the foot of the bed.

And then, just as it seemed Aziraphale was ready to take him properly, a scream tore through the air.

A sharp, painful scream the men recognized immediately. Crowley sat up with a jolt, his heart stumbling in his chest.

"Anathema," Aziraphale murmured, pulling away from him.

Reality came crashing back like a bucket of cold water. They ran to get dressed, stumbling over the clothes scattered on the floor. Crowley yanked on his pants without thinking, uncomfortable from the hard erection he had to shove into his jeans. He threw on his shirt while Aziraphale tied a robe over a pair of tartan pajama pants with an elastic waistband.

When they reached the main bedroom, Anathema was twisted in the sheets, eyes shut tight, words choking in her throat.

"No! Don’t leave me… don’t leave me alone…"

Aziraphale knelt beside the bed and took her hand gently, murmuring comfort. Crowley stood frozen, tense, feeling how that artificial peace they had built in the guest room was beginning to crack.

Ana awoke with a spasm, gasping, and the first thing she saw was Aziraphale’s face. She calmed down a little, enough to speak.

"It was the city… everything was burning. My mom ran out in flames and left me completely alone. You… you weren’t there."

Crowley swallowed hard. He had been there, and it hadn’t been a dream. The smoke. The screams. The city in flames. Death.

"It won’t happen again. We won’t go anywhere without you," said Aziraphale in that sweet voice of his, so full of certainty it almost hurt.

"We promise," Crowley added. And he meant it.

Night was falling, slow but steady, as Crowley and Aziraphale prepared in the kitchen. The shadows stretched across the floor like black tongues, and the sky turned deep blue with stars on the horizon. The city lights didn’t come back on, and that was the sign to leave Boston behind.

Crowley filled his pockets with essentials, prepared Aziraphale’s loaded revolver and bullets. He grabbed a flashlight, the taser, and his bat. Aziraphale unfolded an old map of his neighborhood on the table, his fingers marking the way to Gabriel’s street.

"Gabriel lived just two streets down. He had a safe in his office. He always said if the government fell, he’d be ready for the resistance."

"Charming guy," Crowley muttered sarcastically, inspecting the long knife he had taken from the hotel kitchen drawer. "You think he kept weapons in there?"

"I’m pretty sure. He showed them off more than once at his dinner parties. And if not, at least we can look for more supplies."

Crowley looked up and stared at him. Aziraphale looked like someone else. Hair still tousled, cheeks flushed, and a determined expression. He looked more beautiful than ever.

"Ready to break into your paranoid ex-neighbor’s house?" Crowley asked playfully, and Aziraphale allowed himself a smile.

"I hope he’s still my neighbor, dear… Besides, isn’t this exactly what you used to do before the world fell apart?"

Crowley chuckled quietly. "Maybe. But doing it together sounds way more fun."

They grabbed flashlights, gloves, tools. The air was cold, with that electric smell that precedes disaster. Crowley handed Aziraphale his gun, and their fingers lingered together a moment before Aziraphale secured the revolver tightly in the leather holster on his belt. Crowley cursed inwardly at how damn sexy his angel looked with a weapon at his waist.

Anathema stayed in the bookshop, safe among ancient walls and the scent of paper. She packed backpacks with a complete mental list: quick changes of clothes, canned goods, protein bars, maps of the whole country, water purification tablets, a flashlight for each of them, batteries, a knife and can opener, thermal blankets.

"For Jim too." she said as she folded a small blanket into a cat carrier backpack with mesh openings and side pockets stuffed with dry food.

Crowley gave her one last look before heading out into the street. Ana was safe, and he was certain Adam was too, wherever he was. He spoke the promise to himself among the warm lights and echoes of a borrowed refuge.

They left the apartment in silence, descending the stairs to the street. And they walked into the darkness of the night in silence, not looking too long at the shadows dancing in the shattered storefronts.

When they reached Gabriel’s door, Crowley examined it closely. It was a strong, reinforced door, and brute force wouldn’t be enough. He pulled the lockpicks from the inside pocket of his coat and offered them to Aziraphale with a crooked smile.

"Care to do the honors, angel?"

Aziraphale took them without hesitation.

"It would be my pleasure."

And as the click of the lock echoed in the shadows, Crowley thought that maybe there was still hope in breaking into a stranger’s home.

They burst through the front door, moving like shadows. Crowley followed behind Aziraphale, covering him. Not because he doubted him, but because something in his chest demanded to always keep him in sight. Always within reach. In the entrance hall, a framed photo miraculously remained hanging. The beam of Crowley’s flashlight landed on it, revealing cruel details. A couple. He, tall, square-jawed, with violet eyes that always seemed to judge with arrogance. Everything about his demeanor screamed default American. She, on the other hand, was small, with dark hair and a sharp grimace on her face.

They were smiling on a beach, probably a honeymoon.

"Bee and Gabriel," Aziraphale murmured.

Crowley nodded. "They looked happy."

"They are. I hope," said Aziraphale, walking toward a half-open door.

The kitchen was a battlefield. Twisted ladles on the floor, plates shattered into pieces, and the table overturned with a broken leg. There were food remnants and empty bottles rolling against the walls. Everything spoke of a fight that ended in violence. Or fear. Or both.

They reached the office at the end of the hallway. The doorknob was stained.

Crowley didn’t have time to warn him. Aziraphale stepped in first and stifled a cry. Crowley caught up in two steps, and then he saw it too.

Gabriel was slumped against his desk. His face—or what remained of it—was a grotesque mask of torn flesh. Dried blood covered the carpet like a thick lake.

One eye was open, bulging, and the other was gone.

Crowley felt nauseous. Not because of the blood, but because of the weight that fell in the air. The silence that came after.

"Was it her?" he asked, not needing to say names.

Aziraphale swallowed hard. He leaned forward slightly, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. "It’s likely. Bee… she was a small woman. But she had incredible strength, beyond her nature."

Crowley froze, staring at the body. Gabriel had a revolver in his right hand. Aziraphale crouched carefully and took it from him. He inspected it with pressed lips.

"It’s loaded. All bullets are intact."

"Then he didn’t try to defend himself," murmured Crowley. A pang of empathy stabbed between his ribs.

Az lit the floor with the flashlight. The bloody footprints were there, dry and small, marking a trail leaving the office.

"She didn’t run. She walked after doing it."

"And the safe?" asked Crowley.

Aziraphale lit the bookshelf to his right, and there it was, the metal box open. Inside were few things, but important ones. Crowley pulled out a bottle of whiskey that still smelled like heaven.

"You’re taking that…"

"If we’re walking among corpses, I’m going to need this."

Aziraphale didn’t argue. Inside the box there was also a canister of pepper spray, a taser identical to his own, a couple of smaller guns with their respective boxes of bullets, and a silencer for the revolver that Gabriel had held before.

Crowley took it all. Down to the last round.

"Let’s go upstairs," said Aziraphale. "I want to know about Bee."

"It’s dangerous…"

"I need to know… if she’s okay or if she needs help…" Aziraphale replied, and Crowley gave up the argument.

The upper floor was dim. The flashlight crossed empty walls, abstract paintings, and pretentious decorations. The master bedroom had a neatly made bed, and the bathroom had a half-filled tub but no sign of Bee.

And then they saw the door at the end of the hallway, and when they opened it, the world seemed to stop.

Sky-blue walls. Glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. A mobile of moons and planets still swaying, as if the air hadn’t fully died. An unused crib. Baby clothes with tags still attached on a chair. Untouched stuffed animals and the scent of lavender barely covering the new smell of hope.

Crowley didn’t move.

Aziraphale entered as if stepping on cracking ice. He touched the crib with his fingers, as if he could awaken something just by brushing it.

"Gabriel told me last week he had ‘incredible news.’ I didn’t think he meant this."

Crowley looked around the room, at the crib, at the colors that would never touch any skin. He felt something crumble inside. Something very old, familiar, and deep.

"She was pregnant" said Crowley, as if it still needed saying. "And even so… she killed Gabriel. And he didn’t stop her."

Aziraphale didn’t reply. Crowley leaned against the wall, as if all the air had been stolen from him. All that love. All that future. Broken in seconds.

"Do you know what it’s like… to love someone so much you let them kill you? To lose your… sanity enough to kill the one you love most?" he asked in a low voice, not knowing whether he was talking about Gabriel, Bee, or himself.

Aziraphale didn’t reply. But he crossed the room and took his hand. Nothing more was needed. Some things didn’t need to be said.

"For me… losing hope doesn’t mean screaming and violence. It’s an empty room painted blue." Crowley said, letting the anxiety devour him, he began to cry and clung to Aziraphale’s body.

Crowley was the first to cross the threshold of the bookshop when they returned, but he didn’t stay with them. He only muttered a “be right back” that barely carried in the air and climbed the stairs to the rooftop. No one followed him.

From above, the sky stretched, free from artificial lights, cruel in its indifferent beauty. The stars twinkled shamelessly over a world falling apart. He dropped to his knees, hands clenched on the edge of the wall, face lifted as if begging for an answer that would never come.

He thought of Adam. His laugh. How he liked cereal with too much sugar. How he looked at him like he was invincible. How his son had never seen him cry.

Meanwhile, below, life continued with silent dignity. Aziraphale wandered the aisles of his bookshop as if doing so for the last time. He touched the spines of books with his fingers as if saying goodbye to old friends. Every title, every scent of aged paper, every corner was a memory. Every shelf seemed to whisper “don’t go.” But there was no more time to stay and consider his options.

Anathema was flipping through a worn olive-green book; the author’s name on the cover caught her attention—it was the name of an old relative.

"Can I take this?" she asked, lifting a hand-bound book of prophecies. Aziraphale looked at it and nodded with a faint smile. "I… I’m a distant relative of Agnes Nutter… I’d like to have something of hers."

"It belongs to you more than to me now," said Aziraphale with a smile.

She went upstairs with Jim in her arms. The cat, restless, meowed as she gently settled him into the carrier backpack.

"Come on, buddy," she whispered. "Let’s go see the world."

Alone, Aziraphale closed his eyes. He let himself feel everything. The echo of past laughter with his neighbors. The afternoons between books and tea. The shared silences with customers. He found himself by the door when the others came down. The bookshop behind him, with its crooked sign and warm light, seemed to hope it was all a mistake and they’d be back in five minutes.

Crowley came down at last, eyes red but chin high. He carried a bag of food and a backpack with military-grade camping gear from Bee and Gabriel’s house, all top-of-the-line equipment—they were the best they had found, aside from the weapons. He stopped in front of Aziraphale, who looked on the verge of tears as he caressed a window of the shop.

"We’ll come back someday," said Crowley, like a promise carved in stone.

And without waiting for an answer, he kissed him. In front of Anathema and Jim. Aziraphale was breathless, surprised at first, then moved. Ana simply smiled. She adjusted her backpack and the front carrier where Jim purred.

"There’s no better moment than now," murmured the girl, walking slowly.

Aziraphale kissed Crowley again, this time with more resolve. As if holding onto the only real thing he had left. And so, hand in hand, with steps still trembling but filled with a new certainty, they walked away from the city. The bookshop was left behind. But the moments Crowley lived there walked with him.

Dawn was just beginning to break when they found it.

A slightly secluded house at the top of a hill, part of a small gated community that seemed forgotten by both time and catastrophe. Windows shuttered, doors barricaded, but no signs of violence. They moved in silence, with the trained discretion of those who had learned the world was no longer a safe place. The home had been abandoned quickly—no food in sight, clothes strewn everywhere. Crowley hoped the family had evacuated and not something worse.

They took turns using the bathroom, then climbed up into the attic hidden by a trapdoor, where the roof offered something like shelter due to the lack of access.

They pushed furniture over the entrance, secured the cracks with blankets, and shut themselves in behind an improvised wall of furniture and toppled desks. All of it so that, for a few hours, the world would remain outside.

The air smelled of dust and damp, but that didn’t matter. Aziraphale pulled out the sleeping bags they’d found at Gabriel’s place and spread them across the bare wooden floor. Jim curled up next to Anathema in a corner, using a couple of old towels as a bed. She stroked him, murmuring something soft that sounded like peace.

Crowley stood silently against the wall, watching, as Aziraphale unfolded a map on the floor. One of many they’d brought from the bookstore, it was marked with routes, arrows, and frantic scribbles. The path to Tadfield, their possible destination, was drawn in shaky black ink.

“If everything stays the same…” Aziraphale began, but his voice faded when he saw Crowley’s expression. “We’ll reach it on foot in about fifteen nights, maybe more. But if we find a car… we could make it in just two. The most likely option is Eastgate Academy, 26 kilometers from here. Being a private school, it’s very likely it was evacuated—we can resupply, rest, and find a car in decent condition.”

“I’m surprised by the lack of cars on the way here,” said Crowley. “Most of them were wrecked or looted…”

“And the rest… likely taken by survivors. But I promise we’ll find one,” Aziraphale said, stepping close to embrace him. “We’ll reach your son as soon as possible.”

Aziraphale wrapped his arms—and all of himself—around Crowley, as if he could shield him from the memory of Adam, from the dead, from pain. Crowley clung to him with a deep, almost childlike need. They lay down on the sleeping bags, still fully dressed, their bodies intertwined. There were no more plans for that morning.

They slept like that, wrapped in each other, while outside the world turned more slowly. For a moment, however brief, it seemed they had found something like peace.

They woke in the afternoon, exhausted from planning the journey and walking for kilometers along the roadside. Then Ana washed her face and hands with a damp towel, which she shared with Crowley. Aziraphale followed, and the three of them sat on a blanket on the floor to eat the fruit salvaged from the bookstore and Gabriel’s house, before it spoiled.

They talked about their lives before the catastrophe. From his backpack, Crowley pulled out a folder containing his illustrations for The Starmaker, and told them what it was like to live off art. Aziraphale shared his experience making a living from literature. Ana told them her dream was to be a fortune teller, but she was so good at math that her parents would never allow it.

They all laughed while eating fruit and cheese, drinking from water bottles taken from a forgotten hotel in Boston.

The last grape hung suspended between Crowley’s fingers when a sudden, metallic noise broke the warm attic atmosphere. A dry, nearby crash that put them all on alert. The three of them raised their heads at the same time. Jim hissed and stirred restlessly in Aziraphale’s arms, who instinctively hugged him tighter, pressing the cat’s muzzle against his chest to muffle the sound.

Ana exhaled forcefully, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.

From their elevated position, they could peek out through a window overlooking several streets, and there—bathed in the golden dust of dusk—they began to appear.

First two, then three more, and finally a group of seven figures dragging themselves through the empty street like rotten leaves pushed by a sick breeze.

They were people. Or what once had been.

Their clothes hung from their bodies like rags defeated in a battle against invisible claws. One of the women was completely naked, her skin covered in scratches and stains that could have been dried blood or mud—but looked far worse. A teenage boy led the group, his mouth clamped around his own forearm, chewing with animal desperation, tearing flesh from himself with his teeth. Among them, a grown man walked erratically, gripping a garden spade stained with blood.

And then it happened.

A medium-sized dog—dirty, skeletal, with one eye half-closed and the other like a white sun—came running out of a backyard. As it knocked over a metal trash can, the crash it made echoed dully.

The sound seemed to ignite a spark in the fogged minds of the creatures in the street.

Four of them—the teen, the naked woman, and two others with jerky movements—launched after the dog with terrifying agility, letting out disjointed shrieks and running with unnatural speed, as if an invisible string pulled them all in the same direction.

Jim let out a high-pitched meow, and Aziraphale held him tighter, muffling his muzzle against his chest.

Ana let out a shaky breath, unaware she’d been holding it.

The three “phoners” that stayed behind looked like statues. A woman in a loose dress, possibly lace or just strands of what had once been a proper garment.
An old man, his face hidden by a fully white beard, clutching an orange pumpkin to his chest—round, large, and far too perfect for such a context. And the man with the spade, who had stopped walking and was now glancing from side to side, as if assessing something beyond the empty street.

The woman took a step toward the old man, unsteady, arms outstretched toward the pumpkin.

None of them spoke. They only growled in ragged breaths, but the intent was clear.

He didn’t give it up. Instead, with sudden violence, he lowered his head and slammed it into the woman’s forehead.

The crunch echoed all the way up to the attic, and Ana gasped, a lump in her throat.

The woman collapsed to the ground with a guttural moan, face bloody, feet dragging like a broken doll trying to remember how to stand.

The old man, barely trembling, tightened his grip on the pumpkin, taking a step back. Then the man with the spade acted.

Without hesitation, he raised the handle over his head and struck the old man hard. Once.

Twice.

On the third blow, the body stopped moving.

The pumpkin rolled a few inches away, intact.

Crowley covered his mouth with his hand, eyes wide and fixed on the massacre. Aziraphale barely breathed, Jim curled up tighter against his chest, and Ana hid in the blonde’s arms, burying her face in the cat’s fur.

The man crouched. Wiped the spade’s blade on his own pants, and with a precise motion, split the pumpkin in half. One of the halves flew through the air and landed near the bloodied woman, who stared at it for a few seconds as if it were a forgotten language.

Then she crawled toward it and, with increasingly clumsy but voracious movements, began to devour it.

Her teeth tore at the moist pulp as orange juice dripped down her neck.

The man took the other half, raised it with both hands as if it were a trophy, and took a bite. He chewed awkwardly. His jaw seemed to have forgotten how to work, but it did.

Then, without looking back, he began to follow the direction the group chasing the dog had taken. The woman remained a few seconds longer, devouring the last fragments of shell and fiber with a primitive hunger. And when there was nothing left, she stood up with puppet-like movements and started walking after him.

The street fell silent once more. An abandoned corpse and a half-eaten pumpkin lay between the cars.

"Oh my God..." Ana whispered, barely audible. "They-they know how to use tools."

They remained in silence, the three of them kneeling by the window, as if the slightest movement could call the creatures back. Dusk was falling over the suburbs through the woods like a curtain of rust, and the air in the attic grew thicker with every passing minute.

Crowley was the first to move, his face tense, jaw clenched. He sat next to his belongings and unrolled the map with trembling hands. He traced a line from their location to the heart of the city.

“There’s a secondary route… if we go around through the houses on the north side, we could reach Eastgate Academy before midnight,” he muttered without looking up.

Aziraphale turned slowly toward him. Jim was still in his lap, now asleep, though his breathing remained fast.

“Eastgate Academy?” Ana asked as she packed away the food remains and her sleeping bag.

“A private school. It had a boarding facility, big grounds… and a parking lot.” Crowley said it with a mix of urgency and pain. “If we’re lucky, there might be cars. Or even a generator.”

Ana moved closer and knelt by the map.

“And what if it’s occupied by… them?”

Crowley looked her in the eyes for a second. Then lowered his gaze.

“Then we move on. Find another route. But if we want to reach Tadfield and find Adam, we need wheels.”

Aziraphale tightened his arms around Jim. He said nothing at first, but then nodded slowly.

“If there’s even a slight chance… we have to try. We leave as soon as it’s fully dark. Avoid the main roads. Take the backyards. No lights.”

Crowley carefully rolled up the map and stuffed it into his backpack.

“No noise. If we see anyone, we hide. We don’t talk. We don’t run. We don’t fight.”

Ana nodded. Aziraphale stood silently, placing Jim inside the carrier with a folded blanket. The cat looked at him with a faint meow, almost a protest, but curled up into a shivering ball of fur.

“And if everything goes well… Tadfield will be just one more day away,” Crowley said, arranging his things.

With the sky fully darkened and an ominous silence, the three descended from the attic, one after another. Each step creaked like a warning. But their goal glowed among the ruins of the streets—a lost boy and a hope still alive.

And they walked toward it.

The forest closed around them like a black dome scattered with branches. They walked in silence and single file, eyes fixed on the damp earth beneath their feet, avoiding treacherous roots and puddles that reflected the scarce moonlight. To their right, beyond the tree line, the road snaked empty like a tongue of dead asphalt. No one dared step on it. It was too open, too silent, like a trap.

Aziraphale carried Jim in his carrier, strapped with a rope across his back. Ana walked in the middle, flashlight off in her hand, using it only occasionally to find a firmer path. Crowley took the rear, map pressed against his chest, senses alert as if he could hear the leaves breathing.

Then it happened. First came the headlights—three pairs of beams slicing through the darkness from afar. Then, the roar of engines, growing wilder, hungrier. And finally, the laughter.

The three of them instinctively ducked, hidden behind a row of trees. Aziraphale squinted, unsure, and when he saw they looked human, he stepped forward, raising a hand.

“Maybe they can help—”

Crowley grabbed his arm tightly and pulled him back down.

“No.” His voice was low and urgent. “Something’s wrong.”

The vehicles sped past. They were wrecked pickup trucks, packed with men and women shouting, drinking, sticking bare torsos out the windows. One fired into the air, another lit fireworks that burst in dirty colors. Music blared from speakers taped together, distorted by volume and rage.

Then they saw the chains. Hanging from the bumpers, dragging bodies. Men. Women. Maybe teenagers. The asphalt stained with a dark red trail as the corpses slammed, bounced, and broke against the pavement. Some weren’t entirely dead—the arms still moved, the legs kicked. Horrible, maddened grunts came from their broken mouths. “Rasth!”, “Buaaw!” and other unintelligible sounds, but clearly from the phoners. Humans perhaps taking revenge, but it didn’t stop the whole thing from being a fast, horrifying spectacle.

Aziraphale trembled, and Crowley felt his arm shake beneath his hand. Ana simply watched, her face blank.

When the last vehicle disappeared around the bends, silence returned abruptly.

“We’re all mad here, Alice…” Aziraphale murmured, as if speaking to a ghost in his head.

They walked for hours. Exhaustion sank into their bones like cold, but fear was a more powerful fuel. The forest thinned gradually, becoming less dense, more domesticated, until the trees parted and a row of houses appeared before them. It was a town.

Crowley recognized it on the map, but didn’t care about the name. What mattered was what they saw: people. People walking. Carrying backpacks, travel bags, shopping carts full of blankets, bottles, canned food. Some pushed strollers with sleeping children. Others held their kids in their arms, tight against their chests. They spoke in whispers, moved slowly, in small groups like a nomadic caravan heading in different directions.

Crowley froze. It had been days since he’d seen a child.

Days since he’d heard a soft cry or a babble. Seeing parents still fighting for them hit him with a sudden, unbearable tenderness.

He looked at Aziraphale and, without thinking, took his hand.

It was a natural gesture. A need. As if the simple touch could prove to the world there was still something more than death. Aziraphale said nothing. He simply intertwined his fingers with Crowley’s gently and glanced at him. A trembling smile spread across his face.

“There’s still hope” Crowley murmured, as if he could barely believe it.

Aziraphale nodded without hesitation.

The small town’s streets were a mosaic of slow steps and tired faces. There were murmurs, a few muffled cries, but also a kind of resigned calm, as if the survivors had made peace with the hell stretching out behind them.

Crowley, Aziraphale, and Anathema walked among them toward the north. Jim, hearing new voices, perked up inside his small carrier. A soft cry caught Aziraphale’s attention—two children sitting in a shopping cart.

He approached without thinking, his smile wounded but still intact.

Chapter Text

As night was just beginning to fall, the rain began to ease, and the last flashes of twilight painted the academy walls in lavender and ash tones. Crowley pulled on his coat, grabbed a flashlight, and went out to inspect the vehicles surrounding the campus. He couldn’t keep waiting or stay there forever. He had to find a car and find Adam.

He walked through the mud, through wet leaves and overgrown weeds, brushing aside branches with automatic gestures. He wandered for hours, but the cars were ruins. One was overturned, some were covered in blood. Another had its windshield shattered and its interior scorched. A third had no wheels at all, as if it had been stripped by giant rats. What hadn't been consumed by chaos had been looted, dismantled, or simply forgotten.

“Most of them were looted,” said a voice behind him. It was Dagon, standing with a shotgun slung across her back. “Some escaped during the first days and took what they could. Others never came back.”

Crowley nodded without speaking and walked away from her—he didn’t want any more trouble because of her. He combed through the academy without finding a single drop of fuel or a vehicle capable of getting him to Tadfield, dirtying his boots and sweeping the darkness with his flashlight. Then, a youthful voice broke the silence.

“Hey... you. Yeah, you, the one with the long coat.”

Crowley lowered the flashlight. Warlock Dowling, in a coat two sizes too big, was approaching down the cobblestone path, flashlight in hand and some mud on his knees.

“Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

He led him to the old staff parking lot behind the gym. There, inside a garage with a broken padlock (which Warlock smashed open with a shovel), rested a sleeping jewel. A black Bentley, still gleaming beneath the dust.

“It belonged to Headmaster Azrael,” said Warlock. “I saw him... the day the Pulse happened. He came out of the campus pond... naked, mumbling numbers. Tore the skin off his face with his fingernails. I don’t know what became of him.”

Crowley swallowed hard, approached the car, and lifted the hood. The engine was intact, but something wasn’t right.

“Shit. Did they take the carburetor?” he muttered to himself, running his fingers inside the machine. “And of course, without a battery, this is just a luxury coffin...”

“Does it work?” Warlock asked hopefully.

“It will. But I need to find the parts. And gasoline. A lot of gasoline.”

“There might be something in the town, but...” Warlock glanced sideways at him. “Dagon won’t let you leave during the day. You know that.”

“Then I’ll go at night,” Crowley replied without hesitation.

But that night, he couldn’t go.

Nor the next. Nor for the five that followed.

A thunderstorm began that dawn. A thunderclap roared with almost supernatural force, and rain fell as if the sky had been torn in two. The academy windows groaned under the pressure of the wind. Water crawled down the walls like cold, eager fingers.

It lasted six full nights, and Crowley lived them all without sleep.

During the day he slept little, exhausted, shivering in his sleeping bag or smoking one of his last cigarettes by the window. He watched the Bentley under its tarp like someone watching a grave, hoping that someday someone might breathe again.

But the worst part wasn’t the rain, or the confinement.

It was Aziraphale. Or rather, his absence.

He avoided him. Every time they crossed paths in a hallway, the angel would turn around or excuse himself with a sudden cough, an urgent conversation with Ana, or some invisible task. There were no glances, no words. Just the echo of the unspoken, hanging between them like another silent storm.

On the night of the sixth storm, Crowley couldn’t take it anymore.

His heart was in pieces, his eyes dry, and a rage that he no longer knew whether it was pain, fear, or despair. He dragged himself to his office, took off his wet boots, sat in the darkest corner, hugged his knees, and like a child, unraveled.

He cried.

As he hadn’t done since he was little, since he didn’t have to pretend to be strong, since he didn’t have to be the man who could handle it all.

He cried until his chest ached. Until the sobs turned into gasps.

And there, curled up like a wet cat in the shadows, he heard a soft knock at the door.

He didn’t know if it was real or just the echo of what he most wanted.

The knock came again. Then the soft creak of the door barely opening. The storm’s light filtered through the window, illuminating a familiar silhouette. Crowley didn’t even lift his gaze—he couldn’t. He didn’t want to be seen like that. But he heard it.

“Crowley...”

Aziraphale’s voice was soft, broken. Full of fear. Full of tenderness.

“May I...? May I come closer?”

Crowley didn’t answer, but he didn’t move either. Aziraphale took slow steps across the wooden floor, closing the door behind him. He crouched in front of him, balancing on his heels, and looked at him through the dimness. He saw him curled up, face hidden in his arms.

Then, without asking permission, he embraced him.

Crowley tensed. Then he simply let go, as if the weight of both storms—inside and out—dissolved the moment those soft arms wrapped around him.

“It’s okay,” Aziraphale whispered into his ear, rocking him gently. “Adam is okay. I know it. I feel like... the rain is protecting him more than you can imagine. Out there, somewhere, someone is keeping him safe from the cold. Caring for him. Loving him.”

Crowley pressed his forehead to Aziraphale’s shoulder and took a deep breath, trying to hold back the tears he no longer had. The scent of dry fabric, of warm skin, of home.

“I didn’t want you to see me like this...” he muttered through clenched teeth.

“Like what?”

“Broken.”

Aziraphale didn’t answer. He simply ran his fingers through his hair slowly, as if each strand were a wound that needed healing. Crowley swallowed hard, feeling his throat close up.

“I’m sorry...”

Aziraphale looked down.

“For what happened with Dagon,” Crowley continued, his voice barely audible. “For not being honest. For making you feel like you were... a bridge, a means to get to Adam. You never were, Aziraphale. You never would be. Not to me.”

The angel looked at him in silence, eyes brimming with unshed tears, unsure what to say.

“I want to be with you,” said Crowley, squeezing his eyes shut. “And I’m not saying it because I’m hurt, or because you found me like this. I’m saying it because it’s the only truth I have left. Everything else has gone to hell. But you... you’re still here.”

“Crowley...” Aziraphale whispered. “I barely... barely know you.”

Crowley finally looked up. His face was a map of shadows and torn emotions.

“I know,” he said with a laugh that was both bitter and sweet. “And still... I feel like you’re what I’ve been looking for all my life.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and rested his forehead against his. Thunder roared in the distance, and the world seemed to unravel beneath the downpour.

“Then we need to truly get to know each other,” Aziraphale said at last, barely above a whisper. “Because I’m not going to be a temporary comfort, Crowley.”

“You’re not. I swear.”

“Don’t swear it. Prove it.”

Crowley nodded. And for the first time since the “Pulse” he allowed himself to close his eyes peacefully, knowing he wasn’t alone.

The sound of rain bounced against the windows, and inside the office, under the cover of a worn blanket Aziraphale had brought with him, Crowley was breathing deeply, calmer than on previous nights. Aziraphale watched him from the shadows, his eyes damp, one hand still resting in Crowley’s messy hair.

Crowley opened his eyes, sat up slightly, and his fingers brushed Aziraphale’s face. His lips parted as if to say something else, but instead of words, it was a gesture that connected them—he kissed him. Slowly at first, as if testing reality, and then with a kind of urgency that can only be born from the fear of losing everything. Aziraphale responded with the same repressed longing. They clung to each other, and for a moment, the rain outside became a distant whisper.

“I’m sorry,” Crowley murmured against his lips.

“Shh...” Aziraphale replied, caressing his cheek, his voice nearly breaking. “Just... don’t lie to me anymore.”

When the rain eased by the next dawn, Crowley proposed they go out. Aziraphale accompanied him without a word. No one else could know—it was too dangerous. The phone-crazed ruled the day. They would move in shadows.

Dressed in makeshift waterproof cloaks, they crossed the back gate of Eastgate Academy, flashlights in hand and empty backpacks on their backs.

They set off toward town, slipping through the nighttime mist, flashlights off for most of the way. They navigated by the distant lightning of the storm and Crowley’s memory—he had arrived from that direction days earlier.

The town, once alive with the murmur of wandering groups, was now completely empty. The streets were silent, the signs broken. Some houses stood open, as if their occupants had left without planning to return. Shopping carts that once carried children now lay abandoned.

“Where is everyone?” Aziraphale whispered.

“I don’t know... I don’t like this.”

They searched in silence. In a wrecked auto parts store, they found a compatible alternator. Then, in a half-collapsed garage, a battery that still worked. Someone had left gasoline canisters—each of them empty.

They walked toward the gas station at the end of the street. It was a low building, with a broad roof, where a single figure stood outlined in the rain: an old man, with white hair, a long trench coat, and a crisply ironed white shirt. He held a gas pump nozzle as if still waiting to fill his car.

“Crowley… do you see him?”

“Yes. Something’s not right.”

The old man didn’t move. He didn’t seem to notice the rain or the passing time, so Aziraphale raised his voice.

“Excuse me, sir! We’re looking for fuel! Are you alright?”

There was no response.

They moved cautiously, their feet splashing in the water. They filled the empty canisters—eight in total, the large ones in each arm, the smaller ones in their backpacks. Aziraphale approached the old man, afraid he might be lost or disoriented. He reached out, very gently, and touched his shoulder.

The man turned.

His eyes were completely white. No pupils. His mouth opened and a ragged, screeching sound emerged—like a television signal with no reception. A wave of static sliced through the air like a blade. The man began to spray fuel onto the ground while Aziraphale stared in shock.

“Run!” Crowley shouted.

They rushed back with the canisters in tow, but they hadn’t made it to the street when the blast caught them. The gas station exploded, a column of orange fire lighting up the cloudy sky. The roar of the explosion threw them to the ground.

They were left sprawled, stunned, soaked. Their ears rang. The image of the motionless old man, uttering an impossible roar, still floated in their minds.

Back at the academy, they were greeted with shouting. Anathema blocked them in the hallway, her face twisted with fury.

“Are you insane?! You just leave without telling anyone?! What if you hadn’t come back?!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, panting, still drenched.

Crowley could barely speak, still in shock. Dagon and Warlock had joined the scene.

“What happened?” Warlock asked.

Aziraphale sank into a chair. Jim meowed softly from the corner. Then they told everything: the empty town, the parts they’d found, the man at the gas station.

“He wasn’t just any crazy,” Aziraphale said. “He was… different. Like he was waiting for something... a signal. And that sound... it was static. It came out of his mouth.”

“And then the station exploded?” asked Dagon, arms crossed.

“Yes. We think it was him.”

A heavy silence fell. Anathema finally sat down.

“Maybe they’re evolving,” Warlock murmured.

“What?” Ana asked.

“The phoners. Maybe they’re not all obvious anymore. Not all screaming and running. Some might... wait. Some might seem normal.”

The idea sank deep into all of them. No one said anything else for a long while. Outside, the rain began to fall harder again, as if it wanted to wash away the last spark of hope they had left.

They slept during the day, wrapped in the silent walls of the office they now shared as a kind of improvised sanctuary. The rain had stopped, but the air remained heavy with moisture, and the latent threat beyond the sealed windows made every breath feel held.

Aziraphale and Crowley curled up together on the sofa bed covered with rescued blankets. The soft twilight filtered a golden glow through the dirty panes, and among those diffused beams, the shadows of their bodies intertwined. They didn’t make love out of desperation, but with cautious tenderness. Aziraphale’s fingers slowly traced Crowley’s torso, following old scars, guessing at nameless stories. Crowley responded with gentle touches to the nape of his neck, his back, the soft line of his jaw, as if with each touch he could convince him to stay, to hold on a little longer.

“Everything will be alright, angel,” Crowley murmured at one point, his heart still pounding in his chest. The blond didn’t reply. He only nestled closer, tangling his legs with his, as if afraid he might vanish with the dawn. In whispers, kisses on the forehead, half-asleep caresses, and broken words, time passed slowly.

But even there, in gestures of tenderness and entangled limbs, fear never fully left them. At every distant creak, at every gust of wind against the structure, their bodies tensed, and their ears strained into the dark, wondering if the silence would be enough to keep the phoners away.

With the arrival of night, the tension of the day slowly unraveled like an old bandage. The deranged screams the storm had carried from afar faded with the sunset. In their place, the ominous stillness of the night offered both freedom and a dangerous urgency.

The autumn cold slipped through the walls and bit at their bones. Still, Crowley and Aziraphale went outside with flashlights, gloved hands busy with the final task of fixing the Bentley. The car looked like a sleeping beast, majestic even after days of inactivity. Guided by Warlock’s memory, they had found it in the covered parking lot, shielded from the cold.

Aziraphale assisted with tools, holding parts as Crowley maneuvered in the dark. Ana, who had slept all day next to Jim, had begun to load backpacks, flashlights, and fuel cans into the vehicle. Jim now slept in his carrier, wrapped in a checkered blanket, as if the chaos of the world was nothing but white noise to him.

Warlock’s voice pulled them from their focus.

“I can’t find her… Miss Dagon. I’ve looked everywhere. She’s not in her office, or the library, or the east wing…”

His words were a trembling whisper. A jolt of alarm hit them, and Crowley stood up immediately.

“The only place we haven’t checked… the football field.”

Dagon’s only prohibition when they arrived at the academy—the one place strictly off-limits for their safety—was nearly a kilometer away, beside a tall satellite dish.

They took off running, flashlights shaking in their hands, driven by growing desperation. The path stretched past the rear parking lot, through leafless trees and rusted benches. And there it was—the football field, under the moonlight and filled with people.

Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Human figures standing like poorly sculpted statues. Silhouettes broken by madness. Their gaping mouths emitted a static hum as they stared fixedly at the top of the antenna. In the middle of the crowd, one figure moved with purpose. A woman.

“Dagon…?” Aziraphale whispered in horror.

She didn’t look at them. In her hands was a metal fuel can, and she was methodically spraying each of the bodies with a dark, glistening liquid. The stench of gasoline was so strong that they all covered their mouths.

“What the hell is she doing?” Crowley exclaimed, stepping back.

“Gasoline,” Ana said, her voice cracking. “The whole field is soaked in it…”

Finally, Dagon looked at them. Her face was expressionless, and her voice was as sharp as the edge of a rusted blade.

“Leave.”

“Dagon, please,” Warlock pleaded. “You don’t have to do this. Come with us. We can leave, you can be safe.”

The woman didn’t respond. In her hand, a lighter sparked briefly. A flicker. A blink.

And then—fire.

The artificial turf exploded into flames, a roar rising that seemed to consume the sky. The unmoving bodies began to convulse, and the static turned into a scream—an inhuman chorus that tore through the silence like knives.

“What have you done?!” Aziraphale shouted, horrified.

Dagon didn’t blink.

“I just made the world a little safer for everyone,” she replied, eyes lost in the reflection of flames devouring the past.

No one said another word.

The flames rose like enraged giants. The phoners screamed without moving, and the fire swallowed the horror at its source. Crowley turned to Aziraphale, and his face was streaked with silent tears. Warlock trembled as Ana held him. Jim, several meters away inside the car, meowed anxiously from his carrier.

It was time to leave.

And this time, there would be no coming back.

Anathema was the first to get into the Bentley, sitting in the backseat with her backpack at her feet and Jim dozing on her lap, still inside his carrier. The passenger door was open, as if it had been waiting for someone to close it. Aziraphale took that seat, and his previously anxious face shifted to an alert expression as he saw Dagon and Warlock approaching the car with their belongings.

Anathema quickly turned to look behind them, searching for those who were still missing. Warlock climbed in next, head down. Dagon followed, more composed, her boots stained with soot. Crowley got in last, oblivious to the tension inside the vehicle.

“Warlock and Dagon? They’re coming too, right?”

“Yes,” Dagon answered, though her voice didn’t quite sound like her own. “Of course.”

The car filled with a heavy silence as the engine roared into the night, and the wheels began to roll southward, toward Tadfield.

Crowley was driving with tense concentration, his fingers gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles had turned white. Beside him, Aziraphale held Jim in his lap, absentmindedly stroking the cat’s back as if trying to soothe his own thoughts.

No one spoke at first. In the back seat, Warlock tried to break the silence.

“When I was a kid, I used to think cabins were secret houses. I always imagined I lived a double life, and my family had no idea I had another place hidden away in the mountains.”

Anathema smiled with that broken tenderness that becomes habitual after the end of the world.

“I always associated them with prophecies. Don’t know why. Maybe because of all those horror movies where idiots mess around with ouija boards.”

But silence returned, heavy as a soaked coat. Crowley didn’t respond. He just kept his eyes on the road, occasionally meeting Dagon’s gaze in the rearview mirror. He didn’t trust her. He couldn’t. Something about her calmness—about how she’d set that field ablaze without the slightest tremor in her voice—left him deeply unsettled, a feeling even music could no longer ease.

They took alternate, safer routes according to Warlock. Rural roads lined with abandoned farms, twisted road signs, and homes swallowed by darkness. The highway was faster, yes, but they didn’t want to risk crossing paths with whatever now ruled it. They’d rather take twelve extra hours than die in five minutes.

By the time dawn wrapped them again in its cold, damp embrace, they reached a roadside motel. One of those three-story places, paint peeling from the walls, metal staircases exposed to the elements. A crooked neon sign hung dark, its word unreadable.

The place seemed deserted. No lights. No sounds. Just the creaking of branches and the wind pressing against the silence.

They entered the small first-floor lobby through a door barely shut. Behind the counter, several keys still hung from a corkboard. Some were rusty. Others, stained. Crowley grabbed five of them—rooms 302 through 306—and they ascended the stairs in silence, carrying their belongings and Jim in his carrier, still asleep.

They barricaded the stairway to the third floor with chains, chairs, and broken beds—a makeshift trench. Not much, but in this world, any barrier mattered.

Of the five rooms, three had shattered doors. The stench of death spilling from them was unbearable—a mix of rotting flesh and something metallic. No one wanted to know what was inside. They used the two that remained intact.

Room 305 was for Aziraphale, Crowley, and Anathema. It had one double bed and a single. No one objected. Aziraphale and Crowley took the larger bed, while Anathema silently settled into the single with her backpack at her feet.

In Room 306, Warlock and Dagon lay in separate beds. The boy didn’t protest—he simply lay on his side and closed his eyes, his expression tense. He was at his limit.

Their bodies collapsed more from emotional exhaustion than physical. The last twelve hours—the past few days—had eroded what was left of their strength. Silence became both refuge and reminder. They had survived one more day, but still didn’t know how many more they could.

A couple hours before sunrise, it happened.

The night had settled thick as tar, pressing down on the motel with its humid autumn shroud. All was quiet, save the faint creak of old wood and the occasional moan of wind threading through the trees beyond the asphalt. Everyone was asleep—or so they thought.

The first sound was a soft scuffle. Something muffled, like someone tripping over a chair, or dragging a suitcase. It pierced the thin walls like a needle in a deep dream. Crowley, sleeping with his arm around Aziraphale’s waist, opened his eyes halfway. But he didn’t move. He was too tired.

Then—a scream. Brief. Stifled.

And two gunshots.

Dagon’s shotgun. There was no mistaking it.

Crowley sat bolt upright, heart hammering against his chest.

“Warlock,” he whispered, barely audible.

“Wait. Don’t move yet...” Aziraphale pleaded, still pressed to his side, clutching him as if it could keep the world from unraveling.

Crowley obeyed. He felt Aziraphale’s trembling body against his, the cold dampness of his hands. Both of them stayed still, holding their breath.

“Guys...?” came Anathema’s voice from the other bed, already awake, fear crackling through her tone.

“Don’t move, Ana... don’t make a sound,” Crowley murmured.

And then, the other sounds came.

Something—or someone—was moving along the motel’s outer walkway. The harsh scraping of objects being dragged. A dull thud against the metal railing. The clinking of chains—or perhaps bones. The wind, once a gentle breeze, now a mournful wail slipping through the window edges like a ghost’s breath.

Crowley couldn’t see anything from where he sat, but he felt the threat in the air—like the scent of blood just about to spill.

In bed, Aziraphale stared at him with wide, glassy eyes, his blonde curls damp with cold sweat. Fear pierced him like a stake. He wanted to move, to protect, to act... but he also knew that a wrong step could mean death. He gripped the gun he'd left on the nightstand—a small, smooth-barreled pistol they had taken from Gabriel’s safe—and slipped from the bed without making a sound.

He crept toward the window overlooking the outside walkway, carefully pulling back a corner of the curtain to peer out.

And then he saw it.

Outside, hanging from the sign that once blinked “MOTEL” in flickering neon, was a body. Hanging by the arms, torso half-naked and soaked in gasoline, skin already beginning to blacken under the tongues of fire crawling up the abdomen.

Crowley felt his breath leave him.

It was Dagon.

The face was barely recognizable. But the hair, the posture, the jacket he hadn’t had time to take off. There was no doubt.

And he wasn’t alone. In the parking lot, under the flickering light of the fire devouring his body, figures were rising. Two dozen, maybe more. They were people—or had been. Now they trembled uncontrollably, as if an invisible force passed through them, moving them in unison. Their open mouths produced a barely audible hum, like the whisper of a thousand poorly tuned radios.

The static filled his ears, faint but insistent, as if it could sink into his bones.

Crowley was so horrified he didn’t notice McFell approach, but Aziraphale took a step back, his face pale as wax as he watched the scene.

“No…” he murmured. “No, no, no…”

Dagon’s body began to crackle with the fire. Those around her seemed entranced, as if the fire were a rite and she a sacrifice.

“What about Warlock?” Ana asked in a thin voice.

There was no sign of the boy. Not even a shadow. Only fire. And that horrible procession of unmoving figures.

Aziraphale covered his mouth, holding back tears. Jim snorted inside the carrier, uneasy. The tension in the air was so thick it felt like it was choking them.

Then the motel sign gave way. Dagon’s body fell to the ground still engulfed in flames, and the humming turned into a low, synchronized static chorus.

Crowley looked at Aziraphale with a mix of panic and resolve.

“We need to get out of here. Now.”

Outside, the bodies didn’t move. Not yet. But they knew that state—that supernatural stillness—wouldn’t last.

“We can’t leave now,” Anathema whispered urgently, checking the digital watch on her wrist with trembling hands. “If they find us… we’re dead.”

Silence filled the room like a heavy fog. No one argued with her. Because she was right.

Outside, the fire still consumed Dagon’s body, and the sickly-sweet stench of scorched flesh seeped through every crack in the building, mixed with the damp air of early morning. The “phoners” were still there, unmoving before the sign.

But then something strange happened. As the first ray of sun filtered over the mountains in the east, tinting the motel's edges amber, the phoners began to disperse.

Not in a rush, not fleeing the fire or the dawn. They simply left. As if their purpose was fulfilled. One by one, they began to walk in different directions, slowly, unsteadily, returning to wherever they had come from.

All but one.

An elderly man, his pale clothes covered in ash, stood in front of the Bentley. He stopped a few meters from the car, tilting his head as if trying to decipher its shape. The wind ruffled his tangled hair. His hollow eyes seemed to search for something.

He stood there for over half an hour.

Alone. Motionless. Watching.

Crowley stared at him through the window, breath held, the gun tightly clutched in his hand.

“It’s the man from the gas station… Does he see us?” Aziraphale whispered behind him.

“I… I don’t know,” Crowley replied, eyes locked. “He doesn’t seem to… but I don’t like it. How did he know we were here?”

Finally, as if something called to him, the man turned his head and slowly left, unhurried, dragging his feet toward the horizon.

The day advanced in a slow descent into nightmare. No one dared go outside. Dagon’s body still smoked. The motel sign had collapsed under her weight. No one spoke. No one slept at first. But the human body has limits.

By noon, one by one, they gave in to exhaustion.

Crowley was the first to fall, still holding the gun, sitting against the wall of the room. Sleep took him like a dark wave, dreamless and without relief.

When he awoke, the sky was black again. The sun had set a few hours earlier and the night breeze slipped through the cracks in the walls like a whispered warning. Everything was silent. Too silent.

Crowley stood, ran a hand over his face, and grabbed the weapon.

"It’s time," he said softly, addressing Aziraphale and Anathema, who were still curled up asleep on the mattress next to Jim's carrier.

The angel opened his eyes immediately, as if he had been waiting for those words in a dream. Anathema took a second longer, but nodded without protest.

With the stealth of those who have learned to fear every sound, they stepped into the hallway and crossed to Dagon and Warlock's room.

The door was slightly ajar.

Crowley was the first to enter.

The stench of dried blood hit like a slap.

Everything was chaos. Furniture overturned or broken, curtains ripped, glass shattered across the carpet. Blood. On the walls, the floor, the corner of a broken chair.

"Warlock..." Aziraphale murmured, his throat tight.

The room seemed empty, but something in Crowley’s instinct led him to an old built-in wardrobe against the wall. It was heavy, unnecessarily large, and upright, showing no signs of violence. Amid the chaos, its intactness stood out as an anomaly.

Crowley frowned.

"Let me check something..." he muttered.

He nudged it with his shoulder just enough for the door to creak open. There he was.

Warlock Dowling's small body, curled up, arms wrapped around his legs, his face wet and twisted with tears. Asleep. Or perhaps fainted from fear. Crowley held his breath. Something inside him clenched. It wasn’t rage, but something rawer. Sadder.

"A-Angel," he whispered, his voice breaking.

Aziraphale immediately knelt beside the wardrobe. Gently, he stroked the boy’s head, letting out a groan of relief that seemed centuries in the making. Warlock shuddered. And then screamed.

A short, frightened, almost animal cry. But when he saw their faces, his eyes filled again and sobs shook him like a storm. He threw himself into Aziraphale's arms, who held him as if he were the most precious thing in the universe.

"Shhh... it’s alright now... we’re here. You’re safe, my dear..." Aziraphale murmured gently, stroking his back.

"I thought I was going to die..." Warlock sobbed. "She... she locked me in... said she would protect me... but... there was so much noise..."

Crowley closed his eyes, furious, pained, overwhelmed. Dagon had saved the boy. She hadn’t run or handed him over. She hid him and then chose to sacrifice herself to stop the others.

Night fell thick and damp over the asphalt as they began preparing for the next leg of their journey. Few words were spoken.

Crowley was the first to move. With firm, though tired steps, he returned inside the motel. He searched the ruined rooms for blankets, pillows, anything that would let them sleep—or at least rest—with some dignity when the road overtook them. He gathered them like treasures: a plaid blanket smelling of stale cigarettes, a pillow with faded dinosaur covers, a beach towel repurposed as an improvised coat.

Outside, Aziraphale and Ana had begun checking the surroundings, not with hope but with the need to try. The reception office had little left: empty boxes, expired food wrappers, a disconnected fridge. Among the bushes, a plastic bag floated lazily in the wind like a ghost of what once was normal.

Warlock, for his part, searched in silence.

His eyes—red from crying, though now dry—scanned anxiously every corner, every nook of the parking lot and the empty room. He searched for Dagon’s shotgun. Not to use it, they all knew that. He just needed something of hers. Something tangible. An anchor.

But he didn’t find it.

And that absence hurt more than anything else.

Crowley watched him from the shadow of the motel’s doorway, heart tight. Knowing that a child had just gone through something none of them—not even himself—could have endured without breaking, was unbearable. And now he wandered like a soldier who had lost their commander, searching the ruins for a broken sword.

And what he found... was nothing.

The idea that a group of phoners might have taken a firearm was enough to make his blood boil.

"Bloody hell..." he muttered through gritted teeth, clenching his fists. Fear had many forms. And this was one of the worst.

When everything was packed—folded blankets and pillows, dew-damp coats, a small box of fruit scraps, a flashlight and a couple of still-drinkable water bottles—they got into the Bentley.

Aziraphale helped Warlock in and settled him beside him in the back seat. The boy didn’t protest. He simply let himself be held, burying his face in the angel's coat, wrapping his arms around his waist and sinking into the body that had become, unwittingly, his refuge.

Ana sat beside Crowley, the map spread across her lap.

"There’s an alternate route, a bit longer, but it keeps us away from the main roads until we’re near Tadfield," she said, her voice barely audible. "If we take it... we’ll get there tomorrow night."

Crowley nodded, starting the engine. The Bentley’s headlights lit up the empty road like two old beacons in the fog. The road stretched before them like an open wound in the forest. Silence fell again.

The car began to move and for hours, no one spoke.

The trees passed around them like motionless sentinels. Occasionally, a gust of wind swept across the road, dragging dry leaves or branches, as if nature itself were trying to warn them. The moon hid behind heavy clouds, and the previous day’s rain had left black puddles reflecting broken stars.

Inside the car, only the sound of the engine, soft and low, and the occasional murmur of the wind against the windows could be heard.

Crowley kept his eyes on the road, but every so often, he turned slightly to look in the rearview mirror. Seeing Aziraphale holding Warlock in his arms disarmed him completely.

The angel had tilted his head until his chin rested on the boy’s dark hair, and one hand stroked his shoulder in slow, steady circles. As if that alone could keep nightmares at bay. As if he were a guardian.

And he was.

Aziraphale, that stubborn, reckless, brave angel of flesh and bone, was his refuge. And now also Warlock’s.

Crowley thought of Adam. Of his son. Of that eleven-year-old boy who once asked him if birds understood English. Of his crooked-toothed smile. Of the voice that called him "dad" as if the world still made sense.

And for a moment, he wished with all his heart that Warlock were Adam. That this was over. That the boy sleeping in the angel’s arms was his son, and that their search was complete.

But he wasn’t. And this wasn’t over.

And yet now, Warlock was his responsibility too. Part of the group, his people. One of those still clinging to the last threads of humanity.

"Do you think Adam will get along with Warlock?" Crowley asked suddenly, eyes on the road.

Aziraphale took a moment to answer.

"I think that... if he’s as sweet as you... yes. I think they’ll be like brothers."

Crowley swallowed hard. The lump in his throat wasn’t new. But now it hurt a little less.

"We’re close..." Ana murmured, folding the map and looking at him with tired eyes. "Tomorrow night... we’ll be in Tadfield."

Crowley didn’t respond. He just gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

In the distance, the trees seemed to part in their favor. The winding, fog-covered road dragged them toward something inevitable. The rural highway had been narrowing more and more, as if the forest wanted to swallow it whole. The branches formed a natural tunnel, and moss grew over the rusty signs, forgotten for years. The air had an earthy scent, as if they had just left behind the world as they knew it. And then they saw it.

The cabin was hidden among the undergrowth, surrounded by a three-meter-high thorn fence that time had strengthened rather than weakened. Its weathered wooden structure looked almost noble, proud of having endured what other homes had not. Aziraphale, as soon as they got out of the Bentley, looked at it as if he saw paradise.

“It’s a little Eden,” he murmured, his eyes lit by something more than just the flashlight’s reflection.

Tall trees protected it like sentinels, and a thick silence surrounded them—not accusatory, but comforting. No one lived there at that moment. It was perfect.

The door creaked as it opened, but they heard nothing more than the echo of their own footsteps. Inside, the cabin was modest but sturdy. A small kitchen, a living room with a couple of armchairs covered in old blankets, and most importantly: two bedrooms. One with metal bunk beds that creaked at the slightest touch, and another more private room with a queen-size bed, a small desk piled with ancient books—almost enough to make Aziraphale cry—and what seemed almost a miracle, a fully equipped bathroom.

The faucet squeaked, but hot water flowed.

Anathema took the first turn, just in case the heat didn’t last. Outside, the rain was starting to ease, leaving a scent of damp earth. Inside, Aziraphale helped Warlock remove his dirty clothes, his movements slow and patient, as if he didn’t want the boy to feel vulnerable for even a second longer.

Warlock remained silent but obeyed. He went into the bathroom and closed the door. Aziraphale and Crowley waited beside her, standing, holding their breath as if the sound of running water confirmed that everything—even if just for one night—was going to be okay, just as they once knew Ana would be okay.

When Warlock came out, already wearing one of Aziraphale’s old pajamas, he looked more like a child than ever. He curled up on the bed without a word and fell asleep within minutes.

Next was Aziraphale’s turn, followed by Crowley’s.

When Crowley returned, drying his hair with a towel, he found Aziraphale already in bed, lying on his side, watching the rain slide down the window. He slipped under the covers with him, resting his body against his back, wrapping his arms around his waist as if afraid the world might take him away again.

“This place has practically everything. It’s remote, safe for the kids…” Aziraphale murmured, his voice barely audible, like a thought escaping his lips.

Crowley nodded, his nose brushing the curve of Aziraphale’s neck.

“I need to go for Adam…” he answered softly, kissing the bare shoulder. “I can’t… I can’t wait any longer.”

There was a silence. Aziraphale turned his body slightly, just enough for their eyes to meet.

“Have you thought about what will happen after you find him?”

Crowley looked at him with a pained tenderness, as if he already knew.

“We’ll leave. You and me… far from here. To a place with no antennas, where no signals reach, where the lunatics don’t dare go. An island. An even more remote cabin. With Adam, Warlock, Ana… and you.”

His hand rose to caress Aziraphale’s cheek.

“I won’t go anywhere without you” Crowley stated.

The blond looked at him for a second, as if weighing the promise in his voice. Then he whispered, his eyes glowing with something deeper than desire.

“You’re mine, Crowley.”

And in a slow, deliberate movement, he crossed a leg over him, straddling him with an almost reverent gentleness. Their lips met Crowley’s with restrained hunger, but without hurry. The kiss was slow fire, a dance of tongues and hands that searched, rediscovered, remembered. Crowley responded with the desperation of someone who finally finds home in another body.

“I am” he whispered against his mouth.

The kisses grew deeper, slower. Hands explored, caresses lingered, sighs blended with the creak of the bed and the constant murmur of the rain. They made love in silence, with the care of two souls who had survived hell and met in the dark, touching so as not to forget.

And while the world outside kept burning in flames, they ignited in another way. A way that needed neither fire nor words.