Chapter Text
Crowley stood still for a moment in the silence of the bookshop, gathering his thoughts and trying to remember how to breathe (not that it mattered). When he finally recalled the mechanics of respiration he took in the smell of dust, ink, and bergamot that still clung to the air, fading slowly, as if the angel had only just stepped out.
He set the two feathers on the desk. One shimmered faintly gold, unmistakably Aziraphale’s, soft as a sigh. The other was… wrong. Too pristine. Too symmetrical. The light caught on its edge and flashed like a blade. It wasn’t alive. It was… made.
“A feather shouldn’t click,” Crowley muttered, turning it over in his hand. “You’ve gone and gotten yourself mixed up in something, haven’t you, Angel?”
The open Antigone on the desk was taunting him, smug in its ancient Greekness. The post-it placed, he was certain, by Aziraphale’s tidy hand, marked a line. Crowley squinted and translated under his breath: I was born to love, not to hate.
He huffed a laugh that didn’t quite make it out. “You daft, glorious idiot. Quoting Sophocles in a crisis.”
Something inside him twisted. It was the kind of ache that he couldn’t miracle away. They have been through Hell’s fire and Heaven’s wrath… and paperwork together. He wasn’t going to lose Aziraphale to literature and mystery feathers.
Crowley ran a finger along the page. The letters shimmered and seemed to change, the ink rippling like water. He yanked his hand back as the Greek text twisted itself into a message: Find what heaven would bury.
The feather in his hand pulsed. Once. Twice. And then began to unfold. Tiny precise gears clicked into motion, fanning into a shape like a mechanical bird’s wing. It lifted an inch from his palm, trembling, humming faintly with power that felt neither holy nor infernal… but like some tiny mechano-bird.
The message repeated, this time whispered through the room in Aziraphale’s voice: Find what heaven would bury.
Crowley’s breath caught. “Angel?”
The air went still. The smell of machine oil and ozone thickened. Then, from somewhere above, a sharp thud. Metal striking glass.
He looked up toward the skylight just as a dark silhouette passed over it. Wings, vast and wrong, glinting with steel.
Crowley’s pulse spiked. “What the heaven?”
The feather collapsed in on itself, a final spark flaring in his palm before it vanished.
A single word echoed in the silence. Not Aziraphale’s voice this time, but a mechanical voice coming from that thing above.
“Run.”