Chapter Text
It began, as most of their worst disagreements did, with petty revenge.
Aziraphale had turned the Bentley yellow.
Not a tasteful cream or buttery champagne. No, no. Canary. Daffodil. The blinding shriek of a lemon that’s had a nervous breakdown and decided the world must suffer alongside it.
He’d called it cheerful.
Crowley had called it sacrilege.
Aziraphale, perched in his usual spot behind the counter of his bookshop, had smiled serenely as if the color of the Bentley were a mere trifle — the kind of trifle one might garnish with a sprig of mint and call “refreshing.” He sipped his tea delicately and pretended not to notice the way Crowley’s sunglasses nearly cracked from rage outside the window.
“Change it back,” Crowley had hissed, voice low and full of menace, the sort of menace that had once toppled kingdoms or at least ruined a good cup of tea.
“Or what?” Aziraphale said, flashing that maddening, unrepentant smile. And he calls himself an angel! Crowley thought bitterly.
But Crowley was nothing if not practical. And when faced with angelic insubordination, the answer was always the same: escalate.
He sold a book.
Not just any book.
A first edition, silk-bound, annotated copy of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Aziraphale’s favorite. Well, one of them. This book was absurd, dreadful, and yet rare enough to be worth something—if not for its literary merit, then for Aziraphale’s personal notes scrawled in the margins, lovingly correcting 18th-century prose like a passionate but slightly mad scholar.
The buyer was a very sweet little old lady named Mrs. Penelope Hargreaves.
She had come into the shop that morning asking for directions to the local post office, clutching a handbag so stuffed with knitting supplies it threatened to burst at the seams.
Crowley had smiled, leaned on the counter with all the charm he could muster, and said, “Buy a book, why don’t you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” Mrs. Hargreaves replied, fluttering her glasses nervously.
“I insist,” Crowley said smoothly.
“But really—”
“Look, love, it’s either you or a sticky-fingered brat who’s been eyeing that leather-bound horror all week.” He gestured vaguely toward the book.
And then, to Aziraphale’s horror, Mrs. Hargreaves bought the book. Paid in cash. Took a toffee from the jar on the counter. Said, “What a lovely shop,” and toddled out, completely unaware of the miniature apocalypse she’d just triggered.
The fallout was immediate.
Aziraphale appeared at the doorway of Crowley’s flat barely an hour later, clutching a still-steaming teacup in hand. That was concerning on several levels. Several.
“You sold it,” he said, voice low but genuinely frightening—no angelic sweetness, just cold, sharp danger.
Crowley didn’t look up from pruning a suspiciously wiggly houseplant in the corner. Perhaps if he ignored the problem, it might just resolve itself.
“Don’t know what you’re on about.”
“You sold it to a human, Crowley.”
Crowley sighed dramatically, loud enough to make it clear this was a grievous injustice, the kind usually reserved for broken sunglasses or the sudden disappearance of all his favorite vinyl records.
“Oh, come off it, angel. You turned my car into a banana. We’re even.”
“We are not,” Aziraphale insisted. “That book had my notes. My personal annotations. I made corrections. Corrections, Crowley!”
“Yeah, that’s why she liked it,” Crowley replied, snipping the stem off a wilting leaf.
There was a silence.
It stretched. It simmered.
It grew teeth.
“Get. It. Back.”
Crowley froze, eyes wide behind his sunglasses. That was not worth arguing over. That was serious. He was going to have to get that book back.