Chapter Text
There was a pounding in his head that felt like it came from… uh. Somewhere. Somewhere else, to be specific – not Heaven.
Something was wrong. The only problem was that the “wrong” seemed omnipresent; the state of the universe – no matter where he looked. Not that he could look, with his vision blurred around the middle and blacked out around the edges.
There was laughter.
Someone joined in.
Perfect! The others would be able to tell him what he had done wrong for everything to feel so… off. Maybe he had dropped gravity again and broke it…? It had almost hit him on the head last time! In any case, the others would have him sorted in a jiffy. He just had to follow their voices.
They led him to a wall of some kind: Silicia, aluminia, magnesia, and something earthy. Surely this was none of his designs! But no matter how often he talked to the others about it, there was no accounting for taste. Especially with the ones assigned to Earth.
“Another round!” Someone yelled, followed by a cacophony of excited roars. “The cards have been good to me, this evening!”
With wobbly legs, he found the entrance in the wall and stepped into the space where his compatriots were having a much more animated discussion than he had ever seen them partake in. And there they were: Sitting around tables, holding small objects of some sort and bumping them into each other. He stared into red faces he did not recognize. But maybe that was because whatever kept trickling down his forehead was painfully dripping into his left eye.
“Hey, you,” a bald person yelled from behind another wall – a small, wide and flat one that only went up to his hips. “I told you to not show your face around here again!” They rolled up their sleeves and stepped out from behind their weird, unfit hiding place.
Okay… This seemed… slightly threatening for some reason? Rude. Had he maybe dropped the container with the celestial sparkles on Lucifer again? He’d been rather pissed, last time around. Yeah, alright; before he could try to diffuse the situation, he needed to find out what the situation was in the first place. So he asked: “Who are you?”
The other person was unimpressed and kept advancing. “Who am I? I’m the tavern owner that is going to kick your butt, matey.” When they were close enough for him to smell something sweet and sour on their breath, they suddenly stopped and said: “You look like someone got to you before I did. Came for me to put the boot in?”
“Huh?” He asked intelligently. God, this place was spinning around him. It was giving him a headache. He blinked.
The world tilted sideways.
When he opened his eyes again, the other bloke had grabbed him by the front of his garments and yanked him towards their chest. One of their hands was pulled back, raised to eye level, and clenched into a fist. He sure hadn’t seen that posture before, but he instinctually decided that he didn’t like it. And he definitely didn’t like being held. He was about to tell this bad angel as much, when they proclaimed:
“You shouldn’t have hauled your sorry arse back here if you didn’t want my footprint on it!”
“Crowley!” A new, bright voice joined the general mutter in the room. “No! Just… no! You will not wile away in my favourite pub!”
He turned his head and squinted through the black fog that the world was starting to become. Someone with blonde curls and uncomfortably stiff, gleaming, silver garments was standing in the entrance and had put his hands on his hips disapprovingly. That was a posture he knew he had seen before. On a regular basis. He was about to tell the newcomer that he still didn’t like the dad-stance, when they, too, interrupted him: “Sir, unhand this fiend at once, lest you get written up in Heaven for violent behaviour!”
The guy who was holding him by the scruff of his neck (or, well, clothes) looked over, and then lowered their fist. “A knight,” they said wearily.
“I am,” the supposed knight replied in a tone that suggested they were delighted to have been acknowledged and recognised. “So would you please let that scallywag go? It’s for your own good.” And thus, the next moment found him swaying wildly on his feet, with the support of the hand fisted into his collar gone. His arms wheeled around him in a propellor-motion to stay upright. (Ugh, where had he left his bloody wings? In the wash?)
“I don’t want any trouble,” his former captor said warily and held up their hands. “But I also want him out of my tavern. Now. He’s done enough damage yesterday!”
“I see,” the knight huffed. “I will handle it, good man.” With that, the knight turned towards him and their lips pursed disapprovingly. “Crowley, if you would be so kind as to leave this establishment and make sure you don’t come back? I would quite like to drink my ale in peace, thank you very much.”
“Uh,” he answered, in his usual, articulate way. (Forming words in his head was hard at the moment, and even after that first step, his tongue felt sluggish still. That usually only happened to him when he was excited. Was he excited? He didn’t feel excited.) “One problem,” he finally managed. “I’m not Crowley.”
The knight frowned. Apparently, that expression came easy to them. “Again?” they asked. “What have you changed it to this time?”
“Huh?”
The knightly frown became audible when they said: “Your name. What shall I call you?”
“My name is…” Oh.
Huh.
Wait, what was his name again?
That was odd. Your own name wasn’t usually something that slipped your mind. But then, he had been working pretty hard those last few weeks. And, alright, getting a bit over-excited, too. Keeping up with the names of all those gas balls, nebulas and star systems might have taken up a little more space in his head than they should have. But if he forgot the name of Alpha Centauri, then who was going to tell them their names? He could always ask the others.
“Cr- I mean…” The knight let out a long breath. “Will you get on with it please? The bartender is waiting.”
“Uh…”
Another sigh. “Alright, we’ll continue this conversation outside.” Gently herding him towards the exit with an outstretched arm, the knight turned back to the angry bloke. “I will be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Would you please prepare my usual order in the meantime?”
And with that, they both left the strange, walled-up place that smelled like someone had spilt some sort of slightly toxic beverage in there.
“So,” the pushy knight asked once they were outside. “Was ‘Crowley’ too mundane for you? Are you called ‘Mephistopheles’ now, after all?”
Now it was his time to frown. “No, I… uh. Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”
The furrow between the knight’s brows grew more and more pronounced, but there was a sharpness in their eyes that spoke of something other than annoyance. “What do you mean, you don’t remember? Crowley, what’s going on?”
He floundered and waved his arms in a bid to maintain balance and convey his frustration at the same time. It probably didn’t work. Nothing seemed to, at the moment. “I don’t know,” he whined. “Thinking makes my head hurt even more than it is already.”
In an instant, there were hands on both his cheeks, holding his head still as the knight was searching his face for… something – a give-away to a lie he wasn’t telling. Huh. That was nice. Maybe he liked being held!
“You’re bruised up badly,” the knight said with concern that had chased away the last traces of the irritation previously dripping from their tone. “I thought it was just from whatever wiles you get up to in that ridiculous Black Knight armour of yours, but… Crowley, is that blood?!”
A tentative finger dabbed at something wet on his forehead. He immediately decided that being held was not nice and he didn’t like it at all. “OUCH! Who is Crowley?” he hissed through the pain.
“You are!” The knight was starting to sound panicky.
“Oh,” Crowley answered. He needed to let that sink in for a second. ‘Crowley’. He didn’t remember being called Crowley. Surely he’d remember that, right? “That doesn’t sound very angelic, does it?”
“It-,” the knight cut himself off while something akin to horror flashed over their features. “Why would it sound angelic, Crowley?!”
“Because we’re angels! …you are an angel, right?” Crowley asked as he tried not to wince. Apparently this other angel had forgotten that they were fingering what felt more and more like a cut on his forehead.
“Yes! Of course I’m an angel! I’m Aziraphale! Crowley, how have you forgotten-”
“Aziraphale,” he repeated slowly. Somehow, that name rang a bell that ‘Crowley’ didn’t. “I knew an angel called Aziraphale. They helped me set up the universe. Told me their name for absolutely no reason. Which I guess you’d need to do with people if your name was something like ‘Aziraphale’.”
“He,” the knight said.
“He who?”
“I go by ‘he’,” they- he clarified. “That angel was me, and I’ll have you know I don’t just walk around and remind people of my name ‘for no reason’. Just because you’re a mannerless airhead who wouldn’t know a polite introduction if it hit him in the face- …Crowley, are you saying you only remember me from before the Beginning?”
He – that is himself – he… God, why couldn’t he remember his own name? Maybe it was Crowley. It just didn’t sound very angelic, but it didn’t feel wrong. So, he – Crowley, that is – said: “Of course I remember you from before the Beginning. We haven’t yet Begun, have we? …Oh God, have we?” Shit. He definitely had some holes in his memory. If he had missed the official Beginning, he was going to kick himself! He had marked the date for the Almighty’s ribbon cutting in his calendar ages ago! And he even had been counting down the days ever since!
Crowley stepped (or, alright, tumbled, sue him!) back from Aziraphale a bit to squint at the landscape around them: No stars twinkling at him from anywhere – just a couple of very tall, green fellows that swayed in the wind and made mocking rustling noises.
“Yes, we…” Aziraphale hesitated, but at least he seemed less frustrated with Crowley now. He was wringing his hands. “We have Begun already. The universe, that is.”
“Bollocks!” Ah, shit. He shouldn’t curse in front of other angels. But what the Heaven? They had just started without him?
“Crowley, time Began over four and a half thousand years ago,” the other angel said softly. “How can you not remember that?”
Crowley made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and pressed both hands to his temples in a desperate bid to calm the sledgehammer that was merrily beating out a tango in his head. “I don’t know! I have to talk to the higher ups! They must be able to figure this out. Gabriel or Michael or-”
“No!” Aziraphale’s outburst was so sudden that Crowley almost jumped. “You can’t go to Heaven! There’s been… There’s been an incident.”
“In Heaven?” Crowley laughed – and immediately regretted it as the answering pain vibrated through his skull. “Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing ever changes in Heaven. I just have to find one of the archangels-”
“There has been a war,” Aziraphale interrupted him rudely. “In Heaven. The angels split up in two groups and one of them Fell and became these horrible- … I mean, some of them are horrible- … They’re all demons now! Do you understand? They’re not angels anymore. They’re demons! Heaven’s enemies!”
A derisive snort left Crowley’s nose. (A careful, calculated snort that didn’t upset the construction site that was his head at the moment.) “Enemies of Heaven? How the Heaven would that work?”
“They’re evil! Michael smote the lot of them during the Great War, and if they were ever to come back, I’m sure that’s what would happen again.”
The whole notion was ridiculous! Crowley tried to make his face express as much but he wasn’t sure how much of it was actually cooperating right now. Aziraphale must be joking. Either that, or… “Alright, so you’re saying there are evil angels-”
“Demons,” Aziraphale corrected him.
“Demons. Fine,” Crowley amended. “You’re saying there are demons now. And in that context, you don’t want me to go back to Heaven because-”
“-because you’re one of them,” Aziraphale kept up his extremely rude bit of cutting Crowley off. Only this time, he didn’t let it bother him:
“-because you’re a demon,” Crowley finished his own conclusion pointedly. He folded his arms and lifted his chin, daring Aziraphale to contradict him. (Not that he could do anything about it – especially not physically. He had never been a good fighter, and at the moment, he felt like he would lose a fistfight with a snake.)
At least Crowley got the satisfaction of seeing Aziraphale gaping at him with an open mouth. “Me?!”
“Yup,” the angel – because memory or not, Crowley knew that he was an angel and everything else was bollocks – said proudly. “Either that or you’re lying. Because if you were telling the truth about this War, and I was a demon, then you would want me to go to Michael and be smited- …smote- …You’d want Michael to do that to a demon. Or are you saying we’re both demons?”
“What? No!” Aziraphale sounded genuinely offended. “I’m still an angel!”
“Yeah, that makes no sense,” Crowley countered, unimpressed. “If you were an angel and I was a demon, we’d be enemies and you’d want me to get my butt kicked. So you must be lying. I don’t know if I’m an angel and you’re a demon or if there wasn’t even a War to begin with… now that I think about it, you’ve always seemed like a little rascal who would prank others like that!”
“Excuse me?!”
Crowley ignored his rather organic sounding cry of outrage: “Either way: I’m going to Heaven.”
“I…” Aziraphale (the demon, definitely!) hesitated a second before his face settled into grim determination. Oh-oh, what was that expression about?! “I cannot let you do that, Crowley. I simply can’t.” And with that, he drew a sword that had apparently just hung at his side the whole time and had the insolence to only now introduce itself to Crowley, who was too scandalized to take a step back.
“I have sworn to guard the gates of Heaven from the likes of you…” Aziraphale sounded unconvinced by his own words. Even Crowley, who was standing directly in front of him (by only a sword’s length to be precise!), had trouble picking up the syllables, as if there was possibly someone else present who Aziraphale was talking to. “…so this is not an act of fraternisation with the enemy. I’m just executing Her will. That’s it.” He took a deep breath when he finished speaking.
And then, the blade of the sword rose to Crowley’s eye-level and Aziraphale’s voice finally rose to levels Crowley was sure were meant for him, and said: “Defend yourself or surrender!”
“What?!” Crowley screeched. “How is that fair? You have a suit of armour and everything!”
“You shouldn’t have gotten rid of yours, then,” Aziraphale said. His voice sounded like it was made from the same material as his weapon. It made the hairs on the base of Crowley’s neck stand up.
“What do you mean?”
“You are the Black Knight,” Aziraphale reiterated, patient and unrelenting, “You are not helpless; you had a suit of armour yourself. Even without it, you are still the Serpent of Eden; you have wiles sharp enough to get you through any sword fight. You seem to have temporarily misplaced that, too, but even still – you are a resident of this Earth. So what you do have, in any case, is my word as the guardian angel stationed on this planet with a mission to protect: I will not let any harm come to you.”
“You’re a lunatic!” Two steps back and Crowley found his back against a wall, so he decided it was very understandable and not uncool at all that he was now screeching: “You are threatening me with a big knife!”
The fully armoured knight in front of him was advancing slowly. “I am so sorry for this, dear fellow.”
In a fit of panic, Crowley let his knees drop to the ground. Something swooshed through the air right above his head. With a blunt, hollow sound, it connected with the wall. Aziraphale cursed.
Crowley’s vision was swimming ever since he had woken up, but he knew he had to grab something to defend himself. A piece of metal. A stick. Anything. His hands scrabbled over the earth in front of his knees.
But there was nothing there. The ground was soft dirt and gravel. Crowley snapped, and concentrated his entire will on a thick, sturdy tree branch he needed to come into existence.
Nothing happened.
Another lunge from his opponent barely missed his head because it was a little too slow as Crowley ducked away to the side. Instead, the hilt of Aziraphale’s weapon hit Crowley’s shoulder just hard enough to smart.
It knocked his elbow into the sword on his own belt.
Huh. Since when had that been there?
Well, no time to ponder that now. “GET BACK!” Crowley yelled and whipped the blade in a wide haymaker around himself.
Aziraphale actually stopped dead in his tracks. Thank God! Perhaps Crowley had underestimated his own fighting skills after all.
He huffed, already exhausted from his sudden burst of strength, and heaved himself back onto his feet. “Hah…!” Crowley paused for effect after one triumphant laugh (not because he was out of breath or anything) and relished in being threatening for once in his life. “Now you’re scared, huh? Not so brave when the other guy is also armed, are you?”
“I’ll be honest,” the knight in shining white armour answered. “I was a bit taken aback by that swing. But only because I was under the impression that you have held a sword before. Had that swing hit anything, it would have probably broken your wrist.”
“Oh, come off it,” Crowley did his best to lift said sword again. When he felt his wrist tremble at the weird angle, he covertly adjusted his grip.
“That’s better,” Aziraphale commented drily. “But with that stance, even half a hit will knock you off your feet.”
“I think you’re just trying to get me to surrender,” Crowley snorted with as much derisiveness as someone with a lung crying for air could possibly muster. “Afraid?”
“Of you hurting yourself? Yes. That’s the whole point!” Aziraphale sheathed his weapon.
Wow! A victory? Crowley really was better at this whole combat thing than even he had thought!
Unfortunately, the other being took another step towards him and rudely didn’t look all that defeated.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Crowley barked and threw out another swing. This time, it connected with Aziraphale’s armoured shoulder. The reverberation from the strike went straight up Crowley’s arm, through his torso and proceeded to fold his legs underneath him like straws during a hailstorm.
Before his head (which really had seen better days!) was able to make sense of where’s up and where’s the bloody ground, the world around him flipped over again and Crowley felt himself be hoisted onto a hard, rounded, metallic ledge.
That prick picked me up, his brain helpfully informed him half a second later.
“What the Heaven?” Crowley, realising he dropped his sword in the whole kerfuffle, started banging his fist against the gleaming armour plates in front of his nose. “Let me down!” An arm around his waist jostled him a little to redistribute his weight. The world finally clicked into place in Crowley’s head: His hip was folded over the knight’s shoulder, with Crowley’s head dangling down an armoured back so that if he looked up (well, down, actually) he could see the scoundrel’s heavily armoured butt.
“If you were actually trying to get down, as it were,” Aziraphale said with a sigh, “I would gladly let you. What I’m trying to prevent is you going up.”
Crowley kicked his legs against Aziraphale’s front which only got himself jostled a second time. “Let me down, demon!” he cried again, outraged at this undignified end of his very heroic sword fight.
First there was an outraged gasp from Aziraphale. Then it was echoed in a more shocked manner from their right (well, Aziraphale’s left). Though before Crowley’s ever-uncooperative vision was able to take in more than the silhouette of a person, he was whirled around when Aziraphale rudely turned and thereby threw Crowley’s torso in the opposite direction. He really was being very inconsiderate.
“Oh, don’t worry, young lady,” Crowley’s rude, unwanted conveyance said and affected a laugh that wouldn’t even fool Gabriel. The hand holding onto Crowley left his hip for a moment – possibly to wave at their new audience. It was great how Aziraphale remembered to emote to people around but spared absolutely no thought to how undignified Crowley must be looking. Great! Absolute top marks! Figures that the first and only other angel Crowley met down here, was completely lacking in manners. Definitely a demon, Crowley decided.
“I assure you I am not a demon,” Aziraphale told the person that Crowley still couldn’t see because he was being swung around like a scarf. “He just got himself into trouble at the pub, so I’m taking him… uh… into the woods.”
“Into the woods?!” Crowley croaked. “Is that the best lie you can come up with? How would that help anything?”
“He’s right,” a female voice said. “Since when do knights take plastered patrons to the woods?”
“Erm…” Aziraphale did something with his hands again that Crowley imagined was something rude, since everything else he was doing fit into that category. “Don’t worry about any of this and dream of whatever you like best!”
The distinct smell of ozone filled the air, and that of miracle form A38 appearing on another plane, waiting to be approved.
“Great,” Crowley sighed. “A bad liar and a cheater.”
“Says the demon who poses as the Black Knight when he doesn’t even know how to hold a sword,” Aziraphale bit back, apparently not impressed with how mouthy his captive was, and gripped onto his charge to adjust the weight on his shoulder for a third time.
“Could you at least not put your hand on my butt?” Crowley asked in a tone that made it clear how annoyed he was with the other’s impertinence.
“Oh!” Aziraphale’s fingers immediately slipped a few inches higher up his hips. “So sorry! Is that better?”
“Will you please stop holding me in place at all?” Crowley demanded. Worth a try. Angels were naive sometimes.
“Will you please stop wriggling around so I don’t have to be afraid that you’re going to fall off as soon as I let go?” Aziraphale asked back in the same dry tone Crowley had used.
“No,” the abducted angel admitted. “Just thought you might wanna be considerate for once.”
“Then that’s also a no from me,” Aziraphale huffed. “And I’m surprised you even know that word. You really must have hit your head quite hard.”
They marched on. (Aziraphale did, to be clear. Absolutely no marching was happening on Crowley’s end.)
Crowley drummed his fingers impatiently on the metal ridge of the armour sticking out in front of his nose. “Are you taking me to this demon place? Hell?” It was getting harder and harder to pay attention to their surroundings. Almighty, his head was foggy...
“No,” the knight said, steadily trudging away from all the newfangled walls and buildings of the settlement. Or at least Crowley thought so. “I already told that girl: I’m taking you with me into the woods.”
“And what are you planning on doing there?” Talking was getting very exhausting. Maybe Crowley could just close his eyes for a second...
“I don’t know!” Aziraphale suddenly sounded like he was carrying the weight of the Earth and was waiting for someone to come and help him with it. “Oh, Crowley, I don’t know!”
And then there was yet another voice. One that Crowley had never heard before – not that he remembered hearing a lot of voices. But he would definitely recall one so loud and angry: “There! That’s the demon! He’s abducting that man and he made Cecily dream about the handymen taking off their shirts!”
Aziraphale let out a desperate whistling sound and shouted: “Oh ffff-”
And that was when Crowley’s poor, abused head had enough arguing, fighting, shouting and dangling upside down, and decided that it was overdue for a good old passing out.