Chapter Text
“She’s a pagan!”
Elspeth had gone to sleep after a dinner which had, fortunately enough, gone by with no more incidents. She had insisted that Aziraphale and Crowley should take the bed while she slept in another sofa next to Adam’s, but obviously the angel and demon had insisted on her staying in her room. They had heard a loud thud upstairs, but had thought nothing of it as she had exclaimed “Am fine!”
“She is a pagan-ritual-performer, a-a venerator of the goddess of the moon, a wandering sheep lost in the depths of the darkest forest away from the light of the Lord!” Aziraphale rambled on as Crowley rubbed his temples, sitting on the chair as he started to get a hellish headache. He stood up and went closer to the angel, with an angry expression.
“Your Boss,” he hissed and was interrupted by an apologetic whine, from Aziraphale. “Your Boss has abandoned this… tooth-rotting sweet human being,” he continued, moving back to point at the top of the stairs from when Elspeth had disappeared, “for being a pagan?”
“W-well, there are many other pagan people who haven’t been abandoned by the Almighty, Crowley,” Aziraphale said making a sad and worried face as Crowley looked at the top of the stairs, his arms crossed on his chest. “Maybe she has an obscure and dark, unforgivable secret.” Crowley gave him a look at the word “unforgivable.” “Maybe she’s a psychopath,” he added with a hint of hope.
“Maybe she’s a psychopath,” Crowley mimicked him. “Are you hearing yourself?”
“W-well… we can’t know the ways of God, but there must be a good reason why she was abandoned. And maybe we can help!” he added, his face lighting up at the thought.
“Oh, no. No, no, no! This trip is supposed to be about us and Adam staying away from the picture until Heaven and Hell find something else to keep themselves entertained.”
“Oh, but, dear, don’t you want to help the child?” he asked him. “You said it yourself, that is was… upsetting that she found herself in such a situation.”
“I never said that! I couldn’t care less,” he hissed.
“Oh, but you do care, and she was so nice to us!” the angel pouted. Crowley looked at him from the corner of his eyes and let out a grunt.
“Alright! What do you suggest?!”
“I suggest,” Aziraphale started with a satisfied smile, “that we convert her to Christianity.”
“Bullshit. That’s boring and doomed to failure. Besides, we have to leave this cottage as soon as possible. There’s no time for lame catechesis.”
Aziraphale let out an indignant gasp as Crowley moved to the kitchen to investigate if Elspeth had some more wine. “But your car is not even fixed! How do you suggest that we continue?”
“I’d rather go all the way up to Shetlands walking than stay here imparting catechism to a girl that probably doesn’t even know what a Bible is!”
“She has an extremely beautiful copy of King Jame’s Bible,” Aziraphale said proudly and Crowley gave him a look as he poured some wine on a cup. “You shouldn’t drink her wine without her permission,” the angel frowned and Crowley started drowning the wine, looking in his eyes as he did. What was he going to do? Make the wine become water? Hah! When he finished, he shove the cup aside, breaking it, and started drinking from the bottle directly. “You are upset.”
“I’m not.”
“Why are you upset?”
“I’m telling you, I’m not!”
“Oh, you are impossible!” Aziraphale exclaimed and fixed the cup with a miracle.
“Can you stop doing that?” Crowley hissed in annoyance, going closer to him again.
“Doing what?”
“Being so fucking nice! So unbearably nice that you put yourself in danger! I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to use our powers unless it was extremely necessary during this trip.”
“Well, then don’t go around breaking other people’s property,” he sentenced. “Besides, it would be more suspicious if we didn’t use our powers at all than if we continue making small deeds,” he concluded with a satisfying nod.
“Oh?” Crowley said, feigning surprise. “Then I guess it’s alright if I fix my car and we go the fuck away from here.”
Aziraphale meditated in silence for a while and his face light up again. “We can take her with us!” Crowley gave him a look and took another, long sip of wine, going out of the house from the kitchen door. “Crowley? Crowley!” Aziraphale started following him as he gave long, rushed steps down the garden into the forest.
“You want to take the girl because you want to make up for God being an almighty dick to her? Alright! Go ahead! Take her!!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is it the same thing you did to me?!” he asked, and Aziraphale stopped running. Crowley turned around and started walking towards him, drinking more wine and finally threw the bottle away. “Did you only agree to fraternise with me out of pity?”
“I won’t have this conversation with you while you are still drunk,” Aziraphale stated, giving him a hurt look. Crowley let out a grunt and started sobering up, Aziraphale looking away. When he finished, Crowley gave him an expectant look, wanting him to reply to what he had just asked although his sober state made him quite embarrassed on his previous statement. Nothing he would ever admit, though. “Do you really think so?” Aziraphale finally broke the silence, giving him a few shy and sad glances.
Crowley stubbornly shrugged with an indifferent expression. “Isn’t that what you angels do? Be too… extremely nice?”
“Our relationship has always been genuine,” Aziraphale continued, glancing downwards. “At least from my part.”
He let out a grunt. “You always point out how demons and angels are natural enemies” he made gestures as if separating the two categories. “So…”
“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale suddenly said, and Crowley stopped gesturing and talking altogether. He looked at him with his mouth wide open. “You’re right,” Aziraphale nodded, “I realised a long time ago you were right when you said there’s only our side, and… maybe I haven’t been able to express it as I felt it.” He gave Crowley an apologetic look.
The demon couldn’t go out of his stupor. The angel was apologising to him for the first time in more than 6000 years. Up until then, he had heard him being thankful, mad, content, happy towards him, but never before had he been sorry for something he had done. It was usually the other way around, although Crowley would only acknowledge it when he desperately wanted or needed something from Aziraphale: it would do the trick.
“You’re sorry,” he stated.
“Well, that’s what I said!” Aziraphale frowned.
Crowley hadn’t felt as confused and warm since the angel had showed up in his car with a bottle of holy water, and he had to admit that he quite enjoyed the feeling (more so now that the deed wouldn’t imply in one way or another the risk of the irremediable effacing of his presence in the entire universe forever). “W-well… thank you.”
Aziraphale nodded and gave him a polite smile. “You’re welcome.”
“Should we…?”
They both started heading back to the cottage. “I hope you won’t make a fuss tomorrow when I suggest Elspeth to join us on our trip,” Aziraphale changed the topic of conversation back to its controversial beginning. Crowley let out a groan of exasperation that indicated Aziraphale he had given up.
“Fine, do whatever you want to, involve the Scottish lass,” he mimicked the Scottish accent and the angel gave him a bright smile.
“You won’t regret it! It will be fun! You know… the more, the merrier!” Crowley rolled his eyes, but opened the door for him, gesturing him to go inside with a dramatic bow. “Oh. Thank you,” the angel smiled softly and Crowley snorted a laugh.
Next day dawned with Elspeth milking her cow. She wanted to give her guests a nice breakfast just as they woke up: pancakes with wild berries, fresh milk, and a nice cup of tea. Of course, she didn’t know that two of her guests hadn’t slept during the whole night, but spent the entire evening going through her book collection (in the case of Aziraphale) and looking at the music one (in the case of Crowley)
“See? Even the wench likes good ol’ Freddy Mercury. And Prince,” Crowley whispered, taking her vinyls from one of the shelves and showing them to him with boastfulness.
“I never said they weren’t good,” Aziraphale raised his look momentarily from a fine edition of Virgil’s Bucolics. “Just that they aren’t refined enough for my taste.”
“Oh, no,” Crowley said in the same tone. “Look at this, angel. This may seem refined enough for you,” he stuck out his tongue as he raised a copy of The Sound of Music. Aziraphale frowned and looked back to the book as Crowley laughed.
But let’s go back to our girl, who was fulfilling her duties as farmer that morning for her guests. The day was sunny and there was no breeze, so she didn’t need more than a coat over her sleeping gown to do so. She shared her cow with her neighbour Alistair, and she was the most beautiful cow in the county. She had a good temper, too, and would never wander stray, staying always between Elspeth’s and Alistair’s cottage. But the cow wasn’t the only thing Elspeth was proud of. Her hens, too, were beautiful and fat, and she made sure that they stayed safe from her cats. It had been complicated building the chicken-run for them, and she had almost had a fatal incident at least three times during the affair, but Alistair had helped her. As a way to thank him, she had offered to share the cow as long as he behaved nicely with her.
And the cow was almost like a sister to Elspeth. This cow was none other than the daughter of Beth, who belonged to Elspeth’s mother, Margaret. Similarly, Beth’s mother was the cow of Elspeth’s grandma, and so on, and so this cow belonged to a generation of calves that had belonged to her family ever since the Romans tried to conquer Scotland. In fact, Aziraphale and Crowley had been lucky enough to meet both Elspeth and her cow’s ancestors many years ago.
“Ave Cesar,” Aziraphale had said to the woman, who was milking her cow on a fine morning, pretty much as Elspeth was now. Her ancestor didn’t even look up as she was paying attention to the apple of her eye. “Woman, I am afraid you are sitting right on the door of the Antonine wall. You must move, eh, 50 feet to continue with your business. Now.”
The woman and the cow looked at him with indifference and as the animal let out a moo, Elspeth’s ancestor stained his brand new sandals with milk. Aziraphale moved back with a gasp and was about to speak up in a rather exacerbated tone when Crowley appeared from the forest behind the woman, in the Scottish part of the wall.
“Crowley,” the angel called him with a happy smile.
“A wish a lad would look at me the way that Roman looked at that fellow,” Elspeth’s ancestor told her cow.
“Aziraphale! What are you doing on this side of the wall?”
“That woman is milking the cow at the entrance!” he explained, walking towards him in an annoyed manner. “And she milked on my sandals! They were made of the finest leather in the entire Empire!”
Crowley looked at the sandals and let out a pout. “Ow, I’m sure they’ll wash away rather fast if they were of such a good material,” he said, making the stain disappear and Aziraphale smiled and let out an “oh” of content and gratefulness. “Let me talk to that woman, will you?”
He walked in front of her and Aziraphale stared at the pair with a look of regret, afraid of what Crowley could do to the Scot and her cow, but ultimately letting him do his business with her. He kneeled in front of her and the woman frowned.
“Now, if this isn’t a fine cow,” he said, patting her side a bit too strongly and making the cow moo, upset. The woman gave him a look. “It would be a pity if something were to happen to her, wouldn’t it?”
“Stay away from ma cow, ye bastard.”
“No. You stay away from the wall. Understood?” Crowley smiled menacingly and the woman stood up. She didn’t understand how a Scot could be working with a Roman, but she didn’t like it in the slightest. Nevertheless, she took her bucket and her cow and walked past him and Aziraphale into the forest.
“Ye’re a traitor to yer people!” she exclaimed at Crowley, making him frown.
“If you knew who my people are…” he whispered. Aziraphale looked at the scene, the demon’s mood making even him upset, and so he spoke up to make the woman go away faster.
“Leave at once, woman, or… or…” he had to think of something, something menacing. For once, he was going to play the bad police. “Or God will turn His face from you and your lineage forever!”
The woman made a rude gesture. She would always raise her family to venerate the pagan gods anyway. Crowley approached Aziraphale with a raised eyebrow and an amused smile as he hesitantly stared at the woman leave.
“Maybe I should take that back,” he said with a worried expression. “I don’t actually mean it.”
“Nah, just an empty threat, no real harm in it,” he shrugged. “Just let it be. Otherwise you would only extend the conversation unnecessarily. What would you say to some lunch instead?” he suggested.
“With those clothes you wouldn’t be able to close the wall!” Aziraphale replied, although he was looking forwards to a lunch with his frie… acquaintance. With a gesture, Crowley’s attire transformed into Roman robes. “I would be delighted,” Aziraphale smiled and both of them crossed the wall.
Of course, Elspeth didn’t find anyone to threaten or damn her as she was milking her cow, for she always made sure to do so in a place where she would disturb no one. Besides, it was quite difficult to find a single soul around that place ever since she had moved into the cottage. She made her way back when she filled the bucket with milk, humming a merry song at the thought of her guests drinking it, but just as she arrived there, she tripped on a rock and fell down, milk and all on the floor.
That’s how Adam found her when he went out of the cottage to walk Dog.