Chapter Text
This was an ordinary sight for a comfortable suburb on Christmas Eve: a couple leaving their home in the silty light of the late afternoon, secure in their coats and their mufflers, locking up behind them as they went on a holiday visit. One of them headed towards the car in the drive, which was not an ordinary sight in any suburb: a Bentley in near-mint condition.
“No, not the car, darling,” said the other. “We go where we go.”
Crowley shrugged. He joined Aziraphale at the side of the winter-browned country lane, walking at no particular pace.
“So, how do you start?” Crowley said eventually. “You like to play Father Christmas? Turning up at shacks with a pile of dolls and things?”
“Oh, goodness, no. No, you can’t do that,” said Aziraphale. “When a child finds he’s got strange new toys, what do you suppose the family thinks? The poor thing gets beaten for stealing. Else the parents take the toys and sell them.”
Crowley nodded. Then:
“… This actually happened, didn’t it.”
“Only the once and I was very sorry and I fixed it right away. Oh, now, look, there’s that pothole. They still haven’t sorted that.”
On any other day, this would have been a remarkably dull thing to say. Today, however, it had meaning. No sooner had Aziraphale spoken than the pothole was gone—not vanished, but as if it had never been.
“Potholes?” said Crowley, with a slight air of injury. In his former line of work, he had been very fond of them. “Are we just going to walk along doing the council’s job for it? Where are we going?”
Aziraphale took his hand.
“Come and see,” he said.
And with that, they were gone.
——
An angel or a demon can, of course, pass through short spaces as a pin passes through gathered fabric. It attracts no attention from Above or Below if they move across a room, or even a street, in this fashion; but to travel across the globe all at once this way would be extremely bold.
On Christmas Eve, Aziraphale dared to move more than he usually did, but even so, he passed through the world every thousand miles, at the least. He did so unseen; it cut down on explanations. And not every situation, as even he had come to admit, was improved by the sudden appearance of an Englishman, no matter how cheerful and kind he might be.
——
At Heathrow, a border control agent admitted each waiting soul in her line to the United Kingdom, with a warm smile and a “happy Christmas to you.” Several hours later, when her own personality returned, she would have a panic attack and go to the hospital.
——
On the coast of France, in a nameless camp, a tent shared by a family of five was suddenly warm. There was no dramatic moment in which they came to realize this; it was simply that they were able to sleep, more or less. In the morning, their mother would find five loaves of bread that no one could remember buying, and that would be a great deal more dramatic.
——
In a crevice between buildings in Berlin, a young woman who sat mounded under a layer of moving blankets felt a deep movement in her gut, strange but not bad. She did not yet realize it, but she would not need her fix in the morning, or ever again. That sickness was gone from her body, and it would not come again.
She had a vague idea that a man had just stopped to touch her, but that had to have been a dream—he hadn’t tried to do anything awful. He had simply gone away, joined another man, and walked into a convenience store across the street. She pulled her blanket tight, and tried to sleep again.
——
Convenience store coffee is a concept, rather than a pleasure. The concept is warmth and wakefulness, and Crowley needed the first, if not the second. The pair of them took their cups of coffee from the Spätkauf and wandered down the street, which would have been a dangerous route if anyone else could have seen them.
“The truce,” said Crowley suddenly. “Christmas Eve. 1914. When the Germans and the British wouldn’t fight. Sang songs instead, and drank to each other. That was you, was it? Passing through on your walk?”
“Well,” said Aziraphale, with a modest smile. “Yes and no.”
“No?”
Aziraphale sipped his coffee.
“It wasn’t my idea, you see. The soldiers thought of it themselves. Lots of them, in different places, different years.”
“Ah.”
“I was there then. I’d thought of something like it before I came. I thought I could give them their peace as a gift. But it was already there. Just below the ground.”
The two of them had slipped through space again; now they were traveling on foot through fields far to the west of the city. The stars hung clear and cold above; the frost crackled beneath their boots.
“Fragile thing, of course, a Christmas peace,” said Aziraphale.
“’Course it is.”
“She was there again, soon enough. War is … I couldn’t …” Aziraphale stared away, toward the amber lights of the nearest town. “But one does one’s best.”
Crowley took his arm; and they passed on.
——
Miles to sea off Cabo Verde, the third officer of the freighter Chelsea picked up a distress signal from a sinking fisherman. How the freighter had come to pick up the weak and antiquated radio signal from the weak and antiquated boat when it was well out of range, no one quite knew. What was certain was that the freighter’s aid saved five lives that night.
The captain of the boat swore that an angel had sent the Chelsea, but that was the kind of thing he said; he had once sworn that an angel had sent Cristiano Ronaldo. No one paid much mind to it, which was all right with the angel who had sent the Chelsea.
——
“Crowley, wouldn’t you like to think of something? Something ni—something in the spirit of the thing?”
“Right. I said I would, didn’t I. Well. Er. Shall we—oh, right, here. I know this place.”
——
In Bermuda, the weather was generally quite nice on Christmas Eve. As it was a particularly British island and very wealthy, no one paid much attention to a pair of rather overdressed and visibly British gentlemen on a promenade in Hamilton, looking seaward. This was also because half the fire department was barreling down the street on the other side, towards the harbor.
“Generally,” said Aziraphale, “and, I should say, ideally, in my experience, Christmas Eve does not involve arson.”
“Arson,” said Crowley cheerfully. “That’s a rough word for something that just sparked up in a bit of old rope, isn’t it?”
“It sparked because you looked at it.”
“True. True.”
“You set a ship on fire!” snapped Aziraphale.
Crowley leaned against the railing and into the breeze.
“Ship? She was a yacht. And she was empty. Don’t you know whose that was?”
Aziraphale only stared. Crowley told him.
“He’s one of ours. I mean Hell’s. Most CEOs are.”
“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Oh. Well. I, er. I still disapprove.”
“No, you don’t.” Crowley winked. “She’ll burn to the waterline. She’ll ruin Christmas morning for him. Just like he ruined Christmas morning with, what was it, two thousand job cuts?”
“You are absolutely not entering into the spirit of the thing,” said Aziraphale, biting back a smile.
“Oh, I think I am. —Where to?”
——
After a busy half-hour in Manhattan, they paused for more terrible coffee in Washington Heights.
“Just there,” said Aziraphale, waving at the High Bridge. “Eighty—no, eighty-two years, it must have been, not long before the war—I found a young man on this very bridge. Standing on the railing. He thought I was mad to come after him. I let him think so. It gave him an interest in life.”
“Did it work?” Crowley warmed his hands on the coffee. He had long ago given up trying to tell Aziraphale that people generally did think he was mad.
“So far as I could see. I sat with him. Took a bit of the pain away.” Aziraphale looked down into the river. “I walked him about until we found a place that would take him into the warm and give him a hot toddy. Which rather took some doing on Christmas Eve. People were awfully rude. I kept telling him stories, ridiculous things, just to keep him laughing at me. Seemed to do the trick. I saw him home. I told him he would do very well for himself in a solid line of work, if he looked. And I meant it, too. I gave him my blessing.”
Crowley was suddenly attentive. An angel’s blessing was not just a word of kindness; it was a powerful thing.
“What, er,” he said, “what line of work was he in, do you recall?”
“He said he was a scenario writer for the motion pictures. No kind of career for a man with a young family, I should think.” Aziraphale sniffled, and pulled his peacoat tight over his shoulders. “I do hope he settled himself.”
“I expect he did all right,” said Crowley.
——
There are, of course, worse places to be on Christmas Eve than in a Walmart, but if you are in a Walmart on Christmas Eve, none of those places will spring to mind. A Walmart is a particularly sorrowful place to be if you are very small and have no money, which was the case for Lupe, age six, of San Antonio, Texas. Her mother was doing her best under difficult circumstances, but Lupe promptly got herself lost. A staff member eventually found her in an empty toy aisle, talking to an imaginary friend, and delivered her back to her mother.
Later, Lupe’s sister said: “Why did Mama buy you a doll at Walmart? Where’s mine?”
“She didn’t,” said Lupe. “Slenderman was giving them away. He said not to tell any grownups. He said I could take anything I wanted.”
“Wh—? Slenderman’s not real.”
“Well, that’s what he looked like,” said Lupe. “But redhead. And nice.”
“Okay, that’s dumb, and that’s weird, and I’m telling Mama.”
“I got one for you too,” said Lupe.
“You did?” said her sister. “What kind?”
——
“Crowley, I specifically told you what would happen if you gave things away to chil—”
“—And I remembered it. Nobody over twelve can see those toys. Anyway, they’ll forget all about them by New Year’s. Wouldn’t need me to do that.”
——
But this was a dark and difficult country to help, and there were only the two of them. Some of what they saw, they never spoke about again.
Where the angel could help, he did: he brought warmth to those huddled outside, he found food to hide near them, he lifted the pain that their bodies held; and he gave them his blessing. To warm the cold, to heal the sick, to find food for the hungry: these things he could do.
To ask why they were cold, why they were sick, why they were hungry: that was not what he had been made to do. He did not have the strength or the right to interfere in the kingdoms of the world, except as he was directed. And now there was no one to give him direction, and no one to keep him from asking.
He said none of this out loud. What he did instead was to stop abruptly in an empty parking lot in San Francisco and throw his arms around Crowley. Crowley said nothing out loud himself, only held Aziraphale’s head against his shoulder as the angel breathed hard and deep, his shoulders shaking.
——
What Crowley did say, eventually, was:
“Cocoa. You need it. Don’t argue. —Unless you want tea instead. But no caffeine.”
The sky was only just dark in San Francisco, and there, they had no need to go unseen. It was entirely all right for two men of a certain age to walk hand in hand together, looking for the warmth of the wider world. They found a bar still open, a kind bartender, and a cup of spiked hot chocolate—powdered cocoa, perhaps, but real cream and good rum.
In the next week, the bartender would learn that she had been awarded a grant for her paintings, the first in a chain of events that would lead to her never needing to tend bar on another Christmas Eve.
——
There were ships at sea, again, and Anchorage, and Hokkaido, and beyond. There were hidden food caches, and miraculous remissions, and dreams of peace for those who could have nothing more. There were also mysterious fires in corporate offices, accidental data leaks that would come to bring down politicians, children with unaccountable toys, and very lucky pickpockets.
There was, in short, a merry Christmas, more so for some than for others.
——
In the violet-blue of coming dawn, a nice suburban couple unlocked their doorway and returned home with no more fuss than any other family returning home exhausted from a long Christmas trip. The door shut hard behind them.
Crowley was hanging his long black duster and scarlet scarf on the hooks beside the door when he noticed that Aziraphale had not moved from his place on the doormat, that he was staring across the room, disconsolate.
“You all right?”
“I’m tired,” Aziraphale said. “That’s all.”
That was not, of course, all, and Crowley knew it. He stepped softly behind Aziraphale and reached around to unbutton his double-breasted peacoat.
“It was your show,” Crowley said. “I thought you said you’d always liked doing this.”
“Did I? I shouldn’t think I would have said that. ‘Liked’ is not the word. It is good. It is the very least I can do.”
Crowley took the peacoat and hung it up. He returned to Aziraphale and began to unbutton his jacket, then his waistcoat, with the quiet attention of a valet.
“But … it takes so much. This year, I … it was more than I could bear.”
Crowley took the jacket and the waistcoat away and hung them on hooks, then returned again to Aziraphale. Without a word, he embraced him from behind, buried his chin in his shoulder, held him still. Aziraphale leaned back into him, bearing a weight.
“I should like a bath,” he said at last.
“Go and have one,” said Crowley. Upstairs, there was the squeak of a tap opening, then the mild, good sound of water pouring into an empty tub. “Then come to bed. Don’t do that, that thing you do where you sit up worrying and tell me you were reading all night. You promise?”
——
Later, in the milk-blue light of dawn, Aziraphale came to bed, careful and quiet in his cream-colored flannel. Crowley slid over in his satin pajamas and lay across his chest, breathing him in, as he did whenever he was allowed to.
“There you are,” he muttered, settling himself, curling his fingers into the crook of the angel’s neck. “There you are.”[1]
Aziraphale clasped his hand tight, and was wordless.
“How are you?” Crowley said. “Better now?”
Aziraphale’s answer hitched in his chest.
“Christmas Eve was easier before,” he said at last.
“Without me?”
“No, no, no. I’d wished you could come along for ages. Only, before—then there was a Plan, you see.”
“Mmph,” said Crowley. He did not miss the Plan.
“I believed it. I … I truly believed that it did not matter that I couldn’t help everyone. That it was not cruel or random to help one without helping another. That it was well that I should go back and be safe and warm in my shop, that in some grand accounting it would all be made right. And now …”
“Now what?”
“That’s it exactly. Now what?” There was pain in the angel’s voice. “Now what can I do for them? What can I not do for them? Why did I come home? Why should I have a home? Should I not spend myself? Should I not leave this house, should I not—”
“Shh. Shh—”
“—should I not go? Why not?”
Crowley raised himself and pulled himself level with Aziraphale’s face.
“Because a demon has possessed you and bound you to this house with wards and sigils strange. Sort of thing. At least till morning.”
Aziraphale smiled weakly.
“It is morning.”
“No, it’s not,” said Crowley, stroking his white-golden curls. “Doesn’t count as morning till you’ve been asleep. And the trick is, if you sleep long enough, everything hurts less.”
He pressed the length of his hand against Aziraphale’s face. Aziraphale swiftly did the same, then buried both hands in Crowley’s overgrown red locks.
“Think about sorting everyone else out when you’re sorted out, right, angel?”
“My love, you’re so good to me—so good at heart—”
“No, I’m not,” said Crowley, the heat rising in his cheeks. “I’m selfish. I’m keeping you.”
Aziraphale’s gaze was cobalt in the low light. Crowley kissed the crest of his brow.
“You want to do more,” he said, “or you want to do things differently, then we’ll see how we can make it happen. In the morning. Which is not now. Morning might be three P.M. at this rate. And besides—”
He began to unbutton Aziraphale’s pajama top, then ran his fingertips through the pale golden hair on his chest. The angel shivered.
“—what’s anyone done for you for Christmas?”
Even now, every time he saw that Crowley wanted him, there was a brief and sudden light of awe in Aziraphale’s eyes, an amazement that such a thing could be for him.
“Oh, you cannot mean it,” he said; but he began to pull apart Crowley’s own buttons. “At this hour? A double entendre? You are unbelievable.”
Crowley kissed his mouth hard and quick, then said:
“You have to believe me. You have to know what you are. Not what you were meant to do, you. How else do I show you?”
Tears started in the angel’s eyes. With one finger, he traced the loops of the snake tattoo on Crowley’s temple.
“Terrible man. Wonderful, terrible man. How did I ever go through this without you?”
“Let me take care of you,” Crowley whispered.
“If you’ll have me—”
“Always,” said Crowley, and bit gently into his neck.
——
Beyond, beneath the low haze of clouds blown in from the sea, lay the rest of the town, where, in houses and apartments and cottages, children were one by one squirming awake and slinking downstairs to see what Father Christmas had done. And in these houses and apartments, couples had fallen exhausted to bed, chasing what sleep there was left.
Most of them slept with their backs to each other, pushed apart by the heat of the holiday, the stress of the presents, the ordeal of surreptitious toy assembly. Some couples—these mostly in homes without children—slept closer together, granted a peace that did not come out of simple spent passion but from the steady warmth of a lasting love.
One such couple stayed asleep long after the others had risen, made themselves tea, and dressed for whatever Christmas Day might bring. Outside this couple’s home, a car passed now and again, winding its way to dinner at one grandmother’s house or another.
“They’ve fixed that pothole. Took them long enough,” one driver murmured to his wife as they passed.
“Mmph,” was all the answer he got; but then, it had been a remarkably dull thing to say.
[1] He said this every time he got Aziraphale where he wanted him, alone. At first, Aziraphale thought it was only gentle nonsense; then he remembered what Crowley’s face had looked like when Crowley had lost him. There you are: when he said it, he meant it.