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London Blitz- 1941
In a church
Sometime on the waning end of midnight.
It had all gone a bit… pear shaped.
Aziraphale liked pears. He didn’t like Nazis. He certainly didn’t like Nazis with their malicious Nazi fingers stroking carelessly over his first editions. He didn’t like being double-crossed by a Nazi agent who had sought him out and seemed so sincere in her desire to help the Allies stop the spread of Nazi terror. He didn’t like the idea of all the paperwork, in triplicate, which he would have to fill out, in triplicate, if he were to be inconveniently discorporated by said double-dealing Nazi woman.
He’d been played for a sucker.
Oh, bother.
Aziraphale knew that he didn’t have to be discorporated. He could just as simply jam the gun, render the bullets ineffective, do any of a thousand small miracles that would save himself from a mountain of tedious bureaucracy, but that Strongly-Worded rebuke of his ‘frivolous miracles’ from the 18th century was still – relatively – fresh in his mind.
If it hadn’t been for Crowley turning up at an opportune moment and rescuing him from his predicament, he’d have been forced – if only for the sake of appearances – to keep an appointment with Madame Le Guillotine. He could hardly expect, he thought, for the demon to materialize in his moment of need again.
Just about when this thought floated through the part of his mind not preoccupied with the barrel of a gun in his face, there was the distinct sound of a heavy wooden door slamming, followed by quiet hissing, and the clip-clip-clip of expensive shoes hopping along the marble church floor.
“Sorry, consecrated ground.” The demon himself came clip-clopping down between the pews wearing his customary dark sunglasses and a dapper wide-brimmed fedora. Aziraphale was so taken aback by the spectacle, he practically forgot about the double-crossing Nazi woman, or her accomplices, or their guns. “Oh! It's like being at the beach in bare feet.”
“What are you doing here?” the angel asked. He was standing in a church, on consecrated grounds, in the middle of the London Blitz, opposite a gaggle (a trifecta? A murder? What is the multiple for Nazi?) of armed enthusiasts of the German War Machine, and he looked like he could not be less concerned if he tried.
“Stopping you getting into trouble,” Crowley replied fairly flippantly, switching from foot to foot restlessly.
“I should have known,” the angel huffed, “Of course. These people are working for you.”
Crowley looked slightly offended. “No. They're a bunch of half-witted Nazi spies running around London, blackmailing and murdering people. I just didn't want to see you embarrassed.”
“Mr Anthony J. Crowley.” Mr. British-Sounding Nazi seemed to realize that the gravity of the situation was shifting and seemed eager to refocus the conversation, “Your fame precedes you.”
“- Anthony?” Aziraphale interjected. Crowley was making changes to his name again.
“- You don't like it?”
“No, no, I didn't say that.” He did, rather. But it wouldn’t do to inflate the demon’s ego. “I'll get used to it.”
“The famous Mr Crowley? That's such a pity you must both die.” She seemed genuinely impressed with the demon, and not-genuinely remorseful of their assumed impending deaths. Aziraphale was having a hard time continuing to be impressed.
“What does the "J" stand for?” he asked, suddenly curious (and suddenly rather concerned it may be something blasphemous).
Crowley shrugged, “It's just a "J", really.” He glanced over at the fount of blessed water and whistled, “Look at that! A whole fontful of holy water. It doesn't even have guards!”
The was about when the increasingly confused, and increasingly frustrated Nazis decided they’d had rather enough of the odd duo and their perfectly pleasant, perfectly private conversation being conducted as if officials of the Reich were not pointing guns – guns! You’ve got to respect a peson with a gun on you! Those are the rules! – and ordered them killed.
Crowley, it seemed, had different ideas. “In about a minute,” he said, as if revealing the end of a fairly marvelous magic trick (the kind he was constantly asking the angel to never, ever do), “a German bomber will release a bomb that will land right here. If you all run away very, very fast, you might not die.” He looked at the Nazi woman particularly, “You won't enjoy dying, definitely won't enjoy what comes after.”
“You expect us to believe that? The bombs tonight will fall on the East End.”
The demon grinned, dark and amused, and terribly please with himself. “Yes. It would take a last-minute demonic intervention to throw them off course, yes.” When nobody moved, he sighed, “You're all wasting your valuable running-away time! And if,” he gave his ethereal counterpart a Significant Look, “in 30 seconds, a bomb does land here, it would take a real miracle for my friend and I to survive it.”
Their deaths were ordered again, but nobody seemed particularly into it anymore, and besides; there was a whistling that seemed to be getting… louder. Crowley pointed finger-guns toward the ceiling before quite deliberately stuffing them into his ears.
And then was the explosion. Aziraphale twisted his wrist in a complicated motion and while light and sound – as well as everything else in the near vicinity – exploded around them, the angel concentrated on himself, and on his friend, and on the fact that they would. Not. Die.
In the aftermath, Crowley was cleaning his glasses, his yellow snake eyes bright in the moonlight over their suddenly exposed heads. The light softened the demon’s sharp features and Aziraphale was momentarily taken over by sheer relief at their Arrangement, and their strange symbiosis, and their… friendship.
“That was very kind of you,” he said, powerless to keep the tenderness he was feeling out of his voice.
“Shut up!” The demon replied, slipping his glasses back up his straight, strong nose. There wasn’t heat in it, though. There was amusement.
“Well, it was. No paperwork, for a start.” And then a horrible thing occurred to the angel and he gasped. “Oh, the books!” he wailed, feeling a particular kind of despair crawling up his chest. “Oh, I forgot all the books! Oh, they'll all be blown to – “
He had barely begun to work up a good lament for his beautiful, irreplaceable, personalized prophetic texts when the demon reached past him and pulled a leather satchel, so pristine and unharmed as to suspend the belief that it had been involved in an explosion to begin with.
“Little demonic miracle of my own.” He was grinning devilishly, holding the bag out to him, his long pale fingers sliding against the angel’s own as Aziraphale took it. The feeling in his chest turned liquid and warm, and so absolute it ached.
“Lift home?” It was a nonchalant question, tossed over Crowley’s shoulder as he swaggered back down the decimated rubble that used to be the isle between the pews. Nothing like a bomb to desacralize some Holy ground. Crowley could probably drink what was left of the Holy Water, though Aziraphale would rather evaporate every drop of liquid in London than let him try.
The angel could only stare after him, powerless to stop the slightly soppy look spreading across his angelic face. Nothing had changed, not really. He didn’t feel any different; in fact, he felt exactly the same.
Aziraphale didn’t fall in love with Crowley that night. As he clutched the buttery leather satchel to his chest and followed the rakish dark figure to the shining black-and-gray Bentley perched across the street, slid into the passenger side and sat primly with that soft, far-away smile still perched on his lips, the angel realized he always had been.