Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Here was the thing about saving the whole universe. Not the world, mind you, the world had been saved hundreds of times over, including one memorable instance where a rat set in motion a chain of events that kept half the population of the planet from being utterly eviscerated.

No, saving the whole universe was a different beast altogether, and what its (admittedly) hapless and very, very lucky saviors didn’t anticipate was that once the universe was saved, well. You got used to it. There were a few tense years in the aftermath, of course, where the angel and the demon barely slept[1] for fear that Something would happen. They’d been told their whole lives that Armageddon was inevitable, a part of the Great Plan, and despite their statements to the contrary on Tadfield Air Base, both of them worried that, perhaps, they had been wrong. That they’d delayed the Great War, not stopped it, and that any minute, Something would rip apart everything they’d built and the world—the entire bleeding universe—would be completely, utterly done for.

And of course, they were always on the lookout for scouts from their respective home offices, though neither of them really thought of Heaven or Hell as home anymore.[2] Their little trick with the holy water and hellfire had gone off without a hitch, but there was always the chance that Heaven or Hell would send scouts to check up on them—Crowley and Aziraphale were Oddities now. They were different and the home offices didn’t particularly like different things, though for vastly different reasons.

But years passed and slowly, bit by bit, they let their respective guards down. Battle fatigue was exhausting, and Crowley had not been made for battle. That was Aziraphale’s bag, but the angel, despite his reputation in Heaven and that ridiculous flaming sword, had long since taken a shine to the softer things that Earth offered. Pillows and comfy sofas and the aforementioned scratchy sweaters.[3] Eventually, they just…relaxed.

Adam Young was growing into an excellent young man, who they took great pleasure in visiting every few months; Crowley had his plants to terrorize and his immaculate apartment and his angel; Aziraphale’s bookshop had fewer and fewer customers every week, something that brought him insurmountable joy. He had tea and desserts and sushi and, most importantly, he had Crowley. They began, perhaps for the first time in six thousand years, to actually, properly live.

There had been false alarms, of course. Several dozen of them, all spurred by Crowley, who had proved himself to be a little more than excitable. Demons were suspicious creatures by nature and there was nothing more suspicious than silence. Plenty of empty space for the suspiciousness to creep around in silence, before pouncing on them unawares. In the first year after the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t, Crowley had announced that they’d been found out and their destruction was imminent no fewer than thirteen times. Every year, the false alarms were less and less frequent, which Aziraphale took as a good sign.

Which is why, when Crowley burst into the bookshop one rainy fall morning as if the legions of Hell were chasing after him, Aziraphale didn’t so much as move from his sofa.

“Angel, we are fucked,” Crowley gasped, visibly winded.[4]

The angel looked at his precious, ridiculous serpent over the top of the spectacles that he didn’t particularly need but thought made him look rather clever. “Yes, I’m sure we are, dear.”

“Mazi—I saw…” Crowley managed, working himself up even further at Aziraphale’s distinct lack of reaction.

“You want to go to a maze?” Aziraphale guessed, turning the page of his book. “Hampton Court might be a bit cold this time of year, but maybe we could miracle up some nice weather for the weekend and make a day of it. How does that sound?”

“Not that kind of maze, angel,” Crowley spat, pressing himself against the bookshop door as if he could physically hold back whatever was chasing him. His wings were splayed wide, feathers prickled and tense, which had the effect of making him look like a terrified pinecone. “Bloody Mazikeen.”

That got Aziraphale’s attention.[5] His head snapped up in earnest and he put his book down. “Tell me everything.”

“She’s here, angel. In London. Our London,” he said for emphasis, as if there was another London that Aziraphale didn’t know about.

“What was she doing?” Aziraphale asked.

“I don’t bloody know,” Crowley wailed. He couldn’t understand why Aziraphale was so calm about this. Then again, his angel never had the pleasure of meeting the infamous Mazikeen. Crowley had only met her once, and it was an experience he’d gone out of his way not to repeat. He’d never found a demon who so reveled in their Hellish duty. “Do you think that I stuck around to ask what, exactly, she’s doing in our city? I ran, angel, and right now, we both need to run. Run far and run fast because if Mazikeen is in London, that means the home offices don’t just want us dead.”[6]

Something occurred to Aziraphale, something so awful that it made him mantle, his feathers bristling as half-forgotten battle instinct surged to the surface. “We’re supposed to meet Adam this week. His whole year is in London for a school trip, and we told him that we’d come into town and visit.” Aziraphale’s stomach felt cold, the opposite of how he felt after he’d eaten a particularly lovely dessert.

His horror reflected on Crowley’s thin face. Yellow snake eyes widened and then narrowed with determination that was not in his nature.[7] “Then we find Adam and take him away…far away. Alpha Centurai!” It was bitterly cold in space, but they’d keep him warm. Adam wasn’t quite the Antichrist, not anymore, but he still had more sway over the universe than Heaven or Hell liked to admit. And if Adam was in London and so was Hell’s foremost killer, then perhaps someone was trying to kick up the war again. Or maybe they were just tying up loose ends. Technically, Lucifer wasn’t the boy’s father any longer, but the whole fiasco was an embarrassment for both sides and Aziraphale didn’t even want to contemplate the sheer volume of paperwork that would’ve been generated by unmaking Adam as the Spawn of Satan, the Great Beast, etcetera etcetera.

“But his schoolmates, that gang of his…won’t they be in danger too?”

“Then we take them all,” Crowley surged forward, gripping Aziraphale by the shoulders. “We take everyone he cares about and we get them the bloody Something out of there.” They could, with some stretching of miracles and a bit of bending the rules of reality, keep Adam and his friends safe for up to a century in space where Mazikeen wouldn’t find them.[8]

“He’s still Traced, isn’t he?” Aziraphale asked, forcing his frantic thoughts into order. Oh, they really were in trouble.

 “Yes,” Crowley nodded, grasping where his angel’s mind had gone. The Trace was a tricky little miracle, something they’d devised in the year after the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t. They didn’t think that Hell would send Mazikeen, but it wasn’t far-fetched to assume that either side would want Adam Young to simply…disappear. He was, after all, evidence of a very embarrassing failure on both of their parts and it would make things simpler for everyone if he just ceased to exist. And the hellhound Dog, for all that he was a lovely, little creature, very good at hunting small game and yipping at squirrels, wasn’t a proper protector, not anymore. So Crowley and Aziraphale had put their heads together and come up with a little something that wasn’t quite pure enough to be Heavenly, nor damned enough for Hell. Something just a little bit Odd, that would hide Adam from celestial and occult forces alike, similar to the protection over him when he was a child, but much stronger because it was fueled by an angel and a demon’s collective love for him, and for the world that produced him. It made arranging meetings something of a disaster, because the Trace protected him from Crowley and Aziraphale as well, but he’d given them his mobile number ages ago, and was fairly good at keeping in touch.[9]

“No wonder she hasn’t found him yet,” Aziraphale said. It was a brief respite, but they still had to find Adam before Hell’s premiere hunter, which was next to impossible, despite their advantage of having Adam on speed dial. They had a chance. It was small, and grew smaller every second they tarried here talking, but they might be able to find Adam before Mazikeen did.

Crowley was already dialing Aziraphale’s antique telephone and threw it down in frustration when Adam’s voicemail message greeted him. “He’s not answering.”

“Then we find him another way,” Aziraphale insisted. They hadn’t planned for this exact scenario, but each entity was formulating how to best find their godson in a city of millions and millions, while racing against a hunting demon.

“Meet back here in an hour, or call if you find him,” Crowley said. His voice shook slightly because what they were proposing was mad and would almost certainly get them both killed, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it. He was scared, for Something’s sake. Scared for Adam, scared for his angel. Scared for himself. But that didn’t stop him from knowing, deep down in his metaphorical heart[10] that he would fight tooth and nail to keep his strange, Odd family safe.

Aziraphale was back on the phone before Crowley had winged out of the shop. He was terrible with technology, it was true, but he was—or had been, in any case—an angel. And there was nothing that angels excelled at quite like bureaucracy. Surely Aziraphale would be able to make a few phone calls and find the itinerary for Adam’s school trip.[11]

Crowley’s plan was a bit different. While his angel preferred his bookshop and his sweaters and his tea, Crowley understood humans. Messy, terrible, brilliant humans who had free will and made fast cars and were, at their very core, worth saving. They’d given him Earth and, in a strange, circuitous way, given him Aziraphale, and for that alone Crowley loved them dearly.

More than that, he liked them, which was arguably even more important. Even under orders from Hell, Crowley had liked them. They were so much more interesting than your standard, off-the-rack demonic entity. Humans were wonderfully unpredictable and it made them worth knowing. Even now, when Crowley hasn’t been causing Proper Evil[12] in centuries, Crowley still liked humans enough to collect them. He had a network, of sorts, of the most interesting humans London had to offer.

One of them was a detective. A detective with a vicious drug problem who happened to owe Crowley a favor.

“I need you to find a boy,” Crowley said before his Italian leather shoes even hit the carpet of 221B. He didn’t bother retracting his wings or ringing the doorbell; the detective already knew, or at least suspected, that Crowley was a little less than human and Crowley was in too much of a rush to care if he gave the detective’s husband a mild heart attack.[13]

“A specific one, or did you wake up with a craving?” the detective asked in his sardonic way that Crowley usually found charming.

“Adam Young, sixteen years old, on a school trip from Tadfield. I need him found now.”

“Boring,” the detective said, while his poor husband tried to regain control of his breathing, which was proving difficult, considering a winged not-quite-a-man had just appeared in their front room. Crowley snapped his fingers and the doctor’s lungs began working properly again, all the while making unbroken eye contact with the detective.

“Moriarty,” Crowley said softly, hissing the worth with sharp teeth and forked tongue.

The detective’s expression didn’t change, he just sighed. “Fine. Give me an hour.”

“You have forty-five minutes,” Crowley said, winging back out of the window and setting the doctor to spluttering and hyperventilating all over again.

The detective would find Adam, Crowley was certain of it. He was a massive prick and, Crowley had long suspected, more than a little Odd himself but there wasn’t a finer investigative mind in London.

Crowley didn’t waste any time, reaching out to his other eyes through the city. He was looking for a needle in a pile of eight million needles, only this needle was his—Adam was theirs, his and his angel’s—and Crowley may be a coward but he would burn his beloved London to the ground it if meant keeping Adam safe.

He was high above the city, searching for something, anything, when a demonic aura hit him so hard that it nearly knocked him out of the sky. It was a wonder that everyone below didn’t feel Mazikeen’s presence.

Crowley banked hard, intending to fly back to his angel as fast as he possibly could before he remembered the Trace. Their clever Trace that hid Adam so completely that he could be down there with one of Crowley’s deadliest Hellborn brethren and he wouldn’t be able to sense it.

“Swollen, pestilent bollocks,” Crowley swore with relish, tucking his wings away and dropping to the ground with the force of a small, terrified meteor. There was no time for thinking, no time for a plan, because the instant he stopped to consider his actions, he would remember that he was, at his core, a snake.[14] Crowley didn’t pray—he was a demon, Fallen, and that would be ridiculous—but he thought of his brave Aziraphale for strength as he crept forward towards that the concentrated Hellish energy that was moving through the busy London streets like…well, like she was human, which Crowley couldn’t begin to understand. And why—why in the name of sweet Something—would Hell’s premiere torturer bother standing in long for the London Eye, of all things?

 And then Crowley saw the child.

“Aziraphale!” Crowley hissed in Enochian.[15] “I need you.”

His angel appeared so quickly that some of his feathers fluttered to the dirty London street which, under different circumstances, would’ve caused Crowley to drag him home for a good preening.[16] Even so, Crowley made the effort to surreptitiously snatch those beautiful parchment-colored feathers out of the air and tuck them into his pocket for safekeeping.

“What is it?” Aziraphale asked, looking windswept and wonderful, and for a brief second, Crowley was just a little bit dazzled. “I was on the telephone with the Tadfield superintendent and I’m sure I could’ve convinced her to tell me where Adam’s class is staying in London if I’d just had a—”

“She’s kidnapped a child,” Crowley interrupted, taking Aziraphale’s chin in his hand and pointing the angel’s face in the right direction. There, in the churning crowd of helpless humans, Mazikeen stood in her human disguise that barely held in the force of the demonic energy emanating off of her like heat from a particularly hot coal. Her arm hung low, and she held the hand of a child in her grip. It didn’t look like the child was in any immediate danger, but he knew how capricious demons could be. Violence simmered within them like tea in a kettle, threatening to boil over at the slightest provocation. “I don’t know if the little one is a hostage or one of Adam’s classmates but she is a child, angel, and we need to get her away from there right this minute.”

Aziraphale hummed a soothing, thinking note, his mind tripping in its haste to come up with a plan. Crowley just vibrated, looking like he was about to rush to the child’s aid and get himself killed in the process.[17]

“Crowley, darling,” Aziraphale said urgently. “What we need is a distraction.” With so many people about, the slightest provocation could cause a panic, which might be exactly what they needed. Aziraphale twisted their hands together, trying to pull Crowley’s focus. “Think, my wily serpent. We need chaos.”

Chaos. Crowley could do chaos. It wasn’t his bag, but he’d taken credit for human pandemonium for centuries. Surely, he could replicate it.

“I can do that.”

“Then do it.”

His Crowley vanished, then, off to do what demons did best and what he had never been particularly good at. It made Aziraphale love him all the more, but right now they needed—the child needed—Crowley to embrace his long-since-abandoned Downstairs mandate.

Aziraphale’s concentration was wholly on the demon, who never dropped the little girl’s hand, and almost seemed to be talking with the child.[18] When Crowley did whatever it was he was going to do, Aziraphale thought that he could move quick enough to snatch the child away from the foul fiend keeping her captive and whisk the girl to safety without getting them both destroyed in the process.

And then the London Eye began to fall into the Thames.

Oh, Crowley, Aziraphale thought, praying to the Almighty[19] for the souls on the Eye. He knew that his serpent would try to keep them all safe, but miracles were tricky, especially under stress. Aziraphale didn’t hesitate, leaping into the air and flying so fast that even celestial beings would not have been able to track his movements. He was quite good at that, speed. His brothers and sisters often opted for shapes that encouraged wonder or fear, and were built for strength and stamina, but Aziraphale had always favored speed, something for which he was grateful now.

Between one heartbeat and the next, Aziraphale witnessed something extraordinary: the demon pulled the child behind her body, as if trying to protect her. Perhaps she was a more valuable hostage than they knew, to warrant a demon to act so outside of itself. It hardly mattered. A single second later and Aziraphale managed to rip the child from the demon’s grip and held her in his arms as he flew away as fast as his wings could carry him. Surprise, he knew, was on his side, and was undoubtedly the only way he hadn’t been greeted with a Hellish blade to the chest.

“You are safe now, my dear,” Aziraphale murmured, miracling his voice so that it would reach the child’s ears despite the wind that whipped around them both.

“Let me go!” the little girl shouted, her small voice surprisingly loud despite what must’ve been a series of nasty shocks. “Maze!” she cried. “Maze!”

It hadn’t even occurred to Aziraphale that “Maze” may be a nickname for Mazikeen and they may have gotten the whole thing terribly wrong when something cut into his side.[20]

“Let me go!” the girl shouted again as Aziraphale was forced to stop mid-flight for fear of falling out of the sky, landing gracelessly in a narrow alley. The little girl tumbled out of his arms with the grace of a child who’d been taught how to fall, brandishing an enormous hooked knife that looked wrong in her small, human hand.

“Angel?” Oh, Crowley. Thank the Almighty for his Crowley. “Shit, angel, what happened?” Crowley demanded a split-second before seeing the child. “What the Devil are you doing with that?”

“Stay away from me!” The child waved the knife and Crowley mantled, spreading his wings wide over his injured Aziraphale. “Where’s Maze? What did you do to Maze!”

“Get her out of here,” Aziraphale. He could feel something coming, something Hellish and positively furious. “If she’s enthralled then she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She needs to be kept safe.”

“But you—” Crowley had lost his glasses in the chaos he’d created and his yellow eyes found the wound on Aziraphale’s side. It wept golden ichor.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Aziraphale promised, in that moment, every bit as serene as the angel he was meant to be. [21] “Go. Right now, before it’s too late.” Mazikeen was coming and his Crowley was no fighter and Aziraphale would be damned if they all died because of something as silly as a light stabbing.

“Come on, kiddo,” Crowley said, turning to the knife-wielding child. She stabbed the knife at Crowley’s side with a viciousness he might have appreciated if that same blade hadn’t just been used on his angel. Crowley, not taken unawares in mid-flight like Aziraphale, dodged the thrust easily and took the knife out of the child’s hands. “You and I,” he said, grabbing the child round the waist and determinedly not looking back on his wounded angel, “are going to have a long talk about playing with sharp objects.”

“Go,” Aziraphale said again, because he knew that Crowley was stalling—he always knew—and they hadn’t the time for that.

And Crowley went, because his angel asked him to and in six-thousand years, Crowley had never been able to refuse Aziraphale anything. His black wings spread against the murky London sky and for a moment, as he flew away from Aziraphale, he wondered if all the talk about demons not having hearts was bollocks, because he was fairly certain that he could feel his ripping in two.

[1] They didn’t need to, in any case, but Aziraphale rather liked sleeping and there was that nasty incident where Aziraphale was cross with him and Crowley slept for an entire century as a result. Not that he’d ever admit it. He had some dignity, after all.

[2] Crowley had never, not once in his achingly long life, thought of Hell as home. Home was scratchy sweaters and white-blonde hair that hadn’t changed style in six-thousand years, and was, if he was honest, a bit of a gluttonous ponce sometimes.

[3] Crowley liked them too, but only because they made Aziraphale happy. He understood his angel’s tendency towards clutter—who wouldn’t love maximalism, after the severity of Heaven?—but without some kind of system of organization, however haphazard, clutter sometimes reminder Crowley of Hell. He had long ago resolved to never, never, never tell Aziraphale this.

[4] Technically, demon-kind couldn’t get winded. You needed lungs for that sort of thing, and Crowley had no need to breathe. He could, however, work himself into a hysterical later, given enough incentive, and Crowley had proven himself to be something of a drama queen in the last few millennia.

[5] Angels didn’t associate with demons, not the ones made in Hell. Heaven was aware of the Fallen, of course, because they’d once been angels, but the twisted creatures made from Hell itself…Well. That wasn’t worth thinking about. Even so, everyone Up Top knew about Mazikeen. Lucifer’s favorite was someone worth watching, demon-stock or no.

[6] It meant the home offices wanted them unmade. Erased, so completely that they may as well have never existed in the first place. Mazikeen didn’t just kill. She completely, utterly destroyed. She was Hell’s premiere torturer, and no creature had mastered the terrible art of stripping souls of their humanity quite like she had. Crowley wouldn’t be surprised if the home offices were working together on this one.

[7] Crowley was, by all accounts, a coward. It was something he was rather proud of—someone had to be sensible and angels didn’t have much by way of sense.

[8] But eventually she would find them. Because she was Mazikeen and she didn’t give up on things like destroying the former Antichrist. 

[9]  Or, as good as a teenager could be about these things. Adam loved his god-beings, he really did, but the truth of the matter was that they were both wretched with technology and sometimes trying to explain to them how to compose a proper text wasn’t worth the headache.

[10] Demon-kind didn’t have hearts, and neither did angel-kind. They were too well-designed to keep such vital organs in something as vulnerable as a chest. Personally, Crowley wondered how humanity managed, with all those important squishy bits sloshing around in the very middle. They may as well have walked around with great big targets on their chests. He supposed the whole thing was ineffable.

[11] It was not that simple, because of course it wasn’t. If there was a bureaucracy even more tangled than Heaven, it was that of the British school system.

[12] More like low-grade nuisances. Mild aggravation. General frustration, that sort of thing.

[13] Though, undoubtedly, Aziraphale would fuss and fret and insist on having them both round for tea to apologize for Crowley’s rudeness, which Crowley would’ve objected to even if their lives weren’t at stake.

[14] And a snake would always save its own skin.

[15] His angel would hear him. The language of the angels traveled and even with Crowley’s garbled diction—his mouth wasn’t made for the low, melodic vowels anymore—he knew that Aziraphale would come.

[16] Contrary to popular belief, angels were notoriously lax about maintaining their wings. Before Crowley had straightened him out—and it had taken a beastly long time to get to that point—Aziraphale had looked like a dove that had been hit by a taxi. Crowley’s own wings were sleek and lovely, thankyouverymuch.

[17] Aziraphale didn’t begrudge his serpent this. Children had always been something of a weakness for Crowley. The angel remembered how terribly upset Crowley had been at the Almighty’s drowning of the world, so long ago. They’d had an awful row over it.

[18] Hissing threats, probably or perhaps promises. What could that horrible creature have done to ensure that the child remained so still and docile? The girl must be terrified, or enthralled, and for the life of him Aziraphale could not decide which he thought was worse.

[19] Unlike his darling Crowley, Aziraphale still Believed in the Almighty. The Great Plan was ineffable, which meant that there was every possibility that Aziraphale and Crowley, for all their falling and scheming and Arranging and sauntering, had been following it all along. Aziraphale had granted himself a choice after the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t, and he chose to Believe.

[20] Which was remarkable for two reasons: one, small children should not carry weapons of any kind, and two, Aziraphale began to bleed. He had not bled in centuries. Not since the First War. He’d forgotten how unpleasant it was to bleed.

[21] In that moment, every bit a dastardly liar because he’d managed to hide quite how deep the knife had driven into his side and precious organs or no, demon blades were deadly to those of angel-stock and Aziraphale was still enough of an angel for it to begin the process of killing him.

Chapter Text

Crowley had just barely departed when the demon Mazikeen appeared, skidding into the alley at a speed that would outstrip even the fastest human but was still visible. Clearly, she could not be bothered to hide her nature from the mortals in their midst. Aziraphale felt something in him clench at the sight of her ruined, skeletal face.[1]

“Oh, put that away, would you?” Aziraphale said with as much dignity as he could muster. He had somehow managed to stand to his less-than-formidable height, but the effect was ruined somewhat by the golden blood weeping from the wound on his side and the way his wings hung limp on the dirty London street. For more reason than one, Aziraphale was grateful that Crowley was gone.[2] “You’ll startle the pigeons.”

Mazikeen snarled, baring a mouthful of teeth sharp enough to tear flesh from bone. Absently, Aziraphale wondered if Greater Demons were venomous. Crowley was, occasionally, but he was rarely in his snake-form these days. “Where is she?” the she-demon hissed, grabbing Aziraphale by the lapels and pulling him so close that he could smell the sulfur on her breath.[3] Demons and their personal space issues. Honestly.

“She’s safe,” Aziraphale said, channeling Uriel’s unflappable, insufferable nature. He would not be cowed by this violent creature, no matter how much she frightened him. Almighty help him, the angel had forgotten just how monstrous demons could be. He’d grown too accustomed to his snappish, strange, ultimately good Crowley.

His Crowley, who he may very well never see again. The thought made him sick to his stomach and it took quite the effort not to let it show on his face.

"Safe?” the demon snarled. “What the fuck do you know about safe? You’re an angel!”

Aziraphale puffed himself up slightly. “I am an angel,” he said with as much gravitas as he could. Oh, he was not built for this. He very much wanted to go home to his bookshop, where it was safe and warm and there was cocoa and Crowley. “And I will not stand by as you drag an innocent child into the Pit with you and your ilk, fiend.”

“Fiend?” Mazikeen spluttered, her demonic face twisting into a parody of human disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Language,” Aziraphale chided. It was the wrong thing to do. The demon’s eyes flashed yellow as the sulfur pits of Hell. Angels did not need to breathe, but Aziraphale could not help the way he gasped as the demon pushed him into an adjacent wall with the strength of an oncoming train. Oh, but he did not like pain, and between the wound on his side and the pressure of her fists against his sternum, felt like he was dying.[4]

“Where is she?” Mazikeen demanded again.

“I’m terribly sorry, my dear, but she is somewhere you will never be able to harm her again. And now, if you’ll excuse me.” Then, in possibly the first instance of its kind, an angel very quietly, very politely slipped into unconsciousness.[5]

A few miles away, Crowley had his hands fill with a child who seemed singularly unhappy to have been rescued. She’d spent a good deal of time and energy throwing Aziraphale’s things, only to have Crowley suspend them in midair. There had also been a great deal of shouting and language that Aziraphale, were he here, would’ve positively hated. He would’ve thrown an entire fit, complete with tutting and fussing and insisting that there were perfectly good ways to express oneself without resorting to such vulgarities.[6]

“I hate you,” the child said matter-of-factly, her massive eyes never straying from Crowley.

“You’re a bit Odd, aren’t you?” he asked because his temper was fraying and apparently that meant verbally sparring with taciturn children.

“That’s rude,” the girl said. “You’re rude. You shouldn’t call people names.”

“You shouldn’t stab people either, poppet, and yet here we are.” Crowley spun the demon-blade around his finger, which was more for show than anything else and it was, quite frankly, a wonder he didn’t slice off his thumb. He really was dreadful with weapons, and this dagger had the same aura he suspected might surround a nuclear bomb. It was not something to be trifled with and especially should not have been in the hands of a child.

Nor in the side of his angel, but Crowley was steadfastly not thinking about that because Aziraphale had said that he was fine, he would be fine, he would be right long and at any moment, he’d poke his head through the front door and say something ridiculous like “tickitey boo” and everything would be okay again.  

“Oi oi!”

The person who walked through the door was certainly not Aziraphale, but Adam Young was a welcome sight nonetheless, in spite of his recent habit of altering his speech patterns to sound like a mug.

“Hey, Uncle Ant,” Adam said, nodding at Crowley.[7] “Where’s Uncle Zira?”[8] He blinked at the little girl perched on the squashy couch, who looked seconds away from making an ill-fated escape attempt. “Who’s the kid?”

“Who are you?” the girl demanded, spitting acid.

“You’re American,” Adam said, fairly nonplussed, which he thought was fair, given what he’d just walked into. His uncles were odd, sure, but they were also fairly solitary, so finding Crowley in the bookshop with an American child who clearly did not want to be there was something of a shock. “I’m Adam,” Adam said, still looking between Crowley and the girl, his confusion growing with every passing second. “Quick question, Uncle Ant: did you kidnap a kid?”

“Yes!” the girl shouted. “They took me from Maze!”

“She’s enthralled,” Crowley explained helpfully, waving away the child’s wailed protests to the contrary.

“Cool,” Adam said, nodding as if finding his demonic god-being with a kidnapped, enthralled child in Aziraphale’s bookshop that was suspiciously lacking in the angel himself was par for the bloody course. “Honestly, I really don’t know what else I expected.” He snapped his fingers and the door to A. Z. Fell and Co. locked themselves behind him.[9] “Explain.”

It didn’t take long for Crowley to lay out the whole fiasco. His day had started out so nicely too. He’d been feeding the ducks in St. James’ park and was going to surprise Aziraphale with pastry from a lovely little patisserie that had just opened up when he saw Mazikeen swanning about London as if she wasn’t the most dangerous thing in this hemisphere.

“So you think that she was after me?” Adam clarified once Crowley finished his story. One of them, or perhaps both, had put up an invisible, soundproof barrier between them and the little girl to keep her from protesting at every single thing Crowley had to say. “Well…I didn’t see anyone. And I mean…wouldn’t it have been easier to just kill me in Tadfield, if that’s what she wanted to do?”

Adam’s location wasn’t a secret: the whole Universe knew that the ex-Antichrist lived in a small village outside of London. Adam could see why his god-beings might have thought that this Mazikeen, whoever she was, would have been targeting him on a school trip, but it didn’t make sense for her to wait for him to be in one of the busiest, most surveilled cities in the world to try to take him out. Even with demonic powers, it would be tricky to hide that kind of thing from all those security cameras, especially if Adam fought back. Finding and killing him in Tadfield would have been worlds easier.

Adam could also see that his god-beings had made a series of frantic, rushed conclusions that had led to them kidnapping a small American child.[10] Before he could begin to try to untangle that whole mess, Crowley’s phone rang.

“What?” Crowley snapped into the receiver. “No, I know where he is, thank you, he’s in the bookshop.”

“Well,” said a low, snide voice that Adam shouldn’t have been able to hear through the receiver, but he had very politely asked the soundwaves to reach his ears and the Universe obliged him.[11] “One of my eyes may have found a rather unpleasant looking woman with your boyfriend.” Crowley bristled at the term boyfriend, but he didn’t have time to argue semantics with a dour detective.

“Where are they?” he demanded.

“The Ritz.”

 Aziraphale was rather surprised to wake up.[12] He was hurt, rumpled, and had been propped up in a chair with his wings tied behind his back, but he was—

“Wake up, little brother.”

All at once, Aziraphale wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t died and been sent, for reasons too awful to contemplate, to Hell. Why else would he have woken to find himself face-to-face with Lucifer bloody Morningstar?

Aziraphale had only met the Lightbringer a handful of times in Heaven and never after the Fall. To be called “brother” by the Devil was too personal by half—they were family in the same way that birds of the same genus could be classified together while being completely different species. Guardian of the Eastern Gate or not, Aziraphale was rather low in the Heavenly pecking order and sinking ever lower.

If he were honest with himself in a way he had not been in a long while, Aziraphale knew that he was one step from Fallen and had been for some time now.

“You know, I thought I smelled sulfur,” Aziraphale said, crinkling his nose. The effect was ruined somewhat by the woozy quality of his voice, but Aziraphale thought that the sight of the Morningstar’s eyes widening in surprise was gratifying enough to be his last. If he was going to be smited at any moment, he would do so by channeling his beloved Crowley. The angel tried to keep his face from betraying him, but he couldn’t help but close his eyes, anticipating the end.

Which is why it was so surprising when Lucifer Morningstar, the Demon of the Pit, Satan Himself, laughed out loud. The sound sent shivers sown Aziraphale’s spine and it occurred to him that the last time he’d seen the Devil, he hadn’t looked quite so human.

“You’re mouthy, aren’t you?” the Devil chuckled. “A mouthy angel, where has Heaven been hiding you all this time?” The amusement in his words didn’t meet his eyes, not even close and with his wings winched behind him, Aziraphale felt rather like a sparrow with its wing trapped under the paw of a prowling cat.

See, wings were tricky. They were part of his body, sure enough, but they were also part of him, the incorporeal part that would survive if he were to be discorporated. Miracles didn’t quite work on them; something about the frequency of celestial bodies and the Heavenly intent having to do with miracles being too close together; Aziraphale wasn’t entirely sure. The point was, he couldn’t simply snap his fingers to free his wings.[13]

Oh sweet, Almighty, this day had not gone how he had hoped, not at all. A rescue and subsequent violent abduction by a demon that was not Crowley were not ideal at the best of times, but Aziraphale had such a lovely day planned.[14] And now he was going to die by the hands of Satan, who had decided to inhabit a distractingly attractive body[15] this time round, instead of towering over him like he had years ago in Tadfield, looking terrifying and cartoonish with the red skin and horns and smelling of brimstone, the whole clichéd song and dance.

“We’ve met, actually,” Aziraphale replied primly. “I’m surprised you don’t remember. How terrible it must have been for you, to have been denounced by your own son.”

“You.” The Devil’s eyes flashed a color deeper than red, one that could not be perceived by human eyes and promised all the pain and suffering of Damnation. “You little—”

“A son?” The woman’s voice sounded before the woman herself burst into the room, which Aziraphale noticed, rather latently, was actually what looked to be a hotel suite.[16] He and the Devil were in the sitting room and the newcomer had come from the bedroom.

 “Detective!” the Devil whined. Whined, like a child who was being denied the chance to place with a new toy. Aziraphale wasn’t entirely comfortable with the metaphor. “Keep away from him, he could be dangerous,” warned Lucifer, the Devil Himself, Demon of the Pit, who was showing every symptom of being dangerously immune to irony.

“I rather think that of the two of us, I pose much less of a threat,” Aziraphale sniffed. He wouldn’t have dreamed of fighting the Devil even if he hadn’t been stabbed and his wings weren’t winched behind his back like a turkey prepared for plucking.[17]

“I’m sorry, a son?” the human, the Detective, said again. She glared at the Devil, crossing her arms over her chest. Aziraphale winced, expecting her to be turned into bloody soup with a flick of his Satanic wrist, but the Devil, well. He just pouted. “When were you going to mention a son?”

“I, erm,” the Devil hedged, wriggling like a schoolboy being told off. His eyes snapped to the doorway where the Detective had entered and Aziraphale’s gaze followed to find that they’d been joined by Mazikeen.

 Lovely. If Crowley were here, he would no doubt have already thought of a joke. ‘A human, a demon, and the Devil Himself walk into a bar,’ that sort of thing. Crowley was good at jokes.

The Devil pointed between the she-demon and the Detective. “You were supposed to keep her in the other room.”

“It’s her kid, Lucifer,” Mazikeen said, leaning in the doorway and crossing one ankle in front of the other. She met Aziraphale’s eyes and bared her teeth. “Trixie got you good, didn’t she?”

Aziraphale sniffed again, pointedly looking away from her. He would not give the demon the satisfaction of knowing just how much the wound in his side was hurting him, though she could probably tell. Greater Demons had a nose for pain, or so the rumors went.

“Okay, both of you out,” the Detective ordered. The steel in her voice reminded Aziraphale, a little unpleasantly, of Heaven. She held herself like a soldier, this human woman, one who, apparently, could command the legions of Hell.

“But Detective,” the Devil protested, still with a childish cast to his voice.

“Now, Lucifer!”

“Fine,” the Devil groaned, before practically stomping into the adjacent room. The demon Mazikeen, however, proved more tenacious. Aziraphale could only wonder why, but there was so much going on that it made his head spin and his side really was hurting and it didn’t help that his wings were dreadfully uncomfortable.

“Go, Maze,” the Detective insisted. “I can handle this.”

“He’s an angel, Decker.” Mazikeen spit the word like it was dirty and Aziraphale’s bound wings ached as he mantled on instinct.[18] “He’s dangerous. You don’t know angels like I do.”

“Darling, deluded demon, I very much doubt that you would know an angel from a common house finch.” Aziraphale said, because he could not force himself to stay quiet any longer. He did not take kindly to being captured like a common criminal and if he was being forced to keep such dreadful and overwhelmingly deadly company, he may as well allow himself to speak.           

Besides, Aziraphale rather thought Crowley would like that line. The demon, if her renewed surge towards Aziraphale was any indication, did not find it quite as charming.

“Maze!” The detective—Decker—snapped. She had a very authoritative voice that reminded Aziraphale, a little unpleasantly, of Heaven. Perhaps this human who consorted with demons was Odd. “I’ve got this.”

“You have ten minutes, Decker, and then I’m coming back,” the demon threatened. She fixed Aziraphale with one last, Hellish glare. “You won’t like what happens when I come back.” Aziraphale did an admirable job hiding the way her words, a hissed promise that he knew she was just itching to keep, cut to the heart of him.  

The Decker woman didn’t move any closer to Aziraphale, crossing her arms over her chest as she eyed him up and down. “You’re an angel.”

“Quite so,” Aziraphale answered, reaching for some angelic calm. He wasn’t very good at it, not like his siblings in Heaven—he was too fussy and prone to fretting—but the human had no way of knowing that.

Decker’s expression didn’t change; she wasn’t surprised by his celestial nature, which was rather strange and gave more credit to the theory that she was Odd.

“You and your accomplice took my daughter.” It was a statement, not a question, and Aziraphale was again reminded of the soldiers of Heaven. She held herself like a soldier, this woman, stock-still as she surveyed him with a critical eye that Aziraphale suspected missed very little. And clearly she had some knowledge outside of the mortal sphere, which in and of itself was interesting. Despite the circumstances and the way she reminded him of home—of Heaven—Aziraphale liked her immediately. She was lovely. Her soul shone through her skin, which made her look a bit like those floating lanterns in that children’s film that Crowley adored but would never admit to adoring.[19]

"You are mistaken, my dear,” he said as gently as possible. “My compatriot and I rescued your daughter from a very dangerous creature.” Aziraphale wondered whether or not to mentioned that he very strongly suspected that Decker herself was ensorcelled, but he didn’t think it would help his case and besides, he very much doubted that the Devil and his favorite torturer weren’t listening in. “I sweat to you, neither myself nor my associate wish you or your daughter any harm. You have nothing to fear from us.”

Decker almost looked like she believed him, which was a lovely start. However, Aziraphale’s words were slightly undercut by the door of the suite slamming open a moment later with the force of a small hurricane as Crowley came bursting in as though he’d been shot from a cannon, brandishing Aziraphale’s flaming sword.[20]

“Aziraphale!” Crowley shouted at the top of his voice. The ensuite door slammed open and the Devil and Mazikeen flew to Decker’s side. Mazikeen pulled the human behind herself, already crouched in a fighting stance with two hooked blades in her hands. The Devil took two steps, murderous intent in every movement, before stopping short as he assessed the intruder.

“Motherfucking Christ,” Crowley swore. The sword clattered out of his hand as he beheld the Devil, standing in his human form, and Aziraphale knew that it went against all of Crowley’s instincts not to immediately take wing. His serpent was not made for fighting.

“Crawly?” Mazikeen’s snarl was tempered somewhat by the question in her voice.

The Devil just looked confused, his crimson eyes flitting between the two of them until, at last, understanding dawned. “Not quite.”

[1] He knew, of course, as all angels did, that Greater Demons were not actually broken remains of human souls, but the thought that she had been designed that way made his stomach turn.

[2] Crowley was beastly particular about wing maintenance. Perhaps even more so than the rigid standards by which he ruled his greenhouse.

[3] As well as something else that the angel would’ve sworn was cotton candy, of all things. But he did know better and the thought was absurd. Who’d ever heard of a demon eating cotton candy?

[4] Aziraphale did not quite know what would happen to him. He’d been struck by a demon blade, which threatened more than just discorporation. And even if he did find himself back in Heaven, it was highly doubtful that his brethren would let him slip away a second time.

[5] This was not, in fact, true. There was one rather embarrassing instance wherein Gabriel brained himself with a celestial football and knocked himself unconscious for over two minutes. The records of this have been scrubbed, of course, because Gabriel is, if nothing else, a self-important git.

[6] It was a shame that he was so out of his mind with worry, otherwise Crowley would’ve found the whole thing hilarious. He rather liked swearing. He’d popularized taking the Almighty’s name in vain, way back when. It’s such a little commandment, he’d whispered in some strategic Mesopotamian ears. And think of the oomph it’ll add to your everyday language.

[7] You tell the former Antichrist your fake full name one time and he never lets it go. Honestly.

[8] Adam had long since decided that Aziraphale was much too much of a hassle to bother with on a regular basis. “Zira” was just the latest of a never-ending parade of nicknames. Anathema he pronounced without a hitch every time, though Crowley suspected it was because Anathema would not take kindly to any kind of butchering to her ancestral name, friendly or otherwise.

[9] The reports of Adam’s loss of power after his emancipation from Satan were greatly exaggerated. The Universe still bowed to his will, mostly because he was a sensible and polite young man who took care not to abuse his abilities and always said “please” and “thank you” to the Powers That Be when he needed them.

[10] Adam loved his Uncles, he really, truly, did, but sometimes he wondered whether or not the Earth was safe while they loved it. Because for all of their celestial-occult powers, the truth of the matter was that sometimes his god-beings were just so, so stupid.

[11] She really did love Adam, the Universe.

[12] He wasn’t ungrateful, mind, or unhappy, but he thought that he was entitled to a bit of surprise, given his precarious situation when he fell unconscious.

[13] Not like he could’ve done in Paris during the Reign of Terror. Yes, Azriaphale could’ve freed himself from that beastly Frenchman, but he’d been written up just a few days before for frivolous miracles and besides, Crowley was ever so much better at that sort of thing than Aziraphale himself.

[14] Crowley was going to bring him pastry from the new place near St. James’ Park. Aziraphale was going to act surprised and then they might’ve spent the day strolling around London, just taking in the fresh, cooling Autumn air and enjoying each other’s’ company before perhaps finding somewhere to have dinner.

[15] Not Aziraphale’s type, of course. He much preferred his demons slim and with an inexplicable love for black leather trousers.

[16] He could be forgiven for not realizing that he was, in fact, within the walls of his beloved Ritz. Admittedly, Aziraphale didn’t have much use for the rooms of the hotel themselves; his love of the historic building began and rather ended in the dining room.

[17] There was that time at Tadfield, of course, but Aziraphale hadn’t done much fighting in that encounter, per se. Crowley stopping time had been very impressive and Adam had done the majority of the heavy lifting.

[18] It wasn’t as if he was the biggest fan of his Heavenly brethren at the moment, but it was the principle of the thing, you understand.

[19] Twisted. Unraveled. Unkempt hair was a theme, of that, Aziraphale was certain.

[20] He couldn’t make it light, of course. He had been an angel once, but it had been much too long for the sword to blaze for him.

Chapter Text

Crowley did not have the intestinal tract needed to defecate, but upon seeing Lucifer fucking Morningstar burst into the room with Mazikeen on his heels, he suddenly understood what humans meant by “scared shitless.”

Mazikeen took a threatening step forward and Crowley flinched hard, every part of him screaming to just grab Aziraphale and run. Before she could get any closer, Lucifer raised a hand to halt her progress.

“Well, isn’t this interesting?” the Devil purred. Crowley’s whole body went cold and for once it wasn’t because of his inability to regulate heat.[1] “You’re the one who tipped the London Eye into the Thames, I presume?” The Devil’s smile was sharp and cold. “Clever…Crawly. You were always excellent at making trouble.”

The chill in Crowley’s bones cooled even further at the very specific way that the Devil said his name. Not his real name, just the awful nickname they’d given him in Hell after he’d Fallen.

He knows, Crowley thought with sickening certainty. Jesus Christ, he knows. He remembers. 

There wasn’t any time to properly panic about that, not this very second.[2]

“Okay, back up, both of you,” said a woman Crowley had never seen before. His fingers dug into the hilt of Aziraphale’s sword and he mantled, his wings stretching wide in a feeble attempt to appear more intimidating. His forked tongue slipped past the fangs he was usually careful about hiding and he hissed out a warning.

The Devil’s eyes burned with the promise of punishment, but Crowley held his ground. Panic burned through his body like poison and he was fairly certain that he was visibly shaking, but Aziraphale needed him. His angel was in trouble and Crowley would be damned all over again if he let anything happen to him.

“You do not threaten her,” the Devil boomed in the voice he used to command the legions of Hell.

“Enough, Lucifer,” the woman—who Crowley had only just realized was human—said, pushing past Mazikeen to put herself between the four of them. It was possibly the most dangerous place to be in the entire city at the moment, if not the entire country, but if the human didn’t seem to know or care. “Someone tell me what’s going on. Now.”

Crowley winced, waiting for Satan to smash her into bloody paste, but he just sighed, put out. “Detective, meet Crawly—”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale snapped from his position on the chair. Crowley snapped his fingers and the ropes fell away, allowing Aziraphale to stand.[3] The angel brushed a bit of dust off the sleeve of his cream-colored waistcoat before fixing his mismatched audience with a severe look. “His name is Crowley.”

“Crowley, fine,” the human said, before her Hellish companions could answer. She turned her attention to Aziraphale. “I didn’t get your name.”

“Aziraphale,” the angel replied, his tone immediately kinder. Crowley didn’t know why, but his angel clearly liked this strange human who could somehow control the Devil Himself.

“Aziraphale,” the human replied. “I’m Chloe, and you two clearly know Lucifer and Maze.”

“We’ve met,” Crowley said, his eyes darting between the two of them. He didn’t know why they hadn’t killed them yet, but it really did seem like this human was staying their hands. 

“Someone start talking,” the human—this Chloe—said finally. She looked rather harried, pinching the bridge of her nose in a way that reminder Crowley of an overextended chaperone on a school trip.

“Well, clearly they’re here as some new way for Dad to screw with me.”

Crowley winced as Aziraphale bristled, his feathers puffing until he looked like an irate pinecone.

“Dad?” Aziraphale repeated incredulously. “My goodness, I heard that you were reductive, but male pronouns for the Almighty? Truly?”[4]

“Reductive?” The Devil spluttered.

“Lucifer, be quiet,” Chloe snapped. Behind them, Mazikeen snickered. Her posture had changed to something almost relaxed, but Crowley knew that she would explode into violence at the slightest provocation. “Aziraphale, please just tell me where my daughter is.”

“I will not,” Aziraphale said, drawing himself up tall. “You have clearly been bewitched, and I will not put an innocent in further danger by exposing her to the Devil and his minion.”

“No one’s bewitched anyone!” Lucifer protested as Mazikeen snarled, “Minion?”

Crowley’s tongue flicked out, tasting the air for lies, deception, anything that tasted of Hell, but there was nothing. Frustration, anger, sure, he tasted those in spades, but overtop of all of it was worry, pure and simple. And not just from the human. The Devil and Mazikeen, for all their posturing, were genuinely worried about the child.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said softly, letting the sword hang loosely by his side. “I think we got it wrong.”

Far away, Someplace Else, in a bit of the universe that was not Heaven, Earth, or Hell, but somewhere in-between, another angel and another demon met in secret.

“He’s on Earth,” said the angel. He did not have a body, not on this plane of existence, but the form he favored had violet eyes that were inherently Good but held no hint of actual goodness.[5] “With the troublemakers.”

“We want him back.” The angel’s companion was a buzzing, humming little creature who was both Evil and evil, though not necessarily in that order.[6]

“Agreed,” said the angel. “We cannot simply let such insubordination stand. It goes against the Plan.”

“The Plan,” the demon agreed. If it had a body in this plane, it would be nodding. “And what of the inconsequentials?”

“They will be welcomed to whichever Kingdom they have earned in life,” the angel said, as if it should be obvious “Or will be destroyed completely.” 

The children were playing on some sort of video game console that had most certainly not been there before when Crowley finally returned to the bookshop.

Explaining everything—getting the whole story from four celestials and a very harried human—had taken a little over an hour and had never nearly come to blows no fewer than six times. Crowley still wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the whole, impossible situation[7] but every single person in that hotel room wanted the best for the child they’d stolen.

“They love her,” Aziraphale whispered during a stolen moment. “All of them. Unselfishly. I didn’t—” He hesitated, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. “I didn’t know that demons—the Devil—could love like that.”

Crowley simply readjusted his sunglasses.

The agreement they’d struck was this: Aziraphale and his sword would remain in the hotel with the Devil and Mazikeen, while Crowley and the human retrieved her daughter. It was a tense arrangement, but Aziraphale refused to reveal the location of his bookshop, which he had so diligently warded against the forces of both Heaven and Hell. Mazikeen had nearly bit Crowley’s head off when he suggested that Chloe come with him, but it was the only sort of compromise they’d been able to reach that didn’t end in discorporation or actual death.

“You’re cheating!” Adam shouted as the stolen girl—Trixie, her name was Trixie, which Crowley rather thought was a name more suited to an exotic dancer than a little girl—did something complicated with her controller that resulted in Adam’s character dying a gruesome pixilated death.

“I’m not cheating, you just suck,” Trixie said with a wide grin.

“Trixie, language,” Chloe said. The words sounded habitual, a mother’s instinct to instill manners, but her relief was so great that Crowley nearly choked on it.

“Mommy!” Trixie jumped up from the couch and barreled into her mother’s stomach. Crowley fiddled with his glasses.[8]

“Hi, monkey. You okay?” Chloe kneeled down, quickly checking her daughter over for any visible injuries. “You’ve had a big day, haven’t you?” She said, finding that Trixie was wholly unharmed.

“I flew, Mommy,” Trixie said. “How come Lucifer never flies with me? Is it because he cut off his wings?”

Crowley’s stomach dropped into his Italian leather loafers and he couldn’t help the sound of panic that escaped his throat. Cut off his wings? Cut them off? It was obscene, it was unimaginable. King of Hell or no, they were his wings for Someone’s sake. They weren’t an optional part of this form or that body, they were essential.[9]

Chloe’s eyes snapped to him and Crowley had the doused-icewater sense of being seen before she turned back to her daughter. “You going to introduce me to your friend?”

Adam stood and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said politely and Crowley added a swell of pride to the confusing jumble of emotions roiling around in his middle.[10]

“Adam’s magic!” Trixie exclaimed and Adam flushed. He rubbed an uncomfortable hand on the back of his neck.

“Erm, kind-of,” he hedged.

“Pay up,” Trixie continued, holding out an expectant hand. “You lost.”

Adam grinned, embarrassment vanishing in an instant. “Whatever you say, cheater.” He shot Crowley a commiserating glance. “Americans.”

There was no puff of smoke or flash of lightning, no thunderclap or anything equally dramatic. One moment Adam’s hands were empty and the next they contained a massive slice of chocolate cake in a plastic container.

Chloe sucked her breath in through her teeth, her face paling somewhat at the way this strange boy had turned the Universe inside-out to provide her daughter with dessert.[11]

“How about we save that for after dinner, okay monkey?” Chloe said, taking the cake gingerly, as if it might explode in her hands.

“You should be going,” Crowley said abruptly. His angel would bemoan the inexcusable rudeness but an itch had burrowed under his skin and he couldn’t bear to be around these Odd humans—this bizarre little family that loved so deeply that it made him ache—a second longer.

“I’m sorry about all this,” Crowley said as Chloe nodded and began ushering her daughter out the door. “The kidnapping, I mean.”

“You thought you were helping,” Chloe said generously. “I’ve…you’re different from Maze. I mean, you’re both demons, but—”

“I want my angel back,” Crowley cut her off before she could continue down that disastrous line of questioning. “And that means you two need to go.”

“Oh—” Chloe looked taken aback[12] and Crowley absolutely did not feel badly about it. “You’re right.”

“Bye Adam!” Trixie called, twisting around to wave into the shop. She waved so vigorously that it was a wonder she didn’t dislocate a shoulder. “Thanks for the cake!”

“You know my handle for a rematch, cheater,” Adam laughed. Crowley’s teeth hurt. “You okay, Uncle Ant?” Adam asked when the humans had gone.

“Fine,” Crowley lied. “Stay as long as you like. Aziraphale should be back soon.”

“Where are you going?”

Crowley was going home, but he was already in the air by the time the question was fully out of his godson’s mouth. 

Crowley was in the process of systematically stalking up and down the rows of his greenhouse, hunting for every possible botanical imperfection, when Aziraphale found him.

“You’re not good enough,” Crowley snarled at a slightly-crooked begonia. “You think that your flowers are enough to save you, but they’re not. The beautiful things that you create do not excuse imperfection.”

“Dear, there is nothing wrong with that plant,” Aziraphale said gently, tapping on the doorframe to announce himself.

 “It’s not good enough,” Crowley hissed, baring his teeth.[13]

“They’re plants, Crowley.” Oh, how Aziraphale hated when Crowley got like this. “They’re not meant to be perfect.”

“In this greenhouse, they are, and anything—” He wheeled around to glare at the rest of the greenhouse’s terrified occupants— “that grows incorrectly earns a one-way ticket to the garbage disposal.”

“Then let me have it,” Aziraphale suggested. “There’s a lovely sunny place in the bookshop where it will fit right in.”

It would’ve been kinder to strike him. After all of the violent awfulness of today, Crowley would’ve preferred a blow to his angel’s unending, unearned kindness. Crowley didn’t deserve it; for a thousand different reasons he didn’t deserve it.[14]

“No, Aziraphale!” Crowley shouted, loathing the hurt that flashed across his angel’s unbearably kind face. “You can’t just swoop down and rescue every broken, irredeemable thing that crosses your path.”

“Crowley—”

He didn’t know what compelled him to keep speaking. It had been a rather stressful day, between the rescue-slash-kidnapping, coming face-to-face with Satan, and watching his lovely Odd godson and the Devil’s Odd humans loving and being loved and— “Some of us have Fallen too far! Some of us hurtled from Alpha bloody Centurai into a boiling pit of sulfur and—”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale shouted, matching Crowley’s volume. “My love, please stop.” Aziraphale sounded moments away from tears and Crowley didn’t think it was possible to feel even more wretched. “Come here.”

Crowley didn’t move.

“Please,” Aziraphale held out a hand, his wings spread wide as if he could wrap them around Crowley as well. “Please come to me, dear, because I won’t force you and I have to admit that this has been an awful day and I am terrified and I…I would very much like to hold you right now.”

A second ago, Crowley would have thought that not Heaven nor Hell could move him from his spot but his body almost moved of its own accord when he saw the tears shining in Aziraphale’s eyes.[15] Crowley launched himself at his angel and they collided in a tangle of limbs, arms and legs and wings, before falling to the floor in a disheveled heap.

Aziraphale’s fingers knotted in Crowley’s hair, bringing their foreheads together while Crowley pressed his fingertips against the wound on Aziraphale’s side. He couldn’t do much but manage the pain and he knew that Aziraphale was in pain by the way he winced at Crowley’s gentle probing. Aziraphale wasn’t touchy by any stretch of the imagination, but Crowley knew how he moved and he was too stiff by half. Trying to stay still to keep the wound from pulling.

“I’m alright,” Aziraphale promised. He didn’t move their foreheads apart and Crowley didn’t want him to. He preferred his angel exactly where he was, thank you very much.

“Hush, you were stabbed,” Crowley said. He was a snake; he knew what to do about venom.

With a demon blade there wasn’t much he could do except let it heal on its own—a painful, meandering process that would take weeks, if not months—but he could ensure that nothing was infected.

With that done, Crowley turned his attention to Aziraphale’s wings, smoothing down his puffed, frightened feathers until they were shiny and beautiful. Cowley had always loved Aziraphale’s wings. They looked white at first but upon a closer glance, were actually the color of well-worn parchment. They were perfect. His angel was perfect.

And Crowley, wicked, slimy, Fallen Crowley, was not.

"What a perfectly awful day,” Aziraphale said finally. His voice was thick and wobbly and Crowley pulled him even closer.

“Not one of my favorites, to be sure.”

A soft, plaintive sigh. “Are you alright, dear?”

“Am I—” Crowley stuttered, pulling away so he could look his angel in the eye. “You were stabbed, angel. I should be the one asking you—”

“I’m fine,[16] but you’re clearly not,” Aziraphale said firmly, gripping Crowley’s chin in one hand just as Crowley began to spiral all over again. Aziraphale had been stabbed—he’d been stabbed—and here Crowley was, moping about his apartment like a moron. “That was—that was Satan, Crowley. I can hardly blame you for being upset.”

It wasn’t just that. Seeing Lucifer, it had scared him stiff, sure, but it wasn’t why Crowley was upset. But what was doubly upsetting was that he couldn’t bring himself to talk to Aziraphale about it.

They didn’t get uncomfortable, not physically, at least, but if they’d been human, their knees and backs would have ached from how long they stayed on the floor, tangled in each other’s arms and wings. Crowley didn’t explain, didn’t have the heart to, but Aziraphale was wonderful and didn’t push him. He didn’t feel better by the time they finally broke apart, but he was with his angel and they were both safe, so that was a start.

“I think I left Adam in a bit of a rush,” Crowley said finally. “I didn’t mean to run out on him.”

“He’s back with his friends,” Aziraphale said. “We can talk to him about all of this tomorrow. Or the next day. Either way, it can wait.”

“He conjured a video game console,” Crowley said softly, because he wanted to talk—he was rather excellent at talking—but the truth was too close to the surface and if he stayed quiet it might just burst free. “For Trixie. They were playing it when I came in.”

“He’s an excellent young man,” Aziraphale hummed, pleased. “But, by Heaven’s light, a video game console? In my bookshop? I do hope he took it with him when he left.”

“I’m sure he did, angel,” Crowley replied. He didn’t smile, but he almost did and that was good enough.

“Why don’t we get dinner?” Aziraphale suggested a few hours later. The sun had long since set and they’d moved to the couch by then. Aziraphale didn’t like Crowley’s apartment, not like he loved his bookshop,[17] but it was where his serpent felt safe at the moment, so he was willing to stay out the century if it made him feel better. “Wine, food, anyplace you like. It’ll make you feel better.”

It would not, in fact, make him feel better, but Crowley didn’t have a better way to spend his time. Truthfully, he would’ve preferred to shift into snake-form and sleep on a hot rock in the conservatory until he forgot that this horrible day ever happened, but that didn’t seem to be an option.

 Finally, Crowley nodded. “Anyplace but the Ritz.”

They settled on a little Thai place within walking distance of Crowley’s immaculate apartment. It was close enough that they could dash if need be, and there was nothing like meeting the Devil in person—again—and risking death and discorporation to make one crave a spicy curry. Aziraphale carried the conversation, chatting about everything and nothing, allowing Crowley to interject at his own pace.

Aziraphale knew that there was something Crowley wasn’t telling him. He was fine with that. Crowley was complicated; they both were. Six thousand years of taking marching orders from Heaven and Hell had put them both in situations they would have rather avoided, and they’d both done things that they would happily forget.[18] Perhaps Crowley would tell him in time. Aziraphale hoped that he would; not for want of the information,[19] but because he could see how much it was weighing on Crowley, this terrible secret that so ate at him.

“Hello, brother. Little brother.”

It was fair to say that between the two of them, the angel and the demon enjoying their curries at the booth furthest from the door, had had a bit of a Day. It had been very emotionally, and in the angel’s case, physically taxing. So neither of them could really be blamed for their rather violent outbursts upon seeing the Devil sliding into the booth next to them, grinning from ear to ear as if he was about to eat them both whole.

“Fuck,” Aziraphale snapped, which was so perfectly out of character that Crowley might have laughed, if he hadn’t been busy attempting to jam a butter knife into the Devil’s hand.

And succeeding.

“Bloody hell, ow!” the Devil swore, yanking the knife out from between his knuckles. It was only a minor miracle that kept the other diners from noticing that they'd caused a bit of a scene. “What was that for?”

Crowley gripped Aziraphale’s hand, already halfway out of his chair. He’d hurt the Devil. He hurt Satan Himself and he didn’t know how, but he was sure that he was about to be smashed into a bloody pulp.

“It was because you deserved it,” Chloe Decker reprimanded, pulling up a seat and taking it. Crowley’s eyes snapped between the two of them and if Aziraphale’s grip on his hand was any indication, the angel was just as confused and frightened. “Apologize, Lucifer.”

“Apologize?” the Devil repeated dubiously. “Detective, he stabbed me.” He lifted his bleeding hand as evidence, pouting again. What was with the Devil and pouting around this human?

“You tried to scare them,” Chloe protested. She turned her gaze to Aziraphale and Crowley in kind. “I’m sorry about him. He wasn’t given enough attention as a child.”

“Well now you’re just being hurtful,” the Devil said.

“Not to be rude,” Aziraphale said in a tone that indicated that the next words out of his mouth would, in fact, be rude. “But I’d rather hoped never to see either of you again.” He turned to Chloe in particular. “I mean no offense to you, my dear. You are lovely but you’ve chosen rather upsetting company and it’s difficult enough that you’re in our city, let alone at our dinner table.”

“Your city?” the Devil interjected, a predatory smile waltzing across his mouth.[20]

“Yes, our city,” Aziraphale replied tartly. “And you have just about overstayed your welcome.”

The Devil raised an eyebrow and his eyes flashed red. “In your city.”

“My dear Satan, on this planet.”

“Why you—” Crowley and Chloe moved at the same time, yanking the angel and Devil away from each other.

“Lucifer!” Chloe snapped. “Didn’t you have something you wanted to say to them?”

“Detective—”

“Lucifer.” Chloe’s voice brooked no argument and the Devil sighed like a put-upon toddler.

“Fine. The Detective is making me—” A sharp elbow to the ribs and the subsequent ow. “I mean, I wanted to apologize. I understand that this was all a massive misunderstand and that I did not…help the situation with my presence. I didn’t know that you two were here. I’ve been topside for a long time myself, and I’ve taken great pains to forget all that unpleasantness with the, erm, the Apocalypse. Turns out I rather like Earth the way it is.”

“Forget about Adam, you mean,” Crowley said, speaking up for the first time. He fought not flinch as the Devil’s gaze landed on him, but he would not let Satan’s parental absenteeism go unspoken.

“Which leads to the second thing he wanted to say,” Chloe said, looking at the Devil expectantly.

“Right,” Satan hedged. “I want to meet him.”

“Who?” Aziraphale asked as Crowley snapped, “You must be joking.”

“Adam. My son.”

“He’s not your son,” Crowley snarled, showing his teeth. “He’s Arthur Young’s son.”

“He’s emancipated,” Aziraphale added stiffly. “The Universe heard him deny you and She agreed. You are not his father.”

The Devil looked at Chloe, raising a hand as if he’d won some previous argument. “See? I told you that they would be totally unreasonable about this. Besides, I’m absolutely dreadful with children.”

Aziraphale harrumphed. “Well, you wouldn’t know, would you? Since you let Adam be raised by strangers and only pretended to give a damn about him when it was time for him to end the whole world. Maybe he never was your spawn, after all, because at least Adam has a lick of common sense and you clearly have none.”

“Look,” Chloe said, throwing her arms up before any of the celestials around the table could strike at one another. “You’re right. Lucifer is selfish and impulsive and definitely drinks too much and—”

“Detective!”

“But he’s trying,” Chloe continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I’ve seen him try. Believe me, I wouldn’t be here with him if I didn’t think that he’s changed. However you knew him before, he’s different now.” She swallowed hard and Crowley may not have had Aziraphale’s nose for love but even he could sense her affection. Their affection, because despite his constant pouting, the Devil was clearly besotted. A human falling in love with a celestial—not just any celestial, but Satan. It tested the limits of the imagination. “He deserves a second chance.”

“I just want to talk to him,” the Devil said, his voice suddenly lacking its sneering edge. “And only if he wants to talk to me.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll swear on whatever you want, Dad—” Aziraphale huffed and the Devil rolled his eyes before correcting himself. “Fine, the Almighty, Heaven, Hell, fish fingers and custard, you name it. But I swear that I won’t let any harm befall Adam.”

Of course, because the Universe[21] has a wicked sense of humor, the words had barely left the Devil’s mouth when the lovely little Thai restaurant exploded.

[1] Despite his human disguise and his inky black wings, Crowley had still been fashioned from a snake. Hell wasn’t as good as making bodies as Heaven, so demons’ original forms still held some sway over their physiology.

[2] But there would be time later, if there was a later for them, and Crowley could feel a truly excellent panic coming on.

[3] Crowley felt rather bad for letting his angel stay tied up for so long, but he’d had a rather nasty shock and thought he would be forgiven.

[4] The widespread reference to God as a father was something that had chafed Aziraphale since it became popularized thousands of years ago. The Almighty was genderless, of course, and it was commonly known that They preferred a female voice to speak through. Recently They had chosen the voice of a human named Frances Macdonald, which Aziraphale thought was a lovely selection.

[5] The distinction was not important to the angel. The distinction was massively, unimaginably important.

[6] The distinction was less important.

[7] Part of him was sure that this was some kind of trick from the home offices to punish him and his angel

[8] His stomach hurt. He wasn’t sure why—there were no pesky organs in his thorax that would cause him pain—but his stomach hurt nonetheless.

[9] It didn’t help his rapidly-rising blood pressure to hear a tiny child call Satan Himself Lucifer, as if they were friends. As if he wasn’t the incarnation of Evil Itself and could kill each and every one of them with a flick of his wrist.

[10] He wasn’t meant to house this many emotions, he truly wasn’t. Great big Feelings, sure, he had those in spades, but he didn’t know what to do with these sharp, contradictory little feelings that hooked deep inside and wouldn’t let go.

[11] Chloe was doing her best with all this, she really was, but she’d known the truth about Lucifer and Maze and…all of it for only six months and after a day where an angel and a demon had stolen her daughter, seeing Adam conjure cake was reaching the limits of what she could handle all at once.

[12] Crowley didn’t blame her; he was all over the place, hot and cold, guilty and frightened and ill in a way he couldn’t understand.

[13] Not at Aziraphale, never at Aziraphale but close enough.

[14] Because he was a coward, because he’d asked questions and caused trouble. Because he was Fallen—by definition, unforgivable. Unforgiven. Because he was a liar.

[15] Crowley lived by a complicated set of rules, most of which were confusing and arbitrary and were—if he were honest in a way he was not—meant to make him miserable. But chief among them was the cardinal rule that Aziraphale was not to be upset, and if Aziraphale was upset, Crowley was to administer hugs and a good long preen until his angel felt better.

[16] This was untrue, but Aziraphale refused to say so. It was just a light stabbing and he was certain he would heal. Crowley needed him at the moment, so he would buck up.

[17] Not all angels nested. In fact, Aziraphale was one of the very fussy few who did, but he did find himself putting all of his most precious things in his bookshop. His tea, instruments, books, and, of course, Crowley. Demons did not nest at all, they simply lived in disorganized filth without any love or reason for the items they collected. Crowley did not nest either, but not for the same reasons as his Hellish brethren.

[18] Aziraphale remembered every face of every innocent drowned in the Great Flood. He watched them all try to outswim the raging waters; he refused to look away as they all fell into the depths, one by one. The rainbow had not been enough to account for the loss and there had always been a part of him that knew he should’ve done something. It may not have been Good, but it would’ve been good, but he hadn’t known the difference back then.

[19] Well, not wholly for want of the information.  Aziraphale was a bit of a snoop, after all.

[20] In truth, Lucifer was rather starting to like this mouthy angel. At least Crowley had taste, he’d give him that. But he had appearances to maintain, you understand.

[21] For all of her love for the bizarre cadre collected around that table

Chapter Text

Aziraphale was not a warrior, not anymore. He’d given it up, made the choice to do away with the violence that was so commonplace in the early days. It was his first choice, forever memorialized in the flaming sword he’d given to poor Adam and Eve, who had no place to go after the Garden and who Aziraphale could not bear to let wander the vicious wilds without some kind of protection.

Aziraphale wasn’t a warrior. He was fussy and silly and soft, and he liked gentle things, like warm blankets and mild tea. As Gabriel had so kindly pointed out, he had a bit of a gut. He liked his gut. He liked his bookshop and his books and surrounding himself with all the comforts he could collect on his precious Earth. But here was the thing: Aziraphale wasn’t a warrior, but he had been built as one. Once, he’d fought in the First Great War. The Almighty hadn’t given him the sword for no reason[1] and Aziraphale had spilled his fair share of demon blood before he fell in love with Earth and gave it all up.

Human biologists have written pages upon pages of research about the function of instincts and how even the most buried of natural impulses can be unearthed with the right pressure and circumstances. Now, comparing Earthly biology to anything celestial would be akin to madness, but in this particular instance, it would be correct. Despite six-thousand years of lying dormant, all it took to remind Aziraphale that he had once been a solider of the Heavenly Host was a bomb to drop on his head.

Faster than human eyes could track, faster than thought, Aziraphale launched himself forward, his wings spread wide to protect the human Chloe Decker from the brunt of the explosion.

He’d barely gotten his arms around her when the world went white and when his eyes adjusted, they were Someplace Else entirely.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale breathed, recognizing the Sands of Time as they swirled around his feet. Crowley hissed out a breath, his forked tongue flicking out between too-sharp teeth.

“Where the hell are we?” Chloe demanded, whirling around in an attempt to rip herself out of Aziraphale’s grip. He kept a close hold on her wrist, unwilling to let a lone human get lost in the Sands. Not even two celestials would be able to find her then and she would go mad in hours, not days. “Where’s Lucifer?”

“Satan will be fine,” Aziraphale said primly, his eyes still on Crowley.

“I’m alright, angel,” Crowley said, catching Aziraphale’s gaze and holding it fast.[2] “But you need to get the humans to safety.” A single drop of sweat crawled down his brow. “I can’t hold this for much longer.”

“Where’s Lucifer?” Chloe demanded again.

“He’s the Devil, my dear,” Aziraphale said with a little less patience than before. “I rather think he’s in the best position to survive an explosion.”

“No, he’s not!” Chloe protested, all the blood draining from her lovely face. Her eyes were wide and terrified. “He’s vulnerable—I make him vulnerable! He’s going to die if you don’t—”  

“Well then save the bloody Devil while you’re at it,” Crowley snapped. His body began to fold it on itself, slowly being crushed by the weight of holding back Time. “Anyone else we’re forgetting? Santa? The fucking Easter Bunny? No? Then get moving, you two, because I…can’t—”

Aziraphale flew to his side, ungracefully pulling the human with him as he stroked Crowley’s sweaty cheek. “Hold it just a moment longer.”

And then they were back, Aziraphale and the human. It was as if the world had stopped spinning on its axis at the very moment of impact. The roof should have been in fiery splinters, raining superheated shrapnel on their heads, but it was all stuck in place, stagnant from Crowley’s efforts.

“Lucifer!” Chloe shouted, running to the Devil’s side. Crowley hadn’t included him in the Pause and the Devil lay prone on the ground, already bleeding from a dozen vicious wounds all over his body. His suit was slashed to ribbons and from his frozen position, it looked like he’d been reaching for Chloe as well.

“Get him to safety,” Aziraphale ordered, steel in his voice that he hardly recognized. He didn’t wait for her to respond before taking wing. With Crowley sucking all of the magical potential out of the air with his own miracle, Aziraphale didn’t dare perform any of his own, for fear of sapping away the precious little energy Crowley had to keep Time from ticking forward. Instead, the abgel flew them out one by one, grabbing the humans as gently as he could without sacrificing speed and depositing them safely away from the explosion.

The Thai restaurant near Crowley’s flat was excellent, but something of a hidden gem and they’d gone for dinner rather late, so there were only a handful of other diners to contend with.

Chloe was still dragging Lucifer out of the exploding building when Aziraphale found her.

“My dear, we quite literally do not have the time for this,” Aziraphale said by way of warning before scooping her over his shoulders. “Hang on, we’re about to go fast.” Chloe’s arms latched around his neck and it was beastly uncomfortable to fly with a human on his back, but he wasn’t in a position to complain about his own discomfort when his precious Crowley was still keeping Time still.[3]

“Stay here,” Aziraphale ordered, placing a very windswept Chloe on the ground where she would be well outside of the blast radius. “Crowley!” Aziraphale shouted in Enochian[4], winging back to the restaurant to crouch low over the Devil’s prone form. A principality protecting the Devil Himself, what a world. Maybe those Daily Mail nutters were right and everything truly was going tits up, because never in his dizziest daydreams would Aziraphale ever have thought that a day like today was possible. “Crowley, let it go!”

The heat was a shade shy of unbearable as it scorched his fine clothes and singed his outstretched wings. Aziraphale winced as fiery bits of the restaurant slammed down upon him.  

“Detective!” Lucifer cried out, his voice torn with pain and a worry so consuming that Aziraphale felt it reverberating in his own chest. “Chloe!” The Devil’s eyes, so wide that the whites outshone the inky black of his iris, found Aziraphale and he swore colorfully. “You! You did this! You killed her!”

“Please,” Aziraphale sniffed. “Cease with the baseless accusations, will you? Chloe is perfectly all right. But you—”

Aziraphale didn’t get any further with his admonishment because it appeared that Satan had done a rather human thing and passed out.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, appearing as if he’d stepped out of thin air. “Angel, I—” Crowley reached for him, but all of his strength abandoned him at once and his body collapsed into Aziraphale’s outstretched arms. In that instant Aziraphale had the startlingly strange idea that they looked rather alike, Crowley and Lucifer. Then he blinked and the similarity faded as if it had never been there at all.

Aziraphale clutched his serpent close, breathing in the soft scent of his hair for a moment. “Please,” he whispered. To the Almighty, to the Universe, to whoever might be listening to a silly excuse for an angel like him. “Please, don’t take him from me.”

The Universe liked Aziraphale, she really did. Almost as much as the Almighty, though neither of them would admit to having favorites. She heard him and she listened. A blink, a breath, and the three celestials were transported to Aziraphale’s bookshop. A second later, Chloe appeared, disheveled and out of breath.

“What the fuck?” she demanded, pulling a pistol out of her belt and wheeling around with it.

“I think not,” Aziraphale said, waving the gun out of existence. He would not allow violence in his shop, not right now. Not when Crowley was vulnerable and Aziraphale’s nerves were absolutely shredded.

“Where’s Lucifer?” Chloe made a conscious choice not to comment about the vanished gun. She was handling this. She was compartmentalizing and right now, Lucifer needed her more than she needed to understand how, exactly, her gun had vanished. Or how she’d gotten back here. Or how they’d managed to survive the direct blast of an explosion that should’ve vaporized them where they sat.

Dear Christ, they should have died. She should have died just now. Chloe had never really known whether or not she believed in Capital-G-God, but after knowing Lucifer’s secret, knowing that God was actually, really real, she’d found herself praying more than she ever had in her life.

Right now, even though she knew he would hate it, she prayed for Lucifer. And she thanked whoever was listening that Trixie hadn’t been in the restaurant. Chloe inhaled raggedly through her nose. Jesus, Trixie. She wanted to hold her daughter in her arms and hug her until neither one of them could breathe.

“Back room,” the angel said, some of the gentility scrubbed away. He looked awful, half-burnt and bent over the body of his red-haired demon…friend. Boyfriend? Husband, maybe. Chloe didn’t want to ask and honestly, she didn’t think she would be able to parse the intricacies of celestial love anyway.[5]

“Is he okay?” Chloe asked, inching closer. She wasn’t afraid of Aziraphale—he’d just saved her life and had gotten himself hurt “saving” Trixie from Maze—but he looked like he was a breath away from a full-blown meltdown and Chloe wasn’t sure she wanted to witness that.

“Satan will be perfectly all right,” Aziraphale said brusquely. “He will not be harmed in this place.”

“I meant him,” Chloe said, nodding to Crowley.

Aziraphale softened slightly. “I don’t know.”

 “Can I hug you?” Chloe asked, because Aziraphale sounded like he was about to cry and she was, at her core, an excellent human being who didn’t like to see others hurting, even strange angels who’d kidnapped her daughter by accident and was apparently one of the godfathers to Lucifer’s emancipated son who had nearly started the Apocalypse.[6]

“No, I don’t think so,” replied Aziraphale, who was feeling rather fragile at the moment and worried that he would shatter into a million forlorn pieces if she so much as breathed too close to him. “I think you should attend to the…to your Lucifer.” He paused. “I’ll contact Mazikeen and let her know that you’re safe. I think that the explosion will have made the news by now.”

“But you didn’t…I mean, earlier you were so adamant…” Chloe began, intending to argue that Aziraphale hadn’t wanted Lucifer nor Maze to know the location of his shop just a few hours ago.

“I think the time for my comfort has rather passed, my dear,” Aziraphale said with a wobbly, unconvincing smile. He preferred to be British about the whole thing. Stiff upper lip and all that. Oh, he would have a good cry about all this later, but that would wait until Crowley was up and moving. Maybe…maybe they would take that vacation to the stars after all. Get away from all of this for a while.

It had been a very, very taxing day.

Someplace Else, on a plane that did not vibrate on the same frequency of Heaven, Hell, or any planet in between, an angel and a demon met again.

“He’s still on Earth,” the angel said stiffly, his displeasure translating through the celestial wavelength on which they resonated.

“Our attempt was unsuccessful,’ the demon buzzed, expressing their own irritation. They thought that their plan was efficient enough,[7] but something had interfered with the explosion. It was unprecedented—there were no casualties, not one—and that meant a horrific amount of paperwork. Thwarted evil always generated the most paperwork.

“Clearly,” the angel griped, “I should have known better than to trust you with this.”

“Clearly,” the demon clicked, “both of us underestimated our quarry.”

“I will handle this from here on out. There are resources at my disposal that are not available to…your type.”

“I don’t care how it gets done,” the demon said. “We want him back. He cannot be allowed to remain on Earth.”

“It will be done,” the angel replied with the smug self-satisfaction that ran rampant in angel-kind.[8]

“It better be.” 

Crowley was dreaming of the stars. This was odd in itself. Technically, demons did not need to sleep and so they had no innate capacity to dream.

“Oh,” Crowley murmured, the sound escaping from a mouth softly agape. He whirled on wings the color of the ether that surrounded him, the crushed-velvet black that did not reflect even the light of his stars.

Sweet Someone, how he missed them. He’d never named them[9] but Crowley had watched with interest as those clever humans discovered his work one-by-one. Orion. Helix. The Three-Ring. Not particularly inspired named, to be sure, but Crowley had spent enough time in Houston to know that what they lacked in creativity, they more than made up with in sheer, ridiculous excitement.[10]

Crowley viewed all his stars at once, some quirk of the dream-space that allowed him to see millions of lightyears at the same time. They were beautiful, a miasma of colors that could not be viewed with three-cone eyes. They burned bright and died brilliantly, collapsing into supernovas so fantastic that it pained him to be away from them.

"You’re running out of time, brother,” said a voice from behind him, a voice Crowley knew intimately and hadn’t heard in several thousand years.

“Oh, fuck off,” Crowley said immediately, wheeling around to face the Angel of Death.

“Is that how you greet your big sister after all this time?” Azrael asked with a small smile. “And in front of our dear creations, too.” She swept out a black arm to gesture at the stars they’d spent so many centuries building together. Azrael had been breaking things long before there were souls to be ushered Beyond, but no one had understood how to destroy things as beautifully as she did. “I thought I taught you better than that.”

“You’re literally a hundred years older than me,” Crowley reminded her. For immortal beings, a century was so short that they may as well have been twins. “And I don’t recall you going out of your way to visit me after—” He hesitated, swallowing around a lump that had formed in his throat. “Not even in Tadfield.”

“You know why I couldn’t be there.”

Crowley did know why but he was determined to be petulant about the whole thing.[11] “But not one visit? Not one?”

“You found another angel,” Azrael said simply. Her four wings flapped out of time, sending iridescent space-dust scattering across the cosmos. She was the only other celestial with black wings, the absence of light spreading throughout her entire form so that, to Crowley, she looked as though she’d been carved from some Heavenly cousin of onyx, a type of perfect, celestial stone that only existed to allow for her creation and would never been seen again.[12]

“Is this it, then?” Crowley asked. “Have you come to take me, sister?” Demons did not have an afterlife, but it had never been a secret that Crowley was Azrael’s favorite. He was the only one who created things worth the beauty of destruction. If she would break the rules of life and death for anyone, it was him.

“I’m here to warn you,” Azrael said. “You’re not the only ones breaking the rules anymore and there are going to be serious consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?” Crowley asked. One-by-one, his stars began to wink out of existence until it was just him, Azrael, and a painfully empty sky.

“I can’t tell you anything else,” Azrael said.

“Of all the enigmatic bullshit—Az!” Crowley shouted, but the dream was already fading and taking his sister with him. “Azrael!”

"Be careful,” Azrael’s voice echoed out of the nothingness that had replaced the ether. “Brother, keep your angel close. Give Samael my love and tell him to stop being such a dick.” The nothingness took on his sister’s smiling voice. “It was so good to see you, R—”

Crowley knew that he was back in Aziraphale’s bookshop before he’d even opened his eyes. After the heart wrenching dream and a cryptic message from the Angel of Death herself, he was grateful for the comfort of someplace safe and warm. What he didn’t expect was to be in snake-form when he woke up.

“Welcome back, dear,” Aziraphale said softly, upon seeing Crowley’s lovely yellow eyes open for the first time in what felt like an eternity. “No, no, don’t change,” the angel warned, sensing Crowley attempting to exert himself. “I think this is the best form for you to heal.”

“How long?” Crowley asked. Speaking through a snake’s mouth wasn’t ideal, but he could tell that Aziraphale was right. He was in no state to transform. Time was clearly much angrier with him than she had been the last time he’d trifled with her. Perhaps she was more forgiving of his trick when he was using it to stop the Apocalypse than an explosion in a local Thai eatery. Whatever the reason, Crowley knew that he was lucky to be alive.

If Azrael’s message was as catastrophic as he thought it was—Azrael’s gift for understatement was legendary and Crowley had drama in spades to make up for it—his troubles were just beginning. But good, sweet Something, if this was how his troubles started, Crowley shuddered to think of how they might end. But right this very moment—

“You should sssleep.” Crowley would be able to taste his angel’s exhaustion even without the enhanced senses of his snake-form.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Aziraphale blustered with a wave of his hand. “I’m perfectly all right.”

“Liar.” Crowley could sense Satan’s presence in the bookshop, along with Mazikeen and the two humans, and he knew better than most how jealously Aziraphale guarded the sanctity of his nest.[13] He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. “Angel. Please. It will make me feel better.”

“Well, if you insist,” Aziraphale said at last, extending an arm so Crowley could wind his way up and settle across his angel’s shoulders. The bookshop didn’t have a bedroom, not technically, but there was a bit of a hidden pocket dimension that served as an all-purpose space. When Crowley wanted to cook for them, it was a fully-stocked professional kitchen. Other times, a private garden that existed in-and-out-of-doors at the same time. In this instance, it was the softest bed he could possibly conjure, warmed by a minor miracle so that Crowley wouldn’t lose any body heat in a form that was truly terrible at thermoregulation.

Aziraphale settled in a bundle of soft blankets, pulling them around himself until he’d formed a kind of cocoon. Crowley slithered across the linens, which felt strange across his scales, until he found Aziraphale again and wound around every bit of exposed skin he could reach.

“Are you quite sure it’s all right if—” 

“Sssleep, angel,” Crowley said. “I’ll bite anyone who comesss too clossse.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Aziraphale clucked indulgently. He was in moments.

Crowley kept watch while his angel slept, his head carefully placed on the hollow of Aziraphale’s throat where a pulse did not need to beat but did anyway because that was how the humans did it. Crowley didn’t mind; he liked the reminder that Aziraphale was here, with him, and with every beat of his lovely heart, Aziraphale fought for this Odd, human-adjacent life they’d built for themselves.

It hadn’t been long enough before their unwanted guests began to stir, puttering around the bookshop in a way that he knew Aziraphale would loathe. Collecting in the front room and no doubt poking about all of the angel’s things.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale muttered, feeling Crowley begin to untwist himself to mind their visitors.

“Ssstay put,” Crowley ordered. “I’ll handle it.”

It was a true testament to his angel’s exhaustion and injury that Aziraphale didn’t immediately begin to argue with him, just gave a sleepy nod and burrowed even more deeply in his blanket nest.

“Don’t touch anything,” Crowley’s voice was still a hiss when he managed to reform himself enough to present in partially-human company. He would’ve rather not changed at all but showing up in a room half-full of humans as a giant serpent would have perhaps been a bit much.

“What happened to your face?” Trixie Decker asked, tearing her eyes away from yet another video game console to gape at him,[14] judging with the critical gaze of a human child. “Maze, why don’t you look like that? I’ve seen your demon face and you don’t look like a snake.”

“I’m a Greater Demon,” Mazikeen explained, as if discussing demonology was wholly appropriate for a child. “He’s—”

“Fallen.” Crowley made a very conscious choice not to look at Satan as he finished Mazikeen’s sentence for her. “That’s a different kind of demon, entirely.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Crowley replied tartly, his tongue slipping past his teeth.

“What I would like to know,” Lucifer said, ignoring the barb, “is who, exactly, dropped a bomb on my head, where they are, and how I can punish them. Because anyone who dares—”

Crowley tuned out the Devil’s impassioned ranting, feeling a headache creeping into his skull that had nothing to do with Time’s ire.

Someone else isn’t playing by the rules. Azrael’s voice echoed in Crowley’s head and it occurred to him that whoever was causing all of this, whoever had caused that explosion, the Devil was their target. Why else go to such extremes?

Lucifer was still nattering on when Crowley forced himself to refocus. He knew that he shouldn’t say it—Lucifer was too close already—but impulse control had never been his strong suit[15] and his nerves were shot after the events of the day. 

“Azrael says hello,” Crowley said, turning to look the Devil in the eye for the first time. Lucifer’s skin mottled and his mouth dropped open in surprise. Crowley almost smiled. “She says to stop being such an unbearable arsehole.”

“Azrael?” Aziraphale’s voice came from behind him, so sleep-soft that Crowley wanted to scoop him up and run far, far away, until they were someplace no one could find or hurt him ever again. “Darling…erm, how, exactly, do you know the Angel of Death?”

Lucifer raised an eyebrow and Crowley immediately regretted saying anything. “Yes,” Satan purred. “Why don’t you share with the class, brother?”

[1] Of course not, but Aziraphale still didn’t quite understand that the Almighty had known that, for all his potential for violence, Aziraphale would always give the sword away to Their first creations. Because the Almighty had designed Their Aziraphale not just to be a warrior like his siblings, but to have the biggest heart of any Principality ever made.

[2] He was lying, of course. Stopping Time was not something he was meant to be able to do, and his little stunt in Tadfield had damn near killed him. Not that he’d told anyone, because he was stubborn and stupid and didn’t want his angel to worry.

[3] And she was punishing him dearly for it. Time, like her sister the Universe, did not approve being tampered with. Crowley was not polite like Adam, who asked permission before exerting his will, and holding Time in place was not as simple as providing a slice of cake or a video game console. There were consequences, and the Fallen was paying them.

[4] The language of the angels could traverse Time and Space; Crowley would be able to hear him, even stuck in the Sands.

[5] Which was ironic, considering that she was in love with the actual Devil, but that was yet another think she was Not Thinking About.

[6] It occurred to Chloe Decker than she didn’t know when, exactly, her life had spun so completely out of control.

[7] Bombs were a human invention for which Hell had long since taken credit for.

[8] It was not a flaw of design, per se, but a consequence of a culture convinced of its own Goodness that did not bother to do actual good.

[9] He hadn’t needed names, he knew them as intimately as if they were a part of him, which they were. They were every bit a part of him as his starless wings or Aziraphale.

[10] Crowley loved Houston. London was his, of course, but Crowley had spent over fourteen years in Texas in the mid-Twentieth-Century. Imagine humans, those frail little creatures, hurtling toward his stars in a tube, propelled by fire. It boggled the mind and Crowley loved them for it.

[11] Yes, yes, Azrael and Death couldn’t occupy the same physical space, blah blah, ripping a hole in the Universe and destroying all life, yaddah yaddah yaddah.

[12] Humanity could not behold Azrael’s form, no matter how she chose to present herself. She was a breath on the back of a neck, a kind whisper in an ear, the call Beyond.

[13] There was a reason that Aziraphale’s bookshop operated on such ridiculous, borderline childish hours. The objects within were not meant to be bought and purchased, and as such, Aziraphale had put a great deal of time and effort into making the shop as inhospitable as possible.

[14] Crowley had all of his limbs back, but his skin was still patterned with black and yellow scales and was smooth and flexible to the touch. His eyes, unobstructed by sunglasses he could not be bothered to conjure, were not even remotely human. He usually made an effort to at least provide white sclera to help him attempt to pass for human, but now the yellow spread across the whole slit-pupiled eye.

[15] Except, of course, when it came to Aziraphale. Crowley’s self-restraint had never been tested like when he had waited—and waited—and waited—for Aziraphale. Every agonizing moment had been more than worth it.

Chapter Text

Crowley never would have thought he’d be grateful for Mazikeen, but it was a day of firsts.

“Azrael?” she barked out, waving her muscled arms. Chloe still had her hands clapped over Trixie’s ears, glaring at Crowley, presumably for his use of naughty language, but Crowley rather thought that swearing was the least of their many, many problems. “You mean the one with the flaming sword? The one that cuts through anything?”

“That would be mine,” Aziraphale corrected, though he’d not heard that the sword could cut through anything. That seemed like a rather difficult thing to test. He gestured down to himself. “Guardian of the Eastern Gate.”

Mazikeen’s eyes snapped between him and Lucifer and she rubbed her temples, her eyebrows beginning to scrunch together. Crowley didn’t blame her. He’d had a headache since this morning and he didn’t think it would be going away anytime soon. “I thought that Azrael was the only one with a flaming sword. Why would they give one to—” She gave Aziraphale, who still looked careworn and sweet in his nightgown, a critical once-over. “I mean. God gave it to him? Please.”

Crowley hissed at her, his hackles rising at her tone, but Aziraphale raised a hand.        

“My dear, do you really think that in all of Creation, there has only ever been one flaming sword? I have mine, which I…misplaced a rather long time ago before it was returned to me. Perhaps Azrael took it after Adam and Eve. Perhaps she forged her own. Perhaps mine was simply on loan for a few millennia. She’s quite a bit older than me and she’s never been the type to reveal her intentions.”

“That’s just confusing,” Mazikeen grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest.

“It’s ineffable,” Aziraphale said, folding and refolding his wings over one-another in a way that made him look perfectly serene.

“It’s bullshit is what it is,” Lucifer griped. 

“Lucifer!” Chloe snapped. She still looked rather pale and it occurred to the celestials around the room all at once that this may be a bit much for their more mortal companions.[1]

“Chloe, you look like sh—” A sharp look from the human and Mazikeen quickly changed course. “You look awful. I mean it. You and Trixie need to get some sleep before you have a full-blown panic attack.”

“I’m fine, Maze,” Chloe said in a tone that indicate that she was very much Not Fine.

“Mazikeen is right,” Aziraphale said, startling everyone. “I cannot imagine how you must be coping with all of this and I am truly sorry not to have thought of it earlier. Come, I have a perfect place for you and Beatrice to rest.”

Lucifer took several very aggressive steps towards Aziraphale, posturing, and it was quickly revealed that he was in much worse shape than he was leading them all to believe. He wobbled dangerously to one side and only Mazikeen’s quick movement kept him from falling face-first on the book-laden floor of the shop. 

“They’re not leaving my side,” Lucifer said through his teeth. Oh, and he’d started bleeding again, how lovely. Aziraphale wondered how he was expected to get Devil blood out of the upholstery. Crowley was far more concerned about the fact that a human—even an Odd one—could made Satan Himself vulnerable. Aziraphale would say it was ineffable; it was bollocks, in Crowley’s opinion. “Last time…” he gasped. “Last time…”

“Last time I made the extraordinary effort to save you at her request,” Aziraphale reminded him, inspecting his immaculate fingernails. “For which I have not received a thank you, I’ll add. No manners, none whatsoever. Something is going on here and we’d better hash it out fast but our first priority should be human safety, can we at least agree on that much?”

Chloe made a disgruntled noise, all of her panic and confusion from the last twenty-four hours coming to a head at being spoken about as if she wasn’t in the room. She pulled Trixie close. “These humans can hear you, you know.”

Aziraphale turned to her, his cheeks going splotchy with immediate chagrin.

“Mommy…I am kind of sleepy,” Trixie mumbled, rubbing at her eyes. Crowley didn’t doubt her sincerity—children were wildly adaptable, but even they had to recharge—but some instinct told him that she was doing her best to diffuse the tension.[2]

Crowley shot her a small, secret smile as Chloe’s defenses melted before his eyes. The human was exhausted, overwhelmed, and Crowley was massively impressed that all of this hadn’t reduced her into a raving mess of paranoia and disillusionment. She was extraordinary. 

“Okay monkey,” Chloe said. 

“Please,” Aziraphale said, gesturing them back to the pocket room that would transform into the bedroom most accommodating for the human pair. “This way.”

“If you—” Lucifer started to threaten.

“Oh, stuff it, would you?” Crowley snapped. “And sit down, brother, before you injure yourself further.”

“On my—” Aziraphale started, intending to put the Devil’s mind at ease. Something was shifting in the angel’s mind, puzzle pieces twisting and rearranging to create a new picture of Satan. In this moment, he was not the Adversary foretold, nor the terrifying monster who had ripped through the ground of the Tadfield Air Base, but something infinitely more complicated: he was a man, and he was very much in love.

“On your what?” Lucifer snarled. “Your honor as an angel? Spare me. I’ve known far too many angels.”

“On my wings,” Aziraphale said, his shifting, multi-toned eyes finding Lucifer’s. The steel in his voice did not undercut its sincerity. “On my wings, there is not a thing in this shop that shall harm them.”

Lucifer swallowed rather hard. “Well. That’s all right, then. I suppose.”

“Just go,” Mazikeen urged, rolling her eyes. “Before he starts to have another tantrum.”

Chloe nodded, looking between all of them before taking a deep breath and turning away.

“Goodnight Lucifer!” Trixie said, waving as her mother led her from the room. “Goodnight, Maze! Goodnight Crowley.[3]”

Mazikeen waited until the humans were safely out of earshot to whirl around, spinning vicious ring daggers in her hands as if they were demonic stress balls as she paced the floor. “Fuck, Lucifer. What is going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just a vacation, you said. It’ll be fun, you said. Maybe there will even be a bounty, you said. Funny how I didn’t hear you mention that you have family here and oh, right, someone is trying to kill you.”

Lucifer grimaced and it occurred to Crowley that his brother was already looking better, as if by a miracle.[4] “We don’t know they’re after me,” he said, almost sounding cowed by Mazikeen’s rebuke.

“Hell wants you back,” Mazikeen argued. “They have since we left. Why else would they drop a fucking bomb on you?”

“They’re not playing by the rules,” Crowley muttered. “That’s what Azrael said.”

“Who isn’t playing by the rules?” Lucifer demanded. 

“She wouldn’t tell me,” Crowley admitted. 

“Never a straight answer with that one, never,” Lucifer moaned, dragging a hand down his face. “Prissy little—”

“Keep talking and I will remove your tongue,” Crowley promised, rage seeping into his bones like he hadn’t felt since he’d thought Heaven had taken Aziraphale from him. He knew that he should be terrified, should defer to this creature in Aziraphale’s sitting room who was his brother, his master, and his undoing all at once, but he couldn’t find the fear any more. Something about seeing his sister, his stars—something about watching his lovely Aziraphale get injured and try to put on a brave show for these unwelcome celestials in their midst—had burned it all away. 

Aziraphale, who’d returned on silent feet, watched Crowley without comment. Cogs whirred in his brilliant mind, but he also knew that they were all having a bit of a tough time at the moment and that an inquisition would help no one. Aziraphale resolved himself to ask later, if he was so bold. He didn’t begrudge Crowley his secrets, but being on first-name terms with the Angel of Death? One might have thought it would come up after six-thousand years and it…well. It hadn’t.

Aziraphale would ask later, and Crowley would answer or he wouldn’t. Simple as that.

“Are you two really going to make me be the voice of reason here?” Mazikeen interjected, huffing. “Really? Because it’s not in my nature.” She breathed out hard through her nose. “Fucking angels.”

“I am not—” Crowley and Lucifer began at once, before stopping midsentence, glaring at each other.

“Angels,” Mazikeen said again, rolling her eyes. “Jesus Christ, you’re all the same.”

“Not so,” Aziraphale said, unconsciously shifting into a tone that Crowley knew preceded a good long lecture. “’Angel’ is simply an umbrella category. Calling all angels alike would be akin to calling every winged thing a bird, where there are multiple genuses and millions of species under the overarching category and to do so would be ignorance akin to madness. I, myself, am no more related to the darling Devil in my sitting room than you are, my dear.”

Maze massaged her temples, flicking an aggravated glance towards Lucifer. “Then you’ve been calling them your brothers, why, exactly?”

“Because it’s much easier to paint yourself as the unwanted stepchild when you pretend that all of Heaven is made up of blood relatives,” Crowley chimed in stonily. [5]“Which they most certainly are not.”

“What about Amenadiel?” Maze asked, sounding confused and annoyed in equal measure. Crowley did an admirable job hiding his concern that Lucifer and Mazikeen had been in contact with his more, er, warlike brother recently. Aziraphale just shook his head, as if hearing that one of the Almighty’s foremost soldiers was flouncing about on Earth with the Devil was par for the course at this point.

“Direct relation, I’m afraid,” Lucifer admitted after a moment. He hadn’t stopped looking at Crowley and Aziraphale wanted desperately to ask why.

“Fuck Heaven,” Maze said with a finality that Aziraphale might have agreed with, coming from a different source.[6] “It’s all bureaucratic bullshit up there, isn’t it? At least Hell is simple. Greater Demons, lesser demons—”

“And Fallen,” Lucifer said softly. “Yes. Much simpler.”[7]

Adam Young was an excellent young man. He was well-mannered and polite and despite the small matter of nearly ending the world at age eleven, he showed every sign of growing up to be an exceptional, if Odd, adult.

Adam Young was also seventeen and had been emancipated from the Devil Himself during the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t. Choosing the father who had raised and loved him since he was a baby had been an easy decision, but Adam could not be blamed for his curiosity about his original not-father. Especially when the Universe had whispered that the Devil was in London and had run afoul his god-beings. He’d been preoccupied all day, trying to come up with a way to convince Uncle Ant and Uncle Zira to arrange an introduction or somehow seek out the Devil on his own. It wasn’t exactly thoughts conducive to a productive school holiday.

The Them were in the process of making a daring midnight snack heist when the world split open and a stranger stepped into their midst.[8]

“Adam!” said the stranger who’d appeared out of nothing.

The Them jumped back. Wensleydale dropped his ice cream, which he thought was a crying shame, but his disappointment over losing a treat was overshadowed by the sudden appearance of an adult out of nowhere. The Them were rather used to the Stuff and Nonsense that often came along with Adam’s less-than-ordinary heritage[9] but it was still startling. 

“Who are you?” demanded Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, who went by Pepper, and who had killed War and decided that she was the only one with enough sense to keep an eye on the boys.[10] The stranger ignored her, their focus wholly on Adam, which Pepper didn’t appreciate either. “I’m talking to you.”

“Adam,” the stranger said. Their form was fuzzy. Not obscured by the darkness, but blurry round the edges, as if it hadn’t fully settled yet.

"Answer her,” Adam said, wary because today had been strange, his ex-father was in the same city, and because the Universe was tickling at the back of his mind, as if she was trying to tell him something. He nodded at Pepper and willed the street to be less dark. 

“It’s me, Adam.”

Now, the Them knew Crowley very well, and they recognized him as the London streetlamps suddenly glowed doubly bright. He and Zira always made time to visit the Them when they came to check in on Adam, and often the whole lot would have tea with Newton and Anathema. They liked Crowley. He was funny; his best joke was pretending that, of Adam’s two god-beings, that he was the intimidating one. “Something’s wrong, I need you to come with me right away.”

“Uncle Ant?” Adam asked. “What’s happened?”

“Your father,” Crowley stammered. “He’s attacked the principality—he’s attacked Aziraphale!”

“My father?” Adam repeated, the whisper in the back of his mind growing into a tingle on the back of his neck. Adam was a very bright young man, but he was, as aforementioned, a teenager.[11] He should have known right away that Crowley would have never referred to Lucifer as Adam’s father. He should have known that underneath the dark glasses, the color of the eyes wasn’t right at all. Yellow was replaced with cool, assessing violet. But he’d been preoccupied with thoughts of Satan all day, and the idea that Aziraphale could be in trouble—that his god-being needed him—was enough to silence any suspicions he should have had. 

Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, however, had not been preoccupied with such thoughts. She had no interest in meeting Satan on their school trip—once had been quite enough for her, thankyouverymuch—and she had the good sense to take a closer look at the stranger purporting to be Adam’s Uncle Ant.

Heaven is very good at making bodies. They have all the right raw materials for it. But angels, once created, rarely switch up or change up their forms. It’s well within their capacity to do so, but smug superiority often comes paired with an unwillingness to change[12] and a criminal lack of imagination.

It was this lack of imagination that caught Pepper’s eye. She’d often commented that Adam’s Uncle Ant moved like he hadn’t quite gotten used to having legs, not even after six thousand years, but the stranger in front of them held himself stock-still and immobile as a mountain. And his clothes were wrong, as well. Crowley didn’t wear suits or, at least, not ones cut like that.

“He dresses like he’s heading to a posh leather bar,” Anathema had commented to Newton, once when she hadn’t thought the teenagers were listening. Pepper had liked that description very much, and it had stuck in her head ever since.

This person didn’t look like they were heading to any sort of leather bar, posh or otherwise. They looked horribly stiff in a way that Crowley most certainly was not.

“Adam,” Pepper warned, noting the various inconsistencies. Not fast enough. Not-Crowley’s arm snaked out, wrapping tight around Adam’s bicep before he could move.

“Uncle—” Adam started, his concern morphing into horror as the stranger’s disguise melted away. “I know you.” Adam remembered every detail of the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t, and he most certainly remember the Archangel fucking Gabriel. “Get off me.”

"Stay away him!” Brian and Pepper shouted together. Wensleydale forwent words altogether and rushed the archangel, head down and shoulders braced like an American footballer. The archangel blinked lazily and the Them flew backwards as in hurled by an enormous hand. Brian hit his head against the adjacent wall and slumped; Pepper and Wensleydale remained conscious, but bruises already began to bloom over their skin.

“I forgot how incredibly irritating you human children are,” Gabriel said, shaking his head. “And to think, you three killed the Horsepersons. Unbelievable. Why the home office insisted that we keep you alive is beyond me.” He shrugged, shaking Adam a little. “Above my paygrade.”

“What the hell do you want?” Adam demanded, loud and blustering to keep from showing how much his voice shook.

“It’s Hell that’s the problem,” Gabriel said mildly. Like any good bureaucrat, he chose to shift blame. This was all Hell’s doing, of course it was, because he was an angel and therefore Good and incapable of doing wrong. “Someone got out, someone who shouldn’t have, and you’re going to help me get him back, or I’m going to conveniently forget that my home office would prefer your friends alive and deal with the paperwork involved in killing them.”

Adam’s blood went cold and all at once, he forgot that the Universe listened to him.[13]

“There’s a good Antichrist,” Gabriel said, giving Adam a condescending pat on the head before punching a hole through the world and pulling Adam through it.

There were many things that Aziraphale didn’t understand. Whole libraries could be filled with information he didn’t know. Chief among them was modern technology. Aziraphale had gotten on swimmingly with the inventions of the Victorian era and had been increasingly dismayed when Time insisted on marching forward, away from gas lanterns and the pedal-powered bicycle and towards a shiny new era of electric vehicles and iPhones. So, it was completely in character for Aziraphale to stare blankly when Trixie Decker raced into the bookshop at top speed. Chloe trailed behind her, sleepy-eyed and mussed from the scant few hours of sleep she’d managed. It had only felt like a blink of an eye to the celestials, who’d used the time to bicker and heal, in that order.

“Aziraphale!” Trixie shouted at the top of her voice, waving an iPhone that Aziraphale could hardly recollect manifesting. Perhaps Adam had given it to him; yes, that was right. Adam didn’t understand why Aziraphale only used landlines and Crowley’s old Nokia was hardly better, so he’d produced two phones for them to use.[14] “Crowley, Lucifer, look!”

She thrust the phone into Aziraphale’s hands, who held it upside down and squinted at the single button at the bottom of the blasted device.

Lucifer snorted, swiping the device from the angel’s hands and Aziraphale’s wings pricked with irritation. “Give it here, you Luddite.”

“Just because I prefer—”

“—shouldn’t have, and you’re going to help me get him back, or I’m going to conveniently forget that my home office would prefer your friends alive and deal with the paperwork involved in killing them.”

Lucifer’s face drained of color as he saw the scene unfold on the little screen, clandestinely filmed by Pepper.[15] Crowley hissed, immediately reaching for Aziraphale and gripping the sleeve of his nightgown tight. They both knew that voice. 

“Gabriel has Adam,” Lucifer said, turning the phone towards them. Aziraphale wouldn’t have believed that Satan would have been able to muster even an iota of worry for his former son, but he looked ready to break something in half. “That uppity son of a bitch.”

“Trixie,” Chloe said, kneeling down in front of her daughter before they could all start talking over one another. Crowley’s head spun with the implications. Get who back? Who was Gabriel looking for? Lucifer was an obvious choice but he and Aziraphale weren’t exactly in Heaven and Hell’s good books since the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t. “I need you to go into the other room for a little while, okay? The adults need to talk.”

“No,” Trixie said, crossing her arms over her child’s chest. “Adam’s my friend too. I want to help him.”

“You can,” Chloe said gently. “You can help by staying safe. Mommy is going to do everything she can to help Adam, but I can’t be worrying that you’re going to get hurt while I do.”

“You both should stay out of this,” Mazikeen said when Trixie glared them at them all balefully before marching out of the room. “You’re human, Decker. You don’t want to get involved in this. Trust me.” Aziraphale was inclined to agree with her. Humans running around with celestials was dangerous in and of itself, but Gabriel was especially so. He was too certain of his own righteousness, too willing to leave collateral damage in following what he believed to be the Great Plan. He would kill Chloe as soon as look at her, especially if he knew how much she meant to Lucifer.

He would kill Adam too.

Chloe whirled, eyes blazing and Aziraphale could feel the love pouring off of her, converted into something that burned hotter than his sword. “Bullshit. Clearly, none of you can be counted on to keep your shit together and one of us has to keep you celestial children from accidentally setting the world on fire with whatever harebrained scheme you come up with.” She turned on her heel so fast that Lucifer took a half-step backward. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten that you have—had—whatever—that there is a kid out there who was or is yours and you never mentioned him.”          

Lucifer swallowed hard. “I mean, to be fair, Detective, it wasn’t my finest moment and—”

“And nothing,” Chloe said severely. “You’re going to fix this, Lucifer. You’re going to make it up to that boy or so help me I’m going to strange you.”

“We don’t even know what Gabriel wants,” Lucifer protested.

“Of course we do,” Mazikeen interjected. Crowley wouldn’t have thought that she would be moved by Adam’s plight but there were spots of color high on her cheeks and her mouth pressed into a thin line. “He wants what everyone’s wanted since we left. He wants you back in Hell.”

“Not quite.”

Crowley jumped at Gabriel’s voice suddenly amongst them. He pulled Aziraphale close, their black-and-parchment wings mantling in such a way that they overlapped, covering each other’s blind spots. Gabriel shouldn’t be able to manifest in the bookshop, not with the way it had been warded.[16]

“Gabriel,” Lucifer said coolly. Mazikeen bared her teeth, pulling Chloe behind her. “What an entrance. And they say I’m dramatic.”

“Lucifer.” Gabriel didn’t appear in the bookshop, not really. The wards held his physical form outside the walls but he managed to project his voice, carried on a floating sphere of Heavenly light.

“Don’t look,” Crowley warned Chloe in a hiss. He shifted his wings slightly so that one of his primaries fell directly in front of her eyes. He didn’t know how much of Heaven Gabriel had brought with him, bit too much could burn up Chloe’s body in a split-second.

“For someone who quite literally Fell because of their disdain for humanity, you do seem to spend a lot of time with the little monkeys, don’t you?”

“I’m glad to see that you’re still as much of a twat as I remember,” Lucifer said acidly. “Cut the shit, Gabe. Tell me where Adam is before I find you, rip your wings off and beat you with them.”

Aziraphale winced at Lucifer’s tone. Gabriel wasn’t to be trifled with and Aziraphale didn’t want to think about what he would do to Adam if his temper snapped.

“Charming as ever, brother.” Gabriel almost sounded disappointed that they already knew that he had Adam, as if he’d been working towards a monologue and they’d stolen his opportunity to perform it.

Lucifer bristled.[17] “What do you want?” His lip curled over his teeth.

“Someone,” the-light-that-was-Gabriel said with a little spin, “is supposed to be in Hell. Don’t blame me for trying to recreate Order. I’m merely the messenger.”

“What, Hell must always have a King, is that it?” Lucifer snarled.

“Hell will go on, with or without you,” Gabriel said. “The demons will crawl around in their slime and muck, spreading Evil whether or not there is a King. No, we don’t want you.”

Crowley had a single moment of premeditative clarity, and he knew what his bastard brother was going to say the instant before he did.[18]

“Raphael,” Gabriel’s voice said, the ball of light flickering victoriously. “Your little sojourn on Earth is over. The choice is yours: the Antichrist, or the Pit.”

[1] It was a bit much, for Chloe, at least. She was doing an admirable job with everything that had happened, she truly was, but the adult mind gets a bit stuck in its preconceived notions about the Universe and such. Trixie, on the other hand, was utterly unfazed. She was worried about her mother, because the last time Mommy had looked like that, she and Daddy had gotten divorced, but otherwise, she was handling the newfound knowledge of angels and demons and celestial hullabaloo rather nicely. Children’s minds were elastic, but it helped that Trixie was, as both Crowley and Aziraphale had guessed, Odd.

[2] He was right. A child from a broken family will always recognize the tactics when used by another.

[3] Crowley turned his head away, unwilling to show the complicated things happening in his chest at being included in the child’s string of “goodnights”.

[4] It was not a miracle, but a little trick of interdimensional physics. Chloe made him vulnerable when she was near, but she was—quite literally—in a separate dimension at the moment. Spatially, quite close, but pocket dimensions were clever that way and the Universe was willing to allow the distinction.

[5] There was a Family in Heaven. There was the Family, the first of God’s creations before the other subspecies of angels were created out of the cosmos. It had been a long, long time ago.

[6] Crowley definitely agreed, source be damned. Quite literally, in both of their cases.

[7] Two of the celestials in the room knew that it was not that simple, not by a long shot.

[8] They were all well-behaved children but they were also teenagers on a school trip to London and one of them had what essentially amounted to superpowers. It would’ve been criminal to waste the opportunity to sneak out and explore.

[9] They had all needed counseling after the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t. They’d won, but the psychological effects of finding that their friend was the Antichrist and subsequently destroying three of the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse at the tender age of eleven were rather long-lasting. It was alright. Tadfield had an excellent psychiatry office, and the Them had each other and always kept their phones under their pillows and their ringers on high for when someone had nightmares.

[10] Sure, Adam had superpowers, but Pepper had brains in her head and she would take the latter over the former any day of the week.

[11] Now, there is nothing particularly wrong with being a teenager—in fact, those years are often ones of spectacular growth—but amongst the existential horror of changing bodies and raging hormones, the truth of the matter was that teenagers cared. They cared so very much, about what people thought about them, about themselves, about the world around them and their place in it. Adam Young was an extraordinary seventeen-year-old boy, but his undoing was that he cared about Aziraphale.

[12] And why would they bother changing, the most smug of the angels reasoned, when they were already perfectly made?

[13] And this was the secret about the Universe: she could whisper and warn all she pleased, but she could not act without being asked to do so.

[14] Which they hadn’t, of course, but it had been a sweet gesture in any case.

[15] She’d taken to texting memes to Adam’s Uncles in the last months. She didn’t care much if they responded, but either way, she had their mobile numbers when it mattered most.

[16] Literally to Hell and back.

[17] His shoulders widened as if he’d mantled his wings, but they remained winched and hidden. In fact, Aziraphale realized that he’d not yet seen the Lightbringer’s famed white wings. Crowley hadn’t gotten around to telling him that Lucifer had made the stomach-turning choice to cut them off.

[18] Some part of him, the part that wasn’t screaming with blind panic and wishing that he could rip a hole in the Universe, grab Aziraphale, and hide for the rest of eternity, wondered if this was how Agnes Nutter, witch, had felt. How she was able to predict every awful thing that would happen to her and had no power to stop it.  

Chapter Text

 Gabriel’s light grew blinding. “You have one hour.”

Even the celestials had to look away as his messenger burned like a second sun and then vanished. Crowley couldn’t bear to look at any of them. His mouth tasted like ash and something in him felt as if it had been ripped out and now he was laid bare, exposed in a way that he never had been before.

He’d been so careful. Everything—every single thing he’d done since the Fall was to protect this secret.[1] Crawling out of the sulfur pits with the others, shedding his form and letting them call him ‘Crawly.’ Taking every opportunity to escape Hell, every assignment by the home office, so that he was as far away from prying eyes that might recognize him. The archangel Raphael was missing, but Heaven didn’t seem to care one way or another, and no one noticed another demon slithering around in the damp and the dark.

Eventually, he just…became Crowley, the Serpent of Eden. He was the snake shedding its skin, and leaving Raphael behind had been a matter of survival. Either home offices learning who he was—who he’d been—would be nothing short of absolute catastrophe, the worst possible outcome.

And yet, part of him had always known that this would happen, that one day the façade would be ripped away and everything he’d built would crumble. Part of him had been ready for it to happen. He was on borrowed time and sooner than later, the debt would come due. He expected a second Fall.

He hadn’t expected Aziraphale. Sweet, fussy, brave Aziraphale who’d given his sword to Adam and Eve so they might survive the wilds. Who’d sheltered him from the first storm and every other since. His accomplice, his companion, his best friend.

The love of both of his lives.

Aziraphale, who Crowley was most certainly not looking at because he couldn’t bear to see the betrayal writ plain on his face.[2]

“Raphael?” It was Mazikeen who broke the stunned, cavernous silence. “The archangel fucking Raphael? The one who hung the stars? That Raphael?”

“Him and Azrael. The twins,” Lucifer said when Crowley didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. Something in him had splintered and as soon as he opened his mouth, he would start spitting blood.

“Heaven has twins?” Chloe asked, and Crowley might have smiled if it hadn’t hurt so much. He wondered how she’d come to that question to ask, as if everything else was so big that she’d landed on something palatable: the ability of celestials to be twins.

“Just them,” Lucifer said. “They’re the only ones.”

“And no one noticed that a whole archangel had taken a swan dive into Hell?”

“I never spent much time in the Silver City,” Crowley said, feeling as if he was speaking around a mouthful of broken glass. “Too busy in the sky.” With Azrael.

He didn’t look at any of them, too busy trying to hold himself together. Mazikeen and Chloe, they kept looking at him as though they expected him to change before their eyes, as if ‘Crowley’ was another skin to shed and he’d reveal that there had always been an archangel beneath the Valentino sunglasses and the yellow eyes. They didn’t understand that the Fall had changed him, stripped away his grace until there was nothing left of Raphael but his wings. He was gone and Crowley was what he’d been able to rebuild from the burnt out husk left behind.[3]

“Why you?” Lucifer asked and Crowley flinched as though he’d been struck.

“What does it matter?” Aziraphale said so fiercely that Crowley flinched again, mistaking his tone for condemnation. “They can’t have him.”

Crowley blinked twice. “Of course they can,” he said, as if it should be obvious, which it was. “It’s Adam, Aziraphale. There’s no choice to be made.”

“We can get him back,” Chloe volunteered and Crowley felt a great swell of affection for the Odd human. She meant it too, her brow furrowed with determination as if finding and stealing Adam back from Gabriel was possible. Even if it was,[4] there was no way they’d be able to do it in an hour, not with all the scheming in the world. Not even if Crowley managed to stop Time again without being flattened like an insect.

"You’re a bunch of angels and demons!” Chloe insisted. “You can think of something.”

Oh, he did like her, this woman who’d stolen his brother’s flighty heart. Crowley would miss her and her equally Odd child. There wasn’t much chance of them finding their way to Hell once they died.

“You don’t know Gabriel,” Crowley said quietly, steeling himself.

“Fuck Gabriel!” Chloe shouted.

“Why does he want you?” Lucifer mused again.[5] Crowley didn’t know why it mattered. Gabriel had found him out, he’d kidnapped Adam, all to get him back in Hell.

“Who cares?” Crowley said. “He has Adam. He wants me. Easiest decision in the world.”

“But what about—” Aziraphale’s voice did something complicated and awful and some of Crowley’s forced calm began to splinter.

“Out!” Mazikeen commanded, grabbing Chloe and Lucifer by their wrists and marching them towards the door. “For the love of Someone, read the room you two.” She pulled them outside and slammed the door behind her.[6]

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said to the suddenly-empty bookshop.[7] He still hadn’t looked his angel in the face. It was strange; he wouldn’t remember ever not wanting to look at Aziraphale, but not he was certain that if he saw the look on his face he would die. Simply cease to be, because Crowley had been lying for six-thousand years and he hadn’t ever meant to be found out, let alone like this.[8]

“I love you,” Aziraphale blurted before Crowley could even attempt to come up with something to say. Crowley’s heart squeezed hard in his chest and he spun around so fast that he had to throw his wings out for balance. He knew, of course, that Aziraphale loved him, but they didn’t say it. They didn’t need to. They’d proved it to each other in a thousand different ways since the day they met in the Garden.[9] But saying it aloud? That was so…so—

So human.

“I love you,” Aziraphale said again, closing the gap between them so that they were nose-to-nose. Aziraphale’s lovely face obscured everything, until the angel was his whole world—and wasn’t that appropriate? “I love you so much. I’ve loved you since the Blitz. I think—I think I loved you sooner but that’s when I knew.”

Crowley didn’t know how he managed a smile. “I’ve loved you since Eden.” It was the easiest thing in the world to say those words. “Since you gave away your sword.”

Aziraphale’s mouth dropped open slightly, his beautiful eyes widening slightly in surprise. “All that time?” Aziraphale could feel love, and he’d always assumed that the love he’d felt rolling off of Crowley since the day they met was a kind of reverberation, an echo of their mutual adoration for Earth.

“All that time. You were the first good thing I saw since the Fall.” Not Good, good. The distinction mattered and Aziraphale could hear it. Crowley lifted his hand to cup Aziraphale’s cheek and his angel’s eyes fell closed as he nuzzled even closer. “You are the only thing I love more than the stars.” The words were said in a whisper, the admission not that of an archangel or a demon, but of Crowley, who was both and neither.

A deep breath through his nose. “Don’t tell me not to go.” Because he would listen. If Aziraphale asked him not to, Crowley would let Gabriel make good on his threats. Because he was selfish, and a coward.[10]

“I just wish we had more time.” There was a dampness on his cheeks that was not his own and Crowley squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t bear to see Aziraphale cry.

“It’s Gabriel,” Crowley said like it was a death sentence, which it was. “It’s Adam.”

They could stop the Apocalypse in a week, but stopping Gabriel in an hour? It wasn’t possible. Crowley wasn’t willing to put his godson’s life on the line, not for the thinnest possibility that they’d somehow find a way to free Adam without risking his—or anyone else’s—life. This was the best way. The only way.[11]

“Make sure my plants grow well,” Crowley said softly. “Maybe…maybe you don’t have to destroy them if they aren’t perfect. Maybe you can just let them try to be better.”

“I promise,” Aziraphale said. “They’ll be beautiful.” A pause. “I’ll take care of them until you get back.”

“Okay.” Crowley didn’t have to tell him that he wasn’t ever coming back. He’d managed to slink away before, but Gabriel would ensure that it would never happen again.

“This is not goodbye,” Aziraphale said, fierce again. “It’s not.”

“I love you,” Crowley said again because he could. Sweet Someone, why had he waited this long to say those words? So many wasted opportunities. “I’m so glad I met you.”

Aziraphale swallowed hard. “Hurry back, dear.” His voice was wobbly and thick but the words held.

“I’ll send Adam along shortly. Give him and those hooligan friends of his my best.” Crowley closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against Aziraphale’s, inhaling the smell of him once.

Then he was gone.

Adam Young was in a bubble. Adults sometimes said something similar about young people—“Oh you teenagers and your Tide Pods and your socialism, you’re all off in your personal bubbles.” That was the kind of condescending nonsense that the Them—especially Pepper—couldn’t stand, but in Adam’s case it was painfully literal.

In any other scenario, floating around in a translucent bubble would be the exact kind of thing that Adam and his friends would dream up for a lazy Saturday afternoon. But this wasn’t Tadfield, and Adam was not in charge of this bubble.

“Humans like to gamble, don’t they?” asked the archangel Gabriel. “Care to make a wager, young Antichrist?”

Adam just glared at him, pulling his knees even closer to his chest. The bubble was already too small for his sixteen-ear-old gangle, with the added bonus that it shrank even smaller every time he tried to reach out to the Universe.[12]

Gabriel continued, unbothered by Adam’s sullen silence. He hadn’t wanted an answer, not truly, but he reveled in the chance to monologue.[13] “I don’t think he’ll show. Raphael was always a coward, even in Heaven.” He cast his eyes skyward, his lip curling. “He didn’t even fight in the First War, can you imagine?”

Adam kept glowering. This Gabriel wanker was mad, obviously. He kept calling Uncle Ant ‘Raphael,’ kept calling him family. Adam was Uncle Ant’s family. Adam and Uncle Zira, not this pretentious plonker who clearly needed to set up an appointment with Doctor Gold to deal with his family issues.

“Hope you didn’t bet against me,” Uncle Ant said, appearing from nowhere. “Gambling’s a nasty habit to get into so young. And against your own uncle, too.”

“Raphael,” Gabriel said, his voice stiff with surprise or disappointment, or some combination of the two.

“It’s Crowley,” Uncle Ant said coldly, showing his sharp teeth. “Let my godson go.”

“Your godson,” Gabriel sneered. “I forgot how deeply you’ve gone native.”

“And you haven’t changed one bit.” Uncle Ant hissed the words like they were poison.

Gabriel’s slate-gray wings shuffled and reshuffled on his back and Adam suddenly remembered Uncle Zira’s wings doing the same thing when he was pleased with himself. The comparison made him uncomfortable. “There is no need to change that which is perfectly made.”

Fucking prick, Adam thought viciously. Without meaning to, he reached out to the Universe and the bubble immediately began to shrink again. Adam cried out as it pressed even tighter against him and didn’t stop. Even after he let his power go, it kept squeezing until his head was forced against his knees and his skin burned from the pressure and friction.

“Enough, Gabriel!” Uncle Ant shouted, the cold giving way to panic. Adam closed his eyes, doing his best to breathe but he—was—being—crushed.

And then he wasn’t. Adam was barely aware of the bubble popping but suddenly he sprawled against the concrete beneath him. Adam breathed in great heaving gasps, not bothering to hide the tears that streamed down his cheeks. Uncle Ant kneeled by his side, his ink-black wings spread wide, creating a barrier between them and Gabriel.

“I’m sorry,” Uncle Ant said. “I’m so sorry Adam, you were never meant to get stuck in the middle of all this.”

Adam didn’t know what the hell was going on. Why did Gabriel want his uncle so badly?

“Uncle Ant—” Adam started before Crowley cut him off.

“Hurry along. Give Aziraphale my love.”

He was saying goodbye, Adam realized with a sickening start. Whatever was going on, Uncle Ant didn’t expect to come back.

Uncle Ant swiped his thumb over Adam’s forehead and there was a tingle down his spine like he’d had a bucket of ice-water dumped over his head. Before Adam had a chance to ask what was going on, the world began to shimmer, distorted like heatwaves over a flame, and Uncle Ant pushed him through.

“He’s gone.”

Look. Maze was a monster. That was a fact. She’d been forged from the deepest pits of Hell, created for the single purpose of being the most efficient torturer possible. Every part of her had been fashioned to draw blood, from the tips of her fingers to the razor edges of her wings. She knew her way around pain, she could smell weakness like a shark scenting blood. Earth hadn’t dulled her senses or her natural inclinations, just repurposed them slightly. Which was why she nearly went to her knees when she finally opened to door of the angel’s bookshop.  

“Fuck,” she gasped. Her russet-colored wings plunged into the ground, tearing gouges into the plush carpeting in an attempt to stay standing. Aziraphale was alone in the front of the room of the bookshop, his arms slightly extended as if he’d been holding someone just a moment before. His mouth was closed, his body held perfectly still, but he was screaming. Maze didn’t know that a single entity could feel that much pain.[14]

“He’s gone,” Aziraphale said again, like the world had ended. Maze blinked at him, watching as the angel’s essence tore itself into bloody ribbons in anguish.

“Aziraphale,” Chloe said, shuffling closer to the shattered angel.

Maze took advantage of the moment of distraction to whirl on Lucifer. “Fix him,” she hissed.

“What?” Lucifer wasn’t built for pain like Maze was, but even he was affected by Aziraphale’s aura.

“Fix. Him,” Maze snarled. “I don’t even know how he’s standing.”

"What do you want me to do about it?” Lucifer asked.

“You’re the King of Hell,” Maze said. “Your brother is in Hell. Put two and two together, dumbass.”

“I’m trying to stay out of Hell,” Lucifer hissed. “Do you really think Dad—the Almighty—is going to let me out again if I go back?”

Maze wanted to strangle him. Her fingers curled inward, her nails biting into her palms as she fought the urge to actively murder her best friend. What a dense asshole. Crowley was his brother. Maze knew that didn’t mean shit to angels—it didn’t mean shit to Maze, either, truth be told—but she knew that when someone was hurting this badly, you were supposed to at least try to fix it. Chloe and Linda had taught her that much and what was the point of trying to fit in on this stupid rock if she didn’t follow the advice of the two smartest humans she knew?[15]

Someone help her she did not have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate another being. Lucifer, Chloe, Linda, and Trixie were enough of a hassle as it is and what the Heaven would her demonic brethren think if she went around adopting every weepy, stuffy principality she came across? In that moment, she hated all of them for making her care, even the slightest bit.[16]

“There’s nothing for him to do,” Aziraphale said, overhearing. Maze raised a single, challenging eyebrow. Nothing? From what she’d heard, these two celestial ding-dongs had stopped Arma-fucking-geddon, and he was just going to let his ex-archangel boyfriend get dragged into Hell without a fight? Bullshit.

“What do you mean, nothing?” Maze demanded. “Look, I get a time constraint, but he’s already down there. Let’s just kick the door down and go get him already!”

Chloe shot her a weird look that Maze was definitely not going to acknowledge, but her human roomie looked very proud of how up and arms Maze was getting about their current situation. It wasn’t like she cared about either of them, no definitely not that, but they had a nice little thing going here[17]and Maze was about sick and tired of archangels fucking everyone over.

She didn’t care. She didn’t even like Aziraphale. He’d stolen Trixie a day ago, for one thing, and he was buttoned-up and weird. He definitely wouldn’t be a fun night out, that was for damn sure. She didn’t like him. She definitely didn’t like Crowley, who was scared shitless of her and Lucifer but who wouldn’t leave his boyfriend’s side when they first met, and whose personal style was much more aligned with hers, despite the unfortunate fact that he’d been raised in Heaven with a silver spoon up his ass like Lucifer.[18] So yeah. She didn’t like them. Chloe could shut up.

“My dear, you misunderstand me,” Aziraphale said, turning to face them both. Chloe’s hand was still on his shoulder but he looked as if he’d been carved out of stone and all at once, Maze remembered that Aziraphale’s fluffy exterior was a choice, and he’d fought and killed in the First War. There was a flinty glimmer in his eyes that she’d seen in Amenadiel’s when he was about to go fuck some shit up, and sometimes even in Lucifer’s. “There is nothing for Lucifer to do. I, myself, fully intend to—how did you put it? Kick the door down and go get him already.”

“But Gabriel—?” Lucifer started.

“Fuck Gabriel,” Aziraphale spat. It was strange to see him swear, like it would be strange to see a dog walking on its hind legs, or Lucifer in sweatpants, or Trixie saying no to a slice of chocolate cake. It was just too weird. “I’ve beaten him before and I’ll do it again.”

“And how to you propose to do that?” Lucifer asked. “It’s not as if you can just walk through the front gates. And you don’t have a soul, so if we kill your body, you’ll just get discorporated, and I have a feeling that Heaven is not a fan of yours at the moment.”

“I once impersonated Crowley during his trial in Hell,” Aziraphale explained coldly.[19] Maze remembered hearing about that—she’d been off torturing some poor son of a bitch or other, but everyone had been buzzing about the demon who’d survived a bath in holy water unscathed. She should have put two and two together and realized that this pair was behind that as well.[20] “I remember the way.”

Lucifer’s face did something complicated, and Maze knew that he was fighting his instinct to tell the whole lot of them to, well, to go to Hell. Linda had been working on Maze for years, but Lucifer had been her patient the longest. He was the first one who’d been changed by their time on Earth and Maze watched, in real time, as the two halves of him went to war.

“Oh, bollocks,” he said, coming to a conclusion, though he didn’t look very happy about it. “What do you need me to do?”

Aziraphale’s smile was cold. “I have a few ideas.”

[1] That wasn’t quite true. Aziraphale had nearly discovered Crowley’s secret a dozen times over their six-thousand years together and as they grew closer, Crowley found himself acting to protect his angel, not his identity.

[2] It wasn’t betrayal on Aziraphale’s face, though Crowley daren’t look. It was a bit of hurt, but overwhelmingly, his expression was one of deep understanding as he flipped through six millennia of memories. Puzzle pieces were suddenly clicking into place, strange interactions finding new meaning, little gestures, and odd phrases making a new kind of sense that they never had before.   

[3] Crowley held the charred heart of his former self close, built up walls—built a whole persona—to protect it.

[4] It wasn’t.

[5] He was doing an admirable job of pretending to be relieved, perhaps even a bit offended, that Gabriel didn’t want him, but deep down, something in him ached for Crowley. He’d done it—escaped from Hell and built a life for himself, everything that Lucifer was trying to do in Los Angeles—and Heaven, Hell, whichever, was ripping it away from him.

[6] Mazikeen was remarkably sensitive for a demon. In Hell, that acumen had been for sniffing out a sinner’s weak points, the buttons to press to make them break. On Earth, it made her extremely attuned to the emotions of those around it. It was gross.  

[7] Not quite. Trixie was still in the pocket dimension and was shamelessly eavesdropping.

[8] There had been times, over the centuries, when he’d been tempted. Aziraphale was his and he was Aziraphale’s, but how could they possibly keep their life together if it had been built on a lie?

[9] The rescue during the Reign of Terror. Making Hamlet a success. Saving books from Nazis. Their whole Arrangement. Standing together in front of Heaven and Hell and choosing neither, choosing humanity. Choosing each other. A thousand ‘I love yous.’

[10] Because he had never been able to refuse Aziraphale anything.

[11] And if he was honest, Crowley knew that he deserved this. Every year spent with Aziraphale on Earth had been stolen. He hadn’t earned any of it. This was his second Fall, his true Fall, and this time it had burned all the way to the heart of him.

[12] She heard him, she was listening, but Adam never had a chance to ask for anything before the bubble threatened to crush him. A thunderstorm gathered in the sky above, reflecting her anger and frustration.

[13] His fellow angels were too stuffy to give him the feedback he craved from an audience. Humans were just so deliciously emotional.

[14] This was what happened, of course, when a being made entirely of love, built to love and sense love, had his heart broken.

[15] Not that she’d ever tell them so to their faces. Maze was a demon, detached and terrible. She had a reputation to maintain.

[16] No one had told her how exhausting it was to give a shit about people. Because it was. Exhausting. Maze was exhausted. 

[17] Not her taste, to be sure, but Maze was more a whips and chains than books and tea kind of demon.

[18] Though, even she had to admit that being the Angel of Death’s twin was pretty damn cool. She could almost forgive being an angel for that fact alone. Even among demons, Azrael was known for being a stone-cold badass.

[19] It had taken a long, long time for Crowley to admit that Aziraphale had not been given the same courtesy. Hell had tried Crowley for his crimes—a rigged trial, but a trial nonetheless—and Heaven had tried to kill Aziraphale on sight. Justice was not a concept with which Hell was familiar, but at least they pretended. Worst of all, Aziraphale hadn’t been surprised at the lack of trial. He’d just shrugged, as if he’d expected as much.

[20] If she was honest, it had always made her shiver, thinking of a demon dying like that. It was an awful way to go.

Chapter Text

Hell was the same. Crowley didn’t know why part of him expected it to have changed in his absence, but it was as mind-numbingly awful as ever. Aziraphale might have been able to find some shred of a silver lining in the sameness, but Crowley, for the life of him, couldn’t.[1]

He didn’t know which was worse: the literal rivers of lava that snaked through the underground like fat, lazy serpents; the fire and brimstone that were every bit as terrible as those sanctimonious preachers topside used to scare their flocks into compliance; or the Dark City itself. Massive buildings scraped the earthen ceiling above them, twisted into shapes that the laws of physics would outlaw on Earth. Within them, the cycle rooms, personal Hells for the humans that deserved it. Even further below, the torture pits where demons like Mazikeen did their work breaking soul after soul in the dark and on the racks.

And then, the Pit. Hell’s seat of power: the administrative compound, if you will. Dank and drab, crowded and stinking, demons milling about everywhere, cogs in a wheel that had long since stopped working properly and perhaps never had. Crowley couldn’t help the way his lip curled in disgust at being back in this place. Even millennia ago, before he’d found Earth, before Aziraphale, he’d stayed as far away from here as possible. He didn’t think there was a place in this Universe where he was farther from his stars. The thought made his stomach twinge.

Crowley forced himself to steady, forced his mind away from everything he was giving up.[2] The distance from his creations was a moot point. Crowley knew that he wasn’t going to last long here; Hell had wanted the War just as much as Heaven and despite he and his angel’s little switcheroo, they still held him responsible for stopping the fighting. It was his greatest triumph, and his brethren were going to kill him for it within minutes. And he still didn’t know why. Why did Gabriel want him so very badly? Why him?

Crowley lasted approximately sixty-seven seconds in Hell before he decided, fuck it. He was going to die down here anyway. May as well annoy his treacherous bastard of an older brother while he was at it. “Y’know, Gabe,” he said as casually as he could manage, which was very. Crowley was good at casual, he was an expert at feigning coolness when he was just seconds away from a breakdown. “I’ve got to say, I think this environment suits you. I always said you were too much of a bastard for Heaven.”

Gabriel’s feathers ruffled and Crowley felt a stab of vindication. He hadn’t thought of the archangels as his family since even before his Fall, but little brother instincts ran deep.

His victory was short-lived. Gabriel’s composure returned almost instantly, and he fixed Crowley with an unyielding look. “You’d know, wouldn’t you, Raphael? You’re the one who Fell.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “You Fell, and no one even noticed.”

Crowley couldn’t help the hiss that dragged from his throat. Hurt swept through him as if he’d been struck and he bared his teeth to hide it with a show of anger. “Why are you doing this? We beat you. Get over it! Armageddon isn’t happening!”

“It’s not about that.” Crowley spun at Beelzebub’s voice, his instincts screaming at him to turn and run from the Dark Prince. “It’s about you, Raphael.”

“My name,” Crowley said, drawing himself up to his full height, “is Crowley.”

Beelzebub was not impressed, their gaze cutting through Crowley’s surge of courage like a demon blade through sinew and bone. “It’s not about the War,” they said again. “Armageddon will come eventually and we’ll be ready when it does.”

“Then what?” Crowley asked, deflating somewhat. “Why do all this?” He wasn’t pleading for his life, he knew it was forfeit and he wasn’t willing to put his family in danger for something as inconsequential as his own freedom. “What’s the bloody point?”

“Hope,” Beelzebub said, as if it should be obvious. “Raphael the healer, the one who lit the sky. Who loved humanity so much that he Fell and then Ascended.”

Crowley startled, and the breath caught in his lungs. Ascended? Was that what he’d done? Crowley hadn’t done anything special.[3] He just hadn’t wanted to do any more harm.

Gabriel picked up the monologue, ignoring Crowley’s distress. “You’ve got to understand why we can’t just let you go. The Fall, well, that’s ancient history. But you, little brother, have done something new.” He sniffed disdainfully. “If word gets out that Raphael not only Fell, but crawled back out of Hell—I mean, can you even imagine it? Demons trying to Rise again? Greater Demons, even? There would be chaos. Anarchy.”

"And if they succeed,” Beelzebub said solemnly, the fly atop their head buzzing, “then there might not even be two sides anymore. Just a mess of half-demons and half-angels, without any place in the Universe. Without a place.” A sneer. “Without a Plan.”

What would be so wrong with that? Crowley wanted to scream. Why did there have to be sides? He and Aziraphale were the proof of concept that it could be done. Humanity had always done the heavy lifting for them. They were good and evil and every shade in between. They didn’t need celestial intervention, they never had. Humanity was awful and wonderful and free. There was a reason the Almighty favored them.[4]

Before he could recover—could speak, move, anything—Beelzebub surged forward, landing a swift kick at his midsection. Crowley’s breath vacated his body all at once as pain radiated out from his middle. He doubled over, his wings curling protectively around his front, but just as quickly as Beelzebub had struck him, Gabriel grabbed his wing by the join and yanked.

Crowley cried out, going to his knees, but that just increased the pressure on his wing. It was nearly out of its socket and Crowley had to grit his teeth against the pain. It scraped up and down his spine, sending dark spots dancing around in his sight.

“You understand, don’t you, brother?” Gabriel asked evenly, twisting Crowley’s wing even further out of place. Crowley bit his lip so hard that his sharp teeth pierced straight through and his vision whited out.

“Stop,” he gasped. Blood trickled down his chin. “Please. You have me. You have me—just stop!”

“It’s for the best,” Gabriel said as if Crowley hadn’t said a word. Beelzebub raised a hand and a door appeared out of nothing. Crowley screamed as Gabriel dragged him into a dank room no bigger than the office in the back of Aziraphale’s bookshop. “If you don’t see that now, you will soon.” A pause. “Or maybe you won’t. It doesn’t matter.”

There was a single moment of relief as Gabriel’s grip in his wing loosened a fraction. Crowley managed to suck in a single breath before one hand on his wing became two and then—

Snap. 

Lucifer was the Lightbringer. He was the Prince of Heaven and the King of Hell. He’d been God’s favorite, Samael. He was the fucking Devil Himself.

And he was scared. Terrified, in fact.[5] He was alone. Lucifer had never done well with solitude. Not in Heaven, Hell, or on Earth. He’d always had followers, cronies, minions. Friends were few and far between. Maze was premiere among them, though that circle at grown since his time in Los Angeles.[6] Linda. Ella. Trixie. Maybe even Detective Douche, on every second Thursday when he wasn’t being unbearable.

Chloe. Who had captured his heart so completely that Lucifer hadn’t known what had happened until it was too late, and by then, he wouldn’t have changed a thing. His safety, his invulnerability, his divinity, he’d give it all up to be close to her. The Devil in love with a human. It was still a little unbelievable, even to him.

Lucifer, on principle, didn’t pray, but he thought that maybe, just this once, it wouldn’t hurt to wing a prayer to the Almighty. Just for a little luck and perhaps a bit of divine intervention to keep the strange little cadre of humans and celestials he’d collected safe.

“Oh, Ga-abe,” Lucifer sang in Enochian. Gabriel already knew that he was in London and his humans were as safe as they could be. There wasn’t any point in playing coy. He sipped a flat white outside a nondescript café in Soho, waiting for his sanctimonious older brother to show up. He took a deep, steadying breath. “Don’t you want to know what happened to Uriel?”

Lucifer could feel the change in barometric pressure that preceded his brother’s arrival. The air cooled, responding to Gabriel’s anger as he appeared across the table from Lucifer.

“Samael,” Gabriel said icily.

“Lucifer, if you please,” Lucifer corrected before bringing his cup to his lips. Gabriel glowered. “Samael died a long, long time ago.”

“What happened to Uriel?” Gabriel demanded. His voice was blank, severe. Of all the archangels, Gabriel and Uriel had always been the closest. They were both stubborn and self-satisfied, convinced that they could do no wrong because they were following the Plan. The great fucking Plan, vague and awful and ineffable. The cause of so much bloody suffering. While Raphael had been off in the stars and Michael and Amenadiel went around fighting anything that looked at them sideways, Gabriel and Uriel celebrated their own intelligence and their Goodness.

“Where is he?” Gabriel nearly shouted, causing a few Londoners to shoot them dirty looks.

“I’m surprised you don’t know.”

“Do you think this is a joke, little brother?” Gabriel asked, quiet again. Lucifer would’ve preferred him shouting.

“No, I don’t think you’ve got much of a sense of humor, Gabe.” Lucifer paused, considering. “But you also chose that suit so I could be wrong.”

“Enough,” Gabriel hissed. “What have you done to my brother?”

Lucifer sneered, some of his hesitation siphoning away. Oh, how his siblings loved to emphasize the importance of family when it suited them. Lucifer had been Gabriel’s family, once upon a time. Crowley, too, but that hadn’t stopped him from pulling Crowley into Hell. Family was everything to those halo-wearing sons of bitches, until it wasn’t.

“He’s dead.” The words still tasted like acid in Lucifer’s mouth, and he’d still do anything to undo what he’d done, but right now Gabriel couldn’t know that. Wouldn’t know that. “I killed him. Borrowed a flaming sword to do it. Thought it was Azrael’s, might’ve been Aziraphale’s, the whole thing was a bit of a mix-up. Either way, Uriel’s deader than disco.[7]”

Lucifer watched carefully as the calm that was as much a part of Gabriel as his tacky suits abandoned him all at once. One moment he was sitting stiffly in the café’s outdoor chair and the next he loomed over Lucifer, his massive wings spread wide to make himself more intimidating.[8] “You what?”

Lucifer blinked up at him lazily. His own wings were still winched, despite the old instincts that shouted at him to run or at the very least to make himself look bigger. “Have you become hard of hearing in your old age?”

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Gabriel roared. “Killing an archangel, it’s—it’s—”

“Bloody difficult, I’ll tell you that much.”

Gabriel looked like he was a split-second from razing the entire city around them. “Why are you telling me this? What’s your game, Samael? You know that you can’t beat me in a fight.”

“I don’t know about that, Gabe. You’re a bit out of practice and I’m one-for-one for killing angels.” Gabriel’s face mottled purple. “But no. I’m just a simple distraction. I called in reinforcements to kick your feathery ass.”

“Hi, Gabe,” Amenadiel said, winging in on cue. “Hear you’ve been picking on the smaller kids.” Gabriel didn’t have time to react before Amenadiel punched him in the face.

Here was the thing about Amenadiel: he knew Aziraphale. He liked Aziraphale. The principality was a little off-color—quite literally in the case of his wings—and a little odd,[9] but he was sweet and earnest and when the First War came, he’d proven himself over and over again, even though it couldn’t be clearer that he hated every second of the fighting. Amenadiel was a warrior, he was God’s sword alongside Michael, but he appreciated what the little principality was willing to sacrifice for Heaven.

And Crowley. Amenadiel and Raphael had never been close, but there had always been a part of him—small, but there nonetheless—that respected his brother’s determined pacifism. He’d been as angry as anyone else about the Apocalypse getting put on hold but, retroactively, he was grateful for the angel and the demon who stood together and said, No. This is wrong. The Earth was worth saving. Humanity was worth saving.

It also helped that Gabriel was an asshole.

Lucifer watched his brothers take to the sky, colliding over and over again with violent crashes that rivaled thunder.

Hurry, Lucifer thought, sipping his coffee. Whatever Aziraphale was planning, Lucifer hoped he could do it fast, because without killing him outright, there was only so long Amenadiel could keep Gabriel occupied. Above him, the sky crackled with lightning in response to the battling angels. Please hurry.

“Remind me again why we’re taking a kid into Hell?” Mazikeen asked for the fifth time.

“I’m the Antichrist,” Adam said tartly.[10] They’d been sniping at each other since he appeared in the bookshop, rattled and slightly squished from spending the better half of a night in a bubble. Aziraphale tried to convince him to stay back, but Adam insisted that if they were going on a rescue mission for Crowley, he was coming with them.

“Still a kid,” Maze replied. “Come on, angel—”

“Don’t,” Aziraphale snapped, his feathers puffing. “Don’t call me that.”

Both Adam and Maze looked surprised at his outburst and Aziraphale immediately felt wretched.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I don’t mean—”

“It’s okay, Uncle Zira,” Adam said before Maze could snap back. He met the demon’s eyes. “He’s my family. I have superpowers. I can help.”

“I’m not saving your ass when you get in trouble,” Maze warned.

“Ditto.”

Aziraphale ignored both of them, focusing on finding a backdoor into Hell. Dying wasn’t an option—neither he nor Mazikeen had souls and discorporation would just slingshot him into Heaven and that was the opposite of where he wanted to be—and as an angel[11] it wasn’t as if he could just pop Downstairs. He wasn’t invited, like Michael had been for Crowley’s trial. So backdoor it was.[12]

“Here,” Aziraphale said suddenly, stopping short. The American embassy was a little on the nose for an entrance to Hell, but Aziraphale could comment on the irony when Crowley was safe and home.

“And how are we supposed to get in now?” Maze asked, eyeing the striped and starred flag as it flapped in an unnatural breeze. No sooner had the words left her mouth than a shimmery barrier appeared in front of them, shifting for a few seconds before turning into a simple black door that sat in the middle of the sidewalk as if it had always been there.

Adam turned to her. “Superpowers.”[13]

“Adam, stay close to me,” Aziraphale said tersely. Bringing Adam along in the first place hasn’t been the brightest idea Aziraphale ever had, but the angel wasn’t willing to waste time arguing. He wasn’t going to let Crowley stay in Hell a single second longer than he had to. How he was going to find him, or get the rest of them all out was another matter altogether, but he’d cross those bridges when he got to them and then burn them down behind him because there was no way that Gabriel wouldn’t retaliate. They could die. People could die.

Even worse, Aziraphale didn’t care. The Earth was his home and he loved it dearly, but he loved Crowley more. It was selfish and he felt awful about it, but Aziraphale would let it all burn to keep Crowley safe.

“Oh, come on,” Maze said when Aziraphale hesitated before crossing the threshold. “Let’s go, you two.” She strode through the door, leaving them no choice but to follow.

It was the smell that hit him first. Aziraphale wasn’t sure how he’d managed to forget the smell, but it hit him like a physical force.[14] It wasn’t just sulfur—that was predictable and passé—but the moldy dampness was what crawled up inside his nose and stuck there. Hell was underground it felt that way; Aziraphale was keenly aware of the pressure crushing him. He couldn’t be further from the sky and Aziraphale ached to think of Crowley stuck here again.

They would take a vacation to Alpha Centurai, Aziraphale decided then and there. A nice long vacation.

“Home sweet home,” Maze said. Aziraphale’s eyes cut to her but the demon’s smile was forced. Part of him had expected Maze to truly be happy to be back, but her eyes were hard as she surveyed the wretched, twisted city in front of them.

"Shit,” Adam breathed. Aziraphale couldn’t help but agree. He’d only been in Hell a few hours last time and it had nearly killed him.[15]

“Come on,” Maze said. Her daggers were in her hands and for the first time Aziraphale was grateful for them. “I know the way.”

“You do?”

Maze rolled her eyes. “I’m Mazikeen,” she said by way of explanation. “And unless you’ve got a map of Hell tucked into the pocket of your waistcoat, I’ll take the lead from here.”

Aziraphale tightened his grip on his sword and nodded.

The trek through the Dark City was long and treacherous. Mazikeen led them down alleys so narrow that they could only fit one at a time and over rivers of magma so hot that they would’ve been scorched if not for Adam’s intervention. Aziraphale didn’t dare perform any miracles down here for fear of drawing demonic attention, but Adam’s powers seemed to go unnoticed.

“Don’t move,” Maze snarled after the Almighty only knew how long they’d been walking through the city. She pushed Aziraphale and Adam hard against the wall before stalking out into the open.

“Mazikeen?” asked a growly voice that sounded like boulders grinding together. “Where’ve you been?”

“Heya, Mammon,” Maze said. Aziraphale froze, feeling as if a bucket of ice water had been tipped over his head. Mammon was a Prince of Hell, one of Lucifer’s lieutenants, or he had been when Lucifer had sat on the throne.

She was going to give them up, Aziraphale though with a stab of chilling certainty. The angel who’d stopped Armageddon and the Antichrist would be excellent prizes to bring home. Sweet Almighty, how could Aziraphale have been so stupid as to trust her? He’d known better—of course he had, how could he not have known that she would betray them—and Aziraphale knew that he couldn’t win a fight against Mazikeen on her own, let alone if she combined her strength with Mammon.

“What’ve you been up to?” Mammon asked as if they were old friends, which they may as well have been. Aziraphale’s heart sank even further. “Heard you were causing chaos Upstairs with the boss. How’s that—” A pause and a deep inhale, as if the Dark Prince had caught a scent.

His scent. Beside him, Adam conjured a metal baseball bat and held it ready. His young[16] face was tight with concentration and fear.

“Do you smell that?” Mammon asked. “I smell—” His words were cut short by a grunt of pain.

“Run!” Mazikeen shouted, and Aziraphale had a split second of regret at how completely he’d doubted her before she reappeared and yanked them out into the open. “Fucking run, you morons! Find Crowley!”

Aziraphale didn’t need to be told a third time. He took Adam’s hand and launched into the sulphur-choked air. Mammon bellowed, massive and terrible, and Aziraphale saw a flash of sharp teeth as Mazikeen faced off against the Prince.

They were fucked. Aziraphale was out in the open, an angel in Hell, flying for every inhabitant to see and carrying the boy who should’ve been their prince in his arms. He had no plan, no way out, and no idea how to find Crowley.

“Uncle Zira!” Adam shouted to be heard over the blistering wind that roared in their ears. “Uncle Zira…I think I know how to find Uncle Ant!”

Adam didn’t quite know how he knew, but something inside of him, the part that would always be inextricably linked to Hell no matter how much he willed it otherwise, realized, suddenly and all at once, that this horrific plane of existence would listen to him.[17]

Before the thought had fully formed in his head, another rift opened up and this time Aziraphale didn’t hesitate before flying straight into it.

And then he was no longer airborne, but even deeper underground. Aziraphale’s wing clipped an unyielding stone wall, hard, and he crumpled, curling his arms and wings around Adam to absorb more of the impact as they tumbled to the damp ground.

“Are you alright?” Aziraphale asked breathlessly once they rolled to a skidding stop, his hands checking Adam for damage.

"Yeah, I think so,” Adam said. He winced as Aziraphale’s fingertips grazed his side. “Don’t,” Adam warned, sensing Aziraphale gathering his strength to heal him with a miracle. “I know this place is hurting you. I’ll be okay, I promise.” Adam got to his feet unsteadily, blanching.

“Just let me—”

“No,” Adam insisted. “We both need to save power to get home.”

When had he gotten so wise? When had he learned how to sacrifice for his family? Aziraphale’s chest twinged at the thought of Adam purposefully letting himself hurt in order to conserve his strength for the return trip. He shouldn’t have to think about these things, he shouldn’t have this kind of responsibility. I’m sorry, Aziraphale wanted to say. I’m so sorry you got involved in any of this. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.

“Go find Uncle Ant,” Adam prompted. “I’ll stay out here. Be the lookout.” He gave a brave smile and the aching feeling in Aziraphale’s chest only increased. He pressed a kiss to Adam’s forehead[18] and turned on his heel before he could lose his nerve. Adam had gotten them this far, Aziraphale could do the rest. Crowley was close, he could feel it. Aziraphale didn’t think, he just followed the pull that guided him through the winding labyrinth of damp hallways until they led to a black door that looked as if it had been wrought from iron.

Crowley was in there. He was in there and Aziraphale was going to get him out.

Please, Aziraphale prayed, for all the good it would do down here. Please, let him be alive in there.

 His sword ignited in his hand and it took a few hard swings, but the door eventually gave, crashing hard against the stone floor.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale called in a low whisper. The room swallowed his voice without so much of an echo. “Darling, where are you?”

“Aziraphale?” It took a second for Aziraphale’s eyes to adjust, but when they did, anger lit in his chest like a torch, burning away his despair and leaving nothing but white-hot righteous fury behind. Crowley was crouched in the corner of this small, cramped space, his long legs pulled close to his chest to present the smallest target possible. One of his wings curled over his middle, hiding him from sight, while the other splayed out by his side, bent at an angle that made Aziraphale’s own wings twitch. It was broken. They’d broken his wing.

Bastards, the lot of them.

Aziraphale wasn’t built for hate. He was a being of divine love and forgiveness, but in that moment he hated Gabriel and Hell and every single entity that had taken Crowley from him and hurt him so deeply. He hated all of them and he wanted to be there when they finally met their gruesome end. He wanted to do it himself.

"Aziraphale,” Crowley said again, his voice shifting to something halfway hopeful before horror flashed across his face. “Aziraphale!”

The warning didn’t come soon enough. Aziraphale barely had time to turn before his flaming sword was ripped from his grasp. He registered Gabriel’s face, the same smug smile he’d worn for millennia, and then bright, searing pain as his sword, the blade gifted to him by God to guard the Eastern Gate, pierced through the place where his heart should be. Agony like he’d never felt roared through him as his form was consumed by the holy flames, and somewhere outside of the maelstrom of pain his body had become, someone screamed.

Then there was nothing.

[1] Aziraphale wouldn’t have found anything positive to say about the way their previous home offices were purposefully impervious to change. The Earth changed a thousand different ways every single day; it was why Aziraphale loved it so much. The stubborn refusal to move on, to change and grow, was not something even Aziraphale could make into a positive.

[2] Earth, the stars, the hope of ever seeing his sister again. Adam. Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale.

[3] Yes, he had. Of course he had. His Fall should have stripped his ability to love, but it had remained despite everything. It had flourished on Earth, with his angel.

[4] It was the same reason Lucifer had rebelled in the first place, the reason he’d Fallen. The reason they’d all Fallen.

[5] It was an emotion that he was more familiar with than he’d ever admit. How else could he cause such fear in others, without being intimately acquainted with it himself?

[6] He’d never say so, but Aziraphale and Crowley had it right the whole time. Fuck Hell and fuck Heaven. He’d let them both burn for Earth.

[7] Crowley hated that expression. He’d helped to inspire disco and was rather proud of that whole decade. He looked spectacular in bell-bottoms, though Aziraphale insisted to this day that the mustache was an affront to his eyes.

[8] Christ alive, no wonder his opening words to humanity had “be not afeared.” Gabriel loved to intimidate and it had taken him centuries to understand that humans didn’t take well to seeing a celestial’s true form.

[9] Aziraphale had always been odd, even before he was Odd.

[10] Not technically true, but Aziraphale wasn’t going to correct him. Now was not the time to be a pedant.

[11] Or a former angel, depending on who you asked.

[12] Which was significantly easier said than done. Soft spots in the world where they would be able to slip into Hell were few and far between, despite Aziraphale’s feigned confidence to the contrary.

[13] It was more complicated than that. Emancipation or not, Hell was his birthright and, though he didn’t know it yet, would obey him.

[14] It had taken weeks to get the stench out of his feathers after Crowley’s trial. Weeks and tireless preening from an irate Crowley.

[15] His wings weren’t the only things that needed to recover from his last sojourn in Hell. Aziraphale wasn’t exactly sure of the state of his grace these days, but he could feel it diminishing with every second spent in this place.

[16] God, he was so young, too young for the life he’d led.

[17] Not the way the Universe listened to him, because he and the Universe had an understanding. They were friends, in an abstract sort of way that. Hell obeyed Adam without thinking, without any sort of positive exchange, because everything here was done by brute force.

[18] In the same place where Crowley’s thumb had pressed against just hours before.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale knew that he was dead. He knew it like he knew the sky was blue and that he loved Crowley more than anything in this life, and that he was heartbroken to leave his family this way.

There was no afterlife for celestials. They were humanity’s afterlife, but if they died, they died. Killing their body just led to discorporation. It was a beastly amount of paperwork but usually a new body could be created or salvaged, and they would just pop back down to Earth as if nothing had happened. This, though. Being run through by a divine weapon…well. There was no coming back from that. Aziraphale knew it. He knew that there was nothing left for him; the holy flames would’ve burned him up and that would be that. 

Which was why it was so very surprising that Aziraphale found himself…somewhere. It wasn’t Earth, certainly, but it wasn’t Heaven or Hell either. In-Between, perhaps. But that didn’t make sense at all, how could he be anywhere In-Between when he was so clearly dead?

“Aziraphale,” said a voice from behind him and Aziraphale didn’t have a body in this space, but his consciousness, whatever part of him was still alive and kicking, managed to whirl around. Azrael, the Angel of Death, floated before him and Aziraphale gasped as the rest of the plane took shape. Bright balls of flaming gas burned around him, a billion stars that had been so lovingly created and placed in the sky by his Crowley. He could see them all at once, his vision somehow modified so that he could view the whole of Crowley’s creation at the same time. Crowley and Azrael’s creations.

The Angel of Death smiled, her teeth strikingly white[1] against a body that looked as though it had been carved from obsidian. “I think it’s time that you and I had a talk.”

It was like a bomb had gone off. One moment Aziraphale was there and the next he just…wasn’t. He hadn’t screamed, hadn’t cried out, only let out the tiniest “oh,” as Gabriel drove the sword through his chest. 

And then he was gone, and the force of killing an angel knocked Crowley’s head into the wall. Dark spots danced in his vision, but Crowley was already moving, forcing himself to his feet even though the pain of his broken wing threatened to knock him back down again. 

“Well,” Gabriel said, eying the flaming sword and the empty space where Aziraphale used to be. “That’s one problem solved.” His gaze found Crowley, still struggling to stand up and he rolled his violet eyes. “You know that you’re not worth all this trouble, don’t you? Even in Heaven…I mean, why go to the effort? Roping in Lucifer and Amenadiel was a nice touch, but you know those two. All the subtlety of a runaway train. It was easy enough to see through their little distraction. Almost worked, but you know what humans say about close.”

Horseshoes and hand grenades. Yes, Crowley knew that odd expression. Adam had taught it to them a long time ago and it had never made a lick of sense to Crowley. But right now, in this instant, Gabriel’s insufferable gloating was enough to give him an idea. 

A truly, truly terrible idea but Crowley was hurt, heartbroken, and furious. Aziraphale was gone and he had officially run out of fucks to give. Gabriel wanted to call him by a dead name, insist that he was the archangel Raphael, the one who created the stars, fine. Crowley would give him Raphael. Gabriel wanted stars? He’d give him one of those, too. Right here, right now, in Hell. 

Creating the stars was the work of an archangel, the most powerful of the Host, and even then, it had taken centuries to get each one quite right. Crowley wasn’t an archangel anymore and he sure as shit didn’t have centuries, but what he did have was a harebrained idea, a vengeful streak a mile wide, and a heart full of love. He hated Gabriel for what he’d done, for everything, but he loved Aziraphale more. He loved him enough to try to create a star in the belly of Hell and blow the Pit and every single stinking demon inside to kingdom come.

The Universe shouldn’t have allowed this. She knew better, she really did, but she also knew that a great injustice had been done and continued to be done. She’d had to watch as Gabriel kidnapped and tormented her favorite son, as he threw an archangel-turned-demon—who’d inexplicably, impossibly, found love in the arms of an angel—into Hell. She’d had to watch Gabriel kill Aziraphale, a principality who’d only ever wanted to do good, whose heart was greater than all the other angels combined, and who was silly and gluttonous and selfish sometimes but who was, ultimately, everything an angel should be.[2]

Creating a star should have been well outside of Crowley’s capabilities, but he prayed for the change to avenge Aziraphale, he prayed to the Almighty and the Universe and whoever else might be listening for this one, last thing. Just this one. He knew that it was impossible and he knew that whatever happened here, he wasn’t likely to survive it, but he asked anyway. For Aziraphale. For himself. For all the collateral damage in a war that no one wanted except for those who were never in danger of dying because of it. He asked for the chance to do something completely, ridiculously impossible. He asked. 

And the Universe listened and she answered. She said, Yes. 

Crowley screamed as his broken wing realigned itself with a terrible popping sound that nearly sent him to his knees. He’d barely recovered from the violent bout of healing when four new points of pain exploded from either side of his spine, two on the left and two on the right. 

"What’s going—” Gabriel started to ask but suddenly the room was too small because all at once, Crowley had not just two inky black wings, but six. They burst through his skin, each feather pure black without a hope of reflecting even the tiniest bit of light. 

“You took everything from me,” Crowley snarled in a voice that shook and echoed with the vengeance of a thousand fallen souls, that contained the majesty of the stars, and the depth of grief of a demon who mourned for his angel. “I’m taking it back.”

Gabriel’s eyes darted to Crowley’s outstretched hands, where flames began to ripple and form. The air around them began to shimmer with the heat of the power he channeled. A star was being born in the unlikeliest of places: Hell.

“Uncle Ant?” Crowley almost didn’t hear Adam’s voice, but his godson’s dirt-smeared face was unmistakable as he rounded the corner, as was the fear that shone in his eyes.

Some of Crowley’s righteous fury drained away. “Aziraphale’s gone, Adam,” he said, his voice quiet, almost numb. Crowley couldn’t stop what was happening. He wasn’t in control of the power anymore; he was just the conduit. “You need to go home now.”

“But what—what happened? What do you mean Uncle Zira’s gone? And what the fuck are you doing?”

“I love you, Adam,” Crowley said, making a point to look his godson in the eye. He’d wasted millennia before telling Aziraphale he loved him, and he wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He wasn’t going to leave without saying— “Goodbye.”

It was a small favor, a tiny thing, to ask the Universe to take Adam home. The thought had barely formed in Crowley’s mind when Adam was whisked away, out of Hell, before he could so much as shout in protest.[3]

I love you Aziraphale, Crowley thought, and he poured all of his love—six thousand years of pining and devotion—into the star gathering in his palms. I don’t regret any of it. 

Then, ignition. 

“You’re—you’re—” Aziraphale stammered, still a little taken aback to be anywhere at all, let alone somewhere in the stars, talking to Crowley’s twin.

“Azrael,” Azrael said helpfully. She looked like him, Aziraphale realized. Like Crowley. Not physically, of course. Azrael would never pass for human like Crowley did, but their essence was strikingly similar. It made him ache.       

“Where am I?” Aziraphale asked because he was having quite a hard time getting his thoughts in order and that seemed to be most pressing. “Shouldn’t I be…”

“Dead?” Azrael filled in again. Crowley did that for him too, when he rambled.[4] “You are. Very much so, in fact. Death by flaming sword, now that’s one I haven’t seen in a good long while. Dramatic death, that.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, careful not to show the great swell of disappointment he felt in the place where his stomach might have been. He’d thought…well, he’d thought that perhaps since he was still conscious that he was at least a little bit still alive. Silly of him.           

“Well,” Azrael continued. “Dead-adjacent. I’m the Angel of Death, as I’m sure you are very much aware, and I wanted to have a chat with you. I’ve been watching you for a very long time and we’ve never come face-to-face, so I may have pulled a few strings.” Her smile grew even more blinding. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Why me?” Aziraphale asked. “Why…I mean, I’m terribly grateful, you understand, of course I am, who wouldn’t be grateful but—”

“Because my brother loves you,” Azrael said, cutting him off at the pass. “And I love my brother. He and I are…estranged because of the Fall, but he’s still a part of me and I think that an exception can be made for you.”

“I’m nothing special,” Aziraphale demurred instinctively. 

“You’re the angel who held Crowley’s hand and helped him Ascend,” Azrael disagreed. “That’s not nothing.”

Aziraphale might have blinked at her in shock, if he had eyes to blink with in this place. Ascended? Crowley had Ascended? But that was impossible. 

“Besides,” Azrael continued on as if she hadn’t just turned Aziraphale’s entire world on its head and spun it like a top. “Heaven and Hell aren’t playing by the rules anymore and I rather like the rules. Keeps me in business.” She winked. “So, tell me, Aziraphale of the Eastern Gate. What’s down there worth living for?”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said without hesitation. It was the easiest thing she could’ve asked him. “Adam and his friends. This human woman named Chloe and her lovely daughter.” Perhaps even Lucifer and Mazikeen, though Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure how Azrael would react if he added them to his little list. She smiled like she knew what he was thinking anyway, so he pressed on.

“I’m not going to beg you for my life, Azrael,” he said, suddenly bold. The Angel of Death’s smile grew and if she’d had sharp teeth and a forked tongue, the smile would’ve been identical to Crowley’s. “I don’t…I don’t want to be dead[5] but this isn’t about me. Gabriel took Crowley and I don’t know why. Whatever happens to me, I just want to know that he’ll be safe and free. And if you can—I don’t know—pause death to have this little chat with me than surely you can do something for your own brother.”

He wasn’t sure when in the little speech he’d started getting worked up, but Aziraphale was nearly yelling by the time he finished. He felt a little bad about it and a little like he was about to be blown to smithereens[6] but Azrael just cocked her head, surveying him with a keen gaze that Aziraphale knew without a doubt missed nothing. The smile was gone, replaced by something else much more considering.

“I see why he loves you,” she said at last. In the inky expanse of darkness, her six wings beat out of time. “You’re special, Aziraphale.”

“I’m not.” He shouldn’t contradict her. He really shouldn’t contradict the entity that was keeping him from oblivion, but this felt important. More important, somehow, than his own life. “I’m just an angel. I’m just someone who didn’t want to fight anymore and doesn’t want to see the people and the places he loves get eaten up by some stupid war that we never asked to fight in. That’s not special.”

Azrael hummed, the smile returning. “I disagree. And so does my brother.” A pause. “Why don’t we see what he’s up to? See how ordinary you are, Guardian of the Eastern Gate.”

She waved her hand and a shimmering barrier opened up in front of them, almost like a window that looked out of whatever plane they were in. That looked into Hell. Aziraphale recognized the room where he’d died. Gabriel was still where he’d been, still holding Aziraphale’s sword, but everything else was different.

Crowley was different. He was standing upright, face to face with Gabriel, with his arms outstretched between them. Fire bloomed in his palms, so bright that it hurt Aziraphale’s eyes to look at it.

“Sweet Almighty,” Aziraphale murmured, finally dragging his eyes from the fire to see that Crowley’s wings had multiplied. Six wings, blacker than pitch, had burst from his back, each flared wide, terrible and beautiful.

“He’s so dramatic,” Azrael laughed. “Always has been, ever since we were first created. He’s trying to make a star. Right there, in Hell. That’s what you inspired, Aziraphale. Just a principality, my feathery ass. He’s doing this for you and for your family, for everything you’ve built on Earth.” She leaned in conspiratorially, and Aziraphale could feel the power radiating off of her in waves. “Want to know a secret? He’ll be able to do it, too. He’ll make a star, just for you. All our centuries building nebulas and galaxies together, and this will be the most beautiful thing he ever creates.” Another pause, another considering look. “Of course, it’ll kill him in the process—”

“No!” Aziraphale shouted, too loud, too suddenly, but he couldn’t bear it. Crowley’s face was pained, he was hurting, and Aziraphale didn’t want him to die, not like this, not for him. “No, you can’t let him. Please! Please, you have to do something.”

“Anything for my brother-in-law.”

And then he was back. Back in Hell, back in the room with Crowley, though there was significantly less room now that there were four extra wings and a newborn star to contend with. Time stood still, but somehow Azrael tailored the miracle to allow the Aziraphale and Crowley to still move freely. 

“I think—” Azrael said, putting her hand over Crowley’s. As soon as she came close to the star it began to spit gasses in brilliant, flaming colors. What Crowley was trying to create, she was destroying. Together, they would make a miniature supernova— “it’s time for you to go home, brother.”

Crowley barely had time to register Azrael’s appearance when he saw Aziraphale and his mind went blank.[7]The star hissed and spit as Azrael moved to quench it, and then they were home.

Not Heaven. Not the stars either, which was what Crowley would have assumed Azrael meant if he’d had time to think of anything. Instead Azrael transported them to the bookshop.

Crowley didn’t waste any time. The star was gone, no doubt chucked skyward where it could explode safely, so there was nothing impeding him from throwing his arms around Aziraphale’s neck and hugging him so tight that had they been human it would’ve crushed the air out of their lungs.

“You’re alive,” Crowley said over and over again like a prayer, like the instant he stopped or let go, Aziraphale would disappear. “You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive.” He pulled away, still gripping Aziraphale by the shoulders. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I refuse to let you go,” Aziraphale said serenely, as if he hadn’t literally just been brought back from the dead. “I was thinking that I wanted to bring you home.”

“You died,” Crowley said. Tears gathered on his lower lashes and Aziraphale wiped them away with his thumb.

“Worth it.”

Crowley made a strangled noise somewhere between a laugh and a cry.

“It didn’t take, don’t worry,” Azrael said. Crowley and Aziraphale both turned towards her, still tangled up in each other’s arms. If he was honest, Crowley had pretty much forgotten that she was there at all, too elated to see his angel.

“What did you do, Az?” Crowley growled. Not the kindest greeting for his sister who’d saved the love of his life, but Crowley was more than a little traumatized and he had too many wings all of a sudden, so she’d have to forgive his rudeness.[8]

“Thanks for saving my husband, Azrael,’” Azrael said in a gently mocking tone that made Aziraphale think of how Adam spoke to his friends. “’‘Thanks for not letting me blow myself up, Azrael.’ ‘Oh, hey, Azrael, your skin is looking extra luminous, have you been moisturizing with starlight?’”

Crowley’s mouth opened and closed for a moment before he launched himself at his sister, wrapping eight of his ten limbs tight around her. “Thank you for saving both of our dumb arses,” he mumbled against her neck. “Thank you so much.”

Azrael stroked her long fingers through his hair. “I love you, Crowley.” He glowed at her use of his name. Crowley, not Raphael. Crowley. “Feels a bit weird to say it aloud. Very human.”

“Love you too, sis,” Crowley said, still a little misty.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, laying a hand on Crowley’s shoulder. “I don’t think I’ve said that yet.”

Crowley extricated himself from his sister’s arms, returning to Aziraphale’s side. He still couldn’t believe it. He’d seen Aziraphale die and yet here he stood. Their fingers tangled together along with their wings, feathers interlocking in a flurry of black and off-white.

“You’re welcome,” Azrael said and for the first time, Crowley appreciated his sister in an Earthly body. Her celestial form would’ve made her look like some kind of ancient statue they’d stolen from a museum or a dig site,[9] but her human form was rather lovely. She was still Black, though her skin had lightened to a human shade, and her hair twisted out of her face in a crown of tiny, intricate braids. Her cheekbones were high and proud, and gold-brown eyes surveyed the bookshop, glittering. “But you know, I can’t take all the credit.” She paused, her whole body humming with excitement. “I was talking to Mom and I think it’s going to stick.”

“What is?” Crowley asked, squinting at her. He tried to speak before Aziraphale could—

“Mom?” Aziraphale demanded, prickling up. He was nothing if not consistent. “Sweet Almighty, you’re just as bad as Lucifer. Are all archangels so binary, my goodness.”

Azrael blinked at him, looking more amused than anything else. “Okaaaaaaay, fine. I was talking to the Almighty,” she said, with exaggerated emphasis, “and They said that…you’re back.”

“I’m what?” Crowley repeated, dumbstruck. 

“Ascended,” Azrael said. “The wings, the stars, the power, they’re all yours when you come back to Heaven.”

Aziraphale didn’t say a word, but his hands tightened around Crowley’s and his lips pressed together in a thin, pained line. This was a good thing, he tried to tell himself. Crowley could go back, he could spend the rest of his days in the stars. The Almighty had signed off on it. That would be enough that even Gabriel wouldn’t be able interfere.

For his part, Crowley went perfectly still as he was leveled by the gravity of what his sister was offering. He could go back to the sky. He could make things again, he could create. He could have it all back.

And he would lose everything that mattered. Aziraphale wasn’t an archangel. He couldn’t follow Crowley where he would go and neither of them knew if the pardon would extend to a principality. The Almighty was offering him everything and absolutely fucking nothing.

“No,” Crowley spat, suddenly furious. “Take it all. The wings, the divinity, all of it. I don’t want it.”

“Dear, think about this,” Aziraphale said softly, even though ever word felt like he was being stabbed all over again. “You’d be safe up there. Don’t you want to go home?”

Crowley’s tongue slipped past his teeth as he hissed. “I am home.” His furious yellow gaze cut to his sister. “The answer is no."

He expected anger, or retribution, or even disappointment, but instead, Azrael smiled so wide that it must have hurt her face to do so. Crowley could've sworn that tears gathered in her eyes but he didn't have a chance to take a closer look before a light—warmer and more brilliant than the sun—flooded into the bookshop. 

Aziraphale gasped and Crowley swallowed hard. They both knew that light, they both remembered it from millenia ago. How could they not have recognized the light of God?

The Almighty didn't speak to either of them. There was no burning bush, no lovely voice of Frances McDormand, just the light and the warmth that didn't last nearly long enough before it was gone. It was gone but the feeling of warmth remained. It stayed with him, changing them somehow.

"Was that...?"

"You know," Azrael said. Her voice was thick but her smile didn't fade a single degree. "I thought you might say something like that." She looked between the two of them, unbearably proud. "I think I'm going to let you two figure this one out on your own."

And then she vanished, in a flash of six wings flapping at once. Her voice echoed behind her even once she was gone. "Don't be a stranger, Crowley," she said. "I'm sure I’ll see you both soon."

Neither of the celestials moved for a very, very long time. They didn't know what to do. They were changed, both of them, but neither knew how or to what degree. They just knew that they were still together and somehow, they knew that they would be safe from now on. That they all would be safe, everyone they cared about. Everyone they loved. It was a promise from God, protection so complete that they could feel it on their skin and in their hearts like they'd swallowed some of that warmth into themselves. 

God wasn't angry with them.[10] They had passed judgement, given the celestials a choice—a test—and Crowley had chosen love. That's all God had ever wanted for Their children, human and celestial alike. To make their choices not out of fear, or hatred, or because they were mindlessly following orders, but out of love. They couldn't ask for anything other than that. 

And as for the changes to Aziraphale and Crowley, well. They'd always been a little Odd, but now it was official. They weren't an angel and a demon any longer. They weren't even an archangel and a principality. They were just Aziraphale and Crowley. They were in love, they were together, and that was enough. 

As they finally collected themselves, still hand in hand after hours of stillness, and resolved to find their companions and tell them everything that had happened,[11] they knew that it would always be enough.

[1] And just a little bit…pointed.

[2] She loved them, this family that had found each other, against all odds. See, the Universe operated by a very strict set of rules and those who broke them were often the victims of her ire, but she’d made an exception with these ones, and she’d never, not once, regretted it.

[3] Adam was her favorite, after all, and he hadn’t asked to die in Hell alongside his Uncles.

[4] Which was often. Aziraphale was many things but succinct was not one of them. He had a tendency to talk long and fast when he was excited about something and sometimes he’d trail off, lost in his own thoughts, and Crowley would always help him pick up the conversation again. He always listened, no matter what Aziraphale was nattering on about.

[5] He rather wanted to live, thankyouverymuch.

[6] Though, what could she really do to him other than allow his death to stick?

[7] Not quite blank, but it shorted out, unable to maintain a line of thought that was not, Aziraphale! Aziraphale! Aziraphale! Of course, that was usually what ran in his head on various loops, but rarely with this kind of joy of desperation.

[8] He’d forgotten how cumbersome it was to navigate the world with six wings flapping about.

[9] Which, as both of them had adopted British personas, would have been rather appropriate.

[10] Aziraphale might've wept with relief. He'd always hoped that They were proud and now he knew for certain. God approved of what he'd done. God was proud.

[11] And maybe sleep for a very, very long time.