Chapter Text
Demons don’t need to breathe, not necessarily. Breathing is, in fact, rather impractical to those who’ve taken the sulphuric nosedive. In the bowels of Hell, breath can carry in the stench of putrescent flesh and its more archetypal metallic, bloody undertones. It’s the kind of odor that stimulates the senses, bringing the keen taste of anguish to the tongue and allowing it to ferment there.
Now, normally, this would be no issue to demonic entities; they pride themselves on torture and luxuriate in the rather palpable despair of others. Too much of a good thing, though, can bring on a truly terrible migraine, like an automatic air freshener that’s malfunctioned and spewed out its pumpkin spice-y contents all at once. Or perhaps a “rebellious” adolescent who’s layered on cologne a bit too thickly to mask the tell-tale scent of marijuana [1]. So most demons have opted out of breathing and live their trivial and inefficacious existences without sparing it a second thought.
Crowley, though, recognises that he does not need to breathe, and decides to do so anyway. He indulges himself in the pleasures of Earth-bound life, however frivolous they may be. The demon has a few joys. His car is chief among them; he cherishes the Bentley and has kept it in perfect condition since he drove it home from the factory in 1926. Though he’d be hard pressed to admit it, especially to the plants themselves, gardening is one of his favourite hobbies. He likes good booze, and drinking it, particularly with his closest friend. Those were a few of his favourite things.
How Julie Andrews of him. Aziraphale fervently loathed The Sound of Music [2]. The sudden thought of him was suffocating.
And, since he’s also come to rather enjoy breathing (an obscenely human vice, he’s aware), Crowley finds it especially perturbing when something prevents him from doing so. Although Crowley could breathe, and very much wanted to, he couldn’t. Not now.
His chest felt crushed by an invisible force when he became upset. Truly, a terrible human ailment; he is the product of his environment. What's worse is that with breathing left, so did other senses. Sight, for one.
The demon would never admit it, nor let another soul see it if he could help it, but his eyes were blurred with tears. They distorted the world around him and the Bentley into a nauseating kaleidoscope of colour. His fingers flex and curl around the wheel rhythmically, not that he can feel it. This tic, which usually soothes him, proved useless in the face of the profound numbness overtaking his body. Blood burned beneath his skin with a white-hot frigidity that turned everything tangible into cotton. His arms were, in theory, part of his body. A being such as Crowley need not worry about his physical form, being able to change it at will and such; however, there is something truly disconcerting about being able to clearly see your arms functioning as they should, yet feeling only a glacial nothingness in their place. The entire experience was reminiscent of Eden: he was an insignificant, vile, and limbless creature again, positively seething with misplaced resentment. It seemed that, even now, he refused to show his under-belly.
He shoves his Valentino shades further up; they begin to bite into the bridge of his nose, ensuring that his wet eyes remained hidden. A taste of pain in hopes of grounding his senses, but it proved futile. He only succeeds in making deeper, more tender grooves in his skin.
Crowley never feels completely worthy, so he continues to hide behind his sunglasses.
He taunts himself, fantasizing that tears alone could obscure his eyes, and with it, the truth of who he is. It was almost laughable. As if pain could wipe away 6000 years of existence and suddenly make him enough .
All in all, this combination didn’t make for the safest driving, but he was emotionally compromised, and it’s hard to think rationally when you are in the throes of any variety of passion. Impulsivity was another uniquely human trait that he had acquired, a byproduct of free will. But Crowley had discovered that demons, too, could be impulsive.
He raced down the M25 at 90 miles an hour in reckless mania. You Take My Breath Away by Queen blares through the Blaupunkt.
I lose control and shiver deep inside
You take my breath away
You can reduce me to tears
With a single sigh
(Please don't cry anymore)
Crowley flattened his lips, returning to his practiced façade of cold indifference. He would be able to break down and feel when hell froze over. He wanted to curse the Bentley for being more empathetic than him; it seemed that even his car surpassed his emotional intelligence. Come to think of it, his deficiency in the “emotional department” was the primary source of his current...distress. He had fallen from heaven long ago, but only now fallen from his angel’s good graces. There are two things on this Go—Satan forsaken Earth that he can never bring himself to curse: his car and Aziraphale.
In a fashion far more nuanced and progressive than anything Hastur could devise, the personal hell of Crowley’s mind created his own torture. Against his own will, it conjured images and memories of pure anguish.
He recalled the last time Aziraphale had pushed him away.
I don’t even like you.
His eyes, which had always looked upon his angel with softness, had turned empty and glassy with those words, but Aziraphale hadn’t seen how his words affected him then. His glasses were an Earthly protection (and a style choice), but also a curtain of privacy in those painful moments.
Then, it was dangerous. Then, it was “fraternizing with the enemy”, with the danger of eternal destruction. While the respective agendas of heaven and hell were still involved, their association was star-crossed.
Now, they were free to be and do as they wanted, but Aziraphale still hesitated, and it stung.
Better not.
Now, there’s nothing in the way but Crowley himself, and he’s intuitive enough to take the bloody hint. Despite all of his best efforts to be benevolent, he is tainted where Aziraphale is clean. He is fallen while Aziraphale remains holy. He is a demon, and Aziraphale is an angel. From the way Aziraphale smiles at him, he has no doubt that the angel wants to be closer. But as for whether Aziraphale can ever dissolve the fallacious conceptions of his diametric opposite ingrained into him since creation, he is unsure. He is scorched and scarred and brittle in so many places from being bathed in hellfire: it only took one true rejection for him to crumble.
He knows Aziraphale doesn’t mean to hurt; though he has some bastard in him, he is not cruel.
But sometimes, intent matters little.
You go too fast for me, Crowley echoed in his mind as he continued to accelerate.
His vision became even more bleary. The road and the other cars became little more than moving, liquid shapes. Crowley couldn't read the numbers, but he saw the faint outline of the white arrow moving steadily up and up and up the speedometer, faster and faster. The car groans an ugly, sputtering sound: the beloved Bentley attempted to save him.
“You are my car,” he croaks bitterly, through gritted teeth.
This tires scream and burn in protest.
“I would never hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Betraying his inner maelstrom, Crowley’s voice cracks and sputters in tandem with the car.
The Blaupunkt skips furiously through Best of Queen , and the demon catches snippets of Freddie Mercury through the ringing in his ears.
Too much love will kill you—
Love kills, drills you through your heart—
Scars you from the start—
Death on two legs, you’re tearing me apart—
Do you feel like suicide (I think you should)
Crowley breathed in shakily.
Is your conscience alright—
Love of my life, you’ve hurt me—
Are you ready? Are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?—
You can reduce me to tears
With a single sigh
I could give up all my life for just one kiss—
Crowley sighed, partially out of resignation, and partially out of a feeling he would never admit: deep, deep heartbreak.
With its master careening off the motorway, the Bentley attempted to right itself by jerking the wheel, sending them both rolling helplessly. Crowley finds the experience comparable to his descent; the line between memories of extraordinary pain and the present blurred until he could no longer differentiate between them.
The Bentley tumbling over the flimsy divider, turning over itself in a warped mass of black and chrome, evokes memories of the demon’s fall: saudade for the blissful ignorance of a heavenly existence. Just as from God, he was tailspinning at the mercy of someone he loved deeply, but ultimately failed. The sensation of hot iron burning through the roots of his feathers, one by one, now manifested as literal molten metal. It was slicing into his back, compressing him, crushing him—cauterizing the bloody wounds it opened. Blisters form and pop across his back, like bubbles in the boiling sulfur pools of Hell, leaving it raw.
Everything but a single thought slips away. A memory from deep in the abcesses of his mind flows forward like pus from an infection: love. Divine and unadulterated, of a strength palpable in the ambient air. It’s familiar to him, in the way your memories feel characteristic of you and your story: the nuances and intricacies of it are innately known.
Aziraphale’s love, for instance, was the scent of warm cocoa, even on a hot summer day in city smog where it has no business being made. The smooth severity of starched dress shirts. The roughness of old, yellowing paper and the crisp headiness of it—the overpowering smell of barley and ink in antique books.
It sickened Crowley to ponder the thought. A bile circulated in his stomach, rancid and ghastly. But the shape of it felt familiar, the impression of a lost jewel. Once he held the stone and thumbed over its surface, it was recognizable. Love in the imagination and holy conception of an angel’s mind: his mind, before his fall from grace.
Maybe he and Aziraphale were close before the fall...
He pushes the thought away. It doesn’t matter.
Crowley’s infatuation with love, both agape and eros, had always brought him to this point. Whether it was hell fire or holy fire, he could never let go of burning passion.
His love of his Mother, his blind and juvenile faith in HER, had led him down this path. That and the company he kept [3]. It was SHE who taught him how to love, to feel compassion, to care unequivocally for HER creation, however effete and flawed it was. It was SHE who damned him, then and now, to his fate—which SHE had always known. It was SHE who damned him, but it was he who took the fall.
The demon never fully ceased believing in Her, but his faith was clouded by disillusionment.
Crowley occupied the liminal space of moral grey. He was a bad angel: too inquisitive, too empathetic. He was also a rubbish demon: too compassionate, too unorthodox. He was undeserving and incapable of love by design, but craved it regardless [4]. His efforts were always futile. Angel or Demon, it didn’t matter: when you stripped away his nature, his affiliations, the agendas forced upon him, he was simple: scared, wanting, and deprived.
And, most of all, he was a failure.
Simple tasks, literal world-ending tasks. He failed them. That is what he was at his core, and perhaps the burning Bentley around him was just another thing that he had failed. His last effort to save the car fails too, of course, but he manages the slightest of demonic miracles.
He’d tried so hard since his creation, and each time he was met with the same outcome. Some arrogant arse once said that was the definition of insanity. Crowley was not supposed to have free will, but he’d be damned if he didn’t attempt to exercise the right anyway. So perhaps he’ll break the cycle now, choose a new path. Perhaps the answer was, all along, to stop trying.
So he does.
1: For you Americans: imagine a fraternity member coated in AXE body spray, much to the same effect, except he also presumes that girls will find it attractive.
2: Crowley regarded this as a mortal failing.
3: Lucifer was a mama's boy once, just like him. They got on. That’s why he was sent to “go up there and make some trouble”.
4: It was his Mother’s gift to the world, after all.
A very distressed woman, seeming to be in her late forties and beginning to show the exhaustion of aging, paces next to her parked Jaguar. She holds on to her coat nervously, shaken by what she had witnessed.
Death is a private affair, but also a spectacle. Sensationalised so that even when it is gory and horrific, it is difficult to avert the eyes. Humans can never peel their eyes from rotting fruit.
Her hands fumble with her phone, tremor. With great care, she spells out 999.
“H-hello? Someone just got into a truly terrible crash. The car is all smashed. I-I don’t honestly think the young man driving could have survived, no. He— oh ”
Her soft whimper echoes across the line. Her gut swirls and clenches, and she feels that she will be immediately ill. A few seconds later, she sicks acid and water on to the concrete, her throat burning as her chest throbs from panic. Then, she composes herself: she must be strong.
“No, no I’m alright. Nothing’s—I’ve just ventured in a bit closer now and it’s all burnt to—”
She raises her shoulder to her ear, holding her mobile in place. Her hands clutch at one another nervously, until the pinprick pain of her manicured acrylics finally coaxes her back to reality.
“No, no he’s dead.”
“He’s not breathing, he can’t be. What does he look like? Male, a Black Bentley. All gone up in flames. No- no, I can’t give you any more descriptors! I can hardly find a face at all, much less give you a bloody description of it. I’m not sure he has a face anymore.”
After a few minutes, her voice raises in frustration.
“The bugger was doing twice the limit!”
The police these days , she huffed, walking around the car to investigate per the responder’s instruction.
“Oh lord the smell—”
She gags at the odor of burning flesh.
“He was right sick. Terminal, I think. His eyes’ve gone all yellow, far as I can see.”
Her voice turned gentler, as if she gleaned empathy from the air.
“He must’ve been in so much pain, the dear. Diseases like those, they’ll sap the hope right out of you—must’ve wanted to go on his own terms.
“Oh, the accident? I didn’t see all of it, but the poor thing was speeding like the devil, skidding through grass with not a care in the world ! I don’t think he was really with us at all anymore, then. I—”
She was pulled from her tunnel vision back into the wider world as her panic shattered into general nerves.
“Please hurry. I’ve locked my son in the car with his sissy, and I just—something in me just doesn’t feel right leaving this man alone in this state.”
Mothers—at least the good ones—never abandon their children, even when all proper sense would say it is better to. And this woman, instinctually, felt that the man needed a mother’s love [1].
“I can’t imagine—Thank you, yes, I’ll stay on the line.”
She looks at her children, knocking on the glass of the car and calling for mummy. She hushes them, blowing them kisses, before walking over to the wrecked Bentley (at least, the shattered remnants of one).
Her mum always told her ‘everything happens for a reason’, and when her mum had passed, she'd had to tell herself that. It happened for a reason. Death happened for a reason.
She leans down to speak to the man.
"You'll be alright, dear," she comforted: a boldfaced lie. "It all will make sense sometime, you just have to will it so. It all happens for a reason, all of it, no matter how rubbish it seems.”
She murmured, thinking of her own mother. Mum would hold her cheeks after she fell and scraped her knee as a girl, before kissing it all better. “You'll be alright, love.”
She’s unsure of just how long she stands there, numb to the heat of the asphalt pulsing through the soles of her shoes, her hand resting on the man’s bloodied arm [2]. Some amount of time later she’s made aware of the world again by a light pressure on her shoulder and soothing murmur in her ear.
“Miss? Did you know ’im?”
She shook her head faintly.
“I had a look at him. He was deceased upon impact. I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the vehicle.”
A policewoman, a younger woman with a kind face weathered beyond its years by experience, walks past the frazzled mum and over to the coroner. She and her colleagues are unsure as to how the radio survived the crash. Anything inside the car would have been crushed to bits and bobs. Margot has been an officer for 20 years: she’s seen anything and everything on the streets of London, but nothing quite like this. Though muffled by the man’s body, Queen resounds loudly through the tunnel, an almost eerie anthem juxtaposed against the sizzling of hot metal.
So please don't go
Don't leave me here all by myself
I get ever so lonely from time to time
I will find you
Anywhere you go, I'll be right behind you
Right until the ends of the Earth
I'll get no sleep till I find you to tell you
That you just take my breath away
That’s “Don’t Take My Breath Away” , she realises. It was our first dance at our wedding.
She doesn’t know how eyes so obviously sickly, covered with the recognizable film of death, could look so sad. Something about it transcends nausea, leaving her deeply unsettled.
But the thought of her love, her partner, brings an unwanted personal connection. When she looks back over at the faceless man it’s so easy to see her sweet girl’s features in his—or what’s left of them.
Even the ambiguous structure of his face lends itself to Carol’s high-set cheekbones. The ones she especially loves to trace her fingers over when she crinkles up her eyes just so, gleaming with joy—her wife is so beautiful—just before she kisses the smile right off her smug face.
She turns, nearly retching hot bile into her closed fist. That is not her wife; her wife’s face does not belong on this poor man.
But she can’t quite unsee it now. She makes a silent promise to find whoever loves him and tell them personally. Someone must love him, after all, if he’s playing a song like that. It just keeps repeating. Over and over, until the lyrics are lost amid the cacophony of sound: the crack of splintering metal as the door is cut away and the roof is split to remove the body, the chatter of first responders, the spluttering of resilient, nearly-extinguished flame.
The coroner approached, oblivious to her musings.
“Oddly enough, he has his arm outstretched. To the side, like he was coverin’ someone in the passenger’s seat, like it was second nature to him. Better check his identity. Call his family.”
The coroner continued, after thinking for a moment. “I would ask if we had a next of kin to identify the body, but I don’t think anyone could—”
The officer cuts him off.
“I don’t care. Order a test. Call it in.”
The officer wrenches open the glovebox.
Her hopes of finding someone to break the news to gently sink. All that tumbles out is ten, perhaps twelve pairs of designer sunglasses, some of them crushed beyond repair. She picks up one to inspect with a gloved hand, avoiding the blood splatter.
“He didn’t have insurance. No indication of living relatives. It’s as if he didn’t exist.”
1: Unbeknownst to her, he did indeed crave his Mother’s love. And though Crowley would never know she stayed, it would have meant something to him.
2: Or, what she thought was an arm, anyway. It was difficult to discern.
Somewhere in Tadfield, a young boy shoots upright in bed. He buries his fingers in his dog’s coat when it begins to whine and nose at his fingertips.
“Someone’s gone and done something stupid .”
Aziraphale is cleaning his bookshop, sweeping and quietly humming, not a care in the world. He manages a fond smile at his Arthur Miller collection, gracing a finger over the spines. His hand rests on Death of a Salesman [1]. Aziraphale shuddered with the touch, figuring that, perhaps, a bit of the raw emotion and dread of the piece had wiggled its way from the text and found its home in his chest. Tricky things, works like those: the tragedy of them was tangible, what, with the unresolved grief of a lover left behind.
Suddenly, Aziraphale is struck by an immense pressure in his ears, and a fuzzy ringing. The edges of his vision blur and soften with a creeping darkness, casting the shop around him as an unsettling vignette. His world is captured in black and white: devoid of subtlety and movement. Soundless, airless, a moment frozen with perpetual suspense. Something feels innately wrong, and the only thoughts occupying his mind are of Crowley.
A circle of divine light illuminates the room with glory, its intensity almost blinding. Metatron’s booming voice reverberates through every corner of the shop and within every cell in Aziraphale’s body.
“CONGRATULATIONS, AZIRAPHALE, FOR COMING TO SEE THE ERROR OF YOUR WAYS. YOUR ROLE IN THE DISCORPORATION AND SUBSEQUENT EXECUTION OF THE DEMON CROWLEY WAS COMMENDABLE AND HAS PROVEN TO US THAT YOUR...PROBATIONARY PERIOD, SHALL WE CALL IT? HAS OFFICIALLY ENDED!”
Aziraphale’s knees buckle underneath him as a wave of visceral horror wracks his body. He leans on the chair behind him for support, attempting to stow any show of emotion.
“That’s...wonderful. We shall be in contact, then?”
The angel’s voice falters.
“WELCOME BACK TO YOUR HEAVENLY FAMILY, AZIRAPHALE.”
The light dissipates, and Aziraphale crumples to the floor as soon as Heaven is no longer watching. All of the strength leaves his body in a rush, leaving him shaking like an earthquake. He quickly moves to close the portal, erasing some of the white lines on his shop’s floors with his feet. To prevent any future untimely discorporation, of course. And the last thing he wanted to do at this moment was speak with Heaven.
It was his fault. Unequivocally, undoubtedly, he was to blame. His association with Crowley is—was a dangerous affair.
Everything in his being shakes, tremors rattling their way through his arms. He struggles to prop himself up, each effort to rise even the slightest of bits feeling inordinately laborious. Aziraphle’s entire body is numb and prickly. He collapses back to the ground, defeated, and buries an increasingly red face into clenched fists.
He’s never had to support himself alone before, not once. He’s always had a bit of help. He’s always had that presence, that lingering, subconscious knowledge that he’d be saved in a pinch, as comfort. Aziraphale has never been alone before, not even in his own mind.
Angels are not very individualistic creatures. Aziraphale has always had the comfort of another, or his faith—the solace of community and love. Give a human complete solitude and they will be happy for quite some time before they lose touch with reality. Angels were more the trial run. It doesn’t take long for them, not long at all. In fact, Aziraphale was just now discovering it only took a few minutes.
Heaven knows what Aziraphale has done to Crowley—and he hasn’t the faintest. Aziraphale has never harmed or killed a living thing, and the thought he even remotely caused Crowley to suffer... not to mention, be praised for it; it sickened him. Crowley could be soaked in holy water, torn apart limb by limb, finger by finger. Stung by Beelzebub’s hordes of wasps every day before they burrow and nest in his hair and flesh, in perpetuity, for a truly Promethean punishment. He’s plunged into abject horror by the thought of a demon, face contorted into a sick caricature of joy, filleting Crowley’s wings and removing his flight feathers—to snuff out any hope of escape—before pulling at them and fisting feathers from the bases out in downy, bloody clumps.
Or perhaps they’ve reserved an honorary seat for him at some hellish reconstruction of The Rose, preserving its most abhorrent odors at the highest intensities. Perhaps they’ve bound him to his seat, forcing him to watch an amateuristic production of Shakespeare's King Lear, peeling his eyelids open to ensure he views each instance of severe paternal idiocy. Crowley always did hate the gloomy ones, this piece especially. How dull it is that Lear only views his misstep dethroned and bumbling. "How sharp a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," indeed [2].
Oh lord, what if I’ve been doing it all along? What if I’ve been sapping the life out of him with each touch. He's a demon, after all, what if I’ve been hurting him by being near him?
His body practically shaking him to the point of discorporation, Aziraphale frantically scrolls through his memories, trying to find something, anything that’s been different from what they’ve always been. The way Crowley’s always been. He found nothing.
Crowley would surely tell him, Aziraphale assured himself, or show some signs of deterioration. Crowley had tiptoed around the church for him, so he knew his demon would endure pain for him, but not silently. He would have made a big fuss, really thrown a proper tizzy. Aziraphale knew Crowley—he wasn’t one to suffer silently.
Aziraphale stays on the ground and lets his lip tremor a few times; a scream has tangled itself in his chest cavity and nestled itself beneath his ribs, within his lungs. He chokes on the hiccuped breaths and whimpers that manage to dislodge from his throat.
The angel is pressed flush against the wall, slouched into a position that is absolutely ungainly and undignified, but he cannot move his body. Aziraphale is not in control. Any human being would recognise this feeling as the common, existential fear of isolation and oblivion, but for a celestial being, this is a rather large wall to confront. The crushing embrace of a panic attack is another human trouble Aziraphale now knows intimately, too.
He sits there a while; his eyes flick up, then down, then up again. Aziraphale’s mind is completely blank in the worst way.
The first words the vaguely human-shaped being say in hours falter from his mouth, and his face crumples in on itself the moment he speaks:
“Please?”
All is silent again.
After some amount of time, Aziraphale sinks into his chair in the back, looking over to the space Crowley had liked to occupy for years: where the demon had set chocolate when he’d first opened shop, where he’d lean in that bizarre fashion against the desk, where he’d make snide remarks about his “customers”, where he’d drink wine and laugh and take off those horrible tinted lenses and show Aziraphale his eyes. Where he’d listened and smiled and rolled his eyes and told Aziraphale how silly he was. Where he’d offered lunch and straightened his tie and complained endlessly about Aziraphale and his dumb books.
Aziraphale looks to it and he finally says what has been on his heart for thousands of years, lurking in the air but never spoken.
“I love you.”
The answering silence is deafening.
He breaks then, and starts to sob.
Aziraphale clings to the hope that maybe they hadn’t executed Crowley straight off. Hell is about the torture of it, and they’re incredibly petty. Aziraphale had experienced it first hand, so of course, they’d want to exact their revenge slowly [3].
He would never wish torture upon Crowley, never, but Aziraphale is selfish. He just needs his demon to be alive. He needs him to be.
So he throws himself into research, hunting through every book in existence, trying to find ways to summon a certain demon. A month is not long, not in their lifetimes, but Aziraphale has never felt time progressing so keenly.
Aziraphale’s bookshop has remained closed for a while now. It falls quickly into disrepair, his books of prophecy neglected. They have now gathered a thick layer of dust, which causes Aziraphale great distress, but he tells himself that he must not mind it.
Crowley is all he can afford to think and care about, Crowley, enduring hellish torture. With every passing day his chances grow slimmer, the oceanic waves of time carrying pieces and grains of hope every time the tide comes in. Aziraphale’s immaculately manicured nails are bitten short, his hair is messy and matted, his suit jacket encrusted with a layer of grime. Aziraphale has not stepped outside in days, and it shows.
After a while, Aziraphale tires, more in the mental than the physical sense. Hope is beginning to dwindle for the angel, and amongst a pile of unhelpful books, he sinks. If something does not materialize soon, Aziraphale will begin the slow and painful process of grief, which he had long been avoiding. He wondered if he merely delayed the inevitable, as he and Crowley with the Great Plan. Some things were ineffable, and who was he to argue with that?
For the record, great pustulent mangled bollocks to the Great Blasted Plan.
The tainted memory leaves a bitter taste on Aziraphale’s tongue, but it also carries with it an undeniable, nostalgic sweetness. Every memory of him is sweet, however childish their rows might’ve been. The angel’s brows upturn and his eyes soften, a kind of effortless and unintentional smile that could not be manifested by force. The scene plays like a film in his mind, each glimpse of Crowley pausing in suspended motion. He clings to what he can gather from Crowley’s expression: the twitch of a bitter smile, the lack of tension contorting his sharp features, his open, amiable stance. As Crowley’s expression shutters in the past, Aziraphale’s follows in stereo.
It’s over.
How silly he was, how daft. If he’d had any inkling of the future he would never have been so foolish, so cautiously adamant about the rules. Now that it was well and truly over, Aziraphale would never voluntarily wish the pain of regret on anyone, even when it was deserved. But it was a just penance for mistakes that could not be helped any longer.
The books are strewn about the floor in haphazard stacks. On this particular day, Aziraphale discovers a shelf of books he had acquired about a century ago, entirely forgotten. After brushing off the dust with one hand, Aziraphale reads the title on the cover aloud.
“A Brief but Complete Guide to Botany by T. Pratchett.”
After delays at the post and many weeks of waiting, a smile arrives.
He finds a stack of old gardening magazines from the second Great War in a discrete pile.
Aziraphale rests for the first time in days [4]. Setting the Brief but Complete Guide on the worn wooden side table, Aziraphale makes himself a steaming cup of cocoa. Sipping the sweet with care, he leans back into his favorite chair, magazines in hand, and begins to read.
Aziraphale is absorbed by them, adamant on learning everything in gardening there is to conceive of. If he let Crowley die, he wasn’t going to damn his demon’s beloved plants to the same fate.
After a long day of voracious reading, Aziraphale places the final magazine on his untidy heap of glossy print. He lays in the armed chair, staring at the ceiling thoughtfully, reinvigorated with a passion. The angel brushes some of the dirt off his collar, walking over to the occult book with the most promise, and thumbs through the pages. An anxiety comes over Aziraphale. He quickly traces his pointer finger down the list of materials before rushing off to gather them, as if fire threatened to devour his feet.
After collecting a large pile of various seemingly-harmless materials one would never guess could be used in a demon summoning, Aziraphale stopped in his cupboard. He stared blankly at a certain item on the shelf, as if it were sentient and could be intimidated into submission [5].
It was a spare tartan thermos, full of perfectly ordinary water, aside from the fact he had blessed it.
His hand slid around the plastic cautiously, as if it would burn him, knowing full well the devastation it could create in the right hands. Aziraphale hoped desperately that he was the right hands.
“For insurance,” he reasoned, as if trying to convince himself, too. A series of chills ran up his spine.
1: Truly a modern prophet if there ever was one. Just the right amount of righteous indignation that Aziraphale found himself to appreciate in the company he kept.
2: That bit in specific hits a bit too close to home for Crowley’s tastes, Aziraphale presumes.
3: Satan enjoyed a good rotisserie chicken.
4: Angels, strictly speaking, do not require sleep or rest, but their vessels may begin to show signs of wear if not properly cared for, as they are not holy and perfect. Occasional rests are necessary.
5: Even if it could have been, Aziraphale was poor at being intimidating. He was soft.
Dagon’s tone, inflicted with an invariable disinterest, hangs heavily in the blood-stale air of the rank cell, their words crafting their own miniature assault on the prisoner’s ears.
“Welcome back, Crowley. We’re delighted”—the word is crooned—“to have you back in shape, serving your Master.”
The prisoner opens his eyes for the first time in his new body.
“Hold up,”
The upper right corner of the demon’s lip curls upward into half sneer. He looks around, incredulous, his voice raising an octave.
“Who the fuck is Crowley?”