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CROWLEY
Didn’t you have a flaming sword?
AZIRAPHALE
Er…
CROWLEY
You did. It was flaming like anything. What happened to it?
AZIRAPHALE
Er…
CROWLEY
Lost it already, have you?
AZIRAPHALE
(mutters inaudibly)
I gave it away.
CROWLEY
You what?
AZIRAPHALE
I gave it away! They looked so miserable. And there are vicious animals, and it’s going to be cold out there, and she’s expecting already, and I said, here you go, flaming sword, don’t thank me, and don’t let the sun go down on you here … I do hope I didn’t do the wrong thing.
CROWLEY
(drily)
You’re an angel. I don’t think you can do the wrong thing.
Aziraphale does not notice the sarcasm.
AZIRAPHALE
Oh. Thank you. It’s been bothering me.
*
Aziraphale, Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate and somewhat accidentally co-saviour of the world, finds his flaming sword in the backseat of the Bentley after a very long lunch at the Ritz.
“Whatever is this doing here?”
Crowley looks equally baffled, but also a great deal more wary. “I thought you gave it to the delivery man? After you stopped sitting on it, that it. Here now, don’t you go lighting it on fire in this car! It’s only just survived the last fire.”
Aziraphale spares his demon…ic companion, [1] – he spares him a quick look of exasperation before returning his gaze to the weapon in his hand.
[1] Not his demon, that would be ridiculous, whatever do you mean to imply by that?
“Oh don’t be ridiculous, darling. Whatever would I need a flaming sword for in here? The most dangerous thing in the Bentley is its driver as far as I can see.”
The Bentley’s radio crackles slightly, as if it were about to turn itself on. Or as if it were supressing a snigger. Which … would also be ridiculous.
Aziraphale eyes the Bentley’s dashboard a little suspiciously for a moment. The car had been a charred ruin only yesterday, and now here it is, as good as new. And here’s Aziraphale’s old sword, sitting on the backseat…
“Crowley..” He says, very slowly and carefully, and still very aware that he is about to sound utterly ridiculous. “Did your car… Do you think that your car brought the sword with it? Back to London?”
Crowley raises one very eloquent eyebrow at him, and Aziraphale feels himself flush a little.
“Really, angel? I know you don’t like the car that much but are you really accusing my car of – what? Kidnapping your sword?”
Well, when Crowley puts it like that…
“Now, darling, I never said that I don’t like your car! Regardless of the many times you have attempted to discorporate me with it, I would certainly never hold the Bentley responsible for the manner in which you like to drive it. Besides, it’s such a beautiful car, and you’ve taken such care of it and loved it so long, I couldn’t dislike it so, even if it hadn’t helped you so much … yesterday."
And you can call Aziraphale an old silly if you like, but the interior of the Bentley most definitely seemed to suddenly be a little brighter, as if it were glowing with satisfaction at the compliment. Aziraphale patted the dashboard absently, in case the car really was listening.
He took a deep and stubborn breath and continued.
“But the fact remains that I definitely gave that sword back to the nice young man with the delivery van, you saw me do it! But here it is again, and it’s in your car. What else am I to think than that it has hand a hand in this?”
Crowley appears to be speechless with rage at the notion that his car could be used to deliver lost property.[2]
[2] Deliver the Antichrist? Yes, though only under extreme duress. Deliver lost flaming swords? Not a chance in Hel- well, in somewhere, Crowley thinks. Crowley is often wrong.
“I refuse to have this discussion any more, angel. My sword is not in the business of transporting holy weaponry around the place. It’s not like the Bentley has a mind of its own. Honestly.” [3]
[3] As we say, Crowley is very often wrong.
Aziraphale sighs and resigns himself to taking the sword back to the bookshop with him until he can arrange for it to be collected again.
“Of course, dear. I’m sorry. It’s just been a long week.”
Crowley is mollified by this concession, and pats the angel’s knee gently before pulling away from the pavement.
“A Hell of a week, I’d say, angel. Let’s get you home; you’ll feel better once you’ve updated your inventory with Adam’s new books.”
Aziraphale brightens right up at the prospect, and the sword is forgotten while the Bentley quietly lulls its pair of passengers with We Are The Champions. [4]
[4] The Bentley tended towards love songs when Aziraphale was in the car, but this seemed a much more apt choice at the time. Not to mention that the song also reflected the flaming sword’s sense of satisfaction on being properly returned to the angel’s possession again.
The Bentley was happy for it; the car would hate to think of Crowley leaving it behind without so much as a goodbye, after all.
*
“Ah, so… Angel,” Crowley started, wary fondness in his voice. “Much as I applaud the spirit of paranoia as evidenced by you bringing along a flaming sword to feed the ducks, can I ask if this is actually motivated by something in particular? Or is this some new fashion trend from 1734 that you’ve recently discovered and decided to make your own?” [5]
[5] It should be noted at this juncture that this is in no way out of the ordinary for Aziraphale and a surprising number of fashion revivals have been powered by Aziraphale finding an old favourite outfit in the back of his wardrobe and unashamedly messing around in Paris until it is acceptable for him to wear it out of the house once again. Crowley really wishes he’d stop doing that, as it’s playing … Hell… with his fashion projection reports he sends downstairs, and he can’t bloody explain why!
Aziraphale didn’t even turn around to look at the weapon in his proximity; he just sighed heavily.
“I didn’t bring it, it just… followed me here.”
“It what?”
“It followed me here!”
The demon looks at the flaming sword again, startled. The sword looks back at him a little menacingly. [6] No, Crowley is very aware that the sword does not have eyes, thank you very much. This knowledge in no way alters the fact that the sword is looking at him.
[6] Not so very menacingly, of course. It wouldn’t do to really upset the Serpent after all; the flaming sword was rather fond of him already. Terribly bad form in general, of course, but understandable in this particular case, it felt. This demon was taking very good care of the sword’s angel. He could stay.
“Can swords… do that? Just move themselves around and trail after people?”
This opened up previously unthought-of possibilities for Crowley which he wished very much to have been allowed to leave unthought… He’s just not feeling up to being stalked by a sword today. Or ever, really.
Aziraphale gives Crowley a look which is very put-upon. “Well, mine has and is currently so doing, so I think that counts as an affirmative.”
Crowley grins. “So, does this mean that you have quite unjustly maligned my car when you accused it of sword-napping then, huh angel?”
A quick flash of a glare and then; “I am not at all above chucking you in that duck pond darling, if you keep this up.”
Oh … the angel is grumpy. And that’s… That’s sort of delicious….
Crowley in general is very much Against things which make his angel grumpy and are not him, but he supposes that the flaming sword is one of the few things in all of Existence which can claim to have been there first, and therefore he ought to make a few allowances.
Also, Aziraphale’s blushing and clearly hot under the collar of his jacket, and he’s twitching like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands all of a sudden.[7] Crowley has to swallow very hard for absolutely no apparent reason at all.
[7] He really didn’t. He was thinking really very hard about some extremely human method of shutting people up, and the idea of using it on Crowley was … dreadfully distracting. And inappropriate in a public setting. The ducks would absolutely notice.
Also - and Crowley feels that it is important not to allow himself to get distracted from this point – this whole scenario is objectively hilarious.
“Angel, are you being stalked by your Holy Weapon?” Crowley can’t stop sniggering, he just can’t.
The angel sighs again, this time more pointedly.
“It … it seems to have got attached to me. I can’t persuade it to stop, despite my best efforts, so please stop mentioning it, if you will? I’m hoping that once it understands that the Apocalypse was a significant deviation from the normal course of my life, it will get bored and go off and do something else.”
“Something else? What ‘else’ does a sword even do, angel?”
The angel pointedly ignores him, except to sniff.
The ducks let out a chorus of quacks which sound disturbingly like the audience bursting into raucous laughter at a play when a character says something especially funny. Crowley thinks that the joke might be on him. Or them. Maybe the pair of them are the joke?
That sounds entirely likely. And perfectly justified too.
Crowley examines the flaming sword from the corner of his eyes, while Aziraphale is preoccupied with miracling up more manna for the ducks. [8] Their bench is promptly flocked by the avian denizens of evil, which provide Crowley with an ideal angel-distraction, as Aziraphale settles into clucking away to them.
[8] It’s their favourite meal, of course, and has the additional benefit of not being bad for them.
When Aziraphale had picked up his sword, during the whole show down that stood in for an Apocalypse, Crowley had suffered one blinding moment of panic. He’s known this angel now for 6000 years, and he’s never in all that time seen him so very focussed in his life. Crowley had wanted to hide, to kneel and surrender, to do whatever it took to make Aziraphale turn that focussed attention on something else. He rather suspected that he had suddenly seen, for just one instant of a second, what Aziraphale had looked like as a General in battle, back in the First Great War, fighting Lucifer and his followers, protecting his flock.
The problem with Aziraphale, not that Crowley tended to think of it as one, was that it was so very easy to forget what he was. Not to forget that he was an angel, of course; Crowley called him ‘angel’ all the time after all, and he’d never think of him as anything less than his own angel for so long as he lived.
But Aziraphale had been a warrior, and was still one to this day, once you scratched down a little beneath his surface. He’d fought - oh yes, he had - and won with far greater efficiency and far fewer losses than he ought to have done by all the accounts Crowley had garnered in his early days on Earth. Though Someone knows that you could never get Aziraphale himself to talk about it, no matter how drunk you got him. [9]
[9] And oh boy, had Crowley tried down the centuries. There were drinking establishments that had nearly gone out of business after some of those more lengthy experiments in prising the angel’s secrets out of him, so much had the angel put away. And still the most Crowley had managed to pry from him was his worry about that damned – no, blessed? – urgh flaming sword, and where it was, and who currently held it and how it was doing. Which all made more sense now, Crowley realised…
But Aziraphale put so much effort into making you forget about all that. He had cultivated so many thoroughly harmless interests – food, and wine, and books, and comfortable fashions he refused to let go of, no matter how out of date they became – all things that could never hurt or threaten anybody. He had gone and got himself into trouble on some many occasions, and in such strange and unlikely ways down the years, and then he had dithered around and refused to put up any real effort to save himself, to get himself out through force at all. Crowley had even wondered once or twice if it was because the angel thought his demon friend needed a hobby, and nominated ‘Angel Saving’ in lieu of something more mundane?
Even Crowley, who had seen first-hand plenty of examples of the destruction and cruelty and terror than an angel was capable of inflicting, even Crowley who had known Aziraphale right from the beginning and he seen him hold that same, slightly stalker-y flaming sword when the world was new, even Crowley looked at the angel and saw him as … soft. Not weak, of course, but kind. And gentle, and stupidly optimistic at times, and scatter-brained, and enthused by weird little things that made no sense to anyone outside of his strange well-stuffed brain.
And then Crowley had watched that gentle, genteel angel shed every single one of those distracting little bits of camouflage that convinced anyone who looked at him to immediately discount him. Had watched all that focus – normally scattered around into manageable pieces to share between a bookshop and the Ritz and this very duck pond – come suddenly snapping back into one place.
Crowley wonders, as he watches the sword watching him, whether that might be the root of the issue here.
An angel with fussy mannerisms and harmless interests and soft eyes; that angel can be forgotten easily enough. Aziraphale’s entire career on Earth had illustrated that clearly enough, after all.
But an angel of old with a flaming sword; a Holy Weapon steeped in blood and willing now to be wielded only by its true hand? That angel had to be taken very seriously indeed. And Aziraphale wasn’t really used to be taken seriously, was he?
*
Crowley walks into the bookshop one morning, only to find his angel having a shouting match with an inanimate object.
Well.
Right then.
This is a thing that is happening, apparently.
In fairness to the angel, the object in question is that bloody sword of his which, if recent events are anything to go by, is about as far from an inanimate object as it is possible to be without having legs. The thing’s been bloody following them (well, following the angel but Crowley’s not letting Aziraphale out of his sight if he can help it for the next century, so this amounts to very much the same thing) for about a month now. [10]
[10] They aren’t talking about it. Ever. The Bentley has started to play the Flash Gordon Theme to announce the sword’s presence, and Crowley isn’t entirely sure if this is meant as a warning to him, as a greeting to the sword, or as personal joke to the car, and he’s still refusing to ask.
“- frightening customers away is one thing, but you’re going to scare Crowley away if you keep appearing out of nowhere without warning! Do you want that? His people don’t have good connotations with flaming swords you know! And Goodness knows I gave him quite enough of a fright waving you around at him back in Tadfield. The poor dear looked so frightened…”
Aziraphale trails off, momentarily lost in the memory, it seems. Crowley curses himself silently for allowing the angel to see his fear, intense moment of not. Of course Aziraphale noticed, he’s always so good at doing that just when Crowley most wishes that he wouldn’t. And of course he’d taken that as a failing on his own part, stupid angel. Demons are meant to be wary of angels waving flaming swords at them, but that didn’t mean that Crowley was frightened of Aziraphale.
Much.
There is the creaking sound of ancient springs, suggesting that the angel has dropped into his armchair. Crowley just bets that his head is in his hands too, going by his slightly smothered and ever-so-slightly pleading exasperation when he starts speaking next.
“Why can’t you just stay in your box? Or at the very least upstairs? It’s not as if a threat is going to come barrelling in through the shop door at any moment!”
Crowley thinks about intervening in the dispute, but to be honest even from where he’s standing he thinks that the sword – while silent – is giving off enough mutinous vibes as to be carry at least half of the argument. [11] Possibly winning it.
[11] Besides, Crowley agrees with the flaming sword here. A threat did come barrelling through the door, and that time – that one utterly crucial time - neither the sword nor the demon had been there to keep their angel safe. Being over-prepared was apparently the only safe option left to either of them.
Instead, Crowley thinks about his life choices for a rare moment and silently backs out of the shop.
He’ll come back another time.
When his angel isn’t losing an argument with a sword.
Crowley’s life used to make a lot more sense to him… He wonders what happened?
*
Lunch at the Ritz is delightful as always, but Crowley has slowly been gaining awareness that there is another presence in their midst since they finished up the second course, and it’s been setting his teeth on edge. He’s scanned the clientele of the restaurant for angelic or demonic spies five times now and found nothing, but he hasn’t been on Earth for 6000 years by now without learning to trust his instincts.
There’s definitely a …something hanging around their table, and Crowley’s not going to be able to properly enjoy his angel’s company until he finds out what it is.
Thankfully, in his distraction, Crowley manages to knock his hand against his fork, sending it tumbling to the floor. Bending to retrieve it allows him to discover a covert agent in the form of Aziraphale’s wayward sword.
Because of course the sword has followed them here.
Well, well, well, thinks Crowley, Fancy meeting you here.
He should probably say something, tease the angel about being followed around by his pining sword. That would be the properly demonic thing to do, after all. Except…
Look, Crowley really sympathises with that sword, alright? He’s been there himself, over and over for nearly 6000 years; wanting to be in the weird, kindly angel’s orbit but always being gently shooed out of it.
They are far too similar, the pining sword and the pining demon; they both want so very much to be part of Aziraphale’s life, and they are both beings that the angel worries he can’t keep.
They both want to keep him safe, and Aziraphale has never been very good at thinking of himself as something which can or should be kept safe. A warrior sent from one battlefield to another, recruited again as an armed guard, given the broad and unending mission to prevent evil from winning – whatever that might mean – and to spread a little good in a world which already had so much of it, but which also tended to disregard what it already had in search of something else.
Crowley’s gone 6000 years as the only person to see Aziraphale - weaknesses and vices and dreams and hopes and shattered optimism - and want to keep him safe. It hadn’t occurred to him that there was someone else [12] out there who had felt the same, but he’s found them now and he’d rather not lose them. A flaming sword might not have been the obvious choice, but then neither is a demon.
[12] Personhood being a fluid concept which has, in Crowley’s opinion, nothing to do with breathing and everything to do with refusing to accept life as a thing which just happens to you.
Crowley was never a commander in the Great War, never led troops like Aziraphale had. He’d gathered information, passed along messages, thrown metaphorical spanners into the works of various plans. He’d been in the odd skirmish when he hadn’t been able to get out fast enough. But he knows just as well as any seasoned General that it is important to have allies and make the most of them once you find them.
“Are you alright, my dear? You’ve been down there quite some time, you know.”
He winks at the sword, as reassuring as he can be to something that’s not his angel, and sits back upright.
“Missing me already, angel?”
Aziraphale huffs, trying to look annoyed despite the smile that’s covering his face. It’s sweet that he tries.
“Vanity, thy name is Serpent.”
Crowley lounges comfortably in his chair, and looks over his sunglasses with a roguish smirk.
“’S not vanity if it’s justified, you know.”
Aziraphale rolls his eyes a little and carries on with their meal. Crowley turns his attention to the sword errant under the table, thinking of some way to encourage the angel to accept it properly. Amusing as this whole escapade has been, if it goes on much more then the angel will get frustrated and grumpy, and Crowley rather suspects that if the sword has a mind of its own like it so clearly does, then it has feelings which can be hurt too.
Not that Crowley cares, of course. He doesn’t. He’s just … looking out for his primary ally. Like any good strategist would.
Finally, he has one of his strokes of brilliance. Aziraphale orders the apple tarts – a particular indulgence he loves but will only order around Crowley when he’s sure the demon is in a suitably good mood – and Crowley has a sudden flash of memory. Of an angel standing all on his own on the walls of Eden, watching the only to people he had left to talk to being sent away. Of him standing alone, always, even when he was technically in the centre of a crowd. Of Aziraphale always, always having time to talk to Crowley, because at the end of the day, they were really the only two people on Earth who understood anything about the other, no matter that they each supposedly had a whole side of their own to talk to.
Aziraphale knows what it is to be lonely, truly lonely, and he would never wish it on another person.
As they get up at last to leave, Crowley finally lets on that the angel’s sword is with them, and he in no way misses the fact that the angel just reaches for it without thinking. Yes, those two belong to each other, Crowley thinks, his angel’s just unused to no longer having a part of himself missing is all. It’ll barely take any nudging at all.
“Oh my,” Aziraphale says, before catching Crowley’s well-hidden smirk. “Did you know it was there this whole time?”
Crowley keeps his voice light and airy, unconcerned and uninvested, as if the ties between an angel and a sword are of little matter to him. Demons are built for lying, after all.
“Only spotted it after I dropped the fork. Poor thing must be lonely, if it’s following you the Ritz like this. You ought to take it out more, I don’t neglect the Bentley like this. It’s cruel.”
“The Ritz is not the sort of place for flaming swords, my dear!” The angel sounds aghast, but he is also clutching the sword protectively to his chest while he says it. Crowley doesn’t miss that either, and instead he files it away for later.
“Oh I don’t know,” he continues to speak airily while turning and heading back towards the door. “I think it lends a real … flair to your whole ensemble, that sword does. You ought to make a Thing of it somehow.”
They climb into the Bentley, and Aziraphale lays the sword across his lap while he reaches for his seatbelt, forgets to move it away from himself again. More notes taken.
“Do you think so? I shouldn’t think that I’ve ever been much of a flaming sword-having angel, really. Not even at the Beginning.”
Crowley rolls his eyes behind those dark glasses he wears. So typical of Aziraphale to worry about appearances and whether he really ought to have a sword he wants so much to keep and who wants to keep him. So typical to undervalue himself too. Good thing Crowley’s here, really, or Aziraphale would probably sweep himself under the doormat to save everyone else the trouble
“Well, I think you suit it, and it seems to like you, so I don’t know who else you think matters enough to have a say.”
Aziraphale thinks about this for a long moment.
“Well, I … I suppose I shall have to think about it, won’t I?”
“You do that.” Crowley fiddles with the Bentley’s radio until there is a satisfactory level of Queen in his vicinity.
They drive away in silence, the angel doesn’t let go of his sword, and Crowley sends the mismatched but perfectly-suited pair fond glances whenever he won’t be spotted.
He’s getting soft in his old age, that’s the trouble.