Chapter Text
“Crowley?” Gabriel strode through the bookshop in search of the demon, found him in the backroom, and then stopped short and backtracked, eyes landing on the child sitting behind Aziraphale’s pointless cash register. “Hello?”
The boy did not look up from his painstaking task when he said, “Hello.” The dog lying at his heel growled, but in a friendly sort of way.
“Right.” Gabriel carried on back to the backroom, where Crowley was still waking up from his nap. There was a tartan throw wrapped around him and his glasses were sitting on top of his head. “What is the Antichrist doing here?”
Crowley shrugged. “Dunno. Ask him? Adam! What are you doing?”
“I’m making friendship bracelets for Pepper and Brian and Wensley,” came the called response, and Crowley gave Gabriel a ‘there, see’ gesture.
“He’s making friendship bracelets.”
Gabriel decided not to point out that wasn’t what he meant, and instead swaggered (tried to- he was still getting the hang of it) back into the main shop to peer curiously at the boy’s work.
“Why are you making friendship bracelets? Followup question, what’s a friendship bracelet?”
“It’s a bracelet that means we’re going to be best friends forever,” Adam explained patiently, attention still intent on the piles of beads and twine in front of him. “And I’m making them as a way to apologize about the way I acted during the Apocalypse, because I was horrible to them and I need them to understand that I’m really, really sorry.”
“Oh.” Gabriel reached over and toyed with one of the beads spread out on the counter. It looked a little bit like a fly- black, with two white circles on it. He spun it slowly on the countertop, staring thoughtfully at his fingers over the bead.
Adam finally looked up, and pushed a spool of twine toward him with a smile. “You can join me, if you like.”
-/-
Beelzebub sighed when Gabriel burst into her office with a little too much swagger to be natural. She rested her jaw on one fist and gave him a flat look.
“Don’t you knock?”
“I got you a present.”
She was too stunned to protest when he handed her a velvet box. It was the sort of box that a commendation or a medal might be delivered in, but when she opened it all it held was a tacky plastic bead-bracelet. She took it out and held it up.
“What is it?”
“It’s a friendship bracelet! The letters stand for best fallen fly friend forever.”
It was quite probably the ugliest accessory she’d ever seen- saying something, since she’d been at the forefront of hell’s fashion scene for six thousand years now. The back half was made of alternating black, purple, and red beads; on the top, the letters ‘b f f f f’ adorned several pastel colored beads, interspersed by a selection of plastic flies, each just a little bit different to the others.
“I’m not really a jewelry person,” she said, slipping it onto her wrist. It was too big for her small hands; she glared at it until it knew better than to slip free, and added, “Or a friendship person, for that matter.”
“You don’t have to wear it,” he began, reaching for it, and she batted his hand away.
“No, I’m going to wear it forever, fuck off.”
-/-