Archive of Our Own

I. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1847. ST. JAMES'S PARK. MORNING.

"I simply won't do it," said Aziraphale, tossing a hunk of bread into the water with what was meant to be an authoritative and emphatic gesture.

Crowley's head tilted. Through Crowley's dark spectacles, Aziraphale could just barely see those bilious yellow irises, now tinted a kind of absinthe color by the green lenses. Crowley didn't look as if he were grinning; but Aziraphale felt a grin, all the same.

"I'm not going there. The weather's always foul and the food is abominable."

"Look, angel, I went to bloody Manchester for you not twenty-five years ago--"

"We agreed never to speak of that again."

"Suits me," Crowley said, bitterly. And then, after three seconds of trying to leave it alone, he added, "I've told you and told you. It was the humans' idea to bring in the cavalry."

This argument, every time they had it, affected Aziraphale's heart much the way the touch of a hot poker affects human skin. Aziraphale suspected that it was the same for Crowley, and that either he simply refused to show the pain it caused him, or was so used to the pains of hell that pangs of the heart didn't even register.

"The terms of our..."

"Arrangement," Crowley needled.

"...understanding, include a mutual agreement that neither party will ask the other to perform anything that he would find intolerably repugnant, or anything that carries an unacceptably high risk. This fits both criteria."

"It's too risky for you, but it's all right for me," Crowley spat. "Thanks, angel. You're a true gentleman." 

Guitily, Aziraphale watched Crowley fidgeting with his collar. So far, the fashions of this century had been nothing but a source of torment for Crowley. Crowley hated cravats; he also loathed petticoats. No attempt to combine articles of masculine and feminine dress had either satisfied him or played well with the humans. Since the Byron craze had flamed out in the 1830s, Crowley could no longer slink about the island in leather trousers, silk turbans, and open-necked white blouses. Well, of course he could have. When Aziraphale found something cozy and sufficiently inconspicuous, he kept it. Sometimes for centuries. But Crowley had to have the latest. It was as if he was trying to run away from immortality. He always had to be caressing the cutting edge, even when it hurt him. 

"I was referring to the risk of discovery, Crowley. That's not a risk if you're the one doing it. Your lot expect you to be buying souls for the Devil. My lot certainly doesn't."

"I don't see what makes this any different from last time," Crowley said. "And the time before that. And the time before--"

"It is different. You want me to--to go to Ireland in the midst of a famine and induce starving people to sell their souls to Satan."

"They don't have to be starving," Crowley shrugged. "I've been told to deliver one thousand signed contracts. Downstairs don't care who signed them, or why. A soul is a soul." Crowley's lips settled in a scowl as his thoughts turned inward. "Can't get that through Hastur's head, ever. But it was conveyed to all of us, very explicitly and very emphatically. Hell is entering the age of mass production. It's all about quantity now."

"Nevertheless," Aziraphale began. Crowley cut him off.

"Yes, nevertheless the poor are always more eager to sell, especially when they're hungry."

And as for the rich, Aziraphale found himself thinking, hell can't buy what it already owns. 

Crowley jammed his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and let out a long sigh.

"Angel, you know and I know that most of what we do is so indirect and the results are so intangible that you can claim credit for nearly anything."

"You can," Aziraphale said primly. 

Crowley let out an irritated little hiss. It made Aziraphale shiver just a bit.

"Point is, angel, it's not like them to demand a specific deliverable. A concrete thing that I have to physically go down there and hand over. I don't like it. It feels like a test. It feels like--well, never mind."

Aziraphale's heart rate increased slightly.

"You don't mean they're...they're on to you? To us?"

"I don't know, angel. All I know is, I'd better have those contracts to give them by Monday week."

"Well go over to Ireland and get them, Crowley! It won't take you a day. You could sell sand in the desert."

"I can't."

"Nonsense."

"I don't mean about sand in the desert. I mean I can't go to Ireland. I literally can't go."

"What do you mean you can't go?  Why ever not?"

Crowley sighed, slowly, painfully.

"I've been...banned."

"What piffle. By whom?"

Crowley continued to stare at the water and look mortified.

"Oh my goodness," Aziraphale cried, bursting into laughter. "No. Not really. That actually worked? You literally cannot enter Ireland now, all because of St. Patrick?"

"It's not funny, angel," Crowley growled.

"It certainly is," Aziraphale retorted. "My word that man can hold a grudge. Fourteen hundred years later and he's still keeping snakes out of Ireland. Oh, Crowley. You really put your lack of foot in it that time. You should have been more careful."

Whatever mechanism Crowley had been using to keep a lid on his seething frustration, it suffered a catastrophic failure.

“I didn’t know he was a saint! They’re funny old things, saints–-especially in Ireland. Seems like anything in Ireland becomes a saint if it tries hard enough. You could be talking to a bird or a bell or a skinny old man with moss in his beard or something that you THINK is a demon because he is twelve feet tall and he has got the head of a wolf, and then out of a clear blue sky, WHAM! the thing SAINTS right at you. What is a saint anyway? What do they do to get their…miracle powers? Is there some sort of exam?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified,” said Aziraphale. 

"Right."

"It is!" Aziraphale insisted. And it probably was. Certainly everyone seemed to be keeping the process a secret from Aziraphale.

"The material point," said Crowley, "is that I haven't told head office about any of that. If they find out I've been faking all my Irish mission reports for the past fourteen hundred years--"

"Oh you haven't."

"Of course I have!"

"Oh, Crowley," Aziraphale groaned.

"Listen," said Crowley, desperately. "Ninety-eight per cent of the time, whatever they order me to do in Ireland, the humans are already doing it. All I have to do is read the papers. That's what makes me so suspicious about this mission. This is something humans can't do. It's something I can't fudge or make up. It has to be done, and I can't do it, and if they find that out--"

"But--"

"I'm begging you, angel. I don't like it, but I am. This is the essence of the Arrangement. You do what your lot sent you to do, and also do what my lot sent me to do, and we cancel each other out."

"My lot?" Aziraphale repeated. "My lot haven't--"

Aziraphale stopped. 

"Haven't they?" Crowley said, blinking behind the green lenses. "Well, they will in a minute. Terrible suffering on a massive scale. Bound to send you, sooner rather than later. Surprised they haven't already."

A little knot began to form in Aziraphale's stomach. He had in fact received no orders from head office regarding Ireland. It had not occurred to him until this instant to be surprised by that. 

Well, Crowley was right. Surely the order would come. How pleased everyone would be if, when they sent it, he could tell them he was already on the case!

"These contracts," said Aziraphale. "How do they work?"

Crowley began to smile, saw it was bothering Aziraphale, and stopped.

"Pretty straightforward, really," he said. "You give them gold, and in return they sign on the bottom line and promise that when their mortal bodies die their souls will go Downstairs for all eternity."

"And there's no...fine print?"

Crowley snorted. "Course there's fine print, angel. Hell invented lawyers. Nobody Downstairs reads it though. The lighting's just...so terrible."

Aziraphale considered this for a moment. 

Crowley reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a cloth bag clanking with coin and a leather satchel stuffed with papers. He held them out to Aziraphale. 

"Do we have a deal?"

Aziraphale sighed. 

"Well if it will save your skin," he said, reaching out to take them.

Crowley handed them over, with an unusually dazzling smile.

"May the road rise up to meet you," Crowley said.

II. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1847. THE SNUG OF THE BLACK HORSE PUB, SKIBBEREEN. EVENING.

How exactly did you solve a problem like Aziraphale? 

This was by no means the first time Gabriel had asked himself this question. However, he could not recall ever having asked it under such sordid and uncomfortable circumstances. The great advantage of this pub's 'snug' was that it locked on the inside. None of the mortals currently inebriating themselves at the bar would witness this embarrassing encounter. Its disadvantages, however, were many. One: the top of the oaken table at which Gabriel sat was sticky with the residue of spilled ale. Two: the wood paneling was very dark, and there were only two candles, and Gabriel couldn't risk a fiat lux.  Three: turf smoke somehow managed to drift in from the fire outside. The smell was foul and the slight haze gave the angel slumped opposite him a very seedy and dissolute air. 

Even without the smoke, Aziraphale would have been painful to look upon. Normally fastidious to a fault, Aziraphale had, in what Gabriel estimated was slightly over twelve hours, managed to soil every single item of human clothing he had on. The knuckles of Aziraphale's right hand were weirdly swollen, and marked with little spatters of one of the humans' many bodily fluids. Sawdust and fragments of nutshells sullied his blonde curls. There was an unmistakable print of bright red lipstick on one stubbly cheek. 

"Well," said Gabriel. "Now you've sobered up, are you ready to touch base?"

Aziraphale gulped, mournfully, and pushed away a large clay bowl which now contained a disgusting reconstitution of the brew that had so recently polluted his celestial form.

"Yes," Aziraphale rasped. He sat up straight, for a moment, and looked Gabriel in the eye. Then he blinked, dropped his gaze, and slumped back against the paneled wall behind him.

"Do you remember what your most recent assignment was?"

Aziraphale mumbled something indistinct.

"You are meant to be on a transatlantic voyage to Boston, to discreetly encourage the abolitionists."

"Yes," Aziraphale nodded, sadly.

"And instead you are where?"

"In a pub in Skibbereen," Aziraphale whispered, closing his eyes in shame.

Gabriel let him stew for a few moments.

"So you did get on a ship," Gabriel prompted. "But it wasn't bound for Boston."

"No," sighed Aziraphale.

"It was in fact bound for Rosslare Harbour, where it docked at nine o'clock this morning."

"Why ask me if you know it already?" Aziraphale protested, mildly. "And why are you dogging my movements? I don't see why I should be insulted this way, after so many centuries of good and loyal service-"

"I wasn't dogging your movements!"

Gabriel heard his voice rising, and quickly took himself in hand. A good manager never allowed himself to lose control. He closed his eyes, breathed in through his nose, and settled himself.

"Here's what happened," Gabriel said, cheerfully, and with what he hoped was a bright smile. "At nine-forty-five a.m. local time I was alerted that there had been a sudden decrease in requests for divine intervention concentrated in a small area of Wexford near Rosslare Harbour. Naturally we suspected the work of the Adversary. In fact, when Uriel looked into it, he discovered that rumors were going around town that the Devil had set up shop in on the village green and was offering gold for human souls. I don't have to tell you I found that extremely concerning."

Aziraphale drew breath to speak. Gabriel cut him off with a gesture.

"Naturally my first move was to contact you," Gabriel said. "But you weren't in your bookstore. And by the time I reached Wexford, there was in fact no one buying souls on the village green. Instead, there was a kind of...impromptu...festival going on."

"A festival?" Aziraphale said, with the first look of something approaching enthusiasm. "How lovely. They haven't had much to celebrate lately."

"They were celebrating," Gabriel said, as he felt his smile hardening, "the miraculous disappearance of the potato blight from their village."

Aziraphale's face wore a fleeting look of guilt and fear. Then he tried to brazen it out. "My word! What a stroke of luck for them."

"Also the fact that the bins in which their seed potatoes had already rotted were now inexplicably filled with healthy ones."

"Extraordinary," Aziraphale said, faintly.

"At the next village I came to," Gabriel went on, "everyone was gathered round a--a--what do you call those metal things, they're like bowls but really big--"

"Cauldrons," Aziraphale murmured.

"Thank you. A cauldron, making some sort of soup. They had been making soup in that one pot for two hours, during which they had fed approximately five hundred people."

"An amazing achievement," said Aziraphale. "Really, the Irish should be given more credit for their thriftiness." 

"The cauldron was still full, Aziraphale."

"Was it?" Aziraphale's circulatory system seemed to be having some kind of malfunction. His face had gone almost as pale as his hair.

"I watched them serve the soup out of that thing for a half an hour. It stayed full."

"Remarkable," Aziraphale said. "Sounds like the cauldron was druid-made. You can't imagine how wily those druids are, and--"

"The cauldron had apparently been gifted to the village by a mysterious benefactor. A stranger, dressed all in white. This stranger was described by one local resident as "a bit soft in the head," by a second local resident as "a bit soft all over really," and by yet a third local resident as "a decent enough man, for a Saxon.""

Aziraphale let out an anxious little squeak.

"Some were at first inclined to view the gift as diabolical, but after the soup didn't kill anyone, and given the stranger's fashion choices, they concluded that the cauldron must have been given to them by an angel."

"Now--don't go jumping to conclusions--"

"After that," said Gabriel, "I simply followed the trail of increasingly egregious unauthorized miracles."

Gabriel drew the relevant ledger and a quill pen from the pocket of his greatcoat. He began going down the column.

"By three-twenty-five you had made your way--undoubtedly by miraculous means--to Cork city. At least so I assume, from the fact that at precisely three-thirty pm local time, a literal mountain of foodstuffs manifested in a park in Cork city centre."

"I wouldn't call it a mountain," Azirapahle demurred. "It was more of a gentle sloping--"

"In the surrounding outskirts, meanwhile, the steward of one of the larger estates was drawn, by the alarmed lowing of his cattle, to ride out and inspect some of his grazing land."

Aziraphale closed his eyes. He attempted to become invisible. He was too nervous to do it, and kept flickering in and out.

"He was astonished to discover that instead of grass, that field was growing sausages."

"I didn't realize there were cattle grazing there," Aziraphale said. "They were pork sausages, granted, but it must still have been...disconcerting..."

"Disconcerting?"

The final flicker faded. A fully visible, fully crestfallen Aziraphale manifested across the table from him.

"And finally," Gabriel said, "after tracing your miracles from one southern coastal town to another, I find you in this--tavern--"

Aziraphale groaned and covered his face in his hands.

"--surrounded by filthy humans, some of them female--"

"Oh, now, I won't have that. These humans are my friends--"

"--who are 'drinking your health,' by which they mean poisoning themselves and you with this--liquid--"

"It is poisonous, yes, but the humans do find it enhances a celebration. It's actually a very interesting phenomenon, I mean to make a special study of--"

"--by way of thanking you for--let me see if I have this right--"

Gabriel looked at his notes on the ledger. Aziraphale fell silent.

"For punching a man...in the face."

"It wasn't a man. I mean--it wasn't a human." 

Gabriel took a closer look at the form sitting opposite him. There was something new about it. Some...it was one of those human emotions. One of the hot ones. Anger. That was it.

"What was it then?" Gabriel said, brightly.

"It was Famine."

Gabriel laid down the pen. 

"You engaged in an altercation, in public, with another immortal entity."

"Yes. I did."

Gabriel made a few more notations.

"Aziraphale," Gabriel said, looking up from the ledger. "What can you possibly have to say for yourself?"

Aziraphale sighed, and kept his eyes fixed on the table.

"WHY?" Gabriel asked. "Why under Heaven would you do even one of these things, let alone ALL of them? Why did you go to Ireland in the first place?"

Now, at last, the crumpled being opposite Gabriel began to sit up and show a bit of fight. Gabriel was immensely relieved to see it. He always felt so much more righteous when someone else was being wrong at him.

"Because I had credible intelligence indicating that the demon Crowley had been ordered there to buy souls for hell from starving people. I assumed you would wish me to thwart him. I was after all under the impression that thwarting the wiles of evil is in fact my job."

"Your job, Aziraphale, is to thwart the wiles of the Evil One. Which are everywhere. It is not to thwart the wiles of one specific demon who happens to be based in England. You could have filed a report and then gone to Boston. It would have been acted on through the proper channels."

"Would it?" Aziraphale demanded. "Oh that's such a comfort, because until this instant, based on what I've seen since I disembarked this morning, I had come to the conclusion that I have never seen a place that so vividly meets the literal definition of Godforsaken."

"The Almighty sees and knows all, Aziraphale. None of the earthly Creation is ever or has ever been truly forsaken."

Demons, as they both well knew, being another story.

"You know very well--you said it yourself--that on a normal day this place is covered with humans who are begging Her for help. Not, you know, the way most people ask for her help with a difficult examination or a rugby match. Begging her to give them a mouthful to get by on. Begging for bread or milk or anything that will keep body and soul together for another day. Or if that's too much to ask, begging that they be taken right now so that they don't have to see any more of their children die. I thought, surely She will answer. Surely they'll send someone. Probably they'll send me. So I went without being ordered to. That's all."

"May I ask what you thought you were going to do when you got here?" Gabriel asked, icily. "Because I'd like to believe that you didn't plan this."

"I thought..." Aziraphale tried to pass one hand through his curls, was evidently disheartened by the nutshells, and gave up. "I managed to obtain a copy of a standard soul contract. I realized that it would be quite simple to introduce an escape clause into the fine print which provided that the individual who sold his soul could reclaim it by performing a simple task. So I added language indicating that if at any time the seller wished to regain title to his soul, all he had to do was give some portion of the gold he had exchanged for it to a person less fortunate than himself. And then I was going to set myself up at a little...booth, or something...just like the one Crowley would have and offer higher prices and so drive him out of the market. But I would tell them about the escape clause, you see. So they'd be able to get their souls back."

Gabriel was fairly certain that he had followed this explanation. And yet, the plan seemed to him, all the same, like...

"Insanity," Gabriel said. 

"I beg your pardon?"

"Aziraphale, we do not bribe the humans. That's what the Other Side does."

"Well why don't we?"

Gabriel stared at him.

"Why should the Other Side have all the money? You've no idea how hard that makes it--"

"Because the whole thing that separates good deeds from bad is that good deeds are altruistic and disinterested," Gabriel said.

"How can a human be expected not to take an interest in his own survival?" Aziraphale retorted.

Gabriel now began to feel truly appalled. Aziraphale seemed to realize that, and began backing down.

"But--but--well, it doesn't matter anyway because I got off the boat and I set up my shop and people began lining up and I looked at their faces and I just started giving the money away."

Gabriel clenched his teeth and then tried to turn it into a smile. He couldn't be sure if he had succeeded. 

"And caused a stampede," said Gabriel.

"Well...yes. A bit."

"Anyone hurt?" Gabriel inquired, in his most neutral tone.

"Miraculously, no."

Gabriel unclenched his jaw. Teeth were the worst thing about these stupid bodies. They were just pain waiting to happen.

"But then...I was out of gold, you see, and I didn't want to cause any more trouble, so..."

Gabriel burst out laughing. Aziraphale looked startled.

"You didn't want to cause any more trouble," Gabriel said, standing up. "Sure. Fine. So you just, very discreetly, miraculously cured a potato blight and created a magical bottomless cauldron and a literal mountain of food and--"

"It wasn't literally a mountain--"

"Sausages, Aziraphale?" Gabriel shouted, right into that maddening fleshy face. "SAUSAGES?"

"They are eating the grass!"

Gabriel was so startled to see Aziraphale lunging him that he was momentarily at a loss for words. Aziraphale repeated himself, jabbing his forefinger into the shoulder of Gabriel's coat to emphasize each syllable.

"THEY. ARE. EATING. THE. GRASS."

Aziraphale broke away from him. He took a few steps, came up against the door of the snug, leaned one hand against it, and took some deep breaths.

"Aziraphale."

Gabriel tried to say it gently. Aziraphale shook his head, and wouldn't look round.

"Aziraphale, Famine has been in this world since the Expulsion. Famine's always somewhere. This is not your first run-in with him."

"No," Aziraphale said.

Aziraphale finally turned around. But he still wouldn't sit down, and he looked now as if he had swallowed a teakettle that was still on the boil. Gabriel mentally noted the simile for future use.

"But so far, you have always managed not to put your fist through his face."

Aziraphale continued to steam.

"So what I am trying to understand here is why you became...sufficiently unhinged...to--"

"He--was--laughing!" Aziraphale shouted. "He was laughing and I went over to him--politely, of course, very politely, I asked if he would mind too terribly much not gloating about his triumphs, or at least not gloating over them in this particular pub at this particular time--"

"And he wouldn't."

"Actually, no. He said he would spare my sensibilities this once because he'd had such a perfect day. He said it was absolutely exquisite, here in Skibbereen...and..."

"And you punched him."

"No!"

"No?"

"No! I said, well we'll see about that, and he said you should really give it up, I rule here now and forever, I'll be lord and master of this place for as long as humans have stomachs."

Gabriel took a patient breath. "And it was at that point that you--"

"Of course not! I should I hope you would know I would know better than to be baited into swinging for him by...bog-standard braggadoccio. They love gloating, the Opposition. I've heard all the gloats."

"So if you could just cut to the chase," Gabriel snapped, "and tell me what exactly did make you punch him."

Azirpahale paused a moment. 

"Well, I said, the plague didn't last forever, and neither will phytophthora infestans. And then he said..."

Aziraphale broke off. Then reluctantly, angrily, he spat the rest of it out. 

"Famine said to me, 'Well you know what they say in these parts. "God sent the blight; but man made the famine." ' "

"And then you punched him."

Aziraphale nodded.

Gabriel made another note in the ledger. He stared at it, gloomily, for a few seconds, then slapped it closed and miracled it back Upstairs.

"Is it true?" Aziraphale demanded.

Gabriel looked at him. "That man made the famine?"

"That God sent the blight."

Gabriel couldn't believe it. "Aziraphale...you know how this works. The Almighty created life and life takes its course."

"That's not an answer."

"It IS the answer. This--organism--is just doing what all organisms were created to do. I mean I hate to say it about any of those disgusting ghouls, but Famine's right. The humans made him, and the humans are keeping him alive. There's always enough. It's a problem of distribution."

Gabriel felt a memory stirring.

"I understand. It's frustrating. You spent all that time with Joseph, back in the--I forget which Pharaoh it was--one of the Rameses, maybe--anyway. You thought you had Famine licked then. And he just keeps coming back. It drives you nuts. I get it. But."

Gabriel shouldn't have to justify the ways of God to an angel. He didn't have to justify them. And yet, something made him attempt it. Aziraphale was a princpality. He had been absolutely fearless, and absolutely terrifying, during the War. It was not only pathetic, but genuinely unnerving, to see him in such a decrepit spiritual condition. This mission had been too great a strain. Too much responsibility. 

"This is one of the things the humans are meant to learn, Aziraphale. How to share. If you just go around--miracling up solutions for them--they won't learn to make their own."

"Oh don't tell me," Aziraphale said, in a voice like death. "Don't tell me she's testing these people. It's not fair. It's just not--

"God is not testing them, Aziraphale!" Gabriel broke out, against his better judgment. "This is not a test for the hungry. It's a test for the well-fed."

Aziraphale, to his credit, did not pretend that he didn't understand this. But he also wouldn't stop arguing.

"But did She want this suffering? Did She intend it?"

"Aziraphale, the Almighty's intentions are not to be--"

"I can't believe She would--but if She did, then--"

"Aziraphale!" Gabriel shouted. "Shut up!"

Aziraphale opened his mouth.

"SHUT UP before you say something you'll regret for ever!"

Aziraphale's mouth closed and his eyes widened. It had now become extremely difficult for Gabriel to control this clumsy thing he was inhabiting. Its hands seemed to be shaking and he couldn't get them to stop, even when he folded them in front of him and tried to look nonchalant.

"You are on Earth to work with humans," Gabriel said. "To help them change their ways. Not to question the Almighty's."

"You don't understand." Aziraphale looked suitably chastened, and he had moderated his tone; but he was--unbelievably--still talking. "You've never been hungry. You don't know what it does to them. You can't ask people to--to--if you offer someone starving the chance to eat they'll sell you--anything. Their bodies--compel them to do it."

Gabriel began drafting a memo in his head. Recommendation for transfer of principality Aziraphale. Extended exposure to humans having clearly deleterious effects on his morale, psyche, and intellect.

"Why are human souls even--saleable--anyway?"

"Humans have free will, Aziraphale," said Gabriel. "That's the point of humans. Their souls are their own, to do with what they will. If they sign them away, they sign them away. The Almighty can't do anything about that. Not without ending free will."

"Nobody who's starving has free will."

"Aziraphale, I know these corporeal bodies are very--convincing--but they're temporary. A human body lasts, what, a century, tops. Souls are eternal. What does it matter what happens to their bodies during the second and a half they're living in them, as long as their souls come home to heaven?"

Gabriel had said things very similar to many of his colleagues, including Aziraphale, many times. Never before had he felt that saying it put him in danger of being punched.

"It matters to them," Aziraphale said, gripping the edge of the table rather tightly. "It matters a great deal what happens to your body, while you're in it."

The use of second person pronouns did not go unnoticed by either of them.

"Do you think," Gabriel finally said, "that this is the only place on Earth where people are suffering?"

Aziraphale let out an aggrieved sigh. "Of course I don't."

"Do you think there's something so special about the Irish that they deserve miracles, when everyone else has to suffer without them?"

"I--"

"You were asked to go to Boston to try to support the mission to end chattel slavery in the United States of America. Which do you think is more important? Feeding the Irish or freeing the slaves?"

The look on Aziraphale's face was extraordinary. A truly unique combination of astonishment, revulsion, and panic.

"Do I--do I have to rank their sufferings before I do anything about any of them?!" Aziraphale demanded, appalled.

"No, Aziraphale," Gabriel bit off, clasping his hands a bit tighter. "You don't. But I do."

"That's--"

"I am the one who listens to all those cries for help. I am the one who has to ignore some of them so I can send our covert agent to where he could help more of them. Running around throwing magic cauldrons and sausages everywhere only helps the people who happen to be standing next to you. I have to think about the whole world."

Unbelievable. In all the millennia they were working together, Aziraphale had clearly never for a moment tried to see this human mess from Gabriel's point of view.

"You want to make me the asshole?" Gabriel said, spreading his hands. "Fine. I'm the asshole. That's how I serve the light. By being the asshole who says no, Aziraphale, you can't make sausages grow out of the ground just because you feel bad for the tiny group of humans with which you are personally interacting. Because doing that jeopardizes our entire mission. It endangers the Truce. Because if we come out in the open, they come out in the open. If we take the gloves off, they take the gloves off. Just think about that for a hot second, Aziraphale. Is that what you want? You want the humans dealing with demons red in tooth and claw? You want another War of the Angels? Cause that's where your bullshit is gonna lead us."

Aziraphale's eyes just kept getting bigger. All the air seemed to have gone out of the rest of him.

There was a long and uncomfortable pause.

"Are...have we finished?" Aziraphale finally ventured.

"No," Gabriel said. 

"What are you...waiting for?"

"I'm waiting for instructions about what to do with you."

Aziraphale staggered back to the bench, and fell rather heavily into it.

Gabriel received his instructions.

"Unbefuckinglievable," Gabriel muttered.

"I'm sorry?" from Aziraphale.

"I have been instructed," said Gabriel, "to conduct you back to your bookshop in London."

A spark of life returned to Aziraphale's eyes. Gabriel tried not to hate the sight of it.

"Is...is that really all?" said a rather bewildered Aziraphale.

"No," said Gabriel. "I am also instructed to tell you two things."

Aziraphale braced himself for the worst.

"Number one: There is a ship sailing for Boston at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. You will be on it."

There was a sudden nodding of the dusty blonde curls as Aziraphale gratefully seized the opportunity to submit to the will of the Almighty.

"Yes. Yes, of course. Yes. Thank you. I--I won't fail you again."

"Number two," Gabriel said, ominously.

Aziraphale waited, cringing slightly.

"You are henceforth banned from Ireland."

"Banned?" said Aziraphale, with a bit of a squeal. "For how long?"

"Until the end of the world."

"Banned," Aziraphale murmured sadly. "Like the snakes."

"Snakes?" Gabriel made another mental note to his imaginary memo: N.B. successor should be issued with new body. The current body's thinking lump has clearly deteriorated over time.

"Yes. The snakes. You know. Banned. By St. Patrick."

Gabriel just barely stopped himself from taking the name of the Lord in vain.

"It's bad enough the humans making this drivel up without your believing in it," he said, instead.

Incredibly, after all the sentences that had passed between them, Aziraphale chose to lose his mind over this one.

"What--you mean--it's not true?"

"Of course it's not true!"

"But St. Patrick--"

"Was a great saint and did some miracles in his day but this thing with the snakes is just a joke that got out of control."

Aziraphale gasped. Gabriel decided he had had enough.

"You wanna know why there are really no snakes in Ireland, Aziraphale?"

"Why?"

"Because it's a fucking island."

Something was happening to Aziraphale that could not be explained even by a perfectly delivered archangelic zinger. Aziraphale did not look fit to return to duty. He did not look fit to run a bookshop. He looked as if the all of the crinkly pink glop inside that human head of his had somehow suddenly vanished.

"Are we good here?" Gabriel finally addressed himself to that empty stare. "Are we ready to go?"

Aziraphale nodded, slowly. His shattered expression finally dissipated. 

"All right then," said Gabriel. "Let's try to get you back to London without ending the detente."

"Detente," Aziraphale echoed, softly.

"Yes. It's French."

"I know it's French," said Aziraphale. "I was--well it made me think of another French phrase."

"Oh really?" Since Aziraphale was willing to pretend things were going back to normal, Gabriel was willing to play along. "Which one?"

Aziraphale looked him right in the eye.

"Laissez-faire," he said.

That son of a bitch. With all Gabriel was doing for him.

"Hang onto your head," Gabriel barked, and snapped his fingers.

III. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1847. BOOKSHOP OF A. Z. FELL & COMPANY, SOHO, LONDON. LATE EVENING.

Aziraphale had never exactly given Crowley a key to the bookstore. Aziraphale had never exactly asked Crowley to come over once in a while, when he was away on a mission, and growl at his house plants. Aziraphale had also never given Crowley permission to curl up in an armchair with a first printing of Paradise Lost and a double whiskey and while away the wee hours muttering to himself in iambic pentameter. Nevertheless, Crowley was now in the habit of doing all of these things, when he knew that Aziraphale would be out. Aziraphale's shop was very warm, his whiskey was superb, his collection of Milton's works was unparalleled, and his plants were a mess. Either they had simply abandoned themselves to perdition, or they were already so full of the fear of God that they simply couldn't absorb any more of it.

Of course, Crowley had always vanished himself as soon as he heard Aziraphale's key in the lock. Aziraphale loved keys. Antique iron contraptions with fussy little prongs made to fit ever so snugly into their little aperture. Every time Aziraphale heard that little metallic click he got this insufferably beatific look on his face. All because he had successfully operated one of the simplest machines ever devised by the mind of man. 

But not tonight. Tonight, he would wait. For days, if need be; but Crowley was fairly certain it needn't.

And there was the click. Right on the money. 

Crowley leaned back in the armchair, displaying his limbs to what he felt would be their best advantage, negligently dangling the priceless edition from the fingers of one elegant hand.

He heard the door slam. He heard Aziraphale take a few steps. Something about the rhythm bothered him. They were certainly his steps. And yet they didn't sound right. 

"Because it's a fucking island," he heard Aziraphale say, in tones of bitter mockery.

Crowley smiled. It was all going according to plan. At least it would, once Aziraphale actually looked at him.

And now to the drinks cabinet. Well, all the better for the machinations to come. Lubricate the gears and cogs and whatnot.

Ice cubes clinking in the glass. Bottle coming out of its cabinet. 

Silence. 

"Oh no," said Aziraphale, mournfully. "Not my Tallisker."

To hell with lurking. Lurking could go on forever. A spot of stalking would be more refreshing.

Slinking as sinuously as ever he could, Crowley moved into the doorway. Aziraphale had his back turned to him, absorbed in his pouring. Crowley waited until Aziraphale had finished, and was in the act of lifting the glass to his lips.

"You sure you wouldn't prefer Jameson?"

Aziraphale started. Crowley felt his ventricles expand and his blood start to rise in anticipation of one of Aziraphale's delicious angelic outbursts.

Then he saw the glass slip from Aziraphale's hand. He saw Aziraphale letting it fall. Before Aziraphale had even turned his face in Crowley's direction, Crowley had begun to feel a bit of a chill somewhere in his viscera.

"You," snarled Aziraphale.

Intellectually, of course, Crowley had known all along that Aziraphale was dangerous. He had always known that he was playing with fire, just as much as Aziraphale was. But he'd come to trust his own knowledge of Aziraphale's quirks and flaws and moods so much that all this feinting and parrying and thrusting was no longer laced with the thrill of danger. It had become a game of skill. Absorbing, of course; fascinating, even; but no longer a matter of life or death.

At this moment, however, Crowley was looking into Aziraphale's eyes, and he could quite clearly imagine Aziraphale ending him.

He tried to play it off, not because that seemed to him like a good idea, but because he didn't have any others.

"Well, angel," Crowley said. "How is dear old Ireland, and how does she stand?"

It accomplished one thing: Aziraphale's anger was no longer whole and perfect. Like a burning log, it had cracked all over. Through the fissures, something unexpectedly chilly was oozing out.

"You...played me."

Crowley slowly turned on a very triumphant smile.

"Like a maiden harp, angel."

"You made it all up."

"Well, the banned from Ireland bit, yeah. Did actually meet St. Patrick, not actually a fan. But."

"Well I hope you made it up about the deliverables," Aziraphale retorted. "I didn't get a single contract signed."

"Of course you didn't," Crowley said. "I knew you wouldn't. How you could not know that I knew you wouldn't--"

"Oh, shut up, Crowley!" Aziraphale shouted.

The bottle slammed onto the top of the cabinet, still open. It wobbled, then tipped over. Single-malt Tallisker began trickling over the edge of the cabinet and onto the floor. Crowley felt his insides morphing into a state which was diverging quite sharply from his still-insouciant outside.

"It wasn't faked," Crowley said. "They really did order me to go. I just didn't fancy the job. I like a bit more challenge, you know. Bit of danger, keep things interesting. It's dead easy, stealing from the poor. I'm bored with it."

"You told me your life was on the line!"

"Well," said Crowley, considering. "I didn't actually say that. I may have implied it a teensy bit--"

"You lied to me!"

"I'm a demon," Crowley said, hanging grimly onto his smile in the vain hope that Aziraphale might eventually be charmed by it. "That's what we do."

"I suppose it is!" Aziraphale said.

Aziraphale was not charmed. Crowley knew what Charmed Aziraphale looked like and this was definitely something very much else. The angel's voice was no longer entirely human. It had risen to a pitch Crowley had never heard him use. There was a weird resonance that could not be explained by any of the material acoustics of the room. It was not unbeautiful, but it was not at all inviting.

"I suppose I'm a fool for expecting you to be any different," Aziraphale finished.

The vibrations had altered. The sound of Aziraphale's voice had become sharply painful. But it was not a pain Crowley could locate. He could not understand the mechanism by which it was being inflicted. 

"So what exactly was the damage, angel?" Crowley made one more desperate attempt to recapture the teasing tone that had always so reliably fluttered Aziraphale's feathers. "How many miracles did you do?"

"So help me Crowley, if you don't get out of my sight immediately--"

"What exactly is the problem here, angel?" Crowley demanded, sharply. "You answered their prayers. What does it matter how? This is, what, the third year of this horror? And your lot have done bugger-all about it. You think those poor bastards care whether it was heaven or hell that finally got them some fucking relief?"

Aziraphale seemed to be choking on something he couldn't say. Since choking couldn't possibly be fatal to Aziraphale, Crowley kept going, though not without a rising sense of panic.

"You're an angel, aren't you? Isn't that what you do?" 

Crowley did not like what was happening with Aziraphale's breathing. Was it possible to discorporate yourself just out of barely-suppressed rage? No. No, surely not. If that were possible, Crowley would have spontaneously disintegrated sometime in the early fourteenth century.

Nothing to it but to go on through it. Crowley forced out an incredulous laugh.

"Are you actually angry with me," he said, "for 'tricking' you into doing them some good?"

Crowley could not actually see, from his position, any of Aziraphale's many antique barometers. But he felt certain that the air pressure in the bookshop had just doubled. He thought he could feel it doubling again. He wondered which of them would be the first to implode. He racked his famously wily brain for a means of defusing all this.

"Angel," Crowley said. "I think your eyeballs are discorporating."

Tears had, until that instant, been trembling in Aziraphale's eyes. Now they streamed all over his face. Down his cheeks and along his nose and into his open, screaming mouth.

"You've been--just--tempting me all this time!"

At odd hours, when he was bored, Crowley had imagined the moment when Aziraphale would finally grasp the true nature and purpose of the Arrangement. These pleasant daydreams had always involved Crowley cackling in triumph, and Aziraphale trembling at his feet, with his feathers all a-rustle. The present moment was soul-searingly, horrifyingly, utterly unlike any of that.

"You want me to fall!"

Aziraphale's words echoed off every surface in that bookstore. Crowley felt those echoes strike and burn him. In his ears, in his teeth, in his pulse, in his entire corporeal form. 

"How dare you!" Crowley heard himself shouting. "How--could--I'm in hell! All the time! Doesn't matter where this stupid body is! I am in hell, which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, point is I fucking know hell and--" 

These fucking human hearts. How did people live with these things? Crowley's was all right most of the time but then get into a tricky situation and it would just pound and pound and--

"You think I want that for you?" Crowley's lungs kept right on pumping and words just kept coming out of his throat. "I don't want any of that for you!"

Crowley felt his heart actually stop.

Not even for a whole second. Just long enough for Crowley to feel the full terror of what had just happened.

Because what Aziraphale had said about Crowley was true.

But what Crowley had just said about himself was also true.

He just hadn't known it was true until he said it.

Knowing that it was true felt very bad. 

It felt like falling.

It was only by looking at Aziraphale's stricken face that Crowley could form a rough estimate of what kind of shape he himself was now in. It's the damned body, Crowley thought, panicking. Downstairs words were just tools and nobody believed anyone and nobody expected to be believed. Words weren't about anything more than what you could use them to make someone do. But this damned body. Make a word out of your own breath and throat and tongue and teeth and you felt the truth or the lack of it and you just knew. It was awful. And more of this awful truth just kept coming out of him.

"If I thought that--because of me--those bastards would get their claws on--a single--feather of--I'd--"

Crowley could not push enough air into his stupid lungs to finish his stupid sentence.

Aziraphale took a deep breath. He gulped back some of his tears. Crowley thought he could see a kind of...agitation...going on behind Aziraphale's shoulders, rippling the back of his muddied cream-colored jacket.

"I'm sorry, Crowley. I'm so sorry." 

Aziraphale was walking toward him, slowly, hands raised tentatively. His voice had become gentle. So gentle. As soft and as kind as the days in Paradise.

"But--you were--but--I was--"

"Tempting me," Aziraphale said, softly. "I know. You didn't mean me any harm. You can't help it."

Aziraphale put a hand on Crowley's shoulder. It was so tempting. So tempting just to accept Aziraphale's kind, compassionate, even loving excuse for him. But I did mean harm, he thought. I could have helped it. You were right. Right and also wrong. I thought I wanted you to fall. But really I just want you with me.

"I forgive you," Aziraphale murmured.

"You shouldn't," Crowley rasped.

Crowley's eyes did not produce tears, per se. He had always thought of that as an advantage. Now, he envied Aziraphale the release tears evidently provided. All Crowley could do, it seemed, was collapse.

He slumped onto the floor, evading Aziraphale's arms. Crowley curled up into a tiny ball. He heard Aziraphale struggling out of his jacket. He heard the sound of fabric tearing. He felt warm currents stir around him as a pair of wings extended between the lantern dangling from the ceiling and his own shuddering body. He felt a thousand interlacing shadows ripple around him. He heard the floor creak as Aziraphale crouched down near him, with a sigh.

And then he was floating. Not in the air. In a snug little cocoon that smelled of starched linen, damp earth, rotten potatoes, stale beer, and--absurdly--pork sausages.

Aziraphale was carrying him, in his arms, upstairs. Crowley opened his eyes just a sliver. The candlelight from the wall sconces drifted down to him through the shifting screen of white feathers. Aziraphale's wings were wrapped round him as if they were the shell of an egg.

Crowley felt himself being gently deposited into the center of a very old, rather saggy feather bed. He unrolled himself. He risked a glance at Aziraphale. He was sitting in an overstuffed and tasseled armchair, drawn up to the bedside. He was wearing his radiance. It made the clothes look even funnier. But from the neck up, flushed with divine light, Aziraphale was beautiful. Beautiful the way Crowley once had been. Beautiful in the way She used to be.

"I can't cry," Crowley said. "My eyes just--don't do that. What do you do with one of these bodies when it can't cry? How do you--get rid of things?"

Aziraphale sighed. That little wrinkle of concern appeared between his eyebrows. "I don't know, Crowley."

Then, suddenly, Aziraphale (metaphorically) brightened.

"There's always music." 

"I hate it," Crowley said, rolling away. "Even before it turns into Handel, I hate all of it."

"I know!" Aziraphale said happily. "Poetry!"

"Oh, you bastard," Crowley groaned. 

"It will help."

"You great--feathery--hypocrite," Crowley continued. "Say you forgive me and then you torture me in my weakened state..."

But Aziraphale was already trotting eagerly down into the lair of the books. Crowley groaned. He kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks. Then he allowed himself to accept his currently reality long enough to remove his jacket and toss it on the floor. The blasted cravat soon joined it. He hastily detached the starched collar and flung that across the room. Further divestment would have required him to engage his conscious brain, which might begin bleating at him about motives and consequences. He crawled in his shirtsleeves and trousers toward the corner of the counterpane to pull it back. 

"NOT MILTON!" Crowley shouted, as he burrowed under the covers.

"Of course not Milton," Aziraphale said, padding back up the stairs with a leatherbound, musty, dapple-edged volume. "Whatever do you take me for? Ridiculous notion. Worst thing in the world for you in your present condition. Now."

Crowley watched him pop down into the armchair, glance sadly at the grass stains on his trouser knees, and go through the usual tiny series of incremental adjustments to the position, relative to the armchair's upholstered embrace, of what Crowley had long ago mentally nicknamed the sacred set-upon.  

Aziraphale watched him watching, with apparent serenity.

"Close your eyes and listen," Aziraphale said.

Crowley exhaled a sigh that was meant to sound very aggrieved and long-suffering. He closed his eyes. He heard Aziraphale drawing breath. All this time and he had never let himself know how whenever Aziraphale drew breath, Crowley's whole skin started to tingle.

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense," Aziraphale murmured. "As though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains..."

The radiance began to dim. Night stole through the open window. That terrible thing coiled around Crowley's heart began to stretch itself, expand, seep slowly into the rest of him.

"Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, but being too happy in thine happiness..."

Aziraphale was right. It did help. In some ways.

"That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim."

What forest, Crowley thought, could possibly hold the both of us? And how many tentacled creatures and destroying angels would have the run of it?

"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou amongst the leaves hast never known." 

There was a break in Aziraphale's voice, followed by a difficult breath.

"The weariness, the fever, and the fret, here where men sit and make each other groan...oh. No, I'm sorry. Here where men sit, and hear each other groan..."

Outside the window, there was an odd kind of whistling sound. Not a whistle, exactly. A kind of liquid trilling. Like the bubbling of spring water through a little silver pipe.

"Darkling I listen, and for many a time...I have been half in love with easeful death."

Crowley's eyes popped open. 

"Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme..."

"If Death touches you, angel, I will kick his insubstantial arse."

"It's not me, Crowley, it's Keats. Go take it up with him if you don't like it."

"Is he one of ours?"

"Well, he isn't one of ours. Ahem. To take into the air my quiet breath..."

Breath. It was all breath, this poem. Words flowing out, slower and slower, on one long sigh. Aziraphale's breath became the river that Crowley's impossible tears would have been. Buoying all his trouble up; bearing it slowly away.

"Was it a vision, or a waking dream?" Aziraphale said.

"Hell if I know," Crowley muttered. 

"Silence, foul fiend. Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?"

Sleep. That seemed like a good plan. Best plan either of them was likely to come up with, at the moment.

Crowley gave out a couple of unconvincing snores. 

Aziraphale pretended to be annoyed. He put the book down carefully on his little octagonal bedside table, retracted his wings, wriggled further into his chair, folding his hands decorously in his lap, and closed his eyes.

"Aziraphale," Crowley called.

"Yes, Crowley?"

"Don't be an idiot."

Aziraphale sighed. The bed creaked. The mattress gently nudged Aziraphale's body into the hollow in the middle.

Aziraphale's shirt was open at the collar, torn quite through over the shoulderblades, and very dirty. His trousers were stained with grass and grease and all manner of things. Crowley silently miracled the stains, and most of the smells, away. Aziraphale pretended to take no notice. Aziraphale lay on his back and sighed at the ceiling. Crowley turned over on his side, snaking one arm under Aziraphale's neck, resting his head on Aziraphale's partially-bared chest. Aziraphale slipped one hand protectively around the back of Crowley's head. 

For a few moments, all Crowley could hear was the sound of Aziraphale's breathing, and his own. That, and the noisy, noisy bird perched, apparently, right on the damn windowsill.

"Aziraphale," Crowley finally said.

"Hmm?"

"I mean it. I don't want you to fall. Not ever."

Another one of those long sighs whispered through Crowley's disordered hair.

"If I fall," Aziraphale said, "it won't be your fault."

"Whose fault would it be then?"

"Gabriel's."

"Fucking Gabriel," said Crowley, snuggling in closer. "Fuck that guy."

Aziraphale did not join in the merriment.

"Or I suppose," Aziraphale said sadly, "it'll be because I can't do anything else."

"Nope," Crowley said, drowsily. "Your first instinct was right. Blame Gabriel."

"Thing is, he's...I mean...I think he's sort of...right..."

"Gabriel?" 

"But I know he's also...very wrong."

"Oh well then," Crowley said.

"I don't understand how both things can be true at the same time."

"That's ineffability for you," said Crowley.

In making this allusion to the Almighty, Crowley felt little filaments of panic start to blossom along his nerves. It made him want to roll away. To get out of this bed and go down the stairs and just keep on walking.

No. He did not want to roll away. He was merely afraid to be where he wanted to be. It was past time for him to learn that the two things were not the same.

"What are you going to do about those contracts?" Aziraphale said.

"Forge them like I always do," Crowley murmured.

Aziraphale, to Crowley's great relief, laughed.

"You just make up the names?"

"No, I use real ones. Law of averages, some of them wind up Downstairs, people think oh, well done Crowley. When I had nothing to do with it."

Aziraphale fell silent. Crowley wondered if Aziraphale was concerned about how long even Crowley's luck could hold out. And then Crowley started wondering about it. If one day, some petifogging little tick like Belial took it into her head to start following up...

"This is dangerous," Crowley said.

"I agree."

"We should stop."

"You mean the Arrangement? Or the sleeping in each other's arms?"

"Both."

Aziraphale pulled Crowley in a bit closer.

"Tomorrow I'm getting on a ship bound for Boston. I may be in America for some time."

It was painful to hear; but it was an enormous relief. Aziraphale hadn't been fired. And his corporeal form would soon be in a faraway place where Crowley would not be tempted to interfere with it.

"There'll be a...pause...in any case," Aziraphale said, thoughtfully. "So we needn't--decide about--stopping."

"And when the pause is over?" said Crowley.

The notes of that bird outside the window filled up what would otherwise have been a deathly silence. 

 "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Crowley sighed. He closed his eyes.

"What a day," Aziraphale said. "From one end to the other, just one long, terrible disaster."

"Disaster," Crowley murmured. "Absolutely."

Sleep finally came to Aziraphale. Crowley lay in the dark, listening to him breathe. 

Sleep would be a reprieve. It would not be a solution. Some other would have to be found.

Outside, the nightingale finished her song. She listened, for some minutes, to the unanswering night. Then she spread her wings and flew away. 

THE END