Chapter Text
Right, where to begin.
Back in the beginning, before there was anything of note, things were chaotic and… well, just a bit lumpy. Everything was still unformed, and the only thing that was really there in the great and unending void of nothingness was the darkness, which swirled and thought and eventually got a bit bored of there being absolutely nothing else in the vast chasm of existence. So, it started to make things. If it had understood the concept it would have known that it was lonely, just its great unceasing self with nothing to do and no one to have a nice chat with. So, after an indeterminate amount of time that might have been a second and might have been a millennia, it gave up the parts of itself to create… more.
Planets, and burning stars to warm them, then more stars, enough to fill eternity, the great cosmos spinning out around itself. Finally, there was light, and it ate at the darkness but created more, so it let it be. It parcelled up everything it was into new forms and breathed life on them.
Thus, the Earth was born.
Thus, everything else was born too.
The Earth came out lumpy and misshapen, and first the darkness wept to see it, filling great ravines with its tears until much of its surface was covered with salt-water. But then it saw the beauty of it, all the grey and blue, and despite its faults there was something singularly magnificent about it, about its very existence.
It was at that moment that the darkness began to think of itself as a mother, or perhaps The Mother, and so she took it upon herself to help this one little planet along a bit.
The All-Mother created guardians for the little-planet-that-could, and left them on the mountain tops, and wandered away to the next world, to see what else could be made.
She left these beings quite alone.
That might have been her biggest mistake.
The Guardians were supposed to have come out all the same, equal of might and temperament, but of course, once you breathe life into something you lose your ability to control them. They soon developed their own personalities, their own feelings, and their own hatreds as well. They called themselves Gods, and at the beginning, they had no qualities, no tasks to guide them.
They entertained themselves as best they could, and unfortunately, that led very quickly to war, because that is exactly the sort of thing that happens when mothers wander off and leave their children to their own devices.
What they argued about is lost to time. Whether it was over space, or power, or simply that they didn’t like each other very much is no longer known by anyone other than the Gods themselves, and they are not talking. What is known is that some of the Gods overpowered the others and threw them from the mountaintops to the ground below. It was – and remains – impossible to kill a God, but banishment from their mountain fortresses was certainly a manageable task. It was then that the Gods took upon themselves the tasks that had been waiting for them, bowed their heads to the mantle of their powers. The greatest Gods on the mountains acquired the celestial duties, and the lesser Gods of the mountains found themselves with smaller roles, some of which didn’t seem to make any sense. They simply sat and watched and waited whilst the stronger Gods looked after the air and blew the winds and formed the clouds and moved the sun across the sky and painted new stories into the skies. They formed strict hierarchies and divisions between themselves, based on their duties, and all settled into their appointed roles.
The Gods on the ground took over maintenance of the earth itself. They knew the taste of the sea and the touch of the leaf and the feeling of the earth on their backs from when they had been cast from the mountaintops, so they found themselves caring for the sea and the land and the plants and the animals that soon began to fill the land and water, wished into being by Gods or else simply just appearing, as if they had been waiting for a God to arrive to look after them.
And so, after the Great Divide, there were in fact two kinds of Gods: the Celestial, and the Chthonic. It was quite a neat divide and quite a well-structured world, and all might have continued in this easy separation had there not been an entire other realm that neither team had paid any attention to whatsoever.
The Afterlife.
And that is where our story begins.
“Oh, bugger,” Aziraphale said. “Bugger, bugger, bugger.”
Luckily, because he was a relatively minor God on a mountain full of Very Important Deities no one paid all that much attention to him, or to the scroll that he was clutching in his hands, which had suddenly become rather sweaty. He had received the missive moments previously from one of the lesser messenger Gods, who had seemed rather overwhelmed at being tasked with carrying a message directly from Metatron and had almost thrown it at Aziraphale in his panic to get rid of it.
If he had known what it was Aziraphale wouldn't have caught it. Or would have thrown it off the mountain before opening it. Or maybe just thrown himself off. It was a close call.
The scroll was embossed with Metatron’s heavy seal, gleaming gold and catching the light, shining rather annoyingly into Aziraphale’s eyes. He had never been sent a message from him before – why would he have? No one cared much about what a minor God of protection was up to, let alone the great God of prophecy. He had presumed that if he spent his days flying enough below the radar, no one would ever really notice him or remember that he wasn’t doing much – but evidently, he was incorrect.
It was there, irrevocable, on his scroll.
Reassignment to Underworld duty.
The Gods had never considered it, when they were dividing things up – back then there had been nothing living on the Earth yet. Maybe the occasional mollusc, if you were going to be picky, but no one really thought much about them other than the God of molluscs, and according to everyone that had met him, he was rather weird. It had only been later, when life had flourished and the Gods had created, that they realised that the natural end point of life was death, and that souls needed to go somewhere.
By the time they realised that the Underworld even existed, it had been an administrative nightmare which neither side had any interest in claiming. There were very tense discussions about whose jurisdiction it fell under. Gods very carefully did not have arguments as they debated. The Celestials said that, since it was conceptually an ‘Under’ world, it should belong to the Gods who ruled the world. Unfortunately, said Chthonic deities were having absolutely none of it, mostly because they had been the ones kicked off the mountains down to earth in the first place.
No one wanted to deal with it.
Eventually, the Celestials had ended up in charge of it, probably because the God of lawyers had ended up on the Chthonic side in the fall (humans hadn’t been created at that point, and therefore neither had lawyers, so she didn’t have much to do but bully Celestials in God-court). They had taken responsibility for it immediately, by pretending it didn’t exist. They had allocated someone to be in charge of it, Aziraphale vaguely remembered, but no one had actually gone down there and taken a look at it.
Evidently, someone had changed their mind.
Name: Aziraphale
Classification: deity, minor
Duty: protection [unconfirmed]
Assignment: Underworld administration
Instructions: proceed immediately to location of new assignment and begin task.
“Bugger,” he repeated one final time, though he wasn’t convinced anyone was actually listening. It was frustratingly vague, but then again he supposed Metatron had never seen the Underworld to be more specific. What exactly was his task, and what was the administrative structure of the Underworld in the bloody first place?
He was not looking forward to finding out for himself.
He continued to stare at the scroll for the entire trip to the Underworld, which involved some rather unpleasant temporal and cross-dimensional shifting that left his stomach in knots and his eyes watering. On the plus side, that did mean that he couldn’t see all that much of the place when he actually did arrive, just a blur of grey and beige around him. Beneath his feet was heavy stone and against his skin was the touch of dry, still air; in the far distance, he could hear the slow, soporific sound of water lapping gently against a shore. Everything smelt vaguely stale.
“You must be the new guy,” came a voice, quite suddenly out of the stillness.
Aziraphale started, and rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear his vision. It took him a moment or two, but things finally swam into focus. The place was strange – it felt like outside, with the dim light of a grey afternoon, but above him was a stone ceiling, not quite close enough to be claustrophobic but close to it. He was facing a wall, stretching out indefinitely into the distance, carved of blocks of stone taller than he was. Who had made them, he wondered, briefly – what primordial force had shaped this barrier?
In front of him was a gap in the wall, informal and wide. The land between it was trodden flat with the footsteps of millions, forming a path that stretched on into the distance across the arid land behind the wall. There was something strange about it, some shimmer of power that made it difficult to look at. Instead, he let his eyes slide to the side, where a figure was sitting on top of the wall. She was staring right at him, dark hair and copper skin, markings in gold etched across her face and arms, jade beads in long strands looped around her. She was strange, and otherworldly, and distinctly not a Celestial being.
The weird part about it was that she was clearly not a Chthonic, either.
“Anathema,” she said, swinging her legs slightly. “God of witchcraft, magic, doorways and the dead. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to turn up and sort this place out?”
Aziraphale hadn’t even known there would be another God down here. He just shook his head dumbly.
She rolled her eyes and hopped down from the wall, landing gracefully, despite the height.
“I suppose I had better show you around.”
To say that Aziraphale did not like the Underworld was an understatement.
Anathema made for a thorough tour guide. She showed him first the rivers of the Underworld, none of which were particularly pleasant. The Styx first, the river of hatred, encircling the Kingdom seven times, which Aziraphale couldn’t help but feel was a bit of an overkill. The Acheron next – the river of pain – which was awful, full of bones and with a crumbling bank that threatened to topple you in it at any moment. The Lethe – forgetfulness – oozed unpleasantly, nothing like water should, and emitted a strange odour that seemed to settle on the skin and in clothes, lingering long after you had left it. The Cocytus was introduced to him as the river of wailing, and yes, the water did let out eerie screaming sounds. Aziraphale tried very hard not to think about the actual logistics of that.
The Phlegethon was on fire. That just seemed unnecessary.
“Oh, umm, yes. Lovely,” he mumbled, when Anathema looked at him.
She snorted.
“Come on, lets get you inside. There is only one road into the Kingdom of the Dead – makes things a bit easier, but it does lead to traffic jams. We’ve cleared everything for day, so you can get a bit of a sense of it all.”
“One entrance doesn’t seem very practical,” he replied. “Why not have more?”
She shrugged. “Harder to maintain, I suppose. This world is created through need and necessity though – it does what its King wants, and it has never had a King. There are rumours though – that sometimes pathways open in the rock, right when people need them the most, though I don’t know if that is true or not.”
Aziraphale could have done with an emergency escape route, he thought to himself as they left the rivers behind them and turned back to the gates. This place was horrible.
“Does it get better?” he asked, his voice a bit hoarse, as they reached the fields of dead grass.
“I’m afraid not.”
Through the gates was the main thoroughfare to the dead, and to his surprise, there were a number of other Gods waiting to meet him. The Gods of Anxiety stood alongside Grief and Agony; Disease huddled with Old Age and Hunger; War and Discord and the Furies whispered as he passed; twins brothers, Death and Sleep, went hand-in-hand; Need stood alone, skeletal arms reaching for something that only he could see. All of them were like Anathema – neither Celestial nor Chthonic. Belonging to neither side. Something else entirely.
None of them looked particularly happy to see him, and he rather felt that the feeling was mutual.
His eye was caught by the tall boughs and huge limbs of a distant tree. Other than the dead grass beneath his feet, it was the only other form of plant life that he could see.
“What is that?”
“That is the Elm tree.”
“Oh, umm. I see.” Aziraphale squinted at in, and in particular at the rather strange looking lumps that seemed attached to its limbs. “And, umm. What is hanging from those branches?”
Anathema shot him a look. “Those are the Oneiroi. Did… did they tell you nothing about all of this before they sent you down here?”
Aziraphale shook his head, trying hard not to look too embarrassed. “What are they?”
She was frowning now.
“The Oneiroi? They are false dreams. If you touch them, you are trapped forever by their spell.”
“Oh. Um. That’s nice. Should they really be out here then, where anyone could just wander up and fall into them?”
She stared at him. She didn’t seem to quite know what to say to that, which wasn’t very reassuring.
“I think we’ll skip the bestiary for now,” she said, in the end. She sounded a little faint.
Aziraphale was not particularly upset. The tree had been unsettling enough – he wasn’t sure his nerves could handle the great monstrous beasts of the Underworld quite yet.
“There is one other person you have to meet,” Anathema said, pulling herself together. “I have to warn you, he isn’t the most pleasant. Eyes like fire, wild hair, filthy cloak, that kind of thing. Some people think he does it deliberately to cultivate the image – to be honest, I think he is just a bit dirty. Indoor plumbing isn’t the best down here. Terrible water pressure.”
“You know,” Aziraphale replied. “You’re really not selling the place to me.”
“No,” Anathema said. “I don’t suppose I am.”
He waited for the apology. It was not forthcoming.
“So who is it I have to meet?”
“The Ferryman,” she muttered, glancing around the Gods still hovering at the side of the path. “He brings the souls of the dead across the river to the Kingdom. He is of vital importance and is an absolute pain. Where the hell…”
“Witch!” came a scratchy voice that probably had great aspirations to booming, but hadn’t quite made the cut. A God shambled out from behind the crowd, looking even worse than Anathema had described. Her arms were folded, looking decidedly unimpressed.
“Witch!” he repeated, a little shaky this time, as if he had been waiting for a response that he had not been given. “What gives you the right to summon me from my task?”
“New God,” she replied, hooking a thumb in Aziraphale’s direction. “Supposed to be in charge. Sent from upstairs.”
The Ferryman blinked. “Oh. Looks like a bit of a pansy, doesn’t he?”
Anathema pulled a face, as if Aziraphale wasn’t even there. He was half tempted to apologise and leave, just to make things a bit less awkward, but before he could she turned back to him.
“Aziraphale, this is Shadwell. He is horrible, don’t bother talking to him at all unless he stops doing his job and you need to fire him, in which case do so immediately and hire someone competent.”
Shadwell grumbled, and glared some more at Aziraphale, looking entirely unimpressed. Aziraphale couldn’t really blame him. He was feeling increasingly out of his depth, and borderline terrified. He had no clue how he had ended up here, or even what he was supposed to do. Anathema must have caught the panic on his face, because she hooked an arm through his, and started to drag him away.
“Come on, you,” she said. “Let's get you inside.”
Further down the path, appearing as if from nowhere, were a vast pair of iron gates, dull in the grey light. They seemed to suck in the light around them, making them appear looming, and rather intimidating. Fortunately, Anathema did not let him hesitate – she pulled him bodily through them, into a vast stone courtyard. The stone flags beneath his feet were dark, and cracked. He stared at his feet, hoping that if he did everything else would go away. Around the courtyard were huge, looming buildings, pale grey and imposing, dark open doorways looking like gaping mouths.
“That one is the palace,” Anathema said, pointing at a building – they all looked rather similar to Aziraphale. “All the others are the administrative buildings. But you’ll know all about those, at least.”
Aziraphale’s mouth fell open. Unfortunately, no words actually came out of it.
She bowed to him, a short and sharp thing that made him rather uncomfortable and disappeared almost immediately. Aziraphale forced himself to take a deep breath and walk towards the palace. Surely it couldn’t be that bad.
He was wrong, of course. It would have been entirely counter to the rest of the day if he had been correct.
The palace was made of the same dark stone as the floor of the courtyard, designed with countless vast rooms that seemed to contain absolutely nothing but dust and the pervading sense of abandonment that he himself was starting to feel. The windows were tall and paned with fine glass, but the weak light outside did little to alleviate the pervading sense of gloom that seemed to have settled over the entire place. He wandered, lonely and more than a little miserable until he found himself in another courtyard. This was a small, internal one, tucked away, presumably for the private use of the occupant of the palace. The stonework was paler here, almost white, and there was a long bench running down one side of it. In the centre was the skeletal frame of a long-dead tree, and beneath his feet shed leaves let out a rasping sound that cut through the silence like a knife.
He sank onto the bench, took a deep breath, and forced himself not to scream.
Aziraphale had expected things to be a bit of a mess, but never in his wildest dreams had he thought it would be as bad as this. He spent his first week mindlessly staring at the chaos, trying and failing to come up with ways to fix it. The main problem was that the issues, the things he had to fix, were all incomprehensibly large. There were millions of unprocessed souls, animal and insect and fish and human, and everything was all waiting in one line, no semblance of organisation. There was no clear method of processing, and the strange ethereal spirits that were trying to do so clearly could not differentiate between types of spirits, or good and bad, so could only stare at their files in confusion for the longest time before rubber-stamping them with either a positive or negative sign. And that was another thing! There were two vast holding rooms beyond processing, one filled with ‘positive’ signs, for the souls deemed good, and another one filled with the ‘negative’. But there was no real difference between the two other than that the ‘negative’ room was always slightly too warm and smelt a little stale. They called it a holding room, but Aziraphale had absolutely no idea what they were supposedly holding these souls for, or why nearly all of the lobsters had been designated evil.
The system wasn’t working, that much was clear, but he was entirely overwhelmed by the mess of it. The wraiths kept staring at him hopefully, their shoulders slumping when he quickly walked away, avoiding having to admit that he didn’t know what to do.
And that was the worst part of it! Everyone seemed to assume that he would know everything, that he should be able to fix it – they were treating him like he was meant to be down here, rather than just an administrative patch up who was here against his will. It was strange, and deeply uncomfortable.
It was on one day, as he was carefully avoiding eyes and trying to temper down the panic, that he accidentally walked into the relics hall – a great chamber full of indeterminate things that were apparently of great importance to the Underworld, even though they were all covered in dust and had apparently never been used. And by walked in, he meant fell, tripping over the doorframe and crashing into the one closest to the door, knocking it right off its pedestal and onto the floor, where it smashed. It had been a lovely thing, made of metal and jade, and as he read the little card that had once sat next to it he felt his heart sink.
‘The Scales of Justice’. Oh dear. He wasn’t entirely convinced he knew what they were, but they sounded rather important.
Rather than do the mature thing, which was to report the damage and get on with things, Aziraphale promptly panicked, and ran away. He fled the palace and the courtyard and the grey dullness of the administrative buildings and their endless lines of souls. He was definitely not avoiding responsibilities, or hiding from anyone that might ask him questions that he didn’t know the answer to. He was walking very quickly (because it was healthy, not because someone might catch up) when he saw something that he had never seen before, which was rather unusual in the grey and monotone landscape.
A door, cut into the rock, small enough that you might not have noticed it unless you had been panic-staring at the walls in terror at the idea of eternity doing the same thankless administrative chores. He slipped through the gap before he had a chance to think, finding himself in a narrow tunnel. Pathways out of the Kingdom of the Dead, he thought to himself, recalling Anathema’s words. Appearing to those who needed them the most. He felt the sandy dirt beneath his bare feet, and he was gone before he even had a chance to think it through, slipping through the gap.
It was cool in there, darker, and the path twisted this way and that at a gentle incline. There was something still and calm about it, as if no one had ever passed this way before, and he wondered if Anathema had been right – did these places really only appear when they were needed to? It seemed too whimsical for the mighty Kingdom of the Dead, and he wasn’t really sure why it would do this for him anyway. He didn’t belong here, after all – he was a Celestial, a minor protection deity without a true purpose or duty, just put here to fill in an administrative gap.
He walked for what might have been hours and what might have been minutes as he told himself this, until it began to feel different. The air began to feel fresher, cleaner. A breeze was moving against his skin, movement the likes of which he had not felt since he had come down to the Underworld. The light was getting better too, brighter, more like the actual sun – and then, suddenly, there was another doorway, and-
The living world.
It stretched out before him, shining in the sunlight of early morning. Oh, he had seen it from the mountains of course, stretching out in blurry swatches of colour, but that had been without detail and focus, without the specifics.
The exit was a small doorway in a cliff face, he realised as he stepped out, the side of a craggy mountain surrounded by a forest. He had seen forests, admired them from afar, but he had never really understood what those vast stretches of green would look like up close. He didn’t know there were so many types of tree, for a start – that some would have silver bark, and others would have leaves that were purple-red. He had not realised that there would be plants underfoot, or that birdsong would sound so lovely, or even that the air would smell the way it did, sweet and full of earthy decay.
He should not be going out into the world of the Chthonic Gods. This was not his land, his territory.
A cool breeze kissed the back of his neck, blowing from the tunnel.
Then again, the Underworld wasn’t really his home either.
He took a step forward, and no thunderbolt came from the sky to smite him.
He took another, and smiled.
Aziraphale was quite pleased with himself. Not only had he found his way to the surface, nothing had killed him yet. He had been wandering for hours, soaking in the feeling of it, the sun against his skin and the leaves under his feet. The other Celestials had always told them that the earth was an evil and corrupt place, full of the Gods thrown off their mountains for the blasphemy and sinful ways, but this place was quiet, and serene, and lovely. Maybe they just hadn’t seen this bit of the earth before?
Then, through the trees, came a voice, loud and angry, enough to make Aziraphale jump.
“You know what? There is nothing acceptable about this. Do you really think I would stand for this? Were you intending to disappoint me?”
Aziraphale dithered for a moment, all his immediate responses set to flight-mode. He would have listened to them and run away, had he not realised quite suddenly that there was no response. Who on earth was speaking, and who were they speaking to? He crept closer until he could make out the shape of a figure
There, half-tangled in a mass of ivy, stood a God… and no one else.
He held one small pink flower between his fingertips, and was glaring at it with a level of fury normally not directed at innocent plant life. He appeared to be… lecturing the plants.
“Honestly, I give you chance after chance. I don’t ask much! All I want is for you to grow, and-”
A stick cracked under Aziraphale’s foot, and the God whirled round.
“Who the hell are you?” Fat flowers were blooming around his feet, bright begonias that curled around his ankles possessively. His hair was red, his skin was pale, and his eyes… oh, his eyes. Aziraphale had never seen anything like them before.
, Of course, he hadn’t, he realised suddenly. This was a Chthonic God. Bloody hell.
“Oh goodness, I am sorry, please excuse me,” he sputtered, trying to move backwards with as much grace and speed as possible, away from the God he had unwittingly interrupted. Oh, this would be his luck – first time out on earth, accidentally dismembered by an evil God that Aziraphale had actually walked over to.
“No, wait – oi, come back!” the God was calling after him, but Aziraphale was not about to stop and see what he wanted. Unfortunately, the world seemed to disagree with him, and promptly used a tree root to trip him up. He lay face down in the dirt for a moment, stunned, until he registered footsteps coming up to him, at which point he made a rather half-hearted attempt to crawl away.
“Look, I’m… are you afraid of me?” the other God sounded rather bewildered. Aziraphale used the moment to roll over onto his back, so at least he would see what was coming. Instead of the large and grotesque weapon he had been imagining, the God just had his hands folded across his chest, staring down at Aziraphale with a look of amused confusion on his face.
“I… umm… well, I suppose – that is to say, aren’t you one of them?” Aziraphale managed to say. Not quite his most eloquent, but he supposed he could be forgiven.
The God was dressed in a rather dramatic series of flappy bits of black fabric draped over him (Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure how they were all staying together, let alone staying on, but he was glad they were because if there was one thing right now he couldn’t deal with it would be his possible-murderer accidentally flashing him). The God was smiling a bit now, the corner of his mouth twisting upwards, as if he was as unsure of what to make of Aziraphale as Aziraphale was to make of him.
“That probably depends on what ‘one of them’ is.”
“A Chthonic God,” Aziraphale said, blinking. “One of the earth-bound deities.”
The God smirked. “Was it the plants that gave it away? It’s always the plants.”
He offered Aziraphale a hand, as if to pull him up, but Aziraphale just stared at it owlishly. What on earth was going on?
“I’m not supposed to talk to you!”
The God did not withdraw the hand.
“Are you not? Oh dear. You’re not doing a very good job of it.”
Things were getting a bit awkward now, so Aziraphale let him help pull him to his feet. He didn’t seem particularly threatening, though he had been warned in the past that Chthonic Gods were wily beings, full of tricks. He dusted himself down, hoping that the Underworld cleaning service would be able to get the grass stains off.
“You’re not supposed to talk to me either!” he reminded the God. “We’re hereditary enemies!”
“Why, because you’re a Celestial?” the God asked, looking a little confused. “You don’t feel much like a Celestial.”
Aziraphale could feel the gentle push of powers against his own, far softer and kinder than other Gods normally did. It was a normal way to check for Godhood, for powers and strength, but normally people were a lot rougher with Aziraphale, correctly assuming that a God with such limited strength could do nothing in response.
“Well, I’ve been reassigned lately,” he replied.
“Reassigned?”
“Yes. To the Underworld.” He expected this God to look as disgusted as a Celestial would at such an unpleasant assignment, but he just looked curious.
“Then what are you doing here?” he asked.
Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I ran away.”
“Permanently?”
“Well, no. But I accidentally broke the scales of justice so I thought I had better… make myself scarce. For a while at least.”
“You did what?” the God was grinning now, wide, his eyes dancing with amusement.
“I knocked them over,” he admitted.
“Can’t have been very sturdy then,” the God told him, in a voice that was clearly trying very hard to be reassuring. “Probably weren’t all that important anyway, if they would just break like that.”
“No, they were a bit flimsy,” Aziraphale replied, and despite himself he realised that he was smiling too, and feeling quite a bit better about the whole affair.
“Sorry, what was your name?” the other God asked, and Aziraphale blinked. He probably shouldn’t be standing around making introductions, but then again, the God hadn’t really done anything threatening.
“My name? Oh, Aziraphale.”
“I’m Crowley. Plants, growth, that sort of thing.”
Crowley. It wasn’t a name he was familiar with, but Aziraphale had never really paid attention to the names of the Chthonic deities, other than the greatest and strongest, who had led the rebellion to get themselves kicked off the mountains. There were thousands of Gods on both sides whose names were never remembered.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, realising that he had been staring and that he was supposed to reply in kind. It was only polite, given that Crowley had told him his powers. “Protection. Sort of. Never been fully confirmed.”
“Really? How so?” Crowley asked, with genuine interest.
Aziraphale shrugged. “Never manifested anything properly.”
“Oh well. It happens.” Normally people responded to this sort of information with distain, or worse, pity. Some Gods never quite came into themselves – there was a sense of what their powers were about in the edges of their magic, but they did not develop any specific gifts beyond the basic ones that they all had. Aziraphale was one such God, normally overlooked and disregarded, but Crowley was still just looking at him, his expression barely changed.
“I suppose so,” he replied. It felt quite nice, not to be completely ignored by someone the moment they found out about him.
Crowley flashed him a grin.
“You’re still talking to me, you know.”
“I… well, you’re still talking to me as well!” Aziraphale sputtered, but Crowley just shrugged in response.
“I didn’t have any issue with it to begin with.”
It probably didn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things, did it? No one would watch Aziraphale, and even if they did, why would they care if he spoke to a Chthonic deity now and again? He had been irrelevant enough to get sent on Underworld duty – if one of them did decide to torture or dismember him, none of the other Celestials would care that much anyway.
“I should get going back,” he said. Crowley’s smile faded a little.
“You’re going to come back?” the other God asked, and Aziraphale bit his lower lip.
“I… probably shouldn’t.”
Crowley was watching him carefully, with those strange and lovely eyes. “Yeah, but who is going to stop you?”
Aziraphale looked up at the sky. It was much further away here than it had ever seemed to be on the mountains. There was more space here, he realised. Less of the crushing weight of obligation and expectation that he had always felt as a member of the Celestial host.
“I suppose I can make my own rules now, can’t I?”
“Exactly,” Crowley said, reaching out and tapping a single finger against Aziraphale’s hand. “So… come back?”
Aziraphale smiled, a sudden flush across his neck.
“Okay. I will. Are you normally around these parts?”
Crowley ducked his head, as if he were a little embarrassed.
“I can be,” he said, his voice warm. “I will be, if I get to see you again.”
Crowley hadn’t been entirely sure that the strange sort-of-Celestial would show up again, but to his surprise, several days later, he reappeared from between the trees. Crowley had been hovering around the place, trying to see if he could work out where Aziraphale had come from, with no success – he supposed it was rather inevitable that the route to the Underworld would be hidden from all those who were not supposed to be there.
He liked Aziraphale. He was interesting and far different from many of the other Gods that he had known – most of the ones he had met he disliked, which was why he spent so much of his time tucked away in far-off corners of the earth like this one, avoiding all communication and occasionally spending weeks at a time in his snake-form. But he was willing to forgo the comfort of that form for Aziraphale – though it had been very amusing to watch him flinch the first time Crowley had shifted in front of him.
But Aziraphale had a good sense of humour and asked lots of interesting questions about the world, particularly when he forgot that he was supposed to hate all Chthonic deities.
Crowley had known many Celestials in his time, from when he had lived on the mountains and from when he had been kicked off them – not that he had really done anything wrong, as far as he was concerned. Aziraphale wasn’t like any of the others he had known. He was smaller, not just in size but in… well, everything. He seemed to curl in on himself as if he was waiting to be told off. It made Crowley a little irate, if he thought about it too hard.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his Godhood was undeveloped. Crowley had come into his own powers a long time ago now. He had been one of the first. He had been lying in the dirt, in the crater he had made from when he had been thrown from the mountains, but unlike so many others he had not been staring at the sky, filled with grief, wondering how it had all come to this. Not him – he had been distracted by the dirt on his skin, the smell of it, the feeling of something, deep below him in the earth.
He knew what that was now, of course – it was the potential of plants, the power of them, the power that was his to twist and shape and bring out into the daylight. When the other fallen Gods had been trying to work out what to do next, he had been chasing that feeling, and so his Godhood had come to him earlier than it had to others. He knew who he was, on a deep visceral level.
Aziraphale didn’t have that knowledge, that awareness – he didn’t know that part of him. Crowley had met other Gods that had never come to their full powers, here and there, and he knew what they felt like. Aziraphale didn’t feel like that, not at all. It took him a while to work it out, as Aziraphale’s visits became more and more frequent, as they relaxed a little around each other, as Crowley’s own power grew more familiar with the taste of Aziraphale’s.
His power… it was there, under the surface. It was tempered, as if something was holding it back, preventing it from growing, from turning it into what it needed to be. It didn’t feel Chthonic, or Celestial, not really.
Aziraphale was something else, something waiting to become.
“What are you thinking about?” Aziraphale asked him. They knew each other well enough now that they were sat side-by-side, and that he could clearly see that Crowley was distracted.
“The Underworld,” Crowley told him, and it was only something of a lie. “Will you let me go back with you, one day? I want to see it, to see the Underworld. I want to know what it is like.”
“It is not exactly the nicest place for a picnic,” Aziraphale answered. He was watching Crowley out of the corner of his eyes, and must have seen something in his expression, some glimmer of disappointment, because his shoulders sagged, and he made a strange flinch with his hand, an aborted movement in Crowley’s direction.
“You can still come though,” he hastened to add. “Whenever you like. If you really do want to see it, I mean.”
“Promise?” Crowley asked, plum blossoms curling around his wrists. He shook them loose absentmindedly, and they fell to the ground, setting out roots through the earth.
“Promise,” he replied.
He knew Aziraphale would keep his word – he wasn’t the kind of person to consider that he had the option not to. But he was worried, rubbing his hands together, frowning in that way that made Crowley want to reach over and smooth the lines between his eyebrows with his fingertip.
“Just… don’t judge me for it, will you?” he asked.
Crowley shook his head. “Never,” he told him.
Aziraphale took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he said. “Come on then. Better now than never.”
Crowley was quiet as Aziraphale led him to the cliff-face, only speaking when it – and the came – came into sight.
“I have walked past this rock face many times,” he remarked. “And there has never been a tunnel here.”
Aziraphale shrugged. “I suppose you are only supposed to see it if you are meant to.”
Crowley raised his eyebrows at that, but did not reply. He followed Aziraphale into the tunnel without question, which seemed to widen after a moment to allow the two of them to walk side-by-side. Aziraphale was a little concerned about that – he wasn’t quite sure why it was being that hospitable, or what it might want in return. They followed its path in silence, until eventually, it let them out, right outside the main courtyard of the palace and administrative buildings.
“This is…” Crowley said, unable to finish his sentence.
“Yup,” Aziraphale replied. “Bleak, isn’t it?”
“Show me around?”
He supposed there was no way to try and sugarcoat it – the Underworld was not a pleasant place, and soon enough Crowley would realise that and want to leave, just like any sensible God would. He showed him the courtyard, the tracks worn in the stone by the passage of so many years of souls. Crowley just nodded at it, his eyes narrowed and assessing.
“There are pots over there,” he remarked. “What grows in them?”
“Nothing that I’ve ever seen,” Aziraphale replied, but it was to Crowley’s back – he was already walking over to them, placing the palms of his hands against the dry and dusty earth contained inside them.
“Cypresses,” Crowley told him, after a minute. “They… they haven’t grown here before, but they could. Or they should. It is strange. It is the magic of the Kingdom, I think. It is waiting to be told what to do, and it thinks it should have cypresses.”
“Should it?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley shook his head immediately.
“Cypresses are for death, for mourning. Apt, yes. Thematically appropriate, of course. But a bit ghoulish, isn’t it? No need to rub it in. You might as well have something bright. Delphiniums, maybe. Those are nice. Tall and pretty, blues and whites and pinks. A bit of colour, you know?”
“And what do delphiniums mean, if Cypresses stand for death?”
Crowley finally looked up, his eyes bright. “Levity, joy. Good things for bad times.”
“That does sound quite nice,” Aziraphale said, and he might have continued, but small sprouts were pushing from the earth, tiny splashes of green. The earth was getting darker too, healthier.
“How did you do that?” he asked, in awe, and did not spot the curiosity in Crowley’s eyes, the confusion as he glanced down at the soil.
“Come on,” Crowley said. “What is next on the tour? These buildings look like they contain terrible and boring things.”
Aziraphale tore his eyes from the pots and their new life, and led Crowley through to his least favourite halls, where the endless souls of the dead waited. Endless hoards of them, in queues that wove through rooms that had expanded far beyond their physical limits in order to hold them all. It was a dim, grey space. The small windows did nothing to illuminate rooms that had been stretched so far, and scant candlelight flickered eerily. The floor beneath the bare feet (and paws, and hoofs, and so on) was sandy earth, and the ceilings were low. Aziraphale led him along the length of several rooms before they reached the wraiths who were currently on duty.
“What is all of this?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale sighed.
“Unprocessed claimants.”
“Unpro… do you mean people?”
Aziraphale sighed. “Among other things – and trust me, I wish I didn’t.”
Crowley looked up and down, eyes following the rows of people. “Why are they all queuing?”
Aziraphale wrung his hands. “They never bothered sending anyone down here! The poor wraiths were doing their best, but they weren’t designed for this level of administration. They’re overwhelmed – we have such a huge backlog. We have to go through their entire file, there is a spreadsheet involved… It’s a nightmare. None of the wraiths can read properly, or understand the difference between good and evil... and they all hate lobsters for some reason.”
“You have to process every soul?”
“Even the bloody insects, and molluscs.”
“And the children?”
Aziraphale nodded, glumly. Crowley looked devastated.
“You can’t… I mean, they expect you to judge children?”
“All things should be judged, apparently.”
“Not kids,” Crowley said. “That’s just unkind.”
Aziraphale shrugged. “Trust me, I know. I don’t know who designed this original system, but it is an absolute mess, and I have no idea how to go about fixing it. The other Underworld Gods are no help, either. They just blink at me in confusion every time I mention it.”
Next came the positive and negative rooms. Crowley seemed even more disturbed by those, and Aziraphale couldn’t blame him. Souls stood in regimented order, staring blankly in one direction without moving – in both rooms.
“Well, this is miserable. Is this for the good people or the bad people?”
“This one is for the good people – though there isn’t much of a difference between them.”
Crowley shivered. “Let's get out of here.”
Aziraphale smiled to himself, a little wryly. Here it was, then. He would take Crowley out to the courtyard and he would wish him well and then ask to leave – and no doubt, having seen what Aziraphale was in charge of, he would have no interest in spending time with him out on the earth anymore. It upset him a little more than he was willing to admit, but there was nothing to be done. He led Crowley out, and turned to him, expecting an expression of anxiousness, of guilt, of disgust.
Instead, Crowley was looking around them, at the tall grey columns and the grey stone ceiling and the cold grey floor. Even in the dim light of the Underworld he seemed to shine, his hair and eyes the brightest thing in the place.
“Why… why do it their way?” he asked, and Aziraphale blinked. He had so thoroughly prepared himself for the ‘so sorry, I have to dash’ talk that he was momentarily thrown.
“What?”
“Well, I mean… you’re in charge down here, right?” Crowley asked, looking now at him, carefully.
Aziraphale nodded, a little hesitantly, as if he himself wasn’t entirely sure of that fact.
“Well then. Can’t you just do it your way?”
Aziraphale took a breath, sharp and aborted, other words on his tongue that died suddenly before he had a chance to say them out loud.
“I don’t really think I know what my way is,” he said in the end, hating himself for how ineffectual they felt.
“Oh,” Crowley said, and then shrugged. “Well, then maybe we should figure that out.”
“We?”
A small light of hope, in his chest. Crowley smiled.
“Sure. I’ll help.”
Aziraphale shook his head. “You don’t want to stay down here.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Crowley replied, the edge of a smile around his mouth, warm and invited.
“Really?”
Crowley patted his shoulder gently. “Well, it looks like you need my help.”
Joy bubbled up in Aziraphale’s chest, thankfulness that he would not be alone in this, that Crowley was not going back to the surface right now, that someone actually wanted to help. He was smiling, so wide that it was already starting to hurt his cheeks.
“I’ll show you the palace,” was all he said, because thanks were too difficult to say out loud. Crowley was watching him though, and there was something in his eyes that told Aziraphale that he understood.
“Fancy,” Crowley said, as they made their way towards it. Aziraphale swatted at his arm.
“Shush. It’s a pretty miserable place.”
“Well, why don’t we start there?”
Aziraphale blinked. “Really?”
“The palace is the centre of a Kingdom, right? The seat of its ruler? And more to the point, it is where you spend your free time. You can’t expect to make positive changes if you wake up feeling terrible every day.”
Aziraphale frowned at him, thrown. “Gods don’t sleep.”
Crowley nudged him, and Aziraphale didn’t even mind that the shadow of the palace was drawing nearer, that he would soon have to enter that bleak place – and besides, maybe it wouldn’t have to be bleak for much longer.
“We can if we want to.”
“Wow, you weren’t kidding about this place,” Crowley said as Aziraphale led him through the palace doors. It had not improved since Aziraphale’s first day – if anything, it had grown worse, slumping in on itself as if it was as disappointed in Aziraphale as he was in himself.
“Not the cosiest, is it?” he said, with a rueful smile. Crowley shrugged.
“Good décor,” he remarked, as they moved through one empty, bleak room to another.
“Are you serious?” Aziraphale replied, incredulous. Crowley had that look on his face, the one that meant it was probably a joke even if Aziraphale didn’t know how to read it. He was cheerful, but he could feel the place weighing on him, sapping that energy. He caught Crowley watching him from the corner of his eye, assessing.
“Big windows,” Crowley remarked.
“Not worth much when there is no light,” Aziraphale replied, trying to smile. Crowley strode over to them, pulling the heavy curtains back more thoroughly, poking his nose close to the glass in an attempt to judge the non-existent sky outside.
“Does the sun… wait, is there even a sun? No, there isn’t, is there? Where does the light come from? Do you even have night-time?”
Aziraphale shook his head, even though Crowley could not see him.
“Can you change it?” Crowley spun on his heel, staring at him.
“What?”
“Make it brighter. Or better yet, make it imitate a real day. And a real night, for that matter. Moonlight is beautiful, no reason you shouldn’t have it just because you’re stuck below ground.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to begin,” Aziraphale managed to say around his disbelief.
Crowley was watching him, smile at one corner of his mouth, one eyebrow raised, waiting.
“You’re the one who grew those plants out there, why don’t you try,” he said accusingly, though it did not stop Crowley from smiling.
“I’m a creator, sure – but we’re not trying to create anything. We’re trying to change something. No reason I should be any better at it than you.”
This confused Aziraphale, possibly more than anything else could have done. “Why would this place listen to me?”
Crowley sighed, and glanced up at the ceiling, as if asking for it to give him strength. “Oh, try and stop complaining.”
Aziraphale was going to protest, but Crowley’s eyes were full of belief, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to. Instead he closed his eyes, stretched out the feeling of his powers to its limits, and… pushed. It took a moment, but he could feel something, something wrapped all around them, a strength and an unknowable magic, something greater than anything he had ever known. The Kingdom of the Dead, the place itself imbued with its own power, opening up to him. and all he had to do was reach, touch just a little, here and there, and-
“There you go – look at that.”
Aziraphale opened his eyes. Outside, the sky was brighter, the air lighter. It was now the colours of a warm summer evening, and without knowing how he found that he knew instinctively that it matched the daylight outside, and that when night came to the earth so too would it come down here. He had done that. He had changed the very fabric of the Underworld.
Or perhaps, as it would be more accurate to say, it allowed him to change it.
“It looks better in here already, doesn’t it?” Crowley said, and Aziraphale nodded absentmindedly.
“We need to get rid of the damn dust next.”
Crowley was standing very close to him, he realised. Close enough that he could feel the warmth of his body, the press of his magic.
“Musty in here,” Crowley said, with a hint of mischief. “Shame there isn’t a breeze.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes. A moment later, and the windows blew open, a strong wind following, lifting the dust motes and sending them scattering around the room. He opened his eyes again and laughed, full of the joys of magic, of power that had never been in his reach before. He moved from room to room, Crowley at his heels, and each space he came to changed around him. The dark walls lightened, the sagging ceilings straightened themselves out, the floors polished themselves, the curtains shook themselves free of dust and turned a pleasant, airy white to match the walls. Furniture appeared in each room, solid wood and comfortable cushions.
There was laughter in Crowley’s voice. “Well, at least you can accessorise anything with a white wall.”
Aziraphale smiled at him, and the accessories of the room all turned the red of Crowley’s hair.
“Careful, you’ll give me a complex.”
“Are you doing this?” Aziraphale laughed. “Are you helping me? I have never had a power like this before.”
“No,” Crowley said. “This is nothing to do with me, my dear. Perhaps the palace was just ready for a bit of attention.”
“It looks better, doesn’t it?” Aziraphale said, slowing. This was the last room, he realised – he stared through the open doorways to the ones he had already been through. Everything was bright, was beautiful, was the kind of place he might want to actually live in. He was tempted to walk back through them all, to see them all again – but Crowley had spotted something through the doorways.
“What is through there?”
A hint of stone, of dead leaves on the ground.
“A garden – well, sort of.”
“Now you’re speaking my language.”
Aziraphale was reluctant to go back there, when his mood was as bright as it was, but Crowley was already setting off, and he trailed after him. The bright light had improved the sight of the garden, he though when he peeked over Crowley’s shoulder, and the breeze seemed to have blown away the worst of the dead leaves. It looked a little prettier now – but still dead.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, watching Crowley’s face carefully. He was frowning, staring at the tree, but when he heard Aziraphale’s voice he seemed to snap out of it, turning back to him.
“It’s not ready yet,” he replied.
Aziraphale pulled a face. “What does that mean?”
“Some things can only grow when they want to, when they are supposed to. And this one isn’t ready yet,” Crowley replied, with a strange look back at the tree.
The light was dimming, Aziraphale realised: the sky was slowly taking on the purple-red hues of a sunset, despite the fact that there was no sun.
“Look at that,” Crowley said, noticing too. “Your first evening. Fancy seeing if we can make this place prepare some dinner?”
“Gods don’t need to eat,” Aziraphale replied, nonplussed, and for the first time Crowley laughed, throwing his head back.
“You really don’t know anything about self-indulgence, do you? Come on, I’ll show you. I have a feeling that you’ll be a big fan of food once you get the hang of it.”