Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In retrospect, Crowley should have caught on that things were going too well. Playing out too perfectly. After all, perfect was never good, the two being enemies since at least the 1700s.¹ Exhibit A: heaven.

“You got it. Consider it done,” Gabriel said, strained smile force-plastered over a face that wanted so badly to snarl. His palms were raised, the very gesture of surrender. “We’ll stay away from you and your disgusting demon. No interference, now and forevermore. Angel’s promise.”

Crowley remembered just in time that he was play-acting Aziraphale to bite back the retort on his tongue. What would meek, polite Aziraphale do? Not tell his soon-to-be ex-boss to fuck off, for one.

It turned out that he didn’t need to think up a response. Gabriel couldn’t keep his mouth shut even if his very existence depended on it.

“And you too. You’re disgusting, you know that? Six thousand years. We’ve been directing resources to you for six thousand years! We even amended our annual budget since 1900 so you can have extra miracle allowances. Do you know how hard it was to convince Operations that they really didn’t need a weeklong Christmas party? The executive team had to cut back on our own Christmas celebration!”

Gabriel paused for dramatic effect. Or to breathe. Neither was necessary nor, in Crowley’s not-so-humble opinion, warranted.

“You know how long it took me to convince Raphael? I practically forced him to take one for the team, traded away my signed first edition of Sound of Music to get his yes. And here I was, thinking it was all worth it because our agent on earth needed some extra boost from Head Office, because there’s no 'I' in thwart and we all needed to support him together. When the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth! This – this fraternizing. To think that I assumed you were doing your job all along!”

Crowley would like to point out a common human saying about ass-u-me-ing things, but Aziraphale wouldn’t say that. Soft, kind Aziraphale would feel bad about Operations not having their full-length Christmas party. He schooled his best friend’s face into an expression of mild regret, hoping that this display of listening comprehension would win him the dismissal he so desperately wanted.

Alas, no such luck.

“And one more thing. Defying me in front of Beelzebub? You have some nerves. I don’t even want to think about the gossip that’s going on Down Below right now. My reputation is ruined! And – and, and now you have the nerve to not die? You’re beyond disgusting, you’re an abomination. You hear that? Abomination. That’s what you are.”

Aziraphale is always polite, Crowley reminded himself, even when he’s in bastard mode. But that didn’t mean his angel was a doormat. Crowley glared at Gabriel, putting on the full fury of That Glare that only happened to particularly unfortunate humans who found themselves inside a certain bookshop.

The Archangel’s mouth clicked shut.

Ah, all this rambling. Gabriel was afraid! Scared shitless that the botched execution proved heaven’s traitor to be invincible. A thrill tingled down his spine. He was in control here.

“If you’re quite finished, Gabriel, I would like to get out of here now,” Crowley said in Aziraphale’s bugger-off voice, which he had always appreciated for that perfect balance between menacing and feigned politeness. Proof of consummate bastardry if there ever was one. He turned around, tilting Aziraphale’s head at that perfect angle reserved for snubbing one’s superiors. It was one of his proudest inventions.

“Farewell forever.”

Not one of the angels made a move toward him, not Gabriel, Uriel, or Sandalphon. Crowley concentrated on detecting the presence of another dark being. He would offer to share the ride down with the disposable demon that Below had sent up as the hellfire courier, but the poor lad was nowhere to be found, had likely scampered off the moment he realized what happened and decided he wanted to live for another day.

But if the demon was no longer around, then what was this other presence –

“I’m afraid you may not leave yet, Aziraphale,” a familiar voice called from behind him, popped in from nowhere.

Something in that quiet command compelled Crowley to turn around. Oh... oh. He barely stifled a groaned. (He was Aziraphale. Aziraphale did not have undignified quirks like groaning or letting out strangled screams while whacking one’s forehead against the steering wheel.)

“M-Michael?”

Michael nodded, face impassive. There was no way of knowing what she was thinking. And dammit, after six thousand years, the First of the Archangels, Warrior of the Almighty, Leader of the Heavenly Hosts, and Winner of Heaven’s Smite-a-Straw-Demon Holiday Contest² could still ignite utter dread inside Crowley, all by simply standing there. Cur – bles – fuck her.

Taking a steadying breath, Crowley let loose of what he hoped was his charm filtered through Aziraphale’s face. “What a surprise! You see, I was just finishing up here with, er, not dying, apparently. It’s all ineffable, right? I mean no harm, truly. I’ll go back to earth and you’ll never have to see me again. Look, I’ll even see myself out! No need to trouble you –”

“Aziraphale, you know the rules.”

His fake smile froze into something that probably made him look constipated. “T-The rules?”

“Yes, rules. We are, for all intents and purposes, terminating your employment contract with heaven. There is paperwork.”

“Paperwork,” Crowley repeated numbly. Oh bugger.

If the real Aziraphale was here, he may offer to be properly killed by hellfire to avoid celestial paperwork. After all, if one was extinguished, someone else would have to take care of it for him, right? But Crowley valued his existence, and he was damn well going to return this body back to Aziraphale unharmed.

“Right. So, er, makes perfect sense. Thanks for the reminder! I’ll just swing by Angel Resources on my way out. I’m sure the wonderful staff there will make short work of things, what with having to deal with mass separation and all, once upon a time, haha. Bet they have the processing down to a science. It’s like riding a velocipede, one simply doesn’t forget how to do it. Oh dear, listen to me, using an earth reference. Never mind me. I’ll go there right away –”

“Aziraphale.”

That was all it took for Crowley’s mind to go blank. Would Aziraphale’s mind go blank? He didn’t know. What he did know was the unfurling of a demon’s primal fear when faced with the possibility of being smited. Michael was a well known warrior of the Lord.

And apparently a spellcaster as well. Because it wasn’t fear that caused what happened next, oh no, not at all. It was... it was whatever Michael did that made him suddenly channel Aziraphale so perfectly. Like the blasted angel who could never last more than ten seconds being coy about (accepting, naturally) an offer of cake, the moment Michael turned to walk deeper into the bowels of heaven, Aziraphale’s legs gave up all pretense of loyalty to Crowley and started carrying him in the wrong direction, trailing after her. Double-crossers, these unreliable appendages! There was a reason why he preferred to slither about with no limb sometimes.

As Crowley passed his failed-executioners, Gabriel and his gang neither moved nor said anything, faces confused into unison gaping. Good, confusion was good. Better than fear. Aziraphale would be confused, and obedient to a certain degree. Play the game, Crowley. Fill out those blessed paperwork so you can flee back to earth.

He only hoped that the time required would be much, much shorter than eternity.

-

Once they were seated in Michael’s office, separated by an office desk that managed to look both grand and minimalist at the same time, the Archangel snapped her fingers and the door slammed shut.

OhnoOhnoOhnoOhnoOhnoOhno –

Crowley was stuck inside a room with white floor, white ceiling, white walls, and white furniture. The only thing that wasn’t white was the top-to-bottom glass panel that served as the far wall behind where Michael sat, the privilege of C-suite executives who were granted a view of the scenery outside of heaven’s office building. He used to like this aesthetic, had briefly considered making his flat all white before deciding to go with all black. Now he felt suffocated, could sense this place thrumming with judgment against anyone impure who was unfortunate enough to be dragged into here, such as himself. Particularly himself.

“Your betrayal leaves me in a very difficult position,” Michael began, her forearms resting on the desk and her upper body leaning forward, the perfect body language of a superior pretending to be understanding. Crowley half-expected her to follow with something like look, I really want us to work past this as if Aziraphale still had a rung in heaven’s corporate ladder to cling onto, but that was more Gabriel’s style. Michael wasn’t trying to be everyone’s favorite boss. And she didn’t bother with feelings.

“You weren’t supposed to leave here alive,” she added, no-nonsense and matter-of-fact, like she was pointing out something obvious. Which, technically, she was.

In the olden days, before the age of boilerplate templates and downloadable contracts, Crowley was a consummate wordsmith. Suggest may instead of must to a councilor, and many a laborer would be driven to destitution by landowners who pointed to the law as justification for not compensating them for their work. Introduce faulty logic to a prominent theologian by confusing “some” and “all,” and he would get the masses believing that “some angels are dancers, all dancers are demons, therefore all angels are demons” and, wrecking the faith of generations of the pious aside, this had caused one particular (read: the only) dancing angel to stop talking to him for months. Crowley cared about how words were used. So even though ninety percent of him was fuming over Michael’s pronouncement, the other ten percent was busy parsing her choice of using “weren’t” instead of “aren’t,” and if his chance of staying alive had just skyrocketed.

Michael was taking out a thick stack of paper from some drawer—no, from the top desk drawer, meaning she had prepared all the paperwork in advance—and Crowley’s ponderings converged into a single point of clarity that this wasn’t about “weren’t” or “aren’t” as if, like cartons of milk, intent came with an expiry date. This paperwork was always going to be ready for the occasion, and Michael was the guardian of all hundreds of pages of it.

She was the one who gave the go ahead for Aziraphale’s execution.

Michael gestured at the stack of paper. “I’m going to ask you some questions for your exit interview – Aziraphale, please ease up your grip on the chair.”

Anyone other than Aziraphale would stare her down and grip the armrests tighter until they snapped off. Crowley, for the record, would very much prefer to go for the throat and then swallow her whole. But he was Aziraphale, and so he lowered his gaze like a docile underling and focused on making nice with the chair. He chose not to dwell on the very uncomfortable splinter poking at the back of his mind, wondering how the real Aziraphale would react if he was faced with incontrovertible proof that God’s first Archangel had ordered his death. He force-dragged the image of a disillusioned and heartbroken Aziraphale into the same mental junkyard where he barely managed to stuff away his rage, a black hole in the mind of Crowley that he most often used for depositing unwanted thoughts concerning his angel.

“Thank you,” Michael acknowledged, in the exact tone that Aziraphale would use to convey you better not do it again rather than actual gratitude. Did all angels behave like this? Well, he had millennia of experience in placating Aziraphale, and so it was no problem to spare a little effort for Michael. He sat up straighter and made himself look more respectful. Respect always worked on angels.

Crowley was relieved when Michael took her focus off him and started rummaging inside a drawer. He wasn’t surprised when she, ever stuck in the old glory days of heavenly wars and zero civilization, took out a quill that seemed to have been plucked from the first bird that humans hunted to extinction. Ink miraculously blackened its tip. “I’m going to fill out the paperwork on your behalf. At the end of this, you will need to sign.”

It was then that Crowley realized he had no idea how Aziraphale signed his name. Surely not in English as A.Z. Fell, maybe not even spelt out in angelic script. Did he sign with the equivalent of a demonic sigil that Crowley used for his own real name? He hadn’t asked, never thought he would need to, and if this was the one thing that blew his cover, after the fire stunt that he pulled off without a hitch –

“You just attempted to kill me, and now you want me to sign?” he protested. Better to go on the offense than to reveal the chink in his armor. “How do I know what I’m signing anyway? Am I giving you unlimited attempts to extinguish me until you succeed? How – how could you? We’re siblings, all God’s creatures! Did you even know all the good things I did on earth? Loving and caring for humans and guiding their souls to the light? I never went against the Ineffable Plan. None of us did!” It was Aziraphale speaking. It was also Crowley speaking. He was furious with heaven’s senior management, with their callousness and cruelty to the best angel he had ever known. In all these centuries, did anyone take interest in really knowing the good that Aziraphale did on earth? Did they take interest in Aziraphale? No and no. At least Hastur checked in on him from time to time, even if it was for nefarious reasons. For hell to be doing something better than heaven... “pathetic” couldn’t even begin to describe it.

His heart was thudding so hard that he thought his chest might explode. He glared, broadcasting how Not Okay he was with the way heaven mistreated—no, discarded—its finest angel like a used rag. Fuck self-control and fuck trying to suppress his serpent’s instinct. He could go without blinking for all eternity.

Michael held his gaze placidly. She was not provoked. If it even made sense at all, she looked... thoughtful, and that, more than anything, doused a bucket of ice water all over Crowley. Was it – had he acted too demon-y? He couldn’t have, or else the Chief Smiter would be reducing him into demonic dust right now. But he mustn’t risk it. Aziraphale was too important to him. Grasping back at every ounce of self-control that he’d just thrown into the stratosphere, Crowley looked down again.

While trying to force his breathing into a calm rhythm, he became aware of heavenly singing somewhere beyond the door, seeping through the quiet that had settled inside the office. There was always some angelic choir out and about. He didn’t care for it when he belonged in heaven, but now the music soothed him, the eight-part harmony reminding him to play it cool, for Aziraphale’s sake.

Time didn’t have the same meaning in heaven. Crowley didn’t know whether it had been five minutes or fifty minutes. All he knew was that as each idea of a minute passed, he doubted more about his chance of getting out of here alive. This was Michael who was going to interrogate him—Michael, who wanted Aziraphale dead, not some gormless Angel Resources worker. What would happen to him if she found out who he was? If he died here, what would happen to Aziraphale down Below?

“What is your name?”

“Cr – Aziraphale!”

Michael was writing before she finished asking the question, scribbling “Aziraphale” mechanically into the first field on the first sheet of the stack of papers. Crowley held his breath, hoping she hadn’t caught his almost-slip of tongue.

“Rank?”

“Principality.”

“Occupation?”

“Former Guardian of the Eastern Gate, then heaven’s angelic representative on earth.” Also former.

“Contact information?”

He rattled off the postal address of the bookstore.

Michael turned a page.

Reading upside down, he could see that the next field was “Reason for separation.” Michael wrote “treason” without asking.

How dare she...

“You will have the opportunity to prove yourself innocent,” she spoke into the paperwork. “Just let the form register my response.”

A few seconds passed, and the previously blank expanse underneath “Reason for separation” self-populated into a list of questions. All were yes-no questions, with two columns of tick-boxes appearing next to each, one column marked “yes” and the other “no.” Ah. Topic-specific questions that would appear depending on the reason given for separation. He was almost impressed. It seemed like heaven had finally caught on to basic earth-based HR technology.

Michael looked up. “You are expected to answer with complete honesty.” It was such a poorly veiled threat that a paper parasol would do better to protect him in a rainstorm. Crowley considered his predicament. No paper parasol and no way of escape. He had no choice.

He nodded.

“Have you ever knowingly befriended the Enemy?”

There was no use denying this one. “Yes.”

“Have you ever relayed classified information to an agent of the Enemy?”

Crowley, my side is going to kill all the firstborns next! The Angel of Death will be here tomorrow night. Please, whoever you can tempt out of Egypt, just do it!

Aziraphale would own up to this one proudly. No regrets.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever cooperated with the Enemy against any title, chapter, and section of the Great Plan?”

Crowley couldn’t help rolling his eyes. This question may as well be 'Did you help stop the Apocalypse?'

The correct response, of course, was great pustulant mangled bollocks to the Great blasted Plan.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever failed to thwart, or willingly perform, actions on behalf of the Enemy?”

When you put the Arrangement that way, it did sound treasonous. Sort of. The question completely missed the two-way-streetedness of their partnership. Besides, it wasn’t Aziraphale’s fault. He was the one who first suggested the Arrangement and badgered the angel until he accepted. Aziraphale may have given into temptation, but that was hardly treason.

Michael was scrutinizing him. “I am led to believe that when you were assigned to certain localities, both angelic and demonic activities in that area would increase even though our observer angels would only detect the presence of one non-human being.”

She knew? For how long... what was the chess metaphor that humans liked to use? Check.

“Coincidentally, my... source from Below had confirmed on multiple occasions that this would happen when the demon Crowley was also assigned to those same localities. It seems fair to say that only one of you would do the traveling even though the, ah, productivity didn’t suffer for either side.”

“Checkmate,” Crowley said dully.

A shadow of confusion crossed that normally imperturbable face. “What was it?”

Crowley snapped, “You know the answer. So why ask me?”

“The Almighty commands us to confess our sins. It is a Grace given to humans.” She paused as if suddenly finding Crowley interesting. “And it seems this Grace is available to you who have been living among humans as well.”

To “Aziraphale” who the Archangels were willing to oh-so-graciously extinct? If they hadn’t switched bodies, what physical corporation or consciousness would Aziraphale have left to make his confessions with? Michael couldn’t be serious. Shove this talk of special Grace up through the third heaven then back around into the ninth circle of hell.

“Fine! Yes. Yes to both. I’m a bad angel. Are you satisfied? Is She listening too? Or do you have to send the paperwork up to the Metatron so he can Morse code it to wherever the h- wherever She is?”

Michael didn’t rise to the bait. That was what was so infuriating about her. She couldn’t be provoked, ever. She would fit right inside one of those human corporation Board rooms, talking with disinterest about metrics and widgets as if underpaid workers weren’t struggling to survive and oh, by the way, send out a memo to the peons to remind them not to get maimed or killed on their subsistence-level jobs please, because we can’t possibly absorb the lost to our revenues if that happens. The way she was looking at him now, with almost open curiosity, made Crowley feel exactly like those guinea dogs or mice or whatever it was that humans liked to experiment on. Trapped with nowhere to go. Interrogated for entertainment value. Fucked.

Michael put down her quill and leaned forward to really look at him.

Oh G- Sa- Somebody. He was fucked. He’d let his anger get to him and forgot to act like Aziraphale. His angel never doubted or resented the Almighty, not even now. Nowhere in that brilliant mind of his did Aziraphale have any room for Bad Thoughts against Her.

“I apologize,” he grated out. It was one of his least favorite words.

Michael arched an eyebrow, and Crowley felt judged again. But she nodded after a moment. She took up the quill. “Next question: Have you consorted with the Enemy and defiled the physical body you were issued?”

“D-Defiled?”

“Yes. Performing the act of procreation. Knowing one another. I believe humans call it having sex. Or f–”

“Okay, okay, stop. I get it. It’s better to say 'making love,' you know? 's more angelic. Like, 'love your enemies' and all, only with your bodies. Er.”

He was discussing sex. With an Archangel. With the Archangel.

This time, Michael’s dispassionate response was very welcomed. “I do believe we should learn more about human procreation. It was unfortunate how the incident of the Annunciation went. Perhaps Gabriel should have consulted you before botching up the... well, let’s just say it was unfortunate.”

Hey Aziraphale, you heard about Gabriel’s little day trip to go freak out some girl?

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Oh, c'mon angel, don’t be a spoilsport. Even you must see how hilariously horrible it went. 'Hey, I’m just here to bring you some unexpected but nonetheless good tidings, okay? How am I supposed to know where babies come from? You’re the human, you figure it out.' I mean, could that have gone any worse?

Crowley! He was only fulfilling the –

Ineffable Plan, yeah, yeah, I know. Look, she’s still going to have the baby, I’m sure the Almighty already arranged for that. I just want to laugh at Gabriel. Or punch him. I’d do it if I were Mary. Admit it, who wouldn’t want to punch that face?

“Aziraphale?”

Oh right, he was Aziraphale, in heaven, stuck inside Michael’s office. Vigilance, Crowley.

He answered honestly, refusing to acknowledge the tinge of something that felt like regret. “No. We’ve never. The an– I, it’s me. I kept turning him down.”

Michael ticked the “no” box, fully taking him at his word.

“That’s very commendable of you,” she said softly, “as I have no doubt that the demon Crowley has tried to seduce you many times. Tell me, do you love the demon Crowley?”

Wait, this was unfair. She went off-script!

Crowley knew his own answer. Oh dear Satan did he know how utterly besotted he was with his angel. But he was Aziraphale, and Michael was expecting an honest answer from Aziraphale. (He could lie, of course, but not about this. Never about this.)

Did Aziraphale love him?

You go too fast for me.

“No.”

Michael was looking at him strangely. “And the demon. He would say the same?”

Crowley swallowed. No, of course not. But this was not the time or place to declare his feelings.

He was glad he had a fall-back answer for this one. Always had. “Demons can’t love,” he lied.

“You seem so certain about this.”

What the hell did that mean? He realized there was so much to Michael that he didn’t know. She was neither a faceless part of a group called the Archangels nor the sum total of all the legends about her. It was... it was as if Michael also had knowledge of interacting with demons besides smiting them.

But whatever hint there was of a more understanding side of the Archangel was quickly gone, as Michael turned back to the paperwork.

“The filer is to add up the number of boxes ticked in each column, then input the sum total into Line 6. The column with the greater sum shall be used to determine the culpability, or lack thereof, of the filer as it relates to the stated reason for separation. The result will be relayed to the Director of Angel Resources or, in certain cases, to the senior management representative overseeing the case—that would be me. Upon review and verification of the veracity of the recorded responses, the filer shall be allowed the opportunity to provide explanations. Appeal may be permitted under certain circumstances and shall require approval from senior management. To appeal, please refer to Form 9854-A and the corresponding instructions on pages 34-87 of this packet. To waive the right to appeal, please proceed to page 88.”

Michael summed up the columns (yes – 4, no – 1; treason – guilty), flipped to page 88, then looked up.

“I trust that you do not plan to appeal?”

“No point to,” Crowley mumbled. But it was one thing to choose not to do something, however illusory the choice was. It was entirely unjust to have no choice at all. “How was I supposed to appeal anyway, if I was already dead? Were you going to make up answers in the event of my demise? Whatever this packet says I’m guilty of, I’m still the filer. It says so in that long paragraph you just read.”

“We may have been too hasty in carrying out your punishment,” Michael acknowledged with not a trace of guilt. Bastard. “But do you still refuse to admit that you are a traitor?”

When you’re the ones making up the definitions, Crowley thought bitterly. Just like 'asking too many questions' was somehow a crime worthy of Falling. Why couldn’t he and Aziraphale have their own side? Can heaven not see how beneficial it would be for everybody?

There’s no our side. Not anymore.

His loyal, traitorous Aziraphale. If even he couldn’t see it, then he supposed it was too much to ask heaven’s management to essentially reorganize heaven, hell, and earth to create a new side just for the two of them.

But maybe they could be left alone.

“Look, Michael, you win. I’m a traitor. Guilty as charged. Okay? And I’ve already been punished. Leave me alone from now on, please? I won’t cause any trouble, promise.”

The Archangel flipped to a page that must have been in the one-hundred range. “Upon separation, the filer may be compensated for damages, if applicable, or be subject to disciplinary actions in accordance with celestial laws. Should a disciplinary measure fail to address the full weight of any crime that has been committed, Angel Resources and/or senior management may be consulted to carry out further post-separation disciplinary actions. In all instances, the decision of the Director of Angel Resources or senior management is final.”

“Wait, what? I’ve been executed, I could have died! What more do you want to do to me?”

Michael turned to yet another page even further back within the hefty packet. Somewhere inside Crowley, a scream was let loose.

“Michael, no more reading, please. Can’t you just, like, paraphrase?”

There it was again, that penetrating gaze on him, as if she was dissecting him from the inside out. Crowley realized he was gripping the chair’s arms for dear life again, but he couldn’t will his hands to relax.

Whatever Michael was looking for, she seemed to have found it. She answered as if there hadn’t been an awkward staring session inflicted upon him just now, “In normal circumstances, a committee would be formed to review the separated filer’s crimes and consider any mitigating factors. I must admit, your case is highly unusual. But there may be an exception, if I’m correct...” She looked down at something on her desk that started glowing. “Ah. Hell’s sham of a trial for the demon Crowley is nearly over. I must go make a delivery. Stay here. No harm will befall you.”

At “stay here,” bindings appeared and coiled around his wrists and ankles, tying him to the chair. Michael then miracled a jug full of—Crowley was bound, but still he recoiled.

Had Michael figured it out? Was she going to use holy water on him before going Below to execute the person hell believed to be Crowley? What would happen to Aziraphale, if she splashed him and he died now? She would know, and she would tell Downstairs, and they would both be killed for good, and –

Michael leveled a Look at him that somehow reminded Crowley of the lady in Leonardo’s painting, poised and enigmatic, and, water jug in hand, left her office.

Crowley was left alone with his thoughts.

1. Crowley didn’t invent the phrase “perfect is the enemy of the good.” He refused to have a pissing contest with Voltaire about who stole it from folk sayings. What he could take credit for was popularizing the concept among modern-day leadership development circles, in a fit of pique after an outing with Aziraphale had gone sour. He did it as a middle finger to Aziraphale. That he received a commendation from Below for it made him reevaluate what was so bad after all about “really, my dear, if you aren’t going to actually live in the flat like a human, then there’s no need to saddle your broker with all those impossible demands.” By the time he got his (perfect, but certainly not good) place in Mayfair, this particular corporate-speak had become so ubiquitous that hell had printed its own version onto a motivational poster: “No perfection or goodness here, suckers!” — entirely missing the point. ^{[ back ]}

2. Sandalphon had come in a respectable second. And apparently, Gabriel had scored so close to some ranking that all of the judges decided they needed to review the results yet again, “just to be sure.” The review went on for the entire holiday event until Gabriel was given an award at the closing ceremony and forgot about his smiting score. No one had the heart to tell him that he was a distant last. ^{[ back ]}

Chapter Text

The first thing Crowley tried to do when Michael was out of sight was to transform into a snake. That was a mistake. Not only could he not retract his limbs in order to take on a snake shape, but the bindings on said limbs burned as soon as he drew upon his demonic energy to initiate the shape shifting.

“Ow ow ow ow ow!” he cried, then blessed under his breath.

Right. Anything demonic was a no-go in heaven. Crowley was many things, but he was never one of those two-type creatures. Even on earth, a snake was a reptile and not an amphibian. And he was just as much at a loss here, all demon despite wearing an angel’s face. It wasn’t as if he could pick and choose. Be at least ninety-five percent demon when attacked by hellfire, then up the angelic essence when escaping celestial bonds.

Okay, so Plan A didn’t work. He gave a full thirty-seven seconds to rue the singed areas of his outfit, and took a deep breath. The blisters that were now bubbling into existence on his wrists and ankles would be easy enough to fix once he got out of here. But the suit belonged to Aziraphale—tailored, not manifested—and miracling away the burnt holes would do nothing to change his knowledge that the coat and trousers were once ruined because of him.

By the thirty-eighth second, Crowley stopped feeling sorry for himself and the suit. Time to move onto Plan B. In for a penny...

A loud riiiip tore through the fabric at his shoulder blades as wings unfurled from his corporation. The manifestation tugged at some muscles at the base of his neck, and Crowley instinctively rolled his head and shoulders to ease the sudden tension there, helping the muscles along so they could figure out the right alignment with the added presence of wings, and... huh. So that was why the angel always did his neck cricking thing when materializing his wings. There was a reason for that adorable tick of his.

Crowley made no effort to stop the smile spreading on his face. “Oh, you glorious angel and your glorious body.” He took a moment to appreciate the gleaming wings of an angel, all pure and white. If his hands weren’t tied, he would raise a knuckle to smooth out the row of flight feathers and coax the errant ones back into position. Even by angel standards, Aziraphale’s wings weren’t well groomed. But they fit that idiot, always clinging to old things like dusty books and decades-old outfits, and oh—it had been ages since Crowley had seen white wings on himself. He didn’t miss them, had become rather fond of his impeccably groomed black wings. But these ones whispered of heaven, not the one he was currently stuck in but a paradise of their own that was on the brink of a new beginning. He lowered the right wing so it brushed against his hand. So light and soft. Perfect. Not even heaven could ruin Aziraphale.

He closed his eyes, sending a thought to no one in particular that Aziraphale was safe where he was. He must be. If Michael had somehow agreed to deliver holy water to Below, then that must be hell’s punishment for him. Aziraphale would be untouchable.

Crowley renewed his resolve as he gave the wings a few experimental flaps. A bit on the stiff side due to centuries of disuse, but flyable. He flapped harder, lifting himself (chair attached) off the floor a few inches. Okay... this was rather like trying to float a hot air balloon that was tied to a basket of lead, utterly inefficient and with absolutely no style or elegance to speak of. But opening the office door was his goal, and flapping about was sufficient to get the job done. He’d worry about the actual escape later.

He wobbled left, right, and in reverse until he finally got the hang of carrying himself forward, hitting the floor a few times when he couldn’t maintain lift between wing flaps. But he eventually hauled himself against the door and let the bobbing motion drop him down a few inches, low enough to level his bound hand right there to reach for the door knob –

– and promptly got zapped by angelic energy so strong that he was thrown across the room into a heap of tangled appendages.

The chair broke.

“Owww…” he groaned.

It took rather more than thirty-eight seconds this time, but after the new pains subsided and he managed to retract his wings, Crowley stood up, wobbly but mobile at last, feeling triumphant. He was generally a glass-half-full kind of guy. Breaking free of that horror of a half-plastic, half-wood chair was pretty darn good even if he was still stuck in this prison of an office. But still.

“Ow ow ow what the – ow, stop that, you!”

He willed his wrists and ankles to stop hurting, and that achieved a glass-half-empty level of success. The blisters weren’t throbbing anymore because he refused to believe they should hurt that much. But the bindings hadn’t come loose. He looked ridiculous with them still on him, every limb now attached to a broken piece of chair. He hoped Michael’s room didn’t have security cameras. If Aziraphale ever found out how undignified Crowley had made him look... yeah, he’d take the pain please.

Crowley assessed his predicament. Snake form was a no, as was leaving through the door. There was no desk phone in this office, so escape via any form of telecommunication network was also out. He looked up. He could practically feel the energy vibrating off the ceiling, the same celestial force that guarded the door. And—he concentrated on detecting the same hum and felt it on all other structural surfaces—walking on the floor and leaning on walls were okay, but damaging them in any shape or form would be an instant dinner invitation for angels to come try some Crowley goo.

This left only one option.

Crowley walked around Michael’s desk to approach the floor-to-ceiling wall of window that showed blue sky and clouds and earth’s various architectural wonders on the other side—outside, where he wanted to be. The panel was glass, or more accurately, glass-like. This surface felt... quieter, no hum of destructive energy. Lifting a hand, Crowley touched the tip of a finger to the window. Then poked harder. Nothing.

Nothing was the best news of the day. He had a Plan C.

Crowley may be many things, but he wasn’t a fool. He was fully aware that while the window may look like earth stuff, they were certainly nothing like those breakable set pieces that actors in superhero movies would shatter with a flick of their pinky finger. Crowley had neither superpower nor weapon. All he had were his hands and feet, plus assorted pieces of former chair legs and armrests tied to him that added no value whatsoever.

Besides, these were Aziraphale’s perfectly manicured hands. It would be a travesty to drive this fist through what was likely to be a triple- or quadruple-reinforced surface made of substances harder than diamond.

“Think, Crowley. Think, think, think...”

If the bindings didn’t allow him to summon his inner power, then what about drawing power from an external source? Hell may be many levels down from heaven, but earth was somewhere in the middle, and there were plenty of occult energies stored up in the water, land, and sky there that he could harness. He looked at a pyramid that managed to peak above the clouds. Plenty of ancient cultic vibes coming from there. He glanced at the Shard and could just smell the perfume of low-grade dissatisfaction that permeated every inch of that monstrosity. Everyone rich enough to live in there possessed capital-E Envy in droves, constantly worrying about being out-this or out-that by their peers. It made the best kind of explosion fodder.

There was no shortage of raw materials to draw from. He could do this.

Crowley turned to Michael’s desk and considered the gruesome death he would die for invading the privacy of the chief of the Archangels. An eleven on a scale of ten for Do Not Touch. But today was one of Those Days where common sense wasn’t so common, and technically, he had already died a gruesome death. So.

He pushed the plush-looking rolly chair aside and walked up to the desk.

“For the record, I’m only looking for office supplies, not whatever highly classified information that Archangels keep in their work stations,” he said to hopefully no one.

He reached out a hand.

Well, he it goes...

The first drawer he opened was the wide, shallow one directly under the center of the desk. Humans would place their computer keyboard there. Michael’s version yielded permanent markers, highlighters, sticky notes, paper clips, and a glue stick. Crowley took out a black marker. He didn’t want to use permanent ink on an office window, but he would if he had to. Next, he checked the series of three drawers situated underneath the right side of the desk. The top one was empty. Ah, that was the drawer where Michael had taken out those hundreds of pages of paperwork.

Michael had a quill, he recalled, which meant she preferred at least one older writing tool. He needed an old-ish writing tool, a very specific one if his plan was to work. There must be other older writing tools stored somewhere. Which drawer was it where she pulled out the quill from?

“Come on...” He opened and then shut the middle drawer, home to Michael’s stash of snacks.

The bottom drawer was a demon’s worst nightmare, full of angelic relics, artifacts, things that looked like weapons, and several bottles of holy water. Crowley shrieked and slammed the contents out of sight.

There were two drawers under the left side of the desk. The bottom, larger one revealed Michael’s running shoes and a sports outfit that reminded him too much of Gabriel’s line of outerwear. He shuddered at the thought of heaven’s executive team being running buddies. He then tugged open the top drawer and was presented with the sight of quills. Yes, this was it, the drawer of outdated supplies! He dragged out the full length of the drawer. There was a letter opener, a stylus not of the tablet computer kind, an actual (clay) tablet, a mechanical pencil with refill leads, and was that a first-generation pager from the early 1900s? He rummaged through the contents at the back. If he was going to find it, it would be here...

“Aha! Bingo! Ta-da!” Crowley cried out as he fished out a box of chalks. “Chalks and demonic summonses, just like ducks in a pond!” He didn’t need the marker anymore. He returned it to its proper place and took out the glue stick instead. Time to get to work.

He emptied the box of every stick of chalk and furiously grated them all against a particularly rough-surfaced piece of broken chair that he picked out from the rubble. Within minutes, a small mountain of multicolored powder collected on Michael’s desk. He then chose a spot on the window and lathered an area the approximate size of a pizza box—the big kind for sharing with a friend, of course—with glue, so that the surface was sufficiently sticky to trap a deserving insect, if one was stupid enough to buzz into heaven and sully its sterile environment.

He turned back to the pile of chalk powder. He knew how this was done, having lived through that miserable phase six years ago of a young Warlock discovering the joy of glitter glue pens, plus one unfortunate birthday party that featured said glitter travesty as the main and only attraction, on cake¹. Pinch by pinch, Crowley stuck a chalk circle onto the gluey part of the window, then added lines and dots to construct the most infernal sigil he could manage. He had, after all, went for maximum evilness by choosing the very section of the window directly across the Shard to construct his means of escape.

This sigil required a dot at the very center of the circle, which he saved for last, dabbing a chalked finger to complete the symbol the same moment he uttered an incantation and dove behind the desk that would separate him from an exploding circle.

What happened next would put humans’ notion of time slowing down to shame.

Crowley spared three percent of his brain appreciating the exquisite craftsmanship that went into creating perfect, literally sound-canceling glass walls that also seemed to absorb all broken pieces into the ether. The other ninety-seven percent of his brain flared into panic mode as soon as it registered that the explosion had propelled all of Michael’s demon-destroying items out of their drawer and onto a projectile path aimed straight at him.

He swore the objects were obeying the laws of freeze-frame videography like in those stop-action animation films for the first few inches or so, but then everything sped up and Crowley wondered if the distortion of time had superimposed a flashing “me! Hit me!” bull’s eye onto his entire corporation. Screaming, he dodged the sharpest looking objects and thanked the Almighty Herself for those bottles of holy water bouncing, then rolling, along the floor without bursting open. He had manifested wings to shield himself on instinct and was unsurprised when a sharp pain tore along the top of his left wing, followed a few heartbeats later by a thud of something against his right wing that sent every feather, muscle, and bone from zero to extreme pain before he could suck in enough air to scream. He imagined as hard as he could that the wings were okay enough to retract, but they refused to cooperate, sending pain signal after pain signal into his brain as more objects pelted against both wings. By the time random objects had stopped raining around him and he somehow managed to half-roll, half-shuffle into a position where he could see out of a gap between scorched feathers, Crowley noted that the office desk had been blown into smithereens, the rolly chair had either turned invisible or been sucked out into the literal heavens, and—from the perfectly pleasant pile that had gathered next to an upturned former snacks drawer—Cadbury Eggs were apparently indestructible.

So the glass-half-full verdict of Plan C was that it worked. The sigil had blown a hole through the window as intended. The glass-completely-empty version though? Everything else.

Crowley hissed in pain as he pulled in his left wing to examine the wound. White wing bleeding black where some blessed flint had sliced him. A wound from a blessed object could not so easily be miracled whole, not that he could attempt it anyway under present circumstances. He carefully shrugged off what remained of Aziraphale’s jacket and pressed the fabric against the worst of the wound. Thank Somebody that the wing was responding to what hint of Aziraphale that lingered there, for the bleeding stopped shortly after and the blackness ceased spreading.

He brushed a finger to the tip of a surviving feather on his right wing and hissed. Something had scorched his very demonic essence there, much deeper than the surface. He looked among the debris for the culprit, for an item that thudded instead of sliced. His eye fell on a bottle of holy water that had rolled up against a rectangular object. The clay tablet. Not an artifact or a weapon. He was almost killed by stationery.

The tablet was cuneiform-side up, and Crowley squinted, tried to recall what he could of the Sumerian language, one of the very firsts that humans had come up with. And there it was, a god-symbol denoted next to a name followed by mighty attributes of said god, then a field symbol, something about harvests, and... a snake symbol. His bespoken cuneiform that he invented for the humans, and the bloody tablet was calling on God to smite Crawly.

“Is this funny enough for you?” he screamed. “Let Crawly dig a hole that he’ll fall into thousands of years later. Are you laughing? If you are, maybe you’d like to share some humor with me, because I’m absolutely not amused right now!”

Plan C had included a Part II, where he was going to squeeze through the hole made by the sigil and fly out to freedom. With a bleeding left wing and a divinely barbecued right wing, he would plunge straight into hell if he jumped. He didn’t fancy Falling all over again.

His wrists and ankles chose this moment to remind him that yes, they were still covered in blisters and very much escalating skywards in terms of the pain level.

He sighed. Or more accurately, the last bit of optimism left Crowley and he simply deflated.

Plan D: not die.

He looked around.

Correction. Plan D: clean up the mess he’d made and hope not to be smited by a furious Archangel when she returned.

-

¹ Brother Francis had been extremely displeased about that. It wasn’t enough for Nanny Ashtoreth to offer to miracle away the glitter, because “what if you do it wrong and I get glue coating my esophagus? Then everything I eat will get stuck, which means I’ll never get to eat again!” To which the nanny, being extremely unladylike, flipped an actual bird at the good monk. Later that evening, perhaps as an apology, a clean, full-sized birthday cake (no one had dared touch it) and a bottle of top-shelf whiskey mysteriously appeared inside Brother Francis’ humble abode, with a note that read: “Alcohol dissolves everything. Trust me.” It was reported that Brother Francis acted in a manner most inconsistent with his gentle and pleasant nature the following day. No one ever found out why, but it was widely known that the Dowlings never ordered from the same caterer again. ^[back]

Chapter Text

Crowley was in the process of begging the former desk to please, just think how happy you’ll make her if you join up all your pieces and become a desk again when he felt fire around his neck.

He went utterly still.

He didn’t need to turn around to know that it was a flaming sword. And seeing how he was already on his hands and knees in his attempt to communicate, er, eye-to-eye with pieces of wrecked furniture, this corporation couldn’t sink any lower to plead for his life.

There was no excuse he could offer anyway. He knew he wouldn’t accept any excuse if he were to find some unfortunate soul mucking about next to the wreckage of his Bentley. He just... he needed more time, that was all. He had hoped Michael wouldn’t return so soon.

“One move from you, demon, and I’ll smite you into oblivion.”

Bugger.

She knew.

(Of course she knew. But it was one thing to guess that a holy weapon at your neck meant you probably blew your cover. It was entirely different to hear it said out loud.)

“I didn’t mean it! I-I’m sorry! Really, you have no idea how s –”

The flame moved closer. Crowley swallowed the rest of his words.

He looked down at the broken furniture and was overcome with a sudden bout of empathy, a sense of solidarity borne out of knowing that this was what his body would soon look like. Divide and conquer, quite literally. Should he start thinking his last thoughts? He’d always believed that if it ever came to this, he would lose consciousness to the mental image of Aziraphale. But he couldn’t conjure up a memory of a smiling Aziraphale right now, knowing how much he’d failed him.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, louder and more desperate. He wasn’t sure which angel he was saying this to anymore.

A distant part of his brain registered the sound of a door slamming shut. The message it sent couldn’t be clearer. It was now or never.

“Aziraphale?” he asked. “D-Did he make it? Is he safe? Please, Michael. I need to know. I won’t ask anything else.”

Long moments passed, long enough that his sense of hope decided it was fed up with the waiting and took its leave. It was foolish of him, really, to expect an answer. But even as the silence stretched, Crowley refused to let go of his glass-half-full philosophy of life, or whatever minutes that was left of it. Michael wasn’t talking. That could mean a lot of things, but at the minimum it meant that she wasn’t boasting about how Aziraphale died in agony for having been found out. Which meant Aziraphale survived. Maybe. He hated that he would have to settle for a “maybe.” But if that was all he was going to get, he supposed he was fine with it.

The sword’s flames were making crackling noises that reminded him of thunder from the very first storm, foreboding and signaling the end of something good. Inevitable.

Inevitable felt horrible when he didn’t know when the blow was going to hit. His wrists were hurting more and more, not to mention the sorry state of his wings and how they were threatening to topple him over. He didn’t know how long he could support himself in this position, how many seconds before he’d finally collapse and the sword would collapse with him—through him. What was Michael waiting for? He willed his biceps to stop spasming, and when that didn’t work, shifted more weight to his knees. But they too were threatening to give out.

“Get up.” A command. A reprieve.

This was one order he was happy to obey. Crowley funneled every ounce of remaining strength into his hands as he pushed his torso up, then straightened his upper body. Slowly, he wobbled onto his feet. He kept his head bowed, not out of respect or defeat but because he needed to concentrate on making his lower body move. Transfer his weight to the balls of his feet. Stand up slowly, knees unbending. One small hobble to the right for balance. Keep those injured wings steady, don’t go whacking them into Michael’s sword. Ankles, still screaming with pain, turning just like that to guide the rest of his body around. Stopping when the right rotation was reached, flaming sword now pointing directly at his chest. Final movement, raise his head. Face his executioner. Die not from something but for something, someone.

He tried to be brave. But it was much easier to fancy himself a hero in the comfort of his flat. Here, it took all of Crowley’s imagination to convince his lower lip not to quiver.

Speaking of imagination, the Archangel looked nothing like herself in his fantasies either. Michael was... off. She had acquired a wild glint in her eyes, and her normally impeccable updo had become just a tiny bit unraveled. Her arm holding the sword started trembling.

Ah. He was looking at her with Aziraphale’s face. How ironic, the one who ordered the Principality’s execution was confronted with the corporation of her victim. Crowley’s mind turned quickly. He had an idea.

“Thou shalt not murder,” he said in Aziraphale’s holier-than-thou voice. “You kill me, you kill Aziraphale’s body. He will become permanently discorporated. One of your kind, Michael. You’ll have murdered a fellow angel.”

If Crowley were to sum up his 6,000-year-old life, if he were to gift-wrap his legacy and leave it as a forget-me-not for earth and humanity, he supposed he should go back to the very beginning, to the garden. The Original Tempter. The Serpent who twisted not his form but his words, so that a well-placed “did God really...?” and a bite of fruit later, the whole course of human history was forever changed. He was good at temptations. Insinuate just enough, then sit back and let human curiosity run its course toward sin and destruction. He always won.

He had sown doubt into Michael’s mind, tempted her to question her own righteousness.

The sword lowered.

Another moment, and Michael lifted her free hand, snapped, and a new rolly chair popped into existence.

As if seeing an old friend was all the motivation it needed, the former desk hurried to gather its pieces to reassemble itself. Behind Crowley, the former guest chair did the same, and the bits of armrests and chair legs finally left him as they tugged free of the bindings and flew to rejoin the rest of themselves.

And then, the blisters on his wrists and ankles began to heal. He tried to retract his wings and realized that he could. They had been made whole also. In fact, even his clothes had been restored. He lifted his hands to inspect them. Still Aziraphale’s hands, perfectly manicured as ever.

Crowley met Michael’s frankly ineffable gaze.

“The chair is repaired. Sit.”

Crowley took two steps backwards. The moment the back of his knees bumped into the chair, all strength left him and he collapsed onto it.

Michael walked toward the window and performed a final miracle to remove all evidence that a sigil had blown a hole through there. She then scooped up the pile of perfectly undamaged Cadbury Eggs and carefully laid them back into the snacks drawer.

So here they were again, Michael in the rolly chair behind the desk and him sitting across from her, with the stack of paperwork magically making a return, just like the past hour hadn’t happened.

But it had.

“Aziraphale is safe. All the demons were led to believe that Crowley has become invincible and they couldn’t wait to get him out of hell fast enough.”

Crowley sagged into his seat. It worked. Thank Somebody that it worked! His eyes started to burn and he had to blink rapidly to keep the wetness from spilling over. He was doing all this without his sunglasses. He didn’t care.

Michael looked at him meaningfully. “Do not think you’re getting out of here alive.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Crowley muttered. It was a matter of time, he knew, may even be quite soon, as soon as Michael got over having to look at Aziraphale’s face while ending him. “Why heal me then,” he snapped, “why not let me suffer until you figure out a way to kill me without sullying your precious conscience?”

“Holy water kills a healthy demon slower and leaves no trace of physical remains,” she explained, and even though Crowley wasn’t surprised, had known for a long time that Michael was ruthless, he couldn’t help succumbing to a full-body shudder. But of course. Melt him and she wouldn’t have to look at the face of a dead Aziraphale. Highly sensible solution, it was. Except for the tiny detail that he was the demon in question. Crowley gave the room a quick glance around.

“There’s no escape. I believe you already found that out.”

“I’m not just going to sit here and wait! Or do I need to fill out paperwork, give consent for my murder? Because that’s one piece of paper I’ll never sign.”

“Paperwork is not necessary for the delivery of justice.”

“Justice? You call this –” He gestured around. “– this isn’t justice! No case, no trial, lock me in your office so you can execute me without anyone else knowing? Humans have names for all these, you know, none that they would associate with angels. You said hell had a trial for me down Below? Well good for them. I’m proud to be a demon for once!”

There. He’d done it. Crossed every line there was to cross; signed and sealed his own death warrant. Crowley never wanted a heroic death, would prefer not to die ever, thank you very much. But dear Somebody, if he had to go, then sticking it to an Archangel as his final act came pretty close to perfection.

Michael, as usual, was not ruffled. She opened a drawer—not the one with the Cadbury Eggs, unfortunately—just like she was conducting yet another business meeting and needed to look for a “confidential” stamp to confine what she was about to do strictly to this room. When her hand re-emerged, she had a bottle of holy water in hand. She placed it on the desk directly across from Crowley.

He knew running was of no use and was half-expecting angelic coils to tie him up again. But something about the holy water shifted Michael’s mood, and she suddenly became very interested in her mobile phone that she had placed next to the stack of papers.

After a few seconds, Michael waved a hand, and Crowley instinctively shrank back. But the bottle top didn’t fly off and holy water didn’t shoot at him. Instead, the screen of Michael’s mobile flashed a rubbish bin icon accompanied by a corresponding “are you sure” sound. Crowley craned his neck just so to make out from where he was sitting that a phone contact had been permanently deleted.

“I offered to deliver the holy water to hell,” Michael spoke to the phone, and funny, wasn’t it, how utter terror could make one feel an uneasy sense of calm. After what Crowley thought was his moment of extinguishment only to be told to hang on, please, Death’s using the loo and will be with you shortly, he found himself listening.

“...would never darken my essence in that godforsaken place. But I told myself I would do this. I would personally ensure the delivery of holy water to see the demon Crowley destroyed.”

Without warning, Michael lifted her head and the full weight of her gaze crashed into Crowley. “You killed Ligur,” she said in a voice that had gone deadly calm, not accusing, merely stating a fact.

On earth, Crowley had developed a sort of hobby to observe humans arriving at moments of epiphany—those of the consequences-bite-you-in-the-arse kind. He reveled in the headiness of a well-timed horrified realization, particularly if the realization happened at the moment of death. When pieces of a person’s schemes fell into place only for everything to become inverted into a metaphorical anvil falling upon one’s own head, Crowley could always be found nearby, lurking somewhere in the shadows, savoring the sweetness of schadenfreude as much as Aziraphale savored his chocolate cakes.

Trust the big fat anvil to be dropping on him, as his earlier pondering about whether Michael knew other demons blared the obvious answer directly into his brain. Ligur. Ligur was Michael’s “source,” possibly even an... acquaintance.

No wonder she volunteered to deliver holy water to Below. This was personal vengeance. Michael was willing to extinguish Crowley at all cost to avenge Ligur.

“I had to! He tried to kill me. It was self-defense!”

“Spare me your excuses,” came the icy response.

Michael stood up. A bucket appeared next to the bottle as she did so. Crowley gulped, remembering the Almighty’s laws about an eye for an eye that heaven still embraced fully and quite literally. Maybe he should stand too. Being on legs would make for a better chance of dodging than on his bums. But his lower body wouldn’t listen to him. Or any part of his body, for that matter.

“Word gets around,” Michael said as she poured holy water into the bucket. “Most of heaven’s management knows by now about the demon who destroyed one of his own with holy water.”

“Michael, please... if you’re going to do this, let me at least return this body back to Aziraphale.” He hated how desperate he sounded, or how wet his eyes had become. But now was not the time for pride. He’d toss out all of his dignity for the chance to see Aziraphale again. “I beg you, Michael. Please!”

“He won’t need this body back. He will be recaptured and executed as soon as you are extinguished.”

“What? No! This isn’t fair! He already escaped—hell let him go! And you lot up here tried to kill me when you thought I was him. If you do it again, that – that’s three times in a day! You can’t have triple punishment for one crime. Not today and not ever. He’s still an angel, the Almighty didn’t Fall him. You have no right to kill him!”

He was braver advocating for Aziraphale, wouldn’t think twice to dive headfirst into the bucket if it meant saving his angel’s life. He found that he could move again, jumping to his feet and actually approaching Michael, planting his hands flat on her desk to make it very clear that heaven should leave Aziraphale the hell alone.

Michael sneered. “Very touching. But you have no bargaining power. Now stand still to be executed. Or do I need to immobilize you?”

Crowley ran. He managed two steps before an invisible force snapped his legs together and slapped his arms to his side, freezing him in place. Michael smirked as she picked up the bucket and rounded the corner of her desk. He tried to shout, but even his vocal cords had been disabled. His eyeballs could still move though, and he darted them between the bucket and Michael’s gleaming eyes, full of malicious emotions that angels shouldn’t possess. They were getting closer, both Michael and the instrument of his extinction. I’m sorry, Aziraphale, he pushed the thought outward, prayed. Michael was within water-dousing distance now. He closed his eyes and resigned himself to immeasurable pain.

A tune sounded, melodious and full of rhythm at the same time. It instilled a sense of utter urgency inside Crowley, reminding him of the time when he was awaken by such a pressure on his bladder during his decades-long nap that if he didn’t wake up and go relieve himself, his body was going to explode. He cracked open his eyes, and the way Michael’s features twisted into something unpleasant told him that she was feeling the same thing. His eyes followed hers toward the office desk. The mobile phone was glowing. Everything about it screamed that this was An Important Call, one that would be very unwise to ignore. Yet even so, Michael tried for several seconds to resist. But resistance was futile, as they said in that human space travel show, and Crowley had never felt so grateful for the inconvenient timing of a phone call.

Crowley wasn’t merely the Original Tempter. Over the millennia, he continued to get humans to ask questions, had refined his skills into an art form like how wine got better with age. He also knew when a temptation wasn’t going to pan out. He had no problem cutting his losses. Humans had free will, after all, and it was their right to exercise the virtue of resisting temptations.

Angels and demons weren’t supposed to have free will, or at least possess equally strong conflicting desires along the continuum of good and evil. Yet as Crowley observed the phone call, hearing nothing except for Michael’s occasional terse responses to what was clearly not an equal dialogue, he had no problem seeing straight into Michael’s inner conflict, manifested outwardly in her tight set of shoulders, like she was resisting the very foundation of angelic nature because she wanted to be vindictive, to be cruel –

“But why?” An Archangel. Pushing back. Asking questions.

Whatever answer Michael received seemed to burn her ear, and she wrenched her phone away and stabbed at the screen to disconnect the call. It took her some moments to end her glaring match with the phone, but she eventually remembered Crowley was in the room and directed her attention to him.

She looked him up and down, her mouth twisted in disgust. A snap, and he was dumped unceremoniously onto the guest chair. But, forced into an unnaturally straight posture, Crowley along with the chair toppled over and both hit the floor with a loud crash. Despite the ruckus, Crowley still heard some of what Michael was muttering: “... won’t work... a demon... can’t...”

It took a moment for Michael to notice Crowley’s failure of being properly deposited. Annoyed, she unfroze him and looked pointedly at the chair. Doing his best to ignore the pins and needles sensation that started attacking his extremities as soon as he could move again, Crowley tilted the chair upright and slithered onto it, no longer feeling the need to mimic Aziraphale’s posture.

So here they were again, for the third time this afternoon, seated in their respective chairs with a desk holding up a thick stack of paperwork between them.

Michael pulled out a form from the very last pages of the stack, turned it rightside up for him, and slid it across the desk.

“Fill this out.”

Crowley glanced down. The paper had a lot of words. He didn’t trust celestial paperwork with a lot of words.

“Yet another way to try to kill me?”

“I can kill you with holy water at any time,” Michael replied, her voice back to being businesslike. Emotionless. “This is for Aziraphale. If you want him to live, then fill it out.”

Well played. Dangle Aziraphale in front of him, and he would willingly follow. But...

“You’re changing your mind then, about executing him again?”

A shadow flittered across Michael’s face. There it was again, that resistance, as if she was fighting herself to do what she was told. It didn’t make sense. She was the highest Archangel. No one ordered her around. Had that been the Director of Angel Resources on the phone, demanding proper paperwork to be filled out before a murder?

He knew better than to ask who was on the other end of the line.

Michael pushed the form forward, refused to answer.

Crowley took the paper. The header read Form 58479G, Guarantor Intervention.

I, _______, the undersigned, do hereby agree to assume the role and responsibilities of Guarantor to ________, the filer, in regards to matters related to the filer’s reason(s) for separation and any disciplinary action(s) required thereof. The undersigned shall take on the filer’s outstanding obligations, including but not limited to obligations of a legal, financial, ethereal/infernal, spiritual, and corporeal nature. The undersigned shall submit to a full accounting of all resources in undersigned’s possession, including but not limited to financial assets, equity, miracle allocations, celestial power and authority, life force, moral and ethical capacity, and current account balances on love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The undersigned shall be cognizant of the full risk in executing guarantorship, including but not limited to loss of material assets, loss of non-material assets, loss of Grace, termination of celestial duties, bodily discorporation, spiritual damnation, and existential extinction.

Crowley grimaced, skipping the rest of the legalese and stared blankly at the signature line at the bottom of the form where he knew Michael expected him to sign. How exactly was he supposed to preserve Aziraphale’s life with this? He had none of the resources other than of the earthly monetary kind and was personally acquainted with almost all of the so-called risks. Who would want to entrust their well being to someone with plenty of loss of Grace and spiritual damnation to spare? He’d make a terrible guarantor.

He opened his mouth to tell Michael exactly that, but she cut him off: “Your decision will determine whether I will personally recall Aziraphale from earth for his execution.”

“I’ll sign!” Crowley exclaimed, reaching over to take the quill. He started writing Anthony on the first line to indicate himself as the undersigned, but the ink erased itself as soon as he scribbled in the name. He frowned at the quill. The tip was black and moist, evidence of sufficient ink. He moved to the second line and identified Aziraphale as the filer. That one stuck. He blessed.

“The paper doesn’t want me.” He pushed it toward Michael, incomplete. “You can’t stake Aziraphale’s existence on a stupid piece of paper. Even you must see how unfair it is.”

Michael ignored his plea. She slid the paper back to him.

Maybe the paper didn’t recognize Anthony. He tried again, just Crowley this time. The word disappeared.

He gestured at the infuriating form. “See?”

Arms crossed, Michael leaned back in her rolly chair, determined as ever to not offer any help. She was also doing the impassive staring thing again.

Well, he wasn’t going to let Aziraphale die. He took up the quill and went further down his own existence’s memory lane. Maybe official paperwork only accepted given names, not names that people thought up for themselves.

He wrote Crawly.

It disappeared.

Perhaps using English was the problem? He tried again in infernal script (disappeared), using a sigil (disappeared), and even spelling out his demonic name in angel script (also disappeared).

He could feel it, desperation beginning to creep in when the possibility of failure was looming simply because he couldn’t write his own bloody name. He wondered if he needed to dig up his long-discarded angel name. He didn’t want to go there; that wasn’t him anymore. But even as he forged ahead and gave the first letter of that name a try, the ink promptly erased itself.

He was out of names.

He looked to Michael and pleaded, “Please, I can’t – I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Well, I mean, obviously I’m not qualified to be a guarantor. Can’t you find someone else? Let that person keep Aziraphale alive? I’ll – whatever I can do, I will! I’ll pay them, give them my flat, my plants, my car!”

Material possessions were so... material. He loved what he owned and especially prized his Bentley above many human lives. But none of that was enough. No thing could save Aziraphale.

No thing, his inner voice piped up, but not no one.

And it hit him then, realization bigger and heavier than a bludgeon, sending everything that hadn’t been making sense flying only to have them settle back inside his head in perfect, understandable order.

The undersigned shall take on the filer’s outstanding obligations.

Michael didn’t offer him the form to save Aziraphale. She expected it not to work. And with his failure she would resume her plan with the holy water and then track down Aziraphale to execute him, all because in theory it shouldn’t work, because demons couldn’t love.

Except this was Crowley.

Alright then, death by paperwork it is. Crowley stood up. This one was a no brainer.

“You keep saying heaven won’t let up on Aziraphale until he’s extinguished. Well –” He glanced at the bucket of holy water, his worst nightmare. “– kill me then. Avenge Ligur like you wanted to. Is that how this guarantor thing work, a life for a life? I don’t have any angelic resources or quality, but I have a life I’m willing to give. Go ahead. Extinguish me. Just promise me none of you will ever bother Aziraphale again.”

He wasn’t scared anymore. What could Michael the Chief Smiter do to him that he wasn’t now ready to give away of his own free will? He only regretted that he would never see Aziraphale again. It was idiotic of him, all these years, to insist on “demons can’t love” and thinking that they would have time to work this out, without realizing that no one, not even immortal beings, could expect to plan beyond one day, one hour, or even one minute of their existence at a time.

Michael was looking at him intently. She seemed to have swallowed something bitter, as if she loathed the taste of every word she had to speak.

“You are sure of this, demon Crowley?”

His voice was as fierce as hers was not. “Yes.”

She nodded, then pointed to the paper. Crowley looked down. In the guarantor field, the form had self-populated his name: Anthony J. Crowley.

“How –”

“The form has accepted your request. All that remains is for you to sign.”

Perplexed, he sat down and examined the paper. Nothing had changed, none of the “including but not limited to’s” or the stipulations in the paragraphs that followed. All of this was beyond his comprehension.

Crowley signed.

And then the paper started to glow, and he dropped it with a yelp, his fingers stinging from the aftereffect of coming in contact with holy energy. Eyes trailing the paper as Michael retrieved it, he noticed that the form had been countersigned. The name was in heaven’s ancient language. He didn’t recognize it.

Michael waved a hand over the form and a copy emerged. She handed it to Crowley. This one didn’t burn.

He lifted his head, questioning.

“As guarantor to the Principality Aziraphale, the demon Crowley is to be extinguished by hellfire on the Principality’s behalf,” Michael said. Her voice was still unfriendly, bordering on hostile even, but the better part of professionalism had returned. “This is in accordance with Form 58479G that you just signed and with the form’s corresponding statute as recorded in the Great Book of Common Celestial Law, Section I, Part C. As guarantor, you have the right to review the archival records on this section of the law.”

“Er, no thanks,” he said when he realized he was expected to answer.

“Very well. Let it be shown in the records that the Principality Aziraphale’s execution was carried out against the demon Crowley, acting as guarantor, today morning under the witness of Gabriel, Uriel, and Sandalphon. Intent and informed consent of the guarantor was later obtained, under special circumstances, today afternoon under the witness of myself, Michael. The Principality Aziraphale is thereby released from all disciplinary action as related to the stated reason for his separation. His employment standing: separated. Cause of separation: treason. Verdict: guilty. Status: exonerated.”

The record that Michael requested materialized, fully composed, on her desk and she inserted it into the stack.

And then they were staring awkwardly at each other again. Well, Crowley felt awkward, anyway. Michael didn’t seem to understand the notion of social faux pas commonly agreed upon among humans.

He decided to be the adult and blinked. “So, er, that’s it?”

“Yes.”

He glanced at the holy water. Michael banished it with a wave of her arm.

“Set foot in heaven again, and I will extinguish you with holy water.” She paused. Her face scrunched as if she had sucked on something sour. “For today, as a guarantor, your presence and continued existence here is allowed. The door is no longer warded. You are free to go.”

“None of you will harm Aziraphale again? Because Gabriel –”

“Gabriel is not at liberty to defy higher authority.”

Angels, as a general rule, did not lie. The Archangel Michael in particular was widely known for being too brutally honest. If she said Aziraphale was safe, then logic would dictate that he should believe her. But the heart was not so easily persuaded as the head.

A thought occurred to him. “Hang on, but you’re all Archangels. Horizontal names in the company org chart and all. I’ve seen it before, thousands of years ago, and I don’t think anything has changed.”

“I wasn’t referring to myself.”

She wasn’t? “Okay...”

“The one who countersigned your form. He forbids all further action against Aziraphale. And against you.” At this, Michael sounded displeased.

It wasn’t hard for Crowley to connect the dots between the counter-signatory and the one who saved his life with a call. They were the same person, had to be. But who was this higher authority? Who could be this powerful? Who would care about him?

Crowley looked down at his copy. No, not the Metatron. Even with his rusty recall of the ancient angelic language, he knew how the Metatron’s name was spelt. This name didn’t ring a bell.

“He goes by a different name now,” Michael prompted. Nope, still not the faintest idea. Another pause. “You’ve met him once. On earth.”

He did? Crowley looked down again. This time, the countersignature glowed and the letters rearranged themselves into different positions, into a human language.

Oh, Him. The bright young man from the seaside who later met Crowley amid the sandy heat of the desert, two thousand years ago. The Boss’s Son.

“How – why? He hated me! I showed him the kingdoms of the world and he cast me out, sent me away! Didn’t appreciate anything!”

Michael gave him that Look again, the one that never failed to make him feel slow and inadequate. “He chose humans over things. I would think the similarity is self-evident.”

Choosing humans. Loving them. Giving up His life for them.

Going by this standard—and maybe the Ineffable Plan did employ different standards than the Great Plan—this would mean loyalty to humanity wasn’t treason at all.

Michael resumed her awkward staring, and even though Crowley was free to go, the sheer discomfort of it pinned him in place to hear whatever Michael still wanted to say.

“I asked about Aziraphale’s affection for you.”

That? But it was the only completely honest answer that he gave. He didn’t even think to lie. And what was so wrong with his response anyway? “Was I supposed to say 'yes, I love all of God’s creatures, including Crowley?'”

“Aziraphale would simply say yes.”

The words entered his ears and stayed there, spinning in circles until the ringing inside his head became so loud that he had to squeeze his eyes shut to force out the feeling that Michael’s clipped words, a mere opinion, unleashed inside him. Which may or may not have caused a strangled scream to escape his throat, or a bout of head-shaking to try to fling the words far away from him even if the feeling refused to follow suit. When he opened his eyes again, the world was dark because he had buried his face into his hands.

Aziraphale... loved him? Like that?

He composed himself minutes later to the sight of Michael going back to the beginning of the stack and flipping through every sheet of paper, occasionally inserting a “sign here” sticker marking one of the pages. Any second now, he just knew she was going to pick up with the conversation as if nothing had happened. He wondered if all angels were trained to ignore demons’ dramatic meltdowns.

“Aziraphale is much bolder than you would believe,” she continued as if on cue, “he risked his immortal existence for you, in hell.”

Implied and shouted into the deafening silence was the part she didn’t need to say, that Crowley risked his life today too, many times, in heaven. If their care for each other was this obvious to the Archangel, then perhaps it was time for him to own up to the truth.

“Prior to today, Form 58479G has only been used once.” Michael gestured at Crowley’s copy. “The Boss’s Son became humanity’s guarantor. Generated quite a buzz among Records staff when they realized what document they were processing. Substitutionary atonement, I believe the humans call it. It was an act of love.”

Crowley heard, unmistakably, the self-evident version of those final words. He supposed he did indeed perform an act of love. And he was alive to tell the tale, to meet up with Aziraphale at St. James’s Park and tell him, well, he would tell him everything that happened, of course, including every shriek of Gabriel’s and Michael’s Cadbury Eggs. But there was something else he would need to tell Aziraphale eventually. Soon. Because he had already said it in paperwork, and any other way would be less tedious and much, much more preferable than that.

-

Epilogue

The present tale would not be complete without the readers knowing what happened next.

About a fortnight later, a box appeared mysteriously inside the premise of A.Z. Fell & Co. It was neither delivered by hand nor through post, as the box was many times larger than what could be squeezed through the mail slit on the door. It also appeared when the store’s regular occupants, an angel and a demon, were away. When they returned, sufficiently tipsy from a restaurant whose owner was somehow delivered too many cases of top-shelf drinks without being charged for them by the supplier, neither was in possession of the right state of mind to be suspicious of an unknown package.

“Hey angel, look! There isss... there’sss a box for you!” Crowley slurred.

“Oh, how lovely! Whosit from?”

“Dunno. No name. Sssender name, I mean. 's for you alright. Says here. Azir – Aziiir – you know. Your name.”

The angel, seeing that his companion was in no state to properly open a box (though neither was he), took it from Crowley and proceeded into the back room. Crowley took a step to follow, but the room tilted, which made it difficult to figure out where “back” was when the bookstore was a circle that had started spinning.

He sobered up immediately when he heard Aziraphale’s scream. Well, it wasn’t a scream, precisely. More like a shriek. Or a yelp, a very high-pitched one.

“Angel?” He rushed toward the back room, ready to draw upon his demonic energy if the box had dared hurt a single hair of –

Upon entry, Crowley also emitted a high-pitched sound.

“W-What does this mean?” Aziraphale shouted, waving a yellow object frantically in the space between them. He, too, had sobered up, though an observer would be hard pressed to tell the difference given his present state of incoherence. “Is this – does it mean – wait, she found out? But how?”

Crowley, initial shock having passed, looked between that not-so-angelic-at-the-moment face scrunched up in mortification and the yellow object.

He doubled over and laughed.

They were safe here. From now until the next end of the world, no harm would befall them. Crowley laughed and laughed and laughed, then fished out a thick stack of papers that was underneath more of those yellow things from the box and thwump'ed it onto the coffee table.

“All for you,” he said, pointing to the hundreds of sticky notes poking out of various pages that indicated signatures were needed. He then took a handful of yellow objects for himself and continued laughing.

He would explain to Aziraphale later. And apologize profusely, judging by the very confused yet increasingly cross look (adorable, really) that was cast his way.

His ears were ringing from the ghost of a short exchange, the very last one he had in heaven.

A final question, Crowley , if you may. Aziraphale had asked this of Beelzebub. Tell me: what is a rubber duck?