Chapter Text
Crowley was jerked awake.
Literally. He was pulled without warning from his bed, dragged through nothingness, blackness—
It was Hell, he thought, panicking, struggling fruitlessly—they’d come for him. Where was Aziraphale? Was he safe?
He landed in an undignified heap of limbs, untidy red hair, and black silk pajamas, on something hard and cold, some kind of confined space—
It wasn’t Hell.
He knew the feel of Hell, and this wasn’t it. Also, the lighting was wrong, too warm; and it was too muted and cluttered for Heaven—
Oh. This was a house. A human’s house. A finished basement, by the look of it, he thought as he struggled to his feet.
He’d been Summoned.
How irritating.
He pulled up his most terrifying Hellhound face, spun around—“WHO DARES—oh.” He let his face relapse into its usual configuration. “You’re kids.”
There were four of them, girls (probably), older than the currently 11-and-a-half-year-old Warlock but certainly not adults, wearing pajamas and currently recovering from having jumped several feet away from him and the pentagram trapping him.
“Um,” said the tallest one, a Black girl, athletic-looking, with strong features and thin braids (Crowley eyed them with interest), “foul fiend”—
“Don’t call me that,” he objected, but she overrode him—
“…we have summoned you from the pits of Hell—”
“You certainly have not,” he interrupted. “I was asleep. In my bed. And now you’re calling me names.” (Names that only one being could safely use for him.)
A second girl, almost comically shorter than the first one, cocked her head to one side. “I thought it would be scary, not sulky.” She was also Black, but rosy as opposed to the first one’s more chiseled look, with her hair in a neat round pouf. She gave off a bookish rather than an athletic air.
“Oh, I’m definitely sca—hang on a minute.” The girls sounded odd, and he’d just realized why. “Are you American?”
They looked at each other. “Of course we’re American,” said one of the remaining two. She was Latina with long, dark curly hair pulled into a ponytail that rivaled Crowley’s at its longest.
“Why do you sound like you’re from England?” asked the last one, who was white with a long sheet of blonde hair (a few shades darker than Aziraphale’s, Crowley noted automatically).
“I am from England. I mean I live there. London. Mayfair. Or Soho.” That was odd—he didn’t live in Soho; he just visited the bookshop—admittedly as much as possible in these past few months since Armageddon didn’t happen; in fact, he was due there this morning for—
“Breakfast!” he shouted.
The girls jumped. “What?” asked the tall one blankly. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I said I’d bring him breakfast,” Crowley muttered. “Wait—what time did you say it is?”
“Eleven-thirty.”
“At night? No—that can’t be right—it was eleven-thirty before I went to sleep.” He’d made himself leave the bookshop for once, climbed into his own bed around midnight.
“It’s eleven-thirty here,” said the short bookish girl. “This is Atlanta. We’re on Eastern time.”
He looked at her blankly. “Atlanta?” This took some seconds to process. “You mean in America? Ha! That explains the accents.” He ignored the looks the girls were now giving him. “That means it’s…Nnghkh, I can’t do time zones. Humans, always trying to cut time up into neat little slices. What time is it in London?”
“Four-thirty a.m.,” said the bookish girl without hesitation.
“Alright,” he said with relief. “Haven’t missed breakfast, then.” He had his phone out anyway, was automatically pulling up Aziraphale’s number before he realized the phone had no signal, at all—normally never a problem for him, since if he imagined there should be a signal, there was—“Aarrghhh,” he groaned, running his hand through his bed-skewed hair. “Of course there’s no signal; I’m in a bloody pentagram.” If a phone signal could get out, so could he, technically. So of course the pentagram wouldn’t allow that.
“Wait,” came an American teenager’s voice from outside his small prison, “you have a smartphone?”
“Of course I have a smartphone; d’you think I’d still be using a flip phone?” he retorted, hitting the call button anyway (nothing happened).
“Demons use phones?”
“Of course demons—well…ehhh”—he thought of Hastur demanding what a computer was—“it varies.”
“So, you’re calling another demon?” one of the teenagers asked suspiciously.
“What? No, of course I’m not calling another demon; what would I want one of them for?” Crowley rotated around in the pentagram, angling the phone, pointlessly trying to find a spot that had a signal. “I’m calling my friend. Or, not calling. Not calling him or anyone else. Aaagghh!” He flung the useless phone down. It didn’t break, because he had decided long ago that his phone was very tough (at least that still worked). What it did do was slide across the smooth floor right out of the pentagram.
“Nnnngh,” he said weakly, watching it slide to a stop well outside the clear but very solid wall, still showing Aziraphale’s name with the flame background (flaming sword, get it?).
The blonde girl picked up the phone. “Your friend is...Azire”—
“Aziraphale,” Crowley snarled before she could mangle the angel’s name.
“Aziraphale,” several voices repeated carefully. “And you said he’s not a demon?”
“Definitely not,” Crowley snapped, working hard to conceal how uncomfortable he felt with someone else holding his phone. “He’s an angel,” he added without meaning to.
“An angel?” the girls echoed.
“Yes, an angel,”—Crowley rolled his eyes—“celestial being, ethereal entity, supernatural something or other—whatever you like.” He leaned against the nearly-invisible side of the pentagram to keep himself from trying to pace, since there wasn’t any room for pacing anyway.
“Okay,” said the tall girl, “you’re saying there are demons living in London”—
“A demon. Singular,” Crowley corrected.
“Demons with smartphones,” someone else continued.
“And also that there are angels living in London,” another one added.
“Just the one angel,” Crowley said through his teeth.
“And that the angels and the demons are friends?”
“The singular angel and the singular demon are friends,” noted the bookish girl.
“Yes,” Crowley said defiantly, having waited 6000 years to be able to say so in public, “we’re friends. An angel and a demon are friends. Do you have a problem with that?”
They looked at each other, shrugging. “No,” said the tall one. “Just wouldn’t have thought angels and demons would get along, really.”
“They don’t. At all.”
“Thanks; that really clears things up,” muttered someone.
“If angels and demons don’t get along, then how are you friends with this…Aziraphale?” asked the blonde one.
“That’s a really long story,” said Crowley, “and we are not getting into it. Look, he and I are friends; that’s a thing. And I’m supposed to bring breakfast to his bookshop this morning, and if I don’t turn up, he’s going to be worried, and believe me, you don’t want a worried angel on your hands. Just—just give me my phone back, and send me back, and we’ll pretend like this didn’t happen.”
They looked at each other again, and he knew it wasn’t going to be that simple.
“Why don’t we just call him from out here, and you can talk to him on speakerphone?” suggested the ponytailed girl, practically.
“Ah…ehhhhaalright,” consented Crowley feebly. It was far from ideal, but if it let him talk to Aziraphale, he’d take it.
“You can’t call him in the middle of the night,” objected the blonde girl, who appeared to share Aziraphale’s commitment to rules of etiquette.
“It’s fine; he won’t be asleep,” Crowley assured them. “Just call him, please. I’m asking nicely. Work with me.”
It was the tall one who took the phone and pressed the call button. It rang a considerable number of times; Crowley worked to suppress his increasing anxiety by imagining Aziraphale making his way out of the back room, winding between tables and shelves, frowning suspiciously at the ringing phone—
“Er…hello?” came his friend’s voice, warily.
“Angel!” Crowley said, and had to pause, swallowing—he was shockingly relieved and reassured by the sound of Aziraphale’s voice.
“Crowley! What is it? Are you alright?” Of course getting a call from him at four in the morning would make Aziraphale panic; Crowley should have anticipated—
“I’m fine, I’m fine—calm down, angel; it’s fine.”
“Where are you? What’s happening?”
“It’s fine—I mean, I’ve been Summoned, but—”
“Oh no! Crowley! What do you mean? Is it—is it Hell? What…what do they…want?” The fear in Aziraphale’s voice was shattering. “Where are you? I’ll come to you—”
“No—no, angel, it’s fine; I promise it’s fine; it’s not that kind of summoning—it’s not Hell. I’m fine—don’t worry, please, angel.”
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley could picture him, standing by the table with the ancient phone, a hand pressed to his heart, closing his eyes and trying to take calming breaths, “please tell me where you are and what’s going on.”
“I will, if you’ll stop interrupting me”—banter; their everyday banter would calm the angel down, surely—“I’ve been Summoned—by—you know, by humans.” This was suddenly embarrassing, and he hadn’t even gotten to the “teenagers’ slumber party” part yet. “With a pentagram and a spell book and everything.”
“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said, the panic easing out of his voice, replaced by sympathy. “How dreadfully inconvenient for you.” He paused, then, delicately: “Shall I come…liberate you?”
“Ehhnngh,” Crowley deliberated, imagining Aziraphale swooping to his rescue through the phone lines, his own personal avenging angel, freeing him from—
Four teenagers in pajamas.
Four teenagers in pajamas who were now, he noted, whispering to each other and looking at him in an entirely new way, that he didn't understand but was sure he did not like.
“I don’t…I don’t think it’s necessary,” he told Aziraphale. “I’m not in danger. Probably. It’s just—breakfast. I might not be…ah, finished here in time to bring breakfast like I said. I just didn’t want you to worry. Wanted you to know where I was.” That was already more than he’d meant to say; he pressed his lips together to keep himself from adding anything else—for instance, how badly he’d needed to be sure Aziraphale was safe as well, even though there was absolutely no reason he wouldn’t be; the way the fact that there was an entire ocean between them kept making him go cold all over—
“We’re not going to hurt him,” the tall girl interjected toward the phone, indignantly; the others chimed in similarly.
“Oh!” came Aziraphale’s voice, with the special tone to it that he added when dealing with technology, “You can hear me?”
“Agh, yes,” Crowley jumped in, “you’re on speakerphone; sorry, Aziraphale.”
“Oh my, how marvelous,” Aziraphale replied happily. “Wait—Crowley—are they children?”
“A—a bit, yeah.” Crowley rubbed his face.
“I see.” Then, thoughtfully: “Can I speak to them again?”
“You are speaking to them.” Crowley rolled his eyes.
“Ah. Yes. Well, then—what were your names, my dears?”
“Maya,” answered the tall one.
“Kasey.”
“Kami.”
“Reya.”
“How lovely,” Aziraphale replied. Crowley heard—though the girls probably could not—a certain hardness under the angel’s tone that made his eyebrows shoot up in alarm. “I’m afraid you’ve kidnapped my friend,” Aziraphale continued.
“We didn’t kidnap him,” said Maya, blinking. “We Summoned him.”
“My dear, if someone took you from your home in the middle of the night and put you in a room you could not get out of, what would you call that?”
The girls all looked at each other. “Uh…”
“Precisely,” said Aziraphale. How did that smiling voice sound so cold? “Now, since he says he’s not in danger, I’m willing to—ah—well, temporarily overlook that, so long as you return him safely.” Crowley frowned momentarily, his brain conjuring up the image of himself as a package. “I must say that I’m already quite put out that he might miss our breakfast. I really must insist on seeing him for lunch today at the latest. If I don’t—well. I’m afraid I will be forced to…pay you a visit.”
The girls looked at each other with confused smiles, which Crowley couldn’t understand—he was having to fight the urge to back to the corner of his pentagram farthest away from the phone and the angel’s voice.
“Okay,” said Maya, not quite keeping a patronizing note out of her voice. “We’ll get him back safely. Don’t worry. You won’t need to…um…visit.”
“My dear,” Aziraphale’s voice came through the phone with a kind of patience that sent chills down Crowley’s spine, “my friend Crowley is a demon. You understand that, of course, since you Summoned him. I, on the other hand, am an angel. A principality, to be precise. Have you heard of…holy wrath, perhaps?”
The girls blinked at each other. “Not really.”
“Smiting, possibly?”
More noncomprehension.
“Sodom and Gomorrah?”
This finally raised a chorus of uncomfortable understanding from the teenagers.
“Ah, there we are. You see, that was done by angels. Acquaintances of mine, in fact.” Was he comparing himself to Sandalphon? “And though I can’t say I approve of their actions—in fact, even at the time, I had grave concerns—that should help you understand that a visit from an angel is not necessarily something you would enjoy. Am I explaining myself clearly?” The voice was not at all reminiscent of a comfortable, somewhat anxious bookshop keeper, but rather an ethereal guardian wielding a flaming sword.
The girls’ smiles had vanished. “Um,” said Maya. “Yes, sir.”
“Excellent.” The cheery tone was back, but the steel and the flame were by no means gone. “Let me speak to my friend again, please.”
“I’m right here, angel.” Crowley’s own voice sounded hoarse.
“Ah, hello, Crowley.” The usual warmth was back. “I’ll see you for lunch, then?” Still a hint of the steel, actually.
“Yep,” Crowley replied immediately. “Absolutely. Lunch. See you then. Definitely.”
“Quite,” came the angel’s voice. “Ta-ta, then.”
Silence fell for a few moments after they hung up. The girls looked at Crowley; Crowley looked back at the girls.
“Your friend is kinda scary,” said one of the ones who wasn’t Maya.
“Honestly, usually he’s the nice one,” Crowley said, spreading his hands. “I don’t know what got into him.”
The girls exchanged glances like maybe they had a pretty good idea, which wasn’t fair; they hadn’t even met Aziraphale in person, while Crowley had known him for six millennia.
“Does he have to rescue you a lot?” asked another one, probably Kami or Kasey.
“No!” spluttered Crowley. “Alright, it’s happened, but it’s supposed to be—ehhgh—it’s usually the other way ‘round. I got him out of the Bastille during the Reign of Terror—uh, do you know what the Reign of Terror…?”—eye-rolling nods from four teenagers—“Nazi book thieves—that was a fun one—agh, why am I telling you about—we’ll be here all night and I’ll miss lunch if I list all of them.”
“Well, you can’t miss lunch, or your boyfriend will come smite us,” said the bookish one.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Crowley said automatically, breaking his own heart, as usual.
This was met with more eye-rolling, except from one of the girls—the medium-height white one. Kami. Maybe. “I told you,” she said to the other girls. “They’re in deep denial.”
“Denial?” Crowley snapped. “What are you talking about?”
“You have to be kidding!” Another one—Reya, possibly—threw up her hands and walked away.
“He’s not…” Crowley started. “We’re not… Why would you think that…we’re…?”
The room was full of sighs and knowing glances.
“He’s going to turn us into salt or whatever if we’re not nice to you.”
“You just said how you rescue each other all the time.”
“You call him angel.”
“I—don’t be ridiculous,” Crowley blustered. “First of all, I call him angel because he is an angel, literally—it’s not some kind of—” he choked. Then he coughed. Repeatedly. “It’s not because—” he tried again, but this time it was worse; he ended up sitting on the floor, gasping, his eyes streaming. He could hear the girls offering panicked, contradictory advice—“Just keep coughing!” “Take deep breaths!” “Do you need some water?” “Someone needs to hit his back!”
“What,” he wheezed up at Maya, the lead demon-summoning girl, who was staring at him with huge, worried eyes, “did you do?”
“What? Nothing! You were talking and all of a sudden you were choking!”
“No—with your stupid book, and your penta—gah”—he coughed some more.
“I summoned you. That’s all.”
“No…you did something else. I mean something also. Something in addition.”
“I don’t know; I just read the spell!”
“Errrghhh! What d’you want to go around saying spells when you don’t even know what they are? Show it to me.”
They refused, which was probably one of the more sensible things they’d done that night, but he wasn’t having it. “Don’t be ridiculous; I can’t use a summoning spell. I am the demon—I get summoned. I could say the dam—the blessed words until someone hears me and records it and sells it as a Gregorian chant, and it wouldn’t summon a bloody maggot from Beelzebub’s toilet.”
Eventually, after a good deal of suspicious conferring, they held up the book so he could see the spell.
“Ngghh,” he complained, squinting at it, “Latin. You realize how long it’s been since I’ve read Latin? No, of course you don’t. And of course none of you can read Latin.”
“I can,” said the bookish girl with the round pouf of hair. Kasey.
Crowley blinked at her (a rare occurrence). “What are you talking about? Nobody speaks Latin anymore outside of the Vatican—not that I would know what they speak inside the Vatican. For all I know, they’ve upgraded to Coptic or something. You’re not a priest, are you? Pretty sure you aren’t a priest. I’d have noticed.”
She waited for him to wind down, like a teacher who would one day reach the end of their patience. “I’ve taken Latin since I was a freshman,” she said coolly. “The spell just talked about ‘calling up a fallen spirit to this soil,’ something about ‘unbreakable walls,’ something about locks and truth—”
“Errrrrrgh! A truth lock! That’s—that’s—that’s…actually, that’s a reasonably good idea. Whoever wrote that spell was…not entirely stupid.”
“What’s a truth lock?” asked a number of voices.
“It’s…like it sounds,” he said, peering at them. “I can’t lie while I’m in here. What d’you think a truth lock is?”
“Oh, like a truth field,” said Kami (blonde, medium height, thinks of herself as a relationship expert, Crowley catalogued). “You know, like in that one episode with the planet where everybody had to tell the truth.”
“Episode? What episode?” Crowley asked, lost. “What planet?”
“Nope!” said Reya (curly ponytail, medium height, practical), holding up a shushing finger in Kami’s direction. “Don’t get her started; we really will be here all night.”
“Um,” said Crowley, “right.” He shook his head vigorously. Maybe he should be glad his nanny duties for Warlock ended before the boy had become a teenager; they seemed unreasonably confusing. “Can we…I don’t know, get on with it? You summoned me for a reason, right? Besides for stealing my phone?”
“Right,” said Maya, drawing herself up. Her full height wasn’t much shorter than Crowley’s. “You have to, to”—he could feel her uncertainty, but she was putting up a confident face—“give us each what we request, and then we’ll release you.”
He leaned against the wall of his pentagram, finally recovering some of his usual swagger. “That’s a genie,” he said disdainfully. “You still don’t know what you’re working with here. I’m a demon. We don’t grant wishes. You call up a demon, you’re making a bargain. You’ve heard the phrase ‘deal with the devil?’ Well”—he pointed to himself with both hands—“guess what I am!”
They finally looked something approaching appropriately nervous, for the first time since the phone call with Aziraphale.
“So,” said one of them, “do you mean we have to…sell you our souls, or something?”
“What?” He was nonplussed. “No! What would I do with your souls? It’s not like I can put them in a wallet. ‘Oh look, here’s my little soul collection Rolodex.’ No—I mean, you have to perform a service. Do a…a task.”
“Like what?” said Maya, suspiciously.
“I don’t know,” he said, flinging his arms out—well, as much as he could. “We’ll figure it out. It’s not like I get summoned every week and keep a to-do list sitting around for potential summoners. The last time was…I don’t know. Centuries ago.”
“What did you make them do?” asked Kasey the bookish one.
“Uhhergh…” Crowley tried to remember. “Nostradamus!”
“You got summoned by Nostradamus?”
“No, don’t be ridiculous—some other human. He had some original Nostradamus text. A rough draft or something.”
“So you made him give it to you? And what did you do for him?”
“Uhh…” Crowley was distracted by the memory of Aziraphale pulling on gloves to gently caress the Nostradamus text. “He had…a kid. Ah! His son was sick. That was it. Would have died in a couple of weeks. Fixed it.”
Maya, his current summoner, frowned at him. “You saved his son’s life, and all you got out of it was a book?”
“It was a collection of unpublished Nostradamus prophecies,” Crowley said defensively.
“You’re into prophecies?” Maya had eyebrows that were very good at skepticism.
“Of course,” Crowley meant to say—
“No,” his mouth said. He’d forgotten the truth lock. “Eurghhhh,” he groaned. “It wasn’t for me, alright? It’s not impor—” He stopped himself, feeling the truth lock threatening to clamp down on his throat.
“Ohh,” said Kami. “It was for Aziraphale.” She was grinning in an aggravatingly knowing way.
“Shut up,” Crowley growled.
Now all four girls were sharing the aggravating grin. “Alright,” said Kami, the lead romantic, innocently.
“Forget it.” Crowley gave his best attempt at menacing. The only effect it produced was muffled giggles as the girls arranged themselves across the furniture—Maya with her legs tucked under her in a massive and disreputable armchair, the other three draped across a faded, very squashy-looking couch.
For some reason, Crowley was suddenly hit with a fresh pang of missing Aziraphale.
“Look,” he said, in a pointless attempt to shake it off, “this pentagram—I mean, it’s very solid, good work, congratulations—but it’s really uncomfortable. Can I…I don’t know, get a chair or something? And not one of those hard ones either.” He gestured at some plain, straight-backed wooden ones in a corner. “Something comfortable.”
“Seriously?” said Kasey (hair in pouf, short, intellectual, he continued his mental catalogue).
“Can we put a chair in there?” Maya wondered. (Crowley already had her identified, but just to round things out, mentally noted braids, tall, athletic.) The question seemed to be directed at Kasey, but Crowley intercepted it.
“Just don’t knock over the candles; it’ll be fine,” he sighed, with an eye roll of his own. “It’s not real—I mean it is real, it’s extra-real—err, metaphysical, different plane of reality, supern—ah, whatever, look, chairs don’t affect it, and it doesn’t affect chairs. Or, you know, phones. Like mine. That you’ve stolen.”
Kami looked slightly guilty about this; the others had no trouble ignoring the hint. But they did procure a chair that was reasonably comfortable. Crowley slouched into it, his feet propped up on the opposite wall of his pentagram.
“That’s better,” he decided. “Wait!”
At least a couple of them jumped. Maya rolled her eyes. “Do you always do that?”
“Wine!” he said. “That’s what’s missing. Got any wine?”
All eyes went to Maya. “Uh,” she said doubtfully, “my dad keeps some Jack Daniels around, but I’d definitely be in trouble if he noticed some was missing…”
“Nope, nope, never mind,” Crowley backpedaled. “Alcohol when I’m in a truth lock is a really terrible idea.” Also, as much as tempting teenagers to raid their parents’ liquor stash was appealing, they were hard enough to deal with when they were sober. “What about…coffee?” He knew better than to ask Americans for tea. “Got any coffee? Since apparently you’re going to be keeping me up all night.”
There was coffee. It was tolerable. Maya brought it to him in a mug that said “Not Today Satan.”
“Really?” he demanded.
She said nothing, just cocked an eyebrow. He scowled (to keep his grin from showing), and made a mental note to order one of those mugs for Aziraphale.
The Girls!
From left to right: Reya, Kasey, Kami, Maya.
(by anonymous user b--THANKS!!!!)
