Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Every year following The End of the World (Sike!), the six humans and one angel, demon, and Antichrist who had stopped it gathered together to toast the continuing world.¹ Before the children were sixteen they gathered in Tadfield, and when they were old enough everyone gathered in London at Aziraphale’s shop so that the adults could go out after for drinks. They always met the Saturday after Adam’s birthday, which meant that this year, Adam’s eighteenth since he was first handed to Crowley in a basket by two Dukes of Hell, all of the Them could join the adults at the pub.

Now, Adam was a boy of eighteen who’d grown up in a small English village. He was familiar with alcohol. That alcohol was largely squash and cheap vodka he’d stolen from his sister, but it was alcohol all the same. The trouble with Adam, however, was that he was a lightweight, and that he was still too young to understand that this was something he ought to try and regulate.

For his friends, this had provided endless entertainment. Not only was Adam hilarious when he was drunk; he was still the Antichrist. Their drunken escapades had included going to a nightclub where one had never existed before, ice skating on a pond that really ought to have cracked, and solving a mystery involving a real estate scheme and a rubber swamp monster costume. But even drunk, Adam was careful not to mess his human friends about that much. He’d saved the world because he loved them, after all, and he wouldn’t change them for the world.

He did not, however, have that same protective feeling for Crowley and Aziraphale. He was fond of them, alright, especially after so many summers together, but they were older, and they weren’t human, and he’d never been drunk around them before. So, when they started bickering, his guard was down.

It had started out innocently enough. Crowley was telling Anathema about the plans he was just beginning to make for Y2K. Anathema said something about how hard he was working, and Crowley grinned.

“Yeah,” he said, elbowing Aziraphale, “unlike this one who just sits on his arse reading and shooing away customers all day.”

Aziraphale glowered at him. “I do quite a bit more than that, my dear.”

“Yeah? What was your last big project? I do your job, Aziraphale, I know what it is you do. You just sit on park benches and encourage people to be nice to each other.”

“Oh, and what about you? You sleep for days on end.” He turned up his nose. “I just do my work more efficiently.”

Pepper snorted. “You two are ridiculous. I think you just need to walk a mile in each other’s shoes.”

“Yeah,” Adam muttered to himself. “Yeah, maybe you do.”

Nobody thought anything of it. Adam himself was too drunk to consider its implications too far, and by the time he woke up the next morning with a pounding headache, he’d forgotten he had said it at all.

The gathering broke up when the pub closed. Newt and Anathema went back to Madame Tracy’s flat, the Them to their late night train home, and Crowley and Aziraphale went back to their respective homes. Crowley went to sleep, and Aziraphale sat up in his favorite chair with a good book.

Only, he realized as he woke up that morning, he must have fallen asleep.

How odd. Aziraphale didn’t sleep, as a rule. It just wasn’t something he got any pleasure out of. But he must have forgotten to sober up and not realized, because here he was with his head on a pillow and a plush duvet pulled over his shoulders. Shivering, he pulled the blankets more tightly around him. He must have left a window open, as well, because he couldn’t seem to get himself warm.

Grunting, he opened his eyes. All at once, he was hit by several realizations.

The first was that he was in Crowley’s flat. He could have sworn he’d gone home to his shop last night. It didn’t make any sense.

The second was that he was in Crowley’s bed. A quick glance around him confirmed that Crowley wasn’t in the bed with him, but he couldn’t be certain if that was a relief.

Especially not as he came to his third realization. Because he’d grunted, and his voice had sounded wrong. It was slightly deeper, and the timbre of it was different. He wondered briefly whether he’d caught cold, but that was ridiculous. He was an angel; he’d never had a cold in his life.

“What in the world?” he muttered experimentally to himself. There was something familiar about the voice that came out, but he couldn’t quite place it. He sat up, and as he did so he got a glimpse of his hand. He knew that hand, he realized. It just wasn’t a hand he was used to having attached to him.

The phone on the nightstand rang and he picked it up immediately.

“Hullo?”

“Aziraphale?” asked his voice on the other line, sounding desperate and frightened.

Aziraphale pursed his lips around teeth that were just a little too sharp. “Crowley?”

“Yeah,” his voice replied. It sounded wrong. Too casual for Aziraphale’s liking. “So I’m guessing you’re in a similar situation to me?”

“And what ssssssssituation is that—?“ Aziraphale began, and then he clapped a hand to his mouth.

“Ah, yep,” said the voice that apparently now belonged to Crowley.

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Oh dear.”

 Crowley-in-Aziraphale’s-Body paced the living room of Crowley’s flat. It was remarkable, how small and Crowley-like he managed to looked even with Aziraphale’s additional height and weight. It was just the way he carried himself, Aziraphale supposed. Ever the serpent, ready to strike or slither away at a moment’s notice.

They had agreed not to make any changes to each other’s corporation, as it was clear it was only their consciousness that had switched and they’d need to find a way to return to their own bodies for things to be back to normal. Crowley didn’t keep any clothes in his flat, so Aziraphale had been forced to summon his own clothing. He’d piled on a shirt, a jumper, a thick wool jacket, and now he was summoning a scarf in the hopes that this might be enough layers to make a dent in the chill that had settled into his—Crowley’s—bones.

Crowley stopped pacing and scowled “Oh, take that off. You’re making me look ridiculous, and it’s not going to do anything.” He gestured, and the lamp over Aziraphale’s seat on the couch lit up. “External sources, alright? You can’t just wake up and get going. You’ve got to use something like this heat lamp to warm up first.”

Aziraphale crossed his arms, glaring enviously at his body’s warm-looking padding as his elbows hit Crowley’s ribs. “I don’t know how you sssssstand your corporation,” he said. “The cold and the sssssspeech impediment are intolerable, and I don’t know why, but every time I walk by your plantsssss and look at the dirt my mouth watersssss!”

Crowley’s face remained carefully blank. “That last one sounds like a you problem,”² he said, “and as for the rest, it’s not my fault. If I could change them, I would, but as you’re experiencing now, I can’t.”

“My dear boy,” said Aziraphale, raising an eyebrow, “your cold blood and your hissssssing are both very much your fault.”

“We can get into theology later, angel. Right now, we’ve got to figure out how to fix this. How the hell did this even happen?”

“I sssssusssssssspect—oh, my, how tiresssssssome. I think it’ssssss got sssssssomething to do with Adam. No one elsssssse would be able to sssssswitch our mindssssss like thisssssss. If we’d only changed corporationsssss, I imagine I wouldn’t be dealing with your curssssse and you wouldn’t be giving off all the holy energy you are right now.”

“Right,” said Crowley. He shifted his feet uncomfortably. “Are you feeling alright, by the way? Other than the cold, I mean?”

“You mean the feeling of being damned?”

He nodded.

Aziraphale shrugged. “Unssssettling, but not unbearable.” He hesitated, but between his guilt and his curiosity, curiosity won out. “What about you?”

“It’s… I don’t know. It’s warm? On an essential level, I mean, although the internal body temperature regulation is a nice perk.” He let out a shaky laugh that didn’t sound right on Aziraphale’s voice. “I didn’t know warm clothing felt this good. But, I don’t know. I can feel God’s presence in everything.” He shuddered. “It’s a little oppressive, to be honest. Or, I don’t know, not oppressive, exactly. Invasive? I think I don’t like it.”

Aziraphale hummed thoughtfully, considered this, and very quickly decided he ought to stop considering it. “I think you’d better call him. I’d offer, only I haven’t figured out how to talk around your…” He fished for a word without a sibilant, tired as he was of his words dragging, and he finally settled on, “…problem.”

“Well,” said Crowley, picking up the phone, “hopefully you don’t have to deal with it for long.”

He dialed the number for the Young residence and put the phone to his ear. Aziraphale heard a faint ring, and then another, and four more before he heard the faint, polite tones of what could only be a voicemail message. He saw Crowley’s eyes go wide, and as he watched he observed that it was harder to tell what exactly Crowley was thinking when his pupils were round and his irises were Aziraphale’s dark shade of brown.

“What?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley hung up the phone. “I’ve just remembered. The kids went home last night because Adam needed to get up this morning. For a camping trip. In Wales. For a whole week.”

Aziraphale widened his eyes. “Oh no.”

Crowley sat down on the couch. “Alright,” he said, looking dazed. “I should call again and leave a message. Then I’m going to teach you how to be me, because you’re doing a terrible job of it so far.”

Aziraphale, forgetting himself, hissed with irritation. Then, for the first time all day, he blinked. “Fine,” he said miserably. “You have got me there.”

Being in Aziraphale’s body was an odd experience for Crowley. He was taller, for one thing, and beneath the fat Crowley wasn’t used to having, there was also more muscle than Crowley was used to having. It was just more body than Crowley tended to give himself, and it made him feel exposed. After all, if he’d wanted to be tall, he would have shaped his own corporation that way.

The metaphysical aspect was also strange, but Crowley was trying not to think about that. For all that being a demon was uncomfortable, feeling the warmth of Creation within himself after six thousand years nursing the wound his Grace had left felt… itchy. The Light was too bright, and the dark was too dark without eyes that were meant for Hell. He’d missed his Grace very much when he was young and freshly traumatized, but now that he had a considerable distance from his fall it was nice to get a little validation.

And speaking of itchy, good Go—bad... Anyway, Aziraphale’s wings were in a sorry state. He held out for most of the day as he and Aziraphale worked through what Crowley could remember of his Copper Age speech therapy exercises. He even resisted for a few hours after he got back to Aziraphale’s shop that evening, because grooming Aziraphale’s wings for him felt like an invasion of privacy. But, he decided, they were his wings for the week, and he’d be blessed if he was walking around with his feathers all twisted and dirty.

He got them out and got the job done quickly. It had been a long time since he’d seen Aziraphale’s wings, but it felt wrong looking at them when it wasn’t Aziraphale showing them to him. Maybe Aziraphale felt differently about showing his wings than Crowley did, but after such a long time around humans, Crowley felt that wings were a private affair.

At least it was fun getting to dress Aziraphale’s body himself after so long having to watch it be wasted on eye-searing patterns and hideously practical shoes. It was the first thing he got to work on when he got back to the shop from his flat.³ He couldn’t dress Aziraphale like he’d dress himself, and to do so would have been a waste of jumpers when Crowley was getting the first chance he’d ever had in his life to see what the fuss was all about. He went for cleaner lines, subtler colors, and shoes that weren’t beat up white trainers.

He was not better at doing Aziraphale’s hair than Aziraphale was. It was Afro-textured, which Crowley wasn’t terribly familiar with in general, but Aziraphale also tended to wear it wild and un-shaped in a way that suited him nicely. Crowley’s own hair was smoother in texture, and he’d been combing his dark waves flat with pomade or whatever else was popular since he’d woken up at the turn of the century, so while the effect he achieved with Aziraphale’s hair was certainly wild, it was too messy to really suit anyone.

Aziraphale had agreed to cover for Crowley at his meetings for the week, so in return Crowley had offered to run the shop and see to Aziraphale’s regular angelic duties. It sounded easy enough. All he had to do was sit in the shop and not sell any books, right?

It was Monday, which meant the shop was open from six to eight in the morning, half two to four in the afternoon, and for fifteen minutes between the hours of five and six if he felt generous. Six o’clock was ordinarily when Crowley liked to wake up, but he didn’t think Aziraphale would mind a slight modification to the shop’s schedule.

The shop was out of the way, tucked into a dead end lane off Broadwick Street, so he didn’t get his first customer until his second “shift” that day.

It was an married couple, two elderly tourists from Australia. As soon as Crowley heard the bell ring, he made himself scarce and pretended to be shelving books deep in the labyrinthine stacks. He tried to tune out their conversation and pretend they weren’t there, but eventually the woman yelled, “Excuse me! Is anyone in?”

Crowley stepped out from the stacks. “Can I help you?” he asked, trying to sound as put-upon as he possibly could.

“Oh, there you are!” said the woman, beaming. She was tiny. Crowley supposed most people looked tiny to Aziraphale, but even in his own body he would have been struck by how tiny she was, her hands eagerly clutching a century-old print of Little Women. “We were hoping to buy this.”

“It’s our daughter Ella’s favorite,” her husband added, his sandy blond-grey mustache turning up with his smile. He had a few inches on his wife, but he was tiny as well, and delightfully round. He was smiling the smile of a man who loved his daughter with every cell in his body, and couldn’t wait to bring her back a surprise from his adventures abroad.

All Crowley had to do was lie. “It’s not for sale,” he told them.

The woman frowned, her eyes sad behind her bright red coke bottle glasses. “Are you sure? We were quite interested in the inscription.” She opened the front cover and pointed to the endsheet. “It says, ‘To my darling Ella, with love from Zoey.’ That’s our Ella’s wife’s name. Zoey. Can’t you make an exception?”

Alright. Maybe he was under strict instructions not to sell any books, but surely Aziraphale would understand this one. He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Forty pounds,” he said.

He sold another that hour, because it turned out people really, really liked pretty old books, and after that he decided it would be best to just keep the shop closed for the week and do Aziraphale’s other job. He only had a week, so he couldn’t set up anything huge, but several coffee shops and fast food establishments suddenly found themselves playing host to chains of people paying for the people behind them.

Crowley had been right, Aziraphale’s job was easy if you were creative about it. He hadn’t even used any miracles. He’d just slipped an extra tenner to each of the cashiers, and the humans did the rest. By the end of the week, it was a headline all over Britain.

It had taken a solid day of practicing tongue twisters, but Aziraphale could now mostly operate Crowley’s tongue with nothing more than a slight lisp. He’d forgotten how hard Crowley had worked in the beginning to learn how to blend in with humans. Considering how many phrases Crowley had Aziraphale test out that morning, he thought Crowley might have, too, but after Aziraphale had gotten speaking properly more or less down, he spent the rest of the evening putting together a wardrobe for Aziraphale so that he wouldn’t embarrass him, so he was clearly still sensitive about it.

It didn’t hit him just how sensitive he was until he had a meeting on Wednesday with broadband company Crowley was working with.⁴ They met at the sort of flash upscale restaurant Crowley liked to visit that Aziraphale couldn’t stand; it was big, with little padding on the walls and ceilings so that your voice echoed. The food was more pretty than it was palatable, but the real stars of the show were the strong cocktails you came to be seen ordering, so that didn’t matter to most of its clientele.

When Aziraphale arrived, dressed in defiance of Crowley’s instructions in a black turtleneck and tartan trousers he felt were quite flattering on Crowley’s body,⁵ one of the suits at his table called out to him. Aziraphale joined them and exchanged a few greetings as they down a server to get him a drink, and immediately they started laying into him.

“You got a little lithp there, Tony,” said one with a grin.

Aziraphale frowned. Crowley didn’t like being called Tony, in his experience. “I don’t like being called Tony,” he told the man, his tone clipped. “And, yes, I was at the dentist yesterday and the swelling hasn’t quite gone down. Let’s get to business, gentlemen, shall we?”

“‘Buthineth,’ another one repeated, chuckling. “Lighten up, Tony. Who pissed in your porridge this morning?”

All at once, Aziraphale could see how this day was about to go. The lisp jokes would turn into gay jokes, and they’d keep calling Crowley by an overly familiar nickname he didn’t like, and once the drinks got flowing Aziraphale hardly saw how anything productive was going to happen at this meeting. Crowley probably would have tolerated all of it. He’d have laughed with the crowd, accepted the nickname, and written his wasted time off as an important stage of networking or some nonsense like that.

Aziraphale wasn’t having it. He glared at the man who’d just spoken, wishing he knew how to project facial expressions around his sunglasses the way Crowley did. But, it would have to do.

“I cannot tell you people the dreadful week I’m having,” he seethed, "and even if I could, I doubt you’ve either the compassion or the intelligence to comprehend it. Now, I’ve come here to discuss business. Presumably, so have you, unless this is some sort of university boys’ club I’ve stumbled across and I was given the wrong restaurant.” He reached down and pulled the file Crowley had put together for him out of his briefcase. “Now, if you please.”

Everyone at the table stared at him slack-jawed, and Aziraphale couldn’t help wondering whether standing up for himself was too out-of-character for the demon he was pretending to be.

They checked in with each other throughout the week. Crowley didn’t tell Aziraphale about the books, and Aziraphale decided against telling Crowley about his outburst at lunch. Aziraphale got to have tea with the old woman who lived in the flat below Crowley, and Crowley got to meet the young man Aziraphale was pretending was his son to get him hormone replacement therapy. It was an odd week, to be sure, but it was actually rather nice seeing how the other lived.

The only other big hiccup was on the last day before Adam was set to get home. The day had taken a turn for the relatively chilly, as was often the case in London in late August, and Crowley intended to appreciate the last hours of his warm-bloodedness by taking a nice nap under the wool blanket Aziraphale kept on the sofa in his backroom.

He was just settling in when the phone rang. He sighed. “A.Z. Fell and Company.”

“Crowley, I think I’m dying,” slurred a voice on the other line.

Crowley cringed. It wasn’t a bad voice, objectively speaking, but it was always a bit odd hearing oneself from outside of one’s head. “Hey, Aziraphale.” He took a deep breath and steeled himself for an obnoxious conversation. “Why exactly do you think you’re dying?”

“I-I went for a walk and it started raining, and then my head started swimming, and I couldn’t see straight, and—“

He sighed. “It’s fourteen degrees out and you went for a walk?”

“I got bored,” said Aziraphale in a small voice. And then, in a a louder, more petulant tone, he added, “And the heat lamp isn’t helping.”

“Yeah, no, it wouldn’t. It sounds to me like you’ve sent yourself into brumation.”

He went to tell Aziraphale how to snap himself out of it with a hot bath, but then he stopped himself. It was always lonely and frustrating when the cold got to him. Every muscle in his body ached, his vision blurred, and the last thing he wanted to do was drag himself to the bathroom and sit against the tub until it was full of hot water so he could snap himself out of it. And at least he was used to it. Aziraphale had been whining about the cold all week because, as an angel, he simply wasn’t accustomed to physical discomfort. Crowley couldn’t imagine how unsettling this must be for him.

“Just sit tight,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

When he arrived, he didn’t bother knocking. Aziraphale was curled up under a blanket, glaring out from under it with rain-soaked hair like a wet cat.

Crowley waved a hand and the hair dried. “There’s your first problem,” he teased him gently. “What you need is a hot bath. About fifteen minutes should do the trick.”

“A bath,” Aziraphale repeated. He glanced down at the body he was occupying under the blanket, and then back up at Crowley. “I see.”

Crowley furrowed his brow. “Is there a problem?”

“No, no, if that’s the best course of action I will of course take it.”

For a moment Crowley squinted at him suspiciously, and then he remembered Aziraphale was in his body, and Crowley was asking him to take a bath in it. As celestial beings, hygiene wasn’t really a concern. Crowley personally hadn’t gotten Aziraphale’s body down to anything more risqué than his undergarments out of respect for the angel’s privacy. There were a number of contexts he could—and frequently did—imagine where he’d quite like seeing more of Aziraphale, but none of those involved having his mind trapped in Aziraphale’s body. He was sure Aziraphale felt the same way about him.

“Um.” He thought about it for another moment. “I mean, I don’t mind. You’re in pain, and it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Doesn’t look too different to how it did in the Roman baths.”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen any of it since the baths were operational,” said Aziraphale uncomfortably.

“Fair enough.” Crowley frowned, and then he glanced at the blanket and saw an opportunity that might be pleasant for both of them. “You know what? Here.” He sat down next to Aziraphale, kicked off his shoes, and pulled the blanket so that it was lying over the both of them. “It’s your body heat; you might as well use it.”

Aziraphale chuckled and rearranged himself so that he was lying against Crowley. “I suppose that’s true. Thank you, my dear.”

Crowley yawned and pulled Aziraphale closer to him. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d been this close. “I was about to take a nap before you called, you know,” he said. “Do you mind?”

Aziraphale smiled. “Not at all, my dear. I might give that a try myself.”

They settled in, their breath slowing until they were nearly in sync with each other. Crowley was just beginning to drift off when the phone on the end table next to Aziraphale rang and shocked them both out of it.

Crowley dove over Aziraphale and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hi,” said Adam Young. “Aziraphale? You left a message earlier this week. You said you had an emergency of some kind.”

“Oh. Um, yeah. You sort of got drunk and switched our bodies. This is actually Crowley speaking.”

Adam was silent for a moment. “Shit. I’m so sorry, you guys. I’ll fix that right now.”

Crowley started to thank him, but all at once the world shifted and he was suddenly curled up under a blanket, half-frozen and clinging to Aziraphale’s large, soft frame for warmth.

Aziraphale stared down at him, wide-eyed, the phone clutched to his ear. “Ah. Hello, Adam. This is Aziraphale now. Yes, you’ve fixed it. Yes. It’s quite alright, my dear. Could have happened to anyone. Did you have a nice holiday? Oh, I’m so glad to hear it. Well, now that things are as they should be, I think I’d better get going. Thank you, dear. Goodbye.” He hung up the phone and reached over Crowley to set it back on the end table. “Well,” he sighed, “that certainly was an experience.”

“Mm,” Crowley agreed, too dazed from the shock and being plunged back into a body that wasn’t in the best condition to say much else.

“Are you alright?”

“You really did a number on me while I was out,” he slurred.

Aziraphale smiled and pulled him closer. “Well,” he said, “I might as well finish what you were generous enough to start to make up for it.”

¹ Shadwell had sadly passed away under mysterious circumstances after their first reunion. To this day Madame Tracy was too distraught to talk about it, but the life insurance payout had worked out nicely for her and nobody really minded that he was gone.

² It wasn’t an Aziraphale problem. Crowley was desperately hoping he wouldn’t think too deeply about the text of Genesis 3:15 and find out about one of the stranger habits his punishment had saddled him with.

³ This was after he’d finished talking himself down from a panic attack over being trapped in a body that wasn’t his for a week.

⁴ Crowley was trying to sell them on a package of verbal notifications, including, “You’ve got mail,” “Error! Error! Error! Error! Error!, etc.,” and a fully automated, incredibly loud text-to-speech program for Clippy that could not be turned off without some serious programming talent.

⁵ Not that Aziraphale was about to admit just how much pleasure he’d taken looking at the fit of Crowley’s outfit in the mirror.