Chapter Text
The Principality Aziraphale leaned forward, his hands on his hips, squinting down at the globe before him. He hadn’t got the resolution zoomed in quite right to find his flaming sword, but he wasn’t feeling very sincere about completing the task, either. After looking about stealthily to ensure Gabriel wasn’t spying on him or anything, he hooked a thumb into a large patch of clouds and set the frozen image back to spinning. Maybe he’d happen upon it by chance. He slurped loudly on his hot cocoa and watched the continuing thunderstorm impassively.
In another room of Heaven, Gabriel’s phone went ping for the seventeenth time in the last half hour. He continued loudly haranguing the unlucky angel across his office desk, so that he could pause at the most unnerving moment in his diatribe, then spared the phone a glance.
[Aziraphale] has stopped time on the Earth!
Big whoop, he thought. The phone pinged again.
[Aziraphale] has started time on the Earth!
He grunted, slammed the phone onto his desk, and said “FURTHERMORE” to the uncomfortable, squirming angel before him and the phone went ping again. A little muscle in his jaw bulged in and out as he picked up the phone again.
[Aziraphale] has done a miracle! (marshmallows appeared in hot cocoa)
While he was still holding the phone, it pinged again.
[Aziraphale] has done a miracle! (marshmallows appeared in hot cocoa)
The muscle in his jaw, by this point, looked like it might be trying to escape his physical form. The phone pinged a third time.
[Aziraphale] has done a miracle! (hot cocoa heated to perfect temperature)
“WHAT THE HEAVEN!” he roared and threw the phone across the room, miracling it to burst into flames as it arced, thus leaving an unsightly burned spot on the wall where it impacted. Gabriel got a new phone most every day, sometimes multiple times. His superiors felt that he was needlessly violent with them, and he’d already been written up three times this week for being wasteful, but angels had the nerve to be doing things at all hours when he was trying to put the fear of God into-
He paused this line of thinking as he realized with ever-mounting rage that the angel he’d been chewing out had taken the opportunity to flee without being excused. Well! That was going in their permanent file. As soon as he could be bothered to remember their name.
It was an excellent way to get Gabriel to “happen” to not have phone updates while Aziraphale looked for that damnable sword, at least in Aziraphale’s opinion.
**********
Crowley was hella annoyed.
He’d found out about the wildfires in Australia (which somehow he’d missed hearing about for some months – it was early winter now) and been fully prepared to take a nap for at least a decade. 2020 was shaping up to be a total bullshit year and he wanted nothing to do with any of it, and other than worrying slightly about whether it would bother Aziraphale, he’d felt no qualms about shutting off communications to everybody, and had settled in for a week-long test nap.
A nap attempt that had lasted exactly until he was beginning to drift off to sleep, before there had been an obnoxiously loud cop knock on his front door.
He stormed to the door in his pink bunny slippers and a bathrobe that was only technically tied closed over one hip.
“WHAT. THE FUCK.”
“Hey Crowley, I heard that you-“
“FUCK. OFF. HASTUR.” Crowley leaned forward threateningly and Hastur was forced to take a half-step backward. He lost his balance as he shuffled just far enough back on the top step, and grabbed the handrail to stay upright. Crowley watched this with amusement and slight disappointment that Hastur hadn’t landed on his ass. Maybe he could make some arrangements, though... Hastur’s zombie-like skin flushed a deeper green with anger.
“I wouldn’t act that way if I were you,” he hissed. “I am in the know about your……………………”
Crowley stared at him with one eyebrow cocked. Why the fuck was he on Crowley’s porch saying partial sentences. At this time of day. It was 3:52 PM, the perfect time to take a nap to get away from reality. The nerve.
“………………………………………………………………………………………activities,” Hastur finished.
Crowley continued staring as blankly as possible, assisted by the fact he’d been wearing his favorite driving sunglasses indoors and hadn’t stopped now. All of Crowley’s identical driving sunglasses were his favorites; this was just his current pair. He cleared his throat. He waited for Hastur to talk again. Hastur just looked at him expectantly, his dead eyes deliberately fixed on what he thought of as Crowley’s stupid face, rather than any other insufficiently clothed part of him. Hastur shuddered involuntarily at this thought. He was used to looking people squarely in the throat. It was a good intimidation factor as they subconsciously thought he was going to lunge. But he didn’t want to take his eyes off Crowley’s face because there was…egh, too much human-esque flesh. Ugh. Humans. Also, the bastard telegraphed everything he did in his expression, and he’d already almost made him fall down the steps just on general principles.
This line of staring back intimidatingly, well, it wasn’t actually doing anything, Hastur realized.
“Your angelic activities,” he finally was uncomfortable enough to state. Crowley thought he did a very good job of keeping his poker face, but inside, something primal was screaming. When he returned his mind to the present moment, one of his eyebrows was doing things he hadn’t realized it was doing, and Hastur had the tiniest, tiniest smirk turning up a corner of his mouth.
“Ngk,” said Crowley. He continued staring at Hastur. If he outlasted the monstrous Duke’s patience, he might come out of this alive, if nothing else. He might not be able to save Aziraphale, but at least he’d get to needle Hastur on his way out. Small favors.
“You were seen,” Hastur finally said when he realized he wasn’t getting any more syllables out of Crowley presently. This was extremely annoying. He wanted Crowley to be writhing on the floor before him in pain and begging for mercy, was what he wanted, and here he was standing in the bloody cold on the idiot’s stairs while Crowley waggled his eyebrows.
“Seen.” Crowley said flatly. It wasn’t a question. He was doing his damnedest to act calm and unimpressed, despite the continued brain-screaming. At least Hastur was disappointed in his reaction, he supposed.
“Consorting,” Hastur said. Crowley’s twitching eyebrow moved downward into a half-frown. Ah. Hastur thought I got through to him, then?
Crowley thought he can’t possibly mean that he saw us kissing last night that was inside the bookshop that was private that was- “with an angelic entity,” Hastur added unnecessarily. He gave a dramatic pause and the words “in. the. park.” slithered out like poison slugs intended to destroy Crowley.
Crowley guffawed. “I was seen? Consorting? By whom? That was. That.” He lost himself in a gale of laughter that reddened his face until it matched his hair. He hoped he was hiding his enormous relief. Hastur was quite green at this point. It was…not the reaction he’d been after.
Crowley had rehearsed the cover story that he and Aziraphale had concocted, millenia ago at this point, so many times he could tell it in his sleep. Ah yes, sleep, which he could have been doing if this idiotic Duke of Hell weren’t on his doorstep telling him he’d been seen having a standard Tuesday afternoon conversation in Saint James Park. There was none of the hanky-panky that “consorting” had seemed, in his panic, to imply. He spat out the cover story as easily as driving his car: he’d been tempting Aziraphale. Bringing down the other side one at a time by dragging them into the quicksand of sin, all that sort of thing. He took great satisfaction in spitting it all out in one giant breath and slamming the door in Hastur’s face. What a tosser. His uppance would come. Crowley would see to that.
**********
“What are you saying?” Aziraphale said, confused. Crowley’s phonecall wasn’t making a lot of sense.
“Well, I’m saying that we need to be more careful,” Crowley responded, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one had seen him go to the last functional phonebooth in London (to his knowledge). It didn’t appear anyone was interested in following him. “I think you know what I thought he was on about.” He could practically hear Aziraphale blushing.
“F-Friday?” Aziraphale managed after a second.
“Friday,” Crowley confirmed as gently as he could. There was a fuzzy, crackling quality to Aziraphale’s silence. Crowley knew when phone lines sounded like that it was a general sign the angel was upset. He didn’t need to make it worse.
“Look, Crowley,” he said at last. “I can’t…I can’t not…” there was a long pause. “Not see you. Not after…not after all this time.” He didn’t sound scared, he sounded exasperated.
“But maybe we should be a little more…clandestine, Angel?”
Aziraphale thought back over those 6000 years of pining and hints, veiled glances and quiet yearning late at night. He was so weary of their relationship being a secret. He let out a gusty sigh. He was going to have to tell Crowley the particulars of his job, one of these days. He didn’t relish the thought. “Alright, we change meeting places.”
“Agreed.”
“And we keep public interaction focused on business.”
“Of course,” said Crowley. There was another pause. “Wednesday night wine?” he asked, just to be sure.
“Naturally,” said Aziraphale warmly. “I have new red that I’ve been dying to try. Er, that is, a very old red. I left it in a cave rather a long time ago.” He stopped short, acutely aware that he shouldn’t even be dropping that much of a hint. Not until he was ready to come clean.
Crowley finished the conversation amiably and walked the two miles home to plot something Hastur definitely wouldn’t enjoy whatsoever.