Chapter Text
He hadn’t thought anything of it, really. Not until Crowley set the blanket on fire.
They'd gone back to the bookshop after a lovely dinner at the Ritz, had talked long into the night. Aziraphale had inspected everything, running his fingers along the volumes and murmuring lovingly to his shop until Crowley started making kissy noises at him and drawled, “Do you two need some time alone?”
The wine cellar, small as it was, had apparently also been restored. They’d almost certainly had too much in their elation at, if not being free of Heaven and Hell, at least having had the opportunity to each tell their respective sides to go jump in a lake.
Time flowed and their conversation eventually flagged, settling to the occasional giggle and repeated refrain of "rubber ducks!" which had become inexplicably hilarious as they sank deeper into their cups. Crowley eventually subsided into a boneless, exhausted slumber on the backroom couch. Aziraphale pulled a blanket across his sleeping demon and sobered up just enough to be able to pull out a favorite book and read for a while.
He hadn't actually expected Crowley to sleep for 3 days, but it was hardly unprecedented. And there was plenty to do in his bookshop, what with all the new inventory from Adam that needed sorting through and with the shop itself having been somewhat neglected for eleven years as well. And besides, he knew that Crowley was in the habit of taking the occasional kip that might last for days. So he didn't actually think anything of it until he smelled something burning.
"Crowley?" he called automatically, thinking that the demon might have awakened. He wandered towards the back room. "Is that you?"
It was, indeed. But he hadn't done napping yet--he was lying on the couch, yes, but where he had been relaxed he was now pale and shivering.
And the blanket was just catching flame.
"Crowley!" Aziraphale dashed forward and grabbed the blanket, pulling it to the floor and stomping out the fire. He coughed at the smell of burning wool. "Well, that blanket's done for," he said as he checked on his friend.
Crowley was, well, burning up--hot to the touch and smoking. And he still wasn't waking up.
The couch beneath him, however, was beginning to blacken and char.
"Oh, absolutely not," Aziraphale said, appalled. "No, no, absolutely not. I have had this couch for 132 years and you are not setting it on fire."
Crowley didn't say anything.
"I don't know what's wrong, my dear. But I will not let you burn down my shop again."
He summoned a wet towel and laid it over Crowley; it steamed and began to catch flame. He summoned ice for Crowley's forehead; it hissed and popped and boiled.
When he took himself closer, however, Crowley leaned towards him like a flower to the sun. And when he leaned closer still, to look closely at Crowley's eyes, the lanky demon threw arms and legs around him and clamped on like a limpet, burrowing his face into Aziraphale's neck quite uncomfortably until Aziraphale wrested off the designer sunglasses.
Well, that was... Hmmm. There were definitely some things to think about, there.
The one thing he was absolutely sure of, though, is that if left alone someone was going to set his book shop on fire again, and he was not going to have that.
Well, two things. As he summoned more water to put out the flames licking his couch, he was also quite certain that this amount of steam couldn't possibly be good for his books.
Crowley dreamed of cold. Of trying to keep himself warm and continually failing. Of knowing that warmth was there, somewhere, and being unable to reach it.
He woke to a confusing blend of sensations--gentle splashes and the clink of ice and the feeling of steam. He was wrapped around something warm, and something cool was wrapped around him.
He pried his eyes open with some difficulty. Not much help there; his vision was filled with navy and white stripes. Or possibly white with navy stripes? Either way, he suspected an angel had a hand in it.
"Zzirf'l?" he said. Not a bad try, anyway. "'ngl?"
The stripes--and his pillow, as it happened--moved. "Oh, my dear boy, you're awake! You are awake, aren't you? This isn't another dream you're having?"
"M'wake," he said. He tried to lift up to look Aziraphale in the face and nothing happened. "Wh'happen?"
"I was hoping you could tell me, dear."
"Why can't I move?"
"Oh, you can't? Dreadfully sorry. Here." He was moved, manhandled, lifted like it was bloody nothing-- the navy-and-white stripes resolved themselves into a full-body bathing suit circa really fucking long ago, worn by a curly-haired bastard of an angel.
He found himself resettled, draped across Aziraphale relatively comfortably with his head resting on the angel's shoulder such that he could make reasonable eye contact.
He was draped across his angel.
And he'd been, been snuggled up to him before, too, and he'd missed it.
He really had no idea what was going on, but he was about to start hyperventilating.
"And how are you feeling, my dear?"
Confused. And overheated. And also cold. And, now that he was thinking about it, really not very good at all. "Eugh," he said in summation, and decided to bite the bullet. "Angel?" he said patiently. "Why’m I snuggled up to you?"
"I'm dreadfully sorry, dear. Only you, um, didn't want to let go. I consulted with Anathema, and she thought that since you are a demon and therefore probably couldn't die of a fever, it might be best to give you what you wanted."
"And I wanted... to snuggle you?"
"You did mutter something about 'warm' at one point."
He remembered vaguely, in the way of fever dreams, being cold and unable to get warm. (Until he found just the right rock to curl up on, actually, one that was warm and soft and felt like sunshine.)
That... was a thought that perhaps he shouldn't examine too closely just now.
"S’why're you wearing, and I really don't want to use this phrase, a bathing suit?"
"Well I was hardly going to climb into the pool in my good kit, was I? I've had it forever and this would just ruin it."
The... pool. He was going to regret this, he knew he was going to regret it, but he was able to shift himself just enough to look at something that wasn't Aziraphale.
They were settled in an inflatable kiddie pool. It was full of water that was quite warm, if a little less warm than his angel. Steam rolled gently up from the surface.
And the pool itself was in the middle of his flat. The plant room, to be precise.
"What? Ah! No, you'll spoil them!"
"Oh, my dear Crowley, I could hardly spoil them. They're so beautiful, aren't they? I'm sure you take excellent care of them! And they do seem to be enjoying the extra humidity!"
The plants looked at him smugly. A couple of them had relaxed.
"You didn't tell them they were nice, right? You wouldn't do that to me, you didn't go talking to my plants!"
"Oh, but I had to tell them how lovely they were! And you were hardly a great conversationalist. I didn't know demons could even have fevers like that."
Great. His angel was ridiculous and his plants were rebelling--they were all going to have to die. He'd never get them back under control after they'd seen him this way. Maybe this was Hell, and they'd never made it out of the trials after all--
Waaaait.....
"Aziraphale," he said calmly. "I need you to tell me exactly what happened and how long it's been."
"We were having a lovely night of it. We went to the Ritz and it was just wonderful! And then we went back to the bookshop for a nightcap, and you fell asleep."
He nodded. So far, so normal, so not involving a kiddie pool in my flat, he thought.
"I must say, darling, I'm quite relieved to hear you sounding like your old self."
"Yeah, well, I still feel like shit. And none of what you said explains how we got from the back room of the shop to an inflatable pool in my flat in front of my plants," he said testily. He was beginning to have an idea of where this was going, and he really wasn't looking forward to it.
"Well you slept for a few days, and I really thought you must have just been jolly tired. I'm sure you had been through quite a lot!"
Tired, check. Still not explaining the bathing suit.
"And that's really when the fever started. I was able to miracle out the char marks on my couch, but my favorite blanket will never be the same," he went on, with a more pointed note in his voice.
"But the shop is still standing, right?" Crowley cut in. Watching it burn once had been enough of a nightmare for 60 lifetimes. He couldn't stand the thought that he might have burned it down.
"Oh, yes! I doused you with water before it could get very bad."
Crowley felt as though his wits were as waterlogged as the rest of him, but a certain picture was taking shape.
"...water. Right. And that's why the pool?"
"Oh, yes! Anathema concurred--said that even if you were steaming it off, water was probably the best way to keep you reasonably cool."
"Which you needed to do because of the fever," he said slowly.
"Well you were setting fire to things, dear."
Yep. Combined with the way he still felt, a picture was definitely taking shape. "Yyyyyeah. Aziraphale," he said.
"Yes, my dear?"
"When you were in Hell... did you lick the walls?"
There was silence. It was a distinctly guilty one.
"Did you lick the walls when you were in Hell in my body?"
"Um... yes?"
He managed to prop himself up on one arm so he could give the angel a proper stink eye. "Why would you do that? There are signs everywhere specifically telling you not to do that!"
Aziraphale's guilt broke into aggrieved patience. "I was being you!"
"What's that got to do with it?"
"You always ignore the signs! You nearly got discorporated seventeen times when pedestrian crossing signals came in because no little red man was going to tell you what to do!"
Crowley's arm gave out. He wasn't sure whether it was because his corporation was still messed up, or just because he couldn't believe what was going on, but he let himself slump bonelessly.
It was probably an accident that this now had him resting comfortably on his angel's belly.
Probably.
He sighed theatrically. And if there was a certain note of aggressive contentment in it, well... okay, Aziraphale probably knew him well enough to pick it out.
"Okay, angel," he said. "Thing one, do not lick the walls in Hell. If you ever want to lick the walls in Hell, remember this conversation and do not lick the walls in Hell."
"Um, yes, dear. Will you be quite alright?"
"Thing two," Crowley went on. "It's been, what, nearly a week? Yeah. We're probably in for more of this. Never let Book Girl know that the kiddie pool was a good idea."
"Oh good, it was?" Aziraphale said with a little wiggle.
"Don't get cocky, angel. Nobody expected any of this to happen on Earth. I've only seen anyone go through it in Hell, and you can't actually set fire to anything else in Hell. Keeping me doused is probably the only way not to burn the whole place down. Book Girl never gets to know, but she was right."
Aziraphale "Hmmm"ed. Crowley tried not to think about the interesting way it made his belly pillow move. No matter how much he liked it, he was in no position to do anything about it just at the moment.
Besides, the world was going fuzzy at the edges again, which probably meant he didn't have a whole lot of lucid time.
"Thing three," he said, and he could feel the shape of his words starting to slip. "There’s a good chance that I’ll revert to sssnake before this is done. You juss volunteered to be my basking rock."
"Oh, really? That sounds lovely!"
It did? No, no time for that. The world was definitely fuzzing around the edges. "...hope you ordered in, 'cause this is going to go... on... f'rawhile...."
Everything faded into darkness.
Aziraphale poked and prodded at Crowley's cellular telephone. He hadn't yet been able to make it call anyone, but it had so far given him 14 different cocktail recipes as well as a very soothing video in which young woman with a very comforting voice talked about book restoration--simple techniques, of course, suitable for beginners, but competently carried out with soft music and calm narration.
This led him to more very soothing videos, and then more after that. All seemingly without requiring any input from him whatsoever, which was lovely because he wasn't actually sure how to give any.
It did not, however, get him closer to speaking with Anathema. And Crowley possessed a landline--he was sure he did. But as he was currently very wedged under his demon, he couldn't really just get up and check.
The umpteenth very soothing video had just begun, and Crowley was showing no signs of moving anytime soon.
Aziraphale sighed. He had promised to call Anathema back, and yet all his attempts to make Crowley's mobile do what he asked of it only ended in it, quite frankly, doing what he wanted, instead.
"Oh, very well," he said finally, and miracled Crowley's desk phone next to the pool. He'd neglected to arrange for a longer cord, but it worked just the same.
Anathema answered blearily. "Aziraphale?"
"Yes, dear, it is! How did you know?
"I saw it in a mystic vision," Anathema said.
"Really? How extraordinary!"
"A mystic vision of the caller ID on my phone," she went on. "Technically it says you're Crowley, but I knew it had to be you because you wouldn't have gotten as far as letting him call without keeping me updated, right?"
"Oh! Oh, yes, quite! Dreadfully sorry, it took me a while to find Crowley's mobile intelligent telephone and make it do what I wanted it to do."
"And then you gave up and called me on the landline," she said. "At two in the morning."
"Oh, I say. You are getting good at this!"
"Caller ID," she reminded him. "Also Earth’s resident angel and demon are the only people who aren't afraid of being cursed if they call up a witch in the middle of the night."
"Dreadfully sorry," he said again. “You should go back to bed and I'll--"
"Aziraphale tell me what you called to tell me!" she said all in one breath.
"Ah. Yes. Crowley woke up!" he said, and sat beaming.
There was the distinct air of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then Anathema’s voice saying, “....good?”
"And then he didn't," Aziraphale said. "Er. This one may be a teensy bit my fault."
Another, more ominous pause from the other end of the line, followed by the words, "What did you do?"
"I--" he started, and then had additional thoughts about the wisdom of explaining their recent switch-a-roo on an open phone line. Or even on a closed phone line, given that it was Heaven and Hell they were talking about. "You know I sometimes encouraged his more chaotic tendencies," he said instead. "Well, it seems acting outrageously in Hell might have some teensy consequences."
"Did he explain further?" Anathema said after there had been silence for a long moment.
"Only a bit. It won't be very pleasant for him, I'm afraid, but it should pass eventually. Oh!" he went on, "and I am absolutely not to tell you that this inflatable bath you suggested was a marvellous idea!"
"It's a kiddie pool," she said tiredly. Then, more cautious: "Did he say, tell her I told you not to say this? Or did he just say, don't tell her this?"
"Oh. Right. I'm afraid I found too many cocktail recipes and wanted to try them out. Perhaps it's best to forget I ever said that."
"Unless I want him to cover my walkway in rare coins, he'll never hear it from me."
Aziraphale wiggled happily in the pool and arranged for some more water to fill it. Crowley really had steamed off quite a bit.
"Aziraphale? Is that all you needed to tell me?"
"I, I think so? Some of those cocktails really were quite lovely."
"Yeah, I'm going to sleep now. Call me if anything changes, or if you need us to come down to London for anything. But it's two in the morning and I'm going to sleep."
"Sleep well, my dear girl," he said, and sent a little blessing down the phone line to make sure that it happened.
"Yeah, thanks. Hey, when Crowley wakes up?"
"Yes?"
He could hear the grin through the phone line when she answered. "Tell him he's a saint."