Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first night at the sanatorium, Aziraphale thinks of fire. Of pages curling up in the flames, of words turning to light, to ash. Silence surrounds him, presses on his eardrums—until there is a sound, light steps in the corridor outside his room, and he lowers his book, glancing towards the door—

-

The ascent takes hours: up and up, past the narrow ribbons of waterfalls, past sloping fences, over bridges, towards and through the clouds. The train groans to a halt at small stations with long names and starts again, its engine spewing smoke and soot into the air.

Soot settles on the tartan of Aziraphale’s travel trunk, on the white of his cuffs, on his book. He waves an irritated hand, miracles it out of existence, gets up to slide the window closed.

He is at the village by mid-morning. A carriage takes him up the winding road from the station to the sanatorium grounds. He spends some time on the stone terrace in the shadow of the main building, listening to the strains of music that waft up from the valley below. There is an early autumn chill in the air. To three sides, snow-capped mountains rise out of a sea of dark firs.

He checks that the gently shimmering letter of introduction is at the top of his belongings, and goes to find Director Lang.

-

“Any refreshments? A cigar?”

Sprawled in an armchair, the Director is beaming at him. He is a large man, fair-haired and handsome, an immaculately white surgeon’s coat that speaks of authority and scientific progress worn over his suit.

“We are immensely flattered, Herr Fell. I’m sure your employer will be most impressed, both with our society and our methods. Shall I tell you a little about them?”

Not waiting for Aziraphale’s reply, he does.

These are modern approaches, great advances in the battle against the white plague: collapsing a badly affected lung, filling it with nitrogen, waiting for the lesions to heal as the other lung takes a double burden. It is fascinating and terrifying, the way humans dare.

(They called it schachepheth in Egypt, phtisis in Greece. Aziraphale remembers pale shadows nearing the end of their journey, exhausted with fever, coughing up blood. He remembers many others, too: those afflicted by lumps and boils, by palsy, dropsy, and the burning ague. Those raging against the decay of their bodies and those trying to take comfort in the words of the priests.

Illness had followed humans out of Eden.

Plagues, yes, and more insidious killers, too.

He remembers the wooden clappers of the lepers resounding in the streets.)

A messenger boy arrives to say that Aziraphale’s room in the guest wing is ready. Having reached it, and pressed ten francs into the startled boy’s hand, Aziraphale puts his trunk down, hangs his overcoat by the door, crosses the floor to step out onto the balcony. Above him, clouds glide as if on a pane of glass, flat-bottomed and heavy with rain.

(There were those who would travel for days, weeks, months, for one last chance after every other remedy failed: that they may be one of the lucky few, see the King, or the Queen, and be healed. Of course, royal touch never truly cured “the king’s evil”—not unless Aziraphale was also at court, and before he got a strongly worded note bearing Michael’s name.

Crowley was there, then. Aziraphale could swear he’d see a little colour return to those who crossed the demon’s path, their steps get lighter, their afflictions fade a shade or two.

“What are you on about, angel? Come, let’s have a drink.”)

Aziraphale returns to the room, holds a towel under ice-cold tap water, presses it to his eyes. Director Lang will be expecting him downstairs in half an hour: some introductions, a tour of the grounds.

Best to get it over with.

(“Have you seen this? That’s what they give out nowadays at the laying of hands.” They are at a tavern, their table half-hidden by shadows. There’s a glint of gold in Crowley’s fingers. “Catch!”—the demon flips the coin towards Aziraphale.

There’s a winged figure on the front, spearing a great snake.

“They call it ‘the Angel’, you know. S’posed to heal you. Worn close to the heart, all that,” Crowley says. “This here is Michael, fighting the dragon. What has Michael ever done for them?”

He looks up at Aziraphale. Something in his gaze, the colour of gold, makes Aziraphale’s heart stutter.)

Aziraphale unpacks his few possessions, finds them places on the shelves. The wallpaper is white, almost radiating light; there is a fresh coverlet on the white metal bed. He sits down on it, rubs the heel of his hand across the bridge of his nose.

What if it all goes wrong, Crowley had asked the last time they saw each other.

It was later that evening, as he paced the floor in the bookshop—pens, quills, papers in a disarray on his desk—that he realized with chilling clarity: it already has.

-

They’ve just missed Doctor Vogel, a white-capped nurse informs them downstairs.

“She sends her sincere apologies, she is in surgery now.”

“No matter,” the Director says, waving his hand as if swatting the nurse’s words away. “Always busy, that one. Let’s start our tour, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover this morning.”

They visit the sanatorium’s garden, its flower beds offering a mix of herbs and late-season blooms in subdued colours. Then, the Director leads Aziraphale to the copse behind the main building, talking all the while: illustrious guests, costs and profits, plans to expand.

As they stroll along the wide path lined with wooden benches, the Director calls out greetings—there are patients out for their prescribed walks, in twos, threes, and small groups. Many of the men are hatless, their skin bronzed by the sun; the women, sensibly dressed, wear bright sweaters against the chill. Cheerfully, they share their morning measurements (fevers abound), complain of new symptoms, rejoice in previous symptoms lessening.

“Most of our clients are here for the treatment of tuberculosis,” the Director says, guiding Aziraphale towards a stone staircase, “but we get plenty of visitors, too. The patients take their meals in the cafeteria—six a day, you know, nutrition is key for a full recovery. We will join them for luncheon today. Do you ski, Herr Fell? No? This area is very popular in winter. I’m sure that will be of interest to your employer. Once wintertime really sets in, down in the village there won’t be so much as a cupboard to let, from before Christmas to at least Saint Walpurgis Night.”

The Director is talking about remarkable rates of recovery, about the healing qualities of mountain air, when they round a corner, coming back to the terrace, and Aziraphale’s gaze is drawn to a tall dark figure in a cluster of patients returning from their morning walk.

He stops.

This—

No.

Surely not.

The Director is still talking; Aziraphale can no longer hear him. Time is slowing, the world is grinding to a halt, details and colours drop away; Aziraphale’s vision has narrowed to a point. All he can see is the achingly familiar set of narrow shoulders, hair like licks of flame—and, as the man turns to respond to some remark, twin reflections gliding across dark lenses.

Crowley.

Something inside Aziraphale shatters.

He is not sure if he makes a sound.

It’s—

It’s been fifty years. Fifty years of silence, of half-written letters, of evenings alone,

of turning to his left, smile at the ready—

of thinking, oh, Crowley will love this, I should tell this to Crowley—

before remembering, and feeling sunlight drain out of the world.

I don’t need you.

And the feeling is mutual.

His heart is racing, an absurd pitter-patter. The patients, and Crowley, make their unhurried way across the terrace; Crowley has a walking stick that he leans on lightly. Someone next to him lights a cigar, casting furtive glances towards the sanatorium entrance. A joke is made, followed by peals of laughter; Crowley does not join in. There is an instant when Aziraphale thinks he can see hesitation in the demon’s steps, is buoyed up by a ridiculous hope that Crowley will look his way, see him, and with that, all the words said that summer afternoon half a century ago will have lost their bite—

—and then the moment is gone. The first of the patients reaches the steps of the portico.

“Herr Fell!” Aziraphale starts as a large hand lands on his shoulder. The Director’s voice is suddenly back full volume; a white-coated chest blocks his view. He looks up into eyes that are—he is seeing it for the first time—a startling glacial blue.

“Herr Fell! Has our walk tired you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Ha! Not to worry, not to worry, happens all the time. It’s the air, you know. Takes some getting used to. A few days and you will be right as rain.”

He can hear voices and laughter, heels clicking on the paving stones, a brittle shiver of glass panes in a door being slammed shut.

When he manages to steal another look at the terrace, he sees only dust, kicked up by the wind.

-

The cafeteria, which resembles nothing so much as an oversized glasshouse, is filled with rows of long tables, their white linens already set with plates and cutlery. Porcelain and glass catch the sunlight streaming in from outside. Aziraphale pauses by the door, held open for him by the Director, and straightens his vest before stepping inside.

It’s loud. There are patients milling about, the gurgle of their conversations interrupted from time to time by cascades of laughter. Some are already seated, or making their way towards their tables. Enticing smells waft from the kitchen—rich aromas of cheese, onions, sizzling meats. There’s table service, waiters and waitresses gliding through the crowd with stacks of expertly balanced plates.

Dragging Aziraphale by the elbow, the Director cuts through the throng, pausing to point out a high-ranking guest here, a painting in a narrow space between two windows there. He talks about the menu, the arrangement of tables, the training of the chef, all while Aziraphale keeps searching the crowd, his gaze snapping to anyone who happens to be wearing black.

They are talking to a retired military commissioner, whose name Aziraphale has already forgotten, when a side door opens with a bang. A gust of cold wind sweeps through the hall, lifting the edges of the tablecloths, setting the diaphanous curtains aflutter.

Aziraphale turns around, and there, outlined sharply against the doorframe, is Crowley.

Looking at—him.

The world seems to slow down, again.

Crowley is—

—alabaster-pale, some part of Aziraphale observes impartially, cataloguing the blush high on Crowley’s cheeks, his startled, caught expression.

Aziraphale’s heart thumps wildly, blood whooshes in his ears, his breathing stumbles to catch up.

“Herr Crowley!” a sonorous woman’s voice exclaims. “There you are! Late as usual, I see.” A lady, dressed far more formally than the occasion requires, approaches him and smacks his forearm with a miniature fan. “I haven’t forgotten your promise. Do come.”

Slowly, the demon turns to her, just as Aziraphale realizes that the ruddy-faced commissioner has asked him a question and is looking at him expectantly, the silence growing taut.

“I… I beg your pardon?”

“I say! One never sees so many fine people in one place outside of the best dinner parties. Is that what you are thinking? What I asked was—I believe Director Lang mentioned that you are in the employ of His Majesty?”

“Yes, yes,” Aziraphale says impatiently, standing on tiptoe to see where Crowley and the woman have gone. This proves impossible, even more patients having arrived to mill about the floor like dancers at a ball.

“Herr Fell, it’s time we find seats,” the Director booms above his ear. “I—and Frau Vogel, at my behest—sit at different tables every meal, I consider that an important tradition. To show the patients a little bit of our human side, you see, works wonders for patient-physician relations. Some conversation, a coin trick, and there you have it! Good morning to you, good morning to you!”

He grabs Aziraphale’s elbow firmly once again, and the crowd parts to let them pass.

With the precision of a ship setting course straight for the rocky shore, the Director leads them to the table where—Aziraphale’s breath catches again promptly—Crowley and his companion have gone to sit down.

And the demon, his jaw set, is resolutely not looking at him.

Nudged by the Director, Aziraphale takes one of the last unoccupied seats. The table is too large for conversation to include everyone, and, to Aziraphale’s relief, no formal introductions are made—but his immediate neighbours swoop in at once.

“Welcome, welcome!”

“You just arrived today, didn’t you? A pleasant journey, I hope?”

“Frau Zimmerman, do give our new companion a moment to catch his breath.”

“Dear me, of course! I’ve quite forgotten my manners. Though I’m sure you’ll understand, Herr…”

“Fell,” Aziraphale says, risking a glance at Crowley. The demon, although well within earshot, is staring fixedly at his plate.

“A pleasure, Herr Fell. So as I was saying—it gets a little boring here, especially for those of us who have been around for a few years. Manners are, I’m afraid, one of the first things to go out the window.”

“What are your first impressions, Herr Fell?” her neighbour, a bearded gentleman in a checkered jacket, joins in. “Is your room to your liking? Oh—if you don’t mind me asking—what floor did they put you on?”

“Herr Fell is a visitor,” the Director answers in his stead. “A very special visitor. He will spend some time in the sanatorium to see its inner workings first-hand.”

There are nods and whispers around the table, uncertain but intrigued, and more questions that Aziraphale does his best to answer politely yet briefly—all while not looking at Crowley, not knowing if the demon is listening, having no idea of what’s going through his mind.

He is spared from further questioning by the arrival of the main course, and by the conversation sliding towards its apparently customary track: the weather, the meal, the gathered patients’ prospects of leaving the sanatorium before Christmas (for the most part, slight).

“Oh, this is terrible for my gout,” a gentleman a few seats away complains loudly as he plunges his spoon into a bowl of delicious-looking stew. “No, don’t be ridiculous,” he huffs in response to someone’s inaudible question. “Of course I’m going to finish it. They oughtn’t be allowed to cook it this well, that’s all I’m saying.”

Conversation washes over Aziraphale in a steady drone.

Crowley is here.

Crowley is here, and Aziraphale didn’t know it.

Of—of course he didn’t.

The Arrangement is off, it’s been off for fifty years, and both of them must know, must understand—

This was necessary.

This is for the best.

He should never have agreed to it in the first place.

And now... He is startled. That’s all there is to it. Anyone in his place would be.

It’s just—

Crowley could have let him know. If only so that they’d stay out of each other’s way.

No, he tells himself firmly.

No. This is ridiculous, and he is being unreasonable. He didn’t let Crowley know, either—and he could have, if he so chose. He could have… written a letter, like those he’d written over the years. An assignment here, or there. A new cafe where Aziraphale himself could—incidentally—be found Mondays or Wednesdays, likely after five o’clock and certainly no earlier than four: indispensable information if one wished to avoid chance encounters.

He’d written so many letters that they overflowed the cabinets, piled up in rustling stalagmites in the corners of his desk, until one day, a pile collapsed, burying his floor in debris.

Not a single note from Crowley in all those years.

He looks towards the demon, just in time to see him turn sharply away, gripping his fork with a white-knuckled grip.

Anger, then.

There was plenty of anger in their last meeting, too.

“Herr Crowley,” the woman to Crowley’s left says in the same sonorous voice of an opera singer. “You’ve eaten nothing! Nothing at all!”

Aziraphale doesn’t catch what Crowley says in return—the demon’s murmur is too low for him to hear—but sees the woman’s cheeks go scarlet as she clicks her fan shut and smacks Crowley’s arm in playful indignation.

The angel drops his gaze back to his food.

Crowley’s effect on humans, women and men alike, hasn’t dulled at all.

Well, he is a demon, Aziraphale reminds himself as he picks up a piece of veal—wonderfully flavourful, smothered in a rich mushroom sauce that is slightly tangy with an aftertaste of excellent wine.

Perhaps—perhaps—this is why Aziraphale was sent here in the first place, because Crowley had been stirring trouble.

Which—really.

Humans—particularly these humans, with their handkerchiefs and sputum flasks and incessant coughs—deserve some peace.

The best thing he can do is ignore Crowley completely and get on with his work.

“So, how long are you planning to stay in the Underworld, Herr Fell?” the gentleman in the checkered jacket asks him jovially.

“Pardon? The… the Underworld?” The angel is briefly at a loss.

“Herr Steiner! We are more than five thousand feet up. This is practically Heaven,” somebody says to his left.

“Well, the food would certainly make you believe that.”

To Aziraphale’s right, Frau Zimmerman sighs with theatric exasperation.

“Oh, Herr Fell, pay them no heed! But do tell, how long are you planning to grace us with your company?

“A—A few weeks, I think,” Aziraphale says.

There is a startled exclamation, the scraping of a chair, and the woman next to Crowley throws her napkin on the table. Between them is an overturned cup, its dark contents soaking into the tablecloth.

“Here!” she says, brushing off her dress before sitting back down. “No damage done.”

Crowley’s grip on his fork is so tight that his fingers seem to shake.

A waiter comes by with more napkins, shielding him from sight.

“Well!” a gentleman further down the table exclaims. “You might well decide to stay ’til Christmas, Herr Fell, once you get a measure of our lives. Time flows differently here.”

“True, true,” Herr Steiner says. “And there are those who don’t want to leave at all. When was this, the spring before last? There was this young girl, Gertrude her name was.”

The Director is nodding.

“Ah, yes, sweet Gertrude.”

“Spent years here at the sanatorium, she did. Then, one day? Healed! Done! But she wouldn’t go back to the flatlands, the poor dear, no matter how her parents and Doctor Lang here reasoned with her. So she ran off. Went for a swim in the lake, believe it or not. There was still ice on it, it was so cold. She said she’d never leave this place while she lived.”

“And?” somebody asks, breathlessly. Aziraphale finds himself leaning in.

“Not even a fever! Imagine her disappointment. So down the mountain she went, the poor dear.”

Aziraphale sits up straighter, puts his fork down. Whether it’s the noise, the heat, the shock of seeing Crowley—his head feels light, his body oddly weightless, as if gravity is about to relinquish its hold on him. A feeling of wrongness takes hold of his corporation, and he realizes that it’s been with him for some time—since his train started climbing up the mountain, that long twisting climb.

(He’d never sent a single of his letters—

—and one evening, after Gabriel visited him unannounced, he burned them all.)

“You should rest after your journey, Herr Fell,” he hears the Director say cheerfully. “Enjoy a cigar or two, doctor’s orders. And perhaps you’d even like to try out the reclining chairs? Add some first-hand experience to your report?”

Aziraphale snaps his head up, looks around. The waiters are carrying away empty plates, the chairs are pulled out, the napkins are strewn across the table.

The luncheon is at an end, and Crowley—

Crowley is gone.

-

It takes Aziraphale another half an hour to extricate himself from the Director—and in the end, he needs a small miracle to chase his insistent companion away. As Director Lang leaves, he promises that they will see each other very soon.

Keeping to deserted corridors, the angel returns to his room.

So, Crowley is staying at the sanatorium.

He should—

No. He will stay in his room, rest, read one of the books he’d brought. After all, the Director is bound to notice that nothing actually pressing is waiting for him at the office—and may decide to once again seek out his guest.

He’d rather overdone the enchantment on his letter, Aziraphale scolds himself. He should be more careful, especially with this assignment—what with Heaven wanting his reports every week.

But the Director mentioned afternoon rounds, something that is going to take him, and the elusive Doctor Vogel, hours—so he will be free to talk to the patients then.

Firm in his decision, the angel opens the first of the books he’d brought.

Two hours pass uneventfully, with no visitors (not that he was expecting any) and nothing at all to break his concentration.

Aziraphale snaps his book closed, slides it over to the corner of the writing-desk, frowns.

The feeling of wrongness that has taken root in his chest seems to be unfurling delicate feelers.

Perhaps—

A walk, yes.

A walk will do him good.

Hands clasped behind his back, he strolls along the patient wing, past an empty hall with reclining-chairs and a galvanized roof. There are groups of patients out and about, none of them wearing black.

Aziraphale spends some time in the sanatorium garden, looking at the green-and-white flag fluttering on top of a tall flagpole. The flag carries a familiar symbol, a staff with a serpent wound around it, and Aziraphale is briefly transported to a long-ago desert, scorching sand as far as the eye can see, a ragtag band of humans gathered around an old man who lifts a staff entwined by a gleaming brass snake.

(“I’ve always wondered,” Aziraphale had asked Crowley over oysters during one of their many evenings in Rome. “How did it start, with the snakes? Moses, Asclepius… If they needed a symbol to represent healing, couldn’t they have chosen, ah, I don’t know—a dove?”

“No idea, angel,” Crowley had answered quickly, turning to call for more wine. “Anyway, did you meet that Moses fellow? Insufferable, that’s what he was.”)

Aziraphale takes a turn in the copse, heads towards the stone staircase, rounds a corner.

The terrace is empty. The angel stands there for some time, looking at the clouds dragging across the sky, at the snow streaming from faraway peaks, lit up by the sun.

Then, moving with sudden purpose, he starts towards the portico.

-

The corridors of the upper floors gleam with hard enamel paint; the smell of disinfectant pinches his nose like early-morning frost. Overhead, milky globes of light guide his way, a chain of little moons. He sees a few nurses in their white-winged caps give him sidelong looks, and walks with the air of a man who knows exactly where he’s going.

Incongruently, he thinks of Heaven: white hallways, walls glowing with internal light, the sidelong looks of the other angels.

His steps echo in the silence. Somewhere, someone is coughing: a hacking, abortive sound that appears to bring no relief.

Forty one. Just as the patient roster had said.

There’s movement inside the room, steps that still at his approach.

Breathing in, he straightens his vest, raises his knuckles to the door’s glossy surface—and does not have time to knock.

The door flies open. Aziraphale finds himself looking into the molten gold of Crowley’s eyes. “C… Crowley?” he tries, and then Crowley is pulling him inside by the vest. The door slams shut behind them. There is a dizzying, too-long moment, Crowley’s hands still on Aziraphale’s chest, his eyes wide with an unnamed emotion.

Then, the demon takes an abrupt step back.

“What,” he hisses, “are you doing here?!”

Before Aziraphale can respond, Crowley looks around, crosses the room in two strides, picks up his sunglasses from the side table, slams them onto his nose. Stills, his shoulders tensing. Turns to face Aziraphale from what appears to be a safe distance.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale tries again, and is encouraged by the almost-steadiness of his voice. “What on Earth is happening?”

Crowley sputters.

“You… You arrive in the middle of my assignment. You insinuate yourself into that wanker’s company. You befriend half the table in the first five minutes. By luncheon’s end, the chef is ready to pledge allegiance to you, and you are asking me? I have work to do here!”

“Insinuate? My dear, I am an angel, I hardly…”

At Crowley’s sharp movement, Aziraphale backtracks, goes over his words. Oh. Oh.

“That is to say, I… I was sent here. I have an assignment. Upstairs has been very… particular lately.” He points vaguely upwards, offers Crowley an uncertain smile.

“Right,” Crowley says, rubbing his temple with the heel of his hand. “Right. Okay.”

“I…” Aziraphale starts at the same time that Crowley says, a crack in his voice: “Angel.”

There’s a strand of hair across Crowley’s forehead, damp with perspiration. Aziraphale fights a sudden urge to brush it away, to touch Crowley’s brow, checking for fever the way he had seen humans do countless times. His hand twitches on its own accord, ready to reach out.

No. No. Out of the question. It’s a disguise, and a subtle one at that. It is designed to have precisely that effect.

Recoiling, Aziraphale takes a half-step back, folds his traitor hands in front of his vest, tugs at his ring.

Crowley’s expression is unreadable.

“I’m so sorry to intrude,” Aziraphale says. “I wouldn’t…”

“…wouldn’t have come if you knew I was here.”

“No. That’s not… I… “

“It’s fine, angel. We do our business, we get out of each other’s way. Simplifies the paperwork.”

“The paperwork has been something dreadful,” Aziraphale says, hopefully.

Even through the opaque glass, he can feel the weight of Crowley’s gaze. He suppresses a shiver.

“What are you doing here, then? If… if I may ask.” Aziraphale says.

He shouldn’t be asking.

For a few moments, the demon stands there as if Aziraphale hadn’t spoken. The angel has time to notice Crowley’s breathing, rapid and shallow, the way his cheeks burn with a feverish blush.

Finally, Crowley takes a few steps towards an armchair and falls into it, one leg hooked under the other.

“I,” he says, “am tempting the inmates on their death-beds. A real feather in my wing, if I play it right. Very traditional. And you? Turning them to good? Wrong place, far too popular with the bourgeoisie.”

He doesn’t smile, watching Aziraphale with unwavering intensity.

“These are hardly inmates, Crowley,” Aziraphale says reflexively. “They are patients. They came to a place that offers them hope.”

Crowley shrugs, turns to look out the window.

“Yes, well.”

White curtains billow in the cold wind. Beyond them, the sky is mercilessly blue.

“A… about your question. Yes. I. I am, as a matter of fact, supposed to turn them to good,” Aziraphale says. “I have a list of names here, but if… if opportunity arises, I am to encourage reflection and repentance. In anyone.”

“Try early mornings,” the demon says drily. “Lots of repentance to be encouraged before breakfast, especially after the usual evenings’ deeds.”

Nurses call to each other outside the room. Something heavy is rolled along the corridor, and a door bangs closed.

“Anyway,” Crowley continues. “How long are you planning to stay?”

“Well, I’m… A few weeks should do it, I think.”

“The food’s decent. You should check out the visitors’ restaurant, far better wine. Books… not much. Local histories, good for insomniacs. Pills are best, of course, Nurse Becker has a stash. The weather is going to be dreadful. Quite a lot worse than Wessex, in this season.”

Aziraphale is watching Crowley as he speaks: the lines of his nose, the jut of his chin, the curve of his neck arriving at the exposed hollow between his clavicles.

“‘Cause you can give me your list, you know,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale comes to with a jolt. “I’ll do it. My treat. You can be back in the comfort of your bookshop in no time.”

Crowley hasn’t turned away from the window. He is very, very still.

Aziraphale swallows.

“My side wouldn’t like me dealing with a demon,” he says, as assertively as he can. “I’m…”

“Not dealing with a demon,” Crowley says. “Gotcha. ‘Course.”

The mountains outside are vertiginously high and far away.

Aziraphale is searching for a topic, something, anything—a thread—and misses the beginning of Crowley’s sudden movement, a kind of an uncomfortable twist that leaves Crowley cradling one arm.

There is a shift in the air. Somewhere, a bell starts ringing: a deep, resounding peal.

The demon winces.

There are steps in the corridor, then voices: several women speaking indistinctly, a man’s baritone joining in.

Aziraphale frowns, looking at the careful way the demon lowers his hands.

“Crowley…”

“I’m sure,” Crowley interrupts, unfolding from the armchair and moving towards Aziraphale, “that you have a lot to do to settle in.”

No, Aziraphale thinks, allowing himself a brief panic. No—not yet—not after all these years—

The weight of unsaid words is crushing him, pinning him to the ground.

I wrote to you, he wants to say—there was so much—it was too dangerous, I needed you to be safe—

Crowley is very close now, circling him in a slow arc. Even his scent is the same, that little bit of wood smoke, ash, windfall apples, a bitter note of something he could never quite place. His cheekbones are somehow even sharper. Aziraphale looks up at him and forgets to breathe.

There is a knock at the door. Out of the corner of his eye, Aziraphale sees the handle turning.

The door swings open. Director Lang himself strides in, a small fierce-looking woman on his heels.

The rounds. These must be the rounds.

“Oh-ho!” the Director exclaims, looking directly at Aziraphale. “Herr Fell! You and Herr Crowley are acquainted, then? Excellent, excellent! Herr Crowley, I apologize for the intrusion, I was sure I heard your response. Frau Vogel, you haven’t yet met Herr Fell, let me introduce you—his employer is interested in sponsoring our establishment, you know—royal patronage—quite the honour—”

“Ah. N-no. I—I beg your pardon.” Aziraphale is horribly off-balance. He shakes Doctor Vogel’s hand when it’s offered, mutters a “pleasure to meet you,” feels Crowley’s gaze on him all the while.

It’s all happening much too fast.

“Herr Fell?” Doctor Vogel asks with a tinge of concern.

“It’s the air, it’s the air,” the Director declares. “Herr Fell arrived just yesterday, you know, not nearly enough time to get used to it. He’ll be one of us before the week is out. But do tell, Herr Fell, how do you and Herr Crowley know each other? Just this morning, in the cafeteria…”

“Ah. N-no… We don’t… we don’t know each other,” Aziraphale stumbles through the words as he looks wildly around the room, casting about for a plausible excuse. “I was, um… I was just…”

“Borrowing a book,” Crowley finishes smoothly.

Relieved, Aziraphale turns to the demon and is startled to see his smile, crooked and thin.

“Ah, yes.” The Director is nodding. “The books Herr Crowley brought in are very popular with the patients, too. Though at times, I am afraid, rather too exciting for them.” He laughs briefly, slapping his thigh as he does. Beside him, Doctor Vogel, thoughtful, looks from Crowley to Aziraphale and back.

“Here it is, Herr Fell,” Crowley says, leaning past the angel to pick up a tome bound in red cloth from a pile on the writing-desk just behind him. He hands it to the angel, one corner of his mouth curling up in real amusement. “Do enjoy.”

“Much obliged,” Aziraphale says. “I’m so sorry to impose, I—I will leave you to…” He realizes he does not know what the rounds involve. “Well. Good day.”

“You should join me after supper this evening, Herr Fell,” the Director says cheerfully. “I got a fresh box of cigars from overseas—a grateful patient, you know—I think you’ll find them quite to your taste.”

Nodding, acquiescing, confirming, Aziraphale makes his escape.

He pauses just outside the door, raises the book to look at its cover, feels the tips of his ears starting to burn.

Still a demon, then.

He should have known.

Chapter Text

—the steps outside his door move on. Further down the corridor, there is clinking of keys, a muffled click.

Silence floods Aziraphale’s room once more.

Just another guest, returning late from an evening spent down in the village. Nothing to do with him.

Aziraphale grips his book tighter and does not turn the page until the sky is bright with dawn.

-

Over the next while, Aziraphale has plenty to do.

Despite Crowley’s insistence—in their first, and so far only, conversation—that Aziraphale has quite won the patients over, this is far from the truth.

He is not one of them.

He is a curiosity, certainly; he is someone with news from the flatland (which Aziraphale turns out to be woefully unprepared to provide, having spent the weeks before his trip with his collection of Jane Austens).

He is not a confidant.

He is determined to remedy that. There are outings, he knows, daily walks in the mountains—excellent for getting to know the patients outside the din of the cafeteria, he is assured by Director Lang. Getting dressed for his first walk, Aziraphale is picturing blue skies, a gentle wind rolling through meadow grasses, peaceful cows raising their heads to look at the passers-by through long lashes. He expects conversations on the meaning of life and musings about the ineffable, brought about by the closeness of Heaven itself.

He is decidedly not prepared to see Crowley in the small group of patients gathered on the portico steps.

The demon, facing away from him, hasn’t noticed him yet. It’s not too late to—

“Ladies, gentlemen, good morning, good morning!” the Director calls out cheerfully as they step through the door. “How do you feel about taking another guest on your romp today?”

“Herr Fell!” the gentleman in the checkered jacket—Herr Steiner—exclaims with matching cheer, turning their way. “But of course, our pleasure!”

Crowley’s back stiffens.

“Capital!” the Director says, clapping Aziraphale on the shoulder. “That’s settled, then. I won’t be able to join you today, Herr Fell, but I’m sure they’ll take excellent care of you.”

“You can count on us, Herr Director,” Herr Steiner assures him.

And then, Crowley is turning to look at him, too.

“Herr Fell,” he says evenly. “What an unexpected pleasure. How are you finding the book?”

“Oh, you are reading one of Herr Crowley’s books!” a lady in the group exclaims, delighted. “Quite shocking, no, how free the modern authors are in exploring that side of human nature?”

Willing his flush to go down (it’s not the book itself, of course, it’s… it’s… well, Crowley’s gall in clearly intending to inflame the passions of the sanatorium’s inhabitants), Aziraphale resolves to give the demon no satisfaction in seeing him embarrassed.

“Well, I—I haven’t read that much of it yet, but what I have has… interesting parallels with another work I’ve recently had the pleasure to read.”

“Oh? Do tell, do tell!”

Soon enough—and, judging by Crowley’s looks, much to the demon’s displeasure—he finds that they have a rapport. Their small group is diverse: Max, an apprentice in a law firm, aged about twenty, a young woman who introduces herself as Marinochka, fairly new to the sanatorium, a couple of older ladies, Frau Haller and Mrs. Grant, who appear to be fast friends, the genial Herr Steiner himself, armed with a sturdy walking stick, and Herr Redlinger, an army officer who hopes to be back to the flatlands before the month is out (“And is quite deluding himself,” Frau Haller whispers to Aziraphale, “he is in a bad way, for all his swagger.”)

All of them, and Crowley.

The walk turns out to be quite peasant. Good weather holds, the wind brings scents of the last of the wildflowers and grass, the conversation turns to books that Aziraphale can discuss with quite a bit of enjoyment (although there is a brief argument over a plot point in Doyle, and once, he catches himself mid-sentence for fear of revealing his personal acquaintance with the Brontës)—but all the while, Aziraphale is acutely aware of the demon’s presence.

For the most part, Crowley appears to be avoiding him. As they walk along the path, pines and an occasional larch giving way to meadows tinged with yellow, Crowley talks to everyone in turn. Here he is debating something with Herr Redlinger, well out of Aziraphale’s earshot, here he looks like a perfect gentleman with Marinochka on his arm, here Frau Haller and Mrs. Grant are regaling him with a convoluted story of a patient who had his mother, his wife, and his mistress all visit him the same week.

This—this is good, Aziraphale tells himself. Crowley is staying out of his way.

At a particularly scenic spot, where a wooden bench is set into the ground next to a rocky outcrop shaded by firs, Aziraphale brings out the biscuits. Packed in neat rows in a tartan tin, wrapped in delicate paper, they are met with cries of joy from the ladies and approving nods from the gentlemen. Discussion dies down as everyone gathers around the bench—everyone, that is, except for Crowley, who settles on the ground with his back to the rock and picks a withered stem of grass to chew on.

“Oh, Herr Crowley! You must try the biscuits, you simply must!” Marinochka exclaims, waving half a biscuit in his direction.

He actually smiles at her, a fleeting ghost of a thing that causes something to twist in Aziraphale’s chest.

“Frau Blum, consider: a biscuit for me is one less biscuit for you.”

“But they are wonderful, and you hardly ever eat! Doctor Lang isn’t happy with you, and Nurse Becker…”

“…is never happy with anyone. Egalitarian, that’s her.”

Marinochka turns her large brown eyes on Aziraphale, pleading.

“Herr Fell, you must help.”

Feeling exceptionally foolish, but unwilling to cause a scene, Aziraphale takes a few steps towards Crowley as the demon scrambles to get off the ground.

“Please,” Aziraphale says stiffly, proffering the box to Crowley.

“Right,” Crowley says. “Um.”

“Heavenly!” Mrs. Grant exclaims as she bites into her biscuit, her other hand cupped under her chin to catch the crumbs.

Crowley’s hand freezes halfway to the tin.

“Not at all, I assure you,” Aziraphale hastens to call out. “I put in a special order with Chef Otto last night.”

He watches Crowley’s thin fingers wrap around the biscuit, pull it out. Marinochka is immediately at the demon’s side, looking into his face in happy anticipation.

Aziraphale turns away, walks back to the bench, places the tin down, takes another biscuit for himself.

The feeling of wrongness keeps growing, expanding within him.

The biscuits, though—they really are wonderful. Buttery rich with just the right amount of sweetness, a hint of salt like a memory of the sea: Chef Otto has taken his request and produced a work of art stunning in its simplicity.

“Herr Steiner!” comes an affronted exclamation. Herr Steiner jerks his hand away from the tin, his fingers curling guiltily. “Please do leave some for the rest of us!”

A jovial argument follows, in which counts of biscuits are recited, nutritional demands questioned, and Herr Redlinger, his moustache curled into dangerously sharp points, takes the role of biscuit distributor. Laughter rings through the air; Aziraphale, sidelined, watches from below a windswept fir.

This is what humans always do, he thinks, what they’re so good at: celebration in the middle of adversity. They have today, they only have today, and today, they will live.

“Couldn’t have done it better myself,” Crowley murmurs to his left, causing him to start. “Angel, I’m impressed. Tempting six people to gluttony with a single box of biscuits.”

“And you are here to toy with them, Crowley. It’s cruel.”

“I’m a demon, Aziraphale. That’s what I do.”

“Well, I don’t intend to just sit by,” Aziraphale says, looking at Marinochka’s bee-line for the briefly unattended box. “They deserve a chance.”

“And they have choice.”

Have had it since Eden. But they don’t know the rules, Aziraphale thinks. They have never really known the rules.

Led by Herr Steiner, their little group goes on, climbing higher and higher towards the clouds. Some distance ahead of Aziraphale, Crowley is loping forward, Marinochka to one side of him and Max, who’d just caught up with them and is panting audibly, to the other.

Aziraphale quickens his steps, gets close enough to hear their conversation.

“…so that’s how you do it,” Crowley says, concluding an explanation that had clearly gone on for some time.

“No!” Marinochka cries out, aghast. “Do you mean to say that every séance is… is just trickery? I will never believe that for a second!”

“That would indeed be a bold claim to make,” Crowley says seriously. “It is, however, true of every one I’ve been to in the last, ah, twenty years.”

“Perhaps you were just unlucky, Herr Crowley,” Max cuts in.

“Perhaps,” Marinochka says, “you were just too much of a...”

“Killjoy?” the demon suggests, arching an eyebrow.

“Skeptic, to be invited to anything worthwhile,” she says mercilessly. “Herr Crowley, do you even believe in the invisible world?..”

“‘Course. Our doctors do as well. And that fellow, Koch, he was on to something.”

“Oh, but you know I don’t mean that!”

“Perhaps you should. It appears to have rather a lot of practical importance.”

They go on like that for some time, Max piping up diligently in Marinochka’s defence—and then a vista opens up beyond a bend in the trail, putting an instant stop to conversations.

The trail veers to the left. There, across a meadow, a waterfall thunders down into a cloud of mist—and in front of them, the mountain falls sharply away, opening onto an airy valley with a lake nestled at the bottom. Fed by faraway glaciers, it glints the brightest turquoise; cotton puff clouds that drift above it cast deep green shadows over its glittering surface.

There, above the clouds but still well below their feet, an eagle is wheeling over the valley, its outstretched wings catching updrafts of warm air.

Aziraphale’s own wings, folded into invisibility, quiver with sympathetic desire.

“Think they’d take you for a big bird if you went out at night?” Crowley asks softly to his left. “Or have the humans grown too advanced for that?”

Startled, Aziraphale turns to the demon.

“They’ve gone on to the waterfall,” Crowley says. He stands with his shoulders hunched, hands stuffed in his pockets, and is looking straight ahead—at the eagle narrowing its circles or at the mountains standing sentinel around the lake.

Unbidden, Aziraphale thinks of thunderstorms and sand dunes, of the first humans walking out into the unknown, of standing there, on the wall, with Crowley by his side, watching them. Of the warmth in his chest when the demon looked at him, of thinking that, against all odds, there was something about Crawly that was golden, and light, and…

“Crowley,” he asks, “How… how long are you planning to stay here?”

Crowley shrugs.

“I’m in no hurry. You’ve given it some thought, then?”

“It?”

“The blessings.”

“Oh. No, I’m afraid—that is rather out of the question.”

“Right,” Crowley says after a while. “Well. I’m going to the waterfall. See what the shouting is about.”

Turning on his heel, he strides away, his hands still in his pockets.

The angel follows him. There is indeed shouting in the distance, growing more agitated by the minute.

Over by the waterfall, some of the humans have apparently made a decision that they are about to regret.

“It’s slippery! No! Don’t!..”

“Are you all right? Do you need a hand?”

With a yelp, the young man—Max—goes down a large boulder, slick with spray. Herr Steiner and Marinochka observe this from neighbouring boulders, Marinochka’s hands flying to her face.

“Oh… oh dear. Are you very badly hurt?”

Undefeated and apparently whole, Max climbs back onto the rock.

“Let me try that again,” he says.

“What on Earth are they doing?” Aziraphale asks Mrs. Grant, who watches the tableau from off to the side.

“Getting as close as they can to where the water breaks on the rocks,” she says, shaking her head. “They have the combined age of a biblical patriarch and they’re worse than children.”

“No discipline,” Herr Redlinger confirms.

“To your left!” Frau Haller calls out to the climbers. “Try going to your left!”

“See what I mean?” Mrs. Grant sighs, watching Frau Haller hurry towards the rocks on her spindly legs.

In another few minutes, all the humans, Herr Redlinger included, are absorbed in plotting the best course towards the base of the falls.

Perched atop a large boulder, Crowley is watching the group. It’s a good vantage point, and Aziraphale steps closer, tensing as another human sways on top of a slippery rock.

“Fireflies, the lot of them,” Crowley says quietly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Fireflies,” Crowley repeats. “Light trails in the dark. Don’t know where they came from, don’t know where they’re going, have no idea what it’s all about. And some of them have no time at all. Have you seen the moribund yet? Upper corridor. They keep them out of the way.”

The humans are moving steadily closer to the base of the falls, helping each other climb over the most treacherous rocks. Mrs. Grant, small and determined as a sparrow, follows their journey along level ground with quick hopping steps, shouting out advice.

“These here are the lucky ones,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale imagines that, the demon’s eyes hidden as they are by dark glasses, he does not blink as watches the group.

”Those on the flatlands are even luckier. Even so, do they have time to get things right? And then they—drown, or starve, or meet Jack the Ripper, or… or run out of air,” Crowley gestures helplessly. “Just like that.”

The sun comes out, and the mist over the rocks bursts into rainbows. The humans, almost at their destination, cheer.

“Don’t say it’s ineffable,” Crowley warns, though Aziraphale had made no move to say anything at all.

He thinks of Crowley, instead. There in Heaven, before Aziraphale’s time. Asking questions. Not knowing the rules.

No wonder he’s siding with humans with every fibre of his being.

And yet—Crowley still has a job to do, and he is going to do it.

“It is not for us to question God,” Aziraphale says, as much to himself as to Crowley.

Crowley turns to glare at him.

“Right,” Aziraphale amends, sharper than he’d intended. “Not—not for me.”

There are cries of victory as the humans finally reach the rainbow-filled cloud of mist over the rocks.

“Yes, yes, good job,” Mrs. Grant calls out to them. “I’m sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but it is time for us to head back if we are to return by luncheon. You’ve got to get over here now.”

When the adventurers arrive, their hair is flattened by the spray, Max’s boots are squelching audibly, and everyone is in very high spirits. Chatting and laughing, the group spills out onto the path—but, to Mrs. Grant’s dismay, their progress is glacial at first, punctuated as it is by stops at each of the side trails where everyone argues about taking—or not taking—another route to the sanatorium.

“Couldn’t we do it next time? Tomorrow, if you’d like!”

“It’s a long way to tomorrow, my friends. Let’s take what’s on offer today.”

There’s a signpost at one of the crossings, weathered wooden plaques pointing in different directions, with quite a few aimed north-east and south-west.

“Well, this doesn’t look useful at all,” Frau Haller sniffs, looking up. “What’s that? The Great St Bernard Hospice? That’s hardly walking distance.”

“You are absolutely right, my lady,” Herr Steiner says. “This sign merely tells us what lies in each direction, straight as the crow flies.”

“A very determined crow,” she says, squinting at the distances on each plaque.

“Anyway—the hospice is a place with history going back centuries, though you must know this, I’m positive. Mrs. Grant, your compatriot, Mr. Dickens, had a book set there, hadn’t he? Or part of a book?”

“It’s just one monastery after another,” Marinochka complains, wrinkling her nose at the sign. “Can’t we go on?”

The next signpost is of more immediate use—and by then, Herr Steiner has most of the group convinced that veering off course is what they should do, and that he has plenty of experience to guide them.

“Such rugged beauty! Don’t you just love it?” he exclaims, holding on to his hat as he describes a semi-circle in the air with his walking stick, head thrown back. “What are we here for if not to discover the raw power of nature?”

Skeptical, Aziraphale looks down, thinks of frivolous miracles, resists the urge to turn his shoes into a sturdier pair: if the humans appear unconcerned, it would be absurd for him to worry.

Two hundred yards into the detour, he thinks he might have made a mistake.

The side trail, narrow at the outset, has narrowed even further. On the left, the wall of rock soars sharply upwards, dissected by deep crevices, water trickling down them in rivulets. On the right, the forest has grown thicker, gnarly branches extending towards the path. It seems to be distinctly colder, too, although above them, the sun is continuing its climb to the top of its arch, silvery-white through a haze of thin cloud.

“Have you actually been here before?” Frau Haller asks Herr Steiner, eyes narrowed.

“I absolutely have.”

“When were you here before?”

“Oh, do let’s turn back,” Marinochka pleads, wrapping her pigeon-grey shawl tighter around her shoulders.

“Never fear, Frau Blum,” Herr Steiner says as he stomps ahead. “We are much closer than you think. These mountains are practically our back steps—did you know Berghaus is the highest-altitude sanatorium across both Switzerland and Germany?”

“Oh, the winters here!” exclaims Mrs. Grant. “Well, you will see for yourself soon enough, my dear. They have to cut trenches through the snow, you know, and last year the road from the village was completely impassable for two weeks.”

The trail narrows even further. They are walking single file, now, careful to look under their feet. Herr Steiner leads the way, Aziraphale is second-last, Crowley a silent shadow behind him. The men have taken it upon themselves to assist the ladies on some of the more treacherous parts of the trail, pulling them up the large boulders, holding their hands for support on downwards scrambles.

A shadow passes over the sun, seemingly too large to be a bird. Aziraphale looks up—

and his foot slips. Pieces of stone clatter towards the other side of the trail, pain sears through his ankle, the wall of rock sways suddenly closer—

and then the world shudders, the clouds tick backwards, the air itself changes shape.

Aziraphale is upright again, the ground beneath his feet level and still.

There is a noise behind him.

He whips around.

Crowley, one hand to the rock wall, looks up, beads of sweat glistening on his temples.

Aziraphale opens his mouth to speak.

“Anything the matter, angel?” the demon asks hoarsely, one eyebrow rising above the frame of his glasses.

“Crowley, did you just…”

“Did I just what.”

“You did something, you helped—” And suddenly, Aziraphale is not sure if he’d imagined this. If he’d… if he’d only wanted Crowley to have helped him.

Perhaps the magic was his all along, a reflexive save.

“This was your…” he continues uncertainly. “This…”

“I do not help,” the demon bristles. “I’d do nothing of the sort. That’s you lot. Lots and lots of help all around, as long as nobody asks inconvenient questions.”

Aziraphale exhales slowly, resists the urge to bite his lip.

“Herr Fell! Herr Crowley!” Mrs. Grant calls out, far ahead along the trail. “Please do hurry, it’s almost lunchtime!”

Feeling strangely exposed, Aziraphale turns around and walks on, treading carefully and listening to the sounds behind him: light footsteps, the shuffle of dry fir needles, a barely audible hiss.

The rest of their trek to the sanatorium proceeds without incident.

They all part ways in front of the main entrance, the ladies deciding to retire to their rooms to freshen up before luncheon.

“We’ll be playing cards in the parlour later,” Mrs. Grant tells Aziraphale. “You should join us, your friend will be there.”

Involuntarily, Aziraphale glances at Crowley, who seems to be engrossed in saying goodbye to Marinochka a few steps away.

“Oh, we don’t know each other,” he says, half out of habit. “He’s not my…”

Mrs. Grant gives him an odd look.

“Well, do still come, I’m sure you will enjoy the company.”

She is gone, then, scaling the steps of the front entrance with Frau Haller on her arm. Marinochka follows them shortly.

Aziraphale looks around, searching for Crowley, but the demon is nowhere to be found.

Chapter Text

The dark comes earlier now. More and more often, the sanatorium wakes up to a glittering cover of snow over the grounds and icy ferns and flowers blooming across windowpanes. Aziraphale spends his nights in an armchair, a book on his lap, thinking.

(It’s odd, about the books. He only took a few with him in his trunk, and had read them in the first few nights. Then, one morning, he chanced to look at the top of the pile and saw that the treatise that was there the night before has morphed into a tome of poetry by Lord Byron. One from his own collection, to be sure, and one he had been thinking about that evening, but it should’ve been back at the bookshop, wedged safely between its siblings. This has happened several times now—with no trace of magic other than his own.)

In the cafeteria, the conversation has turned to escapes.

There are the familiar ones. They are frowned upon by the doctors, which adds to their allure, but they are harmless enough: slipping away for too-long rambles in the mountains, going down to the village to dance.

Some are more serious.

A patient leaves for good: a young man who’d spent years at the sanatorium, came of age within its walls. His departure is widely regarded as a hasty move and is a topic of conversation for days. “He will be back before the snows melt,” Mrs. Grant proclaims. “Wanting to see the world in his state! Stuff and nonsense!” Herr Arnaud, the escapee’s particular friend, mutters darkly about the undue influence of certain newcomers and glowers at Crowley, who has the gall to smirk back.

Other than at meals, Aziraphale sees very little of the demon. This isn’t chance. Whatever gathering one of them attends, the other stays out of—and for the most part, they get the steps of this intricate dance right.

Now that the cold has descended, the walks are far fewer. There are reclining chairs on the balconies, though, and prescribed times when all the patients settle in them, wrapped in thick camel’s-hair blankets and resembling nothing so much as oversized babies. The rest-cure, it’s called, and Aziraphale wonders idly if Crowley partakes as well: if the demon spends his afternoons and evenings stretched on a chaise-longue, blankets pulled up to his nose, only his sunglasses visible above the edge. The image is more than a little absurd.

Once, they come together during a lecture of the sanatorium’s Philosophical Society: an introduction to anthroposophy, by a guest lecturer who speaks passionately of the coming of a new age, of the need for a different approach to spirituality.

“We must build a spiritual science,” he says, punctuating his assertions by punches to the air. “We must treat the spirit as something actual and real. The human mind is capable of penetrating behind what is sense-perceptible to grasp the true nature of the world, and…”

He is interrupted by Crowley’s resonant snore from the back row.

-

One evening, Frau Haller, agitated but resolved, finds Aziraphale in the sanatorium library.

“Herr Fell?” she calls out in a whisper that carries easily across the room. A young woman at a desk by the window glances up before adjusting her wire-rim glasses and returning to the rather impressive stack of books before her.

“Yes, my dear?” Aziraphale snaps his book closed, returns it to the shelf.

“It’s Max. We think… You’d better come.”

“Is he…”

“The doctors don’t always tell us.” Frau Haller, spindle-thin as she is, moves surprisingly quickly, and Aziraphale has difficulty keeping up. “So as not to worry us.”

They cross into the patients’ wing, climb up the stairs to the third floor. Frau Haller, out of breath, leans heavily on Aziraphale’s arm, but refuses to slow down.

They reach the room just as Nurse Becker emerges, pushing a small tray cart covered in white linen. She nods at them. “You may come in. Don’t tire him out.”

“Thank God,” Frau Haller says quietly, gazing after the cart as it is rolled along the corridor. “It must not have been as bad as it looked. Agatha and I were so worried.”

Inside, Max is propped up on pillows, his skin waxen, his eyes sunken and dark below bushy eyebrows. He looks startlingly young. Marinochka is curled up in an armchair by the head of his bed, her pigeon-grey shawl tight around her shoulders.

“You scared me half to death,” she is saying. “All that blood. What do you people say? I’ll sue for damages, see if I don’t.”

“I haven’t ever said that,” Max protests feebly before he’s overtaken by a coughing fit.

“He will be fine,” Mrs. Grant states from her post by the window. “You’ll be fine, young man. Years and years you’ve got. Now I’ve seen some bad cases—hopeless, it was said. And then they arrived here. The doctors, the air, who knows what did it, but half a decade later, here they still are, spiking their milk with whiskey, gambling away their family’s fortunes. And you? Pish. A pinnacle of health, you are. Or will be.”

It’s true, Aziraphale thinks. That’s what the sanatorium is known for, why whole families will sometimes go hungry to send their loved ones here. Phenomenal rates of recovery.

Even so.

They settle in. Chairs are dragged closer to the bed, cards are brought out, but the game proves too taxing for Max. Before long, he is asking if anyone’s got something to read, and whether they’d read it aloud. Mrs. Grant produces a battered copy of Faust, and Aziraphale is volunteered to read most of it—though Marinochka, looking over his shoulder, declaims Gretchen’s lines with obvious glee.

After a while, there’s a lull as Aziraphale and the others glance at Max, whose breathing has evened out. The boy’s eyelashes flutter open.

“Ah,” he smiles faintly, looking towards the door. “Herr Fell. Your friend is here, too.”

Aziraphale follows his gaze. There, leaning against the doorjamb, his arms crossed, is Crowley.

“Crowley,” he says reflexively (how long had Crowley been standing there?) “But you are mistaken, Max dear, we are not…”

Crowley’s face is inscrutable. Aziraphale cuts himself off, not quite knowing why.

The demon peels away from the doorjamb and saunters towards the bed.

“An interesting choice of topic, Herr Fell,” he murmurs in Aziraphale’s direction. “Though I’ve got something better for you, Max.” With that, the demon places a brown package on the bedside table, letting his fingers linger on the neatly tied knot. The eyes of every human are instantly drawn to the point of contact.

“Don’t go opening it with this lot around.”

Never off the job, Aziraphale thinks.

“Now,” Crowley says, crossing to the mahogany desk to perch atop it—one knee bent, the heel of his shoe threatening to mar the polished wood. “Where were we?”

The angel has no choice but to keep reading.

The play picks up. Max is more awake now—and soon, Herr Steiner and Herr Redlinger join their little group. Crowding around Aziraphale’s chair, each of the humans chooses a character to speak for, and in the text, witches and wizards gather for Walpurgis-Night on the Brocken.

“Herr Crowley, will you pick a part, too?”

“Nah,” the demon says. “That’s got to be a gloomy one, if it’s anything like the other stories about that Faust fellow.”

“I heard,” Marinochka says with the air of imparting a great secret, “that an actual devil had appeared on stage once during a performance. Caused such a ruckus. The lead actor refused to go back on stage, after. Never played another role.”

Glancing over at Crowley suspiciously, Aziraphale finds the demon completely engrossed in studying a crack in the wall.

The evening wears on. Max, his burst of energy spent, falls soundly asleep just before the play’s conclusion, at which point everyone but Marinochka, who settles deeper in her armchair, files out of the room. Goodbyes are said just outside the door, hands shaken—though Crowley, Aziraphale cannot help noticing, has already slunk off—and then the angel is alone.

He thinks about humans as he walks along the now-dusky corridors towards his room: the way they dare, have always dared, to love in the face of transience of all things.

To love, knowing it cannot last.

-

Max gets better—and rather quickly, too. In a few days, he is back at his table; his return is met with cheers and the clinking of glasses of milk. New empty spots appear at other tables, though, and Aziraphale soon finds out, through whispers and nods, about two unfortunate souls who have taken a most definite turn for the worse.

He visits them.

One, he can see instantly, is death-bound, already insubstantial as he reclines on his mountain of pillows. They talk. The man will have a daughter left alone—she couldn’t be with him now, he misses her terribly—what wouldn’t he do for just a little more time with her, here in this world. Aziraphale does his best to comfort him, dispensing small miracles: tranquility, as much as he can give, and a dream to say goodbye.

The other patient meets him with howls of rage. It is unfair, he bellows, it is ridiculous for him to be in this bed right now, he’s paying a round sum for his stay and this is not what he was promised. Indignant, he pushes away his nurse’s hands, refuses oxygen, swears until he’s breathless, spittle flying in all directions. He is finally tamed by Director Lang himself.

“Not long for this one,” the Director says when they are out in the corridor and the door closes behind them. “But he’ll bring in another round sum before he goes. More if he keeps the shouting up. Ha! Oxygen containers are six franks apiece, and these dying ones are gluttons for it.”

“Are they,” Aziraphale says coldly.

“Oh, the lengths they go to,” the Director continues, oblivious. “There was this captain, just before you arrived. Got to forty containers a day, well, you see how that mounts up. His widow was left near-penniless. But I’m boring you with all these numbers, Herr Fell, am I not?” He puts his arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders, and the angel is too startled to resist. “Of course I am,” he goes on. “There’s something far more interesting that I want to show you, something your employer is certain to appreciate. Nurse!” he calls out to a white-clad young woman who’d just stepped out of one of the rooms.

“Please don’t trouble yourself, Herr Lang,” Aziraphale says, shaking off the Director’s arm. “If you’ll excuse me. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

He spins around and is walking down the corridor, its walls gleaming harshly, as briskly as he can, when a door opens at the far end, and Crowley steps through.

Intending, no doubt, to visit these same patients, to tempt them however he must.

Crowley slows his stride as they near each other, looks as if he is about to speak.

Aziraphale walks right past him, not sparing him another glance.

-

Winter begins in earnest. More often than not, the faraway mountains are in a haze of falling snow; inside, radiators crackle with heat. The patients have taken to telling ghost stories in the parlour after dark, by the light of a fireplace, wind howling outside the shutters. They sit in pairs and tight groups, the ladies crying out and clutching at each other’s hands with sudden turns of events: avalanches, fires, dragons appearing from under the ground. The scariest of tales appear to bring them the most delight.

A few times, Aziraphale hears a rumble in the mountains, a distant but powerful groan that seems to come from the rock itself. “Another avalanche,” somebody tells him. “Not to worry, they don’t happen here.”

Crowley, who was usually late to meals, is now frequently absent altogether. What he is up to during these times, Aziraphale doesn’t know—and doesn’t care about, the angel tells himself sternly. Aziraphale has his own work cut out for him.

The ski season is in full swing; down in the village, there is scarcely a room to let. The visitor’s wing is bustling with activity: skiers and other aficionados of winter sports arrive in droves, the visitor’s restaurant is the busiest it’s been.

The inhabitants of the sanatorium, not allowed to join in such exertions, are getting bored. In addition to occasional walks, there are gatherings in the cafeteria, on the terrace, in the patients’ rooms. Gossip and trysts abound. “You are truly a sorceress, Frau Thorn! Yesterday evening, weren’t you in your loggia, wrapped in blankets, with your cozy little lamp on—and at the same time, didn’t I see you downstairs, quite enjoying the company of that dashing young man? Oh! Oh! And your husband, has he written to you lately?”

At luncheon one day, a new arrival starts coughing up blood, seemingly great amounts of it. There is scraping of chairs, cries of alarm, general agitation: the patient is frantic, clutching at his throat and chest with bloodied hands, and neither Director Lang nor Doctor Vogel are in sight. Aziraphale makes his way to the man, now on the floor, cradles and reassures him the best he can, presses the light of a miracle into his chest—not healing, he is not allowed to do that, just… calm. The patient breathes in gulps, blood still streaming from his mouth, and finally a nurse arrives to take over, Doctor Vogel on her heels. Aziraphale hardly registers the patient being carried away, the whispering crowd swaying to follow his departure. On his knees on the polished floor, he raises his bloodied hands to his face, palms up, and stares at them unseeing, ghosts of other times shifting around him with kaleidoscopic quickness: castles and hovels, battlefields and hospital rooms, Death presiding over everything.

Helplessness threatens to drown him.

Then, somebody’s hands are under his, steady and warm. He looks up, and it’s Crowley, kneeling on the polished wood of the floor. His lips move soundlessly as the roar continues in Aziraphale’s mind. The pressure of Crowley’s hands, his thumbs digging into Aziraphale’s blood-stained palms, keeps the angel grounded, connects him with the present; in some indeterminate amount of time, the roar starts to weaken, as if he is moving away from a great waterfall step by painstaking step. Still stunned, he looks at the demon’s face and sees, once again, that hectic flush high on Crowley’s cheeks, the drops of perspiration on his temples, the way his hair falls over his forehead in a damp wave, mussed up where he must have dragged his fingers through it.

“Crowley,” he tries to say, and feels the pressure on his hands increase. There’s a shift in the air, a lick of hot magic, and then the bloodstains are gone, his hands as clean as they have ever been.

The sounds are back: the murmurs of the crowd, somebody’s hacking cough, his own quickened breath. Crowley’s hands slacken, twitch. “Th—thank you—” Aziraphale starts, voice surprisingly hoarse—and sees the demon flinch and recoil.

“Don’t,” Crowley says curtly and is already on his feet, loping off towards a side door—away from the crowd.

Slowly rising from his knees, Aziraphale looks at his retreating back, the white of the corridor engulfing him, and feels an unexpected chill.

-

In the days that follow, Aziraphale doesn’t see Crowley at all—though he is quite certain that the demon has not left the grounds of the sanatorium: there is always somebody who had just seen him, had spoken to him not too long ago.

Still, Aziraphale doesn’t catch as much as a glimpse.

(Once, he tugs, gently, at his magic, and to his consternation finds that he cannot locate the demon that way either: there is interference, some kind of a disorienting background hum.)

The patients, in the meantime, are preparing to send off one of their rank: Herr Roberts, someone-or-other high up in international trade. Since Herr Roberts isn’t on Aziraphale’s list (unexpected—but not like Aziraphale would write to Gabriel demanding a double-check), and since their first acquaintance wasn’t one Aziraphale was eager to continue, the angel had spent next to no time with him. He is all the more baffled when, one morning, he receives a note: six o’clock, Chalet Le Chasseur east of the village, select company, breathe no word to the doctors.

“You are going, of course?” Mrs. Grant asks. “Only you’ve been looking so forlorn, you poor dear. Company will do you good.”

He goes. Every opportunity to talk to the patients brings him closer to his goal, gives him material for his reports. These are chances he should take; no less is expected of him.

He regrets it almost instantly. The party, it turns out, is not only for the patients: many of the guests are his neighbours in the visitor’s wing, some are clearly vacationers from the village. Inside the lodge, it is already very hot; the rough-hewn tables are piled high with hors-d’oeuvres, there is a throng around the punch bowl. Loud, full of vigour, and increasingly red-faced, the men gather around in groups to talk of politics and trade. The ladies, for the most part in separate circles as yet, settle in armchairs and start up games of bridge, sipping on steaming punch. Herr Roberts, a rotund balding man, grabs Aziraphale’s elbow, assures him that the honour is all his, and adds, in a low voice, that he has a few proposals of interest to Aziraphale’s employer. By the time the angel extricates himself and returns to the first floor from the upstairs balcony where he’d been dragged, the celebration is in full swing.

“Herr Fell!” he hears, and another arm is wrapped around his. This time, it’s a patient—one of the new arrivals, Herr Krauss—and the angel allows himself to be led to a tight circle by the fireplace in the main hall. He is met with cries of delight, handshakes, and a couple of awkward hugs; somebody presses a cup of punch into his hand. He can see that a few of the patients around the fire have glasses sparkling with pale green.

“To think that I may also go down to the flatlands one day, for good,” a woman to his right says dreamily, watching Herr Roberts cut through the crowd.

He follows her gaze—and sees Crowley.

The demon, all in black, lean as ever, firelight flickering in his hair, is… startling.

He is flanked by two men, both in white suits; Aziraphale feels an icy hollow open inside him before he realizes these are only humans. One of the men—the taller one, about the same height as Crowley but at least twice the girth—has his hand on Crowley’s sleeve; the demon is ignoring that fact as he impassively responds to something the man is saying. Presently, the trio is joined by Herr Roberts, and together they move through the crowd towards the back of the lodge.

Aziraphale returns his attention to his own group, just in time to answer some queries about London and be asked for his opinion of Director Lang (“Sure, he runs the place,” somebody says, “but d’you know who I would like to—God forbid I need it—operate on me? Doctor Vogel, that’s who.”) A plate of hors-d’oeuvres is brought their way; the golden cream-filled pastries are delightfully hot, the spice setting off the richness of the cheese.

The meandering conversation continues. After some time, there’s a commotion at the punch table, followed by the clinking of a spoon on glass; commanding everyone’s attention, Herr Roberts gives a speech.

“My friends!” he bellows. “For, whether we’ve known each other for a fortnight or for months, you are my friends—and the cream of the cream of this society. It is my hope that tonight, as we celebrate my departure, you will get to know each other as well. After all, we are…” he turns to a small man on his right, asks an inaudible question, nods, and carries on, “more than five thousand feet above the sea, and there is something to be said about making friends in high places!”

There are ripples of laughter among the guests, cheering that intensifies as Herr Roberts announces prizes for the games to come. Furniture is moved out of the way, one of the guests is blindfolded, and the others scatter, teasing and egging each other on as they dash behind sofas and find nooks to hide in. The curly-haired Herr Krauss appears again, laughing, grabs Aziraphale by the hand and drags him off towards the far wall, shielding him. “What are you doing, standing there like that! You’d be the first one down.” Then, eyes on the blindfolded man, Herr Krauss narrates the scene: “He’s moving to the other side! Splendid, we’ve got a breather. Oh no, Frau Speck! Ah, she is safe now, a narrow escape. And there’s that red-haired fellow, looking this way instead of… look out! Look out!”

Aziraphale turns sharply, follows his gaze.

Across the room, Crowley sidesteps the chaser at the last possible moment; to his left, one of the white-suited gentlemen from before scrambles backwards just in time. The next man is not so lucky, and the chaser’s outstretched fingers connect with his shoulder. The crowd half-groans, half-cheers; the blindfold changes owners. The new chaser, much more agile, is far more of a threat: the floor around him clears instantly, and the players resort to misdirection, shouting “Here!” and “No, here!” as they tiptoe across his path, shaking with silent laughter.

As the game continues, the gentlemen start shedding their jackets, unbuttoning their collars; a few of the ladies pick up fans. In between the rounds, Herr Krauss asks Aziraphale a multitude of questions: his impressions of the sanatorium, his favourite walking trails, how long he intends to stay. He’s an eager listener, and conversation flows easily.

When a break is announced, Herr Krauss dives into the fray of people by the punch table and emerges victorious, carrying not only punch but also a little plate of hors-d’oeuvres. He presents them to the angel with a flourish. Picking up a scrumptious-looking canapé, Aziraphale considers that on the whole, the evening is looking up.

“Isn’t this splendid?” Herr Krauss beams at him. “When I just arrived, I thought that my fellow sufferers were a dull bunch. Well, look at them now!”

Quite unprompted, he then announces that he is going back for some sweets—will Herr Fell wait for him?—and once again dives into the crowd.

The cup of punch warm in his hands, Aziraphale is looking over the guests, thinking about nothing in particular, when the crowd parts for a moment. There, in the far corner, below an ostentatious pair of antlers decorating the wall, stands the white-suited gentleman, a glass in his hand—and Crowley is sitting on the floor next to him, his back to the logs, one knee bent, a tall glass balanced carelessly on it.

The crowd closes again before Aziraphale can take a better look.

“There we go,” Herr Krauss says, appearing next to Aziraphale with another small plate. “I think I got some of each. Which ones are your favourites, Herr Fell? Oh, did—did something happen? You look…”

“It’s nothing, dear boy,” Aziraphale says, letting go of his ring and lowering his hands.

Herr Krauss gives him a sideways glance.

“Well. These ones are honeyed apple, I think, and these have some kind of a berry mousse inside. Chocolate here, and—ah, no, I really don’t know what all of them are. Do tell me which ones you like the most, though, I’ll hunt for extras.”

“That is very kind of you,” Aziraphale says as he picks up a likely-looking sweet. “Why… Why don’t you tell me a little about your life back home, Herr Krauss?”

“What’s waiting for me when I get back down?” Aziraphale’s companion grins. “Not much, really, you’d be surprised. I think my family was happy to be rid of me. Well, there’s my sister, not her, but for the rest, I’m afraid I’ve been a bit of an inconvenience.”

“Oh?”

“You know how it is, the eldest son turning out to be… not quite the kind to pin one’s hopes on. Though actually, I hope you don’t know—I apologize, I didn’t mean to—”

Aziraphale thinks of Gabriel, looking him up and down during their Heavenly parades and pursing his lips. Of Michael, who’d barely spared him a glance the last time he arrived to make his report in person, trying to intervene on someone’s behalf.

“No need to apologize,” he says. “I… I would like to hear it.”

Herr Krauss grins again, open and delighted, and launches into a tale.

By the time the game starts again, some of the players are less than steady on their feet. This adds to both the challenge and the amusement, and Herr Krauss—Christoph, he asks Aziraphale to call him—is thrilled.

“We take ourselves far too seriously most of the time, don’t you agree?”

Not in this game. It gets rowdier and rowdier, players falling over each other in the rush to get out of the chaser’s way. Some execute whole strategies, shouting “Come this way!” in front of another player and then ducking just in time, with the unfortunate getting tagged instead of them. Herr Roberts is apparently keeping score, though how the man can see or remember anything in this whirlwind, Aziraphale has no idea. And they, Herr Krauss and he, are not at peace for long: a chaser comes their way, dashes forward before Aziraphale can tear his eyes away from the crowd—from Crowley, who is on his feet again, if a little unsteady—and the angel doesn’t see the threat, such as it is, in time.

At the last moment, Herr Krauss steps in front of him, and is tagged.

The crowd oohs and applauds. Crowley, only a few paces away, snaps his head in their direction.

Blindfold on, Herr Krauss is spun around. He stands still for a moment, listening to the expectant murmurs of the players, and then—

He whirls towards Aziraphale, takes a few steps, and tags him.

The crowd erupts in shouts, incredulous and gleeful in equal measure. Herr Krauss pulls the blindfold down, laughing.

“Herr Fell! I did get it right, I did! I’m so sorry for my deception, Herr Fell. You see, I wanted to be the one to tag you.”

It is Aziraphale’s turn. After the glare of the electric lights, the darkness—full of whispers and giggles—is disorienting. Hand outstretched hopefully, he walks along, feeling little currents of air as somebody runs past him. There are claps—to the left and to the right—and enthusiastic but disjointed shouts of ‘here’ that do nothing to help him. He changes direction, walks forwards briskly, hears people scrambling out of his way, hears more laughter—

And then, with his next few steps, the whispers start to die down.

His outstretched hand makes contact with something—smooth cloth, a—a lapel. A hush has fallen over the players.

There’s warmth under his fingers, a distant echo of a beating heart, and…

…and he suddenly realizes that, in among the usual smells of alcohol, sweat, and various perfumes, there’s the scent of windfall apples, too.

He pulls the blindfold down as if it’s burning him.

“Herr Crowley, you didn’t run at all,” somebody says, disappointed.

“No,” the demon agrees, looking down at Aziraphale for a long moment before turning his head in the direction of the speaker. “Don’t you wonder why?”

Aziraphale doesn’t find out what, precisely, Crowley’s game plan is: just after the new round starts, Herr Krauss twists his ankle and has to take a break. Would Herr Fell join him, he asks hopefully—and of course the angel does, looking back only once as he assists his limping friend in getting to a sofa by the fireplace.

The ghost of warmth still clings to the tips of his fingers.

Afterwards, they join some other games. One, particularly absurd, involves standing in a circle and asking one’s neighbour, “Have you ever seen the Devil with a nightcap on?”, to which the neighbour must answer “I have never seen the Devil with a nightcap on” and repeat the question to the next person—and on and on. The whole time, Aziraphale is plagued by the image of Crowley in a nightcap, looking incredibly unimpressed, and so it’s rather a relief when the game is done.

With time, as more and more of the guests find cozy spots around the room or upstairs, games give way to conversation. A record is put on a gramophone; music sweeps through the lodge.

It is another half-hour before Aziraphale realizes that he hasn’t seen Crowley for some time.

It shouldn’t worry him.

It does.

He can’t quite explain it to himself. It’s… it’s really none of his business, what temptations the demon is working on for the evening.

The last time he saw Crowley, the demon was—he was on the sofa, the white-suited gentleman next to him, filling Crowley’s glass from a bottle sloshing with green. He then raised his own glass—a twin of Crowley’s—in a cheer.

The image doesn’t sit right.

Apologizing, Aziraphale gets up. “Shall I keep you company?” Herr Krauss asks. “No? Come back soon, then.” He gives the angel a wide and slightly inebriated smile. “We’re going to miss you terribly!”

The other patients in their little group nod, murmuring their assent.

The angel makes his way through the room. There are couples everywhere, on sofas and in nooks by the windows. He didn’t quite catch it when the mood of the evening changed. The lights are dim; the air is hazy with cigar smoke. The gramophone in the corner is playing what Aziraphale thinks is dance music—and there are couples dancing in the open area, very close to each other, though not all of them seem to be hearing the same tune.

He walks along. The lodge, with its multitude of small side rooms and an abundance of furniture, is far more of a maze than it has any right to be.

Finally, he spots a glimmer of white in one of the side rooms. Coming closer, he can make out the scene—there, on the sofa, is the white-suited gentleman from before, and Crowley is next to him, and they…

Oh.

He steps backward, nearly tripping in his hurry to avoid being seen.

It’s—he—

He doesn’t know what he expected.

They are kissing, or rather it seems that the white-suited man is kissing Crowley—and has an arm around Crowley’s shoulders, is pulling the unresisting demon close. A glass of absinthe dangles loosely in Crowley’s fingers. There is another glass, empty, off to the side, and a few empty bottles underfoot.

Crowley—moans.

Stepping further and further back, Aziraphale no longer knows what he was going to do.

Dazed, he returns to his spot by the fireplace. Herr Krauss lights up at his approach, breaks into another of his disarming crooked smiles. “Herr Fell, there you are! I brought us some more treats while you were gone. Look! And they had pomegranates, too, imagine that!” The angel thanks him, goes to take a pastry, looks up at Herr Krauss’s eager face as he does—

Oh.

Herr Krauss is…

Oh.

And he was oblivious the whole time, wasn’t he.

Aziraphale’s head is swimming.

It’s… too much, too fast. But then, the humans—and these humans in particular—do not have the luxury of time. They are always in a hurry—in love, in life, in everything—

Fireflies, the lot of them.

The whole world is going too fast, the planet spinning madly on its axis.

And everything seems possible, now. The humans have chased away the night with their incandescent lights. They have taken flight. They’ve seen inside their own bodies.

Holding the delicate pastry between his fingers, Aziraphale looks around their small group. While he was gone, the patients had brought out small plates, their ‘inner portraits’, as they call them, and are holding them to the light. He’d seen them before, these images they carry, exchange in the parlour, are frankly titillated by: windows into each other’s bodies, onto the marvel of ghostly ribcages, clavicles, lungs.

Early on, Director Lang had given him a tour, had shown him the radiograph that produced these images, hidden in the gloom of one of the basement rooms. He remembers it now—remembers the patient, too, stripped to the waist, standing between the screens as the machine crackles, as the air takes on an odd, sharp smell—ozone, the Director says—

And then he is thinking of Crowley, of whether the demon had been down there, too, and whether the Director, or anyone else, had seen his exposed human heart.

Abruptly, Aziraphale gets up.

“Dear boy,” he says to Herr Krauss. “I. I really do apologize. There is… I cannot quite explain, but there is somewhere I’ve got to be.”

“Of course. I understand,” Herr Krauss says, his face falling—and then, when Aziraphale is already on his way, adds, wistful: “You never did tell me what your Christian name was.”

Having once again walked through the maze of the first floor, Aziraphale pauses by the side room door and looks in.

They are still there on the sofa, Crowley and the white-suited man, though they are no longer kissing. The man’s left hand is on Crowley’s knee, slowly traveling upwards.

Whatever the demon is thinking, nothing shows in his face.

Aziraphale closes his eyes. When he opens them, the man is reaching towards the demon’s glasses. He might be intending to take them off, or to adjust them, or maybe he isn’t reaching for the glasses at all—but Aziraphale finds he no longer cares.

This may be a temptation that Crowley has set up, but Aziraphale no longer cares about that either.

The angel steps into the room, strides towards the sofa.

“What do you think you are doing?” he says to… the man? Crowley? himself? He is not quite sure.

Both of them turn towards him, the man frowning, and Crowley—

He cannot look at Crowley. Not now. He can’t.

“And who the Hell are…” the white-suited man starts saying, and Aziraphale looks at him instead: really looks at him.

“Go,” he says simply—and feels his voice shift into a Heavenly register.

In the next room, the gramophone hiccups, the instruments in the recording going, impossibly, out of tune.

The man’s eyes are suddenly wide with terror. He scrambles off the sofa, kicking over the empty absinthe bottles with his heel in his haste to be gone.

Aziraphale closes his eyes again, breathes out. When he opens them, the man is nowhere to be seen—possibly running towards the village through the freshly-fallen snow. The rest of his night—and likely more—will not be good.

Biting his lip, Aziraphale turns to Crowley.

“Angel, that’ss…” the demon says wonderingly, sibilance slipping through unchecked as he looks at the door.

“Unnecessary. I… I know. Crowley, listen, I…”

And then, as Crowley tilts his head up to look at him, Aziraphale cuts himself off.

That high blush. That sheen of sweat, pearlescent over his skin. The demon’s quick breathing, his slightly parted lips.

And the smell of liquor so strong that even the fumes would be a danger to house-cats and songbirds.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says slowly. “How. How much have you had.”

“Nmgbh.”

The white-suited gentleman, whoever he is, is not going to have a good year.

“Right. We are going back to the sanatorium. Please see if you can stand.”

Crowley rises from the sofa, hesitantly, using one hand to hold on to the sofa’s high back. His whole body is oriented towards Aziraphale, and the way he just—does what he’s told—sends a shiver down Aziraphale’s spine.

That… that is good, though. In a bit, Crowley should be able to walk. Aziraphale had seen far worse, over the years. That time he found Crowley during the plague…

“You should really sober up, you know.”

Instead, the demon winces and sways, nearly letting go of his handhold.

“Right,” Aziraphale says and steps closer. “All right, we’ve got to… No, lean on me. Yes, like… like this.”

Together, they make their way across the room and towards the darkened hall. No humans look at them, absolute in their certainty that there is nothing to see.

The hall appears to be endless. Pressed against Aziraphale’s side, the demon’s body is radiating heat. The angel pulls at his collar with a free hand, ineffectually.

“I think,” he says, “That you are going to feel a whole lot better once we get outside.”

A couple slams into the wall just ahead of them, kissing furiously, hands all over each other’s bodies.

Aziraphale closes his eyes, feels Crowley’s breath hot on his cheek, walks on.

Finally—thankfully—they are at the doors. Aziraphale is pulling on his overcoat when he is struck by a thought.

“Crowley,” he says. “Where... where is your coat?”

The demon, who’s been looking at the floor, his back to the log wall for balance, shows no signs of having heard him.

“Don't tell me you walked here without one.”

“Uh. Moghtvedgtr.”

“What was that?”

“Might’ve done.”

“For fashion’s sake, wasn’t it. You actually walked here without a coat, through the snow, in winter, in the Alps, for fashion’s sake.”

Crowley shrugs noncommittally, looks around as if searching for whoever the comment was addressed to.

“To impress your friends, probably. Crowley, you are a snake.”

“Not at th’moment,” Crowley objects.

Aziraphale is not impressed.

“Well, we can’t have you walking back dressed like—” he gestures at the demon, who raises an eyebrow, “—dressed like this.”

“Dressed like thiss,” Crowley echoes. “And what’s wrong with this?”

“It’s practically tissue-paper, that’s what’s wrong. Do you remember Iceland? I distinctly remember Iceland.”

“Y’know,” Crowley muses. “If you wore ssomething like it, you wouldn’t be sweating so much right now.”

“You—you—have you even seen yourself, Crowley? You look like you fell in a lake.”

“Are you finally admitting I’m hot?” Crowley asks seriously, and for a moment, Aziraphale is speechless.

“That,” he says at last, “was terrible.”

“I’ll be ssure to mention it in my report.”

“Crowley. I… I mean it. You have to magic something warmer.”

The demon goes still. Then, giving a one-shoulder shrug, he jerks his chin to the side. Aziraphale follows his gaze.

“No,” he says. “Out of the question. We are not doing this. We are not taking some poor human’s coat because you’ve been… unreasonable. Here.”

With this, Aziraphale shrugs off his overcoat and thrusts it into Crowley’s arms.

“Savile Row,” he says with dignity.

Meaning to say, not Heaven.

When they finally emerge from the lodge, it’s like plunging into an ice-cold alpine lake.

The trek back to the sanatorium is not long, although at this time of night, no reasonable human should be attempting it. It’s a shortcut through the mountains, a trail wide enough for a couple to walk side by side in the summer, but almost too narrow now for one, with drifts of snow to both sides. In the windswept stretches, the snow cover is thin, baring the rock and the gnarled tree roots underneath.

Above them is a multitude of stars, a river spilt across the black.

Aziraphale walks in front, pausing, listening to Crowley’s footsteps behind him. The demon had gone quiet when they stepped out from the lodge, is still quiet now, thinking—well, whatever it is Crowley thinks of in these moods. They walk in silence for some time, through patches of silver light and shadows like deep gashes in the world. Aziraphale doesn’t look back, giving Crowley space.

Then, Crowley’s footsteps stop.

Aziraphale whips around.

The demon, Aziraphale’s overcoat hanging absurdly off his narrow frame, is looking up, stars reflected in the black of his lenses, which—which he really doesn’t need, Aziraphale thinks, not when it’s just the two of them—

It’s when Aziraphale takes a second, closer look that he notices Crowley swaying slightly on his feet.

“Crowley?” he asks, frowning.

The demon starts. He looks at Aziraphale, takes a few steps forward, too uncertain and quick—and trips over something half-hidden by snow.

He lands in a heap, gracelessly, and doesn’t immediately attempt to get up.

Aziraphale hurries towards him.

“Crowley, do try to sober up properly,” he says as he approaches, a veneer of irritation over his growing concern. “It’s really not safe.”

After another long moment, Crowley scrambles to his knees and looks up at Aziraphale. His glasses, knocked off in the stumble, are somewhere on the ground, and as he meets Aziraphale’s eyes, his own are wide and somehow lost.

“Angel,” he says softly.

“Y-yes?” Aziraphale’s heart stammers in his chest.

“You’re glowing.”

Aziraphale stops in his tracks. Slowly, he raises his hand, palm up. There is a faint luminous outline around it—around the sleeve, too. A spark fizzles and dies on his cufflink.

“S’bright.”

This, Aziraphale thinks, is not good.

This, in fact, is very much the opposite of good.

He kneels in front of the demon, a careful foot away.

“Crowley, are you… Can you… Something is happening, isn’t it.”

In the starlight, the red of Crowley’s hair is electric.

“Downstairs has a job for you, they ssaid,” Crowley murmurs indistinctly, eyes not quite focused on the angel. “Don’t f-fuck it up, they said. We’ll pop in to check. Toodle-oo.”

“Crowley, who—who said that?”

“And they did, you know. Pop in. Jussst. Just before you arrived.” He closes his eyes, inhales. “I think you should leave, angel.”

“What? No, I—Crowley, we are talking about what’s happening to you—“

“I’ll do your bless—blessings. Whatever you need.”

Aziraphale is silent for a moment. Crowley opens his eyes.

“They are not letting you heal this lot, are they. Not a single one.”

“That,” Aziraphale says firmly, “has nothing to do with anything. Crowley, we’ve got to get a move on. Can you stand?”

“I have to find them,” the demon says, looking around, then leaning to ineffectually scrabble over a patch of rock and dry grass.

“Here,” Aziraphale picks up his glasses from a snowdrift, hands them over to the demon. Crowley takes them without flinching—a good sign. “Can you stand?”

“You go on,” Crowley says confidently and sinks back into his heels, glasses in hand.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Crowley. I’m not leaving you here in the snow.”

Crowley’s eyes are suddenly wide and bright yellow with panic.

“What—what are you—“

“I’m going to carry you,” Aziraphale explains. Getting off his knees, he puts his hand on Crowley’s shoulder, waits for a few heartbeats. When Crowley doesn’t flinch, only keeps looking at him like a cornered thing, he goes down on one knee, wraps his arm around Crowley’s back, pulls him half to standing and, somewhat awkwardly, lifts him into his arms.

The demon, who holds onto his shoulders with a vibrating tension, weighs almost nothing.

“All right?” Aziraphale asks.

“Y… yeah,” Crowley says, not looking at him.

“Off we go, then,” Aziraphale says brightly.

In a while, Crowley’s grip on his shoulder loosens. Glancing over at him, Aziraphale can see that his eyes are closed.

“You do have to tell me what’s happening, Crowley,” he says quietly—and, as the demon’s head lolls against his shoulder, has to chase away the thought of touching his lips to Crowley’s forehead, checking for fever.

It would be unnecessary. With Crowley’s body so close to his, pressing into his stomach and his chest, and with cold winds buffeting them both, he knows it for a certainty: the demon is burning.

(When they get to the sanatorium, not a glance is turned their way as Aziraphale carries Crowley up to his room: the angel makes sure of that. As he is getting the demon into bed, taking his shoes and jacket off—which feels like a terrible imposition—Crowley’s eyes fly open, once, and he asks, very distinctly:

“What were you going to say, Aziraphale? Back there. At the lodge.”

And then, before Aziraphale can think of an answer, he is out cold.)

Chapter Text

When Crowley wakes, it is to a skull-splitting headache.

“Nhhh,” he says blearily, rolling over to his side—

—and in another ten seconds, sits bolt upright, looking wildly around. The thundercloud in his head explodes, lightning flashing across his vision.

“Ow,” he says when he can speak again.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck. How much did he… what did he…

A curtain of falling snow is all he can see through the window. His jacket is folded neatly on the armchair, his shoes placed carefully by the bed. He is alone in his sanatorium room.

What did he tell Aziraphale.

-

The morning finds Aziraphale behind one of the slate-topped desks in the library. It’s a comforting place, with its scent of books and dust, the soft polish of the wood panels, the worn green plush of the seats—but Crowley was right: except for a few shelves of materials supplied by the Philosophical Society, the sanatorium library is stocked no better than a dentist’s waiting-room. The book Aziraphale is leafing through comes from different stock entirely.

D. Demons. Origin of. Appearance. Notable sightings. Powers.

Nothing on the source of their power, however—not past the obvious. And nothing on—well—illness.

It is a lot to ask of a human author, of course.

Not to mention it being—absurd. Demons do not fall ill.

Aziraphale closes the book, drums his fingers on the back cover, hums.

He should go check on Crowley again.

By the door, the hands of an ornate pendulum clock point to half-past eleven.

Oh dear.

Aziraphale gets to the patients’ wing as quickly as he dares to, keeping his miracles in check to avoid attracting attention from Upstairs. His knock gets no response and, foregoing his ritual of brushing off nonexistent lint from his vest, he resolutely pushes the door open.

In the diffuse light filtering through the white curtains, Crowley’s room is almost unbearably bright—and completely empty.

-

Crowley has no idea where he is going. He only knows that he needs to be on his feet, needs to move, needs to think.

The air, frigid as it is against his face, feels very little like relief.

He’d… he’d gone and made an idiot of himself. Again. And it’s all fragments, all memories jumbled together. The lodge, the heat, Aziraphale, the taste of anise and wormwood on someone’s lips, something—something going very wrong.

He remembers Aziraphale standing over him, a sharp crease between his eyebrows. He must have been in the angel’s way—an obstacle, a nuisance, something to contend with, and he couldn’t—Crowley couldn’t—

He’s in the copse behind the sanatorium, at the head of trails. He picks one at random and starts walking down it, trudging through deep snow.

—he couldn’t even sober up, not properly, nausea and pain hitting him just as they did before, a side effect of his own magic. Out of whatever sense of angelic duty, Aziraphale had led him back to the sanatorium—and he had felt the cold fury radiating from the angel causing even the trees to cower and bend out of their way.

You were a nuisance. Again. He’d told you, Crowley thinks, he’d told you before, he meant it: you are not friends.

He’d said it so many times.

Up ahead, a wooden signpost sticks out of the snow, uselessly pointing at things hundreds of miles away. Crowley trudges towards it, his inessential lungs burning with the effort.

The thing is, he’d hoped. Of course he’d hoped.

That first day at the sanatorium, when Aziraphale came to find him—on his own accord—he’d thought… he’d thought…

It doesn’t matter what he’d thought.

Fraternizing.

The signpost, now in front of him, suggests directions to a monastery somewhere in France. Crowley swears and goes to kick it, succeeding only in getting his foot stuck in the compacted snow at its base.

Dizziness hits him, stronger than ever before. He shoots out his arm, grabs onto the post, slowly sinks into the snow.

And this, he thinks. Whatever this is.

It occurs to him that he should be afraid.

-

He just needs to think through it, Aziraphale tells himself as he hurries along the corridor. To reason it out. There is absolutely no need to panic.

The demon isn’t in the common rooms. Isn’t in the cafeteria. Isn’t at the visitor’s restaurant.

If only Crowley was in any state to talk the night before—

But he wasn’t. And if he was, just how much would he admit to Aziraphale, after everything the angel had—had not—done? After the years of silence between them?

Would he say if the angel’s presence had been affecting him? If that was why he’d tried to put so much distance between them, as frequently as he could? Why he had started disappearing? Why he wanted Aziraphale to leave?

Aziraphale had spent the first part of the night by Crowley's bed, irresolute, listening to the demon’s shallow breath—and then, as Crowley’s torpor seemed to give way to actual sleep, had reluctantly gotten up, taken his overcoat and his scarf, walked to the door.

He needed to know.

And he needed to be well away from Crowley’s room to find out.

He knew, now, after the experiments he’d done in the copse, at the head of the trails, snow-covered firs looking on as he called out to the world and had the world respond to him with shocking power. It responded to his words, to his touch, to his very thoughts; light that he called down burned holier and brighter than ever, the puff of wind he conjured arrived as a gale.

His power had been growing, and he hadn’t realized it all this while.

If it had tipped over some heretofore unknown threshold, if he started affecting Crowley, stifling his very nature—

He had to leave immediately, assignment or no assignment.

And yet—

That night in the mountains, when their fingers brushed as he handed Crowley his spectacles, the demon didn’t flinch, just kept looking at him in the same lost way. And then Aziraphale carried him—carried him all the way to the sanatorium—but Crowley’s pale skin had been unmarked anywhere he’d dared to check: not a blister, not a burn.

Which—which was something, wasn’t it.

But he’d left the room. He’d resolved to stay away from Crowley as much as possible until he could talk to the demon, and he’d left the room, and when Crowley woke up alone—

Aziraphale is too distracted to notice that there is someone in his path.

They collide.

A clipboard clatters to the floor, white sheets flying out like so many doves.

“Herr Fell! Are you all right?”

It’s Doctor Vogel, concern on her face.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Aziraphale says. “Here, let me…”

Once her notes are back in order and both of them straighten, he sees that her look of concern hasn’t dissipated.

“Herr Fell, is something wrong?”

“No, I’m… fine, thank you,“ Aziraphale says, “It’s really nothing. Just lost in thought.”

She nods slowly. “Of course. But can I help you with anything?”

“That is very kind of you, Doctor. I—I am ever so sorry. I don’t want to take up any more of your time, and I should be on my way…”

“Of course,” she repeats, looking at his hands. He lets go of his ring, clasps them behind his back, looks longingly at the end of the corridor where the stairs are concealed behind a milk-white door.

“You know where to find me if you do think of anything,” Doctor Vogel says. “I hope you have a good afternoon—ah!”

Aziraphale, who already begun to walk past her, jumps.

“I just remembered something,” she continues. “If you happen to see Herr Crowley, can you please tell him that the trails are off limits until we've had time to clear them? I saw from a window that he was headed that way. Well, I’m sure he’d noticed by now—there’s been quite a bit more snow than usual—”

“I—yes, certainly,” Aziraphale says. “Thank—thank you.”

He thinks she might still be looking after him as he steps out onto the landing.

-

As soon as the dizziness passes, Crowley is on his feet.

Right, he thinks. Right. Time to come up with a plan. A good one. Or—or a bad one, any kind of plan would be useful just about now.

He can’t let Aziraphale see him like this. If the angel figures out that something is happening, there’s no saying what he’ll do, high-strung as he’d been.

But leaving the sanatorium, for Crowley, is out of the question. For all he knows, they are watching him even now.

For all he knows, this time the threats that Hell had made are real.

Or… they just want him to think that.

Which—fuck. That’d also be just like them.

He’s back to the head of trails and already through the copse when he sees someone coming his way, marching through knee-deep snow with unwavering determination.

Aziraphale.

The angel’s wool overcoat is buttoned all the way up, his tartan scarf wrapped tightly around his neck.

They meet in the middle of a field of white.

Aziraphale looks—exhausted. And more than a little alarmed.

“Crowley,” he says, stepping closer. “Where’ve—where have you been?”

More memories uncoil from the tangled mess that is, in Crowley’s mind, the previous evening. A sky full of stars, a path through the mountains, quicksilver patches of light and coal-black shadows. Aziraphale turning to him, limned in a holy glow.

“Just, uh, taking a walk,” Crowley says with as much nonchalance as he can muster. “Aziraphale…”

He’d seen it before, that look of helpless alarm. Just a few days ago, in the cafeteria, when Aziraphale knelt, immovable, his hands blood-stained, as the crowd eddied and swirled around him. Before that, in countless sickrooms and on battlefields. Everywhere the angel was sent to observe—and told not to interfere.

“Angel,” Crowley says before the thought is even complete, “you should leave.”

There is an odd echo of deja vu to his words.

“You—this is—this is not a good place for you.”

Aziraphale looks up at him. His eyes are a gunmetal grey, dark with worry—darker even than the clouds that hang over the mountains around them.

“You think I should leave,” Aziraphale repeats slowly.

“Mh, yeah. Look, we’ve been through—I can do your blessings. More fun than what I’m supposed to be doing, anyway. And I already know everyone, so…” He snaps his fingers, smiles what he hopes looks like an easy smile. “Piece of cake.”

He just has to convince Aziraphale—it’s got to work this time, he can see the hesitation in the angel’s face—and then he will be free to make his escape. Before Aziraphale notices that anything is amiss.

“Crowley, I know that something is wrong,” Aziraphale says.

Fuck.

“I know that you—you really are ill.”

“I am fine.”

The angel looks at him, mouth set, and shakes his head.

“I’ve already done some research. Your—your power is weakening, isn’t it. That’s why you had such a difficult time sobering up yesterday, for one. But you’ve… you’ve got to tell me a little more before I can help.”

You can’t help, Crowley thinks frantically. Don’t you go digging.

“Aziraphale, what the deuce are you on about?” he says aloud.

“For—for Somebody’s sake, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, exasperated, and steps closer. “You’ve got a fever.”

Crowley scrambles back.

“I do not.”

“You do,” Aziraphale insists, taking another step towards him.

Backing away, thinking furiously, Crowley does his best impression of a nonchalant shrug.

“Angel. Really? We are at a sanatorium. That’s the fashion. ‘Course, it’s somewhat less fashionable now that they’ve discovered that bacterium, but that only applies to the poor.”

He keeps talking—and as he does, he splits part of his attention off, lets it dive under the surface of the world, sift through the threads of events around them: some closer, some further away. He grasps and pulls at the brightest thread, wincing as it burns him.

There’s a shift in the air.

A small crowd of patients rounds the corner of the main building, spilling down the stone staircase with alternating cries of joy and indignation.

“Don’t you dare—Max—don’t you dare—aaaaaah!”

As Marinochka attempts an escape, a snowball hits her squarely in the back of her fur hat, bursting into a shower of glittering sparks.

“I will get you, Max,” she hisses, crouching behind a low stone wall and plunging her hands into fresh snow.

“Let me help you, my dear,” Mrs. Grant sings out as she sends a volley of snowballs in Max’s direction—and then lets out a rather undignified scream as Frau Haller appears behind her with a handful of loose snow.

It takes the humans no time at all to notice him and the angel out on the trail. Aziraphale glances his way sharply, then looks back over his shoulder, resigned.

“Herr Crowley!” Herr Redlinger calls out, saluting him.

“Herr Fell!” Mrs. Grant cries, waving.

“Well,” Herr Steiner says, thoughtful. “I think it’s us against them.”

And then, stumbling, laughing, the humans are running their way.

-

Six humans and a demon should not be able to cause as much chaos as they do. Snowballs are flying in high and low arcs, the air rings with laughter, the sun hangs blindingly brilliant high in the pale sky.

With the running, the hiding, with veritable explosions of snow, nobody notices it when the demon disappears—though when they do, the humans are quite put out.

“Where could he have gone?” Mrs. Grant asks, squinting towards the trees in the distance, then towards the stairs.

“He does that, doesn’t he,” Frau Heller says thoughtfully. “Herr Crowley! Where are you?”

Herr Crowley, Aziraphale thinks in exasperation, does not want to talk, and does not care to be found.

Ages pass before he can extricate himself from the humans, who have decided—wisely, for once, given that most of them are now short of breath—that they have had enough exercise for the time-being. They brush off their coats, help him brush off his, barrage him with questions: was he at Herr Roberts’ party the previous evening? What was it like? Does he remember any of the guests? Herr Steiner, in particular, is left disappointed with his answers: a party like that, he says, would’ve been the perfect place to study human character—didn’t he take the opportunity?

Finally, after dragging him for a turn around the sanatorium grounds and then depositing him on the terrace, they depart, apparently to meet Herr Redlinger’s cousin who’d arrived for a visit just that morning. The cousin bears news from the flatlands—and possibly even souvenirs, Marinochka says excitedly—so they must be on their way.

Aziraphale is left to his thoughts.

Crowley could not have been more clear: the conversation is over. He’d done magic, had rather unmistakably shifted probabilities to engineer an escape—and it is clear, now that Aziraphale is paying attention, that magic is causing him actual pain.

He chose to do that rather than speak to Aziraphale.

Slowly, the angel walks to the parapet, looks at the snow-covered mountains, at the road winding down and down towards the village in the valley. A wind rises, whipping up the tops of snowbanks into powdery white clouds. Somewhere further off—he cannot quite see where—something wooden rattles and creaks under its gusts: a lonely, eerie sound that echoes off the walls and the paving stones.

The cold is seeping into his coat, under all of his layers of clothing, into his very core.

-

Up above, in the empty solarium on the fifth floor, Crowley steps away from the glass, leans against the wall, stuffs his hands in his pockets, closes his eyes.

Aziraphale has just gone back inside after standing on the windswept terrace for what seemed like a sizeable chunk of eternity. He supposes the angel will find him if he really wants to—when he wants to.

Which—well. Crowley had gone and messed up again, hadn’t he. Just went ahead and blurted out whatever was on his mind.

But can’t you see what they are doing to you, he thinks hopelessly. An angel will, if brought to a place of suffering, attempt to ease it, unless expressly forbidden by his superiors. Hasn’t this happened time and time again? They are torturing you, Aziraphale. And you… you deserve everything that is good, and soft, and kind.

He can recall more of the previous evening now, see it in full colour on the insides of his eyelids. Aziraphale, taking a pastry off a plate held by a curly-haired young man. The man bowing playfully, grinning with such self-satisfaction that it sets Crowley’s teeth on edge.

Aziraphale leading that man away from the games, towards a darkened corner. Never looking back.

Good, and soft, and kind. What does Crowley know about that?

(And if he had lied, all those years ago, about having lots of people to fraternize with, Aziraphale had said nothing but the truth.)

He remembers it clearly, that day in the park. Remembers his note floating on the surface of the water for a weightless moment, then bursting into flames, called up by another’s will.

Aziraphale, trying to burn him clean out of his orderly life, all the mess of him.

He’s right to.

And Crowley—Crowley can’t help it. He is drawn to the angel, the one bright thing in his life. Gentle, and warm, and more than a little ridiculous. So brilliantly, contagiously alive.

All he can give back is trouble, and danger, and pain.

All he can be is a reminder of everything one stands to lose.

-

The snowfall starts within an hour, shrouding the sanatorium and the grounds in white. In the library, Aziraphale sits by the window, a stack of books growing beside him as he tries to keep his mind on the task and his eyes on the page.

This is his best chance.

His best chance, or a terrible mistake. Perhaps he does need to leave immediately, perhaps that is the single best thing he can do for Crowley—

But there are things that don’t add up, no matter how he runs the sums.

Crowley had said something about this being a special assignment, about somebody dropping in to check on him. Threats must have been made. This is par for the course for Hell, of course, a long-standing tradition of intimidation, and yet—

What happened, all those years ago, for Crowley to ask for holy water? What changed between his easy “nobody has to know” and the way he stood, tense, looking fixedly at some spot across the lake as he made his impossible—selfish—request?

As it gets darker, the sky takes on a greenish tint.

The sanatorium, it seems to Aziraphale, is full of ghosts. White-clad nurses float along the corridors, insubstantial, paying him no mind as they go about their ghostly business. The patients ignore him, caught up in their conversations. He hears them laugh, sees them throw back their heads in mirth, yet no warmth reaches him. He walks along the upper floor corridor, stopping by each of the doors leading to the rooms of the very ill, and blesses each inhabitant in turn: restful sleep, dreams of whatever they like best.

Beyond the windows, the snow keeps falling, incessant.

He can’t find Crowley anywhere.

If—if only Crowley wasn’t so stubborn, he thinks helplessly. So stubborn and so ridiculously proud.

One room, newly empty, smells sharply of disinfectant. There is a forgotten potted plant in the corner of the windowsill, red flowers brilliant against the dark glossy leaves.

Aziraphale is still looking at it when he senses a movement by the door, hears a quiet sound that nevertheless makes him whip sharply around.

“Crowley?” he calls towards the conspicuously empty doorway. “Is that you?”

The silence that follows is that of someone keeping very still. Then, just as Aziraphale is about to start towards the door, Crowley steps into view.

“Gone, is he?” the demon says casually. He saunters towards the empty bed, his thumbs hooked in his pockets. “Where do you think he went, in the end? One of yours?”

Aziraphale stares at him.

This room. Exactly like the one where Max lay in his mound of pillows, not too long ago. Where they’d read Faust. Crowley stayed, that evening, though Aziraphale was sure he’d slink off at the first chance. He’d stayed and listened to all of them for hours, teasing them, of course, and yet...

Mephistopheles’ mocking lines rise in his mind.

I find things, there, still bad as they can be,
Man’s misery even to pity moves my nature;
I’ve scarce the heart to plague the wretched creature.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says slowly. “You… haven’t been trying to tempt them at all, have you.”

“‘Course I have,” Crowley says instantly, glancing his way. “That’s why I’m here. That’s the point.”

Aziraphale shakes his head.

“Crowley, you—you don’t need to do this. I—I understand. Is someone in Hell after you? Is that why they sent you here, knowing that you couldn’t actually…”

Crowley rounds on him.

“Couldn’t actually what,” he hisses.

Aziraphale presses stubbornly on.

“Crowley, I think—no, I know that you are in trouble. With—with your assignment. And you are not telling me because, well, because you are still mad at me for what happened fifty years ago…”

“And what, pray tell me,” Crowley asks icily, “happened then?”

“You were as unreasonable then as you are now,” Aziraphale snaps. “That—that was childish, that diversion you called up earlier, and it hurt you. Crowley, if you’d only let me help, I could…”

“I don’t need your help. Or anyone’s.”

“Crowley—“ Aziraphale tries again, taking a few steps towards the demon, holding his hands palms out, entreating. “Look. This—this is much too important. You are in danger, and we have to…”

He stops when he realizes that Crowley is backing away.

Oh no. This—this is not going well at all.

“Crowley, I—” He attempts to start over. “Please listen to me. I know we haven’t parted on good terms, and I—I said some things, and I’m sorry, but you can’t... we don’t have time for this right now, we must…”

Crowley is shaking his head.

“You’re wrong, angel. And I’ve got stuff to do.”

He’s almost at the door.

“Crowley, wait,” Aziraphale pleads.

The demon pauses on the threshold, his expression unreadable. Aziraphale wishes desperately that he could see his eyes. There’s something large and hot in his chest, pressing outwards, like a breath he’d taken and keeps holding still.

Crowley waits.

Aziraphale finds that he cannot—does not know what to say.

“Crowley,” he asks finally, helplessly. “Where are you going?”

“For a nice long walk,” Crowley responds, turning on his heel. “Toodle-oo, angel. Mind how you go.”

The library is filled with the rustle of pages, a ghostly susurrus. In the corner, two gentlemen converse in low voices, flipping through their books: something about power, and places of power. The young lady from before is studying maps at her desk, drawing lines over them, biting the end of her pencil thoughtfully as she angles her ruler this way and that.

Leafing through tome after tome from his own collection, classifying rituals and spells, Aziraphale wonders if he’s getting any closer. There aren’t that many ways for a demon or an angel to start losing strength. Blessed or cursed objects could do something of the sort, but they’d need to be powerful enough—and he should be able to feel a blessed object, especially if Crowley has one on his person.

As it is, he can barely feel the demon’s presence at all.

Looking at the window, beyond which snow is still falling against a background of deep Prussian blue, Aziraphale thinks of Crowley out there, walking the trails now impassable to humans, his anger with Aziraphale fanned into roaring flames.

And Aziraphale himself had been the one to do it.

He did rather make a mess of things, the angel thinks sadly. What is there to do now but try to find an answer, and then find Crowley, and just—explain everything, and—

And it will be fine. Somehow, it will all be fine.

Perhaps he should go to Crowley’s room. See if the demon has returned.

Aziraphale goes to dinner instead. Crowley isn’t there, of course—the angel hears whispered questions about when he was last seen, finds himself twisting his ring, clasping his hands until his knuckles go white.

He must find the answer. He must, he will.

“No, I haven’t seen Herr Crowley for some time,” he says in response to Mrs. Grant’s question. Then, he takes the chance to ask her a question in turn.

“Mrs. Grant. Were you here when Herr Crowley first arrived? Do you remember anything about it?”

She darts a quick sideways look at him, reminding him once again of a small and tenacious sparrow.

“Oh, do I ever. The most fun we’ve had in months, and not just the books. There was that young gentleman, quite insufferable, and Herr Crowley…”

“Please… please forgive me, Mrs. Grant. It’s just that… I need to confirm something. It’s quite important. During his stay, over these past few months… did Crowley get better, or worse?”

“Ah. Well. I’m not sure I should…”

“Please.”

“Oh, all right. But really, try not to worry yourself over this. Doctor Vogel is wonderful, and Director Lang... that man knows what’s good for business. They are going to help him. If only we could persuade him to stop these ill-advised walks—”

She reaches out to pat Aziraphale’s hand.

“I know how it is,” she says. “When Alma took a turn for the worse, I—well, I could hardly eat. She’d scold me for it, and demand I eat something right there, with her watching. Wanted to make sure I’m keeping up my strength, you see.”

“How much worse,” Aziraphale asks, though he thinks he already knows the answer.

“The word is, he arrived at an advanced stage already, and that’s why it’s been so quick. But—Herr Fell. If anything can help him, it’s being here, in this place. He is right where he needs to be, and so are you.”

“This place,” Aziraphale repeats.

“And look! Would you even know that Alma spent a good two months completely bed-ridden? Look at her now! I’m sure that Herr Crowley…”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says, sliding his chair back and folding his napkin. “Thank you, Agatha. You’ve been a great help.”

This place, he thinks. It’s something about this place. He can’t—he can’t believe he hadn’t considered it. This isn’t consecrated ground, he’s certain—but what if it’s having the same effect? If he finds out precisely what is happening, he’ll have something to show Crowley, proof that brooks no argument.

It’s late enough for the library to be nearly empty. The gentlemen have gone, though the studious young lady is back at her desk.

Aziraphale walks straight to the shelf with all the local histories, scans the covers. There are books on regional folklore, lists of notable people and events, a heavy tome that promises to tell him everything about the last fifty years of natural disasters in this part of the world. Further down the shelf, the increasingly ambitious titles advertise stories of battles, landmarks, and trackways across Europe, from antiquity to the modern day. These books and more, as the book-plates indicate, have been provided by the Philosophical Society.

Aziraphale wonders if the answer has been here all along, in plain sight, if he’d unknowingly held it in his hands.

He sits down at a table by the window and re-starts his search. Every fifteen minutes, the clock by the door chimes, causing him to look up in concern. There’s so little time. He’s got to focus. This place, something about this place, something that connects it to…

Oh.

Here it is, a thin book, a poorly printed translation from German. Lines of… power, it calls them. Heilige Linien.

Holy Lines.

Aziraphale closes his eyes for a moment, panic rising in a sickening wave.

The humans. They have figured it all out. As they’ve figured out so many other things, faster than he thought possible. Now, they’ve looked at the Earth and seen something heretofore invisible, lines connecting sacred sites across hundreds of miles and hundreds of years. He should’ve known.

By now, he should’ve known.

And he hadn’t.

He’d never been told.

(There are so many things he’d never been told.)

A map, he thinks.

He needs a map, needs to see this for himself, needs to confirm if this is true.

There were maps on the shelf, right there, but the spot is empty now, a narrow dusty void.

…Oh.

If the young woman is startled when he approaches her, she doesn’t show it. Of course, she says brightly. Here they are. Then, she apologizes, the bridge of her nose going pink: she’d drawn lines on some of the maps. There was this lecture a few days ago, put out by the Philosophical Society. Phenomenally interesting. All about lines that connect places of power. She’d decided to check something on a whim and it was just as she thought—Herr Fell is also interested in this, is he not? Would he like to see? Their sanatorium is aligned with a number of other places, all along the same straight line. This monastery over here at the border with Italy—St Bernard’s, such gorgeous dogs they breed, don’t they—and that cathedral there, and… oh no, is Herr Fell unwell?

Crowley, he thinks, no longer able to dam the flood of panic. He has—he has to find him. The demon needs to leave, now, to get as far away from here as he can, this place is sapping his strength, it’s—

—it’s killing him.

Leaving the alarmed young lady behind, Aziraphale rushes out into the corridor, towards the main hall. He doesn’t know where he is going. The background hum of the Holy Line blocks his attempts to locate Crowley.

He leans into the search—and feels his grasp on the magic slip.

There is a sound.

It starts out as faraway thunder, grows into a deafening roar. It’s coming from everywhere all at once: from the walls, from the air, from under his feet. As he looks around, stupefied, he sees the inhabitants of the sanatorium spill out of the common rooms, mouths opening in cries that are drowned out by the noise.

He takes a few steps towards the main door. A nurse rushes into his path.

“You can’t go there!” she shouts. “You’ve got to stay inside!”

“What’s happening?” he calls out over the sound—and then the horrible noise is dying down, slowing, turning into a hiss like that of an enormous snake. “What is this?”

“An avalanche.” The nurse’s face is ashen. “I’ve never heard one so close.”

Before the last word is out of her mouth, Aziraphale is pushing past her, running towards the doors. His mind is a wasteland that seems to be able to hold on to one thought only: Crowley had been out there.

Crowley.

Chapter Text

I’ll come to thee by moonlight,
Though Heaven bar the way

He probably shouldn’t, Crowley thinks. In fact—if the evening at the lodge was any indication—he definitely should not.

Well, bugger that.

He waves for more wine.

The door of the bar opens with a bang, admitting a rowdy group of red-cheeked winter sports enthusiasts. They stomp by the entrance like a clumsy many-legged beast, brush off their coats, trumpet into their handkerchiefs; then, spotting some acquaintances across the lamplit room, they call to them loudly. There is clapping of backs, cheerful complaints about the quality of snow, jostling and bumping; somebody nearly crashes into Crowley’s chair as they walk backwards, blabbering all the while.

The demon glowers at the newcomers, which has exactly zero effect, then gives up, returning his attention to the bottle in front of him.

It has all gone wrong.

Aziraphale—knows.

Not what is happening, exactly—but then again, Crowley himself does not know that.

No, the problem is that Aziraphale knows too much of just the wrong thing. There is no saying what the angel is going to do now, commanded by his misguided sense of duty, worn thin by the suffering he sees and is not allowed to relieve.

A guardian, ordered to war relentlessly against his nature.

He could decide to stay longer than he needs to because of Crowley. Showing mercy to one’s enemy, turning the other cheek, all that rot.

He could stay out of pity.

And that—that would not do. None of it would do. Crowley had already made a fool of himself more than enough times.

Fraternizing.

There it is, isn’t it. He’d dared to ask, back then, and he’d gotten his answer, and that answer still burns him to this day.

Get a grip, you, he hisses at himself.

This is probably Her plan, all of it, that’s what he gets for asking questions, for doubt. His punishment, this soft, fussy, anxious angel, with his gentle hands and a smile like sunlight after forty days and forty nights of rain.

Do you hear me, God, Crowley thinks, not for the first time. Mother. Is this what you enjoy, is this what that’s about? Mother, are you amused?

Damn it all, he thinks—

and feels a spike of Heavenly power.

Over by the sanatorium.

Over where…

He’s already half to his feet.

Aziraphale.

There is a sound.

It’s a deep rumble, echoing all over the valley, reverberating through the mountains, coming from—

No.

No no no no no.

The humans in the tavern are frozen in mute alarm. Crowley is out the door before any of them can blink, out the door and in the middle of the street. Snowbanks tower to both sides of him; the street is a narrow canyon between them, street-lamps along it rising from pools of their own light. Crowley pauses, looking at where the road out of the village starts its winding climb up the slope. Snow is falling all around him, down and down and down.

Still dazed, he takes a step, another step—and breaks into a run.

-

Where the trails used to be, the landscape is unrecognizable: the Arctic, perhaps, or the surface of the Moon. The sky above him opens into the icy black of space, and Aziraphale is rapidly running out of air.

A whole slab of tightly packed snow has slid down the mountain, breaking trees in its way, carrying boulders with it. Its surface is so dense that the angel can walk on it, can even half-run, feet barely sinking, across this desert of ice. A wind rises, becoming a whirlwind before long; the fresh snow it brings quickly blots out everything in the middle distance.

Having left the sanatorium far behind, Aziraphale no longer sees the lanterns, no longer hears the shouts that followed him for the first while: to stop, that this is dangerous, that the rescuers from the village will have a much better chance, that there should’ve been nobody out there anyway.

The terrible certainty that had gripped him at the first sounds of the avalanche is driving him on.

Crowley was out here.

Crowley.

He’s got no plan, no way to actually locate the demon. His only hope is that if he gets close enough, he will be able to sense him, even through the hum of the Line.

Because Crowley could die. With the Holy Line involved, Crowley could—he could actually—

“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls out. There is no response, nothing but the hiss of the storm, all around him, encircling him: a vortex of white.

This cannot be happening, he thinks sickly. Not now, please, not now.

Not when he has so much figured out, when he can actually help Crowley—can save him, for a change.

…All this time.

All this time, Crowley was ill, losing strength day by day, probably without realizing it at first. All the times he’d winced, gone pale. He was in pain, trying to hide it, and Aziraphale hadn’t bothered to look closer.

Crowley, collapsed on the mountain trail.

The silvery light, the sharp black ink of the shadows.

How weightless the demon felt when he picked him up—and the long walk towards the sanatorium; Crowley in his arms, burning.

Standing feet away from Crowley’s bed, not daring to come closer in case he was the cause of Crowley’s fever.

Sitting down in the armchair, his hands clasped at his knees.

The night.

The shadows gathering in the corners of Crowley’s room, the halo of light around the table lamp.

Crowley’s hair, the colour of dried blood against the white of the pillow. His spine, curved away from the angel. The vertebrae at the top of his neck, sharp and vulnerable.

Crowley, deep in sleep his corporation shouldn’t have needed at all.

It took all that for Aziraphale to understand.

And then he’d gone and said exactly the wrong things.

In the eerie light coming from above, the tilted plane before him is featureless, deserted. Here and there, buried trees stick out from under the cover of snow, their branches reaching towards the sky as if begging for help.

I can’t help anyone, Aziraphale thinks despairingly. Not the humans, not Crowley, not—not even myself.

The vortex around him is constricting, inch by inch—and suddenly, he realizes that all this while, he’d been in its eye.

-

Up by the sanatorium, Crowley feels a change in the air: it has grown sharp, charged, and the clouds are oddly luminous above the towering mass of the building.

His eyes sting.

There is no mistaking this. He can feel Heavenly power all around him—a buzzing, pulsing thing, like a swarm of divine bees deeply suspicious of his presence.

If he had any sense at all, he would be running the other way.

But—Aziraphale.

Something has gone very, very wrong.

He’s got to find the angel.

There’s a small crowd of people out on the front steps, voices raised in an argument. He heads towards them, noting the familiar faces.

“Herr Crowley!” Frau Haller exclaims, looking over at him when he is feet away. “Oh, thank God! We didn’t know where you were for the whole afternoon, you really mustn’t do that…”

And then they are all speaking at once, rushing to get the words out.

“Thank God you are fine!”

“You came from the village, didn’t you? Oh, you are just in time, I’m sure they will know what to do—we couldn’t follow him—”

“But otherwise everyone is accounted for—“

“And it’s so dark out, we don’t even have enough lanterns—“

“We telephoned down, well, Nurse Becker did, we told them we have a situation—“

“Are they just behind you? Are they bringing dogs? We’ll have a good chance of finding him, with dogs…”

They go silent, then, one by one, as he keeps scanning the crowd. Every face is turned to him, greenish-white in the eerie light.

“Him,” Crowley repeats slowly, looking at Frau Haller.

His insides are ice, ready to shatter at a word.

“Oh. Oh God,” somebody in the crowd whispers. “He doesn’t know.”

Biting her lip, Frau Haller nods.

“He wouldn’t listen,” she says quietly. “He just ran out there.”

“We tried to stop him.”

“Rescuers are on their way, they must be just behind you, they’ll be here in minutes—“

“They are going to find him, they are going to get him out—“

Aziraphale.

“Which way,” Crowley says hoarsely.

“You can’t mean to…”

“No—you can’t—“

“Which way did he go?” Crowley repeats, looking from face to face.

Nobody answers him, but their glances are enough.

Crowley takes off at a run, his skin burning as if touched by an invisible star.

-

The alien landscape offers Aziraphale no clues. Trees have moved, dragged along by formidable force. So have boulders—and though the moon is pouring its ghostly light through the clouds, the snowstorm wheeling around him shrouds everything past just a few steps in white.

He can’t, Aziraphale tells himself, breathing in gulps of needless air, feeling the cold sear his lungs. Crowley cannot die.

They are immortal, both of them, here for as long as the world will carry them. He’ll—discorporate, at most.

(Even if he… discorporated, at most, a mocking voice within him says, would Hell allow him to return?

Would he have the strength to?

Would he—want to?)

He has to find Crowley.

Each step is more difficult than the one before. Aziraphale’s eyes sting—from the snow, he thinks deliriously, wiping them with the heel of his hand.

This is all his fault.

That silence between them. The silence of stopped clocks and covered mirrors; of telegraph cables, cut; of ice in the dead of winter, frozen solid to the bottom of the lake.

For fifty years, he’d been trying to prove to himself that he didn’t need Crowley. He almost believed it, too, there at the end, until every wall he’d built up shattered the instant he saw Crowley out on the terrace, sunlight in his hair.

And now he may never see Crowley again.

He may never—

The vortex is no wider than the span of his wings when something about the storm changes.

All of a sudden, Aziraphale’s breathing is metronome-even. Heavenly power flows into him, courses through his corporation, unrolls in his spine.

To never see Crowley again. Is that—such a bad thing, really? Crowley is a demon, Crowley is temptation incarnate, Crowley can be banished and Aziraphale will—will be free from whatever this is, weighing on him, growing through his heart.

This is the right thing to do, something within him suggests. He sees it in his mind’s eye: Crowley walking into the snowstorm, into a wall of cleansing, pure white, never looking back—and feels profound relief: it will be over, it will be done, there will be no conflict now, no hesitation, nothing to tempt him ever again.

This is what must be.

But, as Aziraphale stands immobile, transfixed by Heavenly power, something warm and alive beats wildly against the cage of his ribs, like a small and desperate bird.

-

The angel must have gone this way, but his tracks have long been buried by the snowfall.

Crowley straightens, shivering, and closes his eyes.

(He should have worn a coat. What kind of an idiot runs out into a blizzard, not even wearing a coat?

What’s his plan, anyway?

It’s a wonder he can hear anything past the tolling bell of his heart.)

He’s got to focus.

The storm is raw power, every snowflake charged with it, all of them coming at him in squalls. Where he would usually be able to sense Aziraphale—with effort, yes, only when he is really trying, yes—there is now only turmoil.

Focus.

Think of the angel. Of his hands, clasped around each other, holding on to each other—holding him together, somehow. Of his ridiculous little reading glasses, of the way he touches pages of books, almost reverent—look, look what the humans have managed to do, did you know they had it in them?

(What they had in them was so much more than either of them had expected, standing there on the wall, side by side, looking at the first humans make their halting way across the desert.)

“I gave it away.”

Think of that.

Not just the sword, was it. Aziraphale had given away—belonging. Feeling safe, for all time.

And he’d spoken to Crowley. Had sheltered him from the very first storm. A decision, and another, and a multitude more after, even as Heaven kept telling him “no”, over and over again.

…There.

A faint angelic presence, a candle in the wind. Far ahead, so very far and faint, the image blurring, dissolving around the edges.

No, Crowley thinks, panic rising. No no no no, Aziraphale, you’ve got to hold on, you can’t let this drown you.

He opens his eyes into air that is blindingly white—and before he can take a single step, dizziness hits him like a steam locomotive.

-

No, Aziraphale thinks, suddenly self-aware and horrified. No, I’m—I’m not going to hurt Crowley, not him, never him.

The storm releases its grip, and Aziraphale is moving up, up through impossible pressures, surfacing as if from a deep dive, gasping for breath. The snow, though it still wheels around him, seems to have drawn back. There is no sign of the demon.

Exhaustion is settling on Aziraphale’s shoulders like the heaviest of winter cloaks.

This is not just a storm, he thinks. It’s… it’s… He must have set off some kind of resonance within the Holy Line, it’s dangerous, Crowley should be taking cover, wherever he is.

Wherever he is.

He might be buried feet and feet under the snow, and Aziraphale has no way to get to him, does not even know where to look.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls out again, his voice breaking.

No response.

The angel gets up, brushes the snow off his trousers reflexively, starts walking. Time seems to have lengthened, the same expectant crystalline second stretched to infinity, the world suspended in an endless moment—as if a great clock is getting ready to strike, and never does.

The air is bitingly cold.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls out yet again.

And then he hears an answering call.

It’s faint, so faint that he is afraid it may be a trick of his eager mind.

“Crowley! Is that you? I can’t see you… Where are you?”

There. Over there, beyond the undulating white wall, a shadow, almost-solid one moment and dissolving into nothingness the next. Aziraphale starts towards it—and then stops abruptly.

The hiss of the storm is changing into something that makes his blood turn to ice.

Singing. There is an echo of Heavenly singing in the wind.

And then, there is light.

A pillar of Heavenly light comes into existence amid the snow, to his right, unmistakeable, chilling.

Then, a second one appears to his left.

A third one in front of him, just off to the side.

Another one behind his back.

More and more of them.

All around him, pillars of light going up into the sky.

Like the numbers on the face of an enormous clock.

And—this he is certain of—not one of them is going to tell him to be unafraid.

No.

Dear God, no.

This must mean that they—know. That Heaven knows about Crowley.

Have they known all along?

Is this—is this his punishment, and Crowley’s, too?

The lights in front of him start to move. Slowly, ceremoniously, they are closing in—

but not on him.

They are closing in on the other figure, crowding it, leaving it no escape.

This is what must be.

Aziraphale spins around wildly, like a cornered animal, looking at the Heavenly glow, trying to make out the features of any of the angels—and then, abruptly, the lights are gone. Ahead of him, the figure—distinctly human, tall and thin and heart-stoppingly familiar—is swaying, staggering—

And then it falls.

The angel doesn’t manage to call out. He scrambles to stand, dimly realizing that at some point, he must have fallen to his knees. Then, he is running, his recent exhaustion replaced by a burst of desperate energy, forward and into the snowfall.

The white engulfs him.

It takes him a moment to orient himself, to be able to see again, and when he does, he sees Crowley, face-down in the snow just a few steps away.

He rushes to the demon’s side, drops down next to him, rolls Crowley over and sees, to his horror, that the demon is white as snow. He is not breathing, his eyes are shut, hoarfrost clings to his eyelashes and his once-flaming hair. Cradling him, repeating his name over and over again, blinking back tears, Aziraphale no longer knows where or who he is, the world around him listing to one side, like a sinking ship.

This is what must be, something within him says. Evil has no place here.

This is Crowley, Aziraphale thinks vehemently. This is Crowley, and he’s my—he is my friend, and I need him back.

There is a pause in the storm, an almost-imperceptible change in the wind.

Why.

Wait, Aziraphale thinks, dazed—and as he looks down, he sees Crowley’s body turn to glittering crystals, dissolve into the wind.

Why.

Aziraphale gets up—and feels anger grow inside him.

He is my friend, he thinks furiously. I need to find him. I need to help him.

Why?

He is my friend, Aziraphale is shouting soundlessly—and then the floodgates of memory open.

It’s all there, the things he’d tried to put away, lock within himself—and drop the key into the sea, and sink the boat.

Crowley smiling at him on the wall of Eden, a smile so open and dazzling that Aziraphale thinks there must be a mistake, that no Hellish creature would ever be capable of this—unless they all are, he thinks, briefly horrified—unless this is how they get you. He is dizzy already, his knees going soft—and he has to stand straighter, square his shoulders, purse his lips, frown as severely as he knows how to.

Alexandria, the remnants of a once-great library engulfed in flames. Crowley, his face and hair soot-streaked, coming over to where Aziraphale stands transfixed, watching another wall crumble.

“Oi, angel. Do you want this?” A singed scroll in his hand. “You know I don’t read.”

Slowly, Aziraphale turns to look at him. Crowley, his arm still outstretched, looks back.

“Before you ask,” he says defensively, “that fire had nothing to do with me.”

The oysters in Rome, followed by so many other evenings he’d spent there with Crowley. Them telling each other of their travels, of the humans they’ve met, of what those humans have gotten up to. And that particular evening: leaving the popina together, laughing, nearly falling over each other:

“You are piss-drunk, angel.”

“I am nothing of the sort, I am—decorously inebriated at most—”

—and then running through the streets, undignified, pursued by the servants of a patrician Crowley had decided to childishly taunt. The servants won’t remember it after, and neither will the patrician, and really, either of them could fix the whole mess with a single miracle—but neither of them does, and after Crowley pulls him into an alley, letting the pursuers stomp by, both of them dissolve into giddy laughter, holding on to each other and the walls for balance as they do—until Aziraphale realizes how close they are, Crowley’s breath hot on his cheek, and an uncalled-for shiver goes through him, sobering him instantly.

This and more, always more.

Running into Crowley at a market in Byzantium, where the sellers call out exorbitant prices for bright-feathered birds in gilded cages, there among intoxicating scents of freshly-baked honey cakes and fruit. She is dressed in flowing silks, a veil thrown carelessly over her copper-bright hair, and as she turns to him, one of her earrings catches the light, sparkling a gorgeous, deep green that reminds him all of a sudden of—Eden.

“Oh!” He says, reaching out without thinking. “Oh, is that—this is masterful work, I think I know who the artisan is...“

—and then he realizes what he is doing, sees the blush creeping into her face, goes to withdraw his hand—and brushes against her cheek. She inhales, sharply—then grins and winks at him.

”Like what you see?” she purrs.

There is no reason for his heart to pound, for his breath to quicken.

“Oh, don’t you try that with me,” he says, as sternly as he can—and then adds, for good measure: “You fiend.”

She throws back her head and laughs, infectiously, causing a hapless potter’s apprentice to walk right into a honey merchant’s stand.

…The memories are a torrent, Aziraphale swaying under its force. It’s all there, the touches and the thoughts, everything that does not befit an angel, everything that could never be, everything that is impossible, everything that is impossibly bright.

What were you going to say, Aziraphale? Back there. At the lodge.

What he’d always wanted to say, and never possibly could.

Unstoppable, the answer is rising within him, breaking through his defences, demanding to be heard.

…The storm changes.

The snow is withdrawing, white rivers of it flowing backwards, draining the raw power that permeated him, leaving him exhausted and shaking, yet once again leaving him be.

But with it, the memories are fading, too, until it’s just—him,

and his empty hands,

and the night.

-

When Crowley comes to, he’s on all fours in the snow, but the dizziness is receding.

He pushes himself up.

The angel’s presence is still there, flickering in the storm.

Stumbling and rising again, sliding down and clambering up, Crowley runs.

He has no idea where he is, the mountains hidden by the snow and the dark, every trail erased, but he does know that he is getting closer—and closer, and closer, and closer—

And then he is out of the buffeting snow and in the eye of the storm.

His vision is clear, suddenly, as if someone has drawn aside a fluttering veil.

Footsteps, luminous under his feet. Overhead, great curtains of white light, impossible auroras shifting across the mountainside, taking up half the sky.

And—

Aziraphale. In front of him, just a few dozen paces away.

Half-collapsed in the snow, like a great injured bird. His wings spread out, curved protectively over nothing.

“Aziraphale!” Crowley shouts against the wind, rushing towards him.

The angel looks up. Snowflakes cling to his curls in tiny drifts.

“Crowley,” he breathes out. Crowley not so much hears him as reads his lips, feels his own name reverberate around him.

“Aziraphale, you idiot, what do you think you are doing?”

He drops to his knees, grabs the angel by the shoulders, and looks into his face.

-

“Crowley,” Aziraphale hears himself saying. “It’s—really you. You are alive.”

“Of course I’m alive, what else would I be?” Crowley says frantically, grasping his hands, bringing them up to inspect them. “Aziraphale, you’ll get frostbite, what are you doing here, where is your coat, what were you even thinking?”

The demon’s hands are not just warm—they are scaldingly hot.

“Then again,” Crowley is saying, “frostbite is the least of our problems, we’ve got to get you out of here right now, and you’ve got to, you’ve got to calm down…”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, and the demon cuts himself off mid-word, jerking his chin up to look at him. He’d lost his sunglasses, and the angel can see his eyes, radiant gold from side to side.

“Crowley. I—I’ve figured it all out. I have to tell you. You’ve—you’ve got to leave.”

“What? Aziraphale, what are you talking about? I’m not leaving you!”

With that, Crowley drops Aziraphale’s hands, leans in even closer—and then his hands are on the sides of Aziraphale’s face. “Aziraphale, listen to me,” he says urgently, “this is not just a snowstorm, it’s—it’s some kind of a power storm, I’ve never seen anything like it—”

Aziraphale looks at him—he cannot stop looking.

Crowley’s hair is wet, flopping over his forehead in a tangled wave. His jacket, absurdly thin, is soaked through, the occasional snowflake melting as soon as it touches the fabric.

Crowley’s voice takes on an even sharper edge of panic.

“Aziraphale, can you—can you hear me? Are you listening?”

Yes, he thinks, but he cannot say a word, cannot bring himself to move, his arms hanging limply by his sides, a layer of snow on his useless wings. Crowley is here, really here. He wasn’t caught in the avalanche, he wasn’t buried under the snow, he is alive, but the storm—

The storm is suffused with holy power, and Crowley is caught in the middle of it—because of him.

“Aziraphale. Angel. Stay with me. Oh, no, oh, fuck,” Crowley is saying, his trembling fingers flitting over Aziraphale’s cheeks, chin, lips, leaving hot trails in their wake.

Slowly, Aziraphale reaches up, takes one of Crowley’s hands. The demon stills.

“Does this burn?” Aziraphale asks quietly. “My touch?”

Crowley shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Crowley.”

He hasn’t let go of the demon’s hand. Both of them look at the point of contact.

“Nhh. No—that is—only a little. It’s really nothing, angel, don’t even—”

And then, as Aziraphale starts to withdraw his hand, Crowley takes a shuddering breath and flings his arms around him, nearly causing both of them to tumble into the snow.

“See,” the demon says close to Aziraphale’s ear, his voice unsteady. “M’fine.”

He smells of sweat, wood smoke, windfall apples, all tinged with a familiar bitterness. Inhaling deeply, Aziraphale closes his eyes and allows himself to embrace Crowley.

“And… like this? Am I hurting you like this?”

Over by his ear, Crowley lets out a shaky laugh.

“No, angel. Though maybe we need to test it out longer.”

Aziraphale beats his wings, once, letting the snow slide off them, and folds them forward, shielding the demon from the icy wind.

“All right?” Crowley asks an indeterminate while later.

No, Aziraphale thinks. Neither of us is.

“We need to—we need to get you out of this storm,” he says instead.

He releases Crowley and they look at each other, there in the circle of Aziraphale’s wings. Outside, not even thirty feet away, the storm is still wheeling, snowflakes glittering sharply in the eerie light.

“Right,” Crowley says, sinking back into his heels. “Yeah. Give me a moment.”

“How bad is it?” Aziraphale asks quietly, looking at Crowley’s rapid-fire pulse, visible in his exposed neck.

“The storm? Not that bad, actually. A bit like sunburn. When you forget you aren’t a snake and fall asleep in the garden for too long.”

“And… the rest of it?”

Crowley looks at him—and says nothing.

“Right.” Aziraphale says quietly, half to himself. “Right.”

And then he starts speaking, laying out what he knows, offering it to Crowley—too little, too late, but the only thing he’s got to give.

“Crowley. I—I found out what’s happening. It’s—it’s this place, it’s been sapping your strength. The humans call them Holy Lines. It’s like… holy ground—well, weaker, but over time… I think this one’s been getting more powerful, the longer I’ve been here. The longer you’ve been here. And this storm, I think this storm is some kind of a disturbance in the Line, a resonance—I don’t quite understand it, but we must get you out of here—”

Crowley blinks, his eyes sulfur-yellow in the eerie light that suffuses the air around them.

“Huh,” he says wonderingly. “A Holy Line. No—yeah—that actually…”

“Yes,” Aziraphale continues, interrupting him, unable to slow down. “So you see, you’ve got to leave. We’ve got to get you out of this storm, and out of the sanatorium, and you’ve got to leave. Crowley. I. I need you to be safe.”

The demon looks at him, eyebrows knit together.

“I need you to be safe,” Aziraphale repeats. “Crowley, I…”

He does not manage to go on.

The demon nods and swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Right then,” he says hoarsely. “We’d better start walking. Come on.”

Resolutely, Crowley pushes off the ground. Aziraphale wipes at his eyes, shakes out his wings, starts folding them.

Crowley, now on his feet, reaches out his hand.

Aziraphale takes it.

-

Later, when Crowley thinks back to their trek over avalanche terrain, he wonders that they made it.

He also knows, with absolute certainty, that neither of them would have made it alone.

The sky burns above them. Time, like distance, seems to distort, to stretch as they make their torturous way across the snow.

“That’s it,” Crowley says decidedly as he stumbles again, and Aziraphale pulls him up. “I am going to sleep through every winter from now on. Like those, whassname. Marmots and things.”

“Bears.”

“Bears. Very sensible, bears. Know what’s good for them.”

He gives Aziraphale a sideways glance as he speaks.

The angel looks—there is no other word for it—haunted. He keeps glancing backwards, to the sides, up towards the sky, at him—and Crowley can see it in his face: the stark white of his sclera, that anxious crease between his eyebrows, the way his breath comes in quick shallow pants.

Aziraphale is terrified.

Crowley keeps talking, a stream of nonsensical remarks and observations. Memories, too: crêpes in Paris, blintzes with caviar in Moscow, that frigid winter both of them were sent there to deal with False Dmitry (a bloody business, in the end—he doesn’t bring that up). He is not sure how much the angel takes in, but one glance at Aziraphale’s open, hopeful expression—nobody has any right to look like that at a demon—convinces him to go on.

When, tentatively, the angel puts his hand on Crowley’s sleeve, it takes all of Crowley’s focus to keep going.

He is in the middle of a story about Queen Victoria’s tricycle mishap when the thought strikes him.

“You know what’s odd?” He looks around. “We haven’t reached the blizzard yet. I could’ve sworn we’ve walked quite a distance.”

“We—we have,” Aziraphale says faintly. “It’s just. You see, I’m… I’m afraid it’s following me. I’m always in the dead centre. I’ve been able to keep the storm at bay, more or less, but not… to make it dissipate.”

“Oh,” Crowley says, squinting at the wheeling snow. “It’s a little closer now, though, isn’t it?”

When he looks over at Aziraphale, the angel is very pale, his mouth set in a determined line.

“We’ll just—keep going, yeah?” Crowley says hopefully.

Aziraphale nods, still staring ahead at the wall of snow.

They walk on, and as they do, Crowley feels the dizziness that lay in wait, coiled and ready to strike, stirring. Soon, he has to slow down, to think very, very hard about putting one foot in front of the other, to try to ignore the inescapable fact of each step being a little fall, a voluntary relinquishing of balance.

His nails dig into his palms. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. Aziraphale needs you to keep going.

“Crowley? Are you—all right?”

He stumbles, then, because of course he does—and the snow is so very soft, like those fluffy down feathers deep in Aziraphale’s wings, and he only needs a moment, he’s going to get up right now—

—but then Aziraphale is next to him, scooping him up effortlessly, and he is too startled to argue at first. Aziraphale shushes him when he finally tries—“Oh, stop your hissing, you silly old snake”—with such gentleness that his useless heart stammers, tries to break out of the confines of his chest.

It’s too much. Too much, too close—he can’t… he can’t take it.

When the dizziness passes, he is back on his feet, despite Aziraphale repeating, more than once, that it’s no trouble, that they would make better time this way, and “really, Crowley…”

He can’t bear being a literal burden, too.

They walk on.

The wind seems to pick up again, howling like a pack of hellhounds as it wheels around them in ever narrowing circles—and had that somehow escaped Crowley’s attention, Aziraphale going silent, tense, and even more determined would tell him everything.

Looking at the angel, Crowley knows that things are very, very wrong.

By that point, they must be close to the sanatorium, though everything around them is spinning chaos. Aziraphale keeps walking, his hand on Crowley’s sleeve, and looks—past the snow, somehow, into the air and then deeper still. His hand on the dark fabric of the sleeve has gone completely white, and, as Crowley touches his fingers to it gingerly, he feels streamers of icy cold unfurl into his fingertips.

“Aziraphale.”

The angel, who is walking forwards with light, easy strides, gives no indication that he’d heard Crowley speak at all.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley says again, insistent—and covers Aziraphale’s hand with his, the radiating cold instantly numbing his palm.

The angel blinks, slows down, turns his head towards Crowley—and Crowley barely resists the impulse to scramble back.

Aziraphale’s eyes are reflecting light that is nowhere around them, a celestial azure of cloudless skies.

“Crowley.”

—

Something is wrong.

Well, this is hardly news, everything has been wrong for rather a long time.

No, something is wrong.

The storm, Aziraphale notes absently, is picking up in force, growing wilder, the sky dancing with impossible colours.

It’s a beautiful sight. Majestic, really—in a way that the kings and queens of the Earth could only ever hope to imitate.

And it is giving him strength. Walking is so much easier, now; his feet barely touch the surface of the snow. The demon he is escorting seems to be having a lot more trouble, an echo of a hiss in his laboured breathing, the fingers that he touches to Aziraphale’s hand unsteady and startlingly hot.

Crowley. This is Crowley.

The demon Crowley, Aziraphale thinks, his thoughts sounding strange to him, like whispers under the vaulted ceiling of a great cathedral.

No, no, this is Crowley, I’ve known him for six thousand years. I’m not—escorting him, we’ve got to get to safety—

There is no safety, something within Aziraphale whispers. Not with him around.

“Aziraphale,” the demon calls out softly.

No, I—I must keep him safe.

Safety, the power within Aziraphale says, is in making him harmless.

This—this is not right. My thoughts aren’t right. We need to go on, I must—

Must get it over with, the power within him insists as the storm presses ever closer. Crowley is a test, he’d always been a test, for the humans, for you, and the humans had succumbed to their temptation.

No. No, I don’t—

But the rest of the thought is dissolving, slipping away.

“Aziraphale?”

This time, the demon’s touch sears through him. He slows down, turns to look at the insistent being.

“Crowley.”

For that is the being’s name.

An adversary, old as the world itself.

Aziraphale faces him fully. They are opposite each other in the snow, now, the whirlwind just a few paces away and closing in.

Evil has no place here. You know what you have to do.

He isn’t sure what he is waiting for as he stands there, studying the demon: his eyes, sulphur-yellow and wide with what must be terror; the way he presses his lips together, the corners of his mouth turned downwards; the way his shoulders slope and sag, like he is barely holding himself upright against the pull of the Earth.

“I see,” the demon says softly—and smiles a small, crooked smile that causes something to move within Aziraphale’s chest, a tectonic plate shifting. “I thought this might happen. Hoped it wouldn’t be so soon. Well. At least it will be you. In a way.”

There’s something on Aziraphale’s cheek, a hot trail traveling down. He reaches up, touches it, and his fingers come away wet.

“Aziraphale,” the demon in front of him says again—and then he is moving towards him, reaching out, touching a burning hand to the angel’s face.

Oh.

The market in Byzantium. The evening in Rome.

Eden.

This is Crowley, Aziraphale thinks with crystalline clarity, with sudden force. This is Crowley. He is not a function, not a test. He is—alive, and his own. He is my—friend, and I. will. keep. him. safe.

The snow is drawing back.

He is a demon, the power within Aziraphale says, affronted. You are an angel.

Yes, Aziraphale thinks, looking at Crowley, blinking away the water from his eyes, feeling an odd smile tug at his lips. Yes. So help me God.

He steps towards the demon, closing the remaining distance between them, and brings his hands up to Crowley’s face.

Crowley’s eyes go even wider.

Aziraphale kisses him.

The world goes

still.

Quiet and still,

and there is only—

Crowley’s hot lips, the contact of their bodies, his hands now in Crowley’s hair—

The way Crowley’s body is rigid, at first, tense with shock—

The strangled sound he makes, not trying to pull away, not breaking the kiss—

And then, he is answering Aziraphale, his hands sliding up the angel’s back, gripping at the fabric, holding on to him—

And he makes another sound, a different sound, raw and desperate—

And everything else ceases to matter.

Neither of them notices the stillness around them growing, pushing at the storm, overtaking it, covering it with a blanket of quiet. The snow retreats. The wind slows and dies, letting the last white streamers float down, settle silently over the tilted white plain.

When they break apart for unnecessary breath, the air around them is clear for miles, pinpricks of stars burning in the perfectly black velvet of the sky.

“Angel,” Crowley croaks. He looks suddenly helpless in a way Aziraphale hadn’t ever seen before, like there is a question bigger than him that he wants to ask and cannot, for once, find words for.

In the distance, there are wavering lights, dogs barking, the clamour of voices.

“My dear.” Aziraphale touches his fingers to Crowley’s temple, brushes away the hair falling over his eyes, traces the shape of his eyebrow. “My dear. Yes. And I think—I think you’re safe now.”

Then, abruptly, all remnants of the storm’s holy power are gone. Aziraphale staggers, feeling Crowley grip his elbows tightly. The demon is trying to keep him upright, but the waves of exhaustion are dragging him under, drowning him, closing above his head.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley’s panicked voice is distant, barely reaching the angel as he plunges—falls—

down

(twilight)

down

(midnight)

down

(the abyss)

—into the blackest deep.

Chapter Text

When Aziraphale opens his eyes, he sees white. An expanse of spotless, luminous white—and briefly, his chest feels hollow, like the hull of a ship, breath ricocheting between his ribs.

There is a thin crack through the luminance, and as his vision clears further, he realizes that he is looking at a whitewashed ceiling.

He’s in a room.

It’s not his room. It is, however, a room in the sanatorium, with all the furnishings one would be expected to contain: a white metal bed, a pair of armchairs, a mirror, a desk. The pale cold light of an overcast winter’s day is pouring in through the window.

He was sleeping.

He feels—like he would like to lay back down.

A short while later, the balcony door opens with a creak and Crowley slides inside, a paper bag under his arm.

“Do you know,” he says conversationally, glancing at Aziraphale, “that you’ve got one of the Furies stationed at the end of your corridor? No—Aziraphale—please get back into bed—the nurse! I mean the nurse! Bad joke, I’m sorry, I—I know.”

He sidles over to the writing-desk, deposits the bag. Something clunks and gurgles within as it hits the polished wood.

“They didn’t want anyone waking you, you see. On the other hand, this also means that our worried friends won’t gain entrance for at least another couple of hours. Unless they get the same idea as me. Which. They better not.”

Alarmed, Aziraphale looks from Crowley to the balcony door and back. “Crowley, did—did you climb over the balconies? That’s not safe!”

“Yes, well, neither is going past Nurse Becker. Especially while carrying something she might want to inspect.”

Facing away from the angel, Crowley rummages through the bag.

“Here,” he says, pulling out a dark glass bottle and waving it in Aziraphale’s direction. “Nicked from downstairs. Not great stuff, I’m afraid, but all I could get.”

Setting the wine on the desk, he reaches into the bag again and produces a cardboard box, neatly tied with a satin ribbon.

“And this, uh, got this from Chef Otto. Some pastries, I thought you—you seemed to like this kind. So, what’s your opinion of sleep? That was Doctor Vogel’s prescription for you, you know, though you probably don’t remember much about us getting to the sanatorium, and them admitting you…”

Sinking back into the pillow, Aziraphale frowns.

Crowley is wearing his sunglasses.

He hasn’t met Aziraphale’s eyes.

He is talking too fast.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, sitting up again and letting go of his blanket.

“Angel.” Crowley finally turns around, breathes in. “So. How—how do you feel?”

Aziraphale feels like—

Like he has woken into a new world.

Memories of the night are coming back to him in fragments, sharp and clear, fusing into a picture of such radiance that looking at it is like looking directly at the sun.

He remembers waking in the dimly lit room, the abrupt return of consciousness plunging him straight into terror:

“Crowley! Where are you? I can’t see you—“

“I’m here, Aziraphale.” The gentlest of whispers. A hand taking hold of his. Crowley sitting down on the edge of his bed, the mattress dipping slightly under his weight, his long fingers wrapping around Aziraphale’s. Him raising Aziraphale’s hand to his lips and holding it there, the pressure of his fingers just short of pain. “I’m here.”

Blackness.

Waking up again, to a weight on his chest, and looking down to see Crowley’s head against it, the demon’s tousled, matted hair. Crowley is sleeping, awkwardly half-draped over Aziraphale’s body, twisted at the hips—who knows how long he’d sat there, holding the angel’s hand, until exhaustion took him over, too—

His fingers are still wrapped around Aziraphale’s.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale whispers, touching the demon’s cheek with his free hand, running his fingers through Crowley’s hair. “Crowley.”

The demon wakes, then, and attempts to sit back up, his irises blown wide, the confusion of sleep still clinging to him like cobwebs.

(Even now, his fingers are wrapped around Aziraphale’s.)

“Shhh,” Aziraphale says. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He sits up, too, and moves over in the narrow bed until his side is pressed against the wall. In the glow of a small table lamp, the wallpaper is light sepia, like the background of a photograph, and Crowley’s shadow glides soundlessly against it. “You need to rest, too.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Crowley says hoarsely, shaking his head. “I’m not…”

“I know,” Aziraphale says, freeing his fingers to take hold of Crowley’s wrist. “Come here.” He pulls.

“W—what?”

“Come here.”

Crowley does. He kicks his boots off, hurriedly, and climbs in next to Aziraphale, a dusting of pink over the bridge of his nose.

“Not a lot of space, I know,” Aziraphale says. “But. You need sleep, and this is far better than sleeping in an armchair, isn’t it.”

Crowley nods, seems to want to say something—and bites down on it.

“So come on,” Aziraphale says, pulling Crowley closer. His limbs are leaden with exhaustion; he feels like he is moving underwater, far below the surface, there in the incredible pressures of the deep.

They settle down together, facing each other. Aziraphale has just enough time to release Crowley’s wrist, to interlace their fingers instead before the blackness comes for him.

When he wakes up for the third time, the sanatorium is still quiet, the sky in the gap between the curtains anthracite-black. Across from him, Crowley is awake, his eyes the colour of dark amber in the shadows.

Their fingers are still intertwined.

“You are not sleeping,” Aziraphale says with a note of drowsy accusation.

“No, angel,” Crowley agrees, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards. “Very perceptive of you.”

“Does it—does it hurt? Are you in pain?”

“No, I’ve just been… thinking.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale prompts.

Crowley shakes his head slightly. “Doesn’t matter. Not now. But y’know what? I think you did something over there in the storm, something that—must be insulating me from this Line thing. It’s like there was a—silence, a weight over everything. I got used to it, I think, didn’t even notice it until it lifted. And now it’s—barely there.”

“Good,” Aziraphale says sleepily. His eyelids are heavy, and so is his body—though it’s a different, warmer heaviness now. He doesn’t try to fight it. It’s a new experience, this descent into soft, comforting dark—with Crowley next to him, safe, dear.

He wants to say as much, but is asleep before he knows it.

And now, it’s morning again, white and cold, and Crowley is standing across from Aziraphale, wearing his sunglasses, his eyes hidden. He must be nervous, Aziraphale knows him enough to notice the fizz of anxiety just under his skin, and he’d brought offerings, as if his presence alone isn’t worth everything to the angel—

“Aziraphale?” Crowley asks. His voice is gentle, achingly gentle, despite everything.

Aziraphale looks at the demon, framed in the white light coming from the window, the diaphanous curtains absurdly wing-like over his shoulders—

—and feels the enormity of what he’d done descend on him.

He…

He had told Heaven “no”.

Not... not Heaven proper, some part of him hastens to object. Just a Holy force, a blind power…

…that had taken him over, had directed him to root out evil, to purge, to cleanse: exactly what Heaven proper would have him do.

And he’d refused to.

He was able to refuse.

Because—because he’d needed Crowley to be safe.

His Adversary. His…

(…he is not ready to think it.

Not yet.

Not yet—

but he knows.

Someone help him, oh, he knows.)

Aziraphale’s eyes dart over Crowley’s frame. The demon’s breathing is forcibly even, his shoulders tense; Aziraphale has a sudden image of Crowley balanced on a precipice, poised to either scramble backwards or to fall forward, arms outstretched.

He cannot find his voice, not yet, so instead of an answer, he gives Crowley a wavering smile.

There is no going back. And he is an angel, still: he feels the connection to the source of all things within his chest, luminous, unbroken.

This shouldn’t be possible, he thinks.

Six thousand years ago, he’d given away his sword. There was no rule saying he oughtn’t, but he’d never dared to admit that to Heaven all the same.

And now he’d outright refused to do Heaven’s will.

For a demon.

And Heaven—well.

Both of them are still alive. There are no Archangels in the corridor, not as far as he knows—and even with the power of the Holy Line humming around them, he would be able to feel ethereal presences in advance of their arrival, would feel the traces of a holy visitation afterwards, shimmering trails through the fabric of the world.

Nobody came to check on him, not yet.

But it is a different realization that makes him sit there motionless under Crowley’s probing gaze, his hands clasping the edge of his blanket.

He’d refused to do Heaven’s will—

and, for Crowley, he’d do it all over again.

He finds his voice.

“I’m—“ It comes out wondering, awed. “I’m actually doing quite well, I think. I… believe Doctor Vogel was right on the mark.”

Crowley gives him an encouraging smile, just a little tight at the edges, and waits.

Aziraphale sits up, brings his legs over the side of the bed. His pyjamas, white cotton with sky-blue stripes, are embroidered with the sanatorium monogram. They haven’t transformed into tartan overnight: a good sign.

The linoleum is cool against his bare feet.

He faces Crowley. The demon looks apprehensive, and this is a fact for Aziraphale to consider, to understand before he does irreparable harm to this new, tentative connection between them. Now that the rush of emotion must have passed, Crowley might be having second thoughts, he might want more distance between them—and after everything that had happened, after fifty years of silence, he would be well within his rights. And Aziraphale had kissed Crowley, there in the storm. That might have been—inappropriate, unwelcome—

(Or not, something within Aziraphale tells him, something unflinching and bold. Or not—remember the way he held you, the aching desperation of that kiss?)

The air between them is thrumming with things unsaid. He has to start saying some of them, he knows—

—or else the feeling that presses outwards from his chest, the pent-up thing demanding to be let loose—

it will break free, felling everything in its path.

He won’t contain it.

“Crowley. I—I really must thank you. No—please—give me a moment, just this once. I must thank you, and I must—apologize. For—for many things, really, but… You went into the storm to find me. No, please don’t argue, I already know. It was foolish, what I did yesterday, and I put you at horrible risk, and—”

Crowley is as still, as poised as before. On the writing-desk behind him, the overfull paper bag he’d brought is leaning over bit by bit, ready to topple and spill with preposterous precision.

Then, with startling ferocity, the demon rounds on Aziraphale.

“Foolish,” he hisses. “Just—foolish? Running out there like that? Everything else aside, there’d been an avalanche, Aziraphale, and you... Oh, for Somebody’s sake,” he throws up his hands, “if you did find any humans, how were you planning to get them out? Your lot aren’t even allowing you to heal them!”

Aziraphale gapes at the demon as Crowley goes on, oblivious to his shock.

“For your information, angel, there weren’t any humans there. Every human in a hundred mile radius had better sense than… What?”

Aziraphale shakes his head.

“Crowley, I... Well, I’m glad there weren’t any humans there. Obviously. And I do know that the humans can help each other, far better than I could have helped them under the circumstances. But do you remember how you’d said that you are… going for a walk? No, I know, I—I jumped to conclusions, and it—it doesn’t really make sense now, does it…”

“Oh,” Crowley says, lowering his hands. He leans against the writing-desk, grips its edge. “You were. Looking for me.”

Carefully, Aziraphale nods.

“But that is—that is worse, Aziraphale. Don’t you see that it’s worse? You can’t go around putting yourself in danger over—over a demon, don’t ever do that again!”

Warmth, and indignation, and a sprinkling of anger, and passionate hope—the pent-up thing within Aziraphale nearly explodes with them, but his mind doesn’t quite catch up in time.

“Crowley, I am talking about you. Not any demon, you. And you are the one in danger here, you still are. Even if—if the Line isn’t draining you right now, we know hardly anything about it. It’s not over, whatever has been happening. We’ve got to get you out of here. We’ve got to get you out of here today.”

This isn’t the turn he’d wanted the conversation to take, Aziraphale thinks distractedly—but also, though the colour is back in Crowley’s cheeks, though some swagger is back in his gait, they have to talk about what to do next, they have to prepare, they have to plan—and this need is a ringing alarm bell in his mind.

Because nothing is over—and here, in the sanatorium, Heaven feels very close indeed.

“To get me out of here,” Crowley repeats, his sudden flash of anger having run its course. “Right.” He drags a weary hand through his hair, scrapes his fingers forcibly down his cheek. The fizz of anxiety is there, just under his skin. “Yeah. Well. I do have a little self-preservation left. I’ll—I’ll go.”

His tone is unbearably matter-of-fact: I’ll go.

“We’ll go,” Aziraphale corrects—and then adds, entreating: “Crowley. Please. I know you may need time. A lot of time, I realize that. But let me at least get you safely out of the sanatorium. I promise I won’t impose on you if you’d rather part ways after, but I—I hope—”

The thing in his chest burns as hot as a welding torch, sending out blazing sparks.

“Angel,” the demon says quietly. “You don’t have to. You’ve got no obligation to. It could be an accident, me being sent here, or if not, then it’s probably just another one of Hell’s weekly plots, they are a dime a dozen Downstairs, just—just think of them as staff training. Somebody found out about Holy Lines, wanted to see what happens if a demon sticks around one for too long. Made sure one demon is, uh, motivated to comply. It’s probably not even personal—”

But it could be, Aziraphale thinks. It could be, and you—

“Tell you what,” Crowley goes on. “How about a—a snack first. You should get back into bed, rest will do you good. Take some time to think about all this. And I’ll… I’ll bring you some treats, yeah? I’ve got a couple plates here, nicked them from the cafeteria, it’ll all be in style, you’ll love it. There are more pastries than that one box, too, and—did you know that Chef Otto keeps a list of your favourites? Come on, Aziraphale, work with me…”

Aziraphale nods slowly, sits down on the edge of the bed, holding on to the white enamelled railing for balance—and Crowley, seeing him comply, whips back around to the writing-desk, still talking at the speed of thought.

“So. Hazelnut and honey here, and these are pear and brandy—wait, here is another box. Biscuits! The kind you brought on the hike. I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for, but—these ones are good, yeah? These will do? You liked them?”

“Thank you, dear,” Aziraphale says, closing his eyes. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

Crowley.

Crowley, who had walked into the storm, knowing full well what that storm was.

Who may be trying, even now, to protect him. To make sure that Aziraphale has a way to retreat, to return to the relative safety of things hinted at but never uttered—and thus never made terrifyingly real.

(They were always real.)

Or he may be waiting for the full weight of the night’s events to hit Aziraphale, afraid of what Aziraphale might do when he finds himself unmoored.

Or—both.

Aziraphale opens his eyes. Over by the writing-desk, Crowley is methodically sorting through the contents of the bag, peering into boxes, discarding delicate paper wrappings—and still talking as if something large and menacing lives in the silence around them, and he cannot possibly allow it to come close.

The angel looks at the way Crowley’s shoulders hunch forward slightly as the demon reaches for box after box, watches his shoulder blades move sharply under the smooth fabric of his jacket.

Crowley’s wrists are so thin that Aziraphale could almost encircle both of them with one hand.

If we could only be safe, Aziraphale thinks—and imagines it: reaching out and touching Crowley, unafraid.

If we could only ever, ever truly be safe.

But that’s… that’s the thing, isn’t it.

He had stayed away for nearly fifty years, had warred against himself for nearly fifty years, and Crowley wasn’t safe at all.

He could have lost Crowley, for all time, without ever having seen him again.

Just like that.

Crowley has a right to know, he thinks. Whatever happens next, whatever Crowley chooses to do next, I have to tell him. He has to know. I cannot bear him having to doubt it for the rest of… however long we’ve got.

Abruptly, Aziraphale gets up. His feet take him forward, towards Crowley, though he is only dimly aware of that happening.

“Crowley. I—I have to tell you something.”

A sliver of what he feels must be coming through in his voice.

The demon half-turns to him, slowly puts down the plate he’d been loading with sweets, places one hand on the table-top for balance, fingers splayed. His face is once again unreadable, deliberately so—but his chest is rising and falling in an erratic rhythm.

He looks like he is expecting a blow, Aziraphale thinks and wills himself to hold together. He shakes his head, links his hands just below his breastbone, goes to touch his ring—

and does not touch it.

“Crowley, I—I wrote to you.” His words seem painfully inadequate. “Every day, for most of those forty eight years. Even when I swore I wouldn’t. I could—pretend, while writing, that you are within reach. Could imagine you arguing with me, or groaning at whatever silly thing I’m vexed about, or just saying ‘what did your humans get up to now’ in that way you have.” Patient. Amused. “And I’d… never sent any of the letters, I’d—I’d burned them. All of them. I thought—I thought I was protecting you. I thought I was keeping you safe. And I was wrong.”

He drops his gaze to the floor. It will be easier to say the next part like this.

“I didn’t think about any of that back then, though. Not in the park. I only panicked, when you asked me for Holy Water, and I’d burned your note, and I didn’t have time to understand. When I came to—when I really came to—I told myself that what happened was for the best. That it was the only real way to protect you, to protect both of us. Breaking off whatever—whatever we had. And so I’d put you in far more danger.”

He hears Crowley move across the linoleum and snaps his head up, worry surging.

“Hey,” Crowley says softly—and reaches out to touch Aziraphale’s hands. The angel realizes that they are knotted together to pain—but in that instant, Crowley’s fingers are on the knot, loosening it, prying it open.

“Hey, angel, you don’t have to—it’s fine, it’s fine now…”

“There is no safety for us,” Aziraphale says, looking into Crowley’s face, unlocking his hands, capturing Crowley’s slender fingers. “No true safety, ever. You know that.”

“Insignificance is the best we’ve got, yeah,” Crowley says. “That, and convincing reports. Which we will work on, angel, so don’t—”

“The thing I have to tell you. It. It puts no obligation on you. It’s just something I want you to know. In case—in case it all goes wrong.”

In case it all goes pear-shaped, he remembers suddenly—and knows exactly why Crowley had asked for Holy Water all those years ago.

“Angel?” Crowley’s voice is laced with uncertainty that edges on fear. “Angel, what are you…”

“You can stop me,” Aziraphale says—and waits, Crowley’s hand in his. A heartbeat. Two. Three.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says desperately.

Aziraphale inhales, making absolutely sure that he will not run out of air. Not this time. Not again.

Not ever again.

“Crowley. I—love you. I think I’ve loved you for a very long time.”

Crowley rips his sunglasses off with his free hand, sends them clattering sideways across the writing-desk.

“Aziraphale. Angel. It’s been—it’s been an ordeal. You don’t know what you’re saying. This will settle down in a few days, and you…”

Slowly, Aziraphale raises Crowley’s hand to his lips, presses a kiss to the windburned skin over the demon’s knuckles. Crowley sucks in a breath, appears to forget that his train of thought had ever existed.

“It’s—it’s really fine, my dear,” Aziraphale says softly. “And this won’t have to change things. Not unless you’d like it to. And not unless you’re ready.”

“Angel, you—you love everyone, you are a guardian, you—“

Shaking his head minutely, Aziraphale brings one hand to Crowley’s cheek, touches it with the tips of his fingers, opens his palm against the side of Crowley’s face.

“Do you think this is some kind of an enchantment?” he asks, tracing the curve of the demon’s lips with his thumb: center to corner, a delicate arch.

“Must be,” Crowley says quietly, his breath warm against Aziraphale’s skin. “The kind that fades, and then you’re left with—with stones and dry leaves and addled memory. I—I couldn’t do that, angel. Anything but that.”

“I know,” Aziraphale says, letting the pad of his thumb rest in the corner of Crowley’s mouth. “May I kiss you?”

Crowley keens and surges towards him.

It’s sunlight, when they come together, and exhilaration, and ever-present danger; it’s a melody rising to an unexpected but precisely right note; it’s the first moments of flight when you realize that the air is holding you, that the air will keep holding you, that you get to soar. It’s rains over a parched desert; it’s star-fire, the birth of helium within the stars’ plasma-hot cores. It’s six thousand years of longing collapsed into a single impossible point.

(Crowley breaks the kiss once, to gasp, “Aziraphale. Angel. I—I love you. I’ve loved you since Eden—” and then Aziraphale grasps his wrists, differently this time, and walks Crowley backwards until there’s a wall behind him, and Crowley’s smile is blinding—

—and neither of them speaks a human tongue for a long while.)

-

It’s an odd sort of morning, after. A sort of morning that, even as it unfolds, already has a distinct quality of—a memory, or a dream. Something within it is pushing inexorably against the grain of reality, is infusing reality with—no, not magic, precisely—

Hope.

(It’s the sort of morning when Aziraphale could easily believe quite a few impossible things—and perhaps, given what happened, he already does.)

The humans come by as soon as they are allowed, crowd the small room, settle on the writing-desk (Marinochka and Max, their legs dangling, ankles hooked together), in the armchairs (Frau Haller and Mrs. Grant), on the window-sill (Herr Steiner, who keeps glancing at the snow-clearing efforts outside, and Herr Redlinger, who’d hesitantly abandoned his cousin to the mercy of the other sanatorium inhabitants).

They are curious, of course they are. Aziraphale doesn’t remember a lot about the night—he’d never reached such depths of exhaustion before, did not know that it was possible—but he does remember the humans’ concerned voices, Doctor Vogel cutting through: “I’m afraid everyone will have to leave now. Please return to your rooms. Herr Crowley, do you mind staying? I have a few questions—no, Nurse Becker, this is my responsibility—Herr Crowley, do stay.”

“Nobody really knows what happened,” Frau Haller says. “Well, a lot of people say that Herr Fell was somehow involved, and a few people seem to vaguely remember Herr Crowley, but other than that? Nothing.”

“Which appears to be a benefit rather than an inconvenience,” Mrs. Grant adds, ”to those who want to talk.”

“Which is everyone,” Frau Haller opens her hands, seeming to suggest, nothing to be done about that.

They are curious, yes, but they don’t pry.

They do, however, care.

“Herr Crowley, are you sure it’s wise for you to leave the sanatorium?” Marinochka asks, worrying the fringe of her shawl with nails that appear to have been gnawed on. “You really haven’t been well—”

“Oh, more than wise. Believe me, it’s a matter of life and death,” Crowley says cheerfully.

“That’s awfully dramatic,” Mrs. Grant sniffs. “But. I think we all know that Herr Fell here wouldn’t let you do anything rash.”

“Herr Fell happened to practically run into an avalanche,” Frau Heller observes wryly. “I think Herr Fell is perhaps not the best judge of rash.”

So it goes—and later, when Marinochka proclaims that Herr Crowley had been completely selfless and immensely brave, and that she’d only ever read about such things in novels, Aziraphale is almost forced to wonder whether Crowley’s alarmingly scarlet blush means the return of his fever.

When it is time for luncheon, the humans leave.

They sit down to plan, then, Crowley and he—after the demon shuts the door behind Herr Steiner, the last to go, and makes sure the lock is tight. It’s a ritual more than anything else, this checking of locks; both of them know it, both of them go through with it anyway.

That is what it is, now, Aziraphale thinks, this is what it must always be.

To his surprise, there is no bitterness to that thought. They are on their own side. He is resolved; that comes with its own odd sort of peace.

Crowley pulls both armchairs up to the writing-desk, flops into one of them, puts his feet up on the desk’s edge.

“So,” he says. “Let’s talk.”

They do. They talk about what their assignments really mean: whether Aziraphale was sent to repair the Line that Crowley had somehow affected, or whether the intersection of their tasks was incidental, as has happened more than once before. They talk about keeping up appearances, for the humans and for their respective employers—and whether their employers are on the way.

“I don’t think so, angel,” Crowley says thoughtfully. “I really don’t think anyone’s coming. My lot probably think me dead, what with that storm, so that gives us some time. The storm is also why they’d have to be barking mad to come here for the next while. Which a lot of them are, sure, just—not like that. Your lot, though? If they cared? Aziraphale, they would already be here.”

They would, Aziraphale thinks. They would, and they are not—what, exactly, does that say?

Crowley reaches for the draft of Aziraphale’s report to Heaven, settles back into the plush of the armchair to rifle through the pages. He looks so much stronger, now, Aziraphale thinks. The sinuous grace is back in the demon’s body, his pose as he lounges in the armchair a challenge to both gravity and anything that possesses bones.

The angel gets up from his own armchair, walks around to the back of Crowley’s, looks over the top of Crowley’s head at the pages the demon is holding. Crowley takes his feet off the edge of the table, scoots up in the armchair to give Aziraphale a better view.

“Following Herr Roberts to thwart suspected demonic wiles,” he reads aloud—and then lowers the page. “Pretty solid, that. But. Your list. Over here, just a few lines above this, you talk about your list. You were done with it weeks ago. I mean, yeah, it’s good for the report, they can’t possibly object to you leaving the sanatorium now, but—you’d overstayed for weeks.”

“Yes, my dear,” Aziraphale agrees, bending down to kiss the top of Crowley’s head. The demon breathes out sharply, tilts his head back to look him in the face.

“And that was because…”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says again, reaching to brush a wayward strand of hair out of Crowley’s eyes. The demon blinks a few times in quick succession. “I couldn’t leave you. And not because that was—an obligation, or duty. You know this now, yes? You have to know.”

They linger in that moment, the tips of Aziraphale’s fingers travelling across Crowley’s temple, crossing into his hair. Crowley closes his eyes, leans into the caress. He looks—peaceful, like this, every angle of his face softened by the diffuse light, and Aziraphale’s heart gives an odd sort of quiver.

“How do the humans do it, you think?” he says, not quite trusting his voice.

“Do what?” Crowley asks, his eyes still closed.

“All of it, really. Live. Love. They just get—such a terribly short time together, and are always on the brink of loss. How do they do it?”

Crowley’s eyes fly open, then, and he looks straight at Aziraphale.

“With everything they’ve got, angel. With everything they’ve got.”

Afterwards, Aziraphale doesn’t quite remember how they end up entwined, embracing each other in the middle of that small room, holding on to each other, their foreheads touching. There’s a stillness to the air around them, the same crystalline quality as there was in the eye of the storm when Aziraphale finally knew himself, and knew what he had to do.

I love you, he thinks, pulling Crowley closer still. I love you, I’ve loved you for millennia.

And also:

I will keep you safe.

It’s an impossible thing, of course, nothing more than a desperate wish, with the shadows of both Heaven and Hell looming over them, with their very lives not their own—

but it rings out like a vow,

and though he hadn’t said it out loud—he is sure he had not—

a jolt goes through Crowley; the demon’s fingers curl into his shoulders, he jerks his chin up to look at Aziraphale, eyes wide—

and in that moment Aziraphale knows, with startling certainty, that Crowley had heard.

-

By the afternoon, the sanatorium is plunged into gleeful chaos. The news of the nights’ events has traveled through it like wildfire, and conversations are still smouldering at its edges. Aziraphale catches curious looks, fields questions coming from the bravest of the sanatorium inhabitants—as evasively as he can, and wondering all the while at the way the recent events have already transformed and shifted in their minds. Did the storm affect the humans’ memories? Or is this just what humans do: embellish and expand?

So be it, the angel thinks. With the rumour mill of the place going at full tilt, all he and Crowley have to do is plant some seeds, and any nuggets of truth will be safely hidden in the riot of sprouting gossip. If Heaven or Hell went investigating—which is looking increasingly unlikely—they, too, would have rather a difficult time trying to sift for those nuggets.

In the meantime, he and Crowley have a plan.

They will leave before the day is out. They will board the same train: this is, everything considered, the safest of the options, though it will take some effort to convince the inhabitants of the sanatorium that their leaving is coincidental.

The tickets are already waiting at the top of Aziraphale’s travel trunk.

A going-away party is planned for four o’clock—at first, before the word gets out about Crowley, for Aziraphale alone. There will be cake, apparently, and a multitude of other treats reserved for special occasions. Chef Otto has the grave air of an orchestra conductor as he stands in the middle of the kitchens, bellowing orders, checking things off three separate lists, concluding each check with an airy flourish.

Aziraphale spends a large portion of the afternoon saying good-byes to the patients up on the top floor, those who won’t be coming down for the festivities. They will get the food delivered to them—he’d made sure of that—and every one of them will also get a note from Aziraphale himself, a memento infused with gentle magic. He can do this much—and presently, going from room to room, he holds the patients’ hands, listens to their stories, and blesses them, thinking all the while about hope.

(Crowley, he knows now, is doing just the same. He’s got his own rounds, has had them from the first day he’d set foot in the sanatorium. He’d been visiting the moribund, yes, but—

“You haven’t been tempting them,” Aziraphale had said. “Not like Hell told you to.”

“The humans do a pretty good job of tempting themselves,” Crowley had muttered. “When have they ever needed me?”)

Outside, in the gathering shadows, the white-and-green flag unrolls in the wind, the coils of the serpent seeming to move and tighten around the staff.

Aziraphale visits Director Lang.

The Director, presumably still enchanted by the unexpected strength of Aziraphale’s letter of introduction, shows no surprise at the angel’s abrupt change of plans; he praises Aziraphale’s bravery in the rescue effort, all while appearing fuzzy on what, exactly, happened after the avalanche, and proclaims that he’d have expected no less of someone in royal service. Then, he goes to shake Aziraphale’s hand and is at it for nearly a full minute, clasping it in both of his until Aziraphale’s palm goes numb, assuring the angel that he’ll wait most eagerly to hear from his employer.

Aziraphale nearly runs out of the Director’s office when he is finally released.

He is on the way back to the visitor’s wing—Doctor Vogel was not around—when he sees Frau Doctor herself coming towards him along the corridor.

There is a letter in her hand. It takes him no time at all to recognize the Heavenly sheen on it, a charged glow invisible to the mortal eye.

“Herr Fell, this is for you,” Doctor Vogel says, handing the letter over. “It’s… quite unusual, I must say. This letter was with the mail, it’s addressed to you… but it has no postage, no return address. They didn’t even write the name of the sanatorium.”

She is looking at him intently.

“Thank you,” he says, taking the letter, inhaling around a sudden weight in his chest. “Please—please excuse me, Doctor Vogel. I should read this at once.”

A letter from Heaven is far better than their visit—but he has to know what it contains.

Doctor Vogel nods.

“I hope it’s good news, Herr Fell,” she says—and walks on. The clicking of her heels echoes along the otherwise silent corridor, getting fainter and fainter.

Good news would be a lot to hope for, Aziraphale thinks.

The seam of the envelope falls open neatly under his fingers—no risk of paper-cuts with Heavenly stationery—but at first, he cannot even focus on the page which keeps jumping in front of his eyes. He wrangles it still, holds on to it, reads the words over and over again.

They make no sense.

The letter—

The letter is a commendation. It is dated, signed, and stamped. It says that his efforts have been recognized—that the quarterly figures are up significantly across the board—that the targets of Heavenly influence have been achieved within record time.

A job well done, worthy of the highest praise.

What on Earth, he thinks, dazed—

—and then he understands.

The storm.

The storm.

They’d picked it up, that wild disturbance in the Line, Holy power surging and cresting. They’d picked it up, and said that it was Good.

The truth has always been in the numbers. Yesterday, the numbers spoke for themselves—and Heaven had followed the standard procedure. He’d been issued a commendation. They signed off on it, and did not care.

None of them cared.

Aziraphale almost laughs, giddy with relief. Oh, Crowley will love this, he can’t wait to tell this to Crowley—

A door squeaks open to his right, splitting the stillness of the corridor. He hears a quiet rustle, a low “oh”—and looks up, incredulous laughter still bubbling up inside him. There, in the doorway, is a patient, a wan young woman in a dressing gown, barefoot, her cheeks lit up by a feverish blush, her dark hair spilling over her shoulders. She has a comb in one hand. Her eyes widen as she looks at him, and for a second, she appears mesmerized, transfixed by what she sees.

Then, she smiles a wide, dizzy smile that must, Aziraphale realizes, be a reflection of his own.

Pauline. Her name is Pauline. She, as most others here, is not well.

“Herr Fell!” she says, gesturing towards the letter with her comb. “Good news from home? Oh, you look absolutely radiant. This must be very good news indeed.”

She is holding on to her smile as if it is a gift.

Aziraphale very nearly shakes his head. Good, he thinks, does not begin to cover it. This is far better than anything he could have hoped for. Heaven is not coming. He will get Crowley out of the sanatorium. They have a real, actual chance—and not just for right now.

Pauline is looking at him, expectant, seeming to hold her breath. He cannot begin to tell her the truth—but does not, in that moment, have the heart to disappoint her.

“Yes,” he says. “Absolutely. Very good news indeed.”

“What is it?” she asks, breathless, swaying towards him.

Oh. He didn’t—he wasn’t prepared—

But then, in a sudden flash of inspiration, he alights on something that will, to a human, carry precisely the right weight.

“A wedding.”

She clasps her hands in delight, the comb clattering down to the linoleum floor.

-

The going-away party is, as far as the patients are concerned, a resounding success. There hasn’t been one in simply ages, a thrilled Frau Thorn tells Aziraphale—not one that everyone would have been invited to, anyway—and it’s really too bad that he must actually leave: they are planning to take over the parlour and continue the festivities long into the night, which even the doctors are bound to allow with all the recent perturbations. An honest-to-goodness avalanche! What a thing to write home about!

The food is marvellous. He wouldn’t have expected less from Chef Otto, of course, but the man has quite surpassed himself: the dishes being brought in would not be out of place at the finest royal dinner party.

There is a shadow of parting over everything. Looking over the hall, Aziraphale realizes with a sudden pang that he will miss this place, odd as it had been, dangerous as it still is. It’s a world in itself, nothing quite like it out on the flatlands, a world of altered time—and of change.

A hubbub hangs over the gathered crowd, broken from time to time by shrieks of laughter and by enthusiastic applause. The patients drag their chairs from table to table to join in the most interesting conversations, clap each other on the shoulders, begin their speeches with excited variations of “so I heard”. One table over, Crowley has joined in just such a conversation; it’s becoming more and more animated the longer the demon is there, and already, a patient is banging on the table with his palm and demanding to be taken at his word.

Catching Aziraphale’s eye, Crowley sends him a mischievous smile.

He’s enjoying this, Aziraphale thinks. Chaos is Crowley’s element, he is having actual fun.

Mrs. Grant and Frau Haller appear arm in arm, present the angel with a box of sweets for the journey, make sure they know what train he and Crowley are planning to board. Then, Max and Marinochka swear him to secrecy and tell him that this time next year, they’ll be married, perhaps even settle in the village down below.

“A real home, if only for a while,” Marinochka says dreamily, “and close enough to the sanatorium, should either of us need it.”

(Aziraphale silently hopes that, with the Holy Line still so near, they won’t need it at all.)

Herr Redlinger rises to say a toast and ends up announcing his own intentions—to go back to the flatlands come spring, “no matter what!”—to cheers and admonishments in equal measure. Then, Herr Arnaud recites some verses about departures to wistful applause, while Herr Steiner, impervious to the general melancholy mood, launches into a speech about the indefatigable human spirit.

In the middle of the proceedings, a girl of about thirteen—Aziraphale had seen her before, she is family to one of the patients—walks up to the angel decisively, her chaperone on her tail.

“Herr Fell! Do tell, oh, please do tell. What is she like?”

“I beg your pardon? What is who like?” Aziraphale asks, bewildered.

“Your bride, of course! You are going to be married, aren’t you?”

Oh no, Aziraphale thinks with dawning realization. Oh no no no no no.

“Shhh, Helen,” the chaperone scolds the girl, pulling her back. “Don’t pester the gentleman, this is beyond impudent. I will absolutely tell your mother.”

“Mother would be the first to ask what she’s like!”

“Helen, that’s quite enough!” the chaperone says sharply, dragging her charge away to a refrain of apologies aimed more or less at Aziraphale—as the girl twists and calls over her shoulder:

“I think you should be the one to marry her!”

Aziraphale looks after them helplessly.

“Well,” Mrs. Grant says, looking in the same direction. Her eyes twinkle with amusement. “That’s not going to happen, is it now?”

Then, thankfully, desserts are brought in—a wonderful variety of crêpes—and Aziraphale gets up to find Chef Otto. The man gives him a bear-hug, shakes his hand, tells the angel he has never encountered a truer connoisseur—all while trying to surreptitiously wipe at his eyes.

Director Lang and Doctor Vogel arrive when the meal is nearly over. Aziraphale has, by that point, comfortably settled close to a platter of the most delightful meringues in the corner; Doctor Vogel, on her way towards him, has to sidestep a small crowd of patients who’d started an impromptu dance.

She sits down beside him, watches the dancers for a silent minute. Crowley is among them; one of the patients is attempting to teach him, and the others, steps to a new, rather absurd dance: “All the rage back home. They call it ‘the turkey trot’, imagine that—wait, no, not like this, your foot goes here!”

“I came to wish you a safe journey, Herr Fell,” Doctor Vogel says finally, turning to Aziraphale. “That letter—is everything well?”

“Thank you, Doctor Vogel, and—yes, it—it really is.”

She nods.

“I’m glad.” There is true warmth in her voice. In another minute, she rises to her feet, waits for Aziraphale to rise, too, and extends her hand for him to shake. Just as she is turning to leave, she glances at the dancers once again.

“Take good care of him,” she says.

Aziraphale looks at her in surprise—and catches her sudden, brilliant smile.

-

They consider leaving in separate coaches to keep up the pretence, but eventually decide against it. “Not much point,” Crowley says, and he is right: with as much snow as there’d been in the last few days, the coaches all follow each other along the narrow winding road, locked between the tall snowbanks like a river in a deep gorge. Pines and firs glide by on both sides, black cutouts against the low dark clouds. Aziraphale cannot talk to Crowley—not with the others around, not with the driver shooting them curious glances—so, pulling the scarf tighter around his neck, the angel reflects on the peculiar transformations that the rumours about him—or them—have gone through over the course of just one evening. The latest snatches of conversation he’d heard are truly baffling, and he turns them over and over in his mind, studying them as if they are mismatched pieces of a shell belonging to a mysterious creature.

“…he looks fine now, I know, but he looked like death when they brought him in.”

“You can’t mean…”

“Think about it. Has there ever been an avalanche around these parts before?”

“No, but…”

“Want to know what can cause an avalanche? Gunshots.”

-

There is, it turns out, a crowd at the station to send them off. Some patients—and visitors, too—have come in advance and are, by now, stomping irritably and huffing misty breaths into the chilly air. Others disembark from coaches alongside them—and for a while after, hopeful stragglers arrive to check if they have missed any fun.

It’s not quite snowing, but occasional snowflakes drift towards the hot glass of the platform lights like tiny misguided moths.

Their friends are all here: Frau Haller, Mrs. Grant, Max, Marinochka, Herr Redlinger, Herr Steiner. Herr Krauss arrives at the last moment, out of breath, a large rectangular package under his arm. Awkwardly grasping it by the corners, he hands it over to Aziraphale, makes the angel promise that he won’t open it until he reaches his destination, gives him a small tight smile—and goes to shake Crowley’s hand, fearless despite the demon’s scowl.

There is talk of letters that will be written, requests for postcards from London. The humans all mill about, chatting to each other. Off to the side of the platform, a boy (Aziraphale had seen him in the visitor’s wing just that afternoon) is eyeing him curiously—and, sure enough, he manages to slip his mother’s watch just before the train arrives.

“Do you always carry pistols, Herr Fell?” he asks eagerly, sidling up to the angel.

“I… beg your pardon?” Aziraphale says, thinking of how much of a refrain this has lately become.

“It’s just that… I wonder how one gets duelling pistols. If they’re ever needed.”

“Dear child, what on Earth are you talking about?”

“I’m not a child,” the boy complains. “And anyway, duels hardly ever happen now, which is terribly dull, so it’s not like I can just ask anyone.”

“Psssst,” Frau Haller whispers to the boy, bending down conspiratorially and pointing to the side of the platform, “your mother is coming over.”

Barely glancing that way, the boy sprints off.

Frau Haller straightens. She and Mrs. Grant exchange amused looks.

“This,” Mrs. Grant says, “is going to be a month to remember. A duel, how about that. Over a fair lady.”

They burst into laughter, shaking their heads, their arms around each other’s waists.

“I wish you all the happiness in the world,” Frau Haller says earnestly, looking from Aziraphale to Crowley and back.

The train arrives before Aziraphale can demand any explanations at all.

“What do you think that was about?” Crowley asks curiously as they settle next to each other in the compartment.

“I’ve—I’ve got no clue,” Aziraphale says. “I’ve been meaning to ask you the same thing. The others, too—they’ve been talking about… gunshots? A duel that has something to do with the avalanche?”

“Huh,” Crowley says, brow furrowed.

And then, as the train starts rolling out of the station, Aziraphale is struck by an idea.

“Crowley,” he asks, keeping his voice level. “What did you tell the humans about why you are leaving so abruptly?”

“Oh, that. A wedding,” the demon shrugs. “Misdirection, as you said. Didn’t give any details. Humans love that stuff, they rush off all the time where these things are concerned.”

“A wedding,” Aziraphale repeats slowly, clinging to a faint hope that he’d misheard. “You really told them…”

“Well, another option was “a funeral”, and I could hardly have gone there with this crowd, yeah? Wait, why… Was there something that you told them?”

The angel feels his face heat up.

“I didn’t mean it to—I didn’t mean to give that as my reason, Crowley. I told one person—completely spur of the moment, it just, it just slipped out—I was holding that letter I told you about, I looked—radiant, she said, and I didn’t want to disappoint… Oh, bother.”

Crowley quirks an eyebrow at him. “Out with it, angel. What exactly did you tell that one person?”

Aziraphale groans.

“That I received good news. About—a wedding.”

“You what?” Crowley exclaims, shocked and delighted, and pulls his sunglasses off to look Aziraphale in the eye.

“Well, I—I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything about myself—“

“I can’t believe this.” The corners of Crowley’s mouth are starting to twitch. “So the humans—they’ve gone and decided that we are rivals, is that it? And that we’d had a duel, and that we’d caused the avalanche in the first place—never mind that we weren’t anywhere close when it happened—“

“I know,” Aziraphale moans, craning his neck to look at the receding platform, barely visible through the branches. “Oh, it’s a complete disaster. What are they doing? Do you see what they’re doing?”

Crowley doesn’t answer—but when Aziraphale turns back to him in alarm, he sees that the demon is choking on silent laughter.

“Crowley, this—this is not funny!”

“Oh, but it is. Oh, this is brilliant. I hope this one sticks.”

“This is absolutely not funny—I can’t believe it, we should’ve, we should’ve discussed this, I never expected…”

“Angel,” Crowley says with some effort. “You wanted them to have something to talk about, yeah? Well. I think—I think they are talking.”

And then Crowley is laughing, really laughing—and in a moment, Aziraphale is laughing, too, helplessly, tears welling up in his eyes. They fall against each other, unable to contain their mirth, wiping at their eyes fruitlessly with Aziraphale’s handkerchief that they keep passing back and forth, and it feels like release, like hope, impossible and absurd but there, and theirs—

—and then Aziraphale reaches for Crowley’s hand, and Crowley reaches back—

—as the train takes them down the mountain, plunging into the night-filled valley below, and the future stretches out before them: a blank canvas, a great unknown.

Chapter Text

Much later—the averted Apocalypse and their trials safely behind them—Aziraphale still thinks about it, sometimes: at night, as he listens to Crowley’s even breathing (the demon is curled up next to him on the bed, relaxed and unguarded in his sleep), as he looks at the pages of his novel and sees images of other times, other places come to life over the thicket of the words.

What would these years, these decades have looked like if their story had gone differently? If they hadn’t been sent to the sanatorium? If the dam hadn’t broken? If he kept repairing it, with wood and stone and cement, stoppering all the leaks he could find, ever afraid of feeling too much, of showing too much, of making an inadvertent promise?

(They did make a promise, didn’t they, there in the sanatorium room the morning after the avalanche: a promise that both of them had meant fully and without reserve.)

What would it all feel like—the riots and the wars, the magnificent and terrifying discoveries, the inexorable, ever-quickening rate of human progress—if Aziraphale had to face it alone, to make sense of it alone, without Crowley’s exuberant, mischievous presence at his side, without the demon’s boundless energy, wordless understanding, irreverent jokes, gentle touch?

(Had he even known, before, how gentle Crowley could be? He must have, although he would have tried very hard to un-know it, to un-think those dizzying thoughts.)

-

In the end, they leave the sanatorium without issue. Nobody chases after them; no agents of Hell or Heaven meet them at their destination or along the way.

They travel back to London.

They settle into their lives anew, and the world fits differently around them, the threads of their lives having shifted and intertwined.

They take time, rather a lot of it, to figure out what it means to be on the same side, to learn to say things they have left unsaid for six thousand years.

Their once-frayed connection—their sense of each other—knits itself back in a surprising form.

It must be in the sanatorium that Aziraphale feels it first.

They have such a difficult time stepping apart, Crowley and he, there in the white-walled room, even as the time comes for them to visit the humans. On their first attempt, Aziraphale changes his mind when Crowley is almost at the door, goes after him, overtaking him easily, presses the door closed with the heel of his hand, pulls Crowley forward by the lapels, kisses the demon’s arch smile. My love, he tells him—and Crowley laughs a still-incredulous laugh, kisses Aziraphale’s fingers one by one, whispers, yours.

They do manage to step apart on the second attempt—and it’s when the door closes behind Crowley, when Aziraphale listens to his footsteps get fainter and fainter that the angel realizes: he can sense the demon despite the hum of the Holy Line.

Yes, that is precisely when it starts.

And within a few short, wonder-filled days, that connection blossoms into full power.

On a Saturday morning less than a week after their return to London, Aziraphale is looking out the bookshop window into the snowy street (Crowley had ventured out to get croissants from a nearby bakery) when it dawns on him: he knows exactly where the demon is, he can feel it—as warmth, a touch of a familiar hand, fingers splayed on his chest, over his human heart.

(He remembers a fire-lit lodge in the mountains, a blindfold being lowered over his eyes, the darkness descending. He remembers the tips of his fingers making contact with the smooth fabric of Crowley’s jacket, Crowley’s staccato heartbeat under his touch.)

When the demon returns, Aziraphale asks him, tentatively, whether something had changed for him, too—and Crowley takes Aziraphale’s hand to place it on his own chest, just a little to the left. “Here,” he says softly. “That’s what it’s like.”

It is, Aziraphale thinks. It’s precisely like that.

They had reached out.

They had found each other in the dark.

They had refused to let go.

The warmth of Crowley’s touch stays with Aziraphale as the demon makes his way Downstairs for the first in-person report since the avalanche, flares into radiant happiness when Crowley comes back, unscathed, amused, and pulls Aziraphale into an embrace.

“They’re impressed, angel. They are actually impressed.” Crowley swoops in to kiss Aziraphale’s eyelids, the corners of his eyes, the bridge of his nose. “Rather to their annoyance, yeah, but they are. Unnerved, too. I don’t think they expected the storm, but they really did not expect me to survive it. And—angel? I could sense your presence all the while. Felt almost like… like I could stand up to Satan himself, if it came to that.”

Heaven never follows up on what happened in the sanatorium. Months later, Aziraphale ascends there for his own in-person report, a matter of course; he carries the warmth of Crowley’s touch with him. The gleaming cage of the elevator floats upwards, its angelic operator asking him polite questions about life on Earth, and throughout his visit, none of the angels notice anything different about him, not even the archangels recognize his and Crowley’s impossible connection, that thread pulled across space.

History moves forward.

Dark times come.

Aziraphale feels the warmth of Crowley’s touch as he steps into the clinging mist of early autumn mornings, walking past newsstands that overflow with reports of war.

He feels it in field hospitals, working through his quota of blessings and finding ways to do more, more, and more still—though frequently, “more” just means morphine, or hot tea, or the mercy of sleep.

Crowley and he meet between the lines of their assignments, finding each other on battlefields, in hospital wards, in the changed London streets. They get to spend the day of the armistice together, sitting with the dazed soldiers by a log fire that roars in the still-new, incomprehensible silence of the front.

The war is followed by a decade of people living at breakneck speed. Crowley, ever true to his nature, dives into change headfirst; he gets an automobile, one of the terrible fast ones, and coaxes it to go even faster. He appears in the bookshop smelling of gasoline, excitement, and new colognes; he revels in it all.

(They spend a lot of time in the bookshop, with good reason: they are safe there, as safe as it is possible for them to be. Having learned from the humans—alarms and wards and a multitude of other things—Aziraphale makes sure of that.)

Sometime in the 1920s, an Englishman by the name of Watkins, one of Aziraphale’s antiquarian correspondents, writes a book. It speaks of old roads—straight tracks connecting places of power—that he calls “leys”. He sends Aziraphale a signed copy. Having received it, and leafed through it thoughtfully, the angel walks to the very back of the shop to put it on a shelf cordoned off by a velvet cord. Then, he goes to make himself a cup of hot chocolate—and on the way to the kitchen, stops by a painting that hangs in an alcove between two shelves, glowing softly through the shadows: a white plain, an eerie green sky, snow-covered peaks in the distance, the sanatorium nestled against one of the slopes, its windows reflecting the ghostly light.

(“Herr Krauss painted that, you say?” Crowley had asked on first seeing it. “Huh. A bunch of the humans in that place were really on to something, weren’t they?”)

Dark times come yet again.

The warmth of Crowley’s touch lingers over Aziraphale’s heart as he descends into underground stations made into bomb shelters, blessing anyone within reach, as he tells stories to the sleepless humans waiting for the all-clear (for stories are blessings, too, although of a different kind), as he walks into Bletchley Park. Unerringly, he and Crowley find each other in the VE-Day crowds on Trafalgar Square, both of them finally back to London, both of them fervently hoping for a time of peace for the sake of the exhausted humanity.

After the war, the world speeds up even more, a cosmic merry-go-round with its lights ablur. Even the humans feel it, talking about the Age of Aquarius, trying on all kinds of newfound freedoms for size.

(The humans put up fights, too. They protest injustice and oppression. They rebel against illness, time, and death itself, coming up with the iron lung, with antibiotics and vaccines. Tuberculosis and polio lose ground.

Some sanatoriums close. Berghaus remains open for many years yet, although it, too, changes with the times.)

One evening, Aziraphale and Crowley are comfortably settled on the sofa in the bookshop. The demon is curled on his side, his head in Aziraphale’s lap, and a record is playing on the gramophone (to the angel’s surprise, Crowley does not even comment on its age). Their conversation ebbs and flows—and during a lull, Aziraphale’s gaze catches on one of the books on the side table.

“Oh!” he says, an involuntary smile slipping into his voice. “My dear, I’ve—I’ve never actually read Agatha’s and Alma’s first novel to you, have I?”

“Mmhhh?” the demon asks against his vest.

“Only I think you’d enjoy it quite a bit. It’s a mystery, murderously funny. They wrote it under a pen name, you know. Caused years of speculation.”

“Did it, now,” Crowley says with interest, a corner of his mouth twitching upwards. “Good for them. And yeah, you should. Read it, that is.”

Aziraphale hums as he absent-mindedly strokes Crowley’s hair. A crease appears between the demon’s eyebrows.

“They never left that place, did they?” he asks.

“Agatha and Alma? Well.” Aziraphale runs the tips of his fingers against Crowley’s neck, causing the demon to shiver. “Never came back to the flatlands, no. But you must remember that cottage where they lived for a few years, down in the village. It looked lovely in the photographs.”

“I do remember.” Crowley is silent for a while. “Had a garden.”

“The loveliest rhododendrons. And more, of course. You’d know the names.”

Crowley uncoils, rolls over to look Aziraphale in the face.

“I’d like that, one day,” he says softly. “A cottage. A garden. With you.”

Aziraphale smiles down at him. “I’d love it.”

Humans go into space.

Humans land on the Moon.

Humans build cities, and highways, and walls.

Sometimes, they tear them down.

Crowley and Aziraphale find each other in Berlin on the evening of November 9, 1989, by one of the checkpoints in the Wall, their connection drawing them together with a steady magnetic pull.

Aziraphale knows exactly where the demon is, of course—and also senses his wild and mischievous presence ahead, a kind of a dark light. He makes his way to Crowley through the giddy, turbulent crowd just as the gates are thrown wide, just as the humans to both sides of the barrier erupt into cheers. The demon is already turning to him, open glee in his face, and Aziraphale sees that he’s got something in his arms, a long handle of an instrument held to his chest, an instrument that looks very much like…

“…a sledgehammer,” the angel breathes, shaking his head in disbelief. He wants to laugh, he wants to throw his arms around Crowley, that ridiculous snake so at home in the heart of human rebellion. “Crowley, are you—are you going to literally tear down that wall? My dear, really, where did you even get this thing?”

Crowley laughs, then, exuberant and unreserved, and shoves the sledgehammer into the arms of a nearby student. “Go have some fun, will you?” he tells the youth—and then he grabs Aziraphale by the hand, then they are running through the crowds together, the humans around them calling out to each other, embracing, popping open bottles of champagne, greeting their neighbours with—with flowers, with actual bouquets—where did they get the bouquets?—

—then Crowley pulls him into the darkened foyer of an apartment building, unlocked and blissfully, miraculously empty, and they kiss as the euphoric crowds stomp by outside, picking up disjointed but heartfelt snatches of song, and as they kiss, the angel thinks of East and West, of rebellion, of walls falling—

before Crowley’s lips move to his neck, to the hollow of his throat,

before Crowley’s fingers snag on the buttons of his shirt and he can no longer think of anything at all.

(When the time comes to stop the Apocalypse and to face Heaven and Hell, they are ready, they do—

and, in defiance of both their sides,

they win.)