Work Text:
Angela stood in her backyard, blushing profusely. Her two young students were smirking nearby, but staying generally out of trouble. They were good eggs, usually, if snarky.
The source of their infinite amusement stood in front of her: two angels, one fallen. The latter loomed tall and lanky in a fashionable black suit and dark glasses, while the former stood nearby holding Angela’s copy of A Concise Compendium of Angel Summonings , looking charmingly out of date in pale colors with a tartan bow-tie that somehow suited him perfectly. Both held glasses of home-brewed mead, murmuring to each other between sips.
The not-fallen angel cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, my dear, did you say your family is ‘full of nutters’?”
Angela winced and sighed. “We’re not crazy. Well, okay, we kind of are, but it’s a family name, ‘Nutter’. We’re from England.”
“I see. Are you familiar with the name ‘Agnes Nutter’?” Aziraphale asked, his tone still strange and cautious.
“‘The last true witch burned in England’? Yeah, she’s like my great-great-great-great-great aunt or something. I’m descended from her younger brother, Theodore. Why?”
Crowley raised an eyebrow. “So, she’s what, book-girl’s cousin, then?”
“So it would seem. Eleventh cousins twice removed, if I’m not mistaken.”
Angela’s eyebrows furrowed. “‘Book girl’?”
“Anathema Device, the current direct descendant of Agnes Nutter,” Aziraphale clarified.
She nodded. “Oh, right. I think some of the Device side of the family lives in So Cal now.”
“Anathema is still in England last we saw her.”
“Most of the family is, as far as I know. I’ve never met any of them outside of the local branch. Every once in a while, I get weird mail from England about the extended family. I have no idea how they know what’s going on with me, but it’s not like I hide it.” She laughed. “Maybe they stalk us all on social media or something. Hey, do you want to come inside? I only have four chairs out here.”
“Thought you’d never ask!” Crowley blurted out, moving directly for the door one of the students, Lai, had opened for them.
“Don’t mind him, dear,” Aziraphale assured her quietly. “He’s just getting a bit cold, now the sun is setting. Serpents, you know.”
“Oh, right, yeah.” She nodded absently, then turned to her other student. “Will, can you please wash off the chalk before you come in?”
The young man nodded amiably as she led her guest inside.
From the dining room doorway, the angel could see a small study lined with shelves. He nodded with approval and moved immediately to examine them, only to look up with a confused frown. “I don’t see where to put this book.”
Angela nodded. “That goes in the upstairs library.”
Aziraphale’s eyes lit up. “You have two libraries?”
“Fiction and secular non-fiction go down here. Religion, folklore, and magic upstairs, yeah.”
“May I see this other library?”
“Sure, it’s this way.”
-----
Lai led Crowley into the great room, intent on offering him a chair, only to lose him immediately when he spotted the wet bar.
“Aha!” He gestured triumphantly. “You do have harder stuff! And… candles?”
“Yes, that would be the sacred booze section. The secular booze is in the kitchen.”
“The sacred booze is the good stuff, right?” His grin was positively wicked. Lai resisted the urge to roll their eyes.
“I like to think we have good stuff in both places, but…” Lai shrugged. Normally the sacred booze was for rituals and offerings, but this was a supernatural guest, technically. They called out, “Angela, can these guests have the sacred booze?”
Her voice floated down from the loft. “What? No! Wait… yeah, okay, yeah. Just not the pepper rum!”
Crowley perked up. “Pepper rum?”
Lai sighed. “Of course he wants the pepper rum!”
“Crowley, dear, don’t be a pest,” the angel’s voice admonished from on high.
“Demon!” he retorted, seemingly automatically.
“Oh, fine, but get the gloves!” Angela called down, equal parts exasperated and distracted.
Lai nodded, resigned, and headed for the first aid kit.
Crowley frowned. “Why do I need gloves? It’s not mixed with holy water or s’mthing, is it?”
Lai laughed. “Have you ever poked yourself in the eye with a chile pepper?”
He scowled. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Exactly.” They handed him a pair of nitrile gloves. “Help yourself!”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to let me drink straight from the bottle?”
“Right, no, hold on.” Lai began rummaging through the cupboards for glasses.
“Center drawer!” Angela called down.
Crowley huffed. “Does she do that a lot?”
“Yeaaaah.” Lai pulled three shot glasses out of the drawer and set them on the counter, gesturing for Crowley to pour. “Which songs am I supposed to use for this?” they called up to their mentor.
“The one from the thing and the one about the dog!” she called back.
“Dog?” Crowley tilted his head.
“‘We didn’t eat it,’” Lai replied absently. They were still trying to remember the words to the first song.
Crowley just shook his head, confused, and reached for one of the shot glasses only for Lai to hold a hand out. “Wait until I’ve finished the songs, please.”
“Oh, right, ‘course.”
----
“This is a lovely collection, my dear,” Aziraphale gave her a calm, if somewhat tepid, smile. “Very… modern.”
Angela nodded, looking around with her hands on her hips. “People give me stuff, and I collect what I can from wherever I can, but a lot of the older theory is full of racist crap, and the practical stuff is impossible to find in print. I can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a unique book I’m probably not actually going to use, so I don’t have the really obscure stuff.”
“It’s always nice to get them signed by the authors, even so,” the angel mused, idly paging through a book on possession trance techniques.
“Whenever possible!” she agreed. “Angel stuff goes over here.” She slid the flawed grimoire that had brought these unusual guests to her home back into its slot on the shelf.
“What’s this section?” Aziraphale gestured to a small stack of books placed carefully next to an antique side table covered in photographs and eclectic knicknacks. He lifted several thin volumes to reveal a carefully-wrapped package of hand-pressed papers.
Angela leaned around to look. “Ancestors. Please be careful with those. I think the family sent them, and I still don’t know why.”
“Further Nife and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter: Concerning the Worlde that Is To Com; Ye Saga Continuef!” The angel’s eyes widened. “Have you read these?”
“I’ve looked them over. Most of them make very little sense. Some of them seem kind of familiar. A couple sound like dreams I’ve had. Why?”
“Did you ever see the first book?”
“First book?”
“The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.”
“Ah, hence ‘further’. No, I’d never heard of it.”
“It’s why he calls Anathema ‘book girl’. The only copy is in her possession. It’s a bit singed now, admittedly. Every prophecy it contained was absolutely true. I read them myself.”
She raised both eyebrows. “Wow, really? What were they about?”
“Armageddon.” Crowley’s low voice startled her, and she turned with her hand on her heart to find him emerging from the staircase. “You might have noticed it a couple years ago.” He sipped his pepper rum, hissing slightly. “Or not. Most people forgot it all.”
Angela tilted her head, her eyes unfocused for a moment as her brows furrowed. “It was... August?”
Aziraphale nodded, somber.
“There was that one week… It’s kind of hard to remember.” Her head ached. She blinked several times, trying to focus. “Everybody was calling me… and the waters... I thought maybe I dreamt it, but it didn’t feel right.”
The angel and demon exchanged a significant look over her tilted head.
“I think perhaps you’d better come with us, dear. There’s someone you should meet.”
-----