Archive of Our Own

run, run, run away, run away darlings

It began on a Thursday.

Most things tend to happen on a Thursday – well, most Significant things do. Of course, not all, since the world was created on a Sunday, most major organised events on Earth tended to take place on Saturdays (weddings, coronations and so on) and most sensible people consider that the normal week starts on a Monday (thus meaning Mondays are a source of great joy for a lucky few and a source of growing dread for many others).

(This applied to both Upstairs and Downstairs, in fact, as on Sunday the Heavenly powers tended to be at their peak and Upstairs liked to finish on a high note, whereas Downstairs tended to reset by smashing things – preferably other demons or particularly fine china plates (occasionally both if some unfortunate happened to be standing in the right place at the right time) – on a Sunday evening to, er, vent frustration at the aforementioned high note and so approached Monday morning with a particular enthusiasm that might almost be referred to as ‘vim’.)

But anyway, Sundays and Mondays and Saturdays aside, this particular thing began on a Thursday.

More specifically, it began at twenty-three past ten in the morning on Thursday 20th July 2023 AD. Beelzebub remembered it precisely, down to the exact second (fourteen past the minute) and the atmospheric temperature (a shade warm at 8,714 Kelvin) because it woke her up.

She didn’t much like being woken up.

She had been sleeping, stretched out underneath a smoke-caught blanket, in that gentle place where your toes dip into the still, shimmering waters of the Dreaming and the lure of true deep Sleep lingers above your head like clouds, when someone knocked on the star.

Not a loud knock, not a big, booming, thunderous knock, no: just a little, polite, excuse-me-I’m-so-sorry-but-are-you-home kind of knock. A one, and-two, three rhythm.

Jaunty, if you liked that kind of thing, which at twenty-three minutes and fifty-six seconds past ten in the morning (of sorts), Beelzebub did not.

It did what it was, well, not intended to do in itself but was going to do regardless, which was wake her up. Stretching out her shoulders in a long, limbering sort of stretch, she sat up and snapped her thoughts into something of an order. Then she sat, patiently coiled, and waited.

A minute passed.

Then another thirty seconds. Then another thirty.

And then, eighteen seconds later (one hundred and thirty-eight seconds in total), the knock came again, in the same irritating little pattern: one and-two three.

Beelzebub rose, moving towards the door in a sweep of black that grew bigger and thicker, a swarming, swelling mass that buzzed and bumbled and hummed, spreading out from her shoulders to hover behind her head. She twisted a hand and a sword slipped into view, a long line of slim, spiked obsidian.

It trembled in her hand like a stallion about to race and the tassel, pinched shut with a time-ragged fly made of black jade from Guangxi, curled itself up around her wrist.

It had been a long time. Swords don’t like that – they’re thirsty things, impatient and greedy.

The entrance, if it could be called that, was a light-spot on the near-side of the star, facing towards the Milky Way and Earth. Rightly, it wasn’t a proper entrance (there wasn’t anything much stopping anyone from dropping in anywhere else on the star, stars not having much in the way of walls or ceilings) but Gabriel had spun a latticed archway out of dust and rock that glowed gold-toned when the star beamed brighter and silver-sung when it dipped softer, fluctuating like molten metal poured into a mould and called it an entrance and she could never have asked him to take it down.

She approached it in a miniature storm, a cloud of dark, heavy warning, her black jade sword shivering with the anticipation of drinking long, something cold and furious and certain hammering in her chest – if this was Them, either of Them, then she could at least hold them off for a time, until Gabriel returned or until she could tell him to leave – and then. She stopped.

“Oh, ah, Lord Beelzebub,” Aziraphale, awkward in his usual beige frock-coat and absurdly sky-blue bowtie, stared with obvious alarm, the bow on top of the neatly-wrapped box in his hands quivering. “I, er, do hope I’m not intruding.”

“Oh this is wonderful,” Aziraphale said, his hands clasped behind his back as he looked out from the surface of the star, his gaze skating over the Fireworks Galaxy as it swirled infinitesimally slowly about them, a blaze of blues and pinks and purples blurring into each other, spotted with white-bright pin-pricks of other, smaller, softer stars. “Really very beautiful. I don’t think I ever came here much Before – but whoever did this was quite the master, don’t you think?”

Beelzebub hovered, or close to it – she still felt on edge, oddly springy in a way that felt old, familiar and forgotten, some way behind him.

“I should remember who did it,” Aziraphale continued, his voice steady but a little faster than usual – perhaps a quarter of a heartbeat quicker. She was good with that sort of thing, timings and so on. The flies understood time and speed differently, a second to them was a day, and she’d had more than enough time to learn. “I was there, after all. Of course,” he added, giving a sheepish twitch of his hands. “Not that I mean to suggest you weren’t there, I mean of course you were too, I’m sure, though I can’t say exactly where at any particular point – I don’t think we knew each other then, do you know –”

“Why are you here?” she asked. It might be rude to cut someone off but she was convinced that rambling on aimlessly was equally as rude if not more so.

No one likes a babbler. Unless they’re speaking in tongues – that had always been pretty fun. Something about the freedom to just make any old shit up and watch them howl and flail about.

Good times. Old Times.

Aziraphale jumped; a twitchy sort of jump, and when he spun to face her, he adjusted his hands in front of himself, his fingers lacing themselves together disjointedly.

“Oh yes, that,” he said, looking like a very, very lost pigeon. “Well, I thought I’d just drop by and see how you’re getting on, that sort of thing, seemed the neighbourly thing to do and all that.”

He smiled, but it was brief and just as twitchy as his hands.

“I brought a house-warming gift,” he offered tentatively, gesturing towards the neatly-wrapped box with its bright yellow ribbon.

She looked at it for a moment, at its garishly patterned paper and its innocuous almost-a-square shape, squat and objectively Cute, and then back at Aziraphale.

Whatever it was – and whatever a housewarming gift was – it could wait.

“We’re not neighbours,” she said flatly, crossing her arms across her chest and hitting him with a Hard Stare. “So why are you here?”

Aziraphale frowned and fluttered a little, flustered. He seemed to be having trouble finding his tongue in his own mouth, or perhaps it was just the words that were evading him. “Well, I, oh, well I suppose I wanted to talk to you.”

Now that made no sense whatsoever. Admittedly, most things Aziraphale did made no sense to Beelzebub in general, but this one seemed stranger than usual.

“You wanted to talk to me,” she repeated slowly, watching as the angel nodded and said, ‘oh yes’ in an oddly decisive tone. “We don’t really have anything to talk about.”

The only thing they had in common was Gabriel and if Aziraphale wanted to talk about Gabriel, she didn’t see why he wouldn’t simply talk to Gabriel himself – it would be much simpler and Gabriel wasn’t the type to bite. She wasn’t sure if he was really capable of anger, at least not in the way she would think of anger. He just… floated along, like a ship on a calm sea; that was exactly the kind of person you could Talk To About Things.

It helped that he also had the Aura Of Heavenly Wisdom thing down pat. Even when what he said was abject nonsense. Which was rare, but still occasional enough for humour.

“I just thought it’s been a while since we all saw each other and it would be good to catch up,” Aziraphale rushed out in a burst, twisting his hands together like a scolded child, and Beelzebub had a horrible, awful, sinking sort of feeling – surging and slick – that she knew what this was about.

Small talk. Fuck.

The nervousness made sense. He must think she was about to feed him to the flies. Literally.

She couldn’t deny that she was considering it either.

(Unfortunately – though Aziraphale would likely disagree with her assessment – she suspected Gabriel wouldn’t much like it if she left his one-time subordinate and rescuer a pile of picked-clean ghost-white bones.

Fuck it all again.

Shame really.)

When Gabriel found her, she was still there: sitting haphazardly on one of the chairs they’d formed out of a pile of stubbly rocks – it was a big thing, this one, high-backed and with long arms so she felt enthroned, and her favourite – staring at the stupid box with its multicoloured spotted paper.

“Bub?” Gabriel asked, his smile falling into a frown as he came over. He had discarded the clothes they’d been wearing when they left Earth those months ago and swapped on instead a navy blue-ish suit with shining silver buttons.

He had turned out to be surprisingly fussy about tailoring. It had been an endearing discovery.

“Aziraphale came by,” she said, looking up at him – he was annoyingly tall when she was sitting down, it made her neck hurt to do it for too long.

“Ah,” Gabriel made a noise and nodded twice, a bobbing thing that seemed more to be confirming something to himself than to her. Lingering standing, he pointed, “I assume that explains the box?”

“A house-warming gift, apparently,” she shrugged, holding out a hand so one of her flies could land on her fingernail, its compound eyes darting about here and there squared. “Whatever that is.”

Gabriel approached the box, examining it from all angles and sides, before settling down in front of the low-cast table, crossing his legs in the lotus position and plucking the box up. “I believe – and I may be wrong, human studies is not my area of speciality – that a house-warming gift is something humans give each other when they move into a new house, to celebrate it.”

Huh, she considered that. It didn’t make much more sense than before – was moving into a new house something especially exciting for humans? She’d moved into a cacophony of different bodies over the years and had never celebrated any of those, but she supposed perhaps a house was a little different.

That, or humans were just strange. Which was also a possibility.

Carefully taking hold of the end of the ribbon, Gabriel tugged it gently free until it unfurled into his lap. Then, he set it down and frowned again.

“Do you think the paper is part of the gift?” he asked, glancing over to her and she shrugged again.

“Don’t know,” she said. “Give it to me and I’ll find out.”

He passed it over to her with both hands, as though it were precious, and she glared at it up close. There were lines of tape, perfectly placed over the folds in the paper, holding it sealed but a loose bump near a corner where she could just slip a small nail underneath and rip it open.

Gabriel gave a little involuntary sort of noise.

“It’s fine,” she shook her head at him, but it was hard not to be, well, fond at the same time. “The paper’s nothing – there’s a box underneath.” She shook it a bit. “There’s something in it.”

She handed it back to Gabriel, who was encircled by curling shreds of wrapping paper floating at ankle-height, their little spots of various colours bright against the white of the paper. The box itself was a plain, sturdy brown thing, blank of any words or symbols or characters. Not even a squiggle.

Peeling off the tape sealing the box shut, Gabriel opened the lid and pulled out a pair of tiny china mandarin ducks. Their little bills were painted a sweet cherry red and their distinctive colours – the flashing blue-green on their wings and the purple body of their breasts – were bold splashes among tiny flecks of black and white. They were delicate things, absurdly precious and out of place on the surface of the star; Gabriel placed them with an exaggerated slowness onto the table, and they stayed, almost beak-to-beak and unblinking.

“There’s a hole in one of them,” he said, after a long moment in which they both contemplated the ducks. “And look, in the other, there’s a whole set of holes in some sort of pattern. It must mean something.”

“It could be some kind of code,” she offered, sitting up straighter and squinting at the box with a bit more interest now. Odd little china ducks were not really her forte – but codes and secret languages, ritual items and incantations were much more her kind of thing.

“I suspect not,” Gabriel replied, brushing a finger over the head of one of the little ducks. “Aziraphale was never much hat at codes – perhaps he just thinks they’re sweet.”

“Sweet,” she repeated dubiously.

“Mm,” he confirmed, and it was more the gentle sort of contentment that seemed to be radiating out of him as he petted a china figurine than the ducks themselves which meant that the ducks stayed.

Beelzebub spent roughly one hundred and thirty-four hours, seventeen minutes and six and a half seconds, give or take eight microseconds, contemplating the ducks, running her mind through a stream of different codes and codex, shorthand, every language on Earth and Above and Below, a handful of secret languages and several dead ones and came up with squat.

No message. Or, if there was, she couldn’t read it.

So, no message.

(The ducks had remained where Gabriel had placed them the whole time. Occasionally, she would see him brushing the tops of their heads and along their painted backs. ‘You’re meant to dust them’, he had told her when she caught him once, and she had been so confused she’d just nodded and watched him surreptitiously all the same.)

(He had caught her too, in her attempt to decipher them, when she had been commanding them by force to Yield Up Their Secrets. ‘You can always ask Aziraphale when he comes back’, he had said and there had been something so remarkable and so discombobulating about the way he was trying to soothe her – and, privately, secretly, the way he was succeeding – that she didn’t really give the phrase the proper consideration.

In hindsight, this was an error.)

The knock this time was less concerning – though no less irritating, and Beelzebub found Aziraphale by the archway, gazing up at it with his little round hat in his hands. He smiled at her though when he saw her and it was less fearful and twitchy than before which was a disappointing way to progress.

He had, though, flinched to see if she had the black jade sword out again and the flash of relief had been gratifying enough.

“I brought you this,” he said, once they’d made their way to the sitting room type area and Beelzebub had settled in her favourite chair, leaving Aziraphale to perch awkwardly on a chaise longue opposite. Out of a pocket, he pulled a smooth rosewood box, a kaleidoscope of different scents arising from it. “It’s tea – all different types, Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Silver Needle, Hibiscus, Chrysanthemum, lemon tea – I wasn’t sure which you would prefer, or, well, if you had a preference at all, so I thought a combined box would be, ah, a better gift.”

He put it on the table, pushing it into the centre and then clambered back to his seat. It reminded her of the old worshippers, back when the world had been young – and she and Gabriel and Aziraphale too had been young – the way they would kneel and bow and offer up gifts on flat stone altars.

“What do you want?” she asked. The worshippers had always wanted something; as an exchange, this was simple and familiar. Nostalgic in a way that was sweet.

“I just wanted to see how you two were getting on, make sure that no one unwanted had been by,” Aziraphale said, his voice pressed even. She could see the emotion bubbling underneath the surface. For an angel, he was very noisy: his feelings rocketed wilder and wider than any other angel she’d met before.

If Gabriel was a calm sea, Aziraphale was a lake in the hours before a storm.

“I mean, that is, no one uninvited,” Aziraphale amended hastily. “No one unseemly – no, that’s not quite right either – no one… well, you know what I mean: that no one from anywhere else has come by to, you know, round either of you up.”

It was a pathetic excuse, really: if anyone from anywhere else had, as he said, come by to round either of them up, they’d send an army with swords and trumpets and crackling halos, not an emissary who bothered to knock.

“But why are you here?” she asked again, waving a hand to indicate – the room (of sorts), the star, she wasn’t quite sure. But she still didn’t really understand and she hated, hated-hated-hated, not understanding things.

A buzzing sounded next to her head and she blinked to look down through compounded eyes at a kaleidoscope of Aziraphales, their curled white hair bobbing in each lens.

“It’s just,” he paused, and he had collapsed into something a little defeated and dulled. Almost desolate, but that required a certain understated dramatic flair. “All everyone else wants to talk to me about it this, well, the next Phase, shall we say, and it’s really quite nice to not talk about it, even if not for very long. And I know you don’t understand exactly, but you do understand enough of something like it and, well, outside opinions can be very helpful.”

“Wouldn’t you rather talk to Gabriel?” she said – and she thought suddenly that she hadn’t seen him since earlier that morning. He’d told her he was going to go and swim in one of the pools on Pluto, but that had been a while ago and it took him a blink of an eye to get there and back.

“Oh no, no, thank you,” Aziraphale shook his head a bit, alarmed. “I wouldn’t want to trouble him. Besides,” he added, and this was accompanied by his face twisting between guilt and something a child would think was shifty. “I find that the best outside perspectives are the ones, ah, from, um, furthest away, if you know what I mean.”

She did – and really, his attempts at being furtive and conspiratorial were enough to make her laugh – but the tickle of humour in her head didn’t negate the fact that there was an elephant in the room which was currently trumpeting in Aziraphale’s ear. Loudly.

“Don’t you bother Crowley with this shit?” she asked, and that – that did it. It was a minute thing, but a swallow in the throat and a pinch in the mouth and a spike of something in his eyes.

Ah. That made unfortunate, unforgiveable, damnable sense.

Fucking fuckety shit.

“Crowley and I,” he stopped and cleared his throat a bit. “Crowley and I have both been quite occupied of late so we haven’t had the time.”

No, seriously: fucking FUCKING fuckety shit.

Canaan had been a beautiful land: packed with everything, from rocky outcrops and tall, ragged hills, to rolling, lush-green plains and sandy beaches stretched out against the rush of the sea. The seasons had turned it from one thing to the next, recarpeting it each time in a different palate of colours – the verdant greens of summer fading into the rich reds and oranges of autumn giving way to the desolate pristine blues and browns of winter bursting into the speckled green-and-yellow-and-whites of spring again and again and again.

It was a tireless place; she was tireless, then, gloried and exulted and filled to the brim with it.

She had been Baal then, a god in himself, calling thousands to his temples and under his banner. They had built statues of him and her in their same tall, conical crown. They had built her naked slaying demons with a long, iron-tipped spear, and him sitting on his throne in state, dressed in jewels and fine clothes which covered his chest and fell to his ankles.

There had been gardens in Ekron then, her city of cities where she had been king of kings and god of gods, Baal’zebul Lord of the Heavens: he had had fig trees and orchards of lemon trees, slaves bringing bowls of fruit to set at his feet between braziers of thick-scented fire for his flies to ravage and rip clean.

They had prayed for the usual things – humans had never really changed: for health, for foresight, for luck, for love, for success, for blood.

He had given them everything and they had given him crumbs of it back, feeding him until he had swollen with power, his body then wrecked with it, the force of holding the meat and the bones together as he wore it out relentlessly, recklessly, wildly.

Ekron had been destroyed, in the end.

He had burned in the orchards along with the city, the sour sting of the lemons scenting the flames, an odd base note to the smoke and the stench of seared flesh. He had burned and screamed defiance again and summoning the rains to stutter the fires, but it was a desperate, doomed endeavour, and he had seen at the last a tall smudge of gleaming silver-blue, white wings outstretched on a hill, looking Down.

They don’t talk about the past, but the melancholy – unusual and irritating and itchy – settled on her shoulders and she sat on the ground before the box of tea, waiting for Gabriel to come. Settling next to her, he looked at the scorch mark smudged into the table and reached out to take her hand.

He didn’t say anything, but what could he say?

The day after, she woke up to find that the table had been changed, shaped so that it stood on scroll-curved legs with a polished, wood-fake top; it looked like something out of Versailles at the height of the Sun King’s reign rather than an ancient altar to a long-gone god, and she spent three hundred and eight-six minutes, forty-three seconds spinning a lemon tree out of the dust and the dirt and a tiny fragment of lemon tea that had somehow escaped.

It took Aziraphale until the sixth visit to fuck it all up. Honestly, she was surprised it had taken him that long to do it – he seemed especially adept at fuck ups for an angel, but he had spent eons in Crowley’s company, so it was probably their influence rubbing off on him.

By this point, he had started coming nearly every other day. As though they were actually neighbours.

(There was a pattern to it, she had realised, a simple sort of algorithm which clicked and spun and reordered itself in her mind until it sat, neat and proud, in her head in a parade of numbers and she thought, emphatically, fuck I hope not.

So far, Not So Good.)

This sixth visit – on Friday 4^th August 2023 at forty-two minutes past two in the afternoon, she knew, in that Ineffable way of Knowing Things – had been unusual from the start.

She had been walking with Gabriel on the far side of the star, fingers laced through his and just, well, just walking nowhere and talking about nothing (literally nothing; there was always a song strung between them in the silences), when the knock sounded again: one and-two three. Before she could complain or even roll her eyes, Gabriel twitched, and said,

“I, ahem,” he cleared his throat with the sense of a person doing it for the first time because they thought they ought to. Probably it was the first time and he did feel he ought to. “Am late to see the Perseid meteor shower. I’ll bring you back some meteor dust and sparklers – won’t be long!”

And then, literally, poofed out of sight in a spatter of glitter-dust.

Beelzebub considered that to be very rude and was torn between a fond sort of pride that perhaps he was learning things from her – corruption and a mad descent and all that – and an annoyance that he was being rude to her and that all merged into a warm sort of glow in her chest which didn’t match at all that day’s weather (a shade cold at 8,436 Kelvin) and was really very confusing.

She was being confused a lot recently. It was rude.

Still, for reasons Entirely Unknowable and Unfathomable, she went to meet Aziraphale again, who had brought yet another gift and the book of Persian poetry (the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, who she had a vague sense she’d met Once Upon A Time) was added to the fruit bowl, the plush rug, the koala-shaped cushion, and the solid silver gravy boat (she’d checked and nearly broken her teeth on it).

The salt and pepper shakers – she’d sent a fly to Earth for a cursory reconnaissance mission to uncover their True Purpose – were still on the table, next to the fruit bowl (now featuring a selection of entirely inedible but appropriately yellow lemons from the ever-expanding orchard).

“If you don’t mind,” Aziraphale said, quieter and hesitant and practically vibrating off the chaise longue with a hummingbird anxiety. “I would like to ask you something, well,” he hesitated again and she glared at him. He blanched and stuttered, “Well, you see, it’s, well, something Delicate.”

He pronounced it with the capital D too – Delicate.

“Just get on with it,” she bit out at him – she wanted, really, to go and find Gabriel by the Perseid shower, to slink through the comets with him and catch falling drops of stardust. And ask him why the fuck he had run away as soon as Aziraphale arrived, abandoning her to this tedious tedium.

See, she was so bored she was repeating herself.

“I had some questions about demons,” Aziraphale said carefully. “And, well, Certain Feelings.”

He blinked at her like a lamb and she glared back in horror.

Oh no. Oh fuck.

Beelzebub wondered if this was the Ineffable Lord’s newest method of torture. She could feel the creeping humiliation inching up the whole of this body, lava stealing its way down a hillside, growing faster and hotter and greedy to swallow her whole.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had wanted so fervently to be wrong. (Being wrong was, after all, rude of other people and so it happened very rarely.)

“I have grown concerned that, ah,” Aziraphale closed his eyes for a moment and there was a pink-dust blush on his cheeks. It was a rushed surge of bravery that sprung into being from whichever creepy-crawly place it had been hiding. “I am having some Feelings that may suggest I am at risk of, well, Falling.”

The list of things Beelzebub would rather do than have this conversation was quite extensive, involving various excruciating methods of torture and many things completely unmentionable, and included terrors like attending a happy Christmas lunch, blowing party poppers, and suggesting to Lucifer that shoulder-pads had long gone out of fashion for the stylish demonic prince.

“Shit a brick,” she said faintly.

“Oh yes, ha, not quite what I thought, but, I suppose, similar enough,” Aziraphale trailed off and glanced at the ground, clipping his heels together as he sat, pinched straight and looking oddly huddled together by himself. “I just wondered if perhaps you had, well, any advice on how to handle, er, It – the, ah, Feelings that is, not the Falling – I really wouldn’t want that, although undoubtedly Some People would be delighted by the thought –”

Some People, Beelzebub had deduced pretty early on, somehow always referred to Crowley, just without their name or anything else. Aziraphale had a tendency to use it like a title: pushing a heaviness onto it, a Weight and a Significance.

She approved. Every demon needed a good title. Some People was admittedly a bit of a limp start but it’d do until Crowley could work their way back up to something better. Something a bit more demonic.

It was, however, only a minor distraction from the main issue at hand, being the Delicate Feelings Aziraphale for some reason thought Beelzebub could help with.

“What do you mean, advice on handling It?” she asked, after a silence that had been long enough and thick enough to turn milk into cheese.

Or, indeed, water into wine if one were so inclined. Which at the moment, she was feeling very, very inclined – but for something stronger than wine. Absinthe might do, or that horribly nasty fireball stuff Asmodeus had brought Down from Earth once. Had the lesser demons belching flames at each other for weeks until his whole palace had been a mass of half-melted demons stumbling into pillars and jabbing each other’s blisters so they burst.

“I – well, I don’t want to assume, but you’re, you know,” Aziraphale was beginning to look spooked, which would normally be a comforting twist in their conversations but today that was a little boat bobbing away from her on the ocean of torment she was stuck in. “A demon, so you Fell and you have an Understanding of Certain, well, Feelings. Especially,” he added as an afterthought, and this, this was the moment she thought about dragging the Antichrist back from whatever sweetly wholesome place he’d ended up, surrounded by friends and family and a happy, yapping dog, and forcing him to blow the entire cosmos to ashes. “Considering, you know,” he gestured with a vague waft. “Him.”

“Him.” She stared. She was doing a lot of staring in this conversation.

“You know,” Aziraphale shifted in his chair, looking almost despairing and decidedly pink. “Him. Gabriel.”

The Fireworks Galaxy is known for its bright, blaze of colours in a myriad of pinks and purples and blues, fluttering and shuttering from one to the other, incandescent and dancing; like a Catherine wheel it spins but slow, drifting through a tumbling, bumbling sort of turn, full of light and heat and a hundred hundred supernovas, yellow and red and flashing fierce.

If scientists had been observing the sky closely that night, they would have seen that the star Danab, in the constellation Cygnus, stationed as it was in the Fireworks Galaxy, winked at them for half a second, give or take three microseconds.

Then, it blazed a searing, cold-hot obsidian-black-jade-silver-mint-blue, and buzzed like a thunderstorm in a hail of glittering, honeycomb eyes in a hum that shook all the way down to a bump of dome-topped observatories on Earth.

The finest minds in the world would have been baffled, scratching their heads and furiously noting down the new phenomena, frantically calling colleagues-and-rivals in Zijinshan and Gemini and Mauna Kea to ask if they also saw the thing and what could it possibly mean, no it couldn’t be a black hole, but what could it be then?

It would have spawned eight scientific papers, four conspiracy theories, three of which were alien-based, and a hit TV show starring Timothée Chalamet and Jisoo from Blackpink.

As it happened, there was a very excellent pub quiz on that evening which most of the scientists were busy attending in various avatars of drunkenness; of those who hadn’t gone, two had eloped with each other in Las Vegas, five were asleep (two at the quiz, where they were providing valuable support as sources of pens, tissues, and funds to pay for more shots), and one was stuck on the toilet with an unfortunately extensive bout of diarrhoea, so it went unnoticed.

A shame because the tv show really would have been very, very good; the theme song would have become one of those horrible little earworms everyone sings over and over again until everyone hates it almost as much as they loved it in the first place, like Let It Go from Frozen.

Gabriel did bring back the stardust for Beelzebub, but as she’d forgotten all about it, he kept it in a pouch in his suit pocket, the one on the inside of the jacket, and waited.

Five days later, there was a different knock. This one was timid, a quick one-two-three that apologised for the sound even as it made it.

When Beelzebub formed by the archway, brooding and baleful and glaring again, the angel waiting there flinched and took a stuttered step back, her face blanched milk-white – almost as white as the ruffled blouse and tight pencil skirt she was wearing.

“L-l-lord B-beelzeb-bub,” the angel swallowed, the gift bag in her hands – mint-green with curlicue gold writing and a white-wound string – rattling about as her hands shook like a bush in a storm. “G-g-good morning, are you w-well?”

This one, Beelzebub decided, was substantially less annoying than Aziraphale. At least she was appropriately terrified. It had been a long time since she’d reduced someone to quite that state of a shivering wreck and there was a comfort in seeing it again.

“Who are you and what do you want?” she asked, adding a flourishing bare of her teeth just for emphasis, hearing the gentle buzz of her flies – eight of them today and growing fat on the Really Very Inedible lemons the orchard kept producing – behind her as they darted about in fidgety excitement. They had an unfortunate taste for visitors.

The angel closed her eyes, pulled her shoulders square and recited, “My name is Muriel and I am here to present Lord Beelzebub and the former Archangel Gabriel with a gift from Aziraphale and pray that they accept this gift as his apology for any and all offence he caused during his last visit.”

She opened her eyes, blinked and asked, anxiously, “Did I say all of it? Did I do it alright, do you think? He was very specific about the wording but I’m not very good with that sort of thing.”

“No kidding,” Beelzebub said flatly.

“Thank you, your Lordshipness,” Muriel beamed, a sunny sort of thing which lit her up – almost literally. “Oh, here,” she added, holding out the bag with both hands.

Beelzebub reached out to take it and Muriel twitched, saying quickly ‘oh, sorry’ and adjusting her hands so that she proffered the bag with both hands underneath the bottom of it, the bag wobbling dangerously on top of her palms.

“There,” Muriel breathed a sigh of relief and smiled again once Beelzebub had taken the bag by its little white cord. “So should I inform Aziraphale that you’ve accepted his apology?”

Beelzebub, the former god Baal and all his varied aspects, one-time Lord of all the Heavens, Demonic Prince of Envy and Pride and Icons, previously one-third of the Triumvirate of Hell, considered it for one-and-a-quarter seconds precisely, and then said,

“No.”

The gift turned out to be a large box of chocolates, packed with thin slivers of translucent paper between each layer – four of them. There were chocolates in every shape (circles, squares, rectangles, little miniatures domes, even a triangle and a solid round ball and a neat chocolate star), every size (from slabs of chocolate big enough to write a whole shopping list of commandments on to teeny, tiny little flecks of chocolate sprayed silver and gold like edible confetti) and every flavour (the miniature menu provided, in writing you had to squint to read, a taste journey like nothing you’ve had before which was, at least for Beelzebub and Gabriel, very true indeed, neither of them being much at all in the way of food and drink).

The flies claimed the chocolates were edible, but the flies claimed lots of things were edible which weren’t and many things weren’t which were, so they were hardly a good barometer for the Edibility of a thing.

“Took you long enough,” Crowley was leaning on the archway, their legs crossed at a piratical angle. A little way away the Bentley sat in a heap of slowly steaming black-painted metal, the engine vibrating with a loud hum.

Cars don’t do well on stars, it’s not their natural habitat.

“Get rid of the car,” Beelzebub said flatly. “It’s annoying the flies.”

“Ah Lord Beelzebub,” Crowley pushed themself off the archway and flopped into a sarcastic bow. “Your Malevolence, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Disappointed I wasn’t the first to get an invitation and all – I thought I was your favourite.”

They were grinning that tongue-between-the-teeth grin that hissed half cheeky and half vicious.

“Oh, a little birdy told me I’m supposed to bring gifts apparently,” they added, pulling from nowhere a bottle of Fireball Whisky Liqueur, the yellow-and-red label bringing back a hazy, haphazard sort of memory of a too-tall wooden table and Asmodeus, their long hair plaited down their back and still in pyjamas patterned with pawprints, pouring out line after line of shots.

The bottle had never emptied. For four days and four nights, it had stayed mostly-but-not-completely-full.

“So shall we open it up and have a taste?” Crowley grinned. “Find your angel too, let’s make this a party!”

Karaoke was meant to be terrible. That was the whole point. It was not meant to be sung by a former archangel with perfect pitch and a beautiful soulful tone, somehow conjuring a host of echoed voices in a swell behind his own.

Thankfully, Crowley was always happy to participate in karaoke and they were, to put it mildly, really fucking shit.

Like, cut-your-own-ears-off-and-burn-them-for-good-measure shit.

Beelzebub lay curled on the sofa, hugging a mug – Crowley had conjured shot glasses from nowhere at the beginning, but she’d long ago given up on them – and gazing through sleep-stuck eyes up at them, Crowley’s dark glasses and red hair a wild smudge next to the solid smooth of Gabriel, his head framed in a soft glow against the stars, glittering purple-pink and dipping like twilight.

The taste of cinnamon lingered on the tip of her tongue, the thick burn of alcohol trailing hot down to her stomach and she thought absently that this was, all things considered, A Bit More Fun than Asmodeus’ parties.

Fun fact: angels do not get hangovers.

Less fun fact: demons do. Something to do with just desserts or something equally as petty.

The morning after and Crowley was sprawled across the chaise longue, their shirt buttoned haphazardly and their dark glasses missing somewhere ineffable, sipping from a quaintly old-fashioned china teacup, when Beelzebub made her way through their House That Isn’t A House (houses have doors and walls and roofs and things; their place didn’t have any of those things, really, when the walls led nowhere and the rooms were open to the sky and the star-spotted view), her head fuzzy and her body lazy.

She would much rather be sleeping, but Gabriel was already up and she didn’t really trust him to keep an eye on Crowley. He was too trusting, he’d believe whatever rubbish Crowley spouted about This or That or Another Thing. Their tongue had always been forked and Once Upon A Time that was a source of great glee for her, but now, now she had a Gabriel and things were Very Different.

“Good morning,” Crowley drawled, their voice rough and a little cracked but not nearly as bad as she’d hoped.

Oh well, she supposed you couldn’t have everything. Regretfully.

“I have to say,” they continued. “Your archangel makes a terrible cup of tea. Truly, honestly, totally shit. It’s completely undrinkable.”

And yet, she noted, they kept sipping it.

“Why are you here?” she asked, biting down the temptation to ask where Gabriel was. She did and didn’t want to hear them say ‘your archangel’ again. It did horrible, queasy sorts of things to her stomach and the things it did to her chest were more alarming than anything – a horribly human jolting.

“Have you thought about getting a doorbell?” Crowley asked, sipping the tea with a grimace and sucking in through their teeth. “Gods this is shit – but you should think about it. Much more fun to irritate the neighbours by relentlessly hammering the doorbell over and over again.”

She glared, her head lanced through with an ache.

“I’m just saying,” Crowley grinned, their snake-slit eyes glimmering liquid lime-green as they glanced up from where they were scrabbling about at the ground for their glasses. “Doorbells allow for some entertaining low-level mischief, that’s all. And they’re useful too – apparently.”

Beelzebub Glared, and this time it stopped the dust in mid-air, slipped mist over the nearby suns and the temperature plummeted to 8,127 Kelvin.

“It’s a bit chilly, isn’t it?” Gabriel’s voice emerged from behind one of the Room Divider-Walls. He was spotless: dressed out in a neat soft rain-blue, the long coatigan thing reminiscent of the robes of Yesteryear. For all he’d drunk A Lot the night before, there was no trace of it in him now – he was simply Exactly The Same As Always. “I wonder if it could snow here.”

“Now there’s a question,” Crowley pointed their teacup at him. They had, it seemed, given up on finding the glasses, which were nowhere to be found. “Can it snow on a star? A new philosophical quandary.”

“Oh, not really,” Gabriel said absently, sliding his hands into his pockets and gazing skywards as though searching the heavens for a glimpse of a single, tumbling snowflake, all sugar-paste and fragility. “Where a star has the right atmospheric conditions for water it can certainly have snow – that it simply a question of temperature, though the exact components of the atmosphere would determine which type of snow, given that water snow, true snow, and dry-ice snow all require different elements to combine in –”

Crowley groaned, clinking their teacup on its saucer, cradled in their arm like a baby. The groan was less a groan and a little more of a yowl, like a cat that’s been kicked. “It’s like being back in those seminars at The Beginning – all those endless meetings on Design and Aesthetics. Endlessly tedious.”

Beelzebub sneaked a glance at Gabriel – she wasn’t sure why she was sneaking, as such, but nonetheless – to see that he was smiling, a small, amused thing that played around his mouth and set his face soft.

Her chest hurt. Fuck.

“Aesthetics are highly important,” Gabriel replied gently, whimsically. “Even to demons, otherwise no doubt Down Under would have much less of a colour scheme than I have heard it does.”

“Angels,” Crowley wagged the teacup at him in a fake threat. “Are not meant to be logical.”

“Ah, I apologise,” Gabriel said – and was, was he being glib? Beelzebub felt disoriented and not because of the lingering, spiking migraine and the tickle of vomit on the back of her tongue. “I will try to remember not to be logical in the future.”

Beelzebub glared at a patch of dust-strewn earth for good measure. So far this day had been pleasant – convivial and funny and nice – and it was starting to edge more uncomfortable than she could really take.

Wonderfully, sweetly, happily uncomfortable. Ugh.

“Right,” Crowley seemed to catch on – they had always had a decent sense of self-preservation, to be fair to them; better than Aziraphale at least, who seemed to think that morals trumped everything else like a sixteenth century martyr. “I’ll head off back to the bookshop, and leave you two to –” they waved a hand and it was so like Aziraphale only sharper and more dramatic. “I dunno, hold hands and moon about, whatever it is you two kids get up to, eh?”

Beezlebub considered, irrational and spiked, condemning them to the centre of a black hole.

Their tongue pressed behind their teeth when they grinned and Gabriel nodded politely.

“Would you like me to show you out?” he offered.

Crowley shook their head, a wisp of grey-cast smoke twisting from nowhere into another pair of glasses. “Nah, I can find my way out – big, carved archway, can’t miss it.” And they grinned.

They wandered off, whistling some tune or another – it was a merry, bouncing sort of thing – and Beelzebub saw the dip in Gabriel’s smile, a flicker of the melancholy she remembered from earlier days and nights on the star, before she’d fostered her orchard from half-forgotten memories.

Slipping over to him, she hesitated for a moment, a twist of something nervous and proud in her stomach, before she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned, awkward, against his chest. They stood like that for a while – a long while – watching the stars overhead, Gabriel’s fingers looped together around Beelzebub, until something of it came to conclusion of sorts in his head.

“It was good,” he said quietly, and there was no trace of melancholy now, only a wistfulness and a regret that carried a weight of years. Hundreds and thousands of years. “In The Beginning – before Everything After.”

In The Beginning, there was nothing. Nothing but a lot of work – quiet, patient, busy-as-bees work.

Most angels were forming stars out of tiny, miniscule atoms, crowding them together until they crashed into a star that glowed hot-hot-hot and gleamed from far away; some, a Select Few, were working on something Bigger, something Better, and something Extremely Top Secret.

Samael was spinning a Great Star, blazing white-yellow and settled in the centre of Everything; Michael was working on a little pet project of their own, a red-rust planet that evoked a sense of something fierce and fiery. There were others there, too – adding moons when directed and tiny comets as finishing touches, setting in motion things that would take thousands and millions of years to pass and then only for a moment’s breathtaking beauty – and, closest to Samael but not too close, Gabriel and Beelzebub.

She hadn’t been Beelzebub then, of course, but it had been so long ago that her name was long forgotten, lost somewhere in Time.

She had hovered, her six wings shining a bright, metallic copper-red, in the empty space that lay between where Samael, their white-curled hair brushing about their shoulders, was focusing, gathering and gathering and gathering to build the Sun, and the marker for where one of them, gloried and honoured, would build Earth.

Far back towards the edge of this secret, closed-curtains corner of Everything, she could hear Uriel and Raphael whispering as they worked in-tandem-and-not on their planets, leaving Zerachiel humming alone as she threaded a planet smaller than the rest, scarcely bigger than a large asteroid.

A study in form, she called it when she had finished, setting it aglow so it glittered like marble, dusted with white snow-sugar over blended blue and russet.

Beelzebub hovered there and she thought of Light and Laughter and the sound of Music, a fuzzing warmth and a deep breath in and a gentle hug and a sense of wonder and mystery and the sensation of smooth over skin and – and she raised her hands and started spinning.

Venus when she finished was yellow, spotted dark and light and awash with cream-white clouds that wound about her body. She was neither the biggest nor the smallest nor trussed up in fanciful rings like Ramiel’s Saturn; she was hot enough for steam and mist but she would never, ever have snow, and she shone bright, brighter than all the rest except the Sun (because Samael was best at the glorious things).

She would be seen from Earth – that Beelzebub was certain of.

She finished it, critical and punctuating it with a nod to say, Finished, and noticed that she – Venus – they had been being watched.

Next to her, Gabriel smiled, his lower wings brushing the edges of his feet as his planet, still a Work In Progress, slowly spun from this into that and this again; occasionally he would frown, she saw, and wipe a layer of something – blue or green or purple or once, a flash of orange that was there for only a heartbeat before he wrinkled his nose and unwrote it – away again.

He glanced over at her Venus, watching as she spun it about, admiring the way it faded in and out, the amber-yellow of it as the cloud-mist formed and reformed and twisted itself into something new time and time again, and she noticed the way he considered the colours, lingering on the flash of it, paler than gold and soaring, and turned back to his little planet.

With a flourish that was so understated as to barely be a flourish, Gabriel added a sprinkle of glitter, yellow-gold and dancing, over the body of blues, and Mercury was Created.

Three days after Crowley had left, Aziraphale came by, bringing with him a ‘snazzy’ vase made of coloured glass – “it reminded me of your archway” he had said by way of explanation, which made no sense at all because there was no glass in the archway – which was set on the Louis XIV table next to the salt and pepper shakers, dust-free as always.

He was nervous again, tripping over his tongue whenever Beelzebub huffed, and only settling just before he announced it was time to leave, but there was no mention of Certain Delicate Feelings, the nature of demons in relation to Certain Delicate Feelings, or other difficult and emotionally mature topics.

“It is hard, of course,” he had at one point, musing mostly to himself in a way that made Beelzebub feel more like she should have a notebook and a pencil and wondering if she could remember which one of her former brethren had inspired Freud.

It would be an easy solution, wouldn’t it: all of your problems revolve around you wanting to fuck your father.

Only in this case, the problem was quite clearly that Aziraphale wanted to fuck Crowley. Or was starting to and wasn’t sure how to. Or whatever. She was trying hard not to know.

“All of this, ah, stuff,” Aziraphale continued, gently, bravely morose. He sounded like she ought to know what he was talking about but she didn’t and didn’t bother to ask for enlightenment. Too much effort. “But, as the humans say, when life gives you lemons.”

She frowned, as she finished his tea, thanking Gabriel very politely without a hint of a lie in his voice or face – a skill, really, she would have to learn – and made his way towards the archway, hat in his hands.

“What comes after?” she asked, a little loud – and she curled a smile about her teeth when he flinched, spinning around and dropping a hand over his heart as he heaved a gasp.

Dramatic – so like Crowley, in his own way.

“Gracious me,” he breathed. “What do you mean, what comes after?”

“When life gives you lemons,” she repeated. “What?”

His face cleared and he nodded, as though she had said something wise. “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Four days later, Muriel dropped off (quite literally: she was trying to hand it to Beelzebub but her hands shook so badly it thumped on the ground between them, pages bent and crooked and asunder and she had turned so pale Beelzebub thought she’d pass for a vampire (now that had been fun back in the 1400s: flitting about from here to there in a wash of dark mist, all red-flecked eyes and pointy teeth – proper demon’s night out)) a book all about making things with lemons.

There were lemon-flavoured cakes, biscuits, breads, pastry-type-things that sounded like they should be served with coffee; sauces and little jelly-bodied sweets and smooth, whipped centres to be encased in dark, bitter chocolate.

She read the page about lemonade and snorted. It sounded horrible: bubbly and summer-set and fun.

The page after was titled ‘limoncello’ and the picture showed it served in shot glasses. That, she thought, seemed more promising.

(Appropriately, it took forty days and forty nights.)

“I know you missed me,” Crowley grinned the second time they visited. They were still in their usual black blazer and their favourite slim shirt with the malfunctioning buttons, but they looked, well, peaky. Even for a demon, who traditionally looked a bit peaky – or, as it happened, purple or pimpled or perpetually frowning; on rare occasions, some managed all of the above which was considered quite the feat Down Under.

(This Down Under was not to be confused with the other, more Earthly Down Under. While both were hot, wild, frequently inhospitable and full of things that wanted to kill you, the comparisons didn’t go much further than that. Mostly.)

“Not at all,” Beelzebub said flatly – which was rather undercut by Gabriel, who appeared almost immediately.

“Crowley!” he smiled, and she watched as they shook hands, quick and enthusiastic. It was strange. “We missed you! Come in, come in – I’ll make tea.”

Crowley’s grin slipped off and shattered on the floor. “Oh no, that’s really not necessary,” they deferred hastily – and the note of alarm in their voice was vindictively funny.

“No, no, not at all,” Gabriel assured him, already bustling off in the direction of the kitchen-type-area where the teacups sat on a shelf that lingered in mid-air against a translucent fresco of swirled light, pink-and-dust-orange. “It’ll only take a minute or so!”

“You’ll have to drink it,” Beelzebub told Crowley, casual and light-hearted – the vindictiveness tucked underneath was quiet enough not to be heard. She thought.

They snorted, “Dogs dying of thirst in the Gobi Desert wouldn’t drink it.”

She looked at him, cutting and clear and impatient. “Drink. It.”

Crowley opened their mouth to say something else and Beelzebub elbowed them hard in the gut, neatly slamming into the squishy places of the belly. They doubled over and gasped, a heaving-wheezing thing, and she turned away to lead them through to the lounge, where they sank onto the chaise longue – sitting exactly where Aziraphale traditionally sat (and oh but she hated she now thought of it as where they sat, both of them – how had it come to this?), leaning too far back and resting a hand over their ribs as if for protection.

It was silly, really, she hadn’t cut anyone’s heart out in years and that had never much been her sort of thing anyway.

“You should get more plants,” Crowley said into the silence, as they twisted their head round and round the room. “Not enough greenery here. I can get you some, if you like – hardy little things, spiky and temperamental; Gabriel will love them.”

That was pointed – and she glared, wondering where precisely the nearest black hole was and how much time would she have before Gabriel appeared but –

“One tea,” Gabriel set it down carefully in front of Crowley, who smiled, all teeth, and offered a polite ‘thank you’, sipping at the cup with an exaggerated slurping sound. “You’re welcome – what were you talking about?”

“What?” Crowley avoided Beelzebub’s glare with a practiced ease. “Oh right, I was just saying you should get some more plants here. I have some which I think you’d like, if you want?”

“Oh that would be very kind,” Gabriel seemed genuinely, honestly touched. “I remember how much you value your plants – it’s very generous of you.”

“Not at all,” Crowley grinned, swallowing the last of his tea and setting the teacup back down on the table with a loud clink that had Gabriel flinching. “Now, where’s the real stuff to drink?”

Beelzebub considered that – aware that between them, Gabriel was trying to surreptitiously tilt the teacup up to check for cracks – and then she alighted on a thought and nearly, nearly smiled.

“I have some limoncello,” she offered, ignoring the slightly disapproving look Gabriel was giving her.

“Perfect,” Crowley grinned, waving a hand. “Crack it open and let’s get on with it!”

She graciously allowed Crowley the first sip.

They choked. “It’s rat piss!”

Then, hissing through their teeth, they downed the shot in one.

In the Small Hours of the not-really-a-day-as-such on the star, once half the bottle had been drunk and the sticky sweetness of it had lulled them all somewhat soft and sleepy, Beelzebub remembered something important.

“What do you want?” she asked, feeling Gabriel’s fingertips drawing circles, light and warm, on her shoulder as she sat against his side, decidedly not curled up or nestled in or anything stupid. Simply next to him.

“Hmm?” Crowley was drowsy with a Cheshire-cat-smile and she thought that she really should sit down the next day, once the headache had receded, and remind herself of where the next black hole is, density, distance, etc. so that she could have a proper, serious threat in place for next time.

She did not want there to be a next time, but something about it felt inevitable.

(It was difficult to pin down a pattern with Crowley. Partly because Crowley was impetuous and whimsical and driven by random bursts of fancy, but mostly because they were an impossible twat.

Still, there would be one, if she looked hard enough. She’d find it – it would just take some time, and some patience. Given that she had time and Gabriel had patience, she was sure it would happen.

Eventually.)

“You’ve been here twice, Making Conversation,” she elaborated. “What do you want?”

“Nothing much really,” Crowley shrugged, turning back to gazing up at the sky, dark glasses still on, and one arm tucked under their head. “Although –” seriously, black holes. Sooner rather than later. A necessity.

“When you were, you know, Lord of Down Under,” they said – and she corrected, idly, proudly, “Prince.”

“Yes,” they agreed quickly – too quickly. “Prince of Down Under, you were in charge of jealousy, right?”

Oh no. Oh shit, oh fuck, oh no.

She could see where he was going with this and she didn’t like it at all. Suddenly, she was extremely aware of Gabriel next to her, the warmth of his shoulder under her head and the line where her body met his and the fact, more than anything, that he was listening to this too.

She glared at Crowley but she couldn’t focus enough to turn it into a Glare which would set the whole star to shudder.

Gabriel’s fingertips on her shoulder were really very, very distracting.

“Well, I had a question about that – or, a few questions really,” Crowley said, conversational and idle. There was a distinct lack of tension in their voice and their body which was either proof of rampant stupidity or an arrogance that could shame Lucifer.

Or, of course, both.

“Well,” Crowley amended and she noted, absently, abstractly, that he was lapsing into speaking like Aziraphale – all wells and maybes and perhaps and endless, polite stretching of a sentence into a dozen little component parts. It was infuriating. “Sort of questions for both of you.”

“Questions Should Be Asked,” Gabriel advised and even fogged up with sleep there was a note of something Wise in his voice.

“So,” Crowley swung their legs round, their glasses gleaming in the dim light and they swayed a little where they sat and Beelzebub thought, of course, arrogance and stupidity together – they were drunk, drunker than drunk. “How do you handle it all – all those differences and the history, all those moving parts of things with love and sex and, and friendship? Angels and demons, I’d say it seems impossible but you’ve done it, so how can it work?”

There was a tremor of something, urgent and vibrant and coiling upwards which Beelzebub belatedly recognised as desperate, raw passion.

In her defence, Gabriel had stopped tracing circles on her shoulder and that was more distracting than when he’d been doing it.

If it had been a Miracle that no one either Upstairs or Down Under had noticed Beelzebub’s temper-burst on Aziraphale that first time, the Miracle this time was that neither Beelzebub or Gabriel were thinking enough of anything at all to be able to explode in the same way.

Crowley, wisely, didn’t stick around for after-drink mints or a soothing morning tea.

They ran. Metaphorically, of course, but still.

(They stole the rest of the limoncello. Rat piss it may be, but it was good stuff.)

Overhead, the Orionid meteors were dancing, blazing by in bursts of white-bright light, leaving long dusting trails behind them, blue-purple and shot through with glitter. They were a beautiful sight, delicately cold in their cloud-like puffs and just lingering enough to be tantalising, tempting you to watch and stare up at them, stunned into silence by the vastness of space and impossibility of that vastness.

Whoever had done them had done a good job, she thought.

“Bub?” Gabriel had followed her – she had expected it, really. Perhaps she’d really been waiting for him, sitting here and caught between knowing he’d come and hoping, desperate and nervous, that he wouldn’t.

He sat down next to her and their legs dangled, one two three four, over the edge of the galaxy, swinging gently in the stillness.

It was quiet, the stillness, and comfortable, in the way that a silence and a stillness only can be between two people who know each other well and are comfortable in each other and that silence can be.

“I have Thought about it,” Gabriel said, low and gentle and steady. “And Crowley is wrong.”

Beelzebub risked a glance at him; he was looking out at the meteor shower, face tilted slightly upwards and eyes watching a single meteor as it sped through the universe, crawling across the sky stately and sparkling.

“How are they wrong?” she asked, and a surge of bitterness she hadn’t realised she could taste before sank into her voice. “Angels and demons are different, you know that – more than everybody, you know that.”

“It is not a question,” Gabriel did look at her now, and she looked away. There was something about Gabriel when he was like this – sensible and solemn and serious – that was captivating and commanding in equal measure and she couldn’t quite meet it. Not in this conversation, at least. “Of difference. It is never a question of differences.”

She frowned; wisdom was sometimes frustratingly obtuse. “What isn’t a question of differences?”

“Crowley said love,” Gabriel frowned, and she nodded. “And sex,” she nodded again. “And friendship,” a third nod. “Well, none of those things are ever a question of difference – to be friends is to build something intangible on things in common; sex is a question of pure, physical compatibility; and love –”

He paused, glancing back out at the meteors. She followed him.

“Love is at its heart a question of understanding – a reflection of yourself: the best parts of yourself and the worst and the secret things you’ve never shared before,” he said and his voice was softer, just for her.

She didn’t really know what to say; hesitantly, she inched her hand rightwards until her little finger brushed his. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him smile.

Fuck.

He had always been handsome and had always been known to be handsome – back In The Beginning, when beauty had been so associated with goodness even more so than it still is, it had been understood to be Good and Correct that Samael and Gabriel, the beautiful and the handsome, had been the first and second in line. It had made sense in a blind, obvious kind of way.

Now, though, she was aware that Gabriel was handsome in a way that rang a little deeper, a little more personal – and that, that was uncomfortable but wildly, teeteringly, electrifyingly, comfortably so.

“So,” she began slowly. This felt taboo in some way, to be talking about this and with Gabriel no less. She wasn’t sure she’d ever spoken about it before – what need was there Down Under, where she had been a Prince and a Lord and a God before and no one, no one would say anything, because her and Asmodeus and Lucifer had an unspoken understanding that they propped each other up, not least because it meant pushing other demons down, down, down.

(The truth about the Bro Code is that really, it’s half demonic and half angelic and the question of which half is which is never quite able to be determined.)

“So there is no real template for love,” she said. “No requirements to be met – no, as they say Upstairs, need for a joining of two flesh or marriage or whatever?”

Gabriel considered that for a moment, “I don’t think so, no. Some things simply are as they are.”

Overhead, the meteors sprinkled dust in their wake, spotted clouds of violet and indigo, patched like flowers or ink-in-water, flecked with tiny dashes of yellow where their bodies, packed tight and fierce, burned their way through the atmosphere.

Beelzebub smiled to herself, feeling disoriented and light and absurdly, awfully happy. It was thudding in her chest, setting this body’s heart to jumping, and Gabriel was still there, their hands still touching.

Shifting – she startled him and when he glanced over, she avoided looking at him too long – she swung her legs over his and pushed herself up until she was sitting in his lap, arms locked in a hug around his waist and resting her head sharply on his chest, tucked under his chin.

The kiss Gabriel pressed into her hair was fragile, more than half a smile.

“Aziraphale and Crowley are idiots,” she muttered.

“They’ll work it out,” Gabriel hummed an agreement, but gentler as always.

She snorted, and he said again, amused and echoing with a Certainty, “They Will.”

Later that not-night, with a belly full of tea, she lay staring up at the stars, calm and still and yet so very, very awake. Something about peace made her want to sit and daydream and enjoy it, minute by minute, and so she stayed there, astrological twilight draped over them like a blanket, washed a dark blue-green-black and littered with starlight.

“If I were doing this wrong,” Gabriel’s voice came out of the half-shadowed light, and when she glanced at him, he was frowning, Serious and Solemn with eyes that shone. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you think you’re doing wrong?” Beelzebub asked, turning on her side and feeling the actual blanket, spun out of dust into something light and airy and upsettingly soft, twist around her.

“Crowley said that demons have,” Gabriel swallowed and in the dark she couldn’t see if he was blushing. “Different feelings. So I wondered if I had been missing something out in this.”

She could feel her heart racing and she felt strange once more: there were bubbles in her eyes and an odd feeling in her stomach, lumpy and a little acidic, and she wanted to hug him and hide at the same time.

Perhaps this was why he mentioned it now – for all it wasn’t True Night, the dip of twilight provided a sort of cover overhead; a gentle cloak that made it easier to talk about those secret, unspoken things.

“I’m not Crowley,” she said, and she saw him nod a little bit – but there was still that seriousness, that frown clinging to his face and she wanted it gone, and it was easier then, in the dark, thinking about smoothing it away, to say, “I don’t think we’re missing anything – unless you –”

“No,” Gabriel, the former Archangel, previously the Left Hand of God, interrupted her, quiet and firm and happily hasty. “No, me neither.”

She nodded, aware that she was smiling, smiling in way she hadn’t done for years, smiling in a way she couldn’t stop – didn’t know how to stop – and muttered, “Go to sleep.”

Angels and demons don’t really need to sleep. It’s just nice from time to time. Breaks up the monotony of eternity. Provides a semblance of rhythm.

Also, it’s more fun to dream lying down and in the dark. There are things you can think in the dark which are much bigger and more complicated in the light.

Through the leaves, green and waxy and spiked with yellow veins, the sky beamed down, a star-studded pale, snow-blue which filtered through the canopy in blades of light that buzzed with dust. Under the sky-light, the lemons gleamed a bright-bold yellow, their bodies perfectly oval with their hard, wax-work skins bumped and bobbled beneath her fingertips as she squeezed their sides gently between thumb and forefinger, testing for the ripe ones.

The trees were thicker than before, grown tall in the month or so since planting, blooming with leaves and white-petalled blossom that had fallen in waves of confetti. Some still clung to the branches, stubborn to the last even as their edges browned and curled and withered and the wind tried to pluck them off, coax them off, rip them away.

Behind her, basking in the sunshine with his face turned to the sunshine and his eyes closed, Gabriel held the basket, already half-full.

Beelzebub stretched on her toes, pushing lightly off the ground with the wind lifting her up around the waist so the lemon she was reaching for settled neatly into her hand and tugged free from its spot on the branch.

She glanced back, “I didn’t need the help,” she said, but there was nothing behind it – no heat, no fire. It was simply said for the sake of saying it.

“Of course,” Gabriel said with a little hum of agreement, and when she looked again he had turned slightly, chasing the sun like a tall, smartly-dressed sunflower.

With a shake of her head, she turned back to the tree, reaching for the next lemon – but the sound, thick and quiet, of footsteps stopped her.

She spun on her heel; her black jade sword sliding into her hand with a hiss as the dark blade cut into the air. Carefully, Gabriel placed the basket down by the foot of one of the tree-trunks and, reluctantly, he twisted his wrist to form a sword of blinding white steel.

In the filtered light, the mother-of-pearl gleamed iridescent.

The footsteps grew closer, faint still and accompanied by a flapping sound – like wings beating through the air – and Beelzebub shifted her grip on her sword, clenching her empty right hand tight.

She hadn’t expected Them to come.

At first, it had seemed obvious that someone would eventually – neither side, she reasoned, would bear to endure it, her and Gabriel simply Leaving – but as the days had turned into weeks and the weeks had become months she’d stopped thinking about it. It wouldn’t happen, she’d reasoned to herself, finding so many ways it would be Impossible (and so many ways the Impossible could still happen).

And yet.

She could feel her soul thrumming, her mind slowing and stilling to a single, cold focus.

It had been a long time. A very, very Long Time.

The footsteps rounded the bulge of the lemon-grove and she swung –

And Aziraphale squeaked, eyes wide and hands slowly, tentatively rising to either side of his head.

“Don’t shoot!”

“It’s a sword, fuckwit,” she snarled, furious as she slammed the black jade sword away in a cloud of wood-burnt smoke, dark and fierce.

“Oh, yes, well, either way, please don’t hurt me?” Aziraphale added, an audible gulp in his voice. His eyes darted over to Gabriel, clocking the sword vanishing from his grasp as well, and then back to Beelzebub.

“Why didn’t you knock?” she asked, irritable and still a-flutter in her soul as she warmed up again from the inside out.

“I did!” Aziraphale frowned, pulling himself up and pinching his hands together in front of him like a contrite child. “It’s quite far away from the archway here, presumably you didn’t hear it. I suppose I should have waited, though – I apologise unreservedly for any disturbance caused.”

He was still, she noticed, talking almost entirely to her. Every now and then his gaze would flicker over towards Gabriel, but everything else – his body language, the tilt of his head – was directed at her.

For his part, Gabriel was seemingly on edge about something, ready to spring up and fly away at the earliest opportunity.

“Apology accepted,” he said to Aziraphale with a small, gentle smile – and he sounded like himself, true, but still. She glared at him and wondered. “I think perhaps I should leave you two to talk,” and he bent, picked up the basket, slung it over one arm and left with a quick, steady sort of pace, looking horribly tempted to whistle.

Beelzebub glared at his back and then at Aziraphale for good measure.

“For a moment there, I really thought you would kill me,” Aziraphale commented, with a small, hopeful sort of smile – the kind of smile that’s pleading forgiveness even as it suggests it should, will, definitely ought to be given.

Beelzebub Glared and the sky-light from the stars hissed as it shimmered through the leaves.

Aziraphale’s smile wilted and he swallowed a bit.

Blood flowed down the smooth, low-cut white steps that decorated the entrance to the Temple. As the light faded dim under the sweep of once-Samael-now-Lucifer’s wings, the gold of it darkened to brass, staining the stone dull and finding minuscule, hair-line cracks to creep along so the hall looked broken by it: a body of sorts, leeching the blood from the fallen as they lay, never dying but not living either, eyes and hearts still and shattered souls fled elsewhere about Upstairs.

The clamour was oddly quiet, in truth: the metallic clang and clash of blade upon blade; the sizzle of a halo’s bite as it burned against flesh; and above it all, once-Samael-now-Lucifer’s screams, raw and raging, for Him to show His face, take to the field and protect what He claimed to have fathered.

Four had died under her sword, its black blade bearing a lick of gold along the edge of it, spattered on her hand and the once pristine-white of her robes, silk and slick.

Then, she saw him.

She could never quite explain why it struck her so much – why she remembered it so clearly: perhaps it was because in all of her memories, throughout the whole of the battle, she had been numb, fiercely cold and stripped bare of any kind of emotion – but she did, all the same.

Gabriel, in his favoured light blue, his sword sweeping through fallen angel after fallen angel with an odd, luxurious grace; and the sorrow on his face, quiet and understated but so very real, his purple eyes gleaming bright and almost glass-like, as though he were already grieving.

Around her, around him, the battle surged: next to her, Sandalphon’s sword clattered against two fallen angels; a little way away, Asmodeus was holding his own with a vicious, wild grin etched on his face. Further away, in the thick of it all and at the very steps outside the Temple doors, Michael faced once-Samael-now-Lucifer in a column of pure-white light.

It surged, the battle, and it swayed, and when she crashed another to the ground, she found herself alone, somehow, in a sea of individual duels, and Gabriel, his back half-turned to her, exposed as he sliced, neat and tidy, against another one of her co-conspirators.

She could have killed him then. She should have killed him then.

In her hand, the black jade sword twitched.

Beelzebub didn’t – she watched as he slashed across another fallen angel’s chest, sending them stumbling back onto the ground – and when he turned to see her, his purple eyes clouded as Lucifer’s wings stretched wide across the battlefield –

She turned away, leaving him her back instead, and the black jade sword swung to meet Sandalphon’s blade with a chiming ring that jarred her down to her bones and knocked something of that drowning, pooling sorrow Gabriel had seemed to be cloaked with, down and out of her.

It sank into the ground, into the once-smooth stone and trailing along with its cracking brass-shine veins.

“Will you tell Gabriel something for me?” Aziraphale asked. They were standing either side of the archway, its curved head stretching up high above them, the lattice a beautiful, scrolling mass that looked like vines and roses and fleur-de-lys en argent and the breath of clouds across a thunder-cast sky and none of them and all of them at once.

He had never asked that before. In fact, since the, ah, Delicate Feelings conversation (which she had attempted with a desperation bordering on fanatical to scrub out of her mind) he had always seemed to avoid mentioning Gabriel too much at all, stepping round it with a neat little hop here and there as though he were some kind of awkward thing to mention.

So this was Unexpected.

Beelzebub nodded, slow and careful, watching him and folding her hands behind her back.

She hated being a messenger normally – Princes of Hell do not carry messages like owls or servants or metal boxes which beeped incessantly – but this seemed Significant and she was curious.

“Will you tell him that I don’t blame him?” Aziraphale said, with a slight frown on his face – a drooping sort of frown, somehow sad and forgiving at the same time. She thought it was mostly patronising, but she supposed Gabriel wouldn’t see it that way. “It’s not his fault, not really, and I know perhaps it would be too much to be friends, as such, no one really wants constant reminders of their, ah, previous job fluttering about the place, but I would dearly like it if we could at least be friendly. Provided of course that he, um, would like that too.”

She stared at him. “You want me to repeat all of that?”

“Ah, yes, if you could, that would be wonderful,” Aziraphale smiled – it was an attempt at his usual happy sort of beam, but it didn’t quite work.

There was something of a different air about him, she noticed, something which had been growing: an unusual confidence, still timid and tentative, like a tortoise poking its head out of the shell, but it was there all the same.

Curiouser and coriander.

That wasn’t right, she knew, but she didn’t have time to think it through.

The sky was darkening a little, the washes of pink and purple deepening to violet and a slick of blue twisting its way through as the stars twinkled.

Beelzebub blinked; she hadn’t noticed the time and that, really, was unsettling.

“Oh gracious, yes, it’s been a while, so I really must be getting back,” Aziraphale smiled again, and Beelzebub didn’t, but she didn’t glare either. “Thank you for the tea – and, I may say, for the company?”

He vanished in a dart of light that sped across the sky like a falling star in a blaze of sweet, bright white.

Beelzebub watched him go and then she turned to find Gabriel.

The trouble with angels and with archangels specifically is that precognition comes and goes – it’s not a very practical sort of tool, never quite precise enough for certainty, and some angels never get close to mastering it at all – but it did enough to be the proverbial Sixth Sense.

And Gabriel, she knew, was unfortunately Quite Good at it.

So, of course, he was waiting for her.

He was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, reading a book with a long ribbon-like bookmark draped between the pages and swaying ever-so-slightly in the breeze that drifted across; she watched him barely a heartbeat before he looked up, closing the book and stretching to place it on the table in front of him.

“You could have sat on the chair,” she pointed out as she crossed the room to him.

“I know,” he said and he reached up at hand to link their fingers together. “But I thought I’d like to sit on the floor.”

She settled down next to him, their linked hands strung between them, and she thought about resting her head on his shoulder – but didn’t. Not yet. It didn’t seem right, for this Message Delivery.

“Aziraphale gave me a message for you,” she told him. “If you want it.”

Gabriel smiled a bit – and there it was: that angelic thing of smiling half-sadness and half-forgiveness at once.

“You can tell me if you like,” he said. “But I know what he said.”

Beelzebub brushed her thumb over his knuckles, enjoying the way his fingers curled about hers, cupping their hands together, and asked, “So that’s why you’ve been avoiding him?”

Gabriel breathed in on a sigh, gently untangling their fingers and glanced away – deliberately over her shoulder and towards the sky, the angle turning his eyes a beautiful amethyst purple.

“I didn’t Know exactly,” he said slowly, in a voice that was low enough and gentle enough to be hushed. “But when we,” he glanced at her and the amethyst in his eyes gleamed like diamond. “When I made my choice, I knew that They would find someone else to take my place. I didn’t know it would be him They would choose, but I had, well, an Inkling.

“I suppose I thought he’d blame me for it,” he shrugged and it looked the half-heartedness of it looked so wrong on him she wanted to shake it out of him and kiss him quiet and she knitted her own fingers together in her lap to stop from reaching for him. “Given, well,” he frowned. “Crowley and his bookshop and things. He would never have wanted the job, but he would never have said no when he was offered it. So my selfishness in this cost him his happiness, in the end. I didn’t expect that to be forgiven.”

The air was cooling around them, rushed along on a brisk, dark breeze that flustered Beelzebub’s hair about her eyes.

“He doesn’t blame you,” she told him, feeling a sort of savage protectiveness rising in her, and she shifted to sit pressed up against him, locking an arm about his waist. “And if you think it was selfish, then I’m glad we were selfish. This is better than Before.”

He looked down at her, smiling a dusk-lavender smile, and said, gentle and secret and confessional, “It is.”

The trouble with algorithms and patterns is that eventually, like all objects or paths or souls, they cross – colliding like ships on rocks or a polite nod on a street in the rain or meteors in a cascade of stardust and fire. Always – always always always.

Beelzebub saw the dates converge in her head and said, out loud, “Fuck.”

Gabriel hummed a question, combing his fingers through her hair as she muttered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” into his chest, the blanket tangled around their shoulders.

She’d known it would happen eventually, but she’d hoped that eventually meant a long, long, Long Time Away, when the Earth had aged another millennia and the stars had shifted in the sky.

As it was, it was much sooner than expected. Or anticipated – by any of the parties.

Not that Aziraphale or Crowley had even an Inkling whatsoever of what was rapidly approaching.

“The algorithms,” she murmured, settling her head down on Gabriel’s chest again, smoothing her hand over his stomach and up to his shoulder. “They’re going to cross.”

“Mm,” Gabriel hummed. “I see. When do you think it will happen?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and listened to the soft thud of Gabriel’s heart and the song of the stars and the gentle thrum of the Universe itself, and said, mournful and irritated, “Next Thursday. The 16^th.”

Silence hung about them for a long, stretched moment as the date shimmered in their minds: Thursday – of course a Thursday, it had to be a Thursday – sixteenth of November.

“What was that word you said?” Gabriel asked absently.

“Fuck?” she queried.

“Yes, that was it,” Gabriel said and she could hear a sigh in his voice before he said, with a slight hint of twined glee and wonder and apprehension, “Fuck.”

The screech of tyres ripped through the air and a quartet of flies zoomed away from the archway in sweeping, looping arcs to find Beelzebub sitting in the living room, a dozen sheets of paper, yellow-tinted and covered in scrawled writing in a kaleidoscope of languages and scripts, strewn about her.

“Good morning!” she heard Crowley cry out in their usual half-growl. “Oh, alright, good afternoon then, go on!”

“Is your car alright?” Gabriel asked, and she could hear the frown in his voice – and see how it would sit on his face: slight, that hint of concern that was always perfectly genuine, the inflection of ‘shouldn’t you’ that never quite became ‘should I’. “It’s sizzling.”

“Oh, she’ll be fine, she always is,” Crowley tossed the concern away as though throwing a pebble over his shoulder. “Have you got taller here? I swear you were shorter last time.”

The flies sped off, following them as Gabriel carefully shepherded Crowley through the ruin-like maze of the house towards their newest creation, a little pagoda-like pavilion nestled in the centre of the half-moon orchard.

“I don’t believe so, no,” Gabriel said politely. “There’s a new batch of limoncello if you would like to try – Bu – Beelzebub is looking for tasters – but I can make you some tea if you prefer?”

“Why not all of it?” Crowley’s voice grinned as much as their teeth did, sharp and wolf-like, and she could see in her mind’s eye how they would be spreading their arms in that showman-esque way of theirs. “I’m up for anything if you are, big boy.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Gabriel said diplomatically and with a chime of apology and Crowley laughed.

Beelzebub, surrounded by algorithms scribbled on paper, all leading to a single, insoluble, ineffable answer, smiled to herself, ringed the answer in blood-red ink and then set them all on fire so they twisted into ash in seconds, vanishing off into the dust-scattered air.

She supposed she should help Gabriel with Crowley. After all, there was still time for a drink – or two, or three, or, well, a little less than half of a bottle which is never half-empty.

On the ash, swirling away, the tiny fragments of paper, if coaxed back together and reordered like the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle, would read: Thursday 16^th November, thirty-eight minutes and sixteen seconds past two in the afternoon (Greenwich Mean Time).

(In English and Sanskrit and cuneiform.)

Many, many hours later, when the day had long since tipped over into night and the constantly-moving calendar of the Universe had clicked one day forward into the 16^th already, Beelzebub crawled into bed, curling up like a fly tucked on the underside of a leaf, one hand loosely curled into the line of Gabriel’s shirt, the buttons cool and smooth under her palm.

In the background, somewhere nearby, a record player was playing endlessly, spinning round and round and round and round without pause – you better think carefully, I’ll have you up seven moons with me, I’ll turn you to a –

Faintly, through the hanging silks draped along the columns that market rooms, a myriad of shades of indigo and faded gold and lemon-yellow and midnight-blue, she could see a jagged, rocking silhouette as Crowley danced and danced, holding a fat, panda-shaped mug up to their lips like a microphone as they lip-synced their way through time.

– dream of me wherever you go, if I take you home, I’ll turn you to a –

“When did we get a record player?” she asked suddenly, leaning on his chest to look down at him. Her handsome, handsome archangel.

Gabriel frowned, thoughtful and considering. “I’m not sure?”

“Huh,” she considered it a moment longer and then discarded it, nestling down to sleep.

They had bigger fish to fry, after all.

(Metaphorically, of course.)

It was a nice day, Thursday 16^th November: not too nice so as to be notable but nice enough. Normal, ordinary, usual.  

Limoncello is, by nature, quite strong already. Beelzebub had perfected it: distilling it down-down-down so it was more alcohol than ethanol. The kind of drink that burst into flames on contact with air, let alone anything else – it deserved a big yellow sticker emblazoned with ‘DANGER: HAZARDOUS’.

Crowley was still asleep when they woke, surrounded by curls of lemon peel, bleached-white and yellow in the morning light, dappled by the leaves as they brushed against the pagoda’s frame of a roof spun from silver-like. They weren’t making a single sound, sleeping as soundly as the dead, and Beelzebub carefully laced their water with more limoncello in case they woke up again and Gabriel draped a fluffy blanket over them to make sure they kept sleeping, safe and sound.

One down, one to go.

The knock came at almost one-fifteen.

Beelzebub felt an anticipation, hungry and bouncing, stir in her stomach and she stalked to the archway with a deceptively calm air, a solitary fly trailing to and from her, passing updates on Crowley from their little relay set-up.

When she got there, she nearly, nearly sent the entire star careening into nothing, hurling them all into the nearest black hole and screaming until the very gates of Hell sundered.

She didn’t, though. But it was close.

“What,” she spat through gritted teeth. “Are you doing here.”

Muriel trembled, leaf-like and milk-white, and started to babble something before she dissolved, almost literally, into a sobbing, wordless heap of white flared trousers and ruffled shirt.

Beelzebub glared.

The solitary fly buzzing about her head sped off, finding its teammate in the relay (Crowley was still asleep, hugging a lemon peel to his chest with a certain amount of tenderness) and quietly suggesting that they find Gabriel. He would know what to do.

“What do we do?” Beelzebub felt remarkably like one of her flies: fluttering, buzzing around, unsettled and hovering, her heart thrumming with a nervous sort of energy she couldn’t quite control.

“Oh, nothing much,” Gabriel said, delicately sliding a marble coaster under a tall glass of ice-cube-encrusted water next to where Muriel lay, curled up in a foetal position and still sobbing, a steady stream of tears flowing relentlessly. “It’s just shock, it’ll wear off in a little while and she’ll be – what’s that phrase? – right as rain.”

“Not her!” Beelzebub hissed, gesturing wildly at Muriel. “Him! Aziraphale! He was meant to be here, not her. What if it’s gone wrong – what do we do?”

Gabriel looked up at her and smiled, the faint startle in his eyes blinked away to a quietly amused softness. Standing, he took her hands, prising her fingers out of their curled, stressed fists, and rocked them gently between them.

“Then we wait,” he said simply. “Aziraphale will come or not, it’s up to him. All we can do is wait.”

“I hate waiting,” she grumbled, but it was half-hearted because he was already pulling her into a loose, warm embrace and she allowed herself to rest her head on his chest – his shoulder much too high for that when they were both standing, unless she stood on a step.

Behind them, Muriel sniffed, blowing her nose on a tissue she’d pulled from a packet in her pocket with a series of trumpets, and hiccupped out another sob.

Thursday 16^th November – somewhere in the heart of the Universe, a white-light clock, ephemeral and coalescing with a flock of dove-cast bluebirds, smoke-thin and slinking into a twist of jasmine, blossom falling into snowflakes, each one unique and sprouting glyphs round the rim, ticked another minute forward.

The time, someone would say if they were watching, is thirty-six minutes and seven seconds precisely.

By the archway, Aziraphale waited, his hat in his hands.

There didn’t seem to be anyone home; he’d knocked, twice now, but there hadn’t been the booming bong that normally sprung from it, and there was no Beelzebub storming towards him.

He hovered there, rocking on the balls to the heels of his feet, glancing back and forth and forth and back.

Overhead, a solitary fly buzzed excitedly and then looped back in a long arc.  

It happened at forty-four minutes and twenty-one seconds past two in the afternoon precisely. The temperature on the star was 8,577 Kelvin – and then got significantly warmer very rapidly.

The frame of the pagoda roof shuddered as the star-surface rumbled, grumbling a too-late warning, and then it collapsed in a cascade of dust, caught half-tumbled like pillars of salt licked by the sea.

“Oh goodness,” Aziraphale whispered.

Next to him, Crowley slipped their hands into their pockets. “We’re fucked,” they agreed.

The shadow of the storm was cold, dripping dust into snowflakes, glinting ice-sharp and toothlike as they hung in the air, dazzling little shuriken, a thousand upon a thousand of them. Among them, the black jade sword swung silently, the blade a dark and hungry leer, held in a hand that cracked bone-white around the knuckles.

Beelzebub, the former god Baal and all his varied aspects, one-time Lord of all the Heavens, Demonic Prince of Envy and Pride and Icons, previously one-third of the Triumvirate of Hell, gleamed in the way that only a perfect absence of light can gleam: a fractured mirror of the light glittering in the star-studded sky above – but even the stars flinched from this kind of fury.

Gabriel, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He did, though, stand on the other side of the sword.

Being in love was one thing, but it didn’t have to make you stupid.

“We’re really unimaginably sorry,” Aziraphale tried, looking as though he were trying to become a ghost.

The black jade sword slashed and the hiss that snaked out of the eye of the storm wasn’t Beelzebub so much as it was a hundred aspects of a fallen god and the fury of a demonic prince, and Crowley pinched Aziraphale’s sleeve and tugged him a pace back.

Between them, the orchard was ablaze, a sharp crackle hitting the air as the lemons cracked in the heat, spitting acid like miniature fountains; here, a tree lay fallen entirely, snapped at the base with its body wreathed in red-orange fire and its stump smoking – there, a branch broke, pitching a bundle of spark-lit lemons into a mess of leaves and wood and smoke-spun dust.

It was spreading from the centre, arching out towards the tips of the half-moon grove, whisked from branch to branch and tree to tree and lemon to lemon by a merry sort of breeze that had misunderstood the situation entirely.

Beelzebub shook.

Everything shook. Alarms sounded in Upstairs and Down Under, blaring and flaring as heads knocked over tables trying to locate the source of the disturbance – not the Who, mind you, but the Where.

From nowhere, the sound of a fresh spring rain rose, coaxed from the air and the far-off atmosphere: it was a quiet pitter-patter at first, but it grew bolder and brighter and sadder, full of a smooth sorrow and the soft promise of New Life and it poured onto the crackling, cackling fire with a steady, humming, drumming intensity, battering the flames into cooling, curling ash, the sting of smoke slowly washing away under the rain’s rhythmical insistence, cool and clear and clean.

Crowley’s hair flopped into their eyes, straggly and limp; Aziraphale carefully shook the water from his hat.

Gently, Gabriel reached out and took Beelzebub’s hand, easing the sword from her grasp and sheathing it into nothing-and-everything, and laced their fingers together.

“Now,” he said, the one-time Left Hand of God, Messenger of the Lord, former Archangel, and the patience there was Perfect. “Shall we sit down and discuss this over tea?”

Tea was, naturally, Tense. Actually that would be a major understatement, but the English language doesn’t really a word that quite encapsulates the level of trembling, terror-filled, anxiety-stuffed nervousness that permeated every microsecond it took.

To be fair to English, neither does any other language, human or Divine or Damned.

“It is the Responsibility of the Guilty to Make Amends,” Gabriel said, solemn and sorrow-eyed.

“Of course,” Aziraphale, still somewhat ghostly, agreed immediately with a bobbing nod. “It’s the least we could do.”

Crowley scoffed, holding their teacup by the little bone-china handle, their pinkie stuck decisively out. “Demons don’t Make Amends.”

“I don’t have any particular authority or expertise in that area,” Gabriel said delicately, as Beelzebub buzzed next to him, swarmed by flies which massed around her head in a muttering, mumbling cloud. “But I would recommend it in this case as otherwise Bub is going to bury you in the heart of black hole.”

“She won’t do that,” Crowley huffed, but the grin they showed was twice as wolflike as normal and their feet tapped a strange dance under the table. “I’m her favourite.”

Gabriel considered this for a moment, nodding thoughtfully as he sipped his tea. Placing the cup on the saucer and adjusting it so the handle was pointing at a whimsical two o’clock, he glanced at them both and then over at the orchard.

It was smouldering under the last of the rain, the water dissipating into steam which hung in the air like a shattered mirror, glimmering a silver mist over the burned, hollowed-out trees and the carcasses, yellow and oily, of the lemons.

“May I give you both some advice?” he asked.

They glanced at each other – awkward and tentative, like two teenagers caught in flagrante – and then Aziraphale nodded and Crowley waved a hand.

“I suppose so,” they said.

“Thank you,” Gabriel smiled. “The Ultimate Truth about any relationship – whether it’s formed around friendship, hatred, love, lust, regret – is that it can never be replaced. Like a snowflake, every relationship is unique and you cannot simply spin a new one: even if you create it exactly identical, it will still be different, because it is not the original. A copy is unique, even if you can’t see it.

“And that, that uniqueness, is what makes them precious – what means that humans cling to them so desperately and what means that with all of eternity ahead of us, we don’t consider them at all: when everything around you is unique, is precious and beautiful and good, it loses something of the meaning of it.

“It is the same, really, with everything: every second, every blink, every lemon is subtly, slightly, minutely different if you Look,” he added, softer, lavender-eyed and tossed back into memories of another orchard, burned and drenched in rain, left in ruin as smudges and piles of crumbling charcoal, the air still scented with a bittersweet mix of sweet fruit and thick smoke and the stale taste of ash and the echoes of screams. “And so no relationship can really be wiped away – there is always something of them left, because that uniqueness changes the people it touches and that change is irreversible, no matter how much you might wish it to be.

“Do you understand?”

There was a pause and the breeze blew and the rain pattered itself out into a glorious starshine and the teapot whistled and,

“Not a word,” Crowley said with a shake of their head.

“It was rather a lot to take in,” Aziraphale ventured, grimacing an apology.

If Aziraphale’s cheeks were a little pink and Crowley’s voice a little too loud, it was a Miracle that neither Beelzebub or Gabriel mentioned it.

Gabriel eyed them, much like a father eyes an irritating little shit of a child, and then sighed, patient as always, and said, “Fix the garden, please.”

Back at the house, Muriel stopped crying, glugging her water down in a row of gulps and washed her eyes, tear-red and tired, in a low-slung marble washbowl.

Poking her head round corners and tiptoeing about – literally, she couldn’t remember if she’d stepped in anything on the way in and didn’t want to accidentally track mud all over Lord Beelzebub and Lord Gabriel’s carpets – it took her twenty-six minutes to come to the conclusion that no one was around. At all.

“Did I miss something?” she wondered.

Settling down at the coffee table, she reached out with a flat-footed finger to pet a small china duck on the head, petting it once, twice, thrice, and then bumping its bill carefully against the other duck in a bone-china duck-kiss.

The archway glimmered overhead, twisting through a cacophony of forms – hieroglyphics and the pattern of a peacock’s feathers and the constellation Pegasus and the waves of the Atlantic ocean at midnight – and one by one, guests (for once, not all unwanted nor unlooked-for) edged towards leaving.

Crowley was fussing over the Bentley with a pink hand-towel Gabriel had fetched from somewhere in the recesses of the house, whisking away the steam with the clucking care of a flustered parent; Muriel had settled herself in the back with three cups of tea in a thermos flask and a collection of recipes by a man with a surname she stumbled to pronounce (“Otto – Otto-leen-ghee? Otto-lung-ghee? I’ll look it up later”), already more than ready to leave.

Meanwhile, Aziraphale hovered by the archway, as reluctant to leave as he was to stay – mostly, really, it was about Crowley and the prospect of travelling back together, but he found himself determined to ensure that he had properly Made Amends.

“We really are sorry,” he said finally, and of all the endless apologies he’d made over the previous hours, this one felt the most real. The most True. “About the orchard. It wasn’t intentional but still, it was precious to you and we destroyed it and we’re really, very, truly sorry.”

Beelzebub stared at him, forensic and knife-like – it was a glare that wasn’t quite a glare – but it still sliced through down to the soul.

The silence stretched and Gabriel, as he did, waited, noting the flush of pink in the sky: fuchsia and a sweet rose-pink in a blur together.

Aziraphale bobbed on his feet, rocking back and forth and forth and back, heel to ball and ball to heel.

“Fine,” Beelzebub said eventually and the word hung in the air like a pristine, baby-new snowflake. “Just fuck off.”

“Ah, of course,” Aziraphale gave a little bow and nodded to Gabriel, jamming his hat onto his head as he turned to face the Bentley, the passenger door wide open and Crowley fiddling about with bits in the driver’s seat, pulling this and twisting that and shouting at Muriel to stop bothering the plants.

He took a step, then a second and then turned back, but not to Beelzebub (she’d been dreading the thought of having to say another word which wasn’t ‘die’ or ‘burn’ or anything homicidal in general) – and Gabriel smiled, as though he’d been waiting for this.

Probably, unfortunately, most likely, he had been. Sort of.

“Do you have any, ah, Words Of Wisdom for, well, all of this?” Aziraphale asked, tentative as always – but there was a slight difference in it. For all of the tiredness and the building worry, there was a small, quiet sort of strength emerging.

Gabriel looked a little startled for a moment, blinking twice as though to bat away the shock, and then he smiled, warm and light and so much himself.

“Of course,” he said, and the pause which followed gathered Weight and Meaning and it grew solemn and bright and gleaming as Gabriel seemed to grow, the Left Hand of God again for a feather-split of a second.

“Never Eat The Yellow Snow.”