Chapter Text
Almost four years to the day since the whole Tadfield business, Newton Pulsifer found himself in a long-awaited performance review.
Performance reviews, on the whole, were something Newt had become remarkably familiar with. He was well-acquainted with the warning signs. His supervisors got a sort of glazed over look in their eye, a finality to the set of their mouths. They stopped trying to give him increasingly more frantic instructions and instead started trying to give him a wide berth. This would trickle down through the rest of the ranks, though coworkers tended to avoid him from the get-go so Newt didn’t really feel the effects of that one so much. Then, it would appear — a little notification in the corner of his monitor, telling him that he had a meeting scheduled in half an hour. Somehow, the option to decline was always greyed out.
Newton Pulsifer had no way of knowing this, but he had had more performance reviews in his brief time on earth than anyone else in the entirety of history.
Well. Almost anyone.
The man from the end of the world continued to stare at him.
“I’m here about the…” the man said, twirling a finger he had pointed at the sky. Five minutes ago, Newt had been sat in his flat, nursing a shit cup of coffee and thinking about the end of the world as much as he usually did. That is to say, quite a lot. Not so much that he couldn’t function on a day-to-day basis, of course, but enough that if he didn’t have a podcast on while he was brushing his teeth he had the unfortunate tendency to start screaming.
Five minutes since the buzzer went off and made him jump the way it always did, despite him having lived here for years now. Four minutes since he came down the pointedly creaky stairs, trying to spit-clean shit coffee off the front of his jumper. Three minutes since he’d opened the front door and found the man from the end of the world.
“I’m surprised it took this long,” he found himself muttering, looking up where the man was pointing. It was a bit cloudy, but he hadn’t seen any fish or frogs or whatever start to fall from the sky yet, so at least there was that.
The man frowned, and Newt could tell he had noticed the coffee stain. “Not had anybody else come looking?”
Newt shook his head, wishing someone else had. He’d always sort of hoped that, when it happened, it would have been the other man from the end of the world. He had looked like the sort of bloke who occasionally spilled hot drinks on his jumpers, Newt might’ve stood a better chance of talking his way out of it with that one. “You’re the first.”
“Ah, right. Cool.”
“So, did you, um. Did you want to come up, or…?”
The man seemed a little taken aback. “Bit harder to do it out here, surely?”
Newt nodded, taking a calming breath and gesturing for the man to follow him inside. The stairs shrieked, like a Greek Chorus that hadn’t quite managed to finish their vocal warm up.
“Do they always do that?” The man asked, and Newt could hear the grimace on his face.
“The old owner said it was part of the charm,” Newt replied, feeling it probably wouldn’t be the smartest thing to explain to the man that what Shadwell had actually said was ‘all the better tae hear the devil comin’ lad!’. The ‘devil’ often turned out to be someone on their way to up Tracy’s, who Shadwell would then chase off with nothing but his sparkling personality as a weapon.
“And the current owner?”
“What?”
“Do you think it’s part of the charm?"
“Oh. Er, no. It’s awful.”
Newt could tell the man was wondering why he hadn’t just fixed the stairs himself. It was a good question. It was one Newt asked himself every time he trudged up or down them, coming or going from some new interminably awful job where he’d made no career progress and no friends. There were plenty of practical reasons that Newt hadn’t fixed the stairs, or any of the other seven thousand things wrong with the two flats he’d been gifted after the Shadwell-Potts households had eloped, but the man didn’t ask further and Newt was spared the embarrassment of having to try and explain himself.
“So one of these is yours, I take it?” The man asked, looking between the two doors on the landing. His gaze then landed on the old-school rotary phone and he made a noise that Newt thought was a well-worn mockery of ‘delighted’, tapping his fingers across the bakelite. He heard himself answer in a vague affirmative, explaining about the empty flat across the way, but Newt had started the process of Performance Review Dissociation. He was drifting a little outside of his body, almost feeling the relief of knowing he was about to be told in no uncertain terms what a terrible job he’d done. There was a small bubble of hysteria reminding him that this wasn’t going to just be a ‘pack your shit and leave’ sort of thing. Accidentally deleting a decade’s worth of data was one thing. Cocking up the end of the world was another entirely.
Newt started turning to his door and then felt all the colour drain from his face. The man was inspecting the stupid piece of paper, another thing Newt hadn’t bothered to sort.
“Defy the foul fiend?” The man asked, with a slight smirk at the corner of his mouth.
Newt leapt forward and tore it off the door, shoving it into his pocket. “Just, ah, just a weird— the old owner, he, uh, well, you know.”
From what Newt had been able to piece together, the man knew very well. Both he and the other man had been almost entirely responsible for paying Shadwell’s Army wages, and thus responsible for paying Newt’s. Or, they would have been, if Shadwell’s company structure had allowed for that sort of thing. Newt, while brushing his teeth one night, had listened to a podcast about a thing the Americans had invented called multi-level marketing and felt something click inside his brain. Several frantic Google searches and two multiple-choice quizzes later, he concluded that he may have, very briefly, joined a cult, though the internet was quick to inform him he shouldn’t blame himself, and that it had probably happened because he was something called an INTP.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” Newt asked, pushing his shoulder into the door to get past the part where it had swelled and stuck against the frame. “Or coffee? I imagine you’ll be wanting to get on but, um, I can’t not ask. My mum would know, somehow, and I’d never hear the end of it.”
Oh god, his mum. Newt wondered if the man would let him write her a letter, or maybe a phone call? What day was it, Thursday? She was probably in the lab today, she wouldn’t be able to pick up. It would have to be a letter. How do you write a letter explaining you did Armageddon wrong and now a man who you were pretty sure was a demon was going to pull your insides through your nostrils or whatever it was that demons did, but yes, don’t worry, he did offer him a cuppa first.
“Coffee for me, ta,” the man was now standing in the middle of Newt’s flat, looking around with a pained expression. “It’s very… full. In here.”
Newt looked around at the wood panelled walls, the shelves filled with dusty old book after dusty old book, the beaten up sofa and the stacks of papers stuffed haphazardly into cardboard boxes that he tripped over on his way out the door every single day. Newt tried to count how many of the things on display were his, and came up with an alarmingly low number. “Most of it isn’t mine. The-”
“Old owner?” The man scoffed, raising an eyebrow. “How long have you lived here for, exactly?”
“Er, four years. Give or take.”
The man took his coffee with a soft grunt, took one sniff, and then did… something. Newt couldn’t have said what, but he knew that the coffee the man was drinking and the cold coffee Newt had picked up again were of vastly different quality.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to ask me some questions, then,” the man said, folding himself down into what Newt thought of as Shadwell’s armchair. Newt perched carefully on the edge of the sofa, looking down into his mug.
“Why now?” He asked, pleased at himself for keeping the tremor out of his voice.
“Blimey, bit of a big question right out the gate. Dunno. Just seemed time,” the man answered, and Newt couldn’t really argue with that.
“Is it just you, or—”
“Just me,” the man said, his tone coming down over that line of questioning like a guillotine.
“Is there nothing I can do to convince you not to do this?” Newt finally asked, looking up to meet the lenses of the man’s glasses. “I know you’re probably just doing your job, but I thought— you seemed to, um, to not want to do your job. When we last saw each other. And I, I know I probably didn’t stop it right, it doesn’t make sense, the way it happened. What I did to stop it. That’s not how, how computers work, and I didn’t even know Ireland had nuclear missiles, so I knew it probably wouldn’t have worked properly and I was just hoping that maybe I could, um, have another chance? I feel it’s only fair, you know, it’s, you, you’re supposed to get written warnings before this sort of thing and there haven’t been any signs at all so I think I’d, um, prefer to go to the HR department first. Please. If that’s okay with you.”
The man from the end of the world stared at him. He then stared at him some more, and then whipped off his sunglasses to stare a little harder. Newt didn’t react to the reveal of his eyes, though that wasn’t so much to do with him not being pants-pissing scared in his moment but more because he’d sat through so many Valuing Equality and Diversity in the Workplace presentations, and he could practically see a smiling ClipArt animation of a cartoon Black woman over the man’s head wagging her finger at him and telling him that reacting negatively to a difference in appearance was a big no-no. The man stood up, stalking towards Newt, and all the creeping shadows from the various corners of the room seemed to come with him, twisting around him until all Newt felt he could see were those eyes that would give even the most enthusiastic Workplace Tolerance Officer a run for their money. The air in the room seemed to hiss like a neglected kettle as the man opened his mouth to speak.
“What on earth are you on about?
Newt swallowed.
“The— are you not here for…” He gestured up, spinning his finger in a circle the way the man had done on his doorstep.
“I feel like we’re doing different—” the man repeated the action. “I’m here because you put an advert in the paper. Cheap flat, south facing windows.”
Newt was aware his expression must have nudged somewhere into ‘gormless’, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t understand what the man from the end of the world had to do with the advertisement he’d placed in the local newspaper looking for a tenant for Madame Tracy’s old flat. He’d been somewhat loath to become a landlord, not for any political reason but because insurance companies usually ran a mile when they saw him coming. He couldn’t help how many damaged electronics claims had his name attached, now could he? But the job market hadn’t been kind to him recently and it seemed ridiculous to just let the flat stand empty when lots of people out there needed a home. Hopefully people who could afford to spare a couple hundred quid each month so that Newt could turn his own heating back on and maybe, sometimes, order from the adults menu of his favourite takeaway.
“I don’t think I said it had south facing windows. I’ve never been very good with directions.”
“Well, no, alright, you didn’t. They are, though, just for the record. Are you gonna sort that, or?” The man asked, jerking a thumb behind him. Newt peered around the skinny shadow and saw that he had, in fact, left the kettle on top of the hob. He looked up at the man, helplessly, who rolled his eyes and clicked his fingers. The kettle fell silent.
“So you aren’t here to kill me for cocking up Armageddon?” Newt finally got out, still looking up at the man.
“Kill you? Armageddon? How do you— oh. Oh. Oh!” The man suddenly pointed and Newt, having seen what he could do with just a click, squeaked and cowered back into the lumpy cushions. “The computers! The Irish Missiles! Defy the foul fiend! You’re Shadwell’s boy!”
“I’m— I’m a thirty year old man.”
The man strode around, peering into the various glass cabinets and at the map on the wall, letting out a squawk of glee as he bounced a finger against the Witchfinder Army pin. “So this is where all my money ended up. Was always a bit curious about how a man like the Sergeant lived. Not, of course, curious enough to ever drop in myself, but…”
Newt cleared his throat. “So, once more for total clarity, you’re not here on behalf of the company to—“ he made a few chopping motions “—me?”
The man snorted. “What you saw on that airfield was essentially an embarrassingly public exit interview. I don’t work for the company, as you so eloquently put it, anymore. I told you. I’m in the market for a flat.”
“So you don’t currently have a job?”
“No. Is that a problem?”
“Well, just, in the interest of— of my interests, I wondered how you might be intending to pay for the flat? Seeing as you have just told me you’re unemployed.”
The man shrugged. “I was intending to befuddle my human landlord and make it seem like I was paying each month, s’worked in the past, but I think we should just skip that part, don’t you?”
Newt took a deep breath. “Then you… will be paying?”
“What?” The man laughed. “No, course not. I just won’t, you know. Clickity click click. Bit awkward, seeing as we know each other, Mister…?”
“Pulsifer. Newton Pulsifer,” Newt supplied, defeatedly.
“That… certainly is a name. Crowley,” the man — Crowley — said, holding out his hand. Newt took it automatically, and felt a little fizzle between their palms, and realised he’d probably just been tricked into agreeing to the terms of the contract as stipulated by his new demonic tenant.
Newt thought back over his script that he’d written for interviewing any potential tenants, trying to salvage some control of this situation. “Did you, um, did you have a move in date in mind, Mr Crowley?”
“Oh, already done,” Crowley said, waving his hand through the air. “You won’t mind if I have the parking space out front, will you?”
“Actually, uh, my car—”
“You don’t have a car.”
There was something about Crowley’s voice that made Newt almost, almost , agree with him. But Newton Pulsifer knew he had a car. He’d always had a car, the same car, it and his provisional arriving on the same day. He remembered, when he had stuck the custom sticker on the boot, his mother worrying briefly about the resale value. He remembered crashing it, just before he met Crowley for the first time. He remembered the frankly criminal bill from the garage he got for a new door afterwards. He went to say something, to tell Crowley he did have a car, thank you very much, but Crowley got there first.
“Ugh, stop that. Fine, keep the ugly car, just find somewhere else to park it. If I have to see that every time I walk through my front door, I might actually change my mind about the whole not—” he made the same chopping motion Newt had “—thing.”
Newt, not sure what had just happened, didn’t think Crowley really seemed the sort of off him over something as petty as not liking his car. It still probably wouldn’t hurt to move Dick Turpin round the corner as soon as possible. Maybe a couple of streets over for good measure. And perhaps he’d get one of those big tarps he always thought they put over posh cars to protect them from being looked at too much by poor people, but maybe they were also attempting to hide their vehicles from aesthetically motivated demons.
He found the new set of keys he'd had made up from the shop downstairs and handed them over, running through the schedule for bin day, when utilities were due, and a few other bits of relevant information he'd looked up and carefully rehearsed to tell to whoever ended up taking the flat, though it was pretty obvious Crowley wasn't paying attention to him at all. When he was all done, though, the demon stayed in his flat, looking around at the various Witchfinder relics and poking at precarious stacks of newspaper clippings. Newt cleared his throat.
“Did you, um, need me for anything else, or…?”
What Newt had thought was a fairly reasonable question, for a new landlord sussing out the needs of his tenant, had an immediate and baffling effect on Crowley. He all but sneered, nearly knocking over the pile of TADFIELD OBSERVER (2019-2020, organised by weirdness, then chronologically) clippings he had been rooting through.
“I’ll see myself out then, shall I?” Crowley hissed, launching himself up the stairs and slamming Newt’s front door so hard that his teeth rattled. He heard the staircase in the hall scream as the demon thundered down, then suddenly the sound stopped halfway through the usual refrain. The stairs then started up again, only more half-hearted this time, barely managing a few yelps as Crowley came back up. Newt saw his shadow in the crack under the front door, then heard the door to Tracy’s — Crowley’s, now, he supposed — swing open and close in a thankfully less dramatic fashion than his own had, but still with a pretty sizeable bang.
Newt tried to look on the bright side. He wasn’t dead! Yay! He also had a tenant (who wasn’t paying him anything) and it was someone he knew (a demon) and now maybe he’d finally get around to replacing the door hinges like he’d been meaning to for months.
The door, as if to cheer him on, helpfully came away from the frame and landed with a clatter in the hall.