Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was a pounding in his head that felt like it came from… uh. Somewhere. Somewhere else, to be specific – not Heaven.

Something was wrong. The only problem was that the “wrong” seemed omnipresent; the state of the universe – no matter where he looked. Not that he could look, with his vision blurred around the middle and blacked out around the edges.

There was laughter.

Someone joined in.

Perfect! The others would be able to tell him what he had done wrong for everything to feel so… off. Maybe he had dropped gravity again and broke it…? It had almost hit him on the head last time! In any case, the others would have him sorted in a jiffy. He just had to follow their voices.

They led him to a wall of some kind: Silicia, aluminia, magnesia, and something earthy. Surely this was none of his designs! But no matter how often he talked to the others about it, there was no accounting for taste. Especially with the ones assigned to Earth.

“Another round!” Someone yelled, followed by a cacophony of excited roars. “The cards have been good to me, this evening!”

With wobbly legs, he found the entrance in the wall and stepped into the space where his compatriots were having a much more animated discussion than he had ever seen them partake in. And there they were: Sitting around tables, holding small objects of some sort and bumping them into each other. He stared into red faces he did not recognize. But maybe that was because whatever kept trickling down his forehead was painfully dripping into his left eye.

“Hey, you,” a bald person yelled from behind another wall – a small, wide and flat one that only went up to his hips. “I told you to not show your face around here again!” They rolled up their sleeves and stepped out from behind their weird, unfit hiding place.

Okay… This seemed… slightly threatening for some reason? Rude. Had he maybe dropped the container with the celestial sparkles on Lucifer again? He’d been rather pissed, last time around. Yeah, alright; before he could try to diffuse the situation, he needed to find out what the situation was in the first place. So he asked: “Who are you?”

The other person was unimpressed and kept advancing. “Who am I? I’m the tavern owner that is going to kick your butt, matey.” When they were close enough for him to smell something sweet and sour on their breath, they suddenly stopped and said: “You look like someone got to you before I did. Came for me to put the boot in?”

“Huh?” He asked intelligently. God, this place was spinning around him. It was giving him a headache. He blinked.

The world tilted sideways.

When he opened his eyes again, the other bloke had grabbed him by the front of his garments and yanked him towards their chest. One of their hands was pulled back, raised to eye level, and clenched into a fist. He sure hadn’t seen that posture before, but he instinctually decided that he didn’t like it. And he definitely didn’t like being held. He was about to tell this bad angel as much, when they proclaimed:

“You shouldn’t have hauled your sorry arse back here if you didn’t want my footprint on it!”

“Crowley!” A new, bright voice joined the general mutter in the room. “No! Just… no! You will not wile away in my favourite pub!”

He turned his head and squinted through the black fog that the world was starting to become. Someone with blonde curls and uncomfortably stiff, gleaming, silver garments was standing in the entrance and had put his hands on his hips disapprovingly. That was a posture he knew he had seen before. On a regular basis. He was about to tell the newcomer that he still didn’t like the dad-stance, when they, too, interrupted him: “Sir, unhand this fiend at once, lest you get written up in Heaven for violent behaviour!”

The guy who was holding him by the scruff of his neck (or, well, clothes) looked over, and then lowered their fist. “A knight,” they said wearily.

“I am,” the supposed knight replied in a tone that suggested they were delighted to have been acknowledged and recognised. “So would you please let that scallywag go? It’s for your own good.” And thus, the next moment found him swaying wildly on his feet, with the support of the hand fisted into his collar gone. His arms wheeled around him in a propellor-motion to stay upright. (Ugh, where had he left his bloody wings? In the wash?)

“I don’t want any trouble,” his former captor said warily and held up their hands. “But I also want him out of my tavern. Now. He’s done enough damage yesterday!”

“I see,” the knight huffed. “I will handle it, good man.” With that, the knight turned towards him and their lips pursed disapprovingly. “Crowley, if you would be so kind as to leave this establishment and make sure you don’t come back? I would quite like to drink my ale in peace, thank you very much.”

“Uh,” he answered, in his usual, articulate way. (Forming words in his head was hard at the moment, and even after that first step, his tongue felt sluggish still. That usually only happened to him when he was excited. Was he excited? He didn’t feel excited.) “One problem,” he finally managed. “I’m not Crowley.”

The knight frowned. Apparently, that expression came easy to them. “Again?” they asked. “What have you changed it to this time?”

“Huh?”

The knightly frown became audible when they said: “Your name. What shall I call you?”

“My name is…” Oh.

Huh.

Wait, what was his name again?

That was odd. Your own name wasn’t usually something that slipped your mind. But then, he had been working pretty hard those last few weeks. And, alright, getting a bit over-excited, too. Keeping up with the names of all those gas balls, nebulas and star systems might have taken up a little more space in his head than they should have. But if he forgot the name of Alpha Centauri, then who was going to tell them their names? He could always ask the others.

“Cr- I mean…” The knight let out a long breath. “Will you get on with it please? The bartender is waiting.”

“Uh…”

Another sigh. “Alright, we’ll continue this conversation outside.” Gently herding him towards the exit with an outstretched arm, the knight turned back to the angry bloke. “I will be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Would you please prepare my usual order in the meantime?”

And with that, they both left the strange, walled-up place that smelled like someone had spilt some sort of slightly toxic beverage in there.

“So,” the pushy knight asked once they were outside. “Was ‘Crowley’ too mundane for you? Are you called ‘Mephistopheles’ now, after all?”

Now it was his time to frown. “No, I… uh. Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”

The furrow between the knight’s brows grew more and more pronounced, but there was a sharpness in their eyes that spoke of something other than annoyance. “What do you mean, you don’t remember? Crowley, what’s going on?”

He floundered and waved his arms in a bid to maintain balance and convey his frustration at the same time. It probably didn’t work. Nothing seemed to, at the moment. “I don’t know,” he whined. “Thinking makes my head hurt even more than it is already.”

In an instant, there were hands on both his cheeks, holding his head still as the knight was searching his face for… something – a give-away to a lie he wasn’t telling. Huh. That was nice. Maybe he liked being held!

“You’re bruised up badly,” the knight said with concern that had chased away the last traces of the irritation previously dripping from their tone. “I thought it was just from whatever wiles you get up to in that ridiculous Black Knight armour of yours, but… Crowley, is that blood?!”

A tentative finger dabbed at something wet on his forehead. He immediately decided that being held was not nice and he didn’t like it at all. “OUCH! Who is Crowley?” he hissed through the pain.

“You are!” The knight was starting to sound panicky.

“Oh,” Crowley answered. He needed to let that sink in for a second. ‘Crowley’. He didn’t remember being called Crowley. Surely he’d remember that, right? “That doesn’t sound very angelic, does it?”

“It-,” the knight cut himself off while something akin to horror flashed over their features. “Why would it sound angelic, Crowley?!”

“Because we’re angels! …you are an angel, right?” Crowley asked as he tried not to wince. Apparently this other angel had forgotten that they were fingering what felt more and more like a cut on his forehead.

“Yes! Of course I’m an angel! I’m Aziraphale! Crowley, how have you forgotten-”

“Aziraphale,” he repeated slowly. Somehow, that name rang a bell that ‘Crowley’ didn’t. “I knew an angel called Aziraphale. They helped me set up the universe. Told me their name for absolutely no reason. Which I guess you’d need to do with people if your name was something like ‘Aziraphale’.”

“He,” the knight said.

“He who?”

“I go by ‘he’,” they- he clarified. “That angel was me, and I’ll have you know I don’t just walk around and remind people of my name ‘for no reason’. Just because you’re a mannerless airhead who wouldn’t know a polite introduction if it hit him in the face- …Crowley, are you saying you only remember me from before the Beginning?”

He – that is himself – he… God, why couldn’t he remember his own name? Maybe it was Crowley. It just didn’t sound very angelic, but it didn’t feel wrong. So, he – Crowley, that is – said: “Of course I remember you from before the Beginning. We haven’t yet Begun, have we? …Oh God, have we?” Shit. He definitely had some holes in his memory. If he had missed the official Beginning, he was going to kick himself! He had marked the date for the Almighty’s ribbon cutting in his calendar ages ago! And he even had been counting down the days ever since!

Crowley stepped (or, alright, tumbled, sue him!) back from Aziraphale a bit to squint at the landscape around them: No stars twinkling at him from anywhere – just a couple of very tall, green fellows that swayed in the wind and made mocking rustling noises.

“Yes, we…” Aziraphale hesitated, but at least he seemed less frustrated with Crowley now. He was wringing his hands. “We have Begun already. The universe, that is.”

“Bollocks!” Ah, shit. He shouldn’t curse in front of other angels. But what the Heaven? They had just started without him?

“Crowley, time Began over four and a half thousand years ago,” the other angel said softly. “How can you not remember that?”

Crowley made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and pressed both hands to his temples in a desperate bid to calm the sledgehammer that was merrily beating out a tango in his head. “I don’t know! I have to talk to the higher ups! They must be able to figure this out. Gabriel or Michael or-”

“No!” Aziraphale’s outburst was so sudden that Crowley almost jumped. “You can’t go to Heaven! There’s been… There’s been an incident.”

“In Heaven?” Crowley laughed – and immediately regretted it as the answering pain vibrated through his skull. “Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing ever changes in Heaven. I just have to find one of the archangels-”

“There has been a war,” Aziraphale interrupted him rudely. “In Heaven. The angels split up in two groups and one of them Fell and became these horrible- … I mean, some of them are horrible- … They’re all demons now! Do you understand? They’re not angels anymore. They’re demons! Heaven’s enemies!”

A derisive snort left Crowley’s nose. (A careful, calculated snort that didn’t upset the construction site that was his head at the moment.) “Enemies of Heaven? How the Heaven would that work?”

“They’re evil! Michael smote the lot of them during the Great War, and if they were ever to come back, I’m sure that’s what would happen again.”

The whole notion was ridiculous! Crowley tried to make his face express as much but he wasn’t sure how much of it was actually cooperating right now. Aziraphale must be joking. Either that, or… “Alright, so you’re saying there are evil angels-”

“Demons,” Aziraphale corrected him.

“Demons. Fine,” Crowley amended. “You’re saying there are demons now. And in that context, you don’t want me to go back to Heaven because-”

“-because you’re one of them,” Aziraphale kept up his extremely rude bit of cutting Crowley off. Only this time, he didn’t let it bother him:

“-because you’re a demon,” Crowley finished his own conclusion pointedly. He folded his arms and lifted his chin, daring Aziraphale to contradict him. (Not that he could do anything about it – especially not physically. He had never been a good fighter, and at the moment, he felt like he would lose a fistfight with a snake.)

At least Crowley got the satisfaction of seeing Aziraphale gaping at him with an open mouth. “Me?!”

“Yup,” the angel – because memory or not, Crowley knew that he was an angel and everything else was bollocks – said proudly. “Either that or you’re lying. Because if you were telling the truth about this War, and I was a demon, then you would want me to go to Michael and be smited- …smote- …You’d want Michael to do that to a demon. Or are you saying we’re both demons?”

“What? No!” Aziraphale sounded genuinely offended. “I’m still an angel!”

“Yeah, that makes no sense,” Crowley countered, unimpressed. “If you were an angel and I was a demon, we’d be enemies and you’d want me to get my butt kicked. So you must be lying. I don’t know if I’m an angel and you’re a demon or if there wasn’t even a War to begin with… now that I think about it, you’ve always seemed like a little rascal who would prank others like that!”

“Excuse me?!”

Crowley ignored his rather organic sounding cry of outrage: “Either way: I’m going to Heaven.”

“I…” Aziraphale (the demon, definitely!) hesitated a second before his face settled into grim determination. Oh-oh, what was that expression about?! “I cannot let you do that, Crowley. I simply can’t.” And with that, he drew a sword that had apparently just hung at his side the whole time and had the insolence to only now introduce itself to Crowley, who was too scandalized to take a step back.

“I have sworn to guard the gates of Heaven from the likes of you…” Aziraphale sounded unconvinced by his own words. Even Crowley, who was standing directly in front of him (by only a sword’s length to be precise!), had trouble picking up the syllables, as if there was possibly someone else present who Aziraphale was talking to. “…so this is not an act of fraternisation with the enemy. I’m just executing Her will. That’s it.” He took a deep breath when he finished speaking.

And then, the blade of the sword rose to Crowley’s eye-level and Aziraphale’s voice finally rose to levels Crowley was sure were meant for him, and said: “Defend yourself or surrender!”

“What?!” Crowley screeched. “How is that fair? You have a suit of armour and everything!”

“You shouldn’t have gotten rid of yours, then,” Aziraphale said. His voice sounded like it was made from the same material as his weapon. It made the hairs on the base of Crowley’s neck stand up.

“What do you mean?”

“You are the Black Knight,” Aziraphale reiterated, patient and unrelenting, “You are not helpless; you had a suit of armour yourself. Even without it, you are still the Serpent of Eden; you have wiles sharp enough to get you through any sword fight. You seem to have temporarily misplaced that, too, but even still – you are a resident of this Earth. So what you do have, in any case, is my word as the guardian angel stationed on this planet with a mission to protect: I will not let any harm come to you.”

“You’re a lunatic!” Two steps back and Crowley found his back against a wall, so he decided it was very understandable and not uncool at all that he was now screeching: “You are threatening me with a big knife!”

The fully armoured knight in front of him was advancing slowly. “I am so sorry for this, dear fellow.”

In a fit of panic, Crowley let his knees drop to the ground. Something swooshed through the air right above his head. With a blunt, hollow sound, it connected with the wall. Aziraphale cursed.

Crowley’s vision was swimming ever since he had woken up, but he knew he had to grab something to defend himself. A piece of metal. A stick. Anything. His hands scrabbled over the earth in front of his knees.

But there was nothing there. The ground was soft dirt and gravel. Crowley snapped, and concentrated his entire will on a thick, sturdy tree branch he needed to come into existence.

Nothing happened.

Another lunge from his opponent barely missed his head because it was a little too slow as Crowley ducked away to the side. Instead, the hilt of Aziraphale’s weapon hit Crowley’s shoulder just hard enough to smart.

It knocked his elbow into the sword on his own belt.

Huh. Since when had that been there?

Well, no time to ponder that now. “GET BACK!” Crowley yelled and whipped the blade in a wide haymaker around himself.

Aziraphale actually stopped dead in his tracks. Thank God! Perhaps Crowley had underestimated his own fighting skills after all.

He huffed, already exhausted from his sudden burst of strength, and heaved himself back onto his feet. “Hah…!” Crowley paused for effect after one triumphant laugh (not because he was out of breath or anything) and relished in being threatening for once in his life. “Now you’re scared, huh? Not so brave when the other guy is also armed, are you?”

“I’ll be honest,” the knight in shining white armour answered. “I was a bit taken aback by that swing. But only because I was under the impression that you have held a sword before. Had that swing hit anything, it would have probably broken your wrist.”

“Oh, come off it,” Crowley did his best to lift said sword again. When he felt his wrist tremble at the weird angle, he covertly adjusted his grip.

“That’s better,” Aziraphale commented drily. “But with that stance, even half a hit will knock you off your feet.”

“I think you’re just trying to get me to surrender,” Crowley snorted with as much derisiveness as someone with a lung crying for air could possibly muster. “Afraid?”

“Of you hurting yourself? Yes. That’s the whole point!” Aziraphale sheathed his weapon.

Wow! A victory? Crowley really was better at this whole combat thing than even he had thought!

Unfortunately, the other being took another step towards him and rudely didn’t look all that defeated.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Crowley barked and threw out another swing. This time, it connected with Aziraphale’s armoured shoulder. The reverberation from the strike went straight up Crowley’s arm, through his torso and proceeded to fold his legs underneath him like straws during a hailstorm.

Before his head (which really had seen better days!) was able to make sense of where’s up and where’s the bloody ground, the world around him flipped over again and Crowley felt himself be hoisted onto a hard, rounded, metallic ledge.

That prick picked me up, his brain helpfully informed him half a second later.

“What the Heaven?” Crowley, realising he dropped his sword in the whole kerfuffle, started banging his fist against the gleaming armour plates in front of his nose. “Let me down!” An arm around his waist jostled him a little to redistribute his weight. The world finally clicked into place in Crowley’s head: His hip was folded over the knight’s shoulder, with Crowley’s head dangling down an armoured back so that if he looked up (well, down, actually) he could see the scoundrel’s heavily armoured butt.

“If you were actually trying to get down, as it were,” Aziraphale said with a sigh, “I would gladly let you. What I’m trying to prevent is you going up.”

Crowley kicked his legs against Aziraphale’s front which only got himself jostled a second time. “Let me down, demon!” he cried again, outraged at this undignified end of his very heroic sword fight.

First there was an outraged gasp from Aziraphale. Then it was echoed in a more shocked manner from their right (well, Aziraphale’s left). Though before Crowley’s ever-uncooperative vision was able to take in more than the silhouette of a person, he was whirled around when Aziraphale rudely turned and thereby threw Crowley’s torso in the opposite direction. He really was being very inconsiderate.

“Oh, don’t worry, young lady,” Crowley’s rude, unwanted conveyance said and affected a laugh that wouldn’t even fool Gabriel. The hand holding onto Crowley left his hip for a moment – possibly to wave at their new audience. It was great how Aziraphale remembered to emote to people around but spared absolutely no thought to how undignified Crowley must be looking. Great! Absolute top marks! Figures that the first and only other angel Crowley met down here, was completely lacking in manners. Definitely a demon, Crowley decided.

“I assure you I am not a demon,” Aziraphale told the person that Crowley still couldn’t see because he was being swung around like a scarf. “He just got himself into trouble at the pub, so I’m taking him… uh… into the woods.”

“Into the woods?!” Crowley croaked. “Is that the best lie you can come up with? How would that help anything?”

“He’s right,” a female voice said. “Since when do knights take plastered patrons to the woods?”

“Erm…” Aziraphale did something with his hands again that Crowley imagined was something rude, since everything else he was doing fit into that category. “Don’t worry about any of this and dream of whatever you like best!”

The distinct smell of ozone filled the air, and that of miracle form A38 appearing on another plane, waiting to be approved.

“Great,” Crowley sighed. “A bad liar and a cheater.”

“Says the demon who poses as the Black Knight when he doesn’t even know how to hold a sword,” Aziraphale bit back, apparently not impressed with how mouthy his captive was, and gripped onto his charge to adjust the weight on his shoulder for a third time.

“Could you at least not put your hand on my butt?” Crowley asked in a tone that made it clear how annoyed he was with the other’s impertinence.

“Oh!” Aziraphale’s fingers immediately slipped a few inches higher up his hips. “So sorry! Is that better?”

“Will you please stop holding me in place at all?” Crowley demanded. Worth a try. Angels were naive sometimes.

“Will you please stop wriggling around so I don’t have to be afraid that you’re going to fall off as soon as I let go?” Aziraphale asked back in the same dry tone Crowley had used.

“No,” the abducted angel admitted. “Just thought you might wanna be considerate for once.”

“Then that’s also a no from me,” Aziraphale huffed. “And I’m surprised you even know that word. You really must have hit your head quite hard.”

They marched on. (Aziraphale did, to be clear. Absolutely no marching was happening on Crowley’s end.)

Crowley drummed his fingers impatiently on the metal ridge of the armour sticking out in front of his nose. “Are you taking me to this demon place? Hell?” It was getting harder and harder to pay attention to their surroundings. Almighty, his head was foggy...

“No,” the knight said, steadily trudging away from all the newfangled walls and buildings of the settlement. Or at least Crowley thought so. “I already told that girl: I’m taking you with me into the woods.”

“And what are you planning on doing there?” Talking was getting very exhausting. Maybe Crowley could just close his eyes for a second...

“I don’t know!” Aziraphale suddenly sounded like he was carrying the weight of the Earth and was waiting for someone to come and help him with it. “Oh, Crowley, I don’t know!”

And then there was yet another voice. One that Crowley had never heard before – not that he remembered hearing a lot of voices. But he would definitely recall one so loud and angry: “There! That’s the demon! He’s abducting that man and he made Cecily dream about the handymen taking off their shirts!”

Aziraphale let out a desperate whistling sound and shouted: “Oh ffff-”

And that was when Crowley’s poor, abused head had enough arguing, fighting, shouting and dangling upside down, and decided that it was overdue for a good old passing out.

Chapter Text

Oh, God. Oh, Almighty! What was he supposed to do?

Aziraphale was running furrows into his newly created carpet runner.

He was in so much trouble. And for what? A demon? A lying, deceitful enemy of Heaven? A shrewd, blasphemous traitor to all that was holy? A helpless, injured being who let Aziraphale have his oysters because he didn’t like the mouthfeel?

Oh– …someone! Better not invoke Her name, lest She see what he was doing.

His eyes fell on Crowley’s unconscious form on the pile of straw that was supposed to be a bed.

What was he doing?

Kidnapping a demon to prevent him from getting himself killed, dragging him out into the woods, panicking, and then miracling up a whole tower to stash said unruly demon in, apparently. He only hoped that Heaven wouldn’t question his sudden need of vertical architecture in an uninhabited forest clearing in the middle of the lower back of beyond. But perhaps he could come up with something about the homeless deer population wanting to know the piety of learning how to use stairs. Gabriel might buy that.

It probably didn’t help that he had had to make several adjustments to the structure already… The first time around, he had accidentally made the tower angular instead of round, however, and that just wouldn’t do. (He had spent some time last century in a Chinese cloister with some very talented Feng Shui masters and he wasn’t about to let their gracious education go to waste!) And then he realized he’d forgotten to add one of these little, adorable mini-towers that spawn on the upper edge of big towers. And then he noticed that a tower of this calibre definitely needed a beautiful, wooden oriel.

… and then he remembered why all towers seemed to have a wooden oriel and he debated for a good two hours whether to add the hole in the bottom. He prayed to someone (who wasn’t the Almighty since She hopefully was far away from this whole situation) that Crowley wouldn’t need the hole.

His memory was a bit… holy, in both senses of the word, but his corporation seemed to be supernatural still, as far as Aziraphale could tell. Except for the enormous bump on his head, just above his hairline. The angel had only noticed that when he finally managed to heave Crowley onto the hay-bed.

The demon grunted. His leg twitched in his sleep as he rolled around the prickly straw.

Without further thought, Aziraphale miracled the heap of hay into an actual bed, like he had seen in Arthur’s private chambers. What was one more miracle if you already had to explain a toilet for stair-climbing deer?

Crowley’s face relaxed as he settled into the down pillows with a small sigh. He looked peaceful despite his earlier shouting, head wound, and general disgruntlement. And, well, being Crowley.

What had to have happened for a demon to think he was an angel?

As far as Aziraphale could tell, Crowley had gotten into some kind of fight. Which was not very surprising (unless you counted the fact that it had taken until now to happen). The perpetrator was possibly the angry bartender. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to have another word with the man – without Crowley in tow. Just to be safe.

An obnoxiously loud yawn alerted Aziraphale that his charge had woken up. Really, for a demon who got into fights, he was surprisingly innocuous, sometimes.

“Good morning, Crowley,” Aziraphale said politely.

“AAAAH DEMON!” Crowley shouted, rather less politely.

Really!

The angel – who was decidedly the least demonic being in the room, thankyouverymuch – sighed. “I thought we’ve been over this. I am an angel. My name is Aziraphale. We’re colleagues, so to speak; since we’re both stationed on Earth.”

Crowley had jumped upright on the bed – apparently less wobbly on his feet now – and had assumed some sort of defensive stance. It made Aziraphale want to put his hands on his hips and huff disapprovingly.

Instead, he added: “Really, you are being quite ungrateful. I saved you.”

“Begone, foul fiend,” the demon shouted.

“Excuse me?!”

Crowley didn’t seem to take constructive criticism about his behaviour right now, and began to raise both hands towards the ceiling. “What are you-” Before the angel could finish his question, Crowley brought his fingers down in a double snap that echoed impressively loud through the room.

Nothing happened.

“If you’re trying to miracle me away,” Aziraphale hazarded a guess, “or miracle yourself a suit of armour – though God knows I’ve seen you fight and don’t see how even armour would help you in any way – might I suggest trying to pull your power from another direction than from above?”

Crowley squinted at him suspiciously. “You must have used some kind of miracle blocker on me!”

Aziraphale clucked his tongue and decided to not dignify that preposterous accusation with an answer. His rival was a smart cookie. He was going to get to the right conclusion eventually.

“Doesn’t matter,” the smart biscuit-adjacent pastry continued, rather less smartly, in Aziraphale’s opinion. “I can do it the human way!”

“What on Earth are you talking about?”

In lieu of an answer, Crowley held his index-fingers in a cross-shape and started a Latin incantation.

“Are you trying to exorcise me?!” Aziraphale asked incredulously.

For a second, Crowley paused. “Shut up, you’re distracting me! Omnis incursio infernalis adversi… uh. Adversiorum? Uh …omnis congregatius…”

“Oh, fine! If you must!” This was getting more and more ridiculous. Without the patience of an angel, Aziraphale wasn’t sure how anyone tolerated this preposterous creature for long enough that it had taken until now for someone to clock him over the head! “But after this, will you finally listen to what-”

“…et sectum diabolicum! OUCH!” Crowley jumped three ells straight into the air as soon as he finished the incantation.

Aziraphale pursed his lips in reluctant respect. “I wouldn’t have thought a demon had enough holy power left to even smart, but apparently we should consider ourselves lucky that you didn’t manage to properly exorcise yourself. Can we – now that we’ve established that you’ve lost any memory of the last millennia and of Latin declension tables – get back to our current situation? You obviously cannot get rid of me so easily, so we might as well put our heads together and figure out how to get out of this mess.”

“Uh-huh,” Crowley made, unconcerned for whether or not he sounded convinced. “Fine with me. Where are we, by the way? I remember us fighting in the settlement.”

“The human village, yes.” Aziraphale would rather not have fought Crowley in earshot of a bunch of hapless humans. He would have preferred to not fight Crowley at all, truth be told. They had miraculously managed to avoid that all those centuries, despite being who and what they were. It was rather nice, now that Aziraphale thought about it. “We were indeed in a human village, but they were… starting to ask questions about my intentions with you. So I brought you out into the woods. We can stay in this tower until we figure out what happened to you.”

“What do you mean, what happened to me?” Crowley asked and wrinkled his nose. “You happened to me!”

“Getting into fights seems to be a new pastime of yours, from how you looked when we met in the tavern,” Aziraphale said, unimpressed. “Someone has gotten to you before me and it clearly did something to your memory. And your agreeableness, to be frank.”

The demon narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?” At the rate he was going, he was going to have his whole face scrunched up in a single frown by the time Aziraphale was done explaining.

“I mean that we used to be-” the angel cut himself off. There was no word in the Cornish language that could possibly describe their relationship to each other. At least none that Aziraphale was prepared to hear spoken aloud. “-more cordial with each other.” And that hurt to admit; both because it wasn’t supposed to be true and because it was past tense. He already missed Crowley’s smile when when they had a chance meeting in a tavern, or his wink during a surprising sighting across a street.

“No, I meant ‘What do you mean, I’ve been getting into fights?’,” Crowley ignored Aziraphale’s little hesitation completely. “I know we’re more cordial with each other.”

“You do?” Aziraphale perked up before he could remind himself that this was a demon sitting in front of him, and he was not excited about smiles and winks, and he was not happy about one of the damned regaining memories from the time after his Fall; after he had turned evil.

“Of course,” Crowley threw up his hands like the theatrical creature that he was. “I’m an angel! I’m cordial with anyone! I’m not rude!” He wrinkled his nose.

Aziraphale stared at him for a second. “You,” he repeated, just in case he had misheard. “You are not rude. You?”

Crowley glared at him so rudely that Aziraphale had trouble keeping the smirk off his face.

“I know you want me to think I’m one of those… Fallen demons or whatever, but even if I would play along with that for just one second; I have never been rude as an angel, so why would that change?”

“Excuse me?” Aziraphale felt his own eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Our very first interaction was you yelling at me from afar. And then, after I came over and introduced myself, you brushed me off and refused to tell me your name.”

Crowley blinked. “Huh?”

“You didn’t even say ‘hello’ back if I recall correctly.”

“That- that was only,” the oh-so-polite demon started sputtering and the rebellious smile on Aziraphale’s face finally won the revolution against his stoicism. Crowley’s sputtering wasn’t over yet: “That was just because I was busy! I had a lot to do!”

“And I didn’t?” Aziraphale asked as haughtily as he could manage while he was trying to remember what he had been doing at that fateful point in time. It might have been important. It might have been lunch break.

“Ngk, I mean… I assumed-”

“You assumed you’re the most important person in the room – as you always do.” Ah, yes, it had been lunch break and he had heard about the cloud cooler in the observatory having been filled with rejoice-flavoured cirrus.

“Look, I was a bit preoccupied with my work. You know… the creation of the universe and everything!” Crowley defended himself. “There was a lot to keep in mind! You know – more important stuff than the first pretty face that crosses my path.”

Aziraphale’s face suddenly felt warm. “The first pretty-”

“I’ll let you know, I get very absorbed in my work,” Crowley thankfully interrupted him.

“Oh, is that what demons call ‘being overly excited like a puppy smelling bacon for the first time’?” Crowley bristled visibly at the blatant accusation. The one about being a demon, or the puppy-comparison, Aziraphale couldn’t tell. The angel felt a smile stretch his lips wider. “Don’t worry, it was just as endearing. But we have gotten off topic: You have evidently been getting into fights even before I found you three seconds from being dressed down by a barkeep.”

“Yeah, well,” Crowley clucked his tongue accusingly. “Seems to be happening around these quarters. I got beaten up immediately after, even though I hadn’t done anything.”

Aziraphale coughed over the twinge that those words caused in his chest. “I used the pommel of my sword in order to not seriously hurt you. You were hardly being ‘beaten up’. Besides, you took care of all the ‘beating you up’ quite well yourself. I didn’t lay a finger on you during the fight.”

Since Crowley was already opening his mouth for a rebuttal, Aziraphale decided to move the conversation along before they got sidetracked again. (That seemed to be happening a lot to them whenever they got talking, memory loss or not.) “You had bruises before I arrived, and from what you told me, you have been in this… condition for at least a little while,” he reiterated the whole amnesia business.

“Yeah, well. That human you’re referring to seemed to have something against me,” Crowley mused. “Wouldn’t be surprised if it was him.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Even if not, he might have a clue as to what you were up to before. We should go back there and ask him a few questions.”

Something crossed over Crowley’s face that reminded Aziraphale of goat-kids and blue lizards. It was gone in an instant, as the demon leaned back on his elbows and half reclined on the bed. (At least he still had his impossible posture and immunity to back-pain!) “Maybe you should be going alone, ‘angel’,” he suggested. It was the usual moniker he used for Aziraphale, yet it sounded like a challenge. “I’m feeling a little under the weather. You know – after I’ve been beaten up, threatened, in a fight with someone wearing a suit of armour, and kidnapped.”

Aziraphale felt his face getting warm. “Kidnapping is a strong word.”

“Oh yeah?” Crowley asked in mock surprise, which made Aziraphale question why he was so concerned about this impossible creature in the first place. “What word would you prefer? Abduction? Ravishment?”

The temperature in his cheeks climbed to ‘hot’. “This is at best a witness protection situation,” Aziraphale protested weakly.

Crowley raised his eyebrows sceptically. “A what?”

“You know… When you’re confined to your quarters for your own good because there is a real possibility that someone out there will harm you.”

The snort that came out of Crowley’s nose was derisive and reassuring. “You read too many stories,” he said and Aziraphale tried not to beam at him. “So, oh noble witness protector who is definitely not a demon, do you need me to come with you despite being told I’m not welcome to go back to that bar-place – which would be quite rude, I’d wager – or can I just stay here and rest my poor, injured head a bit?”

“Of course, my dear.” It was out before Aziraphale could stop it. ‘My dear?’ Oh goodness, he was getting a little too caught up in this whole spiel of rescuing a damsel… or, well, demon in distress, wasn’t he? No reason to let this… situation cloud his judgement of the relationship he and Crowley had cultivated in recent centuries.

It was just that Crowley was really rather hurt; and with his memories and therefore his wiles missing, he was… strangely vulnerable. It made Aziraphale feel queasy to think of him out there, in a world with highway men and angry tavern keepers. It made him feel even queasier to think of Crowley marching into Heaven, expecting help and getting a flaming sword for his troubles.

He shook his head to get rid of the image forming in mind. It only occurred to him how weird that must have looked without the context of his thoughts when Crowley furrowed his brows at him. “I’ll go and have a talk with that gentleman, and perhaps even get you un-banned from the establishment while I’m at it. They really do have a great house brew and I’d appreciate someone to share it with,” Aziraphale concluded as he got up to get the light grey fur coat he had left next to his swamp-water damaged, off-white suit of armour, on a wooden stool near the entrance of the room. “Just don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone. That includes leaving for Heaven.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Crowley said, which was a lot more concerning than had he put up a fight about it.

“Good. Then you won’t mind that I didn’t put a door on this tower.” Wrapped in fur, Aziraphale took his sword and stepped down the wooden winding stairs leading to the ground floor of his hastily miracled-up tower. (It wasn’t so much that he thought he needed his sword as he was vaguely aware that you shouldn’t leave sharp objects in the care of former angels that thought you were a demon.)

“And that was before he started yelling at the potted rosemary by the window,” the tavern keeper complained.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale fretted. “But that is hardly a reason to hit someone over the head!”

“What? Of course not,” the human agreed. He continued polishing a clay cup with a rag that Aziraphale wasn’t sure made the cup’s overall hygiene better or worse. Perhaps he should think about bringing his own crockery, next time he was here for a meal.

“You did not get into a fight with the redheaded individual from yesterday?” Aziraphale clarified. Oh no, this was his only clue. “Even though he is reasonably annoying?”

“No!” The barman sounded appalled, as if he hadn’t been ready to clock Crowley in the face just a day ago. “Not even when he somehow made the musician sing all those blasphemous songs about throwing snowballs in the bishop’s face. Don’t know how he did it; it doesn’t make any sense, but the lute player seemed too upset to be in on it. So after I noticed that all the chairs of all the guys who started to heckle him miraculously got one wobbly leg, I told him to never show his face in here again, or I might forget that my mother raised a pacifist. Your friend left completely wankered but without a going-over.”

“He’s not my friend!” Aziraphale cried a little too hastily to be believable. Gosh, he had to stop doing that!

The tavern keeper snorted and finally finished up the cup, only to immediately pour ale into it and give it to a man to Aziraphale’s right, who already had too much to drink to keep his head upright without the help of his hand and elbow. (Definitely crockery from home, next time!) “My bad,” the tavern keeper said, clearly amused by something. “So why are we talking about this if not because you want to tell off whoever pummelled him, or to give me a conscience bad enough to let him come back here?”

“Wellllll,” Aziraphale mused and decided that he, in his capacity as an angel, liked asking for forgiveness. And circumventing asking for permission would grant him more opportunities for asking for forgiveness. Thus, it was the angelic thing to do! “It is actually so very nice of you to offer to rescind his ban. Thank you so much! I will pass the good news on to him.” He continued speaking without stopping for breath, so that the human couldn’t wedge a protest in: “But I am here to understand what happened. Do you perchance know where he went after he left your establishment? It would be ever so important to know.”

The man behind the counter grunted. “Staggered into town, probably to the herbwife. He was talking to the chap on the table next to him about directions to her house before. God knows he needed someone to help him sober up. If you’re still looking for who gave him the scrapes – my bet is he ran into a post and that’s what did it.”

“Thank you for your help,” Aziraphale said shortly. He wasn’t interested in coming up with an explanation as to why that was improbable. He knew that all that was standing between Crowley and an intimate encounter with a sign post after a bender, was his demonic nature at the best of times. Though even Crowley was sensible enough to sober up a little if he wanted to go somewhere and noticed that he could see the road twice, and both were somehow capable of waving at him.

Perhaps he should return to the demon now. Searching for the herbwife of the village would take some time and the way from the tower to the tavern had already taken an hour.

He wasn’t concerned for the demon but him being too exhausted to accompany Aziraphale to the village didn’t sound much like him. And who knew how Crowley fared without his powers that – as just established – were usually the only thing that kept him alive.

And, of course, there was the matter of the tower that Aziraphale had miracled up and therefore was his new home now – and he simply couldn’t trust a demon to not ruin the place with all his… evilness, if left alone for too long. It wouldn’t do if he had gone through all that trouble to get the furnishings just right, only to be forced to move back into his little, bleak house in the village.

It just couldn’t be helped. Aziraphale had to return to check if everything was in order.

For his interior design’s sake.

Chapter Text

Crowley waited for the slam of the door before he carefully cracked an eye open. What a promising sound! Not only had the “angel” left (Crowley had sarcastically dubbed him as such in his head since this guy kept insisting that he was an angel despite all obvious evidence to the contrary) – what was way more: It meant that this blasted tower had a door, no matter what that tosser said!

Hah! What a simpleton! Did he really believe Crowley – an actual angel – was too tired to go into town? Served him right that he was gonna come back to an empty building with a distinct lack of actual angels now!

Triumphantly, Crowley jumped out of his (admittedly very nice) bed… and immediately keeled over.

Alright. Maybe he was a little woozy from being on this weird planet. The air was just different down here! Viscous. Spoilt with oxygen. Ugh.

But enough lying on the ground! Escape time! (Not least because the floor was cold, even though it was made from wooden planks. There was a rug, but it had not had the decency of quickly relocating itself underneath Crowley when it saw him fall. Clearly a demonic creation.)

In a weird, but not unfamiliar, ever-increasing urge to procrastinate, Crowley finally took a second to look around the room he was in. From down here on the floor, it looked almost huge: There was a bed (again: way too nice for a make-shift prison like this; maybe it was designed to trap him here with its cosiness in contrast to the cold temperatures all around), two lonely wooden shelves on opposite walls that hosted nothing but a few books, and a fireplace in the middle of the chamber. There was a table and two padded chairs by the stairs, where Aziraphale had been sitting when Crowley first woke up. The walls were curved around the perfect circle of the room. Everything was very simple, very plain, almost like the sparse furniture back home in Heaven – only that this stuff here had a texture to it; a grittiness that caught in the grooves of the pads of Crowley’s fingers and helped him anchor himself in this strange world.

Or, well, almost everything was plain. Again, there was the strangely out-of-place bed, and then… the windows in the oriel. They were made of coloured glass that was less reminiscent of a mysterious tower in the woods and more of a cathedral in the centre of a megalopolis. The light that visited him from the outside refracted on the floor in flower patterns and geometrical shapes of all colours and skewed sizes, and danced across his nose where he was currently lying on the floor.

You’d never find something like that in the white vastness of Heaven.

But as fascinating as they were, they wouldn’t help Crowley get back home. So he finally got up, cracked his spine (ouch, since when could he do that?! That was horrible!) and left the mismatched room at the top of the tower to go down the crooked, wooden stairs.

Down in the basement, he was greeted with darkness and a damp smell that hailed from places even further down than he had already strayed from Heaven.

Weirdly, his eyes caught the little light that was coming through a few grooves between the stones in the wall, where the mortar had been forgotten. He could see as if it was day, albeit one beset with so many rain clouds that it had drained the world of all colour.

Crowley blinked.

He distinctly remembered being night-blind. It had been a blessing since it let him appreciate the blazing dots swirling through the universe around him so much more for their shine.

Another curious thing that he noticed – thanks to the first curiosity of “hey, I can see!” – was that there was no bloody door anywhere down here! What the Heaven? The only stupid door in the entirety of the tower seemed to be the one on top of the stairs, leading to the room he was just in!

Then what on Alpha Centauri had that slam been, then, when Aziraphale left? Did that fiend go around slamming walls? (If so, the brazenness of this demon was unprecedented… Crowley had to admit he liked his style.)

The only thing here were crates of fresh fruit and vegetables, more crates with bottles of some sort of liquids, and a stash of as-of-yet unlit candles.

Right. So. No door. No matter! There were other ways out of a building than a stupid door.

He counted the stairs when he stomped them back up into the direction he was so infuriatingly impeded from going. (Not that the elevator to Heaven was technically really above him but you get the idea.) Eighteen. Hm. A jump from this height would proooobably be survivable without discorporation but it might be a tad uncomfortable.

Crowley didn’t like uncomfortable. Especially when it entailed broken legs. (And he also didn’t like discorporation, or even the risk of it. He might revisit that emergency exit when – if! – all else had failed, but if he could help it, he’d like to keep his limbs where they were currently connected to his body. It was a nice design!)

So. Jumping out of the window was currently out the window. (If he couldn’t go that way himself, he might as well throw ideas out there.) Huh. Wait a second. Throwing something out of the window for someone else to find? That was certainly an option. Shame for the fancy colourful glass that Aziraphale had for some reason put into this tower, but what could you do? If destroying a bit of architectural art was the only downside to this plan, then it was one of the best plans Crowley had ever had.

The removal of the pretty glass-pane in the window had not been the only downside to his plan, as it turned out. There was a slightly bigger, slightly chillier downside that Crowley had not considered before throwing a tankard through the window: The question was not so much why Aziraphale had bothered putting coloured glass in as it was why he chose to put glass in at all.

It was pretty chilly without it, Crowley had the misfortune to discern. It hadn’t felt that chilly yesterday when he was out! But then again, he had been in a sword fight for his life and, crucially, on the ground floor right outside a heated building during the time.

A pity that he couldn’t do much about this late realisation now that the glass was littered in reproachful colour-specks on the grass in front of the tower and sparkled up at him in insurrection. (Really, someone should invent windows that opened and closed whenever you wanted. It was a real market niche if you asked him!)

Oh, well. He’d just have to make sure the chill was worth it.

Leaning out of the newly made hole in the wall as far as he was comfortable (he had already more or less fallen out of bed today, so he wasn’t too trusting in his own sense of balance), Crowley could see the surrounding trees, sprinkled with the odd hut here or there – on the cusp where the woods became village. Right below him, a lazy brook babbled its way through the isolation of the woods and onto this lonely forest clearing that hadn’t even held a tower, yesterday.

Jackpot!

But just as Crowley was inwardly celebrating his discovery, the ivy creeping up the side of the tower caught his eye. Maybe there was an even easier way to escape! (Pity, he liked convoluted plans…)

“Hey,” Crowley yelled, putting all his weight onto his elbows on the window frame. “Hey, you! Yes, you, the buildering plant that thinks it’s very cool! Come over here, I need to get down!”

The ivy thoughtfully rustled in the wind.

“What’s the hold-up? Don’t wanna help a kidnapping victim?”

There was a murmur when the stems scratched along the limestone in the breeze.

Crowley ground his teeth. “Come over here right now or I’ll use you as a candlewick, you useless vertical shrubbery!”

With the swish of a particularly strong gust of wind, all green fled the outside of the oriel and exposed the light brown wood and the naked, white stone of the tower.

Right.

So.

Back to plan B for brook, then. Figures that even flowing water was more emotionally stable than a stupid botanical hive-mind that might be able to free Crowley without much fanfare if it didn’t have its head up its roots.

But who cares! The utensils were collected in no time, even within the sparse amenities that Aziraphale had left him with: There were plenty of bottles downstairs (the sickly sweet smelling red liquid was easily discarded, now that the window was open), there was plenty of paper in all of the books on the shelves, and if he wanted to be very fancy, he even had plenty of candles to seal the cork back onto the bottle once he was done.

So Crowley set to work. He would call this new invention… bottle post.

With the leftovers of the red liquid as ink and a feather of a disgruntled pigeon Crowley had managed to mug when it made the mistake of landing on the windowsill (he was already up against a demon – what was one more fluffy mortal enemy on this planet?), he crafted his message:

Perfect! Surely no human could read a plea like this and stay unaffected. They were supposed to be a helpful bunch, right? (More so than ivy in any case.)

Message rolled and bottled up, cork in – all that was left to do, was to hurl it out of the open window and into the brook. And then, he could move on to the next step: Getting rid of this pesky demon.

Well, that was going to be the easy part…

There was a polite knock on the lopsided oak door to the room, even though it was already ajar. “Crowley, I’m back!”

“Great,” Crowley tried to say sarcastically but it was kind of hard to keep the gleeful smirk off his face.

There was a pause. The door didn’t open.

“Did you just come to the door to tell me that or…?” Crowley prompted.

“Well, you didn’t invite me in,” Aziraphale huffed in return. “It would be rude to just barge into your room unasked!”

“You’re fine with abducting me,” Crowley summarized succinctly, “but you draw the line at entering a room uninvited. What are you, a vampire?”

Aziraphale’s brow-furrow was almost audible in his voice: “You had forgotten what humans are for a second there, yesterday – how do you know what a vampire is?”

“Invented them, didn’t I? You bite Gabriel one time…! I mean, it’s his fault for sneaking up on me! Can hardly blame me for taking a quick nap on a cloud instead of calculating the architectural integrity of a nebula for the third time in a row! And then that hypochondriac panics about it so much, he invents a whole new cryptid before cryptids are even a thing! …So are you going to come in or not?”

Another snooty huff. “That depends. Are you going to invite me in?”

“No!” Crowley shouted, pride briefly blinding his careful planning. “Why would I do that?”

Instead of a huff, there was a defeated sigh outside the door. “I understand. For what it’s worth, I wish things were different. I’m sorry.” The last sentence was punctuated by footfalls getting fainter on the stairs.

“Wait!” Crowley said and was halfway to the door before he caught himself. That bastard! Now he was making Crowley feel bad even though he was in the right! “You can’t just lock me up in a tower and then leave me.” It was meant to come out indignant, so he ignored the undertone of hurt when it surprised himself.

The noise of the footsteps stopped immediately. “I was never going to leave you,” Aziraphale said so quietly that Crowley barely picked it up, even through the slightly open door. “I wouldn’t do that. Not with you being this vuln- this forgetful. I can sleep in front of the tower though, if you’d rather not have me in here – but I’d like to be in earshot, just in case you need something or… remember a time in your life that might have been… not very pleasant and you need someone to talk about it.”

It was Crowley’s turn to sigh in defeat – but it didn’t feel like defeat at least; just like one of his warring emotions triumphing over the other. “No, I don’t want you to sleep outside the tower. And I think I’d appreciate having someone to talk to – demon or not.”

There was a pause. Finally, Aziraphale’s voice came closer as it said: “I know the sentiment.”

And then the door began to open and Crowley suddenly remembered why he had wanted so badly for Aziraphale to come in before he started thinking too much about how the ‘angel’ leaving made him feel.

The metal pitcher on top of the door somersaulted downwards and drenched the fluffy, white-clad demon with his fluffy, white hair until he looked like a disgruntled poodle whose owner had dragged him out into a downpour but forgot to bring the treats.

Aziraphale blinked at Crowley. One blink in shock. One blink in surprise. A third blink in dawning understanding. And the fourth in absolute pissiness.

“Huh,” Crowley whistled in mild surprise. “I really thought that would do something.”

“To soak me with water?” the poodle asked testily.

“Weeeeeell,” Crowley drew the syllable out as long as it stretched, but he couldn’t really come up with a way to say it that didn’t sound extremely mean: “Back in Heaven when there was a particularly unholy spot on the lightning-stove that we couldn’t just clean away with the normal, cloud-based detergent, we angels’d bless a bit of the cleaning water to shorten our time on cleaning duty a bit. So from that, I figured it’d reeeally sting someone who is also unholy.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said very slowly and very carefully, as if he was trying very hard not to grind his teeth around the words. “You are a demon. Which is by the way further evidenced by trying to get out of cleaning duty, which I know for a fact we angels are not supposed to do. You cannot create holy water. You just physically cannot.”

“Counterargument: I am an angel and this is holy water,” the definitely-angel amnesiac-starmaker said and picked up the pitcher that had clattered to the ground. It still contained some remnants of water of questionable piety, so Crowley stuck his fingers into it and flicked them at Aziraphale.

Aziraphale blinked as the droplets hit him square in the face.

“The power of Christ compels you!” Crowley said for good measure.

“That phrase does not even work if an actual angel says it!” Aziraphale groused and finally snatched the pitcher from Crowley’s hands – maybe a bit more forceful than necessary. “And how do you know the name ‘Christ’? You didn’t even know the name ‘Crowley’, twenty-four hours ago!”

“Oi! I was there when they planned the whole thing before we started the universe. Suggested they make it a dodecahedron instead of a cross but nobody listened!”

“How would that even- Oh, nevermind! Well, you’ve tried to exorcise me and you tried to kill me with holy water,” Aziraphale scolded him. “Are you quite done yet or do we need to say my name three times in a mirror before we can lay your harebrained theory of me being a demon to rest?”

“Uh,” Crowley said intelligently. “First off, a little soak would hardly kill you. But I’ll pretend like I do believe you for now if you pretend to not be cross with me for hosing you down.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Aziraphale said huffily. “I was already cross with you before I even entered the tower.”

“What? Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps you would like to explain to me why one of the pretty stained glass windows I made for you has been disassembled into deadly colourful confetti on the meadow below the window?”

“Oh,” Crowley said. “Oops.”

“Or maybe I was a bit disappointed with you for littering all over the grass and the rivulet?”

“Huh?” Crowley said because he was having a very articulate day today. “What are you talking about?”

“The bottles, Crowley! You littered the whole forest clearing with bottles and bits of paper!”

“Oh, yeah,” the still very articulate Crowley said. “Just didn’t seem to manage to hit the brook with my bottled-up messages to send them downstream.”

“Well, you seem to have hit everything else!” Aziraphale groused. “And quite a lot of them were lying in the water before I fished them out, actually!”

“Yeah, that’s after I practised my aim a bit, when it then turned out that the brook is not carrying enough water to transport a bottle anywhere without it immediately catching on the ground.”

Aziraphale pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, even though it sounded more like someone letting out a deep breath to calm themselves down. “Where did you get the paper for all those messages, anyway?”

Crowley pursed his lips and made a squeaking noise with them before answering: “Remember how you said you were cross before coming up the tower?” He didn’t get an answer, if you didn’t count the glare that hit him straight in the face, so he continued: “So that means you already calmed down now and you don’t want that whole emotional journey to have been in vain, right?”

“Crowley…!” Aziraphale said in the threatening voice of a parent who was about to count to three.

“In my defence: I have been abducted by a demon!” His kidnapper’s eyes didn’t start glowing, nor did he grow fangs – and he did seem rather calm for someone who was obviously furious from the rising suspicion that Crowley had disembowelled his books – but somehow, that quiet upset made Crowley more uneasy than an archangel’s full fury. (Which he had encountered exactly once: When he had to tell Uriel that he’d borrowed all of their pretty, golden freckles to dust an equally pretty supernova with – right before it exploded and sent gold dust everywhere.)

Aziraphale very visibly had a little inner monologue about staying calm before he spoke: “I know none of this is your fault – probably. Possibly. To be honest, knowing you, it likely is your fault. In any case, you owe me. The biggest. Apology. As soon as you regain your memory.”

At the sheer absurdity of that suggestion and their entire situation, Crowley blew air through his pursed lips so hard, he sounded like a horse. “Like what? Should I do a little dance while saying ‘You were right, I was wrong’?”

“I was thinking more of a five course dinner, but actually, yes, I would like the dance,” Aziraphale answered with so much hostility that Crowley thought that maybe, just maybe, he did not, in fact, want a dance or a five-course-meal but rather to strangle Crowley here and now. “Let’s change the subject before it comes to light that you also burnt all my favourite coats or whatever else you have indubitably cocked up… I am wondering since I came in: Why are you wearing your blanket like a cape,” Aziraphale finally asked when Crowley just smiled (or bared his teeth) at him apologetically.

“I, uh…,” Crowley briefly considered coughing up a hairball or whatever earthly corporations did to play for time. Aziraphale had graciously given him an escape route from that specific topic and yet he didn’t see any path that didn’t return to the scene of the crime when answering this question: “I kind of defenestrated the window.”

“Yes, thank you for reminding me. I had almost forgotten,” Aziraphale noted wryly.

“Yeah, and, uh… it turns out those things are actually a great invention! Windows, I mean. Turns out they keep out the draughts.”

Amazingly, Aziraphale didn’t look annoyed. Instead, his face morphed into that of an angel who had been offered a plate of cloud fluff with the challenge to tell if it was a cumulus or a stratus by taste alone. “It has gotten rather chilly since the sun set,” he mused and looked at the broken window first and then at his own hand. “I could… But then they will definitely take notice upstairs if I keep up the miracles around this tower. Perhaps we should handle this the human way.”

And with that, he took a step towards the hearth and picked up a neatly arranged flint and a piece of steel. He looked at them a little doubtfully. “I have to admit that I never had to do this and I’m not entirely sure how starting a fire with these works.”

“Oh,” Crowley shouted and immediately sprang into action beside Aziraphale. “I know this!” Without further prompting, he took the utensils from the other being. He had always been pretty friendly with all the other angels, but this fuzzy feeling that flooded him at the thought of being helpful and needed was new. As he began to strike the two objects together over a bundle of dry hay, he explained: “Had to study all of these chemical reactions when we made the… uh. I don’t remember what the official name was. The big bang in the beginning!”

“I surely hope that that will not be the official name for it,” Aziraphale said in a deprecating tone – and yet it sounded as if it had been said through a smile. “It sounds ridiculous.”

“Thanks, I- ouch!” God, it was bad enough that Crowley only knew this whole ‘fire making’ process in theory, but getting his hands to cooperate was an additional challenge he had not anticipated. His left thumb started glowing in an angry red where he had accidentally struck it with the stone.

“I thought you knew what you’re doing,” Aziraphale said and the annoyance Crowley was searching in his voice was nowhere to be found.

“I do!” Crowley asserted quickly. It didn’t do to have his authority challenged! He weirdly appreciated the feeling of someone – in this case Aziraphale – watching him competently do something they wanted done. “It’s just that the colder my fingers get, the less they move when I tell them to!”

“Oh, dear!” Without any preamble, there were suddenly warm hands around Crowley’s – cupping his fingers as he was holding the tools.

He blinked at them in surprise.

“You’re freezing!” Aziraphale murmured as he started very lightly rubbing the tips of Crowley’s fingers. Crowley let out an incredulous noise in question and amazement. He wanted to get out of this tower so badly, and yet where his hands were felt very nice. Like a place he couldn’t quite locate in the haze of his memories.

Like somewhere he wanted to stay.

Chapter Text

Crowley was shivering.

Not much. But Aziraphale couldn’t think about anything else. He tried to focus on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (which had several stories amputated, thanks to a certain someone), but his eye was repeatedly drawn to every movement – perceived or real – coming from the bed.

The fire in the hearth was roaring, thanks to Crowley’s and Aziraphale’s combined efforts, and Aziraphale was feeding it a lot more kindling than it strictly needed. (He’d have to go out tomorrow and gather some more, just in case.) Still though, there was a small, nagging voice in his head reminding him of how the death of a fire in humans’ homes was so often closely followed by that of the inhabitants – at least during the winter.

It wasn’t that cold yet. He knew that. Summer had just passed the proverbial torch to red and yellow foliage and sleepy hedgehogs. And there was that small detail of Crowley being a literal demon, no matter how much he denied it. Aziraphale doubted he could freeze to death, even if he tried.

But still. Something about Crowley lying in a bed, blankets pulled tightly over his shoulders and trembling with discomfort, was stealing the warmth out of Aziraphale’s chest, too.

He was made to protect, after all.

A kick to the sheepskin, after it dared to expose a defenceless, scaled toe to the nigh fatal chill of the room, settled it: The angel put his book down (cringing just a little when the pages automatically flipped over to where Crowley had ripped out their brothers and sisters) and fished a long, flat rock out of the fireplace.

Briefly waking Crowley up was the lesser evil, he decided, than letting his sleep wrestle with the drawbacks of his cold-bloodedness. (Which was ridiculous anyway. He had always thought so! The Fall had changed a lot about Crowley, but it certainly had not managed to make him cold-blooded in more than the biological sense.)

(… or that was what Aziraphale had been thinking until now. On second thought, though, with a Heaven-minded version of this former angel here to compare with the demon he had become, perhaps Crowley was and had always been just a little bit of a cold-blooded killer. Ovid’s Metamorphoses certainly suggested it. Books had souls too, after all!)

(An audible sigh and a shiver later, and Aziraphale had forgotten all about that poor dear’s criminal history of tome-defilement. Of course this freezing, human-shaped snake would try to find a way out of a tower with a broken window! Really, it was his fault for not providing Crowley with an adequate heating system!)

Armed with a clay pot that was rattling with the smouldering stone from the hearth, Aziraphale did something that felt just a titchy bit mean and lifted the edge of Crowley’s blanket.

Crowley sat up in bed like he’d been punched in the face with an entire harrow. “Nghrrrkwhhmmmguh?”

Aziraphale sucked his lips between his teeth to keep them from making a shape Crowley would probably not appreciate in his shocked state. “I’m sorry, dear, but you’ll thank me later,” he promised and tucked at another blanket that was wrapped around Crowley’s thigh. (This silly creature had more layers than an onion painted in Photoshop – which, of course, would not be invented for a couple (thousand) years yet, but what a hobby-littérateur would Aziraphale be if he let something like chronology get in the way of a good simile?)

“What in Heaven could you do that would justify wa- oh!” The complaint ended in a pleasantly surprised hiccup when the warmed up clay carefully touched his shivering skin. “Yeah, alright. You’re forgiven.”

Again, Aziraphale needed to reign in his mouth. “Thank you. Don’t go setting the bed on fire with it, please. If you do, I’d have to wake you up again.”

“’s fine. …At least I’d be warm, then,” Crowley mumbled as he settled back into his little blanket nest. “Wasn’t quite sleeping anyway. Really want to.” A yawn punctuated the statement. “But can’t figure out how.”

“Hm,” the angel hummed. “Your body has probably grown accustomed to sleep, but your brain has forgotten how to do it.”

“How do the humans figure it out?” Crowley blinked his eyes, one after the other – just a smidge out of sync. It had no business making Aziraphale’s heart grow two sizes in his chest.

“I would assume,” the angel said and gave up the unwinnable fight against his dawning smile, “the same way you did, originally.”

Crowley huffed. “Big help, that. Can’t remember.”

“I know.” It came out a little too soft but thankfully, Crowley didn’t look suspicious. Perhaps he hadn’t heard. “Is there anything that is uncomfortable?” Aziraphale asked quickly to cover the faux-pas. “Perhaps if we get you comfortable enough, it’ll come back to you.”

A pensive, unhappy grunt dislodged itself from Crowley’s throat as he wiggled a little from side to side in his bedstead. “’s like a draft around my left arm.”

“I see.” Aziraphale promptly grabbed the blankets and furs that lay atop the demon, pulled them taut and tucked them tightly underneath Crowley’s left side. There was a reddish hue on that ginger-framed face when Aziraphale righted himself again.

“Anything else?”

“Uh…” Crowley blinked slowly before he answered: “M’ face is warm now. The pillow is very prickly though.”

“It is filled with straw,” Aziraphale explained.

“You’d think there’d be softer materials.” It sounded so sulky, the angel could barely hide his laugh in a sniff.

“Give it here,” he demanded and grabbed the offender. He closed the door behind him when he left the room without explanation and hoped that Crowley wouldn’t be able to see the glow through the gap underneath the door.

A few minutes later, he re-entered with a fully stuffed pillow. Crowley sat ramrod straight in his bed and stared at him. No luck, then.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Try if the pillow is better now,” Aziraphale very sneakily ignored the question.

Crowley took it from him. He experimentally squashed the fabric and its filling a couple of times in between his hands. “It’s so soft,” he whispered in wonder.

“I believe kings use feather pillows, too. So it might just be enough for your refined taste,” Aziraphale joked anxiously to get the strangely reverent mood out of the room.

Crowley finally used the thing like he was supposed to and plopped it down to put his head on it. “How’d you get feathers in the middle of the night without using a miracle?”

The angel rolled his shoulders against the slight strain he always felt whenever he overstretched his arms to reach something right behind his back. “Don’t worry about it, dear.”

Crowley looked at him weirdly while he settled deeper into his new pillow. The fact that he did not blink was unsettling, Aziraphale reminded himself. That was why the prolonged eye contact made his skin tingle. Just one more sign that he was a demon.

(Just one more thing that made him Crowley.)

“Is there something on my face,” Aziraphale asked eventually.

“No, just…” Still no blinking. “Bringing me a pillow and all… ‘s very nice of you. You know, for a demon.”

The angel could stop neither the corner of his mouth nor his eyebrow from shooting upwards. “Golly, thank you!”

“Just saying,” Crowley shrugged. And kept staring.

The seconds ticked by.

(No blinking.)

“You still can’t sleep, can you?” the angel asked.

“I just can’t figure out how to stop my head from doing this thing!” The petulant whine in Crowley’s voice almost made Aziraphale reach out to… do something with his hand. Smooth something over. He didn’t know what.

“You mean thinking?” he asked.

“No, the- the throbbing thing it does.”

The warm fuzziness on Aziraphale’s skin turned into goosebumps in a sudden, imperceptible gust from the destroyed window. “Your head is still hurting?”

Another shrug from Crowley. “I thought that’s normal? Been like this since I remember.”

“Which is about a day and a half,” Aziraphale noted – for which Crowley shot him a glare, but really, the angel had just said it to reassure himself. “I think you hurt your head quite badly and that’s why… we’re in this situation. At least I have to assume so.”

The fact that Crowley could shrug while laying on his side in bed was quite impressive, and he showed that talent off again. “Thought you went and cleared that up with the tavern keeper.”

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale sighed and gingerly sat on the side of the bed that was not currently occupied by a demon. “Turns out you used your extraordinary aptitude to annoy people on more than one person at a time. The tavern keeper said he had nothing to do with it and I am inclined to believe him.”

“How kind of him to not clobber a presumably paying customer,” Crowley drawled sarcastically. Aziraphale lifted an eyebrow at the word ‘presumably’ but the demon already continued: “Doesn’t help with my head pounding like a supernova, unfortunately.”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t”, the angel agreed and reached one hand out towards his patient. Before he could touch him, hesitation crept in again.

Crowley wouldn’t really like that, would he? If he had his memory? The demon had never been the touchy kind. On quite a few occasions, Aziraphale had even noticed Crowley flinching back at the last second before impact, the moment he noticed himself reaching out towards Aziraphale.

But that didn’t help the Crowley currently in front of him. And that Crowley was in pain. “May I?” Aziraphale asked eventually.

Instead of answering, Crowley bowed his head and shoved it into Aziraphale’s hand like a cat.

When Aziraphale didn’t move, he said: “You may, ‘angel’.”

Something in Aziraphale’s stomach fluttered. Aziraphale furrowed his brows. What was wrong? Crowley used to call him ‘angel’ all the time. It’s just that Aziraphale had assumed it to be nothing more than a descriptor, not… whatever else there was.

“I thought you didn’t believe me about being an angel,” he said quietly while he carded his fingers through Crowley’s hair, willing his hand to be as soft as his words, searching for a bump or a cut.

Crowley just shrugged again. “Behave like one,” was his accusation, said around a smile. His eyes were closed.

Aziraphale scratched his thumb over a spot behind Crowley’s ear that made the demon lean into the touch. He couldn’t feel any scarring, but he moved his thumb over the spot a few more times, just to be sure. “I try,” the angel said eventually.

He didn’t know why admitting it made him want to cry.

“You’re good at it,” Crowley said, voice sleepy.

“Thank you.”

“I meant at pretending to be an angel.”

“Yeah,” Aziraphale breathed. It felt wet somewhere in his lungs. “I am.”

Finally, at the front of Crowley’s hairline, Aziraphale’s index-finger connected with something that felt like an angry ridge. The contact made Crowley flinch immediately, but Aziraphale held his head steady, carefully, and poured just a little angelic blessing into the cut. He felt it melt away underneath the pads of his fingers.

Crowley let out a long, shaky breath.

“Better now?” asked Aziraphale.

In lieu of an answer, the demon laid back down, looking flamboyantly relaxed and grinning at the angel like a challenge.

“Unfortunately, now that I blessed you, you probably shouldn’t go back to Hell either. At least for as long as it would take for your head to heal on its own. Then the blessing will have dissolved too.”

“You’re really holding onto that story, aren’t you,” Crowley said, clearly amused. “Of me in Hell.”

“We wouldn’t want to confuse you even more with inconsistencies,” Aziraphale joked and didn’t mind that the twinkle in his eye could probably be plainly seen. “Do you think you can sleep now?”

“I mean… The clay pot is getting colder,” Crowley complained like a professional.

Aziraphale eyed the amount of furs and blankets the demon was already engulfed in. “I’m afraid I didn’t take your cold-bloodedness into consideration,” he fretted. “I suppose you need something to keep you warm that is warm in itself. Not just warmed up by fire.”

“Like…?” Crowley drawled suspiciously and gave Aziraphale a sceptical side-eye – which was impressive, given the fact that he was facing him frontally.

“Like nothing we have available!” Aziraphale rushed to say, all in one breath and far too quickly. He took a step back as if the bed had developed sudden-onset leprosy.

“Right,” Crowley snorted, and Aziraphale recognized the relief in his tone, but there was something else in there that seemed diametrically opposed and rather confusing for the angel. “I don’t know why you’d think I’m cold-blooded, anyway. It’s just freezing in here.”

“I’ll put two more stones into your clay pot,” Aziraphale promised and held his hand out to take the kitchenware from his sleep clinic patient.

“Don’t bother,” Crowley declined and sat up. “Can do it myself. ‘m not feeling sleepy anyway, so maybe getting up is the only way.”

“Oh!” Another idea finally formed in Aziraphale’s head. “You do that, I’ll go get you something to get the cosy-sleepy-feelings going!!”

Crowley looked at him like he wanted to say something. He would be saying something – about demons not feeling cosy. Something that would barely conceal the true problem with that word, which had nothing to do with his demonhood, and everything with the tragic misconception that Crowley had about himself being too cool to be “cosy”.

He didn’t.

Instead, he turned towards the fire without a word.

Aziraphale was relieved that the demon who thought he was an angel couldn’t see his face fall. “Right!” The actual angel clapped his hands and forced a jovial sounding, foul tasting tone out of his mouth. “Make yourself comfortable! I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail!”

When he returned, there was something underneath the blankets, furs and sheep-skins that was clearly a boa-constrictor trying to squeeze both the pillow and the clay pot to death at the same time.

The fabric piled on top of it was moving slowly and rhythmically, so Aziraphale sneaked into the room on his tippy-toes and closed the door as softly as the creaking wood let him. But with the bucket in his hands, it was hard to catch the handle at the right time, and so the hinge gave a desperate wheeze as if the door was choking it. The angel cringed.

“Don’t worry,” said the blanket constrictor. “Still can’t sleep.”

“Oh, good!” Aziraphale said, relief washing over him.

A yellow eye glinted at him like a warning from below Blanket Mountain.

“My apologies, that came out wrong,” Aziraphale wrung his hands around the narrow handle in his fists. “I was just very excited to give you this…!” He held up his spoils.

The eye of the dragon housed in Blanket Mountain got a smidgen wider. Due to the darkness in its lair, Aziraphale couldn’t make out the accompanying eyebrow and the angel had to hold on to the laugh on his lips even tighter than to the bucket in his hands.

“You went missing for hours in the dead of night to find a wooden bucket?” Crowley asked with the derisiveness befitting a lifted, but sadly invisible eyebrow.

“Oh, no, no, no!” Excitedly, Aziraphale hung the bucket above the hearth while he fetched a pitcher. “It’s still warm, but it’s probably even better with a bit more heat!” He rifled through the mess that Crowley had made out of the room while trying to exorcise an angel with “holy” water. By the time it took him to find what he was looking for, he decided that his nightly haul had been heated up enough.

“Try this!” He poured a tankard of steaming, white liquid and excitedly held it out towards the bed. The blanket monster grew an arm that hesitantly reached for the drink and then dragged it into the black oblivion that was the bed.

“It’s warm milk,” Aziraphale explained. “I knew several humans who always drank it before they went to sleep – in order to get into the proper headspace, I suppose. And it tastes so wonderfully rich, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to share it with you!”

A slurping sound came out of the abyss. Then, after a few seconds, the yellow eye reappeared. “It’s…”

“Delicious?” Aziraphale prompted with a smile that felt like his face was barely big enough for it. “Isn’t it just!”

“Um…” Something rummaged through the bedsheets. “Can you pour out the rest of the white stuff and give me the bucket?”

Aziraphale blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Now!” Crowley’s voice was so urgent that the angel sprang to action immediately, even though his heart broke for the spoils of his hard-earned nightly milking as he hurriedly stepped towards the oriel.

As soon as the bucket’s contents had gone out the broken window, Crowley jumped out of the bed, snatched the container from him and darted out of the room. He slammed the door behind him as if it had personally called him ‘kind’.

Aziraphale blinked again as there were hasty footfalls trampling down the stairs.

And again when there were… noises.

It took a long time before Crowley re-emerged from the lower floor.

“What,” said the head poking through the crack in the door, staring at Aziraphale with a horrified look on his face, “in all of Heaven and creation was that?”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure what his face was doing. It felt like it was on fire while, paradoxically, all the blood seemed to have drained from it at the same time. “I- I suppose snakes are not mammals and don’t really have the… inner workings to process milk.”

“I’m not a snake!”, Crowley protested. He finally opened the door just enough to slip into the room. As quickly as possible, he closed it behind him as if he could lock out the smells. “I’m an angel!”

“A lactose intolerant one, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale compromised. This wasn’t a time to argue.

Perhaps he could risk one more miracle – because he certainly wasn’t going to show Crowley the secret exit from the tower, but he also had a feeling that offering to take care of whatever Crowley had done downstairs was a smidgen more intimate and a lot more embarrassing for the demon than letting Aziraphale card his fingers through his hair…

The night went by understandably sleepless after that. Crowley lay dozing in bed, but the constant tossing and turning, grumbling and dragging the blankets around with him, was a dead give-away for his state of wakefulness.

Aziraphale kept an eye on the candle he had lit to tell when it was time for matins. He was not looking forward to the choice that was constantly approaching: Was he going to complete his prayers to the background noise of a disgruntled insomniac with an upset stomach or was he going to discreetly leave the room only for Crowley to make snide comments about whether or whether not he was sneaking off to do some satanic ritual or whatever he believed demons to do in the middle of the night.

When the candle wax was melting around the matins-marker, he still had not made up his mind – and before he could make a decision, there was a rustling underneath the furs to his left.

“’s it already time for prayer?” Crowley asked – sounding, for someone who hadn’t even caught a second of sleep, as slurred as a toddler who had just downed a bottle of wine. Fortunately, Aziraphale had grown accustomed to what the demon sounded like when he was drunk or just couldn’t be arsed to actually move his tongue while speaking, and so it wasn’t too difficult to make out the words.

“You wouldn’t believe me anyway, would you? Since you’re so convinced that I’m a demon.”

The only actual demon in the room pushed himself upright in bed and dragged his feet from underneath the blankets onto the ground. “I can show you how it’s done.”

Aziraphale’s head whipped around to stare at him. “Pardon?”

With a thorough yawn and a big stretch that could make a cat envious, Crowley finally got up. “You didn’t think a little amnesia would make me forget to pray, did you?” He stood beside Aziraphale and gave him a sassy look before he bowed his head and closed his eyes.

Aziraphale gaped at him in shock. The “Don’t!” was out of his mouth before he had time to think about it.

Crowley cracked an eye open and lifted the corresponding eyebrow at Aziraphale. “What, am I cramping your demonic style?”

Again, Aziraphale just stared. He didn’t know what was wrong, he just knew that it was. “I- I don’t…” Then it hit him: Crowley – bitter, disillusioned, fallen Crowley – the Crowley who had been betrayed by the Almighty for a crime that Aziraphale either couldn’t get out of him or Crowley himself did not know – would be broken and shattered on the ground of the Fall again, by himself this time, if he regained his memory and knew he had returned in prayer to a God who had forsaken him.

“I think perhaps we shouldn’t talk to our head offices for the time being,” Aziraphale fumbled around for words while his mind was still trying to grasp the grotesqueness of the situation. “As a kind of a truce between you and me, yes?”

Crowley had always seemed proud to a fault, ever since they met on the wall. (Ever since they met before the Beginning.) But now, millennia later, Aziraphale knew that this apparent sin had morphed from something different into what it was now and what it was supposed to be. Back then, when he still pretended to kill goats and burn houses full of children, his prickliness had not been pride. It had been the claws of a creature torn apart and backed into a corner by its own flock.

It had been distrust, despair and self-preservation.

He couldn’t allow Crowley, when the only person who was always looking out for him had lost his memories, to go guileless and defenceless back to the entity that had broken him down.

His hard-won pride would shatter. And somehow, Aziraphale’s heart with it.

Crowley sighed. “Is this a wile? Are you thwarting me?”

“Yes, I am,” Aziraphale said and forged his voice into that of a demonic entity that only existed in Crowley’s mind. But if it took a demon to protect Crowley, and if the one who had done it for the last four-thousand years now thought he was an angel, then a demon Aziraphale would become. Just for tonight. “You wouldn’t want to explode me by talking to the Almighty in front of me, would you?”

The sceptical eyebrow that was already trying to loom over Aziraphale from Crowley’s face climbed a few more steps on the scepticism-ladder. “You would explode?”

“Absolutely,” Aziraphale lied and didn’t think too much about rules that came in tens. “If you did it anywhere in this place that I miracled up. Godly power and demonic miracles don’t mix, you know?”

Crowley huffed and folded his arms in open disbelief. The change in posture relaxed Aziraphale somewhat. “I thought you said you weren’t a demon?” Crowley taunted.

“I’m not,” sighed Aziraphale. “But if you don’t believe that, then my actual reasoning wouldn’t make any sense to you. So you’ll have to go with what I am telling you right now.”

“Alright, fine.” The demon who didn’t remember being a demon threw his hands up and let himself sink back onto his bed. “No praying, then. Wouldn’t want you to explode.”

For once, Aziraphale understood why Crowley so often just couldn’t leave well enough alone and added: “Even though I kidnapped you like a damsel in distress?”

“Yeah, well, I do want out of here,” the captured damsel countered. “Doesn’t mean I want you destroyed. I’m an angel after all! And now that I met a demon, I don’t think angels can be supposed to hate them.”

“No,” Aziraphale agreed while he refilled Crowley’s clay pot with new, smoldering stones from the fireplace. “No, the Almighty would not demand the impossible from Her flock, would She?”

Chapter Text

“Look, I don’t know if you think I’ll give your feather back or if you have a humiliation kink. But whichever it is, you’re not getting what you want! Shoo!”

“Grooo,” repeated the pigeon.

“No,” Crowley shouted maybe a little louder than is strictly necessary when arguing with a bird. “‘Shoo’! It means ‘go away’! Scram! It’s my quill now!” For emphasis, he pushed his hand into the fluffed up pigeon-chest and shoved it several finger-breadths away from him until it was on the edge of the windowsill. Since it had flown here (and flown away again after he had poached a feather to write with, yesterday – and then flown back here again today), he was pretty sure it was able to fly.

At least eighty percent sure.

He didn’t push it off, just in case.

“Look, your application to carry my messages to town has been reviewed but the position has already been filled.” He gestured to the big, black bird that had hopped through the window and landed on Crowley’s breakfast table as soon as Aziraphale had left. It was clearly more intelligent and – to be quite frank – a lot more stylish than a bright, white, cross-eyed dove that was dumb enough to accidentally donate one of its tail feathers to Crowley’s writing utensils. “This black fellow here is smart enough to have waited for the demon to leave and then come in,” Crowley argued. “You on the other hand have been cooing from the ivy all morning like the world’s worst spy.”

To be fair, he should like gleaming white feathers better than the other bird’s sleek, black sheen. He even vaguely remembered some talk in Heaven about making the species of this fluffed up, doe-eyed pushover on the windowsill the symbol of the Almighty Herself. But there was just something about that careless, black, cawing rebel that had fluttered in as if it owned the place. And that something gave the humans about to receive Crowley’s message a better idea about who had sent it. A way better idea than if it arrived on the leg of a sunbleached featherball that looked as if it had spawned straight out of Crowley’s pillow, at least.

“Seriously, you can sod off,” he told the pigeon again. It just blinked at him and tilted its head to the side in confusion. “This guy on the table has it covered. He came in here before I could even hedge the plan to send out a message by bird! He’s even more focussed on getting word out to the humans than I- HEY!”

Just as Crowley turned back to his stylish visitor in black, he caught it catapulting the last of the nuts on the table into the air and catching them with its beak.

“Oi, that’s my breakfast!”

Caught red-clawed, the little thief started beating its wings, knocked Crowley’s freshly refilled water-pitcher to the ground, and fluttered out the window, right over the pigeon’s head.

“Grrrrrroo?” asked the remaining bird.

“Agh,” said Crowley. “Fine. But only because you’re begging me to do it. And don’t think you’ll get your bloody feather back!”

And thus, Crowley sent another message into the world outside the tower – this time via airmail, since the maritime route had been proven to be unreliable when the brook had refused to cooperate.

He somehow doubted that this derpy looking little bird would be much more successful in delivering the note to someone who could actually read, and not another pigeon in a nest somewhere. Oh, well. He’d just have to think of another plan tomorrow. Or maybe his problems solved themselves even before that… Aziraphale had asked him earlier if he didn’t want to accompany the demon into town for the purposes of “an investigation” into what happened to Crowley’s head.

So firstly, Crowley could probably just refuse to go back to the tower, though that might depend on whether or not he could win a round of rock-paper-scissors where the latter were a sword and Aziraphale permanently went for rock – what with the way he had used the pommel on Crowley’s bonce the last time.

But secondly and more importantly, there was no way for Aziraphale to get Crowley out of the tower without showing him where the exit was… if there was one that didn’t depend on miracles.

Aziraphale did, in fact, not have to show Crowley anything. Because Aziraphale was a demon after all! A wily, devious, insidious demon who came up with unprecedented devilish contraptions and procedures to prevent Crowley from learning where the bloody exit was: He tied a piece of cloth around Crowley’s head and spun him around a couple of times.

Well, to be fair: He barely tied a piece of cloth around Crowley’s eyes, then kept fretting about it possibly being too tight and about whether Crowley would really, honestly, tell him if it was – until the rag just slipped off during their first step out of the room.

Rinse and repeat seven times before Crowley lost his patience and tied the damn blindfold himself. Yes, he technically could have tied it in a way that would still allow him to peek under it. (Alright, he technically had tied it just high enough to play peekaboo with his environment.) But then Aziraphale reminded him that if he did that, it would prove that Crowley was playing unfair and therefore was the demon between the two of them after all.

So Crowley closed his eyes and pretended he couldn’t see anything.

And the “spinning around”-part was… uh. Well. Aziraphale very carefully took Crowley’s hand and then very slowly walked around him in a circle a couple of times. And then he refused to let go again because he wasn’t convinced Crowley’s poor, battered head wasn’t dizzy. Even after Crowley bristled with indignation and ensured Aziraphale that he could spin him around properly. That fiend of a demon – pretending to be an angel – just huffed and said “I’m sure you could handle it, but this will just have to be enough.”

And then he proceeded to lead Crowley down the stairs by his hand, holding it up for more control, as if he was a gentleman leading a dame to a ball. His grip was very firm. With a strength that Crowley realized he could lean on if he needed to.

He felt a bit more like a damsel than he did before. And perhaps Aziraphale was right – he was feeling a little dizzy after all.

The “investigation” (as Aziraphale insisted on calling it while making an embarrassingly histrionic gesture with both hands) led them to a hut outside of town. Well, if a hut could have a mossy thatched roof and walls made out of bricks. Around the windows and the door grew so much blooming greenery that it was spilling over onto the ground and where it had evolved into a small garden that shielded the house against visitors like a moat.

Much to Crowley’s dismay, that was almost all the lifeforms that were in sight. The only person there whom he could signal to about being abducted, was an apathetic kid munching on a patch of herbs that formed the border between garden and meadow.

Kid as in goat, obviously. There was no benefit in signalling to the human kind – from what Crowley had gathered so far, they rarely had the capacity to understand their surroundings, even when fully grown. This one was black, with the tiniest adolescent but already battered horns. A fighter, then! A good sign in a potential rescuer!

So the demon gestured between Aziraphale and himself, crossed his hands as if they were bound, and mouthed “help” at the goat.

The creature looked at him with a tuft of parsley hanging out of its mouth.

Crowley wrote “help” into the dirt road with his foot.

The goat winked at him in understanding. It used both eyes to do this, but Crowley was smart enough to understand that it had gotten the message and was in turn relaying “don’t worry, I’ll handle it, just play along for now”.

Good plan!

He stepped beside Aziraphale who was knocking on the cottage door in a polite volume for an impolite amount of time now. “My good lady, please open up! I know you’re in there, I can smell fresh tea!”

The rustic door was ripped open angrily to reveal a middle-aged human woman with a simple, washed-out blue linen dress and black curls in such disarray that they formed a halo around her head. She was holding a clay mug in a more threatening way than Crowley would have expected clay mugs to be able to be held in. “What?!”

Aziraphale smiled politely as if he hadn’t just banged on her door for a solid minute. “Oh, hello! Fancy meeting you here!”

“I live here!” She raised her voice at Aziraphale for a second before she noticed Crowley. Her eyes narrowed and her tone went from cold to frigid. “You! I told you you’re not getting a potion. I’m a healer, not a hag.”

Aziraphale looked surprised. “You know him? And he wanted a potion?”

Her eyes narrowed even more. “You’re not seriously trying to tell me that’s not why you’re here!”

“No, actually,” the ‘angel’ started to knead the knuckles of his left hand under her sharp scrutiny, “we wanted to ask if he was here. You see, the bar-keeper in town thought that perhaps he might have ended up here after leaving the tavern. But I think we can skip that question now and instead talk about what exactly happened when he was here…” He trailed off when he found her still glaring daggers and quite possibly curses at him. “But if it’s inconvenient, perhaps we can come-”

“-come back later and disturb me again as soon as I sit down with a cup of tea?”

“Er,” Aziraphale said and eyed the mug she had brandished like a weapon. It steamed suspiciously and smelled of roses. “Well, I’m so sorry to have-”

“I don’t live out here because I am so fond of visitors, you know!”

The goat bleated.

Crowley whispered back: “Yes, I know this is the perfect opportunity, but it’s just getting interesting!”

“Could we- could we maybe come in?” Aziraphale smiled at her so brittle and full of hope to appease, Crowley wondered why the demon hadn’t done that instead of roping Crowley into a sword fight. That look and a “oh please, would you let me lock you up in a tower” would have worked on him.

“No,” said the herbwife. Crowley decided that he disliked her.

“O-of course,” Aziraphale stuttered. His knuckles were becoming red where he put all the pressure of his other hand on them. “Would you mind telling me what happened to this chap here,” he gestured in Crowley’s direction, “when he visited you last time?”

“What happened to him?” The woman echoed incredulously and Crowley, fine-tuned to the subtleties of human conversation as he was, got the distinct feeling that that had been the wrong thing to say. “He happened to my pots!”

Aziraphale and Crowley leaned to opposite sides of each other to catch a glimpse around the human, through the door and into the dim house. A broom was leaning against a small table littered with rounded clay shards and some sort of putty. Underneath the table were miniscule pieces of burnt clay, visibly too small to pick up, neatly swept into one pile.

“Uh,” Aziraphale said. “My sincere apologies for whatever he has done. I would assure you he is usually less of a destructive nuisance – but only yesterday, he poured out several bottles of my claret and ripped the end pages out of all my books.”

“I was trying to escape!” Crowley defended himself.

“You weren’t trying to escape when you knocked on my door in the middle of the night, drunkenly yelled about needing an anti-anxiety potion, and then dropped my biggest pot into all the other ones when you were checking it for ‘more wine’,” the woman narrated Crowley’s forgotten exploits with the dryness of a customer service worker. “He was worse than that bloody goat that keeps showing up and eating all my herbs!”

Crowley looked at the kid and jerked his head in a “time to get out of here”-gesture. The goat chewed a saffron crocus at him.

“Oh, my dear!” Aziraphale’s eyes were wide with concern when they landed on Crowley. He supposed that emotion was warranted if the human saw what was happening to her exotic plant. “Why did you need an anti-anxiety potion?”

Crowley shrugged. “Dunno. Doesn’t sound like me.”

Aziraphale made a thoughtful face. “I think except for the potion-bit, it sounds exactly like you.”

“Oi!”

“He said he needs the potion for a friend,” the woman said, apparently deciding that if she provided the answers Crowley didn’t, they might be leaving sooner. “Or an acquaintance. Colleague.” She shrugged. “The denomination kept changing.”

Aziraphale looked only more confused. “You have friends?”

“Oi!!” Just like the last time, the exclamation went ignored.

“Who of your lot would need a remedy for anxiety?” Aziraphale asked instead.

“Don’t know,” Crowley said again. “That one nervous scrivener of the 37^th order?”

Again, the human jumped in with a clarification: “He said something about them agreeing to some kind of arrangement if only they were less scared all the time.”

Crowley’s eyebrows furrowed. “Are you telling me I was planning to propose?!”

“Let’s-,” Aziraphale, suddenly frozen in place, began and then immediately broke off. “I- uh… I know what you were-” His thoughts seemed to catch up with his mouth and he shook his head slightly and continued in a firmer voice: “I don’t think this line of inquiry is helpful. Let’s talk about how my companion here got his head wound.”

The woman looked affronted again. (Great, they had come full circle!) “He didn’t have a head wound when he came in here. He was drunk off his arse and unconscionable to boot, but decidedly unharmed. And I sure did not lay a finger on him. I’m a healer, not a ruffian!”

Aziraphale sighed, as if he was disappointed that this witch had not beaten Crowley over the head with her broom. “Do you by any chance know where he went after he left your pottery in shambles?”

She massaged a temple with her free hand and closed her eyes as she answered: “I told him to sleep off his inebriation at the inn, but he said they already threw him out – a story I had no trouble believing. So then I suggested he go to the monastery. They take in the poor and the sick; why not also the bothersome?”

They ended up going back to the tower. Before Aziraphale would have to run some more unspecified errands, they allegedly needed to collect firewood before it got dark (and cold). Crowley wondered whether the demon had miscalculated how much firewood to miracle up with a tower, or if they had gone through far more kindling than a human household needed in a whole year.

He didn’t really want to know the answer, either, so he didn’t ask.

He watched apprehensively as Aziraphale bent down to add another log to the pile he was carrying. He was neither complaining about the work, nor about Crowley being deliberately useless. Instead, he did a thing with his eyes whenever they caught Crowley’s; a thing where there was a star trapped in them that twinkled at Crowley from both the corner of Aziraphale’s storm-blue eyes and the upward-twitch of his mouth.

As a starmaker, Crowley had always found celestial bodies terrifyingly distracting.

In the end, they returned to the tower with one of them carrying a stack of branches and logs, and one of them with a bouquet of wild flowers. Crowley wanted to pay something back (big fan of revenge and payback!) and in his sudden panic, the only thing he could think of was the purple flowers hanging from the goat’s muzzle.

In the safety of his room, Crowley shoved them at Aziraphale as if they were about to explode. Aziraphale opened his mouth but said nothing. He just took the bouquet with a smile and puttered around for a suitable vase.

Why did it feel like Aziraphale had shown him mercy by not thanking him?

Why was it making Crowley feel as if this being knew the answer to that question because he knew Crowley better than the former starmaker did himself?

“You have some tangles in your hair from the shrubbery,” said the demon who had shown him nothing but kindness. “Would you like me to fix it for you?” He was lifting his right hand towards the sky, middle-finger pressed against thumb.

“No!” Crowley blurted out. “No miracles for me!” Aziraphale had implied more than once that he would get in trouble if he kept using his powers around him. “I…” Crowley stopped. What would that mean if Aziraphale was so ready to make sacrifices for someone else? What did that say about who of them was what?

Crowley looked at those fingers, poised to snap, pointing into only one direction.

“I don’t want demonic influences anywhere on me,” he finished his protest hollowly. And suddenly the broken window had made the room unbearably cold again.

There was a wooden tub now, big enough to wash an entire farmstead’s clothes in, filled with steaming water that Aziraphale had heated up in buckets over the hearth.

Getting into the bath had felt so, so good and so very wrong.

The moment that Aziraphale’s fingertips started carding through Crowley’s hair, the grasping tendrils of that wrongness thankfully faded into the same realms that had taken his memories.

“Your hair is nice and smooth again.” Aziraphale’s voice was soft and warm like the water. “Would you like me to help work some soap into it?”

Crowley made a noise that he hoped was affirmative. It was at least affirmative enough for Aziraphale’s nails to keep lightly scratching Crowley’s scalp. It didn’t smell like the ozone and holiness of a miracle – it just felt like one.

Having the claws of your enemy on you, that close to your face, shouldn’t feel nice.

“You’re a rubbish demon, you know,” Crowley slurred.

“I shall return the compliment,” hummed Aziraphale. “Why do you think so?”

“Could’ve just killed me with that sword. Or at least discorporated me. Would have freed up a lot of your time that you spent on abducting and waiting on me. You could have used it instead to… I don’t know. Kill that helpless, hungry goat or something. That’s what someone evil would do. Not this.”

“Why the goat?” Aziraphale asked without pausing in his ministrations. There was something in his voice. Lurking. But even here, Aziraphale failed, because the prospect of getting caught by him didn’t feel frightening to Crowley.

“Or the human,” he amended. “Just anyone who’s there when it’s convenient.”

Aziraphale summarized: “If I was evil, I would have taken every opportunity to kill goats and humans?”

A thumb scratched behind Crowley’s ear, right where it had searched for injuries yesterday night and found a spot that made Crowley hum. And so, humming, he turned his head into the pressure and straightened his bent knees for leverage. The tub was a bit too small for him to stretch his legs out under water, but a cold toe could be easily reheated, he figured. Especially if the trade-off was making warmth spread through his neck and chest.

He propped his feet up on the edge of the tub and hummed “m-hm” in lazy agreement to Aziraphale’s last question that was still floating above the waterline.

“Would you believe me if I said I agree?” Aziraphale asked. No more lurking. He sounded earnest.

Crowley decided to let this new question go unanswered. While talking to Aziraphale made something in his chest pull him forwards with a satisfying, and simultaneously terrifying jolt, he felt like he was ready to sink into the feeling of fingers carding through his hair, steaming water encompassing him securely and a soft, kind demon’s voice lulling him to sleep.

He might as well doze off here, since he didn’t manage last night.

When his eyelids fluttered open again, he was drowsy enough to have black specks dotting his vision. He rubbed the film out of his eyes with the heels of his hand.

The black specks were still floating above the tub, in front of his exposed feet.

He wriggled his toes. The black dots moved with them.

They weren’t floating in front of his feet. They were on his feet. Crowley stared at them. They looked like… scales. Black reptile scales.

His eyes dragged their gaze forcefully to his left hand, resting on the side of the tub. There was black soot stuck underneath his nails where golden stardust used to stick.

“Aren’t you cold,” Crowley asked tonelessly without turning towards Aziraphale.

“No.” The other’s voice sounded amused. “Because I’m not cold-blooded.”

Crowley swallowed. “Neither am I.”

The fingers in his hair stilled for a moment. “Of course not,” said the same voice from before, but its lightness had become brittle.

Crowley couldn’t have nodded off for more than a few moments, but it must have been enough to make the water around him grow cold.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale must have overstepped.

Ever since Crowley had gotten out of the bath, the poor thing was acting weird. He was looking at his feet rather than staring Aziraphale down with a smirk on his face and a challenge in his beautiful, golden eyes. That look had been so comforting that it had made Aziraphale forget how this wasn’t exactly his Crowley – not that Crowley had ever been his, of course! It was just that… He wasn’t anyone else’s either. And Aziraphale wasn’t as much on any side as he liked to pretend or Gabriel liked to think. What he was meaning to say was: After their adventure in the land of Uz, both of them, demon and angel, had been rather alone. Together.

Anyway – where was he? Yes, this version of Crowley wasn’t quite h- (no, no, bad wording!) …wasn’t quite the version of Crowley who remembered cheering Aziraphale up when they met on a wall, or meeting him over oysters, or lying to him about feeling lonely. But that mischievous and happy twinkle in his eyes with which he had been looking at Aziraphale while refusing to carry any firewood, had made Aziraphale forget for a moment that this demon had no idea who he really was.

And after Crowley had given him the flower bouquet, he had thought they were on the same page again. If not memory-wise, then at least in regards to their relationship.

What a foolish notion! When had they ever been on the same page? When Crowley was appalled at how Aziraphale could just stand by and watch the world drown in God’s wrath? When he had disturbed him in Rome while Crowley had just wanted to have a quick drink in peace? When he had attacked him with a sword and locked him in a small, draughty tower?

What had Aziraphale been thinking, forcing his friend- … his companionship onto the poor demon? Especially when Crowley had no means of escaping and was extremely vulnerable without his demonic powers or memories.

Aziraphale stared at the flowers, picked by Crowley, given to him.

They felt like an accusation all of a sudden.

In the meantime, Crowley had rolled up in his blankets and furs so tightly that it looked like the whole construct might burst. Before he had rolled over and pretended to sleep, one foot had been peeking out into the window’s and the night’s cold breath. But as soon as Aziraphale made a light-hearted comment about it, the foot had vanished and Crowley had packaged himself up as if he was a hedgehog and the blankets his quills.

The angel selfishly hoped it was due to his toes being so cold, he couldn’t even feel them anymore. Because if he could, then Crowley would have retracted them at the first chilly wisp of wind – or the cold wasn’t the problem at all.

Which would mean the problem was Aziraphale; that Crowley had left a vulnerable spot on his body open to him, and that was what he had so hastily and vehemently rectified.

The worst part was: Crowley would be right about it. If he was actually safe with Aziraphale, would Aziraphale then have wished for Crowley’s feet to have been hypothermic, just to ease his own mind?

“Shut up,” Crowley grumbled from somewhere in his cocoon.

“Was I talking?” Aziraphale winced, surprised enough to doubt himself for a moment.

“I can hear you think,” Crowley complained. “Reeks of worry. Stop it, it’s distracting!”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” the angel said dumbly, before he realised he had no idea what his demon was talking about. “Distracting from what?”

“Trying to sleep,” the insomniac groused. “Can’t.”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale and a strange relief flooded him at finally being able to do something. “Well, if that’s the case, then I have an idea! Two actually. Would you come here for a moment?” He stepped around the bed and to the window. One peak outside told him that everyone was in position! He gestured for Crowley to join him.

The lanky creature that refused the notion that he might be a snake-demon slithered out of the cosiness and did as he was bidden – albeit with an openly doubtful expression on his face. “What’s that gonna do?”

Aziraphale just pointed, and Crowley’s eyes followed the index-finger to the forest clearing below, between the brook and the tower.

Down there, a whole flock of white, fluffy cotton balls was littered onto the grass. Some rolled up into perfect spheres, some with long tails and floppy ears sticking out. One of them had its head pillowed on the fuzz of another.

“Sheep,” Crowley realized, his tone lost somewhere between fascination and confusion.

“Those are the errands I told you I needed to run after your bath,” Aziraphale said with a cautious smile. Crowley didn’t seem as if he was uncomfortable. If that was true, it might be an even greater success than getting him to finally fall asleep.

“You went out and got a bunch of sheep?!” Crowley asked incredulously as he stared down at the display of sleeping cotton candy clouds. “Wait, is that one black one? And is it standing on top of another one?!”

“Oh, that’s the goat,” Aziraphale explained. “I’ll go get it!”

“Wha- Why? What?” The incredulity morphed into more and more confusion. “You mean the goat from that witch’s cottage? Why is it here?”

“Well, she emphatically said that she doesn’t want it anywhere near her house,” Aziraphale explained as if it was obvious. Because it was rather obvious, wasn’t it? “And you are always so cold at night! So I thought to myself: What do the humans do when they are too cold to sleep? And the answer is: They get another human or an animal to sleep under the blankets with them. This is a warming goat!”

“You… You got me a warming goat?” Crowley asked as if Aziraphale had done something weird. “Wait, do you think this whole flock of sheep fits into my bed?!”

Aziraphale huffed. “You’re being silly. Of course not! The sheep are for counting!”

“For… counting.”

“Yes,” he asserted. “Of course! You count them and it’ll help you fall asleep! It’s a human trick. And this time I am quite sure that it won’t have any negative effects on your bowel movements.”

Crowley stared at him as if he had lost his mind.

Aziraphale didn’t let it dampen his newfound enthusiasm. “Go on! Count them!”

“You are a demon after all!”

“What?” The angel felt himself bristle immediately.

“You’re making fun of me!”

“I’m not making fun of you! Why would you think that?”

Crowley looked at the sheep down below and back to Aziraphale. “You’re asking me to count. Out loud. Sheep. You’re asking me to count sheep out loud.”

“Yes!”

“I can count, you know!” Crowley said, clearly affronted.

“Just try it!” Aziraphale urged him. “The humans swear by it!”

With a huff, the actual and only demon in the room (thank you very much!) turned back towards the window and started pointing. “One.”

“Very good!” Aziraphale encouraged.

Crowley glared at him. “Two. Three. Four. Can I stop now?”

“No, you need to count them all!”

“Sixteen,” Crowley said, exasperated. “It’s sixteen sheep!”

“See, this is why you need to count them out loud,” Aziraphale admonished. “They’re fifteen!”

“No, they’re not. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine-”

“You counted that one twice,” he interrupted Crowley’s second count and pointed at a white fluff cloud that was just trotting over to another cluster of fluff balls. “It was the one that was over there before, with those two that you started with.”

“No, it wasn’t. Number three went over there to eat that message-in-a-bottle that’s still hanging in that patch of grass,” Crowley protested.

Squinting, Aziraphale tried to make out the exact size and silhouette of the sheep currently eating a page from one of his precious books. “No, that one has a black spot on its tail.”

“Yes, and it did so when it was over here, earlier, too; just on the other end,” Crowley protested.

“Hm.” Aziraphale wasn’t convinced but he didn’t have the zoological knowledge to disprove him. “Well, you must have counted the goat by accident, then!”

“I didn’t count Lucifer.”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t count him,” Crowley repeated, still pointing at one sheep at a time and mumbling under his breath.

“You named the goat Lucifer?” Aziraphale asked, incredulous.

“Well, he looks like Lucifer,” Crowley shrugged. “I wonder how he’s doing. …ten… He always got along with every angel, he must have been bummed out when some of them Fell …twelve…”

“Well,” the word ended up a lot more clipped than Aziraphale had planned. “He certainly was… ‘bummed out’.” He leaned over the window sill and squinted. “He does look a little like Lucifer.”

“Seventeen,” Crowley concluded.

“Pardon?”

“It’s seventeen sheep now.”

“Crowley, I know you lost your memory of Earth but they don’t reproduce that fast.”

“Well, count them yourself, then!” Crowley insisted and made a sweeping gesture out the window with one arm while bracing the fist of the other against his hip.

“Fine!” Aziraphale huffed. “I will!”

“Fourteen.”

Crowley looked at him dubiously. “You said you bought fifteen. What happened, did you lose one?”

“Yes, well, that would explain it,” Aziraphale sniffed. “And it’s certainly more plausible than it being seventeen all of a sudden!”

“God forbid a sheep makes a friend on the long trip over to this tower.” With more theatrics than the situation warranted in Aziraphale’s opinion, Crowley threw his hands up.

“Well, we will just have to keep counting them,” the angel concluded. “Perhaps that’s what fascinates humans about counting sheep.”

It turned out that counting the same flock of sheep over and over again, and getting increasingly more competitive and antagonistic while doing so, was not adjuvant in putting an insomniac demon to sleep.

“You’ve counted Clarence twice,” Crowley noted with an almost aggressive disinterest.

“I have not,” Aziraphale assured him tetchily and did another quick headcount to make sure that he was telling the truth. “That’s Ignatius.”

Giving them names had originally resulted in an increase in arguments (mainly about whether or not one of sheep looked more like a Mary or a Theresa Gustava Bonaventura II) and had complicated their counting efforts for a while, but in the end, it did help with being able to tell the flock apart.

“Well,” Crowley clucked his tongue, “then I’m sorry to tell you, but you counted Aziraphale twice.”

“We’re not naming him Aziraphale,” Aziraphale insisted and gave Crowley the sternest look he could muster. Not that it had ever impressed Crowley, in all the time they had known each other.

“We absolutely are,” the very unimpressed Crowley smirked and nodded his head towards the sheep in question. “He’s fluffy, white, has a haughty walk, and he’s the softest one of the whole flock.”

The freezing night breeze had not abated in the slightest, but Aziraphale felt his face grow warm. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything! And secondly, how would you know? You haven’t touched them!”

Crowley grinned in a way that showed off his slightly sharper-than-natural fangs, and for some Almighty-forsaken reason, the heat in Aziraphale’s face crept underneath his hairline and down his neck. “Oh,” said the demon with a grin like a shark. “I know softness when I see it.”

Aziraphale swallowed. “Well.” He believed him. “Be that as it may.” There was no point in arguing. “I did not count him twice.”

“Alright,” Crowley drawled. “How many sheep are there, then, according to your oh-so-reliable count?”

“Eighteen,” Aziraphale postulated unhappily.

The grin on Crowley’s face just became more shark-like. “They really reproduce like stars in a gas cloud collapse.”

“Perhaps it’s for the better that you can’t sleep,” Aziraphale said even more unhappily. “At this rate, if we take our eyes off them, we’ll have caused economic collapse in England by dawn; all the farmer’s fields will be overrun by sheep.”

Crowley belted out a laugh that came from a depth that surprised Aziraphale. The demon might not be asleep, but – despite their rivalry about the accountability of countability – Crowley’s earlier standoffishness was completely forgotten.

Maybe Aziraphale had imagined it.

“Still tired though,” Crowley said casually. It almost didn’t sound like a complaint. More like a challenge.

“Shall I fetch your goat?” Aziraphale offered.

Crowley smirked again. “I think I’m good… if you’re so uncomfortable you can’t even say its name.”

“I gave in with Mary,” Aziraphale huffed. “I will compromise for Sheepziraphale. But I am not going to call that goat Lucifer.”

“Jealous,” Crowley mocked around fangs that were too sharp and pointy and fascinating for a human’s.

Aziraphale, trained in not letting his fascinations show, raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him.

“No need. I named a sheep after you,” Crowley continued, watching Aziraphale like a hawk, as if there was some trap laid in between them and he was just waiting for the angel (or in Crowley’s opinion: alleged demon) to stumble into it.

When had the mood shifted like that?

“Well, I’m still not asleep,” Crowley said when the silence stretched a little longer. His eyes fell onto his own feet – the subtle uptick of the corners of Crowley’s mouth vanished. “I don’t really want to hear my own thoughts at the moment. So what do you usually do at night, ‘angel’?”

Again, Aziraphale forgot to answer. What did Crowley mean by that? He had been all ‘self-assured angel’ during the whole ordeal since the tavern, until suddenly, tonight, the ice underneath his feet had cracked. As if he knew – even if he didn’t remember. As if his corporation remembered the sudden pull of gravity that hadn’t existed in Heaven until Crowley’s lips learnt the form of a question mark and its taste of rejection.

There was a severity in his eyes that was too heavy for clouds to hold.

It looked familiar. Comforting. It looked like Crowley, not like the angel who would become Crowley, and Aziraphale hated himself for that excited skip of his own disloyal heart at the sight of Crowley’s mournfulness.

He felt himself reach out.

Crowley flinched.

Aziraphale did too. “I’m sorry-”

“Don’t,” said Crowley and used his hand to cover a dark snake-scale freckle on his neck, where Aziraphale’s traitorous hand had hovered just a moment ago.

“I read,” Aziraphale answered, because he didn’t know what else to do.

The silence, this time, was heavy on Crowley’s side.

“At night, instead of sleeping. I read books.”

“Alright,” Crowley sounded as tired as he claimed he was. “Read a book to me.”

“Alright,” echoed Aziraphale. It should make him more excited. He had been waiting for centuries to share his collection of stories with the demon. Only that Crowley probably wouldn’t appreciate Aziraphale’s newly acquired Bible – written by a particularly disgruntled and/or bored monk (which had Aziraphale unreasonably excited for each next chapter).

Or worse, what if Crowley was genuinely happy to read the psalms and verses? There was that awkward interaction about the matin-prayers on their first night in this tower, and Aziraphale would not let Crowley get into another situation where he was at risk of betraying his own memory-laden self.

So he went to the small bookshelf and searched for a better option.

“The Odyssey,” was what his eyes landed on. “I think you would enjoy that one. It’s about someone getting on the nerves of the gods.”

“Well, I’m sure if you like it, it’ll put me right to sleep,” Crowley snarked tentatively, looking at Aziraphale as if he was trying to fulfil some kind of expectation. He was still rattled by something. Aziraphale could see it.

He just couldn’t do anything about it.

And so, the angel pulled out the two chairs from the table, sat down and patted the free seat beside him. Crowley scooted it a little closer to the other one and sunk onto it as if he’d never seen someone use a chair before. (At least some things stayed the same, memory or not.)

With a cautious smile of relief, Aziraphale started reading.

Page turned after page.

Crowley’s head kept lolling around. The chairs didn’t have a big enough backrest for him to relieve his neck from the weight. He looked a little uncomfortable.

Aziraphale told him about the godly messenger who came to the island to help the king escape.

Crowley’s head landed on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

The reading faltered for a second. No one acknowledged the pause, but Crowley adjusted his position slightly, to get more comfortable with his newfound cushion. So Aziraphale continued, softer, quieter, careful not to disturb the tired being that the archangels kept insisting was dangerous.

He wanted to ask if the demon’s head still hurt. But had never met a version of Crowley who would appreciate that sort of question, so Aziraphale kept reading.

“I would just swim away,” someone muttered into Aziraphale’s shoulder sleepily. “’s just the Mediterranean.”

“Strong swimmer, are you?” The angel couldn’t help but tease the land snake who he knew hated being wet.

“Nah,” Crowley slurred and rubbed his cheek into Aziraphale’s shoulder like a cat trying to make itself comfortable in a basket. “But if I knew someone was waiting for me at home, then good luck keeping me locked up.”

He shouldn’t. He should just let the topic go. “You’re locked up in a tower for two days now,” Aziraphale said anyway.

“Yeah,” Crowley yawned. “I’m ‘locked up.’ Sure. So how does he get off the island then?”

Aziraphale turned the page. Two frayed ridges stared at him from the crease where the words should be spilling out of the book’s spine; where some mastermind had ripped out papers with which to write bottled messages for a brook that was about as deep as a spilled water jug.

“Hm?” Crowley made an expectant noise, his eyes still closed.

“Hermes, the winged messenger from the gods, talked to Calypso, who held Ulysses captive,” Aziraphale improvised. Crowley was so sleepy – he didn’t need his bedtime story interrupted by a lack of pages. And he certainly didn’t need to be jostled awake by guilt over having destroyed Aziraphale’s copy of the Odyssey.

Well, the angel could tell the story on his own. “Because he firmly believed that Ulysses should be free. That he should not be punished for a mistake; for a perceived affront to a god he never meant to insult.”

The head on his shoulder grew heavier. But that was fine. Aziraphale was used to weight on his shoulders – and for Crowley, bearing it was easy.

And while he kept improvising the story of a man who had trouble finding his home, Crowley eventually, finally, drifted off to sleep.

Aziraphale kept reading for a while; to keep himself entertained and to keep Crowley’s steady breaths company with the lull of his voice. But after an hour or two of feeling Crowley’s chest rise and fall against his side, the small letters in his book seemed to dissolve into illegible swirls and Aziraphale caught himself yawning. Perhaps he ought to stretch his legs a little. Get the blood flowing, catch some of that crisp, fresh air and keep his mathematically impossible flock of sheep company before they entered into the set of irrational numbers.

…or were led into a revolution by Lucifer the goat.

Carefully, very carefully, Aziraphale extricated himself from a cheekbone that was sharp enough that – if he managed to pull it from his shoulder – the angel feared could crown him the rightful king of England. And he had to go about it a lot gentler than Arthur, since Excalibur did not tend to have trouble falling and staying asleep.

As soon as he was free, Aziraphale put one arm around Crowley’s shoulders to hold him steady, and another underneath his knees, until Aziraphale held him like the damsel he refused to be, even if locked up in a tower.

Suddenly, the angel felt very out of place. He was standing here, in a tower, with his arms full of a wily rival who did not remember being his rival, and wondered if Crowley would have ever fallen asleep against him if he still had all of his memories.

Perhaps?

Ever since Uz, Crowley had been pushing the boundaries of their relationship. Very, very slowly, but nonetheless with the irresistible force that he was, in every infuriating way. He had been becoming friendlier and friendlier with Aziraphale, the angel who had not fallen for helping Crowley save Job’s children because Crowley thought he ‘would not like it’. Crowley had even suggested some… some kind of Arrangement, last time they had spoken. About not doing their jobs – or at least about not being a hindrance to that of the other. (Which meant not doing their jobs.) As if they were on the same side, together, against a universe that made up arbitrary rules about good and evil, up and down, and sides and enemies.

Crowley had never seen Aziraphale as his enemy. Either that, or he had a weird way of acting around someone he ought to hate.

So maybe, just maybe, Crowley wouldn’t have minded sitting up late with Aziraphale, reading about the adventures of a human who was thrown into torment, forever barred from seeing his loved ones because he had arbitrarily angered some God by just doing what humans do.

Maybe even a Crowley laden with the memory of what that was like, wouldn’t have minded this situation so much.

The question was: Would Aziraphale? If Crowley had all of his memories?

Was he just following his base instinct of protecting someone who needed protection? Or did being needed just make it easier for him to let himself need companionship, too?

Crowley snored loudly in his arms and curled his upper body into Aziraphale’s chest, just to go back to a deep and steady breathing rhythm.

No matter how they got here – here they were now. And what Crowley would say about this with the context of 4000 years of rivalry was about as nebulous to the Aziraphale of the present as the question of what he himself would think as soon as that history was shared between the two of them again. For now, he needed to put a demon to bed and visit the humans in town to find out what had made Crowley lose his memory in the first place.

Only when Aziraphale gingerly lowered his charge onto the blankets, an arm wrapped around his own like a boa constrictor.

“Crowley?”

A grumble, but no answer.

“Are you awake?”

“Nnuh-uh.” The circulation in his arm was cut off and the limb was dragged down further onto the bed.

Aziraphale bit the inside of his cheek to keep in a fond laugh. “Crowley, you will have to let me go if you want to sleep.”

“Nuh-uuuuh!!” the impossible creature grunted, hugged his captured prey tighter to his chest, and rolled over to face away from Aziraphale… Which had the side effect of dragging the angel down onto the bed with him, since physics refused to short-out for that moment, and Aziraphale’s arm kept firmly attached to his shoulder.

“Crowley!” he yelped as he found himself lying against a warm, cold-blooded back; his arm halfway around the demon’s waist. When the only answer was a contented hum, even Aziraphale had to admit that he accepted his fate rather readily and drifted off to the beating of an unconquerable heart that neither God nor Devil had managed to stop.

A little bout of amnesia wasn’t able to throw it off its rhythm.

Crowley would be fine – Aziraphale could feel it.

Chapter Text

Pretending to be asleep (so Aziraphale didn’t keep asking him his opinion about Ulysses’ deeds) had backfired. Apparently, sleep was a real, actual thing that existed. And it had the audacity to only finally grace Crowley with a visit when it was least convenient to him. But then, he’d been trying to sleep for days and just couldn’t remember how. So really, who was the winner here?

Apparently not Aziraphale, who was rolling his shoulders against Crowley’s back.

Wait a second.

Was Aziraphale supposed to be in his bed?

It was at that moment that Crowley’s brain decided to parse that the comfy body pillow he had dragged across his side and smushed between his hands and chest, was an arm.

Ah.

“Y’could’ve gott’n up,” said Crowley accusingly into the part of said pillow that was crushed against his chin. Attack was the best form of defence, after all! Blame it on Aziraphale that Crowley wasted his time lying immobile, doing nothing!

“Could I though?” Aziraphale’s voice asked from behind Crowley, which made sense if that was where his shoulders were located. He sounded disgustingly chipper and amused for the unholy hour of the morning it must have been. Truly a demon! … only he wasn’t, was he?

“Yeh,” yawned Crowley affirmatively.

“You’ve been holding my arm as if you were hoping for it to detach if you pulled hard enough,” Aziraphale accused him through the smile in his voice.

“Y’ almost beat me wi’a sword-pummel,” Crowley reminded him sleepily and settled deeper into his blankets, not wasting any thought to getting up or other similarly bad ideas. “’m sure y’could’ve managed defending y’self ‘gainst a bit of arm-pulling.”

A single laugh weaved its way into the cosiness of the morning. “Unfortunately, I haven’t fought a cuddly constrictor snake before and found myself surprisingly outmatched.”

“Not cuddly,” Crowley protested but couldn’t really muster any real indignation in his sleep-addled state. “Very dangerous.”

“I’m sure,” Aziraphale placated him generously. “Which is why I simply couldn’t get away.”

“Hm. Too bad. Well, now you can feel free to do whatever satanic rituals you morning people usually do before the normal ones wake.”

“You mean morning strolls?”

Crowley gave him an affirmative grunt.

“Crowley, it’s the afternoon! And you’re still holding my arm!”

“True hero of a Greek tragedy, aren’t you,” Crowley mumbled with less sympathy in his voice than the words would suggest. He felt his consciousness drifting off again, slowly, peacefully, like it was carried away on a cloud.

Like an angel.

“Is something the matter?” Aziraphale’s voice asked with some alarm. “You suddenly tensed up!”

“No.” Crowley let go of the arm that was giving his feelings away. He clutched the sheets around himself instead. “It’s time for you to get up, I think.”

He felt the figure behind him sit up and say “Alright?” It sounded more ‘unsure’ than ‘alright’. But thankfully, the angel let it go.

Because that was what he was, wasn’t it?

Aziraphale was an angel after all.

“I have to go and take care of the sheep,” the angel said. His voice wavered around the end of the sentence as if he was trying to say something more. Eventually, he settled on: “And we should pay a visit to the monastery, I think.”

“You can go alone,” Crowley said gruffly. He stayed on his side, back turned towards Aziraphale.

“But-,” the angel started, “…but we need to find out what happened to you. It would be helpful to have you with me, in case you remember something.”

Crowley didn’t answer. Maybe, if Aziraphale thought he had fallen asleep again, he would leave.

“Alright,” the angel said, more unevenly than the first time. He kept making a mockery of that word. “We can go later. I’ll take care of a couple of things first, then.”

And when Crowley pretended not to hear, Aziraphale finally, eventually left with the soft click of the heavy wooden door closing behind him.

Crowley was alone.

He didn’t remember much, in the grand scheme of a life he supposedly had lived for four thousand years. All he could do was connect the dots he had uncovered since that fateful evening that had found him in the woods without a single clue of what had happened there.

These things were true: Aziraphale was helping him, to his own detriment. Aziraphale was soft and kind and safe.

The second truth: Aziraphale was claiming that he was an angel, and that there had been a chasm; that angels had fallen and warped into something beyond the grace of God.

The third truth: They were on opposite sides, Crowley and him. Even if they tried not to be. And there was something that was preventing Aziraphale from using miracles; there were limitations to his power – only when it came to Crowley – and these limitations were for their own safety. That was what this tower was. Aziraphale, Crowley knew, was trying to keep him from going to Heaven. Whatever the reason, there should be easier ways for a being of either divine or formerly divine power to keep him here. And yet, no matter how desperate Aziraphale seemed in regards to Crowley returning home, he limited himself to the tools of humanity: He had locked his charge in stone walls instead of smiting him or just binding him to this Earth by miracle.

Instead, there was a tower.

And the last truth: There were black scales on Crowley’s feet.

He didn’t know if Aziraphale hadn’t noticed them or was too polite to use them to win their argument about who is an angel and who isn’t. But Crowley was pretty sure that angels did not have scales. He knew of Heaven’s love for gleaming white wings, gilded robes and brightly shining haloes.

Black scales were hideously out of place in the divine host.

And what’s more; the angel who had beset the skies with stars – the version of Crowley, thousands of years ago, that he remembered like it was yesterday – had never had a single scale, black or white, on his entire body.

Something must have changed.

Something had changed him.

Aziraphale was right. He was an angel. Crowley was not.

The angel’s voice echoed ‘They’re Heaven’s enemies’ in his head. What had he done? What had he done to make everyone he once knew and loved turn against him?

Had the Almighty turned against him, too?

Crowley threw off the covers with more force than their weight warranted. It was foolish to hope that they were gone, but Crowley had always been an optimist.

There were black scales on Crowley’s feet. Still.

“What did I do?” He asked the empty room. There was nothing in here able to answer. The Odyssey sat silently on the table, accusing him of selfishly ripping it to shreds, regardless of the treasure it was and how much Aziraphale clearly cherished it. Next to it was a clay cup that held the bouquet of wild flowers Crowley had picked.

They had completely wilted over night.

Crowley lost it. “What do you think you’re doing??” He catapulted his monstrous, scaled feet out of the bed so violently, he was pulled upright by the same movement. It allowed him to advance menacingly at the dying plants. “Do you think you’re allowed to just… let go because someone picked you that you don’t like?”

Impossibly, the flowers started… shaking.

Crowley bared his teeth. A hissing sound dislodged itself from his throat. “What are you doing?” He wasn’t supposed to be able to make that sound. Flowers weren’t supposed to be able to be afraid of an angel.

But they were. And they were still wilting.

Tainted. Condemned to die. Because he had picked them.

“GET! BETTER!”

The yellow head of a corn marigold broke off and tumbled to the ground. No, no, no, no! This couldn’t be. This couldn’t be it! Yes, Crowley had been a little mischievous from time to time, but committing an atrocity horrible enough that even the Almighty Herself deemed it unforgivable?

What had he done?

No.

No, this was all wrong. Aziraphale was wrong. The flowers were wrong. They had been on death’s door anyway – he’d probably done them a favour by picking them and giving them some fresh, clean water in a room sheltered from the elements!

His feet were wrong.

He didn’t have scales. He wasn’t a monster.

He didn’t have scales.

“Hark, fair maiden! I, Sir William the Handsome, have come to free thee from thy plight and return thee to thy rightful kingdom!”

Crowley poked his head out of the window. “’Scuse me, what?”

A little tin can on a horse was traipsing to and fro at the base of the tower. To be fair, the man inside the tin can was probably only ‘little’ because Crowley was looking down at him from the first storey. But he was holding a standard, and in Crowley’s opinion, only little men needed to have a flag to wave in people’s faces in order to prove how important they were. “Fairest damsel, thy tribulations are over,” he shouted up the tower.

Crowley blinked and repeated: “What?”

You could say about that weird man what you wanted, but he was very persistent in his endeavour to explain to Crowley his reason for being here; even while his horse – which was decked out in the silliest little outfit that Crowley ever remembered seeing on a horse (which, to be fair, was none) – pranced impatiently on the spot. “I come to thy deliverance!” he shouted.

“Can you take that bucket off your head?” Crowley shouted back. “I can barely make out a word you’re saying!”

The stranger finally opened the visor on his helmet. “Thy bird hath reached my village and thy message saddened my heart!”

Eventually, it dawned on Crowley what was going on here. “Oh! The pigeon I sent! Wow, that bird really hit a bullseye by delivering my letter straight to a knight! Smarter than it looked! I should probably give it a thank-you-treat or something.”

The knight – William the Arrogant or something – shook his head. “Alas, thy winged messenger hath reached a young wench in my village, who brought the letter to the monastery from where hearsay hath spread through the townsfolk like sickness.”

“Ah,” Crowley said, a little less impressed with that feathery braggart he had sent off with his note. “Well, still, I suppose it got the job done and deserves a prize.”

“I fear thy bird hath not found the wench by itself, but was brought to her.”

With a huff, Crowley mentally minimized the amount of seeds he owed the pigeon further. “At least I should say ‘thank you’ or something.”

“I’m afraid the bird and the attached letter were brought in by the young girl’s cat.”

“I don’t know why I thought that glorified feather duster could deliver a message to begin with,” Crowley said, increasingly unimpressed by his former fairy-tale-esque helper. “Oh well, give some bird seed to the cat from me, I suppose.”

“Thou mayest bestow thy prize on the beast thyself, once I rescue thou and thou agreest to accompany me to the wedding celebrations,” the knight suggested.

“Oh, right!” Crowley immediately perked up when he remembered his original plan. “The rescue! I’m sure Aziraphale won’t like it one bit, but I have to get out of here and back upstairs so I can clarify a few things and maybe have some divine memories hammered back into my head.”

The horse whinnied dramatically and the rider seemed a little more elated than, in Crowley’s own humble opinion, his answer warranted. He yelled up: “So thou agreest to my proposal?”

“What?” It took Crowley a second to remember what else that poser had been on about. “Oh. Come to your wedding. Sure, sure, real weird way to look for a wedding planner, but if it gets you to help me out of this tower… sure, whatever.”

“Willst thou jump, so I can catch thou?”

“Jump?” Crowley asked, his voice not shrill with disbelief at all, thankyouverymuch. “Are you crazy? Haven’t you brought a ladder or something? I thought you came prepared!”

“Prepared I am,” the knight assured him proudly and patted the side of his hip where a sheathed sword was affixed so that it bumped menacingly against the horse’s butt whenever the animal nervously danced on the spot – thus creating a perpetuum mobile.

“A sword?” Crowley couldn’t believe he had to ask this. “How’s a sword gonna help a bloke get out of a tower?!” The lack of professionalism in modern day heroes! Ulysses would have already built a ladder from... sheep. Or something. There were surprisingly many sheep around in Ulysses’ adventures; as well as presently around the tower, now that Crowley thought about it.

“Excuse me, Sir, but I must insist that you immediately stop trespassing on my premises,” came a third voice into the conversation.

Crowley perked up immediately when he spotted the second knight at the cusp of the clearing, wearing all white. “Aziraphale!”

“Foul villain,” cried William the Troublesome… uh- Handsome, immediately, and brandished his rescuing implement at Aziraphale, even though it still certainly wasn’t a ladder. “Thou hast wrongfully imprisoned this dame for the longest time!”

“By the way, not that I mind or anything,” Crowley interjected, “Why do you keep referring to me as a woman? I’m fine with it, honestly, but it’s weird because when we’ve been to town, everyone addressed me as a man.”

Aziraphale sighed. “It’s a sexism thing. Something about being locked up in towers and needing rescue,” he shouted back helpfully. He was still a little ways away from where the knight had planted himself in front of the building, but kept steadily trudging forward; if he had noticed the stranger unsheathing his weapon, Aziraphale wasn’t impressed by it. He was wearing his own suit of armour and the sword he had tried to pommel Crowley with (no, he was not letting that go any time soon), was dangling uselessly from his belt.

“Oh, maybe I do mind, then,” Crowley shouted back. “But why does everyone else assume I’m a bloke?”

Aziraphale now arrived at the small brook that cut the forest clearing in half, apparently debating on whether he wanted to endure the indignity of trying to hop over the ditch in a metal suit and in front of a rude stranger, or whether his stateliness was worth getting his feet wet. “Also sexism. About who gets to wear which clothes,” he explained loud enough for the wind to carry it to Crowley, while he finally grasped the proverbial nettle and waded through the water. His face contorted as if someone had just forced him to eat reheated broth made by his least favourite inn keeper.

Crowley made a mental note to inquire more about possible fashion choices that were best suited to properly confuse everyone he’d meet.

Meanwhile, Aziraphale, finally on the correct side of the brook and in possession of newly thoroughly wet socks, found that a – literally innumerable – amount of sheep were already trotting his way. “No, go! Shoo! I don’t have any food for you right now! I’ve already fed you, what are you- No! Stop! Bad goat, bad goat! My cape is not for munching on!”

“We have to work on your dramatic entrances,” Crowley deadpanned – which usually shouldn’t be audible all the way over the clearing, but since he was dealing with a supernatural being, he was satisfied when Aziraphale shot him a sour look.

“What is this person doing here?” Aziraphale asked when the livestock had finally decided that their new owner would be tastier if they waited for him to season himself with the blood, sweat and tears of a sword fight. He directed the question, rather rudely, at Crowley even though the angel had traversed the meadow so that said question’s topic was now right in front of him.

“I am right in front of thee,” protested the knight to underline that circumstance.

“Yes,” Aziraphale huffed indignantly. “Precisely why I am asking.”

“Eeeerrr,” Crowley stalled and then decided that a lie would probably not last very long – what with the very chatty wannabe rescuer in earshot. “You won’t like the answer to that.”

“I have come to rescue this innocent soul from thine clutches,” cried William the Dramasome.

Aziraphale, Almighty bless him, scoffed. “Innocent soul? I do think you may have the wrong tower!”

“Oi,” Crowley protested but Aziraphale lifted an eyebrow at him that shut him right up.

“She is my bride!” the stranger exclaimed.

“I am what?” Crowley asked with mounting alarm. “I think I would know about that!”

“She has agreed to be wed to me for her rescue,” William went on.

Crowley furrowed his brows. “I really need to start reading the fine print before signing off on knightly tasks.”

“Give her up or perish!” cried the knight that just wouldn’t shut up, and turned his nervous horse around towards Aziraphale, sword raised menacingly.

Reluctantly, Aziraphale drew his own sword as well. “Oh, believe me, I have tried that at least once every century. I fear it won’t happen.”

Crowley blinked.

Before he could parse what Aziraphale had just said, there was the crash of metal on metal from down where the angel had swung his blade in a wide arc around his head, just in time to deflect a blow from his opponent.

“Hey, stop that immediately!” Crowley yelled. Maybe he should jump. His feet were hurting already from what he had been doing before this idiot arrived, but there was a human down there – one that he had summoned – and he was attacking Aziraphale.

On the next blow that Aziraphale parried with visible ease, Crowley’s urgency calmed down a little, as soon as he saw William the Unwed subtly shake out his wrist. From the looks of it, the duel was similarly one sided as Aziraphale’s sword fight against Crowley had been.

“Who are you?” Aziraphale asked a question that should sound polite for all intents and purposes, but somehow registered to Crowley as nothing but ‘Bastard’.

“The saviour of the helpless, protector of the weak! The name’s William the Handsome!” The knight, apparently done with nursing his wrist, lifted his sword again. You could say about him what you wanted, but at least he was persistent.

“I’m afraid you’re at the wrong place, then,” Aziraphale countered, with words as well as with his blade. “No one here is helpless or weak. I should have known you’re William the Handsome.”

“Why?” asked the human in between blows. He was barraging Aziraphale incessantly while the angel did nothing but parry. “Because of my handsome features?” William was out of breath already while Aziraphale seemed completely unbothered. With one of them on horseback and the other on foot, you’d expect the fight to go a little differently.

“Because,” Aziraphale quipped as he shoved his opponent’s blade to the side with his own, “a name like William the Wise or William the Trained-at-Swordfighting would be false advertising.”

Crowley would feel sympathy for the poor horse as it staggered backwards on four uncoordinated hooves, but something deep inside told him that the animal deserved it. (He didn’t know anything about horses, but at the same time, he was entirely sure that if any species belonged to this ‘Hell’ that Aziraphale had told him about, it was this one.)

“Would you kindly cut this short and surrender now?” Aziraphale asked. “Then you could be on your way. I also have better things to do. And since I have no intent of hurting you, I fear that this fight will go on for as long as your stamina allows.”

“Never!” cried William and spurred his horse into a two strides long gallop over the distance it had previously tried to get in between itself and the unmovable object that was the angel.

“Oh for-” Aziraphale cut himself off and Crowley could practically smell the eyeroll in the air before the angel lifted his free hand and snapped his fingers. (Quite the impressive feat, given the gauntlet.)

The horse shrieked out a panicked whinny as it was suddenly unmanned and unguided, still barrelling towards Aziraphale who clearly hadn’t thought this part through. At the last second before he was discorporated by the stampede of a single animal, he snapped again. The horse found itself confusingly turned around by 180 degrees.

It stopped and whinnied questioningly.

“It’s alright,” Aziraphale said and patted the horrible creature on its long neck. “Your human is still there. He’s just a little lighter now. And a lizard.”

Something tugged at the edge of Crowley’s memories. A little girl. And a pot. “A blue lizard?”

“Oh, don’t start,” Aziraphale huffed. He was very good at huffing. “I didn’t exactly have time to think, did I? So I went with something that… stuck in my mind.”

“What-” Crowley broke off to shake his head against the strange images it conjured. They were dark and cramped. They smelled of roasted meat and spilled wine. They felt annoying and anxious and so very, very right.

“Be a dear and head home,” Aziraphale said. It took Crowley a moment to realize that the angel wasn’t talking to him but to the horse. “Your rider will turn back to his human self in a couple of days. Off you go!” And with that, he touched the animal on the forehead and it trotted unhurriedly off into the forest.

“A fire,” Crowley said apropos nothing.

Aziraphale, for some reason, knew, though. “You burned down their house,” he said. He didn’t sound angry or reprimanding; more like he was recounting a funny anecdote that both of them had lived through.

When Crowley didn’t answer, Aziraphale called. “I’m coming up, is that alright?”

Crowley nodded. He had a feeling that, in the last 4000 years, it had always been alright if it was Aziraphale who asked.