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The front door of a certain Soho bookshop was ostensibly always locked.
This was because the proprietor of said shop didn’t require anything as pedestrian as a key to open a door, and neither did the one regular visitor, for much the same reason. Keeping the door locked also had the secondary, much-desired effect of prohibiting the entry of every luckless would-be customer drawn to the shop by the “rare and antique books” byline on the sign.
Ever since the dark-haired visitor with the good cheekbones had suggested locking the door at all hours of the day as a customer deterrent, the door had remained firmly secured, and the two otherworldly inhabitants peacefully uninterrupted, apart from the occasional rude banging on the door by the particularly bloody-minded book-hunter.
Or, rather, the door remained firmly secured until, late one drizzly October night, it wasn’t.
No key was present, but the lock felt the sudden inexplicable inclination to disengage, drawing back its bolt and allowing the door to swing open with a slight creak and the faint tinkle of a dusty bell.
A backlit figure strode calmly into the darkened bookshop, sensible low heels loud in the quiet, empty space. The dim light rendered her stylish white blazer a pale gray, and her shadow stretched before her like a specter. Slightly unkempt wings followed her invisibly, the tips of the ethereal feathers brushing softly against the floorboards.
The rain drummed quietly outside as the angel moved forward, but there wasn’t a speck of rain glistening on her starched shoulders or in her dark hair. Behind her, the door swung shut with a soft click, muting the rain slightly as the lock suffered a sudden crisis of conscious about having neglected its duties.
The angel’s eyes swept across the bookshelves, taking in the shadowed volumes as she walked directly towards the rear of the shop. She wasn’t here to dally.
Her name was Estalia, and she had been sent to collect the annual status report of the principality Aziraphale, who had failed to deliver his in a timely manner. She had spent the better part of the day tracking down similarly late-reporting angels, and the principality was the last on her list. Heaven could only be expected to run in a smooth and efficient manner if everyone maintained clear lines of communication, and Estalia found the lack of diligence on the part of her fellow angels most frustrating.
She opened the door to the back room, glanced around the empty, darkened space, and proceeded up the rickety stairs she came across next. She moved through each of the upstairs rooms methodically, feeling the principality somewhere nearby. She could feel something else as well, something dark and unnamed that put her on edge and made her ethereal wings bristle.
She wished she’d brought a weapon.
The hairs on the back of Estalia’s neck stood up as she slowly pushed open the door of the bedroom and found the object of her mission. He appeared to be sleeping, which was highly unorthodox, but that wasn’t what made her stiffen—what did that was the sight of the abomination curled blasphemously against him, demonic claws splayed dangerously close to the sleeping principality’s throat.
~~***~~
Crowley was having quite a pleasant dream involving a sunset, the Bentley, a vintage bottle of high-quality rosé, and a certain angel that was not so very different from reality, when someone’s cold hand closed tightly around his ankle.
A moment later he landed hard on the floor, jolting half-awake and hissing at the sudden pain and loss of warmth. He started thrashing around automatically, feeling himself caught in some sort of binding.
It took Crowley a solid three seconds to register that he was only wrapping himself more thoroughly in the sheet that had followed him off the bed.
He might have thought that he had simply rolled too close to edge of the mattress and fallen off, except for the furious angel standing over him.
The comforting darkness in the room started to abate with alarming speed as Estalia stretched her hand towards Crowley, palm out. Light was gathering around her hand, sparking between her fingertips and clustering at her palm in a knot of pure white light that burned Crowley’s eyes just to look at.
Crowley, trapped in the sheet and with a good part of him still asleep and drinking wine with Aziraphale, only blinked rapidly and tried uselessly to crawl backwards.
The light at her palm was growing stronger, but now it was dancing in her eyes as well, and faint waves were washing over Crowley, sizzling his exposed skin and searing with a dangerous intensity at something much deeper and basic.
A flare of fear went through Crowley as every inch of his demonic soul recoiled instinctively, trying to pull away from the damaging light. The heels of his hands slipped on the floor and he fell back onto his elbows, trapped in the sheet and unable to flee further.
“Angel,” Crowley rasped in panic, finally thinking to call for help as the part of him still enjoying a sunset with Aziraphale jolted into high-alert wakefulness at last.
His eyes had locked onto the searing knot of white light in Estalia’s hand, and it was growing more intense with every passing second. Crowley’s eyes started burning alarmingly and he knew he was almost out of time. He had to do something— anything —but his body wasn’t listening anymore and his mind had gone into a terrified loop of She’s going to smite me.
“That’s right,” Estalia said in a satisfied tone, and Crowley didn’t even have the presence of mind to realize she wasn’t affirming his unspoken, terror-stricken thoughts.
Then the light flared brighter than Crowley thought possible and, with a sudden burst of pain from behind his eyes, everything went white.
A heartbeat later, there was a loud thump and a cry, and then the intense light was mercifully gone. The floor vibrated violently beneath him and Crowley realized distractedly that Aziraphale must have tackled the other angel.
The demon rolled over onto his stomach, getting caught further in the sheet in the progress, and ground his face into the carpet, feeling the hot, blinding light still searing his eyes, though the painful prickling was thankfully fading from his skin. Crowley managed to disentangle one his arms and rubbed miserably at his eyes with his fingertips as the solid, buzzing white in his vision faded slightly to a very light gray.
Behind him, there were the sounds of a scuffle and then he sensed Aziraphale planting himself firmly between Estalia and the vulnerable demon.
“Stop,” Aziraphale said firmly, voice filled with an authority Crowley rarely heard.
“What—what are you—let me smite the demon,” Estalia said, sounding slightly winded but very determined. “It was—was—trying to kill you in your sleep, brother!”
“He was doing no such thing,” Aziraphale snapped.
Crowley’s vision was starting to clear a little and he took the opportunity to glance over his shoulder. He could see the hazy shape of Aziraphale through a thick gray fog, and he was standing near what the demon recognized as the corner of the bed. Crowley couldn’t make out more than blurry, bright shapes, but from the tone of Aziraphale’s voice and the width of his stance he guessed the angel must look every inch a warrior of Heaven, even with the bedhead and ridiculous tartan fleece pajamas. Beyond him, Crowley couldn’t see any shifting gray shapes that looked like his attacker, and he wondered suddenly if he was out of her line of sight.
Crowley twisted back around, fixed his burning, watering gaze on a spot of what he assumed was carpet, and focused on doing something he hadn’t attempted in a long time.
~~***~~
“I saw it—” Estalia protested, but Aziraphale cut her off again.
“You don’t know what you saw. And what are you doing here, anyway?”
Estalia pursed her lips and straightened up, not bothering to fix the offset tilt her blazer had acquired after Aziraphale had knocked her to the floor. “Heaven would like to know where your annual status report is, principality.”
Aziraphale ignored the jab at his embarrassingly low Heavenly rank, focusing instead on her other words. “Annual status report? Aren’t those due on the 21st?”
Estalia’s strict expression changed to one of exasperation. “That was three days ago. You failed to send one in.”
Aziraphale, feeling the immediate threat to Crowley starting to pass, allowed himself an embarrassed smile. “Was it really? Oh dear. I must have lost track of the date…” Aziraphale thought back guiltily to the previous week, which he’d spent almost exclusively in the bookshop with Crowley.
“We can get to that later,” Estalia said, brushing aside Aziraphale’s words and pointing past him at the far side of the bed. “What we need to do first is take care of that fiend.”
“About that,” Aziraphale began, but his voice trailed off as his eyes slipped past the angel and locked onto a lithe, serpentine shape slithering sneakily out from underneath the far side of the bed, keeping to the edge of the wall and inching past Estalia. Aziraphale shook himself mentally and returned his gaze to Heaven’s messenger. “I don’t think we want to be hasty.”
It would have been difficult for Estalia to adopt an expression more incredulous. “Hasty?” she repeated in disbelief. “Hasty? It’s a demon.”
“He,” Aziraphale corrected automatically, with a touch of annoyance, but Estalia wasn’t to be calmed. Behind her, the lithe serpent shifted silently into an equally lithe man, reaching out carefully towards one of the piles of books stacked near the door, using both hands and moving very slowly.
“We need to smite it right now , and if you won’t do it, I will, but Michael’s going to hear about this, don’t think he won’t—”
The thick volume of Venetian shipping ledgers hit Estalia solidly in the back of the head and she went down like a rock. Aziraphale moved to catch her, and laid her carefully on the floor.
“Really?” Crowley asked, sounding a little incredulous himself. He took a step forward and tossed the book in the direction of the bed. It landed very near to the edge of the mattress, wobbled dangerously, and decided not to fall off. Crowley raised a hand to his eyes and rubbed them distractedly.
“Are you all right, my dear?” Aziraphale asked, stepping over the fallen angel and putting a light hand on Crowley’s elbow.
“Yeah,” the demon grumbled, rubbing at his eyes a little more and then dropping his hand, blinking at Aziraphale blearily. “I think I just looked at it a little too long. And talk about a rude awakening.”
“Let me see.”
Crowley forced himself to stop blinking and look off into the blurry middle distance as Aziraphale’s hand went to the demon’s chin and held him still. He could sense Aziraphale studying his eyes and would usually have snickered a little, but his eyes really did still sting and everything was lighter than it should have been, and hazy.
“You’ll be fine,” Aziraphale announced after a moment. “Demons aren’t built to withstand holy light, but you were just getting the initial spillover, I think—rather like foreshocks before an earthquake.”
“Great,” Crowley said unenthusiastically, wondering miserably what the main event would have looked like. Bright spots were still dancing over his vision, though things were starting to come into sharper focus.
Aziraphale leaned forward and gave the demon a reassuring kiss on the forehead. “Now,” he said, moving his hand back down to Crowley’s elbow and keeping it there as he turned to look over his shoulder, “what should we do with our unfortunate friend?”
“Your friend,” Crowley muttered. “She tried to smite me. She’s not my friend.”
Aziraphale patted Crowley’s arm comfortingly, but frowned a little himself.
“As soon as she wakes up, she’ll go straight Upstairs and sell us out,” Crowley pointed out. “We’ve got to get rid of her somehow.”
Aziraphale gave Crowley a severe expression that the demon couldn’t have mistaken if he’d been completely blind. “Come now, my dear.”
“I mean, we wouldn’t kill her,” Crowley allowed, somewhat reluctantly. “If we did, Heaven would know something was up and just send someone else.”
For a long moment the two man-shaped beings stared down at the unconscious angel, Crowley blinking as his vision slowly returned.
“I’ve got it,” Aziraphale said at last, snapping with his spare hand and moving past Crowley and out of the room.
“Got what?” Crowley asked as he followed, keeping a steadying hand on the wall just in case.
“I know a spell...if you’d just wait here a mo, my dear, keep an eye on her…” And then Aziraphale was gone, off down the stairs.
Grumbling to himself, Crowley returned to the bedroom and slid onto the edge of the bed, successfully knocking the book of shipping ledgers onto the floor this time as he blinked at the motionless Estalia.
Crowley’s vision had mostly cleared by the time Aziraphale re-entered the room several minutes later, holding open a dusty-looking book and looking triumphant.
“How about this?” the angel asked, coming to a stop beside Estalia’s prone form. “It’s a memory spell; we can wipe her mind of the events of the last hour, and then she won’t even remember having seen you!”
Crowley considered for a moment and then nodded appreciatively. “Sounds easy. But what about the—what was it? Annual report?”
Aziraphale shrugged unconcernedly. “I’m sure I wrote up some spares a century or two ago, in case I ever forgot. I’ll just use one of those.”
“From a century or two ago?” Crowley repeated doubtfully. “They won’t think it’s odd that humanity has suddenly regressed from automobiles and ansaphones to inventing the steam engine?”
“Not at all,” Aziraphale said cheerfully, scanning through the details of the spell. He paused for a moment and looked up at Crowley. “I’m certain no one actually reads them. Personally, I think they’re all just filed away somewhere. I wrote one just about a lovely walk I took through St. James’s Park once, and they didn’t even blink.”
“But St. James’s is sort of Heavenly,” Crowley supposed. “Maybe they just thought humanity was really into parks that year.”
Aziraphale gave the demon a kind smile. “My dear, I truly think they would have said something had anyone bothered to actually read it, because you were in it.”
Had Crowley been drinking something at the time, he certainly would have spewed his latest mouthful across the room. As it was, he choked on his own spit a little, which was plenty embarrassing.
“You—put me —in the park —in a report—to Heaven?” Crowley wheezed.
“Well, of course,” Aziraphale said sweetly. “It wouldn’t have been half so lovely of a walk if you hadn’t been there.”
Crowley continued coughing and wheezing while the angel returned his attention to the book.
“This seems straightforward enough,” Aziraphale said after a moment, looking from the pages to the unconscious angel and then to the demon. “Care to help?”
Crowley did, and the spell was carried out without any hitches. Aziraphale retrieved his most recent spare annual report (1926), shamelessly tore off the title page and replaced it with one with the current year, and stapled it back together. Then Aziraphale and Crowley, with varying degrees of gentleness, carried the unconscious angel downstairs and arranged her on the floor. Crowley retreated upstairs and Aziraphale awoke Estalia with a cup of tea and a light touch on the shoulder.
After having assured her that she had simply taken a wrong step on the rain-slick threshold and accidentally banged her head, poor thing, Aziraphale handed her his report with his heartfelt apologies for his tardiness and steered her out of the shop and into the night like she was nothing more than an ordinary customer.
Aziraphale locked the door after her, tapped the lock sternly with his index finger, and told it to behave itself this time. He then returned upstairs to find that Crowley had managed to return the sheet to its proper place on the bed. The demon was standing very near the door, clearly ready to bolt downstairs if Aziraphale’s plan went less than smoothly.
“No problems,” Aziraphale said breezily. “She’s gone.”
Crowley gave him a relieved smile and some of the tension left his shoulders.
“Now, then,” Aziraphale said, glancing at his watch. It was the small hours of the morning, and ever since Crowley had convinced him to give sleeping a try he’d been enjoying it rather more than he’d thought he would.
Clearly thinking along the same lines, Crowley took Aziraphale by the hand, tugged him over to the bed, and climbed in. Aziraphale followed suit, stretching out on the comfortable mattress and feeling Crowley settle into place beside him, a hand draped possessively over the angel’s arm. Aziraphale made a small motion in the direction of the door and the lights turned themselves off.
“Are your eyes feeling better?” Aziraphale asked as darkness descended on the room again.
“Mm-hmm,” Crowley affirmed, tucking his head in next to Aziraphale’s shoulder so that the soft tangles of his dark hair tickled the angel’s cheek.
Aziraphale smiled automatically and pried his arm free from Crowley’s grasp so he could wind it around the demon instead, tugging him a couple of inches closer.
“Sorry about all of that,” Aziraphale added guiltily after a moment, feeling that he ought to be held accountable for anything angelic that ended up in Crowley’s path.
“Don’t worry about it,” the demon said, or something like it, as he nuzzled further into Aziraphale’s fleece shoulder. “You’re the one that wrote about me in your stupid report.”
Aziraphale felt himself flush slightly. “Well, you see, I used to send in very detailed reports of the highlights of the year, and the most important events, and, er, when 1914 rolled around…”
“World War One started,” Crowley pointed out drowsily. “I’d say that was pretty important.”
Aziraphale flushed even further. “Yes, but, well, in the grand scheme of things, surely—or, maybe, er, at least, in my grand sch—”
Aziraphale didn’t get to finish, because Crowley propped himself onto his elbow and gave him a long kiss.
“Don’t ever change, angel,” Crowley said, and then dropped down beside him, tucking himself back into place effortlessly. “And thanks for, you know, saving me.”
“Wouldn’t have crossed my mind to do anything but,” Aziraphale said truthfully, absently stroking his thumb over Crowley’s shoulder blade in short, slow strokes.
“Course it wouldn’t,” Crowley repeated with a slight huff, relaxing into Aziraphale’s touch.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment, and Aziraphale was starting to drift off quite comfortably when Crowley shifted nervously beside him.
“You’re sure you wiped her memory properly?”
“Hm?” Aziraphale said, stirred back towards wakefulness. “Oh, yes, quite sure.”
Crowley was quiet and Aziraphale was just starting to drift off again when the demon added, a tad uncertainly, “What if they send someone else anyway?”
Aziraphale felt a smile twitch across his lips and he patted Crowley gently on the back. “Don’t worry, my dear, I shan’t let them smite you.”
“That wasn’t—” the demon began, and broke off nervously.
Aziraphale, beginning to sense that something was wrong, rolled over a little so he could look at Crowley. The demon’s golden serpentine eyes shined at him from the darkness, looking a little worried. “What is it, Crowley?”
The demon’s mouth twisted and he blinked and looked away. “Above will find out eventually,” he said. “Or Below. We can wipe memories all day long, but at some point we’re going to miss somebody or it’s going to end up in the open somehow. And what are we going to do then?”
“Whatever we have to,” Aziraphale assured him, pushing the troubling scenario from his own mind. “I won’t leave you, Crowley, no matter what Hell or Heaven has to say about it.” To emphasize his words, he tugged the demon a little closer, and felt Crowley’s hand wrap itself around a fold of his fleece pajamas in response.
“Besides,” Aziraphale added optimistically, “I hadn’t missed an annual report in two centuries. Above hardly ever sends actual angels in person to check in. Before the Apocalypse, I’m not even sure they knew we were friends.”
Crowley made a noise of hesitant agreement.
“And Below works in much the same manner, yes?” Aziraphale continued. “They certainly prefer talking through the Bentley’s poor radio over sending someone with a set of eyes.”
Crowley laughed a little at that, and settled into a more comfortable position at Aziraphale’s side. “I suppose so,” he allowed. After a moment, he chuckled to himself. “Honestly, I don’t even remember the last time I saw another demon. It might have been old Beelz himself.”
That made Aziraphale huff a little, Crowley’s hand moving up and down on his chest as he laughed. “Does he know you call him that?”
“God, no,” Crowley said quickly. “Well, Somebody, no,” he amended hastily. “Let’s just keep this between ourselves, angel.”
Aziraphale smiled and patted Crowley on the back again. “Of course, my dear. Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“You’d better not,” Crowley mumbled, and rested his head against Aziraphale’s shoulder.
The angel rubbed Crowley’s back reassuringly until the demon’s breaths grew long and even, and then allowed himself to drift off as well.
Aziraphale, thankfully, did not dream of the Lord of the Flies, but rather of a sunset, the Bentley, a bottle of good wine, and the company of a certain demon. It was not so very different from reality.