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Oh, for Someone’s sake.
Bentley tries to block out the sound of bickering and concentrate on driving. It’s harder than she’d thought, out here where the road is mostly a suggestion of gas fields and tendrils of black holes and gravity is something that Crowley’s thinking about really really hard to make sure it keeps working.
There’s a particularly good meteor shower going on off to the left, but they’re too busy squabbling to notice it. She takes a good long look, anyway.
‘I told you, we needed to head left somewhere around Orion.’
The angel’s voice is that slightly tight one she’s hardly heard from him since their retirement, the one she mostly associates with complaints about paperwork and someone called Gabriel who she’s never met but dislikes on general principles.
‘We’re in the wrong sector for Orion. I think we should have seen the Southern Cross by now.’
Her demon sounds exactly like he used to do when he’d forgotten he’d done something to bring the North Circular Road to a standstill again, and then tried to get across it.
In actual fact, they’re both wrong and she’s been ignoring their directions ever since they’d turned for home.
‘Second star to the left and straight on-‘
A long suffering sigh. ‘That’s Peter Pan, angel. I know you know that. We took Warlock to the pantomime and the crocodile gave him nightmares.’
There’s a silence with potential to explode as she swings right handed and spots the edge of the solar system on the very edge of her vision. Not that a car ought to have vision, but there’s only so long you can spend around an angel and a demon without a few things rubbing off. Humanity can be a bit contagious like that.
‘I’ll ask Bentley -’
‘How about we ask your car -’
Their voices overlap, and the awkwardness is suddenly gone. A beat of silence, the whisper of wheels on nothing that really exists and then the emptiness of space is filled with their laughter. She flashes her headlights as the nearest thing she can manage to laughing, and Crowley pats the steering wheel in something that might be admiration.
‘Take us home, car. To the world, please.’
It’s been a long while since she’s been allowed to navigate by herself. A few too many day trips from the cottage had turned into multi day explorations, although she’s still prepared to argue that both of her owners had been quietly suggesting that they go on an adventure. And it’s been even longer since Crowley, drunk and miserable, used to leave her in control of where they went around London as long as they avoided Shax and meant that the angel didn’t find out he was homeless.
But the theory hasn’t changed in all that time.
She can feel home, the soft pulse of it a song that she can’t ignore. All their mingled lives, and the quiet assurance of the centuries old cottage the pair of them had rebuilt almost entirely in the human fashion, until it was so much a home that she could hardly remember rainy nights in Soho.
It’s a lighthouse, a beacon, a thousand silly things she’s heard in songs, and it’s calling to her across the universe.
Bentley puts her accelerator down. There’s a startled yelp from the driver’s seat, and then the laws of space and time take a brief holiday all around them.