Good Omens fic: Before Eden pt II

[rainjoyswriting]

Before Eden part II of III, a Good Omens fic, sequel to But Thou Readst Black Where I Read White.

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, nor, mercifully, the unholy mess of S2.

Rating: R but for violence and its aftermath, go careful.

Warnings and spoilers: Again, violence. I'm sorry.

Summary: Mostly. Mostly, they’ve survived.



Note: Getting a bit more into the muscle memory of formatting stuff, yay, but the next part might take a couple of days, got stuff on, sorry <3 And my new word processor can actually distinguish m- and n-dashes, which is novel.






“Hello, Gabriel,” he says, and offers the tray across. “Chip?”

Gabriel glares at the sea, and his jaw works silently. Aziraphale draws his breath in for a little sigh and looks down again at the tray in his hand. “Should have picked up another one of those little forks for you, really,” he says. “Suppose they are a bit greasy without one. Um.”

The fork he’s holding is one of the wooden ones, which went out of fashion for a time (miraculously there always seemed to be one available when Aziraphale bought chips; they’re just not the same on plastic) but now seem to be back; humans like doing that, he’s noticed. They get bored of things and then later remember that they quite liked them, actually, and start circulating them again. He eats another chip, contemplatively, and watches the sea alongside Gabriel. He’s not quite beside him and knows it, an arm’s length back from where a friend would stand, but then they’re not friends. Gabriel tried to kill him in a way that went quite a lot further than merely trying to kill him, and Aziraphale still feels that, in the rippling of the muscles of his back, when he’s close.

He eats another chip, ignoring Crowley’s dark glowering from his lean against the Bentley, Gabriel’s dark glowering at the railing over the sea. “They are good,” he offers, as if that will help. “Don't know why they can’t seem to get them right in London. I mean, you'd expect the fish to be a bit substandard, nowhere near the sea, but I hardly see how that would affect frying potatoes correctl–"

“Why are you here?” Gabriel grinds out, still glaring at the sea. “Why are you here. Do you think I want to see you?”

Close to an expression of Gabriel’s anger Aziraphale feels his body’s urge to lean away, to put whatever distance it can between the two of them, but Aziraphale is driving his body, not the other way around, and he holds his back straight and raises another chip on the end of his fork. He says, “I don’t think either of us want to see each other. Life isn’t about what we want.” Except sometimes, he thinks, eating the chip. He did really want Crowley. And chips.

“What does that mean. What do you think this will achieve, do you think you can wear me down, do you think I’m going to apologise and repent and see the error of my ways?”

In that moment he feels it, understands it, believes it right to the bones, the knowledge of it. “No,” he says, and doesn’t even feel upset about it. Funny to so very suddenly close a door he hadn’t even realised he'd been watching, waiting to step through these last two years. “No, I don’t suppose you’ll ever do that. I don’t think this is really about that.”

“Then why the Hell are you here? You keep coming here, why?”

“. . . not entirely sure myself, if I’m honest,” Aziraphale says, and eats another chip, thinking. Salt and vinegar are a delicious combination, humans have hardly topped that one since they discovered it, though he enjoys all of their attempts to do so. Gabriel is looking at him, which makes a change – usually Gabriel stares at the sea for much longer in their conversations – and Aziraphale can feel how his pulse has picked up, how strange that an angel feels the same urges that human bodies do when human bodies are subject to very different dangers. You wouldn’t think that angels would need fear and yet She gave them all the physical mechanisms for it. They were made perfect, he knows that. He must need fear, even if he doesn’t know why, or She wouldn’t have given him it. In construction they are perfect; it’s only in their choices that they falter. “It just seems like the right thing to do.”

“Since when have you cared about the right thing to do.”

It feels strange that Gabriel is staring at him and Aziraphale is staring at the sea. He swallows, watching the light on the waves like sparkling confetti, and mumbles, miserable with it, “Always. Always, always.”

“You really think that’s why you betrayed us?”

“. . . some of it.” He licks salt from his lip and looks at Gabriel, he does not like looking at Gabriel’s angry face but he holds his back steady and is brave, because Crowley is at his back (the mercy of knowing his back is protected) and he can feel the vice around Gabriel’s power, the enforced weakness of his clipped-off wings. “Sometimes I was just weak. I didn’t want to go all the way to – rural Wales or Aberdeen or – and I got to see Crowley. I got to see Crowley, if I . . . sometimes I was just weak, and I knew it, and I promise you I’ve felt guilty enough for it Gabriel, I know that She knows. But I only felt guilty because I cared about what the right thing was. And when I left, I know I did that because it was the right thing to do. Look at all these people, all of them would have been – you know what would have happened to them –”

“Damnation or salvation as they deserved.”

“Yes, well, they seem to rather like getting on with their lives, so damnation and salvation can jolly well just let them get on with their lives for a little while longer. We shouldn’t get to choose for them, that’s the point. Our big petty war, they shouldn’t have to suffer for it. It isn’t right. Don’t you think – do you really think that we’re so much more important than they are? Why have we been doing all this work for them if we are?”

Gabriel looks away, at the sea, and works his jaw. Aziraphale sighs again, and eats a chip.

“Ramiel and Zophiel say you still don’t . . . socialise very much.”

Gabriel glares at the sea.

“I know what being lonely is like,” he says, raising uneasy eyes to Gabriel. “And if you do want to believe that I could only care about this out of selfishness, I don’t believe that anyone is safe while you’re still so unhappy.”

“No-one is safe even while I’m like this,” Gabriel hisses, mutilated wings stretching invisibly behind him.

“. . . even while you’re like this,” Aziraphale says, and swallows. “No-one benefits from you being miserable, you least of all. And they’re a lovely couple, Ramiel and Zophiel. They’d love it if you were more friendly. Or at least a bit less – bit less silent and, well, creepy, anyway.”

He glances across at Crowley for – Lord, he doesn't know what for, he doesn’t expect moral support because he knows that Crowley and he disagree on what ‘moral’ means in this situation (he knows that it’s not that Crowley doesn't care about the right thing, because Aziraphale is certain that he does, whatever Crowley sometimes says; they simply dispute what the ‘right thing’ is). Crowley is watching blackly from beside the car, arms folded, glaring grim through his sunglasses. It’s hard to read anything from his face but hatred of Gabriel, and Aziraphale eats another chip, contemplatively, ruminating as he chews.

“Why am I here,” he murmurs to himself, and feels the sea breeze in the feathers of his wings.

He would like it if Crowley would take his side in this, it might – well, it would make it easier, if Crowley would hold his hand while Aziraphale has to stand next to Gabriel. Instead they have this awkward compromise because Crowley hates the whole situation too much to put that aside, and the thing is – the thing is, Aziraphale does understand that, and he respects it. He’s asking a lot of Crowley, coming here with him, facing Gabriel again. He can’t ask for everything. Life isn’t about what they want, that’s not how Earth works.

But it is, it occurs to him with a little shock of in-breath, what Heaven is like, Hell as well, it’s what angels and demons are used to, all or nothing and never the need for compromise. Aziraphale’s little slides into compromise – chatting with Crowley, being friendly with Crowley, trading favours with Crowley, all the way to – all the way to this, Crowley willing to wait beside the Bentley to keep him safe when he doesn’t want to be here at all, and Aziraphale understanding him in it utterly, loving him in it utterly, seeing the heart of him in it and feeling only blessed by it; all of that came in its clumsy messy Earthly way, and that doesn’t make it less than the unblemished perfection of Heaven. Love in Heaven is perfect but abstract, never about touching a single real heart, or body. Love here is very different, face to face and eye to eye it has to be. The way these things are done on Earth isn’t worse, or better, come to that. It’s just how it is here, and how Aziraphale prefers it, in the end.

“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” he offers, watching Gabriel’s eyes. “None of it is, here. We catch little bubbles of perfect with miracles but it’s not the same, it’s really not. You can make the stains go away but you always know.” There is a sweet warm patch on the back of his coat’s shoulder where Crowley made things perfect for him and that is better than the perfection of there never having been a stain there at all. “But it’s alright that it’s not perfect. Good enough is good enough. If you just talk to someone – not me, I know you’ll never like me, and I don’t . . . not me.” He looks down. ‘Good enough’, he thinks, good Lord. “But the other angels and demons. Someone. Just find something – if you miss how clean everything is in Heaven, the clarity of it, how – nice and neat it all looks – it can be just as nice on Earth, it really can be. It’s just different. Perfect is different here. You learn to find the flaws beautiful as well. They must be intended, after all. She put them here.”

Raw-eyed and stone-jawed, Gabriel snarls low, “And if there’s nothing but flaw?”

Aziraphale looks at his chips, which are getting cold – nothing on Earth stays perfect – and says, “Then I suppose that’s when love matters most. What is compassion for but the flaws?” He holds the tray of chips one-handed to untuck and check his watch, says, “. . . we should be going, I don’t like Crowley driving in the dark.” Too dangerous for other road users. “But – Gabriel –”

He really, really does not like looking Gabriel in the eye but he clutches his chips like a shield between them and he does, and while Gabriel still looks angry, there are darker and bleaker things behind his eyes as well and Aziraphale finds himself just as frightened of those. “It’s awful,” he says, and gestures a hand between the two of them. “This. It’s messy and it’s painful and it’s – horrible, and sometimes things are just like that and – and that’s just how they are. But – this – you and I – this isn’t all Earth has to be to you. Things can always get better. Always.” He remembers the late nineteenth century, a very lonely low point, and then that war when Crowley was just there again and Aziraphale's heart opened like cathedral doors and all the light inside poured out into the black of the night, everything illuminated. “You don’t need perfect, Gabriel. You’d be surprised by how perfect good enough can be.”

Aziraphale smiles, only manages it with one side of his mouth, a wooden twitch of a smile, he never can be natural with Gabriel, well, does he wonder why. “Goodbye,” he says. “Until next time.”

Gabriel – sighs, in a heavy, stuttered way, turning to glare out at the sea again. Aziraphale walks a little sidelong way away, not quite turning his back to Gabriel until he’s closer to Crowley than him, eyeing the gulls on the wing and a small troupe of sparrows hopping about on the pavement; he tips the rest of the chips out there for them, the dear little things, a pile of chips bigger than a sparrow between them.

Unoccupied, he finds that his hands are very slightly shaking.

He puts the tray in the side of the quite full bin beside the car and dusts his hands off briskly, and a stray gust of wind bounces the tray straight back out again to skid across the pavement, startling the sparrows into a burst of scattered wings. He looks at the tray, then narrow-eyed at Crowley, and murmurs, “Really, my dear.”

“Sorry,” Crowley says, in a not very sorry voice. “Bad mood.” He snaps his fingers and the tray spontaneously combusts, shrivels, and is entirely gone, which Aziraphale will settle for. He opens the car door as Crowley walks around to the driver’s side, sunglasses pulled down so he can glare yellow-eyed over them at Gabriel’s back as he goes.

Crowley climbs into his seat and slams the door, says, “Friends yet?” and does not indicate before jarring the car out onto the road so Aziraphale grabs in panic for – his hand scrabbles at the top of the window, shoulder wedged there and blinking across at Crowley.

“You know that that is hardly the point of this.”

“Yes, well, forgive me if I still don’t know what the blessed point is,” Crowley says. “He should –”

“I know, I know, I know,” Aziraphale rubs his forehead and really doesn’t feel like he has the emotional energy for Crowley’s anger right now, Crowley’s hatred of Gabriel, he does just find hatred so draining. “I know, Crowley, I know, I know.”

Crowley looks across at him, then back at the road. “You alright?”

“- no.” He folds his arms and feels awful, that horrible prickling feeling like guilt, like guilt, like Gabriel really did lose all of Heaven because of him. “But I’m – alright with not being alright. If that . . .”

Crowley's fingers flex on the steering wheel and he says, “. . . yeah. Yeah, I’ve been ‘alright’ like that a lot too.”

Aziraphale looks at his face in profile and knows exactly, exactly what the skin of Crowley’s cheek feels like to the touch, exactly how cool, exactly how firm, how taut across the muscle where the shape of the snake tattoo coils. He swallows and tries to settle for knowing it, with the knowing of the years between them; he’s not going to reach across and touch his cheek, he really doesn’t like distracting Crowley when he’s driving.

“Do you know,” he says, because changing the subject is usually the safest thing to do, “I think I could drive this thing now.” He pats the seat he’s sitting on, wriggles himself to a more confident sort of sit rather than folded against the door and gripping the dashboard for dear life. “I’ve been watching you and I don’t think that it’s difficult at all, it doesn’t even always move when you wiggle the wheel, it just goes where you want it to as fast as you want it to, there’s nothing really to know.”

“Oh, no,” Crowley says, “no, no, it’s much more difficult than that, there’s loads to it, really subtle, you could never learn from just watching, you wouldn’t be able to drive my car.”

“You could teach me!”

More darkly, “You wouldn’t be able to drive my car.”

“Not if you don’t teach me!”

Crowley cuts a look across at him, says, “Tell me that you’re joking or I’m driving us both into the sea.”

“I’m joking if you promise that you will watch the road, Crowley –”

“Yes, yes, yes,” in a mutter, but his shoulders are less gripped-in tight already, and Aziraphale looking at his cheek thinks that it would feel a little softer, a little less tense, now. The things you know, from the years of knowing.

The words form; ancient shyness clutches him; they spill loose anyway like water coming free. “You look – ever so handsome, when you’re concentrating, anyway.”

Crowley doesn't look at him, but his hands seem tight on the steering wheel, his arms oddly locked. Aziraphale folds his own hands together, squirms a little in his seat, looking hopefully to Crowley for some sign . . .

Crowley clears his throat, says, “Yeah, no, you couldn’t drive it. You can, you know,” He stares straight ahead through the windshield, eyes entirely on the road, “watch me, if you like. See what you. Pick up.”

“That’s a marvellous idea,” Aziraphale says, and admires the shape of his cheek, and tries to feel that diaphragm-deep warmth of loving Crowley and not the senseless formless helpless guilt, that Gabriel feels dreadful and that this fact is somehow that he cannot make himself understand his fault.

The scenery runs past like water. He lets it run. He squeezes his hands in his lap, and looks at Crowley to keep himself calm.

*

The cottage feels to Crowley a cocoon; London, life itself, feels kept at a distance, as if a dome closes over their roof here and extends the distance between them and the rest of the world. And he likes that. He still takes some smirking pleasure in all the defectors who come their way, because fuck Hell and fuck Heaven twice as much, though he’s careful to always appear aloof rather than pleased to other rebel angels and demons. But what he likes more than anything, what he likes best of everything in this glorious, chaotic, exciting mortal world, is having Aziraphale, and having Aziraphale all to himself, and not having to share him with anybody.

Crowley is wise enough to know that Aziraphale must know this, and doesn’t draw attention to the matter with his quiet angelic tact, as opposed to the loudly-displayed angelic ‘tact’ he enacts when he wants Crowley to know about it. And it’s that jarred contradiction of this cottage, that it may be Crowley’s favourite place on Earth (apart from that precise spot on Aziraphale’s chest to rest his cheek, where the cushion of his flesh is just right over the bone, and that slight texture of the hair on his chest through the silk of his pyjama shirt feels so comforting, cosy against the skin) and yet to get here, every time, they have to run the gauntlet of Gabriel, and Crowley has to watch Aziraphale fragment, again.

He distracts the angel in every way he knows how, he distracts him with a fervour that he knows Aziraphale must see, and ordinarily it would break Crowley to be seen as so clingy, so desperate. He doesn’t like to take a hand off him, an arm from around him, he presents surprises – a book or a record or a God damned jigsaw or just flowers, never food, he knows Aziraphale has no appetite the night he’s looked Gabriel in the eye again. He strokes his arm and looks too needily into his eyes and the only distraction he really offers in these moments, he thinks, is allowing Aziraphale to focus on soothing Crowley instead of trying to soothe himself.

It doesn’t last. Crowley can’t distract him forever, it’s always got to be faced and felt at some point, and it is always, always going to hurt. Crowley makes coffee that evening as the sun drips low and watches as the shadows in the rooms edge plum and then indigo and Aziraphale walks around the living room looking at things, touching them; books on the shelves, the record player, the long verdant leaf of an acceptably-performing golden pothos. Crowley can feel the excess energy in the angel’s nervous system like it’s sparking out of him, like static electricity, as Aziraphale touches the half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table and his hand isn’t quite steady, he knocks the edge crooked and jolts his hand back, stares, puts a hand over his own forehead as if checking for a fever, as if an angel could have such a thing.

Crowley puts his cup down, stands slowly, unfolding his body with long, unthreatening movements. Aziraphale lowers the hand on his forehead to cover his eyes and says, “I’m quite alright,” and his other hand, at his side, is a fist so tight it’s white. Crowley touches first his elbow, a gentle warning pressure, and then slides his arms around him, flexes and closes his wings around him since he’s here now, enclosing Aziraphale entirely in an umbrella of Crowley where he can feel safe.

“I know,” Crowley says, because he’s been alright like this a lot as well.

It takes a moment for the rigidity of Aziraphale's body to sink loose, like water suddenly dropping and then he’s a weight Crowley can really hold, eyelashes brushing closed against the edge of Crowley’s jaw. They’re silent for a moment, Crowley feels like he has to be, Aziraphale knows everything he could say and they can’t have that fucking fight here and now, that if Gabriel wants to drown himself in holy water that’s only what's best for everyone, that Aziraphale should never have to look at him again. Aziraphale’s arms hang in an exhausted way around Crowley’s waist. He rubs Crowley’s lower back a little and Crowley’s entire centre of gravity shifts into the path of his palm, where all the nerve endings fire like sparklers.

Crowley’s trying to think what to say, what can sound casual enough for both of them, when Aziraphale clears his throat a little at Crowley’s chest and says, “I don’t – don’t think I’ll be sleeping much tonight, dear.”

Crowley tucks his chin back, eyebrows high, to look down at him. Aziraphale looks up and smiles, very tired, a little bleak. “No,” Crowley says. “Yeah. ’course.” He stares down at him. He doesn’t know what to say. He kisses him instead, and Aziraphale seems to like that so at least he’s got something right.

He made him promise last time, didn’t he? To not sit gnawing his stomach out on his own, to tell Crowley, to wake him if he had to so he didn’t have to be alone in it. Fuck, Aziraphale’s actually keeping it, he doesn't think Crowley’s going to keep his promise, does he? Shit. Aziraphale feeling this bad makes Crowley feel like his heart’s being smashed into an ice sheet by a cricket bat, does Aziraphale think Crowley’s going to make him feel like this? No fucking chance. Crowley is hurting Aziraphale like this the day that Hell opens a holy water swimming pool, Aziraphale has been hurt more than e-fucking-nough already, Crowley is cutting off his hand before he hurts him.

He says, “I’ll let you alphabetise my CDs.”

“Oh you are a darling.” Aziraphale stands back a little, straightening the lapels of Crowley’s jacket under his hands. “But didn’t I do that before Christmas?”

“Ah, you know how it is, they just . . . migrate.” Crowley hates having his CDs in alphabetical order. The moment Aziraphale is done with them he itches to make them messy.

“Play me something, dear,” Aziraphale says, kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you.” He turns in Crowley’s arms and slips away for the shelves in the corner where Queen lives next to Tori Amos because that’s just how Crowley likes it, and Crowley feels Aziraphale slip through his wings and this moment in this place is something he wouldn’t even have known that he would have lost if he’d lost him, and for a moment his throat is too broken for him to move.

He knows Aziraphale hates most of his music and can’t really understand music once melody and harmony start taking a back seat after the sixties, so he puts on Otis Redding, These Arms of Mine. He saw him once, in London, back when humans thought it subversive for white people to listen to Black people sing, Crowley has always listened to whatever was subversive at the time even when the controversy made zero fucking sense to him. Crowley went to a concert in Finsbury Park and saw the crowd just lose its screaming mind for this tall handsome man singing like his heart was cracking into pieces in his throat and Crowley felt the words in the backs of his own bones; Crowley knew no-one he wanted to tell how that voice made him feel except Aziraphale, and stood there in that roaring, roiling club feeling like he was alone in the room because he couldn’t tell Aziraphale.

He walks to Aziraphale where the angel is sorting all the A’s out of Crowley’s shelves and wraps his arms around him from behind, tugging the angel upright to his own chest, saying to the back of his neck – almost offhand, it feels so entirely, abjectly true, “They all make me think of you.”

Aziraphale's shoulder dips, he says, “You old snake,” and Crowley lifts his head to catch that little pinched smile of Aziraphale trying not to smile too much.

They organise CDs, and chip away at another fucking jigsaw, and in front of the computer Crowley teaches Aziraphale to double click which he’s been putting off for fucking months out of sheer disbelief that it’s required. By the dawn Aziraphale already seems more settled, a little more serene. Sleep isn’t necessary for either of them of course, Crowley simply likes doing it – he enjoys sleep, prioritises sleep, he is sleep-positive – and he hardly objects to a single night off. As for Aziraphale, he’s long been much more nocturnal than Crowley, up all night with a book or pottering about Soho or doing God knows what really, long after upstanding demons are deep in their slumbers. Crowley doesn’t mind a missed night. And by the dawn, which they greet with coffee in the little oak-timbered kitchen set down a couple of steps from the ground floor for no reason Crowley can work out, Aziraphale says philosophically, “In its way it’s not worth getting upset over.” He looks down at his coffee, fluffs his invisible wings behind his back. “It’s only what they live with every day. Humans, I mean. Mortality and – and bodies being wretchedly uncomfortable things to inhabit. Humans live with it and they don’t complain.”

Crowley’s eyes are on where Aziraphale’s wings are. “Firstly,” he says slowly, certainly, “it is exactly the sort of thing it’s worth getting upset over and don’t let anyone make you feel like you shouldn’t get upset over it, including you. And secondly, fuck, Aziraphale, what the Heaven are all those books you read about? All humans do is complain about mortality and – and bodies. And most of them never had an Archangel – God, of course it’s worth getting upset about.”

Aziraphale looks at him across the table, patient, a little puzzled. “You sound more upset about it than I do.”

Crowley growls into his cup, “That’s because I let myself feel what I’m feeling. Your wings want a brush.”

“Do you really think I don’t . . .” Aziraphale's fingers drum off his coffee cup. “Don’t suppose I do, you’re right.” He glances over his shoulder at a wing. “On both counts.”

Crowley swallows coffee, says casually, “Do you want me to do it?”

“Would you, darling? You know there’s always that one spot you can’t reach on your own –”

It's not much of a conversation but it feels like a topic they’ve exhausted, really, what’s new to say? Gabriel is evil, Aziraphale survived, Crowley did not bloody his hands at Aziraphale’s request (not with any blood that wasn’t Aziraphale’s, the thought makes his cheek tic). All the rest is just interpretation, which Crowley and Aziraphale often disagree on. So they move to the bedroom for Aziraphale’s set of silver-backed brushes, so the angel can sit primly on the edge of the bed – Crowley likes to lounge to be groomed, even before Gabriel Aziraphale never really unpicked his back – and Crowley deals with Aziraphale’s feathers, almost filling the room the great wide white of them. They’re really no scruffier than Crowley’s casually are but Crowley and Aziraphale have different standards, differently-interpreted standards at least, and they both know why Aziraphale’s wings could do with a little neatening after another brush with Gabriel. All that unconscious fluffing, fluttering, resettling of them, every second’s confirmation of their weight on his back.

Under Crowley’s fingers they’re slightly warm with a living body’s warmth, and he has never, never touched anything softer. It’s no comfort. Too many things in this world are hard and sharp for soft to ever be a good idea.

*

Home in London it drizzles, and the drizzle turns to true rain, which Aziraphale doesn’t really mind as long as he stays in the shop. It’s a quiet day in Soho; Penemuel has gone out to Skoob Books near Russell Square, said she had nothing to read. “I thought I loaned you Proust,” Aziraphale said, genuinely confused, and she just repeated, “Nothing to read, not a page,” and took off her waistcoat to go out in the rain. Aziraphale thought that might not be the best idea, especially as her shirt seemed a little small for her as it was and barely buttoned at the chest, but she just left the waistcoat over the back of a chair and walked out into the rain, tossing her hair back, and Crowley had one of his small throaty laughs to himself.

“She’s never stopped being a bit demonic.”

“Penemuel? She’s a lovely girl.”

“Very lovely,” Crowley says, stretching long on the bookshop’s couch. “Lovely enough to make humans walk into lampposts. Ah, there’s nothing wrong with being a bit demonic.”

Aziraphale gives Crowley a long thoughtful look; one of his shoes on the coffee table, one arm flung dramatically over the couch’s back, eyes lazily closed behind his sunglasses. “No,” he allows, thinking it through. “No, I suppose there isn’t.”

A quiet day in Soho, the sky muted and miserable, Aziraphale quite content with Crowley apparently asleep in his shop and the angel himself meaning to dust some Borges and then getting distracted by a short story he’d entirely forgotten, and at his desk with his chin propped a hand he says without looking up to the bell over the door dinging – he doesn’t want to stop reading – “Oh, sorry, we’re closed.”

And it feels like someone’s thumbnail runs all the way up his spine.

He startles to his feet, book thumping backwards onto the desk, and Crowley’s up with a long in-drawn hiss, wrenching the sunglasses from his eyes, Aziraphale didn’t even know he was awake. “The door wasz open,” Beelzebub says in her harsh, metallic way as if always angry at all the world, closing the door with a firm bang behind herself, glaring between them both. “The snake can bite hisz tongue, I’m not here for your petty desertersz.”

Aziraphale scuttles to Crowley’s side, clutches his sleeve before he can stride at the Lord of the Flies and do goodness knows what, alarmed all the way through at not knowing why she’s here, not knowing what Crowley will do, not knowing what – not knowing anything, truly, a condition familiarity really ought to have made more comfortable for him which it decidedly has not. Crowley says, high and angry like his throat is scorched, “You don’t come here, this place -”

Beelzebub gives him a withering look, and snaps her fingers. And the sunglasses drop from his hand to clatter on the floor and Crowley crumples into Aziraphale’s arms like a rose cut from the stem and Aziraphale makes a noise out loud he could never repeat if he tried to, terror the solid bones inside him, filling him and freezing him on the spot because –

(He couldn’t move, and of everything, of all of it, to already be helpless and then to not be able to move it’s like his stomach tries to invert –)

He clutches Crowley’s limp body close and for a moment he can’t speak, dumb with the inability to comprehend so, so much horror, that she came here to do this, to do – what? Beelzebub gives the side of Crowley’s head a squinting look as if not trusting him to be unconscious, then looks at Aziraphale, and Aziraphale’s tongue is gone, his mouth is empty, he hasn’t even the strength to want to scream. She says, “I came to talk. You szeem to be the more rational one.”

Aziraphale struggles to find the strength to swallow – his throat is shaking – and holds Crowley pinned tight to himself with terror for one second more, not knowing what, what to do. Then he draws a trembling breath in, looks down at the top of Crowley’s sagging head and hikes him up in his arms (he’s not heavy, though he is unwieldy, long) and his voice comes wispy, as if scared to leave his throat. “– yes. Perhaps. You’re right. Um.” (Both he and Crowley believe themselves the ‘rational one’ in the relationship. Miraculously, neither of them are correct in that.) “Listen, if you are – here to cause – bother, I – I will protect him.” There’s finally some purchase for his voice, these words come stronger, as if they have some proper foundations; the tone is still a little uncertain but these words he knows he means. “I’m still an angel, I was made to protect – to protect the things I love. I will. I don’t honestly know how yet, but,” he swallows again, holds Crowley tight, “but I do know, know that I can be really terribly dangerous actually, when I’m forced to think.”

“Yesz,” she says sourly, eyes narrowed at him, “I remember, you got in the way of our apocalypsze. Thisz isn’t about that.”

“Well. I. Good. I mean, no hard feelings and all, hm? Water under the bridge, no point bearing grudges, terrible for the digestion. Um.” He stands there in the middle of his bookshop holding Crowley – Crowley shows no sign of waking, no sign of life apart from the slow shifting of his breath and the feeling of the heart in him that Aziraphale, who is sensitive to love, feels like a hot water bottle on a cold day, lovely, and in danger. “Why – why are you here . . . ?”

“To give a friendly warning. Well.” She gives a harsh snort. “To give a warning.” She holds his eye, and Aziraphale holds his back steady, feels his wings behind him shiver with their wanting to fold forward, to cup around Crowley, to make him safe. “Aszmodeus has defected.”

“Ah - oh. Oh.” Aziraphale looks stupidly back at her, eventually says, voice inflecting hopefully upwards, “That’s bad?”

“Well they haven’t come to you, have they? So that means they’re . . .” She waves a hand, stalks to a bookshelf and glares at the titles there, arms folded jagged. “If they come here and szmush you like a bluebottle,” she says, one finger tapping irritably at her own arm, “it waszn’t my idea, and he should know that.”

“. . . oh.” Aziraphale looks down at Crowley’s face, gentle in sleep, vulnerable in sleep, and his heart pangs its pain. “Yes,” he says quietly. “Yes. Of course.”

He looks around, feels vague, his mind, unable to really process this, gone off distant somewhere where it doesn’t have to take a close look at the problem. He walks to the couch and lays Crowley down, carefully, settling his head gently back on his own arm before on a cushion. “Yes,” he says, slowly, really feeling it now. “Yes, it is bad.”

He never knew Asmodeus in Heaven and certainly never after they Fell, but he knows that they were a Seraphim once, as powerful as Beelzebub herself or more, as powerful as Gabriel, and if they come here then he and Crowley are in terrible trouble, he just doesn’t know what to do about that. “Would they come here?” he says uneasily. “I mean, Crowley and I, we’re really not very important to someone like . . . are we?”

“I don’t know,” Beelzebub says, her voice grating on impatience, “and I don’t care, but if they do come, that one,” said with a stab of the finger at Crowley as she turns, and Aziraphale steps to the side without thinking, between the two demons and shielding Crowley in his sleep, “shouldn’t blame usz. You were the onesz who started the whole busziness of free will.”

“As a point of historical accuracy I think that might have been Lucifer, actually,” Aziraphale finds that his mouth has said, his mouth just does that sometimes, there are just all these words that he didn’t actually think about saying at all. “I, mean, we – can’t take responsibility for every angel and demon who–”

“Thisz iszn’t about responszibility, this is about blame,” she snarls. “I blame you, and he isz not to blame usz. Undersztood?”

Aziraphale stands there, between the Lord of the Flies and his sleeping Crowley, hands held low as if to hold Crowley back, or shield his body, invisible wings flexing uneasily wide behind him. He breathes, slowly. He says, “Yes. I understand.”

He does. Not exactly what she wants him to, but he does. He doesn’t know exactly what’s happened but he understands that there’s no coming back from Asmodeus walking away from Hell, and if they haven’t chosen to come here then Hell’s problem with factions has just become a war of every demon for itself. If they’re lucky, that will occupy the demons enough to keep their attention away from Earth, and if they’re very lucky, Heaven won’t see it as a good moment to attack, with Earth stuck in the middle . . .

Beelzebub gives one last glare at Crowley dead to the world and hopefully dreaming something nice, and then she turns and wrenches the door open and it bangs with a slam and the bell’s incongruous tinkling, and Aziraphale breathes out, slow and shaky. He puts a hand to his chest, goodness the speed of his heart, and swallows, and looks down at Crowley. Crowley is relaxed, asleep, a state Aziraphale has seen him in a thousand times. He feels the contrast with his own face, the muscles drawn stark, he doesn’t feel like there’s a spot of blood left in his skin. He feels –

He lays a hand on Crowley’s forehead and thinks about how he feels. He thinks about making some physical expression of how he feels now that Beelzebub has gone, his knees would quite like to deposit him on the floor, and he thinks about that; about collapsing, hyperventilating, maybe having a little scream, because she did to Crowley what Gabriel did to him and she didn't follow it through, no bloody metal tools, no bones snapped out in bits, but the fact remains that there are forces in this world that they are powerless against and they will never, never be anything but powerless against and Aziraphale has to live with that, and has to live with Crowley living with that too. So he could fall on the floor and shake and retch and have a bit of a scream, see if that makes it better somehow, see if existential terror can be mollified by hysterical response. He just doesn’t see how it would. He stands there still instead, feeling his breath pass evenly in and out, and strokes Crowley’s brow with a thumb.

His wings, invisible, flex uneasily, shake themselves back.

He just really doesn’t see the point. Nothing would change the situation as it stands, so there seems no point in trying to fight it. His tears don’t change the world, he’s learned that long before. The Almighty has Her own purposes, to be acquiesced to, endured; there are forces in this world so much more powerful than him, and he is finally so, so tired of it all, all he can do is bow his head.

He gets down to one knee with a little grunt, tugging his trousers more comfortable, and runs his thumb along one of Crowley's eyebrows. “Crowley, dear,” he says gently, he’s good at gentle at least, brushing his thumb along his temple, tucking some fox-red hair behind his ear. “Crowley, my love, can you wake up? I need to tell you something. There’s a dear. There we are.” A slit of gold underneath his eyelashes, his breath drawing in on a slow easy hiss. “Jolly good, hello, hello Crowley.” He folds his mouth into an awkward smile for him, really trying, he doesn’t see what else he can do. “Got a bit of bad news, I’m afraid.”

*

It’s –

They will get around to fucking Asmodeus, alright. But what immediately matters is that Beelzebub came to this place – this place, this bookshop, Crowley’s most sacred space, and she clicked Crowley out of consciousness like he doesn’t even matter to talk to Aziraphale alone. And Crowley feels –

Crowley feels –

He rants up and down the bookshop until an angel defector peeks up from the basement to see what all the noise is, blushes and flees again at the acid-yellow snap of his eyes. He wants his anger to look like strength, not fear. He wants to feel like Beelzebub wanted him asleep so he couldn’t protect Aziraphale because he does protect Aziraphale. He doesn’t want to feel what he does feel, like a cyst in the stomach, like rot; he doesn’t want to feel scared because he can’t protect Aziraphale.

It’s when he snarls that he’s following her and even strides for the door that Aziraphale, standing there hands clasped nervously by the sofa watching Crowley strop his way around the room, almost still but for the nervy flicker of his eyes, finally lurches forwards with something like a shriek, startling Crowley’s hand from the door handle, “No no no Crowley no -”

In that second it is such a pain in the fucking arse to him to not get to do what he wants whenever he wants because he has someone else’s wants to consider as well, because Aziraphale watched Beelzebub do to Crowley what Gabriel did to him and is terrified, heart near-rupture terrified, of Crowley being anywhere near Beelzebub again. And then, in the sheer clarity of that fury – turning it on Aziraphale, feeling his soul reject anything turning on Aziraphale like it’s hit him in the eyes –

Then all the softness, all the grief, all the need to be better than he is; he walks back to his angel, puts his arms around him – Aziraphale’s hands clutching Crowley's back are too tight, and can’t still – and says into his hair, staring over his head, “Alright, angel. Alright. We’re alright.”

“Don’t, please don’t –”

“No. No.” Crowley strokes Aziraphale’s trembling back, tucks his arms around his waist. “It’s alright. We’re alright.” He sighs, tries to feel the moment they’re in, not the centuries of terror preceding all these centuries of terror they always have ahead of them. Right here and now, in this space together, now at least, this is true. “We’re alright.”

If she ever comes back -

Who the fuck is he kidding. If she ever comes back, now she’s worked out how to work around him, they’re both dead. Maybe. Maybe they’re the least of Beelzebub’s problems now, Asmodeus . . .

He thinks, dull and very miserably meant, Fuuuuuuuuck.

The immediate problem, before he can turn his mind to how entirely and utterly fucked they are if Asmodeus does decide to head to Earth, is that Aziraphale is so not alright, so completely not fucking alright, Aziraphale’s inner calm is in broken bits all over the floor because Crowley does understand, Crowley has always understood, that his helplessness against what Gabriel did to him has always been worse to Aziraphale even than the violence of it, and Beelzebub making Crowley just as helpless even without the violence is more than the angel can cope with. Crowley locks the doors for all the good that will do while Aziraphale is patting at his own cheeks with his knuckles muttering about needing some fresh air while it pisses down outside and there’s nothing Crowley can do, helpless again, as the angel mumbles, “Tea, tea,” and heads off unsteadily for the kettle.

Crowley can’t even make a cup of tea, a-fucking-pparently, Aziraphale has paperweights more useful to him than Crowley is right now.

But the tea has its magical placebo effect on the angel, always has, and after a little time sitting slumped on the couch holding cup and saucer and staring into space as if staring into the very deepest pit of Hell, Aziraphale blinks a few times, rousing himself, puts the cup in the saucer and looks across at Crowley. Crowley is standing by the window, too tense to sit, arms folded jagged and jaw tight on wanting its teeth to be much longer and more venomous than they currently are. “Asmodeus,” Aziraphale says, and clears his throat. “Did you know them?”

Crowley makes a pfft noise on a huff of his breath. “No. Nah. It’s not like that, demons like that . . . it’s not even like the way you knew the Archangels.”

“I wouldn’t say I knew them,” Aziraphale murmurs, eyes slipping elsewhere, and Crowley’s teeth clench on wishing he hadn’t said that.

“But you interacted, you could interact. A demon like Asmodeus –” Crowley pushes his sunglasses up, rubs his face with a hand. “I don’t even know if they use language. They’re not . . . humans would call them monsters.” He feels weary even thinking about the depth of danger they could be in, and gives a dark, humourless laugh. “They’d be right, for once. You know how we’re in human bodies, with – with human-like brains, with all that –” He waves a hand at the side of his own head. “– all that comes with it?”

“I always sort of thought,” Aziraphale says, slumped so deep in his seat that he’s resting the saucer on his own chest, “that it was more that humans were made like angels, in their way.”

“Okay, yes, whatever, that works, we’re basically similar, yes? In the head. That’s why we’re good at screwing with them to make them behave the way we want them to. But demons like Asmodeus –” Crowley sucks his breath in through his teeth. “Nowhere near a human. Nowhere near an angel. Can’t reason with them. Can’t frighten them. Pure monsters, seething under the bed and eating human souls and I don’t know if it’s any different to them to eating crisps or rocks or –” He shakes his head. “Just monsters.”

“Funny thing,” Aziraphale says, distantly, “that demons have monsters too.”

“Yes, but angel,” Crowley says as gently as he can, “we’re other people’s monsters, so our monsters . . . ?”

The cup on Aziraphale’s chest takes a slow rise up and then a heavy, slightly wobbling sigh down, and Aziraphale says quietly and very meant, “Oh God I am so tired of being terrified all the time.” and Crowley immediately pushes away from the window to sit beside him.

“Don’t, don’t be, angel, we’ll be –”

Aziraphale waves a hand. “No, I’m not . . . I’m so tired of even thinking about it. There’s nothing we can do about it, not a jot, is there? I just thought . . . we need to warn the others, all the rebel angels and demons. Don’t suppose there’s anything they could really do either but think what cads we’d feel if Asmodeus –” His fingers waggle vaguely – “turns up and rents their souls to agonised flayed pieces or some such and we hadn’t even given them a bell to let them know.”

Crowley looks at Aziraphale’s face for a long time, while Aziraphale looks at nothing, gloomy and exhausted over his teacup. Crowley touches his hand, closes his fingers around it. “Angel,” he says, quietly. He doesn’t know what he means by it, he just feels unsettled, all the horror and danger, they’ve done this already too many times, he would give anything, anything just to make Aziraphale feel safe, and his helplessness – his helplessness –

Heaven, Beelzebub is an amateur at making Crowley feels helpless.

Aziraphale blinks to him, smiles wanly, squeezes his fingers. “Don’t worry, dear,” he says. “I don’t suppose the two of us mean anything much to a demon like Asmodeus, I can’t see why they’d be interested in us, and even if they are we’ll think of something. We always think of something. We’ve survived this far, haven’t we?”

Crowley looks at the angel’s soft sweet face and remembers the nothing of his body in his arms, the feel of him as insubstantial as air, less solid than all the blood he’d left behind, and thinks, Weeellll. Because there’s something wrong with Crowley’s heartbeat, he knows, and he can’t tell if it’s running too fast or too slow.

Mostly. Mostly, they’ve survived.

Aziraphale closes his eyes and sits there with his tea in silence for some time then, looking so genuinely exhausted that it picks like unsteady fingers through Crowley’s guts, seeing how deep it really does run. When he finally does open his eyes he looks so tired and so lost and so sad, it puts a panic in Crowley, why does he look so sad – ?

“Do you think –” the angel says, and stops, and swallows and looks miserable. “I know that you think it,” he says helplessly. “I’m the booby who hasn’t . . .” He sits up properly, settling his teacup in his lap, and looks at Crowley bleak and small, and his voice comes thick and wretched. “I don’t think I can keep going back to Gabriel. I can’t . . . I can’t.”

Crowley stares, mouth shaping a sound that doesn’t come, because this wasn’t the turn he’d expected. Aziraphale lifts the teacup and lowers it again as if losing the strength for it, and says hopelessly, “I can’t, I just can’t keep – I am so tired Crowley, so tired of how – scared I have to be all the time, I – I don’t even know what I was thinking, what I wanted, that’s – that’s a lie, actually, that is a barefaced lie, oh.” He puts the cup of tea aside as if finally even that can’t help him, and now at least his hands can wring together the way they’ve clearly wanted to for some time. “I know exactly what I wanted and it’s for him to know that what he did was wrong and that was never going to happen and how stupid – how stupid and – prideful – to even think he would –”

“Angel,” Crowley says, very quietly.

“It’s the childishness of it mostly.” Aziraphale swallows hard, settling his shoulders back in a prim way, invisible wings all tight and twitchy. “As if it would change anything. As if it would change anything, what difference would it make? The past has already happened. And I just can’t . . .” He grimaces as if he can taste something terrible, and Crowley instinctively puts a hand on his knee, wants to speak and doesn’t know what to say but Aziraphale is already looking at him again, tired and miserable but nowhere near tears. He says, low and clipped, “Please don’t make me do that stupid dance over this.”

“No – no – no, no no no.” Crowley rubs his knee, his voice falling to almost a hum, almost a lullaby. “No. You weren’t wrong. What you wanted and what you tried to do, none of that was wrong. You didn’t do anything wrong. She dealt you a shit hand and you just – you weren’t bluffing, Aziraphale, you were just trying.” His voice hurts, and he squeezes Aziraphale’s knee. “You never have to apologise to me for wanting the world to be better than it is.”

“I told you it was childish.” Aziraphale says, resettling his shoulders to keep his back straight.

“It’s not childish.” Crowley says, to the only pole star he has ever had, his light in the dark, the only true good he has ever in all of eternity known. “It’s beautiful.”

His stomach turns slowly on what Aziraphale has just said, because there is a very immediate response of pure greed, which is that Crowley wants Gabriel to do worse than merely rot in Hell and Aziraphale no longer dragging the two of them through trying to redeem the fucker is exactly what Crowley has always wanted. So he allows himself a brief warm moment of pleasure like basking on a sun-warmed rock, to finally get exactly what he wanted, before he turns to what he has to admit is the real issue, which is whether this is what’s best for Aziraphale. It was Aziraphale’s wings, Aziraphale’s being made helpless, and mutilated, and in a drawn-out, cruel, torturous way murdered. What Crowley wants in this situation isn’t what should matter to either of them, really.

What Aziraphale has wanted, truly wanted, Crowley knows, is not merely that Gabriel acknowledge to Aziraphale that what he did was wrong, Aziraphale would very much like that Crowley knows but he also knows that Aziraphale isn’t him. Gabriel crawling after Aziraphale on his hands and knees begging for his forgiveness would unsettle the angel, partly for the way that it might, briefly, please him; what Aziraphale has wanted mostly is for Gabriel to be better than his behaviour proved him to be, to know that what he did was wrong because it was wrong, not just because he did it to Aziraphale. Yes, an apology would probably help, but Aziraphale only partly wanted an apology. He just wanted Gabriel, and the world itself, to be better than this. Justice, for Aziraphale, goes deeper than just Aziraphale’s feelings. It’s about the world being in balance, all beings being in balance, everything being as She said it ought to be and then abandoned them to live up to on their own.

Aziraphale isn’t just giving up on Gabriel. He’s giving up on the hope he has always had that the truth of the world is kindness and justice rewarded and love being enough. It’s not naivety, it’s his entire philosophy of life, and finally it has been broken for him. Crowley might have spent centuries trying to do that for him in a gentler way but this is what has finally collapsed the ground beneath Aziraphale’s feet, Gabriel did this to him too. And now that Crowley’s got what he really wanted ever since Aziraphale started trying to reach Gabriel, trying to get through to him, it’s the worst fucking win he’s ever had and he knows that it’s the best thing for both of them. Aziraphale can’t keep doing this, putting himself through it, he never owed it to anybody (never to Gabriel) and it’s the universe kicking his soul when it’s already on its knees and it’s the best decision he could ever have made. It’s all of those things at once, and this fucking world She made, it makes him feel sick.

Crowley says quietly, “If this is what you want then it’s what I want too.”

He really wants Aziraphale to look back at him like if he doesn’t feel relief then at least he’s feeling acceptance, at least resignation. But that stony look on Aziraphale’s face, all it looks like is defeat, and when it comes to the ‘best’ thing in this situation, there isn’t one. There are lesser ways of it being even worse and this is the one they’ve chosen. When someone’s broken your leg, none of the paths ahead look good. At least on this path there might be a little less pain.

It catches in Crowley’s jaw, trying to get the words out, his throat is too full and his voice comes thick, too much; “I’m so proud of you.”

Aziraphale’s gaze hits him shocked wide open, then flutters away with the corner of his mouth hardening. “Oh, don’t.”

“I am, you have no idea, I could never be so –”

“I am a coward.” said low and bitter.

“No. No. You look it all right in the eye. Gabriel is a coward.” His voice nearly cracks. “You are magnificent.”

Aziraphale’s eyes strain on the ceiling, his hands twist in his lap, he says too tightly, “Well I really wish I felt it, then,” and Crowley catches his arms around him, and their wings tangle in the hug.

*

Aziraphale is incredibly tired, afterwards, sitting on the sofa in the bookshop with Crowley stroking the back of his neck even though Crowley knows exactly how weak and stupid he has been. He remembers those days sleeping so he didn’t have to care about anything in the world with a pained wistfulness, he knows he can’t. But he doesn’t even feel like he has the energy to get off the bookshop’s sofa, just slumps there and feels like a failure, while Crowley tries to coddle him and it breaks his throat because he is the kindest, kindest creature in the world and Aziraphale knows that he has no idea, none, and nothing he says could ever make Crowley believe it.

But finally he has exhausted himself of hope, of faith, that he can find the words, or be patient enough, for Gabriel to be better than he is. Perhaps, eventually, Gabriel will find his own way back to goodness, though Aziraphale can’t in honesty remember when he ever would have said that Gabriel was there to begin with. But whatever it takes for Gabriel to be good, it can’t be Aziraphale. He has tried, and tried, and tried, and tried, and he hasn’t got the strength anymore. It would take more than an Archangel to bring Gabriel back to good and Aziraphale is just a ridiculous, stupid little principality whose luck really ran out when it came to Gabriel. He has no power in this situation. He hands it off to God, to ineffability, and lives with his own weakness, his smallness. There is no triumph, not even any relief of not having to face him anymore. All he feels is tired.

Something odd in his stomach as well, not like hunger. Something uneasy, he doesn’t like it, a queasiness low down. He tries to ignore it, takes a breath, wants to say something to Crowley – say something to Crowley, offer something, so that Crowley isn’t worried and suffering because Aziraphale can’t do anything about the way he’s suffering himself – he tries to find the words –

Crowley says, uneasily, “Do you – feel that?”

The back of Aziraphale’s neck tingles, not in the good way. “Feel –” he says, and that thing in the pit of his stomach, it’s like feeling the opposite of love, his hand comes up to his chest –

It isn’t the door that collapses inwards as if hit by a wrecking ball, it’s the wall. Angels and demons feel each other like an awkward sixth sense, like static electricity sensed before the spark, and Asmodeus feels, towering over them like a bull had a child with a building, like Hell.

Its shoulders are as broad as it is tall – ‘it’ is the only word Aziraphale can think, it isn’t a demon as he’s known any of them, he understands what Crowley meant utterly, it is a monster. He thinks of the golem but that golem was a child’s toy, Asmodeus turns its huge dark horned head to them, left and right, its snout so wide that its flat round eyes must see in almost opposite directions, its breath smoking in the air of the bookshop and its vast body, too impossibly big for its limbs to hold it up the way they do, lunges, at them.

Aziraphale has a fraction of a second to think with mad panic that what are they to a thing like that, how can anything as puny as the two of them matter to that, and then the sofa is shattered and he’s knocked and bounced off any number of things and left flailing his panic on the floor, bruised and startled but that thing didn’t kill him because it wasn’t aiming for him, it knocked him aside when it grabbed –

“Crowley!”

It holds Crowley in one massive, clumsy hand and Crowley makes a garbled noise of whatever it’s already done to him, his chest – it rears back its free arm like a treetrunk and the fist on it –

“Crowley! Get off him! Get-”

Aziraphale has already run to grab the thing’s arm but he isn’t that fast, the sound of the blow, if he didn’t already feel empty with terror he thinks his guts might have retched on autopilot, Crowley; he grabs the thing’s elbow as it comes back for another punch and Crowley is making a wet broken noise in its hand and Aziraphale is screaming at the thing to stop and hanging onto an arm wider than he is, which shakes him back at first as if just trying to dislodge a fly but then with an angry huff of smoke, it jars him back so hard he hits a bookshelf and then the floor and then some books hit him on the back and he’s stunned and disorientated, trying to push himself up but his elbow just skids out under him, and his breath is shaking so hard he can’t – he can’t get it –

He sees the terrified faces of two angels, Malachel and Elyon, having found the courage to come up from the basement but no more courage faced with this and standing frozen where they are behind a shelf. And he sees the thing holding Crowley, Crowley who is making noises of how broken his body is and a whimper comes out of Aziraphale just like a breath, he can’t stop it –

That thing has paused, hot dark breath sighing out of itself, as it has turned its enormous head to look out of one eye at Aziraphale.

It turns its massive bulky body, two steps so it faces him in a way that it can turn its head both ways to see him, Crowley dangling from its hand and coughing something up onto his own shoulder, a moan comes out of Aziraphale. The creature’s vast head turns as it considers him with each eye, left, right, and it –

It doesn’t say, it doesn’t speak; the sentiment more than any mortal words are there in Aziraphale’s head, bigger than Aziraphale’s head and surrounding him with the sound of metal scraping through granite; You are the angel he left Hell for.

His eyes are damp with sheer terror, with the horror of the noises Crowley is making, with how helpless – how helpless – he tries to push himself up again, makes it at least to his knees, oh Lord he’s shaking. “– I –”

You will come with me.

He feels like he’s in a sudden bubble of silence at that, the fact of it, everything else ceases to matter, he knows that that is what happens next. He has no choice. He knows what helplessness means. “Don’t hurt him,” he whispers. “Don’t hurt him and yes, yes I’ll come with you, don’t, don’t hurt him –”

Asmodeus drops Crowley’s gargling body and Aziraphale doesn’t even see him hit the floor, everything has gone dark. Everything has gone dark in the same way that sometimes when Crowley needs everything to slow down for a fucking second, everything goes white; the angel scrabbles himself backwards through where there was a bookshelf a second ago, black sand getting into his shoes, fumbling himself to his feet and his heart is beating so fast he feels faint. The world is a black and empty desert, black sand and black sky, but for him and Asmodeus and now at least those angels can get to Crowley, now they can heal him, they can –

Oh good Lord this is how he’s going to die and he’s so frightened he can’t think –

Asmodeus turns its head, left and right, looking at Aziraphale. Aziraphale stands there shaking, too scared to speak or move, but Asmodeus isn’t speaking or moving very much either. Aziraphale tries to wet his lips but there’s no wet to his tongue; he jerks at his waistcoat, awkward with shaking hands, probably makes the bow tie worse for his attempts to neaten it. He coughs, as close as he can get to clearing his throat. He puts his hands behind his back and grips tight to try to stop the shaking. And he stands there sinking slightly lopsided in the sand, alone outside of reality with a monster, and he tries for the last chance that he will ever get to be brave. He has never managed it much in his life. This is the last time he will have to, the last time that he can.

Asmodeus makes a low rumbling noise that Aziraphale feels underneath his sternum the way he feels it when Crowley plays his music really too bloody loud, and the sentiment is there in his mind – or the sentiment is larger than he is, and he is inside of it – You are the angel he left Hell for.

The feeling that accompanies it, like a tone of voice, seems – pleased, full of pride, which Aziraphale doesn’t understand. He swallows, and stands there, and almost turns a smile on but it just drops off his face again, he hasn’t the strength. He should say something, something. ‘How do you do?’ What absolutely idiotic last words to have.

Asmodeus looks at him, left and right, almost as if admiring a prize, and Aziraphale works very hard just to keep his knees holding him up. The great bull-headed demon doesn’t seem to be in any sort of hurry to kill him, though Aziraphale isn’t in any denial about where this is heading. He doesn’t know why him, why a creature like Asmodeus could possibly care about something as small as Aziraphale, but clearly it does. All he can do is endure the helplessness, and wait.

(What will Crowley do when he’s healed, when he realises what has happened? There’s nothing Aziraphale can do about it now, nothing, his throat feels like it’s collapsing inside him, all he can do is hope –)

Because Asmodeus does seem to be running out of patience, head turning left, right, and still Aziraphale just stands there weak with terror. The demon watches him and waits, it’s clearly waiting for something, does it think that Aziraphale will try to run or fight it? Where is the point? There is nowhere to run here, and can you really say that a gnat ‘fights’ the sole of a boot? And yet Asmodeus turns its head, and looks at him in a more glowering, confused way, and the sentiment overwhelms him again; You are the one he left Hell for. What is it that you do?

He has to cough a few more times to find any voice for it, small and thin as it comes. “W-what do I – do?”

He left Hell for you. They say he could have ruled Hell itself, the power he wields, and he left Hell for you. It looks like a bull but Aziraphale is reminded in a way that never usually jars him so of snakes, because when it looks him in the eye he’s utterly frozen. What is it that you do that is better than Hell?

Aziraphale stares at it, unable to speak, and then eventually his damp eyes flutter and his throat goes with it, and he gets out, quiet and shaky, “. . . o-oh. Um. Oh. I – don’t – I really don’t do anything, I’m afraid, I – I –”

Asmodeus turns its massive head, left eye, right eye. He left Hell for you. You are better than Hell. What do you do that is better than Hell?

Aziraphale finally understands what is happening, exactly why he’s going to die, little bubbles of horror bursting in slow motion in his brain because in Hell they speak of Crowley like he could have battled Satan to rule Hell himself had he cared to, a belief entirely Aziraphale’s fault, and Asmodeus mulling this over in its enormous, inhuman head must have come to the conclusion that the only reason Crowley didn’t make himself King of Hell if he had the means to was because he had something better than that. Crowley had something better than ruling all of Hell, Crowley had Aziraphale, and so Asmodeus decided to take the greatest prize of them all for itself; better than the rulership of all of Hell, Asmodeus was taking Aziraphale, the thing worth more than all the power of Hell.

Except that he isn’t, Aziraphale knows that, knows exactly what he is and what he’s worth and oh dear, oh dear, none of it is like that at all, and how to explain to Asmodeus – how to make Asmodeus understand –

But when it understands it will kill him.

Well. Honestly. One way or another it will kill him anyway.

He lets go of the rigid grip he’s got of his hands behind his back and brings them to the front of his body, to fold his fingers together, almost like prayer, for what comfort it can give. “I – I’m afraid it isn’t – like that. It’s not that there’s something I can do that – that made leaving Hell worth it for Crowley. That isn’t – why he left.”

Asmodeus turns its head, left, right, patient in a horrible way. He left for you.

Aziraphale’s mouth twitches a floppy smile that won’t stay put, and he whispers, “Yes, yes, he did, didn’t he, the darling thing. Yes, he did.” He wants to cry, and if he actually has left Crowley behind safe in coming here to die like this, he doesn’t regret any of it. “But it’s not because – it’s not because there’s something I can do or give that is better than Hell. Objectively, I’m not – well, honestly, objectively anything is better than Hell, but I don’t suppose it looks like that to . . .” He takes a breath, he is getting very distracted. “For Crowley I was worth leaving Hell for because he loves me, the perfect creature, and because I love him. That’s all. I don’t do anything, I’m not – worth anything, not to anybody but Crowley. I’m sorry.” Who is he apologising to? The universe at large, it feels like. “Just a bit of a misunderstanding, terribly unfortunate, I’m – terribly sorry.”

Silence. Asmodeus isn’t even turning its head anymore, is staring at Aziraphale hard from out of its right eye with the smoke running slow from its wide open nostrils. It’s silent for a long time, like a statue almost, the most horrible statue that Aziraphale could think of, and then the words engulf him, he is tiny in the heart of the thought like looming stone; I don’t understand.

He could almost laugh but it feels more like crying. “No,” he says, wet-eyed and he smiles and isn’t it beautiful, how little sense it’s always made? “No, I don’t understand it either, not really. There’s nothing I do that made it worth leaving Hell for, for Crowley. He just wanted to be with me. I don’t understand it either.” He wipes his cheeks quickly, and smiles. “I don’t.”

A pause, and then almost hopefully, curling around him like the body of a python, the thought, Possessing you is better than Hell?

“I don’t think that that’s the right way to think of it,” Aziraphale offers, apologetic again. “Here and now I think – I think we can safely say that you are in possession of me right now but I doubt I seem worth very much to you like this. It’s just Crowley, you see, because we love each other. It won’t work for you the same way. You need to find your own thing to love. Only that can ever be worth everything to you in the same way.”

Here in this empty dark foreverness he feels the confusion of the demon all around him, but finally he’s come somewhere past his own fear, because here in the dark he knows that Crowley loved him – that it was never about what Aziraphale was worth or what he could do, Heaven there was precious little he could do, but Crowley loved him and he really feels it, faced with naming it like this. A frightened little principality, like a small white mouse alone in the dark, with so little to offer the world that Crowley could have wanted him for no reason other than love. Crowley loved him; oh you precious creature, he thinks, closing his eyes and his breath shakes in his chest, oh you darling man, you were worth leaving Heaven for, whatever it cost me, you were worth all of it.

The smoke snorts out of Asmodeus as heavy as an old exhaust and the thought overwhelms Aziraphale to the point of staggering him backwards in the sand, I don’t understand.

And then it feels like a hand grabs his brain, in absolute horror he feels it read his mind in the space of a snap of the fingers, in a matter of a millisecond it has been through all the millennia stored inside Aziraphale’s head and read every second of his memory to try to make sense of why Crowley would think him worth leaving all the power of Hell behind for –

Aziraphale could already have told it that it wouldn’t find that there. But what it does find, as it’s gone from his head and the world snaps back to colour and he drops to his knees in his bookshop with his hands already clapping to his mouth, the enormous bulk of Asmodeus turning and galloping into speed out through the hole in the wall and away, Crowley apparently mid-fight with Malachel and Elyon turning from them with a squawk at his reappearance and scrabbling to his knees in front of him, staring at him with wild golden eyes but before he can get a word out Aziraphale grabs his shoulders and chokes, “Crowley it read my mind it went right through my mind oh God Crowley it knows where Gabriel is it knows where Gabriel is and his wings clipped –”

“I thought you were dead,” Crowley says in a hollow broken voice, hands cupping around his face and his eyes – the angels clearly did heal him but his eyes look – “I thought it took you to kill you and I couldn’t even –”

“Crowley it’s going to kill Gabriel and it’s so fast –”

“Fuck Gabriel, are you alright? I th–”

“Can we get there faster?” He tries to get up and falls over again, damn he’s still shaking, hauls himself and Crowley up through sheer bloody-mindedness and stares at the open wall into the shocked street outside, he doesn’t even want to think about how they’re going to have to cover all this up. “Crowley, that thing with the telephone wires, but– but we couldn’t even fight it if we, we need to get him away – what do we do?”

“What are you talking about ‘what do we do’?” Crowley lost the sunglasses somewhere in all the chaos and his eyes are livid yellow with anger. “Of course we could get there faster, some stupid demon who’s never left Hell, it’ll be running the whole way, we could beat it in the Bentley, but it – it wants Gabriel?”

“It does now it knows where he is and helpless,” Aziraphale says, all his fault, oh good Lord. He turns to Malachel and Elyon, says, “Could you two take care of -” He makes a general flustered gesture at the entire open wall of the shop. “Hurry, Crowley, we have to get there first, will you hurry–”

“What so – you think we’re going to race Asmodeus to rescue Gabriel, I just got – pulverised and watched it take you and you think we’re going after it again for that piece of–”

“Crowley we do not have the time for this.”

“If it eats him all I want is popcorn.”

Aziraphale barks at him, “We do not have the time for you to pretend to be heartless right now, get in the car!”

It’s a miracle; Crowley jumps as if he’s had an electric shock, and then hurries after Aziraphale like a lamb.

Doors slammed and lurching from the parking space after that demon, Crowley murmurs, “When you get all headteachery–”

“Oh don’t you even start.” Aziraphale says, hanging onto the door handle in a grim, fixed way. “This is all my fault, please just drive.”

“How is this your fault? How did it – it was looking for Gabriel? How did it know that you knew where Gabriel was?”

“It didn’t, it – oh I’ll explain later, I’ll explain later, it’s too much to – please just drive, and – oh Crowley I’m so glad that you’re alright –”

“Jury is still very much out on that, where we’re going, angel.” Crowley says, putting his foot down further, Aziraphale pressed back into his seat as if by an invisible hand.


Part III