Chapter Text
Aziraphale was baking scones when he felt another trap take hold in the pantry, so he paused to check their progress and put the kettle on before retrieving the intruder, who was trying to free himself from the glue trap and making more noise, banging himself against the wall and floor, than if he’d screamed. Somehow he’d caught not only two paws and his tail, but one ear; the resulting position looking so pathetically uncomfortable that all the fury Aziraphale’d worked up while kneading vanished. “Goodness, you have gotten yourself into a pickle,” he said, picking up the trap and holding it so as to minimize the mouse-shaped captive’s discomfort. “Hold still. You’re only making it worse.” He stroked the velvety head with one finger. “Don’t be afraid! It won’t help.”
The bright eyes rolled at him and the palpitating heart did not slow; but Aziraphale could only deliver reassurances, not enforce them. He carried the trap and its captive into the lounge, where Crowley sprawled, his chin on the edge of the tea table, staring into the inverted jam jar through heart-shaped sunglasses while the lizard-shaped entity inside ran around and around, its jeweled sides heaving, its shed tail flopping on the cloth. The wood fire crackled, Aretha Franklin sang from the stack of records on the gramophone, and the light through the windows was dim in expectation of evening rain. Aziraphale flicked the electric lamps on. “This one’s just as hapless,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything to gain by constraining them.”
“Might be boobytrapped,” said Crowley.
“With what, hellfire and holy water having both failed?” Aziraphale detached most of the mouse body from the trap and set it on one of the four chairs. Crowley slipped Nanny Ashtoreth’s birthday card from Warlock Dowling, currently of Virginia, under the mouth of the jam jar, moved the whole to the seat opposite the glue trap, pulled out the card, and lifted the jar. The loose tail flopped onto the floor, so Aziraphale crooked a finger to reattach it.
“All right, you two,” said Crowley, sitting up straight, for him. “Put yourselves into better forms for interrogation -“
“Conversation, my dearest!”
“Talking! Or we’ll do it for you, and don’t think we can’t!”
Simultaneous shudders through lizard and mouse, and two humanoid figures blinked at the bone china place settings and the asters in the centerpiece. The former mouse, a muscular androgyne whose features would blend into any Japanese crowd, tore the glue trap off their ear and tried to hurl it away, but it stuck to their hand, and then to the nap of their shiny gray suit. Aziraphale moved his hand, and it betook itself to the wastebasket by the sofa. “Knocking on the front door would have been more dignified,” he said.
The former lizard, now an aggressively feminine ash blonde in a bedazzled polyester doubleknit dress, of sorts, stuck her tongue out at him. “I don’t do dignity.”
“May we know your names and reasons for skulking behind our wainscot and in our garden?” Aziraphale asked.
“I am the Principality Muriel,” said the former mouse, their eyes glittering with defiance even as their voice squeaked into a terrified upper register. “And dying in the service of Heaven is nothing to me!”
“More fool you.” The lizard girl leaned her elbows on the table. “I go by Bella when I’m up here, and I’m highly bribeable! With Lust and Gluttony, for choice.” Her narrow lacquered lips writhed into a parody of a smile.
“You’ve come to the right place for Gluttony,” said Aziraphale, as the kettle began to sing in the kitchen. “Excuse me.”
The scones were almost done, he’d already finished the sandwiches, and the petit fours and biscuits only needed stacking. He took his time about assembling the tea trolley, giving Crowley ample room for his Bad Demon routine. Their guests were not, in the strictest sense of the word, unexpected. Throughout the delightful process of choosing and decorating their cottage and experimenting with domestic routine, they had also discussed how to deal with any demonic or angelic intrusions on their lives, and they had roles and goals within which to improvise. He hoped that Crowley wouldn’t overdo his half of the play. They had not been expecting two such low-rankers to come after such desperate outlaws as themselves, and it wouldn't do to terrify them too much.
Aziraphale did not listen to the conversation - or lecture, for the primary voice was Crowley’s - going on in the lounge, but he did track its rhythm and chose a moment when Crowley had just delivered a devastating snark to wheel in the trolley, with a cheerful rattling of dishes. “Here we are then,” he said, not reacting to the changes in appearance Bella and Muriel had undergone in his absence. “If you’d given me notice I would have nipped out and laid in some first rate pastries this morning, but as it is you’ll have to settle for my baking, I’m afraid.”
“And by ‘settle for’ he means ‘wallow in,” said Crowley. “He’s been stress baking since you tripped the alarms. Help yourselves; no need to stand on ceremony.” He showed his teeth in one of his more vicious smiles. “We’re all comrades here.”
“Nothing for me,” said Muriel, whose suit was now better fitting and of a more plausible material. They had gotten better control of their voice, the terror huddling behind loftiness. Crowley glared, and they added, not quite stammering, “Thank you.”
Bella helped herself to a scone, breaking it open and buttering it with a hand much cleaner than it had been. Her outfit was of a better-draping fabric now, though still low-cut and bedazzled. “Manners,” she chided. “What did he just say about manners? It all looks wonderful, sir, thank you so much. Three sugars for me, please, and plenty of milk!”
“I did not come here to stuff myself with gross matter,” said Muriel.
Aziraphale nearly winced, nearly spilled the tea.
Crowley turned on Muriel. “No, you came here to sspy on uss! And Aziraphale’s first impulsse was to make you ssomething nicce to eat! So you can get that sstick out of your -“
“Dearest,” said Aziraphale, holding out a cup. “That’s enough. They needn’t eat or drink anything they don’t care to.” Crowley accepted the tea, and Aziraphale smiled apologetically at Muriel. “Gabriel’s been at you, I see. Gross matter in the body is one of his pet peeves. I’ve never understood it, myself. Consider the process of creation. One makes the simplest things first and works up to the more complex, subtle, and beautiful things after getting one’s hand in. A great deal of divine energy went into the creation of the building blocks of the food experience; and then on top of that the mortals put in an extra effort of applied chemistry to create complex, delightful, and nutritious dishes. It seems positively ungracious, to me, to decline to partake of the end result of so much effort and ingenuity. But you must do your duty as you see fit, and it’s no one’s business to make you feel bad about it.”
Muriel’s reaction to this spiel (during which Crowley swallowed a a cucumber sandwich, a scone, and a petit four, in one bite apiece) was to settle into even more stoic mode. If they’d had much experience of bodies and human body language they probably would have folded their arms over their chest, instead of letting them hang awkwardly at their sides, and leaned back instead of sitting so abnormally straight and still. Aziraphale wondered whether they’d ever incorporated before. What was Gabriel thinking, sending out such an inexperienced angel? Unless, perhaps, the point was to see how they were gotten rid of?
Bella, by contrast, consumed a scone dripping with butter and raspberry jam, two petit fours, five chocolate biscuits, and her tea in short order. She didn’t gulp like Crowley, but chewed with gusto and a great scattering of crumbs. Aziraphale ate with deliberation, starting with a nice hot scone. He was still overkneading them a tad, wasn't he? But he was getting the hang of it.
Crowley drained his tea cup and turned the stress of his regard onto Bella. “So. You’ve had your bribe. What the heaven is a lowlife like you doing drawing a dangerous assignment like this? Finish chewing that before you answer.”
Bella swallowed her mouthful of tea and scone and grinned at him. Or was it a leer? Something betwixt the two; at any rate, Aziraphale didn’t care for it. “This isn’t my assignment,” she said. “I was sent up to tempt some schoolgirls into being mean to each other, which took all of five minutes because I dawdled. And then I looked for you, and finally found you. I’ve been looking every chance I got since this summer.”
“Why?”
Yes, that was a leer! “Because I’m a huge fan!”
Aziraphale could tell Crowley didn’t buy it; nor was he flattered. “I was under the impression that my only fans down there were the highest ranks that never had to actually deal with me, and they decided I was problematic awhile back.”
“And that’s when I turned into a fan! I mean, c’mon! You're an epic! Us lower ranks always hated you because you weren’t any bigger in the rebellion than we were, but afterward you were always so there. Volunteering to go to Eden when everybody else was afraid to, and then you knocked that out of the park so hard, getting the humans kicked out, so you kept getting the plum assignments we all would’ve killed for, and hardly ever had to come back down. Every time you got a commendation we had to sit through a meeting about it. It was so annoying! So when we found out you were a traitor and would be getting the Greatest Show Trial and Execution ever, we were so stoked! Even more than when we found out you’d murdered Ligur.”
“That was self defense,” murmured Crowley. “He was in the process of invading my home to do me grievous bodily harm. Get it right.”
Muriel, whose face had been getting blanker and blanker, seemed to reach some tipping point. “You hated Crowley but you admired his murder of one of your leaders so much you changed your mind? That makes no sense!”
“Somebody never met Ligur, and it shows!” Bella slurped her tea and held out the cup for a refill. Aziraphale obliged. “Hate comes in lots of flavors. Hating Lord Crowley was Envy-based. We all wanted to be him, and couldn’t because the slot was taken. Hating Ligur and Hastur is experienced-based, from dealing with them day in and day out. Hastur kills people outright if he’s inconvenienced, and then you reincorporate and get on with your day. Ligur wasn’t as irritable, but when he got teed off, he’d make a whole big production out of it, torture you in some hideous time-consuming way, and then you had to thank him for his input and go heal on your own. And I mean heal, not miracle yourself better. All his tortures had curses on them a low rank couldn’t break.” She buttered another scone. “Plus Ligur dying and the traitor thing opened up two promotion slots. I’m not in line, but it keeps things lively, watching the competition.”
“That makes no sense either! How can those slots still be unfilled? It’s just a matter of shuffling around to close the gaps in the chain of command.”
“Hell has no chain of command,” said Crowley. “S’more like a net. With fishhooks all over it. Pass me a petit four, please, angel.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s as good as a play,” agreed Bella, not quite before she finished swallowing her cucumber sandwich. “But it’s not as good as Crowley’s trial! You should’ve seen it, Heaven-drone.”
“Muriel,” corrected Aziraphale. “We use names here.”
“Fine, you should’ve seen it, Muriel. He swaggered in under his own power and acted like he didn’t know how to be afraid. Talk about suspense! We kept waiting for him to break, and he didn’t, not even when that angel bastard came in with the holy water -“
Aziraphale had been momentarily distracted by Crowley’s petit four; but recalled himself to the matter at hand in time to see Muriel’s unpracticed body register outrage in every feature; and to catch the other angel’s hand by the wrist as it rose. “None of that, child! Really! You can’t go around smiting your fellow guest! I’ll have no such behavior in my house!”
Muriel seemed surprised at their inability to twist their wrist out of Aziraphale’s grasp. “But she lies!”
“No, she doesn’t,” said Crowley. “Archangel Michael. Came down with a pitcher, assured Beelzebub it was the holiest, poured it in the tub, and then took off back upstairs while they tested it on some poor little slob.”
Bella’s face dropped its gleeful leer. “Polikletus was so proud to be picked for usher! Usually the higher ranks use - used - him to practice ball games. But that one day he had marks of office. Practiced the declarations for hours, couldn’t talk about anything else but having a front row seat and it - it - he had a way with curses, you see. The higher ups didn’t know, but we did. After one of Ligur’s punishments he’d come and, and work on them, a bit at a time, so we’d heal faster.”
“Oh, how kind,” said Aziraphale, in pleased surprise; but also with regret, for he remembered the usher’s fate all too well. He released Muriel’s wrist.
“I’m sure he charged through the nose for it,” said Crowley.
Bella shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it ‘through the nose.’ All he wanted was for us not to pick on him for a few years, maybe a century, nothing major. And he’d hover around the ones who weren’t picking on him and then you found out he was fun. He collected jokes, knew all the good gossip. All the bad gossip, too.” She did not look leery or cheery at all, staring straight ahead, a cucumber sandwich hanging unnoticed from her hand. “And then Hastur picked him up and dumped him in. And I couldn’t look. So - I looked at you instead.” She turned her face to Crowley to start fawning again. “I watched you the whole time he burned and dissolved and screamed. Not once that whole trial had you been afraid. But you were horrified. You didn’t even know him. But you hated to watch him die. I even thought, I don’t know how the thought even came into my head, but I thought, you’d have saved him. If you could have.”
Aziraphale had in fact been trying to work out a way to do it, but as usual in a crisis thought too slowly and then the poor creature was dead. Polikletus. He would try to remember the name.
Crowley huffed and made one of his “I’m not nice” faces. “Yeah, well, I’ve done harder things. But I wasn’t expecting to see Michael, or the holy water, and I was busy worrying about Aziraphale, and then - it was too late. Sorry.”
The eager fannish fawning in Bella’s face was pierced with something more real, if no more reliable. Aziraphale felt himself bristle. But, she was either a skillful liar sent to spy, or a malcontent looking beyond Hell and Heaven for - something - and either way Crowley, experienced tempter that he was, had her halfway to where they wanted her. Aziraphale had no idea how to work a similar miracle on Muriel, who sat across from Bella with their mouth opening and closing like a fish in an aquarium, their eyes wide, their whole self taut as piano wire. But this was not their moment. Aziraphale spoke to Bella instead. “I’m sorry that your friend got caught in the middle of that business.”
Bella turned on him a face with an expression very different for the one that had gazed upon Crowley. “Demons aren’t friends!”
Aziraphale smiled at her. “Now, child, we all know that isn’t true! Crowley has been my friend for thousands of years, even when I was too afraid to be his friend back.”
“Too afraid to admit it,” said Crowley. “You may have fooled Heaven on that score, but you never fooled me. And you -“ turning on Bella with an abruptness that made her flush. “Don’t fool me either. The word ‘friendship’ covers worlds of feelings between ‘I don’t like the idea of hurting this person’ and ‘The world’s about to end and that’s where I meet Aziraphale, better do something about it.’ Polikletus was your friend and you have a right to mourn him even if it’s only in your secret heart.”
Bella shrugged, her mouth full of petit four. She chewed, and swallowed, and had control of her face again. “I hate Hastur,” she said. “I wanted you to push him into the holy water and hold him down till he burned out, worse than Falling, worse than anything, till there was nothing left of him but the memory of how much I hate him.” The gleeful leer returned. “But what you did do was almost as good! After they hustled you out he started screaming, and screaming, and screaming - he screamed for three days straight! And sometimes now he randomly starts screaming again! It's glorious!”
“Wait, what?” Muriel asked. “I don’t follow.”
“What, Michael didn’t report back what happened? She saw most of it when she came back to get the holy water.”
“I’m hardly privy to the Leader of the Host's reports,” said Muriel. “Not that I believe Michael was there. Obviously you’re both lying. Hell may have gotten hold of holy water somehow, but if so, obviously Crowley evaded going into it.”
“Oh, dear,” said Aziraphale. “What was your mission briefing like? I know, I know - “ He held his hands up in placation as Muriel glared at him. “Getting no information out of you. Because you weren’t given enough information to keep yourself alive if your mission went south, apparently.”
“Ain’t that just typical?” Bella said. “Hell don’t brief for shit either - sorry!” Crowley frowned at her. “I forgot, okay! Sorry Mr. Aziraphale sir, your husband warned me not to swear but I barely know swear words from other kinds so it’s not easy.”
“I understand, child. You were, I believe, about to tell Muriel what happened when Crowley got into the holy water bath.”
Bella clapped her hands and leaned forward over her plate. “It was so great! He hopped right in and started splashing around like the happiest kid in Puddletown! Threw water against the barrier to spook the audience, asked for a rubber duck! Made Michael get him a towel! Looked Beelzebub and all the Dukes in the eyes and told them to leave him alone in the future or they’d find out what else he could do, and they wouldn’t like it!”
“Not quite what I said,” murmured Crowley.
Bella shrugged. “Close enough.”
“And this made Hastur scream?” Muriel asked.
“Oh! Oh oh oh you don’t know how Crowley killed Ligur? He dumped a bucket of holy water on his head! And then he threatened Hastur with a plant mister. Hastur’d been going around bragging about how he saw a drip get on Crowley’s hand and called his bluff, disintegrated the mister so the water sprayed all over Crowley; but when he realized Crowley’s immune to holy water and probably wasn’t bluffing, so it was only dumb luck Hastur wasn’t soaked in it too, that’s when he started screaming. I don’t think he’ll ever be over it!”
“I hope not,” said Crowley.
“And anyway right then and there’s when I knew I had to get onto this bandwagon, fast as I could.”
“And now you’ve lost us all. What bandwagon?”
“Why, yours, Lord Crowley! I know I’m only a low-ranking demon, but so were you once, and I’m an excellent servitor, and know lots of demons who’d come aboard if I approach them right. I can recruit, and spy on Hell for you, and -“
“Whoa whoa whoa, hold on!” Crowley cut her off with a gesture. “My name is Mr. Anthony J. Crowley, lord of nothing at all, and I don’t want recruitss and I don’t want sspiess and I don’t want sservitorss! What exactly makess you think I would?”
“For, for your kingdom on earth.” Bella faltered under the glare of the heart-shaped sunglasses. “That’s what this was all about - isn’t it? You co-opted the anti-Christ, seduced an angel, put together a team of humans to defy Hell, and Heaven too. Why else would you do all that? Earth is ripe for conquering. I promise, I don’t expect to be given anything, I’ll work hard, I’ll do anything to earn a fraction of that power -“
“I knew it!” Muriel slapped the tea table so that the cups jumped. “I knew it! The Archangels wouldn’t say, but when we heard about Aziraphale’s attempt to murder them -“
“My what? Oh, child, that is really too much!”
“Did you think they’d keep it a secret?” Muriel’s face finally held a definite expression, their eyes burning and their voice quivering with fury. “Did you think your platoon wouldn't talk about seeing you Fall on purpose? Did you think you could breathe hellfire on Gabriel and get away with it?” They gripped the edge of the tea table as if about to flip the whole thing into Aziraphale’s face, but now they’d started talking everything they felt seemed set to rush out of their mouth. “How could you, you ungrateful traitor brat? He believed in you, he went to bat for you, you owed your position to him, even when Michael showed him the pictures of you hobnobbing with the demon he said there must be an innocent explanation, and then when he called you in to explain yourself you tried to kill him!”
“Shut up!” Crowley roared.
Muriel fell silent, limbs trembling. Aziraphale fought to get his own face under control. Give him pens and books and notepads and some cocoa and most of all time with no one in his face making demands, and he could work out all kinds of problems, but when crunch time came he was hopeless! It made him too dependent on Crowley and he knew it, but he couldn’t help how he was made, and oh, Crowley was so angry, his “protect Aziraphale” trigger already pulled -
“I’m all right, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, though his voice sounded wrong. “Muriel wasn’t there. They weren’t properly briefed. They don’t know.”
“You are not all right and they ought to know! How can anybody look at you and not know -“ He slapped Bella’s hand away from the petit fours. “Sstop that! You’ve had ssix and Aziraphale’s been too busy looking after everybody elsse’ss platess to have any and they’re the besst ones he ever made!” He surged from his chair to snatch up the remaining little cakes - four of them - and dump them onto Aziraphale’s plate. “Eat them. You’ll feel better. And you -“ he rounded on Muriel, who recoiled but stopped trembling - “you can ssit there and watch him eat and assk yoursself if that’sss a murderouss fallen angel! And as for you - “ Lunging toward Bella, who saw which way the wind blew and braced for it, eyes wide and puzzled - “look around and tell me where you ssssee any ssigns of a wannabe world ruler!” He plopped back down into his chair. “And we’ll all take a minute to regroup.”
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” sang Miss Franklin from the gramophone.
Aziraphale picked up a petit four and started babbling. “Honestly I’ve been a little afraid to try these, after the last three batches. ‘The best I’ve ever made’ is a low gate to get over! They did come out very pretty, though, didn’t they? The frosting behaved beautifully for once. Excuse me -“ He bit into the little cake and Oh! Crowley always knew the right thing to do and he was right - the textures, the flavors - he’d done it with this batch. He couldn’t help sighing in satisfaction, focusing on Crowley’s face, watching it relax, as if theirs were the only two faces at the table. “Goodness! Not professional quality, but a real triumph for an amateur. I should have known, when you took a second one.”
He worked his way daintily through all four cakes, not rushing, leaving his face and aura as open as he could bear. Miss Franklin sang. Crowley watched him. Muriel also watched him, with what was no doubt intended as stoic defiance but which Aziraphale recognized from experience as nauseating uncertainty. Bella hunched in her chair sending appraising, anxious glances around the room, at laden bookcases, comfy sofa, fine art prints, thriving plants, polished wood, thick rugs, recordings in formats from wax cylinders to CDs. By the time the last crumbs were gone, so was all the residual outrage in Aziraphale’s heart. He lay his soft plump hand on Muriel’s white-knuckled one, still gripping the edge of the table. “So what’s the verdict? Am I Fallen? Am I evil? Would I murder anyone?”
Muriel looked everywhere but at his eyes, and shook their head.
“I rejoice to hear it.” Aziraphale patted their hand and leaned back, giving them space. “Now, I’m going to explain what happened that day, and whether you believe me is out of my control, but I know you want to make a full and accurate report to Gabriel. So please listen until I’m done, no matter how it makes you feel.”
He waited. Muriel nodded.
“So. I’d met up with Crowley for ice cream, after we’d spent the morning exploring what had and hadn’t changed when Adam repaired things. Very considerate, young Adam.” Bella made a noise and Crowley shushed her. Aziraphale ignored them both, focusing on Muriel’s face and picking his way through the minefield of truth and omission. “But that’s neither here nor there. We’d just gotten our ice cream when the angels, led by Uriel and Sandalphon, jumped us. I didn’t see who dragged me away very well - neither of them was you, I don’t believe?”
Muriel shook their head again, but seemed to be thinking. If they were part of Gabriel’s staff they’d have a reasonable chance of realizing who it had been. If their thoughts turned that way, this was progress.
“We expected retaliation, but an angelic ambush was a surprise. We had been braced for Hell to come for Crowley and Heaven to summon me. And Hell did come for Crowley, the next moment, and we couldn’t help each other. I’m afraid someone must have done something to the humans, too, because not one of those around us reacted. It was a smooth abduction, especially considering that it was probably the first joint Heaven/Hell operation.”
Muriel didn’t like that, but kept their mouth shut, so Aziraphale tried out a placating smile on them. He couldn’t think of a way out of doing the next bit in first person, so plunged right in. “They restrained me -“
“They tied you to a chair, angel, don’t sugarcoat it!”
“Crowley, dear. Let me tell it.” They had been over and over and over the details. Crowley needn’t worry about his forgetting anything; but Aziraphale knew far better than Crowley did how the details would sound to Muriel. The implanting of truth and doubt and cognitive dissonance was a delicate operation that could easily backfire. “I was more indignant than afraid,” he continued. “Remember, I reported directly to Gabriel for my entire earthly service. I thought I understood him, and I certainly understood the devotion his personal staff have for him. I took it for granted that the restraint was a bit of overzealousness on their parts. At that point I wanted to speak my piece, take my punishment, and get out to see if I could do anything to help Crowley. Because it stood to reason, Crowley would suffer much, much worse at Hell’s hands than I would at Heaven’s. I was supposed to be with him, not faffing about upstairs! So when Gabriel came in I tried to put my best face on, or rather, the face he’d react to best, to get it over with. But he wouldn’t listen to anything I said. And when a demon came in with Hellfire - Duke Hastur’s personal assistant, I believe -“
“Legion? The bunny demon?” Bella asked. “I never saw any of them during the trial. A good thing for them, too. Hastur’d have taken them apart to relieve his feelings.”
“Yes, thank you, they did have lapine features.” Aziraphale was peripherally aware of Crowley shushing Bella again, but didn’t turn his face from Muriel’s, which was set and mulish and unhappy. No wonder, poor thing, with Aziraphale planting the seeds of the destruction of their worldview in their mind; and yet, it had to be better for them to deal in facts than in the party line. “Hastur’s aid brought in a fountain of hellfire, which was the point at which I wondered where Michael was. And suddenly I knew there’d be no rescuing Crowley.”
“But, but you knew you had immunity,” said Bella.
“We didn’t, exactly,” said Crowley. “And if you interrupt him again you’re finishing your tea as a lizard.”
“We knew,” said Aziraphale, “that Crowley and I could do things that others couldn’t, or at any rate, didn’t do. But there is a limit to the experiments we were willing to conduct. We knew a few things, such as that Crowley survived the holy water assault on Ligur and Hastur without a scratch, and that I could possess a human with her permission. As for hellfire - well!”
“You were sticking your pinky into hellfire over my dead body, angel,” said Crowley, as if recalling a string of earlier arguments.
“Yes, well, a pinky wasn’t going to do it on this occasion,” said Aziraphale. “I could walk into hellfire when they released my restraints, or I could try to fight my way out against two archangels, Sandalphon, and all the security they could muster, thus declaring war on Heaven, which was the third-to-last thing I wanted. The first two, of course, being the End of the World and the End of Crowley. If the alternative was sitting tamely observing either of those, yes, one-angel War with Heaven it would be, but those weren’t the alternatives before me. So I did my best to take a courteous leave of them, and Gabriel looked me in the eye and said -“ Impulsively Aziraphale adjusted his eyes and his voice, violet and American - “Shut your stupid mouth and die already.”
Crowley yelped, as if in physical pain; and Muriel flinched; but Aziraphale returned his body to normal and continued without pause for breath: “There was no point in making a spectacle of myself, so I walked into the fire and hoped for the best.” He shrugged one shoulder, and repressed a smile. Well, mostly. “It was hot, but pleasantly so. More like a good Turkish bath - have you ever had one? Or a Finnish sauna? A shame. By all means try either when you get an opportunity. The heat is right at the edge of human bearability and it’s like melting. Then I started to rise on the hot air - oh, it was wonderful! I haven’t flown properly since I was pinioned after Eden; just a little jaunt on Madame Tracy’s scooter which I had no time to enjoy, and now the heat was lifting me straight up and it was lovely! But then I looked out of the fire at Gabriel, Uriel, and Sandalphon, and saw that they were terrified. Uriel even demanded to know What I was, as if I could be anything but what Heaven and Earth had transformed God’s original creation of me into. I’ve spent most of my existence avoiding Wrath, but Hellfire is literally made of Divine Wrath. Did you know that?”
Muriel shook their head, looking stunned; battered even.
“So I breathed in as much fire as I could hold, and exhaled it at them. I used to practice blowing smoke rings when tobacco was popular, and the principle was the same. Even before they scrambled backward, it was never in danger of scorching them; but they felt the heat, right enough.” Muriel almost objected at this point, but Aziraphale kept talking. “Gabriel isn’t a coward, whatever else he is. He retreated, but kept himself between me and his underlings, to protect them. Confronted by someone with excellent reason to retaliate against him, equipped with a deadly force he knew he could not reasonably counter, fear was only a spiking of Prudence. And I needed him to maintain that Prudence! I had no desire to hurt anyone, but I also didn’t want to spend the next six thousand years dodging assassins, so I needed to make it quite clear to them that, if backed into a corner, I had the means to get us out. So I breathed at them again, and walked out of the column of flame, and took the lift down to the lobby. Where I met Crowley coming up. And that, my child, is the truth as well as I can tell it to you.”
Muriel‘s face struggled to express what was happening behind it, and failed. Aziraphale knew the story would take several years, centuries perhaps, to assimilate to its new surroundings in their mind. In the meantime, the angel found a vector of defiance and seized upon it. “Stop calling me that! I’m not a child! We’re all the same age here!”
“Are we, though?” Crowley asked. “When you think about it? Chronologically, sure, I suppose so, but it’s not years that matter in aging. It’s experience. You don’t get a lot of that in Heaven. Or Hell. Earth’s the place for it. Wiling, thwarting, blessing, cursing, getting blindsided by human ingenuity, making best friends with your enemy, doing all sorts of things you’re not supposed to be able to do - had a lot of that sort of thing in your life, have you?”
“You won’t catch me in your net of words, demon!”
Aziraphale tutted. “His name is Crowley! He is also perfectly correct. Why do you think humans wear out so quickly? Experience piles on experience, each generation building on the one before. And we were there for all of it. We’ve got more wear and tear on us than any other created beings we know about. Even the stars are younger.”
“That can’t be right,” grumbled Bella. “How would that work?”
“Ah. Well. What’s your most vivid memory?”
“My what?”
“Memory. What experience, when you think of it, leaps to mind in full sensory detail, color and scent and taste and sound, makes your muscles clench and your emotions roil up as if the event were happening again?”
Bella and Muriel shuddered simultaneously and said, with one voice: “The Fall.”
“Of course,” Muriel added. “It’s everyone’s most vivid memory. All those angels - our brethren, our co-workers, our friends - falling and screaming and burning -“
“Ugh!” Bella rubbed her arms. “I wish I could forget.”
“The Fall was a biggie,” said Crowley, with no sign of distress. “But it’s hardly the most vivid for me after all the time I’ve spent wearing the edges off of it.”
“I didn’t watch,” said Aziraphale. “I couldn’t blank out the screaming, or the smell of sulphur, but I don’t have any visual memory of it. I’m happy I have so many other, more vivid, memories to rely on, even if some of them are even more horrible, in their own ways. I do my best to recall the pleasant ones more often, though, and it’s paid off.”
Angel and demon looked from angel to demon and back again, their disparate faces equally uncomprehending.
“That first rain,” said Crowley, relaxing into his beautiful smile, as today’s rain started falling.
“Yes, that’s a good one,” Aziraphale agreed, “but rain tends to segue into the Ark for me, and I hate that!”
“Oysters, then? It rained that night, too.”
Aziraphale laughed and poured himself more tea. “My first time on a boat. Water from above, water from below, and the hold was stuffed with apples.” The room smelled of bruised apples, and saltwater, and they heard the sailors furling the sails.
The apple smell in the room intensified. “Eve’s face, as she took the fruit.”
“Adam’s, when I gave him the sword,” The distinctive flaming sword smell, very different from the woodsmoke in the grate, and Aziraphale did not want to dwell on open flame, not when Crowley might catch it. “But now I’m going to be sad again so excuse me for hurrying on. Fire, smoke - oh! The club rooms were smoky, where I learned the gavotte, arm in arm with all those lovely gentlemen, so patient with me, and the smell of port and tobacco and the music -“ Miss Franklin, most improbably, was singing a gavotte now, and tobacco smoke wreathed his head.
“First time I heard music,” said Crowley. “Real music, I mean, not that celestial harmony stuff. Human music. Woman beating time on a skin drum, boy with a strung turtle shell, girl with a little bone flute.” Thin and sweet and haunting, the long-dead tune curled around the room. “The Euphrates was flooding right on schedule, irrigating their fields. They had time. I ate goat cheese and got chills and didn’t know why.”
“Oh, goat cheese! It was the first thing I ever ate that wasn’t a pure product of nature. I was on my way to an assignment, and these people - such lovely people, nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing, didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox, but it was late and I fell in with them as they brought their flocks home and they just - swept me along, told me I had clearly been walking all day and they had plenty of room. They didn’t, it was the merest hut and they shared it with the goats, three generations packed in together, but they made room for me, a total stranger, and this tiny wrinkled woman like a raisin, for whom I’d never done a single thing, washed my feet while her daughter brought me food.” The welcome coolness of the water laved feet he hadn’t realized were swollen, and he felt again the arthritis in her hands easing as he reflexively returned her ministrations. “I couldn’t refuse - they’d have been so offended and unhappy! But when I ate and told them it was good - because it was, it was delightful! - they were so gratified, as if I’d done something for them.” The room was dim around them, the fire fitful, the smells of furniture polish and scones layered under the smells of that night, the tea competing with the salty savor of goat cheese.
Muriel swallowed, a look of wonder on their face. “What -?”
“The smell of that room, that takes me right back to being mead drunk,” said Crowley. Miss Franklin did not quite drown out the sound of raucous laughter and hands beating time on a table somewhere, and the sharp sweetness of fermented honey sliced right across the flavor of cheese. “All my temptations worked, and they were all hilarious, and I danced with the handsomest man in the room, if you could call it dancing, hopping from foot to foot, between moving swords! Wonder I didn’t cut my feet off.”
“Hopping,” laughed Aziraphale. “I turned around and you were hopping down the aisle -“ The drone of bombers, the light dim nearly to darkness, the smell of stone and old books.
“Hopping!” Crowley protested. “I was very suave!”
“You said it was like walking on the beach in bare feet.”
“Oh! That beach in Carthage! I couldn’t get the scales on the soles of my feet thick enough, fast enough, had to run straight into the water and learned to swim.” The drone of planes gave way to the hush and slap of Mediterranean waves; but Carthage was North Africa and the smell of water and salt air was already giving way to parchment, flowers, and fresh ink.
“I read St. Augustine’s drafts of his autobiography in a garden,” said Aziraphale. “In spring, when roses were blooming, not these modern roses but the old-fashioned little ones, with the big leaves and small blossoms and such a fragrance! The birds were courting and the light was cool and bright and perfect - “ like the light in the room now, like the fragrance now - “and beyond the wall I heard children laughing and a woman singing and a baby crying -“
Crowley’s face changed. “Baby,” he said. “Crying. The siege is over and the sack is underway. I want to get out.” The baby cried, from everywhere and nowhere, that insistent rhythmic unignorable sound, aligned with the human pulse. “The mother’s trying to hush it but the baby won’t stop crying and the soldier spears it - right through the stomach - waves it in the air -“ The room smelled like blood and bile and feces. “And it still cries and cries -“
Oh dear. “All right, all right, listen to me, back to the church, it’s not crying, it’s planes -“
“It’s crying!” The smell grew worse, the baby’s wails more pervasive as it suffered and wouldn’t die. “Angel, help, I’m trying to make it bombers but I’m stuck!”
No. Nonononono he only ever got stuck in the burning bookstore! But this was a memory that had never come up before. Aziraphale threw out cues, trying to knock him off course. “Toss you for Edinbro? Crepes? Nightingale?”
“I can’t -“ Crowley reached across the table. The smells and the crying overpowered all the other sounds and smells in the room.
Aziraphale seized his hands, held them tight, searching for something, anything, that would springboard from this memory to something better, or different anyway, anything to kick him loose from this - “It’s all right, I’ve got you, that’s not a dying baby, that’s a living baby, a baby that’s lived, against all the odds, I don’t remember when, I don’t remember where. Azrael stopped to tell me he was leaving. A beautiful morning that smelled of death and the baby was crying and I was so tired. Gabriel never, ever, ever filled my personnel requisitions during pestilences. I had to make one last effort because the baby was crying, but the girl beat me to it. Not quite a little girl, but little enough. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, barely had breasts or hips. She’d never had much and she’d lost it all, her brother, her mother, the man who treated her almost like a father, and the baby’s family had turned her away with a curse when she came to beg them for something to give to her mother while she was dying. But she went in and came out with the baby, sat down on the doorstep in the first rays of morning, rocking it and singing -“ He could hear the lullaby, they all could, clear and off-key and breathless and sweet twining with the harsh relentless crying. One of the Germanic languages. The smell of blood was replaced by a quieter odor of a village of the dead on a dewy morning. Crowley, gripping Aziraphale’s hands, rocked back and forth to the melody. “But lullabies can’t cure hunger. She uncovered her useless breast and said it was welcome to try. So I pushed out the final miracle I had strength for, to enable her to lactate, and then she winced, and then - she smiled.” The crying ceased.
“Let’s stop there, angel,” said Crowley. “To the world!”
“To the world, my dear,” said Aziraphale. Glasses clinked, the lighting was the lighting of the Ritz on that fabulous Sunday afternoon, and then the cottage’s soft white electric light and the dying fire and the falling rain resumed. Miss Franklin said a little prayer for them. Crowley released Aziraphale’s hand and each withdrew to their own parts of the table, Bella and Muriel watching with their mouths open.
“What the fu- flaming sword was that?” Bella demanded.
“That was us not being able to pick only one most vivid memory,” said Aziraphale. “A very small, very faint inkling of what it’s like to be on earth for six thousand years.”
“Either of you could do it, too, if you had any memories worth sharing, and someone to share them with, and help you out of the ones that haunt you,” said Crowley. “But you don’t. You’ve been wasting all your time in Heaven and Hell, nipping up for the odd temptation, down to fill an assignment. I know, I know, I was always on a pretty long leash, and yours is shorter - but so was Aziraphale’s, and he learned to stretch his. What have you kids ever done, to be more than Hell or Heaven want you to be?”
“It was a bit isolating, being here so long,” said Aziraphale. “But it was also exciting. Educational. Enjoyable! I know at first it was a punishment for my part in Eden, not to be allowed back till I deserved it, and ‘deserve’ never defined. But as punishments go it was great fun, as well as a chance to begin to understand what effect blessings and smitings and miracles had. Long-term, I mean. The flashy stuff, the big missions that Gabriel likes to do himself, mostly frighten people. Humans prefer small miracles. Things they can pretend didn’t really happen, or can treasure up as their own personal little odd memory. To know what to do, when to do it, in order to do them real lasting good, and truly thwart that wily old serpent over there -“ Crowley grinned at him - “you have to know them. Eat with them, drink with them, sing with them, listen to their stories, let them explain their inventions to you.”
“And you lot want power,” Crowley sneered. “Which is why you’ll never have it. Aziraphale and I can do what we do because we are who we are, because we did what we did, every day for six thousand years, one day at a time. You want to resist being destroyed by holy water? You find something outside yourself to care about enough that you’d run into a church to save it. Live like that long enough, and maybe you’ll get what you think you want now. Eventually. While you’re in the process of doing something else entirely.”
“I’m sure one of the things you were sent to find out was what other abilities we’ve developed,” said Aziraphale to Muriel. “We couldn’t tell you that even if we wanted to. We don’t know ourselves. We’re both still discovering new things. Trying and failing and learning, all the time.” This was true, as the meal before them demonstrated. He was learning to cook. Crowley was learning how to cultivate plants without abusing them psychologically. They were even getting better at the waltz, thanks to a ballroom dance class and intense personal instruction from Mrs. Edalji down the lane, who had taken them on as a retirement project. “I would rather not have to discover another new skill the way I discovered I could possess someone, under stress and with time constraints. I shudder to think what could have happened if I had found someone to carry me less wise and unflappable than Madame Tracy, or if I had done it wrong and harmed her! So we experiment. But - and I cannot emphasize this enough - we have no interest in revenge or in ruling anybody. Neither Heaven nor Hell has anything to fear from us, so long as we are left alone and the humans are unmolested.”
“But we can’t leave you alone!” Muriel wailed. “With one act of treachery you averted the war -“
“We didn’t!”
“No part of that sentence is true,” said Crowley. “If that’s what Gabriel thinks he’s even stupider than I always thought he was. Between us, Aziraphale and I must’ve committed several million acts of what he’d call treachery over the millennia.”
“And we didn’t avert the war! We barely even helped! I would have made everything much, much worse, if Madame Tracy hadn’t prevented me from shooting Adam. I was so panicked and desperate and adrift I tried to kill a child! But she was with me and she knew that any plan that included that was the wrong plan!”
“Adam prevented the Apocalypse,” said Crowley. “He was the only one who could. Him and his friends, and the witch with her prophecies, and the witchfinder with his techjinx, they did all the heavy lifting. But Gabriel and Beelzebub were too high and mighty to talk to the people with the real power in the situation. Wouldn’t humble themselves to speak rationally to a human child. No, they ignored everyone else and tried to give him orders! We were able to make them listen to us, but we were only negotiators for a principal, and the principal was Humanity.”
“But you, you banished Satan back down to the deepest pit of Hell,” whispered Bella. “He’s still there, hasn’t stirred -“
“We didn’t. Adam did! Because he had all the power on Earth flowing in and through him, it was his world and he could make reality sit down and shut up, and that included his biological father who was not, as Adam so wisely said, his real dad.” Crowley threw his hands in the air. “Don’t you get it? This world is not something for the likes of us to fight over! It doesn’t belong to us!”
Muriel was looking faint. Aziraphale heated the contents of the teapot by cupping his hand around it, poured a cup with two sugars and a little milk, and pressed it into their hand. The habit of obedience was strong and the unaccustomed body low in blood sugar, struggling to keep up with the torrent of new ideas and sensations, so they drank deeply, and looked a little better.
“I know you are loyal to Gabriel,” Aziraphale said. “That’s as understandable as it is commendable - shut up, Crowley, dear - and I hope that he is loyal to you, too. In his way. Though your inadequate briefing is troubling. He has the military virtues, I'm sure. But one of the things you learn down here is, that every virtue has its corresponding vice. It wasn’t Justice that allowed him to condemn one of his own to Hellfire. It was Wrath.”
“But, but you aren’t one of his own anymore!”
“Aren’t I?” Aziraphale poured the last of the tea into his own cup. “Gabriel is in charge of all the angels sent out on missions to earth. And I never stopped fulfilling my mission, to the best of my ability, even when it became clear that almost everyone else had forgotten what it was.”
“The, the Great Plan -“
“A Plan is not a Mission. There was a reason Crowley was sent to tempt and I was sent to thwart, he to curse and me to bless. What the leaders of Heaven and the Lords of Hell all seem to have forgotten is that none of this was ever about us. It’s about the humans. It’s only ever been about the humans.”
Muriel drank tea, eyes fixed on some unseeable middle distance.
“Hubris,” said Bella, grinning. “You’re saying Heaven’s full of Hubris. Ain’t that a kick in the head!”
“Please don’t tease him,” said Aziraphale. “This is harder for Muriel than you can imagine.”
“Can you imagine anything, Bella?” Crowley asked. “All the humans can. Even the ones who think they can’t, who’ve been raised to think that imagination’s something special and separate from real life instead of their innate heritage. That’s what makes them so wonderful and so terrible. Hell doesn’t grasp that. All those Commendations of mine? Those are me being an opportunist. I couldn’t have thought of the Spanish Inquisition for myself if I had six million years to do it in! By demon standards I can think on my feet, but compared to humans? I don’t even have feet. I am, just barely, clever enough to keep myself alive around them.”
“Well, but - they aren’t going anywhere. If you raise an army of angels and demons to lead them -“
“Haven’t you listened to anything we’ve said? This world, their fate, belongs to them.”
“Who says?” Bella demanded. “God? She’s Gone! Satan? Got chased off by his own kid! The archangels or the Dark Council? Bunch of has-beens! You could ride this pony! Harness them and do so much -“
“I could get my wings handed to me on a platter! Not only do I not want to lead them or rule them or interfere with them, I know better. Sure, they’re always busy tearing each other apart, but some upstart demon pops up, telling them what to do? They’d drop everything else to put me in my place, and invent some appalling method of keeping me there.”
“But they can’t -“
“They can,” said Aziraphale. “That containment field you’ve both been testing yourselves against since you got inside the perimeter? The one neither of you can find any weakness in? The one we opened for you when we felt you probing it, and closed seamlessly behind you? The one that’s keeping you here now that you’d rather be anywhere else? Humans designed that.”
Muriel and Bella made full, horrified eye contact.
“Not many humans know about the Armageddoff,” said Crowley. “And the ones who do, don’t think about it much. But humans only need hints. Theories. Hypotheticals. Stories.”
“The occasional burst of divine inspiration, the hard daily stubborn slog of making it so,” said Aziraphale. “We know how to inspire and tempt humans to make anything they don’t know they need. And we know they’ll make it better and worse and more clever than anything we could have asked for.”
The tea trolley was empty, the tea table covered with empty dishes, cups, and crumbs. The clock chimed six. “My goodness, how late it is!” Aziraphale smiled round the table. “And you both have such a long way to go. We shouldn’t keep you any longer.”
“You’re – letting us go,” said Muriel.
“Of course, child. What did you think, we have an oubliette for trespassers?”
“What conditions?” Bella asked.
“Don’t come back,” said Crowley.
Bella’s face fell. “What if I overhear something - ?”
“I don’t care what happens in Hell as long as we’re let alone.”
“I, I will report everything I heard here,” said Muriel.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Aziraphale. “Maybe that will prevent further trespasses.”
“Um. In the interests of a full report. That sound that’s been running in the background - what is that?”
“That’s part of Crowley’s music collection. Recordings of a woman named Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul. Anything else?”
Muriel licked their lips, as if tasting a thousand questions they didn’t know how to ask.“N-no.”
“Then would you be so kind as to deliver a personal message to Gabriel?”
“Certainly.” Muriel came to attention.
Aziraphale had written and rewritten this message in his head many times, telling his former superior that he was soft because he chose to be, every single day; that this choice could be made differently at any time. That he was still a Guardian Angel. That the humans and Crowley were Off Limits. But all of that seemed beside the point, merely a continuation of Heaven’s empty game of egos. “Tell Gabriel that if he will trouble himself to read some significant portion of the mission reports I submitted over the years, he will understand the situation down here much better. And that if he wants good results, he needs to stop sending down angels only half-briefed, with stingy miracle budgets.”
Miss Franklin sang that you’d better think, think, think about what you’re trying to do to me.
“I will tell him,” said Muriel. “Thank you for the tea.” And they were gone.
“What a drag,” said Bella. “This all would’ve been so much more fun without them. But now that they're gone we can dish the real dirt!” She leaned forward, the leer front and center. “I can’t get a handle on the dynamic here, and it’s driving me wild. I have to know: Which one of you tops?”
Of all the insolence!
“Drop the spoons you stole and get out,” said Crowley.
Bella stood, three silver spoons and a cake server dropping with a clatter onto her plate. “Y’know, I don’t need your permission to raise an army in your name.”
“You have a count of ten.”
“I could -“
Crowley raised a finger. “One.”
“All right, all right, don’t have a cow.” Bella pretended not to hurry through the double doors to the garden, leaving them open behind her so that the chill autumn rain splashed into the snug room. By six she was at the garden wall, by seven atop it, by eight she was a lizard, darting down the other side into darkness, outside the circle Anethema and Newt had designed.
Aziraphale gestured, closing the garden door and the wards, and drawing the curtains, then sighed and rested his forehead on his hands. “Well. That was exhausting. But at least we have an inkling of what Heaven and Hell are thinking.”
“If you can call it thinking. Setting up as world rulers! What’s the matter with them all?”
“They’re angels and demons. Those are the terms they think in. But at least we never have to do this again. One civil tea is prudence. Two would be allowing harassment. I’m afraid I don’t trust Bella to make our point to Hell, though.”
“You can leave any future hellish overtures to me.” Crowley laughed. “You made quite an impression on Bella during your sojourn down there! If she knew you were the happiest kid in Puddletown, she’d have been drooling on your shoes instead of mine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! If she knew, we'd lose our edge. Besides, I did everything exactly as you would have done it, so her admiration, however disgusting, is properly directed.”
“If you say so, angel.” He snapped his fingers, and the mess vanished, replaced by a nice clean tartan cloth and fresh asters. The fire crackled pleasantly.
“Thank you, my dear. I’m so sorry about the memory trap.”
“At least it wasn’t the bookshop.”
Aziraphale went around back of him, to slip his arms around his neck. “I would like to sit by the fire and read with your head in my lap, for awhile.”
“Great idea, if you read aloud and I pick the book.”
“A dangerous combination. I accept.” He dropped a kiss on his demon’s head. The gramophone stopped. The rain intensified. Crowley pulled out a collection of Shakespeare’s funny ones. Aziraphale settled himself upon the couch and prepared himself to read aloud, doing different voices, till dawn.