Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Crowley, much to his own disgust, woke up.

It wasn’t like he actually thought that he could discorporate himself with liver failure, or even really wanted to deal with the hassle of discorporation on top of- well, everything. The world. Things. But it would have been nice to be insensate for a while longer. Maybe a decade or two, just until things calmed down…

Well he was awake now, and also, now realizing that where he was didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was too hot, for one thing. For another, he could hear the sea. There was something stiff and vaguely fabric like beneath him, but he didn’t recognize the texture. His tongue flicked out, and the air was packed with scents he couldn’t recognize.

Nothing seemed to be burning nearby, though. There was that, at least.

He opened his eyes and realized that he was indoors. Part of him recognized that, if he really had drank so much that he’d passed out, he probably should have woken up outside in the gutter, if not in prison. The rest of him was trying to make sense of the room he found himself in.

It was absurdly clean, for one thing. The panes of glass he could see on the window were uniformly made, and there were so many of them. There were- crates? Chests? Boxes?- made of something not quite paper and less like wood scattered around, and on the far end of the room there was a large black rectangle of something semi-reflective.

Next to him, on the carpet- was it a carpet? It went all the way through to the walls, fitting perfectly, that was some high quality work there- was an infernal dagger. This was less alarming than the sight of the clothing he was wearing.

“Satan, I could start a riot in this,” he said, plucking that the oddly heavy fabric covering his legs like a second skin. It didn’t have a lot of give. His shirt had something written on it, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. Fucking textura cursive, he ought to try and get a commendation for that.

He looked around. When nothing appeared in the room to explain itself, he picked up the dagger, and then himself. Time to find some kind of explanation.

In the very next room over, there was not an explanation, but there was Aziraphale, tied to a chair. His clothing was also very strange, albeit in a different way to Crowley’s clothing.

“Aziraphale! What’s happened, what's going on?” he asked, laying down the infernal dagger on one of the not-paper box thingies far away from the angel.

“Mmmph!” Aziraphale was also gagged apparently, with some kind of shiny grey square of something that seemed to be fused to his face.

“Satan!” Crowley hissed, scrambling over to him. “Hang on, I’ll just-” He felt carefully around the edges of the square, and found that he could get his fingernails under the edges and peel it carefully off of him.

It was very sticky. It stuck to his hands once he was done with pulling it off of Aziraphale’s face.

“What is this stuff?” he asked, and did a double take as he took in Aziraphale’s face. “Never mind that, why do you look old?” It wasn’t something about his corporation, though that too seemed slightly different. It wasn’t anything that could have been perceived by human eyes. There was a sort of dust that accumulated on the soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call it as a result of living on Earth. Aziraphale had more than he should have had- centuries more.

Aziraphale was looking up at him in horror. “You’re- Crowley, what’s the last thing you remember?”

Crowley did not want to remember. That had been the point of getting so drunk in the first place.

“Getting completely shitfaced in a tavern just outside Seville,” he said, which was true enough without going into the specifics.

Aziraphale looked, if anything, even more horrified. “The Spanish Inquisition?”

“I didn’t do it!” Crowley protested reflexively, even as Aziraphale said, with mounting rage “They took all your memories back to Spanish fucking Inquisition?”

It was the profanity that really knocked Crowley for a loop. “What- I, uh. What?”

“I know it wasn’t you,” Aziraphale said, his voice suddenly quite soft. “I never, even for a moment, believed it was you.”

“Oh. Well.” There were a lot of emotions swelling in his chest, relief being the safest one. He pushed it down, and tried to get the sticky square to stop sticking to his fingers. Eventually he gave up and told it on no uncertain terms that it would stick to the leg of the chair Aziraphale was tied to and nothing else if it knew what was good for it. Then, feeling slightly calmer for having accomplished something, he ran Aziraphale’s words back. “What was that about memories?”

“Could you untie me while I try to explain?” Aziraphale asked. “These are infernal ropes so-”

“Shit, hang on-” Crowley scrambled around for the knot, wincing at the sheer unholy power that jolted from it to his fingertips like a particularly nasty static shock. It was a good thing Aziraphale like getting his clothes on Earth instead of miracling them into being. They would have eaten away at something conjured by a Heavenly miracle, and the burns from these could have been life threatening.

“It’s July 18th, 2029,” Aziraphale told him. Crowley forced himself not to be shocked by it, and continued to untie the angel. “We’re in the South Downs, the part which is on the south coast of England. We’d come to try and complete the warding spells for the cottage, but before we could complete them, we were ambushed.”

“We’re working together then?” Crowley asked. He’d been trying to get Aziraphale to agree to work with him, and there had been a few times where the angel had not quite disagreed- a few assignments they found repugnant and needed an excuse not to complete, here and there. Some coordination, when neither of them was particularly fussed by what they were doing, so they didn’t step on one another’s toes. But Aziraphale had always been very clear that they were not working together, so much as they were coordinating their own separate works to avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness.

“Yes. And quite officially, too.”

Crowley couldn’t quite contain his shock at that. On the one hand: yeah, it made sense. Of course Aziraphale would only really work with him if Heaven approved it. On the other, significantly weightier hand: what the fuck was out there that had made Heaven and Hell decide to work together?

“Is there a third side?” Crowley demanded.

“Yes. Ours.”

Crowley had enough presence of mind to make sure that the ropes didn’t touch Aziraphale’s bare hands as they slipped off onto the floor, and not enough for much of anything else besides gaping.

“What?” he managed to croak eventually.

“Could you please keep untying me?” Aziraphale asked.

“Yeah. Sure,” Crowley gave himself a little shake. “Can you try to explain what- and, and how did-”

“The world was supposed to end ten years ago,” Aziraphale said.

“End?”

“Yes, end. As in the End of Days, the Apocalypse, Armageddon,” Aziraphale said. “We didn’t like that. You, in particular, didn’t like it, and eventually I realized that I agreed with you. So we decided we would put a cork in it, so to speak.”

“And that worked?” Crowley demanded.

“We- it’s a long story. I think the shortest possible version is that it didn’t go even remotely as planned, but when the fateful day arrived the Antichrist was a perfectly normal and happy boy who didn’t want the world to end, and we’d more or less declared our subversive intentions directly to both Beelzebub and Gabriel.”

“So now they want our deaths,” Crowley said, understanding clicking into place. “They thought I would kill you upon finding you like this, because that’s what the demon who created the Spanish Inquisition would do. And then- then what? Are they waiting for us?” For me, after I’d killed you? Are they expecting to welcome me back into the fold, or to kill me as well?

“They’re probably watching,” Aziraphale confirmed as the last knot finally came loose. “So we should leave as quickly as possible. They left you a weapon, I presume?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty well profaned, though,” Crowley said, sparing a glance for the dagger. “Probably forged directly in the fires of Hell and everything.”

“Then you hold it,” Aziraphale said. “We’ve got to go. Now.”

Crowley grabbed the dagger, and looked for something to wrap it up in. Before he could, however, Aziraphale had come up to him, Aziraphale had taken his hand-

“We need to go, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “Do you feel up for following me?”

“Yeah,” Crowley. His voice did not squeak or shiver. He was really proud of that, good job him. He let Aziraphale project around the both of them, and then with a pop, they were gone.

They reappeared on the side of a busy road, though how Crowley knew it was a road at all was something he couldn’t quite explain. It was full of fast-moving metal somethings, and loud, and the unnameable scents he’d tasted in the cottage were even thicker here.

“Whoa,” Crowley said, clutching tightly to Aziraphale before he could quite remember not to. Aziraphale didn’t seem to mind.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make sure that no one will notice us, and we keep some spare glasses for you in the shop.”

Crowley had barely remembered that he’d woken up sans glasses until Aziraphale mentioned it. He nodded, and let Aziraphale guide them through the throngs of people to the shop.

There was no need to ask which shop they were headed towards. It was the grand, old-looking bookshop, labelled A.Z. Fell & Co. It was the shop which radiated more celestial power than the two of them combined could have comfortably emitted, layered with ward upon ward, enchantments baked into the very mortar of the place. Some of them were old, decades and even centuries, almost all of them Aziraphale’s work, and almost all of them meant to keep humans from prying too closely. More of them were laid in the past decade or so, and Crowley recognized his own occult signature in roughly half of them.

“This is a bloody fortress,” Crowley said. There were wards here that they would have had to bleed to produce- wards that would have required burnt feathers and all manner of difficult to procure occult and ethereal ingredients. And even- “Is that an amulet hanging over the door?”

“You’re immune to it,” Aziraphale assured him. “And, yes, we utilized a few human security measures as well. Some rather old, and some very modern. There’s an alarm now, and security cameras. Top-notch fire suppression system too.”

Crowley nodded, not quite understanding the words. “What was the cottage being warded for?”

“Same as here, more or less,” Aziraphale said. “We just didn’t get as far as breaking out the ingredients for the more potent wards before being interrupted.”

Crowley nodded again. He took in the shop as Aziraphale locked the door behind them with a clanking of metal that seemed too substantial for the little knob he’d turned.

Books, books, and more books- yeah, this was Aziraphale’s place, no doubt about that. Many of the books looked strange to him, particularly the three shelves off to the side, in the only brightly-lit part of the shop. He supposed those were the newer ones- moveable type was a new enough invention that Aziraphale had spent a good chunk of the time they were Naples together talking about it. The process had probably evolved even further, nearly 550 years down the line.

“You can stick the dagger in that cabinet over there,” Aziraphale said, nodded his head towards it. “It’ll unlock itself for you.”

Crowley nodded, and went to place the dagger inside as instructed. As promised, the lock knew him and opened for him.

There were other touches of his long-established presence here too. There was a hat on a rack near the entrance that he could tell he’d willed into being well over a century ago and then apparently left there. The rug on the main floor was one he last remembered seeing in his own house in Seville. There were plants scattered around the shop, whose leaves quaked as he passed them by. Most damningly of all came when Crowley followed Aziraphale to the till. There was a framed picture there, a hyper-realistic one of the two of them sitting at a table set for dinner, long wine glasses in hand. They were both smiling, and in clothes Crowley got the impression were fancy, though Aziraphale’s outfit wasn’t too different from what he was wearing now.

Without meaning to, he reached out and took hold of the picture frame. He then promptly dropped it as the picture began to move.

“Gah!” he shouted, leaping back. Aziraphale looked up at him in alarm.

The picture landed face down, but it was emitted sounds.

“So we just- do we say something for this?” came something like Aziraphale’s voice from the- whatever that was.

“Yeah, sure,” came Crowley’s slightly-distorted voice from the same source. “Shall we toast to the world again?”

“And to us,” Aziraphale agreed. There was the clink of glass on glass, and then the thing fell silent.

“What the- just,” Crowley tried not to spluttered too badly and failed miserably. “What was that?”

“It’s just a portrait, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “They don’t all move like that- it was actually quite a newfangled invention when we had that taken a few years back- but they’re growing increasingly common, as I understand it.”

“Okay,” Crowley said. “Okay, okay. Cool, cool, cool, no doubt, no doubt, no doubt.” What were those words and why were they coming out of his mouth?

They must have become a normal thing for him to say at some point, because Aziraphale made no comment. He just rummaged around in the drawers until he emerged with a pair of glasses for Crowley.

“Here you go,” Aziraphale said, handing them to him. He took them numbly. “You don’t have to wear them indoors, of course, but you generally like to have them on you.”

“Yeah. Yeah,” Crowley said, looking down at them. The glass was dark, and it was more-or-less the same shape as the pair he’d been wearing in Seville.

Aziraphale picked up the portrait, and placed it back on the countertop, next to the till. Where he would be able to look at it, while he worked.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, before he could lose his nerve. “Are we friends?”

Aziraphale started, and inwardly Crowley winced. Too fast! his brain screamed at him.

“Of course we are,” Aziraphale said before Crowley could muster up an apology. “We’re the very best of friends.” He said it like it was inevitable. Of course they were friends. How could they be anything less?

“Oh,” Crowley said with a grin he didn’t even try to suppress, and then folded the glasses and hung them upon the collar of his shirt. “Well, good.”

“You must have questions,” Aziraphale offered after a moment.

“I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start,” Crowley confirmed, aware that he was still grinning like a loon but not really able to care enough about it to stop.

“Let’s go into the kitchen, then. I’ll pour us a drink and try to answer your questions as best I can.”

“That sounds great, I’d like that.”

Aziraphale lead the way through the back of the shop, past a small sitting room with a very inviting-looked couch, and into a small kitchen. Aziraphale went over to a cabinet, and Crowley draped himself into one of the tall chairs at the equally tall kitchen table without thinking too much about it.

“What are you-” Aziraphale said, his voice muffled by the inside of the cabinet. Then he suddenly pulled back and stared at Crowley.

“What?” Crowley asked.

“Your memories date back to sometime in early February of 1481, correct?” Aziraphale asked.

“Yes?” He hoped Aziraphale didn’t want an exact date, because all he was certain of was that it was some time after the 6th.

“And you haven’t so much as gone north of Hadrian’s Wall since it was still manned by Romans, correct?” Aziraphale asked.

“No, I think I would remember that.” It was an absolutely miserable journey, up to Albany or Scotland, or whatever it was now.

“Then, in essence, you’ve never had single malt scotch whisky before,” Aziraphale declared, sounding positively giddy.

“No?” It didn’t sound familiar at least. “It’s good, I take it?”

“I keep nothing less than excellent whisky, thank you very much,” Aziraphale informed him primly. He reached back into the cabinet and emerged with a bottle of something enticingly amber brown and a beaming smile that did funny things to Crowley’s chest. He grabbed two glasses off the rack that hung over the sink and sat down across from him, still beaming. “And now, I get to watch you take your first sip.”

He poured out two measures of whisky into the glasses, and slid one over to him. He watched intently, still grinning, as Crowley took his glass.

“Here’s to the world,” Crowley said, holding up his glass in cheers.

“And to us,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley was going to blame the unfamiliar alcohol on the way he choked.

Single malt scotch whisky was very good and he enjoyed it greatly.

Other facts about himself that he’d learned: they were currently in London, which had still been called Lundenwic when last he’d been here. He’d lived in London for some centuries, and Aziraphale had been here longer, give or take the odd decade spent in China or Brazil (Aziraphale didn't explain either of these places, and while Crowley had a good guess about China, Brazil he couldn't picture at all). This particular neighborhood was called Soho, and Aziraphale had opened up the bookshop here back in 1800. Crowley had a property in Mayfair, which was a nearby neighborhood, but he was rarely there these days- no shop, just a flat, which was now mostly empty.

The metal things on the road were called cars, and also automobiles, and also, back in the day, “horseless carriages”. Crowley himself owned one: it was called a Bentley, and it was currently parked outside of the cottage they’d just left. It would be fine, Aziraphale assured him: after over a century of a kind of demonic possession, driving through a ring of hellfire, and being resurrected by the Anti Christ, the thing was pretty much fully sapient and able to look after itself.

Aziraphale didn’t tell him that he cared about the Bentley, but it was obvious without being directly said. Crowley understood. He was half in love the moment he heard the word “horseless”, and by the time Aziraphale told him how fast it went he was a goner.

“So. The Antichrist,” Crowley said. “Perfectly normal, happy boy.”

“Well, he’s an adult now,” Aziraphale pointed out. “But yes, he’s quite a splendid young man.”

“How did that work?” Crowley asked.

“It’s a long story,” Aziraphale said again, getting up to get another bottle. He was wobbling only slightly- Crowley supposed his tolerance for alcohol had increased over the years. “Please keep in mind that it would have been worse if we’d been at all competent before the very end.”

One long and convoluted tale of really staggering incompetence, two and a half bottles of whiskey, and a very earnest apology for a fight he couldn’t remember having later, Crowley was on the floor in tears.

“You asked the assembled Lords of Hell for a rubber duck?” Crowley asked, fairly rolling around. He only had a vague impression of what a rubber duck was in this context, but some things didn’t really require a perfect translation to be funny.

“And the Archangel Michael for a towel. Surprised her so much she actually miracled one up,” Aziraphale repeated gleefully.

“Were they scared?” Crowley asked.

“Terrified,” Aziraphale said. “Absolutely petrified of you, I made sure of it.”

Crowley sniggered, trying to picture Beelzebub in a state of terror. Or Dagon. Or Hastur, or-

Well. Ligur was dead. Really, properly dead, and Crowley had been the one to kill him. That was just fucking weird.

“Here’s to us!” Crowley said, raising his glass rather than thinking about it. “We pulled off the greatest con of all time!”

“Cheers!” Aziraphale replied. They clinked glasses, and drank.

“There is- I- so many questions. Still. Just, so many.” Crowley giggled. Aziraphale sat down next to him, and refilled his glass. He stayed sitting, his thigh very, very close to Crowley’s head.

“How did we become friends?” He blurted out.

“That,” Aziraphale replied. He was very obviously drunk, and then, he was suddenly quite sober. “That is a question with a complicated answer.”

He thought about it, for long enough that Crowley was beginning to really regret having asked.

“It’s not complicated because of you,” Aziraphale said quickly when he caught sight of Crowley’s face. “You’ve been really extraordinarily patient and constant. I just took a very long while to catch up.” He frowned down at his glass, which refilled itself. He drank.

“I suppose,” Aziraphale said after another moment to think. “That it became a more formalized thing right after the Inquisition.”

“Formalized?”

Aziraphale let out a little annoyed huff. “It’s- you must understand. I cared for you, before that. For a long time before when your memories currently end, I cared for you. It’s just that the implications of that terrified me, and even without that, I’m occasionally rather rubbish at showing it.”

“Really?” Crowley asked. He’d hoped, of course. Of course he had. He’d just never actually had proof before, and hadn’t wanted to risk the whole lack of smiting thing by asking for it.

Aziraphale shrugged, smiling slightly. “Not terribly long ago you told me that you thought the whole English national character being one of emotional repression was down to the fact that I’d lived here for so long that they started mimicking me. And you were teasing, but I’m not sure you were wrong.”

“Oh,” Crowley said, for lack of anything intelligent to say.

“At any rate we entered into The Arrangement shortly after this whole nasty business with the Inquisition,” Aziraphale said. “Because of the Inquisition, even.”

“How?” Crowley said, his face wrinkling.

“Well,” Aziraphale said. “Just- I’m not proud of this- but when I heard from Heaven that you were stirring up trouble in Spain and that I should get a move on, I went, and while I didn’t believe the Inquisition to be your handiwork for a moment, I also didn’t think you would much care.”

Crowley blinked at him.

“It was hardly the first time you’d gotten a commendation for something you hadn’t done,” Aziraphale explained, not quite looking at him. “And you never seemed to care before. You just- you treated it as a sort of free holiday. You had this sort of attitude about it. Oh, I got this for just being in the area. Didn’t have to lift a finger, and now it’ll be months before they’re on my case again. That sort of thing.”

“That does sound like me,” Crowley admitted.

“It didn’t hit me until- well, much later than the Inquisition that you must have been putting on a brave face for at least some of those commendations,” Aziraphale continued. “And when I arrived in Seville, I didn’t have the slightest inkling of it until I found you on the floor of that tavern.”

“Yeah, that’s about where my memory cuts out,” Crowley said.

“Oh!” Aziraphale said, sounding surprised. “Yes, I suppose it must be.”

“Must?”

“Our reports would have lined up- because we wrote them together, but I don’t think they’ve worked that out yet. We said that we had a confrontation at Seville- by which I mean that I tried to persuade you to get off the floor and only managed it because I threatened to start chanting in Hebrew-”

“Chanting in- are you nuts?” Crowley spluttered.

“No, just very desperate to get you somewhere private so you could recover,” Aziraphale told him. “And it worked. Then we said we had a fight- by which I mean that we ended up in your house, with you too drunk to sober up all at once, and had a philosophical discussion about whether it was more the fault of the apple that humanity could do this sort of thing, or the fault of that blasted sword of mine-”

“What.”

“I still don’t know which of us did the right thing,” Aziraphale confessed with a small, helpless laugh. “Sometimes I think neither of us did. Sometimes I think it was both.”

“Is that possible?”

“Stranger things have happened. More things than dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy, that’s for certain,” Aziraphale replied. It sounded like a quote, but Crowley didn’t recognize it.

“At any rate, we reported that I drove you out of town- in a stagecoach, which I’d bought and then did end up driving myself because you’re hopeless behind the reins of a horse and I didn’t trust any of the humans to be around you in your state- and then we reported that you gave me the slip at the Port of Huelva. In reality, I saw you off to a ship to Portugal- you ended up in Porto for the next little while- and then I took a ship to Greece. We had everyone in Heaven thinking you’d slipped off to the Ottoman Empire, while everyone in Hell was celebrating your cunning.”

“So they must have cut off my memories at about the time we would have met again,” Crowley realized. “Because as far as they know, we had a huge fight when we met up in Seville, and I was primed and ready for that, and not… moping about on the floor.”

“You were always a better person than anyone would give you credit for,” Aziraphale said, like you might describe the sun as hot. He really needed to stop doing that if he didn't want Crowley to discorporate. “Including, very often, me, but after that… it seemed very silly to deny that we could work together effectively. So we came to an Arrangement. I scratch your back, you scratch mine… we’d generally meet up somewhere to discuss things, and that very quickly became a habit of going out to eat, and then it was dinner and a show, and then dinner and a show and back to the shop for a bottle of something good…”

“So we became friends,” Crowley said.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, smiling. “Yes, we did.”

Not too terribly long after that there was a sudden vibration from Crowley’s bottom.

“What is- what?” Crowley said, leaping up. The vibration continued. “What?”

Aziraphale looked momentarily confused before his expression brightened. “Oh! That’s your mobile!”

“My what?”

“Your mobile phone, it’s in your back pocket,” Aziraphale informed him as he stood. Then he reached out and took the little vibrating rectangle out of his back pocket, which was right on top of Crowley’s arse.

“Ejguagvee?” Crowley asked, meaning roughly Is this a thing now? Do people casually touch their friends on the butt?

It wouldn’t be the most invasive custom, to be sure. There had been plenty of parties in Rome that sort of required letting people touch your dick with their dick, for example. But that didn’t seem right, for the customs of a country that apparently had taken their cues from Aziraphale from how to deal with their emotions. Aziraphale didn’t strike him as someone to casually reach out and touch your butt.

Aziraphale hadn’t struck him as such, at least. The evidence to the contrary was still vibrating in his hands as he frowned down at it.

“I’ve just realized that I normally rely on you to deal with modern technology, and that’s going to make things very difficult,” Aziraphale said. He jabbed his finger at the mobile, to no apparent effect. “Hmm.”

“Modern technology?” Crowley asked.

“Humanity found its way back to indoor heating and plumbing, and I just got very comfortable and didn’t really bother keeping up with things after that,” Aziraphale explained. “Ah well, I guess one more frivolous miracle won’t give too much away.”

“We have plumbing?” Crowley asked.

“Yes, we do!” Aziraphale said, smiling. He flicked a finger, and what Crowley had previously thought was some kind of utility hook over the wash basin turned out to be a faucet. Crowley walked over to it, and poked his hand under the streaming of running water.

“It’s warm,” Crowley said wonderingly.

“Yes, you can adjust the temperature by turning the knobs at either side of tap,” Aziraphale said. “There used to be separate taps for hot and cold, but then around the 1990s you broke in and put a mixer tap in, which I must concede is a great deal more convenient.”

“Why are you explain the plumbing to Crowley?” came a voice Crowley didn’t recognize, and couldn’t find the corresponding person no matter where he looked.

“It’s the mobile, dear. Humans use them to keep in touch over long distances,” Aziraphale explained, pointing to his mobile.

“Plumbing and the phone,” said the voice, apparently mobilly. “Did he hit his head really hard?”

Aziraphale snorted bitterly. “Beelzebub hit his head really hard,” he explained. “They took his memories all the way back to the back on the 15th century.”

“Beelzebub did this?” Crowley demanded, whirling away from the sink.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, looking a little embarrassed.

The voice in the mobile laughed. “Did this just happen five minutes ago?”

“Not quite,” Aziraphale admitted, blushing furiously. “We were at the cottage, trying to get things ready for the movers when we were ambushed. More like… five hours ago, perhaps?”

The voice laughed even harder.

“Right, well. Introductions. Crowley, this is Adam, and Adam, this is Crowley from 1481,” Aziraphale held out the mobile to him. There on the flip side of it was a very familiar looking face.

“Gah!” Crowley cried, leaping back.

Aziraphale looked confused. “It’s not- it’s like the picture, Crowley, it’s just- it’s how people normally communicate these days. Or so you always tell me, at least.”

Crowley looked between the angel (confused and a little worried) and the picture framed in the mobile (who was squinting at him a little). When the scene refused to dissolve into the revelation that Hell had found out that he hadn’t had a thing to do with the Inquisition after all and had dragged him back down for a few decades of torture, Crowley allowed himself to take a deep breath.

“I’ve asked you before, if I look like him. You know, the bio dad,” Adam said, after a moment. “You always change the subject.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said softly.

“Right, I’m not sure why I wouldn’t answer you before, but: yeah, you look disturbingly like your infernal father,” Crowley told him, before tilting his head up towards Aziraphale. “You didn’t know?”

“I never met him,” Aziraphale said. “Or, well. I saw him, on the day Armageddon failed to go off but he didn’t look particularly human then.”

“Right,” Crowley said, inching closer to the mobile.

After the physical world began to manifest- someone had since decided to call it day number three, but as time hadn’t been invented yet he didn’t really think that was right- some of the angels began to craft bodies for themselves to explore the new plane of existence with. Many chose animals. And then, when the last big project the Almighty had lined up was revealed, many began to pattern themselves after the humans who had not quite yet come into being too.

Adam did look an awful lot like the form Lucifer had chosen, but there were differences: not quite the same colored eyes, not quite the same nose, a little bit of baby fat still clinging to his cheeks that Lucifer would never have thought to give himself. He’d never have thought to make his hair go all flopsy like that either.

“Right,” Crowley said again. “So you’re the Antichrist that wasn’t, then?”

“That’s me,” Adam confirmed cheerfully. “And now I’m studying law with a concentration in environmental justice.”

“I have no idea what those words mean in that combination, but I’m glad you’re having fun?” Crowley told him.

Adam frowned. “Is it permanent, do you think?” he asked.

“Probably,” Crowley said, at the same time Aziraphale said “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t?” Crowley asked him. “Why?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re speaking 21st century British English, not 15th century Andalusian Spanish, and you have been since you woke up,” Aziraphale said.

“Good point,” Crowley admitted.

“For another… it’s patchy, but you’ve developed some habits in the past five hundred years, and you’ve been falling into a few of them without thinking.”

“I have?”

“You put your glasses in their usual spot, you sat in your usual chair, and once you'd had the first two glasses you drank the scotch in your usual manner as well,” Aziraphale said.

“Oh.” The fact that Aziraphale apparently knew him better than he currently knew himself was doing funny things to him.

“I also remember reading about a few cases of people’s memories being removed by demons,” Aziraphale added. “While this is not exactly the same situation, generally speaking the memories were not gone, but suppressed until something triggered their return.”

“So what’s the trigger, then?” Crowley asked. “Do we know?”

“At a guess… probably you murdering me,” Aziraphale said with a wince.

“Well I’m not doing that!” Crowley protested.

“I know that. Beelzebub didn’t. They expected you to be a loyal soldier of Hell.” Aziraphale said. “They’ve gotten a bit better about gloating over the years, unfortunately, but I still got the impression that their plan was for you to kill me, and then have your memories of our current relationship return while you were standing over my corpse with an unholy blade.”

“Maximum cruelty,” Crowley said softly. “Yeah, that sounds like them.”

“At any rate, I was going to wait until Anathema returned, and get a second opinion before trying to poke about with your memories,” Aziraphale said. He sighed and looked down at the mobile. The picture was facing away from him still- Crowley wondered if Adam could see him, or if it was like someone speaking behind you. “Any word there?”

“That’s what I was calling about, actually,” Adam said. “She called Newt- she’s fine, her family is fine, their home is fine, even, which just means that they’ve got the whole town squeezed in under their roof.”

“Oh good,” Aziraphale said, though he neither looked nor sounded please. “Well I’m glad to hear that everyone is well.”

“Ophelia trashed the roads leading down from her family’s part of the mountains, and from the sound of things the closest airport is out too,” Adam continued. “She doesn’t think she’ll be able to leave for a few weeks at least.”

Aziraphale frowned. “A few weeks.”

“Yeah. Sounds like.”

Aziraphale sighed again.

“So we have to wait a few weeks before I can start remembering the last five hundred years?” Crowley asked. “At best?”

“I can do some research on my own,” Aziraphale said. “But I would prefer not to do something as delicate as try to restore your memories without seeking a second opinion, and unfortunately, Anathema is person most knowledgeable on the subject of the occult who is also least likely to kill us.”

“So. A few weeks then. Doesn’t sound too bad.” He regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth.

“Knock on wood,” Aziraphale said, reaching out and rapping his knuckles against the kitchen table.

“So. You said you were ambushed at the cottage?” Adam said. “Do you want us to go swing down there and pick your things up? Pepper can borrow her parents’ van no problem.”

“Best to not, I think,” Aziraphale said quickly. “The cottage is almost certainly being watched, if it hasn’t been outright destroyed by the forces of Hell.”

“I can set up a google alert for it?” Adam offered. “See if anyone gets to talking about a cottage being set on fire or something?”

From the look on his face Aziraphale didn’t understand what a google alert was any more than he did. “You do that. We’ll have to discuss whether or not it’s worth it to try and collect our things from it when Crowley’s memories are restored. Thankfully, the only item of sentimental value we brought with us was the Bentley, and I honestly expect it will drive itself back to the lot behind the shop in the next day or so.”

“I’ll let you know if anything changes,” Adam said.

“Thank you. We’ll do the same. Your phone recognizes my landline still, correct? Crowley’s phone is going to be iffy, as neither one of us currently knows how to operate it.”

“Yes, it does,” Adam confirmed. “Well, bye then.”

“Goodbye, Adam,” Aziraphale said, and after a moment Adam’s picture disappeared from the mobile, to be replaced with a picture of the two of them not unlike the one next to the till. Before Crowley could get a better look at it, Aziraphale placed it face down on the table and pinched the bridge of his nose, hunching in on himself.

“Aziraphale?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just- it’s just hitting me that we’re going to have to go house hunting again,” Aziraphale said. “I know- I know you don’t remember, but it was really a stroke of good fortune, finding that cottage. It had a marvelous view of the sea, a little path down to the beach, space for a garden, space for library… there was even an apple tree out front. It really felt like a place that was meant for us.”

“That was our cottage?” Crowley asked.

“Oh!” Aziraphale seemed to startle himself straight. “Oh, yes. I mean, yes. We. We wanted a place to be able to- to get away from it all, you know.” He laughed. It sounded very strained.

So, a safe house, then. Because the forces of Heaven and Hell wanted them dead. Crowley nodded, taking it in as much stride as he could.

“Who’s Ophelia?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ophelia. She trashed the witch’s place, Adam said. I don’t know any demon by that name. One of yours?”

“Oh goodness me,” Aziraphale said. “You’ve forgotten Hamlet.”

“Who?”

“It’s a long story,” Aziraphale said. “And not actually relevant to your question, so I’ll tell you later. The humans have taken to naming the really big storms, particularly hurricanes and typhoons. Ophelia is the name of the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico a few days ago. Anathema was visiting family there when it suddenly veered away from the Bahamas. We offered to miracle her a seat on a flight, but as we have to presume that our former offices are keeping track of our miracles even though they don’t seem willing or able to cut us off she declined. It’s best that they only have the vaguest of ideas as to where our friends are. So, she’s stuck, and we’re now a bit stuck without her.”

Crowley nodded, absorbing all that information as best he could. Aziraphale was on first name terms with a witch. The witch was from Puerto Rico, which meant she was back in Spain somewhere, he guessed. Funny how these things went around, wasn’t it?

“Flight?” he asked finally.

“Oh! The humans learned to fly!” Aziraphale told him.

“What? Like, that thing Leonardo was working on-”

“Oh no, much bigger. Aeroplanes, they’re called, planes for short. They can seat hundreds, nowadays. You can fly clear across the world if you’re willing to make a few stops along the way. Oh! And outer space! The humans are in space now too, though only as far out to the moon thus far, and that’s not an option available to the general public just yet.”

“WHAT?”

For most of the afternoon, Aziraphale walked him through all the humans exploring space that he no longer remembered: from heliocentrism and Galileo Galilei through Sputnik and Neil Armstrong, all the way through to SETI and the ISS.

“They’ve really come a long way,” Aziraphale said enthusiastically, plying him with large books full of very finely detailed pictures of the cosmos that were, apparently, Crowley’s property. “And those telescopes get better and better with every passing day, or so it seems. There’s even some serious talk about setting up a colony of sorts on Mars.”

“How would they manage that?” Crowley asked. They’d decided against making Mars inhabitable fairly late in the game. They’d had to stop the core and blow all the atmosphere away, and anything more complex than bacteria had needed to be relocated.

“Oh, Wensley- that’s one of Adam’s friends, Wensleydale, he’s the one who defeated Famine- is working on that. There’s some kind of special accelerated program he’s in, and he just contributed to a fairly well-received book about how to go about doing that… I think I have that on the salesfloor, actually, hold tight.”

He made to go back into the shop part of the shop, before turning around and pulling out a book from the stack in front of Crowley. “Here,” he said, handing it to him directly. “This has some of your favorite pictures the humans have taken of your work. Fair warning, they’ve colorized them, so they don’t look quite right- but the effect is actually quite stunning!”

He hurried off, leaving Crowley to quietly absorb the fact that at some point he’d talked to Aziraphale about what he’d done in Heaven before the Fall, and that he’d done so long enough ago that whatever weirdness Aziraphale felt over the fact that he used to be a seraph had faded. He opened the book mainly to have something to do with his hands, and then let out a long, low whistle.

“These are gorgeous! We should have made them colored!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know how we would have done that- maybe found some way to introduce more heavy metals into the coronas…”

He trailed off when he realized that there were eyes on him. Aziraphale had returned, and was leaning against the entryway to the kitchen, looking at him with a fond little smile on his face.

“What?” Crowley asked, fighting down a blush.

“Oh!” Aziraphale said, shaking himself upright. “Oh, it’s nothing. Well, not nothing, it’s just- that’s the very same tear you went on the first time we went to a full-color planetarium show.”

“It was, like, three sentences,” Crowley said, after a moment to tell his circulation system that he would shut it off if it kept trying to make him blush. “That’s not really a tear.”

“The beginning of the same tear, then,” Aziraphale corrected himself. “And here’s Wensley’s book.”

The book was called Greening Mars. Crowley barely spared it a glance before searching for something else to talk about.

“Full-color?” he asked.

As a change in topic, it worked spectacularly.

“You don’t remember the cinema!” Aziraphale said beaming gloriously, his entire face lighting up.

As something that would make Aziraphale stop looking at him like that it failed spectacularly.

“You know that I don’t,” Crowley told him.

“Yes, but you love the films!” Aziraphale said, clapping his hands together in delight. “And I have a home entertainment system now. And I know how to use it! Oh, come along, dearest, I know you’ll enjoy this.”

He nearly skipped into the sitting room, leaving Crowley to mouth dearest in relative dignity.

After a moment, he put the space book back on top of the pile of space books and followed Aziraphale into the sitting room.

“There’s one film series you particularly enjoy, it’s been going for a while now,” Aziraphale explained. “We couldn’t catch most of them together when it was in the cinema, but we’ve watched some of the older ones on here since, and you've promised to take me to the new Idris Elba ones. Anyway, I’ve always wondered what your reaction to seeing them the first time was. I guess now I get to find out.”

“Cinema,” Crowley repeated, as Aziraphale bustled around something that looked like a dark rectangle that had been in the room he’d woken up in. “Can you explain what that is?”

“It’s a sort of public theater, but for viewing films,” Aziraphale explained. “Not all of the films go to cinema before being released for home consumption these days, but many do, particularly big budget productions such as these. You like the special effects- all the explosions and car chases and such.”

“Okay,” Crowley said. “And we couldn’t go to them together because...”

“Oh, well,” Aziraphale seemed to dim a bit. “That’s- well. Hell, basically. They latched on to all the latest forms of communication in order to, well, communicate. With you, and I suppose anyone else who was up here at the time. The used the radio in the Bentley right up until the end, but otherwise moved on to television around 1970 or so, and then when the Internet took off they started using home computers, and from the moment they have sound, they used films, whether they were being viewed in public or not. They can see you when it’s a screen. It would have taken a lot to explain why you were sitting nicely next to me.”

“Oh,” Crowley said. “Is that why you avoid modern technology?”

Aziraphale spun around so sharply that something expensive sounding got knocked onto the floor and shattered. He stared at Crowley, looking very startled.

“What?” Crowley asked.

“I… hadn’t thought you’d put that together,” Aziraphale admitted nearly wringing his hands. “It’s just- well. I’ve seen how Hell gives their instructions. It always seemed so unpleasant. Invasive. Not to mention the way they would talk to you! I figured- well. There should have been some place where they would have had trouble reaching you, so I. I made one.”

Crowley had been thinking that Aziraphale had stopped keeping up with the times to stop Hell from spying on him. He hadn’t budgeted emotionally for this.

He hadn’t budgeted emotionally for anything that was happening today, but this was a limit he hadn’t known he had.

“They can’t get through now. The wards are too strong- we couldn’t do that earlier. It would have given everything away, if they’d tried to reach you only to be blocked by angelic warding with any degree of regularity,” Aziraphale assured him quickly, rambling on with a nervous sort of energy. “And it wasn’t a great hardship or anything! The pace of technology these days is really far too much for me to keep pace with, and I truly am quite comfortable with just the basics. I have a wireless from before I realized that they used them to communicate with you, but it was no issue to unplug it and put it away whenever I wasn’t using it. I’ve been to the cinema plenty by now and it turns out I really do prefer live performances. This whole home entertainment system with the big screen and the streaming is really quite nifty, but aside from the cooking shows I only ever use it to watch things with you anyway, so no loss there. Hell only ever came through on computers that are hooked up to the Internet, so I was able to use my old computer from the pre-Internet days to work out my taxes. I didn’t know what I was missing with the whole online shopping phenomena, but you did, and you kept your eye out for anything I would have missed and bought it for me, so that’s also a wash. I concede that audiobooks are quite the invention, but I don't think I'll ever quite be comfortable with an e-book reader while there are still physical paper books to read. And I know I should get a mobile, but I have to admit the idea of having something on me that allows others to call me at any given time fills me with a kind of dread, so I’d probably just have it turned off more often than not anyway.” He shrugged, having apparently run out of modern devices Hell used to commune with him.

Crowley was not nodding so much as he was bobbing his head very slightly up and down. He was beginning to make himself seasick, doing that, so he stopped.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale prodded after a moment. “Can you say something, perhaps? Please?”

“I don’t know what to say,” Crowley said, slumping against the settee. “I don’t-”

He knew what he wanted to say. Six thousand years later, and you’re still looking for ways to keep the rain off me. But that seemed a bit much. Even for this new whatever they apparently had between them.

Though, it wasn’t new for Aziraphale, was it? It was innate. Established. It was an intrinsic part of their interactions with one another, something that dictated that they drink and laugh and even touch one another now, without reserve, as the very best of friends on a side all their own.

This was all way, way beyond what he’d ever thought he would have. He had no idea, still, after all of Aziraphale’s explanations, what he’d done to get here, but he knew that if he didn’t get a grip he’d spoil it.

“We haven’t discussed this, you said,” Crowley managed.

“We haven’t discussed a lot of things, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale admitted. “We spent six thousand years working for opposites sides, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And, well. We saved the world. We’ve been enjoying it, for the most part, still having a world to do things in.” He snapped, and whatever it was that had fallen to floor reconstituted itself and returned to its place in the cabinet.

“Makes sense,” Crowley said.

“Speaking of enjoyment,” Aziraphale said, seemingly glad to change the subject. “Popcorn is traditionally considered the food of choice for film viewing, but I did have some things set aside for a picnic we won't be able to get to now that we should probably eat. Do you think you can eat?”

“I can certainly try?” Crowley offered.

Aziraphale beamed. He was doing a lot of that these days, apparently. “Excellent. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

He returned a moment later with a tray that he set down on the table in front of the settee. He sat down himself, picked up a small rectangle, and began to press buttons. The large black rectangle suddenly brightened, and let out a loud chime.

“Okay,” Crowley said, sitting down next to him. Aziraphale didn’t react, too busy squinting at the large black rectangle as he manipulated the buttons on the small one.

“Sponge cake and stuffed eggs?” Crowley asked after a moment of watching Aziraphale somehow use the small rectangle to write J-A-M-E on the large one.

“Hmm?” Aziraphale replied, distracted with adding the letter S. “Oh! Oh, well, that’s a bit of a joke.”

“It is?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, turning away from the rectangles. “You see, this type of sponge cake is called angel’s food cake. And while there is a corresponding devil’s food cake, you don’t enjoy sweets quite like I do, so I made what are now called deviled eggs instead.”

Explanation provided, he turned back to the rectangles, leaving Crowley to regard the food with bemusement.

“Well, far be it from me to turn down one of my former boss’ eggs,” he drawled.

“CroWLEY!” Aziraphale nearly shrieked, a scandalized flush creeping up his neck.

Crowley smirked, and popped one of the eggs into his mouth in reply.

They watched the film- called Dr. No after the villain of the piece- for some given value of the term ‘watch’. Neither one of them paid very much attention to the large rectangle, which was apparently known as a screen. Every time Crowley so much as glanced in his direction, Aziraphale would turn to him and take off on some tangent, hands moving excitedly through the air, beaming at him like there was nowhere he’d rather be than sitting next to him, filling him in on things like how the films differed from the books, what was going on when the film had first been released, a bit about the author of the books, and how they’d met him once, as coworkers.

“This was during the Second World War,” Aziraphale said.

“The Second what?”

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale had said, and pressed something to make the film stop for a time.

Aziraphale skimped on a lot of the details, but it was obvious that, as their name implied, the World Wars were pretty horrific. The first one had been utterly terrible- it had involved something called mustard gas and apparently trenches had gotten worse over the years- and Crowley had fought in it, on Hell’s orders. Aziraphale, who hadn’t been given any direction from Heaven as to what to do and had a corporation that looked just old enough not to be drafted, had worked in a manor house than had been converted into a hospital instead. All in all, a good forty million people died during that first war.

The second one, apparently, had been even worse.

“You got credit for starting it,” Aziraphale said. “You’d been in Germany when their dictator, Adolf Hitler, took power. I’m pretty sure you were just enjoying yourself in Berlin’s cabaret scene, but Hitler certainly seemed demonic enough and you were in the area, so. They gave you a commendation for his rise to power, and then several more for the ensuing atrocities.”

“I don’t want to know what that means, do I?” Crowley asked.

“No,” Aziraphale said flatly. “I’ll tell you if you ask, but I can assure you that you’ll be much happier not knowing.”

Crowley opened his mouth to ask anyway.

“Let me put it this way: I hadn’t seen you that drunk since the Spanish Inquisition, and then I saw you that drunk every other month for nearly four years,” Aziraphale added.

Crowley closed his mouth. He considered taking a drink, but the one provided was something nonalcoholic and fizzy and he couldn’t figure out how he was supposed to drink it without it going up his nose.

“How bad did it get?” he asked instead. “The Spanish Inquisition.”

“It’s hard to get decent numbers,” Aziraphale said. “Records weren’t well kept, or else were destroyed. There was another religious schism, and England was on the other end of it from Catholicism, so much of the English-language material made it out to be worse than it was.” He hesitated, and then said, clearly hedging “The most reliable sources I’ve seen place the number of people executed by the Spanish Inquisition in the thousands, and the number of people sentenced to some form of punishment in the tens of thousands- up over one hundred thousand, actually. It didn’t actually end until 1834, though it wasn’t particularly active by that point. It closed down on July 15th, 1834, if memory serves. I took you out to lunch. We got rather spectacularly drunk in a celebratory manner.”

“How far over one hundred thousand?” Crowley asked.

Again, Aziraphale hesitated. “Roughly one hundred and fifty thousand, is the generally agreed upon number for the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Shit,” Crowley said, leaning back against the arm of the settee. “Just. Shit.”

There would have been more- more people tried. Tortured, and then found innocent. He’d seen it. That first auto-da-fé. All those people being paraded around in sackcloth, the innocent grovelling before their neighbors in gratitude for being spared the public penance of the lash and worse.

There would have been more deaths than just the official tally, too. People whose hearts gave out under the strain of being tortured, people who would later die of infections. Suicides, too.

Crowley’s memories only held six. The first six deaths of thousands, and every informant, torturer, and executioner damned for it another little notch in his demonic bedpost. Well done him. Small wonder they’d given him an award, if that was how things were going to go.

“It’s not your fault,” Aziraphale said, gently yet firmly. “They come up with the worst ideas on their own, just as they come up with the best ones.”

Crowley didn’t know what to say about that, so he just nodded. It seemed to be enough. After a moment, Aziraphale picked up the small rectangle, and the film resumed.

A few minutes later, when Crowley next tried to sneak a look at him, Aziraphale turned to him, smiled, and rambled on about the difficulties he imagined there would be in filming in a guano quarry, and inadvertently informing Crowley of what guano was in the process.

It was...weird. Really weird. Not the guano- though, yes, the guano, a little bit- but the fact that Aziraphale kept looking back at him. Crowley had literal thousands of years worth of experience looking at Aziraphale without him catching on. When did he start noticing? When did it start making him smile and engage in conversation?

Was this really his life now? Did he regularly spend time sitting next to Aziraphale, with a film playing before them that they would happily disregard in favor of conversation?

No Hell to report back to. No Heaven guiding Aziraphale’s every action. No Apocalypse looming ahead of them. They could just be, if they wanted, and apparently Aziraphale did want to spend time with him.

How was it that this was his life? It didn’t feel like his life, and he was pretty sure that it wasn’t just down to the missing memories. Something was off here. Something just didn’t add up…

The next thing he knew, the film screen had gone dark and Aziraphale was shaking him gently on the shoulder.

“Huzzayut?” he asked intelligently.

“You fell asleep, dear,” Aziraphale said.

“What?” Crowley asked. “Why?”

“Well, it’s been a long day and you underwent a very invasive demonic miracle quite against your will,” Aziraphale said. “I imagine you’re tired.”

“But why?” Crowley demanded. “We don’t need to sleep.”

Aziraphale blinked at him. Then he laughed.

“What?” Crowley asked.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, gone a bit pink in the face. “It’s- you got into the habit of sleeping every night, apparently far more recently than I’d presumed.”

“What?” Crowley asked again. Sure, he liked his naps, but… “Every night?”

“More or less,” Aziraphale told him. “You can go longer, of course, but it takes effort, and after the sort of day you’ve had it might be for the best to rest up a bit. Recover your strength.”

“Uh. Sure?” Though he’s not sure how that was going to be accomplished. Aziraphale had mentioned rooms of some kind in that nearby neighborhood, but he’d also said that they were pretty much empty. Aziraphale didn’t just wake him up only to send him to sleep on the same bloody settee he’s currently on, did he?

“You keep a bed upstairs,” Aziraphale said, standing up. Crowley hadn’t quite realized that his hand had still been on his shoulder the whole time until it was gone. “Come on, I’ll show you.”