Special delivery for aviss (Part 1)!
Title: Keep Out of Reach of Children
Recipient: aviss
Author: lilbanili
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: My dear prompter, I hope you don't mind the length on this story; it ended up being quite a bit longer than I expected. I'm rubbish at writing short stories; it's impossible for me to write without plot. Which is probably why I so enjoyed your prompt, as it gave me ample room to create at least a bit of a real story. I had a terrible lot of fun writing this piece, and I hope you have as much fun reading it! Happy Holidays!
Summary: Sometimes even large quantities of alcohol are not enough to solve your problems. Luckily, an angel can help.
There was some sort of laughter in the background.
Andy Pinewood wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from; it might have been in his head, or perhaps someone in one of the classrooms above him. Maybe it was the universe cackling at him. All he knew was that it was becoming desperately annoying, scraping against the sides of his skull and becoming a large distraction. It had started up a few days ago, though he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that he noticed it.
It must have something to do with that book. He hadn’t thought anything of it when he’d first discovered it in the back of the old bookshop he worked at, but now he was starting to think that maybe there was something to it after all. He couldn’t see any other reason that he would be going spontaneously crazy.
Andy slouched across the campus, pulling his hood up and keeping his head down as he tried to avoid other people. Though the whispering chuckles in his head did lend to his want of solidarity, his behavior wasn’t irregular. He was an anti social kid - gangly, soft spoken and all around awkward. A freak, he thought bitterly to himself, and the laughing in his cranium seemed to magnify slightly.
The college boy grabbed his bike and turned towards the bookstore mechanically, the sky darkening above him. As he peddled closer to his workplace, he noticed that the laughter began to sharpen, and he thought he could even make out a few whispered words, spoken in some guttural language that he didn’t recognize. Throwing his bike onto the rack near the bookstore, Andy darted inside with a quick wave to his employer, a middle aged Scottish man who was clinging to the last shreds of a hair line. Andy headed for the back room.
The book was where he’d left it, tucked in a back corner of the storage room. It was a wholly unremarkable book, with a plain leather front held together by a thin belt. The front had nothing on it but one red symbol that the young man couldn’t comprehend - it was sort of wiggly and pear shaped, and when you turned your head away at the right time of day at the right angle, it lit on fire and flitted about the cover. As a human Andy lacked the extra verabrae necessary to complete this motion, and so would never witness the spectacle.
When he laid his hands on the book this time, the voice in his head magnified and he could hear a distinctly unpleasant language being knocked around his skull. The voice was deep and bloody and sounded amused in a way that froze Andy’s bones as it melted away his muscles. It made him feel waifish and insubstantial. Bitterly, he realized that it didn’t feel so different from his normal life.
He carefully opened the book’s cover and let it fall to a random page. When the papers - or whatever they were, the pages appeared to be made of some kind of leather - began to move on their own, Andy couldn’t say that he was entirely surprised. It wasn’t that things normally moved on their own when he was around. The college boy had simply come to terms with the fact that he was either crazy or something magical was going down. He was willing to bet heavily on the first, but he figured he may as well roll with it until something proved him otherwise.
Maybe he was just dreaming. That would be okay.
The pages came to a standstill, fluttering down to part somewhere near the middle of the book. One page was covered in strange sigils, and the one opposite it had a large diagramme of an odd looking pattern with a star in the middle. Andy ran his fingers across it. They came away tingling.
He blinked a few times; it appeared that the symbols on the page were moving, wriggling around like worms under the sand. After a few blinks he realized that the words were, in fact, moving, twisting a turning into new shapes, familiar shapes, sort of almost English type shapes that tickled the back of his mind and throat as he tasted a few, letting them fall from his tongue and plop, fat and wet, on the dusty floor of the room.
Something exploded, and Andy raised his eyes to discover that the back room of the book shop was on fire.
The flames danced over his feet, twisting around him and curling through his hair without leaving a single soot mark. Though he didn’t know it, hellfire had a way of ignoring people that it considered to be on its side. Andy wouldn’t probably have considered himself on Hell’s side, but in that moment, feeling the heat of a raging fire without burning, feeling power rushing under his skin and through his head, he wouldn’t have argued either.
He laughed as sirens began to roar through the cracked air.
Crowley was having a good day.
This wasn’t completely unusual; Crowley was a generally optimistic demon, though he’d never admit to the fact. That’s just not how the demon business was done. You were supposed to be pessimistic about as many things as possible, hopefully all at once. You were supposed to hate everything, wreak destruction, and generally not have very nice days.
Crowley, however, had decided that this was a cop out. He did good - well, bad, technically - work up here, and he hardly considered it fair that he was supposed to spend all his time constantly moody and obsessed with snatching up souls for Hell. Granted, Hell wasn’t known for being particularly fair, but he hadn’t been down to Hell in a few centuries at least. He figured he was allowed to make up some rules for himself now.
So Crowley was having a good day. An especially good day, he would have said, if he were inclined to share that sort of thing with anyone. He’d had lunch with the angel at a new cafe near their park, and they’d had a nice conversation that only circled back around to ineffability once or twice. They’d made plans to meet back at the Ritz for dinner and drinks, after they both did a spot of tempting and thwarting, respectively. Had to keep up with quotas and all that.
The demon walked home, taking the time to drop a few pennies along the way(1) as he sauntered along. He made sure to give the window washer’s ladder a good kick as he walked under it(2) and even felt he may have scored a soul when he made the fire hydrant across the street explode over a smartly dressed businessman. He spent a good hour terrorizing his plants, and then set out to get drunk with Aziraphale.
Overall, a very good day.
Andy wasn’t sure how he arrived at the graveyard. He was pretty sure he’d called a cab, or maybe he’d walked, or maybe he’d ridden his bike. It didn’t matter so much; he was here now, and the voices were whispering and cackling in his mind.
He had the book. He wasn’t sure where he’d gotten it. The firemen that had taken him out of the raging fire had left it, and he hadn’t been able to go back and retrieve it from the ashes. But somehow it was in his hands, and the runes across the front were twisting and turning as if the cover were made of muddy water. Andy ran his hands along it, a humming filling his skull and making his teeth ache. The book groaned in his hands, and the pages strained at the buckle. Carefully, the boy unlatched it, and blinked when the book burst open in his hands.
He knew what he wanted. Power power power. He’d felt it on his tongue, thrilling through his bones when he had started the fire in the bookstore. Now he wanted more, wanted it all the time, everywhere. No one would ever look sideways at him again, or make painful jabs at his skittish behavior and gangly limbs. He would never be weak again, never never never...
The pages of the book began to turn, searching for what he grasped at. It settled, finally, on a complicated page covered in symbols and diagrams. The scraping whispers in his head carved the words across his mind, searing them into his brain. He could see empires falling, skies bleeding into the oceans, worlds dying. This was only the beginning, he knew. He would be more powerful than a god.
He spoke.
Crowley was in the middle of another bout of ineffable discussion when he felt it.
He hadn’t felt a summons in at least a millenium, give or take a few centuries. People had pretty much gotten over that after the fourteenth century - fucking fourteenth century - and once science came into play, the legitimate summoning spells faded into obscurity. Occasionally you’d get some old bloke whose great great something grandmother had left him with some homemade remedy for bunions that ended up being a weak summoning spell, but Hell had been pretty clear that it did not want humans controlling demons without the demon’s expressed permission(3). So it had been a while since Crowley had felt someone calling him across the fabric of spacetime.
Even so, it wasn’t really a feeling you forget. It was distinctly unpleasant, sort of like a cold finger wrapping itself around your organs and squeezing gently. Clammy and constricting. It was generally followed by a sharp tug at the base of your spine and a quick trip between the folds of the universe, to plop you down wherever you were expected.
It gave him just enough time to say to the babbling Aziraphale, “Sorry, gotta go,” before he was snapped into oblivion.
Aziraphale stared at the spot Crowley had vacated with a fair amount of surprise and confusion. He and Crowley generally didn’t use the whole teleportation thing much anymore - it was a little flashy and attracted attention, both from other supernaturals and inquisitive humans. As it was, he was left with the task of erasing the memories of everyone in the cafe who’d been paying attention(4). He waited around for a good twenty minutes, hoping that Crowley might return, but when the demon did not the tweed clad angel simply shrugged to himself and reasoned that Hell must have called with some business or another. He’d get an explanation out of Crowley tomorrow, if he happened to see him.
Leaving a large tip, Aziraphale stood and went home.
Crowley landed with a short stumble in an old graveyard, which kind of pissed him off, as he used to be able to teleport without so much as a shift of the hair. Muttering about being out of practice, he straightened his tie and looked around, dust settling around him as it became used to the sudden mass that had invaded the area. A cloud of demonic energy hung in the air, and he wondered what kind of graveyard this could be; the ground was saturated with Hell’s particular energy, whereas most graveyards were consecrated ground, Heaven’s domain. Usually setting foot in a graveyard, or any consecrated ground, really, would leave him feeling nauseated and slightly sunburnt. Here he felt invigorated and very, very nervous.
There was someone laughing a ways off, a disturbing and hollow sound that Crowley usually associated with most of the cafés in Hell. He decided to ignore it for now in favor of the figure that had summoned him.
It was a small figure, smaller than he would have expected. Maybe a teenager or a young man. His face was all bones in the sick yellow light curling off of the book in his hands, his grin making his skull like appearance even sharper. In the half light of the full moon, the boy looked ecstatic, and it seemed that, though he wasn’t himself laughing, the sound was emanating from him.
Crowley cursed quietly(5). This was not something he wanted to deal with today. Sticking his hands in his pockets and trying to look at least a bit put together, he took a few steps toward his new “master”. Manchester, he hoped the kid wouldn’t want a title. Obnoxious prat.
The boy was closing the book now, the yellow light fading down, leaving a faint tinge in the air and a lingering smell of sulphur. Crowley slithered up, trying to look bored.
“Okay, kid, let’s get through this as quickly as possible. You know the drill. One soul for all your desires. Make it snappy,” the demon drawled, checking his watch for emphasis. He peered at the boy over his sunglasses. The kid was even smaller up close, though Crowley guessed that he was somewhere in his college years. He had sunken blue eyes and floppy blond hair that fell into them, his skin stretching across thin cheekbones. Maybe the kid would wish for some muscle definition.
The boy’s head was tilted to the side curiously, looking Crowley up and down. “You’re not really what I expected,” he said in a thin voice, wary.
“I rarely am,” Crowley agreed. “Name’s Crowley. Your personal demon from Hell. And you are?”
“Andy,” the boy said. Crowley raised an eyebrow. It wasn't a particularly impressive name.
“Well then, Andy, how about we hurry this along so I can get back to dinner?"
The young man smiled thinly - everything he did was thin, broken and twisted. “I don’t think so. See, they... the book says that the spell I used was a binding spell, not just a summoning spell. I’m your master now, right? That means more than one wish, and I get to keep my soul.”
“Kid, your soul is screwed,” Crowley muttered. Usually when you told a human that you were there to make a deal, they didn’t turn it down and try to tell you something different. But the kid seemed to be going off of good information. Bless it all. “Fine,” the demon growled. “What d’you want?”
Andy grinned again, and Crowley heard the whispers more clearly, chortling on the edge of his thoughts. It set his teeth on edge. “We’ll start tomorrow,” Andy said. “I need to get some things, and then we’re going to begin on a little project.”
Crowley blinked, something that happened so very rarely that it surprised even him. “What kind of project?”
“Well, first we’re going to make an example of an old enemy of mine, and then we’re going to open the Gates of Hell.”
Andy snapped his fingers, and Crowley disappeared.
He hated that.
Crowley was no longer having a good day.
Actually, it was now about two in the morning, so technically it was a new day, and it was promising to be absolutely horrid. He landed, startled and disheveled - two things he did not enjoy being, ever - in the middle of the pond that he and Aziraphale frequented, making him also incredibly wet. He startled the ducks, which annoyed him, and it was all he could do not to sink every one of them. He only managed it because of the grief he knew Aziraphale would give him when the angel found out.
Magicing his clothes dry, Crowley opted to walk home, having had enough of the teleporting for one day. He decided that he was going to pour himself a large brandy and get completely hammered, and then he was going to sleep until this Andy kid died of old age.
The kid wanted to open the fucking floodgates of Hell, bless every living thing. Most demons would have little problem with this; after all, demons on the loose was good for most demons. Crowley however, had two problems with it. One, with so many demons roaming the Earth, humans were sure to realize what was going on, and knowing them, the best response would be to declare war. Which would get Heaven involved, and again, knowing humans, they’d declare war on Heaven as well. The last thing Crowley and Aziraphale needed was a three way, multidimensional war between Earth, Heaven and Hell. It would be mass destruction - worse than the Armageddon the angel and demon had managed to avert. There would be no more brandies, no more duck ponds, and most assuredly no more stylish London flats or cozy Soho bookshops.
The second problem Crowley had was that, when it came down to it, he really just didn’t like demons very much (6).
Crowley finally reached his flat and fell into bed, forgetting the brandy in favour of immediate unconsciousness.
He woke up with a headache, and he wasn’t in his flat.
He was, he was surprised to find, lying on Aziraphale’s couch in Soho.
Sitting up slowly, he realized that he was devoid of shoes and sunglasses, wearing only his rumpled shirt and pants. Wincing, he figured that he must have teleported here in his sleep; Andy had partial control of Crowley’s demonic powers now, so until he got used to it, they were going to be more on the fritz, especially when Andy become emotional, wherever he was.
“Good morning,” Crowley heard a familiar voice say. A steaming mug of what he hoped was alcohol-laced tea was passed into his hand.
“Morning angel,” he said, taking a swig and mentally scolding some brandy into it.
Aziraphale sat down in the armchair across from the demon, holding his own cup of tea and raising one eyebrow in a question. “I’m not at all bothered, dear, but I was wondering why, exactly, you fluttered out of dinner last night and then appeared on my couch in the early hours of the morning. It’s just rather unusual.”
Crowley shrugged. “Had some demon-y things to handle.”
“Not in any trouble, I hope?” the angel asked, concern furrowing his brow.
Crowley rolled his eyes. “I handled it. S’ all good, angel.”
“Alright then. I assume there’s no good explanation for the couch.”
Crowley shrugged. “I was tired?”
The demon could practically feel Aziraphale mentally patting his head. “Of course, dear.”
Aziraphale was worried.
Not incredibly so; Crowley had been a constant source of worry in the past, first as an enemy and then as an almost-friend kind of ally, but the demon could handle himself. Even so, it was very unlike him to suddenly teleport himself into Aziraphale’s back room, particularly while asleep. He had also seemed rather unsettled when he’d awoken, avoiding all of Aziraphale’s questions and heading out the door as soon as he could materialize shoes for himself. Aziraphale had even offered to pay for breakfast, but the demon had simply waved him off with some muttered excuses.
The problem was that, even after knowing each other for six thousand years, sometimes as friends and sometimes as enemies, Crowley was never the type to ask for help. It was in his nature to be prideful and arrogant, something that Aziraphale had learned to accept and eventually find amusing. Over time, though, the angel had come to realize that these traits often got his demon counterpart into trouble. Crowley simply couldn’t bring himself to stoop low enough to ask for help, even from Aziraphale.
Based on past experience, Aziraphale knew that no amount of haggling would get him any answers. He was going to have to figure it out for himself.
The second summoning, despite being completely expected, was still just as unpleasant as the first, if not more so. Crowley had never become comfortable having his essence grabbed and hurled across existence, and he hoped he never would.
Andy was waiting for the demon in an abandoned amusement park - clearly what he thought of as a classically creepy atmosphere. Crowley wondered who the kid was out to impress; it wasn't as if a demon would have trouble grasping the concept of creepy. The boy was looking mildly annoyed in a sweatshirt and jeans, peeved in a way that said he would rather be in a suit, or maybe a cape. Something with a little more dazzle.
Also, something about him was different. Maybe it was the increasingly loud chuckling raking across the base of Crowley's spine, or maybe the way the kid stood just a bit away from everything else, a bit more there and not there at the same time. Like part of him was human and part of him was just... not.
Crowley decided not to dwell on it for now.
Leaning against an old chain link gate, he sighed and said, "You rang, Oh Lord?"
The kid ignored the drawl. "Indeed," he said, rubbing his palms together like some sort of cartoon villain. "It's time to get the ball rolling on this thing. I have a list of items for you to collect, things that we'll need in order for this to work."
"The whole... opening the gates to Hell thing. Right. Er," Crowley said. "What sort of list?" If it was the kind that involved virgin sacrifices, he was going to get very drunk, find a large basin of holy water, and take a bath.
Andy pulled a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, handing it to the demon. "Just some ingredients that I've found more difficult to procure." Crowley accepted the paper and was pleased to find that the words “virgin” and “blood” were nowhere in sight. As far as he could tell, it was a list of rare herbs - all with demonic properties, naturally, but you’d be hard pressed to find a plant that couldn’t be used for demonic purposes in some way.
Sticking the list in an inside pocket, the demon said, “Fine. That all?”
“For now,” Andy replied, and for a moment the air was thick with something dark and heavy and ancient. Crowley did his best not to shiver in an undemonic fashion and snapped himself back to his apartment.
This time he did get drunk.
Aziraphale was a good researcher. Though he had a tendency to avoid computers like the plague, he had enough books that finding the information he wanted wasn’t usually very difficult. In addition, he had a plethora of contacts that he could call upon if he was at a loss; one did not spend six thousand years in one place without making allies. On the subject of Crowley, however, Aziraphale had never been a very good researcher. The demon was incredibly hard to find, as the angel had discovered time and time again back when they had been at odds. Crowley might have been bad at acting like a demon, but he was still a fairly powerful one. When he wanted to stay hidden, he did, even from a Principality.
It had been a good week since Aziraphale had seen the demon, and he was beginning to grow truly concerned. Normally he wouldn’t be bothered by a week long absence by Crowley; at times they would go decades without saying a word to each other, simply because business got in the way, or they found something else to occupy their time. It also wasn’t uncommon for Crowley to sleep away a week or two without noticing. So generally, the angel wouldn’t have been worried by his missing demon.
However, it was very unusual for Crowley to not return calls and skip out on dinner plans they’d made weeks before. It was also unusual to have him popping up in random places and causing random inanimate objects to explode. Based on the sudden bursts of energy coming from the demon, Aziraphale would swear that Crowley’s powers were on the fritz, but he had no idea what might cause such a thing. And so far his reading had turned up nothing. Earth didn’t have a lot of material on what might cause a demon to become skittish (7).
In the end, Aziraphale resorted to spying.
On to Part 2!
Recipient: aviss
Author: lilbanili
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: My dear prompter, I hope you don't mind the length on this story; it ended up being quite a bit longer than I expected. I'm rubbish at writing short stories; it's impossible for me to write without plot. Which is probably why I so enjoyed your prompt, as it gave me ample room to create at least a bit of a real story. I had a terrible lot of fun writing this piece, and I hope you have as much fun reading it! Happy Holidays!
Summary: Sometimes even large quantities of alcohol are not enough to solve your problems. Luckily, an angel can help.
There was some sort of laughter in the background.
Andy Pinewood wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from; it might have been in his head, or perhaps someone in one of the classrooms above him. Maybe it was the universe cackling at him. All he knew was that it was becoming desperately annoying, scraping against the sides of his skull and becoming a large distraction. It had started up a few days ago, though he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that he noticed it.
It must have something to do with that book. He hadn’t thought anything of it when he’d first discovered it in the back of the old bookshop he worked at, but now he was starting to think that maybe there was something to it after all. He couldn’t see any other reason that he would be going spontaneously crazy.
Andy slouched across the campus, pulling his hood up and keeping his head down as he tried to avoid other people. Though the whispering chuckles in his head did lend to his want of solidarity, his behavior wasn’t irregular. He was an anti social kid - gangly, soft spoken and all around awkward. A freak, he thought bitterly to himself, and the laughing in his cranium seemed to magnify slightly.
The college boy grabbed his bike and turned towards the bookstore mechanically, the sky darkening above him. As he peddled closer to his workplace, he noticed that the laughter began to sharpen, and he thought he could even make out a few whispered words, spoken in some guttural language that he didn’t recognize. Throwing his bike onto the rack near the bookstore, Andy darted inside with a quick wave to his employer, a middle aged Scottish man who was clinging to the last shreds of a hair line. Andy headed for the back room.
The book was where he’d left it, tucked in a back corner of the storage room. It was a wholly unremarkable book, with a plain leather front held together by a thin belt. The front had nothing on it but one red symbol that the young man couldn’t comprehend - it was sort of wiggly and pear shaped, and when you turned your head away at the right time of day at the right angle, it lit on fire and flitted about the cover. As a human Andy lacked the extra verabrae necessary to complete this motion, and so would never witness the spectacle.
When he laid his hands on the book this time, the voice in his head magnified and he could hear a distinctly unpleasant language being knocked around his skull. The voice was deep and bloody and sounded amused in a way that froze Andy’s bones as it melted away his muscles. It made him feel waifish and insubstantial. Bitterly, he realized that it didn’t feel so different from his normal life.
He carefully opened the book’s cover and let it fall to a random page. When the papers - or whatever they were, the pages appeared to be made of some kind of leather - began to move on their own, Andy couldn’t say that he was entirely surprised. It wasn’t that things normally moved on their own when he was around. The college boy had simply come to terms with the fact that he was either crazy or something magical was going down. He was willing to bet heavily on the first, but he figured he may as well roll with it until something proved him otherwise.
Maybe he was just dreaming. That would be okay.
The pages came to a standstill, fluttering down to part somewhere near the middle of the book. One page was covered in strange sigils, and the one opposite it had a large diagramme of an odd looking pattern with a star in the middle. Andy ran his fingers across it. They came away tingling.
He blinked a few times; it appeared that the symbols on the page were moving, wriggling around like worms under the sand. After a few blinks he realized that the words were, in fact, moving, twisting a turning into new shapes, familiar shapes, sort of almost English type shapes that tickled the back of his mind and throat as he tasted a few, letting them fall from his tongue and plop, fat and wet, on the dusty floor of the room.
Something exploded, and Andy raised his eyes to discover that the back room of the book shop was on fire.
The flames danced over his feet, twisting around him and curling through his hair without leaving a single soot mark. Though he didn’t know it, hellfire had a way of ignoring people that it considered to be on its side. Andy wouldn’t probably have considered himself on Hell’s side, but in that moment, feeling the heat of a raging fire without burning, feeling power rushing under his skin and through his head, he wouldn’t have argued either.
He laughed as sirens began to roar through the cracked air.
Crowley was having a good day.
This wasn’t completely unusual; Crowley was a generally optimistic demon, though he’d never admit to the fact. That’s just not how the demon business was done. You were supposed to be pessimistic about as many things as possible, hopefully all at once. You were supposed to hate everything, wreak destruction, and generally not have very nice days.
Crowley, however, had decided that this was a cop out. He did good - well, bad, technically - work up here, and he hardly considered it fair that he was supposed to spend all his time constantly moody and obsessed with snatching up souls for Hell. Granted, Hell wasn’t known for being particularly fair, but he hadn’t been down to Hell in a few centuries at least. He figured he was allowed to make up some rules for himself now.
So Crowley was having a good day. An especially good day, he would have said, if he were inclined to share that sort of thing with anyone. He’d had lunch with the angel at a new cafe near their park, and they’d had a nice conversation that only circled back around to ineffability once or twice. They’d made plans to meet back at the Ritz for dinner and drinks, after they both did a spot of tempting and thwarting, respectively. Had to keep up with quotas and all that.
The demon walked home, taking the time to drop a few pennies along the way(1) as he sauntered along. He made sure to give the window washer’s ladder a good kick as he walked under it(2) and even felt he may have scored a soul when he made the fire hydrant across the street explode over a smartly dressed businessman. He spent a good hour terrorizing his plants, and then set out to get drunk with Aziraphale.
Overall, a very good day.
Andy wasn’t sure how he arrived at the graveyard. He was pretty sure he’d called a cab, or maybe he’d walked, or maybe he’d ridden his bike. It didn’t matter so much; he was here now, and the voices were whispering and cackling in his mind.
He had the book. He wasn’t sure where he’d gotten it. The firemen that had taken him out of the raging fire had left it, and he hadn’t been able to go back and retrieve it from the ashes. But somehow it was in his hands, and the runes across the front were twisting and turning as if the cover were made of muddy water. Andy ran his hands along it, a humming filling his skull and making his teeth ache. The book groaned in his hands, and the pages strained at the buckle. Carefully, the boy unlatched it, and blinked when the book burst open in his hands.
He knew what he wanted. Power power power. He’d felt it on his tongue, thrilling through his bones when he had started the fire in the bookstore. Now he wanted more, wanted it all the time, everywhere. No one would ever look sideways at him again, or make painful jabs at his skittish behavior and gangly limbs. He would never be weak again, never never never...
The pages of the book began to turn, searching for what he grasped at. It settled, finally, on a complicated page covered in symbols and diagrams. The scraping whispers in his head carved the words across his mind, searing them into his brain. He could see empires falling, skies bleeding into the oceans, worlds dying. This was only the beginning, he knew. He would be more powerful than a god.
He spoke.
Crowley was in the middle of another bout of ineffable discussion when he felt it.
He hadn’t felt a summons in at least a millenium, give or take a few centuries. People had pretty much gotten over that after the fourteenth century - fucking fourteenth century - and once science came into play, the legitimate summoning spells faded into obscurity. Occasionally you’d get some old bloke whose great great something grandmother had left him with some homemade remedy for bunions that ended up being a weak summoning spell, but Hell had been pretty clear that it did not want humans controlling demons without the demon’s expressed permission(3). So it had been a while since Crowley had felt someone calling him across the fabric of spacetime.
Even so, it wasn’t really a feeling you forget. It was distinctly unpleasant, sort of like a cold finger wrapping itself around your organs and squeezing gently. Clammy and constricting. It was generally followed by a sharp tug at the base of your spine and a quick trip between the folds of the universe, to plop you down wherever you were expected.
It gave him just enough time to say to the babbling Aziraphale, “Sorry, gotta go,” before he was snapped into oblivion.
Aziraphale stared at the spot Crowley had vacated with a fair amount of surprise and confusion. He and Crowley generally didn’t use the whole teleportation thing much anymore - it was a little flashy and attracted attention, both from other supernaturals and inquisitive humans. As it was, he was left with the task of erasing the memories of everyone in the cafe who’d been paying attention(4). He waited around for a good twenty minutes, hoping that Crowley might return, but when the demon did not the tweed clad angel simply shrugged to himself and reasoned that Hell must have called with some business or another. He’d get an explanation out of Crowley tomorrow, if he happened to see him.
Leaving a large tip, Aziraphale stood and went home.
Crowley landed with a short stumble in an old graveyard, which kind of pissed him off, as he used to be able to teleport without so much as a shift of the hair. Muttering about being out of practice, he straightened his tie and looked around, dust settling around him as it became used to the sudden mass that had invaded the area. A cloud of demonic energy hung in the air, and he wondered what kind of graveyard this could be; the ground was saturated with Hell’s particular energy, whereas most graveyards were consecrated ground, Heaven’s domain. Usually setting foot in a graveyard, or any consecrated ground, really, would leave him feeling nauseated and slightly sunburnt. Here he felt invigorated and very, very nervous.
There was someone laughing a ways off, a disturbing and hollow sound that Crowley usually associated with most of the cafés in Hell. He decided to ignore it for now in favor of the figure that had summoned him.
It was a small figure, smaller than he would have expected. Maybe a teenager or a young man. His face was all bones in the sick yellow light curling off of the book in his hands, his grin making his skull like appearance even sharper. In the half light of the full moon, the boy looked ecstatic, and it seemed that, though he wasn’t himself laughing, the sound was emanating from him.
Crowley cursed quietly(5). This was not something he wanted to deal with today. Sticking his hands in his pockets and trying to look at least a bit put together, he took a few steps toward his new “master”. Manchester, he hoped the kid wouldn’t want a title. Obnoxious prat.
The boy was closing the book now, the yellow light fading down, leaving a faint tinge in the air and a lingering smell of sulphur. Crowley slithered up, trying to look bored.
“Okay, kid, let’s get through this as quickly as possible. You know the drill. One soul for all your desires. Make it snappy,” the demon drawled, checking his watch for emphasis. He peered at the boy over his sunglasses. The kid was even smaller up close, though Crowley guessed that he was somewhere in his college years. He had sunken blue eyes and floppy blond hair that fell into them, his skin stretching across thin cheekbones. Maybe the kid would wish for some muscle definition.
The boy’s head was tilted to the side curiously, looking Crowley up and down. “You’re not really what I expected,” he said in a thin voice, wary.
“I rarely am,” Crowley agreed. “Name’s Crowley. Your personal demon from Hell. And you are?”
“Andy,” the boy said. Crowley raised an eyebrow. It wasn't a particularly impressive name.
“Well then, Andy, how about we hurry this along so I can get back to dinner?"
The young man smiled thinly - everything he did was thin, broken and twisted. “I don’t think so. See, they... the book says that the spell I used was a binding spell, not just a summoning spell. I’m your master now, right? That means more than one wish, and I get to keep my soul.”
“Kid, your soul is screwed,” Crowley muttered. Usually when you told a human that you were there to make a deal, they didn’t turn it down and try to tell you something different. But the kid seemed to be going off of good information. Bless it all. “Fine,” the demon growled. “What d’you want?”
Andy grinned again, and Crowley heard the whispers more clearly, chortling on the edge of his thoughts. It set his teeth on edge. “We’ll start tomorrow,” Andy said. “I need to get some things, and then we’re going to begin on a little project.”
Crowley blinked, something that happened so very rarely that it surprised even him. “What kind of project?”
“Well, first we’re going to make an example of an old enemy of mine, and then we’re going to open the Gates of Hell.”
Andy snapped his fingers, and Crowley disappeared.
He hated that.
Crowley was no longer having a good day.
Actually, it was now about two in the morning, so technically it was a new day, and it was promising to be absolutely horrid. He landed, startled and disheveled - two things he did not enjoy being, ever - in the middle of the pond that he and Aziraphale frequented, making him also incredibly wet. He startled the ducks, which annoyed him, and it was all he could do not to sink every one of them. He only managed it because of the grief he knew Aziraphale would give him when the angel found out.
Magicing his clothes dry, Crowley opted to walk home, having had enough of the teleporting for one day. He decided that he was going to pour himself a large brandy and get completely hammered, and then he was going to sleep until this Andy kid died of old age.
The kid wanted to open the fucking floodgates of Hell, bless every living thing. Most demons would have little problem with this; after all, demons on the loose was good for most demons. Crowley however, had two problems with it. One, with so many demons roaming the Earth, humans were sure to realize what was going on, and knowing them, the best response would be to declare war. Which would get Heaven involved, and again, knowing humans, they’d declare war on Heaven as well. The last thing Crowley and Aziraphale needed was a three way, multidimensional war between Earth, Heaven and Hell. It would be mass destruction - worse than the Armageddon the angel and demon had managed to avert. There would be no more brandies, no more duck ponds, and most assuredly no more stylish London flats or cozy Soho bookshops.
The second problem Crowley had was that, when it came down to it, he really just didn’t like demons very much (6).
Crowley finally reached his flat and fell into bed, forgetting the brandy in favour of immediate unconsciousness.
He woke up with a headache, and he wasn’t in his flat.
He was, he was surprised to find, lying on Aziraphale’s couch in Soho.
Sitting up slowly, he realized that he was devoid of shoes and sunglasses, wearing only his rumpled shirt and pants. Wincing, he figured that he must have teleported here in his sleep; Andy had partial control of Crowley’s demonic powers now, so until he got used to it, they were going to be more on the fritz, especially when Andy become emotional, wherever he was.
“Good morning,” Crowley heard a familiar voice say. A steaming mug of what he hoped was alcohol-laced tea was passed into his hand.
“Morning angel,” he said, taking a swig and mentally scolding some brandy into it.
Aziraphale sat down in the armchair across from the demon, holding his own cup of tea and raising one eyebrow in a question. “I’m not at all bothered, dear, but I was wondering why, exactly, you fluttered out of dinner last night and then appeared on my couch in the early hours of the morning. It’s just rather unusual.”
Crowley shrugged. “Had some demon-y things to handle.”
“Not in any trouble, I hope?” the angel asked, concern furrowing his brow.
Crowley rolled his eyes. “I handled it. S’ all good, angel.”
“Alright then. I assume there’s no good explanation for the couch.”
Crowley shrugged. “I was tired?”
The demon could practically feel Aziraphale mentally patting his head. “Of course, dear.”
Aziraphale was worried.
Not incredibly so; Crowley had been a constant source of worry in the past, first as an enemy and then as an almost-friend kind of ally, but the demon could handle himself. Even so, it was very unlike him to suddenly teleport himself into Aziraphale’s back room, particularly while asleep. He had also seemed rather unsettled when he’d awoken, avoiding all of Aziraphale’s questions and heading out the door as soon as he could materialize shoes for himself. Aziraphale had even offered to pay for breakfast, but the demon had simply waved him off with some muttered excuses.
The problem was that, even after knowing each other for six thousand years, sometimes as friends and sometimes as enemies, Crowley was never the type to ask for help. It was in his nature to be prideful and arrogant, something that Aziraphale had learned to accept and eventually find amusing. Over time, though, the angel had come to realize that these traits often got his demon counterpart into trouble. Crowley simply couldn’t bring himself to stoop low enough to ask for help, even from Aziraphale.
Based on past experience, Aziraphale knew that no amount of haggling would get him any answers. He was going to have to figure it out for himself.
The second summoning, despite being completely expected, was still just as unpleasant as the first, if not more so. Crowley had never become comfortable having his essence grabbed and hurled across existence, and he hoped he never would.
Andy was waiting for the demon in an abandoned amusement park - clearly what he thought of as a classically creepy atmosphere. Crowley wondered who the kid was out to impress; it wasn't as if a demon would have trouble grasping the concept of creepy. The boy was looking mildly annoyed in a sweatshirt and jeans, peeved in a way that said he would rather be in a suit, or maybe a cape. Something with a little more dazzle.
Also, something about him was different. Maybe it was the increasingly loud chuckling raking across the base of Crowley's spine, or maybe the way the kid stood just a bit away from everything else, a bit more there and not there at the same time. Like part of him was human and part of him was just... not.
Crowley decided not to dwell on it for now.
Leaning against an old chain link gate, he sighed and said, "You rang, Oh Lord?"
The kid ignored the drawl. "Indeed," he said, rubbing his palms together like some sort of cartoon villain. "It's time to get the ball rolling on this thing. I have a list of items for you to collect, things that we'll need in order for this to work."
"The whole... opening the gates to Hell thing. Right. Er," Crowley said. "What sort of list?" If it was the kind that involved virgin sacrifices, he was going to get very drunk, find a large basin of holy water, and take a bath.
Andy pulled a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, handing it to the demon. "Just some ingredients that I've found more difficult to procure." Crowley accepted the paper and was pleased to find that the words “virgin” and “blood” were nowhere in sight. As far as he could tell, it was a list of rare herbs - all with demonic properties, naturally, but you’d be hard pressed to find a plant that couldn’t be used for demonic purposes in some way.
Sticking the list in an inside pocket, the demon said, “Fine. That all?”
“For now,” Andy replied, and for a moment the air was thick with something dark and heavy and ancient. Crowley did his best not to shiver in an undemonic fashion and snapped himself back to his apartment.
This time he did get drunk.
Aziraphale was a good researcher. Though he had a tendency to avoid computers like the plague, he had enough books that finding the information he wanted wasn’t usually very difficult. In addition, he had a plethora of contacts that he could call upon if he was at a loss; one did not spend six thousand years in one place without making allies. On the subject of Crowley, however, Aziraphale had never been a very good researcher. The demon was incredibly hard to find, as the angel had discovered time and time again back when they had been at odds. Crowley might have been bad at acting like a demon, but he was still a fairly powerful one. When he wanted to stay hidden, he did, even from a Principality.
It had been a good week since Aziraphale had seen the demon, and he was beginning to grow truly concerned. Normally he wouldn’t be bothered by a week long absence by Crowley; at times they would go decades without saying a word to each other, simply because business got in the way, or they found something else to occupy their time. It also wasn’t uncommon for Crowley to sleep away a week or two without noticing. So generally, the angel wouldn’t have been worried by his missing demon.
However, it was very unusual for Crowley to not return calls and skip out on dinner plans they’d made weeks before. It was also unusual to have him popping up in random places and causing random inanimate objects to explode. Based on the sudden bursts of energy coming from the demon, Aziraphale would swear that Crowley’s powers were on the fritz, but he had no idea what might cause such a thing. And so far his reading had turned up nothing. Earth didn’t have a lot of material on what might cause a demon to become skittish (7).
In the end, Aziraphale resorted to spying.
On to Part 2!