Happy Holidays, vulgarweed!
Title: Sherbert Holmes and the Elephant of Surprise
Recipient: vulgarweed
Author: A Secret!
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG
Notes: 'Superintendent Crowley,' he said brusquely, flipping a wallet open and shut quickly enough that there was just a metallic shine, there and gone. He could make the Inspector - Lestrade, according to his desk plate - believe just about anything he wanted, if he tried, but why make the effort? With the right sort of attitude, the right sort of smirk under expensive sunglasses, a fake FBI badge from a box of Shredded Wheat in 1991 would do just as well. It made you despair for the whole sorry lot of them, it really did.
2 years earlier
It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon, just past three, and the sun was pouring like treacle through the dust-dimmed panes of the bookshop window. It took its time to peruse the few books the owner had left out in offering, Dan Brown's name fading into obscurity, before spreading its slow beams gently across the floor. By the time it lapped at the toe of the snakeskin boot that was swaying to and fro as it idly conducted Handel, it was moving at a particular fraction of the speed of light that had only previously been experienced on physically improbable worlds in quite incredibly distant universes. It was, in short, a day built for basking, and that was precisely what the shop's sole occupant intended to do.
Occupant was probably entirely too neutral a term for him. Customer was out, of course, since through diligent effort on the part of its proprietor the shop hadn't in fact sold any books since 1973. Crowley'd favour benevolent overlord, if asked, but he'd happily settle for 'parasite' if there was Twinings in it for him. Aziraphale, who people tended to mistakenly think was the nicer of the two, would probably have gone with 'denizen'. Then again, just now Aziraphale was in a snit, because Crowley had sneakily pincered the last bag of Assam out of the caddy and left the angel to either faff about with the loose leaf or pop along to the Tesco Metro on the corner. They'd Had Words about it. Crowley had, of course, denied everything in particularly injured tones.
It was Crowley's very favourite sort of day.
Crowley's standards had changed, recently. Any day on which the world didn't collapse petulantly into sulking disorder and threaten to bring existence to its ultimate end was, frankly, a win. That this one also included Handel, and sunshine, and the inevitable passive-aggressive tea making was really just a bonus.
In the front of the shop a tiny brass bell gave a gentle tinkle. Out there, somewhere, an angel got its wings, and rather closer at hand one grumbled under his breath and rustled a carrier bag pointedly, as Crowley deliberately adopted the most obnoxiously insouciant pose in his repertoire.
Aziraphale's progress, Crowley had found over the years, could be tracked around the shop through the particular tone and timbre of the squeaks that accompanied him. The floorboards were old and tired and had settled, in their decrepitude, into the sort of grudging proximity that necessitated garden fences. The final stuttering squawk of a high F# pulled his chin up as though it were on strings, and that particular round-cheeked glare had always played merry hell with whatever it was that roosted in his stomach. Crowley rolled his eyes and buried his face back in his book until his mouth started behaving again.
'Afternoon, angel,' he said, once he was sure his voice wouldn't betray him.
'What have you done to the Ds?' Aziraphale said, uncharacteristically snippy, even in the face of purely hypothetical tea theft.
Crowley stared at him, unblinking. He was good at that. Once his point had, he felt, been sufficiently made, he glanced from Aziraphale to the sofa he was lying on and back, as though any movement from its upholstered embrace was inconceivable. Aziraphale arched a skeptical eyebrow. He'd learned that from Crowley, too, the bastard.
'If I had any idea what you were talking about,' Crowley said loftily, 'I wouldn't have any idea what you're talking about.'
Aziraphale huffed and, after depositing the carrier safely on the rickety table, plopped himself onto the end of the sofa.
It wasn't the proximity that made Crowley's mouth dry, because the depth of corduroy between the tip of his shoe and the angel's warmth served approximately the same purpose as kevlar. It was the ease of it, the familiarity, because for a demon who'd been hanging around the more attractive areas of this big ball of mud for the better part of 4,000 years, everything was familiar at the same time that nothing was. The washing machine of history tumbled in endless cycles, fading everything over time to the same muted shade of pale-bled red, but nothing stuck around long enough to become anything more significant than that one determined sock that always stuck to the top of the machine. Of course there had always been Aziraphale the - to belabor the metaphor to the point of absurdity - twenty pence piece in the spin cycle of Crowley's patchwork history; the flashes of light and the occasional clatter drew the eye, of course, but that was just due to the nature of it. You couldn't pick the coin out a line up.
Only if Aziraphale was a lucky twenty pence piece then Crowley was a bad penny, and somehow that combination turned up over and over until proximity was pedestrian and the urge to stretch his legs out across the angel's lap, just to see, just to try his luck, had Crowley springing up from the sofa like he'd been electrocuted.
'Ts,' he said.
'Ds,' Aziraphale corrected, still looking disgruntled and a little tight, now, around the mouth.
'Teas are the only thing I've touched - and yes, that's me admitting it.' He skated lightly past it, heading through the pentatonic scale that led to the shop floor. 'What's wrong with your Ds?'
'I don't know,' Aziraphale said, a little despairing, and when Crowley risked a glance back at him he was standing with his arms crossed and a faintly lost expression on his face, holding onto his elbows like their intrinsic normality was all that was keeping him tethered. (It was a very expressive posture).
'Right,' Crowley said. Then, after a moment's taut silence, 'Adam?'
Aziraphale sucked in a breath. They didn't say his name.
Crowley trailed his fingers along the spines of the shelf in question; Dahl, Darwin, Defoe, Dickens and Dickinson, Dostoevsky and Dumas. He frowned, tapped the shelf between The Idiot and the Musketeers, thoughtfully.
'I don't know,' he said after a moment, voice oddly distracted, thoughts sliding away from the subject even as he answered. 'It looks all right to me.'
*
Present day
It was some sort of warehouse, because of course it was some sort of warehouse. Steel columns marched into the darkness on either side, a faint and improbable mist drifted, and in order to fully round out the atmosphere in the distance condensation, obligingly, dripped. It was as though the place had been waiting, created purely for the possibility that some day, somehow, someone would need to be horribly tortured.
It was a scene that begged a trussed up action figure. A setting that deserved a sweating bestubbled man with a surfeit of muscles who wore a sweat-stained vest and the blood of his enemies.
Sadly it had to make do with Aziraphale.
Aziraphale frankly considered sweating unseemly, and certainly never did so in public. His muscles were - well, they were perfectly serviceable, and he would never be caught in anything less than three layers - although he was at least, under his neatly co-ordinating jumper and shirt, most definitely wearing a vest.
His seat was entirely out of place too; a dark green wing-backed chair, mildewed and damp and possibly chewed on in places but evidently of expensive breeding. Planted next to his elbow was a lopsided end table, a page from a local paper folded tightly and tucked under one leg, and perched on its surface was a cracked china teapot and a Jubilee mug. It was a jarringly jaunty counterpoint to the room.
The other man, at least, had the grace to fit the appropriate villainous mould to a tee. His suit was expensively cut, his accent appropriately - yet comprehensibly - foreign, and a whetstone had been taken to his smile.
'Had enough?' he asked, his solicitous tone undercut by the look in his dark eyes.
If this were that certain sort of action movie, now would be the point in proceedings where Aziraphale would spit out a defiant globule of blood. He'd quite possibly smile with red-tinged teeth and say something witty to the villain that would effortlessly showcase his heroism and incidentally play well in adverts, hidden for the sake of the censor's conscience behind numbers and warnings and a gravelly voiced announcer using meaninglessly dramatic words.
Aziraphale still hadn't updated the VCR whose clock flashed midnight in some unregarded and unused room upstairs from his shop, though, and even if he had the technology available to watch them he'd never really been one for those sorts of films. The little cinema he occasionally frequented didn't even show them. So Aziraphale didn't really have a frame of reference for this sort of thing, and besides, with angels that wasn't really the way this was done. There was no blood, for starters, and most certainly no spitting; a clock, ticking just ever so slightly off tempo, a radio too quiet to be listened to but very slightly too loud to be ignored, the wince he barely held back at what had been done to the tea.
The bottom of his cup scraped against the edge of his saucer with the faint enameled squeaking of tightly gritted teeth. From somewhere deep inside, a razor-edged and black-clad corner carefully cultivated in his soul, Aziraphale dredged up a smile.
*
Something about the way the inspector scooted hurriedly upright, brushing crumbs off his front, something about the way he sadly eyed the ficus in the corner and the striped polyblend tie that was tangled in its branches, was deeply satisfying to Crowley. It was a sign he was doing his job right, fear like that.
'Superintendent Crowley,' he said brusquely, flipping a wallet open and shut quickly enough that there was just a metallic shine, there and gone. He could make the Inspector - Lestrade, according to his desk plate - believe just about anything he wanted, if he tried, but why make the effort? With the right sort of attitude, the right sort of smirk under expensive sunglasses, a fake FBI badge from a box of Shredded Wheat in 1991 would do just as well. It made you despair for the whole sorry lot of them, it really did.
'Right, Crowley,' Lestrade said, pushing to his feet and sending his office chair sailing into a filing cabinet with an indecorous crash. 'Sir,' he added belatedly. He didn't wear deference particularly well; Crowley decided he liked him.
'So,' Crowley said. 'Baker Street. You got my email?' He eyed the other man curiously - there had been a sort of aborted flinch in there.
'I thought it was pretty cut and dried,' Lestrade said, stiffly.
Crowley arched an eyebrow.
'You do, do you? Got all the answers?'
Lestrade shot him a narrow glance, his jaw tight with something Crowley wasn't entirely sure he could place, and the demon took a deep breath to calm himself just in case. His sibilance was slipping.
'Pretty sure we know everything we're going to, sir,' Lestrade said, his voice heavy.
'Right,' Crowley said, 'absolutely. The answer just fell out of the sky into our laps, did it?'
It wasn't often that a human got one up on him. He wasn't saying it never happened - they were devious when cornered, it almost made him proud. But he hadn't expected the sudden movement, the controlled violence, and he was pushed up against the window with blind slats digging painfully into his back before he could blink. He almost did, in surprise.
'You might have a shiny badge,' Lestrade hissed into his face, tone saturated with the kind of miserable, futile anger that Crowley usually used like a homing beacon. 'They may pay you the big bucks, sir, but Sherlock Holmes was my friend, and -'
'Sherlock who?' Crowley blurted. Lestrade blinked at him from entirely too close. The bags under his eyes would hold enough changes of clothes for a week in Paris, and he'd missed - the majority of his chin, actually, while shaving. He looked like a man at the end of his rope, and Crowley lifted a hand to rest on his shoulder without even really thinking about it, providing enough divine grace to get rid of a few of the lines between Lestrade's brows.
It was all the hanging about the with the angel that did it, of course. He was a horribly good influence. Speaking of -
'I don't know anything about a Sherlock,' Crowley said, trying to keep his tone steady, soothing, trying not to hiss with every breath. His suit had cost approximately the same as the GDP of one of the smaller European countries, and it was getting unforgivably mangled in Lestrade's fists. 'It's number 221 Baker Street I'm interested in.'
'Right,' Lestrade said. '221b.'
'C,' Crowley corrected.
'The basement?' Lestrade said, sounding a little incredulous. He stepped back, brushed Crowley's lapels almost absentmindedly for a moment before he seemed to realise what he was doing, what he'd done, with a slow dawning horror. Crowley watched the expression on his face like a connoisseur, but reluctantly decided that the resulting discomfort on all sides wouldn't be worth letting him dangle.
'No harm done,' he said instead, feeling like the angel in his magnanimity; he had to quickly gesture, shift the bag of sugar in the little kitchenette right to the very teetering edge of the shelf, just to feel normal again.
'So,' he said, '221c.'
Every now and again the angel got these fancies. He'd probably been doing it for as long as he was on humanity's green Earth, but Crowley had only been around enough to notice it for the past couple of years. (It was like an abscess in his chest, an odd sort of sucking sore that he had to keep poking at. If humans felt this sort of thing all the time, it was no wonder they messed about with asps, and ill-advised suicide pacts, and thousands of ships).
In any case, something had caught his attention, and Crowley had almost had a heart attack - in the purely metaphorical, to all intents and purposes immortal sense - when he'd gone around to the bookshop and found it locked up and dark and shuttered. The only reassuring thing about the scene had been the distinct lack of graffiti, the fact that even though it was a weekend it hadn't been used as a public convenience. The angel wasn't gone, then, merely absent, and when he thought to check through the pile of correspondence he hadn't thought to vanish in a while there was a change of address card in Aziraphale's unnecessarily fussy copperplate.
That would have been an end to it if he hadn't been sauntering (not hopefully, he wouldn't admit to hopefully) through Soho one morning, only to find streaks of white across Aziraphale's old-fashioned shutters. DAVID CAMERON IS A WANKER, it unimaginatively yet probably accurately stated, and Crowley had felt his heart drop into his stomach, his boots, or any other metaphorical resting place you could choose to name.
Hence the ruse, hence the police station, hence the faintly suspicious look Lestrade sent his way as they waited to brief the team.
'Don't remember hearing of you before, sir,' he said.
'Been undercover,' Crowley told him, blessing the Met and its bureaucratic nightmare of an internal communication system. 'All very hush hush. Plus I'm not really local.'
'No?' Lestrade asked, as the chosen team trailed into the room like school kids into assembly, with the requisite shoving and the whinges about folding chairs.
'From down under, originally,' Crowley said, with a slight smirk under dark glasses Lestrade was too polite to ask him to remove.
'Huh,' Lestrade said. 'I wouldn't have guessed, from the accent.'
'No.' Not many people would guess. It wasn't something he really wanted to think about, not with how much of a problem it could become. 'I guess you could say I've gone native,' he said.
A sudden burst of laughter startled him out of his reverie and Crowley looked up. The double take that resulted would have been the stuff of cinematic legend, had there only been a camera. The shoving and nudging and general horseplay had escalated a quite ridiculous amount, focused around four figures on the opposite side of the room, three dressed in perfectly fitted uniforms that nonetheless looked entirely alien against their ridiculously youthful faces.
'Oh bless me,' he said, under his breath and over the sudden and unhelpful pounding of his heart. 'Not you.'
*
'When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in -'
'Oxford,' Anathema interrupted from the kitchen, and Tracy let out a small sigh. 'Oxford, please!'
'Anathema,' she admonished gently.
'Well it's just that I can get the 91 from practically outside my front door,' Anathema continued, wiping her hands briskly on a tea towel as she appeared in the kitchen doorway. 'Everywhere else involves trains, and Phaeton's not the same on hills as -' she deflated slightly, finally picking up on the atmosphere, adopting a long-suffering look that was entirely too old for her face. 'Oh very well,' she said ungraciously, dropping into a mismatched ladder back chair and folding her arms. 'Get on with it.'
'- or in rain,' the newest member of their little circle finished with an uncertain little laugh. 'I'm afraid that's all I can remember.'
'It's all anyone ever can, Mrs Hudson dear,' Tracy told her soothingly. She patted Mrs Hudson's hand gently, then snatched her hand back when the long dangling sleeve of the blouse she wore for her mediuming flirted with one of the numerous candles set in saucers all over the table. Even without looking Tracy could tell that Anathema was watching her with that particular expression of superior smugness that fit her face like it was made for it. She didn't understand the ambulance of being a medium; Anathema didn't hold much with any of the trappings, to be perfectly frank, and had very little patience with the seances that Tracy still held. For someone with actual, hereditary, practically visible psychic abilities, Anathema was remarkably close-minded.
'I just don't know why you'd want to speak to the dead,' she'd told Tracy once, because Anathema wasn't terribly good at asking. 'They're just like the living, only even more horribly tedious.'
Well there's your problem right there, Tracy wanted to tell her. You'd never see the point of seances if you weren't fascinated by people. More than half of Tracy's messages from the Beyond were manufactured entirely under the genuine 1920s beaded turban she insisted on wearing. (More like three quarters, her conscience prompted her; it had learned over time to be generous in its estimates). It wasn't about what the dead wanted to say and never had been; seances and mediums and the like were entirely about what the living wanted to hear. People are strange and dull and wonderful and terrible and different every second, Tracy wanted to tell her, and she found them fascinating. That they found her fascinating too, the boost of the ego that gave her, that didn't go amiss either.
(Tracy, not having had a classical education - or much of an education at all - didn't know that the original meaning of fascinate meant to bewitch, from fascinum: spell, or witchcraft. She didn't know, but she'd like it).
Besides, she wanted to tell Anathema, her main source of income didn't pay nearly so well as it used to, not with her regulars reaching an age at which the spirit is more interested in crosswords and cups of tea. The flesh of most of them, of course, had been rather unwilling for quite some time, but she wasn't against being paid for some perfunctory fondling, a cup of tea and a ferocious Boggle competition. In any case, there was only so long you could keep a man in cans of condensed milk on what little that raked in, so she'd stepped up the seances, tarot readings, and bought in boxes of loose leaf tea. So, she wanted to conclude, quite possibly with a haughty sniff, how Tracy chose to spend her time was between her and her clients, and provided she wasn't hurting any body Anathema had no business commenting on it.
She wanted to say all that, but listening was another of those things that Anathema wasn't particularly good at.
'So, Oxford?' Anathema said again.
'Oh dear,' Mrs Hudson said, in the faintly fluffy tones that concealed, Tracy had found, an iron will - like a ball bearing concealed in a marshmallow. 'Oh dear, I wouldn't be able to come along to Oxford. I don't get out much. My hip, you know.'
Madame Tracy made appropriately soothing noises.
'How about some reiki, then?' she asked. It was another of those things she was trying on for size, because as far as she could tell no one could ever prove you weren't doing it correctly.
'Oh no,' said Mrs Hudson, with an uncharacteristically poisonous towards downstairs. 'I don't hold with foreign foods.'
'I'm sorry I couldn't hear anything from your young man,' Tracy said, settling back into their previous conversation only partly for the annoyed look it put on Anathema's face. She'd been coming to see Mrs Hudson for a couple of months now, had managed some credible messages from her happily departed husband and late lamented mother, but the woman was talkative enough that Tracy knew she was better off not even attempting to mimic the incredible Sherlock Holmes. He sounded, from Mrs Hudson's mouth, like some sort of outlandish character from a book.
'Oh that's all right,' Mrs Hudson said, 'he didn't hold much with psychic sorts when he was alive, he's certain to be a righteous terror to them now he's dead. Even his John wouldn't dream of subjecting someone to a seance with Sherlock storming through it.' She sighed. 'It's just a shame he couldn't have been about to work out what happened to my downstairs lodger.'
While Tracy was still trying to work out if that was a euphemism, and if so what for, Anathema stood up and clapped her hands.
'Well this has been lovely,' she said, with a faintly acidic look at Tracy, 'but we really must be going.'
'...of the Patient Resident, John would probably call it,' Mrs Hudson said, chuckling to herself. 'Goodness but he had a lot to put up with, what with the police through at all hours of the - oh, are you off?'
'We really must be,' Tracy said regretfully. She'd stay longer, only she needed Anathema to refer to as her granddaughter and really sell the 'forgotten the over sixties bus pass' act.
Tracy had tried on shame, once, in the '80s. It hadn't fit.
'Well remind me to tell you about it next time,' Mrs Hudson said, trailing after them to the door. 'All candles, he had, and chalk circles all over my nice clean floor. Such a nice man, too! Still, at least most witchcraft doesn't smell as strongly as the marijuana the girl before him had. I was almost relieved when she moved out, although I will miss her baking.' She brushed past them to tug at the door, which had swollen slightly in the rain. 'Oh, hello Inspector,' she said when it finally opened, apparently entirely unfazed at the sight of the better part of the Met's homicide unit outside her front door.
Tracy felt her mouth drop open. She'd always liked a man in uniform, and these were so much more realistic than the ones she usually saw.
'Afternoon, Mrs Hudson,' the Inspector said. Nice looking chap he was, too, if - Tracy suspected - a little vanilla in the bedroom. 'Tea for -' he looked over his shoulder - 'about a dozen?' To his credit, he at least looked a little shamefaced.
'Oh dear,' Mrs Hudson fluttered. 'Yes, of course. No, that's fine.'
Tracy eyed one of the policemen towards the back of the rabble; sharp-suited, beautifully cheekboned, and naggingly familiar. She turned to Anathema. There was a quick exchange of the sort women master as soon as there are faintly permanent men in their life, all conducted with eyebrows and micro-expressions, and Tracy turned back around, triumphant.
'We'll give you a hand, dear,' she said. 'And don't you give me your no sugar nonsense,' she called to the inspector, as she sailed back up the stairs. 'I'm ever so good at knowing what men want.'
*
2 years earlier
The Annual Tadfield Bring and Buy was in less than two weeks. It had been the Annual Tadfield Blue Peter Bring and Buy, but there had been a series of unimpressed letters in the Advertiser after one of the presenters had been found in a public convenience with a suspicious quantity of off-white powder and a rent boy named Jim.
Small town politics were a fraught and convoluted business, and the contributions to the Annual Tadfield Bring and Buy were a massive indicator of status within the village. It showed the collected mothers of Tadfield not only what one had, but what one could afford to give away. One year Mrs Ashraf-Smythe had been foolish enough to leave the receipt in the bag, evidence of the terrible sin of buying for the sale, and had never lived it down. She had eventually moved to Greater Tadfield out of shame.
Mr Young, therefore, had been sent for his annual investigation of the garage, attic and the crawlspace on the first floor to see what Deirdre could hold over her friends in subtle comments and sideways smiles for at least the next half a decade.
Mr Young was a man built for garages, and attics, and crawlspaces on the first floor. He could spend many a happy hour in the dust, having pulled on an ancient boiler suit for the purpose, tucked away in a designated Male Sanctum that avoided the chatter, floral scents and potential for tears that he dimly associated with women, despite all evidence from his wife and daughter to the contrary. Occasionally he made sure to make clattering noises, just to signal that he was still paying attention, to dismiss any possibility of being dragged away to be sociable with the endless stream of women at this time of year.
The children were now old enough to have outgrown a huge number of their toys and games, and there was the possibility that there was something that would be good enough condition not to embarrass them horribly. Sarah's boxes were full of that particularly obnoxious shade of pink that advertisers had decided attracted small female children like flies to the leavings of the family pet; Adam's were a random assortment of any number of things. Microscopes and telescopes, crystal growing kits and recipe books and a pair of reassuringly flexible and blunt swords.
Perhaps the oddest collection of objects was the bubble pipe that sat atop a magnifying glass and an odd sort of hat with flaps to cover the ears. A deerstalker, Mr Young thought it was called. He couldn't for the life of him understand why the items were all set together; every child had a brief period of discovery involving magnifying glasses and ants. Horrible, of course, but perfectly natural. The hat, though - with Adam's imagination, Mr Young fought the urge to cast about for a stray rifle.
Now he thought about it he could vaguely remember Adam marching around with all of the accessories in place. Something about gingerbread houses, sherbet homes perhaps? Bacon?
The thought was like a soap bubble, though, slippery and elusive and quickly dissipated. A shrill voice called from below and Mr Young set to industriously rattling boxes, all thoughts of Adam's games safely tucked to the back of his mind.
*
Present day
It was like one of those old comedy sketches, Madame Tracy reflected. The ones where they create an endless stream of policemen by sending them out through the window and back in through the front door. Mrs Hudson's poor kettle was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because along with the stream of sensible police boots came thoroughly sensible police appetites and the bladders of elephants. Mrs Hudson had had to dig out her best china to cope with the influx, and she was fluttering about with coasters and stray pieces of china, and if it weren't terribly impolite she probably would have resorted to goalie gloves, too.
Anathema had popped to the shops for supplies the better part of two hours ago, and had invited Tracy to go too with some fairly emphatic head jerks, but Tracy was oddly fascinated by the palaver, by where the palaver seemed to originate.
The only pair not affected by the invisible center of gravity in the basement were settled in Mrs Hudson's kitchen with her; the young(ish) man in the aran jumper settled at the table with a sweetened cup of tea, and Mrs Hudson in gentle orbit around him, stopping by to touch his elbow or shoulder whenever she thought she could get away with it. He looked up as one of the police came to the door, odd without a uniform amongst the forest of blue, and squinted at him through one eye the way that Tracy had taken to, to counteract the oddness of his flickering.
'I'm Adam Older,' he said. 'I'm a consulting detective. This is D.I. Salt, and D.I. Cheese, and this is - is -' he stared blankly at the solid sort behind him.
'P.C. Brian,' the man said helpfully. With both her eyes open, Tracy was convinced they all had mustaches. Even the woman. She closed one eye again.
'Have you had any luck?' Mrs Hudson asked, in the worn thin cheer of a woman who's mentally resigned herself to chipped handles and eternal shame, should the queen ever come to tea.
'Not much,' Lestrade said, pushing his way through to the front, taking a small absentminded detour in order to avoid Older entirely. The one with the cheekbones followed him through; his detour was entirely deliberate.
'Just the chalk, the unlit candles. A couple of them had fallen over, was that you or -'
'Oh no,' Mrs Hudson said, 'Sherlock would have my -' she swallowed, cast a glance at the man at the table, but he was more interested in the police in the doorway. 'I know how to preserve a crime scene,' she finished stiffly.
'Right then.' Older clapped his hands, and three police officers with him snapped to attention. 'Back to the station.' They piled out, shoving their way through the door like children at the end of the school day, bickering about who was going to drive, and whether they were going to get to use the siren this time, please Adam...
'But - but they're thirteen,' the man at the table said eventually, once they were most definitely gone.
There was something a little glassy about Lestrade's eyes when he clapped him on the shoulder.
'Showing your age, John,' he said, 'they get younger every year.'
'No, they're,' John said, half under his breath, as Lestrade exchanged goodbyes and the Superintendent watched with an unnervingly unblinking stare, 'literally, I mean -'
Tracy patted his hand soothingly, as Lestrade and the Superintendent took their leave, passing Anathema and her lone carrier bag at the door.
'Is no one else seeing this?' John said, a frustrated plea to the universe.
'Goodness but you've got a pair of eyes on you,' Tracy said. 'Don't miss much, do you? Rather oddly shaped blind spot, though.'
'One that's about six foot tall,' Anathema said, scrutinising John. 'With a face like a horse. You should shave off the mustache,' she added sternly. 'It really doesn't suit you.'
'We're going,' the Superintendent said, abrupt and audibly frustrated. 'He didn't complete the - there's nothing useful here.'
'Right,' Lestrade said, the glassiness in his expression replaced by the dogged expression of all true policemen. 'We'll get back to the station, work out our next steps. Thanks for the tea, Mrs Hudson, glad we caught you in.'
'Oh, you always know where to find me,' Mrs Hudson said, something oddly heavy about her tone, like the almost inaudible resonance after the striking of a church bell. Madame Tracy examined her thoughtfully.
'We should go too,' she says thoughtfully after a moment. 'After all that business I've quite gone off tea. What do you say Mrs Hudson? One of those floofy coffees would just about hit the spot.'
'Oh Mrs Hudson can't leave Baker Street,' John says absently, remembering something, or quoting something, something he's heard more than once. 'England would fall.'
'Hmm,' said Tracy. She squinted sidelong at Anathema, but she never seemed to listen right when people spoke. She wasn't ever so good at body language, not unless it was practically staring her in the face.
Prophecies were only proper if they were printed, with her.
*
Crowley leaned against a wall and watched.
To the casual observer the stillness would seem calm. He stood out against the chaos of the office, the chaos centered on a slightly built officer with sun-gold hair that curled against his head. He was a point of peace against which the chaos battered in vain, or so it initially appeared. It'd take a longer perusal than anyone had the attention for to note the white knuckles, the thinner than usual lips, the relentlessly tapping (and quite possibly not regulation) snakeskin boot.
It wasn't even his position that rankled overly. Crowley was a game piece, he'd resigned himself to this over the years; he'd always considered himself to be slightly more important than a pawn, at least. A rook, maybe, or - well, okay, no horses, and bishops were out for obvious reasons. Definitely a rook, then, although he didn't like the thought of Aziraphale being a bishop. He'd prefer to imagine they stood in the back row side by side, elbowing each other when things got dull.
It was an odd line of thought, he supposed, since any sort of logic would suggest that they'd be on opposite sides of the great chessboard of life. But what sort of logic could apply to anything like this, where fate had its reins held by a thirteen year old boy with the face of an angel and the smile of the devil? Everything had always and ever been shades of grey, and Aziraphale and Crowley had long had their colours mixed up in the wash.
So it wasn't his position that rankled, it was - well, it was the lack of somebody to elbow. This was all a game, and no matter who won or how the board was upset in the process he was relatively certain that all the game pieces would make it through to the end. Adam was conscientious, he put away his toys when he was done. Crowley just had the faintly nagging, horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach that Aziraphale's piece might end up spending some time lost in the dust under the piano until the box was pulled out again, until Adam was once more ready to play.
The thought of time spent without Aziraphale, without knowing precisely where to find him, made Crowley feel rather like that lost piece, buried in drifts of thick grey, not quite able to breathe.
'Can I interview a suspect?' one of Adam's little minions said, excited. Crowley tilted his head back against the wall, cool plaster slowly bleeding away the over heating but doing nothing much about the temper behind it.
'Go on then,' Adam said, a little smile curling his perfect mouth, and Crowley pushed away from the wall before he could think, because he had to, because thinking at this point would only stop him and stopping was the last thing he could do.
Eerily blue eyes were watching him before he was more than halfway across the office, the air around him thickening with Adam's attention, testing his will.
'I remember you,' Adam said when he got close enough, and there was something underlying it that made it sound like a threat. 'I remember all about you.'
'I'm not here to stop you,' Crowley said, crossing his fingers where they were shoved deeply into his pockets.
'Doesn't much matter if you are,' Adam said with a shrug.
'I just thought,' Crowley forged on, through gritted teeth, 'maybe you could find someone else to play the victim, you know? Maybe you could leave the angel out of it.'
Adam blinked at him, and the lack of recognition in his eyes felt like an open wound.
'Angel?' he said. 'What angel?'
*
Aziraphale, for lack of anything else to occupy him, for fear that his grinding teeth might wear down to something that would require an entirely new body, had fished out the page that was supporting one of the table legs. The spelling mistakes alone were enough to lose one's faith in humanity, he thought to himself, and the stories were even worse. Petty disputes and bickering on a global scale; there was nothing to give one any sort of hope at all. It didn't even seem worth saving any of them, didn't seem worth the effort he went to every -
The thought fit badly inside his head. It was roughened at the edges, poorly carved, and the oil that had got it in there left a slick over all his other thoughts.
'Ah,' said Aziraphale. 'You're back.'
'Give me time,' the other man said, with a cheerfully cracked grin. 'Give me time and you won't even recognise me in there.'
'Well as tempting as the offer is,' Aziraphale said, plastering all the serenity he had left to muster to every inch of his tone, 'I'm afraid I have friends that will arrive shortly. One in particular that I'm fairly sure you wouldn't want to face.' He leaned forward a little in his chair, the discomfort of it prompting a tiny shift in the shale of his thoughts, uncharitable thoughts skittering across the surface of his mind and loosening the mountain of faith and goodness a little with every pass. 'Look,' he said, matter-of-fact and earnest and far kinder than his mind wanted him to think the man deserved. 'Look, you don't have to do this, you know.'
'Oh,' the man answered, 'I really think I do.' His singsong tone put Aziraphale's teeth on edge.
'Then you deserve whatever you get,' Aziraphale said, a boulder bounding down the slopes of serenity he'd maintained over the temptations of years. 'You deserve whatever is coming to you.' He smiled a smile he wasn't sure his face had worn before, his muscles stretching strangely around it, oiled at the edges.
'Hell is empty,' the man said, 'and all the devils are here.'
'Oh yes,' said Aziraphale, leaning back in his chair, 'but they're really not so bad as all that once you get to know them, you know. But I'm sure, oh I'm reasonably certain, that Crowley can be persuaded.' The smile was settling more comfortably under his skin, now, and the man was watching him with hungry dark eyes. 'He's coming, you know.'
'Yes,' said the man. 'Oh yes, that's what I'm counting on.' And he laughed a laugh that was high-pitched and loud, that shook the foundations of Aziraphale's smile until it collapsed. Until he felt entirely himself again, and entirely afraid.
*
2 years earlier
The Dark Council had not been pleased.
It was such a small way to say it, so inadequate, but there weren't words in all of Earth and Hell that would entirely describe it. Hell believed in efficiency, in making the most of its every asset, and Hastur's wealth of experience in the field could not be discounted. But time was a human construct (and lunchtime, perhaps, doubly so); Hell could make an hour last precisely as long as it wanted to, and Hastur felt every last minute of that want.
And with every gasping, heaving breath, with every regrowth of his eyes and his nails and his skin, with every shuddering exhale from new and old and battered lungs, Hastur repeated a name.
Crowley's name.
Crowley had always called them 14th century minds. Thought they hadn't heard him, with his slick sunglasses and his car telephones, with his wide thinking and quotas and benchmarking. All the little modern touches that made Hell love him, let them overlook his less than deplorable quirks.
Hastur preferred to think of himself as more of a Renaissance man. He'd always been a fan of what the Spanish Inquisition had come up with. But Crowley was right, he was old fashioned; he was methodical and he was slow.
So when he appeared in the middle of Soho in a cloud of greasy smoke, when he picked out a name for the vessel he'd chosen (James Moriarty had seemed nicely harmless, nicely pedestrian), Hastur took his time to check out the lay of the land.
Patiently, he'd started to plan.
*
Present day
Madame Tracy had been thinking. She'd been thinking quietly and ferociously through the floofy coffee she'd persuaded Anathema to buy her. She'd been thinking so quietly and so long that Anathema had started to look almost worried, had bustled them out of the shop and into the fresh air.
She quite liked England, of course. She'd quite liked the world, too, and she felt the same sort of need to do her part in saving it. But one couldn't save something, she decided, without it being decisively in danger in the first place. It wasn't like she could spend all her time hanging about in London and waiting for something to happen, and it was a terrible heavy load of a thing to pin to Mrs Hudson. Almost cruel, to expect her not to leave that old fashioned flat of hers.
So when a vintage black Bentley drove up next to them, when the policeman with the sunglasses and the beautiful cheekbones leaped out, all in a tizzy, she decisively dropped the dregs of her frappiato into a bin.
'It's Mrs Hudson,' she said firmly, and climbed into the passenger seat, leaving the policeman - Crowley, that was his name - and Anathema to sort themselves out.
'It's what?' Crowley said. 'I - look, you two are psychics or something, right?'
'Or something,' Anathema said, casting a quite uncharitable look at Tracy. She decided to ignore it, for the sake of speed.
'It's Mrs Hudson,' Tracy said again. 'She's holding it all together.'
'All what?' Crowley looked like he was almost tearing his hair out, all flustered and desperate and with sadness in every long line of him.
'Oh,' she said, 'oh it's your young man, isn't it?' She remembered him now, in the fuzzy way that one remembers dreams; soft, he'd been, older than she'd thought him, and all kind of gold around the edges.
Crowley let out the sort of undignified snort that's snottier than it's meant to be, the sort that stood in, in public, for tears. He rubbed his eyes under his sunglasses and breathed heavily for a moment, and Anathema, uncertainly, reached out and patted his hand gently. Tracy beamed with pride for a moment or two, then loudly tutted.
'Come on then, you two,' she called, 'we aren't getting any younger!'
It wasn't an easy business, bundling a woman with determined dignity into the back of a Bentley, but eventually they managed it and tooled - far faster than Tracy would have thought remotely possible at this time of day - to Baker Street. It wasn't as though she needed the confirmation that Crowley wasn't entirely human, but the fact that he found a parking space just exactly outside the little cafÈ marked him as a worryingly powerful sort.
Mrs Hudson, when she answered the door, gave Madame Tracy a far cannier look than she'd thus far managed. Tracy'd always suspected, of course - no one could give off so perfect an impression of helplessness without some level of devious cunning - but she was almost taken aback at the firmness of the refusal.
'No,' Mrs Hudson said, and it seemed to reverberate as though they were in a much smaller space, as though the sky didn't go all the way to the heavens after all.
'Well I can see there's no persuading you,' Tracy said.
'No,' Mrs Hudson said again, but there was a level of ease in her tone now, something entirely more human, and that was the opening Tracy had been looking for. You couldn't do the job that Tracy had had for years without some flexibility, without a strong core and the thighs of a Valkyrie. She bent and shoved her head under one of Mrs Hudson's arms, gripping her about the waist and shoving herself upright so Mrs Hudson was practically upside down over her shoulder. It wasn't an easy business, she had to tug hard against a moment of rootedness, a moment of dizziness, as though gravity itself had been defied. But if Mrs Hudson was the immovable object then Madame Tracy was the unstoppable force, and she was an unstoppable force with years of experience.
'Start the car!' she bellowed, as she raced for it, and she pushed and shoved and toppled Mrs Hudson into Anathema's lap and dived into the front seat even as Crowley pulled away, just in time.
England fell.
*
Aziraphale was counting stars when the world ended.
In fact it was only England, he'd find out later, but he wasn't to know - and frankly neither were they. Presumably the world would notice if England went entirely off the map, so who was counting the responses and reactions? And if they didn't exist, then did the event? If a tree falls and nobody twits, then did it really happen?
('Tweets,' Crowley said, exasperated, when he was relating this story later, 'it's tweets, angel.' But he was smiling into his hands, Aziraphale could see around the edges of it, and they happened so often now that Aziraphale had ceased counting them, so how exasperated could he really be?)
The warehouse had run out of things to entertain him but something was needed to drown out the doubting voices that were starting to take over his head. Those slimy insidious thoughts that still didn't feel anything like his own but were getting too loud to drown out. So Aziraphale was counting stars through a skylight when the world ended, when the fog descended, when everything outside of the warehouse he was sitting in went silent in unison. Everything except the familiar putter of an ancient motor pulling up, the familiar creak of an elderly handbrake, the twin slams of familiar undersized doors.
Then there was a distinctly unfamiliar cry of delight from outside.
'Ooh, it's like Alison Wonderland!' it said. 'The road's been all brushed away behind us!'
'Alice,' another said, exasperated and long suffering. 'It's Alice.'
'Alice Wonderland?' the first replied, dubious. 'No, that doesn't sound -'
'Alice in,' the second voice said, 'and hush, will you?'
'It's all right,' a third chimed in, resigned, and Aziraphale's breath caught in his throat almost hard enough to choke him. 'I think the element of surprise has been conclusively lost.'
'Oh,' said the first voice, 'element. I suppose that does make more sense.'
The warehouse door slowly rattled open to reveal a ragtag bunch. Two women were supporting a third, all of them looking a little worse for wear. The one on the left was tall with dark hair, the one on the right - well, it was difficult to see much past the false eyelashes. The one in the middle looked sort of washed out and thin, hard to see against the backdrop of grey. Only it wasn't on the first glance that Aziraphale noticed all this, because his first glance was taken entirely with Crowley.
They're friends, he would have admitted, before all of this. Crowley had long since made the step up from acquaintance, because acquaintances' arrivals don't stir up the stomach so. Only Aziraphale, being who and what he is, had never been altogether familiar with the 'friends' concept. Had never really had all that much to compare it to. So it wasn't until that moment, that view of Crowley framed in the doorway, those familiar sunglasses and the entirely unfamiliar relieved smile, that Aziraphale realised. That Aziraphale recognised that this really wasn't just 'friends' at all.
'Crowley,' he breathed, and Crowley's smile changed into something more familiar, something that felt like lazy Sundays where it was almost as though the world didn't exist outside of the two of them, as though he needed nothing beyond his shop. Aziraphale choked out a small laugh at the thought, one that sounded threadbare at the edges, because of course it would take the end of the world - again - for him to notice quite what he'd been feeling.
Crowley took two stumbling steps forward, almost as though he couldn't help it. Just far enough that he could see the man waiting to Aziraphale's right, the dark empty eyes and his sharp empty smile. He stopped as though he'd run into a brick wall.
'Hello Crowley,' the man said, vicious delight in his voice.
'Hastur,' Crowley hissed.
'Oh bugger,' Aziraphale swore.
Demons should fight like angels. It's in the genes. They should fight with swords and hell fire and skill, they should fight like they're a spectacle, like a medieval painter's somewhere just off to the side, taking down every particular. They should fight, Aziraphale thought, like there are rules.
But Crowley and Hastur fought like they were human, and like they hated each other. There was nothing clean about it, nothing anyone would want to paint. There was just fists and there was fury, punches thrown with the weight of worlds.
And Crowley was losing. Crowley was falling back. And Aziraphale was powerless to help him because Aziraphale is an angel, and Crowley is a demon as much as Hastur is, and any divine intervention couldn't result in anything but cataclysm. Not this time.
If anything was going to stop it, it was going to have to be something else entirely.
*
2 years earlier
Adam stood for a moment in the ruins of a bookshop.
A moment is subjective. It's far less defined than a second, and this was far less than a second. Adam stood for a moment, a millisecond of a millisecond, a fleeting fragmentary fraction of eternity.
And as he put back what had been, as he tweaked and adjusted and made things better, he thought about how it couldn't always be games. About how he couldn't always be playing. And how it was just unfair, actually, that all the best sorts of things only seemed to happen in stories.
He'd learned not to push, though, because pushing didn't end well for anybody. He just nudged. Suggested. They just didn't play Sherbert Holmes much, after that. Like their minds started to slowly slide off it, as though the world was slowly making space for something else.
*
Present day
Tracy had never approved of violence.
Pain was fine, of course. Pain was a large part of her stock in trade, and so long as everyone was consenting and everyone was enjoying themselves, pain was a perfectly acceptable alternative to another Sunday night in front of the telly.
But violence, while sharing a similar sort of soundtrack, always made her a little sick to the stomach. Still, of the three of them, she felt she was the one best qualified to deal with men - or at least man-shaped beings - so she levered Mrs Hudson's weight entirely onto Anathema and tucked them both behind a crate.
'Stay here,' she said, and Anathema's mouth opened for an immediate protest. Tracy slapped her hand over it before anything could come out. 'Be sensible at her, dear,' she said. 'You're ever so good at that.'
Ignoring the look of outrage and faint hurt, Tracy straightened and cast around for something that could be helpful, making a small triumphant noise when she saw what was tucked behind a stack of pallets. She kicked off her faintly impractical heels, hoiked up her M&S skirt, and clambered into the cab of the fork lift truck.
What would have happened next to the industrious deus ex machine operator, trundling slowly across the rough concrete floor and aimed squarely at a pair of deadlocked demons, is anybody's guess. Just at that moment, though, there was a loud grinding crash, a juddering smash, and the sort of silence that the dictates of narrative causality insist must be punctuated by a tiny rolling tinkle.
The demons froze as though they were frozen in amber. The forklift shuddered and died beneath her, a fate that poor Mr Perkins had narrowly avoided just the week before. It put her in the perfect position to best appreciate the figure that appeared in the gaping warehouse door.
Every aspect of the scenery worked together to display him to best advantage. The security lighting, cast against the peak of a deerstalker, cast his face into mysterious shadow; the reflection from a serendipitously angled crowbar lit just his knowing smile; the low slow mist that had so despaired of Aziraphale curled about his ankles like an affectionate cat. He was the perfect movie hero, the epitome of a noir detective, and it only very slightly spoiled the picture that he didn't look as though his voice had yet had time to break.
Three rather less impressive figures crowded into the doorway behind him, and the addition to the scene made it entirely more real, less crafted, more human.
'Can't believe you didn't let us use the siren,' the girl grumbled.
'Pepper,' said the chunkier boy, sternly, 'that would have upset the elephant.' He walked forward until he was shoulder to shoulder with the boy in the deerstalker, and regarded Madame Tracy, the forklift, the no-longer warring demons with the cynical eye of one who'd seen CGI that was better than this, thanks. 'However did you work it out, Holmes,' he said, in the slightly mechanical tones of one who's been coached.
'Elementary, my dear Wensley,' the Young boy said, and puffed industriously on a pipe that produced a rainbow of bubbles. The eyes of all the adults watched them as they drifted across the warehouse, alighting on the rough concrete and staying for an unlikely moment before they popped.
Alongside, apparently, Anathema's temper.
'Adam Young,' she shouted, with a voice like the crack of doom, with a voice like the very essence of mothers, with a voice that made Adam hunch his shoulders and duck his head into his collar. For the first time he looked like the thirteen year old boy he was, scowling at his tennis shoes and scuffing his feet across the concrete. 'What do you think you are doing?'
'I was only playing,' he mumbled. 'Didn't s'pose anyone could tell me off, not if I was only playing.'
'You are old enough to know better,' Anathema said, and his - the - Them all gasped like she'd said something unpalatable to a vicar. Adam just scowled more ferociously, scuffed more viciously.
'Um.'
It was the man they'd come to rescue, the one Crowley had been quite so beside himself over. He wasn't, in Tracy's professional opinion, all that much to look at. Sort of fusty, rumpled, badly dressed. He looked so nice, though. Not nice like people used it these days, like a biscuit or something else bland and undistinguished. More like a cup of tea and a pair of slippers after a terrible sort of day. And Crowley looked like a man who had a fair few terrible days.
'Sorry,' the man continued, flushing faintly along the apples of his cheeks as everyone turned to look at him, 'but know better than what, precisely? I mean, how on Earth did you -' he pinched the bridge of his nose, looking like a headache was slowly forming. 'Isn't Sherbert Holmes - wasn't there a book?'
'Everyone exists somewhere,' Adam said, sulkiness tempered slightly by the touch of schoolboy pride. 'Just had to shuffle them across a little.'
'And Mrs Hudson?' Tracy asked, her voice a little strained as she tried to climb down from the fork lift truck without flashing anybody her knickers. Or tried to give that impression, anyway.
'Had to anchor it somewhere,' Adam said, with a shrug.
'That was thoughtless,' Anathema said. She'd brought out the big guns now, Tracy thought with admiration. She'd never heard someone sound so disappointed. Adam shrugged again, just one shoulder this time, but Tracy noticed he didn't meet anyone's eye.
'Sorry,' he said, half under his breath. The word seemed to do wonders for Mrs Hudson, though, who got some colour back into her cheeks and stood on her own two feet.
'Better,' said Anathema. 'Now put everything back where you found it.'
'Even him?' Adam said. He gestured vaguely to where the demons were standing, paused mid-fight. When Tracy looked closer she could see that they were moving after all, only infinitely slowly. There was something hideous about watching the incremental formation of a resigned expression on Crowley's face, as Hastur's fist moved towards him like a tectonic plate.
'Yes, him,' Aziraphale snapped. 'The further the better.'
'But he's the arch enemy,' Adam said, a touch wistfully. 'It'd be interestin', having an arch enemy.'
'And should we unleash Hastur on another dimension?' Aziraphale asked, worriedly.
'Oh I'm sure he'd be no trouble,' Tracy assured him. 'Mr Crowley's barely a bother at all.'
'Everything,' Anathema insisted.
Mostly Anathema got her way through the fierce belief that nothing could go against the way she'd decided the world would be. It came, Tracy supposed, from the rock hard knowledge of events she'd had since a young age. Against that mountain of certainty even Adam's will would bow.
'Fine,' Adam said. 'Everything. My part of this story's finished with, anyway.'
He lifted his hand, that simple gesture like the first shivers of the wings of one of those butterflies, the ones that cause cyclones - but he was stopped by a gentle tug at his sleeve.
'And what about Sherlock?' Mrs Hudson asked.
That was bravery, that, Tracy thought. Couldn't get much braver; talking to a boy who was strong enough to move worlds, just to see what you could do for a friend. Tracy felt an abrupt pang of sadness that her world didn't contain a Mrs Hudson, not really. Maybe she'd have to have a go at those books of his.
'Wouldn't be much of a story,' Adam said, 'if the main character died before the end. Not the kind of story I'd want, anyway.'
Mrs Hudson fell back with a smile and Adam looked around with one eyebrow raised, as though challenging someone else to speak, and then he abruptly gestured, and the world changed.
'Abracadabra,' he said.
*
It was a Sunday afternoon, just past three, and the rain was pounding against the front of the bookshop. Someone nearby was playing dubstep loud enough that the tea cups were rattling, the milk was on the turn, and Crowley had the nagging feeling that there was something he'd forgotten.
Aziraphale squeaked his slow way to the back of the shop, having locked the door against the Sunday hordes (his word; two ladies had popped into the shop and popped swiftly out again at the look Aziraphale had sent them). He stopped on a low G, in front of the fiction shelves, somewhere close to the beginning of the alphabet, if Crowley was any judge.
'We've a surfeit of Ds,' he said, bewildered, and Crowley felt something in his chest give an uncomfortable warm lurch for the sake of a pronoun. He cursed himself under his breath, but that didn't prevent the slow smile from forming.
'Well I've a distinct lack of T,' Crowley said, savouring the huffs of annoyance and, more so, the detour into the key of B minor and the gentle click of the kettle's switch.
When Aziraphale settled Crowley was barely sprawled at all, the cushion beside him carefully chosen to be the most inviting one. The brimming cup of tea must have knocked his balance off centre, though, because it wasn't long until the lean resumed.
Somewhere something had cracked or shifted, enough to let in an insidious draft, and it was just where it could find its way onto the back of the neck of whoever was on the sofa, but Crowley was finding it difficult to care. He ducked his head further into his collar and shifted so Aziraphale's arm - which had shifted as he did, warm against the back of his neck - served as better protection. Somewhere nearby the bass emphatically dropped, momentarily obscuring the play on Radio 4; something about detectives, he thought, a detective, a vaguely familiar name. The angel pressed his freezing cold nose against Crowley's temple with an annoyed tut, and the demon hissed out a profanity.
It was Crowley's very favourite sort of day.
*
It was a Sunday afternoon, just past three, and the rain was pounding against the front of the bookshop. Someone nearby was playing dubstep loud enough that the tea cups were rattling, the milk was on the turn, and Crowley had the nagging feeling that there was something he'd forgotten.
Aziraphale squeaked his slow way to the back of the shop, having locked the door against the Sunday hordes (his word; two ladies had popped into the shop and popped swiftly out again at the look Aziraphale had sent them). He stopped on a low G, in front of the fiction shelves, somewhere close to the beginning of the alphabet, if Crowley was any judge.
'We've a surfeit of Ds,' he said, bewildered, and Crowley felt something in his chest give an uncomfortable warm lurch for the sake of a pronoun. He cursed himself under his breath, but that didn't prevent the slow smile from forming.
'Well I've a distinct lack of T,' Crowley said, savouring the huffs of annoyance and, more so, the detour into the key of B minor and the gentle click of the kettle's switch.
When Aziraphale settled Crowley was barely sprawled at all, the cushion beside him carefully chosen to be the most inviting one. The brimming cup of tea must have knocked his balance off centre, though, because it wasn't long until the lean resumed.
Somewhere something had cracked or shifted, enough to let in an insidious draft, and it was just where it could find its way onto the back of the neck of whoever was on the sofa, but Crowley was finding it difficult to care. He ducked his head further into his collar and shifted so Aziraphale's arm - which had shifted as he did, warm against the back of his neck - served as better protection. Somewhere nearby the bass emphatically dropped, momentarily obscuring the play on Radio 4; something about detectives, he thought, a detective, a vaguely familiar name. The angel pressed his freezing cold nose against Crowley's temple with an annoyed tut, and the demon hissed out a profanity.
It was Crowley's very favourite sort of day.
Recipient: vulgarweed
Author: A Secret!
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG
Notes: 'Superintendent Crowley,' he said brusquely, flipping a wallet open and shut quickly enough that there was just a metallic shine, there and gone. He could make the Inspector - Lestrade, according to his desk plate - believe just about anything he wanted, if he tried, but why make the effort? With the right sort of attitude, the right sort of smirk under expensive sunglasses, a fake FBI badge from a box of Shredded Wheat in 1991 would do just as well. It made you despair for the whole sorry lot of them, it really did.
2 years earlier
It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon, just past three, and the sun was pouring like treacle through the dust-dimmed panes of the bookshop window. It took its time to peruse the few books the owner had left out in offering, Dan Brown's name fading into obscurity, before spreading its slow beams gently across the floor. By the time it lapped at the toe of the snakeskin boot that was swaying to and fro as it idly conducted Handel, it was moving at a particular fraction of the speed of light that had only previously been experienced on physically improbable worlds in quite incredibly distant universes. It was, in short, a day built for basking, and that was precisely what the shop's sole occupant intended to do.
Occupant was probably entirely too neutral a term for him. Customer was out, of course, since through diligent effort on the part of its proprietor the shop hadn't in fact sold any books since 1973. Crowley'd favour benevolent overlord, if asked, but he'd happily settle for 'parasite' if there was Twinings in it for him. Aziraphale, who people tended to mistakenly think was the nicer of the two, would probably have gone with 'denizen'. Then again, just now Aziraphale was in a snit, because Crowley had sneakily pincered the last bag of Assam out of the caddy and left the angel to either faff about with the loose leaf or pop along to the Tesco Metro on the corner. They'd Had Words about it. Crowley had, of course, denied everything in particularly injured tones.
It was Crowley's very favourite sort of day.
Crowley's standards had changed, recently. Any day on which the world didn't collapse petulantly into sulking disorder and threaten to bring existence to its ultimate end was, frankly, a win. That this one also included Handel, and sunshine, and the inevitable passive-aggressive tea making was really just a bonus.
In the front of the shop a tiny brass bell gave a gentle tinkle. Out there, somewhere, an angel got its wings, and rather closer at hand one grumbled under his breath and rustled a carrier bag pointedly, as Crowley deliberately adopted the most obnoxiously insouciant pose in his repertoire.
Aziraphale's progress, Crowley had found over the years, could be tracked around the shop through the particular tone and timbre of the squeaks that accompanied him. The floorboards were old and tired and had settled, in their decrepitude, into the sort of grudging proximity that necessitated garden fences. The final stuttering squawk of a high F# pulled his chin up as though it were on strings, and that particular round-cheeked glare had always played merry hell with whatever it was that roosted in his stomach. Crowley rolled his eyes and buried his face back in his book until his mouth started behaving again.
'Afternoon, angel,' he said, once he was sure his voice wouldn't betray him.
'What have you done to the Ds?' Aziraphale said, uncharacteristically snippy, even in the face of purely hypothetical tea theft.
Crowley stared at him, unblinking. He was good at that. Once his point had, he felt, been sufficiently made, he glanced from Aziraphale to the sofa he was lying on and back, as though any movement from its upholstered embrace was inconceivable. Aziraphale arched a skeptical eyebrow. He'd learned that from Crowley, too, the bastard.
'If I had any idea what you were talking about,' Crowley said loftily, 'I wouldn't have any idea what you're talking about.'
Aziraphale huffed and, after depositing the carrier safely on the rickety table, plopped himself onto the end of the sofa.
It wasn't the proximity that made Crowley's mouth dry, because the depth of corduroy between the tip of his shoe and the angel's warmth served approximately the same purpose as kevlar. It was the ease of it, the familiarity, because for a demon who'd been hanging around the more attractive areas of this big ball of mud for the better part of 4,000 years, everything was familiar at the same time that nothing was. The washing machine of history tumbled in endless cycles, fading everything over time to the same muted shade of pale-bled red, but nothing stuck around long enough to become anything more significant than that one determined sock that always stuck to the top of the machine. Of course there had always been Aziraphale the - to belabor the metaphor to the point of absurdity - twenty pence piece in the spin cycle of Crowley's patchwork history; the flashes of light and the occasional clatter drew the eye, of course, but that was just due to the nature of it. You couldn't pick the coin out a line up.
Only if Aziraphale was a lucky twenty pence piece then Crowley was a bad penny, and somehow that combination turned up over and over until proximity was pedestrian and the urge to stretch his legs out across the angel's lap, just to see, just to try his luck, had Crowley springing up from the sofa like he'd been electrocuted.
'Ts,' he said.
'Ds,' Aziraphale corrected, still looking disgruntled and a little tight, now, around the mouth.
'Teas are the only thing I've touched - and yes, that's me admitting it.' He skated lightly past it, heading through the pentatonic scale that led to the shop floor. 'What's wrong with your Ds?'
'I don't know,' Aziraphale said, a little despairing, and when Crowley risked a glance back at him he was standing with his arms crossed and a faintly lost expression on his face, holding onto his elbows like their intrinsic normality was all that was keeping him tethered. (It was a very expressive posture).
'Right,' Crowley said. Then, after a moment's taut silence, 'Adam?'
Aziraphale sucked in a breath. They didn't say his name.
Crowley trailed his fingers along the spines of the shelf in question; Dahl, Darwin, Defoe, Dickens and Dickinson, Dostoevsky and Dumas. He frowned, tapped the shelf between The Idiot and the Musketeers, thoughtfully.
'I don't know,' he said after a moment, voice oddly distracted, thoughts sliding away from the subject even as he answered. 'It looks all right to me.'
*
Present day
It was some sort of warehouse, because of course it was some sort of warehouse. Steel columns marched into the darkness on either side, a faint and improbable mist drifted, and in order to fully round out the atmosphere in the distance condensation, obligingly, dripped. It was as though the place had been waiting, created purely for the possibility that some day, somehow, someone would need to be horribly tortured.
It was a scene that begged a trussed up action figure. A setting that deserved a sweating bestubbled man with a surfeit of muscles who wore a sweat-stained vest and the blood of his enemies.
Sadly it had to make do with Aziraphale.
Aziraphale frankly considered sweating unseemly, and certainly never did so in public. His muscles were - well, they were perfectly serviceable, and he would never be caught in anything less than three layers - although he was at least, under his neatly co-ordinating jumper and shirt, most definitely wearing a vest.
His seat was entirely out of place too; a dark green wing-backed chair, mildewed and damp and possibly chewed on in places but evidently of expensive breeding. Planted next to his elbow was a lopsided end table, a page from a local paper folded tightly and tucked under one leg, and perched on its surface was a cracked china teapot and a Jubilee mug. It was a jarringly jaunty counterpoint to the room.
The other man, at least, had the grace to fit the appropriate villainous mould to a tee. His suit was expensively cut, his accent appropriately - yet comprehensibly - foreign, and a whetstone had been taken to his smile.
'Had enough?' he asked, his solicitous tone undercut by the look in his dark eyes.
If this were that certain sort of action movie, now would be the point in proceedings where Aziraphale would spit out a defiant globule of blood. He'd quite possibly smile with red-tinged teeth and say something witty to the villain that would effortlessly showcase his heroism and incidentally play well in adverts, hidden for the sake of the censor's conscience behind numbers and warnings and a gravelly voiced announcer using meaninglessly dramatic words.
Aziraphale still hadn't updated the VCR whose clock flashed midnight in some unregarded and unused room upstairs from his shop, though, and even if he had the technology available to watch them he'd never really been one for those sorts of films. The little cinema he occasionally frequented didn't even show them. So Aziraphale didn't really have a frame of reference for this sort of thing, and besides, with angels that wasn't really the way this was done. There was no blood, for starters, and most certainly no spitting; a clock, ticking just ever so slightly off tempo, a radio too quiet to be listened to but very slightly too loud to be ignored, the wince he barely held back at what had been done to the tea.
The bottom of his cup scraped against the edge of his saucer with the faint enameled squeaking of tightly gritted teeth. From somewhere deep inside, a razor-edged and black-clad corner carefully cultivated in his soul, Aziraphale dredged up a smile.
*
Something about the way the inspector scooted hurriedly upright, brushing crumbs off his front, something about the way he sadly eyed the ficus in the corner and the striped polyblend tie that was tangled in its branches, was deeply satisfying to Crowley. It was a sign he was doing his job right, fear like that.
'Superintendent Crowley,' he said brusquely, flipping a wallet open and shut quickly enough that there was just a metallic shine, there and gone. He could make the Inspector - Lestrade, according to his desk plate - believe just about anything he wanted, if he tried, but why make the effort? With the right sort of attitude, the right sort of smirk under expensive sunglasses, a fake FBI badge from a box of Shredded Wheat in 1991 would do just as well. It made you despair for the whole sorry lot of them, it really did.
'Right, Crowley,' Lestrade said, pushing to his feet and sending his office chair sailing into a filing cabinet with an indecorous crash. 'Sir,' he added belatedly. He didn't wear deference particularly well; Crowley decided he liked him.
'So,' Crowley said. 'Baker Street. You got my email?' He eyed the other man curiously - there had been a sort of aborted flinch in there.
'I thought it was pretty cut and dried,' Lestrade said, stiffly.
Crowley arched an eyebrow.
'You do, do you? Got all the answers?'
Lestrade shot him a narrow glance, his jaw tight with something Crowley wasn't entirely sure he could place, and the demon took a deep breath to calm himself just in case. His sibilance was slipping.
'Pretty sure we know everything we're going to, sir,' Lestrade said, his voice heavy.
'Right,' Crowley said, 'absolutely. The answer just fell out of the sky into our laps, did it?'
It wasn't often that a human got one up on him. He wasn't saying it never happened - they were devious when cornered, it almost made him proud. But he hadn't expected the sudden movement, the controlled violence, and he was pushed up against the window with blind slats digging painfully into his back before he could blink. He almost did, in surprise.
'You might have a shiny badge,' Lestrade hissed into his face, tone saturated with the kind of miserable, futile anger that Crowley usually used like a homing beacon. 'They may pay you the big bucks, sir, but Sherlock Holmes was my friend, and -'
'Sherlock who?' Crowley blurted. Lestrade blinked at him from entirely too close. The bags under his eyes would hold enough changes of clothes for a week in Paris, and he'd missed - the majority of his chin, actually, while shaving. He looked like a man at the end of his rope, and Crowley lifted a hand to rest on his shoulder without even really thinking about it, providing enough divine grace to get rid of a few of the lines between Lestrade's brows.
It was all the hanging about the with the angel that did it, of course. He was a horribly good influence. Speaking of -
'I don't know anything about a Sherlock,' Crowley said, trying to keep his tone steady, soothing, trying not to hiss with every breath. His suit had cost approximately the same as the GDP of one of the smaller European countries, and it was getting unforgivably mangled in Lestrade's fists. 'It's number 221 Baker Street I'm interested in.'
'Right,' Lestrade said. '221b.'
'C,' Crowley corrected.
'The basement?' Lestrade said, sounding a little incredulous. He stepped back, brushed Crowley's lapels almost absentmindedly for a moment before he seemed to realise what he was doing, what he'd done, with a slow dawning horror. Crowley watched the expression on his face like a connoisseur, but reluctantly decided that the resulting discomfort on all sides wouldn't be worth letting him dangle.
'No harm done,' he said instead, feeling like the angel in his magnanimity; he had to quickly gesture, shift the bag of sugar in the little kitchenette right to the very teetering edge of the shelf, just to feel normal again.
'So,' he said, '221c.'
Every now and again the angel got these fancies. He'd probably been doing it for as long as he was on humanity's green Earth, but Crowley had only been around enough to notice it for the past couple of years. (It was like an abscess in his chest, an odd sort of sucking sore that he had to keep poking at. If humans felt this sort of thing all the time, it was no wonder they messed about with asps, and ill-advised suicide pacts, and thousands of ships).
In any case, something had caught his attention, and Crowley had almost had a heart attack - in the purely metaphorical, to all intents and purposes immortal sense - when he'd gone around to the bookshop and found it locked up and dark and shuttered. The only reassuring thing about the scene had been the distinct lack of graffiti, the fact that even though it was a weekend it hadn't been used as a public convenience. The angel wasn't gone, then, merely absent, and when he thought to check through the pile of correspondence he hadn't thought to vanish in a while there was a change of address card in Aziraphale's unnecessarily fussy copperplate.
That would have been an end to it if he hadn't been sauntering (not hopefully, he wouldn't admit to hopefully) through Soho one morning, only to find streaks of white across Aziraphale's old-fashioned shutters. DAVID CAMERON IS A WANKER, it unimaginatively yet probably accurately stated, and Crowley had felt his heart drop into his stomach, his boots, or any other metaphorical resting place you could choose to name.
Hence the ruse, hence the police station, hence the faintly suspicious look Lestrade sent his way as they waited to brief the team.
'Don't remember hearing of you before, sir,' he said.
'Been undercover,' Crowley told him, blessing the Met and its bureaucratic nightmare of an internal communication system. 'All very hush hush. Plus I'm not really local.'
'No?' Lestrade asked, as the chosen team trailed into the room like school kids into assembly, with the requisite shoving and the whinges about folding chairs.
'From down under, originally,' Crowley said, with a slight smirk under dark glasses Lestrade was too polite to ask him to remove.
'Huh,' Lestrade said. 'I wouldn't have guessed, from the accent.'
'No.' Not many people would guess. It wasn't something he really wanted to think about, not with how much of a problem it could become. 'I guess you could say I've gone native,' he said.
A sudden burst of laughter startled him out of his reverie and Crowley looked up. The double take that resulted would have been the stuff of cinematic legend, had there only been a camera. The shoving and nudging and general horseplay had escalated a quite ridiculous amount, focused around four figures on the opposite side of the room, three dressed in perfectly fitted uniforms that nonetheless looked entirely alien against their ridiculously youthful faces.
'Oh bless me,' he said, under his breath and over the sudden and unhelpful pounding of his heart. 'Not you.'
*
'When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in -'
'Oxford,' Anathema interrupted from the kitchen, and Tracy let out a small sigh. 'Oxford, please!'
'Anathema,' she admonished gently.
'Well it's just that I can get the 91 from practically outside my front door,' Anathema continued, wiping her hands briskly on a tea towel as she appeared in the kitchen doorway. 'Everywhere else involves trains, and Phaeton's not the same on hills as -' she deflated slightly, finally picking up on the atmosphere, adopting a long-suffering look that was entirely too old for her face. 'Oh very well,' she said ungraciously, dropping into a mismatched ladder back chair and folding her arms. 'Get on with it.'
'- or in rain,' the newest member of their little circle finished with an uncertain little laugh. 'I'm afraid that's all I can remember.'
'It's all anyone ever can, Mrs Hudson dear,' Tracy told her soothingly. She patted Mrs Hudson's hand gently, then snatched her hand back when the long dangling sleeve of the blouse she wore for her mediuming flirted with one of the numerous candles set in saucers all over the table. Even without looking Tracy could tell that Anathema was watching her with that particular expression of superior smugness that fit her face like it was made for it. She didn't understand the ambulance of being a medium; Anathema didn't hold much with any of the trappings, to be perfectly frank, and had very little patience with the seances that Tracy still held. For someone with actual, hereditary, practically visible psychic abilities, Anathema was remarkably close-minded.
'I just don't know why you'd want to speak to the dead,' she'd told Tracy once, because Anathema wasn't terribly good at asking. 'They're just like the living, only even more horribly tedious.'
Well there's your problem right there, Tracy wanted to tell her. You'd never see the point of seances if you weren't fascinated by people. More than half of Tracy's messages from the Beyond were manufactured entirely under the genuine 1920s beaded turban she insisted on wearing. (More like three quarters, her conscience prompted her; it had learned over time to be generous in its estimates). It wasn't about what the dead wanted to say and never had been; seances and mediums and the like were entirely about what the living wanted to hear. People are strange and dull and wonderful and terrible and different every second, Tracy wanted to tell her, and she found them fascinating. That they found her fascinating too, the boost of the ego that gave her, that didn't go amiss either.
(Tracy, not having had a classical education - or much of an education at all - didn't know that the original meaning of fascinate meant to bewitch, from fascinum: spell, or witchcraft. She didn't know, but she'd like it).
Besides, she wanted to tell Anathema, her main source of income didn't pay nearly so well as it used to, not with her regulars reaching an age at which the spirit is more interested in crosswords and cups of tea. The flesh of most of them, of course, had been rather unwilling for quite some time, but she wasn't against being paid for some perfunctory fondling, a cup of tea and a ferocious Boggle competition. In any case, there was only so long you could keep a man in cans of condensed milk on what little that raked in, so she'd stepped up the seances, tarot readings, and bought in boxes of loose leaf tea. So, she wanted to conclude, quite possibly with a haughty sniff, how Tracy chose to spend her time was between her and her clients, and provided she wasn't hurting any body Anathema had no business commenting on it.
She wanted to say all that, but listening was another of those things that Anathema wasn't particularly good at.
'So, Oxford?' Anathema said again.
'Oh dear,' Mrs Hudson said, in the faintly fluffy tones that concealed, Tracy had found, an iron will - like a ball bearing concealed in a marshmallow. 'Oh dear, I wouldn't be able to come along to Oxford. I don't get out much. My hip, you know.'
Madame Tracy made appropriately soothing noises.
'How about some reiki, then?' she asked. It was another of those things she was trying on for size, because as far as she could tell no one could ever prove you weren't doing it correctly.
'Oh no,' said Mrs Hudson, with an uncharacteristically poisonous towards downstairs. 'I don't hold with foreign foods.'
'I'm sorry I couldn't hear anything from your young man,' Tracy said, settling back into their previous conversation only partly for the annoyed look it put on Anathema's face. She'd been coming to see Mrs Hudson for a couple of months now, had managed some credible messages from her happily departed husband and late lamented mother, but the woman was talkative enough that Tracy knew she was better off not even attempting to mimic the incredible Sherlock Holmes. He sounded, from Mrs Hudson's mouth, like some sort of outlandish character from a book.
'Oh that's all right,' Mrs Hudson said, 'he didn't hold much with psychic sorts when he was alive, he's certain to be a righteous terror to them now he's dead. Even his John wouldn't dream of subjecting someone to a seance with Sherlock storming through it.' She sighed. 'It's just a shame he couldn't have been about to work out what happened to my downstairs lodger.'
While Tracy was still trying to work out if that was a euphemism, and if so what for, Anathema stood up and clapped her hands.
'Well this has been lovely,' she said, with a faintly acidic look at Tracy, 'but we really must be going.'
'...of the Patient Resident, John would probably call it,' Mrs Hudson said, chuckling to herself. 'Goodness but he had a lot to put up with, what with the police through at all hours of the - oh, are you off?'
'We really must be,' Tracy said regretfully. She'd stay longer, only she needed Anathema to refer to as her granddaughter and really sell the 'forgotten the over sixties bus pass' act.
Tracy had tried on shame, once, in the '80s. It hadn't fit.
'Well remind me to tell you about it next time,' Mrs Hudson said, trailing after them to the door. 'All candles, he had, and chalk circles all over my nice clean floor. Such a nice man, too! Still, at least most witchcraft doesn't smell as strongly as the marijuana the girl before him had. I was almost relieved when she moved out, although I will miss her baking.' She brushed past them to tug at the door, which had swollen slightly in the rain. 'Oh, hello Inspector,' she said when it finally opened, apparently entirely unfazed at the sight of the better part of the Met's homicide unit outside her front door.
Tracy felt her mouth drop open. She'd always liked a man in uniform, and these were so much more realistic than the ones she usually saw.
'Afternoon, Mrs Hudson,' the Inspector said. Nice looking chap he was, too, if - Tracy suspected - a little vanilla in the bedroom. 'Tea for -' he looked over his shoulder - 'about a dozen?' To his credit, he at least looked a little shamefaced.
'Oh dear,' Mrs Hudson fluttered. 'Yes, of course. No, that's fine.'
Tracy eyed one of the policemen towards the back of the rabble; sharp-suited, beautifully cheekboned, and naggingly familiar. She turned to Anathema. There was a quick exchange of the sort women master as soon as there are faintly permanent men in their life, all conducted with eyebrows and micro-expressions, and Tracy turned back around, triumphant.
'We'll give you a hand, dear,' she said. 'And don't you give me your no sugar nonsense,' she called to the inspector, as she sailed back up the stairs. 'I'm ever so good at knowing what men want.'
*
2 years earlier
The Annual Tadfield Bring and Buy was in less than two weeks. It had been the Annual Tadfield Blue Peter Bring and Buy, but there had been a series of unimpressed letters in the Advertiser after one of the presenters had been found in a public convenience with a suspicious quantity of off-white powder and a rent boy named Jim.
Small town politics were a fraught and convoluted business, and the contributions to the Annual Tadfield Bring and Buy were a massive indicator of status within the village. It showed the collected mothers of Tadfield not only what one had, but what one could afford to give away. One year Mrs Ashraf-Smythe had been foolish enough to leave the receipt in the bag, evidence of the terrible sin of buying for the sale, and had never lived it down. She had eventually moved to Greater Tadfield out of shame.
Mr Young, therefore, had been sent for his annual investigation of the garage, attic and the crawlspace on the first floor to see what Deirdre could hold over her friends in subtle comments and sideways smiles for at least the next half a decade.
Mr Young was a man built for garages, and attics, and crawlspaces on the first floor. He could spend many a happy hour in the dust, having pulled on an ancient boiler suit for the purpose, tucked away in a designated Male Sanctum that avoided the chatter, floral scents and potential for tears that he dimly associated with women, despite all evidence from his wife and daughter to the contrary. Occasionally he made sure to make clattering noises, just to signal that he was still paying attention, to dismiss any possibility of being dragged away to be sociable with the endless stream of women at this time of year.
The children were now old enough to have outgrown a huge number of their toys and games, and there was the possibility that there was something that would be good enough condition not to embarrass them horribly. Sarah's boxes were full of that particularly obnoxious shade of pink that advertisers had decided attracted small female children like flies to the leavings of the family pet; Adam's were a random assortment of any number of things. Microscopes and telescopes, crystal growing kits and recipe books and a pair of reassuringly flexible and blunt swords.
Perhaps the oddest collection of objects was the bubble pipe that sat atop a magnifying glass and an odd sort of hat with flaps to cover the ears. A deerstalker, Mr Young thought it was called. He couldn't for the life of him understand why the items were all set together; every child had a brief period of discovery involving magnifying glasses and ants. Horrible, of course, but perfectly natural. The hat, though - with Adam's imagination, Mr Young fought the urge to cast about for a stray rifle.
Now he thought about it he could vaguely remember Adam marching around with all of the accessories in place. Something about gingerbread houses, sherbet homes perhaps? Bacon?
The thought was like a soap bubble, though, slippery and elusive and quickly dissipated. A shrill voice called from below and Mr Young set to industriously rattling boxes, all thoughts of Adam's games safely tucked to the back of his mind.
*
Present day
It was like one of those old comedy sketches, Madame Tracy reflected. The ones where they create an endless stream of policemen by sending them out through the window and back in through the front door. Mrs Hudson's poor kettle was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because along with the stream of sensible police boots came thoroughly sensible police appetites and the bladders of elephants. Mrs Hudson had had to dig out her best china to cope with the influx, and she was fluttering about with coasters and stray pieces of china, and if it weren't terribly impolite she probably would have resorted to goalie gloves, too.
Anathema had popped to the shops for supplies the better part of two hours ago, and had invited Tracy to go too with some fairly emphatic head jerks, but Tracy was oddly fascinated by the palaver, by where the palaver seemed to originate.
The only pair not affected by the invisible center of gravity in the basement were settled in Mrs Hudson's kitchen with her; the young(ish) man in the aran jumper settled at the table with a sweetened cup of tea, and Mrs Hudson in gentle orbit around him, stopping by to touch his elbow or shoulder whenever she thought she could get away with it. He looked up as one of the police came to the door, odd without a uniform amongst the forest of blue, and squinted at him through one eye the way that Tracy had taken to, to counteract the oddness of his flickering.
'I'm Adam Older,' he said. 'I'm a consulting detective. This is D.I. Salt, and D.I. Cheese, and this is - is -' he stared blankly at the solid sort behind him.
'P.C. Brian,' the man said helpfully. With both her eyes open, Tracy was convinced they all had mustaches. Even the woman. She closed one eye again.
'Have you had any luck?' Mrs Hudson asked, in the worn thin cheer of a woman who's mentally resigned herself to chipped handles and eternal shame, should the queen ever come to tea.
'Not much,' Lestrade said, pushing his way through to the front, taking a small absentminded detour in order to avoid Older entirely. The one with the cheekbones followed him through; his detour was entirely deliberate.
'Just the chalk, the unlit candles. A couple of them had fallen over, was that you or -'
'Oh no,' Mrs Hudson said, 'Sherlock would have my -' she swallowed, cast a glance at the man at the table, but he was more interested in the police in the doorway. 'I know how to preserve a crime scene,' she finished stiffly.
'Right then.' Older clapped his hands, and three police officers with him snapped to attention. 'Back to the station.' They piled out, shoving their way through the door like children at the end of the school day, bickering about who was going to drive, and whether they were going to get to use the siren this time, please Adam...
'But - but they're thirteen,' the man at the table said eventually, once they were most definitely gone.
There was something a little glassy about Lestrade's eyes when he clapped him on the shoulder.
'Showing your age, John,' he said, 'they get younger every year.'
'No, they're,' John said, half under his breath, as Lestrade exchanged goodbyes and the Superintendent watched with an unnervingly unblinking stare, 'literally, I mean -'
Tracy patted his hand soothingly, as Lestrade and the Superintendent took their leave, passing Anathema and her lone carrier bag at the door.
'Is no one else seeing this?' John said, a frustrated plea to the universe.
'Goodness but you've got a pair of eyes on you,' Tracy said. 'Don't miss much, do you? Rather oddly shaped blind spot, though.'
'One that's about six foot tall,' Anathema said, scrutinising John. 'With a face like a horse. You should shave off the mustache,' she added sternly. 'It really doesn't suit you.'
'We're going,' the Superintendent said, abrupt and audibly frustrated. 'He didn't complete the - there's nothing useful here.'
'Right,' Lestrade said, the glassiness in his expression replaced by the dogged expression of all true policemen. 'We'll get back to the station, work out our next steps. Thanks for the tea, Mrs Hudson, glad we caught you in.'
'Oh, you always know where to find me,' Mrs Hudson said, something oddly heavy about her tone, like the almost inaudible resonance after the striking of a church bell. Madame Tracy examined her thoughtfully.
'We should go too,' she says thoughtfully after a moment. 'After all that business I've quite gone off tea. What do you say Mrs Hudson? One of those floofy coffees would just about hit the spot.'
'Oh Mrs Hudson can't leave Baker Street,' John says absently, remembering something, or quoting something, something he's heard more than once. 'England would fall.'
'Hmm,' said Tracy. She squinted sidelong at Anathema, but she never seemed to listen right when people spoke. She wasn't ever so good at body language, not unless it was practically staring her in the face.
Prophecies were only proper if they were printed, with her.
*
Crowley leaned against a wall and watched.
To the casual observer the stillness would seem calm. He stood out against the chaos of the office, the chaos centered on a slightly built officer with sun-gold hair that curled against his head. He was a point of peace against which the chaos battered in vain, or so it initially appeared. It'd take a longer perusal than anyone had the attention for to note the white knuckles, the thinner than usual lips, the relentlessly tapping (and quite possibly not regulation) snakeskin boot.
It wasn't even his position that rankled overly. Crowley was a game piece, he'd resigned himself to this over the years; he'd always considered himself to be slightly more important than a pawn, at least. A rook, maybe, or - well, okay, no horses, and bishops were out for obvious reasons. Definitely a rook, then, although he didn't like the thought of Aziraphale being a bishop. He'd prefer to imagine they stood in the back row side by side, elbowing each other when things got dull.
It was an odd line of thought, he supposed, since any sort of logic would suggest that they'd be on opposite sides of the great chessboard of life. But what sort of logic could apply to anything like this, where fate had its reins held by a thirteen year old boy with the face of an angel and the smile of the devil? Everything had always and ever been shades of grey, and Aziraphale and Crowley had long had their colours mixed up in the wash.
So it wasn't his position that rankled, it was - well, it was the lack of somebody to elbow. This was all a game, and no matter who won or how the board was upset in the process he was relatively certain that all the game pieces would make it through to the end. Adam was conscientious, he put away his toys when he was done. Crowley just had the faintly nagging, horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach that Aziraphale's piece might end up spending some time lost in the dust under the piano until the box was pulled out again, until Adam was once more ready to play.
The thought of time spent without Aziraphale, without knowing precisely where to find him, made Crowley feel rather like that lost piece, buried in drifts of thick grey, not quite able to breathe.
'Can I interview a suspect?' one of Adam's little minions said, excited. Crowley tilted his head back against the wall, cool plaster slowly bleeding away the over heating but doing nothing much about the temper behind it.
'Go on then,' Adam said, a little smile curling his perfect mouth, and Crowley pushed away from the wall before he could think, because he had to, because thinking at this point would only stop him and stopping was the last thing he could do.
Eerily blue eyes were watching him before he was more than halfway across the office, the air around him thickening with Adam's attention, testing his will.
'I remember you,' Adam said when he got close enough, and there was something underlying it that made it sound like a threat. 'I remember all about you.'
'I'm not here to stop you,' Crowley said, crossing his fingers where they were shoved deeply into his pockets.
'Doesn't much matter if you are,' Adam said with a shrug.
'I just thought,' Crowley forged on, through gritted teeth, 'maybe you could find someone else to play the victim, you know? Maybe you could leave the angel out of it.'
Adam blinked at him, and the lack of recognition in his eyes felt like an open wound.
'Angel?' he said. 'What angel?'
*
Aziraphale, for lack of anything else to occupy him, for fear that his grinding teeth might wear down to something that would require an entirely new body, had fished out the page that was supporting one of the table legs. The spelling mistakes alone were enough to lose one's faith in humanity, he thought to himself, and the stories were even worse. Petty disputes and bickering on a global scale; there was nothing to give one any sort of hope at all. It didn't even seem worth saving any of them, didn't seem worth the effort he went to every -
The thought fit badly inside his head. It was roughened at the edges, poorly carved, and the oil that had got it in there left a slick over all his other thoughts.
'Ah,' said Aziraphale. 'You're back.'
'Give me time,' the other man said, with a cheerfully cracked grin. 'Give me time and you won't even recognise me in there.'
'Well as tempting as the offer is,' Aziraphale said, plastering all the serenity he had left to muster to every inch of his tone, 'I'm afraid I have friends that will arrive shortly. One in particular that I'm fairly sure you wouldn't want to face.' He leaned forward a little in his chair, the discomfort of it prompting a tiny shift in the shale of his thoughts, uncharitable thoughts skittering across the surface of his mind and loosening the mountain of faith and goodness a little with every pass. 'Look,' he said, matter-of-fact and earnest and far kinder than his mind wanted him to think the man deserved. 'Look, you don't have to do this, you know.'
'Oh,' the man answered, 'I really think I do.' His singsong tone put Aziraphale's teeth on edge.
'Then you deserve whatever you get,' Aziraphale said, a boulder bounding down the slopes of serenity he'd maintained over the temptations of years. 'You deserve whatever is coming to you.' He smiled a smile he wasn't sure his face had worn before, his muscles stretching strangely around it, oiled at the edges.
'Hell is empty,' the man said, 'and all the devils are here.'
'Oh yes,' said Aziraphale, leaning back in his chair, 'but they're really not so bad as all that once you get to know them, you know. But I'm sure, oh I'm reasonably certain, that Crowley can be persuaded.' The smile was settling more comfortably under his skin, now, and the man was watching him with hungry dark eyes. 'He's coming, you know.'
'Yes,' said the man. 'Oh yes, that's what I'm counting on.' And he laughed a laugh that was high-pitched and loud, that shook the foundations of Aziraphale's smile until it collapsed. Until he felt entirely himself again, and entirely afraid.
*
2 years earlier
The Dark Council had not been pleased.
It was such a small way to say it, so inadequate, but there weren't words in all of Earth and Hell that would entirely describe it. Hell believed in efficiency, in making the most of its every asset, and Hastur's wealth of experience in the field could not be discounted. But time was a human construct (and lunchtime, perhaps, doubly so); Hell could make an hour last precisely as long as it wanted to, and Hastur felt every last minute of that want.
And with every gasping, heaving breath, with every regrowth of his eyes and his nails and his skin, with every shuddering exhale from new and old and battered lungs, Hastur repeated a name.
Crowley's name.
Crowley had always called them 14th century minds. Thought they hadn't heard him, with his slick sunglasses and his car telephones, with his wide thinking and quotas and benchmarking. All the little modern touches that made Hell love him, let them overlook his less than deplorable quirks.
Hastur preferred to think of himself as more of a Renaissance man. He'd always been a fan of what the Spanish Inquisition had come up with. But Crowley was right, he was old fashioned; he was methodical and he was slow.
So when he appeared in the middle of Soho in a cloud of greasy smoke, when he picked out a name for the vessel he'd chosen (James Moriarty had seemed nicely harmless, nicely pedestrian), Hastur took his time to check out the lay of the land.
Patiently, he'd started to plan.
*
Present day
Madame Tracy had been thinking. She'd been thinking quietly and ferociously through the floofy coffee she'd persuaded Anathema to buy her. She'd been thinking so quietly and so long that Anathema had started to look almost worried, had bustled them out of the shop and into the fresh air.
She quite liked England, of course. She'd quite liked the world, too, and she felt the same sort of need to do her part in saving it. But one couldn't save something, she decided, without it being decisively in danger in the first place. It wasn't like she could spend all her time hanging about in London and waiting for something to happen, and it was a terrible heavy load of a thing to pin to Mrs Hudson. Almost cruel, to expect her not to leave that old fashioned flat of hers.
So when a vintage black Bentley drove up next to them, when the policeman with the sunglasses and the beautiful cheekbones leaped out, all in a tizzy, she decisively dropped the dregs of her frappiato into a bin.
'It's Mrs Hudson,' she said firmly, and climbed into the passenger seat, leaving the policeman - Crowley, that was his name - and Anathema to sort themselves out.
'It's what?' Crowley said. 'I - look, you two are psychics or something, right?'
'Or something,' Anathema said, casting a quite uncharitable look at Tracy. She decided to ignore it, for the sake of speed.
'It's Mrs Hudson,' Tracy said again. 'She's holding it all together.'
'All what?' Crowley looked like he was almost tearing his hair out, all flustered and desperate and with sadness in every long line of him.
'Oh,' she said, 'oh it's your young man, isn't it?' She remembered him now, in the fuzzy way that one remembers dreams; soft, he'd been, older than she'd thought him, and all kind of gold around the edges.
Crowley let out the sort of undignified snort that's snottier than it's meant to be, the sort that stood in, in public, for tears. He rubbed his eyes under his sunglasses and breathed heavily for a moment, and Anathema, uncertainly, reached out and patted his hand gently. Tracy beamed with pride for a moment or two, then loudly tutted.
'Come on then, you two,' she called, 'we aren't getting any younger!'
It wasn't an easy business, bundling a woman with determined dignity into the back of a Bentley, but eventually they managed it and tooled - far faster than Tracy would have thought remotely possible at this time of day - to Baker Street. It wasn't as though she needed the confirmation that Crowley wasn't entirely human, but the fact that he found a parking space just exactly outside the little cafÈ marked him as a worryingly powerful sort.
Mrs Hudson, when she answered the door, gave Madame Tracy a far cannier look than she'd thus far managed. Tracy'd always suspected, of course - no one could give off so perfect an impression of helplessness without some level of devious cunning - but she was almost taken aback at the firmness of the refusal.
'No,' Mrs Hudson said, and it seemed to reverberate as though they were in a much smaller space, as though the sky didn't go all the way to the heavens after all.
'Well I can see there's no persuading you,' Tracy said.
'No,' Mrs Hudson said again, but there was a level of ease in her tone now, something entirely more human, and that was the opening Tracy had been looking for. You couldn't do the job that Tracy had had for years without some flexibility, without a strong core and the thighs of a Valkyrie. She bent and shoved her head under one of Mrs Hudson's arms, gripping her about the waist and shoving herself upright so Mrs Hudson was practically upside down over her shoulder. It wasn't an easy business, she had to tug hard against a moment of rootedness, a moment of dizziness, as though gravity itself had been defied. But if Mrs Hudson was the immovable object then Madame Tracy was the unstoppable force, and she was an unstoppable force with years of experience.
'Start the car!' she bellowed, as she raced for it, and she pushed and shoved and toppled Mrs Hudson into Anathema's lap and dived into the front seat even as Crowley pulled away, just in time.
England fell.
*
Aziraphale was counting stars when the world ended.
In fact it was only England, he'd find out later, but he wasn't to know - and frankly neither were they. Presumably the world would notice if England went entirely off the map, so who was counting the responses and reactions? And if they didn't exist, then did the event? If a tree falls and nobody twits, then did it really happen?
('Tweets,' Crowley said, exasperated, when he was relating this story later, 'it's tweets, angel.' But he was smiling into his hands, Aziraphale could see around the edges of it, and they happened so often now that Aziraphale had ceased counting them, so how exasperated could he really be?)
The warehouse had run out of things to entertain him but something was needed to drown out the doubting voices that were starting to take over his head. Those slimy insidious thoughts that still didn't feel anything like his own but were getting too loud to drown out. So Aziraphale was counting stars through a skylight when the world ended, when the fog descended, when everything outside of the warehouse he was sitting in went silent in unison. Everything except the familiar putter of an ancient motor pulling up, the familiar creak of an elderly handbrake, the twin slams of familiar undersized doors.
Then there was a distinctly unfamiliar cry of delight from outside.
'Ooh, it's like Alison Wonderland!' it said. 'The road's been all brushed away behind us!'
'Alice,' another said, exasperated and long suffering. 'It's Alice.'
'Alice Wonderland?' the first replied, dubious. 'No, that doesn't sound -'
'Alice in,' the second voice said, 'and hush, will you?'
'It's all right,' a third chimed in, resigned, and Aziraphale's breath caught in his throat almost hard enough to choke him. 'I think the element of surprise has been conclusively lost.'
'Oh,' said the first voice, 'element. I suppose that does make more sense.'
The warehouse door slowly rattled open to reveal a ragtag bunch. Two women were supporting a third, all of them looking a little worse for wear. The one on the left was tall with dark hair, the one on the right - well, it was difficult to see much past the false eyelashes. The one in the middle looked sort of washed out and thin, hard to see against the backdrop of grey. Only it wasn't on the first glance that Aziraphale noticed all this, because his first glance was taken entirely with Crowley.
They're friends, he would have admitted, before all of this. Crowley had long since made the step up from acquaintance, because acquaintances' arrivals don't stir up the stomach so. Only Aziraphale, being who and what he is, had never been altogether familiar with the 'friends' concept. Had never really had all that much to compare it to. So it wasn't until that moment, that view of Crowley framed in the doorway, those familiar sunglasses and the entirely unfamiliar relieved smile, that Aziraphale realised. That Aziraphale recognised that this really wasn't just 'friends' at all.
'Crowley,' he breathed, and Crowley's smile changed into something more familiar, something that felt like lazy Sundays where it was almost as though the world didn't exist outside of the two of them, as though he needed nothing beyond his shop. Aziraphale choked out a small laugh at the thought, one that sounded threadbare at the edges, because of course it would take the end of the world - again - for him to notice quite what he'd been feeling.
Crowley took two stumbling steps forward, almost as though he couldn't help it. Just far enough that he could see the man waiting to Aziraphale's right, the dark empty eyes and his sharp empty smile. He stopped as though he'd run into a brick wall.
'Hello Crowley,' the man said, vicious delight in his voice.
'Hastur,' Crowley hissed.
'Oh bugger,' Aziraphale swore.
Demons should fight like angels. It's in the genes. They should fight with swords and hell fire and skill, they should fight like they're a spectacle, like a medieval painter's somewhere just off to the side, taking down every particular. They should fight, Aziraphale thought, like there are rules.
But Crowley and Hastur fought like they were human, and like they hated each other. There was nothing clean about it, nothing anyone would want to paint. There was just fists and there was fury, punches thrown with the weight of worlds.
And Crowley was losing. Crowley was falling back. And Aziraphale was powerless to help him because Aziraphale is an angel, and Crowley is a demon as much as Hastur is, and any divine intervention couldn't result in anything but cataclysm. Not this time.
If anything was going to stop it, it was going to have to be something else entirely.
*
2 years earlier
Adam stood for a moment in the ruins of a bookshop.
A moment is subjective. It's far less defined than a second, and this was far less than a second. Adam stood for a moment, a millisecond of a millisecond, a fleeting fragmentary fraction of eternity.
And as he put back what had been, as he tweaked and adjusted and made things better, he thought about how it couldn't always be games. About how he couldn't always be playing. And how it was just unfair, actually, that all the best sorts of things only seemed to happen in stories.
He'd learned not to push, though, because pushing didn't end well for anybody. He just nudged. Suggested. They just didn't play Sherbert Holmes much, after that. Like their minds started to slowly slide off it, as though the world was slowly making space for something else.
*
Present day
Tracy had never approved of violence.
Pain was fine, of course. Pain was a large part of her stock in trade, and so long as everyone was consenting and everyone was enjoying themselves, pain was a perfectly acceptable alternative to another Sunday night in front of the telly.
But violence, while sharing a similar sort of soundtrack, always made her a little sick to the stomach. Still, of the three of them, she felt she was the one best qualified to deal with men - or at least man-shaped beings - so she levered Mrs Hudson's weight entirely onto Anathema and tucked them both behind a crate.
'Stay here,' she said, and Anathema's mouth opened for an immediate protest. Tracy slapped her hand over it before anything could come out. 'Be sensible at her, dear,' she said. 'You're ever so good at that.'
Ignoring the look of outrage and faint hurt, Tracy straightened and cast around for something that could be helpful, making a small triumphant noise when she saw what was tucked behind a stack of pallets. She kicked off her faintly impractical heels, hoiked up her M&S skirt, and clambered into the cab of the fork lift truck.
What would have happened next to the industrious deus ex machine operator, trundling slowly across the rough concrete floor and aimed squarely at a pair of deadlocked demons, is anybody's guess. Just at that moment, though, there was a loud grinding crash, a juddering smash, and the sort of silence that the dictates of narrative causality insist must be punctuated by a tiny rolling tinkle.
The demons froze as though they were frozen in amber. The forklift shuddered and died beneath her, a fate that poor Mr Perkins had narrowly avoided just the week before. It put her in the perfect position to best appreciate the figure that appeared in the gaping warehouse door.
Every aspect of the scenery worked together to display him to best advantage. The security lighting, cast against the peak of a deerstalker, cast his face into mysterious shadow; the reflection from a serendipitously angled crowbar lit just his knowing smile; the low slow mist that had so despaired of Aziraphale curled about his ankles like an affectionate cat. He was the perfect movie hero, the epitome of a noir detective, and it only very slightly spoiled the picture that he didn't look as though his voice had yet had time to break.
Three rather less impressive figures crowded into the doorway behind him, and the addition to the scene made it entirely more real, less crafted, more human.
'Can't believe you didn't let us use the siren,' the girl grumbled.
'Pepper,' said the chunkier boy, sternly, 'that would have upset the elephant.' He walked forward until he was shoulder to shoulder with the boy in the deerstalker, and regarded Madame Tracy, the forklift, the no-longer warring demons with the cynical eye of one who'd seen CGI that was better than this, thanks. 'However did you work it out, Holmes,' he said, in the slightly mechanical tones of one who's been coached.
'Elementary, my dear Wensley,' the Young boy said, and puffed industriously on a pipe that produced a rainbow of bubbles. The eyes of all the adults watched them as they drifted across the warehouse, alighting on the rough concrete and staying for an unlikely moment before they popped.
Alongside, apparently, Anathema's temper.
'Adam Young,' she shouted, with a voice like the crack of doom, with a voice like the very essence of mothers, with a voice that made Adam hunch his shoulders and duck his head into his collar. For the first time he looked like the thirteen year old boy he was, scowling at his tennis shoes and scuffing his feet across the concrete. 'What do you think you are doing?'
'I was only playing,' he mumbled. 'Didn't s'pose anyone could tell me off, not if I was only playing.'
'You are old enough to know better,' Anathema said, and his - the - Them all gasped like she'd said something unpalatable to a vicar. Adam just scowled more ferociously, scuffed more viciously.
'Um.'
It was the man they'd come to rescue, the one Crowley had been quite so beside himself over. He wasn't, in Tracy's professional opinion, all that much to look at. Sort of fusty, rumpled, badly dressed. He looked so nice, though. Not nice like people used it these days, like a biscuit or something else bland and undistinguished. More like a cup of tea and a pair of slippers after a terrible sort of day. And Crowley looked like a man who had a fair few terrible days.
'Sorry,' the man continued, flushing faintly along the apples of his cheeks as everyone turned to look at him, 'but know better than what, precisely? I mean, how on Earth did you -' he pinched the bridge of his nose, looking like a headache was slowly forming. 'Isn't Sherbert Holmes - wasn't there a book?'
'Everyone exists somewhere,' Adam said, sulkiness tempered slightly by the touch of schoolboy pride. 'Just had to shuffle them across a little.'
'And Mrs Hudson?' Tracy asked, her voice a little strained as she tried to climb down from the fork lift truck without flashing anybody her knickers. Or tried to give that impression, anyway.
'Had to anchor it somewhere,' Adam said, with a shrug.
'That was thoughtless,' Anathema said. She'd brought out the big guns now, Tracy thought with admiration. She'd never heard someone sound so disappointed. Adam shrugged again, just one shoulder this time, but Tracy noticed he didn't meet anyone's eye.
'Sorry,' he said, half under his breath. The word seemed to do wonders for Mrs Hudson, though, who got some colour back into her cheeks and stood on her own two feet.
'Better,' said Anathema. 'Now put everything back where you found it.'
'Even him?' Adam said. He gestured vaguely to where the demons were standing, paused mid-fight. When Tracy looked closer she could see that they were moving after all, only infinitely slowly. There was something hideous about watching the incremental formation of a resigned expression on Crowley's face, as Hastur's fist moved towards him like a tectonic plate.
'Yes, him,' Aziraphale snapped. 'The further the better.'
'But he's the arch enemy,' Adam said, a touch wistfully. 'It'd be interestin', having an arch enemy.'
'And should we unleash Hastur on another dimension?' Aziraphale asked, worriedly.
'Oh I'm sure he'd be no trouble,' Tracy assured him. 'Mr Crowley's barely a bother at all.'
'Everything,' Anathema insisted.
Mostly Anathema got her way through the fierce belief that nothing could go against the way she'd decided the world would be. It came, Tracy supposed, from the rock hard knowledge of events she'd had since a young age. Against that mountain of certainty even Adam's will would bow.
'Fine,' Adam said. 'Everything. My part of this story's finished with, anyway.'
He lifted his hand, that simple gesture like the first shivers of the wings of one of those butterflies, the ones that cause cyclones - but he was stopped by a gentle tug at his sleeve.
'And what about Sherlock?' Mrs Hudson asked.
That was bravery, that, Tracy thought. Couldn't get much braver; talking to a boy who was strong enough to move worlds, just to see what you could do for a friend. Tracy felt an abrupt pang of sadness that her world didn't contain a Mrs Hudson, not really. Maybe she'd have to have a go at those books of his.
'Wouldn't be much of a story,' Adam said, 'if the main character died before the end. Not the kind of story I'd want, anyway.'
Mrs Hudson fell back with a smile and Adam looked around with one eyebrow raised, as though challenging someone else to speak, and then he abruptly gestured, and the world changed.
'Abracadabra,' he said.
*
It was a Sunday afternoon, just past three, and the rain was pounding against the front of the bookshop. Someone nearby was playing dubstep loud enough that the tea cups were rattling, the milk was on the turn, and Crowley had the nagging feeling that there was something he'd forgotten.
Aziraphale squeaked his slow way to the back of the shop, having locked the door against the Sunday hordes (his word; two ladies had popped into the shop and popped swiftly out again at the look Aziraphale had sent them). He stopped on a low G, in front of the fiction shelves, somewhere close to the beginning of the alphabet, if Crowley was any judge.
'We've a surfeit of Ds,' he said, bewildered, and Crowley felt something in his chest give an uncomfortable warm lurch for the sake of a pronoun. He cursed himself under his breath, but that didn't prevent the slow smile from forming.
'Well I've a distinct lack of T,' Crowley said, savouring the huffs of annoyance and, more so, the detour into the key of B minor and the gentle click of the kettle's switch.
When Aziraphale settled Crowley was barely sprawled at all, the cushion beside him carefully chosen to be the most inviting one. The brimming cup of tea must have knocked his balance off centre, though, because it wasn't long until the lean resumed.
Somewhere something had cracked or shifted, enough to let in an insidious draft, and it was just where it could find its way onto the back of the neck of whoever was on the sofa, but Crowley was finding it difficult to care. He ducked his head further into his collar and shifted so Aziraphale's arm - which had shifted as he did, warm against the back of his neck - served as better protection. Somewhere nearby the bass emphatically dropped, momentarily obscuring the play on Radio 4; something about detectives, he thought, a detective, a vaguely familiar name. The angel pressed his freezing cold nose against Crowley's temple with an annoyed tut, and the demon hissed out a profanity.
It was Crowley's very favourite sort of day.
*
It was a Sunday afternoon, just past three, and the rain was pounding against the front of the bookshop. Someone nearby was playing dubstep loud enough that the tea cups were rattling, the milk was on the turn, and Crowley had the nagging feeling that there was something he'd forgotten.
Aziraphale squeaked his slow way to the back of the shop, having locked the door against the Sunday hordes (his word; two ladies had popped into the shop and popped swiftly out again at the look Aziraphale had sent them). He stopped on a low G, in front of the fiction shelves, somewhere close to the beginning of the alphabet, if Crowley was any judge.
'We've a surfeit of Ds,' he said, bewildered, and Crowley felt something in his chest give an uncomfortable warm lurch for the sake of a pronoun. He cursed himself under his breath, but that didn't prevent the slow smile from forming.
'Well I've a distinct lack of T,' Crowley said, savouring the huffs of annoyance and, more so, the detour into the key of B minor and the gentle click of the kettle's switch.
When Aziraphale settled Crowley was barely sprawled at all, the cushion beside him carefully chosen to be the most inviting one. The brimming cup of tea must have knocked his balance off centre, though, because it wasn't long until the lean resumed.
Somewhere something had cracked or shifted, enough to let in an insidious draft, and it was just where it could find its way onto the back of the neck of whoever was on the sofa, but Crowley was finding it difficult to care. He ducked his head further into his collar and shifted so Aziraphale's arm - which had shifted as he did, warm against the back of his neck - served as better protection. Somewhere nearby the bass emphatically dropped, momentarily obscuring the play on Radio 4; something about detectives, he thought, a detective, a vaguely familiar name. The angel pressed his freezing cold nose against Crowley's temple with an annoyed tut, and the demon hissed out a profanity.
It was Crowley's very favourite sort of day.