Happy Saturnalia, slowsunrise
Title: Rule Britannia
Recipient: slowsunrise
author: prestissima
Word Count: 8,028
Prompt: C/A, set during or after WWII. Cue supernatural Nazi stuff, serious violence, and happy endings.
Notes: Turned out more like pre-C/A, but I hope you enjoy nevertheless. The title comes from the song, Rule Britannia. Have a happy holiday!
"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.
-Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing”
At half past three, the large clock in the entrance hall of 128 Bond Street sounded its tentative and reproachful chimes close to the ear of Colonel Reginald Dewforth Huntsboroughleigh III. He had been taking his afternoon nap beneath yesterday's Times, and as St. Thomas' was the sort of gentleman's club to provide shelter from harridans and enterprising telegraph ladies, the good colonel had been left in peace to blithely miss tea all on his very own. Happily and honourably discharged from his military duty of fighting the good fight during the Great War, Huntsboroughleigh, Reggie to his friends, now considered it his civilian duty to uphold the fine English virtues of hiding from women in fashionable parts of town guaranteed to deter even the most determined of aunts. In any case, his valet had gone off to the fields of Flanders and was not about to be preparing his dinner anytime soon.
"Strange, that," he remarked to himself. As he rose from the hallway bench, he regrettably left behind the soporific sweetness of luncheon treacle tart. His private utterance referred to the missing duet of Fell and Crowley, who were not at their usual table in the smoking room. (The Lyceum once enjoyed Fell’s custom, but with the War and one's duty, you were more likely to find your mates in officers' clubs like St. Thomas'.) At present, it was just the one; the fair-haired staff sergeant was dithering at an empty cards table, waiting for Crowley no doubt. Reggie took a chair in the corner behind a neglected fern, oddly comforted by the familiar creaking on the green leather.
Fell and Crowley had been coming here since the war began, and certainly never missed a single tea. They were one of the few certainties upon which Reggie could rely, in a world where sugar was being rationed and sirens went on at all hours of the night. Fell's expression made Reggie uneasy, and he debated breaking the Code and introducing himself. Could Fell's nerves stand such a breach in decorum? The man looked a bundle of stress as it was. He had already torn his train ticket into little pieces, and they littered the table like so many Communion wafers.
It was entirely possible that Crowley had been sent away to the front without even an opportunity to inform his friend. Fell might want comforting from a fellow St. Thomas member, a veteran of loss and single serving, forever alone, afternoon scones. Heart pounding in his ears, the colonel ventured to clear his throat. His valiant, reluctant attempt was arrested mid-squawk by a slamming of the front doors and Crowley's sudden entry into the room. Reggie was so relieved by the rescue from social engagement that as he sank back into another nap beneath his newspaper, he did not even mind the glare that somehow issued from behind Crowley's perpetual sunglasses. Had he not returned to sleep with the urgent voices of an angel and a demon lulling him towards Lethe, he would have heard quite a mystifying conversation.
"Crowley! I was afraid you'd died! Er, that is, discorporated. Anyway, there was an awful lot of bombing last night!"
"It's all right. The Jerries didn't get the Bentley," Crowley said, taking a seat at the card table. As a demon, he wasn't particularly loyal to any one country, but he considered himself a demon of fashion, and had picked up the terms of the age. "I'll have to find a new flat though. Half the street's bombed out and it wouldn't do to look too fortunate."
"How terribly inconvenient. You must come and stay at the shop then. I won't be needing the upstairs anyhow." Had Reggie been awake, he would have been surprised to see Aziraphale brush a hand over the bits of paper and reveal a train ticket instead.
"What?" Crowley asked, alarmed. "Where are you going?"
"Above is sending me off, SAS special mission, most likely destroying airfields or something. I haven’t been told," Aziraphale said, looking almost embarrassed. "I'm sorry, my dear, but it would appear that I shall be the one in mud and trenches this time around."
"Right," muttered Crowley. Last time the Great Powers went to war, Below had sent him to Ypres. The humans had turned the air to poison somehow, with Crowley stranded in corridors of mustard. He'd stopped talking for a while. There wasn't anything he could say. Anything out of his mouth would have been a wish for Hell.
"My dear?" Aziraphale asked worriedly, as if he too suddenly remembered finding Crowley hunched over in a trench, eyes bandaged not from the gas, but so he wouldn't have to see anymore.
"Never mind," Crowley said. He waved away Aziraphale's Concerned-Hand-On-Shoulder-No.-6. "Below gave me a little job too. Some German SS business. I didn't read it too carefully. The Fuhrer's trying to scare up some secret weapon."
"Oh? Why would your people bother? One would imagine you receive souls from either side," Aziraphale said.
Crowley shook his head. "No, this one's got some lower imps spooked. I think they're looking for a summoning but they keep tapping into the wrong frequency. Trust me, it's a mess to mop up."
"Why, whatever do you mean?"
"They're sending holy words into Hell, angel. Some bastard picks up the signal on his frequency and, well, the psychic transmission imps have a tendency to splatter when they receive His Word." Both of them winced at the mental image.
"One can imagine the paperwork," Aziraphale said with sympathy. "But why would the Germans open channels Below, only to utter sacred words through the connection?"
"Whatever they're doing, it's not a summoning. At least not from the right place. All I know is that it's making a mess Downstairs. Does it sound like anything your people would try?" Crowley asked.
"One does one's best to stay informed, but really, my dear, you know it gets a bit tiresome to filter through Michael's speeches," Aziraphale said reproachfully.
"Right right, don't remind me," Crowley replied as he stood up. "Well, I have to be going, angel. They want me to take care of this fairly quickly, as you can imagine. Or at the very least find out who gave them the right formula. Do you know where you'll be? We could compare notes."
"I believe Staff Sergeant Fell is being sent to the African campaign," Aziraphale said, and began to smile. "After that, it's up to---"
"Yes, yes, I know," Crowley said, cutting him off testily.
"I was going to say fate, but very well," replied Aziraphale with a forgiving smile. The two held each other's gazes for a moment.
Finally, Crowley spoke.
"Good luck out there," he said, as they shook hands. They weren't in any actual danger, not exactly, but humans were...unpredictable, and anyway, war was always a dreadful bother. Aziraphale liked to have his routines and having war declared all the time always disrupted his tablet/papyrus/scroll/codex/book cataloguing system. There was also the matter of his demonic counterpart, who Aziraphale felt cared far too much about how any war was getting on. Certainly it was important to have concern for your fellow man, or at least your fellow member of Creation, but soon there'd be another batch of people who looked vaguely the same and behaved about the same too. Crowley had trouble letting go. Yes, Crowley had trouble letting go, and with war, he had to let go of quite a lot of people all at once sometimes. Thessaloniki had really put him off in 390 AD, not to mention Constantinople in 1182 (though Aziraphale was sure Crowley hadn’t known all 80,000 of those poor souls). These things just happened from time to time.
They shook hands once more as they left the club, and each went in different directions. Aziraphale stopped and turned to glance at Crowley's retreating back. He really hoped he wouldn't have to collect Crowley this time round. Again.
It was a good thing Huntsboroughleigh heard the entire business, Aziraphale reflected later, and had called Aziraphale back inside the club. Otherwise, he might never have seen Crowley ever again.
~*~
Two weeks later, Aziraphale was busily being sick on the HMS Tambourine as it trawled the waters past French Morocco. The treacherous sea, laundry blue and pristine that morning, had darkened and roiled by noon, and made her displeasure known to the ships in Her Majesty's Navy. Aziraphale clutched his hat in one hand as he held onto the railing with the other, blinking his eyes against the stabs of raindrops against his face. The wind tugged through his hair and scraped against his skin like sandpaper, and for a moment he wondered if it would be cheating to miracle this storm away.
Instead he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and staggered back down below deck. The other officers paid him no mind as he collapsed into one of the bunks. They were busy at cards, and Aziraphale had stayed in bed for most of the trip anyway. Reggie had told him not to talk to anyone, and his constant dyspepsia made that task easy. The last time he'd been this seasick, he'd snuck out of Noah's Ark and gone for a flyaround with Crowley. He was an angel, and angels didn't get seasick, except when their bodies were convinced otherwise. He wondered if he'd be discharged if he went missing for a short flight. Their entire platoon might be sent home for mass hallucinations, unless headquarters decided they were too short on men to risk even losing cannon fodder.
At least they were close to Libya, where they were due to land. When he was above deck offering noisy obeisances to Poseidon, Aziraphale had seen the dark mass of rock and sand that awaited them. The ship itself was chugging along at a fairly even pace despite the tossing waves. He thought he could even hear the guns of a distant battle-unless those were the guns of a very immediate battle. Suddenly, the ship rumbled and pitched to one side, tossing him out of his bunk and scattering playing cards everywhere. Books upended on his chest and his world flashed in and out of darkness as their lamp swung wildly around the ceiling.
A door opened, water bursting in and around their colonel while he braced himself against the doorframe.
"At the ready! We're landing early!" he screamed. "They've got guns on the beach!"
Bewildered and more than a little nauseous, Aziraphale grabbed his helmet and his landing gear and followed the rest of the men up on the deck. Now above the chaos of the cabin, his eyes spotted the bursts of fire punctuating the rain like a string of signal lights along the beach. This hadn't been the plan, but this also wasn’t his first war. He slid into the small landing craft and sardined himself into the middle, where the press of bodies might keep him upright. The men were silent. Other than the sound of distant gunfire, there was just the voice of the colonel, tearing through the storm and striking a chord more urgent in their hearts than any alarum ever before.
He didn't have long to wait before he had to pull out his medical bag, if only for show. Medical Staff Sergeant A. Fell had absolutely no medical, surgical, or scientific training, but no man had ever died under his finely manicured hands. As he felt himself shoved out of the landing craft by the press of soldiers, he nearly tripped over a fellow bleeding in the surf. Aziraphale knelt down and felt around for the wound. The angel couldn't really stop things like sudden headshots and surprise attacks, but as long as a soldier wasn't dead already, all he'd come out with would be a scar.
He said a few Words.
Eyes clenched in pain opened in relief, then surprise.
Aziraphale smiled.
"Bless you!" he said as cheerily as a Girl Guide, and got up to look for his next patient.
He made his way up the beach with ease, waving a hand here and there so that there were rather a few more miraculous saves than could be attributed to probability. Aziraphale noticed that two guns in particular were causing most of the mortar fire. He waved his hands at them a little, but for some reason they refused to jam. Puzzled, Aziraphale began to pick his way towards the battlements, ducking his head occasionally to avoid the whiz and clip of bullets around him. After all, it wouldn't do to look like he was taking a stroll in Regent’s Park. When he was closer, he tried to jam them again, and was rewarded with a brief stutter, then a series of booms that were loud enough to cause his teeth to rattle. Huffing and puffing, he finally made it to the little concrete bunker with his fingers stuck in his ears, quite pleased with his little climb. Even the rain had stopped. If it weren’t for the rat-a-tat-tat of repeating gunfire behind him, he might think he was on a seaside constitutional.
Without warning, someone yanked his arms behind him and shoved a foot against the backs of his knees. His chin knocked against the rocky ground as he landed, and he tasted wet sand. Oh bother. Angels have the gift of tongues, and so he heard, quite clearly, his German assailant shout, "Standartenführer Rohm! Are we taking prisoners, sir?" His captor yanked rather harder than necessary on his hair, shoving his face against the corner where the wall of the bunker met the ground. There was either rain or blood on his face, because quite a lot of sand was stuck to his cheek and chin. The German was holding him against the cold concrete wall of the bunker, and Aziraphale could feel the change in his grip as what must have been his superior approached.
Gingerly, Aziraphale shifted his head a little so he might at least look at or talk to the commanding officer. His gaze traveled from the unusually shiny black boots to the grey military greatcoat, the buttons gleaming in the post-rain gloom. He twisted his face a little more, and when his eyes took in the insignia of the collar, he stiffened with an entirely foreign feeling. Fear. This was the uniform of the Schutzstaffel-Totenkopfverbände. Hitler’s Death’s Head Units.
Steel blue eyes ran over his abject figure, the medic pack, and the rumpled uniform. They swept back out to the beach, where figures were still trying to make their way across the sand. He must have been calculating how Aziraphale had made it so far as a mere medic.
“Take him to the Oberführer. I think he speaks English,” Standartenführer Rohm finally said. “The Englishman might have some useful information.”
“Yes sir!”
The German soldier pulled Aziraphale to his feet and shoved him forwards. Aziraphale raised his hands in an act of universal surrender, and tried his best to remain charitable as the soldier prodded him rather harder than necessary with the butt of his pistol. There was no need, really. Aziraphale already wanted to be as far away from Rohm as possible. He’d heard…rumors, yes, merely rumors, he hoped, about the Totenkopfverbände.
They took a simple dirt path, away from the blast of guns, and towards a small tent at the edge of a small encampment, set a small distance away to distinguish itself.
“Heil Hitler!” the soldier saluted, when they reached the tent. “Oberführer, we have a British prisoner for interrogation, sir!”
“Yes, yes, bring him in,” said a far too familiar voice in German. “You may return to your post.”
Aziraphale was shoved rudely into soft light of the tent, where he stumbled into the table set there. Underneath the hanging lightbulb there was a bottle of wine and a few glasses, as if waiting for a victory toast. With what Aziraphale had done on the beach, that prospect appeared unlikely. The identity of the oberführer was now unmistakeable, even with his back facing Aziraphale. When he turned around, Aziraphale’s blood chilled to see Crowley attired in the cold grey uniform of the Totenkopfverbände, complete with the grinning skull on his right collar.
“Crowley?” he asked incredulously, even though the moment he heard his voice he knew it to be so. “You look…” he paused, taking in Crowley’s thinned face and stressed features once he had removed his sunglasses. The gold of his eyes flared in the light, making his eyes and cheeks look more sunken by contrast.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, angel,” Crowley said quietly.
“Crowley?”
“I didn’t think…was that your jamming of the guns?” Abruptly, they stopped. “That’s much better, don’t you think?”
“Crowley, what’s happened?” Aziraphale said. Crowley was never this calm, never this still. He moved to grip Crowley’s arm, but stopped himself when he saw the demon flinch. “What are they doing? What’s wrong?”
Crowley looked so miserable that Aziraphale took pity and poured him a glass of red. Crowley’s hands shook as he accepted the glass, but instead of drinking it he set it, rattling, down on the table again. He pulled out the flimsy camp chair and almost fell into it, covering his face with his hands. The movement jostled the table and sloshed the wine out of the glass. In the unsteady light, it looked like the wood was bleeding.
“This is more than war. This is beyond war. The Gestapo and the SS, they both…” Crowley stopped, and he looked about ready to vomit. He stared blindly at the wine stain, the liquid spreading out against the grain of the wooden table. “I have to wear this uniform. Even the German people are afraid of us. Of Oberführer Crowley.” He spat the title out like a filthy thing. He finally looked up at Aziraphale, resigned that he would have to face him and his terrible judgement. His gaze never connected, and he looked as if he were still watching whatever nameless and unspoken horrors played out in his memory.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said slowly in the tone of voice one uses to coax a man off a high ledge, “what are you talking about?”
“I haven’t done anything. I’m not in Europe. Our division isn’t in Europe,” Crowley kept repeating, but his voice was toneless and without life. “I want you to remember that. We came straight from Berlin into Libya, en route to Egypt for an archaeological expedition. I never did anything in Europe, not in Poland, not in Austria, not in Germany, not anywhere there, you have to remember that.”
“Why, what’s happening in-“
“It will come out. It has to come out. Promise me. Promise me when this is over you’ll remind me that I had nothing to do with Europe, nothing in the East. I couldn’t-there’re so many-and they sent me here,” Crowley said in that same dead tone, and despite himself, Aziraphale reached over and put a hand on his arm. Crowley hadn’t been taking care of himself, and Aziraphale could feel his bony shoulders through the wool.
“I promise,” he said firmly. “I believe you aren’t doing whatever it is they are doing in Europe. Now will you tell me what’s going on? Why are you here and not in Europe?”
“The Reichssicherheitschauptamt-er, the Reich Main Security Office, Heydrich, he sent us with orders from the Führer himself. I only just managed to get myself placed in this division at the last minute. They want two things, that’s all we have orders for. We’re not to be involved with anything else,” Crowley said, almost to himself. “There’s an artefact in Egypt they need to dig out.”
“Does it sound legitimate?” Aziraphale asked, pulling up a chair so he could at least talk to Crowley from the same height. “Do they have the right incantation?”
“Almost. Hitler wants no trouble with the Vatican, so summoning, say, a pack of hellhounds, would be rather counter to an ostensibly Christian country intending to blanket the world with good German culture. But a divine power at the helm can make even a pack of hellhounds look good. So they’re looking for an angel to demoralize the Allied forces and lead the German way to victory,” Crowley said without much enthusiasm. “They won’t get one, of course. That idiot from the Gestapo keeps mispronouncing the words, so they get a straight line to Below instead. No hell hounds, no angel.”
“So they want an artefact that they think will fix their formula. That’s one. You mentioned two things, my dear,” Aziraphale said gently.
“Ah, yes. There are rumours of a demon who frequents the Eternal City of Jerusalem, and causes mischief for the Turks,” Crowley said with a humourless smile.
“Ah,” was all Aziraphale said. He gave himself a moment’s recollection. “So that night with the girl from Elim’s tavern?”
“Yes.”
“And when we went with the performing troupe up to the palace?”
“They know about that too.”
Aziraphale coloured. “And the seduction of an, ahem, innocent bookseller at the baths by the Selim Gardens?”
“Just one of that demon’s many devilments, ah ha,” Crowley replied grimly. “They think that should they summon or capture said demon, an angel will arrive to smite the demon and reward them with its service. I haven’t found out what their source is, but you and I know it can’t work. Incantations of that sort don’t need artefacts or totems.”
“It’ll be some poor fellow with a strange facial growth, I expect,” Aziraphale said sadly. “At least they’ve stopped burning them as witches.”
“They’re doing far worse,” Crowley said hoarsely.
Before Aziraphale could ask what he meant, the tent flap opened and Standartenführer Rohm stepped in.
“Heil Hitler,” he said, saluting his senior officer.
“Heil Hitler,” Oberführer Crowley replied perfunctorily, raising his hand a little in a wave. He had already restored his sunglasses to their perch.
“Excuse me for interrupting your interrogation, sir,” Rohm said with a little bow, “but we can’t get the guns unjammed. I don’t mean to say we are retreating, but…our highest priority is in Egypt, sir. Brigadeführer Lang has ordered that we pull out of this beachfront and head for Egypt right away. Reinforcements are coming in soon from Generalfeldmarschall Rommel.”
“And just when will the old Wüstenfuchs be here?” Crowley asked, eyeing Aziraphale, who was listening attentively.
“Shouldn’t be more than a day now, sir. They’ll take the British by surprise as they’re digging in. We have our orders. What do you want done with the prisoner, sir?” Rohm asked.
“I would prefer he remain, to sing praises of our strength, our civility, and our superiority,” Crowley said as if reciting from memory. “Sow dissension in their ranks. Brigadeführer Lang would not want us to bring along any unnecessary baggage.”
“Yes sir. How admirable and skilful that you were able to show him the light in such a short time!” Rohm exclaimed, saluting again as Crowley rose from his seat. “Brigadeführer Lang also informed me he wished to see you before we departed. Shall I escort the prisoner to the guns so that he may greet his fellows?”
“Yes yes, he won’t be any trouble. Heil Hitler and all that, see you later,” Crowley said absently. He didn’t even hear Rohm’s enthusiastic reply, for he was already thinking of his meeting with Lang. He shook hands with Aziraphale, his grip too tight and his mouth tense. Aziraphale didn’t recognize the thin smile coming from this man-shaped being in a murderer’s uniform. And with that last thought lingering in Aziraphale’s mind, Crowley left the tent.
“Come, come,” Rohm was saying in passable English as he tried to tug Aziraphale back towards the beach. Aziraphale left the tent and watched Crowley walk along the dirt path until he reached another tent, where he saluted to the guard. “English, ja? Come!”
“Hmm? Ah yes, my apologies,” Aziraphale said, as he followed Rohm to the beach. They clambered up the rude dirt path to the concrete. On one side, Aziraphale could see the rest of the British troops disembarking and making their way towards the sabotaged gunnery. On the other side, the SS and Gestapo camp was already packing up, leaving only a skeleton Totenkopf regiment to hold ground. They were too far away for Aziraphale to possibly spot Crowley.
“German better, ja? Have good…was is word, engel, ja?” Rohm was asking him in poor English. He was grinning like a wolf when he switched back to German. “And now that the rat has learned his lesson, there is no more point to tolerating his taint,” he said, and shot Aziraphale square in the chest.
As he lay in the sand beside the bunker, listening to Rohm’s departing guffaws, Aziraphale reflected, if rather crossly, that it was a good thing he was an angel. Someone might have been killed.
~*~
For your sake, I hurry over land and water:
For your sake, I cross the desert and split the mountain in two,
And turn my face from all things,
Until the time I reach the place
Where I am alone with You.
-Al Hallaj
In the sea of darkness outside Cairo, Aziraphale stumbled over sand and dune, trying to mark out his path in the shifting grains. Overhead, the stars outshone his small torch with their glittering riot of burning gases against the faraway night sky. Somehow their brilliant light made the night around him even gloomier in the vast expanse of emptiness. The coldness of the desert carried from the wind right through his bones, but his men were too watchful for any small miracles. He felt cold, and very small.
“Halloa!” one of the men cried from a distance. “I’ve found it!”
Stumbling and emphatically not-cursing as he went, Aziraphale slipped and slid down the sand dunes towards the officer. After he had passed on information to Reginald, Aziraphale had followed Crowley’s group to Egypt. His own platoon split off into SAS men, headed for Egypt, while the rest of the enlisted remained in Libya to continue the fight against Rommel. And while Aziraphale did not envy them, being huddled in a trench sounded less lonely than stumbling blindly in the vastness of the Sahara.
“Splendid work, Jones,” his colonel called out, and as Aziraphale neared the growing congregation of torchlight, he realized they had found the abandoned Nazi campsite. It was not the usual regimented decamping. Half-broken tents flapped in the night air, and the remains of a campfire lay scattered across the sand, smelling strongly of camel. Someone had been very excited to leave at once.
“Sir, I think I’ve found something,” said someone Aziraphale thought might be Captain Braithwaite.
“Oh? What’s this? Can’t make heads or tails of it. Foreign rubbish. Give it to Fell, he’s a Cambridge man, isn’t he?” he heard the colonel say.
Braithwaite (he hoped) came trotting over with what appeared to be a heavy slab of diorite. Aziraphale had been here a long, long time ago. The people who used to live here hauled diorite from miles and miles away to build statues and holy things. He helped write some of the inscriptions.
“Do you recognize it, Staff Sergeant Fell?” Braithwaite asked, huffing and puffing a little. Diorite was heavy, and expensive, and Aziraphale recognized the handwriting immediately. The last people to use the language on the slab, however, had died hundreds of years ago.
Squiggle, squiggle, circle, wedge, wedge…
Angel,
PLANS HAVE CHANGED. Göbbels (this was written phonetically; it was either that or a phrase that meant “Nimrod had too many barley cakes”) arrived yesterday, and it is clear that he is running the show. He says angels are God’s perfect messenger. Imagine, the first propaganda minister with the perfect messenger at his side. He canceled the demonic summoning. All they want is an angel now. STAY AWAY FROM JERUSALEM. They have an artefact, and it feels funny (flock of birds flying over Eliezer’s clean chariot) to me. Lang says it’s from Babel. No one will let me see it. DO NOT GO TO JERUSALEM. Something’s wrong.
Squiggle.
Wedge, trapezoid, half-moon, foot.
“Staff? What is it?” Braithwaite asked again. The tablet was icy cold in Aziraphale’s hands, and he dropped it in the sand with a heavy thud.
“No idea. Savage language, most likely. The Nazis didn’t see fit to bring it along so I hardly imagine it would be worth our time,” Aziraphale tried to say airily, but Crowley’s missive worried him. Crowley hadn’t even seen the artefact, and yet his warning was etched in stone. “Is that all we have here?”
“I’ll go and see, shall I?” Braithwaite said obediently. When the man had walked far away enough, Aziraphale coughed and stamped down on the tablet. No human would have been able to make it shatter into a million pieces, but by the time Braithwaite returned, the black stone dust had already melted into the night air.
“A local guide heard them talking about Jerusalem, sir,” Braithwaite reported. “The colonel’s ordered us to make ready.” He shivered, bringing his coat a little closer around himself. “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I always thought Egypt was supposed to be hot.”
“Hmm,” Aziraphale replied noncommittally. He thought of Babel, of Nimrod, and of voices crying out in the desert. There had been a sea, and trees, and rivers lush with life. There had been war then too, copper helmets glaring against the sun, mudbrick walls splashed with blood, and always, the wailing of mothers and sisters and daughters. He thought about the church in Jerusalem, where he had tried to save all those books. Crowley had run in during the fire, hair ablaze, head to toe in Templar garb, and carried him out kicking. There was nothing they could do, that night, not much more than a miracle here and a miracle there, like grains of sand in a desert of human greed and human hatred.
He stared into the blindness of the desert dark, then up into the endless sky stretching above them, so pure, but so cold, and so far removed from the sweat and smell and dust of human life.
He felt very alone.
~*~
In the Christian Quarter, behind a potted plant near the Souk el-Dabragha, Colonel Reginald Dewforth Huntsboroughleigh III-of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service, of Corpus Christi College, of Cambridge, and most recently, of a very small wagon loaded with figs-waited. He was unrecognizable from the persona he maintained at St. Thomas’ Club. The invalided civilian who frequented those carpeted halls was terribly convenient for spying out good chaps like Staff Sergeant Fell and recruiting them for secret missions. He was, however, utterly and unfailingly incompetent at wearing a headdress, growing a beard that rivaled those on the wisest gurus, and speaking fluent Arabic while hiding a .455 Webley about one’s person. And so Reggie, long time operative in the Middle East, with a network of several informants in Jerusalem, had dusted off his keffiyeh and sent himself down to Egypt.
It was a good job, that, finding a man like Fell. Reggie hadn’t been entirely sure the afternoon of Crowley and Fell’s conversation at the club. He suspected Crowley to be an SIS man, and he certainly wasn’t going to let the SAS sit this one out. As he watched Fell struggle out of the window of the small house where his SAS raiding party was hosted, he wondered just how the Nazi plot was coming along. He had received no messages after Libya, and it was only by chance that he learned that Fell was in Jerusalem at all. In times of war, communication was insecure and suspect, but no operative likes to remain uninformed.
There were few lamps lit along the street, oil being a precious commodity and sold to Allied and Axis alike. Reggie tried to follow Fell through the shadows, but the blond staff sergeant appeared to be more than familiar with the winding streets. Had it not been for Reggie’s stint here during the Great War, he might have lost him.
~*~
“War doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left.” - Bertrand Russell
The moment he entered the city, Aziraphale had felt the pull of the artefact. There was no denying that in Aziraphale’s psychic landscape, there was an enormous valley towards which everything was draining. He could close his eyes, plug his ears, and he would still know exactly which direction the artefact lay.
The Christian Quarter had not changed all too much, and in any case, Aziraphale could not have gotten lost, so long as he had the artefact’s undeniable pull. Crowley was right about one thing: something was wrong. Neither of them knew of any actual thing that could affect angel or demon on earth. Incantations had power, rituals had power, but a mere object? At most, there might be a haunting or a strong psychic residue, but for a mere physical object to draw in a Son of God, there was something else at work.
Jerusalem was always itchy territory for Crowley. There were holy sites scattered left and right, and if there was anywhere that a demon would definitely not want to be, it was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Aziraphale approached the dark bulk of the building, and resisted the urge to scrutinize the architecture. He was always a little embarrassed about the antechamber known as the Chapel of the Angel, and he had had a few words with Komminos of Mytilene, but there was nothing to be done.
With some difficulty, he scaled the wall closest to where he knew the artefact would be, and espied the candles that were set around an ecumenical altar. The rotunda was crawling with SS officers, Gestapo, and a few other official-looking men in suits. He eased himself through a side door and hoped nobody would see him in the darkness. The urge to find the artefact was nearly irresistible now, and he gritted his teeth against its power.
The man he recognized as Joseph Göbbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, stood before the altar dressed in robes of white and gold. (As usual with officials on these occasions, he wore a funny hat.) Aziraphale tried to find Crowley in the mix, but with the grey and black of the uniforms, all the officers looked alike. This became even truer when they lined up and stood at attention, commanded by the short barks of a man he remembered as Standartenführer Rohm.
Göbbels reached under the altar and brought out a small silver box. He looked around him with pleasure, and the light from the candles reflected in his mean, fierce eyes like blades of steel.
“Heil Hitler!” he began, and waited until the chorus of salutes died down. “Tonight, I shall wield the power of Heaven on behalf of the Reich. We have in our possession an artefact of enormous power. It was used to lay the foundation for the Tower of Babel. When Nimrod shot his arrows into heaven and they returned dripping with blood, this was the trowel fashioned out of that very blood. We know, in our glorious Reich, that power and purity is all in the blood. Imagine what an instrument of angelic blood can do!”
One of the officers turned his head quickly in alarm, and Aziraphale spotted the flash of gold that betrayed Crowley’s eyes.
“With this divine instrument, I shall summon a holy being of Empyrean lineage. With this instrument, with this divine and holy instrument, I shall prove that the Reich has the blessing of the divine, for we already have an angel who watches over us, which I shall reveal to you!” Göebbels cried, and Aziraphale pressed himself against the wall with a gasp. Crowley, along with the other officers, was looking around frantically, no doubt hoping that his angel had listened to his warning.
“Yes, an angel watches over us, an angel who has sought to conceal himself, but he did not imagine that I would see through his disguise. After all, how can a Son of Heaven imagine the wiles and deceit that a Reich Minister must battle?” Göbbels’ voice was growing louder now, and it filled the church, echoing and bouncing off walls nearly as old as Crowley and Aziraphale. He removed a small key from his pocket and unlocked the box. With a trembling hand, he brought out the trowel of Nimrod, and the scroll that held the incantation.
Aziraphale wrapped his arms around the column before him and dug his fingernails into the spaces between the stones. His hair stood on end and every bone in his body rattled. Crowley was barely still standing in the rank and file.
“Son of God,” Göbbels began, in a language Aziraphale had almost forgotten. “In the old language of the Fathers, I summon you to my side. With the blood of your brothers, I bind you to my will. I bind your power to my will, and you shall not deny me!” He said some Words.
There was a collective gasp from the officers as Crowley was flung to the ground before the altar, and a scrambling to tamp out the candles that had fallen in his wake. In the darkness, a glowing circle appeared around Crowley’s prone figure, and when he raised his head, they finally saw his golden eyes.
“Hah!” Göbbels nearly screamed in triumph. His eyes were glowing blue, and an unseen wind whipped past him, making his robes and hair billow out around him. “I knew it was you! I have you under my will, Son of God! Yes, I can feel the power! My God, it is wonderful!”
Inside the circle, Crowley looked disoriented, and he shook his head a few times before he rose to his feet. Now that the artefact was fulfilled, Aziraphale no longer felt its electric pull. He let go of the column before him and got down on his hands and knees in case the preternatural glow revealed his location.
“When Rohm told me of your unwillingness to go to the camps, of your mercy for the enemy, of your weakness when told of the vans and the ghettoes, I knew, I knew you were not one of us,” Göbbels jeered as he approached the circle. Crowley looked steadier on his feet now, but he still hadn’t said anything. “I thought it was unusual, with your lack of enthusiasm for anything else, that you would volunteer for this special secret mission. But when Rohm and Lang told me how they never saw you eat, how they never saw you asleep, I knew with absolute certainty that my actions had divine guidance. Yes, with your power at my command, the German people will be an irresistible tide of purity and glory across the face of the Earth!”
He reached across the circle and grasped Crowley’s chin in his hand, wrenching his face down to meet his. Aziraphale could see the panic in Crowley’s eyes, and when he saw Crowley’s hands waving frantically as they always did when performing miracle after miracle, he realized that Crowley was powerless inside the circle.
“I will have my scientists and doctors dissect you and discover the secret essence of your power. We will divide you up and distil you and bottle you to every German soldier and every Aryan child. They will speak directly to the minds of all the races of the Earth, purifying and cleansing. The Earth will be covered with German angels, and it all begins with you.”
“No!” Aziraphale shouted without thinking, and leapt down from the scaffolding. He landed inexpertly on a bust of St. Helena, then dove for Göbbels. The man was too quick for him, however, and grabbed the trowel.
He said some Words.
It was like being turned inside out. Everything that made Aziraphale feel like himself was peeled open and dumped out for all to see. He lay panting in the middle of a second glowing circle, surrounded by SS guards who had come to Göbbels’ defence. Göbbels looked like it was his lucky day.
“Trouble in Paradise?” he asked mockingly. “So you would stop me?” He looked up at the guards, and only barely nodded.
“Angel!” was all Aziraphale heard Crowley yell before a rain of blows from boots and rifles cascaded down on his head. Instinctively, he tried to miracle the pain away, but nothing came as he was kicked and struck. Someone stepped on his fingers, crushing the bones in his hand, and before he could attempt to scream, someone else wrenched his head back and struck him with the butt of their rifle. With each blow, the stars of the Sahara seemed to return to him, flaring against his eyelids with each explosion of pain. He almost longed for the deprivation of the desert.
“Stop this!” Crowley demanded furiously. He pounded against the invisible barrier of the circle in vain.
“I apologize, my pet angel, but I am afraid that dissenters and traitors cannot be allowed in the Third and Eternal Reich,” Göbbels said, watching the brutality unfolding before him with glee. “I know that you yourself, as an angel, cannot countenance such violence, but it will be over soon. The circle traps your angelic power, after all. Your friend will not last long.”
Before he turned back to watch the spectacle, however, he was interrupted by Crowley’s hand on his chest. It was on fire.
“Whuh…yuh…” Göbbels spluttered. “But you’re an angel! No angelic power can leave the circle!”
The rest of Crowley came through the circle, his uniform burned away, his eyes glowing with hellfire. Huge wings spread out and upwards, knocking approaching soldiers away. When he spoke, his voice held the echoes of the wails of millions of souls.
“You fool,” Crowley spoke as he lifted Göbbels straight into the air. “All my angelic power is in there, yes. But that leaves you with a very angry set of demonic powerssss, and none of them are under your control.” Crowley tossed Göbbels against the altar and shoved the soldiers aside, sinking his hands through chests and burning them down to their souls. Those who ran, he burned with a lick of hellfire until not even their souls were left. He thundered through them until he had expelled, destroyed, or cremated anyone hurting Aziraphale.
“Angel! Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, the growls in his voice at odds with his worry.
“Crowley. Thank you,” Aziraphale said through split and swollen lips. He opened his eyes, and struggled to his hands and knees in alarm. “What happened to you?”
Crowley looked down at himself sheepishly. He was naked and bloody, his wings were unfurled, and every part of him was on fire. They looked behind him to the circle that was his former prison. It was still glowing blue.
“You know how you alwaysssssssaid there wassss a shred of decency insssside me?” Crowley asked. “I think I jussssst losssst it.”
“Oh Crowley,” Aziraphale said, unable to reach across the circle.
“It’ssss hard to sssstay like this,” Crowley hissed, shutting his eyes tightly. He sank towards the ground, trying to stop himself. “I want…to hurt people.”
“No!” Göbbels shouted, having recovered from his blow. His eyes glowed blue with energy, still feeding off of Crowley and Aziraphale’s captured power. When he spoke, his voice echoed with divine might. “Schutzstaffel! Awaken!” Whatever officers had not been maimed or annihilated rose as if in a trance. “To me!”
“What’s all this then?” A clear voice rang out in the carnage. A bizarre creature swung down from the scaffolding. He was dressed like an Islamic scholar, his skin was tanned and smooth from desert sun and sand, and yet his blue eyes twinkled when they flashed at Aziraphale.
“Who the hell are you?” Göbbels shrieked.
“I do apologize,” said the scholar in a familiar accent. “Colonel Reginald Dewforth Huntsboroughleigh III, at your service. Reich Minister Joseph Göbbels, I presume? I’m afraid I shall have to disrupt your little affair.”
“You are too late, colonel,” Göbbels said. “God is at my side! I have the power of tongues, I have the irresistible charisma of kings, and all who hear my voice shall obey! Bow before your new master, Reginald Huntsboroughleigh III!”
“I say!” Reggie cried out as his knee bent. He sank towards the floor as Göbbels approached him, and visibly struggled as his body bent.
“You see, colonel, nothing can stand in my way now!” Göbbels declared.
“Not bloody likely!” Reginald shouted, and with herculaean effort, thrust his body upwards. His fist rose and struck Göbbels under the chin, knocking the man unconscious and cracking his head against the altar. The zombie Schutzstaffel guards dropped back to the floor, and the glowing circles faded. Reginald jumped up and snatched the trowel from Göbbel’s limp hands. He turned back towards the two bewildered supernatural creatures.
“What?” Crowley said, so shocked he had forgotten to winch in his wings. He was no longer on fire, and his voice had stopped sounding like a pack of wolves had set upon a battle between chainsaws and chalkboard screeches.
“He had our power,” Aziraphale said. “His…er, natural charisma should have been impossible to disobey.” He waved his hands a bit, looking pleased when his broken bones healed.
“Well gentlemen,” Reggie said with a raised eyebrow. “Not to say that you lot aren’t spiffing and what, with your wings and your powers. But we humans have got something far more special.”
“What?” Crowley said again. He was beyond babbling.
“Free will,” Reginald said, and winked. “As long as we’ve got the will to refuse Heaven or Hell, we’ll always be free. I’ll see you two back at the club, shall I?” He tucked the trowel into his pocket and walked away whistling ‘Rule Britannia.’
Crowley and Aziraphale stared after him.
“What?”
~*~
Britain was rationing, and in these tough times, even the ducks of St. James’ were pulling together. Two man-shaped beings watched as two ducks divided a wholemeal slice between them. With some care, one of the beings slipped on a pair of gloves.
“One would think miracling away broken bones would mean no phantom pain,” one of them sniffed. The other one started, and when he spoke, his voice was thick.
“You’ll always know it was there. I’ll always know it was there. It’s not like getting a new body,” he said. He looked relieved to be back in his suit and tie, after the grey and black of the sharply cut Nazi uniform. He swallowed.
“Rather good of the SAS to clean it all up,” his companion remarked. “Those boys can do wonders with stains. I must have some over to the shop some time.”
They continued watching the ducks, who were now swimming in formation. They had lined up expectantly, like good soldiers at inspection time. Aziraphale tossed them another slice.
“I expect we’ll have to get the trowel off Reggie at some point. I still have no idea what that was all about,” Aziraphale added. “Spot of luck, finding us when he did, wasn’t it?”
One of the ducks had acquired a rather larger piece of bread than the others. A second duck came along to steal the bread, and the first duck smacked a third for the insult. And so wars are born.
Crowley coughed awkwardly, unable to bear the silence much longer.
“Er, about what happened in that church…”
“I didn’t see,” Aziraphale said lightly, as if they were discussing the weather. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it. One presumes you gave them what for, after what they did to me.”
“You…you approve?” Crowley asked, surprised. “But I tore them apart, I…I’ve never, you know I would never…”
“In the Great Détente, we are not permitted to be directly involved in human matters of damnation and salvation,” Aziraphale mused. “We can only watch and…influence.”
“I did a hell of a lot more than influence, back there. I don’t know what the paperwork will be like-“ Crowley began, but Aziraphale cut him off with a kiss. It was soft, and dry, and it smelled like books. It was enough. He goggled at the angel when it was over.
“Thank you, Crowley,” Aziraphale said warmly, eyes twinkling. “For getting involved for me. For rescuing me even when it meant losing yourself.”
“I-I…”
“Come on, then,” Aziraphale said. He took Crowley’s unresisting hand and patted it. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
”There’ll always be an England,
And England shall be free,
If England means as much to you
As England means to me.
-Ross Parker & Charles Hughes
Recipient: slowsunrise
author: prestissima
Word Count: 8,028
Prompt: C/A, set during or after WWII. Cue supernatural Nazi stuff, serious violence, and happy endings.
Notes: Turned out more like pre-C/A, but I hope you enjoy nevertheless. The title comes from the song, Rule Britannia. Have a happy holiday!
"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.
-Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing”
At half past three, the large clock in the entrance hall of 128 Bond Street sounded its tentative and reproachful chimes close to the ear of Colonel Reginald Dewforth Huntsboroughleigh III. He had been taking his afternoon nap beneath yesterday's Times, and as St. Thomas' was the sort of gentleman's club to provide shelter from harridans and enterprising telegraph ladies, the good colonel had been left in peace to blithely miss tea all on his very own. Happily and honourably discharged from his military duty of fighting the good fight during the Great War, Huntsboroughleigh, Reggie to his friends, now considered it his civilian duty to uphold the fine English virtues of hiding from women in fashionable parts of town guaranteed to deter even the most determined of aunts. In any case, his valet had gone off to the fields of Flanders and was not about to be preparing his dinner anytime soon.
"Strange, that," he remarked to himself. As he rose from the hallway bench, he regrettably left behind the soporific sweetness of luncheon treacle tart. His private utterance referred to the missing duet of Fell and Crowley, who were not at their usual table in the smoking room. (The Lyceum once enjoyed Fell’s custom, but with the War and one's duty, you were more likely to find your mates in officers' clubs like St. Thomas'.) At present, it was just the one; the fair-haired staff sergeant was dithering at an empty cards table, waiting for Crowley no doubt. Reggie took a chair in the corner behind a neglected fern, oddly comforted by the familiar creaking on the green leather.
Fell and Crowley had been coming here since the war began, and certainly never missed a single tea. They were one of the few certainties upon which Reggie could rely, in a world where sugar was being rationed and sirens went on at all hours of the night. Fell's expression made Reggie uneasy, and he debated breaking the Code and introducing himself. Could Fell's nerves stand such a breach in decorum? The man looked a bundle of stress as it was. He had already torn his train ticket into little pieces, and they littered the table like so many Communion wafers.
It was entirely possible that Crowley had been sent away to the front without even an opportunity to inform his friend. Fell might want comforting from a fellow St. Thomas member, a veteran of loss and single serving, forever alone, afternoon scones. Heart pounding in his ears, the colonel ventured to clear his throat. His valiant, reluctant attempt was arrested mid-squawk by a slamming of the front doors and Crowley's sudden entry into the room. Reggie was so relieved by the rescue from social engagement that as he sank back into another nap beneath his newspaper, he did not even mind the glare that somehow issued from behind Crowley's perpetual sunglasses. Had he not returned to sleep with the urgent voices of an angel and a demon lulling him towards Lethe, he would have heard quite a mystifying conversation.
"Crowley! I was afraid you'd died! Er, that is, discorporated. Anyway, there was an awful lot of bombing last night!"
"It's all right. The Jerries didn't get the Bentley," Crowley said, taking a seat at the card table. As a demon, he wasn't particularly loyal to any one country, but he considered himself a demon of fashion, and had picked up the terms of the age. "I'll have to find a new flat though. Half the street's bombed out and it wouldn't do to look too fortunate."
"How terribly inconvenient. You must come and stay at the shop then. I won't be needing the upstairs anyhow." Had Reggie been awake, he would have been surprised to see Aziraphale brush a hand over the bits of paper and reveal a train ticket instead.
"What?" Crowley asked, alarmed. "Where are you going?"
"Above is sending me off, SAS special mission, most likely destroying airfields or something. I haven’t been told," Aziraphale said, looking almost embarrassed. "I'm sorry, my dear, but it would appear that I shall be the one in mud and trenches this time around."
"Right," muttered Crowley. Last time the Great Powers went to war, Below had sent him to Ypres. The humans had turned the air to poison somehow, with Crowley stranded in corridors of mustard. He'd stopped talking for a while. There wasn't anything he could say. Anything out of his mouth would have been a wish for Hell.
"My dear?" Aziraphale asked worriedly, as if he too suddenly remembered finding Crowley hunched over in a trench, eyes bandaged not from the gas, but so he wouldn't have to see anymore.
"Never mind," Crowley said. He waved away Aziraphale's Concerned-Hand-On-Shoulder-No.-6. "Below gave me a little job too. Some German SS business. I didn't read it too carefully. The Fuhrer's trying to scare up some secret weapon."
"Oh? Why would your people bother? One would imagine you receive souls from either side," Aziraphale said.
Crowley shook his head. "No, this one's got some lower imps spooked. I think they're looking for a summoning but they keep tapping into the wrong frequency. Trust me, it's a mess to mop up."
"Why, whatever do you mean?"
"They're sending holy words into Hell, angel. Some bastard picks up the signal on his frequency and, well, the psychic transmission imps have a tendency to splatter when they receive His Word." Both of them winced at the mental image.
"One can imagine the paperwork," Aziraphale said with sympathy. "But why would the Germans open channels Below, only to utter sacred words through the connection?"
"Whatever they're doing, it's not a summoning. At least not from the right place. All I know is that it's making a mess Downstairs. Does it sound like anything your people would try?" Crowley asked.
"One does one's best to stay informed, but really, my dear, you know it gets a bit tiresome to filter through Michael's speeches," Aziraphale said reproachfully.
"Right right, don't remind me," Crowley replied as he stood up. "Well, I have to be going, angel. They want me to take care of this fairly quickly, as you can imagine. Or at the very least find out who gave them the right formula. Do you know where you'll be? We could compare notes."
"I believe Staff Sergeant Fell is being sent to the African campaign," Aziraphale said, and began to smile. "After that, it's up to---"
"Yes, yes, I know," Crowley said, cutting him off testily.
"I was going to say fate, but very well," replied Aziraphale with a forgiving smile. The two held each other's gazes for a moment.
Finally, Crowley spoke.
"Good luck out there," he said, as they shook hands. They weren't in any actual danger, not exactly, but humans were...unpredictable, and anyway, war was always a dreadful bother. Aziraphale liked to have his routines and having war declared all the time always disrupted his tablet/papyrus/scroll/codex/book cataloguing system. There was also the matter of his demonic counterpart, who Aziraphale felt cared far too much about how any war was getting on. Certainly it was important to have concern for your fellow man, or at least your fellow member of Creation, but soon there'd be another batch of people who looked vaguely the same and behaved about the same too. Crowley had trouble letting go. Yes, Crowley had trouble letting go, and with war, he had to let go of quite a lot of people all at once sometimes. Thessaloniki had really put him off in 390 AD, not to mention Constantinople in 1182 (though Aziraphale was sure Crowley hadn’t known all 80,000 of those poor souls). These things just happened from time to time.
They shook hands once more as they left the club, and each went in different directions. Aziraphale stopped and turned to glance at Crowley's retreating back. He really hoped he wouldn't have to collect Crowley this time round. Again.
It was a good thing Huntsboroughleigh heard the entire business, Aziraphale reflected later, and had called Aziraphale back inside the club. Otherwise, he might never have seen Crowley ever again.
~*~
Two weeks later, Aziraphale was busily being sick on the HMS Tambourine as it trawled the waters past French Morocco. The treacherous sea, laundry blue and pristine that morning, had darkened and roiled by noon, and made her displeasure known to the ships in Her Majesty's Navy. Aziraphale clutched his hat in one hand as he held onto the railing with the other, blinking his eyes against the stabs of raindrops against his face. The wind tugged through his hair and scraped against his skin like sandpaper, and for a moment he wondered if it would be cheating to miracle this storm away.
Instead he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and staggered back down below deck. The other officers paid him no mind as he collapsed into one of the bunks. They were busy at cards, and Aziraphale had stayed in bed for most of the trip anyway. Reggie had told him not to talk to anyone, and his constant dyspepsia made that task easy. The last time he'd been this seasick, he'd snuck out of Noah's Ark and gone for a flyaround with Crowley. He was an angel, and angels didn't get seasick, except when their bodies were convinced otherwise. He wondered if he'd be discharged if he went missing for a short flight. Their entire platoon might be sent home for mass hallucinations, unless headquarters decided they were too short on men to risk even losing cannon fodder.
At least they were close to Libya, where they were due to land. When he was above deck offering noisy obeisances to Poseidon, Aziraphale had seen the dark mass of rock and sand that awaited them. The ship itself was chugging along at a fairly even pace despite the tossing waves. He thought he could even hear the guns of a distant battle-unless those were the guns of a very immediate battle. Suddenly, the ship rumbled and pitched to one side, tossing him out of his bunk and scattering playing cards everywhere. Books upended on his chest and his world flashed in and out of darkness as their lamp swung wildly around the ceiling.
A door opened, water bursting in and around their colonel while he braced himself against the doorframe.
"At the ready! We're landing early!" he screamed. "They've got guns on the beach!"
Bewildered and more than a little nauseous, Aziraphale grabbed his helmet and his landing gear and followed the rest of the men up on the deck. Now above the chaos of the cabin, his eyes spotted the bursts of fire punctuating the rain like a string of signal lights along the beach. This hadn't been the plan, but this also wasn’t his first war. He slid into the small landing craft and sardined himself into the middle, where the press of bodies might keep him upright. The men were silent. Other than the sound of distant gunfire, there was just the voice of the colonel, tearing through the storm and striking a chord more urgent in their hearts than any alarum ever before.
He didn't have long to wait before he had to pull out his medical bag, if only for show. Medical Staff Sergeant A. Fell had absolutely no medical, surgical, or scientific training, but no man had ever died under his finely manicured hands. As he felt himself shoved out of the landing craft by the press of soldiers, he nearly tripped over a fellow bleeding in the surf. Aziraphale knelt down and felt around for the wound. The angel couldn't really stop things like sudden headshots and surprise attacks, but as long as a soldier wasn't dead already, all he'd come out with would be a scar.
He said a few Words.
Eyes clenched in pain opened in relief, then surprise.
Aziraphale smiled.
"Bless you!" he said as cheerily as a Girl Guide, and got up to look for his next patient.
He made his way up the beach with ease, waving a hand here and there so that there were rather a few more miraculous saves than could be attributed to probability. Aziraphale noticed that two guns in particular were causing most of the mortar fire. He waved his hands at them a little, but for some reason they refused to jam. Puzzled, Aziraphale began to pick his way towards the battlements, ducking his head occasionally to avoid the whiz and clip of bullets around him. After all, it wouldn't do to look like he was taking a stroll in Regent’s Park. When he was closer, he tried to jam them again, and was rewarded with a brief stutter, then a series of booms that were loud enough to cause his teeth to rattle. Huffing and puffing, he finally made it to the little concrete bunker with his fingers stuck in his ears, quite pleased with his little climb. Even the rain had stopped. If it weren’t for the rat-a-tat-tat of repeating gunfire behind him, he might think he was on a seaside constitutional.
Without warning, someone yanked his arms behind him and shoved a foot against the backs of his knees. His chin knocked against the rocky ground as he landed, and he tasted wet sand. Oh bother. Angels have the gift of tongues, and so he heard, quite clearly, his German assailant shout, "Standartenführer Rohm! Are we taking prisoners, sir?" His captor yanked rather harder than necessary on his hair, shoving his face against the corner where the wall of the bunker met the ground. There was either rain or blood on his face, because quite a lot of sand was stuck to his cheek and chin. The German was holding him against the cold concrete wall of the bunker, and Aziraphale could feel the change in his grip as what must have been his superior approached.
Gingerly, Aziraphale shifted his head a little so he might at least look at or talk to the commanding officer. His gaze traveled from the unusually shiny black boots to the grey military greatcoat, the buttons gleaming in the post-rain gloom. He twisted his face a little more, and when his eyes took in the insignia of the collar, he stiffened with an entirely foreign feeling. Fear. This was the uniform of the Schutzstaffel-Totenkopfverbände. Hitler’s Death’s Head Units.
Steel blue eyes ran over his abject figure, the medic pack, and the rumpled uniform. They swept back out to the beach, where figures were still trying to make their way across the sand. He must have been calculating how Aziraphale had made it so far as a mere medic.
“Take him to the Oberführer. I think he speaks English,” Standartenführer Rohm finally said. “The Englishman might have some useful information.”
“Yes sir!”
The German soldier pulled Aziraphale to his feet and shoved him forwards. Aziraphale raised his hands in an act of universal surrender, and tried his best to remain charitable as the soldier prodded him rather harder than necessary with the butt of his pistol. There was no need, really. Aziraphale already wanted to be as far away from Rohm as possible. He’d heard…rumors, yes, merely rumors, he hoped, about the Totenkopfverbände.
They took a simple dirt path, away from the blast of guns, and towards a small tent at the edge of a small encampment, set a small distance away to distinguish itself.
“Heil Hitler!” the soldier saluted, when they reached the tent. “Oberführer, we have a British prisoner for interrogation, sir!”
“Yes, yes, bring him in,” said a far too familiar voice in German. “You may return to your post.”
Aziraphale was shoved rudely into soft light of the tent, where he stumbled into the table set there. Underneath the hanging lightbulb there was a bottle of wine and a few glasses, as if waiting for a victory toast. With what Aziraphale had done on the beach, that prospect appeared unlikely. The identity of the oberführer was now unmistakeable, even with his back facing Aziraphale. When he turned around, Aziraphale’s blood chilled to see Crowley attired in the cold grey uniform of the Totenkopfverbände, complete with the grinning skull on his right collar.
“Crowley?” he asked incredulously, even though the moment he heard his voice he knew it to be so. “You look…” he paused, taking in Crowley’s thinned face and stressed features once he had removed his sunglasses. The gold of his eyes flared in the light, making his eyes and cheeks look more sunken by contrast.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, angel,” Crowley said quietly.
“Crowley?”
“I didn’t think…was that your jamming of the guns?” Abruptly, they stopped. “That’s much better, don’t you think?”
“Crowley, what’s happened?” Aziraphale said. Crowley was never this calm, never this still. He moved to grip Crowley’s arm, but stopped himself when he saw the demon flinch. “What are they doing? What’s wrong?”
Crowley looked so miserable that Aziraphale took pity and poured him a glass of red. Crowley’s hands shook as he accepted the glass, but instead of drinking it he set it, rattling, down on the table again. He pulled out the flimsy camp chair and almost fell into it, covering his face with his hands. The movement jostled the table and sloshed the wine out of the glass. In the unsteady light, it looked like the wood was bleeding.
“This is more than war. This is beyond war. The Gestapo and the SS, they both…” Crowley stopped, and he looked about ready to vomit. He stared blindly at the wine stain, the liquid spreading out against the grain of the wooden table. “I have to wear this uniform. Even the German people are afraid of us. Of Oberführer Crowley.” He spat the title out like a filthy thing. He finally looked up at Aziraphale, resigned that he would have to face him and his terrible judgement. His gaze never connected, and he looked as if he were still watching whatever nameless and unspoken horrors played out in his memory.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said slowly in the tone of voice one uses to coax a man off a high ledge, “what are you talking about?”
“I haven’t done anything. I’m not in Europe. Our division isn’t in Europe,” Crowley kept repeating, but his voice was toneless and without life. “I want you to remember that. We came straight from Berlin into Libya, en route to Egypt for an archaeological expedition. I never did anything in Europe, not in Poland, not in Austria, not in Germany, not anywhere there, you have to remember that.”
“Why, what’s happening in-“
“It will come out. It has to come out. Promise me. Promise me when this is over you’ll remind me that I had nothing to do with Europe, nothing in the East. I couldn’t-there’re so many-and they sent me here,” Crowley said in that same dead tone, and despite himself, Aziraphale reached over and put a hand on his arm. Crowley hadn’t been taking care of himself, and Aziraphale could feel his bony shoulders through the wool.
“I promise,” he said firmly. “I believe you aren’t doing whatever it is they are doing in Europe. Now will you tell me what’s going on? Why are you here and not in Europe?”
“The Reichssicherheitschauptamt-er, the Reich Main Security Office, Heydrich, he sent us with orders from the Führer himself. I only just managed to get myself placed in this division at the last minute. They want two things, that’s all we have orders for. We’re not to be involved with anything else,” Crowley said, almost to himself. “There’s an artefact in Egypt they need to dig out.”
“Does it sound legitimate?” Aziraphale asked, pulling up a chair so he could at least talk to Crowley from the same height. “Do they have the right incantation?”
“Almost. Hitler wants no trouble with the Vatican, so summoning, say, a pack of hellhounds, would be rather counter to an ostensibly Christian country intending to blanket the world with good German culture. But a divine power at the helm can make even a pack of hellhounds look good. So they’re looking for an angel to demoralize the Allied forces and lead the German way to victory,” Crowley said without much enthusiasm. “They won’t get one, of course. That idiot from the Gestapo keeps mispronouncing the words, so they get a straight line to Below instead. No hell hounds, no angel.”
“So they want an artefact that they think will fix their formula. That’s one. You mentioned two things, my dear,” Aziraphale said gently.
“Ah, yes. There are rumours of a demon who frequents the Eternal City of Jerusalem, and causes mischief for the Turks,” Crowley said with a humourless smile.
“Ah,” was all Aziraphale said. He gave himself a moment’s recollection. “So that night with the girl from Elim’s tavern?”
“Yes.”
“And when we went with the performing troupe up to the palace?”
“They know about that too.”
Aziraphale coloured. “And the seduction of an, ahem, innocent bookseller at the baths by the Selim Gardens?”
“Just one of that demon’s many devilments, ah ha,” Crowley replied grimly. “They think that should they summon or capture said demon, an angel will arrive to smite the demon and reward them with its service. I haven’t found out what their source is, but you and I know it can’t work. Incantations of that sort don’t need artefacts or totems.”
“It’ll be some poor fellow with a strange facial growth, I expect,” Aziraphale said sadly. “At least they’ve stopped burning them as witches.”
“They’re doing far worse,” Crowley said hoarsely.
Before Aziraphale could ask what he meant, the tent flap opened and Standartenführer Rohm stepped in.
“Heil Hitler,” he said, saluting his senior officer.
“Heil Hitler,” Oberführer Crowley replied perfunctorily, raising his hand a little in a wave. He had already restored his sunglasses to their perch.
“Excuse me for interrupting your interrogation, sir,” Rohm said with a little bow, “but we can’t get the guns unjammed. I don’t mean to say we are retreating, but…our highest priority is in Egypt, sir. Brigadeführer Lang has ordered that we pull out of this beachfront and head for Egypt right away. Reinforcements are coming in soon from Generalfeldmarschall Rommel.”
“And just when will the old Wüstenfuchs be here?” Crowley asked, eyeing Aziraphale, who was listening attentively.
“Shouldn’t be more than a day now, sir. They’ll take the British by surprise as they’re digging in. We have our orders. What do you want done with the prisoner, sir?” Rohm asked.
“I would prefer he remain, to sing praises of our strength, our civility, and our superiority,” Crowley said as if reciting from memory. “Sow dissension in their ranks. Brigadeführer Lang would not want us to bring along any unnecessary baggage.”
“Yes sir. How admirable and skilful that you were able to show him the light in such a short time!” Rohm exclaimed, saluting again as Crowley rose from his seat. “Brigadeführer Lang also informed me he wished to see you before we departed. Shall I escort the prisoner to the guns so that he may greet his fellows?”
“Yes yes, he won’t be any trouble. Heil Hitler and all that, see you later,” Crowley said absently. He didn’t even hear Rohm’s enthusiastic reply, for he was already thinking of his meeting with Lang. He shook hands with Aziraphale, his grip too tight and his mouth tense. Aziraphale didn’t recognize the thin smile coming from this man-shaped being in a murderer’s uniform. And with that last thought lingering in Aziraphale’s mind, Crowley left the tent.
“Come, come,” Rohm was saying in passable English as he tried to tug Aziraphale back towards the beach. Aziraphale left the tent and watched Crowley walk along the dirt path until he reached another tent, where he saluted to the guard. “English, ja? Come!”
“Hmm? Ah yes, my apologies,” Aziraphale said, as he followed Rohm to the beach. They clambered up the rude dirt path to the concrete. On one side, Aziraphale could see the rest of the British troops disembarking and making their way towards the sabotaged gunnery. On the other side, the SS and Gestapo camp was already packing up, leaving only a skeleton Totenkopf regiment to hold ground. They were too far away for Aziraphale to possibly spot Crowley.
“German better, ja? Have good…was is word, engel, ja?” Rohm was asking him in poor English. He was grinning like a wolf when he switched back to German. “And now that the rat has learned his lesson, there is no more point to tolerating his taint,” he said, and shot Aziraphale square in the chest.
As he lay in the sand beside the bunker, listening to Rohm’s departing guffaws, Aziraphale reflected, if rather crossly, that it was a good thing he was an angel. Someone might have been killed.
~*~
For your sake, I hurry over land and water:
For your sake, I cross the desert and split the mountain in two,
And turn my face from all things,
Until the time I reach the place
Where I am alone with You.
-Al Hallaj
In the sea of darkness outside Cairo, Aziraphale stumbled over sand and dune, trying to mark out his path in the shifting grains. Overhead, the stars outshone his small torch with their glittering riot of burning gases against the faraway night sky. Somehow their brilliant light made the night around him even gloomier in the vast expanse of emptiness. The coldness of the desert carried from the wind right through his bones, but his men were too watchful for any small miracles. He felt cold, and very small.
“Halloa!” one of the men cried from a distance. “I’ve found it!”
Stumbling and emphatically not-cursing as he went, Aziraphale slipped and slid down the sand dunes towards the officer. After he had passed on information to Reginald, Aziraphale had followed Crowley’s group to Egypt. His own platoon split off into SAS men, headed for Egypt, while the rest of the enlisted remained in Libya to continue the fight against Rommel. And while Aziraphale did not envy them, being huddled in a trench sounded less lonely than stumbling blindly in the vastness of the Sahara.
“Splendid work, Jones,” his colonel called out, and as Aziraphale neared the growing congregation of torchlight, he realized they had found the abandoned Nazi campsite. It was not the usual regimented decamping. Half-broken tents flapped in the night air, and the remains of a campfire lay scattered across the sand, smelling strongly of camel. Someone had been very excited to leave at once.
“Sir, I think I’ve found something,” said someone Aziraphale thought might be Captain Braithwaite.
“Oh? What’s this? Can’t make heads or tails of it. Foreign rubbish. Give it to Fell, he’s a Cambridge man, isn’t he?” he heard the colonel say.
Braithwaite (he hoped) came trotting over with what appeared to be a heavy slab of diorite. Aziraphale had been here a long, long time ago. The people who used to live here hauled diorite from miles and miles away to build statues and holy things. He helped write some of the inscriptions.
“Do you recognize it, Staff Sergeant Fell?” Braithwaite asked, huffing and puffing a little. Diorite was heavy, and expensive, and Aziraphale recognized the handwriting immediately. The last people to use the language on the slab, however, had died hundreds of years ago.
Squiggle, squiggle, circle, wedge, wedge…
Angel,
PLANS HAVE CHANGED. Göbbels (this was written phonetically; it was either that or a phrase that meant “Nimrod had too many barley cakes”) arrived yesterday, and it is clear that he is running the show. He says angels are God’s perfect messenger. Imagine, the first propaganda minister with the perfect messenger at his side. He canceled the demonic summoning. All they want is an angel now. STAY AWAY FROM JERUSALEM. They have an artefact, and it feels funny (flock of birds flying over Eliezer’s clean chariot) to me. Lang says it’s from Babel. No one will let me see it. DO NOT GO TO JERUSALEM. Something’s wrong.
Squiggle.
Wedge, trapezoid, half-moon, foot.
“Staff? What is it?” Braithwaite asked again. The tablet was icy cold in Aziraphale’s hands, and he dropped it in the sand with a heavy thud.
“No idea. Savage language, most likely. The Nazis didn’t see fit to bring it along so I hardly imagine it would be worth our time,” Aziraphale tried to say airily, but Crowley’s missive worried him. Crowley hadn’t even seen the artefact, and yet his warning was etched in stone. “Is that all we have here?”
“I’ll go and see, shall I?” Braithwaite said obediently. When the man had walked far away enough, Aziraphale coughed and stamped down on the tablet. No human would have been able to make it shatter into a million pieces, but by the time Braithwaite returned, the black stone dust had already melted into the night air.
“A local guide heard them talking about Jerusalem, sir,” Braithwaite reported. “The colonel’s ordered us to make ready.” He shivered, bringing his coat a little closer around himself. “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I always thought Egypt was supposed to be hot.”
“Hmm,” Aziraphale replied noncommittally. He thought of Babel, of Nimrod, and of voices crying out in the desert. There had been a sea, and trees, and rivers lush with life. There had been war then too, copper helmets glaring against the sun, mudbrick walls splashed with blood, and always, the wailing of mothers and sisters and daughters. He thought about the church in Jerusalem, where he had tried to save all those books. Crowley had run in during the fire, hair ablaze, head to toe in Templar garb, and carried him out kicking. There was nothing they could do, that night, not much more than a miracle here and a miracle there, like grains of sand in a desert of human greed and human hatred.
He stared into the blindness of the desert dark, then up into the endless sky stretching above them, so pure, but so cold, and so far removed from the sweat and smell and dust of human life.
He felt very alone.
~*~
In the Christian Quarter, behind a potted plant near the Souk el-Dabragha, Colonel Reginald Dewforth Huntsboroughleigh III-of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service, of Corpus Christi College, of Cambridge, and most recently, of a very small wagon loaded with figs-waited. He was unrecognizable from the persona he maintained at St. Thomas’ Club. The invalided civilian who frequented those carpeted halls was terribly convenient for spying out good chaps like Staff Sergeant Fell and recruiting them for secret missions. He was, however, utterly and unfailingly incompetent at wearing a headdress, growing a beard that rivaled those on the wisest gurus, and speaking fluent Arabic while hiding a .455 Webley about one’s person. And so Reggie, long time operative in the Middle East, with a network of several informants in Jerusalem, had dusted off his keffiyeh and sent himself down to Egypt.
It was a good job, that, finding a man like Fell. Reggie hadn’t been entirely sure the afternoon of Crowley and Fell’s conversation at the club. He suspected Crowley to be an SIS man, and he certainly wasn’t going to let the SAS sit this one out. As he watched Fell struggle out of the window of the small house where his SAS raiding party was hosted, he wondered just how the Nazi plot was coming along. He had received no messages after Libya, and it was only by chance that he learned that Fell was in Jerusalem at all. In times of war, communication was insecure and suspect, but no operative likes to remain uninformed.
There were few lamps lit along the street, oil being a precious commodity and sold to Allied and Axis alike. Reggie tried to follow Fell through the shadows, but the blond staff sergeant appeared to be more than familiar with the winding streets. Had it not been for Reggie’s stint here during the Great War, he might have lost him.
~*~
“War doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left.” - Bertrand Russell
The moment he entered the city, Aziraphale had felt the pull of the artefact. There was no denying that in Aziraphale’s psychic landscape, there was an enormous valley towards which everything was draining. He could close his eyes, plug his ears, and he would still know exactly which direction the artefact lay.
The Christian Quarter had not changed all too much, and in any case, Aziraphale could not have gotten lost, so long as he had the artefact’s undeniable pull. Crowley was right about one thing: something was wrong. Neither of them knew of any actual thing that could affect angel or demon on earth. Incantations had power, rituals had power, but a mere object? At most, there might be a haunting or a strong psychic residue, but for a mere physical object to draw in a Son of God, there was something else at work.
Jerusalem was always itchy territory for Crowley. There were holy sites scattered left and right, and if there was anywhere that a demon would definitely not want to be, it was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Aziraphale approached the dark bulk of the building, and resisted the urge to scrutinize the architecture. He was always a little embarrassed about the antechamber known as the Chapel of the Angel, and he had had a few words with Komminos of Mytilene, but there was nothing to be done.
With some difficulty, he scaled the wall closest to where he knew the artefact would be, and espied the candles that were set around an ecumenical altar. The rotunda was crawling with SS officers, Gestapo, and a few other official-looking men in suits. He eased himself through a side door and hoped nobody would see him in the darkness. The urge to find the artefact was nearly irresistible now, and he gritted his teeth against its power.
The man he recognized as Joseph Göbbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, stood before the altar dressed in robes of white and gold. (As usual with officials on these occasions, he wore a funny hat.) Aziraphale tried to find Crowley in the mix, but with the grey and black of the uniforms, all the officers looked alike. This became even truer when they lined up and stood at attention, commanded by the short barks of a man he remembered as Standartenführer Rohm.
Göbbels reached under the altar and brought out a small silver box. He looked around him with pleasure, and the light from the candles reflected in his mean, fierce eyes like blades of steel.
“Heil Hitler!” he began, and waited until the chorus of salutes died down. “Tonight, I shall wield the power of Heaven on behalf of the Reich. We have in our possession an artefact of enormous power. It was used to lay the foundation for the Tower of Babel. When Nimrod shot his arrows into heaven and they returned dripping with blood, this was the trowel fashioned out of that very blood. We know, in our glorious Reich, that power and purity is all in the blood. Imagine what an instrument of angelic blood can do!”
One of the officers turned his head quickly in alarm, and Aziraphale spotted the flash of gold that betrayed Crowley’s eyes.
“With this divine instrument, I shall summon a holy being of Empyrean lineage. With this instrument, with this divine and holy instrument, I shall prove that the Reich has the blessing of the divine, for we already have an angel who watches over us, which I shall reveal to you!” Göebbels cried, and Aziraphale pressed himself against the wall with a gasp. Crowley, along with the other officers, was looking around frantically, no doubt hoping that his angel had listened to his warning.
“Yes, an angel watches over us, an angel who has sought to conceal himself, but he did not imagine that I would see through his disguise. After all, how can a Son of Heaven imagine the wiles and deceit that a Reich Minister must battle?” Göbbels’ voice was growing louder now, and it filled the church, echoing and bouncing off walls nearly as old as Crowley and Aziraphale. He removed a small key from his pocket and unlocked the box. With a trembling hand, he brought out the trowel of Nimrod, and the scroll that held the incantation.
Aziraphale wrapped his arms around the column before him and dug his fingernails into the spaces between the stones. His hair stood on end and every bone in his body rattled. Crowley was barely still standing in the rank and file.
“Son of God,” Göbbels began, in a language Aziraphale had almost forgotten. “In the old language of the Fathers, I summon you to my side. With the blood of your brothers, I bind you to my will. I bind your power to my will, and you shall not deny me!” He said some Words.
There was a collective gasp from the officers as Crowley was flung to the ground before the altar, and a scrambling to tamp out the candles that had fallen in his wake. In the darkness, a glowing circle appeared around Crowley’s prone figure, and when he raised his head, they finally saw his golden eyes.
“Hah!” Göbbels nearly screamed in triumph. His eyes were glowing blue, and an unseen wind whipped past him, making his robes and hair billow out around him. “I knew it was you! I have you under my will, Son of God! Yes, I can feel the power! My God, it is wonderful!”
Inside the circle, Crowley looked disoriented, and he shook his head a few times before he rose to his feet. Now that the artefact was fulfilled, Aziraphale no longer felt its electric pull. He let go of the column before him and got down on his hands and knees in case the preternatural glow revealed his location.
“When Rohm told me of your unwillingness to go to the camps, of your mercy for the enemy, of your weakness when told of the vans and the ghettoes, I knew, I knew you were not one of us,” Göbbels jeered as he approached the circle. Crowley looked steadier on his feet now, but he still hadn’t said anything. “I thought it was unusual, with your lack of enthusiasm for anything else, that you would volunteer for this special secret mission. But when Rohm and Lang told me how they never saw you eat, how they never saw you asleep, I knew with absolute certainty that my actions had divine guidance. Yes, with your power at my command, the German people will be an irresistible tide of purity and glory across the face of the Earth!”
He reached across the circle and grasped Crowley’s chin in his hand, wrenching his face down to meet his. Aziraphale could see the panic in Crowley’s eyes, and when he saw Crowley’s hands waving frantically as they always did when performing miracle after miracle, he realized that Crowley was powerless inside the circle.
“I will have my scientists and doctors dissect you and discover the secret essence of your power. We will divide you up and distil you and bottle you to every German soldier and every Aryan child. They will speak directly to the minds of all the races of the Earth, purifying and cleansing. The Earth will be covered with German angels, and it all begins with you.”
“No!” Aziraphale shouted without thinking, and leapt down from the scaffolding. He landed inexpertly on a bust of St. Helena, then dove for Göbbels. The man was too quick for him, however, and grabbed the trowel.
He said some Words.
It was like being turned inside out. Everything that made Aziraphale feel like himself was peeled open and dumped out for all to see. He lay panting in the middle of a second glowing circle, surrounded by SS guards who had come to Göbbels’ defence. Göbbels looked like it was his lucky day.
“Trouble in Paradise?” he asked mockingly. “So you would stop me?” He looked up at the guards, and only barely nodded.
“Angel!” was all Aziraphale heard Crowley yell before a rain of blows from boots and rifles cascaded down on his head. Instinctively, he tried to miracle the pain away, but nothing came as he was kicked and struck. Someone stepped on his fingers, crushing the bones in his hand, and before he could attempt to scream, someone else wrenched his head back and struck him with the butt of their rifle. With each blow, the stars of the Sahara seemed to return to him, flaring against his eyelids with each explosion of pain. He almost longed for the deprivation of the desert.
“Stop this!” Crowley demanded furiously. He pounded against the invisible barrier of the circle in vain.
“I apologize, my pet angel, but I am afraid that dissenters and traitors cannot be allowed in the Third and Eternal Reich,” Göbbels said, watching the brutality unfolding before him with glee. “I know that you yourself, as an angel, cannot countenance such violence, but it will be over soon. The circle traps your angelic power, after all. Your friend will not last long.”
Before he turned back to watch the spectacle, however, he was interrupted by Crowley’s hand on his chest. It was on fire.
“Whuh…yuh…” Göbbels spluttered. “But you’re an angel! No angelic power can leave the circle!”
The rest of Crowley came through the circle, his uniform burned away, his eyes glowing with hellfire. Huge wings spread out and upwards, knocking approaching soldiers away. When he spoke, his voice held the echoes of the wails of millions of souls.
“You fool,” Crowley spoke as he lifted Göbbels straight into the air. “All my angelic power is in there, yes. But that leaves you with a very angry set of demonic powerssss, and none of them are under your control.” Crowley tossed Göbbels against the altar and shoved the soldiers aside, sinking his hands through chests and burning them down to their souls. Those who ran, he burned with a lick of hellfire until not even their souls were left. He thundered through them until he had expelled, destroyed, or cremated anyone hurting Aziraphale.
“Angel! Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, the growls in his voice at odds with his worry.
“Crowley. Thank you,” Aziraphale said through split and swollen lips. He opened his eyes, and struggled to his hands and knees in alarm. “What happened to you?”
Crowley looked down at himself sheepishly. He was naked and bloody, his wings were unfurled, and every part of him was on fire. They looked behind him to the circle that was his former prison. It was still glowing blue.
“You know how you alwaysssssssaid there wassss a shred of decency insssside me?” Crowley asked. “I think I jussssst losssst it.”
“Oh Crowley,” Aziraphale said, unable to reach across the circle.
“It’ssss hard to sssstay like this,” Crowley hissed, shutting his eyes tightly. He sank towards the ground, trying to stop himself. “I want…to hurt people.”
“No!” Göbbels shouted, having recovered from his blow. His eyes glowed blue with energy, still feeding off of Crowley and Aziraphale’s captured power. When he spoke, his voice echoed with divine might. “Schutzstaffel! Awaken!” Whatever officers had not been maimed or annihilated rose as if in a trance. “To me!”
“What’s all this then?” A clear voice rang out in the carnage. A bizarre creature swung down from the scaffolding. He was dressed like an Islamic scholar, his skin was tanned and smooth from desert sun and sand, and yet his blue eyes twinkled when they flashed at Aziraphale.
“Who the hell are you?” Göbbels shrieked.
“I do apologize,” said the scholar in a familiar accent. “Colonel Reginald Dewforth Huntsboroughleigh III, at your service. Reich Minister Joseph Göbbels, I presume? I’m afraid I shall have to disrupt your little affair.”
“You are too late, colonel,” Göbbels said. “God is at my side! I have the power of tongues, I have the irresistible charisma of kings, and all who hear my voice shall obey! Bow before your new master, Reginald Huntsboroughleigh III!”
“I say!” Reggie cried out as his knee bent. He sank towards the floor as Göbbels approached him, and visibly struggled as his body bent.
“You see, colonel, nothing can stand in my way now!” Göbbels declared.
“Not bloody likely!” Reginald shouted, and with herculaean effort, thrust his body upwards. His fist rose and struck Göbbels under the chin, knocking the man unconscious and cracking his head against the altar. The zombie Schutzstaffel guards dropped back to the floor, and the glowing circles faded. Reginald jumped up and snatched the trowel from Göbbel’s limp hands. He turned back towards the two bewildered supernatural creatures.
“What?” Crowley said, so shocked he had forgotten to winch in his wings. He was no longer on fire, and his voice had stopped sounding like a pack of wolves had set upon a battle between chainsaws and chalkboard screeches.
“He had our power,” Aziraphale said. “His…er, natural charisma should have been impossible to disobey.” He waved his hands a bit, looking pleased when his broken bones healed.
“Well gentlemen,” Reggie said with a raised eyebrow. “Not to say that you lot aren’t spiffing and what, with your wings and your powers. But we humans have got something far more special.”
“What?” Crowley said again. He was beyond babbling.
“Free will,” Reginald said, and winked. “As long as we’ve got the will to refuse Heaven or Hell, we’ll always be free. I’ll see you two back at the club, shall I?” He tucked the trowel into his pocket and walked away whistling ‘Rule Britannia.’
Crowley and Aziraphale stared after him.
“What?”
~*~
Britain was rationing, and in these tough times, even the ducks of St. James’ were pulling together. Two man-shaped beings watched as two ducks divided a wholemeal slice between them. With some care, one of the beings slipped on a pair of gloves.
“One would think miracling away broken bones would mean no phantom pain,” one of them sniffed. The other one started, and when he spoke, his voice was thick.
“You’ll always know it was there. I’ll always know it was there. It’s not like getting a new body,” he said. He looked relieved to be back in his suit and tie, after the grey and black of the sharply cut Nazi uniform. He swallowed.
“Rather good of the SAS to clean it all up,” his companion remarked. “Those boys can do wonders with stains. I must have some over to the shop some time.”
They continued watching the ducks, who were now swimming in formation. They had lined up expectantly, like good soldiers at inspection time. Aziraphale tossed them another slice.
“I expect we’ll have to get the trowel off Reggie at some point. I still have no idea what that was all about,” Aziraphale added. “Spot of luck, finding us when he did, wasn’t it?”
One of the ducks had acquired a rather larger piece of bread than the others. A second duck came along to steal the bread, and the first duck smacked a third for the insult. And so wars are born.
Crowley coughed awkwardly, unable to bear the silence much longer.
“Er, about what happened in that church…”
“I didn’t see,” Aziraphale said lightly, as if they were discussing the weather. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it. One presumes you gave them what for, after what they did to me.”
“You…you approve?” Crowley asked, surprised. “But I tore them apart, I…I’ve never, you know I would never…”
“In the Great Détente, we are not permitted to be directly involved in human matters of damnation and salvation,” Aziraphale mused. “We can only watch and…influence.”
“I did a hell of a lot more than influence, back there. I don’t know what the paperwork will be like-“ Crowley began, but Aziraphale cut him off with a kiss. It was soft, and dry, and it smelled like books. It was enough. He goggled at the angel when it was over.
“Thank you, Crowley,” Aziraphale said warmly, eyes twinkling. “For getting involved for me. For rescuing me even when it meant losing yourself.”
“I-I…”
“Come on, then,” Aziraphale said. He took Crowley’s unresisting hand and patted it. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
”There’ll always be an England,
And England shall be free,
If England means as much to you
As England means to me.
-Ross Parker & Charles Hughes