~ Sand and Feathers ~

There was not just one singular apocalypse. There were in fact several concurrent apocalypses. Adam Young's awakening just so happened to coincide with that of Setsuna Mudo, the two occurring approximately halfway across the world from each other, and involving entirely separate factions of the forces of Heaven and Hell. Both apocalypse scenarios ended up being averted, with some far-reaching consequences that neither of them intended to reach the other, which caused more confusion in the cosmic fallout of their clean-up efforts, time reversals, revivals of the dead, and so on and so forth.

One of these consequences, which no one could possibly have been able to predict (except perhaps Agnes Nutter, whose wisdom is inaccessible after her descendant burned the only extant copy of her second book of prophecies), was that the hotel room booked by a certain pair of angels and their recently-adopted daughter somehow accidentally ended up being double-booked by the travel, so that when the family arrived, they found their room already occupied by a certain demon and angel.

Upon hearing the sounds of someone attempting to get into the room, Crowley jerked open the door and greeted them with a surly, "Who the hell are you?"

Golden eyes narrowed and the intruder said flatly, "Crowley."

"No, I'm Crowley. Who the hell are you?"

It was at this point that Aziraphale wandered over to see what was going on.

"Crowley, don't swear in front of the child," Aziraphale admonished his partner.

"Oh, trust me, she's heard worse," the man at the door said, causing both Aziraphale and the man holding the child to turn disapproving frowns on him.

"Do you know them?" Crowley asked his partner in an undertone.

Seemingly ignoring the demon, Aziraphale addressed the intruders, "Rosiel, Katan, and..." He drew a blank on the child's name. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen an angel that fresh from the Tree of Life before, much less met one while they were still a child.

Rosiel glanced over his shoulder at his partner, and Katan supplied, "Tiara."

"...and little Tiara," Aziraphale finished.

Crowley's face scrunched into slightly miffed expression at the way his angel cooed over the child. Of course, the three at the door were angels as well, although ones that had been created after Crowley's... departure from Heaven. Which explained why he was not familiar with the adult pair.

"Our daughter," Katan added.

And at that statement, Crowley slid his sunglasses down, peering over the top of them at the angel child - specifically, at the child's eyes, which were... he couldn't quite tell in this light, but definitely not red.

"Doesn't look like an Aion," he said, pushing his glasses back into place.

"She's not an Aion; she was born from the Tree of Life," Katan explained. "We've adopted her."

"Don't you have angels who specifically take care of raising the little ones and things like that?" the demon asked, not caring that it was a social misstep until he felt his partner plucking anxiously at his sleeve.

Rosiel and Katan glanced at each other, and this time Rosiel was the one who answered, "Extenuating circumstances."

"Yes, that's understandable, what with everything that's been going on recently," Aziraphale babbled out quickly, not giving Crowley a chance to say anything more. "And of course, that's the reason we found ourselves in a need of a little vacation now that things have settled down. Which brings us back to the initial question. What are the three of you doing here?"

"Here as in the mortal realm, here as in this beach, or here as in this particular room?" Rosiel inquired.

Aziraphale didn't quite catch on to why he was being asked to clarify where exactly he meant by 'here' and, with a bewildered smile, simply gestured for his interlocutor to go on.

"This," Rosiel said pointedly, putting quite firm emphasis on the word, "is our room. We booked it using a human travel agency and paid for it with human currency. So you two need to leave."

"There must be some mistake," Aziraphale said, still sounding entirely too confused for his partner's liking.

"Yes, obviously there's been some mistake," Crowley said. "And not by us. We arranged things through human means as well, and paid for this room."

A tense silence stretched for a few long minutes, which was broken when Aziraphale strode over to the nightstand between the two beds, and picked up the hotel phone to call down to the front desk and get the matter sorted out.

Unfortunately, after a long and circular conversation with the hotel staff...

"They accidentally double-booked us and all of the other rooms are full. They say there's nothing they can do about it except refund the deposit for whichever of us isn't staying."

The tense silence from earlier threatened to make a reappearance, but they were spared the discomfort of that when the child piped up with a solution none of the adults would have considered:

"We can share!"

~to be continued~