i.
On Monday, Aziraphale visited the manicurist's.
"What the hell have you been up to?" Anne asked when she saw the hand he had held the sword with. She looked amused.
"Not exactly," he said, in a tone that suggested it was an answer. Which it was, if you had six thousand years' worth of context, or, failing that, better things to do than listen carefully to every word your silly, harmless customer said.
She nodded wisely and set to work filing off the blackened parts of his distals. Her daughter, she told him, was doing well. Apparently she had very much appreciated the educational books, especially the one about vultures' defense mechanisms. Aziraphale smiled, said he was glad, and made a mental note to have a talk with Crowley about meddling with his deliveries.
Her palm felt warm and solid under his.
Afterwards, he stepped outside, stopping at the curb. The sun shone palely from behind feather-gray clouds. He examined his lovely gleaming nails; they might never have been singed, although the soft pads of his fingertips were still puffed up with blisters. And he looked up, at the quiet Soho street(1), the interesting people going about their uninterrupted lives.
"Not a bad job, all round," he said aloud. "What we did."
The world, saved, did not reply.
(1) Soho streets are nearly always quiet, for almost exactly the same reasons as churches are: that is, awe, and a bowel-clenching fear of being recognized.
ii.
On Tuesday he took the bus to Lower Tadfield, and enjoyed the ride, which was slow, bumpy, and involved wearing absolutely no lingerie(1).
Finding Adam took some time: he had to navigate the lovedness of the place, wading through ripples of affection towards the source. Eventually Aziraphale came to the lip of the quarry, and hidden behind a screen of nettles he watched them, the Them, sitting on their milk crate. Well. Not them, exactly, but the space between them.
He listened, also. Their conversation, which covered a thousand years of human history and more of inhuman, felt- curiously familiar, although he was sure he'd never heard Darwin's theory of evolution described so colorfully(2). It was something else. The way they addressed each other, the ease with which they spoke, dropping consonants like breadcrumbs and forgoing transitions, assured of the fact that the others would follow their train of thought. Familiar and unfamiliar all at once, a sharp paradox lodged somewhere in his ribcage.
Adam never looked up. Aziraphale supposed he didn't need to.
And he walked back to the village after a while, and saw the young lady, Anathema, and saw her clear forehead crease when she looked at him, her expression the slightly hunted one common to people everywhere who have forgotten your name. He thought about re-introducing himself. She vanished into her cottage, though, before he could. Aziraphale lingered until a car full of agitated young man pulled up, and then left.
The bus home was crowded. It didn't seem to matter, not to the bad taste in his mouth.
(1) No one had referred to Madame Tracy's underthings as lingerie in some forty years, not even in the privacy of their own heads, but Aziraphale believed that changing social mores were for other people.
(2) Green, in particular, came up a lot.
iii.
On Wednesday, a man in dark glasses came to the bookshop, and for a moment Aziraphale thought it was Crowley.
Then the man began a sentence with the word 'fire hazard'.
For the rest of his life, he would be plagued by nightmares about being small, and cold, and terribly fragile. He would also be plagued by an inexplicable urge to catch flies with his tongue.
In a bookshop in Soho, Aziraphale rubbed his face, sighed, and decided that next time he would count to all the way up to a hundred while he was taking his deep breaths.
He also got out a mop. For the trail of slime.
iv.
On Thursday, Aziraphale sat in the back room of his bookshop cataloguing his new stock and drinking cocoa and dipping in and out of old adventure stories. These were really not so different from the Bibles that had preceded them, although they were slightly less exciting. Fewer explosions, and no rape at all.
His mind drifted.
There were things he ought to be doing. He'd gotten a ways behind on his real job, in the past few years, busy scheming with a demon.
And as if on cue a middle-aged woman had rounded the corner and was heading, a trifle unsteadily, for his shop, her misery an itch, and he could easily flip the sign to 'Open' and go and welcome her in and make her laugh with his books from another, kinder, more cringe-worthily earnest age. She would talk, given enough coaxing.
He held his breath as she stopped outside. It felt like he was somewhere far away.
She walked on.
He forgot to breathe out again, but he did sag, in his chair, his corporation all squishy with relief. It was the tiredness, he told himself, catching up with him. Perfectly understandable. He'd helped stop an apocalypse, hadn't he? Or at least worked very energetically if not always productively to stop it. And.
Too much messin' around, Aziraphale thought.
Adam was a bright boy, no doubt about it.
He turned to the next book. His throat had gone dry, but that passed, as he sat, and drank his cocoa. The dust settled on his back.
v.
On Friday, someone called.
"Crowley?" he said, picking up the phone.
There was an awkward little cough on the other end. "Uh, no," said the voice, which was vaguely familiar, and feminine. "Hi, is this Mr. Fell?"
"Yes, you've reached Fell's Rare Books," he said, once he'd recovered from his surprise. "Who is this? How may I help you?"
"My name is Anathema Device," she said.
Oh. Well. That explained it.
"I have a- an heirloom," she continued, "an old book, in my possession, which I want to... to get rid of. It- I think it's the only one that was ever published. Um. I know this sounds strange. It's more than three hundred years old, and I know you deal in old, rare- well, of course, haha, sorry- books, and you came recommended. I think. I can't remember who by."
Aziraphale started breathing, purely for the pleasure of stopping again.
"I see," he said, eventually. "Could you tell me the title?"
He could hear the blush from London, and the one corner of his mind that was not, metaphorically, crammed with small screaming Aziraphales hoped that she wasn't actually holding the book as she spoke to him, because the ancient paper might well have combusted from the heat coming off her face.
"Further Nife and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Concerning the Worlde that Is To Com; Ye Saga Continuef!" she said(1). "And before you ask- yes, there's another one- a, hah, a prequel- but I seem to have... misplaced it.
"The funny thing is," she added, softly, "is that I don't quite know how."
Aziraphale didn't waste more than thirty seconds on suitable guilt.
"You've certainly caught my interest," he said, heartily. "Send it over, and I'll have a look, how about that? Assess it for you. From the sound of it, there's a good chance I can, ah, help you out. "
"That would be lovely," she said. "I'll bring it by as soon as I can. Would Sunday afternoon be all right?"
"Certainly," he repeated. "Certainly."
She hung up.
He put the phone back in the receiver, trembling.
(1) Under any other circumstances, Aziraphale would have been impressed by her pronunciation of the Es, missing and otherwise; it was better than that of any human alive and all but a few dead. At the time, though, he was busy biting down hard on his tongue to keep from bursting into song or, possibly, bribery, and didn't notice.
vi.
On Saturday, Aziraphale ate at the Ritz.
The duck was excellent. Likewise, after a few molecular modifications, the wine. He chewed slowly, meat-juices mingling with alcohol in his mouth, and he carried on through fullness and out the other side, for the sake of the crack of crisp skin between his teeth.
Crowley talked at him throughout, bright and brittle. It was really only natural that Aziraphale should refill both their glasses, again, and again, trying to smooth the edges out of Crowley's voice, first out of sympathy, then out of irritation, and finally out of a kind of morbid curiosity. It didn't work, no, but the things that happened instead were so very interesting he found it increasingly difficult to care.
Back at the bookshop after an exciting drive home, complete with policemen and miraculously altered portions of London geography, he brought out older vintages, which bent the light strangely and had never had English names. "Nicssssse," Crowley said, sipping.
And it was true.
vii.
On Friday, Aziraphale woke up, for the first time in a quarter of a century.
His face was stuck to the floor, there was an unpleasant amount of pressure on his right kidney, and his neck felt like it was trying to make a new career for itself as a block of wood.
"Oh dear," he said, and immediately regretted it.
When the dry heaves had finished, he peeled his cheek off the splintery wood and did what he could for the hangover with a miracle followed by all the wine that was left in the glass he'd been holding. The other problems were simpler; the kink in his neck he healed, although it took him a few tries, and the pressure on his kidney turned out to be just the weight of Crowley's head resting on his side. Aziraphale pushed him off.
"Ow," said Crowley, opening his eyes. His sunglasses were missing. Aziraphale had uneasy recollections of trying them on somewhere around the ninth bottle, which he immediately suppressed, for what good it did him. In any case, their absence meant Aziraphale could see the dark marks on the lower lids, and the redness, and also the smooth brass of the eyeballs, broken only by the contracted pupils like slots in an arcade machine.
"So sorry, my dear boy, but you were lying on me," Aziraphale pointed out, reasonably.
Crowley glared. Aziraphale shrugged, and set about pulling his tie back from where it had somehow worked its way over his shoulder. He could still feel Crowley's body heat on his flank, a warm patch the width of Crowley's skull. It was as well, he supposed, that Crowley had known where to stop when it came to ridiculous affectations. Snake eyes and scaly feet were all very well, but cold-bloodedness was going a bit far.
"I hate you," Crowley said.
"I should hope so," Aziraphale said. "It is traditional."
Crowley shot him a look. Aziraphale gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Crowley groaned, and rolled over.
The doorbell rang.
Horrified, Aziraphale glanced at his watch. It was nearly two.
He dashed out to the front room, wishing himself presentable, and yanked the door open. Anathema stood on the other side, fresh as a daisy, or as a daisy would have been if daisies were inclined to be a strange combination of suspicious and sheepish(1).
Under her arm was a rectangular package, wrapped inexpertly in brown paper.
Aziraphale did his best not to fall over. "Good m-afternoon, dear," he said.
"Afternoon," she said, peering over his shoulder into the gloom. "Here it is," she added, unnecessarily, nodding to the package. She made no move to give it to him.
"Er," he said, reaching out. "If I may?"
"Oh," she said. "Right. Yes. Of course."
Her vivacious features twisted like someone undergoing the forcible extraction of some vital organ. Slowly, she unlocked her elbow and slid the book out.
Aziraphale took it. "I'll call you back in a few days with my findings, my dear. Will that be all right?"
"Yes," she said, staring at it, and at him. Then she ran, sudden as a bird startled out of a bush, and leapt into a car parked by the Bentley, which Aziraphale recognized distantly as belonging to that agitated young man. Well. Good.
He went back in, stepping over Crowley. He laid the book on the table, and put gloves on, and took out his case of tools.
"Angel," said Crowley, "are you transitioning directly from 'hungover' to 'bibliophilia'? That's just not right."
"Mm," Aziraphale said, slicing off the wrapping paper.
And there it was.
He opened it. He skimmed the subtitles (a shorter list, presumably because this had never been officially published; there were few italics, and nary a rave review). He turned to the first prophecy.
Angel, it read, ye sharl not Cheat mine Descendent, Anathema, inne Buying This Booke, Or Elfe.
He winced.
Nowwe, it continued, look Behind Ye.
Odd.
He looked. Behind him was Crowley, of course, sprawled pale and open on the floor, all obtuse angles and white panels of shirt, like an oversized book, though considerably smellier. Aziraphale thought he might have passed out again, or else was pretending. It had been some time since either of them had gotten drunk enough to pass out. Two, three centuries? He'd forgotten how Crowley looked when he was unconscious. Absurd. Absurd, and eminently readable.
He shook his head- to clear it, obviously, of dangerous analogies- and went back to the book.
The next prophecy read:
Denial Is Notte ae Place inn Egypte.
He gazed at it.
Helplessly, he started to laugh.
"What? What?" Crowley said blearily. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," Aziraphale gasped, "nothing." He spun around.
Crowley blinked at him. Weak London light cut across his jaw. He looked quite horrible, and yet-
Aziraphale thought: All right, then. If that's the way it is.
He blinked back at Crowley. The world changed, just a little. In the pit of his belly, a sudden warmth unfurled, and it felt strange, and it felt new, and here, he thought, they were.
(1)Improbable, since sheep are the natural enemies of daisies. Logically speaking, daisies should be inclined to be suspicious of sheep. Daisies are not logical, of course, but the point stands.