Okay, here we go!
The first half of this chapter is about Crowley visiting Hell, about two weeks after the not-pocalypse, and it is a scene that appears in the previous story, "Days To Come." Except, this time, it's more from Beelzebub's point of view. So, if it feels familiar, it may very well be!
The rest of the chapter is a bit of summary of "Days To Come," plus the weeks following, all the way up to the"today" where the real meat of this story will begin, four weeks after the not-pocalypse. You will get a lot of my take on Crowley and Aziraphale's thoughts and motivations.
Not the most exciting chapter of fanfic in existence, but hopefully good for a laugh and perhaps a few feels. Enjoy!
TWO
It was a Saturday afternoon in Hell. Most demons were, frankly, doing paperwork.
A few others were building Powerpoint presentations.
A fortnight had now passed since the thwarted Apocalypse, thirteen days since Wet Sunday, and four days since Hastur's Third Domain presentation.
They were no closer to actually finding out what horrible thing had saved Crowley and Aziraphale from their respective executions, but grinding on the topic had reached critical mass, especially Hastur's theory. The Third Domain notion frightened the ever-loving bejeezus out of everyone in Hell, though Beelzebub had spent quite a bit of time wondering whether Hastur had just pulled the concept out of his arse, or whether he had any conviction in it. The temptation to get in touch with Gabriel was considerable… she just wanted to know if they knew anything… but she reckoned, if they didn't, she wasn't about to tip them off. She couldn't very well just phone him out of the blue, and make him believe she just wanted to shoot the breeze.
Or maybe she could. He was quite the pillar of idiocy...
But she considered that possibility a non-possibility. So she contented herself (well, not contented, but occupied herself) dragging her feet through endless hallways that looked like the inside of an onyx statue's intestine, looking bored, randomly poking people with a burning-hot prod, and belittling the underlings.
And suddenly, like a rescue, like a breath of fresh air in a dank basement, the sudden appearance of something to do for an agitated Lord of Hell, there was a ripping sound in the air. Beelzebub knew that sound. It was the whzp-whip-thip-zrrrrp of someone using the main entrance in Central London. Only one demon ever bothered to use that entrance…
She focused on the sound, and suddenly found herself standing in front of the dark-bespectacled entity about whom they'd all been flapping their jaws, since the day he'd backstroked in the deadliest substance known to Hell…
"Lord Beelzebub!" he said, exaggeratedly boisterously. "Just the thing I wanted to see!"
"Demon Crowley," she snarled, as the lost souls groaned and slipped around them. "Or should we revert to your original name, Crawley, as you've come back. Crawling. You know… in an undignified manner. Like a thing… that crawls. Like a snake, because you're a snake. Beneath us all."
"Erm, yeah… no offence, but you might want to practise your impromptu bravado," Crowley suggested. "I mean, when you've got a script, you're brilliant, but when you're taken by surprise, you just sort of… trail off. It's not very commanding, you know?"
"Still talk too much, I see," she commented.
"That's all you've got? Seriously, Lord Beelzebub. Just run drills with Hastur every now and then, you know? Improvisational menacing. Look into it."
"You're impertinent."
"Oooh, burn!"
Annoyance surged within Beelzebub's chest, and she grabbed him by the lapel of his designer jacket, and hauled him through a door that she'd conjured in the same moment. She slammed it behind them, and suddenly, they were in one of the endless office spaces, always with poor lighting, ceilings dripping with something, and the Legions of Hell squinting over mountains of bureaucratic forms and dossiers and briefs and spreadsheets and manifests and notes and...
"Blimey," grumbled Hastur, who was sitting in the front row, doing his Hastur thing. He looked Crowley over. "Look what the cat dragged in. Come crawling back have you, Crawley? That is your real name isn't it? Crawley, like a snake? You know…"
"Oh, dear Satan, please stop with the crawling and the snake references," Crowley groaned. "It's tragically unfunny, and as it happens, I haven't come crawling back!"
"Then you've got five seconds to state your purpose before we destroy you," Beelzebub said, colourlessly.
"Ah-ah, careful," Crowley warned, with one index finger. "Let's not forget that the last time you saw me, I was quite happily bathing in holy water, much to your great personal terror. Remember that? Eh?"
Of course they bloody remembered. It's all anyone had been able to think about since then, but she wasn't about to tell him that. Still, she had no idea what he was actually capable of, and she figured there was no reason to incur his wrath yet… just in case. So, she nodded. Hastur just looked down at his hands on the desk.
"How do you reckon that was possible, oh, Lord of the Flies?" Crowley asked.
"I'm sure I do not know," Beelzebub responded, back to feigning boredom.
"Exactly," Crowley spat. "And Hastur, me old mate, if you've been chatting with our friend Michael, up in the top floor office, you might know that a certain annoyingly persnickety angel achieved something similar when his bosses decided to get revengey."
"Maybe I knew it. Maybe I didn't," Hastur grumbled.
"I'm curious," Crowley said. "How many meetings have you had about it?"
"Seven," Hastur said, before he could stop himself.
"Shut it," Beelzebub warned him.
Crowley cackled with laughter. "I can just see it now! A really riveting Powerpoint presentation entitled, Can Angels and Demons Become One?"
"It was called The Ying and Yang of Angels and Demons," Hastur said. "But you've got the basic gist."
"Would you shut up?" Beelzebub growled at Hastur, growing very agitated.
"Well, that question, sadly, remains to be answered," Crowley muttered. "But what about When Demons Fall? Have you lot talked about that? What happens to the substance of a demon when we start to stray from the fold? I might have been your guinea pig! Is it like when we fell from heaven, or is it a much more concrete, fleshy process? And what does it mean?"
"That one was rubbish," Hastur said, uncomfortably. Well, everything he did and said, he did and said uncomfortably.
"Hastur, you complete moron!" Beelzebub shouted.
"My presentation was called Is There a Domain Other Than Heaven and Hell, and What Are Its Interests?" Hastur confessed, with his usual total lack of finesse, and utterly not hearing Beelzebub at all.
"For Hell's sake, Hastur, are you fucking kidding me?" Beelzebub screamed.
And then after that, there was silence. Beelzebub could feel Crowley studying both of their faces. In spite of herself, Beelzebub had long-since admitted that Crowley had a way about him, that allowed him to manipulate things with surety and refinement, read people, read angels, read other demons. In almost a human way, he knew when others were uncomfortable, or lying, or both. She and Hastur had no idea how to "act," unless it was her well-practised boredom with all things in existence.
And she knew that he could see their fear. And she bloody hated that.
"A domain other than Heaven and Hell?" Crowley lilted. "What an interesting question."
"If you like," said the fly-infested Lord, trying like mad to act like she didn't care.
"Maybe you lot aren't as daft as I thought," Crowley said, still with a softened voice that she found utterly grating.
But bells began ringing in her head. Shit! It's real! Crowley practically confirmed it! Shit, shit, shit!
"Indeed not," she replied calmly, though she was, in reality, panicking. She looked Crowley over rather conspicuously, with disgust in her eyes.
"You're wondering if my very presence here is dangerous, aren't you?" the slithery demon asked.
"Maybe," she responded.
"You're wondering what I am now, aren't you?"
"Maybe."
"You're right to worry. And you're wondering what's coming, aren't you?"
"Maybe."
"Well, Lord Beelzebub, have I got a book for you!"
Crowley had returned to his pristine, black, 1926 Bentley after meeting with Beelzebub, with a time-travelling device in his hands, and laughter on his lips.
"The transaction was humorous?" Aziraphale asked, as the demon slid into the car beside him.
"Unbelievably! I've never enjoyed Beelzebub's company so much!"
Crowley went on to relate to his angelic friend the highly amusing tale of Hastur theorising that they, Crowley and Aziraphale, were now agents of a secretive third domain, a supernatural plane of existence, separate from Heaven and Hell, and totally mysterious to all parties involved. If the angel and the demon had, at some point, been transformed into its minions, their angelic/demonic qualities would have melted away, replaced by traits of the other domain… which no-one knew anything about. And this is how they survived their executions.
Of course, no-one in Heaven nor Hell would suspect that they'd used their analogous brands of magic to perform a rudimentary glamour. They'd done a superficial body-swap that allowed Crowley to stand in for Aziraphale in the column of hellfire, and Aziraphale to dunk, unharmed, in the bath of holy water on behalf of Crowley. Crowley frequently took great gales of mirth in the idea that it was actually Aziraphale, of all beings in the universe, who had utterly, balls-to-the-wall, terrified the nastiest agents of Hell. And f ever there was someone who wasn't terrifying...
The swap had been all about appearances – nothing more. It was both too simple and too imaginative for the likes of Gabriel or Beelzebub or Michael or Hastur or any other dutiful, supernatural drones who had spent as little time as possible in the company of humans, and therefore, had never touched creativity or good old-fashioned problem-solving. Beings like that would assume that something had been done to them. Those who followed protocol like imprinting ducks often had difficulty understanding how others act, as opposed to react.
Aziraphale had been appalled that Crowley would allow Hell's middle management to believe such a theory, but it was, ultimately, the ruse that precipitated Beelzebub's handing-over of the Temporal Plier, the device that folds time.
From there, Crowley and Aziraphale had travelled back two weeks, to the day after Armageddon was derailed, to retrieve Agnes Nutter's second manuscript, which otherwise would have been burned by her descendant and lost to the ages.
After acquiring the book, the pair had had to check into a bed and breakfast in Tadfield, in order to wait for time to catch up with them.
Until the day when they'd gone back in time, Aziraphale had been staying at Crowley's flat because he was being incredibly particular about how his own flat got remodeled, after the Antichrist's resetting of the world. Anyone looking on could see quite well that Aziraphale had absolutely no intention of ever going home again, and that with Crowley was where home was, wherever that may be.
That day, there had been a lot of talk about love, both the physical manifestation of, and the emotional impact of. And an affirmation was made: Crowley had given his companion an "out", and Aziraphale had chosen not to take it. It was the closest they had ever come to admitting that they just wanted... no, needed one another, longed to be together… yet they (especially Aziraphale) still felt they needed to make excuses.
We have to live together right now because my flat isn't ready, he told himself. Though he knew that Crowley could see through it. He just wasn't ready to say, We have to live together because we have to. Full stop.
And then there was that other thing that one may do when one is in love. The physical act. The thing angels aren't supposed to do, but demons and their temptations sometimes engage in, as a necessity. And indeed, Crowley had admitted to "knowing" a lot more than Aziraphale on this count (which wasn't difficult, because Aziraphale knew practically nothing, somehow, even though he'd lived on this planet for six thousand years). Aziraphale had begun to euphemise the act by calling it "seeking joy," and Crowley, in spite of being a demon, in spite of only ever having used the act as a cynical, manipulative device, felt it was a fitting description for two participants in love (or, at least two participants in love's metropolitan area).
I should probably experience 'seeking joy' with someone (possibly Crowley, because we know each other and he's nearby) so that I can better understand the human experience, Aziraphale told himself, and Crowley, numerous times. He was not ready to say, I want to seek joy with Crowley because I want to, and it feels right, and because we chuffing well deserve it after six millennia.
And Crowley understood this completely, resolved to continue being the patient party, and immediately suggested that they sample the local Osso Bucco.
And this was where they landed when they'd begun their two-week stint, standing still in Tadfield. They spent thirteen nights and fourteen days in each other's constant company, not even parting ways to sleep. It was the most time they had ever spent together, all at once, since The Beginning. No interruptions, no worries about being seen or heard, no agenda, no particular guilt – it was glorious.
In that time, they had a few lunches with Newt and Anathema, had seen Adam Young in passing several times, waving at the eleven-year-old Antichrist from a far, as he biked through the town square with his friends. They tried every restaurant, every pub, drank at least a dozen bottles of wine, and talked and talked and talked and talked. They talked about love, war, friendship, tragedy. They talked about fear and the future. They talked about the Almighty, and Her ineffable plan, and how bloody sick they were of the whole thing… even though they were continuing to go round and round and round about it ad infinitum…
But the best bits were when Aziraphale would lie back on the bed, Crowley would lounge in the leather armchair with his feet upon the ottoman, each of them casually sipping on a glass of wine or a cup of tea, and Crowley would read aloud from Agnes Nutter's second manuscript, and the two of them would try to interpret it.
"Okay, here's another one I can't suss out," Crowley said. "When a liberator of Mankind, a dispassionate Being of Heofon, becomes at last grounded with his Essential, and takes leave of his ascetic Qualms, the Probing of the Tertiary Territory will commence. What do you suppose that means?"
Aziraphale, running way past drunk at that stage said, "I think it means Tinkerbell is coming to life!"
"What?" Crowley asked, flatly, who for some reason, had chosen tea that evening, instead of wine.
Whereupon, Aziraphale spent the next ten minutes explaining why this prophecy was definitely about Tinkerbell. Crowley stared at him the entire time with a blank, open-mouthed, half-annoyed, half-fascinated, what the fuck sort of face, but secretly, the demon didn't mind at all, listening to Aziraphale's stream-of-consciousness rantings.
Finally, on that same Saturday when Crowley had borrowed the Temporal Plier from Beelzebub, after getting very cosy in Tadfield for a fortnight or so, they went and hid near Jasmine Cottage, and waited to see the Bentley come round the bend. They watched themselves get out of the car, and use the Temporal Plier, then watched themselves disappear into the past, and into a chain of events that would lead them to this moment. At that point, they were caught-up, and knew it would be safe to get in the Bentley, and return to London.
They did not say so, of course, but both angel and demon felt that they were returning to London, having been profoundly changed by two very quiet weeks in Tadfield.
Any confusion? Let me know!
Any feels? Let me know!
Any laughs? Let me know!
And thank you so much for reading! ;-)
