Guys, I can't thank you enough for the influx of reviews! It is so soothing to a writer's soul, to read what people think! Honestly - it's like manna from heaven. Or from wherever. ;-) Thank you!

Speaking of which, one reviewer predicted that Crowley would not be happy about this turn of events (Aziraphale cast out of Heaven). Well, read on, friends - you might be surprised at how anger manifests in this chapter!

Also, there's a pretty big revelation here... though, is it really that big? Heh.

Enjoy!


FIVE

When Aziraphale had used the Central London entrance to Heaven, he'd known that Crowley was using the same entrance to get to Hell, but he wasn't particularly thinking about his hellish analog at the time. His mind had been occupied with the tedious dread of seeing the Archangels, and anxiety over having to actually hand over Agnes Nutter's work.

But into Hell Crowley did go.

"Well," whined Beelzebub, appearing before him, in one of the dank, damp hallways. "If it isn't Crawley! The crawling-at-your-feet snake!"

Hastur was with her, looking at Crowley with that good old, familiar, uncomfortable, beady-eyed gaze.

"Oh please, oh please, oh please, Lord Beelzebub, I am literally begging you, please don't do the Crawley-crawling-snake, trying-to-mock-me thing. It's really embarrassing. For you, I mean. Just let it go! There are so many other, more interesting ways to make fun of me! Honestly, just say the word, and I'll help you out! I've never made it all the way through a Star Wars film – make fun of that."

Beelzebub looked at him flatly. "Why are you here?"

"To return this," Crowley said, producing a triangular apparatus out of his pocket. The thing had been used two weeks ago (or one month, depending upon one's perception) and allowed the demon and his angelic counterpart to travel back in time two weeks, to retrieve Agnes Nutter's Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies.

"Ah, yes, the Temporal Plier," Beelzebub said, holding out her hand. Crowley deposited the thing in her palm, and it quickly vanished as though it had never been there. "Any trouble using it?"

"None whatsoever," Crowley shrugged.

"Pity you didn't get stuck in the past," Hastur growled. "Or sliced in half on your way there."

"So, that must mean you have the book," Beelzebub said.

"Ehhhh, yeah, about that," Crowley said, feigning discomfort. "We weren't able to get it. Sorry."

"What?"

"Well, we thought it would be fairly logical to check with Anathema Device, Mistress Nutter's descendant, to see if she had it. Turns out, she doesn't," he lied. "Agnes must've had it in mind for the hands and eyes of someone else entirely, because we now have no idea who has it."

"We?"

"Yeah, we," Crowley shrugged. "Are you really going to pretend to be surprised that I wasn't working on it alone?"

"Nothing surprises me," the bored Lord of Hell said. She rolled her eyes.

"Wet Sunday surprised you," Hastur said.

Beelzebub turned and looked at him with utter disbelief. "Are you fucking kidding me, Hastur? Do you just have zero concept of how to keep your bloody mouth shut?"

"Well…" Hastur began.

"What's Wet Sunday?" Crowley asked, wrinkling his nose. It had a delightfully disgusting, hellish ring to it, but Crowley had never heard the term before. Though, he was aware that he'd been out of the loop for a few weeks.

"Never you mind, Crowley," Beelzebub spat. "Wet Sunday is none of your concern."

"Well, he was the one who…" Hastur started.

"Shut it!" screamed Beelzebub, and she snapped her fingers, and made the sloppy Duke of Hell disappear.

Crowley laughed. "Okay, I get it. Wet Sunday. Very cute. Very apt!"

"You gave it to him, didn't you? You gave Agnes Nutter's second volume to him, your little lapdog, Aziraphale!" Beelzebub said, completely ignoring the Wet Sunday revelation.

"Er, for the record, I don't have a lapdog, and I never would," Crowley said. "And I didn't give it to anyone, because there is nothing to give! Or… there is, but I have no idea where to find it. It's probably in a box, in a broken-down house in the outer boondocks of Nowhere, and it'll take a miracle to find it."

"Then conjure a miracle, Crowley!" she shouted. "By all the Minions of Hades, do I have to think of everything?"

"Don't you think we tried that?" Crowley shouted back. "What do you take me for, a complete imbecile? You know what? Don't answer that. Point is, I'm not, and it might surprise you to know, neither is Aziraphale. And I'm telling you, we couldn't find it! Two supernatural beings could not locate a thing, which means that said thing is nowhere!"

"I don't trust you, Crowley," she snarled.

"Yeah, sing me a new one, would you?" he muttered, turning and walking away from her. "Ciao."

And then the slinky demon disappeared up the escalator back into Central London.

Hastur joined Beelzebub in the hallway once again then.

"Why does he always talk about food when he's walking away?" he wondered aloud.

"You're a bloody idiot, you know what?" she asked him. Then she sighed. "Well, did you hear the rest of the conversation?"

"Yeah," Hastur replied. Then he growled, "Crowley. Crowley, Crowley."

"Crowley," she echoed.

"Pigment-having, Antichrist-losing, hip-swinging, boot-wearing, book-saving, lying, flash bastard Crowley."

"So you think he's lying?"

"I do."

"Me, too," she told Hastur. "If we're going to be investigating this Third Domain thing, we need that book. If anyone had information on it, it's Agnes Nutter. And if anyone knew what's coming down the pike for us, it's Agnes Nutter."

"Agreed," he said. "We could threaten him until…"

"Threaten him with what?" she interrupted. "He's already bloody immune to holy water! What could we possibly do to him that's worse? We don't know a blasted thing about his vulnerabilities anymore!"

Hastur got that I-may-or-may-not-currently-be-defecating look on his face, suggesting he was thinking.

Beelzebub sighed heavily again and said, "I suppose, in retrospect, it was more than a bit daft to hope that Crowley would just hand the thing over. If he's working for the Third side now, of course he wouldn't want to let us know anything about it."

"Same for Heaven, then," Hastur offered. "That means that his boyfriend might not have handed it off to Gabriel."

"I hate to say it, but I think we need to find out," she said. "And maybe we can trade information."

"I hate trading. It smacks of cooperation. Which smacks of goodness."

"Oh, save it, Hastur. This is totally self-interested of us."


Crowley paced around his flat like a caged tiger. It was like a month ago when they were uncertain the identity and whereabouts of the Antichrist, with Armageddon days away… he had had bouts of total inability to sit still, then, too.

Today, the uncertainty and agitation came from Aziraphale. He had left this morning in the Bentley with Crowley, and they'd gone to the Central London entrance to their respective head offices (former head offices, really). They weren't sure who would finish up first, but they agreed that since either transaction could take a while, whoever was finished first should just go back to Crowley's flat without the other.

Crowley would have presumed that the angel would just hop on the Underground and be back in a jif, all tickety-boo-like, even if it was some time after Crowley had driven home.

But Aziraphale was nowhere to be found when Crowley returned. And now, six hours later, he still wasn't back.

A lot could happen in the presence of the Archangel Gabriel in the space of six hours – Crowley knew this from experience.

He decided that this was cause for concern. Truth be told, he hadn't liked the idea of Aziraphale going by himself, into the presence of those jackals. All of them were angels, supposedly, but they were not all made of the same stuff. Aziraphale was a damn sight tougher, and yet, softer. In all the right ways. In all the ways that made him real, and made the others merely poseurs. For his money, Crowley would spend an afternoon with Beelzebub any day over Gabriel. At least the Lord of Hell didn't pretend to be something she wasn't.

Aziraphale was actually good, whereas that stick-up-their-arses gang of Archangelic thugs weren't even particularly nice, when you got right down to it.

"Aw, shit, Aziraphale," Crowley groaned and spat, heaving himself upward and forward out of his office chair, grabbing his sunglasses off the desk and heading out the door. "For Somebody's sake, where are you?"

As an afterthought, he came back and left a note on the guest bedroom door demanding that the angel phone him if he happened to come back, then he ran down the steps of his building to the street.

The Bentley began moving almost before he was in it, and it was headed for Soho. The last month notwithstanding, where does one go to find a wayward angel? For Crowley, the answer to that question had been, for the past century-and-a-half or so, a rare book shop on a corner of London's Bohemian coffee-house district.

He parked, as usual, illegally, directly in front of the shop, and amid protestations from angry humans, he climbed out of the car, and up the stairs of A.Z. Fell and Co. Bookseller.

The sign said closed, and the shades were drawn, but Crowley knew that there was a clandestine little corner of the window where the shade was slightly torn and gapped, and if you crouched just right, you could see straight through to the back room. And surely enough, there sat the angel, in his desk chair, but with the desk behind him. He was staring straight ahead at nothing. He was unmoving – for all the world, he could have been a wax statue.

This sent bells ringing in Crowley's head, and he began to try the door, and knock soundly on the window. "Aziraphale! Aziraphale! What the Heaven are you doing? Open up! What's gone wrong?"

He startled the angel something fierce, and suddenly, Aziraphale was on his feet, shaking off a kind of stupor, clutching at his chest, and moving toward the door. He stumbled and fumbled to get it open, and when he did, he sighed, "Crowley."

"Yeah! It's me! Remember me?"

"Yes, I remember you," Aziraphale said flatly, quietly, turning his back and returning slowly to his desk chair.

Crowley shut the door behind him, and locked it. He then watched the angel bend slightly and return to his seated position in the antique chair that matched the antique rolltop desk, that Aziraphale had had from new. Everything about him reverted to form – the stoic look in his eyes, the stillness, the staring at nothing. Crowley had seen him moving, and still might've taken him for a wax figure.

He approached carefully. Aziraphale didn't move.

After he'd stood and stared for over a minute, the demon finally asked, "Angel, are you going to tell me what's going on, or are we going to play twenty questions?"

"I don't know."

"Okay, erm… how about, no questions, just… say, comments, yeah? Let's start with, I was expecting you back at the flat hours ago, and I've been worried," Crowley said. Then he shuddered. "Ew, don't tell anyone I said that."

"I'm sorry. I decided to come here for a while, instead of coming home."

Crowley briefly noted how Aziraphale had called the demon's flat home, in contrast to here, which was his actual home. But he passed it by, in favour of, "Yes, I can see that. Why?"

"To gather my thoughts."

"Any luck?"

"No. The contents of my head are still splattered all over the universe, and existence, and the last six thousand years."

"Oh. That's… a bit of a brutal image. Well done."

"Splattered all over you, and Gabriel, and all the things I've done and said, all the foods I've eaten, all the blessings I've done… and of course, the great, ineffable plan."

"Again with the splattering," Crowley muttered.

"The plan! God's plan!" Aziraphale said, finally with some expression. He said it with exaggerated, sarcastic delight. His voice rose, and he got to his feet, and began walking briskly back and forth through the store, from his chair to the European History section, then back again. He began to laugh. "God's plan! God's ineffable fucking plan!"

The last three words came out in a shout louder and more violent than Crowley had ever heard come from the throat of a non-demon. His celestial powers seemed to be reverberating with his rising anger, and the walls practically vibrated with the weight of this outburst, his curse, his blasphemy. It was the kind of scream that people in the trinket shop next door would have felt, but not necessarily heard, unless they, too, were supernatural beings.

Crowley wondered if Aziraphale had ever been this angry before. Angels generally considered themselves above the sin of wrath, but then again, there were quite a few things that most angels were not wont to do, save for Aziraphale.

"Whoa, whoa, angel, calm down," Crowley said, approaching him with arms held out."

"Goddamn it, Crowley! Don't tell me to calm down!" Aziraphale shouted at him, not from the heights of heaven, but from the depths of his throat. "I've spent six thousand years trying to be calm and what the Hell has it ever done for me? Eh?"

"Angel…" Crowley tried again, a bit disturbed, in spite of himself, by the blaspheming and the sudden, unfettered cursing. This was not his friend at all.

"I'll tell you what it's done for me," Aziraphale said, as he continued to pace. His steps were quick, hard, and he stared at the floor, and words fell out of his mouth carelessly, like gravel out of the back of a truck. "It's got me bullied by Gabriel and his wacky band of Archwankers. It's made me follow orders I didn't want to follow. It's had me witnessing the drowning of an entire populace by their supposedly benevolent God, and standing by as a humble and kind carpenter from Galilee is tortured and murdered for defending the Will of the Almighty, while they all just let it fucking happen! Not to mention the myriad, the bloody shedload of other atrocities like it! Being calm has made me say things, for millennia – do you hear that? Millennia! – like 'well, it's best not to speculate,' and 'we're not meant to understand,' and 'the Almighty will fix everything!' none of which I ever really believed!

"But I couldn't just be that guy. No, no. God couldn't just make me to be an obedient angel of Her Will, because that would mean I'm infallible, and we can't have that, can we? So, I have free will! Huzzah, isn't it grand? And with my free will, I've chosen to be calm, like an angel should. Yes, yes, let's be calm, and never get riled – we'll just go with the flow, as they say, and thwart the wiles of the enemy at every turn… calmly, and with the utmost dignity."

There was a long silence while Aziraphale paced for about ten seconds, and then continued.

"I swear to you, I've only tried to be the best me I can be. But being me, mixed with free will… oh ho! Aren't I naughty boy! It's made me relish this world, want to protect the human race, fall in love with a demon, become attached to this planet, care about the mortal coil, turn into a food snob, and a book snob, and a clothing snob and someone who values practicality over protocol. And I get away with it for millennia upon millennia! Then suddenly, they see me use my free will to help avert a cruel plan to kill seven billion innocent people… and I wind up here. "Aziraphale stopped pacing then, and with his back to his companion, he stared at the floor. "Despondent. Fallen. This is what being calm and scrupulous has done for me."

Crowley's heart was pounding from what he'd just heard, but he didn't think this would be a good time to focus on the in love bit. The angel clearly hadn't fully meant to say it, it was more like word-vomit, made of anger and thoughts and six thousand years of self-oppression. So, first things had to come first.

"Aziraphale," Crowley whispered, because he did not have the wherewithal to speak any more loudly. "Did you say… fallen?"

Aziraphale turned and faced him, his eyes swimming with tears. "I've been cast out. Starting at midnight, I am no longer amongst the Celestial Assembly."

"So, you'll be what?" Crowley asked, ripping off his glasses and squinting in disbelief at Aziraphale. "A demon?"

"That's what happens when angels fall, isn't it?" Aziraphale asked, rather curtly.

"So I've heard, yes," Crowley answered. He took a pause, then walked forward toward the angel, and dared to take him by the hands. This was not met with resistance in the slightest. "Look, I don't want to minimise your pain, because, believe me, I know how you feel just now, and I can feel your anger – I could feel it from across the room. It's like a crashing tide… if the sea were made up of leaky nine-volt batteries. And I can't say that I blame you. But you know from experience, Aziraphale, and from hanging out with me for six thousand years: your life isn't going to be all that different. Especially now. Both sides are terrified of us, and now they've got this stupid theory about a Third Domain. It's fifty-fifty Hell will even notice you're on the roster. And if they do, I fully doubt they'll come looking for you, 'cause they know they'll have to deal with me."

Aziraphale took a long, deep breath, pulled his hands gently away, and once more sat down in his chair. "I suppose you're right," he said, resignedly. "I can still run this shop, I can still eat the foods I like, I can still do blessings or miracles if I want to, and I can still…"

He stopped short and instinctively looked up at Crowley, then looked sheepishly away.

"You can still participate in my crêpe-making experiment," Crowley said.

"Yes. That's what I was going to say."

Crowley couldn't help but smile a little bit, at what went unspoken there. They could still be together – nothing was going to change in that regard. And there was something beautiful about both of them being demons. They had always been of the same original essence, but their auras would be more similar, once the change was made. Their oscillations, vibrations, their sensibilities would be more on-par, even if their personalities remained disparate. Honestly, Crowley could think of worse contingencies than living in sin with another demon, shaped like Aziraphale. He could think of worse things, indeed.

"I don't understand why you didn't just come home," Crowley said, now taking a seat and stretching out on the sofa. "Did you not think you could tell me?"

Aziraphale folded his hands in his lap. "I was ashamed."

"Ashamed? Of what?"

"Just… ashamed. Of having done wrong and being punished for it."

"You were ashamed to tell me? Really, me?"

Aziraphale shrugged. "I know it's absurd, all things considered, but it's in my nature. For a little while longer, anyway."

"Well, you've got nothing to be ashamed of from my end. I'm here, same as always, sitting by your side, plotting the next move with you. Though, now that I'm not the only sinister one, perhaps I can sit on the right from time to time, eh? Even when we're not in the car."

"Heh," Aziraphale chuckled. "Yes, perhaps. So, Crowley, what will actually happen at the stroke of midnight? Will I suddenly get the urge to do bad things?"

"Of course not," Crowley spat, as though it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. "You know that, angel! Blimey, I guess I have to stop calling you that."

"Oh, please don't," Aziraphale said, with a tight smile. "Would you mind? I'd really like it if you continued to say angel. It would be sort of a nice thing that… well, it could be one thing that never had to change, couldn't it?"

Crowley smiled. "Okay, you've got it. But as for what will happen… I don't know, exactly. It's a different experience for every demon, from what I understand. I had the sensation of falling, falling, falling, like a million miles per hour, through the fabric of creation, ripping through threads of the universe for hours. Or days. Or it could have been thirty seconds - I don't know now, and I didn't know then. It was, frankly, horrifying and bloody amazing, all at once. Until I stopped falling by making a big splash in a lake of boiling sulfur. I had to climb out, and when I reached the shore, Lord Beelzebub was waiting to take me into the fold. The rest of the story, you already know."

"Good gracious, I wonder what it will be like for me," Aziraphale mused. "I wonder if I will feel any different."

"Not on the inside, as such," said Crowley. Then he looked around the shop. "But I'll tell you what needs to be done before the change."

"What's that?"

The demon stood up and crossed the room. He reached out with his thumb and forefinger and picked up the Bible from the little shelf atop Aziraphale's desk. It immediately began to smoke and sizzle against his fingers, and he dropped it on the floor, then shook out his fingers to ease the burn.

"You've got to get rid of stuff like that," he said.


Okay, a few thoughts:

1. I hope Aziraphale's rant is surprising, yet still in-character. I think we all know that he will curse when pushed, and I think he could be a serious badass if he ever chose to.

2. There seems to be a whole "genre" of fanfiction devoted to Protective Crowley. This is, indeed, intriguing. I suppose there could be an alternative version of these events which sees Crowley lashing out and going all Lovesick Demon Magic on Gabriel. I just didn't go that direction!

3. I realize that Aziraphale accepts Crowley's comforts, and turns his anger around rather quickly. But Crowley has made an entire existence out of being incredibly persuasive, and... well, stay tuned for chapter 6. :-)

4. As always, I'd love a review! You guys are amazing, and I appreciate your reading this story!