When last we saw our ineffables, they had just learned that Aziraphale had not, in fact, fallen (one reviewer kept predicting that it wouldn't happen!), and that there is a prophecy from Agnes Nutter, concerning the Third Domain! Thus far, they'd been pretty certain that it was a made-up phenomenon... so what the Hell? Or Heaven?

I've been aware at different times that this story seems to be very heavy on Crowley's thoughts and point of view... perhaps because I like him better ;-), perhaps because I can relate to him more (most of us can, I should think). Perhaps because I feel that Crowley has actual thoughts about the relationship, and that he's done some conscious analyzing and angsting. Whereas, it seems that Aziraphale's p.o.v. is something like attraction/denial/love/denial/sexual frustration/denial.

Anyway, we're going to dip briefly into Aziraphale's thoughts and past... it was a challenge for me. I'm not exactly a hedonist, however I was not raised in a religious household - all of my knowledge of Heaven and guilt is theoretical. So, it's an intellectual (rather than a visceral) exercise for me to understand why someone like Aziraphale behaves the way he does, which might make it seem a bit stilted. My hope is that my writing is good enough to gloss over my gut-level unfamiliarity with the concepts (!), and it doesn't halt the story too much. :-) It was a fun challenge.

And I hope you enjoy!


ELEVEN

Aziraphale had come into being, and had been "reared," as it were, in a way that had left precious tiny room for grey-area. Heaven was a very white place; things were good. One must be good. One must obey. One must be patient and calm, and take one's cues from the Almighty, and as long as one does that, one shall not falter. One's spirit is, in a very real sense, infinitely more important than one's body (and actually, most major world religions had got that bit correct, though a few of them failed miserably in the interpretation and execution).

That was all very well and good for those Heaven-dwellers who lived quite literally with their heads in the clouds. Heaven contained no creatures, and therefore had no need of creature comforts. It contained no corporeal concerns; no real pain but no real pleasure, no real horror but no real beauty. It contained nothing to feel passionate about, nothing to despise, nothing to hold onto…

…and no temptation.

But Earth? It was a great, big bundle of nothing but wonderful, fantastic stimuli. The World contained all of the above, and Aziraphale had very quickly, as they say, gone native. He'd been keen to embrace not just foods and texts, but also people, perfumes, flowers, music, art, wine, humor, compassion, friendliness… He'd devoured everything that he could, shared everything that he could, and constantly sought more, whilst always being the dutiful angel. He'd been wrought as one of the most sensitive of celestial beings in the first place, and so it was thought that he'd make a good liaison between the Archangels and mankind.

But it was that very sensitivity made him a veritable sponge for all the amazing things the material world had on offer. Not to mention, Aziraphale, as the Earthly emissary, had something to which other angels could not relate: a constant corporeal form. Sure, Gabriel and Michael and the rest, they had bodies when they walked about on Earth (and that was something they did as seldom as possible) but they abandoned their bodies when they were in Heaven. Aziraphale walked about on Earth all the time. He was the only angel who spent any quality time in his body. That meant, unlike any other celestial entity, twenty-four hours a day, he could feel. He could bleed. He could cry. He could sweat, he gained weight (and also lost it, if he chose), he got hangnails, his hair grew. He had taste buds, a stomach, genitalia, fingerprints, bones, muscles, tendons…

Ah yes, the Almighty had created him imperfect – this angelic soul in a human-like body. He desired to be obedient, but all that flesh and skin and nerves… they got the better of him sometimes.

Make no mistake, though, Heaven had been correct about the sensitivity thing: he was very good at his job. He had an intrinsic sense of the best course of miracles and blessings. He had a talent for seeing possible ripple effects through the human spirit, and knew almost always precisely what to do to make things better, even in The Beginning. (Through the ages he had observed that his demonic counterpart possessed the same sensitivity, which made him equally susceptible to The World, and also better than most at small, insidious tortures. And later, when the need arose, he performed the odd blessing surprisingly deftly.)

But being sensitive and a sponge had also left Aziraphale susceptible to temptation. And he knew it. Well, he'd have to be quite the extraordinary imbecile not to realise it, wouldn't he?

God tests us, time and time again. Especially with temptations.

And so, there was Crowley, almost from day-one. Well, back then, he was Crawley, and until humankind came into its own, he was more reptilian than humanoid, sometimes a bit of both. But even then, charm oozed off of him like crude oil… which is appropriate, given that crude oil had been a demonic invention.

For a long, long time, Aziraphale believed that Crowley (though a demon, a being in his own right, totally sentient, autonomous, et cetera, et cetera) was a test for him, sent, probably indirectly, by the Almighty. At first, it was not a physical test – that is to say, he was not physically tempted by Crowley. Sexuality was not on Aziraphale's metaphorical radar just yet.

And more often than not, he failed the test. Miserably. Spectacularly.

In the early days, the temptation of Crowley had been all about the simple fact of daring to fraternise with an amiable adversary, being seduced by the grey-area, and by the little bits of harmless hedonism in which he was wont to indulge while Crowley was about – mostly drinking and whinging. But after a couple thousand years of no-one in Heaven bringing it up, no-one giving any indication of realising that he and Crowley worked often side-by-side, and various agents mentioning Crowley's name as though Aziraphale had never heard it, the angel began to let go of that particular neurosis. He began to realise that what Crowley had been saying for centuries was true: no-one in Heaven gave a toss about what Crowley was doing, and no-one in Hell had ever given Aziraphale even the slightest hint of a thought. Moreover, the two sides only marginally cared about what their own operatives were doing, so long as stuff got done.

Because, there was one major, glaring truth about The World that had not exactly escaped the likes of Heaven, but that Higher-Ups chose more or less to ignore most of the time: the sacred cannot exist without the profane. One can say that one only wants beauty, happiness, and peace in one's life, but without horror, pain, and war, how would one know the difference?

It hadn't taken Aziraphale very long at all to internalise this truth, and Crowley had internalised it in very much the same way, in the opposite direction. How could anyone be truly horrified if they had never experienced beauty? How could anyone be disgraced if they had never tasted glory?

The two Earthly emissaries could see quite clearly that they were two sides of the same coin, though they would never have spoken those words back in the old days. However, once the angel had released his grip on his belief that Crowley was his personal demon to slay, it had taken still taken another few thousand years to bend to the arrangement. And even then, he often tried to pretend it wasn't happening. He never forgot that he was meant to be the nice one, but he also never forgot that nice was nice, but it wasn't all that there should be. Small corners of his mind harboured not-nice things, and as the millennia wore on, those corners changed colour, texture, they grew and shrank…

And weirdly, one of them morphed into love. One of those places in Aziraphale's subconscious, where he cultivated the true notion that without Crowley, life on Earth would be boring as Heaven, it had begun to grow out of its clay pot and curl round other parts of his mind. It wound around his feelings, like happiness, warmth and comfort. And once he accepted the fact that Crowley was actually nice a lot of the time himself, lines blurred, and suddenly, there he was: quite in love.

Though, ninety-nine per cent of the time, all of this complex, explosive, Earthiness was buried deeply beneath the surface.

Crowley's Presence as a concept began to interbreed with Emotions, to form new Emotions, specifically Crowley-related-Emotions, that Aziraphale sometimes (most of the time) could not face. Before long, the Emotions, both faced and ignored, began to dig into his corporeal form… his body.

He could feel Crowley's Presence in his body.

And that's where things started to get properly confusing. He was feeling desire, lust, yearning… and he could not abide it. He was an angel, for God's sake, and this was not happening! Although the exterior, and first few layers were all quite beatific, the core of Aziraphale had been churning with heat and conflict, ready to erupt, for probably the past three hundred years, if not longer.

He didn't quite understand any of it. He barely knew it was there – all he knew for sure was that he felt a violent dissonance whenever he was with Crowley, and it wasn't entirely unpleasant. Something about that mix of fire and comfort made him seek out Crowley's company more and more often…

And then, one day in 1941, standing in the ruins of a cathedral, surrounded by dead Nazis, Crowley handed him a satchel full of books.

The books pushed it all into the light. The kindness, the effort, the show of knowing him thoroughly…

I love you and I have no idea what to do about it.


Aziraphale felt a little bit that way today, given how things had turned out. Only this morning, he knew that he loved all of this, and didn't know quite what to do about it.

All of this, being waking up in Crowley's flat each day, walking about in a robe for hours, fully-realised intimacy, a life à deux, with familiarity, cosiness, privacy, sex, kisses, coffee in the morning…

But the prophecy was weighing heavily on him, and as an angel, still an extension of Heaven, he could not help but feel that he was being punished for all of this, which Heaven saw as a transgression. If Crowley was a test, then he'd been failing in small ways for thousands of years… last night, he'd taken a gorgeous, well-executed swan dive into failure.

But oh, hadn't it been spectacular? Truly? Every tightly-coiled, overwhelming moment?

He sat in Crowley's kitchen, staring at a computer screen, while the demon threw a handful of berries into a bowl, along with a container of plain yoghurt, a squeeze of honey, and some granola.

Crowley hadn't made breakfast yet, since he'd begun the morning by wondering how on Earth he would ever do justice to the night they had shared. But the day had taken a decidedly different turn when the Archangel Michael and Lord Beelzebub had turned up on the television screen in Crowley's parlour. Now, there was no time for crêpes, or miraculously-timed deliveries from the Ritz, or peach Mimosas…

Still, he did want his companion to have something to nosh on.

He set the parfait down on the table beside Aziraphale, along with a spoon.

Aziraphale absently took a bite, then read the prophecy aloud again. "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."

"Was it that tertiary thing that grabbed you?" Crowley asked, topping off their coffee. "Having seen the Tertiary Territory in a prophecy, given what we're going through now, with this fallen-angel-oops-we-changed-our-minds meshugas?"

"That was part of it," Aziraphale admitted. "But the combination of other words… grounded with his Essential, ascetic Qualms…"

"It's very sensual," Crowley muttered, sitting down, close enough to see the screen himself. "Or… could be interpreted that way."

Aziraphale squinted at the text. "Sensual. Really? Well, I suppose…"

"Grounded with his Essential," Crowley said. "I'm thinking, Earthy, sense-based, feeling-based. Becoming grounded means coming down from on-high in favour of something Earthy. It could even be something as simple as, you know, getting out of your own head so you can just feel something."

"You interpreted all of that from grounded? Might you be a tad over-analytical?"

"It's a prophecy, written by an insane witch who's been dead for three hundred and fifty years, and communicated in metaphors half the time, Aziraphale. What am I supposed to do? Type it into Google Translate?"

"I don't know what that means, but I'll go ahead and say touché anyhow," Aziraphale muttered. "Your point is taken."

"His essential has got to be about another person, because what else is really essential? And the word ascetic is about self-deprivation, but the prophecy talks of abandoning it."

"Oh," Aziraphale said, flatly at first. Then, "Oh, Crowley, I don't like this at all! We'd better delineate and translate each phrase, then."

"Break it down."

"Indeed. When a Liberator of Mankind… a liberator of mankind," Aziraphale said, trailing off. "Someone who saves people? Like a policeman or a firefighter? It could even be a clergyman…"

"Mankind suggests bigger. It's not just someone who saves people, it's someone who…"

It occurred to them both at once.

"…has saved… mankind?" Aziraphale asked, his voice high with worry. "As in, the planet?"

"Oh shit," Crowley sighed.

"A dispassionate Being of Heofon," Aziraphale continued. "Heofon being the Old Anglo-Saxon word for Heaven."

"A disenfranchised Heavenly associate," Crowley said. "That's you, Aziraphale. A disillusioned, disappointed, dispassionate angel who helped save the planet."

Aziraphale looked at Crowley with heartrending worry in his eyes. He gulped hard, then, "When he becomes at last grounded with his Essential, and takes leave of his ascetic Qualms…"

"I think we can both see what that means, angel," Crowley muttered.

"When he… when I became grounded with… you…" Aziraphale pressed on, sputtering through the interpretation with difficulty. Though, the difficulty was not with the interpretation itself, but rather, with the weight of it. "Grounded, as you described it, being…"

"… Earthy, sense-based, out-of-your-head, listening to your body…"

"And ascetic Qualms being the misgivings I had about… well, I was depriving myself, wasn't I? I'd been keeping all of my desires under lock-and-key for so, so long, and I finally abandoned all that, and dared to have that sense-based experience, the creature comfort… to have you, at last…"

"The Probing of the Tertiary Territory commenced."

"Oh, God," the angel breathed. "We caused this, Crowley. Or rather, I did."

"No, hold on…"

"Heaven and Hell are going to join forces and tear reality apart trying to uncover the truth about the Third Domain because I finally gave in last night!"

"No, angel, no. Listen to me…"

"Crowley, it's right there in the prophecy! Agnes Nutter has never been wrong! Not ever!"

"Angel, listen," Crowley said, earnestly, grabbing Aziraphale's arm hard enough to get his attention. He let go. "For a start, if it's in a Nutter prophecy, and Nutter is never wrong, then it was meant to be. There was nothing to be done about it. You were going to set yourself free – set us both free – no matter what. It is written. Besides, how could our actions together lead Heaven and Hell into something this daft, this big? It's ridiculous. It's Agnes Nutter predicting the coincidence of events happening at once, not a cause-to-effect thing."

"That may be true, but…"

"I'm not finished," Crowley told him, leaning on the table with one elbow. "For another thing, you deserved to give in. We both did. We did nothing wrong."

"I know that in my gut, Crowley, it's just…"

Crowley now got to his feet, nearly toppling the chair he'd been sitting in. "No! Stop!" he barked. He stalked around the table, and turned back to Aziraphale. He cringed, then said, "In that room, last night, with you… it was the only truly exquisite thing I've ever had in my grasp, in over six thousand years of existence. And it was the absolute purest act of love that I can imagine. And you are not going to take that away from me! Agnes fucking Nutter sure as Hell isn't either!"

"I'm sorry," Aziraphale practically whispered now. "I wouldn't want to take it away from you. Or from me, because I feel the same way."

"Do you?" Crowley asked, just a hint of cynicism creeping into his voice.

"Of course – how could you even wonder, after all this time? Just being with you was… beyond words. I have no words. Nary an adjective nor a comparison… being touched by you, it defies language."

"You're a big fan of the word ineffable. You've finally found something that's actually ineffable, and not just God's Mysterious Ways."

"I suppose that's true," Aziraphale said lightly, with a smile. He looked down at his hands in his lap. "Again, I'm sorry, Crowley. I didn't mean to make our time together about something other than… us."

Crowley took a deep breath, and sat back down. He squeezed Aziraphale's hand, and whispered, "Thank you." Then, after a few beats he said, "Want to know what else I think, angel? It think it was practically entrapment! Gabriel and the Almighty, they pushed us into it, and now are taking advantage of the prophecy!"

"Pushed us into it? Oh, Crowley. Surely not even you could believe that!"

"I mean, don't get me wrong. All of the stuff that happened last night, it happened because it needed to. It had been begging to. I mean… I love you so much, it hurts. Feels like it's been building for aeons. We were never going to be able to hold back forever, were we? But the catalyst for it to happen last night was the fact that the Archwanker Network and their Almighty Boss tried to cast you out. Without that, it would've taken longer for us to…" Crowley shrugged.

"Longer. That seems unthinkable now."

"Doesn't it just? But it happened because you were upset, so I comforted you. You thought everything was changing anyway, so you decided to lean into that change, and admit what you've always wanted… and now here we are. So, you could blame the Almighty for all of this, which you should do anyway, because She's the instigator of everything, She pulls Gabriel's strings, and She's undoubtedly going to demand that the Third Domain be destroyed."

"Oh, Crowley."

"But even without that, you're overlooking two fairly obvious reasons why you should relax, and stop blaming yourself – blaming us – for the possible, hypothetical destruction of reality."

"Oh yes?"

"Oh yes. And I'm not just saying all this because I'm terrified that you'll interpret all of this prophecy rubbish as a reason why you're not meant to experience physical love, and return our relationship to the former status-quo."

"You're so dramatic," Aziraphale tsked, but secretly, that's exactly what he'd been wondering, in spite of being terrified of the idea, himself. "But please, enlighten me."

"One: Beelzebub made contact at eleven-fifty-eight," Crowley said. "And after she described the Third Domain to Gabriel, Michael talked him into keeping you on the roster for a bit longer."

"So?"

"The timing doesn't work out. You and I didn't start getting physical until after midnight, after you thought God had abandoned you. You said guilt wasn't a thing, and if Heaven was watching, you didn't give a damn. So, our tryst could not have kicked this off."

"But Crowley, what if the clock in my bedroom is wrong? We're only talking about a four-minute discrepancy! It could easily be said that I made the decision, then Beelzebub made contact. We just don't know."

"If that were the case, how would they have had time to decide not to cast you out? Whatever… don't answer that. It's not the point. Anyway, one last thing you're missing, angel: there is no Third Domain!" Crowley pointed out. "Heaven and Hell can search all they like – they're not going to find it."

"I don't agree," Aziraphale said, rather evenly. "I'm sorry, Crowley, but I'm afraid that this is the thing that you have been missing about this whole Third Domain business. Do you remember Beelzebub's words? 'A third domain that lies in wait, as powerful as Heaven or Hell,' was what she said. We both know that that is real. It's not what they think it is, but it's real."

"It's humanity," Crowley said, flatly, realising it himself.

"It is. Which means you were right when you said that a big one is coming. All of us, against all of them. Heaven and Hell versus humanity."

"Right. Are we us, or are we them?"

"I don't know anymore. Do you?"

Crowley shook his head.

"What I'm afraid of, Crowley, is that if our liaison last night instigated – even just at the level of prophecy and coincidence – the two sides' investigation into the Third Domain, then we've just sped up the process of them realising that the humans, collectively, are just as powerful as they are. Without all this, it would have taken them - who knows? - another six thousand years to work that out. You and I, we know it because we've been here… we've been Earthy and grounded, since the Garden. But Gabriel, and the like…"

"Well, Michael's clever, even if Gabriel isn't," Crowley conceded, now quite concerned, himself. "And Beelzebub isn't totally clueless about the world at-large, even if guys like Hastur are."

"Exactly. And with both side on the case, they'll have it solved in a century or two, and then humanity is in danger. Again."

"So, the bottom line is, it doesn't matter if we've set things in motion or not. We've got to face the fact that the idea of a Third Domain was conceived, and that is ultimately what's going to mean the end of the world."

"And we have to stop it, Crowley."

The demon groaned. "Yeah, I suppose we bloody do. At least we've got more than eleven years this time."

"We've made the mistake before of thinking we had loads of time. Perhaps we shouldn't dawdle."

"What does Agnes say?"

"Oh, now you care what the rest of the prophecies say?" Aziraphale asked.


All righty, folks. A new direction for our heroes. Or is it the same direction as before?

Either way, I'm extremely needy, and am languishing with such little feedback! If you're out there, if you're reading, please play fair, and let me know your thoughts! It is a HUGE motivator to keep me writing!

Thanks so much for reading!