Crowley grimaced as the Bentley lurched forward a few feet and came to an abrupt halt, throwing them all forward, as the engine died.

"You have to," he started when Yeshua turned the key in the ignition again, holding it too long with a whining strain to the starter. "No, not like that, don't-" he was cut off again as the car once more performed its lunging act, desperately trying to achieve first gear, and shuddering to a halt.

"Just STOP," Crowley shouted out desperately.

Yeshua froze, looking flustered.

Crowley let out a calming breath. "Now, just turn the key until the engine turns over, then slowly let loose on the clutch, while you push down on the accelerator, until the transmission catches into gear."

Yeshua concentrated very hard as he did what Crowley had instructed. The gear caught this time, and they made it nearly halfway down the block before the car gave a few more shudders and died again.

"You have to keep your foot on the accelerator once you have it in gear," Crowley gritted out. He rubbed a hand lovingly over the dash. "'S all right, baby. He's trying. He doesn't mean to hurt you," he said softly to the car.

Yeshua tried again, and they were rolling along for a bit, until Crowley could feel the rpms increasing. "Okay, now shift into second," he instructed.

Crowley bared his teeth, as the sound of grinding of gears caused him the kind of severe emotional trauma that manifests as physical pain. "Push the clutch in all the way for fuck's sake! No, SECOND!" The engine gurgled and spluttered. "Clutch in. CLUTCH IN!"

Crowley grabbed the gear stick roughly over Yeshua's hand and pushed it into second gear. They had been losing speed rapidly, and when Yeshua released the clutch, the Bentley once more lurched, died, and threw Crowley hard against the dash, as if in rebuke.

"Perhaps, you should just drive dear," came Aziraphale's voice, placating, from the backseat.

This had all gone much the same way when he had tried to teach the angel to drive, some ninety years ago now, and Aziraphale, a flustered ball of nerves over the whole endeavor, had said the exact same thing then.

Crowley breathed out again, willing himself to relax. "No. No. It will be fine. It just takes a bit of practice to get the knack of it. Now Yeshua, listen closely, I'll explain again."

"It's all this shifting," Yeshua said. "There's no reason for it to be so complicated." He waved a hand over the gear stick, and it disappeared. "There," he said. "An automatic will be much easier."

Crowley waved his hand through the empty space where his gear stick had been a moment before, in abject horror. "You can't," he spluttered. "What did… What have you done?"

"Oh relax," Yeshua said. "This will be better. None of that messing about with shifting and clutches to slow you down."

"Better?" Crowley asked in disbelief. "Better?" He demanded. "Slow me down?" He let out a whimper, as Yeshua blithely missed the point.

"You don't have to thank me," Yeshua said. "It's just a small miracle between friends."

"Damnation," Crowley argued. "Blessed are the considerate; who don't go blasted mucking about, making alterations to perfection, for they shall inherit another fucking sunrise."

oOoOoOo

"Um, Jesus? I mean, Yeshua?" Aziraphale asked.

"Yes?"

"I don't suppose you have any idea what would happen to us if we were discorporated now?" Aziraphale's knuckles were white where he had his hands scrunched into the fabric of the legs of his pants. "I mean, since, strictly speaking, we don't belong to Heaven or Hell? Do you suppose your Father would issue us new bodies?"

"Dunno," Yeshua said, swerving around a garbage skip and between a pair of coupes, at a speed even Crowley didn't usually manage. "Why do you ask?"

"Oh, no reason,"Aziraphale said in a strangled choke.

"How does the music thing work?" Yeshua asked, hitting buttons on the dash.

"No, not like that," Crowley muttered.

"WATCH OUT!" Aziraphale yelled, as they sped past a cyclist close enough to brush the man's leg. Aziraphale spun in his seat to look out the back window. The cyclist had swerved off the road directly into a pedestrian, both tumbled over, but appeared relatively unharmed. "Please, slow down. You're going to kill someone."

"Oops," Yeshua said, and he did slow down. He was still breaking the speed limit by a considerable amount, but at least it no longer felt as though they were about to break the sound barrier.

"Here," Crowley said, hitting a button on the stereo. A blast of noise from the speakers left Aziraphale's ears ringing before he turned the volume down.

Instant Karma's gonna get you

Gonna knock you right on the head

You better get yourself together

Pretty soon you're gonna be dead

Crowley froze, his hand still hovering by the stereo. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Yeshua asked.

"The music," Crowley demanded.

"Oh," Yeshua answered. "It's Instant Karma. John Lennon."

"Yes," Crowley agreed, in a quiet, measured tone, between gritted teeth. "Yes, I can hear that. What's it doing playing in my car?"

Yeshua shrugged. "It's my favorite."

"No," Crowley said firmly. "Nonononono. The Bentley doesn't play John Lennon. It plays Queen, and more Queen, Freddie or Brian's solo albums, and then more Queen. On a good day, I can get T-Rex, Velvet Underground, a few tracks of Bowie, but then it's more Queen! The Bentley does not play John Lennon."

"Oh," Yeshua said. "Is it broken or something?"

Crowley made a bunch of inarticulate noises. "My car is not broken. It just has strong preferences. You can't just superimpose your own taste on it. It's not right." He folded his arms over his chest. "Tell him, Aziraphale."

"It's all bebop to me," Aziraphale said, and Crowley made more noises.

Aziraphale smirked.

It was only fair that Crowley should finally be on the wrong end of some messiah induced jealousy- even if his proprietary instincts were directed toward the Bentley rather than Aziraphale.

Instant Karma's gonna get you

Gonna knock you off your feet

oOoOoOo

When they arrived in Oxfordshire, Crowley snatched the keys out of Yeshua's hand and clasped them to his chest. "Never again," he said. "Jesus Christ. Who taught you manners?"

"My mother," Yeshua said.

"Yeah, well. The Virgin Mary has some bloody explaining to do then."

oOoOoOo

Adam was at one of the work tables in the paleontology lab, re-sorting some specimens that the undergrads had been using for one of their lab assignments, when the door to the lab burst open and Crowley swaggered in.

"Whatever it is, NO," Adam said, pulling a partial specimen of a trilobite out of a tray of coprolite and putting it where it belonged.

"I have someone for you to meet," Crowley said, ignoring him.

Adam wasn't quite sure who he was expecting when he looked up, but it was just Aziraphale and some hipster guy.

"I'm not getting involved in whatever," Adam gestured between the three of them, "this is."

"It's a family reunion. Yeshua, meet Adam. Adam, Yeshua," Crowley said.

The hipster came forward and extended his hand.

"Who?" Adam asked, starting to extend his own hand in reflex.

"Yeshua bar Yoseph of Nazareth," Crowley explained. "The Messiah. Son of God."

"Jesus Christ," Aziraphale said, and Adam wasn't sure if it was a curse, or if Aziraphale thought the son of God part hadn't been clear enough.

Adam jerked his hand back before they could touch. "What the fuck?"

"Language," Aziraphale reprimanded.

"Hypocrite," Crowley accused.

"It's good to finally meet you," Yeshua said, his hand still extended to shake.

"Uh," Adam said, staring at the hand, "likewise, definitely. It's just… if you're the Christ and I'm the Antichrist, and we touch… won't we sort of… cancel each other out? Like matter and antimatter colliding?"

Yeshua took on a thoughtful expression and started to pull his hand back, and then he reached out and patted the top of Adam's head.

"Apparently not," he said, smiling.

Adam scowled. "You'd feel pretty stupid right now if we had both ceased to exist." He looked to Crowley. "If he's here, then I'm guessing there's something is going on."

Crowley shrugged.

"Gabriel said that God wanted the two of you to meet."

"I'm supposed to try to convince you to do your job," Yeshua said.

"My job being to bring about Armageddon?"

Yeshua waved a hand in the air. "Naw, just take your place beside Lucifer in the fight between Heaven and Hell. Hey! What are these?" He asked, picking up one of the coprolites.

"Fossilized poop," Adam answered.

Yeshua dropped the coprolite and wiped his hand on his hoodie.

"Those are about 200 million years old," Adam said, "they're mostly calcium phosphate. They're as sanitary as any rock you would pick up in the road."

"The world is only six thousand years old," Yeshua said, still wiping his hand.

"Tell that to the dinosaurs," Adam said.

"Dinosaurs aren't real. They're like Vulcans and Timelords. It's just Science Fiction. I know it looks real, but they're just puppets. Anima… animate… "

"Animatronic," Adam said, "but I have about a hundred kilos of fossilized shit to sort through, that says differently."

"That's just Dad's little joke," Yeshua dismissed.

Adam gave Yeshua a hard look. "There's evidence in the fossil record of five world-wide mass extinction events. Maybe it's a really elaborate prank by a celestial being with too much time on Her hands, or maybe Granny isn't telling you everything, and She had a few false starts before The Garden of Eden."

Yeshua frowned.

Adam huffed out a sigh, and shook his head in frustration. "Do you want to see a dinosaur?"

oOoOoOo

"This is Eustreptospondylus oxonienis," Adam said, standing before the four and a half meter long skeleton. "It was discovered, just a few miles from this spot, in1871, and it lived in Oxfordshire 155 million years ago."

"Ooh," Yeshua said, not looking. "What are those ones?"

"That's a Tyrannosaurus and an Iguanadon," Adam said, following Yeshua's gaze over to the two massive skeletons on display, "but those ones aren't real. They're replicas made from casts of the actual fossils. This one is real though. These are the actual, fossilized, remains of an real animal that might have actually stood on this very spot, a hundred and….I've lost them." Adam sighed as he followed after Yeshua and his godfathers to the much more visually impressive replicas.

"I told you they weren't real," Yeshua was telling Crowley. "Look at those teeth though."

"Have you been listening to a word I've been saying?" Adam asked. "They were real. A mass extinction, 65 million years ago, killed them all off, but they were real. We've discovered over seven hundred different species of dinosauria so far; that's not counting all of the other forms of life from the same period. And that's just one epoch of life on Earth. We have specimens in the fossil record from 3.5 billion years ago, and evidence of biodiversity arising between each of the five mass extinctions. I'm not going to argue with you over the existence of God. I've met Her. I know that She exists. But what could possibly be the point of fabricating all of this?" He gestured around the Oxford Museum of Natural History's lobby.

"It's a joke," Yeshua said. "Raphael came up with it. He thought it would be funny to keep the humans guessing. Dad thinks it's hilarious."

Adam glared at him.

"Oh look, there's a gift shop," Crowley said suddenly. "Come on, angel. I'll buy you a souvenir." He grabbed Aziraphale by the arm and pulled him away from Adam and Yeshua.

"What?" Aziraphale asked, as he was pulled along. "Why?"

"They'll have knick-knacks. You like knick-knacks."

"Well, yes," Aziraphale said. "I suppose so, but what about Adam and Yeshua?"

"It'll be good for them. Let them get to know each other without us hovering over their shoulders."

"This is about the dinosaur thing isn't it?" Aziraphale asked. "You don't want Adam to find out that-"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."