Adam and Yeshua walked along the shore of the duck pond while Crowley and Aziraphale argued about feeding the ducks- while feeding the ducks.
Yeshua drew in a long breath through his nose, and his ever present smile took on a serene cast. "You know, I've missed this."
"Earth?" Adam asked.
"The smells," Yeshua explained.
"Duck shit and pond water?" Adam asked, skeptically, after having a sniff of his own.
"All of them," Yeshua said. "Heaven doesn't smell like anything. It's completely sterile. It's everlasting life, but without the dirty parts that make life, life."
Adam snorted. "I think I'd prefer sterility to an eternity of the smell of rotten eggs."
"Hmm?"
"Have you been to Hell?" Adam asked. "It's horrible. It's anguish and suffering, nasty smells, and creepy signs, and demons who wear slimy things for hats. Worse than that, it's all so arbitrary. One soul might spend an eternity being tortured for a sin that another person, who's hanging around the Silver City in paradise, committed a thousand years later. Only, it wasn't a sin anymore by then, so that guy gets to enjoy harps and fluffy clouds while the poor bugger who once wore a shirt woven from two different materials, in 300 BC, is stuck being tortured for all eternity."
Yeshua sighed. "I see your point. But, if you hate it so much, why do you fight against your chance to change it?"
Adam shrugged. "Why should I have to do it? There's a whole host of demons down there who rebelled against Heaven, because they didn't like the way God was doing things. Then what? God casts them out, so they spend the rest of eternity doing Her dirty work, until they get another chance to try to overthrow Heaven. Why bother with it? If they're only getting the souls of bad people, then why not just leave them to make their own Hell?"
"That would be chaos," Yeshua said.
"Isn't that the point?"
Yeshua frowned. "I don't know. You have me all turned around."
"Yeah," Adam said. "That's the problem with rock-solid faith; it doesn't hold up to questioning. Science is all about questions. Give a person free will, and suddenly they have a whole lot of questions." Adam looked back over his shoulder to glance at Crowley. He'd often wondered about that. If angels didn't have free will, then how could they rebel in the first place? And, if it was God's will that they should fall, and they had never had any choice in the matter, how could they be evil?
Crowley obviously wasn't evil. Most of the demons that Adam had met hadn't seemed particularly evil—not in the way that humans could be. Demons tended to fall into one of two categories, either they were repulsively ugly, with foul smells emanating from them, and the intelligence of your average jelly, or they had a kind of near divine beauty about them, with the sort of stubborn streak that might have caused them to ask the wrong sorts of questions in the first place. Adam supposed that there was some kind of order to it all, the ringleaders and the followers, but it really just brought up more questions. Were fallen angels the likes of Lucifer, Azazel, and Crowley somehow more divine in God's eyes, that they got to keep their good looks when they fell, or was there as much variety of appearance amongst the angels as there was with humans, and Hastur and Beelzebub had been just as ugly before the fall?
There was something else that he'd been wondering about as well. He wasn't about to ask Lucifer about it in a million years, because that would mean that he cared- which he didn't. It occurred to him now, that Yeshua might be just the person to ask though.
"So," he said. "Your mother was a human, right? I mean God gave Her, or His, seed to a virgin, mortal, woman, and nine months later, you pop out in the middle of a barn, right? That's how it went?"
"Yes," Yeshua said, "more or less."
"So, where did I come from then?" Adam asked. "Did Lucifer impregnate some young girl and then snatch me up, after the difficult part was over, to give me to Crowley for a little game of infant musical chairs? Which, of course, they botched anyway. Or did I just spring fully formed from his head like Athena?"
"Who's Athena?" Yeshua asked.
"Greek goddess of wisdom," Adam said.
"And she came out of Lucifer's head?"
"No," Adam said. "Well… maybe metaphorically, I don't know. Where did the other pantheons come from? I assumed humanity invented them. That's not really the point though."
"You want to know if you have a mother."
"No," Adam said. "I know that I have a mother. Her name is Deirdre Young, and she raised me. I want to know if someone gave birth to me."
Yeshua shrugged. "It stands to reason."
"Does it?" Adam asked. "Because, if that's true, then why bother with all of the baby swapping nonsense? Why not just impregnate the woman that you want to raise the Antichrist in the first place?"
Yeshua frowned. "Did you ask Lucifer?"
"No," Adam admitted. "I'm a bit worried over what the answer might be- Lucifer in female aspect and a maternity dress." Adam shuddered.
Yeshua sucked in a hiss of breath. "That is a little disconcerting. Still," he slapped Adam on the back. "You're here now, so there isn't any sense in worrying over it."
oOoOoOo
Azazel hadn't been to Earth in 2,500 years or so. The last time he'd been kicking it around the mortal plane, everyone had still been herding goats and living in tents for the most part. Still, all the old sins remained the same, just brightly packaged in a brand new format.
The library had seemed to be a dead end, until he'd had a bit of a fumble with one of the plastic cases arranged in rows on a long desk. It didn't take him long to figure out how it all worked, but he'd been distracted for an hour or two watching videos of cats. When he'd gotten around to typing "give him the piss" into the search bar, it had opened his eyes to a whole new world.
Now, he was back at it, catching up on a couple millenniums worth of innovation in the field of human sexuality. The librarians had asked him to leave three times now, but a little minor demonic magic had sent them scurrying away- back to their stamps and late fees.
Azazel was developing quite a list to bring back to Lucifer, and he would need to stop at the store he'd spotted next door to the fairy's bookshop to bring back a few souvenirs from his trip to Earth.
Turning his attention back to research for his mission had led him down a whole other rabbit-hole. He hadn't thought that their initial meeting had gone too badly, but as he had not been able to coax the messiah into temptation, it seemed that more drastic measures may need to be employed. If an interest in water sports was an indication of the bent of the Christ's particular kinks, he might well need to venture into some truly unfamiliar territory.
He wondered how the Lamb of God felt about furries.
Azazel wasn't ready to tip his hand just yet, but he thought that the manifestation of his horns might compliment some if the attire on offer quite well.
oOoOoOo
"I'm just not sure how comfortable I feel sharing a bed with your ex," Aziraphale was saying as he tossed bits of bread for the ducks. "I wouldn't want him to get the wrong idea, and if you have any designs on the possibility of it being the right one, you can just think again, you old serpent."
Aziraphale was refusing to meet his eyes, his posture tight and straight. Crowley just gaped at him.
"My what?" he demanded.
Aziraphale did turn to him then, to give him a skeptical look.
"You think me and Yeshua were… what? Off buggering on camelback while I led him on a whirlwind tour of every brothel East of Eden?"
Aziraphale stiffened and looked away again. "I'd rather not know the details."
"There aren't any details. We're just friends, angel. We've only ever been friends. I'm not going to say there was never anyone before you. I was a demon; it's part of the job description. But, Yeshua is celibate. I couldn't tempt him into bed with a twelve inch cock."
"I didn't think that was his preference," Aziraphale said. "Don't think that it escaped my notice that you were favoring a female aspect when we met in Golgotha. Though, I have to say, you've never made a very good showing as a woman. It wouldn't hurt you to pad the hips and the bosom a bit more. You always just look like a man in a dress."
Crowley scowled. "Not all of us need to be the belle of the fucking ball. Just because you're slapping on a pair of tits, doesn't mean they have to stick out like the prow of a ship. You always look like you're carrying around a pair of watermelons under your frock."
"Envy doesn't suit you, my dear."
"Envy," Crowley barked out. "I don't envy you for looking like some rejected actress at a casting of Baywatch." Crowley could see that the reference was wasted on Aziraphale, but he refused to clarify out of spite. "Anyway, tits or no, Yeshua was as celibate as a male praying mantis: right up until the end. So, for the last time, we were just friends. I have never, and will never fuck Jesus Christ."
A woman passing by with a baby in a pram shot them an odd look.
"I believe you," Aziraphale said. "But, you wanted to."
"What difference would that make?"
"All the difference," Aziraphale insisted. "If it was just a one and done temptation, just work, that would be one thing, but you care about him."
"Of course I care about him, we're friends."
"Surely you have some idea of how that makes me feel. You can't blame me for being a bit jealous."
"Oh, pot meet kettle," Crowley huffed out.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Just you. You with your Hundred Guinea Club, and your gavotting about with a green carnation shoved in your buttonhole, and your bloody Oscar Wilde first editions, with the special inscriptions and their darlings and my dear fellows, that you think I don't know about. And I can't say one word against the great Scottish twat without you getting your feathers ruffled."
He was doing it now, holding his shoulders in that way that suggested that, if he had his wings out, the feathers would be puffed out like the hair on an agitated cat.
"I have no idea what you're insinuating."
"Don't give me that. You and I both know that if Oscar bloody Wilde had offered to throw you over his chaise lounge and bigger you silly, no divine miracle could have gotten your kit off fast enough."
"There was never anything like that between us. I simply admired him as a writer."
"Rubbish. Great, steaming, piles of codswallop. You can't even say his name without getting little pink hearts in your eyes."
Aziraphale opened his mouth, ready with another completely unconvincing denial, Crowley was sure, but instead he said, "Oh, now what are they up to?"
Crowley turned to follow Aziraphale's gaze and saw Yeshua, standing on the surface of the duck pond, trying to coax Adam to join him. A crowd of pedestrians had started to gather around them, goggling at the spectacle.
"That's really not good."
