"It's easy," Yeshua was saying, standing on the surface of the water with his hand extended to Adam. "Just try it. The worse that's going to happen is you get your feet wet."

"That isn't water," Adam said. "That's diluted duck shit."

Yeshua took a few steps further out onto the pond. "It will be fun. Just imagine that it's a solid surface. You know those cartoons where the coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, but he doesn't fall until he realizes that he isn't standing on anything? It's like that. Just don't realize that you're standing on the water."

"You comparing this to Loony Toons, isn't really making me feel a boost of confidence," Adam said.

"Don't be a coward. Come on."

"I'm not being a coward," Adam said. "I'm being a person who doesn't want to sink thigh-deep in duck shit."

"You have to take a leap of faith."

"Fuck faith," Adam said. "I don't have to do anything. Free will, remember?"

"Well, it's performance magic, innit?" a voice said from behind him. "Chris Angel, David Copperfield shit."

Adam turned, and there were almost a dozen people ranged along the bank behind him, watching. One of them had their phone out and was recording the whole thing.

"Uh, Yeshua," Adam said. "I think we'd better go."

"Not until you take a leap of faith," Yeshua insisted.

Fuck it, Adam thought. He closed his eyes and took a step forward onto what felt like a solid surface, much to his surprise. He opened his eyes, and dared a look down- expecting to end up doing an aquatic Wile E. Coyote impression, right into a big helping of duck soup. When he didn't immediately break the surface, he took another tentative step.

Four strides brought him to Yeshua's outstretched hand and beatific smile. Adam grabbed him roughly by the wrist and started jerking him towards the shore.

"The surface tension of this water is about 72 dynes/cm," he said angrily. "There just isn't sufficient cohesion between the molecules to compensate for our weight. It violates the laws of physics."

"What does that mean?" Yeshua asked, straining against Adam's hold on him.

"It means that water is a bloody liquid, and you can't walk on top of it!"

Adam felt vindicated satisfaction as Yeshua started to sink, but it evaporated as soon as he felt the cold seep of pond water permeating his trainers.

oOoOoOo

"What do we do about all these people?" Aziraphale asked, as Crowley helped pull Adam and Yeshua out of the muck.

"They think it's a magic act," Adam said, groaning with effort as he pulled one shoe loose from the sticky silt. "Give them a bit of showmanship, and they'll dismiss it as entertainment."

Aziraphale beamed, and Crowley glared at Adam.

Twenty minutes of bad hat tricks, the accoutrement for which Aziraphale seemed to pull out of nowhere, while Adam and Yeshua shivered, and Crowley seethed with contact embarrassment, and the crowd had dispersed.

"Well, I say," that was a jolly good show. Look, I've earned nearly four pounds." Aziraphale showed them his top hat, which held a scattered assortment of loose change.

"I've never been paid for miracles before," Yeshua said.

"Thank the modern skepticism of the masses," Crowley said. "You can give them as many divine miracles as you like, but all they want to know is how it's done. Tell them it's God, and they write you off as a lunatic. Pull a rabbit out of a hat, so they can spot the false bottom in the table, and they go away happy- secure in the superiority of their own cleverness."

"Yeah, great," Adam said. "Can we go now? I'm cold and covered in shit."

Crowley raised an eyebrow. "That's becoming a bit of a habit for you. Maybe you should stop having ideas that involve ending up at the bottom of the pond."

"You're only gloating because you weren't in there with me this time."

"I still don't understand why that happened," Yeshua said. He'd been sulking since Crowley had pulled them out of the water.

"You looked down and realized that you weren't standing on anything," Adam said with a shrug. "Christ and Antichrist, remember? My belief cancelled out your belief and physics took over from there."

"But, why?" Yeshua asked again. "You ended up in the water too."

"Yeah," Adam said, getting to his feet. "But, I proved my point." He started walking to the car park.

"Oi, where are you going?" Crowley called after him.

"Home."

"Oh, no. This is your fault. I'm not letting Yeshua ride in my car like that. I've only just got the smell out from last time. You have to at least give him a ride back to the bookshop."

oOoOoOo

Once back at the bookshop, Yeshua had managed to convince Adam to stay at least long enough to get cleaned up, and to help him cook something for all of them to eat that would be at least marginally edible.

He had no idea what his Father had been thinking in sending him here. It was obvious that nothing Yeshua said was going to convince Adam to toe the company line, as it were. But, regardless of the futility of his assignment, he was determined to enjoy himself as much as he could while he on Earth.

He had missed Crawly. The demon had always made life more interesting, and whatever he wanted to call himself these days, he was still the same sarcastic and self-confident bastard on the outside, and the same caring and self-sacrificing bastard, with a heart of melted butter, on the inside- much as he tried to hide it.

Whatever this thing was that he had going with the former principality, it seemed to suit him. He was definitely further from the edge of a nervous breakdown than the last time Yeshua had seen him. Though, Yeshua himself may have been partly to blame for that.

Aziraphale though, he couldn't quite put a finger on who he was exactly. Parts of him seemed every bit the morally superior angel, and Yeshua got the feeling that he didn't like him very much, but he had a sweetness and a joy to him that none of the Heavenly Host seemed to have.

He could be a bit stuffy with his prim suits and sense of propriety. At those times, it was hard to see what Crowley saw in him. They didn't seem like a good fit at all. But, at other times, well… they were almost like a unit, the way they complimented each other, like one couldn't possibly exist without the other.

He supposed it was a perfect example of the balance that his Father was always going on about. He'd had a good laugh over it the first time he'd seen Star Wars. Bring balance to the force… He'd hardly been able to be in the presence of God for years after that. He'd just hear James Earl Jones in his head, saying, "Luke, I am your father," and he wouldn't be able to stop laughing. Yeshua secretly suspected that it was the reason He'd been favoring a female aspect for the last few decades.

Still, for all the obvious love between them, the idea that Crowley and Aziraphale were in some kind of romantic, sexual, relationship had completely sidelined him. Crowley was plenty demonstrative with his affections, always had been, but Aziraphale had been an angel not so long ago, and, whatever he was now, he hadn't Fallen. Admittedly, he didn't have any personal experience on the subject, but Yeshua knew a lot of angels, and the idea of any of them soiling themselves with the physical act of lovemaking was laughably ridiculous.

Watching Aziraphale now though, eating the chocolate cake that Adam and Yeshua had purchased at the supermarket for dessert, and making it look like he was committing the Sin of Onan, Yeshua didn't think he'd ever seen anything so hedonistic in his life. And, Crowley just sat there, chin resting against his hand, and watched him intently, like that was exactly what he was doing. It was practically obscene. And, well… Yeshua could imagine them soiling themselves with the physical act of lovemaking, all too easily.

He wasn't so sure that he wanted to share a bed with the two of them again.

He was pretty sure that the best idea would be to get out of the flat for a few hours to give them some more alone time.

"Don't you like the cake?" Adam asked, blissfully unaware, or at least ignoring, the scene before them.

Yeshua took another bite of his cake, but inclined his head toward Aziraphale and Crowley, meaningfully.

Adam snorted. "Yeah, they always do that."

"Do what?" Crowley asked, tilting his head towards them without lifting it from his chin.

"You're making dessert look like something that people should be sent to Hell for," Yeshua said.

Aziraphale pulled his fork out of his mouth with a little 'pop', and looked guilty. "We aren't used to having dinner guests."

Crowley smirked. "The way I see it," he said. "What's the point of immortal, moral neutrality, if you can't have a little damnation with your dessert, free of repercussions?" He turned back to Aziraphale. "Go on, angel, there's a bit of frosting left on the plate."

Aziraphale set his fork down, pointedly.

"Spoilsports," Crowley accused Adam and Yeshua. "You've fucked up a perfectly good angel. Look at him. He has food anxiety now. He can't even enjoy his dessert without worrying about how erotic he looks while he's doing it. And, there's whipped cream, too."

"I knew we bought whipped cream for the cake," Adam said. "What did you do, steal it out of the bag while we weren't looking and hide it somewhere?"

Crowley shrugged. "I wanted some angel food later."

Adam made a gagging sound, and Aziraphale flushed an even deeper shade of red than he was already.

Yeshua cleared his throat. "Hey Adam, would you mind driving me somewhere on your way home? I have some shopping to do."

"Earplugs?" Adam dropped his napkin over his plate and stood up. "I was just leaving now. I'll give you a lift anywhere you want to go."

Aziraphale started coughing, and Crowley was failing to suppress a grin.

Yeshua had no idea what that was all about, and probably didn't want to know. He was starting to understand Adam's feelings towards them now—a fond and exasperated sort of love, accompanied by a sense of light disgust. He decided that discretion was really the better part of valor, and he joined Adam in a hasty retreat.

oOoOoOo

Yeshua had asked Adam to drop him at the nearest hardware and home improvement store, and he was wandering the aisles with a shopping trolley piled high with hand tools, hardware, and an exciting variety of power tools; a pair of bright red earmuffs sat atop the lot.

Before leaving Heaven, The Archangel Michael had given him a little plastic card, and told him that he could use it to buy anything he needed while he was on Earth. Adam had shown him how it worked when they had purchased food for dinner. It seemed simple enough. He wasn't sure if this was exactly what Michael had in mind when she'd given it to him, but he wasn't going to worry too much over that in the face of over two-thousand years of carpentry innovation. He'd been watching every home improvement show he could find for years, and he was eager to try out the power tools.

He was distracted for a moment by a display of nail guns, and he turned the corner without looking, accidentally crashing into someone.

"Oh, crap. I'm so sorry," he said, and hurried to help the… someone up.

"I'm okay," he said, and got unsteadily to his feet. Yeshua wasn't sure if he was unsteady from being knocked over by the trolley, or if it was from the false goat-hoof shoes we wore under a pair of low-hung, fuzzy, pink, trousers. He wasn't wearing a shirt either, just a kind of hot-pink leather vest. He had a mask on over his nose and upper-lip to extend his face out into a short snout, and there were glittery goat horns peeking out between the tresses of his silver hair.

That's when Yeshua recognized him as the man from the bakery that morning: Asher. He didn't think there were that many humans going around with hair dyed that particular shade of metallic silver, though perhaps it was a wig. It made a bit more sense with the way he was dressed now. Yeshua wasn't quite sure how that was exactly, but modern humans had really expanded the idea of fashion to a whole new level.

"What a coincidence running into you again," Yeshua said. "I don't know if you remember me from this morning at the bakery?"

"You'd be hard to forget," Asher said.

Yeshua smiled to be friendly, though he was eager to get back to his shopping, and didn't want to get drawn into awkward small talk. "That's quite an interesting… um, costume?"

"Awooo," Asher purred, and stroked his furry tail- which seemed a bit incongruous with the whole goat thing that he had going on, but he seemed to enjoy petting it. "Do you like it?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, it's very…pink," Yeshua managed.

"I know where we could get one for you," Asher said.

"That's a very kind offer, but I would just ruin it, if I wore something like that tonight."

"Oh?" Asher smiled. "Plans to get dirty?"

"Well, this is a hardware store," Yeshua said, gesturing around. He was eager to get back to exploring this little slice of Heaven that he'd found. "I'd better get to it, if I want to get to the fun part tonight, but it was nice seeing you again. I really am sorry for knocking you over."

"No problem at all," Asher said. "I'm tougher than I look."

Yeshua didn't think that would be hard, if you went around dressed like an anthropomorphic, pink, goat on your down time, but he just smiled and gave a little wave as he turned his trolley down another aisle- marveling at just how many different types of chain they had in the 21st century.