Disclaimer: Aziraphale, Crowley, and Good Omens are created and copyrighted by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. This is a fanfic, intended only in the spirit of fun. Tons of love and thanks is owed to the amazing and wonderful Daegaer, who provided tons of feedback for the first half of the fic, and then ended upsomehow volunteering herself as a beta-reader and a proofreader, and who helped me correct many of my Americanisms with proper British English. And thanks to y'all for reading!

Ordinary Miracles

by Nenena

Chapter 06

Bagdasarian, Adam. 2002. First French Kiss and Other Traumas. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York. PZ7.B14018 Fi

They spent Christmas day at home, enjoying a day of rest and peace and quiet. Theo thought at first that he would be bored, but the hectic schedule of the last week was finally catching up with him, and he spent most of the afternoon drifting in and out of a peaceful, restful nap.

When Theo ventured back down into the bookshop the next day, he found the angel busily re-shelving books. "What are you doing all that for?" he asked, watching curiously, as Aziraphale seemed intent on completely re-arranging his entire collection as much as he could.

"I like to de-alphabetize the shelves every now and then," the angel answered cheerfully. "It discourages customers from finding the books that they want to buy. And I seem to get a real kick out of re-alphabetizing the whole lot again, too." The angel paused with his arms full of books and peered at Theo for a moment. "I thought you would sleep the whole day through today. Since you're up, should we go out and try again with this miracle business?"

"Sure. Fine. I can go out," Theo agreed amiably enough.

After distracting Margie with food and making a quick escape, the two of them went back out on the town. "It's going to be different from now on," Aziraphale told Theo, "because Crowley's back at work. We have to look for wiles, and we have to thwart. On top of all the other daily duties, mind you. And we simply must remember to schedule regular luncheons and outings with him. For sociable purposes, of course."

Crowley's wiles, as it turned out, were not all that difficult to spot. There was the buggered traffic light downtown, the tangled phone wires uptown, and in midtown, the marriage counselor who thought that it would more interesting to try to break couples up rather than convince them to get back together. There was also the television executive that greenlighted three new reality television shows, and the music industry executive who signed on a new boy band that was sure to do its part to destroy fine music and human civilization as the world knew it. There was also, at last, the amateur herb specialist who finally decided that he would be doing the world good by mass-marketing his proven new manhood-enlarging formula via unsolicited electronic mail.

For once, Theo found that he was good at something. He could sense the demon's distinctive fingerprints on a fiasco from several miles away. "He's a bloody genius," Theo said at the end of the day.

"Good heavens, do you mean Crowley?"

"I think he's doing a better job of it than we are, at least. I mean, his tricks affect a whole bunch of people at once, and makes them miserable and mean to each other. But when you do miracles, it only affects one person at a time, and half the time they aren't even grateful, and don't ever even know that an angel intervened on their behalf, and don't even believe in angels in the first place, and just go on living their small-minded, secular lives without being inspired at all to do more good or to be a better person."

Aziraphale tsked. "The piano woman was a church-goer."

Theo decided to leave it at that.

Over the next few days, life settled back into its routine, demon or no demon. Theo was taken out every day and tried, very hard, to perform some decent miracles. They all backfired on him. Except for the one about turning water into wine - that, apparently, he could do, although only occasionally, and he only ever tried it at home in the bookshop. Aziraphale would have pointed out that he never needed to turn water into wine during the course of his daily duties that actually counted as doing good for people, but he didn't want to crush Theo's feelings.

Still, it was becoming painfully obvious to all parties involved - including Theo himself - that something was just not clicking for him.

The day before New Year's, they met Crowley for lunch at the Ritz.

Theo sat across the table from Crowley, dressed in his Sunday best (or rather, Aziraphale's idea of what a young boy should wear as his Sunday best), and glared at the demon as he laughed and nearly choked on his own tongue and asked incredulously, "You said you're a WHAT now?!"

"Vegan."

"Oh, that's precious." He smirked at Aziraphale. "Are you going to let that granola-cruncher get away with this?"

"Crowley, his beliefs are perfectly valid."

"Yeah, right. Say it like you mean it, angel."

"Let's go away," Theo pleaded to Aziraphale. "He's awful. I don't want to eat at the same table with him. He makes me sick."

"What?" asked Crowley innocently. "I was just planning on ordering their biggest steak, and maybe a glass of cow's blood to drink. Would that make you feel better?"

"Ha! This restaurant doesn't sell cow's blood."

"Just because they don't sell it..."

Aziraphale sensed the distinct tingling in the back of his neck, which signaled that Crowley was about to conjure up something in his hand. And Aziraphale could guess instantly what Crowley was about to be holding a glass full of; at that moment, he had had enough. "I'm going to get up and leave unless you two promise me that you'll behave yourselves in public," he hissed at them both.

"I'm not going to sit here and listen to the treacherous filth spewing from this demon's mouth," Theo huffed angrily, while at the same time Crowley said, "You know I'm not supposed to behave myself, that's the point."

"Crowley..."

"I'm thinking of ordering milk to drink," Crowley said casually. Aziraphale knew that Crowley normally wouldn't be caught dead ordering something as prosaic as milk; still, he would probably do it, and drink it, too, just to disgust Theo. Well, at least it was a step up from cow's blood.

"The bill's on me this time," Aziraphale said quickly.

"Well, then." Crowley seemed to perk up when he heard that. "I think I'll order a bottle of their most expensive wine instead."

Aziraphale silently breathed a sigh of relief. Crisis averted, for the time being.

The rest of the meal passed beneath a thin layer of civility. Aziraphale did his best to engage Crowley in conversation as much as he could; this he did at the expense of paying any attention to Theo, who chewed his salad stubbornly and glared daggers at the demon throughout the entire meal.

At the end of the meal, Crowley offered them a ride home, but Theo angrily threw on his coat and snarled, "We'll walk, thank you very much." Crowley didn't even look to Aziraphale for a second opinion; he merely shrugged and said, "Fine, suit yourself."

When Theo and Aziraphale left the Ritz, Theo was prickling with anger. "How can you stand him?" he huffed at Aziraphale. "How can you STAND him?! He's horrible! He spent thirty minutes rambling about the joys watching the drug cartels oppress the peasants in Columbia and you just sat there and tsked at him!! TSKED!! As if that would do any good! If you ask me, you should be doing your job and giving that demon a proper smiting--"

"Theodore! Who exactly are you to be telling me how to do this job?"

Theo was momentarily taken aback. Something flashed in the angel's eyes that he had never seen before - something steely, and perhaps a little bit angry. Theo looked down at his feet as they walked home, but nevertheless, still pouted. "He ordered filet mignon. I had to sit there and watch him eat filet mignon."

"Nobody was forcing you to watch him eat."

"How could I not watch him eat?! He was eating the flesh of an innocent creature!"

"Aha. And therein lies your failure." Aziraphale's voice was already lilting into lecture mode. "The way that Crowley works is that he gets humans to inflict misery upon themselves. And you played right into his hands - had to watch him eat, indeed. There were plenty of other things to look at or do in that restaurant. And yet, you still focused every bit of your attention on him."

They walked on in silence. Theo could feel his checks turning deeper and deeper shades of red, and it wasn't just from the cold.

That night, New Year's Eve, while other people were out partying in the streets, Aziraphale stayed in and read the Bible and prayed, while Theo insisted on watching all the big countdowns on television. This at first posed a problem because Aziraphale did not have a television; but a quick miracle later, there was an old, dusty, black-and-white set up on the second story where Theo was staying. Aziraphale felt it only appropriate that if he should own a television, it would by default by old and dusty and somewhat unreliable, just like every other appliance he had ever owned (save for his computer, and the quite modern cash register in the shop, which was only dusty through lack of use).

Theo sat in front of the television, watching happy, beautiful people counting down the minutes until the new year. No good at miracles, no good at dealing with demons, no good at anything, he thought of himself, growing more and more miserable by the minute. He had never felt more alone, and more hopelessly frustrated, ever in his short life. He was literally a world away from his family, whom he hadn't seen since death; his angel was an addle-brained fool who couldn't teach worth dirt and couldn't seem to connect with him at all; and the demon alternatively horrified, frightened, and disgusted him. Even the blasted cat seemed to be avoiding him lately, since she by default seemed to prefer strictly angelic company.

It's almost been two weeks, thought Theo as he crawled into bed early the next morning. At this rate, I'll never earn my wings.

Stewing in his own existential angst, Theo fell asleep.

He slept late the next morning, and awoke to the smell of cinnamon and rising dough.

But there's no kitchen in this place, he thought as he groggily dressed and stumbled down the stairs.

There was still not a kitchen, at least not officially. But there was a narrow oven with a small range on top tucked into a corner of the back room, next to the small refrigerator. Aziraphale was in the back, fussing with a stack of messy bowls in the sink. He saw Theo, blinked with surprise, and immediately asked, "Does yeast count?"

"What?"

"For a vegan. Does yeast count as, er, not-vegan? Because they are, you know, they are all God's creatures, but, er, I'm not exactly sure if they're animal or vegetable or mineral, but I didn't want to wake you up to ask, that would just have been so awfully rude, and--"

"What are you doing?"

"Cooking," answered the angel cheerfully. "Since it was a holiday, I thought I would try my hand at something nice for breakfast."

"Have you ever...?"

Aziraphale waved a dough-covered spoon vaguely. "I used to do it all the time, in the first thousand years or so. Then I figured that I agreed with Crowley when he said that it was more enjoyable to have other people cook and serve and do all the work for you. But I suppose I've forgotten how gratifying it is to roll up your sleeves and just do it yourself, and I--"

"What's in the oven?"

"Bread. I think. It should turn out to be bread, hopefully. And there's cinnamon and nuts and raisins and all sorts of things in the dough. No cream or anything of bovine origin, I assure you. And no meat."

Theo sat down at the small table and eyed the angel suspiciously. "Why?"

"I told you, dear, it's because it's a holiday."

"And you were just, what, suddenly seized by the New Year Spirit, is that it?"

"There's no need to..." Aziraphale's voice trailed off, and he turned away from Theo, working on furiously scrubbing a sticky bowl beneath the pouring faucet in the sink. "I just thought that maybe it would be something nice to cheer you up, that's all."

Margie suddenly appeared out of nowhere, meowed loudly, and rubbed herself against Theo's feet. Theo ignored her, and stared at the angel. Aziraphale, for his part, kept his gaze focused squarely on the bowl that he was scrubbing down in the sink, his cheeks beginning to turn an absolutely fascinating shade of red.

Finally Theo said, "Baking bread isn't going to help me perform any decent miracles, you know."

"Theo--"

"It's been two weeks already! We're halfway through the trial period and I haven't been able to do anything right yet! Would you stop dancing around the issue and just TALK to me about it? Why can't you tell me what I'm doing wrong?! I don't need some dotty old grandfather figure who bakes bread for me. I need a TEACHER who can tell me how to do what I need to do!"

"Teaching, dear boy, is exactly what I've been trying to do this whole time." Still not looking at Theo; scrubbing furiously.

"Oh, so now it's all my fault?"

"I never said such a thing."

"Than what was 'exactly what I've been doing this whole time' supposed to mean?"

Aziraphale tsked under his breath. "Sometimes talking to you is like talking to a brick wall."

"You mean, trying to instruct me is like trying to instruct a brick wall to make miracles. Right? Why not just come out and say it?"

Again, that tsk. Slightly louder this time. "That isn't at all what I meant. You should stop being so defensive. If I had meant that, I would have said that."

"I'm going back to bed," Theo grumped. "I knew there was no point in getting up this morning."

"Theo, please--"

But he was already halfway up the stairs. A moment later, Aziraphale heard the bedroom door slam shut in the level above.

Aziraphale surprised himself at how grateful he suddenly felt when Crowley showed up at the bookshop an hour later, champagne bottles in hand.

"I see the cat, but where's the brat?" he asked suspiciously, peering around the back room as he sat down and uncorked the first champagne bottle.

"Upstairs, sleeping. So please keep your voice down."

"Sleeping still? Don't tell me that the party animal was out later than I was last night."

"It's not that," Aziraphale said miserably as he sliced up a loaf of suspiciously lumpy sweet bread that happened to be cooling on the table. The bread, like everything else that happened to exist within the internal space of Aziraphale's bookshop, had already begun to accumulate a layer of dust.

Crowley stared at the loaf of bread as if he halfway suspected that it would try to eat him. "Which bakery were you shopping at, and what sort of discount did you get for picking up such a reject?"

"Crowley, I baked this."

"You did not. You haven't baked anything in thousands of years."

"I did too bake. This morning."

"Okay, angel. Right. Sure you did." Crowley thought it best, at the moment, to just encourage Aziraphale's little white lie, rather than argue with him about it. Lying was definitely a habit that Crowley hoped he could push the angel further into.

"Try it," the angel pleaded, "You'll like it, I'm sure."

Crowley did get up the courage to nibble a bit of the slice Aziraphale offered him; he made a face. "It tastes like holy manna."

"Really?" Aziraphale seemed pleased to hear that. He pushed the loaf aside then, sat down across from Crowley, and helped himself to a glass of champagne. "Happy New Years to you, then."

"Likewise." Crowley drained his glass, which really wasn't the proper way to drink champagne, but he didn't care. It was already the wrong time of day anyway, so he figured he might as well break all the rules at once. "So why's the kid upstairs pouting?"

"I think it's because I tried to bake for him this morning. He seemed upset about that. I don't see why; I was just trying to do something nice for him. Do you think that yeast counts as living creatures, for vegans?"

"Somehow, angel, I don't think he was upset about the bread."

"It's all - It's all --" Aziraphale stuttered, which was horribly uncommon for him, and wrung his hands nervously, which was becoming a more and more common gesture. "It's all so confusing! I feel like I'm doing everything wrong with him. I don't understand how Heaven could leave me without an apprentice for six thousand years and then decide that now is a good time to stick me with one. I don't have the first clue about what I should be doing!"

Crowley leaned back in his seat and was quiet for a moment, his face unreadable. It was usually unreadable, due to the sunglasses, but at this particular moment, the demon seemed even more obtuse than usual. Then he said, "Oh come on, angel, I thought you were smart enough to figure it out."

"Oh, so now I'm a fool for not having made every right step with the strange little boy right from the start?!" the angel huffed. "I'll have you know, Crowley, that building relationships with children is a very difficult, delicate matter--"

"No, I wasn't talking about that," Crowley said dismissively. "I know, angel, I know, kids are like demons. Can't stand the little buggers myself. Don't see how Theo is any different. But I meant the other question - why they'd choose now, of all times, and you, of all teachers, to be assigned to that boy."

"Metatron told me that because I had never taken an apprentice before, it was only fair that I do so now. And surely you'd agree that it's fair. I have to do my share of the duty."

"Yes, angel, but why in all of these six thousand years have you never, not once, ever taken on an apprentice before?"

"Er..." Aziraphale paused, and then lowered his gaze, staring down at his hands folded on the table. "It's that... You see... Ah... They just, er, must have just skipped over my name every time that it came up on the master list. Completely by accident, of course. Bureaucratic oversight. Happens all the time with these things, you know, and it's very unfortunate, but--"

"Don't tell me that you honestly believe that."

Aziraphale glanced up at Crowley sharply. "Excuse me?! They told me that's what happened."

"Still sounds like a load of bull to me."

"Angels do not lie, Crowley," Aziraphale said, icily. "Especially not to other angels."

"Oh, really, now." Crowley leaned back in his seat and stretched his arms above his neck, his joints popping in a pleasant, satisfyingly disgusting way. "I've seen you lie to other angels, Aziraphale. And I wouldn't put it past them to do the same to you."

"You must not think very much of me, then."

"No, I just don't think much of other angels." In any other context that might have been a compliment, but hearing it come from Crowley, Aziraphale still felt insulted. The demon continued, "And look at Theo. I mean, he's sort of... He's, ah... How shall I put this... He doesn't exactly strike one as having much of a, uh, angelic essence, shall we say?"

"Well of course, he's not an angel yet."

"Yes, but I still can't help but wonder why he was ever chosen to become an angel in the first place."

Aziraphale sighed, and looked down at his hands again. His glass of champagne bubbled and fizzed, un-drunk and forgotten, on the table in front of him. "I've often wondered that myself, Crowley. But, you must understand, we angels don't ever actually make those decisions. If Theo was chosen, then he was chosen because God himself must have seen something in him... Something that I, with my regrettable limitations, have yet to see." He turned his head and gave Crowley a lukewarm smile. "Ineffable, right?"

"Oh, sure, ineffable. But still, if I were an angel up in Heaven," Crowley said without a trace of irony in his voice, "and someone told me that God had chosen that boy to become an angel, well, I'd be shitting bricks." Aziraphale colored at that, but Crowley apparently didn't notice. "You know what I think of other angels, Aziraphale, and I know that you agree with what I think about other angels, even though you've got your flaming sword stuck so far up your non-existent derrière that you'd never admit that you agree with what I think about other angels, and the truth of the matter is, what it all comes down to is, they're pricks. Angels are nothing but a bunch of goody-goody, holier-than-thou, self-righteous, snobbish pricks. And I'd bet my horns and pointy tail that some angels Upstairs were positively displeased when they were told that such an abominable brat as Theo was slotted to become one of them."

"But you don't have horns or a pointy tail--"

"I was trying to make a folksy expression."

"Crowley..."

"Don't you get it?!" Crowley suddenly blurted out. "They're trying to set you up for failure!"

Aziraphale stared at him, silent and shocked. Crowley could see the realization - and the hurt - beginning to creep into the angel's expression. But Aziraphale still managed to ask, calmly and softly, "Crowley, what in Heaven's name are you talking about?"

"This. Is. Your. Punishment. Your punishment for everything that happened last year, everything about the Armageddon that wasn't. I already had mine, and now it's your turn. Only your superiors are angels, so of course they're to la-di-da-di-peaceful-kind-and-good to actually come out and say that they're punishing you, so they have to go about being sneaky and underhanded about it, the bastards. But think about it, Aziraphale, really think. You told me yourself, the Metatron wasn't reading your reports, and of all the field workers to be assigned to Earth, you're the only one that's been stuck down here on pretty much a permanent basis. Add in the fact that they've never assigned you an apprentice, that they keep skipping over your name on their master list or whatever - and then, well duh, you get it, don't you? They haven't assigned you an apprentice before because they don't think that you'd do a good job with one. In fact, they keep you stuck down here probably because they'd rather not have you Up There, with the rest of them. They don't bother with your reports anymore because they just want to keep you out of their hair, out of their sight, out of their minds. And they--"

Aziraphale moved so fast that Crowley never even saw it coming. In one swift motion he stood up, stepped over toward the demon, swung back his hand, and slapped Crowley across the face. Hard.

Crowley's shades went flying across the room.

Crowley stared up at the angel, stunned. Aziraphale was trembling, literally shaking with rage. Normally, Crowley would have been elated to realize that after all these years, he had finally managed to incite Aziraphale into an act of furious violence. He just wished that this particular angel's violence hadn't been directed so painfully at himself.

"I don't know which makes me angrier," Aziraphale said coldly, glaring down at the demon with an expression that would have made the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah turn their faces fearfully toward the sky searching for the fire and lightning that was about to rain down upon them. "You insinuating that I am somehow incompetent, perhaps that I could let be. After all these years I've certainly gotten used to the insults coming from you. But for you, demon, to suggest that the good angels of Heaven themselves would be ensnared by such petty, spiteful, evil emotions is--"

"--the truth."

"Crowley! Do you want to get yourself smited?!"

"I'm telling you this because you need to be told! Somebody has to open up your eyes, you bloody stupid angel! Heaven doesn't particularly like you, Heaven needs to punish you for what you've done last year, and along comes with horridly awful would-be angel that Heaven surely doesn't want to actually succeed in becoming an angel, and voila! The solution to all of Heaven's problems instantly presents itself. So they assign the boy Theo to you as an apprentice. And they do so fully entertaining the expectation that you'll fail in your duties, Theo won't get to become an angel, and they'll finally have an excuse to engage in some official angelic discipline against you. That's all that I'm trying to say. You haven't ever had an apprentice before because somebody Upstairs certainly does think that you're incompetent, and the only reason that you have this particular apprentice now is because somebody Upstairs is absolutely convinced that you're incompetent." Suddenly there was a new pair of shades resting on Crowley's nose, hiding his eyes. "It's like I said before. They're setting you both up for failure." He stood up from his chair, glanced over Aziraphale's shoulder, and said, "Oh, hello, didn't see you there."

Aziraphale whirled.

Theo was sitting at the top of the steps behind him, his face a black thundercloud.

"Theo," Aziraphale gasped out, the name escaping his lips in one horrified outward hiss of air. "How much did you--?"

"I heard enough."

"Figures," Crowley said as he shrugged on his coat and turned away from them both. "That's the way it is, is all I'm saying. Now all you two have to do is prove all of them wrong."

He left. Aziraphale didn't even turn around to watch him leave or to say goodbye. Aziraphale didn't even notice that Crowley had actually left both bottles of champagne behind on the table. His eyes were transfixed by Theo's gaze.

The two stared at each other for a long, long time.

Then Theo finally said, "I knew it. I knew that there was a reason that I was stuck with a useless angel like you."

He stood up, turned, and stomped back into his bedroom.

Theo slammed the door behind him, sniffled, and then flopped himself down across his bed. He buried his face in his pillow and held very, very still. He breathed in and out deeply, trying to get a grip on things.

The naked look of hurt that had crossed Aziraphale's face when Theo had said what he had said to him... That had been horrible to watch, but yet, at the same time, strangely satisfying. That feeling of sick satisfaction, knowing that you've said exactly the right thing to stick the most poisonous barb through another person's heart - Theo wondered if that was the sort of good feeling that demons like Crowley thrived on.

With that thought, he began to weep.

Theo dozed against his tear-soaked pillow. Sometime later, he drifted back into awareness when he heard his bedroom door open and shut, slowly. The bed creaked as somebody sat down on it, settling himself beside Theo. A warm, soft hand brushed the hair back from his brow.

"Theo...?"

" 'M awake."

"How do you feel? Are you all right?"

Theo refused to look up, to meet the angel's gaze. But still, he told his pillow, "I'm sorry." The angel said nothing, so Theo continued. "I'm sorry about what I said, you know. I didn't mean it."

"Theo..." The angel sighed. "Yes, what you said to me then was hurtful and wrong, that is true. But it is a far worse sin for any person to be dishonest with their own feelings, to lie to themselves. You did mean it, and I know that you meant it. Please do not try to tell me otherwise."

Theo squeezed his eyes shut and buried his face in his pillow. "Then what am I supposed to say?" he asked, his voice muffled by layers of feathers and cloth.

"Please look at me when you're talking to me. I'm getting old, and my hearing isn't what it used to be." Theo could hear the smile behind the angel's words. "Goodness, I could hardly understand a word that you just said!"

Theo sat up, groaned, and shifted himself until he was sitting next to Aziraphale. But he still would not meet the angel's gaze. He studied his lap and repeated sullenly, "Then what am I supposed to say?"

"I wouldn't know. It's a tricky business, this whole etiquette thing." Aziraphale waved his hand, as if pushing the topic aside. "Tell you what. Why don't you give me another chance?"

"A what?"

"Just give me another chance. I'm not sure what I have to prove to you or to show you. I think that you and I are just operating from very different expectations of how angels should do their jobs. But maybe, if we give ourselves time, we can come to some sort of, ah, mutual understanding?"

Theo thought about this for a moment, then said, "Um."

Aziraphale waited patiently for more to come. When nothing did, he asked, "Um what?"

"Um, it felt good. It felt good, saying something so mean."

"Well, of course it did," Aziraphale said dismissively. "Being mean usually does feel good, in some way. That's why humans tend to do it so often."

Now Theo finally did look up to meet the angel's gaze, and there was something fearful in his eyes. "But isn't that awful? If I'm supposed to be an angel and all, how can I just sit here and think, 'well, that felt good, just better not ever do it again'?"

"Theo, most field workers slip up every now and then. You must remember that you're not perfect. You can never be perfect. Only God is true perfection," Aziraphale lectured.

"Then how am I supposed to know if I'm gonna Fall or not?"

"Yes, well, that's a tricky bit, too."

Theo frowned poutily. "If you're trying to be a helpful angel this time around, so far, you're not doing a very good job of it."

"Tell you what," the angel said gently. "There's a place that I like to go when I'm feeling worried or upset. It's a lovely little church where you can always pray in peace. Would you like to pay a visit there?"

They sat side by side on a pew, gazing up at the stained-glass windows. There were angels in white robes above and shepherds in brown robes below; wise kings, camels and donkeys, a manger, and Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus with halos around their heads.

The stained-glass angels had halos, too.

Theo pondered this. "Do you have a halo?" he finally asked Aziraphale.

"Only sometimes. Like when I've eaten something bad."

"Ah." Theo decided not to pursue that particular train of thought any further. And then, "When you pray, can you, um... Can you, like, talk directly to God?"

"Sometimes." Aziraphale folded his hands in his lap. "God is always available for a bit of quick conversation, you understand. But it's often human hearts, and sometimes angel hearts, that don't know how to properly quiet down and listen for Him. That, and you might as well not even bother asking Him any of the tough questions. He doesn't give out any of the big answers. He told us that it would be too easy, that way."

"So you don't know the meaning of life or why the universe was created or anything like that?"

"No."

"Oh." Theo felt somewhat disappointed. "But don't you ever wonder?"

Aziraphale smiled at him. "I prefer not to think about such things."

Theo snorted. "Huh. Not me. I'd rather ask the big questions than go about life in a state of ignorance."

"Hmm." The corners of Aziraphale's eyes crinkled with amusement. "You know who that reminds me of?"

"Who?"

"Crowley."

"Oh, please." Theo rolled his eyes.

They sat quietly for another moment, then Aziraphale stood up and said, "Pardon me for a moment, but I'd like to go have a word with the priest. Would you mind waiting here, Theo? It will only take a moment."

"Fine. Whatever."

The angel picked up his cap and coat, and wandered off. Theo sat on the edge of the pew, swinging his legs back and forth, his eyes wandering across half a dozen panels of stained glass windows.

Sometime later, somebody else came and suddenly flounced down on the pew beside him. "You don't think they're really listening to us, do you?" she asked.

Theo turned his head and blinked. It was a girl. She was frowning up at the stained glass windows, almost angrily. "Who do you mean?" he asked her.

"God and Jesus and Mary and the angels and stuff. You don't think they're listening to us, do you?" She turned her large, dark eyes toward him. "I saw the way you were glaring at baby Jesus up there."

Theo folded his hands in his lap. "Sometimes they listen," he echoed Aziraphale.

The girl picked absent-mindedly at the cuff of one of the sleeves of her knit black sweater. She looked as though she were trying to unravel it. " 'Sometimes' doesn't seem good enough to me," she proclaimed airily. "I mean, if God's all-powerful and stuff, then why only pay attention just sometimes?"

Theo tried not to stare at the cuff of her sleeve. He had never had a conversation like this with a complete stranger before. And suddenly, he was seized by a terribly brilliant idea. "Is something troubling you?" he asked, trying to sound as mature and concerned and sensitive and sympathetic as he possibly could.

She waved her hands vaguely. Theo saw that her fingernails were painted black. "Everything," she sighed dramatically. And then, she echoed the famous refrain of angst-ridden pre-teen sufferers everywhere: "My life sucks."

Theo tried as inconspicuously as possible to subtly slide himself closer toward her. "Sucks like how?"

"Just name a problem, and I've got it," she said, her tone of voice almost bragging. Then she began ticking off her sufferings on her fingertips. "Grandma died, parents are divorcing, pop's taking the cat with him, my brother's a jerk, we're moving, my mum won't let me pierce my tongue, my pop won't let me see Bill anymore, my math teacher's out to get me, I got my purse stolen last week, I lost my allowance for fighting with my mum, and I'm broke."

"That sucks," Theo agreed with an authoritative nod of his head.

"Yeah, sucks," she echoed, her face a picture of perfect needful misery that barely, just barely, masked her obvious enjoyment at being the subject of so much incorrigible angst.

Some people, Theo knew, seemed to enjoy wallowing in their own depression. They were usually, in his experience, the type of people that wore lots of heavy, dark-colored eye shadow above their eyes. Theo didn't have to scrutinize the girl very closely to see that she was definitely wearing dark eye shadow above her eyes.

"Well," said Theo carefully, "maybe I can help."

"I thought so too," she said slyly. She licked her dark purple lips. "You busy right now?"

Theo was caught off guard by that. "Uh, what?"

"Busy right now? There's a pool bar down--"

"Um, I'm here with my dad," Theo said quickly.

Her face fell. "Geez. And I thought you looked like fun."

Theo struggled to get back into his mental game. He thought she'd approached him and began talking to him because she was miserable and wanted some sympathy, but now it was becoming increasingly clear that she'd really had an ulterior motive all along. Dear lord, Theo thought numbly, I've never been picked up in a church before!

It was the way he had been frowning up at baby Jesus, she had said. Well, in retrospect, that would seem attractive to a person like her, wouldn't it? And the outfit he was wearing, too, Theo realized. Something about the fifty-years-behind-the-times look seemed outrageously trendy and almost fetishistic to a select group of people, usually the same group of people that liked to wear dark eye shadow and purple lipstick. Chicks dig a nice pair of corduroy trousers.

Still, now that Theo knew what was going on, he still wasn't going to let that deter him from pursuing his own goal. "I'm sorry I can't leave right now," he said diplomatically, "but listen, er, I have to ask you something. If you could change just one thing - any one thing - about your life right now, what would it be?"

She blinked at him, long eyelashes gobbed with eye shadow bobbing up and down across her dark irises. "Like, make a wish, any wish, but just one wish, that sort of thing?"

"Yeah, a wish." Or a miracle, Theo added silently.

She gave him that same sly smile again. "What's the point? You can't make wishes come true."

"How do you know? Maybe I can."

"Bullshit."

"Maybe I'm an angel."

She thought about this for a second. "Y'know, I'd probably rather do business with a demon," she said.

"Okay, fine," Theo sighed. "I'll be a demon, then."

"That seems more credible." She held out her hand. "Shake on it?"

"What?"

"I'll make my wish, and you make it come true. And in exchange, I sell you my soul and all that."

"Oh, no," said Theo quickly, "this miracle is free of charge."

She laughed. "You're cute, you know that?" Then she shrugged, and held out her hand again. "Okay. Let's try this. What could be the harm? If you can't grant my wish, at least I don't have to sell you my soul, right?"

"I think you're missing the point," Theo grumbled, but he reached out nevertheless, and grasped her hand.

She squeezed his hand tightly. "Close your eyes."

"What?"

"Close your eyes. I'm going to close mine. Then we count to three, and I wish."

"You're a nutcase." But still, Theo closed his eyes. If he could deal with this crazy girl for just a few more minutes, he told himself, he might have a chance to make a really good miracle that would actually help someone out, and quite possibly earn him his wings. Then he would be done with this whole insufferable apprenticeship business, he could leave behind Aziraphale and the evil cat and the awful demon and the dusty, smelly old bookshop, and he could finally get on with his afterlife.

Theo's mind, at this point, was already forcefully denying the fact that the girl did not seem genuinely miserable at all with all of her problems. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying her suffering. In fact, she seemed to have taken "nutcase" as a compliment.

Theo ignored all of that. At that moment, he was absolutely, positively determined to help the girl out, and do a really, really good deed for once. And nothing was going to deter him from his goal, absolutely nothing.

"Are your eyes closed?" she asked.

"Yes," Theo answered, squeezing his eyes shut.

"All right." She took a deep breath.

Theo called up some equations in his head, fiddled with some thirteen-dimensional numbers, and mentally revved himself up for a miracle.

"It's just one thing I can change about my life, right?" she asked.

"Right. Just one thing."

"Tough call. I mean, my whole life does suck... Oh, very well, here we go. One, two, three." And then she proclaimed aloud to the echoing church, "I wish that things were different than they are!"

Theo's eyes snapped open. "Hey, wait a minute, that's too--"

He meant to say "vague," but he never got the chance. At that moment, she leaned forward, eyes still closed, and smacked her purple lips against his.

Theo choked on the sound of his own voice. His hand tightened spastically around hers. His brain fumbled with a bit of thirteen-dimensional division, slipped, skid, choked, and his mental train of miracle-coding equations derailed and crashed spectacularly all across his sub consciousness.

"Guh," Theo gasped into her mouth, as the remains of a miracle dribbled all over the inside of the church. This kiss was unbelievable - his first one, in fact. He didn't know whether to be angry or ecstatic that he had been set up from the beginning.

She broke the kiss, let go of Theo's hand, pulled back, and smirked at him. "Boy, you really are something. Don't you know that chicks really dig corduroy?"

Aziraphale was outside the church, whispering into the ear of a priest who was admiring the sky and searching for signs of God's existence in the clouds, when all of a sudden, every hair on the back of his divine neck stood on end.

Oh, he thought, feeling his stomach drop to his feet, dear me.

He rushed away from the priest's side.

Theo teetered backward, and slumped against the back into the pew. "Guh," he said again, for lack of anything better to say. He wiped his mouth slowly with his sleeve.

"I'm Nicki," she said, trying to prod his train of thought back to reality. "Do you come here often?"

"Guh."

"You know, you really--" She cut herself off, looked up over Theo's shoulder, and frowned. "Shit. Is that your pop?"

Two exquisitely manicured hands suddenly grasped Theo's shoulders and wrenched him up off the pew. "You!" Two brisk slaps, across both of Theo's cheeks, jolted him roughly back to awareness. "Theo, what did you just do?!"

"Ow!" Theo cried out with indignation. "Let me go!"

Aziraphale loosened his grip and Theo wriggled out of his grasp, stumbling away from him. "It's not my fault! I was set up! I was framed!" His eyes did a quick, sweeping glance of the church, and he saw Nicki pelting away from them, already half way to the exit. "It's her fault!" he insisted, pointing at Nicki as she ran away. "She made me do it! She distracted me!"

But Aziraphale would not so much as glance in Nicki's direction. The expression on his face was alternatively furious and frantic and panicked, and all of his attention was fixed squarely on Theo. "Theo, what in God's name were you trying to code here?!"

"I just wanted to do a miracle for her!" Theo said defensively.

"Oh, you made a miracle all right," Aziraphale said darkly. He turned and looked all around the church, up and down and side to side, and then turned back to Theo and asked gravely, "Now, you didn't happen to see which way your miracle went, did you?"

"What do you mean, went?"

"You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Oh, no." Aziraphale's legs seemed to wobble beneath him, and he sat down heavily on a pew. "Listen, I don't what sort of miracle you just did, but I do know that I can sense an unfinished code when it's executed, and you never finished coding a specific target for your miracle." He took a deep breath, as if calming his nerves. "It could be anywhere now, affecting anyone. It might not even stop at one target, if you made it powerful enough."

Theo gaped at him. "You mean, like, it's a runaway miracle?"

"This isn't funny."

"What exactly does a runaway miracle look like?"

"It looks like a runny mass of half-finished thirteen-dimensional equations. Are you sure that you didn't see where yours ran off to?"

"Er... No... You see, I wasn't looking for it, because, I, um, I sort of started to code a miracle, but then, uh, something else came up, and I got distracted, and I stopped thinking about it, so, you know, I figured that since the miracle wasn't finished, it, you know, it wouldn't execute."

Aziraphale stared at him. "No... That's not the way that it works." He sighed. "This is partially my fault, I suppose, for not making this absolutely clear earlier. But four-dimensional reality is lot more malleable, and a lot easier to manipulate, than you humans seem to think. It is very, very dangerous for an angel to start firing off thirteen-dimensional equations without ending the sequence properly. Just because you don't specify a target or an end purpose for your miracle, doesn't mean that you haven't started affecting reality already." Again, a deep breath. "All right. Fine. Let's start from the beginning. I need you to tell me exactly, Theo, exactly and precisely, what you coded your miracle to do."

"Well, um, that's the funny thing." Theo shuffled his feet uncomfortably. "I was trying to help out a person, and I asked her to make a wish, and she said that she wished things were different than they were." Theo looked down at his feet.

Aziraphale waited, his patience thinning, for Theo to continue. "And...?"

"And, um, that's it."

There was a long, long pause.

And then, Aziraphale asked softly, "Let me make sure that I understand clearly. She asked you to 'make things different.' And THAT was the basis for your miracle?!"

"I was going to ask her to specify," Theo cut in quickly, "But she, uh - she - uh, I couldn't right then, because she--"

"Oh, dear," Aziraphale moaned wretchedly. "The only thing worse than a half-finished miracle without a target, it a half-finished miracle without a purpose. Or," he added gloomily, "in your case, with a purpose so vague that it could be anything."

"Meaning...?"

"Your miracle," said Aziraphale darkly, pointing one accusing finger at Theo, "is out there, somewhere, right now, making things different. That's what you told it to do, isn't it? And that's just assuming," he continued, "that you somehow got your miracle to do what you wanted it to do at all. And I'm terribly sorry, Theo, but judging by your track record so far, that's not likely to be the case. What that means, then, is that we have no way of knowing what sort of half-finished miracle you've just unleashed. All I know for certain is, it was big, whatever it was. It was huge. I could feel the echoes of your miracle from outside this building - and I wasn't so very close to the epicenter, if you will."

"Oh," breathed Theo, beginning finally to grasp the implications.

"Your miracle was so strong that its echoes could affect this reality in ways that we can't possibly accurately predict." Aziraphale took a deep breath. "What under God's blue sky, Theo, could possibly have jolted you enough to create an effect that powerful?"

"Er..."

Another long pause.

And then, finally, the angel said, "Fine. If you don't want to tell me, that's fine. Anyway, we have to go," Aziraphale said determinedly, standing up again - although he wobbled slightly as he did so. "We have to go now."

"Go where?"

"Back. Home. I have to report this right away. Then we start, of course, looking for the awful thing. It might even have escaped this city by now. Who knows?"

Continued.