A/N: I blame Hedrick Chapman and his yellow Mustang convertible blasting the Rolling Stones, the other literary car that I wanted to ride in as a kid. When Aziraphale turned the Bentley the same color, hi I am Shax now I am jumping in front of this season despite swearing that I was going to try to get through all the juicy hurt/comfort and fluff first before I wrote anything. This is not a fix-it, it's a title that wouldn't get out of my head until I wrote something for it. Because... *cue baseline*
There were no more "past due" notices awaiting him at the flat. There was a neat little stack of bills, but they all read "thank you for your payment" and "service restored." Crowley didn't know how much Shax had actually bothered to move in in the past couple years, but now it was dark and clean and empty, with only a bottle of a nice whisky sitting unopened on the counter.
Said bottle probably deserved better than a quick twist and upending straight down the hatch, but he did bother to check the label after necking about half of it. Crowley'd had a long day; he hadn't lost every ounce of entirely reasonable paranoia. Shax was no longer using the flat, hell would argue over the appointment of a third agent in a decade until the decade was over, and Beelezbub might have done him a solid (or at least decided to shove his nose in drippy soppy emotions that he wasn't allowed to have) or Muriel might have been encouraged to shoo him away from the bookshop on behalf of heaven. Crowley wouldn't even rule out Coffee Girl guessing his other usual drink order, though where Nina and Maggie might have gotten the money from was harder to say.
(Muriel, probably. If Record Girl thought Aziraphale had been an easy mark for missing rent, Maggie was going to go wild with "Inspector Constable" as her new super.)
He was not expecting a neatly calligraphed "Congratulations upon your new position" scrawled across the maker's emblem. Crowley nearly spit it back out, even though he recognized that handwriting better than his own.
Was his - no, never his - was the angel trying to kill him?
Sure, he'd almost welcome a spike of holy water in his whisky after today, after he'd made a great big blundering fool of himself - Coffee Girl ought to stick to coffee, thank you - but this was perfectly drinkable. It was just twisting the knife. Aziraphale had forgiven him and now he was making a peace offering. Ugh.
Did he have to do it while reminding Crowley that he was a renegade from both sides, now? Beelzebub was right enough that the dark legions were a shambles and heaven's forces were a barely better organized joke; Crowley had felt safe enough coming here after the rest of London felt a little too evocative for his tastes upon three hours of aimless driving and even Tadfield felt too far away without a good nap in an actual bed that didn't stink of "Jim." But it was the principle of the matter.
"Ahem." There was the sort of knock on the door to his flat that would qualify as a smart rap, better than the pounding Crowley might have expected. That "ahem" certainly sounded like Michael would have rather used a sword instead of a doorbell. "Ahem," the archangel said again, with more venom.
Crowley looked at the door, which failed to burst open under the force of forced politeness, looked at the bottle in his hand again, shrugged, and polished it off before he went to let Michael in. At least he could break the bottom for a makeshift weapon in a pinch.
"Foul fiend," Michael greeted him, as if this were Crowley's official title and the archangel hated to give him even that much respect. "You have drunk of the Talskier and reentered the flat. What other demands will you place upon heaven's bounty?"
"Er, wha?"
"Your dues have been settled. You have an unlimited miracle budget, which I protested. What. Other. Demands. Do. You. Have. Of. Heaven?" If any angels besides Aziraphale - and apparently, the Metatron - ate, Crowley would have assumed Michael had something sour stuck in the metaphorical craw. White teeth ground together in a snarl of a smile, but Michael held in place.
"You're asking me if I want anythin' from heaven. You. You're offering me anything I want." The whisky must be starting to hit.
"You're technically the highest ranking occult being in heaven. It's a short list," Michael said quickly, as if that were a reason to curb his enthusiasm instead of spark his wonder. "And currently, the head archangel has seen fit to rearrange the heavenly spheres so that the occult powers have jurisdiction above the ethereal - or at least most of them."
Michael could've knocked him over with a feather. "Ssso… what I'm hearing, and I'm ssure you'll tell me off if I don't have this right, iss that I'm your boss? And thiss is Aziraphale's doing?"
Michael didn't answer right away, which was an answer in itself.
"'M sstill a demon. Big sssnakey ssserpent. Didn't ssign up for thiss." Crowley flicked out a forked tongue as much to check for himself as to make it weird for Michael. It was plenty weird for him.
"None of us did." Someone spare him from Michael's sympathy. Er, shared feelings. "Sympathy" was a stretch. "The head archangel insisted that he would not move forward with the Ineffable Plan unless he had the 'nicest, kindest being' he'd ever met as his second in command. Even if you're too wrongheaded to Rise. Frankly, I don't see it."
Crowley wished he had sunglasses that covered his entire head. He wasn't even sure what expression was flitting across his face when he muttered "that bastard," but it came out far fonder than it had any right to. "Got the lot of you stepping and fetching already, does he?"
"He did say that you already had some experience acting as a tour guide for the messiah."
Crowley had not missed heaven at all. "I'll get Adam. We'll see sssomething, all right."