The knock on Crowley's door this time was, while still insistent, a knocking and not a banging. He figured Maggie must have taken over the duty of annoying him out of his room. They had been over the past couple of days, bringing him food he never ate and having conversations he barely participated in. It was distracting him minutely from the pain, but he was not having it.

"Not today," he shouted through the door.

"Crowley, it's me. I need to talk to you."

"They kick you out already?" Crowley answered, proud his voice didn't waiver.

Crowley was unaware until this moment that his body was capable of being in shock. Unlike a human, his otherness could recognize it while still being completely stuck in it. There weren't many human experiences he had tried that he didn't like, this was assuredly one of them.

"Crowley, open up, it's urgent. We haven't much time."

The we stung. We used to be the two of them, and now it meant Aziraphale and Heaven.

"Then what are you doing down here talking to a demon?" Crowley spat out. "I'm sure you have leagues of angels to do your bidding now."

"Actually only six."

"What on Earth are you talking about?" Crowley said and against his own judgement, he opened the door.

The moment he saw Aziraphale, he startled back. The angel stood in the doorway looking almost the same as when he'd last seen him, the same confused hurt look on his face, the resigned slump in his shoulders. But the eyes, they were different. The familiar blue was gone, replaced with a chilling violet.

There were a thousand things he had wanted to say to Aziraphale over the last few weeks. Most of them included swearing in every language known to man. He wanted to tell him how much he had hurt him. How he took the only good thing in his existence away. But even though his eyes were differently coloured, they weren't different, and he could see that Aziraphale knew exactly how much he had hurt him. And how much hurting him, had hurt Aziraphale. In the end he could say only one thing.

"Your eyes."

"My eyes?" Aziraphale had clearly not expected this either.

"You haven't seen them?"

"Not many mirrors in Heaven," he replied, the heaviness leaking into his light tone.

"Come on then."

Crowley led him to the bathroom, waiting at the door while Aziraphale walked past him and looked into the mirror. Crowley watched his face in the mirror as his eyes widened.

"That is rather unsettling."

Crowley almost smiled, forgetting for a moment that things were irrevocably different, but then Aziraphale met his eyes in the mirror and the pain flooded back. Crowley turned and walked away, feeling trapped.

When Aziraphale joined him back in the main room, his face was all business.

"You have a lot of nerve coming to me, unless you're here to smite me? Then go ahead." Crowley swept his arms out theatrically. "Although I expected my side to come for me first. I have been a very bad demon of late. I haven't corrupted a single soul. Something like that could ruin a demon like me."

"Your side?" Aziraphale responded as if he had heard nothing else.

"You're right. I don't have any more sides to take. I'm sideless."

Crowley could see the words cut just as he'd hoped. It didn't make him feel better.

"What are you here for, Aziraphale," he sighed, wearily.

"All human life is going to end in two days if we don't figure out how to stop it."

"Can't you just say no? When Gabriel was Archangel, it worked for him."

"It hardly worked for Gabriel, they took his memories! Besides, they won't listen to me!" Aziraphale did a little stomp of frustration.

Crowley did laugh then. "All this time as a dictatorship and they put you in charge and in less than a month all the angels are rebelling?" No matter how mad Crowley was at that moment, this news was a delight to him.

"Not all of them," Aziraphale replied petulantly.

"Right, right, you said there were six."

"Crowley, this is serious. If I don't get the souls meant for Heaven off the Earth, Jesus is going to come and send them all to Hell."

"Jesus? No, no, no." Crowley understood what this meant. The second coming wasn't exactly a secret, but he didn't expect it so soon. In fact he rather thought it had been called off with the apocalypse. "I thought we would have more time."

The two met eyes and once again everything was left unspoken.

"Let me get this straight, they gave you a mission that if you don't complete, all the souls meant for Heaven will end up in Hell? Just when you thought they couldn't get any worse."

"You once said I could always rely on you. Is that still true?" Aziraphale gave Crowley a hopeful look.

Crowley may have still been mad at Aziraphale, but he was not so stubborn as to damn the entire human race for it. Although he did briefly consider it.

"What do you need me to do?"

"I was hoping you could tell me," Aziraphale said with a slight shrug.