AN:
Hey friends! I know there was an extra long wait for this chapter, but hopefully I've made it up to you by having the chapter itself be extra long!
CW for referenced self-harm, very close to the end. Enjoy the rest trigger-free!
After much trial and tribulation—and no small amount of snarled profanity—Crowley managed to position himself into something spinelessly upright. Lounging with his back against the leg of a chair, one knee tucked up to his chest while the other stuck out ramrod-straight, he was vertical enough to accept Maggie's offering of spiked coffee and decided that he'd struggled enough already, and couldn't be arsed to move another inch.
Besides, he needed his energy for glowering.
Tipping his head back, Crowley gulped down the entire cup in a few long swallows. "So. How are we doing this interrogation?" He waggled his empty mug in Maggie's direction, peering at her over the glasses that Muriel had been—ugh—kind enough to locate for him.
She huffed and set the mug on a serving tray—one he'd given Aziraphale sometime in the late 1700s, if he remembered correctly—before crossing her arms. "Oh, don't be dramatic."
Well, it was obvious why Maggie had been nominated to lead this little tête-a-tête; he might have eviscerated anyone else for that kind of commentary.
"Dramatic? Moi? Of course not. Don't know the meaning of the word." Crowley laid a hand over his heart and fluttered his lashes.
Muriel's voice came from Crowley's other side. "Oh! That's when–"
"He knows what it means, Muriel," Maggie said with the tone of a parent heavily disappointed in her progeny, who was also half a step away from tapping her foot in blatant irritation. "He's being an arse."
"Ah. Sarcasm," they replied with a sage nod.
"How you've existed around Nina all this time and never picked up on that is beyond me," Crowley muttered.
"You're deflecting." Maggie's arms dropped as she crossed the room, sinking into the chair that had Muriel perched on its arm. "I know you don't want to sit here and have a chat–"
"Caught that, did you?"
"But," she continued, undeterred, looking more like an exasperated schoolmarm with every interruption, "it's not like you're going anywhere in the next few minutes anyway. So, humour me?"
Crowley's upper lip pulled back at the reminder. His infernal system still buzzed with leftover sanctity—if he tried to pull himself through the firmament now, his very demonic attempt at space-time manipulation would probably backfire spectacularly.
Heaving a sigh, he let his head fall back against the chair's seat. "Fine. Consider yourself humoured."
"Then– That day," Maggie began haltingly, and Crowley couldn't help but tense. "What– What happened?"
He forced himself to shrug. "Dunno. I woke up, saw it was dark out, and went home." Which—skipping a few steps—was perfectly true.
"Were we really out that long?" Under the bottom rim of his glasses, he watched Maggie turn a shocked blond head to Muriel.
"For as long as the power was, at least," Muriel said contemplatively, straight white teeth worrying at their lower lip. "We didn't want to leave you, Mr. Crowley." They were so fucking earnest that it made his face twitch. "But I– I thought I killed the humans."
"Yeah, me and Nina were caught in the crossfire, and when we went to look for you, you were gone." Maggie looked miserable enough that even Crowley's cold, blackened heart cracked. Just a little.
Not enough to be nice about it, though.
Folding his arms across his stomach, he brought his head up to glare at them both. "It still took you three months to make a bloody phone call." Muriel raised a finger; he responded with a growl. "Don't be pedantic, kitten, it doesn't suit."
"We rang you loads." That was from Maggie, who hunched forward, twisting a ring on her finger. "You never picked up."
There was no way in Heaven he was about to admit the reason why.
"Apparently you know where I live. Nina threatened to drag me out of bed by my ear." Crowley jerked his chin toward the shop in question.
"Only from this morning." Maggie looked pained. "Muriel found Mr. Fell's address book. Showed it to Nina, and I guess she decided to give you a ring."
"Aziraphale has a little black book?" Crowley laughed, but there was a bite to it. "Of course he does."
Muriel leaned down to Maggie's ear. "Does it serve the same function if the book is red?"
Maggie patted their hand reassuringly. "Just a phrase, dear."
"So. To summarise: You" —he pointed at Muriel, who merely cocked their head— "booted me from the shop because you were leaking so much energy that you blacked out the whole bloody block and assumed you were about to take me out with it. Then you" —his accusatory finger switched to Maggie, who was guiltily settling her gaze everywhere but on Crowley— "and your partner in crime dumped me out front because you were afraid our precious kitten here was going to, I don't know, explode? And then the three of you just… collapsed until dusk?"
They glanced at each other, then back at Crowley. Muriel gave a graceful, one-shouldered shrug. "Yes." He threw his head back and groaned. When he dared look again, Muriel's smile was mischievously sweet. "It doesn't feel good to have your entire worldview put on its side, does it?"
Crowley bared his teeth. Muriel grinned, obviously pleased with themselves.
"I'm sorry, what?" Maggie sounded genuinely baffled.
Before Crowley could open his mouth, Muriel brightened. "Mr. Crowley thought we'd all left him to die in the street!"
The look Maggie gave him made his ears burn. "That's exaggerating a bit–"
"He said as much to Nina." Muriel rolled right over his rebuttal, bubbly and effervescent. Crowley squeezed his eyes shut, red creeping down his jaw and into his neck. More conspiratorially, Muriel lowered their voice to a stage whisper. "He thinks no one cares about him because he's a demon."
Crowley could feel two sets of eyes on him, and refused to rise to the bait.
When they got no response, Maggie whispered back, "Is that what all the–" He cracked one eye to see her making a vague gesture over one arm, and Muriel nod back in affirmation.
"I can still hear you, you know." Satan, he sounded weary.
"Good, because we're not done talking yet."
Heart sinking into his stomach, Crowley shifted with a wary stare. "We're not?"
Muriel clasped their hands together, eyes sparkling. "Do you know anything about interventions?"
Crowley found himself bitterly entangled in a new Arrangement: Every two days, like clockwork, one of his so-called friends would appear at his door and drag him, snapping and swearing, back into the world.
"I'll ward everyone out, the whole lot of you," he'd grumbled as Maggie explained her—their, apparently; the three of them were fucking conspiring against him—idea.
Muriel, straightened with excitement. "I've never seen demonic runes in person! May I? It would be so much better than what's in the Archives!"
Crowley stared.
No few scrolls were from the eras before Time, epochs marked by the development of the Heavens, or the creation of new Host, or the forward movement on the Earth Project. The very earliest annals contained the base language—the formulary—for all written spellwork, used Upstairs and Down.
Muriel—a low-ranking angel who loved to read and who had otherwise nothing to do for centuries at a time—was probably uncomfortably familiar with every kind of supernatural protection that the Archives had to offer. Shit, they'd probably memorised their favourite passages, if they took in knowledge with even a tenth of Aziraphale's vigour.
He might have had six thousand years to refine his defences, but the logistics of a high-tech security system didn't matter if the person breaking and entering came armed with the bloody password.
The thought made his blood run cold.
He was forced ever-further into the city, usually accompanied by an exasperated reminder that he had a nigh-impenetrable base of operations a mere snap away.
No one on their respective sides would anticipate another angel working with another demon; as far as either bureaucracy knew, Crowley was so disillusioned with the system that he hadn't so much as spoken to the replacement angel since they'd officially been assigned to Earth.
Which meant that no one would be expecting the—stringent, and strangely-harmonised—modifications to the Embassy.
"Oi. Kitten. Let me see those runes Shitbrick wrote again?"
Crowley told himself that he was doing this as much for himself as he was for Muriel; he was in need of a safehouse, after all, even if it did technically belong to Heaven. But at least half of the offensive backlash he wove into the existing Enochian script was out of spite—and maybe a desire to be there when Sandalphon discovered his little bit extra, a surprise delicately placed just in case the the rat-faced bastard decided to ever set foot near Muriel again.
Working side-by-side, it was impossible for the alterations to go unnoticed. Muriel glanced over his work with a critical eye; Crowley swept his hand sideways until the characters burned brighter.
Their dark gaze met his behind his glasses. "You mixed up those two," was the only comment.
All the while, small, bronzed hands plucked at ethereal chords, unravelling entire sections and scribing over them with a ferocity that was, frankly, a little terrifying. The new angelic barriers tapped into the unholy lines that twisted into and over and through those of the Divine, subjecting servants from Above to the same curse that had nearly discorporated Crowley. With a few swift gestures, Crowley completed the loop, infusing his additions with profane Intent that drew in a never-ending well straight from Below.
Any approaching entity would receive a warning—a single warning. A preemptive strike with enough bite to it to make even the strongest foe wary.
Together, the opposing forces were devastating, and they'd been bent into a solid blast that consumed itself as much as its target; with the power of the wards behind it, a perpetual-energy machine acquired a laser-like focus which ate away at an intruder's true form, until even the empty husk was scorched to nothing.
Muriel was ruthless, and Crowley approved. They didn't volunteer information on the incident that had made them so pragmatic, and he didn't ask. He only met their eyes when they were done and gave a single, acknowledging nod.
So he wandered through Kew Gardens with Maggie, went wine-tasting with Nina, let Muriel tag along with a bag of peas while he sat in St. James' Park. He let Nina drag him to a car show on the other side of London; later, Maggie asked him to the farmer's market with such zeal that he was almost afraid to say no. Muriel followed him, through the neighbourhood, giggling, as he glued change to the sidewalk and swapped the coins for bills whenever a human was tenacious enough to pry one up.
Crowley, for the first time since his angel set foot on that blessed lift was doing more than surviving; he was living. Knowing that a different person was due to appear on his doorstep three days a week with a scripted adventure was enough to keep him from descending into that blissful nothingness that soothed the jagged edges of existence.
Arseholes.
Morose and lethargic—and, unfortunately, hungover—Crowley ignored the incessant hammering on his door until it seemed the person's fist was slamming directly against his skull, right between his eyes. Groaning, he rolled away and buried his face in the couch cushions. "Not feeling it today! Piss off!"
The concussive thunder and subsequent spray of splinters startled him up and over the back of the sofa, where he landed in an indelicate sprawl.
"What the actual fuck?" Leaning on one elbow, he glared around the edge of his furniture.
Anathema, of all bloody people, stood framed in the doorway, impassively surveying the carnage with a wide-eyed Newt peering over her shoulder. Crowley hissed through his fangs; she stared him down, somehow even more unimpressed.
He was three days into a bender—he'd lasted two years, alright—and knew that he looked it, but the least she could do after blowing pieces of his flat to bits was let him have his pride.
"Was that really fucking necessary?" he asked as he shoved himself to standing.
"You weren't answering," she replied, as if explosions were a typical answer to that problem. "Now come on. I have a tour at Alnwick Garden and I don't want to be late."
Crowley eyed the battered entryway; she couldn't actually come in, not with his wards, but he wasn't as confident concerning whatever other spells she might have on hand.
With a sigh, he flicked his hand up; fresh clothes wrapped around a clean body, shaggy hair impeccably styled and glasses firmly in place. "The poison place? Do I even want to know?" His gloves took a moment longer to find, unusually resistant to being summoned. He yanked them on, bearing down on Anathema with a scowl.
"They have some herbs I need, and my usual channels are taking too long."
"Petty thievery? At this hour?" Crowley shouldered past them both and gestured behind him, the door reconstructing itself in a clatter he was sure to hear about later from the old lady a floor down.
"Problem?" she asked sweetly.
"'Course not. Should've led with that, really." Punching the button for the lift, he hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and glanced at Anathema's companion for the first time. "Oh. Hi, Newt."
"How did I end up here?" he muttered, grateful for his black lenses as the sun glittered off the water and lightened the sand. He couldn't remember the last time he'd willingly been to a beach.
"Because it was my turn to pick a place, and you're not allowed to say no," Muriel chirped, so cheerfully he could strangle them.
Crowley grunted. "Sounds right." He cast a slow glare around the mostly-deserted waterfront. "So what's the plan, here, Scrivener? Gonna splash for a while? Bit cold for that."
His only warning was a hint of Muriel's playful smirk before their hand surreptitiously twitched downward with a familiar-but-not burst of ethereal energy. "Something like that."
"Oi!" he hissed as Muriel's wings spread behind them, stretched to their full width. "What the Heaven do you think you're doing?"
"The humans can't see me," they said, unconcerned. Muriel turned in joyous circles, arms outstretched while their pearlescent white feathers danced in the ocean breeze, and they whooped, wild and free. "Come fly with me!"
"Oh, no. Absolutely not."
"Why not? When's the last time you flew, Mr. Crowley?"
Millennia ago.
For some reason, the answer made his heart ache.
Was the last time he'd looked down at the Earth during the Flood, while he was carrying unsanctioned children to hide aboard the Ark? It had been centuries before Job, that much he remembered; he'd stayed on that rock long after Aziraphale had left, carding his fingers through the mess of his neglected coverts, removing bent secondaries, brushing away dirt and down.
It was then that Crowley had promised to tend to his wings until they shone.
The only people to see them since were Aziraphale and Adam Young.
He wasn't going to embarrass himself if he manifested them in front of Muriel, but.
"This is a bad idea, kitten."
Satan, that smile was going to kill him. "They're the only kind I have," they shouted, cheeky, and launched themselves skyward.
Muriel was almost to the horizon before Crowley shook himself out of his stupor. With a thought, his own feathers appeared, a prism of blues and purples, deepest reds and hints of green as they unfurled in the midday sun. He rolled his shoulders to adjust to their Material weight, swished them in a few experimental flutters to warm up muscles that hadn't been used in over four thousand years.
"I'm gonna kill them," he muttered, pacing a line away from the water's edge and belatedly remembering to tell the air around him that he wasn't really there. "It's going to take forever to get all this sand out."
He spun around, gauging the distance. Not quite running—demons didn't run, not unless they were being chased—Crowley gave himself a few preparatory beats before he pushed into the air in earnest. To his surprise, he barely floundered as he gained altitude, the swift-moving currents buffeting him backward, but up. The dot in the distance that was Muriel sent up a shower of sparks; Crowley snorted despite himself.
Muriel's wingspan was smaller and less powerful than his own, and he covered the distance quickly enough to catch the pleased surprise on their face.
Not gonna be happy in a minute.
The moment he was close enough, Crowley tucked into a dive. Muriel, laughing, followed, until he flung his wings into a spin with a spray of salt that drenched them head to toe.
"You're a bloody menace," he accused without heat. Heaven, they might not even have heard him over their shriek.
A few lofty pumps brought Muriel higher, and they shook off the water with a triumphant grin. "Whatever gets you out of the house."
"Yeah, yeah." Crowley's shoulders already burned with exertion. But Muriel dragged him all the way out here, and he was going to enjoy himself, bless it. Smirking lazily, he jerked upward. "Hey. Follow me."
It was a longer climb than he remembered; up through the cloud cover, until the air went thin and cold. Crowley picked his glasses off his nose and tossed them to Muriel. They grasped them in a fumbling catch, and when their befuddled gaze turned back to him, Crowley flicked two fingers in a sarcastic salute.
Then he folded his wings and tipped backward.
Muriel yelled, but the words themselves were lost in the roar of freefall. Crowley loosened the iron grip on his form just enough to send himself into a spiral; with eyes half-closed, he breathed in the sea air, listened to the far-off crash of waves on the shore, slipping into a meditative calm he hadn't achieved since sometime in the seventeenth century.
At the very last second, he snapped his wings open, gritting his teeth against the strain and sweeping into a loop to avoid real injury. Behind him, he could see the silvery spread of Muriel's feathers billow out like a parachute, barely stopping their descent before they ended up chin-deep in foam.
Crowley grinned as he dragged his hand through the white-capped surf, gently rotating to face them.
"I– What– You–" They were red from more than just the wind, eyes wide and chest heaving; they didn't even seem to notice they were soaked almost to the knee.
"Never seen you speechless before, kitten. I feel like I should be honoured." His tone was just as indolent as the way he circled, a shark-like backwing that brought him within arms' reach.
"Don't do that again!"
"But it's fun. Though you lot wanted me to have fun."
"I thought I was going to watch you discorporate!"
Crowley's smooth motions stuttered enough that he dropped a few inches toward the churning ocean. Now that he looked closer, he could see Muriel's fists clenched by their sides—his glasses clenched hard enough to have cracked and broken—and their face was twisted in what, on the surface, looked like fury, but what he'd seen often enough on Aziraphale to recognise as angelic terror.
Muriel had thought they were witnessing a suicide.
He swallowed, thick. "No, Muriel," he managed, barely audible. "I wouldn't do that to you."
They looked away, swiping their wrists across their crimson cheeks. "I think we should go back."
Desperate to pull them onto safer ground, Crowley tried for a carefree grin that probably came across as a grimace. "Race you?"
Brown eyes studied him for a long moment; much like their predecessor, Muriel always saw too much.
And, much like their predecessor, Crowley was terrified to ask what they'd seen.
Then, finally: "What do I get when I win?"
Letting out his breath in a relieved chuckle, Crowley pretended to think. "When. Alright, kitten. I'll buy you whatever you want from that creepy bloke in the park."
Muriel raised their chin in challenge. "Fine."
"Deal." In a show of good—ha—faith, he extended a hand.
One small palm reached out to curl around his larger one.
You trusting little fool.
Crowley yanked his fingers out of Muriel's, pressed a hand to each of their shoulders, and with a powerful surge of his wings, propelled himself toward shore.
Their indignant shout shook free Crowley's first genuine laugh in seven hundred and ninety-nine days.
After that, Crowley started taking initiative.
The first day he'd appeared in Give Me Coffee of his own accord, Nina had shot him a glare, shoved two tenners in his hand and pushed him right back out the door. "Out of almond milk again, and get me some soy while you're there!" she'd shouted over the line of customers.
Crowley had been too baffled not to obey.
A few weeks after he deemed Thursdays to be Crowley's Espresso Day, he started noticing the dulcet tones of Velvet Underground's lesser-known albums piping out of the storefront next to A.Z. Fell & Co. Maggie didn't bother to hide her hopeful gaze, or her elated smile when he visibly caved and strolled across the road to meet her.
Whickber Street's largest change was to A.Z. Fell & Co. itself; no longer touted as a purveyor of rare books and antiquities, the building now housed a scholarly research library. Crowley, in a blow that lay waste to his heart, wondered if all angels sounded like Aziraphale when they'd done something desperately clever, or if he was just very unlucky that Muriel used the exact same tone.
"That's what you were talking about then, with the appointments?"
"Mmm!" They swallowed around a hot dog—horrible invention, that, but Muriel seemed terribly fond of them once it was doused in ketchup—and gave him that shy, furtive smile that always spelled trouble. "It's perfect, don't you think? Easy to control how many humans come and go, and all of them are very protective of the books. One man threatened to put his student's paper in an acid bath because she wasn't properly gloved!" Their grin faded with the memory, softened, and they glanced down. "I know nothing inside is truly to be parted with, Mr. Crowley."
Crowley clenched his jaw and looked very pointedly toward the pond. He'd understood, on a mental level, that it would be impossible to spend time with one angel without thinking of the other, but he was still surprised by how much it hurt to imagine Aziraphale's giddy pleasure. Because he could, vividly; Aziraphale would be ecstatic that Muriel had found a solution that allowed him to share his beloved first editions with those who could appreciate them, but without the risk of someone wanting to carry them off.
It was a wonder neither of them had thought of it before.
"Then what's the deal with the sign?"
"The sign?"
"Your store hours. Seem pretty regular, now. Don't mention appointments anywhere." He flicked his eyes back.
Muriel grinned again, sly, and popped the last mouthful between their lips. Intrigued, Crowley stretched an arm across the back of the bench and raised an eyebrow.
"Oh good, it works!" Muriel brushed invisible crumbs from their trousers in false humility, blinking up from under their lashes.
"Okay, kitten, I'll bite. What did you do?"
"I was left with orders to give the shop more structure," they began in a tone that heavily implied not only what they thought of said orders, but also who had given them. Crowley snorted. "So, a human sees the same note that's always been there, but an angel–"
"You little minx!" Crowley tipped his head back in absolute delight. "You're really awful, you know that?"
Muriel accepted the compliment as their due tribute and bowed their head magnanimously. "I know. But I still like to hear it."
The worst part of this whole babysitting business—not that he would ever, ever admit it—was that they'd been right. The Three bloody Stooges were helping. Crowley didn't have time to wallow in his misery when he knew that, in a few hours, someone was going to lean on his doorbell until either it broke or he did.
The stupid bell won every time.
So he agreed to make up Nina's face the first time she braved the queer club alone, and drank an entire bottle of wine on her couch while she detailed her victorious aftermath. He thrust a second ticket to Judas Priest into a blushing Maggie's hand and immediately regretted it when she loaded his arms up with band T-shirts. Mrs. Sandwich mentioned a few of her girls were doing a burlesque number at the bar down the road, and Crowley gleefully taught Muriel when and how to tip the performers.
While he couldn't say he was happy, he could admit that he had moments that were happy. He had flashes of contentment. The grief, the depression, the desire to sink into the Earth and never reappear weren't gone—would likely never be gone—but it was… workable.
He could get out of bed, and that was more than could be said of him a few months ago.
In his worst moments, the urge to desecrate himself was still there. The forced banality of what should have been a fatal wound turned his words cutting and his temper explosive. More than once Crowley caught himself picking at the old scabs in a bout of savage wrath, working open the gash on his palm that was slow to close, flexing his other hand with a manic gleam in his eye as it cracked and bled.
Even a demon could forestall healing for only so long.
By the time he'd formed a weekly routine—terrorising academics and trying new house blends and maybe encouraging Londoners to purchase their LPs online—all that remained was a smattering of burn-like scars up and down his left side, and a thick, raised, purple slash where Muriel had done their work.
His well-worn routine came to a crashing halt as Crowley was tugging on his gloves.
The thunking on his door was subdued—for the people who usually knocked, anyway—its cadence slow and heavy.
Crowley, brow furrowed, flung it open to reveal Nina. She looked lost, with red-rimmed eyes, arms crossed protectively over her middle. He fought back the instinctive snarl, tried to think past the clanging alarms and the raging desire to bring absolute ruin to whoever had had the balls to make this woman cry.
"Nina?" He waved a hand in front of her face; she glared at him like she might bite it off. Thank fuck, she's still in there somewhere.
"I think I need a drink."
"I'll say." Crowley took her by the elbow and pulled her toward the lift. "Where to?"