They didn't see Alex for a few days whilst Rodrick was taken out of the cellar. The blood was carefully cleaned up so as to not disturb the binding circle. Astraea and Morpheus sat in silence whilst the death of Rodrick Burgess settled on the household.
It was four days later when Alex returned, this time, with a friend. "How are they today, Rogers?"
His voice was the first thing she heard as the gate was being opened. Astraea looked up from the binding circle that she had been staring at in the hopes that it would disappear.
"Buggered if I know, sir. She's been staring at the same spot for hours and he moved his hand this morning. Right hand." Alex and his friend entered into the cellar.
"Oh, my God. Alex?" His friend looked at the two supernatural beings in awe and pity. Astraea didn't want his pity, she wanted to be free.
"Hello. This is my friend Paul." He turned to look at his friend, "Paul, these are our unwilling guests." He turned back to face them, trying to smile at them.
"Look, we've been talking, Paul and I, and if I let you out, will you promise not to harm us?" He looked between the two beings hopefully.
"If you could just speak to us." Astraea knew that it wasn't time for them to leave, the stars had shown her that, so she stayed silent. Morpheus did to.
"You see, I told you" Alex turned to face Paul in defeat.
"I'm telling you, you have to keep trying. Show them that they can trust you. Show them that you mean it." Paul argued with Alex, she was a bit put out that they ignored their presence when they weren't speaking to them, but she appreciated the effort made by Paul to argue for them.
"I do mean it. Just promise that you won't harm me or Paul, and I will let you out." Neither Astraea or Morpheus spoke, just continued to stare at the pair.
Alex and Paul kept coming back over the years, trying to convince them to speak.
On rare occasions, once every few years, the next guard shift would be late and they would be left alone for a few minutes. They spent these minutes talking, they would have gone insane if they hadn't had these small reveries where they could speak to each other.
"So, you have your own... kingdom?" They spent these isolated moments questioning each other.
"Yes, the dreaming. It's beautiful. You should visit sometime." His answers had become longer over the years, accepting that his only communication was going to be with the cherubim beside him. "What about you? Any home to go back to?"
"I have my brother's book shop in London. Well, I say book shop, he will do everything in his power to not sell a book." They both laughed at that, it was funny, a book shop that doesn't sell books, "It's not much of a kingdom like yours, but I also have my place in the stars, the constellation Virgo." She missed her stars, they weren't important to many outside of zodiacs, but she was Virgo incarnate, Virgo was her.
"Ah, so you're a star angel." His condescending tone mirrored most views of star angels, they were unimportant - pretty dots in the sky for the humans to point and stare at.
"I was also the goddess of Justice for the Greeks. I know that you were also worshipped by them." She didn't like mentioning her involvement with the rogue Virtue's pantheon, but it did usually make her seem more dignified to the higher ups.
"Really?"
"Yeah, and when they finally shut Zeus down, I was given his lightning to look after. I don't wield it much and can't at the moment any way, damn binding circle." He seemed slightly impressed at that. For a cherubim, she did have quite a lot of power, she couldn't use much of it, but she had it.
"Huh, wonder why we never met during the Greeks then." The guards entered as he finished his sentence, if they heard the voices they didn't comment on it - they never did.
Years passed as they enjoyed the small moments of conversation that helped to pass the time. Time spent with the guards were spent thinking of questions to ask each other and by the end of the century, they knew quite a lot about each other from their minute long conversations.
She knew everything about him from his quirky librarian, Lucienne, to his life long feud with his siblings - namely Desire. She knew that his favourite place in the Dreaming was Fidler's Green, she knew that he had a friend, Robert Gadling who was an immortal man created from a bet between Dream and Death, he was currently losing. In turn, he knew that her best friend was her brother, Aziraphale. He knew that her favourite drink was her brother's hot chocolate. He knew that she loved to dance and that when she was a young angel, she had quite fancied Lucifer Morningstar. He had laughed at that.
Alex and Paul were now withering away with age, and were trying yet again to get them to speak.
"I could have asked you for wealth or power, like my father did. But all I ever wanted was to be free of you. Surely you want that too." He pleaded once again, focussing his efforts on Morpheus. From the looks of Alex and Paul, Astraea supposed that the apocalypse should be soon to happen, if it hadn't already happened.
"Alex, darling, please." Paul pleaded, the pair of supernatural beings had noticed that the man had given up on them years ago and just wanted to live out his final days in peace.
"Take me upstairs, Paul. I don't think I'll be coming down here again." Alex sat down in his wheelchair, he'd needed one for years now and Astraea didn't know why he still tried to make the journey down in one.
Paul grabbed a hold of the handles on the chair and wheeled him out, reversing slightly to turn around.
Astraea felt the air fluctuate and her power trickle back into her system. She looked down and saw that both of the binding circles had been broken by the chair's wheels. Paul looked back at them and slightly nodded his head before wheeling Alex out of the cellar.
She could feel as her power slowly started to regain, she just needed enough to shatter the glass and then she was free. Morpheus was smiling in his own sphere as he stared at one of the guards.
"Old Dracula here's not giving an inch."
"Why do you call it Dracula?"
"Coz I think it's one of them Dracula's. What do you think it is?"
"I try not to. You know what I do think about? Majorca. Four days... and I'll be on the beach. Stinking of suntan lotion." The guard's voice trailed off as he slowly dropped his arm, his eyes closing and his breathing evening out. He was asleep. Or at least daydreaming. Astraea wondered whether Morpheus' powers extended to daydreams as well, she was surprised that she had never asked. Though, she supposed, she had never thought to ask.
Astraea looked over to Morpheus and saw his eyes fixated on the guard, the guards eyes were still closed as he stood up and grabbed his gun from his side.
He began firing shots at Morpheus' sphere cage and the other guard returned from wherever she had been, yelling for him to stop. He didn't. He continued to fire his gun at the glass until it shattered and Morpheus was freed from his prison.
"Don't move, stay where you are!" One of the guards yelled at him.
Astraea could feel that she had enough power to shatter her sphere, she gathered it in herself and imagined the lightning that she had been gifted shattering the glass around her and freeing her from her century long cage.
She could hear crackles of the lightning that lit up her hands as she stepped out of the broken glass and into fresh air for the first time in one hundred years.
"What... what's he got in his hands? Oi! Open your hands!" He did, and as he did so, he blew the sand into them and they dropped down, asleep on the floor.
He looked towards her, "Do you need any help getting home?" His voice was soft as he asked, over the years they had formed a bond created in isolation and he didn't want her to be stranded in this house any longer than she had to be.
"No, I'm alright. I'd say I've got enough power to get myself to my brother's" He nodded his head at her, before fading into the light. It was poetic really, he had been practically dead for a century and now he was going into the light.
Astraea waited until he had left before gathering the remaining strength that she had and disappearing with a singular lightning bolt. The cellar was left in chaos, two asleep guards and a sheet of shattered glass across the floor. If she had stayed any longer she would have heard Paul's cried as Alex dropped into eternal slumber, his punishment for their imprisonment and Jessamy's death.
Instead, she reappeared 70 miles south of East Sussex, in front of a book shop in Soho, London. She would remain, a collapsed body on the floor, in a sundress from the nineteen twenties all through the night until her brother opened the door to his book shop in the morning.
Aziraphale had spent the last one hundred years searching for his sister, he had asked for help from the other angels, he had even asked for Crowley's help. Yet, he could not find her. She had disappeared and he blamed himself for not noticing soon enough, thinking the had had to go and rushing off. She was flighty like that, he expected it of her.
So when he unlocked his bookshelf two years after the apocalypse had almost happened, he did not expect to find his older sister passed out on his doorstep in the same clothes he had last seen her in.
"Astraea? Oh dear, Astraea!" From behind him another man exited the book shop, dressed all in black and sunglasses on his face despite the early morning sun that peered through the blinds.
"Crowley, help me get her inside." The angel and demon carried her from off the streets and into the flat above the book shop. They placed her in her old room.
She used to spend so much time at the book shop and the flat above it, that Aziraphale had given her her own room. She had spent an entire summer decorating it, paintings of the universe hung above her on the ceiling and the room was an overall purple colour. She had grown fond of it over the years.
"I wonder what happened to her? How did she end up here?" Crowley placed a comforting hand on the angel's shoulder as he looked down at his sister's sleeping form. She wouldn't awaken for a few hours at least. Until then, they could only speculate.
"I have no idea, Crowley. But she's home now, that's all that matters."
The angel and demon settled down for a restless night waiting for the cherubim to wake in the early hours of the morning.
When she eventually awoke, she saw the angel and demon quietly asleep leaning on each other. They had probably tried to stay up to meet her when she woke.
She looked around her room, it was the same as she remembered it. Nothing had changed. She almost cried with the relief of freedom, she could move, she could walk, she could speak. She moved to sit up and get a better grasp on her surroundings, she still couldn't quite believe that she was free, that she had escaped. Her brother wriggled in his spot, his head resting on Crowley's shoulder.
The two nuzzled closer together as a draft came in through the window and Astraea giggled at them.
Aziraphale startled awake, in turn, waking Crowley up. He looked frantically around the room before his eyes finally settled on Astraea's awake form looking back at him with tears in her eyes. They stared at each other for a moment.
"Astraea?" Aziraphale's voice cracked as he spoke, emotion welling in his heart as he looked at his sister.
"Zira."