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It happens because of a bird; a tiny sparrow, no bigger than the length of Aziraphale’s pointer finger.
They’re taking their regular evening constitutional through the park when Crowley stops abruptly, head tipped to one side as if to listen for something. He gently disengages Aziraphale’s arm from his and takes a step off the path, toward a thick cluster of brush.
“What on earth have you found?” Aziraphale asks, following along behind.
“Someone’s had a close encounter with a cat,” Crowley says by way of explanation.
He crouches down and reaches into the dense thicket, and Aziraphale knows him well enough to be prepared for some manner of small, delicate creature to be folded in the cradle of his hands when they reemerge.
Aziraphale loves animals the same way he loves children and customers who leave his books with cracked spines or dog-eared pages; at arm’s length. Things that tend to be messy or noisy or largely unpredictable create anxiety for an angel who is very much a creature of habit.
Crowley, of course, has an unrelenting fondness for any agent of mess, noise or general chaos. This includes animals, children, and any customer daring enough to sit in one of the shop’s overstuffed armchairs and argue theology with the Serpent of Eden for the better part of an hour.
He kneels there in the grass, a fragile, broken-boned creature cupped in his elegant hands, and Aziraphale aches to think of all the excuses Crowley has to make for all the love in his heart.
“Jammy bloke,” Crowley says admiringly. His voice is pitched just a hair softer than usual. “Drove that bastard away and found yourself a safe place to wait things out. Well done, you.”
Aziraphale can feel the bird’s distress now, a tiny thread of pain that only manages to cross the vast sea of Aziraphale’s angelic perception because Crowley is giving it focus. Crowley is healing the creature as he speaks to it, giving it his voice to focus on instead of the ginger prodding of his fingertips.
As its pain goes away, the white-hot needle of its fear goes with it. All Aziraphale can feel from it now is weariness and something like wary curiosity.
“Yeah, I’m a snake,” Crowley says shortly. “But I wouldn’t go through all the trouble of fixing your wing if I was just going to eat you, now, would I? Be sensible.”
A woman passing by on the path gives their trio a dubious once-over. It makes Aziraphale feel irrationally protective. If Crowley wants to sit in the grass and talk to a bird, who on Earth has the authority to tell him he shouldn’t?
Thankfully, Crowley finishes up before Aziraphale’s feathers are ruffled any further.
“Looks like I’ve got a boarder for the evening,” he says, pushing to his feet with the sparrow in the cup of his left hand. “Little blighter’s all out of sorts. He’s going to kip with me, and I’ll bring him back out here in the morning.”
“Sweetheart,” Aziraphale teases, smiling—only smiling wider when Crowley waves him off sharply with his free hand, the pointed tips of his ears and the fine lines of his cheekbones already turning pink. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? You really are such a kind-hearted soul.”
“Tell the whole blessed world while you’re at it,” the serpent grumbles, but he doesn’t fight the arm that Aziraphale winds around his waist. The evening is getting colder, gray clouds sponged across the sky, so he even presses into Aziraphale’s side just a little as they walk together.
In the name of fairness, it could be said that it’s just as much Aziraphale’s praise as the sparrow’s plight that put Crowley in danger; but it’s much easier to blame the bird.
Hastur has the feeling he’s missing something.
Everything falls back into business as usual after the world didn’t end, and does so with surprising alacrity, given how bureaucracy in Hell tends to work. The Apocalypse itself is a faint, distant memory—something that almost happened, but didn’t, and nothing to worry about anymore, thank you very much.
“I don’t like it,” Hastur gripes, standing shoulder to shoulder with Ligur in one of the derelict office hallways. They’re sharing a cigarette in front of a No Smoking sign and an intern too cowardly to say anything about it. “Feels like someone’s come along and made us remember differently.”
Ligur makes a harrumphing noise of agreement, blowing smoke toward an out-of-order smoke detector.
“Kinda like the Fall,” he says. His voice is dark and growling, a dangerous timbre that Hastur admires. “None of us remember who we were up there, ay? And that seems the sort of thing you wouldn’t forget on your own. Naw, someone is messin’ us about.”
Hastur nods grimly. There is some persistent, gnawing feeling of dread at work in the back of his mind. Forgotten fear, or retroactive grief. Something happened. It stopped happening, and it isn’t happening anymore but it did. At some point, it was. And Hastur can’t quite recall what he was afraid of. What it was he lost.
With every moment that goes by, with every inch deeper the gulf between then and now grows, the feeling gets smaller and smaller. Soon it will be out of reach entirely. There is a very small part of Hastur that’s glad.
Ligur punches him in the arm, and Hastur realizes he’s been holding out the cigarette. Hastur takes it, and takes a deep pull from it, and the nicotine rushes down his lungs and up into his brain with a satisfying buzz.
“Remember when Crawly brought these down the first time?” Ligur says, tossing the empty pack up into the air and not bothering to catch it on its way back down. “Got a bunch of us hooked and wheedled favors right and left before he’d bring us any more.”
“Insolent snake,” Hastur spits, but it manages to sound like a reluctant compliment more than anything. “You know, I checked with the census bureau the other day. The projected number of damned souls hasn’t changed since we cut him loose. Makes you wonder if he was really as effective up there as he always claimed to be.”
Ligur tips his head back and roars with laughter. “He conned us from the very Beginning.”
One does have to admire the hustle. Ligur’s obvious amusement takes the prickly edge off Hastur’s own irritation, and he flicks the butt of the cigarette onto the rotted floor. The intern across the way has the nerve to look relieved. In response, Ligur pulls a new box out of an inner chest pocket and tears it open, grinning with too many teeth. The intern ducks their head behind the grimy plastic of a computer monitor three decades out of date and doesn’t reemerge.
A Baron chooses that moment to stalk past with an armful of perpetually backlogged paperwork, looking harassed.
“Don’t either of you have any work to do?” he snaps at them.
Ligur flips him the bird. The topmost memo in the Baron’s hands gets Hastur’s attention. He snatches it off the stack and then bares his teeth when the Baron protests. He visibly gives up on the memo and rolls both pairs of his eyes at them before continuing to shoulder his way through the milling crowd.
When he’s gone, Ligur says, “We don’t really have any work to do, do we?”
“None.”
And more to the point, Hastur couldn’t find the same joy in his work that he used to. Damning saints and torturing souls and building up the army of the Fallen—all of it was pointless now, wasn’t it? The world wasn’t going to end. There wasn’t any reason.
He examines the paper he stole. The familiar, scrawling signature at the bottom in place of a proper demonic sigil is what caught his eye.
“What’s that, then?” Ligur asks impatiently.
“A receipt,” Hastur says. He reads it, and then reads it again to make sure he read it right the first time. “For Crowley’s latest miracle.”
“Oh? What’s that belly-crawler up to?”
Hastur shoves the note at him, incredulous. “He healed a bird.”
Ligur reads more quickly than Hastur did, and winds up smiling. It’s sharp and wicked and one of Hastur's favorite things to see.
“Why don’t we go topside for a bit, then?” Ligur says. “We ought to pay our friend a visit. Sounds like he needs help getting his head on straight.”
Eagerness fills Hastur with motivation, like a pool of hot water lapping at all the empty spaces this crisis of purpose left in his shriveled soul.
They could find Crowley and drag their answers out of him. And then they could play with him a bit, give him a few years on the rack to show him what they think of being made fools of in his long con, and once the interrogating and torturing were out of their systems, they could remind him of who he really was.
No matter what he pretends to be, Crowley Fell. He’s one of them. No matter how badly he fucked up at the end of the world, no matter how jumbled his motives are after too much time on Earth, Crowley belongs to Hell, just like the rest of them do.
“Yeah,” Hastur says with a nasty grin. In the farthest corner of his mind, there is screeching vindication. Payback, he thinks hatefully, though he doesn’t know what for. He doesn’t let it bother him. They’re demons; he doesn’t need a reason to hate. “Let’s pay him a visit.”
They miracle themselves most of the way. Climb out of dirt and asphalt and gravel in some shady, dank alleyway. The city is well-lit in the fading dusk, cars whizzing by and humans bustling about in all directions.
The serpent’s nest is just around the corner, but Hastur and Ligur don’t make it more than two steps before a flash of Divinity hits them like a solar flare.
A Principality stands before them, Aziraphale of the Eastern Gate, flaming sword in hand. The Holy fire draws Hastur’s cautious eye. Ligur is cursing and scrubbing at his eyes with a sleeve, still half-blinded by the angel’s flashbang appearance.
“You must be Crowley’s angel,” Hastur sneers, trying to find his footing. He means it as an insult, but it misses its mark entirely.
“I am,” the Principality intones severely. “What’s your business here?”
There is no even match between an angel and a demon; the Fallen are inherently disadvantaged. Broken and discarded, his Grace carved cruelly out of its house in his soul and his multitude of eyes burned shut, Hastur is not the whole and shining creature that he once was. He is powerful as far as demons go, but he would struggle in a fight even with a bog-standard angel, let alone a Principality as old and accomplished as this one.
“Our business is with the snake, not with you,” Ligur says plainly, never one to be easily cowed. “Why don’t you flutter off and find some orphans to bless and leave us be.”
The look in the angel’s human-shaped eyes can really only be described as Old Testament. Hastur readies himself for what is shaping up to be a bloody, brutal fight. He’s even eager for it; the last few years have been so bloody boring. There’s a leaping animal inside of him like a hunting hound pulling at its lead, ready to be set loose.
“He’s no longer affiliated with you.” The angel manages to sound indignant, of all things. “I—that is, he even got it in writing. Signed by three of Hell’s kings. It’s all very official.”
“Well, we’re not here in any official capacity,” Hastur says. “It’s more of a personal visit. Friendly chat, that sort of thing.”
If he was indignant before, Aziraphale is outright angry now. “You’re not his friends. You hurt him.”
“Of course we did,” Ligur says, as if the angel is particularly slow. And he might well be, if he needs this much spelled out. “We’re demons.”
“You tortured him,” Aziraphale presses, unrelenting.
“It’s Hell,” Hastur says impatiently. “It’s ninety-nine-percent torture on a slow day.”
“Not all of it’s the traditional sort,” Ligur adds in the name of accuracy. “Sometimes it’s, y’know, mind games. Never had much patience for all that, myself. Tearing off a limb or two always works just as well as a decade in solitary.”
Aziraphale closes his eyes briefly, as though he’s suddenly without the strength to keep them open. His face is ashen with pain. Hastur has no idea what blow they managed to land, just standing around and talking about quite ordinary things, and he doesn’t have time to puzzle it out.
“If you come within a hundred miles of him, I will know,” the Principality says. “This is the only warning I will give you. You will not hurt him again.”
His curly hair and round face and soft, heavy human body are a dangerous camouflage. He's a creature of iron and fire, built for war. If Hastur squints, he can just make out the angel’s trueform, with its resplendent crown and scepter, burning wheels and thousands of eyes, the mane of a lion and the horns of an ox.
“You can’t be this sore about it,” Ligur says incredulously. “He’s a demon. Hurting is just part of it.”
Aziraphale grits his teeth, so hard a muscle in his jaw jumps. His eyes are blazing. “Not here.”
Ligur blinks, and trades a sidelong look with Hastur.
Hastur feels equally as wrong-footed. “Not ever?”
Mistaking their confusion for flippancy, the angel points his sword at them, its fire bright enough to cause flashburn. Hastur and Ligur both shuffle warily.
“You heard me,” Aziraphale tells them coldly. “He is not yours. You will leave him be.”
Threat firmly delivered, the angel disappears.
He isn’t to know that the TV in Crowley’s flat has leaky wires. That is to say, the video signal is so used to delivering correspondence from Hell that it doesn’t think twice about making room for a pair of nosy demons to ride up and peer safely out of a muted flatscreen display at the scene in the living room.
The serpent is asleep on a squashy-looking loveseat, a handful of tasseled cushions knocked to the floor in his subconscious quest to both curl up in defense of his stomach and to also take up as much room as he physically can. There is a wooden wine crate on the floor beside the sofa, lined with soft linens, and the bird inside it is rustling comfortably and talking to itself.
The Principality appears without a sound, a few loose papers on the low table behind him fluttering gently as if in a breeze. Crowley doesn’t so much as twitch at this new presence in his lair, as skittish and paranoid as he always was when Hastur popped in to check up on things, and Hastur can’t imagine why. It’s not a demon’s purview, imagining things. Much simpler to look something obvious dead in the face and completely misunderstand.
Certain danger has come to his flat, the hereditary enemy standing above him while he is defenseless, but Crowley sleeps on. When the angel lays a hand upon his face, divine palm curled tenderly against damned cheek, Crowley only shifts closer.
There is pain on the Principality’s face, in his steel-bright eyes, sharp and unrelenting as though it might go on forever. His wings spread and mantle until they form something of an iron shield, hiding most of Crowley’s corporation from the TV lurkers’ line of sight.
“Up you get, my darling,” Aziraphale says. His other hand moves up into the serpent’s red hair, stroking through it. “I’m taking you home with me. Wily creature, always getting into trouble without someone around to keep an eye on you.”
Crowley’s eyes open, yellow from side to side and properly demonic. He presses a hand over the angel’s, holding it to his cheek.
“No trouble, angel. M’sleepin’.” The sibilants each catch on a hiss. “S’cold outside.”
“You can sleep,” the Principality assures him. “I’ll keep you warm.”
And that heralds the end of the discussion, because silver-tongued Crowley doesn’t put up any fuss when he’s gathered in deceivingly soft arms and lifted off the sofa.
The Principality could crush that old serpent in a second, could grind him into nothing but ash and dust between his hands, could burn him away until not even a feather or scale remained, but he doesn’t. He only shifts his hold until Crowley’s head is pillowed comfortably on his shoulder, until the demon can bury his face against the vulnerable column of the angel’s neck.
If it were Hastur, he would dig teeth into that neck and tear. He wouldn’t stop until he was choking, until the angel discorporated and the floor beneath them was slick and sticky and red. He wouldn’t be able to help it, wouldn’t even think. It’s his nature.
Nature skipped Crowley. He just closes his eyes, belly up in predator’s arms, fanged mouth pliant against prey’s throat.
“Don’ forget th’ bird,” Crowley mumbles.
“Of course not,” the Principality soothes.
When Aziraphale miracles the three of them away, he doesn’t touch the bird’s crate to bring it along. He doesn’t have to. He didn’t have to hold Crowley, either, but he did. It was the first thing he did. And for some reason it’s the last thing that sticks in Hastur’s mind as he plays back the encounter over and over again, year after year after year.
It takes a decade to track Crowley down to a sea-side cottage. He feels so different now that they kept flying right by him. The wounds in his soul have scarred and faded, so much lesser now than they used to be. There is a light in his eyes that is very close to divine for all that She's not the one who put it there.
Still a demon, Hastur thinks uncharitably. And yet...
There is music spilling from the open window of the conservatory behind him, a pitcher of iced berry water waiting patiently on the sill, the crisp smell of bread baking from somewhere inside. The snaking boughs of an apple tree spill over the garden wall, tempting neighbors to its fruit.
Crowley is not smiling, but he is at peace. He is kneeling in a flowerbed with a sparrow on his shoulder, coaxing life to take root in the rich, turned soil. The sun is full and glorious and touches every part of him without burning. When an angel steps outside and beckons to him, Crowley abandons his greenery and gardening gloves without a second thought.
They kiss in the doorway, and then Aziraphale tucks Crowley against his chest; one hand pressed to the back of his head, the other on the small of his back, holding him safe and close. And he looks over Crowley’s shoulder in the direction of where Hastur and Ligur are watching with a scrying spell, ninety-nine miles away, with those guardian eyes that burn and burn and burn.
Hastur tips his head, something between a bow and a nod. A concession. They aren’t looking for a fight.
Aziraphale’s gaze lingers for a moment, threat very neatly implied, and then he turns to draw Crowley into the house. The door closes behind them. Their ridiculous affection for one another alters reality; the world around them picks up on it and adjusts accordingly. The old bones of the cottage decide to be as strong as any castle rampart. The flowers in the garden turn their faces watchfully, a couple hundred silent sentries ready to sound the alarm at the first sign of approaching danger. There's a powerful force at work here, one too grand for a simple demon to make any sense of.
“Maybe there’s something to it,” Ligur admits reluctantly. “This ‘love’ business.”
Hastur’s hands are buried in the pockets of his coat. The scrying spell is still active, the image of the house suspended on the surface of a pool of still water, and Hastur is still watching it. For some reason, he stands a full step in front of Ligur when there is water nearby.
He tries to imagine an existence without pain, a life in the sun. He can't wrap his mind around it.
“You reckon we should give it a try?” he asks.
Ligur rubs his nose. His bright orange eyes are studying Hastur with an intensity he’s not familiar with. And then the lizard demon says, offhandedly, “S’against the rules, you know.”
He grins with too many teeth, showing what he thinks of the rules. Hastur laughs, the sound of it surprised out of him. He sometimes forgets he knows how to do that.
“Right,” Hastur says, shoulder to shoulder with the only person he has never grown tired of. “Let’s do it, then.”
When they’ve lived by the sea for fifty years, Crowley comes home from a daytrip to the city with a story about a strange encounter.
“You’ll never guess who I saw in London today,” he says, sauntering into the angel’s study and setting a paper cup of hot chocolate from Aziraphale’s favorite cafe on the desk by his elbow. Crowley’s voice is so bland that Aziraphale doesn’t think to worry, barely even looking up from his book except to give a quick kiss to the cheek in greeting. And then he goes on, “Hastur and Ligur, carrying Sainsbury shopping, of all things.”
That gets Aziraphale’s attention. He turns in his chair sharply enough that he knocks the cup clean off the desk, and only a quick miracle on Crowley’s part rescues the three-hundred year old rug beneath their feet.
“Angel, it’s alright,” he says, holding the cup in both hands, eyebrows lifted and eyes round with surprise as Aziraphale stands. “I didn’t mean to spook you.”
Aziraphale lifts the drink away and sets it aside, and takes Crowley’s face in both his hands. He is sun-kissed and freckled, after thousands of mid-morning naps in the garden and afternoon rambles across the white chalk hills, and the dearest thing in one angel’s whole life.
“They didn’t hurt you?” It’s too gentle to be a demand, but every bit as insistent as one. “They didn’t try anything?”
Crowley covers Aziraphale’s hands with his own. He’s smiling a little now, knowing how to reassure.
“‘Course they didn’t, after you put the fear of God back into them. They froze like a couple of deer in the road. I wish I’d had time to think it was funny.”
His racing heart beginning to settle, Aziraphale draws Crowley into a kiss. It goes on for awhile, long enough that the shadows in the room have changed when they part and Crowley looks like he needs to sit down.
They wind up on the sofa in the den, and Crowley recounts the events of the afternoon with much hand-waving and general good humor. The sparrow is drawn to the window by the sound of his voice and then invites itself inside without so much as a by-your-leave, miraculously not a day older than it was when Crowley found it in the park. Aziraphale tries not to mind as it flits about the room.
“I was just leaving Friarwood when I saw them,” Crowley says. “Hastur was wearing jeans. Ligur had his lizard on a leash. If I hadn’t just dropped nearly a thousand pounds on wine, and with the receipt in my pocket to prove it, I would think the whole thing was a strange fever dream I cooked up after too long in the sun.”
“What on earth are they doing there?” Aziraphale murmurs. He may have retired to the coast for a quieter life with his husband, but London still holds a piece of their hearts; the bookshop is there, and St James’ Park, and the Ritz. He’s loath to let unruly demons have the run of the place.
“Could be they weren’t doing anything, angel,” Crowley says carefully. “It looked like they were just coming back from the shop. They looked like people. Like, properly human. New to it, still, a little stiff—and Ligur kept forgetting to blink—but they walked away without saying a word. Did I already tell you Ligur’s lizard was on a leash?”
Aziraphale can’t help smiling. “Yes, love, you did. But I imagine it was worth telling twice.”
Crowley summons both the hot chocolate and the book left abandoned on the angel’s desk, and then produces a tin of chocolate-dipped biscotti with a little flourish. At that point, Aziraphale’s worry has no choice but to take a step back. There simply isn’t room for it at the moment.
Crowley opens the tin, giving the task more attention than it deserves, so his hands are busy and he doesn’t have to look up when he says, “You know that poet? Frost? American bloke.”
“Robert Frost? Of course.”
“He said something once,” Crowley mumbles. The tips of his ears are pink. “About, uh. Earth. He said it’s ‘the right place for love’.”
“‘I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.’ Oh, you darling.”
“Don’t,” Crowley groans, shoulders hunched up next to his ears. “I just. Ngh. I think he had it right, that’s all. Earth’s the best place for it. You and I can see that. Took us six thousand years, but we figured it out. Maybe they will, too.”
Aziraphale snatches the tin out of Crowley’s hands and tilts his face up, despite the demon’s squirming embarrassment, to tell him sternly, “No, don’t think you can quote poetry at me and get away with it. I absolutely adore you. You’re just going to have to put up with hearing about it this evening, my dear.”
Crowley makes a noise that doesn’t quite manage to be a word, but there’s the hint of a smile in his mouth. Aziraphale thinks he’ll be able to coax it out. He’s willing to dedicate the rest of his life to the cause.
“And you’re right,” he says, touching Crowley’s cheek, following it with a kiss, never taking for granted that he can. “Maybe they'll learn to see it. They deserve a chance to try.”