Chapter Text
They didn’t land so much as find themselves still standing.
“—yyyyyyyyyyy, oh!”
Crowley’s face was smothered in Aziraphale’s shoulder, but he knew one thing without needing to see it.
“Is there snow? There’s snow isn’t there?”
“Just a smidge.”
“Urghhhh.” Crowley squinted aside and was blinded by an endless stress headache of white. “Why does there have to be snow? I hate snow.” He snapped on a pair of sunglasses and fashioned a scowl from his squint.
“Well—” Aziraphale hedged and Crowley just knew he was about to say something absolutely ridiculous. “Because we’re in a snow globe, I think.”
“Are you—” Crowley aimed his scowl upwards. The heavens were clouded with pinkish pearlescence, but beyond the mystical candy fluff stuff, the sky itself looked—oddly shiny. Oddly distorted as though it were reflecting something in as well as mirroring the pinkness and the dazzle of the snow. “Is that Mona Lisa?” Crowley had gone back to squinting again.
“I think so, yes.” Aziraphale tilted his head, trying to better decipher their living room wall through the distant, not-so-much-a sky above. “She looks more as if she’s smiling from here.”
Crowley grumbled and stamped his cold feet in the snow.
“Well, that makes one of us.”
“It’s rather bigger on the inside isn’t it?” Aziraphale glanced aside at Crowley and was met by a menacing glare. “Oh, come here, you poutsome cherub.”
Crowley sputtered.
“Not a cherub. Not ever a cherub.”
But he allowed himself to be comforted nevertheless with a kiss to the bridge of his nose and the warmth of a miracled scarf rearranged by loving hands beneath his chin.
“Tartan?” he asked, glancing down at it. “Really?” But Aziraphale was warm from chest to belly pressed against him, and Aziraphale was saying, almost touching at the lips:
“You know how I like you in things of mine—” and maybe Crowley would remember he was meant to be annoyed once he’d finished being thoroughly smooched.
“There. Is that better?”
“No,” Crowley lied. The snow was melting off tree boughs above them. “We’re in a snowglobe, on the mantelpiece, on Christmas stupid Eve and—” Crowley floundered in frustration. “I don’t want to.”
“But we’re together.” Aziraphale looped his arm through Crowley’s. “And I’m sure we’re quite safe.”
Something unfairly close by them chose that particular moment to bellow like a freshly gutted boar.
Crowley went taut as a wire.
“I, uh— I don’t suppose there’s a flaming sword up your cardigan sleeve?”
Aziraphale flapped his arm regrettably. “No.”
Whatever had made the awful din could be heard moving towards them through the trees, and Crowley’s throat bobbed as he swallowed.
“Battle of wits it is then.”
“Perhaps we can reason—” Aziraphale’s eyes went wide with horror, his sentence losing what small confidence it had as the branches before them parted, “—with it. Oh, dear.”
Like the nightmare before, during, and just after Christmas, a towering beast of an animal shouldered its way from the forest of piney trees. Crowley clung at Aziraphale’s arm in a futile attempt to keep his own from trembling.
“I think I'll leave that part to you.”
“H—” Aziraphale rose to the task heroically. “Hello.”
Apparently not one for talking, the great hulking creature tossed its head and trudged a step nearer. It was skull and throat taller than Crowley, not to mention its three feet of antlers, and its pelt was matted rottish green, hanging off it in filthy scrags. Its breath made stinking billows on the stark north polar air, and strings of slaver swung pendulous from its jaws as it brayed in either rage, or pain, or both. Its eyes were restless and weeping, milky white as though it might have been half blind.
“Is that, uh— Hhm.” Crowley sounded surprisingly calm considering. “Angel, is that a zombie reindeer?”
“I think it’s zombie Rudolph.”
Sure enough, where Aziraphale timidly gestured, Crowley saw that the beast was wearing a barely distinguishable leather halter around its raggedy neck. The illuminated R embossed upon its front was legible enough, and the rest did seem to make a fairly passable suggestion of udolph.
“Restore the magic,” Crowley muttered. “Revive the dead.”
“I fear,” Aziraphale conceded, “that Santa may not have been entirely candid with us.”
Crowley grumbled like the Bentley on a mud-rutted country byway.
“If we find a naughty list somewhere around here, I am putting him on it. Right at the top.”
“I’ll underline it,” Aziraphale offered. “Twice.”
And though it made them both feel better, it didn’t really help matters much. Rudolph bobbed his huge, grim head and gobbets of drool threatened spattering Aziraphale’s shoes.
“Argh!” He stumbled backwards. “Reviving the dead then, yes? We can manage that, can’t we? Do reindeers slobber less when they’re alive?”
Crowley steadied Aziraphale’s stagger.
“How the heaven should I know? How many reindeers d’you think I’ve met?”
“Take my hand!” Aziraphale had grabbed hold already, but Crowley squeezed back to show willing.
“Count of three?” Crowley widened his stance and clenched his bottom preparatively. “One—”
“Two—”
“Three.”
As they spoke this last in unison, each of them focused a tentative miracle at Rudolph with the intention of restoring him to his, presumably less gruesome, former self.
Be as you were, was how Aziraphale phrased it. Unzombify yourself, you petrifying bugger, and look like you’re meant to on Christmas cards, was closer to Crowley’s request.
The two combined made nonsense poetry. Rudolph huffed and sparkling smoke burst from his nostrils, engulfing him like a conjurer’s trick and clearing to reveal—a reindeer no less towering, but rather less likely to cause the children of the world lifelong trauma. His coat was thick and shaggy, his antlers were felted with velveteen fuzz, and his nose looked so soft you could rub your face on it, faintly pinkish like an angel’s favourite waistcoat.
“He’s not smaller,” Crowley noted.
“I’d even say he’s taller,” Aziraphale reckoned. “Now his posture’s improved a bit.”
“He’s ginormous!”
“Brobdingnagian.”
“Brobdngk— yeah,” Crowley quite agreed. “That big.”
“I say—” Aziraphale had a sudden, decidedly awful thought. He nosed at Crowley’s ear behind his hand lest Rudolph should hear him. “You don’t suppose he ate the other reindeer?”
“Serves them right if he did,” Crowley reasoned. “Laughing and calling him names.”
“Could you not at least pretend to be horrified, petal?” Aziraphale despaired of him. “Just a little bit?”
“Angel. They wouldn’t let him join in any reindeer games!”
“Mmmmrrrrrhhh,” said Rudolph emphatically, approaching them now at a heavy but much more eloquent gait. His eyes were bright and intelligent, and when he nosed at Crowley’s shoulder, almost knocking him over backwards, his breath smelled of tinsel and candy canes.
“Oh! I think he likes you.” Aziraphale sounded delighted. Crowley, having almost been thrown on his bottom in the snow would have rathered the reindeer’s indifference, but heigh ho. “Could you lead us to Santa’s workshop, my dear? Oh!” Aziraphale broke into tinkle-bell titters as he realised what he’d said. “My deer!”
Crowley groaned as though he wasn’t grinning secretly inside.
“Can we please just get on?”
“Right.” Aziraphale sobered himself. “Of course. Santa’s existence hangs in the balance.”
“He might have finished all your sherry by now,” Crowley pointed out innocently, “and be starting on the port.”
Aziraphale visibly steadied himself.
“Well, what are we dallying for! Spit spot!” He clapped his hands in sudden haste and started to stride away into the ankle deep snow. “We have a naughty list to find.”
With Rudolph having adjusted their course in the opposite direction, where a distant group of buildings could be seen, they soon arrived at what appeared to be a stable. Rudolph snorted towards a courtyard with several more buildings behind it, and then made sad eyes whilst hovering in the gargantuan archway which led to his lodgings within. Judging by the archway’s size, he had always been as big, and when Aziraphale and Crowley stepped inside, they found a single stall with a half-door almost as tall as Crowley, and the rest of the open space beside it taken up by a mountainous mound of dirtied tarpaulin.
“What do you suppose a reindeer eats?” asked Aziraphale, pushing open the door to Rudolph’s stall and peering inside to find an empty food trough mounted on the wall and another, presumably for water, on the floor.
“One that size?” Crowley countered. “A lot.”
“Do you recall?” Aziraphale persisted. “That first Christmas at the Dowlings? Young master Warlock made magic reindeer food—”
“And ate half of it when no one was looking.” Crowley snorted at the memory. “Sparkly poo for days—”
“Yes, quite, but, do you suppose—since all of this is powered by the collective human imagination—that perhaps they might actually—”
“Eat glitter and oats?”
By this point in proceedings it didn’t seem like the most ridiculous suggestion, and Crowley had just begun to make a begrudging suppose so face when Aziraphale, looking purposefully round at the ground thereabouts, suddenly pointed and cried: “A-ha!”
The A- he was ha-ing, Crowley cautiously discovered, was a dried up clump of reindeer poo, trampled amidst the ratty old straw and, yes—bending nearer with his breath held just in case—still faintly glittery in places.
“Oats and glitter it is then.”
Crowley miracled the wall trough full of the stuff (and threw in a thought-full of carrots on top for the sake of Rudolph’s health) while Aziraphale saw to the water trough and laid down clean straw with a wave of his hand. Rudolph bellowed for joy and went rollicking into his stall, shaking the ground beneath them like a narrowly localised earthquake. He stuck his nose into the water trough first, and drew back wailing shortly after as though he’d been stung.
“I don’t think he likes water,” said Crowley.
“Oh,” Aziraphale fretted. “Um—” And then he tentatively miracled the water into sherry, at which point Rudolph went happily diving back in, lapping up a half pint at a time.
“That explains why his nose glows,” Crowley observed, and when Aziraphale turned to look at him, the dashing old devil was grinning. Aziraphale frowned, feeling vaguely like the butt of some joke or other. Shortly after, he started to smile, quite by accident, Crowley’s happiness being infectious, but caught himself sober a half-second after, having realised the punch line of the joke. Aziraphale stuck his nose—which didn’t glow actually, thank you, ever, no matter the number of sherries he drank—in the air and gestured primly towards the grubby old tarpaulin.
“I imagine that must be the sleigh.”
“Probably.” From beneath the dirtied tarpaulin, a peek of golden railing was visible now, where Rudolph’s frolicking had jostled it aside. “No wonder he’s so brobding-what’s-it-called. He’d need to be, pulling that.”
The sleigh was, indeed, gargantuan. As they drew away its coverings it towered above them, climbing steeply at the rear behind a driver’s seat the width of a three-seater sofa. All its railings and its runners were a dull brass-gold, while the red painted wood of its body had begun to peel and fade. At the fore of the sleigh, a spectacular carving of eight leaping reindeer, hewn somehow, one out of another in grand, sky-galloping poses, as though they were racing, each pair of them onward, ahead and ahead and ahead, and all their weathered golden paintwork flaking off as they flew.
Without even needing to glance at each other, Crowley and Aziraphale joined hands, directing their combined miraculous powers towards the sleigh, just as they had done with Rudolph. By the time they were finished, all its metalwork was gleaming; its paintwork, though having grown several shades darker (reminiscent of a certain angel’s bookshop, as it happened) now glossy and beautifully sleek, while the galloping reindeer looked carved of old gold.
For a moment, they both stood in silence, marvelling (and worrying, in not quite equal measure) at the magnificent sleigh before them, neither one of them wishing to mention the fact they would have to figure out how to fly it very soon.
“Toys?” suggested Crowley.
“Toys,” Aziraphale concurred.
As it turned out, the youngsters of the modern age weren’t so keen on toys as on gadgets. Doodads, even, in Aziraphale’s opinion, picking through the great heaped piles of them, the factory seals on their boxes all broken, their warranties unanimously void. There were toys as well, in the three-building storehouse they’d found, but they were buried underneath the sprawling junkscape of techno-wotsits, and Crowley walked beside Aziraphale with his arms crossed, shaking his head and tutting now and again as he surveyed the task at hand.
“Never mind unzombifying Rudolph,” he grumbled. “Convincing a million Apple devices they can be fixed for free out of warranty? That’ll really take some lazarii, that.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have any trouble, surely,” grinned Aziraphale. “Serpent of Eden.” He waited for Crowley to divine his own punchline and, when Crowley refused with a slow-growing grimace, gave it to him along with a nudge and a wink. “Apple.”
“I understood the reference.”
“We can do it though,” Aziraphale persisted. “Together.”
And Crowley couldn’t help but smile, just a little bit, at that. He tried to hide it under something like annoyance, mind you, baring a fang as he grouched, “Course we can. Stupid question. We can do anything together.”
Aziraphale kissed him blithely, just at the quailing corner of his ever so menacing snarl.
“It wasn’t a question, my dear.”
It took them a good four hours, coaxing every doodad back to full working order, uncracking screens and uncorrupting hardware, and restoring every broken seal. While they worked, they vanished each gift from the pile into large, slightly careworn velvet sacks which were hung up along the wall (and which Crowley had privately not had the heart to spruce up because they reminded him of Aziraphale’s waistcoat, though he’d blamed not wishing to waste further miracle energy, of course.)
After the gadgets came the toys. Each of them mended and spruced up neatly, from leggy plastic dolls with toothpaste advert smiles to darling little teddy bears and everything between. If Aziraphale gave all the cuddliest things (he grew particularly enamoured with a handsome, slope-nosed lion) nifty bows of tartan ribbon, well, nobody had to know.
By the time they were done, they were exhausted to the wing joints; heavy with a pins and needles tingling sort of fuzz, having channelled so much energy for so prolonged a time.
“I’d’ve thought there’d be elves?” Crowley noted, while they dragged the first of several dozen burgeoning sacks of presents (they were bigger on the inside) across the snow dusted cobbles of the courtyard and into the stable block the human way, while they gave their weary miracles a rest.
“Me too.” Aziraphale glanced all about as though he might spy a hitherto unnoticed army of miniature beings with pointed ears and jingly hats that had possibly been invisible up until now. Unless they’d all been turned into snowflakes, there was no one to be found.
“There’s only that building left, over there.” Crowley pointed, as they exited the stable block, trudging back across the courtyard to collect the next sack, at a little slanted cottage, tucked away at right angles to the stable’s far end. “Must be where Santa lives?”
“It’s not as—” Aziraphale considered the right word for what Santa’s cottage wasn’t.
“Gingerbready?” Crowley suggested.
Aziraphale crinkled his eyes.
“Gingerbready as you’d expect.”
“Maybe when we—” Crowley wiggled his fingers.
“I’m not certain I have gingerbready left in me,” Aziraphale confessed.
Crowley sidled against him and laid a weary head upon his shoulder as they walked.
“Nor me.”
As it happened, when they did, metaphorically speaking, wiggle their fingers about it—Aziraphale willing once more, be as you were, while Crowley willed, sort yourself out, you look awful. You’ve got guests coming round and I bet you haven’t vacuumed—the cottage before them dutifully repaired its leaking roof and renewed its rotted window frames, re-mortared its brickwork and reattached its letterbox, and shook away the cobwebs in the corners of the windows, and gave its front door a fresh lick of burgundy paint, but didn’t turn a single roof tile into gingerbread.
When they ventured inside, however, they were greeted by the smell of fresh-baked gingerbread and—Crowley turning to Aziraphale and Aziraphale turning to Crowley—they exchanged vague eyebrows about it.
“I don’t think that was me,” said Crowley. He was awful at miracled baking and if it had been him the gingerbread would have smelled a lot more burnt.
“It wasn’t me either,” Aziraphale insisted, and made a beeline for the kitchen to investigate further.
The cottage was very old-fashioned, as though it hadn’t been updated since the notion of Christmas began to become what it was thanks to Dickens. The kitchen was a tiny space with a brick-red tiled floor and an old fat bellied iron stove. On the hearth, there lay a rag rug all in cheerful scraps of colour, while above there hung a myriad of copper pots, and jelly moulds, and toffee pans, and sweet making rollers, and clusters of bunched cookie cutters. And, sure enough, on the counter, beside a lovely old Belfast sink, arranged upon a twee plate with holly painted on it, there sat, apparently awaiting them, a batch of perfectly browned gingerbread biscuits, in the shape of little houses.
Crowley peered past Aziraphale’s shoulder to see, on account of the fond little, “Oh!” he had expressed, and saw that the middlemost biscuit said ‘thank you’ in a lovely cursive hand, while the others were all neatly iced to resemble the sorts of gingerbread houses they’d feared they might have had to miracle Santa’s home into.
Crowley grinned.
“It’s like the bookshop! Do you feel it?”
Aziraphale beamed at the ceiling.
“I do!”
There was sentience here, which really shouldn’t have surprised them, and it nudged the plate of gingerbread towards them while it gave a happy creak of its cupboards.
“Thank you, my dear!” Aziraphale picked up the plate and carried it with them back through the hall and into a cosy little sitting room with a roaring log fire and a wing back chair so piled over with blankets and cushions it was scarcely even visible beneath.
Aziraphale buried his bottom amongst it all, while Crowley settled on what ought to have been the arm, and there they nibbled a biscuit each in not quite silence. Aziraphale expressed enthusiastic yummy noises, while Crowley quietly pondered each bite as though he were fathoming something out.
“Do you feel… I don’t know.” He did a bit more nibbling, deciding how it felt. “As if it’s sort of topping up your fuel tank?”
Aziraphale said, “Mmphmfuh—” and then lifted a finger to excuse himself while he swallowed down the last of his biscuit. “I think I know what you mean.” He flexed his fingers, looking thoughtful. “I feel as though I could miracle the night away and not get a bit worn out!”
Three biscuits later, Crowley expressed the strange sensation that crackles of sparks might erupt from his head. Aziraphale suggested that this probably meant he was fully charged and oughtn’t to eat anymore, just in case.
“Mine are up to my nose,” he confessed, wrinkling said nose with caution. “I’m rather wary of sneezing…”
“Keep the fireworks for new year, angel.” Crowley rose from the chair arm and reached for Aziraphale’s hand. “First, let’s concentrate on saving bloody Christmas.”