Chapter Text
It took a good five minutes of brisk walking until Aziraphale finally decided that maybe - just maybe - storming out of his own bookshop probably wasn’t the wisest idea he’d had this millennia. He paused, momentarily, in a valiant attempt to regain his bearings. He’d stopped himself just outside a pub, The Adam and Eve, and rolled his eyes at the irony of it. At least he knew where he was now, he supposed. Now it was just a case of deciding if he was prepared to head back the way he’d come and confront the archangel and demon he’d left in his shop, where they’d hopefully still left some of his shop standing of course.
He knew he hadn’t been in his right mind when he’d left. Usually he would head directly out of his shop and walk the 15 minutes to St James’s Park to clear his head. He wasn’t quite sure why his feet had lead him in the opposite direction. With a small huff, he made to turn on his heel and head back in the other direction when he was stopped again. This time, by a rather petite young woman. Her hair fell in tattered strands around her shoulders, but her eyes were wide and bright. Too wide, and too bright, Aziraphale noted just as an overwhelming aura of Bad invaded his senses.
He thought he’d been quick to disguise his surprise, but the smirk that played upon her lips told him that she knew he’d realised. He briefly wondered why that would seem to please her, until he took a couple of steps back and suddenly felt the pointed tip of a large blade at the small of his back.
“Any more steps and even dear Raph won’t be able to help you”
The voice behind him was cruel in even its intonation. A sense of vileness played on every syllable that fell off the unknown demon’s tongue and all of a sudden, Aziraphale felt very small, and very scared, and very stupid for doing the one thing that Crowley had asked him not to do.
The one that had taken on the female form laughed. Short and sharp and really more of a cackle than genuine laughter and the sound drew some attention to them from passers-by. It was short-lived though and Aziraphale knew that human’s wouldn’t be able to help him out of this particular predicament. Demon’s were incredibly gifted at making human’s think that there was nothing out of the ordinary happening.
“Not got much to say have you, eh? Angel?”
Aziraphale grimaced as he was reminded of Crowley’s predilection towards calling him ‘Angel’. However, when he said it, it sounded more like a term of endearment. This sounded more like mocking and Aziraphale decided against giving her the satisfaction of a reply.
She waited a moment longer, before she whined, “Hastur… it’s not being any fun!”
He knew that name. He’d heard Crowley complain about the so-called 'Duke of Hell' on multiple occasions. Then he remembered what else Crowley had mentioned and his blood ran cold. Hastur was the demon that Crowley had tried to kill with Holy Water - or one of the two at least. He recalled Crowley bragging about how the trap had ‘got one of them at least’ and at the time he’d simply smiled and nodded and not really thought about it since. Until this moment.
“Don’t worry yourself, Erzin” Hastur replied, “I’m sure Beelzebub will let you watch when the real fun begins… Belias says she’s gonna start selling tickets!”
The female-presenting demon, Erzin, clapped her hands together in glee, and it was at this point that Aziraphale began to think that he should start figuring out a way to get out of the situation. Unfortunately, as though he’d read his mind, Hastur pressed the tip of the blade even harder against Aziraphale’s back,
“Ah ah ah, angel,” he tutted, bringing his free hand up to curl around said angel’s throat, “This here’s a special blade – don’t know if you’ve heard about it yet – but I’ve been told by my superiors that one slice from this will very slowly drain the grace out of an angel. And we know all about your punishment – I reckon even the tiniest nick will have you empty.”
Aziraphale stilled instantly. The colour drained from his face and now he was truly beginning to panic, “What do you want from me?” He had to ask, as though demon’s tended to have reasons for the cruelty they inflicted,
Erzin smirked, “You made Beelzebub look like a fool!” She exclaimed, her voice tinged with outright glee, “You and that thing we call ‘brethren’”
Crowley. Suddenly Aziraphale was terrified, not just for his own safety, but he worried about what they were planning to do to his beloved demon. Clearly, Hell wasn’t as ignorant of Crowley’s part in the averted apocalypse as he’d thought they’d been. It was, admittedly, a foolish thought, he reasoned. If Heaven had decided that Aziraphale needed punishment, they should have guessed it would only be a matter of time before Hell would come up with their own version of punishment for his counterpart.
“Please,” normally he would be horrified at the idea of begging with demons in this manner, but he couldn’t think of what else he could do, he was all but powerless with his Grace diminished, “do whatever you want with me – but I must ask that you leave him alone”
That earned him a bark of laughter for his efforts and the sound made him wince
“Stupid angel,” she spat, “Can’t you figure it out?”
He must have given her a somewhat confused look, judging by the way she rolled her eyes in exasperation before throwing Hastur a look that asked for him to take over explanations.
“It’s very simple,” He continued, conversationally, “That idiot, Crowley, has allowed himself to care for you.” Aziraphale could almost see the sneered plastered on his face when he said the word ‘care’, as though it was the worst thing that Crowley could have done. Perhaps to most demons it was. “Of course, that makes things easy for us. We torture you beyond all recognition and can you imagine how that would make him suffer?”
Aziraphale gulped and thought again about whether just trying to run for it would be worth the risk. All those times that Gabriel had tried to persuade him to exercise, in an attempt to keep his corporeal form fit and healthy. He was beginning to think that he might take the archangel up on that offer. If he ever got out of this alive, that was.
“Or even better,” Erzin added, “we torture you until you curse God. Until you lose all of your remaining hope and faith. And you know what that would mean, don’t you?” She had a wild look in her eyes as she encouraged Aziraphale to nod with her, “How many millennia has it been since our last Fallen angel? It’s so exciting isn’t it?”
He had nothing to say. Or rather, he had a lot he could have said. He could have begged and pleaded some more. He could have tried praying to see if someone in Heaven might hear him, though he rather suspected that if he’d tried that the knife at his back might be quickly slicing through his spinal cord. He didn’t want to think about how much the thought terrified him.
So he stayed silent, attempting defiance, though the result was less than impressive and he knew it. He tried not to let his mind wander to the sort of torture that Hell had waiting for him. Crowley had told him before that they were particularly inventive about the punishments they inflicted on those that were captured or demon that had done too much Good. There were nights that Crowley, having decided that Aziraphale’s sofa was a ‘good enough’ place for a nap, had woken up in a cold sweat after his mind had supplied him with images of those punishments being executed on him. Aziraphale had comforted his demon during those nights, held him close and surrounded them both within the safety of his wings while he used an aura of peace and serenity to soothe him until his thoughts were calm. And each time, without fail, Crowley would leave the next day and spend the next week or so tempting the general population into doing Bad, or performing deeds that would cause foul tempers and irritation to surge within whatever humans he chose. On these occasions, Aziraphale would leave him to it and feign ignorance if his lack of thwarting was ever called in to question.
At the time, he’d been scared of what would happened to his beloved if Hell had ever decided to come for him. Now, he was facing the very real inevitability of finding out first-hand what they might have had planned.
“Urgh,” Erzin grumbled after a few minutes of silence, “It’s not saying anything now - can we just go?”
Hastur glanced around him once. Then once more to be certain. Then with a sharp nod to his colleague, Aziraphale felt himself being pushed towards a nearby abandoned building where he could feel the large quantities of demonic evil washing over him, invading every pore and making his skin crawl uncomfortably. Angels of his rank (even his rank before his latest punishment) were not supposed to be this close to a portal to Hell. The waves of Evil were already making him feel a bit woozy. In fact, he thought it seemed like there was an inky blackness creeping into the periphery of his vision. That was, as it turned out, his last coherent thought before he slumped forwards in unconsciousness.
***
“Does he usually leave for this long?”
Gabriel was the one to awkwardly break the tense silence that had been present since Aziraphale’s departure. Neither the archangel nor the demon had moved from the spots that Aziraphale had left them in and it suddenly hit Crowley that they’d been standing and throwing glares at each other for around an hour so far. He looked towards the shop door as if half-expecting Aziraphale to appear as though summoned, cheeks tinged pink as they always were after a brisk walk on a chilled spring day in London.
That didn’t happened though, and Crowley frowned slightly, “Not usually.”
It wasn’t entirely true. Aziraphale did tend to leave the shop for long periods, especially when he’d gotten wind of a rare book for sale in some random shop in the middle of nowhere. Crowley, on multiple occasions, had had to scare off some solicitors that had tried to take advantage of the angel’s absence and forcibly evict him. His efforts had accidentally garnered the bookshop a reputation for being a paranormal hotspot, and Aziraphale had ended up having, not only solicitors, but also teams of paranormal investigators knocking at the door.
However, Aziraphale didn’t tend to leave for so long after claiming he was only popping out for ‘just a moment’. Especially given the circumstances under which he left.
“Would you know?” Crowley asked.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow, “Know what?”
“If something happened to him?” Crowley didn’t particularly want to imagine that anything could have happened to his angel in such a short space of time, but the thought would be plaguing his mind if he didn’t at least ask, “Like, you can feel a Heavenly presence nearby, right?”
“We’re not bonded” Gabriel snapped. He hadn’t meant to, if he were honest with himself. The demon probably wasn’t aware of the phenomena he was very nearly describing and he wasn’t particularly far off with what Gabriel thought he had meant to describe. He was almost correct in that Celestial beings could sense another’s aura, whether that aura was Heavenly or Infernal. However, the way Crowley had put it made it sound more like the almost psychic link that formed between a bonded pair of celestial beings. The implication that he might have something like that with Aziraphale stung in a way that Gabriel hadn’t quite been expecting.
“You what?”
Interesting. Gabriel perked up, just slightly. The demon wasn’t aware of bonding. Of course, his knowledge and memories of Celestial things, such as bonding, would have been erased after his Fall. Apparently, Aziraphale hadn’t yet felt the need to inform the demon of the possibility of such things.
He couldn’t help but allow a surge of hope rise within him. Perhaps Aziraphale didn’t want to form a bond with the demon after all.
“Nothing,” He waved Crowley’s question off, “But, yes, for that matter. It’s not about feeling a ‘Heavenly presence’, as you so idiotically put it. I can feel an aura of Good, though.” Then he frowned, “It is, however, far stronger than Aziraphale’s had been when he left”
It was odd. Aziraphale’s aura had been alarmingly weakened after the ritual and had only marginally regained in strength as he recovered from the ordeal. The aura he could feel was akin to…
“Fuck,” Crowley interrupted Gabriel’s train of thought, his voice strained with discomfort, “That feels like a damned migraine heading straight for me.”
Then a light knock sounded on the door and the feminine voice called, “Aziraphale? Gabriel? Are you in there?”
Sariel.
The door miracled itself open, and then closed itself once the Seraph had entered the room. A kind smile was present on her face when she looked to Gabriel to greet him. A smile that was quickly wiped away when she caught sight of the demon that also occupied the small space that was Aziraphale’s shop floor.
“What is he doing here?”
Crowley bristled. Every fibre of his being telling him to tell this new angel where to shove it, and that he had more right to be here than any of them, but the thought that Aziraphale might be upset with him for doing so kept him holding his tongue. To an extent at least.
“Oi!” He exclaimed, “Why don’t you start by telling me who, exactly, you are?”
Like most other angels, she had perfected the very specific look of distaste that angels liked to give demons. Like they were a particularly bothersome stain that refused to be washed out of their favourite top. It was a look that Crowley had remembered Aziraphale trying to replicate early in their time together. Not that Aziraphale had done a very good job with it.
This new angel though, she was very good at it. Crowley might have even said she was better at it than Gabriel was, and that was saying something. However, there seemed to be more to it than that. Crowley could feel her gaze piercing through him, like she was looking for something in particularly and getting more frustrated that she couldn’t find whatever it was she was looking for.
After a moment of staring him down, she finally replied, “My name is Sariel, of the Seraphim”, with a huff for good measure, before she turned to talk to Gabriel again,
“Is this definitely him? The demon?”
Gabriel nodded, “Definitely him, yes”
“But he doesn’t feel that-”
“I know, Sariel”
“It is strange, because most demons feel-”
“I said I know,” Gabriel gritted out, “Do you understand the problem now?”
“Is it Aziraphale’s doing?”
“I’m…. I don’t know”
Gabriel sighed, a hint of defeat audible in his tone. Sariel’s features took on a softer look; the righteousness that seemed to be ever-present on most angels had faded to take on a look that Crowley could only think to describe as ‘sympathetic’
“Would anybody care to what you two are going on about?” Crowley interjected, “You know, it’s quite rude to talk about someone when they’re in the same room as you”
Sariel turned her attention back on him before she moved closer. She moved as if she was floating and Crowley was struck with the sudden urge to back away very fast. All at once she felt like his judge, jury and executioner, to deal punishment for a crime he wasn’t sure he’d committed and Crowley had to wonder whether everybody who met her felt as he did. It was ridiculous. He was a demon; he wasn’t supposed to feel judgement from any angel. Apart from Aziraphale, on occasion. However, that was more judgement along the lines of, putting one of his first editions in the wrong place on the bookshelf, or driving the Bentley too fast through the middle of London, or whispering in his ear all the ways he would pleasure the angel while he was in the middle of eating his desert at the Ritz.
“You are not like the others,” She said, whether to herself or to him, he wasn’t certain.
“What others?”
As this, she hesitated, seemingly seesawing between telling him the truth, or throwing out something cryptic that he couldn’t make head nor tail of. She looked towards Gabriel, who replied with what appeared to be a cross between a shrug and a nod.
“Most demons are devoid of love. It is what defines them as demons. It allows them to tempt and corrupt and lead innocents on a sinful path.” She explained, “However, I can feel a sense of love in you. How is that?”
This didn’t surprise Crowley as much as it probably should have done. He knew he could feel love. He’d known it millennia ago. If he thought back long enough, he’d have remembered feeling that initial spark the moment Aziraphale had told him that he’d given the flaming sword away to Adam and Eve. As it was, he could feel it every time he saw Aziraphale smiling at him from the other side of the bookshop while Crowley lounged atop the old worn sofa to pass the time as he thumbed through the latest rare book addition to his collection. He could feel it every time Aziraphale touched his arm in that gentle way of his when he wanted to get Crowley’s attention. He could feel it every time he made love to his angel, after he’d spent himself inside the other, wrapped his arms around him and nuzzled into the top of his blonde curls.
So yes, he was perfectly aware of his own capacity for love. He still didn’t know whether that made him different from other demons, or whether other demons that he knew of just chose to not show love and angels, in their arrogance, just assumed the demons were incapable of it. But he wasn’t about to let her know that,
“‘Love’?” He scoffed, “What utter nonsense. I am a demon you know. Think love’s a bit contradictory there don’t you? Now lust on the other hand…”
“Lying to me would be a very foolish thing to do, demon”
Crowley raised an eyebrow and happened to glance over at Gabriel as he did so. Which was apparently the right thing to do and he just caught Gabriel mouthing something at him. ‘-ath’? ‘inpass’? No, not a word. ‘Impasse’? That didn’t seem right. ‘A path?’ What point would that make?
Then it hit him. Empath.
Now it all made sense. That’s why Crowley felt a keen sense of judgement when she looked at him. He’d known about the empathy of angels, he’d probably had it himself when he was an angel, though that time has been wiped from his memory. It was an innate sense for most of them, but the emotions that most angels could sense had to be felt keenly by the one they were reading. Crowley had heard of these particularly powerful empaths.
With this thought in mind, he kept his lips pressed tightly together.
She stared him down a moment longer, then sighed and said, “Tell me, where is Aziraphale now?”
Crowley and Gabriel glanced at each other, then back to her, then back to each other where Crowley offered a shrug as an answer and Gabriel seemed to be stammering for some kind of explanation for the angel’s disappearance. To which Sariel responded, with a huff and a roll of the eyes,
“It would be easiest just to tell me that you don’t know”
Gabriel acquiesced, “We don’t know”
“Well done” She replied, and here Crowley was thinking that Aziraphale was the only angel able to coat each of his words with such sugar-coated sarcasm, when apparently there were others that shared this trait.
He was almost ready to feel amusement at the sight of Gabriel being talked to as if he were a particularly difficult child, but then he felt something. Deep inside his core. The same feeling he got whenever he went back down to Hell. It was as though someone had given him a quick short of unnecessary adrenaline that buzzed through his nerve endings in a way that felt wholly unnatural. You see, a demon could sense evil. Could sense just the faint whispering threads of it with a pinpoint accuracy. It lead them to the exact right souls to corrupt and tempt. Most humans were thrumming with it, bubbling just under the surface. The challenge was to tempt the souls that had only a touch of it before an angel could come along and snuff it out.
“Guys,” He interrupted the two angels as they descended into a minor argument about Gabriel’s incompetence in regards to keeping an eye on Aziraphale, “Do either of you feel that?”
They turned to face him, “Feel what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” He couldn’t help it, he’d been around Aziraphale for over 6000 years, sarcasm was becoming second nature to him, “maybe just the overwhelming aura of evil that’s just popped up?”
Both the celestial beings sniffed the air in unison, noses wrinkling and upper lips curling in distaste and Crowley was suddenly struck with the thought that Aziraphale was truly different from most angels.
“We thought that was just you” Gabriel shrugged as he glanced towards Sariel, who nodded in agreement.
Crowley narrowed his eyes, though, with them still hidden behind his sunglasses he wasn’t sure what effect the glare might have had. With a quick shake of the head, and a sudden fear that their nonchalance towards Aziraphale’s disappearance may have been unwise, he made his way towards the front door, giving little care as to whether or not the archangel and the seraph followed behind. His attention was focussed on pinpointing the source of the overwhelming sense of evil and hoping that there was no trace of anything celestial near it.
***
He hadn’t had to walk far.
He also probably didn’t need to try so hard to locate it. With every step he took closer to the source, he noticed people fighting with each other, customers being thrown from normally quiet establishments, car horns blaring loudly for seemingly little reason. Yes, he was definitely getting closer.
The worry was that Crowley could also sense that warmth that surrounded him every time he was around his angel. It was faint, and it felt tainted amongst all of this chaos, but it was there. There were a number of times that Crowley could remember Aziraphale’s aura feeling similar. It had been noticeably tainted after the two World Wars. Crowley remembered the days he’d spent with his angel, reminding him that good still existed in the world. As much as it had pained Crowley at the time, they had eventually managed to find the amusement in a demon having to remind an angel about the good that humanity had to offer.
Crowley was vaguely aware that Gabriel and Sariel were following close behind him, the two angels having wasted no time in running out of the door as well.
“The stench is foul” He heard Gabriel mutter, “We must be getting close”
Crowley pressed his lips tightly together before he answered, “We are”
Then he turned them off the sidewalk and into a nearby abandoned building. A warehouse to be precise. Hell wasn’t really known for its originality when it came to location scouting. Crowley had tried to bring it up in a meeting once before, that perhaps they might have more luck luring people into the ‘jaws of Hell’ as it were, if said ‘jaws’ were in nicer places. Not many humans tended to wander into spooky abandoned buildings, or eerie forests. Well, not up until recently. Paranormal investigation had taken a big jump into popularity and Hell was having a whale of a time with possessions.
What greeted them, as they entered the stereotypically demonic derelict building, made them all stop in their tracks,
“Is that a…?”
“Portal to Hell?” Crowley finished, “Yes”
“What is it doing here?” Sariel queried,
Crowley rolled his eyes in exasperation. For beings of such divine intellect, angels could sure be a clueless bunch.
“You know, at a guess, it’s probably here to take souls down Below” He replied, “Just a guess though”
Crowley let them stew it over as he walked closer to portal. His corporeal form had a heart, not that it served much purpose for his general state of being, it just sort of came with the territory. However, he could have sworn that he felt his heart sink as his circled the area. He could sense it there, just underneath the surface of evil, that aura that was so distinctly Aziraphale. They were lucky that they had gotten there when they did; the trace of Aziraphale was fading rapidly. If they’d waited much longer Crowley might have never been able to sense it.
He felt Gabriel sidle up to his side, as he stood there by the portals edge, frozen to the spot, before he heard him, “They’ve taken him, haven’t they?”
He felt himself nod, not trusting his mouth to form the correct words in this situation. He wanted to yell. To scream and shout and ask the angels that stood next to him if this was what they wanted when the dealt Aziraphale’s punishment. To query whether they knew what danger they were putting the former-principality in when they turned him nearly mortal. If they had even considered that Hell might act in this way.
He would have continued standing in silence, contemplating his next course of action, until Sariel spoke,
“How could you have let this happen?”
That had him turning on his heel, his serpentine eyes blazing, the yellow overtaking the entire eyeball as he marched to stand toe-to-toe in front of the seraph, “How could I have let this happen?!” He exclaimed, “You think this is my fault?”
“He was left under your care” She replied, seemingly nonplussed at having an enraged demon yelling at her,
“I wasn’t the one that left him on Earth in a severely weakened state am I?”
“He could have been back home by now if it wasn’t for you” came the retort, her serenity of her voice sounded more strained than it had previously,
“His home is here on Earth”
“He only thinks that because of you!”
Crowley blinked; his mouth gaped slightly as he lost his comeback on the tip of his tongue and took a step backwards, “Excuse me?”
Sariel kept quiet, keeping her arms crossed tightly over her chest as she stared Crowley down, and Gabriel took the opportunity to interject before the argument had time to start back up again,
“Look, don’t you think we should, perhaps, focus on getting Aziraphale back from Hell?”
The seraph and the demon held their glares for a moment longer, before Crowley broke it and turned to the archangel, “Do you have a plan?”
He didn’t want to sound too hopeful. He wasn’t quite certain that if he couldn’t think of a plan on the spot, it was highly unlikely that Gabriel wouldn’t have fared much better. But he wasn’t expecting to feel quite so disappointed when the archangel deflated somewhat.
“Yeah, I thought not” Crowley said,
“Can’t you just,” Gabriel faltered slightly, his hands gestured vaguely towards the portal, “go and find him?”
Crowley raised an eyebrow, “You think I can just go in there, by myself, and waltz up to Beelzebub like, ‘Hi, mate, look I know we’re not on best terms but d’ya reckon I can take back that angel you’ve just kidnapped?’ Think that’d work do you?” Gabriel at least had the good sense to look somewhat sheepish that he hadn’t thought of those consequences, before Crowley continued, “Why can’t we all go and… rescue him, I suppose?”
Sariel was the one to answer this time, “We can’t enter the realms of Hell”
“Why not?”
“If we take one uninvited step on infernal ground, it would be acknowledged as an act of war” Gabriel continued, “Given your actions during Armageddon, I can only assume that a war isn’t quite the result you’d be hoping for”
Crowley conceded the point. In truth, to save potentially save Aziraphale’s life, he would happily risk a war between Heaven and Hell in a matter of seconds and take both Aziraphale and himself off to Alpha Centauri to lay low (as per his original plan). However, after everything they’d gone through to prevent the first war, Crowley knew deep down that that was not the result that Aziraphale would want either.
“Well then,” He sighed, clapping his hands together to keep the attention, “we’d better start coming up with some fool-proof plans pretty rapidly then, hadn’t we?”