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i. with angelic host proclaim
Tempting Aziraphale is against the rules.
The real rules, that is. Not the Arrangement, for which the rules are: strict division of labour; twenty-four hours’ notice unless the Proms are on, in which case it’s a week; and Aziraphale has to do his own actual visitations. Crowley can miracle a halo and white wings and declare, “Be not afraid!” but it gives him a migraine.
(Not that upstairs goes in for visitations, these days. It’s all works in mysterious ways and faith is its own reward. Crowley’s suspicions of the Almighty, never not his defining feature, haven’t diminished with the advent of paid-for streaming services and sliced bread.)
It’s also against the (real) rules to harm Aziraphale in any way. Not that Crowley ever has, though Hastur and Ligur gave it some thought in the old days. “You could,” Hastur said, through that infernal buzzing, “just sneak up on him, and—“
“And what?” Crowley asked, baffled. “Smack him over the head with the Nicomachean Ethics?”
Hastur made a gesture that Crowley eventually figured out was meant to be a snake’s jaws coming together, which was ridiculous. (He had bitten Aziraphale once, which was an honest mistake: they’d been in the desert for forty days and nights and he was feeling a bit slithery. Aziraphale merely glared, miracled away the poison and went to bed for a week. There had been a slight coolness between them for a decade or so and after that everything was fine.) But that, Crowley observed, was not how it worked. You didn’t nobble angels. It wasn’t cricket.
(Aziraphale invented cricket, incidentally. Crowley invented the five-day Test match.)
So harm is out of the question, and temptation also rather a non-starter – Aziraphale’s vices can all be accomplished without Crowley’s help save one, and lust became love a long time ago – but there’s no rule against a demon having a little fun.
Which is why, on this scorching hot June day in a Soho café draped in rainbow banners, the radio has just started to play “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”.
“We should go along this year,” Aziraphale says, as Crowley gets up to order. “An iced coffee, thank you.”
“Go along where?” Crowley asks. He gets two frappés and a pain au chocolat, and breaks the air conditioning while he’s up.
“The parade,” Aziraphale says, absently installing a ceiling fan. “Pride, I think they call it.”
“You know perfectly well what they call it, we go every year,” Crowley says. He likes its scope for innumerable minor transgressions – drunkenness, public debauchery, snogging your brother’s boyfriend (for the revolution!) – and Aziraphale likes it for reasons Crowley has never been quite clear on. Principle, maybe. Some flaming-sword type reason.
“Yes, but we should go along this year,” Aziraphale says. “Gosh, how unusual for the season.”
“What is?” Crowley asks, blandly.
“The music.” Aziraphale considers. “Still. All who wish should sing Her praises.”
There’s icing sugar from the pain au chocolat on his nose. Crowley wonders how long it will take him to notice.
*
ii. angels and archangels may have gathered there
Aziraphale isn’t stupid, of course. It can’t be Christmas carols all the time, even the experimental glitterpunk version of “In The Bleak Midwinter” Crowley found on a Christian rock Spotify playlist. It improves after fourteen repeats but only if you survive the abyss of iterations nine to twelve.
(Neither of them take responsibility for Christian rock. Humanity came up with that all on its own.)
Instead, Crowley broadens the scope. Fairly soon every radio in Aziraphale’s vicinity is playing “Angel of Harlem” and “Speaking With The Angel” and “Angel Eyes”, inter many alia. Crowley meets him for tea at the British Library café, where the background music is suddenly the original cast recording of Phantom of the Opera. Waitrose, shortly afterwards, is playing Sarah McLachlan and Aziraphale looks like he’s getting a headache as well as risotto rice and antipasti. They make dinner and share a single glass of whisky, which Aziraphale doesn’t like; he wrinkles his nose when he tastes it in Crowley’s mouth, later, and pauses in what they’re doing to close the window. The drunks outside are singing “City of Angels”. In the morning, next door’s radio wakes them up with the relevant scene from Handel’s Messiah. Aziraphale is half-asleep and doesn’t seem to notice.
(He does rub his eyes a lot, and shakes his head as though trying to clear his ears of water.)
Crowley might have left it at that, but a day later he discovers the original version of “In the Arms of the Angel” is even more excruciating than its successors, and in a moment of diabolical inspiration, he gets it played on repeat in place of the Today programme. Radio 4 can’t switch it off and have to shout over it instead. It’s wonderful. Everything is wonderful. Crowley gets out of bed and warbles along in the shower.
Then Aziraphale strides in and throws a potted plant at him, which wasn’t part of the plan.
*
iii. angel of the morning
“Andrew Lloyd Webber, Crowley!” Aziraphale yells. Crowley has teleported them both to the bookshop because he was afraid if they stayed in his flat Aziraphale was just going to keep throwing plants at his head. Here is better. Aziraphale loves his books more than he loves denting Crowley’s face with them.
Although – Crowley pauses mid-thought – Aziraphale does have a book in his hand, and it’s a mass-market paperback edition of Brighton Rock. Aziraphale hates Graham Greene and everything he stands for. Crowley takes a step back.
“Angel of Music!” Aziraphale says. “That one gave us all a bad name! Angels hiding in people’s bedrooms! Peeping at young girls as they get undressed!”
“That is sort of what Gabriel did,” Crowley offers, when Aziraphale seems to have run out of steam for the moment. “I bring you tidings of great joy! And all that.”
“Gabriel is an arse!” Aziraphale yells. “And so are you!”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, alarmed.
“I thought I was having delusions of grandeur,” Aziraphale continues. “And then I heard that nineties bebop, and I knew.”
It’s really not Crowley’s fault that two (two!) different boybands recorded slushy ballads with “Angels” in the title. It was just too much of a temptation.
“I didn’t think you’d be so… humourless,” he says. Nearly every other angel Crowley has ever known has had a necktie instead of a sense of humour, but not Aziraphale. “It was a joke.”
“A joke,” Aziraphale repeats, just as Brighton Rock hits the wall above Crowley’s head.
“Aziraphale, it’s the humans that are obsessed,” Crowley says. “Every bloody song is about you.”
“Not me, specifically,” Aziraphale says. There is actually one Victorian hymn that is about him specifically. It has a lot of thees and thous and beseeching. Most of the volumes that contain it have been mysteriously pulped. “And besides, that’s not the point!”
“What is the point?” Crowley asks, genuinely baffled by this. He was expecting exasperation, not projectiles. Aziraphale picks up a hardback copy of Angels In America and Crowley takes another step backwards.
“The point is,” Aziraphale says, slowly, as though addressing a small child or an archangel of the Lord, “is that you’re torturing me because you don’t have anything else to do.”
“It wasn’t torture,” Crowley says. “I didn’t write any of the songs! It’s not against the rules!”
“There are no rules, Crowley!” Aziraphale yells. “There’s only us!”
That’s it, Crowley realises, all at once. All of what they knew – temptation, harm, love, lust, the Arrangement, the end times, the Fall -- is gone. That’s what neither of them have looked at too closely until now. “What do we do, then?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Aziraphale says, quietly. “Get out, Crowley. I don’t want to talk to you.”
He means it. The radio is playing Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders. Crowley turns it off on the way out.
*
iv. Bach cantata #130: Herr Gott, dich loben alle wier
Aziraphale doesn’t speak to him for a week. Crowley potters around his flat, yells at his plants, isn’t sure what to do with himself. The problem is, diabolically inspired acts tend to have a momentum of their own. Crowley truly isn’t doing it on purpose any more, but Aziraphale is still being followed around by Robbie Williams, Counting Crows and Hozier, plus more Christmas carols in June and an unbearable song about angels recorded by one Astley, R. After a radical indie bookshop in Exmoor Market plays “Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene” at him six times in a row, Aziraphale decides he’s going to go and live in a sensory deprivation tank in Tibet.
“You get claustrophobic,” Crowley points out. “And besides, we’ve got plans this weekend.”
He was slightly afraid that Aziraphale would throw a plate at him and then cancel– he’s still furious, even if he is sort-of talking to Crowley again – but they go to Pride as they always do.
“Such a lovely sight,” Aziraphale says. They’re watching from several storeys above Regent Street, on the balcony of an Air BnB miraculously available for this weekend. “Gosh, I do like the colours.”
Crowley, who knows how many small miracles of courage are happening below, rolls his eyes. “Very lovely,” he says. “Aziraphale, I’m sorry about the thing, I really am.”
He figures it’s best to get this out while the two of them are having a civil conversation. They’ve had fights before, even discounting the one about the apocalypse, and he’s pretty sure Aziraphale had cosied up to Shakespeare by the time he wrote the bit with the asp in Antony and Cleopatra. Poor venomous fool, indeed. For an erstwhile member of the heavenly host, Aziraphale can certainly hold a grudge.
Aziraphale smiles at him. “Oh, you know,” he says, vaguely. “One overreacts sometimes.”
“Does one,” Crowley says.
“But, really, Crowley, you don’t have to pull my pigtails to get my attention,” Aziraphale says, leaning forwards over the railing. Crowley resists the urge to pull him back by the scruff of the neck. “Just because we don’t have the excuse of the Arrangement any more. We’re still… what we are, aren’t we?”
Crowley has been worried about that since Aziraphale threw enlightenment at him in the bookshop. Without their respective sides to define them, there’s a sense in which they’re not human, angel or demon. It’s a kind of rootlessness.
Then he realises that Aziraphale means what they are to each other. “Oh,” he says, intelligently.
“My dear,” Aziraphale says, “I won’t ever be gone from you. Don’t think I will.”
Crowley kisses him. He looks back down at the parade, and is seized with an awful premonition. The lead float in the parade is equipped with an impressive sound system. It’s playing Abba’s “Dancing Queen”. He has no idea what it will be playing five seconds from now but no one in London is going to enjoy it.
“Aziraphale,” he says urgently, thinking that maybe they can teleport themselves to the bookshop or the Scottish Highlands or maybe Mars. But Aziraphale smiles at him and takes his hand.
“Well,” he says, and launches them both over the balcony.
“Fuck!” Crowley yells. But Aziraphale opens his wings in a great rush of light and feathers, and he swings Crowley around by his hands until he does the same. With fingers still entwined, they do a full, slow, impressive somersault in mid-air above the parade. For a minute the music becomes the chorale of a Bach cantata, composed for the Festival of St Michael and All Angels. The crowd themselves are singing it. When they think of it later, Crowley knows, they won’t remember how, or why, or worry about it at all; all that matters is the light and the sanctified moment.
They land. Aziraphale brushes off the dust from Crowley’s shoulders. The people come together for Abba.
“You could have done that every time,” Crowley realises, as normality finishes restoring itself around them. “You could have changed the music to whatever you wanted every time. Instead you yelled at me and threw things.”
“I like throwing things.” Aziraphale smiles at him again. “I thought it might be nice to do what we liked, for a change.”
His wings are translucent and shot through with rainbows. He and Crowley walk invisibly through the crowd, letting people jostle them, spray them with sparkles, shriek and laugh and cry.
*
v. angels of the silences
Everything stops being all angels at half past five in the morning, just as the sun comes up over a riverside bench at Waterloo Bridge. Aziraphale listens to a minute or so of “Bat Out of Hell”, then throws Crowley’s phone in the Thames.
Crowley thinks about jumping up and down and shouting very loudly, but doesn’t. He wants Aziraphale close to him, glittering like the water's margin, in this earthly city where they’ve come to rest.