Chapter Text
Aziraphale was pootling in the hallway, swapping his great- and undercoat for the comfort of his cardigan, unwinding his scarf and hanging all three on the stand beside an alabaster statue of Venus (shrouded head and shoulders in Crowley's flung jacket) and humming O, Come All Ye—
“Angel.”
It was not quite the usual ‘angel.’ At least, not of late. It was an ‘angel’ reminiscent of the end times, and Aziraphale swallowed a sickness of panic that he hadn't mourned the absence of at all.
“Yes?” he called back, cheerfully.
“C’mere.”
Aziraphale hadn't known what to expect as he peeked his head in at their living room door, but what looked like a visiting scarecrow with burst stuffing hair, dressed in an oversized suit of red velvet, with jingle bells strung on his black leather belt and his boots caked in what looked like freshly trodden snow (though the weather outside wasn't frightful, albeit sharply chilly) sprawled face down on their sofa, dandling a bottle of Aziraphale’s best sherry and snoring like billy-o would have never been it.
“Goodness.” Aziraphale hastened to Crowley’s side and hugged hold of his arm. “Do you think it’s a burglar?”
“Door was locked.” Crowley spoke like a bird flirts its head when it knows there’s a cat on the prowl. “Window’s are closed. Wards aren’t broken. It can’t be a demon—”
“Or an angel,” Aziraphale supplied.
“Or an angel, or—” Crowley flailed his arms about. “Or anyone!”
“No,” said Aziraphale. “Quite. You even added in that squiggly bit that wards off travelling bards.”
Crowley nodded erratically.
“Exactly!”
Aziraphale thought for a moment.
“Perhaps they got in down the chimney?”
This suggestion did very little to soothe Crowley’s nerves. “Down the— Are you serious?”
“Well, I don’t know!” Aziraphale wrung Crowley’s sleeve like a neck. “Do our wards cover the chimney?”
Crowley, who was at all times perfectly prepared to offer scathing or otherwise impertinent response, faltered with his tongue behind his teeth for several seconds.
“Well, how the heaven would they fit?”
“You did once travel down a phone line, petal.”
Crowley tensed like a wire beside him.
“So you do think it’s a demon?”
“I think—” Aziraphale laid an absent hand on Crowley’s tummy, steadying the quiver of tension there. “It’s someone not entirely real.”
“It isn’t Father Christmas.”
Aziraphale ignored Crowley’s protest, gazing at the sofa in thoughtful abstraction.
“Angel, it isn’t—”
“Belief.”
“Sod belief!”
“Imagination, then.” And Crowley couldn’t sod that, though he looked as though he very dearly wanted to. “A collective imagining,” Aziraphale persisted, “by a sizeable chunk of humanity, over hundreds and hundreds of years—”
“Have you been watching Doctor Who?”
“Well, that fourteenth fellow was rather attractive. Could prove powerful enough to make the thing they imagined manifest outside their minds, in seeming reality—” Aziraphale drew a deep breath in. “Goodness me.”
“What do you mean, he’s attractive?”
“Your friend is correct.”
“Oh, mind your own— Nghh.” Crowley grasped at Aziraphale’s cardigan and the two of them squabbled for a moment, each trying to get a shoulder in front of the other. Aziraphale triumphed when he planted a heel determinedly between Crowley’s feet and wedged his bottom in the demon’s hip.
“Why are you here?”
The unkempt intruder laboured up onto an elbow, coughing against his shoulder through a straggle of beard as white as snow in London gutters come rush hour.
“Because, what happens,” he posed in a hoarse throated wheeze, “when they all say, sod belief?”
Aziraphale threw Crowley an accusatory glance, to which he pulled a face befitting of a toddler.
“I imagine,” Aziraphale ventured, returning his attention to the possibly, logically-not, but still perhaps might be Father Christmas on their sofa, “that would leave one feeling— rather spread thin.”
Aziraphale felt Crowley flinch as he took a step forward, presumably resisting the impulse to snatch him back again. He reached a hand behind himself and caught the grateful clasp of Crowley’s fingers.
“But more specifically,” he pressed. “Why here?”
Father could be Christmas, actually, heaved himself up to a half seated slump. Even the soft shing of bells as he moved seemed melancholy and slightly out of tune. The thickly furred brim of his hat slouched over his forehead, coming to rest upon the chaos of his wiry old eyebrows. Fleetingly beneath, a twinkle of the magic and mirth that might once have been, sharpened the contrast of the sorry state he’d come to.
“There are very few beings on earth who could help me.”
It certainly sounded like Santa. That rumbling voice of warm, wise kindness and welcome, heard in every Christmas film since talkies were invented and adopted, with varying levels of gusto thereafter by every human who’d ever spent the season sat upon a throne-ish sort of chair in a fairy lit grotto, sweating through a red velvet suit (lightly padded) and white curly beard (highly itchy, most likely skewiff) surrounded by fake snow and mechanically animate penguins.
“Angel, he’s looking at me. Why’s he looking at me?” Crowley tugged at Aziraphale’s cardigan sleeve, hissing in his gathering alarm. “Why’s he smiling?”
“I don’t know, dear,” Aziraphale whispered, raising his arm halfway as his cardigan drooped off his shoulder in the likeness of a somewhat anxious Roman. “Would you like me to ask?”
Crowley made a sound like someone mowing over gravel. “He’ll only answer if you do.”
Aziraphale, supposing this to be a reasonable assumption, cleared his throat and, very politely, requested instead: “Would you mind awfully not smiling at him? It’s unsettling him, rather.”
“My apologies.” Father bugger it is him isn’t it gave an indelicate burp, excused himself the rudeness and performed a most menacing scowl. “Is that better?”
“Is that better?” Aziraphale checked past his shoulder, where Crowley looked fit to start smoking. “Oh dear—”
“Would it help,” asked Father Christmas, “if I swore at him a bit?”
“Oh, there’s really no need for—”
“Go on then.”
“Crowley!”
“Tinsel tangled bollocks!”
Crowley cackled like someone had tickled a Grinch.
“Can we all just, please— Oh, goodness.”
Aziraphale hurried forward as Santa doubled over with an agonised, “huh, uh— ohh.” Crowley followed after, his hand having been abandoned, and loitered protectively by, while Aziraphale shored up Santa’s shoulders.
“There now. Deep breath.”
Crowley winced at the raggeding wheeze the ailing legend on their sofa endeavoured to take at Aziraphale’s gentle bidding.
They shared a worried glance, and Crowley ventured, “Can’t you heal him?”
Aziraphale shook his head sadly.
“I don’t think he’s really ill.” He sank to one knee and laid a hand against the rattling in the old fellow’s chest, closing his eyes for a moment. “It feels more as though he were simply—fading away. As though his lungs weren’t solid enough to keep the air in anymore—”
“Because no one believes they exist?”
Aziraphale nodded morosely. Crowley paced a tiny circle where he stood with his fingertips shoved in his pockets and his eyes on the unseen heavens.
“Will we ever live our lives in peace, angel?”
“I suspect you’d be awfully bored if we did.”
Crowley came to a halt and smiled, although it looked as though it cost him a fair bit of effort. Aziraphale reached for his hand and thumbed the jean-lines on his knuckles.
“Be surprised,” Crowley grumbled, “how much absolute, complete and utter nothing I could do with you and still be blissfully, abominably happy.”
Aziraphale glowed like a flame through banked wax, and Crowley suffered a look to be lavished upon him, the likes of which he still had to take on the turn of a cheek some days.
“So.” He cocked his head aside. “How can we help him?”
Aziraphale supposed they should ask.
“Um—” He turned his attention to their ailing interloper. “Hello. Again. Mister—Christmas? You said you required our help?”
”I require Crowley’s help. Yes.”
“Come again?” Crowley knew he must have heard wrong. Mainly because all of this was ridiculous down to the last cracked jingle of Santa Claus’s bells, and he must have been dreaming, so what had actually been said was probably something like, ‘I require holy meth.’
“I require your help.” Father Christmas gave a particularly harrowing wheeze and Crowley winced from his toes to his teeth.
“Why me?”
Why always me?
“Because— Oh dear.” Santa caught Crowley’s elbow and tugged with feeble urgency, bending him into a faceful of stale beard and sherry. “Could you fetch me a bucket?”
“Angeeel!” Crowley yowled in a panic. “Sober Saint Nick up, toot sweets!”
Aziraphale gave a swift flourish and Santa went from puff-cheeked green to sag-cheeked grey in an instant. He drew a few steadying breaths and then smiled weakly.
“Much obliged, my dears. Because—”
Regrouping as much of his flair for the dramatic as an ailing old fiction could, Father bugger it is him isn’t it lifted a leather gloved hand and conjured starglint with a wiggle of his fingers. A miniature cosmos slowly formed, star by miniscule, dust-fleck star, half an inch above his palm. Glowing ember-warm and faintly pink, his creation seemed to restore something of the rosiness lost from his cheeks.
“Your heart is generous, and full of light.”
Crowley snorted.
“Think you’re mistaking me for him.” He jabbed his thumb towards Aziraphale and then glanced at the angel for agreement.
Aziraphale was doing That Face he more usually reserved for ducklings and infant antichrist’s toesie-woesies.
“My heart’s not— It’s full of—” Crowley floundered under Aziraphale’s stubbornly glowing regard. “Oh, bugger off.”
“You answered the children’s letters.” Santa (not Satan) Claus was looking at him softly then as well, as though he’d done something horribly admirable, and it made Crowley feel very itchy.
“Oh, come on,” he sputtered. “That was—hell! Helly hell stuff, wasn’t it? Spreading misinformation. False hope. Encouraging kids to pester their parents for toys.” Crowley knew he was lying, of course, but he couldn’t get dragged into whatever the heaven this was. Not now. “It’s our first Christmas.” He hadn’t meant to say that part out loud.
Aziraphale stepped up close beside him; slipped his arm under Crowley’s and gently joined their hands.
“Is it something that would take very long?” he ventured practically. “It is Christmas Eve, after all.”
Crowley, by this point in proceedings, had resigned himself to appearing like a soft, wet kitten in front of the only entity on earth who could legitimately put him on the Nice list, and also that this, whatever the heaven it was, would end up happening, no matter how much of a fuss he kicked up.
“That is why it has to be tonight,” Santa nodded.
“What’s this it? What is it?” Crowley kicked up a fuss regardless, and Santa coughed a kindly laugh at him as though he were being a sausage of the silliest kind.
“Saving Christmas, of course!”
“I’m sorry,” Crowley lied. “I didn’t sign up for a Christmas special.”
“How long will it take?” Aziraphale persisted, though Crowley thought ‘how hard slash perilous will it be?’ would have been a more useful question.
“How hard slash perilous will it be?”
“It must be done before dawn,” Santa answered their first question gravely. ‘Must’ and ‘will’ seemed like two very different things to Crowley, but at least once the sky started lightening they could give it up as a bad job and make their way home. “As for hard— It shan't be easy. But, Crowley. My dear fellow! You made the stars.”
Thus saying, Santa did something awfully impressive with the tiny cosmos floating in his palm, making it burst into colours and sparks.
“Slash perilous?” asked Crowley.
Aziraphale squeezed his hand.
“Entirely unperilous.” Father Christmas sought to smile through the straggles of his beard. “Except to me.”
“We’ll do it!” cried Aziraphale and Crowley’s bottom clenched in protest.
“Angel!”
“Crowley, look at him. We have to help.”
Crowley grimaced. It was a testament to how far their relationship had come that Aziraphale didn’t even think of saying, ‘I’ll do it alone if I must.’ He didn’t even really employ those pleading eyes that had served him so well for millennia. He merely held Crowley’s hand and waited patiently for his blessed better nature to triumph against his fears.
“Rrrrrrghh—” Crowley’s jaw ached. “Alright. Do we get any hints or is it just, ‘save Christmas, off you pop’?”
“Restore the magic,” Santa wheezed, and Aziraphale’s eyes gave a shing at the mention of the word in that way Crowley dreaded and adored in equal measure. “Make them believe.”
“And how do we—” Before Crowley could finish, the world began swirling around him. He yelped in dismay and clung to Aziraphale in the midst of whirling fairy dust and stars and—was that snow?—and flapping cardigan, and closed his eyes and hoped.
Aziraphale clung right back with arms like girders wrapped in mohair, his parting cry echoing out as they were snatched away into the ether.
“Don’t drink anymore of my sherryyyyyyyyyyy—”