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kat_lair***
Title: Lose A Kraken, Gain An Angel
Author:kat_lair / Mistress Kat
Fandom: Good Omens
Characters/Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 11,622
Disclaimer: Not mine, only playing.
Summary: Hastur needs help. The Kraken is vexed. Crowley would just like to get back home. Erm, the Bookshop.
Author notes: For H, who loves both Hastur and the Kraken. She also provided the title and was emotionally blackmailed into betaing this. Except the Epilogue which she didn’t know about… :D 8th fic for the 100 Fandoms Challenge I’m doing withpushkin666 and dreamersdare. AO3 Collection here.
Fic on AO3
Chapter 1. In Which Something Is Lost
Crowley woke up to a ringing phone and a bad feeling. It was a Thursday, a mere three weeks after the world got a second chance it didn’t even know about and was already wasting, and London was in the grips of a heatwave. Crowley loved it and had spent several afternoons curled up on the hot roof of his building, or in the comforting gold-green shade of his plants.
This particular Thursday, he had been napping in his human form, which made answering the phone just a fraction quicker.
“What is it?” he asked, one hand on the receiver, one hand snapping clothes into existence.
“Oh, it’s… It’s me,” Aziraphale said. “Aziraphale.” As if anyone else called Crowley. Ever.
Well, occasionally someone did, to ask about his life insurance or discuss the accident[1] he’d had but that wasn’t his fault.[2]They were the kind of conversations that the phrase ‘this call may be recorded for training purposes’ had been invented for.
“I know it’s you, angel. What’s wrong?”
There was a beat of silence at the other end, during which Crowley imagined five different kinds of life-or-death[3] scenarios and changed his outfit twice.
“There’s nothing wrong. Why would you think something’s wrong?”
There was definitely something wrong, and the fact that Aziraphale was trying to deflect – badly – set all of Crowley’s finely tuned alarm bells ringing. They chimed to the tune of Hammer To Fall, which was both apt and, well, alarming.
“I just wondered if you could pop over, dear?” Aziraphale was saying. “No hurry, just a little… situation. That would benefit from your… input.”
That did not sound good. At all.
“I’ll be right there,” Crowley promised and slammed the receiver.
He cast about for something to use as a weapon, briefly considered grabbing one of the larger cacti[4] but in the end left with nothing but the keys to the Bentley (which he strictly speaking didn’t need) and a long thin scarf (which he absolutely did).
Crowley regretted his decision as soon as he got to the bookshop. Well, about thirty seconds after he got to the bookshop and discovered what Aziraphale’s ‘little situation’ consisted of.
“Oh,” Aziraphale said, “You’re here!” He had the gall to sound surprised as if Crowley’s arrival had somehow been in doubt.
“You cal— Um, you said there was a problem,” Crowley snapped, pretending very hard that he didn’t jump at even the slightest reason to see the angel, and had in fact been forgetting to wait for one lately and just started showing up and depositing himself in Aziraphale’s general vicinity whenever because of reasons.[5]
“Now, dear, I don’t want you to jump to conclusions.” Aziraphale was coming from behind the counter, hands held up in a decidedly placating fashion. “If fact, if the recent events have taught us anything, it is that things are not always what they seem.” He cast a nervous glance toward the backroom, which was all the information Crowley needed to know where this ‘little situation’ resided.
He started toward it, in long, determined strides, pushing his jacket sleeves up as he went.
Aziraphale fluttered next to him like a particularly fuzzy moth. “Just… hear him out, that’s all I’m saying. Crowley? Crowley, are you listening to me?”
Crowley was not listening to him. Because by that point he’d nudged the door to the backroom open and clapped his disbelieving and horrified eyes on…
“Hastur!?”
On the sofa, Hastur swivelled around to stare at him, shrieked, launched to his feet and promptly fell over the back of it, disappearing into the narrow gap between the sofa and the wall.
“What is he doing here?” Crowley shouted at Aziraphale, stepping in front of him, and then “What the fuck are you doing here?” at the sofa, behind which he could just see one bulging toad eye.
Hellfire burst from his palms, completely useless against other demons but also completely instinctual.
“What is he doing here?” Hastur’s voice was shrill with fear, which gave Crowley a sense of deep satisfaction, but also with the kind of offended outrage that made no sense in the context. “You promised not to call your pet snake!”
“Hey!” Crowley exclaimed, willing himself not to blush because now was not the time,[6] and then “What?” because “What is, what does…? What?”
Crowley turned half of his stare to Aziraphale, and then had to extinguish the hellfire because the idiot angel was reaching for his hands like it was nothing, like Crowley couldn’t…
For a moment, Aziraphale closed his hands around Crowley’s, cupping them gently before letting go.
“Now, I told you to just hear him out,” Aziraphale said, in a tone that was obnoxiously calm for an angel who had a demon on his sofa. Behind it. Specifically, a demon who wasn’t Crowley, who had damn well earned that spot on the sofa over six thousand long years and who was now very angry that he’d never had the foresight to investigate the space behind it because now that would always be a part of the bookshop that Hastur had been to and Crowley hadn’t and—
“Get out here so I can kill you!” Crowley yelled, pointing a finger at the sofa. One of the cushions exploded.
Hastur’s toad made a strangled sound and disappeared from sight entirely.
“Nobody is going to kill anyone in my bookshop.” Aziraphale’s voice had taken on the kind of quality that evoked a pissing-in-pants-reverence in mortals. Crowley huffed and lowered his arm.
“Now,” Aziraphale said, straightening his waistcoat. “Why don’t both of you sit at the table while I make us a nice cup of tea.” It was phrased like a suggestion but it very much wasn’t.
“He’ll take his with an extra blessing,” Crowley muttered, just loud enough to be heard.
Aziraphale rolled his eyes but Crowley was pleased to see Hastur looking somewhat apprehensive as he shuffled out from behind the sofa.
“Whipped,” he hissed at Crowley, walking past, making a wide circle to reach the other side of the table.
They sat at the same time, keeping a close eye on each other. Crowley was looking out for any sudden movements that could be interpreted as a threat. Well, more so than Hastur’s inexplicable[7] presence in Aziraphale’s bookshop.
“Well now,” Aziraphale said, setting out a tray with a teapot and three cups, milk, sugar, and assortment of biscuits. “This is…” He visibly swallowed ‘nice’ and went with “…more civilised.”
He poured out the tea. They drank in silence, Hastur waiting to see if Crowley started melting first before taking his own sip.
Crowley was almost certain Aziraphale had holy water somewhere in the shop, but he was also absolutely certain that he would never tell him where even if that were the case. More’s the pity, he thought, and imagined Hastur slowly puddling into goo.
From the look on Hastur’s face, he knew exactly what Crowley was thinking.
Crowley could feel his fangs lengthening and was just about to flash them to the maggoty bastard opposite when Aziraphale shoved a digestive into his half-open mouth.
“Listen,” he said, and then at Hastur, “And you, tell him.”
“But…”
“Talk.”
Hastur looked like every one of the wriggly crawly things living inside him was lodged in his throat but eventually he spat out: “I lost it.”
Crowley swallowed his biscuit. “Lost what? Your wits?”
Hastur glared but a pointed cough from Aziraphale’s direction derailed whatever non-witty comeback he’d been planning. “No,” he said grudgingly. “I lost the Kraken.”
Crowley blinked.[8] Then he blinked again, more slowly, and burst into the kind of laughter they invented the word ‘demonic’ for.
It turned out, Darjeeling stung awfully, coming out of one’s nostrils.
***
The North Atlantic Ocean was relatively calm, waves rolling across the vast expanse of it on their way toward distant shores. The three of them were hovering some forty feet above the surface, high enough to get a good look.
“It was right here,” Hastur said, and pointed at a spot in the ocean, quite indistinguishable from any other.
“And how do you know it’s not there still?” Crowley asked, grumpily. “Did you go and have a thorough look? And if not, maybe you should do that right now?” He wrapped his arms around his middle tightly, suppressing a shiver. It wasn’t really cold, not like it would be during the winter, but the temperature was still a far cry from the sunny roof of his building.
Hastur muttered something inaudible, pointedly turning his back to Crowley. His wings were the colour of swamp water; the kind that had sat still for years and had an ecosystem of its very own.
“What’s that you said?” Crowley asked. The whole thing was ridiculous and he wanted to get back to London, to Aziraphale’s bookshop, which he would have to disinfect thoroughly now, to erase all evidence of Hastur’s presence.
“He said he’s connected to it,” Aziraphale supplied. “That’s how he knows.” He twisted in the air next to Crowley, turning into a kind of graceful loop around him, catching the air currents to actually avoid using his wings too much.
Crowley tried not to look at the angel directly like this, bathed in rays of the setting sun, his wings catching the restless sway of the water as it reflected light back up onto the white feathers. It was too much; blinding and painfully lovely.
“You can check yourself though,” Aziraphale said, his voice gentle like he somehow knew what Crowley had been thinking about. “Just cast your mind—”
“I know how to do it, angel!” Crowley snapped, then immediately felt bad about it, and thrust his mind down and outwards in an effort to avoid thinking about anything except…
Thousands, millions of life forms, spread out underneath the surface; the endless web of plankton and cold water corals, the quick, darting swarms of fish, the curious whistle-click-echo of whales, more and more and still more, so many of them, silver flashes of life, there and gone and…
“Dearest.” Aziraphale’s voice. “Don’t get lost. Come back to me.” An iron grip on his arms, a deep whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of Aziraphale’s wings, beating hard to keep them both up because Crowley’s own were hanging still and…
“I’m fine,” he said, pushing off to fly under his own steam again. “No Kraken.”
“Told you,” Hastur said. He was hovering nearby, eyes darting between the two of them.
Crowley stiffened, ready for a pointed comment about what had just happened, but curiously Hastur kept to the topic.
“If I don’t find it soon, Beelzebub is going to have my intestines for garters.”
“Remind me again,” Crowley drawled. “Why is that a bad thing, from my perspective?”
Aziraphale answered for him. “Because we still have a missing sea monster. And if it’s not in the sea…”
“Then where the fuck is it?” Crowley finished. It was a good question. The kind that probably had a very, very bad answer.
***
Footnotes:
1 If Crowley had had it, it was not an accident. [ return to text ]
2 It was, however, definitely to his credit. [ return to text ]
3 Specifically, Aziraphale’s life, at cost of whatever death Crowley was required to sow to keep it that way. [ return to text ]
4 The Saguaro Cactus in question was relieved. It was getting rather large for its pot and really wanted to be outside, preferably in a nice desert somewhere warm, but barring that maybe a garden or a balcony. It did not harbour any ambition to be used as a pummelling stick against whatever trouble Crowley had gone to face. [ return to text ]
5 That do not need to be explored at this junction, or any other, ever, would you just stop looking at Crowley like that? [ return to text ]
6 This is incorrect. ‘Now’ was precisely the time, in as much as ‘now’ denotes every currently experienced moment of present, all of which were vulnerable to blushing, stammering and sweaty palms, given the mutual presence of certain parties. Sometimes just the thought would do it. [ return to text ]
7 Outrageous, despicable, unnatural [ return to text ]
8 The novelty of being able to do this, in his human form, had never worn off. The expressive potential of such a single gesture was vast and Crowley had mastered them all, from the slow ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’ blink that he was deploying right now to the coy flutter of lashes he hadn’t actually deployed outside his bathroom mirror but was hoping he would someday have a reason to. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 2. In Which Something Is Sought
The Kraken was.
That much was the same. The Kraken Was. It existed, still here, now, wholly itself.
Well. Only… somehow a little less so than before. A lot less, in fact.
It didn’t really have a very complicated understanding of mass or dimensions, but it knew that Before there had been the Kraken and Other Things, and that the Kraken had been bigger than almost all of the Other Things. Now, the Kraken still Was, but almost all the Other Things it could observe were bigger than it.
This was vexing.
Also vexing was the sudden limit to its Being. Namely, the space in which the Kraken Was. Before there had been A Lot More of it, any limits distant and made of continents and the deep ocean floor. Now, if the Kraken stretched all its tentacles out at the same time, each of them encountered a Limit, one that was smooth and transparent and most, most vexing.
The Kraken, who had never in its considerable existence, been vexed about anything, found this a rather undesirable state of Being. It dragged down several ships in an expression of its Mood, but unlike Before there was no screaming and all the ships just plopped right back to the surface as soon as it let go of them.
The Kraken did not like Now. It wanted Before with the limitless Space and ships that sank and stayed sunk and perhaps also the small-big-green-grey winged creature that had started showing up recently. The Kraken had liked him and the amusing high-pitched noises he made whenever it had tried to pat him on the head with a tentacle.
***
Facts of the matter were these: After Hastur had failed to deliver his part of the infernal plan[9] and been complicit, by virtue of being there, in the demise of another demon of some note, his stock in Hell fell, and it fell fast. He still had enough cronies that killing him outright or even major torture were out of the question, but Beelzebub, when they put their mind to it, could squeeze out a few drops of creative evil.
“They made you a glorified zookeeper?” Crowley was delighted by the revelation, to the point of open glee.
“Of all mythical creatures, great and small,” Aziraphale injected, sounding fond and wistful. “Are you sure you haven’t seen any—”
“For the last time, there are no unicorns left!” Hastur snapped. He drained his drink and wandered over to the bar to get another one.
It turned out that Hastur was a beer drinker. Crowley was not sure how he felt about it, except unsurprised.
“Oh. I was kind of hoping…” Aziraphale sighed, sipping his Merlot.[10]
“It was…” Crowley swallowed, and kept his eyes firmly on the stuffed reindeer head above the bar. “Kind of you to ask.”
They had located to a small and rather grubby bar-slash-general store-slash-post office somewhere above the arctic circle. Crowley thought they were in Norway, but didn’t care enough to check.
He turned to stare at Hastur, now back with a large tankard of something frothy and smelling strongly of hops. “So, you’re saying you have some kind of…” Crowley fluttered fingers next to his temple. “Psychic connection with the Kraken?”
“Yes.” Hastur sat down again, wedging himself between the two of them in a way that made Crowley’s fangs ache.[11]
“Well…” He scooted his chair around the table until he was pressed against Aziraphale’s other side, flashing a triumphant grin at the other demon. “Why can’t you just locate it by using that?”
Hastur rolled his eyes, and his toad rolled its in unison.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Hastur said, in tone of someone who had already explained something several times and anticipated doing so again several more. “It’s not a bloody satnav!”
“What’s a…?”
“Never mind.” Crowley cut Aziraphale off before they went off on a tangent about GPS. Quite frankly, he was surprised Hastur knew what a satnav was – well enough to use it in a sentence and everything. “How does it work then? Can’t you tell anything?”
Hastur stroked his toad morosely. At the bar an old reindeer herder swore off drink forever and ordered three of them in one breath.
“I can tell it’s… not happy,” Hastur said finally.
They all drank deeply, struck silent by the full ramifications of an unhappy Kraken. A lonely tear[12] rolled down Hastur’s pockmarked cheek and Crowley was certain it wasn’t on behalf of any unlucky humans, ships or small islands that might bear the brunt of the Kraken’s displeasure.
Wordlessly, Aziraphale handed over a tartan handkerchief.
Behind the bar, the proprietor poured herself some of the leftover Merlot and contemplated whether it was time to move down south. Her daughter was a very successful civil rights lawyer in Oslo and was always begging her to come live closer. Perhaps she would give Gudrun a call tonight.
“Right,” Aziraphale said after a few minutes of steady drinking. “We need a plan.”
Crowley agreed. Too bad, he didn’t have a clue where to start.
Luckily, Hastur chose this as the moment to contribute something more than a general air of despondency to the venture.
“The witch!” he declared loudly. Several of the bar patrons looked over and then quickly found somewhere else put their eyes with a distinct ‘no sir, no witches here’ message.[13] “We’ve got to go see the witch!”
***
They went to see the witch.
Jasmine Cottage was glorious in the morning sun, covered in bashful ivy and flowers of every variety, the steady humming of bees already audible despite the early hour. An assortment of wind chimes tinkled gently in the breeze.
“Satan preserve,” Hastur spat, visibly flinching at the sight. “It’s hideous.”
Even Aziraphale blinked a little at the spectacle. “It’s… It’s like something out of a storybook.”
“Or a young boy’s imagination of what the cottage of a Good Witch looks like,” Crowley commented. It seemed Adam had restored and improved[14] everyone’s dwellings in his post-apocalypse reset, not just theirs.
Crowley wondered briefly if, when the boy grew up, Jasmine Cottage would return to its original dilapidated state and cease to be quite so… enchanted. Probably not.
Despite the sun being up, it wasn’t much past six o’clock. Aziraphale unceremoniously slapped at Crowley’s wrist when he tried to knock on the door, tutting about decent visiting hours.
He made them wait until the kitchen curtains were drawn open before announcing their presence.
Of course, it would have perhaps been prudent not to wait right outside the kitchen window for that. The sight of three otherworldly beings with their faces pressed right to the glass was one Newt neither expected nor appreciated, a sentiment which he expressed with a blood-curling scream. This, in turn, sent Anathema downstairs and out of the front door, hair in disarray and a large cast iron frying pan in her hand.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, dear!” Aziraphale said, vanquishing the frying pan before it connected with Hastur’s head. “We didn’t mean to startle you.”
Anathema squinted at him for a few seconds, having clearly run out without her glasses. “It’s you,” she said, not sounding overjoyed by the realisation. “Guess you better come inside.”
Crowley rubbed his temples. There was a headache threatening, somewhere just behind his eyes. “Tell me there’s coffee?” he pleaded.
“You’ll have tea or nothing,” Anathema said brusquely. “And I’m going to need my frying pan back.”
***
Newt made pancakes.[15] He was glad to have something to do that didn’t involve sitting around a table with an angel (!!), two (TWO!!!) demons and a witch (just because he adored Anathema with everything he had, didn’t mean he also didn’t fear her, just a bit).
“You want me to do a location spell?” Anathema was asking between forkfuls of pancake. She’d known there was another reason to keep Newt around beyond the, erm, unexpected skillset[16] he had originally displayed. Agnes hadn’t steered her wrong yet.
“You do know how, right?” Crowley asked. He was sipping some Earl Grey and trying very hard not to stare at the way Aziraphale scraped his fork through a smear of jam, brought it to his mouth and then licked each tine individually, his pink tongue darting out and through the gaps in a way that was so blatantly indecent it could only be entirely accidental and unconscious, which was the worst thing of it all.
“I mean…” He dragged his eyes away from Aziraphale’s mouth and forced himself to look at Hastur instead. Nothing quite quelled inconvenient feelings than watching a being made of maggots and spite feed blueberries to his head toad.
“You are a witch, are you not?” Crowley finished his half-hearted query. It was difficult to maintain appropriate focus or care for anything but Aziraphale’s soft hands with their neatly manicured nails cutting a pancake with a precision of a brain surgeon.
“Obviously I know how to do a location spell,” Anathema said. “Well. In theory.”
Newt put another stack of pancakes on the table and replenished the teapot. Hastur cautiously tried a blueberry himself and then immediately spat it out. Crowley snapped his fingers, making the mangled berry disappear mid-flight.
“Perhaps you could try?” Aziraphale said, in that way of his that sounded like a completely neutral question but strongly implied both how delighted he would be if you did and how utterly disappointed if you didn’t.
“I… Of course, I will try.” Anathema said, with barely a hesitation. And not like Crowley could blame her. After all, he had tried far more outlandish feats simply because Aziraphale had threatened never to speak to him again.
“Wonderful!” Aziraphale smiled in a way that made both Crowley and Hastur hiss, though for entirely different reasons.[17] “Now then,” he looked at Hastur meaningfully. “What do we say?”
Hastur stared back, uncomprehending.
Crowley rolled his eyes. Trust his angel to try and install actual manners in a demon, what a concept.[18] “He’s grateful,” he gritted out, because otherwise they would be here all day and Crowley very deliberately did not want that. “We all are. Perhaps we could now Get On With It?”
“Quite!” Aziraphale clapped his hands and the pile of dishes by the sink found itself scrupulously clean, every chip and crack fully repaired. “No time to waste. Oh, and Newt?” He beamed beatifically at the cook. “These pancakes were simply scrumptious.”
***
Anathema was a witch, but not one who had had to do much witching before, on account of focusing on her ancestor’s prophecies and the little thing called Saving The World. She was a bit unclear on how much of the world saving was due to her but confident that she had played an important part (though she couldn’t really remember exactly which one) in the venture. And in any case, the world was very much Saved, at least from an apocalypse of the supernatural kind. Anathema was working on preventing the manmade ones next, and the village was fast becoming fully carbon neutral, much to the consternation of Tadfield Neighbourhood Watch.
The point was that she hadn’t actually done many spells. Luckily, there were books for this kind of thing.
“Uh… Can’t you do it yourself?” Anathema asked, proffering one of the large volumes at Aziraphale. “And why do you even need a spell? You’re actual mythical being yourself, can’t you just…” She waved her hand around in a manner reminiscent of Crowley’s earlier gesture. “You know.”
“No, we can’t.” Crowley crossed his arms. Witchcraft made him kind of twitchy. People had blamed it on his side which was frankly insulting considering the amount of practical help and healing women with that label had done in the past.
“It doesn’t work like that, dear,” Aziraphale said and pushed the book gently back to Anathema’s hands. “I’m sure you’ll do great.”
Hastur was standing by the window, his back turned to the room. On the other side of it, a fly was buzzing against the sun-warm glass, emitting a gently resonant bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt as it travelled the length of the window, trying to find a way in.
It could be just a regular fly.
It could be something much, much worse.
With a dry swallow, Hastur turned back to the others and said something not even a century on the rack would’ve dragged out of him previously. “Please.” He choked a little on the word. “I need to find it.”
Crowley’s eyebrows hiked up, clearing the upper rim of his glasses.
Anathema squared her shoulders and cracked open the spell book. “Alright then. Let’s have a look.”
***
Three hours, four half-burned candles, and five smouldering piles of herbs later, they were all gathered around a large map of the world. Above it, a black hairpin with a crow[19] hung in the air, unmoving. It hovered over southern of England, the spot Anathema had placed it on at the start to denote their current location.
“It’s not working!” Anathema growled in frustration. She’d done everything correctly and they’d all been elated when the hairpin had obediently risen to float above the map, and then… Nothing.
“Why isn’t it working?” Hastur demanded. He cast a nervous eye at the window. The fly was still there. In fact, there were now two of them, and two more at the other window.
“I don’t know!” Anathema snapped. “If I knew, don’t you think I—”
“Look!” Crowley interrupted them. He too was kneeling on the floor, nose practically touching the World Atlas as he stared intensely at the hairpin.
“What is it, dear?” Aziraphale bent down to the same level, which had the devastating effect of putting his face within touching distance of Crowley’s.
Crowley’s heart skipped several beats it didn’t strictly speaking need to hit. “I… Uh… Thought I saw it move.”
Both Hastur and Anathema’s heads entered his field of vision. They all stared at the hairpin.
“There!” Aziraphale exclaimed. “It… sort of quivered.”
“I saw it too,” Hastur said. He had. Definitely.
They all sat back up and contemplated the situation.
“It’s supposed to move from our location to the location of that which is sought,” Anathema repeated the information she’d already told the several times. “But it’s just sort of… vibrating in place.”
Crowley frowned. He eyed the map, a large World Atlas they had ripped from back of one of the old dictionaries that seemed to breed in cottages like this. It encompassed everything, including all the oceans, just… not in a lot of detail.
“Maybe…” He tilted his head one way and then the other. An idea had taken root somewhere deep in his mind and the pale tendrils of it were now close to breaking to his conscious thoughts. “Maybe it is moving, just…”
He got up suddenly, took several steps away and made a square frame with the thumb and forefinger of both hands through which he regarded the tableau of the map and the three beings – one human, one demon, and one angel with an ability to turn him into a tangled noodle of feelings.
“Go on,” Aziraphale said softly. He got to his feet as well and, careful not to disturb Crowley’s focus, shuffled next to him. “What are you thinking?” he asked, hand grazing the back of Crowley’s jacket, just a quick almost-caress masquerading as an encouraging pat.
Crowley drew in a shuddering breath, held it as the thoughts floated to the surface and coalesced into words. “Maybe…It’s just not moving very much?” he offered on the exhale. “Maybe the scale is too big.”
The other three stared at him for a few seconds and then Anathema sprung up.
“Of course! It’s… Hold on, I’m going to get a different map!”
“Crowley, that’s brilliant!” Aziraphale exclaimed. Now both of his hands were wrapped around Crowley’s upper arms and he was shaking him a little bit, enthusiastically. “Absolutely marvellous!” His smile was incandescent and Crowley could feel himself slowly disintegrate in the warmth of it.
“Ugh, just a guess,” he said, pulling himself away. There was only so much praise he could take[20] without puddling like an ice-cream cone in August heat.
From the floor, Hastur was watching them with the horrified fascination of a five-year-old watching a spider eat a wasp.
“I still have some Holy Water,” Crowley told him pointedly. It wasn’t even really a lie. Aziraphale had some and Crowley… (his mind tripped over the thought a bit, did a couple of awkward somersaults, but eventually arrived at…) had Aziraphale. Sort of. He was… pretty sure that’s where they were at. Now that the concept of ‘sides’ had ceased to have quite so profound consequences.
At the very least, Aziraphale had him, a simple fact of life that had remained unchanged and largely unacknowledged for six thousand years.
“Let’s try this one!” Anathema came back, Newt trailing after her with a look of apprehensive curiosity on his face.[21]
She slapped down a battered A-Z map of Great Britain, opened it on the map of England and slowly inched it under the still hovering hairpin.
Unerringly, the pin moved to float above the tiny dot titled ‘Tadfield’.
Everyone looked at each other. A sense of unease was growing in the room, much like a slimy mushroom in a particularly dank cave.
Silently, Anathema flipped to a different page, the one that showed the area with its villages and roads in a larger scale still. The hairpin trembled, turned around a couple of times like a dog looking for a good place to sleep in, but remained above the village centre.
Anathema cleared her throat. “Newt, could you… In the kitchen there’s a…”
Newt nodded, ducked out and came back with a folded piece of paper. It was the Tadfield Tourist Map, a grand name for something the late Mrs Grove from the post office drew two decades ago and that had been photocopied ever since. Still, it was the most detailed cartographic representation of the area they had at hand and once they slid it on top of the previous one the hairpin gave a happy little jump and visibly moved several centimetres, first to hover above Jasmine Cottage and then shooting to hang above…
“Son of a…” Crowley fought the urge scramble backwards and straight out of the house, the village, and possibly the entire country. Madagascar was nice this time of the year, he’d heard.
“Number Four Hogback Lane,” Aziraphale gasped.
Both Anathema and Newt looked unhappy about the news. The only one nonplussed was Hastur, who had the blank expression of the blissfully ignorant.
Crowley was happy to ruin it. “The Antichrist,” he hissed. “That’s where Adam bloody Young lives.”
Hastur looked at the others for confirmation and saw three heads all solemnly nodding. His mouth opened and the noise that emerged was not dissimilar to the sound of someone throwing a bucketful of toads into a wood chipper and then turning it on the slowest setting possible.
Crowley felt vaguely envious. Lucky toads.
***
Footnotes:
9 Technically, of course, it wasn’t Hastur’s fault. However, he had been there, and he was the only one left Hell could actually punish in some way, now that Crowley appeared untouchable, Adam remained a wild card no one wanted to pick and God Herself was somewhat out of their jurisdiction. [ return to text ]
10 The bartender (who was also the owner of the fine establishment) had been rather astonished to find a dusty bottle of Castello di Ama in the back cupboard, but since the flashy foreigner had forked out two-hundred krone for a glass without batting an eyelid, she wasn’t exactly complaining. [ return to text ]
11If you have any doubt about whether Hastur did this deliberately then you are a fool that should not be let out to socialise unsupervised, and certainly not with any demons. [ return to text ]
12It was not crystalline. It was, in fact, the colour and consistency of mud – the lively kind that you wouldn’t want to walk barefoot in. [ return to text ]
13There were, in fact, no fewer than five witches in the establishment, which coincidentally was also the exact number of people in it. [ return to text ]
14 To the value of ‘improved’ as judged by Adam. It would take him over a decade to fully understand that ‘What Adam Liked Best’ was not necessarily the same as ‘What Other People Liked Best’. In that, he was of course wholly in line with average human development. [ return to text ]
15 He made them with a top of the range Aus-Ion Seamless Satin Skillet, made of single piece of iron. It was not, strictly speaking, the pan Anathema had grabbed from the kitchen counter but it was the pan they now had. [ return to text ]
16Sex. Obviously, sex. He wasn’t truly great at it yet, but he was a quick to learn and took direction well, and then there were the pancakes of course. [ return to text ]
17 Crowley’s had a higher age rating. [ return to text ]
18The irony escaped him entirely. [ return to text ]
19 They had needed something, a needle for the compass so to speak, and this had been the closest pointy thing at hand. Or, in Anathema’s hair, to be precise. [ return to text ]
20 The amount of praise Crowley could take from beings who were not Aziraphale without any effect whatsoever: infinite. The amount of praise Crowley could take from Aziraphale without the risk of losing the structural integrity of his corporeal form: small. Very small. Like, a casual ‘thank you, dear’ was fine, he’d become immune to that, but a more involved ‘gosh, how did you find this place, the food is simply divine, so glad you suggested we eat here, dear boy!’ could send him to paroxysms of Feelings that had to be stuffed away immediately and with extreme prejudice. Crowley’s estimation of how successful he was about this was vastly different from the reality [ return to text ]
21 His default expression. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 3. In Which Something Is Found
When the knock came, Adam was – wonder of wonders – actually home. He was also home alone, except for Dog of course, because his parents had gone to some sort of garden show in the next village over. They had of course invited him along, but as much as Adam liked adventures, he just didn’t think rows of vegetables and flowers[22] would provide that.
Besides, his new pet seemed kind of unhappy.
“Do you think it’s lonely?” Adam asked Dog. They were both sitting in the shed,[23] staring at a large aquarium. Inside it, the Kraken stared back at them, forlornly. Or, at least, Adam thought it did. It was difficult to tell.
“Maybe it needs a friend,” Adam mused. “Do you think we should find another one?”
Dog whimpered at the suggestion. Then its ears perked and it erupted in furious barks, shooting out of the shed and toward the front of the house. This typically happened when someone knocked on the door so Adam was not in any way concerned, slowly walking across the garden and around the house.
He was, it has to be said, somewhat surprised to see the group huddled on the front steps. He recognised all but one of them of course, even liked them (well, Anathema, because witches were cool, he wasn’t sure about the others), but the last time he’d seen all of them at the same time had almost cost Adam all that was his and all that he was.
Still, that had never involved being a coward.
“Hullo?” he said and then “Can I help you?” because his mum would somehow know if he hadn’t at least tried to be polite.
All five people (beings?) swivelled around. The one Adam didn’t know let out a short but impressively piercing scream and dove behind the rose bushes.
“Adam!” the angel said. “How are you? Erm, keeping well I see?” His name was Aziraphale, Adam remembered, had, in fact, known[24] it despite the lack of any formal introductions since the second the angel had pointed a weapon at him.
“I’m… Fine?” He was pretty sure that was true, now. “What is this…?”
“Where is it?” the unfamiliar demon (that’s what he was, Adam could see that now) demanded furiously. He’d poked his head out of the roses and had somehow acquired a toad on it. Adam was fascinated.
“You Son of Satan! You ruined the apocalypse already!” He seemed very angry about this, which Adam didn’t quite understand. “Did you have to go and ruin this for me too?”
The others all stared at the toad demon (Adam concentrated, ahh, Hastur), mouths open, eyebrows reaching higher climes.
“Uhh… Calm down there a bit, matey?” Crowley said tentatively. There was something akin to grudging respect in the way he eyed the other demon, tinged with the same kind of fear with which people regard those with nothing to lose.[25]
The angel cleared his throat. “What he means to enquire about is… That is, if you’ve maybe seen…?”
“Where’s the Kraken?” Anathema asked, blunt but not unkind. “And don’t bullshit me Adam Young, we all know you have it.”
Adam sighed. It’s not that he’d expected to keep it a secret forever,[26] but longer than a few days would’ve been nice.
“I was only trying to help,” he said. “I thought it might be lonely. And, well…” He squirmed under everyone’s disbelieving gaze in the manner of young boys everywhere when they know their explanations don’t quite hold water without knowing precisely why. “Robbie Grant in my class got a tarantula for his birthday last week.”
Everyone blinked, even Crowley who Adam thought had taken to the activity with unnecessary enthusiasm.
Surprisingly, it was Newt who was the first to progress from facial expressions to actual words.
“Ah,” he said, nodding as if he knew exactly what Adam was getting at.[27] “I really wanted a lizard as a kid.”
In the background Hastur made a mournful sound while Crowley flinched.
“You… stole the Kraken because you wanted… an exotic pet?” Aziraphale asked, aghast.
“I didn’t steal it!” Adam protested hotly. “It doesn’t belong to anyone!”
“Quite,” Anathema said, oddly gentle. “What you did could more accurately be described as an abduction. An unlawful imprisonment, if you like.”
Adam’s eyes widened. Dog pressed against his master’s calves, sensing his distress. “I…” To his horror, Adam could feel his bottom lip wobble. “I didn’t think of it like that,” he said, miserably, even though he knew that was no excuse and had never been one.
“Where? Is? It?” Hastur had inched to the front of the group, still visibly afraid but with a determined jut to his pockmarked chin.
“Oh,” Adam said, brightening. Maybe this was one of those mistakes that could be easily fixed.[28] “It’s just there.” He pointed behind himself. “In the shed.”
***
This was fast becoming one of the weirdest days of at least, oh, the last millennium or so. Not the worst, because despite the general unpleasantness of having to share space with Hastur of all beings, there had so far been nothing that had seriously threatened the wellbeing or even the happiness of his angel. But one of the weirdest for sure, Crowley thought as they filed after the Antichrist[29] (former Antichrist?) toward a red and rather rickety looking garden shed.
“I had to make it a bit smaller, of course,” Adam was explaining. “Okay, a lot smaller. But it was really difficult to find an aquarium of even this size and, well…” He pulled open the door and gestured inside. “I can reverse it, no trouble.”[30]
Crowley shuddered. From behind, he heard Anathema mutter “We’re going to have to have a chat with that boy about responsible use of power. Do you think he’s too young for Foucault?” to Newt under her breath.
As soon as the door was open, Hastur pushed to the front, rudely elbowing Crowley on his face and pushing Aziraphale practically into his arms in his haste to get to the large aquarium taking up most of the room.
“Oh dear, terribly sorry,” Aziraphale said, clutching at Crowley’s shirt for balance. A truly alarming amount of soft angel was pressing against Crowley, every point of contact burning like he’d been dosed in holy water. He shuddered again, though for entirely different reasons.
“I… He should be more careful,” Crowley said lamely, trying to push Aziraphale up without appearing to push him away, precisely.
“Quite,” Aziraphale said, patting Crowley’s chest in a way that was most distracting.
Sadly, not distracting enough to let either of them block out the little shout of joy Hastur made.
They turned to look and found Hastur plastered against the side of the aquarium, emitting the kind of cooing noises that made Crowley deeply uncomfortable. On the other side of the glass was the Kraken alright, suction cups pressed right where Hastur’s face was.
When Adam had said he’d made it smaller, he’d been correct. This, however, did not mean that he’d made the Kraken small. Oh no, it was still the size of a human child, maybe even a teenager, with added horror of tentacles and a beaked mouth, now prominently displayed against the glass.
“Fuck me!” said Newt with fervour and then “Ow!” because Anathema stepped on his foot with “There are children here! And an angel!”
The angel in question didn’t seem to notice. “How should we…? Well that’s… Is that a good idea?” Aziraphale asked, suddenly alarmed, but it was too late.
Hastur had already pried open the top of the tank and the Kraken was pulling itself out with impressive speed and a great big slosh of displaced water.
Everyone took several steps backwards, got briefly bottlenecked by the doorway, and then plopped out, much like the armada of plastic toy ships that was currently being violently evicted from the aquarium.
Everyone except Hastur. He tried, but was severely hampered by the eight tentacles wrapping themselves around his torso, damp and determined and ever so slightly… clingy.
“Gah!” Hastur said, staggering under the weight. “Argh!” His arms came around automatically and the effect was… Well, it was horrifying.
“Awww,” said Aziraphale. “They’re hugging.”
Crowley turned to stare at the angel in disbelief.
Now out of the shed, Hastur and the Kraken lurched by in a tangle of limbs and muffled shrieking. One of the Kraken’s tentacles was gently petting Hastur’s toad, who seemed to take the situation in its stride. Probably not the worst thing it had seen, the poor thing.
“Oh!” said Adam, snapping his fingers as if he’d just realised something profound. “It had a friend already. My bad.”
“Send. It. Back!” Hastur gasped from between tentacles. “Now!”
“Adam, my boy, I think you rather…” Aziraphale looked like he was considering intervening. Crowley reached out and grabbed the back of his jacket just in case the angel was going to do something stupid.
Luckily, he didn’t have to.
“Alright.” Adam snapped his fingers again, this time with intent.
The Kraken disappeared.
So did Hastur.
“Ooops?” said Adam.
Crowley threw his arms in the air in victory.
***
Alright, so turned out that having a do-gooder for a best friend meant that said best friend would just not. let. things. go.
“He’s fine,” Crowley said. “Probably.”
“You don’t know that,” Aziraphale pointed out. “Adam doesn’t know that so there’s no way you do.”
On the background, Adam spread his arms in a universal shrug of ‘haven’t the foggiest, mate’. “I’m guessing he’s with the Kraken?”
“He’s guessing,” Aziraphale sniffed.
“What does it matter anyway?” Crowley asked, crossing his own arms petulantly. “We found the Kraken, which was the main thing. Why do you even care about Hastur?” To his horror, Crowley could hear himself whining. It was pathetic. He wanted to gag himself.
“Well, I…” Aziraphale fussed with his sleeves a bit. “I don’t. Precisely. I care about making sure that no one comes asking questions about him.” He cast a meaningful glance downwards.
As if on cue, Newt asked, “Is it me, or is there an awful lot of flies around?”
“Shit,” said Crowley, turning to Adam urgently. “Can you do something?”
“That is not my fault,” Adam said, pointing at the patch of grass that had begun to swirl and buzz in a way that suggested something might be heading upwards. Someone, to be precise.
“Well, they are going to be your problem,” Crowley hissed.
“How rude,” Beelzebub said, rising from an earth much like an odour rises from a week-old carcass. “I count at least as a minor disaster.” They shook dirt off their coat, surveying the garden with an air of someone surveying a murder scene and finding some of the bodies missing. “Now, what have you done with that wretched pile of maggots?”
“Do you think I should get my sword?” Aziraphale muttered under his breath, just low enough for Crowley to hear.
“Yessss!” Crowley whispered right back. “I mean, what? You can still do that?”
“Well only in—”[31]
“Okay, look,” Adam said, hands on his hips and sounding as impatient as only an 11-year-old boy can. “My parents are going to be home real soon. We were gonna have sausage and chips for dinner and maybe watch a movie, and none of that’s going to work if I have a garden full of…” He hesitated, flapping a hand around a bit. “You lot.”
Beelzebub raised their eyebrows, high enough that they disappeared into the scraggly hairline. The buzzing turned decidedly angry. “That’s rich, coming from you. As if you aren’t more or less of the same stock.”
Aziraphale too had turned indignant. “Let he who is without sin cast—”
“Enough!” Adam shouted and brought his hands together in a clap that seemed to shake the ground.
Or, Crowley thought, perhaps just the bones inside him, each of them vibrating on a frequency of the universe.
The last thing he heard was Anathema’s irate scolding. “Adam Young!” she yelled, “That is not the way to solve your problems!”
Then the world turned cold and dark, like heart of a storm, and Tadfield disappeared from view. Desperately, Crowley reached out and grabbed two fistfuls of Aziraphale’s tweed jacket, pulling him close. There was no way in Hell, Heaven, Earth or any other plane of existence that he was going to be separated from the angel.
Never again.
***
The North Atlantic Ocean was cold and very, very wet. The three of them materialised about ten feet above the rolling waves, which was nowhere near enough of a gap to even think about getting one’s wings out, not when gravity was much quicker on the draw than any of them.
“Son of a—!” Beelzebub curled up, divebombing into the sea in a tight ball of rage and alarmed flies.
Aziraphale and Crowley were fully tangled thanks to Crowley’s last second grab, their limbs still entwined once they plummeted into the water, too shocked to even scream.
The cold hit like a boot to the solar plexus and both of them froze for long seconds, clutching at each other. Crowley had gone under back first and over Aziraphale’s shoulder he could see the surface grow more distant, light dimming with each hammer of his heart, pumping furiously thanks to extra adrenalin.
For a brief moment he panicked; a full whiteout of pure fear pushing aside every rational thought like how angels, or demons, couldn’t really drown.
A sudden jolt reengaged his brain, their descend halted by… Aziraphale’s wings, fully manifested now and acting like a pair of giant fins, granite grey in the fading light.
Aziraphale shook him, mouth tightly pursed to keep breath in, eyebrows doing a furious gavotte.
Crowley got the message alright. With an urgent push, his wings flared out, slowing the two of them even more. His human body had also caught on to the circumstances and when Aziraphale finally let go, pointing furiously toward the surface, Crowley’s feet knew just what to do, kicking at the water.
They couldn’t drown, but their human bodies could and discorporation would be an outcome with a very uncertain resolution considering their less than amicable relationships with their respective (former?) employees.
It was like flying against a gale wind, each beat of his wings hard work that made his muscles scream in agony. On the plus side, it only took a few of them to propel himself to the surface.
Crowley broke from the water gasping and spluttering, Aziraphale right next to him similarly wheezing. A short distance away, Beelzebub was floating on their back, a steady stream of curse words falling from their mouth, the giant fly circling above them in a decidedly protective manner.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Crowley spat, pushing wet hair off his face. “Get your sword, angel. We’re going right back to Tadfield and killing that insufferable little brat!”
For a second there, Aziraphale looked like he might agree. But before he could say anything, a large wave pushed them apart. Crowley could see a brief tumble of white feathers disappearing from sight for excruciating three seconds before reappearing several feet above the water.
“Quick!” Aziraphale shouted. “Get out of the water! We’re about to have some company!”
“Fuck!” Crowley beat his wings, taking off as gracefully as one of chubbier ducks at St James’s Park,[32] Beelzebub with their chitin wings having a much more successful take-off.
The Kraken rose from the depths like an island, vast and craggy. Restored to its original size, its skin bore the marks of millennia of disagreements with ships, sharks and continents. Its tentacles flew out in every direction and Crowley did some of the best flying of his life, avoiding each of them in his bid to rise high enough.
To his relief, Aziraphale was already out of immediate grabbing distance, his eyes wide with the sheer spectacle of what they were witnessing when Crowley reached him. To his disappointment, Beelzebub too had made it, coming to a spot close by.
“What is that?” Aziraphale asked, pointing.
“Seems like it’s got something…” Crowley squinted, trying to make out what the thing wrapped at the end of one of the Kraken’s tentacles was. Something grey and… wriggling. Maybe an unlucky seal?
Beelzebub too was looking, face pinched in concentration and then, suddenly, clearing. “Ha!” they barked. “I’ll be damned…”
Crowley flinched. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Beelzebub smile. It was a not sight that inspired joy and goodwill.[33]
It wasn’t until the Kraken let go of what it was holding, throwing it up and away like a prize bowler of a cricket team, that Crowley could recognise its captive.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrhggggggggggggggggaaaaaahhhh!” Hastur screamed, flying past all of them in a sodden clump of feathers, shedding maggots like a distressed dog sheds its fur.
“Gentlemen.” Beelzebub tapped their fly with two fingers as if tipping a hat. “I got this. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure. Won’t say I look forward to seeing you again either.”
Aziraphale and Crowley watched them fly after Hastur’s disappearing form. Below them, the Kraken was slowly sinking under the surface again, having successfully completed its mission.
Within a minute it was just two of them, hovering above the ocean. In the distance, a Chinese oil tanker was about to file a report that got its captain and most of the crew fired.[34]
“Well,” Crowley said, too exhausted to even miracle himself dry. “Shall we get a drink?”
Aziraphale turned in a circle, twice, before pointing toward the horizon. “I think the coast of Norway is this way.”
They set off, flying slowly and close to each other.
***
Footnotes:
22 Adam had not yet seen the musical Little Shop of Horrors, for which we all should be very, very grateful. [ return to text ]
23 Arthur Young liked having a shed. He didn’t really do much with it, except store the lawnmower and odd tools, but he very much liked having it. Just, mostly in an abstract sense. [ return to text ]
24Sometimes Adam just knew things. Sometimes they were the kinds of things that made other people uncomfortable to have an 11-year-old boy know. Of course, if they knew why Adam knew those things they’d be even more uncomfortable. [ return to text ]
25And that was a state of mind Crowley recognised very well. [ return to text ]
26 After all, his dad did go to the shed sometimes. And Adam was going to run out of reasons to request fish for every dinner, especially as he didn’t actually like it that much himself. [ return to text ]
27In a way he did, being the only one of those gathered who had personal experience of what it was like to be an 11-year-old human boy. [ return to text ]
28Unlike the last one. [ return to text ]
29 The Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness. [ return to text ]
30 Alright, so it was a little trouble. If Adam really wanted something changing now, he had to focus hard and want it a lot, but the idea of a giant cephalopod flattening the village had been a good motivator. [ return to text ]
31‘Only in dire emergencies’ was what Aziraphale was going to say. This was not strictly speaking true. In fact, so far Aziraphale had accidentally-on-purpose summoned his flaming sword 1) when faced with a particularly stubborn old book collector who had proven most resistant to more subtle forms of discouragement, 2) protecting a flock of baby ducks crossing a busy cycle route in the park, and 3) once when he got kind of drunk and maudlin and started thinking about the ‘what ifs’ too much, namely ‘what if Crowley had not survived’ which turned into a long list of ‘things that could still go wrong’ and the next thing he knew he’d almost set fire to a pristine third edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream because the sword was suddenly there, in his hand, flaming like anything. [ return to text ]
32That is to say, not very. [ return to text ]
33 Quite the opposite, in fact. [ return to text ]
34 This was ultimately a good thing, as most of them banded together to start a solar power company that not only disrupted the Chinese energy markets, contributing to an overall switch to renewables, but also importantly ensured that none of them had to step foot in any type seafaring vessel ever again. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 4. In Which Something Else Is Found (Metaphorically Speaking)
They’d ended up in the same bar-slash-general store-slash-post office as before,[35] gathering their strength over several bottles of vintage red wine that hadn’t really existed until the moment Aziraphale staggered to the counter to place his order.
It was a decent enough stopover but it wasn’t home. “I am not flying back to England,” Crowley declared, half-way to the third bottle.
Aziraphale nodded. “We could—”
“No planes, trains or automobiles. No ships of any kind.”
“My dear.” Aziraphale smiled in a way that was decidedly wobbly around the edges. “I’m sorry but I don’t think I could miracle us all the way to London right now.” He touched the back of Crowley’s hand fleetingly, as if in apology. As consolations went it was… Well, it was actually pretty good but that’s because Crowley was very tired and disgustingly needy right now.
Which is why his mouth went ahead and wrote a cheque the rest of his body absolutely could not afford. “Me neither,” he said, “but what if we did it… together?” like it was nothing, no big deal, just demon and angel, mingling their energies for some collaborative, two-way miracling.
Fucking hell.
“Together?!” Aziraphale’s eyes widened, sky blue and big enough for Crowley to drown in.[36]
“Just an idea.” Crowley shrugged, suddenly immensely interested in the scratched table top. “A stupid one, forgot I said anything.” He desperately wished for his glasses, which he’d lost to the North Atlantic Ocean. His face felt vulnerable and was probably as easy to read as a seventeenth century manuscript. That is, not very for your average human, but like a picture book to someone who had been around long enough.[37]
“Oh no,” said Aziraphale. Softly. Way too softly for Crowley’s peace of mind. “It’s a brilliant idea. We should…” He reached out again and this time didn’t just brush Crowley’s hand but went right ahead and grasped it in his own.
Just like that. In the middle of some shitty pub above the Arctic Circle.
Crowley suppressed a hysterical giggle, and then an even more hysterical urge to transform into his snake form and slither out into the night. Neither was going to help him now.
“Ugh, sure?” Crowley said, downing his drink. “Let’s… let’s do that.”
***
The sky stretched above them like a dome of a vast chapel. Out here, the habitation was scarce and the starlight pouring over the angel pure and undiminished. Crowley thought that if he were to touch his fingers to Aziraphale’s hair, the rounded curve of his jaw, they would come away stained, dripping silver.
“It’s beautiful,” Aziraphale said. He was not looking at the stars.
Crowley breathed, oxygen and scent of pines and something, something to fill him up, to hold him together, before he folded down like a bad hand of poker. It came out loud and shuddering.
“Come on,” he said, gruff. “Let’s get on with it.” Before he ruined things. Before his mouth said things that could not be unsaid.
Aziraphale nodded. “Together, then.” He reached for Crowley’s arm, anchoring them together, his other hand raised to the Heavens.
Crowley pulled up, up, fire and earth and bitter sulphur, feeling it rise. ‘Home’, he thought. Home.
He brought his hand up, Aziraphale pulled his down and they met in a middle, the synchronised snap of their fingers echoing like a crack of thunder.
At first there was nothing, just the too weak, trembling force of his own miracle, lingering like a flat note. He could feel it pushing against Aziraphale’s power, tendrils sneaking over the barrier both ways. Oil and honey, mingling but not mixing.
It wasn’t going to work. They were never meant to… It couldn’t…
Ink spilling over vellum. Candle wax dripping onto pewter. A sandstorm of earth and air.
“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s face was very close, both of his hands on Crowley’s skin now, fingertips leaving burn marks over his wrist, the side of his neck. “Crowley,” he said. “Our side, remember?” The look in his eyes made Crowley want to sob.
He nodded. Our side. They did not belong to Hell or Heaven anymore. And so their power didn’t either. It was theirs.
The barrier broke. Wave after wave of light and sound and sensation crashing through him, through them both, as their combined power shuddered, changed, became something new, something…
Greater than the sum of its parts, Crowley thought. Like the two of them, rubbing together like grains of sand in the ocean of time, changing each other through millennia of arguments and jokes and shared meals, of grief and wonder and favours that were never about reciprocation. Of choosing each other over and over and over again.
And now. Aziraphale’s power, his essence, pouring over him, into every cell and atom, into every empty, aching space left barren by the long Fall from God’s grace. But even better than that, so much better, was the way Crowley could feel himself welcomed in return, every door and window flung open as Aziraphale laid himself bare without hesitation.
This time, Crowley sobbed.
***
Three seconds passed, during which galaxies were born and died, and Crowley’s worldview tilted even further toward one particularly fussy angel, which he frankly hadn’t thought possible.
When he opened his eyes, they were standing in the middle of Aziraphale’s bookshop. His throat hurt like he’d been screaming. Maybe he had.
Aziraphale was right in front of him, one hand still wrapped around his wrist, the other cupping the side of his face. He was also still inside him, his mind, his… soul, for the lack of better word, though up until this exact moment Crowley would have denied having such a thing. Maybe in choosing humanity, they had gained that too.
It was too late now, to change his mind. Crowley had not thought through the consequences of what they had done, at all, and now every last barrier between them had been torn down like wet paper. There was nowhere left to hide.
“Dearest.” Aziraphale stroked the thin skin under Crowley’s eye with his thumb, a lick of fire he felt everywhere. “Do not be afraid,” he said, and Crowley would have laughed, would have mocked him mercilessly for the cliché if he’d had any words left that weren’t…
“Angel.” Honey-thick, it coated his mouth from the inside and Crowley trembled with the weight of what they were about to do. He’d known, of course he’d known, ever since they’d chosen each other over everything else, that this is where it would lead. But inevitable didn’t mean expected, didn’t mean Crowley was in any way prepared for the devastating tenderness in Aziraphale’s eyes, for the soft demand of his mouth, drinking his own name from Crowley’s lips.
He’d thought of home and ended up in Aziraphale’s arms. If that wasn’t a miracle to break both Heaven and Hell, Crowley didn’t know what was.
He did know not to squander it though.
The noise Aziraphale made once Crowley finally managed to coordinate his muscles enough to respond to the kiss, rather than just stand there and take it,[38] shocked to stillness, was indecent. The noise he wrenched from Crowley in retaliation was worse, better, Aziraphale’s tongue tracing the seam of his lips and seemingly liquefying every bone in his body as he not so subtly steered Crowley toward the backroom sofa.
“No,” Crowley said, dazed but determined to get his point across between kisses, digging his heels in. “Nuh-uh.”
“My dear.” Aziraphale sounded satisfyingly breathless. His hair was a disaster. Crowley loved it. “You are sending some rather – ah!” The skin under his jacket and waistcoat and shirt and undershirt[39] was like warm silk. “…Mixed messages,” Aziraphale finally managed to finish a sentence. His fingers were doing something decidedly un-angel like[40] to the buttons of Crowley’s shirt.
“I am not,” Crowley kissed the corner Aziraphale’s mouth, “Going to do,” behind his ear, “This,” the newly exposed notch of his throat, “On that sofa.”
Aziraphale whined, a low hum that caused every hair on Crowley’s body to stand up. Then he lifted Crowley’s hand to his mouth and bit the fleshy part at the root of his thumb, the blunt pressure of his teeth enough to make Crowley hot and shivering with the possibility of feeling that elsewhere in his body. Maybe, if he was very, very good, Aziraphale would…
“Why not?” The question fanned over the inside of Crowley’s wrist and it took him five long seconds to remember how to form words that weren’t ‘please’.
“Because…” He swallowed, tried again. “Because I’m not going to… with you. On the sofa where, that…” Aziraphale’s tongue was slowly dragging over his pulse point, and Crowley could feel the way his blood pushed closer and closer to the wet heat of it, which made it an absolute sacrilege – the kind he still cared about – to spit out the name of the shrieky pile of maggots, but it was imperative to make Aziraphale understand why he would not, ever, do this on any furnishing touched by… “Hastur,” he managed to gasp finally.
Aziraphale’s head snapped up, eyebrows high with surprise. “Oh!” he said, realisation dawning. Then he rolled his eyes with the familiar fond exasperation, hooked an arm around Crowley’s waist, huffed “Oh, for goodness sake!” and snapped his fingers.
They reappeared upstairs, next to a bed that Crowley was sure was double the size it had been since the last time he’d seen it.[41]
“Better?” Aziraphale asked. He was trying for confident, but there was a tremor of uncertainty in his voice and his grip on Crowley has loosened to an unacceptable degree.
Given the circumstances, Crowley thought the clearest, most unequivocal answer would be to fling himself on top of the covers like an offering and proceeded to do just that.
“Oh my,” Aziraphale breathed. The expression stealing over his features was akin to one he got when faced with a particularly decadent dessert trolley. He even licked his lips.
“Ngk,” Crowley said. His legs fell open, creating a perfect space for his angel to crawl into.
“My thoughts exactly, dear,” Aziraphale murmured and finally accepted the invitation Crowley had been issuing for six millennia with gratifying enthusiasm.
***
Footnotes:
35 With the same four witches as before. The owner had taken some long overdue leave to visit her daughter in Oslo and shop for a nice retirement flat. The others took turns behind the counter. [ return to text ]
36 Yes, it was clichéd. Yes, Crowley wanted to vomit as soon as he caught himself thinking it. Didn’t make it any less accurate though. [ return to text ]
37To call Aziraphale a dedicated scholar of all things Crowley would be a gross underestimation. [ return to text ]
38 Although when put like that… [ return to text ]
39Crowley had a long-standing love-hate relationship with Aziraphale’s layers, one which he was determined to resolve once and for all. [ return to text ]
40 Some might even say ‘wicked’. [ return to text ]
41 He was wrong. The bed was, in fact, four times the size it had been only seconds ago. This, however, was not a reflection on Crowley’s lack of imagination, but on Aziraphale’s priorities. They too had experienced a recent reconfiguration. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 5. Epilogue
The Kraken Was. Importantly, it Was like had been Before – bigger than Other Things and in the cool depths with Acceptable Limits. The small green-grey-winged creature was responsible for this, of this the Kraken was certain. It did not know how, but it had a very clear association between the creature’s beaming face and being released from the confines of invisible walls.
It also had a fond memory of being able to wrap all its tentacles around the creature without squishing him to death. The Kraken did not miss Being Less than it was, but it did miss being able to do that. Just a little bit.
Which is why when, a few weeks after being returned home, the bottom of the ocean split and out swam a Thing that was not Other but Another, the Kraken experienced a Mood so profoundly joyous it registered on the Richter scale as far as Egypt.
***
In his bedroom, Adam Young stretched, his vertebrae making sounds like corn tossed into campfire. It was good to have friends,[42] he thought with the satisfaction of a job well done. Then he ran outside, in search of Wensley, Brian and Pepper, Dog barking excitedly at his heels.
***
Technically, demons weren’t meant for the deep seas.
Of course, technically, demons weren’t exactly meant for caretaking roles either but here Hastur was, swimming down toward the particular rift he knew the Kraken liked to rest in, just to check that it was still there. Maybe also to check that it was okay.
Beelzebub’s punishment for losing the Kraken had been to extend Hastur’s glorified zookeeper duties indefinitely, and whilst there were several mythical beasts he decidedly Did Not Care For,[43] after everything they’d been through, he had developed a certain… affinity with this particular one.
The bottom of the ocean was both very cold and very dark, but the first could be endured and the second was easily remedied by some of his little friends. Hastur could see the Kraken’s tentacles waving out of the rift, moving peacefully with the currents.
All seemed normal, and Hastur was just about to turn back, his mind already half preoccupied by the next stop on his rounds,[44] when an unusual rock formation near the edge caught his attention.
Hastur swam closer. The rocks were smooth and round and larger than him, clustered together in an oddly symmetrical formation almost as if…
Gradually and with mounting apprehension, Hastur turned his head back toward the rift. This time, he counted the tentacles.
He counted them three times. Each time the total was different, and each time it was more than eight.
Next to a mound of what were quite definitely not rocks but eggs, Hastur opened his mouth. The bubbles that came out and slowly drifted toward the surface were large and full of screams.
***
Footnotes:
42 In this, he was entirely correct. [ return to text ]
43Minotaur, for example, was a surly bugger. And he kicked. [ return to text ]
44The Mongolian Death-Worms were Hastur’s favourites. [ return to text ]
***
Title: Lose A Kraken, Gain An Angel
Author:
kat_lair / Mistress KatFandom: Good Omens
Characters/Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 11,622
Disclaimer: Not mine, only playing.
Summary: Hastur needs help. The Kraken is vexed. Crowley would just like to get back home. Erm, the Bookshop.
Author notes: For H, who loves both Hastur and the Kraken. She also provided the title and was emotionally blackmailed into betaing this. Except the Epilogue which she didn’t know about… :D 8th fic for the 100 Fandoms Challenge I’m doing with
pushkin666 and dreamersdare. AO3 Collection here.Fic on AO3
Chapter 1. In Which Something Is Lost
Crowley woke up to a ringing phone and a bad feeling. It was a Thursday, a mere three weeks after the world got a second chance it didn’t even know about and was already wasting, and London was in the grips of a heatwave. Crowley loved it and had spent several afternoons curled up on the hot roof of his building, or in the comforting gold-green shade of his plants.
This particular Thursday, he had been napping in his human form, which made answering the phone just a fraction quicker.
“What is it?” he asked, one hand on the receiver, one hand snapping clothes into existence.
“Oh, it’s… It’s me,” Aziraphale said. “Aziraphale.” As if anyone else called Crowley. Ever.
Well, occasionally someone did, to ask about his life insurance or discuss the accident[1] he’d had but that wasn’t his fault.[2]They were the kind of conversations that the phrase ‘this call may be recorded for training purposes’ had been invented for.
“I know it’s you, angel. What’s wrong?”
There was a beat of silence at the other end, during which Crowley imagined five different kinds of life-or-death[3] scenarios and changed his outfit twice.
“There’s nothing wrong. Why would you think something’s wrong?”
There was definitely something wrong, and the fact that Aziraphale was trying to deflect – badly – set all of Crowley’s finely tuned alarm bells ringing. They chimed to the tune of Hammer To Fall, which was both apt and, well, alarming.
“I just wondered if you could pop over, dear?” Aziraphale was saying. “No hurry, just a little… situation. That would benefit from your… input.”
That did not sound good. At all.
“I’ll be right there,” Crowley promised and slammed the receiver.
He cast about for something to use as a weapon, briefly considered grabbing one of the larger cacti[4] but in the end left with nothing but the keys to the Bentley (which he strictly speaking didn’t need) and a long thin scarf (which he absolutely did).
Crowley regretted his decision as soon as he got to the bookshop. Well, about thirty seconds after he got to the bookshop and discovered what Aziraphale’s ‘little situation’ consisted of.
“Oh,” Aziraphale said, “You’re here!” He had the gall to sound surprised as if Crowley’s arrival had somehow been in doubt.
“You cal— Um, you said there was a problem,” Crowley snapped, pretending very hard that he didn’t jump at even the slightest reason to see the angel, and had in fact been forgetting to wait for one lately and just started showing up and depositing himself in Aziraphale’s general vicinity whenever because of reasons.[5]
“Now, dear, I don’t want you to jump to conclusions.” Aziraphale was coming from behind the counter, hands held up in a decidedly placating fashion. “If fact, if the recent events have taught us anything, it is that things are not always what they seem.” He cast a nervous glance toward the backroom, which was all the information Crowley needed to know where this ‘little situation’ resided.
He started toward it, in long, determined strides, pushing his jacket sleeves up as he went.
Aziraphale fluttered next to him like a particularly fuzzy moth. “Just… hear him out, that’s all I’m saying. Crowley? Crowley, are you listening to me?”
Crowley was not listening to him. Because by that point he’d nudged the door to the backroom open and clapped his disbelieving and horrified eyes on…
“Hastur!?”
On the sofa, Hastur swivelled around to stare at him, shrieked, launched to his feet and promptly fell over the back of it, disappearing into the narrow gap between the sofa and the wall.
“What is he doing here?” Crowley shouted at Aziraphale, stepping in front of him, and then “What the fuck are you doing here?” at the sofa, behind which he could just see one bulging toad eye.
Hellfire burst from his palms, completely useless against other demons but also completely instinctual.
“What is he doing here?” Hastur’s voice was shrill with fear, which gave Crowley a sense of deep satisfaction, but also with the kind of offended outrage that made no sense in the context. “You promised not to call your pet snake!”
“Hey!” Crowley exclaimed, willing himself not to blush because now was not the time,[6] and then “What?” because “What is, what does…? What?”
Crowley turned half of his stare to Aziraphale, and then had to extinguish the hellfire because the idiot angel was reaching for his hands like it was nothing, like Crowley couldn’t…
For a moment, Aziraphale closed his hands around Crowley’s, cupping them gently before letting go.
“Now, I told you to just hear him out,” Aziraphale said, in a tone that was obnoxiously calm for an angel who had a demon on his sofa. Behind it. Specifically, a demon who wasn’t Crowley, who had damn well earned that spot on the sofa over six thousand long years and who was now very angry that he’d never had the foresight to investigate the space behind it because now that would always be a part of the bookshop that Hastur had been to and Crowley hadn’t and—
“Get out here so I can kill you!” Crowley yelled, pointing a finger at the sofa. One of the cushions exploded.
Hastur’s toad made a strangled sound and disappeared from sight entirely.
“Nobody is going to kill anyone in my bookshop.” Aziraphale’s voice had taken on the kind of quality that evoked a pissing-in-pants-reverence in mortals. Crowley huffed and lowered his arm.
“Now,” Aziraphale said, straightening his waistcoat. “Why don’t both of you sit at the table while I make us a nice cup of tea.” It was phrased like a suggestion but it very much wasn’t.
“He’ll take his with an extra blessing,” Crowley muttered, just loud enough to be heard.
Aziraphale rolled his eyes but Crowley was pleased to see Hastur looking somewhat apprehensive as he shuffled out from behind the sofa.
“Whipped,” he hissed at Crowley, walking past, making a wide circle to reach the other side of the table.
They sat at the same time, keeping a close eye on each other. Crowley was looking out for any sudden movements that could be interpreted as a threat. Well, more so than Hastur’s inexplicable[7] presence in Aziraphale’s bookshop.
“Well now,” Aziraphale said, setting out a tray with a teapot and three cups, milk, sugar, and assortment of biscuits. “This is…” He visibly swallowed ‘nice’ and went with “…more civilised.”
He poured out the tea. They drank in silence, Hastur waiting to see if Crowley started melting first before taking his own sip.
Crowley was almost certain Aziraphale had holy water somewhere in the shop, but he was also absolutely certain that he would never tell him where even if that were the case. More’s the pity, he thought, and imagined Hastur slowly puddling into goo.
From the look on Hastur’s face, he knew exactly what Crowley was thinking.
Crowley could feel his fangs lengthening and was just about to flash them to the maggoty bastard opposite when Aziraphale shoved a digestive into his half-open mouth.
“Listen,” he said, and then at Hastur, “And you, tell him.”
“But…”
“Talk.”
Hastur looked like every one of the wriggly crawly things living inside him was lodged in his throat but eventually he spat out: “I lost it.”
Crowley swallowed his biscuit. “Lost what? Your wits?”
Hastur glared but a pointed cough from Aziraphale’s direction derailed whatever non-witty comeback he’d been planning. “No,” he said grudgingly. “I lost the Kraken.”
Crowley blinked.[8] Then he blinked again, more slowly, and burst into the kind of laughter they invented the word ‘demonic’ for.
It turned out, Darjeeling stung awfully, coming out of one’s nostrils.
***
The North Atlantic Ocean was relatively calm, waves rolling across the vast expanse of it on their way toward distant shores. The three of them were hovering some forty feet above the surface, high enough to get a good look.
“It was right here,” Hastur said, and pointed at a spot in the ocean, quite indistinguishable from any other.
“And how do you know it’s not there still?” Crowley asked, grumpily. “Did you go and have a thorough look? And if not, maybe you should do that right now?” He wrapped his arms around his middle tightly, suppressing a shiver. It wasn’t really cold, not like it would be during the winter, but the temperature was still a far cry from the sunny roof of his building.
Hastur muttered something inaudible, pointedly turning his back to Crowley. His wings were the colour of swamp water; the kind that had sat still for years and had an ecosystem of its very own.
“What’s that you said?” Crowley asked. The whole thing was ridiculous and he wanted to get back to London, to Aziraphale’s bookshop, which he would have to disinfect thoroughly now, to erase all evidence of Hastur’s presence.
“He said he’s connected to it,” Aziraphale supplied. “That’s how he knows.” He twisted in the air next to Crowley, turning into a kind of graceful loop around him, catching the air currents to actually avoid using his wings too much.
Crowley tried not to look at the angel directly like this, bathed in rays of the setting sun, his wings catching the restless sway of the water as it reflected light back up onto the white feathers. It was too much; blinding and painfully lovely.
“You can check yourself though,” Aziraphale said, his voice gentle like he somehow knew what Crowley had been thinking about. “Just cast your mind—”
“I know how to do it, angel!” Crowley snapped, then immediately felt bad about it, and thrust his mind down and outwards in an effort to avoid thinking about anything except…
Thousands, millions of life forms, spread out underneath the surface; the endless web of plankton and cold water corals, the quick, darting swarms of fish, the curious whistle-click-echo of whales, more and more and still more, so many of them, silver flashes of life, there and gone and…
“Dearest.” Aziraphale’s voice. “Don’t get lost. Come back to me.” An iron grip on his arms, a deep whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of Aziraphale’s wings, beating hard to keep them both up because Crowley’s own were hanging still and…
“I’m fine,” he said, pushing off to fly under his own steam again. “No Kraken.”
“Told you,” Hastur said. He was hovering nearby, eyes darting between the two of them.
Crowley stiffened, ready for a pointed comment about what had just happened, but curiously Hastur kept to the topic.
“If I don’t find it soon, Beelzebub is going to have my intestines for garters.”
“Remind me again,” Crowley drawled. “Why is that a bad thing, from my perspective?”
Aziraphale answered for him. “Because we still have a missing sea monster. And if it’s not in the sea…”
“Then where the fuck is it?” Crowley finished. It was a good question. The kind that probably had a very, very bad answer.
***
Footnotes:
1 If Crowley had had it, it was not an accident. [ return to text ]
2 It was, however, definitely to his credit. [ return to text ]
3 Specifically, Aziraphale’s life, at cost of whatever death Crowley was required to sow to keep it that way. [ return to text ]
4 The Saguaro Cactus in question was relieved. It was getting rather large for its pot and really wanted to be outside, preferably in a nice desert somewhere warm, but barring that maybe a garden or a balcony. It did not harbour any ambition to be used as a pummelling stick against whatever trouble Crowley had gone to face. [ return to text ]
5 That do not need to be explored at this junction, or any other, ever, would you just stop looking at Crowley like that? [ return to text ]
6 This is incorrect. ‘Now’ was precisely the time, in as much as ‘now’ denotes every currently experienced moment of present, all of which were vulnerable to blushing, stammering and sweaty palms, given the mutual presence of certain parties. Sometimes just the thought would do it. [ return to text ]
7 Outrageous, despicable, unnatural [ return to text ]
8 The novelty of being able to do this, in his human form, had never worn off. The expressive potential of such a single gesture was vast and Crowley had mastered them all, from the slow ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’ blink that he was deploying right now to the coy flutter of lashes he hadn’t actually deployed outside his bathroom mirror but was hoping he would someday have a reason to. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 2. In Which Something Is Sought
The Kraken was.
That much was the same. The Kraken Was. It existed, still here, now, wholly itself.
Well. Only… somehow a little less so than before. A lot less, in fact.
It didn’t really have a very complicated understanding of mass or dimensions, but it knew that Before there had been the Kraken and Other Things, and that the Kraken had been bigger than almost all of the Other Things. Now, the Kraken still Was, but almost all the Other Things it could observe were bigger than it.
This was vexing.
Also vexing was the sudden limit to its Being. Namely, the space in which the Kraken Was. Before there had been A Lot More of it, any limits distant and made of continents and the deep ocean floor. Now, if the Kraken stretched all its tentacles out at the same time, each of them encountered a Limit, one that was smooth and transparent and most, most vexing.
The Kraken, who had never in its considerable existence, been vexed about anything, found this a rather undesirable state of Being. It dragged down several ships in an expression of its Mood, but unlike Before there was no screaming and all the ships just plopped right back to the surface as soon as it let go of them.
The Kraken did not like Now. It wanted Before with the limitless Space and ships that sank and stayed sunk and perhaps also the small-big-green-grey winged creature that had started showing up recently. The Kraken had liked him and the amusing high-pitched noises he made whenever it had tried to pat him on the head with a tentacle.
***
Facts of the matter were these: After Hastur had failed to deliver his part of the infernal plan[9] and been complicit, by virtue of being there, in the demise of another demon of some note, his stock in Hell fell, and it fell fast. He still had enough cronies that killing him outright or even major torture were out of the question, but Beelzebub, when they put their mind to it, could squeeze out a few drops of creative evil.
“They made you a glorified zookeeper?” Crowley was delighted by the revelation, to the point of open glee.
“Of all mythical creatures, great and small,” Aziraphale injected, sounding fond and wistful. “Are you sure you haven’t seen any—”
“For the last time, there are no unicorns left!” Hastur snapped. He drained his drink and wandered over to the bar to get another one.
It turned out that Hastur was a beer drinker. Crowley was not sure how he felt about it, except unsurprised.
“Oh. I was kind of hoping…” Aziraphale sighed, sipping his Merlot.[10]
“It was…” Crowley swallowed, and kept his eyes firmly on the stuffed reindeer head above the bar. “Kind of you to ask.”
They had located to a small and rather grubby bar-slash-general store-slash-post office somewhere above the arctic circle. Crowley thought they were in Norway, but didn’t care enough to check.
He turned to stare at Hastur, now back with a large tankard of something frothy and smelling strongly of hops. “So, you’re saying you have some kind of…” Crowley fluttered fingers next to his temple. “Psychic connection with the Kraken?”
“Yes.” Hastur sat down again, wedging himself between the two of them in a way that made Crowley’s fangs ache.[11]
“Well…” He scooted his chair around the table until he was pressed against Aziraphale’s other side, flashing a triumphant grin at the other demon. “Why can’t you just locate it by using that?”
Hastur rolled his eyes, and his toad rolled its in unison.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Hastur said, in tone of someone who had already explained something several times and anticipated doing so again several more. “It’s not a bloody satnav!”
“What’s a…?”
“Never mind.” Crowley cut Aziraphale off before they went off on a tangent about GPS. Quite frankly, he was surprised Hastur knew what a satnav was – well enough to use it in a sentence and everything. “How does it work then? Can’t you tell anything?”
Hastur stroked his toad morosely. At the bar an old reindeer herder swore off drink forever and ordered three of them in one breath.
“I can tell it’s… not happy,” Hastur said finally.
They all drank deeply, struck silent by the full ramifications of an unhappy Kraken. A lonely tear[12] rolled down Hastur’s pockmarked cheek and Crowley was certain it wasn’t on behalf of any unlucky humans, ships or small islands that might bear the brunt of the Kraken’s displeasure.
Wordlessly, Aziraphale handed over a tartan handkerchief.
Behind the bar, the proprietor poured herself some of the leftover Merlot and contemplated whether it was time to move down south. Her daughter was a very successful civil rights lawyer in Oslo and was always begging her to come live closer. Perhaps she would give Gudrun a call tonight.
“Right,” Aziraphale said after a few minutes of steady drinking. “We need a plan.”
Crowley agreed. Too bad, he didn’t have a clue where to start.
Luckily, Hastur chose this as the moment to contribute something more than a general air of despondency to the venture.
“The witch!” he declared loudly. Several of the bar patrons looked over and then quickly found somewhere else put their eyes with a distinct ‘no sir, no witches here’ message.[13] “We’ve got to go see the witch!”
***
They went to see the witch.
Jasmine Cottage was glorious in the morning sun, covered in bashful ivy and flowers of every variety, the steady humming of bees already audible despite the early hour. An assortment of wind chimes tinkled gently in the breeze.
“Satan preserve,” Hastur spat, visibly flinching at the sight. “It’s hideous.”
Even Aziraphale blinked a little at the spectacle. “It’s… It’s like something out of a storybook.”
“Or a young boy’s imagination of what the cottage of a Good Witch looks like,” Crowley commented. It seemed Adam had restored and improved[14] everyone’s dwellings in his post-apocalypse reset, not just theirs.
Crowley wondered briefly if, when the boy grew up, Jasmine Cottage would return to its original dilapidated state and cease to be quite so… enchanted. Probably not.
Despite the sun being up, it wasn’t much past six o’clock. Aziraphale unceremoniously slapped at Crowley’s wrist when he tried to knock on the door, tutting about decent visiting hours.
He made them wait until the kitchen curtains were drawn open before announcing their presence.
Of course, it would have perhaps been prudent not to wait right outside the kitchen window for that. The sight of three otherworldly beings with their faces pressed right to the glass was one Newt neither expected nor appreciated, a sentiment which he expressed with a blood-curling scream. This, in turn, sent Anathema downstairs and out of the front door, hair in disarray and a large cast iron frying pan in her hand.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, dear!” Aziraphale said, vanquishing the frying pan before it connected with Hastur’s head. “We didn’t mean to startle you.”
Anathema squinted at him for a few seconds, having clearly run out without her glasses. “It’s you,” she said, not sounding overjoyed by the realisation. “Guess you better come inside.”
Crowley rubbed his temples. There was a headache threatening, somewhere just behind his eyes. “Tell me there’s coffee?” he pleaded.
“You’ll have tea or nothing,” Anathema said brusquely. “And I’m going to need my frying pan back.”
***
Newt made pancakes.[15] He was glad to have something to do that didn’t involve sitting around a table with an angel (!!), two (TWO!!!) demons and a witch (just because he adored Anathema with everything he had, didn’t mean he also didn’t fear her, just a bit).
“You want me to do a location spell?” Anathema was asking between forkfuls of pancake. She’d known there was another reason to keep Newt around beyond the, erm, unexpected skillset[16] he had originally displayed. Agnes hadn’t steered her wrong yet.
“You do know how, right?” Crowley asked. He was sipping some Earl Grey and trying very hard not to stare at the way Aziraphale scraped his fork through a smear of jam, brought it to his mouth and then licked each tine individually, his pink tongue darting out and through the gaps in a way that was so blatantly indecent it could only be entirely accidental and unconscious, which was the worst thing of it all.
“I mean…” He dragged his eyes away from Aziraphale’s mouth and forced himself to look at Hastur instead. Nothing quite quelled inconvenient feelings than watching a being made of maggots and spite feed blueberries to his head toad.
“You are a witch, are you not?” Crowley finished his half-hearted query. It was difficult to maintain appropriate focus or care for anything but Aziraphale’s soft hands with their neatly manicured nails cutting a pancake with a precision of a brain surgeon.
“Obviously I know how to do a location spell,” Anathema said. “Well. In theory.”
Newt put another stack of pancakes on the table and replenished the teapot. Hastur cautiously tried a blueberry himself and then immediately spat it out. Crowley snapped his fingers, making the mangled berry disappear mid-flight.
“Perhaps you could try?” Aziraphale said, in that way of his that sounded like a completely neutral question but strongly implied both how delighted he would be if you did and how utterly disappointed if you didn’t.
“I… Of course, I will try.” Anathema said, with barely a hesitation. And not like Crowley could blame her. After all, he had tried far more outlandish feats simply because Aziraphale had threatened never to speak to him again.
“Wonderful!” Aziraphale smiled in a way that made both Crowley and Hastur hiss, though for entirely different reasons.[17] “Now then,” he looked at Hastur meaningfully. “What do we say?”
Hastur stared back, uncomprehending.
Crowley rolled his eyes. Trust his angel to try and install actual manners in a demon, what a concept.[18] “He’s grateful,” he gritted out, because otherwise they would be here all day and Crowley very deliberately did not want that. “We all are. Perhaps we could now Get On With It?”
“Quite!” Aziraphale clapped his hands and the pile of dishes by the sink found itself scrupulously clean, every chip and crack fully repaired. “No time to waste. Oh, and Newt?” He beamed beatifically at the cook. “These pancakes were simply scrumptious.”
***
Anathema was a witch, but not one who had had to do much witching before, on account of focusing on her ancestor’s prophecies and the little thing called Saving The World. She was a bit unclear on how much of the world saving was due to her but confident that she had played an important part (though she couldn’t really remember exactly which one) in the venture. And in any case, the world was very much Saved, at least from an apocalypse of the supernatural kind. Anathema was working on preventing the manmade ones next, and the village was fast becoming fully carbon neutral, much to the consternation of Tadfield Neighbourhood Watch.
The point was that she hadn’t actually done many spells. Luckily, there were books for this kind of thing.
“Uh… Can’t you do it yourself?” Anathema asked, proffering one of the large volumes at Aziraphale. “And why do you even need a spell? You’re actual mythical being yourself, can’t you just…” She waved her hand around in a manner reminiscent of Crowley’s earlier gesture. “You know.”
“No, we can’t.” Crowley crossed his arms. Witchcraft made him kind of twitchy. People had blamed it on his side which was frankly insulting considering the amount of practical help and healing women with that label had done in the past.
“It doesn’t work like that, dear,” Aziraphale said and pushed the book gently back to Anathema’s hands. “I’m sure you’ll do great.”
Hastur was standing by the window, his back turned to the room. On the other side of it, a fly was buzzing against the sun-warm glass, emitting a gently resonant bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt as it travelled the length of the window, trying to find a way in.
It could be just a regular fly.
It could be something much, much worse.
With a dry swallow, Hastur turned back to the others and said something not even a century on the rack would’ve dragged out of him previously. “Please.” He choked a little on the word. “I need to find it.”
Crowley’s eyebrows hiked up, clearing the upper rim of his glasses.
Anathema squared her shoulders and cracked open the spell book. “Alright then. Let’s have a look.”
***
Three hours, four half-burned candles, and five smouldering piles of herbs later, they were all gathered around a large map of the world. Above it, a black hairpin with a crow[19] hung in the air, unmoving. It hovered over southern of England, the spot Anathema had placed it on at the start to denote their current location.
“It’s not working!” Anathema growled in frustration. She’d done everything correctly and they’d all been elated when the hairpin had obediently risen to float above the map, and then… Nothing.
“Why isn’t it working?” Hastur demanded. He cast a nervous eye at the window. The fly was still there. In fact, there were now two of them, and two more at the other window.
“I don’t know!” Anathema snapped. “If I knew, don’t you think I—”
“Look!” Crowley interrupted them. He too was kneeling on the floor, nose practically touching the World Atlas as he stared intensely at the hairpin.
“What is it, dear?” Aziraphale bent down to the same level, which had the devastating effect of putting his face within touching distance of Crowley’s.
Crowley’s heart skipped several beats it didn’t strictly speaking need to hit. “I… Uh… Thought I saw it move.”
Both Hastur and Anathema’s heads entered his field of vision. They all stared at the hairpin.
“There!” Aziraphale exclaimed. “It… sort of quivered.”
“I saw it too,” Hastur said. He had. Definitely.
They all sat back up and contemplated the situation.
“It’s supposed to move from our location to the location of that which is sought,” Anathema repeated the information she’d already told the several times. “But it’s just sort of… vibrating in place.”
Crowley frowned. He eyed the map, a large World Atlas they had ripped from back of one of the old dictionaries that seemed to breed in cottages like this. It encompassed everything, including all the oceans, just… not in a lot of detail.
“Maybe…” He tilted his head one way and then the other. An idea had taken root somewhere deep in his mind and the pale tendrils of it were now close to breaking to his conscious thoughts. “Maybe it is moving, just…”
He got up suddenly, took several steps away and made a square frame with the thumb and forefinger of both hands through which he regarded the tableau of the map and the three beings – one human, one demon, and one angel with an ability to turn him into a tangled noodle of feelings.
“Go on,” Aziraphale said softly. He got to his feet as well and, careful not to disturb Crowley’s focus, shuffled next to him. “What are you thinking?” he asked, hand grazing the back of Crowley’s jacket, just a quick almost-caress masquerading as an encouraging pat.
Crowley drew in a shuddering breath, held it as the thoughts floated to the surface and coalesced into words. “Maybe…It’s just not moving very much?” he offered on the exhale. “Maybe the scale is too big.”
The other three stared at him for a few seconds and then Anathema sprung up.
“Of course! It’s… Hold on, I’m going to get a different map!”
“Crowley, that’s brilliant!” Aziraphale exclaimed. Now both of his hands were wrapped around Crowley’s upper arms and he was shaking him a little bit, enthusiastically. “Absolutely marvellous!” His smile was incandescent and Crowley could feel himself slowly disintegrate in the warmth of it.
“Ugh, just a guess,” he said, pulling himself away. There was only so much praise he could take[20] without puddling like an ice-cream cone in August heat.
From the floor, Hastur was watching them with the horrified fascination of a five-year-old watching a spider eat a wasp.
“I still have some Holy Water,” Crowley told him pointedly. It wasn’t even really a lie. Aziraphale had some and Crowley… (his mind tripped over the thought a bit, did a couple of awkward somersaults, but eventually arrived at…) had Aziraphale. Sort of. He was… pretty sure that’s where they were at. Now that the concept of ‘sides’ had ceased to have quite so profound consequences.
At the very least, Aziraphale had him, a simple fact of life that had remained unchanged and largely unacknowledged for six thousand years.
“Let’s try this one!” Anathema came back, Newt trailing after her with a look of apprehensive curiosity on his face.[21]
She slapped down a battered A-Z map of Great Britain, opened it on the map of England and slowly inched it under the still hovering hairpin.
Unerringly, the pin moved to float above the tiny dot titled ‘Tadfield’.
Everyone looked at each other. A sense of unease was growing in the room, much like a slimy mushroom in a particularly dank cave.
Silently, Anathema flipped to a different page, the one that showed the area with its villages and roads in a larger scale still. The hairpin trembled, turned around a couple of times like a dog looking for a good place to sleep in, but remained above the village centre.
Anathema cleared her throat. “Newt, could you… In the kitchen there’s a…”
Newt nodded, ducked out and came back with a folded piece of paper. It was the Tadfield Tourist Map, a grand name for something the late Mrs Grove from the post office drew two decades ago and that had been photocopied ever since. Still, it was the most detailed cartographic representation of the area they had at hand and once they slid it on top of the previous one the hairpin gave a happy little jump and visibly moved several centimetres, first to hover above Jasmine Cottage and then shooting to hang above…
“Son of a…” Crowley fought the urge scramble backwards and straight out of the house, the village, and possibly the entire country. Madagascar was nice this time of the year, he’d heard.
“Number Four Hogback Lane,” Aziraphale gasped.
Both Anathema and Newt looked unhappy about the news. The only one nonplussed was Hastur, who had the blank expression of the blissfully ignorant.
Crowley was happy to ruin it. “The Antichrist,” he hissed. “That’s where Adam bloody Young lives.”
Hastur looked at the others for confirmation and saw three heads all solemnly nodding. His mouth opened and the noise that emerged was not dissimilar to the sound of someone throwing a bucketful of toads into a wood chipper and then turning it on the slowest setting possible.
Crowley felt vaguely envious. Lucky toads.
***
Footnotes:
9 Technically, of course, it wasn’t Hastur’s fault. However, he had been there, and he was the only one left Hell could actually punish in some way, now that Crowley appeared untouchable, Adam remained a wild card no one wanted to pick and God Herself was somewhat out of their jurisdiction. [ return to text ]
10 The bartender (who was also the owner of the fine establishment) had been rather astonished to find a dusty bottle of Castello di Ama in the back cupboard, but since the flashy foreigner had forked out two-hundred krone for a glass without batting an eyelid, she wasn’t exactly complaining. [ return to text ]
11If you have any doubt about whether Hastur did this deliberately then you are a fool that should not be let out to socialise unsupervised, and certainly not with any demons. [ return to text ]
12It was not crystalline. It was, in fact, the colour and consistency of mud – the lively kind that you wouldn’t want to walk barefoot in. [ return to text ]
13There were, in fact, no fewer than five witches in the establishment, which coincidentally was also the exact number of people in it. [ return to text ]
14 To the value of ‘improved’ as judged by Adam. It would take him over a decade to fully understand that ‘What Adam Liked Best’ was not necessarily the same as ‘What Other People Liked Best’. In that, he was of course wholly in line with average human development. [ return to text ]
15 He made them with a top of the range Aus-Ion Seamless Satin Skillet, made of single piece of iron. It was not, strictly speaking, the pan Anathema had grabbed from the kitchen counter but it was the pan they now had. [ return to text ]
16Sex. Obviously, sex. He wasn’t truly great at it yet, but he was a quick to learn and took direction well, and then there were the pancakes of course. [ return to text ]
17 Crowley’s had a higher age rating. [ return to text ]
18The irony escaped him entirely. [ return to text ]
19 They had needed something, a needle for the compass so to speak, and this had been the closest pointy thing at hand. Or, in Anathema’s hair, to be precise. [ return to text ]
20 The amount of praise Crowley could take from beings who were not Aziraphale without any effect whatsoever: infinite. The amount of praise Crowley could take from Aziraphale without the risk of losing the structural integrity of his corporeal form: small. Very small. Like, a casual ‘thank you, dear’ was fine, he’d become immune to that, but a more involved ‘gosh, how did you find this place, the food is simply divine, so glad you suggested we eat here, dear boy!’ could send him to paroxysms of Feelings that had to be stuffed away immediately and with extreme prejudice. Crowley’s estimation of how successful he was about this was vastly different from the reality [ return to text ]
21 His default expression. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 3. In Which Something Is Found
When the knock came, Adam was – wonder of wonders – actually home. He was also home alone, except for Dog of course, because his parents had gone to some sort of garden show in the next village over. They had of course invited him along, but as much as Adam liked adventures, he just didn’t think rows of vegetables and flowers[22] would provide that.
Besides, his new pet seemed kind of unhappy.
“Do you think it’s lonely?” Adam asked Dog. They were both sitting in the shed,[23] staring at a large aquarium. Inside it, the Kraken stared back at them, forlornly. Or, at least, Adam thought it did. It was difficult to tell.
“Maybe it needs a friend,” Adam mused. “Do you think we should find another one?”
Dog whimpered at the suggestion. Then its ears perked and it erupted in furious barks, shooting out of the shed and toward the front of the house. This typically happened when someone knocked on the door so Adam was not in any way concerned, slowly walking across the garden and around the house.
He was, it has to be said, somewhat surprised to see the group huddled on the front steps. He recognised all but one of them of course, even liked them (well, Anathema, because witches were cool, he wasn’t sure about the others), but the last time he’d seen all of them at the same time had almost cost Adam all that was his and all that he was.
Still, that had never involved being a coward.
“Hullo?” he said and then “Can I help you?” because his mum would somehow know if he hadn’t at least tried to be polite.
All five people (beings?) swivelled around. The one Adam didn’t know let out a short but impressively piercing scream and dove behind the rose bushes.
“Adam!” the angel said. “How are you? Erm, keeping well I see?” His name was Aziraphale, Adam remembered, had, in fact, known[24] it despite the lack of any formal introductions since the second the angel had pointed a weapon at him.
“I’m… Fine?” He was pretty sure that was true, now. “What is this…?”
“Where is it?” the unfamiliar demon (that’s what he was, Adam could see that now) demanded furiously. He’d poked his head out of the roses and had somehow acquired a toad on it. Adam was fascinated.
“You Son of Satan! You ruined the apocalypse already!” He seemed very angry about this, which Adam didn’t quite understand. “Did you have to go and ruin this for me too?”
The others all stared at the toad demon (Adam concentrated, ahh, Hastur), mouths open, eyebrows reaching higher climes.
“Uhh… Calm down there a bit, matey?” Crowley said tentatively. There was something akin to grudging respect in the way he eyed the other demon, tinged with the same kind of fear with which people regard those with nothing to lose.[25]
The angel cleared his throat. “What he means to enquire about is… That is, if you’ve maybe seen…?”
“Where’s the Kraken?” Anathema asked, blunt but not unkind. “And don’t bullshit me Adam Young, we all know you have it.”
Adam sighed. It’s not that he’d expected to keep it a secret forever,[26] but longer than a few days would’ve been nice.
“I was only trying to help,” he said. “I thought it might be lonely. And, well…” He squirmed under everyone’s disbelieving gaze in the manner of young boys everywhere when they know their explanations don’t quite hold water without knowing precisely why. “Robbie Grant in my class got a tarantula for his birthday last week.”
Everyone blinked, even Crowley who Adam thought had taken to the activity with unnecessary enthusiasm.
Surprisingly, it was Newt who was the first to progress from facial expressions to actual words.
“Ah,” he said, nodding as if he knew exactly what Adam was getting at.[27] “I really wanted a lizard as a kid.”
In the background Hastur made a mournful sound while Crowley flinched.
“You… stole the Kraken because you wanted… an exotic pet?” Aziraphale asked, aghast.
“I didn’t steal it!” Adam protested hotly. “It doesn’t belong to anyone!”
“Quite,” Anathema said, oddly gentle. “What you did could more accurately be described as an abduction. An unlawful imprisonment, if you like.”
Adam’s eyes widened. Dog pressed against his master’s calves, sensing his distress. “I…” To his horror, Adam could feel his bottom lip wobble. “I didn’t think of it like that,” he said, miserably, even though he knew that was no excuse and had never been one.
“Where? Is? It?” Hastur had inched to the front of the group, still visibly afraid but with a determined jut to his pockmarked chin.
“Oh,” Adam said, brightening. Maybe this was one of those mistakes that could be easily fixed.[28] “It’s just there.” He pointed behind himself. “In the shed.”
***
This was fast becoming one of the weirdest days of at least, oh, the last millennium or so. Not the worst, because despite the general unpleasantness of having to share space with Hastur of all beings, there had so far been nothing that had seriously threatened the wellbeing or even the happiness of his angel. But one of the weirdest for sure, Crowley thought as they filed after the Antichrist[29] (former Antichrist?) toward a red and rather rickety looking garden shed.
“I had to make it a bit smaller, of course,” Adam was explaining. “Okay, a lot smaller. But it was really difficult to find an aquarium of even this size and, well…” He pulled open the door and gestured inside. “I can reverse it, no trouble.”[30]
Crowley shuddered. From behind, he heard Anathema mutter “We’re going to have to have a chat with that boy about responsible use of power. Do you think he’s too young for Foucault?” to Newt under her breath.
As soon as the door was open, Hastur pushed to the front, rudely elbowing Crowley on his face and pushing Aziraphale practically into his arms in his haste to get to the large aquarium taking up most of the room.
“Oh dear, terribly sorry,” Aziraphale said, clutching at Crowley’s shirt for balance. A truly alarming amount of soft angel was pressing against Crowley, every point of contact burning like he’d been dosed in holy water. He shuddered again, though for entirely different reasons.
“I… He should be more careful,” Crowley said lamely, trying to push Aziraphale up without appearing to push him away, precisely.
“Quite,” Aziraphale said, patting Crowley’s chest in a way that was most distracting.
Sadly, not distracting enough to let either of them block out the little shout of joy Hastur made.
They turned to look and found Hastur plastered against the side of the aquarium, emitting the kind of cooing noises that made Crowley deeply uncomfortable. On the other side of the glass was the Kraken alright, suction cups pressed right where Hastur’s face was.
When Adam had said he’d made it smaller, he’d been correct. This, however, did not mean that he’d made the Kraken small. Oh no, it was still the size of a human child, maybe even a teenager, with added horror of tentacles and a beaked mouth, now prominently displayed against the glass.
“Fuck me!” said Newt with fervour and then “Ow!” because Anathema stepped on his foot with “There are children here! And an angel!”
The angel in question didn’t seem to notice. “How should we…? Well that’s… Is that a good idea?” Aziraphale asked, suddenly alarmed, but it was too late.
Hastur had already pried open the top of the tank and the Kraken was pulling itself out with impressive speed and a great big slosh of displaced water.
Everyone took several steps backwards, got briefly bottlenecked by the doorway, and then plopped out, much like the armada of plastic toy ships that was currently being violently evicted from the aquarium.
Everyone except Hastur. He tried, but was severely hampered by the eight tentacles wrapping themselves around his torso, damp and determined and ever so slightly… clingy.
“Gah!” Hastur said, staggering under the weight. “Argh!” His arms came around automatically and the effect was… Well, it was horrifying.
“Awww,” said Aziraphale. “They’re hugging.”
Crowley turned to stare at the angel in disbelief.
Now out of the shed, Hastur and the Kraken lurched by in a tangle of limbs and muffled shrieking. One of the Kraken’s tentacles was gently petting Hastur’s toad, who seemed to take the situation in its stride. Probably not the worst thing it had seen, the poor thing.
“Oh!” said Adam, snapping his fingers as if he’d just realised something profound. “It had a friend already. My bad.”
“Send. It. Back!” Hastur gasped from between tentacles. “Now!”
“Adam, my boy, I think you rather…” Aziraphale looked like he was considering intervening. Crowley reached out and grabbed the back of his jacket just in case the angel was going to do something stupid.
Luckily, he didn’t have to.
“Alright.” Adam snapped his fingers again, this time with intent.
The Kraken disappeared.
So did Hastur.
“Ooops?” said Adam.
Crowley threw his arms in the air in victory.
***
Alright, so turned out that having a do-gooder for a best friend meant that said best friend would just not. let. things. go.
“He’s fine,” Crowley said. “Probably.”
“You don’t know that,” Aziraphale pointed out. “Adam doesn’t know that so there’s no way you do.”
On the background, Adam spread his arms in a universal shrug of ‘haven’t the foggiest, mate’. “I’m guessing he’s with the Kraken?”
“He’s guessing,” Aziraphale sniffed.
“What does it matter anyway?” Crowley asked, crossing his own arms petulantly. “We found the Kraken, which was the main thing. Why do you even care about Hastur?” To his horror, Crowley could hear himself whining. It was pathetic. He wanted to gag himself.
“Well, I…” Aziraphale fussed with his sleeves a bit. “I don’t. Precisely. I care about making sure that no one comes asking questions about him.” He cast a meaningful glance downwards.
As if on cue, Newt asked, “Is it me, or is there an awful lot of flies around?”
“Shit,” said Crowley, turning to Adam urgently. “Can you do something?”
“That is not my fault,” Adam said, pointing at the patch of grass that had begun to swirl and buzz in a way that suggested something might be heading upwards. Someone, to be precise.
“Well, they are going to be your problem,” Crowley hissed.
“How rude,” Beelzebub said, rising from an earth much like an odour rises from a week-old carcass. “I count at least as a minor disaster.” They shook dirt off their coat, surveying the garden with an air of someone surveying a murder scene and finding some of the bodies missing. “Now, what have you done with that wretched pile of maggots?”
“Do you think I should get my sword?” Aziraphale muttered under his breath, just low enough for Crowley to hear.
“Yessss!” Crowley whispered right back. “I mean, what? You can still do that?”
“Well only in—”[31]
“Okay, look,” Adam said, hands on his hips and sounding as impatient as only an 11-year-old boy can. “My parents are going to be home real soon. We were gonna have sausage and chips for dinner and maybe watch a movie, and none of that’s going to work if I have a garden full of…” He hesitated, flapping a hand around a bit. “You lot.”
Beelzebub raised their eyebrows, high enough that they disappeared into the scraggly hairline. The buzzing turned decidedly angry. “That’s rich, coming from you. As if you aren’t more or less of the same stock.”
Aziraphale too had turned indignant. “Let he who is without sin cast—”
“Enough!” Adam shouted and brought his hands together in a clap that seemed to shake the ground.
Or, Crowley thought, perhaps just the bones inside him, each of them vibrating on a frequency of the universe.
The last thing he heard was Anathema’s irate scolding. “Adam Young!” she yelled, “That is not the way to solve your problems!”
Then the world turned cold and dark, like heart of a storm, and Tadfield disappeared from view. Desperately, Crowley reached out and grabbed two fistfuls of Aziraphale’s tweed jacket, pulling him close. There was no way in Hell, Heaven, Earth or any other plane of existence that he was going to be separated from the angel.
Never again.
***
The North Atlantic Ocean was cold and very, very wet. The three of them materialised about ten feet above the rolling waves, which was nowhere near enough of a gap to even think about getting one’s wings out, not when gravity was much quicker on the draw than any of them.
“Son of a—!” Beelzebub curled up, divebombing into the sea in a tight ball of rage and alarmed flies.
Aziraphale and Crowley were fully tangled thanks to Crowley’s last second grab, their limbs still entwined once they plummeted into the water, too shocked to even scream.
The cold hit like a boot to the solar plexus and both of them froze for long seconds, clutching at each other. Crowley had gone under back first and over Aziraphale’s shoulder he could see the surface grow more distant, light dimming with each hammer of his heart, pumping furiously thanks to extra adrenalin.
For a brief moment he panicked; a full whiteout of pure fear pushing aside every rational thought like how angels, or demons, couldn’t really drown.
A sudden jolt reengaged his brain, their descend halted by… Aziraphale’s wings, fully manifested now and acting like a pair of giant fins, granite grey in the fading light.
Aziraphale shook him, mouth tightly pursed to keep breath in, eyebrows doing a furious gavotte.
Crowley got the message alright. With an urgent push, his wings flared out, slowing the two of them even more. His human body had also caught on to the circumstances and when Aziraphale finally let go, pointing furiously toward the surface, Crowley’s feet knew just what to do, kicking at the water.
They couldn’t drown, but their human bodies could and discorporation would be an outcome with a very uncertain resolution considering their less than amicable relationships with their respective (former?) employees.
It was like flying against a gale wind, each beat of his wings hard work that made his muscles scream in agony. On the plus side, it only took a few of them to propel himself to the surface.
Crowley broke from the water gasping and spluttering, Aziraphale right next to him similarly wheezing. A short distance away, Beelzebub was floating on their back, a steady stream of curse words falling from their mouth, the giant fly circling above them in a decidedly protective manner.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Crowley spat, pushing wet hair off his face. “Get your sword, angel. We’re going right back to Tadfield and killing that insufferable little brat!”
For a second there, Aziraphale looked like he might agree. But before he could say anything, a large wave pushed them apart. Crowley could see a brief tumble of white feathers disappearing from sight for excruciating three seconds before reappearing several feet above the water.
“Quick!” Aziraphale shouted. “Get out of the water! We’re about to have some company!”
“Fuck!” Crowley beat his wings, taking off as gracefully as one of chubbier ducks at St James’s Park,[32] Beelzebub with their chitin wings having a much more successful take-off.
The Kraken rose from the depths like an island, vast and craggy. Restored to its original size, its skin bore the marks of millennia of disagreements with ships, sharks and continents. Its tentacles flew out in every direction and Crowley did some of the best flying of his life, avoiding each of them in his bid to rise high enough.
To his relief, Aziraphale was already out of immediate grabbing distance, his eyes wide with the sheer spectacle of what they were witnessing when Crowley reached him. To his disappointment, Beelzebub too had made it, coming to a spot close by.
“What is that?” Aziraphale asked, pointing.
“Seems like it’s got something…” Crowley squinted, trying to make out what the thing wrapped at the end of one of the Kraken’s tentacles was. Something grey and… wriggling. Maybe an unlucky seal?
Beelzebub too was looking, face pinched in concentration and then, suddenly, clearing. “Ha!” they barked. “I’ll be damned…”
Crowley flinched. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Beelzebub smile. It was a not sight that inspired joy and goodwill.[33]
It wasn’t until the Kraken let go of what it was holding, throwing it up and away like a prize bowler of a cricket team, that Crowley could recognise its captive.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrhggggggggggggggggaaaaaahhhh!” Hastur screamed, flying past all of them in a sodden clump of feathers, shedding maggots like a distressed dog sheds its fur.
“Gentlemen.” Beelzebub tapped their fly with two fingers as if tipping a hat. “I got this. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure. Won’t say I look forward to seeing you again either.”
Aziraphale and Crowley watched them fly after Hastur’s disappearing form. Below them, the Kraken was slowly sinking under the surface again, having successfully completed its mission.
Within a minute it was just two of them, hovering above the ocean. In the distance, a Chinese oil tanker was about to file a report that got its captain and most of the crew fired.[34]
“Well,” Crowley said, too exhausted to even miracle himself dry. “Shall we get a drink?”
Aziraphale turned in a circle, twice, before pointing toward the horizon. “I think the coast of Norway is this way.”
They set off, flying slowly and close to each other.
***
Footnotes:
22 Adam had not yet seen the musical Little Shop of Horrors, for which we all should be very, very grateful. [ return to text ]
23 Arthur Young liked having a shed. He didn’t really do much with it, except store the lawnmower and odd tools, but he very much liked having it. Just, mostly in an abstract sense. [ return to text ]
24Sometimes Adam just knew things. Sometimes they were the kinds of things that made other people uncomfortable to have an 11-year-old boy know. Of course, if they knew why Adam knew those things they’d be even more uncomfortable. [ return to text ]
25And that was a state of mind Crowley recognised very well. [ return to text ]
26 After all, his dad did go to the shed sometimes. And Adam was going to run out of reasons to request fish for every dinner, especially as he didn’t actually like it that much himself. [ return to text ]
27In a way he did, being the only one of those gathered who had personal experience of what it was like to be an 11-year-old human boy. [ return to text ]
28Unlike the last one. [ return to text ]
29 The Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness. [ return to text ]
30 Alright, so it was a little trouble. If Adam really wanted something changing now, he had to focus hard and want it a lot, but the idea of a giant cephalopod flattening the village had been a good motivator. [ return to text ]
31‘Only in dire emergencies’ was what Aziraphale was going to say. This was not strictly speaking true. In fact, so far Aziraphale had accidentally-on-purpose summoned his flaming sword 1) when faced with a particularly stubborn old book collector who had proven most resistant to more subtle forms of discouragement, 2) protecting a flock of baby ducks crossing a busy cycle route in the park, and 3) once when he got kind of drunk and maudlin and started thinking about the ‘what ifs’ too much, namely ‘what if Crowley had not survived’ which turned into a long list of ‘things that could still go wrong’ and the next thing he knew he’d almost set fire to a pristine third edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream because the sword was suddenly there, in his hand, flaming like anything. [ return to text ]
32That is to say, not very. [ return to text ]
33 Quite the opposite, in fact. [ return to text ]
34 This was ultimately a good thing, as most of them banded together to start a solar power company that not only disrupted the Chinese energy markets, contributing to an overall switch to renewables, but also importantly ensured that none of them had to step foot in any type seafaring vessel ever again. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 4. In Which Something Else Is Found (Metaphorically Speaking)
They’d ended up in the same bar-slash-general store-slash-post office as before,[35] gathering their strength over several bottles of vintage red wine that hadn’t really existed until the moment Aziraphale staggered to the counter to place his order.
It was a decent enough stopover but it wasn’t home. “I am not flying back to England,” Crowley declared, half-way to the third bottle.
Aziraphale nodded. “We could—”
“No planes, trains or automobiles. No ships of any kind.”
“My dear.” Aziraphale smiled in a way that was decidedly wobbly around the edges. “I’m sorry but I don’t think I could miracle us all the way to London right now.” He touched the back of Crowley’s hand fleetingly, as if in apology. As consolations went it was… Well, it was actually pretty good but that’s because Crowley was very tired and disgustingly needy right now.
Which is why his mouth went ahead and wrote a cheque the rest of his body absolutely could not afford. “Me neither,” he said, “but what if we did it… together?” like it was nothing, no big deal, just demon and angel, mingling their energies for some collaborative, two-way miracling.
Fucking hell.
“Together?!” Aziraphale’s eyes widened, sky blue and big enough for Crowley to drown in.[36]
“Just an idea.” Crowley shrugged, suddenly immensely interested in the scratched table top. “A stupid one, forgot I said anything.” He desperately wished for his glasses, which he’d lost to the North Atlantic Ocean. His face felt vulnerable and was probably as easy to read as a seventeenth century manuscript. That is, not very for your average human, but like a picture book to someone who had been around long enough.[37]
“Oh no,” said Aziraphale. Softly. Way too softly for Crowley’s peace of mind. “It’s a brilliant idea. We should…” He reached out again and this time didn’t just brush Crowley’s hand but went right ahead and grasped it in his own.
Just like that. In the middle of some shitty pub above the Arctic Circle.
Crowley suppressed a hysterical giggle, and then an even more hysterical urge to transform into his snake form and slither out into the night. Neither was going to help him now.
“Ugh, sure?” Crowley said, downing his drink. “Let’s… let’s do that.”
***
The sky stretched above them like a dome of a vast chapel. Out here, the habitation was scarce and the starlight pouring over the angel pure and undiminished. Crowley thought that if he were to touch his fingers to Aziraphale’s hair, the rounded curve of his jaw, they would come away stained, dripping silver.
“It’s beautiful,” Aziraphale said. He was not looking at the stars.
Crowley breathed, oxygen and scent of pines and something, something to fill him up, to hold him together, before he folded down like a bad hand of poker. It came out loud and shuddering.
“Come on,” he said, gruff. “Let’s get on with it.” Before he ruined things. Before his mouth said things that could not be unsaid.
Aziraphale nodded. “Together, then.” He reached for Crowley’s arm, anchoring them together, his other hand raised to the Heavens.
Crowley pulled up, up, fire and earth and bitter sulphur, feeling it rise. ‘Home’, he thought. Home.
He brought his hand up, Aziraphale pulled his down and they met in a middle, the synchronised snap of their fingers echoing like a crack of thunder.
At first there was nothing, just the too weak, trembling force of his own miracle, lingering like a flat note. He could feel it pushing against Aziraphale’s power, tendrils sneaking over the barrier both ways. Oil and honey, mingling but not mixing.
It wasn’t going to work. They were never meant to… It couldn’t…
Ink spilling over vellum. Candle wax dripping onto pewter. A sandstorm of earth and air.
“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s face was very close, both of his hands on Crowley’s skin now, fingertips leaving burn marks over his wrist, the side of his neck. “Crowley,” he said. “Our side, remember?” The look in his eyes made Crowley want to sob.
He nodded. Our side. They did not belong to Hell or Heaven anymore. And so their power didn’t either. It was theirs.
The barrier broke. Wave after wave of light and sound and sensation crashing through him, through them both, as their combined power shuddered, changed, became something new, something…
Greater than the sum of its parts, Crowley thought. Like the two of them, rubbing together like grains of sand in the ocean of time, changing each other through millennia of arguments and jokes and shared meals, of grief and wonder and favours that were never about reciprocation. Of choosing each other over and over and over again.
And now. Aziraphale’s power, his essence, pouring over him, into every cell and atom, into every empty, aching space left barren by the long Fall from God’s grace. But even better than that, so much better, was the way Crowley could feel himself welcomed in return, every door and window flung open as Aziraphale laid himself bare without hesitation.
This time, Crowley sobbed.
***
Three seconds passed, during which galaxies were born and died, and Crowley’s worldview tilted even further toward one particularly fussy angel, which he frankly hadn’t thought possible.
When he opened his eyes, they were standing in the middle of Aziraphale’s bookshop. His throat hurt like he’d been screaming. Maybe he had.
Aziraphale was right in front of him, one hand still wrapped around his wrist, the other cupping the side of his face. He was also still inside him, his mind, his… soul, for the lack of better word, though up until this exact moment Crowley would have denied having such a thing. Maybe in choosing humanity, they had gained that too.
It was too late now, to change his mind. Crowley had not thought through the consequences of what they had done, at all, and now every last barrier between them had been torn down like wet paper. There was nowhere left to hide.
“Dearest.” Aziraphale stroked the thin skin under Crowley’s eye with his thumb, a lick of fire he felt everywhere. “Do not be afraid,” he said, and Crowley would have laughed, would have mocked him mercilessly for the cliché if he’d had any words left that weren’t…
“Angel.” Honey-thick, it coated his mouth from the inside and Crowley trembled with the weight of what they were about to do. He’d known, of course he’d known, ever since they’d chosen each other over everything else, that this is where it would lead. But inevitable didn’t mean expected, didn’t mean Crowley was in any way prepared for the devastating tenderness in Aziraphale’s eyes, for the soft demand of his mouth, drinking his own name from Crowley’s lips.
He’d thought of home and ended up in Aziraphale’s arms. If that wasn’t a miracle to break both Heaven and Hell, Crowley didn’t know what was.
He did know not to squander it though.
The noise Aziraphale made once Crowley finally managed to coordinate his muscles enough to respond to the kiss, rather than just stand there and take it,[38] shocked to stillness, was indecent. The noise he wrenched from Crowley in retaliation was worse, better, Aziraphale’s tongue tracing the seam of his lips and seemingly liquefying every bone in his body as he not so subtly steered Crowley toward the backroom sofa.
“No,” Crowley said, dazed but determined to get his point across between kisses, digging his heels in. “Nuh-uh.”
“My dear.” Aziraphale sounded satisfyingly breathless. His hair was a disaster. Crowley loved it. “You are sending some rather – ah!” The skin under his jacket and waistcoat and shirt and undershirt[39] was like warm silk. “…Mixed messages,” Aziraphale finally managed to finish a sentence. His fingers were doing something decidedly un-angel like[40] to the buttons of Crowley’s shirt.
“I am not,” Crowley kissed the corner Aziraphale’s mouth, “Going to do,” behind his ear, “This,” the newly exposed notch of his throat, “On that sofa.”
Aziraphale whined, a low hum that caused every hair on Crowley’s body to stand up. Then he lifted Crowley’s hand to his mouth and bit the fleshy part at the root of his thumb, the blunt pressure of his teeth enough to make Crowley hot and shivering with the possibility of feeling that elsewhere in his body. Maybe, if he was very, very good, Aziraphale would…
“Why not?” The question fanned over the inside of Crowley’s wrist and it took him five long seconds to remember how to form words that weren’t ‘please’.
“Because…” He swallowed, tried again. “Because I’m not going to… with you. On the sofa where, that…” Aziraphale’s tongue was slowly dragging over his pulse point, and Crowley could feel the way his blood pushed closer and closer to the wet heat of it, which made it an absolute sacrilege – the kind he still cared about – to spit out the name of the shrieky pile of maggots, but it was imperative to make Aziraphale understand why he would not, ever, do this on any furnishing touched by… “Hastur,” he managed to gasp finally.
Aziraphale’s head snapped up, eyebrows high with surprise. “Oh!” he said, realisation dawning. Then he rolled his eyes with the familiar fond exasperation, hooked an arm around Crowley’s waist, huffed “Oh, for goodness sake!” and snapped his fingers.
They reappeared upstairs, next to a bed that Crowley was sure was double the size it had been since the last time he’d seen it.[41]
“Better?” Aziraphale asked. He was trying for confident, but there was a tremor of uncertainty in his voice and his grip on Crowley has loosened to an unacceptable degree.
Given the circumstances, Crowley thought the clearest, most unequivocal answer would be to fling himself on top of the covers like an offering and proceeded to do just that.
“Oh my,” Aziraphale breathed. The expression stealing over his features was akin to one he got when faced with a particularly decadent dessert trolley. He even licked his lips.
“Ngk,” Crowley said. His legs fell open, creating a perfect space for his angel to crawl into.
“My thoughts exactly, dear,” Aziraphale murmured and finally accepted the invitation Crowley had been issuing for six millennia with gratifying enthusiasm.
***
Footnotes:
35 With the same four witches as before. The owner had taken some long overdue leave to visit her daughter in Oslo and shop for a nice retirement flat. The others took turns behind the counter. [ return to text ]
36 Yes, it was clichéd. Yes, Crowley wanted to vomit as soon as he caught himself thinking it. Didn’t make it any less accurate though. [ return to text ]
37To call Aziraphale a dedicated scholar of all things Crowley would be a gross underestimation. [ return to text ]
38 Although when put like that… [ return to text ]
39Crowley had a long-standing love-hate relationship with Aziraphale’s layers, one which he was determined to resolve once and for all. [ return to text ]
40 Some might even say ‘wicked’. [ return to text ]
41 He was wrong. The bed was, in fact, four times the size it had been only seconds ago. This, however, was not a reflection on Crowley’s lack of imagination, but on Aziraphale’s priorities. They too had experienced a recent reconfiguration. [ return to text ]
***
Chapter 5. Epilogue
The Kraken Was. Importantly, it Was like had been Before – bigger than Other Things and in the cool depths with Acceptable Limits. The small green-grey-winged creature was responsible for this, of this the Kraken was certain. It did not know how, but it had a very clear association between the creature’s beaming face and being released from the confines of invisible walls.
It also had a fond memory of being able to wrap all its tentacles around the creature without squishing him to death. The Kraken did not miss Being Less than it was, but it did miss being able to do that. Just a little bit.
Which is why when, a few weeks after being returned home, the bottom of the ocean split and out swam a Thing that was not Other but Another, the Kraken experienced a Mood so profoundly joyous it registered on the Richter scale as far as Egypt.
***
In his bedroom, Adam Young stretched, his vertebrae making sounds like corn tossed into campfire. It was good to have friends,[42] he thought with the satisfaction of a job well done. Then he ran outside, in search of Wensley, Brian and Pepper, Dog barking excitedly at his heels.
***
Technically, demons weren’t meant for the deep seas.
Of course, technically, demons weren’t exactly meant for caretaking roles either but here Hastur was, swimming down toward the particular rift he knew the Kraken liked to rest in, just to check that it was still there. Maybe also to check that it was okay.
Beelzebub’s punishment for losing the Kraken had been to extend Hastur’s glorified zookeeper duties indefinitely, and whilst there were several mythical beasts he decidedly Did Not Care For,[43] after everything they’d been through, he had developed a certain… affinity with this particular one.
The bottom of the ocean was both very cold and very dark, but the first could be endured and the second was easily remedied by some of his little friends. Hastur could see the Kraken’s tentacles waving out of the rift, moving peacefully with the currents.
All seemed normal, and Hastur was just about to turn back, his mind already half preoccupied by the next stop on his rounds,[44] when an unusual rock formation near the edge caught his attention.
Hastur swam closer. The rocks were smooth and round and larger than him, clustered together in an oddly symmetrical formation almost as if…
Gradually and with mounting apprehension, Hastur turned his head back toward the rift. This time, he counted the tentacles.
He counted them three times. Each time the total was different, and each time it was more than eight.
Next to a mound of what were quite definitely not rocks but eggs, Hastur opened his mouth. The bubbles that came out and slowly drifted toward the surface were large and full of screams.
***
Footnotes:
42 In this, he was entirely correct. [ return to text ]
43Minotaur, for example, was a surly bugger. And he kicked. [ return to text ]
44The Mongolian Death-Worms were Hastur’s favourites. [ return to text ]
***