Chapter Text
1
The cottage is warm and welcoming, all of the windows open to let in the fresh and comfortable air of the spring day. Aziraphale is relaxing in his favorite chair in the library, legs crossed and a book on his knee, content as could be. Adam, down for the weekend while his parents have a bit of a getaway to Wales, is laying on the couch on his belly, legs kicking idly as he reads his own book. Crowley is somewhere - probably the garden, this time of year, threatening a few plants into early blooms no doubt - and the whole thing is so wonderfully perfect that in spite of his book, Aziraphale allows his mind to drift.
6000 years. 6000 years of worry, of deception, of hiding. It had been worth it, without a doubt. He is blessed, so blessed , and as his mind happily takes up residence on cloud nine, his soul sings thanks to God for allowing him this moment, for leading him to this little microcosm of the universe, his own personal Heaven. He basks in it, smiling widely, head leaned back and eyes closed, and it’s all so lovely he wishes he could take a picture, bottle the moment, do something to preserve this forever, for the cold and rainy days -
He hears a sneeze and, not thinking, with the entire force of his being behind it, every single fiber of angelic love and benevolence, he says, “ Bless you .”
Because, of course, Crowley is out in the garden. Of course he is.
It is not until precisely two nanoseconds pass that his brain kindly informs him that he heard Adam say ‘Bless you’ in exact unison with him.
By the time he hears the strangled scream from the den, he is already bolting up. “I’ve killed him,” he says, frantically, darting out of the library.
“What?” Adam says, before abandoning his novel and trotting after him. “Who’s dead?”
“Crowley!” Aziraphale skids to a stop in the hall, pale and panicked, looking into the den with wide, beseeching eyes. “Crowley you’re alive! You’re …” he looks his demon up and down, searching for the damage. His wings are out again, no surprise, but he’s still human-shaped. Still, something’s wrong, Crowley’s looking down at himself with horror, and Aziraphale can’t put his finger on it …
“When’d you start wearing white?” Adam asks, moving to stand next to Aziraphale in the doorway, his head cocked curiously. “And what happened to your wings?”
His wings, Aziraphale realizes with a start. How had he not noticed right away? Crowley’s wings are as familiar to him as the demon’s face: they’re black, and twisted, and they don’t work properly, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s what Crowley’s wings look like, and Aziraphale wouldn’t care if they were bat wings, or missing entirely, because they would be Crowley’s, and by extension, Aziraphale’s favorites.
Except these wings are not Crowley’s wings. They are white, and full, and whole. And there are six of them. Feathers are still drifting down on either side of him, lazily falling from their apparent explosive entry into reality. Back into reality, possibly.
“What?” Aziraphale says, thickly.
Crowley looks up, and Aziraphale realizes - slowly, and in the background, because the majority of his brain is still busy with the wings issue - that yes, he is wearing all white: white jeans, a white Henley, a white scarf. His glasses are changed, too: the lenses are a rich amber instead of black, and the frames are gold, shining in the sunlight. No, Aziraphale thinks, no, not sunlight, the light from his … his halo .
“What did you do to me?” Crowley whimpers, looking to the two of them desperately. “Angel, I feel … like an angel .”
Adam is gaping. “I think you sneezed yourself out of Hell,” he says, quietly.
“Am I an angel ?” Crowley asks, the timbre and pitch of his voice rising with each passing second. “Angel, am I an angel ?” And then he has to stop, because he is sneezing again, puffs of feathers fluttering out of his six wings with each bout.
“Good Lord,” Aziraphale gasps, rushing to his side, “you’re allergic to being Holy.” And then he sneezes, too.
“No, I’m - bless it, er, damn it, er, ah … fuck it ,” Crowley says with feeling, before shaking his head violently. “There’s sneezing powder, hang on.” He snaps, but nothing happens. Awkwardly, stunned, he tries again, this time fumbling his hand downward with the gesture instead of upward. The urge to sneeze fades immediately, and Aziraphale stares at him.
“Are you an angel?” he asks, grabbing Crowley carefully by the shoulders and spinning him around, the better to study the wings. “You have six wings.”
“I would, if I’m an angel. Again,” Crowley says weakly. “Oh, God. Am I going to have to talk to God?”
Adam joins them, warily snatching a falling feather from the air. Aziraphale shrugs, spinning Crowley back to forward-facing. There are questioning thronging in his mind, log-jamming up his train of thought, and he asks the first one that materializes on his tongue: “What were you doing with sneezing powder?”
Crowley boggles for a moment. Splutters a little, inarticulate and somewhere between indignant and bewildered, and then says, “ I was playing a bloody prank of course, you great prat !” He throws up his arms, wings fluttering behind him. “I was playing a prank, and you blessed me back to angel-dom -”
“I helped,” Adam says, not wanting to be left out.
“- And now I’m a bleeding angel again, I never asked to be an angel again, Aziraphale, you blessed me into rising !”
Aziraphale opens his mouth to speak - to point out that surely a blessing from an exiled Principality wouldn’t be enough to make a demon Rise, even if it was helped along by the Antichrist, and God must surely have approved - when a knock comes at the front door. All three freeze.
“It’s God,” Crowley whimpers first. “Oh, God.”
“It probably isn’t,” Aziraphale says weakly. “Probably.”
Adam sighs. “I’ll get it.”
“No!” the two angels say in unison. All at once, they both spring into action, diving for the archway into the hall, struggling to move at something like a run as a unit to the front door. Behind them, awed and bemused, Adam follows, his hands in his pockets, determinedly not moving faster than his habitual slouch.
Aziraphale reaches the door first, but by the time he’s swung it open, Crowley has caught up, and the two of them end up crammed into the doorway together, Aziraphale’s bowtie askew, Crowley’s glasses slipping down and only hanging on one ear by this point. Once the door opens fully Gabriel, standing on the front porch with his hands in his pockets and a resigned expression on his face, sighs.
“Yeah,” he says, casting his eyes upwards. “About what I figured. Good Lord.”
Crowley recovers first. “What do you want?”
Gabriel scowls. “What do you think, Angel Crowley ?”
“So it really is …” Aziraphale exhales. “He’s Risen.”
“You blessed me into Rising!” Crowley snaps, glaring at Aziraphale for half a second, before turning his ire onto Gabriel. “I didn’t ask to Rise!”
“And yet here we are. Is that the Antichrist back there?” He cranes his head a little, the better to try to see around Crowley and Aziraphale, but Crowley snaps out a wing and effectively blocks his view, ignoring Adam’s offended snuffling when he gets a face-full of feathers. Gabriel shakes his head. “Whatever. I certainly wasn’t consulted on this, but I guess orders are orders. Here.” Suddenly, in his hands, there is a lap harp. He thrusts it forward toward Crowley. “Standard issue.”
Crowley stares at the harp for a moment before his mouth twists into a sneer. “I’m not taking that.”
“Yes, you are,” forcing the thing into Crowley’s arms in spite of the former demon’s resistance. “I don’t care if you never play a note on it, just take it.”
Spiteful, Crowley plucks a single note, before the shape of the harp twists and becomes a rather expensive electric guitar. It is white, of course, but Aziraphale is impressed that in spite of that Crowley managed to imagine little flame art in being on the sides.
“Whatever,” Gabriel groans. “Fine. Whatever. Ugh, just … you have to re-contract. Sign this.”
“ No !” Crowley draws back with a hiss, guitar clutched in front of himself like a shield. “You bloody wanker, I’ve been a demon for the past 6000 years, I’m not just gonna be an angel and sign this !”
“6020 years,” Aziraphale murmurs quietly. “Give or take.”
“6020 years!” And, in spite of his denial, he is studying the contract in Gabriel’s hand. It is a singular page, simple enough: Heavenly contracts tend to be more straightforward than their Hellish counterparts, and are significantly abbreviated in comparison. Of course, it does make them easier to wriggle out of, but when breaking a contract comes with a smiting clause, people are unsurprisingly reluctant to do so. “What’s it for?”
“Your angelic service. Which,” he elaborates, in the same tone someone might use to describe a particularly disgusting insect, “is strictly a formality, since I haven’t found a single angel who would be willing to work with you aside from the obvious exception. Effectively, you will work in exile.”
Crowley leans in - he still has snake eyes, Aziraphale thinks, watching him read, and he wonders if that means he is a heavenly winged serpent - and frowns at the contract. “Hang on,” he says, prodding a line with one long, bony finger, “says here my boss is Raphael.”
“Yes.” Gabriel snorts derisively, and shrugs. “If you can find him, you’re more than welcome to introduce yourself.”
“Where do I sign?”
“Listen just - huh? Oh. Oh, uh. There’s fine.” Gabriel produces a pen from his jacket and hands it over, pulling his hand back quickly when Crowley takes the pen, before they can touch. “On the dotted line.”
Aziraphale watches with no small amount of surprise as Crowley tosses the guitar aside and seizes the contract - eagerly, he’s downright eager all of a sudden - and signs a sigil with a flourish at the bottom. He is grinning, and Aziraphale is aware that that grin has absolutely nothing to do with being redeemed in the eyes of the Lord and absolutely everything to do with being Up To No Good. His stomach sinks a little. “What are you doing?” he hisses.
“Agreeing to Raphael being my boss,” Crowley says, handing the contract back to Gabriel and beaming at the Archangel. “There you are, all in order.”
“Yea - very funny , Crowley.” He looks repulsed, and holds the contract out, pointing to the signature. “You think this is some kind of joke? I need your sigil, not Raphael’s you idiot.”
“Oh, but Gabriel,” Crowley says, crossing his arms and leaning, languidly, up against the doorframe. Six wings , Aziraphale thinks, realization slamming into him like a wave crashing onto the shore, He has six wings. Seraphim have six wings . “Raphael’s sigil is my sigil.”
By the look of it, Gabriel is realizing the same thing, his eyes flickering from one wing, to the second, to the third, and the fourth … “No,” he says, quietly.
“You’re Raphael? Like, an Archangel?” Adam asks, still behind them, his voice muffled by Crowley’s wings. “Hang on -”
“ No !” Gabriel, quite unconsciously, reaches up and grabs handfuls of his hair. “All this time - you’ve been a demon all this time?” He shakes his head. “Worse, you’ve been Crowley all this time?”
Crowley laughs, and it only sounds a little amused. “Oh, I’m still Crowley, never fear. Prefer that name, really. I’d be obliged if you changed it in the celestial phonebook or whatever.” He leans over to punch Gabriel on the shoulder in a mockery of the Archangel - the other Archangel - himself. “Get it sorted before the next Archangel board meeting or whatever, would you? Imagine I’ll be seeing you there.”
Gabriel stands stock-still for a long time. Then, like tendrils of frost creeping across a pond, the color drains from his face, slowly replaced with red. Red, flushing, anger . “You -” he chokes out, barely able to speak, “You … You -”
“ ACHOO !”
“Good God!” Aziraphale yells, jerking upright and awake, heart pounding worthlessly in his chest. He looks around, frantic - he’s in the library, in his chair, with a white-knuckled grip on the leather armrests. The windows are open and the breeze is blowing and … and there’s Adam on the couch, leaned over a little cardboard box that Crowley - yes , he thinks desperately, yes, actually Crowley, all in black and with his sunglasses and no wings visible, yes - is holding. And, he realizes, as various portions of his brain continue to grumble back to alertness, they are both staring at him.
“Alright, angel?” Crowley asks, slowly, after a few uncomfortable seconds.
He raises a hand to his chest and pats himself down, just to be sure. Same waistcoat, same bowtie, same softness. He gulps in a breath, and nods. “I think so. Yes, I … I believe I had a dream.”
“Oh.” Adam looks relieved. “Oh, good.”
Crowley, on the other hand, looks intrigued. “You, dreaming? Must have been something.” He mouth twists a little. “Not a nightmare, was it?”
“I … don’t think so.” He frowns. “But it was very odd.”
“Oh yeah? What happened?”
Aziraphale frowns more deeply. He wonders if he should say. And then he shrugs. It was just a dream, after all; Crowley has them all the time, and they never mean anything. Or hopefully they don’t, anyway - the recurring one with Lord Beelzebub turning into a gigantic blueberry muffin might just prove apocalyptic after all, should it ever come true. “You Rose,” he says simply. “You sneezed, and I … said the words … and you Rose.”
Crowley winces. “So a nightmare, then.”
“And then Gabriel showed up,” Aziraphale says, trying to remember the dream, amazed at how the images are already slipping away like water from a tide pool. “He … gave you an electric guitar, I think. And … and then you were the Archangel Raphael? I think. Or, you’d been Raphael all along, you didn’t become Raphael, but when you rose you became Raphael again.”
“Raphael was my boss,” Crowley says after a stunned moment, laughing a little. “Definitely not me. I was just another working stiff.”
“Nonsense, dear, you’re never ‘just another’ anything. But I understand.” He sighs, and leans back into his chair. “Well. I think I’ll avoid sleeping for the next few centuries. That was very odd.”
“Did I look good?”
“What?”
Crowley waves a hand, egging Aziraphale on. “As Raphael. Did I look good?”
“Oh, dear boy.” Aziraphale smiles, and then finds himself laughing softly, shaking his head. “Of course you did: you always do. But yes, you looked very stylish.”
“Can’t have been too bad of a nightmare then,” Crowley concludes with a smug little grin.
Aziraphale shakes his head, but doesn’t reply to that. “What’s in the box?” he asks instead, wagging a finger at the package. “That there.”
“This?” Crowley holds it up, the better to peer into it. He’s still grinning, but it’s a devilish expression now, the same from the dream, which preceded a stereotypically-Crowley episode of mischief.
Adam jumps in. “Sneezing powder!” he informs the angel. “Crowley’s going to loan me some for school! It’s gonna be wicked!”
“Doubtlessly,” Aziraphale says. Adam nods with enthusiasm, and turns back to the box, cautiously prodding a finger into the depths. There is a little puff of powder that wafts up, and uncontrollably, Crowley sneezes when it drifts into his face.
“Ble -” Adam starts, but Aziraphale shouts “ STOP !” much louder and more quickly than intended, startling the boy into silence. “Um.”
Aziraphale blushes. Embarrassed, he picks at the edge of his waistcoat for a second, and then rises, weaving around the coffee table on his way to the couch. “Sorry it’s … well, Crowley being a demon, his corporation doesn’t always respond positively to blessings.”
“I don’t think I’m actually going to Rise, though,” Crowley says, obviously bemused, as Aziraphale plucks the box from his hands. “It was just a dream, angel.”
“I know,” he says primly, making sure the lid of the box is snugly in place. “But better safe and all that.”
Adam looks from one to the other, and then shrugs and sighs. “Okay, sure. So what do you say instead? I gotta say something - it’s rude not to.”
“You say ‘salad’,” Aziraphale says, business-like, before turning on his heel to leave the room. “I’ll put this with your things, Adam. I think it’s proven it’ll work just fine.”
They watch him go, Adam confused and Crowley chuckling quietly. After a long minute, Adam turns slowly to Crowley and says, carefully, “ Salad ?”
“It’s a long story.”
Adam thinks that over for another minute, staring at Crowley all the while. “You know, honestly?” he says then, his voice hushed, almost awed, “The angel and demon thing almost isn’t the weirdest thing about you guys.”