Chapter Text
It is late afternoon in Crowley’s Creepers. Gigi is attempting to fit Dog with a flower crown while Crowley holds Justine and Jesus’s ten-month-old baby, Anton. Because Mariam and Yosef are with the rest of the souls in God’s jam jar, Crowley has become part of a pool of semi-willing Whickber Street babysitters with Maggie, Mrs Singh and Big Gerry.
Eric is in the back room working on flowers for a funeral. In an attempt to preserve some demonic cool, he insists funerals are his specialty, but he is equally in demand for weddings. It is a big event so Glasgow-Eric and Cardiff-Eric have come to help. Now that demons are no longer officially evil, they should, in theory, be able to go into churches. No one has put this to the test yet, which is where the three Muriels, currently having a book club meeting next door, come in.
Adam is getting ready to start work. Having finally taken up a place at university, he now does weekend and late shifts. As soon as Hell and Heaven left him alone, he gave up his previous evil genius degree at Oxford and applied to study Literature in London. He also has a series of supernatural adventure novels in progress and is writing an antichrist memoir entitled Adversary. Crowley can’t wait.
Aziraphale comes in with a bag from the delicatessen and a few books to tide him over. Gigi and Dog abandon the coronation and rush over to greet him. He puts down his books and bags to pick up both of them, listening carefully to Gigi’s chatter and having his face licked by Dog. Something about his new freedom has made him irresistible to children and animals. He considers this a mixed blessing at best.
“Stop staring at Anton,” he says to Crowley when he is permitted to put them down. “Even if he happened to be Uriel, you’d never be able to tell.”
“The way he looks at me. He’s got to be archangel or above.”
“Surely he’s too sweet a baby to be any of them?”
“You were always too trusting. I’m keeping my eye on him.”
Jesus comes in to collect his children and bring Aziraphale his evening supply of baked goods. The Bread of Life queue is never more than one or two people these days, it is no longer attracting thousands of customers from around the world, neither is Jesus producing miraculous quantities of bread. But the bakery is still popular and, according to Aziraphale, simply scrumptious.
Soon after that fateful Street Sweepers and Shoplifters meeting, Jesus’s powers faded away. Crowley suspects the problem is performance anxiety. If you suddenly discover you are not God’s only son after years of believing you are, it is bound to knock your confidence. However, human belief, which granted the power in the first place, is as robust as ever, so he is sure some of that power will return in time. Meanwhile, Jesus is as sweetly unnerving and as charismatic as he ever was. An ordinary human who doesn’t need magic to get everyone bending to his will.
There is a tap at the window. It is Nina, who still refuses to come into the shop. Crowley gives Anton to Jesus and goes outside.
“Another dream?” He asks.
“Yes,” she grudgingly admits.
“Go on then, what happened?”
“There was a dungeon full of giant, vicious dogs with red eyes.”
“Hellhounds.”
“If you say so. Then there was that…person…who comes to see you sometimes, the one with the…ugh…lizard’s tongue.”
“Furfur.”
“I told Furfur to turn the dogs into -”
“Kittens?”
“Ostriches.”
“Hell-ostriches? Really? I’ll pass it on.”
“Why won’t you tell me what this is all about?”
“If you wanted to know you’d know.”
“That makes no sense. You’re so annoying.”
“Thank you.”
She crosses the road back to her café, still baffled and oblivious.
When Jesus has taken the children home, Crowley is finally able to get near enough to Aziraphale to kiss him. They do not believe in quick pecks and only stop when Adam starts sweeping around them.
“Darling,” Aziraphale says. “Shall we go home?”
They say goodnight to Adam and the Erics and go through to the back room. A door appears on the wall there and opens as they approach. It leads into the farmhouse kitchen.
No one thought to demote the angel’s powers from Supreme Archangel back to Principality when he lost his job. Those inclined to do so have been catapulted into unsuspecting wombs all over the planet. The result is a fold in reality and this portal. The miracle, which is high on the Lazarus Scale, keeps the shop permanently connected to the farmhouse, thus resolving the city/country retirement dilemma.
The house has mostly stopped changing its appearance. It has settled into what must be its ideal solution to the style versus comfort conundrum. House plants and crammed book cases exist in harmony. Hard and monochrome combine with soft and age-faded to everyone’s satisfaction. It helps that the treasured possessions of both occupants are migrating here, often of their own accord. The souvenirs they each have kept from their centuries on Earth are not so incompatible as they might previously have expected.
They share the house with various animals. The wooden carvings Aziraphale accidentally brought to life when he regained his powers resist any attempt to permanently reverse their animation. When Aziraphale and Crowley returned to the farmhouse after the not-so-final judgement, ark-level chaos resumed. Some frantic finger-snapping sent the elephants and alpha predators to their preferred habitats, the squirrels and deer to the nearest woodland, the water fowl to the village pond, the hedgehogs, frogs and various birds to the garden. Aziraphale had been prolific so they were still left with three cats, one with a leg which keeps falling off, some possible hamsters, a rat, a parrot and the mantelpiece cobra. The snake has not eaten the rat today which makes a change. When Crowley complains about having to host a zoo, he is told to be grateful Aziraphale hadn’t had time to start on the dragons and dinosaurs he had been sketching out before he got his powers back.
For the first time in their long lives, neither of them has anyone sanctioning their miracle use. The resulting small luxuries feel deserved. The revival in popularity of the 78RPM vinyl record, the perfectly calibrated climate in Crowley’s garden, the consistently excellent food and wine available in the specialty shops of Soho.
It is a bloody lovely life. Sometimes he doesn’t believe in it; he convinces himself he is going to wake up alone in a ruined farmhouse fifty years after all the humans disappeared. Then he looks at his angel, busy feeding the animals and trying to teach the parrot manners and is calm again.
They have not, however, been able to avoid the post-restructure confusion in the other realms. The multiple Muriel and Eric doppelgangers may be the official Earth link to Above and Below but the newly minted Supreme Archangel and Prince of Hell soon discovered they can speak with authority only on the subjects of cake and flowers. The same is true of Aziraphale and Crowley but they are better at bluffing. Chaniel, armed with a list of questions, is often knocking politely at the boot cupboard door and Furfur is regularly found lurking in Whickber Street.
Up in Heaven, the concept of working communally is catching on, the coffee lounge is back, as are the gallery, garden, music room, library, forest and beach. In the absence of the disapproving higher orders, ordinary angels are more inclined to visit. A copy of a New York City street has been created with the ostensible purpose of trialling leisure activities for human souls. Some enterprising tenth orders opened a bar on it. As a result, Heaven has had to deal with its first inebriated brethren. And that was before Crowley turned up with a crate of Tequila.
They go down to Hell once a week. Aziraphale teaches pasta making to demons while Crowley gives slide presentations about what God might have meant by nice bits of Italy. Yes to Tuscan countryside, gondolas floating past romantically weatherworn palazzos, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and fragrant Neapolitan food markets. No to organised crime, impenetrable bureaucracy and neo-Fascists.
They have been co-opted on to various afterlife planning groups too. It hasn’t been straightforward. Never mind the habitual mistrust between angels and demons, you can’t get a whale to read an agenda or a human to concentrate without access to chocolate digestives.
But things are a lot more hopeful. God was right to send the top brass away, and right to try and make things better for humans when they die. Ugh, how annoying to admit it. Crowley is infuriated by Her refusal to take responsibility for what went wrong, and worried about those who suffered in life being expected to share a realm with those who caused their suffering. But for the first time in a long time, he trusts both the process and the plan.
“Nina had another dream,” Crowley tells Aziraphale later when they have settled in for the evening. “God seems to be keeping Her eye on things.”
“I wonder if that has always been the case. Do you think God might have been helping us all along?”
“Utter bollocks,” says the parrot on Aziraphale’s shoulder in an uncanny impersonation of Crowley.
“What he said,” says Crowley.
“Quiet Jim,” Aziraphale chides the parrot.
“Nuts,” says Jim hopefully.
“I can’t think of another reason for you discovering this house at the same time as the portal door appearing in my office. Or Nina and Maggie turning up at Canary Wharf in time to stop Jesus. Or, for that matter, the return of my powers. Perhaps some part of God’s consciousness was awake, as it is now.”
“Awake and looking after us? I really don’t think She’d go to that much trouble, not for me anyway.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Aziraphale says. “After all, you didn’t Fall, you applied for a transfer.”
“Never going to let me forget that, are you?”
“Probably not.”
“Listen, for thousands years, God didn’t approve of anything happening in any of the realms and still couldn’t be bothered to turn up for work. I doubt She was spending her time navigating the Bentley, She’s not that subtle.”
“I suppose.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t Her, perhaps it was us. Perhaps we’re more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.”
“We did do that super-duper miracle to hide Gabriel.”
“Super-duper? Yeah, all right, it was both Super and Duper. Want to fight God and rule the world?”
“I’m quite happy where I am, thank you very much.”
Which is currently on the ridiculously comfortable yet stylish sofa with Crowley’s feet in his lap. He feeds the parrot a slice of banana and is told to eff off.
“I’m holding you responsible for Jim’s behaviour,” Aziraphale tells Crowley.
“Foul fiend,” the parrot adds.
Crowley is quite happy where he is too. Or he will be. He turns himself and several cats around so his head is resting on that gorgeous lap. Aziraphale opens a book while stroking his hair and gives a contented hum. Outside, a former tree branch, now a nightingale, starts to sing.
End
September 2024