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Aziraphale was fretting like he’d rarely fretted before, but was doing his damn—er, best, to hide it from himself by staring fixedly at the brittle pages of a Victorian novel and trying not to lean against the car that waited beside him (for being caught leaning on it would have consequences), and by reminding himself constantly to not jiggle his foot or, for Anywhere’s sake, bite his nails.
The car tinked once in sympathy. It was a very old car, as cars go. And it and the angel were waiting for the same person, er, entity—who was late, and Aziraphale was hoping fervently that he was late in only one sense of the word.
It wasn’t that all Hell had broken loose – only part of it. That is, the part that had really had a stake in Apocalypse futures, and that part hadn’t turned out to be rather large after all. Most who were middling along just fine as things were with their own self-contained little brimstone pits and pretty little impalement-stake-ringed lakes of fire in the back yard hadn’t taken so well to a challenge to the status quo. You don’t just upend everything and send even demons off to war without a bloody good cause, and Himself Below had already done it for his ego once.
Still, the ones who were angry were really frigging angry, and it was all even an independent-minded Antichrist could do to hold them off--mostly by refusing to believe in them, which had a severe dampening effect on their powers.
Currently enamoured of the writings of Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, 20-year-old Adam Young was in fact capable of casting out such a miles-wide skepticism aura as to reduce a huge swarming furious mob of literally pitchfork-wielding demons to the level of unusually unattractive football hooligans.
But there were still a lot more of them than there were of Aziraphale and his associate, and the last word Crowley had heard had been along the lines of “We’ll get you, my pretty—and your pudgy angel too.”
“I am not pudgy,” Aziraphale had huffed. “I’m solid.” There was nothing else in the veracity of that statement he felt qualified to question. It wasn’t as if his people were likely to stick out their elegant pinkies for his sake.
Even he couldn’t read under these conditions. He was almost on the verge of pulling out just a little hair when the grass at the edge of the lot rustled, and a squiggly dark line drew itself across the pavement, and Aziraphale had never been so glad to see a snake in his existence.
“Where the…Glasgow have you been?”
“Shut up,” Crawly snarled, drawing up his head and letting Aziraphale see his belly was rubbed raw from long-distance speed crawling. “I ssslithered as fassst as I could!”
“But…why didn’t you..?”
“I can’t change back! Believe me, I’ve tried. Watch!” He started thrashing about in a way that looked painful even to Aziraphale, who had never been in any way serpentine.
“Oh. Oh!” said Aziraphale finally when he couldn’t watch any more. Crawly looked as panic-stricken as a snake can get, which is surprisingly intense. “It’s Adam, I’m sure. His Agnosticism Zone, when things get strange. Don’t be cross with him, it’s probably what kept that lot”—he gestured at the mob gathering at the foot of the hill – “from finding you and fricasseeing you. I’ve never eaten snake but I’m told it tastes like chicken.”
“Get. Ussss. Out. Of. Here.” Crawly hissed. He looked regretfully once at his beloved 1926 Bentley and opted for his own skin. “C’mon, let’s go!”
“Finally!” Aziraphale sighed, picking up the squirming snake and manifesting his wings.
Or trying to.
His beige button-down shirt hovered calmly at his back, utterly unruffled.
“FUCK!” he cried.
“Worksss on you too, I ssee.”
“Please stop hissing, my dear,” Aziraphale spat.
“I’m a bloody snake. It’sss what we do.”
“Alright, well,” said the angel, looking wildly around. “You can’t run. We can’t fly. I suppose we’ll have to…”
“It’sss pretty obvious,” Crawly sighed.
“You realise it’s just like a normal car at the moment,” Aziraphale said as he climbed in.
“It’sss a good car,” Crawly said, and then hissed in a new wave of exasperation when he noticed that Aziraphale had tossed him onto the driver’s seat. “Are you jussst mocking me now, angel?”
“What? We might have to go off-road and possibly crash through the gate at Tadfield. I don’t know how to do any of that. I don’t know how to drive at all, for that matter.”
The hiss was so loud and vicious Aziraphale was suddenly very glad that Crawly had never been, as far as he knew, actually poisonous.
“Driving’s easssy, Azzzziraphale,” came the cold, furious voice just on the edge of ever-more-extreme panic as the demon voices behind them started to sound a lot like the voices of a New Zealand rugby crowd drafted to do the voices of Orcs for an epic fantasy movie. “You work the pedalsss with your feet. And the gear shift and the wheel with your hands. Now what’sss wrong with thisss picture?”
Aziraphale had never seen a snake’s eyes roll quite like that before as he nervously edged over and traded places with Crawly, who pooled himself in the bucket of the passenger seat disconcertingly, still looking like he was poised to strike.
“Just tell me what to do,” Aziraphale said stoically.
As the engine started up (which by all rights it should not have done considering Crowley hadn’t bought petrol since 1967) and the lights came on (which by all rights they should not have done considering it had never occurred to Crowley to have them checked or repaired at any time) and as the demon walked him impatiently and rudely through every step of the convoluted process, Aziraphale realised he had the worst back-seat-driver (or rather passenger-seat driver) in the history of the Universe.
The gear shift made an awful noise. Crawly recoiled and muttered something that was, for the best, unintelligible. Aziraphale tried again, and the sound wasn’t quite as bad, but the car lurched nauseatingly for many yards backwards. “Moving at least,” Crawly said gamely. “Sss’ an improvement.”
“Shut up. Now what?”
“The other way. Towards the road. NO, NO, not that pedal, that’s—“
Aziraphale yelped and slammed the car to a halt, pointing at a half-quarter angle that was vaguely towards the road.
“The wheel, Aziraphale. Try using that. It helps.”
“It’s so much to keep track of all at once.”
“You’ll get the hang of it…just let’s GO!”
And they did – awkwardly, hesitantly, weaving a bit like a drunk with a bad ankle, but at a reasonable clip, and the heaviness of the disbelieving air seemed to fall away with the rapid motion, and the two of them started to feel that they might emerge from this yet. Even if Adam wasn’t quite sure when to be expecting them, surely he would know they might be coming soon and in a bit of a hurry, and have the gate open…
***
In the intervening years since Barmygeddon, the crash of the tech bubble had wreaked havoc upon the management corporation that owned Tadfield Manor, and such showy but no longer practical assets had been the first to go off the ledgers, making for a good public performance of belt-tightening.
That it had wound up in the hands of a rather bohemian collective that included a peace activist who was quick with her fists, two computer technicians (one spectacularly inept, one not), and one intense young man with no visible means of support—among others—raised a few eyebrows at first. It may have been Powers at work, or it may have had something to do with that vivacious and perpetually pregnant young woman with the incredible knack for predicting the ponies. Family secret, she always said as she redecorated yet another bedroom as yet another nursery and shuffled her Tarot cards.
***
At the moment, Adam Young was draped across an antique settee, utterly lost in a particularly gripping exegesis of Heidegger, and all but deaf to the small riot about to take place outside the very gate of Tadfield Manor, which he’d insisted on locking at night lest Dog get out again and impregnate yet another local bitch. While Adam certainly supported the free sexual choices of all individuals in principle, the canine paternity suits—and premium puppy chow for the litters whose humans couldn’t be bought off so easily-- were starting to weigh upon the household budget.
He was roused only by a furious pounding on the door. Pepper had been calling his name for quite some time.
“Adam, go check it out already. I think we’ve got demons in the driveway again!”
***
They hadn’t lost them after all. Or that lot back at the car park had been just the vanguard, or more likely the laggards. When the Bentley came wheeling its unpredictable way up the Manor driveway, they burst from the dark trees, snarling and clutching and being very upsetting although their instruments of menace were limited mostly to their very bad teeth and their very crude-looking sticks and spears and clubs.
“FASSTER!” Crawly shrieked as only snakes can shriek.
“But look at the—the gauge thingy, I don’t think it can—“
“YESSS IT CAN!”
Aziraphale pressed harder, and a stout little demon bounced off the windshield, cursing.
Crawly stretched himself almost to full length to peer up ahead, “Fuck, the gate is shut. Once we get in, I think we’re alright, I can’t imagine Adam not warding…but it’s ssshut, and that means…”
“It means we die?”
“NO. It meansss SPEED UP, and MIND YOUR HEAD.”
“What?’
Crawly grinned like a suicidal snake. “They built cars strong back in the old daysss.”
Aziraphale made a hesitant noise.
“Ssstop whimpering. At least it’ss not on fire. Now, FASTER. HARDER.”
It wasn’t the usual context for such commands from him, that was for sure. Aziraphale decided the best course of action was to let himself vanish partway into the middle distance and convince himself those bars of metal approaching so rapidly were in some other dimension entirely and were going to pass through them like fog.
“Turn the wheel,” said Crawly in deadly quiet, slithering into the angel’s lap. “Aim for the middle. The chain.”
Aziraphale couldn’t see the manic glint in his own eyes, but Crawly could, and was reassured. Aziraphale was less so when the snake dipped his head and slunk down his leg. “Now when we hit,” Aziraphale muttered, “I imagine the glass will shatter.” He was shocked at how calm his voice sounded and how clearly it carried through the din of a dozen claws trying to take off the paint and peel through the doors.
“Probably. Duck your head. I’ll be all right down here.”
Aziraphale felt the slight reptile weight, the strange muscley texture, around his gas pedal foot. He pressed down just a little bit harder, against every bodily-preservation instinct he’d developed over six thousand years.
Now.
Can’t.
But--
“OW!” the angel shrieked as something incredibly sharp pierced his ankle, and his foot spasmed just enough to bump their speed right over the top. He looked down in rage at the serpent spitting bits of argyle lint out of his mouth as the top of the car collapsed in a shower of glass and metal and blood of a few clinging demons, and the heroic Bentley made its screeching claim to the summit of the Antichrist’s domain. Sanctuary had never been so noisy.
“Are you all right?” the snake finally asked.
“I think so. You?”
A serpentine nod. Aziraphale straightened up as best he could and started clearing a pathway to climb through. They were still out there, waiting. But the motion-detector lights backlit a slim young man loping down from the house, hands in his pockets, Dog at his heels and growling. So Aziraphale picked himself out carefully through a million sharp sharded edges, Crowley’s coils wrapped warmly around him.
“Good job, angel,” the snake nodded grudgingly.
“Thanks. No thank you for the biting. You really aren’t poisonous, are you?”
“Don’t think so. I’d’ve offed you that way long ago.”
“Right.” Aziraphale paused for a second. He had something to confess, and Crawly probably already knew it. “The upsetting thing is…once I got past the mortal terror part…I rather enjoyed that.”
“I knew it,” smirked the serpent. “There’s hope for you yet.”
***
“Gosh, I was worried about you guys,” Adam scolded.
“Didn’t know you cared,” sighed the snake draped around Aziraphale’s shoulders. “Didn’t think you thought much of our kind these days.”
“Oh no, don’t think that,” Adam said, brow furrowed. “I do like you two. You’re the sort of entities I can believe in.”
With that Aziraphale crumpled to the ground, pinned hard and painfully to the pavement under a suddenly very man-shaped weight, in a sprawl of unwieldy limbs—six each. He had one of Crowley’s large soaring feathers in his mouth and the demon’s sharp jaw was edging painfully into his groin. “Not in front of the boy, dear,” he muttered, pushing Crowley’s head away.
“Nice,” Crowley sneered, trying to get an arm free to rub his cricked neck.
“It’s not shocking to me,” shrugged Adam, who had absorbed all sorts of ideas from philosophers lately, especially the French. “Although the wings do add something.”
***
The mob—which was much smaller than it had sounded--was at the gates—or what was left of them—a sorry excuse for the abused peasantry at a very unconvincing Bastille.
It was Adam who faced them down. He was best suited, after all. If anyone had been expecting thunderclaps and glowing eyes, they’d’ve been sorely disappointed. “Proper demons, proper angels,” he shrugged contemptuously. “What’s all that mean? Existence is what you make of it. Don’t rely on Anyone Else to give you meaning, because we’re all going to die…I mean, theoretically…it’s possible…we could…somehow….eventually…It’s up to the individual to define his, or her, or its purpose, and….”
“Don’t shit me about dyin’! That rotten snake killed me,” snarled one squat and ugly one near the front.
“And I brought you back, you ungrateful little prick,” said Adam. “Remember? And better! That toothache? Felt it lately? Didn’t think so!”
“How dare you speak to a Duke of Hell that way…”
“I’m choosing to believe in you for the moment. Don’t make me change my mind.”
“If there’s a protocol of Hell or …t’Other Place…those two haven’t broken…We must have vengeance…it is written,” boomed a tall and ugly one, beside the first.
“Written where, on the wall in the bog? Scratch it out and put up some succubus’s number, it’s more useful.”
The tall demon made a horrendous noise. “Young man, your father would…”
“What? Ground me?”
“What’s so fuckin’ special ‘bout those two, anyway? Seems to me they suck real bad at being what they are.”
“It’s about finding meaning,” Adam flailed, trying to speedily condense thousands of erudite pages on Existential thought for the benefit of a being who probably needed help understanding the comics in the Sun. “They appreciate things. Existence as an art. A good car, a sleek pen, a good meal, fine wine, literature…”
“We really like sex too,” yelled Crowley. “I think we’re getting good at it.”
A furiously blushing Aziraphale elbowed him hard.
“Just trying to make our case,” Crowley muttered.
Adam was momentarily derailed, halfway between banishing an unbidden mental image and wondering if making a truly indecent proposal later would count as “messing people about.”
“Just leave us alone, please,” Adam finally sighed. “You’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses. We don’t want any.”
“We’re not sellin’ anythin’, we’ve come for—“
“And you can’t have anything. Or anyone. Now HAVE A NICE DAY.”
And when Adam slammed the gate, it stayed slammed.
“That’s how my dad gets rid of salesmen,” he smiled. “My dad here, I mean. If you’re polite, they can’t do anything.”
“Best not to add to the ill will in the world,” Aziraphale said quietly.
“It pisses your enemies off that much more,” said Crowley, slipping one arm around the angel and the other around the Antichrist. “So tell me more about this philosophy of yours, Adam. You do believe in good Scotch, don’t you?”
~fin~