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Crowley first noticed because of a travelogue.
It had arrived that morning — a new one, fat and illustrated, smelling pleasantly of ink — and Aziraphale had immediately commandeered the Chesterfield with it, pulling Crowley down beside him.
They’d been going through it together for the better part of an hour.
“Oh, look. Prague.” Aziraphale tapped a photograph fondly. “Do you remember that little bakery near the old town square? The one with the windows.”
“All bakeries have windows.”
“These had a perfect view of the astronomical clock.”
"Ah."
Aziraphale turned the page. “Mm. The Loire Valley. I did love that library.”
“You tried to steal a book from that library.”
“I tried to acquire a book from that library..” Aziraphale peered more closely at the photograph. “I wonder if they ever found it.”
“Probably not,” Crowley said, pointing toward one of the shelves a few feet away where the gilt name La Fontaine caught the light from the oculus. “Given that you still have it.”
"Yes, well."
Aziraphale turned the page. “Oh, that’s lovely. Amalfi.”
“It was hot.”
“Beautifully hot, especially after that stint in Greenland.”
“We argued the entire time.”
“We did,” Aziraphale agreed, pleasantly. “Good trip.”
He turned the page.
They remembered their way through Prussia and Liechtenstein. Through Axum and Yerevan.
Aziraphale turned a page, and they reminisced, and talked about places they’d like to visit again, this time without the spectres of Heaven or Hell hanging over them. The morning passed in quiet companionship.
Then, without a word, without a sound, without so much as a change in expression — Aziraphale turned one page, glanced at it, and turned to the next.
Crowley cocked an eyebrow.
The page they’d skipped was still faintly visible at the edge: a fjord. Blue water. Steep grey cliffs.
A red, white, and blue flag on the corner.
Aziraphale was already reading about Lisbon.
Crowley looked at the side of his face for a moment. “Angel.”
“Mm?”
“Go back a page.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just for a second.”
“Lisbon is very interesting. Do you remember–”
“Aziraphale.”
Aziraphale turned forward another page. “Ah! Andalusia!”
A week later, Crowley was still thinking about it.
Not because Norway was particularly interesting — Norway, in his considered opinion, wasn’t interesting. It was just there: cold, expensive, full of jumpers.
The interesting thing was that Aziraphale had reacted to it. And Aziraphale almost never reacted to places on their own.
Food, certainly. Books, constantly.
The French, occasionally.
But places were just places. He’d cheerfully wandered through plague-ridden London, Revolutionary Paris, and Los Angeles.
Yet somehow Norway had produced visible distress.
“So,” Crowley said one afternoon, thumbing through the travelogue casually.
“No.”
“I haven’t asked anything.”
“I know exactly what you’re about to ask.” Aziraphale didn’t look up from his book. “And the answer is no.”
Crowley grinned. “Then you already know what you’re saying no to.”
“Don’t you have some wiles to attend to?”
“Nope, all caught up on my wiles.”
“Goodbye, Crowley.”
The theories began shortly thereafter.
The Viking theory lasted three days, the Norse gods theory almost a week. Crowley approached the latter with what he felt was genuine scientific rigor.
“You did something,” he said. “To one of them.”
“There are no Norse gods.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It most certainly is.”
“Because if you accidentally got Odin off-side—”
“I did not get Odin off-side.”
“Or Thor. He’s very territorial.”
“He doesn’t exist,” Aziraphale said, and then Crowley pointed at him, and Aziraphale set his book down with great deliberateness. “I did not have a conflict with any Norse deity, real or otherwise.”
Crowley narrowed his eyes.
“What about Loki?”
Aziraphale picked his book back up.
“I’m not having this conversation.”
Which wasn’t a no, Crowley noted. But he filed it away.
The troll theory lasted longer, mainly because Aziraphale’s reaction was suspicious.
“Trolls.”
“No.”
“You answered that far too quickly.”
“The answer is no.”
“That’s exactly what somebody traumatized by trolls would say.”
Aziraphale closed his book.
“There are no trolls.”
“There are if you’re traumatized enough.”
There was a brief fjord theory, during which Aziraphale gave him a look over the top of his glasses so withering that Crowley moved on purely out of self-preservation.
Then came the midnight sun theory, which nearly convinced Crowley he’d cracked it.
“Days without darkness,” he said triumphantly.
Aziraphale hesitated — just slightly, just for a moment — and Crowley pointed.
“There. That. You paused.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You did.” Crowley leaned forward. “You don’t like the midnight sun.”
Aziraphale sighed.
“I don’t care for it, no. It disrupts one’s sense of time. It’s unsettling.”
“You just described fear using longer words.”
“I’m not afraid of it.”
“And the winter?” Crowley said the next day, as if they’d merely paused the conversation overnight.
Aziraphale didn’t look up.
“What about it?”
“The long night. Months of darkness.”
“I’m aware of how Norway works.”
“Doesn’t bother you, though?”
“No.”
“Months,” Crowley said. “Of darkness.”
“I’ve been to Hell, Crowley.”
“Hell has torches.”
A pause, longer this time. Aziraphale turned a page, or pretended to.
“It bothers me somewhat,” he said eventually. “The darkness is fine. It’s the waiting. Everything just… stops. The world goes very quiet and very still and there’s nothing to do but sit with it.”
He smoothed the corner of his page. “I don’t care for sitting with things. At least not for that long.”
Crowley looked at him for a moment. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know the feeling.”
Aziraphale glanced up. Their eyes met, and held, and then Aziraphale looked back at his book and Crowley at his mobile phone, and neither of them said anything else about it.
The polar bear theory was brief and bitterly contested.
“There are no polar bears in most of Norway,” Aziraphale said.
“So there are some polar bears.”
“That is not the point.”
“It feels like the point. Big white bears, months of darkness, sun that won’t set, gods you may or may not have offended—”
“I didn’t offend anyone.”
“—trolls you may or may not believe in—”
“I don’t believe in trolls.”
“Sounds dreadful, Norway.”
“Norway is perfectly nice.”
“But you won’t go there.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn't have to. Do you remember that time I ran into you on your way to Copenhagen?”
Aziraphale sniffed. “Of course I do.”
“You stayed below deck rather than spend an afternoon in Kristiansand.”
“I was in the middle of a rather exciting book.”
“I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I remember you saying you had no desire to visit Norway.”
“Nor did I.”
"The ship was tied to the quay, angel. You were in Norway."
"I was aboard a British vessel," Aziraphale said, with enormous dignity. "There's a meaningful distinction."
Crowley grinned, and filed it away with the rest of the data he’d been collecting.
Every theory produced some reaction — never enough to confirm anything, but enough to keep him going, enough to feel like progress. He’d treated it like a game, which was easy at first, because the image of an angel afraid of an entire country was genuinely funny and he’d been happy to let it stay that way.
But Aziraphale could be dramatic, yes. Evasive, certainly. What he wasn’t, usually, was evasive for this long — and the longer it went on, the less it felt like he was guarding a funny story and the more it felt like he was guarding something that had actually cost him something.
By November, Crowley had stopped trying to catch him out.
One evening they were sitting in the bookshop after closing, rain tapping softly against the windows as they shared a second — or was it third? — bottle of wine.
Aziraphale was reading. Crowley was pretending to play Candy Crush.
Finally Crowley put his mobile down. “What happened in Norway?”
Aziraphale didn’t look up. “Nothing.”
“Something.”
“Nothing.”
“Angel.”
“No.”
Crowley waited. Aziraphale kept reading. Crowley waited longer, and Aziraphale turned a page, and Crowley waited longer still, and Aziraphale turned another.
Finally Crowley said, very quietly, “You know, when people say nothing happened, that’s usually how you can tell something happened.”
The page-turning stopped.
“Fine,” Aziraphale said eventually.
Crowley sat up. “Fine?”
“Fine.” The angel closed his book with a resigned expression and fussed needlessly with the cuff of his sleeve. “It was quickclay.”
“…what?”
“Quickclay.”
“What the heaven is quickclay?”
Aziraphale explained. The ground looks solid, and then it stops being solid. The clay liquefies. Buildings sink. Entire sections of land can collapse without warning.
As he spoke, Crowley’s expression grew increasingly serious.
“That’s…horrific.”
“Quite.”
Crowley nodded slowly, and Aziraphale seemed to take some comfort in that.
“So what happened?”
“My miracles were restricted at the time.”
“What? Why?”
Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I’d rather not talk about it, Crowley. The whole thing is a rather painful memory.”
Crowley frowned, but nodded. “Alright.”
He leaned against the back of the Chesterfield, and if his shoulder brushed against Aziraphale’s, well, that was hardly worth noting, was it?
They remained, for a time, in silence. Aziraphale had gone back to his book. Crowley had not gone back to his game, but instead found himself sinking into a golden haze, lulled by the patter of raindrops and the susurrus of turning pages and an angel’s steady breathing.
“It was 1838,” Aziraphale said softly, and Crowley fought his way through treacle to sit up, to look at him.
“Oh?” he said, keeping his voice at the same volume as the angel’s. Best not to spook him if he finally wanted to open up.
“I was after a book.”
“Of course you were.”
“It was for you, actually. A first edition Gartner’s Horticultura that I’d managed to track down. He talked about gardening, as you would gather from the title, but also about the stars.”
“Oh,” Crowley murmured.
“I’d just obtained a copy and was on my way back to my lodgings when it happened.”
Aziraphale shuddered, his gaze fixed in a way that suggested he wasn’t seeing what was presently in his line of sight.
“What happened, angel?” Crowley asked. “You said it was quickclay and you couldn’t use any miracles. Was it… was it that bad?”
Aziraphale’s shoulders shook, and Crowley wrapped an arm around them.
“You don’t have to–”
“I rather think I do,” Aziraphale said. “It’s a beautiful country, really, and I, well, I hate to have it tainted by one experience.”
“Yeah, sure, but–”
“Let me finish, dear, or I’ll never get it out.”
Crowley nodded, and mimed zipping his lips shut with his free hand.
“As I was saying, there had been an incident with two nuns, a visiting bishop, rather a lot of wine, and a cat. By the time everything was sorted out, the situation had become rather difficult to explain, and needless to say Heaven was not best pleased with me at the time.”
Crowley bit his tongue to keep from commenting.
“So when it happened, there was– there was nothing I could do about it.”
“Angel,” Crowley said quietly, breaking his self-imposed vow of silence. “We’ve both been there. It’s…” —he took a breath — “it’s hard, not being able to… especially if there are people… and… and kids–”
He still wasn’t sure what had happened, not exactly, but he’d always prided himself on his imagination, and it was certainly serving him well — or poorly, depending on one’s perspective — at the moment. He could see it perfectly: a child, maybe two, perhaps a whole schoolful, screaming in terror as the ground beneath them gave way, as they were carried away by an emotionless force of nature, as a powerless angel looked on in horror.
“Anyway,” Aziraphale said. “I was walking. And then I wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means the ground disappeared beneath my feet.”
Aziraphale was still into the middle distance. Crowley opened his mouth, read the answer already sitting on Aziraphale’s face, and closed it again.
“You were caught in it?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said.
“Oh.”
“What… what happened?”
“Well, I was stuck,” Aziraphale said, and something in the way he said the word caught Crowley’s attention.
“Hang on,” he said. “When you say stuck, what exactly do you mean?”
“I mean I was stuck, Crowley. Trapped. Imprisoned. Entrenched, one might say.”
“Buried?”
“Oh no, thank goodness.”
“Thank– exactly how deep was this mud, er, clay?”
Aziraphale’s face spasmed in what looked like dismay. “Waist-deep.”
“You got stuck up to your waist in Norwegian mud.”
“Quickclay.”
“You got stuck in quickclay.” Crowley felt the laughter bubble up and was powerless to rein it in. “And you couldn’t miracle yourself free. Couldn’t fly. Couldn’t vanish.”
“No.”
“So what happened? Clearly you escaped.”
“I had to wait.”
“For your miracles to restart?”
“Good grief no,” Aziraphale said. “I would have been there for two weeks if that had been the case.”
“Then–”
“I had to wait for help.”
“For help.”
“Yes.”
“From humans.”
There was a pause, before Aziraphale said, very quietly, “Yes.”
“I can see,” Crowley drawled, “why that’s such a traumatic memory.”
“It was!” Aziraphale protested. “You’ve no idea how humiliating it is to be an ethereal being capable of wondrous things and to have to rely on humans to rescue one from such a situation.”
Crowley stared at him. “Did they laugh at you?”
“What? No!” Aziraphale shook his head. “They were all quite kind actually. I think that made it worse.”
They’d been concerned, Aziraphale recounted, and helpful, and patient. They’d fetched ropes and boards and additional people and tea. One woman had offered him a handmade jumper.
He’d been standing in Norwegian mud for forty minutes by that point and had accepted the jumper.
“She was very sweet,” Aziraphale said. “She kept patting my arm and telling me it happened to her cousin.”
“Did it?”
“I have no idea. But it was kind of her to say.”
“How many people did they bring?” Crowley asked.
Aziraphale looked away.
“Angel.”
“Twenty-three.”
“Ah.”
“Plus the children, who all came to watch.”
“Well, it’s not everyday you get to see an angel stuck in the mud.”
“They didn’t know I was an angel.”
Crowley snorted. “As if anyone who’s spent any time at all with you could doubt it.”
Aziraphale smiled, seemingly despite himself, but it faded almost immediately.
“For a moment,” he said quietly, “just a moment, I thought that was it.”
Crowley stilled.
Aziraphale was looking into his wine glass.
“The ground kept shifting. The villagers were shouting at one another. Nobody seemed entirely certain what would happen if more of it gave way.” He shrugged. “And I knew, rationally, that it wasn’t likely. But for a moment I thought, well. This is how I die.”
Crowley didn’t laugh this time.
“I thought I’d never see you again. And I found I minded rather more than I expected.”
Crowley forgot, briefly, about the mud.
Outside, rain tapped softly against the windows.
“We hadn’t spoken properly in some time,” Aziraphale continued. “I remember thinking it was a terrible thing to leave matters as we had. That if I never saw you again, I’d be sorry for it.”
Crowley stared at him. Something tight and unwelcome settled in his chest.
“Angel…”
“Then I remembered I’d merely be discorporated.”
Crowley blinked.
Aziraphale brightened slightly. “Very embarrassing, certainly, but hardly permanent.”
Crowley let out a startled laugh. “Right. Exactly.”
“But oh, it was awful,” Aziraphale said. “My shoes were ruined.”
“Your shoes.”
“They were handmade. And my coat. That was the real loss.”
“Not the brown one.”
“The brown one.” Aziraphale’s voice went flat with the memory of it. “There was clay in the seams. I tried everything. It never came out properly.”
Crowley looked at him. “I wondered why you’d stopped wearing it.”
“I loved that coat.”
“You see now why I was so concerned about the paint splatter a few years ago, the one you so kindly removed for me. Thank you again, my dear.”
Crowley felt his insides go soft and squishy and wondered if that was something that happened to humans when people said nice things to them. “Don’t mention it.”
He turned away from the crinkle at the corners of Aziraphale’s eyes and cleared his throat. “So. The villagers pulled you out, presumably.”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “In a most undignified way. And all the while, I could hear mothers telling their children that here was an example of why you must always look where you are going.”
“Oof,” Crowley said. “Became a bit of a local lesson, did you?”
“Just so,” Aziraphale confirmed. “It was utterly embarrassing. And so I vowed I would never return to Norway.”
Crowley lost all remaining composure. He doubled over as the laughter overtook him — the helpless kind, the kind that left tears at the corners of his eyes and made speech temporarily impossible.
“A hundred and eighty-four years,” he managed eventually. “You avoided an entire sovereign nation for a hundred and eighty-four years because twenty-three Norwegians saw you fall in a hole.”
“It was not a hole,” Aziraphale argued.
Crowley laughed so hard he slid sideways on the sofa.
Aziraphale folded his arms and waited with the patient dignity of a man who had endured considerably worse.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
“I really am.”
“You are impossible.”
“And you,” Crowley said, wiping his eyes, still shaking, “are holding a grudge against a whole country because it embarrassed you.”
Aziraphale sniffed. “And because it ruined my coat. And my shoes.”
“Ah, that’s perfectly reasonable then.”
“I think it is.”
Without saying anything, Crowley reached over and topped up Aziraphale’s wine.
Aziraphale looked at the glass. Then at Crowley.
But Crowley had already looked away, back up at the ceiling, in the specific way he had of pretending to be somewhere else entirely.
After a moment, he said, “The coat really was very nice.”
“It was,” Aziraphale agreed, quietly.
They sat for a while after that, not really reading, listening to the rain work its way down the windows.
“I still don’t want to go to Norway,” Aziraphale said at last.
“Course not. Would never make you. Terrible place.”
“Thank you.”
“Full of clay. And jumpers. And very helpful villagers.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes. “Not another word.”
Crowley smiled into his wine. “Not another word, angel.”