Chapter Text
This was attempt number infinity and one, and it still wasn’t right! The humans always get to the Day of Judgement, and just fail. Just fail it. Wiffle ball it. Completely. It all keeps coming down to the Antichrist. He’s not picking the right solution to this conundrum. He’s not being human enough with his decision. I haven’t put enough chance in place or I haven’t given him the fullest range of experiences.
Maybe it’s his age? He is only eleven after all, but he can’t be any older than eleven! That’d give him time to become jaded, adult. Maybe next time I should redo all of humanity and leave out puberty. Oof, never mind, I tried it millions of attempts ago. The worlds before puberty got humans only as far as outside the garden before it became Lord of the Flies. Despite the insidious nature of puberty , it is a requirement lest I want to backtrack, and I don’t. Regardless, what to change? What to change?! What can I change? While I think on it, best get the ball rolling on the time-tested and true maneuver to restart the universe. Now where did I put that apple?
Thank G-, well Myself, I’ve always given myself clear goals. After all, who can get anything done without a firm and repeatable list of action items. Currently, the Apocalypse is in a specific moment during Revelations. The four horsemans’ rolls are over. Most humans destined for Heaven have been picked up already. The rest are marked by the beast on Earth awaiting passage into Hell. The Seven Trumpets have all been sounded, so we’re on to the Seven Bowls, the plagues that wipe the world clean. They are delivered from heaven by Angels, and are as so: bowl one is boils for those marked by the beast. Bowl two is the death of all sea creatures. Bowl three is all water turns to blood. Four is the sun burns the planet. Five is darkness. Six is Satan gathers the forces of evil for the last battle, and finally bowl seven is an earthquake that renders all mountains gravel. At the end of that, the war is fought and won, and the Angels toss the Antichrist into the Lake of Fire. Try to keep all this in mind. It’s not complicated. It’s just weird.
The planet is a saltine cracker. All the good-growing loam has dried to powder and blown into the stratosphere an untold amount of time ago. What is left is a cracked brick of sickly-yellow flats. There is nothing else but the crumbled cement structures, the blood-red sun stabbed into the dusty sky, and maybe a skeleton tree the texture and color of asphalt every few thousand miles. The horizon is the same color as the sky and ground. Sure, there is also the odd demon here or there. Some animals successfully converted to hellish stock, and the shambling, hollow corpses of once humans, now marked by the beast, but mostly this, empty and so brittle-dry. All the thermometers likely popped or errored-out eons ago.
Serpentine eyes, the color of the world, meditate on the cracks in the ground. He has been falling into this pattern lately, where a texture is a decadence to him. Inside the crack, he can see the shade, and maybe a tiny drop of moisture lives in there, hidden from his sight. The ragged edge is a cliff. He could swan dive off into a deep blue pool. It would be as cool as a glacier. His mind hovers on the edge of manifesting a bottle of water into existence. It’s entirely within his reach, but he stops himself. Best not alert Hell to where he is. The ease in which he once would call impossible things into the world is another habit he needs to break. He pulls his wings tighter over his head.
This isn’t the first time he’s hyper fixated on a crack. There is so little to look at. If there was still time, he knows that he has wasted years looking at the strange wiggling shadows his wings cast, at the cellular shapes on a minuscule piece of petrified wood, at the white veins running through a granite stone. ‘This is unhealthy, Crowley,’ he chastises himself. ‘Go back down to Hell, at least there are things to look at down there.’ But he doesn’t want to go back to Hell. That’s a different kind of torture. He wonders if demons can lose their minds. He wonders if he already has. These cracks have the flavor of coffee with too much cream. Milky on top and espresso dark inside swirling. He thinks of ice cream. He thinks of vanilla on a cone with a flake. He thinks of those familiar colors, a familiar hand in a familiar park, but he swerves away from that thought. ‘Don’t go that way. That way only leads to pain.’ Within these cracks are the night sky he can’t see anymore. Inside, stars twinkle.
At some point, he is sure he hears something. It hurts. Everything hurts up here. At first it’s just sounds, but then garbled and wretched, the sounds become words. And the words, at first nonsensical, he begins to recognize. It is one word. It is his chosen name. It takes work mentally to find something to say back that would categorize as a response.
“Ngk.” It’s the only one he can manage.
“Crowley. I need you to do me a favor.”
He snaps his eyes away from the brutalized ground, and his black hairline pupils shrink to almost nothing. In that instant, all his vocabulary returns with a force. “Ah fuck no!”
He stumbles over his scaly feet. Being transported from one place to another was never this disorienting, but now nausea thunders through him. There is no point of reference in the absence of a clear horizon line. ‘Time to turn off that inner ear.’ He keeps falling into old habits up here.
In the distance, over the mirage, he sees wiggly shapes. He’s suddenly parched, and it’s not from lack of water. He hasn’t seen water since it all turned to blood and that must’ve been...well he’s not sure. It’s been one single day since the Apocalypse began. One, infinite day.
He wanders toward the shapes, and one shape is beginning to approach him. Flickering over the mirage is a black horse and on it, a rider. They are gaining speed, barreling down on Crowley. The black shirt flares out into a pair of wings. The air becomes filled with the screeching sound of locusts swarming. Crowley reels back. He remembers fear. He is suddenly afraid for so many reasons.
He desperately squints through his glasses at the approaching figure. His hand slams into his brow, casting a sliver more of shade on his overtaxed eyes. “Aziraphale?” He rasps, but the approaching figure is odd, too fierce, and the black wings. The stature is right, the posture too, and slowly Crowley’s squint pays off, the face. “It is you isn’t it.” He’s never seen this expression before though, hard and cold. His once pool-blue eyes are on fire, actual tongue-licking fire.
The angel bares down on him with his flaming sword lit. The horse rears, flaming hooves and flaming eyes. Crowley throws out his hands, “Aziraphale! It’s me!”
The flaming sword is fumbled and falls. The reigns are snapped. The kicking hooves jerk down ungracefully to hard dirt. The hell horse staggers forward, gnawing madly at it’s bit. Neither of them want to move. When Aziraphale finally speaks, his voice is pained. “Crowley?” It’s low and shaking and it hurts. Everything hurts. Crowley is frozen.
“Can it really be you?” He slides off his horse, and walks so tentatively forward. His hand is out as if preparing to part a curtain. “Crowley? Not a trick?”
“Aziraphale.” Crowley stumbles toward him. He’s unable to formulate a sentence. Of all people, he should be asking if the angel is real, and not a trick, not a ghost. Up until recently, he thought the angel was dead. Burned to ashes in his bookstore before the start of Armageddon. He curses himself for not looking longer, harder. He’s a hideous coward. He’s choking on his own tongue, haggard and voiceless, by the time Aziraphale’s outstretched fingers press into his collarbone. They jerk back at first before sliding up his cheek. Crowley’s hand moves of it’s own will to cover it. Aziraphale’s hand is real.
“You are really here.” Aziraphale’s flaming eyes extinguish with a blink. Crowley’s voice is a jagged garble. He can’t look into those absolutely-sinfully-decadent blue eyes without feeling obscenely guilty. When was the last time he had seen blue? The texture of them squeezing around a shadow of a pupil. Blue is a forbidden color on this yellow bone planet. He looks away feeling his own eyes prick.
Aziraphale withdraws his hand. He’s absolutely hollow. That touch was an indulgence he had craved millennia before, but he can’t decide if he enjoyed it. Everything he ever enjoyed in the past has been weaponized against him. Each desire transformed into a little needle, a reminder of what can never be again, pin-cushioned thickly into his body. He loved so much, and each love, a knife. Crowley is the biggest knife of all, alive and well in front of him. But Aziraphale has learned to revere weapons. Keep the blade sharp. Don’t let them drop on the ground. This is a comfort. He doesn’t need to breath, but he does. It’s ragged.
“I thought you were dead.” The knife speaks. Aziraphale aches.
“Oh?” Aziraphale thinks ‘Are we not living death right now? Is this not the picture of death? Look at the state of things.’
“I thought you had been burned in your bookshop.”
Aziraphale aches even more. He had a bookshop once. He laughs dryly. “Everything burned, Crowley, either with the first trumpet or the fourth bowl.”
Crowley shifts his gaze back to Aziraphale, pinned by the ever seeking blue eyes. “I mean before. Before all of this. The day it began, but before it did. I thought Hell set fire to your bookshop while you were inside.” He’s struggling with each word, constructing sentences like a vulture picking at carrion.
Aziraphale’s face softens minutely, but he catches himself and it snaps back to stoney. He has his own weapons, and he collects his flaming sword from where he dropped it. “Ah yes, the day you went to Alpha Centauri. What brought you back?”
“I...” He’s wide eyed behind his glasses. That was right, that was their last conversation before Aziraphale disappeared. “I didn’t go.” His voice is dismal. “There wasn’t a reason to go there anymore.”
Aziraphale hurts all over. He glances at the sun. It’s the same color as Crowley’s hair. He can’t forget now. It’s in front of him. “How about we move inside.” He whistles to his mount, who trots over.
“Inside? Like Inside-inside? Well, yeah.”
“No. No. No. No. Not ever. Fuck you.” Crowley is speed walking. His black blazer and tie flapping in the hurried wind he’s making. His legs are scale-slick.
“Crowley, you can’t run from me.”
“No fucking way. I will never do anything for you. Not after what you did to me. Not after what you did to this planet. Not after what you did…” He catches himself on the last part.. “Not ever. Get the picture. Leave me alone.”
He is being pursued by a light unlike the hot sun glaring down on him. This one is like the dawn, welcoming and pleasant. It is a forgotten warmth. He hates it. He wants to rip it to pieces. The light is, of course, God, completely unmistakable, and the light is asking him to do It a favor .
“You will listen eventually.”
Crowley spins on his heel, dust kicks up. He jabs a finger at the light. “You have enough angels to do you favors. I’m a demon . You’re doing, remember? Not me. Not ever me.”
“If you promise to do my task, I will give you help. I’ll take you to Aziraphale.”
His face collapses in a soundless howl before he’s screaming at the light. He screams in rage, and in relief. God knows. God always knows.
The petrol station is beyond weathered, but the reinforced concrete has bent to no wind, fire, or earthquake. They had walked quietly through a herd of helhests to get here. Aziraphale patted the ones that approached him with a certain semblance of care.
“Honestly, I expected something more.” Crowley squiggles his hand through the air in the shape of a mansion with perhaps fountains and palms and grapes on a plate.
“Can’t exactly miracle up a villa complete with impluvium, right now, can I?” Aziraphale sulks, and points upwards weakly as if that explains it all. “Maybe you…?” He looks at him expectantly, eyes glittering.
Crowley bites his cheek. The gnawing sensation to give in and recreate the hanging gardens of Babylon for Aziraphale just to see him smile is back, but then they’d have to contend with Hell. “No can do, angel. If I miracle anything, I’ll ping on Hell’s radar. They’d be up here faster than it takes to spit.”
“Ah. Well then yes, this is it.” The sparkle of Aziraphale’s eyes ashen, Crowley anguishes to see it go. It would do no good to have a piscina for only a few seconds before he gets dragged down to his superiors. He’s going to have to resist responding to Aziraphale. These old habits again causing problems.
Despite not being a villa, the shelter is blissfully dark and noticeably cooler inside. Exiting the constant heat elicits a relieved sigh from both of them. Once Crowley has chased all the spots from his eyes, of which there are many, he sees a sparse room with a table and chairs, a small bookshelf overloaded with books, and a window sheltering a cactus. His hands hover over it, wanting to touch but unable to without drawing blood on an aggressive spine. He thinks of blood, and of water. “How do you water it?”
Aziraphale plops his cowboy hat on a bent metal hook, and runs his hand through his bone white curls. The extinguished sword he places on the table. He glances hesitantly at Crowley. “Does time exist anymore? I might never need to water it.”
Crowley can only nod. Flashes of memory worm their way back, an entire room of green leaves, jungle plants, a plastic mister filled with water. His fingers, eager to touch something, anything, drift over the top edges of the collected books instead. Each one is crispy from the dry air, but still that familiar course edge of paper makes him draw a sharp breath. “And these books? How?”
“People hid books in all kinds of places. I would know. Most of those came from fireproof lock boxes of some sort. I bring them here when I find them.”
Crowley’s inside are rolling with three-fold relief. One for shade. Two for the multitudes of familiar sensations, places to rest his weary eyes. And three, beyond what he felt he deserved, Aziraphale. He’s alive and he’s here and he’s, for the most part, unchanged, even after everything that’s happened. He’s still collecting all manner of things and sheltering them despite the odds. Yes indeed, very like Aziraphale. But his eyes are so different. They are withdrawn, more focused on the distance than before, less mobile too. The sparkle in them dimmed, and at times, completely absent, like there is nothing in front of him that brings him joy. Those eyes are very unlike Aziraphale despite how blue they remain. Other things have changed as well. “And you’re a cowboy?”
A familiar huff. (Crowley’s chest flutters.) “It’s a style . It’s decent for deserts and tending horses.” His hands flit over his arms as if to pat the dust off. “And you’re one to talk, you aren’t even wearing trousers.”
Crowley remembers what it is to smile. “Well, angel, I am not trying to impress anyone. Besides I’m a snake. Scales are decent for deserts. Likely better than that cotton weave you’re wearing.” He flicks his forked tongue out. “Why the helhests? Aren’t they a bit yaknow...demon-y”
Aziraphale wants to snip ‘I’ve learned a thing or two about shepherding demons. Lots of experience with it.’ But how quickly the two of them have slipped into bickering causes a jolt of pain to shoot through him instead. Crowley had called him ‘angel’ too. All this time, and Crowley has the audacity to stroll out of the wastes like he missed him, like he had been looking for him for time immemorial. He schools his expression. “They are useful. They are similar to real horses. Gives me something to do.”
Crowley’s eyebrows perk up over his glasses. “Are you looking for something to do?”
“It’s the end of the world. If I were in heaven right now, I’d be busy using this time to make ready for the war. Instead I’m here.” He gestures outside, actual hell on Earth.
Crowley frowns. His guilt is back. He can’t imagine why he didn’t look for Aziraphale longer. He doesn’t understand why he assumed the angel was capital D dead and not just discorporated, but he can’t bring himself to boldly ask what exactly did happen. Nothing had gone the right way that day. “I...I’m sorry. Sorry I wasn’t here.”
Aziraphale pinches the bridge of his nose. He hasn’t had a conversation in so long, and Crowley, here, reachable, audible. He’s itchy. There is a desire to pace and rail around the space shouting. Pulling his hair out. Rolling on the ground. He wants to throw a fit, to be a raving lunatic. But he has something better and he is pleased he has kept it untouched. He strides to the hatch on the floor, and throws it open. It creaks so loudly that Crowley winces. “If we are going to keep up like this, best drink something.” He pulls out a dusty and scorch-stained clear bottle. “Can I interest you in tequila?”
Crowley instantly salivates, and snatches the offered bottle. It is crystal clear. Liquid sloshes luxuriously within. Crowley isn’t sure how he manages to keep from sobbing. “This isn’t blood?!”
“Thankfully no. Revelations doesn’t mention what happens to liquor. It was an unexpected loophole.” He plucks the bottle from Crowley’s clutches, procures two glasses, and pours generously. He sips generously as well, and waits for Crowley to taste it. Crowley drinks and noticeably lounges deeper into his chair, sighing. The sharp liquor coaxing wetness back into his parched mouth. Aziraphale tugs his bib shirt down, and clears his throat. “Now, tell me Crowley, why are you suddenly here?”
Crowley cradles the precious glass of liquor. Like Azirphale, he never thought he’d see alcohol again. He brings it slowly, so slowly to his mouth. His mouth hasn’t stopped salivating. Just like Aziraphale to give him a drink and then ask an exceptionally challenging question. A question with multiple answers too. So many in fact he has the urge to slurp the whole glass down and ask for seconds, maybe thirds in quick succession. ‘Aziraphale,’ He would have started, ‘you see, I love you, and if I hadn’t been chained to a desk in Hell after I thought you died to stamp documents of admission for eternity, maybe I would’ve found you sooner. Maybe I’d still be trying to convince you to run away with me. But no, no, instead, instead…’ And that seems like a more plausible place to start. All the words that come after that instead , so he begins there. “You aren’t going to believe this, but…”
“You want me to what?” Crowley holds an apple. It’s odd in his hands, as red as his hair, as the sun. An apple tree hasn’t existed since the first cleansing fires. Its meer presence a paradox, a ripe, fleshy body, unrotten, untouched by grime. Part of him hungers for a bite.
“Find the Antichrist and get him to eat that apple.”
“Yes yes I get that, but the universe part?” He runs a thumb over the apple’s perfect, taunt skin. The presence of the apple screams, ‘I shouldn’t exist. Don’t look at me too long. I’ll rot your brain.’
“The universe needs to be reset.” It is a fact, but Crowley is incapable of accepting it as infallible, even coming directly from God.
“And you can’t just do that yourself? Right now? Without all this trouble? What does that even mean?” Crowley air quotes with his fingers. “Resetting the universe?”
“Agree to it and I will send you to Aziraphale.”
Crowley sighs. As if he possibly had a choice at all. He places the apple in his blazer pocket. The strange bulge ruins the coat’s silhouette. He frowns. ‘What a drag.’ He pats the pocket like it holds the keys to his Bentley. It’s mostly for show. “Fine, yes. I’ll get this apple to the Antichrist. Get his nice beast-y fangs in it. You could’ve made it something he’d actually want to eat though? Kids aren’t fond of apples.”
God snorts. It takes the sass almost out of Crowley. “Oh and do it quickly. The sixth and seventh bowl follow the fifth swiftly.”
“You’re giving me a deadline!? A deadline when time literally does not exist!?” Crowley hisses.
“There is always a deadline.”
And the light representing God is gone, and he’s somewhere else entirely. Aziraphale runs him down with a demon horse and a flaming sword moments later.
“God gave you, a demon , a mission?” Aziraphale snaps his glass onto the table. “Millions of angels at Her disposal, and yet…” His eyes are sparkling again. It’s more refreshing than a glass of tequila in a waterless land. “You?” His eyes slip from Crowley’s toes up to the top of his head. “Well, I am certainly surprised.”
Crowley is absolutely reveling in delight. Before the mission felt like a lame chore, but now, with Aziraphale actually paying some positive attention to him, it might just be fun. It might be just like old times. “I was shocked that you weren’t picked. The only angel left on Earth and all.” His smirk is playful at first
But his words must have stung, and Aziraphale’s face shutters. “Oh well no, of course it wouldn’t be me.” He drains his tequila to hide his quivering lip, and pours another hurriedly. “I’ve become a bit of a fallen angel. Not officially, mind you, but I’ve done some things. I’m sure if God really wanted to She’d have plenty of reasons to...” His quaking hand covers his mouth, and he looks away.
Crowley stiffens like he was slapped. Behind his wayfarers, his eyes fixate on Aziraphale’s decidedly and wrongly black wings. They widen. “Oh no, angel, no. You are doing the best you can. I...I didn’t mean it like that.” His fingers crawl across the dirty table and press their tips to Aziraphale’s glass-gripped hand. It’s the smallest touch Crowley can manage. If there was more tequila in him he might have stood and grabbed the entire wrist, wrenched the hand covering Aziraphale’s mouth away, and maybe pressed their lips together. Said ‘I’m sorry’ a thousand times to the inside of Aziraphale’s pleasing pink mouth, but he can’t and he wouldn’t. This is an old dance. He realizes that old habits had returned along with their similar desires.
Crowley swallows instead. “Everything is wrong isn’t it. It’s the biggest cock up that could ever be committed, this Armageddon business.”
Aziraphale’s eyes have slid back to the table focusing sharply on Crowley’s touch. When was the last time anyone had touched him before this recent appearance of Crowley. He thinks back to the day that started it all. He had missed the bombs, but so had many people, many frightened people. He shivers, and stands up abruptly. He wanders over to the window, hands clasped behind his back. One thumb stroking the location of where Crowley had touched him. “Yes,” He quietly agrees to the baked yellow desert outside. “This mission from God, you could have been hallucinating, you know?”
Crowley’s frown looks like it was cut in with a blunt tool. He shoots the tequila and peels his eyes away from Aziraphale to focus on the texture of the table. He’s a hunched, thin demon crouched in the dark. He pulls out the apple from his pocket and places it in front of him. It’s all the proof he needs. “I wasn’t hallucinating.”
Aziraphale stares at the apple. It shouldn’t be there, so red and impossible, so fresh and impossible. It is beguiling how untarnished it is. How could the Antichrist possibly resist such a nostalgic treat? Aziraphale closes his eyes and thinks about his teeth in its ripe skin, about the likely snap of the fruit tearing, of the juice of it, tart and sweet. His eyes open again, but this apple isn’t for him.
Crowley sees he made his point and continues on unmoving, unblinking, “I think we are supposed to go together. On this mission, I mean.”
Aziraphale’s eyes flicker. But then he looks at his small stack of books, each one he’s read a thousand times. Each book organized and cleaned carefully as often as he can. He looks at the cactus, so rare and special. The dirt it’s housed in even more so. At the hell horses all brought together slowly, communing with each other outside. At this precious, shaded shelter he’s discovered with a small underground latch stocked with non-perishables. It’s all so little, too little. He then carefully considers leaving all these priceless items he’s found behind, and something twists inside him. It’s raw and jagged. He’s spent too long assembling this scrap of life to abandon it. Abandon it for what anyway? A false errand? From the very entity that made all of this happen? A desperately challenging slog with equally awful odds? “I’d rather not.” He says to the window.
Crowley can’t say he’s surprised, but he doesn’t want to think much about anything right now. He has never seen Aziraphale react like that, like he’s haunted. Many things had indeed changed, and he wasn’t entirely prepared for them. So “oh, okay,” is all he can manage. He slips the apple back into his pocket and flicks dust on the table. An errant particle pings against the tequila bottle. “Want to just get drunk then? Like old times sake?”
Aziraphale sighs loudly, but the gaze he brings back to Crowley at the table is one of relief. “Yes, I believe I do.”
A sound bellows from heaven similar to the sound of a spoon hitting a champagne glass but in slow motion and growing in intensity. Crowley has the suspicion that everywhere on the planet this tone can be heard. Aziraphale throws himself to the door, eyes up. Crowley follows in a rush. The sound is reminiscent of a jet approaching the sound barrier. The wind has increased and has begun wiping sand into their eyes and mouths. A star of light floats over the planet but doesn’t fall.
“What is this?” Crowley shouts over the sound.
“It’s the fifth bowl!” Aziraphale responds in kind.
“Oh shit!” The sound stops, which makes Crowley’s exclamation booming in the sudden silence.
The floating star disappears and from where it once floated leeches black like ink dumped on wet parchment. The yellow sky thirstily pulls at it, and the blackness of the spot grows and deepens, casting a strange liquid shadow over the Earth. Crowley watches Aziraphale’s face disappear in black as the darkness swells over the sun. He misses it immediately, so he strikes his fingers like a match and a flame appears in his palm. This isn’t a miracle, he can always choose to be a being wreathed in flame. He chooses not to most of the time. Body decisions aren’t impossibilities, he’s an occult thing after all. Aziraphale stares blankly into the fire.
Crowley looks away to the black world. The heat continues to radiate from the baked earth despite the lack of sun. The darkness is claustrophobic. Only the flaming eyes of the horses shrinking smaller and smaller in the distance prove that there is a landscape there at all. “A long time ago,” He starts and swallows, “I asked you to come with me. You told me no. That there was nowhere to go. Now there is somewhere to go. Come with me.”
Aziraphale peels his eyes up. The fire dances in his corneas. “How can you possibly believe we can do anything about this? The challenges are insurmountable.”
“What are the alternatives? Stay here in this pitch black hovel? Wait for the end surrounded by whatever we’ve scraped together in the dark? This is a real divine mission, Aziraphale. Not some garbage Gabriel and his crew have cooked up. However you’re feeling about yourself, you can’t just bow out of this. How can you discard your duties so lightly?” Crowley has always been good at finding loopholes in Aziraphale’s self-narrative. He’s not a lesser demon after all, he’s the genuine article. He wishes that the words were less sharp, and ultimately, that he could’ve stayed here with Aziraphale drinking forever instead. Even at the end of the world, he remains a puppet to the forces that be.
Anger pools in Aziraphale’s chest, but it’s not directed at Crowley. It’s so vague and directionless. He grits his teeth as if he has been fed a particularly bitter tonic, because in truth, Crowley is right. If even one of the true fallen can be tasked by the Lord Almighty Herself, then his current sense of self doesn’t alter his responsibilities to upholding the Greater Good. To turn down Crowley would be falling from his high moral standards, and that’s unacceptable, even for a renegade angel with two feet on the land of the Beast.
All the anger disperses, “Let me get some things.” And he departs into the dark interior of the petrol station. Moments later his flaming sword ignites and he wields it around the small space, illuminating this and that corner. He exits the station with a leather bag, his hat, his sword and the recapped bottle of tequila. The thrust to his chin determined. He whistles twice into the darkness, and two pairs of glowing eyes trundle over through the dark until two helhests appear on the edge of Crowley’s cast light. Aziraphale mounts one with an ease that only comes from endless practice. “Where to then?”
Crowley smirks but inwardly he’s congratulating himself. “The Lake of Fire. That’s where he’ll be. The Antichrist.”